Day: May 14, 2024

By Leonard Weinberg

The coming presidential election contest between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump has aroused serious worry not only in the United States but among observers from other Western democracies. Many clear-thinking analysts such as William Cristal, Timothy Synder and Liz Cheney worry that a Trump victory would likely bring an end to America’s democratic experiment. They appear to think that this outcome would represent an aberration — something relatively new under the Sun.

But, as President John Adams wrote to a friend, John Taylor, in 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes itself and murders itself.” This comment came from one of America’s Founding Fathers, someone who shaped the ‘experiment’ about whose future he seemed doubtful.

Adams’ skepticism about the democratic prospect was likely influenced by the outcome of the French Revolution, with the impending restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy. Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other founding fathers had examined the historical record and read the works of the ancient Roman and Greek philosophers. They were also well aware that previous democratic experiences had flourished for relatively brief periods of time and collapsed or were superseded by other forms of rule. Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, the city-states of medieval northern Italy had all given way to astrongman- or strong-family-rule or to the fusion of church and state after varying lengths of time. 

It is true that the US constitution was made in the name of “We the People.” But after that prologue, the Founding Fathers did what they could to protect the federal government from the will of the people in whose name it was conceived, or at least rhetorically conceived.

Accordingly, the only federal institution directly accountable for the wishes of voters was the House of Representatives. The Senate, the presidency and the Supreme Court were all originally insulated from direct popular control through various filters — the state legislatures in particular. It was really only over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries that constitutional amendments provided greater popular control over the country’s national institutions. That was when the beginnings of democratization took hold.

But did the Founding Fathers get it right? Was insulating the American national government from popular control beneficial? Perhaps we could learn from their decisions. Plato and Aristotle believed in the primacy of reason as a principle to govern the conduct of the individual, and by extension the polis or government, as well. When passion dominates over reason, disorder and chaos follow.

The people, the Greek philosophers reasoned, tend to be dominated by passion and emotion rather than reason. That is why they believed democracy was an inherently unstable form of rule. The will of the people was volatile and capricious, so much that demagogues (individuals skilled in manipulating the people through captivating or transgressive oratory) would come to dominate democratic life. Under these conditions, rule by the people would inevitably give way to rule by the demagogue.

Can democracy be good government?

The late historian James MacGregor Burns argued that, unlike the ancient Greek city-states which never had more than a few tens of thousands of citizens, Americans are too numerous to fall under the spell of a self-enamored demagogue, not to mention too educated and too prosperous. To what extent is this true?

Surveys of American public opinion provide a clue. During the mid-to-late 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy sounded alarms about supposed communist infiltrators, researchers like Samuel Stouffer sought to measure the extent to which Americans supported the protections provided citizens by the First Amendment. Taken as abstract principles, most members of the public agreed with the First Amendment’s protections of free speech, public assembly and worship. Attitudes changed substantially though when the questions became more specific: Do you support the right of a communist to speak in public? Should the books of atheists and socialists be available at public libraries? Posed in specifics, support for the First Amendment protections broke down, with significant percentages of the respondents denying the rights to which they had agreed in the abstract.

Opposition to these more specific probes was not randomly distributed in the public. Individuals who had completed fewer years of education and displayed lower socio-economic status were the least likely to support First Amendment protections when they were expressed in concrete terms. Why?

Various analysts, like sociologists Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, maintain it is a matter of cognitive sophistication — a kind of sophistication that normally comes with educational attainment. In the United States at least, the ability to see shades of gray between black and white is typically linked to the number of years in school respondents have completed.

The effect of education on American voters is most obvious in Trump’s electoral appeal. Opinion surveys have revealed that Trump’s constituency is disproportionately drawn from less educated segments of the American public. Those most likely to be governed by passion over reason, as the ancient philosophers maintained. Indeed, they seem to be vulnerable to demagoguery, identity politics and conspiracy theory.

Trump’s public performances are characteristically directed at American voters more motivated by passion more than reason, voters who perceive the world in black-and-white terms and whose find his oftentimes vulgar and contempt-laced speeches irresistible. 

The crucial question before the house is whether or not this segment of the electorate is sufficiently large to restore Trump to power. Are college-educated Americans numerous and influential enough to deny Trump a second term of office? The fate of the American experiment depends on the answers.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

• About the author: Leonard Weinberg is foundation professor emeritus at the University of Nevada. Over the course of his career he has served as a visiting professor at King’s College, University of London, the University of Haifa (Israel), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of many books on terrorism and right-wing politics.
• Source: This article was published by Fair Observer

The publication of the results of the second round of the sham parliamentary elections of the Iranian regime has caused a stir. The media and regime officials describe it with phrases such as “disaster,” “scandal,” “shame,” and “sounding the alarm bell.”

Amidst this, the outrageous remarks of Ahamad Vahidi, the Minister of Interior Affairs, who had referred to this scandal as a “heroic saga,” have sparked a storm of ridicule. The state-run Ham-Mihan newspaper has sarcastically titled it as the “Eight-Percent Heroic Saga!” referring to the 8% voter turnout.

Former Minister of Communications Mohammad- Javad Azari Jahromi wrote, “Presumably, their notion of heroism refers to the 92 percent non-participation in Tehran.”

Even a former regime television host came forward and said, “It is an honor for all of us that the Minister of Interior Affairs understands the concept of ‘heroism.’”

The matter becomes more serious when newspapers and institutions affiliated with regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei also join in the mockery.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)–run Javan newspaper, wrote, “In Tehran, we witnessed a significantly disappointing level of participation in the first round and witnessed an eight percent participation in the second round.”

The Resalat newspaper, with the sarcastic title of “When ‘Everyone’ Showed Up!” mocked the regime’s claims of purifying its ranks and wrote, “When we said you’re not purifying the front, but rather emptying it, nobody paid attention.”

Khamenei’s goal of appointing Ebrahim Raisi as president, and unifying the regime, followed by purification, was aimed at closing the crisis-ridden gaps within the regime in the face of the inevitable storm of anti-regime uprisings. However, in practice, we can see that this policy has led to an “emptying” or weakening of the regime’s foundations. We are now witnessing the most intense conflicts and power struggles within the regime’s ranks, with officials and insiders attacking each other and exposing each other’s corruption.

The situation has reached a point where even the allies of Khamenei openly criticize him with mockery and insinuations such as “We expected these elites to foster unity and coherence, not for 92 percent of eligible voters to abstain and say ‘no.’” (Source: Resalat, February 12)

But Khamenei is not inclined to heed these words. He cannot afford to change course at this point. Khamenei knows well that given the current explosive state of Iran’s society, opening any rift or even taking a step back would unravel the whole situation and impose a series of inevitable retreats, ultimately leading to the downfall of the regime.

By surgically removing radical elements and elevating people such as Raisi, Khamenei was seeking to close the rifts within his regime.

However, it seems that the crises have reached such a height that in his recent speeches Khamenei has been forced to caution against “spreading hatred,” “contentious rhetoric that fuels disputes and fosters enmity,” and reminding that such actions “can destroy the sweetness of the new parliament” (Khamenei in a meeting with the Assembly of Experts, March 7, 2024).

It is known that the internal crises of the regime generally arises from the widening divide between the people and the ruling authority. At this stage, what has led to the crisis is the fact that Khamenei’s engineered elections, according to his own admission, has turned sweetness into bitterness and produced opposite results. The blunt instrument of a nationwide election boycott has had its impact. With each passing day, the effects and consequences of this devastating blow become more apparent, creating further divisions within the regime.

However, the real source of the regime’s troubles and its failure to purify its political institutions is the people’s mass boycott of the elections and their loud cries of “my vote is regime change” and “it is not the time for elections, it is time for a revolution.”

By Peter Jacobsen

Off and on over the last two years, we’ve heard from major media outlets about something called a “vibecession.”

The idea behind a vibecession is straightforward. Many people say they “feel” like we’re in a very bad moment economically, despite the fact that inflation has begun to slow relative to its worst levels (granted, prices aren’t going back down), unemployment rates are low, and average incomes seem to be rising again after the economic downturn caused by Covid policies.

Recent reporting claims the vibecession is cooling down, but the question is, was there ever anything to it?

Well, it’s possible that people are still adjusting to higher price levels (which have only continued to go up over the last year), but overall I’m skeptical of people’s claimed feelings about the economy. To see why, let’s consider how economists learn about the world.

Demonstrating Preferences

In introductory microeconomics classes, economists often start by presenting some postulates based on human action. The reason they start there is because the economy is really complex and involves literally thousands of moving parts. If we can’t understand even the individual parts, how can we hope to understand the economy itself? This raises the question: how can we know about human beings if we can’t put them under a microscope?

One way we can do this is by thinking through the logic of action. If a human acts in a purposeful way (so involuntary bodily movements are excluded), this means that he has to choose between alternatives. If you are hungry, you have lots of options. You can run to the kitchen and make a meal, go out and buy a meal, gorge on junk food instead of a full meal, or you could skip eating entirely.

If someone chooses to skip lunch to save money, he is demonstrating that he prefers to save his time or money over the possibility of eating. This is called demonstrated preference, or, alternatively, some economists call it revealed preference. Sometimes people quibble over which term is more appropriate, but there’s no need to do so here.

The economist Murray Rothbard wrote about demonstrated preference in his article Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics. Rothbard says:

The concept of demonstrated preference is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale. Similarly, if a man spends five dollars on a shirt we deduce that he preferred purchasing the shirt to any other uses he could have found for the money. This concept of preference, rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis.

Economists can claim to know the preferences of individuals because, where the rubber meets the road, people always act to choose the option they like best.

Cheap Talk

This approach is different from many other social science approaches. Oftentimes, social scientists will try to figure out people’s preferences by asking them.

This seems sensible on the surface. Want to know what someone is thinking? Why not just ask him?

There’s actually a good reason not to ask him. Let’s use demonstrated preference to explain why.

Let’s say I survey a group of recent college grads. I ask them on a scale from 1 to 10 how afraid they are about paying back their student loans.

Let’s imagine they all say 10. What does that demonstrate? Well, it demonstrates that they value giving the answer of 10 more than they value giving any other answer.

But is the answer that people prefer to give always the true answer? Of course not. We shouldn’t expect that to be the case.

There are lots of reasons why we might expect people to give inaccurate answers rather than accurate answers.

First, sometimes people give inaccurate answers because providing accurate answers is too costly. If I walk up to you and survey you on the street, it’s asking a lot for me to demand that you provide a thorough analysis of your level of fear about student loans. Most people will give their gut reaction, but likely after significant thought their answer might change.

Second, people may decide to exaggerate their answers when they feel it is in their best interest to do so. If the group of students all favor their student loans being forgiven, they may decide the best answer for them is to say they can’t bear the weight of their student loans. Maybe if they all yell loud enough, the politicians who rely on their support will try to send them some money to guarantee loyalty.

A physician doesn’t always prescribe or recommend heavy pain killers when someone rates his pain as a 10. This is because physicians know that someone saying his pain is a “10” doesn’t always mean his pain is bad. It may just mean that the patient prefers to say the thing that gets him painkillers.

This is all a very long way of saying a very simple, and frankly trite, fact of life: talk is cheap.

When people buy goods and services, they have to sacrifice money to do so. They demonstrate their preference for the goods by their willingness to sacrifice.

No equivalent sacrifice exists in answering survey questions. As such, how you answer a question doesn’t tell me what you really think; it tells me what answer you most value giving.

Applications

This mentality doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever trust or believe anyone. If you know someone and trust his or her ability to be honest and accurately self-evaluate, of course you should trust his or her statements.

However, this way of thinking about human action provides us with some useful tools for assessing how much people believe things. If talk is cheap, people should be willing to do more than talk when important issues are at play.

For example, imagine someone tells you he believes the economy is going to collapse tomorrow. He assures you that it will be the worst crash in history, and the stock market is going to be obliterated.

Here’s a simple follow-up question to ask him: “How much of your own money have you risked shorting the market?” If the market is going to collapse tomorrow, next week, or next month, a person could make millions by properly shorting the market. If someone comes to you offering a message of doom and gloom, check and see if he believes it enough to risk his own money.

A similar question could be asked about rising sea levels and owners of beachfront houses. Do alarmists who live in areas threatened by climate change tend to move away from those areas, or do they tend to stay? If they stay, that tells me they might believe adaptation can overcome the climate difficulties we face.

What about the vibecession? Well, we can imagine ways that people would be acting if they felt like we were about to enter a recession. In a recession, stock markets tend to get hit. Again, in that case, people who believe a recession is on the horizon should be pulling their money out.

If we were actually in a recession, we would also expect that people would cut back on unnecessary consumption. People tend to save money when they think they may lose their job at any moment. And yet, consumption expenditures have been going up ever since the pandemic ended.

This isn’t a bulletproof case against a secret vibecession, but the point is simply that if people are saying that we are in a recession (or we are about to be), but they aren’t acting like that’s the case, I’ll tend to trust their actions over their words.

Due to this, I remain a skeptic of the vibecession. I’m not shorting any markets, so I must not be too seriously concerned about the economy in the short term. That doesn’t mean I’m correct, of course, but it does highlight how it is valuable to ask people to “put their money where their mouth is” when it comes to proclamations about impending doom.

• About the author: Peter Jacobsen is a Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
• Source: This article was published by FEE

By Barry Brownstein

In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek called cultural historian and philosopher Moeller van den Bruck “the patron saint of National Socialism.” Hayek quoted him describing the fierce opposition of German youth to liberalism: “Liberalism is a philosophy of life from which German youth now turns with nausea, with wrath, with quite peculiar scorn, for there is none more foreign, more repugnant, more opposed to its philosophy. German youth today recognizes the liberal as the archenemy.”

Van den Bruck was referring to classical liberalism. Today’s youth are again in revolt against classical liberalism.

In the City Journal, professor Eric Kaufmann reports, “While the American public leans two-to-one in favor of cultural liberalism, a majority of Americans under 30 incline toward cultural socialism.” Cultural socialism, he writes, “has inspired race-based pedagogies and harsh punishments for controversial speech” and promotes “equal results and harm prevention for identity groups over individual rights.” 

Alarmingly, interpreting survey data, Kauffman argues “progressive illiberalism of young people” is not just a phase young people are passing through.

Suppressing freedom of thought and speech has never ended well, and the same plot can produce tragic consequences again. We would be wise to use historical evidence to see where the youth’s turn against classical liberalism may lead. 

Joachim Fest wrote Hitler, a biography and historical portrait of Germany. In the period before Hitler came to power in Germany, Fest observed, the Nazi party “became for a while a new kind of youth movement.” 

Thomas Childers, in his history of Nazi Germany, quotes a 1933 statement by Hitler in which the goals of his program for indoctrinating youth are set out: “My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. I want a youth before which the world will tremble . . . a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth.” 

By 1935, Childers observed, “the party had managed to insert itself into the family, driving a wedge between parent and child, teacher and student, priest and young parishioner.” “Parental rights and personal freedom” eroded. When children denounced their parents, their parents lost their jobs.

Childers describes one 1936 roundup of Jews: “At the front of the procession were youths who chanted ‘Jew Perish.’” Such youths would feel welcome on some college campuses today.

Heinrich Mann was the older brother of the Nobel laureate in literature, Thomas Mann. Heinrich, himself a writer, was an ardent critic of the Nazis and fled Germany in 1933. 

In a 1934 article for Foreign Affairs, “Dictatorship of the Mind,” Heinrich Mann explained that Nazi youth “were the first to applaud” Nazi doctrines: “The least resistance to all this [Nazi policies] comes from the youth. Always susceptible to irrational enthusiasm and appeals to collective action, the young men of Germany are the very basis of the dictatorship.”

Mann explored how the Nazis went beyond previous dictatorships, beyond directing the economy to control thought. He wrote, “The German dictatorship is perhaps unique in claiming nothing less than complete control over the whole intellectual and spiritual life of the nation,” tolerating “neither opposition nor neutrality.” Mann was apparently unaware of developments in Stalinist Russia, where the communists were developing their own terror system for controlling minds. 

Mann wrote that German youth were the chief backers of thought dictatorship: “If thought is now controlled in Germany, instead of being free, it is chiefly the fault of the younger generation. They sing ‘We are the Soldiers of the Future’.” 

Mann described the extent of this thought dictatorship: “Only official truths are admitted, and only such creative work as happens to serve the purpose of the authorities.” For the Nazis, “Everything in the arts and sciences which contradicts or goes beyond the National Socialist doctrine is looked upon as non-existent, simply by reason of the fact that the artists and thinkers concerned have left Germany.” 

Today, if you disagree with the progressive orthodoxy about climate change or trans issues, young people will look upon you as “non-existent.” 

A survey asked respondents the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with this statement: “My fear of losing my job or reputation due to something I said or posted online is a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged groups.” Kaufmann reports the finding that only 27 percent of respondents under the age of 30 disagreed with this statement. 

Astoundingly, “Younger age brackets are both more fearful of cancel culture and more supportive of it than are older age groups.” In short, like National Socialist youth, individual rights mean nothing to young people today.

The loss of talented people with different opinions was a plus for the Nazis. Mann observed, “Having eliminated all opposition, the government is far from regretting the loss of eminent personalities which added to the permanent glory of the country. It is delighted to have to deal only with minds which are timid, with talents so mediocre that they can easily be directed.” 

Do you remember when Hillary Clinton saw some voters as “deplorables” and some “irredeemable?” In Nazi Germany there were “irreconcilables.” Mann wrote, “The irreconcilables have been eliminated in advance; there remain only the weak and the mediocre to be dealt with, not to mention the shrewd who, after having made their way in a free regime are quite prepared to profit from the methods of a dictatorship.” 

With all dissenting opinions eliminated, what remained was propaganda “subordinated to the will of a single chief, named Goebbels.” In 2021, the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher lamented that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

In Nazi Germany, the ability to read, think, and reflect were gone. Mann explained, 

Germany has promptly lost the habit of reading. Partly this is because people have little time for it, being constantly occupied with manifestations in favor of the government, military night marches, and forced labor on behalf of a few people of wealth. Every German is conscripted for life. Never being alone for a minute, how can he think? 

Mann observed, “Controlled thought… has distorted the minds of whole generations of young folk, and it leaves them no time for learning.” 

The Nazi system, Mann observed, “would not work without violent pressure on the unwilling.” And just like on today’s campuses, Nazi youth punished those out of favor with the Nazi orthodoxy: 

Neither a critical sense nor common sense prevented the students from driving out professors who happened to be Jewish, democratic, or simply merely honest. Nor has it prevented them from taking bloody reprisals against their classmates who hold different ideas from theirs. From the beginning, the movement exploited the youths of less than twenty years. 

Mann’s prescient warnings issued in 1934 are applicable today. The safety valves of criticism are missing when thought is controlled. He warned, “Catastrophes can approach unannounced. History has recorded, times without number, the dangers and degradations caused by the suppression of freedom of conscience.” 

In Mann’s time and ours, “It is sad to see one generation of men going back on the moral conquests made by its predecessors.” Mann wrote that “truth” had become “a mere matter of convention.” 

Mann had an optimistic message for embattled champions of liberty. Those who hijack truth and suppress freedom “are powerfully entrenched and their capacity for harm is far from exhausted. They will last, and they will make the most of their opportunities before they disappear. But disappear they will, and free thought will survive them. On that score, too, history leaves no doubt.”

• About the author: Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.
• Source: This article was published by AIER