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These are generally fair long, so I'll use spoiler tags to keep the thread manageable.

The incredible vanishing Congress:

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It began with George Washington’s declaration of American neutrality in the 1790s war between Britain and France. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the authority to declare war. From this a reasonable person would assume Congress has the authority to withhold a declaration of war, which would amount to a declaration of neutrality.

Yet Washington took it upon himself to declare neutrality. No one objected to the substance of his decree, none really wanting war. And though sticklers like James Madison grumbled that the executive was intruding on a legislative prerogative, no major protest was mounted. Score one for the president. Score a minus one for Congress.

Washington’s successors lacked his stature, and for decades Congress held the line against additional erosion of its powers. If anything, under the leadership of Henry Clay the House of Representatives and the Senate elevated their standing vis a vis the presidency. The Senate in the 1830s censured Andrew Jackson for his treatment of the Bank of the United States and his firing of the secretary of the treasury. Just after the Civil War the House impeached Andrew Johnson for firing the secretary of war, and the Senate came within a vote of convicting him. Meanwhile Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from Johnson and imposed its own political blueprint on the defeated South.

All the great debates in American politics in the 19th century took place in Congress. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 were compromises between parties and factions in the legislature. The tariff – the most consistently contentious topic in American politics from the 1810s to the 1930s – remained squarely where the Constitution placed it, in the purview of Congress. Several tariffs had names – the McKinley tariff, the Underwood tariff, the Fordney-McCumber tariff, the Smoot-Hawley tariff - and every named sponsor was a member of Congress.

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Things began to change about the start of the 20th century. America developed a full-time foreign policy. Part of this was due to the acquisition of the Philippines and other offshore territories, which were administered by the executive. Part reflected the complications with Japan and other countries the new possessions created, complications that fell most naturally to the president. And part reflected the outsized ambition of Theodore Roosevelt, who seized the Panama Canal Zone and unilaterally declared an American protectorate over Latin America.

Further erosion occurred amid the depression of the 1930s. The economic emergency fostered dictatorships in several countries around the world, and though the United States stopped well short of giving the president dictatorial powers, Congress collaborated in a dramatic expansion of presidential power by the creation of numerous new executive agencies that answered to the president rather than to Congress.

World War II and its sequel, the Cold War, shifted the balance of power still further toward the White House. The president and his assistants designed the institutional framework that shaped international affairs in the aftermath of the war. At crucial moments Congress still played its constitutional role. The Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty. The House and Senate voted funding for the Marshall Plan.

But when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Harry Truman committed American troops to the defense of the latter without asking congressional approval. He explained after the fact that the threat to America’s defensive perimeter didn’t allow time for the traditional declaration of war by Congress. He contended that the war in Korea was not really a war but a police action under the aegis of the United Nations.

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As in the case of George Washington’s neutrality declaration a century and a half before, Truman’s usurpation of the warmaking authority of Congress wasn’t seriously challenged. Amid the red scare inflamed by Joseph McCarthy, no member wished to be seen as opposing anything anticommunist. And as in the case of Washington and neutrality, the failure to challenge Truman on warmaking produced a permanent cession of power to the president. America has fought five regular wars since World War II, and not one has been declared by Congress.

Congress ceded still other powers in the subsequent decades. While nominally retaining its constitutional grip on tariffs and trade policy in general, the legislature allowed the president to impose tariffs and regulations in the event of emergency or in response to unfair trade practices. And it allowed the president to determine when such conditions existed. In 1970 Congress approved the Economic Stabilization Act, which authorized the president to impose wage and price controls when he thought them necessary. Nixon did just that the next year. Congress set broad guidelines on immigration but allowed the president to modify them in the interest of national security – again as defined by the president.

The abdication by Congress continues. Since Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20, the news from Washington has been dominated by what the president has done or is about to do. Will there be a trade war? Trump will decide. Will ten million immigrants be deported? Trump will decide. Will millions of federal workers be fired? Trump will decide. Will federal grants already appropriated be disbursed to their recipients? Trump will decide. Will American aid to Ukraine continue? Trump will decide.

In each of these and other areas, decisions intended by the framers of the Constitution to be made by Congress are being made in the White House. Congress could reclaim its authority if it chose to. But the Republicans don’t dare to cross Trump lest he unleash his supporters at the next primary, and the Democrats lack the numbers to protest effectively.

Neither party is willing to take a principled position on the relationship between Congress and the president. As much as Democrats dislike Trump’s unchecked authority, they were happy when Barack Obama and Joe Biden wielded the presidential hammer. Neither party wants to roll back presidential power per se, for fear that their party’s disarmament will prove unilateral.

The Capitol still sits at the east end of the national mall. It used to be bigger.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Jerry Callo said:

Many of you probably recognize H.W. Brands as a history professor at University of Texas - in fact the Jack C. Blanton Sr. Chair in History.  Unfortunately, I never took one of his classes, but I have followed him for many years.  He has written several biographies of U.S. Presidents along with other books.  For the last several years, he has published A User's Guide to History on Substack - hwbrands@substack.com.  I subscribed and get several emails a week.  His range of topics is endless, but most touch on the historical relevance or foundation of a modern issue.

I mainly wanted illuminate his writings to those who are interested.  I will probably post a few of his articles - at least some that I find interesting. 

I was fortunate to take a course from him, focusing on the 1890's through the lens of his book The Reckless Decade. Hands-down one of my favorite courses I took in my time at Texas

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Posted

An army in the streets

Spoiler
An army in the streets

Troops as cops?

Feb 7
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Americans who lived through the Revolutionary War had a deep aversion to the use of the army in civilian affairs. They remembered how the stationing of British troops in Massachusetts had led to the Boston massacre and the battles of Lexington and Concord.

The memories persisted in 1787 when delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write a new constitution. The charter they produced increased the powers of the central government and of the executive in particular. But it reserved to the legislature the authority to declare war, to raise and support armies, and “to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.”

The delegates didn't expect the Congress to actually command the army. That power was granted to the president, who would be “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

The delegates expected domestic law to be almost exclusively the responsibility of the states. Yet it allowed an oversight role for the central government. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion, and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

As for federal law which applied to individuals, in the early days there was almost none. The first important exception was an excise tax approved by Congress in 1791. Its stated purpose was to provide revenues to pay off debt from the Revolutionary War. A secondary purpose, in the minds of advocates of greater centralization such as Alexander Hamilton, was to make federal power real in the lives of individuals.

The taxed items included whiskey, the production of which was a staple of the economies of the western parts of states like Pennsylvania, where bad roads and long distances prohibited the profitable export of commodities like grain to the markets of the East. Conversion of the grain into whiskey enormously increased its value per pound and made such export feasible.

The whiskey distillers of the region around Pittsburgh were no more pleased by the new tax on whiskey than American colonists had been pleased by the new tax on stamps in 1765. Their response was much the same. They refused to pay. And when federal tax men came to collect the tax, they were threatened and assaulted by the tax resisters.

Hamilton had been waiting for just such a response. He urged President George Washington to use military force to crush the whiskey rebellion. Washington wasn't as trigger-happy as Hamilton. At first he sent special envoys to talk to the whiskey rebels. But to lend weight to the government's side of the negotiations, he called on the governors of nearby states to send militia to Pennsylvania. Washington himself got out his old military uniform, saddled up his warhorse, and rode to rendezvous with the arriving militias.

By this time the president’s authority had been bolstered by the 1792 Militia Act. The measure allowed the president, on the request of a state legislature or governor, to summon militia from the several states to suppress an insurrection against the government of the requesting state. It also permitted the president, on his own authority, to mobilize militias to enforce federal law when federal marshals were unable to do so. The second permission applied to the whiskey rebellion.

Washington’s show of force persuaded the rebels to scatter. Washington was pleased at having avoided a pitched battle. Hamilton was disappointed

Soldiers in the service of the United States were employed to enforce the law on subsequent occasions. The Civil War was the most spectacular case, lasting four years and involving millions of troops. During the war, Union troops were dispatched to New York to suppress anti-conscription riots in 1863. During Reconstruction, Union soldiers embodied military rule in the former Confederate states. Ulysses Grant sent the army against the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in the early 1870s. Grover Cleveland dispatched federal troops against rioters during the Pullman railroad strike of 1894. Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to secure school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. George H. W. Bush deployed federal troops during riots in Los Angeles after the 1992 beating of Rodney King.

The use of the army to enforce law during Reconstruction prompted Congress in 1878 to narrow the circumstances under which federal troops could be used. The Posse Comitatus Act declared, “It shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus” – a concept from English history with a label meaning “power of the county” and referring to citizens deputized to assist in law enforcement – “or otherwise for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.” The constitutional authorization came from the passage cited above. An act of Congress would be specific to a particular case.

The deployments of troops after passage of the act followed requests from the state governments for help in suppressing domestic violence, per the Constitution. The exception was Eisenhower’s dispatch of troops to Arkansas, over the objections of the state government. Eisenhower cited federal civil rights laws from the 1870s as triggering the “act of Congress” language of the Posse Comitatus Act.

President Trump has indicated his intention to use federal troops to assist in the enforcement of immigration law. He hasn’t specified the legal authority for his action, which would appear to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. He might cite his sworn duty to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” He has frequently described illegal immigration and the other crimes he associates with it as an invasion. On his first day in office he declared a national emergency at the border with Mexico. “America’s sovereignty is under attack,” Trump’s declaration said. “This assault on the American people and the integrity of America’s sovereign borders represents a grave threat to our Nation.” Therefore: "It is necessary for the Armed Forces to take all appropriate action to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining full operational control of the southern border.”

Trump might cite a series of insurrection laws dating to the 1790s and including the measure under which Lincoln waged the Civil War. Trump’s order characterized the situation on the southern border as “widespread chaos.” From chaos to insurrection might be a short interpretive step.

Or he might simply break new ground in presidential authority. He is doing so in other areas. In this area as in some of those, he’s likely to face lawsuits challenging his authority.

How such lawsuits will turn out is, at this point, anyone’s guess. As is how the president might respond to adverse rulings in them. And how — most crucially — the army would respond to presidential orders given in defiance of the Supreme Court.

 

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Posted

Skeptical of climate change?:

Spoiler
Skeptical of climate change?

Follow the money

Feb 8
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  The Particular Horror of the Los Angeles Wildfires - The Atlantic  

 

When North African pirates plagued American shipping in the early 19th century, they didn't have to capture many American vessels to wreak havoc on American commerce. A few seizures sufficed. When German submarines torpedoed merchant ships in the Atlantic in World War I, the effects of the sinkings went far beyond the physical reach of the U-boats. Houthi insurgents in Yemen today can all but close the Suez Canal with moderate expenditures on armed drones.

In each case, the actions of the interdictors have been magnified by their effects on insurance markets. The actuaries of the insurance companies calculated risks and adjusted premiums accordingly. Thomas Jefferson might become incensed at the depredations of the Barbary pirates. Woodrow Wilson could denounce the German violators of American neutral rights. Leaders of the world's shipping powers can threaten destruction of the Houthis. But nothing speaks louder than rising costs of conducting business as usual.

The debate over climate change has shifted in the last decade or so. Outright deniers have grown fewer. Some have retreated to the position of acknowledging higher temperatures and fiercer storms but attributing them to natural rhythms in the earth's climate. Others grant a human role in the changes but contend that the costs of mitigation outweigh the costs of doing nothing.

Until recently the costs have been hard to quantify. They still are, because they involve actions that reach far into the future, and some depend on technology that hasn't been invented.

Yet certain costs of inaction are becoming clearer, in a specific sense. Home insurance rates have spiked upward in many places subject to extreme weather events. Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, tornadoes in the Midwest, and wildfires in the West have increased the risk to properties there, in the reckoning of the insurance companies. Some companies have pulled out of risk-prone areas entirely, leaving the homeowners on their own and disrupting real estate markets.

Insurance isn't the only industry where money is talking on climate change. As ice in the Arctic Ocean retreats, shipping companies are rerouting their vessels to exploit passages heretofore unnavigable. The long-sought Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has been found. At present it's open only part of the year, but the shipping companies are ordering new ships able to exploit an extended season, eventually the whole year.

Petroleum companies are prospecting for oil in the far north in places they've never been. Other companies hope to exploit Greenland’s deposits of rare-earth minerals, deposits that are becoming more available as the Greenland ice sheet shrinks. Donald Trump is too canny to rile his political base by talking of climate change, but his interest in Greenland, surprising to many, reflects his desire to corner the mineral wealth of that big island before anyone else does.

One useful characteristic of money is that it is agnostic on political, philosophical and theological issues. Some people can be persuaded to change personal habits out of concern for the welfare of humanity. But nearly all of us are susceptible to the pinch of higher prices on our personal pocketbooks. In the 1970s, when Americans waited in line at gas stations to fill their tanks, many fretted that the world was running out of oil. Economists answered that the world would never run out of oil. If and when reserves in the ground dwindled, the price would go up, and up and up. The last barrel would never be pumped because it would be too expensive.

Scenarios of oil’s end have changed but the same principle is at work. The cash price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is lower than in the 1970s. But the total cost, including the externality costs of emitted carbon dioxide, are causing demand to flag.

Climate warriors often speak in moral terms. Some listeners are moved, others aren’t. Money, by contrast, gets everyone’s attention. The most reliable antidote to a planet growing hotter is cold cash.

 

 

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Posted

Overrinsured?

Spoiler

Overrinsured?

Peace of mind doesn't come free

Jan 17
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A previous essay characterized insurance as a clever idea. Yet all good ideas can be carried too far. In America we might be nearing that stage of excess.

Economists speak of “moral hazard,” the tendency of people to do risky things when they are shielded from the costs if those things go wrong. When governments bail out corporations, the directors of the corporations are encouraged to repeat the actions that made the bailouts necessary. When individuals have loans forgiven, the individuals don’t learn to be more cautious in taking out loans.

Moral hazard is a possibility with every kind of insurance. Drivers with auto insurance might not be as careful as drivers who will have to bear the full costs of wrecks. Lawyers with malpractice insurance might take greater risks in interpreting the law than lawyers without.

Beyond moral hazard is the cost of administering insurance programs. All the people who work for insurance companies have to be paid, typically from the premiums of policyholders.

Connected to cost is the adversarial relationship that can emerge between insurers and insured. A company that sells you homeowners’ insurance is happy to collect your premium but unhappy to pay your claims. It has an incentive to deny the claims. You say your roof damage is from last week’s hail storm, which would be covered. The company says it looks like normal wear, which would not be covered. You and the company fight it out, perhaps in court.

This adversarial dynamic can be particularly distressing in the field of medical insurance. Companies make decisions about what kinds of treatment are covered and what kinds are not. Cost is an important consideration. Doctors prefer to prescribe treatments based on their professional judgment as to what’s best for their patients, regardless of cost. Some treatments are expensive, and if the insurance companies don't cover them and patients have to pay out of pocket, the patients might not be able to. So doctors sometimes feel obliged to prescribe suboptimal treatment. Many clinics have staff whose primary job is to negotiate among the companies, the doctors and the patients.

Insurance of all kinds has evolved over time. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, American insurance was mostly a private matter between individuals and companies. But government entered the field in a large way during the 1930s with the creation of the Social Security Administration, which provided unemployment and accident insurance and old-age pensions. Many people still have private pensions, but Social Security has become a mainstay for most. Nearly half of retired Americans rely on Social Security for a majority of their retirement income.

The establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s added medical insurance for the elderly and the poor to the expectations people had of government. Today a third of all American spending on medical care comes from these and other federal programs, including those created under the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The rest comes from private insurance, often associated with places of employment, and from patients’ own pockets directly.

Other government insurance is more specialized. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation protects bank depositors from loss in the event of bank failure. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation protects farmers against the vicissitudes of agriculture. The National Flood Insurance Program pays property owners for damage from floods.

There are benefits to all this. People are better able to survive the blows of fickle fate. Up to a fifth of lung cancer patients never smoked. It was simply their bad luck to develop the disease. People who keep their shoulders to the wheel can still be laid off in a recession. America’s wealth allows us to help the unlucky.

But there are costs. The direct cost is the expense of the programs. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid consume half the federal budget. Some of this is covered by taxes in the present, the rest by borrowing against the future.

The chief indirect cost is the moral hazard. People who expect to receive a government pension are less likely to save on their own. This is worrisome because Social Security wasn’t designed to be the sole means of support for retirees, but rather a backstop for those who suffered financial misfortune. Homeowners who get federally subsidized flood insurance are more likely to rebuild in flood-prone areas.

People are generally better stewards of their own money than of other people’s money. Insurance schemes diminish individual stewardship by mingling the money of lots of people. Government insurance programs mingle the money of even more people, including those who aren’t part of the covered group.

There was a time when Americans were more on their own than they are today. They were worse off in some respects, especially being insecure in the face of misfortune. This was why their democratically elected government created the programs we have today.

But they were better off in other respects, including paying lower taxes and having less government debt hanging over their heads. Many Americans were very attached to the ideal of self-reliance. Many still are.

Where does the balance between security and self-reliance lie? That’s a question every generation has to answer for itself.

 

Posted
On 2/6/2025 at 9:50 AM, Captainant said:

I was fortunate to take a course from him, focusing on the 1890's through the lens of his book The Reckless Decade. Hands-down one of my favorite courses I took in my time at Texas

I was supposed to take this course, but had to drop it due to off-campus work internship commitment.  Thanks for the reminder to pick up this book and read it on my own time. 

Posted

History - Linear or cyclical?

Spoiler

BQ 5: Linear or cyclical?

The big questions of history

Feb 11
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Time is a conundrum. It puzzles even physicists, for whom it is a foundational concept. Einstein wrote it into his description of the universe, as a fourth dimension after length, width and height. This made the calculations easier, but it didn't necessarily yield insight. The three ordinary dimensions are observably reversible. I can go forward and back, left and right, up and down. But time appears to permit one direction only—toward the future. No one has figured out how to go back in time.

Time is as foundational for historians as for physicists. And it is often as puzzling. We go backward in time, in our research and our imaginations. We sometimes wish we could go backward in time physically, to clear up a question our research leaves unanswered. What was Cornwallis thinking in letting himself be trapped at Yorktown? I'd love to be able to ask him.

Just as every person is an amateur physicist, everyone is a historian. I don't jump off cliffs because I know about the law of gravity. I form a mental model about the past, because without it I wouldn't be able to operate effectively in the present. On federal holidays in America, banks are closed. They have been for many years. So I won't expect my bank to be open next Fourth of July.

Two mental models have predominated in thinking about history. One is linear, the other cyclical.

In the linear model, history moves in a single direction. This direction has been characterized variously: toward greater complexity, toward a higher state of civilization, toward the fulfillment of religious prophecy, toward inevitable demise. Observations of the past have been adduced to support the different characterizations. Urban life in China at the beginning of the 21st century certainly seemed more complex than village life in China had been been five centuries before.

The characterizations could be self-serving. People who spoke of “higher civilization” generally placed themselves on the upper rungs. People who looked to the fulfillment of religious prophecy typically reckoned they were among the saved.

These observations demonstrate that a conception of history's direction is as much about the future as about the past. Knowledge is power, and no knowledge is more powerful than that which foretells the future. If I spot a trend in the stock market before others do, and if that trend continues into the future, I can become rich. If I correctly project political trends from the past into the future, I can jump aboard the winning party and get a plum job in the next administration. If the end is indeed nigh, a timely repentance can save my eternal soul.

The second common model of history is the cyclical one. History moves not in a straight line but in a circle. Patterns repeat. An empire rises, then it falls. A new empire rises, then it too falls. Economists speak of the business cycle. A shortfall of product causes prices to rise. Rising prices prompt producers to increase output. Collectively they overshoot the mark, and their excess production causes prices to fall and some producers to fail. The reduced output makes prices rise again, and the cycle repeats.

The linear model of history appeals to cultures that value the idea of progress. History has a direction, and the measure of a culture, society or nation is the progress it makes in that direction. Cultures that are part of the Abrahamic tradition of religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—lean toward the linear view, for in each religion adherents believe that the world unfolds according to God’s plan. The plan commenced with the creation of the heavens and the earth. It did or will proceed with the coming of the Messiah. It will culminate in an end time when the dead will be resurrected and the world finally perfected.

Other cultures are more comfortable with a cyclical view of things. The Chinese calendar embodies twelve-year cycles. Chinese historians developed a theory of government based on dynastic cycles under the “mandate of heaven,” which provided legitimacy when governance was good but was withdrawn when rulers grew corrupt. Chinese philosophers saw the cosmos as moving through cycles of yin and yang, representing different kinds of energy and force.

Hindu thinkers placed individual lives in the context of an eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth. Most people would pass through many incarnations. The fortunate would finally escape the cycle by achieving the transcendence of moksha.

As the Hindu example reveals, the linear and cyclical models needn’t be mutually exclusive. When joined, the combination can be represented not separately by a straight line or a circle but by a hybrid cycloid, which is the path of a point on a wheel as the wheel rolls down a road. From the frame of reference of the wheel itself, the point’s motion is cyclical—to wit, circular. But from the frame of the road, the point makes longitudinal progress.

  The Ubiquitous Cycloid – ThatsMaths  

Cycloids come in varieties. If the point is on the rim of the wheel (in black above), the linear motion halts when the point touches the road. It then speeds up, reaching a maximum when the point is farthest from the road. If the point is near the axle (blue), the linear motion merely slows and speeds up. If the wheel is a railroad wheel and the point is on the flange that extends beyond the rail (red), the point goes backward periodically.

This sounds complicated. But history is complicated, and the different cycloids show how the linear and cyclical models apply in the real world. Lots of things are cyclical—days, seasons, ice ages, political campaigns, epidemics—but they never return the system to the exact place it started. There’s always some linear motion, if only because the rest of the cosmos has changed while the observed cycle was completing its turn.

This is what makes using history to predict the future at once tempting and dicey. The cyclical aspect of history makes us look for similarities between the past and the present. We can always find something. But the linear aspect of history means that the present is not exactly like the past. The wheel has moved down the road. We can’t be sure in advance whether the similarities with the past, or the differences, will be decisive.

So we have no choice but to roll along as best we can.

 

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Posted

The mechanics of democracy

Spoiler
  Books by James Russell Lowell on Google Play  

“After our Constitution got fairly into working order, it really seemed as if we had invented a machine that would go of itself,” James Russell Lowell wrote in 1888.

The framers of the Constitution weren't all deists. But all were influenced by that Enlightenment version of divinity, in which God was seen as the ultimate watchmaker, who crafted the universe so cleverly that once set in motion, it would operate on its own without further intervention. They hoped for something similar with their Constitution. The people were the spring, the motive force. The three branches of government were the gears. The checks and balances built into the Constitution were the ratchets and cogs that would keep the mechanism in order and under control.

Things hadn't worked out as planned, as Lowell, writing after the Civil War, was painfully aware. But by the late 1880s the damage done by that conflict had been repaired, and it was possible to revive the original hope. “Circumstances continued favorable, and our prosperity went on increasing,” Lowell wrote. The hope, though bruised by experience, spoke well of America. “I admire the splendid complacency of my countrymen, and find something exhilarating and inspiring in it.”

The founders’ hope is with us still, and it accounts for the faith Americans place in our republican government. If our Constitution goes of its own, it doesn't depend on the genius of each generation to keep it operating. The framers might have been demigods, as Jefferson called them, but subsequent users can be mortals. The machine will guide their ambitions and energies into the channels the framers intended.

The problem is that the model is misleading, in two senses. First, it inaccurately portrayed the past. The machine never did go by itself. It required regular tinkering. The 12th Amendment rejiggered the unworkable original version of electoral voting for president. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 kept slavery from blowing up the Union. And of course the Union did blow up during the Civil War. Six hundred thousand deaths and three constitutional amendments were required to piece it back together.

The model was misleading in a second, forward-looking sense. It tended to absolve citizens of their responsibility for keeping the machine in order. Lowell was dismayed by the corruption of Gilded Age democracy. He blamed Americans’ faith in the constitutional machine for their not maintaining the mechanism. “It is certainly a great privilege to have a direct share in the government of one's country, but it is a privilege which is of advantage to the commonwealth only in proportion as it is intelligently exercised.”

The large population of America by the late 19th century contributed to the neglect. Democracy had emerged in America in New England town meetings, where voters could directly observe the impact of their decisions. “But in a democracy as vast as ours, though the responsibility be as great (I remember an election in which the governor of the state was chosen by a majority of one vote), yet the infinitesimal division of power well nullifies the sense of it, and the responsibility implied in it.”

The second election of Donald Trump was, among other things, a rejection of the idea that our constitutional machine would go of it itself. Many Trump voters believe that the federal government has grown beyond control. Trump’s backers support his post-inaugural assault on various agencies and departments of the government. The constitutional institutions that created this mess are unable to deal with it, they say. The extra-constitutional forces Trump has brought to bear — notably the so-called department of government efficiency headed by Elon Musk — have become necessary to save America.

Trump's strategy might or might not succeed. What the president and his aides have in mind beyond breaking the existing model of government is unclear. A new model? A new constitution? Or will a thorough reboot allow the old machine to resume operation satisfactorily?

He and they aren't saying. Quite possibly they don't know. Sometimes you don't realize how bad the damage to a machine is until you take it apart.

Once apart, though, it can be difficult or impossible to put back together. At which point Americans might decide it wasn't working so badly after all.

 

Posted

Dividing the world:

Spoiler

Dividing the world

Then and now

Feb 17
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In October 1944 Winston Churchill traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. The third member of the wartime Big Three, Franklin Roosevelt, was not present. Churchill intended that he not be. The three had met the previous year at Tehran. They would meet in a few months at Yalta. Churchill wanted a tete a tete with Stalin ahead of that meeting.

The Anglo-American landing in France had succeeded. The British and American armies were advancing on Germany from the west. Their second front had greatly eased the pressure on the Soviet army, which pushed toward Germany from the east. Churchill wanted to talk with Stalin about the shape of Europe after the war.

"Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans,” Churchill said, according to his memoir of the war. “Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?"

The translator conveyed this to Stalin. While he did so, Churchill jotted the figures on the memo that appears above.

“I pushed this across to Stalin, who by then had heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.”

A silence ensued. “The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table,” Churchill wrote. “At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ ‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin.”

Churchill was right that his agreement with Stalin would seem cynical when it became public. This was why he hadn’t wanted Roosevelt in Moscow. The American president could never agree to such a division of Europe. Roosevelt had preached the war effort as a struggle for the “four freedoms” — of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Consigning millions of men and women to rule by the Soviet Union would make a mockery of Roosevelt and America.

Roosevelt’s alternative to the spheres of influence favored by Churchill and Stalin was the United Nations, based on national self-determination and guaranteed by the principle of collective security. The spheres approach of Churchill and Stalin was indeed cynical, in Roosevelt’s view. And it was dangerously anachronistic, having produced the two world wars. Roosevelt had no intention of letting it produce a third.

Roosevelt never saw the Moscow memo. He died soon after the Yalta meeting of February 1945. Yet at that meeting he sensed what Churchill and Stalin had been up to, and he realized that the United Nations might not become everything he hoped for.

Roosevelt had one aim at Yalta above the others: to win Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan as soon as possible. If the Soviet army could tie down Japanese forces in China, America’s invasion of Japan would be much swifter and less deadly than otherwise.

Stalin’s agreement — to enter the Asian war ninety days after the defeat of Germany — came at a price: a free hand for Russia in Poland. Poland had been the starting point for invasion of Russia three times since the early nineteenth century. The Soviet army currently occupied Poland, and Stalin wasn’t going to evacuate and risk letting Poland fall into unfriendly hands again.

This posed a problem for Roosevelt, for it contradicted his four-freedoms pledge. Yet he deemed Soviet participation in the war against Japan a higher immediate priority than Polish independence. So he settled for a vague statement that free elections would be held in Poland at some time in the future.

It was the best he could do. And when, to no one’s great surprise, it turned out to be unenforceable, it represented a tacit admission that the spheres of influence approach was unavoidable, at least in territory considered crucial by Russia.

The spheres approach broadened as the Cold War set in. The United States built a sphere in the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe and offshore East Asia. The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe and formed alliances with China, North Korea and North Vietnam. (Britain faded from the picture as its empire dissolved after the war, which had bankrupted Britain itself.)

The bipolar division of the world had the great merit of helping prevent World War III. The United States, for the most part, didn't meddle in the Soviet zone. And the Soviets mostly stayed out of the American zone. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was an exception that proved the rule — almost provoking a nuclear war but not quite.

The bipolar division had the serious drawback of leaving millions of unwilling people under Soviet domination. Poland and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact had to make the best of a bad situation. Not until the Cold War ended in the early 1990s was the Yalta promise of democracy for Poland fulfilled.

Briefly the globalist vision of the United Nations appeared to be take hold around the world. The breakup of the Soviet Union created fifteen republics, most of which seemed to head in a democratic direction. The demise of the Warsaw Pact added several more to the democratic ranks. China was growing rich, and many outsiders hoped it would begin to grow free.

The democratic moment passed. Authoritarianism reemerged in several countries of the former Soviet sphere. Russia invaded Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.

The United States objected to Russia’s moves, most notably by sending tens of billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine.

But last week Donald Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin about how the Ukraine war should end. Ukrainian officials did not take part in the conversation. They complained at their exclusion, much as Polish leaders had complained at their exclusion from the Yalta conversations that determined Poland’s fate.

There’s no indication Trump scribbled a memo defining percentages of influence in different countries. Yet the Ukrainians aren't unreasonable to suspect what Churchill called the cynicism of a spheres-of-influence solution.

Will a settlement made over the heads of the Ukrainians bring peace? Perhaps, but only perhaps. The Ukrainians might fight on without American aid.

Will it resolve the underlying differences between the American approach to world affairs and the Russian approach? Maybe. But if so it will be because the American approach has become more like the Russian approach.

Possibly the Churchill-Stalin approach is inevitable. Perhaps in the end the strong do what they can and the weak what they must.

Still, one would hope for a voice proclaiming the opposite. For the time being, it's not coming from America.

 

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Posted

Shock treatment:  

Spoiler

Shock treatment

From Nixon to Trump

Feb 20
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“If Mr. Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon, he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more,” declared the Washington Post in July 1971.

The reference was to an announcement by Richard Nixon that he would be traveling to China. For more than two decades the United States had tried to isolate the People’s Republic of China by denying it diplomatic recognition and pretending that a rival government — on Taiwan — was the true representative of the Chinese people. It had fought two wars – in Korea and Vietnam – to contain China. It had repeatedly denounced China for threatening the world with revolutionary turmoil.

No American had been more vocal in assailing China than Nixon, who commenced his condemnations as soon as Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949. Not least on the ardency of his anti-Chinese pronouncements, Nixon advanced from the House of Representatives to the Senate, then to the vice-presidency and finally the presidency. For Nixon to go to China was to turn the world upside down. “President Nixon, the quintessential Cold Warrior, was changing colors,” said CBS anchor Dan Rather.

In no quarter was the news more jarring than in Japan. The Japanese adopted a label for Nixon’s China reversal and the events that followed: Nixon shokku. Since World War II, Japan had relied on America for defense against China, its historic rival and the country most desirous of revenge for what Japan had done in that war. At America’s insistence during its occupation of Japan after the war, and with America’s promise of protection after the occupation ended, Japan had sworn off militarism. As long as America was as worried about China as Japan was, all would be well, the Japanese reasoned.

Nixon’s announcement threw Japan’s assurance out the window. The American president had already changed his country’s policy regarding South Vietnam. He was drawing down American troops there, leaving the fighting to South Vietnamese forces. It didn’t require a prophet to see that Nixon was abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. Japan appeared to be next.

Reactions elsewhere to Nixon’s China reversal varied. Some of America’s European allies interpreted it charitably, as indicating a more realistic appraisal of the state of the world now that China had consolidated its government at home and was distancing itself from the Soviet Union abroad. Others, though, worried that if Nixon could flip on China he might do the same regarding America’s commitment to NATO. Again, no great foresight was required to guess that Nixon’s opening to China would be followed by gestures toward the Soviet Union. Where would that leave Europe?

As things happened, it left Europe to work out its own relations with Moscow. Nixon's China flip was a prelude to detente — easing of tensions — with the Soviet Union. Nixon attempted a triangular diplomacy with Beijing and Moscow, playing each communist power against the other. He had concluded that America's resources were overcommitted. While liquidating the war in Vietnam, he sought to rein in the arms race with Russia. America simply couldn't afford any longer to carry the burden it had assumed at the end of World War II.

This became apparent in another shocking announcement Nixon made, a month after his China bombshell. The United States was abandoning its postwar promise to support the international monetary system by redeeming dollars for gold. America's trading partners had been willing to accept large quantities of dollars in the belief they could exchange them for gold at will. Nixon slammed shut the gold window, instantly devaluing those foreign-held dollars. The system of interlocking currencies established at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, near the end of World War II never recovered.

The story of the Nixon shocks has resonance for today, as Donald Trump appears embarked on an even more fundamental reordering of American priorities. Trump has openly questioned the value to America of NATO, America's oldest alliance, in a way Nixon never did. Trump's rapprochement with Russia is more threatening to Ukraine than Nixon's China turn was to Japan. There is no gold window left for Trump to close, but he has spoken of refusing to redeem Treasury bonds held by governments he doesn't like.

The world survived the Nixon shocks, albeit with a diminished role for America. The world will probably survive the Trump shocks. If Trump keeps to form, he will declare it a restoration of American greatness. In truth it will be a tacit admission of American weakness.

There's nothing wrong with that. America is weaker — comparatively, which is the only standard that matters in world affairs — than it was a generation ago, just as America was weaker in Nixon's day than it had been in 1945. China today is vastly stronger than it was in Nixon's time. Europe is richer and more coherent. India is a rising power.

Handled well, the Trump repositioning might inject a healthy dose of realism into American foreign policy. Handled badly, it will make a mess. Handled really badly, it could produce a world war.

Shock treatment is unpredictable.

 

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