These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

Over the last two weeks, controversies about cancel culture have spread across Facebook and Twitter like a brain rotting fungus infecting every edgelord or cranky uncle it came across. The latest hysterics came after the Dr. Seuss Foundation announced it was pulling six books from publication because of racist drawings and then again when news broke that a scene with Pepe le Pew was cut from the new Space Jam movie. 

There's a lot to unpack about why this is so ridiculous and why we're all the stupider for it, but, to clear things up, neither of these things are examples of anything getting cancelled. No one called for the Dr. Seuss books to get pulled from publication, it was something the company decided on their own because they don't want to be associated with images like these anymore.

It's important to note the real problem underlying the Dr. Seuss books isn't that the books were pulled, it's that they were pulled without a fight. 

Even if you take the view that the books were for purely economic reasons- i. e., they did it to protect the brand - what that says is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation looked at their products, looked at the potential damage the controversy could do to their non-racist books, and decided that their better option would be to just recall the titles with those drawings. Even in this telling, which is nothing more than a stripped down cost-benefit analysis, the reactions of Asian and Black communities were deemed important enough that the mere potential of the financial harm they could leverage was enough to change their practices. 

I'm not saying that's how it went down, just using it as an example that no matter how you look at this, this decision was made because the Foundation thought how their minority customers felt about their product, mattered. They thought it was important enough to do something about it without anyone pressuring them to do so. 

What all those headlines about political correctness gone too far are saying is that people who weren't important in the past, are important now. It's amazing how much this simple recognition bothers people, like they can't stand living in a world were other people are important, too. That's all any of this is, all any of it ever is, just blind anger over the fact that minorities get to have a say in the world they live in.

As for the Pepe le Pew thing, his scene got deleted when Space Jam changed directors. This is what's called making a movie. If this upsets you, I congratulate you on living a life with no actual problems. 

What annoys me most about all the outrage pieces over cancel culture is that they universally don't engage with why such a thing would exist in the first place. If they do, it's usually just complaining about how kids get so offended at everything these days. Which, yeah, if you look for people being stupidly upset over inoffensive things you're going to find them, obviously. Conveniently, the push to make this solely about overly sensitive millennials and Gen Z'ers let's people with actual power off the hook for making things this bad in the first place. 

Consider the world since the start of the millennium. We had Bush II lie his way into starting a war, operate a global torture regime, launch an illegal spying program, with no consequences. Then, the global economy burns to the ground in the fallout of fraudulent trading and business practices from literally the entire financial sector. Then, the same banks get caught actively laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, rigging interest rates, and stealing money from their customers. No one went to jail or was even arrested for any of this, naturally. That's not to say we were limited to white collar villainy. For more blue collar scumbags, we have the cops who killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice - for just a small sampling - who all walked away clean after killing unarmed civilians. 

Then, Donald Trump happened. If there's any lesson from the Trump administration, is that people in power get away with whatever they want because other people in power choose not to stop them. Mitch McConnell could've pulled Trump's leash anytime he wanted by slowing down Trump's pet projects in the Senate until Trump behaved like a good little dog on camera, but that never happened. The Democrats could've decimated Trump's agenda by passing budgets that didn't allocate money for the wall, or the Space Force, or for any of the other ridiculous projects Trump undertook. But they didn't, because why would they? Sure, Trump himself is an asshole, but he's still President and this is still America. That Biden is continuing some of Trump's policies- like keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and supporting failed puppet Juan Guadio in Venezuela - show for the umpteenth time that Washington's problem with Trump was his personality, not his actions.

You can't expect people to look at the world, see all the open, unpunished corruption, and do nothing about it. Normal people can't arrest anyone, can't throw them out of office on a whim, but they can mobilize online to publicly shun or humiliate people off social networks. That's what cancel culture is, a response to offi cial failures to hold obvious criminals accountable so that someone, somehow suffers for the shitty things they've done. 

Naturally, there are pitfalls to this. Mass public outrage doesn't leave room for nuance or a sense of scale; for example, when Kathy Griffin posted that picture holding Trump's decapitated head, all that called for was a "wow, that's a bit over-the-top and desperate," not the massive dog piling she ended up buried under.  

It also acts as convenient cover for actual censorship, like when YouTube took down videos by independent news channel Staus Coup. The videos in question were coverage of the Capitol Riot, they weren't endorsing or advocating, just standard reporting. Corporations always move to co-opt the language of social movements to neuter their momentum, cancel culture gives them fertile ground to move against independent creators in the name of "protecting" the discourse from controversial elements. 

Critics of cancel culture are right that it's not good to rely solely on mobilizing mass movements of angry people against new outrages of the week. That what's happening isn't so much accountability as it is the public devouring of randomly selected individuals and doesn't address the systemic issues that allowed the harm in the first place. 

All of that is true, but to spend all the energy tsk tsking cancel culture as a sign of national decline seems more like a modern version of hating on hippies more than anything else. Cancel culture is the product of larger failures, not the cause of them. 

The easiest way to end cancel culture is to tear down the failed institutions that spawned it. Sure, there will always be people railing against something or other but if we can get the world to a place where assholes get punished for their asshole shit as an everyday thing, then at least we'll get to choose how much we want to stick around to listen. 

The Empty Promise of Bitcoin

News that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin sent the virtual currency to an all-time high of $48,000 (it's since climbed to $52,000). This has sparked, again, discussion/enthusiasm about bitcoin's future as a viable currency or further widespread adoption. So this as good a time as any to point out that bitcoin will never be anything its faithful hope it will be. 

What is bitcoin

To understand why bitcoin will never work, we'll need to understand what it is. 

Bitcoin is a virtual cryptocurrency generated by its user base solving harder and harder cryptography equations. Its design and function was laid out in a 2008 white paper by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. 

The purpose of bitcoin was to create a currency that didn't have any state or central bank behind it. Only its users could create the currency and only they could ensure the coins validity. The idea behind this is to prevent the central authority from debasing the currency through inflation or issuing debt to print money. 

To protect against fraud, the system relies on something called a blockchain to record and verify payments. The blockchain is a public ledger filled with every transaction of every bitcoin, allowing its users to theoretically go back and track the entire history of the bitcoin they're being paid with. 

Because there's no central authority backing the validity of bitcoins, the users themselves have to perform these checks for each transaction. To do this, users are assigned a digital wallet they then create a password for. To buy something, the buyer submits a bitcoin- or whatever percentage of the coin they're using- from their wallet, then the coin is assigned a hash, which is like a digital signature. From there, another user, or network of users if they want to authenticate multiple transactions, verify the hash isn't being used for multiple purchases, does all the math, with the end result being the transaction is added to the blockchain, and life goes on. 

It's a ridiculously labor and energy intensive process, with Bitcoin mining using more electricity than Ireland.

Who Needs Trust?

If you wanted a simple reason why bitcoin is doomed to fail, it's that there's no trust in the system. 

The white paper closes celebrating that it laid out the best case for creating a currency that operates without trust. Bitcoin's barkers point to the blockchain as the ultimate solution to this problem- you don't need trust in a system of relentless verification. 

This sounds like a huge, game changing feature- except all it does is make everything more complicated for no benefit whatsoever. 

Imagine going to the grocery store and having to wait in line as the teller calls up every individual customer's bank to verify their account information, their available balance, only hanging up once they confirmed the transfer from your account to the store's was complete. 

Then imagine them doing this all over again once the next person in line stepped up. Then multiply this process for every single transaction at every store in every city of the country. Think about all the things you buy in a day and try, just try, to imagine all the time you'd lose if you not only had to go through this process every single time but also wait for everyone around you to go through it, too.

What people miss the most about money is that it is a social tool. The whole point of it is to facilitate moving resources from one place to another which, at some point, you're going to need trust to move the process along. 

You can see this process in the evolution of paper currencies. During the reign of Kublai Khan, the Yuan imperial government would send out papers marked with the amount of coins they owed to the merchants they bought supplies from. The promise was the merchants could come to the capitol and exchange the paper for coins whenever they wanted. Since trading the papers was as good as trading coin, eventually those pieces of paper became a form of currency in their own right. 

Something similar happened in Europe, too. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, these things called bills of exchange were used to facilitate trade among the different European countries. How they would work is a bank in Italy would issue a letter to one of their depositors so they could exchange it at another bank in Spain, where they could take the letter and exchange it for cash. 

Merchants could also use their bills as payment if they didn't have cash on hand. They would sign the document over, then the new owner could take it to the bank to get paid. Hell, people could even sell the bills themselves if they wanted to get some quick cash in their pockets.  

In London, banks would issue their own paper currencies to their depositors as a representation of the gold they had in their account. Eventually depositors asked for banknotes of smaller denominations so they could use for more everyday purchases. If anyone wanted coins instead of paper, all anyone had to do was just take the note to the bank who issued it and redeem it. And that was it- just trade a piece of paper for gold, no questions asked. 

The point is that for money to work, you need people to trust that what you're giving them is worth what you say it is. You need people to believe that when you hand them a piece of paper that says it is worth x amount of value, they can take that paper anywhere to trade on its stated value. 

Because bitcoin cuts out that trust, it's essentially crippled. It can't process payments at any rate that's sustainable- it can handle 3-4 transactions per second, compared to the 1,667 Visa manages- which leads to embarrassing situations like a cryptocurrency conference refusing to accept bitcoin payments because they take too long to process. 

Money is a vehicle for social cohesion and trust, bitcoin buries its users in isolation and suspicion. You can't have anything like FDIC insurance under bitcoin so if you lose the password to your wallet or someone steals your coins, you can't be reimbursed. Any coins that you got in recompense would have to come at the expense of someone else. Bitcoin at its peak is a zero-sum game, which, yeah, see how long that lasts. Or, see what happens when inevitable economic shock comes and whatever value people have is gone forever. 

Removing the social aspect of money from bitcoin's design has created a currency that demands total faith from its users but offers no protections to them when things go wrong. No matter the myriad other reasons, this choice will forever doom bitcoin from achieving anything its believers hope it will 

The Myriad Other Reasons

Bitcoin is hardcoded to have a limit of available coins. Once 21 million coins have been minted, the system stops producing them. There a few problems that arise from this, the biggest being that bitcoin is suicidally deflationary. 

Put simply, deflation happens when the value of your goods is higher than the value of your currency. So if you have $1 billion worth of goods to sell, but only $100 million in currency to buy those goods with, you've got deflation. The easiest way of solving this problem- just print more money- is unavailable because the currency is tied to a finite resource like gold. 

Since printing money isn't an option, the only thing to do is wait for prices to fall until they're in line with the available money supply. This process can take years as people have to absorb the losses they take while they're cutting prices and wages to match what people have in buying power. 

Why this is relevant to bitcoin is that it is nowhere near big enough to support a national, let alone global, economy. At $48,000, the total value of every possible bitcoin would come in at just over $900 billion dollars. That sounds impressive until you realize that the GDP- the measure of the goods and services produced in the economy- of the United States is $21 trillion. The crunch from the value of goods falling to match the value of bitcoin would trigger a depression so severe in length and scale the only viable way to end it would be to ditch the currency entirely, just like when countries abandoned the gold standard to escape the Great Depression.

The second, albeit not as catastrophic, problem is that one of the incentives for people to use so many resources to verify payments and add them to the blockchain is that they get a bitcoin as a reward. The groups who do this also charge transaction fees, but the coin is obviously the main draw here. 

As you can probably see, if no more coins are being minted, than the only incentive these groups will have to expend all those resources is more costly transaction fees. Plus, the more transactions lined up to get verified, the more difficult the equations get, which means more power, which makes it more expensive to solve, meaning for every single transaction you're not only using up bitcoins to pay for goods but also you're paying more and more for the time and energy needed just for the privilege of buying something. 

Aside from the electricity waste, there's literally nothing bitcoin does better than anything it intends to replace. Because your bitcoin wallet is tied directly to your I.P. address, cash is better for anonymous, untraceable payments which is why there's a concerted effort to reduce the amount of available cash going on right now. The efforts have failed miserably so far but the goal is clear: governments want the ability to track every purchase its citizens make and a blockchain is the perfect tool for that project. 

It barely even holds up an investment tool. Bitcoin's real value is the same as any other commodity: you get to exchange it for dollars. That's why it's not a big deal that some companies allow bitcoin payments, all they're doing is accepting to go through a longer, more complicated process to exchange your assets into real money. All the excitement around bitcoin is based on its dollar value. 

Sure it's on a bit of a tear now but we've been down this road before, too. The price will climb, media attention will draw new users excited to get in on the game but then the reality that you can't do much of anything with your new toy sets in and then the price can drop 20-30% in a single day. 

That's obviously not a very stable investment situation, which means more people cash out at a loss, the more the price drops because people lose confidence in bitcoin's value. Eventually, the price stabilizes again because the user base self-selects for true believers who keep insisting bitcoin is worth something which, slowly but surely, drives the price back up until the cycle repeats. 

Ironically, all these failures are why bitcoin won't be going anywhere any time soon. As an object of faith, the more bitcoin fails, the stronger people will cling to their belief. All bitcoin has is the faith of its users which means as long as they have that faith, this wannabe currency isn't going anywhere. 

Is There Any Way To Make It Work?

No. 

Bitcoin is explicitly designed to be harder to use the more people try to use it. The whole point of its payment system is that it grinds to a halt the moment transaction volume picks up. 

You can't change anything about bitcoin to make it more workable because bitcoin, at its core, is an ideological argument. Changing how bitcoin works means admitting the ideology that created it was wrong. Which no one will admit, because ideas aren't products, they don't get recalled if they're defective. 

It's Lies and Liars

The desire to put Trump behind us as January 20th draws closer is approaching something tangible. Already there are multiple retrospectives about his presidency, the impact he had on America, questioning whether we can knit back together what he so clumsily sundered. 

To be honest, I'm not really interested in many of them. After five years, I don' trust anyone who still thinks that Trump is something that happened to America and isn't a representation of what America is.

Let's focus on what many called the most insidious aspect of Trump's presidency- his lies. Surely, there are presidents or people who could match his pace. It seemed like everyday Trump would overwhelm the news cycle with at least six impossible lies before breakfast then move on to entirely new, even contradictory lies in the afternoon. The media never got a handle on this, always seemingly caught flat-footed by the pace and flexibility of Trump's mendacity. They never quite caught on to the fact that Trump wasn't lying to advance anything grander beside making himself look good. Reporter's, pundits, every one kept waiting for the usual script of "Politician lies to support their agenda, gets caught, acts contrite, then moves on to new tactic to accomplish the same," to assert itself, never quite wising up to the fact that the more his lies were exposed, the greater the existential panic in Trump's mind grew, necessitating an even grander lie to square that dissonant circle.

Trump's biggest weakness is that he doesn't know how to play off a loss. He has to be the winner, has to be the best, in everything all the time, no matter what. That pathetic desperation is what did him in more than anything else right from the start. Instead of playing off the fact that his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's by saying that these were the true patriots, real Americans who fulfilled the promise of the founders, citizens who walked the narrow way of freedom, their smaller number a testament that they were swayed onto the easier, wider path of multiculturalism. Sure, fascist overtones are positively dripping from those sentiments, but that never stopped Trump before. Point is, he could've played up the near religious devotion into even higher pathological levels of worship past what they his supporters are already giving him and encased himself in near unassailable political positioning but, instead, chose to use an overhead shot of Obama's inauguration crowd that took five seconds of reverse image searching to confirm. Instead of spending his first week in office basking in the glow of his victory, he was embarrassing himself by pretending he didn't steal the accolades of the Black president who made him feel so inferior.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Trump's supporters is "How could they accept all the lies?" For one, they've been conditioned to by decades of Fox News and radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who built their entire industry over lying to their audience. For another, everything else about their lives has been built on lies in some way, what makes the presidency so different?

Consider, Purdue Pharma actively paid doctors and generated studies to lie about the addiction risks of Oxycontin. The company even plead guilty in court to this in 2019. But it's going bankrupt, none of the executives are going to jail and the Sackler family already set up another pharmaceutical company to keep peddling their wonder drug. Meanwhile, all the addicts they created are now dying in record numbers shooting up heroin. 

You can do this all day, too. Exxon-Mobile knew that the fossil fuel industry was creating a climate crisis then spent decades setting up a network of think tanks and public intellectuals whose sole purpose was to lie about and obscure this fact. Goldman Sachs would bundle mortgages they knew would fail into complex derivative packages, lie about their worth to investors, then turn around and bet against those very same bundles, waiting to cash in on their inevitable failure. Let's not forget the efforts from the tobacco industry do deny their products link to cancer and emphysema, or the lead industry lying about the toxicity of their product. Oh, right, the Radium Girls- women who got cancer after being told to put their radium-infused paint in their mouths to "point" their brushes- also deserve a special mention.

And oh do things just go on. The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor lied about their evidence to obtain a search warrant, police lie so much on the stand in trial that defense attorney's invented the term testilying as shorthand, not to mention the staggering amount of overturned death penalty cases were police and prosecutors lied through their teeth about the defendant's guilt.The military lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War, Nixon lied about sabotaging peace talks for the same war so he could become president, Regan lied about the Iran-Contra and the CIA's facilitating the crack epidemic. We lied about torturing people, WMD's, NSA surveillance, lead in water pipes, COINTELPRO, among so many others. 

Point is, we can't complain about Trump being a liar when our entire society is built around the manufacture and maintenance of lies.

Is it really surprising then, living a country where they're surrounded by lies on all sides, that Trump's faithful would throw themselves so fervently behind someone who lied about everything he spoke about? The only thing you could call out Trump for on his mendacious personality is how pathetic his lies are. But that he lies constantly, about everything, and kills people because of it? Nah man, that's American as baseball. 

"Can you believe that Trump is pardoning his cronies, his co-conspirators?!?!?!?" Yes, yes I can. If #MeToo, pedophile priests, or any of the rape scandals in the military have taught us anything, it's that powerful people stay that way because the connections and organizations they belong to actively cover up their crimes. Plus, this unprecedented abuse of power already happened when Elder Bush pardoned everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair so they wouldn't turn states evidence against him and send him to prison. 

If truth is supposed to mean anything, then we have to tell the truth to ourselves about who we are. We need to admit that the conditions we find ourselves in now are the same that we've been in. The only difference is that the reality has become too intolerable for the lies to paper over anymore. Which, is good, it's the kick we needed to confront the lies that we've become too complacent with. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that these are sudden developments that sprang out of extraordinary circumstances that just require us to right the ship and we'll be back on course. 

No. 

We are what we are because this is what we've chosen to become. We have to accept the responsibility of that. If we don't, we'll never come to terms with the fact that we allowed ourselves to get duped into believing that this brutal system was freedom. And if we never realize that if we have the power to accept it, then we won't see that we have the power to reject it, too.

Nothing Fails Like Success

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca marched his army in Spain over the Alps into Italy, launching what's now known as the Second Punic War into full gear. For the next two years, he would humiliate one Roman army after another which culminated with the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE.

If you've ever watched any show covering battles of the ancient world on the History Channel or YouTube, you've probably heard of this battle. It's famous for Hannibal's Carthaginian army pulling off a double envelopment- basically, Hannibal's army was able to completely surround the Roman army. Out of 86,000 troops, only 15,000 made it out unscathed with almost 50,000 dead and the rest captured by the Carthaginians. 

To this day, military historians lose their shit and marvel at the tactical brilliance of this battle, one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on any Roman army, and use it as the jumping off point for alternate histories where Carthage, not Rome, becomes the sole power of the Mediterranean world.

Also, Cannae is why Hannibal loses the war.

Up until this point, Hannibal's strategy revolved around luring the Romans into battle so he could crush them with clever tactics. The Romans, arrogant honor junkies that they were, obliged him without fail. Its only after Cannae that the Romans decide that a man named Fabius Maximus may have been on to something when he said "How 'bout we don't walk into obvious traps that get us slaughtered?" Following his lead, the Roman army avoids any direct contact with Hannibal's forces. For ten years. Ten long, long years with no major battles. 

This was fatal to Hannibal's war effort. The whole point of his strategy was to show the other Italian cities that Rome wasn't as strong as they thought, that if they joined up with Hannibal, they'd be much better of then sticking with their pompous, condescending neighbors. Once the Romans stopped rushing out to die at his feet however, Hannibal had a major problem. 

See, his crossing of the Alps severely weakened his army. He didn't have the numbers or the supplies to lay siege to Rome, which meant he also didn't have the show of strength necessary to convince the Italians to throw in with him unconditionally. All the cities he turned flipped back to the Romans once Hannibal was out of sight which meant he spent years going all over Italy taking back cities he'd already won, then lost, back to his side. 

As any gamer knows, backtracking is a soul crushing endeavor that, ultimately, accomplishes nothing. With no momentum to his side, it was only a matter of time before the war slipped through Hannibal's fingers which, it did when the man who became known as Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, let's meet Diocletian. In 284 CE, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor by the troops under his command after the last two self-proclaimed emperors died in battle. Now, at the time, the Roman world is going through the Crisis of the Third Century which, as you can probably tell from the name, is a great time to be alive. Civil wars, invasions, plagues, whatever flavor of catastrophe you prefer, you'll find it on offer in the 200's CE.

Being a rather industrious fellow, Diocletian decides to solve the problems that have beset his home and put right what has obviously gone wrong in the world. And then, he does. He defeats all his military rivals foreign and domestic. Once that's settled, he carves the empire into smaller districts to ensure any ambitious generals can't proclaim themselves emperor with a sizeable army at their backs like they've been doing for the last 50 years. Diocletian then divides the empire into four distinct districts ruled over by himself, his co-Emperor and two junior emperors who all pursue Diocletian's vision of unity and stability with aplomb. 

With the empire in good standing, Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden in 305 BCE. Less then twenty years later, the system of succession Diocletian so painstakingly crafted will be just as dead he is. 

When Diocletian retired, he forced his co-Emperor Maximian to step down with him. Overall, it was the smart play- Maximian served as a glorified general elevated to serve the imperial will of Diocletian wherever Diocletian couldn't be physically present. As the next five years would show, Maximian didn't have a political bone in his body, so the idea of leaving him in charge of the Empire was an invitation to disaster.

Sidebar: The cliff notes of Maximian's life from 305-310 are as follows: He helps his son Maxentius rebel in 306 after he's left out of the new tetrarchy, Maximian then betrays  Maxentius to take the reigns of power for himself. When that fails, he runs East to his son-in-law Constantine, declares himself Emperor, gets forced out of the declaration by Constantine, tries to seize power from Constantine, fails, then is forced to commit suicide to end the world suffering his foolishness any longer.

So, while leaving Maximian in charge was unacceptable, this only bred a deeper problem that Diocletian seemed incapable of understanding. When Diocletian created the tetrarchy, it was clear that while they were all relatively equal in their authority, Diocletian was more equal than all of them. Removing himself and Maximian created a power vacuum that his chosen successors would spend the next twenty years seeking to fill.

Eventually, Constantine would come out on top then establish Constantinople as the new heart of the empire, which would continue on for another 1200 years. But to Diocletian, the idea that the empire fell back under the rule of one central authority represented nothing but the failure of his life's work. 

It's hard to be too judgemental, though. Because of his reforms, the empire would survive as a unified whole until the Western half fell in 410 CE. His organization of the empire into smaller dioceses would lay the foundation the Catholic Church would use as it spread after the Roman world fell into chaos. His monetary policy would, in part, pave the way for Roman currency to regain its value which made it easier to keep soldiers in line since they were being paid in worthwhile currency again.

When your entire adult life consists of pulling off one miracle after another,  it's easy to think that the rest will just take care of itself. Everything else has worked, so why not that?

But like with Hannibal some 400ish years earlier, Diocletian didn't take into account how his success would change the world he lived in. Having four emperors during a time of crisis is fine- it means all of them have lots of problems to solve all at once all the time. But once the crises passes, all they've got to look at is each other. Who would be happy with a sliver of ultimate power when you could easily have it all?

That's the irony of the whole thing- the tetrarchy was created to stave off the civil wars that plagued the Roman world for fifty years but once the problems of the empire were handled, civil war between the tetrarchs was the only possible outcome.

To bring this closer to home, we go to 1971. Eugene Sydnor, then president of the Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a memo from his friend Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who worked for Philip Morris and was two months away from his nomination, and eventual appointment to, the Supreme Court. 

The result, known as either The Powell Memo or The Powell Manifesto, advocated for corporations to take a more proactive role in protecting their political interests. He suggested that the Chamber of Commerce should hire scholars to make the intellectual case for unregulated capitalism, monitor text books and TV news for unfavorable content, and to use their donations to colleges to influence those institutions to hire faculty more receptive to corporate interests. 

It's hard to overstate the consequences of this memo. All of Powell's suggestions were put in place, which led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, among others. Combined with the creation of Fox News and conservative radio, the conservative political agenda veered hard to the right.With the addition of the evangelical right, these principles took on a millennial, religious aspect, with a dash of apocalypse if they weren't pursued.

This didn't go unnoticed across the aisle. Spurred by the humiliating defeat of George McGovern, a new wing of the Democratic party began to form with the goal of moving the party away from its socially conscience, liberal image. The election of Bill Clinton solidified the control of the Third Way Democrats which they still enjoy to this day. 

The failure of all this realignment should be obvious. With Republicans actively hostile to social welfare programs and Democrats afraid of them, when crisis strikes it leaves millions of people in the lurch. So that's why you find both parties sitting on their hands as millions of people risk losing their homes, their health insurance, or just straight up starving as the pandemic rages unopposed. 

How these failures will change us is still up in the air. But you can't have the government abandon its citizens to cruelties of their fate without repercussions. Given how far the idea that enterprise is the only real freedom we have, I don't have high hopes. You can't bind yourself to your neighbor and demand better for everyone in a country that sees solidarity as a communist plot. 

We're told that failure is more instructive than success because it forces us to confront our shortcomings. In this way, failure leads to success as we improve, evolving our methods until we find the combination we need to get what we want. 

But we're never really taught that the inverse is true, too. We never get taught that we have to adapt to the world our success creates. Instead we're taught to expect that the world will stop to bask in our glories, that one success will endlessly breed further triumphs.  

That complacency is a trap. It inevitably leads us to disaster and yet, we've never bothered to learn to avoid it. If we come out of this calamity in one piece, we should probably start.