Month: May 2023

One of the best scenes in the first season of “The Crown” is a flashback to the coronation of George VI. In this scene, the new king is rehearsing for the ceremony with the assistance of little Elizabeth. There are about three ideas running through his head at the same time, and you can see all of them on his face. It’s great acting, and it shouldn’t be missed.

I had some of the same thoughts watching the coronation yesterday morning. On the one hand, any ceremony that reminds us that we are just the latest links in a very long chain is, in my view, a good thing. On the other hand, the fundamental premises behind the ceremony are long gone. Nobody believes in any of it anymore. So what’s the point?

The TV commentators clearly believed it will go on forever. Personally, I’m not so sure. There are advantages to a monarchy, but anachronistic mumbo-jumbo isn’t necessarily one of them.

Chris Christie clearly wants to run for president, but he’s not sure he has a path to the nomination. I think he can win if he does the following:

1. Focus your attention on the mainstream, not the reactionary base. You can’t win them in a primary, anyway. They already belong to Trump, but he can’t prevail just as the leader of the reactionaries unless the 70 percent is split. Right now, no other candidate is competing for those votes, so they are yours for the taking.
2. Position yourself as the heir to Reagan, not Trump.
3. Attack Trump aggressively for his election denialism, his relationship with Putin, his willingness to dismantle NATO, and his criminal problems. Argue forcefully that Trump is a proven loser, and that the party needs to go in a very different direction.
4. If you win the nomination, you will need the votes of the 30 percent in the general election. You can get them if you look like a fighter for them against left-wing values. Given your personality, that shouldn’t be a problem.
5. Emphasize your ability to win in a blue state. None of the other candidates has that in his resume.

Here’s my theory:

1. Since the right is impervious to woke criticism, as a practical matter, its impacts are felt most strongly by members of the center-left, who are in the most danger of being cancelled by other members of the left.
2. Notwithstanding #1, it is the right that is enlisting the assistance of state governments to stifle wokeness.
3. The woke left is starting to realize that it needs the help of the center-left to fight the new anti-wokeness legislation.
4. Therefore, we should be seeing less strident woke criticism, and fewer cancellations, in the foreseeable future.

Convinced?

I’m sure you’re going to hear the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment language about the debt was only intended to deal with a single specific potential problem arising from the Civil War. Since the GOP clearly and completely identifies itself with the Confederacy (I’m looking at a house where both the US and Confederate flags are flying as I write this), that line of reasoning shouldn’t persuade you even if the legislative history supports it, which may or may not be the case.

So how does the debt ceiling crisis end? Let’s look at the priorities of the individuals involved for some clues.

Kevin McCarthy’s objectives are, in order of priority:

1. Keeping his job as Speaker;
2. Winning the 2024 election; and
3. Protecting the interests of the GOP donor class.

Biden’s objectives are, in order:

1. Preventing an economic crisis;
2. Getting re-elected;
3. Putting an end, once and for all, to this kind of hostage taking; and
4. Splitting the GOP.

The average GOP House member from a Biden district–the person most likely to break the deadlock–wants the following:

1. To prevent an economic crisis;
2. To put himself in position to win the general election in 2024;
3. To avoid a primary with a MAGA Republican; and
4. To keep his wealthy donors happy.

When you combine these lists, what do you get? First, Biden can’t make a deal with McCarthy, because the latter’s primary objective is to keep his job, which will be endangered if he concedes anything from his party’s wish list. Second, the GOP member wants to make a deal with Biden, but he won’t just roll over and vote for a clean debt ceiling increase; he has to have something that looks meaningful in return in order to avoid a primary. Biden consequently only has two realistic alternatives: he can either offer a compromise package that will look reasonable to moderate GOP voters without turning off the blue base; or he can use one of the unilateral methods to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether. There are no other plausible options here; expecting the GOP to break under pressure is unrealistic.

If Biden does, in fact, invoke the Fourteenth Amendment and continue to pay our debts, the Republicans will be screaming, and some of them will want to sue. Their initial problem will be finding a plaintiff with standing. What American suffers a concrete injury as a result of the payment of lawful debts?

The big losers from the end of the debt crisis would be Xi and Putin. Maybe Ken Paxton can persuade Putin to move to Amarillo to become a plaintiff in his case.

According to the NYT, Biden is starting to take a hard look at invoking the Fourteenth Amendment if no agreement can be reached on the debt ceiling. I don’t know if he’s serious about this or not, since he dismissed it before, but he is wise to put it out there now as a viable alternative. It sends the message to McCarthy and even the GOP crazoids that, if they demand too much, they won’t get anything.

Republicans aren’t the only people in DC who understand leverage.

If Trump is elected president in 2024, there is every reason to believe he will hand Ukraine over to Putin and destroy NATO as we have known it. A slim majority of Republican leaders will be appalled by this but will do nothing meaningful to stop it; after all, Trump is one of them, and they voted for him. The remainder will celebrate. In their eyes, Putin is their friend in the universal war against wokeness, and a potential ally against China if only he can be appeased.

For reasons I described in earlier posts, this line of reasoning is dangerously wrong. The GOP mainstream needs to assert itself in the campaign and nominate a candidate who won’t undo Biden’s diplomatic successes relative to the Axis of Autocracy. Otherwise, Amerlca will find itself dangerously isolated in its dealings with both revanchist powers.

Adherence to traditional cultural and moral values is an important part of any conservative party’s identity almost by definition. It would be unreasonable, therefore, to expect the GOP to go soft on wokeness. That does not, however, mean that the party’s current stance on culture wars is acceptable.

Today’s Republicans don’t just put their cultural ideas front and center; they demonize anyone who doesn’t agree them. They identify the left as an existential threat that needs to be completely crushed, by illiberal means if necessary. They even embrace ruthless, despotic foreign leaders who despise liberal democracy as long as they position themselves as allies in the supposed universal war on wokeness.

That has to stop. Period.

As we know only too well, Donald Trump is a prodigious hater. He hates the people who denied him the respect he deserved when he was growing up. He hates people who are disloyal to him. He hates people who get in his way. He hates people who aren’t “real Americans,” as the right defines that term. That’s what makes him an identity politician, not an ideologue.

Ron DeSantis is different; he hates wokeness (whatever that means on any given day), not particular kinds of people. If you’re not woke, you’re OK with him, regardless of your ethnicity or religious beliefs. If you’re woke, you’re in trouble.

It’s the classic Christian formula: love the sinner, but hate the sin.

Paul Krugman used to say that while the Democrats were ambivalent about immigration, the Republicans were schizophrenic. Put in my terms, he meant that the PBPs see immigrants as a needed boost to the workforce, while the Reactionaries loathe them for both economic and cultural reasons. Since the Reactionaries currently call the shots in the GOP on every issue except taxes, their position is the default within the party–hence, the ultimate failure of the immigration legislation during the Obama years.

The economic case for increased immigration under present conditions is clear and overwhelming. Even a reasonable Reactionary would see some benefit in, among other things, providing more child and health care workers and shoring up Social Security. Is that likely to change their position? Do they really want white Christian American farmers, just to name one group, to struggle getting workers the way British farmers do after Brexit?

Alas, the answers to those questions are no and yes, respectively. The GOP will only become reasonable on immigration if its extreme right wing is crushed in an election.

On the crisis that looms over debt.

The date for default has been set.

Biden says he won’t deal

But the right thinks he’ll yield.

So who will blink first? Place your bets.

He didn’t get the respect to which he thought he was entitled as he was growing up. An outsider by anyone’s standards, he was–unjustly, in his eyes–accused of serious ethical violations in the process of seeking office. As a result, he was angry at the liberal establishment, and wanted revenge. He made it clear that he had no interest in keeping the mainstream happy and would pursue a personal reactionary agenda in office. If the left didn’t like it, so much the better; in the end, there wasn’t much they could do about it.

Is it Trump or Clarence Thomas? You decide.

There are three trains of thought on climate change within the GOP. They are as follows:

1. The most extreme faction, led by Donald Trump, dismisses climate change as a hoax and doubles down on the use of fossil fuels;
2. A slightly more moderate group accepts the reality of climate change in an effort to appear sane to swing voters, but insists that any effort to address it would destroy the American economy. This group consequently views tens of billions of dollars in economic losses and hundreds of deaths per year as acceptable collateral damage for the privilege of burning fossil fuels. It probably speaks for the majority of voters in today’s GOP.
3. The far left of the GOP (such as it is) accepts climate change and wants to fight it, but summarily rejects any solutions proposed by the Democrats as too radical and burdensome. Lacking any ideas of its own, the most it is willing to do is provide funds for mitigation before disasters, rather than after them.

All of these positions are irresponsible; it is just a question of degree. If the GOP really wants to fight climate change, it should support a carbon tax, which could permit cuts in other taxes and reduce the heavy hand of the federal government in picking winners and losers. It would also permit the government to eliminate some of Biden’s spending on green projects, which would reduce the deficit and make reactionaries happy.

There are a handful of well-known GOP figures who agree with me, but not nearly enough. New taxes are anathema to the mainstream. The likelihood of the GOP turning against fossil fuels in the foreseeable future is close to nil. As a result, we are going to see large scale climate migration and much tougher regulations on both development and behavior in my lifetime.

Pay me now, or pay me later. For the GOP, it’s pay me a lot more later.

David French thinks the case law supports Disney in its battle with Ron DeSantis. He’s a lawyer of some repute, so I respect his opinion on the subject. In addition, he thinks that protecting people and corporations from government retaliation for speech it doesn’t appreciate is an essential part of the First Amendment, and liberal democracy as a whole. In his view, therefore, Disney is fighting for all of us. Is he right?

Yes. The situation in Florida is actually more dire than French makes it out to be. DeSantis argues that he is only trying to take Disney’s unwarranted privileges away, but the record shows that his objective is really to force critics of the right to shut up, regardless of whether they have any special privileges. From “Don’t Say Gay” to “Stop Woke” to changing defamation law to forcing politics bloggers to register to preventing professors from testifying to denying liberal teachers tenure to criminalizing peaceful behavior at violent demonstrations to book bans, DeSantis and his Florida GOP acolytes are determined to stifle dissent in their state. Disney is the tip of the iceberg, but you have to start somewhere.