Category: Uncategorized

Joe and Dr. Jill are in the White House, talking about the upcoming campaign.

JOE: So, we’re back on the trail one last time. It’s like “The Last Dance,” except it’s a lot more important.

JILL: I always figured you’d run again, particularly since Trump is likely to be the nominee. What’s the plan this time?

JOE: Same as last time, except we’ll do it from the Rose Garden instead of the basement. We’ll continue to look stable and competent and let Trump make himself the issue. He’ll destroy himself, just like last time. He can’t help it. It’s who he is.

JILL: A Rose Garden strategy has more dignity than a basement strategy, for sure. But you’ll still have to do some campaigning. How is that going to work, at your age?

JOE: Most of my appearances will be at ribbon-cuttings in the Midwest. The rest I’ll leave to Kamala. She needs to make a case for herself, both now and for 2028. This will be a good experience for her.

JILL: Makes sense.

JOE: How do you feel about where we are? Do you think we win?

JILL: The odds are in your favor, but there are a couple of things that could happen that would put us behind.

JOE: Which are?

JILL: First of all, some sort of foreign policy crisis that doesn’t go well, with you taking the blame. A collapse in Ukraine would be the obvious possibility, but there are a host of others. You just never know.

JOE: And?

JILL: The economy goes bad. The big concern here is a default on the debt. You would blame the Republicans, and they would deserve it, but nobody is going to blame Trump. He will be the big winner if it happens. You need to avoid that at all costs.

JOE: Agreed. Anything else?

JILL: A terrible performance at a debate. Of course, Trump may refuse to show up for a debate if it isn’t run by some right-wing nut job organization. That would reduce your risk.

JOE: OK, then. Let’s get the show on the road!

Representatives from the NAACP and an LGBTQ group recently advised their members not to travel to Florida in light of DeSantis’ various anti-wokeness measures. DeSantis responded by saying these advisories were a political stunt.

Thus said the man who used Florida taxpayer money to fly immigrants from Venezuela who weren’t even in Florida to Martha’s Vineyard. He should know a stunt when he sees one.

Ron DeSantis went to Japan, ostensibly to sell Florida “freedom” to the Japanese, and said nice things about his hosts. Under normal conditions, this would be utterly unremarkable, but DeSantis is trying desperately to emulate Trump, and Trump thinks foreigners who aren’t autocrats do nothing but screw us over.

Does this mean that a President DeSantis would have a slightly more mainstream foreign policy than Trump, his comments about Russia and Ukraine notwithstanding? Probably. Will he admit it by attacking Trump on that issue? Probably not; it would make him sound too much like a “globalist.”

Tucker Carlson apparently has no idea why he was fired, so I won’t pretend to know more than he does. I would like to think it was because he did his best to persuade gullible people to burn liberal democracy down, but history tells me that isn’t the reason. He did something to piss off Rupert Murdoch, he cost Murdoch money, or both.

Far more than Trump, who is principally guided by his own unique personal grievances, Carlson is a perfect reactionary. The e-mails uncovered by Dominion prove that he’s a greedy cynic, too. I’m sure he will land on his feet, but he won’t be as prominent as he was at Fox, and I certainly won’t miss him.

The Economist is a strong supporter of liberal democracy, so it is quite properly critical of Chinese saber-rattling and human rights violations. On the other hand, it was founded to lobby for free trade, so it tends to minimize the Chinese challenge when it talks about American protectionism.

In keeping with this trend, the latest issue of the magazine did its best to convince Americans that we are “riding high,” in spite of all of the dissatisfaction with our economy. The gist of the argument was that American GDP has grown much faster than GDP in Europe and Japan over the last 30 years, and that the American economy still represents roughly the same percentage of world GDP even with the rise of China. The underlying message is that life in America is good with globalization, so we shouldn’t mess with a good thing, even if it means enabling the Chinese, as well.

There are two problems with this analysis. The first, of course, is that Europe and Japan don’t present a problem for us, but China does, so it isn’t really very reassuring to tell us that we’re thriving compared to the UK, France, and Italy. Second, comparing GDP numbers–at least, if you are using them as a measure of national well-being–is somewhat misleading, because health care costs in America are far higher than they are in Europe. This is a source of great anxiety, not comfort, to many Americans, but it actually beefs up our GDP, and makes us look better than the Europeans, who have no such anxieties.

You can certainly make a case that protectionism directed at the Chinese should be limited to high-tech products with a clear relationship to national security, and that protectionism focused on Europe and Japan shouldn’t exist at all. I would agree with that. But arguing that we should limit protectionism because we are doing better than our friends with limited government and free trade completely misses the point.

Capitalism is all about creative destruction, so American history is full of victims as well as winners. You never hear about them; in the past, they just moved on and found other jobs. This time is different, however; the losers in the change to a globalized knowledge-based economy present a serious threat to liberal democracy in America, as well as many European countries. Why the difference?

Several reasons:

1. In previous destructive episodes, there was no welfare state, and it was generally accepted that the government had little or no role in redistributing wealth. Not now.
2. The economic blow to the white working class took place at the same time that it was being attacked by the woke left for being misogynist and racist. The culture war blows thus piled on the economic problems to create a perfect storm of lost status and resentment.
3. Previous victims of economic change were relatively powerless and had little sense of social and political entitlement. That is certainly not the case today. White Christian workers have plenty of electoral clout and believe history entitles them to run the country, whether they have a majority of votes or not.

Ever since the Reagan days, all serious GOP presidential candidates have been required to propose a large tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy. The stated purpose of the program is to encourage investment, which improves productivity and ultimately results in higher wages for workers. In reality, this doesn’t happen; the real purpose of the tax cut is to provide a payoff for the GOP donor class, which then uses the proceeds to finance the deficit in what I call “right-wing recycling”.

To date, however, the 2024 candidates have said very little about taxes. The focus of the campaign has been more on electability, the sins of the establishment, and wokeness. Will that continue?

Yes, because the reactionary base is far more interested in wokeness than tax cuts, but I think taxes will start entering the arena fairly soon. In particular, if DeSantis continues to struggle, he’s going to need something pretty dramatic to win back the donor class, and a tax cut is the logical way to do it.

There is plenty of wokeness out there if you know where to look for it. It’s on Twitter, in a variety of periodicals, and even occasionally in the NYT. Some of it is as objectionable as the far right says it is.

But the average farmer in Nebraska doesn’t go out looking for it. Nobody in his path during the day embodies it. No one he meets reminds him that the haughty coastal elites look down on him and his values, or says that gender is a fluid concept, or calls him a bigot. He doesn’t even know any trans people or illegal immigrants. So why does he feel so passionately on these subjects?

Because reactionary activists, mostly from urban areas, post about them and they are broadcast 24/7 on Fox News. The outrage machine makes him angry and profits from it. The rest of us, and our liberal democratic system, are the losers.

The one person in America who hasn’t expressed an opinion on the settlement is Donald Trump, who would have been on trial almost as much as Fox. Why?

Almost certainly because Trump sees his interests, in the long run, being aligned with those of Fox, and he feared the consequences of a trial as much as Fox did. With good reason, I might add.

For Fox, paying large defamation claims is just a part of their business model. Trump doesn’t have that luxury. If it is ever found by an impartial jury that his claims about the “rigged” election were not just false, but reckless and absurd, it will do him a lot of damage.

When you know, you know.

When you know, you know.

It’s time

It’s time to go.

——Lana Del Rey, “Paris, Texas”

Life in Florida these days is deceptively normal, even in areas that were battered by Hurricane Ian. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the tourists have mostly gone home. Everything is as it should be.

Except it isn’t. DeSantis and the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature are engaging in an assault on liberal democracy on a wide range of fronts. No one who criticizes the governor is safe from retaliation–except Trump, of course, who is opportunistically taking the side of the angels on some of these issues.

Barring some last minute, unforeseen issues with our house, we are leaving for the mountains tomorrow. We will be happy to be out of DeSantistan for six months. Of course, the GOP obtained a supermajority in the NC legislature by flipping a Democrat from a Biden district, so we may be going from the frying pan to the fire. We’ll see.

Donald Trump is effectively telling the reactionary base that he will destroy the liberal establishment from the outside–by throwing rhetorical bombs and ignoring constitutional norms. The DeSantis message, on the other hand, is that liberal democracy can be eviscerated through hard, plodding work using the normal constitutional processes. He’s doing his best to prove his point in Florida even as we speak.

That’s what the GOP has come to: a tactical dispute over how best to destroy liberal democracy in America.

The entire ecosystem of the GOP is designed to reward bomb throwing. The way you get ahead in the party is not by working hard and following orders, but by saying outrageous things about Democrats and the establishment–including some Republicans–on Fox News and the internet. It is a system that works well when the GOP is in opposition, and powerless.

But what happens when the GOP is actually in power? How can you plausibly run against the establishment when you’re it? How does throwing bombs help you create an effective working majority that actually runs the federal government?

Hence, the many failures of the Trump years.

It is conceivable–though hardly assured–that McCarthy can get unanimous GOP House approval of a plan by including everything in everyone’s wish list and telling moderates that it is just an opening bid that shouldn’t be taken seriously. That effectively puts off the hard choices to a later date. But what happens next?

The problem for McCarthy is that he can’t possibly get unanimous approval in his caucus for any deal that would be acceptable to the Democrats, who hold most of the cards in this process, as they are relatively united against fiscal blackmail and control the Senate. That means two things: first, if there is a deal, it will probably be made between the Democrats and moderate GOP members, with most GOP House members in opposition; and second, that deal would put his job in jeopardy, given the concessions he made to the extremists in January and his razor thin majority.

The GOP won a crushing victory in the 2010 midterm elections. While this was undoubtedly due more to the slow pace of the recovery than any overriding public concern about spending, the deficit did figure prominently in the campaign, so there was a plausible argument that America was demanding large spending cuts. The debt ceiling crisis of 2011 should be seen in that context.

But what about today? The GOP lost the presidential election in 2020. It lost a Senate seat in 2022. It underperformed, relative to history, and won only a tiny majority in the House. Culture war issues were the focus of the campaign, not spending cuts. Finally, the GOP has shown throughout recent history that it only cares about spending and the deficit when a Democrat is in the White House. The electorate is perfectly aware of that.

It is consequently absurd to suggest that McCarthy has some sort of mandate to impose spending cuts by holding the economy hostage. Given the divisions even within his own caucus, the only mandate he has is to keep the lights on and wait for 2024.

I said weeks ago that the lawyers for Fox should be desperate to settle this case. They finally took my advice.

There were two points to the litigation: to punish Fox for knowingly telling lies in an effort to pander to the base and maintain ratings; and to defend the existing standard for defamation of public officials and public figures. The settlement accomplishes both. It is an unequivocal victory for the good guys.

Unfortunately, we will not be treated to the spectacle of a hardened litigation attorney cross-examining Tucker Carlson. Oh, well. It’s good enough.