J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 330

The Murder of the Slave Women in the Odyssey

Emily R.C. Wilson: "After one of my recent 'Conversation' interviews (in Sydney), someone asked me if the hanging of the slave women in the Odyssey is 'right'...

...Summarizing my answer here on the recommendation of a friend, because it brings up a key distinction for thinking about any literary text. Literature 101: There are 3 separate questions intertwined:

Do I, Emily Wilson, personally think it's right to murder women because of any sexual behavior, even if they were 100% empowered and responsible for whatever it was? Easy question. No.

Do Odysseus and Telemachus think it's right? Yes, but let's define what kind of "right". Odysseus presents the slaughter of the suitors as just punishment. Murder of the slaves is presented differently: it's about being respected and controlling memories and (re) gaining power. Telemachus switches up the murder instrument (from swords to cable), and introduces a different kind of "rightness": he associates the killing with getting rid of dirt from the house. It's right to take out trash, but not the same kind of "right" as self-defense or vengeance.

Does THE TEXT show (consistently?) that it's right? Tough question, not skippable. Narrative shows us why Odysseus and Telemachus want them dead. It also shows us what it feels like for them to be terrified and strung up (bird simile). They don't feel their deaths as "right". Is their pain & their deaths, and the horrible torture and murder of Melanthius, presented as justifiable in the grand scheme of things���a necessary cost for the restoration of Odysseus's household in something like its original state? Maybe. Maybe not. Important grey area.

I think the capacity of literature to create these kinds of rich complex questions or fault-lines, between what this or that character thinks, and what the whole poem or story might be saying, is one of the biggest reasons why literature matters. It makes us see/feel/be more.

Scholars & translators sometimes want to skip this type of question. The Oxford commentary mostly discusses the mechanics of hanging 12 women on 1 rope. But the representation of ethics matters, for how we read/teach/translate/write/think /live.

Beyond changing the subject, another popular dodge is to appeal to supposed history or biography (if any). Use these "facts" to guess what you think the text should say or do. It saves having to read too carefully. E.g. "Ancient societies were X; therefore the Odyssey Y". This move is extra-bogus for Homer, since Homer isn't an Author, and Homeric Society is a construction from, er, the Homeric poems...

#shouldread
#literature
#moralphilosophy

Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads

Andrew Reeves: "A really, really good sign that someone has read neither Thucydides, Tacitus, Homer, nor Plato is when that person talks about how Greek and Roman literature teach us about the Greatness of the West...

Dave Roberts: American white people really hate being called ���white people���: "They want their America, the America where white dominance is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, back. They keep saying so.... Being judged and asked to justify itself, as so many subaltern groups are judged and asked to justify themselves, feels like an insult. If you doubt that, go read this Twitter thread."

Jared Bernstein: [Trump did a bunch of stuff to strengthen the dollar; now he���s upset about the strengthening dollar(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/p...term=.576fbc1e4803)_: "Trump is annoyed that the Fed is raising rates and that the stronger dollar is making our exports less competitive...

Kevin Drum: We Need to Figure Out How to Fight Weaponized Disinformation: "I���ve been blogging for 15 years, and there���s never been a day when I wanted to stop...

Doug Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest: "The hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after 'the event'...

Cory Doctorow: I was naive: "I've been thinking of all those 'progressive' Senators who said that... Jeff Sessions was a gentleman, honorable, decent���just someone whose ideas they disagreed with. They approved Sessions for AG on that basis, and he architected this kids-in-cages moment...

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos-monkey essence. The smart David Leonhart tries to advise people how to deal with this: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that���s as serious as the threat...

The sharp and well-intentioned Will Wilkinson still thinks that the name "libertarianism" is worth fighting for, or perhaps that "liberaltarianism" is worth fighting for. I, however, for one, think that "libertarianism" is poisoned in the same way that "fascism", "communism", "socialism", and "neoliberalism" are poisoned. Too many bad people have waved their banners in bad faith. In libertarians' case, the bad people waving in bad faith have been those who think that the only rights that matter are the rights to discriminate, to exchange, and to hold what you have no matter how you acquired it. Maybe "positive libertarians" has a chance, maybe not: Will Wilkinson: Liberaltarianism: Back the Future: "Misean economics,... filtered through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard's peculiar views of rights and coercion...

Paul Krugman: Brexit Meets Gravity: "These days I���m writing a lot about trade policy. I know there are more crucial topics, like Alan Dershowitz. Maybe a few other things? But getting and spending go on; and to be honest, in a way I���m doing trade issues as a form of therapy and/or escapism, focusing on stuff I know as a break from the grim political news...

David Brooks explicitly practicing identity politics. What's odd is that Jews are almost always first on the block to be excluded from "Western Europe" whenever someone embarks on the journey that leads to ultimately saying that the only true civilization bearers are the Anglo-Saxons (or the Saxon-Saxons, depending), with the wogs starting at either Calais or Liege, depending. Does he even know that the only sovereigns who made significant outreach to rescue the Sephardim expelled from Spain was named Bayezid II Osmanli?: Yastreblyansky: Identity politics with David Brooks: The wolves are in the henhouse: "David Brooks's hot take on the Trump-Putin summit ('The Murder-Suicide of the West') was that it was like when C.S. Lewis's mother died, not that he was there, it was in 1908, but he's read about it, and it's pretty sad...

Spencer Ackerman: U.S. Officials ���at a Fucking Loss��� Over Latest Russia Sellout: "PERSONA NON GRATA: The White House���s refusal to rule out turning over former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul to the Russians has current and former State Department officials seeing red...."

There are two ways this could go���extending "whiteness" or permanent Republican minority status. In the past, "whiteness" has always been expanded so that it includes a vast majority of the American population���and so now we have people named Mark Krikorian denouncing the threat of a Hispanic wave that will pollute America: Kevin Drum: White Party, Brown Party: "I don���t think that our political system will literally become the White Party vs. the Brown Party, but it���s already closer to this than any of us would like to admit. What���s worse, it���s all but impossible to imagine how Republicans can turn things around in their party. They���re keenly aware of the need to address their demographic challenges, but the short-term pain of reaching out to non-whites is simply too great for them to ever take the plunge. Democrats aren���t in quite such a tough spot, but their issues with the white working class are pretty well known, and don���t look likely to turn around anytime soon either

A Britain led by Theresa May or Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbin will not "rediscover its own way... the Britih re most resilient, most inventive, and happiest when they feel in control of their own future". That is simply wrong. And if it were right, May and Johnson and Corbin are not Churchill or Lloyd-George or even Salisbury: Robert Skidelsky: The British History of Brexit: "I am unpersuaded by the Remain argument that leaving the EU would be economically catastrophic for Britain...

I think Paul Krugman puts his finger on the decline of Niall Ferguson here: Paul Krugman: _"What we have here is an example of a phenomenon I've seen a number of times: the doom loop of hackery...

How much of the forthcoming announcement of an upward bump in GDP growth in the second quarter is due to people battening down the hatches for Trump's trade war, and will be reversed over the course of the next year? That is what we are all trying to estimate right now: Paul Krugman: Trump, Tariffs, Tofu and Tax Cuts: "More than half of America���s soybean exports typically go to China, but Chinese tariffs will shift much of that demand to Brazil, and countries that normally get their soybeans from Brazil have raced to replace them with U.S. beans. The perverse result is that the prospect of tariffs has temporarily led to a remarkably large surge in U.S. exports...

Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of England on the feckless indolence of Britain's reporters: Simon Wren-Lewis: How UK deficit hysteria began: "Monetary policy ran out of reliable levers to manage the economy. However, journalists wouldn���t know that from the Bank of England, who tended to talk as if Quantitative Easing was a close substitute to interest rates as a monetary policy instrument...

Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here���s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...

Paul Krugman: "Maybe it's worth laying out the incoherence of Trump's trade war a bit more, um, coherently...

IMHO, betting that "even the Tory Party can spot a wrong 'un" seems a lot like drawing to an inside straight: Dan Davies: "The hard brexit types have been bounced into deal which has taught them that they're not as clever as they thought they were. Now they'll react to that with a leadership challenge which will teach them that they're not as popular as they thought they were. It's like education in the Montessori system-each little independence of discovery builds on the next..."

Anne Applebaum: Brexit is reaching its grim moment of truth���and the Brexiteers know it: "David Davis... and Boris Johnson.... At no point... have they or any of their Brexiteer colleagues offered what might be described as a viable alternative plan. That is because there isn���t one...

Marcy Wheeler: The Mueller Questions Map Out Cultivation, a Quid Pro Quo, and a Cover-Up: "I wasn���t going to do this originally, but upon learning that the Mueller questions, as NYT has presented them, don���t maintain the sixteen subjects or even the 49 questions that Jay Sekulow drew up from those 16 areas of interest, and especially after WaPo continues to claim that Mueller is only investigating 'whether Trump obstructed justice and sought to thwart a criminal probe into Russia���s interference in the 2016 presidential election', I am going to do my own version of the questions, as released by the NYT. I���m not pretending that this better represents what Mueller has communicated to Sekulow, nor am I suggesting NYT���s version isn���t valid. But the questions provide an opportunity to lay out a cultivation, quid pro quo, and cover-up structure I���ve been using to frame the investigation in my own mind..." https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-mueller-questions-map-out-cultivation-a-quid-pro-quo-and-a-cover-up-part-one-cultivation/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-quid-pro-quo-a-putin-meeting-and-election-assistance-in-exchange-for-sanctions-relief/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/the-quo-policy-and-real-estate-payoffs-part-three/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/04/the-quest-trump-learns-of-the-investigation-part-four/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/07/the-sekulow-questions-part-five-attempting-a-cover-up-by-firing-comey/

John Quiggin: Shibboleths: "I was reminded of... 2011, about when the baton was being passed from Palin to Trump...

IIRC, back when I first read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I thought it was a joke: He spent all this space ranting about how nobody is allowed to make consequentialist arguments, and then makes the consequentialist argument that Lockeian appropriation of pieces of the global commons as private property is fine because it has the consequence of making the world richer? And then there was this: using the Cambridge Rent Control Board to break his contract���his self-actualization as a promise-making autonomous moral being���to extort 30,000 dollars from Eric Segal: Anarchy, State, and Rent Control: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that���s as serious as the threat...

I missed this when it first came through: Lessons from special elections, especially PA-18: Josh Barro: Why Pennsylvania special-election result should terrify Republicans: "Should Democrats seek to build a coalition of college-educated suburbanites plus white urbanites and minorities, or should they try to win back blue-collar white voters...

Isaiah Berlin (1972): [The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism](http://delong.typepad.com/isaiah-berl..." title="Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf" alt="Isaiah Berlin 1972 The Bent Twig">Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf): "THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time...

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that���s as serious as the threat...

Alex Barker and Peter Campbell: Honda faces the real cost of Brexit in a former Spitfire plant: "Honda operates two cavernous warehouses.... They still only store enough kit to keep production of the Honda Civic rolling for 36 hours...

Josh Rogin: On Twitter: "In a private meeting, Swedish PM Stefan Lofven explained to Trump Sweden is not a member of NATO, but sometimes partners with the alliance. Trump responded that the U.S. should consider the same approach..."

Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump���s border separations: "Kelly���s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment���at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."

John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ���liberalism��� than ���conservatism���, at least in the American context...

Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...

I think Michael Berube overstates his case���as his character "His" notes at the end: Slate and #Slatepitch are still a thing. But they are much less of a thing. And everyone who writes for Slate or who used to write for Even the Liberal New Republic bears the mark on their reputation: Michael Berube: R.I.P., Liberal Contrarianism: "Before #Slatepitch became a punchline, Slate (and others) really did thrive on a certain kind of anti-liberalism. It���s dead now���well, almost.... ILLE: Here���s your reliable index: the death of the liberal contrarian. HIC: Come again?...

Josh Marshall: And you shall know him by his body language:"

Matt O'Brien: "The funniest thing is Niall Ferguson now says he's "going back to what I do best." What's that, writing conspiracy theories about how inflation is "really" 10%? Or attacking the Fed for doing its job? Or falsely saying Keynes didn't care about the long run because he was gay?..."

The interesting question is why are those who call themselves conservatives on the brink of extinction in so much of academia. Some self reflection from Niall Ferguson on this might be useful. But it might not. And I am not holding my breath: Jacob T. Levy: "If it appears that a powerful right-wing professor is the source of the suppression of disagreement on campus, that just further proves that left-wing student political correctness is the real threat. #unfalsifiable:"

Paul says: "hyperinflation is coming any day now" and "minimum wages at their current levels are killing millions of jobs" are joining "there is no such thing as global warming" and "evolution is false" as destroyers of "conservatives" in academia: *Paul Krugman: "Today's column has nothing directly to do with... the puzzling failure of wages to grow faster despite what look like tight labor markets https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html...

Brad Setser: "Larry Summers on Trump and trade:: 'From tweet to tweet, official to official, nobody can tell what his priorities are.' Certainly rings true to me. I have almost stopped trying to guess. Even for China:"

Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate...

Patrick Iber: "Before we spend all day calling for Niall Ferguson's tenure to be revoked: I don't think he has tenure...

Paul Krugman: "An ugly story from Stanford. But I think Brad gets only a small piece of the issue when he talks about Stanford's intellectual quality control problem...

Ken Schultz: "I���m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren���t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."

Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Stupid Trade War: "Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries...

Paul Krugman* @paulkrugman: Trump is going all in on (a) claiming that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a huge crime wave; (b) Democrats supporter immigrant criminal gangs. Both claims are lies, pure and simple https://t.co/0orSpr9o5e. One important thing to realize about the immigrant crime wave thing is that the people who believe it mostly come from places where there are hardly any immigrants. https://t.co/wNse30FZwp...S

Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a standard conservative pundit lament, but nothing illustrates the unfortunate reality better than the writings of conservative pundits themselves. Read a typical George Will column. It's probably wrong but the most aesthetically disturbing thing you're likely to encounter is a Mark Twain quote taken badly out of context. Read a typical Bobo, Bret, or Douthat column and you'll find discussions of how many sex partners a teen should have, defenses of pedophilia, and sex robots..."

Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...

David Frum: 15 Criminal-Law Questions Surrounding the President: "Open questions...

WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...

Andrew Reeves: "A really, really good sign that someone h...

Andrew Reeves: "A really, really good sign that someone has read neither Thucydides, Tacitus, Homer, nor Plato is when that person talks about how Greek and Roman literature teach us about the Greatness of the West...

...Much of Tacitus could be summed up as, "Are we the baddies?" Thucydides is about the failure of the poleis and the community of Hellenes. Plato spends much of his time picking apart Athenian society and institutions. And Homer (which I love) is violent and nearly amoral. "Why don't we teach The Greatness of Rome anymore?" I mean, sure, the Bible refers to Rome as a dragon with seven heads and Roman literature itself is deeply ambiguous about what Empire did to the culture and character of Rome, but by all means, let's do a sanitized Rome. I mean, sure, maybe Thucydides was a "leftist postmodernist" for outlining the faults and failures of Athenian leadership. Plato didn't cheer for Athens; he thought it was terrible for having killed his beloved mentor.

When publishers of journals whose names rhyme with Gillette talk about ancient literature, the main thing they reveal is that they haven't read any. This has been your rant from someone whose happiest undergrad classroom memories are from learning Ancient Greek.

Done.

#shouldread
#publicsphere
#orange-hairedbaboons

Ancient Technologies of Organization and Mental Domination, Clerks, Linear B, and the Potnia of Athens

SOMETIMES I LOVE THE INTERNET SO MUCH!:

Ancient Technologies of Organization and Mental Domination, Clerks, Linear B, and the Potnia of Athens:

@e_pe_me_ri: I still can't believe I got away with this footnote:

Now I want to read the article this footnote is drawn from...

@e-pe-me-ri: You can! (Though I can't promise that the rest is quite so pithy): https://www.academia.edu/34570648/Creta_Capta_Late_Minoan_II_Knossos_in_Mycenaean_History�����

So your theory is that a bunch of telestai from the Peloponnesos wind up ruling Knossos, and there adopt and develop organizational technologies: clerks and Linear B; one of their number, the wanax, as specially favored of the Potnia; and the Megaron. Then they bring all of these back to Akhaia, where they turn out to be extraordinarily effective in concentrating wealth and power. And then we are off and running, toward Agamemnon, King of Men; the unpleasantness at Wilusa with Alexandru; and everything else?

Seems highly plausible, but whaddooino?

@e_pe_me_ri: That's it! Too often, I think, we consider palatial society on the mainland inevitable; I wanted to contextualize its development better.

But what happened to the Potnia of Pylos? And of Argos? And of Mykenai? And of Thebes? Why only Lady Athena survives to join the pantheon?

@e_pe_me_ri: Good question! There probably wasn't a *pu-ro-jo po-ti-ni-ja, just because we'd expect to have some record of her in the Pylos tablets. As for the others, we can't know if they ever existed. Certainly for Mycenae and Argos syncretism with Hera might be considered probable.This is an area of huge doubt, so the only honest answers are "we don't know" and "this is possible."

"Syncretism with Hera..." touch��... And somehow the Potnia of Ithaka gets syncretized with Athene Potnia comprehensively...

But there definitely was a *pu-rojo wa-na-ka... Where did his special authority then come from? I mean, doesn't Thucydides Herodotos tell us that Peisistratos was still enacting something that looks like a blessing-by-the-Potnia-of-Athens ceremony in mid-6th century BC?

@e_pe_me_ri: Here's where it gets tricky: there's a lot we don't know about the goddess Potnia, including whether she's one or many goddesses. If one, she's one with many aspects (a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja = "Our Lady of" Athens). Otherwise there are many (a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja = Athena).

With Goddesses... "one" or "many" gets complicated. Roman: "This temple on Capitol Hill is the shrine of Jupiter, his wife Juno, and the Lady who protects our city, Minerv..."

Athenian: "Oh, the Lady protects our city too. But 'Athena' doesn't have to share a temple. Zeus Pateras���that's what you said right? It didn't quite catch it���and his consort have their own temples too..."

@e_pe_me_ri: But it does seem clear that there is an undifferentiated po-ti-ni-ja, either an individual goddess or aspect. And it's this "Potnia" that I argue is the one linked with the wanax-not a local version or aspect. So we don't need a *pu-ro-jo po-ti-ni-ja at Pylos, **mu-ka-na po-ti-ni-ja at Mycenae, etc., just one "Potnia."

The big question, then, is why she doesn't survive-the tablets attest her significance. My theory: too closely linked with palaces. So when the palatial system collapsed, "Potnia" disappeared; maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but certainly by Homer.

Interesting... Peisistratos... is there any other patron goddess-king relationship anywhere in classical literature like Athene-Odysseus?

@britishmuseum: Athens was named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Her symbol was an owl and was used on coins for over 300 years!

@e-pe-me-ri: RThe Linear B evidence suggests that it's the other way around-Athena was named after Athens. I explored the evidence for this here: https://twitter.com/e_pe_me_ri/status/899398945901760512. Word of the day: a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja = ������������� ��������������, to the ������������ of �����������. This is often taken as a reference to Athena:

@Nakhthor: How does as local a deity as that achieve proto-pan-Hellenic currency?

@PhiloCrocodile: We can model it out on comparative data, surely? Personally I think in Athena's case 1) Athens status as being unconq'd in LBAIII and 2) (possible) point of dispersal for immigrants unto e.g Anatolia and 3) fame as a cultic focal point. Plus 4) Athena great candidate for syncretism throughout antiquity anyway.

@e_pe_me_ri: This is one of the problems with the theory, but I think @PhiloCrocodile is mostly right. In LB, she's only attested once, so not yet of Panhellenic importance (we never see her at Pylos, despite some pretty extensive records of the gods). But by LH IIIB Athens is clearly the leading centre in Attica, so that could start to explain the spread of her worship. (If we had Linear B from Athens, I suspect this would all be much more clear, but that's an impossible dream.)

Was Athens big enough then for its wanax to feel the need to hire a Linear B scribe?

@CoeurDeCresson: Palace of merchant-prince on the Acropolis, apparently. So as the place got total reconstruction on several occasions, finding #LinB unlikely...

Dave Roberts: American white people really hate being cal...

Dave Roberts: American white people really hate being called ���white people���: "They want their America, the America where white dominance is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, back. They keep saying so.... Being judged and asked to justify itself, as so many subaltern groups are judged and asked to justify themselves, feels like an insult. If you doubt that, go read this Twitter thread."

#shouldread

The Good 2016 Election Map

Today is yet another day when I wish the New York Times would simply hang it up and go home, and let the money spent on it be spent on real journalism. From Wired:

"Populism" or "Neo-Fascism"?: Rectification of Names Blogging: Hoisted from a Year Ago

Hoisted from a Year Ago: : That is neither the post-WWII Latin American nor the pre-WWI North American form of "populism". I do not think we are well served by naming it such. What should we name it instead? There is an obvious candidate, after all...

The highlight of last week's JEF-APARC Conference at Stanford https://www.jef.or.jp for me was getting to sit next to Frank Fukuyama https://fukuyama.stanford.edu, whom I had never met before.Frank is a former Deputy Director of Policy planning at the State Department, author of the extremely good books on political order The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution http://amzn.to/2sEt4AI and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy http://amzn.to/2sU0WZP, and a very sharp guy.

He has also been smart and lucky enough to have a truly singular achievement in his career. Prince Otto von Bismarck said that the highest excellence of a statesman "is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past..." For an intellectual, there is an equivalent and analogous excellence: to recognize what the powerful historical forces of the next generation will be, to grab onto their coattails, and so write an article that provides an incisive and valuable interpretive framework that makes sense not of the generation past so much as of the generation to come.

John Maynard Keynes, I think, accomplished this in 1919 with his Economic Consequences of the Peace http://amzn.to/2sTZdn7. George Orwell's Road http://amzn.to/2sgiUZO and Homage http://amzn.to/2s4RK8h, I think, accomplished this in the mid-1930s. George Kennan's "Long Telegram"���published as "Sources of Soviet Conduct" http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm certainly ccomplished this in 1946. Perhaps Karl Polanyi accomplished this with his brilliant but annoyingly flawed 1944 The Great Transformation http://amzn.to/2rMsPDq. I really cannot think of anybody else.

And, of course, Frank Fukuyama accomplished this with his 1989 article: "The End of History?" http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm. (If you doubt that, go read the brilliant Ralf Dahrendorf's brutal commentary on Fukuyama in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe http://amzn.to/2sTXfTE: Fukuyama definitely struck a powerful nerve, and Dahrendorf's animus springs not from Fukuyama's shortcomings but rather from his insights.)

This is, for an intellectual, something that requires extreme luck and extreme intelligence. It is a righteously awesome accomplishment. And Frank Fukuyama did it.

I spent my time sitting next to Frank attempting to irritate him with respect to what he and many others call "populism", for I do not like to hear it called "populism".

The original American populists were reality-based small farmers and others, who accurately saw railroad monopolies, agricultural price deflation, and high interest rates as crippling their ability to lead the good life. They sought policies���sensible, rational policies in the main���to neutralize these three historical forces. They were not Volkisch nativists distracted from a politics that would have made their lives better by the shiny gewgaws of ethnic hatred and nativism The rise of those forces���of Jim Crowe and the renewed and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan and so forth���were not the expression of but rather the breaking of populism in America.

The post-WWII Latin American populists were also people who correctly thought that their ability to lead the good life was being sharply hindered by a system rigged against him. The problem with post-WWII Latin American populism was that the policies that it was offered by its political leaders were���while materially beneficial for the base in the short run���economic disasters in the long: price controls, fiscal expansion ending in unsustainable that burdens, and high tariffs were especially poisonous and false remedies because it could look, for the first five or so years, before they crash came, like they were working.

But what is going on today, whatever it is properly called, is not offering sensible policies people oppressed by monopolies and by a creditor friendly and unemployment causing monetary system. It is not even offering them policy cures that are apparently efficacious in the short run even though disastrous in the long. What Lech and Jaros��aw Kaczy��ski, Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, Teresa May, and Donald Trump have to offer is (a) redistribution of wealth to family and friends, (b) a further upward leap in income and wealth inequality via cutbacks in social insurance programs coupled with further erosion of progressive taxation, and, most of all, (c) the permission to hate people who look different from you���plus permission to hate rootless cosmopolites who are, somehow, against all principles of natural justice, both doing better than you and offering you insufficient respect.

That is neither the post-WWII Latin American nor the pre-WWI North American form of "populism". I do not think we are well served by naming it such.

What should we name it instead?

There is an obvious candidate, after all.

When Fukuyama wrote his "The End of History?"���note the question mark at the end���his principal aims were twofold:

To advance a Hegelian, or a Kojeveian reinterpretation of Hegelianism, as pointing out that history was ultimately driven by the evolution of ideas of what a good society would be like and consequent attempts to realize them: through Republican, Imperial, Christian, feudal, Renaissance, Enlightenment, rule of law, democratic, socialist, and fascist formulations, the world's conceptions of a good society unfold and develop.

To point out that it now appears���or appeared in 1989���that this Hegelian process of conceptual development had come to an end with the liberal democratic capitalist state and economy: private property rights and market exchange guaranteed by a government controlled by one person-one vote now had no serious challengers, and so this process of historical development���what Fukuyama called History-with-a-capital-H���had come to an end.

Most of Fukuyama's "The End of History" is concerned with the crashing and burning of the idea that the Marxist diagnosis that private property was an inescapably poisoned institution implemented by a Leninist cadre that then set up a Stalinist command economy offered a possible way forward toward a good and free society of associated producers���an alternative to the system that was the reinforcing institutional triad of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism. But there was another challenger for much of the twentieth century: fascism. In Fukuyama's words:

[Fascism] saw the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new 'people' on the basis of national exclusiveness... [an] organized ultra nationalist movement with universalistic pretensions... with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people...

And, in Fukuyama's judgment, fascism:

was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well...

But is the current International���that of Kaczy��ski, Orban, Le Pen, May, and Trump���usefully conceptualized as "fascist". Perhaps we should say "neo-fascist", to be politically correct. It certainly believes in the right of its Volkisch core to rule other people within the boundaries of the nation state���or to expel them. It certainly believes that international politics is overwhelmingly a zero-sum contest with winners and losers. It has negative tolerance for rootless cosmopolites and others who see an international community of win-win interactions. A strong leader and a strong state who will tell people what to do? Check. An ethnic nation of blood-and-soil rather than an elected nation of those who choose to live within its boundaries and pledge their allegiance to it? Check. Denunciations of lack of community, anomie, and weakness? Check. The only things missing are (a) denunciations of materialism, and (b) commitments to imperial expansion.

Fukuyama made it clear last week that he greatly prefers "populism" to "neo-fascism" as a term describing what is going on. A fascist movement, he wrote back in 1989, has to be expansionist rather than simply seeking the advantage of the Volkisch national community. There have to be:

universalistic pretensions... with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people. Hence Imperial Japan would qualify as fascist while former strongman Stoessner's Paraguay or Pinochet's Chile would not...

And this test is one that Kaczy��ski, Orban, Le Pen, May, and Trump's International fails.

But is Fukuyama right? I am unconvinced. I suspect that calling the movement "populist"���whether with reference either to the pre-WWI United States or post-WWII Latin America���misleads it. I suspect that conceptualizing it as "neo-fascist" might well lead to insights...

Epistemic Sunk Costs, Political Bankruptcy, and Folding Your Tent and Slinking Away: The Approaching End of the Trump Grift?

I see this as a sign that it is all starting to break. Why do I think so? Because I see this as John Holbo's concept of epistemic sunk costs and debt http://crookedtimber.org/2018/06/13/epistemic-sunk-costs-and-the-extraordinary-populist-delusions-of-crowds/, as Nils Gilman's edge of political bankruptcy ...

My feeds:

were: "Trump is awesome!", "Trump is crude but effective!", "Trump is accidentally playing eleven-dimensional chess!".

but a while ago they shifted to: "At least Trump is owning the libs!" and "We are transferring two trillion dollars���roughly 1/10 of the total value of the stock market���to the superrich, raising our own taxes, poisoning ourselves, and putting Hispanic children in cages, but it is worth it because it owns Jewy people in Scarsdale and Santa Monica."

and now they are: "It is all the liberals' fault! Mitt Romney was a nice guy! Because liberals would not vote for Mitt Romney, we had to vote for Trump! Yes, he is awful, but it is all the liberals' fault!".

That is what this is:

We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized ���collegiality��� as John McCain? We tried propriety���has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don���t find anything ���dignified,��� ���collegial��� or ���proper��� about Barack Obama���s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don���t see anything ���dignified��� in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don���t see anything ���statesman-like��� in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was ���articulate��� and ���polished��� but in no way was he in the least bit ���dignified,��� ���collegial��� or ���proper.���

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ���60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale... It has been a war they���ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one���the violent take-over of the universities���till today. The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America���s first wartime president in the Culture War. During wartime, things like ���dignity��� and ���collegiality��� simply aren���t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, ���I cannot spare this man. He fights.��� General George Patton was a vulgar-talking��� In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what���s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel���s, he���s shouting, ���You magnificent bastards, I read your book!��� That is just the icing on the cake, but it���s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he���s defeating the Left using their own tactics...

We won't get into the fact that the George C. Scott-as-Patton at El Guettar quote from the movie Patton is "Rommel, you magnificent bastard" while in actual history the U.S. knew that Rommel was back in Germany and von Arnim was commanding the Nazi Panzerarmee Africa...

The thing to note is that when you are no longer saying "We are the good guys, playing fair"���when you are saying "we are cartoon villains now! we have looked into the abyss, and the abyss has looked into us!" you are on the edge of folding your tent, slinking away, and pretending it never happened.

John Holbo's concept of epistemic sunk costs and debt in a nutshell:

The comfortable option is to buy it all���the more so, the more ridiculous it threatens to be. There is nothing uniquely Trumpian about epistemic over-investment. But Trump does seem to have a Too Big To Fail talent for locking folks in, by deliberately getting them deeper and deeper in epistemic hock. Do you think it���s deliberate? Trump knows he gets his base to buy huge, ridiculous lies���things that don���t even matter���just so, when he says the next ridiculous thing, they have to buy that, too? Is it a deliberate group-bonding strategy?...

Nils Gilman's edge of political bankruptcy in a nutshell:

What we're seeing with Trump's current political strategy is something very similar to the maneuvers of a corporation pulling out the stops to delay the inevitable coming bankruptcy.... What's holding him together at this point is only that he has managed to put almost all the GOP electeds in DC in his debt.... Trump's defenders are facing a kind of political analog to the old adage that if I owe you $5, that's a problem for me, whereas if I owe you $5m, that's a problem for you. It won't end well for them...

And so I am actually hopeful: Paul Krugman: "It's not only the elected officialswho, by surrendering to Trump out of expedience, have now tied themselves to his catastrophe...

...Trump voters are also trapped by the enormity of his awfulness. For a Trump voter, to admit that he's corrupt, that he conspired with a foreign power and is now that foreign power's stooge, and that he consistently betrays those who backed him, would be to admit that you were a fool for supporting him in the first place. It will take a lot for people to get there, although I predict that a few years from now, when you ask people whether they voted Trump in 2016, the vast majority will say they didn't...

#shouldread

Simon Wren-Lewis: Brexit Endgame: second stage (which is ...

Simon Wren-Lewis: Brexit Endgame: second stage (which is unlikely to end with no deal): "A No Deal Brexit. It was inevitable that the EU would use this as a threat-that is the whole point of the A50 process...

...Rather less obvious is that the UK would do so as well: we have master tactician David Davis-this is going to hurt us more than you so you should be very afraid-to thank for that. But to be fair, appearing irrationally stupid enough to contemplate No Deal is about the only weapon the government has in its negotiations with the EU.... Stage one... was the break with the Brexiter hardliners to re-engage with the EU.... The second stage... [is] what Theresa May has to do to get over the March 2019 hurdle that sees the UK exit.... May���s primary interest is to get a deal.... Her secondary interest is in perpetual Brexit, by which I mean negotiations that continue to keep Brexit in the news so that a majority of Conservative MPs dare not allow an election for leader.... These interests tell us what May will try to do. Perpetual Brexit requires leaving most of the negotiation of what the final relationship will be with the EU until the transition period....

Brexit may get voted down because no one is happy with the form of Brexit we will get. Yet neither the government or parliament is able to say this is ridiculous and we should stop in now. Ostensibly this is because they feel they have to implement the ���will of the people���. But this is so short sighted, because even the people who voted Leave will be unhappy with the Brexit they get when they see what it is. They voted, it should always be noted, for the ���easiest trade deal in history��� (Fox) where ���we hold all the cards��� (Gove). We now know better, but it seems our representative democracy is paralyzed by a vote for a fantasy.

#shouldread

Comment of teh Day: Erik Lund: : "In the last post on thi...

Comment of teh Day: Erik Lund: : "In the last post on this theme, Japan's early success in replicating Armstrong-pattern guns in domestic arsenals was mentioned...

...which brings me to one of my favourite tragedies in the long history of European imperialism, the defeat of a gratuitously understrength British punitive expedition at Maiwand by the Herati army, using percussion-cap fired rifles and Armstrong guns, all made in the Kabul arsenal. According to the contemporary campaign narrative, the steel of which these guns were made was forged into bars at a water-powered trip mill built by a "Black Persian," unnamed.

So never mind Japan: As of 1880, the industrial revolution was on track in Kabul, too. If you want to know how it came to be derailed there, and not in Japan, I still think we need a great deal more attention on political contingency, a lot less on "culture" and "institutions."...

The Kabul arsenal didn't just shape and make steel. It also produced percussion caps. And, yes, the technology was transferred from Dum Dum. The point is that the Afghans were perfectly capable of receiving the transfer.

The Durrani state never had a plausible path to great power status, and probably wouldn't have developed a scientific military-industrial complex. What I'm saying is that if you arrived in your typical Eurasian city state of 1880 and asked the local arsenal to make an Armstrong gun and accessories, they'd muddle through. And, given state financing, and resources, probably muddle through the entire industrial revolution project, too, absent the internal collapse of their state.

It's the collapse that matters; not "culture."...

#shouldread

That Day: "IT got beyond all orders an��� it got beyond all ���ope...

...It got to shammin��� wounded an��� retirin��� from the ���alt.

���Ole companies was lookin��� for the nearest road to slope;

It were just a bloomin��� knock-out���an��� our fault!

Now there ain���t no chorus ���ere to give, ����
Nor there ain���t no band to play;

An��� I wish I was dead ���fore I done what I did,

Or seen what I seed that day!
��
We was sick o��� bein��� punished, an��� we let ���em know it, too;

An��� a company-commander up an��� ���it us with a sword,

An��� some one shouted ������Ook it!��� an��� it come to sove-ki-poo,

An��� we chucked our rifles from us���O my Gawd!

��
There was thirty dead an��� wounded on the ground we wouldn���t keep���

No, there wasn���t more than twenty when the front begun to go���

But, Christ! along the line o��� flight they cut us up like sheep,

An��� that was all we gained by doin��� so!
��
I ���eard the knives be���ind me, but I dursn���t face my man,

Nor I don���t know where I went to, ���cause I didn���t ���alt to see,

Till I ���eard a beggar squealin��� out for quarter as ���e ran,

An��� I thought I knew the voice an������it was me!
��
We was ���idin��� under bedsteads more than ���arf a march away:

We was lyin��� up like rabbits all about the country-side;

An��� the Major cursed ���is Maker ���cause ���e���d lived to see that day,

An��� the Colonel broke ���is sword acrost, an��� cried.

We was rotten ���fore we started���we was never disciplined;

We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed.

Yes, every little drummer ���ad ���is rights an��� wrongs to mind,

So we had to pay for teachin������an��� we paid!

��
The papers ���id it ���andsome, but you know the Army knows;

We was put to groomin��� camels till the regiments withdrew,

An��� they gave us each a medal for subduin��� England���s foes,

An��� I ���ope you like my song���because it���s true!

��
An there ain���t no chorus ���ere to give,

Nor there ain���t no band to play;

But I wish I was dead ���fore I done what I did,

Or seen what I seed that day!

Wikipedia: Battle of Maiwand: "27 July 1880... Under the leadership of Ayub Khan, the Afghans defeated a much smaller force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows...

...albeit at a high price: between 2,050 and 2,750 Afghan Pashtun warriors were killed, and probably about 1,500 wounded.[2] British and Indian forces suffered 969 soldiers killed and 177 wounded.... On the afternoon of 26 July information was received that the Afghan force was making for the Maiwand Pass.... Burrows decided to move early the following day to break-up the Afghan advance guard. At about 10 am horsemen were seen and engaged, and the brigade started to deploy for battle. Burrows was not aware that it was Ayub's main force. The Afghans numbered 25,000 including Afghan regular troops and five batteries of artillery, including some very modern Armstrong guns. The Afghan guns gradually came into action and a three-hour artillery duel ensued at an opening range of about 1,700 yards (1,600��m), during which the British captured smoothbore guns on the left expended their ammunition and withdrew to replenish it. This enabled the Afghans to force the left hand battalion back. The left flank comprising Indian infantry regiments gave way and rolled in a great wave to the right, the 66th Regiment, as a result of this pressure was swept away by the pressure of the Ghazi attack.

E Battery / B Brigade Royal Horse Artillery (Captain Slade commanding) and a half-company of Bombay Sappers and Miners under Lieutenant Henn (Royal Engineers) stood fast, covering the retreat of the entire British Brigade.... E/B RHA came into action again some 400��yd back (370��m).... Some remnants of the 66th Foot and Bombay Grenadiers in a small enclosure at a garden in a place called Khig where a determined last stand was made. Though the Afghans shot them down one by one, they fired steadily until only eleven of their number were left, and the survivors then charged out into the masses of the enemy and perished. Henn was the only officer in that band and he led the final charge....

Of the 2,476 British troops engaged, the British and Indian force lost 21 officers and 948 soldiers killed, and eight officers and 169 men were wounded: the Grenadiers lost 64% of their strength and the 66th lost 62%, including twelve officers, of those present (two companies being detached); the cavalry losses were much smaller. British and Indian regimental casualties....

1st Infantry Brigade (Brigadier-General George Burrows, commanding)

66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot: 286 dead, 32 wounded.
1st Bombay Native Infantry (Grenadiers): 366 dead 61 wounded.
30th Bombay Native Infantry (Jacob���s Rifles): 241 dead, 32 wounded.
Bombay Sappers and Miners (No.2 Company): 16 dead, 6 wounded.

1st Cavalry Brigade (Brigadier-General Thomas Nuttall, commanding)

E Battery / B Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery:[5] 19 dead, 16 wounded.[3]
3rd Bombay Light Cavalry: 27 dead, 18 wounded.
3rd Sind Horse: 15 dead, 1 wounded.
One estimate of Afghan casualties is 3,000, reflecting the desperate nature of much of the fighting,[2] although other sources give 1,500 Afghans and up to 4,000 Ghazis killed....

The loss of the Queen's Colour and Regimental Colour of the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot at the Battle of Maiwand, following so soon upon the loss of the Colours of the 1st/24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment at the Battle of Isandlwana (22 January 1879) during the Anglo-Zulu War, resulted in colours no longer being taken on active service...

#shouldread
#economicgrowth
#afghanistan