Ambition

Ambition failed us. 

The incentives for top Republicans were not to check lawless power. They were to consent to it. 

"But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. . . .

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

Federalist 51 is dense reading. I will summarize. Alexander Hamilton or James Madison addressed the People of New York explaining that the proposed Constitution would have both the power to act forcefully when necessary, and yet be constrained from itself being becoming tyrannical because each branch of the government would be independent. Therefore, holders of powers in each branch would jealously guard their own prerogatives. Representatives and senators would not let a president become a dictator because in that case their power to make laws and control the finances would be lost, which they naturally would oppose. Ambition counteracts ambition.

People told me that yesterday's post was naive, and gave too much credit to Liz Cheney. I wrote that she was acting from principle. After all, she saw Trump lie about an election to hold onto power, first with legal fictions and then a whipped-up crowd that attacked the Capitol.  Of course she would object. The criticisms of my post argued that in any action by a politician, don't presume principle. Assume self-interest and figure out what that is, they said. Principle fails. Ambition does not

OK. Maybe Liz Cheney is a strategist playing the long game and the road less travelled. Liz Cheney's own concession speech reported her political self-interest as she wanted it understood. She said she won her former primary easily. She said all she had to do was go along with Trump and she would have won again and still been in House leadership. She positioned herself as selfless. Cheney-the-martyr.

But assuming ambition is paramount, possibly this is her strategic long-shot route to the White House in a post-Trump world. She observes a large field of Trump-compliant potential candidates--Cruz, Hawley, DeSantis, Haley, Rubio, Stefanik, McCarthy, Don Junior, Ivanka--and as the outsider, she is Plan B. If Trump becomes toxic for some reason--always a real possibility--then she is the person who was right all along. She would be like Winston Churchill, brought into power when it became evident that his warnings about appeasing Hitler were right all along. It could work. 

I think she is principled, but one can assume the opposite. Either way, she is doing what she is doing. 

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were in the positions that Federalist 51 presumed to be the check on Trump. Their original emotions and instincts were what Hamilton and Madison predicted. They were shocked and offended by the Capitol riot and Trump's behavior leading up to it. They said so publicly. So far, so good.

However, their incentives were not as predicted. Their major incentives were to retain their positions as leaders, not to protect the legislative branch. McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and came back all-in for Trump. McConnell mumbles when it comes to Trump and the insurrection. Trump insults him but McConnell doesn't comment. McConnell says he will do everything he can to get "electable candidates," whatever their policies, to get a Republican majority. He also says he will support the Republican nominee for president, including Trump. 

McCarthy realized within a few days after January 6 that GOP House members were with Trump all the way. McCarthy scrambled to get back in front of his team. McConnell mumbles because the senate includes people who voted for impeachment. McConnell's incentive is to be any-and-all agnostic on Trump. Let Trump be Trump. Let people believe what they want.

Had McConnell and McCarthy stuck with their original observations, they might have led their members and the GOP electorate away from Trump. That wasn't their incentive, not when it meant persuading House and Senate members to persuade their Republican constituencies. Trump won the battle of persuasion. Republican voters believe Trump. GOP leaders didn't want to risk trying to turn the stampeding herd. They wanted to get in front of it.

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Politicians must pay a price

It isn't enough to walk the talk.

To be credible, the walk must be costly.

Nothing is easier that "virtue signaling" when it can be done cheaply. That is why it is meaningless. 

There is a reason for initiation fees for clubs and "hell week" hazing rituals at college fraternities. The intent is to prove commitment. The newcomer is becoming a member, not a customer. 

Sometimes the price of membership is costly, as in the case of Catholic vocations and vows of poverty or celibacy. Catholic vocations aren't a gig. They are all-in commitments. In the Christian story, God proved his commitment to human salvation by having his human incarnation tortured and killed--John 3:16. Sacrifice proves something.

I sometimes give campaign advice to local politicians considering a run for office. They present me with their proposed campaign themes, which typically display high-minded virtues that are intentionally general and inoffensive. It makes sense to them. Their idea is to communicate both their good intentions and desire not to offend. Who could object? I typically tell them their campaign material is worse than worthless. Assertions of being honest, fair, and reasonable simply prove the candidate is capable of politician-talk. No one believes or remembers it.

Liz Cheney staked her ground. She was an eyewitness to an effort to overthrow an election. She had determined that Donald Trump planned and directed it. She says it was dishonest and unconstitutional. Republican leaders condemn her. She was booted from leadership in her party. She just lost an election in her home state. She is now on Americans' mental map with a brand. She paid a price for her beliefs, which makes her credible. Republican critics understand the power of her paying a price, so they are minimizing it to try to undermine her. They are saying she will become a well-paid TV commentator and then will run for president. 

There is insincere virtue signaling, too. On Monday Trump told the Department of Justice 

Whatever we can do to help, because the temperature has to be brought down in the country, If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.

We understand the purported virtue ("Whatever we can do to help") to be more likely a thinly-veiled threat ("terrible things") than a genuine offer to lower the temperature. He was bargaining with the government, telling them to go easy, or else. There was no sacrifice. Empty words. We look to actions, not words, to try to determine real intent.

The political rule of thumb is simple, and true for all parties and beliefs. If the purported virtue words benefit the speaker, then they are presumably insincere. If your own team attacks you for it, and you stand by your position and take heat for it, then it is maybe sincere and memorable. Politicians are best defined by the criticism they get from allies. Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment came when he criticized a Black hip-hop artist. She suggested Black gang members stop killing each other and start killing Whites for a change. Clinton said it sounded like she sounded like a Black version of David Duke, a Ku Klux Klan leader. Some Black critics pounced on him. Clinton got credibility as a centrist, willing to denounce inflammatory racism from his "home team."

I don't suggest that candidates for local office take unpopular positions. I do urge them not to be afraid to take positions that they sincerely believe and which will generate sharp criticism. Locally, Alan DeBoer, a former Republican state senator, took a courageous Sister Souljah-type stand against a position taken by the local Republican Party. It recently made a formal resolution denying the validity of the 2020 presidential election and called Joe Biden illegitimately elected. DeBoer got widespread credit for courage and good sense, but he stood alone among other local GOP leaders. Republican officeholders ducked their heads and let the resolution stand un-refuted. The respect DeBoer gained came with a price of being the GOP outsider. The price he paid validated the respect he got. 

I advise candidates not be afraid of criticism. Be right on the facts and hope that someone is foolish enough to criticize you for your position. Standing up to criticism shows you mean it.

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Liz Cheney launches

"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. . . .
On such a full sea are we now afloat."
     Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

It isn't high tide for Liz Cheney. Not yet.  

From Fox News this morning

Even Fox News sees it and says it. The tide is changing.

Liz Cheney lost yesterday. People looking for a post-Trump GOP must wait. Had Cheney won, the Trump spell would have broken. Republican officeholders and presidential aspirates would see that Republican voters were no longer believing the unbelievable and defending the indefensible. It would have meant that the conspiracy and outrage wing of the party--Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Green--would be a minority faction within the GOP.

It didn't happen. It is still Trump's party. No political equilibrium persists for long.

Reagan-style Republicanism lasted about 30 years, from 1980 to 2010. By 2010 the Tea Party movement had substantially changed the GOP, even as, on the surface, everything was the same. Sarah Palin's know-nothing hockey-mom populism had combined with Newt Gingrich's scorched-earth language of Democrats as disgusting traitors. The result was a new party--an ethno-nationalist party in the style of Pat Buchanan. Mitt Romney was history even before his defeat in 2012. Trump understood and gave voice to this new GOP synthesis of frustration over job losses to China, rapid immigration from Latin America and Asia, and apparent Democratic progressive wins on social issues. He sounded angry and he didn't care if what he said was exactly true. It was true in spirit. Close enough.

Economic elites--the professional class, the Wall Street Journal readers, big-money donors, the Chamber of Commerce and country club Republicans--are going along with the new, angry populist GOP. It is an uneasy fit. They understand the anti-Semitism embedded in comments about George Soros. The traditional GOP elites don't care about homosexuality, gender transition, abortion, or guns. They like immigration. Still, the GOP's business wing wants low taxes, and they get that from the GOP. 

Trump put together this coalition of the GOP by force of personality and the smart decision to turn the judiciary over to  the Federalist Society. Christian nationalist voters wanted anti-abortion judges. Chamber of Commerce Republicans wanted anti-regulation judges. They each got what they wanted. 

The GOP coalition under Trump is fragile. Trump is a minority taste. The important thing in the Wyoming primary is not that Cheney lost. It is that she got 30% of the vote. The Trump GOP is already a loser in a national election in battleground states, and Republican voters are peeling off. Enough people recognize that Trump is a crook. Election defeats change political parties. They adjust.

Liz Cheney represents a new synthesis for the GOP. She remains a national security hawk. The Ukraine issue makes that a popular one within the GOP, putting her at odds with Trump. She changed her anti-homosexual position, and is now a civil-libertarian conservative. That position is in tune with the Kansas vote. She reconnects the GOP with law enforcement, the natural home for GOP voters. 

Political coalitions do not happen because policies "make sense." They happen because political leaders create them by interpreting and anticipating events. Liz Cheney looks and sounds like a leader. She projects the presumed masculine virtues of strength, courage, and integrity. She is willing to take a beating and not whine about it. Trump-the-fighter has always had a patina of fraud about him. He was Mr. Bone Spurs, the ladies-man playboy doing bravado bullying. His complaints about the election have a whiny, sore-loser quality. Trump won't be defeated by his current GOP rivals, who look like they are awaiting table scraps from the master. Only Trump could beat Trump. He is beating himself. Liz Cheney is in position to say she was right all along.

If the law catches up to Trump in 2022 then her tide will be ready in 2024. If not, then in 2028. 

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Sacco and Vanzetti: Execution Song

The Past is never dead. It isn’t even past.

The trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti 95 years ago isn’t past either. 

People aren’t just arguing about it. They are performing operas about it.


College classmate Leonard Lehrman composes music. (262 works to date, including 12 operas.) A project of several decades has been his completion of an opera titled Sacco and Vanzetti begun but left unfinished by Marc Blitzstein (1905-64). The opera memorializes an incident in the life of America a century ago, one that mixes Red-scare fear of anarchism and prejudice against immigrants, especially ones from swarthy-complected southern Europe.

Lehrman

Leonard confidently asserts that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent and were railroaded. His effort of five decades to tell their story via opera included support from Leonard Bernstein, who encouraged him, and Governor Michael Dukakis, who agreed that they were unjustly convicted. Dukakis did not merely pardon Sacco and Vanzetti, which would have implied their guilt. On the fiftieth anniversary of their death, he ordered their official exoneration. Creation of an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti encountered some of the same prejudice that allowed their unjust conviction and execution. Harvard—once again in the spotlight of disputes over ethnic and racial quotas—had a big role in their trial and execution.

Guest Post by Leonard Lehrman

After 21 years’ correspondence I finally met "Governor Mike," as he asked me to call him, in person at his home this past June. There I learned that his Brookline neighbors, Sarah Ehrmann (1895-1993) and her husband, attorney Herbert Ehrmann (1891-1970), who had convinced the composer and lyricist Marc Blitzstein of Sacco's and Vanzetti's indisputable innocence, had also convinced Governor Mike. At the back of Blitzstein's copy of Ehrmann's book, The Untried Case, the composer had sketched the 3-act outline of the plot of his opera, which made it possible for me to understand his intentions, and realize them, over a 25-year working period.

The case had become an obsession for Blitzstein, often called "the father of American opera in the vernacular;" He wrote an unproduced choral work about it in 1930, The Condemned, and then began a new opera on the subject, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, optioned by the Met in 1959. Red-baiting nearly killed it, while gay-bashing killed Blitzstein in Martinique, where he'd been vacationing, finishing up two one-act operas on stories by Bernard Malamud, having come to appreciate his own Jewish identity after a trip to Israel. Leonard Bernstein vowed to finish some of that music, but later turned it over to me, with his blessing, after attending a Blitzstein-Bernstein triple bill I produced at Lowell House, December 5, 1970. In 1990 he dubbed me "Marc's dybbuk."

"The need to guard against susceptibility to prejudice, intolerance of unorthodox ideas, and failure to defend the rights of strangers in our midst" are Mike Dukakis's admonitory words. They could easily have been Blitzstein's (and Bernstein's) as well. With the Blitzstein Estate's approval, I used them in the opera I completed in 2001. It premiered concertante, with piano, at The White Barn Theatre in Westport, CT, in August, 2001.

Vanzetti (James Sergi) consoled by Sacco (Gregory Mercer)

Just two weeks later came 9/11, and an opera with anarchists as protagonists and law enforcement as villains became virtually unproduceable. Then, six years ago, Trump made immigration from “undesirable” places a flash point of controversy. Hofstra University scheduled performances of the opera in three successive years, only to be canceled by COVID.

But now at last, thanks to grants from the Puffin Foundation (which co-funded the original commission), the Maldeb Foundation (founded by Joel Mandelbaum, Harvard '53), and a bequest by my late father, Nathaniel S. Lehrman, '42, Blitzstein's vision will finally come to full fruition, in the Bronx. (See below.)

Dad's class of 1942 had been only 15% Jewish, due to a quota imposed by President Lowell, who had tried to stop Louis Brandeis from becoming a Supreme Court justice, and who had headed the committee that advised Governor Fuller in 1927 not to pardon Sacco and Vanzetti. In the opera, fellow committee member Judge Grant, whose luggage had been stolen while traveling in Italy, remarks: "It is a well-known fact that all Italians lie and steal." To which Lowell chimes in: "Just like Jews." Also in the opera, journalist Heywood Broun's sarcastic contemporaneous remark is quoted: "It's not every wop that gets the President of Harvard to pull the switch on him!" 

My father's roommate, Dr. Bertram Slaff, told me that when Lowell came to dinner at Memorial Hall in 1940, he was greeted by a leaflet saying: "Were it not for you, Sacco and Vanzetti would be alive today." As Vanzetti proudly declared, in court, and in the opera: "Sacco's name will live in the hearts of the people," as will Vanzetti's, in the "work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man. . . ." Today theirs are considered (at least by some) among the most illustrious Italian names in history.

From: Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society

Read about them. Visit saccoandvanzetti.org and watch the memorial program at Community Church of Boston, with speakers including Governor Mike Dukakis, David Rothauser (producer and star of the 2004 film, The Diary of Sacco and Vanzetti), and me--on Sacco-Vanzetti Day, Tuesday, August 23, 2022 at 7pm, in person or on Zoom. Visit the opera's website:

http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/SaccoAndVanzetti.html

And come to the premiere!: 

Sat. Sep. 10 at 7:00; Sun. Sep. 11 at 3:00 at Lehman College Studio Theatre. 

Admission is "Pay What You Can - No One Turned Away."

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Tit for Tat

 "The FBI has a duty to 'We the People' to investigate any appearance of impropriety."

         Fox's Bill O'Reilly, as regards Hillary Clinton, 2016.

We have a failure to communicate.

Comedy Central played a mash-up of prominent Republicans  demanding that the FBI investigate Hillary Clinton. How dare she possess government documents! The Republicans seem so righteous. So adamant. So supportive of law enforcement. Watch.  It's about a minute:

Click

Maybe we can just simply chalk it up to hypocrisy and whose ox is being gored. No need to overthink this. They are fighting for their team. When the target was Hillary, they demanded the FBI go at her hard. Now, with Trump the target, they switched. The FBI isn't honest and professional. Now it is thoroughly corrupt and political. It isn't a "search." It's a "raid." Moreover, they likely planted any documents they will claim to find. 

The pole star is that Trump is an innocent victim and their teammate. Their posturing follows from that premise. That means a superstructure of GOP brand attributes needed to be abandoned. The GOP isn't the "support the blue" party, after all. It is now the civil liberties party. It is the innocent-until-proven-guilty party. It is the Fifth Amendment party. It is the party that presumes that the police are picking on the suspect out of prejudice and profiling. Defund the FBI! And IRS enforcement, too. They sound like leftist critics of racial profiling and prejudice, except that now the victim of police injustice is a powerful, wealthy, White, male ex-president.

Of course, Republicans don't mean it. The posturing is entirely a matter of Trump being their ox. Republicans are treating this as a game of tit for tat. They did what they could to smear Hillary, who deserved some of it, and now they presume Democrats are doing what they can to smear Trump, who also deserves some of it. As soon as the GOP gets control of a chamber of government they are already promising to hold hearings to smear Merrick Garland ('clear your calendar") who maybe deserves something, but at least he can be badgered. Hunter Biden surely deserves some smears, and Antony Fauci made some enemies, as did the January 6 committee. They are great targets. This is pay-back, and it is the GOP's turn.

I look at it very differently. I perceive Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election as uniquely wrong and illegal. It was dangerous. It was a greater threat to our republic than was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no realistic way that Japan could have invaded and occupied the U.S. and gotten troops to the Capitol to replace our president with one Americans did not choose. There would be ugly fighting and tens of thousands of American deaths, yes, but the continuity of legitimate government in the United States was never in question. We now realize that Trump nearly succeeded, and did so with the enthusiastic support of a significant block of people in positions of power in the federal and state governments. They are still there.

Prominent Republican leaders--Senators, Governors, Members of Congress, media spokespeople--are treating Trump's insurrection as a tit for tat game, as if there are good guardrails in place to protect our republic.  As such they can make statements they will forget or recant soon. It is just harmless posturing, right?.

It is not harmless. Trump lit a fire of delegitimization of government. Prominent GOP leaders continue to feed the fire. Trump really did urge Georgia's Raffensperger to "find" 11.000 votes. He really did--as Mitch McConnell said immediately after January 6--instigate a riot to overturn an election. He really did possess government documents at Mar-a-Lago that he denied having. The FBI wasn't playing tit for tat on behalf of Democrats. It was doing its job, investigating crimes, real crimes. As Bill O'Reilly said, that is the FBI's duty.

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Easy Going Sunday: Melon Update

It is mid-August, but my melons aren't ready yet. 

Usually I would start to pick melons about now, but May was unusually wet and cool. So was most of June. I planted when I could, in late June. There is no use planting melons before the soil has warmed up.

I will have a few melons after Labor Day.

Melons for sale in supermarkets in America work their way from south to north from Guatemala and Honduras, to Mexico, to the southern U.S., and now to the north. If you have been eating melons in the past six weeks they have probably come from the American Southwest. Melons from Yuma, Arizona and the Imperial Valley at the southern tip of California get planted in February and start being harvestable in May.

The best prices for Yuma and Imperial Valley melons come at their early harvest in May and then their second-crop melons harvested in November. Arizona and California growers plant as early as possible in the winter. They try to capture all the heat of the winter sun by planting on a south-facing slope and sometimes with a layer of plastic. The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension office demonstrates.

Melons grown for bulk harvest and shipping are picked a week or more before I would pick them. Melons picked green have longer shelf life. And they sell. Customers don't know what a melon is supposed to taste like, so a tasteless melon tastes normal to them. Some people prefer a melon that is firm-fleshed. Melons in restaurant fruit salads or "fruit plate" displays look best when they cut into sharp-edged cubes or slices. Cantaloupes are displayed for color and shape.

It is possible, but unlikely, that readers of this blog in Oregon or anywhere north of the 40th degree of latitude will find local melons in grocery stores beginning now. Heads up about Farmers Markets. Merchants try to service customers, and customers who want melons want them now, while shopping, whether or not they are in season locally. Most places--even fancy places--source them just like other supermarkets, wherever they are available. The photo below is taken in June in Boston: Expensive melons in a high end store. They look great. They were picked very, very green.

A "Whole Foods" type market. 

I took photographs of melons at Costco two weeks ago because the price was so wonderful. By wonderful, I mean expensive. Expensive melons mean that a farmer like myself could earn enough to go back into serious melon growing: $4.50 each, about $1.40 a pound. No thanks. Picking melons is easy, but once one has a dozen nice melons in a bin to carry to the side of a field, the bin weighs 50 pounds. I get backaches. 

Tuscan style. Expensive!!

Picked under-ripe in central California

A vine-ripe melon slips off the vine with a slight push of the thumb. Most of the melon taste comes in that final week between when they are picked green for shipping and when they are ripe. Tuscan-type melons have a better taste when picked underripe than do most varieties of cantaloupes, so if you want a melon out of season, look for a Tuscan variety. 

Stem remnants mean it was picked green. A vine-ripe melon has a neat smooth navel--an "innie."  A melon that looks like this one below is not necessarily completely tasteless, but the stem is a warning notice. 

A common "shipper" melon. Possibly a "Hale's Best."

What to do if you want a excellent melons now?  If you live in the American south, go to a Farmers Market and buy local. Look for a melon with an "innie." If you live in the north, you can start looking now, but you might have to wait another week or two.

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Summer BBQ

August 12, 2022. A gathering of ten. Dinner. Wine. Talk.

Democratic businessperson: 

     Trump and the GOP are in big trouble. FBI search was totally justified. Trump was in possession of nuclear secrets, for god's sake. He was committing a felony.  

Democratic lawyer: 

    Trump and Republicans will be better than ever. He will say he had possession of those documents for four years, so there was no harm in him having them. He will say it's a Democratic witch hunt. He will say they are coming for all Americans next. 

It is good to get back to normal. 

We were eating, drinking, and talking politics. It is summer. We were outside. We grilled meat. No masks. No talk of COVID. We were part of something humans have been doing since the dawn of time. It felt great.

The FBI search at Mar-a-Lago put Trump back in the spotlight. For a few days Biden had been the story, and it looked good for him.

     ***He was a dealmaker who resolved things with Manchin and Sinema, and Democrats passed legislation. It supposedly reduced inflation. It did something environmental. It let Medicare negotiate drug prices, at long last. It appropriated money so the IRS could reduce tax cheating by the wealthy. It made corporations pay a minimum tax. No one understood any of the provisions but it all sounded good to Democrats.

     ***Unemployment is down.

     ***Inflation maybe slowed.

     ***Gasoline prices are down.

     ***There is voter backlash against the red-state abortion laws. 

It was Biden's moment, but it is over. The FBI handed the spotlight back to Trump.

Midterm elections are traditionally a referendum on the president. American consumers and voters worried about inflation and thought the economy was bad. Biden and Democrats were likely to lose badly. Then, a change. The Supreme Court took center stage, reversing Roe and laying hints that gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, and a total nationwide ban on abortion might be on the national agenda. Red-state legislatures showed this wasn't an idle threat. This made the 2022 election a referendum on runaway red-state MAGA extremism. Now Republicans might pay the price. 

Then the FBI search. Trump and the GOP seized the narrative. They immediately made the story a choice over whether the tyrant thugs at the FBI were doing it out of Deep State instinct to preserve its own corrupt secrets, or whether the FBI thugs were carrying out the bidding of Biden. 

Huffington Post

In the after-dinner conversation I sided with the lawyer. Trump will ignore the crimes, and say "So, what!" proudly and shamelessly. I argued that the search managed to do the near impossible: Make Trump look like a victim. That is how he is selling it, and he sells louder and harder than the proper and reserved Attorney General. This elevates Trump and crowds out DeSantis and the other aspirants.

That is not the end of the story, though. All is not lost for Democrats. Biden is old, but he is not as weak as people thought. Maybe he becomes a nonentity, rather than a problem. Trump crowds out the nonentity Biden, too. Trump is interesting. He makes news. Trump is chaos, strife, and trouble. He is also exhausting.

What Americans are experiencing in real time is the setup for a mid-term referendum on Trump. The mid-term election won't be about inflation or Afghanistan or whether Biden is too old. It will be about Trump because Trump insists on it. GOP leaders could band together and end the Trump era, but they don't. Trump-endorsed candidates are on enough ballots to make the specter of Trump part of the GOP brand everywhere. Trump is spreading his scent. 

Republicans will suffer for keeping Trump in place and letting this be a referendum on Trump. Senior GOP leaders and people close to the former president could take charge and lance the boil, but until then it is all about Trump. Trump won't be removed by the law. Only by voters.

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