Gathering Up My Political Reading

The news probably renders these items a bit meaningless. I put them together not for their timeliness, but for their connections. Incompetence, the dumbing down of Americans, what would-be tyrants want to do to us.

The War On Knowledge (Sheila Kennedy)

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

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MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

Ted Gioia's The Ten Warning Signs (The Honest Broker) takes on this war on knowledge from a different perspective, without laying it so much on Trump and MAGA.

We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.

So let’s give it one. 

Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

If we lose the old knowledge system, what replaces it? Do not expect a benign replacement. I would expect a Counter-Scientific Revolution to be anti-rational. Considering what good science has given us (without forgetting its harms), what would an anti-science system produce? 

Yes. People Will Die by Jonathan Cohn (The Bulwark) took on Senator Joni Ernst's defense of Trump cutting Medicare.

OVERALL, 93,000 IOWANS COULD END UP losing insurance if something like the House bill passes and those temporary Obamacare subsidies lapse. That’s according to an estimate from the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee, but their figure isn’t much higher than an estimate from the nonpartisan research organization KFF, which in its state-by-state breakdown predicted coverage losses in Iowa of 83,000.

Newly updated projections the CBO released on Wednesday suggest coverage losses are probably going to be even higher in Iowa, and in the rest of the country as well.3 And losing insurance is no small matter. It’s certainly not a subject that deserves to be treated as fodder for bizarre selfie videos filmed in cemeteries questioning why people are so bothered by reminders of their mortality.

On Tuesday, researchers from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania calculated the effects of all the cuts in the GOP legislation, including reductions in spending on food assistance. Their conclusion: 51,000 more people dying annually. 

One might take comfort that of those dying, many (most?) will be Trump voters. 

How to Tyranny-Proof America’s Future (Bulwark) by Patrick Eddington

In my new book, The Triumph of Fear, I catalogue a sixty-year period from William McKinley through Dwight Eisenhower in which, with perhaps the sole exception of Warren Harding, every man elected to the presidency misused the power handed to him to spy on and even politically persecute his political enemies—real or imagined.

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Under current law, all federal law enforcement officers fall under the control of the executive branch, including the United States Marshals Service, which is charged by statute with protecting both court facilities and staff (especially judges). But what if Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, elected to declare that statute unconstitutional? What if Bondi asserted that Trump could, at his discretion, order the marshals to leave their judicial-protection duties and instead join ICE, HSI, FBI, and other law enforcement on mass deportation operations?

Okay, but here is the point that got the gears in my brain turning:

 My preference, as someone who has closely studied the abuses arising from presidential control of law enforcement, would be for a constitutional amendment that would move all but two federal law enforcement organizations from the executive branch to the control of the federal judiciary. The Secret Service (which protects the president and vice president) and the Federal Protective Service (which secures most federal buildings) would remain in the executive branch, but all other federal law enforcement would come under the control of the federal judiciary . . . and thus outside the control of an inherently political branch of government.

Such a constitutional amendment should also modify current law to ensure that no president can call up a state’s National Guard units for “civil disturbance,” immigration enforcement, or any other domestic mission without the express written consent of the state’s governor. This would safeguard against a future president calling up National Guard troops to shoot political protesters, as Trump wanted to do in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests.

The Guardian's Russia is at war with Britain and US is no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says shows what happens when you turn on your friends:

The conclusion, Hill said, was that “Russia is at war with us”. The foreign policy expert, a longtime Russia watcher, said she had first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea.

“We said Putin had declared war on the west,” she said. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill said events since had demonstrated “he obviously had, and we haven’t been paying attention to it”. The Russian leader, she argues, sees the fight in Ukraine as “part of a proxy war with the United States; that’s how he has persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to join in”.

Putin believed that Ukraine had already been decoupled from the US relationship, Hill said, because “Trump really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn’t need any more enrichment”.

When it came to defence, however, she said the UK could not rely on the military umbrella of the US as during the cold war and in the generation that followed, at least “not in the way that we did before”. In her description, the UK “is having to manage its number one ally”, though the challenge is not to overreact because “you don’t want to have a rupture”.

Why alliances matter:

 Lawrence Freedman's The merits of a wartime mentality (Engelsberg ideas) intrigued me with its headline and its subtitle got me reading : "The continuing Russo-Ukrainian war and the readiness of Moscow to think and act as if it is already in a wider conflict with the West mean a wartime mentality is needed right now."

We should in fact be interrogating the most important recommendations in the review, all of which require prompt implementation. The strong impression it conveyed is that in two key and linked respects the Ministry of Defence is not fit for purpose. The first is that it has a peacetime mentality, as if it allows itself to take any amount of time to decide awkward issues, and that, second, this problem is most evident when it comes to procurement. The independent reviewers responsible for the report, Lord George Robertson, General Richard Barrons, and Dr Fiona Hill, insist that the challenge posed by the continuing Russo-Ukrainian war and the readiness of Moscow to think and act as if it is already in a wider conflict with the West mean a wartime mentality is needed right now.

Even taking a relaxed view of the Russian threat, the advantage of a wartime mentality lies in the sense of urgency it introduces, and the readiness it encourages to push aside unnecessary bureaucratic barriers. The work already conducted with the Ukrainian armed forces has demonstrated the benefits. This requires a more risk-taking approach from both government and industry: much of the report is about how this can be encouraged. One only needs to look at the number of iterations of drone warfare over the course of the Russo-Ukraine War, now used by both sides with more range, accuracy, and stealth than ever before, and in huge numbers. If the normal processes had been followed by the time the initial requirements for a new system were generated, contracts agreed and then manufacture allowed, real-time operational experience would have moved on out of all recognition.

If that is the UK, how much more does the US need this kind of thinking? And what do with have: a Department of Defense more interested in renaming warships: Hegseth Orders Navy to Strip Name of Gay Rights Icon Harvey Milk from Ship (Military.com)

Political stuff from YouTube: John Oliver on Alliance Defending Freedom, and Bill Maher from 6/6/2025. 

I cannot help from putting something about the Trump-Musk breaking up in public.

At least, that one is amusing.

Words like Communism and Socialism get kicked around, far from their meaning, just for the sake of shutting down one's thinking. It is an insult divorced from reality. It is like the bit of road rage I saw last week when one woman called another a "faggot". I expected some fanboy amusement from Communism, Socialism, and Star Trek, but got instead a short, pertinent and intelligent explanation of what American politicians use as a mindless insult:

And if that is not enough for you, go read Devin Thomas O’Shea's Marx: The Fourth Boom (Los Angeles Review of Books).

No matter how much the right wing hallucinates the presence of acidic cultural Marxism, politics in the United States is generally an unbroken tradition of rejecting the labor theory of value—the idea that when you go to work, you create value by committing time, energy, and attention to a task. That value is then siphoned off by the boss and added to the overall value of the company, with a fraction of it returning to the laborer in the form of wages.

As opposed to centering working people as the engine of American excellence, or recognizing that the workplace is where free citizens should exercise control over their lives, almost none of our politics in the United States revolves around that. Hartman cites C. L. R. James’s argument that the American workplace is a totalitarian institution: “The modern worker is a cog in a machine […] All progress in industry consists of making him more and more of a cog and less and less of a human being.” The hyper-surveilled Amazon warehouse comes to mind as Hartman notes: “James wrote about American society through the lens of Marx, who conceptualized human happiness as deeply bound up with autonomy. People who lack control over their own labor remain unfree.”

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Still, the fourth boom has been shut out of power, and wildly underfunded compared to the money one can make studying Friedrich Hayek at the Mises Institute. Contemporary American socialism is treated as unserious by centrist figureheads, and on the right, the fights for universal healthcare and free college are accused of being secret nihilist movements toward enforced unfreedom. This socialist contingent is explicitly ignored (and resented) by Democrats, but as Hartman notes, “reducing millennial socialism to a generational tantrum ignores the fact that many young Americans have been pushed leftward by deeply entrenched historical pressures.”  According to him, “Marx has remained relevant in the United States across more than 150 years because he suggested an alternative perspective on freedom. In a nation long obsessed with the concept, why were so many Americans relatively unfree?” 

Also from Los Angeles Review of Books is Paul North's He’s a Cretin but We’ll Manage Him reviewing Karl Marx’s essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” And here, I thought the old boy was dead.

All the drama in The Eighteenth Brumaire happens in the assembly. Louis Napoleon may be farcical, but the legislature is tragic. “The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie,” Marx tells us. To avoid a real republic, right-wing elements circumvented checks and balances, first and foremost the constitution. And then, when Louis Napoleon circumvented the assembly itself in 1851 in order to extend his rule, conservatives suddenly remembered the republic. It was republicanism, they realized, that had brought them to power, and republicanism that had allowed them to exercise it. With its end, they ended.

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Marx’s analysis comes close to that of Freud and Melanie Klein. The malady resulted from a conflict, internal to parliament and to each parliamentarian. Two facts collided in their psyches. Fact number one was that their power came from the state. Fact number two was that the state was clearly about to turn against them. The two facts couldn’t be maintained as true with the same conviction at the same time. Marx, like Freud and Klein, doesn’t let assembly members off the hook. They are not simply ignorant or blind; they know the state is coming for them, and that scares them. But the knowledge has a peculiar character: they know and they don’t know. The only way to maintain their power is as an illusion. Knowing their danger, they wield ignorance as a shield to protect themselves from the smaller pain of acknowledging what they have already lost and the bigger pain of the coming loss of everything.

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When Russell Berman asked Tom Cole why he let DOGE take Congress’s job, Cole gave an interesting reply: “A Republican Senate, a Republican House is not going to chain down a Republican president.” This sounds like normal party politics in a democracy, but look a little closer. Here is the moment of complicity that just barely conceals capitulation. Here is the disavowal spelled out. Here is the end of the republic in a nutshell.

 I just learned something - I should have read a bit more Marx.

Bruce Springsteen Gets It (Sheila Kennedy)

During a concert in Europe, Bruce Springsteen issued a criticism of Trump and his administration that generated a typically childish response from our thin-skinned autocrat. Springsteen’s comments–unlike Trump’s– displayed a fundamental understanding of what it means to be an American–“the union of people around a common set of values.” That union, he said, is “now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.” 

Springsteen recognized an essential element of American identity, an element that MAGA appears incapable of comprehending: America is, and has always been, about a set of ideals.

Yeah, it's not about blood and soil, and it is not White Christian Nationalism, but it is about all people being created equally with certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

sch 6/7

Sheila Kennedy hits home again this morning with The Brain Drain. I have been reading more and more stories on this point. The anti-intellectual thumbsuckers do not understand how much of their lives depend on those with knowledge through either the video games they play in their parent's basements, or the jobs that put money in their pockets, or that insulates them in safety from those who would impose a harsher existence upon them by natural selection, or just makes life convenient enough to want to destroy their own nests. One of the comments makes the point I have made on this blog that those running Indiana have driven out those whose attainments might make this state more prosperous. Thumbsuckers are so much easier to manipulate.

sch 6/8