How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

 In 2006 the movie An Inconvenient Truth came out.  It featured Al Gore and was built around a slide show he had been giving for years at that point.  It highlighted Global Warming, what caused it, and the fact that if nothing was done very bad things would happen.  Most of the movie was devoted to making the Global Warming case, but a short section at the end outlined how the problem could be fixed.

I thought Gore did a great job of proving his main thesis, that Global arming was a real thing, and that it presented a danger serious enough that urgent action was justified.  Where he fell short was when it came to solutions.  I listened to what he had to say there and thought, "we are so fucked".

It's been fifteen years.  How have things changed?  I regularly follow scientific developments so I was already familiar with large parts of Gore's argument.  But most people don't do that.  For them the movie was their first serious introduction to the issue.  As such, I think its release was, to quote Churchill,  "the end of the beginning" of the public's interest in, and engagement with, the subject.

There has been some good news since the movie came out.  Wind turbines and solar panels existed at the time, and Gore mentioned both.  But back then they were expensive, and especially in the case of wind turbines, not very efficient.

Solar panels are now more efficient and far cheaper.  Wind turbines are now much more efficient and, per unit of capacity, considerably cheaper.  Finally, everybody is now familiar with Global Warming.  Most people now think that it is real and that it would be nice to do something about it.  But that's pretty much the end of the good news.

There has been a lot written on the subject between then and now.  Very recently (it came out this year), an excellent addition to the literature on the subject was added.  It is a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.  It was written by none other than Bill Gates.

I just finished reading it.  What makes this book especially valuable is that he is a numbers guy.  So, he provides answers to all the important "how big" and "how much" kinds of questions.  As a result, you come away with a real understanding of how significant something is or is not.

He backs up his analysis with a lot of detail.  He frequently tells us that he is optimistic the problem will get solved.  Given what he has to say about what will need to be done, he more than justifies labeling himself as an optimist.  The book is an easy read.

He simplifies (and admits he was doing it) in order to keep what's important front and center.  But he does not go down the "no numbers or math" path that many authors writing for a general audience do.  He tells us what the size, scale, and difficulty of the various components are.  He does this, both for the problems he discusses, and for the various solutions he investigates.

Reading this book won't provide you with the information you need to understand all aspects of all the issues in depth.  But it provides a good entrée, an introduction to each issue and an explanation of how it fits in with everything else.

If you want to dive more deeply into any specific subject or aspect then you will have to go elsewhere.  (Check the "Notes" section at the end of the book for where you can find more in-depth information.)  If not, then be assured that he quickly moves on.  You won't get mired down in any one topic.  And speaking of deep dives, I can't dive even as deeply as he does, and often his "dive" is pretty shallow, and still keep this post to a manageable length.

So what I am going to do is give you the headline version of the book.  I will add some commentary and leave it at that.  If you want to dive more deeply, but not too deep, read the book.  It is easy to read and only runs a little over 200 pages.  To work.

"How big is it?", is an important question.  The answer can get confusing, so he consistently uses the same yardstick.  We are putting the equivalent of 51 billion tons of "carbon" into the air each year.  Every bit of it causes warming in excess of the situation before the beginning of the industrial revolution.

If we want to get back to normal we need to drive that number all the way to zero.  Anything less than zero and things keep warming up.  If we drive it down significantly but not all the way to zero, then things continue to warm.  They just warm more slowly.  If we increase it, things warm even more quickly than they are now.

This is an oversimplification.  Gates oversimplifies a lot.  But the oversimplification is in service of the goal of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).  The oversimplifications mean that he might not have one thing or another exactly right.  But he is careful to oversimplify in a ways that get the basic idea right without getting bogged down in the details.  And it is obvious that he knows much more than he is putting in the book.

It can be argued that he should have done this or that differently.  But what he does conveys the important ideas accurately.  And that is the important thing.  I could provide a bunch of examples of places where there may be a better or different way.  But I am not going to.  Just imagine I had.  Otherwise, the post would end up longer than the book.

Poor people contribute to Global Warming to a much smaller extent than rich people do.  This means that things are going to get worse if, as Gates and I hope, these people are able to improve their situation.  In spite of this, he argues that they should be supported in this.  And, he argues, we have to find solutions that they can afford and that work in the less developed parts of the world.

He also spends a lot of time on economics.  If something is a good idea, but costs twice as much as the bad idea, then nobody is going to change to it.  He is a big believer in harnessing business.  Show them a way to make a lot of money doing the right thing and they will happily do it.  They will also stop throwing roadblocks in the way of doing the right thing.

And, unlike much of the business community, he is not opposed to government.  He sees practical solutions as those that harness the power of ordinary people, business, and government.  Later in the book he lays out the roles and duties of each.

His pro-government stand comes in spite of the experience he had when the U.S. Government sued Microsoft.  As he notes, that was a very unpleasant experience.  But ultimately it was one he learned from.

Global Warming is not a "one fix" problem.  Making everybody drive electric cars would help.  But it would leave most of the problem unsolved.  The short version of his solution is:

1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero.
2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter.
3. We need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.

He says nice things about the Paris Accord and about something called "Mission Innovation" that I had never heard of.  And that's the point,  As he notes "Unfortunately, the world did little to prepare".  He is talking about COVID but the same applies to Global Warming.  And, as he often notes, "getting to zero [on Global Warming] will be really hard".

He spends an entire chapter on why the goal needs to be getting all the way to zero.  I have already outlined the super-short version of why this is so above.  If you don't already believe it then I don't think this chapter is going to convince you to change your mind.

Chapter 2 is called "This will be hard".  I think that this is the one single statement about Global Warming that literally everybody agrees with.  It's everything else where the disagreements lie.  The thesis of the chapter name is obvious.  There is, however, information in this chapter that is not obvious.

For instance, an important but less obvious concept is that "fossil fuels are like water".  They are so ubiquitous that we forget how many places they crop up.  Even if you fix all the problems that everybody knows about, you aren't done.  You still have to fix all the other problems too.

Most people don't know how many things use fossil fuels in one way or another. He provides a much abbreviated list.  He also notes that "gas", the stuff you put in your car, is cheaper than name brand bottled water like Dasani.  It is also cheaper than pop at Costco, milk, and many other liquids we don't think of as being particularly expensive.

"History is not on our side", he observes.  The various energy transitions humans have gone through have been critical to improvements in the quality of life.  Firewood kept cave men warm.  Coal fueled the industrial revolution.  Petroleum fueled the twentieth century.

We want things to keep getting better.  It will be hard to do that without increasing the amount of energy we collectively use.  And it will be even harder for poor people to keep improving everybody's situation without also substantially increasing their energy use.  It is not clear how improve everyone's situation without making Global Warming worse.

"Coal plants are not like computer chips."  The point here is that computer chips (and a few other technological marvels) have gotten way better very quickly.  But you can't do the same thing to a coal fired power plant, or many other parts of our energy use infrastructure.  Making them a little better?  Perhaps.  Making them oodles better?  Not possible.

Similarly, "our laws and regulations are so outdated."  He is not anti-regulation.  But regulations change slowly but the problem changes quickly.  Potential solutions change even more quickly.  This means that we are applying old regulations to new problems.  Instead of being part of the solution, this makes them part of the problem.

He then deconstructs that 51 billion.  He puts the components into five general categories.  You have to get a certain distance into the weeds if you expect to get to zero.  This is his idea of the minimum distance necessary.  Here are his five categories:

1. Making things (cement, steel, plastic) - 31%.
2. Plugging in (electricity) - 27%.
3. Growing things (plants, animals) - 19%.
4. Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) - 16%.
5. Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) - 7%.

His point is that, in the end you need to do something about all of these things.  And notice that electric cars isn't even broken out into its own separate category.  If we switched 100% to electric cars there would still be lots left to do.  He devotes a chapter to each category (see below).

This list is imbedded in a chapter called "Five Questions to Ask in Every Climate Conversation".  The questions are:

1. How much of the 51 billion tons are we talking about?
2. What's your plan for cement?
3. How much power are we talking about?
4. How much space do you need?
5. How much is it going to cost?

The category percentages come from his discussion of the first question.  The "cement" question is a proxy for all the hard things that need to be done.  Spoiler Alert:  Gates doesn't have a solution to the problem of how to make cement (the stuff you make bridges out of) without putting out a lot of greenhouse gas.

If we electrify cars, where does the electricity ("power") come from?  Are we just moving the problem around, say by polluting to make electricity rather than driving a gas car that pollutes?  The "how much space" question comes into play when we ask how many acres we need to cover with solar panels or how much space we need for giant farms of wind turbines.

And, in many ways, the last question is the most critical of them all while being the most obvious.  To keep things simple he calculates a "Green Premium".  If it costs $X to make something the old way then what does it cost to make the "green" alternative instead.

Ideally, we want it to cost less.  Electricity from solar or wind currently costs less than electricity made the old fashioned way.  It has a negative Green Premium.  But that is unusual.

In almost every case, it costs more to go green.  It may cost a few percent more, or it may cost 1000% more, or it may be that no one knows how to make something (i.e. cement) "the green way" at all.  Calculating a Green Premium keeps things simple when trying to make these kinds of comparisons.

In a lot of cases the solution is to replace something with electricity.  We replace a gas car with an electric one, for instance.  Because this "fix" is so common, Gates tackles item 2 (Plugging in) first.

And, as he often does, he starts with a discussion of all the people who do not have access to large quantities of electricity.  His point is that these people deserve a chance at a better life.  And, if they succeed, the world demand for electricity will climb.  We need to factor this into our plans.

Green electricity is a topic that a lot of people already know a lot about.  So, I am going to give it short shrift.  Gates is a fan of nuclear power.  So am I.  He talks about fusion power.  He is more optimistic about its prospects than I am.  He notes that batteries suck.  He sees them getting some but not a lot better.  He explores other options for storing power.  He likes Hydrogen.

He spends some time on Carbon Capture.  Compared to other options, this is relatively easy to do.  But it is currently not much done.  "Clean coal" has been talked about for decades without anybody actually pulling it off.  He thinks that "direct air capture", pulling carbon dioxide out of ordinary air, is worth exploring.  Unfortunately, he makes a good case that this vey expensive and hard to do thing may, in the end, be necessary.

On to "making things", starting with concrete.  The component of concrete that is germane to this discussion is cement.  It turns out that China has made a lot more cement (25.8 billion tons) in 2001-16 than the 4.3 billion tons the U.S. made in the entire twentieth century (1901-2000).  So, right now, the only opinion that matters is the Chinese one.

If some experimental technology that Gates talks about that I am not familiar with can be made to work, then the Green Premium on cement is only 75-140%.  If it doesn't pan out then it is higher, maybe infinity, as in there is no workable green alternative.  Even if the Gates thing works, no one is going to pay that much extra.

The (relatively) good news, is that the Green Premium for Ethylene, a typical plastic, is 9-15%.  That's something people might be willing to pay.  The Green Premium for Steel is 16-29%.  Although that's way lower than the one on cement, no one is going to be willing to pay it.  See how the "Green Premium" approach simplifies things.  The figures are estimates which might not turn out to be that accurate.  But they are accurate enough to tell us where we stand.

On to the subject of "growing things".  We will need lots more food to better feed the world's poor.  We will need still more to feed all the additional people who will be around in 2100.  Ehrlich, in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, famously predicted that mass starvation would happen in the near future due to population growth.  It didn't happen.  Instead the "Green Revolution" happened.  The name is shorthand for a bunch of innovations that made it possible to grow a lot more food.

Innovation saved us once.  It can do it again.  Lots more innovation in agriculture (and in many other things) is possible.  Still, Gates advocates moving from meat based food to plant based food.  A cow has to eat a lot of feed (plants) to produce a pound of hamburger.  But, since we all like a good burger once in a while, he advocates for various kinds of fake meat or lab grown meat.  The idea is that these alternatives will give us the "meat" experience while substantially reducing the number of pounds of feed required.

Whatever we do, we will need a lot of fertilizer.  This is another place where we can substitute electricity for fossil fuels.  But that means producing lots more electricity.  And there is a Green Premium of 20% or more that needs to be allowed for.  And there are other problems when it comes to growing things.  There is, for instance, the "fart" problem.  Finally, he goes into the plusses and minuses of planting lots of trees.

On to "how we get around".  Which has more energy, a gallon of gas or a stick of dynamite?  It turns out that its not even close.  There is as much energy in the gas as there is in 130 sticks of dynamite.  Now you know why petroleum products are used everywhere in transportation.

Cars emit 47% of the transportation total.  Trucks, buses, etc. (but not pickup trucks - they get lumped in with cars) emit another 30%.  Planes and ships each amount to anther 10%.  And we have to fix it all.

Cars are pretty easy to electrify.  Not so for the rest of them.  Batteries suck.  Pound for pound, gas contains 35 times as much energy as the best lithium-ion battery.  A heavy truck with a range of 900 miles, less than the range of a standard diesel powered 18-wheeler, would be all battery and no cargo.  It's way worse for planes.

The situation for ocean going cargo ships is worse than it is for 18 wheelers but better than it is for airplanes.  Gates does not discussing adding sails to cargo ships.  They are not a complete substitute even though there were cargo ships that only used sails as late as 1910.  But there are now practical, high tech ways to use sails to supplement traditional engine power.  Such designs would effectively decrease fuel consumption.

Warming (furnace) and cooling (air conditioning) is an interesting subject.  Cutting to the chase, Gates recommends switching homes and offices to heat pumps.  A good idea, I say.  He gets into how failing to update regulations, in this case building codes, in a timely manner inhibits progress here.  Notice that he is not arguing for getting rid of them.  He wants to instead change them so that they encourage needed change rather than discouraging it.

He devotes a whole chapter to adaptation.  If we went to zero emissions today there is already a considerable amount of Global Warming baked in.  Since, at best it will take us a long time, he thinks we can get there by 2050, we will see a lot of warming no matter what we do or don't do.  We need to figure out how to live with it.

There is a lot that can be done on the agriculture front.  And a lot of people are working on it.  And they are having considerable success.  More generally Gates makes the following recommendations:

• Help farmers manage the risk from more chaotic weather.
• Focus on the most vulnerable people.
• Factor Climate Change into policy decisions.
• Cities need to change the way they grow.
• We should shore up our natural defenses.
• We're going to need more drinking water than we can supply.
• Finally, to fund adaptation projects, we need to unlock new money.

On to "Why government policies matter".  He first makes he case for why they matter.  Then he makes the case for why good policies can be very helpful.  Then he drills down to specific areas and makes recommendations.  Here's his list of general recommendations:

1. Mind the investment gap.
2. Level the playing field.
3. Overcome nonmarket barriers.
4. Stay up to date.
5. Plan for a Just Transition.
6. Do the Hard Stuff Too.
7. Work on Technology, Policy, and Markets at the Same Time.

It may be hard to figure out what he is getting at by just looking at the recommendation.   Trust me when I say that they all make sense.  But I am going to direct you to the book for any necessary clarification.

In his chapter "A Plan for Getting to Zero" he does a far better job than Gore did.  He has something to say about:

• Innovation and the Law of Supply and Demand.
• Expanding the Supply of Innovation.
• Accelerating the Demand of Innovation.
• Who's on First?
• Federal Government.
• State Governments.
• Local Governments.

He follows this with a whole chapter called "What Each of Us Can Do".  He then finished the book with a small afterward called "Climate Change and COVID-19".

I give him tremendous credit for completely covering the subject.  Is a lot of it a shallow dive?  Yes!  But there is something on everything.  So, it is particularly good as a starting point.  It also provides the context necessary to fit a deep dive on any specific subject into the broader context.  That is an extremely valuable contribution.

He also gives an accurate picture of the state of the art in all areas.  That too is very valuable.  Unfortunately, the state of the art is a long ways away from where it needs to be if we are going to succeed in achieving his goal.

His general plan is to get everything in place by 2030.  If we then execute the plan well for twenty years, then we will get to where we need to be in 2050.  I find that completely unrealistic.  We'll be lucky to pull off everything we need to do by 2100.

And that's if people aren't throwing unnecessary and unreasonable roadblocks in the way.  But they are.  To paraphrase what Churchill might say at this point, we have now been at war or a while and things are still going badly.

But there is reason to believe that the tide will eventually turn.  That is as optimistic as I can get.  Fortunately, there is Gates.  Over and over he proves that he truly is an optimist.  We need optimists if we are ever going to beat this thing. 

The Conscience of a Conservative - Part 2

This is the second in a series.  Here's a link to the first installment:  Sigma 5: The Conscience of a Conservative - Part 1.  I will do an "Index" post once I have posted several installments.  In this series I analyze the intellectual underpinnings of the Conservative movement.   I take as my reference The Conservative Intellectual movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash.  If you want to know why I chose this particular book I refer your to Part 1.

For this series I am not using chapter boundaries to determine what I cover in a particular post.  I am moving sequentially through the book.  Each new post starts where the last post left off.  I then continue until I hit what appears to me to be a convenient stopping point   In Part 1 I stopped when the author introduced William F. Buckley and his book God and Man at Yale.  It's also where Nash mentions  National Review, a magazine that was both hugely influential in the Conservative Movement, and closely associated with Buckley, for the first time.

The appearance of God and Man at Yale and the National Review marked the "creation and sustaining of an intellectual movement".  Indeed Buckley saw his role as that of safeguarding of the intellectual underpinnings of the Conservative Movement.  Buckley believed that the Movement should stand for something and that the "something" should be clearly articulated then firmly adhered to.  People who did not support the important concepts underpinning Conservatism by both word and deed should be summarily drummed out of the Movement.  If no one else wanted to be the keeper and protector of the torch, he would.  And he did.

Nash associates this particular intellectual thread (one of three he identifies - See Part 1 for details) with the term "classical liberalism".  Elsewhere he uses the term "libertarianism" as another name for the same thing.  To the modern ear, "libertarianism" has the advantage of being a word that is still widely used.  At the time (mid '50s) this intellectual thread was far from the dominant one.  One or another of the threads associated with liberalism were far more popular at the time.  But this libertarian thread had only been around for about a decade.

The fact that it had come all the way from nothing to something in a short ten years was no mean feat.  It was also an achievement worth celebrating.  And it was not just Buckley.  Nash lists several leading lights that were active at this point.  Even taken together they constituted a minority.  But it was a minority that was healthy and growing.

But there was some trouble in paradise.  "Libertarian intellectuals" disagreed about how much government activity was permissible.  There was the "pure laisses-faire" wing.  Then there was the wing that believed in "rule of law" and "maintaining the 'design' of a free market".  They thought that government engaging in activities of those types was permissible while the "pure" wing did not.

Frankly, this latter type of thinking is not what I associate with modern Conservativism.  It will be interesting to see if we hear more from them as the book progresses.  But it was not all trouble in River City.

There were also large areas of agreement.  "In 1951 Senator Robert Taft could identify the choice for the nation as liberty or socialism."  It wasn't just Communism that was an unalloyed evil.  Conservatives tended to not differentiate between Socialism and Communism.  Both were characterized as standing four square in opposition to liberty.

Either would be equally effective at denying the fruits of liberty to the people.  Or so Conservatives opined.  They made no serious effort to justify this stand.  Generally speaking, the peaceful coexistence between democratic forms of government and socialism that characterized wide swaths of Europe both then and now was, for the most part, ignored.

This puts the rejection of socialism as a viable alternative that permits democracy and liberty firmly in the realm of Conservative dogma.  Weak and flimsy arguments are put forward.  A few examples are cherry picked (see below).  But, for the most part, it is just taken as a given.  "Our faith in Conservatism demands that we believe without proof, or in spite of proof to the contrary, that socialism is an unalloyed evil", is how I would boil down their position.

"By the early 1950s", the author opines, "it was evident to everyone that Stalinist Russia was a 'God that failed'".  Actually, this is not true.  There still existed a small group of dead enders that had not given up on the dream of a Communist Utopia in Russia.  But by this time they were a small and powerless fringe.

The Soviet Experiment quickly gathered a lot of support from leftist factions almost from the day the Communists gained control in Russia.  Support for what was going on in Russia increased substantially during the depths of the Great Depression when capitalism and market based economies looked particularly bad.  But by the early '50s little support remained.  That support was concentrated in parts of New York City and in a few other hot spots.

And a strong case can be made that "Soviet" Russia was not being governed according to Communist principles.  What was actually going on much more accurately fits the definition of an authoritarian dictatorship.  Of the "big three" leaders of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, the one who adhered most closely to Communist orthodoxy was Trotsky.  But he ended up playing second fiddle to Lenin.  He was later driven into exile and then assassinated by Stalin.  At no time was he in control.

Russia in the period from 1919 to Stalin's death in 1952 is more accurately seen not as a "Communist" government, but instead as a dictatorship led first by Lenin and then by Stalin.  Both used Communism like dictators often use religion, as just another means of control.

Stalin's "collectivization" of Russian agriculture, for instance, does not fit the Communist model.  He did not bring strong management and improved organization to it, resulting in increased efficiency and better yields.  But he did use the disruptions collectivization required to eliminate individuals and groups that represented potential challenges to his authority.

As another example, his many "show trials", were accurately named.  He often didn't even attempt prove that defendants were corrupt or bad Communists.  Instead, he had them convicted in kangaroo courts using trumped up evidence.  They too proved to be an effective method, not for getting rid of crooks or bad communists, but as yet another method of getting rid of people who threatened his power.

At one point Nash brands the early British experience with Socialism as a failure.  His evidence?  The fact that Winston Churchill, no friend of Socialism, had just assumed the post of Prime Minister for the second time.  So that's the end of that, right?  But Churchill soon proved himself a failure.  And Britain is still a Socialist country.  The same is true of a large number of other European countries.  Once, adopted, none of them have completely abandoned Socialism.

Sure, to an extent Socialism has waxed and waned over the years.  But the definitely not Socialist Conservative party has held power in the Untied Kingdom several times over this period.  In spite of this the country has at all times held on to a considerable amount of Socialism. The same is not true of Churchill.  His second term as Prime Minister didn't last long and it represented his swan song as an influential politician.

I find this waxing and waning of the degree of Socialism a country practices to be completely normal.  I am a believer in a mixed economy.  Use market forces and capitalism where it works well.  Use Socialism and its attendant "top down" approach where it works well.

But there are lots of areas in between where either pure approach may not work all that well.  Getting the balance right is hard.  Mistakes will be made.  Conditions will change.  That inevitably necessitates a certain amount of changing tack.

Nash touts the U.S. at this point (early '50s) as a complete success story.  But he completely ignores McCarthyism, which was rampant at the time.  McCarthyism is a prime example of how Conservatism can go wrong.  And let's be honest.  Joseph McCarthy was a drunk, a liar, and an unprincipled scoundrel.

Doesn't that mean that Conservatives have an obligation to call him out on his rank immorality?  Conservatives say they hold morality to be critically important.  So, if they believe what they say they do, then the answer to the question must be an unequivocal "yes".  But no one in Conservative circles, not even Buckley, called him out at the time on his blatantly immoral behavior.

This is where chapter one of Nash's book ends.  Except, that is, for the 180 footnotes he provides.  I have to concede that the book hews to the highest standards of scholarship.  Its failing lie elsewhere.  But, in any case, on to chapter 2.  The title is "The Revolt Against the Masses".

We now move from the libertarian thread to the "new conservative" one.  (In part 1 I went over the section where Nash said he was going to talk about three intertwining threads of Conservatism.)  I think this thread is now called "neoconservatism".  Apparently, one starting point for the philosophy that undergirds this thread is the term "Chivalry".

Chivalry is a concept that dates back to the feudal era of European history.  One much ignored tenant of chivalry is the idea that "with great power comes great responsibility".  Knights are the super-soldier of their era.  They get to live in castles where they are waited on hand and foot.  And the perks don't end there.  But in exchange for all these goodies they are expected to discharge many responsibilities.  They have to defend their peasant vassals from "all enemies, foreign and domestic", and perform other services.

There are lots of stories from the feudal era of Knights living up to their responsibilities and laying down their lives in the defense of the powerless.  But there are also lots of stories of Knights abusing their power by, for instance, raping peasant girls with impunity.

I tend to pay little attention to what believers in Chivalry say.  Instead, I pay attention to what they do.  And I specifically look for how people who claim to believe in the code of Chivalry actually follow the code when doing so would be detrimental to their own interests or those of their class.  It does happen, but it happens far less often than the code demands.

The idea is that there are always rules and norms, like those of Chivalry, that govern the behavior of "good men and true".  Nash investigates this idea extensively.  But what I find here is that, in practice, the rules that Nash examines tend to entrench and perpetuate the ruling class.  There is also no interest in, nor discussion of, rules that would result in disadvantaging, or even inconveniencing, those who are already in power.  In other words, it's all rights and no responsibilities.

This kind of thinking makes sense if the idea is to maintain a stable ruling class.  Historically, one of the jobs of the ruling class has been to provide officers for the military.  But you can't just have everybody killing off officers willy nilly, even though this makes perfect sense from a purely military point of view.  So elaborate "rules of war" were developed so that service in the officer corps was dangerous but not too dangerous.

Other rules were developed for use in other areas.  These made it hard to get into the ruling class.  But once you made it in, the rules now made it easy for you to stay there.  The fact is that these rules often conveyed great power to the ruling class.  But they rarely conveyed equivalent responsibilities.  This asymmetry is not discussed at all in Nash's book.

Things changed, and for the worse in the author's opinion, with the advent of the twentieth century.  As noted above, the concept of "limited war", war conducted according to accepted rules of conduct, held sway, at least in Europe, for many centuries.  World War I was the first "total" war.  And it was recent enough that Conservative writers and thinkers were very familiar with it.

World War I was not fought according to the traditional "limited war" rules.  It featured machine guns, airplanes, tanks, poison gas, unrestricted submarine warfare, the shelling of civilians and others behind the lines.  Early on everybody stopped playing by the old rules.  The result was devastating for the ruling class.

The heretofore unbreakable tenet that there was one set of rules for officers and another for ordinary soldiers went out the window.  And that meant that officers died at the same or higher rates as ordinary soldiers did.  The War also consumed the wealth of the continent.  The people who lost the most were the rich and powerful.  After the war many in the upper class could no longer afford to maintain their traditional lifestyle.  At the same time, the aristocracy that had run Europe for centuries was swept out of power.

World War II was, if anything, worse.  Cities were carpet bombed.  Factories far behind the lines were destroyed.  Terror weapons like the V-1 and the V-2 were used extensively.  And then there was the Atomic Bomb.  None of this was good for those interested in maintaining the standing and perks of the ruling class.

The author first explores all this through the writings of Weaver.  About him the author opines that, "the study of Southern history was for Weaver a road to the Right".  And by "Southern history" we mean history written by and about white, male, American Southerners.  But wait.  There's more.  He studied the history of the "losing side.  And to be more specific he studied the antebellum south [i.e. the American South before the Civil War]".

He (both Nash, the author of the book, and Weaver, the author Nash is writing about) praises the antebellum South as having "an ethical claim which can be described only in terms of the mandate of civilization".  This equates "civilization" with a culture that enslaved people.

He goes on to praise the South for "view[ing] with disdain the . . . urban man".  "Modernity", i.e. Northern urban society is a "cataclysm".  The rural, often poorly educated, agriculturally oriented, classist, slave holding, "Southern" society is the ideal.

Nash changes the subject by moving from Weaver to Heckscher.  The subject is changed to another area where he judges the North to be the inferior to the South.  You see, in the North there is a decline of religiosity.  Heckscher, argues that there is a lack of "moral content" in our social life.  He detected a conflict between the "methods of the scientist" and "truths about the everyday world".  His solution to this problem is: more Plato.

This is an allusion to the "classic liberal education" popular in Ivy League colleges circa 1900.  Learn Latin.  Learn Greek.  Read the "classical literature", the literature dating from the Ancient Roman period and the Greek period that preceded it.  And read it is its original form, classical Latin or classical Greek.  Reading it in translation is just not done, don't you see.  

But, whatever you do, do not learn modern history or science or business or anything the least bit practical or down to earth.  Anything worth knowing, the thinking goes, was known to the ancients living two thousand years ago.  And, of course, the single most important component of classical literature is the Bible.

At this time there was a concept sweeping the Liberal Arts called "cultural relativism".  At the beginning of the twentieth century the height of morality was believed to be that seen among the upper classes in Victorian England.  Then Margaret Mead went off to the South Seas.

She found that otherwise moral and upstanding people in that culture had quite different ideas about sex.  Others followed and studied other aspects of behavior.  In case after case it was found that in one culture or another tenet after tenet of Victorian Morality got called into question.

After a while a large body of scholars in the Social Sciences threw up their hands and said, "when it come to Morality, everything is relative".  Conservatives vigorously rejected this position.  They argued that everything is not relative.  I agree with them.  Social Scientists got it wrong and Conservatives got it right.  Now, I do object to many specific details of the absolutism that Conservatives champion.  But that disagreement is for another time.

This whole discussion about things being relative got kicked off by Einstein and his theories of Special Relativity (1905) and General Relativity (1915).  Things got kicked into high gear by Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle.  But this is a misinterpretation of the beliefs of Physicists.  Physicists never did believe that "everything is relative".  They came instead to believe that "it's not this that is absolute, it's that".

As an example, in Quantum Mechanics there is a lot of randomness going on.  Traditionally it was thought that in a specific situation either a thing always happened or it never happened.  But numerous experiments demonstrated that things were not that straight forward.  You have to factor in probability.  It turned out that there was probability of something happening.

The thing might or might not happen but the probability that it would happen was always the same.  It (the probability) not the event was the absolute.  (Actually, Physicists did not deal in probability.  Instead they dealt in the square root of probability.  But, for our purposes, that's TMI.)   So absolutes still existed.  They just weren't where people had originally thought they were.

I contend that the same thing is true in the Social Sciences.  The thing that is the absolute is not what they originally thought it was.  It is some other thing.  The problem is that that Social Scientists have not gone looking for that "some other thing".  They just threw up their hands and said "everything is relative" without trying to figure out where the absolute had moved to.  And, by doing that, they earned the ridicule that Conservatives hurl at them.

What Conservatives are doing is behaving like a modern Physicist who insists on sticking with nineteenth century Physics in spite of the fact that Physics has made vast advances since then.  They are just as wrong as Social Scientists when it comes to how morality works.  It's just that they are wrong in a different way than Social Scientists are.

Moving on, and quoting from Nash, "it is easy enough to criticize liberal dogmas and mass culture in the 1940s and 1950s".  Nash doesn't hold back in doing so.  But I find his criticism long on bombast and short on serious analysis.  It is just as easy to criticize Conservatism by laying on the bombast.

It is always possible to find some liberal saying something idiotic.  But it is also always possible to find some conservative saying something idiotic.  Superficial approaches like that don't result in anything that deserves to be given serious consideration.

It takes more than just quoting people accurately.  It takes careful analysis and an attention, not to a silly statement here or there, but to a serious engagement with the ideas presented.  I find that there is little meat on the bones of his "Critique" of liberal thinking.

But Nash in general, and this book in particular, is held up by Conservatives as a reliable source of information about the intellectual underpinnings of Conservativism.  I have tired to focus primarily on the core of what he has to say.  But I would be remiss if I didn't allocate substantial weight to sentiments that are frequently and consistently expressed.

And this is a good time to point out the fallacy in how Nash's uses his critique of liberalism to bolster his case.  The fallacy is called "the excluded middle".  If there are only two possible positions then, if you succeed in proving one position to be wrong, that means that you are entitled to declare the other position to be right without having to prove it.  The problem is that I frequently see this "you are wrong so I am right" argument applied in inappropriate situations.  It is an inappropriate argument to use when there are three or more possibilities.

The example I am going to discuss is one that people who regularly read my posts will have seen me use several times before.  So, I am going to keep it brief.  Scientists debated the nature of light for hundreds of years.  Is it made up of particles or waves?  For a long time one scientist would demolish the "wave" argument then declare "I have now proved that it must be particles".  But then another scientist would demolish the "particle" argument then declare "I have now proved that it must be waves".

If there had only been two possibilities then both scientists would have been justified in their assertion.  What finally broke the impasse was Einstein saying "there is a third way".  If there is a third way then neither of the earlier scientists was correct in asserting that they had proved anything.  Inappropriately asserting that there are only two possibilities is how you fall into the excluded middle fallacy.

And that's what I see going on here.  Nash is saying "liberalism is wrong so conservativism must be right".  He is joined by many liberals who make the mirror image allegation that "conservatism is wrong so liberalism must be right".  What I see is some right and some wrong on each side.  And I see not two, or even three, but many possibilities.

I see an exact parallel with the argument about the nature of light.  The "particle" people got some things wrong and some things right.  The "wave" people got some things wrong and some things right.  The correct answer incorporated some aspects of particle theory, some aspects of wave theory, and some completely new aspects.  I see some right and some wrong in the liberal theory.  I see some right and some wrong in the conservative theory.  I also see a need for some completely new aspects.

I could critique various aspects of liberal thought.  But the subject at hand is a book by Nash about Conservative thought.  So I am going to stick to the matter at hand and confine my observations to what I think of what Nash has to say.

And a subject Nash later takes up is the New Yorker magazine.  He calls it a "smug, self satisfied court gazette".  People at the New Yorker, then and now, might take that as a compliment.  But they would, however, vigorously object to his follow-on statement.  He characterized them as "contemptuous of values".  They would argue vigorously that there are "values" that they are the opposite of contemptuous of.  They are just values that differ widely from values Nash and other Conservatives hew to.

And this is the sort of thing I am objecting to when I am characterizing Nash as "long on bombast and short on serious analysis".  If Nash had listed a bunch of values which he conceded were near and dear to the New Yorker's heart and then said "I think these are the wrong values to hew to and here's why", that would be one thing.  Instead, he paints with a broad brush.  He accuses the New Yorker of being contemptuous of all values.  How can I put this.  That's unchivalrous.

Nash soon moves on to a subject that he has already returned to several times, education.  One of the evils liberals have foisted on society, we are told, is "progressive education".  Apparently the chief architect of progressive education is John Dewey.  So much time has passed and so many battles have since been fought in the ongoing education wars that I confess to knowing nothing about John Dewey.

I don't trust Nash to fairly and accurately present Dewey's ideas.  But what he writes is all I have.  And, fortunately, they are not that important to the current discussion.  Nash focuses of what needs to be done differently.  From that we can infer that Dewey's ideas are along the lines of "not that".

And we already have a good idea of what should be differently.  But Nash adds detail here.  Imagine what was taught, and they way it was taught, in a Southern schoolhouse to "young gentlemen" and you have a good idea of the way Nash thinks education should be done.  Interestingly, one idea was a complete surprise to me.  It is, and here I am quoting Nash, "distain for the common man".

Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me.  If you are a believer in, and a supporter of, a small elite class running everything then this idea fits right in.  If you believe that only the right kind of people are important and that everyone else is cannon fodder. then it is perfectly sensible to have little interest in what they think.  It also makes sense to have even less concern for their welfare.

Another oft repeated idea that resurfaces at this point is a continued insistence on "the necessity for religion and religious education in the schools".  There is no divorcing Conservatives from their close connection to religion.  And, as I have already observed several times before, we are not taking about religion in general or any old kind of religion.  We are talking about mainstream Protestantism here.

This is a good point to end.  My Kindle says I am now 10% of the way through the book.  As someone I like says, "we'll pick it up here on the other side".

Fixing the Vaccine Rollout

 In this go-go era of Twitter and 24 hour cable news channels, things that happened a few days ago are old news and things that happened a few months ago are ancient history.  So the healthcare.gov fiasco from 2013 counts as prehistory.  BTW, the word "history" has a precise definition.  It consists of the body of events that happened at a time and in a place where someone wrote down an account of them.  Everything else is prehistory.  In spite of the fact that it happened so long ago that it is effectively prehistoric, that particular fiasco bears on the current subject.

And, since I am talking about a prehistoric event, let me review the details.  President Obama spent most of his first two years in office passing healthcare reform.  The final law that was enacted is informally called Obamacare.  The official title is the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, for short.  Components of the ACA rolled out in phases.  One of those phases included a web site  that anyone could use to find an "individual" health care plan.  It didn't matter which state you lived in, healthcare.gov was supposed to steer you to a plan that was available in your area.

The web site went live on October 1, 2013 and promptly crashed.  And crashed.  And crashed.  Soon, many people who should have known what they were talking about, started saying, "it's broken and can't be fixed."  President Obama didn't panic.  Instead he brought in a group of very experienced executives from the tech industry to put it back on track.

They succeeded.  And it only took them 60 days.  I wrote a blog post on how it all went down.  You can find it here:  Sigma 5: Fixing healthcare.gov.  It's a good read.  And my thesis for this post is that there are a lot of parallels between that situation and the one currently surrounding the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.  Let's start with a quick review of what went down back then.

The people who were brought in had a tremendous amount of experience managing complex IT projects.  They looked the situation over and decided that the fundamental architecture was fine.  That was good news because architecture issues are difficult and time consuming to fix.  What they did find were a lot of easier to fix problems.  Unfortunately, it would be necessary to fix pretty much all of them before the site would work.

That's because there were a lot of components involved.  Many of them were broken.  Many components also did not play nice with other components.  And a big problem was that the system had to interface with 50 different state systems.  Each had its individual quirks and peculiarities.  But the new team didn't panic.  Instead, they did what good project managers always do.  They created a "punch list".

The idea comes from the construction industry.  You take a tour of the project and look for everything that needs attention.  Each item is a "punch" on the list.  As each item is put right it is "punched" out of the list.  Ideally, you eventually end up with a punch list containing no items.

So the team built a punch list.  Then they prioritized it.  Then they sent out the top priority items to the various contractors working on the project with instructions to fix them.  Then they kept track of the results.  Once these top priority items were fixed they looked at the list and picked out a new set of top priorities and sent it out.  It really was as simple as that.

There are several things that helped.  These people knew what they were doing so they built a good punch list.  The contractors, who it turned out were actually doing good work, knew that these people would not accept second rate work so they set to and started fixing problems.  And the managers were careful to keep their priority list as stable as possible,

You always need to be prepared to change things up as the situation evolves.  But I have spent a lot of time in IT.  And I have frequently found myself in situations where the priority list gets completely rewritten every few days.  It takes time and focus to fix a problem.  You don't get much productive work done by switching from project to project to project all the time without staying on one project long enough to finish it.

The management team also did a lot of communication.  It was important that all the players knew what was going on.  These players included the White House, the various contractors, and each state.  It was particularly important to work individually with each state.

The idiosyncrasies of its particular systems and way of doing business, were different for each state.  But a solution that worked both for the overall system and for each state had to be implemented for the overall project to be a success.

That required a lot of communication and a considerable amount of flexibility.  But the states soon found that they had a partner that was willing to listen to them and to work with them, so it all got ironed out.

For a couple of weeks nothing appeared to be happening.  The site still kept crashing.  Pretty much none of it seemed to be working.  But that was because a lot of things had to be fixed before any change would be apparent to outsiders.

In reality things were being fixed on a daily basis.  But until lots of components were working, and working together, all that was happening was that the point of failure was just being moved around.  But then enough things got fixed that some parts started working.  Then more things got fixed and more parts started working.  And, in a surprisingly short amount of time, it was all working.

The bottom line was that the Obama people really had done a pretty good job.  They just weren't skilled enough or experienced enough to pull a project of that complexity and difficulty off on the required timeline.  With the knowledge and steadying hand provided by the outside experts things came together quickly.  And the good work the Obama people had done in laying a sound foundation made that possible.

Health care is complicated.  Health insurance is complicated.  Tracking a single item, or in this case, a few similar items, is a piece of cake in comparison.  So the fundamental problem presented by the vaccine rollout is much simpler.  But structurally, it has similarities.  This Federal system has to glue everything together.  And it has to deal with the idiosyncrasies of 50 different states.

There is one key difference.  The Obama people believed in doing a good job.  And they felt that what they were doing was an appropriate role for the Federal Government to fulfill.  The Trump people, on the other hand, really didn't believe in government.  So, they doubted that what they were supposed to do was even an appropriate function for the Federal Government to perform.

Assuming the job needed to be done at all, then they were of the opinion that somebody else should do it.  They really don't care if it was the States or private businesses.  Just so long as it is not the Trump Administration.  But it was important to maintain appearances in order to fend off criticism.  So, they put together a system that was more designed to fend off criticism than it was to work well.

As a result, when the Biden people came aboard they found little to work with.  Their standards were completely different.  They expected the system to actually be capable of doing the job, not just pretending to do it.

And a big part of that was providing a system that State Governors, both Democratic and Republican, could make work in their various states.  While the Trump people were in charge Governors found that they did not have a reliable partner at the Federal level to work with.

To pick one well publicized example, a key question is how much vaccine will each State get and when will they get it.  According to lots of public proclamations by various Trump officials the answers were "a lot" and "right away".  But when State officials queried their Federal counterparts they quickly learned that neither was true.

First, the figures put out publicly describing how many doses each State would get were far higher than the actual amount that was later officially promised and still later delivered to each state.  Second, they only learned how much vaccine they would be receiving late in the week before the vaccine would be arriving.

So, states were expected to get by with less.  And they couldn't plan ahead because they didn't know how much vaccine they would be receiving, two, three, or four weeks out.  That made it very hard for them to plan for the efficient distribution and administration of the vaccine they did receive.  It also led to hoarding.  If you don't know how much you are getting, then it seems like a good idea to hold back a lot of what you already have, "just in case".

But it turned out that the problems didn't end there.  Getting doses out of freezers and into arms turned out to be much harder than most predicted.  And it was not just the super-cold freezers that were required.  A key group that everybody prioritized were elderly people living in congregate care facilities.  

These people have a lot of physical and mental issues.  Many of them are bed ridden.  Many of them get confused or upset easily.  You have to go to where they are and you have to provide a lot of extra TLC.  The result was that for this group the amount of time it took to do one injection was about twice as long as forecast.

Plans for tight grouping and tiering also quickly broke down.  The "use it or lose it" characteristic (doses must be used within 6 hours of being "reconstituted") meant that careful plans must be made or many doses would be wasted.  Who was supposed to do this careful planning?  Overloaded and over-stressed State Health Departments and pharmacy chains like CVS and Walgreens.  What could possibly go wrong?

The situation that the incoming Biden team inherited was chaotic and underperforming everyone's expectations.  But the underlying problems were not that complex.  Can vaccine manufactures accurately forecast their production rates?  The answer seems to be "yes".  That's the foundation underlying everything else.

As is typical, the Federal Government is actually doing very little itself.  Others "do" while the Federal Government directs and tracks.  Companies like Pfizer and Mederna manufacture the vaccine.  Companies like FedEx, and UPS ship it.

It gets more complicated than that as we move vaccine doses closer and closer to people's arms.  But it is still a situation where this company or department performs a certain function.  The vaccine needs to be tracked as it moves down the chain.  Then patient information needs to move back up the chain so that we can track what's going on.

One current problem seems to be that long, elaborate, forms need to be filled out for each injection.  That's because in the early going health insurance companies and health care providers, the people who have the information the forms demand, were cut out of the loop.  That is starting to change.

I, for instance, am getting my vaccinations through my regular health care provider.  It already has all the information the forms require in it's computer system.  I know others who have been able to work through their health care provider to schedule and receive their shots too.  That doesn't work for everyone.  But it works for most people.

We all know that the data is going to eventually end up in a compute somewhere.  Any data on a paper forms will have to be keyed in at some point.  So why not do a computer-to-computer transfer in the first place?  It's faster, cheaper, and more accurate.

Things are getting ironed out.  Some of this "ironing out" actually began before Trump left office.  But I expect things to accelerate.  Coordinating vaccine distribution is the easy part.  Compared to getting the healthcare.gov web site working. it is a trivial undertaking.

And collecting and reporting vaccination statistics accurately. and in a timely manner, is also not very complicated.  I expect all of these problems to be ironed out by the end of February.

Getting the vaccine to the states is already working pretty well.  Getting it from there to people's arms is a much more difficult problem.  We have seen progress in this area but much more needs to be done.  Only about 60% of shipped doses have been used, according to the most current CDC statistics.  On the other hand, people have had horrendous experiences trying to finding and schedule an appointment.

One big contributing factor is that demand current vastly outstrips supply.  There is no healthcare.gov one stop web site, for instance.  But the time has passed when it would make sense to create one.  But lots can be done that does not involve a federal web site.

The first thing the Federal government can do is to help states defray the cost.  There is money in the pipeline for this.  And more is coming if the Democratic "COVID" bill is enacted into law.  Even the Republican alternative contains additional funds to help the states with this.

But the federal government can also help with advice and various kinds of technical assistance.  With healthcare.gov, the Federal government went so far as to build the state piece for the states that wanted them too.  Many states took the Federal government up on the offer.  That's not possible in this situation.  But there is a lot the federal government can do to help.  One way or another, I expect this problem to be largely solved by the end of March.

That leaves the biggest problem of all, vaccine availability.  This is totally a Federal responsibility.  And it is the one that will take the longest to solve.  Vaccine makers know that they can sell everything they can make.  So they are making all they can already.

The Federal government can use the Defense Production Act to help the companies out.  While there's nothing that can be done immediately, there is lots that can be done over time.  Ramping up production can only be done so fast, no matter what you throw at the problem.  But the government can be very helpful down the line.

The amount of vaccine that will be produces is pretty much baked in for the next few months.  Production should increase substantially in second quarter (April-June).  It can continue to increase in subsequent quarters.  I expect that supply will be pretty much in alignment with demand by the Fourth of July.  If we are lucky, we will be able to reach that goal by Memorial Day.

That should mean that everybody in the U.S. can get vaccinated before the Summer is over.  And it looks like the same will be true for Europe.  But the combined population of the U.S. and Europe constitutes only about 10% of the population of the world.  And it is the richest and most heavily resourced 10%.  This pandemic will not be under control until the world is vaccinated.  

The vaccines in use in the U.S. are expensive and hard to administer.  They are not the right tools for use in most of the world.  We need vaccines that are equally effective but much cheaper and easier to use.  There are some candidates.  But effectiveness is still a question.  As is cost.  And current world vaccine manufacturing capacity is woefully inadequate.

So, it looks like it will be 2022 or 2023 before the world is shot of this scourge.  And that's a big problem for all of us.  Variants are now popping up all over the place.  Currently the variant of most concern is one that was first identified in South Africa.  All of the vaccine candidates that have been tested against it show substantially reduced effectiveness.

So all is lost, right?  Actually, no.  First, current vaccines are very effective at keeping people out of hospital and, more importantly, at keeping them from dying.  The data currently available indicates that this is true even when the new variants are involved.  Secondly, vaccines can be tweaked.

Many of the vaccines and candidates are based on new technology.  Both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines are "mRNA" technology.  As such, they needed to be subjected to more scrutiny that would have been appropriate for a vaccine candidate that worked the old fashioned way.

We are now field testing these new approaches by injecting these vaccines into a lot of people, including me.  If, as expected, vaccines based on mRNA and other new technologies turn out to be safe and effective, then the technologies they are based on become not "new" but "proven".  Heightened scrutiny will no longer be appropriate.

A vaccine needs to be targeted.  One of the big advantages of these new vaccine technologies is that they can be targeted more precisely and more quickly than vaccines based on old technologies.  Vaccine makers that use new technology say that they can quickly and easily retune their vaccines to improve their effectiveness against the variants that are now popping up.

The approval process should take far less time once the basic approach has been proven out.  That means that vaccine makers think they can turn out "new and improved" versions of their vaccines within a few months.  And I believe them.

There is already talk that people like me, who will soon have competed the current process, may need a "booster" in six months to a year.  "New and improved" vaccines that are highly effective against the new strains, and the capacity to produce them at scale, should be ready by then.

I don't know whether this optimistic forecast will apply to the less wealthy parts of the world.  Work is moving forward on vaccines that are effective but also are cheap to make and easy to administer.  They just aren't ready yet.  When they do become available, some of their characteristics will be critical.

I'm not talking about the necessary attributes of being cheap and easy to administer.  I am talking about other attributes.  Will they come pre-tuned for the new variants?  Will they be easy to retune?  Will periodic booster shots be required?

This last attribute may be the whole game.  Periodically administering booster shots in the U.S. and Europe is relatively easy to pull off.  Having to periodically administer boosters to the entire world looks to be neigh on impossible.

There's hope.  But we are still a long way from being out of the woods on this one.

The Conscience of a Conservative - Part 1

 This is the first of a series of posts on the subject.  The title of the post consciously parrots that of an important book in the Conservative cannon.  The Conscience of a Conservative was published in 1960.  Authorial credit was given to Barry Goldwater but the book was actually written by Brent Bozell.  He was (he died in 1997) a close associate of William F. Buckley.

Why my newfound interest in the subject?  Because many people traditionally associated with the Conservative movement have claimed for some time now that President Trump is not a Conservative, although he frequently claims to be.  My tendency is to agree with them.  But I don't know enough about what Conservatives believe to have an informed opinion.  I decided to remedy that.

My entre into the subject was via a book that was recently published called It Was All a Lie.  The book was written by Stuart Stevens, one of the many people who have long been associated with the Conservative movement in general, and Republican politics in particular.  He argues that the post-Trump Republican party can no longer be described as a Conservative party.  If you want to understand how and why he has come to believe that, then read his book.  It's a quick, easy read.

It would probably have been helpful to the construction of this series to have read the Buckley book but I never have.  Instead, I am working through a book Stevens recommended called The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash.  It was originally published in 1976.  I am reading the third edition, which came out in 2006.  Since the book begins its coverage in 1945, let me first cover the period before that.

It took a while for U.S. political parties to develop into a form that we would now recognize.  Political parties in this country began as a group of like minded people who supported Alexander Hamilton, and and an equally like minded group who opposed him.

By the early 1800s Hamilton was long gone.  But that just meant that these groups found different things to disagree over.  But, by then things had progressed to the point where the groups were called political parties.  They also now had formally agreed upon names, the Democrats and the Whigs.

By the middle third of that century slavery had come to dominate political discourse.  The Democratic Party (how things have changed) decided to go all-in on the "pro" side of the issue.  Whigs couldn't decide whether or not to go all-in on the "anti" side.  That ended up tearing them apart.

The largest Whig faction coalesced around the "anti" side of the slavery argument and named themselves the Republican Party.  The other factions that had constituted the Whig party either withered away or joined one of the two parties that survived.  And so, by a few years before the start of the Civil War, the two parties we now have, the Democrats, and the Republicans, were in place.

For a modern parallel to the dilemma that did in the Whig party, look to Brexit in the U.K.  The Conservative Party became closely associated with the "pro" side of Brexit.  Labor, the second largest Political Party, couldn't figure out what they stood for.  Like the Whigs, they lost power and influence as a result.

Here, the parallel breaks down.  The Labor Party is still a going concern.  The British have a multi-party system, so the other parties could have gained as Labor shrank.  But they have not done particularly well either.

Like the Republicans of the Civil War era, the Conservative Party of the current era benefitted by picking a side and sticking with it.  It helped that both the modern Conservatives (pro-Brexit) and the historical Republicans (anti-slavery) picked the side that turned out to be the more popular one.  Being anti-slave has turned out to gain in popularity as the years passed.  It remains to be seen if being pro-Brexit will also gain in popularity as time goes by.

After the Civil War the Republican Party was able to broaden its appeal.  It evolved from a one-issue party to become more middle-of-the-road and more mainstream.  They were successful enough at this that Democrats had trouble finding an identity and tended to wander a bit philosophically.  Slavery had gone out of fashion, so they abandoned their pro-slavery position.

Well, what happened is more accurately described as morphing than abandoning.  The party's position morphed from pro-slavery to a generic pro-South position.  On the other side, the one non-mainstream position postwar Republicans embraced was "Radical Reconstruction".  It was effectively an anti-South position.

Lincoln had called for moderation and forgive-and-forget, when it came to dealing with the postwar South.  But he was assassinated and the people who replaced him decided that: (a) the South could not be trusted, and (b) it represented a cash cow to be exploited by the less scrupulous.  With his death, the moderate reconstruction that Lincoln envisioned quickly evolved into Radical Reconstruction.

Eventually the South found a way to end reconstruction in all of its forms.  The method that eventually came to hand was a deal engineered between unscrupulous Democrats and unscrupulous Republicans.  The deal left Democrats tightly wedded to the South and Republicans with control of  the White House and with a sordid reputation.  Both parties survived.  But Republicans did more than that.  They thrived.  They did so by making a bargain, not with a region, but with business.

They became strongly pro business.  "The business of the United States is business", and "what's good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.", that sort of thing.  They made no secret of the deal they had made.  Why should they?  For a long time the deal was very popular with voters.  The country was booming, so why not.  But success leads to excess.  And that excess got labeled the "Gilded Age".

Republicans demonstrated a surprising amount of flexibility under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt.  He believed in trust busting and regulation.  The large faction of the Republican party that Roosevelt embodied allowed Republicans to claim that they were the champion of the common man.  But, after TR split with the party, it became obvious that it was TR, and not the party, that was the friend of the common man.

As a result, the public flirted with the Democrats for a while.  But they soon returned to the Republican fold.  The boom that followed the end of World War I resulted in the "Roaring Twenties".  Republicans managed to take credit for it.

It was a time to "party till you drop" because the good times would go on forever.  Except they didn't.  The economy got overheated and the Stock Market Crashed.  Republican President Hoover zagged when he should have zigged.  As a result, things got worse instead of getting better.

As I have noted elsewhere, Hoover was a good, decent, and competent man.  But he was held prisoner by his belief in an economic philosophy that was flat wrong in many ways.  He made the moves that his philosophy said would improve things.  Instead, they made things worse.

He confidently predicted that FDR would drive the whole country off a cliff.  Why?  Because that's what his economic beliefs predicted would be the result of Roosevelt's policies.  Instead, Roosevelt slowly dug the country out of the Great Depression.

That made him, and the Democrats, very popular.  Then he had the temerity to win World War II.  That made Democrats even more popular.  It also made Republicans desperate for a way to turn things around.  And that brings us to 1945, the official start of our story.

Republicans needed a story to tell potential voters.  They knew that they didn't like the governing economic philosophy that Roosevelt and the Democrats has used to get the country out of the Great Depression.  They also knew that the old economic philosophy that Hoover had believed in was wrong, or at least wildly unpopular.

What they needed was a governing philosophy that was neither Hooverian nor Rooseveltian.  It was in this environment that the modern Conservative movement was born.  And the history I outlined above explains why 1945 was a good starting point for a history of the movement.  That was when the development of such a philosophy began in earnest.

And the people trying to develop that philosophy started with nothing.  The author observes that "[i]n 1945 no articulate, coordinated, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States".  So, they were, in a practical sense, starting with a blank sheet of paper.

They knew something about what the philosophy should exclude but almost nothing about what it should include.  In spite of this, our author observes that order emerged out of chaos pretty quickly.  In his telling there were soon three threads that showed promise.

Thread one is the "classical liberal " or "libertarian" thread.  They focused almost entirely on the subject of "threats to liberty" and what that entailed.  They saw themselves as standing in opposition to socialism, which they considered an unalloyed evil.  Libertarianism, at least in its earliest form, had emerged by the mid '50s.

The second thread he identifies as "new conservatism" or "traditionalism".  (This may be what we now call "neoconservatism".  I haven't gotten far enough to know one way or another.)  These people saw themselves as standing in opposition to totalitarianism.  Their solution consisted of a "return to traditional religions and ethical absolutes and a rejection of the 'relativism' which had allegedly corroded Western values and produced an intolerable vacuum that was filled by demonic ideologies".

And by "traditional religions" I presume they meant the mainstream Protestantism that most politicians of the time paid lip service to.  For a long time Catholicism was suspect.  Mormonism was doubly suspect.  Judaism was a non-starter.  And everything else, Islam, Asian religions, or any other religion, philosophy, or culture, was beneath contempt.

Interestingly, Richard Nixon, a Republican politician who began his rise as this time, was a Quaker.  At the time, the Quaker religion was considered a fringe sect and, therefore, disqualifying.  But Nixon convinced everyone that he was  "Quaker in name only" and was really a Chamber of Commerce Protestant at heart.  Like many politicians, then and now, he was actually indifferent to religion.

The third strain the author identifies is what looks like a catch-all to me.  He strings "militant", "evangelistic", and "anti-communism" together as if all are necessary.  And as if one component can't be antagonistic to one or more of the other components.

He associates this strain with "former men of the Left" who have publicly abandoned the "left" or "liberal" end of the political spectrum, and embraced the Conservative end.  They apparently believed that the only contest of importance was the battle between the West and Communism.  Everything else must stand in abeyance until this contest is won decisively and permanently.

That these threads might not align perfectly, the author freely admits.  But, "the need for consolidation of the conservative camp was urgent by the mid-1950s".  He opines that this task was gradually accomplished.  And he pegs the "momentous transformation of the Right . . . from a minority to a potential majority" as having occurred "in the late 1960s and early 1970s".

This gets us out of the Introduction and into chapter 1, The Revolt of the Libertarians.  He then goes into a long jeremiad, which can be boiled down to a single idea.  "Planning leads to dictatorship", he quotes the economist Hayek as saying.  Expanded slightly, he has Hayek arguing that government direction of economic activity inevitably necessitates the suppression of freedom.

But apparently there is "good" planning and "bad" planning.  Some unspecified "kind of preparation by individuals or governments for the future" is good planning.  But "central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan" or "planning against competition" is bad planning.  The central planning used by the old Soviet Union is the "poster boy" example of bad planning resulting in bad things happening.

But the devil is in the details.  And here the devil is encompassed by the word "all".  A completely planned economy is a recipe for disaster.  The Soviet "Five Year Plan" top-down approach, where everything is planned by the government, was a spectacular failure.  For instance, the "collectivization" of Soviet agriculture resulted in production crashing.  That, in turn, led to widespread famines.

But a completely unplanned economy is just a different but equally effective recipe for disaster.  We have many examples of this too.  It is how all banana republics operate.  Measured by per-capita GDP, these economies consistently deliver poor results.  They also do a poor job of delivering superior results to the upper class.

People at the very top in banana republics tend to be very rich.  But they are not as rich as the richest people in successful economies.  And the banana republic rich have expenses those other rich people don't.

They have to spend a lot of money on security.  For instance, they have to build and maintain a big compound that is surrounded by high walls.  They have to supplement this fortress with a large, permanent staff or guards.  They will often need to use a convoy that includes several vehicles full of guards just to get around.  All this is necessary for them to be able to live in safety.  That's an expensive and not very fun way to live.

They also have to spend a lot of money on basic services.  Since the banana republic governments turn out to be incapable of building and maintaining decent roads, providing reliable utilities like sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc., rich people living in banana republics have to spend a lot of money providing for themselves.  The list of missing amenities is very long.

Neither a completely managed economy nor a completely unmanaged economy is the economic sweet spot.  The sweet spot is found in a mixed economy.  Market based mechanisms do a lot of things well.  But they also do a lot of things, like security and the amenities listed above, badly.

Frankly, a socialistic approach works better for both rich and the poor when it comes to reliably and economically providing these benefits.  But the book contains no discussion of these shortcomings.  And that means that there is no discussion of how to get the balance right.

What's going on here is the idea that laissez-faire (unconstrained and unregulated) capitalism is absolutely necessary ("can only be achieved") for any amount of democracy, personal freedom, religious tolerance, peace among the nations, etc., to be possible.  And the alternative is "chaos".  (This is a condensation of an argument he attributes to Mises, whom he quotes extensively.)

I find this argument ridiculous on its face.  But, if you accept it, then everything else follows.  And "everything else" includes any imaginable (and some unimaginable) excess perpetrated by the rich and powerful.  Whatever it is that they are doing is good because it furthers capitalism.  And the furtherance of capitalism is all the justification necessary to make these actions not only acceptable but a necessity.

You might think I am exaggerating.  So, let me quote at length.

Indeed, Mises was convinced that "private property is inextricably linked to civilization" and that lasting peace could arise only "under perfect capitalism, hitherto never and nowhere completely tried or achieved."

If you exchange the word "capitalism" for the word "communism" that sounds like something Karl Marx would say. And these people characterize Marx as an extremist.  So let's talk about Marx and his philosophy for a moment.  And I am going to begin this discussion with the French Revolution.  It began in 1789 and started as an effort to duplicate the American Revolution.

But it quickly went off the rails.  It moved through several evolutions I am going to skip over.  (The primary literature on the French Revolution would easily fill the main branch of the New York Public Library.)  The era ended about twenty-five years later with the final defeat of Napoleon.  It's impact on the French psyche was similar to the impact of the Civil War on the U.S. psyche.

This effect on the French psyche was still strong when the Paris Commune briefly set up for business in 1871.  The Commune, and to a lesser extent, the reverberations from the Revolutionary period that preceded it by fifty or so years, had a profound effect on the thinking of Marx, Engels, and the other leading lights of what ended up being called Communism.  And a foundational concept of Communism is the "class struggle".  (Both the revolution and the Commune were violent manifestations of this struggle.)

Societies containing a thousand or more people have at least two classes, a small ruling class, and a large class of people who work for a living.  (In both cases the class definition is extended to cover the entire family of the principle member of the class.)  And I use the word "ruling" because typically this class controls most of the power and wealth.

Communists and Conservatives both agree on the existence of these two classes.  They also agree that there is a built in struggle for power between the two classes.  Where they disagree is in which class should win the struggle.  Communists strive to have the working class win and Conservatives strive to have the ruling class win.

Interestingly enough, there is another area of agreement between the two.  Both have a jaundiced view of government.  Communists believe that government can be rendered superfluous and will eventually wither away until it ceases to exist.  Conservatives don't go quite that far.  They believe in "small government", one that is only capable of performing only a very limited set of functions.  So both sides are on the "less" side of the argument.

Where they completely disagree is on the subject of private property.  As should be obvious from previous parts of this post, Conservatives are aggressive in their support of private property.  The more the merrier.  Communists fall into the opposite camp.  Resources like property should be held in common for the common good.

Before continuing with the material in the book let me review how Marxists saw things playing out.  The ruling class would not cede poser willingly so a revolution was necessary.  And some intermediate steps were necessary before it would be possible to move on to the ultimate "worker's paradise" stage of political evolution.

Under normal circumstances many workers support the ruling class.   This was because, the story went, the ruling class had been engaged in a propaganda campaign of long standing.  The campaign had successfully duped workers into supporting the ruling class, even though that was detrimental to their own interests.

As a result, a period of indoctrination would necessary to undo the damage caused by the propaganda campaign.  It would also be necessary to educate workers so that they would be capable of right thinking.  Finally, private property would have to be transferred to state control.  There it could be managed much more efficiently for the good of all.

And, of course, a government would be necessary during this transition period.  But once the economy had been transformed.  And once the worker reeducation campaign was complete.  Then government would be allowed to wither away to nothing and Utopia would be at hand.  That, in short, was the Communist plan.

It is also interesting that both Conservatives and Communists agreed that gaining and maintaining control of the educational system was a critical step in achieving their objectives.  Both agreed that the old bad regime had propagandized workers into believing wrong things.  Both agreed that control of the educational system was critical to the implementation of the indoctrination program necessary to repair the damage.

They completely disagreed about what constituted the "wrong" thinking consisted of and what "right" thinking needed to be substituted.  So they completely agreed on tactics.  It was only the end objective on which they disagreed.  With that, let me return to the contents of the book.

One thing I find fascinating in the next section of the book is the repeated use of the word "aristocrat".  It is repeatedly used as the author discusses a book called The Superfluous Man.  Nook, the author of that tome, is described as possessing "charm" and "an aristocratic aloofness from vulgarity".

None of this sounds particularly valuable or useful to me.  Nor does it sound like the basis for a belief that he has anything useful to say.  But it is all we learn about him, so apparently whatever else there is to know about him is unimportant.

People who work for a living can't afford to be superfluous.  Doing so would cause them and their families to starve to death.  The class that can afford to behave superfluously are the independently wealthy.  So, this is an implicit endorsement of an upper class.

And no criteria are listed for who should properly populate this class.  Membership, no matter how it is managed, is all the justification necessary.  No wonder Conservatism holds such appeal for rich white men.

The author then moves on to a long recapitulation of small circulation newsletters, and the authors that wrote for them.  Several books that he saw as significant achieved substantial sales, but most didn't.

In addition to books, there were conferences and societies that appeared to have little influence at the time, but loom large when viewed through the lens of a historian of Conservatism.  But most of this strikes me as analogous to John the Baptist wandering in the desert before Jesus appears on the scene.  I will spare you.

Except, I want to quote a couple of sentences because of the sentiment it compactly expresses.

What are the proper functions of government?  Government [should be] strictly limited to the prevention of "aggressive force"[,] was the FFEs' answer.

BTW, the FFE was one of those "societies of little influence" I referred to above.  The sentiment, however, was not confined to a small corner of the Conservative world.  It was a sentiment embraced by mainstream back then.  It is a sentiment the mainstream of Conservative thinking embraces right through to the present.  The modern version of the same sentiment is, "government should be shrunk in size until it is small enough that it can be drowned in an ordinary bathtub".

I am going to skip over large chunks of this until I get to a milestone that resonates today.  Again quoting,

In 1951 a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley Jr. published a book that produced a sensation, dwarfing even the reception of The Road to Serfdom a few years before.  Widely, often angrily reviewed, God and Man at Yale has probably been the most controversial book in the history of conservatism since 1945, and its importance for this movement is manifold.

This book put Buckley on the map.  He stayed there until his death in 2008.  His influence, not only in conservative circles, but also in wider society, is impossible to overstate.

In the book he set out to prove that at Yale "the net influence of Yale economics to be thoroughly collectivistic".  And that, of course was a very bad thing, in the eyes of Buckley in particular, and more generally in the eyes of all Conservatives in good standing.

Four years later National Review, a magazine closely associated with Buckley for the remainder of his life, was founded.  Until a few years ago it was hugely influential in conservative and Republican politics.  But the Trump-ization of both the Republican party and the Conservative Movement resulted in its influence waning.

In 2016 it devoted an entire issue to essay after essay by noted Conservative thinker after noted Conservative thinker.  The point of every single essay was that Trump should be rejected because he wasn't a true Conservative.  The issue changed few, if any, minds or votes.

And that's where I am going to end this installment.  My Kindle informs me that I am at the 5% point in the book.  I hope to cover more ground per installment in the future.  That hope is based on the expectation that I will have to provide less explanation and supplemental materials as I proceed.  Time, and future installments, will tell.

The Rehabilitation of President Carter

"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven."                         - Ecclesiastes 1:3

It's from the Bible.  It was subsequently turned into a folk song that was very popular in my youth.  It is a poetic way of saying that things go in and out of fashion, then back in.  Jimmy (he insisted everyone call him "Jimmy" rather than James or some other, more formal option) Carter was our thirty-ninth President.  (He was President a long time ago, but he is still with us.)  His Presidency has generally been considered a failure since shortly after he left office in 1981.

Since then, he has become beloved, not for anything he did as President, but for what he has been doing in the forty years since he left office.  Most people only know him for this later period.  They know little about him as POTUS.  But I am going to focus on Carter as President.

Until extremely recently, that was a subject no one wanted to talk about.  But a few months ago Jonathan Alter put out a book called His Very Best:  Jimmy Carter, A Life.  Okay, so some political wonk puts out a "politics" book.  But it's not just Alter.

CNN recently aired a two hour movie called Jimmy Carter:  A Rock and Roll President.  That's surprising because Carter is known for his piety.  He's still married to the same woman.  He still lives quietly in the small town he was born in, Plains, Georgia.  That is not a standard "Rock 'n Roller" profile.

I have seen the CNN show.  It makes a compelling case that the title of the show is accurate.  I have purchased but not read the Alter Book.  My head just has not been in the right space to tackle it.  But I promise you I will read it at some point.  And I may even review it in this blog.

On the other hand, I lived through the Carter Presidency.  So this post will be my perception of Carter's term rather than a deeply researched look at the subject.  And we can't start at the beginning.  We need to start before the beginning.  And that's with Richard Nixon.

Nixon was very familiar with failure and the prospect of failure.  He was an up-and-coming pol in '52 when the extremely popular Eisenhower tapped him to be his running mate.  Then it emerged that he had a slush fund, a fund put together by some of his wealthy supporters to cover "miscellaneous expenses".

It was your standard "unvouchered funds" account that shows up so frequently in spy novels.  Nixon could spend the money however he wanted and did not have to get anybody's approval to do so.  Additionally, no records were kept concerning what the funds were spent on.

 "It was a different time", as they say.  And this was considered such a big deal that it could have gotten Nixon kicked off the ticket.  Nixon redeemed himself by giving his famous "Checkers" speech.  It is a brilliant piece of work.  I'll skip over the details but I recommend you find it on the internet.  it is well worth the roughly twenty minutes it takes to watch.

The goal of the speech was to justify the fact that people had given Nixon gifts.  He ended the speech by talking about a dog that someone had given his daughters.  He vowed that, no matter what happened, he was not going to give the dog back.  The name of the dog was Checkers, and that's where the name of the speech came from.  The speech worked.   Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket.  And the pair served two terms.

Then Nixon lost to Kennedy in '60 when he ran for the top spot.  He again lost in '62 when he ran for Governor of California.  But he found his way back from the political wilderness to win the Presidency in '68.  You have to admire his tenacity and the political skill that this almost impossible move demonstrated.

What he was ill equipped to handle was success.  He somehow managed to become very popular as President.  I was there and he did NOT rise in my esteem.  But I was in the minority.  And that brings us to the '72 Presidential campaign.

Nixon had everything going for him and he used his advantages wisely.  First, he took nothing for granted.  He assembled a top tier campaign organization.  He ran a smart and very aggressive campaign even though he was running against a weak opponent.  He raised what was then considered a shitload of money.  (Now, it would be considered pocket change.)  And it turned out that it was the money that did him in.

His campaign staff, the "Committee to Reelect the President", abbreviated CRP by the staff and CREEP by everybody else, laid out a spending plan.  Everything was generously funded.  No stone was left unturned.  The problem was that they still had money left over.  It seemed a sin to waste it.  (Again, it was a different time.  Nixon never considered just pocketing it.)

So, everybody tried to think up schemes on which to spend the extra money.  There was no need to eliminate even the most hairbrained ones.  As a result the "plumbers" ("we find and fix leaks") were organized and funded.  Their job was to spy on the opposition.

Famously, we learned a couple of years later, that these plumbers broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee looking for secret plans the Nixon people didn't already know about.  The DNC offices were located in an office building that was part of a group of buildings known collectively as "The Watergate Complex".  If Nixon had raised less money, or if his Democratic opponent had been stronger, "Watergate" would probably never have happened.

The Watergate scandal played out on TV news over several years.  So, it made a strong impression.  Nixon resigned and was replaced by Ford, a good and decent man.  But Ford ended up with a stain on his reputation.  He pardoned Nixon.  Most say that was the problem but I think it's more subtle.  I think the problem stems from the way he pardoned Nixon.

Ford, for reasons I am not going to get into, had to be confirmed by the Senate.  There he promised he wouldn't pardon Nixon.  Then he assumed office and continued to say in no uncertain words that he would not pardon Nixon.  Then one day, out of the blue, he pardoned Nixon.  I understand the thinking behind his decision to pardon Nixon.  I disagree with it but I understand it.  And it was his decision to make.

But I think it was completely wrong to pardon Nixon without laying the ground work by first publicly entertaining the possibility of pardoning him.  That would have set off a political firestorm.  But that's okay.  If you make a decision that you know will be unpopular you should expect to take some heat over it.

I'm sure Ford did not telegraph his decision because, for various reasons, he wanted to avoid the heat.  Or at least to put it off until after the deed was done and couldn't be taken back.  If an objective was to reduce the amount of heat he was ultimately subjected to, he failed.  And the combination of the pardon and he way he handled it was enough to move Ford out of the "nice guy - straight arrow politician" category and into the "standard sleazy politician" one.

And that's the runup to the '76 Presidential campaign.  Carter succeeded in selling himself as a nice guy, straight arrow politician.  It was only a few years after Watergate, and it was an even shorter time since the Nixon pardon, so the public was yearning for what Carter was selling.  As a result, he won.  And that brings us to the heart of the issue, his term as President.

Going in he had a hard reputation to live up to.  But he worked to live up to his reputation.  One thing that I didn't understand at the time was how unprepared he was for the job.  He had been Governor of Georgia when he ran.  The experience of being Governor stood two very different people in good stead, namely Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.  So, why did they succeed while Carter failed.

Ragan had been the Governor of California.  California is an activist state with a large, sprawling bureaucracy.  It takes a team to run something that big.  Reagan had successfully assembled a team that was large enough for him to to succeed as an administrator.  It takes an even bigger team to run the U.S. government.  But he had the basic idea down pat when he entered office.

Georgia is a southern state.  They believe in small government and a light regulatory hand.  That meant that the Georgia bureaucracy was easier for one person with a small staff of assistants to manage.  And that staff, nicknamed "the Georgia mafia" was pretty much all Carter brought to Washington D.C.

Unfortunately, he had little or no connections and little or no experience in putting together the large team necessary to manage the Federal Government.  He was never able to get the hang of it.  He was known as a hands-on micromanager.  The Federal Government is too big and too complicated for that to work.  That left him isolated with few of the connections he needed to succeed.

Usually, when an Administration leaves office a lot of people stay behind and stay on in some role or another.  The Carter Administration left very little behind because they never integrated themselves into the network of connections and relationships that is the lifeblood of D.C.

Clinton was from a southern state that is even smaller than Georgia.  So, on paper he was in an even poorer position to become successful.  But Clinton was a champion networker.  He found a way to meet everybody and to know, or know something about, everybody.

Like Carter, Clinton brought only a small team from Arkansas to D.C.  But he was quickly able to expand it by making use of all of the connections he had developed.  He was able to put a team together that was somehow his team.  But they were also able to plug themselves into the D.C. network.  As a result he left a lot of Clintonites behind that continued to be powerful and successful long after he left office.

Back to Carter and his time in office.  Most people have forgotten just how consequential his term in office was.  We have perhaps had a surfeit of consequential Presidents since.  And a lot of people have the excuse that they hadn't even been born yet or, if they had been born, they were a small child at the time.  Others have, for one reason or another, blanked the period out.  Let me give you some examples of just how consequential his term was.

The energy debate started in earnest under Carter.  It was initially of primarily academic interest, but that changed quickly.  At the time the U.S. economy was heavily dependent on cheap oil.  Europeans, for instance, drove smaller, more fuel efficient cars than Americans.  Why?  Because due to high taxes and government policy, gas was twice as expensive there.  American drivers could afford to drive "gas guzzler" cars, because gas was cheap.

Then OPEC flexed it's muscles.  For a long time Middle East oil was controlled by large American, British, and French companies.  Not surprisingly, they favored low prices.  But gradually the Arab countries gained control of these companies.  Then they formed OPEC.  But it was pretty toothless in the early years.  Then these same countries got mad at the U.S. due to the '73 Yom Kippur War in which Israel yet again dispatched a coalition of Arab armies with substantial American help.

The Arab members arranged an oil boycott against the U.S.  This put the U.S. economy into a tight squeeze.  It was mostly for show.  Oil is a "fungible commodity".  That means that oil is oil is oil.  Although U.S. was cut off from Middle East oil there was lots of oil available elsewhere, including in the U.S.  All the U.S. had to do was to shift suppliers, which they did with little difficulty.

But various people took advantage of the optics. And the press fell down on the job.  So various crises', some real, some phony, occurred.  A real effect of all this chaos was that Arab countries were able to jack up the price they could charge for their oil.  In reality, various short term disruptions were quickly dealt with.  But the "crisis" atmosphere that prevailed allowed American oil companies to substantially increase their profits.

And Carter got caught up in one of these crisis cycles.  OPEC raised prices substantially early in his term.  All parts of the U.S. oil industry took advantage of this to increase their leverage and their profits.  All of a sudden, we had lines everywhere.  And that panicked people into lining up even if their tank was two third's full.  Market manipulation and price gouging was rampant.  But Carter never developed an effective strategy for dealing with this.  And lots of people were happy to send the blame this way.

Carter successfully diagnosed the situation as pointing to a need for the U.S. to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.  Global warming was not a thing at the time so it didn't play a part.  But his diagnosis of the long term problem was completely accurate.

The biggest problem was that he didn't have any alternatives that would be effective and that could be brought online quickly.  For instance, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House.  But solar panels, while being a nice symbol, were not practical at the time.  (They are now.)

His other initiatives were more practical but also very unpopular.  One thing that would help in the short term would be for everybody to turn down the thermostat in homes and buildings.  It would only require people to dress warmer, wear a sweater, for instance.  A more long term solution would be to increase the efficiency of cars, appliances, buildings, etc.

These, and other ideas, made a lot of sense from a cost effectiveness perspective.  But no one wanted to hear of it.  And there were many entrenched interests that favored low efficiency.  They cranked up their respective PR machines and unloaded.

Carter response to the largely manufactures "oil crisis" was monumentally unsuccessful, but he did lay a foundation that others were later able to build on.  And Reagan started the GOP trend of blindly opposing this sort of thing.  He publicly had the solar panels removed from the White House.  He rolled back other energy efficiency measures that Carter had begun.  This would not be the only issue where Carter was ahead of his time.

Most people have forgotten "Love Canal" by now.  But it was the first time the public became alarmed by the medical dangers of pollution.  Carter put the "Superfund" law into place.  It was the first mechanism specifically designed to clean up polluted land.  It was wholly inadequate.  Cleaning up pollution is far more difficult and expensive than doing the polluting in the first place is.  But it was a start.

The public was alarmed enough at the time to pressure Congress into passing the Superfund bill.  But, as the costs and difficulties have become apparent, a backlash has since developed.  We now have two entrenched sides on this issue, essentially the "pro" and "anti" pollution factions.  But taking pollution seriously, even if its to oppose mitigation measures and regulations, started with Carter.

Carter was a fiscal conservative. In that, he joins many other Democratic Presidents.  He inherited a fiscal mess from his predecessor.  By modern standards it was a tiny mess.  But it was a big deal at the time.  Carter got Federal spending under control, and with it, the deficit.

But, in a pattern that should now be apparent to everyone, his Republican successor (Reagan) reversed this situation and implemented spendthrift policies.  All the GOP Presidents that followed Reagan have also been spendthrifts.  Now doubt, the pattern will continue as Biden takes over from Trump.

Carter was a pioneer in another area, deregulation.  Starting with the Great Depression and FDR, various administrations had used extensive regulation to try to manage the economy to stability.  Federal agencies set prices and controlled entry to markets in many industries.  There was a broad consensus that this trend had gone too far by the time Carter entered office.  Carter decided to do something about this, and succeeded.

He started with airlines.  Prior to his Administration, they had to file for changes in rates, changes in their route structures, and much else.  Carter changed this by "deregulating" them.  Airlines became free to raise and lower rates, to add and remove routes, and much else.  It now became possible for anyone with enough money to start an airline.  The result was, in part, discount airlines like Southwest.

The result was also bankruptcy, a substantial decline in the quality of service, some markets being overserved and others underserved, or even having no service at all.  But overall, we went from a period where flying was only for the rich to a period when flying is by far the cheapest way for people of modest means to travel long distances. 

Most people think that airline deregulation has made us better off.  But the change has definitely had its plusses and minuses.  There have been "bailouts" by the Federal Government of too many airlines to count.  The current COVID related crisis has resulted in more bailouts of the airline industry by the Federal governments.

This bailout behavior should be vigorously opposed by Republicans on philosophical grounds.  But it is not.

This deregulation business started under Carter and has continued since.  Even Carter didn't confine himself to airlines.  He also deregulated trucking.  His successors have deregulated many other industries or industry segments.  The deregulation of the financial sector is widely blamed for the crash of '08.  There is now talk of reregulating.  But nothing has actually come of it yet.

Carter began the U.S. involvement with Afghanistan.  At the start of his term no one would have been able to find Afghanistan on a map.  By the end of his term that had changed completely.

Sticking with the highlights, the Russians invaded Afghanistan.  Carter saw an opportunity to "Vietnam" the Russians and he took it.  There is a great book (and movie) called Charlie Wilson's War, if you are interested in the details.  The bottom line is that under Carter the Russians did get Vietnam-ed at a tiny cost to the U.S.

The post-Carter approach to Afghanistan has been bungled badly by several Administrations.  As a result, we find ourselves investing American troops and pouring vast quantities of money into the country more than forty years later.  But again, the U.S. involvement with Afghanistan started with Carter.

Like many Democrats before him and many after, Carter took a stab at healthcare.  Like all but Johnson and Obama, he failed to make significant progress.  Where Carter did have more success was in the area of education.  The Department of Education was created at his insistence.

He also saved the Chrysler Corporation, then one of the "big three" U.S. car companies.  Like Obama's later auto industry effort, it was a success.  And Chrysler was bailed out at zero eventual cost to the U.S. taxpayer.  Chrysler paid all the money taxpayers loaned it back in full, and with interest.  (Obama saved the entire U.S. auto industry.  It also paid everything it was loaned back in full, and with interest.)

Before moving on to the rest of the world, specifically the parts outside of Israel and Afghanistan, let me spend some more time on the economy.  Carter was dealt a difficult hand.  The economy was in bad shape when he entered office.  Then relatively early in his term, oil prices shot up.  This second price increase happened only a few years after they had first shot up. The result was something many are no longer familiar with, inflation.

There is (or at least used to be) something called the wage-price-spiral.  Workers get their wages increased.  (Remember, it was a different time.)  Businesses raise prices in order to be able to pay for the wage increases.  This, in turn, results in demands for still higher wages.  Rinse.  Repeat.  The result is that both wages and prices spiral upward.  And, at the large scale economic level, what we see is prices on everything increasing.  And that's called inflation.

The economy got caught up in a wage-price-spiral during Carter's term.  There is a way to deal with this but Carter didn't go there.  Famously, there was a trucker's strike.  A number of economists at the time were saying "let them strike.  It will take some steam out of the economy and break the wage-price-spiral".  Carter instead jawboned the trucking industry into setting the strike by raising wages.

And the race was on.  Wages and prices spiraled upwards even faster.  Interest rates for super-safe government securities moved to above 15%.  For contrast, those same types of securities now fetch interest rates below 1%.  Then the portion of the Federal budget devoted to paying interest on government bonds was high.  Now is is tiny.

I think President Carter made a mistake.  In the short term it was good for truckers.  Their income went up.   But in the long term everybody lost.  This is not the only time Carter came down on the side of a short term gain at the expense of a long term loss.  I will get around to another example below.

It is also not a mistake his successor made.  Reagan went to war with the unions.  Strikes ensued.  But in the short run, and later in the long run, the unions lost.  The back of the wage-price-spiral was broken.  This was hard on the economy for a year or so.  But the economy benefitted over the longer term.

Finally, it was a different time.  Back then, the U.S. economy was largely self contained.  It has since been internationalized.  That gives companies little ability to raise prices.  They can also outsource jobs.  That means the bargaining power of workers is much diminished.  And that makes it hard to imagine a wage-price-spiral either starting or continuing. 

And the FED and the FED's counterparts in other countries, have all found that they can drive interest rates down as low as they want them to go.  And they keep finding reasons to want interest rates to be very low.  That means that it is hard to imagine the interest rate on government bonds rising very far. 

On to the foreign sphere.  I am going to leave the big one for last.  I'll start with another consequential move by President Carter.  He returned the Panama Canal to control by the Panamanians.  This was an extremely controversial move at the time.

There was lots of fearmongering on the "anti" side of the argument.  The Panamanians won't be able to run the canal.  (They have now been doing a fine job for decades.)  The U.S. military will suffer some severe loss.  (Nope!)  The U.S. will look weak and lose prestige.  (We looked strong and gained prestige.)  And on and on.

At the start of Carter's term the U.S. actually had a poor reputation in the third world.  Starting with Iran in '53, and moving on to countries too numerous to easily keep track of in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, the U.S. had been fomenting revolution and pulling strings behind the scenes all over the third world.

And often we replaced a democratic institution with an authoritarian regime.  After all, we replaced a democratically elected government with a dictator in that very first Coup we instigated.  The "sins" of the democracies we ousted typically consisted of some combination of being too hard on American corporations and/or being insufficiently anti-communist.

As a result, in most of the third world the U.S. was seen by the bulk of the population as being imperialists and colonialists.  By returning the Panama Canal and by other actions, Carter reversed that perception in a short four years.  The U.S. reputation went from "bad guy" to "good guy" in what seemed like overnight.   Our reputation has never been as high since.

Central and South America, for instance, started seeing us not as "Yankee Imperialists" but as being on the side of freedom and democracy.  The number of countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democratic rule in the Carter era is astonishing.  No one else has come close.  In fact, in most Administrations the number of democracies goes down and the number of authoritarian states goes up.

Carter was equally successful, perhaps more successful, in Africa.  And right next to Africa is the Middle East.  He worked hard to bring peace and tranquility to the region.  His great success was the "Camp David Accords".  They brought about peace between Israel and its most powerful neighbor Egypt.  And it was a personal triumph for Carter for which he later received the Nobel Peace Prize.  He spent thirteen days personally doing shuttle diplomacy between the Israelis and the Egyptians.

President Trump has succeeded in breaking the Middle East out of the gridlock that has gripped it in the decades since Camp David.  It is too soon to tell if these actions will have a long term benefit.  But prospects look good at the moment.

And that brings me to Carter's big failure, the Iran Hostage Crisis.  I think he pretty much bungled it from start to finish.  Remember the first country the CIA was able to pull a Coup off successfully in?  And don't forget that, at the time, that Coup was seen as being so successful and so easy to pull off, that it became the model for dozens of later attempts by the CIA to replicate its results.  Yes!  That Coup.  The one that put the Shah of Iran into power.

Those particular chickens came back to roost late in Carter's term.  The Shah had gotten old and lost a step or two when it came to manipulating the levers of power.  And he had put no obvious successor in place.  That produced an opening, and religious radicals moved into that opening.  If the Shah had been on his game he would most likely have been able to handle them.  But he wasn't.

Carter's first mistake was to allow the Shah into the U.S. for much needed medical treatment.  He did this primarily at the instigation of Republicans, but they have managed to successfully dodge blame.  In any case, a sick Shah in the U.S. was opening enough for the religious radicals to successfully pull off a Coup.  It was what happened next that was critical.

The radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy and took everyone still there prisoner.  (A bunch of people had managed to get out and sneak into the Canadian Embassy.  See the book and movie Argo, if you are interested in learning more.)  Here's where Carter made his second mistake.  And he made this one all on his own.  And it was another example of doing something for short term gain that ends up having long term costs.

If I had been in charge, I would have immediately issued an ultimatum:  Release them all within 48 hours or expect fire to rain down from the sky.  I believe the Iranians would have caved and that would have been that.

But I could be wrong.  It's possible that instead a bunch of U.S. diplomats would have ended up dead.  Even if that happened it would still have been the right thing to do.  Since then, for four decades and counting, diplomats have been in danger all over the world.  And its all because Carter failed to take a hard line.

At the time Carter used a number of excuses, which I am not going to bother listing, to dither rather than reacting forcefully.  The result is the famous standoff.  It made Ted Koppel famous.  At the time ABC had some dead time after 11:30 in the evening.  The "Kimmel" show now occupies that time slot, but at the time ABC had nothing.

ABC News executives picked a then second stringer named Ted Koppel and told him to fill a half hour every night.  His one and only topic was the hostage situation. The show was titled "America Held Hostage" for a while.  That gives you a feel for the flavor of the content.

Koppel turned out to be brilliant.  He managed to find a way to fill the time and look good doing it.  He soon became a first stringer.  He stayed a first stringer until he retired many years later.

The whole business went on for 444 days.  Carter managed to secure the release of the hostages in the end.  But it was his successor that got all the credit because the Iranians decided that was to their advantage.  But wait, there's more.

Eventually a rescue attempt was staged.  It was another first.  The whole thing was monitored in real time by satellite from the White House Situation Room.  That's now standard fare, both in the movies and in the real world.  But this was the first time it was actually done.

The mission was a fiasco.  The primary group responsible was the CIA.  They refused to share weather data with the Pentagon.  A dust storm, not an uncommon phenomenon, came up and wrecked havoc with the helicopters used.  The only reason it came as close to success as it did was due to Carter's interventions.

But the CIA and the rest of the military were let off the hook by Carter.  If I had been in charge, I would have fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  I would then have put the second in line in charge of a witch hunt.  "Find me some people to blame then fire them" would have been his marching orders.  But Carter chose to do nothing while others maneuvered for political advantage.

Then there's the fact that he spent the last hundred days of the campaign holed up in the White House obsessing over the hostage crisis.  But, as I have indicated above, not taking effect action with respect to it.  The polls said the race was close up to about two weeks before the election.  Then polling stopped and a big shift in sentiment was missed.  (Sound familiar?)  Reagan won in a landslide, but I think Carter could have beat him if he had campaigned vigorously and smartly.  But he didn't, and that's how he came to be a one term President.

As we all now know, Carter has been a superior ex-President.  While being President was a poor fit for his abilities, the role of ex-President has turned out to be a perfect match.  He went back to Plains where he set up the Carter Library and the Carter Center.  Both are the kinds of small, focused operations he is well suited to lead.

And, while he didn't network with the D.C. establishment, and he especially didn't network with Congress, it turns out that he did network with heads of state and other world leaders while he was in office.  He has since leveraged those connections into playing a powerful and positive role on the world stage.

And he continues to not shy away from hard problems.  He has attacked Guinea Worm, a devastating disease in the third world.  He has set out to eradicate it completely.  He has yet to succeed, but he has made tremendous progress.

The Carter Center has also become the "go to" organization when it comes to monitoring elections.  It is seen as competent, fair, and impartial.  If the Carter Center says that an election has been run fairly and well, they get believed.

An area where he has had seen less success is in the field of diplomacy.  He has offered to be an informal spokesman and troubleshooter for the U.S. in sticky situations.  But, for one reason or another, Administrations don't trust him to stay on the reservation.  So they have made use of him in far fewer situations that he would prefer.

It is important to recognize that all the actions he has taken since he returned to private life have reflected well on the U.S.  The same can not be said for many of the moves made by many of the Administrations that have followed him.  That's not a bad reputation to have to carry around.