THE MORNING AFTER

Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for the Presidency.  I shall do everything I can to defeat him, and then everything I can to keep alive Bernie's movement.  I have had my say on this and shall not continue to blog about it until after November 6th.  I consider him an existential threat to what remains of democracy in America.  If Nate Cohn, Nate Silver, and Sam Wang are right, Trump is not likely to win  --  not at all likely.  Lord, I hope they are all getting this one right.

GREETINGS TO AN OLD FRIEND

Austen Haigler, would you tell Michael Pendelbury hello, and that I met his son when I went north to speak at Brown and MIT!  He introduced himself by saying that I had slept in his bed before he was born [in South Africa]!  Small world.

MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MARX

You may recall that on April 21st and 22nd, I spoke at Brown and MIT about my long engagement with the thought of Karl Marx.  The Brown talk was recorded, and Brown has now put it up on YouTube.  You may access it here,  The first thirty-five or forty minutes is me talking, after which there is an hour and twenty minutes of discussion.  It was an interesting event, graced by the presence of the distinguished Kant scholar Paul Guyer.  The MIT event was not recorded, unfortunately.  My last talk at MIT was in the late fall of 1963.  I hope I do not have to wait quite so long for the next one.

FEAST OR FAMINE

All of a sudden, I am swamped with more interesting and thoughtful comments than I can respond to.  I am going to start by replying to a comment by Richard Lewis that is, for me at least, extremely provocative.  Here is what he wrote:

“I disagree with the calculations that would cause a person on the left to reluctantly pull the lever for Clinton. I would argue that there is a factor which trumps the others; existential threat to civilization via global nuclear war. I would argue, based on the candidates' explicit statements, foreign policy advisors' backgrounds, and personal inclinations, that under Clinton the chances of a nuclear confrontation with Russia might be around 1%; under Trump about 0%. I would argue that even this small difference in odds dwarfs any progressive pragmatic inclination to go for Clinton over Trump.

I'm also not sure I see Clinton quite the way Prof Wolff does - as a 'known' quantity - dull, center-right, cautious, etc. On the contrary I fear she may be as much or more of a loose cannon than Trump. The only two instances where she has had real decision making power - the 1990's health reform debacle and the Libya air strike debacle (in depth reporting on both these is available, and disturbing) don't bode well for her basic mental stability and ability to listen to advisors and make rational decisions based on that advice. In short, she scares me more than Trump.”

This comment especially moved me because I spent a number of years, more than half a century ago, thinking about very little else besides the threat of nuclear war, lecturing, writing, arguing in public and private about the threat and informing myself as much as possible about every aspect of it.  Only one president, John F. Kennedy, has brought this country to the brink of a nuclear war, and so far as I am concerned, that fact alone is sufficient to judge him a disaster as a president.

If I really believed that the probabilities rather casually tossed off by Richard Lewis were in fact correct, that alone would not merely justify voting for Trump rather than Clinton but would argue strongly for planning her assassination.  A nuclear war would surely kill more than one hundred million people, pollute large portions of the earth’s surface for countless millennia, and destroy the world’s economy for generations.  A 1% probability of such a catastrophe would, by standard expected utility calculations, imply the certainty of an outcome worse than a world war.

I have no idea at all how Richard Lewis arrived at those numbers, nor do I have any clear idea how I might come up with alternative estimates myself, but I think I can say something about the circumstances under which the United States government would deploy and use nuclear weapons [I am utterly unable to judge the probability that the Russian government would do so.]  First of all, dramatic movies to the contrary notwithstanding, presidents do not make these decisions alone nor do they carry them out alone.  Elaborate bureaucratic procedures are in place that make such decisions very much collective chain-of-command decisions.  I think it is inconceivable that Clinton would initiate such a decision under any circumstances I can now imagine, nor do I think that the notoriously risk-averse US high command would press her do make such a decision.  I can conceive of circumstances in which Trump would be moved to issue such an order, but if he were to do so, I do not think it would be carried out.  Instead, almost certainly, there would be a defensive gathering of generals and admirals around him who would carefully, delicately try to dissuade him while simultaneously consulting with civilian figures about the procedures for removing a president from command on grounds of medical incapacitation.  I am quite serious about this.

Short of nuclear war, would Clinton be more or less likely to use military force than Trump?  This is a very important question and one that it is uncommonly difficult to answer, because of the incoherent quality of Trump’s statements on these matters.  He talks casually of “not taking off the table” the use of nuclear weapons in Europe [!!! Against whom???]  He brags wildly of wiping out ISIS in weeks, without the slightest apparent awareness of the military situation on the ground.  Are we to take these statements seriously?  Are we to ignore them entirely?  I have no idea.

We do have grounds for making predictions about Clinton’s use of military force.  She would be hawkish, as it is now common to say, which means that during her presidency, we would probably see a number of military deployments overseas, and perhaps the initiation of yet another limited war.  That is one of the principal reasons why I so strongly supported Sanders as against her.  My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Trump would be very likely also to order military deployments, particularly if he surrounds himself with the sorts of advisors whose names he has thus far given out.

Well, enough speculation.  If anyone has factually grounded probability estimates of the use of nuclear weapons by either Trump or Clinton, I would very much like to hear them.

ADDENDUM

It was Nader who flipped Florida in 2000 by winning almost 100,000 [not 50,000] votes, almost all of which would surely have gone for Gore.

I STAND CORRECTED

S. Wallerstein calls me to account for my comment about the butterfly ballot.  He is quite right.  No one could have predicted anything that bizarre.  On the other hand, the Gore/Bush contest looked to be quite close, and it was, I think, entirely predictable that even a relatively small Nader vote might throw a state into the Bush column and give him the election.  In the peculiar American electoral system, third parties frequently can have this sort of effect, both on the right and on the left.  As is frequently observed, in a parliamentary system, small third parties can play a very important role in national politics, making them a rational vehicle for dissent from the dominant consensus.

Carl corrects my faulty memory of the numbers of probably unintentional Buchanan votes.  I called them "Jewish" because I recalled that they showed up in a heavily Jewish area, which is what led commentators to conclude that they were mistakes, given Buchanan's politics.  Is that memory also faulty?

I think it is fair to say that no one anticipated the appalling Bush v. Gore High Court decision.  As I recall, the late and entirely unlamented Antonin Scalia actually said in his opinion that the decision was not to be taken as a precedent!

Pretty clearly, my memory is not what it used to be [and in fact ever was].  In the future, I shall rely more heavily on Google.

AN APPRECIATION OF DAVID PALMETER'S COMMENT

I should like to thank David Palmeter for his extremely useful and insightful contribution to the on-going discussion of the painful choices facing progressives in this election cycle.  He takes us back to the 1968 Humphrey/Nixon contest, which I recall vividly.  I think I have already told the story of my voting experience that year.  Depressed by the course of events, and momentarily possessed of the fantasy that things needed to get worse before they could get better, I went into the polling place on Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights determined to vote for Richard Nixon.  In those days, one went behind a curtain and pulled a lever.  I reached for the lever to vote Republican, but my right arm, wiser than my heart or head, refused to obey, and in the end I voted for Humphrey.

David Palmeter's comment illustrates an important fact about complex rule-governed bureaucratic institutions like the America government:  sometimes seemingly minor changes can trigger major consequences.  Had the Florida "butterfly ballot" not been so confusing, 50,000 or so Jewish voters would not have accidentally voted for a candidate -- Pat Buchanan  -- who could not possibly have been their intended choice, and Gore would have become President.  There would have been no opportunity for a politicized Supreme Court majority to go down in history as a disgrace to the legal profession.

I offer a consoling compromise to those who are faint of heart:  If you live in a solidly blue state, indulge yourself by withholding your vote from Clinton, and instead be sure to vote in every down-ballot race, selecting the leftmost available candidate.  However, if, like me, you live in a purple state that could turn blue by a slender majority, then work for and vote for the entire Democratic ticket, regardless of your feelings about Clinton.  Would you really like to explain to a middle-aged Iraqi, orphaned during the "shock and awe," why you voted for Ralph Nader in Florida because you found Al Gore too centrist for your refined tastes?