Blending the StyleGAN2-ADA model I trained on Morrowind NPCs with FFHQ to make Morrowind… but Real

David Klion: It’s pretty clear at this point that we are not going through an actual coup and that Biden is going to be inaugurated as president on January 20th, whether Trump wants to admit it or not. At the same time, nothing quite like what’s happening now has ever happened before in the United States. How would you describe what Trump and his dead-enders are doing, and how concerned should we be in terms of the stability of US political institutions?

Corey Robin: You can’t understand what’s happening now without a historical perspective on conservatism and the right. The right was born in response to the French Revolution, as a reaction against the democratic emancipation of the commoner. Across more than two centuries and many continents, the right has never lost that reactionary ethos.

But what the right learned, slowly, over time, was that to mobilize against a democratic and democratizing left, it could not simply assert a traditional, static, and familiar defense of hierarchy; instead, it had to mobilize a dynamic movement of the masses, a populist politics of the right to counter the masses of the left. That populism was never democratic, but it knew how to draw from the tropes of democracy to push back against democracy. It learned how to use the languages of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and sexism to give a broad circle of the masses a taste of privilege over their subordinates. The fruition of that long learning process—of using populist vernaculars against democracy—was the American right that emerged in response to the 1960s and the New Deal.

For all the talk of Trump’s populism and racism and nationalism, the fact is that he was far less successful at using those vernaculars to mobilize the masses than his predecessors on the right—Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. Nixon and Reagan were re-elected with large popular majorities. Trump, like Bush, lost the popular majority the first time around, and unlike Bush, lost it a second time around.

What Trump and the Republican Party have grown increasingly dependent upon are not populism or mass politics of any sort, but rather the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts. Historically speaking, this is a great—and terrible—reversion for the right, a return to the time when it depended not on its popular touch but on its control over anti-democratic state institutions. It makes today’s right a lot weaker than the right of the Reagan era, and makes it seem much more like the Tories of early 19th-century Britain.

This is why you now see Trump doing what he’s trying to do with the vote. The Republicans can’t win presidential campaigns the way they once did: Since 1992, they have won the popular vote exactly once. Their only hope now is a combination of the Electoral College and the courts.

Far from being concerned about US institutions being insufficiently stable or resilient enough to contain Trump or a similar figure, I’m far more concerned about the stifling stability and resilience of institutions like the Electoral College, the courts, and the Senate, and their ability to prop up Trump and the GOP.

DK: You’ve maintained from the beginning that Trump is actually a historically weak president, in spite of his authoritarian bluster. Can you elaborate on why you thought so back in 2017, how those predictions have been borne out since, and what makes Trump weaker than other recent presidents?

CR: I thought Trump was weak for two reasons, neither having anything to do with his skill or character, but with larger political forces and structures.

The first is that conservatism is an inherently reactionary politics that depends on the real threat of an active, emancipatory left: not the specter of a threat, not the discourse on Twitter, but an actual social movement that has taken state power and is engaged in a project of dispossession of elites. When the left is defeated or disappears, the right’s power ebbs. That is what has happened in the US. The left is, historically speaking, relatively weak, so it’s difficult for the right to get the juice it needs.

Trump’s presidency reflected that: Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured. Next to “law and order” and “the silent majority” (which Nixon made part of our political grammar), next to “the era of big government is over” (which Reagan bequeathed to Clinton as the ruling doctrine of the age), next to Bush’s war on terror and the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, none of Trump’s attempts to permanently transform the political climate—not of the Republican Party but of the whole political culture—seems even remotely comparable. With the exception of the tax cuts, Trump was hardly able to get much legislation through Congress; many of his executive orders will be undone by Biden; the only custodian of his legacy, ironically, will be the courts, which many had seen as the antidote to Trumpism and caretaker of the rule of law.

The second reason I thought Trump would be weak is that all presidents are elected to oppose or defend a larger political regime. A regime, in US political history, is the combination of ideology, interests, and policies that govern over an extended period of time. In American history, we had the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican regime, Jackson’s Democratic regime, Lincoln’s Republican regime, FDR’s New Deal regime, and now Reagan’s free market regime. Whatever the party of a specific president elected may be, he will be forced to operate under the larger regime’s assumptions and expectations of good governance. Bill Clinton was a Democrat, but he had to govern like a Republican; Eisenhower was a Republican, but he had to govern like a Democrat.

There are some presidents who are affiliated with a dominant regime, but the regime is vulnerable. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were those kinds of presidents, and they are considered to be among the weakest. From the moment Trump was elected, I thought he belonged in that Hoover/Carter category. The Reagan regime is increasingly unable to provide the answers and policies to govern the country, much in the same way that the New Deal seemed unable to offer answers during the 1970s. The fact of that weakness made Trump quite weak. Again, the fact that he was so unable to push through legislation, that his budgets were more liberal, in some ways, than Barack Obama’s, and that the Republicans, when they controlled all the elected branches of government, were not able to implement big parts of their program—all that suggests how weak the Republican regime is.

No go area.

Cat ownership in Europe. 

Heraclitus

After the first coins were minted around 6oo BC in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region, and, perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit. Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 BC-c. 546 BC) , Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 BC-c. 546 BC) , and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 BC-C. 525 BC)–in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced. All three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the nature of the physical substance from which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, air. Anaximander made up a new term, apeiron, “the unlimited,” a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but was the material basis of everything that could be. In each case, the assumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled, combined, divided, compressed, extended, or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particular stuffs and substances that humans actually encounter in the world, from which physical objects are composed–and was also that into which all those forms would eventually dissolve.

It was something that could turn into everything. As [Richard] Seaford emphasizes, so was money. Gold, shaped into coins, is a material substance that is also an abstraction. It is both a lump of metal and something more than a lump of metal–it’s a drachma or an obol, a unit of currency which (at least if collected in sufficient quantity, taken to the right place at the right time, turned over to the right person) could be exchanged for absolutely any other object whatsoever.

…

… Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance–as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it–but whose nature was a profound enigma.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years

[Aristotle] … sees that the value-relation which provides the framework for this expression of value itself requires that the house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things, being distinct to the senses, could not be compared with each other as commensurable magnitudes if they lacked this essential identity. ‘There can be no exchange,’ he says, ‘without equality, and no equality without commensurability’ … Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. 'It is, however, in reality, impossible … that such unlike things can be commensurable,’ i.e. qualitatively equal. This form of equation can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things, it is therefore only 'a makeshift for practical purposes’.

…

However, Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. …

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1

The generalization of commodity production is only possible when production itself is transformed into capitalist production, when the multiplication and augmentation of abstract wealth becomes the direct goal of production and all other social relationships are subsumed to this goal.  The “destructive power of money” which was the object of much criticism in many pre-capitalist modes of production (by many authors in ancient Greece, for example) is rooted precisely in this process of the capitalization of society as a result of the generalization of the money relationship.

Michael Heinrich, “A Thing with Transcendental Qualities: Money as a Social Relationship in Capitalism”

Aristotle contrasts economics with 'chrematistics ’. He starts with economics. So far as it is the art of acquisition, it is limited to procuring the articles necessary to existence and useful either to a household or the state. … With the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed … into trading in commodities, and this again, in contradiction with its original tendency, grew into chrematistics, the art of making money. Now chrematistics can be distinguished from economics in that 'for chrematistics, circulation is the source of riches … And it appears to revolve around money, for money is the beginning and the end of this kind of exchange … Therefore also riches, such as chrematistics strives for, are unlimited. Just as every art which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts which pursue means to an end are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit on them, so with chrematistics there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Economics, unlike chrematistics, has a limit … for the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money … By confusing these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the final goal of economics’ (Aristotle, De Republica, ed. Bekker, lib. I, c. 8, 9, passim).

Canada has attracted huge numbers of Chinese millionaires, under the now-defunct federal immigrant investor programme (IIP) and the still-running Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme (QIIP). Most participants of both schemes who stay in Canada end up living in Vancouver or Toronto. But many others leave the country after obtaining citizenship, federal data shows.

The QIIP has an annual application limit of 1,900 families, with the Chinese quota capped at 1,235.

Current figures are unavailable, but 65 per cent of the 55,000 arrivals under the QIIP from 2002 to 2012 were Chinese. When the federal IIP shut down in 2014, there was a backlog of 45,000 mainland Chinese applicants and family members in the queue, out of a worldwide total of about 60,000.