World War II — or rather our misremembering of it — has dangerously distorted our understanding of human affairs.

When we think of World War I, we draw saner lessons. We remember death, futility, the horror of gas and trenches. We can see that whatever its causes were, the consequences of resorting to war so eclipsed them that everybody lost. World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars, because who would do this again?

World War II was objectively a much more horrible war. Many more people were killed, maimed, displaced than during the first World War. It was “total war”, in which the distinction between combatant and civilian was erased.

Despite all of that, despite the carpetbombing of Dresden and the burning of Tokyo and the two atom bombs, we came out of that war with a notion that it had been “worth it”, that the good guys had defeated the bad guys.

War is never worth it. World War II was perhaps the single worst event in all human history.

That is not to say that the allies should not have fought and won and defeated the Nazis. Of course a counterfactual of capitulation to monsters could be even worse than our current catastrophe of a timeline. What it is to say is that even in 1939, with the literal Hitler gesticulating like a drunken scarecrow before ranks of jackbooted thugs, if there had been any possible means of deterring or preventing the German army’s march, that would have been better, even though it would have left that evil regime in place. Tens of millions of lives would have been spared, inconceivable suffering would have been avoided, and we today might be less stupid.

What about the Jews? No one can say for sure, but I suspect even for them (for us, it’s my own ethnicity however much I flee it), it would have been better. Without the more universal institution of wartime forced-labor camps, the extermination camps that distinguish the Nazi genocide of the Jews from history’s many, so many, “ordinary” genocides might never have been, umm, innovated. The Jews of Germany might have been persecuted, detained and mistreated like the Uighurs of China today, or simply terrorized, randomly murdered, and expropriated until they were driven to emigrate. All of that is horrible. One can take a certain satisfaction that the Nazis were utterly destroyed and discredited. But for the Jews, the cost of that satisfaction was probably not worth the escalation of persecution into an industrial supply chain of forced labor and cyanide gas.

We have whitewashed the war. We had trials at Nuremberg which we called justice. And, to be sure, those who were condemned thoroughly deserved their fates.

But was it “justice” when by the very definitions we were then inventing and formalizing for “war crimes”, many of our own leaders and soldiers could also have been condemned, but were not? It was victor’s justice, which is the only justice war ever brings. We foolishly encased it in a patina of sanctimony which has blinded us ever since to the ineradicable awfulness of war.

War is crime.

There are times when crime is necessary. I would steal bread to feed my child, but I would still become a thief. I would take up arms to defend my country, but I would still become a murderer. Whenever crime is necessary, there has been a profound social failure. The work, the main work to which the human spirit is devoted, organizing ourselves for mutual survival and prosperity, has collapsed.

Yes, war is sometimes necessary. But it is never good. It is the rotten fruit of the very worst human failure.

Political leaders sometimes see war as opportunities for glory. That is obscene. Leaders on whose watch war has emerged should presumptively be scorned, shamed. Whatever the conflict, among states or between factions, that led to war should be adjudicated by any and every other means. The only redemption for leaders so terrible, so miserable, so condemned and condemnable as to allow a war to begin on their watch is to stop the horror quickly, to find ways neither to capitulate nor to fight, but to compete on less destructive terms.

Nothing deformed the United States as a political community more than our victory in World War II. Again, I’m not condemning the fighting or winning of that war, to the degree it could not have been prevented or staunched. We are all criminals for Dresden and Hiroshima, but our adversaries also were criminals, and much worse outcomes were possible than the one we achieved.

But we told ourselves a story of good and evil, we were good and they were evil. We went on for decades imagining ourselves to be comic-book heroes, despite growing body counts in Indochina and North Korea and the Middle East. Our culture is now dominated by literal comic-book universes in which violence against evil is depicted as the way we pursue the good. But propounding evils that merit violence is how the devil farms our souls. Violence multiplies evils. It does not quell them.

Russia thinks of World War II as its good war as well. Its new invasion, it says, is denazification. Maybe if you cannot see the corpse this idolatry has bred in your own mirror, you can see the corpses now multiplying in theirs.

Wars end in exhaustion, misery, and catastrophe, whichever flag last stands. World War II was not a good war. Beyond a certain point, it was necessary to fight it, but the world should never have reached that point. If the war could have been deterred by a less yielding and better armed Chamberlain, it should have been deterred.

Deterred. To be against war unfortunately is not to be against arms. Unfortunately, deterrence is often a precondition for keeping the peace. However, the more deterrence is relied upon, the more catastrophic when it breaks. Deterrence by denial is superior to deterrence by punishment. States should rely as much as is necessary but as little as is possible on threat of reprisal to keep the peace. States should rely as much as is possible on proactively resolving disputes, on maintaining interdependence, but on a mutual and equitable basis that resists weaponization. Deterrence is always necessary, but never sufficient.

It is not our turn to take up the fight against fascism and authoritarianism that our grandfathers and great grandfathers won before us. What is ours is to learn the lesson of both the great wars and all the smaller ones, that our first and most important work is to prevent from ever emerging the poisonous choice between capitulation or conflict. Fascism and authoritarianism are defeated by the example and experience of prosperous liberality, which war extinguishes, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently.

Peace alone is insufficient to prevent fascism, as our recent experience attests. But war is always fascism’s friend. Civilization is a narrower road than barbarism. Neither of the simple choices, ferocity or passivity, can sustain it. Civilization, like life itself, requires continual attention, adaptation, innovation, improvisation. It’s exhausting work, Sisyphean, thankless. It is so much easier, so much more exhilarating, to relax ones grip and let slip the dogs. Death is easier than life.

I’ve written about this before, but I wondered if I couldn’t be concise.

Umm. Oh well.

Price rationing of scarce goods has three important characteristics:

1. When the supply of goods is price elastic, price rationing — allocating initially scarce supply to the highest bidders — provokes new production of goods, helping relieve the scarcity to the benefit of all.
2. Ceteris paribus, all else being equal, price rationing allocates scarce goods to the people who value them most.
3. Under circumstances where purchasing power is unequal, price rationing allocates goods to the people with more purchasing power in preference to people with less.

The first two characteristics are generally desirable. They are the reasons economists have historically favored price rationing, and are good reasons why we all should favor price rationing under some circumstances.

However, from a welfare perspective, Characteristic #3 is a point against price rationing. Suppose we had a limited supply of food, enough to feed the whole population, but not enough to give everyone a nice dessert. Under conditions of stark inequality and pure, self-interested, price rationing, the wealthy would enjoy their desserts and the poor would starve. Under nearly anyone's social welfare functions (just a fancy way of saying their values), the dessert-plus-starvation result is inferior to the everybody-eats outcome. So, in this case, it's better to choose equal allocation rather than price-rationing to decide who gets what.

Characteristic #1 is a powerful argument in favor of price rationing. But it also is dependent upon circumstances. In general, when industries are competitive, supply tends to be price elastic, because producers fear that if they raise prices very much, competitors capable of expanding production will undercut us and gain market share at our expense.

But under monopoly, supply tends to be price inelastic. From a producer’s perspective, the very sweetest outcome is when you can get more profit by simply raising prices, without incurring the costs and hassles of new production. (Hat tip Steve Roth!) Further, price elasticity requires that suppliers produce inefficiently, in a static and narrow sense. Firms have to invest in capacity that under current price and demand conditions will be "slack”. If no new demand materializes, that investment will be wasted.

So, without the discipline imposed by rivals who threaten to steal market share, monopolies tend to optimize for current or narrowly foreseeable market conditions. While they may be unprepared for them, they are very glad to be surprised by positive demand shocks. Sure, they will be unable to actually meet that demand at current prices. But they will enjoy the jump in prices by which they ration the insufficient level of production they are prepared to manage.

I’ve written in terms of “monopoly”, but the same argument holds for highly consolidated industries. Firms tacitly coordinate on highly optimized, “zero slack” supply chains, secure in the knowledge that if there is a positive demand shock, neither they nor their rivals will have the capacity to quickly expand share and eat one another’s lunch. Quantity produced will fail to expand. Instead, they will all enjoy an increase in prices and profits.

So.

Characteristics 1 and 2 above are really great arguments for price rationing! But Characteristic 3 is an argument against price rationing. Whether price rationing is desirable depends how much the downside of Characteristic 3 weighs against the upside of Characteristics 1 and 2. The case for price rationing depends, quite simply, on how materially equal a society we are, in terms of the dollar value of purchasing power we can each sustain. The more equal we are, the stronger the case for price rationing.

Plus, Characteristic 1, the most persuasive argument for price rationing, depends upon market structure, on how competitive and contestable our industries in actual fact are. When our economy is one in which most industries are competitive, the case for price rationing is very strong, as we can expect that when demand grows suddenly strong, quantity will expand to meet everyone’s needs, and prices will rise not so much. When industries are consolidated and supply chains are “optimized”, we can expect demand shocks to translate into price shocks, exacerbating the social cost of inequality.

We can’t rely on any dogma. We have to actually evaluate these tradeoffs. The social cost of letting designer handbags be priced so only the wealthy can afford them is small, so designer handbags can pretty much always be price-rationed. The social cost of disparate allocation of food, water, or housing can be tremendous, if we do not have a clear abundance of those resources on the market. For these goods, the choice of price-rationing versus regulated allocation can’t be made theoretically and a priori. Perhaps these goods should be price-rationed, but only if you can show that in fact prices won't rise so much, because new supply will be mobilized to overwhelm the potentially serious cost of disparate allocation.

Price rationing has another advantage. It’s the allocative procedure that, in our current society, we consider normal, even “natural”. When we interject other allocative schemes, there’s inevitably a political struggle over whether and exactly what should be imposed. That struggle can be socially costly. Real resources will be squandered on zero-sum litigation and lobbying. More insidiously, whatever the outcome, those who fail to get their way perceive their loss as injustice, unnecessarily and artificially imposed by state actors never free of corrupt influence.

By camouflaging divisive outcomes as neutral results of "natural" market forces, price rationing helps conserve the legitimacy of state and society. I think that's a huge virtue. We'd be better off if we lived in circumstances where we could dogmatically stick with price rationing and it would work well enough.

Unfortunately we do not. That would require and society more materially equal and an economy more pervasively competitive than what we have in fact allowed to befall us.

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This one is dedicated to my friend Clay Shentrup, who I suspect will disagree with every word.

I find myself increasingly frustrated with the rhetoric of condemnation. In particular, I find the way people use “war crimes” and “genocide” to be lazy and evasive of the actual questions that need to be answered in order to address the situations that provoke those accusations.

To be very clear, I am not to in any way exonerating, defending, minimizing the many atrocities that attract those labels. They are reprehensible actions that anyone ought to find abhorrent. But those atrocities occur in the context of histories and unfolding events for which “just don’t do that” is nowhere near a sufficient answer. Speakers often use the accusations to place themselves on the side of virtue and the accused on the side of evil, without owning up to the consequences they would require of those they admonish.

Whatever some treaty or document held up as “international law” does or does not say about the matter is immaterial. Situations actually need to be addressed, and “international law” as it stands is far from being a system to which states or nonstate actors could simply agree to conform and then expect that their rights and vital interests will be protected.

There are disputes. They have to be addressed with solutions that antagonists can be persuaded at least to live with. Until such solutions are found, there will be conflict. When the terms of conflict create conditions in which the alternative to war crimes is unacceptable to any or all the parties, then war crimes will be committed.

Both the Palestinians and the Israel provide rich examples. The intentional slaughter of 1300 civilians for dancing one morning or waking up in their homes is obviously a war crime, regardless of any right to resist occupiers or claims that their presence on the territory is illegitimate. However routine it has become, every time Hamas launches a missile from Gaza towards Tel Aviv or some Israeli town, they are committing a war crime. Hamas does not carefully target its rockets toward military objectives in a manner calculated to ensure that any civilian "collateral damage" would be proportionate (whatever all that slippery language is supposed to mean). Yet given the actual balance of power and armaments available, if even the desultory missile barrages are taken off the table, Hamas would have no plausible means to prosecute their cause other than on terms set entirely by the Israelis. Symmetric military-to-military warfare against Israel, waged from bases segregated from Gaza’s civilians, would lead to a quick extermination of Hamas' soldiers. It would, very mercifully, spare civilians on both sides, but it would do nothing for the Palestinian cause.

Hamas should not slaughter and kidnap civilians. If you are not still reeling from the horror of what happened last Saturday, I am. Hamas should not even lob missiles at towns, whether or not the “Iron Dome” will manage to intercept them. But if all we do is condemn the war crimes, then we are saying morality compels the Palestinians to accept complete and total impotence to prosecute what they believe is a just and urgent cause. So of course they choose to commit war crimes.

It is absolutely a war crime for Israel to cut off food, water, and power from the civilians of Gaza. But if we accept as given that Israel must extirpate Hamas as a military force from Gaza, then the logistics that support those who will fight and kill Israeli soldiers are the same logistics that support the civilian population. A ground invasion of a densely built urban landscape deeply familiar to its defenders will cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers no matter what. But fewer Israelis will die if the force they fight is depleted and exhausted before the battle begins. When you are at war, ours versus theirs is a more salient concern than civilian versus soldier. The outcome and toll of war is largely a function of logistics. In this case, Israel controls the logistics of the opposing force. To refrain from war crime, it would have to literally feed the snipers who will await its soldiers. Unsurprisingly, Israel chooses the war crime.

Depending on where the balance of your sympathies lie, it is easy — and it is accurate! — to highlight the criminality of either side. If your view is that, however regrettable, the status quo ante plight of the Palestinians was in some sense acceptable or tolerable or redressable by better means, then it is easy to condemn them for war crimes. If your view is that Israel could and should simply cease its occupation, whatever exactly that would mean in practice, then you can just condemn the settler state’s crimes and demand that it accede to a Palestine “free, from the river to the sea”.

But if you think either of these things, you are a fool. Most people are not so foolish, and understand that the Palestinians have been in a cruel, impossible, and unjust position for decades, and also that if Israel were to simply relinquish its authority and lay down arms, civil war and bloodbath would be immediate. It doesn’t matter which side you accuse of war crimes, even if you are right. Of course you are right. But you are helping nothing but the cause of your own self-righteousness. Or worse, you are helping one side gird itself for and justify new atrocities against the other.

If you want to do some good, you have to actually help unravel the thorny circumstances under which each side understandably views the commission of war crimes as superior to the alternative, despite all of our righteous condemnation. Israel should have a government that offers real hope of progress for the Palestinians, rather than one that buys the support of fascists by continually dispossessing Palestinian residents of the West Bank, and buys the support of many others by promising safety while keeping the dispossessed out-of-sight and out-of-mind like factory-farmed poultry. The Palestinians should have governments that are meaningfully accountable to their publics, with legally enshrined regular elections, rather than one mafia that finds patrons for its terrorism and another mafia that finds patrons by collaborating.

I have no tablets with solutions to bring down from Mt. Sinai. I do have suggestions. Israel should not invade Gaza at all, after all, but should offer clear conditions for the kind of government to which it would cede sovereign control of Gaza’s borders, and define milestones that would define incremental progress toward that goal. Obviously one of those milestones would be complete exclusion of Hamas’ current leadership. Israelis who do not wish their country’s role in the world to be fuse of the apocalypse should replace the Netanyahu catastrophe quickly. A new government should commit to naturalize and enfranchise willing Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Settlement has succeeded at changing the facts on the ground, so creating a Palestinian state there would be very challenging. Letting Gaza become a Palestinian state while integrating the West Bank allows Israel to be what most Israelis want, simultaneously a Jewish state and a liberal democracy. Palestinians who prefer their own state could look forward to and help to build a well-governed city-state in Gaza. Jewish Israelis who fear differential birthrates might soon overwhelm them should work to integrate and grant opportunities to Palestinians so that they too experience a demographic transition. Regardless of how a demographic horserace works out, integration does the most important work. Just in case, it might be wise to better entrench protection of minority rights into the structure of the Israeli state.

Perhaps all of this is hopelessly naive. I look forward to your counterproposals. Naivety at least is more constructive than uselessly self-righteous condemnations of war crimes.

“The Jews” do not have a right to national self-determination. “The Palestinians” do not have a right to national self-determination. Neither “Ukrainians” nor “Russians” nor “Estonians” nor “Chinese” have a right to national self-determination. There is no group or tribe called "the Americans" who have a right of national self-determination. There was no such thing as “the Germans” when Bismarck began to unite the state that is now Germany, which is not Austria or Denmark or Switzerland or Holland despite historical and ethnolinguistic entanglements.

“National self-determination” is a stupid, vicious, pernicious idea. It should be counted among the most destructive ideas in all of human history. The conceit that there are a priori nations to which some set of rights and dignities must inhere even at the cost of violent struggle pits human against human in the name of fabricated, ever shifting flags. However powerfully our emotions may become mixed up with these identities, they merit no moral deference. People engage in violence on behalf of sports teams. Their passions may be deep and sincere. But those United for Manchester have no right of self determination that justifies defiance of the laws of their state.

Nation is a flame that burns hot and fickle. It offers no foundation upon which to build a humane and peaceful world. Modernity is not built of or on behalf of nations. Modernity is built upon sovereign states.

States are constructed from boundaries that are at best arbitrary. There is no justice in the armistice lines of whatever ancient squabble defined the border of your state. There is no justice in lines drawn on behalf of colonizers by Sykes and Picot. But what is important is that there are lines.

The lines may be, they always are, wrong in some important sense. At a given moment, they may not match linguistic or perceived ethnic communities. They may have resulted from unjust conquest. But once they are mutually recognized, once states emerge that, however resentfully, accept this side of the line is ours, that side of the line is yours, then and only then is any kind of peace possible.

These lines divide, but they also join. We make them solid and they make us solid in much the same way as marriages. A much larger community than the states that coadjoin recognizes the lines, and promises to uphold them, to shame or shun or even to attack any party that should violate them. Like the topography of marriages in a medieval village, borders are simultaneously pure fictions and the solid foundation of communal life. They cannot be sundered unilaterally, and should not be redrawn lightly, but only with mutual accord of the parties most affected.

History offers ample evidence that deference to borders, however arbitrary and illegitimate their provenance, is far superior to rekindling conflict about where they should be drawn. States with stable borders, even borders unfavoraby drawn against their will, can live in peace and prosper. (Consider Singapore.) When borders are uncertain and violently contested, only the devil prospers.

States precede nations. That’s not a descriptive claim. Of course before the emergence of any given state, there would have been groups sharing language, customs, sentimental bonds. But there is neither peace nor permanence in stateless tribes. If you must call them nations, then they are the worst kind of nations.

E pluribus unum is the work of every state. If you think a state has succeeded because it is “homogeneous”, you've got cause and effect backward. The condition of humankind without organized states is tribal. When observed over time and at scale, you find not stable homogeneity but continual fluidity, as conquests and massacres and migrations and alliances and the simple lack of authoritative dictionaries mean everything from religion to race to language shift, diverge, and remix. For a state to survive and thrive it must, within whatever borders that emerges, forge a nation that will sustain the state, and vice versa. The French were never a nation until a series of events, over time and sometimes quite violently, created France as a shared polity to which its subjects owe deference, within which they accept a shared identity. States build nations much more than they emerge from them.

Nation-building is a continual process. The forces that render nations fickle and often violent in the absence of states continue in their presence. People continue to migrate. Citizens embrace multiple identities, some of which are shared across borders, others of which might fragment the polity. Ideas and new identities continually emerge. They vie for adoption, and become new bases for cooperation and competition that may threaten to destabilize the state.

Successful states work continually, assimilating, accommodating, and excluding (in the framework of Harris Mylonas, inventing and reinventing the nation in order to sustain conditions of effective coordination at scale. Traditions that might seem stable reflect continual reinvigoration, not mere passive inheritance. What is new and changing might represent decay, or else innovation and adaptation. We can only tell the difference ex post, when the nation coheres and the state functions, or not.

Even when borders hold and are not meaningfully contested, states can fail. A state is not only a territory, but a territory within which a monopoly of legitimate violence obtains. What does that even mean? In any state there is freelance violence. There is nowhere without crime. What renders violence "legitimate”?

Legitimacy sounds very subjective, almost populist. Is a state “legitimate” because the masses agree with it, because people like it? No. It’s nice when they do, maybe even helpful, but nice isn’t what we’re after.

We measure the legitimacy of a state by whether those on its territory both conform to it and resort to it. When the state commands, in the civilized tone of some legal notice (the threat of violence echoing faintly from the pages), do citizens obey? Or do various factions succeed at resisting, ignoring, and defying its edicts? When residents enter into dispute, do they draw their own weapons, or make use of the state’s courts and legislatures and police? Legitimacy is revealed by how people behave, not by what they say they think.

My country, the United States, remains for now not a failed state, despite emerging tribalisms which do threaten it if they are not addressed. There is crime, but it is idiosyncratic and freelance, or else small scale (like urban gangs). There may be neighborhoods where the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence is challenged, where people with gripes turn to kingpin rather than cop to resolve disputes, where locally organized violence compels disobedience of the state’s law. But overall, for now, there is a unified state, to whose edicts the vast majority however willingly or reluctantly conform, whose offices are called upon to resolve disputes in place of local violence.

Despite Israel's remarkable successes, the territory Israel/Palestine constitutes a failed state. There is no single government to whose edicts residents conform, to whose offices residents resort to resolve their deep and serious disputes. The failure should not be understood as the result of conflicts between two nations’ legitimate aspiration for self-determination. That is a poisonous framing. “Nations” unanchored to states always make claims that conflict profoundly with one another. Kurds and Uigurs and LGBT people and Turks and White Separatists and Pan-Africans and Jews and Christians and Arabs and Han and Hindu all make claims that would profoundly contravene the aspirations and asserted rights of one another. Even where nations are anchored by states, insulated by territorial isolation and civilized by formal governance, contesting claims emerge that threaten conflict and violence, internally and internationally. Wise states work to manage those conflicts. "Stateless nations" should be integrated, not be treated independently as objects of deference.

The territorial boundaries of combined Israel/Palestine are not meaningfully contested, thanks to the IDF. Other states meddle (hi Iran), but they do not invade. What remains is for a state to emerge on the territory that commands near universal legitimacy. Instead, egged on by foreign football fans masquerading as coreligionists or comrades, factions have worked to harden and heighten conflicts between pre-state conceptions of nationhood, rather than forge a state that could superintend a shared future.

I’m not trying to argue that uniting in a multiconfessional liberal democracy is the near-term solution for Israel/Palestine. That would be my preference, but given the actual passions of the communities who occupy the territory, it may not realistic any time soon. Maybe if the territory were cleaved into two (or three), successful states could more easily emerge on parts of it, with clear new borders that could be internationally enforced. I'm skeptical there too. I don’t have some brilliant solution.

But we can start by not pouring fuel on the fire. The Jews of Israel have no right to national self determination, any more than the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq and Iran do. (If you think the Kurds do have that right, if you are eager to fan the flames of violent decolonization there too, I have nothing to offer you but disapproval, despite my tremendous admiration for the Kurds.) The Palestinians have no right to national self-determination, not because they are somehow a fake nation (every nation is), but because that’s a stupid, incoherent, and destructive principle.

There are human beings. There is a territory. The humans could find civilized means of coexisting. Without an effective state, no one has any right to anything except death, sooner or later. The rest of us should stop fanning any party’s stupid self righteousness and do whatever we can to help them all choose later, much much later.

Ye olde “economic anxiety” versus racism debate is back on, God help us. Here is Jeff Spross and, er, David Brooks making the case that Trumpism / right populism / resurgent fascism have something to do with reaction to legitimate grievances of an economy increasingly stratified into communities of winners and the “left behind”. Here is Zack Beauchamp reprising the great vox.com tradition of pointing out that if you look at fine-grained patterns of who goes rhino, you don’t see that it’s the poor and downtrodden, you find that it’s the fucking racists.

If I have to pick sides, I’m on the side of Spross and, er, Brooks. I’ve written about why the individual characteristics of Trump supporters shouldn’t eclipse the characteristics of the communities from which that support disproportionately derives. I endorse Spross’ position that we should consider the implications of the stories that we choose.

Social affairs are not like natural sciences where usually (not always) one way of modeling the world is plainly “best” and we should work from that story, discarding all the rest. Navigating social affairs requires developing a collection of different, often conflicting, accounts of how things work and making wise decisions about which accounts to use in different contexts and for different purposes. It is not only legitimate, but morally necessary, to consider the implications of different accounts before choosing which one you will let guide your actions. When policymakers accept “hard truths that can’t be denied” (in modern parlance, we might hear “the science can’t be denied”), we face a risk they might persuade themselves to do something awful.

It’s hubris to imagine there is any science so reliable in social affairs, and it is sin to allow any collection of (now) studies or (then) political theories, to justify exclusion, elimination, disenfranchisement, collective punishment or penury in the name of your certainty in some greater good. If you would neither scruple to let your “hard truths” frame some hard action, nor derive any kind of moral and constructive action from your theory, what good to anyone is your “science”? The rational choice is to draw from our portfolio of understandings multiple but actionable truths — the best we can come up with, but subject to a usefulness constraint — and then apply them constructively.

In this old debate, “economic anxiety” versus racism, the mistake is to choose sides at all. As is usually the case in social affairs, the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. It is an intellectual error, then, to design studies as “horse races” to decide which is the better explanation. Perhaps there is no evidence at all for one hypothesis, in which case, sure, it should be rejected. But there is plenty of evidence, especially at the community level, for the “economic anxiety” hypothesis, and plenty of evidence, especially at the individual-characteristics level, for the “racial resentment” (racist motherfuckers) hypothesis. It is an error to imagine that “drilling down” to a more fine-grained level inherently provides superior or more actionable information. Biology provides insights that chemistry cannot. No one could produce a working pharmaceutical from the very best human understanding of quarks.

When in social affairs we have evidence for multiple, nonexclusive hypotheses, the wise thing to do is not to snipe over which we should reject and which we should accept, but to explore how they might relate to one another, and when it is best to deploy one understanding or the other as a simplification.

For this particular debate, the model I would encourage you to think about is triage. For most of us today, triage is just the name they give to intake at the ER. But in wartime, it refers to the harsher practice of deciding whom to treat and whom to let die. When medical resources are scarce, you make decisions about who won’t make it anyway. You take care not to waste medicine that might save someone else’s life on people you’ve decided will die regardless.

When resources are abundant, we avoid making these kinds of choices. We treat everybody. Some small fraction of the people with long odds become miracles, and we let those be worth the cost. When resources are abundant, health care is a human right. But when resources are scarce, we cull the herd, kill the runts or at least leave them to die.

Fascism is a process of internal exclusion, quite analogous to triage, although more in anger than in sadness. At a material level, a fascist order divides the polity into the worthy volk and “life unworthy of life”. It promises to reward and protect the former while extracting whatever labor can be squozen from the latter in the process of its exclusion or extermination.

This is not how human communities behave when they are secure and prosperous, when generosity, magnanimity, “civilization”, are broadly understood to be affordable public virtues. Polities “triage” the worthy from the unworthy under circumstances of perceived scarcity, of perceived threat. When happily ever after for everybody is a luxury we cannot afford. If some of us are to thrive, others must be sacrificed.

With medical triage it may (or may not) be sufficient for a few professionals to coldly decide, on the basis of medical facts, that these patients are a bad use of resources, while those patients may be helped by treatment. But humans writ large don’t work this way. We require moral heuristics to guide our actions, to motivate and then justify what we do. If at a communal level we are going to starve or enslave or expel or exterminate some group, it will not be enough, for most people, to say what a shame, but it is necessary. Instead we will find reasons why they deserve it. We will discover why they are in fact a danger whose dispossession is not to be lamented, but celebrated.

The identification of insidious internal enemies, deliverance from whom demands that “patriotic”, “real” citizens submit to military-like coordination and obedience, is the core move of fascism. It begins with the perception we can no longer afford. To which political entrepreneurs then append to tolerate these people as the concretization of what we cannot afford. It begins with the communal analog of a "scarcity mindset”.

With this account, we can reconcile the conflicting evidence about economic anxiety and cultural resentment. At the communal level, economic factors predict which places are likely to become susceptible to a fascist dynamic, because the case for dividing and culling begins with a perception of scarcity. Communities don’t triage when resources are widely perceived to be abundant and secure.

But at an individual level, within distressed communities, the people most enthusiastic to participate in the fascist dynamic are not likely to be the weak and dispossessed (who after all, might be susceptible to culling, depending what internal enemy gets identified) but those who feel safe in their own position and have preexisting resentments against candidate enemies. The political dynamic can’t successfully take hold, has no fertile habitat, without the “economic anxiety”. The members of the community who most enthusiastically participate in the thrill of fascism are not primarily the downtrodden, however, but relatively safe people who perceive an opportunity long denied to give effect to resentments they stewed in privately when prosperity and security bred norms of magnanimity and tolerance in their communities.

The good news in this story is that both factions of the “economic anxiety” vs racism debate get to keep their preferred prescriptions for discouraging fascism. If a sense of secure prosperity can be delivered and sustained among the broad public, then fascism will find little soil to plant seeds. If “racial resentment” — or, more generally, the psychological and cultural antecedents to the inimicalization of minorities — can be reduced, then the polity would be more resistant to fascism even during periods of economic stress and anxiety. The debate over what kind of politics to adopt, over the praxis of prophylaxis, becomes a question of which is more plausible and desirable to achieve via political means: building a society in which the bulk of the public perceives itself as prosperous and safe in that prosperity, or reforming the culture so that prejudices and resentments towards subgroups are diminished to insignificance.

My view is that the shape of the material world is more susceptible than culture to political means, and that material reforms to engender a broader and more secure prosperity for most of the public are urgently desirable — to discourage the emergence of fascism, but also on their own terms. So in practice I seem to fall on the “economic anxiety” side of the debate. Antifascists more attached to the economic status quo or more skeptical of economic antecedents prefer a politics that intervenes on the cultural side, focusing on countering fascist organizations, fighting and shaming prominent white supremacists, and trying to develop antiracist culture and education.

I am skeptical of the suitability of politics to address cultural concerns directly. I think that over time, politics affects culture profoundly, but indirectly, by altering the shape of material constraints and incentives under which cultures form and transform. I think when politics too overtly tries to alter culture, it yields backlash, becomes resisted as indoctrination or “reeducation” in conflict with the basic tenets of a free and equal society.

A free and equal society, like all societies, requires that its public think and understand the world in ways conducive to the effective coordination at scale that prosperity and defense require. But a free and equal society does not have the luxury of overtly coercing its public to think as they are told. A free and equal society must persuade its public — with speech that individuals are genuinely free to reject, with carrots for prosocial behavior rather than punishments for dissenters — to develop ways of thinking under which people voluntarily, “naturally”, act in ways and within bounds consistent with the functioning of the polity.

A free and equal society is a harder thing to govern and to keep than a more authoritarian system which can impose ideology, culture, authority, hierarchy by force. But an effective free and equal society is a much better community for a human being to be a part of. I do hope we will find the patience and light-touch cleverness to improve or build or rebuild a free and equal society rather than revert, under fascism or in the name of antifascism, to more mechanistic forms of social control that, as information technology has developed, become more available and so more tempting to leaders under inevitable conditions of crisis.