The one is a conviction politician who doesn’t seem to realize that the UK has changed quite a bit since 1945. The other is a rogue with impressive political gifts and almost no convictions. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson are polar opposites. Who will get the better of the other?
Corbyn would do serious damage to his party regardless of the quality of the opposition. Boris will give him the final shove, and then Labour will spend years picking up the pieces.
Night #1 of Debate #2 featured a pretty intense battle between two also-ran realos and the two fundis–Sanders and Warren. The realos held their own this time. That was encouraging.
I expected a pillow fight between Sanders and Warren, but got even less than that. For the purposes of last night, the two were substantive and rhetorical twins. Warren was even shouting angrily and scapegoating big (fill in the blank) just the way Bernie does. There was absolutely no distance between the two, except that Warren did a little better job of generating positive sound bites.
Warren likes to portray herself as a reformer trying to save capitalists from themselves, but last night, she looked more like someone who actually despises businessmen. Her misguided and heavy-handed proposal to use trade deals and access to our markets to club our allies into adopting left-wing policies sounds like something Jeremy Corbyn could love. It would be fair to call that approach to trade left-wing Trumpism. If you’re a Warren fan, you should be concerned; demonizing the goose that lays the golden egg is not a good way to campaign or govern.
On the one hand, there is no dispute that creating a hard border around Northern Ireland will disrupt supply chains, damage the political settlement, and generally cause unnecessary hardship. On the other hand, if there is no real border, Northern Ireland will effectively remain part of the EU, with massive implications for the entire island and the rest of the UK. If Brexit actually occurs on schedule, what will happen next?
In all likelihood, Boris will rely on legal fictions, which is a polite way of saying he’s going to lie about border enforcement. My guess is that he will simply say that the border is now being policed without providing anything like the amount of resources that are necessary to actually do it. And so, life will go on as before, except that everyone will be pretending that something meaningful has actually happened.
Hey, do you have a better solution, other than stopping Brexit?
The two factions of the Conservative Party that support Brexit have diametrically different views on what should happen next. The CLs see the new GB as being a low tax, low regulation, cosmopolitan, free trading paradise; this phenomenon is usually called Singapore-on-Thames. The Reactionaries, on the other hand, just want to pull up the drawbridge, get rid of the immigrants, and return to the happy, prosperous land of their forefathers.
How is Boris supposed to reconcile these two mutually exclusive ideas? With his mouth, mostly:
The problem, of course, is that reality inevitably intrudes, and it will bite. The budget deficit will soar, the pound will sag, and the British consumer will suffer. Boris will call on the spirit of Winston Churchill to carry on in the face of this ongoing disaster. But Boris isn’t Churchill, in spite of his fondest hopes, the EU isn’t Nazi Germany, and the outcome will be very different.
Is Kamala Harris a fundi or a realo? Sunday’s article in the NYT strongly leaned towards the latter. So does her record as a sometimes, but not always, progressive prosecutor. And yet, the question persists, based largely on her apparent desire to keep a foot in both camps.
Her latest attempt to explain her position on Medicare-for-all is a perfect example of trying to thread the needle. Frankly, if I could give her one piece of advice, it would be to stop trying to poach votes from Sanders and Warren and to set her sights firmly on Biden’s supporters. Let’s face it; she’s never going to be able to out-fundi Bernie and Liz, but she can make a plausible argument on its face that Biden is too misty-eyed about bipartisanship, and that she has a program which, with a few exceptions, can get through the system by way of reconciliation and executive action. In that way, she could out-realo Biden, dominate the right side of the graph, and win the nomination.
The newly-minted PM is promising to use Trumpian tactics in his negotiations with the EU. He’s already intensifying efforts to prepare for no-deal. Lots of growling, threats, and table pounding are in the offing. Will it work?
No, because:
In other words, the EU thinks Boris is full of Bullwinkle.
Imagine that you are Bashar al-Assad. Primarily due to the assistance of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, you have prevailed in the civil war–at least in the western part of the country. But what do you do now? Syria is a smoking ruin. Millions of refugees have taken their talents to Turkey and Europe, and they aren’t coming back in the foreseeable future. There are American troops in the eastern part of the country, and the Kurds are effectively in charge; your writ doesn’t run there. The Russians and Iranians have neither the resources nor the inclination to finance a reconstruction effort or a reconquest of the east, and you’re hardly in a position to ask America, Europe, or the Gulf states for help. How do you win the peace?
Realistically, you probably can’t, but there are two things you can try. First, you can acknowledge reality and make a deal with the Kurds which gives you nominal sovereignty, and them practical control of the region, at least for now. That should get the Americans out, and you can deal with the Kurds when conditions are more favorable at a later date. Second, you can pretend to support legitimate efforts at national reconciliation, and offer to take those troublesome refugees back, in exchange for aid. That is unlikely to work, because no one with any sense trusts you, but what else do you have to offer?
I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, first debate blues.
You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.
I thought I had it all wrapped up, but now I’ve got to choose.
My former passive strategy is just a way to lose.
________________
I thought I hit all the right notes, but then it all went wrong.
Like singing in the proper key, but not the correct song.
I didn’t come across as young, and certainly not strong.
In a cast of younger left-wing folks, I don’t really belong.
_______________
I’ve got the blues.
The forced busing blues.
I shouldn’t have to go through this;
You know I’ve paid my dues.
I’m really geared to fight next time.
It’s a matter of survival.
I’ll show the world I’m still the man
And take it to my rivals.
While Sanders and Warren have similar programs, their voters are quite different: Bernie’s tend to be young, male, and poorly educated; while Warren’s are predominantly older, female, and better educated. Why?
Two words–socialism and identity. Bernie’s socialist past is a big liability with older voters. As to the rest, it makes perfect sense that women and the better-educated would support the brainy female Harvard professor, and that men and the poorly-educated would identify with the gruff community activist.
Can either of the two cross over? It won’t be easy, and that represents a problem for the left. As long as the fundis remain divided, the likelihood of a realo candidate, probably but not certainly Biden, prevailing is pretty high.
And for that, we all should be grateful.
David Brooks wonders why liberal white Americans have become much more woke. That’s easy. I’ll be happy to enlighten him.
Barack Obama did everything he reasonably could to be a unifying figure. There was nothing about him that was remotely threatening to white people. The reactionary right basically responded by calling him a Black Panther who hated whites. Brooks and the rest of the respectable right pretended that it wasn’t happening, and that the GOP was still a principled party espousing limited government. The left noticed all of this, and reacted accordingly.
America then elected a man who had first made his mark in the political world by being a birther. He doesn’t even try to hide his racism anymore. Exacerbating racial divisions on a daily basis is part of his plan. The more woke people he creates, the more support he gets from his base. That part of his plan is working. Whether that will be enough to get him re-elected is the big question for 2020.
Regrets? Paul Ryan apparently has a few, according to excerpts of a new biography that were discussed in a Politico article. Ryan knows that he’s going to go down in history as a Trump enabler, he sees Trump’s impact on our civic values, and he’s not happy about either. He’s not throwing the big tax cut back, though.
It’s important to remember that everything could have been different, at least on paper. Trump could have put himself up for sale to either party and proposed genuinely populist policies, and the GOP could have treated him as a third party candidate with whom they would only make temporary alliances of convenience. That didn’t happen. Both completely embraced the other, and both are now stuck with each other, for worse.
Why did that happen? Part of it was just a lack of imagination, I suspect. But the biggest part simply was that the GOP cannot win elections without the assistance of his reactionary followers. There was no practical way for most GOP officeholders to treat Trump in a way that would offend about 40 percent of their voters, so they didn’t try. The rest is history.
“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
It wasn’t a disaster, unless you were foolish enough to think that Mueller would be some sort of white knight riding to the rescue of the nation. It probably didn’t do any lasting harm. It was just stupid.
The foundation of the current GOP is a deal between Reactionaries and PBPs wherein the latter get deregulation and regressive tax cuts and the former get support on social and cultural issues. For a variety of reasons, including the influence of Fox News, the establishment’s failure in Iraq, stagnant wages, the election of an African-American president, and some ringing defeats in the culture wars, the Reactionaries have become more militant, and are talking about renegotiating the deal. The discussion regarding industrial policy at the National Conservative conclave is the logical result of that process; some Reactionaries want to scrap the deal with business interests and impose economic ideas that are anathema to CLs and PBPs on the rest of the party.
Does the concept of a GOP completely dominated by the ideas of Reactionaries have a future? In the short run, probably not; inertia will most likely drive the party back to its Reaganite small government rhetoric once Trump is out of power, particularly if the next Democratic president is a left-wing populist. In addition, the GOP cannot win elections without votes and campaign contributions from business interests; notwithstanding what Trump thinks, Reactionaries are only a plurality within his own party, and a minority within the electorate as a whole. In the long run, however, it depends on how far left the Democrats move. Businessmen would object to the loss of influence within the GOP, but if they are presented with a stark choice between fascism and socialism, they will sit down, shut up, and provide votes for the former every time.
One thing is for certain: if the Democrats want to respond to “national conservatism” by creating a new label for their evolving populist ideology, it had better not be “national socialism.”
There really aren’t many prominent CLs in public life. Rand Paul is as close to a pure CL politician as you can find in Washington, but even he has to make plenty of concessions to the Reactionary faction of the GOP to get re-elected. The Koch brothers are CLs, but their positions are motivated at least in part by self-interest. And then there is George Will.
Will has a new book out. I have not read it, but I have seen reviews and read an interview with him about it on Vox. The centerpiece of it seems to be a distinction between European and American conservatism. In a nutshell, Will contends that European conservatism is rooted in loathing of revolution and the desire to protect existing institutions, whereas American conservatism is based on a very different historical experience, and is focused on preventing tyranny at the federal level, not avoiding societal change.
There is something to his theory; colonists, by definition, were embracing change, not defending existing institutions, and the American Revolution was portrayed by many as a battle against an overreaching central authority. There are a number of weaknesses in the argument, however, including the following:
I don’t agree with the CLs about very much, but they have a certain intellectual integrity that one has to admire. Will can come off as a doddering old fool at times, but at least he hates Donald Trump, because he correctly views Trump as a threat to principled, limited government. At least give him credit for that.
Much is being made of a meeting of so-called “national conservatives” last week. In my terminology, “national conservatives” are just the Reactionary faction of the GOP; the point of the convention was to give better definition to their ideology.
Most of the headlines revolved around racism and immigration policy, but the more interesting bit pertained to the economy. Historically, Reactionaries have deferred to the PBP agenda of regressive tax cuts and deregulation in exchange for votes and financial support on racial, social, and cultural issues. The speakers at last week’s convention, however, urged the group to get behind a much larger role for the federal government: increased social spending, particularly for declining rural areas; subsidies and protection for sensitive industries; and support, in general, for white workers over business interests.
It wouldn’t be too much to call this industrial policy, and it sounds a lot like Warren’s agenda. Some speakers at the convention even acknowledged that, while going on to make it clear that she appalls them for lots of other reasons.
Is this a potential opening for her in a general election campaign? Only to a limited extent, because Reactionaries are primarily concerned with identity issues, and a white female Harvard professor is about the worst possible candidate to win them over on those grounds. Still, it suggests some potential points of agreement between the parties in the future, and that may prove to be significant.