Category: Uncategorized

The GOP, of course, has made considerable political hay over the issue of wokeness in primary schools. The rationale for this is the need for the system to be accountable to parents. I have previously made the point that, as a state and local government taxpayer, I have as much right to a say on wokeness issues as anyone, but the Republicans ignored me. To them, it was only about the parents; taxpayers without children didn’t count.

Since college students are adults and informed consumers, the GOP can’t take the same position with regard to higher education. So what is their argument with regard to wokeness in state colleges? That the system has to be accountable to the taxpayers–the same argument they reject with primary schools!

As a practical matter, the Florida Republican effort to turn universities into incubators for conservatives will fail. There simply aren’t enough conservative professors or students to make it work. The best members of the system–both students and teachers–will flee to other states, thereby leaving Florida dumber and poorer. In short, DeSantis and his friends can’t convert the system; they can only destroy it.

So the right is worked up about debt

Though they don’t have a budget plan yet.

The deficit rose

Fiscal records will show

From Trump’s tax cuts, so don’t you forget.

Rural white Protestant America’s fear and loathing of cities is a theme of our history that stretches through centuries. It extends from Jefferson to Palin, and from the Know-Nothings to the 1920s KKK to the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. I’m not sure it has ever been more pronounced than it is today. Why?

Because, in a knowledge-based and globalized economy, the urban areas are thriving, and the rural areas are not. An economic rationale has thus been added to the usual cultural resentment, which is based on the belief that only white Protestants are real Americans, and that everyone else is a dangerous interloper seeking wealth and power at their expense.

In a sense this is silly, of course; the allegedly purely American culture they embrace with such fervor has cosmopolitan roots. To point out two examples, cowboys and the culture around them are largely derived from Mexico, and country music has its inspiration in a variety of sources, including music created by the descendants of slaves. In addition, would the real Americans really want to live in a world without ethnic food? Probably not.

Regardless of the thinness of the rationale, however, the divide persists, and becomes more dangerous by the day. The Democrats will have to find a way to transcend it if they want to win power as well as office.

I’ve previously commented on the many similarities between Trump and Netanyahu. Now it appears we can add another to the list. Trump was, and is, willing to leave blue America in ashes as long as he can be the leader of the other half; Bibi, it seems, is perfectly willing to bring his country to the brink of civil war as long as he can cling to power.

In Trump’s case, the problem was rooted in his narcissism. Bibi isn’t a narcissist, so what’s his motivation? Fear of the ongoing prosecution? Has he come to believe his own propaganda about being the indispensable man? Both?

I’m guessing the answer is both.

The thing about the internet is that it functions like a pantheistic version of God: it is present everywhere, but has no specific location. As a result, anyone around the world with an opinion about the Florida GOP, or Ron DeSantis, has the ability to post it. That is the reason the internet is regulated lightly, and only at the national and international levels.

Does the Florida GOP think it has the ability to identify the origin of critical posts, when they truly only exist in cyberspace? Or does it believe it has the power to regulate expressive activity outside of the borders of its home state, without other states claiming the same rights? Either way, the assaults on the First Amendment are outrageous, performative, and doomed to fail.

Florida Republicans are on a tear, and that doesn’t even include their new proposed abortion legislation. First, one of them filed a bill regarding defamation cases and public officials that is clearly intended to push the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan. Now, the same guy is trying to force all bloggers who write about DeSantis and other state officials to register with the state and disclose any compensation received for writing the blog. This bill is so unconstitutional under prevailing interpretations of the First Amendment that it makes my head swim, which I suppose is the author’s point.

I’ll leave the legal analysis for another day. The first question I want to ask this guy is, do you think what happens in Florida will stay in Florida? Do you think Gavin Newsom likes criticism any better than DeSantis? Don’t you understand that, if you somehow prevail, your friends at Fox News and Breitbart will be in terrible trouble in blue states? Overturning prevailing First Amendment precedents won’t just impact blue people; it will severely damage liberal democracy in America, and impact the interests of dissenters everywhere, including red pundits in blue states.

If there is one thing on which all members of the GOP agree, it is opposition to wokeness. As a result, it is hardly surprising that some limited government advocates are describing federal programs that largely benefit white Christian workers as “woke.”

Aside from the opportunism, there is a certain logic to this; if wokeness is a kind of war for equality, why must it be limited to people of color? But the public understanding of wokeness revolves around race and sex, not federal spending. Poor white people will be astonished to hear that Medicaid spending keeping rural hospitals in business is “woke.” As a result, these efforts aren’t going to work.

A note to my readers: We will be taking a break from our house restoration until Tuesday. Regular postings will resume next Wednesday.

The obvious solution to the Social Security shortfall is to eliminate the income cap on the tax, which is currently around $160,000. Doing so admittedly would do some damage to the widely held perception that Social Security is a standard insurance program, based purely on consumer payments and actuarial statistics, but that’s only an illusion, so who cares?

Biden has shown a willingness to address the income cap, but only for people earning over $400,000 per year. Why that number? It’s a relic from the Obama years. It bears no relationship whatsoever to public perceptions regarding who is rich and who is middle class. It doesn’t bear any relationship to anything, as far as I can tell.

There is no obvious reason why a poor or middle-class person should pay a higher rate of FICA tax than someone making $399,999 per year. This number needs to go.

Rick Scott, the party’s most prominent CL, and Josh Hawley, its best known “national conservative,” aren’t running for president. That means the scope of disagreement on the issues among the candidates will be relatively narrow. Since the candidates will all be looking for votes from the Reactionary and PBP factions of the party, the real questions will involve their ability to create bridges between the two factions.

For all that, there will be some genuine disputes, including the following:

1. UKRAINE: Trump openly supports Putin and despises Ukraine; DeSantis dismisses Putin as a problem; the rest of the candidates will probably be openly pro-Ukraine. Advantage, the others.
2. ABORTION: All of the candidates will support new restrictions on abortion, of course, but they will probably disagree on a national ban, exceptions, and the length of the legal abortion window. Mike Pence will undoubtedly take the hardest line and win millions of pro-life votes; the others will be all over the map.
3. CLIMATE CHANGE: Trump will say it’s a complete fraud. The others will probably acknowledge its existence, but insist nothing can be done without wrecking the economy. The latter position is closer to the position held by the median GOP voter, but it remains to be seen whether moderation on this issue can attract votes.
4. AGRICULTURE AND TARIFFS: Trump will say his Chinese tariffs were a complete success. Iowa voters may beg to differ, which leaves an opening for the other candidates.
5. IMMIGRATION: Trump will never let any opponent take a more extreme position on the border than he does. He will probably advocate for family separation again. Will the others follow, or simply criticize Biden without proposing any real alternatives? If the latter, will the base punish them for their equivocation? My guess is yes.
6. ENTITLEMENTS: We know Trump fully understands that the base supports Social Security and Medicare. He will never support cuts, regardless of what the donor class wants. What about the others? Expect vague statements about the need to “save” the programs, but no commitments on cuts, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the PBPs and the Reactionaries.
7. TAX CUTS: Republicans have to have a new tax cut warming up in the bullpen, don’t they?

What you won’t hear is a debate on wokeness. There isn’t one in the GOP.

In a way, the assassination saved my reputation. If I had lived to deal with Reconstruction, I would have been caught between my instinct to be generous with the rebels and my desire to do right by the former slaves. I would have been more successful in dealing with Congress than Johnson–that’s not a high bar–but would I have embraced the Radical Republican agenda or attempted to tone it down? We’ll never know.

Unfortunately, the racial issue just morphed into something more subtle and permanent after the war; it didn’t disappear. The fight for racial equality long postdates Reconstruction. In some ways, the Civil Rights Movement was the sequel to the Civil War. Even now, racial issues largely drive American politics.

Like virtually everyone else during my day, I was a racist, albeit an unusually enlightened one. Events since then have proved to my satisfaction that racism is wrong. The Republican Party is consequently no longer on the side of the angels; ironically, it is the Democrats, who opposed the war in the 1860s, who are on the cutting edge of history.

There once was a woman named Greene

Whose ideas were really extreme.

Like Jewish death rays.

We’ll be thrilled and amazed

If she’s hit by a space laser beam.

I never made any bones about it; while average citizens were entitled to some say in government, real power should be exercised by the elite–or, if you like, the “establishment.” By the elite, I didn’t mean some small ossified group of large landowners; I was referring to the most dynamic part of the population–the capitalists. There always has to be room in the establishment for new, enterprising, well-educated people. People like me.

By and large, my vision for America has become reality. America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on the planet. But battles between the establishment and populists have been a theme of American history from the beginning. Jefferson and I fought about it in the late 18th century. Sometimes, as with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, the populist cause didn’t deserve any support. Sometimes, as with FDR and the Civil Rights Movement, it did. Make no mistake: I would have supported MLK every step of the way. He was fighting against the erection and maintenance of artificial legal barriers against black citizens. I was always opposed to those kinds of barriers.

Today’s populists are the product of racism, economic failures partially attributable to our political leaders, media without responsible gatekeepers, and a misbegotten war in the Middle East. They claim to have some sort of entitlement to run the country by virtue of being white Christians even though they don’t have any economic or educational credentials that justify their leadership. That’s not what I had in mind when I supported the creation of a dynamic, flexible establishment. If the populists and the demagogues that exploit them–Trump reminds me of Burr, but has even fewer redeeming qualities–ever get firm control of our country, God help America.

Unlike the nexus between the pandemic and a temporary payment moratorium, the logical connection between the pandemic and permanent debt relief is fairly shaky, which means you could rule against the students on the merits without invoking the vague, arbitrary, and generally odious “major questions doctrine.” The standing question is quite another matter, however. No Supreme Court with any sense of legal propriety would say that there was an injury in fact to any of the plaintiffs in this case.

Do I have any confidence that the Court will rule this way? None whatsoever! The Court is itching to blow up every Biden administrative initiative that makes any difference in the lives of average citizens. That means, inevitably, that Supreme Court reform will be on the menu during the 2024 election, because the left is in office, but not in power.

I was always about checking the power of overmighty governmental authorities. When state governments were out of control, I supported federalism and the Constitution. When Hamilton started using the powers of the new federal government in a way I hadn’t contemplated, I became an advocate for states’ rights. Some people accused me of changing sides, but it wasn’t true; I was just responding to a new and different factual situation. That’s what reasonable people do when conditions change.

I always thought that making fundamental changes through government should be hard; most change should be evolutionary and driven by the private sector. It should require a lot of effort and compromise to build coalitions large enough to get majorities in Congress. That’s what Federalist #10 was trying to say. There is a big difference, however, between difficult and impossible.

The combination of the filibuster–an innovation that was unknown in 1787–along with a partisan Supreme Court has made significant legislation virtually impossible. Since power abhors a vacuum, the executive branch and the judiciary have encroached on the powers of Congress in order to get anything done. That isn’t constitutional government; it’s government by slapdash work-around. It needs to be changed as soon as possible if the objective is to restore limited, but effective government in Washington.

Sunak’s deal with the EU looks reasonable and fair–obvious, even–and in the best interests of both sides. Will he be rewarded for that with a revolt by the hardline Brexiteers? It wouldn’t shock me.