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Suppose you were trying to design a candidate who would have no chance of beating Donald Trump. How would you do it?

First, you would make sure he had a grim, humorless, off-putting personality. Think Ted Cruz without the charisma, if such a thing is possible.

Second, you would tell him to emulate Cruz by attacking Trump from the right. This is a tried and true way to lose the election. If you really want to stack the deck, you could make sure the Cruz wannabe lane is already occupied by someone–say, a former Vice President.

Third, you would advise him to go after the voters that Trump already has locked up instead of the undecideds. Call it the Sisyphus approach to campaigning.

Fourth, you would make sure he got off to a really bad start in order to make a poor first impression with GOP voters who weren’t familiar with him.

Finally, you would tell him to pull his punches with Trump in order to keep the party united for the general election.

Step right up, Governor DeSantis!

The Florida governor Ron

Said he’d bring the far right a new dawn.

But the right prefers Trump

So his poll numbers slumped

And his chances to win may be gone.

The Democrats have a variety of identities; the party is a coalition of women, minorities, young people, liberals, and some workers. The GOP, on the other hand, is a party of a single identity–old and white. When it wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror, it sees Donald Trump.

This makes it difficult for the younger and more vigorous Ron DeSantis to gain any traction with the electorate; an apparent advantage is really a disadvantage for him. It also means the rest of the candidates in a surprisingly diverse field have very little chance of success.

The Democrats always want their nominee to be JFK or Obama–young, vigorous, articulate, and charismatic. For their part, the GOP thinks every election is a rerun of 1980; their candidate is the always optimistic Ronald Reagan, who believes that cutting government at home and projecting power abroad will lead to an American Renaissance, while the Democrat is the weak, ineffectual Jimmy Carter. How is that working in 2023?

If the Democrat wins, he will be the oldest president in history. The GOP nominee is likely to be an angry man with no respect for constitutional norms who wants to take America back to the past from a grim present by oppressing half the country. In addition, Biden refuses to play the Carter role; inflation is subsiding, and we are more than holding our own in Ukraine.

Is it any wonder nobody is excited about a Biden-Trump rematch?

Biden ran as a relative moderate in the 2020 primaries. As a result of the pandemic, he portrayed himself in the general election as FDR for the 21st century. While he had important legislative successes during the first two years of his term, inflation and the Senate killed his attempts to follow through on his ambitions to replace the dollar store economy with a more worker-friendly version. Today, with a GOP majority in the House, he is by both temperament and necessity a Clinton-like triangulator. So how will he run in 2024–as a moderate with bipartisan support protecting us from a right-wing extremist with no regard for liberal democracy, or as the visionary who wants to finish the job of remaking America?

I think you will see some of both, but the predominant theme will be the first one, because it has a better chance of success with swing voters. This time, he will be more Eisenhower than FDR.

Trump has a cult of personality, so why doesn’t DeSantis? The answer is simple: you can’t have one if you don’t have one.

David French knows that we see the anger and hatred at MAGA rallies, but he wants us to know that the participants are having a really good time and bonding together. He thinks the joy at a Trump event sets the man on golf cart apart from DeSantis. Is he right?

Quite possibly. It all goes back to my previous post about how the GOP has to choose between a cult leader and a guy who has nothing to offer America except punishment for the left. Right now, Jesus is beating Torquemada like a drum.

Americans in search of cheap land illegally immigrated to Mexican Texas, rebelled against the government, declared independence, and won. Lacking the men and resources to protect themselves against the Indians and Mexicans, they then asked to be annexed in the US, and got what they wanted. The American government then provoked a war with Mexico over the location of the new border, won it, and gained control of several states, including California, in the process. Would any of this have happened if the Revolution had failed?

The illegal immigration part was inevitable, but the rest was not. Great Britain would have had zero interest in provoking a war with Mexico. Large parts of what is now the US might still be included in Mexico today but for the success of the Revolution.

The good news is that there was no useless War of 1812. The bad news is that there was no Louisiana Purchase, either; Napoleon was hardly going to sell large parts of North America to his British adversaries. In fact, it is virtually certain that the French would have opened up a new front against the British in America. How would that have ended?

It is unlikely that Americans would have been drafted for service in Europe, but it is easy to imagine a scenario in which French forces based in New Orleans would have been fighting Americans for control of the Mississippi. In other words, there probably would have been a Battle of New Orleans; it just would have been against the French, not the British.

In the end, superior American and British resources in North America would have prevailed, and the area included in the Louisiana Purchase would have become a new British colony. It would have been a difficult battle, however.

As I’ve noted many times before, the Fed cannot stop wealthy people from using their pandemic savings to buy overpriced goods and services. It also has no influence over supply chain problems or federal spending. As a result, inflation is coming down, but not as fast as the Fed would like. Is there any prospect of that changing in the near future?

To answer that, consider three areas in which the Fed, on its face, has considerable influence on pricing decisions: housing; credit card purchases; and auto prices. Here is what is actually happening:

1. HOUSING: Efforts to increase supply are being restrained by increased credit costs. In addition, would-be sellers are being discouraged from putting homes on the market for fear of paying the higher interest rates on a new, bigger house. Many houses are still being purchased with cash. Finally, the demand for housing can be satisfied by either purchases or rentals, but on the whole, it is inelastic. As a result, home prices are not falling with the speed desired by the Fed.
2. CREDIT CARDS: Rates on unpaid balances have always been outrageous. Do you think consumers really notice when they go even higher?
3. AUTO PRICES: The car manufacturers have moved to a pricing model in which they make large profits selling fewer cars for higher prices. In other words, greedflation controls here, not interest rates.

The bottom line is that the Fed can’t really do anything significant to bring down inflation except by destroying consumer confidence by rattling the stock and bond markets. Is that really worth it to get, say, from four to two percent? I would say no.

American colonial boundaries were established as the result of interactions between the government and courtiers in London, which is a reason not to accept reactionary arguments about states’ rights today. The new American government created a clear process to convert property outside the existing state boundaries into new states. Would the British government have done the same, if the Revolution had failed?

No. The British government would have continued to try and enforce the Proclamation of 1763, which did not envision a need for any new political entities. Those efforts would have failed, so at some point, given the condition of American communications and transportation facilities, it would have become obvious even in London that property west of the Appalachians needed its own governments. The boundaries of the new colonies, however, would probably have been thrashed out in the same manner as before–on an ad hoc basis, with the interests of powerful courtiers predominating. As a result, the map of British America would have looked a lot different than it does today.

“I know plenty of people on the left call me an Uncle Tom. That really pisses me off, because it isn’t true. I felt the sting of racism every day growing up. I know what it’s like to come from nothing, and to deal with the sneers and the patronizing looks from white people who thought they were better than me. If you’ve had that experience–and you probably have–I understand it, and I feel for you.

But you need to know who your real enemies are. It’s not the racist cop who hassles you in your neighborhood, or the Nazi on TV, or Donald Trump. They’re relatively easy to deal with. The real enemies are the white liberal elites who tell you you’re a victim–that you’ll always be a victim–and that you can’t stand on your own two feet. They say they want to give you a hand. What they really want is to use you, and to keep you down.

My advice to you is simple: don’t ask for help from smug white liberals, and don’t accept any if offered. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re a victim. Be a man! Work hard, and be better than they are. Be successful on your own terms. Be a rugged individual, not just a tiny part of a perpetually downtrodden group crying for government protection. That’s the road to true independence. That’s the path to true equality.

You may think that it’s unfair that you have to start the race from behind. So what? Life is unfair. Good looking people make more money than ugly people. Tall people are more successful than short people. Sick people have tougher lives than healthy people. Left-handed people have more trouble getting through life than right-handed people. That’s just the way it is. You have to play the cards you’ve been dealt.

Martin did it. Malcolm did it. I did it. Even Barack Obama, totally misguided as he was, did it in his way. So can you. You don’t have to be a slave. Your life is in your own hands, not the government’s. Make the most of it.”

Based on his concurring opinion in the affirmative action case, I think this fairly depicts what he would say. When you think about it, he sounds like an existentialist: Jean-Paul Sartre for the 21st century. Are you convinced?

The British government was deeply in debt after the Seven Years War, so the last thing it needed was to spend a lot of taxpayer money protecting land-hungry colonists from Indians. Hence, the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited pioneers–even those who paid good money to buy land from Indians–from receiving good title to property west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The Proclamation was a political disaster. It was unenforceable, and it turned the colonists in the frontier areas against the British government. That was one of the decisive factors in the Revolution; since the government didn’t have enough troops to occupy these areas, it had no hope of controlling them without the help of Tories.

If the British had succeeded in crushing the rebellion, would the problem have gone away? Not at all! The demand for Indian land was insatiable. That meant the British government had two unappetizing choices: either spend money it didn’t have to protect the colonists; or leave them to their own devices, which would have led to the creation of militias and, in the long run, military and political entities that were outside the control of the government.

It was the land of no good options. The Revolution resolved the problem for them. Everybody won except the Indians.

We are usually told that the American Revolution was a fight for “freedom.” “Freedom,” however, is an ambiguous term, particularly in American history. Who would be free, and what would they be free to do?

“Freedom” can mean the legal ability to endanger and oppress others. That’s a battle that is still raging today.

As a slaveowner, Jefferson exposed himself to a charge of supreme hypocrisy for all eternity when he proclaimed that it was self-evident that all men were created equal. At first glance, equality does not appear to be essential to his overall argument for American independence. Why did he say it?

At the time, Americans were second class subjects of the British crown; after all, what was the point for the mother country in having colonies if you couldn’t exploit them? I think the equality argument was primarily intended to address that issue. In a sense, that is what the Revolution was all about; if you accepted the notion that there was such a thing as an “American” (given the ethnic and religious composition of the colonial population relative to the mother country and the very different nature of the land, there was), he was surely entitled to the same rights of self-determination as anyone in Great Britain.

In other words, it was an argument against imperialism. Happy Independence Day!