Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality by Eric Hobsbawm

    Nations and Nationalism was an amazing book that has only furthered my recent interest in nationalism. Hobsbawm discusses the history of national feelings and their development in a historical context up to the Cold War era. The book was excellent. My reflection is below.

    In discussing nationalism, Hobsbawm defines it as the idea that the political and the national unit should be congruent, citing Gellner. For Hobsbawm, the "nation" is not a primary or unchanging entity. Instead, the nation exists only in relation to the nation-state. Nationalism begets nations, and not the other way around. And states beget both nationalisms and nations. There were not primordial peoples who formed the nations. Instead, they are modern inventions projected onto the past. He quotes the Polish liberator Colonel Pilsudski: "It is the state which makes the nation and not the nation the state." Similarly, the author writes that, "languages multiply with states; not the other way around." Hobsbawm is a critic of the nation, and quotes Renan, "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation." He seems firmly anti-nationalism.

    One of the most interesting questions of the book is how a group of people can become a nation. And how can that nation form a nation-state? For example, why did the Cornish fail to become a nation where the Scottish succeeded. First, says Hobsbawm, there is a threshold question of population that vaguely addresses the issue; to form a nation, a people need to be sufficiently numerous. But beyond that he identifies three criteria. First, it helps to have a historic association with a current or past state with a lengthy and recent past. This helped the English, the French, the Spanish, the Poles, and others. Second, there may be the existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative language. This was the basis of Italian and German nationhood, since they did not have long state histories to look back on. And a third factor is a proven capacity for conquest. Imperial power makes people aware of their nationhood.

    An interesting theme was that early nationalism was all about unification of people into one. The people of what is now France ceased to be Normans, Bretons, Occitan, etc. and chose one dialect as "French." Hobsbawm says that nationals languages are actually all like Hebrew, being created to serve a state's purpose. Although unlike Hebrew they usually pick a standard out of many spoken languages and downgrade the rest to dialects. But many of the more recent nationalism seek to break away from states. This is much more difficult because they are lacking the state support that helps so many nations to be born, and they also appear to observers as a sort of regression, whereas unification into larger states has an air of progress about it. So there was a sort of shift that occurred in the 19th century when nationalism ceased to refer to a top-down effort to inculcate national feelings as a means of centralization, but rather just the feelings of common people themselves, arising spontaneously around the 1880s or so. From 1880 through the Peace of Versailles, nationalism abandoned the "threshold question" and created unlimited numbers of self-determining peoples, and the multiplication of "unhistorical nations" led to a greater focus on ethnicity and language as the only criteria of nationhood.

    In coming to the essence of nationality, Hobsbawm identifies many factors in national development that are not decisive. Language is one that he considers as being a state development. He also rejects any ethnic origin of bloodline, since there are many cases of peoples combining into a nation based on belief, not blood; he cites Russian nationalism as one that combines people of many origins. The most decisive factor for Hobsbawm in creating "proto-national" ideas that are fertile ground for nationalism is that existence of a "historical nation."

    But there is also a revolutionary concept of a nation that comes from France and the United States in the late 18th century. "Americans are those who wish to be." The French concept of the nation, at least at the time of the Revolution, was just a plebiscite of those living within the realm. French nationality was citizenship- language, history, or ethnicity were irrelevant. Patrick Henry even served in the legislature. But France eventually merged non-state patriotism with state nationalism, and today the French state is associated with the dominant grouping- the French.

    Nationalism and socialism were in historic conflict, but had a coming together after World War One in Fascist movements. Mussolini was a socialist before he was a Fascist. Hitler's party sought to combine aspects of nationalism and socialism in the "National Socialist German Workers' Party," clearly identifying the national twice and the social twice. While it was conventional to believe that nationalism was incompatible with international class struggle and vice versa, the inter-war period saw parties combine the two. For the most part, loyalties did not conflict in peoples' heads. British, French, and German workers all supported their national states in WWI, but then went on strike for better wages, deaf to accusations of unpatriotism. Hobsbawm even goes so far as to assert that the combination of national and social demands was a more effective mobilizer, since nationalism was limited in appeal to the discontented lower middle classes. There are many examples of this national/social combination beyond the fascists. The Finnish Socialist Party became the de facto national party of the Finns, and Mensheviks did the same in Georgia. The Dashnaks did the same in Armenia and the Jewish socialists also developed national ideas in both Zionist and non-Zionist directions.

    At the time of writing in the late 1980s, Hobsbawm asserts that nationalism was in decline. Not by any means gone, but historically less important than it was. It would seem that in the last thirty years there has been a resurgence of its importance however. But we may still be heading to the world he predicts in the long term, of supra- and infra-nationality, and the decline of the nation-state as an operational entity. 

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this was interesting: "'Patriots,' in the original sense of the word, were the opposite of those who believed in 'my country, right or wrong,' namely - as Dr. Johnson, citing the ironical use of the word put it - 'factious disturbers of govern-ment.' More seriously, the French Revolution, which appears to have used the term in the manner pioneered by Americans and more especially the Dutch Revolution of 1783, though of patriots as those who showed the love of their country by wishing to renew it by reform or revolution."
• In discussing the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 19th century, Hobsbawm criticizes the decision to ask what language was spoken at home on the census. The result was to turn the census into a "battlefield between nationalities," and that "by asking the language question censuses for the first time forced everyone to choose not only a nationality, but a linguistic nationality." This fomented further nationalism, according to Hobsbawm. I would like to know what he would think about US censuses and race. 
• As of 1980, only 6.5% of papers circulating in Barcelona were in Catalan. But while 80% of all inhabitants of Catalonia spoke Catalan and 91% of inhabitants of Galicia spoke Galician, only 30% of the inhabitants of Basque country spoke the language in 1977.
• Hobsbawm classifies anti-imperial movements as either local educated elites imitating European 'national self-determination,' popular anti-Western xenophobia, or "the natural high spirits of martial tribes."
• I thought this was fascinating data about West Germans right at the time of the fall of Communism. When asked, 83% thought they knew what capitalism was, 78% said the same of socialism, and 71% for the state. But only 34% said they knew what "the nation" was. 90% of well-educated Germans claimed to know all four terms, but only 54% of Germans with only primary education claimed to know what the state and the nation were. 43% said that the nation and state were different, which should have been obvious since there was a West Germany and an East Germany. But 35% believed that they were inseparable. About a third believed that East Germans now formed a different nation.

Totalitarianism (Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism) by Hannah Arendt

    Going to skip the reflection on this one. After the other two reflections on The Origins of Totalitarianism I feel kind of exhausted of thoughts. I'll just note a few interesting excerpts from the book below.

Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions.

The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. [(This one goes very well with the Eric Hoffer that I read)]

Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Thus, in 1939, after the gigantic purge in the Soviet Union had come to an end, Stalin could note with great satisfaction that "the Party was able to promote to leading posts in State or Party affairs more than 500,000 young Bolsheviks." The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. 

The Western world has hitherto, even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all men (and only men). It is only because even Achilles set out for Hector's funeral, only because the most despotic governments honored the slain enemy, only because the Romans allowed the Christians to write their martyrologies, only because the Church kept its heretics alive in the memory of men, that all was not lost and never could be lost. The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.

No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. 

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imperialism (Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism) by Hannah Arendt

     I would say that I find Hannah Arendt to be a difficult but very worthwhile read. I had to come back to this after some time, and even as I was reading it, I had to revisit lots of passages multiple times to understand them. Imperialism covers the period from 1884 to 1914 in which the European powers extended their empires across the globe to extract resources from abroad.

    Imperialism is defined by its goal of permanent expansion. Arendt says it was a novel idea in world history because it involved neither temporary looting nor a permanent conquest that would bring about assimilation. This originality comes from the fact that it was not a political idea, but an economic one, with its origin in business speculation. Imperialism was the result of the ruling capitalist class reaching the national limits of its economic expansion. Reaching these economic limits, they turned to politics to stretch the outward bounds of their money-making abilities. They needed to invest abroad to make more money, and then they needed the state to come in and protect their investments. It is ironic that this phenomenon appeared in the nation-state first, because the nation-state is uniquely unsuited to growth. Since the nation-state derives its legitimacy from the "people" or the "nation," once the state grows beyond one nation it loses legitimacy. The nation conceives of its law as the development of its unique national qualities that would not be valid beyond its own people. So the nation-state can apply the law equally within in the nation-state, but then runs into a contradiction when the state swallows up other nations. It can either abandon equality and create different statuses, or it can apply equality, but lose the elevated sense of nationhood that binds the state together.

    The book is organized in X parts: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie, Race-Thinking Before Racism, Race and Bureaucracy, Continental Imperialism: The Pan-Movements, and The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man. They generally track the chronological development of imperialism. First, the bourgeoisie was emancipated and grew strong enough to shape policy, and race-thinking developed at the same time, setting the tone for the racist nature of imperialism to come. Then in Race and Bureaucracy, she discusses how those two concepts were tools of imperialism. She then focuses on the two countries that would eventually become totalitarian: Russia and Germany, which were home to pan-German and pan-Slavic movements. And finally, she discusses the First World War and how the nation-state was delegitimized in the inter-war period.

    Arendt distinguishes race-thinking as a phenomenon that emerged earlier than racism, coming about in all Western countries simultaneously in the nineteenth century. Racism, on the other hand, is the ideology of imperialism in the turn of the century period. Racism is not nationalism, but actually destroys the nation. It cuts across national boundaries and is not defined by geography, language, tradition, or other elements that create a nation. Racists also deny the basis of the nation-state, which is that there is a community of nations operating in equality and peace. Racists, on the other hand, believe in Social Darwinism, that one race will conquer all the others. She says that racism, not nationalism, is the major world ideology along with socialism: "Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." She argues that race-thinking came out of France, but always identified the Scandinavians and Germans as a superior race (identified with the aristocracy in France) and spread to Germany with Napoleon.

    Race and bureaucracy are the two primary tools of imperialism according to Arendt. Race served as a substitute for the nation and an explanation for why Africans could not be of the same species as Europeans. It was useful since it created a system in which no white man needed to really work. White would serve as supervisors and essentially extract rents from their whiteness like passive income. While race was discovered in South Africa, bureaucracy was discovered in Algeria, Egypt, and India. Race was an escape into irresponsibility over humanity by denying their humanness, and bureaucracy was the attempt to shoulder responsibility over "civilizing" broad swathes of poor people--an impossible task. The colonial bureaucracy also had the utility of giving people who would otherwise destabilize the imperial power something to do abroad. Adventurers, idealists, and criminals were sent to the colonies to administer or expand them, and therefore did not direct their energies inward towards the nation-state at the center of the empire. 

    This outlet was useful to France and England, but did not exist for Germany and Russia. Since those countries had no overseas colonies, it was more difficult conceptually to separate the policies of the colonies from those of the nation-state. The same rules were made to apply to both, which led to an oppression over everyone, rather than just the colonized peoples. The "continental imperialism" of Germany and Russia was motivated not by a bourgeoisie's quest for expansion, and their leaders did not include businessmen. It could not offer a panacea for social ills by sending undesirables abroad, and could only offer "an ideology and a movement." Continental imperialism lacked the overseas distance to separate illegality abroad from legality at home, and so they jsut embraced illegality altogether in governance.

    On nationalism, Arendt writes that it "became the precious cement for binding together a centralized state and an atomized society, and it actually proved to be the only working, live connection between the individuals of the nation-state." Citizens can't all share a class, but they can all share a nation. That makes nationalism more suited to activity within a state while class-based movements are necessarily international. Nationalism perverts the concepts of the family of nations into a hierarchical structure in which a nationality follows a "national mission." But that concept of a family of nations is less and less attractive the more that people are in contact with other nations. Those contacts create conflicts and make people less sympathetic to their neighbor-enemies. This was especially bad for the Jews, who were in contact with lots of nationalities, had no state of their own to protect them, and also proclaimed a race-like chosenness that inspired envy and hate. Anyone else who saw themselves as "chosen" would have a problem with that. That might be the difference between old anti-Semitism and modern anti-Semitism in which different races see themselves as chosen.

    One of the most interesting things Arendt talks about towards the end of the books is how rights of individuals are not as logical as rights of the nation. No rights can exist unless they can be guaranteed, which is why there are no individual rights. No individual can protect his or her own rights without a larger group to help them. The concept of the nation allows a group of people who identify with each other to create equal rights within their group. But by guaranteeing equality within the nation it is likely to create inequalities between the nations. But the takeaway is also that human rights can't really work since there is no one actually willing to enforce human rights outside of their own nation or state in a serious way. That is why statelessness is so horrible. Because a human can lose all their rights and retain their dignity, but once they lose their polity itself, they no longer have any representation or protection by a larger group in the world. This was proven in many genocides, but especially the Holocaust, in which the first step towards depriving people of all rights was to make them stateless. When the world was confronted with stateless people, it did not and still usually does not protect their rights as human beings alone. As Arendt puts it, "we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights."

Miscellaneous:

• Arendt makes so many negative remarks about "survival of the fittest" that I am actually wondering if she didn't believe in evolution.
• Arendt claims the Zulu King Shaka killed one million members of weaker tribes but I am skeptical. That number seems huge.
• The book made me think that it is good the US Constitution was written in the 1780s and not the 1880s since the world got so much more divided by that point and universal ideas of equality were at a low point. 
• Arendt has a whole issue with multi-party politics, and thinks it is less stable as a form of democracy than the two-party system. In the two-party system, since the parties essentially alternate, the opposition party remains loyal since it knows it will be in power again. And the King represents the nation. She thinks radicals are held in check by the actual necessities of governance. Whereas in a multi-party system, no party represents the nation, and they can develop enough particularity to endorse specific ideologies. But in the two-party system, a party cannot be ideological since it needs to win a large portion of the vote.
• Similar to Eric Hoffer's thoughts: "Long before Nazism proudly pronounced that though it had a program it did not need one, Pan-Germanism discovered how much more important for mass appeal a general mood was than laid-down outlines and platforms. For the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement."
• I thought his passage regarding Israel and India was prescient: "For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police."

Indian Mounds of Wisconsin (Second Edition) by Robert A. Birmingham and Amy L. Rosebrough

    This was a great survey of Wisconsin's Indian mounds and delivered as promised. Summary below.

    The Native Americans of eastern North America constructed the vast majority of mounds over a toughly 2,000-year-old period, from 800 BCE to 1200 CE. There are some very significant exceptions from long before this period, but this was the period of major activity. The archeological chronology of Wisconsin is divided like so:

Paleo-Indian

    Early: 10000-8000 BCE

              Late: 8000-6/5000 BCE 

Archaic

    Early: 8000-4000 BCE

    Middle: 6000-1200 BCE

    Late: 1200 BCE-100 BCE

Woodland

    Early: 500 BCE-100CE

    Middle: 100 BCE-500CE

    Late: 500CE-1200CE 

Middle Mississippian: 1000CE-1200CE 

Upper Mississippian (Oneota) 1000CE-historic period 

    In the Archaic period, the levels of Lake Michigan were about twenty feet higher, and sturgeon, now in danger, was very important to the survival of the people in the area. Sturgeon can reach six feet and 200 pounds, and Sturgeon is one of the Menominee clans today. The water-centric life inspired belief in some kind of water panther god that lived in a watery world underground, and is represented in many effigy mounds. People in the Archaic period were known to work copper, mining it in the Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale, and performing metallurgy as early as 5500 BCE. 

    Wisconsin's first burial mounds were built in 500 BCE, in Red Ochre Ceremonial Complex. The authors mention a theory that I found interesting, that burial mounds represented a way of returning a body to the earth to restore equilibrium and guarantee renewal for the future. And that mound-building came to an end as agriculture and harvest festivals came about, rendering the mound-renewal redundant.

    There was a period of rapid change beginning in 500 CE, climaxing in 700-1100 CE, when the bow and arrow replaced the speak thrower/atlatl, better pottery vessels were made, and corn joined squash as a major crop for the people of the Midwest. These changes were probably related to the development and spread of Mississippian culture. Corn was domesticated from teocinte and slowly diffused northward, reaching the Midwest by 900 CE. This brought on a shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture that covered the region. The capital of this movement was in southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis, Cahokia. In Wisconsin, Aztalan is almost a small copy of Cahokia, and was a sort of Mississippian colony to the north. It was named by locals in the 20th century on a mistaken belief that it was a northern site of the Aztecs. But that was not correct. Also during this period, mound-building exploded throughout the southern part of Wisconsin, but the reasons are still a mystery. There are some signs of warfare, such as stockades surrounding mounds. More than 12,000 mounds were built in Wisconsin (including 1,000 effigy mounds) before the custom of mound building ended around 1200 CE. 40% of effigy mounds were shaped like bird, 21% bears, 18% water spirits, and 21% unidentified. And not all effigies are mounds, some are intaglios, meaning dug-out depressions in the shape of an animal. Usually, these are water spirits, and would fill with water when it rained, since they are "reverse mounds."

    By 1200CE, most of the people of southern Wisconsin had gathered in a few large, horticultural villages, abandoning many of the places where effigy building had thrived. This makes it look like the end of mound-building came about from a physical concentration of the population do to agriculture becoming dominant. But even with mound-building ended, the Ho-Chunk and Ioway still retained major aspects of their ancestors' belief system that can be traced back to the Oneota and other mound-builders. When Wisconsin Native peoples were asked about mounds, they usually ascribed them to customs that were practiced in the distant past, and the practice seemed to have ended long before Europeans arrived, which spawned skepticism among Europeans that the Native Americans were the true builders at all. However, some mounds were re-used for burials in the 19th and 20th centuries. Unfortunately, 80% of the 15,000 to 20,000 mounds built in Wisconsin have been destroyed by agriculture and development before historical preservation laws came into effect.

 Miscellaneous Facts:

• More Indian mounds were built in Wisconsin than in the territory of any modern-day state.
• The largest mound group in Wisconsin is the Mero Complex at Diamond Bluff in Pierce County, containing 390 mounds and effigies around a one-thousand-year-old village on the Mississippi River.
• The largest effigy mound built in Wisconsin was discovered in 1990 near Muscoda in an aerial photograph. The mound was a bird, and was destroyed by farming, but the soil shadow was still visible from the air.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

     The True Believer is instantly a contender for one of the best books I've read all year. It is short but very profound. It provoked deep thinking like few books can and I see why it is a classic. I had it on my kindle for a while but just happened to pick it up now and the time must have been right because I had to stop myself from reading it too fast I was so engaged. I took a lot more notes than usual (per x number of pages). And I was really intrigued by the life story of Hoffer himself, which seems completely unverifiable and at least partially untrue as he told it (look it up). It is all very tragic involving the death of his parents, childhood blindness, and lots of hard labor, but none of it is verifiable before he reaches the age of 40. He wrote this book while working as a longshoreman in San Francisco.

    Hoffer divides his book in four parts: (1) The Appeal of Mass Movements, talking about why people are attracted to mass movements, (2) The Potential Converts, covering who is likely to join a mass movement (3) United Action and Self-Sacrifice, which make movements successful, and (4) Beginning and End, in which he discusses the major characters who develop mass movements. To sum them up, the appeal of mass movements is a desire for change. It is of secondary or tertiary importance what kind of change. A mass movement just needs to support change. The potential converts are "frustrated" people, undesirables, the new poor, the misfits, the inordinately selfish, the ambitious, the minorities, the bored, and the sinners. They join a mass movement promising change because the status quo doesn't serve them. United Action and self-sacrifice are what make a mass movement successful. The individual joiners of the movement must lose their sense of selves, which is easier for those who were unsuccessful in the old system. Without a sense of self, they find self-sacrifice easier, since there is less self to sacrifice. Hoffer discusses identification with a collective will, make-believe, deprecation of the present, and fanaticism as factors that promote self-sacrifice. He discusses hatred, imitation, persuasion and coercion, leadership, action, and suspicion as factors that unite mass movements. Finally, he identifies the men of words, who create the ideas that inspire a mass movement, the fanatics, who bring the movement about with revolutionary zeal, often ignoring the words from the men of words, and then finally the men of action, who unite and sustain the movement as it moves towards a solidified phase in which administration is more important than revolution. Mass movements are not necessarily good or bad, but they are vulnerable to devolving into violence and chaos.

I. The Appeal of Mass Movements

    What are the mass movements? Today, they are revolutionary and nationalist, but in the past they were religious, such as the Crusades and the Reformation. Nationalism was "the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm" when Hoffer wrote and probably still is today. He even argues that any drastic changes or revolutionary enthusiasms must tap into nationalist fervor to be successful. 

    But these drastic changes may be unpopular with those succeeding in the status quo system. Hoffer posits that the strongest and the weakest ends of society are likely to be supporters of mass movements; the weak out of dissatisfaction with their lot, and the strong out of faith in the future. Of these two groups, Hoffer writes, 

Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless dating. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power--a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it also has faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the future.

And so, to get people to dive into vast change, they must be "intensely discontented but not destitute," and they need to feel like all they are missing is some doctrine, leader, or technique that will give them access to a source of irresistible power. Without this feeling, they will have no courage to actually make the leap, since they need to feel that they are already close to achieving that thing. Second, they need to believe that the future they have within reach is something extremely valuable and worthwhile, utopian, even. And third, they must totally underestimate the difficulties involved in the struggle.

    It is important that in its early days, a mass movement attracts not those who want self-advancement, but those who passionately desire self-renunciation. These are people who see their lives as irredeemably spoiled, and are totally dissatisfied with the way of the world. And instead of reforming themselves, they seek to reform society. But as a mass movement leaves the "vigorous stage" or the "active stage," it will attract those seeking self-advancement--those who are not interested in molding a new world, but are interested in "possessing and preserving the present." This is when the movement becomes an enterprise.

    But in the earlier stage, a mass movement attracts its followers not just among those who want change, but among those who want substitutes. Faith in a mass movement can replace faith in religion. A claim of excellence for his nation, religion, race, or class can replace a man's claim of excellence for himself when he has none.

    Mass movements are also interchangeable. They all draw from the same type of disaffected people, making them competitive with each other in a zero-sum game, and one movement is readily transformed into another. Recruiters for mass movements can only recruit those on the fringes of society, such that the opposite of a Nazi is not a Communist, but rather the opposite of a Nazi and a Communist is a centrist. This provokes one of the main ways of stopping a mass movement--using another one to blunt its strength. And so a national movement can stop a religious movement, or a class movement can stop a race movement. Emigration can also reduce the strength of a mass movement by sending the base from which it would recruit overseas. Hoffer even goes so far to say that if the United States and the British Empire had welcomed mass migration from Europe after WWI that there might not have been a Fascist or Nazi revolution. Moreover, he argues that free and easy migration west across the United States provided a release valve that stabilized the lands from which the emigrants came.

II. The Potential Converts

    In discussing the who of mass movements, Hoffer identifies the poor, misfits, outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, those in the grip of vice or obsession, the impotent, the inordinately selfish, the bored, and the sinners. Of the poor, it is a specific type of poverty that breeds sympathy with a mass movement--too poor and they won't have hope of things getting better. But distant hope is different than immediate hope. If they have distant hope, they will be patient, but if they have immediate hope they are likely to join the movement. If they are so oppressed that they cannot even imagine hope at all, they will not join a mass movement, and that is why it was generally a generation or more after freedom that the peasants of Europe were willing to join revolutions. The unified poor also do not join revolutions, as they are tied into conservatism by their families and social frameworks. But mass social disruptions like wars and plagues can of course turn them into disunified poor, who are more revolutionary. This made me think on the effects of modern living on the "unification" of people today. I think Hoffer is talking about alienation, which to me seems more common than ever thanks to social media and modern living in which people no longer live with their family and friend groups (as much as they used to). It also made me think on Evicted and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth about welfare requirements breaking families apart by paying more to single parents or not paying as much welfare if two recipients live in the same home.

    In discussing the misfits, Hoffer specifically identifies the revolutionary capacity of veterans, very evident in the inter-war period. He argues, however, that it is not the taste of violence or the nihilism of returning from war that makes veterans likely to join mass movements, but the break in their civilian routine. Returning soldiers struggle to get back in the rhythm of civilian life and become temporary misfits. And so the passage from war to peace is actually more important for an established order than going from peace to war.

    Minorities are also fertile ground for converts to mass movements. But not all minorities. Minorities who are solidly a member of their group and have no interest in assimilation are usually conservative. But minorities who want to assimilate don't find the same community in their minority group as the others, and also cannot find it in the group they try to assimilate into. And so, "orthodox Jews are less frustrated than emancipated Jew[s]," and "The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North."

    Hoffer also discusses Jews, Zionism, and the Holocaust frequently throughout the book. He identifies Zionism as a powerful mass movement, which transforms "shopkeepers and brain workers into farmers, laborers and soldiers." He also claims that ghettos protected the Jews of Europe, as they were unified poor in the ghettos, but then totally alone once the ghetto walls came down. They lost the collective bodies they were a part of, but were unable to completely integrate with broader society. This led to Jews becoming the most frustrated individuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which led Jews to be easy converts for mass movements in that time. I'm not sure if this is true, but Hoffer says that the most defenseless against Nazi concentration camps were Western European Jews, who faced their tormentors alone, without vital ties to the Jewish community. But those who were tied to a church, a compact political party, or a close knit national group were able to withstand more. "Individualists, whatever their nationality, caved in." This is what makes the Jewish ghetto, in Hoffer's eyes, "more of a fortress than a prison." It created a sense of unity that enabled survival. Yet, the opposite occurred for the Jews when the British thought that they could handle the Jews in Palestine. While the Jew in Europe faced his enemies alone, writes Hoffer, the Jew in Palestine was "not a human atom, but a member of an eternal race, with an immemorable past behind it and a breathtaking future ahead."

III. United Action and Self-Sacrifice

    A mass movements will be more successful the more it encourages identification with a collective whole. They have an anti-individualist bias, and their members have more ability to withstand coercion and pressure because of their identification with something larger. 

    A mass movement also focuses on the future over the present. "It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral. It reminds me of this tweet I saw: Mis Leading on X: "I broke down today. I can’t understand how people I know can be going to movies, concerts, and conventions whilst a genocide is going on like things are normal, my partner held me as I cried: I understand the woman who lit herself on fire more than I do some of my best friends." / X (twitter.com) That is someone who is in very, very deep. It's just like Hoffer says, "To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy--the present."

    The doctrine is also key to promote self-sacrifice. It needs to be vague and unverifiable, and any part of it that is simple needs to be made complicated and obscure by its followers. Everything needs to seem like symbols in a secret message. The mundane becomes imbued with mysticism. The belief in the doctrine is in the heart, not the head, like belief in a plan. It creates a certainty about the future that allows recklessness in the present, and permits the followers of the movement to use any means necessary. Hoffer quotes the official history of the Communist Party: "The power of Marxist-Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation, to understand the inner connection of current events, to foresee their course..." 

    Fanaticism also promotes self-sacrifice. The fanatic fears compromise, but sees no problem in swinging from one holy cause to another. "His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached." It is easier for fanatics to be converted to Communism, Fascism, or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal, says Hoffer.

    The most potent unifying agent for a mass movement is hatred. Hatred springs more from self-contempt or guilt than any real grievance. This is why, for example, white racists in America hate blacks- because they feel that they have done a grave injustice to black people, and seek to explain it by the innate horribleness of their victim rather than accept their own guilt. In America, we tend to hate each other more than foreigners, which is more common abroad. "The Americans," Hoffer writes," are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners... Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life." The mass movement grants its members a new freedom to hate, lie, bully ,torture, murder, and betray without remorse--it is the freedom from personal responsibility. The member of the mass movement ceases to be an individual and becomes part of a whole, which can justify all sorts of conduct.

    Hoffer also discusses persuasion and coercion as tools used for and against mass movements. He says that a mass movement needs both, but that coercion is the more important of the two. A mass movement can be stopped by force, but the force needs to be "ruthless and persistent." And that requires really another mass movement to be using the force, since no one will use ruthless and persistent force without fanatical conviction.

    A mass movement also needs a leader to be unified. The leader does not need to be of great intellect, noble character, or particularly original. Instead, the most important qualities are audacity, fanatical faith, awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and above all the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants. Some other things that help are faith in destiny or luck, capacity for passionate hatred, cunning estimate of human nature, delight in symbols, an iron will, and a joy in defiance.

IV. Beginning and End

    Mass movements do not arise until the prevailing order has been discredited. Those who discredit that old order are men of words. They usher in the fanatics, who bring the movement to a violent fever-pitch, and use the words only as a fig leaf to cover their coercion. After them come the men of action to consolidate and administer whatever is left. These are generals, industrialists, landowners, and businessmen, and they are latecomers to the movement. "The most strenuous effort of the early phase of every nationalist movement consists in convincing and winning over these future pillars of patriotism." To sum up: "A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action."

    Men of words can not only discredit the old order, but give legitimacy to the new order. A movement survives by either eliminating the intelligentsia or coopting them completely. "Where all learned men are clergymen, the church is unassailable. Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest." This agrees with the common idea that the most dangerous thing for a regime is a glut of under-employed, over-educated people, dissatisfied with their lot. Men of words are the ones most disappointed by a revolution, since the fanatics usually depart from their words. It sort of reminded me of the quote from Rep. Thomas Massie: "All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race." It sort of sums up the classic phenomenon of a revolution or mass movement based on ideology; the original proponents of the ideology eventually have to reckon with the fact that most people just don't care about ideologies at all, let alone their specific one. They just support a crazy guy so they can see shit burn. Hoffer puts it better: 

It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveneness of the demagogue lies not so much in convincing people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence.

    The fanatics come from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. They cannot find fulfillment in their creative work like the man of words can. The man of words does not take action because he is fulfilled in the present by his words. The fanatic can find no fulfillment, and seeks to make things happen. The fanatics include men like Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. Men with literary and artistic ambitions that they could not realize seem particularly dangerous. These are the guys who take a movement and bring it to its maximum and most intense.

    The fanatics are followed by men of power. They are the ones who take over an "arrived" movement, seeking to sustain its unity.

Conclusion

    This is a great book. A must-read. I wish I had read it sooner.

Miscellaneous:

• These movements would have been the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution, the Nazis, or the MAGA movement today, and so on. They are not good or bad, just revolutionary.
• At one point, Hoffer says that the masses in China are unrebellious, which I don't understand since he was published right after the Chinese Communist Revolution.
• I also think he is dead wrong about "millions of Europeans allowed themselves to be led into annihilation camps and gas chambers, knowing beyond doubt that they were being led to death," since it is known that most people didn't know they were being led to death, and most people weren't killed in gas chambers. But I don't know how you would even get good information on this in 1951, so I will give Hoffer a pass.
• Hoffer says that part of the reason immigrants assimilated so well in America's past is because they were the lowest and the poorest from the countries they emigrated from, and if they had been superior, the USA would have ended up "a mosaic of lingual and cultural groups."
• Hoffer identifies an "active" stage of a mass movement, in which there is very little intellectual production. France in the Napoleonic Era, Nazi Germany, etc. But he says this is usually bounded by an era of great intellectual production before and after. After, analyzing what happened and breaking from the spell of the movement, and before, when the old order was weak and spawning thought about what would replace it. But this was not the most clear to me. He says there is a burst of creativity after either the failure or success of the movement because of "the abrupt relaxation of collective discipline and the liberation of the individual from the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and the disdain of his self and the present." The fervor of the active phase drains those in it of creative energy and subordinates their energies to the advancement of the movement. 
• The thing in my mind throughout the book was the TeaParty/MAGA movement, of which I imagine men of words being various people from 2009-2016, Trump being the foremost among the fanatics, and now potentially transitioning leadership to men of action.

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel

    I wanted to read a book about the history of the Ottoman Empire after going to Istanbul and realizing how little I knew about it. Having now visited Topkapi Palace and seen the Bosporus, I was excited to read this book. The book was really good, although it gets hard to read a history this long when things get sort of repetitive over 600 years. There's this plot and that scheme, one vizier after another, and things just sort of blend together politically. But the economic and social parts, although few, were very interesting. I would have also appreciated more discussion of the fall of the empire. I think generally I just wanted more analysis but at least the book was a good survey and primer on the facts of the empire.

    One thing that stuck out to me from the earlier portions of the book was how anti-climactic the fall of Constantinople was. The Ottomans had already vassalized Byzantium by 1391, and besieged from 1394 until before being forced to turn east to face Timur's invasion from Iran (and then being delayed decades by the capture of Bayezid and ensuing civil wars). Moreover, the Byzantine emperors were constantly going back and forth to the west to beg for help, sometimes getting it and sometimes not so much. So it wasn't just that they were abandoned in 1453, it's that the European Christians must have gotten tired of dealing with it. For example, the money collected by Emperor Manuel in England in 1400-03 all disappeared and was still being investigated a quarter-century later.

    During that time in the first half of the 15th century, Constantinople was a thorn in the Ottoman rear, since the Ottomans otherwise controlled both sides of the Bosporus. But in the middle, Constantinople played different Ottoman princes against each other, using them to delay the inevitable. The worst struggle came after 1402, when Bayezid I was defeated by Timur at Ankara. The resulting strife inspired Mehmed II (born just after the civil wars ended) to sanction fratricide as a means of smoothing succession. But with control of everything around Constantinople, it would be hard for the Ottomans not to conquer it, and Mehmed was in the right place at the right time.

    Technically, the Eastern and Western Churches mended the schism in 1439, but no one really paid attention. The problem was that Patriarchs of the church didn't really care about the political situation as long as they could maintain their political primacy, so just like the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, the Patriarch of Constantinople rejected the union. Of course, since the conquest was likely inevitable by this point, he may have saved his religion by maintaining its practice under Ottoman rule through submission. When Mehmed II finally took Constantinople, it was the thirteenth Muslim attempt to take the city since 650, and was aided by the construction of the fortress of Bogazkesen, the "Cutter of the Strait."

    In power, Mehmed II cultivated an aura of mystery, preferring to attend council meetings from behind a screen, watching from above. He built Topkapi Palace to seclude him beyond several courtyards, and developed strict court protocol and hierarchy. He rarely appeared publicly, and was even hidden behind a curtain when he met officials four times a week. For a century following Mehmed II, sultans appeared before the court only on two religious holidays per year. Mehmed was also responsible for significant adjustments to the makeup of the ruling class. Of his seven grand vezirs, only one was a Turkish-born Muslim, but two were Christian-born converts raised by the youth-levy, two were Christian-born scions of the Byzanto-Serbian nobility, and the last was also Christian-born bust of unknown origin. The administration and army of the Ottoman Empire was largely made up of men who were pressed into service as boys. This youth levy was imposed on Christian subjects, although Istanbul and Bursa were exempted. The levy began in the Balkans, and extended to Anatolia in the end of the 15th century. Albanian, Bosnian, Greek, Bulgar, Serbian, and Croatian boys were preferred; Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, Ruthenian, Muscovite, Jewish, and Georgian boys were exempted. Armenians were used only in the palace, not in the army. The term "Osmanli" or "Ottoman," which was originally used to refer only to Osman's house, came to refer to the entire ruling class of the sultan's servants. Peasants and provincials were known as the "re'aya," or the flock. The highest officers of government were usually tied to the ruling dynasty by marriage.

    I also found Ottoman foreign relations very interesting, especially with Europe. Despite religious differences, the Ottomans found common cause with European powers, especially the French, who opposed the Austrian Hapsburgs who were also enemies of the Ottomans. They even allied once against the Pope. When the Sultan Bayezid II's brother Cem, was abroad, Bayezid paid European monarchs substantial sums to guarantee his confinement. I thought it was interesting that Cem, who challenged his brother for power, wrote him poems, and Bayezid replied in poems. And this didn't seem to be unusual. Cem wrote:

          A-smile on bed of roses dost thou lie in all delight,
          In dolour's stove-room mid the ashes couch I - why is this?

And Bayezid replied:

          To me was the empire on the
          Fore-eternal day decreed,
          Yet thou to Destiny wilt yield thee not - why, why is this?
          'A pilgrim to the Holy Shrines am I' thou dost declare,
          And yet thou dost for earthly Sultan-ship sigh - why is this?  

    Bayezid's son, Selim conquered Egypt, and Bayeid's grandson, Suleiman the Magnificent, brought the Ottoman empire to its apogee. Suleiman added the holy sites of Arabia, Cyprus, Crete, Hungary, and Iraq. See below:

Suleiman's reign was the longest of any Ottoman emperor (46 years) and the most successful. But the most interesting thing to me was Suleiman's relationship with Hurrem Sultan, a freed slave who became not only his wife but his favorite wife and trusted confidant. She bore him six children at a time when legal wives had to be high born and concubines could only bear one son before they were forced to use unknown forms of birth control.

    The Ottoman economy was open to the outside, and dealt with inflation in the 17th century brought on by not only its own debasements of the coinage but the discovery of massive silver deposits in the Americas. It was hard for the Ottomans to deal with economic downturns because they reduced tax revenues while the empire did not engage in borrowing through foreign loans until the 19th century. These economic problems were compounded by the fact that as the treasury shrank, it became very difficult to make the traditional donation to the janissaries on the accession of a new Sultan. The requirement to pay off the troops led to other things being neglected, and many times Sultans could not even afford the donation, sparking revolt.

    After the death of Suleiman, the empire went through a time of long troubles. There's sort of a long historical double dip I notice in the later part of the 16th century and then the entire 18th century, leading into irreversible decline. I think there was a geographic element- which was that the empire couldn't keep expanding forever, and then a political element- that the Ottomans claimed to be a universal empire, but the favor of God had clearly left them since they stopped expanding. A lot of legitimacy came from expanding, so once that stopped, it was very hard to keep popular support. And it was hard to keep expanding because the empire was literally based on a tiny isthmus and only had more land to cover as it spread into Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was at this time in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that the Sultan himself started to decline as a figure. Before, Sultans were overthrown by other dynasty members, but by the 17th century, the Sultans had withdrawn so much from public life that they were almost powerless, and overthrown by those with real power, the courtiers. It sort of ends up similar to Japan where the Sultan ends up a figurehead. And the whole thing about the chief black eunuch and chief white eunuch is just wild to me. It must have felt so natural at the time to have the government run by an ex-slave with no penis, but it just seems off today. During this time of weak Sultans, the principle of seniority was eventually established, as the janissary revolts that overthrew Sultans planted the next younger brother in line each time. The new system was that the Sultan was still the ultimate decisionmaker and legitimate user of power, but there was no more deference from the court towards the Sultan, and often his mother, the grand vizier, the eunuchs, janissaries, or other functionaries were more powerful. 

    But at least there was peace in the east. In 1639, the treaty of Zuhab made peace with the Iranian Safavids, ending a struggle that had gone on since 1514. The peace would last until the end of the Safavid dynasty at the hands of Nadir Shah in the 1720s. Equilibrium was restored by giving Yerevan to Iran while the Ottomans kept Iraq and Baghdad, reestablishing a stable system lost after the 1555 Amasya treaty. Finkel calls this one of Murad IV's greatest accomplishments. I find her historical analysis really intriguing. She's doing some very long-term thinking and it makes me think of Kissinger's book Diplomacy. With the gift of hindsight, we can look back on treaties that cause centuries of violence or end it, usually by restoring some geographical equilibrium. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting.

    

    Despite the decline that began at the later part of the 16th century, the Ottomans spent the 17th century as a major power feared by all who surrounded it. But it fell hard at the end of the 17th century.  In a war against the Holy League of Poland-Lithuania, the Holy Roman Empire/Habsburg Monarchy, Venice, and Russia known in the West as the Great Turkish War, the Ottomans lost significant chunks of territory. In the middle of it, the army mutinied and seized Istanbul, overthrowing Mehmed IV and installing Suleiman II. From age 7 to 45, Suleiman II had been a prisoner in a luxurious prison, and then was suddenly made Sultan. You can see how this system necessitated a weak Sultan since the Sultans had no skills that made them useful leaders beyond their bloodline. The Treaty of Karlowitz ended the war in 1699 and established the Habsburgs as the dominant regional power. It also created a peace between the Ottomans and Austria of 25 years, as well as 30 years with Russia, symbolically ending the age of Ottoman expansion by right of religious conquest. 

   

    With Karlowitz came a new focus on diplomacy. This hurt Ottoman control in the provinces because those provincials had relied on raiding Christian states as a form of income. Now the Sultan had to indemnify the aggrieved for this raiding, and that didn't mean the raiders would stop, they just determined that it was now the Sultan's job to subsidize their way of life. The Ottomans also engaged in diplomacy a half century later with Iran, after decades of war with Nader Shah. This entrance of the Ottomans into modern diplomacy meant a transition from a universal empire with a mandate from God to turn the world Muslim into a state just like the others and an equal player in Europe.

    

    Just as the Ottomans were late to diplomacy, they were late to other things as well. One big one was the printing press. The first Arabic-language printing press was established in 1727. Presses had been brought from Spain after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, but were banned by Bayezid II. And even then, few books were printed in Arabic in the 18th century. Literacy was still too low, and those who were literate were scholars who preferred manuscript books. The Ottomans struggled mightily for money at the end of the 18th century, and were unable to get financial assistance from North African states or from France. They tried traditional solutions like increasing taxes, debasing the coinage, melting down valuable objects, and confiscating estates, but nothing worked. There was talk of an international loan, but it came to nothing. It was in this crisis that Sultan Selim III emerged, and ruled from 1789 until he was deposed in 1807 and assassinated the next year. Finkel makes him out to be a real reformer who could have taken things in another direction, but was unable to do so. His reign is somewhat parallel to the formation of some democratic institutions in other absolutist states, calling a counsel of 200 high-ranking state officials months into his reign. But he was unable to implement his reforms and was overthrown, also losing control over Mecca and Medina in the same year.

 

    The coup that put Mustafa IV in power was countered quickly by another coup that brought Mahmud II into power. Mahmud was a much more successful reformer and implemented Tanzimat, a major reorganization of the state and army. The result was a janissary revolt, as predicted, but this time Mahmud was able to put it down and disbanded the janissaries once and for all. Finkel ascribes Selim's failure of reorganization contrasted with Mahmud's success to the fact that the former's reforms were seen as an imitation of Western ways whereas the latter's were perceived as more uniquely Ottoman. I think it is controversial whether or not getting rid of the janissaries was good for the state, but it seems like Finkel's perspective is that it was. With so many janissary revolts, these guys just seem terrible. They had revolts in 1809, 1810, and 1811, with most of those being called up in the 1811 campaign deserting before they even left Istanbul.

   

    With the janissaries gone there were big changes. The janissaries were made up of Christian converts, but some of the dead in the final revolt were found to have crosses tattooed on their arms, fueling fears that they weren't true Muslims. The new army would be an all-Muslim force, with no converts enlisted. But the new military reorganization failed to keep the empire together. A Greek revolt ended in a new independent state in 1832, sponsored by the European powers. The Straits Convention of 1841 forced the Ottomans to close the Bosporus to warships in times of peace. Business interests were all being bought up by Europeans, especially the British, who dramatically increased trade with the Ottomans earlier in the century to avoid Napoleon's "continental system." In 1852, the Ottomans handed over the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the French, and in 1853 the French and British fought the Russians in the Crimean War over who would get the right to colonize the Ottoman Empire. The end of the war brought the Ottomans into equal international affairs with the Europeans, but only as a way to keep Russia out, and forced the Ottomans to guarantee certain protections to their Christian subjects. The all-Muslim military brought new problems. Now, Muslim men in their prime were away from home, and Christians were buying up more land and becoming more powerful. There was also a demographic issue, as the Christian population was growing faster than the Muslim population.

    I wish Finkel had discussed the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Empire more. She doesn't give us a ton, but she gives the reader some hints at her perspective. It seems like a lot of it comes down to the end of expansion heralding the end of the empire. As a universal empire that aspired to bring Islam to all people, once the Ottomans stopped expanding in the late 17th century, the state lost its reason for being. It struggled with that for two more centuries, eventually settling into a focus on welfare of religion and state in the 19th century. But that was unsuccessful with the achievements of the Europeans so glaringly superior right next door. Sultan Abdulhamid II attempted to invoke Islamism as a new purpose of the state, but that too failed. Then, nationalism emerged and split the empire for good after centuries of other empires and revolts nibbling away at the edges. Ultimately, legitimacy came down to "the people," defined as the nations. Islamism didn't seem to develop quickly enough to defeat nationalism. And while it would seem like an old idea, "Islamism," as Finkel refers to it, is something new at the end of the 19th century. In the old way of Ottoman life before the 19th century, Islam was like the water fish swim in. When it is everywhere, it isn't noted. And people didn't have enough interactions outside the Islamic world to think much about it. There was more tolerance because following Islamic customs all the time and living a life organized by Islam actually made the religion less salient. It was when the world became less ordered under the traditional Islamic rules that people were drawn more closely to the word of the Koran as true religious inspiration. As religious governance declined, observance of religious ritual increased.

  

    Under outside and inside pressures, Sultan Abdulhamid II declared an Ottoman constitution in 1876. But this failed to appease outside powers hungry to "protect the Christian population of the empire" (take a piece of the empire), and Russia attached the next year, leading to the abolition of the constitution. Due to internal organizing, a new constitution would be declared in 1908. After that point, the Sultan was essentially a figurehead. But in that same year, the empire lost Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Austrians, Crete to Greece, and more of Bulgaria to Bulgaria. When WWI came, the Ottomans had two enemies that they could choose between- Russia on one side and Austria on the other. The Ottomans chose to attach Russia, and I wish it was clearer why that happened. Alliance with Germany made sense since Germany never had any interest in taking a piece of Ottoman land, but between Russia and Austria it seems like the Ottomans would have more to gain from attacking Austria. I wish that was better explained. The Ottomans would have been wiser to not enter the war at all. Their infrastructure had improved towards the end of the 19th century, but it still took a month to get to Syrai from Istanbul and two months to reach Mesopotamia. Roads were poor and the sea was not an option in the face of British naval might. So the Ottomans lost.

   

    After the First World War, the Turks of Anatolia led by Ataturk fought a war against the Greeks and the British and won, creating modern Turkey. The result of the war was the elimination of the non-Muslim part of Turkey, which went from 20% of the population to 2% of the population. The population also became more rural, as the cities emptied out since the Christians were more likely to be cosmopolitan.

    I wish I came away understanding a little more about the relationship between Islamism and nationalism from this book, but it was a good survey to start with. I would enjoyed it but not I'm tired of history for a little while.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Finkel describes dervishes like Christian monks, either wandering the countryside or living in other communities of holy men. Stories of they deeds and piety formed a long oral tradition, and they were linked to the Ottoman's from the beginning. Osman's son, Orhan, granted land for a dervish lodge. Lodges often formed the nuclei of new communities and became sites of pilgrimage as popular expressions of Islam.
• The Ottomans ended up having an issue later as the dynasty became more successful. Since the inferiority of the bride's family was implicit in noble marriages where the male could marry multiple women, Ottoman girls would only be given to Muslims in marriage not Christians. Ottoman boys, however, could receive Christian girls as wives. Ottoman girls could also not be given to their fellow warrior lords, since that might embolden them to challenge Ottoman leadership. So the most common partners for the Ottoman girls were advisors and bureaucrats of lower birth but high importance to Ottoman administration.
• Hungary was considered the eastern bulwark of Catholicism by the end of the 14th century since it had withstood Mongol invasion and the Bogomil heresy. 
• The Ottomans often gave administrative positions to defeated rebels.
• The Galata Tower was reduced in heigh by 7.5 meters after the Turks conquered Constantinople to reduce the visibility of the foreign presence.
• The Tatars, descended from Genghis Khan, were the only vassals whose khan received an annual stipend and gifts from the Ottomans, and they contributed skilled horsemen to the Ottoman armies. 
• The Ottoman economy was dependent on agriculture well into the 20th century, and even today 40% of the Turkish Republic's population is rural.
• The Ottomans derived great value from Jizya taxes on non-Muslims, discouraging conversions.
• Sultan Bayezid II welcomed Spanish Jews, and observed: "Can you call such a king [i.e. Ferdinand] wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching my kingdom."
• Greek-speaking Jews are called Romaniotes.
• Suleiman I continued the trend of removing the Sultan more and more from daily affairs. By the time he died, an advisor of his was able to hide his death for weeks so that his favored heir could arrive to the capital, and no one seemed to notice.
• Something interesting was the number of Christian Europeans who entered Ottoman politics and converted to Islam, like Cigalazade Sinan Pasha, a noble-born Genoese boy who was captured at sea and converted to Islam.
• The princes of the empire were essentially kept as prisoners in the palace their whole lives until they were either murdered/executed or made Sultan.
• In 1620-21, the Bosporus froze and people could walk across the Golden Horn on the ice.
• I noticed that the Sultans needed juridical opinions to get a lot of things done like starting wars. More interesting was how Finkel just discounted those juridical opinions completely as political tools. I would be interested to read more about those opinions, and I wonder if that is how historians will see our Supreme Court opinions years from now.
• I thought this sentence was taken straight out of 2023: "The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was greatly weakened by this time, the Cossack uprising which had begun in 1648 having developed, by 1654, into a war between the Commonwealth and Muscovy over the question of sovereignty in Ukraine."
• In the 18th century, it was ordered that new coinage be marked "Struck in Istanbul" instead of Constantinople, and from that point on the city was also often called "Islambol."
• The Ottomans participated in the Second Coalition against Napoleon.
• Armenians occupied a similar financial role to Jews in Ottoman society.
• Tanzimat included the introduction of the fez to replace the turban. The fez was then eliminated 100 years later by Ataturk.
• I found it interesting that in the late 19th century Britain was involved in significant efforts to end the Ottoman slave trade. There were some successes, but the trade continued in the east and in Arabia. And the British were never successful at abolishing the sex slave trade, as Ottomans didn't consider that slavery at all.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

     Evicted is a book that's been on my list forever. Like since it came out. I am only just now getting around to reading it because I started volunteering with the Legal Aid project Eviction Free Milwaukee and people mentioned the book. So I realized I had to read THE book about evictions, which is set in Milwaukee. I can see the reason for the book's success. Desmond doesn't just write a book about eviction; he tells the stories of people involved in landlord/tenant issues as if a novel and explains the phenomenon of eviction through their stories.

    So throughout the book, you get lots of narrative, and then a fact like this: "Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers has more than quadrupled. As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments." Desmond also makes important observations, like when he echoes Jane Jacobs that, "A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it was begrudgingly located." These places become perpetual slums with high turnover, preventing people from forming any sort of community. And Desmond's use of a family as an example is not accidental. Families and single mothers get evicted more often. Having kids makes eviction more likely because kids become expenses and do things that get their parents in trouble with the landlord. Families suffer additionally in the screening process. Landlords of course screen for a criminal record, but also screen for evictions. This means that criminals and people with evictions get forced to live together in worse places. And since the evicted are more likely to have kids, those kids end up having to live around criminals at a disproportionate rate.

    And it's not easy to move. Desmond points out that while the differences in quality of housing that exist are dramatic, the price differences are not so great. When he did his ethnographic study, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $600, with ten percent of units below $480 and ten percent above $750. So just $270 monthly was separating the cheapest and most expensive units in the city, meaning that those in the worst units were overpaying while those in the best underpaid. So in the poorest neighborhoods, where at least 40% of families were below the poverty line, they only paid $50 less than the citywide median. But living in the worst apartments is much worse. At the time of the study, one in five renters in Milwaukee had a broken window, a busted appliance, or pests for more than three days. One third had clogged plumbing of over a day and one in ten spent a day without heat-- but average rent was almost the same as the good rentals.

    Over 70% of tenants summoned to Milwaukee's eviction court did not attend (when the book was published). In some places it is as high as 90%. Of tenants in eviction court, the majority spent over half their income on rent payments and a third spent 80% of their income that way. Of those who are evicted, only one in six have a place to stay. Three in four people in Milwaukee eviction court were black, and three in four of that group were women, The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined. In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, one female renter in seventeen was evicted through the court system every year, twice as often as men in those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the poorest white areas.  Women from black neighborhoods made up 9% of Milwaukee's population and 30% of its evicted tenants. It is additionally hard for women because they usually can't avoid eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms. Men will usually approach their landlord with such an offer, but women are usually unable for reasons of physical strength sometimes, childcare obligations, or other work obligations. The more common thing for women to trade was sex for rent. The recession exacerbated the racial inequalities in Milwaukee further: between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% drop in wealth, while the average black family lost 31% and the average Hispanic family 44%. The racial discrimination also came through in this book. The author himself did a blind test and ended up reporting a landlord, and Desmond also mentions how a white couple with felony convictions, an outstanding warrant, five daughters, and past evictions were able to get a place much quicker than two black women without nearly as much baggage.

    I also learned in this book about "nuisance abatement." These are policies that fine property owners if they are responsible for a certain number of 911 calls in a period of time. This means that they best way to avoid a fine is to evict a problem tenant-- who might be an abused woman or a family with children who have special needs. Also in the category of misplaced incentives are aid policies that sought to limit "kin dependence" by giving mothers who lived alone a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives. These have helped to break up families since people could get more money by living at different addresses. Another one is that a Social Security recipient can only get their SSI if they have less than $2,000 in the bank, which is an obvious disincentive to saving.

    What stuck out to me in this book, perhaps because of the flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict right now, was how similar eviction is to deportation or other forced movements. While a genocide may use deportation as part of a catastrophic, ethnically-driven "movement" to make room for some people where others were not welcome, eviction is a continuous "movement" of undesirable people based on their poverty. And it is similarly disruptive to use the power of the state to drive people out of their homes on a continuous basis. Of course, it is this guarantee of state enforcement of private property rights that allows for so many homes to be used by those who need them, but I think now that the problem of enforcement has been solved, it is time to look at how to promote people staying in one place, or at least living where they want to live. It is unproductive to shuffle the poorest people in a city around constantly.

    Finally, Desmond proposes a system of housing vouchers to solve the problem of evictions. I found it unconvincing however. He proposes that every family below a certain income level be eligible for a voucher to live anywhere they want so long as they paid 30% of their income to housing costs. But this seems unviable to me because it would have the effect of dramatically increasing the cost of housing since landlords would just raise rates by an amount proportionate to the increase in spending from the voucher. And it also creates more perverse incentives since people will want to rent places without much regard to cost with the government absorbing 70%. I think the fundamental problem is supply and stock. Giving people more money doesn't actually mean there will be more good places to live. Nowadays, people want to live with more space, and the population is larger. I think that a voucher program could work (Desmond mentions some European countries that use it), but if it's not paired with large increases to good housing stock in cities, it will be counterproductive.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Milwaukee put a moratorium on gas disconnections, so even people who don't pay their bills will still get gas through April in the winter.
• Welfare stipends in Milwaukee have not kept up with inflation since 1997.
• Housing discrimination against children and families was finally outlawed in the 80s after it was discovered that only 1 in 4 rental units were available to families without restrictions. Despite this, housing discrimination against children and families continues.
• A one percent increase in portion of children in a neighborhood can be associated with a seven percent increase in evictions (as of 2010).

I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker

Coronavirus

    The Trump administration's Coronavirus response will go down in history as a case study in failed crisis management, which cost the country countless lives and cost Trump reelection. Initially, it seems like Trump's problem is that he did not want to damage his improving relationship with China when it seemed possible to enter into a trade deal in 2020. Trump consistently downplayed the virus through January and was quoted as bragging about his great relationship with Xi Jinping. He even tweeted about how much he appreciated China's "efforts and transparency." But by January 28th, he had been briefed that this pandemic would look less like SARS 2003 and more like 1918. There were already conversations about cutting off travel to and from China, but no decision was made until late January, and then restrictions on Europe in March. Indecision got even worse when Mike Pence was made the "Covid Czar." Pence didn't use his new powers, so the effect of making him the final decision-maker meant that no decisions got made, and one adviser described Pence as "just drifting around."

    It was also difficult to establish early on what the best precautionary measures were for people's personal health. From January through March, Fauci argued that facemasks were not necessary, but would reverse positions later on. However, Trump and other staffers in the White House solidified in this position, and resisted wearing facemasks. The Trump team also totally missed the importance of testing early on. As of March 12, only eleven thousand Americans had been tested for Coronavirus, less than the twenty thousand tests that South Korea was conducting DAILY. On March 16, Trump abdicated leadership on a phone call with the nation's governors, and told them that they were on their own for procuring supplies like ventilators, testing kits, and respirators. Within the White House, there was lots of debate about shutting down businesses, which could slow the virus, but tank the economy. Trump eventually announced restrictions with an end date of Easter (April 12), but they were later extended at the end of March to last through April. Trump was holding press conferences until April 23, when he embarrassed himself publicly by suggesting it was possible to inject bleach into the body or expose people's insides to UV light as a way to cure the virus. Trump would only make brief remarks after that, and on April 24, the US death toll reached 50,000. Not long after, White House resistance to masking became a public relations fiasco when Mike Pence appeared at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, without a mask on April 28. He had been tested daily, and so was pretty sure he didn't have Covid, but it wasn't a good look. The masks stayed a problem for Trump, and into November, he still insisted on anyone speaking in public taking off their mask, and even expressed shock and asked his Health Secretary, "they work?"

    One interesting thing about this book is that it pretty clearly endorses the "lab leak" theory of Covid's origin, as opposed to the wet market. They make three key arguments: (1) Covid's rapid and efficient transmissions were the fastest in modern history, unlikely for a zoonotic virus that jumped to humans, (2) the initial cluster of cases in Wuhan did not have contact with the wet market, and (3) the Wuhan epidemiology lab had permission to handle the riskiest biohazards despite the US government having voiced concerns earlier about the lab's safety. I have no idea what the origin was, but those points sounded convincing. I would need to read more about the wet market theory to better compare the two.

    From the book, it looks like Trump had two major problems in the Covid response. One was that he was desperate to make a deal with China so that he would have a major diplomatic achievement for an election year. This delayed the necessary response and kept travel open with China longer than it should have gone on. And the second was an inability to empathize with others while obsessing over polling and reelection. This made Trump unconcerned about the virus itself, and more concerned with making sure it was all hidden from sight. The result was that Trump suppressed testing in the early, critical days, and even stupidly told the press that he was doing so. Moreover, in June, the White House objected to increases in CDC funding and even transferred $300 million from the CDC to the public affairs office of the Department of Health and Human Services for a public relations campaign to "defeat despair and inspire hope."

George Floyd/Black Lives Matter Protests

    The authors write that when Donald Trump first learned about the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, he was impacted and empathetic. But things changed pretty quickly. As protests continued and became multi-day events, Trump became obsessed by the thought that he appeared weak. He wanted to be seen as a "law and order" president. He also had lots of advisers urging him to bring down the hammer on protesters, while Secretary of Defense Esper and Chairman Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to cool him down. In one conversation in which Miller told the President that he "had to show strength" because "they're burning the country down," Milley told Miller to "shut the fuck up." Multiple times I was surprised at how Esper and Milley resisted and really even disobeyed Trump. They were very concerned that it would be a political use of the military. Their actions in that summer raise a lot of questions about civil-military relations. But they were dealing with a crazy man. On July 30, Trump would propose delaying the election on Twitter. He tweeted: "With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"

The 2020 Election and "Stop the Steal"

    Trump did not intend to stop being president after one term. In a similar vein to his refusal to support the Republican candidate if he lost the nomination in 2016, Trump refused to guarantee that he would step down if he lost in a press conference on September 23, 2020.  Republicans in Congress, including Mitch McConnell, felt the need to issue statements saying that they would support the inauguration only of the winner of the election. There was more drama days later. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, and Trump held a large event in the Rose Garden (with almost no masks) on September 26 to nominate Amy Coney Barrett as her successor. The next day, Trump attended a Gold Star event for the families of fallen service members, in which he mingled with many guests and commented to staffers that they were letting too many people get close to him, and that "If they have Covid, I'm definitely going to get it." The next day, Trump was doing debate prep for the debate with Joe Biden the following day. The debate culminated in a moment when Biden called Trump a racist, and Trump refused to condemn the Proud Boys, instead telling them to "stand back and stand by." It turned out that sometime during all of this, Trump got Covid and needed to be taken to the hospital due to low blood oxygen levels. He was able to recover after a few days.

    In the fall, it was becoming clear to many on the Trump campaign that he was going to lose. Most of them blamed Trump himself. If his responses to Covid and the summer protests hadn't been bad enough, he then began an attack on mail-in ballots. Without evidence, Trump alleged that main-in ballots would be the source of mass voter fraud in 2020. The result of his claims was to prove nothing, but to convince his own voters not to bother with mail-in voting. His campaign had a mail-in ballot return rate of 2 to 3 percent when it would normally be in the double digits. Trump tried to focus media attention on his "October Surprise," which was Hunter Biden's laptop, which allegedly contained evidence of Biden's corruption. But the so-called smoking gun was just an email from a Ukrainian adviser to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, thanking Hunter for "an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together." While that may imply some nefarious conduct, it is hardly a smoking gun, and got little attention outside right-wing circles.

    It seems like Giuliani was a key player in initiating the nonsense that followed the election. First of all, on election night, he kept trying to get access to Trump to tell him his master plan. The master plan consisted of just announcing victory for any close states before results were in. But even Fox called states like Arizona against Trump, and it was clear by the morning after the election that Trump had lost. But Trump and his proxies were pushing the false narrative that he won. On November 14, a rally was held outside the White House opposing the election results, a harbinger of more to come. At that time, Trump's team was bringing dozens of legal cases to challenge vote totals, and losing all of them. At one, Giuliani expressed confusion when asked the legal standard and just said "the usual one." In total, eighty judges of both political parties would go on to reject Trump's legal claims by January 6. 

    Also in mid-November, Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr met and agreed that the results were not going to be overturned and that Republicans would have to accept losing the White House. At the time, there was still hope that Republicans would retain the Senate in the Georgia runoffs (which ended up electing two Democrats). On December 1, Barr did an interview in which he said the same publicly, asserting the truth that "we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election." The Supreme Court, with three justices nominated by Trump and six from Republicans total, denied both of the major elections appeals from Republicans on December 8 and December 11. The dismissals were from the shadow docket, and the cases were not heard. On December 12, there was another major "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C. At that rally, leader Ali Alexander told demonstrators to be ready to take action and that they should be ready to take the fight up to January 6, when Alabama congressman Mo Brooks planned to object to electoral college certification. Barr resigned his post on December 23, writing a letter praising Trump and telling him that it was just to get out in time for the holidays. He would be happy later to have gotten out when he did. On December 23, Trump called the chief investigator on ballot fraud in Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta, and began personally pressuring her to find him more votes or cancel "fraudulent" votes for Biden.

    Trump issued a call to action on New Year's Day: "January 6th. See you in D.C." And on January 2, Milley got a heads-up from a former defense secretary that all ten living former secretaries would publish an opinion piece in the Washington Post the next day warning current Pentagon leaders to never allow the military to be used to settle an election dispute or interrupt the peaceful transition of power. Milley said to one of his aides that, "This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Fuhrer." And it wasn't helped that Trump just kept ratcheting up his crazy levels. By this point, Giuliani and other crazies had total access to him. This is something that a competent chief of staff would have prevented, but Mark Meadows was powerless. Trump was going crazy, and on January 2, he called Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state, to pressure him to find 11,000 votes. It actually took 18 calls to get through since Raffensperger's office thought they were prank calls. Raffensperger's office recorded the conversation and planned not to release it, but felt their hand was forced by Trump's tweet on January 3 that Raffensperger "was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the 'ballots under the table' scam, ballot destruction, out of state 'voters', dead voters, and more. He has no clue!" It should be mentioned here that Raffensperger is a Republican. On that call, Trump was recorded saying, "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state... Si what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already." Others in the administration criticized Mark Meadows for scheduling the call. Larry Kudlow said, "Mark, did you think for one minute that that call would not be leaked in its entirety? Are we children here or are we adults?"

    Mitt Romney had already suspected that there would be some kind of violence on January 6. His wife asked him not to fly out, but he was going to do his duty and cast a vote. At the airport on January 5, a woman filming him on her phone confronted Romney, asking "Why aren't you supporting President Trump?" But she wasn't the only one. On the plane, Romney discovered that many of the other passengers were Trump supporters on the way to Washington, and a large group of them directed a "Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!" chant at Romney.

    At 8:17 AM on January 6, Trump tweeted, "States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States. AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!" That day, Trump gave a speech at the Stop the Steal rally, concluding by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol, suggesting he may join them. He said, "Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and that "it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy." He continued, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women...We're going to try to give our Republicans--the weak ones, because the strong ones don't need any of our help--we're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." It was then that the storming of the Capitol began. 

    Meanwhile, shortly after one PM in the Capitol, the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell was speaking out for certifying the election, against Trump. He said, "The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a National Board of Elections on steroids. The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. They've all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. This election, actually, was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer than this one. The electoral college margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. [If] this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We'd never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost."

    Within an hour of that speech, rioters were scrambling through Capitol halls, windows, and rooms, ransacking the building. Mike Pence's security team tried to get him to leave, but he absolutely refused. The situation was tense for a few hours, and multiple rioters and a Capitol police officer were killed or died. But things eventually subsided in the afternoon as reinforcements arrived. And at 4:05 PM, Biden delivered remarks from Wilmington, Delaware, condemning the chaos and calling on President Trump to demand an end to the siege. The speech received bipartisan applause when airing to Republicans and Democrats in the Capitol. At 4:17, Trump posted a video on Twitter of him recorded in the Rose Garden. He told his supporters to go home, after two hours of pressuring by his daughter Ivanka, but he also told them, "We love you." He had needed three takes, and the final result was very inconsistent and left lots of room for his supporters to imagine that he really wanted the Capitol to be stormed. Trump tweeted again at 6:01 that "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!" Throughout the entire day, no government or military leaders heard from the president, not even Mike Pence. We can look at that as two things. One, Trump never issued an order to shut down the insurrection. But he also never issued an order to support it either.  

    In the end, six Republican Senators objected to Arizona's votes and seven objected to Pennsylvania's. But in the House, 121 Republicans voted against Arizona's votes and 138 voted against Pennsylvania's. This amounted to about two-thirds of the Republican conference. At 3:24 AM, Congress completed the counting of votes and confirmed Joe Biden's electoral win, and Mike Pence declared him the next president of the United States.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• On August 27, Fauci opened a piece of mail in his office and white powder burst all over his face. Security agents had him stay in his office until a hazmat team arrived and stripped him naked before bringing him to a separate room at NIH where he was sprayed with a decontaminating chemical. 
• On September 15, Trump completed the Abraham Accords, in which Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations. They were united in opposition to Iran, which helped smooth relations.
• For Trump's debate sessions, his aides told Rudy Giuliani to show up two hours later than when they were scheduled to start because they respected him so little and thought he would be a distraction.