Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

COVID Showed Americans Don’t Leech Off Unemployment Checks

Posted on by under Politics

In most states, during normal times, you can use unemployment insurance for at most 26 weeks, half the year, and will receive 30-50% of the wages from your previous job, up to a certain income. This means $200-400 a week on average. One must meet a list of requirements to qualify, for instance having been fired from a job due to cutbacks, not through fault of your own. Only 35-40% of unemployed persons receive UI.

This means that at any given time, about 2 million Americans are receiving UI; in April/May 2020, with COVID-19 and State measures to prevent its spread causing mass firings, that number skyrocketed to 22 million. Put another way, just 1-3% of the workforce is usually using UI, and during the pandemic spike it was about 16%. Just before that rise, it was at 1.5% — and it returned to that rate in November 2021, just a year and a half later. Indeed, the number of recipients fell as fast as it shot up, from 16% to under 8% in just four months (September 2020), down to 4% in six months (November 2020). As much pearl-clutching as there was among conservatives (at least those who did not use UI) over increased dependency, especially with the temporary $600 federal boost to UI payments, tens of millions of Americans did not leech off the system. They got off early, even though emergency measures allowed them to stay on the entire year of 2020 and into the first three months of 2021! (The trend was straight down, by the way, even before the $600 boost ended.)

This in fact reflects what we’ve always known about unemployment insurance. It’s used as intended, as a temporary aid to those in financial trouble (though many low-wage workers don’t have access to it, which must be corrected). Look at the past 10 years of UI use. The average stay in the program (“duration”) each year was 17 or 18 weeks in times of economic recovery, 14 or 15 weeks in better economic times (sometimes even fewer). Four months or so, then a recipient stops filing for benefits, having found a job or ameliorated his or her crisis in some fashion. Some “enjoy” the 30-50% of previous wages for the whole stretch, but the average recipient doesn’t even use UI for 20 weeks, let alone the full 26 allowed. This makes sense, given how much of a pay cut UI is. Again, many Americans stop early, and the rest are cut off — so why all the screaming about leeching? Only during the COVID crisis did the average duration climb higher, to 26-27 weeks, as the federal government offered months of additional aid, as mentioned — again, many did not receive benefits for as long as they could have.

Those that receive benefits will not necessarily do the same next year. In times of moderate unemployment, for example, about 30% of displaced workers and 50% of workers on temporary layoff who receive benefits in Year 1 will reapply for benefits in Year 2. The rest do not refile.

However, we must be nuanced thinkers. Multiple things can be true at the same time. UI can also extend unemployment periods, which makes a great deal of sense even if UI benefits represent a drastic pay cut. UI gives workers some flexibility to be more selective in the job hunt. An accountant who has lost her position may, with some money coming in and keeping a savings account afloat, be able to undertake a longer search for another accounting job, rather than being forced to take the first thing she can find, such as a waitressing job. This extra time is important, because finding a similar-wage job means you can keep your house or current apartment, won’t fall further into poverty, etc. There are many factors behind the current shortage of workers, and UI seems to be having a small effect (indeed, studies range between no effect and moderate effects). And of course, in a big, complex world there will be some souls who avoid work as long as they can, and others who commit fraud (during COVID, vast sums were siphoned from our UI by individuals and organized crime rings alike, in the U.S. and from around the globe; any human being with internet access can attempt a scam). But that’s not most Americans. While UI allows workers to be more selective, prolonging an unemployed term a bit, they nevertheless generally stop filing for benefits early and avoid going back.

To summarize, for the conservatives in the back. The U.S. labor force is 161 million people. A tiny fraction is being aided by UI at any given moment. Those that are generally don’t stay the entire time they could. Those who do use 26 weeks of benefits will be denied further aid for the year (though extended benefits are sometimes possible in states with rising unemployment). Most recipients don’t refile the next year. True, lengths of unemployment may be increased some, and there will always be some Americans who take advantage of systems like this, but most people would prefer not to, instead wanting what all deserve — a good job, with a living wage.

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Comparative Power

Posted on by under History

The practice of reconstructing the past, with all its difficulties and incompleteness, is aided by comparative study. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other researchers can learn a great deal about their favored society and culture by looking at others. This paper makes that basic point, but, more significantly, makes a distinction between the effectiveness of drawing meaning from cultural similarity/difference and doing the same from one’s own constructed cultural analogy, while acknowledging both are valuable methods. In other words, it is argued here that the historian who documents similarities and differences between societies stands on firmer methodological ground for drawing conclusions about human cultures than does the historian who is forced to fill in gaps in a given historical record by studying other societies in close geographic and temporal proximity. Also at a disadvantage is the historian working comparatively with gaps in early documentation that are filled in later documentation. This paper is a comparison of comparative methods — an important exercise, because such methods are often wielded due to a dearth of evidence in the archives. The historian should understand the strengths and limitations of various approaches (here reciprocal comparison, historical analogy, and historiographic comparison) to this problem.

To begin, a look at reciprocal comparison and the meaning derived from such an effort, derived specifically from likenesses or distinctions. Historian Robert Darnton found meaning in differences in The Great Cat Massacre: and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. What knowledge, Darnton wondered in his opening chapter, could we gain of eighteenth century French culture by looking at peasant folk tales and contrasting them to versions found in other places in Europe? Whereas similarities might point to shared cultural traits or norms, differences would isolate the particular mentalités of French peasants, how they viewed the world and what occupied their thoughts, in the historical tradition of the Annales School.[1] So while the English version of Tom Thumb was rather “genial,” with helpful fairies, attention to costume, and a titular character engaging in pranks, in the French version the Tom Thumb character, Poucet, was forced to survive in a “harsh, peasant world” against “bandits, wolves, and the village priest by using his wits.”[2] In a tale of a doctor cheating Death, the German version saw Death immediately kill the doctor; with a French twist, the doctor got away with his treachery for some time, becoming prosperous and living to old age — cheating paid off.[3] Indeed, French tales focused heavily on survival in a bleak and brutal world, and on this world’s particularities. Characters with magical wishes asked for food and full bellies, they got rid of children who did not work, put up with cruel step-mothers, and encountered many beggars on the road.[4] Most folk tales mix fictional elements like ogres and magic with socio-economic realities from the place and time they are told, and therefore the above themes reflect the ordinary lives of French peasants: hunger, poverty, the early deaths of biological mothers, begging, and so on.[5] In comparing French versions with those of the Italians, English, and Germans, Darnton noticed unique fixations in French peasant tales and then contrasted these obsessions with the findings of social historians on the material conditions of peasant life, bringing these things together to find meaning, to create a compelling case for what members of the eighteenth century French lower class thought about day to day and their attitudes towards society.

Now, compare Darnton’s work to ethno-historian Helen Rountree’s “Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain John Smith Barely Saw.” Rountree uses ethnographic analogy, among other tools, to reconstruct the daily lives of Powhatan women in the first years of the seventeenth century. Given that interested English colonizers had limited access to Powhatan women and a “cloudy lens” of patriarchal eurocentrism through which they observed native societies, and given that the Powhatans left few records themselves, Rountree uses the evidence of daily life in nearby Eastern Woodland tribes to describe the likely experiences of Powhatan women.[6] For example: “Powhatan women, like other Woodland Indian women, probably nurse their babies for well over a year after birth, so it would make sense to keep baby and food source together” by bringing infants into the fields with them as the women work.[7] Elsewhere “probably” is dropped for more confident takes: “Powhatan men and women, like those in other Eastern Woodland tribes, would have valued each other as economic partners…”[8] A lack of direct archival knowledge of Powhatan society and sentiments is shored up through archival knowledge of other native peoples living in roughly the same time and region. The meaning Rountree derives from ethnographic analogy, alongside other techniques and evidence, is that the English were wrong, looking through their cloudy lens, to believe Powhatan women suffered drudgery and domination under Powhatan men. Rather, women experienced a great deal of autonomy, as well as fellowship and variety, in their work, and were considered co-equal partners with men in the economic functioning of the village.[9]  

Both Darnton and Rountree admit their methods have challenges where evidence is concerned. Darnton writes that his examination of folktales is “distressingly imprecise in its deployment of evidence,” the evidence is “vague,” because the tales were written down much later — exactly how they were orally transmitted at the relevant time cannot be known.[10] In other words, what if the aspect of a story one marks as characteristic of the French peasant mentalité was not actually in the verbal telling of the tale? It is a threat to the legitimacy of the project. Rountree is careful to use “probably” and “likely” with most of her analogies; the “technique is a valid basis for making inferences if used carefully” (emphasis added), and one must watch out for the imperfections in the records of other tribes.[11] For what if historical understanding of another Eastern Woodland tribe is incorrect, and the falsity is copied over to the narrative of the Powhatan people? Rountree and Darnton acknowledge the limitations of their methods even while firmly believing they are valuable for reconstructing the past. This paper does not dispute that — however, it would be odd if all comparative methods were created equal.

Despite its challenges, reciprocal comparison rests on safer methodological ground, for it at least boasts two actually existing elements to contrast. For instance, Darnton has in his possession folktales from France and from Germany, dug up in the archives, and with them he can notice differences and thus derive meaning about how French peasants viewed the world. Such meaning may be incorrect, but is less likely to be so with support from research on the material conditions of those who might be telling the tales, as mentioned. Rountree, on the other hand, wields a tool that works with but one existing element. Historical, cultural, or ethnographic analogy takes what is known about other peoples and applies it to a specific group suffering from a gap in the historical record. This gap, a lack of direct evidence, is filled with an assumption — which may simply be wrong, without support from other research, like Darnton enjoys, to help out (to have such research would make analogy unnecessary). Obviously, an incorrect assumption threatens to derail derived meaning. If the work of Powhatan women differed in a significant way from other Eastern Woodland tribes, unseen and undiscovered and even silenced by analogy, the case of Powhatan economic equality could weaken. Again, this is not to deny the method’s value, only to note the danger that it carries compared to reciprocal comparison. Paradoxically, the inference that Powhatan society resembled other tribes nearby seems as probable and reasonable as it is bold, risky.

Similarly, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, also found meaning with absence when examining whether Henri Christophe, monarch of Haiti after its successful revolution against the French from 1791 to 1804, was influenced by Frederick the Great of Prussia when Christophe named his new Milot palace “San Souci.” Was the palace named after Frederick’s own in Potsdam, or after Colonel San Souci, a revolutionary rival Christophe killed? Trouillot studied the historical record and found that opportunities for early observers to mention a Potsdam-Milot connection were suspiciously ignored.[12] For example, Austro-German geographer Karl Ritter, a contemporary of Christophe, repeatedly described his palace as “European” but failed to mention it was inspired by Frederick’s.[13] British consul Charles Mackenzie, “who visited and described San Souci less than ten years after Christophe’s death, does not connect the two palaces.”[14] Why was a fact that was such a given for later writers not mentioned early on if it was true?[15] These archival gaps of course co-exist with Trouillot’s positive evidence (“Christophe built San Souci, the palace, a few yards away from — if not exactly — where he killed San Souci, the man”[16]), but are used to build a case that Christophe had Colonel San Souci in mind when naming his palace, a detail that evidences an overall erasure of the colonel from history.[17] By contrasting the early historical record with the later one, Trouillot finds truth and silencing.

This historiographic comparison is different from Rountree’s historical analogy. Rountree fills in epistemological gaps about Powhatan women with the traits of nearby, similar cultures; Trouillot judges the gaps in early reports about Haiti’s San Souci palace to suggest later writers were in error and participating in historical silencing (he, like Darnton, is working with two existing elements and weighs the differences). Like Rountree’s, Trouillot’s method is useful and important: the historian should always seek the earliest writings from relevant sources to develop an argument, and if surprising absences exist there is cause to be suspicious that later works created falsities. However, this method too flirts with assumption. It assumes the unwritten is also the unthought, which is not always the case. It may be odd or unlikely that Mackenzie or Ritter would leave Potsdam unmentioned if they believed in its influence, but not impossible or unthinkable. It further assumes a representative sample size — Trouillot is working with very few early documents. Would the discovery of more affect his thesis? As we see with Trouillot and Rountree, and as one might expect, a dearth in the archives forces assumptions.

While Trouillot’s conclusion is probable, he is nevertheless at greater risk of refutation than Darnton or, say, historian Kenneth Pomeranz, who also engaged in reciprocal comparison when he put China beside Europe during the centuries before 1800. Unlike the opening chapter of The Great Cat Massacre, The Great Divergence finds meaning in similarities as well as differences. Pomeranz seeks to understand why Europe experienced an Industrial Revolution instead of China, and must sort through many posited causal factors. For instance, did legal and institutional structures more favorable to capitalist development give Europe an edge, contributing to greater productivity and efficiency?[18] Finding similar regulatory mechanisms like interest rates and property rights, and a larger “world of surprising resemblances” before 1750, Pomeranz argued for other differences: Europe’s access to New World resources and trade, as well as to coal.[19] This indicates that Europe’s industrialization occurred not due to the superior intentions, wisdom, or industriousness of Europeans but rather due to unforeseen, fortunate happenings, or “conjunctures” that “often worked to Western Europe’s advantage, but not necessarily because Europeans created or imposed them.”[20] Reciprocal comparison can thus break down eurocentric perspectives by looking at a broader range of historical evidence. No assumptions need be made (rather, assumptions, such as those about superior industriousness, can be excised). As obvious as it is to write, a wealth of archival evidence, rather than a lack, makes for safer methodological footing, as does working with two existing evidentiary elements, no risky suppositions necessary.

A future paper might muse further on the relationship between analogy and silencing, alluded to earlier — if Trouillot is correct and a fact-based narrative is built on silences, how much more problematic is the narrative based partly on analogy?[21] As for this work, in sum, the historian must use some caution with historical analogy, historiographic comparison, and other tools that have an empty space on one side of the equation. These methods are hugely important and often present theses of high probability. But they are by nature put at risk by archival gaps; reciprocal comparison has more power in its derived meanings and claims about other cultures of the past — by its own archival nature.

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[1] Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, eds., The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 111.

[2] Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 42.

[3] Ibid, 47-48.

[4] Ibid, 29-38.

[5] Ibid, 23-29.

[6] Helen C. Rountree, “Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain John Smith Barely Saw,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 1 (winter 1998): 1-2.

[7] Ibid, 4.

[8] Ibid, 21.

[9] Ibid, 22.

[10] Darnton, Cat Massacre, 261.

[11] Rountree, “Powhatan,” 2.

[12] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 61-65.

[13] Ibid, 63-64.

[14] Ibid, 62.

[15] Ibid, 64.

[16] Ibid, 65.

[17] Ibid, chapters 1 and 2.

[18] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapters 3 and 4.

[19] Ibid, 29, 279-283.

[20] Ibid, 4.

[21] Trouillot, Silencing, 26-27.

Will Capitalism Lead to the One-Country World?

Posted on by under Socialism

In Why America Needs Socialism, I offered a long list of ways the brutalities and absurdities of capitalism necessitate a better system, one of greater democracy, worker ownership, and universal State services. The work also explored the importance of internationalism, moving away from nationalistic ideas (the simpleminded worship of one’s country) and toward an embrace of all peoples — a world with one large nation. Yet these ideas could have been more deeply connected. The need for internationalism was largely framed as a response to war, which, as shown, can be driven by capitalism but of course existed before it and thus independently of it. The necessity of a global nation was only briefly linked to global inequality, disastrous climate change, and other problems. In other words, one could predict that the brutalities and absurdities of international capitalism, such as the dreadful activities of transnational corporations, will push humanity toward increased global political integration.

As a recent example of a (small) step toward political integration, look at the 2021 agreement of 136 nations to set a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% and tax multinational companies where they operate, not just where they are headquartered. This historic moment was a response to corporations avoiding taxes via havens in low-tax countries, moving headquarters, and other schemes. Or look to the 2015 Paris climate accords that set a collective goal of limiting planetary warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, a response to the environmental damage wrought by human industry since the Industrial Revolution. There is a recognition that a small number of enormous companies threaten the health of all people. Since the mid-twentieth century, many international treaties have focused on the environment and labor rights (for example, outlawing forced labor and child labor, which were always highly beneficial and profitable for capitalists). The alignment of nations’ laws is a remarkable step toward unity. Apart from war and nuclear weapons, apart from the global inequality stemming from geography (such as an unlucky lack of resources) or history (such as imperialism), the effects and nature of modern capitalism alone scream for the urgency of internationalism. Capital can move about the globe, businesses seeking places with weaker environmental regulations, minimum wages, and safety standards, spreading monopolies, avoiding taxes, poisoning the biosphere, with an interconnected global economy falling like a house of cards during economic crises. The movement of capital and the interconnectivity of the world necessitate further, deeper forms of international cooperation.

Perhaps, whether in one hundred years or a thousand, humanity will realize that the challenges of multi-country accords — goals missed or ignored, legislatures refusing to ratify treaties, and so on — would be mitigated by a unified political body. A single human nation could address tax avoidance, climate change, and so on far more effectively and efficiently.

On the other hand, global capitalism may lead to a one-nation world in a far more direct way. Rather than the interests of capitalists spurring nations to work together to confront said interests, it may be that nations integrate to serve certain interests of global capitalism, to achieve unprecedented economic growth. The increasing integration of Europe and other regions provides some insight. The formation of the European Union’s common market eliminated taxes and customs between countries, and established a free flow of capital, goods, services, and workers, generating around €1 trillion in economic benefit annually. The EU market is the most integrated in the world, alongside the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, both earning sixes out of seven on the scale of economic integration, one step from merging entirely. Other common markets exist as well, being fives on the scale, uniting national economies in Eurasia, Central America, the Arabian Gulf, and South America; many more have been proposed. There is much capitalists enjoy after single market creation: trade increases, production costs fall, investment spikes, profits rise. Total economic and political unification may be, again, more effective and efficient still. Moving away from nations and toward worldwide cohesion could be astronomically beneficial to capitalism. Will the push toward a one-nation world come from the need to reign in capital, to serve capital, or both?

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When The Beatles Sang About Killing Women

Posted on by under History

Move over, Johnny Cash and “Cocaine Blues.” Sure, “Early one mornin’ while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down… Shot her down because she made me slow / I thought I was her daddy but she had five more” are often the first lyrics one thinks of when considering the violent end of the toxic masculinity spectrum in white people music. (Is this not something you ponder? Confront more white folk who somehow only see these things in black music, you’ll get there.) But The Beatles took things to just as dark a place.

Enter “Run For Your Life” from their 1965 album Rubber Soul, a song as catchy as it is chilling: “You better run for your life if you can, little girl / Hide your head in the sand, little girl / Catch you with another man / That’s the end.” Jesus. It’s jarring, the cuddly “All You Need Is Love” boy band singing “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man” and “Let this be a sermon / I mean everything I’ve said / Baby, I’m determined / And I’d rather see you dead.” But jealous male violence in fact showed up in other Beatles songs as well, and in the real world, with the self-admitted abusive acts and attitudes of John Lennon, later regretted but no less horrific for it.

This awfulness ensured The Beatles would be viewed by many of posterity as a contradictory element, with proto-feminist themes and ideas of the 1960s taking root in their music alongside possessive, murderous sexism. That is, if these things are noticed at all.

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With Afghanistan, Biden Was in the ‘Nation-building Trap.’ And He Did Well.

Posted on by under War

You’ve done it. You have bombed, invaded, and occupied an oppressive State into a constitutional democracy, human rights and all. Now there is only one thing left to do: attempt to leave — and hope you are not snared in the nation-building trap.

Biden suffered much criticism over the chaotic events in Afghanistan in August 2021, such as the masses of fleeing Afghans crowding the airport in Kabul and clinging to U.S. military planes, the American citizens left behind, and more, all as the country fell to the Taliban. Yet Biden was in a dilemma, in the 16th century sense of the term: a choice between two terrible options. That’s the nation-building trap: if your nation-building project collapses after or as you leave, do you go back in and fight a bloody war a second time, or do you remain at home? You can 1) spend more blood, treasure, and years reestablishing the democracy and making sure the first war was not in vain, but risk being in the exact same situation down the road when you again attempt to leave. Or 2) refuse to sacrifice any more lives (including those of civilians) or resources, refrain from further war, and watch oppression return on the ruins of your project. This is a horrific choice to make, and no matter what you would choose there should be at least some sympathy for those who might choose the other.

Such a potentiality should make us question war and nation-building, a point to which we will return. But here it is important to recognize that the August chaos was inherent in the nation-building trap. Biden had that dilemma to face, and his decision came with unavoidable tangential consequences. For example, the choice, as the Taliban advanced across Afghanistan, could be reframed as 1) send troops back in, go back to war, and prevent a huge crowd at the airport and a frantic evacuation, or 2) remain committed to withdraw, end the war, but accept that there would be chaos as civilians tried to get out of the country. Again, dismal options.

This may seem too binary, but the timeline of events appears to support it. With a withdraw deadline of August 31, the Taliban offensive began in early May. By early July, the U.S. had left its last military base, marking the withdraw as “effectively finished” (this is a detail often forgotten). Military forces only remained in places like the U.S. embassy in Kabul. In other words, from early May to early July, the Taliban made serious advances against the Afghan army, but the rapid fall of the nation occurred after the U.S. and NATO withdraw — with some Afghan soldiers fighting valiantly, others giving up without a shot. There are countless analyses regarding why the much larger, U.S.-trained and -armed force collapsed so quickly. U.S. military commanders point to our errors like: “U.S. military officials trained Afghan forces to be too dependent on advanced technology; they did not appreciate the extent of corruption among local leaders; and they didn’t anticipate how badly the Afghan government would be demoralized by the U.S. withdrawal.” In any event, one can look at either May-June (when U.S. forces were departing and Taliban forces were advancing) or July-August (when U.S. forces were gone and the Taliban swallowed the nation in days) as the key decision-making moment(s). Biden had to decide whether to reverse the withdraw, send troops back in to help the Afghan forces retake lost districts (and thus avoid the chaos of a rush to the airport and U.S. citizens left behind), or hold firm to the decision to end the war (and accept the inevitability of turmoil). Many will argue he should have chosen option one, and that’s an understandable position. Even if you had to fight for another 20 years, and all the death and maiming that comes with it, and face the same potential scenario when you try to withdraw in 2041, some would support it. But for those who desired an end to war, it makes little sense to criticize Biden for the airport nightmare, or the Taliban takeover or American citizens being left behind (more on that below). “I supported withdraw but not the way it was done” is almost incomprehensible. In the context of that moment, all those things were interconnected. In summer 2021, only extending and broadening the war could have prevented those events. It’s the nation-building trap — it threatens to keep you at war forever.

The idea that Biden deserves a pass on the American citizens unable to be evacuated in time may draw special ire. Yes, one may think, maybe ending the war in summer 2021 brought an inevitable Taliban takeover (one can’t force the Afghan army to fight, and maybe we shouldn’t fight a war “Afghan forces are not willing to fight themselves,” as Biden put it) and a rush to flee the nation, but surely the U.S. could have done more to get U.S. citizens (and military allies such as translators) out of Afghanistan long before the withdraw began. This deserves some questioning as well — and as painful as it is to admit, the situation involved risky personal decisions, gambles that did not pay off. Truly, it was no secret that U.S. forces would be leaving Afghanistan in summer 2021. This was announced in late February 2020, when Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that would end hostilities and mark a withdraw date. U.S. citizens (most dual citizens) and allies had over a year to leave Afghanistan, and the State Department contacted U.S. citizens 19 times to alert them of the potential risks and offer to get them out, according to the president and the secretary of state. Thousands who chose to stay changed their minds as the Taliban advance continued. One needn’t be an absolutist here. It is possible some Americans fell through the cracks, or that military allies were given short shrift. And certainly, countless Afghan citizens had not the means or finances to leave the nation. Not everyone who wished to emigrate over that year could do so. Yet given that the withdraw date was known and U.S. citizens were given the opportunity to get out, some blame must necessarily be placed on those who wanted to stay despite the potential for danger — until, that is, the potential became actual.

Biden deserves harsh criticism, instead, for making stupid promises, for instance that there would be no chaotic withdraw. The world is too unpredictable for that. Further, for a drone strike that blew up children before the last plane departed. And for apparently lying about his generals’ push to keep 2,500 troops in the country.

That is a good segue for a few final thoughts. The first revolves around the question: “Regardless of the ethics of launching a nation-building war, is keeping 2,500 troops in the country, hypothetically forever, the moral thing to do to prevent a collapse into authoritarianism or theocracy?” Even if one opposed and condemned the invasion as immoral, once that bell has been rung it cannot be undone, and we’re thus forced to consider the ethics of how to act in a new, ugly situation. Isn’t 2,500 troops a “small price to pay” to preserve a nascent democracy and ensure a bloody war was not for nothing? That is a tempting position, and again one can have sympathy for it even if disagreeing, favoring full retreat. The counterargument is that choosing to leave a small force may preserve the nation-building project but it also incites terrorism against the U.S. We know that 9/11 was seen by Al-Qaeda as revenge for U.S. wars and military presences in Muslim lands, and the War on Terror has only caused more religious radicalization and deadly terrorist revenge, in an endless cycle of violence that should be obvious to anyone over age three. So here we see another dilemma: leave, risk a Taliban takeover, but (begin to) extricate yourself from the cycle of violence…or stay, protect the democracy, but invite more violence against Americans. This of course strays dangerously close to asking who is more valuable, human beings in Country X or Country Y, that old, disgusting patriotism or nationalism. But this writer detests war and nation-building and imperialism and the casualties at our own hands (our War on Terror is directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 1 million people), and supports breaking the cycle immediately. That entails total withdraw and living with the risk of the nation-building endeavor falling apart.

None of this is to say that nation-building cannot be successful in theory or always fails in practice. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, which like that of Afghanistan I condemn bitterly, ended a dictatorship; eighteen years later a democracy nearly broken by corruption, security problems, and the lack of enforcement of personal rights stands in its place, a flawed but modest step in the right direction. However, we cannot deny that attempting to invade and occupy a nation into a democracy carries a high risk of failure. For all the blood spilled — ours and our victims’ — the effort can easily end in disaster. (Beyond a flawed democracy and massive Iraqi civilian body count, our invasion plunged the nation into civil war and birthed ISIS.) War and new institutions and laws hardly address root causes of national problems that can tear a new country apart, such as religious extremism, longstanding ethnic conflict, and so on. It may in fact make such things worse. This fact should make us question the wisdom of nation-building. As discussed, you can “stay until the nation is ready,” which may mean generations. Then when you leave, the new nation may still collapse, as with Afghanistan, not being as ready as you thought. Thus a senseless waste of lives and treasure. Further, why do we never take things to their logical conclusion? Why tackle one or two brutal regimes and not all the others? If we honestly wanted to use war to try to bring liberty and democracy to others, the U.S. would have to bomb and occupy nearly half the world. Actually “spreading freedom around the globe” and “staying till the job’s done” means wars of decades or centuries, occupations of almost entire continents, countless millions dead. Why do ordinary Americans support a small-scale project, but are horrified at the thought of a large-scale one? That is a little hint that what you are doing needs to be rethought.

Biden — surprisingly, admirably steadfast in his decision despite potential personal political consequences — uttered shocking words to the United States populace: “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Let’s hope that is true.

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