There is nothing like the quiet of night to remind you of your every poor life choice and potential impending failure. As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, Americans just elected a president who signs executive orders without reading them and whose foreign policy is mostly just being unpredictable. That’s justifiably nerve-racking for a certain type of person—the kind who loses sleep over things like, say, nuclear war as a distraction from scandal. Maybe that explains why a new internet site that tracks insomnia sufferers by geographic location has a million points of light along the coasts, in the cities and towns that still can’t believe Donald Trump won this whole thing.
The Sleep Loss map offers a global indication of the places people lie awake at hours when most are sleeping. It’s an incomplete picture, because the data is based on tweets, and access to Twitter varies by country for a number of reasons, from government-imposed censorship (Russia, China) to the unending ravages of colonialism (a lot of Africa). U.K.-based blinds manufacturer Hillarys, the company behind the project, designates a tiny digital point of light on a world map to represent Twitter users who have sent messages about not being able to sleep. The more people who are staring at their screens and tweeting when they should be sleeping—the exact opposite of the way to cure insomnia—the more bathed in light an area of the map becomes.
As Breena Kerr notes on Vice’s Tonic, the United States has the most sleep-deprived folks of the countries tracked, at least according to Twitter data. There also seems to be some clear overlap between sleeplessness and having voted against Trump. In the center of the country, the dots of light are scattered across the landscape, some with a fair amount of distance between them. Look out at the edges of the country, though, and you’ll notice more points of light that are densely packed, forming brightly lit patches.
There are probably other contributing factors to the sleep gaps the map depicts. As Kerr points out, “60 percent of Americans in rural areas use social media, compared with 71 percent in suburban areas and 69 percent in urban areas, according to the Pew Research Center's data.” There’s also likely a cultural difference: “late-night” towns like New York, where everything’s open later and the pace of life is hectic, probably have more people up and tweeting than a sleepier town where things shut down by 9pm. But as Kerr notes, Trump anxiety—which is more present in places that didn’t vote for the president—definitely includes sleeplessness.
“Victims of Trump-induced anxiety describe nightmares, insomnia, digestive problems, and headaches,” Slate’s Michelle Goldberg wrote back in September. “Therapists find themselves helping their patients through a process that feels less like an election than a national nervous breakdown."
Like the episode on Mississippi of the classic film series Eyes on the Prize, the Television Academy-Award-winning Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi skillfully weaves together interviews with civil rights activists, archival film footage, and original historical research to portray the key period of civil rights history leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This history is worth recalling in the wake of the presidential election of 2016, in large part the result of decades of voter suppression which threatens to usher in a new period of Jim Crow.
Even in the wake of the civil rights victories of the 1960s, including representation of Blacks in county and state-level politics, the film’s setting of Holmes County remains one of the poorest counties in the United States, with more than half of households having incomes under $21,000 a year (approximately half the state median of $41,000 a year, itself the lowest of all 50 states). Holmes County, like most of the Delta region, voted overwhelmingly against Donald Trump in the 2016 election. But Mississippi remains a reliably Red state, where Republicans dominate the state government and hold both U.S. Senate seats and three of four of the state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The themes raised in Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi, in our view, have relevance both for interpretation of the centuries-long history of racial injustice and the resistance against it, and should offer a cautionary note for the critical next years of the 21st century. Both past and future need to pay attention to the successes or failures of specific organizations and institutions, and especially personal and family networks that cross-generational, geographic, racial, cultural, and other social boundaries. Hope for the future rests in large measure on the ability of oppressed communities to resist and survive.
This film, narrated by Danny Glover, is distinctive in several ways that make it a particularly valuable resource for researchers, students, and social justice activists alike. While touching on historic events that received national attention (Freedom Summer, the murders of civil rights activists Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the 1964 Democratic Convention, and President Lyndon Johnson's legislative initiatives on civil rights), it focuses on the small rural community of Mileston, in Holmes County, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta just under 80 miles north of the state capital Jackson. The film makes good use of oral histories of local activists who seldom feature in the national narrative.
Dirt and Deeds highlights the critical roles of Black landowners as an indispensable support base for freedom and justice movements. In the 1960s, Black landowners provided housing for activists on their farms and armed defense for the organizers of non-violent demonstrations and voter registration drives. Unlike Blacks living on plantations or otherwise dependent on whites for paychecks, landowners had achieved some level of independence and proved willing and able to step up as leaders.
This film also reveals links to earlier history, including a little-known initiative of the New Deal, which established the Mileston farmers on good Delta land from a white plantation foreclosed at the height of the Great Depression. On the less fertile hill country on the eastern side of Holmes County, other farmers traced their land ownership back over a century. Robert Clark’s great-grandfather purchased the land from his former master, and in 1967, Clark became the first Black elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction. He served 36 years, retiring as Speaker of the Mississippi House.
One could add important side notes to the film. The interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) activated sharecroppers, tenants, and wage laborers in the 1930s and left important memories of struggle for the 1960s civil rights movement. The book by one of us (Michael Honey), Sharecropper's Troubadour, recounts the life and legacy of John L. Handcox, the STFU, and the African American song tradition, and helps us to understand how black and white together confronted racial terrorism and poverty in the Delta. The Delta Cooperative Farm in Bolivar County, Mississippi, grew out of the STFU. William Minter spent part of his childhood in Holmes County, living on the successor Providence Cooperative Farm just at the edge of the hill country, and his father provided medical care to its residents.
The STFU powerfully affected a generation of organizers in the Mississippi Delta. Rev. Ed King of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recalled that civil rights organizers of the 1960s drew inspiration from the STFU’s ability to pull together former KKK members and African Americans in Mississippi and Arkansas, who were among the poorest people in America at the time.
The life of John Handcox, born in 1904 near Brinkley, Arkansas, vividly illustrates themes raised in the film. He not only organized the STFU, but wrote some of its most memorable songs, including “Roll the Union On,” and helped to popularize “We Shall Not Be Moved” as a song that became an anthem in the civil rights movement and the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968. The Library of Congress through the work of Charles Seeger and others recorded Handcox’s songs in 1937, and they are readily available to today’s listeners through Smithsonian Folkways. The oral history of Handcox in Sharecropper's Troubadour documents that planter violence suppressed the struggle for justice and dignity for rural workers, but that movement’s songs and its legacy of interracial working-class organizing against impossible odds live on even today.
At the local level in Arkansas, where the STFU was strongest, activists like Carrie Dilworth spanned the generations, carrying her STFU experiences into her activist work with the NAACP in the 1950s and with SNCC in the 1960s. As much recent civil rights history documents, activists of the 1960s drew heavily on the experience of their elders in many rural counties in the South. Dirt and Deeds indelibly reminds us of the special importance of Black rural landowners to that process of movement building between generations.
The question remains, is this history relevant in analyzing today's Black freedom struggle and the continuing "whitelash" against it? Is it relevant in crafting strategies to build the foundation for a "Third Reconstruction" as proposed by Rev. Barber of North Carolina's "Moral Mondays?" Or will we continue the march backward analyzed by Philip Klinkner in his 1999 book on the Rise and Decline of Racial Inequality? Can the institutional positions and professional skills of those who participated in and benefited from the 1960s civil rights movement serve today's resistance, as did the assets of Black landowners in Mississippi in an earlier period? At a recent conference of the Southern Labor Studies Association held in Tampa, Florida, a panel reviewing Greta de Jong’s You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement, asked just such questions.
Does the history portrayed through oral interviews and documentary sources in Dirt and Deeds have lessons for a predominantly urban United States in the age of Trump, at a time when the arrow of history seems to be pointing back to "Jim Crow" acted out on a national stage? Mississippi activist Kali Akuno's thoughts on the road ahead are worth pondering:
I do think in a moment like this, living in Mississippi is an advantage. Mississippi has been dominated by the Tea Party, even before the party had its name. Our governor, Phil Bryant, is a Tea Party member. We have a Republican supermajority and it has been that way for most of the last six years and they can pass almost anything they want. ...
We were like, "Welcome to Mississippi!" to the rest of the United States. We don't wish this on our worst enemies, but this is where we find ourselves. Crying about it or wishing it was different is not going to change the situation. We are going to have to get down, get dirty and struggle and work our way out of this."
Last Saturday, the New York Times published a bombshell report detailing the numerous sexual harassment suits filed against Bill O'Reilly over the past 15 years. Within days, Donald Trump had come to his defense, claiming the Fox News host was a "good person" who should never have paid his settlements. Paul Krugman believes this is all you need to know about the 45th president of the United States. In his latest piece, the New York Times columnist takes aim at both the innumerable failures of the Trump administration and the voters who continue to support his agenda.
As far as Krugman can tell, the only thing that distinguishes this presidency from any other Republican's is its utter incompetence. Trump's health care bill was a bust, his tax plan is unlikely to get very far off the ground, and his infrastructure plan is virtually incoherent (Krugman makes no mention of Trump's foreign policy, but his column was written before the administration launched an airstrike against Assad's forces in Syria.)
"So Trumpist governance in practice so far is turning out to be just Republican governance with (much) worse management," he writes. "Which brings me back to the original question: Does the appalling character of the man on top matter?"
Krugman believes it does. He argues that Trump's appeal is rooted not in the substance of his politics but in his crude personality, which gives "outright, unapologetic voice to racism, sexism, contempt for 'losers' and so on—feelings that have always been an important source of conservative support, but have long been things you weren’t supposed to talk about openly."
"One way to think about Fox News in general, and Mr. O’Reilly in particular, is that they provide a safe space for people who want an affirmation that their uglier impulses are, in fact, justified and perfectly O.K.," he continues. "And one way to think about the Trump White House is that it’s attempting to expand that safe space to include the nation as a whole."
I have long admired Bill O'Reilly as a TV performer. I once wrote that he was to the cable news genre what Johnny Carson was to late night — so at ease and skilled in the format that he looked as if he invented it. He's still the ratings king. But when it comes to O'Reilly,…
In November 1891, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis married the writer and lesbian Edith Lees. He was 32 and a virgin. And since he was impotent, they never consummated their union. After their honeymoon, the two lived separately in what he called an open marriage. The union lasted until Lees’ death in 1916.
This is not what most would consider a model marriage. But perhaps because of its unusualness, Ellis was able to introduce an idea that remains as radical and tantalizing today as it was in his time: trial marriages, in which he envisioned couples exploring a temporary union of varying levels of commitment that allowed them to have sex, access birth control and have an easy divorce if desired, as long as no children were involved. The idea captured the minds of many progressives, including the British philosopher Bertrand Russell and the Denver judge and social reformer Ben B Lindsey, who embraced the new economic and cultural freedoms in the post-Victorian era.
While Ellis gave this type of temporary marriage a name, others had been talking about similar unions years before, including the German poet Johann von Goethe, who entertained the idea in his Elective Affinities (1809), and the American paleontologist E D Cope, who wrote in his book The Marriage Problem (1888) that marriages should start with a five-year contract that either spouse could end or renew with a further 10- or 15-year contract and, if all still went well after that, a permanent contract.
In 1966, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested a two-step version of marriage – an ‘individual commitment’ that would fit college students of limited means and could be easily dissolved or else converted into a ‘parental commitment’ if they were ready and willing to take on the obligations of children. In 1971, the Maryland legislator Lena King Lee proposed a Marriage-Contractual Renewal Bill so couples could annul or renew their marriage every three years. In 2007, a German legislator proposed a seven-year contract; in 2010, a women’s group in the Philippines proposed a 10-year marital contract; and in 2011, Mexico City legislators suggested a reform to the civil code that would allow couples to decide on the length of their marital commitment, with a minimum of two years.
Clearly, lifelong marriage was due an overhaul. Despite all the talk, however, no laws were ever passed, and the idea of renewable marriages remained just that – an idea. But temporary marriages have actually been successfully practised for centuries, among Peruvian Indians in the Andes, in 15th-century Indonesia, in ancient Japan and the Islamic world, and elsewhere. And it appears that we might be ready to put them into practice again.
In a recent survey, many Millennials indicated that they’d be open to a ‘beta marriage’, in which couples would commit to each other for a certain number of years – two years seemed to be the ‘right’ amount – after which they could renew, renegotiate or split, as Jessica Bennett wrote in Time magazine last year. While it wasn’t a scientific survey, it points to a willingness to see marriage as something other than ‘until death’, which, in fact, it is not. In 2013, 40 per cent of newlyweds had been married at least once before, according to the US think tank the Pew Research Center. Since 10 per cent of first marriages don’t even make it past five years, a renewable marriage contract makes more sense than ever.
Our current contract – ‘until death’ – might have worked when people didn’t live all that long (according to the American sociologist and author Stephanie Coontz, the average marriage in colonial times lasted under 12 years); or when many women died in childbirth, freeing men to marry multiple times (which they did); and when men of means needed women to cook, clean and caretake, and women needed men for financial security. But that isn’t why we marry nowadays. Still, we congratulate couples on their anniversaries and get nostalgic as the years add up – 15, 25, 50, 75. Are they years of wedded bliss? Not always; many long-term marriages are loveless and sexless, and sometimes full of anger and resentments. But if they make it until a spouse dies – success!
Longevity alone shouldn’t be the marker of a happy, healthy marriage. Rather than staying in marriages ‘until death’, renewable marriages would allow partners to tweak their marital contract accordingly, or agree that it’s beyond tweaking and end it without the shock or drama of a contentious divorce or lingering doubts about what went wrong. And as the late Nobel-winning economist Gary S Becker noted, if every couple had to personalise their marital contract based on what they consider important, there would be no more societal stigma or judgment over what are essentially private decisions.
If society is truly concerned about the decline in marriage, perhaps it’s time to rethink ‘until death’. And if brides- and grooms-to-be truly want a happy marriage, then it is time for them to take responsibility for defining their goals and expectations in a renewable contract, and stating – out loud or on paper – ‘I choose you again’ as often as they mean it.
By Vicki Larson
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
The United States’ unilateral missile strikes against a Syrian airforce base are a dramatic escalation of its participation in that country’s civil war. The US government has attacked a Syrian government asset for the first time.
The attack also marks Donald Trump’s first major foreign policy test as US president. It represents a 180-degree shift from his previous position of opposing intervention in Syria. And the sudden about-face sends a worrying signal for how his administration may handle future crises in international relations.
The operation
On Thursday, the US unilaterally launched strikes against the al-Shayrat airforce base in Homs. This base primarily houses Mig-23 and SU-22 strike craft and Mig-25 interceptors.
The attack consisted of 59 sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, which targeted airframes and supporting infrastructure. It reportedly led to casualties among Syrian military personnel.
The attack has been justified as a punitive response to the Syrian military’s likely use of sarin chemical nerve agents against civilians in Idlib province. This led to at least 70 deaths and drew worldwide condemnation.
The Idlib incident was a much smaller repeat of a major sarin deployment in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013. That attack led to hundreds of civilian deaths – many of them children.
The Ghouta atrocity led the US to the brink of war with Syria; the Syrian government was alleged to have crossed Obama’s infamous “red line”. Ultimately, however, diplomatic manoeuvring by senior US, Russian and Syrian officials de-escalated the situation. They were able to negotiate the apparent dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program.
Recent events, however, suggest this dismantling was not as extensive as previously thought.
Trump’s humanitarian intervention?
What’s concerning is how the strikes have been rationalised. Trump has described the strikes as aimed at protecting a “vital national security interest”. However, this appears to contradict one of the fundamental themes that buoyed Trump’s rise to power.
The then-presidential candidate was criticised for appearing to be open to accommodating the anti-human-rights predilections of authoritarian rulers provided they served US economic and security interests.
Trump condemned the Obama administration’s response to the Ghouta attacks when strikes were under consideration. He explicitly and repeatedly indicated that, as president, he would adopt a non-interventionist position in Syria in spite of the humanitarian crisis.
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However, the strikes clearly contradict this position. Trump now claims intervention was a matter of “vital national security interest”.
Given the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons threatened no US citizens – nor allies – one is left to conclude that preventing further use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians is now seen as vital to US national security.
This view is itself dubious and inconsistent with a conflict where the US has largely turned a blind eye to half-a-million dead Syrian civilians over the past six years. The US has increasingly contributed to this toll in recent weeks.
A worrying precedent
A point of concern for some has been Trump’s inability to fully grasp the consequences of his actions and his general reflexiveness to the conditions he confronts. Aswithmany of his domestic policy promises on the campaign trail, Trump’s Syria stance appears to be a flip-flop.
Shifts in domestic and foreign policy are generally to be expected and afforded some latitude as a candidate transitions to the presidency. But the degree and speed of Trump’s foreign policy switches are of serious concern.
Unpredictability in international relations has particularly high stakes. It can lead to rapid escalations, collapse of long-term relationships and partnerships, and even war.
This is of particular concern in Syria, given the close proximity of Russian forces actively fighting to defend the Assad regime.
The US apparently ultimately alerted (telling, not asking) Russia to the strikes against the Syrian regime. Yet the speed with which such an operation was organised, along with its unilateral and non-consultative nature, does little to dispel the fears of foreign policy realists about the Trump administration’s inconsistent and chaotic approach to world affairs.
The US military’s strikes only intensify that debate. Will the system ultimately force Trump to fall in line with a more consistent and predictable approach to foreign relations? Or will the policy bedlam ultimately prove sustainable, and make unpredictability the new norm in the international system?
As media outrage around the atrocities in Syria heats up and as our desperate-for-a-political-win president seems to be mulling the prospect of armed intervention in that country, it's important to remember the role Fox News and other conservative media outlets played in the run-up to the catastrophically costly, invasion of Iraq.
In a New York magazine profile of Fox News booker Laurie Luhn -- who suffered 20 years of harassment and sexualized bullying at the hands of ousted Fox News CEO Roger Ailes -- the former talent booker recalled her role in "selling" an invasion of Iraq to the American people.
"As she was promoted through the ranks at Fox, Luhn worked harder and harder to please Ailes," wrote New York's Gabriel Sherman, author of the Ailes biography The Loudest Voice in the Room. "She zealously promoted the network’s right-wing agenda."
“I was very proud of the product. I was very proud of how we handled 9/11. Very proud of how we handled the run-up to the Iraq War,” Luhn recalled. “My job was to sell the war. I needed to get people on the air that were attractive and articulate and could convey the importance of this campaign. It was a drumbeat.”
Pres. George W. Bush's press secretary Scott McClellan admitted after his resignation that the administration engaged in a "propaganda campaign" to sell the war to the U.S. public. From the summer of 2002 onward, McClellan said, the Bush administration manipulated the Iraq issue in a way that "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."
"In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage," he said.
In the weeks ahead, after bombarding the public with images of gassed and murdered children and other civilians, the administration and its supporters may well attempt to gin up another push to war. President Donald Trump may see a foreign war as a means to shore up his and lasso back into the fold those Republicans -- and Democrats -- whose donor base is heavily made up of companies that stand to profit from a war.
In a shakeup by President Trump, top White House political strategist Steve Bannon has been removed from the National Security Council’s principals committee, which is comprised of top military service chiefs and intelligence agency heads. Bannon, who never should have been on the committee in the first place, was removed via an executive order that restored the traditional White House balance of keeping political appointees out of the military and intelligence chain of command.
The decision suggests that Bannon’s still-substantial power in the White House is being restrained and limited—though public statements by Bannon and the White House are offering other excuses. Bannon, the former executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News, was elevated by Trump to the principals committee at the start of his presidency. The move was sharply criticized by Congress and foreign policy experts.
The decision was made by Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an unnamed White House official. Bannon was put on the principals committee—where he never attended a meeting—in part to watch Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has since left in disgrace, Bloomberg reported, also citing an unnamed White House official.
In a statement reported by the Journal, Bannon reverted to his Breitbart conspiracy theory mode, predictably blaming not only the Obama administration for his ouster, but pointing fingers at Susan Rice, the latest Obama administration figure the far-right is seeking to ensnare in its change-the-topic defense of Trump’s campaign contacts with Russia. “Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration,” Bannon’s statement said. “I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized. General McMaster has returned the NSC to its proper function.”
What this means is that the so-called deep state, or Washington institutions that endure throughout changes of administrations, like the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, are reasserting their power by pushing political operatives like Bannon back into a more limited sphere of influence. It means he will not have equal say in military and intelligence agency analysis and decision-making.
An analogy is haunting the United States – the analogy of fascism. It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as – or compared with – 20th-century interwar fascism. Like fascism, the resurgent Right is irrational, close-minded, violent and racist. So goes the analogy, and there’s truth to it. But fascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help.
The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalisation destroyed communities, professions and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War.
The First World War had devastated Europe, killing 16 million people, maiming another 20 million, crushing economies and sowing turmoil. In Italy, for example, the postwar period saw high inflation and unemployment, as well as strikes, factory occupations, land seizures and other forms of social unrest and violence. The Liberal Italian governments of the postwar era failed to adequately address these problems. The Liberals’ constituencies – businessmen, landowners, members of the middle class – abandoned them. The country’s two largest opposition parties – the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI – also offered little effective redress to these basic social problems.
Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) stepped into the breach, taking advantage of the failure or ineffectiveness of existing institutions, parties and elites, and offering a mixture of ‘national’ and ‘social’ policies. Fascists promised to foster national unity, prioritise the interests of the nation above those of any particular group, and promote Italy’s stature internationally. The fascists also appealed to Italians’ desire for social security, solidarity and protection from capitalist crises. They promised therefore to restore order, protect private property and promote prosperity but also to shield society from economic downturns and disruption. Fascists stressed that wealth entailed responsibilities as well as privileges, and should be administered for the benefits of the nation.
These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true ‘people’s party’.
After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, sports and excursion activities. These organisations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy. As one fascist put it: ‘There cannot be any single economic interests which are above the general economic interests of the state, no individual, economic initiatives which do not fall under the supervision and regulation of the state, no relationships of the various classes of the nation which are not the concern of the state.’ Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly ‘racialist’ understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular.
Italian fascism differed from its German counterpart in important ways. Most notably, perhaps, anti-Semitism and racism were more innate in the German version. But Italian and German fascism also shared important similarities. Like Italy, Germany was a ‘new’ nation (formed in 1871) plagued by deep divisions. After the First World War, Germany had found itself saddled with punitive peace terms. During the 1920s, it experienced violent uprisings, political assassinations, foreign invasion and a notorious Great Inflation. Then the Great Depression hit, causing immense suffering in Germany. The response of the government, and other political actors, however, must also be remembered. For different reasons, both the era’s conservative governments and their socialist opponents primarily favoured austerity as a response to the crisis. Thus came a golden opportunity for fascism.
Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) promised to serve the entire German people, but the German fascist vision of ‘the people’ did not include Jews and other ‘undesirables’. They promised to create a ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) that would overcome the country’s divisions. The fascists also pledged to fight the Depression and contrasted its activism on behalf of the people’s welfare with the meekness and austerity of the government and the socialists. By the 1932 elections, these appeals to protect the German people helped the Nazis become the largest political party, and the one with the broadest socioeconomic base.
When, in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis quickly began work-creation and infrastructure programmes. They exhorted business to take on workers, and doled out credit. Germany’s economy rebounded and unemployment figures improved dramatically: German unemployment fell from almost 6 million in early 1933 to 2.4 million by the end of 1934; by 1938, Germany essentially enjoyed full employment. By the end of the 1930s, the government was controlling decisions about economic production, investment, wages and prices. Public spending was growing spectacularly.
Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publically supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’ (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has ‘opened the way for every qualified individual – whatever his origins – to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious and resolute’.
Largely for these reasons, up till 1939, most Germans’ experience with the Nazi regime was probably positive. The Nazis had seemingly conquered the Depression and restored economic and political stability. As long as they could prove their ethnic ‘purity’ and stayed away from overt shows of disloyalty, Germans typically experienced National Socialism not as a tyranny and terror, but as a regime of social reform and warmth.
There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity – but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.
The lesson for the present is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.
By Sheri Berman, professor of political science at Barnard College in New York. Her book Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Much media notice is likely to be taken this spring of the fact that a hundred years ago the US declared war on Germany, initiating for the first time ever American participation in a military conflict on European soil. The unprecedented nature of this “great departure” will surely be commented upon. But it is unlikely that many observers will venture beyond what for a long time has been the standard explanation of that involvement. An opportunity for a clearer understanding of the emergence of the US as a world power in the twentieth century will thus be missed.
We are usually told that US involvement in the Great War can be explained quite simply. Perhaps not surprisingly the prevailing account fits into a broader, widely accepted and promoted narrative about the US role generally in the modern world. Foreign evils are the root of the matter, and they require that the “indispensable nation” make the world, safe, free, and democratic. In 1917, Germany, by its aggressive use of u-boats to blockade Britain and its allies, forced the US to abandon its neutrality. An idealistic president, Woodrow Wilson, responded by rallying Americans behind a crusade intended not only to punish Berlin, but to save the world from ever having to endure war again.
But this explanation is grossly inadequate. To understand what did happen, it helps to keep in mind that American leaders had come, by 1900, well before the war erupted in Europe in 1914, to hold decided views about their nation’s future role in the world. Inspired especially by the stupendous economic growth that America was experiencing, they believed that in the coming decades the US could ascend to a position of international importance comparable to, if not eclipsing, that played by Britain in the nineteenth century. At the same time they believed that the continuance of the kind of international order that London had presided over was vital to their success. They were alarmed by intensifying great power rivalry that might threaten that order and were especially anxious about changes to the political boundaries and commercial frameworks that prevailed throughout Latin America and East Asia. It was believed that both of those vast, underdeveloped regions would see the ascendance of US influence and trade. Out of this concern there emerged the two hallmark foreign policies of America in this period: the (revitalized) Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy.
Great power relations increasingly seemed to require attention as well. While Britain was regarded as a rival, many of its policies were seen as working to US advantage. As a result, the two governments drew closer. And, Washington also began to work with London to promote mechanisms for the settlement of international disputes, war being seen as a threat to the status quo.
From beginning to end, the official US response to the Great War was dominated by the goal of trying to restore and then put on a more secure foundation the kind of international order American policy makers wanted. Ideologically, they assured themselves that this was a quest in the interest not only of all Americans, but of the entire world. The globe’s most unselfish and responsible statesmen were simply working to ensure that the world would be set up the way it was supposed to be, with (in their racialist thinking) the most adult and civilized people of humanity (themselves) leading the rest toward progress.
American involvement in the Great War began right away in 1914 when the war broke out. The Wilson administration wanted the conflict composed, but for the president and his chief adviser, Col. Edward M. House, peace was not an end in itself. It mattered greatly that Germany not undermine Britain and that it be taught a lesson. It was also vital that the settlement ensure against another such upheaval. Toward these ends, the US promoted itself as the only suitable mediator of the conflict and tried to position itself for a place at the peace table. Before the war even began the administration had already floated a rough plan for stabilization. The centerpiece of the plan entailed the US and like-minded big powers coming together to uphold the status quo against potential challengers like Russia and Japan, as well as cooperatively overseeing the future of what Col. House called the earth’s “waste places,” the underdeveloped world. This plan was in fact one of the precursors of Wilson’s League of Nations.
When the war began Wilson declared that the United States would steer a neutral path, and it was certainly his preference to stay clear of the fighting. But in the end his attachment to a particular vision for America’s role in the twentieth century world mattered more than peace. Whatever he said in public, he repeatedly tilted toward Britain and its allies, not only because he did not want them to lose, but also because he wanted to make sure that the US would have a leading role (along with Britain) in arranging the postwar world. Thus he acquiesced in Britain’s sweeping maritime measures, which involved the use of its navy and mines to destroy all of Germany’s trade. And House secretly offered to coordinate his peace efforts with London. The same considerations were key to the quite different posture that Wilson assumed toward Germany’s use of submarines. The president threatened war unless Berlin adhered to his views as to how it might behave on the high seas.
Wilson continued to try to get the two sides to accept his vision of a proper settlement. But both remained uncooperative. His hope of America becoming a world power without participation in the Great War’s fighting thus in actuality was made hostage to the question of how long Berlin would agree to respect Wilson’s red lines. That question would be answered in 1917, just months after he had won reelection as president behind the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
Robert E. Hannigan is Scholar in Residence in the Department of History of Suffolk University. He is the author of The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House press secretary Sean Spicer — the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows — was his pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing.
“The president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” Spicer said.
“… People are often told they have to sell an asset or get rid of something to come serve in the government. And there’s a lot of people that have done a lot to come into this administration to give back, that have been inspired by the president’s victory and the president’s agenda to move the country forward.”
You bet, Sean. In a world of haughty ideals and self-professed high purpose, some would call this notion noblesse oblige — that with wealth and power comes social responsibility; to whom much is given, much is expected, etc. And so it should be. But in Donald Trump’s world, snagging a White House job doubtless will be a solid gold vehicle for using wealth and power to generate more wealth and power for yourself and others, taking optimal advantage of an opportunity handed you by the rich guy who, thanks to the deficiencies of the Electoral College, has landed in the most lucrative pot of jam ever.
And while the new hires may have to hew closer to the conflict-of-interest rules than the boss — did you see the latest about how Trump can keep siphoning profits from his businesses even though he’s supposed to be hands off? — there will be plenty of opportunities to take advantage.
In other words, high-ranking White House employee, those assets that you may or may not have set aside for the duration are likely to be worth a lot more when you and this president are done, even though you will have left behind quite a trail of broken dreams and shattered lives among the less favored of us.
The financial disclosure forms from about 180 staffers that begrudgingly were released by the White House late last week — a Friday night news dump designed to be as cumbersome for the press as possible — revealed, as The Washington Post reported, that Trump, “who campaigned as a champion of the working class, has surrounded himself with a circle of wealthy advisers.
“The disclosures showed that Trump’s top aides have generated millions of dollars from Wall Street, Hollywood, real estate and the media, holding a slew of investments that intensify the administration’s challenge in navigating potential intersections between officials’ personal finances and their policymaking roles.”
Just 27 of these folks have a combined worth of $2.3 billion, and that is a sum, according to a different Washington Post article, greater than what all the households in each of 80 percent of America’s counties make in a year — 86 percent when it comes to the counties that voted for Trump. Per the Post, in a classic bit of understatement, “… This reinforces the disconnect between the Trump team and the voters Trump likes to highlight.”
That would include such team players as chief economic adviser and Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn, worth between $253 million and $611 million; Reed Cordish, the Maryland real estate guy now in charge of technology initiatives, worth at least $197 million; and of course, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, the person known around these parts as The Son-in-Law Also Rises.
Ivanka and Jared, a man whose burgeoning portfolio of responsibilities now covers everything from the opioid epidemic and peace in the Middle East to possibly, I pray, throwing himself between his father-in-law and the nuclear football, are worth as much as $740 million. Eric Lipton and Jesse Drucker at The New York Times write:
“Mr. Kushner did resign from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability companies that make up the family-run multibillion-dollar real estate business. But the financial disclosure report shows that Mr. Kushner will remain a beneficiary of most of those same entities.”
And that’s a big problem, “perilous legal and ethical ground,” according to experts interviewed by the Times. As real estate investors, the Kushner family attracts money from China, Russia, the Middle East and other places where American foreign policy has an interest. What’s more, the banks with which the Kushners deal are regulated by governments here and abroad and stand to gain from Trump pledges to roll back the Dodd-Frank reforms, among others. Some, such as Israel’s Bank Hapoalim, are under federal investigation. The tax code reform that Trump claims to be a high priority will impact the Kushners and their financial interests, too.
One other thing. Looking at the disclosure forms, what’s also striking is how many of the fortunate now staking their claims at the executive mansion made much of their money not via inheritance or banks or industry but in the world of political consulting, a field that has exploded with the infusion of millions now made possible by Citizens United and other court decisions. Those rulings have helped open a fire hose of dark money, much of it from the right — especially the Koch brothers and the Mercers, father and daughter — and it floods the electoral landscape with a deluge of cant and propaganda.
Presidential adviser and mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and consultant, has assets valued at between $11 million and more than $44 million. Last year she made $842,614 from a reported 75 sources of income, including Tea Party Patriots and the Judicial Crisis Network, which has been bankrolling a big media campaign in support of Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch.
And while Steve Bannon made his initial fortune in international investment banking (including Goldman Sachs), an irony given his current anti-globalist nationalism and economic populism, in recent years he has made a lot of his cash from ventures in right-wing publishing (Breitbart), filmmaking, analysis and consulting. His assets are now listed as between $13 million and $56 million.
“While most press reports have focused on the potential for financial conflicts of interest posed by the multibillions in holdings by numerous White House officials, the personal financial statements show how key political advisers became rich via their extreme anti-government activism.”
The profit opportunities are rife, deeply tempting and not just for Trump’s nearest and dearest. This wealthiest administration in American history is going to make for its selected few a bundle of a size unimaginable to the rest of us — yet we’re the ones who will be paying the bill. And when this gang leaves their government jobs, they’ll be making even more, spinning through the revolving door back into the private sector, their worth enhanced by the time they’ve spent working for this mudslide of a president.
Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has said Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” is his favorite book. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, cited Rand as a major inspiration. Before he withdrew his nomination, Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, revealed that he devotes much free time to reading Rand.
Such is the case with many other Trump advisers and allies: The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, famously made his staff members read Ayn Rand. Trump himself has said that he’s a “fan” of Rand and “identifies” with Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s novel, “The Fountainhead,” “an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints.”
As a philosopher, I have often wondered at the remarkable endurance and popularity of Ayn Rand’s influence on American politics. Even by earlier standards, however, Rand’s dominance over the current administration looks especially strong.
What’s in common with Ayn Rand?
Recently, historian and Rand expert Jennifer Burns wrote how Rand’s sway over the Republican Party is diminishing. Burns says the promises of government largesse and economic nationalism under Trump would repel Rand.
That was before the president unveiled his proposed federal budget that greatly slashes nonmilitary government spending – and before Paul Ryan’s Obamacare reform, which promised to strip health coverage from 24 million low-income Americans and grant the rich a generous tax cut instead. Now, Trump looks to be zeroing in on a significant tax cut for the rich and corporations.
These all sound like measures Rand would enthusiastically support, in so far as they assist the capitalists and so-called job creators, instead of the poor.
Though the Trump administration looks quite steeped in Rand’s thought, there is one curious discrepancy. Ayn Rand exudes a robust elitism, unlike any I have observed elsewhere in the tomes of political philosophy. But this runs counter to the narrative of the Trump phenomenon: Central to the Trump’s ascendancy is a rejection of elites reigning from urban centers and the coasts, overrepresented at universities and in Hollywood, apparently.
Liberals despair over the fact that they are branded elitists, while, as former television host Jon Stewart put it, Republicans backed a man who takes every chance to tout his superiority, and lords over creation from a gilded penthouse apartment, in a skyscraper that bears his own name.
Clearly, liberals lost this rhetorical battle.
What is Ayn Rand’s philosophy?
How shall we make sense of the gross elitism at the heart of the Trump administration, embodied in its devotion to Ayn Rand – elitism that its supporters overlook or ignore, and happily ascribe to the left instead?
In this 1962 file photo Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist, is photographed in New York with Grand Central Terminal in the background.
AP Photo
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is quite straightforward. Rand sees the world divided into “makers” and “takers.” But, in her view, the real makers are a select few – a real elite, on whom we would do well to rely, and for whom we should clear the way, by reducing or removing taxes and government regulations, among other things.
Rand’s thought is intellectually digestible, unnuanced, easily translated into policy approaches and statements.
Small government is in order because it lets the great people soar to great heights, and they will drag the rest with them. Rand says we must ensure that “the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.”
Mitt Romney captured Rand’s philosophy well during the 2012 campaign when he spoke of the 47 percent of Americans who do not work, vote Democrat and are happy to be supported by hardworking, conservative Americans.
No sympathy for the poor
In laying out her dualistic vision of society, divided into good and evil, Rand’s language is often starker and harsher. In her 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” she says,
“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”
Rand’s is the opposite of a charitable view of humankind, and can, in fact, be quite cruel. Consider her attack on Pope Paul VI, who, in his 1967 encyclical Progressio Populorum, argued that the West has a duty to help developing nations, and called for its sympathy for the global poor.
Rand was appalled; instead of feeling sympathy for the poor, she says
“When [Western Man] discovered entire populations rotting alive in such conditions [in the developing world], is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride – or pride and gratitude – the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?”
Telling it like it is
Why doesn’t Rand’s elitism turn off Republican voters? – or turn them against their leaders who, apparently, ought to disdain lower and middle class folk? If anyone – like Trump – identifies with Rand’s protagonists, they must think themselves truly excellent, while the muddling masses, they are beyond hope.
Why hasn’t news of this disdain then trickled down to the voters yet?
The neoconservatives, who held sway under President George W. Bush, were also quite elitist, but figured out how to speak to the Republican base, in their language. Bush himself, despite his Andover-Yale upbringing, was lauded as “someone you could have a beer with.”
Trump has succeeded even better in this respect – he famously “tells it like it is,” his supporters like to say. Of course, as judged by fact-checkers, Trump’s relationship to the truth is embattled and tenuous; what his supporters seem to appreciate, rather, is his willingness to voice their suspicions and prejudices without worrying about recriminations of critics. Trump says things people are reluctant or shy to voice loudly – if at all.
Building one’s fortune
This gets us closer to what’s going on. Rand is decidedly cynical about the said masses: There is little point in preaching to them; they won’t change or improve, at least of their own accord; nor will they offer assistance to the capitalists. The masses just need to stay out of the way.
The principal virtue of a free market, Rand explains, is “that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements…”
But they don’t lift the masses willingly or easily, she says: “While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority are free to demonstrate.”
Like Rand, her followers – who populate the Trump administration – are largely indifferent to the progress of the masses. They will let people be. Rand believes, quite simply, most people are hapless on their own, and we simply cannot expect much of them. There are only a few on whom we should pin our hopes; the rest are simply irrelevant. Which is why she complains about our tendency to give welfare to the needy. She says,
“The welfare and rights of the producers were not regarded as worthy of consideration or recognition. This is the most damning indictment of the present state of our culture.”
So, why do Republicans get away with eluding the title of elitist – despite their allegiance to Rand – while Democrats are stuck with this title?
I think part of the reason is that Democrats, among other things, are moralistic.
They are more optimistic about human nature – they are more optimistic about the capacity of humans to progress morally and live in harmony.
Thus, liberals judge: They call out our racism, our sexism, our xenophobia. They make people feel bad for harboring such prejudices, wittingly or not, and they warn us away from potentially offensive language, and phrases.
Many conservative opponents scorn liberals for their ill-founded naïve optimism. For in Rand’s world there is no hope for the vast majority of mankind. She heaps scorn on the poor billions, whom “civilized men” are prodded to help.
The best they can hope for is that they might be lucky enough to enjoy the riches produced by the real innovators, which might eventually trickle down to them in their misery.
To the extent that Trump and his colleagues embrace Rand’s thought, they must share or approach some of her cynicism.
The Los Angeles Times skewered President Donald Trump, the "Dishonest President," in an extraordinary, brilliantly written editorial on Sunday, calling him "untethered to reality."
The editors described Trump as "a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation." The editorial added: "nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck." Though there are many who expected a Trump disaster presidency, his actions so far would score quite high on the political Richter scale.
The paper lambasted Trump for just about everything he has done (or failed to do), but especially for peeling back President Obama's regulations aimed at reducing climate change, his crackdown on immigration and his revenge aimed at "sanctuary cities," and his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have had disastrous effects on millions.
The editorial expressed concern about fake news, lies and propaganda, asserting: "Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction." The paper added that Trump urges his supporters to ignore fact-based evidence, science and what they read in the established media. The message from Trump is to reject long-term institutions like the press and the courts, in favor of ideology and conspiracy theory. This is a "recipe for a divided country," the newspaper asserted.
Trump has often expressed his distaste for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now he has another major media enemy, this one in California, on the left coast, where Trump was crushed by Hillary Clinton. And the LA Times just got started on Sunday. There will be three more editorials in this series to be published under the heading, "The Problem with Trump."
The hard-edged editorial in the most prominent California newspaper highlights the vast chasm between people who live on the two coasts, where voters went for Hillary Clinton in huge majorities, and the South, Southwest and Midwest where voters decided that Trump best represented their interests.
As the New York Times reported, "Hillary Clinton... won California’s 55 electoral votes with 4,269,978 more votes than Donald J. Trump." Hillary Clinton won California by 30 points. Those pro-Trump voters believed Trump's promise about bringing back a romanticized past, where conservative Christians would regain their power, where the coal industry would return to its long-ago glory days as part of a large scale denial of climate change.
The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper in a city with large numbers of immigrants, a couple of hours away from the border with Mexico, showed its concern with Trump's immigration crackdown: "Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the U.S. relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one."
The Times published a series of letters to the editor by irate Trump supporters, complaining that the newspaper has lost its objectivity—though this was an editorial, not an article. Other writers want the Times to give Donald Trump a chance, saying the editorial was hateful and disrespectful and claiming Trump is no less dishonest than his predecessor.
