Akhil Reed Amar writes in Myth America about the founding fathers. He emphasizes Washington's importance to the Constitutional Convention and downplays Madison's contribution, sees little difference between "republican" and "democratic", emphasizes the "union" side of the founding, doesn't accept Charles Beard's interpretation, and accepts the Constitution as helping slavery.
All in all it seems well-argued. I was surprised by his singling out Beard; by 1960 he seemed no longer prominent.
Reading Hive Mind by Garret Jones. Finding it good through the first chapters, until he got to the "Ingredients for Good Politics" and the Coase Theorem. A fast summary: if a state has people focused on the long term, and willing to accept the results of elections, there can be effective bipartisan deals to handle externalities (like pollution) using Coase. Coase says that if you have good negotiators they can find a win-win solution without the need for regulation.
Then I started thinking about the Matthew Effect.
An assumption in the discussion is that high IQ people are more future-oriented and more able to do tit for tat bargaining, without holding grudges which lead to mutual destruction. The problem when you apply the idea to politics is that those with the gold/assets are able to hire those with IQ (lobbyists and lawyers) to rig the bargain.
Currently reading Sen. Leahy's memoir. He entered the Senate in 1974 and was barely re-elected in 1980. It's an easy read, anecdotal and more about persons than policy or procedure.
One point--Reagan's victory in 1980 swept out a bunch of Democratic senators; only Leahy and Gary Hart of the 1974 Watergate class survived in the Senate. Was this the turning point to partisanship? He mentions Carter's farewell address, which included a warning against single-interest organizations. I think the reality is that organizations trying to influence Congress have become more and more specialized over the years. For example, we used to have the "farm lobby", composed of three big national organizations--Farm Bureau, Grange, National Farmers Union. But over time single commodity groups have become more important and more wide-spread.
I've got a couple books in my library queue about the growth of partisan politices; both of which I think go back to the 1990's, but not before.
Reading Dr. Deborah Brix's "Silent Invasion", her memoir of her work in the pandemic. It's basically chronological, and I'm just about 2 weeks in.
She is trying to maneuver among the various camps in the Trump administration:
They killed the last two American troops who were attacked from the air (towards the end of the Korean war.)
That factoid from David Kilcullen's The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. I'm about 100 pages in, finding it interesting and convincing. So far he's using an ecological/evolutionary approach to the recent history (say from 1991 on) of war, and the changes in how the opposing parties have changed their tactics and strategies, mostly learning from defeats.
One observation is that NSA can gather much more data than they can analyze. Terrorist/insurgent organizations don't rely on privacy laws, but on hiding in the woods of all the other data. I think that also applies to the average citizen--we get lost in the mass of data, so we don't need to be paranoid.
[I belatedly checked and saw I'd already posted on this book, so I'm changing the titles of the two posts so they make a series. ]Part of a planned series on Essence of Decision, a very interesting book using the Cuban missile crisis as the core example of three modes of analysis of how organzations work and act.
I'm struck by how much Kennedy got into the weeds during the crisis. Even so, as Allison/Zelikow describe, there were still disconnects where State, Air Force and Navy were doing their thing unaware of or misunderstanding his orders and desires.
Thinking about that presidency and the one completed on Jan 20, 2021, it's like night and day. Kennedy both by experience in the Navy and by inclination was hands-on; the former guy is hands-on only when it comes to furnishing his buildings or painting his airplane. LBJ, Nixon, and Carter would, I think, have been similarly involved, though with different perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses. Ford I don't know well enough, but I have my doubts. Reagan and GWBush no.
So America was lucky that the former guy never had a real crisis.
Another observation--the Soviet Union's communcation network between Moscow and Dobrynin in DC was marginally better than the 1941 network between Gen. Marshall and the Hawaii command (telegram delivered by Western Union).
And one more--Kennedy didn't have the option of a "surgical strike" on Cuba--dumb bombs on jet planes were too inaccurate.The authors say the decision to go with the blockade was due to that lack. Maybe with today's missiles he would have quickly gone to a strike. Then again, maybe Khrushchev wouldn't have decided to install his weaponry.
Reading Martin Indyk's "Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger: the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. Just got through the Yom Yippur War, the one where the US went to Defcon 3 while Nixon was melting down with the Saturday Night massacre. The one where Brezhnev was apparently addicted to drugs and drink.
A year or two ago I read a new book on the coming of WWI tracing the network of misunderstandings and wrong assumptions which led to the war. That's what came to mind as I read--the Soviets, the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Syrians--all were flawed players in the game.
I doubt there's much chance of improving the rationality of our leaders--they're human after all.
(After finishing the book, which covers Kissinger's successful negotiations to calm the area, and take advantage of opportunities to stablize the situation, laying the groundwork for Carter's Camp David establishment of peace between Israel and Egypt.)
I came away with an appreciation of Kissinger's abilities and even more appreciation of Indyk's approach: he's clear on the aims and tactics of the various players and their misjudgments. Anwar Sadat comes off well as a statesman, amazingly for someone who was pro-Hitler during WWII. The other leaders seem capable--no villains, just quirky people.
The Extended Mind is an ambitious book, one which tries to link together a lot of science and social science research into many subjects. Part of the discussion is the way in which our body affects our mind and brain; if we sense, gesture, or move it impacts the working of our brains in specific areas and ways. Space also impacts: are we in natural surroundings or built ones, can we use space to extend our memory (the "memory palace" method). Finally how do groups (experts, peers, diverse groups) affect us. The thrust of the discussion is how we can use the information/research to improve our thinking and effectiveness.
I found myself skimming. One of the Amazon reviews complains about the author's narration in the audible book being monotonal; there's something of a monotone about her writing as well (it would have been improved by following her own advice--adding graphics to the book, particularly for the "conclusions"). It would have been more useful if I were younger. I did skim all the way through, and actually I found the last chapter ("thinking with groups") the most interesting, likely not in the way she intended.
As I read, two phenomena came to mind: the death of the concertgoers in Houston and Trump's rallies. She writes about how groups, particularly students or coworkers, can be more effective, but some factors are common: a common focus (speaker, performer) and common engagement. Both were likely present in Houston and in Trump's rallies. I suspect I'm not too different from many liberals in dismissing the rallies in the past. But after reading the chapter I'm reconsidering, particularly in the light of Houston. Just because I'm proudly individualistic (I write with tongue in cheek) doesn't mean that others are.
Wolff's book gets some 1-star reviews on Amazon, partly for bad writing and for finding Trump to be innocent of bad designs.
Needless to say that's not what I get from it. While there's some problems (many references to Giuliani's drinking and farting) and often the sourcing is clear, he moves the narrative along. His conclusion about Jan 6 rings true: there was no plan because the "adults" had deserted Trump and those who were left in the White House were incapable of forming a plan, much less executing it.
That reminds me of Dana Milbank's take from the Mueller report--while the Trump team wanted to collude with Russia, they were too incompetent to do so.
Carter Malkasian's "The American War in Afghanistan" has gotten some good reviews and a lot of attention, since its publication coincides with the end of the war as far as the US is concerned.
I'm most of the way through it. It's good, though it gets criticized on Amazon for the writing. I'm not as critical as the reviewer--Malkasian likes simple subject-verb-object sentences which usually are clear and give at least the aura of objectivity. He overuses them. I'm more bothered by some of his tics: like using "assessed" as a synonym for "judged,..." and by converting nouns to verbs (which these days seems to be considered as good writing by some).
One thing which is striking about the content: the complexity of Afghan society, about which I may write more later. When you imagine our military in 2002 trying to understand what they're dealing with, you get a sense of the difficulty of their job.
Reading David Hackett Fischers "Champlain's Dream"--
Some surprises:
Interesting--in WWII the RAF bomber crews were self-selected with no divisions of rank or class--they stuck the men who had finished training as pilots, navigators, gunners, etc. in a big room and let them choose each other to form a bomber crew. Lots of diversity, at least by country (different parts of the British Empire, plus Poles, Free French, Americans, etc.)
In contrast America was very authoritarian, as the military tends to be, and strikingly was class-based. College men who were officers were the pilots and navigators; the rest of the crew were enlisted men. A new crew was formed by order from Washington; preferences had nothing to do with it.
James Rebanks is a skilled writer whose book I enjoyed. He's got a new book for sale, already released in the UK and now in the US on August 3.
I haven't read the new book, but anticipate I will, likely from the library. Civil Eats has an excerpt from it, describing his visit to Wendell Berry in Kentucky and to Iowa.
While he calls Iowa farmers the "best farmers that ever lived", he doesn't like our production agriculture, mourning the transition we've made over the last 60 years or so.
I agree with him there have been big tradeoffs, but I'm not as negative as he is about current agriculture. I don't know how well his sheep farm could support his family without, I'm guessing, significant support from his writing.
But he's worth reading.
About a third of the way into Michael Lewis's "The Premonition", which so far describes the development of the pandemic plan in the Bush administration, through the linking of people from different government agencies and a high schooler's science project.
On page 78 he writes:
"Inside the United States government were all these little boxes. The boxes had been created to address specific problems as they arose. 'How to ensure our food is safe to eat,' for instance, or how to avoid a run on banks'..." He goes on to describe the people inside the boxes as knowledgeable and talented, developing a culture around the box, but frozen inside the box with little interest in other boxes.
For me the "box" is a "silo", which includes the "stakeholders" in Congress and NGO's as well as the civil servatns, but the description otherwise rings true.
Mary Beth Norton published this book in 2020, Reading it in the light of the 1619 Project and our current partisanship makes it particularly interesting.
Tidbits:
She defines a "long 1774", essentially starting with the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) and ending with Concord and Lexington in April 1775.
Different communities reacted differently to the importation of tea by the East India Company--the Tea Party was the most extreme among the ports (NYC, Philadelphia, Charleston) in that property was destroyed.+
Gadsden writes from SC that the colony is weakened by its high proportion of enslaved blacks--makes them indecisive in responding to the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Port Act (the first UK response to the party).
The activist faction used tactics to manipulate the results.
"Patriotic terrorism" was a thing in 1774. The "woke" were sometimes successful in silencing their opponents, those who disagreed with nonimportation and possibly nonexportation agreements to protest the "Coercive Acts" punishing Massachusetts for the destruction of tea in the Boston Tea Party.
Much of the dynamic seems to be a recognition that all the colonies needed to act together, hence the first Continental Congress and the "Continental Association"
There was a ratchet effect, each big event pushed the sides further apart. In America the progression cemented unity among the colonies and a sense of being a separate country. Americans might have accepted a revised status similar to that achieved by Canada and Australia in the next century but neither side was able to offer concessions which could have initiated such negotiations.
Within America there was a splitting, as some came to recognize themselves as "Loyalists" and others as committed to the "Patriot" cause, even at the risk of civil war. As the book progressed the reactions of the players seemed similar to those we have seen recently. As the Patriots coalesced they tend to unite around stronger positions much as the way progressive Democrats have emerged and coalesced since the days of euphoria over Obama's election.
If the Bill of Rights had been in effect in 1774 the Patriots would have violated many of its provisions. Assessing them it seems they followed the rule: look at what we say, disregard what we did.
The British government was receiving reports from the Netherlands and elsewhere of Americans buying arms and gunpowder to smuggle into America. They took steps to intercept such shipments and pressured the Dutch government to block such sales. Norton describes these reports but doesn't offer any description of the background--were these individual entrepreneurs acting out of fear of war, much as today people go to the gun store when alarmed, or hope of profit, or were some acting as agents for people in the legislative bodies attempting to speak for the colonies (some improvised conventions, some the colonial assemblies)? Likely there's little documentation to provide such background.
Although Amazon reviews have criticized the writing as dull, I liked it--it's well done scholarship.
Virginia Postrel has a new book on the history of textiles. I gave it to my wife but haven't yet read it myself. Based on online interviews/discussions with her I expect it to be very good. One theory I've developed from them is there's a general parallel between the evolution of the making and use of textiles and the evolution of the growing and eating of food. There's a gradual shift from individual hand labor to mass production and marketing of textiles, just as there's a gradual shift from hand labor to mass production and marketing of food.
Reading "The Room Where It Happened" by John Bolton.
It's Trump porn, appealing to my liberal distrust of Trump and his administration. But that aside, I'm amazed Bolton stayed as long as he did. Either Trump is more charismatic, in the sense of being able to make people lose their common sense when in his presence, or Bolton was very power hungry.
Rachel Laudan has a recent post on the variety of food stores within a 6 mile radius of her Cincinnati home.
I could do a similar post about the Northern Virginia area, centered on Reston. One notable addition: we have Wegmans.
It's a big change since I was a boy. Tyler Cowen did an early book arguing this point, although focused on art, IIRC--i.e., that while the world was becoming more similar, the diversity within many cultures/countries was growing.
"Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema."
I think this is the book I remember.
