Alban Berg's 'Violin Concerto'
— Michael Steinberg
Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born on Monday 9 February, 1885, in Vienna and died there on Tuesday 24 December, 1935. He wrote the 'Violin Concerto', his last complete work, in the spring and summer of 1935, finishing the composition on Monday 15 July and completing the orchestration on Monday 12 August. Louis Krasner, who had commissioned the concerto from Berg, gave the first performance on Sunday 19 April, 1936, in Barcelona, at a festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music; Hermann Scherchen conducted the Orquestra Pau Casals. Krasner, who made the work known all over Europe and America, also introduced it in the United States, at concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Friday 5 & Saturday 6 March, 1937, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting.
In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling alto saxophone) and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 tenor and 1 bass trombone, bass tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam-tam (low), gong (high), triangle, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The concerto is about 26 minutes long.
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On Thursday 12 August, 1909, Alban Berg wrote to Helene Nahowski, whom he would marry two years later, that “this morning a wasp stung me in my right hand, middle finger. It began to swell and has now become so thick I can hardly move the fingers; quite painful. Well that’s life in the country.” In the next day’s letter he writes, evidently from experience, “My hand is not better yet, I ought really to keep it very quiet so that the inflammation won’t spread to the arm.” Twenty-six years later to the day, Berg drew the double bar on the last page of his 'Violin Concerto'. Soon after, the wasps got to him again, and this time Berg, all his life a bundle of ailments, allergies, and hypochondriac fantasies, did not recover. Carbuncles developed, then boils, then an abscess on his back, and then blood poisoning. He received a transfusion—the donor was a Viennese laborer, and Berg expressed the hope that it would not turn him into an operetta composer—but, with sulfa drugs not yet available, nothing helped. On 23 December he said, “Today is the 23rd. It will be a decisive day.” Ever since his first attack of bronchial asthma on Thursday 23 July, 1908—at age 23—he had been superstitious about the number 23. Helene Berg sought to help her husband by moving the clocks ahead so as to convince him that the critical day was past. In vain: Berg survived the critical 23rd, but only by an hour and a quarter.
He was two days older than his adored Gustav Mahler had been at the time of his death. The score of his opera 'Lulu', a project he had harbored for thirty years, was nearly finished. The last completed work was the 'Violin Concerto' for whose sake, and rather to his own surprise, he had interrupted work on 'Lulu'.
Two summonses had called the concerto into being. First, the Russian-born American violinist Louis Krasner (1903-1995) commissioned such a work from Berg. Krasner knew and liked the lyrical quality of Berg’s early 'Piano Sonata', and had been overwhelmed by his opera 'Wozzeck' when he heard Stokowski conduct it in New York in 1931. Then, in Vienna early in 1935, he heard the Galimir Quartet play something more recent and representative, the 'Lyric Suite' of 1925-26. Not only was Krasner impressed by the 'Lyric Suite', he also fell in love with, proposed to, and married Adrienne Galimir, the second violinist in the quartet, which then consisted of a brother and three sisters. Berg was reluctant to commit himself to the idea of a concerto, saying that the world of Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps was not his world, to which Krasner sensibly replied that after all Beethoven and Brahms had written violin concertos, too. Still more telling was Krasner’s suggestion that Berg was the man to demonstrate the lyric and expressive potential of twelve-tone music, and to release it from the stigma of “all brain, no heart.” For a while, Berg stuck to his rather guarded position, but he formally accepted the commission, and friends observed that he lately acquired the new and strange habit of attending violin recitals.
The second summons was a tragic one—the death on Monday April 22, 1935, of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel by her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius.* [Alma Mahler was by then married to the novelist Franz Werfel. In the mid-1970s, research by George Perle and Douglass Green uncovered a long and passionate love affair between Berg and Werfel’s sister, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Berg’s 'Lyric Suite', it turns out, was secretly dedicated to Hanna and is full of references and messages to her that are encoded in various musical and structural features of the work.] Manon, singularly gifted, gentle, vivacious, and beautiful, seems to have been loved by everyone who came in contact with her. She was studying to be an actress when struck down by poliomyelitis, which led to spinal paralysis and so to her death. Berg, shaken through and through, suddenly saw how the concerto might be a Requiem for the beloved Manon. The title page says at the top “Für Louis Krasner” and at the bottom, “Dem Andenken eines Engels” (“to the memory of an angel”). “Angel” carries a specific reference in that Max Reinhardt had planned to have Manon make her debut as an angel in his Salzburg production of 'Everyman'.
In June, Krasner was able to spend some time with Berg at the composer’s country house on the Wörthersee—just opposite Pörtschach, where Brahms had written his 'Violin Concerto', as he was fond of pointing out—and he spent hours improvising for him so that Berg might get to know the strengths and characteristics of his technique and style. Until then, Berg had been the slowest of the great composers, and his catalog is very small. But the 'Violin Concerto' poured out of him with a speed and urgency and ease he had never before experienced. On Tuesday 16 July he was able to write to Krasner that he had finished the composition of “our” concerto the day before. “I am perhaps even more astonished than you,” he added. “I was, to be sure, industrious as never before in my life and must add that the work gave me more and more joy. I hope—no, I believe confidently—that I have succeeded.”
In 1935, Berg was just past the height of his fame and public success. He would have been at the zenith if the establishment in 1933 of Hitler’s regime had not suddenly choked off the performances in all the German theaters of his opera 'Wozzeck'. Losing what had become a substantial source of royalties caused Berg serious financial hardship, and throughout 1934 and 1935 he was obliged seriously to consider selling his country house and the little Ford convertible he had proudly bought with 'Wozzeck' earnings in the fall of 1930.
His father, whom he resembled to an uncanny degree, was a bookdealer who had come to Vienna from Nuremberg in 1867, and the whole family crackled with literary, theatrical, musical, and artistic talent. Berg’s sister, Smaragda, was the only other member of the family to pursue a professional career in music: she became a superb, much sought-after vocal coach, among whose pupils was Frida Leider, the great Isolde and Brünnhilde of the pre-Flagstad era. Alban’s and Smaragda’s older brother, Hermann, who emigrated to the United States, where he joined the New York firm of importers, Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. Inc., was responsible for a creation perhaps even more significant than 'Wozzeck', 'Lulu', the 'Lyric Suite', and the 'Violin Concerto', and certainly one of wider circulation, for it was he who gave the world the teddy bear.
It was Smaragda who spotted a newspaper advertisement on Monday 8 October, 1904, announcing that Arnold Schönberg would be teaching some night classes in harmony and counterpoint, and another brother, Karl, known as Charly, who secretly took some of Alban’s songs to the already celebrated, indeed notorious Schönberg for evaluation. Schönberg accepted Berg as a pupil, and Berg studied with him in a nourishing, trying, often exceedingly dependent relationship until 1910. Those aspects of their friendship hardly changed over the years.
For a time after his father’s early death in 1900, Berg had had to support himself by means of a job in civil service, but an inheritance from an aunt made him modestly independent in 1906. In 1908 he completed his 'Piano Sonata', the first work to which he assigned an opus number and which he counted as the real beginning of his career as a composer. There followed a string quartet in 1910, 'Five Songs' with orchestra on texts by Peter Altenberg in 1912, 'Three Pieces for Orchestra' in 1913, and the completion in 1922 of 'Wozzeck', on which he had begun work in 1914. In 1911 Berg had married Helene Nahowski and moved into the apartment he was to occupy for the rest of his life, and which was still Helene Berg’s home when she died in 1976.
Berg served briefly in the army, wrote some criticism and analysis, and after the war assisted Schönberg in setting up the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. 'Wozzeck' was the turning point. The performance under Hermann Scherchen in Frankfurt of concert excerpts in July 1924 made his name widely known. The first complete production followed in Berlin under Erich Kleiber’s direction in December 1925. Still more significant was the production in March 1929 in Oldenberg, then a city of some 400,000. It made the point that 'Wozzeck' was not just something for the big houses, and within a few years, Berg’s opera was in the repertory of some thirty European theaters. In March 1931, Leopold Stokowski introduced 'Wozzeck' in Philadelphia and New York.
Meanwhile, Berg led his life, traveled to hear performances of his music, carried on a copious correspondence, read voraciously (Balzac, Strindberg, Ibsen, Kafka, Karl Kraus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil were special favorites, but there was also room for Jack London and the Styrian poet, Peter Rosegger), played with his albino dachshunds, laughed at the movies of Buster Keaton and of Laurel and Hardy, cheered himself hoarse at soccer games, was delighted to receive a visit from George Gershwin, and wished in vain that the Austrian government’s tobacco monopoly, which had called its more luxurious grade of cigarette “Heliane” after an opera by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, would name its cheapest working-class brand “Wozzeck”.
Honors began to come his way, but when the City of Vienna offered him the honorary title of Professor (and that is a big deal in Austria and Germany to this day), he turned it down: “Too late,” he said, “Alban Berg is quite enough.” He himself became a teacher. His most famous pupil was that formidable polymath, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who eventually wrote a brilliant and characteristically idiosyncratic study of his master. On the other hand, the parents of an extraordinarily gifted English boy refused, on the advice of his teacher, to allow him to go to Berg, for it was feared he would be a bad influence: Benjamin Britten never got over his chagrin.
Of course the most important thing was Berg’s music. He added to his catalogue the 'Chamber Concerto' for violin, piano, and thirteen wind instruments, the 'Lyric Suite' for string quartet, the concert aria 'Der Wein' on a poem by Baudelaire, most of Lulu, and the 'Violin Concerto'. Twelve days before his death, wracked by fever, he was able for the first time to attend one of the many performances of the five-movement Symphony he had drawn from Lulu: it was the last music he heard. The 'Violin Concerto' he never heard at all.
After Berg’s death, the program committee of the International Society of Contemporary Music, an organization on whose juries Berg had repeatedly served, asked Krasner to play the concerto at the festival scheduled for Barcelona in April 1936. Schoenberg’s most famous pupil, Anton Webern, was to conduct, but, emotionally upset, unable to get along linguistically or in any other way with the Catalan orchestra, allowing himself to become hopelessly bogged down in detail, he withdrew at the last moment, and Hermann Scherchen, with minimal chance to study the score and of course with next to no rehearsal time available, came to the last-minute and heroic rescue.
~
Berg casts his concerto in two movements, each divided into two parts. The music starts in utmost quiet as harp and clarinets with solo violin begin some exploratory preluding, gently drifting at first—the violin’s entrance is just a touching of the four open strings from G up to E and down again—but gradually taking on a firmer sense of direction. A clear cadence is reached and, with a simple accompanying figure to set the pace, the first movement proper begins. When the violin next enters, it again begins on the open G string, but moves up this time into a higher register. The pitches are these—G B♭ D F♯ A C E G♯ B C♯ E♭ F—and virtually every choice of pitch that Berg makes in the concerto is related to that particular ordering of the twelve notes of our chromatic scale. The bold notes are the ones to which the four strings of a violin are tuned and, with each bearing either a minor or a major chord, they are the scaffolding of Berg’s chosen series. The last four notes take on special meaning later. It is clear from the outset that both a place for traditional tonal harmonies and a specifically violinistic element are built right into the material.
The two movements of the concerto can be said to represent respectively a portrait of Manon Gropius and a drama of “death and transfiguration.” The Andante, which Berg thought of as a Praeludium, soon leads to a wistful Allegretto. This is music full of pictorial reference: the sweet thirds in the violin are to be played “wienerisch” (“Viennese”), a more bumpkin-like passage is to be “rustico,” and the hiccup of the yodel is heard. There is even room for quotation when, after a couple of contrasting episodes (Trios to this scherzo, really), a Carinthian folk song is tenderly passed among the horn, the solo violin, and two trumpets. [Carinthia is a province in the southwest of Austria. It was there that Berg composed the concerto. Its German name is Kärnten, and the Kärntnerthor Theater in Vienna that one encounters so often in writings about Mozart and Beethoven was by the city gate where one took the road for Carinthia.]
The second movement enters violently and with an intensity of dissonance Berg has so far avoided. Berg sets up a powerful contrast between the cadenza-like freedom with which he wishes the opening projected and the strictly rhythmic style that takes over later on. A dotted rhythm ominously commands this scene. A demanding cadenza halts the forward thrust for a moment, but when the orchestra re-enters in full force, it pushes the music toward an immense climax. The storm subsides, and the violin is heard quietly but decisively playing a Bach chorale, accompanied only by the bassoon and a few of the orchestral strings. At a point when the first movement was far advanced and the basic compositional material of the concerto was long since determined, Berg was still looking for a suitable Bach chorale that he might somehow introduce. When he found one, it was so right he could hardly believe it: not only was the text perfect, but its first four notes were the last four of his own ordering of the twelve notes. It is, moreover, Bach’s most adventurous, chromatic, tension-laden chorale harmonization, so that it fits uncannily with Berg’s own harmonic style. It comes from the Cantata No. 60, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort' (“O Eternity, Thou Word of Thunder”), and the melody itself is by the 17th-century Mühlhausen church musician, Johann Rudolf Ahle. The words, by Franz Joachim Burmeister (1633-72), are as follows (the German text as given here follows the version printed in the Universal Edition of Berg’s score) :
Es ist genug! / It is enough!
Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, / Lord, if it please you,
So spanne mich doch aus! / Unyoke me now at last!
Mein Jesus kommt: / My Jesus comes:
Nun gute Nacht, o Welt! / Now good night, o world!
Ich fahr’ ins Himmelhaus, / I travel to my heavenly home,
Ich fahre sicher hin mit Frieden, / I travel surely and in peace,
Mein grosser Jammer bleibt darnieden. / My great distress remains below.
Es ist genug! Es ist genug! / It is enough! It is enough!
Berg’s and Bach’s harmonizations alternate and subtly intersect. Variations follow the playing through of the hymn, beginning with the melody in muted cellos and harp. The solo violin, also muted, joins in and is in turn joined by a single violin from the orchestra, then another, and more and more. Berg even asks that at this point the violinist “audibly and visibly” assume leadership of the strings. Louis Krasner stated that to Berg, this was “the real cadenza” of the concerto, and that he thought of the passage as one in which one seemed to perceive the solo through an ever-stronger magnifying glass until one violin, grown to overwhelming dimensions, entirely fills the room. The other strings drop away as gradually as they had entered until only the soloist is left. The Carinthian song is heard as if from a great distance, but it is the chorale, garlanded about with a filigree of solo strings, that leads the work to its serene close: “My great distress remains below.” The last music we hear is a scarcely audible recollection of the preluding on open strings where it all began.
—
Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that, of the San Francisco Symphony & New York Philharmonic.
Book Exerpt : Why Do We Give White Guys a License to Kill Black People?
Elie Mystal
(from 'Bad Law : Ten Popular Laws Killing America', © 2025)
Did you know that Geraldo Rivera has a brother, named Craig Rivera, who is also a broadcaster? I know this because back in the day, very early in my journalism career, I got a call from Geraldo’s producers asking me to do a television segment with Craig.
It wasn’t a normal “talking heads in boxes” TV appearance. Craig had a running segment on Geraldo’s Fox News show, Geraldo Rivera Reports, called “Craig Investigates,” where Craig would go out into the country, among “regular Americans,” and ask them questions about whatever hyped-up culture war issue Fox was pimping that week.
My call came in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin. I had been writing a lot about lax gun laws and racism and how the two intersect and inevitably lead to the deaths of innocent young Black people. Craig wanted to challenge my takes by sending me to a gun store in New Jersey.
That could seem like a non sequitur, unless you understand the ammosexual brain. You see, their standard view is that liberals are both afraid of guns (because we don’t know how to be “real men” who handle their problems with violence) and ignorant of how guns work and of guns’ allegedly life-saving properties. Taking a bog-standard liberal like me to a gun store works as a response to the slaying of Martin because once there, I’d surely expose myself as a wuss who simply doesn’t understand how to defend himself.
It was a dumb idea for a segment, but I was down to clown. I was young, eager to do more television, and totally comfortable being uncomfortable around guns. I am, in fact, squeamish about pumping hot lead into another human being until they suffer enough internal trauma that they no longer live. I imagine I could do it in a kill-or-be-killed type of situation, but I don’t live in a goddamn thunderdome and thus have never had to put that theory to the test. If Katniss Everdeen found a way to win the Hunger Games without straight murdering every single person she encountered, I’d like to think there’s a good chance I can get through my entire life without committing a homicide.
I was totally willing to forcefully defend my effete, northeastern, liberal stance to Fox viewers who are used to liberals who try, unsuccessfully, to hide their effete, northeastern, liberal sensibilities. I wasn’t going to pretend to know more about guns than I do or to be more comfortable with killing than I am. I was going to affably explain that the gun store owner, Craig, and everybody in the store were fucking lunatics whose pathetic need to feel strong with a gun made them the actual wussies. I may be afraid of guns, but these assholes are the ones who still need a night-light.
My principal objection to the segment was that they wanted me to go to Jersey, but once Fox said they’d provide a car, I was in. A few days later, I stuffed my fat, bespectacled ass into a suit (looking every bit like the bookish, soft liberal I was to play) and was driven to some faraway place across the Hudson River. I do not recall the name of the gun store, or the names of men I spoke to, or the make and model of the guns they brandished. I spent most of my time questioning why anybody would need any of these weapons. I do know that I pissed off the gun store owner, because he was showing me some kind of handgun, and I said something to the effect of, “You’re saying this is what you use if you are clumsy and lack the skill or hand-eye coordination to operate a bow and arrow?”
The store owner, agitated and still holding the weapon, asked me, “What would you do if somebody broke into your house and threatened you and your family with one of these?” This, of course, is the baseline fear that I believe prompts most ammosexuals to purchase a compensation device: the fear of home invasion. It’s so pervasive among that set that every gun reform advocate has been asked that question hundreds of times. We all have our standard answers to the question. I gave the owner mine.
“If possible, I’d run,” I said.
“WHAT?!” responded the store owner.
“If an armed man broke into my house, I’d run away at the first opportunity,” I repeated.
“You’d run away from your own house,” a suddenly interested Craig Rivera chimed in.
“Yes,” I repeated for the second time.
“What about your wife?” asked Craig.
“She’s faster than me,” I accurately told him.
I don’t know if the segment ever aired. I didn’t watch Geraldo, obviously, and certainly wasn’t going to start just because I may have been on. I do know I was never invited back on the show . . . even though I gave them exactly what they thought they wanted.
My response, while shocking to gun-addicted segments of our country, was a fairly standard application of the legal doctrine known as the “duty to retreat.” The duty comes to us from English common law, which consists of the precedents and rulings made by judges in England sometime after William, Duke of Normandy, whupped the entire island until he got to Scotland. The doctrine stands for the simple and exceedingly reasonable premise that deadly force may be used only when all other reasonable options have been exhausted.
I know that in our toxic masculinity–bred culture “retreat” is a dirty, nearly unforgivable word. It’s worse than “surrender,” because at least surrendering implies a battle was waged and lost. Retreat implies backing down without a fight. It implies cowardice. American presidents do not like to say the word “retreat,” even when they order a goddamn retreat. Richard Nixon said we were getting “peace with honor” when we ran away from Vietnam. Joe Biden said we were “ending,” or concluding, operations in Afghanistan when we retreated from America’s longest war. George Washington was a crap battlefield general but a master of the organized retreat. He won the Revolutionary War by running away when all seemed lost and keeping his army together to lose another day. I could make an argument that this entire country would be different and better if we remembered Washington as the Great Retreater.
I wish I could relabel the duty to retreat as something else—perhaps the “duty to explore all options” or the “duty to live and let live”—something that wouldn’t make American men’s penises feel sad when it’s invoked. Nonetheless, despite its bad marketing, the duty to retreat is a foundational principle for living in a civilized society. You shouldn’t kill somebody unless you have to. Sure, there will be edge cases where reasonable people disagree on whether they simply had to take another life. But all that the duty to retreat requires is that nonhomicidal options are taken . . . if it is safe to do so.
If some maniac is threatening to kill you, and you can safely walk away, you should just walk away. If somebody breaks into your school and starts shooting people and you can safely flee, you should flee. If you can’t retreat safely, then you should, of course, defend yourself by any means necessary. But if you can retreat safely, you should. The duty to retreat wants you to deal with violent individuals the way we’ve all been taught to deal with fire: run away from the danger and wait for the professionals to handle it. Nobody tells you to stay inside a burning building with a bucket of water to show the fire who’s boss. They tell you to get on the ground, retreat from the flames, and get outside.
In this way, the duty to retreat is not only the appropriate moral stance it’s also the most pragmatic way to stay alive. You are much more likely to survive an encounter with an armed individual if you don’t start shooting at them. This is especially true in theft crimes like burglary and robbery. If a mugger asks for your wallet, give it to them. Don’t try to quick draw them like you’re Billy the freaking Kid. You’re not even Emilio Estevez. Sacrifice your wallet, withdraw, and live long enough to receive new credit cards in the mail.
Most people who object to the duty to retreat gloss over the phrase “if it is safe to do so.” But that is actually critical to the entire concept. Nobody is required to put themselves at risk, just to run away. Nobody who is backed into a corner is required to cower there. Indeed, in most violent encounters, retreat is not an option. If somebody is trying to kill you on the Orient Express, you don’t have to jump off the moving train like you are James Bond. And you don’t need a license to kill in order to defend yourself. The duty to retreat applies only to situations where a person can reasonably, safely, and without much effort, get away.
To put that in criminal law terms: the duty to retreat does not take away anybody’s legal right to self-defense. Self-defense is what lawyers call an “affirmative defense” to a homicide charge. You kill somebody. The cops arrest you and charge you with murder. You go to court and say, “No, no, no, I had to kill that person to defend myself.” Since you agree that you killed the person, you are not presumed innocent. Instead, the onus is on you to convince a jury that you had no option other than the use of deadly force to stay alive. If you convince the jury, you go home. Your homicide is justified. If, on the other hand, the jury feels that there were reasonable, safe, and nonhomicidal measures you could have taken to defend yourself, you go to jail. Nobody is convicted for “failure to retreat.” Instead, people are convicted for murder, manslaughter, or “imperfect self-defense” (which means you honestly thought you had to use deadly force to defend yourself but were demonstrably and unreasonably wrong and thus are still guilty of homicide, albeit with a reduction in the severity of your punishment).
For every thirty or so homicides in America, one is a justifiable self-defense homicide. That figure shouldn’t surprise people. Killing is not usually a defensive action. Most people, most of the time, have some safe, reasonable option other than killing somebody. The duty to retreat simply captures the idea that deadly force is a last resort, not a preferred choice.
The question about whether homicidal self-defense was reasonable or justified under the circumstances has been the critical question in probably every self-defense trial since dudes started fighting with rocks. But the invention and codification of private property inexorably led to the biggest, oldest, and most famous exception to the duty to retreat—what has become known as Castle Doctrine. Sometime in the seventeenth century, the English decided that the duty to retreat should not apply to situations where a person is violently threatened in their own home. The idea that “a man’s home is his castle,” and thus he can murder intruders in his castle as if he were an elf on the walls of Helm’s Deep, is why we call this exception Castle Doctrine. There is no duty to retreat from one’s own home.
There is also no duty to retreat from one’s own business because, of course, capitalist societies treat a home and a business as essentially the same thing for the purposes of shooting people who enter illegally. I could make an argument that whatever level of defense we’re willing to contemplate for a family dwelling should not apply to the damn McDonald’s, or Target franchise you may own, but I don’t feel like pulling out my translation of Das Kapital right now.
Castle Doctrine is a principle that gets rolled into an argument for self-defense. Normally, you can’t kill somebody who is threatening you unless your life is in danger. But in a Castle Doctrine case, a homeowner can kill somebody who has illegally entered (or attempted to enter) their home, even if the homeowner’s life is in no immediate danger. The homeowner is still claiming self-defense, but to make that affirmative defense, the homeowner need only show that they reasonably believed an intruder could be armed or dangerous.
The implications of this doctrine are shocking, or at least they would be if we weren’t all so used to them. It completely warps the normal inquiry into self-defense, because it allows people to kill when their own lives are not in any provable danger. It’s a “shoot first, ask questions later” principle embedded into the very core of our laws.
As you may have guessed, I think Castle Doctrine is a pretty dumb concept as an intellectual matter. Look, I’m a parent. A home invasion scenario, where my wife and children are present and threatened, is pretty much the scariest thing I can think of. I’m not a gun owner because (say it with me now) keeping loaded firearms in a house with small children is dangerous, ineffective, and fucking stupid. But I do have weapons—blunt force or stabbing weapons, like I’m the damn Terminator 3000—stashed throughout my home. If my family’s life were in imminent danger, I’d use them. But if not (allow me to repeat for the third time), I’d gather my family and run away. I’m not trying to get into a deadly shootout to defend my pride and my PlayStation. I’m trying to keep myself and my loved ones alive.
Castle Doctrine is a dumb and unnecessary principle because people already have the right to defend themselves from violent attacks in their own home without availing themselves of any special legal privileges. Castle Doctrine is an argument, made by a killer, and that argument can be rejected by juries at criminal trials. Castle Doctrine doesn’t need to be repealed; it needs to be ignored.
Unfortunately, there’s a version of Castle Doctrine that cannot be ignored—a version that projects Castle Doctrine outside of one’s home, to any sidewalk, street, parking lot, or other physical place. A version pushed and promoted by the National Rifle Association that allows any yahoo with a gun to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they feel momentarily afraid of a Black person existing near them. The bad law that must be repealed is Chapter 776.012 of Florida’s state code . . . more commonly known as Florida’s stand-your-ground law.
I had to go full Rachel Maddow on everybody with that long wind-up because the only way to understand the stand-your-ground law is to understand that in its simplest forms all it does is remove the duty to retreat from any situation: “Stand your ground” as a moniker makes sense only in opposition to “duty to retreat.” In this way, stand-your-ground simply extends Castle Doctrine to any place a person is legally allowed to be.
Because of that, stand-your-ground adopts every stupid and violent problem associated with Castle Doctrine and extends the inane, toxic, testosterone-fueled violence to potentially everywhere. Instead of needing to show that your life is actually in danger in states with stand-your-ground, all you have to do is show that you were threatened or just felt threatened in any place you were legally allowed to be. Walking down the street and somebody threatens you and tries to snatch your purse? Pull out your Beretta and stand your ground. Get into a fender bender and the other guy tries to drive away without exchanging insurance information? Pop the trunk, grab your shotgun, and stand your ground. Somebody cuts you in line and starts shouting slurs and invectives at you? Reveal your AR-15 and stand your ground. Stand-your-ground turns being frightened in public into a justification for murder.
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Trump's Psychological Vulnerability and the Destruction of the American Economy
Dr. Timothy Snyder
Thinking About
Thursday 10 April, 2025
Trump has an obvious weakness that makes America weak. He places the American economy at risk for the sake of a personal foible, a visible vulnerability.
All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.
As he has aged this has grown into a vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy.
An easy example of this, before the tariffs, was Ukraine. Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.
This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States. And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer.
We don't know now, though it is not hard to guess, who told Trump that Ukraine was ripping him off. The Russians have a keen sense of psychological vulnerabilities, and they have been paying close attention to Trump for a long time.
Trump also cites the made-up number of $350 billion to justify tariffs. He claims that Europeans, curiously, somehow "owe" the United States that exact same amount. Trump believes that if Americans buy more from another country than residents of that country buy from us, that is a loss, that he personally is somehow being ripped off. And so when the United States formulated tariffs on the whole world last week, the operating principle was that all trade deficits -- cases where we buy more than we sell -- should be eliminated.
This is nonsensical. There is no state of nature where countries buy and sell the exact same amount from one another.
Imagine a party where people are freely talking to each other. Then someone jumps up on a table and insists that in every conversation each speaker should use the exact same number of words as the person with whom he or she is in dialogue. What would happen then? Every conversation would grind to a halt, because an artificial planned equality of words is not how conversations work. An artificial planned equality of the value of imports and exports is, by the same token, not how trade works.
There is a much injustice in international trade. And there is much to be said for a thoughtful trade policy that protects or encourages certain industries. Manufacturing is of inherent value. But none of this will arise from the hurt feelings of an oligarchical president.
Because Trump's policy is based on personal vulnerability, it is erratic. If someone makes him feel more vulnerable than he was already, he will stop. He will not, for example, impose tariffs on Russia, because he is afraid of Russia. On the other hand, if someone convinces him that he has won, then he will also reduce the tariffs, as has just happened. If he no longer feels that he is being ripped off, then he yields. Until the moment when his feelings change.
To a person which such a obvious vulnerability, everything seems out of control. And so control is the only answer. Everyone is acting to rip me off. And so I must establish control by calling them all out, and making them deal with me from a position of weakness and ridicule. And so now the United States -- so goes the theory - will now negotiate individually with every single country of the world. We have broken agreements with many of them, and now we will sign new agreements, which will probably be worse: we lack time now, and patience, and focus. And we can never get back the trust of our closest trade partners.
The same is true in domestic policy. By establishing the tariffs, Trump thinks that he is creating leverage for himself against American companies. They will all have to come to him personally to seek the "carve-out," the exception, that will allow them to continue to trade in world markets and function as they had before. And so Trump can enjoy feeling less vulnerable as he tries to bully companies. But this amounts to central planning, and of a particularly irrational sort: one that depends upon one man's feelings. Investing inside the United States no longer means what it once did. And this will not quickly change.
We all have our foibles, our whims, our vulnerabilities. But when one person has unchecked power, irrationality becomes unchecked. Donald Trump thinks that everyone is always ripping him off. If he were the president in a normal situation, this would be a minor problem. But in a situation in which he has gotten away with an attempted coup, in which the Supreme Court has told him he is immune from prosecution, in which members of his own party rarely challenge him, in which Congress no longer sees the need to pass laws, and so on, in which too much of the media normalizes him, Trump's vulnerability can bring about the destruction of the country.
We have thousands of years of political theory and indeed great literature to instruct us on this point: too much power brings out the worst in people -- especially among the worst of people. As the founders understood, the purpose of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of regular elections, is to prevent precisely such a situation. Allowing our republic to be compromised has many costs, for example to our rights, and to our dignity. But it also has costs in a very basic economic sense. When you elevate the mad king, you elevate the madness.
