Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 15 days ago, on April 30.

I made a rather arbitrary decision after midnight Tuesday evening to post what I had at the moment. I'm pretty sure I have up to a dozen tabs still open, but I'm not expecting to have much free time Wednesday or Thursday, and didn't want to leave the thing hanging. If/when I do find time, I may add more here (if I think something fits), or save it for next time. One thing that kept me from closing was that I tried to answer a couple questions, and couldn't quite figure out the second (suppressed for now). Good chance I will focus on that next.

More 100 Days Pieces:

Norman Solomon: [04-30] The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn't learned its lesson: "The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict." I'd go so far as to say that the value of a free press in a democracy is that it uncover the facts and framework so that we can properly evaluate and judge our politicians. American mass media has been pretty deficient on that score in general, but especially when it comes to matters of war. Solomon offers numerous examples of how easily the architects of the Vietnam War gamed the media. Sure, in the end, what we saw overwhelmed what we were told, to such an extent that many of us still distrust most public institutions: Trump's charges of "false news" work because that's been our experience forever.

American presidents have never come anywhere near offering an honest account of the Vietnam war. None could imagine engaging in the kind of candor that the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg bluntly provided when he said: "It wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side."

Two months after taking office in early 1977, President Jimmy Carter was dismissive when a reporter asked if he felt "any moral obligation to help rebuild" Vietnam. "Well, the destruction was mutual," he replied. "We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability."

A dozen years later, Ronald Reagan told a gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that the war had been a "noble cause" — "however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom."

While announcing formal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in July 1995, President Bill Clinton felt compelled to fabricate history. "Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives," he said. "They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington in May 2012, President Barack Obama spoke of "honoring our Vietnam veterans by never forgetting the lessons of that war" — which included "that when America sends our sons and daughters into harm's way, we will always give them a clear mission; we will always give them a sound strategy." But Obama was far along in replicating the tragic folly of the Vietnam war.

Yanis Varoufakis: [04-30] Trump and the Triumph of the Technolords: "Trump is a godsend for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other technofeudal lords. Any short-run loss from his tariff delusions is a small price to pay for an agenda that would deregulate their AI-driven services, bolster crypto, and exempting their cloud rents from taxation."

Ed Kilgore: [05-01] Marco Rubio Might Have His Jobs, But He's No Henry Kissinger: Huh?

Chas Danner: [05-03] Trump Loses Another Election Abroad: "Australia's Labor Party looked doomed a few months ago. Now, thanks in part to Trump, it's expanding its majority." The thing I don't quite understand is why the center-left parties in Australia and Canada were considered sure losers before Trump showed them that yes, indeed, things could get much worse. Sure, this fits in with the line that Harris lost as part of a global reaction against incumbents (that also wiped out the Tories in the UK).

  • Yanis Varoufakis: [05-06] Why the centre will not hold: Voters want the system upended: Starts with the Canada and Australia elections, although one could also look at the UK, and France, where the runoff system effectively keeps Le Pen out of power. For the moment, Trump is scary enough to drive voters to alternatives, but what more are the centrists offering other than not being Trump? Not solutions, scarcely even acknowledgment of concerns, but more of the "business as usual" that is generating such widely felt problems. And because they're not solving problems, or visibly attempting, and because they're reluctant even to assign blame and identify enemies (especially the ones they cultivate as donors), they lose all credibility -- even their dire warnings about boogeymen slip by the wayside, until someone like Trump gains power and reminds us how much worse it can get. One big point here is that the wins in Canada and Australia were achieved not at the expense of the far right, but by panicking the left into joining the center, even though the center has nothing positive to offer.

  • Wolfgang Munchau: [05-05] The death of the centre-right: It failed to address an alienated electorate: This is more of a Europe thing, as our two-party system only allows for left-right branding, even when both are for all intents and purposes centered -- meaning under the thumb of the same donor class and its dominant ideology -- leaving their branding options mostly negative: the Democrats are a mixed bag of liberal, left and center who can only find unity as anti-right; the Republicans are more homogeneous, but still are better defined as anti-left than as conservative, libertarian, authoritarian, or anything else. I would add that those stances are more emotional than logical or practical, which allows the center to cater to or humor them without sacrificing power or policy. (Although I'd also point out that the left has a coherent critique and program, and that the right doesn't, which gives the right an advantage for campaigning but makes governance a disaster.) Multiparty systems in Europe allow for more personal profiles: far-right and far-left vs. center-right and center-left are not just points on a political scale but, given the dominance of emotion over logic in voting, are becoming distinct personality types. In this scheme, as the system fails and panic increases, the far-factions increase at the expense of the center. But as this happens, and especially as the far-right become more ominous to those with centrist leanings, the center-right becomes the empty quadrant: they pale in emotional satisfaction to the far-right, they aren't needed to defend against the far-left, and they cannot be trusted by even the center-left to keep the far-right down (as the center-left has habitually done to the real left).

Alexander Nazaryan: [05-04] Who's to Blame for the Catastrophe of COVID School Closures? "A new book tries to make sense of a slow-motion (and preventable) mistake that affected millions of children." The book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig, who is interviewed here, and allowed to spout his opinions with no review. It isn't obvious to me that the closures were bad decisions, or that they had long term consequences, let alone catastrophic ones, but I also find it hard to credit strawman attacks on caricatures of a left that has never come close to exercising the sort of power they are blamed for. This ends with the interviewer asking "are you optimistic that officials will handle the next pandemic better when it comes to school closures?" To which Zweig answers: "I think a significant portion of the public just simply won't tolerate it the way they did last time." So next time will be worse, not just because we learned nothing but because the do-nothing agitators have only been further empowered.

Note that I'm not arguing that the closure policy was ideal or even right, and certainly not that we shouldn't review what happened and learn to do better. I'm not surprised that "remote learning" is less effective for many students, but surely it could be improved much over the current practice of just blasting students with data. Perhaps it requires more individual teacher attention, not less? Also, I admit that my views are rooted in my own ancient experience with a school system that taught me little and tortured me much. One thing I learned later is that at least some, perhaps many, students will learn on their own what they can't learn in school.[*] One thing I really hate is Zweig's attitude that every minute/day/month that a child is deprived of full bore, high-pressure education is a moment totally and irretrievably lost that will mar the person forever. I could point to the practice of tiger parenting here, but I see that more as an internalization of rat race capitalism, and its perverse reduction of human values.

[*] I am probably an outlier in terms of my ability to pick up expertise in purely academic subjects, which was possibly aided by my being freed from the school system at a tender age (15). But I've known others who loathed school and deliberately underachieved, but on their own went on to master not just the rote practice but the science and logic of the trades that interested and engaged them. I've learned as much from them as I've learned from anyone with a proper academic pedigree. Even so, I admit that there are things that I've been unable to learn on my own, where the discipline of coursework could have made the difference. In particular, I've long noted with regret my inability to advance in mathematics after my standard -- and frankly not very good[**] -- curriculum was broken. (I've compensated somewhat by reading books about mathematics, like Philip J Davis/Reuben Hersh: The Mathematical Experience and John Allen Paulos: Innumeracy, two general surveys I highly recommend, as well as more esoteric fare like Douglas R Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science, and Benoît Mandelbrot: The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

The exception (there always is one, isn't there?) was in 6th grade, when I had a very elderly -- and much despised by everyone else I knew -- math teacher who embraced the temporary vogue for New Math, and introduced me to sets and number theory -- concepts not only interesting in themselves but which provided nearly all of the math I eventually needed for a career in software engineering. It is worth quoting from the Wikipedia page here:

Parents and teachers who opposed the New Math in the U.S. complained that the new curriculum was too far outside of students' ordinary experience and was not worth taking time away from more traditional topics, such as arithmetic. The material also put new demands on teachers, many of whom were required to teach material they did not fully understand. Parents were concerned that they did not understand what their children were learning and could not help them with their studies.

But also note what they were opposed to (and eventually managed to shut down):

All of the New Math projects emphasized some form of discovery learning. Students worked in groups to invent theories about problems posed in the textbooks. Materials for teachers described the classroom as "noisy." Part of the job of the teacher was to move from table to table assessing the theory that each group of students had developed and "torpedo" wrong theories by providing counterexamples. For that style of teaching to be tolerable for students, they had to experience the teacher as a colleague rather than as an adversary or as someone concerned mainly with grading. New Math workshops for teachers, therefore, spent as much effort on the pedagogy as on the mathematics.

In other words, New Math might encourage students to learn on their own and to think for themselves. When I moved on to 7th grade, it was back to the rote learning of Old Math, where I learned little of note but the A grades were easy, and I lost interest -- especially after my 9th grade science teacher was so horrible I not only ditched that as a career inclination but never took another science course (and as such had diminished use for more math).

Kenneth Rogoff: [05-06] Trump's Misguided Plan to Weaken the Dollar: "The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, proposed by Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran, aims to reduce the United States' current-account deficit by weakening the dollar. But this plan is based on a deeply flawed understanding of the relationship between the dollar's global status and US deindustrialization." I've been asking this same question: if the goal is to square away America's current accounts deficit, wouldn't it be more straightforward to just weaken the dollar -- making US exports cheaper to others, which should result in us selling more, while making imports more expensive, some of which could easily be replaced with cheaper domestic supplies -- than to raise tariffs, which make trade less efficient while inviting retaliation? I've long assumed that the "strong dollar" was dictated by the political clout of finance, because the main effect of the trade deficits has been to feed money back into the finance system, making the bankers (if not necessarily other capitalists, like manufacturers) all the richer. Those in finance have little reason to reduce the trade deficit, because it's already working just fine for them. Rogoff offers a couple reasons why an attack on the dollar wouldn't help with the deficit, and concludes "the idea that tariffs can be a cure-all is dubious at best," but doesn't really answer my question. He is, by the way, a former chief economist from IMF, and co-wrote a famous book called This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which I don't recall all that well reviewed. He has a new book more specifically on this subject: Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.

  • Ezra Klein: [05-02] Trump vs. the Dollar: Interview with Kenneth Rogoff. An interview, which gets into more depth about "exorbitant privilege": where the idea came from (it was originally, as you might guess, a sneer, but has since been adopted as some kind of divine right), what benefits it bestows, and how insecure they may be. (What is lacking, I think, is details on exactly who benefits, and how much or little that may matter to the rest of us.) The bottom line is here:

    It has stabilized for the moment because Trump has retreated partly. But what I thought might have taken 10 or 15 years to happen took place within a week. And we're never going back.

    So our exorbitant privilege, our lower borrowings -- never going back to what it was. We may have lost a quarter percent, a half a percent, just permanently higher.

    We can have a recession to bring them down -- and we can get into that -- but I don't think that bell will ever get unrung.

    One especially interesting line is: "Americans know they've been good, but they don't know they've been lucky." That's pretty common among evidently successful people. Rogoff follows this observation with sports metaphors, so I'll drop in a couple more: "born on third base, but thinks he hit a triple." You might counter with Branch Rickey's "luck is the residue of design," but few other people ever cultivated luck as assiduously as Rickey. Donald Trump was born with so much luck he's spent a lifetime squandering it and still gets by on nothing but.

Adam Gurri: [05-07] Why We Need a Reconstruction of the Liberal Public Sphere: "How media systems work, how ours came to be, and where we go from here." Son of media guru Martin Gurri -- I have a copy of his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which seemed like it might offer some insight into the Trump-addled media circus, in spite of (or perhaps because) its author having wound up voting for Trump in 2024 (on extremely specious "free speech" grounds); I may have clicked here expecting Martin -- has "worked all over the adtech ecosystem," but also founded Liberal Currents ("an online magazine devoted to mere liberalism"). This is a long piece I've barely skimmed and can't especially recommend but the subject is important enough to bookmark it and return at some future point: Democrats desperately need to learn better ways of talking to and about other people, because recent approaches don't seem to be working at all. I don't know what the answer is, in part because it's hard to see how anything can effectively counter the forces that are fragmenting and denigrating consciousness with their relentless barrage of misinformation and misinterpretation. But I am pretty sure that nostalgia for "the Big Three" era isn't the answer, or even a part of it. That was, after all, the system that gave us the Red Scare, the Cold War, and especially Vietnam, and was still largely intact trumpeting Reagan's "morning in America," Bush's "new world order," and another Bush's "global war on terrorism."

  • Adam Gurri: [04-29] Unfit to Be the Ruler of a Free People: The Anti-American Presidency of Donald Trump: "The Trump administration is an affront to everything good that America has become and everything America has ever sought to be." This piece aligns the author with the liberal democrats who have always sought to see the sunny side of America idealism, and therefore regard Trump as an abomination, rather than as just an especially ripe and pungent instance of rot that's deeply embedded in American history. Choosing sides in this debate is a distracting parlor game, when it's much easier for both to agree that Trump and his legion are hideous and need to be stopped. Still, I will note that those who have tried to rescue patriotism and piety from the Republicans have had not only had very little success, they've become objects of ridicule for the very people they try to convert. (I was especially struck by how Trump made light of Obama's habitual "God bless America" speech ending, obviously a lie because they all agree he's a Muslim terrorist driven by his hatred and lust to destroy America. )

Gaby Dal Valle [05-07]: Grifters thrive under Trump's scam-friendly administration: "Gutted watchdog agencies and unprecedented 'influence peddling' means unrestrained fraud." This is the essential story of the Trump administration, the one you can be sure of adding new installments to each and every week. This is also Trump's main vulnerability, as his graft is only barely more popular among rank-and-file Republicans -- who are so easily motivated by the slightest stench of scandal on the Democratic side -- as with Democrats and independents.

Sarah Jones [05-07]: The Christians Who Believe Empathy Is a Sin: "When suffering is irrelevant, anything can be justified." I don't exactly understand why, other than because their politics depends on desensitizing to cruelty. Ends with: "The social contract is held together by empathy, which is why authoritarians fear and despise it so much. All they can offer is a net."

Orly Noy [05-07]: What a 'peace summit' reveals about the state of the Israeli left: "Well-meaning dialogue workshops, panels on distant political solutions, but no mention of genocide: these are privileged distractions we can no longer afford." I spent over a year, from Oct. 7, 2023 through Nov. 6, 2024, documenting and denouncing Israel's genocide -- a word that will suffice for what's happening, which admittedly is much more than that, but also no less -- but I've largely bypassed the subject since then. This does not represent a change in my views, or a lessening of concern, but simply a choice to focus my limited time and energy on matters that are less glaring and/or are open to possible solution. While I may have been overly optimistic that Harris, had she won and transitioned from campaign to governing (from sucking up to donors to actually having to grapple with real problems), would have compelled Israel to limit its goals, I was certainly correct that Trump would rubber-stamp whatever Israel's leadership wanted. Given that force is not a viable option -- no opposing force has the means, much less the desire, to go up against Israel (and the US) -- the Houthis and/or Hezbollah are at most minor irritants -- and that war wouldn't be a good idea anyway, and that US support can be counted on, the only way this ends is when Israel itself decides to stop it. Hence, our hopes are limited to efforts like this "peace summit," political efforts that gnaw away at blanket US/Europe support for Israel, and the resilience of the Palestinian people, who are paying the price for our confusion and indifference. As usual, if you want latest news, see this website, MondoWeiss, Middle East Eye, etc.

  • Basel Adra: [05-06] Palestinians awoke to bulldozers. Their village was destroyed by noon: Note that this was in the West Bank (not Gaza), the village Khilet al-Dabe.

  • Qassam Muaddi [05-09]: Exterminating Gaza was always Israel's plan, but now it's official.

  • Ofer Cassif: [05-09] Israel laid out its harrowing plan to take Palestinian territories in 2017. Now it is happening.

  • Faris Giacaman/Tareq S Hajjaj [05-06] Israel is creating a power vacuum in Gaza by backing armed looters -- and killing anyone who tries to stop them.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [05-02] Biden staffers admit what we all knew: White House lied about ceasefire efforts.

  • Dave Reed [05-10] Weekly Briefing: Israel plots ethnic cleansing under Trump's cover.

  • Thomas L Friedman [10-09] This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally: No, he hasn't flipped. He still has "zero sympathy for Hamas" ("a sick organization"), and sure, it's taken him an awful long time to get to a point that should have been obvious even before the Oct. 7 uprising, but his extreme reluctance qualifies him as a bellwether. A tweet mentioning this piece starts, "when you've lost Thomas Friedman." If appeals for murdered children would have gotten to you, you'd already be clamoring for a cease fire, if not much more. Friedman only cares about something else: realpolitik. He recognizes that genocide is a bad look for Israel, and that it is bleeding support for the land and people he so cherishes, and under these circumstances, he sees that blanket US support only encourages politicos like Netanyahu to do worse things, to bleed more support.

    One way to look at this is: if you care for Palestinians, you've long recognized Israel as a force intent on your destruction, so your response is to two-fold: to elicit sympathy for your people, and to applaud their heroism and resilience in the face of occupation. You also have negligible political influence, especially where it matters most, in Israel and the US -- and especially to the extent that your aims can be viewed as a zero-sum game at Israel's expense. If your concerns are more general, if you oppose injustice and its enforcement in all forms, then you should be able to recognize Israel as a major offender, and seek remedies, starting with a ceasefire, that restore justice. You, too, have negligible political influence, at least in the US, as is evident by America's deep commitment to global power projection, and by America's generous support for regimes that have a history of abusing human rights. But at least your group is one that the real powers in pre-Trump America feel the need to pay lip service to. (Trump doesn't feel any such need, which makes him an object lesson on what happens when you don't at least pretend to have any scruples.)

    But there is a third group of people who have good reason to oppose Israel's genocide, and that's those who genuinely love their idealized notion of Israel, and wish nothing more nor less than to rescue their ideal from the racist/murderous reality that can no longer be ignored or excused. Their remedy of last resort is "tough love": Friedman's title cannot have been easy for someone who's spent 30+ years propagandizing Israel as America's greatest ally, but he at least recognizes the leverage point, and at long last sees no better option. This puts him midpoint on a scale that started with early "tough love" adopters like Peter Beinart and (somewhat later and more equivocally) Bernie Sanders, and will likely continue even beyond Friedman. When you still find Israel-lovers, work on them: ask how can they profess love of Israel and concern for the safety and well-being of Jews and still excuse what Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir have done? They have no answer, and need to see that. When they fall back on their hasbara, dispel it -- it's really quite easy, as at root its irreducible claim is that God's Chose People have a right to dominion over all others. (If you are one of them, you should recognize that the proposition is ridiculous. If you are not, you have no other recourse, as your side has been chosen for you.) And if they still refuse, they are lost -- as is any nation based on such obstinate self-regard. But we should be clear that anyone who still supports this Israeli government is no friend of the Israeli people and nation, or of Jews anywhere. It is they who are promoting anti-semitism.

  • Hanin Majadli: [04-09] This Intolerable Gap Between Jewish Memory and Palestinian Reality:

    I blame Israel's school system and the State of Israel for having introduced the Holocaust into my veins. . . . This intolerable gap between the memories of the Jewish people and the reality of the Palestinian people, between the insistent pledge of "Never Again" and what is happening now, in the present, is something that burns one's heart, something almost inconceivable. This is the gap between an Israeli society that opens its heart, at least ostensibly, to a painful historical memory while ignoring, sometimes brutally so, the pain that it itself is responsible for.

David Armstrong: [05-08] The Price of Remission: "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I've covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked even me."

Jeffrey St Clair [05-09]: Roaming Charges: 100 Days of Turpitude: Starts with more on the new pope than I ever thought to ask. Although, for the record, see: Pope Leo XIV Calls for Peace in Gaza, End to Israeli Blockade on Aid. Of course, St Clair has much more than that.

Michael Tomasky [05-09]: You Won't Believe How Much Richer the Trumps Have Gotten This Year: Estimate is $3 billion in three months. A big chunk of that comes from crypto: whereas lesser crooks could be accused of "selling out," Trump gets to buy in, on terms that all but guarantee profits. And given his ability to direct public money to private ventures, his "investors" could be able to recoup plenty in his allotted four years. This flows into another [04-25] story specifically on crypto: "Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done." That may seem like a big claim, but whoever's the runner up is nowhere close.

Nia Prater [05-09] A Few of the Many Lowlights of Jeanine Pirro, Trump's Newest U.S. Attorney. Trump nominated the Fox host after finding his original pick, Ed Martin, a counsel for January 6 rioters, "would be unable to survive Senate confirmation." It's hard to see how anyone who would object to Martin would be reconciled to Pirro (who "compared January 6 rioters to Revolutionary War soldiers").

Chas Danner [05-09] A Too-Deep Dive Into Trump's Doll Comments. For more on this:

Liza Featherstone [05-09] Kamala Harris 2028? Hard Pass. "Brat Summer is over and never coming back." She had a solid poll lead coming out of the convention. She had tons of money. Her opponent was a fraud and a nincompoop, and was promising to wreak mayhem on his supposed enemies. And to my mind, at least, she was likable as well as competent. (Maybe I was just a sucker for the cooking videos?) Sure, there were things about her campaign that bothered me, but the choice was so stark and her favor was so huge that I decided just to trust her. She had a theory about winning, and while I didn't particularly agree with it, it wasn't necessarily unworkable. So when she failed, it was just as easy to blame the voters as to blame her. (Pace Hillary Clinton, who did much more to deserve her loss.) But whatever the reason, she's just not substantial enough to keep running. (The only major party candidate to lose repeatedly was William Jennings Bryan, who you may or may not like but at least he stood for things. The only one to come back after a loss was Richard Nixon, and he was much worse than a serial loser. Third party candidates like Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Ralph Nader at least had stands, but anyone can be a "lesser evil," which was ultimately the bottom line for Harris, as for Biden.)

Steve M [05-10] The Rise of Fascism and the Tabloidization of Government: All of his posts are worth reading, but I want to quote from this one:

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil. . . .

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

Also see:

  • Steve M: [05-07] Punishment Is All They Want. Starts with a tweet from Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) saying: "The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci." I don't believe that Democrats should attempt to match the glee with which Republicans wish to consign their enemies to unspeakable hells, but Democrats do need to get much stronger at assigning blame for what ails Americans, and promising to fix those problems, especially by removing those responsible from power. Once removed from power, there is something to be said for forgiveness and forgetting, because falling into the sadistic vengeance trap is not just bad for the victims, but for those in power as well.

Ammar Ali Jan [05-10]: India and Pakistan Are on the Brink of Catastrophe: "Many Hindu nationalists termed the recent Pahalgam terror attack 'our October 7' and now call for Pakistan to be 'reduced to rubble.' Even under a tenuous cease-fire, nationalist saber-rattling is colliding with the collapse of international law." This is always the risk when you install a government whose primary identity is hatred of others. Of course, there are differences, which should be sobering: Pakistan has 240 million people, whereas Gaza only had 2 million. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, where Hamas had little more than sticks and stones. On the other hand, Israel has shown what unopposed power can do, and few nations have followed their exploits more enthusiastically than India has.

Joan C Williams [05-10]: The Left Has to Speak to Average American Values -- or Perish: Interview with the author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2019), has a new book out, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Pull quote: "What working-class people know is that their parents' or grandparents' families looked quite different from theirs, and everything seemed to work then. Now nothing seems to work." I'm old enough to recognize what she's talking about from my own family and neighborhood, but I'm not feeling nostalgic about it; more like resentment, and relief that those times are behind us. I don't disagree that what we have now isn't working as well as it should be, but I prefer solutions based on what we've gained, not on what we've lost. Still, with the future unfathomable, people spend most of their time looking back, and that suggests some ways to talk about present wrongs. We do need help talking, because the standard Democratic Party spiel isn't cutting it. Speaking of which, which article led me to this:

  • Hillary Clinton [03-28] How Much Dumber Will This Get? Well, how much dumber are you going to make it? She starts: "It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it's the stupidity." Sounds like a distinction without much difference, but I'm always wary when someone like her calls others out for hypocrisy. We'll give her a pass on "stupidity," because she's much more useful as an example of how worthless, and sometimes dangerous, smarts alone can be. But Trump, sure, he's so stupid that even his denials ("stable genius," "person, woman, man, camera, TV") are ipso facto proof. His stupidity is so vast one really needs to be more specific. To wit, Hillary continues:

    We're all shocked -- shocked! -- that President Trump and his team don't actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What's much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That's dangerous. And it's just dumb.

    The rest of the op-ed is a long lecture excoriating Trump for sins against conventional (deep state? blob?) foreign policy -- "reckless with America's hard power," "shredding our soft power," "more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America's adversaries," "cozying up to dictators," "blowing up our alliances," "we also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable" -- punctuated by bursts like "dumb" and "not smart." Even when she complains about "undermining the rule of law at home," "flagrant corruption," and "tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt," she's preoccupied with its foreign policy impact ("trashing our moral influence"). It has long occurred to me that her biggest mistake in 2016 was how much desire she had specifically for the role of Commander in Chief. Has any presidential candidate ever won, or even run, on a pro-war platform? Not even Trump has been that stupid.

    PS: My wife offered an answer to my rhetorical question: Kamala Harris. I get the point without quite sharing the feeling. Biden's wars, unlike Bush's, were things he stumbled into, out of bad luck, misplaced loyalties, and a deficit of understanding and will to do anything about them. Harris, following past vice-presidents, made no real effort to distinguish herself, and way too often parroted the deadly clichés of Washington defense-speak, which is pretty much what Clinton did, but with extra relish.

Dave DeCamp [05-12] US Replaces B-2 Bombers at Diego Garcia Base With B-52s: This caught my eye because my father helped build the first B-52s over 70 years ago, when I was a child. He continued to work on refitting and refurbishing the planes until he retired. As noted, the "main difference" between the bombers is that the B-2 has "stealth," but perhaps more important is that the B-52 can carry more bombs, and not the so-called "smart" ones: it is a tool for indiscriminate mass bombardment against an "enemy" that lacks modern anti-aircraft defense. "Between March 15 and May 6, the US launched over 1,000 strikes on Yemen."

Peter Linebaugh/Marcus Rediker [05-13]: A World Turned Upside Down: "Christopher Hill's history from below." Hill was one of the three great Marxist historians of British history, usually listed first ahead of Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, either alphabetically or by period. This reviews a new biography, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, by Michael Braddick. I've been reading a lot of Hobsbawm recently, because his period is closer to mine, but early on I was much more into Hill, perhaps because his period in British history directly flows into American history.

Scattered tweets:

  • James Surowiecki: [04-30] Starts by quoting Attorney General Pamela Bondi:

    Today is Fentanyl Awareness Day. In President Trump's first 100 days we've seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives.

    So each and every fentanyl-laced pill would, if normally distributed, have killed six different people? How does that even work? Even if each and every dose was potentially fatal, how does it move from a dead body to another living body? Wouldn't the second, third, and later generation doses weaken or decay or diffuse? And when you're killing so many people wouldn't there be some reaction that limits the spread? As Surowiecki notes, she's counting "one third of all Americans," even before revising her figures to "258 million lives. That's 75% of all Americans."

  • Sara B: [04-30] Happy 80th anniversary of Hitler killing himself in his bunker to all who celebrate, which, as I now understand, is not everybody.

  • Meidas Michele: [05-04] Just an image, which reads:

    Trump officially entered the psychotic emperor phase. He's not coming back. The Pope image was it. That was the line. He crossed it and kept walking. This isn't trolling anymore. This is clinical delusion. The tariffs on movies. Reopening Alcatraz. These aren't policies. This is a man deep in a psychotic loop thinking revenge is leadership and trolling is governance. Every time he does something more insane, MAGA cheers louder. And every cheer convinces him he's still the chosen one. So he takes it further. No one's driving the bus anymore. They're just throwing gasoline and screaming kumbaya and Hallelujah.

  • Rick [05-06]: Just an image, which reads:

    If we deported MAGA men age 17 to 50 & replaced them with immigrants the violent crime rate would drop 70-80%, Crimes against women & children would be almost zero.

    I'm not sure what data supports this hypothesis, but it's been widely reported that immigrants are much less prone to violent crime than natives, and the male age demographic certainly is, so if you could do this, you probably would see some movement in that direction. Of course, you can't do this, and whatever benefit you might see in crime reduction would be trivial compared to the disruption and backlash such a policy would produce, but the meme has a certain didactic value, as long as you understand that it's really just a joke.

  • Mariah [05-07]: Another image:

    Anyone else notice how all of a sudden no one's eating our cats and dogs anymore? No one's performing sex change operations in schools or aborting babies after birth anymore. The price of eggs doesn't matter and a recession isn't a bad thing, it's just a necessary growing pain.

  • Alan MacLeod [05-13]

    Real democracy is pleasing opinion columnists at a newspaper owned by the world's richest man. For more on how Bezos destroyed the Washington Post, read my report into the outlet.

    This was an article from 2021, so he likely has more he can add. What he does offer is a reference to a 2024 piece by Ishaan Tharoor on El Salvador: The inescapable appeal of the world's 'coolest dictator', Nayib Bukele.

    MacLeod started his thread with praise for Claudia Sheinbaum as the "world's most popular leader" (80% approval rating). Later down my feed, I find a faux link to another Washington Post op-ed, by León Krauze [05-09] Mexico's democracy is fast eroding under Scheinbaum's rule. Somehow these same hackneyed charges get paraded out any time any nation puts someone more/less left into power -- a template that goes back to attacks on Franklin Roosevelt -- yet right-wingers are never held to the same standard.

Obituaries:

  • Trip Gabriel: [04-30] David Horowitz, Leftist Turned Trump Defender, Is Dead at 86: I remember him as an editor at Ramparts and the author of one of the first books highly critical of historical American foreign policy, The Free World Colossus (1965), which I probably still have upstairs. After he flipped to the right, he published tons of books, but as far as I could tell never made a lick of sense -- typical titles include: Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004); The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party (2017); Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America (2017)); Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020); and I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America (2021). Also:

This is old, but I'm reading Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, and the book is made up of previously published book reviews, so most of the chapers are readily available online. This one I especially recommend:

Carlos Lozada [2021-09-03] 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed. On the day, I was well aware of the history of American interventions in the Middle East, including Sharon's counter-intifada that was already underway in Israel and PNAC's plots to project US power throughout the region (their alignment with Israel's far right amplified by post-Cold War delusions of America as the world's sole "hyperpower"). So I saw the attacks as further proof of US mistakes, but also as an opportunity to change course and get right with the world, because doubling down -- as Bush and his loyal opposition did with scarcely a moment's reflection -- would only bring further pain and suffering, and ultimately ruin for all. (As, well, it did.) Mine was a very isolated position at the time, so I'm gratified to see a reviewer like Lozada come around to it eventually.

The books reviewed here are [* ones I've read, 7 of 21; order is from the article illustrations]:

  • [*] Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  • [*] Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)
  • Peter Bergen: The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden (2021): the latest of several books Bergen wrote on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, starting with Holy War, Inc. (2001)
  • Richard A Clarke: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (2004)
  • Jim Dwyer/Kevin Flynn: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (2005)
  • Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019)
  • Bob Woodward: Bush at War (2002)
  • [*] Jane Mayer: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008)
  • David Cole, ed: The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009)
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (2014)
  • Robert Draper: To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (2020)
  • [*] Anthony Shadid: Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005)
  • [*] Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006)
  • [*] Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008)
  • Craig Whitlock: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (2021)
  • The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007)
  • David Finkel: Thank You for Your Service (2013)
  • The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)
  • Spencer Ackerman: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021)
  • [*] Karen Greenberg: Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to Donald Trump (2021)
  • The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)

I skipped all of the official reports and document collections, and I tended to focus more on early books (when I felt more need for research) than on later ones (which seemed unlikely to add much to what I already knew). The recent books by Ackerman and Draper look likely to be valuable. I'm curious about the Graff book to see how it dovetails with my memory. Of course, I've read more in this area. Omitting the large number of books on Israel, as well as most of the more generic books on US politics, Islam, and oil, here's a rough list (whittled down from here, sorted by year published):

  • Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000): First book in English on the Taliban, predates 9/11 and the US invasion.
  • Tariq Ali: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002): NLR Marxist, understood everything instantly.
  • Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002): Not on 9/11 or aftermath, but very influential for those who wanted to justify military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. For the rest of us, a comprehensive catalog of American military misadventurism (e.g., look up "butcher and bolt").
  • Dilip Hiro: Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (2002)
  • Gilles Kepel: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002): Published in France earlier, US edition includes a brief coda on 9/11. This is by far the best book on Jidadist thought all across the Muslim world, certainly to date, and probably still.
  • Lewis Lapham: Theater of War (2002, New Press)
  • Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002): One of the "clash of civilizations" hawks' favorite intellectuals.
  • William Rivers Pitt/Scott Ritter: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (2002)
  • Shibley Telhami: The Stakes: America and the Middle East: The Consequences of Power and the Choice of Peace (2002)
  • Tariq Ali: Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (2003)
  • Joan Didion: Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)
  • Sheldon Rampton/John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
  • Jonathan Schell: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003): More general book, but prophetic title.
  • James Carroll: Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War (2004): Also wrote an important historical book on the US military: House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006)
  • Seymour Hersh: Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)
  • Gilles Kepel: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004)
  • Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004)
  • James Mann: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004)
  • Michael Scheuer [Anonymous]: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004): CIA analyst.
  • Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (2004): Travel narrative across Afghanistan before US invasion.
  • Nicholas von Hoffman: Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies (2004)
  • Andrew Bacevich: The New American Militarism: |How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005): The first of his many books on how Americans kicked "Vietnam syndrome" and learned to love war again.
  • Larry Beinhart: Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (2005): One of the best books ever on lying in American politics.
  • Aaron Glantz: How America Lost Iraq (2005)
  • Michael Klare: Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (2005)
  • George Packer: The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (2005): Big Iraq war supporter changes his mind.
  • Scott Ritter: Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (2005)
  • Paul William Roberts: A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq (2005)
  • Evan Wright: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (2005): Embedded reporter on the road to Baghdad, basis for an HBO series.
  • Tariq Ali: Rough Music: Blair Bombs Baghdad London Terror (2006)
  • Ira Chernus: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (2006)
  • Noam Chomsky/Gilbert Achcar: Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2006)
  • Patrick Cockburn: The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006)
  • Michael R Gordon/General Bernard E Trainor: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006): The embedded view from command headquarters.
  • Frank Rich: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (2006)
  • Louise Richardson: What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006): Not just Jihadists.
  • Scott Ritter: Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (2006)
  • Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006)
  • Nir Rosen: In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006): First report from an unimbedded reporter in Iraq.
  • Ali A Allawi: The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (2007)
  • Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007)
  • Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2007): Massive reporting from all over. Previously wrote the definitive book on Lebanon, Pity the Nation (1990).
  • Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007)
  • Lewis Lapham: Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2007)
  • Trita Parsi: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007): I've skipped over several other books on Iran, but this one has a lot of insight into how Israel uses Iran to manipulate the US (and why the US lets it).
  • William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007)
  • Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008)
  • Chris Hedges/Laila Al-Arian: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (2008)
  • Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008)
  • Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008)
  • Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008)
  • Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009)
  • Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (2009)
  • Karen Greenberg: The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (2009)
  • Seth G Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009)
  • Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)
  • Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009)
  • Thomas E Ricks: The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (2009)
  • Tariq Ali: The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (2010)
  • Andrew Bacevich: Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010)
  • John W Dower: Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010): Historian of Japan, wrote two major books, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986), and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (2000).
  • Tom Engelhardt: The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (2010)
  • Chalmers Johnson: Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (2010): Former CIA analyst, final volume in a brilliant series of books that started with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), one of the first books sensitive to the amount of self-harm America's empire cost. I've read them all, including The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004) and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).
  • Geoffrey Wawro: Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (2010)
  • Nir Rosen: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World (2011)
  • Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012)
  • Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars (2012)
  • Michael Hastings: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2012)
  • Rashid Khalidi: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013): Palestinian historian, so most of his books focus there (I have read several), but US ability to interact with the Arab world is sharply limited to Israel's demands, so you can't really separate the two interests.
  • Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013)
  • James Risen: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014)
  • Andrew Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016)
  • Rosa Brooks: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (2016)
  • John W Dower: The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II (2017)
  • Steve Coll: Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2018)
  • Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War (2018)
  • Matt Farwell/Michael Ames: American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy in Afghanistan (2019)
  • Tariq Ali: The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (2022)

This is, by the way, an incomplete list of books I've read by several authors: Gilbert Achcar, Tariq Ali, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Steve Coll, Chris Hedges, Dilip Hiro, Chalmers Johnson, Fred Kaplan, Jon Krakauer, Robert D Kaplan, Rashid Khalidi, Lewis Lapham, Jane Mayer. The above list seems to tail off after 2012, which is roughly when the Obama surge in Afghanistan burned out. (The Michael Hastings book was pivotal, in that it was shortly followed by the sacking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the shelving of his counterinsurgency strategy, which had no support from troops who had little desire either to fight and even less to aid Afghans.) I wound up paying no attention to the handful of books on ISIS, or on the drone wars that were surging elsewhere. Besides, there was much more to read about elsewhere, especially in US politics.

At some point, I should revisit this list and try to draw up a shorter, more useful annotation. That obviously looks like a lot of work right now, but Lozada's piece is a good framework to start. I don't think his methodology of focusing on commission reports, document caches, and reporters with direct access to their sources (like Woodward) is better than my approach of mostly working through critics I'm familiar with and inclined to agree with (like Ali, Bacevich, Chomsky, Engelhardt, Hedges, Johnson, and Lapham), but if my preferred critics are right, the more conventional sources should ultimately fit into their understanding -- as they do.

By the way, a couple more personal 9/11 book remembrances:

  • Bruce Bernard/Terrence McNamee: Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope (1999): Big pictorial history with over 1000 images chronologically from 1900 into 1999. I spent much of the day of 9/11 thumbing through this book, which helped me keep the day's events in context.
  • Barbara Crossette: The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998): A few days after 9/11, I went to the bookstore in search of historical background. I found nothing that seemed directly appropriate, but wound up buying this book on British imperialism in India, which reminded me of Jan Myrdal's brilliant Angkor, which showed how European imperialists mentally translated their disabilities into badges of superiority.
  • Robert D Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2001): I also, in fairly short order, wound up reading most of Kaplan's travel/history books, including his most famous Balkan Ghosts (1993) and his valentine for the Afghan mujahideen, Soldiers of God (1990, reprinted 2001). His work helped me formulate a framework for understanding the region, although I tended to draw opposite conclusions from his, and I gave up on him as he became increasingly entangled in the US war machine.

Another old article link:

Alison L LaCroix: [2024-06-10] What the Founders Didn't Know -- But Their Children Did -- About the Constitution. This is a useful précis of her book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, which covers legal arguments about federalism in the 1815-61 period. As noted, these debates have been resurfacing of late, especially around issues like abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana which states have often treated variously but which touch on constitutional rights that should be universally protected.

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