Month: June 2023

Like me, The Economist believes the Iranian theocracy may not survive the death of the current Supreme Leader. A recent article suggests that the new government would be controlled by the Revolutionary Guards; in a gesture intended to mollify public opinion, it would be less rigid on issues such as the hijab than the theocracy. Is that a reasonable prediction?

Only in the short run. A government run by and for the Revolutionary Guards would have no legitimacy in anyone’s eyes, as it would be operated and justified solely by force. I suspect one of two things would happen; either the theocracy would be maintained on paper to preserve the fiction that the government is mandated by God, or the new dictatorship would crumble at the first sign of adversity, to be replaced, in all likelihood, by something more democratic.

I’ve never interviewed Ron DeSantis, and it is highly unlikely that I ever will. If I did, however, it would go something like this:

C: I want to make it clear before we start this conversation that while I’m not woke, and I don’t work for the MSM, I don’t agree with most of what you say about wokeness or anything else. I’m not really here to argue with you, however. I want to help define what it is you believe in, and let the American people decide for themselves.

D: OK.

C: In our first conversation, I will be focusing on what wokeness is and how it operates. In subsequent discussions, I will ask questions about what you propose to do about wokeness at the federal level, and about mostly unrelated foreign policy and domestic issues.

D: Fine.

C: We’ll start with the obvious question. Donald Trump says most people don’t know what wokeness means. How do you define it?

D: Wokeness is a series of pernicious ideas held by the left that falsely identify straight white American Christians as bad people who should be forced to give up their freedom.

C: You sometimes call wokeness “cultural Marxism.” I think you would agree that nothing in your definition has anything to do with economic determinism, the class struggle, or dialectical materialism. Why do you continue to compare it to Marxism?

D: Marxism holds that groups of people are bound by history to fight each other, and that a government takeover by the largest group is necessary to prevent oppression. In Marxism, the groups are classes; in wokeness, they’re racial and gender groups. It’s basically the same thing.

C: Even though woke people don’t argue that straight white Christians are bound by some sort of natural law to be oppressors?

D: Yes. It’s the focus on groups fighting each other that matters. It prevents us from seeing all Americans as being Americans, period.

C: Is wokeness primarily a public or private sector phenomenon?

D: The ideas usually come from the private sector. The government abets them and sometimes enforces them.

C: Is Joe Biden woke?

D: Half the time, he isn’t even awake. So, no. But he runs a government that is avoiding its obligation to tear out wokeness by the roots, so he’s responsible for it. He’s in the way. He has to go.

C: You sound like a Jesuit doing battle in the Counter-Reformation.

D: Well, I am Catholic.

C: In keeping with that theme, is wokeness a kind of heresy?

D: It’s a national spiritual sickness. The country can’t be great again until it has been eliminated.

C: Do you hate woke people? By your definition, there are millions of them in this country. A lot of them vote.

D: I hate wokeness, not people. You know–love the sinner, hate the sin. The government needs to do everything in its power to eliminate the sin. Then we can move forward as a single healthy nation again.

C: Would you burn woke people at the stake?

D: We don’t have to go that far, but wokeness requires strong medicine. We need to make the consequences of being woke clear. First, we have to shut woke people up. Then we need to punish them by using the criminal law where possible, and by making them lose their jobs and their families. That will turn them around. You’ll see.

C: I’ll get back to that in our next conversation. Let me throw out some analysis for your reaction. I have identified four different threads of wokeness in my writings. I want you to react to the classification system.

D: Shoot.

C: First, there’s racial wokeness. According to you, I think, racial wokeness revolves around the notion of systemic racism. You would argue that it doesn’t exist, and that anyone who says it does is the real racist. You would say that the law should be completely color-blind, and that no one is entitled to any kind of government privilege.

D: That’s right.

C: Second, there’s gender wokeness. You support traditional values relating to sex and gender. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a pervert or a groomer.

D: I have religious texts and thousands of years of history on my side. The idea that people are naturally non-binary is disgusting to me and to most Americans. The recent increase in the number of queer and trans people is proof that the government needs to step in to avoid contagion.

C: Third, there’s climate wokeness. Climate change is just a hook the left uses to increase the size of government and reduce the freedom of white Christians to drive cars and eat meat. It is a form of left-wing oppression directed by the self-serving elite.

D: That sounds about right.

C: Finally, there’s public health wokeness. This involves the medical elite creating mandates based on poor science to restrict the freedom of real Americans. Americans should be free to decide how they want to deal with medical problems. If that means relying on the internet rather than so-called experts, so be it.

D: Public health was kind of my gateway to the whole concept of wokeness. I didn’t truly realize how evil the elites were until they started criticizing my treatment of the pandemic. Everything fell into place after that.

C: But you’ll agree that mask and vaccine mandates don’t really sound like a form of Marxism, so that part of your definition doesn’t work.

D: It’s not a form of identity determinism, but it does involve government oppression. That’s part of Marxism, too.

C: Would you agree that you didn’t really say anything about wokeness during the first few years of your term in office?

D: Yes. As I said, it was the pandemic that opened my eyes. I didn’t really understand the vast scope of the problem until then.

C: This sounds like a good place to stop. Next time, I will be asking you about how you plan to use the federal government to eliminate the four threads.

As I have noted before, World War I did not start as an imperialist war; the territorial demands only came afterwards, when all of the participants insisted they were entitled to compensation to justify all the suffering they had endured. In the end, the Allies fought on to more or less total victory. In exchange for that, they ultimately got Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. We would never have heard of any of those people if the parties had negotiated a peace treaty on the basis of the status quo ante in 1916.

Keep that in mind when pundits tell you there is no acceptable alternative to a complete victory for Ukraine.

Don’t bet on it. Consider this scenario–it’s late 2024, an election is looming, and the Tories are way behind in the polls. Plodding competence simply isn’t impressing the voters. Why not call on the magic man–the guy who won the crushing victory last time? The base still loves him, after all. All is forgiven.

I’m sure that’s what Boris is hoping for, anyway.

Citing polls showing GOP positions on trans people and parental rights are popular (he doesn’t discuss abortion or gay marriage), Rich Lowry says Ron DeSantis is wise to lean into the culture wars. He is concerned, however, that DeSantis hasn’t tied his opposition to wokeness to a more general narrative in which Americans are better off. Is he right, for once?

In a limited sense, yes, but he has missed the larger point, which is that the entire GOP doesn’t have an agenda to improve the lives of most Americans. It isn’t just DeSantis. The GOP wants to cut taxes for wealthy businessmen and make the lives of the poor and woke as miserable as possible. That’s it. That’s all they have to offer. For example, they don’t have any plans to increase growth in struggling red states, other than a patently counterproductive proposal to reduce the production and use of clean energy, because Republicans are all about reducing the power of government, except to punish their enemies.

In other words, the GOP’s vision of America is limited to owning the libs. It should be fascinating to hear what the presidential candidates have to say during the debates when they are asked specific questions about their nonexistent policy ideas. It will be the exact opposite of talking to Elizabeth Warren about her innumerable plans.

If you ask the average GOP voter what issues concern him the most, you are likely to hear the following list of grievances:

1. Inflation is way too high.
2. The deficit is out of control.
3. The border is a sieve.
4. Deserving white Christian men in rural areas have been left behind by the arrogant coastal elites. They need help.

So, what is the House GOP proposing to solve these problems? Why, a tax cut, of course, which will make the first two worse and deprive the government of resources to address the last two.

It’s Republican logic at its finest.

All of the direct participants in the PGA-LIV deal were winners. The Saudis leveraged their investment in a tour that was costing them hundreds of millions of dollars into partial control of the real tours. The LIV players will get to keep their money and return to the real tours. The disgruntled PGA players will be compensated with bigger purses and equity stakes in the new business. Rabid fans will be happy to see all of the best players under a single tent again. It’s a great deal, no?

Not for Greg Norman, who will be out of a job. More importantly, the average American fan will be turned off by golf’s new association with Saudi money and politics. The estrangement will be particularly noticeable if any elements of the worthless LIV tour are incorporated into PGA events, and if the Saudis nudge tour events on to Trump courses. If either of these things happens, the PGA has lost me as a fan forever.

Louis apparently never said “L’etat, c’est moi,” but Trump probably did (in fourth grade English, of course). How else do you explain why the man would put himself in legal peril for such a trivial benefit?

In 1861, a civil war erupted over slavery in America. In 2023, we could start one over boxes of records in a bathroom.

Will we have riots in Miami, or will the threats of violence turn out to be empty noise, as usual? We’ll see.

The American right claims to have a monopoly on patriotism. It celebrates the accomplishments and culture of rural white Christians. They’re what America is all about–the default, if you like.

But that is only a part of America. The dynamic, productive part is in the cities and, to some extent, the suburbs. It is ethnically diverse, increasingly female, and secular. It provides the impetus for wokeness, for better and for worse.

The reactionary base wants the second part of America to bend the knee to it. It fights for political power in order to oppress everyone who doesn’t agree with its values. It hates the idea of a diverse, changing America. It denies we are Americans at all. It wants us gone.

Even Xi probably wouldn’t go that far.

Many of the targets in the war on wokeness are in the private sector, not the government. DeSantis and his fans are particularly exasperated by “woke capital”: corporations that use their economic power to achieve left-leaning social and environmental goals. DeSantis wants to ban this kind of behavior. But how?

Creating an objective standard for intangible corporate values is not really possible. Furthermore, for corporations–particularly insurance companies–to ignore the future impacts of climate change on their bottom line would be suicidal. It isn’t going to happen.

In all likelihood, the war on woke capital would consist of a few highly publicized attacks by Congress, the IRS, and various regulatory agencies on companies that make their opposition to the DeSantis agenda too visible. In other words, expect dozens of Disneys if DeSantis gets elected.

Wokeness may be dead in Florida, but it is very much alive on Twitter. DeSantis will undoubtedly use his influence with his new pal, Elon Musk, to put an end to it. Will he succeed?

No, for three reasons. First of all, Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist;” running off the far left would be an act of extreme hypocrisy. Second, it would cost him money. Third, he enjoys being a troll; how can he own the libs if they can’t say anything worth demolishing?

The bottom line here is that, barring the assumption of vast emergency powers (an outcome that is far from impossible), it will be very difficult for a President DeSantis to shut the left up once and for all.

I fully expect Trump to be convicted of the new federal charges. His principal defenses–that Biden did the same thing, and that the offenses are trivial–may work in the court of public opinion, but not in a real courtroom. It is pretty clear from news reports that Smith has amassed plenty of evidence to rebut Trump’s only legal defense, which relates to intent. He’s going to go down.

But what does it matter? The pending criminal case won’t stop him from campaigning. The base will take this as even more proof that he is the victim of a corrupt establishment no matter what the record shows and a jury says. He’ll just pardon himself if he wins the election, and the DOJ will stand by him once he is in office. The only way he spends any time in jail is if he loses, in which case he will just be a pathetic old has-been, anyway. So what is the practical point of the indictment?

Smith is making a powerful conceptual argument in favor of the rule of law. He is absolutely right to do so. It just won’t work in the real world.

Like most Americans, I suspect, I do not view LGBTQ people as being “normal,” but I have no wish to oppress them, either. The leadership of the GOP does not agree with me. The recent wave of anti-LGBTQ statutes in red state legislatures is proof of that.

Part of the motivation behind these new laws is a desire to appease the reactionary base with red meat. But what is the greater objective? Given that being LGBTQ is rarely, if ever, a matter of choice, what is the right actually trying to accomplish here?

In the case of gays and lesbians, I think the idea is to force them back into the closet. That way, real Americans won’t have to be offended by their appearance and behavior, and the alleged danger of “contagion” will be minimized. If you accept the legitimacy of the objective, this makes sense. But what about trans people? How can you put a trans person back in the closet?

You can’t. Furthermore, the handful of trans people in this country don’t represent a threat to anyone but themselves. There is no evidence to prove otherwise. The new legislation is oppression for its own sake.

It seems pretty clear that there is a strong correlation between positive portrayals of LGBTQ people on TV and in movies and public acceptance of LGBTQ rights. It is also clear that black people are showing up in much larger numbers in TV commercials and programs, probably for the same reason. DeSantis and his followers undoubtedly view this as an impermissible form of affirmative action, driven by “woke capital,” that is an affront to “real America” and should be stopped. But what can they do about it?

It isn’t practically possible for DeSantis to regulate everyone with a camera. And while he might well privately support a system requiring set percentages of black and LGBTQ people to be portrayed as gang members and “groomers,” respectively, it is hard to imagine how he could get away with that, even in today’s world. The First Amendment still counts for something, so this is a battle that DeSantis cannot win.

Viktor Orban used his very extensive financial and legal powers to force the sale of the principal Hungarian media outlets to his political allies, thus effectively stifling dissent in his country. We know from “The Divider” that Trump tried to compel the sale of CNN to Rupert Murdoch. Would a President DeSantis try something similar, but on a larger scale?

There is no reason to doubt it. It would be far more difficult to put all of the MSM in the hands of the right in America than in Hungary, since our most important MSM don’t require discretionary federal licenses or feed off government contracts, and it would be hard to find someone rich enough to buy out Jeff Bezos. DeSantis would do his best, however. It is his MO.