On Trump's Iran War and Citizenship

[00:04] here. I humbly ask you to let me cook for a I humbly ask you to let me cook for a moment on my country's war against Iran. Or rather, I think that we need to talk about how war powers are distributed in

[00:17] the United States. We have a constitutional flaw that we need to address, and quickly. Because this is a flaw that really could result in a global apocalypse. Therefore, it is the responsibility of

[00:33] all US citizens to be talking about this right now, even if we normally talk about white wine or whatever. My fellow Americans, and to everyone else who is listening in, my fellow Americans,

[00:47] in, my fellow Americans, we cannot let the decision to go to war we cannot let the decision to go to war rest in the hands of one person. rest in the hands of one person. Any person. Your side, my side, doesn't

[01:01] matter. The decision to use military force cannot be left up to a single person, because that person might be crazy, or evil, or incompetent, or dreadfully

[01:16] or incompetent, or dreadfully misinformed, or any combination thereof. And the fact that we've gotten to the point where a single person can start a point where a single person can start a war is a collective failure on our part.

[01:28] The concentration of war powers in the US executive branch is not new. US executive branch is not new. It is the result of many, many choices that people across our political spectrum have made over decades and

[01:42] decades. This is a multi-generational, bipartisan failure that we've gotten to this point where war powers are effectively in the hands of one guy who could be some combination of crazy, evil, incompetent, or badly advised.

[01:57] evil, incompetent, or badly advised. Yes, groups of people can also be collectively crazy, incompetent, or misinformed, but that is that's a less likely scenario. And even if everybody in the group

[02:11] they probably suck in different ways from each other, and that would lessen the odds of the group making a the odds of the group making a catastrophically bad decision. Indeed,

[02:23] there's lots of research about this in social science, obviously, but also like from the business school world, lots of studies showing that managerial teams tend to be better than individual executives at avoiding obviously bad

[02:39] decisions, especially diverse groups, perspectives are being represented. Say, for example, a a congress of people elected by lots of different constituencies, that kind of group would

[02:55] be less likely than an individual to make an obviously catastrophic mistake. Yes, theoretically, under our US Constitution, it is Congress, and only

[03:08] Congress, that can decide whether the nation goes to war. The founders of the United States were drawing on their recent living memory of pointlessly destructive European wars started by kings for petty personal

[03:24] started by kings for petty personal reasons or fanatical religious reasons. In England, they had a tradition going back to Anglo-Saxon times where the king controlled the army, but Parliament controlled the money.

[03:39] If the monarch wanted taxes to fund a war, Parliament would have to vote for it, and thus Parliament generally got at least a de facto vote on whether England went to war.

[03:53] The English Civil War of the 17th century was basically the prequel to the American Revolutionary War, and it was fought in part over this very principle.

[04:05] King Charles I wanted money for some stupid wars. Parliament refused to give it to him. So, the king found some, shall we say, creative ways of raising money without Parliament.

[04:20] When you hear about a US president funding major government projects with donations, you should be reminded of Charles I. It is generally illegal for the US president to raise money for government

[04:36] Congress. And this right here is why. The grandfathers of the US founding fathers had fought over exactly this

[04:48] principle in the English Civil War, because if the king can raise money all by himself, that cuts the people's representatives out of the decision-making process, and that would be bad for many reasons.

[05:05] be bad for many reasons. President Trump asks for donations to build his new palace, his ballroom. And if you're a rich CEO, you know that if you donate money for the ballroom, perhaps he'll lower the tariffs on your

[05:20] business, or perhaps he'll drop a federal investigation into your business, or maybe he'll pardon you for a crime, perhaps a future crime. That kind of thing starts out as run-of-the-mill corruption,

[05:35] but if you let it spin way out of control, over time, it metastasizes into something even worse than corruption. You're left with an executive that has independent taxing authority, even if the taxes are theoretically donations.

[05:52] That's how you cut Congress out of the loop over time, and you're left with an absolute monarch. A president who controls the military and the money to

[06:04] fund it. But Adam, President Trump was elected by the people. How can you compare him to a Well, because I like to read history.

[06:17] >> And so I know that lots of kings throughout history have been elected. Usually they're not elected by like the people. More often they get elected by the property-owning males or by a council of elites, but that is an

[06:32] election. The Holy Roman Emperor was elected. Several English kings and queens were elected. And an elected king is still a king. An elected dictator is still a dictator.

[06:49] Self-rule is about more than just elections. It's about distributing power elections. It's about distributing power across multiple power centers, multiple institutions, so that one guy cannot seize control of the whole thing, even

[07:04] if he was elected to do so. Cuz once you let your elected leader become a dictator, that's generally the last meaningful election you ever vote in. That is how the Roman Republic became the Roman

[07:19] Empire. And you better believe the US founding fathers had that specific founding fathers had that specific example in mind, among others. Self-rule is also about having counter-majoritarian institutions. You

[07:34] have a Congress with a majority party Everybody accepts that the majority party will get more of what it wants, but the minority party gets some of what it wants, too, because you need the

[07:49] minority party's consent for particularly big decisions. An independent judiciary is another counter-majoritarian institution. You have judges who can say, "Look, I get that 70% of you want to murder the other

[08:04] that 70% of you want to murder the other 30%, but that's not okay. Even if the majority votes to do it, so I hereby strike down your let's murder the other 30% law." Voting alone doesn't make you free.

[08:21] institutions that protect you from the people you elect. And you got to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, because it's only a matter of time until the

[08:34] it's only a matter of time until the roles flip. multiple institutions, also so that we don't put apocalyptic power in the hands

[08:46] don't put apocalyptic power in the hands of a single person who could be crazy. The Founding Fathers probably would have been even more careful with constitutional war powers if nuclear weapons had existed back then. We

[09:00] literally have a situation now where one guy, this guy, could end it all. guy, this guy, could end it all. And indeed, nuclear threat is one reason

[09:13] why we in the US have effectively transferred Congress's war-making authority over to the presidency. During the Cold War, we wanted the Soviets to know that if they nuked our capital and took out Congress, we would still be

[09:27] able to authorize a retaliatory strike. Somebody within the presidential line of succession would still be alive somewhere, and that person would have unilateral authority to launch our missiles, thus assuring our mutual

[09:41] destruction and deterring anyone from launching ICBMs in the first place. I get it. That is sound logic. I also get that the nature of warfare has changed. Rarely, if ever, do we fight what the White House lawyers call

[09:57] war in the constitutional sense, where your ambassador delivers a fancy scroll with a wax seal on it declaring war on some country with some fancy

[10:09] gentlemanly language, and then there's like a predetermined mobilization period each other while they're getting their troops and equipment into position and anymore. For reasons that I reckon are technological at least as much as they

[10:23] are political and social, we really do face threats that we need to be able to address with military force quickly and sometimes secretly. You don't want to have a congressional debate about the secret raid that you're

[10:38] planning because the people you're planning to raid also know about C-SPAN, and they can watch the debate in real time to find out when they're going to get hit. So, we've found all kinds of legal loopholes to give the president

[10:52] more and more war-making authority. Congress sometimes passes these authorizations for the use of force, like after 9/11, where they basically said, "Hey, the president has the authority to go after this vaguely

[11:06] defined group of people in this vaguely defined field of operations." President Bush the younger and President Obama used that authorization as a legal fig leaf to do all kinds of things that it probably

[11:21] didn't actually authorize. The most legally outrageous thing Obama did was legally outrageous thing Obama did was probably his 2011 war in Libya. probably his 2011 war in Libya. Though I will say, in tepid defense of

[11:34] remember that time when he wanted to do a regime change war in Syria? So, he asked for congressional authorization, and when he didn't get it, and when he didn't get it, he didn't do it.

[11:51] to President Trump's war in Iran, except that Trump never even bothered to ask. that Trump never even bothered to ask. He just did it. It has been a gradual bipartisan process by which we have transferred war powers

[12:04] from the Congress to the president, and Congress is very much to blame for that. Congress has allowed itself to become completely dysfunctional. It can't do almost anything anymore because it is so polarized.

[12:20] And the biggest reason Congress is so polarized is that the state legislatures have gerrymandered districts so that the party primary is where most individual members of Congress win their elections, rather than in the general election. The

[12:33] people electing our Congress are the most extreme elements of our society. There is no systemic incentive to try to represent the whole district or the

[12:45] whole country. If you are a House member, odds are you are elected solely by your hardliners. That system has produced a totally

[12:57] predictable result, a House of Representatives full of nut jobs who can't agree on anything. And over in the Senate, we have this arcane rule called the filibuster that effectively requires 60 out of 100 votes

[13:12] to do anything important, as opposed to a simple majority of 51 votes. I used to be a defender of the filibuster because I thought it was good to slow the whole law-making process down and to force politicians to build consensus for

[13:27] am pretty convinced we need to let the filibuster go. >> And all that would take is a rule change in the Senate. You wouldn't need a constitutional amendment or even a law. Congress has proven it cannot make big

[13:42] decisions under the current rules and laws. This creates a power vacuum that is inevitably filled by the other branches of government. We have judges making rulings that really ought to have been laws passed by the people's elected

[13:57] representatives. We have presidents making decisions that can't because it is inherently dysfunctional. And when the people's house is dysfunctional, elections stop feeling real because they

[14:13] don't have any real consequence. So, people start voting irresponsibly, voting on vibes, voting like it's a football game instead of real life. This is how you lose your democracy. This is what happened to the Romans.

[14:29] We've read this book before. The people's assembly becomes dysfunctional. A white knight rides up promising to make everything work as long as we put him in charge, and we do. And that's the ball game.

[14:44] You [snorts] may remain prosperous for a time, but you are no longer free. No, I don't think that dictator is President Trump. President Trump is too much of a clown. Maybe if he was younger,

[15:00] another. I'm afraid of the smarter, more disciplined want-to-be authoritarians who are taking notes right now about how to consolidate dictatorial power within the US system.

[15:15] That's a concern for the year 2032, I reckon. That's when the backlash to the backlash might hit us the hardest. In the meantime, I want all of my Republican voting

[15:29] friends and viewers to imagine President AOC having total unilateral war-making authority because that or something like it is where we are headed next. Do you really think it's a good idea for

[15:45] one person to have the authority to start a war on your behalf without having to convince a single other soul that it's a good idea?

[16:00] dangerous single problem in the entire world right now and that is saying a world right now and that is saying a lot. I don't think President Trump's manifestly foolish war in Iran is going

[16:13] to lead to a global nuclear conflagration, at least not directly, but it very well might lead to a global economic depression. And the last one of those we did led directly to World War II.

[16:27] No decision that consequential can be left to a single person. We need a committee. We need a war cabinet. The congressional intelligence and armed services committees have historically

[16:41] functioned kind of like that where there's a handful of congressmen from both major parties who have the highest possible security clearance and the White House brings them in on major military decisions that they can't go

[16:53] public with yet. We need to formalize an institution kind of like that so that we can still act quickly and with secrecy, but the president does need to convince a group of people, a group of the

[17:07] people's representatives that this or that operation is a good idea. Innumerable papers have been written by experts exploring how we could create experts exploring how we could create just such an institution.

[17:22] What about an imminent threat? What about a situation where we know somebody is going to hit us very soon and there is no time to convene the war cabinet for a vote? Well, this is why there has been so much

[17:35] conversation about whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the US ahead of imminent threat to the US ahead of Trump's war. Obviously, Iran did not pose an imminent threat or at least they did not pose a threat that was greater

[17:48] than it had been the day before or the day before that or the day before that. The best that Marco Rubio could come up with was Israel, our client state, was about to attack Iran

[18:02] and Iran's counterattack was likely to hit US military targets because Israel is our client state and so we had to attack Iran first. I'm not even going to dignify that logic by refuting it. That is self-refuting argumentation.

[18:18] Iran posed no particular imminent threat when Trump went in. I spend lots of time in Republican or conservative or MAGA spaces online and

[18:30] lots of the folks there make an argument that is cogent on its face and it goes "If you wait until the threat is imminent, imminent, then you've waited too long."

[18:43] "Sure. I'm no pacifist. If you want to proactively go to war against a long-established enemy, go for it. But because the threat is not imminent,

[18:59] the president has no excuse for acting alone. In the absence of an imminent threat, there's time to talk through the decision with the peoples of their representatives and to make sure that

[19:14] other people also think the war is a good idea. That's why it's relevant that the threat was not imminent. If there's time to involve other people in the decision-making process, then you

[19:28] should involve them because groups are less likely to make an obviously less likely to make an obviously catastrophic mistake. In the event of a true imminent threat, a missile launched and coming right at

[19:42] you, in that event, there is no real decision for the president to make. The enemy has already made the decision. All that's left to do is to respond to

[19:54] it. We get that there needs to be some provision for the rapid authorization of force in the event of a true imminent threat. And again, there's a pile of white papers written on this topic. We

[20:08] can create a constitutional institutional process for this that minimizes the risk of a madman killing every last living thing on Earth.

[20:22] My fellow Americans, we need to act like citizens. Even if you hate this country or its government, you have an ownership stake You are responsible for it even if you don't want to be.

[20:36] I was born into all kinds of responsibilities that I never asked for, but I'm here. I have agency and I have jobs to do. We have to act like small shareholders in the United States of America because

[20:51] that is what we are and the board of directors is bringing the company down. "Stupid [snorts] Ragusea, why can't he just shut up and

[21:05] cook?" I have same feeling. Why can't I just shut up and cook? I don't want to needlessly alienate people in my audience.

[21:20] That that feeling that is us becoming depoliticized that is us becoming depoliticized the way that the Russians are now. That is us relinquishing our citizenship and acceding to serfdom.

[21:36] We're supposed to talk about these things, all of us, because we are participants, not merely spectators or victims. Though you may be a victim it is entirely possible to be a victim

[21:53] of a system in which you are also a participant. You're probably doing it right now. Your victimhood does not absolve you of your responsibility as a shareholder. Indeed it feels good. It feels

[22:07] empowering to recognize that you are part of the very machine that is grinding you down, cuz that means you can do something about it. My fellow Americans we don't have to accept this.

[22:22] We don't have to work around obvious flaws baked into our Constitution by a bunch of rich white enslavers 200 some years ago. We do not have to let the Supreme Court tell us what our Constitution means.

[22:37] We can tell them what our Constitution means by changing it. We can renegotiate our national marriage contract. Contracts of all kinds need to be

[22:51] renegotiated from time to time. People just accept that oh, you can't pass constitutional amendments anymore, we're too polarized. Y'all, we've been here before. We've been polarized to the point of an actual civil war, and we've

[23:06] still managed to change our Constitution 27 times. We can do it again. 27 times. We can do it again. We can have a post-Trump constitutional convention. All the states send delegations.

[23:22] If you're a Democratic president, you name a Republican to chair the convention, or vice versa. There's a whole lot that I think both major parties could actually agree on. I think we can agree that at least one other

[23:34] person needs to agree with the president that the nation should go to war. And for the stuff we don't agree on, I think there is a lot of opportunity for horse trading.

[23:47] Like, maybe you want election security. I want automatic voter registration, like so many of our pure democracies Easy [snorts and clears throat] compromise. A national free ID system

[24:00] that verifies the citizenship of voters and registers them without anybody having to produce any papers. The government already has all the your citizenship and to register you to vote.

[24:16] think that the American body politic is too sick right now for these kinds of national negotiations, and maybe they're right. But it's time to start talking about it and laying the groundwork.

[24:32] There is no going back to normal after Trump. Trump has exposed constitutional flaws that somebody much smarter is going to that somebody much smarter is going to try to exploit very soon.

[24:47] We need to revise the 25th Amendment to provide a quicker route to removing the president when necessary. We need to find a constitutional way to minimize gerrymandering, so that the voters can pick their politicians instead of the

[25:00] politicians picking their voters the way they do now. Again, there's a stack of white papers to consult on how we do that. Maybe I'm being naive with this whole constitutional convention idea that I've

[25:12] been fixated on for years, but I am positive that we need to think big. There are big things we can do within our existing Constitution, within our

[25:24] existing laws that we are in many cases choosing to not enforce. We can choose differently. There is no going back to normal after Trump because the thing that we considered normal

[25:40] was manifestly not working well enough for enough of our people. Trump did not create all of the distrust in institutions. He merely exploited it

[25:53] and amplified it. Trump is a tank of gasoline poured onto Trump is a tank of gasoline poured onto a fire that was already smoldering. We have to make ourselves feel like we're actually in control of our

[26:08] government. Ideally, by actually taking control of our government. And there are lots of smart people having conversations right now about how we do that. My YouTube channel is not going to become the venue for US

[26:21] national renewal, and it doesn't need to. And I'm certainly not calling for like a popular uprising, at least not yet. We may yet be able to vote our way out of these problems. The backlash to the

[26:35] Trump era is going to make a lot of things politically possible that were not possible before. There are going to be some big plans on offer. And I am trying to persuade you to vote

[26:49] for big change. Not to vote for somebody who promises to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We cannot party like it's 1999 anymore, as much as some of us might like to. Any system that results in a madman

[27:04] having his finger on the button needs serious serious reform. political parties, and it sucks that those parties are baked into our

[27:19] electoral system the way they are, but look at how party identities are being scrambled right now by the Iran war, among other things. There are going to be openings in both major parties for candidates who propose serious

[27:34] institutional reform. And I need to be ready to vote for that person, party. No, I'm not running for anything,

[27:46] >> [snorts] >> because I don't want my life ruined. We have created a media environment where the only people who want to run for office are people who need the attention so badly that they are willing

[28:01] to have their lives ruined in exchange. That is a different problem that we need to address. Thank you for tolerating my little rant. Actually, I should not apologize for talking about politics. That is what

[28:16] depoliticized people do. Don't talk like a serf. Talk like a And I will, too. Okay?