Our Billionaire Paradise
Assassination, CO2 growth and James Galbraith. Links for Friday, March 20
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
—H.L. Mencken
Links
Just a few links today, but of great value.
Assassination and the Great Man Theory of History
• Great man history and the 19th century debate over assassination (Carl Beijer)
I found this piece, by Carl Beijer, to be quite interesting. He looks at the argument about political assassination from the perspective of 19th Century thinkers. Recall that the 1800s and slightly beyond was the age of anarchists and targeted assassinations.
The kick-off idea, of course, is the interest by some in the “removal with prejudice” of Grand Duke Elon Musk. Beijer argues that Musk’s removal would be…
unlikely to change the course of history in the long run. DOGE, I have argued, is not the innovation of one man or even one administration — it’s the culmination of a long-term project of neoliberalization pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike. If Musk were gone the same same material forces responsible for neoliberalism would still be guiding our country to the same end, later if not sooner.
A lot of this way of thinking is dramatically at odds with liberal ideology, and if we look back to Marxist thought at the turn of the nineteenth century we can understand why.
It’s the 19th Century thinking I think you should read.
File under “Finding root causes, not easy to do.”
CO2 Growth in 2024
• CO2 growth in 2024 (Glen Peters via BlueSky)
Preliminary data suggests that the global average increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2024 will be a record. Not just a little record, but 25% higher than the previous record. (This is the global average, as opposed to Moana Loa)
I wrote about CO2 growth earlier (see “This Generation’s Problem”), and estimated decadal growth, given this acceleration, as follows: the decade of the 2020s, CO2 growth of 3.0 ppm per year; the 2030s, growth above 3.5 ppm per year; the 2040s, growth near 4.5 ppm per year; and so on.
We’re well on our way. This growth yields CO2 concentrations like this:
2030 — 444 ppm
2040 — 479 ppm
2050 — 522 ppmWhat all this implies for warming in 2050 depends on fast and slow feedbacks, but according to NOAA, the last interglacial period, called the Eemian (see chart below, second peak from the end), saw global temperature of +6°C above temperature today.
File under “Frog-marching our way to the end. What’s to be done? (See above.)”
The World at War
• Europe Can Have Both A Welfare State & A Warfare State (Ian Welsh)
Here’s the rule. Pick any two of the following three:
A Welfare State.
A Warfare State.
Low Taxes on the rich and corporations.
File under “Ahem.”
Our Billionaire Paradise
A number of posts touch this topic.
• “It’ll be OK. I just gotta get past this part.” (Tiktok)
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File under “How revolutions are made.”
• Trump’s Economics—and America’s Economy (James K. Galbraith in The Nation)
Leaving aside the buckets called “culture wars” and “foreign policy,” we may distinguish eight distinct forces at work in Trump’s economics. They are (a) the targeted destruction of specific regulatory agencies, (b) random disruptions of the federal civil service, (c) old-fashioned Reaganism, (d) tariffs, (e) migration, (f) energy, (g) the military, and (h) the general effect of rash and unpredictable policymaking—otherwise called uncertainty and chaos.
Galbraith’s eight buckets — (a) through (h) — give him a good structure to explore the breadth (or lack) of Trump’s effect on the economy. For example, there’s hope in this observation:
Not all regulation is effective. But quite distinct from its social and health benefits, effective regulation serves the interests of advanced businesses, including in manufacturing, by forcing old, dirty, and unsafe technologies and low-wage competitors out. Trump’s government, like others before it, is—unfortunately for its own declared strategy—in the hands of the reactionary branch of the business elite.
Translation: The troglodytes running this ship could soon be opposed by elites who want to succeed in the actual world, not just in their dreams.
File under “More than meets the eye, and quite a bit less.”
• The Bad Deal (James K. Galbraith)
Bonus: James Galbraith is the man who wrote this about Barack Obama when he tried to cut Social Security in 2011:
[T]he President too is a young man. … He'll need a big house in a gated suburb, with high walls and rich friends. And a good income, too, from book deals and lecture fees. He may be thinking about that now. ... [But] it won't save him. For if and when he ventures out, for the rest of his life, the eyes of all those, whose hopes he once raised will follow him. The old, the poor, the jobless, the homeless: their eyes will follow him wherever he goes.
File under “In case you forgot, it doesn’t all start with Trump.”
• It's the Trauma Stupid: Hurt People, Hurt People (LA Progressive)
Anyone paying attention to politics knows that Trump’s second term has been marked by a gleeful cruelty. The blizzard of executive orders, freezing overseas assistance to the world’s poor, firing masses of federal workers and targeting domestic safety nets pick up where his first term left off.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” boasted Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, in speeches before 2024’s election. “We want to put them in trauma.”
This long piece is not just about what trauma is inflicted by Trump and his followers, but what trauma they’ve suffered that they’re now exporting.
Trump gave wounded swathes of the electorate a permission slip to hate immigrants, those transgendered, every diverse Democratic constituency, with special emphasis on educated coastal “elites” and its “lying media.” The irrational hate mobilized against Democrats resulted in many MAGA voters acting like the most crazed sports fans, known for their rigid, sometimes violent, home-team loyalty.
Daniel J. Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, further explains the powerful appeal and draw of leaders who exude hostility and authoritarian impulses.
“People may actually feel excitement that someone in the public eye is expressing aggression, or assertion, the opposite of impotence,” Siegel said. Such traits can feel empowering to those who lack agency and power in their lives, he explained. “It is like a child wanting to be with a parent who will protect them.”
This is very like the “sado-masochistic personality” identified and described by Erich Fromm in his magnificent book Escape from Freedom, about how Nazi Germany, and indeed the aforementioned personality type, rose directly from Europe’s own traumatic response to the Age of Science. (More on this from me here.)
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked,” wrote the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards in 1741.
Worshiping that God, and demanding other do so to the point of personal pain, is our gift to the world. It coincided with the misnamed “Age of Discovery” — how unfortunate for those we “discovered.”
Re “Point of personal pain”: Here’s the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of the torturing minister Arthur Dimmesdale, acting when no one is looking: “In Mr. Dimmesdale’s secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders; laughing bitterly at himself[175] the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh.” A classic Calvinist sado-masochist. They’re obviously still with us.
(And yes, I’m aware the author of the piece at the link is Don Hazen; this guy.)
File under “The damage we suffer we often pass on.”
Music
“Another Brick in the Wall”, busker style.
Actually these two artists are quite accomplished. Dovydas, the guitarist, has quite a few YouTube videos, and the violinist, a 15-year-old named Karolina Protsenko, is stunningly good with this song. She too has a channel, often performing with her parents.
The street is in Santa Monica, probably the Third Street Promenade, another instance of The Great American Mall. (It’s plastic, Benjamin, plastic.)
Feel free to watch the intro; it’s fun. The song itself starts around 2:18. Enjoy. It’s very good.
Much of this newsletter with out-of-context quotes from forgotten literature and no elaboration went over my heard, to be honest.
And, re "It's the trauma stupid": there's been a lot of inconclusive back-and-forth as to whether Trump voters are genuinely economically aggrieved or just greedy, racist or otherwise wicked. I won't dive into that here. But speaking of trauma, remember that 80s-90s term "going postal"? Meaning there had emerged an archetype of the lowly, aggrieved postal worker who eventually showed up at work with an assault rifle? The current regime has suddenly created tens of thousands of lowly aggrieved ex-civil servants. How many of them will go postal?