Often great trees in the forest fall together, and great men leave us at roughly the same time. In the same week that the US lost Jimmy Carter, India lost its great leader, Manmohan Singh, one of the longest serving Prime Ministers of India. Elsewhere I have written about once meeting Jimmy Carter. But by luck I also had the chance to chat for a time with Manmohan Singh.

I had the honor of being seated next to him at a dinner. It was during a function held in Delhi by the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan, an educational institution for Sikh and Punjab studies. Manmohan Singh was serving as President of the organization, one of the several assignments he accepted after his retirement as Prime Minister of India. A good friend of mine, Mohinder Singh, was director of the institute, and persuaded me to speak at a conference he organized in which Manmohan Singh was presiding.

It was after my talk that we gathered together for dinner in the garden of the institute’s grounds. It was one of those lovely Indian evenings when the heat of the day had dissipated in the pleasant breezes of an early evening.

I had many questions I wanted to ask the famous economist and former Prime Minister. After all, he was the architect behind India’s economic liberalization, which has led to the remarkable development the country has experienced in recent years. But like my conversation with former President Jimmy Carter, he first wanted to know about me. Why was I interested in the Punjab?

I told him that I had taught in the economics department at Panjab University in Chandigarh after completing my first set of graduate studies in religion and international affairs in New York. I lived in India for a total of three years or so, and fell in love with the Punjab.

His ears perked up. Manmohan Singh was not a very demonstrative kind of person, and ordinarily he wore a stoic, inquisitive expression that seemed seldom to change. In this case, however, he seemed to come to life.

“Economics, in Panjab University?” he said. What year, he wanted to know. I told him it was in the mid-1960s.

“I was there at the same time, in the same department,” he said, genuinely surprised.

“When Dr. Rangnekar was chair?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he said with what I took to be his version of enthusiasm. “S.B. Rangnekar was a great economist, and my mentor.”

“Mine as well,” I said, though I meant this in a personal sense, not an academic one. I was not an economist, after all, and was a bit out of my element in that discipline. I had come to the university on a study and service scholarship that paid very little. An arrangement had been made for me to stay initially in the bachelor faculty apartments, which gave me room and basic board, as long as I continued to maintain some relationship to the university. But what could I do?

One of the bachelor faculty members was an economist and he encouraged me to see the head of the department, Dr Rangnekar. I protested that I didn’t know anything about economics. “No matter,” my colleague said, “Rangnekar is a great fellow and if anyone can help you, he can.”

So I meekly went to see the important Dr Rangnekar, and he immediately set me at ease. He was a large, avuncular man who had a wonderful smile and a no-nonsense attitude to dealing with any problem put before him. He wanted to know what I could teach.

I told him about my innocence of economics, but I knew about international issues from graduate school and philosophy from college. “Political philosophy?” He inquired. Yes, I said, telling him I had taken a course in the history of political thought.

“Perfect,” Rangnekar said, exuding enthusiasm, “you’ll begin next week.”

“Begin what? I asked, genuinely puzzled. He explained that he had just created an honors school for undergraduates interested in enrolling in the graduate programs in economics at the University. He was chagrined at the low level of knowledge that burdened entering students in his graduate programs. He thought the problem could be solved in part by offering a year of special training in varied subjects, not just economics, to prepare students for graduate work. I would teach a course on political theory.

I indeed started teaching the next week, making up the course as the term went on. I went through the usual list of Western thinkers, beginning with Plato’s republic and then Machiavelli and Hobbes and Locke, and ending with Marx. I didn’t stop there, however, going on to cover what I thought were the most important Indian political thinkers, beginning with Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and culminating with Gandhi’s ideas about non-state socialism.

Rangnekar made my experience at Punjab University truly engaging. I discovered that it had the same effect on Manmohan Singh. He had done graduate work in economics at Panjab University shortly after India’s independence and the partition of the Punjab. At Rangnekar’s encouragement, he then went on to Cambridge for another MA. Later he would return to England for a PhD at Oxford, but in the interim, after Cambridge he returned to Panjab University, now in the new city of Chandigarh. There his old professor, Rangnekar, persuaded him to join the faculty for a couple of years. This was about the same time that I was there helping Rangnekar start an honors program for pre-graduate students.

Alas I don’t remember meeting Manmohan Singh at the time. Though if he was as taciturn and shy as he was later in life, I could easily have overlooked him. He had a depth that took some effort to discover.

At dinner, after a bit of quiet as we continued eating, I turned to him and ventured a comment. “If Rangnekar was your mentor, I can understand how you could rise to a position of great leadership unfettered by pride and bravado, with only the cheerful desire to help your fellow human beings. Rangnekar would have approved.”

Manmohan Singh paused for a moment, then looked at me and smiled. He didn’t say anything, but the smile spoke volumes.

I had a brief meeting with Jimmy Carter when I was a visiting professor at Emory University. A colleague who knew the Carter Center staff arranged the visit, and thought that the former president would be interested in my work on global terrorism.

The Center was in several acres of woods and gardens not too far from the Emory campus. It was a cluster of buildings, nestled in the foliage — a less pretentious setting than, say, the Reagan library in Simi Valley, which I had also visited. The Carter center was full of activities and events. It was much more than just a museum for a former presidency.

There was a lecture hall and conference rooms. Seminars and workshops were held regularly. There were also offices for projects, like peacemaking, the effects of global warming, and eradicating tropical diseases.

There was also, of course, a hallway of presidential photographs and the obligatory recreation of the oval office. My impression was that Carter did not in fact, work in that recreated oval office, since it seemed inordinately spotless and clinically neat.

My impression was correct. Carter’s actual office was in a different building. It was a nice spacious room with floor to ceiling windows looking out on the gardens and the Georgia woods. A version of the White House’s Resolute Desk stood in front of a wall of books. The desk was crafted by a local woodsman to look like the original.

Carter had been meeting somewhere else on the grounds, and came in a bit late, greeting me warmly. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask, many about the decisions to try to liberate the hostages in Iran when he was president. But before I could say anything, he began to ask me questions.

He wanted to know something about my background. I explained that my PhD was in political science but before that I had completed a degree in theology. He nodded, approving of the combination of interests in politics and religion.

Then he wanted to know how I got involved in studying terrorism. Apparently someone had briefed him that this was my area of expertise. I told him that I had lived in India for several years, in the area where the Sikh separatist movement erupted in the 80s, and I wanted to understand how religious commitment could lead to violence.

He said he had wondered the same thing. I wanted to ask him more about what he meant, but immediately he turned to the situation in the Middle East. Did I know anything about Hamas, he asked.

I told him I had interviewed the founder of the movement, Sheikh Yassin, and many of the other leaders. Carter wanted to know what my impression of them was.

Certainly committed, I said. They were unyielding on their view of the situation. They felt that their homeland had been invaded and their culture was imperiled. They saw what we think of as terrorism as defensive acts.

Yes, he agreed. He said he had met with some of them himself when he was in Israel. I wanted to ask him more about that, but he interrupted and asked me what I had learned from them.

I told him that many of them said that they wanted to live in peace with Jews and jointly share the region. They had nothing against Jewish people, they said. Their problem was with what they regarded as an oppressive government.

I said that I didn’t know whether they really believed this or they were just trying to impress me. But they said it in such a way to make me think that they were more open than we were led to believe. It seemed that negotiation was possible

The suicide attacks are horrible, I said. But I told Carter that I had the impression that even some of the leaders were conflicted about whether this violence was morally justified or even whether it was good political strategy. My sense was that the Hamas activists were not of a single mind, I said.

Carter nodded thoughtfully, and said that he had the same impression when he talked with members of Hamas. When he met with Khaleed Mashaal, the Hamas politburo chief, in Doha, Carter was told by Mashaal that he would welcome a Saudi hosted summit to negotiate a two-state solution.

I was eager to hear more about that. But then an aide came in and told the former president that his next engagement was due, actually overtime, and he had to go.

Carter said it was nice to meet me, and went off to his next appointment. As he was leaving I said I enjoyed meeting with him, and thanked him for all of the good work he had done as president and afterwards.

When I sat in the empty office for a moment after he left, I realized that I had not had the opportunity to forward a single one of the questions I wanted to ask him. Instead, he mostly wanted to listen to me.

For a moment I pondered whether this was a mark of greatness. I wondered whether it was not so much the elegant words we say, but how well we listen. Carter was a good listener. And a great man.

This is a podcast interview I did the week after the fall of the Asad regime in Syria, speculating on how the new government might develop.

It has to deal with multiple problems: uniting the disparate ethnic and religious groups within the country, keeping predatory groups and neighboring countries at bay, bringing the former torturers and executioners in the previous regime to justice, creating the infrastructure for policing and internal security, and designing a long-term plan for a future polity that combines democratic participation, free speech, and sufficient centralized authority to hold the whole thing together. That’s a lot.

The question is whether a relatively small group of militants are capable of the task. In their favor is the experience of al Shara (formerly al Julani) and his colleagues in running the Idlib region.

Idlib was reasonably prosperous and well run, though there was a wave of protest against al Shara/ Julani’s authoritarian rule and his habit of imprisoning his critics. He backed down a bit, and perhaps learned from that.

More troubling is his association with an extreme jihadi ideology in the past when he and the other leading members of the rebels were part of al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate. It shared this standing with the Islamic State in Syria. But the two groups quarreled with each other and since then al Shara and his former al Nusra colleagues claim to have renounced their extremism and embraced a more moderate pro-nationalist posture.

We’ll see how all this works out.

[Picture: Ahmed al Shara, known as al-Julani, as the Emir of al Nusra, and more recently as the liberator of Syria]

In a lightning move, Syrian rebels charged down from their small territory in northwestern Syria. In ten days they captured the major cities of Syria: first Aleppo, then Hama and Homs, before victoriously entering Damascus. The fifty-year Assad rule had suddenly come to an abrupt end.

Bashar al-Assad loaded his family onto an airplane at six a.m. and flew off to safety in Russia. The rebel leader, Mohammad Abu al-Julani, marched triumphantly through the streets of the capital city. Syria was free.

But free for what?

The origins of the rebel movement, Hamat Tahrir al-Sham – HTS, “the organization for the liberation of al-Sham” (Syria, Iraq, and adjacent regions, also known as the Levant) — are in al Nusra. It was one of many groups that surfaced in response to the Arab Spring uprising against the Assad regime in 2012. It then quickly affiliated with al Qaeda.

Another movement in Syria, the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also affiliated with al Qaeda. In an effort to create solidarity between them, the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri commanded Baghdadi’s group to merge with al Nusra. Baghdadi refused. He broke with al Qaeda and went on to create the powerful Islamic State that dominated eastern Syrian and western Iraq for several years.

The al Nusra movement in time also tired of its association with al Qaeda. In 2016, the young leader of al Nusra, Ahmed al-Shara, known by his nom de guerre, Mohammad al Julani, broke ranks with what remained of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death. He downplayed the jihadi rhetoric in favor of an emphasis on the national liberation of Syria from the Assad regime. This enabled him to forge a new coalition of rebel groups under the banner of HTS.

So now that the 42-year-old former jihadi militant is now the new leader of Syria, the question is what will he do? What is next for Syria?

Unification is part of the agenda. Al Shara (formerly known as Julani) represents a tiny sliver of the Syrian population. His movement is aligned with Sunni Arabs, who constitute the majority of the country, so that will help. But Sunni Arabs are hardly a unified constituency. Then there is a sizeable percentage of Syrian Christians and Alawites (a Shi’a offshoot) along the Mediterranean coast. Kurds control vast sections of the northern and western parts of the country. ISIS is still present and still bitter over their break up with al Nusra years earlier. Also there are former al Nusra supporters who refused to go along with the moderating style of Shara and formed their own militant cell.

Gaining the support of all these groups, even their tacit accession to HTS’s power, will be challenging. Then there is the need to reconstitute the government after decades of dictatorial rule. Will Shara simply slide into office as the newest dictator, or will there be an effort to reform the governmental process? Does democracy stand a chance?

We will be waiting to get answers to these questions. So far Shara has appeared to be conciliatory. He has assured Shi’a that their sacred shrines will be protected and has promised Syrian Christians and Alawites safety. He has ordered his armed forces to protect government buildings and keep them from being looted, and he has allowed the Prime Minister –who stayed in Damascus after Assad fled—to continue the functioning of government until there is a transition.

But a transition to what? Now that he is in power, will Shara return to his old jihadi ideology and try to impose his own idea of an Islamic State? There are several possibilities:

The ISIS model. Shara could assume he has a mandate to recreate Syria around his own ideology and impose a dictatorship and a rigid Islamic order.

The Saudi model. He could declare Syria to be an Islamic state and impose an autocratic regime while allowing some flexibility in rigid Islamic codes of behavior.

The Iranian model. He could try to resuscitate the trappings of democratic rule while maintaining a fairly conservative Islamic social order.

The Iraq model. His movement could constitute itself as an Islamic-leaning political party and contest elections, negotiating with other parties to create a coalition government.

The Ukrainian model. Shara could emerge as a nationalist hero, admired by all sides, and put his ideology aside while he created a new democratic order.    

While Western observers yearn for the last outcome, it will probably be some variant of the other ones. The hope is that whatever form of polity and social order emerges out of the new regime it will not lead to chaos and even more bloodshed. The Syrian people have had enough of both. They deserve better.

            Since the election I’ve wondered why. I could understand if voters were misled about how Trump would help them economically and shake things up politically.

But was it more personal than that? Did they also have something against a woman as likeable as Kamala Harris? Yesterday I got an answer.

            I received a telephone call from an old friend from my high school in a little town in rural Southern Illinois. She called to wish me Happy Birthday. I thanked her.

Then she apologized for the election since she thought I would be unhappy with the outcome. I affirmed that I was.

She said she felt differently. She went on to say that she was glad she would not have to see the face of that “damned woman” again.

            I muttered something, not knowing what to say. She said she hoped she hadn’t offended me. “No, no,” I said, “speak your mind, it’s ok.”

            But afterwards I began to wonder about the vehemence of her comment. It was not that she disagreed with Vice President Harris’s positions, she hated her. She hated her so much she almost sputtered when she said so.

            Today I called back and after chatting amiably a bit, I asked my friend to do me a favor. “What is it about Kamala that makes you dislike her so intensely?” I asked.

            She hesitated a bit, and then again apologized. She said that I might not like what she was going to say. “It’s ok,” I said, “I just want to understand.”

            “Well,” she said, “here’s what I think. I want a President with high moral standards and honesty that we can look up to with pride.”

            “Right,” I said, hesitantly. Assuming she had voted for Trump, that seemed an odd reason not to favor Kamala.

            “And what makes you think Kamala would not have those standards?”

            “She’s a tramp,” she said. “She was sleeping with Willie Brown when he was married to someone else. Everyone knows it.”

            She was referring to a period decades ago before she became San Francisco District Attorney. It was an office to which she was elected in part because of the support of the popular California politician, Willie Brown.

            Brown had been separated from his wife for many years and had a steady string of girlfriends before he briefly dated Kamala, who was single. Their relationship after that appeared to be solely political.

            But this has not stopped the right-wing news media from harping on this affair and the marital status of Willie Brown at the time. No matter that Trump routinely cheated on each of his successive wives, including his dalliance with a pornstar when the current one was pregnant.

            But he was a guy. Women are supposed to live up to higher standards.

“Especially,” my friend said, “if they are to be the first woman elected President. They have to be the best.”

            But I was not satisfied with this answer. Somehow this did not seem to be a sufficient reason for the vehemence of her hatred of Kamala.

            “Besides,” she added, “she was only interested in getting the Black vote.”

            Now we seemed to be getting somewhere. I asked her why she thought that was the case.

            “She only mentioned her Black father,” she said, “and ignored her lovely Indian mother.”

            I was surprised at this since Kamala’s comments during the campaign seemed just the opposite. She frequently talked about her mother and seldom about her father, who was a distant figure in their separated family.

            My friend went on to compare her with J.D.Vance who was proud of his Indian wife, she said. “Kamala just wants the Black vote.”

            I did not argue with my friend. I felt there would be no point to it. Besides, in my years of interviewing militants involved in terrorism I learned to listen to them and not get into an argument.

My mission in talking with her was to gain some insight into why Kamala Harris lost, and especially why white women would turn against her. I think I got some answers.

My friend appeared to share the perception that the Democrat in this race had no interest in White people, especially White men. They seemed only to talk about minorities and women’s issues, so the perception went.

I mused on how Obama was seen differently. There was a large number of people, men especially, who voted for Obama and then turned around and voted for Trump.

But Obama was a guy, a real guy. He played basketball. He could have been any guy with whom a dude would get into a pick-up game in a vacant lot.

Kamala not so much. Her image was posing with her Black sorority sisters at Howard University.

Even women, including my friend from high school, could not identify with that. Kamala was not, she implied, the sort of person she would want her granddaughters to admire.

Her granddaughters, I presume, are White.

The US Presidential elections that brought Donald Trump back to power created anxious soul searching among progressive voters. What the hell happened?

            Fingers of blame pointed in all directions. The campaign for Kamala Harris was flawed, some said. Others said she didn’t have time to fully introduce her to the electorate. Misogyny and racism were to blame. Misinformation about immigrants and the state of the economy were rife.

            No doubt many if not all of these were factors. They are idiosyncratic to the US at this particular moment in its political life.

            But Trump also fits into a global pattern. The lure of strongmen has risen around the world. Russia after the Cold War was briefly democratic, but that cannot be said today about the Russia under Putin. The same transformation has brought Erdogan to power in Turkey, the growing authoritarianism of Modi in India, the persistence of Netanyahu in Israel, and in China a non-electoral policy has given rise to the autocracy of Xi. Authoritarian right-wing political parties have been on the rise throughout Europe.

The statistics in the recent US elections indicate how quickly the political climate can change. At the time that Kamala was knighted to be the Democratic candidate, the polls indicated that she was a shoo-in. She led Trump by some 7 percentage points in some polls.

            But by October that percentage began to shrink. It eventually came down to an even tie. Then the election itself showed how low it would go.

            What happened in October? This is when people only marginally interested in politics begin to wake up. They did not, however, immediately begin analyzing the policy positions of the candidates, or read the rebuttals to the mistruths and lies that were freely circulated.

            It is likely that this decisive segment of the electorate voted with their guts. They either liked what they saw, or didn’t.

            Many of them looked past Trump’s multiple felonies, proven instances of sexual molestation, business failings and political manipulation. They saw a strongman. His public persona was of a loud, tough leader, who told it like it was.

            Putin leads Russia with similarly ardent support from most Russian citizens. It is true that he has controlled the news media and manipulated the electoral process in a way that skews their perceptions. But it’s also true that people are comforted by the illusion of security that strongmen give.

            Netanyahu enjoyed this sense of invincibility, despite his personal legal problems and his attempts to manipulate the judiciary. Then the October 7, 2023 attack damaged that image. He has tried hard to repair it by taking a stridently militant response.

            Somehow strongmen are able to ward off the criticisms of their many failings. People seem to want a strongman in times of rapid social change, and they are invariably men.

            Globalization has created that unease in societies around the world. Rapid demographic shifts, the caprice of markets to a global economy, the baffling accessibility of manipulated information on the internet have all led to social uncertainty. People wonder who is in charge, and what their formerly insular societies have become.

            Strongmen give that illusion of security. But they are seldom able to maintain it. This leads sometimes to rebellion, and sometimes to increasingly authoritarian repression to keep a discomfited population in check.

            During the US presidential election campaign, one of the Democratic ads tried to warn people about Trump. It sounded an alarm about his dictatorial character and the likelihood he bring a reign of retribution and administer a tough authoritarian rule.

Many of the people at the margins of political awareness were not frightened. They thought this was a good thing.

Whether they will continue to think this way, and continue to admire the skills of the strongman they have chosen, remains to be seen. Trump’s economic plan with tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will likely cause the national debt to balloon. His tariffs on everything could raise consumer prices enormously and spike inflation. The cruelty with which he tries to control illegal immigration, and his revenge against political enemies may shock the populace into an awareness of what strongmen can do to damage the moral fibre of a society.

The historical record is that strongmen do not last forever. Despite their attempts at infinite reins of power, strongmen die and their charisma is not easily succeeded. Even before then their regimes collapse under their own incompetence and through internal opposition. In the meantime, however, life can be hard, and much damage can be done.

It is not a pretty future, both for the US and for global society. But it will not always be this way, and the spirit of people around the world will survive.

For the first time in their history, Americans have to prepare for life under authoritarian rule. The question is how will they survive it?

I have friends in other countries that have had to confront creeping authoritarianism. They are in Russia, Turkey, China, India, and elsewhere. We live in an age of global neo-authoritarianism. We are not alone.

Many of them survive by ignoring it. After all, there is comfort in one’s own cave. Daily life goes on.

But others do not succumb so easily. We are all citizens of the countries of which we are a part, and this means we are collectively responsible for the quality of public life within them and around the world. We cannot just roll over and sleep.

This is true even—and perhaps especially—in a time of rising authoritarian rule. Most of my friends around the world are fighters.

In the face of mounting authoritarian control, they have adopted several approaches, each worth emulating:

Vigilance

            They keep aware of what is happening. They keep up with the news, even when it is increasingly controlled or cowed by strongarm tactics. They are sensitive to the intimidation and manipulation of news media and try to make sure that skewed information does not go unchallenged.

Sometimes they have to resort to foreign sources of news, or to finding information networks online. In the most difficult situations email chains and word of mouth provide ears to hear what is happening in the world around them.

Connection

            They keep in touch with one another. This is a source of information, but also inspiration. It can also lead to creative ways of getting around the limitations imposed by censorship and social controls.

            They also reach out to friends and contacts around the world. We live in an interlocking global society and we need the support of a planetary community.

Alternatives

Local, county, and statewide governmental structures become significant alternatives to a dominant national regime. They can mitigate the influence of manipulative national government. And they can sometimes counter it.

Nongovernment organizations can provide other alternatives to public life. Community-based action can offer services and embrace marginalized people effectively. They point to a different way of conceiving public service.

Resilience

            They do not give up. Most authoritarian powers crumble under their own weight. While democratic institutions still exist the power of elections provide ways to change or mitigate their stranglehold over governmental structures.

            If elections are no longer freely available, other forms of pressure can provide checks on seemingly unbridled power. Sometimes the most effective challenge to authority comes from within the regime itself.

            In my own study of how terrorist movements come to an end, I concluded that their demise is usually due to internal schisms within the organization, and a withdrawal of support from the general population.

            The good news is that they do end. Democracy may be a fragile and capricious way of life, but it is resilient.

            Do not give up.

I asked the kids in my college class to list the things they were concerned about in this Presidential election, and to rank them. Democracy came out on top.

Access to reproductive rights, especially abortion, was their second greatest concern. The economy, which the news media tell you is what concerns Americans most, came in third.

Climate change was next. Then foreign policy issues, especially regarding Israel and Palestine. Gun control, and issues of equality, especially racial and ethnic equality, were also high on the list. Immigration and border issues were eighth on the list, not a high priority.

Here’s the complete list in rank order of concern:

1 Democracy

2 Reproductive rights

3 Economy

4 Climate change

5 Foreign policy

6 Gun control

7 Equality   

8 Immigration

9 Crime

10 Supreme court

11 Student loans

12 LGBTQ rights

13 Voting rights

14 Healthcare

15 Tax policies/tariffs

This is not a scientific poll, of course, just a snapshot of one class in one college. And a rich college at that. After retiring from UC-Santa Barbara I agreed to teach a class each Fall at Claremont McKenna College, part of the Claremont cluster colleges.

The tuition at Claremont McKenna, including room and board, is $80k a year. Many of the kids are econ majors and most end up in business. I suspect most of their parents vote Republican.

In my class half are male, half female, with a smattering of international students. They are very bright, and remarkably engaged in the topic of the class, global conflict. Needless to say, Ukraine and Gaza are on our minds.  

Still, I didn’t expect this outcome. For the future of democracy to be the issue of greatest concern, especially for these folks, was surprising. It says a lot about the concern of this young generation for the future of our political life.

            Well, not exactly. Though Walmart transformed what was a thriving downtown into a shell of its former self.

            I was raised in Carlinville, a town of 5000 in Southern Illinois. It is in the transition area between cornfields and coal mines, and is closer both geographically and culturally to Kentucky and Ozark Missouri than to Chicago.

            My home town is a Mid West icon with brick streets and a circular town square with a bandstand in the middle. A stone monument in our church yard marks the site of where Lincoln campaigned against Douglas for his senate seat.  Nearby is an imposing county courthouse, constructed from huge limestone blocks and surmounted with a magnificent dome. When it was built the town hoped that the state would want it for its capital. Alas that honor went to Springfield, some forty miles north, with what seemed to me to be a much less spectacular capital building.

            The town also boasts a thriving college, Blackburn. It was famed for its work-study program that requires students to enroll in work hours, such as mowing the lawn and helping in the kitchen, in addition to academic credits. The money saved by student workers was said to have allowed the college to endure through the depression even when many other similarly sized institutions were faltering.

            My family home was near the college. It was a simple house, one of a hundred or so prefabricated homes purchased from a Sears-Roebuck in 1930 by the Standard Oil Company to house the workers in its nearby coal mine. It is the largest such colony of Sears-Roebuck homes in the country.

            And the town is on old Route 66. What is not to like?

            I grew up playing in the cornfields near the college, then joining the high school band in concerts for ice cream socials in the bandstand of the town square. My father was elected County Superintendent of Schools and his office was in that magnificent court house. It was as if the whole of the town was my back yard.

            My first proper suit was purchased at Surman’s Clothing Store on the Square. We knew the Surmans, they attended our church, and their daughter Jane sang in the choir. Next door to the clothing store was the pharmacy where we got out prescriptions filled from a pharmacist who knew us by name and would call if we forgot to get a refill that we needed.

            We didn’t need many store-bought groceries since we had a fourteen-acre mini-farm with our own chickens and cows and sheep, and one lethargic pig. It also had a huge garden area where we grew corn, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, and much more. We seldom bought stuff from a store since my mother would cook and carefully seal glass Bell jars that we stored in the basement. The peas and corn and other vegies would last all winter. For ice cream we would make our own from milk that got from our cows, cranking the churner and adding salt to the ice around the interior ice cream bucket. Then we would add our own strawberries and raspberries to taste.

            We would go to the store for sugar, salt, some other staples, and most exiting for me an occasional candy bar. I liked Mars bars the best.  Fortunately the stores were nearby. There was Lanzerotti’s Superette, just a few blocks from our house, run by an Italian immigrant family who lived upstairs. Their sons, Louis and Richard were among my closest buddies in high school. Whenever I went there for even a candy bar or a soda Mrs. Lanzerotti would engage me in long conversation about everyone in our family as if we were kinfolk. For even more food supplies there was the IGA, though for the life of me I don’t remember what those initials stood for—Independent Grocers’ Association, perhaps? I knew almost all of the workers there, since many of them were the older siblings of my high school class mates.

            I visited the hometown recently for a high school class reunion. There were 100 members of our class and now there are only about 40 of us left. Of those half are in long term care facilities or in other ways not able to travel even a few blocks to the reunion restaurant. There were about twenty of us who were there, and we seemed genuinely happy to see each other. Perhaps we were equally happy just to be alive.

            The town had not changed much in outward appearance. Almost all of the old buildings around the square were still intact, including an old hotel that had not seen a guest in decades. I remember that the Elks club occupied the upper floors, and our Boy Scout troop met there, though today only the lower floors are still occupied by various shops.

            What has changed are the shops themselves. Gone are the clothing store, the pharmacy, the neighborhood grocery stores. Instead the shops are occupied by antique stores and tourist items for the Route 66 trade. There are more restaurants, coffee houses, and taverns than I remembered. The town has survived largely because it is seen as a charming old-fashioned Route 66 tourist stop.

            Where have all the other shops gone? To figure that out you have to venture to the edge of town, actually across the city lines in an area that is immune to city sales and property taxes. There one finds an enormous store the size of a football field surrounded by an asphalt parking lot that would hold hundreds of vehicles.

            Walmart has come to Carlinville. And it has conquered it.

            Walmart was founded in 1962 not far from Carlinville in rural Arkansas by Sam Walton, a clever entrepreneur who seized upon a brilliant marketing strategy. The one thing that small town American misses most, he reasoned, were the megastores of big cities that offered a dazzling array of everything imaginable at ridiculously cheap prices. By clever marketing and control of the supply chains back to factories in China and elsewhere, he could offer “always low prices, always,” as the store liked to boast. And it would transform middle America.

Transform he did, garnering an obscene amount of wealth in the process. Virtually every county seat town in the mid-West soon had a Walmart superstore. Within fifty years Walmart was the largest retailer in the world with over ten thousand stores, over two million employees and annual yearly revenues of over 600 billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”).

Though Sam Walton is long gone, his heirs still own over half of the company’s shares. The combined wealth of the Walton family is over $340 billion dollars, making them collectively the richest entity in the world, wealthier than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Sam’s three children each have about a hundred billion dollars in wealth: Jim has $96 billion, Rob has $94 billion, and Alice has $89 billion (making her the richest woman in the world).  

Meanwhile the employees are not faring as well. As of October 2024, the average wage is around $25 an hour, ranging between $14 and $31 an hour. Most “associates,” as the salespeople are known, earn around $26,000 per year. This is a considerable increase from several years ago when the pay was so low many Walmart employees depended on government food stamps to get by.

Though it’s true that the standard of living in Carlinville is not Orange County or Manhattan Island, $26k does not go very far in sustaining a family budget. I talked with one fellow in Carlinville who worked in the stockroom of Walmart and was having to borrow money to feed his family of five. He now has switched to being a welder in East St. Louis, a forty- minute drive away, but well worth it financially.

Most of my former high school classmates are delighted to have Walmart in town. It’s one-stop shopping. They have a clothing department, a pharmacy, a florist section, and a huge grocery supermarket, all with greater variety and much lower prices than the old stores in town formerly had.

All the old stores quietly went out of business, one by one, as Walmart expanded its sales. The last independent grocery store, the IGA, closed a couple of years ago. The Lanzerotti Superette is now a residence, the Surman clothing store now sells antiques, and the town square pharmacy is now a coffee house for the Route 66 tourists.

At least Carlinville looks much like it used to, due to the tourist trade. But Walmart pulls its customers from all of the surrounding towns. Driving through them on the way to the St. Louis airport after my high school reunion, I was dismayed to see the ruins of all the little towns I remember from my youth. They all seem to be in a terminal stage of torpor, additional victims of Walmart’s ravenous reach.

Many of my former classmates have been grumbling about the erosion of the quality of life in the rural mid-West. They often blame the government, immigrants, and the liberal elites on the East and West Coast who sap the country’s strength and weaken the small towns that used to be so prosperous. I quietly encourage my classmates to look not so far away, but at the megastore at the outskirts of our own little village, offering “always low prices, always,” and eviscerating the small shops that used to be at the heart of our town’s commercial life.

My comments last night on BBC-World. Here’s a summary of what I said:

My sense is that neither Israel or Iran want an all-out war, and the US certainly doesn’t want to get involved as it would have to if Israel was attacked in a major way. Iran’s missile attack on Israel was likely understood by Iran to be more for show than for impact. So the likelihood is that Israel will retaliate in a way that does not provoke worse responses in the future. (Unless Netanyahu wants the conflict to continue in order to embarrass Biden and enhance the chances of Trump winning the November election). But the likelihood is that in a few days this will be over.

Netanyahu’s mission was to degrade the military capacity of Hezbollah, and they have largely achieved that, though this is a short term victory. As with the huge assault on Hamas that has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, it will neutralize the military capacity of Hezbollah and Hamas for many months. But in both cases the animosity it has created will likely strengthen both movements in the future. This has been the pattern in the past when Netanyahu tried to destroy Hamas by killing its founding leader, Sheikh Yassin and the predecessor to Nasrullah as the leader of Hezbollah. Both movements roared back stronger than before. 

So although these attacks buy Netanyahu some relief for a few months — perhaps enough time to get him re-elected– they are not a long-term solution. Far from it.