The years from 1968 to 1974 are remembered as the years of Vietnam and Watergate. Both the Vietnam War and the Watergate saga were built on lies. They lived on lies. A superstructure of lies was constructed on a foundation of lies. Those of us who were young during those years knew we were being told lies. Our conception of the United States was fundamentally transformed by the loss of the war in Vietnam and the destruction of Richard Nixon’s (1913 - 1994) presidency.

The justification for America’s war in Vietnam was established by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed on August 7, 1964. The evidence now available indicates that “high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public” in order to get that resolution passed.1 The war was based on a lie.

1968 was the year the lie came home to roost. On the last day of 1967, there were 485,600 American troops in Vietnam. The Americans had suffered over 16,000 combat deaths and almost a hundred thousand wounded during that year.2

The war was heavily criticized in the United States; and, as part of a public relations offensive, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 - 1973) brought General William Westmoreland (1914 - 2005), the commander of American forces in Vietnam, back to Washington to sell the war to an increasingly skeptical public. Upon his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base in November of 1967, Westmoreland declared himself “very, very encouraged” by the situation in Vietnam. Interviewed on “Meet the Press,” he said that American troops would be able to begin withdrawing “within two years or less.”3 On November 21, he spoke at the National Press Club, explaining that “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view. . . . It lies within our grasp. The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”4

The enemy did not see things that way. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive at the end of January, 1968. The United States and its allies won the battles. Tactically, Tet was an American victory. Strategically, it was a catastrophe. Tet “proved to the United States that the war was unwinnable, effectively toppled a president (i.e., Johnson), convinced the new president (i.e., Richard Nixon) to ‘Vietnamize’ the war [an effort everyone knew was doomed to failure], and paved the way for the ultimate triumph of the Communist forces. . . .”5

Think about it. This set of accomplishments places Tet in the pantheon of the most successful attacks in the history of warfare.

To be sure, there was plenty more dying to take place. 1968 was the bloodiest year for the Americans. The United States lingered in the war until 1973. When it was finally all over, 58,220 Americans had given their lives.6 Millions of Vietnamese had also perished.

One considers the carnage of the Vietnam War with a profound sense of the pointlessness of it all and of despair. We who remember those years also remember the loss of faith in the officials who brought about this calamity and who were supposed to look after our best interests.

The United States lost the Vietnam War. Strangely enough, however, our power in the world did not suffer greatly as a result (a stark contrast to the loss of Trump’s war against Iran). Indeed, a decade and a half following Vietnam, the United States and its allies won the Cold War as the Soviet Union disintegrated.

There is, however, one event for which the war was in large part responsible which is of transcendent importance and which is rarely emphasized. In 1973, the military draft was terminated; and the United States transitioned to an all-volunteer army.7

If you were a man between the ages of 18 and 26 during the 1960s and up until the elimination of the draft in 1973, you had to figure out what you were going to do about military service. Would you enlist? Would you apply for officer candidate school? Would you claim a physical deferment?

Questions such as these were the most important that you faced because during Vietnam these questions were a matter of life and death. More than half the Army’s battle deaths were draftees.8

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An unintended consequence of the elimination of the draft was the fact that the power of the president to make war on a whim was greatly enhanced. This power is being illustrated right this minute. Would the Donald have been able to launch this disastrous war against Iran if the troops fighting it were drafted? There have been numerous reports of the terrible conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is deployed to fight Trump’s war. Not famous for his empathy, Trump has dismissed such reports and asserted that the carrier’s deployment was “not nearly long enough.”9 He would not be able to get away with such moronic pronouncements if those sailors and the other combatants had been drafted from the nation’s wealthy and privileged families.

The Watergate saga began when five men associated with Nixon’s re-election campaign were arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. Nixon learned of the break-in on June 20, and observed, “It’s going to be forgotten.”10 Actually, it will never be forgotten.

On August 5, 1974, after two years of dodging responsibility for the Watergate cover-up, the “smoking gun” tape was surrendered to investigators and made public.11 This tape established beyond doubt that Nixon personally ordered the Watergate break-in to be covered up. On August 9, facing certain impeachment in the House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned.

But Nixon’s resignation was not the end of the story. There remained the question of whether or not his successor as president, Gerald Ford (1913 - 2006), would issue a pardon for him.

Ford became president at 12 noon on August 9, 1974; and the pardon issue became of consuming importance. This problem is more complicated than it may seem at first glance. The question not only was whether a pardon should be granted, it was also when it should be granted and what words should accompany the decision. And it was unknown what impact a pardon would have on Ford’s own presidency.

On August 28, Ford held his first press conference. A Nixon pardon was an option, but Ford said that he had yet to make up his mind. “In the last 10 days or two weeks, I have asked for prayers for guidance on this very important point.”12

On Sunday, September 8, 1974, Ford granted Nixon his pardon.13 Ford actually liked Nixon and considered him a friend, something very few others who knew Nixon would be likely to have said. But his affectionate feelings were not, he claimed, the reason for the pardon. “I had to get rid of him!” Ford exclaimed. “I couldn’t get the work done. Everybody was trying to crucify the guy. And I finally said to people, ‘Enough already! Pardon him!’”14

News of the pardon shocked many people (including me). Among those taken by surprise was Ford’s press secretary and longtime friend Jerald terHorst (1922 - 2010). The same day the pardon was issued terHorst resigned, writing:

“[I]t is with great regret, after long soul-searching, that I must inform you that I cannot in good conscience support your decision to pardon former President Nixon even before he has been charged with the commission of any crime. As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes - and imprisoned - stemming from the same Watergate situation. These are also men whose reputations and families have been grievously injured. Try as I can, it is impossible to conclude that the former President is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.”15

As time passed, many forgave Ford for the pardon. He actually received the John F. Kennedy Foundation’s Profiles in Courage Award on May 21, 2001 for issuing the pardon.16

We now know that the elimination of the draft and the pardon of Nixon – both of which were products of Vietnam and Watergate – were terrible mistakes. The nation is in crisis today because it has a president whose power is unchecked. If the children of the upper middle class were dragooned against their will into the armed forces, the nation certainly would not be carried off to war in the casual method of the Donald.

And if Trump and other presidents knew that they could not count on being pardoned for their crimes, they would commit a lot fewer of them.

Being tossed into the slammer is nobody’s idea of a pleasant way to conclude a career. If Nixon had ended his days in jail, Trump and his cronies would have something extra to think about when undertaking their next corrupt activity.

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At this writing, the Polymarket betting site has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the favorite to be the nominee of the Democratic party for president in 2028.1 Her candidacy would be a political earthquake.

Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican extraction. She was born and raised in the Bronx and entered the House of Representatives by upsetting a ten-term incumbent in 2018. During her campaign:

“She called for fundamental changes to immigration enforcement, a higher minimum wage, national health insurance coverage, and urgent action on climate. Her message was electrifying even as her chances seemed nonexistent.”2

“Unprecedented” is a mild word indeed to describe what an Ocasio-Cortez presidential campaign would represent. To begin with gender, no woman has ever been elected President of the United States.

No member of the House of Representatives has ever vaulted from that perch to the White House. True, James Knox Polk (1795 - 1849) had been Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839. However, he gave up that position to become Governor of Tennessee from 1839 to 1841. He was defeated for re-election in 1841 and again in 1843. He was a very dark horse when he surprised the nation by receiving the Democratic Party nomination and winning the election in 1844. And of course, that was a very long time ago.

On January 20, 2029, AOC (as Ocasio-Cortez is often known) will be 39 years old. If she is elected and inaugurated at that time, she will be the youngest president in the nation’s history.

More important than any of these considerations, she is a leading figure on the far-left wing of the Democratic party. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a tireless advocate for such programs as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and abortion rights. (She herself is a rape victim.)3 Can Ocasio-Cortez – or any other politician on the far-left – be elected president of the United States?

The last person who tried was Senator George S. McGovern (1922 - 2012). Things did not turn out well. As he later said:

“I wanted to run for president in the worst way, and I sure did.”4

McGovern faced Richard Nixon (1913 - 1994) in the 1972 campaign for the presidency. Nixon was the incumbent, having been elected in a surprisingly close race in 1968. In 1972, he was always well ahead in the polls. Nevertheless, the magnitude of Nixon’s victory over McGovern was simply awesome.

McGovern won only one state, Massachusetts, and also the District of Columbia. Thus, he did not even prevail in his home state of South Dakota. His defeat was truly national. He lost slightly more than 95% of the counties in the country. Nixon received 60.7% of the popular vote. McGovern, 37.5%. It was, in a word, a total blowout.

This campaign was as full of irony as any other in American history. Although Nixon had every reason to believe that he would win – indeed he commented to a reporter that “The election was decided the day McGovern was nominated”5 – the seeds of Nixon’s eventual downfall in disgrace had already been sown by the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

Oddly, it seems more remarkable today than it did at the time that Nixon was forced to resign from the presidency on August 9, 1974, because of the Watergate revelations – less than two years after one of the greatest landslide victories in the history of American presidential politics. Compared to Trump’s never-ending violations of legality and decency, Watergate is truly trivial. Yet Trump will not be brought low by his corruption.

Why have the fates of Nixon and Trump been so different? The most important reason is that Trump owns the Republican Party, and the Republicans control Congress. In the case of Nixon, the situation was quite different. Despite his staggering victory in 1972, the “Republicans actually lost [two] seats in the Senate and gained only twelve in the House of Representatives, leaving both houses well in the hands of a Democratic majority.”6

Nixon had no coattails.

“The voters had sent a strong message to Washington – they were rejecting George McGovern more than they were electing Richard Nixon and the policies he stood for.”7

The Democrats felt they learned a powerful lesson from the debacle of 1972. “McGovernization” had to be avoided. This term became “standard shorthand for both political parties when they veer toward the unelectable extremes.”8

These reflections bring us back to the present day. AOC is an extreme figure in the context of American politics. Does that make her as unelectable as McGovern was in 1972?

Precisely what was it about McGovern which made it so easy for Nixon – a man whose lack of appeal was clearly illustrated by his downfall so soon after his triumph – to prevail so easily and so completely?

In 1968 and again in 1972, the Democratic party presented itself to the nation as chaotic, while the Republicans appeared calm. The Democratic convention in 1968 featured riots in the streets and chaos in the convention center itself. (I remember this convention vividly. I was there, working for an ABC contractor.)

The Democratic nominee that year, Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978), had been Lyndon Johnson’s (1908 - 1973) vice president from 1965 to 1969; and he could not separate himself from Johnson’s failed Vietnam War policy. Humphrey would not have won the nomination had it not been for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1925 - 1968) after his victory in the California primary on June 6. Kennedy would in all likelihood have been the Democratic nominee; and although of course we cannot be certain, there is every reason to believe that he would have defeated Nixon for the presidency in 1968. If that had happened, we would be living in a very different country from the one we are living in today.

The Democratic convention in 1972 was not as violent as in 1968, but it was terribly disorganized. “There were divisive platform battles over Vietnam, abortion, welfare, and court-ordered busing to end racial discrimination.” The final platform “was probably the most liberal” ever put forward by a major American political party.9

McGovern had a difficult time convincing any prominent Democrat to run as his vice president. He eventually settled on Senator Thomas Eagleton (D, MO)(1929 - 2007). Between time spent on the platform and the vice presidency, the convention droned on for so long that McGovern did not deliver his acceptance speech until 2:48 in the morning, by which time the nation had gone to sleep.

Eagleton spent a mere 18 days as McGovern’s running mate. It soon became known that he had been hospitalized for depression and had undergone electroshock therapy. McGovern at first said that he was “1,000%” behind Eagleton; but the pressure to remove him from the ticket was enormous. Eagleton was forced to step down, and a substitute running mate was found.10 This was a humiliating way to start the presidential campaign.

The Republicans smeared McGovern mercilessly and effectively. They labeled him as the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” In fact, McGovern did not favor the legalization of marijuana, much less LSD (i.e., acid). However, one of his children tragically suffered from substance abuse, which would eventually take her life. This slur resonated. As for amnesty, McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran who had been a vocal and articulate opponent of America’s war in Vietnam, did favor amnesty for draft resisters. However, so did Nixon himself prior to the 1972 campaign; and amnesty was eventually granted by Nixon’s successors in the White House. As for abortion, McGovern was to the right of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. He favored leaving abortion to the states.11

Thus, McGovern was attacked with lies. And these lies were extraordinarily effective campaign tools.

The standard wisdom was that McGovern lost because of his liberalism. He was proud to be a liberal to his dying day. In 2004, he published The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition, in which he wrote:

The liberalism described by McGovern has been replaced by the neoliberalism of the Clintons, both of whom worked for McGovern’s campaign in 1972. Neoliberalism is nothing like traditional liberalism. It is, rather, merely a synonym for conservatism.

The question now facing the United States is: Will the Democratic Party return to its liberal roots?

Will it, by contrast, move toward the Scandinavian model of democratic socialism? Or will it default to the nothingism of Schumer and Jeffries?

Can a candidate who represents such a striking departure as AOC win the Democratic nomination? If so, can she be elected?

These questions will become only more pertinent as our country lurches from crisis to crisis in the months and years ahead.

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On rare occasions as one is making one’s way over the rocky road of life, you come across an observation which strikes you as deeply true. The title of this chapter – “Without a moral center, you can swim in chaos” – was one such occasion for me. When I heard it and I reflected on the study of history, I realized that it was an essential element in understanding how people act, especially in the tense environment created by a defining crisis.

The man who offered this observation was James E. Burke (1925 - 2012). Odds are, you have not heard of him. Let me tell you a little about him.

Jim Burke was born in 1925. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross, and he served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater during World War II. He graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1949, a class which generated so many CEOs that it became known as “the class the dollar fell on.”1

Burke took a job at Johnson & Johnson in 1953 at an annual salary of $12,000. In 1976, he became the company’s CEO, and he held that position until stepping down in 1989. The company did very well under his leadership. Of the numerous products it marketed, there is one with which his name will always be associated: Tylenol.

In late September and early October of 1982, seven people in suburban Chicago who took Extra Strength Tylenol capsules died of cyanide poisoning. Someone, and the identity of the sophisticated murderer is unknown, removed Tylenol from retail shelves and replaced the acetaminophen therein with cyanide. Tylenol was the market leader. Over 100 million Americans had taken the product in 1981. This event was literally a bolt from the blue and immediately became headline news nationwide. The consensus of opinion at the time was that the brand was finished. It was thought to have died along with those seven victims.

Due to Burke’s leadership, the brand not only survived but eventually regained its lost market share. The company innovated a new form of packaging, featuring three tamper-evident barriers to entry.

All seemed well until February 8, 1986. On that date, a 23-year-old woman in Yonkers, New York, named Diane Elsroth died after taking another Extra Strength Tylenol capsule which was laced with cyanide.2 Eventually, Johnson & Johnson terminated all sales of capsule products directly to consumers over the counter. The brand survived these unspeakable tragedies and is on the market today.

I was fortunate enough to undertake a project on Jim Burke during the late 1980s when I was a professor at the Harvard Business School. The result was a video of just under an hour in length and two cases.3 Burke emerged from these tragedies as one of the great crisis managers in the history of American business. He believed that the reason Tylenol and Johnson & Johnson maintained the trust of the consumer was that the company consistently told the unvarnished truth to a public which was understandably confused by these horrific events.

When Burke became CEO in 1976, he inherited a corporate “Credo” from his predecessors. He devoted three years to challenging the Credo among executives in the company all over the world. His goal was to make it a living document. He succeeded. Johnson & Johnson’s Credo was put to the test in 1982 and 1986. During the maelstrom of these tragedies, dozens of executives were making hundreds of decisions and all on the fly. They knew how to do the right thing on the spot without being told.

Johnson & Johnson in the 1980s had a moral center – its Credo. It did not swim in chaos.

This is a powerful lesson which can be usefully applied to any number of activities far beyond business enterprise. One example is politics. The truth of the need for a moral center is illustrated vividly in the career of Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865). It is on display in the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (1813 - 1861) were well known to each other when they entered into combat for the Senate seat from Illinois in debate in 1858. They first encountered one another in 1834 in Vandalia, Illinois, when it was still the state capital.4 In the years and decades that followed, Douglas’s political career soared. He became nationally famous and even known internationally. “Lincoln’s envy of the younger Douglas’s ascendency seemed to drip from him when in 1856 he wrote:

The year 1858 was to change all that. The confrontation that year was known then and will forever be known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, not the Douglas-Lincoln debates.6

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Seven debates took place, beginning on August 21 and concluding on October 15. The opening speaker held the floor for an hour. Following his presentation, ninety minutes were allotted for a reply. The encounter concluded with a half hour for the opener to respond to the reply. Thus, each debate lasted for three hours. (Altogether, the seven debates lasted for twenty-one hours.)

These exchanges made for a grueling three hours. One description has it that the debates:

“were barely restrained political free-for-alls: fiery, personal, furious – and therefore, for the thousands who crowded to witness them, irresistible.”7 The “debates not only riveted the eyewitnesses who packed town squares and fairgrounds to hear them in Illinois, but also captured the attention of readers around the country who devoured every word in newspaper reprints.”8

So to some extent, these encounters took on the aspect of a modern sporting event. But make no mistake: the debates were affairs of substance – profound substance. Here, in the words of a seasoned politician, was what the debates were not about:

“[P]rotection, free trade, internal improvements, the subtreasury, all the issues, in short, which had divided parties for a long series of years.”9

Important as those issues had been, they paled in the public mind with the concern of transcendent importance: slavery. What was the future of slavery in the United States, and what was the future of the African-American?

The learned sophistication and the care in exposition of the debaters was a dramatic endorsement of the belief that the common man could understand difficult issues and arrive at a worthy conclusion. A recent German immigrant in the audience was “deeply impressed by the democratic character of the spectacle. . . . Here were two men, neither of whom had enjoyed any of the advantages of superior breeding or education . . . [who] contended for . . . mastery by appealing to the intelligence and patriotism of the people.”10

Douglas was an unapologetic racist. “This Government of ours is founded on the white basis, . . . for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men,” he declared.11

As Douglas said in the first debate, Lincoln threatened to “make all the institutions [of the nation] uniform, and set the niggers and white people to marrying.”12 It was because of statements such as this that the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) said of Stephen Douglas, “No man of his time has done more than he to intensify hatred of the Negro.”13

Lincoln made his share of incendiary comments about race as well.

“There is a physical difference between the two [races], which in my judgement will probably forever forbid their living together on terms of respect, social and political equality. . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. But I hold that because of all this, there is no reason . . . why the Negro after all is not entitled to all that the Declaration of Independence holds out, which is ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ and I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. . . . [I]n the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else, which his own hands earn, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and equal of every living man.”14

The Declaration of Independence was Abraham Lincoln’s true and unshakeable Credo. He insisted that “all men” encompassed Negroes as well as whites, which was still a liberal point of view in 1858 in Illinois.

“[T]he real issue . . . that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent . . . is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other of the divine right of kings. . . . It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to destroy the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”15

Lincoln’s devotion to the belief that all men are created equal deepened over time. He delivered an immortal testament to it at his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 – a mere five years after his debates with Douglas. As every American schoolchild knows, that address begins with: “Four score and seven years ago.” Eighty-seven years prior to that moment, the Declaration of Independence was published. It was to that document, rather than to the Constitution, which was written in 1787, to which Lincoln looked.

In his politics and in his personal beliefs, the Declaration of Independence was always central. His commitment to it deepened during the period of theretofore undreamt of violence that was the Civil War.

Because Lincoln had a moral center, he did not swim in chaos. Stephen Douglas is remembered only by historians. Abraham Lincoln is known the world over.

If you want to see what it looks like for a president not to have a moral center and to see the chaos which ensues, all you need to do is read the daily headlines.

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The leading historians of the United States in the half century from 1890 to 1940 focused their attention on economic and political conflict.1 True, the contesting parties could change. But contestation was ever present.

In the words of Vernon L. Parrington (1871 - 1929):

“From the first we have been divided into two main parties. Names and battle cries and strategies have . . . changed repeatedly, but the broad party division has remained. On one side has been the party of the current aristocracy – of church, of gentry, of merchant, of slaveholder, or manufacturer – and on the other of the party of the commonality – of farmer, villager, small tradesmen, mechanic, proletariat.” On the one side have been those seeking “to keep the control of the government in the hands of the few in order to serve special interests.” On the other side, we encounter those seeking “to augment the popular power, to make government more responsive to the will of the majority, to further the democratic . . . ideal.”2

Following World War II, the idea of “a pervasive American consensus” as opposed to conflict began to take hold.3 Given what was going on at the time, the idea of consensus as an organizing principle through which to understand American history might seem odd. African Americans were certainly not full participants in the American polity. Neither were Indigenous Americans nor other minorities. But compared to the violent fissures ranging from fascism on the right to communism on the left, which tore Europe and Asia asunder during the World War II era, an American consensus on the value of liberal democracy and capitalism is perhaps more understandable than we might otherwise find it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (1929 - 1968) immortal “I have a dream” speech (delivered on August 28th, 1963) can be understood as a paean to consensual American values. To be sure, King was blunt about the oppression under which his people suffered. He decried the “vicious racists” with whom his people had to contend. However, the dream he described was, in his words, “deeply rooted in the American dream.” He extolled “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” He wanted his family and his people to get to the promised land described in those documents.4

It may seem strange that interpretations of history change over time. The events themselves which make up history do not change. Even God can’t change the past.5 The Puritan migration to New England in the seventeenth century . . . the American Revolution . . . the Civil War . . . Developments such as these which have shaped the nation in which we live are, as people say these days, “done and dusted.” No one involved in these shape-shifting struggles is still alive. Nor are their children. These events took place in the past that can’t be changed.

Given that we are faced with so much uncertainty about the present and future, why should we worry about the past? Why study history at all? Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”6

There are, of course, innumerable reasons to study history. Let us deal with two of these. First, new evidence about people and events can change our views. Second, the questions we ask of the past are determined to a large degree by the point of view we hold in the present. Because we live in an ever-changing world, “every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.”7

Here is a startling illustration of how new evidence can transform our knowledge of the past and therefore also of ourselves. In the 1790s, rumors circulated that Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) was carrying on a sexual relationship with one of his slaves. In 1802, when Jefferson was serving as the nation’s third president, a political opponent of his published these rumors. So the liaison between Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings (1773 - 1835), has been talked about literally for centuries.

Almost all the major sources for Jefferson’s biography denied the truth of these rumors through the years. When I was in graduate school in history in the 1970s, the general view on this issue was agnostic but leaning toward untruthfulness. We were led to believe that this was a question which could never be answered.

In the past few decades, however, scholarly and scientific DNA evidence have both led to the conclusion that the liaison was real and that Jefferson fathered “at least six” of Sally Hemings’s children.8 This is very important information about one of the leading figures in the birth of the United States. And it renders even more repellent the invidious distinctions Jefferson draws between the races, for example, in his famous work, Notes on the State of Virginia.9

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Now to the second reason that we need to rewrite our history periodically. Historians are not scientists. They explore a world they can never fully apprehend. And their understanding is heavily influenced by the world in which they themselves are presently living. Thus, consensus history was born after World War II in the United States because it appeared to some historians that America was a success story.

The best example of consensus history from this era is The Genius of American Politics by Daniel J. Boorstin (1914 - 2004), published in 1953.10 This book was widely praised in its time. Today, however, it is of little use as history. It is as thoroughly dated as a book can be. But it is quite revealing as documentary evidence – as a sign of the times in which it was written.

Boorstin begins by referring to the “marvelous success and vitality of our institutions.”11 He asserts as axiomatic “the continuity or homogeneity of our history.”12 In the United States, there was agreement between the “is” and the “ought” – what is and what ought to be were one and the same.

In order to propound his consensus view of American history, Boorstin has to exclude a lot of people. Indigenous peoples are summarily dismissed.13 Those men and women, black and white, who struggled to abolish slavery in the years prior to the Civil War are criticized for sabotaging “efforts at compromise” and feeding “the spirit of intransigence.” “Nowadays,” he writes, “historians are inclined to minimize [their] role.”14 No black abolitionists are mentioned, and the only female abolitionist referred to is Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896). Her best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, could not be ignored. However, it could be dismissed along with other abolitionist literature as “easy to read because it is concrete and usually lurid. Much of it falls into that class of ‘atrocity’ literature which has become familiar enough.”15

The treatment of the Civil War is simply astonishing. The chapter dealing with it is: “The Civil War and the Spirit of Compromise.”16 In one of the great understatements in American historical writing, Boorstin observes: “For us who boast that our political system is based on compromise, [the Civil War] offers considerable embarrassment.”17

How does he deal with this “embarrassment”? “[W]hat is called a great gulf in our history may not be so great as has been supposed. . . . One of the remarkable characteristics of our Civil War. . . is that ours did not significantly interrupt the continuity of our thinking about institutions.”18 But consensus, as historian Richard Hofstadter (1916 - 1970) has written, “is supposed to be a matter of the workings of institutions, not just a harmony in thought; and the Civil War, taken as a test of institutions, is a major instance of tragic collapse.”19 To put it mildly.

Studying Jefferson and reading Boorstin vividly illustrate the need for each generation to rewrite history in light of new points of view which develop with time. The belief is widespread today that our institutions are breaking down and are unfit for the challenges of the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. Instead of looking at the United States as a success story, we tend to look at it as an uneven success leading to serious breakdown. No informed person can talk of the “marvelous success and vitality of our institutions” today.

At this writing, the president is more like a dictator than like the chief executive of a democratic country. His unthinking, casual impulsiveness has generated the dreadful war with Iran. Congress is a mere rubber stamp.

When asked by reporters, if there were any limits to his power, Trump responded:

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.”20

Given that he is a convicted felon21 and that he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case,22 this does not inspire confidence.

In a number of speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr., observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”23 When he spoke those words, they felt true. Do they feel true today? There was a belief in progress even amidst the many crises of the 1960s. That same belief is hard to sustain today.

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Of the many enemies which stand in the way of the people in this administration living in their fantasy world, none are more important than the nation’s universities.1 “A university,” in the memorable formulation of Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881), “should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning. It is a place for the cultivation of the intellect, for invention, for research. . . .”2 No wonder that Trump, Vance, Miller, Blanche, Bannon, and their ilk hate it.

This administration has launched “the most serious assault on academic freedom in American history. Nothing compares to it: not the clampdown on free speech during World War I, not Senator Joseph McCarthy’s (1908 - 1957) harassment of professors in the 1950s.”3

One model for the assault on higher education is what Viktor Orbán, until recently the dictator of Hungary, unleashed in his country. He expelled Central European University from Budapest. This is “a renowned private university with strong U.S. ties,”4 which has relocated to Vienna.

Prior to his losing an election, Orbán was among Trump’s favorite dictators. He was described as “Trump’s closest ally within the European Union.”5 Shortly before the election that Orbán lost, JD Vance was dispatched to Budapest to speak in his favor. “We want you to make a decision about your future with no outside forces pressuring you or telling you what to do. I’m not telling you exactly who [sic] to vote for. . . ,” the youthful JD said at an Orbán campaign rally. Chip off the old block that he is, Vance then urged his listeners to “go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you.”6

For a time, it looked like Yale was going to escape the Trump administration’s chopping block. That time is now over. Yale is now in Trump’s crosshairs (to mix a metaphor), and it is altogether unclear whether it will stand firm or knuckle under. As Trump watchers have accurately asserted, Yale’s decision will have “consequences far beyond its New Haven, Connecticut, campus.”7

On May 14, 2026, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice accused the Yale Medical School of violating anti-discrimination laws.8 Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration quickly expanded its investigation of Yale beyond the medical school to include the law school and the college. On June 26, the Times reported that Yale had made “quick moves to try to reach an agreement with the government.”9 Yale President Maurie McInnis appeared to want this settled with a minimum of publicity.

If so, McInnis did not get her wish. Yale’s “quick moves” generated a storm of protest. It was reported on July 7 that the Dean of the Law School, Cristina M. Rodríguez, and a number of law school faculty were “arguing that the Trump administration cannot be trusted and that settling would threaten the rule of law and the university’s reputation.”10

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Long ago, on May 1, 1970, Yale faced an existential crisis. The university prevailed because its president, Kingman Brewster, managed to keep the campus together.

“By keeping Yale a community, by encouraging peaceful dissent, by facilitating student participation in decision-making processes, and by opening multiple channels of access, he defused the radical charge that change through the system was impossible.”11

McInnis is finding difficult the vital task of strengthening the bonds that hold Yale together. On July 13, she wrote an open letter to “Members of the Yale Community.” The letter is almost 800 words in length and manages to say very little. Embedded in the verbiage is this:

“I know there are divergent views about admissions policy in general and these investigations in particular. I very much want to hear those views and welcome your reply to this message.”12

Do you think she really welcomes replies to this message? Is there a reason that people write sentences like this? Fool that I am, I did reply to her message. Here is what I wrote:

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership.”13 That is true of the presidency of Yale as well. It looks to me like McInnis is either going to have to make no deal at all with Trump or drive such a hard bargain that she has all her constituents behind her. From what I can gather (and I hope I am not being unfair to her in saying this - I certainly have no desire to be unkind), her original impulse appears to have been quietly to reach an agreement without anyone noticing. Everyone is noticing now. I believe that if she caves, she will not be able to exercise the moral leadership of which FDR spoke.

And her presidency will be at an end.

Nathan Hale (1755 - 1776), Yale class of 1773:

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Two hundred and fifty years ago this past July 4, thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic coast of North America issued a Declaration that:

It has never been more difficult than it is today to come to terms with the nation’s past and to use that past as a platform for constructing a future of which we and those who come after us can be proud.

A theme of American history has been rebirth. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809) declared in his famous pamphlet, Common Sense.2 This is inspiring but also dangerous. To begin the world anew meant that you could not take a bite from “the cake of custom.”3

When Americans revolted against King George, they revolted against King Arthur too. They set out “to make a virtue of having a slender past by becoming the people of the future.”4

Donald Trump has taught Americans that history is political and that it matters. The proof is his interminable lying about it. Look, as one example among many, at the White House webpage dealing with January 6:

Along with the theme of rebirth, the theme of growth has been advanced as part of the master narrative of American history. It is remarkable how many American books use the word “rise” or “rising.” In the words of a friend of Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790):

“All that has happened to you is also connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people. . . .”5

From the Declaration of Independence throughout the nineteenth century, astute observers realized that whether or not America had much of a past, it seemed to hold the key to the future. It was a nation on the march.

Ninety-nine years ago, in 1927, the most important textbook on American history in the first half of the twentieth century was published. The authors were the husband and wife team of Charles and Mary Beard. The title, perfectly befitting its subject, is The Rise of American Civilization.6 This book “was received with all but universal enthusiasm, enjoyed splendid sales, and did more than any other such book of the twentieth century to define American history for the reading public.”7

Only a foolhardy historian today would choose a book title such as the Beards did. In the age of Trump, the United States presents itself not as a success story — a “rise” — but as a question mark. It is a sign of the times that an important book just published by Yale historian Mark Peterson is entitled: The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution.8

Charles Beard, who made his name through a groundbreaking book about the economic motivations of the men who wrote the Constitution,9 observed in 1943 that:

“They put justice into the Preamble of the Constitution; and, if I may make a rash assertion, they made it possible for the American people to have more justice, despite all the black spots on it, than any other people ever enjoyed over such an immense territory for so long time . . . .”10

This is true.

Yet in Peterson’s view, the Constitution written by men, however brilliant they may have been, who did not and could not possibly have had the vaguest inkling of the challenges facing us today, has outlived its usefulness. He begins his book by observing that the original parchment copy of the 1787 draft of the Constitution “is a prime relic of the nation’s civic religion. When the Library of Congress transferred the document to a specially built exhibition hall at the National Archives in 1952, it was delivered in an armored personnel carrier, escorted in a procession of tanks, and placed in a fifty-ton, custom-built safe, from which it could be lowered nightly into a bomb-proof vault and raised again each day into a display case filled with argon gas.”11 Argon is inert. So also, the reader is led to infer, is the Constitution. The nation needs a living document. This is not it. Where Beard saw “black spots,” Peterson sees a black hole.

Note that Beard referred to the “immense territory” of the United States. The territorial expansion of the nation plays a key role in Peterson’s book as well. He observes that “the relationship between land and people – the ultimate sources of power in an agrarian world – [is] a central element and constitutional practice.”12 In his discussion of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the admission of the state of Louisiana to the union in 1812, Peterson makes a brilliant case that a constitutional amendment rather than a simple act of Congress was required. By rejecting that route, even though they knew it was demanded, “Jefferson and his party changed the Constitution – they usurped on behalf of Congress a fundamental power of the people.”13 Down this extraconstitutional road, the nation eventually ran into a civil war.

Of critical importance to both Beard and Peterson is the territorial expansion of the United States across a continent. Let us therefore now turn our attention to the first scholar who focused on the importance of that expansion - Frederick Jackson Turner (1861 - 1932).

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper to the American Historical Association entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”14 According to Charles Beard, this brief essay exercised “a more profound influence on thought about American history” than any other ever written.15 Scholars have been wrestling with it down to the present day.

Here, in very brief compass, is the famous Turner Thesis:

On the one hand, there was a “climate of opinion”17 in the nation receptive to Turner’s assertion. He contributed to the powerful American myth of exceptionalism. We were different, and our democracy was better because of the continuous interaction with the vastness of the continent. The word itself “frontier” had a unique meaning in the United States. As the historian Richard Hofstadter (1916 - 1970) explained, in the European context:

“a frontier was a border, a boundary, a limitation, a place that is costly to defend, and where one might be called upon to die, whereas in America the frontier was the edge of the new and unused, a source of opportunity, a place where one might earn a reputation or a fortune.”18

On the other hand, there is in Turner’s famed essay the feeling that the America of his time was losing that which had made it special. Turner begins by noting that the superintendent of the census for 1890 observed that the frontier no longer existed as an advancing line of demarcation. Settlement had come to the west. “This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.”19

At this point, let us return to the Peterson book. In his final chapter he asks: “What is the purpose of a country or nation?”20 Up until the turn of the last century, Peterson discerns two purposes of the American nation: one was molding “the civic values” from the British tradition into a form appropriate for a nation many times Britain’s size; and the second was “the continuing commitment to colonization, the persistent belief that America’s Indigenous owners were inadequately civilized and were misusing the resources of a vast continent. By taking possession, Americans would transform the continent into a land of limitless abundance for its own citizens.”21

In the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924) defined America’s purpose as “[making] the world safe for democracy.” Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) asserted that “the purpose of America is to defend a way of life. . . .”22 With victory in the Cold War in the years 1989 to 1991, that animating sense of purpose was lost, and the nation found itself wallowing in a state of bitter and endless division.

“Will there be a United States in 2090, and if so, what will it be for?” Peterson asks.23 The United States desperately needs a “national government with the capacity to meet the most urgent challenges our nation and our planet face in the twenty-first century.”24 The Constitution was created for a tiny agricultural nation with a large slave population. It will never be able to meet this challenge. Peterson suggests, rather obliquely, that the nation needs a new constitutional convention to create a governmental structure fit to meet the challenges we face.

Perhaps Peterson is right. However, it is difficult to conceive of such a gathering in the foreseeable future. And there are two issues which render the idea of a constitutional convention highly questionable.

First, it is more likely than not that it would be dominated by the American oligarchy and the far right in American politics. The result probably would be an even less democratic structure than what we have now.

Second, one has to ask what role a governing structure can play. It is arguable that a superannuated structure piloted by outstanding people might be able to deliver a decent polity. It is not arguable that the most finely honed structure imaginable run by Donald Trump and his co-conspirators would result in an unhappy nation.

Seventy-seven million Americans thought it would be a grand idea for Donald Trump to become president for a second term. If that issue – which, for lack of a better word, one might call spiritual – is not confronted, it is difficult to see how structure can save us.

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On June 30, Donald Trump’s “Financial Disclosure Report” was released to the public.1 It is lengthy at 927 pages. And what it reveals is remarkable. Trump’s revenue in 2025 comes to “at least $2.2 billion.”2 Not only Trump, but his family and a few friends are making out like bandits – a particularly appropriate simile.

This disclosure has generated a lot of press. Why? Corruption in American political life is nothing new. Indeed, the editorial in the Wall Street Journal – hardly the stronghold of radical left communist lunatic Trumply-deranged free love hippies – is “The Trump Family and ‘Honest Graft’.”3 “Honest Graft” carries an explicit historical reference. The term was coined by George Washington Plunkitt (1842 - 1924), a big shot in New York City’s Tammany Hall, “the most successful and long running urban political machine in American history.”4

“Yes,” explained Plunkitt, “many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m getting richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft – blackmailin’ gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people, etc. . . .”5

Perish the thought.

Plunkitt was a master of “honest graft.” Here is how he defined it.

“My party’s in power in the city [i.e., New York City], and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. . . . I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can. . . . Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land. . . . Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is.”6

It is as simple as that.

Tammany chieftains could not be accused of hypocrisy. In 1899, Boss Richard Croker (1843 - 1922) was questioned by a New York State legislative committee. The question: “Then you are working for your own pocket, are you not?” The response: “All the time; same as you.”7

The essence of Tammany corruption was the person of Boss William M. Tweed (1823 - 1878), whom Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) described as “a coarse, jovial, able man utterly without scruple. . . . Incredible sums of money were stolen, and especially in the construction of the new courthouse. When the frauds were discovered, Tweed, secure in his power, asked in words that have become proverbial:

‘What are you going to do about it?’”8

Tweed outdid himself in the construction of the courthouse Roosevelt mentioned. Here are some examples. A carpenter received $360,751 for a month’s labor on a building with little woodwork. A furniture contractor pocketed $179,729 for three tables and 40 chairs. A plasterer was paid $133,187 for two days’ work. Perhaps not surprisingly, this gentleman became known as “the prince of plasterers.”9

Ground was broken for the courthouse in 1861. The building was not completed until 1880. The cost was $13 million, four times the cost of the Houses of Parliament and almost twice as much as the purchase price of Alaska.10

And what did New York receive for this investment? “The whole atmosphere [of the courthouse] is corrupt. You look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the place.”11 This description could fit the present White House.

Tweed made too many enemies in accumulating his great wealth. He died in jail in 1878, one of the few Tammany leaders of whom that could be said. (The story of his arrest and conviction would demand another chapter.) That was the answer to the “proverbial question” which made such an impression on Theodore Roosevelt.

“Honest Graft” is, of course, an oxymoron. Graft is theft, and the Tammany system meant stealing from the very people it purported to serve. What is remarkable about Tammany graft is that it was so brazen. Plunkitt, for example, proudly defended it.

There was no particular secret to Tammany’s success. Two features deserve our attention. One deals with the concrete services Plunkitt and others like him provided. Another deals with their attitude toward their voters.

Plunkitt was born into poverty in the slums. He did not need to read a book about deprivation. He lived that life and never forgot where he came from.

“I know every man, woman, and child in the Fifteenth District [which was his territory], except them that’s been born this summer – and I know some of them, too. I know what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in, and I reach them by approachin’ at the right side.”12

When someone in his district experienced hardship, Plunkitt was there to help.

“If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things runnin’ again.”13 Everyone in his district knew the Tammany boss. “Everybody knows where to find him, and nearly everybody goes to him for assistance . . . especially the poor of the tenements.”14

It was philanthropy, but also effective politics.

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The second reason that Tammany built a powerful connection to the voters was the attitude of its members. Unlike so many middle class reformers, Tammany did not condescend. “Live like your neighbors,” Plunkitt advised, “even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is your equal. . . .”15

Moreover, politics should be fun. It should be full of celebration. “Tammany’s the most patriotic organization on earth. . . .” A special day to venerate was the Fourth of July. “You ought to attend one of these meetins. . . . And then see how [those attending] applaud and yell when patriotic things are said!” A “mighty roar goes up” when the Declaration of Independence was read.16

It was a formula dating back to ancient times. Panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

No one like Tweed, Croker, or Plunkitt ever made it to the White House . . . until now. This is not to say, as has been observed repeatedly in the chapters of this Substack, that there has not been corruption under previous presidents. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an administration in which corruption was completely absent.

Nevertheless, in previous administrations there has always been an effort to hide misdeeds. A good example is the story of the Watergate break-in and cover-up from 1972 to 1974.17 On June 17, 1972, Republican operatives were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. President Richard Nixon (1913 - 1994) was informed of the break-in on June 23 and launched an effort to cover it up. He lied about it repeatedly. At long last, on August 9, 1974, Nixon, facing certain impeachment and conviction, was forced to resign.

Nixon acted as almost all presidents have acted facing a corrupt act in their administration. He tried to cover it up. In so doing, he created a mystery story which progressively drew in more and more Americans and indeed people around the world. Everybody became a detective. A saying became well-known to the effect that “it’s not the crime it’s the cover-up” that brings powerful people down.

Trump has solved this problem. His corruption is in plain sight. There is no mystery about it, no cover-up. That is what has caused so much cognitive dissonance. If Trump had been president when Nixon was and if it was he who wanted whatever information might be inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, he would have sent the Marines to break into it at high noon. Nothing to hide. And he would have gotten away with it for a number of reasons, including that the Supreme Court has said he can do whatever he wants and the Republican Party is his tool.

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) published a brief introduction to his Poor Richard’s Almanack entitled “The Way to Wealth.”18 This little essay quickly became famous. Politics is not mentioned as a way to wealth. George Washington Plunkitt saw things differently: “Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry goods or the drug business.”19 Trump can be categorized as a Plunkitt-ist, although he draws no distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

Trump has made history. He has monetized the presidency, enriching himself to an extent undreamt of prior to him. In so doing, he has impoverished every American.

And he has left every American with the Boss Tweed question: “What are you – What are we – going to do about it?”

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One place to look is the damage done by the financial crisis of 2008 and the response of Obama’s administration to it. The roots of the crisis date back years before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. But it was that bankruptcy which ignited a panic, sent the markets into a tail spin, and called for immediate action by the government.

Financial panics do not occur according to a schedule (although it is remarkable how many of them have taken place in the autumn); and they do not choose to occur at a moment which is convenient for government policy makers. The timing of this one made its management by the government particularly difficult. These were the waning days of George W. Bush’s second term as president. Bush was used up, tired of the job. His war in Iraq and his response to Hurricane Katrina had proven disastrous. The last thing he wanted was to take on a huge, new, open-ended responsibility which was piled high with uncertainties. The presidential campaign for his successor was already in full swing. He wanted the next guy to deal with the crisis at the nation’s doorstep.

John McCain (1936 - 2018) formally became the nominee of the Republican Party for president on September 4, 2008. McCain was a Vietnam War veteran who had been a fixture in national politics since 1983, when he entered the House of Representatives. He became a senator in 1987. He ran for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2000 and lost it to George W. Bush.

McCain’s opponent was as new to the scene as McCain was familiar. Barack Obama became a senator from Illinois in 2005. He became the Democratic Party nominee for president on August 28, 2008, after beating Hillary Clinton in a hard fought race.

McCain pressured Bush to host a meeting of both candidates as well as congressional leaders on September 25 to discuss the financial crisis. The venue is noteworthy — the Roosevelt room of the White House. This room is dedicated both to Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) and to his fifth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945).1 Franklin Roosevelt piloted the nation through the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2008, informed people were talking about another great depression. The situation was that serious. In the words of George Bush, “If [you folks don’t do something], this sucker’s going to go down.”2 Many in the public felt they were staring into the abyss of a new dark age.

The meeting went very badly for McCain. He did not know what to say. According to the New York Times, “[H]e sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader. . . .” For Obama, the day provided an opportunity to “shift roles.” It was he who looked like “the old hand.”3

It is worth observing that this is a meeting that Franklin D. Roosevelt would not have attended. He was elected on November 8, 1932, and inaugurated on March 4, 1933. During the four months between his election and his inauguration, he refused to have anything to do with the outgoing administration of Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964).4 Roosevelt wanted to begin the world anew. And he did not want to be associated with Hoover’s failed presidency.

By attending the meeting on September 25, Obama was taking hold of -- and perhaps to a degree responsibility for — the economic crisis which was in no sense his fault. Even more importantly, by selecting as his advisors people who had worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton in years gone by, Obama was making a vital policy choice. Himself the new kid on the block of national politics, he was thrown into the deep end of the pool. He turned for advice to names well known in Democratic circles. If it is true that people are policy, he was choosing the policy of neoliberalism, which characterized the Clintons. The Clintons were middle of the road. In a choice between government action and the market, they tended to opt for the latter.

Obama could have made another choice. He could have chosen a policy of progressivism which looked first to helping the victims of gross financial mismanagement and only second to the bankers who had put the country in this position. However, the people advocating this approach were dismissed “as hysterics, populists, renegades.”5

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Because people are policy, Obama became more middle of the road than he might otherwise have been by staffing his transition team with John Podesta, Larry Summers, and others famous long ago. Paying bonuses to bankers who had acted irresponsibly and neglecting 10 million Americans who lost their homes at least in part because of this irresponsibility did not sit well with the American people. But Job One for Obama’s advisors and therefore for the Obama administration was digging financiers out of the hole they had dug for themselves. For many of these advisors, there was no Job Two.

Obama’s advisors brought a managerial mindset to a situation which demanded leadership. A manager might define politics as the art of the possible. A leader might define leadership as the art of the impossible. When reading the narrative of these crucial months of late 2008 and early 2009, it is clear that Obama understood that the recovery program being proposed was themeless. “Where’s our Hoover Dam?” he plaintively asked.6

There was no Hoover Dam. The people advising him thought it was a bad idea to think in those terms. The guiding principle was the “Three T’s”: “timely, targeted, and temporary.”7 The controlling idea was that if we could save the banks, the market would see to it that the economy would survive. That is the essence of neoliberalism as opposed to progressivism.

Obama had written a book entitled “the audacity of hope.”8 Yet audacious hope is not the program that his advisors put together for him. Their approach was to see to it that the financial system did not drive the real economy into a depression. This was a laudable goal, as far as it went. But they failed to develop effective plans beyond that. They left the basic structure in place, which means this could happen again. And soon.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal concerned itself with the real economy as well as the financial economy. The New Deal built the Triborough Bridge in New York City, the Tennessee Valley Authority, LaGuardia Airport, the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, among other projects. One does not have to look far, even 90 years after it took place, to happen upon projects made possible by the New Deal. Can you name anything that was built as a result of the financial crisis of 2008? All that enormous expenditure not only of money but of talent and nothing today to show for it.

A crisis, it has been said, is a terrible thing to waste.9 Let’s look at the New York Stock Exchange in 1938. Its president was found guilty of embezzlement and wound up imprisoned in Sing Sing. For government regulators, this was “a stroke of incredible good luck.” In the words of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, “The stock exchange was delivered into my hands.”10 That is the kind of opportunism, aggression, and indeed audacity that is necessary to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Not incidentally, the Securities and Exchange Commission was itself a creation of the New Deal in 1934.

Obama’s economic advisors believed that the recession was going to be V shaped. It would hit a trough and then bounce back. These economists, brilliant as they are, were wrong. In the words of a gadfly, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”11 The recession turned out to be L shaped. It took years for the economy to recover.12 A lot of people were ruined in the meantime. Millions of people lost their homes. No one knows how many deaths of despair resulted from the pain inflicted by the sluggish economy.

The door was opened for a man who promised to drain the swamp.

No one knows better than Donald Trump that people are policy. It is no wonder that he used to exclaim: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (1927 - 1986).13 Ken Auletta, a well-known journalist, called Cohn “the personification of evil. . . . I’ve never met a more revolting character.” Auletta believes that Trump internalized the lessons he learned “from his mentor Roy Cohn. Attack. Never apologize. . . . Lie.”14

Look at the people Trump surrounds himself with. Stephen Miller. Howard Lutnick. Todd Blanche. Pete Hegseth. Dan Caine. JD Vance. Marco Rubio. Jared Kushner. Don, Jr., Eric.

What is the policy these people have generated? They have brought us a lost war and inflation. They have insulted our allies. They have attacked our civil liberties and divided our nation. They have helped to make their boss rich – one job they have done very well – while enriching themselves in the process.15

In the words of Tammany Hall sachem (the title used by leaders of New York City’s Democratic machine a century-and-a-half ago), George Washington Plunkitt (1842 - 1924), a man born into poverty who died a millionaire thanks to New York City politics, “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em.”16

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“Ozymandias” is the name of a poem by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) published in 1818. Although composed more than two centuries ago, this poem is still widely read because it is accessible and because it deals with eternal themes. Among those themes are hubris and “hatred of tyranny.”2

This exquisite sonnet - 14 lines long, a mere 114 words - manages with remarkable brevity to paint a picture of a man, Ozymandias, with a grotesquely inflated opinion of himself. He sees himself as a great builder - “Look on my works” - and he had a giant statue created which was dedicated to himself. A traveler happened upon the statue. It had collapsed into pieces. And:

The statue’s condition and the setting in which it was found mocked the odious pretention of its creator. In the final account, Ozymandias was a fraud.

All of which brings us to the modern Ozymandias. He occupies the White House presently.

Here is a brief recap of Donald and his adventures in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is situated between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument in the heart of the National Mall. If you stand on the Lincoln side, you can see the reflection of the Washington Monument. On the Washington side you see the reflection of the Lincoln Memorial. Millions of people visit it each year. Many memorable events have taken place around its perimeter, the most important being Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (1929 - 1968) “I Have a Dream Speech” on August 28, 1963.4

For a variety of reasons, maintenance of the reflecting pool has been something of a challenge over the years. It is large, covering 338,000 square feet; and it is shallow, with a depth between 18 and 30 inches. Most important among the many problems which it poses is the growth of algae. A large surface area of water is exposed to the hot sun of Washington, DC, every summer. That fact plus the quality of the water in the pool turns it into what has been called a petri dish for algae.

Donald to the rescue! “I’m very good at building things and constructing things,”5 he explained to a doubting world.

Trump’s specialty is spectacle, and he planned one for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In order for the Reflecting Pool to play its part, he wanted to be sure it was in tiptop shape. On April 23, he announced that renovations for the pool would cost between $1.5 million and $2 million and would be completed “long before July 4.”

"In another couple of weeks, we're going to have the most beautiful reflective [sic] pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial that you've ever seen.”6

On May 4, he declared:

“This will last for at least 50 years. You’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t. . . If you had a knife . . I don’t want to give anybody ideas. . . If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong. So powerful.”7

He proudly announced that the bottom of the pool would be painted “American flag blue.”8

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On May 7 and again on May 11, Trump estimated the repairs would take “about two weeks.” He routinely defaults to estimating that things will take that long.9 According to a spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior, “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden.”10

It didn’t turn out that way.

The day after the Reflecting Pool was refilled with water, algae blooms began to cover its surface.11 Trump’s repairs turned into a fiasco. Algae was not the only problem. The Reflecting Pool literally came apart at the seams because the construction work on it was so shoddy. And rather than being “American flag blue,” the water turned a nauseating green. It was ugly. It was apparently killing ducks.

Senator John Hickenlooper (D, CO) sent this letter to Trump:

“I write today to call on you to personally reimburse the American taxpayer for the failed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

“For weeks, Americans have watched a national embarrassment unfold on the National Mall. Under the guise of an “emergency,” your Administration bypassed competitive bidding processes to rush a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool. You said you wanted to paint the pool “American flag blue” in time for a July 4th photo-op. What’s unfolded since has been a complete disaster.

“Today, the Reflecting Pool is a fluorescent green swamp of algae, and the expensive blue sealant is already peeling off the bottom in sheets. This was not a result of vandalism but your administration’s incompetence.”12

How could this have happened? It hardly needs saying that Trump always runs from responsibility for his mistakes. This was the fault of “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,”13 and also of “some real problems with vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.”14 Trump has been on the warpath against these supposed vandals.

“They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence and money to build and complete.”15 Soon after this statement, Trump explained that the gash caused by a box cutter or a knife was actually 350 feet in length.16 As of June 27, according to the New York Times, Trump was continuing to blame vandals for his mess. However . . . note that:

“Along the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, devices called nanobubblers have been used to combat algae blooms. But officials removed them on June 12 ahead of an event to promote President Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship birthday celebration at the White House. By the next day, the water had turned from blue to green with algae before officials re-installed the nanobubblers.”17

Why dwell on this story given the other endless mistakes and gross malfeasance of this administration? For two reasons. First, many people are seeing the world of Donald Trump in this grain of sand.18 As Governor Tim Walz (D, MN) put it, “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”19 Some people are calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.”20 This is a reference to the vital Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians have gained control of after defeating the United States and Israel in the recent war.

This episode prompts one to recall any number of boasts from Trump which turned out to be lies. Think, for example, of what he was saying during the campaign about the situation in Ukraine. Fifty-three times he said he would end the Ukraine war 24 hours after taking office. “I’ll get that done within 24 hours. Everyone says, ‘Oh, no, you can’t.’ Absolutely I can. Absolutely I can.”21 Yet, the war continues and some knowledgeable people think it is going to get worse.22 Now think of the tariffs. Think of inflation. Trump has lied so consistently that everything he says, justifiably or not, is considered untrue. His word is worthless.

The second reason to dwell on this is that the green slime in that reflecting pool has made Trump the object of mockery. Trump seems to be immune to rational criticism. But ridicule may be another matter.

Consider, to choose one example, Nadine Otego Seiler, who styles herself “warriorgoddessfortheresistance.” She has said that “I am his number one nemesis.”23 She showed up at the Reflecting Pool recently dressed in quite a spectacular frog outfit. Ms. Seiler held a sign that declared: “First they came for the algae.” This is a reference to the exceptionally powerful declaration of Pastor Martin Niemöller about the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany and the reluctance of people not immediately targeted to stand up to them.24

Niemöller’s Declaration is known all over the world. Indeed, contemplating what he said was one of the reasons I decided to undertake this Substack series. Seiler’s use of the Declaration is both very funny and, when one stops to think of it, deeply concerning. Her use of the word “nemesis” is also intriguing. I wrote about this just last week. Perhaps she and I are on the same page.

Consider the ugly mess Trump made of the Reflecting Pool. He is America’s Ozymandias. Look on his works . . . and despair. But don’t give up.

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Let us begin the first chapter of the next 100 chapters of “Dystopias and Demagogues” with an anecdote.

When I was a senior in college in the 1968–1969 school year, one of my professors, a man who had considerable experience outside of university life, began the class with the following:

“Here is how I used to conceive of the world. Power could be mapped in a series of concentric circles. With each circle, power increased. At the center, within the smallest circle, could be found “M of M” – “Master of Men.”

[Yale was an all-male school through 1969, when I graduated.]

“The Master of Men was ensconced in an office on the top floor of a tall building. He had a 360-degree view of the world beneath him. He sat in a swivel chair in the middle of a circular desk. Now and again, when he got word (he had perfect information) that things were not going the way he wanted, he would throw a switch which would make everything all right.

“What I have learned,” said our professor, “is that no one is sitting in that chair.”

That was a surprising conclusion to this little drama. It comes to mind now, because it is a more accurate picture of the government of the United States presently than ever before. The president is supposed to be the strategist-in-chief. In this administration, there is no strategy.

Trump makes things up as he goes along. Here is the perfect statement of his governing approach: “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!”1 Actually, it does not always work out well. Look, for example, at the war against Iran.

Trump launched what has rightly been called his “capricious and personal war”2 against Iran on February 28. Among the assertions in his announcement was:

“[T]o the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. . . . When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want.”3

This is as vivid an illustration of magical thinking as any American president has ever indulged in. As an expert observed, “The idea . . . that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy—it’s wishful thinking.”4 Indeed. The Iranian regime appears to be stronger now after winning the war than it was when Trump and Netanyahu attacked it. Most importantly, the Iranians have seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. Through that narrow waterway passes the lifeline of the global economy. No other president, as Trump himself said, was willing to do something so foolish.

In the wake of this catastrophic defeat, Trump has been blustering that not only is he the most powerful man in the world today, but that he is the most powerful man in all of history. On June 18, he posted the following from an individual he described as “Presidential Historian Dave King — Sounds good to me!” Here is some of the text:

Where to begin? For starters, Dave King is not an historian. He is a “longtime caddy and personal confidant” of golfer Gary Player.6 On the one hand, it should not need to be said that for a president to be happy about having his name on the same list with some of history’s monsters is absurd. Attila the Hun was known as the scourge of God. Are Trump’s evangelical followers aware of this? On the other hand, it is important to call out this kind of inanity. As a nation, we should not normalize Trump’s behavior.

There is some truth in what “caddy and confidant” King wrote. Trump is very powerful. His power is unchecked by Congress or by the Supreme Court. We are a nation without guardrails – living in a twilight zone between lawful governance and dictatorship. Trump has at his disposal a nuclear arsenal which could end life on earth. Napoleon could not destroy the whole world.

Nevertheless, Trump is a good deal less powerful than he was on February 27, the day before he embarked on his ill-conceived (to put it mildly) war. Look at the list above. None of those people would have lost this war. None of them would have been so wrongheaded as to embark upon it.

What was the cause of the war? There is only one. Trump.

In his chapter on power in Why War?, Richard Overy discusses a particular type of power – that pursued by a single individual.

The three exemplars of hubristic warfare Overy uses are Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler – men to whom the Donald likes to see himself compared.

Trump’s war on Iran is a good example of hubristic power. The war was never popular in the United States. Trump jumped in with both feet because he happened to feel like it. No one could stop him. What he has discovered is that Iran is not like the numberless contractors he stiffed as a businessman.

The dictionary defines hubris as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence : arrogance.” The English language “picked up both the concept of hubris and the term for that particular brand of cockiness from the ancient Greeks, who considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods.”8

Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw uses “hubris” as the subtitle for his first volume. Hitler, Kershaw writes, “swallowed the boundless adulation [of millions of Germans]. He became the foremost believer in his own Führer cult. Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable.”9

Kershaw’s second volume is subtitled “Nemesis.” The dictionary informs us that “Nemesis [was] the Greek goddess of retributive justice.”10 Kershaw writes that “a prescient few” Germans understood that Hitler’s hubris invited nemesis, his own downfall and Germany’s.11

History has lessons to teach, but not if you don’t know anything about it. The Bible has lessons to teach as well. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”12

Picture for yourself the Oval Office in the White House. A partially circular office, not unlike that described by my college professor. Now picture the aged Donald Trump dozing off while surrounded by a legion of flatterers.

“M of M.” “Master of Men.” In our case, it is not the chair that is empty. It is the person sitting in it.

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An Opening Comment

“Dystopias and Demagogues” is presently composed of about 170,000 words. Here is the most important observation:

This is the one hundredth chapter in this series and an occasion to evaluate the road our nation has travelled since the series began on August 1, 2024, as well as to speculate about what the future might hold. The central concern has been to come to grips with the rise of Trump and the concomitant disinvestment in liberal democracy.

Trump has understood how disaffected with their lives a large swath of Americans have become. With breathtaking audacity, he has exploited the toxic brew of fury and despair which characterizes the feelings of so many Americans. And he has also grasped the magnetism of corruption to wed the billionaire class to him. He is an adept showman who understands the appeal of brazenly doing in public what others try to hide. In a word, he is shameless.

Trump has forged an unlikely coalition of the forgotten Americans and the fabulously wealthy. The former deliver him votes. The latter deliver him the money he craves so voraciously. The result of this combination has been his unfriendly takeover of the Republican Party.

Trump toyed with the idea of running for president in 2000 as a third-party candidate, but third parties don’t work in the United States. Seizing the Republican Party delivered to him an institutional base capable of doing the blocking and tackling which is an essential part of politics but which would have bored him to a catalepsy. He craves showmanship and attention. No audience is too large to satisfy him. The Republican Party has become an expression of his ego.

The United States has spawned demagogues before, but none of them have been able to take center stage. Why not? Consider Huey Long (1893 - 1935) and Joe McCarthy (1908 - 1957). Both were as skilled at dominating the news cycle as Trump. Long, unlike Trump, actually instituted some policies that were good for his constituents. However, like Trump, he was deeply corrupt. McCarthy was as reckless as Trump and equally empty.

Long was assassinated in 1935. He was only 42 years old, and there is no telling how far he would have gone had he lived a normal lifespan. McCarthy was a classic bully. He knew nothing of policy and was all bluster. In both cases, the demagogues faced powerful opposition. For Long, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), the only man ever elected to the presidency four times. For McCarthy, it was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969), the hero of World War II.

Whom did the Democrats field to run against Trump for president? Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Kamala Harris in 2024. No Roosevelt. No Eisenhower. No charisma. The only reason Biden beat Trump in 2020 was Covid. The pandemic allowed him to hide in his basement and to campaign by Zoom.

Trump hates democracy and will do what he can to sabotage it. He tried to put an end to the American way of life on January 6, 2021. He should not only have been impeached then but also convicted and prohibited from ever running for office again. Our nation failed to defend itself from him at that critical juncture. This may turn out to be the moment at which we go the way of the Weimar Republic (1918 - 1933), which was also unable to defend itself from the radical right. The result for Germany was Hitler (1889 - 1945). What will be the result for us?

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Trump exercises a fascination for his followers that is difficult for those of us who are not smitten to understand. His “star power” is what has attached so many voters inextricably to him and what has cemented his control of the Republican Party.

Chapter 8, which dealt with Joe McCarthy, posed the question of whether anyone would be able to unmask Trump the way attorney Joseph Welch (1890 - 1960) unmasked McCarthy. I now believe that was a naïve, or at best poorly formulated, question because there is a mythic quality about Trump. In Chapter 36, we saw that the nature of myth is “irrational, and therefore irrefutable and absolutely safe from the attack of rational criticism.”2 The Nazis tried to create a mythic past to excuse the horrors they perpetrated in the present. As the heroic opponents of Nazism, the men and women of the “White Rose” resistance in 1943 (discussed in Chapter 42) put it:

“It is impossible to discuss National Socialism rationally because there is nothing rational about it. . . .”3

Chapter 40 used a well-known book, The True Believer, to provide insights about the leader of a mass movement. The “mass leader” embodies a sometimes unspoken dialogue with the public.

“[He] articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self sacrifice and united action. . . .”

What are the requirements for this performance?

“Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; . . . faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols . . . unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness. . . .”4

How do you confront irrational allegiance with rational argument? That is a question the nation has yet to answer.

Thus, the three pillars of Trump’s power are the Republican Party, the allegiance of the disaffected, and limitless funds from super-wealthy enablers. Each of the three pillars buttresses the other two.

What is next?

This series has repeatedly focused on the threat Trump poses to the integrity of American elections. According to the Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and those governments “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.”5 Trump wants his consent to be substituted for that of “the governed.”

In May of 1861, as the Civil War was getting under way, Abraham Lincoln declared:

“The central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proof that popular government is not an absurdity.”6

Trump wants to prove that it is.

The challenge which is upon us as Americans today is to show that Lincoln was right and Trump is wrong.

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A Note on the Occasion of the 100th Chapter

First and foremost, I would like to thank the subscribers to “Dystopias and Demagogues.” If you have learned half as much from me as I have from you, I am pleased indeed.

I began this series on August 1, 2024, because I wanted to use history to shed light on our nation’s current predicament. The animating ideas for these chapters are two in number. One, we can learn from history. Two, the truth has power.

I have endeavored in my small way to make a contribution to a climate of opinion which holds that Donald Trump and what he stands for are not acceptable. All governments lie and corruption is nothing new. However, the lying in Trump-world and the extent of the corruption are so excessive as to make Trump and his government different not in degree but in kind.

Does anyone who believes in Trump read these columns? I hope so, but I doubt it. If they could be convinced that he is a profoundly unworthy man by reasoned presentations, they would have been convinced by now. Therefore, I conceive of the readership as consisting of people who are not sure what to think about Trump and his project and also people who find him unsatisfactory and are looking for further arguments to buttress their opinion.

Trump is as much a symptom as a cause. Such a man could not make it to first base in a healthy country. In addition to opposing his menacing regime, it is up to us to explore what has generated it and what needs to be repaired so that our nation can eventually move forward into a new and better place.

September 17, 1787 was the last day of the Constitutional Convention. The 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) wrote a speech which a colleague read for him on that day.

“I cannot help expressing a wish, that every member of the Convention, who may still have objections to it [i.e., the Constitution], would with me on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility . . . .”7

There is a lot to be said for a humility. Those of us who oppose Trumpism should keep in mind that in 2024, more than 77 million of our fellow citizens voted for him to have a second term as president. It is good advice that we should “doubt a little” of our own infallibility in our evaluation of Trump.

But only “a little.”

Two hundred fifty years ago on July 4, the United States burst upon the world as an independent nation. The document announcing this birth – the Declaration of Independence – has been the subject of endless interpretation. The Declaration had a number of goals, and these it accomplished efficiently. And in part, inspirationally. Its authors were serious people applying all their considerable intelligence to an extraordinarily difficult set of problems in the hope of achieving a future which was but dimly seen.

The Second Continental Congress established a committee of five men to write the Declaration. Four of them, Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) being the exception, were lawyers. It is no accident that the Declaration reads like a quasi–legal brief. The committee decided that the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) should be the principal author.

To get an idea of the care that went into this document, consider the concluding sentence.

This is what the revolutionaries of 1776 were risking, and it is no exaggeration. The Revolutionary War, which was a civil war as well as an anticolonial war, was long and bloody. If they had lost, the 56 men who signed the Declaration would have been executed. Instead, they died peacefully of natural causes in their own beds, full of years and honors.

What is one to make of the last eight words in the last sentence? Here is the view of one scholar:

“[I]t was a sure sense that made Jefferson place ‘lives’ first and ‘fortunes’ second. How much weaker if he had written ‘our fortunes, our lives, and our sacred honor’! Or suppose him to have used the word ‘property’ instead of ‘fortunes’! Or suppose him to have omitted ‘sacred’! Consider the effect of omitting any of the words, such as the last two ‘ours’ – ‘our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.’ No, the sentence can hardly be improved.”2

The most memorable passage in the Declaration – the passage that makes it immortal – is the beginning of the second paragraph.

The second of these two sentences is easier to comprehend than the first. Men create governments to secure their rights, and government is only just by virtue of the consent of those governed. This is perhaps the most precious virtue of democracy. Through the vote, each of us has the right to endow government with the exercise of power. No room here for the medieval idea of the divine right of kings.

It is that first sentence, and especially the phrase “all men are created equal,” which is of central importance. What did this phrase mean in 1776?

“Americans of 1776 . . . understood equality as a characteristic of their new republic that had a wide range of possible implications - equal liberty, for example, and equal opportunity, equal access to office and equal voting power. But the assertion that men were “created” or “born” equal meant that all men were originally free of subjection, and so were all on the same level, because nobody had a title from God or nature to rule others. All legitimate authority, as the Declaration of Independence went onto say, was founded upon consent.”4

Although the Declaration was designed to explain to the world why the American Revolution was necessary, the ideas that it expounded were not new.

“[The] strength of the Declaration was precisely that it said what everyone was thinking. . . . The underlying preconceptions from which it is derived were commonly taken for granted.”5

A half-century after he wrote it, Jefferson himself said that the Declaration “was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”6 Jefferson would have agreed with the statement of Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885) that “Nothing else in the world . . . not all the armies … is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”7

What did “all men are created equal” mean to the man who wrote it, Thomas Jefferson? This is a man who over the course of his life owned more than 600 slaves.8 Jefferson was no average slaveholder. These holdings made him one of the largest slaveholders in the United States. Perhaps in the world. In a pamphlet entitled “Taxation No Tyranny,” the famed English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) asked, “[H]ow is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [N]egroes?”9 All of us live with contradictions. However, there is no answer to this question.

And Jefferson not only owned slaves; with at least one, Sally Hemings (1773 - 1835), he had sexual relations.10 Sally Hemings and the four children she had with Jefferson were all his slaves. It is more than a little ironic that the first name of the president of the Confederacy was the last name of the author of the Declaration – Jefferson Davis (1808 - 1889). Slavery was America’s original sin.

The man who understood the power of the Declaration of Independence better than any other American political figure was Abraham Lincoln. He re-entered politics in 1854, when it appeared that the slave power of the South was going to succeed in expanding slavery into the western territories. In his Peoria Speech in 1854, Lincoln acknowledged that Jefferson was a slaveholder. However, he also pointed out that Jefferson worked to prohibit the expansion of slavery into the territories.11 Opposition to the expansion of slavery was Lincoln’s political goal between 1854 and 1863. As of January 1, 1863, his goal became emancipating the slaves of the south.

In 272 words at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, Lincoln explained to the nation and to the world what the words of the Declaration of Independence really meant. Four score and seven years earlier, a new nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” was born.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” It was up to us, the living, to ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”12

Lincoln understood that however flawed the founding fathers may have been, the Declaration with which they began the independent nation’s history contained within it the goal toward which the nation must strive. Senator Charles Sumner (1811 - 1874) entitled his eulogy for the slain president “The promises of the Declaration of Independence.” “In the modesty of his nature, he [Lincoln] said [at Gettysburg]: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.’ He was mistaken. The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”13 Sumner was more right than he could have known. How many people reading these words can name anyone who died at Gettysburg? But all of us know the Gettysburg Address.

In Garry Wills’s brilliant Lincoln at Gettysburg, he wrote:

“The Gettysburg address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit—as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it.”14

The address lighted the way to “a new birth of freedom.”

Trump is making no secret of his efforts to undermine the integrity of the elections this fall.15 He routinely does to others what he falsely claims they have done to him. Whether the elections will prove honest and legitimate or not is quite uncertain at present.

In 1862, Lincoln wrote, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”16 That is the situation we face today. We need another Lincoln.

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Trump launched his war against Iran on February 28, labeling American aggression Operation Epic Fury. The following day, he said, he intended the war to last “four to five weeks."1 Since then, he has continually moved the goal posts back. On June 3, he speculated that the Strait of Hormuz might remain closed to traffic through Labor Day,2 which falls on September 7, more than twenty-seven weeks after February 28. This is five times longer than Trump’s original estimate, leaving Americans and the rest of the world wondering how he could have been so wrong.

It has been common knowledge that the Strait of Hormuz is a vital choke point which the Iranians might shut in the event of war. Warnings to this effect were ignored. No one knows why.3 What everyone does know is that if the Strait remains closed for even half as long as Donald is now suggesting, the global economy will suffer severely.

On June 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee that “the war is over now.”4 This assertion makes one wonder what world he and the rest of this comic-opera administration are living in. The day after Rubio’s assertion saw a good deal of violence in the Middle East. None of the goals of the war have been achieved. Operation Epic Fury has become Operation Epic Futility.

Why has Trump fallen into the classic Middle Eastern trap? An important explanation can be found in his relationship to his one time buddy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On February 11, Netanyahu chaired a meeting in the Situation Room with Trump in attendance. The purpose was to sell him on taking the United States along with Israel into war with Iran. Netanyahu had been pushing the United States in this direction for decades. Until Trump, no one fell for it. Not long after Netanyahu’s slick sales talk, Trump proved to the nation and the world that the greatest salesmen can be the greatest suckers.5

We do not have a transcript of the snake oil Netanyahu peddled that day. We do know what he did not say. He did not say that American power was more effectively deployed by its threat rather than by its actual use. Nor did he say that Trump should beware of Iran’s capacity to withstand punishment. Nor did he say that Iran would seize the opportunity to gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, that prices would rise in the United States as a result, and that Trump’s approval rating would collapse along with those rising prices. This is what he didn’t mention. And this is what has happened.

Trump may at last be falling out of love with Netanyahu. On June 1, he said:

“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now.”6

Trump has a limited vocabulary, and this is the way he talks. Nonetheless, it does appear that he and Netanyahu are no longer love birds.

What we are witnessing is yet another illustration of how unfit Donald is to be president. And we are learning another lesson about the nature of war.

When it comes to the futility of war, World War I is Exhibit A.

In the words of former heavyweight champion (and apparently part-time philosopher) Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”7 Operation Epic Fury was a plan until Iran punched the United States, Israel, and the Gulf states in the face. There was no Plan B.

In August of 1914, as World War I got underway, all participants had plans. All were punched in the face. As wars so often do, World War I developed an illogical logic of its own. It turned into a war of attrition, and studying it today makes one wonder whether doctrinaire pacifism deserves more attention than it receives. The profligacy with which the generals on both sides sacrificed their soldiers is staggering.

Take, for example, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861 - 1928), the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France from December 19, 1915, through the end of the war on November 11, 1918. He earned his nickname, “butcher,” thanks principally to two battles: The Somme (July 1 to November 18, 1916) and Passchendaele (July 31 to November 10, 1917).

On the first day of The Somme – July 1, 1916 – the British “lost about 60,000 [soldiers], of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes.”8 This was the worst day in the history of the British army. The spectacle of the men “plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire” has prompted some to compare it to the concentration camps of World War II.9

The slaughter of the British army the following year was at Passchendaele. This battle is notorious for the conditions under which it was fought. Haig launched his attack on July 31. By August 4, the battlefield, pelted by rain, had degenerated to a sea of mud. In the words of a British officer, “the middle of the shell craters are so soft that one might sink out of sight.”10

Winston Churchill observed that “hopes of decisive victory . . . grew with every step away from the British front line. . . .”11 On November 8, three months after this battle had begun, Haig sent his chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell (1862-1954), to the fighting zone for the first time. “As his car struggled through the mud, [Kiggell] burst into tears, and cried, ‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’” “It’s worse further up,” he was told.12

Could nothing stop this madness? Haig was not the man to do so. In his “public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was . . . discernible. . . .”

“[He] compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common touch. He seemed to move through the horrors of the first world war as if guided by some inner voice, speaking of a higher purpose and a personal destiny. That . . . was not just appearance. He was a devotee both of spiritualist practices and a fundamentalist religion. As a young officer he had taken to attending seances, where a medium put him in touch with Napoleon. . . .”

During World War I, he came to believe “that he was in direct communication with God and had a major part to play in a divine plan for the world.”13 He was the Pete Hegseth of his time.

Though failing in so many ways, World War I did succeed in generating some extraordinary literature. Especially noteworthy is All Quiet on the Western Front by the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898 - 1970).14 Published in 1929, the book surprised everyone by becoming a spectacular best seller. Soon after publication, its sales numbered in the millions.15 According to one source, over 50 million copies have been sold.16 The novel was made into a movie in 1930, and by 1982 it had been seen by more than a hundred million people.17

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Remarque describes the overwhelming horror of the war unflinchingly and yet in a way that enables the reader to absorb it without becoming so distressed that he puts the book down.

The physical reality of war is the book’s central concern. “A hospital alone shows what war is.”18 And “what war is” must be avoided.

The book is determinedly apolitical. Neither the protagonist, Paul Bäumer, nor his friends harbor any hatred for the enemy. A well-known book about why men fought in the American Civil War is entitled For Cause and Comrades.19 Those are the two reasons this book offers us. Men fought for the Union or Confederate cause and also for their fellow soldiers.

All Quiet is different. The soldiers have no idea why the war started or why it is continuing. Their loyalty is solely to their comrades. As Bäumer says, the voices of his comrades:

“are more to me than life . . . , they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest most comforting thing there is anywhere. . . . I belong to them [his comrades] and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers. . . .”20

Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) hated this book. It was among the books the Nazis burned after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Remarque left Germany. His sister remained behind. She married and had two children. She was denounced in 1943 and tried before a judge named Roland Freisler (1893 - 1945). In pronouncing sentence, Freisler said, “Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach—you, however, will not escape us.”21 He was the same judge who sentenced the White Rose heroes to death.22

One doubts that World War I would have taken place if the decision makers had known what those four years held in store. It is equally doubtful that the Iran War would have taken place if Trump and his sycophants had thought twice about it.

They did not. It is certain that the economy of the world will pay the price for their irresponsibility. The casualty count has yet to be determined, and the potential for civilian casualties is high. Remember that on April 7, Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”23 Trump and Netanyahu have lost their war. They are both cornered. They both have access to nuclear weapons.

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The inimitable Donald visited Xi Jinping, China’s dictator, from May 13 to May 15. Trump is either at your throat or at your feet. He was at the throat of Ukraine’s courageous President Volodymyr Zelensky when he came to the oval office on February 28, 2025. On that sadly memorable occasion, Trump and his toadies attacked Zelensky and did what they could to humiliate him.1 They succeeded only in humiliating the United States.

In Trump’s trip to China, the shoe was on the other foot. Xi and his people cannot be beat when it comes to passive aggression. According to one report, Trump “was seated on the podium in a chair that made him look smaller than Xi, a slight that could have been avoided had Trump’s State Department not sidelined the protocol officials whose job it is to look after these things.”2 Trump, groveling at Xi’s feet, was obsequious.

This trip was yet another waste of the money of the American taxpayer, with one intriguing exception. Speaking in the Great Hall of the People with Donald in attendance, Xi asked:

“Can China and the United States overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and establish a new paradigm for relations between great powers?”3

Xi has been referring the “Thucydides Trap” publicly since 2015, if not earlier. What is it?

Thucydides (460BC – 400BC) was an ancient Greek historian whose History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the most influential books ever written. The “Trap” which bears his name is a reference to the danger that an established power might go to war with a rising power.4 The idea is derived from this passage in Thucydides’ History: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [i.e., Sparta], made war inevitable.”5 Athens lost the war, but Sparta’s influence declined soon thereafter. “Three decades of bloodshed between Athens and Sparta brought the golden age of Greek culture to an end.”6 This was the war everybody lost.

What is the message that Xi was trying to communicate to Trump, who doubtless never heard of Thucydides? Xi understands that China is growing more powerful, and the United States is fading. “The Chinese media has been talking for some time about the United States as a ‘declining power’.”7 Such talk would not be possible without Xi’s permission. America is the Sparta in the Thucydides paradigm; China is Athens. It is incumbent upon China and America to avoid armed conflict as this inevitable transition takes place. The message to America is simple. Mind your own business. Taiwan is not your business. Nor is Hong Kong. Nor are the Uyghurs. Nor is the South China Sea. We are the hegemons in East Asia. Get used to it.

There is, moreover, an intriguing implicit message in Xi’s reference to an icon of the western intellectual tradition. He could have referred to any one among dozens of Chinese historians and philosophers from ancient times. Why choose Thucydides? China is playing the long game and thinks strategically. We are the hegemon in East Asia now. Tomorrow, we will be the hegemon in the world. We will be what you were in 1945. Will war break out between China and the United States during the course of this transition? Probably not. But with the reckless, insecure man presently in the White House, nothing can be ruled out.

The invocation of a foundational work in the western canon is an indication that tectonic changes in the world order are taking place. Has a leader of the United States ever referred in a public presentation to the Peloponnesian War, the significance of which is so powerfully communicated to us through the millennia by Thucydides? Yes. That man was General George C. Marshall (1880 – 1959), the chief of staff of the American army during World War II, whom Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) described as “the true organizer of victory.”8

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In 1947, a time at which the United States was the world’s number one great power, Marshall became Secretary of State. On February 22, not incidentally George Washington’s birthday, this is what Marshall said to students at Princeton University:

“Twenty five years ago, the people of this country . . . had the opportunity to make vital decisions regarding their future welfare. I think we must agree that the negative course of action followed by the United States after the first world war did not achieve order or security, and that it had a direct bearing upon the recent war and it’s endless tragedies.”9

The government in Washington was determined that things should work out differently this time. In order to understand the changes that would soon be unveiled as the European Recovery Program, also known as the Marshall Plan, one had to study history, and not just recent history.

“One usually emerges from an intimate understanding of the past with its lessons and its wisdom, with convictions which put fire in the soul. I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.”

(Marshall did not call out Thucydides by name, but it is clear from the context that he had him in mind.)10

To those who study history, as Xi does and Trump does not, the reference to Thucydides during the visit to China strikes a cord with Marshall’s presentation 78 years ago. The message is clear. What you were then, we will soon be.

The tectonic changes afoot are taking place not only in East Asia, but even more importantly in Western Asia and in Washington, DC. To begin with Western Asia, the Israeli/United States alliance began a war with Iran on February 28. Up to that day, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz through which an immense amount of oil and other precious material flowed daily was open to maritime traffic. Following the attack, Iran has, with astute opportunism, grasped control of the Strait of Hormuz. There is reason to believe they will never give it up.

Thanks to this war, the United States has greatly accelerated our own decline. The war has taken place because of the ignorance of Trump and his sycophants. Had they been familiar with Thucydides, they would have known this: “Consider the vast influence of accident in war before you are engaged in it. It is a common mistake . . . to act first and wait for disaster.”11

Clearly, it is too much to ask that someone capable of communicating with Trump might have read the classic On War by the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831). As he explained, “Everything is simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war. . . .”12 “War is the province of chance. And no other sphere of human activity must such a margin be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance and deranges the course of events”.13 Three words which historians in the future will use in describing the Iran War are “friction,” “accident,” and “chance.”

Events in Western Asia bring us to the cause of those events in Washington, DC. The United States is governed by a kakistocracy. This is a valuable word which has become much in use lately. According to the dictionary, a kakistocracy is a “government by the worst people.”14 What others have tried to hide, Trump and his enablers boastfully do in public. The result is cognitive dissonance. Those who have tried to lead decent lives are endlessly astonished by this administration.

The problem is not merely that Trump is malevolent. He and his people are unintelligent. They know nothing. If they knew anything about World War I, they would have understood that the war the combatants “expected and the war for which [they] planned was not the war they actually got.”15 This is the story of the catastrophe in Iran. Surely no one even in this administration could have planned this.

Or, someone in the administration might have bothered to read Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”16

Perhaps those words – “fundamental” and “astounding” – should be added to “friction,” “accident” and “chance” when describing war.

This administration is good at one task. It is adept at stoking the toxic brew of fury and despair which is abroad in our nation today.

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2

Persuasion

What Xi Knows That Trump Doesn’t

In an hour we will host a book club with Freya India discussing her book GIRLS: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything. Please join us on Substack Live…

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4 months ago · 304 likes · 5 comments · Francis Fukuyama

It is easier to make war than peace. Often, the study of history generates one ambiguity on top of another; but in this case, the lesson is clear. War is easier than peace.

One need look no farther than the United States Constitution for a structural illustration of this fact. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war by a simple majority of those present.1 To ratify a peace treaty, according to Article II, Section 2, the votes of two-thirds of the senators present are required.2 Thus we live in a country where, formally, it is more difficult (66 2/3% to 50%) to make peace than to make war.

It is not uncommon for a change in administration to be necessary before the losing side of a war consents to a peace treaty. To choose an example, the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1770 to 1782 was Lord North (1732 - 1792). He was forced out of power and eventually succeeded by Lord Shelburne (1737 - 1805). It was Shelburne, not North, who made peace with the Americans by signing the treaty of Paris in 1783. Not everyone was happy about this, but Britain had been forced to recognize that continuing the Revolutionary War was pointless.

After four horrifying years in battle, Germany was forced to admit that it had lost World War I. Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 - 1941), who had taken Germany into the war in 1914, was not the man who signed the armistice. The signatory was Matthias Erzberger (1875 - 1921). Signing that document was an act of pure patriotism.

Right wingers in Germany who refused to face the reality that the war had been lost on the battlefield labelled Erzberger a traitor. In the words of a corporal who had served in the army for four years:

“It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain . . . No, we do not pardon, we demand – vengeance!”3

They got their vengeance. Erzberger was assassinated, as were other members of the government of the Weimar Republic. The corporal just referred to was Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945). When it came to his turn to admit defeat in April of 1945, he chose to commit suicide instead.

There are a lot of other such instances. One would not want to advance this phenomenon as an immutable fact. Rather, we can say that is it is a lot easier to take a country into war than to negotiate peace if you lose that war.

It can be risky for your career even to advocate peace in the midst of war, if your advocacy is for something less than the total victory of your side and the unconditional surrender of the enemy. An event took place during World War I, that most pointless of wars, which illustrates this point.

On November 29, 1917, Lord Lansdowne (1845 - 1927) managed to get a letter published in the Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper. The London Times had refused to publish it. Here is what it said in part:

“We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilized world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it…We do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a great power … We do not seek to impose upon her people any form of government other than that of their own choice… We have no desire to deny Germany her place among the great commercial communities of the world.”4

He was pilloried for writing these words.

In the view of his great-great-grandson 100 years after the letter was written, its publication put an end to Lansdowne’s long and distinguished career and destroyed his reputation.5

Lansdowne himself was hardly what our Donald would label a “radical left lunatic.”6 Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, was one of the richest men in the United Kingdom and a lifelong public servant. He was a great-grandson of Lord Shelburne (1737 - 1805), the very man who concluded peace with the American colonies. (His other title was 1st Marquess of Lansdowne.)

The loss of life in World War I was staggering.

Lansdowne’s second son, Lord Charles George Francis Mercer Nairne Petty-Fitzmaurice (1874-1914), was killed in the first battle of Ypres on October 30, 1914. He is buried in the Ypres town cemetery. You can see his grave today with the inscription:

Lansdowne was “devastated” by his son’s death.8

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1916 and 1917 were years of stalemate and bloodletting on a scale which almost no one had anticipated. On one day, July 1, 1916, the British suffered 57,000 casualties and almost 20,000 deaths. The first day of the battle of the Somme was and remains “the greatest loss of life in British military history. . . .”9

Lansdowne was a truth-teller.

“Had the politicians been less arrogant; and the generals less inflexible – there need never have been anything like 750,000 [British] deaths in the First World War. And had the Government taken up Lord Lansdowne’s proposal and managed to negotiate peace with Germany, there might not have been the sense of national humiliation that arose from . . . the vindictive terms and punitive reparations exacted by the Treaty of Versailles, which together were to spawn Nazism and all that led to.”10

These reflections bring us to the present day. As the world knows, Israel and at its behest the United States are at war with Iran. (As far as one can tell at this writing the war is not yet over.) In truth, this is Trump’s war, not America’s. Plunging the United States into his stupid war against Iran could not have been simpler. Trump, who likes to stay up late, posted an eight minute video on truth social saying he had decided to unleash the American military against a nation which had done us no harm.11 Congress was not consulted and delivered not a peep of protest. Apparently, no one knows for sure, Israel bamboozled Trump into believing this would be a short war.

Thus far, American casualties are reported as 13 dead 300 injured.12 This is nothing like World War I. Yet.

Of course, there is no reason to believe anything our government tells us. On the first day of the war, the United States bombed a school in Iran, killing an estimated 165 young girls and administrators. Trump immediately denied that the United States did what the United States obviously did.13 The only question is whether the United States did this on purpose. Time will tell, hopefully.

There is every reason to believe that the United States has already lost this war. In the words of neo-con Robert Kagan:

“Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran . . . can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be ‘open,’ as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world.”14

This chapter is being written on Monday afternoon, May 25. The preceding week has seen a lot of speculation about the ending of Trump’s war. Here is what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has written:

“Trump’s Iran war may be over, or virtually over. America lost.

“Iran may or may not agree to exercise restraint in its control over the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear program. But as Donald Trump of all people should know, agreements can be broken. At a fundamental level Trump, who began by demanding UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and trying to impose a subservient new regime, is now slinking away, leaving Iran’s hard-liners empowered — and America’s reputation shattered.”15

Trump “seems to hope to slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat.”16 He has chosen the “walk away” option. In fact, this was no choice at all. This was forced upon him because he does not know how to negotiate and because there is no military solution. What we do know is this. Trump has achieved none of the goals he started out with.

The Israelis and their lobby in the United States as well as homegrown war mongers will do what they can to start the shooting war up again. Even if they succeed – and there is no way to predict what will happen in the short run – the outcome in the long run is now ordained.

Trump is a master at changing the subject. Will he invade Cuba? How about Bolivia? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.17

Iran has become far more powerful as a result of this conflict. It now controls the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is greatly diminished.

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“In my life, I’ve always gone for broke”

- Adolf Hitler, August 29, 19391

World War I exerts a fascination equaled by few other events in history. Why? George F. Kennan (1904 – 2005), a distinguished diplomat and historian, memorably labelled it “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. After years of diplomatic experience, “it was borne in upon me to what overwhelming extent the determining phenomena of the interwar period [1918-1939], Russian Communism and German Nazism, and indeed then the Second World War itself were the products of that first great holocaust of 1914-1918 [which] lay at the heart of the failure and decline of . . . Western civilization.” 2

President Jimmy Carter (1924 – 2024) agreed with Kennan’s view.

“When I was president (1977 – 1981), the Soviet Union [a product of World War I] presented the major threat to my country and, perhaps, to world peace. For four years I faced the possibility of a third World War caused by the launching of nuclear weaponry either from the Soviet Union or perhaps inadvertently from the United States.”

Another legacy of World War I was the chaos in the Middle East.

“The arbitrary division [of that area] which fell after 1918 into the hands of the French and the British, resulted in the drawing of national boundaries that were quite artificial in nature and has precipitated much of the violence that we still see there today. Iraq is one example of the serious problems caused by these decisions. The disposition of Palestine is another.”3

World War I was “one of the most complex and influential political events in history.”4 History offers numerous “complex and influential” events of which we know the cause. We know what caused the American Civil War and World War II. The same cannot be said of World War I.

“Herein, alas, lies the greatest problem: for despite all of the books on the causes of the First World War, and despite all of the revelations from military archives, the records of international bankers, and the private diaries of ministers and diplomats, we are as far away as ever from any commonly held explanation of the conflict. Was it the inevitable consequence of capitalism, as Marxists then and later charged? Was it caused by entrenched, reactionary elites seeking to divert internal challenges to their rule? Was it the consequence of inflexible military-operations plans. . .? Was it the result of imperial rivalries—or of changes in the European balance of power? Did not the real cause lie in men’s minds: in their rising nationalist passions, their rejection of the stuffy liberal-bourgeois codes of peace, free trade, and compromise, their Social Darwinist Weltanschauung [i.e., world view] and belief in the value of struggle and conflict? Or was it simply a dreadful accident, a unique concatenation of misperceptions, untoward events, and mistaken decisions, leading to results that no one intended?”5

We want to “assign great causes to great events.”6 Is it really possible that the cause of this conflagration, in which so many millions lost their lives and the map of the world was forever transformed, was that a 19-year-old abstemious virgin named Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian member of a secret organization, happened to be standing in a particular spot in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, when the car in which the Austrian Archduke and his wife were passengers made a wrong turn and drove right to where he was? He fired two shots which killed them both. For the record, he apologized for killing the wife. He meant to kill the colonial governor. He managed to stuff cyanide into his mouth in an effort to die a martyr’s death, but it was not enough to kill him; and he was captured.7 So Princip got a lot of things wrong. But his principal goal, murdering the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was achieved. He lit “a long fuse.”8

In the last analysis, World War I resulted from a series of decisions made by men. But where does this leave us?

“Men are not motivated by a clear view of their own interests; their minds are filled with the cloudy residues of discarded beliefs and their motives are not always clear even to themselves.”9

In a crisis, even normally cool-headed men can fall prey to denial, or what Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) called “knowing-and-not-knowing, a state of rational apprehension that does not result in appropriate action.”10

There is a lot of truth in these observations. However, if an important reason to study the cause of a cataclysm like World War I is to see what can be done to prevent anything like it from happening again, we have to get beyond human nature. Because that is not going to change.

The historians James Joll and Gordon Martel suggest that we might have recourse to “a kind of two-tier history. On one hand, there are the broad lines of social and economic development, of demographic change or of the even longer term effects of differences in the climate and other aspects of the environment. . . . On the other hand, there is the world in which the decisions of individual leaders, whatever their origins, can affect the lives of millions and change the course of history for decades.”11

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Although there is much that we will never know, there are some things that we do know. First, there was a strain of romanticizing war that is quite foreign to most modern sensibilities. In Demian, by the German novelist Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962), one character says to another:

“It hasn’t been declared yet. But there will be war. You can take my word for that. . . . You’ll see what a sensation that will be! People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for the killing to begin—their lives are that dull!”12

Not only did war present itself to some as an escape from “stuffy liberal-bourgeois codes of peace”;13 war also presented itself to governments as a way out of their problems. This seems strange to the modern reader, but it is oddly not uncommon. As the American Civil War was getting under way in April, 1861, Lincoln’s Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801 – 1872) suggested that a war against a foreign power, perhaps France or Spain, could unite the dissolving union.14 Seward was a highly intelligent man, although one would never know it from this suggestion. In Europe in 1914, all of the great powers were “passing through a political and social crisis.” The outbreak of World War I postponed those crises. In Britain, for example, the conflict over Irish home rule was shelved. In Germany, “A foreign enemy was the guarantee of domestic unity. . . .”15 Soon after mobilization commenced, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared that from now on he “recognized no [political] parties, only Germans.”16 Similar stories could be told about France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and even Serbia.

War as a solution to domestic problems would only work if the war was short. As everyone involved quickly discovered, when you “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war,”17 there is no telling how long those dogs will hunt. The war the combatants “expected and the war for which the general staffs and admiralties planned was not the war they actually got. Very few people inside or outside government circles expected a long and destructive world war. . . . Military strategists, civilian politicians and public pressure groups all seem to have been bewitched by what [has been] called the ‘short-war illusion’.”18

There are other examples of how a war in 1914 was going to be different from any other war ever fought. A six-volume study published in 1898 concluded that because of new weapons technology, an offensive war of the type widely favored among the great powers in 1914 could in fact “no longer succeed. Modern guns and artillery could now destroy everything within their range: whereas the grenades used in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 1871) burst into about 30 pieces, the shrapnel available by 1890 would burst into 341; cannons could cause five times more casualties than they had 20 years before.” Technology suggested that “a modern war would simply be one of attrition and exhaustion, perhaps to the point of annihilation.”19 This was true. Tragically, no one wanted to hear it at the time.

The transformation of war was visible not only in theory, it was vividly illustrated in practice by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1906. This was a carefully studied war, but the students of it were incapable of drawing the correct conclusions from their first-hand observations. According to one report:

“[It was] almost impossible for a front protected by really powerful weapons and field defenses to be broken through even by troops of undaunted courage willing to sacrifice any number of lives.”

Tragically, observers “drew conclusions at variance with their own evidence.”20

The result of all this was a war from 1914 to 1918 the like of which the world had never seen.

Today, in the Israeli–American war of choice against Iran, there are distressing similarities to World War I. The United States, the superpower, was drawn into this war by Israel in a fashion similar to the way Russia was drawn into World War I by Serbia. “It would be detestable if the great powers allowed themselves to ‘be dragged into a war’ by Serbia,” declared Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1914.21 Yet that appears to be how Israel has maneuvered the United States.22

And the new technologies of warfare – drones, satellite intelligence, AI – have transformed the battlefield. Trump should have known this because the Ukraine war is a case in point. Iran is a determined, technologically advanced war-fighting nation in an existential struggle. Trump and his toadies fell victim to their own “short war illusion.” We and the rest of the world are paying the price for their ignorance.

On the eve of World War II, Adolf Hitler said, “In my life, I’ve always gone for broke.”23 The same is true of Trump. He always goes for broke. It is no accident that he bankrupted six companies. Now, with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as a direct result of his stupid, stupid war, he seems intent on driving our nation into bankruptcy as well.

Hitler proved that when you go for broke in a war in which you know nothing about your enemy, the war will not end well for you.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”24 The Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu (544 BC – 496 BC) wrote those words. Xi Jinping is doubtless familiar with Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War.25 Trump, who knows neither the enemy nor himself, is doubtless ignorant of it.

Trump will face the results of his bottomless ignorance. So will we.

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Are we on the cusp of a war among the great powers?

“There are enough structural and political conflicts between the great powers today to make major war a likely scenario.”1

That is the assertion in The Coming Storm, a book recently published by an historian at Yale named Odd Arne Westad. Is he right? How “likely” is this “scenario”?

In the Trump era, one should never say never to catastrophe. Here are the comments of a advisor in the British Foreign Office, Ben Judah, who reviewed this book:

“When working with the White House I did not see a great power rationally identifying and pursuing its big-picture national interest. We were dealing with a court, not an administration where a confused, frightened group of courtiers had been sucked into the vortex of one man's unshackled id. It is unnerving to realize that there is no geopolitical logic to the Iran war more important than Trump's own manic enthusiasm: his excitement and interest in the war [Benjamin] Netanyahu was offering. . . .”2

This is an environment in which anything can happen.

Westad tries to make his case by using an analogy to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. “Almost nobody had expected war in the summer of 1914.”3 But of course war is what the world got “because of the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity. . . .”4 The four horsemen he features — jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity — are saddled up and ready to ride today.

However, analogies have pitfalls. One reason to study history is to prevent invalid historical analogies. For example, the American people were continually told during the 1960s that we had to stop the communists in Vietnam because we had learned through the appeasement of Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) at Munich in 1938 that concession leads to world war. The analogy depended on viewing Vietnam as an agent of global communist aggression rather than as a nationalist rebellion against colonial oppression. That invalid analogy cost a lot of lives and achieved nothing. Westad’s analogy is also problematic.

To make the analogy work, Westad offers the following comparisons. China today is supposedly like Germany in 1914. Russia is similar to Austria-Hungary. The United States to Great Britain. He views the status of Taiwan as central to the tension between the United States and China. “The Taiwan conflict is a bit like Alsace, Bosnia, and Belgium rolled into one.”5

If one is looking for analogies to 1914, a good one would be between Serbia and Israel. In both cases, small states determined the actions of great powers. This tail-wagging-the-dog story deserves a chapter; but it does not get one.

Westad takes for granted that the most dangerous bipolar relationship in the multipolar world of today is between the United States and China. What is the evidence? He quotes the inimitable Donald:

“[W]e can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.”6

What earthly reason is there to place any faith in what Trump says? He does not know anything about China. Trump also said that Haitian immigrants were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Has that problem been cleared up?

Westad insists that “the American priority” is East Asia or Southeast Asia.7 Is it? That is not how U.S. priorities look to the Japanese and South Koreans right now. First, they can see that America betrays allies with reckless abandon. As Henry Kissinger (1923 - 2023) is often quoted as saying:

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”8

Americans may find this cute. Our allies do not. Look at how we are treating NATO.

Second, it is worth at least asking where America’s military and naval assets are being stationed. Our focus is on the Strait of Hormuz right now, not the Taiwan Strait. This book was published on March 3. The Israeli-American war against Iran, the second war in as many years, began on February 28. It is remarkable that the book was not withdrawn for revisions. As far as Iran is concerned, Westad says that it “may be belligerent and provocative, especially toward Israel, but it is highly unlikely to become a regional hegemon.”9 What if it can charge a toll at the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity.

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Westad asserts that China’s dictator Xi Jinping’s “authoritarian instincts seem to match many of those held by Wilhelm II (1859 - 1941) [emperor of Germany from 1888 to 1918]. Like Wilhelm, Xi has not made a secret of his dislike for democrats, business leaders, working-class organizers, student activists, and regional power-holders. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] elite is increasingly acting as imperial Germany’s Junker class, equating their own views and interests with those of the nation while being profoundly skeptical of the social and moral effects of their country’s rapid economic change. And, like Wilhelm and his followers, Xi and the CCP have complete control over the . . . military. . . .”10 This is the point at which Westad’s analogy collapses. Xi presently appears to be the most skillful leader in the world. Trump and Putin are mired in wars concerning which both men utterly miscalculated. Xi is free to maneuver.

What makes this book useful are the reviews it has prompted. Here is one precious passage:

“Wilhelm II spent most of his waking hours talking, arguing, shouting, speechifying, preaching, threatening and generally unbosoming himself of his latest preoccupations to whoever happened to be within earshot. He was like a Tourette's tic at the heart of the German state executive. He cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors . . . with fantastical geopolitical speculations, crackpot plans, sarcastic asides and off-color jokes. [The effect] is like listening for days on end to a dog barking inside a locked car. Wilhelm's interventions were often impulsive shots from the hip and his objectives were diffuse and constantly shifting. The Kaiser picked up ideas, became excited about them, got bored and dropped them. And he remained incapable of developing or realizing a political program of his own, or even of imposing his will on the executive in a consistent manner. He was . . . unfortunately very impressionable. There is no doubt that Wilhelm's flamboyant, aggressive and careless language makes it easy to set him up as an inveterate warmonger [yet he] continued right up until the outbreak of war to vacillate between dovish and hawkish positions."11

The creator of united Germany in the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck (1815 - 1898), “famously remarked that the Kaiser was apt to wander off at any moment ‘like a balloon’.”12

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, this is not a description of Xi Jinping. This is as good a description of the Donald as you will find.

Philip Zelikow observes in his review:

“We live in bewildering times. In such times, people grasp for historical parallels. This is natural. Reasoning from history is the most common form of reasoning in public affairs. Yet the . . . analogies frequently mislead. Worse: when analogies, even those based on recent history, become a shorthand way of finding answers, they detract from analysis of the case at hand.”13

According to Zelikow:

“There are real echoes of the past in today's situation. They are just not featured in this book. China's leader, Xi Jinping, is not much like Wilhelm II, but he does recall memories of Stalin. This may not be accidental. Xi is a deep student of Soviet and Communist history. His leadership style bears little resemblance to that of Mao Zedong. But think of Stalin. With Xi there is a similar combination of remote detachment alongside the omnipresent image of the leader and the cult of personality. There are the quietly and carefully calculated moves. There is the authorship of authoritative ideological texts, Xi's version of the ‘Short Course’ on Communist history. There is the style of reticent inscrutability amid the waves of purges of former Party faithful. There is the overwhelming emphasis on state planning in the rapid conquest of the commanding heights of global technology and preparations for war. As historians used to debate whether Stalin was globally offensive or merely regionally defensive in his expansion of Soviet power, so experts today debate Xi's intentions in similar ways.”14

Where does all this leave us? Is 2026 another 1914? Is the United States about to fall into what has been called the “Thucydides trap”15

Westad is a celebrated and distinguished scholar. Perhaps he will be proven right about his speculation. Perhaps not.

Donald Trump has mastered the art of shocking us without surprising us. It would be shocking to wake up tomorrow morning and discover that Trump has launched a war against China. But it would not be surprising.

It would be equally shocking but not surprising if Trump wandered off “like a balloon” and launched a war tomorrow against Denmark for Greenland.

Ben Judah concludes his review of the Westad book with this:

“It is unnerving to realize that there is no geopolitical logic to the Iran war.”16

Unnerving indeed.

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Believe it or not, the assertion that history does have lessons is controversial among philosophers of history. No less a personage than the celebrated German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) observed:

“[W]hat experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on the teaching to be drawn from it.”1

This assertion arose from Hegel’s belief that:

“Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.”2

This is true. The world is reinvented every day. It is difficult enough to understand the present. How can we hope to understand the past well enough to learn from it? As the English novelist L. P. Hartley (1895 - 1972) put it:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”3

Thucydides (460 BC - 400 BC), the first serious historian in the western tradition, had a different point of view. “The absence of romance in my history,” he wrote at the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War:

“will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.”4

Thucydides has every reason to rest content. His work has been cited through the ages, especially so in recent years. Circumstances do indeed change all the time, as Hegel knew well, but human beings are still human beings; and they react to certain threats and opportunities in ways that do resemble how they have always reacted. As Richard Overy illustrates in his remarkable book, Why War?, the reasons that wars break out are remarkably similar through the ages.5

How, then, does one proceed? English philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1883 - 1943) suggested a useful way to think about the conundrum of history. Even God cannot change the past, but new points of view stimulated by new events and approaches to how we capture the truth mean that human beings can change the way they understand the past. As Collingwood put it, “[E]very new generation must rewrite history in its own way. . . .6

This brief foray into the philosophy of history brings us to a book published by Robert Kagan in 2024, Rebellion.7 Kagan does not mention Collingwood, but he does what Collingwood suggested. He has rewritten history through the lens of Trump and has found an “antiliberal tradition” in America that had been either overlooked or misinterpreted by previous historians. The result is not only a new way to look at American history but an important key to unlock the mystery of Trump.

Kagan asserts that:

“The American revolution did not just produce a new system of government dedicated to the protection of the rights of all individuals against government and community. . . . It also produced a reaction against those very liberal principles, by slaveholders and their white supporters, by religious movements, by those many Americans who have sought to preserve ancient, traditional hierarchies of peoples and beliefs against the levelling force of liberalism.”8

Note the phrase “religious movements.” Donald Trump regularly violates the Ten Commandments. He recently tweeted out a picture of himself as Jesus Christ.9

So much for the First Commandment (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”)10 Yet evangelical Christians have embraced him as no other president in American history.

In the words of one of his PR flacks:

“There has never been a greater president for Christian Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it. [He] ended the weaponization of the federal government against people of faith, proudly defended and expanded our religious rights. . . .”11

Trump probably does not read the Bible, but he does sell it. For a mere $60, he would sell you a “God Bless the USA” Bible in 2024.12 He is an ambulatory sacrilege. But his mystical hold on a large segment of religious Americans is part of his superpower and one of the things that needs to be explained. Kagan’s central insight is that “the Trump movement is no freakish aberration. . . .”13 It is the culmination of a strain of anti-liberalism that students of American society have mistakenly marginalized for decades.

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“In the United States at this time,” according to the celebrated literary critic and Columbia University professor Lionel Trilling (1905 - 1975) writing in 1950, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”14 What Kagan demonstrates by writing history for our generation through the lens of Trump is that Trilling’s “plain fact” was not a fact at all.

There were “conservative or reactionary” ideas circulating when Trilling wrote these words. There were numerous racists in the country, especially in the states of the old Confederacy. In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (1902 - 2003) led a revolt against the Democratic party. He ran for president under the banner of the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” colloquially known as the “Dixiecrats.” Their program was blatantly racist and segregationist. Their symbol was the flag of the Confederacy. He won more than a million popular votes and 39 electoral votes15 in what was among the most successful third-party insurgencies in American history. Not incidentally, the Confederate flag under which Thurmond ran is still much in evidence this very day.

Like Trump, Thurmond was not an aberration. He was a fixture, serving in the Senate representing South Carolina from 1954 to 2003. In 1964, the year Barry Goldwater (1909 - 1998) ran for the presidency and the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, Thurmond formally switched allegiance from the Democratic party to the Republican Party. Along with Goldwater, he voted against the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court has just eviscerated.16

Kagan shows that Thurmond was part of a tradition dating back decades. Look, for example, at one of his predecessor senators from South Carolina, the populist racist “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman (1847 - 1918). Tillman’s opponents labelled him “a transparent charlatan” who recklessly stoked “the passions and prejudices of the ignorant” through “the dynamic power of hatred.”17 Tillman’s brother said that if Southern whites were really free, “instead of having Negro suffrage, we would have Negro slavery.”18

American history is replete with the likes of Tillman, Thurmond, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy (1908 - 1957) (a demagogue who lied as often as Trump does), and Alabama Governor George Wallace (who proudly proclaimed “segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever” in his inaugural address in 1963).19 Like Thurmond, Wallace ran for the presidency as a third-party candidate. He took five states in the 1968 election.

What critics labelled as boorishness beneath contempt, the followers of these men “saw as strength and defiance against a world stacked against them.”20 Wallace held out the hope for “freedom from the conventional taboos. The man says what he thinks. Wouldn’t it be fun to do that?”21

Kagan asserts that:

“One of liberalism’s great weaknesses has always been the belief in its own inevitability.”22

“But this notion of inevitable moral progress upward toward liberalism was and is a figment of the liberal imagination, as the South has proved again and again over the course of two and a half centuries.”23

“[T]he clash between liberalism and antiliberalism . . . was inevitable because it has never ceased.24

What Trump has done that the long line of illiberal vulgarians failed to do is to seize control of one of the two major political parties. The Republican Party is merely an extension of his will. As long as its members are content to humiliate themselves in their subservience to him, the country is stuck with him.

Trump promised an end to inflation and an end to pointless wars. We now have inflation and the most dangerous pointless war the United States has ever been involved in.

Will the Republican Party continue to back Trump through thin and then even thinner? That is the most important question facing the United States today.

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Archaeological evidence demonstrates that human beings have been fighting wars since before recorded time. Why is our species so belligerent? This is “one of the fundamental questions concerning the human past and the human future.”1 It is a question that has been addressed repeatedly and by some of the greatest minds in history. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) and Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) corresponded about why wars were waged at the invitation of the League of Nations in 1932.2

There is no easy answer to this question when posed in a general way. “Indeed, given the human propensity to organized, ‘coalitional’ warfare over much of the long human past,” perhaps the question that should be asked is: “’Why Not?’”3 Wars have been fought for reasons of biology, psychology, anthropology, and ecology. They have been undertaken to capture resources, to propagate beliefs, to exercise power for its own sake, and to achieve security.4

What if we ask the question about specific wars? And what if we narrow our focus even more to specific people in specific wars? On April 7th, Fox News asked whether Trump would “go full Sherman in the war on Iran,” so let’s look at Sherman.

Union General William T. Sherman (1820 - 1891) was one of the most important soldiers in the American Civil War. For Sherman, achieving victory in war meant total war. It was he as much as any other officer who introduced into the United States what the Germans in World War I called Schrecklichkeit, that is, “terror.”

Sherman wrote in his Memoirs:

“My aim, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’”5

“If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”6

“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”7

How would Sherman have answered the question “why war?” concerning why he fought in the Civil War. We know the answer because of a remarkable exchange of letters between Sherman and his opposite number, Confederate General John B. Hood. Sherman captured Atlanta, a pivotal moment in the Civil War, on September 2, 1864. Soon thereafter, Hood complained — “in the name of God and humanity,” as he put it — about the way Sherman was handling the captured city.8

Sherman replied the next day:

“In the name of common sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war —dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag. . . . If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out . . . and not deal in arch hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time. . . .”9

Of Civil War generals, Sherman is the most Homeric. One can imagine him in the Iliad. He had to gain control of himself before he could command others, and that required dealing with serious emotional difficulties — what some have called a depression — early in the war. He was ordered to take a 20-day leave to get hold of himself10 Like Achilles, Sherman withdrew from battle. But also like Achilles, the withdrawal was temporary. After the war, Sherman remarked: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”11

The most promising of Sherman’s subordinates, General James B. McPherson, was killed in action during the Battle of Atlanta. Sherman “wept unashamedly when the body was brought to him.”12 He wrote a touching letter of condolence to McPherson’s fiancée: “I yield to none on Earth but yourself the right to excel me in lamentations for our Dead Hero.”13

War is hell.

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The United States and Israel have embarked on a war against Iran. None of us in this country are in the position of Sherman during the Civil War. He knew why he was fighting. We have no idea why we are.

When the United States has embarked upon wars without a clear idea of the reason why, the outcome has usually been disastrous. Think, for example, of the war in Vietnam. The literature on this episode is voluminous. Among the many books is a novel by Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007) entitled Why Are We In Vietnam?. When one reads the novel (which is definitely not recommended) one realizes that its author has no idea of the answer to the question the title poses. Indeed, the word “Vietnam” only appears on the last page. The last words are: “Vietnam, hot damn.”14

If a novel is ever written about our unprovoked “excursion”15 to use Trump’s word, in Iran, perhaps it will end in a similar puzzled, pointless fashion.

Trump has given us a half-dozen reasons for this war. None of them makes sense. On February 27, the day before the war, the Strait of Hormuz was open. Now it is closed. That may look like progress to Trump, but it is not progress for the world which is having to pay higher prices and shortages as a result.

What is the real reason we are at war with Iran? There is an answer to this question, and surprisingly it comes from long ago. In 1795, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) published an essay entitled “To Perpetual Peace.”16 In order to appreciate Kant’s argument, we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump has been ruling America since January 20 of last year without checks and balances on his power. We do not have a republican form of government at the moment. We have, at least for now, an elected dictator.

Kant wrote that in a republican government (such as the United States once had), “the consent of the citizen is required in order to determine whether or not there will be war.” That consent will not be forthcoming unless “all its calamities” are taken into consideration before citizens commit themselves “to so risky a game.”17

“By contrast, under a non-republican constitution [which, alas, we are living under presently] . . . the easiest thing in the world is to declare war. Here the ruler is not a fellow citizen, but the nation’s owner, and war does not affect his table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals, and so on.”18

How has Trump been spending his time while our nation’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen are deployed to the Middle East where some of them have been injured and some have lost their lives? As peace negotiations were falling apart, he was ringside at Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Miami.

“Round after round, fight after fight, Mr. Trump watched as pairs of competitors sparred in a cage covered in ads for Monster energy drinks, assorted crypto and betting sites, and Bud Light beer. The floor was stained with splotches of dried blood from the first match of the evening, when a fighter took a hard hit to the forehead.”19

War is not impacting Trump’s “places of pleasure” or “his court festivals.” If it did, we would have peace.

Another Look at the Falkland Islands

In Chapter 91 last Tuesday, I referred to the war over the Falklands Islands in 1982 as “forgotten.”

I made the mistake of underestimating Trump’s limitless ability to provoke needless trouble. His administration has dredged this war up. A rumor surfaced last week that Trump could “withdraw American support for Britain’s sovereignty of the Falkland Islands over which the UK and Argentina went to war. . . .”20

In response to this rumor, the Foreign Secretary of the UK insisted:

“[The] Falklands are British, sovereignty rests with the UK, self-determination rests with the islanders.”21

Argentina’s president is reported to have “launched a new effort to claim control of the Falkland Islands.”

“The Malvinas,” which is what Argentina insists on calling the Falklands, “will, are, and always will be Argentine.”22

Donald the diplomat at work!

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Donald Trump said Pope Leo XIV “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Trump will not be surprised to learn that this is untrue.1 What is true is that Iran, Israel, Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and nuclear weapons are much discussed at present. Israel and the United States are now at war with Iran. The world has been given a variety of reasons for this war. Among these is the possibility that Iran may get a nuclear weapon. “Iran,” in the words of Trump, “wants to be a nuclear nation so they can exterminate the world. . . . Not gonna happen.”2 As he explained in his inimitable way, “If Iran had a nuclear weapon, you would be calling everybody over there ‘sir’.”3

As this is being written, the Strait of Hormuz has either been opened or it has not been opened. And this absurd war of choice against Iran is either over or it isn’t. Classic Trump in all his meandering confusion.

Chapter 90 last week and today’s chapter are an effort to provide some historical background for the nuclear issue.

The Cold War took place between the end of World War II in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The most important fact about the Cold War is that it never became a hot, shooting, war. In other words, although the great powers competed against one another in a variety of ways, there was no direct military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union (followed by Russia) or, one must add now, China.

Why not?

Hindsight tends to make history seem inevitable. But there was nothing inevitable about peace among the great powers over the past eight decades. Indeed, we now know how close the Soviet Union and the United States came to war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.4 We also know that collapsing empires, such as the Soviet Union was in the 1980s, have lashed out against their fate by starting a war which they hoped would somehow rejuvenate them. The classic instance is the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire and the war it provoked in 1914.

One reason for this “long peace”5 is dumb luck. Consider the personality of the Soviet leader as its empire was coming to an end. That man was Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022), who was the champion of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). For British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925 - 2013) and President Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), he was a man they “could do business with.”6

What if, rather than Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s leader was the bloodthirsty KGB agent Vladimir Putin? He has described the break-up of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”7 Might he have provoked a crisis to keep the old Soviet Union together? Look at what he has been doing in Ukraine since 2022.

The other principal answer to the “why not?” question asked above is that a new technology of war introduced itself with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively in 1945. “World War II was the first war in human history in which the weapons in play at war’s end differed significantly from those at the outset.”8 And none of these differences matched the impact of nuclear weapons.

An arms race between the superpowers developed soon after World War II. The result was lethality on a theretofore unimaginable scale. Arsenals grew from:

“atomic bombs to thermonuclear bombs – an order of magnitude lighter, cheaper, and more powerful.” As this took place, “a taboo against nuclear war settled on the human community. Mankind had finally developed a weapon too horrendous to use. . . . Even as the two superpowers [i.e., the United States and the Soviet Union] amassed a combined nuclear arsenal of seventy thousand warheads, a consensus coalesced around never using them again.”9

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), whose letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)(referred to last week in Chapter 90) was a critical contribution to the creation of the atomic bomb, sent a telegram to “several hundred prominent Americans” in May of 1946 in which he wrote:

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”10

The following remark has also been attributed to him:

“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”11

In other words, organized life on earth would vanish. If Einstein had lived to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, his prognosis would have been even bleaker. A philosopher coined a new word for what would result from a massive nuclear exchange: “omnicide.”12

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An intriguing but unremarked illustration of the “consensus” against using nuclear weapons took place in 1982. That year, there was a brief war between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. This war has been forgotten by everyone except people living in the combatant nations.

The Falkland Islands are a British overseas territory. Argentina, however, has for a long time claimed that they should have sovereignty over the islands. On April 2, 1982, the Argentine military junta, failing in its domestic policies, decided – as failing regimes sometimes do – to distract its population by invading and occupying the Falklands and thus starting a war.

Great Britain decided to take the islands back by force. The ensuing war lasted from April 2 to June 14, 1982. Britain won, but its victory was not a foregone conclusion. And its victory did not come without cost. Two hundred fifty-five of its servicemen were killed, and there were more than a thousand casualties.

A revealing episode took place as Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was preparing for war. On April 6, 1982, Harold Macmillan (1894 - 1986) paid her a visit. Macmillan served in combat in World War I. He had decades of political experience and was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. His first question to Thatcher was: “Have they [i.e., the Argentines] got the [atomic] bomb?”13 The answer was that they did not.

What is intriguing is that Britain itself did have the bomb. It became a nuclear power in 1952. However, although Britain had the bomb and Argentina did not, to the best of my knowledge no one in authority in Britain contemplated using nuclear weapons against Argentina.

We take this for granted because, as observed above, hindsight makes the past seem inevitable. But there was nothing inevitable about this decision. In fact, the history of war from prehistoric times has been the history of nations with a technical advantage using that advantage to win. “From the Stone Age to the nuclear age, technology has driven the evolution of warfare.”14

Why were western nations able to conquer over four-fifths of the land in the world by 1900?15 The answer is not that westerners were nicer people or more courageous. The reason is that their firearms and artillery “ensured that small western armies could prevail over large native forces armed with only the muscle-powered weapons of antiquity.”16 As one writer put it:

“Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not.”17

Britain had no compunction about using the Maxim gun, a precursor to the machine gun, in, say, 1882.

However, a century later Britain declined even to consider use of its superior war fighting technology. This difference is a vivid illustration of the “consensus” that has existed since 1945 that nuclear weapons should not be used.

The question facing the world today is whether this consensus will survive Trump (and Netanyahu and Putin). Back in 2016, Trump asked an advisor, “If we have them [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use them?”18 As the catastrophic consequences of his war of choice in Iran become ever clearer, might Trump, as he flails about, look for a nuclear “solution” to the Iran problem he has created?

The proliferation of nuclear weapons is unquestionably of great concern (although one school of thought among political scientists advocates nuclear proliferation because the “terrible destructive power” unleashed by the use of nuclear weapons would ensure peace based on a “balance of terror.”)19

How great should be our concern that Trump has control over America’s nuclear arsenal? This question answers itself.

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