The three stages of populism: institutional degradation, popular dictatorship, imperialist expansion

The term populism (or populist) has become a placeholder for a growing gamut of extreme politics. Let's look at some common components of populism and its stages of evolution.

Definitions 

Merriam-Webster

Definition of populist

 (Entr

y 1 of 2)

1: a member of a political party claiming to represent the common peopleespecially, often capitalized: a member of a U.S. political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies

2: a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people

Brittanica

populism is a political program or movement that champions, or claims to champion, the common person, usually by favorable contrast with a real or perceived elite or establishment.

Populism usually combines elements of the left and the right, opposing large business and financial interests but also frequently being hostile to established liberal, socialist, and labor parties.

The term populism can designate either democratic or authoritarian movements. Populism is typically critical of political representation and anything that mediates the relation between the people and their leader or government. In its most democratic form, populism seeks to defend the interests and maximize the power of ordinary citizens, through reform rather than revolution

Political Science (Francis Fukuyama) 

 

 Common characteristics:

1. "Anti-Elitism": Politics that blame the situation of a group -usually considered a majority of low and middle income "native" working class- on the policies and privileges of "elites" or minorities with un-earned access to wealth, property, power, or education, including foreigners, immigrants and ethnic or religious groups (Jews, Arabs, White, Men, European)  or industries (Finance and banking, oil, Technology) and places (rural, small towns vs, big cities, high-end vs poor neighborhoods and slums)
2. Zero-sum, victimization logic: the "gains" and superior wealth, status, and access to education of "the elites" is taken away from "the people" by an unfair system. 
3. Group and class antagonistic and unresolvable (by institutional and peaceful means) conflict there is no "middle ground" or 'melting pot" but segregation, expulsion, or warfare among classes, ethnic groups, locals vs foreigners.
4. Protectionism, nationalism
5. Secessionism, autonomism, separatism
6. Isolationism, anti-"cosmopolitanism"
7. Xenophobia and "kin-based" trust (and distrust)
8. Extreme conspirative views shared in "communication bubbles" with highly exclusive beliefs and even language and behavioral codes
9. Highly emotional, passion-based motivations (mostly rage)
10. Self-reinforcing, partisan politics
11. Distrust in liberal institutions and rule of law
12. Strong leaders totally empowered by  faithful followers
13. Avoidance of "unpopular" positions. "The people" are always right.
14. Use of direct and circumstantial majorities: rule by the crowd, rally, street, referendums.

Evolution and Stages

1. Institutional degradation

Populist politics and policies erode those institutions designed to check and balance power. They usually start by defacing and storming the Congress -as in the cases of 19717 Russia, 1924 Italy, 1932 Germany, 2003 Venezuela, 2020 US, and 2022 Chile.

Soon Congress's compromise and legislation are replaced by referendum and special executive orders justified by some kind of "national emergency".

      2. Popular Dictatorship

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dictators most often are popularly elected; Mussolini and Hitler reached office by vote and were reelected by 90% of the popular vote. Chavez, Maduro, and Putin stayed decades in power through elections. 

Populist leaders "elect" their voters in exchange for benefits. Patronage, fraud, and opposition illegalization make indefinite reelections safe. Nepotism and dynastic succession secure power beyond life terms.

Common policies:

1. Protectionism
2. Clientelism & patronage
3. Anti-free market capitalism
4. State and crony capitalism

   3. Imperialist Expansion

The constant depletion of wealth and resources to sustain corruption and clientelism requires continuous expansion -"Lebensraum" - Hitler's term for our modern "secure borders". Hitler's annexation of Sudetes and Putin's of Crimea follows that same pattern. Hitler's outright invasion of Poland (with Stalin's help) and Putin's invasion of Ukraine show the same type of escalation.

In its imperial expansionist phase, populist dictatorships provoke territorial wars culminating in global conflicts until their regimes are destroyed with large devastation and loss of lives.

Recommended readings: Liberalism and its discontents by Francis Fukuyama

In his book "Liberalism and its discontents", Francis Fukuyama revisits critically his earlier views of "The End of History" and makes new observations about the status of liberal democracy twenty years into the 21st century. 

Fukuyama starts by defining liberalism in the widest possible way:

By “liberalism,” I refer to the doctrine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction. 

Classical liberalism is a big tent that encompasses a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.  

And makes a clear distinction with plain democracy: 

Democracy refers to rule by the people, which today is institutionalized in periodic free and fair multiparty elections under universal adult suffrage. 

Liberalism in the sense I am using it refers to the rule of law, a system of formal rules that restrict the powers of the executive, even if that executive is democratically legitimated through an election.

He finds that, after a triumphant expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union and China's opening to some degree of free market, global capitalism, a new series of challenges have risen from within liberal democracies, both established and new.

Right- and left-wing populism has captured the dissatisfaction of those groups left relatively behind or even threatened by global liberal democracy and free markets.

From the right, rising immigration from developing and Third World countries exacerbated by liberal policies pursued in the US by the Democratic party and in the EU by the center from the left Schengen consensus combined with the 2008 financial crisis and rising unemployment has fueled the rise to power of strong nationalist and xenophobic right-wing populism.

In established liberal democracies, it is the liberal institutions that have come under immediate attack. Leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and America’s Donald Trump were all legitimately elected, and have used their electoral mandates to attack liberal institutions in the first instance. These include the courts and justice system, nonpartisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances."

And also a rise in left-wing populism in Spain, the US, and Latin America

Liberalism has been challenged in recent years not just by populists of the right, but from a renewed progressive left as well.The critique from this quarter evolved from a charge—correct in itself—that liberal societies were not living up to their own ideals of equal treatment of all groups.

There is ample evidence that democracy not necessarily favors liberal systems, particularly when these bring rising unequal outcomes for certain groups -blue-collar native whites on the Right and immigrants from illiberal cultures on the Left.

These new realities are turning upside down the traditional Right and Left political constituencies and clientele: blue-collar workers vote for Far Right candidates and immigrants fleeing Third World socialism vote for an open-borders Left in the EU.

A growing polarization goes hand in hand with ethnic, class, and nationalistic divisions fueled by populist vote-capturing rhetoric. 

Fukuyama notices a growing number of democracies that are turning illiberal by exacerbating the power of an executive strongman favored by local ethnic majorities: blue-collar whites in the US follow if not Trump, "trumpist", 'Tea Party" nationalistic ideas. In Europe, France's centrist government is under siege from the "yellow jackets" disaffected native French rejecting liberal "elites" that tolerate massive unassimilated Islamic immigration. The same situation occurs in all of Western Europe. Russia is also promoting a pan-Slavic, pan-Russian redesign of the post-WWII borders following ethnic and linguistic lines.

The Left wing's challenge to liberal democracy in Latin America and Europe also exploits historical ethnic nationalism -from the pre-Colombian descendants in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina carving land through rewriting constitutions and referendums to the Catalan and Basque separatists in  Spain-.

The world that Fukuyama describes bears an eery resemblance with the one that preceded WWI a hundred years ago. The war in Ukraine resembles the territorial annexations and alliances that triggered both World Wars of the 20th century.

 

 

Putin in Ukraine 2: Autocracy vs democracy in the battlefront

 

Russian military's embarrassing failure in invading Ukraine shows an interesting contrast between autocratic and democratic governance, not just in the civilian but in the military action.

 Reports from the front are eloquent:

Russia’s failings appear to trace to factors ranging from the Kremlin’s wrong assumptions about Ukrainian resistance to the use of poorly motivated conscript soldiers. They suggest that Russia and the West overestimated Moscow’s overhauls of its armed forces, which some military analysts say appear to have been undermined by graft and misreporting.

miles-long convoys of tanks and support trucks have stalled on highways out of fuel,

Hundreds of Russian military vehicles have been destroyed and others abandoned, sometimes because of mechanical breakdowns and poor-quality equipment, said Western officials and military analysts closely following the campaign. 

Russian troops turned to use open telephone and analog radios following the failure of encrypted communications systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, making them vulnerable to intercept or jamming. Russian officers were likely targeted after their positions were exposed by their use of open communications, Western military analysts said

Russian military uses central planning where all decisions are made at the top and unmotivated draftee soldiers wait for orders and are punished if they act on their own,. The jammed lines of vehicles reflect the lack of experience and leadership that makes soldiers pack together in fear, offering a better target to their rivals.

The WSJ reports:

The movement of troops in bumper-to-bumper convoys is a clear sign of “soldiers who are untrained or undisciplined,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and now chair in strategic studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “You need sergeants or NCOs constantly telling them to spread out. It’s a human instinct to huddle together when you’re in danger,

Ukrainians follow an opposite set of rules, gotten from their NATO and Marine Corps trainers, who emphasize mobility, individual initiative, and taking the decision level to the soldiers on the battlefield, 

The contrast reminds of Rambo, the Silvester Stallone "army of one" marine beating up dozens of marshalls and regular soldiers by improvising on the terrain.

Ukrainians play Rambo while Russians fight as the clumsy marshalls in the film.

This is, actually, a contrast between liberal democracy, based on free initiative and entrepreneurship, and autocratic rule, based on central planning, fear, rigid rules, and punishing independent thinking.

There are, of course, other factors, such as one army defending its country and another of invaders that don't even know well the land (there are reports of Russian tank crews lost in the backroads asking locals for directions), but the key difference is between nimble and resourceful, well-motivated militias (such as those that George Washington led to defeat the British in the American Revolution War ) and what Milton Friedman called "An Army of slaves" when he proposed ending the draft during the Vietnam War,

One last note: autocracies are slow, clumsy learners, prone to repeat mistakes.

Francis Fukuyama seems to be right in his dire forecast for Putin's invasion.

I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine.

Putin in Ukraine: The Mouse that Roared

Putin's invasion of Ukraine seems to defy logic. From The Long View perspective, based on analyzing societal performance over time, it is a crystal-clear example of perverse incentives at work. Putin got a 620 billion USD war chest from the hikes in oil price provoked by his previous military invasions of Crimea and Georgia. Those billions went to his war chest to cover military expenses, further military buildup, cover the finances of his failing economy, and feed a corrupt oligarchy that includes Putin himself.

Armchair psychologists' analyses about Putin's personality or madness are both puerile and irrelevant. If anything, Putin's behavior and decisions are perfectly rational responses to a perverse incentives system that reminds that of the old Peter Sellers film The Mouse that Roared. In the film, a small Andorra-like European country declares war on the US, seeking to be occupied and rebuilt with American aid.

Putin is doing exactly the same calculation: war pays in higher oil revenues and increased bargaining power with an oil-dependent EU. 

Iran builds nuclear armament for the same reason. Sanctions are compensated with higher oil prices and bargaining power. Pakistan built and supports the Taliban and fundamentalist terrorism to get US aid to... fight them -not too hard-

Let's remember a simple principle of human and societal performance:

behavior is a function of consequences

And ask two fundamental questions:

1. Are there rewards for bad behavior?
2. Are there punishments for good behavior?

Obviously, Putin received 620 billion dollars for 1. and complains about 2, explaining that if he does nothing, NATO enrolls former allies around Russia, turning them into viable threats and rivals.

It doesn't take a Nobel laureate to figure this out. Just looking from The Long View perspective and using a little societal performance analysis.

How can you stop Putin?

Just put a real punishment or disincentive to his military adventures. Not sanctions, but cheap oil. If the US opens its shale spigot as it did before, oil prices can go down fast enough to paralyze the Russian tanks on their tracks. Just a credible announcement from POTUS would change Putin's personality on a dime (or a few billions more)

Why is it so hard, then?

The answer is simple: domestic   US and EU politics.

US: 

Biden has outsourced his energy policy to his Left, putting dogma before results. Shale is bad, green is good, and Putin knows it and exploits that weakness.

EU

Here green dogma has been the law for years and special interests pushing wind, solar and other green industries blocked shale long ago, More dramatically, outsourced energy to... Putin, who has now control over the gas spigots to force the EU into a quick surrender,  toasting with Vichy water.

The Political Pandemic

The anti-vaccine movement -which has taken on a lethal dimension and impact in this pandemic- unites the extreme right with the extreme left and has very old roots that go back to Eduard Jenner's first vaccination in the 18th century. 

Even then there were movements of organized ignorance and rumors against vaccinations. This continued with polio and other pre-COVID diseases and will surely continue because there are lobbies of lawsuit attorneys in the US who have bulti a cottage industry out of making lawsuits for alleged negative effects of vaccines. 

Although those lawsuits invariably fail, they generate billionaire fees for the lobbyists who make a living from them.

Among them, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr, stands out sadly these days. Kennedy Jr. has broken with his family and combines the power of his last name with a mix of left-wing environmentalism and anti-vaccine propaganda supported by Donald Trump.

 This movement, whose factual base descends into a mix of the most grotesque ignorance and disproven claims by repentant authors of discredited papers, is dangerous due to the billionaire figures it mobilizes in social media, lobbies, and paid militants. 

It is another example of the reactionary nature of extremism -coming from the Left or from the Right end of the political spectrum-.

Slavery: when the past is not even past

 

Slavery -or human trafficking, as it is called in the 20th and 21st centuries- is a present practice in contemporary Africa, as Nobel Laureate from Uganda Wole Soyinha explains in a recent Podcast about writing and African politics.

Any cursory consideration of historical and contemporary evidence shows that slavery and bondage are common practices amongst African and Middle Eastern nations.

Professor Thomas Sowell wrote and explained extensively about the role of African tribal leaders and practices in the slave trade. 

Europeans rarely ventured into the Continent to capture and enslave Africans. Slaves were largely captured and sold in local markets by African warlords as a common practice documented since the 15th century -way before 1619 or 1776-.

Looking after current slavery in Africa we can find that there is an active and lucrative industry in many Subsaharan Africa countries, led by African human traffickers, fundamentalist terrorists and Middle East human traders:

"Uganda is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Ugandan children are trafficked within the country, as well as to Canada, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia for forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Karamojong women and children are sold in cattle markets or by intermediaries and forced into situations of domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, herding, and begging. Security companies in Kampala recruit Ugandans to serve as security guards in Iraq where, at times, their travel documents and pay have reportedly been withheld as a means to prevent their departure. These cases may constitute trafficking.[1]

Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese workers are reportedly trafficked to Uganda, and Indian networks traffic Indian children to the country for sexual exploitation. Children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.), Rwanda, and Burundi are trafficked to Uganda for agricultural labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Until August 2006, the terrorist rebel organization, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), abducted children and adults in northern Uganda to serve as soldiers, sex slaves, and porters. While no further abductions of Ugandan children have been reported, at least 300 additional people, mostly children, were abducted during the reporting period in the Central African Republic and the D.R.C.[1]"

Source: Wikipedia 

Well before European traders came in, African kingdoms practiced slavery and bondage in open markets. During the Middle Ages, African-captured slaves were sold internally and exported through maritime and land routes.

These facts do not by any means make slavery less abhorrent. On the contrary, they show that rather than the "original sin" of a single country or race, this practice has been the shared shame of almost all countries and races, and also that Africa -the cradle of the Homo Sapiens species- has also been and continues to be the place where it's more prevalent.

Present-day human trafficking, bondage, and slavery explain why millions of desperate migrants try to reach countries where the practice has been abolished in search of not just better economic conditions but of basic human dignity and human rights.

Independent readers interested in this dramatic reality that flies in the face of political agendas on the Left and the Right will find these two lectures by 1984 Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinha highly educational:

And with regard to the US Founding Fathers, it might be also good to look at slavery from a historical instead of an anachronistic perspective based on contemporary politics:

The Madisonian Republic at work

 

A recent op-ed in the New York Times shows the enduring influence of James Madison -a Democrat- in modern times. 

Madison's constitutional design sets limits not only to direct democracy (which has turned California into referendum-driven chaos for taxpaying residents and businesses) but also to big-spending, high-impact legislation such as Obamacare and now Built Back Better.

Madison's Republic combines the empowering of states (Electoral College) and SCOTUS with midterm elections -POTUS, COTUS- to check what he called "slim majorities" from overreaching and passing major legislation without bipartisan consensus.

Regardless of the merits of Obamacare and Build Back Better, they have been curtailed for lack of what Madison called a "fixed majority". In 1791, Madison explained that:

"Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.

As there are cases where the public opinion must be obeyed by the government; so there are cases, where not being fixed, it may be influenced by the government. This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people." (For The National Gazette, 1791)

Biden's slim majority -likely to be reversed in the coming midterm elections like almost all the presidents since LBJ- doesn't meet Madison's requirement for major legislation -what we now call a "mandate" supported by a landslide majority such as those behind the New Deal and the Great Society structural legislation-.

Despite progressives' urge for rushing to pass BBB before they lose control of the Senate and House, the Madisonian rule is likely to prevail. If not, the fluctuating majority will block or modify its implementation.

And those are good news for the US economy and political stability. A house divided cannot stand unless it has checks and balances that force negotiation.

US self-correcting system works again: first it stopped Trump, now it stops Biden

 

James Carville's anger after the Democrats' midterm beating channeled the feeling of the Democratic center almost as well as Lynn Cheney's anger at Trump's preposterous attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. 

Voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore send a clear message of rejection to the Democrats' Far Left agenda. David Brooks summarized it in an opinion piece in the NYT alerting about the growing disconnect between the "woke" agenda pushed too far and too fast by the progressives and the priorities of a country that still is 73 % white and 

center-right:

Washington Post's columnist Gary Abernathy's analysis of the causes of the Democratic defeats on the moderate liberal PBS Newshour and his debate with progressive Democrat columnist Jonathan Capehart captured the perspective of the middle America that pushed back against the Far Left agenda.

"For most voters, the 2020 election was not about policy promises. It was a referendum on Trump. To present an alternative palatable to the largest pool of voters, Democrats settled on their most inoffensive candidate. During the campaign, Biden promised support for parts of the far-left agenda, but voters understood he had to pay lip service to that wing. They didn’t elect Biden to do big, historic things. They elected him to restore a sense of calm."

At the New York Times, columnists Maureen Dowd explained how "wokeness derailed the democrats" and their colleagues Gail Collins and Brett Stephens warned that the Far Left policies can drive the Biden administration to an early failure.

So far, even the much-maligned "liberal media" was fast in reacting -although after the fact- and asking the current Democratic administration and COTUS leadership to correct course away from the Far Left agenda items that turn off critical constituencies -such as the "Farmers and Labor" that once were part of the official name of the Democratic Party in some states or other non-urban, non-college-educated segments of the 73% white voters majority-. Thus, the Fourth Power worked slowly but did work.

The other two controls over POTUS did work as well.

Let's start with SCOTUS :

Much to the chagrin of conservatives in the Right and Far Right, Trump appointees to the Supreme Court decided against attempts by the Trumpist governor of Texas to circumvent Roe v. Wade and allow vigilantes to sue women who abort in the State.

COTUS also worked with remarkable effectiveness. Two moderate Democratic senators blocked the unpopular 3.5 trillion-dollar budget pushed by the progressives and six progressive representatives voted against the popular 1 trillion Infrastructure bill that finally passed with Republican votes in a bipartisan way as the voters who voted Trump out of office and Biden in wanted.

Both parties and their partisan media (Fox for the Republicans, CNN, and MSNBC for Democrats) claims that US democracy is dysfunctional are in part bogus. Parties are supposed to be dysfunctional and... partisan. That is part of a democracy, but the United States is first and foremost a Republic -as Benjamin Franklin famously explained in 1787-  but voters and SCOTUS seem to know better and the constitutional institutions created by the Framers to control them demonstrated that checks and balances work. 

As for POTUS, Donald Trump is no longer president and Joe Biden got a serious warning to turn to the center or become a lame duck. 

The Economist also noticed another feature of the US constitutional system that works wisely to prevent parties from obtaining what Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called "hegemony" - the eternal extremist dream-.

Parties that control the Executive tend to lose seats and control of COTUS during the midterms. The hurry to push critical legislation on a temporary partisan majority -brought as coattails by presidential elections- is contained precisely by midterms. President Obama learned that lesson the hard way with Obamacare. Republicans learned that SCOTUS is not COTUS shortly after when Bush-appointee Justice Roberts gave the deciding vote to prevent them from striking down Obamacare.

The fundamental institutions of the United States have been tested twice in the last two years and passed the test successfully:  in 2020, when COTUS certified a legitimate election despite an insurrection promoted by a defeated President refusing to concede, and in 2021, by voters and COTUS preventing a partisan minority from exceeding its mandate-.

De-Polarizing US elections: Two New Ideas

 

In his recent book Forward, former presidential and New York majoral candidate Andrew M. Yang puts forward two promising and concrete ideas: (1) open primaries and (2) ranked-choice voting.

Yang argues that these two mechanisms might correct the current process of polarization by creating positive stimulus for candidates to respond to the 51-61 percent of the electorate that has moderate, pragmatic views instead of those who espouse fringe Far Right or Far Left, unrealistic and dogmatic positions.

Both mechanisms have been proven in Alaska, allowing an anti-Trump Republican moderate such as Senator Lisa Murkowski to resist and survive reelection.

Ranked-choice elections in New York also kept in check the Far Left candidacies that brought before the extreme and disastrous tenure of Bill de Blasio.

Food for thought. 

I, for one, will read Yang’s book in the hope that moderation and common sense can find a way back to where they should be since they represent a steady majority of the American electorate.

Recommended readings: Trans: When Ideology meets Reality, by Helen Joyce

 

In her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality, The Economist writer Helen Joyce presents a compelling study of what is behind the "non-binary" movement.

Joyce argues that while sex is a biological reality and gender a social convention, using surgery to change the former on behalf of the latter is not "liberating" but restricting future options. Joyce studied what is behind the extreme "sex-reassignment" hormonal treatments and surgery -especially in children-.

Rather than focusing on the "non-binary" versus "binary" false discussion -sexuality has a spectrum that determines that no person is 100 percent male or female and cross-dressing and homosexual sex and relationships have always been part of normal sexuality-, Joyce focuses on what she calls "transactivism" and the special interests behind its agenda. She explains:

"It is a story of policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties, notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants. 

They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory, and allied fields, and by the pharmaceutical and health- care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from ‘gender- affirmative’ medicine. 

This powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. 

And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post-operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. 

It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single-sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. 

When the general public finally realizes what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs."

Joyce explores the forces behind "transactivism" and the perils for minors and their parents of itas agenda and clarifies several concepts focusing on the consequences:

"This is a book about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. 

The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology. It’s called gender self-identification, and it is the central tenet of a fast-developing belief system that sees everyone as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it is housed. 

When there is a mismatch, the person is ‘transgender’– trans for short – and it is the identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees and treats them. The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of people who longed to change sex. 

For decades such ‘transsexuals’ were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick clinicians, who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients’ bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and governments treated them as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion. But since the turn of the century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self- declared gender identity over biological sex. 

Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed. 

In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul. 

What is being demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules. 

liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else. 

Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognize other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them."

Joyce explores and predicts several backlashes that transactivism is already generating in different areas such as:

Sports

"Their entire purpose is to enable fair competition, since the physical differences between the sexes give males an overwhelming athletic advantage, and competing separately is the only way that exceptional females can get their due. 

Allowing males to identify as women for the purposes of entry to women’s competitions makes no more sense than allowing heavyweights to box as flyweights, or able-bodied athletes to enter the Paralympics, or adults to compete as under- eighteens. And yet, under pressure from transactivists, almost every sporting authority right up to the International Olympic Committee has moved to gender self-identification. The sight of stronger, heavier, faster males easily beating the world’s best female athletes is sure to outrage deep-seated intuitions about fair play – once it comes to wider notice. "

Pediatric Gender Surgery

"Until recently, hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality. 

But as gender clinics have come under activists’ sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate ‘social transition’– a change of name, pronouns and presentation – followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross- sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood."

The book also covers the negative impact this agenda has on women's rights and the cultural acceptance of alternatives such as bisexuality and homosexuality as not just lifelong but personal, private, and changing options.

Ancient societies such as Classical Greece had already achieved a better balance as any reader of Plato can verify. But Plato and the Great Books are temporarily (we hope) out of fashion, so Joyce's book is a very helpful alternative to distinguish between reason and nonsense. 

Adam Smith: The Invisible Founding Father

 

The documentary that starts this article, written and narrated by Donald L. Miller, professor of History at Lafayette University, explains some interesting but lesser-known facts about the United States' early economic development.

Adam Smith could be considered an "invisible" Founding Father of the United States economic system. Although Smith never visited the British colonies that proclaimed their independence the same year he published The Wealth of Nations, the seeds of the system he described had already traveled with the early settlers in the form of entrepreneurial capitalism. 

These are some interesting facts that Professor Miller points out:

• During its first 100 years, in the period between 1801 (Jefferson) and 1901 (Theodore Roosevelt), the United States population grew from 7 to 77 million, and the territory quintupled to the West and South.

• The first American factory was established by Moses Brown in 1789 using a water mill to power looms in  Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. A few months later, they acquired a patent to use a 32-spin loom to expand. Facing problems with the new technology, they hired a British partner, Samuel Slater, who had worked with the system in Britain. The factory employed mostly women and children from what continued to be a rural community. Men kept working as farmers, and women and children earned extra income working in barns turned into factories. What would be called today illegal child labor was in fact a bonus for the new employees, who already toiled 70 hours a week in rural labor much harder and exacting to the body that working on looms inside the barns.
• Hamilton was strongly in favor of the urban capitalistic model. Jefferson preferred the agrarian version of the part-time farm/factories, farmers/workers.
• At the time "child labor" was normal, particularly in farming, where having as many children as possible was a competitive advantage over hiring (and paying for) hands outside the owning family,
• The westward expansion between 1801 and 1901 went hand-in-hand with the entrepreneurial capitalist model embraced by all parties. 
• Business-financed channels and railroads connected the East Cost, NY transatlantic trade with the Great Lakes and prairie land beyond the Appalaches. \

The "invisible hand" of the growing markets and free enterprise created a century of prosperity and growth, making Adam Smith an "invisible" founding father.

Recommended readings: Cuba, an American History, by Ada Ferrer

 

A significant part of the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the 20^th century was defined by our relationship with Cuba. What turned Cuba and the US into rivals was not the 1959 triumph of the young guerrilla men and women that defeated and deposed the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, but instead on December 2, 1961, when Fidel Castro declared his new government communist and turned to an alliance with the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War. Until then, the American press primarily portrayed Castro as a freedom fighter that would deliver some form of liberal democracy after Batista.

From 1957 to 1961, the US and Cuba were, as during much of their previous history, a sort of quarrelous allies. And in 1959 friendship reached a high point. Castro put special care into befriending American media during his guerrilla campaign. US reporters interviewed Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos several times in their Sierra Maestra quarters. The US and Fidel were undoubtedly playing both ends of the nascent Cold War until the CIA fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 signaled the final break with the US and the beginning of a direct alliance with the USSR.

 "Cuba, An American History," by historian Ada Ferrer provides a long-view perspective of the Cuba-US history. As an American citizen born in Cuba who has continued to return to the island since she left it as a child, Ferrer combines her personal experience with solid scholarship in terse prose to provide a well-balanced portrait of the complex relations between Cuba and the United States.

The result is a picture of unusual clarity, precisely because Ferrer does not fudge complexity and stick to historical facts. The book starts the history of Cuba and the US  with the first trip of the now vilified Christopher Columbus and follows up to the times of Donald Trump. Ferrer's focus on the people's history rather than the government's only shines light on the US and Cuba's critical common ground and ideals rather than on the apparent confrontations. To do so, it avoids the political narratives espoused and promoted by the rival governments to focus on the actual relationships between Americans and Cubans from 1959 to -almost- the present.

Ferrer shows how history repeats itself in both directions. How American independence was supported and launched from Cuba (which controlled Spanish Florida), secession and the slave trade, and how the Cuban flag and its independence founders came from New York and New Jersey.

The book prologue provides a good example:

"Prologue: There and Here 

"The connections between Cuba and the United States stretch back over centuries and run in both directions. Few Americans have likely considered the significance of Cuba for the United States. During the American Revolution, Cubans raised funds in support of Washington’s army, and soldiers from Cuba fought against the British in North America and the Caribbean. 

As the thirteen colonies lost access to other British possessions, the Spanish colony of Cuba became a vital trading partner. In fact, Havana’s storehouse of coveted silver currency helped finance the new nation’s first central bank. Later, after Florida and Texas became states of the Union in 1845, propertied southerners—and even some northerners—looked to Cuba as a potential new slave state or two, as a way to buttress the power of slavery and its economy. 

In 1898, the United States intervened militarily in Cuba and declared war on Spain. With that intervention, the United States turned what had been a thirty-year movement for Cuban independence into the conflict that history usually remembers as the Spanish-American War. 

The end of some four hundred years of Spanish rule was ritually observed at noon on January 1, 1899, with the synchronized lowering of every Spanish flag on the island. But the flag raised in its place was not a Cuban flag but an American one. With that began a full-fledged military occupation that ended four years later, only after Cuban leaders, under enormous pressure, agreed to grant the US government the right of intervention in Cuba. If the events of 1898 were fateful for Cuba, they also helped produce two consequential developments in the United States: first, the reconciliation of the white South and North after decades of disunion and, second, the emergence of the United States as an imperial power on the world stage. 

For more than a century, the role of the United States in Cuban independence has been the subject of disagreement— a shared history viewed in radically divergent terms. Historically, American statesmen have tended to view US intervention in 1898 as an illustration of American benevolence. The United States had rallied to the cause of a neighbor’s independence and declared war to achieve it. In this version of history, Cuban independence was a gift of the Americans, and for that Cubans owed them a debt of gratitude. In Cuba, however, 1898 represents something entirely different: more theft than gift. There, 1898 was the moment when the United States swept in at the end of a war the Cubans had already almost won, claimed victory, and proceeded to rule over Cuba as a de facto colonial power. Cuba Does Not Owe Its Independence to the United States read the title of an important book published in Havana in 1950. 

Alongside that American presumption and Cuban resentment, however, existed dense networks of human contact forged over decades by people of all kinds in both countries. 

Cuba’s flag was designed and flown for the first time by Cuban exiles in the United States. 

The first pro-independence Cuban newspaper was published in Philadelphia, and the first national novel was written in New York. 

Cuba’s most famous patriot and writer, José Martí, spent more of his adult life in the United States than in Cuba, and the largest memorial service for Cuba’s most important war hero, Antonio Maceo, was held at Cooper Union in New York. 

Cubans traveled to the United States to study at Harvard and Tuskegee, to shop in Miami, to play baseball in the American Negro Leagues, to escape dictators, and to view the famous falls at Niagara. 

Americans traveled in the other direction: to drink during Prohibition in the States, to buy land and cigars, to convert people to Protestantism, to forge networks of Black solidarity, to honeymoon and to fish, to hear jazz and get abortions. 

Americans listened to Cuban music, and Cubans watched American movies. Americans bought Cuban sugar; Cubans bought American appliances. Actually, Cubans bought just about everything (except sugar) from the United States."

Then Fidel Castro came along for almost 50 years and Cuba-US relationships seemed to take a 180 turn at the political level. At the social level, relationships remained like those of a family divided by forced migration, with one-third of Cubans living in the United States -most barely 100 miles away in Florida- while the other two-thirds remained -willingly or not- in their home country. After reading Ferrer's book the concept of "home country" for Cubans becomes healthily extended. 

The video at the beginning of this entry is worth watching in its entirety. Ferrer was interviewed in 2018, shortly after Barak Obama's trip to Cuba, and spoke candidly and presciently about its repercussions. At that time, the book we are discussing was still unpublished -Ferrer read the manuscript here and there-, and a well-informed American and Cuban audience made sharp and enriching questions and comments.

The book now includes Trump's four-year return to hostilities and Biden's more recent return to Obama's opening. 

Cuban-American history is still in the making, but it is clear that it will not be long before returning to its traditional roots. Cubans will be freer, and Americans will discover more about their Southern cousins.