Related: A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks
At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump and his cronies are going to rob this country blind. (Smart money says he gets us into a war or two also.)
Author Archives: Chris
Years of Magical Thinking
Andrew Bacevich, How the US Blew the Post-Cold-War Era:
The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments? Answering that question is essential to understanding how Donald Trump became president and where his ascendency leaves us.
Hardly had this period commenced before observers fell into the habit of referring to it as the “post-Cold War” era. Now that it’s over, a more descriptive name might be in order. My suggestion: America’s Age of Great Expectations…
Anne Tagonist, 2016: the year Magic broke into Politics
The mythopoesis of a pre-Romantic Scots witch story is straightforward: a witch or sorcerer has foresworn the church and enjoys great power in the world. Her land is green. Her enemies fear her. She should be happy, but in fact she is beholden to the devil to torment her neighbours so that they, too, will foreswear the church. The hero, brought to agony by the loss of family, land, or freedom, is tempted in a moment of wild rage to call on the devil, but does not. This forebearance kills the witch malefactor, though since this is Scotland nothing improves the lot of the broken hero, whose only consolation is the firm possession of his or her soul. The Romantics prettied it up with ancient ruins and mysterious rituals, but the underlying narrative remains ugly and revolting. Magic, in these tales, is a contagious evil narrowly avoided at the final minute.
But then, history is written by the victors.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
“The wise restraints that make men free.”
Limits are the very stuff of a real democracy — a representative, constitutional republican democracy. Even in the structure of a democratic government there must be checks and balances among its three main limbs: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
No one among them can usurp the exclusive powers of any of the others. On the day the executive assumes the power to make laws or to interpret them, on that day democracy dies. Indonesia itself witnessed this not many years ago. Democracy is not a happy-go-lucky breaking of handcuffs. It is neither party nor picnic nor feast. It is serious business. It is about obligations to others. It is about authority and its limits. It is about rights and freedoms and their limits.
And vox populi is not vox dei. Democracy is not people power. Democracy is the social discipline that makes freedom meaningful and a true blessing: “the wise restraints that make men free.”
Reading Material – January 7, 2017
From the past few weeks:
- Corey Robin, Trump and the Intelligence Agencies: On the Slow Collapse of Imperial Republics
- Chris Smaje, 2016: A sheep’s vigil
- Robert Leonard (NYT), Why Rural America Voted for Trump [Ed.: I find Leonard’s piece depressing in that I see no basis for common ground. As an aside, the reality of taxes. ADDENDA: Dean Baker with some observations which suggests it’s not as straightforward as many – including Krugman and myself – might initially think. FAIR points out some right-wing mythology.]
- Joe Allen, When George Wallace Came to Town
- Matthew Sitman, Leaving Conservatism Behind
- Robert Mitchum, Dust Bowl would devastate today’s crops, study finds [Ed.: It’s all fun and games until climate change breaks agriculture.]
- Rae Ellen Bichell, A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger
- Roger Harrabin, Donald Trump makes top Republican fear environmental future
- Robinson Meyer, Are Climate Scientists Ready for Trump?
- Kate Aronoff, The Republicans Who Want Trump to Fight Climate Change
- Lamar Alexander and Sheldon Whitehouse (NYT), To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power
- Stanford scientist unveils 50-state plan to transform U.S. to renewable energy
- Michael Forsythe (NYT), China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020
- Joe Romm, Trump to cede millions of high-wage jobs to China
- , Green Growth: A U.S. Program for Controlling Climate Change and Expanding Job Opportunities
- Nathaniel Stinnett, Why Don’t Environmentalists Vote?
- Chad Orzel, What Should You Expect From Low-Energy Physics In 2017? It’s Hard To Say [Ed.: I left the field 20+ years ago but I have the same technical background as Orzel. Coincidence or not, I think our outlooks on the world as scientists have a lot in common.]
Voting trends in selected states: What does the raw data tell you?
There’s been much speculation about the root cause of Clinton’s loss, e.g., white working class turnout for Trump? Clinton unable turn out the “Obama coalition”? For example, Nate Cohn offers an analysis in the NYT, “How the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an Opening for Trump“. There’s a section in his post, “It Wasn’t Turnout” (that caused Clinton to lose). With respect to WI, MI, and PA, the three Clinton “firewall” states which went for Trump and essentially won him the election, that’s BS. Just look at the number for votes for the Democratic and Republican candidates over the last five elections.
Wisconsin:
Republican up 147k votes from 2008; Democrat down 295k.
Alternatives
Dan Charles, By Returning To Farming’s Roots, He Found His American Dream:
Eighteen years ago, on New Year’s Eve, David Fisher visited an old farm in western Massachusetts, near the small town of Conway. No one was farming there at the time, and that’s what had drawn Fisher to the place. He was scouting for farmland.
“I remember walking out [to the fallow fields] at some point,” Fisher recalls. “And in the moonlight – it was all snowy – it was like a blank canvas.”
On that blank canvas, Fisher’s mind painted a picture of what could be there alongside the South River. He could see horses tilling the land – no tractors, no big machinery – and vegetable fields, and children running around.
This is David Fisher’s American Dream. It may not be the conventional American Dream of upward economic mobility. But dreams like his have a long tradition in this country. Think of the Puritans and the Shakers and the Amish. These American dreams are the uncompromising pursuit of a difficult ideal.
The scene that David Fisher imagined, on the New Year’s Eve almost two decades ago, has turned into reality. It’s called Natural Roots Farm.