Cromwell

I’m not a big country music fan, but I admired Dolly. Why not? She was religious and conservative to the core, but unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn’t hate anyone. Even blue people could appreciate that.

A few years ago, my wife scored some free tickets to Dollywood, so we decided to make a day trip out of it. I remember looking around at the innumerable tourist businesses in Pigeon Forge and Sevierville and remarking that all of them owed their existence to a tiny woman with tremendous heart and talent from a desperately poor background. The thought of it amazed me.

It still does.

WE’RE SO GLAD WE’RE VOTING FOR THE DSA

Oh well, oh well

I feel so good today.

Mamdani won, and Abdul’s on his way.

We’ll make blue bluer; what can I say?

____________

I won’t miss the tech titans.

I won’t miss the billionaires.

They say growth will slow down.

What do I care?

The working class is winning;

Oligarchs had best beware.

_________________

We’re so glad we’re voting for the DSA.

We’re so glad we’re voting for the DSA.

Everything we want, we’ll get it right here from the DSA.

________________

Parody of “Back in the USA” by Chuck Berry

To start a new trade war with Canada when GOP candidates in Michigan and Maine need all the help they can get sounds utterly suicidal. So why is Trump doing it?

Here are some possibilities:

1. Surrounded by sycophants and fools who pander to him at every turn, Trump has come to believe that he is universally loved and that polls which say otherwise are fake news.
2. Trump thinks that no matter what he does, everything will turn out all right for him, because it always does.
3. Imposing his will on Canada is a more important priority than winning midterm elections.
4. All of the above.

In case you were wondering, the correct answer is “all of the above.”

A fairly recent Ross Douthat interview with Elbridge Colby identified the cornerstone of Trump’s foreign policy: every service provided by Uncle Sam to the rest of the world should be priced at market value. What that means in practice, of course, is that we bully our weaker friends, who profit from our protection and access to our markets, and suck up to our adversaries, who don’t. It alienates the voters in other liberal democratic states, to our ultimate cost.

The market approach reminds me of the definition of a cynic–a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I guess Trump would take pride in that, but he shouldn’t; the refusal of the other NATO nations to help with the Iran war is just a small taste of what is to come.

Jon Ossoff’s popularity in what is at best a purple state is evidence that it is possible to oppose Trump in a firm, consistent, and entertaining way without adopting extreme policy positions or becoming a third-rate insult comedian–a left-wing Trump.

The blue team could learn a thing or two from that approach.

My wife and I went to see “The Odyssey” this afternoon. Since everyone else has expressed an opinion on the movie, I will share mine with you.

Three observations are pertinent:

1. The allegations that the opinions on ethics, metaphysics, and mental health expressed in the movie owe more to Gen Z than Homer are completely true.
2. Don’t let that deter you. As a piece of entertainment, this one is a banger. The special effects are excellent, and the soundtrack, somewhat unusually, keeps everything moving. There isn’t a dull moment in the movie, and most of it is true to the poem.
3. The casting of Helen is not really a problem even if you have strong feelings about wokeness. The character is a minor one, and her outstanding characteristic is her anger, not her beauty.

Most of the speculation about GOP candidates in 2028 has revolved around J.D. and Marco Rubio. To the extent that any outsiders have been mentioned, the usual suspect is Ted Cruz. What about DeSantis? Will Ron run?

From his perspective, there are pros and cons. On the con side, he probably fears provoking Trump again, and he knows he can’t beat J.D. if the current administration is viewed as a success by the electorate. He is also, as he has pointed out, young enough to wait until 2032. On the other hand, as I’ve noted in many previous posts, there are plenty of opportunities for DeSantis to peel base voters away from J.D on issues such as Iran, AI, and “heritage Americans,” so there is a path to victory if Trump is viewed as a failure in 2028. In addition, by 2032, DeSantis will have been out of office for six years, and unlike Trump, he doesn’t have the ability to command the public’s attention on social media. He will be yesterday’s man. His time will have come and gone.

On balance, I think DeSantis will avoid making commitments to either enter or stay out of the race until the last minute. He has already run for president before, so he can probably mobilize a base of donors on short notice. If he thinks J.D. is vulnerable, he will run regardless of what Trump says and does. If not, he will stay out and root silently for a blue team victory in 2028.

J.D. thinks AOC will be the blue team nominee in 2028. Well, of course he does; he believes that the Democratic Party is completely controlled by a small cadre of crazed woke socialists which has no connection whatsoever to real Americans. Is there any basis for his belief?

Regardless of what J.D. believes, the Democratic Party is ultimately controlled by its voters, who have a history of being pretty risk averse. They picked Biden over Bernie and Warren in 2020 because they correctly thought an elderly white male moderate was their best hope to beat Trump. In all likelihood, they will do it again unless the condition of the country is so dire that practically anyone could beat J.D. AOC has an underappreciated pragmatic streak, and she meets the young and charismatic standards for my perfect candidate, but she fails most of the tests, so she is unlikely to be the voters’ choice.

Based on the figures for the trade deficit and manufacturing employment, it simply doesn’t exist. Yes, the new tariff regime has only been in place for a little over a year, but we should have seen some favorable evidence by now. Is this due to flawed execution or an impractical objective?

Both, of course. The chaotic rollout of the program and the constant arbitrary changes to it on the fly–after all, proving Trump is the boss of the world is more important than the fate of American workers–obviously didn’t help. But the truth is that Trump is swimming against the tide of history by putting so many eggs in the manufacturing basket. Technological change is working against him. Even the Chinese will acknowledge that.

Using industrial policy in a few key economic sectors makes sense for national security reasons. Going beyond that is wasteful and inefficient.

Notwithstanding the existence of four distinct patterns of thought within its big tent–the four factions–today’s GOP is mostly united around a man, not an idea; its purpose is to give unconditional support to Donald Trump, no matter how capricious or despotic he might be. This has the advantage of avoiding allegations of hypocrisy. Trump can toggle wildly among the factions without creating the appearance of inconsistency and thereby keep them all reasonably satisfied, because it’s all about him, not an ideology.

Can J.D. do the same? Probably not, because he will be bound by the statements in his book–his equivalent of Xi Jinping thought. In the long run, he will find that writing “Communion” was a big tactical mistake.

Anyone who reads the blog on a regular basis knows that my credentials as an anti-wokeness warrior are impeccable; if you don’t believe it, check out my posts on wokeness from 2019 and 2023 and anything I wrote on “The 1619 Project.” I showed my disdain for woke mobs on the internet on a regular basis. That does not, however, mean I ever had any sympathy for the Trump/DeSantis right, which wants to whitewash American history, not illuminate it. I knew both then and now that MAGA’s purported concern about free speech was bogus, and that its ultimate objective was to use state power to silence the left. Events have proven me right.

Trump 1.0 was a wokeness accelerant. It is interesting that Trump 2.0, which has been far more extreme, has not had the same effect; in fact, even AOC has now conceded that wokeness at its peak was out of hand. We are actually starting to see a swing towards liberalism, not an even more vicious form of wokeness, partially because the original version was largely expressed on a platform which now belongs to Elon Musk, partially as a result of the lost 2024 election, and partially because Trump 2.0 has made the population more conscious of threats to free speech. It is a ray of sunshine in a dark time that is likely to get even darker in the near future.

Trade talks with the Canadian government collapsed yesterday, with both sides accusing the other of making unacceptable demands at the last minute. Based on Trump’s history as a negotiator, the Canadian claim is far more credible.

Now the question is whether Trump will chicken out or double down. Our experience with Trump 2.0 is that he always doubles down unless he is faced with a foe that he even admits he can’t master, such as China or the bond market. Canada doesn’t meet that standard, so expect him to escalate as soon as possible.

This dispute is, of course, more about asserting dominance than making money for Americans. Does Trump think that driving up prices and inviting retaliation against American producers is a good idea a few months before the election? Most likely, he simply doesn’t care; showing the Canadians he’s the boss is far more important to him than winning the midterms.

Joe Biden was the blue team’s nominee in 2020 because, as an old and moderate white guy, he could not plausibly be accused of cultural or economic extremism by the right. His superpower, if he had one, was to take ideas that derived from the left and make them sound reasonable to the electorate. What lessons can we learn from him for 2028?

Our best hope for a victory and for a successful presidency is a better version of Biden. This one would be younger, more energetic, more charismatic, and more skilled at the use of social media, but he would have the same ability to create enduring liberal and progressive coalitions and to make them appear unthreatening to the American people.

Does this person exist? TBD.

Watching the J.D. video described in my last post, it occurred to me that two assumptions are built into J.D.’s view of Christianity: that anyone who has an experience he would describe as “miraculous” must logically become a Christian; and that the differences between Christian sects are unimportant–in other words, Christianity is monolithic. Is he right?

No. Miracles occur in a wide range of religions; it may be the cultural default in America to ascribe them to the Christian deity, but that association is neither driven by logic or a lack of other choices. As to the unimportance of Christian doctrinal differences, try squaring that with the Know Nothing Party, the Klan, and the furor about JFK’s candidacy in 1960, to say nothing of the millions of victims of religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries.

J.D.’s conversion to Catholicism would have put an end to his political career throughout most of this country’s history. He should be grateful he lives in the more pagan environment he finds so deplorable today.

David French has a lot to say, none of it flattering, about a J.D. Vance interview on YouTube. Given my interest in all things J.D., I naturally took his advice and watched almost all of it. On balance, I would say you needn’t bother.

French is particularly critical of Vance’s comment that right-wing neoliberalism made sense in the 1980s because Christianity was still powerful enough at that time to put guardrails on its social impacts. French notes that Vance is too young to remember what the times were really like; it was, after all, the era of Gordon Gekko. Crime, drug use, and divorce rates were much higher then than they are now. Vance’s false sense of nostalgia about the strength of Christian guardrails during his infancy simply has no basis in reality.

What Vance really wants to do, as so many conservative politicians have in the past, is to make war on the 1960s. If he wants to take us back to the Godly Society, he needs to cite the 1950s, when the top marginal income tax rates were vastly higher than they are now, instead of the 1980s.