I reviewed a new book about coal and its history for The Nation and I share some excerpts with you:

Arguably, no technology freed the world from the drudgery and cold of premodern times more than coal. It fueled the Industrial Revolution and rising standards of living that transformed what a human life meant after 1800. The cost of this freedom soon meant slaughtered workers, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the threat of planetary ecological catastrophe.

Today, arguably no technology dooms the world’s future more than coal, with its environmental destruction, pumping of carbon dioxide into the air, and dangerous working conditions that still kill from work, pollution, and climate change. The environmental journalist Robert Wyss, in his new book Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal, provides readers an often-dramatic episodic overview of coal in American history, the great paradox between power and destruction that we could escape today, but we choose not to because of vested corporate interests and Donald Trump’s nostalgia for an America where coal burned plentifully and white men like himself ruled the world.

A cheap, plentiful energy source that could power factories anywhere provided enormous financial benefits, and coal revolutionized the global economy. Early factories relied on waterpower, clean in terms of what were then unknown carbon emissions, but limited development to waterways. Coal transformed the geography of industrialization, allowing enormous industrial operations wherever a capitalist wanted to build. It fueled steel and railroads. It heated homes—dirtily, but in a 19th-century working-class home, avoiding the cold took precedence for most family over smoke. The idea of fossil fuels raising standards of living powers the ideology of many of Trump’s energy advisers, who not coincidentally often have vested financial interests in the industry. They ignore or lie about the massive human and environmental cost.

As Wyss reminds readers repeatedly, coal’s horrors showed up quickly. An entrepreneur could easily post a hole in the ground and find workers to dig out the coal. Beginning shortly after 1800, mines began shipping coal to eastern cities. In an era without regulations, where the courts consistently ruled that employers owed workers nothing if they died or were injured on the job because no one forced them to take that particular job, it did not take long for the workers to start dying from cave-ins, gas explosions, and employer indifference to their lives. Wyss juxtaposes the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 that celebrated the industrial might of an America running on coal with workers going days without seeing daylight, racial tensions in the mines as companies used Black strikebreakers, and death from accidents.

Unsurprisingly, workers began to organize. The nation’s most infamous early labor organization—the Molly Maguires—were an early response to the terrible conditions in the Pennsylvania mines that became associated with terrorism. Men such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick would stop at nothing to keep their coal-fueled steel mills nonunion, and this allows Wyss to tell the story of the Pinkerton invasion at Homestead, Pennsylvania, during the famous 1892 strike at Carnegie Steel. The United Mine Workers would form in 1890 and provide a more respectable sort of unionism. But over time, the UMWA became part of the machine keeping the nation enslaved to coal. Legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis fought like hell for his men, as Wyss explores, with attention to the details of workplace health and safety driving strikes, but he was also a tyrant and a man who believed himself and his union more centrally powerful to the American future than it turned out to be.

Coal also blackened the nation’s collective lungs, both inside the mines and outside where coal smoke blotted out the sun. Wyss tells the story the early 20th century attempts to clean the nation’s filthy city air of coal smoke, a process often led by women who found political space to take on urban reforms based on gendered stereotypes around motherhood, framing this by protecting their children from polluting industry. They struggled to succeed in a world dominated by an ideology of endless industrial growth. Finally, in the 1970s, environmental movements began taming coal, a story Wyss tells by focusing on the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona. As ever, coal divided Americans, in this case the Navajo on whose land the power plant resided and upon which tribal leaders relied for scarce financial resources.

The post Rolling Coal appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Aphorisms from Austin O’Malley’s Keystones of Thought, 1914:

• Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.
• Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself.
• Humility is the sister of humor.
• Think what you have to say, and then don’t say it.
• Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage-stamp.
• A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef.
• The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
• Comedy smiles from a neutral intellect; humor laughs from a favoring intellect.
• An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
• The picturesque is the romantic seen.
• The worst miser is the learned man that will not write.
• To laugh at yourself is real life, never acting.
• Put your purse in your head and you will not be robbed.
• A critic at best is only a football coach.
• A gentleman seldom meets rude persons.
• It is yesterday that makes to-morrow so sad.

“A little learning striving to explain a great subject is like an attempt to light up a cathedral with a single taper, which does no more than to show for an instant one foolish face.”

taymonbeal:

balioc:

Seeing a lot of support for a European-style party system these days. For obvious reasons, to be sure. It’s not like the US 2-party FPTP system is doing anyone any good.

…but it’s not like most places in Europe are doing so great either. And I’m at least semi-convinced by the argument that America’s particular distribution of crazy opinions would end up leaving the government in a very bad place under a parliamentary setup.

I’ve been toying with the idea of going in the other direction and just trying to cripple all political parties entirely. Obviously you can’t prevent politicians (or voters) from forming whatever associations and private clubs they want, but…there’s a lot you could do to prevent those associations and clubs from being in any way relevant. Make it unlawful to put party affiliations on ballots. Stop having publicly-supported primary elections. Change congressional procedure so that parties can make many fewer decisions and control many fewer things.

(And none of it would even require changing the Constitution!)

Thoughts? Arguments for and against? Not sticking my own oar in at least until I’ve heard some of what the people around here have to say.

I’m having a hard time imagining how large-scale electoral democracy would work without parties. How would ballot access be determined? Prioritization of legislative business? Etc.

I also don’t understand what problem this proposal is intended to solve, which makes it hard to tell what arguments should be made for or against it.

OK, let’s hash this out a bit.

In briefest terms: the problem we’re trying to solve here is Donald Trump.

In slightly-less-brief terms: the problem we’re trying to solve here is that even though many Republican Congresscritters obviously hate and fear much of the stuff that Trump is doing, even though they’re being constantly humiliated by him, even though they have the power to stop him whenever they want, they just - don’t. Because, of course, they know that acting against Trump will mostly provide an advantage to the Democrats, and they’re more afraid of that than they are of…well, anything else, apparently.

(It’s been most visible during the second Trump administration, of course, but - hard to get a better object lesson than the aftermath of the January 6 incident.)

In not-brief-at-all terms: we might start with this Substack article by Lee Drutman. I don’t think much of his proposed solutions, I don’t even think his analysis of the problem is particularly helpful, but he’s looking at a problem that exists.

American elections have flattened from a multidimensional space into a single axis of partisan identity. Candidate quality, local factors, ideological nuance, local organizing forces—all those dimensions that used to create competition and accountability have been crushed down to near-irrelevance. In an age of hyper-partisan, hyper-nationalized voting and calcified politics, the big problem is that nothing matters.

This matters because one-dimensional politics is where authoritarians flourish. When the other party becomes the enemy, any candidate with your preferred letter, “R” or “D” – will do. Running more moderates doesn’t address this. We need new dimensions of political conflict.

In multidimensional politics, your coalition fragments when leaders threaten your core interests—farmers and autoworkers defect over tariff policy, fiscal hawks leave over reckless spending, law-and-order conservatives bail over norm violations. These cross-cutting concerns constrain authoritarian impulses.

But when politics collapses into what I’ve called the “two-party doom loop“—where there are only two sides and the political opposition is the enemy—there’s nowhere to go. You tolerate threats to your values because switching sides means empowering people who will destroy everything you hold dear. When 87% of voters believe “America will suffer permanent damage” if the other side wins, we’ve reached a level of toxic partisanship where accountability breaks down completely.

This is the “frozen state“ where any candidate with your preferred “R” or “D” will do—especially one who promises to fight the enemy harder. This is the terrain on which authoritarians thrive. It’s bad news.

(This is also pretty much the diagnosis that @bambamramfan offers.)

So OK. We’ve got a one-dimensional partisan struggle. What does that actually mean?

…one naive model says, basically, “we’ve reached the point where 50% of the voters are blue-haired socialists who think that the government should be mostly concerned with veganism and pronouns, and 50% of the voters are Christian-nationalist oil company stans who think that the government should be mostly concerned with putting immigrant children in megaprisons.” You do see a lot of those people participating in the discourse these days!

But of course this is not actually what’s going on. There are way more hardcore ideologues than there used to be, on both sides, but - the hardcore ideologues on both sides combined don’t add up to even half the electorate, let alone all of it. Normies still dominate, as they always have. The Matt Yglesias centrism-fetishist types aren’t wrong to note that the most successful politicians, when you use meaningful metrics, are pretty much always conspicuously moderate.

So what gives? Why can’t the normies get what they want? Why are we moving towards oscillation between fealty to the Groups and fealty to insane Trump cronies?

Or, to put it another way: when I was young, I was taught the ice-cream-stands-on-the-beach metaphor for FPTP electoral politics, which suggests that your two parties are going to end up huddled together right near the center of public opinion. This obviously hasn’t happened in our FPTP system. You could argue (convincingly) that things used to be that way, but they definitely aren’t that way now. Why not?

————–

Primaries are one obvious issue. You can’t actually get on the ballot by appealing to the center of public opinion. You first have to win an election in which only the people on one side vote (and only the most committed ones, at that). So as the political class becomes more hardcore and ideological, since all nominations have to be filtered through that class, we end up with more elections between a hardcore ideological Democrat and a hardcore ideological Republican. (Relatively speaking.)

Another issue is the much-ballyhooed nationalization of politics. Legislators are no longer expected to be independent actors, really; they’re expected to be foot soldiers for a pan-American political project, led by either the President or [uh, no one in particular, it’s kind of a problem, we might need an official Opposition Leader position in order to make the current setup work at all].

Which is particularly stupid, given that most voters don’t actually support those projects! Everyone and his brother has already pointed out that our partisanship is mostly negative partisanship. Joe Voter isn’t fired up about the D/R Vision For Society, he’s just terrified of the R/D Vision For Society being enacted.

And doubly stupid given that the politicians themselves don’t particularly want to be straitjacketed foot soldiers for national political projects either! They would much prefer to be able to act on their own particular goals and preferences! They would much prefer to be able to make whatever deals they want!

————–

Multiparty systems help in some ways, but in other ways they exacerbate the problem. They turn politicians into absolutely interchangeable pawns, and they subordinate (most) issue-level political positions to the coalitional math of staying in power.

I am contemplating solutions in the direction of - “You cannot vote for an overarching project, those don’t exist, you can only vote for A Guy You Think You Can Trust. Issues get decided on an ad-hoc individual basis. The network of alliances is different for every vote.”

Thanks to those who joined us for an update on our litigation on behalf of protestors, clergy, and journalists in Chicago.

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Here’s how The New York Times covered the district judge’s ruling this week:

For more than an hour, the judge, Sara L. Ellis of Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, read Mr. Bovino restrictions she had previously set as part of a lawsuit over tactics that agents are using and cited examples of times his agents appeared to violate those restrictions.

They used tear gas in a neighborhood where children were about to march in a Halloween parade, Judge Ellis said. They failed to warn residents before tossing tear gas canisters at them, she said, noting an incident in which an agent threw a canister out of a car as it drove away.

The judge then ordered Mr. Bovino, who took the stand in his usual green fatigues and Border Patrol insignia, to appear at the federal courthouse at the end of every weekday to personally provide her with a report on the day’s arrests and incidents.

“I’ll see you tomorrow at 6,” she said, before telling Mr. Bovino that he could get back to work.

Read the whole thing: Judge admonishes Border Patrol leader for tactics in Chicago.

This case is evolving quickly. Minutes ago, the appeals court administratively stayed Judge Ellis’s order for Bovino to appear daily. He’ll still appear for a deposition tomorrow where he’ll be questioned under oath about his tactics.

As JoAnna mentioned, the administration’s seeming non-compliance with court orders in this case is part of a larger pattern. Our friends at Just Security created this extremely helpful tracker to keep up with all of the ongoing litigation against the administration’s overreaches.

Read more: The Trump administration’s conflict with the courts, explained.

We’ll keep you updated on our efforts to stop unconstitutional federal use of force in Chicago, so keep an eye on your inboxes.

In the meantime, as Shalini said, “If we do not use our constitutional rights, we will lose them. And we should all go and use them. If you disagree with what’s happening and the way in which it’s happening, please make your voices heard.”