Month: December 2023

The dance has already begun. When GOP leaders are asked about Trump’s increasingly unhinged statements, they respond in one of two ways:

1. “Hehe. You know Trump. He’s always saying anything that comes into his head. He doesn’t really mean it. Even if he did, the system has enough checks and balances to keep him from being an authoritarian. Nothing to worry about here.”
2. “So what if Trump sounds like a corrupt authoritarian. WHAT ABOUT HUNTER BIDEN, THE TRUMP PROSECUTIONS, AND THE VACCINE MANDATES???? Biden is just as big a corrupt authoritarian as Trump, and he’s running America into the ground. Trump will save us and make America great again!”

This is complete rubbish, of course. Trump 1.0 was a disaster; Trump 2.0 would be much, much worse. His authoritarian statements should be taken both seriously and literally.

Ron DeSantis took several threads of largely unrelated leftist thought (e.g., support for vaccines and anti-racism), tied them together as a single ideology called “wokeness,” and made opposition to it the centerpiece of his campaign. This approach didn’t resonate with the GOP electorate, which found it confusing and irrelevant to their most pressing concerns. That, along with the Hungarian Candidate’s decision to chase the wrong voters and leave Trump untouched, is the reason the DeSantis campaign is dying today.

Biden wants to make the protection of “democracy” the centerpiece of his campaign, but if he does, he may find that “democracy,”, like “wokeness,” is too abstract for the electorate. He would be wise to make the case more concrete–Trump and the GOP are coming for your rights, including (but not limited to) abortion, Obamacare, freedom of speech and inquiry, and your ability to participate in the political process. That is something the voters will understand.

Many left-leaning commentators have read the latest polls and want Biden to drop out of the race. Does this make sense, in the real world?

Ignore the overwhelming practical problems with starting a campaign from scratch just a few weeks before the primary season begins. The obvious issue here is that all of the plausible Biden alternatives have nothing new to run on. You could attack the man from the left, but promising to run as a pillar of wokeness isn’t going to get you very far, even with the Democratic electorate. Apart from that, there is nothing that Biden has done in office that wouldn’t have been done by any other prominent member of the left. In particular, there are no alternative answers from the left to the issues of the border, crime, and inflation that haven’t already been tried.

In the end, you would have candidates running as younger versions of Biden without embarrassing grifter sons. That doesn’t represent much of a platform or a change from the status quo. You might as well stick with the real deal.

No meaningful opposition to a Trump autocracy can be expected from GOP members of Congress, even though the enhancement of executive powers will be a threat to them, as well. The resistance will come from four sources: the bureaucracy; the judiciary; the blue states; and the MSM. What can be expected from them, and how will Trump respond?

As to bureaucratic efforts to resist unwise or illegal directions, Trump is already prepared to deal with them; he intends to put loyalists in charge of the deep state and will fire anyone who gets in his way. The Supreme Court, which is reactionary but not Trumpist, will be ignored; Trump will simply refuse to comply with court orders that he doesn’t like. The real questions revolve around the blue states and the MSM. Will Trump use the military, through the Insurrection Act, to quash dissent and enforce compliance with his will? And will the military follow orders that are clearly in violation of the Constitution?

Let’s hope we never find out.

Both of them were sent by God to save their followers, and both were crucified by the deep state for it. The difference is that Jesus was only crucified once; Trump goes through it on a daily basis.

The GOP as a whole has no use for democracy, as evidenced by its extreme gerrymandering, contempt for the outcomes of referenda, consistent embrace of positions that poll poorly, and approval of measures making voting more difficult. Trump is an exemplar, not an outlier, within his party on those points. What, then, sets him apart from the rest of the GOP?

Trump’s claim to be fighting to protect the integrity of our 2020 election was pure eyewash; there is plenty of evidence showing that he knew he lost, but he didn’t consider his loss to be legitimate, because as far as he’s concerned, only “real Americans” should have the right to vote, and they overwhelmingly supported him. The fact that many GOP House members voted against certifying the election is strong evidence that a large segment of the party agrees with him. That isn’t the answer to the question.

No, what sets Trump apart is his contempt for liberal norms. He openly talks about firing huge numbers of civil servants and replacing them with MAGA loyalists, directing the DOJ to prosecute his enemies, and using the Insurrection Act to clamp down on political dissent. His enthusiasm for tariffs is largely based on his legal ability to grant exemptions to people who suck up to him. He has said that anything the president does is legal by definition. He is an autocrat; he demands the legal ability to behave arbitrarily and to ignore the constitutional rights of Americans who disagree with him.

That, my friends, is why he is such a threat to our system. He hates both pillars of liberal democracy.

Many commentators, including myself, have argued that Trump represents a clear and present danger to American liberal democracy. What do we mean by that?

Let’s start by defining two concepts that are actually quite different. “Democracy” means the rule of the majority of citizens, however that is ascertained–the devil is in the details. After all, the CCP claims to be “democratic.” The fundamental assumptions behind “democracy” are: that sovereignty rests in the citizenry (not God, a conqueror, or some limited group of people); that the well-being of each citizen is equally important to society, even if every person has different levels of ability; that since every citizen has an equal stake in good government, he has an equal right to participate in that government; and that crowds have more wisdom than any individual.

“Liberalism” evolved in England after the 17th century; it thus long predated “democracy.” “Liberalism” assumes that society is the sum of its individual parts, and that the best way to have a thriving society is to protect the right of each individual to pursue his own development and interests without unnecessary interference from government. “Liberalism” is thus the antithesis of autocracy; it calls for checks and balances within government to prevent any one individual from having arbitrary power, and it protects the individual rights of the governed from the excesses of government. Freedom of speech, association, religion, and the press are highly valued in liberal countries, as are the consistent application of law to all citizens, limits on police behavior, and a depoliticized law enforcement system.

Trump is a threat to both the “liberal” and “democratic” pillars of liberal democracy. I will discuss why in my next post.

She wasn’t just the first female justice of the Supreme Court; she was a genuine conservative (not a reactionary) and a swing vote. Nobody could take her support for granted. Any party who came before her had a reasonable chance, which gave the Supreme Court credibility with both the right and the left.

That’s gone. There are no swing votes on the current Court. The only disputes among the six right-wing justices are about how fast to move the train–not which direction it should go.

Joe Biden has always made it clear that he wanted to grow the economy for the benefit of working people, not the wealthy. His choice of means evolved over time and was tied to the prevailing conditions. Initially, he responded to the pandemic by supporting a substantial expansion of the welfare state. This proved to be only temporary, due to inflation, the end of the pandemic, and the lack of votes for the program in the Senate. The second phase–the current one–focuses on infrastructure improvements and massive subsidies for green manufacturing. The idea behind it, other than mitigating climate change, is to create new, high-paying manufacturing jobs, largely in areas that have been left behind over the past 20 years. Will it work, and will Biden get the credit for it?

The subsidies were the only climate change program available to Biden, and they should help with the environmental problem, but it is questionable whether they will make a dramatic difference to workers in the much larger context of the American economy. Manufacturing simply isn’t as big a part of the economy as it was 50 years ago, and finding enough qualified people to do the new jobs has been a problem. As for the credit part, it clearly isn’t working. Biden just hasn’t shown the ability to sell his programs to the American people, probably at least in part because he has been determined not to dominate the public consciousness the way Trump did.