Adam's Ideas

Sometimes small incidents lay bare the truth of things.  Two recent episodes reveal how modern conservatism has gone morally awry, and the limitations of the liberal response. 

Bitches

Back in July, Representative Ocasio-Cortez was reportedly called a “fucking bitch” by a colleague on the steps of the Capitol.   As the Washington Post explained, “In a confrontation overheard by a reporter Monday outside the Capitol, Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “disgusting” and told her “you are out of your freaking mind” for describing poverty as a root cause of crime…”.

Subsequent commentary, including Ocasio-Cortez’s speech on the House floor, focused on Yoho’s sexism and disrespect.  But largely lost was any discussion of what it was that caused Mr. Yoho to come undone in the first place.  Apparently it was the notion that poverty might cause crime.  Not a position that most of us would think all that controversial, much less ‘disgusting.’  But this is the conservative worldview, distilled into a 10-second encounter on the Capitol steps.  

Every good conservative knows that crime is caused by Bad People, who need—for their own good, of course—to be dealt with forcefully by heroic men in blue.  Saying it might have something to do with poverty challenges a whole set of moral assumptions.  Maybe people are not just autonomous individuals, but members of society who can be shaped by circumstance.  Maybe they would respond better to assistance and support, than the threat of punishment. Maybe fellow citizens have a duty to offer help, even—gasp—through the government.  Maybe arresting millions of people for petty crimes and locking them up in jail and ruining their lives isn’t “doing them a favor” by building their character. 

Having this pointed out by a young, progressive woman of color was apparently too much for Mr. Yoho.  No, no, my head hurts—make it stop, b**ch!  

That is what spun up the good Congressman.  And that is what Democrats need to point out, over and over: the narrow and flawed moral universe inhabited by today’s conservatives.  A universe that sees even the suggestion of compassion as “disgusting” and worthy only of obscenities.  A universe that rejects any positive role for government in addressing the underlying causes of crime.  A universe divided, as Mitt Romney told us in an earlier offhand reveal, between virtuous “makers” and parasitical “takers.”  A universe willing to spend unlimited amounts on policing, but eager to cut programs to help the poor. 

Suckers

According to reports that surfaced in August, Donald Trump reportedly called American soldiers buried at Normandy “suckers” and wondered why they would sacrifice themselves.  Biden correctly and emotionally responded on behalf of his own son, who volunteered to go to Iraq.   What he and Democrats more generally also need to do is show what this comment reveals about today’s conservatism.  

Trump’s views ring true not only to his own character (a person who has never done anything in his life that was not self-serving) but also to the core principles of the Republican Party.  The most important of those principles is selfishness.  This is disguised as love of ‘freedom’ and ‘individual liberty,’ but what it comes down to is doing everything to empower individual acquisitiveness while ridiculing the slightest sacrifice for the common good, like wearing masks.  It is 100% about ‘rights’ and 0% about duties.  

Trump’s views on military service, or any public service, are the logical conclusion of a worldview that sees any choice that subordinates self-interest to some broader concern as stupid and incomprehensible.  This encompasses not just soldiers but teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters—these are chumps in Republican eyes.  Trump without doubt privately scorns them all, in accord with the teaching of his favorite thinker, Ayn Rand, for whom altruism was the greatest of all sins (Rand is Steve Mnuchin’s favorite as well, and Mike Pompeo’s, and Clarence Thomas’s, and Alan Greenspan’s, and on and on). 

Democrats must make central to their messaging the underlying selfishness and scorn for the public interest, and therefore for government that reflects that interest, of the modern Republican Party.  This is a Party that for four years has neglected and undermined the Federal Government it is supposed to lead.  It has not bothered to undertake any of the hard work needed to pass legislation, even on issues, like fixing America’s infrastructure, that Trump promised to prioritize during his campaign.  There is no Republican healthcare plan.  No Republican climate plan.  No Republican plan to deal with policing and the racism that continues to plague our institutions.  There have only been tax cuts, which of course have further weakened government capacity, and various grifter schemes to privatize education and other government functions.  This is a kind of political nihilism.      

There is a dangerous tendency with Biden to see Trump as a ‘bad apple,’ who can be defeated, after which we heave a sigh of relief and return to normal and make deals with decent Republican Senators.  But President Trump is no more a bad apple with respect to the Republican Party than Officer Derek Chauvin is with respect to the Minneapolis police.  He is the stripped-bare essence of a broken institution. 

Continued American Decline

Trump has continued America’s decline, but he didn’t start it.  When I say ‘decline’ I do not mean primarily our international standing, though that too is in free-fall.  I mean the quality of life, of day to day experience, for fellow American citizens. 

• In their recent book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, the Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, explain that life expectancy for working class white Americans, people with high school educations, has been dropping under the weight of “deaths of despair”:  suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses.  This is unprecedented for the United States and for any modern advanced nation.  It is due largely to a dysfunctional healthcare system, run for profit at the expense of actual health; and to the callous disregard shown over decades by America’s One Percent for the impact of de-industrialization on working Americans. 

• The most recent iteration of the Social Progress Index, which takes into account 50 measures of well-being that go well beyond the standard metric of “GNP/capita,” shows the US in 28^th place globally, down from #19 in 2011.  We are #100 when it comes to discrimination and violence against minorities.  We are #97 for access to quality healthcare, and #119 for environmental quality.  

• According to the annual Economist Democracy Index, since 2016 the United States has been categorized as a “Flawed Democracy,” instead of a “Full Democracy.”

At the root of our decline is not simple selfishness, it is an ideology and moral framework that exalts selfishness and rejects the very possibility of collective action for the public good.  This is the conservative equivalent of Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever,” the oligarchic vision that conservative strategists hope to make permanent through Constitutional amendments and control of the Supreme Court.  Democrats must connect the dots to point out the underpinnings of seemingly offhand remarks about ‘bitches’ and ‘suckers.’  

The other day I watched a recent PBS “American Masters” on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas seems to be emerging from his shell a bit—he is actually asking questions during Court arguments, something he hasn’t done for decades, and now this biography, which consists largely of Thomas sitting alone and describing his life and thoughts.  

Thomas has long been a spokesman and model for black conservatives. As I write this the US is in the grip of racial unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I have no idea of Thomas’s thoughts on the current protests, but judging by his general views it is safe to say he doesn’t approve.  Unlike most African-American leaders, Thomas sees black progress as almost entirely a matter of individual effort.  Neither government programs or mass action are useful; in fact they harm African-Americans by diverting them from acquiring self-discipline and self-responsibility.  Complaining about the ‘system’ is a sign of weakness. How did he reach conclusions so at odds with the mainstream views in the African-American community?    

Thomas has a compelling life story.  He grew up poor and isolated in rural Georgia and Jim Crow Savannah.  His single mother basically gave up trying to raise him and his brother and turned them over to her parents.  It was his maternal grandfather who, according to Thomas, stamped him permanently and for the good.  He was a tough, unsentimental disciplinarian who taught that the world owes you nothing and you have to fight for everything you get.  He broached no compromises.  In 2007 Thomas wrote a biography with the revealing title My Grandfather’s Son; a review summarizes Thomas’s own description of his grandfather like this:

• “ He never praised us, just as he never hugged us.” Beatings with belt or switch were frequent. Eventually, Thomas writes, Anderson [the grandfather] bought a new truck for his business, but he took out the heater. “The warmth, he said, would only make us lazy.”

• His grandfather was Catholic, and in high school Thomas embarked on a program aiming for the priesthood, then quit because of the insufferable racism of his classmates and teachers (Thomas was the only black student).  His grandfather unceremoniously turned him out of the house for violating one of his key rules, always finish what you start. 

Thomas in college and law school was something of a radical, though more in his politics than his daily life.  He supported civil rights and black empowerment.  But over time his views shifted.  According to his story, when he graduated from Yale the only job offer he could get was for a position in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, offered by its Republican Attorney General, John Danforth.  In Thomas’s view,  this was because prospective employers all believed he had gotten his degree not because of individual merit, but on account of affirmative action.  (I personally find it very hard to believe that in the 1970s a talented black graduate of Yale couldn’t have more options, but it certainly rings true that Thomas would have detected skepticism about his qualifications.)

When Danforth was elected to the Senate, Thomas followed him to Washington and a series of Reagan era appointments culminating in his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Bush.  

• Along the way he fell under the spell of natural rights purists from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in the Straussian orbit; it is unclear what sort of views Thomas had about Constitutional interpretation before this.  

• With help from the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell and reading Ayn Rand—Thomas used to require his staff to watch the movie version of “The Fountainhead”—he began to tilt ever more firmly towards the hard-core originalist views he is known for today. 

In the PBS show you can see how much Thomas revels in the certainty and clarity of his newfound opinions.  When he describes how a natural rights interpretation of the law makes everything clear and simple, his eyes light up, his voice lifts, the clouds roll away.  Ambiguity and uncertainty, even about such difficult matters, clearly fills him with scorn.   

What struck me in watching is that his professional evolution in a conservative direction coincided with his embrace of his grandfather’s worldview.  After being kicked out of the house, there is no evidence Thomas had all that much contact with his grandfather.  His death seems to have come as a surprise; Thomas didn’t know his health was failing.  In the film he says this is one of his great regrets.  But as a mature adult it is the voice of his grandfather—who Thomas says is “the greatest man he ever knew”—that he begins to channel.  

The Lakoff Model. I have been thinking of this as I read a book by the linguist George Lakoff, Moral Politics.  Lakoff is a liberal Berkeley professor who is famous for a theory about the difference between conservatives and liberals that centers around different views of the family.  Conservatives, he writes, are shaped by “Strict Father Morality,” which starts with a dark view of the world and of human nature.  Life is a struggle, most people are weak and sinful, and you only succeed by developing self-discipline and a strict moral code.  Trust in others, especially people who are different in race or religion or background, is risky and naïve.  Children have to be raised with lots of “tough love,” and shaped to go against their natural inclinations to sloth and indulgence.

This underlying worldview, according to Lakoff, carries over into views of politics and public policy.   Government should be limited to a few essential tasks.  Government coddling is immoral and destructive, because it encourages weakness and dependence.  People (and businesses) need to be left to sink or swim without government interference, whether in the form of social programs or taxes and regulations.  Success, especially in business, is the truest indicator of moral virtue.  Blaming failure on a bad environment or poverty or racism is a sign of weakness.  

In conservative eyes, liberals who embrace a different model, “Nurturant Parent Morality,” are guilty of corrupting the youth by offering social programs that short-circuit the development of self-restraint.  Liberal values that emphasize tolerance and concern for the poor and disadvantaged actually hurt their intended beneficiaries.

For Thomas, affirmative action and everything associated with preferences for minorities are prime examples of liberal immorality.  Liberals deny individuality by assuming there is only one ‘correct’ way to be black. Thomas sees his conservatism as proof that he is not defined by his race or by membership in some larger group. (It is hard not to see the self-doubt here, since Thomas’s own career largely depended on special treatment.  He knows his professional rise and his Court appointment have everything to do with his race.  He has constructed a story that denies the obvious, and wrapped it in a worldview that he uses to justify claims of persecution and reverse-racism). 

Thomas seems a textbook example of the Lakoff thesis.  A boy molded by an extreme version of the “strict father” grows up to hold extreme conservative views, and to worship the man who, as he sees it, deserves praise for living according to his beliefs.  Never mind that his grandfather offered no warmth, no encouragement, nothing but criticism, punishment, and, ultimately, rejection.  This was, for Thomas, the right way to bring up a child, the only way to harden him against the slings and arrows sure to come his way.  

When they do come, in the form of Anita Hill and his confirmation hearings, Thomas is ready.  Despite ample evidence supporting her accusations (Thomas admits that during the time they interacted, he was drinking heavily and his personal life was in tatters), Thomas is adamant that it is all fabricated.  He blames not Hill so much as liberal elites who see him as not entitled to his own opinions, as not “genuinely black.” 

The Lakoff model is powerful but limited.  In real life few people are as clearcut as Thomas; most liberals have an inner “strict parent” they can draw on, and most conservatives have a nurturing side.  This is a strength, not a weakness, especially when mapped onto the larger community or the nation.  We need both worldviews, the one correcting for the other, and each available to meet the needs and crises of a changing world.

I would go further and argue that a good dose of Strict Father Morality is probably a helpful framework for the poor, the disadvantaged, the persecuted.  For most African-Americans the world is indeed a dangerous place, and success is going to require more than ordinary discipline, effort, and perseverance.  A nurturing and liberal view is more appropriate for people who live in greater comfort and security.  

This is the overall finding of the World Values Survey, a major cross-national set of opinion polls that tries to track views across cultures.  In poorer and more fragile societies, where prospects are uncertain and the ability to get an education and a job is often limited, people typically hew closer to some version of a Strict Father model, reflected in Traditional values.  As incomes and education rise, Self-Expression values come to the fore.  Over the three decades of the survey one can track clear shifts in Western Europe and North America, with support for issues like gay marriage gaining strength in synch with rising GDP, higher education levels, and greater urbanization.  

Conservatism and Reaction. What the WVS does not quite capture, however, is the interaction between these worldviews.  The transition from one to the other is not placid and seamless.  As conservative values decline, their adherents become angrier and more afraid.  What were once largely unquestioned judgments, viewed as simply natural or obvious, are attacked as partial and conventional.   Here in the US every year the number of “others”—minorities, educated urbanites, coastal elites, the unchurched—seems to grow, while the number of white rural Protestants declines.  The adherents of the new “nurturing morality” can be contemptuous of the old ways.   A reaction often sets in that champions more uncompromising versions of traditional or religious values.  

We saw this dynamic consume Islam and produce spasms of incredible violence.  Here in the US it has not come to that.  Yet. 

Thomas is clearly a product not of some original “Strict Father” unreflective conservatism, as practiced by his grandfather.  He is a champion of a new, harder-edged, self-conscious and ideologically-informed conservatism.  He is, I would argue, no longer a conservative but a reactionary.

The deliberate, conscious choice of a reactionary path may explain one of Lakoff’s most telling observations, that conservatives are much more effective in messaging and articulating their values than liberals.  They are more aware of how views of family and morality relate to politics.  Liberals seem to think people vote, or should vote, in accord with reasoned appeals to their self-interest.  This is largely wrong.  People vote on the basis of their identities and perceived values.

Liberals are continually surprised when voters act against their “self-interest,” usually understood as the immediate economic benefits of picking one party over the other.  Conservatives understand that prejudices and strongly-held worldviews can often overcome self-interest.  Republicans have directed their appeals to self-interest narrowly at the rich and powerful few, while making emotional appeals to the identities and perceived moral values of the lower-class many.

I think this self-awareness is a product of the transition described above.  Conservatives, on the defensive from massive social and economic changes, have been forced to figure out how to defend themselves.  Liberals, who generally see their cause as inevitable and historically-determined (on the “right side of history”), have been complacent.  

Policing. The divide between conservative/reactionary and liberal views is now at the center of our debate over police violence and the best response.  For decades Americans have largely chosen to beef up the police and the rest of the criminal justice system on the assumption that more law enforcement, more “strict fatherhood,” will eventually teach criminals their lesson. 

The video of George Floyd being slowly and calmly killed has temporarily cracked this worldview.  It has forced its defenders to acknowledge that something is badly wrong.  All this toughness has inevitably fallen most heavily on African Americans and other minorities. Arresting and incarcerating African American men at shocking rates (African Americans are incarcerated at over five times the rate of whites) has eviscerated whole communities and furthered not just distrust of the police but alienation from the entire American system.  

Will this lead a majority to rethink a reliance on force and intimidation as the correct, moral, rational way to reduce crime?  Maybe. Thomas himself recently argued that the Supreme Court should re-consider the legal doctrine of immunity for police actions.  But advocates of de-funding the police want to shift resources from policing to community services: less punishment, more support.  This goes against the core values of most conservatives, and not a few middle-class liberals, who have a deep fear of disorder and see the poor (and minorities) as threatening forces who must—for their own good—be taught discipline and respect for the law.

What Thomas is Up To. I noted at the start that it is surprising to see the normally reticent Thomas speak up.  I do not think for one second that this is without some strategic intent. My best guess is that he is trying to tear down Joe Biden and influence the coming election.  During the documentary we see frequent clips of the confirmation hearings, with then-Senator Biden leading the interrogation and allowing Anita Hill to make her case.  

Thomas clearly despises the entire process, and the film is his opportunity to give Biden a beating.  Biden for instance asks Thomas a question about natural law, and Thomas in the movie says:   “I have no idea what he was talking about. One of the things you do in hearings, is you have to sit there and look attentively at people you know have no idea what they’re talking about.”  

The Thomas hearings were not Biden’s best moment, though maybe not for the reasons Thomas thinks.  Thomas may judge it useful to remind voters of this episode in Biden’s career.  

In Part 1 I laid out the argument for thinking that Trump and many of his supporters would welcome an opportunity to use the military and/or domestic police forces, together with supportive white militias, to impose martial law or force an armed confrontation with their opponents.   In Part 2 I consider how this might happen. 

Key Findings 

The most direct opportunity will come with the November election.  A close election, whichever side wins, provides opportunities for Trump to instigate violent confrontations and call on militias and security forces. 

A clearcut victory for Vice-President Biden would make violence and instability less likely, but not impossible.  If Trump sees his prospects for victory declining, he could try to manufacture a domestic crisis before November as a vehicle to increase his popularity, or postpone the election. 

The lack of a widely-accepted and impartial arbiter for election disputes increases the chances of violence and political instability. The response of the military could end up being decisive.

Scenarios

Big Biden Win.  The best case for American political stability is an overwhelming win for Joe Biden.  If the popular vote and electoral college numbers are so lopsided that even Fox News is forced to admit defeat, it will be difficult for Trump loyalists to mobilize and take to the streets.  Not impossible—it is almost certain that Trump will try to make a case for voter fraud or some other rationale for losing.  But it will be difficult to gain traction if the electoral result is not close.

Trump could try to resist the results on substantive rather than procedural grounds by claiming that his defeat paves the way for “socialism” or some other catastrophe.  Having Biden as the candidate, however, makes this tactic more difficult.

• It is hard to make the centrist Biden the poster child for a radical Left-Wing takeover.  

• Trump’s attacks are likely to focus more on Biden’s choice for Vice-President, especially if she is a progressive and/or a woman of color.

A big win for Trump appears highly unlikely.  His popularity has been declining as a result of his mishandling of COVID-19 and his incoherent response to the killing of George Floyd.  The fear of losing power, however, could make him prone to try and force some kind of confrontation with perceived opponents before the election to cement his reputation as a law and order leader, or to create conditions to postpone the election or justify restrictions on how it is held.  

A Close Biden Win.  A Biden win where the electoral college numbers are close will produce a spike in political tensions that is almost certain to include violence.  Such a result is certain to be disputed by the Trump campaign.  Narrow Trump losses in some of the “battleground states,” particularly those with Democratic governors like Wisconsin and Michigan, would make room for a narrative of fraud and manipulation.

• Trump is already laying the grounds for a claim that widespread mail-in voting is the cause of his defeat,despite no evidence that mail-in voting leads to fraud or advantages Democrats. 

• The Republican Party and associated private groups are putting together a coordinated effort to aggressively monitor polling sites as a way to intimidate voters and lay the grounds to claim widespread voter fraud, according to the New York Times. 

A path to declaring a state of emergency or martial law would open up if Trump refuses to concede, opponents take to the streets in large numbers and there are confrontations and violence.  It is easy to see a strategy of encouraging armed militias to oppose protestors, sow violence and disorder, and using that as a pretext to refuse to recognize the election results and/or declare a state of emergency.   

A Close Trump Win.  A narrow Trump win in the electoral college, similar to 2016, would also set the stage for political and social instability.  Such a victory, especially if Trump again loses the popular vote by a wide margin, would likely be seen as illegitimate by many Americans.  Democrats would blame voter intimidation and external intervention by foreign actors, such as Russia, who attempted in 2016 to intervene on Trump’s behalf and seem poised to do the same again.  

A large number, perhaps a majority, of Americans would see four more years of President Trump as an existential threat to our democratic system and to specific vital interests.  Political norms—the independence of the judiciary and the FBI, free and fair elections, an independent press—and policy priorities—women’s rights, minority rights, healthcare, global warming and the environment, America’s standing in the world, the treatment of immigrants, economic equity and well-being—would be threatened.  The corruption and dismantling of the federal government, already well underway in the past four years, would likely become irreversible.    

In this scenario it would be a mistake to assume the reaction would be peaceful or adhere to traditional norms.  We could expect massive demonstrations—the 2017 Woman’s March on steroids—against a continuation of the Trump Administration.  Some state or city governments could become loci for opposition and resistance to Washington, and the country could threaten to divide between red and blue states.  

Trump retains the largely unqualified support of a hardcore of committed partisans, Fox News and other media outlets, and most nationally elected Republicans.  Trump and these backers  would be inclined to welcome the opportunity to create a climate of fear that would make it easy to paint opponents as radicals and justify strengthening executive power.  

An important variable affecting the intensity of the response could be election results in the Senate.  If Democrats win both Houses of the legislature, they might accept this as a sufficient check on the President, with the possibility of successful impeachment as their ace in the hole.  This result, however, could lead quickly to instability. 

• The national government could expect policy gridlock for the foreseeable future, with no progress on key issues, and near-constant attempts to block Administration appointments and investigate White House decisions. 

• Democrats would at some point almost certainly restart impeachment proceedings, a recipe for further confrontations and a plausible impetus for a desperate White House to find an excuse to mobilize supporters and impose a state of emergency. 

Lack of Legitimate Arbiter. A grave danger is that with a contested election there may be no institution that would be accepted by the majority of Americans to adjudicate the results.  It would be easy for both sides to cast doubt on state election systems, demand recounts, and challenge results in court.  Competing claims will confuse many Americans and make it easy to default to partisan preferences.

• Trump has spent considerable time and energy saying vote by mail is illegitimate and establishing the grounds for rejecting election results.   

• Liberal opponents have zeroed in on voter suppression, as well as biased electoral commissions, gerrymandering, foreign interference, and failure to plan for election safety under pandemic conditions. 

The federal judiciary is not likely to be viewed as impartial. The Administration and the Republican majority Senate have over the past three years prioritized appointing loyalist judges throughout the federal judiciary.  Attorney General William Barr has consistently supported unrestricted Presidential authority and can be expected to enthusiastically back the White House in any legal challenges to unfavorable election results.       

Democrats have a much more negative view of today’s Supreme Court than Republicans, and may not accept its rulings on charged issues of party politics.  The current 5-4 conservative majority is the result of Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s 2016 decision to prevent Obama from appointing a replacement for Antonin Scalia.  

• Democrats believe a conservative majority Court intervened questionably on the side of Republicans in 2000.  They are unlikely to accept a similar ruling again. 

• Rulings by this court in favor of Biden would have considerable weight with both sides because it would be seen as going against the Court’s ideological bias.  Rulings for Trump, however, would likely be rejected by Democrats and liberals as further evidence that the Court is not impartial.    

Military Response Crucial.  In the US, as in many cases of internal conflict and instability around the globe, the response of the military could be decisive.  From the start of his term, Trump went out of his way to portray himself as a supporter of the military.  He appointed serving and retired military officers to key positions—Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and Chief of Staff.  He advocated large increases in the military budget, and lavished praise on people in uniform. It is plausible to assume that this was designed to win the military to his side in the event of a political crisis.  

How effective this has been is unclear.  Trump has blasted senior military leadership (in 2017 he called the Joint Chiefs of Staff “dopes and babies”) and interfered with decisions normally seen as the prerogative of the services; his ignorance of national security issues, and his disrespect for former Senator and military hero John McCain, have cut into his support. Senior (mostly retired) military officers have recently taken Trump to task publicly over the use of the military against domestic protestors, and more generally over his leadership style and foreign policy choices.  Polling in the military suggests that half of the men and women in the ranks now disapprove of Trump; officers are even more critical. 

Nevertheless the military is predisposed to obey a sitting President and is extremely reluctant to be seen as taking political sides.  It is unclear how military leaders would react if ordered to impose martial law or stop violent protests under conditions of uncertainty and competing appeals from elected officials.

No Plan, But a Consistent Aim. There is no evidence of a careful plan to seize power or postpone the November elections.  As with many Trump goals, we see inclinations and leanings, along with acts and tweets designed to “test the waters” and judge how the country might react.  Trump has, however, consistently expressed strong admiration for authoritarian methods of rule and tough leaders, and frustration with every aspect of the American constitutional system that restricts the President’s autonomy and freedom of action.  

The run-up to the election could be particularly dangerous if Trump continues to lose  ground.  Psychologists, biographers, and people who have worked closely with Trump have described a personality that is extremely narcissistic:  sensitive to slights, eager to avoid any perception of weakness, highly self-absorbed, and prone to lash out or act impulsively when under stress.  

The prospect of losing would bring out the worst aspects of this narcissistic psychology.  Trump has gone to great lengths to claim popular support, such as his false assertions about the size of his inauguration crowd and the reasons he lost the popular vote in 2016.  If Trump sees a majority of the population turning against him, there is no limit to what he might say or do to show strength and shore up his self-image.  

Early in 2017, shortly after Trump took office and the opposition responded with the Woman’s March, I wrote this:

“We are at a very dangerous point. Just as al-Qaeda and ISIS hope to provoke the United States into an excessive response that mobilizes the Muslim world, so Trump and Bannon want their tweets and directives to make the liberal opposition so angry it over-reacts. In their eyes every coastal city demonstration, every New York Times op-ed, is a victory. It confirms their message that the elites are the enemy. Like right-wing nationalists of the past they yearn to demonstrate strength. They may hope for an excuse to impose emergency measures, which will lead to a police state or civil war.” 

The prospect of “police state or civil war” is much closer today than three years ago.  Steve Bannon is gone from the White House, but his messianic all-things-are-justified worldview still holds.  Today it is embodied in Mike Pompeo and William Barr, two religious zealots who believe Trump is God’s emissary to cleanse a sinful nation.   

Trump’s reaction to the protests over George Floyd—his calls for military measures against American citizens, his finger-pointing at non-existent Antifa agitators, his Bible-toting march through tear gas in Lafayette Park—all tend in this direction.  With the pandemic tanking his popularity Trump is scared that he is on the way out, and does not intend to go quietly.  Any excuse to bring troops into the streets or mobilize his many armed adherents, anything to show toughness, is to be desired.  

The Trump strategy was clearly on display in the recent controversial New York Times op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the use of the military to put down looters and rioters.  Cotton is another humorless zealot, if anything more intransigent than Barr and Pompeo.  He deliberately and with malice represented the current unrest as a one-sided attack on police and property-owners, orchestrated by the extreme left.  In a tweet he called for “no quarter” against looters and protestors.  He hopes to arouse the many armed and angry members of the Trump cult to take matters into their own hands.

The fire and brimstone from Trump and Cotton clearly has no relation to any actual threat. The looting and violence of the past several weeks was nothing compared to riots over Vietnam or civil rights in the 1960s, and quickly gave way to overwhelmingly peaceful protests. No, the intent here is not to stop dangerous unrest, it is to pave the way for the use of uninhibited executive power. It is to soften us up for future militarized responses to enemies who have already been named and identified—leftists, protestors, Democratic governors and mayors, defenders of civil rights.

All over the world we have seen democracies succumb to auto-golpes—coups from within, perpetrated by democratically elected leaders who intimidate or corrupt the press, the courts, the political parties, the business community to consolidate personal authority. Trial runs and appeals to law and order prepare the way for the real thing. Examples include Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Hungary and Trump’s personal favorite, Russia.

Many of Trump’s most passionate supporters hope for this.  They see and applaud Trump’s unabashed worship of the world’s strongmen.  This is a man who said, after China’s Communist Party killed thousands at Tiananmen Square:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.“

Trump’s followers are convinced the country is too far gone in wickedness to be saved any other way.  Even a small shove from Russian or other foreign meddlers will find many an open door.

But Cotton and his ilk seem not to see that the opposite is also possible.  Many revolutions begin with demands for reform, followed by over-reaction from the security forces leading to deaths and martyrs, followed by mass mobilization.  This is what happened in Ukraine in 2014.  This is what happened in the American colonies in 1775.  In a matter of months the passionate desire to separate from Great Britain went from the fringe view of a few, to majority opinion.  The legitimacy of what was then the world’s most powerful state vanished overnight.  

This is not likely, of course.  But then revolutions and coups rarely are.  It is only after the fact that everyone realizes that what seemed solid has melted into air.  

Ask yourself:  what forces are prepared to defend existing institutions?  In conservative eyes the American state has been de-legitimized by decades of misleading cant about government failings and the unquestioned superiority of the private sector.  Trump does not even pretend to care about the government he supposedly leads; to him and his followers it is now nothing but the hated “deep state.”  

For many liberals the fact that someone like Trump could be elected proves the system is fatally flawed.  African-Americans and other minorities did not need the George Floyd video to tell them that America has never been their home.  And both conservatives and liberals see clearly that wealth and corporate influence shape public policy, not the interests of citizens.

We can be grateful that the country’s military leadership has, finally, taken a stand against Trump and his efforts to employ the armed forces against fellow Americans.  But after years of careful flattery and increased budgets there is a great deal of support for Trump in the ranks of both the military and the police.  It is not clear what their response would be if ordered to put down armed white militias wearing MAGA hats, contesting a close election.   

In short, many on both sides are already convinced it may be necessary to blow America up in order to save it.  Some of those people are in the White House.

This is what I see.  If I were analyzing the stability of the United States from afar, I would be saying, as intelligence analysts did before 9/11, “the system is blinking red.”  

As I write this the US is reeling from widespread racial unrest following the police killing of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis. Protests and riots have also been fueled by other incidents, such as the apparent murder of another unarmed black man in Georgia by a white father and son supposedly trying to make a “citizens arrest.”

In the background, the pandemic has been killing black Americans at over twice the rate of the rest of the country. In the foreground, our President has done his usual best to deepen hatred and appeal to the worst instincts of his followers.

After a seemingly intractable history of racial discrimination and division, it is hard to know what to do. So many programs, so many appeals to our better angels, so many times we have hoped we have turned the corner. Why does this disease of racial prejudice keep resurfacing, keep taking new forms, keep resisting all efforts to eradicate it?

I think there is a fairly simple answer, but one that offers a difficult path. One of our two major political parties has made exploiting racial prejudice central to its electoral strategy. It cannot take and hold power without it. As long as this is true, Republican politicians and supporters will continue to make sure to activate racist images, stories, and prejudices that are always close to the surface for many Americans.

Not long ago it was Democrats who carried the racist albatross around their necks. For 100 years Democratic success at the polls rested on the “solid South”. Democratic politicians in the South held power in Washington well beyond their numbers, exploiting the de facto one-party regime in the South to stay in office longer than Senators from other regions, achieving seniority and control over key committees. The electoral college gave rural Southern states disproportionate say in Presidential elections. In return for their support, Democrats had to acquiesce in the South’s oppression of black Americans.

This slowly changed. More numerous northern, urban Democrats began to revolt. African Americans forced the issue by publicly challenging segregation. Finally in the 1960s a southern Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, in perhaps the greatest act of political courage of our time, forced through legal and political changes that broke the back of Democratic white power. Johnson knew the risks, saying prophetically “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

He was right. Republicans were unable to resist the political opening. Nixons infamous “southern strategy” rested on winning over disaffected white voters, former Democrats, with thinly veiled racist appeals. Today the South is solidly Republican, the white working class leans Republican, and the party of Lincoln is led by the most blatantly racist President in our modern history.

This success has come at a huge cost. Racism is a drug that today’s Republican Party is now addicted to. At critical junctures, when it had to choose between widening its appeal to minorities or keeping a tight hold on its white base, it has opted for the latter. This is because at the heart of the modern conservative agenda is a devil’s bargain: how to gain votes for unpopular economic policies that favor the rich and increase inequality. Racism and nativism are critical to offset this agenda and distract voters.

Political parties exist to win elections. Republicans cannot win with their current policy mix—and know they cannot win—without mobilizing their white, rural/suburban base. Race is the easiest, surest way to do this. Whether the issue is “law and order,” or “welfare queens,” or “Obama is a secret Muslim,” a way must be found to stir up fear of African-Americans and their liberal supporters, who are portrayed as “race traitors.” It doesn’t matter anymore whether the Republican strategists who do this are racists themselves; what matters is their willingness to appeal to race to win elections. Hence there is a permanent Republican interest in keeping racial tensions at or near the boiling point.

We have a history that makes it incredibly easy to exploit white fear and dislike of blacks. It is hard to imagine a democratic system in which such a divide would not be seized upon by one side or the other. Winning elections often depends on pushing buttons and identifying and exploiting social cleavages. This is the greatest cleavage in our society, the easiest button to push.

Today’s Republican Party is like Amy Cooper, the woman in Central Park who responded to an African-American man asking her to curb her dog by threatening to call the police and tell them she was being threatened by a black man. Cooper didn’t go around all day using the N word and cursing black people. In fact she saw herself as a liberal. But faced with a situation where she wanted to “win,” she adopted, almost instinctively, what seemed to her the winning strategy.

How do we prevent our two party system from perpetually dragging us down? It’s certainly possible to have a better leader than Donald Trump, but even the mild-mannered George Bush Sr endorsed the blatantly racist Willy Horton ads. For Bush it was a matter of showing he had the “toughness” to win. That being tough took this form was almost beside the point.

The only thing that will end this cycle is for appeals to racism to stop working. Republicans must taste defeat at the polls, deep and long lasting defeat. It must be clear that the racist strategy loses more votes than it gains, and in key constituencies. We may be close to that point now. What it depends on is several things. First, African-Americans (and Hispanics, who are also targets) must turn out and vote in large numbers. The Republican Party is counting on its attempts at voter suppression working. This strategy must backfire.

Second, a significant number of white voters must defect from the Republican Party, and the defection must clearly be a response to appeals to race. Suburban Republicans are highly susceptible to coded racial appeals, but they are uncomfortable with naked racism. They don’t like Trumps crudeness and they don’t want to be lumped together with white supremacists.

The Trump takeover of the Republican Party may turn out to be a boon. It has brought into the open what was once partially hidden. This has changed the minds of some. Max Boot, for instance, the neo-conservative foreign policy analyst and enthusiastic Iraq War supporter, is one who has had his eyes opened: “I am now convinced that coded racial appeals—those dog whistles—had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-­intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades while accusing the Republican Party of racism. I never believed them. Now I do.”

It would certainly help to have a strong voice from inside the Party. Lyndon Johnson succeeded in large part because he was the ultimate insider, a hugely powerful and experienced Southern politician who could manipulate the system. No one could accuse him of not being a real Democrat. (It also helped that in 1964 he won a landslide victory, was extremely popular, and controlled both houses of Congress). Unfortunately this political courage seems so far to be missing among today’s Republican officials. They are prisoners of their devil’s bargain. Change will have to be imposed from without.

Don’t misunderstand. Even a radical makeover of today’s Republican Party won’t end racism in America. It will still be there and will still erupt in ugly and menacing ways. But without the political incentive to spread the virus and keep it potent, I believe it would at last be possible to make headway through education, progressive social and economic programs, and the slow but relentless change of generations.

There are instructive similarities between the two natural disasters we now face, the immediate one from Covid-19, and the ongoing one from global warming.  Maybe, just maybe, America’s experience with one crisis will make it more willing to consider the massive public response needed to deal with another. 

I. Speed matters.  Everyone now realizes that even a short delay in responding to the spread of Covid-19 has big consequences.  More people get sick, more hospitals get overwhelmed, more people die.  Hesitating because you distrust experts and scientists, or because you want to believe it’s some kind of political plot, is disastrous.  If you move fast and move big, however, you can flatten the curve and keep a very serious situation from becoming a nightmare. 

We long ago lost our chance to flatten the curve on global warming.  We will have to deal with the consequences, the droughts and rising oceans and dying forests, just as we have to dealwith the consequences of the virus.  But it is not too late to make a difference, and acting today is better than acting tomorrow.  

II. This is not just a technical problem.  No one says about the pandemic that we should count on scientists to fix it and meanwhile we should just go on with business as usual.  We are of course trying hard to find a vaccine and other treatments.  But everyone realizes that this is also an economic and social crisis, and that our responses need to go way beyond the norm.  We are throwing the kitchen sink at the economy to keep people and companies afloat.  We are considering formerly crazy ideas like sending people government checks and offering free government provided medical services. We are changing our personal behavior quickly and radically as we realize that our actions matter to everyone else, and vice versa.

The climate crisis is likewise not just an engineering challenge, though many see it that way.  They hope some technical fix will let us live the same as always, but without destroying the planet.  This is wishful thinking.  Our response requires us to move from one economic paradigm to another.  Many people will face a wrenching transition.  Without support, people will resist, and the transition will fail.  This demands big public programs—training and unemployment benefits and guaranteed healthcare and so on.  

That’s exactly what the Green New Deal tries to do.  Conservatives and centrists scoffed at the cost, but are now eager to throw trillions (with a T) into our pandemic response.  The lesson here is, we have the resources, we just need to have the will to use them.

As with the pandemic, our response to the climate crisis has to include new ways of being in the world.  We will have to consume less, travel less, make do with fewer cheap conveniences.  We will have to be less individualistic—to be blunt, less selfish—and take into account how our actions affect our neighbors, communities, and the world.  Unlike the pandemic, however, these changes will not be temporary.

III.  Nothing works without trust.  Americans can’t just be ordered to comply with social distancing and other alterations of personal behavior.  They have to be convinced and they have to accept facts and understand the consequences of their actions.  One reason our response has been less than stellar is a broad lack of trust in government and in authorities of all kinds.  Half the population strongly distrusts our current leadership.  The other half strongly distrusts almost all sources of objective information, and instead believed initial partisan messages that the coronavirus was a liberal plot to bring down Trump and destroy capitalism. 

China, South Korea, and Singapore seem to be keeping the contagion at bay more successfully than in the West.  China has the power to require obedience, but the fact is most Chinese think highly of their leaders and believe they have their best interests at heart.  There are clear cultural differences at work here that transcend political systems.  It’s a cliché, but in Asia the individual counts for less, and family and community for more.  American individualism has come to its logical conclusion in Trump’s egotism and selfishness:  “America First.”  This is no basis for the cooperation and self-sacrifice any community needs in a time of troubles.  

The contrast between different approaches could have lasting effects.  China is already seeking to capitalize on the perception that it has responded effectively to the pandemic and is a responsible global actor.  If this is successful, China will try to do the same with its aggressive national projects to fight global warming.

In America we have a ruling party that dislikes and distrusts the government that it runs.  It has done its best to discredit, browbeat, and sideline career government workers.  Now it needs them to do their jobs in a no-kidding emergency, but morale is low, key management slots have been deliberately left empty, and incompetent hacks fill many positions.  You can’t kick the dog for three years, and then in year four expect it to leap up and wag its tail when you ask it to protect you.   

The response to climate change likewise depends on trust.  Do we believe what the scientists and experts say?  Do our government and our elected leaders have our best interests at heart? Do we see other Americans as fellow citizens, or potential enemies?  Much of our citizenry answers these questions with a resounding ‘no.’  

We cannot turn attitudes around overnight.  For a long time the prevailing ideology in American life has fortified selfishness and mocked the idea of public interest.  In many parts of our country the notion of disinterested, public-spirited government workers is met with gales of laughter. 

Americans have always been skeptical of government, but the back to back crises of the Depression and World War II changed attitudes by showing that government could improve lives and accomplish big things.  Today that trust is gone, eaten away by Vietnam and Watergate, but also by an unrelenting right-wing critique that questions the very possibility of public service.  This attack on government is a thinly disguised attack on democracy itself.  It is designed to weaken the state and make it vulnerable to corruption by special interests, and it has succeeded in convincing many Americans that government is nothing but a swamp in need of draining by any means necessary.  

Much of the opposition to climate action stems from a reluctance by the public to empower what is viewed as a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy.  Conservative leaders worry that if government is allowed to act effectively, it will undermine their narrative that only the private sector can be trusted.  But if our institutions are given the support and resources to cope effectively with disease it could make Americans rethink these stereotypes.  

IV. Reality can only be denied for so long.  Today, those who initially downplayed the virus threat have had to turn 180 degrees.  When your spouse or neighbor goes to the hospital, it’s not fake news anymore. The same is happening with climate denial as Australia burns and seas rise and big investors make it clear that it’s time to get out of oil and gas.  Soon a majority of Americans, including conservatives, will abandon their denial and demand action.  

As that happens, we will need to be able to offer clear, believable plans backed by leaders who can be trusted to do the right thing.  There will be plenty of conservative responses that don’t take into account the poor and marginalized, and are designed to enrich corporations and the wealthy. When a crisis hits, it’s too late to come up with new ideas. The ideas that get implemented are ones that are readily available, have been fleshed out, and are already ‘in the air.’  

This is why I think it is so important to make the Green New Deal familiar and to anticipate questions and criticism.  It must be the first thing that anxious leaders reach for when the public demand for action becomes irresistible.  Already many of the specific projects embodied in the Green New Deal are broadly popular.  To the extent possible they should be incorporated into programs to stimulate the economy in this current crisis; this will be the springboard for future action. 

Can We Solve Our Climate Crisis Under Capitalism?  

For much of the past year I have been more and more focused—obsessed maybe—with global warming and what we should do about it.  This is the problem of our time, maybe of all time; it is also, just maybe, our ticket out of self-doubt and a long, low period where we seem to have forgotten the meaning of the public interest.  America used to be capable of big things:  winning World War II, building the interstate highway system, going to the Moon, enacting Medicare and Medicaid.  These efforts pulled us together and made us proud and prosperous.  Today we seem to take pride in…what exactly?  Mostly in clever apps that weaponize our personal information to sell us more junk.

Fighting global warming, as outlined in the Green New Deal, is the kind of great effort that could unite us while transforming our society for the better.  It is a lifeline that could stem what seems an accelerating slide into the populist abyss.  If we have the courage to grasp it. So I want our country to commit to this hard task, to mobilize behind this fight.  

Capitalism and the Climate Crisis 

Thinking about global warming has made me think hard about capitalism.  For decades environmentalists and worriers about population and scarcity have pointed the finger at industrial capitalism and its insatiable focus on growth.  More people, always consuming more, is a formula for eventual disaster.  We have delayed the consequences with better technologies—higher yield crops, cleaner fuels—but it now seems the bill is coming due.  Every few months a new, detailed report shoves our face in the reality of global warming, species extinctions, water shortages, deforestation, and the dire consequences of billions of people in rapidly developing countries demanding (the nerve!) to live like Americans.  It would take the resources of 3 or 5 planet earths to satisfy them.  

A strong-minded set of fellow climate change activists believes that we cannot succeed unless we give up capitalism.  Capitalism, they argue, is a system that cannot exist without constant growth; capital seeks the most profitable investments, and capitalist survival depends on the highest rate of return.  Businesses, even if they wanted, cannot for long survive in a steady state; either they will go under, or be forced by demanding investors or circling take-over artists to increase profits.  Further, the market shapes human beings into consumers who are constantly cajoled, tempted, and bludgeoned into wanting more, more, more.  We are thus driven to use up the earth’s resources—its fossil fuels, its forests, its waters, its fish, its arable land, and on and on.

Naomi Klein, for instance, in her recent book On Fire:  The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, argues for fundamental change:  “The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning just discussed. Increases in consumption should be reserved for those around the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.”  Greta Thunberg was blunter in her September 2019 address at the UN:  “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.  How dare you!”

Even if individuals in the system sense that they are destroying the planet and dehumanizing society, they have powerful incentives not to acknowledge, or to minimize, the harm they are doing.  First, their personal wealth and status depends on it.  As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Second, they are supported by a powerful set of ideas that tells them the market is the optimal way of organizing human behavior, and the most moral thing they can do is keep on with business as usual.  Hence we saw ExxonMobil and the oil industry conduct their own research in the 1970s showing global warming was happening and was a serious threat, and then mount a massive disinformation campaign to discredit the science and argue against doing anything about it.  The mastermind behind this, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, was steeped in the individualist, anti-government mindset typical of the Texas oil-patch. 

Bill McKibben in his recent book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out, offers a melancholy picture of how the Ayn Randian thinking that permeates the upper echelons of the Republican Party has led directly to its policies of climate denial.  Her novels are favorites of officials in all parts of the Administration, including Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself.  Rand’s hyperbolic suspicion of the state and conviction that the least accommodation to government leads inevitably to collectivism leads her followers to dismiss any problem that might require government action.  

What we think about capitalism is starting to seep into our politics.  Bernie Sanders, by calling himself a ‘socialist’—though he is not, by most accepted definitions—has done a service by forcing people to at least consider the possibility of alternatives to capitalism.  Other candidates will need to openly state what it is about capitalism that they like.  But even though polls show that younger Americans have declining faith in the capitalist system, it seems unlikely that politicians angling for votes will dare suggest that there is anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism. 

The Case for Capitalism

In these discussions I have so far resisted the idea that we need to abandon capitalism.  First of all, it would be disastrous for creating the consensus we need to act on global warming if we started by saying, “First, let’s destroy capitalism.”  Global warming skeptics already suspect that fighting climate change is a ruse for imposing socialism.  Second, the alternative is never very clear, and the actual alternatives human beings have come up with have not been very appealing.  I spent a good part of my professional career countering the Soviet Union, not a model most of us want to emulate.  

It seems to me that capitalism is here to stay, in the sense that it is the economic face of modernity, of our rational and scientific worldview. While that dominates, so will capitalism.

Fortunately we have a range of capitalisms to choose from.  My preferred model is a more humane, socially responsible capitalism—something more Scandinavian, perhaps.  If we move away from the laissez-fairy-tale, neoliberal version of capitalism, I’ve argued, we can make capitalism work for the benefit of the many, instead of the few.  What we need is a program to save capitalism from itself, before it self-destructs, or destroys the planet.

There are three big arguments, in my view, in capitalism’s favor. One is that it is enormously productive and has proven able, in a fairly large part (though by no means all) of the globe, to eliminate the problem of scarcity and its political counterpart, some form of aristocracy or oligarchy, with a few rich and powerful haves lording it over a mass of have-nots.  Before industrial capitalism the world consisted of a tiny group of aristocrats and oligarchs lording it over a mass of abjectly poor peasants.  The great wealth generated by capitalism has made it possible to raise much of the world out of misery and support a large middle class.  With many exceptions and caveats, the standard of living, the security, and the happiness, of a large part of mankind has gone up.  In principle this rise in wealth means we can have a much more egalitarian human community than was possible in most places in the past.  

In this way capitalism enables democracy, and I think it is no coincidence that our liberal democracy and industrial capitalism began and grew together.  The year 1776, when we signed the Declaration of Independence, was also the year that Adam Smith published capitalism’s ur-manifesto The Wealth of Nations.

Second, capitalism tends to create a less militarized and destructive society. It powerfully directs human pride and desire for status—our spiritedness or thumos—away from war and conquest towards commerce and making money.  The aristocracy of the ancien regime delighted in combat and despised money-making.  Today we honor soldiers but reserve our real admiration for entrepreneurs and successful hedge-fund managers.  Our mores and manners have softened, as Steven Pinker describes in detail in The Better Angels of Our Nature:  Why Violence Has Declined.  We no longer hang people for stealing a loaf of bread. 

The modern shift in political thought that provides the basis for liberal democracy is accurately described as a lowering of goals.  Instead of expecting politics to make people good and pious and taking its bearings by some vision of human excellence, modern politics takes people as they are and tries to create peace, stability, and prosperity without assuming that human beings are angels.  Capitalist dogma about selfish private interests producing public benefits perfectly fits this perspective.  

Third, a capitalist system enmeshes the globe in a mutual inter-dependence that works against open conflict. Business and financial interests tend to see modern war as economically disastrous and to be avoided.  There is money to be made, certainly, in preparing for war and producing the instruments of war, but generally not in actually using them.  And today’s globalization differs from yesterday’s colonial exploitation:  it is pulling developing societies into the modern economy as part of multinational production and distribution chains.    

And the Case Against 

Still, I have started to wonder if an acceptable form of capitalism is achievable.  Unless we make a huge course correction, we seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns.  Capitalism has its own versions of inequality and oligarchy, which if not recognized and thwarted, create a deeply unequal society.  Recent scholarship, aided by new sources of data, seem to show clearly that in the US inequality has been rising for decades.  What appeared to be a permanent era of economic and social leveling after WWII now seems a blip in a longterm trend of greater inequality. Thomas Piketty and others have shown convincingly that this is built into the way the system works, as the returns to capital outpace the returns to labor.  

Further, inequality is inextricably linked to oligarchy.  Great wealth is a source of great power, and great power in the hands of the wealthy is used to grow and perpetuate both wealth and power.  Here in the US we have seen these interests mount a strategic campaign over many decades to shift our institutions in ways that favor money and property over people and voting.  The Koch Brothers and their allies have largely seized control of the Republican Party and turned it into a vehicle for their vision of untrammeled free markets and less government.  Trump campaigned on a different approach, promising to defend the working man, but in practice he has toed the free market line. 

Is there any built-in check on this process within capitalism?  Free market advocates always argue that capitalism is ‘self-correcting.’ According to Milton Friedman and other free market purists, in theory a totally free market would prevent inequality and wealth build-up.  As fast as concentrations of wealth and business are built up, they are torn down by the churn of the market and the constant competition from new actors.  But the theory rests on a simplistic view of human nature that has been debunked in detail by behavioral economics.  In practice markets are never free, and their proper functioning requires energetic intervention by government to prevent monopolies, curb exploitation, arbitrate disputes and correct for market failures.  

The Need for Government: Wealth and Oligarchy

So what kind of government intervention should we have?  Attempts to guarantee equality by doing away with capitalism altogether, such as Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China, are generally short-lived and hugely destructive.  Many rulers see suppressing competing power centers as essential to a strong state, but suppressing capitalism to this extent ends up weakening the state by reducing growth and innovation.  It cannot be sustained in a world where others take a different path, grow faster, and amass the financial, military, and soft power that comes with prosperity.

Autocrats, especially in the post-Communist period,  have instead sought to get the benefits of capitalism while keeping it under their thumb.  This has sometimes been successful, most noticeably in China, but means in practice that the political ruling elite becomes indistinguishable from the elite of wealth.  Inequality is not checked, or only very partially, and we see a new ruling oligarchy.   Further, China’s success is the exception, not the rule; more commonly autocracy stifles the market under a blanket of corruption and mismanagement, creating the worst of both worlds.

Democratic states have sometimes succeeded at least partially in regulating and overseeing the market to reduce inequality and oligarchy.  This political success largely accounts for the failure of 19^th century Marxist predictions of the impoverishment of workers and the complete concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few capitalists.  The growth of industrial capitalism was met, over a long period of trial and error, by pushback from democratic governments, who under pressure from voters broke up monopolies, regulated wages and working conditions, enabled the rise of powerful unions, created a social safety net, and in a thousand ways limited the reach of the market. 

But these successes are under constant assault from wealthy interests.  The quarrel that the wealthy have with democracy is deep and in some ways intractable.  As Aristotle and many others since have pointed out, the rich are few, and the non-rich—the poor, the middle class—are many.  A system that gives power to the many is potentially threatening to the rich; it will limit their privileges and constrain the way they use property and capital, via taxes and regulations and its control of government to create programs designed to balance the many advantages held by wealthy interests.  This class struggle is inevitable if democracy works as intended and is not entirely ‘captured’ by special interests.  The tools of democracy, the mass political parties controlling the institutions of government, will always to some extent clash with the tools of wealth—its control of business, its access to information and media, its legions of lawyers and accountants and experts, its lobbying and bribery and other hidden but powerful ways of influencing politics. 

This friction can be fruitful when both sides recognize their need for the other and work within limits set by law and custom and shared values.  Democracy can check capitalism’s excesses and provide a strong safety net to shield against the ups and downs of a market economy.  A large middle class coupled to socio-economic mobility acts as a stabilizer, since its more ambitious members see themselves as potentially wealthy and hence resist too much redistribution, while those who are struggling push for greater equality.  

Capitalism Unleashed: Reaganism and the Age of Greenspan

But what had been a successful balance in the US, resulting in the post-WWII boom of shared prosperity and egalitarian economic growth, was upended by the Reaganite shift in the 1980s.  While Eisenhower’s Republicanism acquiesced in the reforms of the New Deal, Reagan made distrust of government—“government is not the solution to your problems, it is the problem”—the center of conservative politics and ultimately of a new conservative identity.  In the Age of Greenspan (another member of the Rand cult), the new orthodoxy of less government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, the unquestioned superiority of the private sector, and privatization of public functions became accepted not just by Republicans but by much of the Democratic Party as well. 

There are many reasons this shift was politically and ideologically successful. But underneath appeals to individual rights and traditional values lies the enduring class conflict and the desire of many businesses and wealthy individuals to limit the power of the people as exercised through elections and democratic government.  Weakening government is a way to weaken democracy, without assaulting it head-on.  The entire long-term program of the post-Reagan conservative movement has revolved around bolstering every aspect of the American constitutional system to emphasize its least democratic features, and exploiting every loophole to increase the power of wealth and property.

This is why we have seen Republicans at the center of gerrymandering, voter-suppression, support for the electoral college, court packing, and a host of new legal doctrines designed to make property rights trump democratic rights.  The conservative mantra that “The US isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic!” reflects the same effort.  Fear of majority rule has risen to the top as conservatives see a country moving demographically towards more minorities, more urbanites, and less Christianity.  How can we stop this, they think?  For conservatives, ‘democracy,’ understood as the rule of the majority, is becoming a dirty word.  And if you want to undermine democracy, a professed love of free markets and a preference for property rights over other rights is an easy cover.  

This makes it very difficult to have a genuine discussion about capitalism and how to reform it.  Even fairly modest policy changes are attacked as tantamount to communism; never mind the much more sweeping and difficult changes needed to address the climate crisis.  This didn’t used to be the case, even here in America. Progressives and New Dealers made frontal attacks on capitalism and big business.  Remember Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth?”  Remember Franklin Roosevelt’s response to attacks from big business:  “I welcome their hatred!”?  Today this language, used by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, horrifies centrists of all stripes. 

Saving Capitalism from Itself

American progressives have often argued that their reforms aim to save capitalism, not bury it.  And make no mistake, capitalism today is in deep trouble.  If conservatives and capitalists dig in their heels, one of three outcomes is likely.  One, the world’s climate and supporting ecosystems will collapse dramatically, leading to the likely end of capitalism, or at least of many capitalists.  Or two, the people of the world, seeing that their climate and ecosystems are heading for collapse, and a miserly few have hoovered up more and more of the world’s wealth, will rise up and tear down the institutions and people they see as responsible.  Leading to the likely end of capitalism, and many capitalists.  Or three, ruling oligarchies will clamp down more and more harshly to keep unrest from exploding.  Leading to the end of liberal democracy and anything approximating free markets. 

I would like to see us instead try a concerted program of pro-capitalist reform.  Let’s make the effort to get bankers and businessmen to recognize that capitalism is much too important to leave to capitalists, that preserving its positive qualities is going to require more oversight and intervention.  Capitalism today  is drowning in unearned wealth, inequality, failure to price in environmental and climate damage, and oligarchic intervention in politics.  Pace standard conservative talking points, capitalism can thrive with higher taxes and a bigger social safety net.  It does in other advanced industrialized countries.  (Denmark, for instance, is rated more highly than the US in the World Bank’s latest study of the ease of doing business in different countries.)  It did here in the US during and after World War II.  If capitalists join in the reforms needed to deal with the climate crisis, they will thrive, and so will the capitalist system.

But I am not sanguine that we can bring this about.  The desire to make more money, to hang onto it by any and every means, to pass it on to one’s children and heirs, is extremely strong.  Once the institutions and supporting intellectual and cultural framework are in place to make this happen, it is very hard to undo.  The economic historian Walter Scheidel tells us in his book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, that when inequality and oligarchy have taken root they are only dislodged by extreme means:  civilizational collapse, plague, revolution, or major wars.  Most of us would agree that we would be better off avoiding such solutions.  But Scheidel does not think normal democratic politics is up to the task. 

The economic shift we Americans must make to save our planet is not small.  The right comparison is probably not to the original New Deal, or even World War II, but to the end of slavery.  When slavery was abolished, slaves were the largest single source of wealth in America, and the cotton empire that slaves made possible was fueling the rise of industrial capitalism not just in the United States but the entire Euro-Atlantic region.  Slavery was not ended peacefully. Today the fossil fuel industry is similarly central, and its rapid end would be similarly disruptive.

Recent Critiques of Capitalism

I define capitalism in the fashion of Karl Marx and Max Weber, as the system where most production is carried out with privately owned means of production, capital hires legally free labor, and coordination is decentralized. In addition, to add Joseph Schumpeter’s requirement, most investment decisions are made by private companies or individual entrepreneurs. (Milanovic)

To test my thinking I wanted to look at some analyses of modern capitalism.  Are there realistic alternatives?  Branko Milanovic asks this in his new book Capitalism, Alone:  The Future of the System That Rules the World.  Milanovic has been our great guide to global inequality, the inventor of the famous ‘elephant curve’ showing how globalization has benefited the poor in China and India, and the rich in America and Europe, while hurting the working class in the developed world.

As his title suggests, he thinks the best we can do is shift to a different variant of capitalism.  According to Milanovic, today we have two major variants, the liberal meritocratic version represented by the US, and “political capitalism” represented by China.  They differ primarily in that under the US version wealthy interests rule indirectly, by funding candidates and parties and lobbying elected officials; while in China they rule directly through a fusion of political and business elites.

Unfortunately Milanovic fails to grapple with capitalism’s weak underbelly.  He dismisses any and every threat to capitalism; in particular, he poo-poos resource exhaustion and global warming as examples of the kind of doomsday predictions we have regularly proven wrong.  Similarly he thinks robots and artificial intelligence will end up creating more new jobs than they destroy, with the tired argument that “that’s how it’s happened before.”  The notion that this time might be different doesn’t enter his thoughts.  

More generally, Milanovic doesn’t think that there are resources within human nature, things that we value that are at odds with making money, that might cause us to step back.  He suggests our preference for democracy will fade if we think political capitalism can give us higher growth rates.  Our resistance to becoming commodities is no longer serious, as we have acquiesced to becoming ‘human calculating machines.’  So there is no Rubicon that capitalism might cross, whether it’s replacing us all with robots or re-designing our genome, that is likely to lead to a revolt.   

If that is indeed your judgment, it is hard to see a way out of the box that capitalism has us in.  We crave the wealth that capitalism offers and have no alternative measure for a good life, and acquiesce to being crushed by rising inequality and the ability of the rich to gain control of the levers of power. 

For reasons that are unclear, Milanovic does not advocate that we in the US look to existing social democracies as models, even though he admits they have many of the features he thinks desirable.  For a close-up look at the social democratic alternative a good place to turn is Lane Kenworthy’s Social Democratic Capitalism, which offers a detailed look at realistic policy choices to shift our system.  

Kenworthy is a longtime toiler in the vineyard of comparative economic and social research.  On issue after issue—healthcare, education, unemployment insurance, taxation, overall quality of life—he can show where the US falls short, sometimes very short, of what has been achieved in the best social democracies.  And he can outline what policies are needed to do better.  There is no need for a ‘revolution,’ only for the US to step back from its current willingness to bow down to money and markets.  

Kenworthy’s starting point is empirical and far from Marxism or Randism:  “To this point in history, the most successful societies have been those that feature capitalism, a democratic political system, good elementary and secondary (K–12) schooling, a big welfare state, employment-conducive public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets.” 

While none of these are even vaguely radical features, a few seconds thought forces one to acknowledge that moving the US in this direction would be opposed by very powerful forces, who would characterize it as ‘communist’ and ‘un-American.’  Hence while the goals are relatively modest, getting there would require a major political upheaval.  This is because the US no longer has a “democratic political system;” it has instead a type of oligarchy.    

American-Style Capitalism Will Not Stop Global Warming

What about our starting point, the crisis of global warming?  Milanovic thinks the same forces that create and sustain global capitalism will cope with resource strains without any major dislocation.  On this I think he is almost certainly wrong.  The most detailed proposals for a market-based solution to climate change call for a steep carbon tax that would reduce  consumption and promote the development of cleaner and more efficient energy sources.  This is an important part of many comprehensive plans, but few experts believe it would be sufficient.  We will need a lot more direct government intervention—regulations, directed investment, restrictions on consumption, maybe nationalizing key industries—to meet emissions goals. 

Would Kenworthy’s social democracy tackle it? The central question is whether a more genuine democracy, not the oligarchy we have now, would agree to the demands and sacrifices needed for a serious climate change effort.  A society that has strong social programs and supports in place, and in which most citizens think political leaders are reasonably responsive to what the people want, would seem more likely to take the risks associated with climate action than a society where many people feel precarious and marginalized.  If climate action means—as it surely does—revamping the economy in ways that dislocate a lot of people, it would seem these people would accept change more readily if they were confident they and their families will be supported during the transition. 

This is the strategy behind the Green New Deal.  It combines the project of the climate crisis with the project of social democracy.  It asks us to achieve both under the same umbrella.  Criticism that this is too ambitious or that the two projects are unrelated is off the mark.  It is hard to see a lot of Americans saying yes to the economic upheaval of the Green New Deal without the accompanying safety net, and without hope that the upheaval will result in a permanent change to a more equitable society.

Already a majority of Americans agree that climate change is real and we should do more to stop it.  A majority supports universal health care, higher taxes on the rich, and other social democratic policies. What is preventing us is not public opposition but the relentless efforts of special interests. 

It is true, however, that support for a Green New Deal rests for the most part on buying into what is called “green growth,” the argument that we can maintain present levels of consumption and growth while switching to clean sources of energy.  There is no need for major changes in lifestyle.  This is understandably politically attractive, but most experts think it is wildly optimistic.  Renewable energy sources cannot fully replace fossil fuels. Really going green will require us to consume less, drive and travel less, grow and eat food differently, and adjust our lives in a thousand large and small ways. 

This reality is at the center of the emerging “de-growth” movement (which you can read about in a recent New Yorker article “Steady State:  Can We Have Prosperity Without Economic Growth?” ) De-growthers call for a shift in production and consumption, from global to local, from mass markets to local markets, from goods to services. This would have to be triggered by a change in priorities, catalyzed by the threat of climate change, away from consumerism and wealth maximization as the goals of individual and public policy.

Some de-growthers talk about dismantling capitalism, while others speak of “post-growth capitalism.”  Whatever the terminology, this would be a huge change taking many decades—much too slow to meet urgent climate crisis goals. It is also obviously 180 degrees from the drill-baby-drill, all-growth-is-good-growth thrust of current US policy.  

I think there is a plausible path, some version of the Green New Deal, to tackle the climate crisis within an overall capitalist system. However, in America implementing such a program is akin to rebuilding the engine of a ship at sea—it requires putting in place the elements of a robust social democracy at the same time that we put in place an unprecedented program of economic reform.  This is not impossible, but would require tremendous political will and public support.

Unfortunately this is not what we have in today’s America.  Instead we have deep divisions, with one party pathologically opposed to social democracy and climate action, and the other party uncertain of its commitment. 

But China’s Might

Our abdication of leadership leaves the field to others, especially China.  China’s leaders could easily decide that a major effort on climate offers China an opportunity to accelerate development, move ahead of its rivals in the West, and demonstrate the superiority of ‘political capitalism.’  Under Xi Xinping, China sees itself as vying with the US for global leadership in the technologies of the future. Already China is leading the world in making and installing solar panels. It may see a similar opportunity in building nuclear reactors. 

A less likely but not impossible scenario is a right-wing climate strategy, probably originating in Europe.  Europe’s nationalist, anti-immigrant movements are less enamored of the free market and small government than their American counterparts.  They are therefore less afraid of the ‘big government’ implications of climate action.  An ‘avocado politics’—green on the outside, brown within—that justifies a strong state to stop immigration, force a rapid shift to less growth, and keep the rest of the world from using scarce resources needed by the West could be quite popular.  Including, I suspect, here in the US.  

The dominance in America, at precisely this juncture, of the most retrograde version of capitalism poses a terrible danger to capitalism and democracy, not to mention human civilization.  It abandons the high road to China and its authoritarian version of capitalism to take up the mantle of multi-nationalism and savior of planet Earth.  

It is possible, of course, that the US will change course again with the next election.  Americans could find themselves mugged by reality, like Australians during this year’s fire season, and turn away from their current path.  If not, Earth’s inhabitants will draw their own conclusion about which system is preferable. 

American conservatives are obsessed with ‘watermelon’ politics:  Green on the outside, Red on the inside. That’s their basic criticism of the Green New Deal and other big plans to deal with the climate crisis—that they’re leftist plots to impose socialism on America. 

American liberals to some extent agree. They think that going green is inherently progressive.  Eventually conservatives will have to bend the knee to science and accept a liberal program that reins in the fossil fuel industry and redistributes wealth to a new generation of solar panel installers.  

Maybe. But maybe not. The American Right is different from the European Right—and even here it is changing.  American conservatives for the most part remain lovers of the free market and small government.  This is why they dismiss climate science, because to accept it would be to accept the need for big government programs and regulations.

This particular idiocy, however, does not claim the European right.  There, a strong state is seen as a good thing, necessary to protect borders and build national cultures. Tough-minded leaders mobilizing the Volk around big national projects is in the nationalist wheelhouse.  So the facts about climate change are not generally rejected.   

It is true that in Europe Green parties that combine environmentalism with liberal views on human rights have been gaining ground. But so have right-wing parties that want to stop immigration and protect Europe from foreign infection.  Marie Le Pen, who is trying to make her neo-fascist French National Rally party more attractive to young voters, has said that someone “who is rooted in their home is an ecologist,” while people who are “nomadic … do not care about the environment” since “they have no homeland.” For the right, the climate crisis is starting to be seen as a useful lever to gain youthful support while justifying a strong state, empowered to take draconian measures:  a new Avocado politics, Green on the outside, Brown within. 

In American right-wing circles similar ideas are taking root. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto, for instance, justified killing immigrants on environmental grounds.  (As did the Christchurch shooter).  Tucker Carlson said in December that “illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”

At first glance a strong climate program would seem uncongenial to nationalists.  Greenhouse gases don’t respect borders, and an effective climate policy needs to build global cooperation and strengthen multinational institutions, the exact opposite of a nationalist agenda.  But climate policies can be envisioned that further right-wing goals.  For instance, the climate crisis can be seen as strengthening the need for strict control of immigration and borders.  As the global south bears the brunt of coming droughts, sea-level rise, and other effects of climate change, Europe and America must gird themselves against refugees.  They must not let themselves sink under an unmanageable wave of the world’s have-nots. 

In addition to defense, the Right argues that Western Civilization must go on offense. White nationalist thinkers agree with liberals that humanity cannot survive if the billions in the developing world use energy and other resources at the same level as the First World. But their conclusion is different.  Rather than sharing wealth and technology to try and midwife a transition to a higher but sustainable standard of living, they want to clamp down on further development.  Here is the analysis of American white nationalist and pseudo-intellectual, Greg Johnson, in support of a right-wing environmentalism (informed by several years sojourning among European nationalists):          

• “So yes, we do need to have a two-tier world economy; we need to have a developed First World—and by the First World what I mean is Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of East Asia, places like Japan, Korea, and China—they have the capacity to do that as well—and the less developed parts of the world need to be, basically, contained. We need to stop feeding them; we need to stop increasing their populations or allowing their populations to increase; we need to basically exercise a certain benevolent control over these people, just like we exercise benevolent control over wildlife.”

In other words, if Indians and Africans try to build coal-fired power plants, or buy more cars, we should stop them.  The more urgent the crisis, the more drastic the response. As Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute wrote recently: “…ratcheting up the rhetoric about the urgency of the climate crisis — “We only have 11 years!!” — can just as easily be used to justify the necessity of avocado policies. Indeed, what seems more politically achievable: creating a globally coordinated and democratically inclusive set of new institutions that will enable the resolution of all the difficult trade-offs associated with a “socially just” approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or shooting brown and Asian people?”

We need to recall that the roots of the modern environmental movement are far from benign.  Many early environmentalists were social darwinists and eugenicists whose prescription for protecting nature was to keep the inferior races from procreating.  The early-20^th century American Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (one of Hitler’s favorite books), was also a founder of the National Parks Association. This is only to say that a passionate desire to protect the planet is not inherently and inevitably linked to a love of social justice and concern for marginalized peoples. 

At some point as the climate crisis grows in intensity the US will shed its climate-denying neoliberalism.  But It would be blindly optimistic to imagine that this will lead to a liberal, globalist, inclusive solution set.  The US and other rich first-world societies, gripped by fear, and facing demands from the world’s have-nots to cut back on their polluting ways while sharing more of their wealth, are likely to batten the hatches and begin jettisoning superfluous luggage.  Among the superfluities will be liberal democracy. It is already on the ropes. As the seas rise and the forests burn, a strong hand will be wanted to oversee a wrenching domestic shift to a low-consumption society. It will be doubly demanded to protect against foreigners seen as wanting to share space in the lifeboat. 

A climate-emergency government could take a left or right-wing shape.  The left version will blame capitalism, nationalize major industries, and sharply restrict individual liberties in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A right version will do much the same, but with special emphasis on the need to rid society of dangerous minorities.

Both versions will need to face off against the developing world by pressuring countries like Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their rainforests, stopping new coal-fired powerplants, and preventing the rest of the world from imitating our destructive lifestyle.  A leftist approach, however, is more likely to try to achieve this cooperatively with aid and carrots; a nationalist environmentalism would be more brutal, more confrontational, and much less concerned with the consequences for the rest of the world. 

A critical variable will be which side of this divide China falls on. China needs no changes to its political system to implement a full-scale climate emergency program, and Chinese nationalism as promoted by Chairman Xi in many ways mirrors the Western right in its civilizational hubris. Will it identify with the First World, as Greg Johnson hopes? If so the full weight of the world’s most powerful states will be behind measures designed to keep the have-nots in their place.  If instead China chooses to be the defender of the developing world (something today’s China does when convenient) we will see a confrontation between China and the West, in which climate fears are added to the already considerable tensions related to China’s growing wealth and power.  

Of course the future does not have to look like this.  But avoiding it will take political courage and leadership that is so far not in evidence. People in rich developed countries need to be provided hope in the form of programs that promise a positive way forward.  They need to be convinced that their fate is intertwined with that of the rest of humanity.  If we do not quickly put in place a humane and inclusive framework, the climate crisis will be hijacked by avocados.   

After moving to New Mexico a year ago, and doing quite a bit of hiking, I began to notice something strange.  On many hikes in what seemed to be fairly remote wilderness areas, in thick pine forests, in the mountains, there were cows.  Now I’m from the Midwest.  I spent my summers on my grandparent’s dairy farm.  I know cows.  Cows are big, messy, clumsy beasts who live in open pastures and eat grass and suck down oceans of water and fill the land with cowpies.  What they heck are they doing up at 9000 feet in the arid Southwest?

The short answer is that this is their summer pasture.  Since Europeans came here hundreds of years ago, they have taken the cows up high where there is more water and forage.  But cows definitely don’t belong in the high peaks.  They are an invasive species that tramples delicate ecosystems, dirties the creeks, and deposits tons of manure.  A fine book about New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, Enchantment and Exploitation:  The Life and Hard Times Of a New Mexico Mountain Range, by William deBuys, describes how years of grazing and overgrazing have destroyed countless acres and permanently altered the face of the Sangres and other New Mexico mountains.  

Today the Forest Service has succeeded in limiting the number of cows in the mountains (often through destructive practices like clear-cutting valuable piñons to turn the land into pasture). But local Spanish communities who cherish the cattle culture—and have little use for the Forest Service—continue to herd cows  even when there is little economic payoff. 

The more I’ve learned about cows, the more I’ve discovered that cows are the secret explanation for so much that has gone wrong in the West.  

What killed the bison and the Indians?  Cows.  Cattlemen saw bison as competitors for rangeland.  Ditto for Indians, who among other sins interfered with cattle drives, claimed valuable land, and had a tendency to rustle livestock.  

What killed the great predators, the wolves and cougars and grizzlies that once adorned the West and kept its ecosystems in balance?  Cows.  Ranchers waged, and continue to wage, unthinking war on every animal seen as a threat to livestock, usually by enlisting the government to shoot, trap, and poison anything that moves.  Further, the millions of miles of barbed wired fencing that ranchers require interferes with animal movement and migration.

Why is the West chronically short of water?  Yup. Cows.  More water is used for cattle than anything else, more than for agriculture or industry.  Water is needed both directly to sustain stock, and indirectly to grow alfalfa and other feed.  On average, a pound of beef requires 1800 gallons of water. The ongoing desertification of the West owes more to cows than anything else.  

Why are so many plant and animal species disappearing?  Cows again.  Huge amounts of public lands—and most cattle in the West live on public lands—managed by the Bureau of Land Management have been overgrazed and decimated; BLM is largely controlled by ranching interests, so it charges nominal grazing fees and resists or overlooks rules designed to protect wildlife and public lands.  Destruction of native grasses and shrubs reduces the ability of the land to hold water, contributes to erosion, and kills habitat for native birds and animals.

What adds insult to injury is that Western cattle are of so little value.  Less than two percent of US beef comes from cattle on public land in the West.  The livestock industry in 11 Western states accounts for only 0.5% of income.  And the industry demands huge government subsidies for roads, fencing, predator control, water projects, and much more.  Grazing fees on public lands are a fraction of those charged by private owners, and ranchers get generous write-offs.  As  Christopher Ketchum writes in This Land:  How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, “The industry, in other words, is provided all kinds of preferential treatments, and survives on the dole, probably irremediably, because in the arid conditions of the West, where the climate conspires against cattle production, it cannot do otherwise.”

Why, then, do we continue to put up with this bovine invasion?  Incessant and coordinated political pressure is the answer.  Ranching interests embedded at all levels of Western government rely on misplaced nostalgia for the cowboy way of life to deflect all attempts to deal rationally with anything seen as threatening the man-on-horseback.   Today’s ‘ranchers’ are in any case likely to be New York bankers or Hollywood stars; the small independent rancher is a vanishing breed.  But they are expert at lobbying and enlisting politicians who cannot resist the argument that we must keep cattle on the range to preserve that American icon, the cowboy.  

Now, I have nothing against cowboys (though it must be acknowledged that the original cowboy legends were largely manufactured back East by dime-novelists and Teddy Roosevelt).  But the notion that raising Western cattle is a noble calling undertaken by rugged Marlboro men overcoming duststorms, Injuns, ravening wolves, and evil bureaucrats is bunk.  It has from the beginning been a destructive industry managed and bankrolled by rich and mostly absentee investors.  The actual cowboys who—for a very brief period—moved big herds to the stockyards in Kansas and Nebraska were mostly poor slobs who were paid little and cast aside.  The cowboy has long since taken on a life of his own due to Wild West Shows, movies, and TV.  And more power to him.  Go to rodeos.  Wear the boots and hats.  But please, give up the cows.

A dangerous development is that lately anti-government radicals have enlisted some of those same cowboy wannabes as the centerpiece of broader grievances against the hated Federal government.  And it’s worked. Remember the Bundy’s, the ornery, racist clan that fought the government over access to grazing land in Nevada?  The Feds tried to rein in the Bundy family’s penchant for violating the terms of its grazing permit by overstocking and threatening critical breeding grounds for the endangered Agassiz desert tortoise.  Cliven Bundy ignored the BLM for almost two decades, and when finally faced with fines and the impounding of his herd, went into open revolt against the US government.  Militia groups and government-haters sprang into action; confronted by hundreds of crazed and armed Bundy supporters, the government caved, returning his cattle and ignoring the $1.1 million in uncollected fees.    

A few years later when Cliven’s son Ammon, spouting the same anti-government nonsense, occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, the feds eventually arrested him and his followers; but after a comically inept prosecution, Bundy was freed.  BLM and Forest Service employees, meanwhile, were regularly threatened and harassed by Bundyites with no serious response from federal authorities.  Federal workers who took their mission of protecting the land seriously were often hung out to dry by their superiors, afraid of retaliation from Congress.  In short, the pro-cow government agencies failed to defend clear laws and regulations.  It goes without saying that these tendencies have metastasized under the Trump administration. 

The broader environmental and dietary problems with beef consumption are a separate issue.  If you want your steaks and burgers, fine, just get them from cows that live somewhere else.  

As I write this it appears we are approaching a climax to the escalating conflict brought into the open by the last election. A constitutional and legal crisis is upon us as the President refuses all cooperation with Congress; how it will unfold is far from clear. It will be decided most likely by the President’s Republican supporters, who will either continue to defend his ever more bizarre and dangerous behavior, or finally turn on him.

If the former we are headed for conflict, not just in the halls of Congress and the courts but in the streets; for Congress, unless it abdicates, will have no choice but to call on the people to enforce its rights against the executive. It seems likely that even if in the end institutions do their job, millions of Americans will not accept the result and, if prompted by Trump—a virtual certainty—will resist.

The outcome is uncertain because I think large parts of our country no longer hold to a common understanding of what it means to be American. Since the Civil War it has been generally accurate to say that the United States was as much an idea, or ideal, as a normal nation state. When you thought of yourself as an American it was not primarily as a resident of a particular territory or a member of a particular race or religion. The United States was defined by fealty to norms laid out in the Declaration and the Constitution and lauded at every Fourth of July oration: inalienable human and political rights, equality for all before the law, representative government, and the seemingly inextricable corollaries of self-improvement and opportunity and economic growth. Immigrants could come and, by pledging allegiance to these ideals, become Americans. In this way it was different from the Old Nations of Europe and Asia.

I say “since the Civil War” because before then, much of the country gave explicit priority to something else: a system of slavery and fixed hierarchy, where rights to property and ineradicable inequalities outweighed individual rights, including the right to self-government. We flattered ourselves that this view had been permanently defeated, especially after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s. But it had not.

Today we are returning to this pre Civil War America. When push comes to shove, a great many Americans seem ready to throw democracy and equality overboard in favor of other ideals.

o Our plutocratic class believes property rights come first. Democracy is suspect since the majority often seeks to redistribute wealth, and limit the power of money. Members of this class have waged a lengthy war to protect their wealth and power by using money and influence to put into office officials who will employ gerrymandering, voter suppression, and conservative courts to limit popular influence. They have fostered an anti-government ideology designed to discredit “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

o Our white, rural/suburban class believes its culture of racial privilege, patriarchy, and Christian fundamentalism comes first. If progress and democracy in today’s multi-cultural American threatens this way of life, so much the worse for progress and democracy. Anxiety and real economic disruption—perpetrated by the plutocrats—has made this class easy prey to demagogues spouting conspiracy theories and stoking racial and cultural divides.

o Our progressive class is beginning to think fighting climate change and expanding a panoply of identity rights come first. If democracy in today’s America means rule by Trump and a thoughtless embrace of planet-destroying capitalism, then what is there to defend? Recognition of America’s historic flaws and continuing shortcomings has, for some, meant a turning away from everything American.

Of course these are generalizations. Plenty of business leaders recognize the need to protect and expand democracy; plenty of rural, white Christians still see the United States as the welcoming land of opportunity for all; plenty of college kids have not given up on America’s unrealized promise. But there is a growing willingness by disparate groups to say out loud what for a long time was perhaps there but not admitted—we don’t really accept this whole liberal-democracy-everyone-is-equal-give-me-your-tired-your-poor thing. We don’t believe it. It’s not working for us. We prefer something else.

What the ‘something-else’ might be is, for now, not clear. For many nationalists and populists it is out and out authoritarianism in the name of ‘traditional values,’ a la Putin, or the slightly less crude version now being rammed into place in Poland and Hungary. For wealthy elites, it’s a globalized world of weak states where the rich can flourish by manipulating the system (until, that is, they can colonize Mars and create the libertarian paradise. You thought Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk just loved rocket ships??:). Liberals dream of an egalitarian society where all vestiges of hierarchy and exploitation have been eliminated, and smart automation means everyone gets a guaranteed basic income.

It is not clear that we have enough people left who both understand American principles and are committed to defending them. I guess we will find out.