Category: Uncategorized

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.

(I have argued on many occasions that America needs a responsible center-right party to be a successful liberal democracy, and that the current GOP isn’t it. In this series, I will describe a number of changes the GOP would need to make to meet that standard. That does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the policies I will be describing, or a prediction that they will happen in the foreseeable future, because there is no reason to believe that.)

Unlike any other supposedly conservative party anywhere else in the world, the GOP believes that tax cuts, primarily for the wealthy, are a good idea in all economic circumstances. This is for two reasons: first, it is consistent with the self-interest of the GOP donor class; and second, the Reagan tax cut is associated with “Morning in America,” the great economic expansion in 1984 that resulted in a crushing GOP victory. Of course, “Morning in America” was caused by a dramatic decrease in interest rates, not the tax cut (it was “Mourning in America” in 1982), and subsequent evidence from the Bush and Trump tax cuts have told us unequivocally that, under present conditions, regressive tax cuts create increased inequality, not higher levels of investment and productivity. Nevertheless, the myth persists, and even GOP politicians who should, and possibly even do, know better insist they believe it.

For the GOP to become a responsible center-right party, its members need to follow the evidence and conservatives in the rest of the world. Yes, there are circumstances when tax cuts are appropriate. No, they don’t always work. Tax cuts during a period of heightened inflation, for example, make very little sense. Just ask Liz Truss.

A few years ago, I said he would gladly reduce half of America to ashes as long as he was recognized as the leader of the remaining half. Is it Trump or McCarthy? You decide.

If you were ever wondering what it is that binds these two very different men together, look no further.

You’re a successful businessman, and you’ve always voted Republican. Why? It isn’t because the economy performs better under the GOP, because that simply isn’t true. It isn’t primarily because the inevitable tax cuts help your bottom line, although you are certainly grateful for them. No, it is because you view yourself as the rugged individual–a job-creating superman–who makes the American economy go. It was you–not Donald Trump, let alone some wacko wearing a Viking outfit in the Capitol–who made America great. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans understood this. They showed you the deference you deserved.

But things are changing. A large part of the GOP is now at war with “woke capital.” They think business is the enemy. They believe businessmen are only entitled to free speech if they say and do the right things.

So, what do you do now? Do you shut up and make money, or defend your constitutional rights? We’ll see.

The NYT had another article about food companies raising prices in excess of any inflationary trends in order to increase profits. This article indicated that the price increases are predictably starting to run into consumer resistance. If that trend continues, consumer spending will ultimately decline, and the businesses in question will lose sales and profits. A recession, albeit a mild one, is the likely outcome.

Who will get the blame for this myopic behavior? Why, Biden and the Fed, of course.

Jamelle Bouie thinks the Supreme Court is arrogant and unaccountable to the public. Is that the real problem with the Court?

The right would (and did) make the same case against the Warren Court, so judicial independence is not really the issue. History will judge the Roberts Court harshly, not because it was indifferent to the transient will of the electorate, but because it imposed a partisan agenda in the following ways:

1. By disregarding normal standing and ripeness questions and deciding issues that never should have come before the Court;
2. By deliberately distorting the factual record in some cases;
3. By inventing a vague new doctrine, “major questions,” out of thin air and using it to invalidate administrative decisions to which it was ideologically opposed; and
4. By cherry-picking historical evidence, particularly in cases involving the Second Amendment.

Twenty years from now, I suspect there will be as much pressure to overrule key Roberts Court decisions as there was to overturn Roe over the last two decades. Alito and Thomas will be to the left what Douglas and Brennan were to the right fifty years ago.

We can be reasonably certain of the following:

1. The issue will go down to the wire.
2. The public will be screaming for a solution.
3. Moderate Republicans in Biden districts will be discussing potential solutions with moderate Democrats.
4. McCarthy will be demanding–at least in public–that the moderates stay the course. He will assure them that Biden will cave if they can just hang on a little longer.

Here’s what we don’t know:

1. Will the moderate GOP members listen to McCarthy or their constituents when push comes to shove?
2. Will McCarthy play a double game–giving the moderates a green light to negotiate in private, while bashing the notion of negotiations in public?
3. If everything else fails, will Biden invoke the Fourteenth Amendment, or will he ride out the chaos and hope the GOP gets the blame?

We won’t know the answers to those questions for a few months. In the meantime, keep the anti-nausea pills handy, because you’re going to need them.

Anyone old enough to remember the USSR will recall that its leaders portrayed themselves as “moderates” who were subject to the control of other, unnamed hardliners in the Kremlin. They would take extreme positions and warn that, if those positions were not accepted, the hardliners would intervene and make things even worse for us. It was a tactic that worked every now and then.

Since he succeeded in getting the House to accept his ransom note without a vote to spare, Kevin McCarthy has no wiggle room in any upcoming negotiations. He can thus credibly argue that Biden’s only alternatives are to accept his demands or trigger a default. It is essentially the “hardliners in the Kremlin” argument in a different context.

The bottom line here is as follows:

1. McCarthy wants desperately to keep his job;
2. Given his tiny majority, he can’t afford to lose any votes, even among the most extreme members of his caucus;
3. There is no way he can get a unanimous vote in his caucus for any reasonable agreement with Biden and the Democrats in the Senate; therefore
4. Any plausible agreement that can be reached will not directly involve McCarthy. The moderates in both parties will have to work around him.

Elizabeth Warren came into the 2020 election as one of the favorites. She had passion, debating talents that no one could match, and a variety of plans that received plenty of positive press. She had a serious problem, however; she couldn’t figure out how to position herself relative to Bernie Sanders. Was she a more electable version of Bernie, with identical policy ideas, or a bridge between Sanders and more moderate Democrats? She zigged and zagged on the question, most notably with her health care plan, but ultimately fell on side of being a better version of Bernie. It didn’t work, and her candidacy died with surprising speed.

Ron DeSantis has the same problem with Trump. As of now, he’s selling himself as a policy clone of Trump with a history of winning elections. The polls are showing that the reactionary base wants Trump, not the Diet Coke version of the man on golf cart. Will he change course before it is too late and focus on the 70 percent of the GOP electorate that is available to him? We’ll see.

To date, Biden has refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling, for two reasons: first, there was no House GOP proposal to consider, and he wasn’t going to bargain with himself; and second, as a matter of principle, paying existing debts should be an unconditional obligation, not an opportunity for extortion. That was the appropriate response at the time.

As of this afternoon, however, we finally have a ransom note, albeit one that only passed with two votes to spare. So what does Biden do now? He has three choices:

1. Continue to refuse to negotiate, and hope a handful of GOP House members fold out of electoral self-interest at the last minute;
2. Rely on the 14th Amendment or the minting of the platinum coin if it becomes clear a bargain cannot be reached days before the deadline; or
3. Bash the GOP in public, but empower a group of centrists to work out a face-saving deal behind the scenes.

In my opinion, Option #1 is not worth the risks, as Trump will be the only beneficiary if there is a default, and dividing the GOP on this issue won’t really impact the presidential election. I personally support #2, but Biden hasn’t shown much interest in it as of today, partly because it will make the markets uneasy. That leaves #3. My guess is that we will ultimately have a deal that includes a commitment to create some sort of bipartisan entitlements and deficit commission, the clawing back of unspent pandemic money, and a few other minor items that won’t move the needle one way or the other.