The Oligarchy Riseth: Greed is King

It didn’t take long. It’s now just over six weeks after the election, and the once and future king is fully in charge.

The (barely) bipartisan bill to keep the government running for only three months more is dead. And it’s hard to tell who killed it: Elon Musk, who has never been elected to anything, or our President-Elect. A roster of fellow oligarchs, known today as billionaires, cheered the bill’s demise mightily from the sidelines.

If you think all this came out of the blue, you haven’t been paying attention. Over nine years ago, before Trump ever rode down his escalator, I wrote an essay describing how corporations, collectively, are coming to rule the world, and governments are assuming a secondary and even subordinate role.

The reasons are simple but profound. First, business corporations have all the money. The example I used at the time was Apple Computer having more cash reserves than France. And while the United States was still digging itself out of the Crash of 2008, US corporations collectively had a $ 2 trillion cash hoard, much of it stashed abroad (awaiting tax relief at home).

Second, corporations do virtually everything that matters in modern life. They make our food, clothing, houses, furniture, streets, cars, railways, trains, planes, boats, cruise ships, computers, mobile devices, and all the raw materials for them. With Musk’s Space-X and Boeing slowly supplanting NASA, they even make our space ships.

What does government do? It makes and tries to enforce rules, puts rule-breakers in jail (the less so the more powerful they are), prints money (except for crypto), and “provides for the national Defense.” (The latter involves protecting us or starting wars, depending on how you look at it.) After a glance at these lists, which do you think is more important to your own personal life: corporations or government?

The third and final reasons are a bit more subtle. Diversity matters: corporations are not yet individually so big or powerful that when one falls so does the nation. They are constantly being born, growing, dying or combining, just like evolving biological creatures. Finally, and partly consequently, corporate CEOs are, by and large, better educated, smarter, more pragmatic (and, if not so, far easier to remove) than the average pol, let alone a President.

So in that essay, I surmised that our species is undergoing a slow but relentless and radical transformation from rule by governments (including democracies) to rule by corporations. It’s much like the transformation from rule by Church rule to rule by monarchy and later democracy that gripped the West during the Second Millennium. Our species is now trying to figure out where corporate “governance” ends and where secular government begins, with taxes the primary battleground.

Rights, you say? Personal rights? Government is supposed to enforce and protect them. But isn’t government doing a terrible job at that, as least vis-a-vis corporations?

Did you ever actually read one of those “click here” agreements (or their paper counterparts) that you have to accept these days to buy goods or services, or to subscribe to any online service? In a few short paragraphs, these “contracts of adhesion” take away your right to a trial by jury, your right to a civil trial at all, and your right to a class action (which makes suing for small swindles possible).

If anything goes wrong, you have to accept secret arbitration, by individuals (not necessarily trained judges) chosen in whole or in part by the corporation, to resolve your dispute. Did it ever occur to you that those few paragraphs take away all the legal rights that English and American law (including our Constitution) have developed to protect individuals in the 809 years since the first Magna Carta?

Yet in my nine-plus-years-old essay, I was strangely positive. I pointed to the diversity, achievements and innovation of our American business corporations, plus the generally good quality of their leadership. I was impressed.

But that was then. This is now. In the intervening years another megatrend caught up with us and changed the picture. It had been slowly brewing for decades, but I had failed to foresee its speed or its consequences.

We Americans no longer make much of anything. China is our factory floor, with a little help from Mexico and Vietnam. Services now comprise about 70% of our economy. Increasingly, they consist of intermediary profit grabbing, advertising, promotion, and the development of software, which does some or all of the foregoing. In other words, the vast majority of our current national enterprise— and increasingly what makes our oligarchs rich and powerful—consists of direct profit-seeking fluff, often by means of software, which produces nothing tangible or of great benefit except to the profit seeker.

Consider Internet searching, for example, for a piece of information on Google or Bing, or for a product on Amazon. In the not-so-old days, if you knew Boolean search logic, you could find exactly the information or product you wanted with a single search. Likely as not, what you sought would appear as the very first search “hit.”

Not so today. Try the same trick today and you will get instead a dozen or more “sponsored” or promotional hits. Most of them will have little to do with your detailed request besides the appearance of one or more isolated search terms or the same general product category.

Thus, in less than a decade, the Internet has morphed from a search tool of great precision to an annoying exercise of mindless distraction, promotion, marketing and advertising. Today, even a search for a business corporation by its own precise name will produce several self-promoting leeches before the corporation itself.

This may sound like a small thing. But the Internet is where a huge and growing part of commerce takes place. If you have a little longevity with it and you think a bit, you can see that its precision, usefulness and efficiency are taking a bigger and bigger daily hit from mindless and intrusive advertising, distraction, promotion and marketing. And I haven’t even mentioned the ubiquitous moving and noise-making video distractions that use various ploys to grab your attention away from what you think you’re doing, and use additional ever-changing ploys to make it hard to get the distractions to stop or go away.

So are the quality and value of the output of corporate business decreasing even as its oligarchs grow rich beyond the dreams of Genghis Khan? You decide.

But I’ll leave you with one question. Can you name a single corporate product, introduced for the first time in our new century and new millennium, with the value and positive impact on human life of, say, Edison’s electric light or phonograph, the telephone, radio, television, X-rays, CT or MRI scans, the digital computer, the personal computer, or the cell phone?

The only one I can think of is the much-maligned mRNA vaccines. They were developed over more than a decade and first used for Covid-19. Their technology allows vaccines to be “programmed” for new viruses, without including any of the pathogenic parts of the viruses, thereby precluding direct infection (although perhaps permitting side effects like allergies and unanticipated intracellular reactions). Of all the stuff developed for mass production in our new millennium, those vaccines are the only tangible things that I can recall that made a big and unambiguously positive impact on human life.

This is what scares me most of all. Except perhaps for Elon Musk, who has absolutely no sense of his limits, nearly all the oligarchs who are now teeming and swarming to Trump’s side made their billions in software with ambiguous or dubious human value. They made most or all of their money on things that distract, delude, deceive, divide and even addict people, especially impressionable youth. And so far, our antitrust laws and our government have done little or nothing to curtail the patently negative effects of what has made them wealthy, seemingly on the theory that what makes money must ipso facto be good.

So we have a modern conundrum. The apotheosis of profit that is our United States once built the strongest, happiest, healthiest, and soundest society and democracy in human history. Now it is self-evidently going off the rails, under “leadership” bent on exploiting all the distractions, divisions, delusions and discontents that easy and thoughtless profit-seeking brings.

What could possibly go wrong? We are about to find our how hidden “leadership” by oligarchs who made their money in this way will remake human society in the Third Millennium.

I’m no longer optimistic. Even Henry Ford made cars that people actually drove. He never meddled much in government, although he did publish some pretty awful ideas.



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The Promise of Al-Jolani

I am a largely assimilated American Jew. I was born a month after the end of Europe’s most catastrophic war, and two months before the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended its counterpart in Asia. For most of my near-eighty years I have enjoyed the safety, security, rising standards of living and hope of the pax Americana that followed.

Now that pax Americana is dissolving before our eyes. A brutal war of conquest rages in Ukraine. Civil and tribal wars rage in the Middle East and Northeast Africa.

Atrocities rarely seen since the days of Nazi conquest and Japanese imperialism are becoming daily occurrences. And the threat of real “battles” with nuclear weapons—rather than limited use by their sole possessor to end history’s most catastrophic war—is growing daily. I see our species making the same disastrous blunders all over again, but this time with species-extinguishing weapons.

Against this background, the feats of a man named Abu Mohammed al-Jolani brought tears of hope and joy to my eyes.

Al-Jolani, of course, is the primary liberator of Syria from the bestial butcher Bashar al-Assad. Starting from his base in Idlib Province in the northwest, he and his rebels liberated Syria from the butcher in eleven days.

Except for some desultory air strikes by his enemies, al-Jolani’s victory was remarkably bloodless. Russian killer planes were preoccupied in Ukraine, and Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets had been largely destroyed by Israel. So all the Syrian people who had not already fled their homeland were free to “vote” with their hearts and hands.

Syrians of all tribes cheered the rebels on. Forced conscripts to Assad’s army abandoned their posts, laid down their weapons, and tore off their uniforms. With Assad on his way to refuge in Moscow, the rebels’ “reconquest” of their homeland was more a welcoming celebration than a pitched battle.

If anything tells us that democracy can, at last, come to the Middle East, this is it.

The very name of al-Jolani’s movement is indicative. It’s “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham,” or HTS. The Arabic word “hayat” is a high-level, versatile abstraction that can mean such things as “life” (including “family life”), “mortality” or “purpose.” “Tahrir” means “liberation”— a fact that only highlights the cruel irony of Egyptian dictator El-Sisi’s massacre of Muslim Brotherhood protestors in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

You will note that neither word has any reference to “jihad”, or “holy war,” or even to “Islam,” the religion. The only possible sinister implication is the breadth of the word “al-Sham,” which loosely translates into “for the Levant.” The word in Arabic is an old one, which one online authority interprets as encompassing “modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and Turkey’s Hatay Province.”

Should we then presume that HTS is out to conquer the whole Middle East, including today’s Israel? Absolutely not.

Syria and Syrians are utterly exhausted by thirteen years of civil war and decades of brutal despotism before it. The huge Syrian diaspora, which is straining Turkey’s resources and provoking right-wing anti-immigrant and anti-Islam sentiment throughout the EU, is eager to come home, rebuild their houses from the rubble of Russian and Hezbollah bombardment, and live as free people.

The US government has labeled HTS a terrorist organization. But I’ve never read any—let alone a coherent or convincing—reason for the designation. All the nay-sayers can cite is amorphous, unsubstantiated fears.

Meanwhile al-Jolani has built on his success in governing Idlib Province well in several ways. He’s worked on repairing and building new civilian infrastructure. He’s ceded control to competent experts and civil bureaucrats within their areas of expertise. He’s kept the secular prime minister in Damascus, at least for the time being, to make sure the infrastructure (such as it was under Assad) keeps running and can improve. He’s made noises about bringing all tribes together as equal Syrian citizens: majority Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Alawites (some of whom supported Assad). He has proposed reserving punishment only for the worst offenders and apologists for the Assad regime, presumably after fair trials.

All the surrounding groups have axes to grind: Lebanese (with Hezbollah), Israel, Turkey and the Kurds. We Americans are a continent and an ocean away. We desire only peace, security, stability, trade, and a bulwark against terrorism and Russian expansionism.

So what should we do? President-elect Trump thinks we should stay out. Our Army, which has some 900 troops in Syria to fight the remnants of ISIS, thinks they should stay and act quickly to wipe out what’s left.

But the last thing we should do is wage more war or send more troops, let alone after our debacle in Afghanistan. The last thing we need to do is make even a single Syrian compare us to the Assad regime.

We must first understand that al-Jolani represents the best chance for rational, non-tribal, and non-despotic rule in the Middle East (outside of Israel) in my near eighty years. With luck and a push in the right direction, his movement might produce a popular democracy. By encouraging the Syrian diaspora in Europe to come home and rebuild that shattered country, we have a chance to relieve the immigration pressure that is even now threatening to restore Europe’s dangerous pre-WWII right wing.

Based on that understanding, we should, to use a favorite phrase of over-the-top extremist Steve Bannon, “flood the zone” with aid, experts and help of all kinds, but not troops or weapons. Our aim should be to get Syria back on its feet and trending towards democracy and Reason as quickly as possible.

We have 31 days to make enough of an impact to move the ball toward peace and stability, and away from war, and perhaps to set a course of American and allied policy that might stick for the long haul. In vast sweep of human history, that effort might have far greater impact than whatever lame-duck President Biden can do with last-minute pardons.


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We'll Know by Spring

Your new government “is a Republic, if you can keep it.” — Ben Franklin, to people assembled outside our Constitutional Convention

We’ll know by spring whether we can. Why? Because our President-elect has repeatedly sworn vengeance and persecution against his political enemies, real and perceived.

Watch his face when he so swears. Watch his eyes, perceive his affect, and notice his bearing. If you have a passing acquaintance with human emotion and desires and their outward expression, you know that he wants this above all else.

He wants the people who have challenged him, who have criticized him, who have charged and impeached him, and who have prosecuted him—politically and criminally—to suffer likewise. To reach that personal goal, he will dismantle the entire operation of the “rule of law, not men” built up so carefully, over decades, in our FBI and DOJ. He even wants to prosecute the journalists who’ve called out his lies.

That’s how democracy dies. That’s precisely how the rule of law gets perverted into rule by men. That’s also how journalism dies, as free and truthful journalists get put behind bars, fired by profit- and politics-conscious executives, or bogged down in grossly expensive litigation that has no legitimate basis.

Cross the boss man, and you suffer. It really is that simple. And that’s not democracy by anyone’s measure.

Few people are courageous enough to stand up to a rogue Chief Executive as did Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, Adam Kinzinger and Adam Schiff. Cheney and Kinzinger, both Republicans, are now out of office, just like Mitt Romney, who was one of a handful of Republicans who voted to convict Trump after impeachment and remove him from office.

According to PBS, half of us Americans could not meet a medical emergency costing $500 without going into debt [see placard, timer at 35:00]. How many will stand up when defending themselves in court costs $50,000-$100,000 just for their counsel’s retainer, and can go into the millions from there?

In twenty-first century America, a tyrant doesn’t have to behead people and put their severed heads on pikes outside the city walls. He doen’t have to “disappear” people like the desaparecidos in the late-twentieth-century South American dictaduras.

All he has to do is intimidate and marginalize the boldest. In the early twentieth century, it was enough for Hitler’s Brown Shirts to show what they could and would do by trashing the homes and businesses of Jews on Kristallnacht. Today, among the mostly comfortable elite that govern us, all a despot has to do is ruin a few examples to intimidate the rest, especially Republicans who’d like to keep their jobs.

Haven’t these tactics already gotten nearly all the sensible middle-of-the road Republicans to give up and retire?

So here are some signs to watch for as winter tightens its grip and slowly cedes to spring:

1. Will Kash Patel run the FBI? It would hard to imagine a man less fit to run the nation’s highest, biggest, most powerful, and most visible law-enforcement agency. He has promised to become Trump’s avenging devil multiple times.

According to David French, FBI Director Christopher Ray’s recent early resignation was hardly a capitulation to Trump appointing Patel. Instead, it was an attempt to invoke the Vacancies Reform Act, which lets a president fill a senate-confirmable position that becomes vacant only with Senate approval, or with a person who has served in a senior capacity in the same agency (G-15 or higher) for ninety or more days during the calendar year after the vacancy occurs. Since the latter category does not include Patel, he will require Senate approval to run the FBI, or he will have to work for ninety days in a subordinate senior position.

But will Patel — like so many nominees for high executive and Supreme-Court appointments — now say what Republican senators want to repeat to a gullible public? Or will enough Republican senators remember what he said to “raw-meat” voters before the confirmation battle?

2. Will Pam Bondi, albeit a more conventional pick for Attorney General, knuckle under to Trump’s lust for revenge? Will she resist and be fired, or will she manage to resist successfully, unlike many of Trump’s first-term cabinet? (Being one of Trump’s more conventional and qualified nominees, she’s unlikely to fail Senate confirmation.)

3. Will Pete Hegseth, who has never held a general command (or any rank higher than major), become Secretary of Defense, in the short chain of command for using our nuclear arsenal? Will he, in his inexperience and extremism, use the US military against our own people for the first time since the Civil War?

A recent news report suggests that Trump and his team are going all out to convince or coerce Repubican Senators to confirm Hegseth. The Trump team apprently views his nomination as a test of dominance, despot-style. It appears to be focusing on Hegseth’s past indiscretions with alcohol, erratic behavior and alleged sexual assualt.

Here’s how over-the-top Trump crony Steve Bannon, who served a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, recently described the Trump team’s approach to filling the Cabinet with extremists:

“A guy like Gaetz performs a critical function — drawing fire, meaning attention, from all other candidates.... It is critical to ‘flood the zone’ strategy to never withdraw, never retreat, double down, and overwhelm the system. That leads to victory.”

But what about Hegseth’s complete inexperience in majory military command, let alone the critical ethos of lawful, constitutional military action? Will the Senate give him a pass on his self-evident lack of character and dubious reported personal conduct, while failing to notice that this inexperienced lout should never have his finger anywhere near the Nuclear Button?

4. If the Senate fails to confirm these and other appointments, will Trump try to circumvent the Senate entirely by firing the heads of departments and trying to appoint acting heads to fill their chairs, without Senate confirmation?? Will he appoint his goons to subordinate positions for ninety days, to satisfy the letter of the Vacancies Reform Act, and then put them in the top spots?

No one but Trump himslef can know for sure what he thinks. But he gives every indication of loving power and craving domination. He likes to watch others kiss his ring (or other places). He demeans and appears to despise expertise of every sort.

It cannot have escaped his intention that he has already completely suborned and dominated a once-healthy and rational Republican party, simply by demagoguing his political opponents and supporting his loyalists. No one knows how rational or analytically smart he is because (among many other reasons) he won’t release his college grades or test scores. But his emotional intelligence is off the scale, or he wouldn’t be president-elect again, after all the lies he’s told and all he’s done and not done.

He would have to be an idiot not to see cause and effect. Punish your enemies, reward your friends and pick no underlings but loyalists, and you can be king, despite what the Constitution says. That’s what the last decade has taught him.

Will there be enough Republicans, especially in the Senate, to say him nay? Will they have the stamina to outlast the impetus of over-the-top rogues like Bannon?

The Democrats aren’t numerous enough to make a difference by themselves. So it’s up to the few Republicans who see the threat to constitutional government, not to mention a sane, law-abiding and professional military, to act. They must do so right from the beginning, before the entire federal bureaucracy, or at least its law-enforcement branches, and perhaps even our military, are suborned.

Even if applied, the Vacanies Reform Act gives us only a ninety-day respite. So we will all know by Spring. If the resistance fails before then, we will have an answer to Ben Franklin’s question. Then, I suppose, it will be all good men and women for themselves, just as under so many despotisms past.


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Now or Never

Never have our American nation and our human species stood together on such a precipice. The future of both is at stake; the signs and signals are everywhere.

The strongest and most obvious signal is from the Middle East. It’s become a playground for old-fashioned imperialism, despotism and barbarism. Our species has not seen its like since Europe learned its painful lesson from World War II and slowly evolved into the EU.

Now the ghastly civil war in Syria has rekindled, running thirteen years. It’s inflamed by and exacerbates the imperial intentions of Russia and Iran. Their current leadership befits the seventeenth century, but with aircraft, long-range conventional missiles, and even nukes (or the near-term potential for making them).

These days, it’s hard even to tell the “good guys” from the bad. Former terrorists in Syria are now fighting the dismal butcher Assad. Israel is moving toward an apartheid state led by a careless bully. On a daily basis, it produces devastation in Gaza and Beirut mirroring the landscape of post-war Berlin.

Then there are the brutal wars in Ukraine and Sudan. Each creates unimaginable human misery on a daily basis. As far as any external observer can tell, their causes are little more than the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin and a handful of more obscure, but no less brutal and heedless, African and Middle-Eastern leaders.

The risk of nuclear weapons being used—and therefore of runaway species self-extinction—has never been greater since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. As I have speculated, this catastrophic feedback loop, in other “intelligent” species far, far away, could be responsible for the Fermi Paradox.

A less obvious signal of advancing chaos is planetary heating. Its global acceleration is now unmistakable. It inflicts misery through wildfires, drought and extreme weather on every continent but Antarctica. Yet trade tensions and American politics are threatening to stop the global conversion to renewable energy, at a time when positive feedback, including methane emissions from “natural” sources, threatens to push our globe over the edge into a self-sustaining transition to a new and inhospitable global climate. A massive reversion to fossil fuels, as suggested by President-to-be Donald Trump in the US and relentlessly driven by Saudi Arabia at COP 29, could easily push us over the tipping point.

As if these two existential threats were not enough, there is a third: a looming pandemic that could be worse than Covid. Avian flu, of the H5N1 variety, is exploding in livestock in America. It threatens to make the transition to humans by way of pigs, which are notorious for helping viruses mutate and leap among species. And a new H5N1 pandemic doesn’t need airplanes to fly it around the world, as did Covid. Birds fly, too. Even now, they are in the midst of their near-global seasonal migration.

The tragic irony is that science has developed the greatest protective measure against mutating viruses ever known: the “programmable” mRNA vaccines first used to tame Covid-19. President Trump took credit for rolling them out quickly during the Covid pandemic, but their technology grew out of scientific research begun decades before. Now a wildly unfit nominee to lead America’s huge and expensive health-care bureaucracy threatens to put all that vital research and development on the back burner just as the next pandemic threatens to emerge.

To add to all this, the postwar “global economic order” put in place under American auspices is falling apart. Its basic premise was that free trade makes everyone better off. But now any unbiased observer can see that free trade does nothing of the kind.

Left to its own devices, free trade creates winners and losers, big time. It raised a billion people in Asia (mostly China!) our of extreme poverty. But it also reduced the US to a make-nothing, paper-pushing society, in which finance, promotion and marketing permeate every aspect of our lives, even making Internet searches more difficult.

In the US, free, global trade is largely responsible for our growing extremes of wealth and poverty. It has left tens of millions of former factory workers in despair and turning to opioids, and a once-proud nation now depending on others for everything from clothes and basic hardware, through personal protective equipment in a pandemic, to the means for producing and using renewable energy.

The mindless meme that “free trade makes everybody better off” is as much a canard as the “best of all possible worlds” meme among the eighteenth-century French aristocracy, which Voltaire satirized in his book Candide, or Optimism.” That canard led to the French Revolution, perhaps the bloodiest in human history (although the two Russian ones also vie for that title). Now our oligarchy’s new canard has led to the precariousness of the US manufacturing economy, and with it the decline in our nation’s superpower status in science and industrial research.

Managing the now-global economy requires more than simplistic mantras or mindless across-the-board tariffs (which helped produce their own past wars). It requires intelligent and future-oriented cooperation among the global economic powerhouses: China, the EU, the US, and countries on their periphery like Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.

The Chinese word for “crisis” has two characters, one for “danger” and the other for “opportunity.” For the US and the world, the danger is obvious: continuing and worsening all the trends just described. Any single one could produce a catastrophe that could decimate our species, whether through nuclear war, runaway planetary heating, or simply economic collapse or yet more pointless wars.

But there’s opportunity also. It lies in the enigma and contradictions that are Donald J. Trump.

On the one hand, he is more like a cartoon despot than any of our past presidents, even Andrew Jackson. He is vain and self-centered. He seems bent almost entirely on self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, which (in his mind) require vengeance and retribution against the American system and his perceived enemies. If this side of Trump prevails in our politics, America will have no chance to roll off the steep political, social, industrial and scientific decline on which it finds itself today.

But Trump also has another side. He styles himself a deal-maker and—when he can extricate himself from his paranoia and delusions of grandeur—his deal-making can have good results. He did, after all, get Israel together with the UAE, and push the mRNA Covid vaccines into actual production at “Warp Speed.” And he does dimly understand, as many US oligarchs do not, that global trade needs to be managed so that working people in developed countries, reduced to poverty, indignity and desperation, do not rise up everywhere with pitchforks and torches. The very political forces that elected Trump president twice arise from the neglect of manufacturing workers in developed countries amidst the infelicities of global trade.

So, to continue the Chinese analogy, Trump is yin and yang rolled into one. Encourage his paranoia and self-obsession, and the US falls, and with it much of humanity’s near future. Encourage his creative and adaptive deal-making, and both have a chance.

Let’s take just one example. Today’s “international order” has a fatal flaw. It depends on institutions that require consensus, if not unanimity, for decisions. Therefore they get little or nothing done. The more important and divisive the issue, the less they can resolve it.

The EU often works this way: for fundamental change, it depends on total consensus. COP29 just fell apart because the Saudis ran around its periphery, effectively whispering “not one word against fossil fuels!” in every committee’s ear. And the UN has become a feckless debating society because the big powers after World War II (including Russia, with an economy today the size of Italy’s!) all have veto power.

But what would happen if the really big powers sat down together to solve the world’s problems? What would happen if China, the US, and the EU convened alone, with India, Brazil, Japan and South Korea playing advisory roles? Could they distribute manufacturing jobs reasonably and fairly among developing and developed nations, straighten out supply chains and make them resilient, and support a truly global distribution of vital scientific and industrial research and development? Could they make rules for “strategic” (read “military” and “espionage”) research and production that would allow the rest of the global economy to soldier on, with less social and political disruption?

Say what you want about China under Xi Jinping. The Chinese are a practical people. Although China served as a “proxy” for its warring “buffer states” Vietnam and North Korea, it has not started or waged a war of its own—let alone a war of conquest like Russia’s in Ukraine—since its so-called “Communists” (today, state capitalists) took over in 1949.

I think China’s pragmatism derives in part from the complexity of its written language. But its origin doesn’t matter. Make a proposition that takes China’s self-interest (including long-term interest) into account, and China will likely agree.

So a conclave of the few powers that really matter, including China, might just help solve many of the world’s problems, and coincidentally our own. And Donald Trump could, in his inimitable way, take credit for having enabled the process.

But for this encouraging picture to come into focus, one thing is absolutely necessary. The people whom Trump appoints to key positions must be qualified, competent and even creative. Bomb throwers, ideologues and intemperate people like Matt Gaetz, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, and RFK Jr. cannot, and will not, perform that role.

With them in key positions, the Second Trump Administration will degenerate into a plaything of a deranged geezer focused entirely on himself. And our multiply challenged nation will come to look more like Russia, Syria, North Korea, or (in the best case) today’s Israel, Hungary, or Venezuela.

So it’s all up to our Senate now. Will enough Republican senators stand firm in populating the Second Trump Administration with sane, qualified, competent people with good ideas? Or will they knuckle under to an aging, increasingly senile would-be despot and let our country and our world go to Hell?

That’s the main question—if not the only one—before our nation and our species today. The answer depends on Republican senators like Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Thune of South Dakota (the upcoming Senate Majority Leader), John Cornyn of Texas, and (most of all) Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

McConnell himself bears extraordinary responsibility. He could have avoided all this risk of chaos, and saved our nation from all these fateful choices, simply by voting to convict a president already impeached for inciting an insurrection, and whom McConnell himself apparently despises. This is McConnell’s, and the others’, last chance to save our nation and our species from chaos and a new Dark Age.

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