Here is Fellow Traveler Quico Toro with the bad news!
Venezuela’s New President Is No Moderate
In fact, Delcy Rodríguez is a regime extremist.
Quico Toro
Jan 5
Here is One after another, Venezuelans lined up to share instances of her awfulness: her tireless whitewashing of the regime’s crimes, the international sanctions she was under, her leadership of the sham constitutional convention Maduro had used to void the opposition’s win in parliamentary elections in 2024, and especially the close links she’s reputed to have with SEBIN, the hated secret police behind Venezuela’s most notorious political prison and torture center.
To Venezuelans who had spent over a decade seeing in her one of Nicolás Maduro’s most ardent and uncompromising acolytes, calling her a “moderate” is an outrage. Here’s a woman who has held all of the most important offices of state—oil minister, minister of foreign affairs, president of the constituent assembly, vice president—and has never allowed any hint of sunlight to appear between her and Maduro.
Earlier today, Delcy Rodríguez became the new president of Venezuela.
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Victimhood
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and the founder of Caracas Chronicles. Like eight million other Venezuelans, he was forced to flee Venezuela’s dictatorship.
Editor: The reader can only wonder at the absence of Historical Memory that afflicts Quico Toro, and his cadre of Neo-Cons: who pass themselves off as the victims, now the prisoner of the American Fachist’s Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio!
Should the reader look to the rich history of Latin America from at the the rise of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara ,The Sandinistas, The Contras, etc.
Editor: Even William James, via Alexander Livingston, offers this: ‘Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism’
IT WAS A wintry night in St Petersburg and revolution was in the air. A piercing wind whipped off the frozen Neva river as, before dawn, the conspirators hurried to Senate Square, close to the Winter Palace. They drew up their troops beneath the stern stare of Peter the Great’s bronze statue; the gilded spire of the Admiralty pierced the inky sky. Before long the imperial cavalry would arrive, and the cannons, and the tsar. “We are going to die, brothers!” exulted one of the rebels. “Oh, how gloriously we are going to die!”
Though barely remembered in the West, that fateful day200 years ago—December 26th 1825 in the modern calendar—was a hinge in time. Had the conspirators prevailed, their country’s history, and the world’s, might have been drastically different. As it was these men, known as the Decembrists, were transmuted into myth. As with many myths, interpretations of theirs vary. To Russia’s authorities, then and now, they were traitors. To admirers, they are champions of the flickering hope that another Russia is possible.
Revolutions are typically fomented by the uppity middle classes. This plot went right to the top. The Decembrists were the flower of Russia’s aristocracy: young men inspired by the American and French revolutions, the Enlightenment and Romantic nationalism. They were immersed in literature, modelling themselves on Roman heroes. Kondraty Ryleyev, a ringleader, railed in verse against “despotism’s heavy yoke”. Alexander Pushkin, the era’s bard, was a sympathiser. “Here is Caesar,” wrote Pushkin. “Where is Brutus?”
Crucially, they were military officers, mostly in the imperial guards, who had fought in the Napoleonic wars. As Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, another leader, put it: “We were the children of 1812.” That was when Napoleon invaded Russia; two years later Russian forces entered Paris. They returned flushed with the pride of liberators—and with visions of bringing citizenship and rights to a vast land blighted by arbitrary rule, in which a third of the population were serfs. Their revolt was, in part, an example of the blowback of war.
As Yuri Lotman, a historian, observed, the Decembrists represented a new psychological type. They were the first generation of Russian aristocrats to distinguish between service to the monarch and to society and the nation. They had earned their honour and dignity, they believed, not been granted them from above. Still, at first they hoped the tsar, Alexander I, would oversee reform of his downtrodden empire. But though he espoused liberal plans, even enacting a few on the empire’s fringes, he backtracked.
The Decembrists formed secret societies, based in St Petersburg, the imperial capital, and what is now Ukraine. Initially neither subversive nor altogether secret, they hardened into a conspiracy for a coup d’état.
Russian history was littered with coups, but the Decembrists’ aims were unique—even if they did not entirely agree on them. The most radical advocated a republic, others a constitutional monarchy. Still, they shared common goals. Having fought alongside conscripted serfs, all demanded their emancipation. They also wanted representative government, the rule of law and an end to caste-based privileges, including their own. Passionate patriots, they envisaged their country as a modern nation state. “All the nations of Europe are attaining laws and liberty,” declared a manifesto. “The Russian people deserve both.”
Blood on the snow
Autocracies are most vulnerable at moments of succession. Russia’s came sooner than the Decembrists expected—maybe too soon—when Alexander died suddenly. Since he was childless, his ostensible heir was his brother Constantine. But he had secretly renounced the throne, meaning another brother, Nicholas, would succeed. Because of the secrecy, however, imperial troops began swearing oaths to Constantine. So did Nicholas, lest he look like a usurper. Briefly, reported the Times of London, Russia had “two self-denying emperors, and no active ruler”.
This was an opening for the Decembrists, who set about agitating against Nicholas. Tipped off about the revolt, he instructed that a new oath of allegiance—to him—be sworn on December 26th. And so, on a frigid morning, the Decembrists led the troops who embraced their cause to Senate Square. Their plan was to seize the Winter Palace, arrest the tsar, install an interim government and convene an assembly. For a while they had the quiet, snow-covered square to themselves. Then forces loyal to Nicholas moved in.
In hindsight, the ensuing drama is doubly poignant. First, because many Decembrists didn’t expect to succeed. Rather they thought it was their duty to Russia—and each other—to make a stand. “There may be little prospect of success,” conceded Ryleyev, but “a beginning must be made.” They saw themselves as tragic actors on the stage of history, hoping for vindication by posterity rather than immediate victory.
Yet in a narrowsense, they might have won. The best chance for revolutionaries is often at the very start, when regimes are caught in confusion, and so it proved. Thousands of largely supportive civilians crowded around the square. The rebels could have seized the cannons that trundled across the cobbles. Above all, they might easily have killed Nicholas, who rode around imperiously, shooing away onlookers. Alexander Bulatov, a hero of 1812, stood nearby with two pistols, but found he couldn’t pull the trigger.
What if the Decembrists had won the day? The rebellion might have been swiftly quashed. Russia could have devolved into civil war, then slid back into despotism. Or, just conceivably, reform would have eased the discontent that led to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Communism might not have overrun Russia—in which case Nazism might not have risen in Germany…
So much for hypotheticals. In reality, the Decembrists were undone by haste and disorganisation. Their leader, Sergei Trubetskoy, didn’t show up. His courage is unlikely to have failed (he was a hero of the battle of Borodino); perhaps he foresaw that the amateurish plot would lead to a bloodbath and crackdown. Without orders, the mutineers shivered in their ranks in ten degrees of frost. Overall they numbered around 3,000. Nicholas’s much larger force encircled them.
It was one of those bleak winter days in St Petersburg when it never truly gets light. Both sides were loth to kill their compatriots; soldiers crossed themselves in the icy air. At length Nicholas ordered cavalry charges in a bid to disperse the rebels. The horses were repulsed, partly by stones and firewood hurled from the crowd. Several officials who interceded with the conspirators were shot. Bishops vainly beseeched them to retreat. “Our last minutes are close,” exhorted Ryleyev, “but these are the minutes of our freedom!”
“Give orders that this place should be swept by cannons,” Nicholas was advised, “or resign the throne!” Four artillery pieces were duly brought forward. No one moved. First came warning shots, at which the rebels shouted “hurrah!” Then grapeshot was loaded; it is said that the gunner refused to fire, so an officer did instead. As blood oozed across the snow, dazed insurgents tried to flee across the Neva. Some drowned when cannons smashed the ice. At least 1,271 people were killed, including many civilians.
By six o’clock it was over. The bullet-ridden Senate building was hastily replastered. Bloodstains were covered with fresh snow. Corpses were shoved into frozen canals. And the conspirators were rounded up.
Furious, Nicholas personally interviewed the leaders at the Winter Palace. He was surprised to see Bulatov among them; Bulatov said he was astonished to see Nicholas—because he had very recently meant to kill him. Offered a pardon, another Decembrist replied that it was precisely the tsar’s ability to override the law that provoked the revolt. The men were held in squalor, chained or isolated on Nicholas’s whim.
Interrogated at night, they were pressed to implicate themselves and each other in attempted regicide. In June 1826 scores were sentenced to decades of hard labour and exile in Siberia. Swords were broken over their heads in symbolic executions. Though capital punishment had been suspended in Russia for 50 years, five leaders were condemned to die.
It is never completely dark during the “white nights” of a St Petersburg summer. In the milky light of a July morning, the five were led to the gallows. Three of the ropes snapped. “Oh Lord, they can’t even hang people properly in Russia,” deadpanned Muravyov-Apostol after his tumble. New ropes were fetched.
The rest were clapped in irons and packed off to Siberia. The tsar instructed their wives to divorce them, but 11 women followed the men into exile, leaving behind their titles, fortunes and children. Arduous journeys led to dismal prisons and labour in mines. Kept in chains for over two years, the men told a jailer they had but one request: “not to insult or humiliate them”.
Their doomed revolution inspired both Tolstoy and Lenin
The Decembrist families suffered and survived together. When their penal servitude ended, some settled in Irkutsk, near beautiful Lake Baikal. You can—or could—visit two of their houses, the blue timberwork decorated with ornate window frames in the 19th-century Siberian style. They painted, made music, studied, taught and farmed. By the time Nicholas’s successor pardoned them in 1856, many had died.
Their story, however, does not end with their demise on a malfunctioning gallows or in the Siberian taiga. The struggle over their memory has been as fierce as the carnage on the square.
After the uprising, newspapers obediently described it as a riot by a handful of “madmen”. An official report of 1826 portrayed the Decembrists as traitors, bent on anarchy and the empire’s collapse.
But for generations of Russian writers they have been emblems of honour and self-sacrifice; the gallows became a martyr’s cross. Alexander Herzen, a liberal thinker, first formulated this version of their myth, seeing them as Roman heroes willing to die “to awaken a new life”. Leo Tolstoy planned to write a novel called “The Decembrists” (his protagonist was to be “an enthusiast, a mystic, a Christian”). As he plunged into their back story, it became “War and Peace”.
After 1917 the Decembrist myth was appropriated by both Bolsheviks and dissidents. Lenin inducted them into the pantheon of Soviet heroes, presenting his own rise to power as the climax of a revolutionary saga that began in 1825. Statues and streets were dedicated to them. This veneration gave cover to those who instead saw them as epitomes of selflessness.
The kgb sabotaged tributes to the uprising, an officer recalled. His name? Vladimir Putin
In 1967 a play about them by Leonid Zorin was staged in Moscow. At its heart was the moral dilemma of revolution: can it be right to shed blood for a higher goal? The Decembrists’ ideas resonated with the audience of Soviet intelligentsia (which included Alexander Solzhenitsyn). “We travelled half the world, liberating it from a tyrant,” the Trubetskoy character said, evoking the mood of Russian soldiers after the second world war as much as 1825. “And what have we found when we came back? Tyranny at home!”
After Soviet tanks extinguished the Prague Spring in 1968—and with it hopes for reform in Moscow—Alexander Galich dedicated a poem to the Decembrists. Distributed through samizdat, it asked: “Do you dare to come to the square?” Soon, in a landmark of the dissident movement, eight protesters walked onto Red Square bearing signs with slogans such as “For your freedom and ours!” Just as the Decembrists looked to Rome for models, the dissidents looked to the Decembrists, whose Romantic brilliance contrasted with the grey, unheroic Soviet world.
On the uprising’s 150th anniversary, the fight over their legacy spilled back onto St Petersburg’s streets. Artists and poets gathered on Senate Square. “For a moment of freedom,” one of their placards read, “I’m ready to give my life!” They were detained, the placard tossed, like the rebels’ corpses, into the frozen Neva. A KGB officer later recalled that, when dissidents planned commemorations for the Decembrists, the kgb put on rival events in the same place. “We’d show up with a brass band. We would lay our wreaths.” Foreign observers would “yawn a couple of times and go home”. The officer’s name was Vladimir Putin.
Even in Mr Putin’s nightmarish presidency, the Decembrists remain an inspiration for some and a moral threat to others. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a one-time oligarch who spent a decade in a Siberian camp, invoked them at his show trial in 2005. Alexei Navalny inherited their civic nationalism and sense of mission, and finally their martyrdom. Conversely, in May 2025 the Decembrists’ case was relitigated at a Kremlin-sponsored conference in St Petersburg. The justice minister decried their “lack of honour”, arguing that their punishment was too lenient. The main lesson was that “the Russian state cannot afford to be weak.”
Were the Decembrists anything more than glorious failures? In the short term the regime they loathed grew more draconian. As often in Russia’s past, reckons Andrei Zorin, a historian (and the playwright’s son), the actions of “the purest and most noble people” inadvertently set back reform. Anti-Putin protests have likewise led to crackdowns and war.
From one point of view the men of 1825 were hopeless dreamers, too aloof or naive to see that Russia’s size and history mean it is doomed to eternal misrule. Or perhaps it is still too early to say. The Decembrists’ rebellion lasted only a few hours, but 200 years on, they remain a beacon of individual dignity in undignified times. A beginning must be made, and it was.
Editor: Reader thank you for your patience ! Here are the final papagraphs of this ‘Economist History’ as the Manufactured War in Ukraine seems to be reaching its toxic end-game? Before Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his retinue decamp?
The reader must grant that this Economist writer and her/his storied cast of characters is compelling?
Karl Marx, Darwin, Javier Milei,Margaret Thatcher, yet this paragraph might trouble that reader?
People will sagely nod at the mention of the anniversary; they will claim to have read it. Yet its reputation exceeds its contents. The book contains fewer genuinely novel ideas than many assume, and more weaknesses than its modern admirers acknowledge.
The Ecomomist writer offers this sketch of Smith’s life, in self-serving reductive terms, Smith seems to have led this writer to a dislike of a man of anothern time and place?
Kirkcaldy, a small town on Scotland’s east coast, is a nice place. But aside from a small alleyway, Adam Smith Close, the town has largely forgotten that Adam Smith lived there. The Adam Smith Heritage Centre is rarely open. The house in which he wrote the “Wealth of Nations” no longer exists.
Kirkcaldy’s lack of boastfulness about Smith is in keeping with the man’s character. Smith was shy, though he enjoyed drinking claret with friends. He never married. He had little time for pomp, quitting a scholarship at Oxford in 1746 because he thought the teaching was poor. He was also fantastically absent-minded. Lost in thought, he once wandered out of town in his dressing gown. He brewed a beverage of bread and butter and pronounced it the worst tea he had ever tasted.
He was nonetheless brilliant. By his early thirties he was the professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. Before long he decided that becoming an independent scholar would allow him to make a bigger impact. Following his great work’s publication in 1776, the reading public wanted more. But Smith never felt that he had completed a worthy successor. On his deathbed in 1790, he ordered his papers to be burned.
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John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, called him a “half-bred and half-witted Scotchman” who advised his readers to “hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods
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How else to understand Smith’s second-most famous quotation?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
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This is an idea that Mr Milei, Ronald Reagan and Thatcher came to espouse. According to Smith’s most famous quotation:
“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
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A cottage industry of academics, led by Amartya Sen, a Nobel prizewinning economist, has encouraged people to read Smith’s work more closely, however. Do so, and the caricature melts away. His first big work, the “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), opened with a clear statement opposing greed-is-good:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others…though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
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Reader on the question of ‘The Impartial Spectator’ see D.D. Raphael’s book:
Oxford University Press
August 28, 2009
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Raphael’s discussion of the way Smith develops the idea of an impartial spectator to explain how we morally judge ourselves is as elegant as it is economical. His discussion spans several chapters, which include a critical appraisal of Smith’s theory of conscience and an examination of Smith’s account of moral rules and the virtues; but his chapter, “The Impartial Spectator,” is the central one. Here Raphael is especially careful to detail Smith’s revisions.
Raphael prefaces this discussion with a brief chapter on the role of the ‘spectator’ in Hutcheson’s and Hume’s moral theories. On his reading, Smith follows his predecessors in grounding moral judgments in the feelings of a spectator, attempting, as they did, to capture the disinterestedness of the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval. According to Raphael, Hutcheson’s and Hume’s idea of a spectator is that of a stranger — someone who is “indifferent in the sense of not being an interested party.” (34) All three philosophers aim to provide an empirical account of the moral sentiments.
Hutcheson was the first to insist that our approval of someone else’s actions can be disinterested, “uninfluenced by any thought of benefit to oneself.” (28) He claims that we possess a special moral sense, in addition to our other senses, that disposes us to feel approval or disapproval when we survey people’s character traits and actions. Hume’s contribution is that he saw the need to explain our capacity to approve and disapprove. He traces it to sympathy: we sympathize with the person herself and everyone with whom she interacts. We judge her character traits and actions expressive of them to be virtuous or vicious in terms of whether they are good or bad for everyone affected. Raphael thinks that the idea of an impartial spectator is present in Hume, although not the term.
On Raphael’s reading of Smith, he only needs the simpler idea of a spectator as “not being an interested party” to explain moral judgments we make about others. His originality and lasting contribution lie in his account of how we come to judge ourselves: how we acquire conscience, how it operates, and how it becomes authoritative.
There are two central features of Smith’s explanation of conscience, both of which were present at all stages in the development of his theory. One is that conscience is a social product, a “mirror of social feeling.” The other is that an agent is able to judge herself only by imagining what an impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of in her conduct.
Smith first stresses the impartiality of the reactions of spectators in his discussion of the virtue of self-command: when an agent tries to moderate his passions to the point where a spectator can sympathize. The virtue of self-command is essential to our being able to see ourselves as others do. Conscience originally springs from our “social experience” of being judged by others and being spectators who judge others. We have a natural desire to be loved and we dread blame. Because we love praise and hate blame, we learn to see our conduct through the eyes of others. We come to approve or disapprove of ourselves by imagining how spectators would judge us.
Raphael argues that Smith increasingly came to trust “imagination more and society less.” (38) One reason is that he was bothered by an objection that Sir Gilbert Elliott raised after TMS first appeared: if conscience is merely a reflection of actual spectators’ social attitudes, how would judgments of conscience differ from those of actual spectators?
However, even in the first edition, Smith’s spectator isn’t an actual bystander, but one we imagine. In the 2nd and 6th editions, Smith stresses even more that the spectator is a creation of imagination. Self-examination requires an ability to divide ourselves:
Whenever I endeavor to examine my own conduct … I divide myself as it were into two persons: and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator… The second is the agent… (TMS III. 1.6)
I become a judge of my own conduct by imagining what I would feel if I were a spectator of my own behavior. I then compare these feelings with the feelings that I as an agent actually have.
This leads to Smith’s famous idea of an internal, impartial spectator — “the man within.” Although conscience is initially a product of the approval and disapproval of others, Smith retains the traditional idea that “the voice of conscience represents the voice of God.” As a superior tribunal, it may conflict with the judgments of actual spectators. How does conscience gain its independence and become a higher authority?
Once we are capable of judging ourselves, we make a new distinction between being praised and being praiseworthy, being blamed and being blameworthy. We want not only praise, but to be praiseworthy; we dread not only blame, but to be blameworthy. Actual spectators may be partial and ill informed, but we are able to view ourselves without partiality or misunderstanding. I may gain the approval of others, for example, by pretending to be virtuous. But since I am able to judge what others would think of me, if they knew everything and were impartial, I realize that I do not merit praise. Not only may the judgments of the internal, impartial spectator differ from those of actual spectators, conscience comes to represent a higher tribunal. Smith eventually saw that being “flattered by the praise of society,” while ignoring the superior verdicts of conscience, is a sign of vanity.
At one point, Raphael remarks that a spectator theory is able to explain more easily third-person judgments, and also second-person judgments, but is “apt to be in difficulties with judgments made in the first person (about ‘me’ or ‘us’).” (31) But, on his view, what is original and enduring in Smith’s thought is his explanation of our capacity to judge ourselves from the point of view of an impartial spectator. He also notes that a spectator theory is “more comfortable with passing verdicts on what has been done in the past than with considering and deciding what should be done in the future.” (31) Does Raphael think that Smith is able to explain how we go from being a spectator of our own conduct to being a moral agent who tries to live up to her own ideals of conduct? In the moment of action, we may not be able to view ourselves impartially. But doesn’t the importance of the internal, impartial spectator lie in the fact that the spectator is the person to whom we, as agents, try to conform our conduct, thereby becoming worthy of love and praise? Raphael says that, according to Smith, an agent who attains a high degree of self-command can “identify himself with the imagined spectator to the extent of obliterating the natural feelings of self-regard.” (41)
Raphael maintains that Smith’s psychological and sociological explanation of conscience also shows that judgments of conscience possess a kind of authority or normativity. Does he think that Smith is able to show that they are authentically normative — answering a justificatory question about why we ought to approve as an impartial and well-informed conscience would? Or does he think that Smith is answering a question in “moral anthropology” — explaining why we are inclined to think that the judgments of conscience are normative?
Interestingly, Hume sketches a process that is similar in some ways to Smith’s account of conscience. According to Hume, sympathy ensures that we will catch the moral feelings other people have about us. Since we care deeply about what others think about us, our internalization of the praise and blame of others has the effect of making us see ourselves as others see us, valuing ourselves as others value us. Sympathy thus pressures us to survey ourselves as we appear to others. Hume says that sympathy may even go so far as to make us disapprove of our own vices, even though they benefit us.
Anyone interested in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy or in 17thand 18thcentury British moral philosophy will find Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator a stimulating book.
These paragraphs end this attack on Smith of the ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and its advocates like Amartya Sen and D.D. Raphael ! And almost adoration for ‘The Wealth of Nations’ framed with this wan cliche : ‘But there is no need for the best bottle in your cellar’ !
Second, Smith sometimes got economics wrong—not just in his support for the Navigation Acts. In the “Wealth of Nations” he argued for the “labour theory of value” (the idea that the amount of work that goes into a product determines its price, rather than how useful that product is). This theory distracted economists for decades and laid the groundwork for Marxism. Exploitation, in Marx’s view, arose from the difference between how much workers had laboured to create a good and what they were paid for producing it. Without Smith, there could have been no Marx.
Third, Smith introduced fewer core ideas of economics than you might think. He did not invent GDP (William Petty, in the 1660s, probably gets that accolade). He was not the first to recommend free trade. François Quesnay, a French economist, got there earlier. Nor was Smith the first to recognise the benefits of the division of labour. Plato beat him by 2,000 years.
Some argue that what makes the “Wealth of Nations” revolutionary is not individual ideas, but its method. Often using his favourite claret as an example, Smith treats the “economy” as a system with regularities. He did not use the term “equilibrium”, yet he clearly understood the interaction of supply and demand. When governments meddle, they distort the process. All interesting; yet these ideas were common in late 18th-century Europe.
Finally, what of his intellectual honesty? The rules about plagiarism were vague in Smith’s day. People often cited others obliquely, or assumed that the reader would already know who originated an idea. Smith, as it happens, was fiercely jealous of his insights, calling out rivals who he believed had stolen them, including Adam Ferguson, another Scottish philosopher, in 1767.
Which makes it funny, then, that the “Wealth of Nations” contains what Salim Rashid of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, delicately calls “unacknowledged borrowings”. Smith does not mention Ferguson’s analysis of the alienation of the worker under the division of labour. Or consider the pin factory. Did Smith personally observe it? Perhaps—he travelled a fair bit. Yet there is circumstantial evidence, including from the details of how the pins were made, that he “borrowed” the idea from the “Encyclopaedia”, a French work. Discussing the charge of plagiarism, John Maynard Keynes shrugged: “It seems unlikely that the question can ever be answered for certain.” So in 2026 raise a glass to the “Wealth of Nations”. But there is no need for the best bottle in your cellar. ■
Economist Reader.
The final paragraphs of this Economist Rewrite of Adam Smith
When the “Wealth of Nations” came out, everyone agreed it was a Very Important Book. But does it warrant calling Smith the “father of economics”? That may be going too far, for three reasons. Smith was a flowery writer; he made strange errors; and he is credited for ideas that were not his.
Take the book itself first. Full of long, winding sentences, it is not nearly as readable as Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” or Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. Even in the 1770s people found it hard to digest, with a contemporary review noting that the work “may be sometimes thought diffuse”. Small wonder that even Smith scholars admit that they have not read the whole thing in one go.
Second, Smith sometimes got economics wrong—not just in his support for the Navigation Acts. In the “Wealth of Nations” he argued for the “labour theory of value” (the idea that the amount of work that goes into a product determines its price, rather than how useful that product is). This theory distracted economists for decades and laid the groundwork for Marxism. Exploitation, in Marx’s view, arose from the difference between how much workers had laboured to create a good and what they were paid for producing it. Without Smith, there could have been no Marx.
Third, Smith introduced fewer core ideas of economics than you might think. He did not invent GDP (William Petty, in the 1660s, probably gets that accolade). He was not the first to recommend free trade. François Quesnay, a French economist, got there earlier. Nor was Smith the first to recognise the benefits of the division of labour. Plato beat him by 2,000 years.
Some argue that what makes the “Wealth of Nations” revolutionary is not individual ideas, but its method. Often using his favourite claret as an example, Smith treats the “economy” as a system with regularities. He did not use the term “equilibrium”, yet he clearly understood the interaction of supply and demand. When governments meddle, they distort the process. All interesting; yet these ideas were common in late 18th-century Europe.
Finally, what of his intellectual honesty? The rules about plagiarism were vague in Smith’s day. People often cited others obliquely, or assumed that the reader would already know who originated an idea. Smith, as it happens, was fiercely jealous of his insights, calling out rivals who he believed had stolen them, including Adam Ferguson, another Scottish philosopher, in 1767.
Which makes it funny, then, that the “Wealth of Nations” contains what Salim Rashid of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, delicately calls “unacknowledged borrowings”. Smith does not mention Ferguson’s analysis of the alienation of the worker under the division of labour. Or consider the pin factory. Did Smith personally observe it? Perhaps—he travelled a fair bit. Yet there is circumstantial evidence, including from the details of how the pins were made, that he “borrowed” the idea from the “Encyclopaedia”, a French work. Discussing the charge of plagiarism, John Maynard Keynes shrugged: “It seems unlikely that the question can ever be answered for certain.” So in 2026 raise a glass to the “Wealth of Nations”. But there is no need for the best bottle in your cellar.
I have spent the last three days reading Mr. Kaplan’s 24 page rambling screed , ‘The Coming Anarchy‘, at The Atlantic published in 1994, just to become familiar with his writing, and found a font of American white male paranoia about the Other:
This exercise in the paranoia of The Hegemon, our enemies are everywhere, is part of the debate in America that included Huntington’s ‘Clash‘ , Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ and that cornerstone of Conservative Sociology ‘The Bell Curve’. Huntington tipped his hand, a bit later in his career, as seer of the fact that America was surrounded by Civilizational Enemies, but more particularly by the Mestizo Hordes,south of our borders, about to engulf American Anglo-Protestant virtue in his Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Mr. Kaplan and his philosophical/historical/political allies are of the Neo-Conservative Declinism School of historiography: the marriage of the Staussians and the epigones of Schmitt.
The operative metaphor of “fated to lead” offered by Kaplan, extemporizes of the central theme of European Colonialism’s ‘mission to civilize‘. Parag Khanna review features the idea of ‘East Coast “universalists” as being out of touch with the rest of America. The question occurs, is it Kaplan’s or Khanna’s idea? The actual term for these ‘East Coast “universalists” is political cosmopolitans, Parag Khanna should know this term!
Yet the reader who confronts the empirical evidence of this weekend , January 28 an 29 2017, at airports across America, in the wake of Trump’s presidential edict/order, to halt refugees/travelers, even Green Card holders, from selected Islamic States, to enter or re-enter America, seems to put that notion of American as ‘fated to lead’ into startling perspective, except to the politically myopic. The potential facts of wall building, and the blockage of the free movement of travelers, threatens the very Free Market Ideology that the Financial Time celebrates as the sine qua non , raison d’etre of The West. Or has Kaplan simply intuited the sea change, from Liberal Internationalism to American Nativism, and tailored his historically informed geographical speculations to the Dismal Age Of Trump?
At a campaign rally in 1976, Ronald Reagan introduced the welfare queen into the public conversation about poverty. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
Who the beneficiary of policy is perceived to be is of material consequence to how it is designed. For the past forty years, U.S. welfare policy has been designed around Reagan’s mythical welfare queen—with very real consequences for the actual families urgently needing support.
Though it was Reagan who gave her the most salient identity, the welfare queen emerged from a long and deeply racialized history of suspicion of and resentment toward families receiving welfare in the United States. Today, 20 years after welfare reform was enacted, this narrative continues to inform policy design by dictating who is “deserving” of support and under what conditions. Ending the reign of the welfare queen over public policy will require recognizing this lineage, identifying how these stereotypes continue to manifest, and reorienting policy design around families as they are—not who they are perceived to be.
Modern-day “welfare” originated from legislation to assist families destabilized by the Great Depression. Although the New Deal laid critical groundwork for future anti-poverty efforts in the U.S., the bifurcation of support along racial lines was present from the start. The 1935 Social Security Act specifically excluded domestic work and agricultural labor—industries that relied heavily on black men and women—from Social Security eligibility. Meanwhile, states had substantial discretion in determining eligibility for welfare, i.e. the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program—flexibility that southern states sometimes used to restrict access to benefits during harvesting seasons, effectively coercing poor, black families into working in the fields at whatever wages were offered. By 1939, the ADC caseload was 80 percent white, despite the disproportionate burden of poverty on black families.
As black Americans moved north during the Great Migration, more black mothers began accessing ADC. This change in dynamics precipitated increasing hostility toward the program in north and south alike, which welfare advocates tried to counter by emphasizing “families,” and specifically white families, as the primary recipients of benefits. Indeed, the political rhetoric and imagery around the “War on Poverty” focused on the white, rural poor to maintain broad support.
However, in the years following the reform, as civil rights struggles intensified, the media’s portrayal of poverty and its relationship to race dramatically shifted. In 1964, only 27 percent of the photos accompanying stories about poverty in three of the country’s top weekly news magazines featured black subjects; the following year, it rose to 49 percent. By 1967, 72 percent of photos accompanying stories about poverty featured black Americans.
It wasn’t just photos that changed. In the late 1960s, the emerging welfare rights movement sought to shift the narrative around public assistance, drawing on the civil rights movement’s rhetoric about dignity, opportunity, and justice, and amplifying broader calls for economic rights as a critical complement to civil rights and a prerequisite for substantive equality. Members of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), who numbered over 100,000 at its peak, “claimed decent income as a right” without tying it to wage work, and, relatedly, also emphasized the work of caregiving. And though the NWRO plan included work incentives so that those who did work would be better off than those who did not, it did not define social citizenship in terms of wage work as prior movements had done.
But, the movement never realized this goal. In fact, the advocacy of low-income black women for a guaranteed income that wasn’t tied to work—and against the backdrop of a national economic recession—triggered a new wave of backlash against welfare recipients and intensified racialized criticisms of the “undeserving” poor.
By the time the “welfare queen” finally emerged on the national stage, the American public was primed for a face to be attached to the perceived waste, fraud, and abuse they saw as enabled by indulgent government programs and absent accountability. By 1989, 64 percent of Americans felt that “welfare benefits make poor people dependent and encourage them to stay poor,” shoring up the political support for reform. When President Bill Clinton declared an end to “welfare as we know it” in 1996, time limits, work requirements, and strict sanctions for noncompliance were presented as acts of repudiation against that system.
In fact, they had the opposite effect: rather than eliminating the myth of the welfare queen, these reforms codified it by shaping policy choices around the prevention of willful idleness and criminal behavior. As a result, welfare reform created a system that expects the worst from families seeking assistance, and in so doing further entrenches a presumed link between poverty and poor character in popular discourse. This orientation is clear in the punitive policies that appear in response to non-existent problems.
Fifteen states, for example, drug-test applicants as part of their screening process for TANF. These policies stem from a perception that people in poverty, and in particular welfare recipients and people of color, are more likely to use illegal drugs, despite evidence contradicting this claim. Predictably, this reliance on stereotypes rather than evidence when designing these policies has proven wasteful and inefficient, costing Missouri, for example, $336,297 to identify a mere 48 positive tests among nearly 40,000 TANF recipients.
Similarly, fifteen states prohibit families from receiving higher benefit levels if a new baby is born while the household is receiving assistance, which “stem[s] from a theory that cash aid serves as a disincentive for poor women to marry and an incentive for them to have more children.” In fact, these policies simply hurt poor children (to say nothing of the absurdity of presuming a woman would have another baby to receive at most an extra few dollars a day, given that the estimated costs of having another child are around $8000 per year).
Over time, politicians have contrived their own modern equivalents of the welfare queen, with policy implications of their own. Newt Gingrich infamously lamented a food stamp recipient who used her benefits to fly to Hawaii at the taxpayer’s expense. As anyone who has actually received SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) would know, benefits are tightly restricted to food products off of the self (no indulding in the hot bar allowed!) and can’t even be used to buy other necessities like diapers, much less a plane ticket.
Images like these have spurred a new wave of policy restrictions around how benefits are accessed and distributed. Federal legislation passed in 2012 requires states to prevent TANF recipients from using EBT cards in liquor stores, casinos, and strip clubs, despite minimal evidence benefits were used in these establishments. In California alone, this policy resulted in a significant diversion of time and money to deactivate over 6500 ATMs across the state, including in rural and tribal areas where the nearest ATM may simply be in a prohibited location.
Smilarly, in Arizona, policymakers discontinued the direct deposit option for TANF recipients, operating under the misguided assumption that the federal law required them to do so in order to mandate that benefits be administered through a product that allowed the state to monitor for prohibited activity. As a result, households that could have formerly accessed their TANF assistance through their own bank accounts now have no choice but to use the state-issued EBT card, which charges a fee for every ATM withdrawal—chipping away at what is already a paltry $280 a month benfefit for a family of three.
These are not examples of failures within the program; they’re examples of the program functioning exactly as it was designed.
As anti-poverty programs increasingly rely on surveillance and sanctions, they strengthen an association in the public imagination between poverty and criminality. In so doing, these policies further stigmatize the receipt of public assistance rather than strengthening these programs’ capacity to respond to critical needs. Designing public policy around the needs and experiences of real families—not mythical abstractions—will be essential for decoupling public assistance and stigma and achieving a social safety net that truly supports the full participation of all Americans in society and the economy.
Editor: Reader I’ll start with Mr. Ward’s final papragraphs:
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Similarly, some researchers have found that foreign-born Americans are slightly more likely native-born ones to express cold feelings toward Jews, though the same researchers stress that the difference is very minor and does not establish a causal link between foreign birth and antisemitic sentiment. Perhaps more significantly, Vance’s attempt to pin rising antisemitism to immigration conspicuously overlooks the role played by openly antisemitic figures on the right — people the white-nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes, who recently sat down for a friendly interview Vance’s close ally Tucker Carlson — in boosting anti-Jewish views.
But it’s fair to assume that Vance isn’t making these comments in the spirit of actually identifying the multivalent causes of these problems. Instead, they’re best understood as Vance’s attempts to manage an increasingly fractious coalition. And as windows into Vance’s own understanding of the primary fault lines dividing the Republican Party, his recent comments are actually quite illuminating.
Vance, who has readily stepped into the role of mediator between MAGA’s various competing factions, seems to have identified the cost-of-living crisis and the rise of antisemitism as two of the major issues splitting Trump’s coalition — with good reason. On the cost-of-living issue, the administration is increasingly coming under fire from populist conservatives who claim that Trump has focused on foreign policy issues at the expense of addressing the affordability crisis at home. Trump has struggled to come up with a compelling rejoinder to this line of critique, instead waffling between assuring voters that he’s taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously and dismissing “affordability” as a “Democrat scam.”
Similarly, the administration has struggled to address the growing divide on the right between stalwart supporters of Israel and “America First” critics of the U.S-Israel alliance — a group that also includes out-and-out antisemites like Fuentes. Trump’s response to this fissure has been to float ambiguously above the fray, publicly doubling down on his support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also reaffirming his backing of Israel critics like Tucker Carlson — a posture has left both camps feeling unsatisfied. Vance, meanwhile, has stayed mostly quiet on the controversy.
At the same time, Vance seems to be betting that opposition to immigration remains the one stance that can unite a movement that is otherwise divided over economics, foreign policy, tech and AI policy, healthcare, the Epstein disclosures and more. Linking these more divisive issues back to immigration offers one strategy for smoothing over the fault lines. It also allows the administration to claim progress on issues where the GOP lacks consensus: If immigrants are causing the housing crisis, then what does it matter if Republicans don’t have a plan for building more housing so long as Trump ramps up his mass deportation efforts?
The risk for Vance is that voters will see through this maneuver and demand more direct plans to address issues like housing costs and stagnating wages, beyond whatever benefits are provided by the administration’s immigration crackdown. But if Vance’s recent appearance in Pennsylvania offers any indication, that’s a danger he’s willing to two-step around. “Why did housing get so expensive, double in price during the Biden administration?,” he asked. “It’s because Joe Biden let in 20 million illegal immigrants who took homes that ought by right go to American citizens.”
Editor: A selection from Mr. Stephens’ self-serving ‘Victimhood Narrative’ !
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Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.
But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984 classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and sincere.
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
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…the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others.
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As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.
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“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love?
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The Reiner murders took place on the same weekend that an assailant, still at large, murdered two students at Brown University, and when an antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, gave every Jew in America a pit-of-our-stomachs sense that something like it may soon happen here again, as it did in Pittsburgh seven years ago.
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… Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan by an alleged assailant who is now a folk hero to the deranged reaches of the left.
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It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.
Syrian-Born Australian Who Tackled Bondi Gunman Hailed as Hero
Video of Ahmed el Ahmed disarming one of the gunmen has gone viral, and officials around the world have hailed his bravery.
Bystander Who Tackled Sydney Gunman Is Hailed as a ‘Hero’
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The parents of Ahmed el Ahmed, 43, said their son was brave and felt compelled to intervene to tackle one of the gunmen in Sunday’s mass shooting at Bondi Beach in which at least 15 people were killed.CreditCredit…AuBC, via Associated Press
Ahmed el Ahmed crouched behind a car in a Sydney parking lot on Sunday, feet away from one of the two gunmen who had just turned a beachside Hanukkah celebration into a massacre.
Then, sirens wailing in the background, Mr. el Ahmed jumped into action.
Even as the gunman fired a shot in a different direction, Mr. el Ahmed ran toward the assailant and pounced on him from behind. The two men tussled for several seconds before Mr. el Ahmed wrested a long firearm from the man, who fell to the ground. As Mr. el Ahmed pointed the weapon at him, the assailant got up and stumbled away.
Mr. el Ahmed — whose actions were caught on a video that has been verified by The New York Times and who was identified on Monday by Australian officials — is being praised as a hero in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Australian history.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting, which left the country and its Jewish community reeling, Mr. el Ahmed’s bravery provided much-needed solace.
Mr. el Ahmed, a Syrian-born fruit seller, risked his life and likely prevented the massacre from being even worse, officials said.
“At the best of times, what we see is Australians coming together,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a news conference, referring to the risks that Mr. el Ahmed took, adding that he had been hospitalized with a “serious injury.” It was not immediately clear how he had been hurt.
Footage of Mr. el Ahmed’s intervention was shared widely across social media and even made its way into the White House, where President Trump called Mr. el Ahmed “a very, very brave person.”
Mr. el Ahmed is an Australian citizen who immigrated from Syria in 2006 and has two daughters, aged 3 and 6, his parents told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He had been drinking coffee with a friend near the beach when he heard gunshots, they added.
“He wasn’t thinking about the background of the people he’s saving, the people dying in the street,” Mr. el Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Fateh el Ahmed, told ABC. “He doesn’t discriminate between one nationality and another.”
Ahmed is a real-life hero. Last night, his incredible bravery no doubt saved countless lives when he disarmed a terrorist at enormous personal risk.
It was an honour to spend time with him just now and to pass on the thanks of people across NSW. pic.twitter.com/3xNBW8vxvZ
Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, who visited Mr. el Ahmed in the hospital, said he had “saved countless lives.” In a picture that Mr. Minns posted on social media, Mr. el Ahmed looks alert and appears to be partially upright and speaking.
A GoFundMe page that was set up to support Mr. el Ahmed has raised more than 1.4 million Australian dollars, or about $930,000 — including roughly $66,500 from Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor, according to the fund-raising company.
GoFundMe said in an email that it was working with the organizers of the page to “help ensure funds raised safely reach Ahmed and his family.”
At St. George Hospital, where Mr. el Ahmed was being treated, Talia Gill and her 10-year-old daughter, Georgie, said in an interview that they were leaving gifts and a letter for him. The attack struck close to home for Ms. Gill, who is Jewish and who had friends who were in Bondi when the shooting occurred.
Georgie said she wanted to tell Mr. el Ahmed, “Thank you so much for saving all those people you didn’t even know.” She added, “You’re probably the kindest person ever.”
Amelia Nierenberg is a Times reporter covering international news from London.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 16, 2025, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Syrian-Born Fruit Vendor Who Tackled and Disarmed a Gunman. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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