It’s not that they merely failed to implement change. Rather, they made conditions worse by leaving thousands of demoralized followers in their wake while providing the radical right with more ammunition than it could possibly need. In Spain, Podemos garnered 21 percent of the vote within two years of its inception in 2014. But then it evaporated when its trendy post-modern, post-Marxist populism turned out to be little more than a media gimmick for a pony-tailed academic-turned-talk show star named Pablo Iglesias. Within a few years, its numbers were back in the low single digits. After urging millions of Greeks to vote no on an EU austerity package in 2015, Syriza did a 180-degree about-face by accepting the package and leaving its followers in the lurch. Today, Greece is ruled by the conservative New Democracy Party whose leader, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has climbed the greasy pole with the help of the group’s anti-immigrant ultra-right.

Sanders backed Hillary Clinton, whose campaign led to Trump I, and then, after heeding Barack Obama’s instructions to withdraw in 2020, threw his weight behind Joe Biden, whose disastrous presidency led to Trump II. The great Corbyn insurgency ended in disgrace when Jeremy, buckling under pro-Israeli pressure, accepted a definition equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

BLM followed the same route. Not only did it rack up $90 million in corporate donations – some of which went to the purchase of a swanky six-bedroom home in LA – but its rejection of an entirely reasonable “all lives matter” slogan allowed opponents to paint it as corrupt and racially sectarian. But as I wrote in 2020, the ALM slogan did not undermine BLM at all, but, instead, reinforced it in the same way that “one for all” reinforces “all for one.”

“By ignoring and even denigrating poor whites” who wondered why other victims of police violence were not getting attention, I argued that BLM was “all but forc[ing] them into the arms of Trump,” a statement that proved all too prescient. Not only did Trump win by a 14-point margin among non-college voters in 2024, but he doubled his support among black voters as well.

And now we have DSA circling the same drain. It would be wrong to assume that Francesca Hong’s defeat amounts to a rejection of socialism per se. Indeed, many Democrats no doubt voted against her because they honestly believe her opponent, a mainstream pol named David Crowley, would fare better against Tom Tiffany, a pro-Trump election denier, in the fall. That’s not anti-socialism but realpolitik as they see it.

But there’s also no doubt that Hong’s twitter feed destroyed whatever chance she had left. More than just loopy , the tweets were downright poisonous in a way that reveals all too much about DSA’s real politics. For genuine socialists, working-class unity is the highest value, the sine qua non, the true motor force of history. So what were they supposed to make of this 2019 gem about a Hong family visit to rural Wisconsin?

I ate two bites of my kid’s cheeseburger at a Culver’s in black river falls and told him they ran out of ice cream. Mostly just wanted to leave bc I was on the verge of a anxiety attack ... to [sic] many old white people who didn’t think we spoke English.

Who talks this way? What did those people do to deserve such abuse? Is it OK to complain about too many white people but not too many blacks, Asians, gays, or whatnot? Non-Hispanic whites account for 56 percent or more of the US population, which means that their support is vital for anyone hoping to turn socialism into a viable mass movement. How can socialists win them over while at the same time reviling them as racists?

Then there’s this tweet from January 2022 in which Hong urges people to “[e]lect more Black and Brown folks who won’t be racist obstructionists.” It’s apples and oranges. Some white people are racist obstructionists and some are not. Ditto blacks and browns, some of whom are progressive and some of whom are the opposite. Equating race with political attitudes leads down all kinds of dangerous rabbit holes, which is why socialists – real socialists, that is – are smart enough to avoid it.

And there’s the infamous Francesca Hong Thanksgiving tweet, which managed to offend everyone who likes stuffing and gravy:

Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.

Concentrated stupidity like this is not unimpressive. First of all, what’s up with “folx”? As one blogger helpfully explained:

While folks is already a gender-neutral term, changing the spelling of the word signifies the inclusion of BIPOC, queer, and other marginalized communities that have been historically excluded from mainstream usage of folks. Basically, when an organization uses the word folx, they are intentionally letting you know that they are accepting towards marginalized identities.

If so, isn’t “indigenous folx and women” redundant since indigenous females fall into the same marginalized category? Moreover, why use such in-group language if, as a socialist, your goal is to appeal to workers in general as opposed to the hipsters who fill Hong’s state legislative district in Madison, Wisconsin (where this reporter happened to live for a few years in the late 1960s and early 70s)?

Then there’s the colonization theory that the tweet so neatly encapsulates. This is the trendy new doctrine that assumes that colonization is unique to America, Israel, and a few other countries. But it ain’t necessarily so since colonization is ubiquitous throughout history. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes colonized Britain so completely in the fifth and sixth century that few linguistic traces of the inhabitants’ original Celtic are to be found in the English that the process gave rise to. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegian colonized Ireland and northern England, German tribes – sorry, German folx – colonized Gaul, Romans colonized Tuscany (named after the pre-Latin Etruscans), Arabs colonized the Fertile Crescent (which was previously Greek and Aramaic-speaking), while black Africans colonized Egypt in the eighth century BC. This was right around the time that someone named “Homer” was producing the first written version of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which, needless to say, celebrates the colonization of a certain portion of Asia Minor.

If there’s no statute of limitations, which there apparently isn’t for a moralist like Hong, then why are those events any less relevant than the struggling community that 150 Pilgrims and others sought to establish in the early 17^th century?

The impulse behind the first Thanksgiving was far from reactionary. After half the community perished in the harsh winter of 1620-21, those who had survived with indigenous help invited some 90 members of the local Massasoit tribe to share in their good fortune. This seems like a kind and generous thing to do. During the English Civil War, the festival took on anti-royalist overtones. Since Cromwell had banned Christmas as a holiday for rowdy and drunken papists, his supporters in New England turned Thanksgiving into an anti-Christmas to be celebrated not in taverns but with the family at home. Lincoln declared it a national holiday in 1863 in response to the urgings of Sarah Josepha Hale, a New Hampshire abolitionist from solid Puritan-Congregationalist stock. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was meant to give thanks for Gettysburg and other victories yet to come.

Surely, this Thanksgiving tradition is worthy of mention. Hong might also have spared a word for workers who are unable to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families either because they work round-the-clock shifts, because they’re on the run from ICE, or because they’re victims of a process of social atomization that has laid waste to family life in general for a growing portion of the population.

But she didn’t. Instead, she turned herself into a Grinch by castigating people who enjoy feasting on turkey and cranberries as latter-day genocidaires.

There is one Hong tweet, however, that stands out as meritorious. When it was pointed out in 2021 that the 57 senators who voted to convict Trump is in his second impeachment trial represented nearly 70 percent of the population – meaning that senators representing just over 30 percent “got their way” by voting to acquit – she tweeted back: “Abolish the Senate.”

Bravo! A grotesquely malapportioned Senate, in which the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states is outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the the other 40, is the US Constitution’s single most undemocratic feature as well as its most intractable due to a clause in Article V that says that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” This makes it all but unchangeable and hence the linchpin of an increasingly undemocratic political structure dating from the age of silk knee britches and slavery that is weighing on society like a millstone. Casting it into the dustbin of history should be every socialist’s top priority.

But when the pro-Trump Tom Tiffany pointed the tweet out, how did the Hong campaign respond? By standing its ground? By telling him to get lost? No, it issued a furious denial. Declared Allison Geyer, the campaign’s communications director:

Tom Tiffany is once again telling lies and inventing quotes because he can’t run on his record. Representative Hong has never called for abolishing the US Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn’t exist.

When Tiffany produced the tweet in question, the campaign then backtracked, saying it was nothing more than “a frustrated reaction” to the January 6 uprising that had taken place a few weeks earlier. The campaign added:

It is not her current position, and it is not something a governor has any role in. She’s running to lower costs, fund public schools, and make childcare affordable.

So the one good thing Hong managed to say is now inoperative, to quote the late Ron Ziegler. She has changed her mind on an all-important issue without bothering to enlighten voters as to why. This is in keeping with AOC’s recent effort to laugh off such rhetoric on the grounds that “woke 1 was crazy.” But Hong and AOC can no more run away from such statements than an anti-vaxxer like RFK Jr. can run away from statements that “[t]he cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

Voters don’t like it when politicians lie to them, which is what Francesca Hong was guilty of doing. And they don’t like it when organizations like Democratic Socialists of America put up candidates who try to cover up their political record. That sound you hear is DSA crashing back down to earth.

Why would you want to change the system that America was born with? This is Article I we’re talking about.

To which Sunkara, after a bit of hemming and hawing about the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War, replied:

I would say that I’m against the Senate. I think the Senate’s an undemocratic body. ... I personally think that whatever replaces the Senate should be decided through a constitutional convention, should be decided through our amendment process, should be decided through democratic deliberation among the American people.

The way to replace the Senate, in other words, is to amend it out of existence via the normal constitutional route. Such is Sunkara’s position, but it’s wrong – deeply and sadly. The reason is that it ignores the upper chamber’s most distinctive constitutional feature, which is that it most definitely is not subject to the normal amending process. To the contrary, after describing how the process works, Article V ends with a killer clause stipulating that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

This makes it exempt. Where two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states are enough to change the rest of the document, nothing less than the unanimous approval of all 50 is required to alter this one particular plank. Ninety-nine percent of Americans may think it’s crazy for California and Wyoming to have two senators each even though one’s population is 67 times greater. But 99 percent is not enough since Article V says that “we the people” must get 588,753 Wyomingites – 0.17 percent of the country – on board as well. Since unanimity on this scale is impossible, the barrier is insurmountable. The mountains may crumble but this lopsided structure will continue for as long as anything like the current constitutional framework exists.

So Sunkara is wrong. Normal means are not sufficient. Worse, he knows it. How can we be sure? Because Jacobin, which he edits, published an article back in 2014 making this very point. Entitled “Abolish the Senate,” it stated that the framers wanted an upper chamber that would “be at least as powerful as the lower to ensure that state interests would be adequately protected” and that they wanted the amending clause to make sure that “the arrangement would be effectively immune to popular pressure.” The result “was the Senate’s enhanced power over treaties and appointments,” which placed it above the House in terms of political clout, plus the equal-state-representation clause in Article V, which placed its fundament structure beyond democratic control.

The article went on:

This was enough to render the Senate all but untouchable back in 1790 when Delaware was less than a twelfth the size of Virginia. But as the number of states has grown and population disparities have widened, the guarantees have only grown more ironclad. Today, a demographic microstate like Wyoming derives so much benefit from the system that the chances of it ever saying yes to reform approach zero. The very idea is unspeakable.

I remember that 2014 article quite well for one simple reason. I wrote it. I also remember Sunkara’s reaction. He was pleased when it quickly went viral. After years of banging one’s head against the wall, it was a sign that leftists were finally coming around to the view that America’s ancient Constitution is fundamentally undemocratic and that structural reform is imperative. But since equal state representation is effectively unchangeable, the article stressed that the only solution was the revolutionary one of casting Article V out entirely. Yet now Sunkara says the opposite.

Why the turnaround? Maybe it’s due to a loss of nerve. After all, some people find Fox News intimidating, so maybe he got flustered. Such things happen. But a follow-up article that a Jacobin writer named Ben Burgis published a few days later made the same point, which is that doing away with the Senate “would require a constitutional amendment if not a new constitutional convention” and no more. So it’s not a flub or a mistake but a doctrinal change – and a surreptitious one at that.

The problem, as I noted in my previous Substack post, “The Coming Crash of DSA,” is the “combination of radical rhetoric and shallow politics” that has long characterized left social-democratic groups such as Podemos, Syriza, and now the Democratic Socialists of America. They want to sound revolutionary by quoting Marx, calling for the overthrow of capitalism, and nattering on about surplus value and the like. DSA’s new platform thus brims with provocative ideas about also abolishing the Electoral College, reining in the Supreme Court, downscaling the presidency, and reorganizing the House on the basis of proportional representation, proposals that are long overdue. But when it comes to implementing them, DSA’ers either grow silent or minimize the difficulty. The line between reform and revolution blurs, and the group winds up sounding like Norman Thomas, its distant ideological progenitor, by declaring that socialists have no interest in overthrowing the Constitution and seek only “its orderly amendment” instead.

Burgis professes bewilderment in his follow-up article that the question of the Senate is drawing so much attention:

What might be less predictable is that, in a platform overflowing with ideas that socialists would be expected to like and conservatives would be expected to hate, the particular idea conservatives have picked out for special opprobrium is DSA’s call to abolish the Senate.

Even Hamilton and (for a time) Madison argued against a Senate based on equal state representation. But now he says it’s almost “as if Sunkara and the DSA were advocating the mass execution of puppies” for suggesting that it’s time for it to go.

But maybe the problem is not that Fox doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s that it understands all too well. Perhaps it realizes that the Senate is the hardest nut to crack of all and that only revolutionary means will do the trick. Aishah Hasnie’s task was thus to dare Sunkara to come clean about his real intentions. Considering his response, she should be congratulated on a job well done since she succeeded in exposing him as someone who’s either confused himself or intent on confusing others about what needs to be done.

To be absolutely clear as to what all this means, the ancient machinery is no longer applicable. Sluggish and unresponsive in the best of times, Article V has now come to a complete halt. There hasn’t been a constitution amendment in more than 50 years – sorry, but the bizarre Twenty-Seventh Amendment doesn’t count – and, under anything resembling current conditions, there won’t be one for 50 years more. The two-thirds, three-fourths rule allows one-fourth-plus of the states, which is to say 13 out of 50, to veto anything sought by the remainder. And since 13 states can add up to as little as 4.4 percent of the population, this means that one person in 23 is in a position to just say no in perpetuity. Any hope of overcoming such a barrier to constitutional change is doomed to failure. But thanks to Article V’s equal-state-representation clause, which allows a state representing just 0.17 percent of the population – roughly one person in 580 – to just say no, real democratic reform is doubly doomed. It’s the ruling class’s ultimate guarantee that real democratic change will never take place.

The entire situation is absurd. Worse, it’s an insult to democracy. “We the people” shouldn’t put up with it for an instant. If Article V renders the people powerless to solve the problem of a wildly disproportionate Senate, then the solution is clear. The people should render Article V powerless by fixing it regardless. This is how the founders solved the problem of the Articles of Confederation, which said that constitutional change would only be permissible if approved by all 13 states. Since this barrier was also insurmountable, the founders declared that the proposed new constitution would go into effect when approved by just nine. (See Article VII for further details.) They violated the old constitution in order to put a new one in its place, substituting their own authority for that of their predecessors. If the problem of Article V is to be fixed, this is how it will be done today, i.e. by the working class imposing its own authority and declaring it null and void too.

As dear old Maggie Thatcher used to say, there is no alternative. Otherwise, the result will be further democratic decay, further economic polarization – even though it already exceeds that of the Gilded Age – and a further descent into rightwing authoritarianism of the sort that will make Trump seem like a Boy Scout. Revolution is the only way out of this conundrum.

Any suggestion to the contrary means misleading working people concerning the real nature of the task at hand. This is something socialists should never do. It’s why Jacobin and DSA owe us an apology.

The pattern is always the same. First they catch fire with middle-class 20-somethings who are volatile, educated, open to new ideas, and fed up with business as usual. The excitement spreads to the press as demonstrations mount and conferences are held. For a time, it looks like Petrograd 1917. But then the establishment pushes back, the flames sputter out, and reporters grow bored. Soon it’s like nothing ever happened.

So it has gone with Occupy Wall Street, Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders (in both his 2016 and 2020 manifestations), Jeremy Corbyn, and Black Lives Matter. Each had its moment in the sun before the world moved on and politics resumed their rightward course. Now that Democratic Socialists of America are generating headlines thanks to the election of Zoran Mamdani and primary wins by congressional candidates Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Melat Kiros, the big question is whether it will do the same.

Short answer: it will.

The reasons are political and ideological. One is that DSA’s “entryist” strategy vis-à-vis the Democrats is fundamentally unsound. Entryism is what happens when a small group bores its way into a larger organization in the hope of winning over a portion of the membership, if not taking over the entire structure. It may work to a degree with parties like Labor in Britain or the Socialists in France because they speak a common class-based political language and therefore may be open to arguments from more committed socialists. But Democrats, to state the obvious, do not speak a class-based political language in any way, shape, or form. The only language they speak is that of patriotism, militarism, national unity, and a meaningless old cliché known as the American Dream. They’re a bourgeois party that has zero comprehension of what socialism means and which would like it even less if it did. For some reason, the press persists in describing Democrats as leftwing. But they’re really a center-right formation whose only quarrel with the status quo is that Donald Trump controls too much of it. Otherwise, all they want is for him to go away so everything can return to “normal.”

Any attempt to “socialize” country-club liberals like these is bound to fail. But there’s another reason DSA will not be any different. It’s because it has no idea of the buzzsaw it’s walking into thanks to its recent platform calling for a top-to-bottom constitutional shake-up aimed at abolishing the US Senate and the Electoral College, scaling back the presidency and the Supreme Court, and turning the House into a kind of unicameral parliament.

Not that such demands are unwelcome. To the contrary, if ever a system was in need of an overhaul, it’s one dating from the days of powdered wigs, silk knee britches, and slavery. Grotesquely unrepresentative institutions like a Senate based on equal state representation must go, the sooner the better. But DSA doesn’t appreciate how radical all this is or the hornet’s nest it’s already stirring up. A conservative writer named Byron York summed it up in the rightwing Washington Examiner on July 16. As far as the MAGA crowd is concerned, DSA’ers are bomb-throwing radicals who:

...want to destroy the government of the United States as it was created in the Constitution. They want to destroy the US capitalist economy, the most powerful in the world. And they want to destroy the way millions of Americans live their lives.

The upshot, he went on is – in so many words – a GOP wet dream:

So what are Republicans going to do about it? First, defeat it wherever possible. But far beyond New York and Colorado and Washington, DC, the GOP should press Democrats of all varieties on the DSA platform. Do they approve of doing away with critical branches of our government? How about a takeover of the US economy? No national defense? No police? Unlimited immigration? Will Democrats denounce the threat that is growing within their party?

In other words, hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire until they cry out in agony. For a GOP that has gotten itself in deep trouble in the Persian Gulf, this is the only way out. In fact, it’s manna from heaven. It’s why Trump has been going at it hard in recent weeks, making fun of “Dumb-ocrats” who are too tired and stupid to confront radicals who “hate our country, they hate our people, they hate the Democrat Party.” It’s why MAGA mini-me’s like David Brooks, James Kirchick, and other neocons are echoing the same theme. DSA is a “parasite,” says one. Democrats “became great not while pushing against the right,” says the other, but “while pushing against the left.” Now that the reds are back, it’s time to bring back Tail Gunner Joe and launch another purge.

This is the emerging GOP-neocon strategy, and anyone who thinks it won’t be effective has lost touch with reality. So far, the Democratic mainstream is not taking the bait – not because it sympathizes with DSA or is too principled to embrace neo-McCarthyism, but because the bright idea of people like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is to interfere as little as possible so that Trump can continue digging his own grave due to the war and the explosion in energy prices. Since anything they say will be held against them, they figure that the best policy is to say as little as possible.

It’s a do-nothing philosophy aimed at positioning themselves as bland centrists in the hope of peeling off repentant ex-Trumpers who don’t like liberals but who at this point may like Trump even less. All it asks of the left is that it keep silent. Don’t be loud, don’t be controversial, in fact don’t be “left” at all. Don’t do anything that might alarm the wavering middle and send it rushing back into MAGA’s arms.

This is what passes for common sense in Democratic politics. But it’s not going to work, paradoxically, because DSA is doing so well. The more its poll numbers go up, the more its call for a constitutional clean sweep catches fire with those excitable 20-somethings – then the more mainstream Democrats will feel like they’re being dragged off into dangerous new territory where they don’t want to go. Every political instinct in their otherwise empty heads tells them that the key to winning elections is not by telling people that society must change, but by tellings them that it’s perfect as it is and that the US form of government is nothing short of divine. It’s to portray Trump as a radical and themselves as conservatives. Constitutional reform is therefore alien. Instead of abolishing the Senate, people like this want to join it so they can rake in millions like everyone else in the upper chamber.

But wait – it gets worse. What DSA also doesn’t understand is that abolishing the Senate or Electoral College is not just a reform but a revolution. Just as it was impossible to overthrow the czar in 1917 without sending shockwaves through broader society, it’s impossible to overthrow the US Constitution in 2026 without doing the same.

This is not airy rhetoric but down-to-earth politics. The problem with the US Constitution is that it’s growing more rigid and change averse the older it gets. The amending clause set forth in Article V has completely broken down. In order to change so much as a comma, it says that “we the people” must gain the approval of two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states. This gives one-fourth-plus of the states, i.e. 13 out of 50, unqualified veto power. Given that 13 states can add up to as little as 4.4 percent of the population, it means that one person in 23 is in a position to just say no. And given that abolishing the Senate or Electoral College would undercut the power of underpopulated lily-white states, that one person in 23 can be counted on to just say no in perpetuity. The mountains may crumble but Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Bernie Sanders’s Vermont will continue to insist on a Senate and EC that give them a stranglehold over the rest of the country.

So what DSA doesn’t get is that nothing can be done under present circumstances. This doesn’t mean sitting back and accepting defeat. Rather, it means recognizing that the circumstances must change. The only solution to the conundrum is a democratic override that casts Article V into the proverbial dustbin of history. But since it was a democratic override that did the same to the French monarchy in 1789-93, the result is the textbook definition of revolution. The R-word may seem far-fetched in today’s America. After all, if ever a country was immune to revolution, it’s supposedly the US. But it’s not. The superannuated system is breaking down so rapidly under Trump that a crunch is fast approaching. Yet the idea of a brain-dead Democratic Party serving as a vehicle for such a transformation is beyond ludicrous.

This is why DSA is sure to flame out like all the rest. Occupy Wall Street caused a big stir back in 2011, but it was nothing more than a slogan – “We are the 99 percent!” – and therefore left nothing behind. Podemos, an upstart movement in Spain that Occupy helped inspire, managed to garner 21 percent of the vote within two years of its inception. But its post-modern, post-Marxist populism, built around a pony-tailed poli-sci prof turned TV star named Pablo Iglesias, turned out to be painfully shallow, and it flickered out too.

The same goes for Syriza, a coalition of greens, social democrats, Maoists, and whatnot that took off even more spectacularly in Greece, capturing 36 percent of the vote by January 2016. But it soon hit a wall too. With the Greek economy teetering on the edge of default, Alexis Tsipris, Syriza’s chairman-turned-prime minister, urged voters to reject a brutal European Union austerity program. But when 60 percent followed his advice by voting against it in a national referendum, Tsipras, for all his radicalism, decided that “no” really meant “yes” and ended up accepting the EU terms after all. Syriza’s collapse followed just as quickly.

Then there’s Bernie, who wooed Barack Obama during his 2020 presidential campaign only to collapse once Obama made it known that he preferred Joe Biden on Super Tuesday. Ditto Jeremy Corbyn, who captured the leadership of the British Labor Party only to crumple in the face of a ferocious Tory press campaign accusing him of anti-Semitism. In a desperate effort to appease the right, Corbyn announced his support for the notorious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’;s efforts to equate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. But appeasement only made the Tories hungrier, which is why Corbyn’s goose wound up cooked like all the rest.

And now we have DSA, whose combination of radical rhetoric and shallow politics is essentially the same. Once the Democrats turn on DSA – which they will – it will find itself at a loss. Its efforts to turn country-club liberals into agents of revolutionary change having failed, it will suffer the same fate.

This is not just a forecast, but a dead certainty. Watch this space for more.

The notes offer a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a man responsible for one of the greatest military debacles in modern history. As such, they call to mind another spectacular — and spectacularly self-defeating — debacle that occurred more than 80 years ago: the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.

The similarities are striking. Just as Islamic fundamentalism has defined the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, since its inception in the 1920s, Shinto, a combination of nature cult and emperor worship, defined the Japanese ultra-nationalism that had begun taking shape in the 20s as well. Where Hamas fighters went into battle wearing green headbands inscribed with the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith in God and Muhammad, Japanese air crews took off wearing hachimaki, white headbands emblazoned with prayers, slogans, or the emblem of the rising sun that were equally an expression of faith in Japanese national destiny.

Both groups saw themselves as engaged in a great anti-colonial struggle. The Japanese were appalled when Woodrow Wilson blocked a proposal at Versailles committing the new League of Nations to a policy of racial equality. They seethed at America for refusing, on purely racial grounds, to allow Japanese immigrants to apply for US citizenship. Tokyo’s answer to such abuses, which it unveiled in 1940, was a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere extending as far south as Indonesia and as far west as India, whose goal would be a continent free of white domination, an Asia of, by, and for Asians alone.

Hamas saw itself as locked in the same kind of combat with a Zionist entity that it characterizes as “racist, aggressive, colonial, and expansionist.” Instead of Asia for the Asians, its aim was, and is, an “Arab and Islamic ummah” stretching from the Atlantic to Central Asia, a Muslim empire of, by, and for Muslim fundamentalists that, needless to say, would prove to be every bit as intolerant and oppressive as anything imperial Japan was capable of producing.

Then there are the military parallels. Japan by 1940 had painted itself into a corner. The war in China, which had begun in July 1937, had turned into a classic quagmire that was bleeding the country dry. Blocked from expanding to the north by the Soviets, who had subjected it to a thorough thrashing in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, resource-poor Japan had no choice but to turn its attention south to the rich oilfields of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. But it found its way blocked by the British, Chinese, Australians, and Americans who were determined to bring Japan to heel by imposing a stiff embargo on oil, scrap iron, and munitions.

Japan was therefore desperate. The only way out, it believed, was a surprise attack that would send the US reeling in pain and bewilderment and clear the way for further expansion. Pearl Harbor, brilliantly planned and flawlessly executed by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was the result. And there is no doubt that the raid was effective and that the US Pacific fleet suffered a serious blow, even if the damage was not as comprehensive as Japan had wished.

Hamas was in more or less the same boat when Sinwar began scribbling notes about another knockout blow. Since taking over Gaza in 2006, his organization had fought four major wars with Israel that couldn’t have ended more badly. Operation Cast Lead, which lasted for three weeks beginning in late 2008, resulted in as many as 1,400 Palestinian deaths versus just 13 on the Israeli side. That’s a ratio of better than a hundred to one. Operation Pillar of Defense, which erupted in November 2012, resulted in as many as 160 Palestinian deaths versus just six for the Israelis. Then there was Operation Protective Edge in mid-2014, in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died compared with 73 Israelis, plus an 11-day outbreak in mid-2021 that saw more than 300 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank versus just 15 on the Zionist side of the divide.

Could anything have been more dismal? Nonetheless, Sinwar was convinced that the tide was starting to turn when mass protests on the West Bank spread to Arab neighborhoods in Israel proper, forcing Benjamin Netanyahu to declare a state of emergency for the first time in more than 50 years. Combined with international protests over the heavy-handed Israeli response, Sinwar concluded that a new balance of power was emerging and that the time had come for a surprise attack that would shift the balance even more.

As he put it in a May 2021 letter to Isma’il Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, the protests represented a “clear victory” and a “magnificent divine triumph.” It was now:

…clear to everyone that there is a predatory, deadly tiger called Hamas and the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and that, when it becomes angry and decides to be deadly, it has the courage to make that decision and is prepared to go further than people imagine and is willing to make sacrifices.

Fifteen months later – on Aug. 24, 2022 to be precise – Sinwar wrote out two sets of notes outlining what the next step should be. In one, he described a sudden out-of-the-blue assault that would allow Palestinians to take back huge swathes of land lost in 1948. He urged Hamas to appeal for international support while the attack was underway and urged the group’s media department to “publish the slogan ‘Returning Home’ in all languages” so as to “focus on the human aspect of the return, using images and videos of Palestinian villages.” The notes specified that “the impression to be conveyed” was “purely humanitarian” and that the importance of “international law” should be stressed. “The objective of the plan,” Sinwar wrote, “is to implement the law which is not being implemented.”

The notes refer to a slide show – the slides themselves have not been recovered – citing the Nakba, the Palestinian mass expulsions of 1948, as historical justification. The slide-show notes provide additional details concerning how the operation was to proceed. Fighters were to seize more than 200 local settlements along with eight “small cities” and three large ones with a total of more than 1.1 million inhabitants, roughly a ninth of the Israeli population in all. Women and children were to be expelled and only men were to be taken hostage – which, as it turns out, was the opposite of what actually occurred.

The second document provides more. It calls for breaching the Gaza wall in at least three locations, with Hamas responsible for the first two waves of attacks and other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad joining in on the third and fourth. With Palestinians expected to mobilize on the West Bank and Hezbollah to lend support in the north, the goal was “to expand the attack to the maximum during the first 6 to 10 hours in order to solidly establish facts on the ground in a way that will render any counterattack impossible.” The second document goes on:

Explosive images ... must be released which will trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum among our people, especially among the residents of the West Bank, the ‘internal’ [Israeli Arabs], Jerusalem, and our entire Islamic nation. This is meant to spur them to respond to the calls to rise up and revolt, while simultaneously sowing fear and terror among the enemy.

Unit commanders, it says, must:

...document and broadcast the images as quickly as possible: stepping on the heads of soldiers, point-blank shootings, slaughtering people with knives, blowing up tanks, prisoners kneeling with their hands on their heads, and the like. Events must be planned from which horrifying images will emerge. A few car bombs exploding inside an outpost or building and causing massive destruction. Heart-wrenching scenes. Enormous fires. 5 or 10 such images will break their spirit. ‘Allah came upon them from where they had not expected and cast terror into their hearts’ [Qur’an 59:2]. Preparations must be made for two or three operations whose objective is to burn entire neighborhoods, a kibbutz, and so on. Fuel or diesel will be sprayed on the site from a tanker, the place will be burned, and the images will be broadcast.

Since Pearl Harbor was purely military, the Japanese had no need for anything comparable. But brutal as Sinwar’s language may have been, five or ten propaganda images were still a far cry from the real horrors that took place on October 7. So why the difference? One possibility is that where Sinwar hoped to enlist “10,000 well-trained fighters” according to his notes, he wound up more than 60 percent short. Given the discrepancy, did he decide that the only option was to wreak more havoc with less? Possibly. Perhaps he realized that expelling large numbers of women and children would be difficult and that it would be more logical to finish them off on the spot. Or maybe the desire for vengeance proved irresistible. In any event, the Israeli intelligence center – full name: the Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute – says that handwritten instructions found in the pocket of a Hamas commander killed on October 7 told fighters “that your enemy is a disease which has no cure except beheading and removing their hearts and livers.” This was the type of sentiment that would prevail – and not only on the Palestinian side.

Needless to say, talk of breaking the enemy’s spirit was spurious. The historian Gordon Prange, whose 873-page opus, At Dawn We Slept, is the standard work on the subject, described the American reaction to Pearl Harbor as “a mind-staggering mixture of surprise, awe, mystification, grief, humiliation, and, above all, cataclysmic fury.”1 The Israeli reaction was even fiercer, not surprisingly since, relative to population, the body count on October 7 was nearly seven times greater. Interestingly enough, the reaction among Israeli Arabs was also fierce, again no surprise since 20 Israeli Arabs were either murdered on October 7 or killed by subsequent Hamas rocket fire. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, 77 percent of Israeli Arabs told pollsters that they opposed the attack while 85 percent said they opposed the kidnapping of civilians.

October 7 and December 7 thus shared a common lack of realism concerning what the real-life consequences would be. But they shared other things too – an apocalyptic mindset and a callous indifference to their own people’s suffering.

Fanaticism in the Japanese military elite ran deep. “I believe that a large percentage of the thinking Japanese people realize that it would be national suicide for their country to become engaged in an all-out war with the United States and Great Britain,” a US commercial attaché named Frank S. Williams wrote in a 1940 memo. But referring to hardliners who had launched an unsuccessful coup attempt a few years earlier, he said:

Army authorities, especially the Young Officer Group, long ago reached the definite conclusion that their future, as the dominating force of this country, depends entirely upon their ability to conquer China or at least bring the China Affair to a successful conclusion. And failing this it would be better for the Army to go down fighting a major power....2

Death was preferable to surrender, not only for themselves but for the people at large — whose opinion, of course, was never asked. Even after Hiroshima, official attitudes remained blasé. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a historian at UC Santa Barbara, wrote in 2007:

The Japanese policymakers, from the emperor down to the military and civilian leaders, ... were prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions more Japanese to maintain the kokutai (national polity), however they interpreted this nebulous concept.

Kawabe Torashiro, deputy chief of the military staff, was typical. On August 9, the day a second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki and the Soviets launched a lightning invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, he wrote that surrender was still out of the question:

But now that the situation has come to this, we should not consider seeking peace. ... There is nothing to think about. To save the honor of the Yamato race, there is no other way but to keep fighting. When we decided to begin the war, I always belonged to the soft and prudent faction, but once the situation has come to this, I don’t like to think about peace and surrender. Whatever the outcome, we have no choice but to try.

In the end, Emperor Hirohito sided with officials calling for peace not because he wanted to put an end to the suffering, but because he and other top officials feared that a Soviet invasion was imminent and would coincide with communist revolution from below. Says Hasegawa:

Whether or not such a revolution was actually likely or even possible, the fear among the ruling elite of such popular unrest sweeping away the entire emperor system was quite real.

For Hamas, mass suffering is also irrelevant. The most sensational item in Sinwar’s notes is a paragraph in which he muses about the possibility of nuclear retaliation:

The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal, not only through attack but also by other means. It may even use a nuclear bomb. But first it will be surprised by the attack and descend into chaos.

The nuclear option seems unlikely if only because radiation would hardly have confined itself to the Palestinian side but would have drifted over to Israeli population centers just a few miles away. Still, it’s remarkable that Sinwar didn’t flinch at the prospect. With 73,000 deaths according to the Gaza Health Ministry and more than 92 percent of housing units damaged or destroyed, the devastation has already been horrific. Yet he was determined to press ahead even if the destruction proved to be total. Hamas was no more inclined than Japanese militarists to ask ordinary people whether they wanted war or not. Since it hadn’t conducted an election since 2006, it saw no need to ask now that the great finale was approaching. Sinwar thus contemplated putting an entire population to death as part of a mad scheme that had zero chance of succeeding under the best of circumstances.

This puts Hamas in the same league as Japanese militarists who plunged their country into total war for reasons that were no less absurd. It shows how militarists raging against people abroad invariably end up doing just as much damage at home, if not more.

It’s a lesson that half-baked progressives should consider before cheering on a self-proclaimed “Islamic resistance” they know nothing about. The next time the eager beavers at Dropsite News prattle on about “the Qassam brigades and Saraya al-Quds [of Palestinian Islamic Jihad] hav[ing] a right to kill Israeli soldiers,” perhaps they consider what the purpose of such killings might be and what they might mean for two million ordinary Gazans who never consented to such insane policies in the first place.

Casey’s series is excellent. But before explaining why, a word or two on the term “allegedly.” Its use is mandatory in this instance for one simple reason: the forces behind BDS are so stupid and vicious, so astoundingly wrong-headed, that it’s questionable whether they can be described as pro-Palestinian at all. Some two million Palestinians are living in misery in Gaza because of the war Hamas started and lost on Oct. 7, 2023, while, 25 or 30 miles away, three million more are in the same boat that Russian Jews were circa 1900, i.e. subject to arbitrary arrests and nightly pogroms by far-right nationalists indistinguishable from the czarist Black Hundreds of yesteryear. The only difference is that where Russian Jews were free to emigrate to the US and other countries, Palestinians are boxed in by an increasingly repressive nation-state apparatus dedicated to keeping the huddled masses of the world out. Their plight is desperate, yet the global response, for all intents and purposes, has been to lock the door and throw away the key.

So who are the forces behind this effort? Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian academic in his 60s, is the name most mentioned because he’s smart and articulate and helped found the movement back in 2005. Barghouti is often accused of hypocrisy because he lives in Israel and for a time was enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Tel Aviv University while simultaneously calling for an academic boycott of Israeli universities like his own.

This was chutzpah, certainly. (Barghouti has reportedly switched to the University of Amsterdam.) But he’s a victim of his own illogic. If he were to truly follow BDS rules prohibiting all economic dealings with the Jewish state, he wouldn’t be able to buy a sandwich or a carton of milk, much less enroll in grad school. Like 2.1 million other Israeli Arabs, he’d have no option but to lock himself in his room and starve – assuming his landlord doesn’t evict him for non-payment of rent, that is, at which point he’d have to leave his apartment and starve in the street.

This is nuts, but what about BDS isn’t? Casey’s series is important because it details the shoddy thinking behind the “narrow exclusionary nationalism” the movement represents. It shows how BDS has opposed joint Israeli-Palestinian efforts to combat Zionist abuses on the grounds that they somehow promote a concept of “normalization” that BDS doesn’t like. (This is like opposing civil-rights marches in the Deep South on the grounds that they promote a concept of interracial amity that certain black nationalists didn’t like at the time either.) Casey shows how the BDS campaign tried to shut down the superb 2024 documentary, “No Other Land,” which depicts Israeli government efforts to destroy Palestinian villages in the hill country south of Hebron. Its rationale was that “some of the team’s Israeli members ... have failed to acknowledge that Israel is perpetrating a genocide.” In other words, it tried to suppress a brilliant exposé of Zionist abuses – an exposé that the Israeli government had condemned and that American distributors have wanted nothing to do with – on the grounds that unnamed members of the Israeli-Palestinian production team reportedly didn’t completely toe the BDS line.

This sort of all-or-nothing approach is designed to shut down cooperation before it can begin. Rather than overcoming a poisonous ethno-religious conflict, it seeks to polarize it even more. Casey’s discussion of such BDS absurdities is smart and penetrating. But here’s another take on the subject that’s perhaps sharper and more succinct.

Eight Marxist reasons to despise BDS:

Reason number one: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad sit on its governing board.

The BDS campaign tries to hide this by listing an organization blandly known as the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine as one of more than 30 sponsoring groups. But the council, which Yasser Arafat helped form in 2000, includes Hamas and PIJ as well the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an outfit that made a name for itself in 1968-72 by engaging in a series of bloody hijackings until its leader, George Habash, finally realized that the tactic was a loser and called it quits.

Why is the presence of Hamas and PIJ so bad? After all, shouldn’t a national committee include all major political organizations that comprise the national community, no matter how dubious their politics? The answer is yes, which is precisely the problem. Marxism doesn’t believe in a united national community. It believes, rather, in class struggle. While it advocates freedom and independence for oppressed nations, it calls on the working masses to hoist separate banners and keep their distance from the local bourgeoisie, whose chief interest lies less in combatting national oppression than in maintaining its own privileged position vis-à-vis those below. Writing after Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang slaughtered thousands of Chinese workers in 1927, Leon Trotsky argued that the forces Chiang represented were no better by virtue of being part of an oppressed nation and, in fact, were a good deal worse. As he put it:

...the conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat, and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards czarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary.

A century later, Hamas and PIJ are so vile and reactionary that they make Chiang’s Kuomintang seem like the ACLU. After all, October 7 is best understood as a kind of auto-genocide in which Hamas sought to sacrifice thousands of Palestinians in order to inspire an all-Muslim jihad. The idea was that the Persian Gulf oil monarchies would be so outraged by the death of fellow Muslims that they’d throw their weight behind a general crusade like the one followers of Muhammed launched in the seventh century and sweep the Zionists out of Jerusalem. But as anyone the least bit familiar with the gulf oil monarchies will know, such societies are paralyzed with corruption and wouldn’t survive a year without US support. The idea that they will somehow lead an all-Muslim jihad against the most powerful military state in the region is absurd. For the Palestinians, the results of such deluded thinking have been nothing less than catastrophic.

Reason number two: BDS is undemocratic.

What Palestinians need at this point is debate, the sharper the better. Conditions have reached rock-bottom, so it’s urgent that they figure out how they got so bad and how best to turn them around. This requires parties, newspapers, free elections, and the clash of ideas. But the suffocating consensus politics promoted by BDS-style national unity discourage anything that might rock the boat. This was clear when the BDS campaign issued a statement on Oct. 7 rejecting internal criticism and placing the blame solely on the Jewish state:

The BDS movement strongly condemns the governments of the colonial West for, once again hypocritically standing with apartheid Israel and duly adopting its deceptive timeline of the current ‘violence’ as if it all began this morning with the powerful armed reaction of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. This skewed timeline is meant to hide the initial and escalating decades-long colonial violence of the oppressor [emphasis in the original].

While the BDS campaign was happy to discuss events leading up to October 7, it maintained resolute silence with regard to October 7 itself. Hamas and its partners in PIJ had just shoved Palestinians off a cliff. They had intentionally triggered an Israeli response that they knew would be overwhelming. But instead of criticizing such gross irresponsibility, BDS said nothing and pressured supporters in the west to say nothing too.

Reason number three: It’s hypocritical.

This applies not only to people like Barghouti, who somehow feel free to violate a boycott they want others to respect, but to BDS supporters throughout in the Middle East who are silent about abuses in their own backyard. Whether it’s Berbers in Morocco or Algeria, Christians in Egypt, Alawites and Druse in Syria, or Shi’ites in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province, it’s hard to think of region that treats minorities more harshly. Entire communities are under siege yet BDS only wants to talk about the Palestinians. The reasons are clear. It wishes to cultivate support in the petro-kingdoms and therefore says nothing about their own internal policies.

Reason number four: BDS is not anti-imperialist.

Instead of opposing the US, the BDS goal is merely to get it to switch sides. If the United States continued to arm reactionary client states like Qatar, Bahrain, and the Saudis, if it continued to back the oppression of minorities, if it saw to it that mega-profits continued to flow and that the climate crisis continued to intensify due to the runaway use of fossil fuels – if the US were to continue doing all these things, the BDS campaign wouldn’t care a bit. All it wants is for the United States to abandon Israel and throw its weight behind the Palestinians. Otherwise, as far as it’s concerned, the status quo can continue indefinitely. But the goal is a pipe dream because of one thing: oil. If America has maintained a growing presence in the gulf region since World War II with increasingly disastrous consequences, it’s not because it hates Islam, dislikes Arabs, or any other such nonsense. Rather, it’s because the gulf is the source of roughly half the world’s fossil fuels, the stuff that makes industrial capitalism run. As Noam Chomsky once observed, would Washington give a fig about the Middle East if “its main exports were pickles and lettuce”? Obviously not. Because military control is America’s top priority, the odds that it might someday sever ties with the most important military power in the region are nil. It won’t happen – not now, not ever.

But BDS wants us to think that the problem is an infinitely evil Israel that has manipulated a guileless US into doing its bidding. It’s an upside-down viewpoint that lets Washington off the hook just as it does Hamas. Simultaneously, it prevents people from seeing how capitalism, Zionist expansionism, Sunni chauvinism, the hideous oppression of gays, women, and minorities, and a growing climate crisis are all intertwined.

Reason number five: It leaves Palestinians in the lurch by depriving them of a crucial ally.

In a powerful op-ed last month, a New York Times writer named Sharon Waxman described how Israeli dissidents are under fire from both the Netanyahu government and BDS. A Paris-based Israeli filmmaker named Nadav Lapid, whose latest work, “Yes,” is getting raves for its scathing portrayal of the Israeli moral collapse, felt compelled to withdraw from a movie festival in Marseille because anti-Zionists were planning to protest his participation. Like “No Other Land,” “Yes” is thus the target of a double boycott by Israeli companies refusing to distribute it and by BDS pressuring viewers to stay away. “The Sea,” an acclaimed 2025 film by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, portrays a West Bank 12-year-old who sneaks into Israel in order to see the Mediterranean. It, too, is getting raves while coming under attack by Israel’s culture minister as pro-Palestinian and by anti-Zionist activists as pro-Israeli.

This is outrageous for any number of reasons, not least of which is that Israeli and Palestinian leftists need each other in order to survive. Both are victims of a Zionist-Hamas war machine whose two sides are more alike than supporters want to admit. They are dominated by religious fundamentalist on both sides of the divide, they’re committed to a common policy of military force über alles, and they’re determined to destroy the few leftists still struggling to hold on. If Israeli and Palestinian socialists don’t hang together, they will surely hang separately (to quote Benjamin Franklin), and anyone hoping for a progressive solution will lose as well.

Reason number six: BDS undermines working-class unity, which is the only unity that counts.

The plight of Palestinian labor is extreme. Inside Israel, Arabs have far more rights than blacks did in apartheid South Africa, but are still second-class citizens in a country in which job discrimination is wide open. But the situation is much worse on the West Bank, where the unemployment runs at around 29.5 percent according Palestinian statistics, and absolutely abysmal in Gaza where the UN puts the jobless rate at 80 percent. The situation is so desperate that thousands of West Bank Palestinians have taken to sneaking into Israel in search of work, hiding out in nature preserves and sleeping in makeshift tents constructed of tarpaulins and scrap wood as they dodge the police. “If it were not for the fact that I have a family and children who I need to provide for,” one illegal told Haaretz, “I would prefer to kill myself and not have to live like this.”

Given that such people are in violation of the BDS boycott, the only thing the campaign has to say to them is to be quiet and go home. Meanwhile, it’s worth pointing out that Israeli workers, the same people whom western progressives dismiss as racist, fascist, or whatnot, are suffering under one of the most lopsided capitalist economies on earth. The cost of living is among the world’s highest while economic polarization is such that, at 52.2, Israel’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, puts it in the same class as Senegal and Sierra Leone and far below countries of comparable technological development such as Denmark (73.0), Finland (72.5), Norway (72.4), or the Netherlands (72.2). Even ultra-polarized America is better at 59.4. Meanwhile, just ten corporate groups, ranging from Bank Leumi to Elbit Systems, dominate the Israeli economy, making it one of the most top-heavy and monopolistic in the word. Palestinian and Israeli workers have more in common with each other than they do with Hamas or Netanyahu. They need strong unions across the board. But BDS says no.

Reason number seven: BDS reinforces backward social conditions.

The Middle East not only needs better treatment of ethnic or religious minorities, but of women, gays, and free-thinkers of every sort. Hard as it is for BDS supporters to admit, Israel is far better in this regard. While Hamas throws gays off rooftops, the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association rates Tel Aviv as “an ideal spot for LGBTQ+ travel” while platforms like the Luxury Travel Expert say it is one of the top ten gay vacation spots in the world. BDS supporters sneer at this as “pink washing,” but do nothing to improve conditions in the Occupied Territories or anywhere else in the Middle East for that matter. It’s another way the movement covers up for Hamas, thereby ensuring that such abusive conditions will continue.

Meanwhile, MENA – the Middle East and North Africa – has the world’s lowest rate of female workforce participation, just 18 percent as of 2023 according to the World Bank versus a global average of 49. This is a vast pool of talent and labor that is going to waste because the region is too backward to make use of it. Back in 2004, the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi said of Arab nationalist regimes that what they:

...have managed to produce is neither lasting national achievements nor continuing social progress nor protection of the dignity of the individual. Instead, they have created a black hole on the map stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian/Arab Gulf, where by and large democracy is absent and the state does as it pleases, and where power and benefits are passed down within a dominant family, oligarchy, or ethnic group.^[1]

What goes for Arab nationalism goes double for fundamentalists like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose politics are even more retrograde. BDS does nothing to undercut such movements and everything to reinforce them. With friends like these, millions of Palestinians don’t need enemies.

Reason number eight: BDS is a feel-good policy that makes western liberals feel warm and fuzzy when they should actually feel rotten.

BDS’s impact has been minimal. It scored a big win last year when a Danish pension fund offloaded its Israeli assets and the Irish Strategic Investment Fund withdrew about three million euros from five Israeli banks and other businesses. But the losses have been more than offset by capital inflows that have sent the Israeli stock exchange soaring to record levels. As Stanford University political economist Joel Beinin points out:

United States-based firms also acquired Israeli startups at a record rate in 2025, mostly in the high-tech sector, which comprises about 11 percent of Israel’s workforce and pays 25 percent of all income taxes. Not only that, Israel just concluded a deal to supply Egypt with natural gas worth $35 billion, and half of that money will go directly into the coffers of the Israeli state.

Even Ireland, where pro-BDS sentiments run high due to the country’s nationalist heritage, is gobbling up Israeli electronics and aircraft equipment. So the boycott is doing nothing to alter Israeli policies. Still, it makes western liberals feel good as they boycott Gal Gadot movies and boo Israeli bands competing in the Eurovision song contest. Even though BDS is doing more harm than good, it allows them signal their moral superiority. And that’s the only thing that counts, isn’t it?

^[1] Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 70.

How can the man who styled himself as the political whisperer of Washington, with real influence over American politicians, be sidelined quite so comprehensively and insulted so publicly by his key US ally?

How can the man who made taking on Iran the center-piece of Israel’s security policy end the war with Iran’s regime arguably in a stronger position?

And how can his old, tarnished political image as Israel’s ‘Mr. Security’ survive the demand from Washington and Tehran that Israel cease attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, months before an Israeli general election?

All well taken, which is why Netanyahu’s rivals are currently on the offensive. Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist opposition – centrism is as far left as the Knesset gets these days – says the Jewish state now finds itself in a no-win position in which the choice is “either a direct and destructive confrontation with our greatest ally or a submissive surrender of Israeli interests.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s semi-fascist security minister, was meanwhile defiant:

My position is clear. We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security, and it does not bind us in any way. We must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah, we must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have captured and cleared of terror infrastructure, we must not return to a situation where thousands of terrorists sit on the fences of northern settlements, and certainly we must not remain silent for a moment in the face of fire directed at the State of Israel.

This was plainly an attempt to get a leg up on Netanyahu and strengthen his position in the cabinet. But even Ben-Gvir knows that Israel can’t do without US military aid, which has totaled at least $16.3 billion since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Despite such tough-guy rhetoric, he therefore has no choice but to knuckle under, at least for now.

As for the rest of us, it’s a valuable teaching moment as to where real power lies. For years, we’ve been treated to various wag-the-dog theories in which Tel Aviv supposedly calls the shots while Washington meekly obeys. The line goes at least as far back as John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s 2007 best-seller, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which argued that groups like AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – were hijacking international strategy in order to steer it in a direction that benefited Israel at long-term US expense. (I panned The Israel Lobby in a Nation book review, available here, on the grounds that it sought to get America off the hook by blaming an outside power for its own miscalculations.) But since Oct. 7, the wag-the-dog thesis has become official dogma on both the isolationist right and liberal left thanks to a BDS campaign aimed at by persuading Americans that Israel is leading them over a cliff and that they had better sever all ties before it’s too late.

All of which is a half-truth at best. If BDS proponents are to be believed, tens of trillions of dollars in US military investments in the Persian Gulf matter less than a few settlements on the West Bank. If every president since Jimmy Carter has thrown himself into a policy of nonstop militarization, it’s not because gaining control of the single most important energy resource on earth has been a top US priority since the 1970s, but because the Elders of Zion somehow tricked Washington into embarking on a policy contrary to its own long-term interests.

It doesn’t make sense. The US can be stupid from time to time, but it’s not as stupid as people like Walt and Mearsheimer seem to think. Neither is it a childlike innocent for Israel to lead about by the hand. For all his ruthlessness, Netanyahu seems to have no illusions as to who’s on top in the relationship and who’s not.

Indeed, this is not the first time the US has put Israel in its place. It’s happened before, most notably in 1956 when Israel joined Britain and France in invading Egypt in response to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. This was no minor assault, but. rather, a full-scale invasion involving more than 250,000 marines, paratroopers, and other forces. It began on Oct. 29 with Israeli quickly establishing air dominance and then sending its armored columns crashing through Egyptian defenses on the way to Sharm El Sheikh at the Sinai Peninsula’s southern tip. The British shot down 200 Egyptian warplanes and, along with the French, set about capturing Port Said at the canal’s northern entrance. Nasser proclaimed a people’s war as he passed out guns to thousands of civilians, but the assault continued regardless. After a week of heavy Egyptian losses, total control of the canal zone was estimated to be just 24 hours away.

But then came the US response, and the whole operation ground to a halt. Worried that the Arab backlash would play into Soviet hands, Eisenhower blocked an IMF loan aimed at shoring up Britain’s shaky finances and ordered George M. Humphrey, his secretary of the treasury, to begin offloading British bonds. This drove down the British pound, which led Harold Macmillan, Humphrey’s equivalent, to warn Prime Minister Anthony Eden that the UK would run out of money for food and fuel imports within a week. Eden had no choice but to agree to a ceasefire. When David Ben-Gurion balked at withdrawing from Sharm El Sheikh and the Gaza Strip, Eisenhower threatened Israel with economic sanctions as well. Ben-Gurion bowed to reality and did as he was told.

The result was yet another of those historical teaching moments. Eleven years into the postwar order, America had made it clear once and for all that it was in control and that British and French imperialism, mighty forces that had once ruled the globe, were now downgraded to second place. Their position was subordinate however much De Gaulle might rattle the bars from time to time. The same went for Israel. It was still the pre-eminent military power in the Middle East and would grow even more dominant in the decades to come. But if it was to continue doing so, it would have to be under a US umbrella. After relying on Paris for arms supplies, Israel began shifting purchases to the United States, a process that would not be complete until the Six Day War in June 1967.

Seventy years later, the fundamentals are unchanged. The US is in charge, and no matter how aggressive Israeli behaves, it knows that it must cultivate support in Washington at every step of the way. But cultivating support is not the same as calling the shots, which is why Trump has not hesitated to put Netanyahu in his place.

Indeed, Trump seems to be channeling Ike in some of his recent comments. First, there was a phone call with Netanyahu on Monday in which Trump, furious over an Israeli air attack on an alleged Hezbollah commander center in a Beirut suburb, launched into an obscene rant:

What the fuck are you doing? You’re fucking crazy! You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.

Then there were his comments at the G-7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, in which he denounced the Beirut attack as “vicious” and read Israel the riot act:

Without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other president was willing to do what I did. I’ve had a great relationship with Bibi, but now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon. Lebanon used to be a great country. It was a country where you had professors, doctors, lawyers ... and now it’s just terrible ... So now I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that’s the deal with Iran.

Trump is the alpha male, and if he says Israel’s war with Hezbollah is just a side show, then Netanyahu has no option but to go along. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a good deal of play left in the US-Israeli relationship – there is, obviously. But contrary to all the BDS supporters and Hamas apologists out there, there’s not the slightest doubt as to who’s wagging whom.

This is why the Netanyahu obituaries are premature. Netanyahu is still the Trump whisperer, as Lucy Williams puts it, and there’s no one else remotely capable of taking his place. Lapid can’t do it, and Ben-Gvir is still too outrageous for even the most fervent Zionists on Capitol Hill. Bibi, on the other hand, knows the ropes, he understands what Trumpism is all about it, and he’s the only one capable of managing the relationship in such a way that’s conducive to Zionist interests.

The rupture, if that’s the right word, is no more than temporary. It’s a minor perturbation that will soon be forgotten as the Mideast’s rolling thunder review continues to build. The US-Iranian memorandum of understanding, whatever it turns out to be, will settle nothing, which is why Israel will have plenty of opportunities to strike back at its enemies in Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran itself. But when it does, it will have to be with US permission, which should not be difficult to get.

Two-party systems have a long history. In 532, rioting between Constantinople’s two main chariot-racing parties, the Blues and Greens, left thousands dead and reduced much of the city to ruin. Fighting between Guelfs and Ghibellines, respectively the party of the papacy versus that of the Holy Roman Empire, tore apart Renaissance Italy. Whigs and Tories collectively controlled the British Parliament from the Glorious Revolution in 1688-89 until the mid-1800s, at which point they gave way to another duopoly composed of Conservatives and Liberals.

But nothing quite compares to the Democratic-Republican dictatorship that has prevailed in American since the 1790s. Not only is it the world’s oldest two-party system by this point, but it’s the only one in which the players have switched ideological sides, with the former rightwing party moving to the left and the former leftwing party moving to the right. Like twin stars, they circle one while remaining otherwise the same.

All efforts at shaking it off have failed. To be sure, the parties went into abeyance in the so-called Era of Good Feelings following the War of 1812 when the Federalists disintegrated and Jeffersonians entered into a decade-long hibernation. But it was only a pause to reload as the former morphed into the Whigs, the party of nationalism and commerce, and the latter turned into the Democrats, the party of rightwing populism and slavery.

A second rupture occurred in the 1840s and 50s when the Whigs self-destructed over the slavery question and Republicans took their place. Yet with the abandonment of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the GOP lapsed back into an updated version of the old Whigs while the Democrats emerged as the party of states’ rights and Jim Crow. Democrats began moving left with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 while Republicans moved right with the election of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.

But it was otherwise a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même scheisse. On a purely mechanical level, the reasons for such durability are not hard to fathom. With few exceptions, elections in America are based on the principle of winner take all. If one candidate gets 51 percent and the other 49, there is no sharing or splitting the difference. Instead, it’s all or nothing – one wins, the other loses. Seems simple enough, except that, as the French Communist sociologist Maurice Duverger pointed out in the 1950s, the results are hard on outsiders because the more candidates who throw their hat into the ring, the more they wind up dismissed as spoilers. If three candidates run, it’s possible to win with just 34 percent of the vote, meaning that the other 66 percent wind up unrepresented. If four run, it’s possible to win with 26, which means that 74 percent are effectively shut out.

It’s unfair. And so, in the name of democracy, a winner-take-all system tends to close itself off against third-party entrants. Parliamentary systems based on proportional representation have gotten around the problem by awarding seats based on each party’s share of the total vote. If Party A wins 25 percent, it gets 25 percent of the seats. If Party B wins 22 percent, it gets 22. Ruling coalitions are those able to bring together parties representing 51 percent of the electorate or more – or, to put it slightly differently, those able to bring together parties that are not opposed by 51 percent or more. The system is fast, fluid, and democratic. But it’s impossible to graft onto a complicated federal structure in which the most important office is the presidency, which does not lend itself to subdivision at all.

The results are intractable enough in the UK where parties compete in first-past-the-post elections in some 650 House of Commons districts or constituencies. This is why the British two-party system has proved so long-lasting, with the Tory-Liberal system of the mid-1800s giving way to the Conservative-Labor duopoly of the 1920s and after, although that is now beginning to disintegrate under the impact of Nigel Farage.

But it’s many times worse in the US where voting is not concentrated in a single arena, but fragmented among three major power centers. The math is complicated. But to displace the Democrats the way the British Labor Party displaced the Liberals, American socialists would have to do three things:

1. Win a plurality in more congressional districts than the Dems.

2. Win a plurality in more Senate contests as well.

3. Win a plurality in enough states to capture a majority of the Electoral College.

If they fall short in the third, they face an addition problem posed by the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1803, which says that, if no one wins a majority, the election goes to the House where members must vote along state lines. California’s 52 congressmen would have to vote for a single candidate, as would Texas’s 38 or New York’s 26. So coming in second in the battle for the House is not enough. A third party hoping to advance to the number-two slot must win a plurality in a majority of congressional districts in a majority of states.

Could Rube Goldberg have come up with anything more complicated? Since a third of senators are elected every two years, it would take an upstart party at least six years before the job is done. Socialists would meanwhile have to battle on dozens of legal fronts against restrictive ballot-access laws designed to keep third parties out. Worse, they’d have to do so knowing that concentrating their fire on the Democrats will provide immediate benefits for conservatives. Even if successful after such a long ordeal, they would wind up facing an ultra-right that was stronger than ever a consequence of their own actions. More than a few party members would be reminded of Germany in the crucial years of 1929-33 when Communists, under orders from Moscow, concentrated their fire on the Social Democrats rather than joining forces with them against the Nazis.

Odds of success are vanishingly small. Liberals typically blame restrictive ballot-access laws, which are indeed scandalous. As the eminent political scientist Theodore Lowi once observed:

...the two-party system has long been brain dead – kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut.

But Lowi, who died in 2017, was wrong. Even if the US had the most liberal access laws in the world, the combination of winner take all, a three-way division of power, and complicated rules like those set forth in the Twelfth Amendment would be more than enough to cut third-party challenges short. Political scientists are forever coming with clever proposals such as consolidating congressional races in individual states so that residents vote together as a whole rather than district by district. But a piecemeal approach won’t work either because PR is impractical in senate and presidential elections as well as in the dozen states that are so underpopulated that they send three representatives to Congress or less. It would end up as a minority affair at best, a minor exception in a blanket two-party system, even if “Repocrats” allow it to get off the ground – which they won’t.

Progressives may work themselves into a lather over this or that leftist victory in Seattle or Syracuse, but it’s all for naught. The mountains may crumble, but American’s will continue choosing from Column A or Column B for as long as anything like the present structure is allowed to persist.

How did we reach such an impasse? The answer is that the US is still an 18^th-century polity locked in place by an unchangeable constitution and therefore one still rooted in an era when democracy was theoretically underdeveloped and parties were as well. Hostility extended across the board. Rousseau saw parties as selfish and narrow while Robespierre viewed them as private conspiracies against public virtue. The founders, those paragons of timeless wisdom, agreed. For Hamilton, they were “the most fatal disease” of representative government while Jefferson declared: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Washington was a bit more flexible in his 1796 farewell address when he admitted that parties might conceivably serve some positive good. But still:

...they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Yet considering that Hamilton and Jefferson were already at one another’s throat over everything from slavery to industrialization, it was inevitable that people would choose sides. With typical hypocrisy, politicians thus denounced parties while organizing them to the hilt. The new republic found itself in the avant-garde in certain respects as thousands of office-seekers took to the hustings. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” written in 1819, vividly describes the consequences. When Rip returns to his Catskills village after 20 years, he finds himself in the very different world of the 1790s:

The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility ... a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of handbills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens – elections – members of congress – liberty – Bunker’s Hill – heroes of seventy-six – and other words which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.

When the agitator pulls Rip aside and asks which side he’s on:

Rip stared in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear, ‘Whether he was Federal or Democrat?’ Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question; when a knowing, self-important old gentleman ... demanded in an austere tone, ‘What brought him to the election with a gun on his shoulder, and a mob at his heels; and whether he mean to breed a riot in the village...’

To which Rip replied:

Alas! gentlemen, I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the king, God bless him!

Whereupon more tumult ensues amid cries of “a tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!”

This was all quite advanced. Britain would not see mass politics of this sort until the rise of the Chartism in 1838, while, thanks to post-1815 repression, France would not see it for ten years more.

Yet by the 1870s, political development in American had not only ceased, but had gone into reverse. Politics, ironically, reverted to the bossism of Sir Robert Walpole, who, a century and a half earlier, had controlled the House of Commons by doling out jobs and favors. In Germany, Social Democrats were pioneering a new kind of party democracy in which thousands of dues-paying members debated politics and ideology and demanded that socialist representatives in the Reichstag carry out party policy in full. Following the 1905 revolution, Lenin called for unity between the rank-and-file, socialist members of the Duma, and the party leadership so that:

...every Social-Democratic deputy may really feel that he has the Party behind him, that the Party is deeply concerned over his mistakes and tries to straighten out his path – so that every Party worker may take part in the general Duma work of the Party, learning from the practical Marxist criticism of its steps, feeling its duty to assist it, and striving to gear the special work of the group to the whole agitation and propaganda work of the Party.^[1]

The goal was to turn the party into a fighting instrument. Yet the story in the United States was the opposite, i.e. one of deepening lassitude and corruption. Instead of allowing politics to advance, an unchangeable 18^th-century constitution pulled them back. Founders who viewed parties as sordid and self-serving had bequeathed a system that saw to it that was precisely what they would become. Instead of participants, voters were reduced to passive consumers idly surveying what candidates had to offer. If they liked what they heard, they might pull the appropriate lever. If not, they moved on. Primaries were billed as a way of circumventing the bosses by opening up nominations to the public. Yet they entrenched two-party rule all the more by turning parties into quasi-public utilities that were the only game in town. Instead of ideological instruments, they were now little better than court-supervised baseball leagues playing according to complicated rules that they themselves set up.

For the electorate as a whole, the upshot is a maze that grows ever more baroque. The more lost voters feel, the more it seems there is no way out. According to Pew Research, Americans disapprove of the two main parties by staggering margins, 59 percent in the case of the Dems and 58 percent in the case of the GOP. According to Gallup, 62 percent would like to be able to vote for a third party, up from 40 percent in 2003. According to a recent New York Times-Siena College poll, levels of dissatisfaction have risen to nearly two-thirds in the under-30 age group. The Times quoted a 24-year-old San Diego college student named Max Cook as saying:

Both parties are the same. They both have the same level of corruption. They both take lobbying money. It’s different lobbying, but the same corruption.

The Times-Siena poll also found that 80 percent of dissatisfied voters say the economic and political system needs major changes or should be torn down entirely, while 77 percent say the economic system is generally unfair.

Yet no solution is at hand. It’s a perfect storm in which politics, economics, constitutional structure, and imperialism thanks to Trump’s misadventures in the Middle East are all coming together in one immense cataclysm. However unmoored Americans may feel at the moment, they are learning a time-honored truth: bottling up change merely insures that it will all the more furious when it finally arrives.

^[1] August H. Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets – or Both(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 250.

1. Promise to release autopsy

2. Put incompetent friend in charge

3. Incompetent friend produces incoherent product

4. Announce you’re not releasing the autopsy

5. Lie about why

6. Gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem

7. Face internal revolt

8. Release autopsy

Clearly, Favreau has gotten Martin down to a T – and anyone who caught him babbling last month about why releasing the autopsy was a bad idea will agree that he deserves every bit of it. According to Martin, making the report public would be wrong because:

...what ends up happening here is that people, of course, want to weaponize the report in a way to look backwards, to point fingers [and] place blame in a way that actually doesn’t keep us focused on the upcoming election, but instead the navel gazing of facing backwards actually takes us backwards.

These were the words of a man whose sole concern is covering his derrière and who was not doing a very good job of it to boot. But now the new Ken Martin says that while the report “wasn’t ready for primetime, not even close,” bottling it up was “creating an even bigger distraction,” so the old statements are no longer operative. Releasing it is now the right thing to do.

This was embarrassing for all concerned. Still, it’s not really Martin’s fault, at least not entirely. He’s merely a symptom of something larger, which is the breakdown of the American “party” system in general.

Why the scare quotes? Because while the Republicans and Democrats call themselves parties and journalists refer to them that way as well, they’re not parties at all in the way other societies think of them. Since the late 19^th century, the concept has evolved into something quite simple. Let’s say you’re up in arms over the ever-growing atrocity known as the war on drugs. You and your co-thinkers therefore decide to do something about it by forming a party devoted to the virtues of legalization. You call a meeting, draw up a program, and settle on a name. Then you beat the bush for dues-paying members. Come election time, you put together a slate of candidates and launch a campaign. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a country with proportional representation, such as Belgium or Portugal, you may actually stand a decent chance of gaining a toehold in the national assembly.

Elementary, eh? But this is not how things work in the US. To the contrary, while thousands of politicians call themselves Republicans or Democrats, there is no such thing as a rank-and-file membership. Mega-donors contribute millions but no one pays dues, attends regular meetings, or takes out a party card. “Repocrats” have platforms that candidates forget about as soon as they’re elected. But what they don’t have is a program that the party is committed as a whole to carrying out in full.

This is a political party’s raison d’être in most of the world. Yet as far as American politics are concerned, it doesn’t exist. If you ask a city council member in Hamburg or Berlin what his party’s position is on, say, bike lanes or urban greenery, he’ll check his files and give you an answer. If you ask a city council member in New York, he’ll look at you like you’re from Mars. The reason is that there is no such thing as a Democratic or Republican position on bike lanes or anything else for that matter. There are only individual positions that politicians formulate for the sole purpose of advancing their careers. The idea of a party position doesn’t compute.

Ken Martin is an example of what such a dysfunctional system leads to. He’s a faceless functionary who believes in little or nothing as far as anyone can tell. His CV is that of a classic networker: chairman of the state Democratic party in Minnesota, president of something called the Association of State Democratic Committees, vice chair of the DNC, and then, finally, the really big one, chairman of the DNC as a whole. Rather than a fighter or ideologue, he’s the opposite – a glad-hander and appeaser whose job is keeping the peace in the Democratic “big tent” and nothing more.

Rivera is reportedly even more faceless. According to a profile in Politico, he’s a “Zelig-like” character who started out working on the Al Gore and John Kerry presidential campaigns before taking a job in Albany as an adviser to a Democratic state senator named John Sampson, who would later spend four and a half years in prison on federal fraud charges. Politico says that even other staffers regarded Rivera as inscrutable and enigmatic. It quotes a former state senate press aide as saying:

The man lurked in the shadows. No one knew where he came from. It was like a ship in the night working with him. Of everyone I’ve ever worked with, he stands out as the man behind the curtain. No one knew how he got there.

“You never know who he was really loyal to, on whose behalf he was acting,” added a former state senator named Diane Savino.

So why entrust the seemingly important task of getting to the bottom of the 2024 crackup to a cipher like this? The answer, apparently, is that it fell through the cracks. A few days after Trump’s 2024 win, the New York Times ran an item that was unexpectedly revealing. “After suffering what could shape up to be their biggest electoral defeat in more than 40 years,” reporters Jess Bidgood and Adam Nagourney wrote, “Democrats agree on one thing: They need to figure out what went wrong.” After dialing up prominent Democrats, “we got the sense that a push for [an autopsy] ... had begun in some quarters.” Donna Brazile was in favor. So were Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Tom Suozzi, a Democratic congressman who had managed to hold onto his seat on Trump-friendly Long Island. An autopsy seemed to be the way to go.

But Bidgood and Nagourney added:

There is less agreement ... on who in the party should undertake such an examination, or what it should look like. It’s hard to do an autopsy when you don’t know who the coroner is.

Precisely. The Times had hit the nail on the head – entirely inadvertently, of course. Democrats needed to figure out what went wrong, yet at the same time they didn’t want to know. A real party has a proper leadership whose job is to step up to the plate when things go wrong. But since Democrats are not a proper party, they have no one in such a position. There’s no “there” there and hence nobody to take responsibility. Since no one could agree who the coroner should be in such a situation, they passed the buck to Martin, who passed it to Rivera.

This is why everyone was flabbergasted when, rather than also dodging the question, Rivera produced something unexpectedly meaty. It didn’t matter if his conclusions were wrong or incomplete. The fact that he said anything at all was disconcerting enough. Didn’t he realize that his job was to avoid stirring up controversy? That when people like Brazile and Jayapal call for an autopsy, what they have in mind is not really an autopsy but something bland and neutral that will lull everyone back to sleep?

Various organizations in the Democratic orbit have been weighing in ever since, but their comments merely underscore the brainlessness of it all. A “progressive advocacy group” known as RootsAction called the report a “disgrace” because it didn’t mention the affordability crisis. A Rockefeller-funded outfit called the Institute for Middle East Understanding complained that it said nothing about arms sales to Israel. CommonDreams.org was upset because it referred to “transgendered Americans,” apparently “an antiquated term that is offensive to many trans folk.” Others complained that it was silent on gun control.

But groups like these are all part of the same mindless swarm. They carp about certain decisions but are oblivious to the fact that a rational decision-making process doesn’t exist at all. Instead of collectively determining their fate, Democrats are like a school of fish darting this way and that for no reason at all.

Not that Republicans are any better. The GOP is also a mindless swarm, although in its case it’s a swarm consisting of billionaires, Silicon Valley libertarians, oil interests, plus the usual assortment of neo-Confederates and QAnon crackpots. The only difference is that where liberals can’t find anyone to rally around, the GOP has found a führer in Donald Trump. He treats them with contempt, but as long as he wages war on the hated Democrats, they’ll follow him wherever he goes. Rather than a party, they’re a horde, and an increasingly authoritarian one at that.

Americans are appalled by what this has led to, which is why 58 percent view the GOP unfavorably according to Pew Research and virtually the same number – 59 percent – view Democrats the same way. According to Gallup, 62 percent would like to be able to vote for a third party, up from 40 percent in 2003, yet it’s the one thing American democracy, such as it is, won’t allow. It’s shocking that such a disgrace is allowed to continue, and yet it does year after year.

Next: why are American political parties so under-developed?

Even though the facts are against him, Alex Steiner seems to think he can prevail in the debate over my article, “Materialism and gender theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical trainwreck,” through sheer force of numbers. His response to my original Feb. 2 piece totaled 6,600 words. After I posted a 3,000-word reply, he has now followed up with a rejoinder, “Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism,” adding up to more than 17,000 words in all.

This is known as flooding the zone, a strategy whose purpose is to overwhelm and distract. Because Steiner says my arguments are absurd on their face, he also adopts the strange tack of refusing to address them in the body of the text. This allows him to show off his wide-ranging knowledge by meandering from Descartes and William Blake to Marx, Lenin, Plekhanov, etc., to speak only of part I, while dismissing specific criticisms in the footnotes. As the old saying goes, if you have nothing to say, say it louder – except that Steiner says it longer.

So let’s zero in as closely as possible on what’s at stake. Two main issues are involved, the “vitalistic biologies” of the 19^th century, a phrase that the postmodern theorist Judith Butler used in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, and evolutionary psychology. Although relatively minor, the first neatly illustrates Steiner’s methodology. “Vitalism” refers to a school of thought that arose in opposition to the crude materialism of the 17^th and 18^th century. Where Descartes held that living creatures were nothing more than machines, no different in essence from a lever or pulley, vitalists argued that they were fundamentally different by virtue of some inscrutable life force. The issue only came up in these debates because Gender Trouble argued that Christian and Cartesian concepts of “the culturally constructed body” were no different from those of 19^th-century vitalists because all were arbitrary social constructs. “Biology is a myth” – this is how I summed up Butler’s point. I added that it is a “coercive” myth according to Butler, because, as Gender Trouble puts it, it is “an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”

Biology is an arbitrary social construct whose function is to enforce an equally arbitrary heterosexual norm – such, I argue, is Butler’s viewpoint.

But in “Marxism, psychoanalysis, and human sexuality,” his Feb. 20 reply, Steiner objected on the grounds not that biology is an arbitrary social construct, but that vitalism is also mythical and that Butler was therefore not incorrect in lumping together equally spurious schools of thought. As he put it:

Butler is therefore referencing an outdated school of biology – some would even call it a pseudo-science - in her statement. She is not referencing “modern biology” at all ... her critique of both the mechanical materialist concept of a biological organism and the vitalist concept is essentially correct.

To which I replied that vitalism cannot be dismissed as a pseudo-science because it represented an important scientific advance. Louis Pasteur, I noted, was a vitalist whose famous fermentation studies in the 1850s, sought to demonstrate the vitalist principle that life cannot arise out of non-life. Hence, he set out to show that a biological process like fermentation can’t occur without the introduction of foreign microbes to kick it off. Thanks to Darwin, we now know that Pasteur was incorrect since the supposedly strict wall of separation between life and non-life was breached some four billion years ago when life arose out of a “primordial soup” consisting of amino acids and other complex but non-living chemicals. But Pasteur’s vitalism still led to crucial breakthroughs in terms of sterilization, germ theory, and hygiene, which, among other things, is why we still drink pasteurized milk.

Hence my conclusion:

...if vitalism is a pseudo-science, as Steiner suggests, what does that make Pasteur – a quack?

This brought an angry multi-pronged response. First, Steiner accused me of a “thoroughly dishonest sleight-of-hand” for “castigat[ing] Butler as being an enemy of ‘modern biology.’” Then he accused me – in a footnote – of misquoting him:

Lazare claims that I dismiss vitalistic biology as a “pseudo-science” where in fact what I said was that “Some would even call it a pseudo-science.” Clearly my use of the pronoun “some” should have tipped off Lazare that I am characterizing the opinion of others and not necessarily my own. I also said nothing at all about Louis Pasteur, but Lazare insinuates that I would have called Pasteur a “quack.”

To which I can only reply that my argument was not the least bit dishonest and that his claim that the use of the pronoun “some” to indicate that he was “characterizing the opinion of others and not necessarily my own” is absurd. Plainly, he was entertaining a possibility he sympathizes with. As for “quack,” the point was perfectly legitimate. If Steiner regards vitalism as a pseudo-science, then it follows that he regards Pasteur as a pseudo-scientist too. Steiner is at fault for raising the pseudo-science question in the first place. All I did was carry it to its logical conclusion.

Then Steiner makes a curious statement:

The rise of vitalistic biology was an important moment not only in the history of science but also in the history of philosophy. For vitalistic biology grew out of the necessity to provide an alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic biology that was one of the outcomes of Cartesian dualism. Vitalism as a philosophical movement was responding to the problem of reductionism in the life sciences.

This is a concession in all but name. Where formerly he wrote that “some would call it a pseudo-science,” he now recognizes vitalism as an important scientific advance, which was my point all along. But does Steiner admit that his original statement was wrong? Of course not. His purpose in flooding the zone is to disguise the fact that he’s revised his point of view.

In any event, this dispute has tried the reader’s patience long enough. So on to evolutionary psychology...

This is far more important because it deals with the question of human nature, which is to say the raw material that socialists must work with in building a new society. Conventional wisdom has it that “there’s no changing human nature,” meaning that human beings are inherently selfish, short-sighted, and violent and that any attempt to reconstruct society along peaceful and cooperative lines is doomed. But what if anthropologists were able to show the opposite, which is that early hominin development rested on new forms of cooperation and egalitarianism that allowed a new species to chart a different course from other primates? Wouldn’t that be politically significant?

The answer, clearly, is yes. But it’s a view that Steiner summarily rejects.

Where part I of Steiner’s “Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism” deals with “sexuality, mechanism, and vitalism,” the subject of part II is “the Darwin wars.” This refers to the Social Darwinism of the late 19^th century and the sociobiology of the 1960s and 70s, movements predicated on the belief that natural selection provided the ultimate justification for inequality. If John D. Rockefeller was worth billions at a time when American workers were living in hovels, it’s because he represented a pinnacle of Darwinian development for which he should be congratulated rather than condemned. The entomologist E.O. Wilson said roughly the same in his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which became an unexpected bestseller when it came out in 1975. Equality doesn’t work, he proclaimed, because inequality is in our genes. Social reform is a waste of time.

These were the self-serving ideas that Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and other scientists quickly challenged in a famous letter to the New York Review of Books. Such theories, they argued, were arbitrary, inconsistent, and little more than a rationalization of the world as it presently exists. “[F]or Wilson,” they wrote, “what exists is adaptive [i.e. evolutionarily advantageous], what is adaptive is good, therefore what exists is good.” Such ideas “consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex.”

Steiner rightly applauds such arguments. But his approval of Gould goes too far. He quotes an evolutionary biologist calling him “[t]he great Stephen Jay Gould”; he praises his theory of “punctuated equilibrium” as “a paradigm-shifting modified version of Darwinism ... that allowed for multiple causal factors behind evolution,” and he says that, in contrast to Gould, “fundamentalist Darwinians” like Wilson have gotten into trouble because they “attempt to explain evolution through a single all-encompassing mechanism” that leads to “absurd hypotheses with no more justification than Kipling’s fanciful [‘just so’] stories.” Marxists have no problem seeing political history through a single all-encompassing mechanism, that of class struggle. But Gould is to be applauded, apparently for approaching natural history in the opposite manner.

In fact, Gould is a much more problematic figure than Steiner realizes. Although Gould and his supporters have trumpeted punctuated equilibrium as a great scientific advance, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about since all it means is that evolution sometimes goes fast and sometimes goes slow. This is an idea that Trotsky, as Steiner well knows, anticipated in the 1930s. (The argument between advocates of sudden versus gradual change has been described as “evolution by jerks” versus “evolution by creeps.”) Gould’s theory of “spandrels” has generated endless confusion for good reason – because no one can figure out what it means. (“Spandrel” is an architectural term for leftover triangular spaces created by adjoining medieval arches, an idea that Gould and Lewontin seized upon to describe anatomical features that arise through evolution but are leftover in the sense of being non-adaptive or non-advantageous, even though they may prove evolutionarily advantageous later on.) It’s confusing because while an anatomical feature may seem to lack a purpose, it may be because scientists haven’t yet grasped what its real purpose is.

Gould is also known for his NOMA principle, the idea that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria” and therefore not necessarily at odds with one another. The Scopes trial, the papal ban on Galileo, the burning of the cosmologist Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for daring to suggest that life was possible on other worlds – none of this would have happened if Gould had been around to expound the virtues of peaceful coexistence. But not only is it absurd to think that opposing theories can exist side by side without clashing, it’s a sop to creationists since it leaves them free to preach about intelligent design while scientists go about their work. To no one’s surprise, the American Museum of Natural History in New York – for years headed by the pro-Gould paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, whom Steiner relies on heavily in part III – features a pro-NOMA video in its anthropology section. The purpose is clear: to reassure museum-goers that nothing in the hall about Australopithecus and the like should be regarded as a threat to religious ideology. But imagine if the AMNH featured a video arguing that Darwinian evolution and religion were incompatible. Funding would dry up in an instant.

While celebrated as leftwing paragon by everyone from the Monthly Review to Cosmonaut, Gould, who died in 2002, was in fact an anti-Marxist who married anti-progressivism in politics with anti-progressivism in biology, a combination that makes him a supremely unsuitable guide to human evolutionary psychology.

Consider the following from one of his bestselling essay collections:

Our conventional explanation of historical sequences tends to be regulated by the primary sociopolitical theme of western life since the late seventeenth century: the idea of progress, with corollaries of movement from small to large, simple to complex, primitive to advanced – an ideal of perpetual growth and expansion. When we add our more general storytelling preferences, our literary biases for narrative continuity between stages and causal unity of transforming forces, we obtain the standard format for historical stories: purposeful, directional, and sensible change. Given the failure and inadequacy of so many tales in this mode – the pageant of prehistoric life from monad to man; Marx’s theory of historical stages toward a communist ideal – we must begin to wonder how often nature deigns to venture even close to our hopes for her constitution.^[1]

Gould adds on another occasion that human beings:

...grasp at the straw of progress (a desiccated ideological twig) because we are still not ready for the Darwinian revolution. ... Darwin’s revolution remains incomplete to this day because we spin-doctor the results of evolution to preserve our pedestal of arrogance by misreading the process as a predictable accumulation of improvements, leading sensibly to the late appearance of human intelligence as a culmination.^[2]

The purpose of the Darwinian revolution is thus to knock humankind off its pedestal and expose progress as bio-political myth. This leads to sophomoric statements about how we live in “an age of bacteria” because “bacteria are – and always have been – the dominant forms of life on earth.”^[3] But if human beings are guilty of “misreading the process as a predictable accumulation of improvements,” it’s because they’re the only species capable of reading. Bacteria don’t think of themselves that way because they don’t think at all.

It’s strange to see Steiner embrace Gould so uncritically since he has written elsewhere (in an unpublished essay, alas) in defense of the Marxist concept of teleology, the idea that human and natural history have a direction or goal. It’s an argument that an “anti-directionalist” like Gould would find laughable – yet another “just so” story for him to dismiss out of hand. Yet Steiner embraces him regardless.

Gould’s hostility to evolutionary psychology is not as blanket as Steiner thinks, although his analysis is still flawed. “Humans are animals and the mind evolved; therefore, all curious people must support the quest for an evolutionary psychology,” he wrote in 1997. Noting that “a male need invest no energy in reproduction beyond a single ejaculation” whereas females must employ various “strategies for extracting additional time and attention from males ... in the form of parental care or supply of provisions,” he added, then the “principle of differential ‘parental investment’ makes Darwinian sense and probably does underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human males and females.” So evolution does shed light on human nature after all. But then the essay loses its way in an impenetrable Gouldian discussion of adaptationism, Lamarck, and spandrels, so the insight ends up going nowhere.

But the problem is not difficult to understand. The reason the old sociobiology is discredited is that it was guilty of backwards reasoning. It began with some feature of modern life, e.g. the fact that Europeans are richer than sub-Saharan Africans, and then searched for a Darwinian rationale to explain it, one that inevitably settled on whiteness as the decisive factor. But Gould does not object to such backwards reasoning per se, but complains only when it strays into racism. As he put it in the same 1997 article:

If evolutionary psychologists continue to push the theory of parental investment as a central dogma, they will eventually suffer the fate of the Freudians, who also had some good insights but ... elevated a limited guide into a rigid creed that became more of an untestable and unchangeable religion than a science.

The methodology is permissible, in other words, as long as evolutionary psychologists don’t take it too far. The reason Gould he doesn’t quarrel with such an upside-down approach, at least not fundamentally, is that he can imagine no alternative. His eschewal of narrative blinds him to the possibility of a comprehensive approach that, rather than trying to explain one or another modern trait, strives to explain the direction of human development as a whole from Australopithecus on. Rejection of a holistic perspective is precisely the sort of reductionism that Steiner inveighs against throughout his three-part series. Yet his hero is no less guilty of it than E.O. Wilson and others he attacks.

The concept of the whole is crucial, as will become apparent in our discussion of part III. But, first, yet another note about Steiner’s distortion of the evidence:

Part II includes the following:

Defenders of sociobiology assert that allusions to their discipline being replete with “just so stories” are a pseudo-problem voiced by “anti-science postmodernists.”

A footnote then explains:

Lazare makes such an assertion against me. His discussion of my supposedly unfair usage of this phrase is made without any reference to the historical context of the debate between the Sociobiologists against Gould, Lewontin and others that began in the 1970’s. Lazare’s thoughts are not original however. He is grafting onto a long history of such arguments by defenders of Sociobiology against the criticism of Gould and others.

This is remarkable. The phrase “anti-science postmodernists” is a misquote. Nowhere does it appear in my original gender article or in my follow-up, “Meeting Judith Butler halfway.” It’s an invention, pure and simple. As for “just so,” the only time my article employs it is when it notes the theory that “[c]ooperative child-rearing and food-gathering led to bigger brains, which led to better tools, bigger populations, and widening fields of activity” and then asks: “Is all this nothing more than ‘just so’ stories?” Other than in a quotation from an earlier Steiner article, that’s the only time the words appear. The suggestion that I accuse Steiner of making “unfair usage” of the phrase, that I fail to place it in proper historical context, that my thoughts on the subject are unoriginal – all of this is nonsense since I offered no thoughts on the subject at all except to ask whether its use is appropriate with regard to certain theories of evolution. How could Steiner get it so wrong?

And now on to part III:

This deals with Chris Knight and others associated with the Radical Anthropology Group in London who engage in precisely what Gould rejects, i.e. a wholesale Marxist approach that attempts to explain millions of years of human development as a totality. They take as their starting point Engels’s writings on anthropology, particularly his stress on the production not only of food, tools, and other items, but on “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species” (to quote Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State). RAG’s answer is that it was the development of new forms of cooperative breeding, child rearing, and food sharing, along with more egalitarian sexual relations, that made possible this great leap forward. These were not just items that hominins picked up along the way, but practices at the heart of “speciation.”

The species took off because the approach proved highly successful in Darwinian terms. Conceivably, big-brained babies might prove a hindrance since they require more food and care during an unusually long period of maturation. A free-market economist might argue that such costs would make for slower growth. But the opposite was the case. “Encephalization” led to intellectual leaps that in turn resulted in technical advances that enabled hunter-gatherers to gain more food, raise more children, and ward off more predators. (Early hominins coexisted with a half dozen or more species of giant cat, some twice the size of modern lions and tigers. Yet while they survived, the giant cats didn’t.) Chimpanzees saw little physical change after parting ways with the first proto-humans some six million years ago. But change on the other side of the divide was dramatic. Dimorphism, i.e. the physical disparity between the sexes, diminished, teeth shrank as the growing use of fire led to cooking, jaws became less protuberant, and skulls more globular. Culture, ritual, and symbolic thinking emerged as a part of the same process. While evidence of physical changes to the vocal apparatus is controversial, it seems likely that some sort of proto-language arose with Homo erectus some 1.5 million years ago or more. One reason is that erectus settler parties crossed wide bodies of water to reach new territory, as much as 150 miles in the case of Socotra, an island off the Horn of Africa where erectus remains have been found. It’s difficult to imagine Homo erectus building seaworthy craft carrying 20 people or more, the minimum archeologists believe needed to establish a new colony, without some ability to say, “Do this,” “Don’t do that,” or “I hear there’s a land with abundant game across the sea.”

But Steiner is disdainful. He acknowledges that Knight and others have come up with “an interesting hypothesis,” but still accusers them of “reductionism.” His logic is muddled, and he makes elementary mistakes in his desperation to make his thesis stick. He says that primitive hunter-gatherer bands were “centered around females,” whereas the RAG group argues that males and females played equal roles. He says that “radical anthropologists turn to the work of the evolutionary anthropologist Sara Blaffer Hrdy as a kind of starting point for their own work.” But since Knight’s major work, Blood Relation, was published in 1991 whereas Hrdy’s breakthrough book, Mothers and Others, came out in 2011, it’s Hrdy who has come around to the RAG view concerning cooperative breeding and not the opposite.

Steiner quotes a critic complaining that Knight:

...show[s] no interest at all in what for Marx and Engels was an absolutely central element in the emergence of the specifically human consciousness of the world: not only the question of reproduction, but the question of production, of labor, and the social relations which permit its development.

Yet Blood Relations devotes an entire chapter, 25 pages in all, to production and technology. “Stone tool-making, fire-tending, and an increasing dependence on meat food were central to the human revolution,” it declares (258). Steiner saddles Knight with the “dismissal of Freud” when Blood Relations cites Freud more than half a dozen times, sometimes critically but always respectfully. He says of the German anthropologist Volker Sommer, who teaches at University College London and is also associated with RAG, that he “demonstrat[es] that chimpanzees, bonobos and even birds practice homosexuality and are therefore just as diverse in their sexual drives as humans.” But nowhere does Sommer assert that animal sexuality is just as diverse as human sexuality. Does Steiner have evidence to the contrary?

Steiner adds, moreover, that even if Knight’s theories are correct:

The most we can say is that our biological heritage provides us with the capacity to be “peaceful” for sure, but, contrary to the biological determinists, that fact does not determine our destiny. Only a fundamental transformation of our social organization can bring about a peaceful society.

But there is nothing in Knight’s work suggesting that biology determines destiny alone or that fundamental political change is unnecessary. To the contrary, he is a sophisticated Marxist who, in a 2017 appreciation of Trotsky’s “Lessons of October,” wrote that:

...even if you are not a Bolshevik, even if you have all sorts of criticisms of Lenin or Trotsky, to succeed with any revolution you need to learn about how revolutions work and how to make them succeed.

Is this the language of an anti-revolutionist? Why Steiner would attack a fellow Trotskyist in this way is unknown.

Part III also includes yet another misquote in which Steiner accuses me of declaring that “Freudianism is not part of Marxism,” when I in fact said no such thing. What I did say in “Meeting Judith Butler halfway” was: “This may be Freudianism, but it is not Marxism.” But it was in response to a statement by Steiner and not by Freud himself. For the record, I believe that Freud was an important thinker and the fact that he was not a Marxist in the slightest doesn’t mean that Marxists shouldn’t engage with his work.

Steiner’s use of evidence is unscrupulous even when he’s not making stuff up. In his zeal to ferret out a leftwing critique of RAG, he has seized on a negative review written by the late Chris Harman, a lifelong member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK), in 1992. Harman’s article was indeed blistering. Headlined “Blood simple,” it called Knight a “quack,” accused him of making “a number of dubious claims,” and clobbered him with the same “just so” charge as well, meaning that his theories are no more convincing as Kipling’s light-hearted tales about how the elephant got his trunk. Steiner describes Harman’s review as “devastating.” But Harman was a notorious hack who managed to follow every ideological twist and turn made by state-capitalist followers of the late Tony Cliff, so why should we take his word with regard to RAG?

Steiner quotes extensively from a second review written by someone with the curious pen name of “Baboon” that appeared in 2007—not in “an anarchist journal,” as he informs us, but in a website run by the International Communist Current, a left-communist, “Bordigist” formation. This is the previously-cited article that accused Knight of showing no interest in production, and it, too, is negative in the extreme.

But then he cites a third review, which appeared a year later in the same ICC website. Steiner quotes extensively from this as well because it echoes the same complaint about tool-making and labor. This makes it seem negative. But the impression is misleading because the review is in fact a corrective to Baboon’s earlier contribution, one that voices a few reservations of its own but is otherwise highly favorable.

“I feel that his work deserves rather more consideration even if some of Baboon’s key criticisms certainly express valid concerns,” it says of Knight. Contrary to Baboon, it praises “Knight’s rejection of the dominant trends in official anthropology, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, which for a long time has been dominated by functionalist, empiricist and relativist theories which have moved very far indeed from the evolutionist spirit of early anthropological studies.”

And it says of Blood Relations that its “principal merit” is:

...that by seeking to return to the question of the origins of culture, it offers an alternative to the dominant trend of blinkered anti-theoretical empiricism in anthropological theory. Knight sees himself as a sociobiologist, but one who has tried to take the findings of this approach out of the hands of those who have used it to develop deeply reactionary arguments about the ‘territorial imperative’ and the inevitability of male domination. He does this by emphasizing the central role not only of women but of solidarity in the evolution of the modern human being.

By no stretch is this a negative review. To the contrary, it recognizes that Knight has made a significant contribution to Marxist theory even while reserving judgment about certain aspects. Yet Steiner misrepresents it by cherry-picking one comment and ignoring the rest.

Marxism is the key issue here. It is impossible to imagine a leading American anthropologist writing approvingly of Lenin and Trotsky. More than politically dangerous, it would not even enter a typical researcher’s imagination. After all, Marxism is not academic or empirical according to the official viewpoint, and using it would mean latching onto a preconceived notion before assembling the data needed to prove it. This, we are told, is unscientific. Hence, it is no surprise that Hrdy, an award-winning anthropologist at the University California, Davis, does not mention Marx or Engels once, much less Lenin or Trotsky, in Mothers and Others, her otherwise commendable book on cooperative child-rearing. In fact, she doesn’t make a single overt political reference at all. Politics are irrelevant according to the scientific establishment, as extraneous to the question at hand as the words of the pope or the Dalai Lama.

This is to be expected in a politically impoverished society like the US where there hasn’t been a mass workers’ party of even the most reformist sort in more than a century. But because the atmosphere is freer in Britain, Marxism is still influential to a degree, leaving Knight and others free to pursue their research along very different lines. Rather than rejecting Marxism, they use it to develop a theory of the whole that seeks to explain why the line moved so rapidly after parting ways with proto-chimps. This does not prove that RAG is correct, needless to say. But for any well-informed Marxist, there is not the slightest doubt that the group has opened up an important avenue of intellectual inquiry. For Steiner to write the effort off as reductionist is absurd.

Steiner’s understanding of biological determinism, a phrase he also wields with abandon, is flawed. Part III declares:

...we are not only biological creatures but social creatures and the economic, political, cultural and ideological dynamics of our lives have long since overridden the biological ones. Man’s second nature, our social being, while never freeing itself from our animal nature, overwhelms it and drives us past it either in a progressive or retrogressive direction.

This reflects Steiner’s anti-Darwinian belief that the human mind somehow arose separately from the evolutionary process. As a result, he falls back on the dualist belief that humans have two natures, one animal and the other social. But where does the social come from? Unless one believes in God, there can only be one answer: biology. When Steiner says that our social being overwhelms our “animal nature ... and drives us past it,” what he is really describing is how biology folds back on itself and ends up transcending itself as well. According to one view of biological determinism, a child who breaks a leg is destined to remain lame for the rest of his or her life because a vital support structure has been shattered. This is true except for one thing, the fact that the biology has shaped the formation of a species of large-brained apes so clever that they can mend broken legs. So biological determinism says the child doesn’t have to grow up lame after all. Biology dictates that human beings rise above mere biology because it is in their biological nature to do so.

Evolutionary theory is of particular importance to Marxism because it shows how class struggle is rooted in larger natural forces. Evolutionary psychology is important because it shows how human personality is rooted in larger natural forces as well. It is astonishing that Steiner is unable to grasp this basic insight.

“Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism” is a mess – sloppy, evasive, self-indulgent, and deliberately misleading. Steiner has painted himself into a corner on a critical subject. The results are not pretty.

[1] Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History (Cambridge: Belknap, 1995), 345-46.

[2]. David Prindle, “Stephen Jay Gould as a Political Theorist,” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 25, no. 1/2 (Mar. - Sep., 2006), 6.

[3] Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 176.

“Three decades ago,” the article began, Joliet:

...was mostly prairie sprinkled with quiet subdivisions. But the early 2000s ushered in the age of online shopping. Then came the rise of next-day delivery. America’s retailers needed warehouses, fast, and the area outside Chicago – flush with interstate highways and rail lines – was perfect.

A construction boom ensued bringing with it more than 146 million square feet of warehousing. That’s more than five square miles of building space in addition to parking lots, approach roads, and thousands of trucks. Traffic quadrupled according to the Times, while congestion, noise, and property losses zoomed as well. Wayward trucks damaged homes, playgrounds and schools, flattened fences, and tore through yards. They also brought murder and mayhem, killing an average of one person per month and injuring nearly 550 per year.

The victims include a 13-year-old boy killed last October while out riding his bike with his twin brother; an eight-year-old girl killed after a truck struck her family’s minivan, and a 32-year-old man killed when his car hit a stalled semi. In 2020, a motorist died when a truck rear-ended his camper at the height of morning rush hour, triggering an explosion that killed a second motorist as well. Last year, a truck collided with a Dodge Dart, killing the 40-year-old driver but miraculously sparing his two-year-old son strapped into the back seat.

So bad is the carnage that residents have begun referring to a nearby stretch of I-80 as “Die 80.” More than 60,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “I-80 and I-55 Corridor DAILY DEATH TRAP.” Although supporters promised that the warehouses would provide an economic boost, most of the jobs created have been part-time and low-wage. Observes the Times:

In 2024, the majority of full-time employees at the Amazon Joliet facility made an average annual salary just shy of $34,000, per a report filed with the state.

Assuming a 40-hour week, no doubt a gross underestimate, that’s barely above minimum wage.

The article is entitled “20,000 Trucks a Day: Life Near a Booming Warehouse Hub,” and it does an excellent job of laying the problem out. But as is always the case with the Times, it rigorously avoids anything resembling in-depth political analysis that might call the larger system into question. This is unfortunate because the story is a case study about the nature of the capitalist super storm now bearing down upon us.

Let’s begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a manufacturer dumping industrial waste onto nearby properties. He’s growing richer by the day while his neighbors dig themselves out from under a growing pile of grime, debris, and toxic substances. If the manufacturer assumed such costs himself, his bottom line would suffer. But since the legal structure lets him get away with shunting them off onto others, profits continue to soar. Since such costs don’t show up in the official figures, GDP is also expanding even though more and more people are doing worse.

This is the paradox of an economy that is growing according to official measures but which people know in their heart of hearts to be doing worse. It’s an accounting trick, a con job, designed to cover up the growing cost of “externalities” not just in the form of property damage, pollution, highway wear and tear, and fatalities, but also in terms of global warming and endless oil wars in the Middle East. If such costs were fully internalized by incorporating them into the cost of doing business, it wouldn’t be just the Joliet warehouse boom that went into a nosedive, but capitalism in general. Since that is obviously unthinkable from the viewpoint of the billionaire class running this country, such costs must be ignored, fobbed off on the weak and poor, or written off as the price of progress.

This is characteristic of empires in decline. In Rome, senatorial fortunes increased more than sixfold between AD 100 and 400 even as vast areas in Gaul and Spain rose in revolt in response to oppression and economic decline. At the height of the British empire, the gap between rich and poor in England was so yawning that Benjamin Disraeli said the two classes constituted “[t]wo nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets....” This was less the case in 1950s America when income differentials were relatively modest and kids could still hop on their bikes and go off in search of adventure. But it is the case 70-odd years later when economic polarization is shooting through the roof and parents must keep their kids at home for fear they’ll be flattened by an oncoming 18-wheeler.

The following chart shows the unprecedented divergence between the financial markets and consumer sentiment.

Wall Street couldn’t be happier while Main Street has never been more pessimistic.

Other data helps fill out the picture more completely. Pew Research reports that confidence that Washington will do the right thing all or most of the time has plummeted from 77 percent in 1964 to just 17 as of last year. That’s a 78-percent drop, hardly surprising considering that the last quarter of a century has seen two stolen elections in which the Electoral College was allowed to trump the popular vote, an attempted coup, chronic gridlock, endless scandal, and skyrocketing corruption.

Democracy, such as it is, allows people in places like Joliet to sound off at will, yet a dysfunctional political system prevents them from acting effectively. It’s a perfect prison in which one can say anything yet accomplish nothing. Since it’s impossible to get a swarm of local governments - of which Illinois has a stunning 9,000 - to agree on anything resembling a coherent and comprehensive policy, the only “practical” solution is to plug your ears, avoid highways as much as possible, or move somewhere less congested.

But power is also fragmented nationally among Washington and the 50 states, each with their own tripartite political structures, and internationally among nearly 200 separate nations. The result of a Hobbesian state of bellum omnium contra omnes, a global war of all against all in which rich nations grab what they can and poor countries suffer what they must. Just as warehouse owners are free to displace their costs onto a hapless public in Illinois, industry is free to dump its waste onto Africa, Latin America, and portions of Asia where people pick their way through giant garbage dumps, labor in illegal goldmines, or struggle to survive amid the nightmarish oil-soaked vistas of the Niger Delta. People in such circumstances can also protest, provided they do so at home, assuming they have one. Otherwise, they’re likely to face a hail of bullets if they venture into the streets.

Yet another paradox driving the warehouse boom and other such phenomena is a bumper crop of billionaires coupled with a long-term crisis of profitability. Here’s a chart showing the number of newly-minted US billionaires per year.

And here’s another one showing what Marx described as the falling rate of profit, in this instance in the G-20 as a whole.

The two may seem contradictory since one shows individual wealth rising while the other shows profitability in a broad-based decline. How can some boats rise when all others fall? But Federal Reserve helps sort it all out. According to the Fed, its asset balance sheet, i.e. treasury bills, corporate bonds, mortgages, and the like that it purchases in order to inject money into the economy, doubled from late August 2008, when the financial storm began striking with full fury, through the following December. With the economy continuing to show persistent weakness, it doubled again over the next seven or eight years and then doubled a third time following the Covid pandemic.

That brought the total to a peak of just under $9 trillions as of 2022, an immense pile of nearly free cash for Wall Street to play with. The result was a boom narrowly focused on the financial markets, which is why the S&P 500 has nearly sextupled since 2008 while the rest of the country is in the doldrums. The Wall Street boom led to the billionaire boom, which led to a warehouse boom as Amazon and other companies began chasing after profits at society’s expense. The fact that the state chipped in tax credits to spur the boom on according to the Times amounts to a further subsidy, as does the failure to charge companies for the full cost of roadway wear and tear, property damage, and the like. Individual fortunes rose while the job market continued to weaken and social conditions pitched dangerously downhill.

The Marxist remedy for such a plunge is proletarian revolution. But the problem is not merely that socialism has suffered a loss of face since the fall of the Soviet bloc. It’s that ever since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908, capitalist policy has aimed “bourgeoisifying” workers by using cars and suburban homes to turn them into middle-class property owners. William J. Levitt, of Levittown fame, summed the approach up at the dawn of the postwar era when he said:

No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.^[1]

Now the same Fordist-Levittown model is crashing amid war, climate change, highway fatalities, economic polarization, and democratic collapse. So far, an atomized society has responded in ways that is even more atomizing, a process of deepening decay culminating in the reign of Donald Trump. Endless populist rebellions accomplish nothing except to prove the Marxist maxim that class war must result “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

This doesn’t mean that socialism is irrelevant. In fact, it means that it is growing ever more relevant as the crisis intensifies. Ironically, the Times, of all publications, is helping to point the way out of the morass by zeroing in on remarkable phenomena like the Joliet warehouse boom – if, that is, we engage in the in-depth political analysis needed to fully understand what the crisis means and where it is really going.

^[1] Kenneth T. Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 231.

Welcome to the tumble-down world of the US Constitution. After 239 years of stasis and neglect, problems are mounting to the point where the entire structure is in danger of disintegration. Since 2000, we’ve seen two stolen elections in which the Electoral College was allowed to trump the popular vote plus one attempted coup due, at least in part, to ambiguities in the 12^th Amendment concerning how to count the electoral vote. The Senate is a monstrosity thanks to equal state representation, the ridiculous idea that Wyoming and California are entitled to the same number of votes each even though one’s population is nearly 70 times greater. An ultra-conservative Supreme Court is taking back rights Americans once thought secure, most notably the right to an abortion, while the executive branch lurches ever more violently toward outright authoritarianism.

Now another disaster is looming, this time in the House of Representatives. Where formerly the House functioned at least vaguely along the lines of a people’s assembly, it’s now morphing into a kind of super state assembly in which politicians in places like Sacramento, Richmond, and Montgomery, Alabama, call the shots more than the people at large.

The reason is the redistricting wars currently raging from coast to coast. Both parties are gleefully pitching in as the corporate press covers it in the usual horserace style. One week the GOP is ahead, another week it’s the Democrats, and the third it’s the Republicans who are back on top following a judicial ruling in Virginia striking down a redistricting plan drawn up by the state legislature’s Democratic majority. The New York Times is doing its best to keep pulses racing by running headlines like “10 Days That Shook the House Map and Democratic Confidence.”

Exciting, isn’t it? Perhaps. But no one is asking the really important question about what it means for the House as a whole. This is unfortunate because the implications are dismal. The more gerrymandering accelerates in the wake of last month’s disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the more the House is coming under state control. It’s turning into what the US Senate used to be back when state legislatures elected US senators instead of the voters. Now they’re doing it again as they redraw political maps in order to gain a partisan edge. Since geography tends to be destiny in American politics, carving out a new congressional district goes a long way toward determining who is going to represent it in Washington. This means that local politicians are determining the make-up of a house of Congress much as they did prior to passage of the 17^th Amendment in 1913.

The system is regressing. Yet no one is asking the American people whether they approve of such changes because the process is out of their control. The more the system morphs according to some internal logic of its own, the more marginalized democracy becomes. While no one knows how all this will end, one thing is clear. “We the people” will be the last to find out.

How did this happen? Gerrymandering goes back at least as far as Elbridge Gerry, a Boston merchant turned independista who signed the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation and went on to serve as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. (He refused to sign the final document because it lacked a bill of rights.) In 1812, Gerry, by this point governor of Massachusetts, teamed up with his fellow Jeffersonians to carve out a long and sinuous congressional district outside of Boston that his Federalist opponents compared to a salamander. The gerrymander was thus born.

But what’s important is that Gerry did so not because he was particularly smart or crafty, but because the Constitution made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. In their eagerness to pile one check-and-balance on top of another, the framers gave state legislatures control over the “times, places, and manner of holding elections” for the House in order to offset federal power. To be sure, Article I also stipulated that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” But what the delegates didn’t know is that such powers of override would go nowhere for one simple reason: once they gained entry to the House, the last thing members would do would be to fiddle with the process that put them there to begin with. Gerrymandering spread unchecked. The American system was highly democratic by the standards of the day. But as Alexis de Tocqueville would later note, it was highly conservative as well.

With re-election rates averaging just under 95 percent, the House turned into a life-long club by the time it entered the 21^st century. Gerrymandering also saw an upswing. By 2016, Republicans had succeeded in rigging the system to the point where they enjoyed a 17.6-percent advantage over Democrats in terms of the number of votes needed to win each district. Barack Obama responded by forming the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, with his friend, former attorney general Eric Holder, at the helm. With backing from Nancy Pelosi and Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, the committee raised $10 million right off the bat. But as soon as the GOP saw what Democrats were up to, members organized a committee of their own, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, and raised millions more. The race was on. After Election Day 2024, the GOP trust came up with the bright idea of asking Republican state legislatures to cease redistricting every ten years when census results are released and instead do so mid-decade in time for the 2026 midterms. When the trust presented Trump with an action plan after he took office in January 2025, he grabbed onto it immediately.

Every attempt to gain an edge merely succeeded in kicking the conflict into a higher gear. After Trump gave his OK, Texas Governor Greg Abbott triggered a political earthquake by calling on the state legislature to approve a gerrymandering plan designed to give Republicans five extra seats. This was in July. Once the Texas state legislature said yes, California responded with a gerrymandering plan aimed at giving Democrats five extra seats too. Then Republican-controlled Missouri chipped in, followed by North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. So far, Republicans are ahead thanks to the May 8 ruling shooting down the Democrats’ redistricting plan in Virginia. But with other states likely to pitch in on both sides of the aisle, the latest war between the states is poised to continue.

Of course, one could argue that since state legislatures are also elected, the process adds up to little more than a democratic reshuffle. Since “we the people” elect representatives at all levels of government, what does it matter which level calls the shots? Don’t the people still control the process throughout?

Not quite. All levels are not created equal. While many Americans, if not most, can name their US senator or congressman, a 2018 Johns Hopkins survey found that less than 20 percent can name their state equivalent. Despite hoary old Jeffersonian myths about local government being closer to the people, the fact is that the bright lights of publicity don’t shine on the states the way they do on the feds. It may be local, but it’s also more obscure. Where America needs a concentrated national debate about where the country is going, the effect thus is to scatter political energy to the four corners where the redistricting battles are taking place. Fragmentation wins while democracy loses.

What can be done? Nothing and everything. As it enters its mid-third century, the American structure is beginning to resemble the French monarchy in the 1780s, the Romanov dynasty in 1905, or the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Governing institutions are shot, the amending process is frozen, and an entire structure is collapsing under its own weight. A supposedly sovereign people has been rendered impotent. A Harvard historian named Jill Lepore just got a Pulitzer for a book called We the People: A History of the US Constitution, which spends some 700 pages describing how the amending clause set forth in Article V has turned into a vast impediment to change. Lepore piles on the anecdotes, but, when it comes to a solution, she ducks. She doesn’t have a clue as to what to do, and the rest of the professoriate doesn’t either.

So nothing can be done. Except that, as in the case of the crumbling old mansion, something must be done regardless. Engineers must be brought in to determine what’s salvageable and what’s not. Plans must be drawn up for a wholesale reconstruction. Ownership must be clarified in order to make sure who’s in charge, who can authorize the work to go forward, and who will follow up until completion.

The US now finds itself in roughly the same position. No one knows whether “we the people” are in charge or a group of long-ago tribal patriarchs known as the founding fathers. The old blueprint is not working, but no one has the authority to draw up a new one. Repairs are essential, yet no one has the power to implement them. Political debate is so hobbled and confused that “we the people” can’t even think straight about where to begin.

These are the problems that must be addressed in order for democratic renewal to go forward. And there’s no doubt that they will be addressed the more the crisis heats up.

But it still makes an important point even if it takes a long time getting to it. This is that the Americans system of government, set forth in a 4,000-word document known as the US Constitution, is not working. It’s inefficient, out of date, and outrageously unrepresentative. The most extreme example is the US Senate, which, thanks to the principle of equal state representation, gives every state two senators each regardless of population. As a result, the chamber is probably the most lopsided major legislative body in the so-called democratic world, one so thoroughly out of whack that it allows the 54 percent of the country that lives in ten mega-states to be outvoted four to one by the minority in the other 40.

Other institutions are also horrendous. The Electoral College doubles or triples the weight of white rural states while a heavily-gerrymandered House has provided Republicans in recent decades with as much as a 17-point electoral advantage. The Supreme Court is all but certain to remain in ultra-conservative hands well into the 2030s regardless of public opinion. And then there’s the presidency, currently in the hands of a mad king who declares war on a whim when not tweeting crazily into the early morning hours. The purpose of the Constitution was to promote stable and rational government, yet what it has given us in the case of Trump is the opposite. But there’s nothing people can do.

Although experts tell us that the document is absolutely, completely, and totally perfect as it is, the people say otherwise. Lepore’s book describes how Americans have hungered for constitutional reform for decades on end, how they’ve fought for it repeatedly, and how they’ve wound up stymied at nearly every turn by the most intractable constitutional feature of them all. This is the amending clause set forth in Article V, a single 140-word run-on sentence that, boiled down to its essence, says you can’t change so much as a comma without the approval of two-thirds of each house of Congress plus three-fourths of the states.

The first part of the formula is bad enough, but the second is worse since it allows 13 states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the country to veto any and all efforts at structural reform. And since we can count on the small states to just say no to anything threatening their interests, it’s a veto that will never, ever go away. The mountains may crumble, but the small-state dictatorship will not only continue but intensify as demographic differentials widen and the terrible 13 shrink relative to the population as a whole.

To paraphrase Orwell: if you want a picture of the future, imagine Wyoming and Vermont stamping on the face of constitutional reform – forever.

Something must be done, yet nothing can be done – such is the American predicament. So this week’s Pulitzer is at least a recognition that Americans are yearning for change even though “the beautiful, exquisite, brilliant genius of the Constitution” (to quote the ineffable Nancy Pelosi) says it’s the one thing they can’t have.

Lepore’s book is not without its strong points. It does a nice job of showing how the Constitution protected slavery, how a frozen constitution contributes to instability, and why it leads to a hyper-politicized Supreme Court. “When you can’t amend the Constitution,” she notes, “you can insist on your reading of it” – which, in a nutshell, is why the interpretation wars in Washington grow ever more feverish. She is also good on the paradox of original intent. She quotes Madison declaring in 1787:

Whatever venerations might be entertained for the body of men who formed our Constitution, the sense of that body could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution.

Which means, basically, that future generations should not rely overly on the opinions of men who created the document in the first place. There’s a problem, however. Future generations have found it impossible not to. Lepore quotes a constitutional scholar named Jacobus tenBroek who argued in the 1930s in favor of “the doctrine of constitutional adaptability,” the idea that Americans should freely interpret the Constitution in view of the needs of modern society. But tenBroek couldn’t resist adding that constitutional adaptability was what the founders intended all along. So are we supposed to follow original intent by not following original intent or what?

It’s enough to make you reach for the nearest copy of Laurence Tribe’s American Constitutional Law and toss it in the fire.

But Lepore pulls her punches when she gets to the question of what is to be done - and so, by implication, does the Pulitzer Board. If we need to amend the Constitution even though Article V prevents us from doing so, what are we supposed to do – sit on our hands as society disintegrates due to an undemocratic governing structure that is simultaneously unchangeable and obsolete? Lepore also quotes Madison as saying:

Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?

Yet blind veneration is what an unchangeable constitution enforces by depriving Americans of a legal way out. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” a Supreme Court justice named Robert H. Jackson famously wrote in the 1940s. But after decades of unremitting constitutional failure, that’s what it’s become. So should Americans go down with the ship because it’s their legal duty? Or should they say to hell with the Constitution and strike out in a different direction?

The answer, obviously, is the latter. They should do what Americans did in 1776 when they threw off the British yoke or in 1787-88 when they tossed out the unworkable Articles of Confederation in violation of the Articles’ own rules. (The Articles, still the law of the land, said any constitutional change must be approved by all thirteen states whereas Article VII of the proposed new constitution said it would go into effect when ratified by just nine.) They should do what the Declaration of Independence tells them to do when it says of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness:

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

They should therefore disregard the law and do whatever they have decided, collectively and democratically, is necessary to save society as a whole.

Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote a famous law-review paper in 1988 arguing that the proper course was not to go through Article V but the Preamble since it recognizes the right of the people to form new constitutions and, implicitly, to toss out old ones in the process of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, and so forth. But this is very radical, needless to say, which is why Lepore steers clear of the entire subject and instead winds up with some of the most cloying prose this side of Oprah Winfrey:

No constitution can be kept forever, like a butterfly under glass, tacked down with pins…. To constitute is to become or establish; to amend is to mend, correct, repair, and improve. Americans might learn again to amend, or else they could invent a new instrument to guarantee liberty, promote equality, nurture families, knit communities, thwart tyranny, and avert the destruction of a habitable earth. Constitutions began with stones and seashells, with old books and oak trees, with sheepskin and goose feathers. From the burning, scorched earth, new ideas might arise once more, seedlings, sprouting, tendrils wending to the sun.

As to what those sprouting tendrils might be, Lepore doesn’t say. She doesn’t want to go there because she’s a respectable professor, because her employer, Harvard - already in trouble enough with the Trump administration - might not like it, and because the ultra-establishmentarian New Yorker, where she is a regular, would be none too pleased. The right of revolution is for aging Trotskyists to argue about as they wander into cafeterias carrying a shopping bag and screaming about socialism, to quote Woody Allen. It’s not a fit subject for pillars of the establishment. It’s also not a fit subject for the Pulitzer Board, which includes such neocons as Anne Applebaum and New Yorker editor David Remnick, which is why it’s given Lepore an award, in effect, for keeping to the authorized path.

But the rest of us have no choice but to wander off because that’s what the unprecedented breakdown in the US constitution structure compels us to do. It’s either that or surrender to a deepening collapse ending who-knows-where.

Robert Mueller played a leading role in two of the most important political crises of the still-young 21^st century. These were 9/11 and its aftermath and Russiagate. In the first, he helped cover up of the crucial role played by Saudi Arabia, the lynchpin of US policy in the Middle East since World War II, while helping “Vulcans” like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice formulate a rationale for the forthcoming Iraqi invasion by shifting the blame for the Twin Towers onto Saddam Hussein.

In the second, Mueller contributed to a political breakdown that continues to intensify. Again, the result was polarization, destabilization, and war – not in the Middle East in this instance, but in the Ukraine. So deep was the damage and so unpopular the result in the form of the Biden administration that Trump’s return to power was all but foreordained.

In the end, Russiagate was just another conspiracy theory, not as whacky as Pizzagate but still bizarre enough. The big difference is that this time it wasn’t the right that was out of control but the liberal establishment.

In 2018, hysteria was such that the FBI arrested Maria Butina, a 30-year-old Russian studying at American University, merely because she was hobnobbing with prominent US conservatives in a way that struck the bureau as suspicious. (Butina pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent and was deported to Russia after 18 months in prison.) In 2024, it raided the northern Virginia home of Dimitri K. Simes, a Russian-American editor and pundit who headed the Washington-based Center for the National Interest – a think tank founded by Richard Nixon no less – because he sympathized with Putin in way that also struck the FBI as unseemly. (Simes was living in Russia when he was charged with working for a sanctioned Russian company and never returned.) The journalist Craig Unger, who had a best seller with House of Bush, House of Saud in 2004, argued in a new book in 2021 that Trump had been a Russian intelligence asset since 1987. New York Magazine published a chart showing Trump’s connections to some two dozen Russians and Russian sympathizers. With its complicated lines going this way and that, it was a paranoid’s delight. The New Yorker, the Guardian, and Vanity Fair all professed faith in the Steele Dossier and its tale of golden showers while Adam Schiff praised Steele as “highly regarded” in a House intelligence committee hearing in March 2017.

Simultaneously, Vladimir Putin was elevated from regional strong man to a demonic world figure straight out of the Elders of Zion. At a time when everyone else regarded Trump as a joke, he alone saw him as presidential material and cultivated him accordingly. Such powers of prophecy were nothing less than biblical. A builder-turned-reality TV star who had dominated the tabloids for years through sheer force of personality was meanwhile portrayed as a helpless pawn in the hands of a Kremlin Svengali.

Mueller was unable to blame the IRA for interfering in Trump’s behalf because its US activities - which, according to the indictment, consisting mainly of sending a couple of female staffers on a month-long cross-country jaunt - began in 2014, a year before he declared his candidacy. So Mueller accused the St. Petersburg company of seeking to “sow discord” instead. The press loved it, but what exactly did the phrase mean? Discord is nonpartisan. It might benefit the Kremlin if pro-Russian viewpoints emerge on top. But it could just as easily result in the opposite if they don’t. So what would be the point? The charge implied that America would be peaceful and harmonious if not for Russian interference. But Americans were already at one another’s throat after decades of political polarization, so how could a few Facebook ads make a difference?

But all Mueller wanted Americans to know was that Trump was illegitimate because Russia preferred him to Clinton and because he stood to benefit from Moscow’s efforts in his behalf. Americans should therefore vote for politicians who were more responsible and patriotic.

But the real reason was different. Trump was causing an uproar because he was speaking out against a powerful pro-war consensus. Years of eastward expansion on the part of NATO were leading to a confrontation with Moscow, which had been excluded from an alliance that now viewed it with growing hostility. Official Washington was all but unanimous in its determination to see the confrontation through to the end. Even Bernie Sanders was on board. “The entire world has got to stand up to Putin,” he declared in March 2014 after the Crimea announced its decision to split from the Ukraine and join with Russia. “We’ve got to deal with sanctions.” Virtually everyone agreed except Trump.

What was worse from the war camp’s perspective is that he was also proving to be an adept performer on the campaign trail. He was tireless, he could hold crowds in thrall for hours on end, and he was smart enough to zero in on his opponents’ weak points. When Jeb Bush accused him of seeking to “accommodate Russia” at a Republican debate in February 2016, Trump first joked about Putin calling him a genius – “I like him so far, I have to tell you” – before replying that the US should concentrate on battling ISIS before worrying about what else Russia might be up to in Syria:

“You have to knock out ISIS. They’re chopping off heads. These are animals. You have to knock ’em out. You have to knock them off strong. You decide what to do after, you can’t fight two wars at one time.”

Trump’s language may have been crude, but what he had to say made more sense than the anti-Russian clichés that yet another empty-headed Bush scion was spouting.

When Marco Rubio accused Trump at another Republican debate of “express[ing] admiration” for a Russian leader who was “sowing instability in the Middle East,” he shot back:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if actually we could get along with Russia, we could get along with foreign countries, instead of spending trillions and trillions of dollars? ... Wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with the world, and maybe Russia could help us in our quest to get rid of ISIS?”

Which again made more sense than the reflexive pro-war policies that Rubio was serving up.

To say official Washington was shocked would be an understatement. Obama called Trump “unfit to serve as president,” and the Atlantic Council labeled him “dangerous. When Trump said in July that he would consider recognizing the Crimea as Russian territory on the grounds that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were, and you have to look at that also,” Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, replied hotly that the statement was “devoid of facts and divorced from traditional American, traditionally European policy” – this from a man who had backed the myth of Iraqi WMDs to the hilt.

Yet Trump was right about ISIS. Putin was battling the Islamic State because he wanted to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an old ally, and because he was concerned about ISIS ideology spreading to Central Asia where it would pose a direct threat to Russian interests. Trump was also right about the Crimea. Unhappy with the nationalist direction of politics in Kiev, the peninsula’s Russian-speaking population had voted 97 percent in favor of union with Russia based on an 83-percent turnout. The US and its allies regarded the March 2014 referendum as illegitimate mainly because Russia had sponsored it. But follow-up polls by Gallup and Pew Research confirmed that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt that the referendum accurately reflected popular sentiment.

None of which is to say that Trump was anything other than erratic, egotistical, and bigoted. But his brashness stood him in good stead with voters skeptical of pro-war foreign-policy experts laying the basis for yet another military conflict, this time with Russia.

As for the Trump-Putin “bromance,” it wasn’t because they were gay lovers as suggested by Lithuanian street artist Mindaugas Bonanu’s famous mural of the two men locked in a passionate kiss. It also wasn’t because Putin was using a supposed “pee tape” to reduced Trump to servitude. It was because they were politicians moving along parallel lines. Both were products of years of political decline. In Russia, the economy had sunk anywhere from 40 to 50 percent under Yeltsin, close to double what US GDP fell in 1929-33. The suicide rate had doubled while life expectancy had fallen 4.3 percent. This is why Putin was elected president in March 2000 with a 53-percent majority – because voters had concluded that only a strong hand could stop Russian society from disintegrating.

The pattern in the US was less extreme but not altogether dissimilar. Wages were flat-lining. Between 1973 and 2013, productivity rose 74.4 percent while hourly compensation rose just 9.2. Inequality was soaring. Where CEOs of major companies earned 59 times more than an average worker in 1991, by 2013 the number had increased five-fold to 296. Drug overdose deaths nearly tripled between 2001 and 2015 while the suicide rate rose 24 percent, both examples of a profound malaise taking hold of an economically devastated heartland.

Then there was the devastation on the political front – chronic gridlock, corrupt power plays, poisonous levels of partisanship, etc. Scholars such as Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt pointed out that the US political structure amounted increasingly to a “tyranny of the minority,” the title of a book they published in 2023. Thanks to the principle of equal state representation, the US Senate allows the majority of Americans who live in just ten mega-states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other 40. The Electoral College doubles or triples the clout of lily-white “rotten boroughs” like Montana, the Dakotas, and Vermont, while rampant gerrymandering has given Republicans a long-term advantage in congressional elections. Since the Article V amending clause allows 13 states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population to veto any effort at constitutional reform, the barriers to change were insuperable. An 18^th-century political structure was frozen in time. Was it any surprise, therefore, that Americans were increasingly frustrated with a dysfunctional political system they were helpless to change?

Millions therefore opted for the same solution. In Russia, they decided that an authoritarian leader was needed to keep the oligarchs in line. In America, they decided that a tough guy was needed to smash stuff up. Voters cheered when Trump broke the rules, spoke out of turn, or was politically incorrect. Clinton’s famous “basket of deplorables,” a line she trotted out at upscale fund-raisers in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, and Manhattan, confirmed her as a member of a smug and self-serving liberal elite. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it,” she said. “And, unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Asked whether they thought Clinton understood their problems, 53 percent of registered voters said she did not.

Clinton still ended up winning by nearly three million votes. But thanks to a constitution that Democrats had long celebrated as the holy of holies, the Electoral College overruled the popular vote just as it had in 2000. The people had spoken only to be trumped by institutions made in their name, but which were beyond their control.

It was a major turning point. But the only answer the party could come up was to blame it on Putin. This was an undemocratic maneuver in the name of saving democracy, but it was Mueller’s job to see it through as much as he could by arguing that even if Trump wasn’t guilty of collusion with the hated Russians, he was guilty of welcoming Russian interference. He was still Putin’s puppet even if the relationship was de facto rather than de jure.

The upshot was a destabilization campaign that ultimately proved successful. Faced with one attempted coup, Trump opted to launch another on January 6 following Biden’s seven-million-vote victory. But it was a failure that caused him to flee Washington in disgrace. If ever a politician seemed to be finished, it was Trump. But while Democrats won the battle, the aggressive prosecutorial style that Mueller bequeathed was among the factors that would cause them to lose the war. Get-Trump legal cases brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and New York State AG Letitia James, both Democrats, were such a stretch, so over the top legally speaking, that they ended up doing the party more harm than good. Enthusiastic crowds cheered Trump as a hero when he took a break from the Bragg trial to visit an uptown bodega - in Harlem, no less.

Both cases were examples of how liberals were using the courts in an increasingly unscrupulous manner for political ends, an approach Mueller helped legitimize. Anti-Russian xenophobia, which Mueller had also helped promote, led to the new administration barking and growling like an angry pit bull. Within two months of taking office, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken got into an angry exchange with his Chinese equivalent, foreign minister Wang Yi, at a summit meeting in Alaska. Biden bragged about insulting Putin to his face: “I said, ‘I looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul,’ and [he] looked back at me, he said, ‘We understand each other.’” Asked if he thought Putin was a killer, he replied, “I do,” adding that the Russian president would “pay a price” for trying to help Trump win re-election.

The purpose of such juvenile was to portray the Biden administration as tough and patriotic in contrast to the traitorous Trump. But they backfired as the Ukrainian situation continued to deteriorate. Anti-Russian forces piled on pressure. The Atlantic Council issued a report urging Biden to step up military aid to the Ukraine by $500 million a year, deepen the country’s integration with NATO, increase the alliance’s presence in the Black Sea, and put an end to the Nord Stream pipeline. The administration paid heed. In November 2021, the US and Ukraine announced a “strategic partnership” aimed at taking back the Crimea along with the breakaway Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. It was a dangerous move akin to Russia and Syria plotting to take back the Golan Heights or Serbia and Russia plotting to take back Kosovo. Unsurprisingly, a bid to take back territory against the population’s own wishes did not go down well in Moscow. Putin regarded it as a casus belli. His “special military operation” followed three months later.

None of which is to say that Putin was justified in invading the Ukraine, merely that chest-thumping adolescent displays were bound to lead to disaster. Thanks to inflation, the White House’s disgraceful cover-up of Biden deteriorating mental state, and Kamala Harris’s dismal performance on the campaign trail, Trump’s return to power in November 2024 was all but guaranteed. Russiagate became a byword for grand-scale political manipulation. Mueller became a symbol of an old order that had at last been toppled.

The consequences have been a shock from the point of view of the American ruling class. A year and a half later, imperialism is in disarray, NATO is reeling, and European rightists are heading for the exits. Where Trump was once a valuable ally to be flattered and courted, he was now a liability that even Italy’s Giorgia Meloni wanted to avoid. Economic distress is rising while it is far from clear how Trump will extricate himself from the mess he has created in the Strait of Hormuz. No one knows whether the war will taper off or expand. With Trump’s economic approval rating at just 30 percent, the upshot could well be an Orbán-style wipeout in November, provided, that is, that Trump allows midterm elections to take place.

Mueller died of Parkinson’s on March 20 at age 81. While he obviously can’t be blamed for the entire crisis, his actions no doubt helped make it worse. Now that he’s gone, there’s no doubt that the political breakdown will continue regardless of what happens in November. America is a broken polity, and there is no way to put it back together again without revolutionary change.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

After nearly two years of investigation, the 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents and other professionals who comprised the Mueller team were unable to come with a basis for a charge. Russia, they concluded, had interfered in Trump’s behalf, and Trump figured he would benefit as a result. But they were unable to come up with evidence “that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

So an indictment was not to be. The get-Trump mission had failed. But the dark cloud had a silver lining. Mueller was free to shape his findings however he wished now that he was relieved of the burden of having to prove his allegations in court. The result was a report that was more anti-Russian rather than less and one that helped poison relations with Moscow even more than they already were.

Along with the disappearance of Joseph Mifsud, the report left two mysteries unsolved: the murder of Seth Rich and the role of Julian Assange.

Rich, of course, was the 27-year-old DNC staffer who was found at 4:19 on Sunday morning, July 10, 2016, “with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back,” according to the Washington, DC, police report. Still conscious, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead at 5:57.

A decade later, it is difficult to discuss the Rich case in an objective manner because of the volcano of conspiratorialism that erupted in its wake. The same fantasists who promoted Pizzagate, the story of Hillary Clinton’s supposed involvement in a pedophile ring operating out of a Washington pizza parlor, pounced on the Rich case and concluded that Clinton in the thick of it as well. A website devoted to lurid tales of the Illuminati said Rich had paid the price for being a “campaign fraud whistleblower.” Another site compared him to Vince Foster, the Clinton administration deputy counsel who committed suicide in 1993 but was really murdered according to those in the know. Alex Jones accused Rich’s family of a cover-up when it hired a Democratic-connected PR man to assist with press inquiries.

For Democratic media outlets, feverish speculation like this was enough to conclude the opposite, which is that the death was the result of a botched robbery attempt and nothing more. Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff told NPR that if Rich was really the victim of a contract hit, the killer would have been careful to shoot him in the head rather than in the back so that he wouldn’t have talked to the cops. The bruises on his face and knuckles indicated that he had put up a fight. But what kind of hitman would allow himself to be entangled in a street brawl? It was far better to finish the victim off with a single shot and then disappear into the night.

All of which makes perfect sense except for one thing: Assange. People who have worked with Assange describe the WikiLeaks founder as difficult, demanding, and egotistical. But one thing they agree on is his honesty. An Australian journalist named Helen Razer points out that “WikiLeaks is the only major Western publication without cause to ever publish a retraction.” It may also be the only major outlet never to have given up a source. Indeed, source protection is at the heart of the WikiLeaks mission since it wouldn’t exist if it didn’t guarantee absolute anonymity for those supplying it with secret documents and information.

So heads turned when, a month after the killing, an interview with Assange ran on a Dutch TV news program called Nieuwsuur:

Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There’s a 27-year-old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down a street in Washington. So....

Nieuwsuur: That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?

A: No, there’s no finding, so...

N: What are you suggesting?

A: I’m suggesting that our sources take risks, and they are, they become concerned to see things occurring like that.

N: But was he one of your sources then? I mean...

A: We don’t comment on who our sources are.

N: But why make a suggestion about a young guy being shot on the streets of Washington?

A: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks, that’s why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.

N: But it’s quite something to suggest a murder. That’s basically what you’re doing.

A: Well, others have suggested that. We are investigating to [try to] understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich. I think it is a concerning situation, and there’s not a conclusion yet, we wouldn’t be willing to say a conclusion, but we are concerned about it. More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens.

Assange was coming as close as he could to identifying Rich as a source without coming out and saying so in violation of WikiLeaks rules. The same day, the group tweeted that it was offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the killers, further evidence that it was Rich who had passed along information from the DNC.

This didn’t prove that Rich was the target of an assassination. It’s entirely possible that he was both a WikiLeaks source and the chance victim of a robbery gone awry. But it certainly raised questions, which is why it is hardly surprising that the internet was soon overflowing with theories and speculation. Assange was meanwhile adamant that the FBI was barking up the wrong tree in saying that Russian intelligence had supplied it with the DNC emails. “We can say, and we have said repeatedly over the last two months,” he told Sean Hannity, “that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.” So if it wasn’t Russia, who was it? Was it a hack or simply a leak that someone downloaded onto an encryption key and then physically transported to Assange and his associates?

Given that the public was in the dark about a matter of supreme political importance, Mueller might have wanted to clear up the confusion. Since the FBI had taken possession of Rich’s laptop, he could presumably have inspected it to determine if it contained evidence of communication with WikiLeaks. He could have questioned Assange to get his side of the story. But he did neither. Craig Murray, a British diplomat turned blogger who is a close associate of WikiLeaks, wrote that Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was willing to make himself available “by video link, by interview in the embassy, or by written communication.” Yet Mueller failed to avail himself of the offer. Was he afraid of what Assange might say?

Rather than investigating Assange’s claim that the source was not a state actor, Mueller stood logic on its head by accusing him of “dissembling” by issuing “public statements apparently designed to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.” He was lying, in other words, because his statements about the source of the DNC material conflicts with the Russia-done-it narrative that was Mueller’s starting point. “After the US intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation,” the Mueller report said, “Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking.” Assange was thus guilty because he dared to disagree. The mere fact that he claimed to be telling the truth was proof of the opposite.

But Mueller’s account of how the DNC emails reached WikiLeaks never made sense. On June 12, 2016, Assange announced that a batch of DNC emails would soon be released. Two days later, according to the Mueller report, someone calling himself DCLeaks messaged WikiLeaks offering support. A month later, DCLeaks sent an email with the heading “big archive” along with an encrypted attachment and, in a separate communication, instructions on how to open it. That was on July 14. On July 18, WikiLeaks messaged back that it had accessed the file. On July 22, it published more than 20,000 emails and other documents.

Mueller wants us to believe that the July 22 material was from the DCLeaks archive that WikiLeaks received on July 14 and accessed a few days later rather than the material that Assange said would be forthcoming some six weeks earlier. Does that mean Assange’s June 12 announcement was a bluff? If so, wouldn’t he have wound up with egg on his face if DCLeaks hadn’t unexpectedly come to his rescue with an offer of brand-new material? Since WikiLeaks is known for its painstaking curation, it would have had to carefully inspect the DCLeaks archive to make sure the material was genuine as opposed to spoofs concocted by Russian intelligence. But how could it comb through 20,000-plus items in eight days at most? The story was implausible, yet Mueller stuck by his chronology regardless. WikiLeaks had collaborated with Russian intelligence in order to subvert American democracy, and that was all he wanted to know. Anything to the contrary was Russian disinformation.

This is the sort of upside-down approach that can only lead to trouble. In February 2018, Mueller did indict certain Russian actors, a St. Petersburg-based company called Internet Research Associates, two of its subsidiaries, a dozen of its employees, plus its owner, the late Yevgeniy Prigozhin. But the indictment was mainly for show since the accused were all safely in Russia and had no reason to travel to the US to put themselves in the hands of a hostile judiciary.

Then came the unexpected. An IRA subsidiary known as Concord Management and Consulting hired an expensive Washington law firm and marched into federal court three months later, demanding to be heard. Concord also demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning access to Mueller’s immense investigative file. Taken aback, the Mueller team requested a delay. Two years later, Mueller dropped all charges on the grounds that going to trial would require him to reveal “tools and techniques” that could compromise classified evidence. He had charged the firm thinking that would be the end of it. But when Concord called his bluff, he beat a hasty retreat.

It’s a shame because Concord’s lawyers could have had a field day. Not only was it unclear what the company had done wrong – it had taken out a few Facebook ads, but what of it? – but its efforts were minor to the point of insignificance. In September 2018, the New York Times ran a 10,000-word article arguing that the IRA social media campaign, of which Concord was a part, amounted to “the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history,” one that may have affected 126 million Americans, a figure “that almost matched the numbers of voters in the election.”

The statement was laughable. In fact, the IRA’s Facebook ad purchases added up to less than $3,000, as Jeff Gerth, an ex-Times investigative reporter, showed in a four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review. This was a drop in the bucket compared to the $81 million in Facebook ads purchased by the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined. As for the 126 million Americans supposedly subjected to IRA brain washing, the figure is merely a mathematical projection of the number of people who may have been “served” IRA material. Even if true, it pales in comparison to the 33 trillion news feeds that Facebook users received in toto over the same period. Gerth noted that a Harvard study concluded that evidence of the IRA’s impact is “scant” and that a study by Danish and American scholars published by the National Academy of Science found “no evidence” that interaction with the IRA accounts “substantially impacted” the “political attitudes and behaviors” of users.

The United States, moreover, was guilty of far worse. In 1996, Bill Clinton openly interfered in a Russian presidential election by arranging for a $10.2-billion IMF loan to bolster Boris Yeltsin’s candidacy and dispatching a campaign consulting team to assist with polling and advertising. The team advised on how to connect with voters and even suggested mounting a “dirty tricks” campaign in which “truth squads” would show up at rallies and heckle opponents. The effort was so unabashed that Hollywood made a movie about it called “Spinning Boris” (2003), starring Jeff Goldblum, Anthony LaPaglia, and Liev Schreiber.

Yet now we were supposed to be worked up over an effort that had cost thousands of times less. Never have so many made so much about so little.

The attack on the Twin Towers flowed from the crisis-ridden nature of Saudi society. Saudi Arabia was – and continues to be – a classic example of a weak dictatorship that is brutal and totalitarian precisely because it is forever tottering on the edge of collapse. After fanatical Muslims took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in late 1979, a badly-shaken royal family decided that the only way it could shore up its religious credentials was by pouring billions into Wahhabist propaganda throughout the Dar al-Islam while at the same time joining with the US in fostering anti-Soviet holy war in Afghanistan. The effort strengthened jihadist fundamentalism while unleashing a sorcerer’s apprentice in the form of Al Qaeda. Terrified of becoming Osama bin Laden’s next victim, the Al Saud entered into a modus vivendi in which Al Qaeda would be given free rein abroad in exchange for a pledge not to engage in terrorism at home. An ex-Clinton administration official neatly summed up the arrangement:

“You don’t conduct operations here, and we won’t disrupt them elsewhere.”

A former Taliban intelligence chief named Mohammed Khaksar thus declared in a sworn statement that Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, hammered out the deal in 1998 by promising that Saudi businesses and Islamic charities would continue to channel funds to Al Qaeda as long as bin Laden abided by his promise. Seymour Hersh described it as “a king’s ransom” on the part of a government:

“...so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.”

But the break with bin Laden was never complete despite Saudi claims to the contrary. Indeed, John O’Neill, for years the FBI’s chief of counter-intelligence, maintained that the on-again, off-again alliance between Al Qaeda and the Al Saud was the key to the puzzle. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” he said, “are in Saudi Arabia.”

Yet the bureau blocked him from investigating. Seething with frustration, O’Neill quit the FBI and took a security job at the World Trade Center in August 2001, only to die two weeks later in the Al Qaeda inferno. The late Bob Graham, a Democratic senator from Florida who co-chaired the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, said the evidence was clear:

“...the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers.... By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purpose dependent on the government – which includes all of the elite in the country.”^[i]

This is the catastrophe that Robert Mueller had to wrestle with within days of taking office as FBI director. As a good company man, his solution was not to get to the bottom of it all come what may, but to cover up the awesome FBI-CIA bungling that had allowed the hijackers to operate freely in the US and then tailor the facts to fit the anti-Iraq scenario that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other “Vulcans” were in the process of formulating. This is why rank-and-file investigators and families of th 9/11 victims would prove so bitter – because it meant that the truth about the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent civilians would take a back seat to patching up the US-Saudi alliance. As noted in Part I, it’s why a retired FBI agent named Mark Wauck would denounce Mueller as “a villain, and an arrogant one to boot,” and why Sharon Premoli, an office worker pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, would be even harsher:

“He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11. In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush campaign to block, obfuscate, and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released.”

This was the man whom Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would call upon a decade and a half later to take charge of the Russia investigation as furor over collusion was reaching a crescendo. With FBI director James Comey out of a job as of May 2017 courtesy of a furious Trump and his successor, acting director Andrew McCabe, entering into secret talks about wiretapping the president and using the 25^thAmendment to remove him from office, it was clear that something had to be done before the system flew apart at the seams.

This was Mueller’s task. Again, his mission, as he plainly saw it, was not to get at the truth, but to serve the same pro-war camp by doing his best to nail Trump and his alleged Russian benefactors to the wall. But he was unable to deliver. His report concluded 22 months later:

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the [Trump] campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Trump wanted his Kremlin pals to run dirty tricks in his behalf, in other words, and figured he’d benefit if they did. But since he didn’t participate in the operation, an indictment would not be forthcoming. It was a Scottish verdict of neither guilty nor innocent, but it was enough to keep Democratic attack dogs like Adam Schiff and the now-disgraced Eric Swalwell going for another few more months.

But even that pared-back version of Russian collusion didn’t hold water.

Russiagate began with three incidents that grow murkier and murkier the closer one looks. The first was the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers in Washington beginning in March 2016. The Mueller report says that “units of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU)” were responsible. But neither Mueller nor the FBI inspected the computers themselves. Rather, they relied on a Democratic-connected firm known as CrowdStrike, whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, was a member of a fiercely anti-Russian Washington think tank known as the Atlantic Council, to inspect them instead. If CrowdStrike said a hack had occurred and that Russian intelligence was responsible, that was good enough for Mueller. It was all needed to know.

But others wondered how he could be so sure. Since “anybody can pretend to be anyone” in cyberspace, a prominent cyber-security specialist named Jeffrey Carr emphasized that “skepticism is so critical when it comes to claims of attribution ... because it’s very easy to place the blame on a foreign power.” The fact that the hackers used Russian software proves nothing, he said, since the software was freely available on the internet. The fact that they signed their name as “Felix Dzerzhinsky,” the founder of the Soviet Cheka in 1917, meant nothing either since it could have been a trick aimed at throwing pursuers off. The hackers could just as easily have been Russian freelancers, non-Russians, or anyone else for that matter – if, indeed, they were hackers at all. Trump was not far off the mark when he wisecracked in 2016:

“I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke into the DNC.”

In any event, CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry told the House intelligence committee in December 2017 that while he had “indicators” that DNC files were removed, he “did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated.” This was explosive testimony that called the entire Russiagate investigation into question. Yet committee chairman Adam Schiff managed to keep it bottled up for more than two years.

The second incident concerned a chance remark that George Papadopoulos, a 28-year-old unpaid Trump campaign adviser, made to an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer. The tip, supposedly passed along over drinks at a London bar in May 2016, was that Russia had damaging material on Hillary Clinton. When Downer passed along the news to Washington five or six weeks later, the FBI concluded that the material might have come from the DNC hack. This meant that Russian intelligence may have broken in with the express purpose of harming Clinton’s prospects. It was enough for the bureau to open a formal investigation dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” after the Rolling Stones song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

But this incident looks curiouser and curiouser too. It turns out that the original source was a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud who had taken an interest in Papadopoulos after learning that he was part of the Trump campaign. Mifsud wined and dined Papadopoulos in London and Rome and then, over breakfast at an upscale London hotel, informed him that the damaging Clinton material consisted of “thousands of emails” that had somehow wound up in Russia’s grasp.

This was the news that created the greatest furor in Washington since Watergate. But who was Mifsud and why was he telling such things to Papadopoulos? Jim Comey, Mueller’s successor as FBI director, said Mifsud was a “Russian agent” while the Mueller report referred ominously to his “various Russian contacts.” Democratic members of House intelligence committee described him as “Kremlin-linked.”

In reality, his connections were entirely with the other side. He was a long-time associate of Claire Smith, a top British diplomat who has served on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, a body that oversees British intelligence, and was also a member of a government panel that supervises security clearances for British civil servants. Smith and Mifsud had worked together at a number of institutions including Link Campus University in Rome, a private college that has served as a training center for western intelligence agents and police. Link has hosted a number of CIA-related events, among them a three-day symposium in 2004 featuring a talk by the agency’s then-deputy director. Smith took part in Link events and even posed for a photo with Mifsud at one of them in 2012. In addition, Mifsud was a speaker at a US State Department-sponsored conference in February 2017.

So unless Mifsud had pulled the wool over the eyes of a top intelligence official in charge of security clearances, we can safely assume that he was part of the UK intelligence apparatus. This raises a thorny question: why was a western intelligence asset feeding a newly-appointed Trump adviser information about Russia and the Clinton emails? Was he regaling a naïve young acolyte with tales of international intrigue? Or was it some sort of set-up?

Since this was a key event that helped set Russiagate rolling, one would think the FBI would be eager to find out. Yet it showed little interest. The bureau subjected Mifsud to only cursory questioning when it caught up with him in Washington in February 2017. The Mueller report said he lied when he “denied that he had advance knowledge that Russia was in possession of emails damaging to candidate Clinton.” Yet the bureau let him go. Papadopoulos ended up spending 14 days in jail after admitting to fibbing about minor details regarding his meeting with Mifsud. But Mifsud went scot-free.

Why the double standard? After his passport and wallet were found six months later in Madeira, Mifsud disappeared. Speculation is that he’s either dead, living under an assumed name, or under the protection of an unnamed foreign intelligence service. But it seems that Mueller made little effort to find him – perhaps, as in the case of the Saudis, because he didn’t want to hear what he might have to say.

The third incident is the Steele Dossier, a series of memoranda that Christopher Steele, a former agent of MI6, the British intelligence service, compiled for a private intelligence firm in Washington and then presented to the FBI in July 2016. The dossier is a fearful mess – implausible, contradictory, filled with allegations that are as unprovable as they are salacious. In one section, it says that “Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for at least 5 years.” In another, it says it’s “at least 8.” It says that the Kremlin was throwing real-estate deals Trump’s way, but adds that, “for reasons unknown, Trump has not taken up any of these.” Elsewhere, it says Trump did his best to enter “the real-estate sector in St Petersburg,” but that he “had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success.” Either Trump didn’t want to do business or he did but wound up flopping out. The dossier didn’t seem to know.

But the most sensational charge concerned a secret video that Russian intelligence had supposedly made of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, footage that it was now using to blackmail him into doing its bidding.

This was straight out of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 Cold War thriller by Richard Condon that was later made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra. But the story is no more plausible now than it was then. Not only were there no witnesses, but the idea of Trump participating in a “golden showers” escapade ran counter to his well-known reputation as a germaphobe. (In a hilarious interview with Rolling Stone in May 2011, Trump had expounded enthusiastically on the relative merits of such hand purifiers as Purell versus a brand known as Super Sani-Cloth Germicidal Disposable Wipes.) Supposedly, his goal was to defile a bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in years earlier. But how did he know it was the exact same room? What would be the point if the Obamas had no way of knowing?

As for the idea that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for five years or more if it was not blackmailing him already, it didn’t add up for the simple reason that no one took Trump seriously until he began racking up Republican primary victories in early 2016. Otherwise, he was a joke, a political punchline. After floating the possibility of a presidential bid in 2011, he had to hang his head in shame when Obama made merciless fun of him at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. The Rolling Stone interview, which also quoted him expounding on haircare and cufflinks, was further evidence of his flakiness. The idea that he might be presidential material was apparent to no one except, supposedly, Putin. How could he alone have known?

Despite all this, this is the document that CIA director John Brennan and three other top intelligence officials – Jim Comey plus NSA Director Mike Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – decided to confront Trump with at a meeting at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan on January 6, 2017, exactly two weeks before he was due to take office. Ostensibly, the purpose was to brief him on Russian interference. But since the “intelligence community” had concluded that Russia had interfered in his behalf, the real reason was to let him know that he was under investigation. Afterwards, Comey stayed behind to brief Trump one-on-one on the “golden showers” allegations. Six months later, he would tell the Senate intelligence committee:

“The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming president to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the president-elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.”

This was nonsense. Although Comey said the IC leadership regarded the dossier as unverified, the fact is that Brennan thought so highly of it that he insisted a link to the text be included in an official intelligence report on Russian interference. When CIA analysts complained that the citation “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment,” they said that Brennan replied, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

So the IC leadership didn’t regard the dossier as unverified at all. As for Comey’s statement that he acted because he knew that the dossier was about to become public, this is equally misleading since he had to know that the meeting would provide journalists with precisely the “hook” they needed to publish the text in full. So was his aim to protect Trump or stir up a scandal that would embarrass him all the more?

The answer was the latter. When Buzzfeed published the dossier four days later, Washington erupted. Golden showers were all anyone wanted to talk about. Trump was crippled. Was the meeting part of a “soft coup” aimed at destabilizing the new administration before it could even take office? The answer is yes.

^[i] For the most authoritative account, see Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), esp. pp. 391-416.

“Robert Mueller just died,” the president posted Saturday on Truth Social. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

To which Adam Schiff replied: “Every day, this president shows his basic indecency and unfitness for office.” Former Obama adviser David Axelrod agreed, calling the post “thoroughly despicable, totally predictable.” Chuck Schumer accused Trump of trying to distract attention “from rising gas prices, his aimless war, ICE abuses, and the Epstein files.”

But it was Dan Goldman, a Democratic congressman from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, who came up with the comment that was most on the mark. “Mueller and Trump,” he posted, “represent polar opposites of what a public servant should be.”

Quite right. Trump, whose first loyalty is to the American billionaire class, is contemptuous of the very idea of public service. But Mueller, a lean, patrician war hero, epitomized it – if, that is, your idea of public service is unfailing loyalty to the deep state.

It was this that put Mueller at the center of a process that eventually led to Trump. When the establishment crumbled from 2001 on, Mueller crumbled with it, leading to constitutional breakdown and democratic collapse. Instead of cursing the ex-prosecutor, the president should therefore thank him for helping to install his brand of authoritarianism in office. If Mueller hadn’t helped grease the skids, no one knows what Trump would be doing today. He might be back on reality TV or selling Florida real estate. But he wouldn’t be in the White House.

Mueller’s role unfolded in two stages. The first was 9/11. Since Mueller had assumed the FBI directorship just a week earlier – on Sept. 4, 2001, to be precise – he can’t be held responsible for the amazing number of FBI screw-ups that allowed 19 hijackers to live and train in the United States despite clear indications that they were up to no good. It’s a scandal, but not one that occurred on Mueller’s watch.

But the ensuing cover-up did occur on Mueller’s watch, and in many respects it was worse. The FBI’s 9/11 investigation hopped the tracks right from the start. Within eight weeks, Mueller had rounded up more than 1,200 people. Elementary legal protections were violated, arrestees were left terrified and confused, yet none turned out to have anything to do with the assault. It was a case of rounding up the usual suspects on a scale that Captain Renault could scarcely have imagined. Simultaneously, Mueller arranged for 160 or more high-ranking Saudi nationals, including Osama bin Laden’s own relatives as well as members of the Saudi royal family, to fly out of the country with apparently no more than cursory questioning at a time when civilian air travel was otherwise closed. Five days after the first plane took off, the FBI returned with subpoenas to the Las Vegas hotels where many had stayed, but it was too late. A 2003 internal memo admitted:

Although the FBI took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the US before they could be interviewed, it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the US without FBI knowledge.

This was damning stuff. Mueller was looking for evidence in all the wrong places, locking up ordinary people for no reason other than their ethnicity and religion while helping planeloads of potential witnesses to escape. Why would become clear a year and a half later when the FBI director testified before the Senate intelligence committee on the eve of George W. Bush’s Mar. 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq:

Although the most serious terrorist threat is from non-state actors, we remain vigilant against the potential threat posed by state sponsors of terrorism. The seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea – remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans.

Mueller went on:

Although Iran remains a significant concern for its continued financial and logistical support of terrorism, Iraq has moved to the top of my list. ... Iraq’s WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion.

The statement made no sense whatsoever. Few if any of the seven countries had anything to do with international terrorism as generally understood, while the one country that did – Saudi Arabia – was conspicuous by its absence. Not only was Mueller signing on to the myth of Iraqi WMDs, but he was toeing the Bush administration line that Baghdad was the real culprit behind the assault on the Twin Towers. “Vulcans” like Condolezza Rice viewed Saudi Arabia as a valuable ally to be protected at all costs. Hence, they relied on Mueller to downplay evidence of Saudi involvement so as to put the blame on Saddam Hussein instead.

Mueller was adept at double talk. In September 2002, he told Congress that, prior to 9/11, “the hijackers effectively operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted law enforcement.”

This also made no sense. The hijackers and their various helpers had aroused plenty of suspicion that higher-ups consistently ignored. Two years before, a pair of Saudi students named Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi caused an scene aboard an airliner traveling from Phoenix to Washington by badgering a flight attendant with suspicious questions and making two attempts to force their way into the cockpit. The pilot was so spooked that he made an emergency landing in Ohio. It later turned out that Al-Qudhaeein and al-Shalawi were Saudi government employees, that the Saudi Embassy had paid for their tickets, and that they were on their way to a Saudi Embassy function. There was good reason to believe it was a Saudi-funded dry run for a hijacking, yet the FBI let them go.

Then there was the memo that a Phoenix-based FBI agent named Kenneth Williams wrote two months prior to the Twin Towers. It warned of:

...a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended civil aviation universities and colleges in the State of Arizona.

The memo was ignored. There was would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui who told instructors at an airline training school in Minneapolis that he didn’t want to learn how to take off and land, “but only to steer.” The school notified the FBI that something was awry, but the bureau did nothing. Finally, there was the briefing memo that Dubya received a month prior to the attack. Its title: “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US.”

Alerts don’t get more frantic than that, yet again nothing was done. Mueller was misleading both Congress and the public about the pre-9/11 warning signs in order to make sure the Bush administration emerged unscathed. He continued in the same vein a month later when he told Congress that he had only learned about possible Saudi involvement from congressional staff and not from his own agents. (See page 443 here.) As he put it in his usual convoluted prose:

I’m saying that the sequence of events here, I think the staff probed and, as a result, some facts came to light here and to me, frankly, that had not come to light before, and perhaps would not have come to light had the staff not proved.

This was nonsense too. The bureau’s top brass was fully aware that FBI gumshoes were coming up with tantalizing leads. A rental car belonging to one of the hijackers led agents to an address in San Diego owned by an Indian immigrant who turned out, remarkably enough, to be a bureau informant. The source put them onto another purported Saudi student named Omar al-Bayoumi who rarely went to class and had a no-show job with a Saudi aviation company. The agents learned that al-Bayoumi had met two of the hijackers at a local restaurant when they arrived in San Diego, provided them with cash, helped them rent an apartment, and hosted a party for them as well. The bureau’s San Diego office concluded that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi spy.

Yet the top brass brushed it off. When Richard Lambert, the FBI agent in charge of the San Diego branch of the 9/11 investigation, was assigned to help prepare Mueller’s congressional testimony a year later, he was told: “The bureau’s position is that there was no [Saudi] complicity” in the Twin Towers attack. Lambert recalled:

I had my marching orders. It was very apparent to me that that was a decision that was made at a very high level....

The 9/11 Commission, whose Republican executive director, Philip Zelikow, was also working behind the scenes to make sure the commission’s report didn’t put Bush II or the Saudis in a bad light, concluded that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded Al-Qaeda” or that al-Bayoumi had “knowingly aided extremist groups.” The bureau itself concluded in 2004 that al-Bayoumi had no “advance knowledge of the terrorist attack.”

Yet an earlier congressional investigation, one headed by an independent-minded Democratic senator from Florida named Bob Graham, detailed extensive contacts between and among al-Bayoumi, the two hijackers, and the Saudi government. The material was contained in a 28-page chapter that was suppressed – on orders from Mueller himself – until 2016, three years after Mueller stepped down. A year after its declassification, the FBI changed its tune in a follow-up memo that admitted that al-Bayoumi “was paid a monthly stipend as a cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency,” the kingdom’s principal spy agency. The memo said the stipend was paid “via then ambassador [to the United States] Prince Bandar bin Sultan Alsaud,” the same Bandar bin Sultan who was so cozy with both Bush presidents that he was known as Bandar Bush.

Today, veterans of the 9/11 investigation are so angry at Mueller they can barely contain themselves. “He’s a villain, and an arrogant one to boot,” a retired FBI agent named Mark Wauck said, adding that Mueller had a long history of acting as a “servant of the deep state.” An ex-agent named Mark Rossini said:

Any letting the Saudis off the hook came from the White House. I can still see that photo of Bandar and Bush enjoying cigars on the balcony of the White House two days after 9/11.

But it was Mueller who made sure to pass along White House pressure to those below. Sharon Premoli, a 9/11 survivor who was pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, said of Mueller:

He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11. In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush campaign to block, obfuscate, and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released.

The result was one of the great cover-ups of modern history, one whose political consequences are inestimable. The Iraq invasion not only led to as many as 655,000 “excess deaths” but sparked chaos throughout the region. The spillover was also immense in the United States where Iraq became the poster boy for the “forever wars” that a clueless neocon foreign-policy establishment was constantly fomenting. Washington had lied brazenly about WMDs that didn’t exist and had concocted a spurious rationale for a military operation that proved disastrous. And Mueller was at the heart of the deception.

The effort also provided an opening for a certain Republican presidential candidate.

“She doesn’t have the temperament to be president,” Trump said of Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of Washington neocons and a champion of the Iraq invasion, in March 2016. “She’s got bad judgment. She’s got horribly bad judgment, if you look at the war in Iraq, if you look at what she did with Libya, which was a total catastrophe.”

Such words resonated. Although corporate media outlets were quick to write Trump off as a know-nothing blowhard, a landmark study by scholars at Cornell and the University of Minnesota concluded that war weariness provided Trump with a margin of victory the following November:

The data analysis presented in this working paper finds that indeed, in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America. Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.

The truth of 9/11 was clear. After teaming up with Saudi Arabia to foster holy war against the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1980s, the US was aghast when the same jihadists turned their war-making abilities against America a dozen years or so later. Washington had played with fire and - surprise, surprise - had gotten itself burned. Owning up the error was out of the question since it would mean admitting that an entire generation of foreign-policy strategists had badly miscalculated. Hence an emerging bipartisan consensus concluded that blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11 would be a far better course. It would get the establishment off the hook while providing the Bush administration with a perfect pretext for attacking a long-time foe. So the experts closed ranks around a policy of redoubled Middle East warfare.

Mueller was part of the team that “fixed” the evidence in favor of an invasion, to quote Matthew Rycroft’s famous Downing Street Memo. He succeeded in the short term but wound up helping to degrade a constitutional structure that was already in an advanced state of decay. Conditions collapsed, and the man the foreign-policy establishment least wanted to see elected wound up in the Oval Office. Washington hasn’t been the same since.

Next: Mueller and Russia, Russia, Russia.

The United States is indeed the largest oil and gas producer in history and no longer depends on hydrocarbon imports. But its social model is uniquely vulnerable to increases in the retail price of gasoline – and Trump explicitly made cheap petrol a central promise of his second term. Every trip to the pump is a stress test of the fundamentally car-centric American social contract.

So argued a London-based economist named Dominik A. Leusder in a recent article in Jacobin, the democratic socialist website. To which one can only reply:

Quite right except you don’t know the half of it.

Leusder is on target when it comes to cheap gas. It’s as central to the American political order as cheap bread was to the French political order of the 1780s. From a chicken in every pot – a phrase coined not by Herbert Hoover, but by France’s King Henry IV, who ruled from 1589 to 1610 – expectations had risen by the early 20^th century to the point where a car in every garage was becoming de rigueur.

The dream turned into reality starting in 1908 when the first Model T rolled off the Ford assembly line. By the mid-teens, traffic jams were tying up American cities from coast to coast. Two other components fell into place after World War II: roads to drive on and homes for all those garages to be attached to. Levittown thus opened its doors in 1947 while the Interstate Highway Act followed in 1956. That was the same year that Elvis had a breakthrough hit with “Heartbreak Hotel.” Middle America not only had a house and car but a sound track to go with them.

Now it’s all coming undone. Ostensibly, the reason is rising gas prices, up nearly 50 percent since Trump launched his unprovoked attack on Iran on Feb. 28. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. The real culprit is a hideously expensive social arrangement whose elaborate support structures are under growing strain.

America is indeed an outlier when it comes to auto transport. It has more motor vehicles per capita than just about any comparable country – 15 percent more than Canada, 29 percent more than the UK, and 32 percent than Germany, land of the Autobahn and BMW. It’s off the charts in terms of gasoline, consuming 2.6 times as much per person as Australia, more than seven times as much per person as France, and more than eight times as much as Italy. Not surprisingly, the US is also a world leader in carbon emissions, pumping out 60 percent more than China per population and nearly four times more than Mexico.

Although Trump told reporters a couple of days ago that the United States “shouldn’t even be” in the Strait of Hormuz “because we don’t need it, we have a lot of oil,” Leusder is right to point out that sky-high consumption levels leave Americans more vulnerable to price fluctuations rather than less. The extra dollar per gallon that US consumers are now paying works out to roughly $135 billion per year or about $400 for every man, woman, and child.

That’s a hefty surcharge for the privilege of spending 11 work weeks behind the wheel, which is what the average American adult does per year. (The figure is based on the 13,476 miles that Americans 16 or older drive annually divided by an average speed of 30 miles per hour.) A way of life that was billed as economical in the 1950s is turning into the opposite as the economic long wave draws to a close.

But that’s not all. Average new car prices are now at $49,353, up nearly 25 percent since 2021. Auto insurance premiums were 55 percent higher as of last fall compared with three years earlier, while repair costs rose 36 percent versus 2019. Congestion is multiplying. In 1982, an average driver spent 20 hours stuck in traffic per year according to a study by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. By 2024, the figure was 63, the equivalent of eight work days doing nothing other than spewing out exhaust and taking up space.

Then there’s the astonishing explosion in housing prices. In 1968, the cost of a new home equaled 2.5 times US median household income per year. By 2024, it was better than five. In early 2020, analysts calculated that $78,236 in annual household income was needed to qualify for a mortgage on a typical home. Today, it’s nearly $117,000, almost a 50-percent increase. Existing home sales fell 19 percent in 2023, close to a 30-year low, while single-family housing starts have fallen 17 percent since 2021 even though the number of households is up five. Childcare, a necessity when both parents are working overtime to cover expenses, is rising at nearly double the rate of inflation.

It’s like a tripod whose legs – cars, homes, and gas – are buckling all at once. Costs are up, efficiency is down, and stress is mounting as people spend more and more time in bumper-to-bumper traffic while losing economic ground. Ultimately, the problem is technological since it makes no sense to strap oneself into a two-ton vehicle in order to fetch diapers or a bottle of milk. But with a multitude of highway subsidies crowding out all other forms of transport, Americans have no choice.

And then there’s war. No, Trump did not attack Iran to distract attention from QAnon, er, I mean, the Epstein files. And, no, he didn’t do it because Israel twisted his arm. Rather, he did it for one reason only – oil. Since the 1970s, America has invested tens of trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf, home to perhaps 50 percent of the globe’s known fossil-fuel reserves. As a result, it now has six major military bases in the region: Al Udeid Air Base, home to some 10,000 US troops, in Qatar; the Fifth Fleet naval base in Bahrain; Camp Arifjan and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, etc. Supposedly, the purpose of all that firepower is to enforce the 1980 Carter Doctrine, which says that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.” But this is misleading since the only outside force seeking control at this point is the US itself. Instead, the bases are aimed at repelling an inside force, which is to say Iran, which occupies roughly half the Persian Gulf shoreline and has been a burr under America’s saddle ever since the shah.

The aim is thus to destroy Iran and Americanize the gulf. This will allow Trump to do two things: control oil prices so as to shore up political support at home while using the Persian Gulf oil spigot to enhance leverage over the world economy as a whole. Trump hopes this will give an edge on China, which relies on the gulf for 55 percent of its crude imports, while furthering the subordination of NATO whose European members also depend on the gulf for oil and fertilizers.

This is not a departure from past practice but a fulfillment since every dollar the Pentagon invests in the gulf serves to stir up militarism to the breaking point. This is why the region has seen five major wars since 1980 plus numerous smaller conflicts. But after Carter, Reagan, Bush et al. paved the way, it’s now up to Trump to deliver the final blow. If successful, the result will be US-Israeli domination of the entire “intermarium” from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea.

Can he do it? Although the war has certainly blown up Trump’s expectations, the near-term answer is still most likely yes. But even if Trump pulls it off, the victory is certain to be Pyrrhic both at home and abroad.

One reason is Iran’s multi-ethnic character. With a population of 92 million, it’s only 51-percent Persian or Farsi, with the rest Azerbaijani (24 percent); Gilaks and Mazanderanis (closely-related Caspian peoples accounting for another eight percent), plus smaller groups like Arabs and Balochis. Destruction of the Iranian state could therefore set the stage for ethnic disintegration on the scale of Syria or Lebanon, only worse. Strife could well spill over into Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, which are also torn by ethno-religious strife and are therefore ripe for destabilization. This means more violence, more hatred, and more refugees. What will Trump do then?

Domestically, the outlook is equally grim. Inflation in the US was accelerating before oil prices began to spike, but now it’s poised for another leap. With gulf production likely to remain crippled for months under the best of circumstances, the upshot will be higher prices at the pump and heightened financial stress overall. If the employment market continues to deteriorate, wage cuts and declining job prospects will follow. So will higher mortgage costs due to the Fed’s inability to cut lending rates. Slowing economic will throw another destabilizing element into the mix.

Finally, there’s the looming threat of a financial sector that’s increasingly unsteady due to turmoil in the $3-trillion private-credit market. Private credit is a form of shadow banking that has mushroomed in recent years due to stepped-up regulation of giants like Citibank and Chase in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown coupled with the “quantitative easing” that has flooded Wall Street with liquidity. The effect has been to send hot money fleeing from traditional banks to a start-up sector in which rules are lax. Thanks to the Fed’s decision to tighten up starting in late 2022, rising interest rates are sending borrowers into default. In February, a $12.5-billion private-credit lender called Blue Owl Capital halted withdrawals to prevent what was in effect a run on the bank. Less than two weeks later, a $48-billion private lender called Blackstone did the same. A few days after that, BlackRock Inc., which has $170 billion in assets, followed suit. Last week, JP Morgan said it would cut back on lending to private-credit funds, an indication that the sector is coming under pressure from both ends.

With 2008 comparisons growing more common, the war, the run-up in energy prices, and the AI bubble as well are adding to the jitters. Is Trump’s war on Iran a final paroxysm of violence that will cause a great unraveling from the Middle East to the leafy suburbs of middle America? The answer could well be yes. If so, the consequences will be immense.

That’s the thing about a social contract: there’s hell to pay when you break it. Just ask Louis XVI. He’ll tell you a thing or two about the political consequences of rising bread prices.

Then things took a strange turn when Alex Steiner, the website’s editor, attacked the article on multiple grounds, e.g. neglecting Freud, “the godfather of all gender theory”; misconstruing the ideas of gender theorist Judith Butler, and failure to understand the uniqueness of human sexuality because I allegedly insist on seeing it “through the prism of a general concept of sexuality appropriate to other animal species which is rooted in the innate drive to reproduce and little else.”

Steiner’s polemic is available here.

Now my response has just been posted. It that the article got Butler wrong, it criticizes Steiner for meeting her “halfway,” it argues that human sexuality is not as unique as he thinks since plenty of other species also engage in non-procreative sex, and it takes issue with his wholesale dismissal of sociobiology. At issue is the question of evolution and biological determinism, which Steiner sees as limiting and reductionist, but which I argue is entirely the opposite.

Anyway, readers interested in the latest installment can find it here.

Cheers!

Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes. Last week, she said that every time Trump attacks a country like Iran or Venezuela, “it has been consistent with a spike or a revelation in what is happening with the Epstein files. I don’t think that that coincidence is something to dismiss off the cuff. I think that he feels existentially tied to it.”

AOC went on:

And I actually think that it is one reason that he must be removed from office, because … if the Epstein files have such a hold on President Trump and this administration that they are willing to … risk world war in order to save themselves politically, that is … the definition of someone that cannot make objective decisions for the American people.

So the purpose of all those aircraft carriers and F-35s, apparently, is not so much to brutalize Iran as to knock Epstein off the front pages. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who oversaw the House’s second Trump impeachment in early 2025, agrees that Trump attacked Iran because of “the accelerating and shocking disclosures from the Epstein files.” So does Ro Khanna, who says “of course Donald Trump launches wars in Venezuela or Iran to try to deflect from [Epstein].” Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California’s affluent second congressional district just north of San Francisco, also regards it as a given that the assault was designed “to distract public scrutiny of the Trump-Epstein files fiasco.”

There’s also the Lincoln Project, the GOP splinter group headed by a never-Trumper named Rick Wilson, which dismisses the Iran war as “a billion-dollar Epstein distraction.” There’s the pro-Democratic media brigade headed by Jimmy Kimmel, who says the war will continue for “however long it takes until everyone stops talking about how many times his name is in the Epstein files.” There’s Stephen Colbert who recently quipped, “Fun fact: Epic Fury is an anagram for Forget Epstein” (actually, it’s not). Then there are the Clintonites over at Saturday Night Live – remember how they applauded Hillary’s victory over Bernie? – who last weekend riffed on the old Edwin Starr song: “War, what is it good for? Distracting from the Epstein files.”

Yuk, yuk. Audiences love it and fans eat it up, but there’s a problem. The thesis is false on at least two counts. One is that there’s zero evidence linking the Epstein files with the decision to go to the war on Feb. 28. The other is that there’s zero evidence linking Trump with Epstein’s sexual activities.

In fact, the bitter truth is that there’s zero evidence in the files implicating anyone other than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. To be sure, lots of people have been embarrassed by being associated with someone who allegedly hired dozens of underage girls to service him sexually, even though he pleaded guilty to illicit relations with just one, an unnamed girl who was 16 at the time. A former Norwegian prime minister named Thorbjørn Jagland may recently have attempted suicide because his name has cropped up, Larry Summers is in purgatory, while Noam Chomsky’s reputation may have been destroyed for good. But not only is there nothing linking such people to criminal activity, there’s significant evidence indicating the opposite, which is that the only ones engaging in such crimes were Epstein and Maxwell.

Hard to believe given all the media hype? Consider an April 2020 FBI memo summing up an interview with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, the man in charge of the Epstein investigation back in 2006. One of the few genuine bombshells to emerge from the files, it says Reiter told the bureau: “None of the victims that PBPD spoke with said they had sexual contact with men other than EPSTEIN while in EPSTEIN’s orbit.”

Then there’s the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which, in 2020, issued a comprehensive analysis of how the original Epstein case was handled. The report quotes Marie Villafaña, the assistant US attorney in charge of the investigation at the federal level who was one of the few heroes in this sordid affair, as saying the same thing: “none of ... the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.” (See page 167 here.) There’s the follow-up FBI investigation in 2019, which searched Epstein’s CD’s, photos, and tapes for evidence of illicit sex. According to the Associated Press, the bureau “found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men.”

No sex trafficking means no blackmail tapes showing VIPs in flagrante delecto, which means no QAnon-style pedophile conspiracy to take over the world. As for Trump, the verdict is the same: no credible evidence linking him with such crimes, but significant evidence indicating the opposite.

The FBI Reiter memo is important in this respect as well. In addition to Epstein’s sexual activities, it describes a phone call the Palm Beach police department received during the 2006 investigation. According to the memo:

TRUMP called the PBPD to tell him “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.” TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, “she is evil and to focus on her.” TRUMP told Reiter that he was around EPSTEIN once when teenagers were present and TRUMP “got the hell out of there.” TRUMP was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating EPSTEIN.

So while Democrats are looking for the holy grail in the form of a photo of Trump with a topless teenage girl on his knee, everything we know indicates that he knew of Epstein’s activities and was glad that someone was finally out to stop them.

Trump was thus truthful for once when he recently told reporters aboard Air Force One:

I’ve been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. They went in hoping that they’d find it and found just the opposite. ... I’ve been totally exonerated on Epstein, and it’s really interesting because they’ve been pulled in. Think of it, they’ve been pulled in. They’ve been pulled in, Clinton and many other Democrats.

To be fair, there’s nothing in the files implicating the Clintons either since it’s now clear that Bill associated with Epstein merely because he thought he could help drum up funds for the Clinton Foundation while Hillary didn’t know him at all.

Still, semi-accuracy is as good as Trump gets. What’s more, it puts him leagues ahead of Democrats who have never more hopped up since Russiagate in 2017-20. Back then, the man leading the charge was Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and a tireless Trump-baiter who saw Trump-Putin collusion under every bed and behind every tree. Now that Schiff has won a seat in the Senate, the commander-in-chief is Ted Lieu, a congressman from Los Angeles who is vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus. Early last month, Lieu told a press conference that the Epstein files contain “highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.” At a congressional hearing a few weeks later, he cited an FBI memo about an informant passing along information to the effect that Trump may have murdered a 19-year-old woman in Oklahoma in 1999 because she had gone to the police. The account made little sense not only because Oklahoma state authorities ruled the woman’s death a suicide – a detail Lieu conveniently left out – but because the informant also somehow implicated the Clintons in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

This was bizarre. Yet Lieu, overflowing with indignation, fairly screamed at Attorney General Pam Bondi:

You need to interview this witness immediately. Epstein should rot in hell. So should the men who patronized this operation.

Then he called on her to resign.

Why such madness? The answer is that Lieu is engaged in a game of distraction of his own. He wants to curry favor with liberals who loath everything Trump says or does while obscuring his own war-mongering in the Middle East, a position that’s no longer as popular as it once was. The recipient of more than $340,000 in AIPAC campaign funding, he has never missed an opportunity to cozy up to Israel or blast away at Iran. “The Iranian government is malignant, dangerous and an enemy of the United States and Israel,” he tweeted in April 2024. “...America’s support for the security of Israel is ironclad.” When Israel launched its Twelve Day War last June, Lieu was jubilant:

I stand with Israel. A world with fewer nuclear weapons is a safer one for everyone. The autocratic and theocratic Iranian regime could launch nuclear weapons not only at Israel, but also US military bases and other US interests.

Even while condemning the president for going to war without congressional approval, it’s not clear that Lieu otherwise finds anything wrong with Trump’s unprovoked attack. Hence, he was careful to leaven his criticism with another dose of anti-Iran invective:

I also want to note that Iran is a murderous theocratic regime. They want to get a nuclear weapon. They fund terrorist networks, and their stated aim is to destroy the United States and Israel.

So Lieu is not especially disturbed that Trump is pulverizing Tehran and murdering civilians by the thousands. He’s merely upset that, legally speaking, he hasn’t crossed all the t’s and dotted every i.

Interestingly, Lieu is sounding the same anti-Russian themes that Democrats like Schiff did in the late 2010s. Noting that Trump has suspended sanctions on Russian oil in an attempt to prevent a spike in energy prices, Lieu sailed into him last week for going soft on the Kremlin.

Reverse your decision to lift oil sanctions on Russia. It is traitorous conduct for you to help Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is assisting Iran in targeting American troops.

The problem with Trump is not that he’s too hawkish, evidently, but that he’s not hawkish enough. Since Lieu is unwilling to clearly state whether Trump should attack Iran, Russia, neither, or both, he prefers to change the subject to the Epstein files and how Trump likes to rape little children. With their usual precision, Democrats are ignoring immense crimes while concentrating their fire on the one misdeed Trump didn’t do.

This is Mexico where people are still reeling from the Feb. 22 death of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes. Better known as “El Mencho,” he headed a heavily militarized drug network known as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel that is supposedly one of the biggest criminal enterprises in history. As of 2017, it was said to control assets worth $50 billion and to be active in 28 of Mexico’s 32 states, although exactly what such statements mean in this instance is less than clear.

But what is certain is New Generation’s penchant for ultra-violence. Following its emergence in 2009 in Jalisco, the Pacific Coast state due west of Mexico City, police discovered mass graves containing at least 152 of its victims. In 2011, the gang claimed responsibility for the massacre of 35 people in Veracruz, and, a month after that, security forces recovered the bodies of another 30 victims whom the group was also believed to have killed. The CJNG, to use its Spanish acronym, ambushed and killed 15 police officers in April 2015 and then used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down a military helicopter a month later, killing nine soldiers and permanently disfiguring a tenth.

Given such unprecedented levels of violence, reporters predicted that the CJNG had at last gone too far and was “sure to bring down the full wrath of the state.” But rather than backing off, it upped the ante by employing not only RPG’s, but land mines, homemade mortars, and armored monster trucks complete with gun turrets and battering rams. A popular song said of the CJNG: “We’ve swapped pocketknives for AR-15s and AK-47s, for .50 calibers and antiaircraft guns.” Members planted hundreds of roadside bombs to knock off enemies and deployed drones outfitted with toxic chemicals and bombs. They reportedly ran rigorous training camps to teach aspiring hitmen how to handle handguns and automatic weapons. One graduate told of instructors forcing trainees to eat human remains to toughen them up.

But if the group is even half as scary as people say, does that mean we can all breathe easier now that El Mencho is gone?

Not quite. El Mencho may be kaput, but drug violence lives on. In fact, based on decades of experience, we can reasonably expect it to rise even more. The reason, simply, is a flawed “kingpin” strategy that assumes that eliminating a drug leader means eliminating his drug operation too. But drugs will continue to flow because super-profits make it all but impossible for dealers to stop. Instead, the only result will be to create a power vacuum that members must struggle to fill. Given that the CJNG is more a network than a centralized cartel, one riven by the usual rivalries and disputes, anyone who has sat through a mafia movie knows what happens next. The bodies will pile up as various factions go to war with one another until a new boss ends up on top.

Like the Hydra, the many-headed serpent in Greek mythology, cutting off one head causes two more to grow back. This is why after touching down at just eight murders per 100,000 people in 2007, the Mexican homicide rate reversed course after George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón, his Mexican equivalent, announced a program known as the Mérida Initiative aimed at providing the training and equipment that would supposedly crush drugs for good. Instead, the initiative caused the trade to explode while sending the homicide rate rocketing skyward. Three years later, it tripled to 23 per 100,000 by 2010, while by 2018 it hit 29.

The drug trade thus expands the more it is repressed. Paradoxically, drug violence does too.

But that’s not all. Spiraling levels of violence make it all but impossible for elected officials to hold themselves aloof. If narcotraficantes shoot up civilians or intimidate rivals by tossing a bagful of severed heads onto a crowded dance floor, angry voters will demand that something be done. Politicians have little choice but to go along despite the negative consequences.

That’s the predicament Sheinbaum now finds herself in. Trump has long warned that if Mexico doesn’t take action against the cartels, he’ll do the job himself by sending in US troops. The pressure is therefore immense. After El Mencho’s death, Sheinbaum told reporters that Trump called her “to ask me what was happening in Mexico, how things were going, are you OK?” Her answer:

“I told him how the operation had gone, that we had received intelligence support from the US government, that the coordination was going very well.”

But the CJNG’s response no doubt gave her pause. In a dramatic show of force, the group marked El Mencho’s death by rampaging across 20 Mexican states, setting fire to cars and buildings, blocking roads, and gunning down 25 soldiers. Businesses closed, travel was disrupted, and tourists were stranded. But what is even more unnerving is that, as everyone knows, such firepower will inevitably turn inward as the battle for succession heats up. The upshot will be more bedlam, more police crackdowns, more militarization, and more violent spillover affecting ordinary civilians. It’s a vicious cycle leading to intensified social breakdown and rightwing authoritarianism as the supposed cure.

By declaring that “Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs,” Trump is putting Sheinbaum on notice that such operations must continue regardless. But a burgeoning pro-Trump right that wants nothing more than US intervention is putting her on notice too. Following Trump’s January 3 arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Mexico’s third richest individual and an arch-rightist who is a likely presidential candidate in 2030, issued a statement advising Sheinbaum that she could be next:

The intervention of the United States in Venezuela is a warning to authoritarian characters all over the world and, in our case, a clear hope for Mexico and Mexicans. Abuse of constitutional democracy and using as a shield the ‘will of the people’ will have serious consequences for the freedom of these corrupt communists and their health.

The aim is to force Mexico to surrender to the “penal populism” sweeping Latin America in which heavily armed police, mass incarceration, and free-market economics are presented as the final solution. The twin poster boys for the rightwing surge are Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has put better than two percent of the adult population behind bars as part of a draconian effort to wipe out drug-gang violence, and Argentina’s Javier Milei, another Trump favorite, who is imposing savage budget cuts while declaring, “Make Americas great again from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.”

That’s not all. There’s also Ecuadorean president Daniel Noboa, who said last year that he “would love to have” US troops helping to combat the drug-gang violence that, at more than 50 homicides per 100,000 people, has turned his country into the murder capital of the Western Hemisphere. There’s Guatemalan president Bernardo Arévalo, who is under intense pressure to “Bukelize” in response to 30,000 tattooed gang members determined to overthrow his government. And there’s José Antonio Kast, the far-right president-elect of Chile, which is also beset by growing drug violence. Kast recently met with Bukele and toured CECOT, the Salvadoran mega-prison that is now home to more than 250 Venezuelans whom Trump deported last year.

All operate on the assumption that drugs cause violence, that the only way to end it is by putting traffickers behind bars, and that leftists nattering on about civil rights and the like should be shoved out of the way. Yet the reality is the opposite. Rather than drugs, it’s criminalization that causes violence by driving the trade underground and creating vast black markets in which the only way to resolve business disputes is at the point of a gun.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University, put it well in a recent article in the Small Wars Journal in which she declared that lopping off someone like El Mencho does nothing other than to promote a self-serving “logic of spectacle.” As she put it:

Highly visible violence plays a powerful role in contemporary security politics. It reinforces narratives of imminent threat, state vulnerability and the need for exceptional measures. ... The timing of El Mencho’s killing is therefore not incidental. It occurred during a US election cycle when law-and-order rhetoric carries particular weight. The operation was quickly framed as enabled by US intelligence cooperation, and President Donald Trump publicly credited his administration with eliminating “one of the most sinister cartel kingpins of all.”

Yet even as “military-industrial and security-technology sectors benefit from renewed justification for expanded surveillance, intelligence sharing, and border enforcement,” Correa-Cabrera said that the drug trade itself “remains largely unaffected.”

The “logic of spectacle” also applies to the CJNG, whose post-El Mencho rampage convinced many that the gang is now fully the equal of the Mexican state. Such displays are thus mutually reinforcing. Gangs need cops to keep drugs illegal so their criminal enterprises can continue. Cops need gangs so they can continue squeezing funding out of the state. Rightwing politicians need both so they can convince voters that stepped-up authoritarianism is the only solution to violence tearing society apart.

Decades of bipartisan drug wars have provided Trump with a perfect instrument with which to shift society in the direction of the dictatorial right. They provide an all-purpose excuse for sending in troops, for eliminating civil liberties, and for imposing punitive social policies. Drugs will continue regardless. But democracy will not.