Patrick Iber

@patrickiber.bsky.social

7929 Followers 776 Following

Widely somewhat respected. Co-editor, Dissent Magazine. Teach history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. New book coming at end of 2026: Poverty of the Imagination: The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America.

The night sky full of stars and the band of the Milky Way, with silhouettes of palm trees in the foreground at right
It has been regarded as a patriotic duty for Americans, on the 4th of July, to apostrophize Liberty and to select from the vocabularies of all languages eulogistic words to describe its value and its glory, and when words failed to express those essential attributes of liberty which made life itself an inferior blessing, bonfires have blazed, cannons have belched their thunder, banners have waved, drums have throbbed, and bugle blasts have called the people to assemble and rejoice together over God's inscrutable decree in bestowing upon Americans blessings denied to all other peoples, kindreds, and tongues since time began. Nor do I doubt that on this anniversary such exhibitions will be repeated, but it will be a hollow mockery. The stage will be gorgeous with scenery for the play of liberty, but liberty will be absent-only its ghost will appear, only its "canonized bones" will be present. -Eugene V. Debs, "Liberty's Anniversary," July 4, 1895
It's the Hoover Institution Library & Archives registration page, including name questions and then preferred pronouns
Bateman: We have probably the most difficult-to-amend Constitution in the world. Every additional state has made it more difficult, because it increases the number of veto points. On the other hand, we amend the Constitution all the time through the courts. And the courts have an enormous amount of flexibility, because we recognize that court decisions are the mechanism through which we accommodate our short, unspecified Constitution to the vastness of the American empire and the American state. The court uses this power, and we give it the power, because we see amending the Constitution itself as such an impossible task. If you raise the idea of amending the Constitution through the regular Article V path, people will laugh in your face.
An orange fox with big foxy ears looking toward the camera. It is lying down in a field full of yellow, white, and pink flowers
A prop model of a Sentinel from The Matrix attacking the top of a building. The Sentinels are squid-like with long metal tentacles that resemble the UFC cage construction at the White House
The Demands of the Common Good 78. But a further point needs emphasizing: Any adjustment between wages and profits must take into account the demands of the common good of the particular country and of the whole human family. 79. What are these demands? On the national level they include: employment of the greatest possible number of workers; care lest privileged classes arise, even among the workers; maintenance of equilibrium between wages and prices; the need to make goods and services accessible to the greatest number; elimination, or at least the restriction, of inequalities in the various branches of the economy--that is, between agriculture, industry and services; creation of a proper balance between economic expansion and the development of social services, especially through the activity of public authorities; the best possible adjustment of the means of production to the progress of science and technology; seeing to it that the benefits which make possible a more human way of life will be available not merely to the present generation but to the coming generations as well.
Warnings of a crisis of liberalism have become commonplace, as it is assailed by an illiberal right on the one side and a socialist left on the other. The situation is plain, and it is at least partially self-inflicted. Liberalism has missed opportunity after opportunity. It is not merely the tepid response to the financial crisis. One critic warns that already in the '80s there were "fresh and full disclosures of poverty" and "the decay of rural industry and population," yet liberals made no serious proposals for reform. "The old laissez faire individualism," he reasons, "was still too dominant." Nevertheless, he holds, there is the possibility of renewal. The cause of liberty can be advanced through social reform, through a more robust welfare state, through attacks on monopolies and unearned property. The writer is the social scientist J.A. Hobson. The year is 1909.
INFORMATION REPORT INFORMATION REPORT CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY This material contains Information affecting the National Defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Laws, Title 18, U.S.C. Secs. 793 and 791, the transmission or revelation of which in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by 25X1 SECRET COUNTRY SUBJECT DATE OF INFO. USSR REPORT Comments on the Change in Soviet Leadership DATE DISTR. NO. OF PAGES REQUIREMENT NO. RD REFERENCES This is UNEVALUATED Information SOURCE EVALUATIONS ARE DEFINITIVE. APPRAISAL OF CONTENT IS TENTATIVE. MAR 2 19525X1 2 25X1 25X1 1. Even In Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western Idea of a dictator within the Communist, setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organi- zation of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain. However, it does not appear that any of the present leaders will rise to the stature of Lenin and Stalin, so that it will be safer to assume that developments in Moscow will be along the lines of what is called collective leadership, unless Western policies force the Soviets to stream- line their power organization. The present situation is the most favorable from the point of view of upsetting the Communist dictatorship since the death of Stalin 2. There will not be a dramatic purge. Inasmuch as the MVD has already been cleaned up and the Party and the Army have not been in the hands of Malenkov's favorites, there can be expected only a normal replacement of officials In the reorganization of the top-level administration of the Party and the Govern- ment. 3. It is hard to draw any parallel between present events and those of the 1920's " when Stalin was ascending to power. There is now no organized opposition inside the Party or in the Soviet Union in general. As the …
The Moe-tosses-Barney meme, with drunk Barney in panel 1 labeled "Fascism" and Moe's toe as "modernization theory", Panel 2 has satisfied Moe labeled as Gino Germani, and in panel 3 Barney reappears behind Moe
It's the Pam from The Office meme, with the pictures labeled "Westernization" and "modernization", "The Ford Foundation needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture"; Pam is labeled "Cold War social science" saying "They're the same picture"
Book cover shows an alleyway in a Rio favela, the black and white photo has been given a bluish tinge; my name is upper left, the title of the book "Poverty of the Imagination" is at lower left and at right, in reddish text is the subtitle "The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America"
A newspaper clipping on a desk titled “Fly by Night” research hit by South Americans
Edward Ruscha's 1962 painting OOF, which is a deep blue background with OOF written in large yellow capital letters in a sans serif font
If Austrians are so unhappy with their lot in life that they would prefer fascism to liberal democracy, a hundred years after the Nazis marched into Vienna, then they frankly need to get out more; what they cannot do is claim, by any global measure, to be suffering to the degree historically viewed as necessary for a people to throw it all away. As a columnist for the left-wing newspaper Der Standard recently pointed out, social science indicates that it is not economic deprivation that primarily drives support for the far right but false perceptions: voters who are doing better than others, objectively, but imagine themselves to be worse off, or are simply anxious about losing their privileged status.
Page proofs of AJA Woods's book "The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West"; the cover art is a picture of Theodor Adorno with devil horns and a tail crudely drawn on
Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign marks a historic breakthrough in American politics. It is the first time that a "social democratic" platform has been presented in the mainstream of American politics and attracted significant mass support. The journal- istic cliche was, and is, that Jackson's program is "extremist," vague, outrageously expensive. In fact, as a correspondent for the London Financial Times reported, only in Ronald Reagan's America could Jackson's eminently moderate and sensible ideas be seen as far out. Those ideas, on full employment, health, North-South and the like, are familiar to readers of Dissent, members of Democratic Social- ists of America, and the broad democratic left. They are, more or less, what we have been talking about during the past decade and in some cases the people who articulated them for Jackson came from our world.
Newspaper headline: Dolphins are said to be releasing Tyreek Hill and Bradley Chubb
FAA tweet announcing closure of El Paso airspace is over
Fundraising email from Elissa Slotkin that says "As a former CIA officer, I've seen democracies flicker out."
Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops
PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND RECONSTRUCTION The world has come to know Adolph Hitler for his insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, cruelty and utter lack of feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints. In the course of relatively few years he has contrived to usurp such tre- mendous power that a few veiled threats, accusations or insinuations were sufficient to make the world tremble. In open defiance of treaties he occupied huge territories and conquered millions of people without even firing a shot. When the world became tired of being frightened and concluded that it was all a bluff, he initiated the most brutal and deva- stating war in history - a war which, for a time, threatened the com- plete destruction of our civilization. Human life and human suffering seem to leave this individual completely untouched as he plunges along the course he believes he was predestined to take.
R. Buckminster's Fuller's Dymaxion Map is a world map that compresses a sphere onto an icosahedron and then unfolds it. The Arctic is in the center and basically have a semi-contiguous map with Australia at left to Antarctica at the right. Greenland, being close to a pole, is, notably, much smaller than in the Mercator Projection
A photo of a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on an urban street. They are on the ground floor of a taller building. Trees shade the sidewalk
Chotiner: It did support numerous coups. Hathaway: Yeah, absolutely. Look, the U.S. has not got a perfect record. There's no doubt about that, and it has betrayed its values many times, but this is of a different order. This is just a blatant throwing-the-whole-thing-out and making a claim to be able to use force whenever it wants.
A headline from Dec 1 2025 "Did the U.S. commit a war crime in the Caribbean?"
Above the fold on an issue of The Onion from 1996, presented as being from 1896. It looks old-timey in font and has a photograph of a man with ornithopter wings struggling to get off the ground. Headlines include "Infant Death Rate Plummets to One-in-Three" "Folly of Flying Machine Claims Life of Fool", "Avenge the Nebraska!"
A clip from The Onion called "UW Snapshots" "Special 'What do you think?' Edition. There are five photos, four men and one woman, responding to "Hooray for High School: a lot of high school students have been around Madison for sports tournaments lately. Students around campus were surveyed, 'How has the teenagers' presence here affected you?" Sue Valens says, for example, "I enjoy talking with them and meeting them--it's an opportunity to be exposed to people from other cultures."
An RT post of Tucker Carlson dung smug face above a post "Terrying sight of Pentagon "MOTHERSHIP SPECIAL OPS COMMAND CENTER" spotted off Venezuela's coast" with the text "Maduro bans gay marriage, abortion, and sex changes; His US-backed replacement wants to legalize them, Tucker explains. Will Americans fight and die for 'GLOBOHOMO'?
Regimes, on the other hand, have good reasons to ad- mit underperformers to their key coercive unit and to not counteract the self-selection of such officials. From the perspective of leaders, underachievers are beneficial be- cause they must diligently work toward the autocrat's in- terests to retain their career chances. For example, Alexan- dru Drâghici, the former interior minister of Romania, was well aware that his secret police agents "had a fairly low level of training and general knowledge, but that these shortcomings were compensated for by their powerful revolutionary enthusiasm" (Deletant 2005, 304). By con- trast, leaders who assign high-performing officials to serve in the secret police must fear that their subordinates will not execute unpleasant orders. Having lucrative career options, competent officials make unreliable secret police agents, as they are likely to stay passive when the regime is under attack (Zakharov 2016).
a still from the 1996 film Independence Day with a giant alien spacecraft shooting a blue laser into the White House as it begins to explode
The regime has perfected the tech- nique of identifying themes likely to capture the popular imagination, and of using messages and images to dis- tract the public. Of course, there is nothing new about Pinochet's al- lowing El Mercurio to run up a debt to the government of roughly a hundred million dollars, and thus being able to count on its unconditional support. Pi- nochet does not ask the owners of the newspaper, the Edwards family, what they have done with the hundred mil- lion dollars, and El Mercurio does not ask Pinochet what he has done with the people more than seven hundred of them--who have disappeared in Chile after being arrested by the mili.
Then come the financial considera- tions and the negotiations with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. This stage is usually fol lowed by doubts and ambivalence: it is possible that Pinochet may continue in power only another year. Going inte exile also poses risks that must be con- sidered. The children may marry for- eigners while they are living abroad, and may not want to return to Chile when the dictator is overthrown. There are usually grandparents to think about; often they are in ill health. In addition, going into exile means that you lose your job, your professional qualifications, and your home. When a family faces exile, the countless elements that make up its life are all swept up in a devastating whirlwind. Exiles who have returned to Chile cannot help those who must make a decision about whether to escape. The exile's return is painful, despite the help of a team of psychologists spon- sored by the Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist churches. It is not easy to renter Chilean life, and most exiles find that political solidarity has been extinguished by the repression and that economic solidarity has been made impossible by the hard times.
Of the Chileans who believe that it is vitally necessary to eliminate Pi- nochet, the majority would prefer to see the United States do it, rather than the Communists. They believe that the Chilean armed forces would accept the operation if it were to be carried out by Washington, but that terrible, indis- criminate repression would be un- leashed if the Communists were to assassinate Pinochet, and this would consolidate the military regime. The truth is, however, that at the moment the United States has other plans for Chile. They are not violent, as they were with Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. They are also far removed from the magic solution that Chilean politicians dream about- an Operation Chile to remove Pi- nochet which would be over in twen- ty-four hours. It is widely believed that the Reagan Administration wants the Chilean armed forces themselves to bring the Pinochet dictatorship to a close--peacefully and, if possible, within the legal framework of the regime. Pinochet would be allowed to spend the rest of his days in a country of his choice; the political parties would be expected to allow the military to return to their barracks in peace; and the Chilean Communist Party would be isolated.
Donald Trump and his subordinates demonstrate daily that their authoritarian desire for control extends across society’s institutions. The press and universities are being brought to heel by threats, lawsuits, and their billionaire backers. Government employees are losing their jobs for doing their jobs, or for no reason at all. Areas of inquiry are being shut down. While Gaza starves, criticism of Israel is dangerous. Civil and political liberties are blinking out. Women have lost rights; trans people are told that they should not exist. The government has institutionalized disappearance and torture by masked agents of the state and gleefully celebrated these actions in ethno-nationalist terms. Even naturalized citizens have been put on notice that their rights are provisional. The military is ordered to assume law enforcement functions. Trump muses about an unconstitutional third term, and the Republican Party is planning moves, like the gerrymander in Texas, that will make it harder to call upcoming elections free and fair. How many leaves have already fallen? A few decades ago, when the study of transitions to democracy rather than away from it occupied the attention of political scientists, one would occasionally encounter an apparent paradox. Consider Mexico’s slow exit from a complicated single-party autocracy under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI lost control of Congress for the first time in almost seventy years in 1997. But no one was certain if the country met the standard to be called a democracy until the PRI also accepted its loss in the presidential elections of 2000. Only at that point did it seem reasonable to say that Mexico probably was a democracy in 1997 too. That process is now playing out in reverse around the globe. Core components of democracy are being lost, but people often don’t know what kind of system they are in at any given moment. That suspension between states may only be revealed by future events.
A few decades ago, when the study of transitions to democracy rather than away from it occupied the attention of political scientists, one would occasionally encounter an apparent paradox. Consider Mexico’s slow exit from a complicated single-party autocracy under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI lost control of Congress for the first time in almost seventy years in 1997. But no one was certain if the country met the standard to be called a democracy until the PRI also accepted its loss in the presidential elections of 2000. Only at that point did it seem reasonable to say that Mexico probably was a democracy in 1997 too. That process is now playing out in reverse around the globe. Core components of democracy are being lost, but people often don’t know what kind of system they are in at any given moment. That suspension between states may only be revealed by future events.
Trump wearing a stupid red hat that says "Trump was right about everything"
Screenshot of the article and Bukele tweeting "Hahahahahaha You know, I once thought the news were real"
Screenshot of the DHS tweeting "Protect the Homeland" with a painting called Morning Pledge by Thomas Kinked; it shows an idealized small-town America, the pavement slick with rain, a church with an American flag, two figures walking past a white picket fence
Domino guy meme with "Ted Schultz defends substituting margarine for butter in wartime" at the low end and "Global Neoliberal Restructuring" at the big end
Small selection of black and white photos of the faces of the disappeared of the Pinochet dictatorship, now at its Museum of Memory and Human Rights
Part of a deep purple panel in a museum with white text describing microscopic organisms called copepods
That said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires erase the city or are erased by it.
A woman listening to the fractal radio used by Luthen Rael and the rebellion to communicate in Andor; hidden in Rael's antiquities shop; it has a similar technological vibe to the image of the Pope below
Kellogg's "Our Brands" with Raisin Bran, Fruit Loops, Pringles, etc.
A photo of a dirty bathtub that looks like a face, with the hot and cold handles for eyes and the spigot a nose and the overflow slot for a mouth
More than anything else, Grandin should be commended for his vindication of what he calls “Latin America’s worldview.” In his scheme, the region’s “humanist” approach to politics—along with economics, literature, theology, diplomacy, ethnic inclusion, social welfare, and above all international law—constitutes a “remarkably coherent” rebuttal to the imperialist ideology of the United States. Now that the country that hubristically calls itself America has yet again been taken hostage by a clique of dime-store Eichmanns, it’s heartening to watch a U.S. historian conjure the spirit of Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Spanish friar who dedicated his life to defending the Indigenous peoples of the New World from the abuses of European colonizers. Yet America, América is ultimately disappointing. Essentializing millions of people from dozens of cultures that seem similar only when considered from the perspective of the United States—even if it is to vindicate them—is another form of imperial condescension.
Some trees and bushes, some cheap white plastic chairs in a stack. And the humble bench described in the post, a blue frame with red, white, and blue caps
Pepe Mújica in 2023, with a blue jacket, inside his kitchen. He sits a simple table with a vinyl red-and-white checked cloth. The walls are cracking in the background
Steve from Blues Clues, a basic white dude with light brown hair, a green-on-green polo and khaki slacks; the cartoon dog is on his shoulders
A photo of the exhibit with Lego bricks on the floor at Alcatraz made into portraits. In the photo you can see Martin Luther King Jr, John Kiriakou, Shaker Aamer
An office door with the Spanish Civil War No pasarán poster on it, depicting a soldier carrying a rifle in the foreground and a shadowy worker carrying a rifle in the background
sympathy, advocating for a similar revolution in their own countries. Even as Castro’s gov- ernment developed a closer relationship with the Soviet Union, Cuba retained a reputation for having a freer strain of communism than its Soviet-bloc counterparts. One of the things that signaled this dif- ference was the revolution’s treatment of artists and writers. Castro assured them that they did not have to be militant revolution- aries, and that there was no prescribed way to produce “socialist” art. Attracted to this vision of a revolution that combined social- ism and artistic freedom, intellectuals of the international left defended Cuba and became an important part of the Castro govern- ment’s international public-relations strategy. Many Latin American writers—Vargas Llosa among them—flocked to the island to serve on the juries of the Casa de las Américas cul- tural organization. The Padilla affair, which intensified when the poet Heberto Padilla was arrested by the Cuban government, marked a turning point for many of the revolution’s fellow travel- ers. In the late 1960s, Padilla often explored disenchantment with the revolution in his poems. For a time this was tolerated, but the situation deteriorated in 1968, after Padilla won a Cuban literary prize. Padilla’s book was published, albeit with an official disclaimer, and articles attacking him soon began to run in state organs, including the Cuban Army magazine Verde Olivo. After his arrest and imprisonment, Padilla appeared in public and gave a coerced statement of debasing self-criticism, while accusing his friends and associates of similar deviations. Disturbed by this turn of events, Vargas Llosa penned an open letter in which he decried Padilla’s treatment, arguing that it “recall[ed] the most sordid moments of the Stalinist era,” and demanded that the Cuban Revolution “return to what it was when we considered it a model within socialism.” Vargas Llosa recruited many famous Latin American, European, and US …
Literature is fire,” Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan novelist and former president. Gal- legos represented the center-left tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa was determined to challenge his audience from the left. Literature, the Peruvian novelist continued, “means nonconformism and rebellion.... Within ten, twenty or fifty years, the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces that now insult and repress it.” Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, Vargas Llosa received a very different sort of prize and delivered a very different kind of speech. Accepting the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, he denounced the Cuban gov- ernment and called Fidel Castro an “authoritarian fossil,” praised the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises as a “great liberal thinker,” and defended calls for privatizing pensions. It was quite a remarkable transformation. In the opening paragraph of Vargas Llosa’s 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathe- dral, the protagonist asks: “At what pre- cise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” It is a question that many people have asked as well of Peru’s greatest novelist. Vargas Llosa is unquestionably one of the most important writers of his genera- tion. He has written 18 novels, at least five
Though Sabers and Utopias is ostensi- bly a book of political essays, Vargas Llosa is at his best when he is writing about culture. There, his essays have the specificity and insight born of lived experience. His tribute to his Chilean col- league José Donoso in particular stands out, compressing a great deal of emotion into a few short pages. Throughout their years of friendship, Vargas Llosa teased Donoso for defending Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and George Eliot’s Middlemarch “simply because his professors at Princeton had forced him to read them.” Donoso’s “knuckles would turn white and his eyes red,” Vargas Llosa recalled of their conversations. When he visited Donoso on his deathbed, Vargas Llosa teased him one last time, telling him: “Henry James is shit.” But Donoso “pressed my hand to force me to lower my head until it was at the same level as his ear,” and then exacted his revenge with three words aimed at one of Var- gas Llosa’s literary idols: “Flaubert, more so.” This exchange, of course, honored their friendship and the writers they jokingly dis- paraged. It is a measure of Vargas Llosa’s significance that one can imagine a parallel scene playing out in the early 21st cen- tury, when a dying writer would whisper to his friend: “Vargas Llosa, more so”—a statement whose meaning would lie not in whether it was true or false, but in whether it still mattered enough to say.
By the end of the book, Grandin has essentially identified the Latin American tradition with social-democratic reforms and Washington with efforts to smash them. That shoe fits often enough, and the book makes a convincing case to appreciate the Latin American intellectual and diplomatic traditions it highlights. With Trump openly declaring ambitions of old-fashioned territorial imperialism, there will be many opportunities in the next years to regret that the United States has abandoned a more multilateral and consensual approach to leadership. Grandin is right that the world—and the United States—were better off when this nation recognized both limits to its own power and the need to work for the common good.
Hands off protest crowd in front of the Wisconsin Capitol building
A group of soldiers are carrying a body towards what appears to be a bus or large vehicle of some sort; a woman in a blue dress seems to be trying to pull the detainee back; they are all in the middle of the street on a sunny day
Three capybaras, one on the grass and two still in the water. They were in a lake in a park near Embu das Artes, near São Paulo