Month: August 2019

The Right: Obamacare is socialism! It’s a government takeover of medicine! Long lines, rationing, and death panels! It’s anti-American! It has to be torn out by the roots! Long live the free market!

The Left: OK, then we’ll just do single-payer.

The Right: Single-payer is socialism! It’s a government takeover of medicine! Long lines, rationing, and death panels! It’s anti-American! It has to be stopped at all costs! Long live the free market!

The Left: But you just said that about Obamacare, and the world didn’t come to an end. For that matter, you said it about Medicare, too. Why should anyone believe you this time?

The Right: Mumbles incoherently.

The prominent gay conservative (no, that’s not exactly an oxymoron) Andrew Sullivan reflects on a recent discussion with Michael Anton and concludes that a reactionary is a conservative who has been driven to extremes by unwelcome “top-down” social change. The theory sounds plausible. Does it fit the facts?

No. The increased restiveness of reactionaries is a recent development, but there have been no new affirmative action programs, the only significant new addition to the welfare state has been Obamacare (a repackaged and colorblind Mitt Romney program once embraced by the GOP), and the most significant legal/social change is gay marriage (Sullivan can hardly complain about that).

Reactionaries are more militant today because their sense of victimhood has vastly increased. This is due in part to their inability to prevail in the court of public opinion in the culture wars, a development that is clearly “bottom up.” The role of Fox News in stoking their anger cannot be overstated. But the biggest single change was the election of an African-American president. It suggested to reactionaries that the arc of history was running against them; they responded accordingly.

Trump’s “disloyalty” argument runs something like this:

1. Proper American Jews are loyal to Israel as well as their own country;
2. That means giving active support to the Israeli government of the day;
3. Trump is close to the current government, while some Democrats are extremely critical of it; therefore
4. A good American Jew is obligated to support both Netanyahu and Trump.

#1 accepts the old and dangerous trope about Jewish dual loyalty, but turns it on its head, and makes it a virtue rather than a vice. #2 is logically false; if that’s the standard, then the majority of my countrymen aren’t real Americans. #3 is unquestionably true. The conclusion fails because #1 and #2 are false.

The identification of Israel with white nationalist America is, of course, going to be hugely damaging to the Israelis in the long run. Who is to blame? Both Trump and Netanyahu, but mostly the latter, because he has been at it longer.

Donald Trump’s signature thought on political economy–mercantilism–had its heyday in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the European powers disposed of property without taking the slightest interest in the wishes of the indigenous people. He also wants to “take the oil” in Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he wants to buy Greenland. It’s completely consistent with his view of the world.

He probably thinks of Alaska as a precedent, but that was 150 years ago, and the Tsar didn’t exercise any control over Alaska outside of a few fairly miserable settlements on the sea. Times have changed a bit since then.

We probably should be grateful that he didn’t just invade, instead.

Donald Trump is a colossus. He alone was capable of saving the country from Hillary Clinton and the liberals. America was treated with contempt by the rest of the world during the Obama apology years, but today, everything has changed. Everyone respects us, the economy is running hot, we win every day, and America is great again!

But Donald Trump is also a victim. He is harassed mercilessly by the MSM and the Democrats. The judicial system won’t do his bidding. His friends and appointments invariably turn on him. The deep state battles him every day. No wonder he can’t get anything done. Everyone should feel sorry for him; Lord knows, he feels sorry for himself.

It’s a ridiculous mindset, on its face, but it appears to be shared by a large number of his fellow reactionaries. It is largely this combination of bravado and mutual victimhood which binds the billionaire casino owner and developer from New York City with his struggling white working class supporters. How can it be overcome? Not by lectures like the “1619 Project,” that’s for sure.

Left-wing pundits are correctly concerned that all of the progressives’ plans to remake America will be derailed by the filibuster. They are consequently indignant at the reluctance of several of the candidates to abolish it. They typically attribute this to a mistaken, anachronistic, misty-eyed romanticism about bipartisanship and deliberation in the Senate. Are they right?

Of course not. The candidates who don’t support abolishing the filibuster can foresee a time in which the GOP has control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. Does anyone doubt that the current version of the Republican Party would use the opportunity to completely gut the welfare state and ban abortion on a national level (once Roe has been overturned)? You could say that self-interest would prevent the counter-revolution, but Republican legislators have had great success using racism and the culture wars to sell this kind of a program to their base in the past, and that could well extend into the future.

Abolishing the filibuster is a gamble that comes with huge risks. The candidates who support abolition need to be open about their willingness to take those risks, and to make a compelling case as to how the worst can be avoided in the future.

The reactionary narrative on recent American history runs like this:

1. Life was good in the fifties. The white patriarchy was firmly in charge, and manufacturers were making good money and paying high wages.
2. The Civil Rights Movement and the culture wars of the sixties were a disaster for the moral fiber of the country.
3. The country was falling apart at the seams by 1980.
4. Reagan changed everything. By cutting taxes and siding openly with white social conservatives, he turned the country around. It was morning in America.
5. His GOP successors believed in tax cuts, too, but they didn’t fight the culture wars with enough gusto. Traditional values collapsed, and real Americans were no longer respected.
6. But Trump won in 2016, and America is great again!

Elizabeth Warren’s version of the narrative, on the other hand, would run something like this:

1. Culturally, the fifties left a lot to be desired, but they were, in fact, a golden age for American workers. Corporations were subject to very high taxes, and were forced to be good citizens. White workers were better off as a result.
2. The Civil Rights Movement and the culture wars of the sixties were a necessary response to the tyranny of the white patriarchy.
3. The problems of the late seventies were overblown, and were largely the result of bad luck.
4. Reagan made corporate greed fashionable. The massive increase in inequality, and the growing indifference of large corporations to anything other than profit, are attributable to his administration. Workers have been suffering ever since.
5. Elect me, and make capitalism great again!

If Warren is the nominee, the election will largely be a battle between these two competing narratives. Will the electorate agree that Reagan was a disaster? I have my doubts.

On current trends, the GOP as we know it is doomed as a force in national elections. Its old white supporters will die and be replaced by left-leaning millennials, largely of color. America in 2035 could thus look like California today. How will the party adjust?

There are several choices:

1. THE GOP EVOLVES INTO A RESPONSIBLE CENTER-RIGHT PARTY: The best alternative is, unfortunately, the least likely, based on its behavior today.
2. NATIONAL CONSERVATISM: The party goes populist on economic issues. Businessmen gnash their teeth, but at least they’re being protected from socialism.
3. GRAND OLD OBSTRUCTIONIST PARTY: The GOP collectively gives up hope of winning the presidency, but relies on its continuing power in rural states, the judicial system, and the filibuster to prevent anything like the “revolution.”
4. DOUBLE DOWN ON VOTE SUPPRESSION: If you can’t win over the voters, you can at least try to stop them from voting! This will require efforts that are far more effective than what has been accomplished to date.
5. FULL FASCISM: Peaceful vote suppression may not be enough, so extralegal violence could be part of the equation. Hey, our way of life is in danger, and we’re justified in doing anything, including wrecking constitutional government, to protect it.

So which will it be? I honestly don’t know, but it’s hard to be optimistic at this point.

It’s January, 2020, and the recession is in full swing. Trump predictably is blaming everyone around him and screaming for stimulus. The Fed is trying, but has little ammunition with which to work, so it’s really up to Congress. What happens there?

The GOP, true to form, demands tax cuts. House Democrats aren’t even slightly interested in that approach, because: (a) tax cuts are an extremely inefficient form of stimulus, as most of the money is saved, not spent; (b) we’ve already been down that street; and (c) no one wants to bail out a flailing president. In order to keep faith with the American people, however, the House passes a series of large spending increases, similar to the spending elements of the Obama stimulus. The bill then goes to the Senate.

Mitch McConnell and his allies have a terrible dilemma. Everyone remembers how they demonized stimulus during the Obama years, and at least a little bit of the opposition was genuine and ideological, as opposed to cynical and opportunistic. If he supports the bill, he violates one of the GOP’s few principles. If he doesn’t, the GOP and Trump are going down in November. Which does he choose?

This could easily happen, and my guess is that McConnell’s desire for power is much stronger than any concerns about deficit spending.

Netanyahu, of course, routinely accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being anti-Semitic. If that were the standard, about half the Jews in Israel would be anti-Semites. The better, and harder, question is whether anyone who rejects Israel’s right to exist is by definition anti-Semitic.

You can only answer that question in the affirmative if you believe that Zionism is an inherent, integral part of being Jewish. Historically speaking, until relatively recent times, that has not been the case. And so, I would say the answer to the question is no.

Personally, I do support Israel’s right to exist, and do not agree with the BDS crowd. In addition, there are certainly plenty of people who reject the whole concept of Israel who are, in fact, anti-Semitic. Being critical of Israel even to the point of refusing to recognize it is not, however, anti-Semitic in and of itself.

When the Civil War broke out, the value of the slaves owned by plantation owners dwarfed all of the capital owned by residents of the Union. As a result, the South, as one would predict, won an easy victory in the Civil War. And thank God they did! Without American slavery, the entire world economy would have come to a standstill, and we would all be poor today.

No? You say that didn’t happen? Your teachers told you that the North won the war, largely because its industrial capacity was much larger than the South’s, and that a great boom ensued after the war even after the demise of slavery? How can we reconcile that with the assertion that slavery was the foundation of the American economy, and that we are living off the proceeds from it even today?

You can’t, and you shouldn’t try. Most Americans at the time of the Civil War were subsistence farmers with no stake in cotton markets or slavery. The industrial activity that was taking place in the North at the time was mostly small scale and for local markets. Cotton was a global industry, mostly financed by London bankers. They weren’t putting money into farms in the North.

The manufacture of cotton cloth was the first truly globalized industry, so naturally it gets more than its share of attention from economists, historians, and African-Americans with an ideological point to make. That didn’t mean it had a significant impact on most of the citizens of the Union back in the 1860’s, it didn’t mean that the world’s economy was doomed when slavery was abolished, and it certainly didn’t equate to an ability to wage war successfully against an emerging industrial colossus, albeit one that was not yet generating huge revenues through exports.

Everything you were taught in school is a lie, thunders the NYT’s “1619 Project;” America is, and always has been, an evil empire, not a shining city on a hill. It was conceived in slavery, brutality, and sin, not a quest for freedom. The Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites. The Constitution was nothing more than a device to keep black people down. After a few brief hopeful moments during Reconstruction, the apartheid system was recreated, and was scarcely better than before; in fact, it was the model for Nazi Germany. Virtually all of the wealth enjoyed by white people today was created by, and stolen from, black people. The only bright spot in this gloomy narrative is the noble, patient struggle of the African-American for freedom and equality. It is the one thing that even begins to redeem this cesspool of a nation.

Naturally, this narrative leaves out a few inconvenient facts. Most notably, it ignores the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who died fighting to free the slaves, and it doesn’t recognize any difference between the Jim Crow South and the milder forms of segregation in the North. The narrative isn’t fake news, or a footnote, and it needs to be told; it also, however, needs to be put in perspective.

I would ask two questions:

1. COMPARED TO WHAT? Was the story of America somehow uniquely racist and oppressive? The European colonial powers, after all, were complicit in the creation of slavery, and continued to profit mightily from it even after they abolished it in their own empires. Most of the rest of the world was ruled by autocracies for most of the period covered by the “1619 Project.” Was life in, say, the Russian or Chinese Empire better for peasants than life in America? I think not.
2. WHERE’S THE REST OF THE STORY? The “1619 Project” narrative puts African-Americans at center stage, and views the rest of American history as a footnote. That would have been news to the people who built the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, and the vast number of immigrants who poured in from all over the world in search of a better life–were they all mistaken, or were they just seeking an opportunity to be oppressors, too?

The legacy of slavery is an extremely important theme in American history, and yes, we are still dealing with it to this day. While it shaped our country, however, it does not define it.

I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, class warfare blues.

You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.

My polling numbers are just stuck, and now I’ve got to choose.

If something doesn’t change right now, I’m surely going to lose.

__________

It’s true I’ve always emphasized class instead of race.

It’s all about the plutocrats; the rest is just a waste.

I don’t believe black people should have to know their place.

But identity is everything? I don’t think that’s the case.

___________________

I’ve got the blues

The oligarchy blues.

This isn’t my first rodeo.

I’ve really paid my dues.

Should Biden be the enemy?

Should I focus more on Liz?

That is my conundrum

And I haven’t passed the quiz.

We all know how Trump loves to negotiate; find or create as much leverage as possible, pound the table, and wait for the opponent to capitulate. You would think, therefore, that he would be using the protests in Hong Kong as leverage against the Chinese leadership in the on-again, off-again trade negotiations. No such luck. Why?

Because there is an exception to the rule when it comes to strongmen. Instead of applying leverage, he sucks up to them in the apparent hope of winning through flattery. He’s been doing it for months with Kim, and now he’s doing it with Xi.

Of course, it is also perfectly possible that he sympathizes more with the oppressors than the protestors, because he admires people who are “tough.” Xi certainly is that.

There are two potential models for a Democratic victory in 2020: base mobilization; and winning over swing voters. But is it possible to do both at once? Can the Democrats walk and chew gum at the same time?

Yes, it’s possible; Barack Obama did it. But it requires considerable finesse, and not everyone can do it. Biden, for example, is depending solely on his appeal to swing voters; for base mobilization, he will have to rely on Trump.

I can see two ways it can happen. Option #1 requires a nominee who is young and a minority (to boost turnout among apathetic identity voters) with a moderate ideological program (for swing voters). Option #2 is the opposite: a white guy who connects with reactionary workers for identity reasons, but who has a radical program to mobilize the base.

Option #1 sounds a lot like Harris, if she can persuade everyone she’s really a moderate at heart. Option #2 would be Bernie Sanders if he would make concessions to reactionary white workers on cultural issues–but he hasn’t. Note that neither description fits Elizabeth Warren, who can fire up the ideologically-committed blue base, but who has no particular appeal for minorities or moderate swing voters, so her chances of winning a general election would depend almost exclusively on mobilizing millennials. That could conceivably work, particular in an economic downturn, but do you want to bet the farm on it?