Month: February 2016

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I will be blogging on the Framers all week, starting with Hamilton, whom I consider to be the most creative of the lot.  Whether you agree with his vision for America or not, there can be little doubt that he was a genius, while his origins as an illegitimate child in the West Indies make his prominence in our history a tribute to the American dream, and something close to a miracle.

Here are the questions, and my responses:

1.  Given his obvious affection for the British political system, why did he choose the Patriot side?   Opportunism, in two different senses.  He undoubtedly (and correctly) perceived that his chances of advancement in society, given the circumstances of his birth, were far better if he joined the side supporting the revolution.  In addition, he saw the Patriot side as being on the correct side of history, which it ultimately proved to be.

2.  What happened to his judgment after he left office?  I’m not a doctor, but I’m going to play one on this blog post.  Everything I have read about the man suggests that he was manic-depressive.  It is perfectly possible that his condition took a toll on his judgment as time went on.

3.  Should he remain on the $10 bill?  Absolutely.  Our financial system has its roots in his ideas.

It isn’t clear after New Hampshire that Rubio is going to be the consensus establishment choice, but, for purposes of argument, let’s assume that he is.  The candidates at that point will be limited to a social conservative (Cruz), an unpredictable wild card (Trump), and Rubio.  This starts sounding a lot like the 2012 campaign, with Cruz playing the role of Santorum, Trump standing in for Gingrich, and Rubio playing Romney, the eventual winner.  It sounds promising for Marco.  But is it?

There are several differences between 2012 and today:

1. Cruz is a stronger campaigner than Santorum.  He has far more money and a connection with evangelicals that eluded Santorum.

2.  Trump is a much more formidable opponent than Gingrich.  Gingrich never had the kind of following that Trump has today.

3.  The GOP electorate has moved further to the right since 2012.  The Reactionary component of the party is larger than ever.

4.  Marco doesn’t fit the GOP as well as Romney did.  Yes, Romney had the Romneycare millstone around his neck, but Marco has immigration, and the two are a wash.  Romney looked like Reagan, was fairly good at swaggering, and had lots of executive experience.  He fit the GOP vision of a nominee far better than Marco does.

5.  Romney had his lane to himself from the beginning.  By the time Marco clears out his opposition, it may well be too late.

I’ve always hated bullies, and that’s exactly what Scalia was:  an angry general in the culture wars who coarsened the judicial system with his over-the-top rhetoric.  He was the 1984 Georgetown Hoyas of Supreme Court justices–merely winning wasn’t enough; he had to crush your spirit and rip your heart out in the process.

That would have been unremarkable if he had been a conservative newspaper columnist or a Fox News commentator, but as a jurist, we had a right to expect better.   And he was a political hack, too; don’t be misled by descriptions of a few of his decisions that make him look like a modern day version of Felix Frankfurter.  He believed in judicial restraint, except when it wouldn’t serve the interests of cultural conservatives, in which case he didn’t.

It was only fitting that Donald Trump put on a show on national TV the same night he died.   In judicial terms, Scalia’s style was a slightly less boorish and far more sophisticated version of Trump’s.

He had better approach his final judgment with vastly more humility and understanding than he ever showed on the bench.  Meanwhile, back on Earth, he won’t be missed, except by his ideological fellow travelers.

Cromwell and Hamilton have been two of my favorite historical characters for decades.  I named my beautiful Australian Shepherd, and ultimately this blog, for Cromwell;  I also made a point of seeking out Hamilton’s grave when I went to New York for the first time in 2003.

Neither of them was what you could remotely describe as a flawless character. Hamilton could be an arrogant windbag; his philandering does him no credit; and his political judgment after he left office was almost uniformly abysmal.  The stain on Cromwell’s reputation was his participation in judicial murders, although politics at the court of Henry VIII wasn’t exactly beanbag, and his opponents were at least as ruthless as he was; the relative lack of bloodshed in the Reformation is at least in part due to his political skills.  That said, both of them combined vision and pragmatism in such a way as to leave us all a legacy for which we should be grateful.

It occurred to me several months ago that there is a very long list of similarities in their careers, including the following:

                                      Cromwell        v.               Hamilton

Status at Birth         Low-born                 Illegitimate

Commercial Experience      Yes               Yes

Revolutionary Times     Reformation       American Revolution

Patron                             Henry VIII             Washington

Woman Trouble          Queen(s) Anne       Mrs. Reynolds

Literary Legacy     English Bible Patron   Federalist Papers

Administrative Innovations     Numerous       Numerous

Opposed by St. Thomas              More                 Jefferson

Violent Death                         Beheaded        Duel with Burr

Broadway Show                      “Wolf Hall”         “Hamilton”

And the winner is. . . All of us, and not just for the high quality of the Broadway shows.

1. Good God, what a circus!  If I were a GOP voter, I would be embarrassed.
2. Trump dominated this one, for better or worse, from start to finish.  He obviously has concluded that his supporters reward him for being outrageous.  If he missed insulting someone with strong ties to the South Carolina GOP establishment, it was obviously an oversight.  It doesn’t appear that there are any lines that he won’t cross.
3. I have no idea how this played to the South Carolina electorate.  If he wins the primary, it is very difficult to see how he doesn’t sweep to the nomination.
4. Most of what he said about Iraq was true.
5. Jeb’s donors must have been putting pressure on him to be extremely aggressive.  I’m not sure how that played with the public, either.  Since Marco didn’t say anything memorable, Jeb might have regained his footing as the establishment frontrunner.  We’ll know at this time next week.
6. Carson and Kasich should be leaving us shortly.

Justice Scalia was the most visible proponent (and he loved being visible–he should have had a show on Fox News) of originalism:  an approach to constitutional jurisprudence which emphasizes the importance of ascertaining the intent of the authors of the constitutional provision that is to be interpreted. It is the legal equivalent of conducting a seance, and it makes little sense in most cases, for the following reasons:

1.  Many of the Founding Fathers did not leave detailed records of their beliefs, which means that undue significance is attached to the opinions of those who did;
2.  Just because, say, Madison said something in 1800 doesn’t necessarily mean he believed it in 1787;
3.  The most important Founding Fathers had profound disagreements on virtually every important legal and political issue;
4.  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had to be ratified by the states, which means it is at least arguable that the intent of the hundreds of members of the ratifying bodies was just as important as that of the Framers; and, most importantly,
5.  The current condition of our country would have been completely unrecognizable to anyone living in the 18th Century.  What would Hamilton have thought about regulating the internet?  Who can possibly know?

In addition, I always thought it was an amusing paradox that originalism sounds a lot like Protestantism, while Scalia was a conservative Catholic to the core.  Was he aware of the contradiction?  I doubt it.

Whatever.  The bottom line tonight is that he no longer has to scour 18th Century texts to determine the Framers’ intent;  he can just ask them himself.  Good luck with that.

As a self-proclaimed “socialist” (he really isn’t one), Bernie Sanders naturally believes that the Democratic Party is (or should be) a predominantly working class party; he views issues like racism and sexism as at best, a symptom of the class struggle, and at worst, an unwelcome distraction from it.  Hillary Clinton sees the party as a coalition of victims, and gives their separate causes equal billing with the fight against the unequal distribution of wealth.

Who’s right?  Historically, that would be Hillary.  We’ll see if that remains true over the next few weeks.

The senator from my home state

Is facing another debate.

He’d better make damn sure

It’s not a New Hampshire.

If not, then extinction’s his fate.

Many commentators have identified an analogy between the current state of affairs in Southeast Asia and Europe in 1914, with China, as the dissatisfied rising power, playing the part of Germany, and the US playing the part of the status quo party, the UK.  The Chinese themselves are well aware of it;  I understand that Chinese TV broadcast a lengthy series on World War I with the analogy in mind some time ago.

Must our conflicting interests lead to the same result?  I think not, for the following reasons:

1.  China, unlike pre-World War I Germany, is not a militaristic society.  Chinese patriotism revolves around the superiority of its culture, not the army.

2.  The Chinese have no reliable allies in their backyard.  Encirclement is, therefore, even more of a concern for them than it was for the Germans.

3.  The Pacific Ocean is a lot wider than the English Channel.  The US has the ability to retreat from the South China Sea, if necessary, without fatally compromising its strategic position and exposing itself to invasion.  The UK in 1914 didn’t have that luxury.

There is a scene in “The Godfather” in which the heads of the five families meet to broker a truce to an ongoing gang war that, to me, serves as a paradigm for the conduct of international relations.  Like it or not, the world outside is full of thugs, and relations among them are frequently conducted at the intellectual level of schoolyard bullies.

I thought of this as I listened to Sanders go into a left-wing rant about Henry Kissinger that would have been fresh material 40 years ago during last night’s debate.  The single most important task for our next President is not to wage war on Wall Street, but to keep us safe from people like Putin.  Can you imagine Sanders standing toe-to-toe with Putin, and making him back down?  Can you imagine him even caring enough about anything happening outside our borders to try?

Me, neither.

China has a single-party system, a politicized judiciary, and severe restraints on the media, all of which inevitably lead to rampant corruption.  That said, it is fair to say that corruption in China may be endemic, but it is not the organizing principle of the political system, as it is in Russia, which has at least the illusion of a democratic process.  Why is that?

I think there are two reasons:

1. The ownership of natural resources plays a far greater part in the Russian economy than in the Chinese:  As a result, the Russian government gets to distribute wealth that is ultimately derived from oil like candy to its supporters. If Russia had entrepreneurs who created wealth without government help instead of oligarchs, the economic and political systems would be different, but no such luck.

2.  The Communist Party plays a positive role in fighting corruption in China:  While you may not agree with the CP’s stated ideology (I certainly don’t, and neither do many of its members), it on paper stands for something other than the accumulation of wealth by its members, and it uses its enforcement powers over officials who violate its standards.  There is no similar mechanism in Russia; everything ultimately depends on the whim of Putin.

Put on your union boots.

Put on your Springsteen t-shirt.

Big mouth at last is mute.

We’re burying Christie.

 

Goodbye to right-wing lies.

No more obnoxious bully.

His waning hopes have died.

We’re burying Christie.

 

Parody of “Burying Davy” by The Decemberists.

Note:  I wrote this six months ago in anticipation of this day.  Christie’s slim hopes revolved around the marketability of his swagger, but he immediately lost that battle to Trump, which left him with nothing but his terrorist fighter shtick.  That obviously didn’t work, to the regret of no one outside of his family and small circle of friends.

 

 

This question took me on an intellectual odyssey that started in Taiwan and ended with Federalist No. 10.  That may seem a bit odd, but stay with me here.

The natural initial answer is no, because the Chinese mainland has no historical experience of anything like liberal democracy, and the culture emphasizes the collective, not the individual.  That said, the government on Taiwan has evolved peacefully into a liberal democracy; the same is true of Japan and South Korea, both of which have elements of Chinese thought in their cultural DNA.  You cannot, therefore, completely dismiss the question at this stage.

China is obviously a vastly larger and more complex country than the three listed above, which is where Federalist No. 10 comes in.  Madison made the argument in No. 10 (in response to critics of the Constitution who believed that it gave the federal government too much power) that a republic would work better in a large state than in a small one due to the likely proliferation of factions, which would operate as a check on each other.  As a result, concerns about an overly powerful central government were misplaced.

Our national experience suggests that Madison was right, but only in the context of the argument to which he was trying to respond.  Our system does, indeed, contain lots of checks and balances (both legal and practical), and make strong central government difficult.  The real question, then, is whether a system with similar checks and balances would work in a country as large as China, with a history of strong central government, under today’s conditions.  In my opinion, the answer is no; the demands for quick and firm action from the government would just be too great.

It is a common observation among conservative pundits that parts of Trump’s platform diverge wildly from orthodox Republican ideology.  It’s true, but irrelevant; Trump’s ideas make out a perfectly coherent whole, but one that finds its inspiration in a completely different source than the National Review.

Trump takes the following positions:

1. Build a wall around the country to keep out immigrants;
2. Increase the size of the military to deter any possible threats to the homeland, and then disengage from the world;
3. Impose tariffs on most, or even all, of our trading partners in the hope of regaining jobs and boosting wages;
4. Maintain existing levels of social spending;
5. Increase spending on infrastructure; and
6. Support business through massive tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.

This is a slightly tweaked and updated version of an economic model for a typical South American country, circa 1950.  It even comes with its own man on golf cart horseback!  The last act typically is stagflation.

Don’t cry for me, New Hampshire.

            Lincoln’s Ghost

The GOP’s put on a show.

More drama every day.

A comedy or tragedy?

I’ve never seen this play.

 

You say that Trump’s a huckster, now.

He’s got a line to sell.

A deal cannot be made without

A buyer there, as well.

 

I thought I saw the ghost of Lincoln

Shedding bitter tears.

The nation he fought hard to save

Surrendering to fear.

 

A few notes on the primary:

1. The magnitude of Clinton’s defeat was a bit shocking, but her firewall is still intact.
2. She hit the right note in her speech:  yes, economic inequality is very important, but there are many other issues that need to be addressed that go beyond class.
3. Rubio’s failure to separate himself from the other Romney Coalition candidates is the establishment’s worst nightmare.  Now they will continue to split the votes in their lane for the foreseeable future, and Jeb still has a chance.
4. My predictions are two for two.  South Carolina is going to be pivotal.  I don’t have the same degree of confidence in my bet on Cruz that I did in the first two contests.