Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics

There have been numerous stories of the very wealthy retreating from cities to flee to the country estates and - better yet if one owns one on one - remote islands - to escape the COVID-19 pandemic and crowded cities such as New York.  They seek to avoid the masses and potential infection.  But, as a piece by a historian in the New York Times lays out, the wealthy have another reason to fear a pandemic and the upheaval that it can bring: the masses demand a more equal playing field and a bigger piece of the economic pie - something Republican "reverse Robin Hood policies" strive to prevent.  At present, the verdict is out on whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic will cause a demand for economic change in America.  Rapidly rising unemployment (another 6 million workers are likely to file unemployment this week) may work against Republican regimes which have long sought to kick the unemployed to the curb or limit unemployment assistance to levels that do not allow for survival.  One can hope that the majority will say "enough" to the 1% sucking up more and more of the nation's wealth and that progressive changes will come.  Meanwhile, here are article highlights on the world's past experiences:  

In the fall of 1347, rat fleas carrying bubonic plague entered Italy on a few ships from the Black Sea. Over the next four years, a pandemic tore through Europe and the Middle East. Panic spread, as the lymph nodes in victims’ armpits and groins swelled into buboes, black blisters covered their bodies, fevers soared and organs failed. Perhaps a third of Europe’s people perished.

The plague returned a mere decade later and periodic flare-ups continued for a century and a half, thinning out several generations in a row. Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.”

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades. According to tax records that have survived in the archives of many Italian towns, wealth inequality in most of these places plummeted. In England, workers ate and drank better than they did before the plague and even wore fancy furs that used to be reserved for their betters.

At the same time, higher wages and lower rents squeezed landlords, many of whom failed to hold on to their inherited privilege. Before long, there were fewer lords and knights, endowed with smaller fortunes, than there had been when the plague first struck.

But these outcomes were not a given. . . . . The policy choices that result determine whether inequality rises or falls in response to such calamities. And history teaches us that these choices can change societies in very different ways.

Looking at the historical record across Europe during the late Middle Ages, we see that elites did not readily cede ground, even under extreme pressure after a pandemic. During the Great Rising of England’s peasants in 1381, workers demanded, among other things, the right to freely negotiate labor contracts. Nobles and their armed levies put down the revolt by force, in an attempt to coerce people to defer to the old order. But the last vestiges of feudal obligations soon faded. Workers could hold out for better wages, and landlords and employers broke ranks with each other to compete for scarce labor.

Elsewhere, however, repression carried the day. In late medieval Eastern Europe, from Prussia and Poland to Russia, nobles colluded to impose serfdom on their peasantries to lock down a depleted labor force. This altered the long-term economic outcomes for the entire region: Free labor and thriving cities drove modernization in western Europe, but in the eastern periphery, development fell behind. But more often than not, repression failed. The first known plague pandemic in Europe and the Middle East, which started in 541, provides the earliest example. Anticipating the English Ordinance of Laborers by 800 years, the Byzantine emperor Justinian railed against scarce workers . . . . The doubling or tripling of real incomes reported on papyrus documents from the Byzantine province of Egypt leaves no doubt that his decree fell on deaf ears. None of these stories had a happy ending for the masses. . . . . In most European societies, disparities in income and wealth rose for four centuries all the way up to the eve of World War I. It was only then that a new great wave of catastrophic upheavals undermined the established order, and economic inequality dropped to lows not witnessed since the Black Death, if not the fall of the Roman Empire. In looking for illumination from the past on our current pandemic, we must be wary of superficial analogies. Even in the worst-case scenario, Covid-19 will kill a far smaller share of the world’s population than any of these earlier disasters did, and it will touch the active work force and the next generation even more lightly. Labor won’t become scarce enough to drive up wages, nor will the value of real estate plummet. And our economies no longer rely on farmland and manual labor.

Yet the most important lesson of history endures. The impact of any pandemic goes well beyond lives lost and commerce curtailed. Today, America faces a fundamental choice between defending the status quo and embracing progressive change. The current crisis could prompt redistributive reforms akin to those triggered by the Great Depression and World War II, unless entrenched interests prove too powerful to overcome.

How Democracies Die

History tells us that individuals and nations often do not make good decisions and live to regret mistakes in judgment.  The election in Britain yesterday may be one such example as that nation appears hell bent now to leave the European Union thereby setting the stage from new efforts in Scotland to break away and perhaps even Northern Ireland to follow suit. England may revel in it xenophobia and go it along attitude now, but down the it may be a different tale.  History also tells us that democracies die often not just because of the rise of a strong man, but also because too many citizens and allow it to happen.  The end of democracies from as far back as the death of the Roman Republic also lays blame for the decline of democratic rule on politicians willing to sell their souls in order to cling to personal power - at least in the short term - with little or care for the nation's or their constituents long term future.  We are now witnessing such conduct by most elected Republicans in America. Like the English, many Americans may come to long regret their shortsightedness of today in the light of a far worse tomorrow.  A column in the New York Times makes this case and urges one to not give up the resistance.  Here are highlights:  

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.

In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”

I reached out to a number of therapists, who said they’re seeing this politically induced misery in their patients. . . . . Karen Starr, a psychologist who practices in Manhattan and on Long Island, some of her patients were “in a state of alarm,” but that’s changed into “more of a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair.” Among those most affected, she said, are the Holocaust survivors she sees. “It’s about this general feeling that the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail,” she said.

Trump, she said, has made bigotry more open and acceptable, something her patients feel in their daily lives. “When you’re dealing with people of color’s mental health, systemic racism is a big part of that,” she said.

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with a straight face that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican Senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit, and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

I for one will not quite.  I fear too much for the future of my children and grandchildren if Trumpism and Republican treason is left unopposed.  Thankfully, at least for the next two years, Virginia is poised to do its part to oppose Trump/Republican misrule.

U.S. In Afghanistan: At war With the Truth

A piece in the Washington Post blows the lid off the disastrous war in Afghanistan that indicates the senior American military and political official seemingly learned nothing from the Vietnam War debacle and knowingly lied to the American public.  To read the piece is disturbing and it underscores that no lessons were learned from Vietnam and underscores the reality that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it - something that is alarming in the age of Trump when Republicans appear hell bent to repeat the mistakes of Germans who allowed Hitler to rise to power. Much of the blame falls on the George W. Bush administration that began the disaster and then made things worse by invading Iraq. Following administration found themselves stuck with a debacle and no easy exit and, one suspects were mislead by military leaders who never want to admit error.  Read the entire piece.  My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones, friends or suffered injuries in a war that should have perhaps never been started. Here are excerpts:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed “snowflakes” by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, “Known and Unknown.” But most of his snowflake collection — an estimated 59,000 pages — remained secret.

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the cache of Lessons Learned interviews broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?”

“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied confidently. “People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

The Vietnam disaster was not only repeated, but in Afghanistan has dragged on even longer. The only positive is that far fewer Americans have died, but many will bear the physical and mental health scars for the rest of their lives.

Trump Cranks Religion to 11 As Impeachment Looms

No segment of American society has been more loyal to the morally bankrupt Donald Trump than evangelical Christians.  Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" - which is neither Christian nor right about anything - it's of little surprise.  Among evangelical leaders - I refer to them as "professional Christians" - it has never been about spreading the gospel message, especially how one is to care for the less fortunate, but rather all about self-enrichment and worldly power.  Their followers are similarly toxic inasmuch as their main motivations are based on animus to others rather than an embrace of Christ's message. In may ways, they and Donald Trump were made for each other: they, like Trump are frauds and their leaders little more than snake oil merchants and con-artists.  Trump seemingly saw these folks for what they are and has used promises of special rights and policies harmful to those they dislike to cement an unholy alliance.  Now, with the impeachment process intensifying, Trump has turned up his shameless courting of these morally deficit individuals.  A piece in Rewire looks at Trump's actions which are reminiscent of those of Richard Nixon when faced with the specter of impeachment.  Here are excerpts:

As Trump’s impeachment fears intensify and the House formalizes its impeachment process, the White House has cranked the religion up to eleven. On Tuesday, twenty-five evangelical megachurch leaders prayed for and with Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, in a grand spectacle. So much for Jesus’s condemnation of public prayer as hypocrisy in his Sermon on the Mount. 

Then, on Thursday night, the White House announced that one of those preachers, Paula White, a televangelist, is joining the White House staff on the Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Earlier in October, Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr delivered now infamous speeches tying the administration to Christian nationalism.

This religious revival is all about impeachment. The hour-long prayer session included a standing ovation and was widely covered by Fox News and other conservative outlets, who explicitly characterized the prayers as a pushback against impeachment.

Nixon turned to religion as the Watergate wave broke over his administration. His first address to the nation about “the Watergate affair” announced the resignations of three senior staffers and the firing of White House Counsel John Dean. It was the first time a president ended a speech with the phrase “God bless America.” The phrase was not merely an offhand religious remark, but part of an overt appeal to Chrisitans all over the nation, a reminder that Nixon was one of them: “I ask for your prayers to help me in everything that I do throughout the days of my presidency. God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.” Nixon also managed to mention “Christmas”—in April—and work in the phrase “God-given rights.”

Eleven months after the first Watergate/’God Bless America’ address, Nixon’s popularity plummeted and the noose of impeachment tightened, so he set off on a public relations tour to woo southern members of the House committee in charge of that impeachment. His first stop was the Grand Ole Opry, where he closed the evening by playing “God Bless America” on the piano so that the crowd would sing along.

Nixon used religion as a political tool throughout his career. Scholars credit him with bringing evangelicals into the GOP. He and Billy Graham used each other in a toxic relationship of religion, politics, and, as tapes later showed, anti-Semitism. Like Trump, Nixon invited evangelicals into the White House and the halls of power in ways previously unseen in a country that adopted the separation of state and church as a founding principle. However, even with that baseline piety, Nixon’s public displays of religion seemed to get more ostentatious as impeachment heated up.

But why? First, there’s a realpolitik element. Trump, like Nixon, is shoring up his base of evangelical support. “Don’t worry. Your leaders still support me. I even gave one a White House salary,” he seems to be saying. This is both un-American and irreligious. When religion is used as a political weapon, it becomes weakened and tainted

The separation of state and church is regularly used to keep religion out of government. But it’s also meant to allow religion to remain free of the taint of the day-to-day political power struggle. This is why Madison wrote that “religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” Politicians taint religion by using it as a political tool. Indeed, Madison’s writing is a prescient warning about Donald Trump. 

The second reason Trump is cranking up the religion is, as I explain in The Founding Myth, to distract the masses and cloak a criminal in the mantle of religion. Religion can be simple shorthand for tribal allegiance, but it also has the power to distract from important issues that actually affect governance and to serve as a rhetorical substitute for genuine morality.

Nixon asked people to pray for him and ended with “God bless America” to remind the nation that he was religious and therefore moral, and thus either innocent or deserving of forgiveness. Trump is doing the same with his gaggle of evangelical bootlickers. The only difference is that with Trump, evangelicals seem content to concede that he is not moral, but an “imperfect vessel” doing their god’s will. We’ll have to wait and see, as Trump continues his campaign of religious pandering, whether he’s done enough to earn the “deserving of forgiveness” label. One thing is certain, more public piety is in our future.

The Virginia GOP's Slow Suicide

As a former Republican and Republican activist - I held a City Committee seat in Virginia Beach for eight years roughly two decades ago - watching the Virginia GOP's slide from power has been watching a form of slow moving suicide, a process which, as I have said before, began when Republicans foolishly began embracing far right Christians and, worse yet, voting them onto city and county committees. To my mind, that move that focused on short term advantage set the stage for the exodus of moderates and educated suburban voters from a party that became increasingly defined by an embrace of ignorance, rejection of science and knowledge and hatred to anyone deemed "other" - a category that includes basically anyone who is not a white right wing Christian.  The move also ushered in the beginning of the GOP's embrace of white supremacy since so may evangelicals in my experience are racist as exemplified by The Family Foundation which traces its roots to supporters of "Massive Resistance" when confronted with school desegregation.  As Virginia's urban and suburban areas have grown, a critical mass was reached where these regions can out vote the racist, knuckle dragging rural regions.  This new reality is not going to change and unless the Virginia GOP can reform itself - something not likely in my view given the grip the Christofascists have on the party even as Millennials exit religion entirely - Virginia will be a "blue state" for the foreseeable future (a view confirmed by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball).  A Washington Post editorial looks at this new reality.  Here are highlights: 

IN POLITICAL terms, Virginia is no longer a Southern state; it’s an Eastern one that tilts heavily Democratic. That transformation, affirmed in Tuesday’s watershed elections that flipped both state legislative chambers to the Democrats’ control, was long in the making and helped by Republicans who fell radically out of step with the increasingly diverse voters who populate the state’s booming suburbs.

Long before anyone imagined Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans such as Corey A. Stewart, last year’s failed GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate and the soon-to-be-former top official in Prince William County, rose to prominence as right-wing culture warriors. Mr. Stewart, assessing this week’s Democratic gains, said Republicans would be “toast” in Virginia for 10 years. That may be right; if it is, Mr. Stewart himself was a prominent toaster.

Mr. Stewart’s brand of Republicanism — immigrant-bashing, Confederate-monument-revering, gun-loving, abortion-blocking, trash-talking and, lately, Trump-lionizing — has been ascendant in Richmond and elsewhere. It has methodically alienated moderate and swing voters, especially in the vote-rich suburbs of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. In a state that won the competition for Amazon’s second corporate headquarters partly on the strength of a well-educated, multicultural workforce, Republicans who threw red meat to their base by attacking undocumented immigrants found their appeal waning.

[T]he GOP’s problems have deep roots. No Virginia Republican has won a statewide election in a decade. And in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties — Washington suburban localities that together comprise nearly a quarter of Virginia’s population of 8.5 million — elected Republicans at any level are now an all-but-vanished breed.

The party’s enfeeblement was accelerated by its rejection of moderate, substantive GOP officeholders such as former lieutenant governor Bill Bolling and former congressman Thomas M. Davis III. And it signed its political death warrant by blowing up the summer’s special legislative session on gun safety after just 90 minutes, without considering a single bill. That act of cluelessness and arrogance came weeks after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach left 12 people dead.

Virginia Republicans are at a defining moment. If they reverse course and tack to the center, they may again become a force in a state that would benefit from a vibrant two-party competition. If not — if they double down by continuing down the Trumpian path blazed by Mr. Stewart and his like — they might become “toast” not for a decade but for a generation.

Iran Might Be America’s Enemy, But Saudi Arabia Is No Friend

Will Trump sell out America's true interest for the sake of the Saudis?

It is beyond frustrating that in general, America never learns from past mistakes or history.  This problem is multiplied ten fold with the Trump/Pence with a cretin when it comes to knowledge of history in the White House whose twin motivations are thrilling his toxic, knuckle dragging base and satiating his ego, when not engaging in corruption to enrich himself at public expense. Nowhere at the moment is this more evident that bellicose talk of war with Iran at the ultimate behest of the nation that furnished the vast majority of the 9-11 hijackers and which has done more to fund Islamic extremism than any other nation.  I refer, of course, to Saudi Arabia, America's false ally.  Making the situation even more disturbing is Trump's boast that the American military - which was unable to fully subdue and create lasting regime change in Iraq, a much smaller and poorer country - is ready to take on Iran.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous case of amnesia and flawed analysis.  Here are excerpts: 

In 1987, an Iraqi warplane attacked an American Navy frigate, the Stark, on patrol in the Persian Gulf. Accepting Saddam Hussein’s explanation that the attack, which killed 37 sailors, had been an accident, American officials promptly used the episode, which came at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, to ratchet up pressure on Tehran. The incident provided the impetus for what became a brief, and all but forgotten, maritime war between the United States and Iran.

Last week, someone — precisely who remains to be determined — attacked two oil refineries in Saudi Arabia. American authorities have been quick to blame Iran, and the possibility of a violent confrontation between the two countries is once again growing. Before making a decision on whether to pull the trigger, President Trump would do well to reflect on that 1987 episode and its legacy.

Back then, the United States had become involved in the very bloody and seemingly interminable Iran-Iraq war, which Hussein had instigated in 1980 by invading Iran. As that war turned into a brutal stalemate, President Ronald Reagan and his advisers persuaded themselves that it was in America’s interests to come to Iraq’s aid. Iran was the “enemy,” so Iraq became America’s “friend.”
 The principal beneficiary was Hussein, who wasted no time in repaying Washington by invading and annexing Kuwait soon after his war with Iran ground to a halt. Thus did America’s “friend” become America’s “enemy.”

The encounter with Iran became a precedent-setting event and a font of illusions. Since then, a series of administrations have indulged the fantasy that the direct or indirect application of military power can somehow restore stability to the gulf.

In fact, just the reverse has occurred. Instability has become chronic, with the relationship between military policy and actual American interests in the region becoming ever more difficult to discern.

In 2019, this now well-established penchant for armed intervention finds the United States once more involved in a proxy conflict, this time a civil war that has ravaged Yemen since 2015. Saudi Arabia supports one side in this bloody and interminable conflict, and Iran the other.
 [T]he United States has thrown in its lot with Saudi Arabia, providing support comparable to what the Reagan administration gave Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. But American-assisted Saudi forces have exhibited no more competence today than did American-assisted Iraqi forces back then. So the war in Yemen drags on.
 Concrete American interests in this conflict, which has already claimed an estimated 70,000 lives while confronting as many as 18 million with the prospect of starvation, are negligible. Once more, as in the 1980s, the demonization of Iran has contributed to a policy that is ill advised and arguably immoral.

[N]either side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America’s “enemy.” But Saudi Arabia is not a “friend,” regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.

The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf (and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of further destabilizing the gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite the folly of one side or the other.

Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by recognizing that Saudi Arabia’s folly need not be our problem.

Is America Going the Way of the Roman Republic?

History - a subject increasing ignored in America's education system and of which far too many Americans are woefully ignorant - can teach us lessons.  Some will argue that what happened in the past has little relevance to today, yet over the centuries, human nature has not changed as much as some would like to think and megalomania, narcissism, and tribalism remain alive and well under the veneer of civility.  Moreover, many remain an easy target for demagoguery and toxic forms of populism that stir mankind's worse instincts.  Throw in propaganda such as what one sees on Fox News - which today incredibly blamed liberals for fanning hate and division - and the same dangers from the past lurk ready to undermine democratic government and, I would argue, common decency. In a very long piece in New York Magazine Andrew Sullivan looks at the parallels between America in 2019 and the Roman Republic of over two millennia ago and notes the danger signs that ought to disturb true American patriots who put the U.S. Constitution and the rule as a top priority.  Here are article excerpts:

[O]ne obvious and arguably apposite parallel exists: the Roman Republic, whose fate the Founding Fathers were extremely conscious of when they designed the U.S. Constitution. That tremendously successful republic began, like ours, by throwing off monarchy, and went on to last for the better part of 500 years. It practiced slavery as an integral and fast-growing part of its economy. It became embroiled in bitter and bloody civil wars, even as its territory kept expanding and its population took off. It won its own hot-and-cold war with its original nemesis, Carthage, bringing it into unexpected dominance over the entire Mediterranean as well as the whole Italian peninsula and Spain.

And the unprecedented wealth it acquired by essentially looting or taxing every city and territory it won and occupied soon created not just the first superpower but a superwealthy micro-elite — a one percent of its day — that used its money to control the political process and, over time, more to advance its own interests than the public good.

As the republic grew and grew in size and population and wealth, these elites generated intense and increasing resentment and hatred from the lower orders, and two deeply hostile factions eventually emerged, largely on class lines, to be exploited by canny and charismatic opportunists. Well, you get the point.

Of course, in so many ways, ancient Rome is profoundly different from the modern U.S. . . . But there is a reason the Founding Fathers thought it was worth deep study. They saw the destabilizing consequences of a slaveholding republic expanding its territory and becoming a vast, regional hegemon. And they were acutely aware of how, in its final century and a half, an astonishing republican success story unraveled into a profoundly polarized polity, increasingly beset by violence, shedding one established republican norm after another, its elites fighting among themselves in a zero-sum struggle for power. And they saw how the weakening of those norms and the inability to compromise and mounting inequalities slowly corroded republican institutions. And saw, too, with the benefit of hindsight, where that ultimately led: to strongman rule, a dictatorship.

So when, one wonders, will our Caesars finally arrive? Or has one already?

Drawing parallels between Rome’s fate and America’s is not new, of course — from Gore Vidal’s trenchant critique of American imperialism in the Cold War, to Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire in the late ’90s, to Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? in the aughts. But the emergence of Trump adds a darker twist to the tale of imperial overreach and republican decline: that the process is accelerating, and we may be nearing a point of no return.

The story of Rome is as unlikely as America’s. Its republic emerged from a period of rule of consecutive kings, elected for life, beginning around 750 BCE, or so later Roman historians claimed. That period lasted a couple of centuries before the last king, a despised figure called Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown. From then on, from 509 BCE to 49 BCE, the rule of one man was anathema and the title rex a political kiss of death. A Senate and other assemblies replaced the monarch, and power was more widely distributed.

The new offices of state, including the most powerful, the consuls, were all held by at least two people, with strict term limits of one year — and with each officeholder given a mutual veto, to guard against any monarchical pretensions. The power awarded to the consuls and the Senate — representing the landed elite and, increasingly, the business class — was balanced against that of the tribunes (there were, at first, two), representing the masses, who had their own assembly with real clout. A new office of “dictator” was created — a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency assignment to one man to assume total power if civil unrest threatened the republic as a whole. But the dictator had a maximum of six months in office, after which he had to step down.

I’m crudely simplifying a complex and evolving set of arrangements, but the core idea was the dispersal and balancing of power, so that every segment of Roman society, apart from slaves, could have some input, even as the Senate effectively, if not definitively, called the shots. (It was a republic and emphatically not a modern democracy.) What kept this contraption together, without a written constitution, was something the Romans came to call the mos maiorum, the “way of the elders.” Tradition, in other words, or what we would call long-standing democratic norms — adherence to precedent, give-and-take in political negotiations, respect for proper procedures, a willingness to accept half-measures rather than imposing zero-sum solutions, and, above all, loyalty to the republic over one’s own ambition. Whenever someone seemed to push against these norms, they were demonized as a wannabe king.

The fact that Rome was in a semi-permanent war with its neighbors — a “forever war” if ever there was one — gave military commanders greater and greater clout, and the loot they hauled from Africa to Asia overwhelmingly enriched the elites beyond anything they had previously experienced.

These were decades and centuries of sudden growth in wealth and territory, but also tension. The forever war required small landowners to leave their farms untended for extended periods to fight. Romans saw many of these small estates fall into decay or ruin and begin to be bought up by wealthier landowners and consolidated into vast estates.
And into this fraught moment came the first real populists, the Gracchus brothers, who rose — from within the elites, as Trump and many others have in the millennia since — in the 130s BCE.

The first, Tiberius, . . . he went straight to the People’s Assembly. Then he tried to get his fellow tribune thrown out of office to avoid his veto, and ran for an unprecedented second term as tribune, at which point several senators, out of procedural tools, organized a small mob, grabbed whatever came to hand, entered the vote-counting arena, and clubbed Tiberius and 300 of his supporters to death.

This kind of violence seems unthinkable in America today, though it was not so unusual in the decades before the Civil War, when senators were repeatedly at each other’s literal throats on the Senate floor. But look past the violence and the situation seems a bit more familiar: deepening polarization, mutual mistrust, abandonment of norms, and trashing of precedents. Soon, it was possible to speak, very roughly, of two Romes: the rich Establishment and the rising masses, the optimates and the populares, waging a zero-sum war through Roman political institutions.

Tiberius’s cause was taken up by his younger brother, Gaius, who ran for the tribunate, won, and proposed even more distribution of land, new colonies for landless citizens, a major investment in roads and infrastructure, the removal of some senators from juries, and a subsidized grain dole for any Roman in need. It was something for everyone but the elites . . . A bloodbath ensued, in which Gaius was slaughtered along with 3,000 of his followers, their corpses thrown into the Tiber.

In The Storm Before the Storm, Duncan quotes the great Roman historian Sallust, who, looking back, pulled a “both sides” argument — “The nobles began to abuse their position and the people their liberty.” . . .  A cycle of polarization had begun.

Within a decade, though, the underlying patterns deepened, and nearly all of Sulla’s reforms collapsed. What lasted instead was his model of indefinite dictatorship, with the power to make or repeal any law. He had established a precedent that would soon swallow Rome whole.

This was no longer a republican culture protected by an austere elite, but an increasingly authoritarian one, with great military leaders and a handful of wealthy men dominating the political scene through money, legions, and military success. The ancient institutions and customs still existed but were slowly losing relevance. Worrywarts in the Senate and intelligentsia became concerned about strongmen emerging within the system — “The political situation alarms me more each day,” wrote Cicero. Two in particular stood out: Pompey, a hugely successful celebrity general who, at the tender age of 35, was made consul; and an up-and-coming Julius Caesar, rampaging through Gaul and then Britain, besting Pompey’s imperial acquisitions, and generating wide popular enthusiasm.

These two celebrity commanders had so many soldiers, had conquered so much territory and won such widespread support, that the Senate had effectively become irrelevant. It could vote, and it did, but its votes no longer mattered.

The civil war that followed lasted four years, spanned several continents, resulted in Pompey’s murder in Egypt and gave Caesar a monopoly of power. He used it on a grandiloquent scale; his parades were beyond sumptuous and displayed the humiliation of his domestic as well as his foreign enemies, as the wider public thrilled to the spectacle. He was granted the position of dictator by the Senate to stabilize the war-torn polity, then reappointed as dictator in 48 BCE for a whole year, and by 44 BCE had been formally named dictator-for-life.

His assassination — the famous murder on the Ides of March — was accomplished not by a mob but by a group of senators, who feared another rex and worried that their own attenuated power — or the republic itself — would disappear entirely. But it was a last-ditch attempt to save any kind of checks and balances within the system. After years of further civil war, Caesar’s adopted nephew, Augustus, finally destroyed his enemies, shed any pretense of republican rule, and established himself as emperor. His reign would last 40 years. Only emperors succeeded him.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes . . . . The vast American middle class that stabilized liberal democracy at the height of the 20th century never existed in Rome. We have a welfare state that provides some measure of buffer against popular revolt and a written, formal Constitution far harder to flout brazenly than the unwritten mos maiorum of the Romans.

But still. It’s impossible to review the demise of the Roman Republic and not be struck by the parallel dynamics in America in 2019. We now live, as the Romans did, in an economy of massive wealth increasingly monopolized by the very rich, in which the whole notion of principled public service has been eclipsed by the pursuit of private wealth and reality-show fame. Cynicism about the system is endemic, as in Rome. The concept of public service has evaporated as swiftly as trust in government had collapsed. When the republican virtues of a Robert Mueller collided this year with the populist pathologies of Donald Trump, we saw how easily a culture that gave us Cicero could turn into a culture that gave us Caesar.

Class conflict — which, in America, has merged with a profound cultural clash — has split the country into two core interests: the largely white lower and middle classes in the middle of the country, roughly equivalent to Rome’s populares and susceptible to populist appeals by powerful men and women; and the multicultural coastal elites, whose wealth has soared as it has stagnated for the rest, and who pride themselves on their openness and meritocracy: the optimates. And just as in late-republican Rome, each side has begun not to complement but to delegitimize the other.

The battles in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elections; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress, where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly to the brink, the government is regularly shut down, the entire country’s credit is threatened, and long-established rules designed for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as fast as any Roman mos maiorum.

And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits, because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them.

So what happens when a populist celebrity leverages mass resentment of elites to deploy that power — as Marius and Sulla and Pompey and Caesar did — in ever more expansive, innovative, and authoritarian ways?

When you think of how the Founders conceived the presidency, the 21st-century version is close to unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. . . . . Like Roman commanders slowly acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected monarchs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly photographed, and now commanding our attention every single day through Twitter.

No one in the American system at this level [i.e., Trump] has ever behaved like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoffing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny, openly demonizing his opponents, calling a free press treasonous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own government when it showed even a flicker of independence — and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and this loyalty has barely wavered.

If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America. Nothing and no one in his administration matters except him, as he constantly reminds us. . . . . He muses constantly about extending his term of office indefinitely, just as those Roman populists did.

Does he mean it? It almost doesn’t matter. He’s testing those guardrails to see just how numb a public can become to grotesque violations of ethical or rhetorical norms, and he has found them exhilaratingly wanting. And he has an unerring instinct for where the weaknesses of our republican system lie.

Is recovery possible? The Roman lesson is that it is in the short term, but that recovery is fragile because norms are so much easier to break than to build, let alone rebuild, and that the longer republican norms are trashed, the weaker they subsequently become. And much depends, of course, on what comes immediately after, whether these compounding trends can be nipped or reversed before they entrench themselves.

In Rome, it took a long while, but there were periods of much quicker erosion, as charismatic figures established a space for authoritarianism that came to be permanent. And then, of course, a sudden and unexpected collapse. In America, the question of whether this history will repeat itself hangs ominously in the air. But that sound you hear in the distance is of future Caesars preparing to make their move.

The Back Story Behind the D-Day Invasion

General - and later President - Eisenhower with troops.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy on D-Day.  To listen to the speakers - even Der Trumpenführer, if one could avoid vomiting as he spoke - made it sound as if western democracies and America were unified and a far different country than the one we see today where hatred and division are the staples of right-wing and Republican politics. The truth is something far different and the forces that are the antecedents of today's nativists, isolationists and white supremacists were very active in opposing the USA's involvement in World War II and the D-Day invasion to liberate Europe from the Nazi menace.  They similarly opposed the New Deal programs that sought to aid poor and disadvantaged Americans.  Somethings seemingly never change especially since then as now, the forces of racial hate, isolationism and nativism used the slogan "America First."  Read the article and you will discover that Trump and the far right have merely dusted off a many decades old playbook..  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at the divided America that helped launch the D-Day invasion at Normandy.  The opponents of the effort were wrong 75 years ago and their descendants are wrong today.  Here are article highlights:

When Allied forces launched a dramatic air and sea assault on German-occupied France 75 years ago Thursday, the very scale and audacity of the operation were awe-inspiring. In the early-morning hours of June 6, hordes of planes dropped over 10,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines; hundreds of warships and thousands more landing craft would soon deliver 130,000 troops to the beaches of Normandy—most of them British or American—on the first day of the assault.

It was a remarkable achievement—and one of the reasons why, so many years later, Americans in a divided country now think of THE WORLD WAR II years as a beacon of feel-good unity and patriotism: Glenn Miller tunes on the radio, war bond posters in every window, Rosie the Riveter at her station “all the day long whether rain or shine, she’s a part of the assembly line.”

That image, however—the war as a moment of American domestic comity—might come as a surprise to anyone who lived through those years. In fact, the nation that waged that war was racked by deep political divisions, some with echoes that are still reverberating today.

In the years leading up to its entry into World War II, the United States was bitterly divided over the New Deal and vehemently at odds over whether it should enter the conflict erupting in Europe. Even during the war, the country remained beset by racial and ethnic animosities that pitted Protestants against Catholic, Catholics against Jews and white Americans against people of color. . . . Even as the country fell in line with this vast expansion of state authority, outwardly uniting behind the war effort, discord boiled just beneath the surface, revealing itself in violent homefront outbursts and acid displays of political demagoguery.

The war almost tore America apart. And yet, it didn’t. The country ultimately rallied behind its popular but controversial wartime president to transform itself into the “arsenal of democracy.”

It’s easy to forget how unlikely an achievement it was. Just four years before D-Day, as Franklin Roosevelt launched his campaign for an unprecedented third term as president, America’s military lay in shambles. . . . . The following year, when Japan attacked and largely obliterated the Navy’s Pacific fleet, little remained of America’s capacity to prosecute the war.

The story of how Americans surmounted their fractured political culture to mobilize for D-Day remains a trenchant example, in our own age of discord and division, of how a country desperately wanting for consensus can rally together in a moment of common purpose.

“Our bond with Europe is a bond of race, and not of political ideology,” the famed aviator and outspoken isolationist Charles Lindbergh informed a national radio audience in October 1939. “Racial strength is vital, politics is a luxury.” Urging listeners to close ranks with Germany in common struggle against “Asiatic intruders”—Russians, Persians, Turks and Jews—who would defile America’s “most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood,” Lindbergh tapped into a deep well of popular nativism. It was a theme he hammered relentlessly from his perch as a spokesperson for the America First Committee, an anti-interventionist organization that marshalled considerable support from prominent names in business and industry to oppose aid to Britain and France. The “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” he intoned in a speech two years later.

It wasn’t just Lindbergh. The anti-interventionist movement enjoyed widespread support in 1939 and 1940, and Lindbergh’s brand of anti-interventionist politics—bordering on being pro-Nazi, and laced with a conspiratorial distrust of Jews—was common in circles opposed to Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies. The America First Committee included outspoken anti-Semites like Avery Brundage, the former head of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had visited ignominy upon the athletic community when he booted two Jewish runners from the track team at the Berlin games in 1936. In Kansas, the America First state chairman told followers that Eleanor Roosevelt, the leading liberal light in FDR’s White House, was “Jewish,” and Winston Churchill, a “half-Jew.”

Even the most respectable opponents of Roosevelt’s mobilization policy verged on extremism. In an editorial entitled “A Plea for Realism,” the Wall Street Journal argued in 1940 that “our job today is not to stop Hitler,” who had “already determined the broad lines of our national life at least for another generation.” Instead, Americans would better direct their focus to “modernize our thinking and our national planning,” a none-too-subtle nod to Nazi state planning and central power.

Isolationist politics were consistent with the increasingly shrill nature of opposition to the New Deal in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, campaigning unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination, warned there was “a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or Nazi bunds.” When Roosevelt asked Congress to pass a conscription act in 1940—a bold move in the heat of a presidential campaign—Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish denounced the measure as “the very essence of Nazism and Hitlerism in the United States.”

If Jews were widely rumored to be profiting from wartime mobilization and skirting military duty, in the South, white communities were rife with rumors that African Americans were stockpiling weapons in advance of a massive race riot. Black domestic workers were rumored to be forming “Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs,” preparing for the day when white women would staff black women’s kitchens. Black soldiers were said to be consorting with, and even marrying, young white women. These fears of caste inversion reflected an ugly response to the limited but appreciable wartime mobility African Americans achieved both in the military and civilian sectors.

The conservative press railed against “the New Deal-Communist axis” (New York Daily Mirror) and claimed “the people who support the New Deal … are supporting the Communists and building them up for the day when they plan to bring the Red Terror sweeping down upon America” (Chicago Tribune). John Bricker, the GOP nominee for vice president, warned that “insidious and ominous are the forces of communism linked with irreligion that are worming their way into national life. … First the New Deal took over the Democratic Party and destroyed its very foundation. Now these Communist forces have taken over the New Deal.”

Then and later, private sector barons who turned out tanks and rifles for the Army, and who staffed wartime agencies as “dollar a year men,” congratulated themselves on the victory of free markets over the state economies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. “If Free Enterprise has not flourished here,” wrote the Saturday Evening Post, “the cause of world freedom might be lost for centuries.” Capitalism, it claimed, was “the last bulwark of civilization,” and the reason America prevailed was “mass employment, mass production, mass advertising, mass distribution and mass ownership of the products of industry.”

This spirit of triumphalism masked a darker reality: In 1940 and 1941, the Roosevelt administration faced widespread resistance, particularly from auto companies, to switch from civilian to war production. The reason Chrysler converted to tank building, and Ford to bombers, was that the government was compelled to offer “cost-plus” contracts that guaranteed defense manufacturers a profit, no matter the efficiency of production. America’s triumph in World War II did not derive from the magic of private-sector genius. It owed to precisely the brand of top-down, state planning that business leaders disdained during the New Deal era but learned to love when it delivered reliable profits in war years.

A country that could scarcely outfit its small Army with rifles in 1940 emerged within four years to outfit one of the most formidable militaries in modern history. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill had likened the United States to a “gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.”

Seventy-five years ago, Operation Overlord proved Churchill right, as Americans saw the culmination of a collective effort unprecedented and since unseen—made all the more remarkable by its successful navigation of very real divisions that threatened, but did not break, the public spirit.

America needs a new New Deal and a form of government intervention that won World War II - despite the shrieks of the far right and demagogues such as Trump.

The Danger of the Decline of Historical Thinking

Increasingly, Americans do not know accurate history as public schools put less emphasis on history and what was once called civics and those seeking history majors in college have declined markedly save at some Ivy League universities. Sadly, geography which is closely tied to learning history has suffered along with the decline of history. As a consequence Americans are less and less able to make informed, knowledge based political decisions and are much easier prey for demagogues and charlatans like the current occupant of the White House and others who benefit from duping the general population and seek a new Gilded Age.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the troubling phenomenon. The money quote:   "A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos."   Here are article excerpts (note that the largest decline is in the Mid-West, so-called fly over country):

Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. With slightly more than twenty-four thousand current history majors, it accounts for between one and two per cent of bachelor’s degrees, a drop of about a third since 2011. The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere.

There’s a catch, however. It’s boom time for history at Yale, where it is the third most popular major, and at other élite schools, including Brown, Princeton, and Columbia, where it continues to be among the top declared majors. The Yale history department intends to hire more than a half-dozen faculty members this year alone. Meanwhile, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, Bernie L. Patterson, recently proposed that the school’s history major be eliminated, . . . The remaining professors will be placed in new departments that combine history with other topics. 

[A]fter the 2008 financial crisis, students (and their parents) felt a need to pick a major in a field that might place them on a secure career path. Almost all of the majors that have seen growth since 2011, Schmidt noted in a previous study, are in the STEM disciplines, and include nursing, engineering, computer science, and biology. (A recent Times story noted that the number of computer-science majors more than doubled between 2013 and 2017.) “M.I.T. and Stanford are making a big push in the sciences,” Alan Mikhail, the chair of the history department at Yale, told me.

Nonetheless, the history major continues to thrive at Yale, in part because it’s a great department with a number of nationally known stars, all of whom are expected to teach at an undergraduate level, and in part because it is Yale, where even a liberal-arts degree opens almost all professional doors. As Mikhail said, “The very real economic pressure students feel today is lessened at Yale.

The reason that students at Yale and places like it can “afford” to major in history is that they have the luxury of seeing college as a chance to learn about the world beyond the confines of their home towns, and to try to understand where they might fit in. That’s what history does best. It locates us and helps us understand how we got here and why things are the way they are. “History instills a sense of citizenship, and reminds you of questions to ask, especially about evidence,” Willis told me. In a follow-up e-mail after our conversation, Mikhail wrote, “A study of the past shows us that the only way to understand the present is to embrace the messiness of politics, culture, and economics.

Donald Trump is the king not only of lies but also of ahistorical assertions. It’s hard to pick a favorite among the thousands of falsehoods that Trump has told as President, but one recent shocker was when he insisted, ignoring everything we know about the Soviet Union’s lawless behavior, that “the reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia.

Republicans, for the past few decades, have depended on Americans’ inability to make sense of history in judging their policies. How else to explain the fact that, under Trump, they have succeeded in turning legal immigration into the excuse for all the country’s ills, when any clear historical analysis would demonstrate that it has been the fount of the lion’s share of America’s innovation, creativity, and economic production?

Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but are we educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life,” Blight told me. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo . . . can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” he wrote. A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos. As he has proved ever since he rode to political prominence on the lie of Barack Obama’s birthplace, Trump is all three. And, without more history majors, we are doomed to repeat him.