Month: November 2020

On the 46th president Joe.

His quest has just two months to go.

Trump thrashes and sues.

In the end, he will lose

And the race will have gone to the slow.

Biden, like most Democratic presidents, is determined to make his cabinet “look like America.” How important is that? Let’s consider three propositions:

1. HAVING A DIVERSE CABINET GUARANTEES THAT THE PRESIDENT WILL HEAR A WIDE RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES: Not really. Most cabinet members don’t have significant influence on the president’s decisionmaking process on a day-to-day basis, and just providing ethnic and sexual diversity doesn’t in any way provide assurance of a range of opinions, particularly in a party with a fairly well-defined agenda.
2. HAVING A DIVERSE CABINET SENDS AN INSPIRING MESSAGE TO AMERICANS THAT MEMBERS OF HISTORICALLY POWERLESS GROUPS CAN MAKE IT, TOO: That only applies to very visible positions. Providing diversity among Supreme Court justices, for example, might matter. But do you think that anyone is inspired by Elaine Chao? How many people even know what she does?
3. MAKING A SPECIAL EFFORT TO DIVERSIFY THE CABINET ELIMINATES WELL-QUALIFIED APPLICANTS AND THUS REDUCES COMPETENCE: This isn’t like filling a local government post, with a small number of potential applicants. There are over 300 million people in America. Even if you limit yourself to, say, black women, the pool of qualified applicants will be large enough that competence won’t be a problem.

My conclusion? Diversity is meaningful to some activists, but not really to the country as a whole, either pro or con.

For Netanyahu, the Trump administration was the gift that kept on giving. Move the embassy to Jerusalem? Check. Recognize the annexation of the Golan Heights? Yes, sir! “Mediate” by applying pressure to the Palestinians? We’re on it. Tear up the Iran deal? But of course. Work out deals for recognition by Arab countries? You can count on us! Acquiesce to settlements? Coming right up!

Bibi, of course, was only too happy to reciprocate. The identification of the Israeli and American right is now complete.

Well, the party’s over, and the hangover is about to start. Biden himself is too moderate to make any kind of break with the Israeli government, but there are plenty of people in his party who have come to despise Israel for multiple reasons. That will be a big problem for both sides.

Biden isn’t going to move the embassy back, and I don’t expect him to say much about the Golan Heights. He’s not going to do anything to stop the Israelis from fighting a low intensity war against Iran in Syria. But he will return the US to its traditional role of being an independent mediator with the Palestinians, and he will try to recreate the nuclear deal, although that will be difficult, in light of changed circumstances. They won’t erect any statues of him in Tel Aviv.

A Bagehot column in a recent issue of The Economist makes the case that Princess Diana brought a more emotional style to British politics that endures to this day. The author thus sees a direct line between Diana and Boris Johnson. I’m a little bit skeptical of that thesis, but it suggested another one to me that has application here as well as the UK.

Populism, like its big brother nationalism, is more of a feeling than an idea; it is romantic, not classical. The whole point of populism is to exalt sentiment, belief, and will over reason and expertise. It cannot be refuted with logic–only results.

If you accept that populism is a romantic concept, you may find that in a sense reassuring, because the history of art tells us the pendulum inevitably swings back at some point. The down side is that the populists can do a tremendous amount of damage while they’re in control. If you don’t believe me, just think about the thirties and forties.

Mike Pence did it by being oily and obsequious. Mike Pompeo was angry and combative. Both apparently had the same objective, however: to position themselves to be the American Maduro by providing unconditional loyalty to Chavez–er, Trump.

The problem with this approach is that it would only work if Trump won in 2020, and was viewed as a success when he left office in 2024. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. So now what? Why would the GOP electorate choose the second rate acolyte of a loser in 2024?

Neither Pence nor Pompeo has the man on golf cart’s gift for owning the libs on Twitter. They have nowhere to go on their own merits. As a result, their hopes have to rest on a Trump comeback in 2024. That is, to put it mildly, a long shot.

Landlords worry that tenants who are on the verge of being evicted will trash the house out of spite on the way out. That, in essence, is what Trump and his minions appear to be doing to the country right now. The virus is out of control, there is no leadership on the issue from the White House, and now Mnuchin is making it harder for the Fed to do anything to combat the recession for no obviously good reason.

Will Trump try to stick us with an unnecessary war as a parting gift, too? The possibility cannot be completely dismissed.

Lincoln started his political career as a Whig, so it is only appropriate that he turned into a Whig historian. His reinterpretation of American history in the Gettysburg Address as a narrative of ever increasing equality, inclusion, and freedom is pure Whig history. It has also been enormously influential, most notably in the speeches of MLK and Barack Obama. The objections in the 1619 Project notwithstanding, it is still the prevailing opinion in America today.

But is it true? The historical evidence is mixed. If you look at purely economic issues, you can hardly argue that increased equality has been a hallmark of American history. What you find is the following: a period of relative equality, due to the ready availability of land, for white people (not slaves, obviously) prior to the Civil War; the temporary crushing of the plantation economy and the freeing of the slaves during the war; the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of enormous corporations and plutocrats in the late 19th century; some slight mitigation of inequality as a result of reforms in the early 20th century; a period of massively increased equality arising from the Great Depression and World War II; and a long era of increased inequality after 1980, due to the victory of GOP supply side economics. The evidence is more consistent with Piketty than the Whigs.

The political part of the story is a bit more encouraging. Here, you see relative stability (minus the slavery issue, of course) up to the Civil War; the massive, mostly unanticipated experiment of Reconstruction; the ultimate termination of black inclusion during Reconstruction; expansions of popular voting rights during the early 20th century; and the victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Today, however, the GOP is trying to turn back the clock and limit voting to its constituents, without admitting that it is doing any such thing. It is not foreordained that these efforts will fail; in fact, they will probably become more pervasive, under the bogus rationale of “fraud,” as the result of the 2020 election.

So, on balance, was Lincoln right? In the economic sphere, no. In the political sphere, broadly, yes, but the gains cannot be taken for granted, and are under attack even today.

Here are two uncontroverted facts about the 2020 election:;

1. Commercials for GOP House and Senate candidates typically focused on what I would call the Twitter left–rioters, looters, advocates of political correctness, and socialists.
2. The ostentatiously moderate Joe Biden ran ahead of his party’s House and Senate candidates.

The initial conclusion that you probably draw from those facts is that the left is responsible for the poor showing of the Democrats in the congressional races. But is that really true?

The truth is more complicated than that, as follows:

1. The lack of a blue wave similar to 2008 is due primarily to the economic factors I discussed in a previous post. Most notably, PBPs who turned against the Republicans when the market tanked and their house values collapsed in 2008 had little reason to do so this time. Their votes were not primarily motivated by calls to defund the police or pay reparations, but by what they perceived to be Trump’s success on economic issues.
2. Since the GOP candidates put so much emphasis on culture war issues and the radical left in their commercials, you have to think that those issues made a difference in some swing districts.
3. But the radical left to which the GOP candidates referred consists of Twitter activists, not prominent Democratic politicians. Even the much-reviled AOC is hardly a leader of the movement to defund the police.

The bottom line here is that blaming prominent left-leaning politicians is a mistake, while blaming activists is fair, but a waste of time, as they cannot be controlled. The Democratic leadership needs to pull itself together and move on.

Donald Trump replaced the Iran nuclear deal with a “maximum pressure” campaign. As everyone outside of Jerusalem and the White House predicted, the new approach led to lots of misery on the part of the Iranian people, but neither resulted in regime change nor a major modification of the Iranian government’s behavior. Today, we have reached an equilibrium that satisfies nobody. Can Biden put the nuclear deal back together?

It won’t be easy, because neither side was completely satisfied with it. The Iranians didn’t see the economic benefits that they expected, while the Americans wanted longer timeframes on nukes and more constraints on Iranian aggression outside its borders. My guess is that the deal, to have any chance of success, will have to be reframed to meet the evolving needs of both sides. That means economic aid, not just the ability to trade, for the Iranians, and longer timeframes and more restrictions on Iranian conventional weapons for the Americans.

Don’t count on it working, due to intense domestic political opposition on both sides. And if it doesn’t? The danger of stumbling into war is still very real.

You can sort of understand and tolerate it when the GOP leadership says nothing about Trump’s frivolous election-related lawsuits, because the litigation won’t change the outcome of the election, and court battles are as American as apple pie. Attempts to persuade state officials to ignore state law and refuse to certify totally lawful results, however, are in a completely different category. They are an attempt to subvert the system, not to work within it to the bitter end.

Trump is going to do what he always does, but any GOP leader who acquiesces to this kind of behavior is marking himself as an enemy of liberal democracy in this country, and should expect consequences.

Let’s rub it in! Here are some ways in which Trump resembles Jimmy Carter:

1. Both ran as outsiders determined, in their very different ways, to clean up Washington;
2. Both won narrow victories over successors to the last elected president of the other party;
3. Both were ineffective leaders; and
4. Both were ultimately overwhelmed by a crisis not of their making (pandemic; Iran).

They’re so similar, they could be twins! Well, not really.

The Democrats won a crushing victory as a result of the Great Recession in 2008. Over 200,000 deaths, a sharp recession, and a mediocre recovery arising from a pandemic produced mixed results in 2020. Why the difference?

Three reasons:

1. THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS WERE DIFFERENT, AND LESS WIDELY FELT: Everyone, including the wealthy, experienced the impacts of the Great Recession, which was in full swing at the time of the election. Unemployment was skyrocketing, home prices fell, and markets collapsed. This time, the markets, after some initial softness, did not collapse; some people and companies actually made money. Federal legislation eased the pain for the unemployed, and the economy was improving at the time of the election. As a result, Trump received credit, not blame, for the economy.
2. TRUMP WASN’T BLAMED FOR THE PANDEMIC BY MOST SWING VOTERS: Bush and the GOP were widely perceived as being responsible for the Great Recession. No matter how poor his response was, no one could say that Trump caused the virus.
3. ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Gay marriage and bathroom bills weren’t even on the horizon in 2008. The culture wars have gotten much more intense since then; today, Christians look at the future and see political correctness as an existential threat. Their support for liberal democracy can no longer be taken for granted.

More than any of America’s erstwhile adversaries, with the possible exception of Iran, Donald Trump really hated the EU. As a result, Merkel and Macron, among many others, will be relieved to see the back of him. They and Biden will be eager to get things back to normal.

Relations will undoubtedly improve immediately. The frivolous tariffs will disappear, the US will re-enter the Paris Agreement, and there will be no further threats to leave NATO. Biden will be asking the EU to help contain China and Iran, and should have some success. There will be some new and difficult issues to deal with in the process of performing the repair job, however:

1. The European leaders know that about 70 million Americans voted for Trump even after seeing how much harm he could do over four years. They will be concerned about a future populist turn in American politics, and may choose to hedge their bets more than in the past;
2. The dominant protectionist gene in the EU is starting to assert itself again. It won’t be going away any time soon;
3. The phenomenon of illiberal democracies within the EU presents problems for both the American and EU leadership;
4. It is unlikely that Biden and the EU will see completely eye-to-eye on the treatment of American tech giants; and
5. The thorny issue of European underinvestment in defense will continue, even if it gets less emphasis from both sides.

Special elections are about mobilizing your own voters. Period. There will be no effort to persuade swing voters here.

History tells us the GOP is better at this, and should win. In this case, however, the ongoing Trump campaign against nonexistent voter fraud works in favor of the Democrats. What’s the point of going to the polls to vote for Republicans if you genuinely believe the Democrats have installed software in voting systems that will flip just enough votes to win? And how do the GOP candidates run commercials asking people to check socialism and political correctness in the Biden administration when Trump doesn’t concede that there will be one?

This situation is temporary. It will disappear after the Electoral College votes are in. But every little bit helps in what figures to be two close contests.

If there is one thing that Trump loves almost as much as himself, it’s leverage. To that end, expect him to keep the 2024 option open as long as possible, for two reasons:

1. Politically, it keeps him relevant, guarantees him the attention that he craves so desperately, and makes him a kingmaker at the very least; and
2. It helps him with his creditors, regardless of whether he ultimately runs or not. If you run Deutsche Bank, you have no reason to extend his loans if you know he’s not running. But would you take that risk if you’re still dealing with someone who could be occupying the Oval Office and regulating you in a few years? Probably not.