Right-Wing Fantasyland meets Chinese EVs

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There was a good article in Bloomberg today describing the many aspects of Chinese dominance in EV’s.  It’s useful if discouraging reading.  How did this happen?  Why is the West so far behind?

Obviously there are multiple items and reasons behind them.  However all of them trace back to a single big one:  the endlessly propagandized right-wing fantasy of the miraculous, all-knowing, perfectly-adaptive private sector.

In this case there were two principal failings of the private sector:

  • Denying climate change, because it was inconvenient for current operations.
  • Discounting any role for government, because the private sector by definition knew better

With these two failings the private sector was blindsided by a market transition they had gleefully dismissed as nonsense—because it didn’t fit with current mindset and current operations of business.  The Chinese did strategic planning, and the private sector in this country congratulated itself on its ability to squelch it.  The oil companies are still at it.  Trump will do it again if he gets a chance. We lost four years of opportunities to position for change–an eternity for competition.

That is not a surprise.  There are things the private sector does well—principally optimizing current operations.  However the current economic powers-that-be are very poor at major transitions.   Instead they will act, as in this case, to hang on to the optimized past and to delay that future for as long as possible.   In other words to defend their their own immediate private interests against the interest of the country as a whole. 

Government of course has no perfect crystal ball, but it doesn’t have the same limitations and the same vested interests. It can act to support future businesses even before their time has come.  We have had some of that.  Both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of Obama-era seed money. (Some readers may remember Romney’s ridiculing Obama for such initiatives!) The mRNA vaccines that stopped Covid were only possible because of decades of government-funded research.  All of that in the face virulent right-wing opposition.  The Chinese government locked up resources and initiated new businesses.  We were too smart for that!

The bottom line here is explicit.   The private sector is not a miracle machine.  Its interests are not the same as our national interests, and it can’t even do a good job of providing for its own success.  We need government to care about the well-being of our people and even about the well-being of its businesses. 

As a final point here it’s worth noting that–contrary to the usual sloganeering–when Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, he was not arguing for government to stay out of the miraculous private sector.  Instead he was making the case for a competitive “free” market, something only possible if government would stop the private sector from perverting the economy with monopolies and government influence.   That’s still a battle today!

Republicans and Guns

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With all the conversations about guns in this country, it’s worth being clear that the Republican Party is, was, and will ever be the party of guns. 

As we’ve noted before, the big donors to the party don’t care about guns—they care about money.   But guns are important as a means to that end.  Guns elect Republicans, and Republicans deliver tax cuts and relief from regulation.  All of that money has certainly pumped up guns as an identity issue.

However guns are not just one issue among many being promoted.  Guns are central to the whole Republican project.

Going back to Nixon’s “southern strategy” and before, Republicans are all about fear.  They have institutionalized and spread the long-term Southern terror of black insurrection.  There’s a big dangerous black man (or an immigrant) behind every tree, and he’s out to get you and your family.  Blacks control the Democratic Party, so it’s complicit.   Democrats want to take aware your guns and leave you exposed and unprotected.  Joe Biden refuses to help.  You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.  Republicans are the only thing between you and chaos.

As always in this election campaign the big issue is crime.  This isn’t about statistics or really addressing crime in any organized way.  It’s all about that big dangerous black man you have to be ready to shoot.  This isn’t a matter of convincing individual politicians–Republicans can never give up on guns.

The only option is to defeat them.

Civics

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There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”.  Reasonable except for the surprise at what happened.  Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption—whether we want to call it that or not—and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented.  The classic work on the subject, which got just about everything right, was written in 1860.  The only problem is that for all the intervening years many societies, including ours, have tried hard to avoid learning.

That blind spot brings up the subject of Civics—what is it that we all ought to know? That’s despite the fact that it’s hard to say the word Civics without wincing. My high school Civics course was a giddy paen to American democracy and its perfections.  One sentence sticks in my mind:  “Propaganda is a neutral term despite its unfavorable connotation; what makes it good or bad is what is propagated.”  Take that for wisdom.

But it strikes me that we can point to a few things that belong in a real Civics course.  I’m going to give three titles.  I’ll start with Max Havelaar (the just-mentioned 1860 classic) for international relations, to disabuse people of the notion that we can be white knights to go fix the rest of the world.  This is not a plea for isolationism, but for recognition that our interests will dominate and corruption will likely follow.  At the very least we should be suspicious about our motives and about the reality of what we create.

A second title is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.  This book has been around since 2016 and has had nowhere near the impact it should have.  It documents the very successful effort of the Koch organization to take over the political system in United States and reorient it to their objectives.  It explains most of what passes for incomprehensible in the press today—why the country has become ungovernable, why democracy is at risk, and how we got saddled with a mind-boggling Supreme Court. All of that was the plan from the beginning, and unless we’re clear on what happened, we’re not likely to be able to change it.

A third title is Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us. This book has some issues from trying to satisfy multiple constituencies, but its main message is clear: the different racial and other groups in this country have been turned against each other in a deliberate campaign of divide and conquer. And the only way to counter that is to recognize common interest and act for the common good. This was deliberate policy for Martin Luther King among others, but it’s not easy to do–group militancy will always fight it. However there is no alternative in taking on the powerful forces described in Dark Money.

Those books alone could give a big dose of reality to our political process. We can contrast that with what passes for Civics in public discourse today.

Most of what we hear about Civics today comes from the far right, where it’s back to the future–the contemporary version of what I had all those years ago with the John Birch Society. In the interim it hasn’t gotten better: this is still God’s country, above criticism and chosen to rule in His name. One particular feature worth noting is the weakness of the support for democracy. Democracy is defined as whatever it is that we’re doing, and it’s good because it’s ours.

On the left the world view is different, but fragmented. One person who does talk about Civics is the strange and (I find) worrisome figure of Danielle Allen.  Ms. Allen presents herself as standing above the messy political discussions of the day and as a pure advocate for civic virtue.  But her Civics lives in a world where there are no bad actors, and the primary issue is alienation of voters from the political system. In that world, the monumental importance of the 2024 election is hidden behind tales of civic involvement that ignore the real forces at work. In the end she’s cover for the people who have put us where we are.

For today, the kind of Civics outlined here doesn’t exist. But it’s worth recognizing that a real, substanitive Civics course is not so hard to describe. Maybe someday it could happen.

Lessons from the OceanGate Tragedy

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(From a comment to the Washington Post)

There is a lesson to be learned here. The CEO who died really believed his own story. And also really believed that any regulation was a bad idea that did nothing but block innovation.

That’s par for the course. Anyone who gets regulated thinks that way. Years ago I worked for the Bell System, which felt exactly the same way about regulators. The fact that people sincerely believe their own story is no proof that the story is true. If you want to protect against bad outcomes, you need a structure that forces real concern.

That’s true up and down the line. It’s true for protecting the public from all forms of pollution, it’s true for doing something about social media, and it’s true for protecting the Supreme Court from being bought.

Democracy is Not Natural

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There is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy that undermines much domestic and foreign policy.  One way to put it is that democracy is seen as a kind of natural way for societies to organize themselves.  What could be more normal than a bunch of people getting together for mutual benefit?  Just get rid of the autocrats, and the people will rule.

Unfortunately it’s the autocrats who are natural, and democratic societies are fragile, rare, and in dire need of careful cultivation.

For starters we can go back to the classical Greek models.   Democracy in Athens was both a sham and a disaster.  The Athenian democracy was created by Pericles as a way of wresting power from aristocrats.  Under its auspices he ruled with enormous personal power, and when he died things went to hell quickly.  The chaos led first to an authoritarian takeover (stopped only by the army) and then to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian wars.  Plato, writing later, dismissed democracy as nothing more than a prelude to dictatorship. 

As another example, a whole raft of new democracies were created in eastern Europe in the wake of World War I.  By the end of the 1920’s every single one of them was a dictatorship.  Once you’re in power there’s no reason to give it up.  And without a broad societal commitment to democracy, there’s nothing to prevent that.  Hitler of course was installed by a democratic election, and the conversion to dictatorship followed quickly and easily.

In the US today we’re so accustomed to this idea of democracy as normal, that we’re unprepared for today’s anti-democratic Republican party.  Since we don’t even ask why democracy is good, the question “why should we give up when we’re winning?” has no answer. Republicans today and their Supreme Court are unapologetically all about winning and maintaining power indefinitely. We’re surprised how easy it is to subvert our institutions, but that‘s what happens if society is not prepared to fight.

There are in fact a strong arguments for democracy.  We can look today at what goes on in China and Russian.  With authoritarian leadership you can never correct disastrous mistakes or deal effectively with corruption.  Further, autocrats once installed are beholden to no one. Rule of law goes out the window, so there is no protection from the rich and powerful. As we’ve pointed out here before, the enemies of democracy are no one’s friends. One problem is that people tend to think that the status quo is permanent, since they’ve always lived it.  So real consequences tend to come as a surprise.  Think of Brexit and the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.

Democracy is important, fragile, easily lost, and very hard to recover.  The powers that be (e.g the ever-present Koch organization) will always want to stand above rule of law.  They have enormous powers to sway the population, and once the population loses interest it’s hard to keep them out.  It is everyone’s responsibility to stand up for democracy.  There’s plenty of publicity these days about the threat to democracy in Israel, but the threat is just as real here and now.  It may take the same kind of mass movements to fight it.  As we all know the Supreme Court already has an end to democracy on its docket, and we can expect to hear about it in June.

Finally it’s worth recognizing that this same misunderstanding of democracy contributes to foreign policy goals that are to say the least delusional.  Most countries are corrupt dictatorships, and they’re going to stay that way.  Further our own attempts at state building (as in Iraq or Afghanistan) will continue to fail in chaos and corruption, because belief in self-evident democracy means there is no recognition of the magnitude of the job (or our own contributions to the problems). In one of Elena Ferrante’s novels she speaks of the power of expectations in controlling behavior—you cannot suddenly have democracy and the rule of law if that’s contrary to the everyone’s experience: 

“It was a world of favors, of services exchanged for other services, of debts contracted and debts called in, of concessions obtained and never returned, of pacts that could be broken and others that held until death. It was a world based on friendships and animosities, on associations and affiliations, on old enmities and new alliances. How could one change that world? By oneself, no one could. There was only one possibility: to become part of it, accept its conditions, go along with it to survive.”

Our biggest responsibility to the world is to build a working democratic society.  At the moment that’s a tall order, but that’s the job we’ve got.  In this juncture in history the US and EU are critical–the West is on the line to show it is a model that can be believed in. That’s not self-evident.

What To Do About TikTok

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It seems to me that the discussion of TikTok is distorted by the kind of xenophobic paranoia that frequently gets in the way. It’s not that there isn’t a problem, it’s that the real problem is not solved by a fixation on nasty foreigners.

There are two frequently discussed problems (that often get confused with each other):

  1. We’re giving a whole lot of information to TikTok that could be used by the Chinese government for nefarious purposes.
  2. The Chinese government could use their state-sanctioned control of TikTok to propagandize to TikTok’s base of customers.

The first point is pretty close to nonsense. Monumental amounts of information on the American population are already being collected, organized, and merchandized by companies who do this for a living. The last time I looked at this issue, more than ten years ago, you could already match what TikTok knows. Today it’s far worse. We need legal controls on information gathering. The fixation on TikTok for this issue is a distraction.

The second point is a more serious issue, as we’ve had more than enough experience with the coercive effects of social media. The problem, however, is that the dangers from TikTok are not an awful lot different than the dangers from good old American social media. There’s nothing that stops the Chinese government from putting propaganda on TikTok, but we’ve already had the Russians (and the Koch people) doing the same thing on Facebook. Unless we put up legal barriers to deliberate manipulation, social media are for sale to the highest bidder. Banning TikTok is just plain not the issue. (To my mind, any network operator that selects content for unsolicited distribution to users should be legally responsible for that content.)

You can even say flatly that the reason there is such bipartisan agreement on banning TikTok is that it is a handy way to make it seem that you’re doing something about a serious problem–without upsetting the real perpetrators much at all.

Bach as Dramatist

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The ideas here are based on a small amount of data and are undoubtedly well-known in some form to many people (perhaps even anyone who has played a two-part invention!).  However they don’t show up in the usual discussions of Bach, and they certainly don’t seem to have influenced performances on recordings.

I’m been playing some pretty basic Bach—three-part inventions (in D and B flat) and a Well-Tempered Klavier I fugue (in B flat).  What is striking is that all of these pieces are in a very specific form you could call Bach’s sonata form.  I’ll say a little about the specifics in a minute, but the important thing is that it is obvious that Bach wants those pieces to be played in a way that reflects this clear dramatic structure.  No one would ever play Mozart or Beethoven without respecting the dramatic structure those composers have set up, frequently based on their own versions of sonata form.  However for some reason pretty much no one does that with Bach.  Is there a concern about “authentic performance”?  How can it be inauthentic if it is clearly intended?

Bach wrote for a harpsichord, so he didn’t have dynamic variation to use in performance. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t build drama.  Tempo variation and ornaments were parts of his language, and he undoubtedly used them to the same ends.

Bach’s sonata form is in five sections:

  1. Entry of the voices
  2. Limited development based on the fugal subject as presented and transitioning to a strong cadence in a new key—as an end to the exposition.
  3. Development section proper, with a clear departure point and free use of any pieces or rhythms of the fugal subject or other features of the exposition
  4. Recapitulation in the subdominant as a clear contrast with development.  In all three pieces Bach goes to some pains to emphasize the recapitulation event.
  5. Transition to the tonic as if anything a bigger event, followed by a short kind of victory lap

All three cited pieces do this exactly.

I think you can make a case more generally that people pay too much attention to the “horizontal” structure of Bach’s music—the intricacies of multi-voice writing—and not enough attention to the “vertical” structure—the musical events created by all the voices acting together.  That overemphasis on the “horizontal” leads to performances where the sole objective seems to be making sure the fugal subject is heard clearly regardless of whatever else is going on.  In the extreme such performances can amount to little more than the same thing played over and over again in different keys—because that’s just about all you can hear. It’s strange that this persists in an era fixated on historically correct performance, since it is patently inauthentic for keyboard!

Another side of the same thing is in the comment you sometimes hear about how amazing it is that that real emotional music emerges out of all that complicated polyphony.  I think that point of view is wrong.  Bach wanted to produce music, and the complicated polyphony was his language to produce it.  He manipulated that language the same way any other artist manipulates his medium of creation.  Bach’s ability to master polyphony is jaw-dropping, but that doesn’t mean he regarded it as the primary objective.

There’s a relevant quote from Beethoven: “I believe that Bach’s works for solo violin are perhaps the greatest example in any art form of a master’s ability to move with freedom and assurance, even in chains.” We spend too much time talking about chains.

P.S. My own ability to make a case for this is limited, but I’ve attached a recording of a familiar fugue from book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. This is fugue #2 in C-minor. There is plenty of drama here, but the recapitulation is rather different than what was described above–it’s actually purely dramatic. For the record there is a difference of opinion about whether the piece should end in C major or minor. My edition used C major, and I agree with that because of the surprise C major chord that occurs earlier in the recapitulation.

We Can’t Afford That

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Heather McGhee begins her book The Sum of Us with the question “Why can’t we have nice things?”.  And she makes clear what she means: “basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics”.

She then goes on to explore how racism has been systematically used by the wealthy and powerful to keep that from happening—which is to say how they keep that money and power for themselves.  I’m happy to promote her book, however I also want to spend a little time here on her question—on the mindset that says we can’t.

My example is Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.  I’m not going to argue the details.  What I am going to argue is the senselessness of the knee-jerk reactions, i.e. how ridiculously entrenched is the idea that we just can’t have nice things.

The cost of the program was estimated by the government accounting office as $400 B, which puts it in the same ballpark as some stimulus packages.  Virtually without exception that number was taken by the press at full face value.  This was ridiculously, “humongously” expensive.    It was going to undermine free enterprise everywhere, drive inflation, and possibly bankrupt the country.  “We can’t afford things like that.”

There are two problems with that assessment. Let’s start with the $400 B number.  For accounting reasons, it is for a program lifetime total taken over 30 years.  That reduces the average yearly value to $13 B, which is the number to compare against stimulus packages.  Except that number is itself too high.  Again for accounting reasons it assumes that all current debtors will keep paying for the full period—something that has never happened in the past.  Let’s take $10 B as a nice round high estimate, and compare it with another per-year item in the budget—the defense budget just passed.   That number is $858 B. The humungous expense is 1% of that total.  It’s not even big enough to count as a rounding error, and the inflation claim is a joke.

We’re so used to “we can’t afford things like that” that the press can’t do even that much arithmetic.

What’s more (on the free enterprise issue) that money was spent because college had become vastly more expensive precisely during the worst downturn since the Great Depression.  (And the Republican legislature refused to do anything about it—hiding behind the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.)  We like to talk about equality of opportunity.  We, the USA, pioneered high school for all.  In today’s economy college or some other form of post-secondary education has become necessary for good jobs (and bad jobs in this country won’t even get you above the poverty line!).  So we’re not talking about buying televisions on credit—we’re talking about most people’s only chance at a middle class existence.

Biden’s debt forgiveness plan does not fix everything wrong with affordability of education. And it isn’t means-tested (although people who borrow are usually not rich and means tests are almost always counterproductive).  But it is a step forward and addresses a real problem that was not caused (despite the rhetoric) by sheer profligacy.  And the most ardent critics of the incomplete solution are the people committed to doing nothing at all.

Most galling, however, is the universal knee-jerk of “we can’t afford things like that” which can’t be bothered for even a cursory look at what’s real.