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.

Was he a delayed casualty of his war?

Over the years, I've written a quite often on Memorial Day (and also on Veterans Day) about various relatives who served in the US military. But seldom about this one, who I actually knew.

My first cousin (my father's sister's son) Kirby Atterbury has been gone over twenty years now. When he was still with us, I was cautious about introducing or explaining him to my friends. The result of any encounter could be unpredictably explosive.

He was born in 1921; yes, the generations are long and screwy in my family. At age 20, he left college to serve as a navigator in the US Merchant Marine on the arctic Murmansk Run delivering essential war supplies to our Russian allies in World War II.

An historical description: "This was no glamorous sea campaign, with full-sail, tall-masted men-of-war firing broadside after broadside into their enemy’s rigging. It was a cold, dirty, dangerous business in which seamen might be blown into a flaming sea of burning oil and left to die of wounds, burns, or hypothermia."

By the way, because the US used private shipping for this hazardous duty, Kirby was not technically a veteran. That seems an injustice. He served.

Kirby came through, married, settled in Marin County, fathered five daughters (several younger than me) and became known as a bon-vivant restaurateur opening a place in Tiburon he named "Caprice." This was also the name of one of the daughters; I don't know which came first.

He was a local fixture according to this nice obituary by longtime Chronicle journalist Peter Fimrite. 

Reading between the lines even of this public obit, it's possible to discern what happened with Kirby. He became well known for consuming the fine alcoholic beverages he specialized in; by the time that, as an adult, I knew him he was a high-functioning drunk. A rage would come out; he needed to offend. When drunk enough, this man would insist "Hitler had some good ideas." 

I'm just glad this angry man didn't live to become an enthusiast for Donald Trump; I'm sure he'd have enjoyed promoting MAGA. Even when justified, war is terrible for living things, for living people.

A feel good story:: Billie Jean KIng graduates from college

I'm going to outsource this one entirely to another Greatest Of All Time, Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

“Shut up and dribble!” The phrase is so ubiquitous these days, and it seems like I’ve heard it said so many times, it’s hard to believe it’s been around for just eight years. That’s right, it was in February 2018 when Fox News personality Laura Ingraham first said those words which, as a basketball player who has always spoken his mind, I found so repugnant. Ingraham prefaced her “witticism” (“witlessism”?) by saying, “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” This, after LeBron James had the nerve to criticize President Donald Trump as “someone who doesn’t understand the people,” and whose recent comments were “laughable and scary.” Hardly a controversial take: anyone who doesn’t get their information from the so-called news channel that employs Ingraham had no doubt reached the same conclusion long before LeBron put it into words. In point of fact, athletes are just as likely to have something worthwhile to say about politics and contemporary society as Fox News talking heads, or the ten men who could buy the world—or certain Presidents of the United States.

This comes to mind now because Billie Jean King, one of the greatest tennis players of all time as well as one of the sports world’s greatest and most outspoken humanitarians, earned her college diploma earlier this week, at the tender age of 82… 65 years after first enrolling at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles). She originally left in 1964 after three years to focus on her burgeoning tennis career and returned last year to complete her class work and get her bachelor’s degree in history as well as serve as commencement speaker.

It’s not every day someone older than I am graduates from college, and it’s even more rare when that person was winning professional sports championships in my same era. Over the course of her career, King won 12 major singles titles, including six at Wimbledon and a career Grand Slam. (She also won 16 majors in doubles and 11 in mixed doubles.) In 1972, she won the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, and became the first woman to win what was previously known as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, sharing that year’s honor with one of my greatest personal heroes, my UCLA coach John Wooden. (I won my second NBA MVP Award that year and scored a career best 34.8 points a game; I was probably wondering what you had to do to win a Sportsman of the Year Award!)

But for all Billie Jean King did on the tennis court, her impact may have been even greater off the court. She led the push for equal pay at Grand Slam tournaments, and her threat to boycott the 1973 US Open led to that tournament becoming the first major where men and women earned the same prize money. That same year, she became the founding president of a new women’s player’s union, the Women’s Tennis Association, or WTA. She also helped found the first women’s professional tennis tour (the Virginia Slims) and World Team Tennis, offering many female players their first true opportunity to earn a living wage. And on top of all that, she defeated the former men’s Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in the legendary Battle of the Sexes tennis match. Granted, Riggs was 55 years old to King’s 29, but Riggs had just destroyed the great Margaret Court in a similar match by the score of 6-1, 6-2, and the very idea of equal prize money was being called into question as a result. King embarrassed the self-proclaimed male chauvinist Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in front of more than 30,000 people at the Houston Astrodome, while an estimated 90 million watched on TV worldwide.

Outside of the tennis world, she was one of a brave group of women who allowed Ms. magazine to report that they’d undergone abortions in 1972, before Roe v. Wade made the procedure legal nationwide. In 1981, she became the first female athlete to come out as a lesbian at a time when discrimination and ostracization were all too common for anyone even suspected of being gay. As it happened, she came out unwillingly, when a former partner sued her for palimony; but the fact that she revealed her orientation rather than submitting to an extortionate settlement before the lawsuit was filed showed that she would face public opprobrium rather than be bullied or shamed into silence.

She was great friends with her fellow tennis champion and social justice warrior Arthur Ashe, and guarded the secret of his AIDS diagnosis for years before he went public. After his death, she remained a staunch advocate for people with AIDS. In 1999, she won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, and their names will be always be linked in the tennis world: the grounds where the US Open tennis tournament is played is called the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, while its showcase court where all its biggest matches are played is in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

As an athlete who always wanted to do something greater for my community and the rest of the world, Billie Jean King is someone I’ve looked to as a model for athletic activism. I don’t know what the tennis equivalent of “shut up and dribble” is—“shut up and serve” perhaps?—but you can bet that if Billie Jean ever heard those words, she would have ignored them.

Congratulations, Billie Jean, you’ve made all Americans proud!

I don't know of many male athletes who have responded to great women athletes with this kind of generosity and respect. There may be guys I've missed ... But Kareem not only affirms King's greatness here, but demonstrates his own.

Friday cat blogging

Here's a cute one.

Mighty curious too.

 Perhaps a distant relative of Janeway? In any case, this Mission District cat was eager to inspect the passerby.

Donald Trump's pecuniary presidency

In what amounts to a lament about the apparent shallowness of the California gubernatorial campaign, former Obama functionary Ben Rhodes reminds that the constitutional authors predicted our current national predicament.  

Benjamin Franklin portrait

The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. 

He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

That hits awfully close to home. Old Ben had our number. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between accepting the flamboyant thievery of Donald Trump's regime or showing the character to seize the reins of power to construck something closer to opportunity and justice for us all.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has wise words to describe our predicament.

... what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the Union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

The pecuniary presidency is a new frontier in the history of the office, the culmination of all that was dangerous about the vast concentration of power in a singular executive — “in all governments in which there is sown the seed of the rule of one man, no checks, no bars can prevent its growing into a monarchy or a despotism if the empire is extensive,” warned “a Maryland farmer” in the spring of 1788, on the eve of ratification — and the particular project of a particular man whose lust for gold rivals that of Cortés. ...

The founding generation knew that greed for gold might overthrow their handiwork. The country has seen this again and again, as when the great wealth of Southern planters provided a justification for human slavery and the great wealth of industrial capitalists undergirded the immiseration of working people for profit. Again and again, the mass of people had fought back, insisting we can be better than this. 

Donald is just an ordinary crook, robbing us every which way. The challenge of the moment is whether the majority of us can find the civic virtue to reform a system which makes rule by such a con man possible?

Donald Trump's travel posters

I thought you might be interested in one of the things the Trump Department of Homeland Security is doing with the $170 billion of our taxes a moribund Republican Congress has forked over to Trump's immigration thugs.

 

DHS wants their prey -- undocumented migrants but really anyone who has not jumped all the hoops to achieve citizenship -- to know that, if they come in voluntarily, they can get shipped away and get $2600.

 

I don't know if they actually pay what they promise. Nor do I suspect these tourist scenes are much like where folks come from, but what do I know?

These are just ordinary people, doing their best

If you follow the suggestion I am about to make and read what some of the people I've just encountered have to say for themselves, you may not immediately warm to them. But you might find the experience instructive, as I did. The country is in such straits under the Trump regime, it's important to learn we can become unlikely allies and maybe friends.

Rich Logis left MAGA and he created a community with others to share their experiences of detaching from the Trump cult. He calls it Leaving MAGA. Here are a couple of testimonies from among dozens:

Michael Sirback: I was born and raised in a small, Republican town in Ohio; I still live there today. I had a pretty good childhood. When it came to politics, my parents didn’t really talk about it much as I was growing up in the 90s.

My family started discussing politics in 2015, when I was in my early 20s. My parents had voted for Barack Obama, but they were drawn to Donald Trump on cultural issues. They saw him as a guy who was going to end gay marriage and transgender rights.

... Still, I just wasn’t interested in politics. I didn’t even register to vote in 2016, although I was hoping Trump would win. After he became president, I started paying a bit more attention. 

... My feelings started to seriously change around the beginning of 2024, thanks in large part to the fact that I am dating Shey, a woman from the Philippines. My relationship with her opened my eyes to how much damage Trump is doing when it comes to immigrants. When Trump ran for president this time, his campaign was nothing but non-stop fear-mongering and hatred towards immigrants, with all its rhetoric about them being rapists, murderers, and the like. ...

... With Trump, only White Christian Nationalists will get treated with decency. That really worries me.

I now believe the Jan. 6 attack was completely unacceptable, a big attack on our democracy. I’m still hoping Trump is held accountable for it, but I have a hard time believing he will be.

Looking back, I see how much disinformation there was about the pandemic. I’ve evolved with regards to women’s rights, as well. I was always pro-life to the core, but now I believe that a woman should make her own decisions, that it’s not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body.

Watching Trump lie about hurricane disaster relief money going to undocumented immigrants, and lying about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, just reinforced my feelings. I now know that he would much rather tell a lie than admit to being wrong about anything. ...

• • •

PattyAnn Giles: I was born and raised in Connellsville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the 1960s; my parents were JFK Democrats: pro-life, culturally conservative. My dad was a big union guy; he worked for West Penn Power. My mom was an administrative secretary for a local hospital. ...

I started paying attention to politics when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. I liked his message, and my dad and I got into it a couple of times over Reagan. I remember asking my dad, “Can you explain to me how you’re pro-life and you support the Democratic Party?” He said, “Well, the Democrats aren’t forcing women to abort. I’m personally against abortion and I would try to talk someone out of it, but I’m not going to be a single-issue voter.”

... A huge influence on my politics came through my becoming a born-again Pentecostal Christian when I was 17. I had a friend in that branch of the church, and she told me Catholics aren’t real Christians. ...

That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me. It reinforced for me that I needed to support the Republican Party, because I saw the Democratic Party as amoral, too secular. I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.

I would go to Republican rallies and it would feel like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.

I got married in 1988 and moved to northern Virginia. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse. I was still a conservative evangelical, and I got involved with some local Republican groups. I was a delegate in 1994 to the state GOP convention in Richmond as a supporter of Oliver North for US Senate. I was a member of the Republican Women’s Committee, and I worked on some local campaigns. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife.” I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.

... Around 2003, when I got divorced, I found myself moving away from the evangelical movement. I still had those basic values, but I was noticing things going on in the church that made me uncomfortable. I started hearing about sexual abuse. ...

The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012. My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries.  ...

I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.

You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, “Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.”

Then in 2015 Trump came along. He had an anti-establishment message, and I was mad at the establishment. He wasn’t my first pick, but after he won the Republican primary I got behind him. He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. ...

... I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars. I liked that he was saying, “I’m a rich guy, I have access, I know who the crooks are in DC, I’m going to expose them, we’re going to get rid of them, we’re going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be more transparent.” ...

... Over the next months, I didn’t like that he was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them. You said you were going to be tough on this kind of stuff. Where’s this coming from?” So my balloon started to deflate a little.

More credible information emerged in 2017 and 2018 about Trump molesting women, how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed. I’m a victim of rape; it seriously traumatized me. And it traumatizes me to hear how powerful men get away with this kind of stuff. 

I was still within the tolerable spectrum in terms of my support for Trump and MAGA, but I was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. 

... Trump’s whole “stop the steal” campaign, his nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election, were the final nail in the coffin for me. I officially walked away from MAGA in 2021.

Then I asked myself, “In what other ways have I been lied to?” I started digging deeper, and I started to learn a lot. ...

The site provides dozens more of these stories of MAGAs who changed their minds. They are us, coming from different lives.

Never give up!

Ruth López committed no crime: she has been imprisoned for an entire year for exposing corruption in El Salvador without any kind of legal process. Her friends at Cristosal ask that we ensure she is remembered -- that the Bukele regime cannot simply disappear this champion for justice. 

Pass it on: We continue demanding #FreedomForRuth and a #PublicTrialForRuth.  #FreeRuth

Marching for hope and a future

Yesterday thousands of Alabamians and friends from all over marched in Selma in support of a "National Day of Action for Voting Rights - All Roads to Lead to the South." The Supreme Court has decreed that racist white politicians can rig elections so NO Black politicians can have chance to represent their communities anywhere that white Republicans control state legislatures. That's just fine, say the infamous black robed six. No more Voting Rights Act in practice. No, this is not fine. Too many people have fought and died for the right to a meaningful vote.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts the struggle to win voting rights for all people in 1960s which culminated in Alabama.

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

... Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

 Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6....

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

The photos included here come from a wonderful photo gallery at the Tuscaloosa AL news site. It's well worth your time.

• • • 

I'm old enough so that the deadly SNCC Mississippi Summer project the year before, the Alabama voting rights campaign, and the Selma march over the bridge are part of my personal memories. A white teenager in a GOP household in Buffalo, NY, could follow the civil rights struggle in newspapers and short TV news broadcasts. I remember being mesmerized by the righteousness and bravery of the marchers.

And I was not as alone in that, as many white teenagers might be today. The private girls high school I attended had never had any Black students until my senior year; I bet the powers that be looked far and wide for the one shy girl who integrated that culturally rigid white place. She was enough younger that I never got a sense of how it turned out for her. 

But I do know that my graduating class were moved by the events of our time. It was the custom that each graduating class collect a sum of money to donate to the school toward something we thought would make the place better. We took a vote, all sixty-some of us, and made a plan. I was part of a delegation that went to the head of the school to present our plan: we wanted our class gift to begin to fund a scholarship fund for Black students. We more or less thought the school was a good place and we should share it.

As I remember, the principal seemed aghast. He was probably correct, even then, that there were legal impediments to such a racially conscious fund. I don't remember what we ended up doing for a class gift.

But in the mid-60s, it was possible for white teenagers to feel something in the wind, to identify with changing times. Can we again find that hope for a better, more just, more equitable country? There's nothing else to do ...

A war in which everyone loses

From 1996 until 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue was a foreign correspondent for The Economist, first in Turkey and then in Iran. He draws on his experience of living under the Iranian mullahs' regime and his continuing connections in the country to try to put the current US and Israeli war in perspective in the New York Review of Books: Iran's New Winter. [gift link]. 

The result is pensive and sobering. This seems a war in which everyone loses, most especially ordinary citizens of Iran.

... Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.…

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants.

I can't help wondering whether that conclusion might also hold true for the USofA.

In an email from the NYRB introducing de Bellaigue's piece, the author reflects:

... I think one should pull back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and consider the balance of forces in the longer term. The Iranian regime was, if not on the ropes, then in very serious trouble as recently as January, when, amid a terrible economic situation with an eviscerated middle class, a large proportion of the population—disgruntled, unhappy, insurrectionary, revolutionary—came out to protest on the streets. 

The regime’s reflexive exercise of force was a big message: we’re ready to kill thousands of our own citizens. In fact, we don’t really regard them as our own citizens but, essentially, enemy combatants in our midst. They killed thousands of Iranians and left tens of thousands more bereft, which in the end cost them even more credibility, in particular among Iranians who had otherwise been unsure where they stood on the question of regime change. There was a crisis of ever-straitening economic circumstances, terrible violence, and an ever-more unhappy population. 

Back in January it seemed there was only one way this was going to go: disaster for the regime and possibly for the populace. 

But then the war started, and it returned to the regime a lot of the legitimacy it had lost. The very government that had slaughtered its citizens in the streets was now, it seemed, heroically defending the country against the most powerful militaries in the world, and with very little in the way of advanced military hardware. And they were doing so with extraordinary bravery, dedication, and ingenuity. 

There have been two important moments in the war so far. The first was when Ayatollah Khamenei was killed. Many Iranians were pleased with that; they had wanted him to be taken out in part because they thought the regime, once decapitated, couldn’t survive. 

But then almost exactly at the same time, American bombs obliterated a girls’ school. Trump blustered and lied and displayed himself in the worst possible light ...

Iranian citizens certainly could not feel that anyone was coming to rescue them.

So the moral argument that the United States and Israel were making for regime change is dubious at best. Iranians who had wanted regime change at any cost now came to see how horrible the cost could be. They don’t want insecurity, and they no longer want, for example, the police to be disbanded because, during wartime, some force needs to prevent looting and rioting and chaos. 

The other surprising outcome was how little Khamenei’s death mattered. I lived in Iran for years, and have been writing about it even longer, and I was sure that after Khamenei’s death, power would be up for grabs. But in fact, the regime has rallied, and whatever complexities there are in the decision-making system that is now in place—and we really don’t know much about it—it has been functioning. ...

The Middle East is in a state of great flux. That sense of imperviousness and safety that the principalities and sheikhdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf enjoyed for many, many years—and that they employed to offer themselves as safe havens for investment—is now in doubt. From that perspective, Iran is in a strong position. 

Where Iran remains weak is that the economy is getting worse, so dissatisfaction will return. How that will manifest is difficult to say because it is now comprehensively a security state. There is zero tolerance for political disobedience.

I just spoke to someone in Iran today—I got a call from an Italian number, which is the convoluted way Iranians have to make international calls now, through VPNs and rerouting and such workarounds. Anyway, it was an elderly woman calling to express her condolences because my father recently died. This is a typically Iranian thing to do in a time of extraordinary stress: to think of other people, to think about their moment of loss. 

But then she said to me, Everything’s been worse since Mr. Khamenei died. And this was someone who’d been praying for the end of the Islamic Republic and for the demise of Khamanei. Now that he’s dead, people are wondering if he was in fact a restraining influence on the regime. ... 

Americans are perhaps less confused than Iranians at the strange moment. Fully seventy percent of us view this as Donald Trump's war of choice, foolish, deadly, even evil, all at once. And now the Orange Toddler can't figure how to back out of it and we all live with the consequences.