Month: September 2019

Any Chinese person who is my age lived through, and remembers, the Cultural Revolution; his parents also survived the Great Leap Forward. The quality of his life has improved immeasurably over the last 30 years. That will buy the CCP a lot of gratitude and forgiveness for its mistakes.

Most Chinese people are not my age, however. Young adults have never known a China that wasn’t growing at a minimum of 6 percent per year. It would be natural for them to take Chinese economic success for granted, and to react strongly if things start going wrong, as they will, at some point.

In short, Xi and the CCP are building a monster of expectations, and they are going to have to keep feeding it. Things could get ugly if they don’t.

It is fair, I think, to call Bret Stephens a neo-conservative. He has an intense belief in liberal democratic values, particularly when regressive tax cuts and deregulation are sprinkled in, and he thinks America has a moral obligation to evangelize for them. Limited government and individual rights, in his view, can and will work everywhere.

That is, everywhere except Egypt. Stephens thinks the only choices on the menu in Egypt are a variety of kinds of dictatorships, of which the military kind are the best. Stephens has some qualms about the Sisi government, however. He doesn’t believe Sisi has the finesse to keep the genie in the bottle forever, and he suspects the dictator who will inevitably follow him will be much worse. On that point, he is probably right, given that Sisi has done everything in his power to delegitimize liberal democracy as an alternative.

What is the basis for the Egyptian exception? Stephens doesn’t bother to explain, but the answer is obvious; his overriding interest is in the security of Israel, and military dictatorships in Egypt have historically helped the Israelis in two ways. First, they have no qualms about using force to keep the lid on with regard to pro-Palestinian sentiments; and second, they give Israel a stronger moral claim to America’s friendship. When American and Israeli interests diverge, the Israelis can always play the liberal democratic solidarity card against the Arab dictatorships they actually support, and it generally works.

Does this sound almost absurdly hypocritical to you? Of course it does. That’s why the Israelis rely on American surrogates like Stephens to provide the open defense for Arab autocrats, rather than doing it themselves; they can’t afford to be seen with dirty hands.

Based on a few hundred years of history, we Americans think time is on our side. We believe that events have proven the superiority of our liberal democratic model, and that a political system based on limited government and individual rights will always deliver more prosperity, creativity, happiness, and freedom than an authoritarian system. It’s a natural law of sorts. We are, in short, Whig historians.

That was before Trump, of course. The Chinese, with a vastly longer history, see the world in a different light. To them, time has a circular as well as a linear component. China has been down over the past 150 or so years, just as it was at the end of many other dynasties, but it is currently on the rise, and it is predestined to regain its accustomed position as the dominant power in its region, if not the whole world. That, too, is the natural order of things.

Two powerful countries with the belief that the arc of history bends their way. In all likelihood, only one can be right. It’s a combustible situation, to say the least.

Donald Trump is a monster in human form. He cares nothing for his party or his country–only his ego. He is profoundly, and willfully, ignorant of anything that happens outside his own orbit. He sees the country as just another incarnation of the Trump Organization, and believes the presidency is a prize to be savored and exploited–not a public trust. He divides the nation on a daily basis purely in his own interest. He has been a complete disaster as president.

But you knew that, and so did everyone with any sense in 2016; the swing voters in 2020 will be the people who chose to believe the best about him three years ago, and have presumably lost their illusions in the interim. The Ukraine affair consequently won’t show the country anything we haven’t already seen. The impeachment process, therefore, won’t really be about Trump; it will be about the GOP, and where it stands on his abuses of power.

I’m willing to bet that virtually every GOP senator privately views Trump as being completely unfit for office. Are they willing to stand up for the country and the Constitution? Or are they too fearful of the base to do anything but acquiesce to this ever-worsening pattern of behavior? And if the latter, how will the GOP be able to look the voters in the eye after Trump is gone?

It’s hard to be optimistic, but it’s early days, and at a minimum, any Republican member of Congress who supports Trump in the impeachment process will have to explain to the voters why he thinks it was ok for Trump to coerce a foreign government to provide assistance to his campaign. The backlash against the GOP after Watergate was pretty fierce. It could happen again.

Bernie Sanders has an Elizabeth Warren problem; while her background and intellectual roots are vastly different than his, her specific policy ideas are not. She is clearly taking control of the progressive wing of the party. How can he turn things around?

As I’ve noted previously, the most logical way to make the “revolution” happen is to move to the right on cultural issues to accommodate reactionary workers, but Sanders won’t do that. Nor will he deign to make himself a more effective identity politician. No, his solution is to move even further left and hope that Warren won’t follow him.

Bernie’s previous ideas about addressing inequality, largely through a massively beefed-up inheritance tax, were constitutional and relatively moderate. His new wealth tax has all of the defects of the Warren proposal, and then some. It’s also too late.

My best guess is that, by moving left, Sanders will cause Democratic voters to view Warren as more of a centrist than she really is, which will be of enormous benefit to her in the later stages of the race. Moving that far left may win him back a few progressive votes, but it is not a plausible path to the nomination.

There was no real distinction between the monarch’s public and private interests in early medieval times; the entire country was theoretically owned and disposed of by him, and his household servants had enormous public responsibilities. The evolution of the public/private distinction took centuries, and was enormously important, from a constitutional perspective.

Donald Trump didn’t get that memo. Predictably, he views the US government as being the Trump Organization on a grand scale. Everyone in it, including the State Department and the DOJ, works for him personally, not the nation. Anyone who works against his interests by complying with the law is a traitor, and should be executed.

In a way, Trump’s obtuseness is the real story here; he barely even made any effort to cover up this outrageous abuse of power, because he thought it was self-evidently OK. In reality, it is Mueller, Part Deux, with the elements of the new crime mostly confessed.

Now there are only two remaining questions: will the whistleblower’s allegations be corroborated; and what will the GOP do in response? More on that in subsequent posts.

ISSUE #1: REALISTICALLY, CAN TRUMP BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE THROUGH THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS? No. Next question.

ISSUE #2: THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE EXERCISE? To gather facts and make them public; to set an appropriate standard for future presidential behavior; and to send a message to Trump and all foreign powers that Congress will respond forcefully to illegal meddling this time.

ISSUE #3: HOW BROAD WILL THE INQUIRY BE? There are two ways to handle impeachment: either confine it to the Ukraine question; or load all of Trump’s abuses of power on a train and see what happens. The leadership appears to be going with the first option, which makes sense, because it will result in a much quicker resolution.

ISSUE #4: WHY THE NEED FOR SPEED? Do you really want impeachment dominating the 2020 election campaign? It would only benefit Trump.

ISSUE #5: IS TRUMP THE INEVITABLE WINNER HERE? Not necessarily. Yes, impeachment will fire up his base, but they’re pretty fired up already, so that doesn’t matter much. The real question is how the swing voters will react. If the House approaches the issue in a sober and moderate way, and the facts look bad for Trump, the ultimate winner could be the Democratic nominee. Anything that looks like a completely partisan witch hunt, on the other hand, will clearly benefit Trump. Democrats, be forewarned.

Ken Burns wants to build bridges between blue and red America. The clear intent of “Country Music” was to prove to blue people that country is worthy of their respect and admiration. He did that by focusing largely on artists with crossover appeal and country’s roots in African-American music.

Did he succeed? To some extent, yes. He convinced me, for example, that Hank Williams, who in some ways is a grotesquely modern figure, should be viewed as a writer of classic American songs, not just a tragic country artist. He also made a strong case that Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash have deep roots in blue as well as red America. On that point, I didn’t require a lot of persuasion.

Those artists were exceptions, however. Country music wasn’t particularly political until the culture wars, but the mainstream clearly took sides in the 1960’s, and never changed. Notwithstanding the efforts of some progressive country artists–most notably, some of the women–the quintessential country fan today is a white guy with a Trump sticker on his pickup truck. Nashville makes a huge amount of money pandering to that audience; there is no reason to believe that will change any time in the future. And so, in my eyes, the program, in spite of its obvious merits, was only a partial success.

Jeremy Corbyn’s plan for the next few months runs something like this:

1. Boris is forced to either defy the law or ask for an extension.
2. If he defies the law and Brexit occurs on October 31, chaos ensues.
3. If he asks for the extension, his base, including the Brexit Party, turns against him.
4. The Tories have to excuse a serious failure one way or the other, and Labour wins the election.

The reality is much more likely to look like this:

1. Boris defies the law, and chaos ensues.
2. With a no-deal Brexit now an accomplished fact, the Brexit Party is no factor in the subsequent election; its voters return to the Conservatives.
3. Millions of Remain voters within Labour rightly blame Corbyn for his role in creating the mess and vote for the Liberal Democrats.
4. Some Conservatives also vote for the Liberal Democrats. None vote for Labour, since Corbyn is universally distrusted on the right.
5. There are two possible outcomes, depending on the degree of tactical voting on the left: either a Conservative victory; or a patchwork coalition with the Liberal Democrats at its head.
6. Labour is no longer the leading party on the left, and Corbyn is the reason why.

Take a bow, Jeremy. Theresa May was right–she knew when her time was up, but you didn’t, and look at the result!

Elizabeth Warren now has a Social Security plan to throw on top of the pile. The gist of it is that the finances of Social Security will be shored up, and benefits will be increased, with the proceeds from a new tax on capital gains, and a change to the current cap to apply FICA to wages over $250,000.

This is a good plan, for the following reasons:

1. It is politically shrewd, because it gives Warren a talking point with elderly voters that no one, including Trump, has a response to as of now;
2. It is sound policy to address the Social Security deficit now, rather than later; and
3. The FICA cap doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the capital gains tax is a welcome move towards making all of society, and not just employers and employees, financially responsible for the welfare state.

So why only two cheers? Because the plan creates a doughnut hole between the current cap figure (around $130,000, I believe) and $250,000. That can only be interpreted as a failure of nerve in order to avoid what has historically (and dubiously) been viewed as a middle-class tax increase. Warren is already proposing to increase taxes on those people in order to fund Medicare-for-All, even though she’s doing her best not to admit it; it is time to come clean on that point.

I always thought George W. Bush was a political unicorn. On the one hand, as the son of a president with strong ties to the establishment, he was the ultimate insider. On the other hand, he always made a display of his contempt for that same establishment, most notably through his embrace of evangelical religion, and the reactionaries bought it. He had the support of all four factions of the GOP after his election in 2000. It was a magic act, and a tough one to follow.

Remarkably, Donald Trump has almost matched him. On the one hand, the PBPs and the CLs saw him as a savvy businessman who would cut taxes and regulations; his overheated Twitter account could be overlooked for the greater good of wealth pursuit. On the other hand, he constantly reminded everyone that his heart was genuinely with “real Americans,” which meant reactionaries. They consequently chose to disregard his innumerable personal failings, obscene wealth, and ties to New York City, and are his strongest supporters today. Only the CDs, to whom he offered nothing, abandoned him, and by now, they are a tiny minority within the GOP. They only matter in a tight race.

So how did this happen? There are a lot of reasons, and I’ve written about them before, but one of them was the abject failure of the Bush 43 administration in both foreign and domestic affairs. The GOP establishment was totally discredited, the CDs were blamed, and the party moved on, with the Reactionary/PBP quid pro quo still in place, although somewhat threatened by the rise of “national conservatism.”

The decision of the UK’s Supreme Court to invalidate BoJo’s move to prorogue Parliament is a serious slap in the face for the PM. It does not, however, change the dynamics of the situation, and it isn’t obvious, at this point, what Parliament has to discuss. The October 31 EU deadline is still in place, the bogus negotiations with the EU are continuing, the act requiring BoJo to ask for an extension is law, and the issue now is whether he will comply with the law or ignore it and illegally impose a no-deal Brexit, with all of the chaos that will inevitably result.

Given his Trumpian tendencies, I’m betting on the latter, and given the issues with Corbyn and Labour, BoJo will probably win the ensuing election, anyway.

A TV critic for the NYT has apparently written a book in which he argues that Trump is best understood as a persona in a TV drama. Is he right?

Largely yes, but not completely. What binds Trump to his base is his anger at their common enemies in the establishment. That has nothing to do with “The Apprentice.”

The right is fueled by anger because reactionary white Christian men see themselves as the proper rulers of America, but the losers of the culture wars, and the victims of a system which gives immigrants and minorities cuts in line at their expense. You may fairly ask why they relate so strongly to a billionaire developer and casino owner from New York with multiple marriages and no understanding of Christianity. All I can say is that Trump only sounds authentic when he’s angry, and that the shared sense of grievance probably comes from a belief that the Manhattan social establishment laughed at him and his father.

Whatever the reason, that anger is very corrosive, and it is starting to damage our institutions; the right clearly attaches more importance to its values than to the workings of our liberal democratic system. If you really want something to worry about, consider the likely response from the reactionaries if Trump loses in 2020. No matter how lopsided the outcome may be, the reactionaries are going to view the new Democratic administration as illegitimate, and things are going to get really ugly.

What would a perfect Democratic candidate for president look like? Here are the obvious criteria:

1. IT WOULD BE A MAN: There are plenty of male swing voters, and some women, who simply won’t vote for a woman for president. That may not be fair, and it isn’t impossible for the right woman to win, but we’re trying to appeal to the maximum number of people in this hypothetical exercise. Sorry.
2. HE WOULD BE YOUNG: The Democrats traditionally have done better with fresh faces, and they need someone to appeal to millennials.
3. HE WOULD BE CHARISMATIC: Think Obama, JFK, and Clinton here. The Democrats want a savior, not a businessman.
4. HE WOULD COME FROM A RED OR PURPLE STATE: The better to appeal to swing voters.
5. HE WOULD BE A MODERATE: Extreme lefties turn off those swing voters who are motivated primarily by ideology.

The list leads you to two conclusions:

1. It’s deeply unfortunate that Beto isn’t a more plausible candidate. He meets all of the standards.
2. Warren fails every single one of them. That illustrates the risk the Democrats are running if they nominate her next year. Even Bernie at least meets the man test; from a purely identity perspective, he’s a more plausible winner than Warren, although he would make a far worse president.

Assume, as I do, that the next Israeli government is headed by someone other than Netanyahu. What will that mean for U.S.-Israeli relations?

Bibi has tied Israel’s interests to those of the GOP, and Trump in particular, to an unprecedented degree. The new government will have every incentive to reverse that, because: (a) it has to be clear now that Trump can’t be trusted to follow the company line on war with Iran; (b) Trump may very well not be re-elected; and (c) the American left is becoming increasingly pro-Palestinian as a result of Netanyahu’s clear contempt for it. That represents a grave danger for Israel in the future.

Expect the new government to reverse course and attempt to work with the American political system on a bipartisan basis. The fact that it will not be beholden to the ultra-Orthodox for votes will definitely help. The real question is whether it is already too late. I suspect it is, but only time will tell.