Armageddon is Coming with a Whimper, Not a Bang

Hemingway famously characterized bankruptcy as a condition that comes on "gradually, then suddenly." With a pandemic sweeping the world, more than 100,000 American citizens dead, and protests against the murder of George Floyd turning violent across the nation, it may well feel that we are in the acute phase of breakdown. But when all is said and done, it is all too likely that the relatively "sudden" crises facing us now will prove to have been distractions from the dangers that continue to build gradually. I fear that, in the immortal words of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "we ain't seen nothing yet."

The problem lies in the emerging "whack-a-mole" pattern of the struggle to "flatten the curve" of charted transmission of Covid-19 here in the U.S. Lockdown measures have ameliorated the surge of infections that was overwhelming the health care system in places like New York and New Jersey. But because insufficient efforts were made to map the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing, or to time the implementation of social distancing protocols correspondingly, new hot spots of infection have begun to form in states such as Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and Minnesota.

Though Congress has passed extraordinary legislation to deal with the acute economic impacts of the virus, thus far the federal government has not acknowledged that the very nature of a pandemic requires a national strategy, implemented simultaneously from coast to coast (and elsewhere), to hold out any hope of redress. Unless and until we implement such a comprehensive national strategy we will see rolling spikes in infection. The virus will move around the map, circling back to previous hot spots where the curve had been successfully "flattened," as social distancing protocols are indiscriminately tightened and eased from location to location.

Why the White House has refused to lead a national strategy is a question for the ages. The consequences, however, are immediate and clear. In a country of 330 million people who enjoy unlimited freedom and (relatively) ample means of travel and commerce, if only a small percentage of them are failing (or refusing) to take precautions while a virus with an estimated "R value" of 2.0-2.5 (meaning that, absent restrictions, an infected person will infect on average of between 2 and 3 other people) is active, the pandemic will continue to move through American society like a cycling prairie fire.

The solution is not simple or easy, but it is clear. A sustained national campaign is needed. On the one hand, vastly more resources and energy must be dedicated to measuring the scope and tracking the path of the pandemic. Measures to reduce the "R value" of the virus are leveraged by a knowledge of where infections are concentrated, when.

Beyond this, a persistent and forceful communication effort must be made to galvanize the public. Transmission rates for the virus in indoor spaces, for example, can be greatly reduced by the wearing of masks, but because wearing a mask protects others vastly more than it does the wearer, the measure will only be socially effective if it is embraced universally. In a country where people cherish independence and harbor mutual suspicion, convincing a critical mass of individuals to wear masks will require the ubiquitous and unrelenting broadcast of visible, authoritative, and trustworthy messaging. Behavior will only change to an effective degree through disciplined and sustained effort on the part of national leadership.

Unfortunately, no such leadership is forthcoming. The only institution in the nation with the profile and authority necessary to lead the kind of campaign that is needed is the White House, and the President has made it clear that he will not shoulder this responsibility. Indeed, it is evident that Donald Trump is utterly misguided about the current state of affairs. He believes that we face a choice between continued attention to the public health crisis or a return to economic productivity.

This is of course ridiculous. As long as we continue to experience rolling spikes in Covid-19 infection in different localities around the country, the economy will remain paralyzed. A modern industrial economy cannot function without a responsive health care system, and the health care system cannot meet the baseline needs of the economy if it is overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients. Beyond that reality, even in places that are momentarily seeing reductions in infection, economic productivity will be suppressed by fear. Unless and until we inspire people with the confidence that they may re-enter the workplace and the marketplace at very low (and discernible) risk, growth will stall and recede. Creating confidence will require that people be educated in the precautions that will mitigate risk, and be reassured that everyone else has assented to the same, which in turn will require sustained and energetic leadership from elected officials (especially the White House).

There is the rub. We need our President to take certain proactive steps to restore the economy, and he has flatly refused. Much ink has been spilled expressing understandable fear about what Donald Trump might do moving forward, but the distressing fact is that he can potentially do as much harm as any figure in our history simply by doing nothing.

The economic crisis set in motion by the pandemic is enormous in scale. Unemployment stands at 14.7%, GDP is shrinking at an accelerating rate. Congress has moved to use fiscal policy to counter the damage of these declines, but all such measures are grounded in the presumption that the crisis will be of acute duration. We are thus faced with the very stark question: how long can the system hold out? How long before curtailed revenue streams and mounting debts induce panic? How long before confidence in the bond and stock markets collapses?

Leadership could stave off such inflection points, but here in the United States, the earliest we can hope for the necessary leadership is January of 2021. Do we have until then? I would not bet my life on it, much less those of my community, friends, and family. What, then, is the answer? Gandhi's adage perhaps holds out the greatest hope: "[We] must be the change [we] want to see in the world." Fighting our way out of this crisis is going to take citizenship of unprecedented intensity and on an unprecedented scale. We must put pressure on state and local governments to coordinate with one-another in the national campaign that should have been coordinated from above. Beyond this, we must encourage and enlist one-another in the ongoing struggle against the pandemic. If we can support one-another as neighbors and compatriots and lead one another through example and compassionate concern, we can perhaps restore enough of our economy to slow the gradual slide into panic, and avoid a sudden Armageddon. 

An Open Letter to Senators Cory Booker and Robert Menendez (NJ)

Dear Senators Booker and Menendez,

       As your constituent I write to plead for urgent action on your part in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that is ravaging our public health and economy. This is the greatest crisis to impact the nation in my lifetime, and I fear that it will irredeemably damage the prospects for my daughter and future generations of Americans if correct steps are not taken. We need the federal government now like we have never needed it since World War II, and it has yet to rise sufficiently to meet that need.
       The problem is not a lack of policy expertise or competent planning on the part of federal officials. Doctors at the CDC and the NIAID have set effective guidelines and provided intelligent benchmarks for the containment and redress of the threat to public health. Our distress arises not from a deficiency in policy strategy, but from faulty political execution.
        As our medical experts have told us, there is as yet no magic bullet or miracle pill that can dispel the pandemic, to combat it we must enlist the cooperation of tens of millions of Americans. Everyone must be mobilized in the collective effort to push forward testing, contact tracing, the maintenance of social distancing, the universal adoption of preventative measures like the use of masks and gloves, and vigilance in the maintenance of hygiene and sanitary conditions.  Without such a mass campaign, the catastrophic danger to public health will persist, and therefore the deepening economic disaster will continue and intensify.
         The crucial task in mobilizing and coordinating such a campaign is communication. None of the plans of medical experts will succeed without stable, consistent, dispassionate, and credible leadership on the part of elected officials. Moreover, given the scale and complexity of the coordinated effort that will be needed to fight back the pandemic, the White House is indispensable to any such attempt. No other institution has the broad audience or unquestioned authority of the Oval Office. We need an informative, disciplined, persistent, and unified message to emanate from the Executive, otherwise the collaborative power to defeat the threat will not be achieved, and the pandemic will rage on indefinitely.
          Unfortunately, our President has proven incapable of providing the leadership we need. Where credibility, consistency, and discipline are needed, he has provided nothing but lies, evasions, reversals, disingenuous partisan rhetoric, and disinformation. He is manifestly erratic, untrustworthy, and focused on his own political interests over the common defense and the general welfare he swore to uphold. Though it is not realistic to contemplate his removal from office at this late juncture, for the good of the nation he must be replaced as "commander-in-chief" in the struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic. We are locked in a battle that Donald Trump does not have the character or capacity to fight, and if he persists as leader in this struggle the entire nation will suffer profoundly. and needlessly.
           What then, is the answer? Pressure must be exerted on Donald Trump to step aside and give leadership of campaign against Covid-19 to a robustly powerful "Pandemic Tsar." Such a person would have to be well known, widely respected, have bipartisan credibility, and bring to the task a proven track record of managerial success. The ideal candidate would be Senator Mitt Romney, as he is one of the most widely recognized figures in the country and has a well-deserved reputation for integrity and dedication to public service.
              Massive pressure must be brought to bear on Donald Trump to hand over management of the public health crisis to a new Pandemic Tsar. I plead with you to take up this cause in the Senate, and enlist your colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join in the effort to secure the leadership that we need. The moment calls on all patriotic and conscientious Americans to do whatever they can to rescue the nation from distress. We look to you to be bold and forthright in your service of the public trust.
              I thank you for your attention on this matter, and hope that this message finds you well.

                                    Sincerely,


                                      Andrew Meyer
 

The Great Inversion

Historians are going to be kept very busy in years and decades to come, sorting through and trying to explain the strange circumstances unfolding now during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the most confounding is the contrast between the impact of the virus in the People's Republic of China and here in the United States. The Chinese government obviously exerts profound control on the gathering and flow of information, thus it may never be possible to fully and accurately quantify the impact of the virus on the PRC with total confidence. But it seems highly likely that, when all is said and done, the per-capita rate of infection and mortality in China will be significantly lower than that in the United States, and that this differential may even extend to the total number of fatalities in absolute terms. In other words, China may actually see fewer people die from the virus despite having 4X the number of people than the US. How is that possible?

As I wrote initially, it will take significant time to sort through evidence and causes. But some factors are on full display to see as the event unfolds. What is most surprising (and inexplicable) is the contrast between the systemic response of the PRC government and that of the USA. The gap between the overperformance of the former and the underperformance of the latter is so yawningly wide as to defy belief, much less explanation.

In the abstract, a neutral observer would expect the fundamental principles of the two political systems to be manifest in the practical response to the virus as events transpired. The salient traits of the PRC system are its authoritarian nature and its radically high degree of centralization. By contrast, the USA is a liberal democracy with a much  more decentralized structure. These facts should have given each system different but predictable strengths and weaknesses, respectively.

The great weakness of an authoritarian state is its tendency to let politics override the needs of policy. Because leaders are not ultimately or directly accountable to the people, their first impulse is very often to cover up problems rather than solve them. We saw this in the initial response of the PRC government to the first appearance of Covid-19. Early whistle blowers like the physician Li Wenliang (who contracted the virus in the course of treating patients and died) were ignored or gagged.

But once the facts on the ground demonstrated that the dangers could not be papered over, the CCP leadership switched very quickly to a "policy first" orientation, and began issuing directives at the advice of its medical experts. I remember distinctly the point at which the PRC went into a very severe "lockdown mode" in January, and friends living in China began to post in social media about being confined to their apartments. I thought at the time that this was a typical "overcompensation" on the part of the CCP leadership. That impression, in retrospect, was of course wrong.

At that point, the hyper-centralized nature of the PRC state, which is usually a weakness, proved ironically to be a strength. There is no ultimate division of jurisdiction or authority between the different levels of the PRC government. The local traffic police in Xiamen are effectively an extension of the government thousands of kilometers away in Beijing, which under ordinary circumstances creates inefficiencies and corruption.

But the pressing need in a pandemic is for coordination. Formulating an effective response requires that everyone be given the same information and undertake the same set of priorities simultaneously. This is a state of affairs to which the PRC system is uniquely well-adapted, and once the CCP had shifted toward a policy based in the prescriptions of epidemiologists, the machinery of the PRC state worked smoothly in its implementation.

Where the hyper-centralized structure of the PRC is usually a weakness, the federalism of the US government is usually a great strength. Allowing for differences in power and jurisdiction between different levels of government makes it more responsive to the particular needs of people in each locality and region, and creates checks against waste and corruption. But in a pandemic, where coordination is at a premium, the balkanization of state functions becomes a liability.

This weakness has been mitigated in past by arrogating robust emergency powers to the federal government, enabling it to step in during such moments of crisis and provide needed coordination and coherence. During wartime and natural disasters, we expect the federal government to take up the reins of leadership. The Covid-19 pandemic is an emergency greater than virtually anything encountered in recent memory, vastly eclipsing a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 terror attacks in impact. Yet federal leadership to meet the scale of the crisis has not materialized. Where a unified national response to the pandemic is critically necessary, each state has been left to formulate its own policy, creating a fragmentary response that has extended and amplified the destructiveness of the disease.

Even more strange than that, what should be the greatest strength of American governance has been totally undetectable in the current crisis. One would expect a liberal democracy like the United States to adopt a "policy first" orientation toward the pandemic from the very outset, especially when so much empirical data about the scale of the threat was available and when clarion alarms had been sounded by seasoned government experts as early as January. But here we are in May, and the White House has been and is still locked into a "politics first" functional routine. Denials and random disinformation are disseminated in lieu of facts, non-essential distractions like "the war on drugs" are spotlighted in public briefings, and partisan attacks are given pride of place over a focus on public health. Almost 80,000 Americans have died, and the United States is seemingly locked into a kind of "Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius," with no end in sight.

No matter how one slices it, the view on either side of the globe makes for a very strange comparison. The Chinese government has effectively overcome its greatest weakness, and converted what is ordinarily its greatest weakness into an extreme advantage. By contrast, the United States has completely nullified its greatest strength and allowed its greatest weakness to metastasize and intensify out of all proportion, essentially crippling the government's capacity to confront the catastrophic threat to public health. We here in the US have fallen into a trap of our own device. For all our sake, I hope that we find our way out of it before the systemic damage wrought by this crisis becomes permanent and irremediable.

An Open Letter to President Donald Trump on the Current Pandemic

Dear President Trump,

        I write to you out of concern for the medical emergency afflicting our nation. With more than a million citizens infected and almost seventy-thousand dead, this pandemic has quickly evolved into the greatest crisis of my lifetime, surpassing even the urgency and impact of the terror attacks that transpired on September 11, 2001. We are in desperate need of leadership that only the White House can provide, and we need it now.

      My purpose is not to cast blame or to make accusations, but to plead for obvious and indispensable solutions. We are faced with a dual threat: the medical peril of the virus itself and the economic devastation that the pandemic brings in its wake. These dangers can not be dealt with separately. There can be no restoration of the economy without redressing the threat to public health, and public health can only be safeguarded by due attention to the maintenance of our collective economic well-being.

       The problem is thus exquisitely complicated. Social distancing has helped "flatten the curve," but can not go on indefinitely without permanently bankrupting the economy. At the same time, though the harmful medical impacts of the disease are currently within bounds that our health care system can manage, until an effective vaccine or treatment is discovered (which may take years), a careless return to "normal" will send infections soaring again and overwhelm our courageous medical professionals, sending us back into an economic tailspin. We are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Our only hope is a coordinated national mobilization, comparable to the civil campaign that underpinned our effort in World War II.

        On the one hand, everyone (man, women and child) must be enlisted in the effort to reorganize our social and economic life to minimize the risk of infection and slow (if not halt) the transmission of the disease. Everyone must acquire and wear masks (and, when appropriate, washable or disposable gloves). All transactions must be reconfigured to allow them to transpire with as little contact as possible. Activities must be shifted outdoors, into venues that allow for social distancing, or staggered in time to allow for lower density of participants. Businesses must be constrained to and supported in adopting flexible work hours or operating at reduced capacity.

        On the other hand, all of the powers of our government and economic infrastructure must be mobilized to support the public health effort. Production of testing kits, masks, gloves, protective equipment, and therapeutic supplies (ventilators, oxygen concentrators, etc.) must be ramped up to meet demand. Transport networks must be organized. Overflow capacity for hospitals must be prepared and ready to be deployed as and where needed.

      Confronting such a complex challenge requires the persistent broadcast of a coherent national message.  Everyone must be given the same reliable information about the dangers of the virus, the proven methods that can stave off infection, and the necessary measures for the protection of the general welfare. Such information must be delivered credibly and dispassionately, without any hint of evasion or partisan political motive. Under ideal circumstances, given how fragmented we are as a society and how distracted people are by fear and disinformation, it will take weeks of focused and relentless communication to insure that the message penetrates as broadly and sinks in as deeply as will be necessary to meet the task. If people have any suspicion that they are being lied to or manipulated in any way they will simply not listen, and the necessary effort to mobilize the nation for recovery will fail.

        This leaves us with a conundrum. Though the White House is the only institution with the profile and audience expansive enough to get the message out, you, Mr. President, are not a credible messenger. You have traded in too many lies, too much disinformation, and too much disingenuous partisan rhetoric to ever enjoy the confidence and trust of a critical mass of our citizenry. Even if you were to see the error of your ways now, we do not have the time to wait out whatever learning curve would be necessary to bring your style into line with our needs as a country. Again, I do not write this to be gratuitously insulting or hurtful, but because these are the plain facts of a critically urgent dilemma.

         What then is the solution? You could appoint a new, vastly powerful "Pandemic Tsar," someone widely known, broadly trusted, and with a proven record of managerial success. Such a person could become the nexus of the vitally necessary communication strategy that is our best and only hope as a nation. The person who would be the obvious choice for such a position is Senator Mitt Romney. He would have the immediate and total attention of the media and the public, and would be a spokesperson credible to almost all Americans, on all parts of the political spectrum. I know that you and he have had profound political differences in the recent past. But for precisely that reason his elevation to the position of Pandemic Tsar would reflect admirably on you both, and inspire unity and hope in the people who need your leadership so desperately.

      I know that the solution I propose is somewhat radical. I hope, however that you will give it some reflection, and that in any case this letter finds you well. Thank you for your attention on this matter.


                      Sincerely,


                       Andrew Meyer

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate

In his first inaugural address, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared that "the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself," he was not merely lifting spirits or deploying powerful rhetoric. In 1933, with the Great Depression raging, FDR was both acknowledging one of the sources of the crisis and laying out one of his key strategies to combat it. Fear was indeed one of the root causes of much economic pain. Lack of confidence in the health of the financial sector was causing investors to abandon markets and depositors to make panicked runs on banks, setting off a vicious cycle (as more banks failed, more runs were set off, causing more banks to fail, etc.) that threatened to destroy the collective wealth of the nation entirely.

FDR understood the role that the president could play in allaying such fears. Mass panic is triggered by each person's lack of faith in what others will do. If I know that the bank is solvent, but I am convinced that all my neighbors are going to withdraw their deposits in delusional terror, I have no choice but to join the general stampede as quickly as possible or see my savings disappear. But if there is a single voice that I know my neighbors will listen to and trust, I can wait and see what will happen. If that voice gives them the reliable information I know to be true- the banks will be fine if only people will refrain from panic- then the crisis might pass. That was what FDR accomplished (in concert with policies like the creation of the FDIC) through his "fireside chats." By getting on the radio he was able to broadcast reliable information about the level of risk to everyone in the nation at once, and by arming people with that information (and the knowledge that everyone else had been similarly informed) he was able to redirect their collective behavior.

The situation now might seem to bear no resemblance to the crisis of 1933, but in concrete ways our problem is the same. During the Covid-19 pandemic much of the personal risk I as an individual face is dependent on other people's behavior. In deciding whether to go out and interact with others, I am confronted with questions. Do they understand the dangers of the virus? Are they taking precautions against infection? Have they washed hands? Disinfected commonly used surfaces? Will they know to wear a mask, and to maintain social distance? The pandemic itself is obviously a medical problem that will largely have to be redressed with medical techniques (vaccination, the development of effective anti-viral drugs). But as in the case of the Great Depression, much of the economic pain being caused by the pandemic is the product of fear, and much of the power to allay those fears resides in communication.

Concern over the state of the economy is understandably high, but in all the bluster about "the cure being worse than the problem" there has been little acknowledgment that the key to a restoration of economic productivity lies in information- both the collection of facts, and their accurate and credible dissemination to the general public. If we want people to go back to dining in restaurants and shopping in malls, we need to let them know: 1) how the virus is spread; 2)what the chances of getting it are in various circumstances; 3)what the risks of developing acute symptoms are (and how those vary from person to person on the basis of age, health, etc.); 4)what provisions have been made to provide them with urgent care (oxygen, ventilators) if they should need it; 5)what the mortality rate is for the population as a whole (and how those odds change from individual to individual on the basis of age, health, etc.). Moreover, it is not enough that this information is gathered and available:  the public must be assured that everyone has been apprised of it and can be counted on to act accordingly.

In this light, part of the challenge confronting our leadership lies in gathering information. Our response to the pandemic is hobbled because we do not have solidly credible answers to the questions I listed above. This is somewhat understandable. The Covid-19 virus is a new pathogen, and it will take scientists some time to sort through its impact on human physiology. But some of the blame for our ignorance lies with government. Developing at least provisional answers to key questions depends on testing (both tests for the infection itself and tests for antibodies in its aftermath), and testing has not been done on anything near the scale or at the rate that would be needed to develop a clear picture of risk.

But even accounting for the impediments posed by lack of testing and information, the vital task for the resumption of economic activity is communication. Since (on a recent, optimistic report) the earliest a vaccine will be available is September, and the economic pain of maintaining our current degree of social distancing will not be endurable until then, our leaders will need to begin to lay the foundations for the reopening of society NOW. As long as there is no general consensus about the risks posed by the virus in the absence of social distancing, about how they might be mitigated, and about what provisions need to be made for people who suffer the worst impacts, everyone will be held in place by fear.

 If we want people to emerge from their homes, we have to prepare them for the assumption of a level of risk, let them know what that level of risk is (or at least demonstrate that every effort is being made to measure it) and how it might be mitigated (through the use of masks, gloves, testing, etc.), and reassure them that emergency provisions are being made to minimize the worst impacts of those risks for everyone (through a temporary boost in hospital beds, ventilators, etc). Above and beyond getting these messages to citizens individually, it will be necessary to make the general public feel that everyone  is on the same page. Since so much of my personal risk will be contingent upon the level of information of my fellow citizens, I will not feel confident that I know what my level of risk is unless I feel that everyone else is armed with and has assented to the same information.

As in 1933, the institution in our society that is optimally placed to broadcast and coordinate the communications necessary to remediate the economic effects of the pandemic is the White House. No other office has such a broad audience or speaks with such authority. We need our president to formulate a coherent message and broadcast it consistently. Informing the public of the situation and enlisting their participation in confronting it will not be the work of days or weeks, but MONTHS of a persistent, deliberate, and coordinated campaign, employing all of the media tools and venues at the government's disposal, and bringing all of the different organs and agencies of the government into alignment.

As anyone who has been following the news must realize who has read and agreed with the last paragraph, the current situation of the United States gives little cause for optimism. The behavior of the Trump White House up to this point has been the exact opposite of what is needed for an effective amelioration of this crisis. Even before the pandemic hit, Donald Trump had undermined his credibility through frequent mendacity and gratuitous vitriol (it is difficult to trust the credibility of someone who has spent almost four years insulting you). Since the pandemic began he has further abandoned the public trust by falsely minimizing risks, evading responsibility, and disseminating misinformation. Communication is the key to forging a path out of the crisis, and our current White House has crippled its own capacity for effective communication.

Change is needed, and it must come quickly. Since the removal of Donald Trump from office is not likely before next January, and since he has shown little capacity to change over more than three years on the job, the best possible solution would be to remove Trump himself from the process. Finding someone to be a proxy voice is an imperfect solution. One of the reasons that the public is so inclined to heed the president is on the understanding that his words are backed by real power, and no one can be vested with power to match that of the president. But if someone with a very high political profile, broad credibility, and a proven track record of managerial success were invested with sweeping powers  and allowed to act with unfettered independence (i.e. the creation of a new, vastly more authoritative "pandemic tsar"), that person could become the epicenter of the communication strategy necessary for a resolution of our economic crisis.

The person who springs immediately to mind is Mitt Romney. There is obviously no love lost between him and the president since Romney's vote in favor of Trump's removal during impeachment proceedings. But for precisely that reason, the appointment of Romney would inspire confidence that the President had acted purely in the public interest, and would advantage the new "pandemic tsar" with both immense credibility and the undivided attention of the media and the public.

Such a move might be a stroke of political genius- by ignoring his own political advantage, the President could ironically increase his political capital tenfold. Given the track record of this White House, I will not hold my breath in anticipation of such a boldly deliberate move. But for all our sake, I hope that the White House will do something to fix its communication problem. Unless it does, there is little chance that our present distress can be alleviated.

The Book of Ruth

Since the autumn I have been volunteering to teach a “Confirmation Class” at our synagogue. Confirmation is a ceremony established within Reform Judaism (my temple, which is Conservative, has adopted it). The concept is to give teenagers a chance to “reaffirm” their commitment to Judaism when they are older and more mature than they were at the age of bar or bat mitzvah (“confirmation” usually occurs at the age of fifteen or sixteen).

I have been meeting with the students once a month for classes devoted to different topics concerning Jewish theology and religious life (past classes included discussions of God, ethics, ritual, tradition). Our last topic was “society,” which was a poignantly apt one to address in an online class during a period of “social distancing.” Since conditions precluded classroom activities like breaking into groups, I cast about for a text that we could read and discuss together in our online session. The one that sprang immediately to mind was the Book of Ruth.

I had read Ruth in the days before my own bar mitzvah, and thus was aware that it would serve our discussion well. But going back to re-read it with 52-year-old eyes gave me a new appreciation for its subtlety and depth. The text is brief, but it succinctly encapsulates some of the most complex dimensions of ancient Jewish social thought.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is that its protagonist is not Jewish (at least not as the story begins). Hers is the only book of the Tanakh (the Jewish bible, comprising Torah, Nevi’im [prophets], and Ketuvim [writings, into which Ruth falls]) whose eponym is a non-Jew.

Another remarkable aspect of The Book of Ruth is the candor with which it depicts the inequities and weaknesses in ancient Israelite society. As the story opens, Ruth’s mother-in-law, a Hebrew woman named Naomi who has migrated into the lands of the Moabites with her husband, loses her husband and both adult sons to famine. The text is very clear that Naomi’s situation is as dire as a human being’s can be, and that her dilemma is the product of forces such as patriarchy, wealth inequality, and xenophobia. Old, female, poor, and a stranger in a strange land, she has been reduced to a position of pure need and liability. She immediately dismisses her two Moabite daughters-in-law, telling them to return home to the families of their birth. She recognizes that it would be unfair to force these young women to share her fate.

One of the daughters-in-law, Orpah, bids Naomi a tearful farewell. Ruth declines Naomi’s dismissal, famously declaring, “Where you go, I will go.” If Naomi is a case study in pure need, Ruth is one in almost pure altruism. Ruth has little to offer Naomi, only her youth and strength. But to call the exchange asymmetrical would be a colossal understatement. Israel had food at the time, so ostensibly Naomi could offer Ruth entry to better circumstances. But the story goes on to show that Naomi’s ties of common heritage have little practical power in Israel. If Ruth has little, Naomi can only requite her with less than nothing: penury, misery, and (very likely) death.

Together Ruth and Naomi return to Bethlehem, the native place of Naomi’s departed husband. Once there, Ruth volunteers to provide for them by “gleaning” in the fields of one of Naomi’s kinsman, a wealthy farmer named Boaz. Gleaning was essentially a form of begging. Leviticus and Deuteronomy contain “gleaning provisions”- commandments that fallen grain and certain portions of each field should not be harvested by the owner of any land, but must be left to be gathered by those who are destitute.

Ruth proposes that she will glean Boaz’s land by following one of his workers during the reaping of the barley harvest. We see from the text that though the gleaning provisions are divine Law, they were honored more in the breach than in compliance. Despite the fact that Ruth is gleaning on a kinsman’s property, she hopes to glean “behind someone in whose sight I may find favor.” In other words, she will have to find a workman that she can charm into letting her collect grain, otherwise she would presumably be chased away. The person she ultimately finds favor in is Boaz himself. He sees her in the field and speaks with her, assuring her that he has ordered his young male workers not to obstruct her and that she may glean in his field unmolested. Again, the text is remarkably candid in admitting that the Law was no guarantee of compassion. If the gleaning provisions were being generally obeyed, it would not be necessary for Boaz to order his men to give Ruth leave.

When Ruth reports back to Naomi, the older woman intuits Boaz’s feelings and sees an opportunity. Knowing that Boaz will be sleeping out on the threshing floor during the harvest and will be approachable, Naomi sends Ruth to seduce him. The text speaks in euphemisms (Ruth “sleeps by his feet”), but it makes clear that Ruth has taken a grave personal risk. Boaz praises Ruth, saying, “this last instance of loyalty [to Naomi] is better than the first.” If Boaz had rejected Ruth, she would have at least suffered a loss of good reputation, perhaps worse. Instead, he conceives of a plan by which he might help Ruth, and sends her away under cover of darkness to Naomi with gifts of food.

Boaz’s plan reveals other elements of ancient Hebrew Law, and the vagaries of its real-world application.  He goes to the gate of Bethlehem in search of one of Naomi’s other kinsman (whose name we never learn), whom he consults in front of the “city elders.”  The issue is, of the two men, who has the right to “redeem” Naomi? 

“Redemption” is one of the most interesting institutions of ancient Israel, the source of the epithet “My/Our Redeemer” often applied to God in hymn and prayer. It is articulated in disparate passages of Torah, and forms a complex of obligations and privileges that fall on individuals as a function of kinship. When any members of the community fell into circumstances from which they could not escape (for example, if they were captured by enemies and held for ransom, or had debts that they could not repay that would drive them into bondage), it was the duty of their closest relative to “redeem” them, to do that for them that they could not do for themselves.

Boaz explains that this other, closer kinsman has the right to redeem Naomi. Naomi, according to Boaz, is “selling” a property she inherited from her husband. It is not clear whether Naomi actually owns the property (in which case the kinsman would simply have to provide men to work it), or whether the kinsman is being asked to purchase it (back from someone else) to help maintain her. In either case the implication is clear: the kinsman will provide for Naomi until she dies, and the kinsman will then inherit the property dedicated to her upkeep. The kinsman immediately agrees, as this looks like a “win-win” situation: Naomi will have support, but since she is older the property used to support her will profit the kinsman in the not-too-distant-future.

Boaz then reveals that Naomi is accompanied by her young daughter-in-law, Ruth the Moabite. At that news the kinsman balks. In the best case scenario he would have to wait out the lifetime of Ruth to have the use of the property, in the worst he might lose his claims on the property altogether if Ruth remarries, and he does not want to encumber his fortune (marrying Ruth would solve the problem, but he was obviously unwilling to do that, perhaps because she was a Moabite). He surrenders his right of redemption to Boaz, who now has a perfectly legitimate pretext on which he can marry Ruth (as part of his obligation of redemption- a “levirate marriage” to continue the lineage of his childless kinsman).

The Book of Ruth is fascinating because the complex of institutions that drive much of the drama of the narrative outline, in ideal form, a relatively robust “safety net” in ancient Israel. One could leap to the conclusion that the ancient Hebrews were early “socialists,” but that is a stretch. The kinds of hard distinctions between “private” and “collective” ownership of property that underpin and distinguish modern ideologies like capitalism and socialism are not articulated in the ancient sources. What makes them intriguing from our perspective is what they have to say about the philosophical foundations of society in the abstract.

The book begins by acknowledging, in almost Aristotelian fashion, that human beings are social animals. This is the import of Ruth’s famous speech- she pledges herself to remain with Naomi not out of some specific filial imperative, but because in very general terms to do otherwise would be to abandon Naomi to die. This is made clear by the text’s framing of Ruth’s sister-in-law, Orpah. Orpah is not depicted as making a “wrong” choice to contrast the “right” path taken by Ruth. The parting between these characters is tearful and laden with emotion. Ruth’s sacrifice is taken almost as much on Orpah’s behalf as Naomi's: since staying with Naomi entails hardship and likely doom, Ruth’s acceptance of the obligation frees Orpah to save herself. From the very beginning the text acknowledges that the operation and maintenance of all social ties entails a complex negotiation between disparate individuals’ obligations to self and others. These tensions are maintained throughout the text’s depiction of the social institutions of ancient Israel and their operation in practice.

Ancient Hebrews would have understood these Laws in theological terms. The Torah opens with God offering human beings a choice between self-awareness and immortality. Two trees were accessible in Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, and only the latter was forbidden. If human beings had obeyed God’s command and accepted the gift of immortality, none of the tensions that drive the Book of Ruth would exist. Since human beings chose exile from Eden, God has taken pity on them by granting them the Torah, which Solomon (putatively) understood to be “a Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it (Proverbs 3:18).” In other words, following the Torah and the social Laws it lays down regarding gleaning, levirate marriage, and redemption could rescue humankind (particularly those of humankind most vulnerable, like childless widows) from the perils of the mortal world and restore the Edenic paradise that God had originally intended human beings to possess.   

Why then, does Eden remain elusive? Here again the text is very candid. In an ideal world, with everyone following the Law to the letter, the Torah might operate as a true “Tree of Life” on the mortal plane. But that would require all people to embrace the Law, including the Moabites, Edomites, Egyptians, and myriad other peoples with whom the ancient Hebrews traded and interacted in diverse ways. Since the reality was that this would never be the case, accepting the socioeconomic obligations of the Law to neighbors and kin always entailed personal risk, which made the probability that even Hebrews would keep faith with the Law relatively low. 

For example, redeeming my kinsman from bondage sounds like a very wise thing to do, as long as I can count on someone doing the same for me if and when I am in such need. But what if some of my kinsmen (or the kinsmen of my kinsmen) are Moabites and do not recognize that obligation? How does that figure into my risk-reward calculation as I weigh my obligation to the Law? If I operate under the assumption that God always punishes the wicked and rewards the good, I might feel more confident (i.e. as long as I keep following the Law, I can be sure never to need to be redeemed by another human being), but if that were the case, why would Laws such as the gleaning provisions, levirate marriage, and redemption be necessary in the first place?

What is most surprising about The Book of Ruth is the irreducible degree of humanism latent in its underlying message. The text shows that God’s will can never be enough to forge a functional society. Laws like redemption, levirate marriage, and the gleaning provisions can sketch out the parameters of what is fair (there but for the grace of God go I- since all providence comes from God, God may command us to share what we have with those who do not), but they cannot in and of themselves create a social compact in the absence of the personal commitment of the individual members of a community.

In the final analysis, the text demonstrates that society itself is not possible without individuals like Ruth. The human condition makes all of us vulnerable at some times (childhood, old age) and some of us vulnerable at all times (due to sickness, poverty, isolation). Unless some of us are ready to “redeem” others- to accept others’ vulnerability as our own responsibility, as Ruth does with Naomi- society will never be able to cohere to any minimal degree. Moreover, though the text acknowledges that there are almost never enough people like Ruth (everyone around Naomi wonders at her unexpected good fortune), in the figure of Boaz it shows how we might have more. Boaz chooses Ruth as a mate as much or more for her “social mindedness” as her other qualities. He shows that if we could see and value that in others (seeing past other arbitrary characteristics, such as their being widowed, poor, or a “foreigner”), the world might be a much better place.

In discussing the Book of Ruth with my students I did not make any mention of our current political situation, but I cannot help reading it in light of what is happening today. Now more than ever we can see that the persistence of society itself depends upon our willingness to accept responsibility for one-another’s welfare. Now more than ever we can see the vital importance of valuing social-mindedness in others, particularly our leaders, over vanity and self-promotion. It is no exaggeration to say that the lessons of the Book of Ruth are not merely timely and cogent, but essential to our very survival. Not bad for a bunch of ancient Hebrews.

Calling Dr. Feelgood, Or This is Our Final Warning, Part II

   

There is this video going around that sums up Trumpism in a nutshell. It is of a chiropractor telling people to eat zinc and drink tonic water to fend off Covid-19 (I won't link to it, because I refuse to move traffic to his page- please Google around if you want to see for yourself). Now, there is nothing wrong with drinking tonic water (according to the chiropractor the quinine in it will have the same salubrious effects as the hydroxychloroquine Dr. Trump keeps prescribing) and little wrong with taking zinc (actually, too much zinc can really do you harm- PLEASE consult your doctor if you are going to take zinc supplements). But anyone who imagines that zinc and tonic water can IN ANY WAY replace washing your hands, disinfecting the commonly used surfaces in your home, and maintaining social distancing as protection against Covid-19 IS OUT OF THEIR COTTON-PICKING MINDS.

      But to watch this "doctor," you would believe that all of this talk of a pandemic is just hooey. He rants on and on about how people are being lied to. The dead are filling hospitals in NYC? Why, in his part of Florida (!) doctors are being laid off! How does he know that quinine and zinc will help PREVENT the virus? Because some doctor in Louisiana has had good results giving it to patients WHO ARE ALREADY IN THE ICU! You can't make this shit up.

       But those noxious leaps of ill logic are not what encapsulate Trumpism in its essence. That effect is achieved by two properties of the video. The first is the whole rhetorical frame. The guy is wearing a kind of medical uniform and sitting in a recognizable medical office (there is a chart of the human musculature behind him). He is thus trading upon the credibility of his profession, without accepting any of the responsibility that such a move would entail (Trump's credo- all the credit, none of the responsibility). As a "doctor" he should stick to what is PROVEN, and the only proven prevention for Covid-19 at this point is hygiene, disinfection, social distancing. For anyone speaking as a medical professional to say ANYTHING different is malpractice. Might zinc and quinine help? Yeah, maybe. MAYBE. The fact that one doctor in Louisiana has had good results giving them to ICU patients is cause for hope, not certainty.

     And suppose, just for shits and giggles, we speculate that what the doctor in Louisiana has shown (we can't know now for sure, after all) is that zinc and quinine will cure you after you develop severe symptoms, but won't do shit for you before that. What would the chiropractor have done then? He will have fucked us all, won't he? He will have sent millions of people out to get zinc and quinine, so that everything in stores and warehouses is bought up, and nothing is available to the hospitals where it might do some good.

     That is the kind of thing you would think about before taping a viral video, if you took your hippocratic oath seriously, in the same way much of what Trump says or tweets would never be uttered or written if he took his oath of office seriously. But taking your oath of office seriously is for losers. Trumpkins have no patience for that kind of thing. And who am I? I am just some libtard who suffers from TDS, so I must just be saying this because I hate Trump 🤣.

     The other way in which Dr. Feelgood perfectly channels the Trumpist message is in his persistent use of a particular logical fallacy. He points to several instances of what he calls "fake news," for example, a news story that misleadingly says that a baby died of Covid-19, when in fact it was born prematurely to a woman suffering from the disease. His criticism of such reporting is plausible, but he keeps comparing these instances to "shouting fire in a crowded movie theater," noting that to do so is a felony.

     This is the scariest aspect of Trumpism. When Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. first articulated the "yelling fire" thought experiment, he was trying to outline the UNIQUE and EXTREME circumstances in which the state might bar free speech- if what you say has the potential to kill or harm hundreds of people IN A MATTER OF SECONDS, the state has a right to punish you for saying it. But now Dr. Feelgood is implying that people should be jailed if what they write in their newspaper or on their website upsets enough young mothers.
 
      This is the true Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trumpkins seem ready to suspend any and all critical thinking about the principles of our democracy in defense of their Dear Leader. Watching them sort through the facts of this pandemic is like watching a medieval astrologer try to explain what is going on in the sky. Trying to explain things like "retrograde motion" is very hard if you are committed to the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. In the same way, trying to deal with the plain facts of our situation on a day-to-day basis is very difficult if you are committed to the idea that Trump is a great leader (hell, if you are committed to the proposition that he merits being called a real "president").

     For example- how does it look that Trump said we would have zero cases by April so we shouldn't worry, then he said we might have as many as 200,000 deaths so we should start taking it seriously, then he said we should all start thinking about getting back to work, because we should stop worrying again? Does that look like the blatherings of a weak, indecisive, and irresponsible "leader"? If so, someone must be to blame! Someone other than Trump, of course. The media! The liberal elites! Round up the usual suspects!

      This cult of personality around Trump is frighteningly toxic and corrosive. As long as Trump is in office we will simply not be capable of having a meaningful discourse about public affairs that engages a critical mass of the citizenry. Now is Dr. Feelgood's time. I would say that I hope he is enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, but it is coming at the cost of endangering many gullible people's lives. Hopefully the fall will bring some amelioration of this pandemic of bullshit, and we will have effective treatments and preventative medicine for Covid-19 soon after.

This Is Our Final Warning

As the United States struggles to contain the spread of Covid-19, the calls to refrain from politicizing the crisis are as understandable as they are impossible. Understandable, because playing politics with a catastrophic public health crisis can only cause harm. In order to slow the spread of the virus, all citizens and institutions must be persuaded to alter their behavior in drastic and often self-sacrificing ways. To win their compliance with these measures, it is vital that they can trust the information coming from the government, and they will neither trust nor comply if they have any suspicion that government pronouncements are motivated by politics rather than the public interest. The President was thus absolutely correct in declaring, in his Oval Office address of March 11, that "[w]e must put politics aside."

It is impossible to put politics aside, however, precisely because Donald J. Trump is President of the United States. Only five hours ago, the President tweeted that his own health agency, the CDC, was unprepared to respond to a pandemic, and that this incapacity was (in part) the fault of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Undermining the public's confidence in the CDC can only make matters worse, by weakening its already anemic leadership of the national response to the pandemic, but the President is concerned with his own re-election and the political impact of Covid-19 in the short term.

This is an example of "Trumpism" in a nutshell. If the worldview of operatives like Karl Rove could be encapsulated as "Politics First," Trumpism is its hyper-steroidal evil twin: "Politics Only." There is no such thing as a durable or inviolate long-term policy imperative in the Trump presidency. Everything is subordinated to the President's perceived political needs of the moment.

The Covid-19 crisis and the tangled web of lies, contradictions, and non sequiturs that have flowed from the White House in response are only the latest and most egregious example of this principle. The full litany of mechanisms by which Trump reduces all policy to politics, from "fake news" to "the Ukraine hoax," to "Build that Wall!", is too long and complex to possibly document here. But the sheer weight of empirical evidence puts this basic aspect of Trumpism beyond the shadow of a doubt. The voluminous flow of luridly irresponsible statements from the President's rallies, interviews, or Twitter account generates endless speculation about his state of mental health or ideological nefariousness (this very speculation is, by the President's own admission, one of the key political advantages bought by his rhetorical strategy), but all such speculation is rendered moot by the clear fact that Trumpism, whatever else it might be or express, boils down to one thing: "Politics Only."

The liabilities inherent in such a state of affairs have never been more evident than what is transpiring in the face of the threat posed by Covid-19. Is the lack of testing capacity a product of routine government incompetence, or does it embody the President's obvious belief that "low numbers" of reported cases benefits him politically? Is the exception given to travelers from the U.K. done in the public interest, or out of consideration for the profitability of the President's golf courses in that country? There is no way to determine answers to these questions, and this very opacity hamstrings the federal government's power to lead in this crisis.

Despite paralysis at the federal level, a robust social response has begun to emerge. Colleges and universities are beginning to shut down, major sports franchises have cancelled season play, civic organizations are moving to cancel conferences and other large social gatherings. Why? Because despite the lack of coordinated federal leadership, the free flow of information has made the scale of the crisis apparent, and responsible leaders at multiple levels of government and civil society have spontaneously acted on the reported facts of the emergency. We are still a free society, and the members of a free society are empowered to mobilize for one-another's protection and welfare.

Quick action at the state and local level may yet save us from the worst case scenario. If Donald Trump is re-elected, however, such a robust social response to the next crisis will not be possible. During a second Trump term the free flow of information that facilitated the emergence of the current campaign against Covid-19 will slow and then stop.

Why? One does not have to imagine that Donald Trump is mad or that he leads a diabolically authoritarian conspiracy to understand the reasons for this future outcome. If, like President Trump, you are committed to a governance built around the principle of "Politics Only," then the minimal functionality of government requires you to control perceptions, and the only way to control perceptions is to stop the free flow of information. We can already see this mechanism at work in the dynamics of the Trump administration, from its blanket refusal to comply with Congressional and judiciary oversight, its vehement concealment of the President's tax returns, and its constant efforts to expand the scope of executive secrecy into otherwise routine affairs. In a second Trump term the administration will move in ways small (restricting press passes to friendly news outlets) and large (using the AG office to sue unfriendly media figures), ordinary (propaganda) and unpredictable ("emergency" laws), to restrict the free expression of inconvenient facts and opinions.

The certainty of this happening can be inferred not merely from the administration's past behavior, but from the clear logic of their situation. They will not survive four more years of challenges half as vexing as those they have already encountered, if they continue under current conditions. Something will have to give. If the Covid-19 pandemic provides one clear object lesson, it is this: should we continue to entrust Donald Trump with the stewardship of our system, the system itself is doomed. This is our final warning.

An Open Letter to Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

       I write you as a concerned Democrat and American. Like you, I recognize the urgency of defeating Donald Trump this coming November. Our nation faces an existential crisis. If Trump is re-elected, he will complete the job of undermining the rule of law and subverting our governing institutions that he has worked at so assiduously for more than three years. A second Trump term will spell the end of the American experiment in democracy. In that light, like you I would like to see the Democratic Party nominate a candidate that has as strong a chance of  defeating Donald Trump as possible.
        I know that you have put yourself forward for the Democratic nomination in the belief that you are well equipped to win in the fall, and I would not contradict you. But you are not alone in that regard. Any of the current Democratic candidates could do so with an energetic and strategic campaign. The only question facing us as voters now is to assess who would possess the greatest advantages and who labor under the most severe liabilities in the general election.  
        On this question I likewise agree with you on one point: of all the candidates now running, Senator Bernie Sanders would be most vulnerable in a campaign against Donald Trump. I do not feel this way because I share your assessment of Senator Sanders's politics or the appeal of his policy proposals.
        Rather, I worry that his past will provide too much fodder for Republican spin doctors during a general election campaign. Too much video and audio exists of Bernie Sanders saying and doing things that were tolerably provocative for a local Vermont politician back in the 1980's, but would be shocking in a national campaign today. The foundation of Bernie's appeal to voters is that he has been so consistent in his values and message for the past decade, in which he has been much more careful about the tone of his rhetoric on the national stage. When the images of his firebrand past hit the airwaves, voters may feel they have been deceived in his true character, and turn on him out of a sense of betrayal.
           Taking that into consideration, the question that faces us now is not "who can beat Donald Trump," but "who can win the Democratic nomination other than Bernie Sanders"? The answer to that question, I would propose, is not you or any of the other "moderate" candidates in the Democratic field. Coming into this election the momentum was always with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The party fielded a moderate candidate in 2016 and lost. Meanwhile, the Republicans fielded a morbidly unfit, malignantly sexist and racist extremist, and met with electoral success. It is no wonder a critical mass of Democrats take from this debacle the lesson that "playing to the center" is a fool's game, and that the party would be well advised to focus on motivating its base voters over any attempt to "win over" the opposition. 
           If the progressive wing of the party has the advantage in choosing the nominee (and for the reasons I outlined above, it does), then the candidate furthest to the right who has any chance of winning the nomination has always been Elizabeth Warren. In both her rhetoric (past and present) and policy proposals Senator Warren appeals to progressive Democrats but is slightly more moderate than Bernie Sanders. Even if they find her too liberal, Warren is the best compromise candidate for whom moderate Democrats may hope.
            I have been a strong supporter of Senator Warren's from the very beginning of this campaign. I am convinced that she will be an optimally powerful opponent against Donald Trump and an excellent president when elected. Your assessment of her may differ, but I think you must agree that she is less vulnerable than Bernie Sanders in the general election. If you are persuaded that she is the most moderate candidate who stands any chance of winning the nomination, I hope that you will consider giving her your endorsement.
            Given the trend in the voting and the polls, Senator Sanders seems well poised to lock up the nomination within the next month at the latest. Unless something is done to change the trajectory of the race, he will be the one on whom all of our hopes to save the nation from Donald Trump will be riding. If you would prevent that contingency, your best option would be to drop out of the race now and throw your support behind Senator Warren. Such a move would bring the moderate and progressive wings of the party together, and forge a broad coalition in preparation for the contest in the fall. 
            I realize that this would be far from what you originally planned when you set out to run for the presidency, but I appeal to your obvious sense of civic duty. Giving your endorsement to Senator Warren would be an inspiring act of selfless patriotism, especially given the constant displays of narcissism, duplicity, and partisan chauvinism by the current President and his Republican enablers. I hope that you will give it some consideration.

                                    Sincerely,


                                     Andrew Meyer

The "Vision for Peace" is a Vision for a One-State Solution

I was at an event yesterday in which a Jewish-American who had lived for many years in Israel was discussing the Trump "Vision for Peace." He presented it as the "best deal" the Palestinian leadership or people are likely to get. That may well be true at this point, but doesn't make the plan anything more than naked political theater. 

 After the presentation was over I went up and asked the speaker how many new Arab-Israeli citizens the plan would create. He wasn't sure, but he agreed that, looking at the map, the number would have to fall somewhere between 500,000-1,000,000. So one must ask, if the plan was carried out, would Bibi ever get re-elected again? No. But it is easy to make promises that you know you will never have to keep, just like it is easy for Jared Kushner to shake his head about how much money the Palestinian leaders are forgoing when you will never have to pony up. 

After asking my shifting demographics question I said to the speaker, "You know, there is a very easy one state solution." "Yes" he said, "but you know what that would mean for Israel." "I know it," I replied, "and Mahmoud Abbas knows it- that is why this 'best deal' is DOA- and Bibi and Trump knew that from the start." 

The easy, fair thing to do would be to make everyone from the Jordan River to the sea (including those in Gaza) an Israeli citizen. That would immediately make Israel a 49% Jewish/51% Palestinian nation. Thus, the creation of a separate Palestinian state is a non-negotiable necessity if Israel wants to persist as a democratic Jewish state along the lines envisioned by Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. 

Bibi and Trump are in no position to tell the Palestinians what counts as a "best deal," because the Palestinians don't require that their nation contain a majority of any particular religion or even ethnicity- they just want the rights of citizens of a sovereign nation on the land they call home. Since what they are bargaining for is radically simpler, their latitude to make demands has always been much higher. This "Vision for Peace" was never meant as a serious proposal- Bibi and Trump deliberately played politics with an issue that is vitally important to Israelis, Palestinians, and Jews throughout the world. In order to please some religious voters in Israel and evangelical voters in the US they have mortgaged the credibility of the US as a fair broker and that of the Israeli government as a good-faith negotiator. In the long term, they have ensured that a peaceful "one-state solution" is almost certainly the best outcome for which anyone can hope.

Abuse of Power is a Crime

Listening to the opening arguments of lawyers defending Donald Trump in the ongoing impeachment trial, it became clear that much of the president's attorneys' defense hinges on semantics. Alan Dershowitz, for example, citing precedents from the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, argued that a president could only be impeached for "crime-like behavior," and since "abuse of power" is not a statutory crime, it does not meet the constitutional criteria for removal of a duly elected president. This arguments fails for the simple reason that, by any reasonable understanding, abuse of power is a crime. Indeed, it is the most basic crime that might justify the impeachment of a president, if we follow the clear logic of the constitution itself.

While the constitution does demand that the president be removed only on commission of "high crimes," the claim that, in the case of the president, such infractions can only be recognized by consulting the current federal criminal code is absurd. It remains a point of controversy, 222 years after the adoption of the US constitution, whether the president is subject to criminal indictment at all (current Justice Department directives say "no"). Since the criminal code does not regularly apply to the president, it is foolish to expect that it would outline every infraction of which the office was capable. Why would Congress pass a law that cannot be adjudicated?

This reality is acknowledged by the impeachment process itself. If the crimes for which impeachment was legitimate could be found in the criminal code, the power of impeachment would be invested in the courts. Because the crimes for which impeachment is warranted constitute a special class of infraction, the process is entrusted to the legislature.

If the crimes for which the president can be impeached are not violations of the criminal code, what body of law regulates such infractions? The answer is quite simple: the Constitution of the United States itself. The constitution is, by its own account, "the supreme law of the land." When a president is impeached, he is fundamentally being accused of crimes against the constitution. Since all of the President's power is invested in him by the constitution (as Article II, Section 1 declares: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America")  and the oath he took to uphold the same, "abuse of power" is the most basic crime for which he may be impeached.

How then, does what Donald Trump has been accused of constitute an abuse of power? The most basic dimension of the infraction lies in the simple act of asking for a political favor from the government of the Ukraine (a transgression that he then repeated and amplified on camera, adding China to the foreign powers from which he solicited such gifts). The constitution binds all officials of the government, but especially the president, to act in "the common defense," not out of a concern for their personal political fortunes. Nothing about the favor requested by the president enhanced the security or well-being of the people of the United States. It was pursued exclusively for the purpose of enhancing the President's electoral chances in November.

This constituted an "abuse of power" because it was a maneuver of which the President, alone among officials of the US government, was capable by virtue of his office as "chief diplomat." The constitution makes the President the prime point of contact between the US and foreign powers, but places discrete constraints on the legitimate exercise of that special access, because it explicitly acknowledges the danger of abuse. All officials are forbidden to accept "gifts, emoluments, offices or titles of nobility from foreign states and monarchies" and the president is made particularly impeachable on the charge of "bribery" because the constitution recognizes the potential for foreign affairs to undermine the democratic processes of our governance. The key check on impropriety by  US government officials is the scrutiny of the American citizenry: any action by an elected official may result in loss of power at next vote. Foreign kings and leaders face no such checks on their actions as regards the US. In their dealings with the US, they are accountable to only one American: the president, and their actions might never be made available for the US voting public to investigate.

If a president were sufficiently free to do so, therefore, he could "outsource" all manner of tasks that would be politically advantageous if their motives and true conditions could be obscured from the voting public. Fabricating a murder scene in a hotel room to discredit a political opponent, for example, carries huge risk for a US official because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and other checks on government power stand as powerful deterrents. But those deterrents do not constrain the actions of a foreign government acting on the president's behalf (this would of course be true in an autocratic government like North Korea, but might even apply in the case of a democratic country whose people were sufficiently hostile to the United States). From any angle that one examines the question, solicitation of political favors from foreign leaders is a violation of the office of the presidency severe enough to constitute a "high crime" in and of itself.

Donald Trump's alleged transgression in the particular case of Ukraine, moreover, is compounded by the fact that he not only solicited a political favor, but is accused of trying to extort it from Ukraine's president using his powers as conductor of foreign policy. The founders were focused on "bribery" as an impeachable offense because they viewed the nascent US as a weak nation vulnerable to the sway of foreign potentates, thus the abuse of power that they most easily imagined a president committing entailed capitulation to foreign pressure. But now that the US is among the world's chief superpowers, the president is able to pressure foreign governments into aiding his undermining of the democratic process. If the president had threatened Ukraine with a military strike unless they announced an investigation of Joe Biden, for example, that would not violate any criminal statutes, yet under those circumstances the president's lawyers could not plausibly argue against such an action being an abuse of power worthy of impeachment. To argue that the withholding of military aid from an embattled ally facing an existential threat is not an impeachable abuse of power similarly violates common sense. In both cases, the president's abuse of otherwise legitimate powers for personal political ends are a crime against the constitution.

As the supreme law of the land, the constitution guarantees us the right to live in a Republic. The basic embodiment of that entitlement is the assurance that our government contains no official with the arbitrary and unchecked powers of a king. The constitution acknowledges that foreign affairs are a realm in which the democratic checks and balances of government are most vulnerable to subversion. That is why proscriptions and sanctions constraining officials' dealings with foreign powers were built into the constitution, and why the powers for the conduct of foreign affairs were shared out between the president and the Congress. Lawyers may argue about the facts of the case involving Donald Trump and the government of Ukraine, but there can be no question that what the president is accused of is an impeachable offense. If the President attempted to extort a personal political favor from the government of Ukraine, against the will of Congress and to the potential detriment of an ally's security, he abused his power as chief diplomat and executor of US foreign policy. Such an act is a crime against the constitution, and would warrant removal from office.

Imagining an Iranian Spring

The recent brush with war between the US and Iran underscores the persistent question of US-Iranian relations: will the two countries ever reach a point of mutual toleration ever again? In my past two posts I suggested ways in which the US would have to change in order to facilitate such a development. But one perspective would suggest that no amount of adjustment in US attitudes or foreign policy would make a difference. The Iranian theocracy is so incompatible with American values, so goes this view, its ruling ideology so antithetical to American interests, that detente will remain forever out of reach unless and until regime change transpires in Iran

Thus here I would like to take a moment to explore whether or not there is any plausible future in which a changed Iran might find common ground with the US. My aim here is not to ponder the ways that Iran must change, but to think through the possibilities of how it might change. Is there any reason to believe that Iran and the US could grow toward one-another, given world enough and time?

The first reality one must confront in answering such a question is that the system of theocracy and the institutional leadership of an ayatollah as "Supreme Leader" is not likely to disappear from Iranian politics, even in the long term. The durability of these structures in the face of extraordinary diplomatic, economic, and military pressure shows that they have deep-rooted support in Iranian society that cuts across lines of class, education, region, ethnicity, and gender. This fact engenders the most vehement pessimism among outside observers of Iran. "A theocracy," so goes this line of reasoning, "is hopelessly behind the times. So long as the Iranian people accept the leadership of the mullahs, they can never truly be part of the modern world."

The latter perspective, however, overlooks several important realities. The first of these is the reason for the resilience of theocracy in Iran. Outside observers might be inclined to believe that Iranians follow the mullahs because, as a society, they are more devout or awestruck by religious authority. This might be true for parts of Iranian society (as it is true for some evangelical Christians in American society that would like to see our government become more theocratic), but it does not statistically explain the persistence of the current system in Iran.

On the whole, the mullahs enjoy the broad support they do because of Iranian nationalism, not religious devotion. Pious Muslim farmers and cynically atheistic university students can be counted among the mullahs' supporters (to varying degrees), because all respect the clerical authorities as successful stewards of Iranian independence. The Shah was widely perceived to be an American puppet, and elected politicians like Mohammed Mossadegh had proven vulnerable to the combined machinations of the US and Soviet Union. Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in establishing Iran as a neutral party in the Cold War, an achievement that few nations as small as Iran had been able to accomplish.

His legates have profited from the lingering credit for that achievement. Moreover, the theocracy is a source of pride among Iranians because it is a system uniquely their own. Because it is built upon the peculiar foundations of the Shi'ite clerical establishment, it distinguishes majority Farsi-speaking Iranians not only from "the West," but from their Arab-speaking neighbors, who (with the exceptions of Bahrain and Iraq) generally adhere to Sunni Islam.

The institutions of the Islamic Republic thus do not mark Iran as any more captive to "superstitious religiosity" than any other nation in the region. A belief in the irredeemable stasis of the Iranian system is more a product of European and American bias, grounded in the prejudices of the Enlightenment, than of empirical fact or observation. The role that the mullahs play in the construction of Iranian national identity is comparable to that of the Queen in Britain or the Emperor in Japan. If the latter countries could evolve to claim a place in the modern world, so can Iran.

How might this occur? By the same process in Iran as occurred in many of the most exemplary democracies of the current era. In both Britain and Japan, for example, democratic (the Parliament and the Diet) and anti-democratic (the royal thrones) institutions shared power in dynamic tension with one-another over decades and centuries. Each of those nations became the "constitutional monarchies" that we see today through a process by which power bled away from the royal throne and toward the legislatures.

A similar process could occur in Iran, transforming it into a "constitutional theocracy." This would require much less system-building than many people might realize. Iran already possesses relatively robust democratic infrastructure. It has an elected parliament and president, both of which have genuine authority and are substantially accountable to the electorate. These offices are presently rigidly constrained and impeded by the arbitrary fiat of the mullahs, but that admixture of power could shift in Iran over time, as it did in Britain and Japan.

Such a shift is more than a hypothetical fantasy. The Green Movement of 2009-10 and the even more violent spasms of civil unrest that have rocked Iran over the last year show that the government of Iran is under constant pressure to further democratize. As unlikely as it is that the mullahs will be overthrown, it is equally unlikely that they will be able to resist pressure to yield power to the democratically elected leadership indefinitely.

Again, some in Europe and America might protest that religious leaders "will never surrender power that they believe comes to them from God." But this again betrays an Enlightenment bias. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire portrayed "religion" as a uniquely pernicious force because they were preoccupied with their own struggles against the Catholic Church. But to insist that Iran's system is uniquely irredeemable by comparison to that of Britain or Japan is to wildly overstate the difference between an ayatollah and a king or emperor. The Queen is after all, the head of the Church of England, and the Emperor is the Chief Priest of the Shinto faith.

The leaders of Meiji Japan were so sensitive to "modern" contempt for "religious superstition" that they encoded the ludicrous proposition that Shinto was "not a religion" into imperial law, so as to  clear the imperial throne of any charges of "theocracy" even as mass participation in Shinto rituals was made compulsory throughout the empire. This did not prevent democratic reform, however. During the Taisho Era Japan saw a burgeoning of democratic political life, in which the imperial throne gradually yielded control to civilian politicians and the elected representatives of the legislative Diet. Writers like Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) envisioned a future of constitutional government for Japan like that I am imagining for Iran, one that bears close resemblance to the democracy operative in Tokyo today.

Some might point to the case of Japan as proof that real democratic reform requires regime change. But this is to (at least in part) overlook the lessons of the Taisho Spring. The rising prosperity and robust international diplomacy (the willingness of the industrial powers to enter into the Kellogg-Brian Pact, for example) of the post-WWI era helped foster democratic reform in Japan. The tide was only turned toward militarism and autocracy by the cataclysm of the Great Depression.

Japan's experience suggests that military pressure and the infliction of economic distress through sanctions will not encourage progressive tendencies in Iran. The forces for democratic reform in Iran obviously exist. For them to prevail, they must be empowered to compete with the forces that would retrench religious authoritarianism. If that were to occur, we could see a shift of power from the "Supreme Leader" and his fellow ayatollahs to the elected legislature and president. The role of the clerical establishment would not disappear, but would become progressively more ceremonial and symbolic (like that of the Queen in England or the Emperor in Japan).

Though violent conflict might play a role in that process, historical example would suggest that violence is not the only or necessary means of such a transition. Rather than continuing to pursue its fruitless decades-long policy of military coercion, diplomatic isolation, and economic deprivation, the US could thus more effectively foster an "Iranian Spring" by being open to commerce and diplomacy with Iran. Such a transition might be long in developing and might never lead to complete trust and amity, but it would assuredly yield profound benefits for the people of Iran, the US, and the entire world.