Election Night, 2024
Princeton, New Jersey
9 pm

As we watch the US election results shamble their way onto our screens, it’s amusing to think that we’ve spent a year or more fixated on the spectacle of two pieces of moral trash engaged in a long, unsavory job interview. Ironically, the result will be a hire and possibly a termination that blurs the distinction between at-will and for-cause. Whoever wins or loses this thing, can anyone really say why?

Contrast this with the fate of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s so-called Minister of Defense, terminated earlier today by his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu. Say what you like about “Bibi,” but give him credit for precision. He has reasons for firing Gallant, however true or false, honest or dishonest, and he comes out and gives them.

Mr. Gallant said Mr. Netanyahu fired him over three main disagreements: the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, a deal to release hostages and his call for a state commission of inquiry into the security failures surrounding the attack Hamas led on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

They may be mass murderers, the both of them, but they wouldn’t dream of terminating one another in the American style, without cause. It’s one thing to kill at will, and another to be employed that way. It just goes to show that there’s honor among genocidaires, as there is among thieves.

Which brings me to another interesting termination-related contrast. I recently finished a book, Dawn of the Code War, by John P. Carlin, a former Justice Department official, about the US Department of Justice’s self-styled crusade against state-sponsored hacking. Carlin, who served at “Main Justice” under Obama, Trump, and Biden–and is, coincidentally, the younger brother of an erstwhile therapist of mine–spills a fair bit of ink complaining about corporate America’s tendency to placate rather than confront “our nation’s” enemies, primarily Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

About half-way through the book, he relates with exasperation the behavior of bank officials in the wake of a Russian hack of a client of the First National Bank of Omaha.

This was the gang’s whole digital operation–a roadmap to the entire case. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant dispatched an engineer to Omaha for months just to help untable the Jabber Zeus code, while the FBI began cycling in agents from other regions on 30- or 90-day assignments. Linguists across the country pitched into decipher the logs. “The slang was a challenge,” Craig [the agent heading the investigation] said.

The messages contained references to hundreds of victims, their stolen credentials scattered in English throughout the files. Craig and other agents started cold-calling the institutions, telling them they had been hit by cyberfraud. He found that several businesses had terminated employees they suspected of the thefts–not realizing that the individuals’ computers had been infected by malware and their logins stolen (Dawn of the Code War, pp. 286-87, emphasis mine).

We aren’t told how many people lost their jobs in this way, for how long, or with what consequences. It’s obvious that the companies in question could not have proven that these individuals had done anything wrong, because they clearly hadn’t. It’s not clear whether any sort of bona fide investigation was ever undertaken in any of these cases, but it seems extremely unlikely that any was. How could every investigation have missed the fact that the suspected employees were themselves victims of malware? Isn’t that what IT is for? And isn’t discovering malware in the financial interest of the company itself–or rather, in its interest once we set aside the possibility of moral hazard driven by shifting the cost to others who might absorb it, including the FBI and the American taxpayer?

I guess not, depending on what question we’re asking. While we’re at it, what do you think were the chances that the people who lost those jobs got a call from HR contritely admitting error on the part of the company, and got their jobs back with back-pay?

Princeton students in front of Cannon Green, where political demonstrations are currently prohibited. 

I doubt they did. Never having to say sorry are what limited liability and at-will employment are all about. That’s what a ruling class is for.

A ruling class needs its protectors, and that’s what “the men and women who enforce the nation’s criminal laws and guard its liberties” are for. When Carlin tells us that “Americans” are under cyber-attack by foreign powers, what he means is that its ruling class is under attack, and that he, as a servant of that class, must protect it in the age-old tradition of the knight in shining armor. The non-ruling-class Americans under attack barely figure in the plot of his book. They are, in fact, under quadruple attack in cyberspace alone: first by the foreign hackers Carlin mentions; then by the corporations blaming their employees for the predictable hacking that the corporations themselves did nothing to predict or deter; then by Big Data surveillance capitalists; and then by the US government itself, which comes back to surveil and hack them (us) in the name of “national security.”

Unsurprisingly, Carlin’s book focuses instead on the trials and tribulations of such epic heroes as Sands Casino, Sheldon Adelson, the Sony Corporation, JP Morgan Chase, and James Clapper. Edward Snowden is misrepresented and described as a villain; Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Reality Winner go unmentioned, full stop. That’s what happens when history is written by the winners–and the “winners” are things like states, corporations, ruling classes, and regimes. Truth loses out, but no one really wins.

So it is with “our election,” which by definition will also be written by the winners. So ask not who won Election 2024. Think of it as ending, very soon, with the tolling of a funeral bell. And ask not for whom the bell tolls. Because if you haven’t figured it out yet, you will soon enough.