"Hard Work, in a Rigged System" might have been a better title for this OpEd by Sohrab Ahmari in TAC.

Reproduced in full below:

Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to “make hard work cool again.” The long-shot Republican candidate has been visiting places GOP politicians typically avoid, like college campuses, preaching the supposedly countercultural virtue of toil. His messaging won’t win him the nomination, much less address the crises of the American labor market. Yet they are a striking reminder of the stability of Whig ideology in our political life across nearly 200 years.

Whig ideology—or “the Whig Counter-Reformation,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it—denies the existence of enduring social classes in the United States, or else suggests that there are no enduring conflicts between the classes. Social misery is the product of either rare misfortune or the failure of indolent individuals to seize opportunity. And reform isn’t a matter of redressing imbalances in power through politics. No, it’s the heart or “the culture” that has to be reformed. Hard work has to be made “cool again,” as Ramaswamy says.

In framing things this way, Ramaswamy stands in an old tradition. Whig ideology was the response mounted by America’s market elites to the Jacksonian uprising. For decades since the Founding, America’s market system had chugged along, industrializing the economy, proletarianizing its once-independent working men, and imposing enormous new stresses on the yeomanry. But it wasn’t until the crash of 1819 that the frustrations of the many, and their sense of vulnerability relative to the few, congealed into what then–Secretary of War John C. Calhoun described memorably as a “general mass of disaffection.”

Not unlike Donald Trump in 2015-16, Andrew Jackson was the unlikely outsider who gave voice to the disaffected. His 1824 presidential bid began as a ruse by local oligarchs against their enemies in his native Tennessee but soon resonated nationally. Old Hickory, who had been left in debt by his own failed stint as a land speculator, blamed paper money and banks for the people’s suffering. Blocked by the “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in 1824, Jackson clinched the presidency four years later. His anger soon found a more specific target in the imperious Second Bank of the United States. The BUS was a private, profiteering institution that was chartered and partially funded by Congress but that strenuously resisted democratic control. This, although it effectively acted as a central bank and disciplined the flow of credit by buying and holding—or selling and demanding specie for—the paper notes of much weaker state banks.

Jackson’s anti-Bank message resonated with broad ranks of American society (although the exact share of the population that supported Jackson’s Bank War has long been contested by historians). Western and Southern smallholders, urban workers in the North, and smaller capitalists everywhere who felt excluded by the establishment rallied to the Jacksonian cause, as did reformist intellectuals like Orestes Brownson, George Bancroft, William Leggett, Frances “Fanny” Wright, William Cullen Bryant, and so on.

Jackson’s “solution” to the tyranny of the BUS was small government: Another old pattern in American history is the libertarian conviction that often goes hand-in-hand with populist sentiment. Jackson, while in some respects an expansive nationalist, was in others a Jeffersonian strict constructionist. He had long believed that “the congress has no constitutional power to grant a charter...of paper issues,” as he told his Democratic senatorial ally (and one-time duel opponent) Thomas Hart Benton. So he vetoed the Bank’s charter when it came up for renewal, and then proceeded to remove federal taxpayer funds from its coffers, placing them instead in select state banks, the so-called pets.

For our purposes, the substance of Jackson’s reforms in the Bank War matters less than the reaction they elicited from market elites jittery about the rise of democracy, both political and economic. Save for a few pseudo-aristocratic strongholds like Rhode Island and South Carolina, the franchise had in this period expanded to include many formerly excluded ranks of white men. A people grown accustomed to having a more direct say in political matters also increasingly demanded popular control over market institutions: not just banking and the currency, but also the workplace became a site of political contestation through the rise of the labor movement.

It was against this backdrop that Whig ideology began to take hold among the wealthy and upper middle classes. An earlier generation of old-school Federalists—men like Chancellor James Kent, Noah Webster, and, yes, Alexander Hamilton—could simply insist that the rabble have no business shaping policy. As Noah Webster wrote, if distinctions between rich and poor were to endure, and they always would, then why not recognize them in the structure of the state? For “the man who has half a million of dollars in property...has a much higher interest in government, than the man who has little or no property.” The one deserves a much greater say than the other.

Yet by the 1830s, Jackson and the Jacksonians had made it impossible to speak this way. One sign of the change came in 1834, when Roger Brooke Taney, among the most militant Jacksonians in Old Hickory’s Parlor (as opposed to “Kitchen”) Cabinet, returned to his home in Baltimore, having helped the general slay the banking “monster” as his Treasury secretary. The local pro-Bank organ, the Chronicle, mocked the working classes who turned up to greet Taney. Their horses, the paper noted, bore collar marks on their necks—meaning, these were poor people with humble livestock.

Democratic papers naturally took advantage of the misstep and, as usual, counterpunched twice as hard. If the Chronicle’s reporter had examined the hands of the men riding the work-worn animals, bellowed the Jacksonian Republican, he would have noticed the same “striking indications of work as were witnessed on the necks of the horses.” It added: “We had reason to believe that our neighbor had but little regard for ‘working men,’ but did not suppose the antipathy went so far as to ridicule a procession on account of the employment in it of working horses.” The Chronicle’s class arrogance was downright ridiculous in this new age.

Yet the elites would soon master a different political vernacular, and this was the Whig ideology. Partly, it had to do with how Whig politicians presented themselves. Going forward, even politicians representing market elites would have to pitch themselves as men of humble origins, solicitous, above all, for the happiness and prosperity of other Americans from such backgrounds. The Whigs would master this transfiguration by 1840, embracing their nominee William Henry Harrison’s dubious image as a downhome man of the people. What Jackson dismissed privately as the Whigs’ “Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbuggery” would prove thoroughly winsome at the ballot box, to Old Hickory’s chagrin and that of his Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren, who was swept out of office that year.

But beyond campaign imagery, there was a deeper ideological effort afoot. Gone was the old-school Federalist idea that those with property should have greater say in the affairs of state. Instead, the Whigs promoted the idea that we shouldn’t think of class differences at all, since “the interests of the classes [were] identical,” as Schlesinger noted. A prominent Philadelphia Whig, for example, wrote that “however selfish may be the disposition of the wealthy, they cannot benefit themselves without serving the labourer.” Thus, “if the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored”—this was in the aftermath of the Bank War—“they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”

A step further was the idea that America simply has no social classes at all. Wrote one Whig critic of the labor movement: “These phrases, higher orders, and lower orders, are of European origin, and have no place in our Yankee dialect”—seeming to forget his own ideological forebears’ insistence that there are, in fact, rich and poor, and that the former must be allowed to rule unchallenged.

Still another variation was to suggest that social classes in America are so fluid and mobile as to be politically meaningless. Today’s worker is tomorrow’s capitalist, who hires a hand, and this third will tomorrow own his own shop and hire still other workers. And so on. “The wheel of fortune is in constant operation,” wrote the Whig Sen. Edward Everett, “and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” The Whig minister Calvin Colton agreed: “Every American laborer can stand up proudly, and say, I AM THE AMERICAN CAPITALIST, which is not a metaphor but literal truth.” Abraham Lincoln, too, promoted this idea — which I have elsewhere called the cycle-of-classes theory of political economy — in his famous Speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society.

Yet the most powerful element of Whig ideology was the primacy of internal, spiritual, or cultural uplift over governmental policy or material reforms. The worker will rise, wrote the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, not by “struggling for another rank,” nor through “political power,” but by “Elevation of Soul.” Instead of seeking worldly reforms, Channing advised, workers should grow in “intelligence” and “self-respect.” Another Whig reformer declared: “Legislation can do nothing; combinations among working classes”—that is, labor unions—“could probably effect no permanent remedy.” But if workers bettered themselves interiorly, they would find the peace that no external policy solution could bring.

“Making hard work cool again” harks back to these old Whig themes. For it suggests that a significant share of American workers simply decided to stop participating in the labor market or grew tired of making productivity gains. The problem, in this telling, aren’t things like the loss of U.S. manufacturing thanks to neoliberal trade policies and the rise of a low-wage and precarious services-based economy. Nor is the financial industry’s erosion of the real economy to blame. No, American workers just decided, en masse, that work is un-cool, and it’s up to the Whiggish politician to tell them that work is pretty cool, actually.

Nearly 200 years ago, Orestes Brownson, the Massachusetts preacher, journalist, and Jacksonian reformer, who certainly wasn’t one to pooh-pooh spiritual uplift, answered Whig ideology once and for all. “This position,” he countered,

is not tenable. If it were, it would be fatal to all progress, and be most heartily pleasing to all tyrants. The plain English of it is, perfect the individual before you undertake to perfect society make your men perfect, before you seek to make your institutions perfect. This is plausible, but we dislike it, because it makes perfection of institutions the end, and that of individuals merely the means. Perfect all your men, and no doubt, you could then perfect easily and safely your institutions. But when all your men are perfect, what need of perfecting your institutions? And wherein are those institutions, under which all individuals may attain to the full perfection admitted by human nature, imperfect?

American support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War was the catalyst for the OPEC embargo, which caused the first oil shock. The oil price roughly quadrupled, from around $3 per barrel to about $12 in a matter of days.

It immediately triggered an energy crisis. There were gas shortages and panic in the US as drivers sat in lines stretching for blocks, waiting to fill their gas tanks.

The second oil shock followed in 1979 as crude prices nearly tripled. A large conflict in the Middle East was again the cause—the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War.

A third oil shock occurred in 1990 as Iraq invaded Kuwait, causing oil prices to more than double.

Here’s the bottom line.

Big Middle East wars are often catastrophic for global oil supplies. And supply disruptions cause price spikes. It’s a simple relationship.

This isn’t surprising. Analysts estimate that over 40% of global oil exports come from the Middle East.

Today, the Middle East is again on the cusp of a large regional war between Iran and its allies and Israel and its allies. The conflict could potentially be more destructive than the conflicts that caused the prior oil shocks.

Patrick Lawrence: The Banality of Propaganda

Nov 17, 2023

I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that takes all cakes in the way of silliness that also manages to be pernicious. In it the Israeli president holds a copy of Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic.

The video was made one day after an immense demonstration in London in behalf of a ceasefire in Gaza and the freeing of Palestinians from Israel’s long, violent repression. Here is part of what Herzog had to say:

“I want to show you something exclusive. This is Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. It’s the book that led to the Holocaust, and the book that led to World War II. This is the book that led … to the worst atrocity of humankind, which the British fought against.

This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews.

This is the real war we are at. So all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology. ”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog seeks to justify his mass killing of Palestinian children by holding up the book Mein Kampf and claiming it was found in a "children's living room."pic.twitter.com/GLSGDHYrak

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) November 12, 2023

You can view a one–minute, 22–second version of this video clip here, or a longer, BBC version here. In both, we watch the Israeli head of state play the Holocaust card, the Hitler card, the Jewish victim card and the Hamas-as-murdering-burning-slaughtering-monsters card all at once.

I cannot identify the television network that showed the shorter version of Herzog, and I am astonished that the BBC took it seriously enough to broadcast it, but this is the Beeb these days — always on for the trans–Atlantic cause.

How remarkably flimsy propaganda is in most cases, I thought after watching Herzog and taking my notes. This is true in many, many cases in the annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II. As you look at it now, none of it is very sophisticated for the simple reason it does not have to be.

Propaganda is about forceful impact, subtlety the last thing on the propagandist’s mind. The banal will always do. The Japanese during the Pacific war were “Japs” or “Nips,” and in the plentitude of American propaganda images they had buck teeth and pencil mustaches and wore round glasses over their evil Asiatic eyes.

After watching the Herzog video I went in search of footage from London the previous day. There have been many demonstrations against Israel’s savage military campaign in Gaza since hostilities erupted Oct. 7, and may there be many more, but London last Saturday looks like the biggest to date.

“Free Gaza,” “Ceasefire Now,” “Not in Our Names” — these were among the things shouted and scribbled on placards as the protest wound slowly through Central London from Hyde Park to the U.S. Embassy several miles away. The police estimated the number of protesters at 300,000. From the footage—all I have to go by—I would put it nearer half a million.

One of the biggest protests in British history is happening right now in the streets of London for Gaza, for Palestine, despite the smears and threats 🇵🇸

Magnificent!pic.twitter.com/z9uvPK751P

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 11, 2023

If you watch enough propaganda, contemporary or historical, you find that it does not matter even if the scripts and images betray the crudity and indignity of those producing the propaganda. The intent is solely to capture the thoughts and feelings of the unthinking majority however this needs to be done.

Israeli Propaganda Department Is Desperate

But this project is more difficult now, in the age of digital media and an increasingly influential independent press. So it seems to me. People can see more and see it more clearly and immediately now, providing they choose to look. And more and more people are so choosing.

If the idiotic Herzog clip told us anything, it is that the Israeli propaganda department is in a desperate state, having already lost the public-relations war as the Israeli Defense Forces dig the hole deeper by the day.

After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Arendt was looking back to the Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union when she wrote her celebrated 1951 treatise. But the thought seems never to have been thereafter far from her mind.

In a conversation with a French, free-speech activist not long before her death in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

Half a century before Herzog made his video and demonstrators filled the streets of London, Arendt called last weekend perfectly.

It is a fine thing that fewer and fewer people are taken in by the psyops and propaganda blitzes of the national security state, the corporate media, and ruthless — indeed Hitleresque, I shall say it — regimes such as Israel’s.

But to live in a world in which one believes nothing of what is said is its own kind of misery. It is effectively a surrender of all public discourse and public space altogether to the malign, the indecent, the inhumane, the degraded and degrading. The truth, and along with it logical thinking and plain decency, become “alternative.”

Is there a way to build beyond our debased circumstances? Or are we to wander indefinitely in a state of negativity, of not believing, of alienation from our own polities?

My answer is yes to the first question, no to the second: There is always a way to build a different future — this as a matter of general principle. In this case the project must begin with the reclamation of language. Rejecting the official language of those in power, as so many people now do, is a start. We must then learn again to speak the language that is not spoken, the language wherein truth resides.

In large part because of how I have spent my professional years, I am especially sensitive to the power of language as it is used in the cause either of clarity and understanding or of obfuscation and ignorance.

The language of institutions, the language of power, is made of obscuring euphemisms — “global leadership,” “collateral damage,” “regime change,” “the intelligence community,” “the rules-based order,” and so on through the bureaucratic lexicon — and of bold falsifications such as Isaac Herzog offered us last Sunday.

Orwell described how the language of ideologues and bureaucratic mandarins devastates our ability to think clearly — precisely its purpose — in “Politics and the English Language.” Since he published his essay in Horizon in April 1946, the problem as we have it is seven decades’ worth of worse.

This use of language has disarmed language itself, depriving it of its assertive power such that speech or writing outside the orthodoxy can be dismissed as a site of serious discourse. Language is rendered impotent as a medium of creative thought or as a prompt to new, imaginative action.

The preposterous, insulting use of “anti–Semitism” that now besets us is a case in point. The obvious intent is to impose a vast silence to obscure the crimes of apartheid Israel.

The task before us is one of restoration. It is to take language back, to renew its life, to wrest it from the deadening influence of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate media — these having deformed language into an instrument for the enforcement of conformity. This is why every shout and placard heard or seen in London or many other cities these days is important, an act of significance and worth.

Clear language is an instrument — unadorned, written and spoken plainly, colloquial in the best sense of this term but perfectly capable of subtlety and complexity. It is the language of history, not myth.

This language is spoken not in the cause of empire but always in the human cause. “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea”: These are two-word and six-word examples of the language I describe.

This is the language necessary to confront power rather than accommodate it. It is language that presumes the utility of intelligence and critical thought. It is meant for the posing of many worthy questions. It is unreservedly dedicated to enlarging what is sayable in hostile response to “the great unsayable,” as I call it.

By way of this language a more vibrant, fulfilling public discourse awaits us. By way of this language the Isaac Herzogs, Antony Blinkens and Ursula von der Leyens who pollute our public space can be reduced to what they are — liars and propagandists. The power of the language I describe will deprive the language they speak of all power.

Let us speak it, let us write it, let us scribble it on walls and sheets of cardboard. Let us know it as the most powerful tool available to those who refuse the silence Isaac Herzog sought to impose upon all those Londoners last weekend.