The Doomed Promise of Change from Within

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

“Why don’t you try applying for ICE and see if you can maybe change things from within?”

I’ve been out of work for several months now with precious few leads and no real opportunities pending. I can’t be the only one in this situation, as our national policy-makers keep inventing new ways to submarine domestic development and make every consumer good more expensive. But every unemployed person ultimately faces the problem alone, as bills accumulate and the daily reality becomes more bleak. I find myself becoming despondent.

Meanwhile, ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has recently received a massive cash transfusion from the Taco Administration, making it America’s largest law enforcement agency. This tops the previous largest agency, Customs and Border Protection. To meet the Administration’s demand for more deportations, ICE is offering luxurious sign-on benefits and expedited training. It’s also notoriously handing firearms to loose cannons and dangerous people.

In this tumultuous context, my friend good-heartedly suggested I join ICE. Why not get that lush government bag, she said, while also standing against the rampant violence we’ve seen unfolding in Minnesota? I’ve read and heard similar stories for years. Applicants join the police, military, federal agencies, and other secure government jobs, full of idealism, eager to push reform peacefully, from within. These stories seldom end well.

We’ve probably all heard anecdotes. For serious sources, let’s consider Shane Bauer, author of American Prison. As a journalistic project, Bauer took a job as a corrections officer at a private prison in Louisiana. In his telling, Bauer started off idealistic, eager to discover how prisons change prisoners while making a profit. He left the project, though, when his girlfriend reported his private communications becoming increasingly bitter, vindictive, and violent.

Matt Taibbi describes something similar while writing about Eric Garner. He quotes a patrolman who joined the NYPD, hoping to challenge the department’s bureaucratic cruelty. But subject to constant micromanagement and quotas, he found he hadn’t changed the department, it changed him. Besides this, agencies notoriously find inventive ways to enforce conformity, resist scrutiny, and punish reformers and whistleblowers.

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

We could discuss why this happens. Maybe power corrupts, but as Brian Klaas demonstrates, power also attracts those most willing to be corrupted. People who become cops and corrections officers already have a vindictive streak; power simply gives them official vestments. Besides law enforcement, we’ve probably all seen laborers who became managers, students who became teachers, renters who became landlords, and adopted the worst aspects of their new positions.

Colleagues of good standing could, hypothetically, stop this. But we know they don’t. Six ICE officers dog-piled on Alex Pretti before one finally shot him; three officers surrounded Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd, not stopping Chauvin, but forming a human barricade to keep civilians back. Maybe officers high-minded enough to stop the violence already quit the agencies, but more likely, participants conformed themselves to the existing structure.

These patterns aren’t unique to law enforcement, though police ubiquity makes it more visible. When institutional rot infiltrates a subculture, purging it is rare. We’ve seen private corporations, college fraternities, and other civilian organizations succumb, even if they aren’t protected by qualified immunity. Put simply, those who have power, even limited power within a specific institution, become enamored of it, and perform heinous acts to protect it.

Nor are these effects limited by circumstances. Shane Bauer recalls needing months to recover from the aggression he learned as a corrections officer, rewriting his book several times to purge the anger. Eyal Press describes the ways that COs, drone bomber pilots, and even meat-packing workers experience wartime levels of flashbacks and nightmares. Social psychologist Rachel MacNair calls this phenomenon perpetration-induced traumatic stress.

I’d argue that the violence we’re now seeing enacted in Minnesota, is a more extreme version of violence we’ve all seen before. From schoolyard fistfights and fraternity hazing, to union busting and workplace interrogation, to police violence at anti-police violence protests, it’s all the same. In a structurally unequal society, those who benefit can maintain their standing only through force, or threats of force. Wealth, power, and status are therefore innately violent.

Therefore, changing from within isn’t possible. Though some individuals make some progress, and the occasional abuser may get purged and prosecuted, lone idealists generally can’t fix broken systems. Once the institutional rot becomes widespread enough that the institution must close ranks to protect itself, there’s little chance of “reform.” The system will warp and destroy those who learn its ways, no matter how idealistic.

Police, Paranoia, and the Streets of Minneapolis

Brian Klaas

American political scientist Brian Klaas, in his 2001 book Corruptible, describes two different recruitment ads for police departments. In the first, for the tiny Doraville, Georgia, PD, features a flashing image of the Punisher logo from Marvel Comics, six men in body armor and assault rifles, and the city’s M113 armored personnel carrier, owned by the SWAT team. The video unambiguously advertises the opportunity to bring the hammer down on Doraville’s terrible criminals and malefactors.

Klaas contrasts this to a New Zealand recruiting video. Several police officers race through the sunlit streets in conventional beat-cop uniforms, pausing to directly address the camera. Some of the featured officers are women or members of the Māori indigenous nation. The video culminates with the officers retrieving a runaway puppy and returning it to an overjoyed little girl. The quieter, lighter-toned New Zealand video emphasizes community, public-spiritedness, and a commitment to serving the citizenry.

From this, Klaas draws conclusions about which recruitment candidates each ad will attract. Doraville, with a land area of five square miles and a population barely over 10,000, will attract testosterone-fueled cosplay warriors, mostly men, who desire to manifest power. Its aggressive, violent ad will alienate the New Zealand video’s target audience of public-spirited and emotionally mature servants. Clearly the Kiwis want people unafraid to show their faces because they live and work among neighbors.

By now, we’ve all witnessed the dire footage of Wednesday’s broad-daylight murder of Minneapolis mother and poet Renee Nicole Good. Confronted by ICE officers bellowing conflicting orders, Good attempted to drive away. Agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots at Good’s moving SUV, killing her. Vice President JD Vance has claimed Ross acted in self-defense, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” But phone videos from multiple angles categorically disprove these claims.

Alex Vitale

ICE agents aren’t police, let’s state that clearly. They have a specific law enforcement remit that doesn’t include traffic enforcement. But it’s impossible to separate the agency’s recruitment tactics from those Klaas describes. President Taco ran on pledges to deport “the worst of the worst” and declarations of a nation riddled with enemies. ICE recruitment relies upon the twin propositions of a powerful, destructive enemy, and a strong Anglo-Saxon defender who will subjugate that enemy.

However, law enforcement by identifying enemies creates a maelstrom of probable boogeymen. Alex Vitale writes how many urban PDs constructed gang units to crack down on groups that were organized as solidarity against prior police crackdowns. Indeed, Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton describes how police forces began stockpiling military-grade weapons in the 1970s because, in the prior decade, Black communities had pushed majority-White PDs out of their neighborhoods. The police see enemies everywhere, and prepare accordingly.

Nor am I the first to notice this. More informed critics describe warrior mentality in police training. Though instructors use guardianship language, the tactics taught resemble those of occupying armies. Many PDs have rules of engagement more draconian than those used in the Baghdad Green Zone. This warrior mentality, and this reliance on violent confrontation, happen because police expect a world full of enemies. And like most humans, they find what they’re paid to find.

The outcome is truly horrific. Almost simultaneously as Agent Ross executed Renee Good without warrant, ICE agents pelted a Minneapolis high school with chemical weapons because students resisted unwarranted seizures of their classmates. Teenagers, who by nature resist authority because they’re kids. We’re approaching late-1960s levels of state paranoia, when unarmed college students marching across campus in unison justified National Guard forces opening fire at Kent State. And it will happen sooner rather than later.

Elizabeth Hinton

Renee Good’s death, like the Kent State shootings or George Floyd’s murder, happened because America’s law enforcement agencies have paranoia baked into their structure. Police academies teach rookies to regard every traffic stop as potential prelude to a gunfight. Federal rhetoric makes undocumented roofing laborers equal to convicted murderers, justifying commando-style raids. Every encounter between law enforcement and ordinary citizens begins with them evaluating us—you—as potential enemies who may need stopped or killed.

You can’t reform this. Protesters said this with “defund the police” in 2020, but heel-draggers scoffed. Because law enforcement is institutionally paranoid, every moving car is an assassination attempt. They constantly demand bigger guns because they believe us peons have artillery. But when confronted by actual shooters, as in Uvalde, they do nothing… because they’re terrified of us. You can’t train fear out of entire institutions. You can only dismantle the institutions and start over.

Sorry, Dad, I Can’t Do Politics Anymore

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

My father thinks I should run for elective office. Because I strive to stay informed on local, national, and world affairs, and base my opinions on solid facts and information, he thinks I’m potential leadership material. Me, I thought I only took seriously the 11^th-grade American Civics warning to be an involved citizen and voter. But too few people share that value today, and Dad thinks that makes me electable.

This week’s unfolding events demonstrate why I could never hold elective office. We learned Monday that a squadron of Executive Branch bureaucrats, including the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense, and the Vice President, were conducting classified government business by smartphone app. For those sleeping through the story (or reading it later), we know because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz dialed Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat.

Unfortunately, Dad is wrong; I’m no better informed than anyone else on unfolding events. I’ve watched the highlights of senators questioning Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA head John Ratcliffe, but even then, I’m incapable of watching without collapsing into spitting rage. Gabbard’s vague, evasive answers on simple questions like “were you included in the group chat” indicate an unwillingness to conduct business in an honest, forthright manner.

Not one person on this group chat—and, because Goldberg in his honesty removed himself after verifying the chat’s accuracy, we don’t know everyone on the chat—thought to double-check the roster of participants. This despite using an unsecured app with a history of hacking. That’s the level of baseline security we’d expect from coworkers organizing a surprise party, not Cabinet secretaries conducting an overseas military strike.

The Administration compounded its unforced errors by lying. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pretended that Goldberg’s chat contained no national security information; on Wednesday, Goldberg published the information. Millions of Americans who share my dedication to competent citizenship couldn’t get our jaws off the floor. Hegseth knew not only that Goldberg had that information, but that he could produce it. And he lied anyway.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

In a matter of weeks, we’ve witnessed the devaluation of competence in American society. Trump, who had no government experience before 2016, has peopled his second administration with telegenic muppets who similarly lack either book learning or hands-on proficiency. But then, no wonder, since studies indicate that willingness to vote for Trump correlates broadly with being ill-informed or wrong about facts. We’ve conceived a government by, and for, the ignorant.

Small-d democratic government relies upon two presumptions: that everyone involved is informed on the facts, to the extent that non-specialists could possibly keep informed, and that everyone involved acts in good faith. Both have clearly vanished. The notorious claim that, according to Google Analytics, searches for the word “tariffs” spiked the day after Trump’s election, apparently aren’t true: they spiked the day before. But even that’s embarrassingly late./p>

Either way, though, it reveals the uncomfortable truth that Americans don’t value competence anymore, not in themselves, and not in elected decision-makers. This Administration’s systemic lack of qualifications among its senior staff demonstrates the belief that obliviousness equals honesty. Though the President has installed a handful of serious statesmen in his Cabinet, people like Hegseth, Gabbard, and Kash Patel are unburdened by practical experience or tedious ol’ book larnin’.

Now admittedly, I appreciate when voters express their disgust at business-as-usual Democrats. Democratic leadership’s recent willingness to fold like origami cranes when facing even insignificant pushback, helps convince cocksure voters that competence and experience are overrated. The GOP Administration’s recent activities have maybe been cack-handed, incompetent, and borderline illegal, but they’re doing something. To the uninitiated, that looks bold and authoritative.

But Dad, that’s exactly why I can’t run for office. Because I’ve lived enough, and read enough, to know that rapid changes and quick reforms usually turn to saltpeter and ash. Changes made quickly, get snatched back quickly, especially in a political environment conditioned by digital rage. Rooting out corruption, waste, and bureaucratic intransigence is a slow, painstaking process. Voters today apparently want street theatre. I’m unwilling to do that.

My father might counter by noting that the Administration’s popularity is historically low, that its own voting base is turning away, and that this controversy might be weighty enough to bring them to heel. I say: maybe. But unless voters are willing to recommit themselves to being informed, following events, and knowing better than yesterday, the underlying problem will remain. The next quick-ix demagogue will deceive them the same way.

Time For the 28th Amendment

How old were you when you discovered that the right to vote isn’t protected in the United States Constitution?

Like most Americans, I studied the Constitution, in different ways and different forms of depth, through high school, into college, and later in various books, seminars, and media deep-dives throughout my life. Teachers and commentators gushed lovingly over how the 15^th Amendment extended voting to former slaves, the 19^th Amendment gave women the vote, and the 26^th Amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.

All of these are good. But they establish that the government cannot withhold the right to vote based on certain protected categories. Not once does the Constitution state who does have the voting franchise; the issue remains airy-fairy and undefined. And I didn’t know that until I read Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority, which I read when I was 49. Only when they pointed it out did I realize this information was missing.

Throughout much of American history, the question of what makes someone a “real” American has loomed large. The Philadelphia Convention of 1789, which drafted the kernel of our current Constitution, was dominated by slaveholders, who wanted their human property counted on the Census, but didn’t want slaves having any vote. These White male aristocrats, whom we dub the “Founders,” handled the problem by punting it onto the states.

As you’d imagine, this created a patchwork of standards. States have, at times, made land ownership a criterion—which created problems when rising industrialization pushed more Americans into cities. Old-fashioned bigotry encouraged many states, overtly or covertly to disenfranchise Black Americans, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned it. Since the Shelby County ruling, states have competed to find innovative new ways to make voting harder.

Many attempts to increase the voting franchise are doomed to fail. Because less populous states, which skew conservative, gain a tactical advantage from the status quo, many common suggestions, like ending the Electoral College or disestablishing the Senate, are non-starters. The Constitution sets the threshold for amendments so high that, in times of bitter polarization like we have now, changing the system is unlikely at best.

But I propose that it’s politically possible to start with something simple: just establish that American citizens have a right to vote, irrespective of state laws. This has multiple advantages. It will set the default for American voting as “opt-out,” rather than the current “opt-in.” It will capitalize on the American fervor for treating everyone equally, since setting a standard baseline of simply letting people vote is, facially, completely equal.

With that in mind, I propose a movement to pressure our lawmakers to create a 28^th Amendment. Since I’m not an attorney or Constitutional scholar, I don’t want to create a binding text for such an amendment; that exceeds my skills. But I propose the following as a starting point:

1. All persons who have been born citizens of the United States, or who have been naturalized as citizens under the standards of this Constitution, and having achieved no less than eighteen years of age, shall have the right to vote and to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the states in which they reside.

2. All persons who have the voting franchise under the standards of this Constitution, but who shall reside outside the United States for military deployment, lawful students studying abroad, citizens working abroad under a lawful visa, or for any other reasons which Congress shall protect by legislation, shall be permitted to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the most recent jurisdiction for which they were most recently resident.

3. The Executive Branch, under terms which Congress shall set by legislation, shall maintain a permanent roster of lawful registered voters in the United States, and shall take responsibility for maintaining the currency of that roster, and shall protect the voting rights of all persons who have the right to participate in the electoral process in the United States.

We voters can pressure American lawmakers to rally behind this straightforward, facially neutral action statement. Sure, I know anti-democracy activists like Peter Thiel exist in America, but I believe they’re controllable, while our system remains tractable to public pressure. We can organize to pressure our lawmakers to support this change by threatening them with the shame of being seen as anti-voting.

This won’t solve all of America’s problems. But it will at least get all Americans involved in the problem-solving process.

Building New Houses Isn’t the Solution

This is what it usually looks like when Americans just “build houses.”

Supposedly, many Americans voted Donald Trump back into the presidency, in part, to protest the continuing rise in housing costs. Despite promises from both parties, housing prices continue outpacing household incomes, and the ratio of price to income is now worse than it was before the 2008 market collapse. Several pundits, including many I respect, have emerged to repeat the same mantra: let’s build more housing units.

The logic seems facially robust. Presumably, most readers learned the “supply and demand” principle in high school, that price emerges from an equilibrium of how much buyers want something, and how many units sellers have available. Therefore, if prices rise, it follows that supply is scarce—and it is. But this overlooks what forces rendered housing scarce, and what measures markets can take to counteract this scarcity.

Consider, for instance: hedge funds and other financial instruments have purchased private housing as investments. These homes nominally exist, and nominally have value. However, to work as investments, their value must constantly increase faster than the overall market, which, as we’ve seen, they do. If these funds sold their holdings, they’d flood the market, driving prices down. Therefore they must continue hoarding housing off the market.

This interpretation, however, is stacked. Many cities which create significant employment exist with ready-made limits to physical growth. New York is built mostly on a series of islands; Chicago is built on reclaimed swampland; San Francisco is built on a rocky peninsula. Even if BlackRock and other funds divested their holdings, these cities can only grow so big before hitting physical boundaries that choke their growth.

Other cities have policy-based growth limits. Many cities built on abundant flat land, like Omaha, near where I live, have urban design based on R1 zoning, the principle of favoring freestanding, detached houses on separate lots. Fully eighty percent of Omaha’s land area—and comparable amounts in similar cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Tulsa—are legally restricted from building mixed-use developments or multifamily housing.

Therefore, building more houses in America’s heartland will require either changing the law, or building more urban sprawl. Despite cities having a reputation for car dependence, as Jeff Speck writes, most cars driven in the cities commute in from suburbs and R1 neighborhoods. And that’s saying nothing about the virgin prairie, swamp, or other ecologically valuable land that developers must destroy to accommodate R1 construction.

And where geography or policy don’t limit development, there’s economics. Eastern Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Gary, and Cleveland grew rapidly, infused with Marshall Plan money, following World War II. But when government money retreated, and precious supply lines moved to Asia, the cities dwindled again. These cities actually have plentiful housing, most of it rotting, because there’s no employment or other development to generate demand.

Different conditions in different cities reflect the diverss influences that cause cities to develop, or shrink. I’m reminded of James C. Scott, who analyzed means by which centralized development plans have created inequality, environmental devastation, and social collapse. These redevelopment schemes have shared an imposed quality: scholars, bureaucrats, or well-meaning but purblind revolutionaries thought they knew better than local communities, and simply issued demands.

Scott contrasts centralized planning with “local knowledge.” Old, unplanned cities, like central Bruges, Belgium, or Manhattan south of Houston Street, are so intricate and winding that only lifelong locals understand their street layouts. Yet these unplanned developments reflect regional geography, community, and economics. What seems sloppy and chaotic to the government planner, actually serves local needs to a T.

America’s federal government has a history of funding dystopian development projects. Rapid expansion in the Rust Belt, for instance, led directly to the same cities’ abandonment. Levittown-style suburban sprawl has always required transfusions of government money, only to create joyless “communities” that young residents aspire to leave. Now advocates call for “building more houses,” heedless of local need, planning regulations, or regional economy.

Well-meaning advocates, and their government allies, want to offset harsh economic conditions. But they impose one-size-fits-all policy recommendations that don’t reflect local needs. In some cities, there’s no more land for construction, while in others, new construction will create sprawl that leaves residents isolated and strands the aged or disabled. And aggressive construction, fueled by diesel, will inevitably create environmental devastation.

Creating decentralized, regionally specific solutions is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. But cleaning up the devastation created by mass-produced central policies has already created messes we aren’t prepared to repair. We won’t fix the consequences by doubling down on the underlying problem.

Ohio On My Mind

One thing which strikes me about this month’s Ohio constitutional referendum, enshrining abortion and other forms of “reproductive freedom” in the state constitution, is that Donald Trump won Ohio’s popular vote twice. Indeed, in 2020, Trump was the first Presidential candidate of either party to win the entire contest without carrying Ohio since 1960. This despite Trump running on the explicit pledge to pack the courts and overturn abortion rights.

Thing is, this outcome isn’t unprecedented, not even recently. Like Kansas before it, Ohio voted one way on candidates, and another way on issues. In the same ballot cycle, Ohioans voted to legalize recreational cannabis, something Republican leadership consistently opposes. Yet despite breaking with organized conservatism on important, high-profile issues, Donald Trump is currently on track for a third Ohio win, with an anticipated simple majority.

We could extrapolate this trend nationwide. I already mentioned Kansas, which has a Republican-controlled legislature, but an endangered Democratic governor. I live in deep-red Nebraska, which hasn’t supported a Democrat for President since 1964. Yet on polls which survey issue-specific views, Nebraskans consistently show razor-thin a majority for legal abortion and wide support for minimum wage increases. Nebraska’s government consistently spikes efforts to let Nebraskans vote on medical cannabis.

On issue after issue, Americans consistently skew center-left. Over three-quarters of Americans support cannabis for recreational and/or medicinal use. More than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in at least the first trimester. Same-sex marriage was once deeply unpopular even in relatively progressive states (think California’s Prop8), but support currently stands above seventy percent. When separated from personalities and parties, Americans consistently support progressive issues.

Despite this, Donald Trump, who has pledged to crack down on all these issues, is currently on track to win next year’s general election. Some of that comes down to single-issue outrage: President Biden’s willingness to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing nationalist government in the current Israel-Hamas war has proven toxic with his own party. But let’s be honest, Trump won’t repudiate Netanyahu either, so that’s a losing issue either way.

Nor are the Republican Party’s opinions exactly concealed. The Party itself hasn’t had a nationwide platform since 2016, and currently is beholden to the whims of its most active members—which, in practice, means whatever applause lines Donald Trump can muster at campaign rallies. As Levitsky and Ziblatt have noted, Trump has no underlying principles; he’s built his entire campaign around whatever anti-democratic puffery his crowds demand.

But that’s the people who actually attend Trump rallies. Crowds are pretty poor barometers of public opinion, as the ugliest, most aggressive crowd members usually dominate the outcry. Worse, they have a polarizing effect. When people only communicate with those they already agree with, they tend to emerge with more doctrinaire, intolerant versions of their existing views. Psychologists call this “group polarization,” but I prefer the military term: “incestuous amplification.”

While Trump panders to his nastiest supporters, Americans overall consistently support more progressive concerns. Ideas which formerly dwelt at the pinko fringe, have become mainstream. Americans want stricter gun control, or at least background checks and red-flag laws; higher taxes on the super-rich; and a path to citizenship for immigrants, including the undocumented. These aren’t fringe Looney-Lefty ideas. All have majority support, and some have overwhelming supermajority support.

This gulf between America’s principles, and America’s candidates, baffles me. Based on the most prominent hot-button issues, the mainstream of the Democratic Party is more conservative than the aggregate American electorate. Some Democrats are arguably losing support, not because they support progressive issues, but because they think they’ll gain electoral advantage by pandering to conservatives and pretending to be bipartisan. Kamala Harris, a law-and-order Democrat, comes immediately to mind.

Ohio has this month become the most prominent example of this division. The state is currently controlled by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor. The state’s GOP has pledged to simply ignore the voters’ will, at least on abortion. Citing Levitsky and Ziblatt again, the Republican Party has become the party of anti-democracy in America today. They see voters as a force to squelch, not honor.

And a frightening number of Americans are apparently okay with that. If Trump wins the Presidency next year, and especially if he shepherds a Republican majority into Congress, they’ll pass laws that contravene the will of their own voter bloc. They have, indeed, pledged to do so. When they crack down on their own voters and suppress the popular will, nobody should pretend that they weren’t warned.

A Shadow on the Center of the World

Martyn Rady, The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe

Readers my age will remember “Central Europe” primarily as a principal front in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, the border between Austria and Hungary, and the proxy fight for control of the Italian government defined the struggles between the aggregated NATO and Warsaw nations. Urbane Western Europe, and countries under its cultural influence, have long disdained Central Europe as a cultural and political backwater, not entirely without cause.

Emeritus history professor Martyn Rady has dedicated his career to Central Europe generally, and Hungary specifically. Now retired, one suspects he’s written this massive, panoramic one-volume history as a career capstone document. His chosen subject is huge, both in terms of geography and timeline, and hindered by the limited early documents of his chosen region. Rady crafts a readable introduction to regional history, but delves into little with greater depth.

The umbrella term of “Central Europe” is vaguely defined, even herein. Rady mostly focuses on the nation-states now found in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the bumper states between them. His narrative spills somewhat into Lithuania, Romania, Northern Italy, and the crazy quilt of former Yugoslavian member states. He starts with the Western Roman Empire’s dying throes, and in around 700 pages, brings us to approximately last week.

Rady’s early chapters deal fleetingly with entire centuries. Limited documentation exists on the rampaging Huns, emerging proto-German states, and various invading peoples. Rady dedicates a few pages to the Avar nation, which didn’t exist, then was mentioned intermittently for centuries in Latin histories, then apparently disappeared again. This signifies the difficulties Rady faces in compiling authoritative history in vernacular language for non-specialist readers.

German “nations,” like the Saxons and Ostrogoths, arose not as states, but as confederations of clans and tribes. This set the pattern for future national identities, such as Poles and Czechs, which organized themselves from isolated regions with local needs. The Frankish Charlemagne tried to impose a unitary culture on these loosely related confederations, but died frustrated, and his empire returned to insular tribes. Again, this pattern would repeat itself.

Professor Martyn Rady

Regional aristocracy, some of whom styled themselves kings, found ways to temporarily unify swaths of land. Many had grandiose nation-building aspirations, which often involved establishing colonies in conquered regions. Most modern states, named for their majority populations, are riddled with minority communities speaking German, Polish, Slavonic, and countless new languages that arose when peoples muddled under the neglectful hands of slipshod dynasties.

If one theme dominates Rady’s history, it’s the conflict between governments that want to homogenize their states, and ethnic groups reluctant to change. Rady acknowledges that most individuals residing in Central Europe have a smorgasbord of ethnic backgrounds to choose from, and many speak multiple languages. The more that states strive to eliminate regional and ethnic differences, the more they created the conditions they strove to prohibit.

As Rady approaches the present, his history becomes more detailed, as you’d expect when the production and preservation of documents becomes cheaper. Early chapters sometimes cover multiple centuries, but Napoleon and the World Wars each merit their own chapters, as well as the interregnums between the wars. Some chapters are arranged thematically—industrialization in the Rhine valley under Bismarck, for instance—and others chronologically.

Culture isn’t really part of this book. Rady has a chapter dedicated to the profusion of German popular culture in the years between Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, but this is an outlier. Perhaps Rady writes this chapter because pre-Reich German literature is frequently political; Rady parallels this entire chapter with a novel by E.T.A. Hoffman. But mainly, Rady focuses on politics, statecraft, and nation-building. Culture matters only when it illuminates politics and government.

He also largely elides certain topics, which presumably exceed his perceived remit. He mentions Germany’s colonial empire in the late 19^th century, for instance, but having mentioned it, largely moves on. Rady apparently considers himself hemmed by geography; events outside his physical domain only matter to the extent that they influence inside events. German colonial history still matters in, say, Tanzania and Rwanda, but isn’t within Rady’s self-appointed scope.

Rady probably writes to leave a legacy outside the Ivory Tower. He’s dedicated thirty-five years to Central Europe, and to offers generalists like me an opportunity to share that knowledge. His narrative is often overly concise, and I wish he lingered on certain topics; for a book the size of a cinder block, it feels remarkably short. Rady offers a plain-English introduction to the topic, sure to whet your appetite without leaving you feeling full.

See also: A Brief History of Germany Before “Germany”

The Life and Afterlife of a Macho Government

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Imagine a wealthy plutocrat with a history of media manipulation and an insatiable appetite. Now imagine he runs for head of state, despite having no political experience. His electoral base loves him, though he has no legislative accomplishments to name, and he has an ugly tendency to snuggle up to Vladimir Putin. Eventually his appetites overtake him, and he’s forced from power in disgrace, though he refuses to accept it.

Of course, I’m describing three-term Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This book’s back-cover copy promises a “blueprint” for strongman leadership in one-man states throughout history. This is, however, somewhat misleading. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, admits unitary male leaders generally aren’t crafty men, and don’t necessarily have a shared playbook. They mostly roll with the punches, though their rapid adaptation tends to follow reliable patterns, which we, the socially engaged, can study.

Ben-Ghiat examines Twentieth and Twenty-First Century strongman autocrats. She defines strongmen as national leaders, usually though not necessarily male, who achieve power through exaggerated displays of traditionally masculine behaviors. Once in power, they rule through force of personality and brook no disagreement; most have no exit strategy, and leave power in disgrace, or worse. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t study Communist dictators, whose power machines behave, she says, differently.

Between the World Wars, strongmen generally achieved power through threats of violence. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever won elections, but both achieved power by stirring up angry crowds and threatening to turn them loose. Later, during the Cold War, strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Colonel Gadhafi led military coups. Recent strongmen, like Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump, have maintained the veneer of democracy, while disparaging its substance.

Strongmen generally gain their people’s acclamation and support (though not necessarily trust) by displaying strength and masculinity. Though only Mussolini and Putin regularly pose shirtless for photographers, coup leaders’ love of military uniforms and elaborate medals reflect their love of power displays. Many like to project images of themselves as brawlers, from Gadhafi issuing threats on state TV, to Trump fantasizing about punching protesters at campaign rallies.

This hypermasculine display results in contradictory relationships with women. Both Hitler and Saddam Hussein kept their private lives private; Hitler concealed his mistress, Eva Braun, from public view for years. Mussolini, however, pursued multiple women, whose brief assignations often turned into years-long surveillance operations. Gadhafi kept a brothel on a military base, often trafficking in arrested dissidents.

(Ben-Ghiat never mentions Stormy Daniels; she doesn’t have to.)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

These strongmen love touting their economic credentials. From claims that Mussolini’s trains ran on time, to supposed wealth generated in Pinochet’s Chile, to Mobutu’s lavish lifestyle, the centralized strongman state putatively creates unmatched wealth. Ben-Ghiat follows the actual money trail, however, and finds that these claims are mostly fictional. Economic gains, if there are any for anyone outside the strongman’s circle, are usually funded by catastrophic debt.

Mercifully, though the strongman projects a façade of invulnerability, he invariably faces massive opposition at home. Hitler survived multiple assassination attempts, and Mobutu regularly shuffled opposition politicians between his Cabinet and prison. Fascists and military strongmen generally leave office in chains, or else in a hearse. Elected strongmen like Berlusconi are more likely to be simply humiliated. Only Francisco Franco actually held power shrewdly enough to lie in state.

Though she avoids commenting on current events, except to provide historical perspective, there’s little doubt Ben-Ghiat writes this to highlight current power dynamics. Donald Trump repeatedly appears in direct parallels to historical strongmen in Ben-Ghiat’s narrative. Though his critics regularly call Trump a small-f fascist, in Ben-Ghiat’s telling, he more closely resembles Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi. Like them, he doesn’t realize how ridiculous he looks on the world stage.

Ben-Ghiat’s narrative focuses on finding parallels between strongman leaders, living or dead. She doesn’t perform deep dives into any individual. (She’s written previous books on Mussolini’s power techniques.) Late in the book, though, Ben-Ghiat admits these parallels are more coincidental than strategic. Strongmen govern in an improvisational style that manifests certain patterns, basically because humans respond to despots in reliable ways, and strongmen respond back.

Both the strongman’s supporters, and his critics, feel like the strongman’s reign is never-ending. Sometimes it indeed drags on. But the strongman inevitably falls, both from power and from his supporters’ good graces, and when he does, he invariably leaves his country poorer and more vulnerable, according to Ben-Ghiat. This final message is both optimistic and bleak, and citizens should plan accordingly.

Quacking In My Boots

Marjorie Taylor Green is so routine in her spiteful rhetoric and over-the-top claims that I sometimes mistake her for a Saturday Night Live character. From the moment she fumbled ass-backward onto the national stage, spouting QAnon theories and mangling her sentences, she’s played like a slightly sexist satire of bottle-blonde conservative women. Her racist statements, foot-in-mouth moments, and love of shouting have endeared her to the sensationalist media.

This week’s tweet about “our enemies… quacking in their boots” seems apropos. I admit having mocked her myself, because it’s consistent with Greene’s oeuvre of public gaffes, including “gazpacho police” and “peach tree dishes.” I’m having second thoughts, though, because unlike those notorious spoken blunders, this has a simpler explanation. Greene tweeted from her iPhone, and got AutoCorrected. Anybody who’s ever inadvertently typed “duck this pizza ship” knows that feeling.

Greene’s AutoCorrect error has, unfortunately, overshadowed the revealing information she tweeted out on purpose. “Quacking” is funny, yes. But the sentence’s real meat is the word “enemies.” Like President Trump before her, she characterizes her opposition as hostile adversaries, as foes who need defeated, as though politics were a real-time game of Dungeons & Dragons, and Greene sees herself as a paladin. That’s a painful insight into Greene’s moral calculus.

I remember learning, in 12th grade American Civics, how democratic politics rests on certain shared suppositions. Different political parties may disagree on the most efficient way to organize an economy or levy taxes, for instance. Such disagreements can even be beneficial, since they result in debates and evidence testing to refine first blush ideas. But small-d democratic participants have to agree on one precept: the process itself.

For democracy to function, all participants must agree that functioning democracy is, itself, a good. They must regard elections as desirable, fellow elected officials as peers, and office as service, not power. That’s why, in Congressional debates, representatives who disagree with one another on fundamental issues of power and government, are supposed to refer to one another as “my esteemed colleague” or “the honorable Representative.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

This veneer of respect is, certainly, often gossamer-thin. In 1856, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Massachusetts senator harangued the Senate chambers, calling pro-slavery senators a string of ugly personal names. South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks responded by beating Sumner with a cane. This failure of the ability of rhetoric to resolve deep regional differences is regarded by historians as evidence that the Civil War was, by then, inevitable.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Greene’s sloppy, high-handed rhetoric isn’t evidence that a Brooks-style physical attack is imminent. However, the characterization of ideological opponents as enemies, rather than as fellow participants in the democratic process, is a sign that procedural norms are failing. Greene, Trump, and those who agree with them have abandoned the pretense of agreement. Governance, for them, is a fight to win, not a debate to resolve.

We’ve witnessed this in, for instance, the way Greene notoriously harassed gun-control advocate David Hogg. Greene eschewed standards of procedural debate and literally chased Hogg down the street. Greene’s defenders will note that she wasn’t yet elected, and her actions have no official governmental standing. But she permitted herself to be recorded, and used the resulting footage in her Congressional campaign, an action which reflects her intent.

The fact that Greene was elected to a second term this week, even as she’s continued such high-profile antics in her official status as a Representative, speaks to more than just her. It tells me that voters, at least in Georgia’s mostly-White 14th Congressional District, actually like this behavior. Greene’s voting base sees her performing such ridiculous stunts, frequently with undisguised malign intent, and says: we’ll have more of that.

Greene was one of several Representatives elected in 2020 on the promise, not to govern responsibly, but to vanquish supposed enemies. While North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn got turfed out in the primaries after, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert is, at this writing, likely to win a second term on a whisker-thin majority. The 2024 Republican presidential ticket is a likely split between culture warriors Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

Democrats continue playing the game soberly, using titles like “the honorable” and inviting the opposition party to debate. But that doesn’t work anymore. In my state, Nebraska, governor-elect Jim Pillen refused to debate the Democrat, Carol Blood, and Pillen won. Small-d democratic precepts are currently failing in America. If we don’t face that fact soon, we’ll face it when the governing party starts suspending elections and civil rights laws.

Liberty, Responsibility, and Spirituality: a Rumination

Why are Americans so spectacularly bad at regulating ourselves? This question has become particularly pointed in the COVID-19 era, when we’ve witnessed an eminently preventable disease sweep through our country, causing economic devastation and personal tragedy. The quintessential American definition of “freedom,” meaning personal autonomy as close to perfect as possible, requires a citizenry willing to regulate itself. Why do we seem unable to do that?

In my younger, more conservative days, I tried my hand at political Libertarianism. It didn’t take. For me, Libertarianism was intellectual hygiene: if government is bad, as conservatives believe, and there’s no clearly definable boundary between “enough government” and “too much government,” I reasoned, then the only conclusion is total abolition of government altogether. Let Americans regulate themselves! We have, I insisted, the wisdom that governments just don’t.

But Libertarianism failed for me because simple observation demonstrated that while Americans perhaps could regulate ourselves, we clearly don’t. As a people, we’re too often drunken, selfish, reckless with money, and heedless of safety. Even before COVID, I watched seemingly reasonable citizens drive at breakneck speeds on residential streets, and rewire their houses without tripping the breaker first. American behavior frequently crosses from inconsiderate, into downright destructive.

Admittedly, outside regulation does only incrementally better. I struggled to define the problem, until I read James C. Scott. He describes the tension between central governments and local communities to manage resources, including land and labor. Governments struggle without what Scott terms “local knowledge,” the intimate familiarity with conditions that comes from knowing and working closely with a place and community. Governments standardize; communities localize.

What knowledge, I realized, is more inherently local, than knowledge of oneself? Just as pre-modern communities regulate themselves by knowing their land and their people intimately, individuals could hypothetically know themselves intimately enough to regulate their responses to crime, economic insecurity, and pandemic. The reason we can’t regulate ourselves, I grasped with a jolt, is because too many Americans don’t know themselves intimately. We’re strangers to ourselves.

This demands two follow-up questions: why don’t we know ourselves better? And how can we fix it? The first is easy. We can’t see ourselves from outside; we need to outsource some knowledge of ourselves onto others because we’re limited and finite. Just as local communities must sometimes seek opinions from neighboring communities, or the federal government, to understand their conditions, we likewise need others’ input to understand ourselves better.

The repair becomes sticky, because it involves a word which makes many Americans squeamish today: spirituality. Let us stress, this doesn’t necessarily mean religion, though it could. Rather, historic spiritual practices, like Christian centering prayer or Buddhist meditation, involve pausing the rhythms the world enforces upon us externally, and hearing ourselves better. Only by pausing the world, and listening to ourselves, can we gain local knowledge to regulate ourselves.

I don’t mean this frivolously. The outside world demands we satisfy the economy, support the hierarchy, and abnegate ourselves. Though we have institutions rather than kings today, capitalism has centralized power more thoroughly than Louis XIV could’ve ever dreamed. This centralized order demands individuals set aside dreams, work for others, and pursue appetites—which spirituality demands we see and resist. Spiritually autonomous people make poor consumers and wage slaves.

Addiction specialist Gabor Maté describes addicts as the ultimate slaves to appetite. Driven by trauma or isolation, they seek something to numb the pain. But what does anyone do, when we define ourselves by bigger houses and sleeker cars, than a socially acceptable version of addictive behavior? Likewise, Maté writes, addicts gradually develop control over their appetites using Buddhist meditation. Though many, including Maté himself, remain agnostic, spirituality yields self-control.

American libertarianism might work if citizens had spiritual self-control. While we’ll always necessarily outsource some acts of regulating ourselves to our neighbors, who can see us in context more objectively, we might captain our lives better if we knew ourselves better. But we don’t. We’ve relinquished all forms of self-knowledge to corporations, billionaires, and financiers. Americans can’t regulate ourselves because we’re strangers from ourselves, walking around with weak, malnourished souls.

Watching Americans demand their freedom without knowing themselves first, I believe we could’ve avoided this whole catastrophe. The problem began long before a noisy, aggressive minority thought they were too important to wear masks. It began when Americans surrendered decision-making authority to rich property owners, while maintaining the illusion that they were free. We’re an individualist society full of withered individuals, and the only solution is to turn inward.

Machiavelli, in His Time and Ours

Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What To Fear

Sometime around 1513, disgraced Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a short treatise on government. Though published only posthumously, The Prince gained such influence that it attracted ire from Counter-Reformation clergy, and the Catholic Church banned it for centuries. Modern critics still argue about how seriously to take the book’s precepts. Everyone seemingly has an opinion, regardless whether they’ve read it, and Machiavelli’s name has become a political byword.

French historian Patrick Boucheron thinks Machiavelli, as a man, means something different than his most famous book implies. Machiavelli wrote amid tempestuous times, when the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Italian Wars made life chaotic and unpredictable. And, Boucheron believes, we face similar tumult today. So time has come again to read Machiavelli, understanding his entire corpus, within his historical context. Boucheron accomplishes this eloquently.

Machiavelli emerged from Republican Florence, born into what we’d consider today the upper middle class: common citizens, that is, but relatively comfortable. But within his lifetime, the Medici family privatized Florence’s public domains, advancing the cause of nascent capitalism. Machiavelli used family connections to land a lucrative appointment to the chancery of the Grand Council, giving him a bird’s-eye view to civic governance— and to democracy’s rapid decline.

Even before the political texts which made Machiavelli immortal, he left copious written evidence, through his personal letters, state documents, and other writings. Boucheron reconstructs Machiavelli’s biography from the innumerable records he left, many of which survive in his own handwriting. Being neither gentry nor pedestrian, Machiavelli saw most of civic order with an outsider’s perspective. This was furthered by his extensive diplomatic journeys and international embassies.

But the Italian Wars saw Machiavelli’s beloved Grand Council abolished, and Machiavelli himself exiled to his ancestral estates. Reduced to country yeomanry, he rediscovered his childhood love of learning. He spent hours engaged in liberal arts studies, as Boucheron quotes him, conversing with the greats of ancient Greece and Rome. He would alternate between reading the classics, and writing his own books, which sought the connection between ancient literature and the Florentine Renaissance.

Patrick Boucheron

Boucheron combines biography with literary criticism to guide audiences through the complex thorn-bush of understanding Machiavelli’s work. Surely the man himself understood how difficult and morally complex his writings appeared. Famous among the populace for comedies like The Mandrake and The Golden Ass, Machiavelli preferred to couch his philosophy for commoners in art and imaginative literature; ordinary Florentines probably considered him a reclusive belle-letterist.

Meanwhile, political works like his authoritarian The Prince and his small-R republican The Discourses circulated among the city’s intelligentsia in manuscript format. Machiavelli attracted a following among the upper crust, and apparently conducted salons, discussing Latin classics for moneyed aristocracy. (Boucheron notes that Machiavelli never savvied Greek, which excluded him from true membership in Italy’s burgeoning patrician Humanist movement.)

Despite being an Ėcole normale scholar himself, and writing about one of history’s most controversial authors, Boucheron keeps everything in vernacular language, staying completely away from academic jargon. Perhaps this reflects this book’s origins as thirty weekly short radio broadcasts on French educational radio: form follows function. It may also reflect award-winning translator Willard Wood, who keeps both academic accuracy and linguistic clarity tied for number-one position.

Notwithstanding one false hope, Machiavelli never regained his political standing within Florence, as it flip-flopped between autocratic principality and madcap democracy. Since his most important works got printed for wider distribution only posthumously, we can only speculate how Florentine aristocracy perceived him. After all, as Boucheron notes, once his diplomatic dispatches stopped, the major source of Machiavelli’s life became his personal journal, which reflects internal turmoil over external acclaim.

Therefore Machiavelli descends to current readers, not as a person, but as a legacy preserved in others’ controversies. Critics debate exactly how literally to take his political positions, especially since he contradicted himself from one manuscript to another. Boucheron doesn’t eliminate this controversy, only to guide readers to participate in the debate more informed about the author. Even he admits, frequently Machiavelli intended less to be taken seriously, than to provoke an otherwise complacent audience.

This book’s main body runs barely 130 pages, and many pages are illustrated; few chapters exceed three pages. Eager readers could consume it in one ambitious Saturday, though I’d recommend spending longer in thought and rumination. An introduction written for the American edition admits Boucheron chose this subject specifically to address the Trump influence in global politics. Boucheron believes Machiavelli speaks to times as ungovernable as his own. Surely this counts as one such time.

What Do I Mean By “Bureaucracy”?

My favorite recent word, apparently, is “bureaucracy.” In writing, I’ve used it lately to describe everything from how corporations and governments ration health care, to how banks strangle locally controlled communities. In speech, I’ve used it to explain why capitalism, communism, and socialism are all equally degrading to human spirits. But this week, when I used the word “bureaucratic” to describe how adults make friends, I have realized I need to define the word better.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines bureaucracy as “a system of government in which most of the important decisions are taken by state officials rather than by elected representatives.” This definition is useful but, like most dictionary definitions, it sands away controversy and nuance. For example, the “rather than by elected representatives” tag implies bureaucracy is a degenerate form of democracy. And the “system of government” qualification suggests bureaucracy only describes states, not other complex institutions.

When I taught at the university, I saw bureaucracy applied to aspects of teaching: course goals written by people outside the discipline, mandatory clauses added to the syllabus by lawyers, and top-level leadership appointed by government without having classroom experience. I can only imagine what public school teachers endure under No Child Left Behind and its successor, Common Core. I’ve heard horror stories of mandatory curricula and standardized tests written by God alone knows who.

In the labor pool, I’ve witnessed site “managers” with no autonomy, lugging binders full of rules written by somebody up the hierarchy, with goals they’re required to accomplish, and regulations they’re required to enforce. Schedules get written by office workers, schedules with no consideration for contingencies like time lost to weather. (In a world wracked by global warming.) Production quotas get written by actuaries who have studied assembly line schematics, but never worked the line.

That’s just my personal experience. I’ve heard similar stories from other fields: a former police cadet who quit the academy when she realized the brass cared more about enforcing regulations than guarding justice. A theatre director who got a day job because he discovered the board cared more about appeasing donors than creating art. A pastor, told to adjust his preaching the gospel to smooth relations with the episcopate. “Bureaucracy” means rules win over honesty.

For me, “bureaucracy” means a system of control where a layer of operatives are appointed to enforce rules, but given no discretion over them. Obeying rules becomes paramount, regardless of whether obedience serves the purpose for which the rules were written. Anybody who’s ever been stuck at an unreasonably long red light at two in the morning knows that sometimes, ignoring the rules is the reasonable choice. But bureaucracy enforces rules because they are rules.

Admittedly, the complexity of living in a technological society with a large population makes some level of bureaucracy necessary. The long supply chains needed to produce computers or diabetic syringes means somebody has to govern the transport and assembly, and the corporate nabobs responsible for top-level decision-making lack the time and skills to do this. So professionals get appointed because they know how to make the necessary decisions to accomplish these goals with minimum delay.

Problems arise when corporations, governments, and other institutions offload such massive responsibilities onto their professionals, that they come to dominate the organization’s time and budget. A recent Reuters headline read: “More than a third of U.S. healthcare costs go to bureaucracy.” Economic historian Jerry Z. Muller writes that government and economy write so many rules for accountability, that institutions have to hire entire staffs to enforce them. Dollar-value economic gains vanish into the system.

So what do I mean when I describe friendships as bureaucratic? Social media has become awash in supposed rules like “Dump toxic friends immediately” and “Only keep friends who lift you up,” rules written by people who don’t know you and your circumstances. Just like CEOs and Congress Critters, these rules writers craft regulations somebody else has to enforce. And that someone is you: you’re both the subject of strict behavior policing, and the police.

Bureaucracy, by its nature, is always blind to real-world circumstances. It always values strict adherence over experience and discretion. Bureaucracy doesn’t permit you, no matter how wise you are, to make informed judgements; compliance, ultimately, is its only principle. And again, in small doses, it’s often necessary. But when bureaucracy becomes its own moral justification, and I believe in our society it has, then bureaucracy becomes anti-human. Then humans develop a moral obligation to refuse.

Doctors vs. Accountants©: the Role-Playing Game

Listening to a @NPR story of a woman who was diagnosed with cancer. insurance denied the medication that would save her life. Her doctor wrote a “compassion letter” to the drug maker asking for mercy.

I’m in my car screaming!

Why in 2019 are we begging to live? #Medicare4All

— Abshir Omar (@AbshirMSP) December 5, 2019

I just encountered another of those audience-grabbing stories about insurance companies failing to provide medical coverage. The bean counters apparently denied somebody’s necessary life-saving medical care. I understand the outrage this story causes, because we all imagine ourselves, with years ahead of us, suddenly facing mortality because an actuary somewhere said “no.” Putting ourselves in those shoes, the prospect seems horrific.

Is it, though? Princeton economic historian Jerry Z. Muller writes that, while medical metrics are frequently overused in ways that undermine doctors’ autonomy, that isn’t always bad. It certainly can be, when insurance executives who don’t understand medicine overrule a doctor’s opinions based on shoddy math. But throughout medical history, Muller says, hospitals have hosted tension between doctors who want to take heroic life-saving actions, and accountants who tally the costs.

Generations of TV medical dramas have convinced laypeople that medicine consists of earnest, energetic professionals making split-second decisions while lives hang in the balance. This might make sense in Emergency Room conditions, where people come in broken and bleeding, staving off burst appendixes and suppurating aneurysms. But most medical care is slow, deliberative, and costly. Asking whether continued costly treatment will have meaningful outcomes isn’t always unreasonable.

The model we’ve all seen in stories like House M.D. looks exciting, dangerous, and fun. Somebody enters the hospital with a twitching thigh muscle, and the glamorous doctors, who have only one case, piece together clues proving how an aortic dissection threw a clot to the brain, resulting in testicular obstructions: medicine as logic puzzle. I might’ve paid better attention in middle-grade biology had I thought I’d get jobs like that.

But an NPR human-interest story broadcast at the peak of that show’s popularity traced the costs of just one episode, landing on a $300,000 price tag—and that’s a conservative number, because I added up their annotated costs and got something far higher. And that’s nearly ten years ago; advancing technology and added administrative bureaucracy probably mean it’s far higher now. Even under the best circumstances, medicine is expensive.

The early-seasons core cast of House M.D.

Let me interrupt myself here and note: I don’t mean accountants should be more active in scaling back costs and denying medical care. A good friend recently received a medical diagnosis that mercifully ties all her disparate symptoms together. She should’ve received this diagnosis twenty years ago, but overworked, underfunded doctors made hasty short-term determinations, almost certainly rushed along by bean-counters. A little more time and money could’ve saved years.

So yes, I acknowledge that there’s no simple, arithmetic formula to strike a balance between the accountants and the doctors, whose desires often conflict. And the arena of that conflict is a patient’s body. The outcome, as seen in the tweet quoted above, can be tragic for individuals—but downright mandatory for the medical economy overall. Anybody hoping to solve this problem concisely should also wish for a pony, because it’ll do as much good.

Because, let’s be honest, when people complain about private insurance’s interference in medical decisions, their solution is often to nationalize medical care, to a greater or lesser degree. As America’s political Left wants to institute Medicare For All, Britain’s political Right is actively considering privatizing the NHS, which American progressives often brandish as a model of more efficient medical template. Which they want because the NHS isn’t much better.

British medical journalist Dennis Campbell, writing in the Guardian, a newspaper with undisguised Leftist allegiance, notes that NHS bureaucrats regularly overrule doctors’ opinions. Campbell cites a panoply of reasons bureaucrats to this, but buried in this list, he names “resources”—a weasel word meaning “money.” So the NHS, like America’s private insurers, overrules doctors’ wishes to keep costs down and funnel money where it’ll do the most good.

If we expect a constant stream of on-demand, high-tech medical treatment, we’ll inevitably run into the impediment that all resources, including money, are finite. Somebody needs to make decisions about who gets costly, invasive treatment. That “somebody” will inescapably be a bureaucratic goat whose official functions, whether funded by the state or private capital, will conflict with life-saving desires. Somebody’s live will take priority over another.

The system is heartless to individuals. I’m sure that woman whose life-saving cancer treatment got denied is suffering greatly. But trading corporate bureaucrats for state bureaucrats won’t solve anything. Unless we abjure high-tech medicine, which will never happen, we’ll always have to make finite resources cover infinite needs. That’s what bureaucracy does. Sometimes, that means making painful decisions and letting human lives go.

See also: Doctors vs. Accountants©: Part II

A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The American President came second in his race. The current British government garnered barely a third of the vote in the last general election. And Russia hasn’t had a truly free election since Boris Yeltsin. Couple that with appallingly low numbers for legitimate newspapers, record highs for passive venues like aggregator websites, and stunning disinterest in voting among the young, and you have a recipe for government by tyrants.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian specializing in Europe around and between the World Wars, has made a career of identifying the social forces which made Fascism and Stalinism possible. He isn’t the first to find correlations between that era and the current international scene. However, he uniquely distilled that era’s lessons into a brief handbook which audiences have enthusiastically embraced. And it’s easy to see why.

Some of Snyder’s pointers seem obvious when confronting illegitimate or autocratic governments. “Beware the one-party state.” “Contribute to good causes.” “Be wary of paramilitaries.” These all reflect very true conditions in a state where the ruling party actively strives to make the opposition seem criminal, strips funding from good works, and keeps an off-the-books security force. These would be truisms, if they weren’t so frequently ignored.

Other points seem less obvious. “Make eye contact and small talk”? Don’t we have better things to do than have conversations when world history is at stake? Not necessarily. If we fight for global causes, but don’t actually know our neighbors, it becomes easy to make immoral compromises that sacrifice the lives of apparent strangers. Similar reasoning applies to “Establish a private life” and “Remember professional ethics.”

And a few pointers seem downright counterintuitive. “Stand out”? Doesn’t the tallest weed get cut down first? Maybe. But while tyranny originates from above, deriving its power from unelected or semi-legal means, Snyder insists tyranny perpetuates itself mainly through citizens who conform, who go along to get along. Resisting tyrannical governments, protecting the institutions that make democracy possible, requires people who think freely, and act on those thoughts.

Timothy Snyder

This is a recurring theme in Snyder’s analysis. Mindless conformity enabled leaders like Stalin and Hitler to consolidate their control, as citizens followed the path of least resistance so they could continue making a living. Then, when leaders used their consolidated control to annex Austria or collectivize Ukrainian farming, nobody could stand against them; all avenues of resistance had been swallowed by the desire to not make waves.

Snyder contrasts this conformist thinking to powerful non-conformists. Winston Churchill dismissed calls from both sides to make peace. Teresa Prekerowa saved families from crackdowns in the Polish ghettos. Václav Havel distributed samizdat literature that fired anti-communist resistance when centralized governments became too powerful. Non-conformists made resistance possible at times when standing up to autocrats seems pointless and self-defeating.

Tyranny, after all, isn’t inexplicable. Snyder notes in his introduction that “Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them.” This similarity should chill anyone following current politics. The election of demagogues like Donald Trump and Teresa May reflects social conditions brought about almost exactly how Twentieth Century tyrants profited from the Gilded Age.

The ultimate resolution may be similar.

Most important, the theme permeating this book involves holding to principles of truth and reciprocity. Tyrants tend to govern by force of personality, adhering to principles of self-advancement and “nature red in tooth and claw.” Maintaining the structures of civil society require organized dissidents linked by moral foundation and a belief that human beings, individually and collectively, are worth fighting for. Which, thankfully, we have seen on the ground.

If I have one point of disagreement with Snyder, it’s his lack of source notes. Throughout this book, he cites from history, name-drops theorists like Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer, and generally quotes a grab bag of luminaries who lived through or commented upon modern technocratic tyranny. The intellectual-minded among us might enjoy delving into his sources. If things get worse before they get better, which seems likely, we need prepared responses.

Throughout, Snyder makes repeated references to “the president” and to current leaders. However, he carefully avoids proper nouns when calling out personalities. He clearly refers to Donald Trump, especially when suggesting that midterm elections might get suspended (a common scare tactic among whichever party lacks power). However, it bears noting that, in 2016, both major parties floated top-of-the ticket candidates with noted authoritarian tendencies. Tyranny should be a non-partisan issue.

Al Franken and the Abuse of Insider Power

Show of hands: whose buddy ever drew a dick on your face while you were sleeping?

When I was nineteen, I traveled to South Dakota with a church group. Sharing a motel room with several rowdy teenagers, I fell asleep around ten PM, my usual time. I awoke fifteen minutes later to raucous laughter: I’d slapped myself in the face when my roommates drew a dick on my cheeks with shaving cream, and I tried to shoo the irritant away. The only adult in the room suggested and encouraged this behavior.

I’ve always known that you’re totally powerless when you sleep. That’s probably why children hate being ordered to bed, and certainly why, when they’re old enough to understand some of the world’s dangers, they frequently refuse to fall asleep without a trusted adult around. But that incident really solidified for me what an act of trust falling asleep in public really is. You have to believe others don’t have malicious intent.

That’s why, the longer the Al Franken controversy continues, the more it bothers me. The ongoing revelation of sexual predation in American politics, journalism, and entertainment continues growing, but it’s usually something pretty straightforward: Roy Moore targeted minors, forced himself physically upon them, and used his public authority to demand their complicity. Even his supporters understand why that’s completely awful, though they justify it.

Franken, by contrast, in his pre-senatorial days, did something more insidious. He didn’t out-and-out sexually assault journalist Leeann Tweeden; judging by the photograph that’s surfaced, he possibly never even touched her. (The alleged forced kiss happened off-camera.) But Tweeden trusted her fellow travelers on the USO plane enough to fall asleep in their presence. And Franken drew a metaphorical dick on her face.

Whether drawing literal vulgar images on somebody’s face, or doing hover-hands over her boobs, as Franken got photographed doing, the point remains the same: to cause a person humiliation for being powerless. Somebody who is awake has remarkable power over somebody who is asleep. The waker could draw vulgarities, take embarrassing photos, take sexual advantage, even stab the sleeper. And the sleeper can’t stop it.

And be honest, Franken wouldn’t have photographed the prank if he didn’t intend to show anybody else. His purpose was to demonstrate his power over another human being, because she made the mistake of considering him trustworthy. Physical pain or psychological distress probably mattered little. This is the ultimate insider humor, the sharing of jokes at a powerless outsider’s expense. Not unlike jocks bullying nerds.

Yeah, this crap never gets old. Unless you need to sleep. So yeah, unless you're human.

All this happened after Franken postulated, in his book The Truth (With Jokes), that he could run for Senate. He’d at least contemplated a life in public service, a role that, depending on the attitude you bring, either involves subjugating yourself to the greater common good, or ruling over others. Since eschewing comedy writing, Franken has used common-good rhetoric in public. But this photo demonstrates a self-superior, ruling-class mentality.

I know, from experience, how such humiliations undermine one’s ability to trust others. Since I was nineteen, I can count on my fingers the number of people I’ve shared sleeping quarters with, who weren’t related to me by blood. It’s very difficult for me to relinquish control that way. I can’t possibly be alone: chronic sleep deprivation, and its related behavior, carb-loading, are among America’s leading causes of obesity, heart disease, Type-II diabetes, and other ailments.

By definition, America’s representative government requires citizens to relinquish control, voluntarily, to others. They’re nominally people we choose, but in today’s party-driven system, where we often choose between elephants and jackasses rather than actual human beings, the selection is often a lesser-of-two-evils choice. By seeking public power, Senator Franken asks Minnesota’s voters to entrust public control into his hands.

That photograph, sadly, demonstrates that we cannot trust him with such authority. In two different public statements, Franken disclaimed that photograph as a joke gone awry. Even if that’s true, remember what he considers funny: this person’s body needs rest, so she trusted me enough to fall asleep, haw-haw. That isn’t a funny group laugh, it’s pointed mockery at another’s expense. It’s taunting the powerless for lacking power.

That’s why I must cut Senator Franken loose. Sure, he’s not my senator; I’ve never had any influence in Franken’s career. But as a voter, I have input. And Franken cannot effectively represent anybody, constituent or citizen, when he arrogates power that way. He’s demonstrated rot at his philosophical core. When given power over others, he uses it for his own aggrandizement. That’s why Senator Franken has to go.