gracchusdixit

Hillary Clinton, the all-but-inevitable Democratic Presidential nominee, finally has some competition:  Martin O’Malley of Maryland, Lincoln Chafe of Rhode Island, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  The three men couldn’t be more different.

O’Malley is a classic life-long politician.  While still in college, he began working on Democratic political campaigns.  After college, he went to law school, where he continued to be involved in politics.  After law school, he spent merely two years as an Assistant State’s Attorney, then promptly ran for the Maryland Senate.  Having lost that race, he no less promptly, but far more successfully, ran for a seat on the Baltimore City Council.  Using that as a springboard to become Mayor of Baltimore, he ultimately went on to serve two terms as Governor of Maryland, winning both terms by huge margins.

There is nothing wrong with any of this.  Far from it.  But the trajectory of O’Malley’s career is so predictable that it’s almost funny.  It marks him as one of those conventionally ambitious politicians we are all too familiar with.

To combat this stereotype, O’Malley is trying to distinguish himself as a progressive warrior all the while painting Hillary Clinton as a pawn of big Wall Street donors.  There may be more than a dollop of truth in that.  Nonetheless, his progressive, anti-Clinton rhetoric is a day late and a dollar short, since Hillary is already singing her own progressive song and doing a pretty good job of it.  What’s more, O’Malley’s record as Mayor of Baltimore and Governor of Maryland is mixed.   It was O’Malley who introduced many of the policing tactics that some believe culminated in Baltimore’s recent race riots, and it is doubtful that the Democratic Party will easily bring itself to nominate a candidate who is viewed suspiciously by minority voters.

Lincoln Chaffe is a less predictable and, one might almost say, quixotic candidate.  He may well be the last member of that all-but-extinct species: the public-spirited New England Brahmin.  The first Chaffe arrived in Massachusetts almost 400 years ago, and his family tree includes two governors, two U. S. Senators, and two generals, as well as a distinguished Harvard philosopher and civil libertarian.  He attended Phillips Andover, an elite boarding school where Jeb Bush was a classmate, then went on to Brown, where he majored (if you can believe it) in classics.  After Brown, Chaffe did not set out to become a politician like his forebears.  He moved to Montana, where—I’m being serious—he learned how to shoe horses, spending several years working on race tracks.

When Chaffe finally returned to Rhode Island to enter politics, he returned as an old-school Republican: conservative in fiscal matters, liberal—in fact, very liberal—on social issues.  As it became clear that the Republican Party was being hijacked by the hard right, Chaffe left the party to become an Independent and, ultimately, a Democrat.

All this, you might think, would make Lincoln Chaffe at the very least an interesting candidate.  But there are two problems.  One is that he is sadly inept in front of a microphone.  The other is that his obsession is foreign policy.  He was the sole Republican Senator to vote against the war in Iraq and believes that the United States should abandon its imperial pretensions in favor of a less aggressive, more consultative role in the world. This is a laudable notion but one that is unlikely to energize an electorate that, while skeptical of our costly adventures in Middle East, remains scared to death of terrorism.

In the end, for very different reasons, both O’Malley and Chaffe seem unlikely prospects to win the Democratic nomination.

The prospects of the Junior Senator from Vermont are a different matter—though you would never know it by listening to the pundits in the media.  Although he has caucused with the Democrats during his entire time in the Senate, Bernie Sanders isn’t a member of their party.  He is an Independent, who describes himself without hesitation or apology as a “democratic socialist” along European lines.   Indeed, he is an out-and-out admirer of Scandinavia’s social democracies, with their steep, redistributive tax rates and broad social safety nets. Because of all this, it is widely assumed among the chattering classes on both right and left that Bernie Sanders has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, let alone the Presidency.  One of the chatterers recently dismissed his prospects with the words: “He’s a socialist, for God’s sake.”

That may be.  But what the pundits routinely overlook is the fact that Bernie Sanders is far from being a utopian dreamer.  On the contrary, he is a formidable, determined, and remarkably effective politician.  Having served four terms as the most popular mayor in the history of Vermont’s largest city, he spent 16 years as his state’s sole representative in the House of Representatives, where he simultaneously stuck to his principles and managed to get a great deal of practical work done.  When it came time for “Bernie”—which is how Vermonters speak of him—to run for the Senate, he was elected by a landslide.  And when he declared his intention to seek the Democratic nomination, he raised millions of dollars in small-donor contributions in a matter of days—a feat that surprised just about everyone except the candidate himself.

The reason is that millions of Americans recognize in “Bernie” that rarest of creatures: an honest politician who means what he says and says what he believes.   He has never attacked an opponent personally and has never run a “negative” ad.  Instead, he insists on sticking to the issues.  He is a fearless enemy of Wall Street and advocates breaking up the big banks.  He is a tireless champion of the middle class and is calling for substantially higher taxes on the rich.  He believes that our social and economic system is rigged and argues fiercely for union rights, universal child care, free college education, and the expansion—rather than the dismantling—of Social Security and Medicare.  If all that amounts to “socialism,” then we are on the verge of becoming a socialist country, for an overwhelming majority of Americans want precisely the same things.

Most important than all of that, Bernie Sanders isn’t running to gratify his ego, and he didn’t decide to run until he was sure that he had a fighting chance.  His odds of winning the Democratic nomination may indeed be slim; but they aren’t zero, either.  Those who underestimate “Bernie” do so at their peril.  He has surprised the pontificators before.  He may yet surprise them again.

The separation of church and state is enshrined as a founding principle not only in the Constitution of the United States but also in the Constitution of France.   This is no accident.  The American and French republics both came into being as the result of revolutions against an oppressive “old order” in which religion played a major role.  Indeed, the men who created the two republics deeply influenced one another.  The leaders of our revolution were students of the Enlightenment who admired great French thinkers like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot.  The leaders of the French Revolution, for their part, were inspired by the example of our Founding Fathers, particularly by the personal risks they were prepared to take to champion the cause of liberty.  These great men, American and French, believed in the same ideals, because they revered the same ideas.

One of those ideas was a determination to keep religion out of the public life of their respective nations.  John Adams voiced this determination in no uncertain terms: “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”  James Madison went even further: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”  And Thomas  Jefferson was positively withering:  “There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity.  It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

Given these views, it is no surprise that, when the Founders declared our independence from Great Britain and its king, they also declared our freedom from Britain’s official and established religion, the Anglican Church.  When the French toppled, and eventually executed, their own king, they likewise ended the domination of the Roman Catholic Church, with its centuries-old ties to the monarchy and the ruling aristocracy.  Having done away with the “old order,” both nations embarked upon a new path—the same path—guaranteeing personal religious liberty to their citizens while insisting that religion and public life be severed forever.

It wasn’t long, however, before the paths of the two nations began to diverge and to do so dramatically.

Here, in the United States, religion has crept inexorably back into our public life.  Despite the separation of church and state decreed by our Constitution, sessions of Congress open with a prayer.  Despite the Constitution’s ban against the consideration of religion in the election of public officials, our Presidents feel obliged to attend annual “prayer breakfasts”.  Political candidates feel compelled to proclaim their faith loudly and often, as long as that faith is some version of Christianity.  And all across the land, evangelicals are now imposing their agenda on everyone: no equal rights for homosexuals,  no access to abortion or contraception for women, no requirement for those with “religious scruples” to obey the law or abide by the Constitution.  Here, religious freedom has come to mean freedom for the religious and for no one else.

The French, on the other hand, stayed the course, holding true to their founding principles.  In France, the public life of the nation and the private world of religion remain utterly separate.  Religious institutions are not allowed to interfere in politics, and overt displays of religious practice are not permitted in public places.  French politicians rarely speak of their religious beliefs, nor do they invoke religious convictions as arguments for, or against, political decisions.  French citizens are left free to believe whatever they wish, but those beliefs are a personal matter, not to be imposed upon others who may believe otherwise or believe in nothing at all.

The French word for all this laïcité.  This word is often translated as “secularism,” implying a complete rejection of religion and religious sentiments.  But that is not the case.  Its origins are ancient, going all the way to the epic poems of Homer, where the Greek word “laos” was the most inclusive term for an entire people or nation.  Some of that original sense still clings to laïcité.

Laïcité asserts that public and political institutions belong to the French people as a whole, not to any particular religious or ethnic group.   Laïcité means that a citizen of France is “French,” no matter where he or his ancestors were born, no matter what language he speaks, no matter what god he worships.  Laïcité  requires that a citizen’s obligations to the ideals of the French Republic—liberté, egalité, fraternité—supersede narrower, more parochial loyalties.

When the French refused to collaborate with the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, right-wing members of Congress thundered their outrage, accused them of cowardice, and demanded that the phrase “french fries” be changed to “freedom fries” on the menus of the three restaurants serving our oh-so-well-fed House of Representatives.  Without intending to, that silly gesture revealed an embarrassing truth: the people who gave us “french fries” seem to know more about “freedom” than we do.  If we truly want to protect and preserve our freedom, a little more French laïcité  wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush recently accused our current President of “intellectual arrogance,” because he dared to say that the reality and causes of climate change are now “settled science”.  Bush insisted that the science on climate change is “convoluted” and complained that the arrogance of those who think otherwise means that “now you can’t have a conversation about it, even”.

It is hard to imagine what sort of “conversation” he has in mind, since it is the thinking of Mr. Bush himself and others like him that is convoluted and arrogant.  Against all evidence, such people continue to deny the facts.  Against all reason, they persist in placating or pandering to the flat-earth society that passes for today’s Republican Party.  In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, they delay, deny, and want us to do nothing.

In the most literal sense, of course, the science on climate change isn’t “settled” and never will be.  Science never stops challenging settled propositions.  It never stops questioning and revising, testing and adapting.  That is what science and scientists do, and that is how scientific knowledge advances.  Scientific knowledge deals in probabilities, rarely in certainties.

There comes a time, however, when the probabilities become so overwhelmingly certain that further doubt and discussion are a waste of precious time.  On the question of climate change, that time arrived long ago.  We and other nations agreed to begin limiting the production of greenhouse gases in 1992.  Since then, we have done next to nothing, and the time that remains to us is not only precious but running out.

We are in the midst of what will very likely be the hottest year ever recorded.  Historic droughts are bedeviling California as well as much of the Middle East, where ecological catastrophe has played a major, though largely ignored, role in creating the chaos that is tearing Syria and Iraq apart.  Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were much worse than they might have been, because sea levels are a foot higher than they were a century ago and will soon become a good deal higher than that.  Houston, situated in a swamp very close to sea level, was just inundated by the worst flooding in its history.  Just weeks before, Eastern Australia was hit by a cyclone of titanic proportions, killing five people and causing billions of dollars in property damage, all the while Western Australia is withering under waterless skies.  Such extreme, violent and “abnormal” weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting for two decades.

The problem is that nations like ours seem incapable of planning for such abnormalities, either politically or economically.  To the extent we plan at all, we plan for what we imagine to be normal, rolling with the punches when something out of the ordinary happens, when events fall outside the “bell curve” of what we have come to expect.  But what happens when the natural world no longer behaves as we expect, when the “bell curve” no longer applies, when previously abnormal events for which we are utterly unprepared occur, not once in a hundred years, but every year?

Imagine a world in which agricultural production in California, which supplies most of the fruit and vegetables we consume, collapses.  Imagine a world in which all of Florida south of Lake Okeechobee is reclaimed by the sea, and the city of Miami simply disappears.  Imagine a world in which New York City south of Houston Street is underwater, the New York subway system turns into one long, permanent sewer, and the millions of rats that lurk there now move up onto the streets.  Imagine a world in which half of Africa turns into uninhabitable desert, and three hundred million desperate refugees scatter in every direction looking for food, water, and land.

These are not fantasies.  They are not even unlikely.  What is unlikely is that measures to prevent or prepare for such looming catastrophes would ever come up in the “conversation” Jeb Bush pretends to long for.  That would require Bush and his ilk to end their convenient evasions and confront reality.

By all accounts, Jeb Bush is a man with a brain.  If that is the case, then he is also a supremely arrogant one, for he has decided not to use it, choosing instead to subordinate his intellect to political gain.  Because of such arrogance, we are all of us going to pay a high price.  Around the world, millions already are.

In Ireland, an overwhelming majority of the electorate just voted in a national referendum to make same-sex marriage the law of the land—the first national referendum of its kind anywhere in the world, with one of the biggest voter turn-outs in recent memory.  This is so surprising  and so deeply ironic that it boggles the mind.

After all, the Republic of Ireland is one of the most Catholic countries in the world, long disparaged by many as a social and cultural backwater of almost medieval proportions.  For centuries, Roman Catholicism was more than the majority religion of the Irish people.  It was Ireland’s quasi-official religion, and the Roman Catholic Church was given a privileged role in the country’s public life, exercising sweeping influence on government, education and personal behavior.  It wasn’t very long ago that divorce was illegal, and homosexuality, abortion, and contraception were punished as crimes under Irish law, because the hierarchy of the Church demanded it.  Who would ever have imagined that Ireland, of all places, would take the lead in legalizing same-sex marriage?

And yet, that is precisely what happened.  It was the Irish people who decided to turn the page of history, affirmatively turning their backs on centuries of prejudice, discrimination and oppression.

There is another, even greater irony in this.  The number of Irish voters who just legalized same-sex marriage was 62 percent.  That’s almost exactly the same proportion of the electorate that here, in the United States, would like to do the same.  Like the Irish, Americans started coming to their senses long ago.  Like the Irish, they now believe that it’s time to turn the page of our own history, putting an intolerant past behind us. If we held our own national referendum tomorrow, there is little doubt that same-sex marriage would, by a huge margin, become the law in our land too.

But that isn’t going to happen.  Instead, we are condemned to crawl our way toward this simple act of justice, state by state, one fragile and bitterly contested judicial and legislative decision at a time.  Unless and until the Supreme Court intervenes, which it may yet do, gay couples will be given their rights in one part of the country but denied them in another.  This makes no legal or moral sense, and it never has.

It makes no sense to say, as so many Republicans do, that decisions about marriage belong to the states.  States rights do not trump human rights, and no state should be allowed to deny its citizens equal protection under the law.  It is utterly ridiculous, not to mention scandalous, for a legally married same-sex couple from Massachusetts to become criminals the moment they cross the border into Mississippi—putting aside the obvious question why any decent person would want to set foot in Mississippi in the first place.

And it makes not even a shred of sense for evangelicals to blather on about the danger same-sex marriage might pose to “traditional marriage,” as if such a thing were even remotely possible.  Heterosexuals won’t stop marrying one another because homosexuals do the same thing, any more than bees will stop cohabiting with bees because ants prefer to cohabit with ants.  Same-sex couples aren’t trying to impose their choices on the rest of us.  They merely want the right to make their own choices, the same right we all have.

Finally, it’s about time we got real about “traditional marriage,” which is far from being the idyllic institution it’s cracked up to be.  Half the heterosexual marriages in our country end in divorce, many of them more than once.  Indeed, divorce rates are the highest among the very evangelicals who scream the loudest about the dangers of homosexuality.  With or without same-sex marriage, “traditional marriage” would seem to be an iffy proposition at best.

It may even be that same-sex couples can teach us all a thing or two about the true meaning of tolerance, fidelity., and the love of one human being for another  After all, they’ve had to fight for these things, and they’ve been fighting for years.  In Ireland, they just won their fight.  We could all learn something from their struggle.  And we can certainly learn something from the Irish.

The inability of Republican Presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to state clearly whether they would have authorized the war in Iraq, had the decision been theirs to make, has created a predictable media flap. If we are lucky, this furor may cause us, once and for all, to own up to the awful mess we have made of the Middle East.  If we are even luckier, it may point us in a direction that is more constructive and hopeful.

On a purely human level, it is tempting to pity Jeb Bush, because he has a brother’s reputation to protect—which in this case is not an easy job.  There is, however, no reason to pity, let alone excuse, Marco Rubio as he tries to wiggle his way through this wormy quagmire.  Jeb Bush may be worth a bit of pity.  Marco Rubio and his ilk deserve nothing but contempt.

The invasion of Iraq, and the invasion of Afghanistan which preceded it, are arguably the greatest military and foreign policy disasters in American history, having unleashed a whirlwind of chaos and carnage that shows no sign of abating nor any hope of being contained or controlled.  A case could be made—though I for one don’t propose to make it—that some justification existed to invade Afghanistan.  No conceivable case can be cobbled together to justify the invasion of Iraq.  That decision seems not merely wrong today, in retrospect, more than a decade later; it was dead wrong on the day it was made, and to pretend otherwise is an exercise in folly or falsehood.

The invasion  of Iraq wasn’t an honest, rational decision that simply didn’t work out.  It wasn’t a defensible response to the best evidence available at the time.  It wasn’t an “error in judgment” made by well-intentioned people.  And it wasn’t a “simple mistake”.  The invasion of Iraq was nothing less than the inevitable consequence of a premeditated lie.

Who were the liars?  President George W. Bush liked.  Vice President Richard Cheney lied.  National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice lied.  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lied.  UN Ambassador John Bolton lied.  CIA Director George Tenet lied.  Neo-conservative intellectuals Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl lied.  All these people, and others, lied to Congress and the media.  They lied to the American people and our allies.  They lied to the United Nations and the world.  Indeed, they are still lying, unrepentant and apparently unashamed.  Hiding behind their credentials and their casuistry, holed up in their lavish homes and their lush academic and foundation jobs, these people are worse than liars; they are common criminals.

The crimes these people have committed, however, are anything but common.  Their lies killed 5,000 Americans and left at least 50,000 wounded, many of whom will never recover from their wounds, will never be whole again, will never be fathers or mothers, will never become the productive citizens and human beings they might have been.  We shall never know how many Iraqis were killed, were maimed, or made homeless.  Their number is certainly in the hundreds of thousands, more likely in the millions.   The maiming and the killing and the dying continue to this day.  This will never stop until we call out the criminals and proclaim to the entire world the enormity of their crimes.

The German people learned this awful truth when they were forced to confront the fundamental evil of Nazism, to confess their own culpability for the carnage of the Second World War, and to come face to face with the demonic attempt of their country’s leaders to exterminate the Jews and the Gypsies and all the “inferior races” of Europe.  This process of confrontation and confession, of remembrance and restitution, is not yet complete in Germany, and it never will be.  Nonetheless, truth-telling was the only road by which Germany was once again able to win for itself a place among civilized nations.  It was the only way the German people could once again live with themselves.

In saying this, it is not my intention to indulge in the cheap trick of comparing what we have done in the Middle East with the uniquely awful tragedy of the Holocaust.  My sole purpose is to talk about means and ends.  If our end is to put an end to the awfulness we have wrought, then we must begin with truth.

Truth-telling is the only possible remedy for us.  It is the only possible expiation for what has been done in our name.  We are a democratic people.  As such, we cannot escape responsibility for the deeds done and for the actions taken by our leaders.  Like or not, we elected these people.  Like it or not, we must hold ourselves accountable for what they do, and have done, as our representatives.

We could go on pretending, of course.  We could go on evading, explaining, and excusing.  But none of that would, or will, alter the truth or even begin to repair the damage.

It is the criminals who are ultimately responsible for the crimes.  But until we brand them as the criminals they truly are, until we judge them, hold them accountable, and punish them for their crimes, the guilt will also be ours.

The Governor of Texas recently announced that the Texas State Guard—not to be confused with its National Guard, which has certain, inconvenient entanglements with the federal government—is being called out to “monitor” a military training exercise which the Pentagon intends to conduct in several southwestern states.  He provided the following rationale: “It is important for Texans to know that their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties will not be infringed.”  Infringed by whom?  By the federal government, of course.

This bizarre proclamation came in response to a feverish conspiracy theory now making the rounds of our country’s lunatic fringe, the claim that the federal government is getting ready to impose martial law and, as part of this devious plan, is building a series of secret detention centers buried—if you can believe it—in tunnels beneath a handful of abandoned Walmart stores stretching from California to Oklahoma.

There are certainly many reasons to view the actions of the federal government (or any level of government, for that matter) with a skeptical and watchful eye.  If we needed any further demonstration of this, we got it when Edward Snowden exposed the illegal and sweeping surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.  But a plot hatched by Walmart and the Pentagon to lock up the gun-toting patriots of Texas?  This eruption of paranoia raises the hysteria jump bar  a couple of notches higher than anything we have seen before.

Let it be said that Texas is not the only loony state in our wonderfully loony union.  In the Great, Crazy State of Alabama, the Chief Justice is an evangelical wing-nut who got kicked out of office for trying to install a monument of the ten commandments in the state capitol, was promptly reelected, and immediately required Alabama judges to defy the federal courts by refusing to recognize same-sex marriages.  In the Great, Crazy State of Tennessee, the House of Representatives recently voted to designate the bible as their state’s “official book,” to complement its “official bird,” its “official fish,” and, for all I know, its “official rock”.  In the Great, Crazy State of Mississippi, almost a third of GOP voters not very long ago told pollsters they would support a law criminalizing interracial marriage, which just happens to have been declared unconstitutional 40 years ago.  And in the Great, Crazy State of Louisiana, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan may soon be running for Congress—again.  There is, in short, plenty of craziness to go around.

Still, Texas is in a class all by itself.  The lunacy of Texas, like the sheer size of the state, is uniquely gargantuan.  This cries out for an explanation.

I think it may be that the worst aspects of our national experience all converge in Texas as they do nowhere else.  Southern racism.  Secessionist defiance.  The delusional fairy tale of the western frontier and “rugged pioneers”.  A pathological obsession with guns.  And of course, the unholy and corrupting influence of Big Oil and all its billions.  They all come together, to an unrivaled degree, in Texas.

Then, there is all that self-aggrandizing mythology.

For 13 years in the early 19th century, Texas was a separate Republic, having declared its independence from Mexico, which had won its own independence from Spain a generation earlier.  Texans today—as least “Anglo” Texans—look back upon this time as an heroic age, in which courageous patriots struggled against all odds to win their freedom.  The ultimate symbol of this struggle is the Alamo, where in 1836 several hundred “Texians” were defeated and killed by an invading Mexican army.

The reality is less heroic.  The so-called “Texas Revolution” was in fact a brutal land grab by slave-owning whites.  The government of Mexico had outlawed slavery, and the “heroes” of Texas were quite correctly worried that they were about to lose their human property.  Their ultimate victory led not only to the preservation and expansion of slavery, it also led to the massacre of thousands of Native Americans who not surprisingly thought they might be better off under a Mexican administration.  This, needless to say, is not how John Wayne told the tale in his 1960 movie, arguably the most lavish and expensive  propaganda film ever made.  Unfortunately, most contemporary “Texians” have swallowed the propaganda.

Last but not least, there is the physical reality of Texas itself, as bleak and colorless a landscape as the mind can imagine: 800 miles long, 800 miles wide, larger than France, almost twice the size of Germany, nearly 270,000 square miles of…nothing.  No wonder Texas is so crazy.  If you lived in such a place, you’d go crazy too.

The stunning results of this week’s national election in the United Kingdom were eerily similar to those of our own mid-term elections last fall.  Pollsters in both countries predicted close races, with uncertain outcomes.  In the U.S., it was never expected that Democrats could retake the House, but it seemed entirely possible that they might retain, even expand, their majority in the Senate.  That didn’t happen.  In the U.K., the Conservatives seemed to be on the verge of disaster, and it was widely predicted that they, even with their coalition partners the Liberal Democrats in tow, might not be able to retain a majority, leading to months of post-election chaos.  That didn’t happen, either.  Defying all predictions, the Conservatives won outright, winning a slim majority all on their own.  The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, were decimated, while the Labour Party lost ground nearly everywhere, causing the leaders of both parties to promptly resign.

What happened?

For one thing, the pollsters in Britain got the election wildly wrong, just as pollsters here got it wrong last November, failing to foresee that voters on the right would come out in droves while those on the left would stay home, unconvinced that the Liberal Democrats or Labour offered clear, credible alternatives.

There was, however, one exception to this pattern—an exception that took everyone by surprise.  It occurred in Scotland.  There, left-leaning voters did indeed turn out, but instead of turning out for Labour, they swept the Scottish National Party into power.  Until this election, Scotland had been a Labour stronghold.  No more.  Of 59 Scottish seats in the British House of Commons, the SNP now holds 56, a result that stunned even the leaders of the SNP itself.

Just eight months ago, the SNP demanded, and got, a referendum to test the idea of Scottish independence.  That idea was soundly defeated.  In the wake of that defeat, many concluded that the Scottish National Party was finished, along with its dream of an independent Scotland.   Just seconds after the latest election results became clear, however, pundits in the U.K. rushed to a new conclusion: that the desire for independence was about to enjoy a comeback.

But another, more significant, factor is at play.  The Scottish National Party stands for something a good deal more threatening than political independence.  It stands for an entirely different social and political philosophy.

Scotland has its own Parliament; of the 129 seats in that Parliament, only 12 are held by Tories.  Scotland has its own version of Britain’s National Health System, one that is more comprehensive, and many would say, more effective, than its English counterpart.  Indeed, the Scots have more in common with the egalitarian Scandinavians than with the governing elite in Westminster, simpering in their upper-class accents and strutting in their bespoke suits.  The Scots are quite simply tired of being lectured to by such people.  They are tired of five years of “austerity” that have done little to restore the U.K.’s economic health and nothing whatever to benefit a majority of the British people.

In the cushy suburbs surrounding London, where the Tories hold sway, the Scots are routinely dismissed as spongers and welfare drones.  In Scotland itself, the relentless accumulation of wealth by the privileged few is despised as selfish Darwinian greed.  The stunning victory of the SNP is a reflection of this fundamental divide.

The irony in all this is that the idea of free-market capitalism to which the Tories are so devoted was invented by Adam Smith, a Scot to his fingertips.  However, Smith understood what the Tories seem to have forgotten: the market only works when it is channeled by what he called the “moral sentiments” of common decency, human kindness, and social obligation.  Ignore these sentiments, and we are left with an amoral monstrosity, with a market, not a nation.  Smith’s modern-day devotees in London, Washington, and Brussels may have forgotten his warning, but his fellow Scots have not.

In the wake of this election, Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to govern a “United Kingdom”.  Despite his victory, this quintessential child of the elite is in for a tough time, because the British people are less united than they have been in three centuries.  Whether the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland survives as a political entity remains to be seen. It is sadly clear that it ceased to be a united society long ago.

These pages are usually dedicated to subjects like politics or religion, which offend sensibilities and provoke heated debate.  Which is why I write about them in the first place.  However, the time has come to discuss a subject that may be less spicy but is far more significant—trade agreements.  That’s right: trade agreements.

If the mere thought causes you to hold back a big yawn of anticipatory boredom, I can’t blame you.  It would be infinitely more amusing to mock the dysfunctional antics of our political parties or the pratfalls of their sometimes laughable Presidential candidates. But the real importance of such things is trivial in comparison with trade agreements, which have a direct, tangible, and lasting impact on the daily lives and future prospects of billions of people around the world.  Next to all that, a question like who will become the next President of the United States is a quaint historical footnote.

And right now, there’s a whopper of a deal on the table.  It is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or TTP, and it will set the terms of trade among eleven nations around the Pacific Rim.  Although the terms are not yet known (more about that in a moment), it is safe to say that the TTP will determine the fate of millions of jobs, thousands of businesses, and entire industries on at least four continents.

TTP is merely the latest in a long series of so-called “free trade” agreements in which we and other nations have participated.  Most have breezed through the approval process with little controversy or public notice.  TTP, on the other hand, is causing a stink.  Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the one raising the stink, asking fundamental questions about the consequences of TTP and calling for a public debate before its ratification.  Her effrontery sparked President Obama to bristle:  “I love Elizabeth, but she’s just wrong on this.”  Coming from Mr. Cool himself, that’s a rare reprimand, especially when it’s aimed at one of his most steadfast supporters.

The problem, of course, is that Senator Warren isn’t just any old bottle and brick thrower.  Apart from her status as the Joan of Arc of progressive Democrats, she is a renowned legal scholar and one of the country’s foremost experts on commercial law.  Elizabeth Warren, in other words, knows a thing or two about business, economics, and, yes, trade agreements.  The red flags she is raising cannot therefore be brushed aside.

And what are those red flags?

The first is that so-called “free trade” agreements rarely deliver on their promises.  The promises are always the same.  “Free trade,” the fairy tale goes, makes life better for everyone by opening up markets, stimulating economic activity, and creating jobs.  Indeed, the very phrase, “free trade,” is a public relations euphemism designed to sound enticing.  What could possibly be wrong with “free trade”?

The answer, unfortunately, is: quite a lot.  While there is nearly universal consensus among our political and financial elites that free trade is a good thing, there is remarkably little evidence to support the fairy tale.  On the contrary, in the decades since we’ve been signing these deals, countless jobs have been shipped overseas, entire manufacturing industries have disappeared, and the American and European middle classes that once depended on those jobs and industries have shriveled.

The second red flag is the way TTP is being negotiated, which is exactly the way all such deals have been negotiated—in secret.  Members of Congress are permitted to see the sausage being made, but they are forbidden, by law, from discussing the ingredients.  We are told that the details are too complex to be understood by ordinary mortals until the terms are finalized, that involvement by amateurs—a.k.a., ordinary citizens—would merely gum up the works.  In other words, the sausage-makers think we’re too dumb to know what’s good for us.

Which brings us to the final red flag—the sausage-makers themselves.  The overwhelming majority of those negotiating these agreements are corporate executives, members of their staffs, and their richly compensated lobbyists.  These people aren’t negotiating “free trade” in the nation’s interest; they’re negotiating deals that will serve their own commercial interests.

The most flagrant demonstration of this reality appears in another mega-deal still being negotiated between the United States and the European Union.  This one is called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP.  Among its many unsavory ingredients is a provision allowing corporations to sue nations for imposing regulations, taxes or tariffs that might diminish their profits.  In other words, if TTIP goes through, national sovereignty will take a back seat to commerce.

For more than a hundred years, corporate capitalism has been pursuing the same agenda.  Corporations expect us to bail them out when they’re in trouble.  They expect to be protected by our laws and, if push comes to shove, by our military power.  But they expect to give nothing in return.  Commerce comes before country, profit before patriotism.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is raising red flags that needed to be raised long ago.  It’s time to rally round and join her on the barricades.

In the run-up to our last two Presidential elections, the field of potential Republican candidates had all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned night of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey under the big top, when there still was a big top.  There was Sarah Palin, whose claim to expertise in foreign affairs was being able to “see Russia” from her house.  There was Rick Perry, who intended to eliminate three federal agencies but could only remember the names of two.  And of course, there was Rick Santorum, who solemnly proclaimed: “One of the things I will talk about, that no President has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.”  What an amazing and amusing crew they were!  Who could ever have imagined that we might someday see the likes of them again?

Yet here we are, still a year and a half away from the next Presidential election, and it is already plain that we are about to be treated to a reprise of the same spectacle.

First to queue up was Ted Cruz, the junior Senator from Texas—and a dead ringer for Robin Williams in his role as Popeye.  Cruz’s announcement was attended by all the suspense preceding the punchline of a Catskills comic, since it has long been clear that patience and humility are not on the Senator’s list of personal qualities.  It is said that, when he was at Harvard Law School, Cruz refused to study with graduates of the “minor Ivies”.  Being a “Princeton man” himself, he presumably didn’t want to demean himself by consorting with mere mortals.  That such a man would now want to run the government he so recently tried to shut down should surprise no one.  His hubris is as irrepressible as his smarmy grin.

Cruz the Condescending was quickly followed into the ring by the Paul the Pugnacious.  Rand Paul is notoriously thin-skinned about any criticism of himself or his sometime loony opinions, but he is said to love a good fight—as long as he is the only one to deliver the blows.  Thus it was that he immediately chose the safest punching bag for any Republican hopeful, Hillary Clinton, slandering her as an example of everything that he imagines to be wrong with Washington.  Which, of course, is quite literally everything.  Like Cruz, however, this does not seem to deter Senator Paul from wanting to run the place himself.

Just a few days after Paul delivered his punches, Marco Rubio decided to take a swing.  Rubio is the poster child for that rather delusional wing of the GOP that hopes to attract Hispanics, all the while it denies them the most basic legal rights, let alone the prospect of citizenship.  It hasn’t dawned on these people that Rubio is Cuban.  Cubans have about as much in common with other Hispanic Americans as Italian Americans do with Julius Caesar.  In any event, Rubio announced his run with grandiose talk of an “American 21st century,” which, under his leadership, will not repeat the tax-and-spend mistakes of “last century” leaders, like Hillary’s husband.  It appears to have escaped Senator Rubio’s notice that we had a budget surplus under Bill Clinton, which was promptly squandered—and then some—by the new century’s first Republican President.

And all this is only for starters.

It is nearly certain that Ben Carson, whose social and political views would be at home in the Stone Age, is going to run, as is Mike Huckabee, who simply cannot shake the quixotic notion that a jowly Southern Baptist preacher and sometime Fox News Channel host is qualified to become the country’s next commander in chief.

Then, there is Scott Walker, nominally the governor of Wisconsin but in actuality an employee of Koch Industries, whose inspired free-market leadership has taken his state to the bottom of the list in job creation and economic growth.  Not to be outdone in the contradictory competition between fact and fantasy is the jolly old elf from New Jersey, Chris Christie, who lumbers on, unfazed by unending scandal, unembarrassed by the abysmal economy of his state, and apparently uninterested in the dismally low regard in which he is held by voters who now overwhelmingly regret having elected him.

And last of all, we are still awaiting the inevitable proclamation from His Royal Majesty,  John Ellis Bush, set to become the third member of the Bush dynasty to pursue his anointed destiny.  Prince Jeb may get all the way to a coronation, since he is already the de facto front-runner, being able to raise more cash with a few before-lunch phone calls to rich Bush cronies than all the other Republican hopefuls put together.

What all this says about the Republican Party’s prospects for winning the White House in 2016 is beyond my reckoning.  What it says about the state of the party itself is another matter.  We haven’t heard a substantive word from any of these circus clowns—just the same old clichés about the evils of big government, the looming catastrophe of “entitlements,” and the sad plight of victimized, over-taxed “job creators”.

There may have been a time when the Republican Party had a coherent and constructive political philosophy, but if so, that time is gone. It has become little more than a three-ring circus, replete with dancing elephants, fire-breathing sword swallowers, and slap-stick clowns who smother themselves in grease paint.

Once it was said that the Roman emperors gave the people bread and circuses to sustain them and entertain them.  Having forgotten about the bread, at least the Republican Party still knows how to put on a good show.  It’s time to sit back, be entertained, and get some cotton candy.

We seem, at long last, to be on the verge of a nuclear agreement with Iran—that is, if recalcitrant Republicans in Congress don’t throw a hissy fit and jettison years of difficult and delicate negotiations. Those who oppose any sort of deal with Iran invoke one reason above all others: the notion that Iran’s leaders are evil, power-made lunatics who are utterly incapable of behaving rationally and will therefore never be able to enter into an agreement that we can depend upon.  In their view, the very idea of negotiating with the Iranians is utterly fruitless or, worse yet, tantamount to bargaining with the devil.

The difficulty for those who make this argument is the fact that the United States has a long history of bargaining with devils.  It was Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservatives, who famously denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” but quite happily signed a nuclear deal with its leader.  The same Ronald Reagan not only dealt with Saddam Hussein—a devil if ever there was one—but also provided Saddam with military aid when Iraq invaded Iran.  The elder George Bush turned a blind eye when the man his son later called a “homicidal dictator” unleashed chemical weapons on his own citizens.  And worst of all, it was Saint Ronald who okayed a secret arms deal with the very Iranians his worshipful fans now deplore and then illegally used the money to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.  Given this tawdry record of dealing with devils, the current caterwauling of Republicans in Congress is both hypocritical and absurd.

Now, no sane person wants the Iranians to get their hands on nuclear weapons.  Indeed, no sane person should want any nation to have nuclear weapons, including our own.  There are those who try to draw a line between countries like Iran, on the one hand, and supposedly “responsible” nations like ours, on the other.  They should be reminded that the only country which has actually used nuclear weapons is the United States of America.   Say what you will about the reasons, the fact remains that we are the ones who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating several hundred thousand Japanese in the process.  Whether that act was “responsible,” let alone necessary, I will leave to historians to sort out.

Nor, on the other hand, should any sane person have so much as one scintilla of sympathy or toleration for Iran’s theocratic government.  The intrusion of religion into the public life of any nation is a prescription for disaster—whether the intrusion comes from Islamic extremism in Iran, Orthodox extremism in Israel, or Evangelical extremism in the United States.  Religion and liberty do not mix.  They never have.  They never will.

None of this, however, changes the fact that, viewed dispassionately, the Iranians can be said to have perfectly logical reasons for thinking about the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons.  After all, they are surrounded by hostile enemies: by the Sunni Muslim states of the Middle East, by Jihadis in Afghanistan, by Israel, and, of course, by the ubiquitous military—and nuclear—presence of the United States.

In 1953, the United States and Britain launched a coup that toppled the only democratically elected government in Iran’s long and ancient history.  Thereafter, the same two countries imposed the authoritarian regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi on the Iranian nation.  It was the Shah’s overthrow in 1979 that led to the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and a draconian embargo on Iranian economic activity, which has poisoned the relationship between the two countries ever since.

For the Iranians to wish to arm themselves against such threats is dangerous to everyone.  But isn’t paranoid, and it certainly isn’t irrational.

Whether we like it or not, Iran is one of the two most populous and powerful nations in the Middle East, it has played a central role in that region for more than three thousand years, and it isn’t going away any time soon.  To imagine that we can ignore or browbeat—let alone invade and subdue—a nation several times the size of Iraq is folly.  And to think that its people, with their ancient culture and their rich literary and intellectual tradition, are mindless lunatics is utter nonsense.

We do not, in fact, know that the Iranians are actively planning to develop nuclear weapons.  But if we want to forestall that possibility, then we must understand the reasons that could cause them to contemplate such plans in the first place.  If we expect the Iranians to behave “rationally,” then we must do the same.  Given the lunacy in Congress, that may be infinitely tougher than dealing with the Iranians.