Indecision 2024: Not a Bang but a Whithering

That debate was something, huh? I didn't watch it live, I was traveling between time zones and had important beer to drink, but I've since listened to the audio. And oh boy, folks. Oh wow...

This is no great shock. Biden was a sundowning buffoon all through the 2019 primary, securing the nomination less because the party believed in his chances against trump and more to squelch their own Sanders insurgency. He was never going to get better and it's a classic tale of hubris that the Dems started believing their own bullshit about how he was still sharp as a whip. Because only Democrats are dumb enough to lose yet another election to Donald Trump.

But speaking of... I don't see what everyone's so scared off. Donny just sounded so tired. For a performance artist best known for his zingers, this was a mediocre showing at best. Which could also have been predicted - Trump was going soup-brained at his own rallies all through the spring. Even when his word salad has some kind of logic, there's none of the energy. MAGA is a spent force, at least nationally. They can claim Florida and a few other worthless corners of the US, but as an ideological project they're just out of gas.

"But Project 2025!" all the professional class liberals have been saying, all over social media for two weks. The Heritage Foundation's grand plan for a Christian Nationalist Reich. Which sure would be scary, if you don't actually read it. Rick Perlstein did, and quite rightly pointed out how this is not some unprecedented power grab. It is in fact very precedented, and more aspirational than plausible.

Especially, I would argue, because if there's one Republican least likely to deliver on this waffentwerp wishlist it is Donald Trump. The White House from 2017 to 2021 had a few committed ideologues passing through, but it had far more media-obsessed nihilists selling each other multilevel marketing scams. Half those ideologues have abandoned Trump as the fairweather autocrat he proved to be, the other half are in jail. And this was already the B-squad of rightwing wonkery. A second Trump administration isn't even going to have his kids along for the ride.

That's not even getting into the many de facto and de jure barriers to the sorts of sweeping executive overreach Very Concerned People are all very concerned about. Federalism proved a solid check against Trumpism the first time around, now blue state governors will be even more energized in their defiance. Trump's upset victory in 2016 has since cost the GOP two midterms, the Senate, and so many state legislatures that they're weaker than the Libertarian Party in Michigan these days. Michigan! Home of the crackpot militias of the '90s! And if current national polls prove accurate - something I personally believe you could just as well flip a coin over - a Trump re-election would occur alongside a Blue Wave across both the House and Senate. How the fuck's he instituting no-fault divorce then?

What a Trump 2 can do, what he's promised to do far more often than any sops to the anti-abortion crowd, is trade war. A yuge trade war, this time with Europe! And appropriately when taking on the Europeans, it'll be an own-goal: more inflation, less jobs. He won't pull out of NATO - he can't, for various boring treaty reasons - but in turning the US from the de facto leader into the sulky junior partner, Trump will foster a new and emboldened Europe. Which will further diminish US influence and ultimately lead to the real doomsday scenario: no more dollar hegemony.

The US dollar's position as the global reserve currency is the imperial foundation of every creature comfort you still enjoy. It's why the 2009 recession didn't hit as hard as the EU's sovereign debt crisis and it's why you get subsidized oil for your SUV. It's why nobody really cares about the federal deficit, no matter how much they pretendto cry about it on cable news.

But that can all change under Trump 2. The EU and OPEC, tired of these schizophrenic Americans, just go, "Okay, we'll peg petrol to some basket of currencies or some digital bancor" and then it's adios Your American Dream. The deficit will suddenly matter, Treasury Bills will decline in value, and you'll be paying ten bucks a gallon at the pump. Which you deserve, it's 100 degrees in the shade and that's your fault.

And then the president will keel over because he's too damn old. That prediction holds for whichever of these marionetted corpses actually wins in November. That Republicans are in this situation, hitched to a loser echo of the Reagan years, is as poetic as it is funy. That Democrats are so enthralled to their own sclerotic elites, well, an empire's gotta end sometime.

Not a Wave, but a Tide

 

I've been rewatching an Adam Curtis documentary and it just so happened to touch on the time the Red Army Faction trained with Syrian paramilitaries.

The specifics of which I'll get into later but the main point I'm gonna try and explain is this: there is no conflict between socialism and capitalism, we live in postmodern technocracy. This is not a critique of our internet addled culture or "woke" anything, but rather the transition from modern liberal capitalism into postmodern technocracy began in 1945. World War II was the end of the old empires and also the end of the grand 18th Century revolution in liberal capitalism. The war economy was the New Deal on steroids. Big government didn't so much reign in big business as they merged, and that synthesis has persisted no matter how much tax cutting Reagan did. His whole schtick, when you get down to it, was less about economic transformation and making America "great" again than it was ameliorating the popular outrage - and malaise - of the transformations of the 1970s. When the rates of profits began to fall and the postwar revolutions failed.

So here's that aside in the lede - back in the early '70s, the German Maoist terrorists Red Army Faction went to train with some Syrian militias that were fighting Israel. These RAF Germans were committed leftists and also very cognizant of their nation's crimes in the holocaust. And they were aghast at their Arab "comrades" who venerated a portrait of Hitler. "Good man. Killed lots of Jews." The Syrians didn't see a problem with this but the Germans suffered from cognitive dissonance, because all their Marx and Mao had taught the Revolution would be international and liberatory for all the working classes. And then here was a particular national liberation movement embracing exactly the kind of genocidal atavism they thought they were fighting back home. The RAF's way of "fighting" was also bombing department stores to shock the middle classes into understanding social democracy was built on global exploitation, and they were equally baffled when the German working classes reviled them as murderers.

Now, how this ties back into the larger point (admittedly clumsily) is how you have a corps of committed ideologues who are both baffled that the rest of society thinks they're pricks and also fighting a battle that was already decided. That's the modern rightwing in America. They genuinely believe banning abortion and trans bathroom panics are the most pressing concerns. So they double down on this, expecting society at large to agree with the intrinsic goodness of their project - as they see it. Then they lose every state referendum on abortion. Then they lose elections in traditional southern enclaves like Virginia and Kentucky. If enough racist grandparents have been migrating there, like Florida, they can look successful but it's like winning class president at a special needs school. "Oh, good for you!" pat on the head, move on.

However, this isn't because more Americans are virtuous liberals. It's because more Americans are just normal. "Normal" being a subjective thing - I remember growing up in the DC suburbs, it was quite "normal" for all the DOD and State Department contractors to decry the big government that paid their mortgages. Today, it's far more normal to think people screaming about "groomers" aor election conspiracies are both unhinged and - worse - annoying. Trump is really annoying these days, and that's gonna hurt him worse than all the trials. His only hope is another electoral college fluke, which is a non-zero probability but so is nuclear war. And again, like the RAF, this is a lost battle. The country's going "woke" no matter how much Trump's fan club whines, no matter how much the really committed try to "rise up" and usually shoot a dozen people with an AR before getting vaporized by the police state. They're not waking up the normal Americans to their manichean "truth" and are just slotted into yet another crime story.

And here we get to how Joe Biden is like Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he's presiding over a transition in American society that's so slow and unconscious that it's hard to spot. Like Reagan, he's a bumbling old guy who is nonetheless endearing, even to those who criticize him. Yeah, lots of young people gripe about Ol' Joe, but that doesn't mean they're gonna vote for the bathroom-creeping Republicans. Where Reagan presided over the enrichment of a corporate oligarchy and suburban culture war that began under Nixon, Biden is presiding over a fuller technocratic transition - "rule by experts" - and the burying of that culture war that began under Obama. Nixon's silent majority were the normal people of their time, annoyed at the hippies. The Democrat voting base of today isn't DSA - I feel like they've just disintegrated since the end of the Sanders campaign - but the normal people in the professional classes. The ones who want peace, order, and good government - in contrast to the Republican base who think everything is a secret Marxist conspiracy. Crying that transcommies are turning your kids gay is the new blaming (bombing) department stores for being counter-revolutionary. Even if you can logically explain the theory, it still sounds fucking nuts to a person not plugged into the deep end of internet political discourse.

To be clear, this is not a hopeful assessment. These same normal people are tuned out to climate change and the gigafication of the economy. I'm not arguing the triumph of technocracy will lead to human flourishing - I'm even skeptical it will ameliorate human want, which is about the only good argument for a dictatorship of the scientists. But I see this as the direction of things. Marxist revolution was a byproduct of liberal capitalism, an attempt to inject some Christian compassion into an exploitative economic machine. And too many latter-day "Marxists" just want to keep the middle class material comforts they grew up with, but not feel guilty about it. Like the MAGA faithful, it's yesterday's fight. The real struggle is against an ever more hostile biosphere, to be met with resilience and managed retreat. Which is also why I don't label my predictions of technocracy as "the good" - too many of these political theorists are just moralizing by other means - because shrinking resources and northward migrations are going to make even more draconian border controls agreeable to the aforementioned "normal" people.

Stop worrying about elections. Start worrying about climate adaptation.

Why All-Out War is Good, Actually

How's your anxiety these days? Mine's a motherfucker. Rumors of nuclear war, PTSD, and a coffee addiction are not a fun combination.

Which is why I'm hoping the rumored "big news" out of Moscow come May 9th - V-E Day - will be a general mobilization. Brutal as it's been, the Russo-Ukrainian war thus far really has been a "special military operation" and not a formal war. This is a logistical as much as legal distinction, because it means the Kremlin cannot call up reservists or directly conscript new soldiers.  Should Putin declare "a state of war" on or before the big Red Square celebrations planned for next week, that all changes as the entire Russian society will be placed on a war footing. Going all-in on Donbass, which will succeed no matter how many Polish BMPs Zelensky can get.

And that's a good thing. The terrible logic of this war from the beginning has been a conventional Russian victory - however that can defined and spinned by the siloviki - is better for the world than continued Ukrainian success. Because nukes. Many American and other Western talking heads and political class suckpuppets have bemoaned that the 4000+ nuclear warheads in the Russian arsenal puts Europe and the US in a sort of hostage situation, where NATO air forces can't just roll in and carpet bomb Russian forces without suffering actual consequences in London and DC.

Somewhere in Baghdad, people are muttering, "See how you like it..."

There's been talk recently, which I am not linking to, about a possible deployment of tactical nukes against Ukraine to clear the current impasse in Donbass. Exaggerated and ridiculous talk but still alarming, as such an escalation besides the horror and suffering immediately in Ukraine would breach the global nuclear taboo that has persisted since 1945. Once Russia uses nukes in a conflict, that sets a precedent for US and Chinese (and Israeli) nuclear forces that amounts to, "Hey, we can do this now." Which will either translate into many tactical deployments as the Great Powers go about beating on weaker countries or - and who knows the odds on this anymore - an escalation to a strategic exchange as NATO "cannot let this go unanswered" or whatever other idiot excuse for annihilating the Northern Hemisphere.

But, should Putin declare All-out War on Ukraine, the possibility of a tac nuke goes way down:

If Putin declares a mobilization on May 9, that would almost certainly indicate a deferral of possible WMD use. More Russian soldiers in Ukraine means more of them exposed to potential WMD fallout. And conquering Ukraine, if parts of it are devasted by WMD, makes no sense.

Michael Kofman, one of the few to predict the war who isn't a hysterical neocon, talked about this a week ago. He argues that current Russian forces, once the Donbass Offensive is done, is a "spent force" that cannot prosecute further military operations against Ukraine - let alone other neighboring countries, despite the yelpings of Polish and Baltic reactionaries. Kofman also makes the point that such a mobilization would commit Putin to maximalist war aims - the total Kyiv regime change that initally failed - and that could prove politically untenable.

There's an inevitable argument that invading Ukraine in the first place made no sense so Putin might still pull the nuclear trigger, but Anatol Lieven makes a good point that while reckless and ruthless, Putin is not insane. His miscalculations are still rational. So here's hoping he doubles down conventionally, or just pulls a "mission accomplished" while the Donbass offensive stalemates, instead of trying to shock and awe the world one last time before that cancer gets him.

UPDATE 2:59PM: A rare good Twitter thread on the costs versus benefits of doing a Bush-In-His-Flightsuit victory lap rather than whole-hog mobilization.

Loosed Upon the World

Two weeks ago, if you told me Ukraine would still be resisting the Russian invasion and Zelensky would still be alive, I'd have laughed in your face. In fairness, I laughed at the prospect of an invasion of this scale up until the morning of February 24th. The idea was simply too stupid across every dimension - tactically, strategically, and politically. I like to think I've so far been vindicated on that analysis, the Russian tactics of shock and awe have stupidly abandoned any sense of modern logistics and led to a whole new genre of internet video: tank theft! Strategically, Putin has stupidly reinvigorated NATO and even inspired Germany to start arming itself again. And politically, this has galvanized the once waning opposition movement within Russia, to say nothing of how it's compromised Vova's position among his fellow siloviki in the Kremlin.

It was all so obviously stupid from the start. And it happened anyway.

And while how it's been happening has been even more of a surprise, how it ends still looks written in stone. A Russian military victory, followed by occupation and insurgency. Putin's very own Iraq quagmire, right on the border and fed by NATO weapons shipments. Hundreds of thousands dead, a nuclear superpower destabilized for a generation, and Ukraine a breeding ground for all the worst sorts of throat-slitters.

Though you wouldn't think it, to judge by every anglophone corner of the internet. Between r/worldnews and Facebook memes, there is a popular certainty Russia is losing the war and will soon be driven from the Ukrainian plains, to allow the sacred sunflowers to grow. Or something. While the conspiratorial may be inclined to see this total domination of the propaganda space to be the works of some three-letter-agency, I think it's genuinely organic. Millions of people throwing moral support to Ukrainians, who despite the sins of the Azov Battalion really are defending their homes from an aggressive invasion. Much like Iraqis or Afghans or Vietnamese or Yemenis or...

And it helps the blue and gold flag memes that Russia's performance - so far - has been so blitheringly incompetent. Michael Kofman, one of the few commentators to have predicted war, has gone on numerous social media threads about both logistical failures and the bizarre way Russia has abandoned their own combined arms doctrine, opting for slap-dash "special ops" zipping in, getting overstretched, and either captured or killed by even Ukrainian militia. Russian soldier morale, already not the highest among armies, has reportedly been sinking faster than the ruble. The way things look - the way they're made to look - is Ukraine only needs to hold out through another week or two of bombardments until either mass desertion renders Russian forces combat ineffective or Vova suffers a palace coup by generals upset that even their own are dying in this stupid war.

Serious question: when was the last time an American General died in battle? I can't think of any since the Civil War - maybe, since Confederates don't count.

A lesson everyone should have learned from Syria is light infantry craft matters. The Kurdish YPG demonstrated this over and over against Islamic State. Ukrainian regular military and militia have demonstrated it over and over again. But light infantry can only do so much against heavy armor, especially when Russia can afford to keep throwing men and material into the Ukraine meatgrinder. For all their bravery, a Ukraine that doesn't reach some ceasefire deal with the invaders is looking at the decimation of Kyiv (which might be happening as you read this) followed by an occupation and insurgency.

Here's how an insurgency works: think about everyone in your entire extended family. All of them, from the old yia-yias to the bouncing new babies to the middle-aged failures. Now kill two thirds of them. Of those, a third died bad. Like basement and power drill bad. In exchange, you maybe get the occupiers to back off for a while. In rare cases, the occupiers leave because the political situation among their bosses no longer allows for the costs of the occupation. That usually takes a few changes in the political leadership or maybe a new generation reaching age of majority. Also, for this thought experiment, you are not one of the guerillas. You just live in the occupied territory. The guerrillas lose more.

A bad deal for Ukraine. And every neighboring country. And it's the big plan inside the Beltway:

The ways that Western countries would support a Ukrainian resistance are beginning to take shape. Officials have been reluctant to discuss detailed plans, since they’re premised on a Russian military victory that, however likely, hasn’t happened yet. But as a first step, Ukraine’s allies are planning for how to help establish and support a government-in-exile, which could direct guerrilla operations against Russian occupiers, according to several U.S. and European officials.

NATO will not engage Russia directly. Which is a good thing, no matter how many schools and hospitals get shelled into rubble. But NATO will keep an unconventional war simmering in occupied Ukraine, nominally to bleed Russia, but also empowering the worst factions within Ukraine. Thoughtful, democratic types make for poor guerillas and Langley never arms Marxist rebels no matter who they're fighting. All this proposed support is going to the Azov Battalion and fellow travelers, because arming the Afghan Mujahideen worked out so well.

Except now, the Great Powers quagmire with militant reactionaries is in the middle of "civilized" Europe. The blowback coming from Putin's stupid war is going to make Paris 2015 look like harsh language.

Oh Shit

Putin is having his Bush Goes to Baghdad moment. Whether this is shock and awe to break off those breakaway regions or a prelude to a Ukraine-wide military occupation, it both amounts to the same thing: thousands dead and the weakness of the Russian state exposed (counter-intuitively) by it's massive violent demonstration.

I remember Stan Goff making this point in late 2004 (can't dig up the old Counterpunch/Beast article, may only be on Wayback now). That the US invading Iraq in 2003 was because they couldn't bring any other measures to bear, that US hegemony had already degraded to the point that soft power didn't work. Short-term, the US military defeated the Iraqi military but then a decade of occupation only managed to produce a corrupt government-in-name-only and the Islamic State.

That's the Russo-Ukraine War trajectory. Swift Russian tactical victory followed by long, grinding decline. It's already a domestically unpopular operation (which will probably fluctuate back and forth, people can forgive any atrocity if it achieves "victory") and has now effectively shut Russia out of the global economy with the all but stated death of Nord Stream 2. Now, the US faced a huge backlash for the Iraq adventure but the US in 2003 was also at it's hyperpower peak. Russia today has been under 8 years of Crimea sanctions and last I checked has a negative birth rate. Holding the threat of invasion was getting dialogue with the US and EU but now that's done. In trying to make Russia great again, Putin just set them on the path to being North Korea.

Anatol Lieven has been one of the war skeptics to still honestly assess what a war might be like. And he doesn't mince words:

The European Union would impose greatly intensified sanctions that would do vast damage to an already troubled Russian economy; the Nord Stream gas pipeline would be abandoned; Russia would be forced into almost complete dependence on China; parts of the Ukrainian army would fight very hard, and might inflict heavy Russian casualties; and if it occupies large new territories, Russia would face the challenge of ruling not the pro-Russian populations of the Donbas and Crimea, but significant numbers of infuriated and rebellious Ukrainians.

That the Siloviki running the Kremlin would take a look at all of this and decide Operation Ukrainian Freedom is better than it's coy brinksmanship of the past year is testament to Neocon-level idiot hubris, an air of desperation over maintaining their own power domestically, or likely both.

And, living on a different continent, this would all be so much background noise - the usual misery of the universe - if not for all the Acela corridor ghouls now salivating to arm Ukraine. Maybe that's why I'm rambling all over the place, because waking up to "War's on," in the one country that sabre-rattles the most at Russia, calling this "Our Sudetenland!" while forgetting Our Haditha means living in the crossfire of two sclerotic oligarchies, always threatening to sock each other in the goshdarn teeth while the ice caps continue melting.

White Riot

History repeats itself but it's important to be clear what history. Last week's failed coup attempt by MAGA and QAnon reactionaries on behalf of President Trump has already been likened to a "putsch" or even the infamous Kristallnacht. These comparisons are natural as Trump and his supporters are fascists - absolutely and beyond any reasonable doubt - but as detailed in such histories of World War II like William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when the Brownshirts had their own riot the rest of the Nazi Party was already well connected to the Conservative Party within the Reichstag as well as German business leaders. That's how Hitler ascended to the chancellorship despite the Nazis never gaining a plurality of political support.

Rather, the attack on Capitol Hill of 6 January is most comparable to Al Qaeda bombing the USS Cole.

In late 2000, the US Navy destroyer USS Cole was anchored off the coast of Yemen. Prior to this, Al Qaeda had already placed itself on the FBI's radar with the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, leading then President Clinton to reportedly develop a fixation on shutting down the terrorist network. This doubled after a small boat loaded with munitions slammed into the Cole, killing fifteen American sailors and injuring a further 37. FBI investigators, with lackluster CIA help, were closing in on Osama bin Laden in late 2000 and into early 2001, then the new Bush administration ordered everyone to drop this Al Qaeda nonsense and turn their attention to Iraq.

Then September 11th happened.

The United States is currently in such a liminal space as it was between the USS Cole Bombing and September 11th. Without the latter, the war against Al Qaeda would have remained a shadowy business of investigations and interrogations. After September 11th, the world got the War on Terror. Either scenario ends with Al Qaeda demolished as it was never a sustainable model for an irregular force but the scenario we know came with tremendous destruction and pain.

Like Al Qaeda, QAnon is unsustainable and born of a delusion. The paranoid ravings of pizza sex dungeons and turning the frogs gay are as grounded as the global holy war Osama bin Laden and his other Mujahideen buddies fantasized about. And also like Al Qaeda in 2000, QAnon thinks they’re winning. The storming of Capitol Hill looks like a victory because you didn’t see anyone stop them on TV. Over 80 people have since been arrested by the FBI and are facing felony murder charges, but the dream that Trump shall soon enact his master plan and all the evil Democrats will be swept aside for some glorious Patriot Reich still animates the thousands threatening to descend on Washington DC and state capitols before Joe Biden’s inauguration a week from now.

The scale of this upcoming armed revolt will determine how this second War on Terror plays out. If there are sporadic clashes, pipe bombs that go off or not, the next few years will see a low-key counter-insurgency waged by the FBI. A darker and more dystopian retread of the 1990s, when Timothy McVeigh and other homegrown bin Ladens made brief splashes in the national consciousness before being swiftly ground under by the federal security forces. And while a relatively more peaceful scenario, this will also see QAnon’s principles nursed by a Republican Party that has no other option for protecting their own jobs and transferred to later generations in a slow, ugly spiral into an ever more vicious and dangerous society outside increasingly over-policed urban enclaves.

Still, this is the best case scenario for the next week.

The worst case scenario is QAnon stages some real tactical victory. Not in DC - anyone making a run at the inauguration will be vaporized - but in state capitols in Michigan or Pennsylvania. A MAGA militia could conceivably occupy a state legislature or governor’s mansion by force of arms and could even hold it until a federal response - and there would have to be a federal response, as so many American police have drunk the QAnon kool aid.

This is the more dramatic scenario and arguably a very likely scenario because American reactionaries really think they can win a civil war - which in their imaginings is always fought against baristas and gender studies departments, not the National Guard. For all the shock and horror, a QAnon “victory” like this will be swiftly crushed because the interests that really matter in America cannot allow such insurrection and because the basic logic of power demands such threats be crushed as a message to the others. It would be horrific, a national trauma, and over much faster than the first scenario with QAnon designated a terrorist organization and the GOP collapsing as a viable political party. Like the first scenario, the FBI would spend years hunting down every last Parler account but without the sideshow of political nihilists trying to flirt with a terrorist base. The entire national conversation would go in one way and the de facto military totalitarianism that really dominates American politics would be laid bare.

Impeaching Trump a second time, while good and right, will not change his followers’ minds. They are diving all in on a civil war they believe they can win but simply cannot. No action on your part will affect the coming days and we are all now at the mercy of history.

So I Just Read Les Misérables

 

This regards the 1987 Signet Classics edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, complete and unabridged, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the original French to English translation by C.E. Wilbour. All spoilers to follow.

I'd tried reading Les Misérables several years ago but quite honestly got tired with Hugo's overwrought prose somewhere in Volume II. Since the world is ending and I ran out of library books, I figured this was a good time to give it another go. I'm glad I did because while Hugo doesn't get any less wrought as the story grows, it's both a fascinating exploration of 19th Century society in the shadow of revolution and an insight into the psyche of the time, still wrestling with old aristocratic habits and new republican ideals.

But having said all that - and planning to say more - what really defines this gargantuan novel is a morality play, centered on the character of Jean Valjean. Imprisoned for stealing bread and kept for four times his original sentence because of repeated escape attempts, he is both sympathetic while being hardened and cunning enough to be a compelling hero. Some might be attempted to call him Byronic but rather his turn from a life of wickedness - or what society deems wicked - to the good is much more religious. Embittered and alienated from all humanity at the start, the kindness and forgiveness of a provincial bishop sets him on his path to redemption at the start to which he pursues with as little regard for the mores and norms of society as when he was a criminal but with rather with a focus on compassion and relieving the suffering of others.

Valjean finds his project of human betterment embodied in the orphaned Cosette. Orphaned by his own charitable machinations in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine, the benefactor from nowhere who builds up the factory town Montreuil-sur-Mer. A factory that employs - and degrades and throws away - Cosette's martyred mother Fantine. But before he can swoop in and save the poor orphan, Valjean's past catches up with him in a morality play within a morality play.

Enter Inspector Javert, Hugo's embodiment not of Good but of Order. Javert's commitment to law and authority is tautological - it must be obeyed because it is law and authority - and he takes visible pleasure in subjecting others to the law's severity. At first suspecting the beloved Mayor Madeleine of being the convict Valjean, he later recants his theory as some poor dolt in a neighboring town is arrested for stealing apples and roundly accused of being the infamous Valjean. Real name Champmathieu, he is subjected to a Kafkaesque trial in which his insistence upon his true identity is proof of his guilt.

This play within a play serves to illustrate Hugo's larger point about the society of his day and law and order. How stealing bread or simply mistaken identity can condemn someone to lifelong ignominy, the old feudal castes persisting under different names, as further demonstrated when "Monsieur Madeleine" storms the trial to proclaim himself the true Jean Valjean, to which everyone reacts with incredulity. He can't possibly be a convict because he is a respected mayor and businessman.

However, as much as Hugo challenges these lingering ideas of inherent goodness and wickedness, of castes assigned either success or misery for all time, he still cannot break free of the essentialist view of human nature. This Great Man theory is a constant theme through Hugo's novel, often in tension with his professed republican ideals. For all his focus on the dignity and suffering of the lower classes, it's only through the superiority of Mayor Madeleine - the reformed Jean Valjean - that uplifts the community of Montfermeil. When he surrenders himself to the law to save Champmathieu, the whole town goes back to seed.

The long digression on the Battle of Waterloo further cements this paradox in Hugo's thinking. Hugo talks glowingly of Napoleon, of how his incredible successes had to be ordained by Providence, and contrasts this with the dull and offensively un-brilliant Wellington. But the dull guy won.

To go on my own brief digression - and Hugo would approve, having dedicated an entire chapter to the history of the sewers of Paris - this Great Man theory so enraptured the French post-Napoleon that it arguably led to their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The Grand Armee had long been accustomed to being the instrument of their supreme commander's genius, but where Napoleon III proved timid and dejected the mid-rank officers of the Prussian forces quickly exploited every opportunity to drive the fight across Europe and back to Paris. Not through any particular genius but rather through disciplined efficiency.

Speaking of the siege of Paris and glorious Great Men getting ground under by forces of history, the tension between Hugo's conflicting ideals also manifests in the dichotomy between Enjolras and Thenardier. The former a young republican idealist and leader of a sort of proletariat salon of downwardly mobile intellectuals styling themselves revolutionaries, the latter an unscrupulous thief and con artist always striving after a new payday. Thenardier appears first in the narrative, he and his wife nominally accepting Cosette into their home to care for her while Fantine works herself to an early grave to provide for the little girl. Thenardier naturally makes the little girl a Cinderella-like slave, while constantly demanding more and more payments from Fantine, citing the many expenses incurred raising Cosette. Which is a blatant lie.

When Valjean escapes the chain gang yet again and comes to rescue Cosette - his coat sewn up with bank bills from his Madeleine fortune - Thenardier lets the little girl go for a song and a mere 15,000 Francs. He's got a good grift going with a tavern at the time, where his wife gets to lord it over everyone and his own daughters get to play with dolls and a kitten. But when this family appears again, they are fallen much lower in circumstances and are living in a squalid boardinghouse. Thenardier is left to composing fraudulent letters begging well-to-do Parisians - or who he thinks are well-to-do - for a little remittance here and there, while quite literally whoring his own daughters out to his criminal contacts. As much pains as Hugo goes to in portraying society beating down the "good" scoundrels like Jean Valjean, here he offers no such compassion for low and grasping people in a chapter even named "The Noxious Poor."

Contrast with the impoverished in matter but not in spirit Enjolras and his coterie. At first secondary to the bildungsroman of Marius that makes up the second half of the novel, they represent the boiling political radicalism that claimed descent from the Revolution but doesn't have much to show in terms of concrete plans - at least as presented by Hugo. They have plenty of noble airs and when the uprising of 1832 comes, they all take up arms and man the barricades gladly, but they have no real plans beyond dying gloriously for "the cause."

Really, the particulars don't concern Hugo so much as Progress. Like Hegel, he sees a deliberate direction to history, rising from the barbarous Ancien Regime into the glorious Republic of freedom and reason. And in service of this Progress, the violence of the barricades is completely warranted. Enjolras feels morally empowered by his ideals to kill not just the gendarmes mobilized to suppress the uprising but also to execute those whose rebellion is too sloppy and undisciplined. He even plans to execute a police spy within the barricade - the long absent from the narrative at this point Inspector Javert - but is bamboozled by Jean Valjean who arrives to rescue not just his nemesis Javert but also Marius, who is due for a wedded ever after ending with Cosette. In the process, he manages to assist the barricade without taking a single life - allowing Hugo to maintain Valjean's sainthood while also indulging in the thrill of revolutionary violence.

In the midst of all this bloody climax though, we get to see an unintentionally more compelling character. Eponine, daughter of Thenardier whose arc takes her from playing with a kitten in the Thenardier Inn to walking barefoot and broken through the slums of Paris illustrates how society fails the unfortunate. She descends through the lower strata of acceptable morality not out of any personal failings or even mistakes, but rather from the misfortune of birth. Her father - and mother, to a lesser degree - are the few truly wicked in Hugo's novel and their vulgar machinations drag their daughter into ignominy, poverty, and an untimely death. A better illustration of how society fails the less fortunate than the transcendent sainthood of Jean Valjean.

All of this being said, I can appreciate how much of a classic Les Misérables is but I wouldn't recommend it as a quarantine read. You'd have a better time with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which offers a more digestible prose style and greater psychological depth. But if you've read that already, you should give Hugo's magnum opus a go.