To the President's Health

At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.

In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December, went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight, which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the rumors he was most anxious to avoid. 

That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27, during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the public thought he might be, based not on observation of the president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.

For the Record: Moldbuggery

Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as "Mencius Moldbug" (and I really should register a protest against at the use of the Latinized name of the philosopher known as Mengzi (孟子, 372-289 B.C.E.), the most humane and liberal of the early Confucians, a man who sincerely and deeply believed in the innate goodness of the human being and the saving value of education for all, a man as remote intellectually from the Moldbug as it is possible for anyone to be, it actually gets me kind of angry). 

It's pretty interesting, though of course perverted, what Yarvin is doing there, which is spelled out at his own substack graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversa.... He claims FDR exercised an "informal dictatorship-for-life" that was so immensely powerful that he retained power after he died. Or at any rate left behind a zombie presence that governs us still, 80 years later, presumably forcing us against our will to accept Social Security payments and workers' comp and unemployment benefits and the like:

Read FDR’s First Inaugural, specifically the part where he demands the powers of a general resisting an enemy invasion. In 1933! These were the powers FDR needed to create what, during his informal dictatorship-for-life, was more or less his personal executive monarchy, then after his death became the formalized administrative state.

That is to say, no, Roosevelt did not rule from beyond the grave, but the institutions of the New Deal persisted after he died, and, with the advent of civil rights laws and no doubt Obamacare, even got worse, from Yarvin's point of view...

Joe Did What? Annals of Rhetoric

 

I guess this is Stephen Miller... 

("slowly but passionately" is classic Miller, with its literary sound unmatched by any actual meaning, and so is the grammatical bear trap of "as powerfully as mere words can get"—get powerfully what?—where the cliché according to which words are "mere" distracts the reader with wondering what other kind of object means things better than words do)

... but it's taking off all over MAGA Twitter, generally in a form like "that's all it means, and if you object to that you must be a communist," which begs the question of what "again" means, and what it's doing in the phrase, with its implication that America stopped being great at some point and the greatness needs to be restored, but that's really a kind of dumb argument in any case. I don't see how there can be some adequate empirical definition of national greatness that you could apply to measure how American moved in and out of greatness the way you can measure how it moves in and out of, say, economic recession, and I don't see the point of arguing about it if we can't even know what it means.

A more useful retort, I thought, might be to say that "woke" just means having one's eyes opened, and why are you so insistent on keeping them closed? Maybe there's a begged question there as well—opened to what?—but the answer to that is easy: opened to injustice. If you disagree with that, if you think we should all just sleep through injustice, then you're weird, in my opinion.

Stupid analogies department

 

Sorry, this is kind of childish.

What on earth is going on at The Times? Their attitude toward the Biden presidency is getting downright venomous, as in this latest "Political Memo" by the Times's Nate Silver ersatz, Nate Cohn:

Biden as a New F.D.R.? Try L.B.J.

The president’s agenda — big progressive change — has placed Democratic priorities over the voters’ desire for practical help on the pandemic and inflation.

Venomous and dumb! It's peculiar enough to start with this dichotomy between Johnson as (bad) "progressive" grinding his ideological axe in the people's faces vs. Roosevelt as (good) "centrist" just doing the practical stuff people wanted, as if Roosevelt had done all his planning on the basis of those stupid "most important issue" polls instead of gathering his Brain Trust during the campaign from the most systematically leftist thinking going on at the time outside the actual socialist parties, to design a huge and transformative program of social insurance, regulation of banking and securities industries, and strictly socialist public works programs, based on stringent structural analysis of the economy and ideas for remodeling it through central government planning. Has Cohn ever read a book about the New Deal?

For the Record: Happy Anniversary Bonus March! (With DACA Bonus)

Bonus Marchers and police, 1932. Photo by an unnamed Signal Corps photographer from the National Archives, via Wikipedia.

Just 88 years ago yesterday, in the midst of the worst economic calamity and one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, the Bonus Expeditionary Force of 17,000 Great War veterans with their families and social justice warrior comrades were attacked with live ammunition at their Washington, DC campsite by local police, on orders from President Hoover's attorney general William Mitchell, two of them dying, and then driven out by an Army contingent under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.

Our friend Henry noted how much less respectful The New York Times was at the time toward President Hoover than they are toward President Trump today (one of the first papers to adopt a nonpartisan stance, as early as 1884, it had nevertheless endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 1912):

A fascinating thread about the Bonus Army yesterday highlighted similarities with protests today. But I was struck by how much *less* credulous the 1932 version of the New York Times was of Hoover compared to 2020 and Trump. “Blaming” and “Asserting”:https://t.co/BgZewqZIEb https://t.co/EdLEky5RoX

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) July 29, 2020

Also noteworthy was this:

A little horse-race pablum for the junkies

Colonel John C. Frémont, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856, in a campaign lithograph, via.

So Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is back on the theory that Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter.

No, really, this has been going on for a couple of years. Just around the time of the inauguration, Julia Azari, Scott Lemieux, and Corey Robin wrote pieces suggesting that the Trump presidency was likely to be what Steven Skowronek called a "disjunctive" presidency, that is one that takes place at the time when an old order or "regime", the long-term ordering of the ideologies and interests on which the politics depends, is falling apart and a new one is not yet clearly emergent; like Buchanan's, before the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, or Hoover's, before the New Deal, or Carter's, before the beginning of what you might call the Era of Miniature Government.

Ross, with an authoritarian's inability to grasp a discussion of systemic factors, took this to mean that Trump must be personally like Carter in some respect, as in this from his contribution to the Times inauguration coverage, committed to the proposition that Trump is as smart as Carter was, with a "vision" that is similarly "new", though unlikely to succeed:

One such president was Jimmy Carter, who tried to maintain the creaking New Deal coalition while also grasping at a new vision for liberal governance. He failed because his party simply couldn’t accommodate the tension, and he himself couldn’t effectively blend the old and new.

Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Mr. Carter with the ’70s-era Democrats, he has grasped — correctly — that Republican politics desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populist-nationalist vision has seemed too racially and culturally exclusive to win him majority support, and it’s layered atop a party that still mostly believes in the “populism” of cutting the estate tax.

Combine those brute political facts with Trump’s implausibly expansive promises, and a Carter scenario — gridlock, disappointment, collapse — seems like the most plausible way to bet. 

Which is pretty amusing in retrospect: whatever we may think about Trump's intelligence and vision, he's turned out to have an amazingly firm hold on his party, in spite of the claims to independence of a few crabby pundits. Today, anyway, Ross isn't going for retrospection, but instead prefers to look ahead, toward the question of who's going to play the "reconstructive" Reagan in this remake ("Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?"):

It's not a Japanese internment order

Screen shot from Evan Salcido/YouTube.

Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt 75 years ago today, is often thought of as an order to put ethnic-Japanese residents of the United States, including US citizens, in detention camps, treating them all as enemies of the state, just because that's what actually happened.

But by Trumpian logic that's totally unfair. It didn't apply to all Japanese, just "any or all" of those in "military areas". Not including Hawaii, for instance, where 40% of the population was of Japanese origin, and where the real-life Japanese attack on the United States had occurred (from Japan, not from anybody living in the territory), but only a few thousand were interned, and not including anybody east of the Mississippi except some Italians and Germans (including German Jewish refugees, because it was thought they might be German agents abusing Americans' natural sympathy for refugees, does that sound familiar at all?).

In fact it really didn't apply to Japanese at all; the word "Japanese" isn't used anywhere in the order. Just "persons", at the discretion of the designated commander:

I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order.

So how can you possibly call it a Muslim ban Japanese internment order? It was just Keeping America Safe. </sarcasm> Or an invitation to racial discrimination and arbitrary tyranny, depending on how you look at it, you know, but I have an idea which, based on the way it turned out.

Annals of derp: The Great Depression

Economist Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, at the College of the Ozarks Free Enterprise Forum in April 2014.

Oh hai Heritage. And what's your Chief Economist Stephen Moore got to cheer about today?

Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts—for those who weren’t bored to tears—repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?

Well, hm, and what's today's argument about how the New Deal didn't work?

Forward

It's November again. The incumbent president makes people wonder why they were so excited four years ago. He was never really "of the left", his main plan was to eliminate the budget deficit then and it still is, his heart is with the bankers in spite of all the abuse they heap on his head—or if it's not, then he's their unconscious tool, which would be worse.

Of course the Republicans have nothing whatever but greed and fear; it's tempting to vote for them because the capitalist system is collapsing around our ears anyway—why not hasten the process and the eventual triumph of the enlightened proletariat? Vote for Alf Landon!

People didn't, though. They voted for the Happy Warrior, FDR, in spite of his weak record and ambiguous attitude toward progressive ideas. They voted for public art and state parks, whatever regulation they could get of the financial sector, and a big, confident grin. It wasn't enough, because it's never enough. It was enough for now. And in retrospect, it was a hell of a lot.

Inauguration Day 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.