Thinking about...

On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate a rebellion. Our official commemorations, organized by the White House, will instead. We are told today, by the men who would humiliate us, that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others. If we accept that offer, we not only get history wrong, but we cede our own power to change things for the better.

In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are again making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” of Haitians promised by the president. Back in February, when I first wrote on this subject, the city was on the brink of a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis, in the context of the racially hateful language of the president.

As Donald Trump announced his whimsy war in Iran, I was reading about another imperial campaign, long ago, against an Iranian people. In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.

Dear readers: Hope you have a cup of coffee in hand for this one. Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration and host of Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance on Substack, to talk about what language to describe our moment, democracy, and civic participation look like today.

Dear thinkers: Earlier today, Tim talked with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, two former senior national security aides to President Biden on their new show, “The Long Game.: They began with Iran — and, specifically, the power the United States has effectively surrendered through this war.

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want.

The United States has capitulated to Iran. There is a “deal,” which has been signed, on terms that can only be described as those of complete Iranian victory. The US-Iranian talks that were supposed to begin today were cancelled, so today is as good a day as any to discuss the signed “memorandum of understanding” and mark the completion of the disaster. We have what we have: humiliation. War, as some people apparently needed to learn, is not about the pleasure one takes in watching things blow up.

Dear Thinkers, This afternoon, Tim sat down with Ruth Ben-Ghiat for a conversation I think many of you will want to watch with a notebook in hand. Ruth is one of the foremost scholars of strongmen and authoritarianism — she teaches at NYU and has spent her career studying exactly the kind of moment we find ourselves in now.

Dear Friends, The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a defining confrontation of our time, and there is much you can do to help Ukrainians defend themselves -- and thereby affirm much that is of value in our world. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War, and there is every reason to think that its outcome will be of comparable historical significance.

In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely. This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests.