Economy & Trade
- The relationship between nation states and their peoples has changed substantially. Are people less patriotic? Maybe they are less willing to follow their leaders’s calls to war?
- Do nation states care more about consent than they used to? Or have they grown more timid? Perhaps they are acting on an everyday awareness of popular opinion gleaned from social media, for example.
- Are contemporary leaders more likely to follow popular opinion than lead it? Even Putin and Trump are hardly leading, unless one thinks gaslighting their nations and the world counts.
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“Judgement” by John MacWhirter, signed print from an engraving, ca. 1935–43, for the Works Progress Administration. Via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179597. Click image to enlarge. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Micah 3. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Isaiah 10. ↩︎
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The Library of Congress has photos produced by the Farm Security Administration of flood refugees in 1937. Many of them are African American. ↩︎
“Trump Says Recession Unfortunate but Necessary Step to Get to Depression,” The Onion, March 10, 2025, theonion.com….
Ukraine has been proving the value of U.S. arms these past three years. Now Trump is using Ukraine to demonstrate the achilles heel of high-end American arms. Their effective use depends on the U.S. political system, which is proving vulnerable to malign domestic and foreign actors.
Conscription, Industrial Mobilization, and the Russo-Ukrainian War
Russia’s war against Ukraine has been marked by an effort to avoid universal (manhood) conscription. It is the regime’s war, so to speak (a “special military operation”), not a people’s war.
On the other side, Ukraine uses conscription because it is indeed a national or people’s war for them. It is a fight for their very survival. Russia is even treating each and every Ukrainian as a “legitimate” target. But even Ukraine has avoided calling up younger men. It seems they lack the political consensus to do so.
I thought about this again when Vance made his historically ignorant accusation in the White House that Ukraine’s military manpower situation was so bad that they had to force men into the army. It’s as if Vance had never heard of the draft in the United States. Or he doesn’t know that “conscription” means “draft” in modern U.S. military history. Regardless, conscription is what countries do when they believe the national stakes are extremely high. If Vance had read any histories of war over the past couple centuries, he would know this.
One notable exception to conscription in national or total wars: Britain tried to fight the First World War with only volunteers, and they succeeded up to a point. By 1916, however, they had to institute conscription as well (“Military Service”). Little wonder. That war in particular had a ravenous appetite for men.
I’ve been thinking about the issue of conscription for another reason. Western leaders have spent the first three years of the Russo-Ukrainian War trying to prevent average citizens from feeling any pain. They’ve avoided spending the money necessary to mobilize our defense industries sufficiently to support a Ukrainian victory and form a credible deterrent to Russia (and China).
This avoidance points to one or all of the following developments in democracies and authoritarian kleptocracies alike:
I have no answer here. It just feels like the post–Cold War era of increasingly volunteer armies and neoliberal economic policies is being challenged by the demands of Mars and his acolytes, even if few have come to accept the consequences of this shift.
Not looking forward to higher fuel and food prices here in Northern New England just because Orange Turd doesn’t understand how regional markets work among friends and allies. #TrumpsEconomy #MoscovianCandidate
'Judgement' by John MacWhirter for the WPA, ca. 1935–43
In the powerful image above,1 a biblical passage on the pulpit reads:
They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field2 … Woe unto them who decree unrighteous decrees … who turn aside the needy from justice, and rob the poor of my people of their rights.3
Below are church pews full of worshipers. Straight ahead are two church windows and above them a cross in front of a bigger window that is cracking. The walls of the church and a beam are coming down, helped along by falling bombs. Surrounding the cross that the bombs are falling toward are four quadrants that show challenges and injustices of the late 1930s and early 1940s. (If they match up with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I am unsure how.)
Clockwise from top-left: There is a factory producing something; out front stands a boy whose emaciated ribs and distended stomach are painfully visible. Next, there are buildings almost completely submerged by flood waters; flooded telephone poles are leaning precariously.4 After that is a Black man hanging by his neck from a tree; the seated onlookers are wearing civilian clothes, not Klan robes. Finally, there are sharecroppers bent over, working a field, presumably for less than their bare subsistence requires.
Orange Ogre’s economic warfare on poor people and blue states undermines the rationale for a federally administered income tax. Why should rich states send money to Washington if there is no ethos or practice of solidarity?
Sergio Olmos, “A surprising immigration raid in Kern County foreshadows what awaits farmworkers and businesses,” Cal Matters, January 10, 2025, calmatters.org….
“If this is the new normal, this is absolute economic devastation,” says one local economist.
This and more recent stories suggest that ICE was chomping at the bit before the rotten orange began his second term.
Strongman regimes … turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture, or sexual assault.…
Rulers who come into office with a criminal record … have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the ‘contagion effect.’ So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 7.
Automation
I was standing near the driver in my bus yesterday, waiting for the light to change so I could get off. When the light turned green, but the car in front of us didn’t move, the driver beeped his horn. I said, “People need to get off their phones,” which earned a laugh from the driver. Then he added something I hadn't recognized about the situation: “Uber drivers are the worst. I thought taxi drivers were bad . . .” I almost quipped something about how automation will soon take care of that, but then thought better of it. Will we lose our bus drivers too?
Today there was this piece on NPR, “As Automation Eliminates Jobs, Tech Entrepreneurs Join Basic Income Movement,” which asks,
When we talk about the economy, we spend a lot of time talking about jobs—how to create more of them and how to replace the ones being lost. But what if we're entering an automated future where there won't be enough jobs for the people who need them?
This is an interesting, if not entirely new question, but also something of a gut punch when I think of all the ordinary human interactions I have in a day. On the other hand, it's possible that the Silicon Valley crowd is informed by more than a little hubris and so can't imagine all the areas of life that cannot—or should not—be automated.
One Problem with Unemployment Statistics
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our current unemployment rate is 8.9%. As bad as this number is, it is still comforting to think about how it is “only” in the single digits. Yet this number does not account for the huge number of self-employed professionals and tradespeople in this country who are unable to file an unemployment claim, even though they are effectively unemployed. And what about those of us who cobble together a series of temporary and part-time jobs that fill up our hours with work, but which do not amount to a job that is eligible for unemployment benefits when some of those gigs fall through? What about the underemployed? My gut and my own experience tells me that that 8.9% number is way too low.
Work
Due to budget cuts, George Mason University did not book me ahead of time to teach history courses this semester. Hence, I took a couple more ESL courses at LADO. Of course, the History Department at Mason offered me something right before its semester started, but I was already working at LADO by that time. Saying no to LADO at the beginning of January on the mere chance of work at Mason was not an option.
The downside is money. Of course, that’s always an issue for teachers, but it’s particularly difficult for people teaching at private language schools. Universities pay adjunct professors by the course, which leaves financial gaps between semesters, but which also leaves time for other part-time jobs. ESL schools pay only by the hours one actually teaches, meaning five hours of actual teaching is only a “part-time” job, never mind preparation time.
Another downside is my crazy schedule. Besides teaching ESL in my DC neighborhood on Saturday mornings, as I did most of 2008, I am teaching mornings in Arlington and evenings in DC. This schedule can be a little disorienting, not to mention tiring. It has an upside too, however, insofar as it leaves me time during the day for job hunting. The trick is to switch gears between the classroom and this other side of my life, and to remember that the actual job search is the most important thing. That’s not easy for a teacher whose natural inclination is to give his classes the highest priority.
One practical upside to my current routine is the lack of long trips out to Fairfax. I have also been enjoying the break in my routine. Teaching ESL to students at a private language school often means the students really want to learn. They can see how the material affects their ability to interact with their environment, unlike students who take an introductory history class simply because it is mandated by the university.
It’s also fun meeting people from so many countries. Lumping my current courses together, my students come from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Japan, Algeria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Many of them work as au pairs or nannies, and some come from the diplomatic community.
This summer I’m scheduled to teach Euro Civ I and II again at Georgetown University. I’ve also got two history courses at George Mason University, Western Civ again and also one on the Great War. The courses at each university are intensive, but they come one after the other, so I won’t be teaching more than two intensive history courses at a time, though I might also continue with the Saturday course at LADO.
Meanwhile, the search for a full-time job must pick up. It might be at university, but I am seriously considering history at private schools as well as possibly something that matches my skills in the government. The State Department could make sense, especially as a foreign service officer who does public diplomacy. Unfortunately, the process for getting that kind of job can take a very long time, as much as two years, if I understand correctly.
Meanwhile, life goes on.
Human Rights in the History Survey
I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."
If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.
The Cold War Museum
The Cold War Museum does not yet have a permanent home, but you can visit it on the web. While I welcome this resource, I am disappointed that it focuses almost exclusively on the military side of this conflict. What about the Cold War's broader impact on culture, politics, and the economy?
I suppose the museum's current focus cannot be helped, given its close relationship with the Cold War Veterans Association, with which it issues a quarterly electronic newsletter. This association seeks recognition for the service of Cold War veterans and promotes the memory of what was in no small part their achievement. Still, veterans would do well to remember the strong connections between military and civilian life. U.S. armed forces did not simply protect the homeland. The Cold War was fought on the homefront too. And what about the relationship between the American homefront and U.S. military forces deployed around the world?
I hope the museum also finds more room for critical analysis than the website currently evinces. While I understand the need for celebration, the Cold War Museum and the Cold War Veterans Association need to ask tougher questions, especially with regard to the Cold War's impact on the current state of our military and its relationship with civilian society. This is more than simply an academic question. Do not the men and women that our country places in harm's way deserve honest scholarship that can help the military to become an even more effective instrument of war and peace?