Diary

Week 1

I decided to keep a record of my thoughts as events transpire, a diary. I have read several reactions by Germans to the rise of Nazism and I was struck by their difficulty to understand where the daily events they lived through could or would lead. In retrospect, we will know, analyze, and make sense. In retrospect everything will have been determined. We may conclude, as did Amos Alon (The Pity of It All) that what did transpire was not inevitable, that history may have taken a different course. But prospectively we can only fear or hope and we do not know which. I have dark premonitions but this is all I have. So my purpose is only to inform the future retrospect by providing a record of my gut reactions to the daily events, as they happen.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

I have spent a good part of my life, 50 years, thinking about political regimes, categorizing them, studying their dynamics, and their effects. And I find myself at a loss. I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.

Trump was elected in fair elections, having actually won a majority of votes. Perhaps to the surprise of some of his supporters, he is implementing his campaign promises. He continues to be supported by a narrow majority in the polls, as are most of his announced measures. Hence, nothing he has done thus far disqualifies the current political regime in the United States as democracy. At the same time, tens of his measures, some only announced but several already implemented, violate the extant laws. Moreover, the government is pursuing some of them even if they have been temporarily stopped by the courts. I am not the only one who does not know what categories to apply to it: Paul Krugman thinks it is an "attempt at an autogolpe," Le Monde, in an editorial of today, sees it as "Imperial Presidency." The word "personalistic" has been used by political scientists to categorize autocracies, but not democracies.

The measures, announced or already adopted, add up to a revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society. The immediate aim of Trump's administration is to reduce the size of the government and to use loyalty as the exclusive criterion of public service: total control of the State apparatus, by the way, is the instrument of all revolutionary governments. The second aim is to drastically curtail the scope and the magnitude of government services to private institutions and individuals. These two offensives are to serve the goal of reducing taxation without increasing government deficit. I cannot find a historical precedent of a transformation of this scope resulting from elections. I thought of Thatcher, who succeeded in decimating unions, but even she did not reduce social expenditures. Milei, in Argentina, is another candidate and he may be closer.

Over the years, I developed a theory of the conditions under which democracies process whatever conflicts that arise in society in liberty and peace. Indeed, my name is associated with one sentence I wrote some 35 years ago, namely that "democracy is when parties lose elections." The conditions, I thought, required for elections to peacefully process conflicts are that elected governments do not make the electoral defeat too costly to temporary losers, so that they are "moderate," and that they do not foreclose the possibility of being removed in elections, so that losing is temporary. Elections fail to maintain peace when they generate revolutionary transformations and, as the absence of precedents indicates, they never do. Unless the government use physical force, that is.

There is also statistical research which shows that democracies survive in countries with high per capita income and countries accustomed to peaceful alternation in office through elections. When I apply this statistical model to the US, with its income and its past 23 partisan alternations in the office of the president, I find that the probability that democracy would die in the US is 1 in 1.8 million country-years, zero.

Hence, neither my analytical nor statistical results equip me to understand the events that unravel hour-by-hour. I just cannot think of either some theoretical framework or of historical precedents that could serve to form expectations about what is about to happen. Is democracy dying in the United States?

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

The core of the American self-perception about its political system is that it is a country obeying "the rule of law." Conceptually, it is a shaky construction. As Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca observed, "The law cannot rule. Ruling is an activity, and laws cannot act." "Rule of law" can only mean that everyone, government included, obeys it.

The relation between democracy and the rule of law is one between two populated institutions: governments and courts. It is a relation contingent on the expected electoral consequences. Governments may obey judges because they fear that otherwise they would lose elections, so that the law rules. But governments may believe that they would win elections when they disobey judges, when a majority does not want governments to listen to what judges tell them they can or cannot do. The rule of law is then violated but as long as government's actions are motivated by the fear of losing elections, the system is still democratic, "illiberal" but still democratic.

Now, all laws leave some margin for interpretation but in the United States there is no law that would regulate in a stable and predictable manner the scope of presidential powers. The Constitution is almost silent about them, restricting the president's role to taking "Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet over the two and half century, presidents used several instruments of ruling: executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, national security directives, and presidential signing statements. Their constitutional status is not defined, so that the only barriers to their use are court rulings or actions of Congress. Presidents are free to try whatever they think they could get away with and what they do get away with depends on political circumstances. This system is neither stable nor predictable. Its consequences can perhaps be analyzed using game-theoretic tools but cannot be deduced from any written norms. This is not a "rule of law" by any stretch of imagination.

As of today, the harbinger of things to come is the issue of the freeze of the NIH funding for the already awarded research grants. Given so many transgressions of laws by the government, it may not be the most important one. But this is the issue where the Trump's administration respect for the judicial rulings will be perhaps first revealed. The government not only announced limiting all indirect costs to 15%, an action which is patently illegal, but also froze the disbursement of all the already allocated research funds. This freeze was itself frozen by a temporary restraining order, the government withdrew its announcement, but it did not stop the freeze. The judge who issued the original restraining order found that the government is in violation of this order, the government appealed, and lost. Some universities are banking that the government would comply but some are already taking precautionary that assume it would not. Here is where "the rule of law" is as of this moment.

As vice-president Vance already observed, the courts have no instruments to enforce their rulings. This is why Montesquieu thought the judicial power is the least effective one. Ezra Klein had a long podcast about this possibility and several journalists already jumped in. But all the legal scholars arrive at is that if the government does not obey the courts we will face a "constitutional crisis." Indeed, we will. But then what? Moving against "elite" universities is popular and probably electorally costless, if not advantageous. So will they brazenly ignore the courts?

Changing the topic. The Democratic Party has been almost mute during the past few weeks. It acts as if nothing big were at stake. Moreover, except for Elisabeth Warren, their gut reaction was to come out in defense of the least popular government policy, namely, foreign aid. But they are in a difficult predicament. Republicans just won an election, they are implementing their electoral program, and thus far the public opinion has not turned against them. Resisting every new policy may appear anti-democratic: after all, the government is just doing what newly elected governments have the prerogative to do. When people in Turkey came out to the streets when the newly elected Erdogan government authorized the use of Islamic scarves in public institutions, the government easily suppressed the protests and was supported by the public opinion. Hence, Democrats need to tread carefully. They need to focus exclusively on the issues on which the public is most likely to be swayed. The role of Musk is a good one at this moment, which is perhaps why Trump sought to institutionalize it by an Executive Order yesterday. But to have a strategy, any organization must be able to discipline its members and the Democratic Party does not have this capacity.

Some street protests are popping up but, given the Nixon experience, I do not know how to think about their effects. My fear is that unless they are truly massive, they will only serve as a pretext of selective repression, confirming Trump's language of "enemies from within." Moreover, they may lead to the rise of decentralized violence that would be condoned by the FBI and the DOJ. Note that as of now, these organizations are just being purged and reorganized. But I cannot help but expect that the worst is still to come, namely, that they will energetically engage in repression of political opponents.

The best bet against Trump is that the fanatics will show themselves to be incompetent and will lose popular support as the economy and government services crash. Inflationary pressure is increasing, with new evidence as of today. The tariffs, whatever their scope will end up to be, will increase inflation. Reduction, and in some areas elimination, of public services will hurt some people who voted for Trump. I am yet to find an economist who thinks inflation will be curtailed and some think that the combination of Trump's policies plus deregulation of financial markers will lead to a major crisis. Interestingly, Bloomberg is in the forefront of government critics. So there are reasons to think that people would turn against Trump on purely economic grounds already two years from now.

Whether this is a good bet still depends, however, whether the people in power are willing to be defeated in a fair election. I do not think they are but the question is what can they do. Given the class composition of the electorates of the two parties, measures aimed at restricting voting rights do not seem to have a clear partisan bias. I may lack imagination but I cannot envisage legal measures taken before the mid-term election that would guarantee Republican victory. This is not necessarily an optimistic thought because it implies that the only way to avoid electoral defeat is to engage in violence.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

I cannot figure out what his happening with NIH disbursements, which I think is the litmus test of the government's strategy vis-a-vis the courts. According to a website, Popular Information, some high officials within the NIH recognized yesterday that the institution must obey the court rulings and announced that it would continue to disburse grants "according to the previously approved negotiated indirect cost rates." I see no echoes of this internal memo in the news today and I do not know what is in fact happening. But the statement of a White House spokesman, cited in today's NYT, is ominous: "Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful. Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people." It seems to indicate that Trump decided that he can get away with ignoring the courts. If this is true, the last institution that could peacefully regulate conflicts is muted.

Some thoughts about the anti-immigrant offensive. Before Trump took office, I thought as many others did, that his announcements were just a campaign strategy. Given the dependence of several sectors of the US economy on immigrant labor and given the costs and the logistics of massive deportations, I expected Trump to perform some highly visible stunts and stop at that. I now think that I may have been too optimistic. The administration is in fact changing legal provisions and building the infrastructure for a long-term, systematic campaign. So far, the numbers are not large but everything indicates that they are about to grow.

I am trying to stay away from emotional reactions but I cannot avoid this one. I know a family which immigrated from a Latin American country two decades ago and now has kids born in the US. [ I described all the nuances of their immigration status in the original draft but I was advised to remove the potentially identifying details.] They all live in terror. Every day as the father leaves for work, his children give him a big hug, fearing he would not return home. Kids in New York City schools are taught what to do if they return home and do not find their parents there. I am an immigrant, now for several decades a US citizen, but I went through some of the same, having been refused at two moments the right to remain in the country and, after I left, to return. I know in my gut what it feels like, even if my misadventures pale in comparison to the terror experienced by millions of people at this moment. It is just impossible to lead a comfortable everyday life in the world of ICE.

The big item on the agenda for the coming weeks is the budget. I have been reading what there is and talking to economist friends but nothing is clear as of now. The deficit for 2024 was around 6%. The task facing Republicans is to reduce taxes (the aim is by 10T over the next 10 years) without increasing the deficit. So for the next year they must find about 1 Trillion, about 3.3% of GDP, by reducing government spending or in additional revenue. Projected increases of the military and border control expenditures add another 0.3T or 1% of GDP. Given 6.9T in 2024 government expenditures. they must somehow save 19%, about a fifth. Tariffs, even if implemented, will bring next to nothing. Reducing government employment, the cost of which is about 6% of government budget, even by a half, would save 3% of expenditures. If the tariffs and government employment cuts generate 5% of current expenditures, 15% still remains to be cut.

This will not be an easy task. They may have trouble even in the House. The remnants of the Tea Party will resist any increase of the deficit and perhaps the debt ceiling. Expenditure cuts will hurt districts controlled by Republicans, so electoral considerations will come into play. And their margin is narrow, so they cannot tolerate defections.

Tax cuts favor the rich, program cuts hurt the poor. If they cut the federal work force by a half, that will add up to about 1.5 million people. Moreover, while in the past people who left government service after elections found jobs in think tanks, universities, and NGOs, their budgets will also suffer. So the ranks of unemployed educated people will swell. All of this augurs badly for the Republican electoral support, so the fundamental issue is what will happen in the election two years from now.

Friday, February 14, 2025

No update on NIH disbursements and the stance of the government vis--a-vis the courts in general.

Trump announced a new tariff policy, "reciprocal." It was sharply attacked by an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, "Reciprocal Tariffs Make No Sense." The subtitle explains why: "How is it in American national interest to let other countries decide what duties we pay." Bloomberg, FT, and WSJ all seem to be skeptical about Trump's economic policies but the stock market remains flat. I find it puzzling.

Returning to the budget. According to Politico today, "Johnson's most immediate problem comes from swing-district Republicans who believe that the steep spending cuts across Medicaid, food assistance and other safety-net programs for low-income Americans could cost them their seats. Moreover, the plan to raise the debt ceiling by 4T is deeply controversial among Republicans, some of whom never always voted against it.

Now let me plunge into something perhaps ill-conceived. I do not know anyone, anyone, who I know to be a Trump supporter. This obviously says something about me, perhaps about the country, and probably about both. The effect is that I never had a chance to engage in a conversation with a reasonable Trump supporter. So I can only imagine what he or she would say. Let me try to guess:

(1) The government is inefficient. This argument is twofold. The services it renders could be delivered at a lower cost. Some of the services are unnecessary and subject to abuse.

(2) The DEI policies are harmful. They promote to positions people who are unqualified to perform their jobs and they are costly.

(3) Some people are naturally more intelligent than others and they should be the ones who decide.

(4) Reduction of government spending will lead to higher economic growth.

Of these arguments, only the first two could lead to a conversation. Point (1) stands: Anything can always be done at a lower cost, and government services are not an exception. I am sure that privately delivered health care could be delivered at a lower cost: it is sufficient to look at international statistics. Internet connection costs about 50% more in New York City than in Paris and the speed in higher in Paris. I thus imagine that US private firms are highly inefficient and the reason is that many markets are oligopolistic, if not monopolistic at the local level. Now, government is a monopoly with regard to most services, so there are reasons to think that it could be made more efficient. In fact, government efficiency has been a concern for several administrations, Republican and Democratic. Moreover, several institutional decides were built into federal bureaucracy to monitor efficiency: government inspects, who Trump just fired, were among them. But my argument would be that to stream the government one should use clippers, not chainsaw ("motosierra," the favorite instrument of Javier Milei). Cutting without knowing what one is cutting does not seem to be an efficient operation.

As for what should be cut, ideological differences are too big to lead to a reasoned discussion. I believe that the "welfare functions" of the government are essential, Trumpyists believe that everyone should be left to their resources. This chasm cannot be breached: this is kind of conflicts that is processed by elections, in which I was on the losing side.

My views about DEI are much more mixed, so a conversation is perhaps possible. A large part of the US society, particularly the more educated and the very young, has embraced a project of expiating for all the sins and horrors committed by their forefathers. The horrors were there, as is systematic discrimination in everyday life. Recognizing them can be salutary for every society even when it is extremely polarizing, as it is in the US. This project is selective: violence against workers is not a part of this list of deadly sins, even though for every race riot, there was deadly repression of unions: between 100 and 300 Black people were killed in the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 but the same year between 50 and 100 striking miners were killed in Ludlow County, WV. But what always undermined my confidence in this project is that it is expiatory rather than remedial. And the expiatory measures are mainly symbolic: censorship of the language in which we refer to one another, of art generated by men who led unsavory lives, removal of offending monuments. This is not a project to restructure the society so that everyone, independently of their skin color, gender, or class could lead a decent life, with secure incomes and social services.

I think I understand the appeal of Trumpism to white males. The vision of society in which people of European origins are all oppressors just makes little sense. Tell this to a fifty year old white man who cannot find a job after the only factory closed in his town. Tell this to millions of white males who survive day to day at the minimal wage. Tell them that "they" are responsible for the past racial injustice. Who are the "they"? Their grandfathers who immigrated from some forsaken European village to pave the streets on which we now walk? Their grandfathers who were being killed for union organizing? Their off-springs, who desperately try to escape the fate of their fathers? Are "they" responsible?

I was thus never taken by the vision of society that generated the DEI policies. But Trump's attack on them, the vituperative language, the rancor, reminds me of my life under communism. When I was living in Poland, the communist government censored the words "elite" (because it was used by Milovan Djilas to criticize communist parties) or "bureaucracy" (because it was used by Leon Trotsky about the Bolsheviks). Now US government agencies generated long lists of words that disqualify research grants. My favorite is "unbiased," on the list issued by the NSF, as in BLUE, "Best Linear Unbiased Estimator." Perhaps 100% of statistical papers are thus disqualified.

It is clear that Trump cadres feel that they must move immediately and indiscriminately. They are not open do any discussion. And they are willing to use the power they have without any scruples.Where this will lead remains to be seen. Thus far, the instrument of coercion has been money. Will they use political repression?

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Time bomb? For as long as I remember, going back to an essay by Edward Shils in the 1960s, high unemployment among young educated people was seen as a mine that could blow up any regime. The Trump administration just fired, indiscriminately across all agencies, federal employees who were hired within the last two years. Their number is estimated at 200,000. The administration also fired more selectively employees of the NIH and CDC. In addition, 75000 federal employees accepted to retire. Finally, while I find it difficult to find exact information, there are stories that FBI will fire all those who were in any way involved in January 6 investigation, about 6,000 people.

I have no idea what the reduction of the federal labor force will do to the operation of the government and to the delivery of its services. I am thinking only about the political consequences. The projections about the ultimate scope of the firings vary, all the way from 10 to 50 percent. Hence, somewhere between 300,000 and 1,450,000 educated, mostly young, people will lose jobs. They include not only FBI and Homeland Security agents but also veterans, some of whom were employed by the Veteran Administration and the US Forest Service. In the past, a few thousand people who left the government when a new president was elected found jobs in the think tanks, universities, or the NGOs. Now their numbers are of a different order and all the institutions in which they found exile in the past are under financial pressure. Obviously one question is what will happen to them. But the politically explosive question, I think, is "What will they do?"

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Following the news as they pop up with a blistering rhythm takes a psychological toll. I was going to take a pause today, read a novel and watch soccer, escape from the world. But it is not possible.

When I read a couple of years ago an article on the "ceasarist" ideology propagated by some people I did not know of, I dismissed it as a fringe. But today was shaken by Trump's echoing what was supposed to have been proclaimed by Napoleon: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

My immediate reaction is to think the nineteenth century Latin American dictatorships: "Whether sincere or deliberately deceptive, the documents of the period always employed expressions suggesting a crisis: liberator, restorer, regenerator, vindicator, deliverer, savior of the country, and so on. Somebody was constantly having to 'save' these countries...". ( from the historian Fred J. Rippy). But this is a long story, going back to Ancient Rome, where dictators were "saviours" whose prerogatives, however, were minutely regulated and restricted to restoring the Roman salus publica. The crucial between Rome and Latin America was that, although dictators almost always insisted that they are performing a task authorized by a constitution, their mission to save the country was unilaterally undertaken by force. Nevertheless, dictatorships were seen in Latin America as something exceptional and something to self-dissolve when the situation is restored to normal. They were "commissarial" in the language of Carl Schmitt.

"Ceasarism" is a concept that emerged in reaction to the regimes of the two Napoleons in France. The phenomenon of grabbing power by a coup and then elaborately institutionalizing the new regime was unprecedented and the contemporaries were at a loss where it belonged in the extant political categories. The first labels attached to these regimes bear witness that it was seen as new: "Bonapartism," "Napoleonism," "Imperialism" (from the "Emperor"). But then an analogy was found in Ceasar's attempt to establish a permanent new regime, so they became instances of "Ceasarism." In Schmitt's distinction, such dictatorships were "sovereign."

What survives from these conceptual debates is the idea that there are times when the only way to save the country is to delegate unrestricted power to someone who enjoys popular support and who would use it, relying on force if need be, not to restore the status quo, but to found a new system that would be impervious to the threats that caused the crisis to the begin with. Too much is at stake -- the very survival of this or that: the country, the nation, the traditional way of life, religion -- to be squeamish about legal niceties.

If this is truly the ideology of the people around Trump, there is nothing they will stop short of, particularly if conflicts spill to the streets.

On a lighter note, I cannot stop myself from quoting in full this Press Release:

Washington, DC -- Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (NY-24) today introduced the Trump's Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act to officially designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate President Donald J. Trump's Birthday and Flag Day.

Born on June 14, 1946, President Donald J. Trump's birthday coincided with Flag Day, which is observed annually and recognizes the anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official US flag in 1777. This legislation would permanently codify a new federal holiday called "Trump's Birthday and Flag Day" on June 14 to honor this historic day.

"No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump. As both our 45th and 47th President, he is the most consequential President in modern American history, leading our country at a time of great international and domestic turmoil. From brokering the historic Abraham Accords to championing the largest tax relief package in American history, his impact on the nation is undeniable. Just as George Washington's Birthday is codified as a federal holiday, this bill will add Trump's Birthday to this list, recognizing him as the founder of America's Golden Age. Additionally, as our nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, we should create a new federal holiday honoring the American Flag and all that it represents. By designating Trump's Birthday and Flag Day as a federal holiday, we can ensure President Trump's contributions to American greatness and the importance of the American Flag are forever enshrined into law."

Monday, February 17, 2025

I have not been able to do any academic work last week but today I had a zoom meeting with collaborators on a game-theoretic model of democracy. At many moments in the past I was able to escape from unpleasant events into mathematics and it worked today again, but only for a couple of hours. But there is little new.

One comment that attracted my attention is by Pete Buttigieg, someone I very much respect. He said "If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general," rather than fire them. This is obviously true but I was struck that this is not the scale of the Trump's or Musk's offensive. They are out to destroy the government, not tweak it by institutional reforms. Is this the scale at which the Democrats see the issues?

Several street demonstrations are currently taking place all over the country. I wonder whether Trump will react to them and, if yes, how?