A public comment I made to the US government not to gut the civil service.

Yesterday was the last day to submit a public comment against Trump's plan to gut the professional civil service known as Schedule F reforms. It was a plan the Project 2025 folks believed was important to knock out the professional civil service and expertise of the civil servants so that dumbness on behalf of corporate power can rule. Anyone who thinks, "Oh, the civil service is so dumb, so corrupt," etc. has no idea how bad it will get if we essentially reinstitute a "spoils system." I urge my FB friends and followers to read this informative primer on the proposal, my comment I submitted below, and then comment for yourself. Please make your voice heard. Not only will administration people read the comments. Courts who will hear challenges to the proposed set of rules will also read the comments and help them understand why this would destroy part of what has actually made the USA great. My comment to the government was as follows (with a couple of small edits):

"Heckava job, Brownie!" Remember that from nearly twenty years ago, which became a "gallows-humor" punch line? That moment of regulatory failure should remind us why it is a BAD IDEA to politicize the US civil service. Yes, this reference concerned a FEMA department head, which was and remains a political appointee position. However, FEMA itself was not destroyed by that bad appointment because the department had, and continues to have, so many great people with practical and technical expertise. This proposed set of rules to re-establish political appointments throughout the civil service will do such serious damage and potentially destroy the entire civil service that our ancestors fought so hard to create.

The fight for a non-political and professional civil service has its roots in political battles during the 1870s and 1880s. People across political worldviews recognized there was a need for expertise in various matters important to human existence. They recognized there was a need to care about having people in department positions who knew how to reasonably follow existing regulations, and write new regulations with good faith and professional understandings and motivations. As there are always ways people try to get around various laws or regulations, the need for new regulations, creating exceptions, closing loopholes that were not anticipated, etc. becomes a very difficult task. It requires people who have knowledge of how regulations function, how people behave, and looking beyond common prejudices and passions.

Partisan politics tends to result in rewarding short-term thinking and often have bad faith motivations that undermine confidence in the rules which govern our daily lives. A professional civil service provides what people ultimately demand from government, and in society, namely fair and equitable rules to function on an everyday level. So many times, one may read a regulation and say, "What is that about? Why so onerous?" and come to find out WHY the regulation was promulgated in the first place. I myself have had many an "ah-ha!" moment where I recognized, "So THAT's why this regulation exists." Partisan politics never gets that far and would rather jettison a regulation that went through a painstaking writing and hearing process.

The argument that executive agency rule-making is a modern "thing" is simply and historically wrong. In George Washington's first administration, Treasury Secretary Hamilton wrote regulations for his department to assist the department in executing laws Congress had passed. Hamilton recognized the actual functioning of the government, and HOW to follow the laws Congress passed, required regulations. He recognized there was a need for expertise in understanding how different situations required more minute, and often more complicated, rule-making. The administrative state was born in that administration, and Attorneys General in the Washington administration understood this as well. Hamilton even used the courts to determine what was a proper regulatory interpretation of a congressional law, sometimes, in those early ethics days, hired lawyers for both sides of a question and helped write the briefs for both sides so the most forceful arguments were able to be made.

The so-called "spoils" system that was formally established under the Jackson administration in the 1830s proved to make for a very inefficient, very wasteful, and very corrupt government, and while railroads grew during that time, nobody who lived through that era nor studied that era would say that this was a good way to run a government. It is why, after the US Civil War, so many from across the political spectrum saw civil service reform as an important reform to undertake. It was an anti-Civil Service reform President , Chester Arthur, who "saw the light" and signed the law creating what became the modern civil service in the mid 1880s. Our nation's civil service thereafter became the envy of the world over decades. Yes, there will always be human frailties that create bad regulators and bad civil servants. But anyone who knows public servants over decades also sees pride in those civil servants who truly do wish to serve the public, and do their best to offer the knowledge and experience they have.

I am a person who worked in the private sector for over forty of my forty-five years of my adult life. However, over most of my 67 years, I have dealt with many public servants and they were, by-and-large, outstanding and caring about the work they do. It was rare to meet someone who fit the stereotype that is so ingrained in so many jokes and partisan attacks. Please do not undermine our civil service system. Having a professional civil service is one of the things that has made our nation great. Don't undermine that greatness.

CNN did a great public service in showing the Murrow-McCarthy play. Its context before and after the play was largely awful.

It was funny in a sardonic way for me to see how, before and after the CNN showing of the Murrow play with George Clooney, the people interviewing and interviewed missed that they themselves have been fearful and lacking in courage in our time. The big issue of our time as US citizens is our nation's enabling, supporting, and egging on Israeli genocide of Palestinians in a misguided attempt to further our nation's strategic, imperial interests. Not one of the people interviewed before or after the showing of the play would dare to remotely speak in any way against what the US has enabled Israel to do and continue to do. Not. One. Of. Them.

CNN put on its post-play panel an outright hack like Bret Stephens, who had gleefully supported the lies the Bush/Cheney administration put out to get our nation to overthrow the Iraqi government in 2002-2003. That Stephen never even thinks of apologizing shows that supporting propaganda is the true way to national success as a pundit in legacy corporate media. And nobody on the panel, excepting Abby Phillip (good for you, Abby) even dared to challenge Stephens. Still, she was a long way off in speaking truth to Stephens' power.

It was also downright hilarious to hear Scott Pelley say that Murrow was a success because of what he did with Joe McCarthy. Even the play acknowledges he lost his weekly Tuesday night prime time slot, and was relegated to a relative few reports (called "CBS Reports") in the dead time of Sunday afternoons. For Pelley to have made a commencement speech in May 2025 telling students to stand up for free speech and speak truth to power when he himself has been and continues to be silent throughout the Israeli genocide the US has enabled and supported, and silent about the student protestors across the nation who have suffered (certainly they have not been "successful" in the way Pelley and that asshat Anderson Cooper assume), is the height of legacy corporate media hypocrisy.

Yes, CNN did a great public service last night in showing this outstanding play without charging anyone wanting to see it on their computers without signing up for CNN's streaming service. They showed it without commercial interruption. It was, again, great. But, CNN's attempt at context before and after almost completely failed.

As a postscript, I'm old enough to know Connie Chung and Tom Brokaw were, in their time, physically attractive airheads of the type the film "Broadcast News" was criticizing. Neither could have ever written the script Murrow did with a Shakespearean bent. They were and remain fairly shallow.

 

And really, CNN. The only historian you could dig up was Tim Naftali? Really? He showed what a schmuck he is when he said Murrow's report on McCarthy was at the "height" of McCarthy's power. Wrong, Tim. McCarthy's hearings against the military were already underway and ABC was showing those hearings every day. For the first time, housewives across the US saw how menacing, reckless, and sometimes drunk McCarthy was. Murrow still acted bravely, yes. But McCarthy was already beginning to slip when the first of the ultimately three shows aired. And I admit that whenever the story of Murrow and McCarthy is told, I cry every time for the late Don Holllenbeck. Every. Time. That was a man with courage whose own personal demons did him in.

I would also almost bet Naftali probably doesn't even know the one liner about "Annie Lee Moss" in the play was the playwright's acknowledgement that the Murrow report on McCarthy got that one wrong. The middle aged black woman, Annie Lee Moss, a federal public servant was most likely a Red. She played dumb before McCarthy's committee when called, and did so brilliantly I may add. But even the Murrow people just assumed the middle aged black lady was not smart enough to be a Red. She was certainly not a spy, however. She was, though, merely a low level civil servant in late 1940s through mid 1950s (and of course beyond) America who lived with a man who subscribed to the Daily Worker. Both knew very well the Communist Party was the only party that fully and consistently supported African-American civil rights in the 1930s through early 1950s. There are a whole bunch of historians CNN could have brought on who have written important works on McCarthy and the Red Scare overall. None, however, are generally allowed to appear in legacy corporate media.

So, ironies pile up upon ironies. Yes, the Trump administration is a danger to so many of our civil liberties. But there are clear boundaries of lies that cannot be countered if one wants a career in legacy corporate media.

First they came for...then they came for...and now the universities; Timothy Snyder has missed the moment until it is too late

I guess this video from now former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder is okay. But note how Snyder never connects the dots to how come there were so many Jewish college students who took part in the protests. There were and are a whole lot, Professor Synder. Where were YOU during the encampments? Where was YOUR voice on what Revisionist Zionism in Israel has done over so many decades of power? There is an element of Pastor Niemoller here as the right-wing part of the establishment and elite powers finally came for the universities themselves--and only now he is speaking up on the topic of antisemitism relating to but still not touching the very essence of the problems of Zionism as practiced in Israel against an indigenous people.

 

As far as I saw, Snyder never spoke up about the wrongful conflation of Zionism and antisemitism. And despite his learning and knowledge, he missed how a belief in Zionist causes can go hand-in-hand with antisemitism. It is not the opposite of antisemitsm. See this critique of a book Snyder wrote over a decade ago where the reviewer shows how Snyder missed how Revisionist Zionism in Poland was a vehicle for Polish Christian antisemitism--not a philo-semitism.* Worse, in an October 2022 lecture, Snyder was expressly willing to designate Putin's war crimes in Ukraine as genocide. But somehow, Snyder has been missing in action regarding what is actually a more obvious case of Israeli genocide against Palestinians under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide.

When I watched Synder's new video and read the transcript, I was struck by how ultimately how hollow it is because of his continued inability to understand how politically-oriented Zionists, not only Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, sold Zionism to European and British leaders as a colonial project--and were adamant against those relatively few cultural Zionists who envisioned a multi-cultural or binational state for Palestine (Rabbi Judah Magnes, philosopher Martin Buber, Jewish Biblical scholar Morris Jastrow, among more than a few others).

Yes, Timothy Snyder. You've been great at sounding the alarm regarding Trump. But, really, man, get your ass out of Hebrew school mythology about Zionism and the State of Israel. It ain't our religion. It's a political ideology attempting to respond to 19th and 20th-Century European Christian-based antisemitism, at best. At worst, even the "good guys" like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann have been exposed as bad guys when Israeli historians began going through their review of the archives.

The only one I will defend is Herzl because, while he may have written The Jewish State in the late 1890s and was the leading founder of the Zionist movement, his novel, published around the time of his early death, New Old Land, posited a binational state where Arabs and Jews from Europe and elsewhere lived in harmony, equality, and peace. Herzl was a true visionary who sensed that building Zionism as a colonial project could lead to precisely what we see today. I wish American pro-Zionist Jews in particular would read the then-hopeful book from the mid-1990s by the now late Israeli Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres, The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodore Herzl in Israel.  Peres went deep into the Herzl novel and why it needed to be resurrected from the dusty shelves of a privileged few who knew it.

* It is stunning to me that such a renowned historian as Snyder missed how Zionist ideology is premised on the immutability of antisemitism, and helps explain why at various points, early Zionists through the end of the 1930s, tried to forge agreements with antisemites, including the German Nazi leadership. Wikipedia is actually very good on the idea of the overlap between Zionist ideology and its acceptance of the assumptions that drive antisemitism. Joseph Massad's polemical essay is, notwithstanding the polemicism, worth reading to take us through today, particularly why it is not odd for Israel to cultivate relationships with far-right and antisemitic politicians throughout what used to be called "Eastern" Europe (at one time "Central" Europe). Most sadly, based upon this series of tweets, I am not sure Snyder is still getting what is wrong with his perspective. He is cogent in recognizing how Trump is following a playbook that overlaps with Hitler and Mussolini. However, he seems oblivious in how Zionist ideology and Israel's leadership are ultimately in league with the thinking and policies that undergird right-wing, nationalist, and antisemitic ideologies. 

The PDA leader's proposal for an outside-inside strategy to transform the Democratic Party leaves me more convinced of my proposal

I read this important proposal, set forth in the LA Progressive online magazine, from PDAer Alan Minsky and hoped to be convinced why I am wrong about progressive leaders simply leading by leaving the Democratic Party altogether as did the brave Whig politicians in the mid-1850s, starting in 1854. After reading Minsky's article, I am more convinced than ever that this is asking progressive activists to do twice the work. He also refuses to acknowledge just how entrenched the money interests are in the Democratic Party, including many state parties. Multiple times, he acknowledges the Democratic Party leadership is hopeless and, worse, refuses to accommodate progressives in the party.

Worse, he doesn't talk about what happened with when his outside-inside strategy in Nevada was already successfully applied. Four years ago, progressives won the chair, vice-chair, and other statewide positions. The establishment Dems, on the way out, took out most of the money from the party and inserted it into a party within a party from those who were previously handpicked before by the by-then Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), who was awful in his lifetime for the most part. Nevada still has two conservative Dems as senators--both women, and one a Latina--who continue to enable Trumpism and the Republican agenda as they claim to oppose it. In short, they bled the money from the party and showed how the money power still controlled the politics in the Democratic Party. This article from the Hill shows the establishment, backed by money power, eventually won back formal power in the Nevada State Democratic Party.

I urge anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party to read this if any thinks this proposal is really viable considering the Nevada progressive experience, the way Dem politicians routinely ignore party platforms--I saw this in CA and see this in NM--and how much hatred there really remains behind closed doors of Dem officeholders against Dem progressive activists. I've seen it, I've heard it, and it is beyond ridiculous. The phrasing these people use is classic projection--as if we are the bad guys, when it is clear our point about losing the working classes is now verbally acknowledged.

My proposal remains much more sound, but requires progressive leaders to act. If they did, one sees how much more effective the time progressives are being asked to spend under Minsky's proposal would be. There is nobody to fight under my proposal. It is a straight shot with progressive candidates, hundreds of millions of dollars donated to a party that one may want to actually and fully support, and candidates who would know their candidacy was BECAUSE of the people who donated, and following a platform they are in agreement with. In the past decades, Dem politicians only care about the money they raise from big donors, run as independent fiefdoms, don't care about party platforms, and find activists a pain in the neck. A replacement party doesn't have those barriers to have to work to get around.

Minsky is letting off the hook the progressive leaders already in Congress. The fact that hardly anyone besides AOC joined Bernie tells you pretty much all you need to know why they are failures, no different than the establishment/corporate Dems.

Tariffs, infrastructure, taxes, religion, ideology, and, at long last, smart policy-making. Too bad we won't get to smart policy-making in the current discourse.

Up into the 2010s and perhaps even into the 2016 campaign, I was either pro-tariff or neutral on the topic of tariffs. In the 1990s, I strongly opposed the NAFTA and the WTO. At the dawn of the 2000s, I strongly opposed the gift of favored trade status to China. Why? Because I wanted to protect US industry and US manufacturing jobs, even as I knew automation was starting to rise in ways that made Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" and Daniel Bell's "Post-industrial society" finally start to look prescient. But alas. It didn't matter who among the two corporate-dominated parties were elected. The US workers and the world were getting corporate-dominated global trade--and damn the US workers and US industrial capacity.

In the 2010s, as I saw how interdependent consumers in the economically advanced US and other nations were on goods shipped from China and elsewhere, I realized the US could only get its middle and lower classes back to New Deal type success levels would be through (a) significant increases in the MARGINAL income and capital gains tax rates on the truly rich and corporations and (b) a massive infrastructure program to rebuild our infrastructure, hopefully with greener technologies (yeah, I supported a New Deal that was Green before AOC).

Also, as I saw the US birth rate was dropping so much, any massive infrastructure program would invariably lead to us putting up "Help Wanted" signs at the physical land borders and sea/air ports. That's a little hint why Trump 1.0 never came through on infrastructure: It would expose that our nation didn't have enough even trainable people to do the infrastructure work. We would also have too many infrastructure jobs chasing too few workers, and that would mean employers would have to pay more to workers. This is STILL TRUE. But the fact remains, fans of Trump and anti-anti-Trump people: Trump never wants to economically help workers or, ahem, bring in more immigrants who would be line workers. And neolibs in both parties don't want massive infrastructure because it would help workers over employers (It is why I was so surprised by neolib Biden's NLRB policies, as it was a break from Clinton and Obama, not just Republicans, including Trump).

The worst part of all this, for me at least, is most Americans receive pro-corporate economics lessons in both high school and college. Most Americans don't realize how corporate media propaganda continually supports a right wing corporate capitalist (known as neoclassical economics) narrative that even Pete Buttigieg, the Clintons, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barry Obama buy into. This seeps into social media as I see even people on my FB feed keep posting the scene in "Ferris Bueller" where Ben Stein plays the economics high school teacher talking about tariffs. Stein, whose Dad (Herbert Stein) was a respected conservative economist who ALWAYS hated the New Deal, repeats the tired and incorrect nostrum that the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930 was what really sent us into the Depression. Sorry, Ben, Herb, and even John Kenneth Galbraith, you are all WRONG.

I wish I could post online the old labor-side economics guy, Gus Tyler, and his great essay in the late 1980s that put that to the lie it is.* It was published in the now defunct (?) "New Leader," an old labor oriented magazine. To summarize its points: The Great Depression was initially caused by people buying stock on loans from banks, and, banks, when collecting the collateral for those loans, as most never had the money to pay back the loans, started to go under more and more as the value of the collateral declined more and more. Second, there was a larger drop in the GNP (now GDP) BEFORE the S-H Tariff went into effect than after. Third, only 10% of our economy relied on imports. Fourth, the S-H Tariff was, for the most part, only a marginal increase in the tariffs that already existed. Therefore, to think this one tariff passed in 1930 was a primary cause of the Depression getting worse is, well, dumb. It is why I consider most econ high school and college econ teachers to be, well, morons.

Thus, in the last decade or more, I've been more against tariffs than for tariffs. And Atrios, a rare smart economist, is absolutely correct to say we shouldn't buy into the current liberal and business-conservative chatter that says tariffs are always and elementarily bad on principle. They are not. They are situational. They definitely played a positive role in building up our nation's industrial capacity throughout the 19th Century. Tariffs also played a hugely positive role in China, Japan, and South Korea in building up their economies in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Today, though, for the US at least, tariffs are not such a great idea. Atrios also states, most insightfully:

(a) Ahem, liberals: Biden kept most of Trump 1.0's tariffs and added more in the late part of his one term; and

(b) It is well past time for regular Americans to reject the pro-free trade assumptions we have bought into since the early 1990s. The only valid question is a practical one: What policies help workers and consumers, and, as a sub-part, what polices will help workers more than consumers or vice versa? The answer to the question and sub-question reveals why we should not be pro- or anti-tariff as if we are standing on some principle. It is why I merely call myself a socialist-oriented person as it is simply an aesthetic or philosophical feeling. You know, the way someone may even think of their religion, though I find the idea that socialism is a religion to be an invitation to confusion and worse. The only thing an ideology shares with religion is that both carry a philosophical default mechanism and generality of a set of principles. However, when it comes to political-economy, and public policy, the policy-making should override, when reasonably necessary, the political-economy principle. Why? Because the best public policy making is empirically-based, situational, and relative. At some point, every public policy should be tweaked or significantly reformed, again depending upon the circumstances. Smart religious and smart ideological thinking requires this recognition--or else we get the excesses that cause religions and ideologies to amass a bunch of dead bodies.

God, I hope this is clear to at least some of us.

*If only Dissent would take another article he wrote for the magazine in the Spring of 1988 from behind the subscription wall. 

Time for the national Dems to go the way of the once-national Whig Party. Only national politicians can make this start to happen.

I have reached the conclusion that national progressive Dems in Congress need to strongly consider, and then do, what then-progressive Whigs did in the early 1850s, which is to form a new national political party. Just as the then-new Republican Party rose quickly out of the morass of the hopelessly divided Whig Party, this new party will find so much support across the nation, starting in places where the Dems are already toxic. The primary platform should revolve around economic policies of a social democratic form to directly challenge corporate power and the Empire. It will also acknowledge cultural issues, but strongly support "live the way you want to live" on LGBTQ and abortion issues, and promote gun safety regulation more than outright confiscation.

I realize the main difference in the 1850s was the Republican Party was able to unite people outside the enslavement institutional South through one issue, the Scourge of Slavery. However, we face an existential threat of corporate domination and a climate crisis that needs to ensure people can be employed in a New Deal of people-helping jobs and green-oriented infrastructure redevelopment, and not continue to be tied to fossil fuel production.

Structurally, the national Democratic Party resembles nothing more than an equivalent to Communist-front organizations where, once the New Deal liberals left in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler deal of 1939, they became hollow shells. Sadly, the national Democratic Party remains controlled by major corporate donors and major consultant companies which have largely destroyed the Democratic Party's ties to working people and New Deal values.

However, all the activists across labor, environmental, and antiwar movements continue to be unable to create a new political party. What it is going to take is leadership from already known politicians, as with William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner, and even a Lincoln, who was very well known in Illinois, contrary to the usual way we think of Lincoln coming out of nowhere for the 1860 presidential nomination.

I am also confident that states with decent Democratic Party leadership, such as New Mexico, will quickly find their way to a new party, and eventually gain more political power in areas now dominated by right-wing Republicans.

 
It is time. Past time. So, Congressional politicians who supported Bernie Sanders' values and/or Bernie, #DitchtheDems.

Echoes of the fall of Paris and France

Chuck Schumer has become the domestic US version of Neville Chamberlain. His argument was that things will get worse if he and other Dems did not capitulate to the Republicans, and that capitulating to Trump now would be more effective later on. This argument collapses on its own intended idea of logic. Trump has now clearly won. This is why Trump humiliated Schumer further in Trump's "tweet" "thanking" Schumer. The other eight Democratic Party senators and independent Angus King of Maine deserve equal blame.

As this has unfolded, I have been reading the Soviet-Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's 1942 novel, "The Fall of Paris." I am just past the halfway point. The parallel of his description of French life from 1935 forward is compelling. Each step Hitler took, from supporting Franco in Spain against the Spanish Republic, to taking the Sudtenland in Czechoslovakia and then the latter itself, was greeted with alarm across the French political spectrum. However, the same political elites (except the Communists, who the political elites from the far right to the Socialists reviled) ultimately decided peace was more important than standing up to Hitler. In this set of decisions from the French elites, it was believed by all the so-called smart people that giving in would sate Hitler and standing up for Spain and Czechoslovakia meant war.

Reading this insightful and literarily well-crafted narrative has provided me with a powerful understanding of how this unfolded day-to-day. It is uncanny to me how I see echoes of this in the discourse I have read and sometimes seen at my folks house on MSNBC and CNN. Except, in our time, our nation's Fascist threat is a call from inside the house.

What is surprising to me in reading this novel is Erhenburg was a dedicated Stalinist during the period of the 1930s through Stalin's death. Yet, this novel is deeply sympathetic with respect to business people, conservative and right wing people, and the politically indifferent people who simply wish people would stop with obsessive political arguments, and leave each other in peace. Ehrenburg has been careful to not show how wrongheaded these people were, as he almost tenderly describes their best motives and arguments. Ehrenburg knew he could write the novel in this fashion, as, of course, he wrote his novel after the fall of France. Readers would therefore themselves be able to judge the thinking of these people.

The reason I am still inclined to be negative in my judgment regarding Ehrenburg the person is based upon my reading Victor Serge's most important work, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," which Serge wrote in his last years before his early death in Mexico in 1947 for what he called the "dresser drawer," and which was not published until after his death. In Serge's magisterial work, he took great care to be as objective as he could about his enemies and opponents. It is what makes the work so powerful, as Serge, a revolutionary, is, in this way, most liberal in that old 19th-Century sense. But he is not willing to be that way with Ehrenburg. In the memoirs, Serge harshly described Ehrenburg as a "hack agitator-novelist" (Serge, 318).

I get Serge's anger. In 1935, Ehrenberg, originally born in Kyvv (!), was then living in France. At an international left writers' conference held in Paris he attended, there was a proposal on behalf of various oppressed writers around the world. One of the speakers mentioned Serge, who was suffering his second internal exile due to Serge being a Left Oppositionist to Stalin and affiliated with Trotsky. Ehrenburg and other pro-Soviet writers denounced Serge as a counterrevolutionary and justified Stalin's treatment of him.

 
Not long after the conference, Andre Gide and Romain Rolland respectively implored the Soviet ambassador to France and Stalin to let Serge leave, and Stalin relented (Serge, 318-319). This proved to be miraculous as Serge eventually left the Soviet Union not long before the "Great Purges" of mostly Bolsheviks began. As Serge remains my Soviet dissident hero, I hesitated to read Ehrenburg's book as I expected it to be hack work. I was stunned from the start with Ehrenburg's brilliant writing, and, as I have reached the halfway point, have found it remarkably prescient in its insights. The only nod to Stalinism I see is his missing the manner in which the Communists in Spain were behaving and a very brief, indirect, unnamed but positive, nod to the Lysenko agricultural methods. The latter led me to laugh and that nod has thankfully not been repeated. The novel won the Stalin Prize for best novel, which also makes me deeply wince, but damn it, it is really great despite that hackish award.

Again, I find it sadly strange to be reading this novel of France in the late 1930s and seeing how it echoes into today's political environment. Heck, I didn't even need to re-read Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935). Lewis' novel is not focused so much on the day-to-day that led to the election of Buzz Windrip. Its focus is on the aftereffects. Ehrenburg's novel takes readers step by step into the abyss in a story with a variety of characters from various parts of life, whose lives overlap with, break apart, or carry on romantic affairs with each other. It is a remarkably insightful and compelling work.