In this world nothing can be said to be more certain, except Donald and his Tariffs ...

 

In principle “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” - Federalist No. 51

It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.

James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788)

Source: The Federalist Papers are easily available online.  Emphasis added.
Note: Compare the famous line “If men were angels, no government would be necessary” and the sentences following with Kant.  See my blog entry, “Kant: The crooked timber of humanity”.

Trump as constrained by “my own morality, my own mind” and Federalist No. 10

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.

James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)

 
Source: The Federalist Papers are easily available online.  Emphasis added. 

h/t: David Lay Williams

Epstein had a French forerunner: the Stavisky Affair

Alexandre Stavisky, a con man who infiltrated French high society in the 1920s and 30s, sparked a scandal that led to his apparent suicide and government cover-up.

A criminal who cultivates relationships with the rich and powerful is treated lightly by the government. Conspiracy theories swirl around his apparent suicide when the law finally catches up with him. After his death, his ties to the country’s political leaders spark public anger and a media firestorm that threaten to bring down an administration.

It is the story of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, of course, but it is also the story of a remarkably similar scandal that engulfed a nation nearly a century ago. And the parallels may help illuminate why the Epstein saga has resonated so deeply and has such staying power.

Alexandre Stavisky was a con man who wormed his way into the highest echelons of French society in the 1920s and 30s. He charmed multiple members of the elite — lawmakers, cabinet secretaries, judges, entertainers — and lived the high life by their side. He also got them to put their money into various “investments” backed by nothing but his vivid imagination. A mayor put Stavisky in charge of a municipal pawn shop and Stavisky sold shares backed by the riches inside — which included what he claimed were a German empress’ emeralds. They were in fact cheap glass.

Remarkably, Stavisky ran many of these schemes after having been arrested for fraud. The government released him and postponed his trial 19 times over six years, during which he continued his fraud under a different name. The public officials involved in his schemes swore they had no idea it was the same man.

When Stavisky’s pawn shop scheme collapsed, and the French government found it was on the hook for hundreds of millions of francs in worthless bonds, Stavisky fled. Police cornered him in a chalet in Chamonix, and as officers moved in, Stavisky shot himself.

At least, that was the official version of events. Speculation swirled that the government had murdered Stavisky to stop him from testifying against French political leaders. Stavisky’s wife told the press she doubted he had killed himself. A police inspector testified that Stavisky had been shot in the right temple, but the gun was in his left hand.

And that wasn’t all, as The New York Times reported: 

Then the trouble began in the Chamber of Deputies. It was found that the dossier on Stavisky had disappeared from the Ministry of Justice. There had been 1,200 documents ... they were all gone. This led to demands for the resignation of the Minister of Justice.

The scandal consumed the country. There were daily protests. The New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner wrote:

To keep up with the Stavisky scandal — i.e., the French government — anyone would have to read the newspapers three hours a day, which is what everybody does. It is curious to be living in a land where the government is busy not governing… Daily, the concocted plot arrives at a peak of ingenuity, complication, villainy, and breathless surprise which simply cannot be beat — until the next day’s new twists beat it all hollow.

The New York Times summed it up in January 1934: “Temporarily the French have forgotten about Adolf Hitler. They now have Alexandre Stavisky on their minds.”

Just like the Epstein scandal, the Stavisky affair was about more than public corruption. It was about a perceived rot at the core of the entire political system: the idea that elected officials were living the high life with a fraudster during a global depression, and that they protected a criminal at the expense of the French people; that they might be going to extreme lengths to cover it all up. It was enough to radicalize even the most equanimous French citizen.

Fascist groups capitalized on the outrage, using the scandal to bolster their case that democracy itself was decadent and corrupt. (It did not hurt that Stavisky, like Epstein, was Jewish, playing into antisemitic tropes of Jews as swindlers and schemers.) Weeks after Stavisky’s death, French fascists led an assault on the French parliament that ultimately toppled the government.

That attack bears eerie resemblance to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — and it similarly reordered national politics for years to come. 

We don’t yet know what impact the Epstein saga may have on the Trump administration. But if history is any guide, the outrage and conspiracy theories and combustible politics with which it has engulfed us will have long-term consequences for our democracy.

Source: This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

See: Maddow Blog | Déjà News: When an Epstein-like scandal toppled a government by Isaac-Davy Aronson, published Fri, September 5, 2025.

See also: David Clay Large, “Down with the Robbers: The Stavisky Affair and the Twilight of the Third Republic in France” in Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930’s (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), pp. 23-58.

UPDATE: The “middle” rides again: Canada, Hegel, and Reconciliation

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact.  We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.

~ Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 20, 2026.

In Mark Carney, the “middle” rides again, and we see it clearly in his speech today in Davos, where he invoked the terms “middle powers”, “a third path”, and the “in-between”.  It’s a text co-written by Lester Pearson, Tony Blair, and Gilles Deleuze.  But the Canadian script has long been inspired by Hegel and accompanied by the dialogue of reconciliation.  Here, presumably for the benefit of my readers, is an updated version of my original post, dated August 03, 2025:

The Roots of “Reconciliation”, Or: A Reassessment of Hegel’s Canada

Much has been said of Hegel’s influence in Canada – maybe too much. Hegel’s philosophy is considered one of the reasons behind the landmark achievements of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which submitted its conclusions in 2015.  Then it should be no surprise that a related book of philosophy followed in 2018, Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites?

Taking titular inspiration from Patrick Anderson’s 1943 poem “Dialectics”, Hegel and Canada evokes the legacy of that mighty trinity of philosophers: Charles Taylor, Henry S. Harris, and Emil Fackenheim. It begins with a contribution by John Burbidge, Fackenheim’s student, and what follows are the voices of other intellectual companions. Hegel’s influence in Canada can be traced back to the nineteenth century, in particular to the philosopher John Watson (1847–1939), long at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a figure who also played an instrumental role in the founding of the United Church of Canada.

Canadians ruminate at length about how a Scottish thinker, Watson, ended up imprinting the nation, even, it appears, the Supreme Court of Canada, with a Hegelian, or dialectical, approach towards thinking. Did it have something to do with a sense of German Romanticism brooding amid once pristine Canadian forests? Was it a Scottish reading of Hegel, Burbidge’s position, that crossed the Atlantic into Canada and colonized our minds? In my view, it was neither of the above.

First, we must reckon with the fact that Hegel (1770-1831) had a huge influence in the nineteenth century, on Darwin and Marx, especially.  He was also in vogue elsewhere in the world during Watson’s own time, not just in Canada.  Italy had its Hegelian idealist in Benedetto Croce (1866-1952).  In England, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924) was its standard bearer.  And in the United States Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was representative.  What is also clear is that Germany was decidedly not Hegelian in the period from, say, 1870 to 1920 when, rather, neo-Kantianism was flourishing there.  We see evidence of this in the Weimar Republic.  Since Watson’s time, perhaps by means of the United Church itself, Hegelianism came to dominate intellectual culture in Canada to a degree that seems unparalleled in the Hegelian world (outside of, say, the former Soviet Union and Communist China).

However, it looks as if Hegelianism suited the Canadian way of thinking because we were already predisposed to the idea of “reconciliation” well in advance of the philosophy of Hegel and any “unity of opposites”. There were two rich historical sources to Canadian “reconciliation” – one known by a different name, the other not so well known. The first was the American War of Independence.  If we look at Thomas Paine’s widely-read revolutionary work Common Sense (1776), we see that he presented the American colonists at the time with two stark choices: “Reconciliation or Independance [sic]”. Thus, it was the United Empire Loyalists, faithful to the British Crown, who found a new home in Canada, in great numbers particularly around the Toronto area: in other words, they had “reconciled” themselves to the Crown.

A similar event occurred more than a century prior to the American Revolution. It followed the aftermath of the mid-seventeenth century English Civil Wars and the short-lived republican Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. The Royal Charter by King Charles II, which launched the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, occurred just ten years into the Stuart Restoration. It brought the son of King Charles I (who was executed by axe) to the throne of England. It speaks volumes that the largest land grant in global history, made by a King who still espoused divine right, served as a foundation for Rupert’s Land (and 200 years later, Canada), thus establishing trading posts in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria and many other places.  What symbolically better way was there to take control and reconstitute the authority of the Crown?  The Hudson’s Bay Company was formed (and so, eventually, was Canada) after England had “reconciled” to the idea of itself as a Kingdom – and was no longer a fleeting republican “experiment” under Cromwell.

This suggests that the United Empire Loyalists were following in the footsteps of the HBC’s traders and explorers. Who knows what would have happened to Canada if this earlier Rupert’s Land “reconciliation” had not occurred beforehand. It is also interesting to note that, most recently, while the HBC faded from commercial history into bankruptcy, discomfitted Canadians were at the same time revisiting “reconciliation” with yet another King from England (Charles III), who read the speech from the throne from Ottawa on 27 May 2025 in the face of new threats to our sovereignty from Donald Trump.

It is important to consider Canada’s creation (as viewed via the Hudson’s Bay Company), at least in part, as a royal act.  And that it occurred while the spirit of “reconciliation” was on the rise in England. This was neither a Puritan inspiration nor a product of the subsequent Glorious Revolution (1688/89), which limited the monarchy, established a Bill of Rights, and rightfully signified the supremacy of Parliament. This in turn draws attention away from the presumed place of John Locke (1632-1704) and the influence of his political thought here.   Locke may actually have played a limited role in the formation of Canada, unlike in the USA (where his legacy is in decline as Enlightenment ideals continue to fade from the political imagination).

Borrowing from Louis B. Hartz’s famous thesis in The Founding of New Societies (1964), it could be argued that the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company represented the Stuart Restoration in Canada but one frozen in time. “For when a part of a European nation is detached from the whole of it, and hurled outward onto new soil, it loses the stimulus towards change that the whole provides. It lapses into a kind of immobility.” This is the reason why there is Puritanism in the USA, but no longer any in England; why Ontario was considered more Scottish than Scotland; and why the City of Victoria, British Columbia, seems stuck in time.

In other words, the leap from “reconciliation” to a Hegelian unity – or synthesis – of opposites was prepared by a distinctly Canadian predisposition for the Crown. We see it in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and we see it in the United Empire Loyalists who followed in its footsteps. We also see it in that Canadian neologism: “winning by acclamation” – that most modest of Canadian sayings. In the United States if one wins an election unopposed, one wins an election unopposed. If this happens in Canada, you are “acclaimed”. To suggest as much is to imply deference to the elected – and possibly, as well, to give a nod to divine authority, so-called, or: the Crown.

Consider also the motto of The Globe and Mail (“Canada’s National Newspaper”) as attributed to Junius: “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.” The word “subject”, followed by the words “truly loyal” and “the Chief Magistrate”, dwell on the experience of the United Empire Loyalists and displace George Brown’s (founder of The Globe) liberal “neither/nor” phraseology. It is because Americans see themselves as “citizens” that the idea of “acclamation” is not commonplace there. It is because Canadians still see themselves as “subjects” that the idea of “acclamation” is commonplace here.

Of course, liberalism and “reconciliation” can be also be complementary, despite the latter’s royalist implications and the connotations of Empire.  Canada’s Hegel culture was at its apex here when Lester Pearson was Prime Minister playing Canada’s role as the “middle power” in the era of Cold War extremes.  Anyone interested in Hegel and the idea of the “middle” will benefit from consulting the work of Emil Fackenheim, especially his Religious Dimensions in Hegel’s Thought (1967).  But Hegel, a notoriously difficult writer and thinker, could not have anticipated our Nobel-prize winning Prime Minister, nor the generous number of Canadian fellow philosophers, most of whom, when looking at Hegel and Canada, occupy positions at universities in Ontario, Quebec, or Nova Scotia. Of the fifteen different contributors to Hegel and Canada, only Barry Cooper of the University of Calgary lives west of the Ontario border.  The telling title of his article: “Hegel’s Laurentian Fragments.” 

So, it appears that Hegelianism per se is in some ways distinguishable from the earlier prevailing - and likely more widespread - sentiment for “reconciliation”.  Greater attention to the geographical nature of ideas would be of benefit here.  This, in turn, invites the thought that Hegelianism, which seems to be a preoccupation of central Canada, might also have stemmed from the “dialectical opposition” between what, in Hegel’s day and age, became Upper and Lower Canada – a possible third source of historical “reconciliation”.  And, Hegel, as an intellectual participant of the early nineteenth century, was also a keen observer of ceaseless forms of political “activity and retro-activity”, especially when looking at France since the Revolution of 1789.  Hegel sought unity in mutual understanding, and Canadians found Hegel in our search for “reconciliation”.

In broad brush-strokes then, Hegel’s thought is to Canada what Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), or Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (written 1680–1683) were to the USA, and maybe what Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) was to China – not comparable revolutionary texts by any means, but an inherently reciprocal philosophy which first found attraction here in a desire to reconcile with the Crown.

Trump as King Minos, mythical ruler of Crete, also son of Zeus

Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy.  He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic Sea [Aegean Sea]; he ruled over the Cyclades, in most of which he founded the first colonies, putting his sons in as governors after having driven out the Carians.  And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.[1]

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (circa 431-411 BC)

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[1] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 37 [I.4].

Canada breathes a sigh of relief as Venezuela becomes the 51st state

 
     Source: The Guardian