The Trump administration has been engaged in a massive military buildup in and around the Middle East preparing for an expected attack on Iran. Do you want to know what all those military assets have in common? They’re air-conditioned. There are no tents waiting to be erected when basecamps are established. No stockpiles of MRE’s, Meals Ready to Eat. There are no woven nylon bags or Hesco barriers ready to be filled with sand and rocks.

Trump has sent two aircraft carrier strike forces to the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln is already in the Persian Gulf area along with its attendant guided missile destroyers, such as the USS Spruance, the USS Michael Murphy, and the USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. The USS Gerald Ford is said to be closing in on its expected station in the Mediterranean Sea, traveling with another group of guided missile destroyers, including the USS Normandy, the USS Rampage, the USS Thomas Hudner, and the USS Roosevelt. Both aircraft carriers are equipped with massive air power, including F-18 D/F Super Hornets, F-35C Lightning stealth fighter/bombers, E-18G Growler electronic warfare and jamming aircraft, E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning and command aircraft, and MQ-9 Reaper drones. An unknown number of submarines are doubtlessly patrolling underwater in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf area. Some American submarines carry nuclear weapons, some carry Tomahawk Cruise missiles, and some carry a mix of the two. The capability and positions of U.S. submarines is a closely guarded national security secret, but they’re out there ready to launch whenever and whatever Trump tells them to launch.

And of course he’s got his fleet of B-2 bombers back in Kansas and Missouri, ready to fly a kajillion miles and drop their bunker-buster bombs like they did when he hit Iran’s nuclear sites last year.

On bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and elsewhere in and around the Middle East, more airpower is stationed, including at least 100 F-15E Strike Eagle fighter/bombers and A-10C Thunderbolt ground strike aircraft, plus dozens of airborne refueling aircraft such as the KC-135 Stratotanker and KC-46 Pegasus, and an entire air fleet of cargo planes, including the C-5 Galaxy and the C-17 Globe Master.

I’m sure Trump has ground troops on standby, but neither the Pentagon nor White House is talking about putting “boots on the ground” in Iran. Trump doesn’t do sand and mud. He deploys only weapons systems with air-conditioning.

It’s the essential delusion of Donald Trump and his Pentagon war-mongers: that this country, or any country for that matter, can use air and naval power to achieve its foreign policy goals. To understand what a gigantic bulldozer load of horseshit that is, look no further than our ill-begotten, ill-carried out, and ill-ended military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration deployed five carrier groups at the start of the Iraq invasion and many more ground-based attack aircraft that we have on the ground in the Middle East right now. And Bush committed around 170,000 ground troops to the invasion and countless hundreds of thousands more over the years we were in both countries. After more than 20 fucking years, what do we have to show for it? Well, the Taliban has a tighter grip on Afghanistan than it did when we invaded in 2001, and they are far better armed, having stolen every scrap of U.S. military weaponry we gave to the Afghan “army.” Iraq is not led by anyone with “Hussein” in his name, but the country is still mired in sectarian strife, with Iran responsible for supporting the Shiite majority against the Sunni minority.

Quite an accomplishment, eh? And just think: The entire endless clusterfuck cost us $6 trillion and counting, with legacy payments to U.S. military retirements and disabled veterans that will push the total beyond $8 trillion, according to most estimates. And let’s not forget the 7,000 American troops who gave their lives. Their parents, brothers and sisters, spouses, and grandparents certainly haven’t forgotten them.

Trump probably thinks he’s a genius for coming up with the Grand Idea of using bombs to pound Iran into submission and achieve whatever goals he thinks he has. We don’t know what those goals are, because he hasn’t said. Leaks from the masterminds he surrounds himself with say that he wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. We were told he’d already done that last year with his bombing campaign, but hell, maybe Trump forgot, or maybe he’s just making shit up as he goes, or maybe he’s so befuddled by all the power at his fingertips that he just figures he can say anything he wants and call it a goal after he claims that he has achieved it.

Trump is reportedly considering a new goal as well: He is said to want regime change in Iran and may try to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He even told reporters last week that “it would be the best thing that could happen” if Khamenei is gone. Trump is apparently unaware that Khamenei oversees a theocratic regime with plenty of little-ayatollahs standing by, ready to step into Khamenei’s shoes. The entire Iranian government, from its military to its Supreme National Security Council to the elite Republican Guards to its judiciary and cabinet and even its legislature is controlled from the top by religious leaders loyal to Khamenei and his Islamic lieutenants.

It ain’t as easy as yanking Saddam out of his hidey-hole and puttin’ in a puppet government, which didn’t work in Iraq anyway.

When is Trump, or Secretary of War Cocktail Shaker or Stephen “grab that kid he’s getting away” Miller or Little Marco going to pick up a book – even a tattered old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica – and familiarize themselves, even a little, with the idea that the Iranian civilization is one of the oldest in the world, along with that of the Tigris-Euphrates valley – read: Iraq – and the people who live there have this thing called pride in who they are and what their civilization has accomplished over the last, oh, let’s just say 6,000 fucking years, and so they might be a little perturbed at the idea that we’re going to come in there and tell them how to run things.

I don’t know what to call this inflamed idiocy. Historians will write it down to hubris, you can count on that, but even hubris doesn’t capture the abject ignorance and bloated egotism behind the idea that you can just push a whole bunch of buttons and launch bombers and missiles and drones and ships and bring the people who have inherited the ancient and honorable civilization of Persia to heel.

So, buckle up. He’s going to spend hundreds of billions of our tax dollars on his insane plans, and if we’re lucky…very very lucky…he won’t get a new crop of young Americans killed in the process.

Madness, I say. Madness. For us, and the rest of the world, just another day in the life of America under Donald Trump.

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Jacob is terrified of oral reports he’s expected to give in his 10th-grade history class this school year. A therapist’s note recommends he be excused, and the school agrees. This scenario is playing out nationwide. The individuals and institutions involved are well intentioned and trying to help students feel more comfortable. But as psychologists who’ve studied and treated anxiety for decades, we believe that this approach — eliminating whatever makes students nervous — is making the problem worse. Here’s
why: Anxiety feeds on avoidance.

Anxiety and fear, particularly among young humans, are fed by a debilitating combo-- the belief that 1) the scary things is truly dangerous, so dangerous that 2) you can't possibly handle it.

I've written about this many times before. Students are still trying to grow coping mechanisms for Scary Things, and they are surrounded by adults who may or may not having very good coping mechanisms of their own. Choices for coping with scary, anxiety-inducing things include:

1) Perform a set of behaviors that will magically keep the Scary Thing at bay. This one is popular among adults, and the problem is that in this model, the scary thing is always right outside, just waiting to get you, and you have to keep performing your keep-it-at-bay activities forever. I'm convinced that much of what we're living through right now is a man (and some like-minded sycophants) frantically pursuing the belief that if he acquires enough wealth and fame and power, he doesn't have to be afraid of dying. No human has ever pursued this tactic so fiercely or extensively, and there is a lesson for all of us in the fact that despite the success of his pursuit, it clearly hasn't assuaged his fear in the slightest. 

2) Denial and avoidance. The Scary Thing isn't real, isn't happening, isn't a threat. You aren't really here. You will run away and therefor avoid it. You can't lose if you don't play. This is every student who is suddenly too sick to deliver their oral report. It's not really coping so much as delaying. Worse, it reinforces the notion that the Scary Things is too devastating and you are too weak to deal with it.

3) Strength. You are strong-- specifically, strong enough to cope with the Scary Thing. Even if you don't beat it (and by God, you might), you will still be okay afterwards. You might even get stronger by wrestling with it.

2 is the strategy that the authors are talking about, and I agree. Every time we give a student a way to avoid the Scary Thing, we reinforce the idea that it really is a threat, and they really aren't strong enough to cope. 

By contrast, when students take on what they’d rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice.

As is always the case in education, there's a lot to balance here. Getting students to face the Scary Thing can mean they need a kick in the ass combined with a forcible closure of all escape routes, or it can mean that they need to have their hand held as they are coaxed and reassured to go forward. It almost always means prepping them for the Scary Thing so that they have the tools they need. 

It also means that teachers have to be thoughtful about how they handle failure in a classroom, in things both big and small. Through most of my career, I tried to respond to everything from wrong answers to a question in class to bombed assessments with a message, somehow, of "That's not what we want, but you are still okay." Students, particularly younger ones, are susceptible to the message that failing at school is proof that they are sorry excuses for a human being-- in other words, they are too weak and too incompetent to face the Scary Thing which is, in fact, a Big Scary test of their worth as a human being. 

Of course, as a teacher, you have to switch gears with a student who doesn't seem to experience any anxiety at all, and of course you have to try to assess whether the student is actually out of !#@%s to give or if that's just a defensive pose (see 2 above). 

Some teachers, it must be said, tend to make mountains out of molehills ("If I have to talk to you one more time it will go on your permanent record and you will never get into college or get a job ever!") which can feed some students' dramatic sense that they are engaged in an epic struggle with apocalyptic forces. This is not helpful.

The messages that students need to hear are--

1) You can do this.

2) If you don't manage it the first, or even the second time, you will be okay.

3) I am here to help you get better at doing this.

They need to hear these messages from teachers and parents and other adults as well. 

They can also, Lovett and Jordan point out, be taught explicitly about anxiety-- what it is, where it comes from, how people deal with it, and how it is a feeling that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. I suspect they could also stand to hear tales of anxiety from adults; sometimes, young humans feed their anxiety with the assumption that everyone else, adults especially, has everything completely under control and therefor there must be something wrong with the young human who does not. 

Adults might also just generally stop pushing the idea that it is a big scary world, that we are all balanced on the edge of disaster, and that young humans are particularly in danger (and incapable of dealing with that danger). 

Schools do not have to be anxiety farms, and teachers do not have to feed the idea that students face Scary Things that those students can't possible deal with or survive. We can believe in our students (and if you teach in one place for a long time, you will see the evidence as they grow and thrive and weather adversity), and we can let that belief color how we treat them. We are all of us stronger than we sometimes imagine; all we have to do is grasp that strength for ourselves and those around us. 

Just north of the Alps, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, lies beautiful Lake Constance. And on the northwest shore of the lake is the lovely small city of Constance, Germany.

Constance is well worth a visit. A lot of German cities have rather bland or unattractive centers, thanks to the American and British air forces. But Constance escaped these attentions entirely, because the Allies didn’t want to risk any bombs landing in neutral Switzerland. So Constance has an unusually intact Old Town with lots of interesting old buildings, some going right back to medieval times.

Constance also has this:



A nine meter tall, 18 ton statue of a medieval sex worker.  She’s down at the harbor, on the lake.  She rotates once every four minutes.  Her name is Imperia.

You may reasonably ask, what?  And part of the answer is, she’s memorializing the Council of Constance, the great political-religious council that happened here 600-some years ago, from 1414 to 1417.  And you may ask again, what?

I’ll try to explain.  

Constance

Lake Constance gets its modern name from the city of Constance.  And the city of Constance is named after Constantius, a fourth century Roman emperor.


[probably this guy, though it might have been his grandson.  it was the 4th century, stuff got confused.]

Back in the first century AD, the Romans pushed up through the Alps into what’s now southern Germany. They brought peace to the region via their traditional mix of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and forced Romanization.  They seem to have built a bridge at Constance — the lake tapers down to a narrow neck there.  And credit where it’s due: the Romans loved nothing better than building transport infrastructure.  Bridge going north, good Roman roads going south, inevitably a town sprang up.  Later, in the 4th century when the Empire was turtling up against the ever more aggressive barbarians, the trading town built walls.  It became a border fortress, and got a new Imperial name.

(You have to work a bit to find corners of Europe that haven’t been touched by someone’s empire.  Roman, Frankish, Byzantine, Holy Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, French, Russian, British, German… ruins and roads, castles and place names, borders and battlefields.  The continent is pock-marked with them like acne scars.)

The Romans eventually departed, but the bridge and the town seem to have survived.  Certainly both were still there a thousand years later, when the Catholic Church convened a General Council there in 1414.

So is Imperia about the Roman Empire, then? 

No, not at all.  Well… not directly.

Three Popes, One Council

“And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”   — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

For a while, back in the 14th century, there were two rival Popes.  Each had his own Papal court and hierarchy, each was doing all sorts of Papal things — collecting religious dues, appointing Bishops and Cardinals, excommunicating heretics — and each was recognized by about half of Europe.  This was generally agreed to be a bad situation!  So there were several attempts to fix this problem.  They all failed, and one went so spectacularly wrong that it produced a third Pope, recognized by another couple of European countries.

At this point pretty much everyone agreed that something drastic had to be done.  So a General Council of the Church was called, with implicit power to sit in judgment on all three rival Popes.  Italy was problematic for a bunch of reasons, France was in the middle of the Hundred Years War — 


[Branagh or Olivier?  discuss.]

— so after some discussion it was decided to convene the Council in the small neutral city of Constance, which if nothing else was centrally located.

In Conference Decided

“A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.”  — Fred Allen

The Council of Constance is just so darn interesting.  

I’ll try not to chase too many rabbits, but here’s a thought.  In the early 15th century Europe was, in terms of global civilization, a backwater.   The Chinese were more technologically advanced, India was richer.  Asia was full of cities that were larger, cleaner, safer, and better designed than Europe’s grubby little burgs.  Heck, the contemporary Aztecs had a capital at Tenochtitlan that was bigger and nicer than anything in Europe,  and those guys were barely out of the Stone Age. 

Europe had nothing that the rest of the world particularly wanted  to buy, which meant that Europe had been running a trade deficit for literally centuries.  (This would lead to a serious economic crisis later in the century, as the continent nearly ran out of  gold and silver.)  Militarily, Europeans had been losing battles and wars to non-Europeans for a while, and this would continue for some time.  In particular, the Ottomans had just embarked on a long career of kicking Europe’s ass. Within a century, a huge chunk of the continent would be Ottoman provinces or tributaries. 

And yet.  Somewhere along the line, Europe went from “D-tier also-ran kind of lame civilization” to “planetary apex predator”. 

Why?  Why Europe? 

Some of the world’s smartest people have spent lifetimes of scholarship trying to answer that question.  Not for a moment will I imagine I can add anything useful to that great debate.  But here’s an offhand thought: there’s a short list of things that are, historically, unique or nearly unique to Europe.  One of those things? International conferences.  


[it doesn’t get much more European than this.]

This is probably because international conferences started as a particularly Christian thing.  The early Church was spread broadly but thinly across a politically united Roman Empire that had, for a premodern state, unusually excellent transport links.  (See earlier comment re: Romans and transport infrastructure.)  So it made sense to periodically come together: to keep doctrine and practice consistent, to resolve leadership disputes, and just generally to settle questions that couldn’t be worked out locally.  The great-grandfather of them all was the Council of Nicaea, back in 325 AD, which gave us the Nicene Creed.


[BEGOTTEN NOT MADE HERETIC iykyk]

And there were lots more Councils, all through late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Chalcedon, Constantinople, Lateran, Lyons.

But there’s a second line of mostly secular conferences called by Europeans to resolve international disputes: most typically to end a war, but often with a sidebar of “and let’s try to set up some sort of international order”.  And you can argue with a straight face that the Council of Constance is the takeoff point for this second line. 

Because Constance was a Church council, yes.  But it was also political in a way that previous medieval Councils hadn’t been.  It was attended by kings and dukes and counts, lawyers and professors and representatives of Imperial Free Cities — in fact, the lay attendees may have outnumbered the clerics.  It relied on the Emperor Sigismund to provide security and enforcement.  Its decisions required buy-in from the secular authorities.  Voting at the council was done by “nations” — groups of Churchmen, but sorted geographically by region within Europe.  And while Church reform and heresy were on the agenda, the overriding imperative was straight-up power politics: to resolve the Papal schism and settle the Church’s internal government.

So on one hand, Constance was just another in that long line of Church councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (1962-65).  But at the same time, it was arguably the first great multilateral peace conference.  Lodi, Westphalia, Vienna, Versailles, Yalta: Europeans have been holding these conferences for a long time.  There’s a direct line from Constance to the G-20.

— No, I’m not claiming that international conferences are what made Europe special.  I’m just noting that these secular peace-and-international-order councils really get going in the 15th century, right around the time that Europe begins its slow ascent out of mediocrity.   Almost certainly a coincidence!  Still: interesting.

Deliverables

So the Council of Constance had three declared goals, plus one goal that was undeclared but universally recognized. 

The declared goals were:

1)  Fix the whole three Popes thing.
2) Deal with heresy.  Specifically, deal with Jan Hus, who was the beta version of Martin Luther, and his followers.  The Hussites had basically taken over one European country already, and were threatening to spread.
3)  Reform the Church, which everyone agreed was spectacularly corrupt, and doing a pretty terrible job of providing spiritual guidance and moral leadership to Catholic Europe.  (This was cross-wired with (2) because the Hussites were claiming to be, not heretics, but reformers.)

The undeclared goal was

4) By asserting the superiority of a Church Council over Popes, convert the Catholic Church from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. 

Nobody was publicly saying this was the plan, but this was totally the plan.  There had been a bunch of bad Popes already.  It was clear that giving that much power to anyone was a dubious idea to begin with, and that this was made worse by a selection process that favored ruthless conniving corrupt SOBs. 

Getting rid of the Papacy was unthinkable, of course.  But regular Church Councils to keep the Popes in check?  That seemed entirely doable.

Key Performance Indicators

They succeeded at (1) and failed at the other three. 

They did burn poor Jan Hus.  It’s a sad story and I won’t go into the details.  TLDR, they burned him, but the Hussites took over Bohemia anyway — the modern Czech Republic, more or less — and stayed in power there for over a century.  The secular rulers around them did manage to contain the Hussite heresy and keep it from spreading, but that wasn’t because of anything the Council did.

But the really consequential failures were that they utterly failed to reform the Church and they didn’t curb the powers of the Papacy.  The Church would remain horrifically corrupt, and the Popes would remain autocratic — and all too often greedy, cruel, and completely uninterested in providing spiritual or moral leadership.

It would take nearly another century for these particular chickens to come home.  But the eventual, inevitable result was the Protestant Reformation.


[hammer time]

By failing to fix the system, the attendees of the Council guaranteed that the system would eventually explode. 

But, really, how could they do otherwise?  Cardinals and bishops and abbots, counts and dukes and kings, priests and professors… they were all products of the system, and they were all benefiting from it.  

Somewhere, Imperia is smiling.  We’ll get back to Imperia.

One fled, one dead, one sleeping in a golden bed

So what happened to those three Popes, anyway?

Well: John, the Neapolitan Pope, was a pretty sketchy character even by the low standards of late medieval Popes.  Among other things — many, many other things — he was plausibly suspected of having poisoned his predecessor.  So the Council offered him a deal: resign, and we won’t open an investigation into these accusations.  Since an investigation would lead to a trial, and a trial would lead to a conviction, Pope John agreed and stepped down.  

But then!  John slipped out of Constance — disguised as a postman, some say.  He fled to the castle of a friendly noble, un-resigned, and declared the Council dissolved.

The Council wasn’t having it.  The Holy Roman (German) Emperor summoned an army to besiege the castle. John fled again, but the Emperor’s forces followed.  Eventually he was caught and dragged back to Constance, where they did put him on trial, and convicted him too.  He spent several years in comfortable but secure confinement.  He was allowed out once it was clear that he would behave himself, i.e. not try to be Pope any more.  

Now, one of John’s few accomplishments as Pope was choosing the Medici of Florence as his bankers.  Did you ever wonder why the Medici were such a big deal?  It’s because they were the bankers for the Papacy for almost a century.  Immense sums of money flowed into Rome from all over Europe.  All of it passed through Medici hands at some point, and of course the bankers took their cut. 

And, credit to the Medici, they used at least some of that money to become some of the greatest patrons of art that the world has ever known.  Michelangelo, Botticelli, the Duomo, Donatello, the Sistine Chapel… all that happened because of bad Pope John.


[“Award of a Sole Source Contract for Financial Services”, fresco, c. 1509]

When the disgraced ex-Pope eventually died, the reigning Pope didn’t want to give him a burial in Rome.  So the grateful Medici whisked John’s body off to Florence, where they gave him a nine-day funeral.  Then they built him a nice little tomb.  It was eight meters tall, marble and gilt, with Corinthian columns and a bronze effigy — you know, the usual — designed by Medici client artists Donatello and Michelozzo.   It’s still there in Florence today.


[phrases rarely found together: “Medici” and “tasteful understatement”]

Gregory, the Venetian Pope?  He cut a deal.  He agreed to resign if (1) the Council subsequently acknowledged that he had been the One True Pope all along, so that his rivals were declared schismatic antipopes, and also (2) he got a unique one-time title of “Second Most Important And Holy Guy In The Church, After The Pope”.  The Council decided this was cheap at the price, and agreed. 

So Gregory is still counted by the Catholic Church as an official Pope.  (Which means he was the last official Pope to resign the office until Benedict XVI’s abdication in 2013, five hundred and ninety-seven years later.)


[he even got to keep the hat]

Benedict, the Spanish Pope?  He refused to resign.  But the Council went to work on the remaining countries and monarchs who were supporting him, and talked them around.  So Benedict ended up abandoned by most of his supporters.  He died a few years later, mule-stubborn to the end, isolated and mostly ignored.

That time they elected the Pope in a shopping mall

Once the Council had eliminated or sidelined the three Popes, they needed to choose a new one.  For this, they used a unique, one-time-only system of voting. Council attendees gathered into geographic “Nations”, each nation picked six guys to represent them, those six guys cast one vote.  This was an attempt to put a new, Council-based system of Pope selection in place, since the existing College of Cardinals process kept throwing up Popes who were scheming evil bastards.  

It didn’t take.  The next Papal election took place when there was no Council, so they went right back to the College of Cardinals.


[and they’ve kept it ever since]

But they also had the problem of where to hold the election.  Because traditionally, Papal electors are isolated, cut off from outside influences until they decide.  So they needed a building that was large, but that could be sealed off, but also handed over to the electors for some indefinite period of time. As it turned out, medieval Constance had exactly one building that fit the requirements:  the town Kaufhaus.

Today the word “Kaufhaus” gets translated as “department store”.  But the Constance Kaufhaus was a combination warehouse and retail center.  Foreign merchants kept and sold premium goods there.  It was a big building full of little shops selling luxury items.  Literally, a high-end shopping mall.

Still, needs must.  And credit to the electors: they managed to reach a consensus and elect a Pope who was, if not brilliant, at least not an incompetent, a criminal, or a monster.  Pope Martin V would rule for 13 years and while he wouldn’t do much that was memorable, neither would he poison his enemies, appoint a bunch of nephews and bastard sons to high office, run the Church into bankruptcy, or otherwise disgrace the office.  

Of course, this goes to a deep structural problem.  The Council chose a kindly mediocrity because they were afraid that a strong Pope would claw power back from Councils.  (Which is exactly what happened, a Pope or two later.)  But the Church desperately needed reform, which a kindly mediocrity couldn’t possibly deliver.  

Also, the College of Cardinals absolutely hated the idea of anyone else being involved in electing the Pope. Partly this was a status issue.  Partly it was about ambition — most Popes came out of the College, after all.  (Still true.)  But most of all, it was about cold hard cash.  Would-be Popes were often willing to pay immense bribes in order to buy votes.  Kings and Dukes would throw in more bribes to support or oppose a particular candidate.  Banks and wealthy families would coolly lend money to finance these bribes, since backing a winning Pope could mean an instant flow of massive wealth. 

This is, of course, how the Medici became the Papal bankers.  It was they who funded the election of bad Pope John in the first place.  



[Allegory of a Papal Election, c. 1480.  the winged figures represent the Medici, scattering flowers (money) as they blow the candidate to the shores of success.  the handmaiden (the Church) is about to clothe her in a robe decorated with flowers (even more money).  the candidate gazes into the middle distance, seemingly unaware.]

So reforming the electoral process would not only have been a hit to the Cardinals’ status, it would also have drastically curtailed their future income.  It’s no surprise that they weren’t enthusiastic about the new system, and abandoned it as soon as they could.

Somewhere, Imperia is still smiling.  We’ll get back to Imperia.

Everybody goes home

The Council wrapped up in 1418.  Joan of Arc would have been in first grade, if medieval French peasant girls went to first grade, which they didn’t.  She was about 10 years away from starting her brief incredible career as the savior of France.  Johannes Gutenberg was a freshman at the University of Erfurt.  He was about twenty years away from inventing the printing press. Over in England, a handsome young Welshman named Owen Tudor was hanging around the court of King Henry V.  In a few years, King Henry would die of dysentery.  His widowed Queen would marry handsome Owen.  Their grandson would be the first Tudor king of England, and their descendants are sitting on the British throne today. 

Jan van Eyck was in his twenties, just getting started on his career as a painter.


[weird mirrors were already a thing]

And down in Portugal — a kingdom small and obscure even by medieval European standards, out on the far edge of the continent — Prince Henry the Navigator was forming an ambitious plan.  Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was running out of gold.  But there was gold down in Africa… somewhere.  It came north regularly, after all, in caravans across the Sahara.  The trade was controlled by Islamic middlemen, who took a hefty cut. 

But what if Portuguese ships could work their way down along the African coast?  They might find the source of the gold… and who knows what else?


[just getting started]

And that’s the story of the Council of Constance.

But wait, you ask.   What about Imperia?

Yes, well… this post got a little out of hand.  But Imperia is not forgotten!  Modern Constance has a nine meter, 18 ton concrete statue of a medieval sex worker that rotates every four minutes, and there’s a reason for that.  We’ll get to her story shortly.

Because she is most certainly still smiling.

Not long after Trump took office, I observed that the status of the US as the “indispensable nation” could not be sustained. A year later, the US, considered strictly as a state actor, is already dispensable and has, in fact, been largely dispensed with, by Europe in particular. The standing ovation given to Rubio in Munich recently (made almost unavoidable when his retinue jumped to their feet in Stalinesque fashion) should not obscure the fact that almost no one interpreted it as anything more than a politer restatement of Vance’s tirade a year ago. At that time, Europe needed to keep Trump on-side to prevent a sudden collapse in support for Ukraine and to avoid an all-out trade war.

None of that is particularly relevant now. Europe (include Ukraine) has held Russia to a standstill for a year despite the complete cessation of US military aid. The US is still relevant as an arms exporter and as a patchy supporter of sanctions against Russia, but that’s about it. Trump has turned his attention to his desire to rule the Americas from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, as well as returning to the forever wars of the Middle East.

US discussions of European military dependence commonly assume that independence requires the attributes of a superpower: global reach, expeditionary capacity, and a highly centralised state authority. But Europe does not need to replicate a superpower model. It needs only sufficient political cohesion and integrated military capability to deny territorial aggression on its own continent. In that sense, the relevant model is a Greater Switzerland: coordinated and capable enough for credible defence, without aspiring to global hegemony and without transforming itself into a unitary — or even fully federal — state.

Measured against this objective, Europe has already surpassed the US. Ukraine alone has more troops, hardened by years of war, than the US, and Europe as a whole many more. Europe’s armaments industry, much derided in the early years of the war, is now churning out munitions (particularly artillery shells and drones) at a capacity far greater than that of the US. There are gaps, notably in missile defence, but these are being closed quite rapidly.

Against this, arguments for continued dependence on the US commonly focus on logistics, command-and-control, and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). These arguments sound impressive, but collapse on closer investigation.

Logistics is the clearest example. Before Trump, analysis of a possible war with Russia assumed a massive lift of US forces to Europe for which only the US had any capacity. But it’s clear that this won’t happen. Europe will have to fend (almost) entirely for itself. The resulting logistics problems are immense, but they all involve land transport within Europe – bridges that can’t support the weight of tanks for example.

In fact, the dependence now goes the other way. The global force projection capacity of the US depend critically on bases in Europe like Rammstein, not to mention the UK-leased Diego Garcia. Until recently, a loss of US access to these bases was unthinkable. But it would be a low-cost path to retaliation in the event of an occupation of Greenland.

The same points apply to command-and-control. The US military is central to NATO and would be crucial in the (now improbable) event of a war between NATO and Russia. But in the actual war between Ukraine/Europe and Russia, it’s irrelevant. At the operational level, Ukraine is in charge of its own military. At the logistical level, it’s increasingly integrated with Europe.

Finally, there is ISR. Most of the work these days is being done by drones, which have made concealment nearly impossible anywhere near the front lines. US military satellites play a role, but it’s less important than it was. The most important US player is not the state but Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is gradually being challenged by European alternatives.

Then there is “intelligence” in the sense of analysis, where the US is arguably worse than useless. The US intelligence system scored a win at the beginning of the war by correctly predicting the Russian invasion, but it was right for the wrong reasons, expecting an easy Russian win. Because of the dominance of superpower thinking, the US has routinely overestimated Russia.

This can be seen in the remorselessly pessimistic reporting of the New York Times, which (not surprisingly) reflects the advice it is getting from US intelligence officials. The NYT first announced the imminent fall of Pokrovsk (a relatively unimportant city in Eastern Ukraine) as a likely consequence of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk in 2024. The latest announcement, accompanied by a concession that Russian progress had been slower than expected, was a week ago. Perhaps they will be right this time. But anyone who had read consistent NYT reports of Russian advances for the past three years, without checking the map, would have been anticipating T-72s on the Champs-Elysees by now. These reports are clearly guiding the thinking (to describe it kindly) of the Trump Administration, and reflected in the advice given to Ukraine.

That’s the military side of things. As far as dispensing with the US role in global society is concerned, Trump is doing the work himself. USAid has been gutted, with catastrophic consequences . The US just withdrew from dozens of international organisations , and is sowing chaos in others

The big steps here, with respect to the UN, World Bank and IMF, have not yet been taken But even if Trump does not make the first move, the continued location of these institutions in the US can’t be sustained. With the US out of most UN organisations, UN presence in New York is likely to shrink to the provision of a meeting place for the Security Council and General Assembly, and even that role is threatened by travel restrictions. Their buildings can presumably be taken over by Trump’s Board of Peace. A similar process will play out as Trump attempts to direct the lending policies of the World Bank and IMF

The big force for inertia is the idea that Trump will be gone in 2029. That seems increasingly unlikely, but unless Trumpism is completely defeated, the process will continue with the next Republican administration. A complete defeat of Trumpism would require a massive constitutional upheaval in the US, which would entail a need to focus almost entirely on domestic problems.

The US state may already be dispensable, but the same is not true of the US role in technology and finance. Conflict in these areas is only just starting, but will be intense. More soon I hope.

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One of the silver linings of this dark time of horror and suffering is that the American right has revealed itself like a cheap Scooby Doo villain. They yanked that mask off and underneath was exactly the soulless monster the left has been accusing them of being for decades.

Racist. Misogynist. Violent. Ignorant. Theocrats. Liars. Bigots. Morons. America-hating fascists who want nothing more than to destroy everything about this country because they hate everyone in it.

For the longest time, no one would listen to us. Elected Democrats refused to acknowledge that Republican voters were the problem. Partly through institutional calcification, but mostly through an inherent need to reach across the aisle. A need to not make waves and anger Republicans, Republican voters, and absolutely not anger the legacy press.1

The legacy press refused to acknowledge what we could all see happening right in front of us because then they would have to admit both sides weren’t the problem. Two long-time and highly respected political analysts tried to tell the truth about the Republican Party back in 2012:

How did the legacy press react? Like someone had left a flaming bag of dogshit on their doorstep.

Mann and Ornstein were not “debunked” by the legacy press. They were erased. No more invites on the Sunday shows. No more interviews. The legacy press lost their phone numbers for a very VERY long time. They said the thing none dare speak.

But here we are, a decade and a half later and who is telling us Republicans are the problem?

Republicans.

New 50-State Survey Finds Majority of Republicans (56%) Qualify as Christian Nationalism Supporters

At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.

To be a Christian Nationalist is to be someone who rejects America. All of it, from top to bottom. The Constitution. The rule of law. The separation of church and state. Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. All of our civil rights. The entire concept of America as a nation of immigrants.

There is nothing about America that Christian Nationalists love. They want to destroy it all and rebuild it in their own racist image. And this is the key: It’s ALL about the racism. None of it is about Christianity.

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This is why the more violent and explicitly white nationalist the Republican Party becomes, the more the base embraces “Christian Nationalism.” This is the ideology that allows them to justify their violence and fascism in the name of “Jesus”:

Christian nationalism supporters hold more extreme views about immigrants.

Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” compared with 32% of Skeptics and 8% of Rejecters. Additionally, majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.

Le gasp! Who could have predicted such a thing except anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the American right for the last 160 years? EVERYTHING is about race with these fucking people. Race and misogyny and bigotry and hate and fear and cowardice.

The American right is comprised of the smallest, pettiest, weakest people America has ever produced, all balled up and concentrated into a pile of self-loathing filth, intent on erasing everything that scares them until all that’s left is a comforting lie. And when the lie collapses, they’ll burn what’s left to ashes, immolating themselves in the process.

At least, that’s what they WANT to do. But that’s not going to happen because the regime is failing, so fuck’em and their dreams of white glory.

What we get out of their non-stop racist temper tantrum, though, is the end of the lie. Even in the middle of the horror they are inflicting on us, they are sowing the seeds of their own long-term destruction. Not literally2, but socially, culturally, politically? Done. The narrative long used to protect them, that the American right is full of god-loving patriots who just want what’s best for the nation, is being shredded in real time by the very people it is meant to shield from accountability.

When this is over, and it will be over, there will be no going back for Republican voters. There will be no memory-holing what they’ve done and what they’ve embraced. Not only will we on the left not allow them to burn their MAGA hats and pretend they were victims all along, it also won’t matter.

Why? Because every time the right fails, they do one thing and one thing only: Lurch to the right. And who is waiting for them with open arms to the right of violent white nationalism? Nick Fuentes and his fellow Nazis.

UnPresidented

Nick Fuentes escalates MAGA civil war: 'We need to burn down the GOP and elect a Nazi in 2028'

Nick Fuentes, the far-right livestreamer long associated with white nationalist rhetoric and the fringes of the MAGA movement, is once again calling for political sabotage from within the right…

Read more

2 days ago · 56 likes · 13 comments · UnPresidented

The right will never go back to dog whistles and coded language. They will never go back to democracy and the rule of law. They will only escalate their extremism and delight in their cruelty and sickness and terrorism. They are so disconnected from reality, they don’t even know how they look to civilized people anymore, as they caper about, drooling and gibbering Great Replacement nonsense and celebrating the murder of protesters.

Democrats are slowly, soooo slowly, beginning to no longer play the game of make-believe. They are slowly, soooo slowly, beginning to acknowledge these people are an unsalvageable threat to the nation. You cannot get them to vote for you because they are lost in a world of mindless fantasy. Write them off and move on.

The legacy press, on the other hand, will kick and scream and bite and scratch until the bitter end, demanding we go back to the good ol’ days when the American right was just a bunch of flag-waving church-goers who worship at the altar of Saint Ronald Reagan and American Exceptionalism. But that won’t work because the right will be flying Nazi flags and loudly worshipping at the altar of genocide.

You cannot gaslight a nation into not seeing a bunch of fucking Nazis being fucking Nazis.

The right doesn’t really understand yet what this will mean for them. They are so used to being coddled and protected, they cannot grasp the concept of being seen for what they truly are. But we see you, you fucking filth, and soon, you will wish you had stayed hidden behind your fig leaf of decency and respectability.

Thank you for being so unbelievably goddamn stupid.

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), and we’ll get through together.

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There are only 256 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Donald Trump’s Supreme Court surprised him today by taking away the emergency tariff power he’s been playing with since taking office last year. He has already thrown his first tantrum, storming out of a meeting with the Governor’s Association when someone came into the East Room and handed him a piece of paper with the news.

Oh, my goodness! Now he can’t call reporters into the Oval Office and announce that he is really, really mad at Brazil because they found the former president guilty of attempting a coup and sentenced him to the rest of his natural life in prison, and he’s going to impose 100 percent tariffs on Brazilian maracas or whatever it is they export when they’re not salsa-ing…so there!

Axios dubbed his abuse of emergency powers a “tariff button,” and that’s exactly correct. On one side of his desk is the Diet Coke button, and on the other side is the tariff button he presses every time he’s got a hair up his ass or he wants to distract everyone from the latest releases out of the Epstein files. The tariff button allowed him to invent crazed shit like the “tariff bonuses” he said he would issue to taxpayers because we took in a hundred trillion dollars at the ports or wherever he thought tariffs were paid. They’re paying so much in tariffs that we can reduce your taxes! Fuck affordability! We’ve got tariffs! A cheeseburger in every pot! A Gulfstream in every driveway!

Trump held a press conference early this afternoon that was notable for two reasons: He wore a suit that was a dull gray, rather than his usual navy blue, and he decided he would throw a couple of grenades at the Supreme Court justices who didn’t vote his way, calling them “a disgrace to our nation.”

He didn’t mention Leonard Leo, the right-wing terrorist whose Heritage Society has earned Trump’s ire in recent months and who was behind the lawsuit that he lost. Darkly, he hinted that “foreign interests” were behind the lawsuit, which should come as something of a surprise to the thousands of Brooks Brothers attired young conservative go-getters who have peppered the Heritage Society ranks in recent years.

All in all, the press conference was a kind of low-speed chase of a tantrum, with Trump reading from notes and occasionally looking up to toss some fresh meat to the MAGA masses. In a blatant poke at the Supreme Court, Trump announced that he was imposing a new 10 percent “global tariff” under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, telling the assembled press it would be “an additional levy over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.”

In other news, Trump acknowledged that he is preparing a “limited strike” on Iran. He apparently came up with the idea yesterday at the meeting of his “Board of Peace” that was held at the old U.S. Institute of Peace building, which he renamed “The Donald Trump Institute of Peace” after it was gutted and emptied of employees during the DOGE days.

Of course he did. It will probably soon be closed for “renovations and repairs” like the Kennedy Center after the member states of his Board of Peace refuse to pay their dues into the fund that Trump announced he will personally control, probably through the same bank account in Qatar where he stashed the $500 million pay off from Venezuela he called “oil revenues.”

What a day. Three card monte tariffs turn into global tariffs as the most criminally corrupt administration in our history continues to accrue wealth for its Master and Commander.

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