The happiest man in America today is Gavin Newsom. The second-happiest is Terry McAuliffe, because Newsom just proved that running vigorously against Trump and the extreme right still works in blue states in 2021.
Whether it will continue to work in 2022 remains to be seen. In the meantime, the Trump playbook—exploit procedural advantages, whip up the base, and whine about a rigged election—has fallen short again. Will the GOP learn anything from the experience? Don’t hold your breath.
Standing directly in front of the man who expedited her nomination in the waning days of the Trump era, Justice Barrett argued yesterday that the Supreme Court is not a partisan institution, and that the public doesn’t understand the difference between politics and judicial philosophy.
Tell that to Justice Garland. I’m surprised Mitch didn’t burst out laughing.
To reiterate, it is true that most of the Supreme Court’s business is not partisan in a narrow sense, and that differences in jurisprudence matter, even among the members of the right-wing majority. It is also true, however, that the GOP has very clear positions on culture war issues, that these issues are often decided by the Supreme Court, and that Barrett was put on the Court specifically for the purpose of deciding the issues in favor of the GOP. To deny that the Court is a partisan institution at this point is to be willfully blind.
For the GOP, during the campaign, the economy was everything. Even staunchly “pro-life” Republicans called for the elderly to live normal lives and risk death for the sake of GDP and the Trump re-election effort.
Today, with a free, effective vaccine in place, it’s all about personal freedom, not the economy. Refusing the vaccine, of course, has the collateral effect of making Biden’s record look worse than it should. Coincidence? Possibly not.
If we were back in 2020, do you think for a minute that the GOP would be tolerant of anti-vaxxers, and so opposed to mandates? This is cynical, opportunistic libertarianism, not the real thing.
If you’re a CEO of a large American company, your primary interest is in maximizing profits and share prices. There are basically two ways to do that. One focuses on costs; keeping wages and taxes down obviously helps. If all businesses succeed in this, however, the result is inadequate demand and the dollar store economy. The alternative is to increase wages and deepen the welfare state in order to boost domestic demand. This is the crux of the Biden plan.
Business wants it all—low taxes and wages, but lots of workers and high demand. That can’t happen. As a result, the choice has been made. The dollar store economy, it is.
Right-wing critics of the new mandates argue they will just make the anti-vaxxers dig in. There is clearly some truth to that. Does that make the mandates a bad bet?
No. Biden is assuming that: the hard core vaccine opponents can only be motivated by sticks at this point; the number of people who will get the vaccine purely as the result of the mandates far exceeds the number who will now never get it for ideological reasons; the economy will improve as a result; and the mandates will have the strong support of the large majority of the population that took the vaccine and resents the irresponsibility of the anti-vaxxers.
My guess is that all of these assumptions are correct.
I have decided that I will no longer obey traffic laws when I am driving in red states. They are an infringement on my personal freedom. My car, my choice.
But, you say, I will be endangering other people if I just start running red lights. So what? It’s all about me, and my rights! I have the power, and the willingness to use it. If you can’t deal with that, just stay off the roads.
Osama is best considered as the political and intellectual heir to the anarchists who terrorized Europe and America around the turn of the 20th century. He thought that the 9/11 attacks would cripple the Great Satan, leave the Western world rudderless, and inspire Muslims to create the universal caliphate. Twenty years later, how does that look?
Osama was a failure, and not just because we killed him years later. While America overreacted to the attacks, engaged in imperial overreach, and is somewhat diminished on the world stage, the beneficiary has been China—not exactly a friend of militant Islam. The Islamic fundamentalists have discredited themselves all over the globe. Terrorism is on the wane. The world is far better prepared to deal with it. The universal caliphate, like the anarchist utopia, is still a distant dream; it is authoritarian government that is on the rise.
Paul Krugman thinks the revolutionary GOP of 2020 already existed in embryo after 9/11. Is he right?
Not exactly. It is true that the party led by George W. Bush was religiously wedded to tax cuts and deregulation, regardless of the circumstances; that, obviously, has not changed. Bush also used culture war tactics to get re-elected in 2004. The current state of the GOP, however, is more the product of his failures than his successes.
The CDs and the PBPs were in charge during the Bush years; the Reactionaries just provided the votes and kept quiet. The Iraq War and the Great Recession completely discredited the CDs, in the eyes of the Reactionaries. The GOP establishment lost control of the rank and file, and the rest is history; today, Donald Trump is the establishment, and anyone who crosses him is toast.
On Biden’s new rules on vaccines.
The Republicans aren’t really keen.
The far right really hates
The idea of mandates
For themselves, if you know what I mean.
The NYT tells us that the Biden infrastructure plan may be slowed by the lack of qualified construction workers. What conclusions should we draw from this?
That infrastructure programs are designed to enhance future productivity, not to create jobs in the short run, and that the progressive plan to make public college free for everyone makes no sense. We need more construction workers, not more college graduates. Making community college free would assist in this, but the plan shouldn’t apply to four year colleges.
Steve Bannon is fond of saying that identity politics only work for the right. Is that true?
In the short run, yes, because the right is far more homogeneous than the left, even though it has many ideological differences. In the long run, it will be a different story. There simply won’t be enough elderly white Christians to win national elections.
There are two competing economic models on offer in this country: the dollar store model, which emphasizes high profits, low wages, and low interest rates; and the social democratic model, which attempts to rebuild the middle class by beefing up the welfare state with revenues obtained from the affluent. Biden’s huge social capital bill is the centerpiece of his legislative effort to change models. His success or failure as president will, in the long run, be judged by what happens with that bill. Period.
The next few months will be very interesting, indeed. Will a handful of Democrats on the ideological margins effectively throw power back to the GOP? It will take all of the leadership’s skills to see that they don’t.
At first glance, America and China would appear to have very little in common. In one respect, however, they are quite similar—their levels of inequality. Like America, but for different reasons, China has a very skimpy welfare state, and a wealthy elite with strong incentives to keep it that way. Like Biden, Xi seems to be determined to do something about this situation. Will he succeed?
Having accumulated a tremendous amount of power in his hands, he is well-positioned to do so. Taking on his peers, however, is a difficult task. He may not have to deal with donors and lobbyists, to say nothing about a legal opposition, but he still has to answer, to some extent, to the rest of the CCP. Politics may be structurally different in China, but they haven’t disappeared altogether.
My guess is that he will back off when the resistance gets fierce, but only time will tell.
Rugged individualism isn’t a solution for either a recession or climate change, but the GOP views them differently; the party will occasionally support strong government action to address the former, but not the latter. Why the difference?
Two reasons. First, recessions end, while the measures necessary to combat climate change may not. Second, the fiscal measures used by Democrats to deal with recessions do not typically attack Republican core values. Yes, they drive up the deficit, but the GOP barely pretends to care about spending anymore.
Here is where the factions stand on organized labor:
CDs: Collective action on the part of labor is a reasonable way to keep capitalists from becoming too powerful. It is the welfare of society as a whole that matters, not the accumulation of wealth by a fortunate few.
CLs: Ugh! Rugged individualism and entrepreneurship made America great. Unions are basically a conspiracy against property and innovation.
PBPs: The whole point of a union is to make it difficult for us to make money. They need to be crushed.
Reactionaries: Unions are OK, but mostly irrelevant. The real issues in this country are social, not economic.
The GOP position on unions is consequently the CL/PBP line, with plenty of toxic masculinity thrown in to distract individual union members from their economic self-interest.