H1B As Boondoggle

After I posted yesterday, it dawned on me that I hadn't mentioned a major country that sends workers here via H1B or other, similar preferential programs, China. This is partly because the media discussions haven't mentioned it, either. But one thing this limits in the discussion is the extent to which the foreign workers' poor English limits their effectiveness.

Workers from India are less of a problem, because the British colonial background made English a highly useful second language for the whole country that otherwise had different regional languages. As a result, a dialect called South Asian English is fully recognized, and it's understood fairly well by speakers of US English.

This doesn't completely eliminate the problem, though, because, due to the US background, English is also commonly spoken in the Philippines, and while Filipino English is understandable to speakers of US English, South Asian English and Filipino English are less mutually intelligible. This has presented practical problems for companies that want to outsource their programming to both Indian and Filipino contractors.

So we're beginning to move into corporate boondoggle territory. The CIO and the CEO can cook up a bright idea of laying off the US IT workers and outsourcing them to India and the Philippines, and it might look really good to the Board, but it turns out the Indians and the Filipinos can't understand each other, and the whole thing becomes unworkable -- except nobody is allowed to mention it, because racism.

If you add China to the mix, it's worse, because mainland China doesn't have a colonial legacy of English use, and Chinese learn it only in school from teachers who mostly haven't practiced it in an English-speaking country. A company that brings in Chinese H1B workers has a much bigger problem. The HR department has a good solution: don't mention it, because racism.

I worked for a company that for a time was a major IBM competitor. Their business model was to buy up software companies who were about to go under, and some of them even had the same business model before they themselves were about to go under, so they were already a big agglomeration of obsolescent and buggy products. That, after all, was why they'd been struggling in the first place.

We'll call this company Technical Associates, or TA. TA mostly rebranded the same products from the smaller comnpanies and simply sold each newly acquired product to its expanding customer base as a part of a bundled discount. You already have Product A -- we can now offer you our new Products B, C, D, and E, which you previously had to buy separately from these now-absorbed companies that have become TA, as a single, discounted package. Such a deal!

The problem was that all those companies that offered the old products were failing because those products were obsolescent and buggy. But TA, as a discount operator, wasn't going to put money into updating those products or fixing the bugs. On the other hand, they had to look like that's what they were doing, or the customers wouidn't buy what they were selling, the stuff (and for that matter, TA) had a bad reputation already.

Through various transfers and reorganizations, I wound up working for TA as a field rep or field engineer, that is, someone who went to the customer site and installed or troubleshot their products. There was a great deal of troubleshooting to do.

I was told by my bosses that the products did indeed have bugs, but the programmers who fixed the bugs had priorities, and I needed to be patient (in fact, they never fixed bugs at all). But my job was to go to the customer sites, listen to what the customer said, identify the problems, call in the bugs to the support center, and get a ticket number. This was in actuality an endless charade, but that's 90% of any job, right?

Both the programmers who suipposedly fixed the bugs and the support reps at the call center who took your call and gave you a ticket number were almost all H1B-type foreign workers, whatever their specific immigration status. The ones from Pakistan spoke the best English and seemed the most cooperative and sympathetic. The Chinese were a different story.

I was flying all over the country to visit customer sites. In one case, I'd been working all week on one stubborn problem and having a hard time getting the call center even to admit it was a problem. It was Friday afternoon, I had a plane to catch, and I was being stonewalled by a Chinese support rep who was slow-walking the whole procedure. "We not golng rush. We do all steps. You run test H37Z?" I began to realize it was to her advantage to speak bad English, that slowed things down even more.

I ran out of patience "By the way," I asked her. "How long have you been in the US? Why is your English still so bad?"

I was in a lot of trouble for that the following week, racist devil, hate Chinese people. But that wasn't the real problem. The poorly-spoken foreign reps at the call center were just a smokescreen to cover up for the fact that the company wasn't going to spend the money to fix the bugs. I began to understand a little better how complicated the whole H1B scenario is. The foreign workers aren't necessarily even there to save money, there are lots of other payoffs. If nothing else, they're simply there to make everything just a little more complicated and just a little harder to figure out. Musk and Ramaswamy can't be that naive.

After I left TA, some whistleblowers went to the SEC, and TA's CEO went to federal prison for securities fraud. I'm convinced the foreign workers made the scam just that little bit harder to detect.

I'm Still Confused

As I said yesterday, the people writing aboput H1B visas have never worked in tech, and they're getting basic things wrong. They start, for example, with this assumption:

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher. These occupations often include fields like IT, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

But this glosses over important distinctions. In medicine, I'm assuming they want MDs or PhDs. In engineering or mathematics, they might want BSEEs, MS, or PhDs. But IT is a very different field. The people who work directly on the keyboard, programmers, operators, system engineers, webmasters, network specialists, program librarians, and the llke, often don't have any type of four-year or even two-year degree.

So I keep asking the question, why do we claim to be scouring the world for the best and the brightest when the US-born workers we hire for these same jobs don't even need a four-year degree? I've worked in IT departments with H1B visa colleagues from India, the Philippines, Israel, Russia, and probably elsewhere who worked interchangeably in jobs with US citizens without bachelors' degrees. (And the US workers all spoke understandable English.) One question in my mind is whether the H1B people even actually had bachelors' degrees, which goes to Elon Musk's admission over the weekend that the system as it exists is "broken", which is at least a step in the right direction.

But here is Roger L Simon, with degrees from Dartmouth and Yale, a detective novelist and political commentator with approximately zero tech experience -- I'm not even sure if he's ever worked in a cubicle environent -- weighing in on the subject:

The H1-B has been misused by a number—we don’t know exactly how many but we should—in order to clerk at the likes of 7-Elevens rather than perform complex scientific tasks for which domestic personnel were not available.

Further, companies have been using this as a source of cheap labor.

I have, however, heard this last contradicted by my own daughter who works in hiring for a major tech company that will be nameless for family protection. (I guarantee you would recognize it.) Her job is to recommend H1-B candidates from across the globe. She assures me her company saves no money from this (the ancillary costs are high) and only does it after exhausting domestic possibilities.

His daughter (Did she go to Skidmore? Wellesley? What was her major?) works for human resources, not IT, and she's full of the purest moonshine. She would never admit complicity in a system that even Musk now acknowledges is broken and corrupt, and indeed, human resources departments are among the chief culprits who've put us where we are -- don't the company DEI coordinators work just down the hall from his daughter? But unperturbed, he continues,

Writing this all down has convinced me this is indeed nothing but a kerfuffle of the most minor sort that has been taken up by the media ad nauseam in recent days.

We just need to make a few tweaks and it'll be fine. After all, Tesla, Wernher von Braun, Fermi, blah blah blah!

But far more importantly, do something about our educational system. That’s the sputtering dragonfly in the ointment. Then we will have plenty of qualified people domestically. The H1-B program at that point might even be phased out.

But isn't he missing another important point here? The US born workers who are filling the critical IT jobs don't have four-year degrees, they do just fine without them. The HR departments where his daughter works, on the other hand, are more picky about who gets promoted to higher-level jobs. Yeah, they probably still need four-year degrees like the people in HR have (what do you suppose their majors were, by the way?).

And why do we see story after story about four-year college enrollment declining? For instanace, in The Guardian earlier this month:

College enrollment is dropping at a “concerning” rate, according to new data.

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped by 5% this fall semester. The data reflects enrollments reported for 1.4 million 18-year-old freshmen as of 31 October 2024.

The decline is most significant at both public and private, non-profit four-year colleges, which have seen a more than 6% decline in enrollment. For 46 states, Inside Higher Ed noted, the average drop was almost 7%.

The answer seems to be that people aren't seeing the value in a four-year degree. So why are we seeking out people from India,the Philippines, Russia, wherever, who supposedly have them, to do the same jobs that US workers without them do just fine? If they can't find enough US workers without four-year degrees to do jobs that don't need them, maybe, er, they could pay the US workers more and give them better conditions. I'm confused.

H1B vs 80-20

The current discussion of H1B visas gets everything wrong. Musk and Ramaswamy see the problem from Mahogany Row. The writers who cover it arem't tech workers, they're writers, in fact, bad ones. I spent a career in tech. Here's an example of what everyone gets wrong:

For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.''

Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work.

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

The piece gopes on to quote 2015 remarks from Trump:

“We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump wrote.

This conflates several issues. In my experience, US-born workers at the coding or other hands-on level in tech generally don't have four-year degrees, in STEM or anythng else. It's worth noting, though, that a requirement for an H1B visa is that the foreign applicant hold a bachelor's degree. I would say that employers over several decades have decided those aren't necessary, and outside of certain highly specialized areas, the degree they want is an MBA -- but that's not for coder-level workers.

All I can think is that the employers are also discounting the value of any bachelor's degree anywhere, or they're finding ways around the requirement.

So the image of H1B workers displacing US-born people with four-year degrees just isn't accurate, and the problem there is less a question of foreign workers displacing US-born ones with degrees than it's a question of the declining worth of a four-year degree. Four-year degrees aren't needed for the work the employers have available, and probably never have been.

Consider the level of skill carpenters, masons, draftsmen, and machinists have always had to demonstrate without four-year degrees. Hands-on tech jobs are at that level. The basic question goes to whether workers at that level can have a middle-class lifestyle. For much of the 20th century, they could, without four-year degrees. What we're beginning to see is the grand failure of the social experiment that expanded demand for a four-year degree.

On the other hand, the people who claim substituting workers from Asia who are paid less than US-born workers depresses wages overall have a real point. But added to that is that H1B visas are a form of indentured servitude, whereby a person was oblgated to work for an employer in exchange for passage to the colonies, which represented the potential for advancement in the new environment.

The servitude is enforced in this modern environment by the fact that under an H1B visa, if you lose your job, you lose your immigration status. Thus H1B workers have a powerful inducement to do things that US-born workers won't, including working unpaid overtime, putting up with workplace abuse, doing what they're told, and so forth -- and just as important, even if they display exceptional talent, they aren't a threat to mediocre bosses, since they're only in their jobs for six years and can be replaced when their visas expire.

This not only depresses wages for US-born workers, but it keeps their working conditions low, and it limits their ability to find new jobs if they're competing with other H1B workers in the job market.

But there's another factor involved, the so-called "80-20 rule", the intuitive observation that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Given the indentured conditions of the H1B visa, those workers are almost guaranteed to be among the 20% of top performers --they have incentives to keep their jobs that US-born workers don't necesssarily have. A US-born worker can simply update the resume, tell the boss to go to hell, and find a new job. If an H1B worker quits, it's back to Bangalore.

And consider all the factors that let the 80% low peformers keep their jobs. DEI has been, and continues to be, a major factor. So is regression to the mean and the incentive among all workers, including the supervisors, to keep the curve low. Then there's sleeping with the boss. I don't think I ever worked in an office environment where this wasn't taking place, and not just a little bit. Consensual sleeping with the boss is a major unspoken problem.

So I can't really disagree with Elon and Vivek, looking at the situation from Mahogany Row, that H1B is a way around the 80-20 rule, but in doing that, it lowers working conditions for everyone. Remember that Henry Ford's great insight was that if he wanted to sell cars, he needed to make the workers who built them prosperous enough to buy them for themnselves.

There needs to be a major reform of incentives. In part, this won't take place until the Savior returneth; how the wicked proper is a subject for the psalmist. But the job is nevertheless to restore justice for the workers, and leaving H1B in its current state won't help.

Prescott Bush As Finpol

This year, we've been in and out of Ferdinand Lundberg's world of finpolity as outlined in his 1968 book The Rich and the Super-Rich, and which I summarized in this post. It turns out that, although Prescott Bush's wealth can be traced to his wife's father, George Herbert Walker. who was presidenr of the Harriman family investment bank, W A Harriman & Co, and Prescott himself became a managing partner of its successor, Brown Brothers Harriman, and was closely associated with Edward Harriman's sons, W Averell and E Roland, Prescott himself is never mentioned as a finpol in The Rich and the Super-Rich.

This was almost certainly by design. According to Britannica,

At least some portion of the Greenwich Bushes’ financial stability came by way of the largesse of the Walkers, who were ostentatious in their demonstrations of wealth, whereas Bush counseled his offspring to play down their wealth and instead advocated public service as a sort of noblesse oblige.

By the early 1900s, following the example of the Rockefellers, the object of the finpolity was to keep a low profile and generally stay out of the news, not least to avoid assassins and kidnappers, but also just to stay clear of damaging publicity. I suspect that most of the families Lundberg identified in his various books would have preferred not to be mentioned and envied the Bushes -- by 1968, for instance, George Bush pere was simply an obscure Texas congressman. However, neither Prescott nor his son George completely avoided accusations of shadowy connections. According to Wikipedia,

In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that [George H W] Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this claim.

In the 1930s, Prescott's name surfaced in connection with the so-called Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, "a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator".

In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany, although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error. According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."

Nazis? According to Britannica, this involved Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's company:

BBH’s association with the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, which continued even after the start of World War II, would taint its reputation. Similarly infamous was the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a BBH asset managed by Bush that transferred funds, bonds, gold, coal, oil, and steel to Nazi Germany during its military buildup. In 1942 the U.S. government, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized UBC and other German-affiliated BBH assets, but Bush was never found guilty of a crime, and the affair would neither prevent Averell Harriman from becoming the Democratic governor of New York nor have lasting political ramifications for Bush or his progeny.

It's possible to make too much of this. Germany was a major part of the European economy, and all US companies had involvement there after Hitler came to power, much like they have stakes in China now. But I noted yesterday a passage in a New Yorker piece that also referred to Prescott's involvement in funding a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor. It's also difficult to tell when Prescott's connection with Averell Harriman began. He and Harriman were from the same social background, and both were at Yale in the 1910s, where both were also members of the Skull and Bones secret society. By the early 1920s, Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was president of the Harriman bank.

By the time of World War II, when Prescott was also at BBH, Harriman was heavily involved in Allied diplomacy and strategic planning as Roosevelt's emissary.

Harriman served as ambassador to the Soviet Union until January 1946. When he returned to the United States, he worked hard to get George Kennan's Long Telegram into wide distribution.[13] Kennan's analysis, which generally accorded with Harriman's, became the cornerstone of Truman's Cold War strategy of containment.

From April to October 1946, he was ambassador to Britain, but he was soon appointed to become United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948, he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan. In Paris, he became friendly with the CIA agent Irving Brown, who organised anti-communist unions and organisations. Harriman was then sent to Tehran in July 1951 to mediate between Iran and Britain in the wake of the Iranian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

By this time, Harriman wasn't just involved in intelligence, he was driving intelligence at the policy level. By the early 1950s, both Harriman and Prescott Bush began to seek elective office. Harriman was elected Governor of New York as a Democrat in 1954 but was defeated for re-election by Nelson Rockefeller in 1958, one of many juxtapositions of finpol families in electoral competition. Prescott ran for the US Senate as a Republican in 1952 and won; he was re-elected in 1958 but declined to run again in 1964.

Business Insider quotes Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy (2008) in summing up Prescott Bush's political influence on George H W and Dubya:

His passion for politics, of course, trickled down to future generations of Bushes. Weisberg writes that, while George H.W. Bush never worked on any of his father's campaigns, he watched closely. He inherited his father's sense of duty.

"Prescott Bush established three essential myths that Bush men lived by," Weisberg writes. "The first is: I made it on my own. The second is: I'm not really rich. The third is: I'm running to serve my country."

But, in the spirit of Prescott Bush, this nevertheless leaves a great deal unsaid. How much was Prescott involvred in Averell Harriman's intelligence activities? How far was Prescott able to place his son George in CIA related activites? In particular, by the time George was named CIA Director in 1976, he'd had fairly minimal public involvement in intelligence -- he was a member of the US House from 1967-71; UN Ambassador from 1971-73; Chair of the Republican National Committee 1973-74; and Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China 1974-75, prestigious jobs, but not necessarily a worker bee at the policy level.

What else had he been doing suddenly to become the chief spymaster?

A Detour Into Prescott Bush

Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy, the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post:

The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of deep-state programs that deploys mentally reprogrammed or chemically enhanced agents who operate extralegally to assassinate problem people, who tend to be idealistic humanitarians with inconvenient views. Jason Bourne, the central figure, is one such agent, who loses his memory when he's nearly killed in an operation, and in the course of regaining it, he discovers his role in the program and sets out to expose it.

This view of a world dominated by clandestine agencies operating outside the bounds of law strikes me as a remarkable paradigm for our recent history, as Democrat Leader Charles Schumer commented on the eve of Trump's first inauguration, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I began to pursue this idea again yesterday as I ruminated on the remarkable obtuseness of Walter Russell Mead when he characterized George W Bush as a "Jacksonian", a movement that championed greater rights for the common man and was opposed to any signs of aristocracy in the nation.

There's also the troublesome problem of both Dubya's and his father's close association with neoconservative foreign policy. Mead himself calls Bush pere a "Hamiltonian", which supposedly favors international commerce and institutions, as opposed to Dubya's Jacksonianism, but the foreign policies of both Presidents Bush strike me as completely congruent, based on prominent foreign military interventions in undeclared wars, variously in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Panama.

Trying to draw a distinction between a "Hamiltonian" and "Jacksonian" in trying to explain this is simply misleading. Jason Bourne understands recent history better than Walter Russell Mead; it's based on a clandestine-service deep state with interventionist instincts that appears to have evolved between World War I and the Cold War, with milestones including the development of the FBI in the 1920s under J Edgar Hoover, the rise of the OSS during World War II under "Wild Bill" Donovan, which morphed into the CIA (over Truman's strong objection) during the Cold War, most notably under Allen Dulles.

One factor in this history has been he Bush dynasty. Again, this points to Walter Russell Mead's obtuseness in calling Dubya a "Jacksonian"; the Bushes, as much as the Kennedys, are the closest thing we have to an aristocracy. Mead, himself a Yale alumnus like the Bushes, seems completely unconscious of this.

There are also tantalizing references tro intelligence work throughout the Bush family's 20th-century history. Bush pere was CIA Director in 1976-77. His father, Prescott Bush, according to Wikipedia,

served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers.

According to The New Yorker,

In the mid-forties, when Prescott helped fund a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the spy organization staffed and run by his Ivy League associates, the worlds of intelligence and national security opened to the Bush family.

From the perspective of the post-Dubya years, it's worth revisiting the Bush family history and trying to parse out why the Bush family and their loyalists like the Cheneys have aligned themselves so clearly against Trump, and in fact why Trump seems to have grasped instinctively the need to purge the Bush influence from the Republican Party. I'll detour into this.

A Generation Ago, They Called Dubya "Jacksonian"

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002:

When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president.

Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests.

I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on,

Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a century ago.

Wait just a moment. Milbank misses an important point, Dubya's 2000 opponent:

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., as the second of two children born to Albert Gore Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. . . . During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C. . . . Gore attended St. Albans School, an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. . . . He graduated 25th in a class of 51, applied to one college, Harvard University, and was accepted.

It's pretty clear that Al Jr was admitted to Harvard in a "basket" reserved for children of celebrities, prominent politicians, and other powerful figures. It didn't hurt that he came from St Albans, but of course, that's how he got into St Albans, too. Dubya, Yale Bonesman, was that because his dad was a Yale Bonesman before him, but then Bush pere's dad, Prescott Bush, was a Bonesman, too. Prescott's uncle and grandfather were Yalies as well.

In fact, Dubya's 2004 opponent, John Kerry, was also a member of Skull and Bones at Yale. In retrospect, what a strange interlude that was -- with few exceptions, beginning in 1988, a succession of privileged, elite-school alumni competed with each other for the presidency from both parties, all of them increasingly detached from the plebeian American experience.

We might say this culminated in Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, only nominally people of color, neither a descendant of US African slaves, whose childhoods were privileged, much of that time living outside the US. Harris in particular dressed as a full-fledged member of the US white upper class while affecting African-American street argot, and very few in the media had the temerity to speak about this. Milbank noted a similar juxtaposition in his 2002 essay:

Jackson was a frontiersman who spoke of the "idiots" in Washington. The cowboy-boot wearing Bush often ridicules Washington in speeches.

A legacy Yale Bonesman who wears cowboy boots whose grandfather was a Wall Street banker closely associated with the Democrat Harrimans. Not all that different from Kamala Harris, if you ask me. Milbank goes on to explore Dubya's "Jacksonian" instincts:

The Council on Foreign Relations' Walter Russell Mead, in a book last year titled "Special Providence," discerned four strains of American foreign policy: the Hamiltonian approach, which favors international commerce and institutions; the Jeffersonian approach, which frowns on costly international entanglements; the Jacksonian approach, an unapologetic flexing of military might; and the Wilsonian approach, an internationalism based on moral values.

The first President Bush had heavy Hamiltonian instincts. Bill Clinton mixed the Hamiltonian with the Wilsonian. Mead's book came out before it was possible to categorize the current president and his response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A recent conversation with Mead, though, allowed for some updating: Bush, he says, is increasingly pure Jacksonian.

The Jacksonian label "summarizes everything Europeans don't like about a strain of American foreign policy," Mead said. "It's a feeling that the preservation of our people, our national community, is the highest law."

Jacksonians have little use for international law. When Jackson was fighting Indians, he crossed into foreign territory, arrested and hanged British subjects. As president, he sent the Navy to Sumatra to burn a settlement that had insulted the American flag.

But if Mead thought Dubya was a pure Jacksonian, what is Trump? On Trump's first Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, Mead wrote,

For the first time in 70 years, the American people have elected a president who disparages the policies, ideas, and institutions at the heart of postwar U.S. foreign policy.

Wait. What about Dubya? But Mead goes on to re-explain his four basic foreign poicy strains:

When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms.

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law.

. . . Jeffersonians, including today's so-called realists, argue that reducing the United States' global profile would reduce the costs and risks of foreign policy. They seek to define U.S. interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways. . . . Both Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seemed to think that they could surf the rising tide of Jeffersonian thinking during the Republican presidential primary. But Donald Trump sensed something that his political rivals failed to grasp: that the truly surging force in American politics wasn't Jeffersonian minimalism. It was Jacksonian populist nationalism.

I'm not at all sure that Mead understood Trump especially well then, and still less now. What about Trump's Christmas messages on Truth Social?

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump kicked off the lengthy posts by wishing a merry Christmas to all, “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal.”

. . . Trump then mocked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he referred to as “governor," and suggested once again that the United States could annex Canada as its 51st state.

He wrote that "if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World."

Trump continued his post by addressing “the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”

Jacksonian? If you ask me, right now, Trump is more like Teddy Roosevelt mixed with Frank Zappa. But let's look at the originator of this "Jacksonian" theory, Walter Russell Mead himself:

He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

. . . Mead was educated at the Groton School, a private boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts. He then graduated from Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.

In other words, he's a member of the traditional US upper class telling us how to think about the traditional US upper class, which at the moment is in turmoil. He wouldn't know a Jacksonian if it bit him on the butt, and I suspect his understanding of Trump at this point is minimal. Trump is beyond Jacksonian, something outside the box.

History According To Lindy Li

Lindy Li is a puzzle. She's been highly visible in the press since the election, characterized as a Prominent Democratic National Committee powerhouse fundraiser who has turned on the party following Harris's November loss, spilling what purport to be insider secrets. I'm not sure about this at all.

Matt Margolis echoes the received line at PJ Media:

Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline.

The reference to "what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala" carries a link to another Margolis story at PJ Media:

In a candid interview with NewsNation’s Natasha Zouves earlier this week, Li shed light on key figures in the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and what they really think about Kamala Harris.

. . . When asked directly, “Do you agree that Obama and Pelosi did not want Harris?” Li didn’t mince words. “I know they didn’t,” she replied. “I have a lot of friends in Obama World, and actually, I'm friends with Speaker Pelosi, and I spoke with her before. . ."

But Li pkept on playing coy, until the interviewer began to lose patience:

Pressed on who Pelosi and Obama were backing, Li painted a nuanced picture. “I don’t think Pelosi was hoping for anyone in particular, or not that I know of. I do know that Obama was carefully vetting Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. I know there were other names on his list.” She also noted, “I’m not saying that Kamala Harris was necessarily at the top of [Obama’s] list, but he was definitely considering other candidates. I don’t think she was ruled out.”

So, er, what did Obama and Pelosi actually think about Harris? Li winds up telling us absolutely nothing, except maybe they were thinking about other candidates, who presumably didn't make the cut. Then there's this odd quasi-tidbit:

Li added, “And Obama and Pelosi were both hoping for a primary instead of a coronation, so to speak.”

This is nothing new; Pelosi had already said this herself:

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the New York Times in comments published Friday [November 8].

“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

But this is disingenuous in the extreme. The Democrat National Committee exerted maximum effort to forestall any primary campaign against Biden starting in late 2023, first denying ballot access to Bobby Kennedy Jr, then doing the same to Dean Phillips. This could not have been done without the tacit approval of both Obama and Pelosi, but mainly Pelosi.

Why would the DNC be opposed to a serious 2024 primary season? Because neither Biden nor Harris did well in primaries in 2020; Harris in particular suspended her campaign even before the Iowa caucuses. If Biden were to drop out as a candidate at any point in 2024 that might have allowed for any sort of primary contest, Harris would have been quickly eliminated. By letting Biden stay in the race so long, it had the effect of making Harris the heir apparent without any sort of primary uncertainty.

This can only have been the intended outcome. Pelosi's hopeful words about an "open primary" are nothing but crocodile tears, and it's a little peculiar that Lindy Li, teasing what she claims to be insider information about what Obama and Pelosi really thought, simply repeats Pelosi's already-published remarks.

But this brings me to another question -- exactly who is Lindy Li, and how did she achieve the powerhouse Democrat insider status she claims to have? According to Wikipedia, she was born December 14, 1990 (age 34) in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. She must be some sort of prodigy, huh, having clawed her way to power and influence starting as a humble immigrant? I'm not so sure. She

immigrated with her family to the United States when she was five years old. She spent much of her childhood in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Li attended the Agnes Irwin School, a private college-preparatory day school for girls, graduating in 2008. Her father is a real estate executive.

According to Data USA, Malvern, Pennsylvania's median household income was $115,743 in 2022. This is higher than the median household income in Pennsylvania ($73,170) and Chester County ($118,574). According to the same source, median household income in Beverly Hills, CA is $116,771. Annual tuition at the Agnes Irwin School for 9th - 12th Grade is $46,250.

Living in an affluent community and attending an exclusive private school are key class markers, even more so than an Ivy degree. However, Li also went to Princeton. As I've often noted here, the Ivy admissions process is highly secretive, but we do know that the offspring of major donors are in fact given preference, as are the alumni of exclusive "feeder schools" like Agnes Irwin.

We know little of Li's family background other than that her father is a "real estate executive". Real estate where? It sounds as though the family may have brought some part of their wealth with them from China, but at the moment, we know very little. For that matter, whose money was involved in Li's fundraising efforts? She seems to have spent only a token amount of time in her own business career -- how did she get all those contacts? Just whose money was this?

Bottom line: I don't believe a word of this whole Lindy Li saga. Somebody else is pulling those strings.