The British Post Office Scandal: How Not to Handle One

“The worst miscarriage of justice in British history,” it’s been called — “an affront to justice.” Hundreds of innocent people convicted on false evidence. Not a 16th Century witch hunt, but one in the 21st.

This true story was dramatized in a multi-part Masterpiece Theater production, “Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.” A disturbing window into an aspect of human nature.

The British Post Office introduced a new Fujitsu computer system called “Horizon,” for local postal outlets, run by private individuals (“sub-postmasters”), mostly as adjuncts to other businesses like little stores. Horizon started showing widespread account deficits. The Post Office’s “help line” was useless in sorting this out (and lied to callers that they were alone having these problems). Hundreds were forced to repay amounts ranging into tens of thousands; stripped of their licenses; nearly a thousand criminally prosecuted for theft and fraud. The P.O. insisted their contracts made them completely responsible. Many lives were destroyed. Several committed suicide.

When this began to unfold, you’d think someone high up in the P.O. would say, “Wait! This makes no sense! Something’s messed up here!”

But no.

A question that came up in the dramatization was — where did the money go? Not to the sub-postmasters, many being bankrupted by the repayment demands. But a question that somehow never arose was — how could those tiny postal outlets even have turnover in such large amounts in the first place?

It made, indeed, no sense at all. There was never anything to indicate that any money was actually missing. The “deficits” were just figments of Horizon computer glitches. That should have been obvious from the get-go.

Yet the Post Office muckety-mucks went into a bureaucratic crouch, refusing to entertain the possibility of anything wrong with the system, insisting all the prosecutions were perfectly proper. Oblivious to reason and the injustice. This continued for a decade. They went through the motions of an internal investigation, an outside review, and a mediation process for victims — all jerry-rigged to bury the truth and produce the desired results. Officialdom in all its gory glory.

It was a human unwillingness to acknowledge error. They also wanted to protect the P.O.’s “brand” from any opprobrium. Perhaps arguably understandable had there been much chance they’d succeed. But with hundreds of victims all across the country, the crap was bound to hit the fan somehow, eventually. Damaging the “brand” far more than an honest handling of the matter in the first place would have done.

They should have quickly realized something was wrong, and gotten out in front of it, doing everything possible to make things right. Instead they doubled down, violating the first rule of holes: if you’re in one, stop digging.

I’ve previously written that all human sins are ultimately rooted in arrogance. And reviewed a book titled Assholes – A Theory, also centralizing arrogance. The “Horizon” story is illustrative — behavior quintessentially arrogant. Asshole behavior.

Being fallible, I make mistakes in my own business. I try to correct them. But government bureaucracies have little impetus to do so, free to behave arrogantly instead. This is a key element of a traditional antipathy toward governmental power.

In the end of a very long and tortuous story, the sub-postmasters, led by the indefatigable Mr. Bates, won a sweeping judicial victory. That “affront to justice” quote came from appeal judges, voiding some of the many criminal convictions. The real criminals, it was now clear, were the Post Office bureaucrats.

Led by Paula Vennells. She almost seemed like a human being — almost. At the end, she was shown in church (she was also a pastor — a woman of God!) at last apologizing to the legions of people who’d suffered so cruelly. Yet still disclaiming criminal responsibility. And: her lips didn’t move. The contrition was only in her head.

Vennells was not prosecuted. Instead, awarded a CBE (“Commander of the British Empire,” a step below knighthood). Vennells later renounced the CBE, a gesture without effect; but King Charles has revoked it.

Yet even now the story’s not over. After the TV drama aired, the BBC News had a brief item quoting Vennells labelling the false numbers spewed out by Horizon not “bugs” but “exceptions” — to make them sound “non-emotive.”

The hole so deep no light can reach the bottom.

The American Dream: A Fairy Tale?

The New York State Writers Institute’s annual Film Festival is always a great event. It’s free, and this year’s included nice breakfast and dinner buffets! (And I got to meet Jacqueline Bisset!)

The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales was produced by Abigail Disney — Walt’s grandniece. Its theme was corporate greed at the expense of workers. Abigail Disney has become a crusader on that.

Not so long ago, battling for a $15 minimum hourly wage was a big thing. Disneyland workers were getting $15; being bumped up to $18.25. But there’s been inflation. In that Anaheim, CA locale, the film asserted, a living wage would now be $24.

So, as vividly shown, those workers struggle to make ends meet. One single gal, Artemis, searched endlessly for affordable housing, finally finding something entailing a two-hour commute. (Nasty confession: I judged her unattractive, only to realize her face must be molded by constant stress about her circumstances.)

The City of Anaheim apparently deems Disneyland a big asset, for all the tourism it attracts. No surprise there. So the City financed construction of a huge parking garage near the park. Then leased it to the Disney company for $1 a year, enabling Disney to reap tens of millions in parking fees annually. WTF??

More profit for the company; less for the City to help its residents. And the pandemic provided occasion for Disney to shed tens of thousands of workers, further fattening the corporate bottom line. It’s stock price has duly marched upward.

None of this does anything for the workers — who in fact have more toil, due to the fewer hands. While Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, is paid hundreds of millions.

Corporate culture wasn’t always so greed-filled, the film argues, pointing to Disney’s own past, when labor unions were stronger. But it invokes Evil Geniuses (a book I’ve reviewed, whose author Kurt Andersen appears in the film) as showing how America’s richest labored to change that culture to feather their nests.

A particular villain in the film is economist Milton Friedman, who held that a business’s only responsibility is to earn profits for its shareholder-owners. That might indeed sound ugly. However, Friedman was not arguing for profit for profits’ sake. Instead, that profits are a gauge of a corporation’s real benefit to society: producing goods and services people want, at prices willingly paid, to enhance their quality of life. Of course corporations wouldn’t do that without profit.

That’s what makes a free market economy beneficial for society. Encapsulated by Adam Smith’s famous line: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” And Friedman was arguing that anything distracting a business from its main job of providing desired goods and services would detract from the general welfare.

The film casts Iger’s pay, and corporate profits more generally, as coming at the expense of Disney’s workers. But again, we can’t expect any business to give us desired things without its profiting. What’s a reasonable level of profit can be argued.

But here another aspect of free market economics comes in: competition. If businesses must vie with each other for consumer dollars, with price a key factor, that tends to drive down prices to levels allowing just enough profit to keep them going. I have friends always saying grocery owners should just cut prices and take less profit. In fact that’s a highly competitive market where profits are, in consequence, just a tiny percentage of cash register receipts.

I don’t know what that number is for Disney. But even Disney, too, faces intense competition. Consumers have numerous other entertainment options.

All that said, however, there’s much evidence that in the big picture, America’s economy has become less competitive, with accordingly higher profit levels. The Abigail Disneys and Kurt Andersens of the world think it’s because government has let corporations get away with more. Yet there’s another factor of government putting its thumb on the scale to reduce opportunities for competition. That’s certainly true in the vast realm of governmental licensing requirements, fundamentally anti-competitive. “Free market economics” is not the problem; freer would be better.

Greed is a mis-used word. The film inevitably quoted Gordon Gekko. It’s simply human to want more for oneself, to improve one’s life. Mostly that’s a motivator for efforts that benefit society (per Adam Smith). What’s a problem (bad greed) is seeking gain unethically, at another’s expense.

As for Iger’s bloated pay: yes, it’s unreasonably excessive, Disney should be able to hire a perfectly fine CEO for a small fraction. And most of what’s now paid to Iger could instead be used to give workers more, without reducing overall profit. CEO pay in general got out of hand due to perversities in how it’s determined, full of conflicts of interest and self-dealing, a system guys like Iger all exploit because they can.

The left’s picture is of a very unequal America, with its Iger types hogging undue shares of its wealth, while the masses, like those portrayed in Disney’s film, suffer. It showed, for example, rising demand for handouts from a local food bank — one striking scene was an endless line of cars awaiting their turns.

But, dare one say, those people have cars. Not to dismiss their undoubted challenges, but poverty in America isn’t what it used to be. Government help is a big reason. More would be justified; but let’s not forget that it’s a relatively modern thing.

And it’s certainly not true that the “the masses” suffer deprivation. The far bigger phenomenon is mass affluence. Most Americans are part of a huge middle class doing a lot better than those in the film. And while there’s much written about a “shrinking middle class,” a lot of that is people rising rather than falling out of that class.

Also much invoked is supposedly rising inequality. But here too the true picture is complex. And while it’s fiendishly hard to parse the data, there’s much evidence that, in the pandemic and its wake, wages in the lowest echelons have actually risen faster than in the rest of the economy — reducing inequality.

But perhaps all this is easy for me to say, having been very lucky, with a resulting great life. I feel for the people in that film. They have it tough, and make great efforts. They are good people.

What the Hell is Happening to America?

The American character has ever been one of positive spirit, optimism, self-confidence. Thus conventional wisdom in politics was that positivity always beats negativism. Exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s sunny persona defeating dour rivals. How distant that picture now seems.

Departure from it might be understandable were there some profound national trauma pushing us onto a radical, disruptive path. Something like, say, the Great Depression. Yet even that did not upset our civic applecart. While it did spur some fringe movements, our basic political culture stood resilient. Testament to the goodness of what America had built.

A democracy where election outcomes are respected and accepted by all sides, with peaceful transfers of power, in a spirit of goodwill. Such civility characterizing all our political processes. Agreeing to disagree, often coming together in pragmatic compromise, actually tackling problems, generally respecting opponents. Intolerant of misconduct, vulgarity and falsehood. All in all making our public culture something genuinely noble. Francis Fukuyama has written how such democracy serves our deep need for “thymos,” having one’s human dignity respected. This has been America’s great achievement.

Rejecting that longstanding salutary ethos, traducing this nation’s most essential character, makes today’s Republican politics tragically baffling. It might, again, be explicable were there some severe system shock. But there’s nothing remotely like that.

Nothing like the Great Depression. Or, for that matter, the Civil War, which we also actually got past with remarkably little discombobulation of our political culture. The pandemic was traumatic, but Trumpism preceded that, and normality returned pretty fast. Now the economy boasts strong growth, rising wages, record low unemployment, stocks up and inflation coming down.

And yet what is a national crisis today is so many voters being so pissed-off and disaffected by who-knows-what that they want to burn the house down. Though they don’t see it that way themselves, instead imagining they’re “patriots” somehow saving the country. From a Biden administration that actually merely embodies the kind of politics-as-usual that prevailed for generations. They’d elect instead a sociopath who literally tried to overthrow the government.

And while there’s a feeling our politics is broken, requiring drastic medicine, they empower the very people most responsible for the breakage. And while despite the good economy some are struggling, they’ll be hurt more than helped by Republican policies.

Sure, there are grievances and cultural divisions. Whites who feel a loss of caste position, traditionalists unsettled by acceptance of divergent lifestyles, fear of immigrants, resentments against educated elites, etc. But there have always been such societal discords, yet they didn’t shred our civic culture or provoke such nihilistic political pathology. A sizable Republican contingent now even justifies political violence.

A key aspect is divorcement from reality, embracing a bizarro mockery of it. Like rejecting the reality of January 6, and the 2020 election’s legitimacy. Trump said it was stolen, based on nothing whatsoever, just because his damaged psyche could not accept losing. Any fool could see that. Yet Republicans refuse to.

My Lawn Sign

Why doesn’t their hateful, destructive behavior make them unelectable? For many voters the whole political picture is just a fuzzy blur, they can’t discern true signal from noise, and not even January 6 provides clarity. Meantime Trump’s pantomime of “strength” is psychologically bedazzling as against notional Democrat “weakness.” When it’s actually derangement versus sanity, depravity versus decency.

Too many take for granted our democracy, without much understanding of it, or its vulnerability to what’s afoot. Some see Trump as more symptom than cause, just exploiting passions already extant. Maybe. But such a perfect storm of badness can do immense damage. He already has.

So we’re sleepwalking off a cliff, poised to witlessly throw away America’s quintessential goodness, making this a much darker country. Indeed, Trump loves dictators and will put us on the dark side globally. A world whose Putins are untrammeled won’t be good for us. “America First” will be ashes in our mouths.

This nation is still full of wonderful people. How can we be sucked into such evil?

Eclipse Apocalypse: Or, A Day at the Beach

You watch, for over an hour, through your protective glasses, as the Moon’s dark disc progressively occludes the Sun. Darkness descends; the temperature drops. Finally only a crescent sliver remains.

Then none. Nothing now visible through your glasses. As instructed, you remove them . . .

And wow! The Sun is a black circle, in a dark sky, edged by coruscating brilliant white. A picture so counter to nature, the mind rebels.

Then the “diamond ring” as the first glimmer of the Sun’s re-exposed edge, a globule of light, bursts from the slowly moving shadow.

So far following the script. But now, something totally unexpected: the “diamond” suddenly exploding into a blazing fireball engulfing the whole Sun. This couldn’t be happening.

It’s understandable how daytime darkness would have unnerved earlier peoples. That fireball would’ve scared their pants off. Again, I never expected it, and some research has failed to confirm this as a known eclipse phenomenon. There’s some indication it may have been an optical effect as my eyes were adjusting. I did fairly quickly avert my eyes and put my glasses back. Yet I know what I saw in that moment, and it was quite dramatic.

Anyhow, I will probably never view the Sun quite the same again.

My wife and I had scoped out Tupper Lake, a few hours distant, as our best viewing bet; paid for a parking slot, and hotel room (exorbitantly priced) for eclipse night, to avoid likely heavy traffic exiting the totality zone. Her sister Catherine came from Waltham, MA, to join us. A last minute addition was my friend Sherrie Lyons, a science writer, whose other plans had fallen through.

We prudently left Albany shortly after 6:00; apparently the route north got congested a bit later. We stopped for half an hour along the way to reconsider our plans, checking weather info, and decided on Plattsburgh instead. Arrived there before 10:00; the free parking lot at Lake Champlain’s beach still had space.

It was chilly and windy, so I didn’t relish a whole day outdoors, but the gals insisted we stake out spots on the already crowding waterfront. It eventually warmed up, becoming a pleasant “Day at the Beach.” Mostly blue sky, with only a slight cloud haze. The eclipse began at 2:14.

After, we got to our Tupper Lake hotel with no traffic delays, and even, to my surprise, found a very nice and uncrowded restaurant for dinner (the Belvedere in Saranac Lake). Again avoided traffic returning to Albany next morning.

Meantime Sherrie and I had taken a long walk along the beach, joined by a lovely family (the wife a CBS News anchor). But it was delightful being among so many people, making a communal experience. It’s a great virtue of human civilization and culture that we thusly come together, sharing in such good spirit.

Was Saving the Union Lincoln’s Big Mistake?

America has been blessed with some leaders of great nobility and vision. Washington and Lincoln stand out. Lincoln almost godlike in his depth of character and wisdom. It’s especially remarkable that such a fraught moment in our history brought forth a Lincoln rather than some exploitative demagogue (like you-know-who). Summoning our better angels rather than our demons.

Lincoln’s guiding light was saving the union. He once said that if that entailed ending slavery, he’d do it; if it required keeping slavery, he’d do that. His Gettysburg address cast the Civil War as fighting for democracy, the union being equated with democracy.

But was that really true?

Southern states had precipitated matters by seceding. “Let them go in peace,” some Northerners were saying. But not many, and it doesn’t seem Lincoln seriously considered it. Yet couldn’t “government of the people, by the people, for the people” have endured in a smaller union?

America’s South is, in many ways, a different country. That was certainly true before the Civil War, and remained so long after (as a Faulkner reader would know). More lately it seemed the South was finally normalizing, getting with the program, exemplified by removal of Confederate monuments. Yet look how much sturm und drang accompanied that.

And look at politics. Many Southern whites vote Republican because they see Democrats as the party of Blacks. Still not truly accepting their being countrymen; still, in the depths of their psyches, fighting the Civil War.

And if the eleven Confederate states had not been bludgeoned back into the union, America would be a different country. Dare I say a better one? Persistent southern mentalities are obstacles to progress along a waterfront of issues. Guns, to name one. Absent those eleven gun-loving states, we’d have long since enacted sane firearms laws, and gun violence would not be such a curse.

So maybe losing the South would have been good riddance. The rest of America going onward just fine, nicer and more enlightened. With far more manpower and productivity, we’d still have grown into an industrial, economic, and geopolitical superpower.

Of course it’s a truism that history can hinge on small contingencies, and the Civil War was a big one. Without it, today’s whole world would be different. Yet it’s hard to see it being worse.

Historian MacKinlay Kantor wrote a 1961 book, If the South Had Won the Civil War. (My ex-partner was fascinated by the notion; after she left, I finally found a copy, and sent it to her.) Kantor imagined the victorious Confederacy eventually evolving toward convergence with the USA, and reuniting. That seems over-optimistic.

A separate South would have been an economic backwater left on its own to grapple with its slavery problem. Not a pretty picture. The last nation to abolish slavery was Brazil, in 1888. How long could the CSA have sustained it? How much bloodshed would have eventuated? What would race relations there have looked like afterwards? Jim Crow and the KKK give some idea, but unrestrained by the U.S. federal government and Constitution.

Meantime, back to voting, would a 39-state America today be afflicted by Trump? He’d have no chance of winning. In fact his very name would be no more than a reality-TV footnote. While in today’s actual world he threatens the America of “better angels” that Lincoln idealized.

Something Lincoln could hardly have foreseen. But perhaps, in the long view of history, his stopping Southern secession was a tragic mistake. With the Trumpian chickens coming home to roost only a century-and-a-half later.

America’s Tiktokification

Nowadays people get their news not from Cronkhite-like broadcasts or newspapers but more commonly from the internet, mainly social media, like Facebook. Programmed to feed them stuff that gets their juices flowing — much of it fake news and inflammatory content — driving political polarization and craziness.

But wait. That picture is actually so 2020. The landscape has changed — again.

The internet still does shape how many people engage with the world. In fact the hours spent scrolling on phones continue to grow. Social media began as vehicles for people to connect and share with each other, and becoming a “digital town square in which arguments of the day are thrashed out and public opinion is shaped.” (To quote The Economist.) Driving movements like #metoo, #Blacklivesmatter, wokism and Trumpism.

But then Tiktok took over the world. “Banning” it actually won’t make much difference; copycats are coming to the fore. Because it turns out that what people really want is not so much all that news-like and political stuff but, rather, entertaining short little videos.

Older rival platforms have taken notice. Musk now claims X (ex-Twitter) is “video-first.” It’s also taking over Facebook, where social interaction has been relegated to a minority of users’ viewing time — and Facebook says news now makes up less than 3% of what people see there.

Such platforms are finding that cute little videos not only excel at gaining eyeballs — and thus ad revenue, which is after all the name of the game — but avoids so much criticism they’d gotten over their handling of politically-freighted content. News just isn’t worth all the hassle it entails.

Anyhow, going hand-in-hand with decreasing coverage of public affairs is less online political engagement. All that sharing, retweeting, commenting, arguing, is greatly diminishing.

One unfortunate fallout is that those who do still engage politically online tend to be the more highly opinionated with extreme views. While more normal people increasingly shun that freak show.

I’m not against entertainment. But isn’t at least a little knowledge important? And we’re seeing another downward lurch there — a further dumbing-down. The 2006 comedy film Idiocracy grows ever more prescient.

For most everyday folks, their ambits of concern don’t much encompass what’s going on in the wider world, which tends to be a dim blur. Leaving the field, again, to the zealots — with regular people even less equipped to counter them.

Indeed, with less news being presented to us overall, the proportion that is crap (as opposed to reliable, responsible mainstream media sourced) rises.

Add into the picture local journalism’s death spiral — and now too AI — and I cringe to think what our civic culture will look like in another decade or two.

Trump Documents Trial: J’RECUSE!

Trump operatives aggressively screamed conflict-of-interest because Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, on his 2020 election crimes case, had an affair with a team-mate. How that could have prejudiced Trump’s case was never clear, and the claim was ultimately rejected.

But meantime — his trial for his classified document thefts is before Federal Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to her position.

How does she not recuse herself? (That means bowing out from the case.) She owes her job to the defendant! Could there be a more blatant instance of potential judicial bias? Indeed, it seems to be more than just a potential. Already Judge Cannon has issued a string of rulings favoring Trump (one of them vigorously slapped down by an appeals panel).

It is fundamental to our justice system that, to maintain public confidence, judges should not only be free from bias, but should avoid any appearance of it. Hence recusal is an important feature.

I have some personal experience in this realm. In 1973, sued for libel in a political case, I came before Judge Arnold Proskin. He had been politically active on the same side. That mere fact made him immediately recuse himself. He would not hear another word.

A decade later I was a Public Service Commission administrative law judge, on another politically sensitive case (involving the Shoreham nuclear project). A comment of mine to a reporter (off the record, I’d said) got published, questioning the merits of one party’s proposal. They moved for my recusal. I thought it was a close call, but finally ruled that the comment did not show bias. The Commission agreed on appeal.

The point is that, again, judges must not be seen to rule in cases where possible bias is a factor. Judge Cannon’s failure to recuse is a disgraceful violation of judicial ethics. A moral dereliction endemic to all Trumpworld. He’s been shrieking that our justice system is biased against him, conducting a “witch hunt,” it’s a centerpiece of his campaign. When in reality he’s been getting away with too much, for too long, making a mockery of justice in America. Judge Cannon’s role is just one piece of that picture.

It undermines public faith in our courts. Just as Trump has also cynically undermined confidence in election integrity. He is a civic wrecking ball. He and his MAGA fools have no clue what America is all about. Electing him president again would be insane.

Christian/Conservative Nationalist Populism

It’s not just in America, but burgeoning all over Europe. And it’s not your father’s “conservatism,” but transmogrified into something unrecognizably darker.

Yet many followers don’t seem bothered by the switcheroo. For them it’s more tribal than ideological. Stick with the “conservative” tribe, no matter where it’s going.

Take Russia. For the better part of a century, conservatives saw Communist, totalitarian Russia as the antithesis of the small government individualist freedom they stood for, and threatening our national security besides. Russia is no longer “communist” but if anything worse. Actually even more totalitarian, repressive, and more actively a military threat.

Yet today’s right sees Putin as no enemy, or even somehow an ally. Casting him as a defender of their traditionalist Christian values. Epitomized by Tucker Carlson’s asinine Putin interview and supermarket documentary about how wonderful and advanced Russia is. Overlooking how impoverished the average Russian actually is — and the brutal repression which, if needed to sustain the “traditional values” these fools babble about, might suggest those values are awry.

Meantime it’s really Trump calling this tune — as if he’s moved by any values at all. Taught by his dad that people are either killers or patsies, and seeing Putin as the ultimate killer. Trump’s role model.

So Putin’s Ukraine atrocity shows his badassness, and to them that’s a good thing. “Strength” bedazzles these people. Likewise it’s Trump’s badassness that, deep down, appeals to his cultists. So they do whatever he says. That’s why they’re blocking Ukraine aid in Congress.

Nationalism is a factor here too — the “America First” trope. The idea that we should stick to our own knitting rather than foreign involvements. As if we’re too poor and weak to do both. (So much for American “strength.”) Many on the right even spout Putin’s nonsense blaming the West for somehow provoking his Ukraine invasion. And never mind that America has a huge self-interest in deterring such violent aggression. But a truculent chest-thumping nationalism is characteristic of these populist anti-globalist movements everywhere.

My old conservatism favored small government to generally keep its nose out of people’s business, maximizing our freedom. Today’s right does hate what it calls “the administrative state,” seen as a vehicle of their left-wing elite globalist bêtes noires. Yet contradictorily, while still fetishizing the word “freedom,” they also want big strong government to enforce their own will on people. Notably, for example, controlling women by limiting their access to pregnancy medical care. How is that “conservative?”

What they really hate is classical liberalism, the humanist philosophy arising out of the Enlightenment, freeing people from the shackles of traditionalist society (and religion), enabling them to better flourish. That’s what “liberal” means outside America, and it’s become a dirty word everywhere, with the left too banging on against “neo-liberalism.” This is why Hungary’s authoritarian poster boy Viktor Orban, a darling of the populist right, proudly speaks of his oxymoronic “illiberal democracy.” (As undemocratic as he can make it.)

Immigration is another right-wing populist bête noir. Thus the “replacement theory” nonsense — positing some conspiracy to swap out regular people for migrants supposedly inferior and more politically pliable. In fact migrants tend to be better people. But they’re from different tribes — reason enough to demonize them. (Plain old racism operates too.)

Immigrants are seen as corrupting and degrading the tribal home (“poisoning our blood”), changing its comfortable familiar parameters. Part of a broad narrative of declinism. Thus Trump’s “American carnage” and “Only I can fix it.”

Again the lure of the strongman. People who feel disempowered see the strongman as compensating for their own sense of weakness. As if they can somehow absorb some of his strength. As if all could be fixed by one person of great wisdom and capability. As if Trump had those attributes. And as if removing democratic accountability serves people better.

The old and familiar, for most of these populists, importantly includes Christian religion. Thus the insistence that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” In fact our founders hated the religious oppressiveness they knew all too well, and aimed to banish it.

Our Supreme Court is undoing their work; applying the legal doctrine, “Christianity always wins.” Going so far in one recent case to literally make up untrue facts to achieve that result (the one where a football coach forced students to pray).

The Economist recently editorialized about the threat posed by this movement of populist “national conservatism.” Cover title: The Right Goes Gaga. But they recognized underlying real grievances: people “see illegal migration as a source of disorder and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up to be poorer than they are. They are anxious about losing their jobs to new technology. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been captured by hostile, illiberal, left-leaning elites. They see the globalists who have thrived in recent decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste.”

The Economist is itself a standard-bearer for classical liberalism, set against both today’s left and right. Both of which need to be opposed, and countered with sensible policies. But squeezed between the other two, true liberalism hasn’t got much traction.

Impeding amelioration of all those mentioned grievances. Much of the West, and America in particular, has fallen into a scleroticized inertia when it comes to any sort of reform or societal change. The inability to deal with immigration policy is one example. Another is the chronic failure to overcome morasses of restrictions stopping desperately needed expansion of housing. Britain suffers this too. (A big rail upgrade project there is such a fiasco that it may actually slow down trains.) A big reason for it all is the intensification of political antagonisms, in what’s been called a “vetocracy” — one segment of society able to block action by others.

Of course the censorious holier-than-thou totalitarian woke left is bad too. But not remotely so threatening, simply because it’s vastly smaller. Meantime the threat from the right might be even bigger were it not tied to a grotesquely depraved con man. However legitimate their grievances might otherwise be, this is no way to help them. Imagine the movement with a leader more palatable to sensible people. Trump’s awfulness may be our salvation.

However — The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper asked some Republican Nikki Haley supporters who they’d vote for between Trump and Biden. All, former Trump voters, said they were done with him, calling him a bad man, unfit to be president, a threat to democracy and global security. But, agonizing, all but one would still vote for him over Biden. Political insanity is the new pandemic.

What is Intelligence Good For?

I was gifted with a 2022 book, Talent, by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. Cowen is known as a Big Thinker. I hoped it might be a Malcolm Gladwell type book (in fact, his blurb is on the cover). But it’s really about corporate recruiters spotting talent (not my thing). Nevertheless, since someone did choose it as a gift, I thumbed through it looking for interesting nuggets.

One chapter caught my eye, titled “What is Intelligence Good For?” It cites data indicating that, in general, there’s only a surprisingly weak correlation between intelligence and performance and individual success. Other factors count for more. Among doctors and lawyers, for example, what matters far more is how educated your parents were. With less educated parents you’re unlikely to enter those professions at all, no matter how smart you are.

The foregoing applies to the population as a whole. However, looking at the very top of the distribution, the highest achievers, IQ suddenly takes on a much bigger explanatory role. The book cites one study indicating that among the top 0.5 percent, a single additional IQ point correlates with earnings about 5% higher.

Take me. I gauge my own IQ (forgive the immodesty) at perhaps the 98th or maybe 99th percentile — but no higher. I’ve been very successful in life — but never a star. And I do sense that was due to gradations within that very rarefied IQ level. I can see the difference in people just a bit smarter. If only I’d had that one more IQ point! Well, I’d probably be miserable today. (My wife is smarter than me. And it shows.)

But the authors do posit that even at the distribution’s very top, IQ alone is not enough. This isn’t contradictory. IQ is necessary but not sufficient. You can’t be among the highest achievers without other attributes — like social skills (also an explanatory factor in my own case), what’s been called emotional intelligence, hard work, and just being in the right place at the right time.

A very different book I read just after this had a chapter looking at all U.S. presidents and finding no correlation between their intelligence and their performance or success. Other factors weighed more heavily. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously pronounced that Franklin Roosevelt had a second rate intellect, but a first rate temperament.

I’ve often thought this kind of analysis pertains not just to individuals, but the achievements of our whole species. Intelligence falls along a bell-shaped curve, with the great mass of people in the central bulge, the outliers at the vanishingly thin edge. And it’s those people in that tippy-top of the distribution who, I suspect, have propelled most or all of our progress. But for them, we’d still be living in caves, wearing animal skins.

If you plot the intelligence bell curve for chimpanzees (our closest kin), it overlaps ours pretty closely. We’re actually, on average, only slightly smarter.

But their curve terminates before reaching the thin right hand edge that ours does. The smartest chimps don’t match the smartest humans. That’s why chimps never invented the internet. Or even the wheel.

Meantime we’ve also invented AI. Its bell curve will soon fall way to the right. Some fear this will mean human intelligence won’t count for anything any more. But humans have always leveraged our capabilities basically by making tools. And AI may prove a great tool for such bootstrapping. We’ll see what happens.

Zero-Sum Us-Against-Them Populism

In the “good old days” (they weren’t) economic progress was nonexistent. Most people lived in extreme poverty, generation after generation. You could only get ahead at someone else’s expense: a zero-sum world.

Gradually a better one emerged. Capitalism, market economics, division of labor, and trade all enabled us to escape the zero-sum trap. If I provide something you need or want, in exchange for something I need or want, we’re both better off.

Thus “the good of others multiplies my own good,” David Brooks wrote in a recent column. This is what sent economic advancement into overdrive, especially with the modern era of globalization applying it the world over. Multiplying real incomes dramatically, raising living standards, and almost eliminating extreme deprivation.

But too many people still don’t get it. “Socialists” imagine all good somehow comes (or should come) from government rather than enterprising individuals; even thinking it immoral to profit from one’s efforts, seen as exploiting others and causing inequality.

Brooks counters with the example of Steve Jobs, who did get very rich, but not by “taking” anything from anyone. Rather, by providing products that improved others’ lives, giving them value exceeding what they paid. But isn’t that the case with any free market transaction? Win-win, not zero-sum.

Yet nowadays even trade itself, commerce itself, is misunderstood as some people benefiting at others’ expense. China is actually demonized for selling us products at low prices! Such nonsensicality is a Trump campaign staple. The whole global trade structure is under assault and crumbling, throwing away opportunities for making us all richer. Trump promises a big expansion of tariffs — which will make everyone poorer.

Such “populism,” is on the rise almost everywhere, thriving, as Brooks explains, on a zero-sum mentality. And it makes the world not just poorer, but nastier. Because if it’s indeed a zero-sum world, then it’s us-against-them. And populist demagogues like Trump specialize in targeting “thems” — they “invariably enflame ethnic bigotry,” Brooks says, “to mobilize their own supporters.”

India’s Modi another example. Actively provoking the Hindu majority to hate the nation’s two hundred million Muslim citizens. Even questioning their citizenship. How insane in a country that’s already seen too much inter-communal bloodshed.

For Trump, it’s mainly immigrants, who “poison our blood.” Actually asserting that other nations empty mental hospitals and jails to send us their inmates. What deranged, vicious nonsense.

Reality: America’s economy is doing so much better than elsewhere, like in Europe, in good part because we take more immigrants. Offsetting population and workforce shrinkage, reinvigorating our society with go-getters who are net contributors and assets to America.

In the dark, zero-sum past, Brooks notes, grabbing territory was how despots sought self-aggrandizement. This is recrudescing with Russia’s attempt to grab Ukraine; while China is poised to try to grab Taiwan.

Israel’s conflict with Palestinians too reflects a zero-sum mentality, as if they’re both fighting over something only one can have, blind to how both could benefit from cooperating together.

But alas, says Brooks, “the thugs [Russia, China, Trump] are winning.” Will we come to our senses in time?