Month: December 2021

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; but then, what year isn’t? Look on the bright side: we didn’t have to watch Trump on TV the entire year.

Here are the biggest stories of 2021, in reverse order:

1. BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: The Olympics went off reasonably smoothly in spite of the pandemic. Americans were subjected nightly to the antics of Simone Biles, but ultimately won the medal count.
2. THE BEAR GROWLS: Putin responded to a drop in popularity by ramping up repression at home and threatening military action in Ukraine.
3. SO DOES THE DRAGON: The Chinese continued to choke the life out of Hong Kong and escalated their threats to Taiwan.
4. BOMB BOMB BOMB IRAN?: The Iranian government, now in the hands of extreme hard liners, showed little interest in returning to the nuclear agreement. Israel was alarmed. War was a serious possibility.
5. ANTI-VAXXERS EVERYWHERE: The American populist right embraced the anti-vaxxer cause, which spread to Europe and Australia, as well. Efforts to control the virus were hampered as a result.
6. INFLATION: Prices were rising all over the world (except in Japan) at the end of the year, due primarily to supply chain issues caused by the pandemic. It was worse in the US than elsewhere, however, as the American economy was more buoyant than Europe’s. Monetary and fiscal tightening loomed.
7. THE BIDEN AGENDA STARTS AND STALLS: Expectations for the Biden agenda were unrealistically high on the left, given the composition of Congress, and were only partially met. Morale on the progressive side slumped.
8. AFGHANISTAN DEBACLE: Whether you agree with Biden’s decision to comply with Trump’s agreement and withdraw (I didn’t), you have to respect the courage it took to avoid kicking the can again. American prestige was damaged, but the world will get over it, just as it did after Vietnam and Iraq.
9. JANUARY 6: The GOP had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump and the rioters; instead, it excommunicated Trump’s critics and called the rioters “tourists”. It is now an overwhelmingly pro-insurrectionist party with zero respect for liberal democratic norms.
10. THE VIRUS: Yes, the virus was the biggest story of the year, just as it was in 2020. Anti-vaxxers are still dying in huge numbers every day. At least most of the American dead are Trump voters.

2021 was a year of stops and starts. The virus appeared to be waning, but roared back. Inflation was supposed to be transitory, but wasn’t, exactly. Biden’s agenda moved forward, and then stalled. We had a debt ceiling crisis, then we didn’t, then it was looming, and then it was resolved. Putin threatened to invade, but hasn’t–at least not yet.

No one exemplified this trend better than Joe Manchin, who permitted parts of Biden’s agenda to move forward, but not all of it. He is the fulcrum of the teeter-totter that was Washington in 2021. As I’ve noted before, you can make a good argument that he represents the will of the American people, as expressed by the results of the 2020 election. Whether this constitutes good policy or not is another question.

For his accomplishments, for better or worse, West Virginia Joe is the Manchin of the year for 2021.

So the first year with Biden is done.

I can’t say it’s always been fun.

Expectations were high,

But it ends with a sigh.

Will Year 2 look a lot like Year 1?

As I noted in a previous post, there are three different ideal types of reactionary: religious reactionaries, who are primarily concerned with what they view as America’s moral decline; racists; and economic reactionaries, who have lost status (largely to women) as a result of the shift to a knowledge-based economy. Where does Trump stand with each of these groups?

Given his conspicuous moral failings, Trump is viewed as being a necessary evil at best by the religious crowd. With the racists, given his passion for stopping illegal immigration, his position is ironclad. With the economic reactionaries, the situation is mixed. On the one hand, his swagger, misogyny, and enthusiasm for protecting jobs typically associated with men (e.g., miner; steelworker) play well with this group; on the other hand, his privileged background and his support of anti-worker policies do not.

Can any of these voters be peeled away from him in either a primary or a general election? An openly devout, but equally pugnacious candidate would certainly win voters in a Republican primary. A swaggering economic populist would also have a chance with white workers in either a primary or a general election. It would be rough sledding, though. Nobody has ever spent more energy pandering to reactionaries than Trump. It’s all he knows how to do.

I have always believed that Netanyahu’s ultimate goal was to force the United States to cut the grass in Iran, while the Israelis watched and cheered us on. In public, however, he argued that withdrawing from the nuclear agreement and applying “maximum pressure” would force the Iranians to capitulate without a war. Trump bought into this line of thinking, with results that are troublesome for the US, and potentially disastrous for Israel. Today, the Iranians are much closer to building a bomb than ever before, and are showing no inclination to return to the original agreement.

So, what now? Biden wants to keep his focus on containing China, not on entering into a perpetual low-intensity war in the Middle East; in any event, if you accept that an Iranian bomb is an existential threat (an extremely debatable premise), it is to Israel, not to us. The Israelis, for their part, insist that they don’t have the military capability to do the requisite damage to the Iranian nuclear program by themselves. The Bennett government, as a result, is making it pretty clear that, in the face of Iranian intransigence, Biden is morally obligated to become Israel’s yard guy.

My guess is that he will refuse. He may facilitate an Israeli lawn mowing operation by providing them with access to advanced American weapons, however. We’ll see.

Ron DeSantis may well fancy himself as a subtropical Viktor Orban. Based on the characteristics of illiberalism that I have identified previously, how does he stack up?

Pretty well, albeit in a somewhat petty way. Here is the record:

1. STACK THE ELECTORAL DECK IN YOUR FAVOR: The Florida GOP has, of course, pushed the envelope on gerrymandering. In addition, Florida approved legislation making it more difficult for minorities to vote in a myriad of small ways in the last session.
2. STIFLE THE VOICES OF THE LEFT: The best way to prevent the circulation of ideas you don’t like, of course, is to fire people or impose criminal penalties on them for using their First Amendment rights. Here, we have the unconstitutional legislation (enforcement currently enjoined) disregarding the free speech rights of large social media companies (but not Disney), the new rules prohibiting the teaching of what is alleged to be CRT, and the proposed “Stop Woke Act,” which will provide right-wing parents with a civil cause of action against local school boards which permit the teaching of CRT. The last of these was obviously inspired by the Texas abortion vigilante act. Who says Florida has nothing to learn from Texas?
3. LIMIT FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY AND POLITICIZE LAW ENFORCEMENT: Thanks to another piece of GOP legislation, people participating peacefully in a demonstration may now be held criminally liable for the violent acts of others. It has already been made clear that this act will not be used against Cubans rallying against the Cuban regime in Miami; it will be employed purely against left-wing protests.
4. FIGHT THE CULTURE WARS TO KEEP THE BASE HAPPY: The “Stop Woke Act,” again, as well as rules against transgender athletes and, of course, consistent and vehement support for anti-vaxxers. Set the virus free, I say!

Sound familiar? It may be small potatoes, in the big picture, but the trend is painfully clear. Imagine what could be done at the federal level with some imagination.

Ron DeSantis won the 2018 election by an eyelash. He has presided over, shall we say, difficult times in Florida. And yet, he is doing nothing to win over swing voters; like Trump, his entire agenda consists of throwing red meat to the base. In particular, he has openly sided with anti-vaxxers, even though polls indicate their cause is unpopular. Can these tactics possibly make sense?

Yes, for two reasons. First, 2022 is not a presidential election year, so turnout will be relatively low, and base mobilization will be decisive. Anti-vaxxers make up a significant part of the base. Second, dead people can’t vote. Living anti-vaxxers appreciate the degree of freedom DeSantis has accorded them, and as for the dead ones, who cares?

If Putin decides to invade, he will face a reasonably competent Ukrainian military, irregular patriotic forces, and some terrorists. The ensuing occupation will not be a picnic. Could it turn into a new Afghanistan?

No, due to geography and topography. Afghanistan has lots of mountains and poor roads; Ukraine is flat. The Taliban could use Pakistan as a refuge; there is no such refuge for a Ukrainian resistance force. Afghanistan was remote from Russia; Ukraine is next door, and its culture is easy to understand. As a result, the war and the occupation would resemble a much larger version of Chechnya, not the Soviet and American failures in Afghanistan.

Which tells you why the Russians should be concerned. Terrorist strikes within the Russian heartland will be a huge problem for Putin, and leaving Ukraine as a cinder won’t exactly do wonders for the Russian economy. The Pottery Barn rule applies here for the Russians, just as it did for America in Iraq.

If you’re a reactionary, you have probably spent a good chunk of your life screaming about the size of the federal government and making a case for states’ rights. But now that you have used base mobilization, gerrymandering, and the Electoral College to win power in Washington, you are going to find that kind of rhetoric embarrassing, because the locus of opposition to your regime is in the blue states, which represent more than half of the national population and wealth. How can you effectively force them to become red states without looking like a complete hypocrite?

The best way would be to manufacture some sort of “emergency” that you can use as a pretext to send in troops to serve as an occupation force. If you don’t have the nerve to do that, you will have to rely on legislative carrots and sticks to persuade the blue state electorate to give up their liberal ideas. The limitation on the SALT deduction in the Trump tax cut can serve as a template for you. Draconian restrictions on voting would also help.

It will be a long, grinding process, but if you can manipulate the system to stay in power for a decade or so, it could be done.

The British ran Hong Kong as a colony, not a democracy; the residents had relatively few political rights. That said, the people of Hong Kong had what are sometimes called bourgeois freedoms: free speech and access to information; the right of assembly and religion; a clean and apolitical civil service; and a fair and transparent criminal justice system. There was nothing arbitrary about government in Hong Kong. The city prospered as a result.

Most of the political battles in Hong Kong over the last decade have been over democracy. That war is now over; the remaining question is the extent to which liberalism will be extinguished, as well. Freedom of speech and assembly have been rolled back. The press has been muzzled. The last two frontiers are the independence and transparency of the judicial system and the availability of anti-government information on the internet. In all likelihood, those will be gone, too, and government in Hong Kong will be the same black box that it is on the mainland.

Then, the big question is whether we will meet the same fate under reactionary GOP rule. We know the Republican Party wants to rig the rules of the political game in its favor; the ultimate objective, as in Hong Kong (and Hungary), is to prevent the circulation of ideas reactionaries view as harmful.

If I may return to the Burke quote that I discussed in my last post, his meaning was that the living have an obligation to carry forward the legacy of the dead, and to avoid making things worse for the following generation. If that is the yardstick, what is the Boomer record?

Ours was a revolutionary, individualistic generation. We broke a lot of barriers, created some great popular art, and made things better for groups of previously powerless people. We didn’t start any world wars. Thanks mostly to the Chinese, we lifted billions of people out of poverty. And yet, I fear that the biggest part of our legacy will be our failure to deal effectively with climate change. We are leaving an imperiled planet to our successors for no reason other than our short-term material self-interest. That won’t look too good in the history books.

I discovered for this first time this morning that my last remaining great aunt had died in October. The news hit me pretty hard.

You might ask whether it was a good idea to be looking for obituaries on the internet on Christmas Day. The answer is yes, because after you become an adult, the holiday is as much about the people who aren’t here, and are missed, as it is about the ones who are physically present.

Burke famously said that society was a contract between the dead, the living, and those who are yet to be born. At this time of year, it becomes painfully obvious he was right. You can’t run from it, so you might as well embrace it.

We have a large inflatable Rudolph in our front yard. We also have a wreath on our door, colored lights in our bushes, and a projector showing Christmas images on our garage door. Inside, we have a small tree and several other decorations. But for all that, we are waging a war on Christmas. Why?

Because Fox News says so, of course! All blue people–not true Americans–think the same twisted way and are consequently responsible for the war. Just as Joe Biden is in the same category as the ultra-woke activists on Twitter, so we must be doing battle with the red Americans who are properly celebrating the holiday. For now, they are imperiled and in decline, but they will rise again, and Christmas will return in its full glory! Just you wait and see!

All I can say is, if we are at war with Christmas, then Christmas is kicking our butts, as usual. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Merry Christmas!

Mitch McConnell thinks the politically constipated America that he did so much to create works just fine, thank you. He’s not a counterrevolutionary. From his perspective, there is no point in blowing up a system that is stacked in his favor.

His anger at the events of January 6 was clearly genuine. But what if Trump gets the GOP nomination in 2024? Is he going to fight back? Will he stand up for liberal democracy in America, regardless of the personal cost?

Of course not! McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, and all of the rest of them will just sit back and watch the destruction of our system. They won’t do a damn thing to stop it, because they won’t be willing to anger the base or put business tax cuts at risk.

We’re living in the Indian summer of liberal democracy in America, my friends. Enjoy it while it lasts. Carpe diem.

The interests and values of the new government are broadly aligned with Biden’s, so relations between the two countries should be relatively smooth. But what happens if Trump runs and wins in 2024? Will the EU and NATO survive?

The only logical basis for a Trump candidacy at this point is to turn him into a human tornado, destroying most of what lies in his path. That’s what he wants, and what his base is begging him to do. It’s hard to see any future for NATO under those circumstances, and the EU will come under plenty of stress, too.