Month: February 2022

We don’t have a flagpole in our yard. If we did, I would fly a Ukrainian flag with “Let’s Go Putin!” superimposed on it and see what the neighbors think.

As you can see, I’m unusually invested in the Ukrainian resistance. Part of this, of course, is support for an underdog and contempt for Putin and his imperialism. Honesty compels me to note, however, that part of it is tied to Trump; Putin and his war are a proxy for the illiberalism of the man on golf cart.

It isn’t just because Putin did his best to get Trump elected. It isn’t even because Trump sucks up to Putin at every opportunity. No, it is because it is becoming obvious that Trump and his reactionary friends view Putin’s Russia as a role model for our political system. Constant lies, attacks on the press, contempt for liberal democratic norms, whining aggression, toxic masculinity, attempts to rig the system, scapegoating outsiders–it’s all there.

And the new right thinks that’s ok, as long as he says he hates immigrants, gays, and trans people. What a great bargain!

TRUMPISTS

Last night I saw Donald Trump on a TV show

With some smartass New York Jew.

And the Jew laughed at Mr. Trump.

The audience laughed at him too.

Well, he may be a crook, but he’s our crook.

If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong.

So I went to the park and I took some paper along

And that’s where I made this song.

_____________

We talk real funny out here.

We pray too much; we watch Fox News.

We’re too dumb to make it in no blue state town.

But we’re keeping the liberals down.

______________

We’re Trumpists.

We’re Trumpists.

And we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.

We’re Trumpists.

We’re Trumpists.

And we’re keeping the liberals down.

________________

We got no neck oilmen from Texas.

White Christian people from Tennessee.

Tattooed truckers from everywhere.

They’re just fighting for what they think is fair.

Call them fascists; they don’t care.

They carry weapons, so they’re not scared.

And they’re keeping the liberals down.

______________

We’re Trumpists.

We’re Trumpists.

And we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.

We’re Trumpists.

We’re Trumpists.

And we’re keeping the liberals down.

_______________

Parody of “Rednecks” by Randy Newman. The song is about fifty years old, but it’s still relevant, even though the target has changed a bit with time.

When Biden was putting his cabinet together, I opined that making it “look like America” was largely a waste of time, because the vast majority of Americans don’t even know who the Secretary of Labor is, much less look up to him. Does that reasoning prevail with Supreme Court nominees?

No. Picking the first member of a large, previously unrepresented group for a position of great visibility and power matters. The Supreme Court, like the Vice President, is important. It was consequently appropriate for Biden both to make the promise to appoint a black woman and to keep that promise.

Will the GOP senators call her a nasty girl? Some will; some won’t. What we know is that there is strong feeling within the party that she is an affirmative action baby who wouldn’t have been on the short list but for Biden’s highly inappropriate commitment to appoint a black woman to the Court.

Is that fair? No, for three reasons:

1. Opinion within the GOP suggests that there is some sort of exam, or game of Legal Jeopardy, which creates a clear and lengthy hierarchy for the purpose of selecting judges. That is not the case; there are literally thousands of people who are qualified for the job (even, arguably, me). Biden was obligated to start with a reasonably large pool of qualified applicants, and to pick someone from it. He did. There is no list with an old white dude with a Harvard Law degree at the top.
2. Given that the Supreme Court is increasingly acting as the nation’s final arbiter of racial and culture war issues, rather than a group of dry technicians reviewing tax statutes, it makes perfect sense to try to make it look like America–not just a bunch of conservative white Catholics.
3. The GOP, of course, engages in its own identity politics when it gets to choose a new justice. That is exactly why the Court in no way represents the views of America as a whole–just, in the party’s view, the “real America” of wealthy white Christians.

Does the selection of a black female justice make enough of a difference in the eyes of the affected group to justify limiting the field so significantly? I will address that question in my next post.

By 2030, Europe had changed beyond recognition. NATO and the EU had disappeared, and Putin was the most powerful figure on the continent. How did it happen?

It started with the Trump victory in 2024. No longer subject to any kind of restraints, he immediately pulled the US out of NATO. With America out of the picture, Putin then attacked the Baltic states. The rump of NATO saw that it was outgunned, believed it had no vital interests in the Baltics, and refused to intervene. The former Warsaw Pact countries got the message, and NATO came to an end.

In the meantime, Putin’s allies won the elections in France and Italy. Along with his illiberal friends in Poland and Hungary, they paralyzed the EU to the point that it could no longer function. It collapsed, as well.

The Germans had a choice–rebuild their army and invest in nuclear weapons, or reach a deal with Putin. Lacking the will to spend the money necessary to create a proper deterrent, they made the deal. Putin promised to put them under his nuclear umbrella and intercede on their behalf with the Chinese in exchange for neutrality and some measure of economic aid. It was an offer they could accept.

Europe today is a highly protectionist continent, run in the interests of Russia against the United States. The American “new right” sees this as cause for celebration. “America First” means an American sphere of influence in the New World, and no commitments anywhere else. Trump’s government is now free to do what it really wants to do–make life as miserable as possible for immigrants, seculars, left-leaning women, the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities at home.

UPDATE: The Ukraine invasion isn’t helping him accomplish any of this. It’s completely counterproductive.

Putin probably thought this would be easy. A small blast of shock and awe, and the Ukrainians would give up. After all, they’re Russia’s little brothers, aren’t they? NATO would respond with its usual fecklessness and division. It would be all over in a few days.

He should have known better. Russia is now faced with Hungary in 1956, except that the Ukrainians have an army and more effective help from NATO. There will be heavy fighting in the streets, and thousands of casualties. Putin is at war with an entire nation, even if he doesn’t recognize Ukraine as one. What does he do now?

He will double down. At home, he will dive into his reserves to mitigate the impacts of the sanctions, while cutting off the internet and arresting the usual suspects. Unfortunately for him, the impacts of the sanctions will be felt immediately, while the mitigation will take time. In Ukraine, he will be forced by his military leaders to escalate in order to protect his troops. There will be massive destruction of residential areas in the cities. The optics will be terrible, and his friends in Europe will be running for cover.

It will be a public relations disaster for his Chinese enablers, too. This is the logical end of wolf warrior diplomacy.

After Putin finishes inhaling Ukraine, the question has to be asked: will he turn his attention to the Baltic states? After all, they were part of both the USSR and the First Russian Empire.

The risk/reward calculus would be totally different. On the plus side: the Baltics are much smaller, and can’t put up much of a fight by themselves; Putin can argue with something of a straight face that intervention is necessary to protect a fairly large Russian minority from persecution; and if NATO chose not to resist, it could mean the end of the alliance. On the down side, the Baltics don’t offer much that he wants, the Grand Duke Vladimir didn’t hang out there, and a full scale war with NATO could result in the total destruction of his regime.

It would be a huge gamble. I don’t think he would do it. But then, Putin seems to have discovered a taste for gambling in his old age, so who knows?

What does Putin do if he captures Zelensky? Have him shot on the spot? Throw him in an old KGB dungeon? Poison him with novichok? Put him on trial? Force him to sign an agreement giving Ukraine to Russia?

There are no options here that won’t outrage the world. Putin would probably be better off if he just lets the guy go into exile.

The standard 18th century formula used by liberals to describe the purposes of government was to protect “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson used the broader term “pursuit of happiness” instead of “property.” What did he mean by that?

I think he was referring to two related concepts. The first was economic freedom; one had the natural right to pursue any calling and to accumulate and dispose of property without facing any arbitrary interference from the government. The second pertained more to what we call First Amendment freedoms– to educate yourself, speak freely, assemble with others, and participate in political life. These concepts went beyond protecting “property” to reject vestiges of feudalism found in most European countries in 1776 and to promote the realization of individual potential.

Many of our political debates have revolved around the meaning of Jefferson’s words. To a CL, the government’s obligation is solely to avoid creating legal obstacles to business and personal growth; to a modern liberal, government has a positive responsibility to remove practical obstacles that already exist as a result of economic and social inequality. Where CLs and liberals agree, however, is on the emphasis on individual growth and rights; socialists and the “new (actually very old) right,” on the other hand, think the unit of measurement should be the health of society as a whole, not the state of each individual.

The Ukraine invasion should be horribly embarrassing for the two far-right French presidential candidates and for Viktor Orban. What will they say? Will they defend the invasion, or will they say that Putin is a changed man, and that they no longer support him, even though they agree with him on immigrants and gay rights? And how will the electorate respond?

This will be interesting, to say the least.

Last April, I posed a question: since Putin could take Ukraine at any time of his choosing, why had he not done so? I listed a number of possible explanations, including lingering doubts about the quality of the Russian military, concerns about sanctions, and the impact on public opinion in America and Europe. In addition, I threw out the possibility that Putin simply didn’t want to embarrass his good buddy Donald Trump while he was in office, and predicted trouble in the future.

Now that the invasion has occurred, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden’s victory in 2020 removed one of the disincentives for war. It is ironic, to say the least, that the presidency of a man who was flamboyantly and obnoxiously pro-Putin, and who famously hated everything associated with Ukraine, might have been Ukraine’s last line of defense.

The two world wars damaged the case for imperialism, so ever since, wars of aggression have typically been sold to the public as wars of liberation. The aggressor isn’t trying to add territory or exploit resources; it is seeking to free the working class, or an oppressed ethnic minority, or the entire country from a tyrannical, unrepresentative government.

But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a blast from the past. He isn’t arguing that the invasion is necessary to protect ethnic Russians from the Ukrainians. He isn’t fighting to restore rights to which Ukrainians have been deprived by the current regime. He wants to extinguish a state that has the support of the vast majority of its citizens and turn those citizens into the subjects of a new Russian Empire because, well, that’s what they were under the later tsars and the Bolsheviks.

In other words, this is a war of imperialism, pure and simple.

If Putin invades and takes Ukraine, he will have to figure out a way to hold it. There are basically two options: annexation and direct rule from Moscow; or the installation of a suitable puppet, presumably backed by opportunistic Ukrainian politicians and civil servants and some elements of the Russian military. Which would he choose?

Putin’s modus operandi has traditionally been to find the most competent thug available, give him the keys, and let him go. I don’t think that will work in Ukraine, given the size of the country and the level of opposition to the invasion. It would also be logically inconsistent to insist that Ukraine is organically part of Russia and then to give it a separate government. I think direct rule is the more likely option.

There was nothing inevitable about the ratification of the Constitution. But for Madison’s takedown of Patrick Henry in Virginia, it might not have happened. Then what?

Here’s what I think happens:

1. There is no single market. Economic growth is consequently much slower.
2. Since there is no Union to preserve, there is no Civil War. That’s the good news. The bad news is that slavery lasts much longer.
3. With no central authority to mediate disputes, rivalries between states, particularly as to the control of lands in the West, become much uglier. European powers are called in as allies in these battles. What became the United States of America would have looked much more like the Holy Roman Empire.

Anyone here signing up to be a subject of the Empire?

Probably inspired by the 1619 Project, there has been a fair amount of commentary about the relationship between the Constitution and slavery over the last few months. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. There was no 18th century equivalent of John Calhoun among the Founding Fathers. No one was making the case that slavery was a positive good. The slaveowner FFs were perfectly aware that they were exposing themselves to a potent charge of hypocrisy. Slavery was defended solely because it was viewed as an economic necessity by the plantation owners.
2. There was a widespread belief, even among slave owners, that slavery might ultimately expire on its own accord at the time the Constitution was written and ratified. That, of course, was before the invention of the cotton gin and the incredible growth of the cotton cloth industry.
3. Without the South, there would have been no United States of America in 1788. Period. The implications of that are mind-boggling.
4. As a result of these facts, the FFs engineered a grubby, short-term compromise in the hope that the problem would disappear of its own accord in the long term. The Constitution neither eliminated slavery nor made its abolition impossible.
5. Realistically speaking, can you blame the FFs? Would we have been better off in the long run without the Union and the Constitution, even with the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction thrown in the middle? Are the FFs to be condemned because they didn’t foresee the invention of the cotton gin and its implications for American politics, and because they weren’t willing to vote for their own economic extinction? Would you have done anything different if you were in the same position? I don’t see it.