Apocalypse Now: Literally

Timothy Burke offers us a truly terrifying explanation of what Trumpism and related apocaliptic movements realy mean.

The gentle beginning:,

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I keep circling around the cluster of people involved in Trump Administration’s programmatic disassembly of constitutional government in the United States, pacing like a zoo animal in a cage. What are they thinking? How conscious are they of their motives? What do they represent?

I try to remember a point I’ve made many times before about governments and leaders, that almost no leader is himself or herself the pivot on which all decisions turn, that the visible leader in a political coalition like like the tip of an iceberg, representing some vaster structure hidden below the water.

Perhaps even, as the phrase goes, a deep state. Or a deep strata of society, a formation embedded across a whole geology, that suddenly erupts into the surface of the earth. American Presidents normally are just the titular heads of an assemblage of ambitious public servants and elected officials who frequently share some social connections and some loose ideological priors, somewhat like the C-suite of a corporation where the CEO speaks for a cluster of executives who’ve risen through the company and some recruited new executives whose experience elsewhere has been deemed useful or generative. (On which point, once again: the CEO is not a king except in a few rare cases of smaller privately-held companies that are led by the scion of a particular family. Maybe.)

Trump’s first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.

Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon’s “populists” and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic’s basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.

As I pace mentally and try to apprehend what this coalition really wants, how it really thinks, what its aims are, I keep coming back to a repeated theme. I’ve already argued that the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters. And perhaps some of them are something bleaker: nihilists who want to negate everything and have no hope of a new world to follow.

And it gets much worse...

A history of American intolerance -- from Talking Points Memo

My favorite news source, Talkingpointsmemo.com, suits me very well, because it takes history seriously as the background for current political and cultural developments. Much of this is due to the influence of Josh Marshall, the founder of TPM and a trained historian, but other talented members of his staff do their part. And TPM brings in outside talent, too. A day or two ago TPM reprinted an essay from Arthur Goldwag's book The Politics of Fear. It is long and it is good. Here's an excerpt that should tell you if you might be interested:

Some of the American dream is real, of course. As a second-generation Jew, I’m a beneficiary of it, as are the descendants of many of the other immigrant groups that came here voluntarily. Many Americans — including Black ones — really have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and for all of its many failures in practice, our system leans toward more rather than less liberty and opportunity. But America’s past, like most countries’, is not just marred by but defined by force and violence and fear and hate; worse still, as William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun (a novel whose plot turned on the legacies of race and rape), “it’s not even past.” Among the fiercest of America’s old hatreds, I would argue, is the hatred of Catholics. The first colonists brought it with them from England. A recent archaeological find sheds new light on this. In 2013, the remains of four men were discovered at the site of a chapel in Jamestown. One of them, Captain Gabriel Archer, had been buried with a silver box that a CT scan showed contained bone fragments and a lead ampulla. It was almost certainly a Catholic reliquary, and it was, in the words of The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, “a bombshell,” potential “proof of an underground community of Catholics.” They would have had to have been secret because Catholic worship had been banned in England since 1559, when Queen Elizabeth issued the Act of Uniformity. The English Protestants who colonized the New World feared hunger, illness, and childbirth, which killed one out of eight expectant mothers and a third of their children who were born alive by their fifth birthdays. They feared the raw wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants, who they knew were servants of the Devil, and the witches and other minions of Satan that dwelled among them, disguised as their wives, children, neighbors, servants, and enslaved people. They feared their own sinful natures and Antinomianism or “Free Grace” Protestantism, the radical doctrine that once they were saved, Christians were no longer bound by the moral law, a philosophy, they believed, that could not but lead to licentiousness and attacks on property and the political order. Most of all, they feared Catholicism, which they had been at war with since the time of Henry VIII. The Catholic French had forged alliances with native tribes in the north and west. The Catholic Spaniards controlled the south. The threat of internal subversion was real as well; the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had been executed less than a year before the Jamestown settlers departed England. Many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracy theorist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism.

Recommended.

Robert Reich, well-known political insider, says "Run for office? No thanks!"

Many of you readers have probably thought about this. I have too. But this brought into focus an important aspect of democratic politics that often doesn't get discussed.

I've included some big excerpts from this piece, but I urge you to read the whole thing:

Friends, Several of you have written asking if I might consider running for office. Well, I have an announcement to make. Brace yourselves. I’m not running — for president or anything else. I’ve run once before (for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002) and learned I don’t have what it takes. Before I ran, I thought I knew everything there was to know about getting elected — which made me think I could get elected, too. I’d been involved in dozens of campaigns. I’d advised candidates running for governor, senator, and president. I’d worked for three presidents. I was wrong. It takes several unique personality traits to successfully run for a major public office. I don’t have them

First, you need to be sufficiently narcissistic to be able to sell yourself to voters (and anyone you need to help bankroll your campaign). In 2002, so many Massachusetts residents urged me to run that I thought voters (and funders) would flock to me once I announced. But the moment I said I was actually running, the burden of proof instantly shifted onto me. Even my most ardent supporters wanted to know: What made me think I would be a good governor? Many of the people who I assumed would be generous with their dollars in support of my campaign became skinflints overnight. Sure, I could promote policy ideas — I’d done it all my life — but I was terrible at promoting myself. It felt excruciatingly embarrassing. Telling complete strangers why they should be enthusiastic about me made me want to crawl into a hole and disappear. Dialing for dollars was the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had.

Donald Trump is a masterful self-promoter because he’s a pathological narcissist. He boasts about himself nonstop and has probably done so since he was an infant. No matter that his bragging requires dangerous lies, vile smears, law-breaking, and a grandiosity that would cause normal people to cringe; he does it all without moral constraint. It’s all he does. He’s the extreme. But you’ve got to be big on self-promotion to get anywhere in electoral politics.

Second, you need to be wildly extroverted. By this I mean you get more energy out of every encounter with a total stranger — every handshake, pat on the back, morsel of conversation — than the energy you lose in such an encounter. So by the end of a day of such encounters, you end up more energized than at the start. Bill Clinton lived off this contact energy...

Third, you need to be a method actor. You have to be able to will yourself into feeling whatever a situation demands, so you come off as authentic. Ronald Reagan was a master of method acting, presumably because it had been his career before politics. Clinton was almost as good. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, far less so. Trump is fairly good at this. Richard Nixon and George W. Bush were lousy method actors; even when they told the truth, they seemed to be lying.

Lots more good stuff in the original post!

"I wish wearing flat-irons on our heads would keep us from growing up."

The quotation I've used in the title of this post is taken from Louisa May Alcott's book Little Women. I basically read it because I realized that I was surrounded by women who absolutely loved it.  Also I am in a book club where we have read some interesting books on growing up.

I immediately saw why this is a classic.  Charming (but imperfect) characters, extraordinary writing, an intimate look at the past.  And for girls, a family that you might love to have.

One thing that really struck me was how close Alcott's language (from 1862) is to North American English today.   Ideas and assumptions vary (see the discussions of marriage!) but the vocabulary and sentence construction would be familiar to any reasonably educated person.

I offer up the example of the post title.  The flat-iron reference might puzzle a good many modern readers, but a good many might get it fairly easily from context.

Image: Louisa May Alcott

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Josh Marshall, historian

Josh Marshall, editor and founder of Talking Points Memo, has some cogent points to make about Alan Dershowitz's defense of Donald Trump in the ongoing trial:

Dershowitz is justifiably acclaimed as a criminal defense and a particularly appellate defense attorney, notwithstanding decades of escalating notoriety as a grandstanding attention whore. He is not a constitutional attorney. He is not an historian. And he is not any other kind of expert on impeachment. But now he’s spent a few weeks ‘reading all the books’ and he’s got it figured out.

This is the most classic sort of dilettante’s history. Understanding the past means more than just ransacking the library for proof texts and quotes. If we are trying to reconstruct the range of arguments the authors of the Constitution were making and how most Americans – who were indirectly responsible for ratifying the document – understood them you need a grounding in the history and debates of the time. Words do not speak for themselves. They have meaning in a particular historical context. We are not bound in our use of these words by their original historical context but we cannot make sense of them or any use of them for our own purposes if we are ignorant of that context.

To put it baldly, if it’s a topic and area of study you know nothing about and after a few weeks of cramming you decide that basically everyone who’s studied the question is wrong, there’s a very small chance you’ve rapidly come upon a great insight and a very great likelihood you’re an ignorant and self-regarding asshole. Needless to say, those are odds Dershowitz is happy to take. Dershowitz has now ‘read all the relevant historical material’ and has it covered.

Portrait of Pocahontas

I was reading a Globe and Mail article on the inappropriatness of using (mainly indigenous)
imagery and costumes in a racist manner on Halloween.  Then I remembered this engraved portrait of Pocahontas in Jacobean English formal (court) clothing.  And I also remembered how astonished I was the first time I saw the portrait.

Quick quiz: So what was she calling herself at this point (1616)?

Enjoy!

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

I just finished this book,

I'm coming to it rather late -- it was published in 1951and has been famous ever since.  (Do younger people know it now?)

Since first publication, it's been famous for a variety of reasons.

• as an astonishing first novel
• as the work of an obscure author who retreated to the country and wrote little else
• as an expose of modern (post-WWII) kids
• as a dirty book unsuitable  for the teenagers it porported to depict, and thus a book time and again banned by school boards, mainly in North America.
• as a source of slang and swear words

I heard a lot about The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager but never was required to read it, or forbidden to read it.  I didn't read high prestige books of that sort; I read science fiction.

But now I've read it, and you know what?  It's very good.

A new look at slavery

Today's Vox includes a substantial article by P.R. Lockhart on slavery   It's based on a recent book by Edward E. Baptist,  The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.  It has a provocative thesis, that slavery was the first modern big business, which was vital to the growth not just of the American South, but of the entire USA.  

Here's a excerpt from Lockhart :

Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.

The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.

But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits.

To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women — the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property — were transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers. As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana, sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps, they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton.

 

The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region. The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.

In recent years, a growing field of scholarship has outlined how America — through the country’s geographic growth after the American Revolution and enslavers’ desire for increased cotton production — created a complex system aimed at monetizing and maximizing the labor of the enslaved. In the cotton fields of the Deep South, this system rested on the continuous threat of violence and a meticulous use of record-keeping. The labor of each person was tracked daily, and those who did not meet their assigned picking goals were beaten. The best workers were beaten as well, the whip and other assaults coercing them into doing even more work in even less time. 

Read that again:  

The best workers were beaten as well,
 

As overseers and plantation owners managed a forced-labor system aimed at maximizing efficiency, they interacted with a network of bankers and accountants, and took out lines of credit and mortgages, all to manage America’s empire of cotton. An entire industry, America’s first big business, revolved around slavery.

“The slavery economy of the US South is deeply tied financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that people who were buying financial products in these other places were in effect owning slaves, and were extracting money from the labor of enslaved people,” says Edward E. Baptist, a historian at Cornell University and the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

 This makes me want to teach Early Modern History again...

Essential California

In the early days of blogging, I included many posts from English Russia, simply because that blog had so much odd and interesting material drawn, of course, from the largest country on the face of the earth. Today, the best source of unique stories about a big country is Essential California. And if you don't think California is a country, follow this link.

Manifest Destiny on a global scale

Manifest Destiny was a popular 19th century idea which attributed to the United States the right to expand and occupy the North American continent from coast to coast. Manifest Destiny was associated with the punchy phrase: "Go West, young man" coined by the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who thought western expansion was the way to go, both for (white) settlers and for the country as a whole. Not that he was unique in this prescription. I was thinking about the Opening of Japan (where the US Navy forced the Japanese empire to allow trade between Japan and the rest of the world) in the 1850s, when I realized that there was a lot of "Opening" in the 19th century. Think Opium Wars! Or the French Conquest of Mexico! Or the slaughter of Australian aboriginals (Being investigated right now by the Guardian)! How did they justify their actions? Somehow I doubt that I will ever have time to explore this topic --Manifest Destiny on a Global Scale -- but maybe someone else will. Or maybe someone already has! Image: Greeley.

Political beliefs

 For some months now I've been reading the commentary of Umair Haque.  His understanding of the current political situation, especially in the United States is so bleak that it reminds me of Old Testament prophecy, or maybe the crazier elements of the Reformation.  

But as this recent essay indicates, 

Umair would not thank me for the comparisons to prophets.  And in fact what he says about  political beliefs is surely the most important part of this post. It is certainly worth serious thought.

A substantial excerpt:

I want to tell you the story of the greatest lesson in history, which you probably don’t know. It’s the one the 20th century is trying to teach the 21st — but we, blinded by ideologies, weary and failing ways of thinking about the world, society, and ourselves, are still only just barely struggling to grasp it — if we are not resisting it outright. After all, we are not even twenty years into this century — so it’s no surprise the last one’s greatest lesson is yet unlearned.

There’s a question that’s as old as time. How do we build ciities, countries, towns, societies — worlds, lives — which prosper, endure, soar? Some said — the brutish and the shallow, mostly: “We gain by taking what is theirs! Let us enslave and exploit them! Why, they are not people at all!” And then cooler and wiser minds replied, shaking their heads: “No, no. We mustn’t do that. We must lift everyone up — and everyone is a person — never pull anyone down.” So. Shall we prosper by exploitation — or through liberation? Through subjugation and slavery, through hate and violence — or their opposites, equality, freedom, justice? Here’s a fact. Nobody really knew. So we humans, being the blind things we are, settled for the best we could: we debated it for millennia, with more and abstruse and abstract theories of morality, ethics, politics, economics. Here’s another fact. We didn’t know the answer — until now.

I was amused — if not surprised — to read, somewhere in a little corner of the internet, a description of myself as a socialist. In that accusatory way that Americans — at least some of them, on the fringe — still use the word. Amused because, well — let me describe my politics to you. My politics are very simple. I try not to have any. LOL — what? I’m sure that leaves many of you bewildered, even surprised. “But you’re always going on about capitalism and — “ Very true, so I do. So what in blazes do I mean?

You could in one way describe my politics, if you are very insistent of putting people in little boxes and neatly labelling them, this way. I suppose that I’m a pretty ordinary kind of social democrat — the kind that most people who aren’t Americans, but live in rich countries, are, from Europe to Canada. I think that the superior social contract at this juncture in human history is simple and straightforward ... That social contract goes like this: people provide one another the basics of a good life in modern terms, which means health care, education, some minimal income and savings, retirement, and so on. Capitalism — at a human scale — takes care of thmy politics” in the sense that people usually mean the term. They are not my beliefs, moral, social, cultural, and so on, based on theories of some such and this that, which I am trying to push on you, to persuade you of, mistakes to correct in you. They are not beliefs — things I don’t know, but presume, or hope, or wish to be true — in any whatsoever ....) So if they aren’t my beliefs, then what are they?

They are facts. Nothing more and nothing less. Just facts. It is a fact that people are happier in social democracies. It is a fact that people are richer, wealthier, closer, live longer, saner, better lives, in nearly every regard. There is nothing subjective or unknown about that statement, and so it is not a belief in any way whatsoever. Do you see the difference here — between fact and belief? You might think that I’m splitting hairs — but I think that both the future, and the greatest lesson in human history that you probably don’t know lie right here.

Why? Let me explain backwards. What’s unique about America? It’s that it got the social contract of modernity, which I described above — people provide each other the necessities, and capitalism provides the luxuries — absolutely backwards. America, unique amongst rich nations — all nations, in fact, tried a social contract where capitalism provides people the necessities, and the luxuries, things like yachts and mansions and so forth, are often had by way of a kind of weird, inverse socialism — cronyism, how close you are to powerful politicians and capitalists and so on, how many subsidies you can grab, how much you take from others.

...

Now, it doesn’t take a genius to have said: hey, listen…this social contract probably isn’t going to work out. Not only does capitalism have no incentive, reason, or motive to provide people the necessities, if the way to get rich is by everyone exploiting everyone else in the first place — then a society will never really go anywhere at all. And that is exactly what happened in America during my whole adult lifetime. Society literally went nowhere.

I mean that in the hardest possible terms. Society literally went nowhere.Incomes went nowhere. Life expectancy fell. Social mobility dropped. Depression and suicide rose. And so on. Along every indicator you can imagine or think of, America has made zero progress during my whole adult lifetime. That is not a belief. It is not my opinion, it is not a subject for debate — it is simply a fact. America tried out yet another social contract based on exploitation — capitalism, after segregation and slavery — whose results were as predictable then as they are real today: as people grew poorer, they turned to authoritarianism, instability became collapse, and here we are today, hoping a Blue Wave will stem the tide.

...

But if I start “believing” things about political economy, about society, about the world, then what happens? I can’t do my job very well if I “believe” things to be true, instead of know them, can I? Then I go from being something like an observer — or maybe intellectual, or maybe just an educated person, or maybe just a civilized one, you can choose — to being something more like a fool, someone who has rejected knowing, scorned truth. Do you see the problem here? It applies to you, too.

So why are we cursed with this burden of political beliefs? Why can’t more of us simply let go of beliefs — and say — whatever labels and ideologies the world, my society, my culture has trained and taught me to “believe” in, I will hold them lightly, tentatively, skeptically? Strangely, if you think about it, we can’t shed the burden of belief because it is a new thing to be able notto have political “beliefs.” Think about the world. Until the 1970s or so, it was eminently reasonable to say something like — “Who knows? Maybe capitalism is better. Maybe communism is! Maybe authoritarianism is. Or maybe apartheid states are the best kind to be! Who knows how the average person will be better off?” You see, we didn’t have much evidence about much at all, when it came to different modes and models of political economy, society, social contracts, and so forth.

Let me put that to you much more starkly. We could have said, probably until the 1970s or so, that America was a rich and powerful nation — and it was still segregated. Furthermore, it had gotten rich through slavery as much or more as through innovation. Europe, too, was still rising from the ashes of war — at that point, Spain was still a military dictatorship, and Germany still a split, riven nation. Who was to say which system was better, out of all the many choices political economy had to offer? Remember my question? It’s as old as time.

...

Over the last fifty years or so, a revolution hidden in plain sight has taken place in the world — which has gone too often unnoticed — and especially not American intellectuals, which is why Americans are in the dark about it (even though they intuitively get it, a full 70% of them can be described today as something like emerging social democrats anyways.) That miracle was this — European social democracy began to pioneer history’s highest living standards ever, period, full stop. Within fifty years — just fifty years! — less than one human lifetime, shattered, wrecked societies like Germany, Spain, and France had achieved the following things: the world’s longest lifespans, richest and largest middle classes, most equitable distributions of wealth, and so on. Scandinavia, taking it further, built history’s, and the world’s happiest, most egalitarian, and wealthiest societies.

...

Does prosperity come from exploitation — or from liberation? No one knew. Hence, millennia of bitter debates, about morality, religion, society, and so on — which simmered until the boiled over, finally, in a century of grand social experiments. American capitalism, Soviet communism, German fascism, and so on. That century was the last one.

...

The system that resulted in Europe, which came to be called “social democracy”, was revealed to be the most powerful lever of human possibility that had been discovered, ever. It was so powerful, in fact, that it made an impoverished, ruined Europe more prosperous in every single way than America in a single human lifetime.

Now, it’s equally important to understand the rejection, if you like, of the alternate hypothesis. Since the beginning of time, human beings have been ruled by the most brutal and foolish among them — and such minds have said: “the way to prosperity is through enslaving and exploiting and abusing others! As long as we can get them to do our work, with the whip or the chain or the trinket — why, we will be kings!” America, sadly, has a tendency to listen to such minds, over and over again. Hence, the basics of the hypothesis it has been testing have always remained more or less the same — prosperity results from exploitation.

But American collapse tells us that exploitation does not lead to prosperity. It leads to poverty amidst grotesque amounts of plenty, like having to choose between medicine and shelter even if you’re “middle class””, that is, profound and terrible inequality, which causes instability, which sparks authoritarianism, and so on.

...

That’s why America is where it is. It is a nation, sadly, which is largely ignorant, by design, of the greatest fact in the world, one of the greatest facts in history: that we have the missing formula for human prosperity, finally, after millennia of strife and war and hate and ruin. It’s simple. Prosperity comes from liberation, not exploitation. That formula — or that recipe — is at this point in human history, an empirical reality,

That is why I try not to have politics, my friends. Politics are largely empty vessels, hopefully obsolete things, in this day and age, really. The future won’t be made with people with political beliefs, as it was yesterday. That is because we have stark evidence about those beliefs, finally, after all the long midnights of human history — all the slavery, all the hatred, all the whips and all the chains. Where did they lead? Upwards — or downwards?

Today — this juncture in human history — really is different. We don’t need to believe, like blind people, anymore — to guess and hope and wonder. We simply need to see what is front of our eyes. The future will be made, then, by radical pragmatists. Who can take history’s great lessons — and apply them. But that is only because they understand them.

From the University of Pennsylvania Press: Slavery in a "Free State"

 The University of Pennsylvania Press is advertising this fascinating book:

The Alchemy of Slavery
Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865

M. Scott Heerman

248 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus.
Cloth Sep 2018 | ISBN 9780812250466 | $45.00s | Outside the Americas £35.00
Ebook editions are available from selected online vendors
A volume in the series America in the Nineteenth Century
View table of contents and excerpt

"M. Scott Heerman provocatively muddies the waters, demonstrating how slavery survived in 'free' Illinois all the way through the Civil War. His reinterpretation does much to link the history of Middle America to the global history of slavery."—Christina Snyder, Penn State University

"M. Scott Heerman offers much-needed and close scrutiny of the Illinois Country, a region that, because it straddled empires, labor systems, freedom, and slavery, opens up new understandings along a number of fronts, not least of which is the relationship between slavery's many iterations and the kind of freedoms those slaveries engendered. This book joins a growing body of scholarship that considers slavery and its legacies to be a national (versus a southern) problem, and which illuminates slavery as a historical process as opposed to a static and singular institution."—Susan Eva O'Donovan, University of Memphis

"Ambitious and meticulously researched, The Alchemy of Slavery illuminates the complex development of slavery and freedom in Illinois over more than a century. Heerman demonstrates the significance of local practices without neglecting broader developments in the French and British empires and in Washington, D.C. This book is wonderfully attentive to questions of geography and scale and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of colonial and early national North America." —Kate Masur, Northwestern University

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery's nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.

M. Scott Heerman teaches history at the University of Miami.

Nightmare

Stephen Marche will chill your blood.  An excerpt describing the steps to civil war:

To sum up: the US Congress is too paralyzed by anger to carry out even the most basic tasks of government. America’s legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government is in free fall. The president discredits the fbi, the Department of Justice, and the judicial system on a regular basis. Border guards place children in detention centres at the border. Antigovernment groups, some of which are armed militias, stand ready and prepared for a government collapse. All of this has already happened.

Struggling Dayton Ohio

 Upcoming on ProPublica:

How Struggling Dayton, Ohio, Reveals the Chasm Among American Cities

I was taken aback by this portrait of Dayton in crisis -- mainly because I grew up in the Dayton area in the 50s and 60s.  Back then Dayton was used by New York ad agencies to stand in for typical, prosperous Middle America.  Then, long after Kettering and the Wright brothers, Dayton was still doing more than OK.

An excerpt:

The irony for Dayton is that it knows the value of innovation clusters as well as anywhere. In the early decades of the last century, the city was home not only to the Wright brothers, but to lesser known inventors like Charles Kettering, who is credited with the electrical starting motor, among many automotive advances. The difference in the industrial age was that the manufacturing that flowed from those advances could be done just about anywhere with manpower, raw materials and transportation access. Today, manufacturing is typically done overseas, while the wealth accumulates in the hub cities where the intellectual property originated.

Image:  A Chinese company paying much lower wages than the GM plant it is replacing opens in Moraine, Ohio, right outside Dayton.

At last, marijuana reform interested in more than just the money

From the L.A. Times:

San Francisco will wipe out thousands of marijuana convictions dating to 1975

By SARAH PARVINI , RONG-GONG LIN II and CINDY CHANG

JAN 31, 2018 | 6:45 PM

| SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco will retroactively apply California’s new marijuana legalization laws to prior convictions, expunging or reducing misdemeanor and felony convictions dating back to 1975, the district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

San Francisco will retroactively apply California's new marijuana legalization laws to prior convictions, expunging or reducing misdemeanors and felonies dating to 1975, the district attorney's office announced Wednesday.

Nearly 5,000 felony marijuana convictions will be reviewed, recalled and resentenced, and more than 3,000 misdemeanors that were sentenced prior to Proposition 64's passage will be dismissed and sealed, Dist. Atty. George Gascón said. The move will clear people's records of crimes that can be barriers to employment and housing.

San Francisco's move could be the beginning of a larger movement to address old pot convictions, though it's still far from clear how many other counties will follow the famously liberal city's lead.

Proposition 64 legalizes, among other things, the possession and purchase of up to an ounce of marijuana and allows individuals to grow up to six plants for personal use. The measure also allows people convicted of marijuana possession crimes eliminated by Proposition 64 to petition the courts to have those convictions expunged from their records as long as the person does not pose a risk to public safety.

Are Americans dumb? Umair Haque says no

Not that his answer will make you feel any better:

Some things in life, my friends, are unpredictable. The weather. True love. The stock market. But some things are entirely, utterly, and almost boringly predictable, too. And strangely, those aren’t small things. Sometimes, they’re big things. One of the most predictable things of all is fascism, the classical sequence of a proto-fascist collapse.
Don’t believe me? Let’s think about. It goes something like this: economic stagnation, a falling middle class, a rising demagogue, who scapegoats and demonizes minorities, blaming the troubles of the many on the few and the different. Soon enough, something like this follows: paramilitaries are formed, parallel judiciaries, law enforcement, and citizenship are created, camps rise, apartheid laws begin, minorities are expropriated of savings, homes, and assets (which are redistributed to the pure of blood, because, remember, the economy is stagnant), forced exile, ghettoization, enslavement, and finally, extermination. The lying press! Enemies of the people! Vermin! Animals! We know how this goes, don’t we?
Where would you saw we are in that sequence of ruin? Judge for yourself. But the fact that you can judge also says: you’re familiar with this sequence, intuitively. Maybe not intimate with it in a textbook fashion. But you know its broad outlines. That makes it predictable. We — you and I — have seen it happen in society after society. Not just Nazi Germany, but Russia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, too, to name just a few. That’s why we all have an intuitive, almost unconscious knowledge of how fascist collapses proceed.
And yet, every single day, day after day, like a broken record, my timeline is full of Americans crying out in surprise. How — for Pete’s sake — can anyone be surprised by any of this, at this point? If every adult human being on Planet Earth, more or less, is familiar, in rough terms, with the points in the sequence above by now — then why are Americans still professing surprise, every single day? Are they acting? Are they really this dumb? They’ve never read a book about the Holocaust? Seen a single movie about it? Ever?
Let met give you an example to make the point.
“Why didn’t the wash that poor kid for 80 days?!” I saw a noted columnist asking, about a neglected, abused kid who was returned from a camp, infested with lice.
Hmm, let’s think about it. There are exactly three possible reasons. There was a sudden national shortage of water, soap, pipes, and bathtubs. Or maybe everybody was timewarped back to the middle ages, where no one bathed at all, including the guards. Or (wait for it) the guards are exactly what people who put little kids in camps need to be, to do it in the first place: fascists. People who don’t think that kid who’s already a filthy subhuman needs to bathe.
Which one is the most plausible? I’m being facetious — and yet, you still don’t know it, I’d bet. There’s only one reason no one would wash a kid in the 21st century. The guards were showering every day, weren’t they? If you were taking care of a kid, and the showers at school or daycare were broken, for months, wouldn’t you just finally take him home, and give the poor kid a bath? The only reason none of the above would or could happen is that if child’s guardians believe he is inherently dirty, that no water and soap can clean him anyways, so what’s the point, that he’s impure. It is as clear a line of evidence of fascism as human history has ever seen. And yet we have a noted columnist who can’t make draw simple logical conclusions. But it’s not just the columnist. It’s every single American I know. Meet. Read. See. Hear from. Every single one appears to be living in a parallel reality where they are perpetually surprised by what they already know. How can that be? It’s baffling, bizarre, and a little gruesome, isn’t it? It leaves us with two possible outcomes. Either Americans are really this dumb, that they don’t what all this genuinely is when they see it — or they’re playing dumb. Let’s take them one by one. Are Americans really this dumb? To be that dumb, you’d have to have never, ever, like I said above, seen a single movie, read a single book, or taken a single class about any kind of atrocity or genocide in history, from the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide to North Korean camps. Does that sound plausible to you? I’m pretty sure most Americans have seen Schindler’s List. I’m fairly certain they know who Hitler was and what happened in Auschwitz. So forgive me, but I don’t think Americans are actually too dumb to understand what’s going on before their very eyes.
I think they’re playing dumb. Which is a much more interesting question, isn’t it? Why would an entire nation play dumb — when the fascists arrive? What would motivate them to commit something so cowardly, so foolish, so unbelievable that it’s actually the stuff of black comedy? After all, that’s what playing dumb really is, isn’t it? A form of cowardice, if we’re a little less polite, and a little more honest.
So why would a whole nation play dumb? I think the answer — the only answer — goes something like this. Americans are willing to give the moral benefit of the doubt to people they think are “real” Americans, and deny the benefit of the very same doubt to those they don’t think are “real” Americans. The camp guards, the agencies, the managers, the contractors — all these people, whatever they are, are at least “real” Americans.
Ah, but you see something genuinely interesting happens now. Americans have made a very foolish mistake. The same one the Germans did, too, with their own Nazis.
They are giving people who acting in bad faith the benefit of the doubt. Hasn’t it been well established by now that “they” — and we all know they are by now — are operating with something like modern history’s most profound bad faith? They’re always read to shatter a norm, break a rule, treat society with deceit, never tell the truth. Aren’t the tactics they use — twisting reality, calling up down, denying what’s in front of everyone’s eyes — all example of bad faith? Isn’t a head of state who’s a renowned liar the ultimate example of bad faith?
Now that I point out the mistake to you, I’m sure you see how foolish it is. Playing dumb with people who are acting in bad faith is like grinning happily and playing Russian roulette with someone who asks you to go first — after loading all six chambers of the revolver. Playing dumb with people acting in bad faith is a recipe to be dominated, disempowered, and shattered. Just ask anyone who’s ever had an abusive relationship — which is what fascism really is. Now. We haven’t yet answered the deeper question. Why are Americans playing dumb — at precisely the time they must wise up? Why are they expressing shock, day after day — when fascism is more predictable than the weather? When we all know exactly what happens when the fascists arrive — demonization, scapegoating, camps, apartheid laws, ghettoes, expropriation, and worse, in roughly that order?
I think the answer’s simple. Culturally, Americans play dumb about everything, don’t they? They strike a pose of coyness. It seems to be what passes for cleverness, now — pretending that the answers are out there in space somewhere. Asking questions we all know the answers to. I’ll give you a few examples — imaginary conversations between pundits. “Why, James, is life expectancy falling?” “I don’t know, Steve!” And yet we all know the answer is: the healthcare system is profoundly broken. “George, I think it’s terrible millennials can’t afford to move out and have families! Why is that?” “Well, Bob, I don’t know!” But we all know the answer is: capitalism has failed massively as a system of social organization.
And Americans do that these days because collapsing societies are something like voids. They collapse because old ideologies fail — but societies only collapse because people clung to those ideologies in the first place. And so, clinging to badly failed ideologies, people can’t seem to see what’s right in front of their own eyes. The only way out is to play dumb. That can’t really be what it seems to be, can it? No, no — it can’t be! Those aren’t fascists! Those are good and fine people. They just don’t bathe kids for months.
Let me give bad faith every last shred of the benefit of the doubt. In other words, the intersection of folly, privilege, arrogance, and tribalism. That’s how you end up with pundits asking: “why did nobody wash a kid for 80 days?!” Gee, Bob. I don’t know. Maybe the entire nation ran out of water. Maybe it timewarped back to the dark ages, where no one bathed. Or maybe, just maybe, the Nazis think those filthy, dirty kids are subhumans, whom even water is wasted upon. Which is exactly what they keep saying to you — if only your deaf ears and your broken mind was capable of listening.

Trump and Russia: It was that close

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo argues that a defacto alliance between Russia and the USA came THAT CLOSE to being implemented in the earliest days of the Trump Administration:

Since this rapid settling of accounts with Russia is no longer the focus or at least at the forefront of coverage, we need to refresh our memories of exactly what was intended. The Trump transition planned to move rapidly in its first days and weeks in office to engineer a dramatic reshuffling of policy toward Russia, in essence a grand bargain which would start with lifting the December 2016 sanctions as well as those imposed in March 2014 for the annexation of Crimea. But it wouldn’t end there. It was also to include a basic reorientation of policy in the Middle East (a policy of close collaboration with Russia in Syria and Iraq/ISIS) and at least some shift in US policy toward Europe and the EU. ...

Despite the claim that Flynn had gone rogue and that Vice President Pence was lied to, details that emerged in the Flynn plea documents make clear that Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak were widely discussed among President Trump’s top advisors. Pence almost certainly knew about them, though we as yet have no direct proof of this. Events were moving rapidly. A string of denials about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak were hit with a rush of leaks that refuted each in turn. By February 13th Flynn was out. The next day President Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into his activities. Comey politely refused. Events were moving quickly and badly.

Various reports, including Isikoff’s, tells us that the staff planning for a rapprochement which was kicked off in the administration’s first days continued. Indeed, in the months since we’ve seen it pop up here and there. There have been repeated hints of discussions to return the diplomatic compounds seized by the Obama administration in late December. In his May trip to Europe Trump had to be coaxed and prodded to commit to the defense of NATO allies. We saw it in Trump’s bizarre and semi-secret Oval Office meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov just after firing Comey. Still, it seems clear that by mid-February, with Flynn fired and the Russia scandal dominating the headlines, any hope of an immediate and thorough-going reset in relations with Russia were abandoned as unrealistic. While the desire is clearly still there, it has been the drama of the unfolding investigation, rather than a grand partnership with Russia that has dominated the news and the administration ever since.

Image:  The new alliances that resulted from the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756

Trump: white president

White people knew, back in the 19th century: if you wanted a high-quality black clown at your entertainment, it better be a white guy in blackface.  Everybody knew that whites could do even blackness better than black people.

At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the American blindness to American racism.

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”

  Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.

And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement...

 Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

Mason-Dixon line

From the BBC: A crown stone along the line. The Beeb thinks this admittedly difficult surveying project was more important than Franklin's electrical work, both being scientific or engineering projects of the 18th century. Hmm.

Celebrating Robert E. Lee

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo asks where those Confederate monuments came from, and why.

What is little discussed today is that the North and the South made a tacit bargain in the years after the Civil War to valorize Southern generals as a way to salve the sting of Southern defeat and provide a cultural and political basis for uniting the country with more than military force. That meant the abandonment of free blacks in the South after the mid-1870s. It is important to see this not only as the abandonment of the ex-slaves of the South. It is difficult to pull away the subsequent history to realize that it was entirely possible in the aftermath of the Civil War that the US would be condemned to perpetual warfare, insurrection and foreign intervention. But if the opposite, the United States that went on to become a global superpower, is what was gained it was gained at a terrible price and a price paid more or less solely by black citizens.

However one judges that past, knowing its full history leaves no reason or rationale for continue the valorization of Lee. He was a traitor and a traitor in a terrible cause. That is his only mark on American history. Whether he was a personal gentle man, nice to his pets or a decent field general hardly matters.

Even this though leaves the full squalidness of Lee’s legacy not quite told. There is the Lee of the Civil War and then the mythic Lee of later decades. Today the battle over Lee’s legacy is mainly played out over the various statues of Lee which still stand across the South. The notional focus on this weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville was a protest over plans to remove a Lee statue. But those statues don’t date to the Civil War, the years just after the Civil War. In most cases they date to decades later.

The historical chronology is important to understand. Reconstruction is generally dated from 1865 to 1877 when the federal government withdrew federal troops and allowed the restoration of so-called ‘home rule’ in the South. But black political power and biracial political coalitions didn’t disappear overnight. Though the sheet anchor protecting black citizenship was withdrawn, it took the better part of a generation for what we now recognize as the Jim Crow system to be firmly entrenched throughout the South. To note but one example, the judicial cornerstone of Jim Crow, ‘separate but equal’, only became the law of the land with Plessy v Ferguson in 1896.

That statuary which is only beginning to come down in our day dates largely from this era and constituted a celebration and affirmation of this victory. Not the victory of the Civil War, which was of course a defeat but the sectional victory to define the post-war settlement.

... All of these statues date not from the Civil War Era but from the decades of the establishment of Jim Crow, to celebrate the South’s ability to establish an apartheid system on the ruins of the Antebellum slave South. A statue of Lee in uniform, mounted on a horse in a southern town square has only ever had one meaning: white supremacy. These statues didn’t come to be associated with racism and Jim Crow only after the Civil War had receded into memory. They were created, from the start, to mark and celebrate the foundations of Jim Crow, uncontested white rule. More mythically, but to the same end, they were built to glorify a vision of the South in which her black citizens had no place