Friday, July 8, 2022
George F. Will urges that the U.S. Navy break the Russian blockade.
Naval forces — including Britain’s mine-clearing talents (to remove mines Ukraine placed to deter Russian attacks from the sea) — should be promptly employed to break Putin’s illegal blockade before it has its intended effect of mass starvation. If Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling deters the nations supporting Ukraine from using their ample naval competencies to execute a humanitarian policy, his contempt for the West will be ratified, and his appetite for additional aggressions will be whetted.
George F. Will, What would the Russian reaction be, I wonder?
The Breaks.
I know that there will be many people who are relieved, and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed and I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world, but thems the breaks.
Boris Johnson
Thursday, July 7, 2022
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXV. Griner and Russian Law, Senseless Destruction, No. 10 Cat to get new Roommate, Russia threats on Alaska, Where's the followup?
Don't be stupid out there
Russia is not the United States.
Brittney Griner is accused of bringing CBD oil into Russia, supposedly in vape pens.
Did she do it? I don't know.
But what I do know is that Russia isn't the US, where a celebrated athlete would likely get a slap on the hands for a drug violation, and where this isn't one.
Americans seem to believe for some reason that if they fall afoul of the law in a foreign nation, the US should rescue them. The US has no obligation to do that.
And like it or not, other nations have much stricter laws on a host of things than the US does. The US in contrast has lots and lots of laws, which isn't necessarily a good thing either. In part, that leaves Americans with a sort of combined quite contempt and ignorance for the law. We don't know what all the laws are, so we don't tend to worry about them overly much. And people can do some pretty bad stuff and not get punished all that much.
In contrast, there can be real penalties for things in foreign countries. In one Southeast Asian country, for example, people get beat with canes for spitting gum on the street. When I went to South Korea with the National Guard in the 1980s I recall us all being warned that you could be jailed for possessing a Playboy magazine, which didn't bother me as I wasn't going to be running around the Korean Peninsula with one, but that's a much different approach to pornography that the US has.
You get the point.
On Griner, my present understanding is that she plays basketball in Russia as women basketball players make less than male ones in the U.S. So she goes there on the off season, where apparently they are then running their leagues. I get that, and that's not just, but that's not a reason to be careless, if she was. Her minority status, her numerous tattoos, her homosexual status, and her American citizenship all made her a target in a nation where all of those are either very unusual or not at all tolerated. On top of that, there's a war going on.
There's not much the US can do to spring her. The Russians will let her go when holding her no longer serves a purpose.
Senseless Destruction.
Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones.
For those who are not familiar with them, there's a really good episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World about them, identifying the builder and why he did it. For a really brief synopsis, based on memory, a physician who lived in another state built them out of concern that things were going down the tubes and giving his own personal guidance and thoughts on how to avoid going down the tubes in the future.
Frankly, they were very 1970ish.
Why would somebody blow them up?
Apparently, some people believed they were evil, which is silly.
Regarding guidestones, with all the crap going on in the US right now, the builders thoughts probably wouldn't be altered if he were around right now.
Boris Johnson falls.
Americans tend to be so self focused on their own politics, which are distressingly weird right now, that they miss the politics of other nations. On top of it, the American press is phenomenally bad on reporting political events in other nations. Added to that, the press of the subject nations tends to be no better, so you are only left with the suggestion that he did something horrible, with nobody ever telling you what it was. An article in the Guardian, for example, calls him the worst leader the Tories every had, but won't say why.
Canadian changes of power, by the way, are completely that way. It's like the entire topic of the election is a big secret.
Anyhow, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned. He will briefly remain Prime Minister until his replacement is chosen.
Usually this happens following an election with the party in control loses. This, however, was due to an internal revolt in the Conservative Party.
Apparently a lot of this has to do with "Partygate", a scandal in which parties were held at No. 10 Downing Street (as if they were going to be able to keep that secret) which violated COVID restrictions in the UK.
I guess it says something in favor of the British that this would bring a Prime Minister down, whereas in the United States a sitting President would attempt to illegally retain power and nothing happen to him.
Russia threatens Alaska.
One of the Russian strategies to deal with its pathetic performance in Ukraine is to threaten everyone else. Now it is threatening the United States, stating it might fight us to take Alaska back.
Seriously?
Usually, bullies have to win to be credible.
And now. . . ?
I'm not going to bother to name names, but there is a politician in Congress who came on Twitter nearly daily to blame Biden for rising gasoline prices.
Now gas prices have fallen for eight days straight. So is he going on and giving credit?
Yeah. . . right.
From Reddit r/100YearsAgo: July 6th, 1922] The Inquiring Photographer asks women in the Flatiron District if they'd go out with a man who didn't wear a coat and vest.
[July 6th, 1922] The Inquiring Photographer asks women in the Flatiron District if they'd go out with a man who didn't wear a coat and vest.
The mere fact that this question made sense in 1922, and doesn't know, speaks volumes as to the change in standards of dress in a century.
And, keep in mind, air conditioning really wasn't a thing in 1922. So, the Inquiring Photographer was asking this question in July, when it was hot, and the obvious expectation was that any man stepping out with these single women would be wearing a coat and vest, although they seemed to be willing to yield on the question.
Tuesday, July 7, 1942. The sinking of the U-701.
Heinrich Himmler authorized sterilization experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, increasing Nazi barbarity to new perverse levels.
It's hard to appreciate how deeply weird the Nazis truly were. As their reign expanded, and authority deepened, they not only turned to greater levels of killing, but also acts that were more and more perverse on every level.
The U-701 was sunk by a Lockheed Hudson off of Cape Hatteras. This was noted by Sara Sundin in her blog, in which she stated:
Today in World War II History—July 7, 1942: US Army Air Force opens Wideawake Field on Ascension Island. US Army Air Force sinks its first submarine off the US East Coast.
Seven men survived the sinking, including the captain, and were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard. Seventeen has escaped the submarine through the conning tower, of which ten died before being rescued. Another 29 went down with the ship.
While I haven't been noting it, while the Germans were losing submarines in this period, they were also commissioning new ones almost every day. An outside observer would have real reason at this point to ask who was winning the war. Having said that, the human toll of submarine losses, which would ultimately be over 50,000 for the Germans, was truly horrific.
On that topic, the U-457 sank the British fleet oiler FRA Alderdale which had been part of the embattled convoy PQ 17. It had been disabled and abandoned two days prior. The U-355 sank the SS Hartlebury. The U-255 sank the SS Alcoa Ranger. PQ 17 was becoming a major naval disaster.
The U-571 sank the SS Umtata off of Miami. It was under tow for repairs at the time.
Sundin also noted the item about Wideawake Field on Ascension Island and has a further website entry on that here:
Of Terns and Planes: While the armies of democracy battled the armies of totalitarianism, a smaller battle raged between US Army Engineers and a little bird called the sooty tern.
Ascension Island figured most recently in wartime in the Falklands War, when the British, whose possession it is, used it as a military staging area. The United Kingdom continues to maintain communications installations there. During World War Two the use of the island by the Air Force was able to extend the range of airborne protection to convoys on the southern route in the Atlantic.
Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, in a debate in the Canadian parliament on manpower, stated that the government's policy was "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary".
An Overview of Switzerland's M70 & M83 Uniforms and Their Red Camouflage...
The pattern may look funny to some, but frankly the pattern works pretty well in the Rocky Mountain West, and the incredible number of pockets makes the M70 a great hunting jacket.
Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Mid Week At Work. Working at the refinery.
I've never done it.
But it sure was a staple of employment around here for a long time, including when I was young, although the handwriting was already on the wall then.
Casper got its start as a railhead. That is, it was the penetration of the railroad into central Wyoming, not the oil industry, that brought the town about. Nonetheless, even from its earliest days dreams of petroleum riches dominated the economic thought of the town, overshadowing the actual industries that were here at first.
Starting as early as the 1890s, however, local oil exploration brought refining to Casper. And World War One caused it to explode. We've written about that here:
1917 The Year that made Casper what it is. Or maybe it didn't. Or maybe it did.
As we've already addressed this topic, to a large degree, I'll forgo doing that again in depth. But I will note that for decades here, indeed most of the 20th Century, petroleum refining provided good, blue collar, industrial jobs at good wages for local people.
And that's exactly how it went. People graduated from high school, or perhaps attended junior college for a while, and then found work at one of the three refineries. They were trained there and worked their way up in classic blue collar occupations, like being a machinist, for example.
The loss of those jobs, for the most part, has made a permanent change in the economics of the town, and in its culture as well. Refining, save for the remaining Sinclair refinery, has been decoupled from production. Jobs that offered stable careers. . . they keep refining even during a recession, have gone away, with many of the remaining blue collar jobs centered in oil and gas exploration, which is very much subject to the fluctuations in the petroleum economy.
Monday, July 6, 1942. An overall good day for the Axis.
U.S. Army issued map of the state of the war for this week, coming out this week in 1942.
Life magazine, hitting the stands on this day, featured the Stars and Stripes on its cover.
Today in World War II History—July 6, 1942: Anne Frank’s family goes into hiding in Amsterdam. Japanese forces land on Guadalcanal to build an air base. British First Army is activated.
All significant in their own way, with the first of course being tragic.
The Royal Air Force sank the U-502 in the Bay of Biscay using a Wellington equipped with a high powered spotlight. While seemingly a simple device, the equipping of aircraft with the lights would cause the German Navy to have to recharge submarine batteries during the day.
Otherwise, the Germans had a good day in the Battle of the Atlantic. And in Case Blue as well, although the Soviets now concluded that the German effort was towards the Caucasian oilfields and not towards Moscow. The Germans took Voronezh
Thursday, July 6, 1922. Casper and Oil
The big news in Casper was that the Texas Company, generally referred to as Texaco, was coming to Casper. It would build a refinery on the edge of what became Evansville, referred to in these articles as the lands belonging to the Evans Holding Company.
The refinery was one of three in operation here when I was young, including the giant Standard Oil Refinery and the Sinclair Refinery, the latter of which had been built originally by Husky Petroleum. Only the Sinclair Refinery remains in operation. The Texaco refinery closed in 1982. The Standard Oil Refinery closed for good in 1991.
Breaking off the trail at the last possible moment.
Years ago, the Trib used to run a paid column on Sundays by a local Protestant minister. I can't recall what denomination he was in, but it was over in the Anabaptist end of things.
It was always interesting, as the author was clearly really going down the trail of the early Church, and he'd follow it week after week consistently. . .right up until it suddenly didn't go where he wanted. So, for example, he'd note Christ's commission to the Apostles, how Peter was the head of the early Church, and come within a hair of adopting the principal of Apostolic Succession. . . before he'd suddenly break off. Or he'd take a look at the Last Supper, start going down the road of Transubstantiation, and then suddenly break off.
It's a very human trait.
Some time ago, on Twitter, I subscribed to Robert Reich's Twitter feed, and I'll occasionally read his articles. They're interesting on economics.
Reich is solidly in the old school, "progressive", left wing of the Democratic Party. I note that, as he can't get over it.
He'll start following a trail of economic thought, and how the economy in his argument is dominated by the few, how that needs to stop, how average people need more control of the economy, and get right up to the brink of Distributism. . .and then break off. Taxes are the solution, he argues.
Well, they have to be. After all, that's the progressive solution for, well, nearly everything.
Robert. Your inner Distributist is trying to visit with you. That's Chesterton's cigar you're sensing late at night . . .
Mitt Romney in the Atlantic
Mitt Romney has an article in the Atlantic that really ought to be read, on the topic of ignoring signs and trends.
Well worth reading.
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Friday June 5, 1942. PQ 17 scatters.
Ships in embattled convoy PQ 17 ordered to scatter, and the escorts ordered to return to the UK.
Rommel halts the offensive of the Afrika Korps due to material losses and logistical problems, combined with effective British resistance at El Alamein.
Axis forces reached the Don.
Wednesday July 5, 1922. Chapter 4 of the Great Gatsby.
In the novel The Great Gatsby, today is the date on which Nick recounts the guest list.
In Brazil, the first of the Tenente rebellions began, in which junior army officers rose up. In this case, they demanded agrarian and distributist reforms.
The Second Sino-Japanese War: Every Fortnight
A person might not the comparisons that could be made in this highly interesting video, with Germany in Russia in 1917 and 1918.
I.e., what's the point of taking ground in mainland China if the U.S. Navy is about to sail into Tokyo Bay?
Snake Oil
Note: This post was originally written, and then not published, in 2019. It's actually not finished, and frankly I hesitated to publish it, but I'm putting it up now, as its more or less written.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Charles DeFate, who wasn't an Indian, holding a bottle of Montana Indian Remedies, which weren't Montana Indian remedies. There's so much wrong in this photo, it's hard to state where they actually begin. Insulting to Indians. Insulting to Intelligence. And Insultling to Science. But Americans still buy off on crap like this.
Why do Americans continually fall for such non scientific unadulterated baloney?
Not a day goes buy where I don't get a pile of spam emails that advertise complete crap that's being sold as miracle cures or ways for lazy people to gain health or loose weight. It's simply amazing. But then, by the same token, turn on your television during the day time (which I don't really recommend) and you'll be assaulted by the same type of material.
A person would think that, in 2019, with science having advanced so much even since the last mid century, that people would run fleeing from science into complete bogosity, but they do. And the number one way they seem to is in the bogus fad. To given just a few examples, here's a selection of spam email stuff or topics that I receive almost every day:
CBD Oil
"Essential Oils"
"Fit Freeze Ice Cream"
"Keto Bread"
this is truly amazing...
“51-Year-Old Mom Shocks the World When She Loses 42 Lbs Eating ICE CREAM Every Single Day!”
Who Else Wants To Plug A Wire Into The Ground And Produce Electricity (It's Real)
It's truly reached the complete bullshit level.
Let's start with something that should be obvious. You, if you are reading this, are a human being. When exactly our species (homo sapien sapien) got up and running isn't completely clear, but it's a long darned time ago and I have no doubt that archaic members of our species, the Cro Magnon's, were around earlier than we suppose and also, frankly, a lot like more of us than some would like to suppose.
Moreover, we're evolved to fit a pretty wide eco niche, but an eco niche nonetheless. Almost all of our modern physical and for that matter mental problems are due to our having left what we were evolved to do and that we're occupying a false eco niche that's unhealthy for anyone or anything.
Your DNA expects you, in other words, to be out there (truly out there) doing the things you were evolved to do, an awful lot of which has to do with acquiring the food you are supposed to eat the way you were supposed to eat it. Mess with that much and you end up overweight and overwrought.
And there isn't much doubt we're both of those things.
In other words, living in a pathetic plastic environment will lead you, pretty soon, to think that somebody like Billie Eilish actually has a point on something and actually is interesting. She doesn't, and she isn't. She's just a messed up 17 year old.
Don't do that.
That's a mild example, of course. There are a lot more than that. People who lament our current era in comparison to the past can legitimately state that our society is about as messed up and confused psychologically and morally as it has been at any point since the 1st Century, with it getting more messed up and confused by the day.
Okay, taking that down a bit further, you were evolved to live in a certian environment and eat certain things. Do that as closely as you can, and you'll be a long ways towards a healthy existance, and a more pleasant one that you might otherwise lead.
Which takes us to some things that should be obvious.
Ignoring the above, and science, and proceeding with baloney cures and diets isn't going to do anything for you.
Let's start with the fad diet.
At anyone time there's a fad diet going on. Some of them are more enduring than others, and some actually have some science behind them. A lot don't.
I"m constantly meeting people who are on "clenses" and other pseudiscientific food based pursuits.
Your liver is busy "detoxing" things all the time. The concepth that if you do this or that you are detoxing your body in some scientific beneficial ways is crap. That doesn't mean that you should continue to injest stuff that makes your liver work overtime. You aren't a polar bear, for instance, that has a heavy duty liver going for it. So you shouldn't be boozing it up every day by any means.
But drinking lime infused cucumber water, or whatever, doesn't do anyting other than put your kidneys to work. It isn't going to detox a darn thing. If you feel it is, it's probably because you were on a diet of Ho-Hos and Bud Lite to start with. Not eating crap and drinking 50 gallons of beer a day is why you might feel better.
Likewise, almost every fad diet really has some serious questions surrounding them.
The fad diet de jure is the Keto Diet, or more properly the Ketogenic Diet.
If you don't know something about Keto, it probably means that you are working at the Starbucks in Jonchon, North Korea and don't get around much, as everyone else in the entire globe has heard of it and, right now, about 75% of the people in the Western world are on it or claiming to be on it. Basically, the diet is a high fat, portein based, low carbohydrate diet that came about as a treatment for epileptic children who were otherwise hard to treat. As the diete is low in carbohydrates the body is forced to consume fats rather than the carbohydrates that hte body would normally turn into glucose. If there aren't very many carbohydrates hanging around the liver is forced into convering fats itno fatty acids and ketone bodies.
That's all well and good, I suppose, for the treatment of epilepsy, but what does it have to do with losing weight? Well, at least at first, people do.
There are scientific reasons for that, but let's state a couple of obvious oddities first. The first is that all you are really doing with this, in some ways, is unnaturally replicating what you would pick up with a natural killetarian diet anyhow.
Now, I'll be frank, I'm not in the "red meat will kill you dead" camp by any means. Indeed, for a vareity of reasons we're heavy on meat consumption in this house anyhow. I have another thread lingering in the hopper on this topic. But I'm also not in the eschew bread and never ever look at it again camp.
Indeed, to really be on the Keto diet you have to eschew all carbohydrates which includes bread. Oddly I've heard some people on the diet claim that you can drink alcohol, but I can't see hwo that could possibly be true. Still, having looked into it extremely briefly apparently you can drink hard alochol and some wines. It must be beer you can't, maybe. I'm not gong to bother studying it.
Anyhow, the problem I have with this thesis is that first of all it forces your body into a state that it's not naturally in, which strkes me as a bad idea, and secondly, bread has been a human staple for so long we have no long how long that is.
We know now that human beings have been harvesting wild grains, pounding it into flour, and baking it millenia. People took up making bread before they took up farming. Entire cultures lived on mostly bread (not a very good idea either) for centuries. If bread was going to badly blimp up everyone all of Europe would have looked like hot air balloons for all the Middle Ages.
Now, obviously that's absurd because people were engaged in heavy labor all the time and food was short so they burned off what htey were eating and didn't eat that much in hte first palce so. . .
hmmm. . . wait a minute. . . .
Exactly.
I only know one person really well who had adopted the keto diet to loose weight, and really needed to loose weight. Taht person lost a lot at first, and the it stopped.
No suprise there.
Your body was evolved for feast and famine in the first place, and that's what's going on there. At some point the DNA, I suspect, overrides everything else and decides to ignore what's going on and the progress ends. Too many calories in. . . not enough calories out.
And while I'm definately not in the "red meat is going to kill you" camp, it's difficult for me to beleive that what I see people on the keto diet eating is really a great idea. Three full meals of nothing but fatty meat? Can that really be good for you?
It might not be harmful if your job burns off a zillion calories a day, but otherwise, there's some reason to question that. Indeed, simply by observation it's long been noted that American Southerners die younger than those elsewhere, and that the high fat diet has something to do with that.
So in the end, again, eating a more natural diet, including raising it yourself and harvesting it, including the ribeyes, is probably a better way to go.
Before I trail off from this, however, I will note that I do think that the Intermittant Fasting diet, assuming a person is healthy enough for it, probably is backed up by science as eveolutionary biology woudl completely support it. In a state of nature, we rarely got full square meals a day.
I'm not going to go into depath on intermittent fasting, but I'll note that I've seen and experienced that working simpply by acciddent. For whatever reason, at some points in my own life I haven't gotten three square meals a day and when that was the case, I really lost weight.* And others I've known who do that, most who are simply indifferent to foods, experience the same thing on occasion.
That's a rather obvious calorie in, calorie out, type of things, we'd note.
So there's something to that, and its not a weird offense to nature. Combine that with a natural diet as noted, and you probably are doing as well as you can.
And what would that natural diet be? Well Michael Pollan claims its to "eat real food, mostly vegetables". I don't eat that way, but if I had my ruthers I'd eat all food I raised or caught. That would create a problem with my long suffering spouse so we don't quite make that, but I would if I could. So, using the killetarian phrase I've heard elsewhere and used here, I'd go with stuff I hunted for, fished for, and raised, except when I couldn't. That seems the scientifically sound diet to me.
Well, what about supplements?
M'eh.
Now, there are people who need very legitmately dietary supplements. It seems to me that when I was a kid every kid on earth took vitamins of some kind and ours did when they were young. I get that. But for some reason a lot of adults feel they need supplements that are of a highly dubious nature. And right now dubosity is in full flower with "essential oils" and "CBD Oil".
Let's start with "essential oils".
There aren't any. None whatsoever.
Oh, that's not true, some oils really are essential. In our current economy, petroleum oil is, for example, essential. Mineral oil is needed for machinery.
If you aren't a car or a machine, however, there's no such thing as essential oils.
The entire oncept is amazingly dubious, but people buy off on it, even educated people, for some reason. I think the reason is a deep seated yearning for the natural combined iwth a modern "I never get outdoors" lifestyle. In their heart of hearts the exponents of "essential oils", who are almsot all women, imagine themselves living out a scense such as depicted in the numerous Soviet Realism paintings in which buxom Russian lasses work in agriculture in bare feet, those bare feet sopping up gallons of essential oils
Soviet realist paining of farm women soaking up essential wheat and barely oil through their feet. . . or something like that.
Well, that's bunk.
If you want your body to have the essential anything it's supposed to have, eat what you are supposed to eat and avoid what you aren't supposed to eat. If it comes from a processing plant that involves something other than squashing it, you probably ought not to eat it.
That's about it.
Among the oils that are now subject to a craze is "CBD Oil".
CBD Oil is, of course, part of the overall Everything Marijuana Craze that the US is now fully engaged in, a fad being fueled in part because of its illegal (under Federal law) status and the accompanying fact that its real effects can't accordingly be studied. In spite of hte fact that the scientific data on nearly everything hemp related is completely lacking, the public is now being sold on an endless series of wild claims for the product that aren't backed up by anything other htan marketing . . .just like tobacco once was.
*I don't really get three full squares now. I'm not a big person and I don't eat lunch everyday. Oddly enough, if I do, it's simply as a vehicle to get a mid day break from working or because I happen to be home and there's food. I never eat a large noon meal as a rule, and on the rare occasions I do, it wipes me out for the rest of the day. I don't eat much of a breakfast either and if I do, it's usually breakfast cereal with no sugar, which is about the only time I consume milk as I don't really like milk much.
Shabbiness and reality.
When you’re real, shabbiness doesn’t matter.
The Velveteen Rabbit
This is a debatable proposition, actually.
Monday, July 4, 2022
Tuesday, July 4, 1972. The Koreas ponder reunification.
North and South Korea announced that they had agreed to discuss reunification. Their joint statement held:
The July 4 South-North Joint Communiqué
4 July 1972
Recently, talks were held in Pyongyang and Seoul to discuss the problems of improving SouthNorth relations and of unifying the divided country.
Lee Hu-rak, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in Seoul, visited Pyongyang from May 2 - 5, 1972, and held talks with Kim Young-joo of the Organization and Guidance Department of Pyongyang; Vice Premier Park Sung-chul, acting on behalf of Director Kim Young-joo visited Seoul from May 29 - June 1, 1972, and held further talks with Director Lee Hu-rak.
With the common desire of achieving the peaceful unification of the nation as early as possible, the two sides engaged in a frank and openhearted exchange of views during these talks, and made great progress towards promoting mutual understanding.
In an effort to remove the misunderstandings and mistrust, and mitigate the heightened tensions that have arisen between the South and the North as a consequence of their long period of division and moreover, to expedite unification, the two sides reached full agreement on the following points.
1. The two sides agreed on the following principles as a basis of achieving unification: First, unification shall be achieved independently, without depending on foreign powers and without foreign interference. Second, unification shall be achieved through peaceful means, without resorting to the use of force against each other. Third, a great national unity as one people shall be sought first, transcending differences in ideas, ideologies, and systems.
2. In order to ease tensions and foster an atmosphere of mutual trust between the South and the North, the two sides have agreed not to slander or defame each other, not to undertake military provocations whether on a large or small scale, and to take positive measures to prevent inadvertent military incidents.
3. In order to restore severed national ties, promote mutual understanding and to expedite independent peaceful unification, the two sides have agreed to carry out numerous exchanges in various fields.
4. The two sides have agreed to actively cooperate in seeking the early success of the SouthNorth Red Cross talks, which are currently in progress with the fervent support of the entire people of Korea.
5. In order to prevent the outbreak of unexpected military incidents, and to deal directly, promptly, and accurately with problems arising between the South and the North, the two sides have agreed to install a direct telephone line between Seoul and Pyongyang.
6. In order to implement the above items, to solve various problems existing between the South and the North, and to settle the unification problem on the basis of the agreed principles for unification, the two sides have agreed to establish and operate a South-North Coordinating Committee co-chaired by Director Lee Hu-rak and Director Kim Young-joo.
7. Firmly convinced that the above items of agreement correspond with the common aspirations of the entire Korean people, all of whom are anxious for an early unification, the two sides hereby solemnly pledge before the entire Korean people to faithfully carry out these agreed items.
Upholding the instructions of their respective superiors S
Lee Hu-rak
Kim Young-joo
A similar communiqué has been issued at least one additional time.
Today, in 2022, prospects for reunification are dim, and frankly they may well be moving further, even permanently, apart. In 1973 when this statement was issued, many Korean had lived in a unified state. Now, many fewer have, and its becoming fewer every day. South Korea is a modern, capitalist, democracy, and younger South Koreans have waning interest in reuniting with the communized backwards north.
The news of the day:
Saturday, July 4, 1942. The first wartime Independence Day since 1918.
The National Publishers Association orchestrated United We Stand Campaign basically hit the newsstands today as the country's weekly magazines all featured patriotic covers.
The country also engaged in the usual 4th of July festivities, such as this gathering in Saint Mary's County, Maryland. Having said that, the 4th was dampened both by the war, and by President Roosevelt's directive that fighting the war should be the focus of the day, rather than celebration.
War related tasks went on.
Aircraft spotters assistants, Dentsville Maryland.
Closer to home, I don't know what occurred on this Saturday of 1942, other than that the day would have been observed somehow.
President Roosevelt had issued a desire to see U.S. forces in action on this day, if at all possible. As a result, the 15th Bombardment Squadron participated in a raid on the Netherlands, thereby making it the first US Air unit to bomb occupied territory in Europe. The low level daytime raid was conducted with British DB7 bombers (A-20s), with the American crewmen borrowing British aircraft.
The A-20 was the most produced attack bomber of the war, even though to a large degree its forgotten now. It served in multiple air forces, including the US, the British, and the Soviet air arms.
The American Volunteer Group, the "Flying Tigers", were converted from a mercenary bad serving Nationalist China in the war against Japan, to the China Air Task Force of the United States Army Air Corps. Almost all of the pilots chose to be released, however, so they could go on and return to their prewar service, or join the service, and fly elsewhere.
A debate between Hitler and General von Bock results in Von Bock prevailing in his desire to commit the 4th Panzer Army to an assault on Voronezh, but the infantry is sent south without support towards Stalingrad.
The gas chambers commenced operation at Auschwitz. This was in part a result of recent German battlefield successes, as the Germans had now taken in so many Eastern European Jews that they could not kill them efficiently enough.
Torpedo bombers harass Convoy PQ17 in the Barents Sea all day, sinking three of the cargo ships in the embattled convoy.
Tuesday, July 4, 1922. Independence Day.
It was, of course, Independence Day, and parades and celebrations took place in communities across the country, such as this one at Takoma Park, Maryland.
Bauer, who became engaged in college to future television host Ed Sullivan, went on to swim in the 1924 Olympics. The marriage did not take place, however, as she died at age 23 of cancer.
At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the Marines reenacted the pivotal day of the battle.
The last race at the Tacoma Speedway took place.
The Usual Suspects. Why the "big change", really isn't.
I'm quoting here from a recent article in The Lamp, the link to which is on the side of our blog.
It's well worth reading.
And it's not the only such article. The one by conservative columnist Jonathan Turley is as well.
To listen to the politicos, this is going to be a huge, huge issue that will drive people flocking to the polls in November. Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, born a Catholic, Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, and Nancy Pelosi, another practicing Catholic, have so aligned themselves with the left wings of their parties they are in open rebellion against a tenant of their faith, that all life is valuable.
On the flipside, recently Tribune had an article in which it discussed if Wyoming's trigger law, which has yet to actually be fired, will be modified to eliminate some of the exceptions that are now in it.
Whatever a person thinks on this one way or another, much of this has a certain "the Usual Suspects" aspect to it. Interviews always turn to the extremes.
Chances are high, again, no matter what a person thinks of it, that much more of the country just went home on Friday night, enjoyed the weekend, and then returned to work on Monday without getting too worked up about it. Their lives, won't really change.
Indeed, hardly noted in this at all, in real terms not that much will probably actually change, whether it should or not. Turley noted in his column:
Putting aside the legal changes, there are major technological changes since 1973 that will impact the post-Roe world. Roughly 60 percent of abortions today are carried out at home, not in clinics, using pills with mifepristone and misoprostol to abort a pregnancy. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration permanently removed the in-person requirement for these prescriptions and allowed women to access the drugs via telehealth appointments and online pharmacies. It will be difficult for states to interfere with such prescriptions, particularly if the federal government protects such access.
I've wondered about that. Fifty years ago, when the court that ineptly penned Roe wrote its opinion, it wrote it with the odd hubris so common of the 1970s that science had reached its pinnacle. We'd discovered the truth of everything, and we could now close up shop with finality. Not so much, it turned out.
Anyhow, states whose legislatures elect to put restrictions or bans on abortion in what we call the democratic process will cause surgical abortions to be outlawed. But can they act on pharmaceuticals that do terminate infants? That's not so clear, at least to me, as the Federal government controls the field on drugs, for the most part. So the killing may very well go on, but in the sort of remote way that killing via drones does. People don't have to watch it happening.
So for those opposed to abortion, who have been well motivated and dedicated all these years, the cause no doubt goes on.
Does it for those wildly in favor of the streets running red? Probably not.
The Lamp noted about the actual nature of the protests in Washington, D. C. the following:
Quite the opposite was true for those who did remain outside the court. They were not shocked, but they were angry. About an hour after the decision was announced, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strode into the crowd, wearing an impeccably brushed pink suit, and led the gathered people in a series of chants. “Into the streets! Into the streets! Into the streets!” she said, before her security escort led her away. That exhortation, which was repeated many times over throughout the day (and deep into the night) largely fell flat. Some people did turn out to protest, but they were the same people who come to nearly every demonstration in Washington, D.C. After Ocasio-Cortez left, I began keeping a list: there was Don Folden, who uses protests to advertise his tourism business; Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, washed-up controversialists from the Trump era; Grayson Quay, who uses these events to “debate” pro-choice activists. Many more activists from groups such as ShutDownDC and Extinction Rebellion padded out the crowd, handing out signs and stickers. An ice cream truck’s loudspeaker cut through all the noise, blaring “Greensleeves,” which at times drowned out the chanting.
From The Lamp, Why The Streets Were Quiet After Dobbs.
The usual suspects nature of these protests were really missed. I've noticed this locally myself, regarding protests.
If you have a left wing protest, you get the same collection of reliably left wing protesters to show up. They come to all of them.
We don't have many right wing protests here, but I do note that if you want right wing commentary, you can depend on the same handful of people to make a comment.
This really begs the question if these people really think out their positions at all. It can't possibly be the case that the same people who turned out last month for some left wing cause are all 100% radically opposed to Dobbs. And I know it's the case that many who are very strongly opposed to abortion are actually in the left or middle on many other issues.
Some of the really nasty predictable prejudices came out right away, including some who instantly attacked the Catholic Church. Catholics are a minority in the United States, and if several Catholic justices voted in favor of the Dobbs opinion at least one fallen away one voted against it, and another wouldn't have gone as far. And the opinion, while no doubt supported by adherent Catholics, isn't a Catholic one. It would be perfectly possible to hold, as a Constitutional matter, that there is a natural right to life, and therefore abortions should not be left up to the states, but banned as a Constitutional matter. The justices didn't hold that, but that would be much closer to the Catholic opinion.
Nonetheless, one of the nation's original prejudices, anti Catholicism, came right out in some quarters. This has the same usual suspects aspect to it, as the same group would blame the Catholic Church for the grocery store being out of mint filling Oreo cookies in a debate.
The "it's only the first step" argument that those on a losing side of an argument constantly advance also came out in droves. As Turley noted:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Vice President Harris and other Democrats continue to claim that the court was taking the country back to the last century. The image of criminalized homosexuality, marriage bans and contraception limits is unnerving — but also untrue.
In the Dobbs decision, the court’s majority expressly, repeatedly rejects the application of this holding to these other rights. Indeed, it is relatively rare to see the court go to this extent to proactively close off the use of a new case in future cases. The court said that “intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage” are not impacted by its holding because “abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged.” It noted that abortion is unique in dealing with “what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being.’”
Even Thomas, whose comments in his dissent about procedural due process have been emphasized, didn't go as far as people suggest and moderated his own comments.
Funny, nobody seems to be noting that.
This is a common tactic, however. And not just on this. Take for example the gun bill that recently passed Congress. If you listen to some, it's a "gun control bill" (it actually hardly does anything whatsoever), that's just the "first step". No, it isn't. But that's the best argument people can come up with to oppose something that otherwise has no rational opposition to it, other than just flat out saying they are opposed to any legislation on the topic.
The Lamp further noted something really significant here, that being:
More protests of course are expected throughout this weekend and for the rest of the summer. They will get a lot of media attention, and who knows, maybe something memorable will happen at one. But it is unlikely that their organizers will muster the same energy that the movement opposing police brutality summoned two summers ago. While most people in the United States believe that abortion should be legal, very few view it as a positive good, let alone something that merits taking to the streets. The bizarre language of the pro-abortion movement limits its appeal: expelling “invaders” from the bodies of “birthing people.”
Most Americans see abortion as a shameful convenience. For decades that fact worked against the pro-life movement, which, even with the most compelling arguments about the value of human life, still has not converted the country to its beliefs. The Dobbs decision, which for the most part allows abortion to remain a convenience (you can still get pills even in states with restrictive laws) puts the pro-choice movement in a similar bind. Only the die-hards care enough about the issue to do something. Everyone else will grumble but in the end settle for the status quo. As anyone who’s spent his entire adult life surrounded by pro-life activists knows, it’s not a pleasant position.
Turley noted the same thing, stating:
While some Democrats are voicing absolute views of abortion, and some Republicans are calling for total bans, most Americans hold a more nuanced view.
Whether they should or not, this is the case.
And so we'll head into the summer with a lot of political talking heads discussing this, but not much really going on most places that will cause that much angst. States that had precluded abortion in 1973 will for the most part go back to doing so. Those that allowed it in 1973 will still allow it. The debate that was arrested in 1973 when the Supreme Court came up with the absurd Roe v. Wade opinion will resume and there will be advancements and retreats on both sides. Some of that argument will be really heated.
Make no mistake. I'm opposed to abortion. But I also am old enough to recall the lingering portion of the debate in the late 1970s when the shock of Roe's usurpation of the democratic process, and that is what it was, was still fairly fresh and the debate still going on, and frankly in more honest terms than it is now.
Fish should swim thrice.
They say fish should swim thrice. . . first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
Jonathan Dean Swift
Vox Populi. How we got to the place where one major political party doesn't respect the right to vote. (I.e., neither do).
Note: This was an old draft post that was last worked on way back in June, 2021.
I've got a lot of those.
I'm publishing it now, unfinished, as it still is applicable, and there's no reason to keep it in cold storage. Shoot, I thought I'd posted this one.
__________________________________________________________________________________
I suspect when future historians go back and tell the story of how the early 21st Century US ceased being a real democracy. . . or overcame its troubles to become a more perfect one, the good analysis will be a lot like what I set out here. I.e, not focused solely on the election of 2020 and the insurrection of 2021, but of the history of democracy in the country in general, with a particular focus on the late 1960s until now, the era where democracy really became disrespected and ignored in the country.
This all started when I was typing out the latest brilliant Zeitgeist installment, and had set out this historical analogy, which isn't unique to me I'd note.
A Caveat
On a Trump focus, a large party of academics has signed on to a letter warning that the GOP's current status in regard to Trump is exactly that which Liz Cheney has warned of, and that the Republican Party cannot be trusted any longer to act democratically.
Even in 2018 that would have been regarded as silly hyperbole but it isn't now. Even one serious Republican figure who regards this as overblown wouldn't reject the warning completely. And added to that Michael Flynn was actually cheered by a group of Republicans for suggesting a military coup.
A coup of that type isn't going to happen, as Trump is no longer really favored by members of the military for one thing and their institutional culture will not allow for it. But its clear that there was a surprising amount of Republican sympathy for legal maneuvering and there still is. The warning is that "when" the Republicans get back in power, they'll do the same to attempt to keep power.
It's easy to dismiss that but there is a surprising amount of remaining belief in the stories Trump told about the election being stolen and now he's even circulating the fantasy that he's going to be "reinstated" to office.
There are really some historical lessons that should be kept in mind here.
One I've reminded readers of here before. The failure to prosecute Richard Nixon set us up for things like this and should be forever regretted.
And so might the failure, so far, to prosecute Donald Trump for sedition.
That's a bold statement, but advances into autocracy and authoritarianism aren't giant leaps, but smaller steps. Germany didn't just vote for the Nazis and the disaster of the Third Reich commenced. Not by a long shot.
Rather, German conservatives couldn't stomach the societal developments, which included real hardcore left wing threats, brought about by the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1918. That brought about support for extrajudicial killings that occurred in 1919 and 1920. Those killers killed Germans in the name of defending Germany, which really meant that they felt that their definition of Germany, and not somebody else's, was the only one that counted. The Kapp Putsch was attempted and failed and then the Beer Hall Putsch followed and failed as well, with light punishment being the only thing meted out. If, we have to wonder, Weimar Germany had imprisoned the prime movers of the Beer Hall Putsch to the full extent of the law, would the Third Reich have arisen? Probably not.
That's an extreme example, of course, but its sort of what Cheney is warning us about, and now academics, and its what Republicans really want them to shut up about, in the hopes that Trump just goes away. The scary thing is that there are now some rank and file street level Republicans who don't think that left wing Americans are real Americans.
Which brings us back to this. There are more voters in Dayton Ohio than in all of Wyoming. The leadership of the state GOP, in listening principally to itself, really ought to think about that.
But in thinking about it, it occurred to me that the analysis, while not incorrect, was deeply lacking something. Something vaguely referenced in our introductorily paragraph and something we've dealt with here before.
So the question is, how did we get here, and who is to blame?
Set out in greater detail, how did we get to the place where one political party (representing, we should note, less than 25% of American voters), has a sizable body (but probably less than half of its rank and file), who no longer hold democracy as a central tenant of their political faith, and are comfortable with extralegal means of attempting to hold power and dictate results?
Turns out, in thinking about it, that' s been the case for at least forty years, and it isn't presently one party.
It's both of them.
And that the biggest single political problem the country faces today.
A history of troubled democracy
If you read contemporary press reports, you'll get the impression that it's "never" been the case that one of the two major political parties has been an opponent of democracy. This simply isn't true.
Of course, if you read the latest revisionist history of things, particularly the woke element, you'll get the idea that the United States was founded as an autocratic slavocracy built on the backs of oppressed people.
That really isn't true either.
But we do have to deal with something here and acknowledge it and start there. And that is that the Democratic Party, the world's oldest political party, and the one that stands for the preservation of American democracy right now than any other major party, didn't start off that way. Indeed, in a lot of ways, indeed scary ways, the Democrats in the South prior to 1980, which isn't long ago, most closely resembled the GOP we see now. That same party, prior to 1865, was the proponent of the concept that an entire native born group of people, African Americans, had no rights really whatsoever. After the Civil War it continued to be a dedicated adherent of that position, something it gave up only with a titanic struggle that finally came to an end in the 1970s. You can find plenty of examples of Southern Democrats outright declaring that blacks had no right to vote, and lots of dedicated efforts to keep them from doing just that.
So saying we've never been here before. . . well that's just flat out wrong. It's even wrong if you take the view that what we mean by this that there's never been a party that had that position nationwide. They did, at least up until 1865, and really after that.
That sets the historical framework for what we're discussing, and experiencing today, but not in the way that people want to grasp it.
The leftwing rejection of democracy
If you read a columnists rendition of this today, from a conventional columnists or one in the center or left of center, in other words, what you'd next read is that the Reagan Southern of 1980 changed all of that, freed the Democratic Party from Southern racism and converted it into the modern fully democratic (small d) party of today. That's not true, however.
The election of 1980 did pretty much end the Southern Democrats, but that process had been on for awhile, and bizareely, applying the dred law of unintended consequences, it formed the root of what's going on today in a way that simply wasn't initiailly predictable.
It was the Democratic Party which ironically did more to end southern institutional racism than any other party. The Republicans had been solidly for civil rights their entire existance, but after the compromise in the 1870s, their support was largely symbolic as very few people in the South ran as Republicans and those who did have no hope of success. Indeed, the entire South, politically, resembled Wyoming today. It had one party, pretty much, and members of the minority party tended to be ethnically identifiable. In other words, southern Republicans, for decades, were black. Most blacks, after awhile, simply didn't bother to register to vote at all for that matter, as Southern Democratic legislatures had put too many roadblocks in their way to doing that.
Sound familiar?
Effectively, therefore, the South was a one party series of thirteen states after the Civil War that was hostile to minority voting and which had a structure rigged to prevent it. We cannot say that the southern states weren't democratic, but democracy in the South was extremely flawed.
Democrats were comfortable with this until New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the Oval Office in 1932. Roosevelt depended on the southern vote, but as he wasn't a southerner, and was a liberal, he was hostile to racism. He also had opportunities that other Presidents had not, as he could depend on the southern vote while at the same time knowing that it was never threatened due to the Great Depression.
Roosevelt did not, as has often been noted, strike heavily at institutiaonl racism in an overwhelming way. But he did more than he's generally been given credit for. If nothing else, he created an atmosphere of equality that was very much part of the New Deal era. Southern Democrats couldn't be comfortable with Roosevelt in that regard, and for that matter were pretty much generally uncomfortable with him.
It was Truman, however, who was a Missouri Democrat and whose early political career had a slight association with the Klu Klux Klan via support from the Prendergast Machine who really started the blows. Truman integrated the military, or more properly reintegrated it, with executive orders starting in 1948. He struck blows at school segregation as well. This laid the groundwork for Republcian Dwight Eisenhower to advance what Truman had started. While we don't think of Eisenhower as a Civil Rights crusader, in fact he was strong in his advancement of civil rights during his tenure. John F. Kennedy picked up where Eisenhower had left off and then Lynden Johnson, another southerner fully dedicated his efforts to the cause. Between 1948 and 1968, a mere twenty years, a series of three Democratic administrations and one Republican ones had overthrown the white Democratic autocracy in the South and brought full democracy to the region for the first time.
Democratic use of the courts were a central facet of this effort. While dramatic things like executive orders and sending in the military tend to be what is recalled most readily in a visual age, it was due to the courts that the civil right bulwark was really established. Courts in this largely Democratic era picked up litigation that had been passed in the wake of hte Civil War and used it aggressively for the first time in a centruy. Seperate but equal, for example, disappeared. Prohibitions on interracial marriage evaporated. The Courts embraced Reconstruction statutes in the way they'd been meant but which had alwayas been fully ignored.
So everything was fixed, right?
Well, regarding instituaionla racism, that's largely true. But something else had occured.
Governing through the courts
The Democrats, and the Republicans for htat matter, had not been able to break southern white autocracy through force of law or even force of arms. It took the courts to do it. Without hte courts, voting rights acts, civil rights acts, and executive orders would have meant nothing and all such measures would hve been at best temporary. But in the use of hte courts, which was fully necessary, the seeds of a new authoritarianism were planted.
The Supreme Court's decisions on civil rights in this era, in regard to race, were fully correct. Indeed, the remarkable thing about them isn't their reviolutionary nature, they weren't revolutionary, but the degree to which prior expressions of hte Supmre Court had simply ignored the law. Had courts in the 1870s through the 1930s applied the law, much of what was achieved in the 1960s would have been achieved decades earlier and American history would read much differently.
The problem was, however, that in order to achieve this goal, administrations increasingly came to appoint jurists who could be reliably predicated to hold legal and political liberal views. And, without reaslizing it, that meant that jurists were being appointed who not only would apply the law in the area of civil rights, but who were fully willing to invent new rights to rework the world as they thought it should be.
The far American left had dreams of doing just htat which dated back at least to the 1920s. Never in the mainstream, the very leftward edge of the Democratic Party had flirted with much more leftwing concepts back that far, and had experimented with them in the 1930s and 1940s. Not really committed to democracy, individuals in that camp believed, much as Marxists did, in the New Man theory of social engineering. People could be constructed, even if only by force, into something they imagined to be better than they were. In doing that, much of the conservative concept of the nature of human kind was simply rejected.
The evolution in the legal world was remarkable. Starting off in the Truman era, the Court struck down racial restrictive housing restrictions in 1948, a remarkably early decision that was fully correct. In 1954 the court struck down segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In Loving v. Virginia the Court held that racial restrictions in marriage laws were unconstitutional, something that was pretty obvious, actually, following Brown.
The first signs, however, that a fundamental shift towards judicial rule had occured came with 1965's Griswald v. Connecticut. In taht case the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the sale of pharmacuetical birth control base don a concept of Constituionally protected privacy. Criticis of the decision have said that hte Court simply made the right to privcay up, but a solid reading of the Constitution would suggest that such a right really is implied and assumed in it.
But what isn't implied and assumed is that such a right extends so far that as long ad pharmaceuticals deal with sex, they're protected by it. That was a wholly new, extra constitutional, and insupportable reading of the Constitution. No such right exists and everyone knew it. The Supreme Court simply created it as the majority felt that such a right should exist.
From Grisald it was a hosrt trip to 1973's Roe v. Wade in which teh Supreme Court once again made a completley legally unsupportable decision based on a supposed right to privace that went so far that it denied the right of one of hte two parents increating a child and allowed the killing of the same based on a scientifically unsupportable trimester system. Really learned left wing legal scholars today acknowledge that Roe is deeply flawed, but what it did was to fully cement in the concetp that hte Court had an absolute free hand in simply making hte law up. With Roe the Court effectively declared itself to be Plato's body of wise elders, the real rulers of the country. The last major act of this type was the Court's decision in Obergefell which overturned millenia of thought on the anture of marriage simply because Justice Kennedy and his followers thought that's the way the world ought to be. That it was a radical redefinition of an ancient human instution didn't matter to a body that thought itself wiser than teh sum total of human history.
So, starting in 1973, the Democratic Party in particular fully adopted judicial rule, abaonding democratic rule. Democracy was okay for more minor matters, but for serious ones, the courts were the ruling bodies.
Contempt of democracy breeds contempt of democracy
In a democracy there are winners and losers, but in the end, the people are to blame for the loss. This isn't the case in an autocracy.
As early as the mid 1960s there were people who were really worried about what seemed to be a trend of the Court supplanting democracy at the state level with judicial wisdom. Griswald was a warning that the Court had slipped off hte rails and some commentators at the time knew it. 1973's Roe was realized as a complete subversion of democracy, but it sparked a highly democratic response to it. That response was fought, all along, tooth and nail by the Democratic Party in the Courts, knowing that it couldn't be fought in legislatures.
And that framed the contest from 1973 to 2016. Democrats openly warred in the Courts, with liberals and progressives freely making resort to them and being open about it. Courts were promoted as the organs of progressive advancment. If the people wouldn't come along on their own, they'd be forced to against tehir will.
Much of what the Court did from 1973 to 2016 was indeed against the will of the people and while it appears that public sentiment has changed, Obergefell was the last straw for many conservatives. With Obergefell there was no longer any pretending that social issues could really be reliably subject to legislation, or so it was thought. Ironically, as conservatives recognized the danger that anti democratic jurists posed, they'd been working inside since 1980 to find reliable judicial conservatives. That process took decades, but it finally started to pay off by the time that Bush II was President. New decisions on the 2nd Amendment, for example, demonstrated that the tide was turning. Obergefll however demonstrated that it hadn't fully turned.
That it hadn't fully turned is something that caused populists to beleive that it hadn't turned at all. Dealt with in other various threads, populists in both parties had, by 2016, grown completley disgusted with both. Much of htat had to do with both parties completley ignoring their concerns, but some of it had to do with a culture of contempt for democracy.
So let's take a trip to Germany, from 1919 to 1939.
Eh?
Yes, for the historical analogy, and its there.
When Germany came out of the Great War in 1918 it came out a functioning but shakey democracy. It only took, however, fourteen years for the wheels to come off. What happened?
Well, what happened is that the German far left and the German far right didn't believe in democracy. They both conceived of their polar opposites as opponents that had to be crushed if the "German nation" was to survive, which meant that over time they increasingly came to view the opposite not as their fellow countrymen but as invading aliens. By 1932 one of those parties, the Nazi Party, had succeeded in wrapping itself in the German flag and defining nearly everyone else as an attacking alien. The German Communist Party, the KDP, held a similar view about the right wing. The democratic middle became smaller and smaller and fell.
Taht's not a perfect analogy, but it is an analogy. The American hard left started viewing the rest of the country as dupes who had to be dragged into a benighted future in the second half of the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1960s it was fully committed to dragging the entire country there against its will, and against its wishes, and in numerous ways against its culture. Legislation that wrecked the employment of blue collar workers, a contempt for the hard hat class, and the ramming of court decisions down the throats of people who found them offensive to their deepest believes were all acceptable and frankly are still regarded by the left in that way.
The attacked group, which makes up the populist segment of the country, knew that htey were under attack and found refuge in a series of political heroes, with Ronald Reagan being the most prominent, but they were also disappointed by at least all of the post Reagan ones who really didn't hold the same views that they did. George Bush I and II, for example, may have been fully honorable men, and indeed they were, but they aren't people that populists can really admire and they didn't really address the conscerns of that demographic. Indeed, they may ahve operated in at least some ways against it.
Then came Donald Trump.
IIIII
Trump is anti democratic and a demogoge. He believes, more than anything else, in himself, and defines the country as himself. He shares in that sense some of the same features as mid 20th Century demagogues and might be rightly compared to Mussolini or Castro. If you want to be kind, perhaps you can compare him to DeGaulle, except that DeGaulle was extremely intelligent and, as it turned out, a surprising democrat.
Trump has told his supporters, effectively, the same thing about Democrats that Hitler told his supporters about Communists, or Castro told the Cubans about right wing Cubans, or so on. They're hte enemy. And political rhetoric that's been hurled about by both sides for the last decade has supported that concept. Moreoever, in a lot of ways, the progressives of hte left have shown themselves to be dedicated enemies to things that many populists and conservatives, and the two are not hte same, do value. Progressives have shown themselves to be the enemies of religion, blue collar employment, biology and even traditional culture in numerous ways and through numerous examples. When Trump declared that "you are going to lose your country" on the date of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the statement wasn't an idle one and its not completley without merit. Democratic progerssives, if they were left unchecked, would in fact have abortion on demand, open borders and an institutional detestation of western culture. Most of what they're accused of being for, by their opponents, tehy are for. And they're nto really for democracy themselves, as one of the things they depend on is a restoration of judicial rule.
Looked at that way, Trump can be compared to figures like Napoleon and Franco. That is people who come to symbolize the "real" country or even, ironically enough, "liberty, equality and fraternity", while crushing it. Viewed in a them v. us way, his supporters naturally can regard their opponents as illigitimate in an exostential way as, looked at that wya, their views are an attack on the nation and they are undeserving of success.
The first principal of democracy is democracy
And hence the problem.
We've crossed over a threshold we've been climbing since at least 1973. The Juanuary 6, 2021 insurrection was a fundamental change in something that's been going on since that time, and earlier. With judicial rule there was, at the same time, at least a measure of democratic rule and enough democracy that most people could still pretend they were a supporter of functioning democracy. Pundits could pretend that the US was functioning as a democracy as well, and in reality, for the most part, save for really huge issues, it was. Attempting a coup remained unthinkable, and it should have.
If we cannot get back to at least January 5, 2021, and soon, the danger this poses is huge. Prior to this fall's election the first principal of democracy, that is itself, still applied, if imperfectly. Everyone acknoweldged that you didn't really hate yoru political opponent and, no matter what they thought of your views, and you of theirs, you were all Americans in the end. If you lost an election, you lost, and worked towards the next.
Now that's been not only challenged, its been rejected, and rejected by one of the two major political parties.
Where this goes is anyones guess. Elizabeth Cheney, however, is clearly correct. Trump's Republcian Party is a threat to democracy, and if Cheney's GOP can't be restored, we're headed for some scary rapids. Indeed, it it can't be restored, we're in for either an era of mid 20th Century failed state type democracy, or a full return of judicial rule.
Neither of which is a good thing.
And the irony of it all is that Trump's administration actually brought about the end of judicial rule at last.
Trump allowed Mitch McConnell to complete his great project, the restoration of functioning Supreme Court. Through Trump, McConnell, an actual conservative, was able to place jurists on the court who didn't see the law through their won political or social goals as a means to achieve them. This was only secured by McConnell at the bitter end of Trump's administration, and but for Trump's childish assault on the election, it would be his legacy.
That legacy now stands in real jeopardy, at an existential level, as at the very moment that a Supreme Court has come into power which will actually allow for state and national legislatures to decide thins for themselves, on a democratic basis, one political party has decided that it openly doesn't believe in that any more, and would rather rule by decree. In the meantime, the other party, which hasn't really believed in that since the mid 1970s, stands to gain in power as it seeks to overturn the McConnell Supreme Court through its own appointments due to the GOP's collapse as a democratic institution.
What's the way out of her?
Restoring democratic behavior.
Whatever it is, it won't be easy.
Democratic behavior is a democratic habit. DeToqueville observed that the single most notable feature of the American political cultures was a democratic habit. We've always had that, even if we've been working on assulting it for forty or more years now.
Sunday, July 3, 2022
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)