Absolutely beautiful essay. Thank you, Professor Reich.
All the more reason to develop a national educational system that nurtures dialogue and autonomy in teachers and students, so that even at an early age, young people learn to recognize and value the strength of a teacher/leader willing to accept or, better yet, invite criticism.
Yes, dictators are in a "bubble" of their own making, but isn't this also true of millions of Americans who create their own "bubble" by selecting news and information sources that confirm their biases and discounting other different viewpoints? Isn't this a major reason why a bad decision by the voters -election of Trump to the Presidency- occurred in 2016, almost happened again in 2020, and may happen in 2024?
no matter how bad their decisions - none of these dictators are EVER held accountable - still waiting for the DOJ to charge tRump for his many crimes!!
I believe I’m a student of life with a open mind and I try to stay nonjudgmental and neutral. A dictatorship makes no sense to me as its the opposite of what I believe. It reflects a complete breakdown of the people . I’m not sure of the dynamics but its a reflection of the vulnerability and weakness of the human mind. We now, not only tolerate criminal behavior and we elect them. Trump did it for me. He is mentally ill on many levels. Check the DSM-5 of mental illnesses and he is in many categories. To name a few, narcissism, megalomaniac, delusions of grandeur, paranoid. I’m still in shock we would elect this despicable human being to lead our country, when in fact he should be institutionalized.
"After all, American democracy stopped Trump from doing even more damage than he did."
Yes, but it also elected him in the first place. Democracies can fail when ordinary people vote against their economic interests. We have borne witness to a 40 year trajectory of this, starting with Reagan and culminating in Trump.
But yes, as Churchill observed, "Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others." And it tends to work best when voters vote their wallets. Does anyone doubt Boris Johnson would dissolve the British National Health Service if he could, thereby greatly enriching his already rich friends? But the NHS, with all its flaws, is regarded as a national treasure. Johnson would be out of office in a heartbeat if he so much as tried.
This is where Marx made a big mistake, the tragic results of which are being played out in Ukraine. Marx assumed that the proletariat would remain powerless unless it rose up against its bourgeois oppressor in violent revolution. The results of such revolution over a century ago are in plain sight: Putin on the one hand, Ayn Rand (with her progeny Reagan, Friedman, and Trump) on the other.
While it is true that dictators (and CEOs! - I have also witnessed terrible CEO decision-making) often act on limited information, democracies can also falter because of limited information. About two weeks before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Senator Sanders gave an excellent account of US complicity, going all the way back to Secretary of Defense William Perry in 1997. Perry was a staunch supporter of NATO, and strongly advocated giving NATO membership to East European countries, including Ukraine. He succeeded with Hungary and Poland. So, the US reneged on the solemn promise it made to Gorbachev in 1989 that, if the USSR pulled out of Germany, and Germans were given NATO membership, NATO would not expand one inch further east.
What is this NATO membership for, exactly? Finland (which actually borders on Russia), Switzerland, and Austria are all prosperous democracies which are not part of NATO.
As for Ukrainian membership of NATO, this always has been regarded as an absolute red line by the Russian elite - not just Putin. And who can blame them? After all, the concept of spheres of influence was practically invented by the US in the form of the Monroe doctrine. As Sanders put it, can anyone believe that if Mexico went communist the US would just say "Oh, Mexico is a sovereign nation with the right to do whatever they want"?
Was this wonderful speech reported in the major news outlets in this country? Of course not, that would amount to information in a democracy. So democracies are far from perfect.
As for Russia, realpolitik demands that you don't poke a bear in the eye.
I understand the frustration of President Zelensky, but, to quote again Winston Churchill, in a conversation with President Eisenhower in 1953, "Don't worry about Russia, it will collapse under its own economic weight within 50 years." Well, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell peacefully. Is it too much to ask for a patient approach to Russia? Eventually, the grim economics of Karl Marx will give way to the enlightened view of Adam Smith, but it will take time.
Meanwhile, we must pay attention to our own democracy.
While I agree with your thought about autocrats and dictators getting accurate information. I disagree that Trump is not stupid. Anyone who suggests, as he did, that people consume bleach is stupid.
Seems to me that China and Russia have every incentive - geopolitically to challenge US power. Ukraine is just a first step. Look at the groundwork done in Saudi Arabia and UAE - who weren't returning Biden's calls. Countries like those don't just ignore the POTUS. Russia - and to a lesser extent China are being economically, socially and militarily targetted by the US government.
We are desperately trying to hold onto our place in a world with a single super-power. Russia has just shoen how hollow that title and position is. While we xontinue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia who has been responsible for the deaths of over 300000 Yemeni's from all walks of life. We continue to shield the Israeli government while they continue the aparteid project of a Jewish nation - having killed so many Palestinians - we dont even have decent estimates.
As our economy is sent into a massive inflation due to energy price increases. This will further degrade our governments ability to legislate - which it can all ready barely do.
This invasion is in line with larger Russian geopolitical interests and stems in part with the inability of the US to truly bring the Russia givernment and people into the capitalist block after the socialist / solviet block fell. And what has started and is coming is in part the blowback.
I >really< appreciate the term "agitprop" - it's so appropriately Orwellian. Presumably, it means "agitation propaganda," or propaganda intended to stir agitation. Provocative utter BS: "Fake news," "Stop the steal," "the radical left," "the socialists," "murderers, rapists, & drug dealers," etc.
You forgot "the rest of the story." Putin trained as a sycophant. That's how he became President. He kissed Boris Yeltsin's butt. Putin was the best ass-kisser in the Kremlin. The obsequious one is always the dangerous one. Be sure that he was talked about around the water cooler in the office. People usually don't confront the obsequious one, they just talk about him/her. I suppose a leader can convince themself of their lies but not without becomingHomer paranoid in the process. Maybe we outta ask Homer or Dante or our founding fathers what they think about Trump or Putin. No! The story to be told is the story St Augustine told. Didn't he talk about "original sin." Something got left behind with the coming of science and statistics, something basic to survival, something evolution gave us long before Augustine or any religion, something the hunter-gatherer practiced, and we forgot with the coming of a surplus. Dr Reich is killing himself trying to show us mathematically how we have become less egalitarian, not egalitarian, more unequal. He is doing one hell of a job. I haven't been inside a church in thirty years save for a wedding or a funeral. Yet reading and listening to Dr Reich has made me think of Augustine and "original sin." Go figure? Homer, Dante, Augustine, Mr. Hunter-gatherer, Dr Reich, will we survive? Help!
Speaking of missing feedback, no one is comparing Putin’s attack on Ukraine with the Bush 2 administration’s attack on Iraq. Both have been unwise “shock and awe” bullying of less powerful countries with the intention of regime change. In both cases the attacking countries media were fed a diet of manufactured lies which they did little to fact check or contest. In our self-satisfied demonizing of Putin we neglect to note that our “war” on Iraq resulted in the death of well over 500,000 men, women and children, WASTED over 2 TRILLION dollars, and completely destabilized a relatively advanced nation which is now in ruins and abandoned to infighting between ethnic factions. Whatever their many sins, Saddam Hussein and the Bath Party were managing to hold in check the deadly ethnic rivalries (which experts had known about for decades) and had evolved the most advanced Arab nation in the middle east. We need to realize that a supposedly civilized nation like ours can be whipped into a war frenzy and then reach half way around the world to beat up a nation which never was a threat to the US.
When I was in school, college, and (to a lesser degree) graduate school, I learned to question everything I heard, saw, read. I did not have access to television and there was no internet, nothing like it. However, college faculty insisted that we keep informed about current events and discuss them inside class and out. We were also required to take a solid battery of courses in literature, the arts, humanities, philosophy and ethics, and history and political science. It was a solid liberal arts college with a solid program in humanities and history...and that was true irrespective of a student's major. The motto of the college (Willamette Univ, Salem, Oregon) was "Non nobis solum nati sumus" (Not unto ourselves alone are we born) and we lived it. There was no fudging and, if you discovered you didn't want a liberal arts education but were aiming for a glorified technical computer training institute, why, you transferred. (There were not such things as personal computers but they were on the horizon.) None (or very few of us) became rich or powerful or famous but that was not the aim of the school. My graduate school experience (UCLA) was very different because the individual faculty members were in the game for self-advancement and positions of wealth and power and they were not shy about sacrificing students to their own cause. My point is that many of the problems we are facing now are due to serious defects in the educational system. Under the newer system, the objective of education is not so much to learn about the world and each other and how to improve the situation for everyone, that is, to assess what is true and seek the truth in order to make the best possible (and most beneficial) decisions for oneself--and for others, but, rather, to seek advancement and gain, everyone else being conceived not as a worthy individual by birth but as a competitor to be beaten down and deprived of the smallest measure of a worthy and decent life. The humanities as I knew them are essentially dead as the race to the top has replaced concern for others or for the environment or for the beauty of playing the French horn or cello or the skill in painting a new and wondrous seascape or singing an aria from La BOheme. Life for all of us has gotten poorer, much poorer, and we end up either trying to hang on to what we remember of the past and write it down for some future generation who cares and gives a damn or going with the flow and burying concerns about who we were and who we are now. We care little or anything for the world and the state of its people at any given moment. Once in a while a crisis raises our attention for a brief time but, well, we don't have the interest in focusing on anything long term or seeing it through to a better posting. The artists and writers and musicians among us have weathered storms better than we have and will continue to do so but not all of them have relinquished the competitive spirit to seek something better and more fulfilling. I believe this all traces back to parents and schools which have generally lacked the will to make a solid liberal arts background the foundation of any program for any student at any level. And of course this applies to students not aiming for college but preparing for a full and rich life that includes more than work and a bond with a computer instead of with other people.
You identified a problem that can afflict anyone who attains a position of power, not only presidents and CEOs, but also governors and legislators. Suddenly, the newly powerful person has all sorts of "friends" coming out of the woodwork, flattering the person and often showering the person with the maximum gifts allowed by law, not because they truly admire him/her, but because they are seeking personal gain. It can go to the person's head, such that he/she starts believing the flattery, believing that he/she is a superior subspecies of human, entitled to special deference. It takes strength of character to resist this, to remain grounded in reality.
As an armchair psychologist, I think this is the case with Kyrsten Sinema. Her Big Money corporate campaign contributors have convinced her that she is a knight in shining armor, Savior of the People, and that by pursuing the policies they propose, she can be a national hero.
When we choose a president, we should examine the way candidates have used the power of positions they already have held.
The reinforcing cycle of decision making within a vacuum isn't new but history does show good and bad precedents for pursuing 'destiny' in the absence of hard information or independent advice eg George Washington had some low points fighting an ultimately successful guerilla war against the British, but Hitler fired his generals in the face of mounting troop losses and died in his bunker.Putin has created his own personality cult but it is based upon much earlier imperial glories under Catherine the Great that still stir Russian national identity.His circle of allies are ex KGB associates, not exactly friends,who have engaged in the asset stripping of the Russian state so there isn't any genuinely independent source of advice available to Putin. Trying to compare the process of democratic checks and balances prevalent in the Western world isn't applicable in countries where personality cults are embedded within the national psyche eg North Korea but as the body count of conscripts rises and living standards plummet in Russia then some sort of strategic retreat based upon consolidating territorial gains for Putin is still a preferable option over nuclear war for the West.
Absolutely beautiful essay. Thank you, Professor Reich.
All the more reason to develop a national educational system that nurtures dialogue and autonomy in teachers and students, so that even at an early age, young people learn to recognize and value the strength of a teacher/leader willing to accept or, better yet, invite criticism.
Yes, dictators are in a "bubble" of their own making, but isn't this also true of millions of Americans who create their own "bubble" by selecting news and information sources that confirm their biases and discounting other different viewpoints? Isn't this a major reason why a bad decision by the voters -election of Trump to the Presidency- occurred in 2016, almost happened again in 2020, and may happen in 2024?
no matter how bad their decisions - none of these dictators are EVER held accountable - still waiting for the DOJ to charge tRump for his many crimes!!
Perhaps Dr Reich's best offering to date. (Or at least it speaks powerfully to me.) I'll be taking some time to cogitate a bit on this one!
I believe I’m a student of life with a open mind and I try to stay nonjudgmental and neutral. A dictatorship makes no sense to me as its the opposite of what I believe. It reflects a complete breakdown of the people . I’m not sure of the dynamics but its a reflection of the vulnerability and weakness of the human mind. We now, not only tolerate criminal behavior and we elect them. Trump did it for me. He is mentally ill on many levels. Check the DSM-5 of mental illnesses and he is in many categories. To name a few, narcissism, megalomaniac, delusions of grandeur, paranoid. I’m still in shock we would elect this despicable human being to lead our country, when in fact he should be institutionalized.
"After all, American democracy stopped Trump from doing even more damage than he did."
Yes, but it also elected him in the first place. Democracies can fail when ordinary people vote against their economic interests. We have borne witness to a 40 year trajectory of this, starting with Reagan and culminating in Trump.
But yes, as Churchill observed, "Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others." And it tends to work best when voters vote their wallets. Does anyone doubt Boris Johnson would dissolve the British National Health Service if he could, thereby greatly enriching his already rich friends? But the NHS, with all its flaws, is regarded as a national treasure. Johnson would be out of office in a heartbeat if he so much as tried.
This is where Marx made a big mistake, the tragic results of which are being played out in Ukraine. Marx assumed that the proletariat would remain powerless unless it rose up against its bourgeois oppressor in violent revolution. The results of such revolution over a century ago are in plain sight: Putin on the one hand, Ayn Rand (with her progeny Reagan, Friedman, and Trump) on the other.
While it is true that dictators (and CEOs! - I have also witnessed terrible CEO decision-making) often act on limited information, democracies can also falter because of limited information. About two weeks before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Senator Sanders gave an excellent account of US complicity, going all the way back to Secretary of Defense William Perry in 1997. Perry was a staunch supporter of NATO, and strongly advocated giving NATO membership to East European countries, including Ukraine. He succeeded with Hungary and Poland. So, the US reneged on the solemn promise it made to Gorbachev in 1989 that, if the USSR pulled out of Germany, and Germans were given NATO membership, NATO would not expand one inch further east.
What is this NATO membership for, exactly? Finland (which actually borders on Russia), Switzerland, and Austria are all prosperous democracies which are not part of NATO.
As for Ukrainian membership of NATO, this always has been regarded as an absolute red line by the Russian elite - not just Putin. And who can blame them? After all, the concept of spheres of influence was practically invented by the US in the form of the Monroe doctrine. As Sanders put it, can anyone believe that if Mexico went communist the US would just say "Oh, Mexico is a sovereign nation with the right to do whatever they want"?
Was this wonderful speech reported in the major news outlets in this country? Of course not, that would amount to information in a democracy. So democracies are far from perfect.
As for Russia, realpolitik demands that you don't poke a bear in the eye.
I understand the frustration of President Zelensky, but, to quote again Winston Churchill, in a conversation with President Eisenhower in 1953, "Don't worry about Russia, it will collapse under its own economic weight within 50 years." Well, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell peacefully. Is it too much to ask for a patient approach to Russia? Eventually, the grim economics of Karl Marx will give way to the enlightened view of Adam Smith, but it will take time.
Meanwhile, we must pay attention to our own democracy.
While I agree with your thought about autocrats and dictators getting accurate information. I disagree that Trump is not stupid. Anyone who suggests, as he did, that people consume bleach is stupid.
Seems to me that China and Russia have every incentive - geopolitically to challenge US power. Ukraine is just a first step. Look at the groundwork done in Saudi Arabia and UAE - who weren't returning Biden's calls. Countries like those don't just ignore the POTUS. Russia - and to a lesser extent China are being economically, socially and militarily targetted by the US government.
We are desperately trying to hold onto our place in a world with a single super-power. Russia has just shoen how hollow that title and position is. While we xontinue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia who has been responsible for the deaths of over 300000 Yemeni's from all walks of life. We continue to shield the Israeli government while they continue the aparteid project of a Jewish nation - having killed so many Palestinians - we dont even have decent estimates.
As our economy is sent into a massive inflation due to energy price increases. This will further degrade our governments ability to legislate - which it can all ready barely do.
This invasion is in line with larger Russian geopolitical interests and stems in part with the inability of the US to truly bring the Russia givernment and people into the capitalist block after the socialist / solviet block fell. And what has started and is coming is in part the blowback.
I >really< appreciate the term "agitprop" - it's so appropriately Orwellian. Presumably, it means "agitation propaganda," or propaganda intended to stir agitation. Provocative utter BS: "Fake news," "Stop the steal," "the radical left," "the socialists," "murderers, rapists, & drug dealers," etc.
Wonderful essay... I dare to disagree on one point—Trump IS stupid!
You forgot "the rest of the story." Putin trained as a sycophant. That's how he became President. He kissed Boris Yeltsin's butt. Putin was the best ass-kisser in the Kremlin. The obsequious one is always the dangerous one. Be sure that he was talked about around the water cooler in the office. People usually don't confront the obsequious one, they just talk about him/her. I suppose a leader can convince themself of their lies but not without becomingHomer paranoid in the process. Maybe we outta ask Homer or Dante or our founding fathers what they think about Trump or Putin. No! The story to be told is the story St Augustine told. Didn't he talk about "original sin." Something got left behind with the coming of science and statistics, something basic to survival, something evolution gave us long before Augustine or any religion, something the hunter-gatherer practiced, and we forgot with the coming of a surplus. Dr Reich is killing himself trying to show us mathematically how we have become less egalitarian, not egalitarian, more unequal. He is doing one hell of a job. I haven't been inside a church in thirty years save for a wedding or a funeral. Yet reading and listening to Dr Reich has made me think of Augustine and "original sin." Go figure? Homer, Dante, Augustine, Mr. Hunter-gatherer, Dr Reich, will we survive? Help!
Hi Robert,
Speaking of missing feedback, no one is comparing Putin’s attack on Ukraine with the Bush 2 administration’s attack on Iraq. Both have been unwise “shock and awe” bullying of less powerful countries with the intention of regime change. In both cases the attacking countries media were fed a diet of manufactured lies which they did little to fact check or contest. In our self-satisfied demonizing of Putin we neglect to note that our “war” on Iraq resulted in the death of well over 500,000 men, women and children, WASTED over 2 TRILLION dollars, and completely destabilized a relatively advanced nation which is now in ruins and abandoned to infighting between ethnic factions. Whatever their many sins, Saddam Hussein and the Bath Party were managing to hold in check the deadly ethnic rivalries (which experts had known about for decades) and had evolved the most advanced Arab nation in the middle east. We need to realize that a supposedly civilized nation like ours can be whipped into a war frenzy and then reach half way around the world to beat up a nation which never was a threat to the US.
John Spock
When I was in school, college, and (to a lesser degree) graduate school, I learned to question everything I heard, saw, read. I did not have access to television and there was no internet, nothing like it. However, college faculty insisted that we keep informed about current events and discuss them inside class and out. We were also required to take a solid battery of courses in literature, the arts, humanities, philosophy and ethics, and history and political science. It was a solid liberal arts college with a solid program in humanities and history...and that was true irrespective of a student's major. The motto of the college (Willamette Univ, Salem, Oregon) was "Non nobis solum nati sumus" (Not unto ourselves alone are we born) and we lived it. There was no fudging and, if you discovered you didn't want a liberal arts education but were aiming for a glorified technical computer training institute, why, you transferred. (There were not such things as personal computers but they were on the horizon.) None (or very few of us) became rich or powerful or famous but that was not the aim of the school. My graduate school experience (UCLA) was very different because the individual faculty members were in the game for self-advancement and positions of wealth and power and they were not shy about sacrificing students to their own cause. My point is that many of the problems we are facing now are due to serious defects in the educational system. Under the newer system, the objective of education is not so much to learn about the world and each other and how to improve the situation for everyone, that is, to assess what is true and seek the truth in order to make the best possible (and most beneficial) decisions for oneself--and for others, but, rather, to seek advancement and gain, everyone else being conceived not as a worthy individual by birth but as a competitor to be beaten down and deprived of the smallest measure of a worthy and decent life. The humanities as I knew them are essentially dead as the race to the top has replaced concern for others or for the environment or for the beauty of playing the French horn or cello or the skill in painting a new and wondrous seascape or singing an aria from La BOheme. Life for all of us has gotten poorer, much poorer, and we end up either trying to hang on to what we remember of the past and write it down for some future generation who cares and gives a damn or going with the flow and burying concerns about who we were and who we are now. We care little or anything for the world and the state of its people at any given moment. Once in a while a crisis raises our attention for a brief time but, well, we don't have the interest in focusing on anything long term or seeing it through to a better posting. The artists and writers and musicians among us have weathered storms better than we have and will continue to do so but not all of them have relinquished the competitive spirit to seek something better and more fulfilling. I believe this all traces back to parents and schools which have generally lacked the will to make a solid liberal arts background the foundation of any program for any student at any level. And of course this applies to students not aiming for college but preparing for a full and rich life that includes more than work and a bond with a computer instead of with other people.
Thank you - you nailed it once again!
And Trump also had the power to blow up the world. Yet another vital reason he should never be in a position of power again.
You identified a problem that can afflict anyone who attains a position of power, not only presidents and CEOs, but also governors and legislators. Suddenly, the newly powerful person has all sorts of "friends" coming out of the woodwork, flattering the person and often showering the person with the maximum gifts allowed by law, not because they truly admire him/her, but because they are seeking personal gain. It can go to the person's head, such that he/she starts believing the flattery, believing that he/she is a superior subspecies of human, entitled to special deference. It takes strength of character to resist this, to remain grounded in reality.
As an armchair psychologist, I think this is the case with Kyrsten Sinema. Her Big Money corporate campaign contributors have convinced her that she is a knight in shining armor, Savior of the People, and that by pursuing the policies they propose, she can be a national hero.
When we choose a president, we should examine the way candidates have used the power of positions they already have held.
The reinforcing cycle of decision making within a vacuum isn't new but history does show good and bad precedents for pursuing 'destiny' in the absence of hard information or independent advice eg George Washington had some low points fighting an ultimately successful guerilla war against the British, but Hitler fired his generals in the face of mounting troop losses and died in his bunker.Putin has created his own personality cult but it is based upon much earlier imperial glories under Catherine the Great that still stir Russian national identity.His circle of allies are ex KGB associates, not exactly friends,who have engaged in the asset stripping of the Russian state so there isn't any genuinely independent source of advice available to Putin. Trying to compare the process of democratic checks and balances prevalent in the Western world isn't applicable in countries where personality cults are embedded within the national psyche eg North Korea but as the body count of conscripts rises and living standards plummet in Russia then some sort of strategic retreat based upon consolidating territorial gains for Putin is still a preferable option over nuclear war for the West.