The Debate Debacle

Watching tonight’s Biden-Trump presidential debate gave cause for despair. Attentive viewers could rationally conclude that the United States is finished as a democracy, if not as a nation.

On display were two old men. One mouthed a torrent of lies and inaccurate superlatives, mostly about himself. The other had trouble expressing a coherent thought. When he did manage a bit of substance—with few exceptions—his words were anything but punchy: they aped a bureaucrat’s soon-to-be-filed-and-forgotten report.

The “winner” was clearly Donald Trump. For ninety minutes, he managed to conceal his apparently increasing derangement under a canopy of self-flattering lies. At one point, the debate degenerated into two old men arguing like six year olds over who’s the better golfer. True to form, Trump never committed to accept the election’s results if he loses.

The media didn’t help at all. Lies and exaggerations flowed like water, without “fact-checking” and without objection. My rough estimate was about five very two minutes, in a 90-minute debate, or some 225 lies in all. The moderators’ failure to intervene—except to cut off unauthorized overtime—reflected the “bothsideserism” that has turned our national media into unwitting accomplices of national catastrophe.

At the end of PBS’ post-debate analysis, its Republican analyst opined that there will never be another debate. I hope so. Not only did Joe Biden look and sound like a loser; he did so for all the wrong reasons, which have nothing to do with governing the country. You might as well give the two candidates maces and lances and put them in a jousting arena, as if they were aging knights of old.

Did this utter debacle move the needle? I doubt it. People like me, who would sooner emigrate than live under Trump as president again, have no alternative but to wait and hope. Members of the Demagogue’s cult would hardly be shaken by their guru’s every appearance of winning. In our scatterbrained nation of minute-by-minute “news” and speculation, this late-June catastrophe will be unlikely to have any effect in November.

In this bizarre election, only two things matter. First, Joe Biden has to live long enough to be inaugurated if he wins. Second, the Dems have to get out the vote in all the battleground states—and in any others made shaky by this debacle—as never before.

Dems can’t do that with overpriced media ads pushing thirty-second second video clips on a population already saturated with propaganda and lies, let alone one in which most voters have already made up their minds. When pols push those ads, only Big Media win. So, as I learned from a recent op-ed, do political consultants and “operatives,” who actually get commissions on their ad buys. (Don’t get me started on universal corruption.)

Dems can only win the old-fashioned way: Getting Out the Vote (GOTV) with face-to-face contacts with reluctant and undecided voters.

That’s why, last November, I decided to cancel all my donations to parties, candidates and my usual charities. Instead, I’m giving all that money in monthly contributions to the following GOTV organizations, which I make through the secure progressive donation site Act Blue: (1) Black Voters Matter Action PAC; (2) Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ old organization); (3) New Georgia Project (a spin-off of (2)); (4) Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; (5) Democracy for America (DFA); (6) Democratic National Committee; (7) Progressive Turnout Project; (8) VPP; (9) Mijente (Hispanic GOTV organization); (10) Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) Action Fund (which seeks to restore ex-felons’ voting rights); (11) Swing Left; and (12) Advance the Electorate PAC.

If any reader knows any other GOTV organization worth adding to this list, please list it in a comment, along with the states and/or regions in which it primarily operates.

Our mass media have destroyed our public sphere for profit, especially social media. They will hardly be our salvation. The only way to save our democracy and our nation now is for us to organize the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia before the 2020 election, and to Get Out the Vote by promoting person-to-person contact with people who care (even if they are paid a subsistence salary). If you doubt whether Abrams’ methods work, just ask Senators Ossoff and Warnock.


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How Immigration can Arrest our Decline

Our upcoming presidential election has many oddities. One of the oddest is the stress on immigration as a campaign issue.

The importance of immigration is not the point. It’s indeed vital to our national future, but not in the way that Donald Trump claims. Immigration is one of the few things that can reverse the root causes of our national decline.

At the moment, our decline is self-evident. Our birth rate is falling. Our population is aging. The old, if not the elderly, have a hammerlock on our national wealth and power.

Politically and socially, we are as divided as never before, except perhaps in the runup to our Civil War. Our global adversaries are exploiting and magnifying our division with algorithmic precision, using our own social media and the Internet that we invented and gave the world. Exhibit A is our current presidential election, bitterly divided among supporters of two old men.

Our elderly show every indication of refusing to release their hammerlock until their survivors—in the immortal over-the-top words of the late actor Charlton Heston—pry the wealth and power “from their cold, dead hands.” They have squeezed the next generations out of all responsibility for their and our nation’s future: those generations are marrying less, producing fewer children, starting careers later, buying houses later (if at all), reaching positions of power and influence later, and generally tuning out. Many younger voters are so alienated that they will refuse to vote in an election that will determine whether our democracy survives. Or they will waste their votes on third-party candidates who have no chance to win.

Demographics is only part of the problem, although arguably a causative part. Another key part is that we have lost our mojo as a nation.

We have lost our scientific and industrial creativity. We have replaced it, partly unknowingly, with creativity in making and manipulating money. The brightest youth who, in my generation, became physicists, chemists, microbiologists and engineers, are today becoming investment bankers, private-equity capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and lawyers. Business-school grads are now telling doctors how to practice medicine and (because they own or control the shares in their medical groups) getting away with it.

Yes, our GDP and our employment are up. Our stock markets indices continue to surge. But all that is superficial. In industry, as in political power, the wealth and influence reflected in those indices are becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer, generally older hands.

To those of us who made careers in or adjacent to science and technology, the decline seems particularly precipitous. I’ll just give three recent examples.

Our own Wright Brothers invented controlled flight. We Americans developed the first long-distance and transcontinental aircraft. We invented the aircraft industry, the airline industry, airline safety regulation, and the computers and computer systems that make mass air travel possible.

Yet this week Congress dragged our premier aircraft firm, Boeing, on the carpet for abandoning a long history of excellence in engineering and safety for a haphazard and deadly rush toward greater sales, greater profit and higher share prices. This was not just a temporary peccadillo, or even a whole bunch of them. Rather, it’s the result of durable, gradual and longstanding corruption. A culture of greed has replaced the excellence in engineering and an obsessive focus on safety that had characterized the American aircraft industry and its regulation since the first few aircraft disasters, back in the 1920s and 30s, brought the practical risks of flying to the fore. Boeing’s insidious corruption did not happen overnight, and it won’t take small changes to repair.

My second example relates to “chips” or integrated circuits for computers and other modern digital devices. We invented them. Not only did we invent them: we invented the transistors that replaced vacuum tubes. Then, by miniaturizing transistors using principles of solid-state physics, we made it possible to build chips containing millions of them—whole computers on a bit of “silicon real estate” comprising a few square centimeters.

But who today makes these chips that our own scientists and engineers conceived, invented, improved and perfected, all here in the USA? Today the primary manufacturers are in Taiwan and the Netherlands. So are the makers of the highly complicated fabrication equipment (the so-called “fab labs”) that make these chips. In the last several decades, the vast bulk of this vitally important and scientifically fundamental industry has migrated overseas. That’s why President Biden’s misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” allocated billions of government money to bringing just a bit of high-end chip making back home to where it all had been conceived and invented.

My final example of national decline involves inventors themselves. Every kid raised in America knows the stories of Andrew Carnégie, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and others. Each created whole sectors of modern industry using imagination, principles of fundamental science and engineering, and sheer persistence. (Edison famously said that “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”) But few have noted how much their addition to American power and wealth derived from immigration. Andrew Carnegie was an immigrant, who came from Scotland to Pennsylvania as a child. Steve Jobs was the son of an immigrant from Syria. Elon Musk is himself an immigrant from South Africa.

In our modern world, software and the Internet loom large. So it’s easy to mistake business innovation using them for progress in science and technology. But the two are analytically and practically distinct. The differences have vast importance for economics, democracy, geopolitical power, and military strength.

Careful readers will note that I omitted Jeff Bezos’ name from the list of key American inventors, although I have praised him on my blog for initiating customer reviews of products and making retail purchases vastly easier, quicker and more efficient. But to my knowledge, despite his contributions to (and changes in!) our economy, Bezos is responsible for no significant advance in science or technology. None. Zip. All his many contributions to our economy and society involved business ideas or software, which in many cases (including his) is just business ideas coded in computer language.

As far as I know, the sole and single fundamental industrial advance in science or technology made in America since Ronald Reagan made greed fashionable was the mRNA anti-Covid vaccines and the microbiology technology behind them. As Anthony Fauci noted in a recent interview on PBS [set the timer at 4:55], that technology made possible having a safe and effective vaccine against a new pathogen in less than a year—a wildly unprecedented advance. The fact that political ideology and misdirection caused nearly a million Americans to die after refusing vaccination shows just how far our national culture has deviated from that of our inventive past. After all, we are the nation that had invented practical electric light, the airplane, the telephone, recorded sound (the phonograph), motion pictures, television, nuclear energy and weapons, and high-altitude flight.

The best diagnosis of our nation’s ills that I have read came from, of all people, Richard Nixon’s data man, Kevin Phillips. In 2006, he published a book entitled American Theocracy. His book contains an important and accurately predictive analysis of our nation’s politics and culture.

One part described and predicted—quite accurately!—the rise of Christian Evangelicals in American politics, which now drives Trump’s campaign eighteen years later. A second part analyzed the influence and rise of oil money and oil families (including the Bushes), which still fuels opposition to sensible climate policy. But the third and least-noticed part of his book described a sociopolitical phenomenon that lies at the heart of our current national decline: the “financialization” of our economy.

Much the same sort of decline affected the Spanish, Dutch, and British Empires. It involved the shift of focus—among the governing class and the “elite,” if not the general public—from real commerce and industry to making a living from manipulating money and finance and their various abstract manifestations.

“Financialization” involves a general shift from inventing, designing, engineering, manufacturing and selling tangible things to conceiving, buying, selling and speculating on financial abstractions: things like stocks, bonds, notes, options, their derivatives and the like. Whereas once a clever boy or girl might have grown up to discover a new principle of science, or invent a chip or an mRNA vaccine, he or she now looks forward to “inventing” a new form of leveraged buyout or tax-advantaged corporation or (as a recent WaPo article revealed) a whole new occupation for lawyers and accountants: inventing new ways to employ shell corporations and partnerships to reduce capital gains taxes by manipulating the tax bases (legal tax values) of assets.

As more and more smart people turn to toward these financial abstractions as ways of making a good living—sometimes a very good living—their society declines in at least four ways. First, talented youth spend more and more time and education learning about financial abstractions than about the real world. They make their careers in an artificial, abstract world which can provide them a very good living but has increasingly less to do with real life and goods, as distinguished from services. Second, a preoccupation with artificial abstractions leads to a very real division between the elite and the people who do the actual work of making, storing, selling, repairing and caring for real, tangible things, including food and medicines. It thus divides people into classes socially, financially, politically and intellectually. It leads to the sort of class division in which designers of Uber’s software can be handsomely rewarded for calling drivers “independent contractors” and so legally depriving them of vacation and sick pay and other benefits, while relentlessly squeezing them with software designed to get them to drive faster and less safely to up their income.

This kind of activity creates little or no new wealth; it just provides a convenient excuse, hidden in financial abstractions, for the elite to split the pie more in their favor. The result is a working class that, however vaguely, senses that it has been had, and so supports demagogues like Donald Trump in a hail-Mary pass toward the goal of some sort of retribution.

Third, the more smart workers spend their time learning and applying artificial financial abstractions, the less they know about the real world, including such things as physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. The more the future belongs to other nations whose smartest people study these things. Finally, artificial financial abstractions are useless in warfare, whether in defense or offense. The more a nation’s elite focuses on them, the weaker it becomes in war or military faceoffs. A clever depreciation plan or leveraged-buyout scheme cannot defend against an incoming artillery shell, let alone a jet aircraft, smart drone, or nuclear weapon.

So the more a society focuses on artificial financial abstractions as a means for its leaders and elite to become wealthy, the weaker and more divided it becomes in the real, non-abstract world. Unfortunately, reality, life and rivals eventually will force it to live in the real world. But by then it may be too late to make a smooth or quick transition.

Over eight years ago, in a blog post about immigration and aspects of the Vietnam War, I came to the following conclusion:

“There’s just one problem with the good life, which Man has known since Athens and Sparta. It doesn’t last long. If it does go on too long, it makes you weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. Then life inevitably gets harder.”

That's where we are headed as a nation are right now. We are halfway down the slippery slope of Kevin Phillips’ financialization. We are headed toward consequent economic decline, industrial weakness, and geopolitical irrelevance.

Spain, Holland and Britain are still nations today. None of them is a terrible place to live. But none of them has a fraction of the influence on science, technology, commerce or the global economy—let alone the balance of geopolitical power—that it had in its heyday. We are following in their footsteps.

There’s no guarantee that we can recover. To my knowledge, no nation in history has recovered from the kind of financialization slide that Phillips describes.

But if we are to recover, one thing is clear. We won’t manage a recovery by relying solely on native-born talent. We must rely on immigrants with a fire in their belly born of harsh conditions abroad that most native-born Americans can hardly imagine. Far from poisoning our blood, as Trump, Nazi-like, has charged, immigrants can renew it. They can bring us renewed knowledge of how much worse things still can get, and many come fired with a desire to do and be better.

Time has created a useful anomaly. Even as we await November’s crucial decision whether to turn our Executive Branch over, yet again, to a grossly unfit criminal psychopath burning with malignant narcissism, would-be immigrants pour through the snake-infested Darian Gap, and from every part of the world, striving just to live among us. Our longstanding reputation as “the City on the Hill” still burns in their imaginations, even as the City itself begins to crumble.

So if we were smart and foresightful, we would not close our borders. We would open them wide, but we would be selective. Yes, we would still allow refugees to seek asylum for reasons of persecution; from the Pilgrims onward, that is basic to our national ethos. But we would also seek out the smartest, the most ambitious, and the most talented among would-be immigrants, of course with no criminal record. We would seek out those who would apply the force of their minds, with wills forged in places of famine, criminal violence, lawlessness and an even more hostile climate, to make our nation better.

Of course we cannot do this now, not when our Demagogue promises Nirvana to the Evangelicals, White Supremacists and Christian Supremacists if only we close our gates. Joe Biden and his team must do and say whatever they need to do and say to keep our nation a democracy.

But if they win in November, we must, as soon as possible, open the gates wide again to the best immigrants, the better to refresh our blood, our youth and our national spirit. If not, Kevin Phillips’ meticulous study of empires that preceded us suggests that there’s nowhere we’re so likely to go as down.

Endnote on the Manhattan Project: At various times, Donald Trump has proposed limiting immigration by Muslims and people from Mexico and “Shithole countries” (apparently mostly in Africa), and favoring immigrants from Scandinavia as compared to Southern Europe. But the history of the federal Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first nuclear weapons that ended World War II, illustrates just how dangerous and counterproductive such a prejudice-based immigration policy would be.

Apart from E.O. Lawrence at Berkeley and a few others, the vast majority of the illustrious scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. Many were Jews; some were from Italy or France. All were admitted to live and work in the US because FDR’s government was smart enough to recognize and take advantage of their unique knowledge and expertise.

At a lower level, casual prejudice, especially against Jews, was rampant in the Roosevelt administration, even during World War II. It led to our own government’s refusal to admit many ordinary Jewish refugees during and immediately after the War; some of these rejected applicants perished in the Holocaust. Imagine how our modern world would look if that prejudice had prevailed entirely, and Stalin’s Soviet Union had gotten key nuclear scientists and therefore had developed nuclear weapons first.

The moral of this story is that prejudice of any kind—whether racial, national or religious—has no place in a rational immigration policy. The sole criteria should be lack of a criminal record and adverse intelligence activity, family sponsorship, legitimate refugee status or service to the US, and objective merit shown by personal history, trusted recommendations and/or entrance tests.



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Despot-Proofing Our Armed Forces

Like most Americans, I’ve been forced by circumstances to think a lot about a man I’d rather never bring to mind: Donald Trump. I’ve thought hard about his possible ascension to our top leadership post for yet a second time. I’ve spent even more time recently, as polls in “battleground” states suggest a realistic chance of his winning the presidency yet again, despite his self-evident focus on himself, his inconsistency, his lying, his tendency toward violence, and his manifest general unfitness.

Deep down, I don’t credit the polls. Why? I think we are witnessing a pollsters’ debacle like that in the Dewey-Truman race, but on steroids.

MAGA partisans are childishly eager to tell the world how they feel and will vote. Progressives like me, who are equally adamant in supporting Biden, spend an hour each day clearing our cell phones and e-mail inboxes of unwanted messages—even from causes and candidates that we wholly support—because there are just too many.

Many of us progressives are already contributing and doing as much as we possibly can. We don’t need reminders of how consequential this race is. So the likelihood of my spending even ten minutes on the phone with a pollster is somewhere between infinitesimal and zero. I assume there are many Biden supporters like me, maybe even more who support Biden lukewarmly.

And yet, and yet. As flawed as they may be, polls tell us that the Cult of Trump is strong. Every time I see an oversized pickup truck with nothing but two gigantic flags in its bed—one our American flag and another labeled simply “TRUMP”—I can’t help but wonder. How many more are there like that? And how many more are there like that in the “red” battleground states that will decide this election?

So I can’t help but think that the best approach for me and our nation is embodied in the motto of the Scouts of America (now, at last, co-ed): “Be Prepared.” We all have to think hard and work hard to prepare our democracy to survive a possible second Trump presidency. How do we do that?

Today’s New York Times has one answer. It has a long story about preparations among progressive organizations to fight such things as mass roundups and deportations of undocumented migrants and the use of federal military force against demonstrators, especially in blue states. Virtually all of the reported preparations involve lawyers and legally oriented private, nonprofit institutions, such as the ACLU. We progressives are building an unprecedented army of advocates armed with law texts, sharp pencils and yellow legal pads.

But when I let my mind relax a bit and drift from polysyllabic words, I think that “crude” best describes our would-be despot. He’s crude in his descriptions of and relationships with women, including those whom he has assaulted. He’s crude in his casual acceptance and encouragement of violence—in his mass rallies, in his speech promising a “bloodbath” if he loses, and in his threats to deploy the judiciary and our armed forces against his enemies. He was crude in encouraging and (in my view) inciting what became the January 6 Insurrection.

In these respects, he’s a brute. We’ve not seen his like in the White House since Andrew Jackson, whom historians tend to hold responsible for one of our greatest shames: the forced displacement, cultural genocide and partial actual genocide of Native Americans.

In Trump’s first term, his crude and brutish tendencies were restrained by those around him and his vague sense that—never having held any political office, let alone the top job—he was in unfamiliar territory. Perhaps the most famous example was then-Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to participate in the appointment of false electors after Trump lost to Biden in 2020. Another was the threat of virtually all the assistant attorneys general to resign en masse if Trump removed the then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replaced him with a “Stop the Steal” lackey. Even General Mark Milley, who unlawfully assisted in using military force to clear Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors, later regretted doing so and pledged not to allow further unlawful use of our military.

But this time, there will be no Mike Pence, no wall of resistance among assistant attorneys general, no Mark Milley. This time, all the people appointed to key positions of civil and military power will be selected for loyalty to Donald Trump alone, and to no one and nothing else. The would-be despot himself has told us so.

Does anyone seriously think that this crude and brutish man, now showing signs of significant senile dementia, will appoint any “underling” to any high position who will have the slightest chance of opposing his every whim? A few good Germans once had such wishful fantasies about Adolf Hitler. Within a year of two of Hitler’s accession to absolute power, they were all gone from positions of power, or dead.

So “being prepared” to save our democracy in a second term of Trump will require, above all, preserving independent and lawful operation of our armed forces, all of them. President Jackson once resisted complying with a lawful order of Chief Justice John Marshall, saying words to the effect of “Where’s his army?” We do not want the second coming of Jackson to take that reasoning to its logical conclusion.

How do we prevent that? How do we preclude the worst case of a second civil war being fought with heavy aircraft, mighty littoral landing craft, attack drones and other sophisticated modern weapons, perhaps even nukes?

I submit that Congress can, and probably would, pass laws to prohibit all the following:

1. The use of nuclear weapons, aerial bombing or strafing, littoral attack vessels, tanks, armed drones and other heavy weapons against American civilians, or where American civilians could incur mass casualties, without specific congressional authorization by a two-thirds vote of both Houses, upon a specific finding that foreign forces or influences were involved;

2. The deployment or non-emergency use of any branch of federal service—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Space Force—for any purpose other than defense of the nation’s capital or designated military bases, except upon invasion or attack by foreign forces, and then only as specifically authorized by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress; and

3. The deployment of National Guard troops to suppress civilian unrest for a period of more than ten days, except upon authorization by Congress, by majority vote of both Houses, after an official report by the FBI concerning the nature and causes of the unrest, and upon the approval of the governors or acting governors of all the States involved.

We never want to see the awesome power of modern weapons, let alone nukes, deployed against American civilians the way Saddam deployed aircraft and gas against the Marsh Arabs. We never want to see, inside our own country, anything like what is going on now in Gaza.

Congress has just over seven months before Donald Trump, if elected again, will take office. It should begin to put in place these democracy fail-safes now. Even in our badly divided Congress, there ought to be enough true patriots and realists to pass these much-needed restraints and democracy fail-safes by majority vote.

Endnote: As a white geezer who just turned 79, I’m enormously grateful for the service (and relieved at the leadership) of Secdef Lloyd James Austin III and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. Both men are Black. As such, both no doubt understand better than most the dangers of misuse of military power to disadvantage and oppress innocent civilians and to violate the most basic human rights in ways both subtle and overt.

I suspect and hope that they are doing all they can to rid our armed forces of extremists, including white and Christian supremacists. I believe that their very presence in top leadership posts is causing at least some extremists to leave our armed forces voluntarily. Good riddance!

But as top leaders, both men serve at the President’s pleasure. They can be dismissed on the day a new president is inaugurated.

Accordingly, if we wish to despot-proof our armed forces, we need to have more powerful institutional, legal restraints and a deep, deep bench of service members who believe devoutly in the neutrality, non-partisanship and egalitarianism of our armed forces. I hope and trust that both top leaders are working hard to entrench the laws, orders, customs, and people who will maintain those traditions. They have seven months to complete their good and vital work before all may suddenly change.

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