Joe Manchin’s longing for bipartisanship figures to be an obstacle to the rest of the Biden agenda. How can he be talked out of it?
By persuading him that the stakes of failure are not just a loss at the polls, but the demise of liberal democracy in America. That’s what we’re playing for, folks.
I am thinking about peddling a concept called “The 1607 Project” to the NYT. As the date would suggest, the central narrative of American history is the expropriation of land from Native Americans. The development of an enormously prosperous and powerful liberal democracy, and discrimination against other groups, is disregarded in this story, because we only have room for one narrative. History is a simple business, after all.
Native Americans are clearly entitled to reparations. I would suggest that white people, Asians, and Hispanics should be required to swap places with them, and live on reservations. Black people, whose ancestors came here involuntarily, should be given the option of returning to Africa.
Do you like my chances?
Bret Stephens tells us we should be rooting for the complete success of Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, because if Hamas is destroyed, the Israeli government will be prepared to treat fairly with a more moderate Palestinian leadership. Is he right?
As if! We’ve seen this movie many times before. Israel can’t destroy Hamas, even if it occupies Gaza, because Hamas is the face of Palestinian opposition to Israel in Gaza, and thus has too much popular support. Hamas can only be eradicated in a war of extermination, which isn’t going to happen. For their part, Hamas and the other related militant groups are accomplishing nothing in a military sense by sending all of those rockets over Israel. They are just blowing off steam, as they do periodically. The episode will end in a few days or weeks with a cease-fire and lots of misery and rubble, as usual.
The bottom line with Bibi is that he doesn’t negotiate with Palestinians when the country is completely secure, because he doesn’t have to, and he doesn’t negotiate when the country is under threat, because that would be a sign of weakness and could end with an unfavorable deal. Better just not to negotiate, period.
The important development here is the violence within Israel. If Netanyahu had any sense, he would do his best to placate his Arab citizens as quickly as possible. It is much more likely that we will start hearing more loud chatter on the Israeli right about collective punishment and stripping the Arabs of their citizenship, instead.
Our old friend Rod Dreher is at it again. In a lengthy blog post cited in a David Brooks column, he compares wokeness to Bolshevism and worries about “soft totalitarianism.” Mind you, he understands Trump’s weaknesses, and thinks the January 6 rioters were a rabble, but clearly, something has to be done to protect decent, God-fearing Americans from the horrors of the woke menace. What might that be?
Like most of his right-wing apocalypse mongers, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to, because he makes a big point of telling us that he is posting from Hungary, which is obviously the New Jerusalem for the cultural right. (He probably loves Putin, as well, but he understands Moscow is a bridge too far for an American) Extreme gerrymandering, the destruction of independent media, the politicization of law enforcement and the judiciary, and so on: illiberal democracy is a small price to pay to prevent the left from setting up a Christian gulag.
I can’t speak to the quality of Dreher’s theology, but he’s a terrible historian, and his analogies are ridiculous. The Bolsheviks were a tiny group of conspirators (mostly in exile) unknown to the vast majority of Russians prior to 1917; they came to power by promising a war-weary public peace, land, and bread, and held it by being single-minded, opportunistic, and, above all, ruthless. The woke crowd is a disorganized group of intellectuals operating perfectly legally in universities and on Twitter; it has no aspirations to overthrow our system, and only seeks to change minds peacefully. Not exactly the same thing.
Oh, and there is no such thing as “soft totalitarianism.” It’s an oxymoron.
In an effort to protect the fundamental rights of his poor, benighted anti-vaxxer constituents, DeSantis has decreed that cruise ships docking in Florida may not require vaccine passports. When he was told that Norwegian Cruise Lines would stop docking in Florida under those conditions, he responded by saying that a small cruise line was expendable and could easily be replaced.
Norwegian is the third largest cruise line in the world. No word on the impacts to the state budget or the passengers who would appreciate the additional protection from the virus. Their freedom to travel safely from Florida apparently does not count for much.
After the 2016 election, Trump owed little or nothing to the GOP establishment, and both sides knew it. How would the two interact?
Mitch McConnell noted Trump’s personal and ideological unreliability and decided to treat him, not as the party leader, but as an independent third party with whom the GOP would maintain opportunistic alliances on issues of mutual interest. As a result, the GOP and Trump cooperated on tax cuts, deregulation, and the appointment of socially conservative judges. When Trump bashed allies, imposed tariffs, and attacked liberal democratic institutions, however, the party openly objected.
The last straw came with Ukraine. The GOP leadership was harshly critical of Trump’s attempts to coerce the Ukrainian government to support him, and thus joined the impeachment effort. Trump was convicted and removed from office. Mike Pence became president.
When the pandemic arrived, Pence made uninspiring, but reasonable efforts to control it. The public was impressed, and remembered the economy of 2019. The GOP consequently won a substantial victory in the 2020 election without making any allegations of fraud. The McConnell project would continue, but liberal democracy in America was safe, at least for the moment.
Donald Trump had a two-pronged approach to public relations when he was in office. He told moderates and business interests that tax cuts and deregulation were the meat of his presidency, and that the tweets were just empty entertainment for the masses; reactionaries, on the other hand, were assured that the tweets were what mattered, not the tax cuts. In spite of the obvious message inconsistency, the approach worked fairly well until January 6, when Trump finally fell off the horse.
Kevin McCarthy is trying to do something similar in the name of party unity. On the one hand, he is visibly sucking up to Trump, voting to expel Liz Cheney, and changing his story on the riot; on the other hand, he is telling the MSM that the GOP recognizes Biden as the legitimate president in order to keep the party looking respectable to the donor class. These stories are mutually exclusive.
Can he continue to walk the tightrope through the 2022 election? It will be up to the Democratic leadership and the handful of remaining principled Republicans to make sure that the answer is no.
Due to the fecklessness of the Palestinian leaders, the regional danger presented by Iran, and the failures of the Arab Spring, the Israelis have felt themselves invulnerable over the last few years. However, as I have pointed out several times, this is based on conditions that will not last forever. The refusal to take risks for peace, while perfectly understandable in the short run, will cost Israel dearly in the long run.
What are Israel’s vulnerabilities? Here is the list:
#4 may be coming home to roost as I’m writing this. We’ll see.
As I was reading Ross Douthat’s NYT column about the Catholic Church spinning out of control as the result of Pope Francis’ equivocal efforts at liberalization, the historical analogy that came to mind was Gorbachev, who saw his country implode when he tried to save the system by shaking it up just a little bit.
If you are surprised or offended by my analogy tying the Church to the Communist Party, don’t be. While the two are poles apart ideologically, they are actually quite similar structurally.
Don’t expect the Church to suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. It has 2,000 years of experience on its side. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge and inertia.
On the West VA Senator Joe.
He dictates just how far we can go.
Part blue, but part red,
Biden hears what he said
But the left thinks he always says no.
One of the GOP attack lines during the campaign was that Biden was just a figurehead, and that Harris (the dangerous lefty black woman) would actually run the administration. Given Harris’ relative inexperience and lack of firm ideology, this was always implausible, and the electorate correctly refused to buy it. Instead, the power behind the throne, to the extent there is one, is . . . Elizabeth Warren!
That doesn’t bother me as much as you might think. Warren might have been the worst possible nominee in 2020 for identity and culture war reasons, and she is a bit too far to the left for my taste, but her expertise in matters of policy and personnel is undeniable. She is a consistent, reliable source of ideas at a time when they are desperately needed. She earned her influence, if not the right to make the final decisions. She is good for America exactly where she is.
Elizabeth Warren didn’t lose in the 2020 primaries because her plans were bad, even though some of them were. She didn’t lose because she equivocated about paying for her health plan, although it obviously didn’t help. Finally, she didn’t lose because she couldn’t figure out if she was a bridge between the moderates and Sanders or a Sanders substitute, even though that was a serious tactical error, too. She lost because the electorate in the primaries understood that an elderly, sharp-tongued female Harvard professor was the perfect target for a Trump campaign based on identity and cultural issues. For those voters, Biden was the obvious choice; they were proven right.
For such a brilliant woman, Warren can be incredibly obtuse when it comes to culture war issues. She simply refuses to take them seriously, and takes it for granted that blue culture war activists are on the correct side of history. In that respect, she differs from Sanders, who has come to appreciate that tens of millions of blue collar Trump supporters cannot be reached by an approach based on economic self-interest. His attitude on that point is far more sophisticated than hers.
To put it more simply, a right-wing insurrection based on culture war issues? She didn’t have a plan for that.
Biden apparently is giving serious consideration to breaking the infrastructure bill into two parts: one with GOP support; and one without. Is that a good idea?
From a purely partisan perspective, definitely not. It gives the GOP a share of the credit for a part of the bill that is almost universally popular. Better to make them choose between accepting the bill as a whole or taking the hit for objecting to the popular bits.
But partisanship isn’t everything. Biden wants to use carrots as well as sticks to make the GOP a responsible center-right party again. It might not work, but what else can he do, other than trounce them in elections?
This is a close one, but personally, I would do the deal with the Republicans, hope that the carrot will work, and fight the remaining battles over the issues that really divide the parties. The national interest in maintaining a viable liberal democratic system has to prevail over narrow partisan advantage in this instance.
Capitalism is synonymous with creative destruction, which is the very negation of conservatism, because it promises endless change and perpetual insecurity. Nevertheless, Ross Douthat argued in Sunday’s NYT column that the American historical record shows that the neoliberal embrace of a fairly raw version of capitalism can’t be the reason for the decline of Christianity in this country. Is he right?
He makes a strong case. I would say that the history of American Christianity reflects a pattern of periodic booms and busts, with the line generally trending down over the last two centuries. The loss of ground over the last 20 years is too obvious to be ignored, however, with unfortunate implications for our political system. What is causing it, if not the dollar store version of capitalism?
I would say two things. First, the impacts of cable TV and the internet, which have resulted in the replacement of a genuine sense of community with an ersatz social media version based on shared loathing of the enemy; and second, the increasing identification of Christianity with the right wing of the GOP. Why would millennials flock to a religion whose members offer anger, hatred, bigotry, insurrection, and science denial instead of hope, redemption, and love for your neighbor? What reasonable person sees Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump as modern day prophets?
It was 2000, and America was riding high. The Cold War was over, and the US had prevailed (or, at least, the Soviet Union had imploded). American economic and military might was unmatched in the world. In the opinion of some, we had reached the end of history, and liberal democracy had won.
Today’s world is, of course, very different. What happened?
Here is the list:
So, what now? Can Biden save the country from the Orban Option, either by uniting us against the twin threats of climate change and Chinese dominance, or by reshaping our economy to bring back middle class prosperity? We’ll see.