Editorial note: it’s very hard for me to keep up with MSU when I’ve also got a day job. I’m only barely managing a monthly publication rate, maybe more like every six weeks. A lot of that time is consumed by all the articles I attach after writing my main points, in “Welcome to the Party, Pal,” “Security Sector Reform,” and “Good Reads.” Obviously I have to read them, then I have to summarize them into a sentence or two, and do all the annoying link cutting-and-pasting. So I’m asking you all: what do you like? How do my personal thoughts weigh against the articles of smarter people I summarize and add? I can track how many of you click on links to pieces I include, but I want to hear from you directly: do the articles enhance MSU or just slow it down? Please tell me in the comments what you think!
The Month
I know Gaza, and protests in the U.S. about Gaza, have taken up a lot of this month. I don’t want to say too much about that, because I covered the key points about this conflict back in December:
To summarize: Israel’s government—terrible. Hamas—worse. Both think they’re winning. As for the Israeli and Palestinian people, they’re staying with these terrible leaders because they prefer them to the alternative of a peace which would involve hard choices and sacrifices by both sides that neither are willing to accept.
But our real stability problem is how this is now impacting protest and politics in the U.S. The protests themselves are basically harmless—more on that in a sec—but of course they could help elect Donald Trump. My focus in this article was to say, stop paying attention to what college kids are doing on campus, because it’s almost always stupid and not the really important story. And boy, am I right!
Let’s look at some clear facts:
A lot of these protesters clearly are Jewish themselves;
The majority of these protesters sincerely opposes Israeli policy towards Palestinians and wants a peaceful resolution to the longstanding conflict;
A not-insignificant number of these protesters are straight-up anti-Semites—there’s no other interpretation to cheering on Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iranians, or chanting “from the river to the sea,” or specifically targeting Jewish people and groups for harassment. Anti-Semitism is a common characteristic of far right and far left;
The Maga politicians having fainting spells over all this and calling for mobilizing the National Guard stand with Nazis and support Israel because Israel’s existence is a prerequisite for the Second Coming and the annihilation of the Jews. They also just generically fear and despise protest and young people; Maybe more importantly
Trump needs images of chaos and disorder to frighten enough people into voting for him, and this is the best he’s got right now, so Maga politicians and the media are creating chaotic images for him; and
A lot of these protests are stupid and ineffective.
This last is really important, because protest was a big part of resisting Trump, and will be an important tool for resisting Trumpism if he wins. But we’ve been seeing globally that protests and civil resistance in general are less effective than they used to be, even as they’re still more effective than armed resistance. Why are they losing effectiveness?
Social media still is a great mobilizing tool, but it’s become a double-edged sword. States have improved dramatically on their ability to use the internet as a repressive tool, even as a decade ago it seemed very liberating. Perhaps worse, too many activists have come to see engaging or performing on social media as a form of protest itself—which it can be (it arguably would be more effective than protests for advancing the Palestinian cause), but not as a substitute for real-world actions;
Boy, do protesters love protesting! It looks like fun! You get to hang together with your friends and meet new people who agree with you on something. Honestly, what college student on a beautiful spring day wouldn’t want to cut class to hang out on the quad all day if given an excuse? But protest is just one of 198 forms of non-violent resistance I flagged back in fall 2020; people fixate on it when it’s likely to be insufficient on its own, and it’s not good to only have one tactic in your repertoire;
These protests in particular are annoying because they’ve become the story, and that’s hurting their cause. Instead of seeing images of suffering in Gaza, we’re seeing images of college kids getting arrested. Which would be more likely to move Americans to call on their elected leadership to help the Palestinians? Smart strategists would develop approaches that keep their issue in the limelight, and themselves out of it. They’d especially make sure they’ve got solid group discipline before starting, so that they can exclude the obvious anti-Semites I trust they don’t agree with.
A lot of activists become “professional protesters”—they love protesting so much they lose complete track of the purpose, which is to persuade people of the righteousness of your cause. You see this most with climate activists who deface art or block rush-hour traffic. These acts gain attention, but cost support. Pro-Palestinian supporters seem to have fallen into this trap.
It’s also striking how aggressively authorities, both campus and police, have responded, completely out of proportion to the protests happening. As some have said, it’s almost as if they’re responding in the way they’ve been preparing to respond to something since the George Floyd protests. It’s sad to see that cops are better at attacking college students than they are at defending children from mass shooters. We need to take this behavior as a dress rehearsal for election-related protests.
The Big Idea
Last Spring Break, I gifted you all with my insights on American politics from a family trip to Florida. This year, you get my insights from visiting Britain and France—a veritable smorgasbord of comparative government! And while it pains me to say so, one of my takeaways from the experience was, our constitutional framers really screwed up.
When I think over the month, what stands out most to me is institutional failure, in a number of different ways and levels. This was my first time in the UK since Brexit, and while I can’t offer you any particularly deep analytic insights (you can read plenty on how severe a self-inflicted wound Brexit was), I can say that even as I had a lovely time, it felt strangely… reduced. Seeing the passport and customs lines where they didn’t use to be—and shouldn’t need to be—traveling from Britain to France was such a reminder of the foolish waste of it all. And if the point was to preserve some sort of distinctly White/European “Englishness,” I can assure you it has failed miserably—and for the better—in His Majesty’s Capital City.
Things are better in France. European news was pleasantly full of the efforts of European governments to provide further support for Ukraine, with France and Czechia being particularly forward-leaning, alongside the Baltic and Nordic states who have always been at the forefront. Of course, that news can’t leave out that the Europeans were so energized because they were highly skeptical of American will to support Ukraine, and that at their most committed efforts, the Europeans alone can’t provide Ukraine all it needs.
The obvious difference between these countries and ours is that they are parliamentary democracies. In Britain, Brexit didn’t happen because of a parliamentary action but because of a parliamentary inaction—punting the question to a popular referendum. This was a gross act of cowardice and irresponsibility, but a failure of political leaders, not of the parliamentary system itself.
In France, although Marine Le Pen commands a disturbing amount of support, to date no other French political party has chosen to go into coalition with her, even where they have areas of policy agreement. With multiple parties, unlike our two-party system, groups have other options for forming coalitions, and it’s easier for them to exclude true extremists from power in government. We can only hope the French political mainstream can maintain this discipline—the temptation of some parties to choose to ally tactically with fascists always will be there, it simply depends on the virtue of the people we empower to lead us—which depends on our own virtue.
How do modern British and French politics relate to our present day and the Constitution’s original framers? First, to give the Framers their due, to the extent Britain and France are liberal democracies, it’s because we set them an example of it their leaders could follow, or… get guillotined. Yay us!
But our framers otherwise messed it up pretty badly. We all know they weren’t big fans of popular democracy; we’re reminded every time some MAGA chucklehead says “we’re a republic, not a democracy.” We can speculate cynically this was because the Framers were propertied men who feared democracy would deprive them of their wealth; but what we know—what they said—was they feared unadulterated popular democracy would lead to a demagogue who would be dangerous to everyone. To hear them tell it, especially in the Federalist Papers, which is the most comprehensive (if one-sided) exposition on their thinking, every check and balance of our constitutional system was designed to prevent a demagogue from using mass populist will to take authoritarian, majoritarian power. Two houses of congress elected differently, a separate executive branch, the electoral college, a separate supreme court and judiciary—all to prevent one person from consolidating power by sweeping up “the mob.”
Wow, did they miss the mark! Donald Trump is the closest person we’ve ever had to the demagogue they imagined, and his rise has been facilitated entirely by the very checks and balances that were supposed to keep that from happening—and his mob’s only a minority! But that’s all he needs, because the checks and balances let him rise only with a motivated minority. Without an electoral college, Trump loses in 2016, and has no shot in 2020, and not a great shot now in 2024. His only hope of evading some form of criminal judgment is his bought-and-paid-for supreme court. He’ll need a senate divided by states and a gerrymandered congress to engineer getting into power and staying there. And once he is there, as a president running his own independent branch—the one with all the guns—he’ll be able to do what he wants.
That the Framers blew it should have been obvious: after all, they failed to resolve slavery and ended up falling into acrimonious parties within their first decade despite saying they deplored them. But how did they miss the mark, and how does that tie to how we, the UK, and France are doing right now?
The Framers sought structural solutions to human problems. Madison said exactly that when he said, “If all men were good, government would not be necessary.” They assumed men (and women) would behave badly, and therefore powers had to be broken up to prevent anyone from arrogating too much. It was a great idea, but it didn’t work, because human problems have a way of defying the best structures.
John Adams might have been closer to the mark. He believed the foundation of good government was a virtuous citizenry. Among other things, he wrote, “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” and elsewhere, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Now, Adams was a Unitarian who denied both the trinity and the divinity of Christ, so to him “religion” was more like “consensus moral values.” But his point remains, and has been well-proven in my lifetime, from Nixon to Gingrich to Trump, from the U.S. to Brexit to France, from the Old Republic to Palpatine’s Empire: no system of institutions can be better than the virtue of the people in them, particularly but not exclusively the governing elites. It goes almost without saying, Adams was pretty cynical about the virtue of his fellow citizens. In the 25 years that he lived on after his presidency, he seemed pleasantly surprised the country was holding together. What we’ve seen in recent years is a failure of our system, but it’s a failure of our system because it’s a failure of our virtue. Like the Brits with Brexit, we, and the leaders we choose, may not be virtuous enough for governing.
Next edition, I’ll try to think through what that virtue or lack thereof means for our future government.
It’s easiest to think about the morons who stormed the Capitol, or those who show up to Trump’s rallies, but it’s more important to keep an eye on the more established fascist groups like the Society for American Civic Renewal. Who doesn’t want to get to know an Indiana shampoo billionaire who calls himself “Maximum Leader” and admires Rhodesia and The Camp of the Saints?
Axios puts it better than I can: “President Trump's ousting of a huge chunk of the Republican National Committee’s staff is a preview of what he plans to do with federal agencies if he's re-elected in November.” They also show how Trump’s people sincerely believe white people are an abused minority needing civil rights protections.
Trump hasn’t won 2024 yet, and his supporters already are justifying why he should be able to run again in 2028. It’s no joke: this could be our last free and fair election, at least for my lifetime.
If you haven’t watched the Tom Klingenstein video of “Trump’s virtues,” I certainly won’t encourage you to. Perhaps the big point is, people who like this video think that, if we think Trump is a Nazi, that means he has to be doing something right.
Read this conservative educator’s take on Oklahoma’s Department of Education.
This Supreme Judicial Council decision effectively bans protest in three states; if you organize a protest, and anyone gets hurt at it for any reason, you personally can be sued. That’s a pretty “chilling effect” on the First Amendment.
Security Sector Reform
It always was delusional to believe our military is apolitical. But that’s very different from politicizing it, which Republicans definitely are doing.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights does excellent work following extremism in Idaho. Their letter against “constitutional sheriffs” is excellent reading.
An increasing number of Americans buying guns are buying them specifically because of political violence—I won’t say whether to commit it or to protect themselves from it. Either way, it’s not good. But we’re playing Big Kid rules here, and I’m telling you to arm up, and so here’s your reminder that you’re not alone. Think of the worst person you know: do you want that person owning a gun, and you don’t?
Check out this awesome study from RAND on extremism in military veterans.
One of the biggest bits of law enforcement bullshit is “fentanyl exposure,” which is a great way to claim disability. But hit hurts real people when laws are being made to punish people for “exposing” officers to fentanyl.
The Seattle Police Department knew this officer had been fired for misconduct in Tucson, hired him anyway, and he killed a woman while driving at 74 mph. The city won’t prosecute him. People who make judgments like this cannot be trusted with your safety.
Good Reads
I like Robert Reich’s characterization of how to approach the summer and fall: “nauseous optimism.”
Nate Silver is right that something really is changing in electoral demographics—voters of color are increasingly voting Republican, while college-educated Whites are shifting Dem. I’m not going to try imputing motive to that here (though I think I might have hit on it in 2021 with “Critical Asshole Theory”), but it’s important to consider when thinking about past political assumptions and what they might mean now.
Before I panic about polling with minorities, I want to see how the gender breakout on these polls look. Jill Lawrence flags that women almost certainly aren’t breaking for the Magas.
Jen Mercieca shows how the GOP through my lifetime was the party of “law and order,” “freedom,” and “patriotism,” but now is the time for Democrats to claim those mantles. She also has excellent advice on how Biden can keep hitting Trump: he’s a loser.
A lot of very dumb people participate in very dumb acts of civil resistance. Nature has an excellent article on what efforts appear successful and what don’t.
This piece is classic Axios: it does a great job showing how Americans really aren’t near as divergent as our politics would indicate, but that doesn’t really matter when people identify their loyalties tribally, does it?
Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller just wrote a book called White Rural Rage, and in this article they defend their thesis in a shorter piece. I agree with them that it’s an odd taboo that conservatives can attack urban dwellers all they like, but we’re supposed to treat rural Americans as salt-of-the-earth real Americans. We have to go to diners and understand them; they never have to come to Starbucks and understand us. But I’d also concur with Professor Robert Pape that, if you look at real “rage,” like members of extremist groups or Jan. 6 insurrectionists, you find a lot more upwardly-mobile people from suburbs and exurbs.
David Pepper reminds us of something it’s easy to forget: every four years, a chunk of the older population, um… “leaves the voting pool,” while new children come of age as voters. There will be people voting this year who were 14 when Trump was elected—if they were politically conscious kids, they might even remember him claiming Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen. We think these days are highly abnormal, but they’re perfectly normal to them. That has to affect how we engage with them.
If you have thoughts, ideas or contributions for MSU, I’d love to get them at monganjh1@gmail.com, and have you follow MSU on Twitter @MoreStableUnion. Share with all your friends so they can subscribe at morestableunion.substack.com.
If there is a choice, I want to hear your thoughts because I know they have been informed by your wide reading.
I mostly enjoy your thoughts, more than the linked material.
Peggy