The Myth of American Idealism: How US Foreign Policy Endangers the World

If you’re not familiar with Noam Chomsky’s insights into the real causes and consequences of US foreign policy, The Myth of American Idealism is an excellent introduction. If you are familiar, it’s a great refresher. IMO, the biggest, high-level takeaways:

1. Rulers have far more in common with and concern for each other than regard for the people they rule (that is, discussing any country as a monolith and failing to distinguish between the interests and desires of the country’s rulers and its ruled will produce inaccurate results);

2. Rulers throughout time and across the world have justified the most atrocious actions with the highest-minded rhetoric; and

3. America’s rulers are much like other rulers, and what prevents people from recognizing this obvious truth is a relentless stream of in-group propaganda (supply side), coupled with a profound psychological need to believe our tribe is good (demand side). That is, cynical combined with clinical—one of the most powerful confluences of forces in human affairs.

To put it another way, my approach to creating characters in my novels is based on the recognition that humans are more alike than dissimilar, that our commonalities are more consequential than our differences. If that’s true, than a good start to understanding the behavior of others is to understand ourselves. America is run by humans, which means it’s run by the same kinds of people—subject to the same laws of human nature—as those who run China, Iran, Russia, etc. Of course culture matters, but culture is only a finite expression of human nature, which itself is unvarying.

See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society:

“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.”

I wish more people would read this book and others like it, including Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, if for no other reason than in recognition that any story a society tells itself about itself is apt to be excessively kind and in need of a corrective. Understanding the real nature of one’s own government isn’t comfortable, but the alternative is a dangerous fantasy of good guys and bad guys that right now has the world on the edge of a nuclear precipice.

Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen

There is no way to read Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario and conclude other than that nuclear abolition should be a top priority for all world leaders. Nothing could be worth the risk to humanity of a highly emotional species, given to miscalculations, mistakes, and misunderstandings, possessing tens of thousands of the instruments of its own destruction.

A lot of people know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at least know enough to understand that in 1962 humanity stumbled to the very edge of mass suicide and nearly toppled over. But there have been dozens of other near-misses (or, as George Carlin would say, near-hits). We can't keep depending on luck to forestall armageddon.

Jacobson is as wonderful an audiobook narrator as she is a writer, but this is not an easy listen (I had to laugh at the end when she was reading the publisher’s boilerplate: “Audible hopes you have enjoyed Nuclear War…”). It feels extremely real (it is extremely real). I can barely imagine what it must have cost Jacobson to research and write this story.

I saw somewhere that Jacobson is adapting the book into a movie, with Denis Villeneuve attached to direct. That is great news. The more people who understand the reality of nuclear weapons, the better.

Often these days when I hear belligerent rhetoric about China and Russia, my sense is that the people in the grip of this Manichean framework don't understand how close we are to ending it all. Some of the problem, I think, is that for whatever reason—ignorance, denial, misunderstanding the nature of nuclear command and control—too many people assume that nuclear war could just never happen. I hope this book will provide a corrective. Once these weapons are used, no one will remember the cause. No one will care. But the few starved and suffering survivors will wish we'd done something, anything—while we still could.

A Ukraine War Primer

1.  INTRODUCTION

I know I’ve been posting a lot about the war in Ukraine. It’s a preoccupation for three reasons: (i) I think our rulers have lost their minds; (ii) I think the popular understanding of the reasons for and risks of the war are dangerously misguided; and (iii) there is a grave risk that the war will continue to escalate and go nuclear, leading to the end of civilization.

2.  HOW THE WAR WILL END

There are only three ways this war will end: (i) the destruction of Ukraine; (ii) the destruction of the world; or (iii) a negotiated settlement that would include UN-supervised elections in Ukraine’s eastern provinces and Ukrainian neutrality. Russia will not allow Ukraine to join NATO, and though that might be upsetting, if you believe Ukrainian NATO membership is a goal worth continuing to slaughter and immiserate millions of Russians and Ukrainians over, you’re necessarily choosing one of the first two outcomes.

I know there’s hope in some quarters that if the war starts to go badly for Russia, Putin will be deposed. This is not something to hope for. The pressure on Putin is from hardliners, not doves. The pressure he’s been facing isn’t, “Why don’t you back down?” It’s “Why have you not responded to the imperialists more forcefully?”

So even if Putin were replaced, it would very likely be by someone less inclined toward restraint. And that’s to say nothing of the dangers of civil strife inside a country with 6,000 nuclear weapons.

The party that feels it’s winning a war continues with the tactics associated with winning. The party that feels it’s losing escalates until it can’t escalate anymore. So far, NATO has been the party escalating, because it recognizes that NATO is losing the war (even western war-supporting media no longer denies this). Russia, which has been winning, has been restrained. If you think Russia’s invasion has been brutal so far, wait until what happens if the Russian government believes it’s starting to lose.

3.  WHY THE WAR STARTED

I know suggesting the nature of this war is a bit more complex than its typical presentation by the western establishment can seem like apostasy. But given the extreme risks (two years ago, President Biden claimed the war had brought the world closer to nuclear “armageddon” than since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962), and because if we don’t accurately understand the war’s nature and causes we’ll have a much poorer chance of a less catastrophic end to it, I think some effort toward accuracy is important. I guess if our rulers end organized human life over this thing it won’t really matter, but we should at least be clear-eyed about why it all happened before they blow up the world. So:

3.A:  Is Putin the Latest New Hitler?

I know we’re supposed to believe Putin (not even Russia, just Putin) invaded Ukraine out of a mad desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and “unprovoked, unprovoked, very double-plus  unprovoked” to undermine the so-called Rules-Based Order because Putin knows Russia can’t compete with the west and so must sabotage it. Most of all, we’re supposed to believe that Putin is the New New Hitler, in support of which there has been an ongoing deluge of western propaganda blaring little else. The truth is, it would be extremely surprising if the USG and its mouthpieces in establishment media *weren’t* comparing Putin to Hitler, given that every enemy du jour of the US establishment is branded as the New New Hitler (NNH) or as Even Worse Than Hitler (EWTH). For example, Google “Hitler Saddam Hussein,” “Hitler Assad,” “Hitler Miloševi,” “Hitler Osama bin Laden,” “Hitler Noriega” (it’s been going on that long!). They’re even rolling it out now with regard to China—Google “Hitler Xi Jinping.” It’s entirely standard.

I’m sure sometimes an NNH or EWTH is done out of ignorance—many Americans know no history other than Hitler! and Appeasement! (here’s a stubborn example from just this morning), and have been trained and encouraged to reflexively defend themselves from psychological discomfort with this form of duckspeak. This is by design—if you know no history other than Hitler! and Appeasement!, you will have no other framework for understanding events, and every potential conflict will automatically be as existential and unavoidable as World War II. More often, I believe it’s done as a sales tactic, and in fairness it does seem to be effective. Much more here, here, here, here, here, and here.

None of this is remotely new, by the way. It tracks perfectly with George Orwell’s Principles of Newspeak, from 1984:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Of course I can’t prove or disprove the workings of Putin’s heart, and I don’t have access to the minutes of meetings of the Russian government. So at some point, arguments about motivations become declarations of faith. But I would argue that in addition to reasons to be suspicious regarding NNH and related explanations for the war, there is abundant evidence, much of it memory-holed or otherwise suppressed in western establishment discourse, that the real and obvious reason Russia invaded Ukraine has been NATO metastasis.

3.B:  NATO Metastasis

My approach to creating characters in my novels is based on the recognition that humans are more alike than dissimilar, and that our commonalities are more consequential than our differences. If that’s true, than a good start to understanding the behavior of others is to understand ourselves. That is to say, the first resort of any sensible person trying to understand another person’s behavior should be to ask some version of, “What would I do under similar circumstances?”

In the case of America’s and NATO’s war with Russia in Ukraine, that question would be, “What would I do if a foreign military alliance relentlessly expanded over the course of decades—eventually doubling in size, incorporating almost all my former allies, and ultimately attempting to incorporate nations along my most vulnerable borders?”

So my view is that NATO provoked Russia with nonstop expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. For much more in support of this view, see Section 5, Additional Sources, below.

I know this view is commonly derided as Kremlin Talking Points, Russian Propaganda, Blame America First, etc., but KTP and BAF etc. are accusations, not arguments, best understood as more duckspeak. I think the facts of history and human nature support the view that NATO knowingly and deliberately, or at least recklessly and wantonly, provoked this war. Certainly the Monroe Doctrine and the Cuban Missile Crisis offer clues about great power reactions to other great powers encroaching on their near-abroad. But please don’t take my word for any of this; NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself in a moment of gloating forgot the official narrative and acknowledged that Russia invaded Ukraine to stop NATO from expanding.

(See also how referring to the war in Ukraine as a  “proxy war” was widely attacked as KTP…until Boris Johnson acknowledged recently that this is exactly what the war is.)

But note that the question of what the US government would do under analogous circumstances—if, say Mexico or Canada or any countries in the Americas tried to enter into a military alliance with China or Russia—doesn’t need to be treated only as theory. Why does the US government have a Monroe Doctrine? Precisely because the US government feels threatened by foreign influence in our near abroad. Or consider the Cuban Missile Crisis. America provoked the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey, which bordered the USSR. The USSR provoked America back by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, off the coast of Florida. It was only the dumbest luck that prevented those provocations from leading to a war that would have exterminated humanity.

3.C:  Self-Determination

For anyone inclined at this point to say, “But Ukraine has a right to join NATO! Self-determination!”, first, note that no, no one has a right to join a club; only perhaps a right to apply, with the club then accepting or rejecting, based presumably on what the club considers to be its own interests.

Second, note the extremely obvious and critically important distortion built into the question. Because what any country or any person has a right to do—that is, what anyone can do—is entirely separate from the question of what any country or person should do, or what is sensible to do consistent with one’s overall interests.

There seems to be an assumption that Ukraine foregoing NATO membership out of fear of Russia displeasure is a form of slavery. This is at best silly. Smaller countries make decisions based in part of the reactions of their more powerful neighbors all the time (ask any country in Latin America about this, and about what typically happens if they displease the more powerful government to the north).

Concern about the reactions of more powerful actors might be unfortunate, but it is ubiquitous and unavoidable and it is not slavery. If I avoid a nearby park during my nighttime strolls because I know there’s a gang that hangs out there that might mug me, it is of course unfortunate. But it is a small price to pay to avoid being mugged, which would be catastrophic. If a truck is barreling towards a crosswalk and I as the pedestrian have the right of way, I’d have to be an idiot or suicidal to exercise my right to enter the intersection first (h/t for the crosswalk analogy to Wim Demeere).

None of this makes me a slave. None of it ruins my life (indeed, it avoids outcomes that could ruin my life). It is nothing more than the kind of common-sense behavior every human engages in—with the notable exception of the lunatics running Ukraine, NATO, and America.

4.  HOW WE’RE TRAINED TO SEE THE WORLD

Here I’d like to pause to consider how discussions about the war in Ukraine are commonly framed.

Supporters of the war typically focus on Ukraine and what Ukraine wants, the rights of sovereign nations to self-determination, etc. Sometimes in these discussions I find myself pointing out that governments have internal factions that want different things, and that governments typically pursue interests that have nothing to do with what their people want. I wind up pointing out how many young Ukrainians have fled the country to avoid the draft; how the Ukrainian government has roving press gangs to force young people into the war; how the Ukrainian military struggles with desertion; how polls show a majority of Ukrainian people want a negotiated end to the war; how what Ukrainians want isn’t easy to know, given that the government suspended voting and other fundamental elements of democracy at the outset of the war. I ask how many more young Ukrainians and young Russians people think should be slaughtered in the service of whatever we’re supposed to believe this war is about.

And then I realize I’ve fallen into the trap of framing what America should do in terms of what another country might want.

One of the most fascinating and insidious aspects of American culture is the way we’re inculcated to believe it’s our duty to help other people with bombs—either by bombing them directly, or by providing the bombs for use by proxy. We don’t seem to think it’s our duty to help in other ways; mostly it’s help via bombing. It’s worth asking why this is.

At the same time, we’re trained never to ask about what Americans want or need. It’s always, “Think of the Ukrainians!” or “Think of the Yazidis!” or whoever else we’re supposed to send bombs on or to. And we’re equally trained to not even consider what all these bombs cost ordinary Americans, whose standard of living has been dropping for decades and who suffer from all sorts of health issues, crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, poor mass transit, etc. We’re not supposed to consider how many Americans could benefit if our government invested at home the $200 billion or so it has now siphoned from American taxpayers, or borrowed from China or Saudi Arabia, and shipped to this overseas war.

America is nearly $40 trillion in debt. The interest alone on that debt is approaching $1 trillion per year, and climbing. How much more should we borrow—how much more in debt servicing should we hang around the necks of our children and grandchildren—for the sake of building more bombs to provide or explode overseas?

Why are we trained to care so much about countries on the other side of the world (at least when it comes to bombing them), and so little about Americans? Why is it that the people who purport to care most about Ukraine are the most prepared to sacrifice Ukrainians?

As is so often the case, a good starting place is George Carlin.

But do the people who insist the war must continue to be fought really care about Ukraine?

Hint: not according to arch warmonger Lindsay Graham, who thinks the war was been a great American investment and is “about money [and] enriching ourselves.”

A useful question to ask people who want the war to continue—because Putin is the NNH, EWTH, Rules-Based Order, it’s a good investment for America, or for whatever other reason—is this:

How many more conscripts and civilians, whether Russian or Ukrainian, are you prepared to sacrifice for this cause beyond the million casualties to date? Ten? Ten million? What’s the number? How many?

Similarly, how much risk of nuclear war do you think is worth it? One percent? Five percent? Fifty percent? Higher?

War proponents tend to wiggle away from these questions. They’re worth asking regardless.

And if the response is some version of, “It’s not up to us; it’s up to Ukrainians,” note first that yes, it certainly is up to us and no one else, we are not obliged to fuel any foreign war just because local belligerents might be interested in fighting it; and second, that regardless it’s not even up to Ukrainians, because since the war began the Ukrainian government has consolidated control of all television stations, outlawed opposition political parties, and suspended elections.

5.  ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Hopefully the foregoing framework will be useful in developing a more accurate understanding of why this war started, and how it can be ended with the least possible additional death and suffering. For anyone who wants to go deeper:

If you want a corrective to NATO propaganda, in my experience a good first step is to Google “Jeffrey Sachs Ukraine.” Among other things, Sachs is a Columbia professor who was personally involved in every element of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. His five-minute video primer:



Another critical resource is John Mearsheimer. Among other things, Mearsheimer is a University of Chicago professor who over the course of nearly 20 years has accurately explained and predicted everything that’s happened in the region, including pointing out about 15 years ago that if NATO kept expanding and tried to bring in Ukraine, Ukraine was going to get “wrecked.” Start with his 2014 article, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault:”

Stephen Walt of Foreign Policy Magazine, the Quincy Institute, and Professor of International Relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has written and spoken frequently on the causes and risks of the war.

Glenn Diesen is a professor of political science at the University of Southeastern Norway. He covers and analyzes many developments ignored by western establishment media and has been as prescient about this war as establishment voices have been wrong.

Just yesterday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Moscow. Lavrov’s 80-minute thoughts are worth listening to, unless you think it’s better to expose yourself only to the views of one side in a conflict.

(I know, I know, “Why is Tucker Carlson meeting with a representative of the New New Hitler?!”, etc. Well, I wish I could also post videos of western diplomats meeting with Lavrov (or with Putin himself, see below), but western diplomats are currently intent on mastering the advanced art of Diplomacy Without Talking.)

Of course, if only someone could have foreseen this disaster before NATO started expanding! Someone like, say, George Kennan, the father of Containment policy, who warned in 1997 that:

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era…Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma’s ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

Or if only 46 foreign policy experts—former senators, admirals, CIA directors, secretaries of defense—could also as far back as 1997 have foreseen that:

The current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons: (i) In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; (ii) In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins”  and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included…

Or if only then-US ambassador to Russia and current director of the CIA William Burns could have warned in 2008 in a Wikileaks-uncovered secret cable called “Nyet Means Nyet” to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that:

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face…

Or if only America’s last ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, could have warned in 1997 in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that:

I consider the [Clinton] administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Then there’s historian podcaster Darryl Cooper. This episode, comparing the west’s treatment of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union with the Treaty of Versailles the allies forced on Germany following WWI, is from spring 2022, not long after Russia invaded.

Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire”, examining American meddling in Ukraine (I know, only other countries can meddle, never America)  leading up to the American-led Maidan coup, is also excellent.

Stone’s 2017 series of interviews with Putin “The Putin Interviews” (available in video, book, and audiobook) is also fascinating and probably something we should all listen to before accepting our rulers’ claim to be gambling with nuclear war because Putin is the latest New Hitler.

Here’s Tucker Carlson’s February 2024 two-hour interview with Putin. Again, I’m glad at least someone is talking to the other side in this proxy war, though it would be nice if our professional diplomats thought talking might be part of their job, too.

(When you read the paragraph above, did you immediately feel phrases like “Hitler! Appeasement! Munich! Chamberlain!” flood into your brain? If so, consider duckspeak again, and ask yourself how and by whom the verbal reflex might have been implanted, and who it serves.)

If you really want to go deep, Scott Horton has a new book, “Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War and Provoked the Catastrophe in Ukraine,” with about 7,000 footnotes (my review here). It’s pretty much the definitive guide to how our rulers brought us to the brink of armageddon.

Here’s Horton discussing the book.

If you want to go straight to the source—even if only to better acquaint yourself with their devilish propaganda—the Russian Foreign Ministry has a Twitter/X page. Or you can ignore the stated views of the other side to this conflict and rely only on NATO as a reliable narrator incapable of self-serving propaganda of its own.

For a better idea of the global risk our rulers are creating with this insanity, I recommend Annie Jacobson’s horrifying but essential “Nuclear War: A Scenario.”

And for something even more visceral, spend a little time looking at photos of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what our rulers are risking for everyone alive. What is worth this risk? Will the survivors even remember, or care?

Sorry this got a little long, but Brandolini’s Law is a bitch.

Scott Horton's Aptly Named "Provoked"

Just posted my Amazon customer review of Scott Horton’s outstanding Provoked, the definitive guide to what really caused and continues to prolong the war in Ukraine:

Among so many other things, “Provoked” is a standout expression of Brandolini’s Law, AKA the “BS Asymmetry Principle” (I’d prefer not to use demure abbreviation, but I don’t know if Amazon would approve the word itself).

Brandolini’s Law posits that “The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” And for decades, the western establishment has been working nonstop to obscure the real causes and consequences of NATO metastasis—metastasis that follow the end of the USSR, the country NATO was ostensibly created to defend against—metastasis which finally provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. So it’s understandable that Scott Horton had to invest two and a half years and 7,000 footnotes to refute this deluge of propaganda.

In another sense, though, it’s bewildering that the refutation was necessary in the first place, given that NATO expansion is so obviously the cause of America’s and NATO’s current proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. And if you think NATO expansion is “Kremlin Talking Points” or whatever, you must also believe that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is a Kremlin agent, because Stoltenberg himself acknowledged that Russia invaded Ukraine to stop NATO from expanding. You can look it up (it’s also footnoted in the book). Similarly, if you think “proxy war” is “Kremlin Talking Points,” look up “Boris Johnson Ukraine proxy war.”

Back to the book:

Humans are far more alike than they are different. So the first resort of any sensible person trying to understand another person’s behavior should be to ask some version of, “What would I do under similar circumstances?”

In the case of America’s and NATO’s war with Russia in Ukraine, that question would be, “What would I do if a foreign military alliance relentlessly expanded over the course of decades—eventually doubling in size, incorporating almost all my former allies, and ultimately attempting to incorporate nations along my most vulnerable borders?”

Ask that question honestly, and the rest, as they say, is commentary.

But note that we don’t even have to pose the question theoretically. Why does the US government have a Monroe Doctrine? Precisely because the US government feels threatened by foreign influence in our near abroad. Or consider the Cuban Missile Crisis. America provoked the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey, which bordered the USSR. The USSR provoked America back by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, off the coast of Florida. It was only the dumbest luck that prevented those provocations from leading to a war that would have exterminated humanity.

So while in once sense it’s dispiriting that this book even needed to be written, the reality is that propaganda is a powerful force and requires a powerful corrective. The entire western establishment wants the world to believe the war in Ukraine was forced on NATO because Putin is the latest New Hitler, who “unprovoked” started the war out of an insane desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, to undermine the “Rules Based Order,” etc. The more you believe those sorts of NATO talking points, the more you would benefit from testing your beliefs with the extraordinarily well told story documented in this book.

Hey Democrats: It’s Not the Volume, It’s the Frequency

The reference might be a bit antiquated in our online age, but frequency means the radio station you’re dialed in to. Volume, of course, is how loudly the radio is turned up.

I’m sure there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of explanations I’ve seen from Democrats following their crushing loss in what they constantly billed as The Most Consequential Election Of Our Lifetime(™ ) ignores the frequency of their messaging and focuses on volume, instead.

It doesn’t seem like anything was wrong with the volume of the Democrats’ campaign. Harris massively outspent Trump on advertising. Democrats have a vaunted ground game (door-to-door operations, as opposed to the air game, which is more about media, though again Democrats outspent Republicans on advertising). Harris was the first black or mixed-race woman to be the candidate of either wing of the duopoly, and this alone brought a lot of attention to her campaign, as did the palace coup and defenestration that preceded it.

And yet all the handwringing I’ve seen has been about Democratic volume, not frequency. Listing everything I’ve come across would turn this post into an encyclopedia entry, but here are just a few.

Let’s start with Jon Stewart:

“I don’t ever in my life want to hear about our vaunted ground game will put us over the top. It’s a 50/50 tossup race, we’re sure of it, but the vaunted ground game—turns out that people knocking on other people’s doors doesn’t get them to do what you want them to do as, I believe, vacuum and Bible salesmen have probably known for many, many centuries…fuck us, fuck me, I was wrong.”

There are some encouraging signs in Stewart’s take—“fuck us, fuck me” instead of “fuck them, fuck you” is the right way to begin a journey of accurate understanding, even though the destination is still a long way off. And toward the end of the video there’s some other thinking that leans toward frequency rather than volume.

But the notion that a ground game doesn’t matter because it’s hard to sell vacuums and bibles door-to-door is wrong. Vacuums and bibles are products. The product matters. If people are thirsty and you’re selling water, you’ll sell a lot of it. If they’re thirsty and you’re selling vacuums, the problem isn’t the salespeople, the problem is the product.

(Also sales is about yeses; the no’s don’t matter. You can get nine no’s for every one yes and still make a good living in sales. For a political ground game, a ratio like that is a catastrophe.)

Here’s CNN’s Van Jones:

“We got beat because Republicans built a different media system that has to do with online, has to do with podcasts, has to do with streaming platforms…we were laughing at them, and knocking on doors in Philadelphia and Detroit was like, ‘There’s no Trump people. They’re not dropping literature. They’re not knocking on doors…’ While we were knocking on doors, they were making these phones into 24-hour-a-day political weapons for themselves.”

Whatever you might make of the merits of Jones’s argument, its focus is entirely on volume. He seems unacquainted with even the notion of frequency. It’s all, “We weren’t saying it loudly enough!” And zero, “Was there anything off about what we were saying or about how we were saying it?”

(Also note how easily, naturally, and frequently this journalist uses “we” to refer to the Democratic party. There is zero independence of thought or action here—you might as well be listening to Harris herself or some other Democratic party bigwig. And yes, obviously this phenomenon exists for Fox News and Republicans, as well. The good news is, viewership of this kind of state media is declining.)

Here’s MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas:

“The media ecosystem they’ve—it’s not a good one, it’s a negative one, it’s a radicalization funnel. But what they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine literally the way militant groups do around the world that takes people from relatively low-level annoyances with the world—‘Why are eggs so expensive, why is my kid learning this new thing in American history in school that I didn’t learn’—and then moves them through YouTube videos, to podcasts—moves them from that annoyance, all the way slowly, slowly, slowly to a full-blown fascist politics. It’s an elaborate, multibillion-dollar infrastructure, and there’s nothing like it on the pro-democracy side…When a man is just lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don’t have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction. By the way, we should educate men that it’s actually really great to live with a strong woman who makes money; it’s actually easier, life is easier.”

There are so many exemplary things wrong with Giridharadas’s approach to reality it’s hard to know where to start.

First, note the focus on volume—“the other side has more and better means of getting its message heard.” But his segue into frequency—the message—is also telling.

Because imagine how well-off you’d have to be to believe rising food prices are merely an “annoyance.” Imagine how thoughtless you’d have to be to believe the way history is taught is also merely an annoyance (for starters, you’d have to be unfamiliar with the novel 1984, or one of Ingsoc’s tenets that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”).

And if you think Joe Rogan’s politics are fascist, it can only mean (1) that you’ve never watched his show (among other things, Rogan endorsed Sanders in 2020, perhaps an unusual move for a fascist; he also invited Harris on during the election, but she declined); or (2) that the voices in your own head are so loud you can’t hear what other people are saying (I don’t follow Peterson, so I couldn’t say, but I’m guessing Giridharadas knows as little about the one as he does the other). Ditto for the notion that Rogan primarily appeals to men who are “lost and lonely,” rather than, say, people who are looking for opinions a bit more heterodox than what’s offered on MSNBC.

But maybe the most telling part is Giridharadas’s notion that men need to be “educated” by the Anand Giridharadas’s of the world, that they need Giridharadas and his enlightened cohort to teach them that strong women are good and that having more income is an advantage (who knew?!). This is the Democrats’ frequency—and Giridharadas and his nodding host Mika Brzezinski think the problem is with their volume! Which in a sense it is, because if smug, condescending, idiotic cultural messaging is what Democrats want to be known for, they’d be better off turning the volume all the way down, not up.

One reason it’s more attractive to focus on volume rather than on frequency is because “We didn’t do it loud enough” involves little personal responsibility. “We’re saying the wrong things, we might even believe the wrong things, tens of millions of people including the diverse people we told ourselves were our identitarian base seem to viscerally loathe us” is a much more uncomfortable concept to grapple with. But if Democrats stick to the more comfortable path of thinking their only problem is volume, that there’s nothing off about their frequency, and that ultimately the fault lies in the stars and not in themselves, they’re doomed as a meaningful political force. They can turn up the volume as loud as they want. It won’t matter. People will just change the station.

Some Post-Election Thoughts

Obviously there’s a lot to discuss about the 2024 election results. I’ll offer just the following.

None of this is about the merits of either candidate; it’s about the broad dynamics that shaped the outcome. You don’t have to like those dynamics any more than you like any other aspect of reality. But as the saying goes, denial has no survival value, so it’s best to try to be accurate and unsentimental in our understanding of events.

I think it was a terrible mistake for Harris to fuse her campaign with the Cheneys, other neocons, and various state security apparatchiks. But I also think the prevailing Democratic take on this fusion—some version of “Harris’s campaign is a big tent, the fusion demonstrates even Republican loathing of Trump, etc”—is missing a far more important dynamic that has to do with the dramatically diminished influence of establishment institutions.

Whatever you might think about Trump, he is fundamentally a people-powered candidate. He won two bruising Republican primaries and survived everything the former GOP establishment and the Democratic establishment could throw at him—Russiagate, two impeachments, numerous lawsuits, attempts at ballot removal, a never-ending media blitz, and more. He swings Republican primaries with endorsements, even with tweets. He fills stadiums with enthusiastic audiences. What Trump did in 2016 was functionally a hostile takeover of the GOP, and he has dominated the GOP ever since. We can quibble over these observations, but I think they are broadly accurate.

By contrast, I don’t think Harris can be fairly described as a people-powered candidate. She had to drop out of the 2020 primaries before the first contest—a contest the Democratic establishment engineered to produce a Biden victory (the closest comparison to Trump on the Democratic side was Sanders, who the Democratic establishment twice managed to thwart). That same Democratic establishment and its media allies gaslighted the country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” and how “age is a superpower” and all that—right up until Biden failed to uphold his end of the bargain and undeniably revealed his condition in the July 2024 presidential debate. At that point, the Democratic establishment swapped him out for Harris.

Again, we can quibble about the foregoing, but my main point is that relatively speaking, Trump’s position derives from bottom-up voter enthusiasm, while relatively speaking, Harris’s position derived from top-down party dictates.

To counter Trump’s relatively people-powered position, Harris relentlessly sought (and received) establishment backing (various Harris supporters also pleaded for a George Bush Jr. endorsement, but Bush endorsed no one). It was less that she needed Republican support; the real need was to bolster her base, which was the establishment (ironically her merger with elements of the Republican establishment seems to have translated into no additional support from Republican voters).

So if there’s a lesson to be learned from this election, it isn’t—or isn’t just—that Democrats don’t benefit from merging with Republicans. It’s more that seeking additional support from an increasingly infirm establishment—political, bureaucratic, media, celebrity, whatever—is a losing proposition.

The foregoing tracks with something I’ve long observed about the humans: they have more trouble changing the frequency than they do the volume. That is, when a tactic isn’t working, humans tend to do it harder rather than changing to a different tactic. To use just one example from the election context, when the media’s eight-year-and-running efforts to brand Trump a fascist proved a failure, did they try a different tactic? Or did they just screech “Fascist!” even louder?

(In fairness, the Harris campaign did briefly experiment with what I guess was a different messaging tactic—“Republicans are weird.” That was such a dud, and so inherently contradictory of the previous messaging, that they immediately reverted to the familiar and comfortable “Fascist!” theme. Please note that this isn’t an argument about whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s an argument that for eight years, the messaging has proven fruitless, and yet Democrats stayed with it, but louder.)

Worse, when the music you’re playing is unappealing to your audience, playing it louder not only won’t solve the problem—it will irritate the people you’re trying to please. That Harris outspent Trump three-to-one would be an example of playing the music louder when the right move was to change the station.

Combine: (1) the human tendency to blame the volume rather than the frequency, with (2) the human tendency to avoid responsibility, and with (3) the human tendency to focus on power within an institution rather than the power of the institution (The Iron Law of Institutions), and even after 2016 and 2024, it’s difficult to see how the claws of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Clooneys, the Schumers, and whoever else selected Biden and then swapped him out for Harris can be removed from the levers of influence.

One more lesson here: it seems bruising primaries produce strong general election candidates—Obama in 2008; Trump in 2016 and 2024. Managed affairs seem to produce weak candidates: Clinton in 2016; Harris in 2024 (I think Biden won in 2020 largely because of Covid, but unfortunately the panjandrums who installed him think he prevailed because of their wisdom, not despite).

Obviously there’s a ton more to be said on the topic of establishment decline, enough to fill a book: 

Luckily someone’s already done that, and I recommend Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public for more insight into the causes and consequences of western establishment decrepitude, which in my opinion was foundational to the Democrats’ election-day catastrophe: a catastrophe in how Harris was chosen; in how and with whom she campaigned, and in the kind of messaging her media allies thought voters would find motivating, but that seems to have produced the opposite motivation of the one intended.