"Quiet, quiet, piggy!"

 

So Trump responded to Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as "bin Salman", that's a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin "Mr. Vladimirovich"—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, "Āl Saud", House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son's father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News's Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post's Jamal Kashoggi:

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It's not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven't heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event,  as something that wouldn't be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that'll be the day.

January 6 Was Not a Dream

 

Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.

I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.

Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And

Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.

"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."

Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a

suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a "Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it."

Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.

We're All Democratic Socialists Now

 

"Socialism in Milwaukee": Drawing from The Milwaukee Independent, probably ca. 1910-12, when the city had its first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel.

I began coming to this idea on election night itself, and the morning after, contemplating the most cautious candidacy, that of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey—cautious for understandable reasons, I might add, with the most plausible Republican opponent, who'd come scary close to beating Governor Phil Murphy four years earlier, in a state that elects an awful lot of Republican governors for one of its general blueness, but I'd been worrying it had made her so cautious it wasn't good for her, making her really tense and uneasy. The victory speech showed her much better, much less buttoned-up and tight-lipped; energetic and relaxed at the same time. It struck me that it was the first time I'd seen her having a good time during the campaign, and I was honestly happy for her.

But something surprising escaped my notice until the morning airing of radio excerpts, from her acknowledgments of all the volunteers and all she had learned from them:

I was moved during my block walk in Trenton with Shanique because she spoke so passionately about the promise of her city and her neighbors despite the challenges. I love the group of young men from Monroe who have been hard at work on this campaign. They want a seat at the table and they're ready to fight for their future. The little girls who come up to me to say that they're going to be a governor or they're going to be a president. It reminds me of my own belief that anything was possible. Akeem's team, who worked their butts off, knocked over 60,000 doors. Akeem told me these are not the kids who will succeed in Trump's vision of this country. But they will in mine. Union jobs at a time when our economy is set up to make it harder and harder for working people. You know what? They don't just fight for their brothers and sisters in labor. They fight for all of us.

Sherrill, under the guidance of working people she's come to know, has come to a particular kind of view on how things are working: that the industrial economy is "set up" to deprive working people of a fair share of the profits, and that the organized labor movement is an essential part of righting the situation, and that the object is a social movement from which the whole society can benefit, "for all of us."

That's more than a little bit Marxist, whether she understands it that way or not. At a very fundamental level:

• that industrial capitalism, the fostering of industrial growth through capital investment, inherently exploits workers, robbing them of the value they produce;
• that the "point" of the analysis, as Marx says, "is to change" the situation for the better; and
• that whatever is done to change it starts with worker organization.

And not at all incompatible with the more orthodox outline of inevitable class conflict in  Zohran Mamdani's victory speech:

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Mamdani's socialism has inspired some violent reaction from some people (mostly Gen-Xers, I imagine) who directly identify, like the fictional Alex P. Keaton, with the bloodsucking bourgioisie; after Mamdani had said:

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

(which ought by rights to be about as controversial as Ronald Reagan announcing that it was morning in America, in fact it's practically the same thing),  I saw some unhinged corporate guy from NBC News reacting to the opening of Mamdani's speech with its stirring invocation of the spirit of Eugene V. Debs with real horror etched in his face, as if he'd seen somebody proposing to perform human sacrifices to Moloch.

But I haven't seen much awareness of Debs's role in American history as one of the most popular third-party politicians we've ever had (clearing 6% of the vote in 1912, the year Bull Moose Theodore Roosevelt got better than 27%), a proponent of expanded labor unions, public ownership of utilities, women's suffrage, and an end to child labor, among other things, characterized by Senator Bernard Sanders as "probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had". Not the importer of some abomination from Russia or China, but as absolutely American a figure as William Jennings Bryan, or Upton Sinclair, or Henry Wallace, whose cause may well have lost out, but who ought to retain our patriotic respect.

One of the weirdest things about the campaign was the continued professed shock at Mamdani's calling himself a "democratic socialist" and acknowledging his membership in the DSA, as if Bernard Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn't been doing the same thing ever since we met them, along with dozens more American politicians young and old from Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib to my own Rep. Jerry Nadler, from 35 in state and local offices in 2017 to over 250 today. Being a "democratic socialist" is not weird! 

But the word itself remains problematic, burdened perhaps by the horrible vicissitudes of its own history, like Sade's heroine Justine (whose subtitle was, remember, "The Misfortunes of Virtue"), from Utopian experimental communities, all inevitable failures, through science fiction thought experiments, through human disasters like the end of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris to the "scientific socialism" implemented in the USSR, in which it was supposed to represent an evolutionary phase on the physically ineluctable path from reality to communism, which obviously never came close to happening, to the self-parody of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". 

In 2021, I wrote a post on the need to rectify the name of socialism, in the following terms:

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean. At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism",

• the "capitalist" imaginary being the world in which all economic activity is performed by individuals—capitalists living off the buying and selling and rent of various things they own, property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, and workers who have nothing to sell but their labor—carrying on like an enormous anthill or machine for value creation, with no outside interference from (for example) a state,
• the "socialist" imaginary being the world in which the state, taken over by members of a vanguard workers' party, has seized all the property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, from the capitalists and administers it all really well, so that all the workers, instead of being left to penury and starvation, get paid a fair wage and have lots of time off to cultivate themselves morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and
• the "communist" imaginary being the world from which ownership has simply disappeared, leaving everybody to work just for the love of working and share the fruits of their labor with their friends and neighbors, forever and ever.

Note that this idea is no less unrealistic than the ideas of Milton Friedman (in which completely ejecting the state from economic management will turn the inequities of the anthill into its own kind of utopia where justice reigns automatically, dispensed by the marketplace magic, through the blind faith of the population), and a typical economist's idea, shaving off all the messy details of actual human life in favor of the cleanliness and beauty of a model. And the reality of socialist practice within the narrow definition has often meant a system that isn't administered well at all and makes things considerably worse (though as I always say don't forget those great industry-nationalizing nations France and Singapore), as bad as the outcome of an attempt at a pure market economy (Somalia or fictional Mahagonny).

Which is why I'm calling them "imaginaries", in a critical-sociology noun that I'm just trying to learn how to use. Because they have little to do with reality, which makes their usefulness questionable.

A broader and more useful concept is an older one, older than capitalism really, dating at least to the late 14th century and the activities of Father John Ball, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the presence of King Richard II at St. Albans, Kent, in 1381, for preaching, to the combatants in Wat Tyler's rebellion, that the division of the English into classes was contrary to the will of God:

When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and... servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord

Not, you see, that property should not exist, as in the communist model, but that it shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of one set of people and excluded from the other set, that it should be more equitably distributed across the society, socialized; not that everybody should be a serf but that everybody should be a lord, on a very modest scale—if not by the violent expedients Ball advocated,

"uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future"

then by some more comfortable method like politics (which, contrary to Clausewitz, is war continued by other means, not the other way around). That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done. That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done.

And that, in my view, is the socialism that Zohran Mamdani and Mikie Sherill may be said to share with the reasonably (not extravagantly) progressive-minded members of their party, DSA and not: that the practices of  capitalism do bad things to working people, and collective action can, and should, ameliorate them to a really meaningful degree.

New York Note

 Happy Election Day! I don't feel like I need to give you a lot of advice about the candidates in New York City, but I thought it might be useful (if late, considering how many people have already voted by now) to say a couple of things about the six ballot propositions, for which the argumentation on both sides, seems to be just diabolically badly written.

Proposal #1: Amendment to Allow an Olympic Sports Complex on Forest Preserve 

This state question is really irritating, because voting for it will ratify an old crime, but voting against it will make it impossible to do anything about it. The crime was the development for the Mount Van Hoevenberg Winter Sports Complex for the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980 and other events, in particular the bobsled run, on land that was constitutionally required to be kept "forever wild". You can't actually "allow" it, regardless of what the language of the amendment may say; that train left the station a long time ago. 

What the amendment does, rather, is to say "It's not illegal any more!" Voters are offering them a pardon. Instead there is some restitution; a package of 2,500 acres of Adirondacks land that will remain forever wild in place of the original (which is frankly not that wild, I think—it's been settled, however sparsely, for centuries, and that's just the white people). 

But given that the land in question is already lost, it's probably the best that can be done. I'll vote yes.

Proposal #2: Fast Track Affordable Housing to Build More Across the City

Three proposed revisions to the city charter have to do with affordable housing; they were the creations of a Charter Revision Commission appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, they're ostensibly aimed at  breaking down some of the bureaucratic barriers, but some have also suspected some kind of plot on the mayor's part to grab some of the City Council's power. The pleasant thing about that is that Eric Adams is definitely not going to be the next New York mayor, so we can look at the proposals on their own merits.

Proposal #2 creates two  new processes for fast-tracking affordable housing projects; one keyed to publicly financed projects, and the other to the 12 community board districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing development over the past five years. Both remove City Council approval from the list of requirements, which may sound undemocratic, but the community board review might be thought more Democratic. After long hesitation, I'm inclining to Yes.

Proposal #3: Simplify Review of Modest Housing and Infrastructure Projects

This fast-tracks small-scale projects, also subject to community board review but not City Council. Again, Yes.

Proposal #4: Establish an Affordable Housing Appeals Board with Council, Borough and Citywide Representation

This is the most charged. Projects that are not fast-tracked will be approved, as always, by the City Council, with the member whose district is affected enjoying a kind of courtesy veto right. Whenever the City Council rejects an affordable housing project, though, the decision can be appealed to a board consisting of three people: the Council Speaker, the borough president, and the mayor. There is a question of NIMBYism operating here, and maybe a question of particular Council members. I love my own member, Gale Brewer, known as a staunch progressive and have loved her for years, for various reasons, but it's come to my attention that there has not been one single affordable unit built in my Upper West Side neighborhood, even as awful luxury condos spring up along Broadway without pause, and I don't think that's right. Voting Yes on this one too. (Non-billionaire Greenwich Village residents might like to think about this too.)

Proposal #5: Create a Digital City Map to Modernize City Operations

Are you kidding? Of course!

Proposal #6: Move Local Elections to Presidential Election Years

Why do we have to hold our mayoral election in the year before a presidential election? It's said that holding an election when nothing else is going on decreases turnout, but this is just an awfully funny year for worrying about that, because the turnout is already exceptionally high (factors are the horror at Donald Trump and his terrible presidency looming over the Republican Party and Zohran Mamdani and his extraordinarily attractive mayoral candidacy lighting up the Democrats in two different directions.

On the other hand, the small number of contests in an odd-numbered year, in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, attracts a tremendous amount of attention from the punditry to issues, ours, that don't always get a lot of attention, and what they represent for the current state of party politics.

Also, nobody's explaining how it's done: do all the City Council members just get their terms cut short by a year in 2028? 

So I'm actually voting No on this one.

Other than that:

Manhattan District Attorney (a state office):

Alvin Bragg, the only prosecutor who has ever gotten a criminal conviction against Donald J. Trump, 34 of them in fact.  He has also implemented bail reform with extremely good results, defeating the fear that letting more defendants off cash bail would lead to rises in crime rates, which has driven the Republicans to insanity (even as the city reaches historic lows in violent crime, they can't stop lying about it). There's a slightly mysterious candidate, Diana Florence, under the label A Safer Manhattan, and she has a gigantic advertising budget—one of her things has been to take over the marquee of the Beacon Theater (the venue for many high-end comedians and beloved rock revival tours, Bob Dylan was there not long ago)—I think there's something suspicious about her, but I'm hopeful it won't matter.

Other than that, there's not a lot I need to say, but for the sake of completeness:

Manhattan Borough President:

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal

Mayor of New York City:

Zohran Mamdani!!!

City Comptroller:

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine

Public Advocate:

incumbent Jumaane Williams

City Council Member:

incumbent Gale Brewer (running unopposed)