Republican decodes Democrats and much more: an unlikely oracle

Sarah Longwell listens to voters with a political messaging consultant's perspective and she knows whereof she speaks. How to Eat an Elephant – One Voter at a Time became a best seller because she translated what she learned from hundreds of voter focus groups -- Trump supporters and Trump critics -- into smart, appealing, and graceful campaign wisdom. This is book an easy read and very worth the time of anyone working to defeat MAGA -- and that project won't be over, even if we win a blue wave on November 3.

People out of my world -- folks loosely left of the Democratic Party -- are likely and probably rightly suspicious of Longwell. After all, she's a former Republican operative and the publisher of The Bulwark, the landing spot for Republicans who couldn't stomach their former party's fascist turn. But she's a dyke (that does help; we view our society from slightly outside) and committed to electing even Democrats she can barely stand if that turns back MAGA. I find her determination to ground her politics in listening to infuriatingly muddled American voters a sign of democratic (lower case "d") integrity.

I'm not going to try to summarize this book. Some of it I very much disagree with. But I really do urge you to read it if you aspire to use the Democratic Party to turn back fascism. I will share some charming tidbits. And then I'll take up one of her observations that that meshes interestingly with my experience over 30 years of deep electoral campaign involvement. 

First, some slightly random teasers from the book, not meant to convey a unified message, but to encourage your curiosity: 

• It’s true (sort of) that voters are the problem. But they’re also the solution. Which is why we need to persuade them by developing policy and messaging frameworks that grow the pro-democracy coalition. It won’t be easy. But there isn’t an alternative.

• The irony is, in elite Democrats’ good-hearted attempts to be maximally inclusive, they end up with a set of rituals and language that baffles most Americans and creates a barrier to connecting with voters.

• Trump’s revolutionary effect was that, first, he made his supporters stop pretending to care about virtue. And then he made them embrace vice. ...  Character doesn’t just not matter—bad character is a marker of authenticity when authenticity is the coin of the political realm. The snake who admits he’s a snake is now deemed more trustworthy than the politician who acts—and might actually be—virtuous.

• I’m struck by how personal and visceral COVID vaccine resistance has become. A woman in Alaska told me flatly: “I got the eight shots I got in the ’60s and I have managed to make it this far with those eight freakin’ shots and I am not getting another one pumped into this body.” This isn’t a policy disagreement. This is bodily autonomy fused with institutional betrayal. The grammar of hidden knowledge has colonized the most intimate domain: what goes into your own body. ...

• To do what I’m talking about, Democrats need to toughen up. Stop crying and start sweating. Sorry, you don’t get Fridays off. Democracy’s at stake. Sorry, you can’t work from home all the time. America is at stake. Put on real pants and go to the office. The fascists are outworking you. They’re out-organizing you. Out-communicating you. You’re talking about microaggressions when you need to prioritize the macroaggressions being committed on a daily basis against the American experiment.

• More good news: This is the kind of moment when new leaders emerge. The old guard is exhausted. The appetite for change is overwhelming. The voters are ready—desperate, even—for something new.

If these quotes whet your appetite, pick up this book. 

• • •

Now to one of Longwell's observations, only glancingly developed, which I think those of us trying to preserve the possibility of a participatory US democracy should attend to. She writes:

The Republican operative world I came up in was mercenary and entrepreneurial. We started companies: consulting firms, media ventures, direct mail operations, opposition research firms, PACs. The incentive structure was clear: deliver results, make money, climb the ladder. There was less hand-wringing about process and more focus on outcomes. If something worked, you did more of it. If it didn’t, you moved on. The culture was competitive, sometimes cutthroat, but it was honest about what it was. We worked weekends.  

The Democratic world, as I have observed over the last decade, operates via a different set of cultural norms. People default to starting nonprofits, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and foundations instead of for-profit companies. The culture is mission-driven rather than financially incentivized. There’s a lot of talk about work–life balance, making sure everyone feels included, centering the right voices. The vibe is values first, process oriented, unionized. There’s a lot of talk about mental health. Employees agitate for four-day workweek. ...

I wouldn't say this is a completely fair description of either side as I've observed them over 30 years of (mostly paid) work in progressive campaigns. But I also think there is some truth.

I've seen plenty of Republican campaign efforts which weren't the pure capitalist enterprises that Longwell describes here; they were just rip offs off of candidates and causes by campaign firms that had made a profitable industry of extracting tribute from the gullible and the semi-powerful. I've also seen plenty of the same from Democratic consultants who may have once had their day, but deliver very little value while skating on reputation. (Looking at you, James Carville.) 

Longwell's description of the Democratic side is something I've seen -- but it misses the essential truth of Democratic campaigns which Longwell is now living.  These campaigns, except possibly at the most local level, are inherently coalition efforts, unlike the Republican ones where the base will toe the line. The Dem base -- both funding and activist -- consists of mission driven fractions which agree (or not) to play alongside each other for a season. They are an arena of multiple cultures -- unions, civic groups, religious groups, racial justice advocates, enthralled candidate fans. Getting them to work together productively IS the campaign. 

When Dems win, it looks obvious and easy -- but it never is. And the building of the really large coalitions is largely imperceptible to participants. When it works, we work hard. We exude attractive purpose. We all think our fraction won the day, even when we are vaguely grateful for the larger whole. And the big Democratic coalitions are held together by mission, not primarily money. 

• • •

One other throwaway line from Longwell that I can't resist raising up. 

One of the stranger things about the success of The Bulwark is that it’s basically free. As [her colleague] JVL likes to say, “You can’t save democracy from behind a paywall.” ...  Despite not charging for almost anything The Bulwark puts out, we still have a robust paying subscriber base. What are they paying for?

Long ago, I was part of another movement/community which worked the same way: the Catholic Worker as founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. The cost for a subscription to its newspaper remained from its Depression era origin: "a penny a copy; more if you can, less if you can't." And the cash flow funded not only the paper, but multiple "houses of hospitality" for a community of the otherwise unhoused.

Some people have always known that financial stability flows from mission; the anomaly is that American society and democracy has forgotten this.

We live in a strange country

It's been hard to get enthused about the United States' 250th anniversary celebration. On the one hand, Donald Trump defiled the big day with a partisan political rally and a fireworks show that left the capital under a world-record smoke cloud. Serious people like Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. used the occasion honestly to ask why the nation has always hated our dark pigmented residents and citizens. 

Yale University historian Beverly Gage takes a light approach to exploring the nation's moment in This Land is Your Land: a Road Trip Through U.S. History. Her story of visiting many famous and obscure historical sites is quite simply fun, though not without sharp and novel observations.

As part of my academic training, I took a ... tempered and realistic look at the United States, with all of its contradictions and injustices. I also learned to be skeptical of self-congratulatory narratives: progress, manifest destiny, shining-city-on-a-hill exceptionalism. Historians tend to be myth-busters. ... With the country’s semiquincentennial—or 250th birthday—on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the proverbial ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, in the third decade of the 21st century. 

... I headed not for Washington, D.C., where recent mandates to teach “patriotic education” have precious little to do with the actual past. Instead, I set off to explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about their history. This book is a report of my travels: thirteen chapters in thirteen American places.

Gage's encounter with George Washington's accomplishments and his historic home at Mount Vernon begins with the story of a slave girl, Ona Maria Judge.  As a child house servant, she was carried by the Washington family first to New York City and then to Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania city was then home to more free Blacks than whites; it was the most anti-slavery corner of the new nation. When the Washington family prepared to return to Virginia after the general's presidency, Judge had other ideas.

On May 21, 1796, while the president and his wife were eating dinner, she walked out the door and never came back. By the time the Washingtons returned to Virginia, she was living and working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as a free woman, though Washington never reconciled himself to that fact.

In visiting the historic homes of the revolutionary generation in Virginia, Gage came to what she thinks is a broadly applicable conclusion about historical preservation and display: 

... Mount Vernon became a public destination thanks to private effort. In 1853, a South Carolina matron named Louisa Bird Cunningham happened to be traveling down the Potomac when, according to legend, she came upon Washington’s grand old mansion, bathed in moonlight. It was in rough shape. She worried that Washington’s legacy would be lost to the public for lack of upkeep and attention. 

“If the men of America have seen fit to allow the home of its most respected hero to go to ruin, why can’t the women of America band together to save it?” she wrote to her daughter, according to a display at today’s Mount Vernon. Thus inspired, they initiated the estate’s transformation into a public attraction. They also established what would become a central feature of historic preservation: It has often been women who have the vision, dedicate the time, raise the money, and do the work.

And in this iconoclastic vein, Gage's journey continues through the remnants of Andrew Jackson's Tennessee, frontier Texas and the Alamo, the astonishingly creative human energies of 19th century upstate New York abolitionists and women's suffrage activists, massacres of native people on the western frontier, and industrial strife in the nation's great cities. She recounts what took place and what remains in delightful prose, highlighting individuals both worthy and quirky.

What other historian would approach the country's invention of the atomic bomb by spending a night in a decommissioned missile silo, decorated to attract curious tourists? Outside Roswell, New Mexico, an entrepreneur has made the experience available to the curious:

The Atlas silos were accident-prone (though no nuclear explosion ever occurred). As a result, the program around Roswell lasted only a few years before being supplanted by superior technology. When military authorities pulled the missiles out in 1965, they left the silos behind: gargantuan steel-and-concrete bunkers hidden beneath the New Mexico desert. ... If I’m being honest, I was a little nervous about spending the night in an underground nuclear bunker all alone. ... 

From a distance, the silo is easy to miss, little more than a concrete platform flush against the landscape. But once [her guide] pulled open the big red steel door, leading down into the residential quarters, a whole underground world emerged. [Proprietor Gary] Baker has reconstructed the silo as a combination history museum and you-are-there immersive experience. It’s cold and deathly quiet, aside from the clanging metal sound that accompanies all human movement.  

Baker lives four stories down with his wife in a full-service apartment complete with running water and Wi-Fi. The Airbnb unit sits just above that. It’s a surprisingly cheery space, with a little kitchen adjoining the main living room, plus a bedroom with two single beds and a bathroom with shower. The kitchen comes fully stocked—which is convenient, since there aren’t many restaurants or grocery stores in silo country. Baker also provides plenty of subject-specific, period-appropriate reading material. I spent a few minutes flipping through Rockets and Your Future, a 1961 book aimed at persuading teenagers to enter the space business. The biggest wow in Baker’s underground lair is the silo itself, located just a few steps from the door of the guest apartment. 

... The missile is long gone, of course. But it’s not hard to imagine it sitting there, encased in its underground habitat, waiting for the chance to burst up through the surface and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

If the official celebration of the 250th anniversary leaves you cold, I can heartily recommend this truthful and quirky romp through the American past and present. Many of us need some cheering up about our country these days. Beverly Gage provides.

How to live in a nation that hates you?

I'm not unusual in being moved by this 250th US anniversary to think about the present through the lens of Centennials Past.  Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. has offered his reflections in America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries.  A scholar of James Baldwin, he is not into pretty pictures of the past; this is not that kind of nation. 

And so Glaude begins:

I do not love America, and never have, especially now.

From there, he's more than ready to tell us why that is:

... Desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to themselves, most white Americans have been led by that fear, and continue to be led, into a kind of delirium that erupts, repeatedly, in unimaginable violence and draconian policies. They lash out. They destroy or render entire populations invisible, lock them away in prisons, push them to the edges of our communities, or deport them in order to keep the country, or their idea of the country, from being torn asunder.

... Trump’s reelection in 2024 signaled that a large swath of white America was unwilling to struggle any longer over race matters. Instead, he reasserted the fantasy of a white Republic. ... 

The burden of white America is a lot to carry. But here Glaude is -- and here we all are.

Glaude takes up various bits of our history and white America's shame in the light of the five great commemorative anniversaries. Particular horrors bubble to the top of this stew for deeper examination. 

For example, launching off the fact that Frederick Douglass's home place was western New York state in the years before the Civil War, Glaude dissects the Tops Market hate massacre in Buffalo in 2021. This one got to me, because Buffalo also was my home place, and I do not want to forget...

... Well over a century after Douglass delivered his speech in Corinthian Hall and Garnet announced in Buffalo that pharaohs were on both sides of the Red Sea, Payton Gendron, an eighteen-year-old white male from Conklin, New York, drove over two hundred miles to east Buffalo, exited his car with a semiautomatic rifle with the word Nigger scrawled on its barrel, and opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market. He was dressed in tactical gear and live-streamed his killing spree on Twitch. [Ten shoppers died.]

Gendron purposefully chose this area because of its high concentration of Black residents. Buffalo is the sixth most segregated city in the country and the third poorest city in the nation. Thirty-five percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Black children in Buffalo live below the poverty line. In 2021, African American unemployment in the city stood at 11 percent. Masten Park on the East Side, where the Tops grocery store is located, is like most Black neighborhoods in poor cities teeming with Black people trying to make ends meet. Severe residential segregation has drawn a hard line between Black and white residents in the city. One reporter likened Main Street to the Berlin Wall, a divide, like railroad tracks in small Southern towns, that separates Black and white neighborhoods. 

Before the horror on May 14, Black people lived in a city that fundamentally devalued and disregarded them, no matter which political party governed. They lived and died by a thousand daily cuts in “the city of good neighbors. ...

Glaude goes on to recount the testimony of the survivors and the relatives of the murdered. These are people who do not have the option of ignoring the reality that too much of their own country discounts their humanity. 

How to live in a nation that hates you? Glaude takes this as his problem and his text:

... We are forced to live with the idea that, because of the color of our skin and because of the color of yours, somehow that says something about our value, our worth. ... 

... There is this palpable sense throughout the country that everything is collapsing around us—that hatred has overrun basic values and that greed has trumped decency. Hope for a racially just society seems like a fool’s desire, because so many white folks—those who can’t imagine themselves as anything but white—have lost their damn minds. 

But love breaks through. Not some sentimentalized love of country that can easily slip into a kind of idolatry that makes one monstrous, but the love of people close to the ground, who give this place meaning and purpose. The love that motivated slaves to imagine a future as a free people when nothing about their experience suggested that such a future could be possible; the love that announces hatred must never have the last word. ...

... Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us. 

The reality is what it is. The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with this madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the “intolerable bitterness of spirit,” because these people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues.

Glaude would never deny he's a kind of preacher. 

When not to follow the leader...

Here's an addendum to my previous post about Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: in the introduction to that 2024 book, O'Brien muses about what Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine might reveal about the Russian's capacities as a war leader.

... As this book is being completed, the greatest example of this reality of personal grand-strategy-making is playing out before us.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to create a greater, more powerful Russia, shows once again that grand strategy can be hijacked by deeply flawed individuals over bureaucracies or structures. In no rational world could the Russian invasion of Ukraine be seen as something well thought out or in the Russian national interest. It was poorly conceived, based on a hopeless misreading of Ukrainian intentions and capabilities. The Russian Army was also constructed in such a way that it was far less than the sum of its parts.

While Putin might have had an ends-ways-means plan in his own mind, we can say now that he had poorly constructed means, which he employed in wholly unrealistic ways in a vain attempt to achieve completely unrealistic ends. Yet just before the invasion he was considered perhaps the most savvy and intelligent leader of a major power in the world.

Putin’s grand-strategic performance has in many ways combined the worst strategic traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In a rational world, with a sober evaluation of the Russian Army, one would have imagined a state’s decision-making bureaucracy would have tried to halt his invasion of Ukraine—as one would have imagined the Italian state might have restrained Mussolini from invading Greece, or German influences might have kept Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union with Britain still fighting.

Like the Axis leaders of the 1940s, Putin made war on the Ukraine of his imagination with a military greatly debilitated by corruption and incompetence of which he was either ignorant or unconcerned. Russia ran into something unanticipated in Ukraine. O'Brien's substack chronicles the consequences. It's my go-to source on the Ukraine war and seems honest, though not objective. He knows who he supports.

Of course, Putin is not the only contemporary leader of a powerful military and country who ignorantly substitutes his fantasies for any coherent plan or strategy. 

 

Does the character of leaders matter?

Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War approaches the history of what Americans call World War II from an angle that I found counter-intuitive. Studying history, I've absorbed the lesson that most of what happened in human societies had less of its origins in the foibles of individuals than in wide economic and intellectual forces which shaped the possible. But, of course, people with power play out their times in the terrain which those forces make possible. This book is O'Brien's whack at how five strong leaders shaped their European war.

And it's a delicious volume, human stories smoothly recounted and convincingly deconstructed on the landscape observed by a student of military history and international relations. I had been reading O'Brien's indispensable substack on the Ukraine war and wanted to explore his scholarship. This makes an easy introduction.

For the purposes of this book, the strategic decision is the choice by the leader, with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow. The implementation is the translation of that plan into action. ... One of the great tests of grand-strategic leadership is learning what not to do as well as what to do.

O'Brien's subjects were two men born in the 1870s (Stalin, Churchill) and three in the 1880s (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler). They were all, in some sense, survivors. 

Stalin clawed his way through prison under the Tsar, civil war, and Bolshevik revolution to make himself the unchallengable ruler of the Soviet Union by 1930. He was something of an unlikely successor to that more complex and brilliant revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin:

Stalin’s fundamental problem was that he was not competent enough to fulfill the purposes of his command. ... You can work very hard to create the reality you want, and with enough power you can often succeed. ... Playing up the idea of a vast conspiracy of traitors in their midst ... helped Stalin appeal to Lenin. He might not have been terribly competent, but he would take extreme measures to protect the Leninist line against all possible enemies—even those who were not enemies yet. Lenin approved of Stalin’s willingness to use the most brutal means against possible enemies, even when he was aware Stalin was making things up. ...

Churchill traveled around the British empire as a young privileged adventurer, then took up political party politics, and got himself appointed in 1914 as First Lord of the Admiralty in time to be held responsible for the British/Australian landing in Turkey which ended in a massacre. More to his credit, he also used his position to inspect the trench warfare in France and took enduring lessons:

Churchill now understood that modern weapons had made a mockery of bravery. Machines would determine the outcome of this war, and exposing oneself was more likely to lead to injury or death than anything else. ... If he had retained many boyish traits when the war started, the man that returned to London was more sober, cautious and methodical in his strategic outlook. He now had a holistic war strategy that stretched from the production of weapons to the deployment of forces in the field, all underlined by a coherent geopolitical vision.

O'Brien skims only lightly over the personal crisis of which Roosevelt was a survivor. During World War I he worked for the Wilson administration in the Department of the Navy and came away with an understanding of how controlling the oceans might be America's great strength. He was a political up-and-comer, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on a losing 1920 ticket. And then he barely survived polio and emerged with paralyzed legs. Despite this seemingly insurmountable setback, he won the governorship of New York State in 1928 and then the presidency in 1932, in time to confront the Depression depths of bank failures and mass unemployment. But he also repudiated his non-militarist foreign policy positions.

During a time of financial hardship and growing military threats in both Europe and Asia, Roosevelt’s agenda strengthened the US Navy while providing desperately needed industrial jobs in shipyards up and down the country. It would be the start of Roosevelt’s military preparations for World War II, and would reveal the enduring legacy of his earlier experiences.

The three who became the leaders of the Allied powers had held responsible, although subordinate, positions during World War I; the two Axis dictators had been ordinary soldiers in the Great War. 

O'Brien manages no respect at all for Mussolini. Of these five men, I had known the least about the Italian fascist, so will quote at some length.

Making Italy great, and himself even greater, would be his foundational strategic mindset—even if he had as of yet no clear idea [in 1918] how to achieve it. ...

... Much of the time within the narrative of World War I, the Italian experience is overlooked in favour of the great battles of the Western and even Eastern Fronts. Yet by Western Front standards, the Italian soldier made an equal, and in some ways greater, sacrifice to that of his British and French comrades. By the end of the war, five million Italians had served in the armed forces, and 650,000 of them had died (or would soon perish because of war-received wounds) 

... trincerocrazia (rule by those who had served in the trenches) would form the core of a “new and better elite” which [Mussolini] claimed should rule Italy after the war. Of course, he was too modest to point out that a prominent newspaper editor who had served in the army would be ideally suited to lead this new trench-ocracy. Mussolini was coming closer and closer to arguing for an overthrow of the Italian state. The journey to a personal dictatorship was shortening. ...

Mussolini had a prescription for regaining Italy's imagined former military greatness.

He said the Germans had made a terrible mistake going on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, as this was actually “more expensive” than going on the offensive. How anyone who had witnessed how machine guns and modern artillery could devastate attacking infantrymen could still think the defensive was more expensive boggles the mind. However, instilling the right values remained to Mussolini the key to preparing soldiers to advance. 

... In the balance between morale and equipment, willpower always triumphed over steel. Mussolini was “certain that thousands of cannons and machine guns are not enough for victory, if the spirit of the soldiers is lacking.”

Having posed the question of Italian "greatness," he made himself the answer for attaining it after that war.

If the Allies had unfairly thwarted Italy at Paris [in the Versailles Treaty], Mussolini would be the man to make Italy great again. He created his own political movement in the midst of this supposed humiliation ... In November 1921 the Fascist Party itself was founded with Mussolini as its leader, and in 1922 he seized power over all of Italy. It was the culmination of his wartime learning. 

Mussolini viewed the Italian state, not insensibly, as too weak and chaotic to save itself. He thus threatened a march on Rome more as an act of bluster than any widespread violent action. Indeed, he was prepared to call the whole thing off if the government reacted with force. Luckily for him they didn’t, and the indecisive King was only too happy to invite Mussolini to take power to end the chaos. Il Duce was made. 

World War I had taught Mussolini how to seize and manipulate power, and the value of acting like a great power even if you were not one. The only trouble with this strategic outlook would come if someone called Mussolini’s bluff.

The rest of O'Brien's account of Mussolini's role in World War II amounts to how Churchill and then Hitler did indeed call the Italian's bluff. Italian fighters executed their deposed dictator in 1945.

Despite having been born in Austria, Adolf Hitler volunteered as a lowly dispatch courier for the Germans in the Great War. And according to to O'Brien, Hitler got lucky, suffering a minor wound that kept him out of the worst of the German rout and killing fields, while leaving some indelible impressions. 

Hitler’s wound, in the thigh, was relatively light, but he was pulled off the line and sent to a military hospital near Berlin. Once there, due to the vagaries of military bureaucracy as much as anything, he would wait approximately six months before returning to the Western Front. Hitler was shocked by what he discovered in Germany. Instead of a people united in support for the war, he came face to face with widespread dissatisfaction, even defeatism, in both the army and the general public. 

Though his doubts about the true resilience of the German people remained, he did not want to admit that Germans might honestly doubt that this miserable war, which had already killed hundreds of thousands and brought misery and famine to their doorstep, was a mistake. No, the real culprit had to be the Jews. In his fact-free world, the Jews had used the war to embed their domination throughout the production process and to stoke animosity between Bavaria and Prussia, all the while skillfully avoiding military service themselves.

He did take one practical if over-blown lesson from his war experience:

Hitler had a much greater focus on the importance of military equipment in determining the outcome of modern battles. ... Hitler’s fascination with the largest, heaviest firepower reveals something common in dictators: a stress on strength, without a corresponding ability to understand rational trade-offs. ...

Hitler's wartime service convinced him that he had found his destiny:

... To answer the question of why [the 1918 German] disaster had occurred, Hitler fell back on the conspiracy theories he had been nursing for years and magnified them to enormous proportions. An internal, criminal enemy had poisoned the mind of the German people, leading them to betray the valiant troops at the front and transforming a possible war-winning situation into a humiliating defeat. 

This is the crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding Hitler as a war leader in World War II. It combined his grasp of how to win wars (heavy equipment based on German technology which carried the biggest punch possible) with how Germany lost this one (home front weakened and then betrayed by evil influences—particularly Jews). 

The combination of these ideas also seems to have been the motivation he needed to change professions. If Hitler went into the army in 1914 still thinking he would become a great artist or architect, by 1918 he had decided to immerse himself in politics. 

Having explored the life lessons these five men brought to World War II, O'Brien's actual recounting of the events of that war is more sparse. Pretty much all of them acted in accord with pre-existing character. 

Hitler, whose ego was already massive, started telling people that everything now depended on him and him alone, and that he needed to act in case he died early and Germany was deprived of his historic leadership. ...

Hitler's war became a parade of strategic failures for Germany. 

On the other hand --

After December 7, 1941, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill had any doubts about the outcome of World War II. They were both convinced that Germany, Italy and Japan would all be crushed. ... Their earlier experiences with war had taught both Roosevelt and Churchill the vital importance of controlling the air-sea super-battlefield—and in that way they had a massive advantage over Adolf Hitler, with his more parochial war and life experiences.

The Russian ruler was the one who learned and adapted most over the course of the war. Because Stalin enjoyed the material support of Britain and the United States and led a country where war had evoked patriotic nationalism, he had time and opportunity to learn to be a successful war leader. 

Stalin’s meeting with [Roosevelt's envoy] Harry Hopkins was just one example of how he reacted to adversity not by doubling down on his own brilliance, but by trying to cultivate and benefit from the support of others. This was not because of any change of personality; it was because he had calculated, accurately, that the chances of his personal survival and that of the USSR (and then later of their further successes) would be better assured by taking help where he could get it, even if this showed him doing things that ideologically or personally he had not done before. ... Stalin had the capacity to learn. In 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and Stalin were quite similar as military commanders. ... 

When Stalin let his generals lead, with Allied materiel arriving, the immense size and valor of the Russian army came into play and turned the tide against Germany. Stalin learned.

O'Brien faults Roosevelt for not being willing to face his own mortality and for failing to prepare his vice president Harry Truman. From having been an anchor of stability, Roosevelt risked the final success of the alliance. 

Though one does not want to analyse Roosevelt’s psyche too much, part of him seemed to believe that, as long as he was president, he could not really die. ... in 1944, Roosevelt would make one of the most selfish choices in international relations history, something so profoundly self-centred that historians still shy away from addressing it. He not only decided to run for office while dying; he decided to change vice president to someone he did not like, would not confide in and would not prepare in any way to be president. ... 

... In refusing to provide the US government with an idea of concrete war aims and purposes, Roosevelt was making a mockery of the Clausewitzian notion of strategy being a connection between ends, ways and means. Roosevelt, more than any war leader, had a clear idea of ways and means—fighting the war with air-sea power and many machines over soldiers, etc.—but [these] seemed disconnected from the ends. The ends were what he wanted at any given moment. 

... By the end of the war, three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions. Even the two survivors, Churchill and Stalin, had aged greatly because of the stress of war leadership. Neither was the same forceful figure after the war that he had been when it started.

O'Brien concludes by arguing in favor of greater focus in historical accounts on the character and capacities of leaders. (Yes, now as then, that seems forever to mean all men.) I greatly enjoyed this book; it rounded my understanding of massive events which I've studied through other lenses. But I wonder -- is this truly the best way to greater understanding?

... grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe. ... then, now and in the future—we have to try to understand the minds of the individual leaders who make the crucial choices. Though we use phrases like “national interest” or “greater good,” these are abstract concepts in grand-strategy-making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt had very personal notions of what national interest was; in some cases, notions that led to the lives of their fellow citizens being made far worse. All of them also believed that they were personally indispensable in terms of making their countries greater, and all imposed their own visions on their states during the course of the war. As such, they regularly acted like their personal views of the world were in the national interest of their countries, when they were decidedly not. If we want to understand strategy, we must also understand the strategist.

Perhaps. Certainly any contemporary American is forced to see what horrors a leader with no moral character at all can lead to.

Good struggles, necessary struggles

The despicable racist hacks on the Supreme Court have eviscerated the hard won national Voting Rights Act passed in 1965: an email from the national citizen action group Indivisible speaks to this moment.

Civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis advised us. “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”

He encouraged us. “Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.”

He challenged us. “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.” 

Waging a Good War: a military history of the Civil Rights Moment: 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks could not be a more timely read if we are to take up John Lewis' challenge to continue his good struggle. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post covering our wars and military affairs, Ricks long wrote a fascinating blog in Foreign Policy in which he dialogued with past and present military personnel about their profession.

In this 2022 book, he explores the civil rights campaigns, "the Movement" as it was known, from the perspective of a war correspondent. 

In the1960s the United States became a genuine democracy for the first time in its history, as laws and practices that prevented many Black Americans from voting were challenged by the civil rights movement. ... Now, six decades later, a significant part of the American political establishment has succeeded in repealing many of the voting rights gains of the 1960s.

This national arc led me to go back and read hundreds of books on the civil rights movement. The more I delved in that history, the more I found myself calling on my own experiences as a war correspondent to interpret what I was reading. I saw the overall strategic thinking that went into the Movement, and the field tactics that flowed from that strategy. ... I began to see the Movement as a kind of war -- that is, a series of campaigns on carefully chosen ground that eventually led to victory. The Siege of Montgomery. The Battle of Birmingham. The March on Washington. The final assault at Selma.

He saw what was coming and what is now before us:

... The same antidemocratic faction of American life that opposed the Movement in the 1960s has been resurgent lately ... there are signs we are once again threatened by the ancient and powerful forces of caste and oligarchy. If America is to have what most Americans want -- a multiracial, multiethnic democracy -- we will need to renew the promise of the peaceful voting rights crusade ...

And he brought a prescription for understanding that past which has lessons for our future struggles:

... to my surprise no studies have looked at the Movement through the prism of its similarity to military operations ...

... the perspective of military history is helpful, even perhaps imperative, if we are to discern how to apply its lessons to our predicaments today. No, the civil rights movement was not a traditional army with weapons and a single command structure. Yet from 1955 to 1968 a disciplined mass of people waged a concerted, organized struggle in a cause greater than themselves. 

Many died; many more shed blood; thousands were put behind bars. In conducting their campaigns, activists made life changing decisions with inadequate information while operating under wrenching stress and often facing violent attacks -- circumstances that are similar to the nature of leadership in war, making the military lens a useful one in understanding what happened and why.

The bulk of the book is a vivid telling of the incidents of the culminating civil rights campaign of the mid-1960s. There was plenty of drama and not a few setbacks along the way, but there was also planning and strategic brilliance. 

... Overall the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. ... Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a veteran of the Movement who served for years in Mississippi, summarized it as "struggle -- disciplined, thoughtful, creative struggle." ... 

Discipline in military operations is most often thought of as following one's training and obeying legal orders, and both are indeed crucial. But the foundation of it all is self-discipline, most often in simply being persistent, of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one's own emotions and fears in order to serve a greater good. In the civil rights movement, an additional form of discipline was maintaining the message that is being sent out to the world. ... As King once put it, "Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks."

... Strategy... involves ... understanding who you are, and next identifying one's goals, and only then developing an overarching plan for using tactics to achieve those goals. One of the Movement's great strengths was that its leaders formulated a strategy, then developed tactics that fit their approach, and finally gave to the people who were assigned to execute those tactics the training they needed to do so. Each of these levels fit together, with each action carrying a message -- the flesh carrying the word, as it were. That meshing is harder than it looks. 

The contemporary American military, by contrast, often tends to be good tactically while lacking an overarching strategy ... tactical excellence without a strategic understanding resembles a Ferrari without a steering wheel  -- the vehicle may be powerful and look good, but it won't get you where you need to go.

The Orange Toddler's "excursion" into Iran sure confirms that last point.

As a movement foot soldier of the Sixties and also of the subsequent women's and gay movements which were spawn of the Civil Rights Movement, I was also interested in how Ricks applied his military frame to the time after the Voting Rights Act was won -- and Movement leaders asked themselves, "what's next?" His observations hold lessons for us today as we envision turning back MAGA fascism. We have a chance to win that battle and we must, as decisively as possible. But then what? Ricks writes about the problems of successful struggles: 

... Success in war inevitably unleashes a new set of problems. As the end of the struggle comes into sight, bonds between allies begin to fray. This is not just a failing of human nature, though festering personal grievances, feelings rubbed raw in the friction of war, often are part of the cause. There are realistic political reasons as well. As the danger presented by the enemy recedes, allies lose much of the incentive they have had to submerge their differences. Instead they begin to focus on them ... As Winston Churchill said midway through [World War II], "The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are still no less difficult." 

... as resolution nears, leaders necessarily begin to contemplate the next task, and because of their differences they often disagree on what that should be. For the civil rights movement, a set of questions arose: ... what is our next step? Is it to go into elective politics? ...Or to remain outside the system, pressuring it...? ... centrifugal pressures worked on the Movement during the Selma campaign. And so by its end, old comrades began to look at each other in new and more critical ways. ...  

We're in a battle; we're in campaigns. We don't know how any of our agonies will turn out. But we can learn from those who went before. 

Concentration camp nation?

Is Donald Trump's gift to these disUnited States to build a national system of concentration camps? Is that what the massive new system of DHS detention warehouses ostensibly to hold victims of his immigrant cleansing policies portends? We're not used to thinking of ourselves as a concentration camp country, but perhaps we should. 

Journalist Andrea Pitzer wrote a massive book that came out in 2017 that surveys the spread of these camps around the world through the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps argues that internment camps are a novel feature of modernity, peculiar to our time. Should we be surprised that the backward looking Trump regime is recreating one of the recent pasts' worst features? 

Pitzer defines her subject:

... The history of concentration camps circles from Cuba [under Spanish rule in 1896] around the world and back [to the USofA's Guantanamo], visiting six continents and nearly every country along the way. Camps have been in existence continuously somewhere on the globe for more than a hundred years. Barracks and barbed wire remain their most familiar symbols, but a camp is defined more by its detainees than by any physical feature. A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process -- sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish.

If prisons are meant for suspects convicted of crimes after a trial, a concentration camp holds those who, most often, had no real trial at all. ... Concentration camps house civilians rather than that combatants -- though at many points, from World War I to Guantanamo, camp administrators have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two. Detainees are typically held because of their racial, cultural, religious, or political identity, not because of any prosecutable offense -- though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up without distinction or recourse.

... detention is announced as preventative, to keep a suspect group from committing potential future crimes. If mass civilian detention without trial is the defining feature of a camp, then it becomes possible to look at a whole host of categories of camps, many of which have interrelated histories over time. ... Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concentration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to the labor camps of the [Soviet] Gulag and [to] Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else.

It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard. ...

... Concentration camps are at heart a modern phenomenon and belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence. Just as other kinds of bombs existed before nuclear devices were developed, concentration camps also had precursors, but nonetheless represented a deliberate escalation and transformation of previous tactics. In both cases, observers realized that some dangerous genie was being released from a bottle, but in neither instance would it have been possible to imagine everything that would follow. 

The book, as befits its subtitle, is a historical-geographical tour of horrors, each with its peculiar national characteristics. Pitzer credits Spanish generals' doomed effort to hold on to their Cuban colony with inventing the modern form; within a few short years, the Americans who had thrown the Spaniards out of Cuba were using a similar system of civil internment to attempt to subjugate our newly acquired Philippine colony. Soon the British were replicating such camps during their imperial war against Boer Afrikaners in South Africa; nearby, German imperial authorities in Southwest Africa came close to exterminating the Herero people by forcing them into detention.

World War I saw internment of foreigners implemented widely by belligerent countries across Europe. And after that war and through the troubled decades that followed came the most widely known detention facilities -- Nazi extermination factories and the Soviet Gulag -- which usually we think of when we hear "concentration camps."

Across the globe, the long series of post-1945 decolonization struggles and internal wars across Asia in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Malay peninsula led to further camps run by several authorities. Concentration camps of a sort went alongside wars of liberation.

Africa was not spared. Both Algeria and Kenya were the sites of murderous concentration camps during their independence battles.

And so, Pitzer comes back the Americas, focusing on "dirty wars" on citizens who opposed right wing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. She highlights the United States' experiment with internment of Japanese-origin residents and citizens during WWII and goes on to our Guantanamo camp created after 9/11.

Pitzer is a journalist, not an historian. She recounts these horrors through individual personal stories. The result is both horrifying and very partial. But just maybe, this mode is the only way we can begin to imagine the cruelties (and infrequent eruptions of kindness) that some people are willing to inflict on others under enabling circumstances. 

She is well aware what her method adds and erases.  

It is tempting to see the prisoners' stories braided through this book as somehow representative. In many ways, they are not. Most crucially, these are by and large stories of those who survived. In addition, the prisoners mentioned here are, on the whole, more educated, more politically active, and more likely to have been tied to networks of people inclined to help them. They often got administrative jobs, medicine from friends, or special favors.

While many concentration camps did hold intellectuals, political figures, writers, and business owners, the majority of those sent to camps across the century were poor, illiterate, or apolitical. They are the least likely people to have a chance to tell their stories, and perhaps also the least likely to end up having their stories told by someone else.The loss of their accounts necessarily makes any panoramic picture of the camps incomplete. 

This book is literally weighty -- 400 plus pages. Fortunately, Pitzer offered a solid summary of her research in this six minute video interview which some may find more approachable. The interviewers are weird -- one ignorant, one pretentious -- but Pitzer knows her stuff and applies her knowledge to our present circumstances. 

 • • •

In case you wondered as I did, the title phrase "One Long Night" comes from an epigraph she takes from Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel in Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

This is about deep story

I was disinclined to give Elaine Pagels' Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus a fair shake. I was wrong. I encountered a book that intrigued, broadened, and even fed delight. 

Pagels is a Princeton University historian of religion, an authority on the numerous texts in the Mediterranean world from the decades just before and at the beginning of the Christian era that didn't make it into the official (canonical) version of the Bible. 

Pagels' subject matter is what made me suspicious of her scholarship. This derives from a quirk of my history. When the Dead Sea Scrolls, 3rd century BCE texts uncovered by archeologists in the Judean desert turned up in the 1950s and early '60s, my intellectually curious, historically inclined, mother was for awhile gripped by a sort of fever for the discoveries. Though just an annoying child, I remember feeling there was something a little too credulous in her enthusiasm. Something didn't feel right. The whole accumulated history of the ancient world couldn't be overturned by some bits of clay covered with scratches. That's not how history works; there are no secrets, just complicated, crooked byways to explore. 

It seemed many mid-20th century popular religious writers, encountering the new historical tidbits, lost their bearings. As I studied history more, I wasn't going there. (Mother eventually got over her enthusiasm as well.) 

And I long pigeonholed Pagels as one of those enmeshed in the glamour of poorly grounded novelties. In Miracles and Wonder she's not, at least not much. Instead she muses with restraint on what modern historical interpretation of the times means to thinking about Bible narratives.

... given the opportunity to draw upon a far wider range of sources than those available to many historians in the past, I am excited to return to the questions with which we began: Was Jesus actually a historical person? If so, what kind of person? The answers are not obvious, since our earliest sources are brief, and often contradictory. There are more questions than answers -- many gaps in what can be known. But the evidence confirms that he was, indeed, an actual person; everyone among his contemporaries who mentions him agrees on that, whether they speak of him with reverence or contempt. 

I began this book with other questions too. What was the social and political context of Jesus' life in Judea? How is it that Jesus, who lived thousands of years ago, has not gone the way of other beings, gods and humans, like Zeus or Julius Caesar, who populate our culture's remote past?

The result is a little uneven, but interesting. 

She particularly chases down the notion, found in multiple more or less contemporary sources, that Jesus had a known male parent, one Pantera, a Roman legionnaire, who presumably raped his mother Mary.

... Recognizing the political context of first-century Galilee is necessary, though to understand the gospel stories. What they tell is what the writers knew well: that everyday life in occupied Judea often included violence. Roman writers picture their empire as a civilizing force, but Josephus [a contemporary Jewish historian] depicts first-century Judea as a land in turmoil.  

What has lent credence to the stories of Pantera is what local people knew: that Roman soldiers brutally suppressed any hint of revolt, exploited subject people, and targeted local women with sexual violence. ... 

... As for what actually happened -- divine miracle, human dilemma, or both -- who can say? As I see it, however these various writers interpret Jesus's origin, [gospel authors, canonical or not] all agree on the spiritual truth: that Jesus is "Son of God," and embodies God's presence on earth. 

That is, this is an historian who gets around sticky, messy questions of "what is truth; what really happened?" by defaulting to "does this story inspire?" This is no way to write academic history, but it may be the only way to chronicle actually existing, longstanding religious faiths whose content morphs and grows within history. This is Pagels' method.

My own experience as a historian has made me cautious. We do not know which episodes were made up, and which might be based on actual or visionary experiences. Furthermore I have shown that some scenes that sound like invention are written as metaphor. ... 

... what fascinates me is not only the historical mysteries my book seeks to unravel but the spiritual power that shines through these stories. ... every one of these gospels -- not only those in the New Testament but also the "secret gospels" [non-canonical fragments] -- ends in the most astonishing reversal of all. After Jesus suffers the worst imaginable fate, betrayed by a trusted friend, abandoned by everyone, falsely accused, tortured, and cruelly executed in public, he is raised to glorious new life, reunited with those who love him, and elevated to receive the highest praise in heaven, to reign over a world renewed in justice and peace. 

Hebrew Scriptures set the pattern for such shifts: people enslaved are set free; a shepherd boy named David fells a hostile giant with a slingshot; hungry lions spare Daniel's life; and Jonah emerges alive from the belly of a whale. The point is as clear as a lightening flash: "God can make a way out of no way," transforming what we suffer into joy. I love this about the gospel stories. Is that what keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history? As I see it, they give us what we often need most; an out burst of hope.

This is a generous book. We live in a time that needs a lot more generosity. I recommend it less for the truth it reveals than for its spirit. But that ain't nothing.

Merry Christmas

 

Hark! the planet continues its round and we've arrived here. Hark, indeed!

A few words for the occasion from Diana Butler Bass' A Beautiful Year:  

... Christianity is that sort of faith. A messy one where the mystery of God's glory runs smack into the muck of human bodies. At its heart is the most shocking idea: The Divine One became flesh from the same dust and spittle that made us all. Mary's body brought forth the tiny body of God; her water breaking and the bloody birth made possible the water and blood of the cross some thirty years later.

... God is born. And that would not have happened without the body of a woman, a body that had experienced all sorts of trauma to bring new life to the world. The cattle in that stable may have been lowing, but surely Mary was moaning. And that was the sound of honest, painful relief, exhaustion, and maybe even joy. ...

I'll be back here after the holiday. 

Like Western civilization, international law would be a very good idea (apologies to M Gandhi)

The most fascinating book I read in 2025 was Phillipe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". By way of his gripping, intimate story of some of the human flotsam thrown about in the violent chaos of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Sands interrogates the development of our contemporary understandings of international law.

For my generation of Americans which came of age when Central Europe -- Ukraine, Hungary, what was then Czechoslovakia, what was then Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, much of Germany -- were barely visible behind the Iron Curtain erected by Soviet Russia, it is not obvious that this region was once the heart of European civilization. But it was. And then, what we call World War I, (functionally 1914 through 1920 or so) tore up and rearranged the state entities that had ruled and organized this part of Europe. After that war, violence and chaos continued. The Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated into unstable nationalist successor states; in Russia, the Soviets overthrew the tsar and fought a wide-ranging civil war that leached westward. Individuals were tossed about between city and country, between morphing national states and nationalities, and among competing intellectual and political influences. 

Much of this human upheaval Sands traces by chasing down evidence about the lives of four individuals whose ideas and fates continue to shape international law today. All lived in or passed through what is known today as Ukrainian Lviv, but which in this period was named Lemberg, Lvov, and then Lwow before the contemporary Ukrainian state took its current form. (Yes, Vladimir Putin is still seeking undo Ukraine's claim to national status which emerged in this period. )

Sands' characters are: 

• Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law, born in August 1897 in the small town of Zolkiew, a few miles from Lemberg, to which the family moved in 1911. ... In 1923, he married Rachel Steinberg in Vienna, and they had one son, Elihu, who was born in Cricklewood, London. 

• Hans Frank, a lawyer and [German Nazi] government minister, was born in Karlsruhe [Germany], in May 1900. ... In August 1942, he spent two days in Lemberg, where he delivered several speeches. [He was executed 1946 after being tried at Nuremberg for presiding over the Eastern European death camps.] 

• Rafael Lemkin, a prosecutor and lawyer, was born in Ozerisko near Bialystok, in June 1900. ... In 1921, he moved to Lwow. He never married and had no children.

• Leon Buchholz [grandfather of the author] was born in Lemberg in May 1904. ... He married Regine "Rita" Landes in Vienna in 1937, and a year later their daughter, Ruth, who is [Sands'] mother, was born there.

Sands knew little of the lives of these four when he began the project that became this book. All contributed through actions and their intellectual contributions to his professional career as one of the most distinguished international lawyers of our day.The book is the story of his investigations into their lives, of finding survivors from their families and associates who knew the men, and unraveling who lived and who died as the Nazis tore apart European civilization.

The book is a compendium of fascinating, very contingent stories. Luck played a huge role in who made it through war and tyranny and who was murdered amid the turbulent chaos.

• • • 

And, in the midst of Sands' tale of these main characters, he takes a charming detour to recount the exploits of one person otherwise lost to history: "Miss Tilney of Norwich."

Who was Miss Tilney?" I asked my mother. 

... she said, "I think she was the woman who brought me [as an infant] from Vienna to Paris in the summer of 1939," insisting there was no more information. ...

Sands was not content to leave the question of Miss Tilney there. He chased around Europe and beyond, finding additional stories of the mysterious English woman who somehow managed to hide or facilitate the escape of a few Jewish people and others at risk from the Germans in turbulent wartime Europe. He never completely uncovered her motivation for this dangerous project which could have easily cost her her life. Perhaps she adhered to a warped Christian theology about bringing on the apocalypse; perhaps she just knew it was the right thing to do. She died in 1974, still unrecognized publicly, in a Florida retirement community. Yet Sands owes his own life to her rescue of his infant Jewish mother.

• • •

Ultimately this book consists of Sands, one of the worlds' current most eminent human rights lawyers, trying to sort out the conflict between the legal "crimes against humanity" edifice that Hersch Lauterpacht brought to the British delegation at Nuremberg and the novel notion of "genocide' invented and advocated by Rafael Lemkin to the American legal delegation at that tribunal.

The most succinct description of this conflict between adjacent legal frameworks that I've seen comes, in our own moment, from M. Gessen, written in the context of reporting on the attempts by legal NGOs, humanitarian organizations and some nations to discern how Israel's murderous campaign against the people of Gaza should understood. She describes the competing legal notions like this:

... International law makes two key distinctions between genocide and the broader category of crimes against humanity. One difference involves intent: Crimes against humanity are crimes of disregard for human life, while genocide is a crime of hatred against a specific group. The other difference involves the way the world is obligated to respond: Under existing law, other countries need not prevent crimes against humanity from occurring, but the Genocide Convention does require other countries to prevent genocide. ...  

• • •

Sands affirms the value of both legal frames and describes a history of human rights advocates leaning in one direction or the other. 

 

At the Nuremberg trials which led to the execution of Hans Frank and other leading Nazis, "crimes against humanity" took center stage. But later Rafael Lemkin's coinage, "genocide," gained adherents, led by the founders of the United Nations, including especially Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Sand ponders deeply about the two ways of looking at the horrors people and nations inflict on each other. As a practitioner of international law, he tries to come to terms with their implications.

... An informal hierarchy has developed. In the years after the Nuremberg judgment, the word genocide gained traction in political circles and in public discussion as the "crime of crimes," elevating the protection of groups above that of individuals. Perhaps it was the power of Lemkin's word, but as Lauterpacht feared, there emerged a race between victims, one in which a crime against humanity came to be seen as a lesser evil. That was not the only unintended consequence of the parallel efforts of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. 

Proving the crime of genocide is difficult, and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as the Geneva Convention requires, can have unhappy psychological consequences. It reinforces the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group. The term "genocide" with its focus on the group, tends to heighten a sense of "them" and "us," burnishes feeling of group identity, and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another it makes reconciliation less likely. 

I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for the crime. For some, to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes "an essential component of national identity' without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent. It is no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper, on the occasion of the centenary of Turkish crimes against Armenians, suggested that the word "genocide" may be unhelpful, because it "stirs up [defensive] national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs."

Yet against these arguments. I am bound to accept the sense of group identity is a fact. ... "Our bloody nature," the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote ... "is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are." It seems that a basic element of human nature is that "people feel compelled to belong to groups and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups." 

This poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted by a tangible tension: on the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other hand the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. ...

Sands could not and does not resolve the tension in his own mind. He sought to understand the two men who represented the two approaches. That quest led him into his own history and how he understands his own career as a human rights litigator. But he arrived at no clean conclusion:

... I [have] wondered ... whether I was closer to the ideas of Lauterpacht or Lemkin, or stood equidistant between them or sat with them both. Lemkin would probably have been the more entertaining dinner companion, and Lauterpacht the more intellectually rigorous conversationalist. The two men shared an optimistic belief in the power of law to do good and protect people and the need to change the law to achieve that objective. Both agreed on the value of a single human life and on the importance of being part of a community. They disagreed fundamentally, however, on the most effective way to achieve the protection of those values, whether by focusing on the individual or the group.

Lauterpacht never embraced the idea of genocide. To the end of his life, he was dismissive, both of the subject and, perhaps more politely, of the man who concocted it, even as he recognized the aspirational quality. Lemkin feared the separate projects of protecting individual human rights, on the one hand, and protecting groups and preventing genocide, on the other, were in contradiction. It might be said the two men cancelled each other out. 

... I saw the merits of both arguments, oscillating between the two poles, caught in an intellectual limbo.

Nothing is easy about trying to envision an international legal order based in justice. Today we watch the Trump regime tear up American fealty to the long standing law of the sea by killing men already drowning, a legal dictate that predates both human rights and genocide law .

 

Bob Dylan sang: "to live outside the law you must be honest." This is not an honest time.

She cries out against a corrupted faith

She's not pulling any punches. Anthea Butler chairs the Religious Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania. She begins her history and jeremiad White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America with this uncompromising declaration:

Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism. 

... why do people who identify as as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? 

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. 

... evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. ... Racism in evangelicalism is not only about individual sin. It is about corporate sins of a religious movement that continues to believe itself good and that good is predicated on whiteness and the proximity to power. 

... As an African American woman who once trained in an evangelical seminary, I don't say these thing lightly... Whether ignoring race or hiding behind race, the evangelical whitewashing of race and racism does not work anymore.

This little book recounts the history which led to the evangelical "problem."

From the time that the first Africans were kidnapped to this country as slaves, enslavers sought to ensure the parts of the Christian bible to which they were exposed emphasized obedience to masters. 

... there was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom.

In the 19th century abolitionists led by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison repudiated and also reshaped American Christianity; after the Civil War freed the slaves, many Christian denominations split into northern and southern fractions over the continuing challenge of freed Black people in "their" society. The South got the KKK; in the immediate post war period, northern denominations aided education for the freed people. 

But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow segregation and repression were the rule most everywhere. White fundamentalists and Pentecostals created an extensive infrastructure in the interwar era; in the 1950s, Billy Graham became the archetypal white evangelist. Butler describes his uneven outreach to Christian formations of color. By the last decades of the 20th century, white evangelicals had become the base of the current right wing Republican party, organized by the Christian Coalition against abortion, feminism, desegregation of evangelical colleges, and gays. They were ripe for the picking by Donald Trump and MAGA.

Growing up Christian in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Anthea Butler thought she was part of this movement -- until she discovered she wasn't.

Once upon a time, I was an evangelical. A Pentecostal, to be exact. I was happily ensconced in the Church on the Way and preparing to start Fuller Seminary in the fall of 1992. That spring, the Rodney King verdict came down and the riots happened. I had a front row seat to one of the ways that evangelicals decided to deal with this traumatic event. Evangelical churches decided to come together under the aegis of Church on the Way's Pastor Hayford to hold what they called a "Love LA" service ... It was to be a healing celebration, a chance for racial reconciliation.  

For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford's mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, 'Welcome to Church on the Way.' At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this white woman's space. I was welcome due to the situation, but I could not possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.

Butler goes on to ask, what went wrong in the evangelical movement?

... This is a movement that could have and should have moved on from its roots in nineteenth-century racism and slavery revealed in this book. Yet it has not. And that is due to the choices made by leaders and followers within the evangelical movement. 

Why have evangelicals and their leadership made choices over and over again to embrace racism? Because it is what has allowed them to attain and hold political power. ... 

... When evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold. Evangelicals became well educated, and they shaped their historical narrative more around theology and esoteric boundaries, mostly white cultural boundaries, ignoring their social and historical connections to broader American life. ... Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along. 

... class and wealth have encouraged evangelicals to hold onto racism tightly as part of their belief about capitalism, God, and nation. ... 

... Access to power made evangelicalism brittle, and unforgiving. Ideology trumped the gospel. Loving your neighbor turned into loving only those who believe as you do. As a result, evangelicals live in silos to keep themselves pure. ... And, as a result, evangelicals are regarded with disdain by the broader public. Evangelicals wear this as a badge of honor and as a sign of persecution of Christians. Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. They are being called to account.

Butler speaks directly to others with whom she has shared an evangelical Christian commitment:

... Ask yourself, What are you leaving as the posterity of American evangelicalism? What are the organizations you support leaving behind? Can you see past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participated in white supremacy and racist policies and policing? ... 

If you asked such questions, you would probably lose friends, and you might even lose your church. Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it. If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation. 

I hope these words find root in you. I hope they trouble you. I hope they sear your soul. I hope they make you change. There is only a little time left, but there is time. The time is now.

When Donald Trump won a second term with evangelical acclamation, Butler wrote a preface to a second edition of her book -- a plea that is anguished but determined:

In this dangerous moment for American democracy, White Evangelical Racism continues to provide a concise history of the motivations and goals of evangelicals who seek to create a white Christian nation, where everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, or creed, will have to live with their leadership and laws. It is not enough for them to have influence with politicians and legislatures, or schools teaching Christian texts. They want Jesus -- or more precisely their view of Jesus -- and by association themselves, to be the center and leaders of civic life in America. Their oft vaunted appeals to the founding of America as a Christian nation are not only a distortion of the nation's history. They are evangelicals' claim to rule and reign in the here and now. 

As you engage this history, think abut what will happen if the United States becomes a theocracy. Consider if you want to live with people who believe that whiteness is the framework, culture should be only "Anglo-Saxon," and religious freedom is only for people who think and believe as they do. 

These are the stakes.

Bad faith Republican politics

Stuart Stevens was a career Republican political strategist, the capstone of whose work was serving in a leading role in George Romney's 2012 campaign against Barack Obama.  In this 2021 book, he looks back at that campaign, and his lifelong political orientation and concludes It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.

He's unsparing about this conclusion; his early campaign work in the South taught him that race was the substrate of all US politics:

[I learned] a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. ... Since [the 1964 Civil Rights Act] no Republican candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republicans. ... 

... the Nixon White House had laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies and legal challenges. It was the road that the Republican Party took in the Trump White House. ... Race has defined the modern Republican Party.

Since the 2024 presidential election, many pundits have attempted to muddy the question of whether the Republican Party is still the overwhelmingly racist formation that Stevens describes, but the best data we have suggests that little has changed despite whatever gestures Trump and his crew make. (Take a look at the cabinet, for example; bet you can't name his HUD appointee, the usual Black slot ...)

Beyond issues of race, Stevens has plenty to denounce in the moral foundations of his former party:

• "Family values" was never a set of morals and values that the Republican Party really desired to live by ... it was just another weapon to portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. ...

• The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity. ...

• The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. ...

• The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. ...

All, I think, commonplace understandings four years on from the publication of this book and among the folks to whom I relate personally here on the Left Coast.

What I found more interesting in this book than Stevens' denunciation of Republican orthodoxies were the moments when he delves into the contradictions that can be experienced by a political consultant or advisor. This is something of which I have some 30 years experience in and around campaigns, some of which I had some influence in. In such a position, your job is to win ... not necessarily to be onboard with all the policy implications. 

For example, Stevens writes:

When [Republican Pennsylvania Congressman] Tom Ridge [on the eve of his campaign for governor] was facing a decision on how to vote on the 1994 assault weapons ban, I'd like to say I urged him to vote for the ban ... I didn't, nor did I advise him to vote against it. I never thought my role was to remind clients of deeply held beliefs. ... I cared about one thing -- winning -- and had every reason to believe it would mean we'd lose.

I get this. I can't say I ever differed from a plausible candidate I was working for on a matter of such consequence, though I'm not sure about that. But I certainly worked at least one campaign without any belief that my candidate would be a net gain to city and society if we won; I wanted the experience of working in a well-funded operation of a particular sort in order to increase my campaign skills, win or lose. That campaign work was about me, not the candidate. Such is extremely common among political operatives, however little we admit this to ourselves.

Stevens' book retained its interest to me, even though in the current Trump regime, it reads a little dated. If interested in what a good man learned that led him away from his previous political positioning, I highly recommend this one.