Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Hillary Speaks

The Plum Line
 Opinion 

Hillary Clinton’s new book blasts Republicans and Russia. She’s 100 percent right.

  
 Play Video 1:53
Clinton calls Trump a 'creep' in her new book, 'What Happened'
Hillary Clinton's new book, 'What Happened,' published Sept. 12 and aims to "pull back the curtain" on her losing presidential bid. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
Today Hillary Clinton’s new book about the 2016 campaign is getting released. This means a lot of very smart people will suddenly decide that they can’t keep these two ideas in their heads at the same time:
  1. Hillary Clinton, her weaknesses as a candidate, and the mistakes she made were partly to blame for her loss.
  2. There are other reasons she lost, and it is not only appropriate for her — and us — to discuss them; it’s desirable, because they have major implications for the future of our democracy.
Clinton’s book, by most accounts, tries to balance those two basic claims. I have not read it, so I can’t say whether it balances them fairly, or whether she feints toward blaming her own failings while dodging accountability for herself via an overemphasis on other causes. But a lot of Twitter traffic today suggests an unwillingness to allow space for the notion that both those claims can even be reconciled or discussed simultaneously at all. That’s absurd, and it could have terrible consequences.
To see why, let’s look at one claim the book makes that we can discuss in isolation (before assessing its overall balance in a future post): Her book reportedly has an extensive discussion of Russian interference in the election, and, crucially, it points a finger at congressional Republicans for failing to show a united front against it. As Jonathan Allen summarizes:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, gets hit for “playing defense” for [President] Trump on Russia. “I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security,” Clinton writes of the Kentucky Republican. “McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway.” …
[There] is a 50-page, point-by-point chronology of Russia’s involvement in the election and the Trump operation’s efforts to capitalize on it. That chapter — called “Trolls, Bots, Fake News and Real Russians” — puts it all in one place for the first time.
In an interview with USA Today, Clinton says she is “convinced” that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian sabotage. That goes too far — while we do know that top Trump officials were willing and eager to collude, we don’t know much of what happened beyond that. Let’s hope her book states clearly that the accusation remains largely unproven and subject to investigation.
However, Clinton is right to raise questions about the conduct of Republican lawmakers — McConnell in particular — when confronted in 2016 with the intelligence community’s conclusion and warning that Russia was trying to tip the election. The Post has reported that during the campaign, Obama administration officials privately presented evidence — which had been amassed by our intelligence services — of Russian interference to a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and asked them to present a united front against it. And then:
The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests. According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
There is more to this story, and as Brian Beutler has argued in a post that puts together much of what is known about it, this matters not just for the blame game, but also for purposes of accountability. In this sense alone, Clinton is right to raise the issue: Even if Russian interference didn’t make the difference, we really do need to know more about the Republican refusal to join in a bipartisan effort to stop Russia from sabotaging our election and democracy. But she is also right to do so for another reason: Any failure of accountability could have consequences for the future.
The larger context is this: Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge that Russian sabotage of the election even happened at all. Yet our intelligence services have warned that Russia will hit our democracy in the future. It’s unclear how seriously the administration is taking the threat of more sabotage; some elections experts have warned that a lot more needs to be done, and state officials report getting too little security guidance from the administration. As the 2018 elections get closer, discussion of this topic will escalate. The difference between now and 2016 is that there are now major investigations underway into possible Trump campaign collusion with the last round of sabotage, and it is now public that the intel services say Russia will strike again. One would hope media scrutiny will make it harder for congressional Republicans to dodge their responsibility to take this subject more seriously this time, and to prod Trump to do the same.
If Clinton’s book can force more attention to this topic, that’s a good thing. Whatever one thinks of Clinton’s own culpability for her loss (my own effort to balance the blame is here), discussion of Russian meddling and Republican unconcern about it shouldn’t be overshadowed by some silly idea that focusing on these things constitutes Clinton dodging blame.
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Monday, September 11, 2017

Another Civil War?

News Desk

Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

By 
August 14, 2017
The recent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white-supremacist rally has stoked some Americans’ fears of a new civil war.
Photograph by Glenna Gordon for The New Yorker
Aday after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, St. Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the Union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.
America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.
“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.
Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.
President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.”
To test Mines’s conjecture, I reached out to five prominent Civil War historians this weekend. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and overlap on top of it the map of the Civil War—and who was allied with who in the Civil War—not much has changed,” Judith Giesberg, the editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and a historian at Villanova University, told me. “We never agreed on the outcome of the Civil War and the direction the country should go in. The postwar amendments were highly contentious—especially the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliver voting rights to people of color? We still don’t know.”
She added, “Does that make us vulnerable to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those specific circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we are not entering something similar in the way of a culture war. We are vulnerable to racism, tribalism, and conflicting visions of the way forward for our nation.”
Anxiety over deepening schisms and new conflict has an outlet in popular culture: in April, Amazon selected the dystopian novel “American War”—which centers on a second U.S. civil war—as one of its best books of the month. In a review in the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote, “Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions . . . both poignant and horrifying.” The Times book reviewer noted, “It’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.” The book’s author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and covered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Ferguson protest as a journalist for Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Before Charlottesville, David Blight, a Yale historian, was already planning a conference in November on “American Disunion, Then and Now.” “Parallels and analogies are always risky, but we do have weakened institutions and not just polarized parties but parties that are risking disintegration, which is what happened in the eighteen-fifties,” he told me. “Slavery tore apart, over fifteen years, both major political parties. It destroyed the Whig Party, which was replaced by the Republican Party, and divided the Democratic Party into northern and southern parts.”
“So,” he said, “watch the parties” as an indicator of America’s health.
In the eighteen-fifties, Blight told me, Americans were not good at foreseeing or absorbing the “shock of events,” including the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the John Brown raid, and even the Mexican-American War. “No one predicted them. They forced people to reposition themselves,” Blight said. “We’re going through one of those repositionings now. Trump’s election is one of them, and we’re still trying to figure it out. But it’s not new. It dates to Obama’s election. We thought that would lead culture in the other direction, but it didn’t,” he said. “There was a tremendous resistance from the right, then these episodes of police violence, and all these things [from the past] exploded again. It’s not only a racial polarization but a seizure about identity.”
Generally, Blight added, “We know we are at risk of civil war, or something like it, when an election, an enactment, an event, an action by government or people in high places, becomes utterly unacceptable to a party, a large group, a significant constituency.” The nation witnessed tectonic shifts on the eve of the Civil War, and during the civil-rights era, the unrest of the late nineteen-sixties and the Vietnam War, he said. “It did not happen with Bush v. Gore, in 2000, but perhaps we were close. It is not inconceivable that it could happen now.”
In a reversal of public opinion from the nineteen-sixties, Blight said, the weakening of political institutions today has led Americans to shift their views on which institutions are credible. “Who do we put our faith in today? Maybe, ironically, the F.B.I.,” he said. “With all these military men in the Trump Administration, that’s where we’re putting our hope for the use of reason. It’s not the President. It’s not Congress, which is utterly dysfunctional and run by men who spent decades dividing us in order to keep control, and not even the Supreme Court, because it’s been so politicized.”
In the wake of Charlottesville, the chorus of condemnation from politicians across the political spectrum has been encouraging, but it is not necessarily reassuring or an indicator about the future, Gregory Downs, a historian at the University of California at Davis, told me. During the Civil War, even Southern politicians who denounced or were wary of secession for years—including Jefferson Davis—ended up as leaders of the Confederacy. “If the source of conflict is deeply embedded in cultural or social forces, then politicians are not inherently able to restrain them with calls for reason,” Downs said. He called the noxious white supremacists and neo-Nazis the “messengers,” rather than the “architects,” of the Republic’s potential collapse. But, he warned, “We take our stability for granted.”
He dug out for me a quote from the journalist Murat Halstead’s book “The War Claims of the South,” published in 1867. “The lesson of the war that should never depart from us,” Halstead wrote, “is that the American people have no exemption from the ordinary fate of humankind. If we sin, we must suffer for our sins, like the Empires that are tottering and the Nations that have perished.”
Eric Foner, the Columbia University historian, won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, for his book “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” Like the other scholars I spoke to, Foner is skeptical that any future conflict will resemble America’s last civil war. “Obviously, we have some pretty deep divisions along multiple lines—racial, ideological, rural versus urban,” he told me. “Whether they will lead to civil war, I doubt. We have strong gravitational forces that counteract what we’re seeing today.” He pointed out that “the spark in Charlottesville—taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee—doesn’t have to do with civil war. People are not debating the Civil War. They’re debating American society and race today.”
Charlottesville was not the first protest by the so-called alt-right, nor will it be the last. Nine more rallies are planned for next weekend and others in September.
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Friday, September 8, 2017

Tutor

School has started and I should hire out as a tutor. My math is a little rusty, but I am still good in physics and chemistry. My grammar skills aren't what they used to be, but I am still good at editing papers. Biology is one of my fortes though I am better with the vertebrates than the invertebrates. Speaking of fortes, I can name all of our country's wars in order. I was a history major after all. I am available.
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Thursday, September 7, 2017

David Herbert Donald - Lincoln Considered (Book Review)

David Herbert Donald was one of the greatest of American historians.  He is known to the public mainly for his 1995 biography of Lincoln.  This collection of Lincoln essays first written in the 50's and 60's expand his views of the 16th President.

Chapter One
"Getting Right with Lincoln"
Former Illinois Senator first said that the first task of a politician was to "get right with Lincoln."
Republicans claim Lincoln, but over the decades Democrats too have laid claim to Lincoln.
What startles me in reading this essay is how far Donald goes in showing how Lincoln was so disparaged while he was President.  It is as if everyone said the worst things about him, and then, of course, it all changed after he was assassinated.
Having read so many books over the years about Lincoln, it is impossible for me, a layperson, to totally "get right with Lincoln."
Lincoln can be cited on all sides of all issues.  No wonder that any politician can claim him.  P. 13
Lincoln was non ideological.  Had no dogmas.
Chapter Two
"The Folklore Lincoln"
Deals with Lincoln legends, of which there are many.
The Lincoln Cult is almost an American religion.  P. 15
The Great Emancipator.
The Great Martyr.
The transcendent rail-splitter.  The frontier man.  Like Davy Crockett.
The self-made man.
Lincoln the religious.
Chapter Three
"Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists"
"Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist.  He believed that slavery was a moral wrong, but he was not sure how to right it.  When elected President, he was pledged to contain, not to extirpate, the South's peculiar institution.  Only after offers of compensation to slaveholders had failed and after military necessities had become desperate did he issue his Emancipation Proclamation.  Even then his action affected only a portion of the Negroes, and the President himself seemed at times unsure of the constitutionality of his proclamation."  P. 31
It's hard for me to evaluate Donald's interpretation of the abolitionists.  It seems to me that historians of his generation had a negative understanding of the abolitionists and only lately has the complexity of their motives and their positives been recognized.
Chapter Four
"An Access of Democracy"
Chapter Five
"Education Defective"
Chapter Six
"Herndon and Mary"
Herndon himself seems to be the historical source of friction between these two.  The subject by and large does not interest me.
Chapter Seven
"Refighting the Civil War"
The chapter concerns military history, which mostly eludes my comprehension.
Chapter Eight
"The Radicals and Lincoln"
The so-called "radicals" have been a foil for Lincoln for decades and maybe still for Donald.  The reputation of the radicals has improved in recent years it seems to me.
Did the radicals desire to implement their program so as to prolong the war if necessary?  P. 106
Giving the freedmen the franchise was politically motivated.  P. 107
At every turn the Radicals harassed Lincoln.  P. 108
In 1865 they were ready frustrate Lincoln's plan for a speedy reconstruction.  But weren't they right to do so?  P. 108
Donald goes into the complexity of the Radicals.  They were not unified in purpose until AFTER the war when Lincoln was gone.  Time to let go of the Malevolent Radical.  P. 120
Chapter 9
"Abraham Lincoln and the American Pragmatic Tradition"
This is the best chapter in the book.
Lincoln was a true pragmatist; he did not have an ideological axe to grind.  He handled issues as they came, making what he thought was the best decision at the time without ideological blinkers.
Was Lincoln a conservative or a liberal?  He was certainly in the conservative category.
To people of his day, AL was neither liberal or conservative.  He was simply ineffectual.  P. 121
He was censured and distrusted by everybody.
Honest and well-intentioned, but weak, lacking in force, and vacillating, lacking in direction.
Showing a lack of determined policy.  P. 121
The author takes the position that Lincoln did little to avert a crisis before he took the oath of office.  P. 122
He seemed unable to cope with the crisis.  P. 122
He seemed disorganized.  Cabinet meetings were non -consequential.  Every segment of society seemed opposed to him.
"My policy is to have no policy."  P. 123
Lincoln reflected a pragmatic tradition in American history.  He was not ideological.  Consistency meant little.
"The dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present.  We must think anew, and act anew."  P. 124-25
Lincoln was always anti-slavery, but the author says that he had to act legally and Constitutionally regardless of his personal feelings.  P. 125
His famous statement to Black leaders in August 1862 though harsh accurately reflected popular opinion in the country.  P. 126
Every problem was unique; each situation had to be decided as it came up.  P. 126
He could approach reconstruction with an open mind and an absence of commitment.  P. 128
He didn't take his 10% plan too seriously.  P. 129  Really?
Okay, so he had an "open-mind" heading into reconstruction.  P. 130
The wisdom of his pragmatism can be debated forever.  P. 132
Chapter Ten
The chapter shows how in certain places Lincoln extended the power of the executive branch, but in certain areas he was restrained in using executive power.
He and his cabinet never formed a united government.  P. 137
He left Congress alone.
He gave his department chiefs complete control.
His view on executive responsibilities reflected the views of the Whig/Republican Parties.
"Thus what Lincoln called his political education helps the puzzling ambiguity of his presidency.  Both in strongly asserting his war powers and in weakly deferring to Congress, he was following the Whig creed in which he was raised."  P. 147
"As our case is new," he argued, "we must think anew, and act anew."   P. 147
Chapter Eleven
"Reverence for the Laws"
Lincoln was a meticulous lawyer and he was proud of his profession.  P. 149
He praised Thomas Jefferson.  P. 150
"The picture of Abraham Lincoln in the prewar years as an unqualified supporter of reverence for the laws and that of President Lincoln who told his subordinates to follow the forms of the law as far as convenient seems entirely inconsistent, and historians have struggled to find ways to reconcile the two images."  P. 154
The Constitution was not a conservative reaction to the radicalism of the Declaration, but rather the Constitution was a fulfillment of the Declaration, or so Lincoln believed.  Lincoln's political philosophy was based on the Declaration of Independence.  P. 161
Rather than stressing the Constitutional limitations placed on the federal government, Lincoln took refuge in the DOI that preceded the Constitution.  P. 161
The emergency powers he assumed during the war was a fulfillment of the rule of law.  He reverenced the law by preserving the country.  P. 163
Chapter Twelve
"A. Lincoln--Politician"
He had to be a skilled politician to survive the endless attacks.  P. 164
The author makes it sound like Lincoln almost acted alone.  P. 167
He used the power of party patronage.  P. 170




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Taxes

Opinion |  OP-ED COLUMNIST

Your Coming Tax Increase

David Leonhardt 
President Trump speaking about tax reform at an event in North Dakota on Wednesday.Doug Mills/The New York Times 
This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.
A 19th-century economist named Adolph Wagner made a prediction that came to be known as Wagner’s Law: As societies became wealthier, their taxes would rise. They would rise because people would want more of the services that government tended to provide better than the private market, like national security, education, medical care and a guaranteed retirement.
Wagner’s Law has proven truer than not, but there are still many people who would like to pretend otherwise. Specifically, they wish we could summon a country with a strong military, good schools, health care and comfortable retirements — but falling taxes. It’s a nice fantasy.
Yesterday, Larry Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary, gave a lunchtime presentation in Washington laying out the statistics that debunk the falling-taxes fantasy. He effectively updated Wagner’s Law for the United States in 2017.
“With the same values and preferences, and the same basic attitude about government activity versus private activity,” Summers said, “you should expect government to be larger in the future than it has been in the past.”
There are four main reasons, he argued:
• One, society is aging, which calls for greater spending on retirees. The ratio of elderly Americans — those expected to be in the last 15 years of their lives — to all other Americans will rise about 50 percent from 2010 to 2030.
• Two, inequality has soared, with living standards stagnating for the middle class and poor. Taxes push back against inequality.
• Three, labor-intensive services, like education and medical care, have become more expensive, and they also tend to be the areas where the government spends money.
• Four, American military spending has not kept up recently with the spending by our main rivals, including China, Iran and Russia. This trend shouldn’t continue forever, Summers said.
I find his case compelling. Even if you disagree in one particular area — say, you favor more private-sector education, or a weaker military — the combined costs are so large that the argument holds up. That’s part of the reason that taxes on the wealthy should rise, and big tax breaks — like those for home ownership and employer health insurance — should be reduced.
I don’t mean to suggest that taxes should always be rising and that government will eventually take over the economy. Capitalism clearly has worked much better than any alternative. And there are times — for example, after a war or when a population is becoming younger — that taxes should fall. It’s also important to cut government where it’s wasteful.
But believing in capitalism is different from believing that government cannot grow. Modern capitalism depends on a well-functioning government. Capitalism has already grown a lot over the last century, across this country and much of the world, and the world is a vastly richer place than a century ago.
“If we want to maintain traditional American values,” as Summers said, “government will need to be significantly larger.”
For more details on the numbers, I recommend a new paper by Paul van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which hosted Summers’s presentation. I first learned of Wagner’s Law from the writer Matt Miller.
In North Dakota yesterday, President Trump tried his best to summon a magical world in which life keeps getting better and taxes keep falling. His pitch “is divorced from reality,” Katrina vanden Heuvel says in The Washington Post. Richard Rubin of The Wall Street Journal called the speech a big step away from tax reform and toward a simple tax cut.
Remember: If Trump succeeds in cutting taxes for the wealthy, taxes for everyone else will eventually need to rise even more.
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