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As we know, the price of gas plunged during the pandemic. At one memorable moment, the value of a barrel of oil was less than zero. Why? Because discretionary driving came to a halt. Prices collapsed in response to falling demand.

Today’s conditions, of course, are exactly the opposite. While a substantial percentage of the current price increases can be attributed to supply shortfalls caused by the war, the rest of it is due to the soaring demand for post-pandemic discretionary travel.

The lesson here is simple: gas prices are largely in your hands! If you don’t want to pay $5 per gallon, cut down on your discretionary driving, and they will come down, just as they did in the pandemic. Don’t make the decision to drive for your own entertainment and then whine that Biden isn’t doing enough to keep prices down, because that doesn’t make economic sense.

In the final analysis, Trump can only respond to the hearings in the following ways:

1. What riot? They were just tourists. The video is fake, and the witnesses were bought.
2. The rioters were good, patriotic people, but they went too far. I didn’t do anything to encourage them to riot.
3. Damn right I told them to invade the Capitol! The election was rigged! Real Americans had their government stolen away from them! The rioters were heroes, not criminals!
4. Politics is purely an exercise in the gaining and use of power; rules have nothing to do with it. Anyone who believes otherwise is a sentimental sap. As a result, I was justified in doing absolutely everything necessary in order to stay in office.

Based on our experience, I would say that Trump really believes in #4. He won’t say that in public, however. He seems to be leaning to a combination of #1 and #3, even though no sane person believes #1.

Trump’s stans are too far gone to be reached; they were probably watching Tucker Carlson, or pursuing pedophiles at the local pizza parlor. Most of the rest of America has probably tuned out. The hearing didn’t reveal a whole lot that we didn’t already know. And yet, the process is not a waste of time. Here’s what the committee can do:

1. PERSUADE THE UNDECIDED THAT THE RIOTERS WERE NOT TOURISTS: The Trump/Carlson narrative is difficult to sustain–at least in the eyes of reasonable people– in light of the video and the witness testimony, which was pretty compelling.
2. TO THE EXTENT THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTS IT, TIE GOP HOUSE MEMBERS TO THE RIOTERS: We now know that at least one House member asked Trump for a pardon after the fact. How many more were involved? Were any of them in direct communication with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers? If so, the committee should name names.
3. CONNECT THE DOTS BETWEEN JANUARY 6 AND THE ONGOING EFFORTS TO RIG THE 2024 ELECTION: This story is ongoing. Trump and his acolytes are still fighting the same battle, but with different weapons. It is essential to stop them.

Thus far, the committee has done its job well. Liz Cheney was particularly effective. As to the future, time will tell.

We know where we are headed as a result of climate change. Large parts of California and the Southwest are going to become uninhabitable, due to extreme heat, fires, and water shortages. Agricultural yields will drop. Tropical events will get much worse, with increased losses of life and property. Illegal immigration will be exacerbated, as life in Central America becomes unbearable due to the heat. Rising seas will destroy the value of coastal property all over the country. It will no longer be possible for most people to afford property insurance in many states. Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn’t it?

All of this is inevitable, based on current conditions. There is no plausible technological fix for the carbon that is already in the system. How much worse than the current baseline can it get? A lot, due to the power of financial and ideological vested interests in fossil fuels all over the world, but particularly in America.

Ezra Klein sees a bright future, with a decarbonized economy and cheap, plentiful energy. The only way that is going to happen in America is if the private sector does it with minimal government direction, given the GOP’s ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, the economy of the 1950s, and culture wars. I don’t see how that is realistically possible.

I’m not as bearish on the 2022 election as most commentators, because: inflation will likely be easing by November; the GOP has to defend more Senate seats than the Democrats; GOP gerrymandering has not been as successful as Mitch would hope; the abortion issue should help somewhat; and increased polarization sets the floor higher for both parties than it was in the past. Nevertheless, the smart money is on the GOP winning both the House and the Senate this year. Then what?

Here’s what we can anticipate. First, there will be no meaningful helpful legislation until 2025 at the earliest. Second, there will be a barrage of frivolous Benghazi-like investigations, mostly starring Hunter Biden, who will be portrayed as a latter-day Al Capone. Third, there will be a blockade on judicial appointments. But most importantly, GOP vandalism will be expressed through a debt ceiling crisis that will be the worst we’ve ever seen. Mitch will do his best to keep the lights on, but McCarthy believes in appeasing his extremists, so the House will make ludicrous demands, probably starting with the reinstatement of Trump as president, and then moving to something more “reasonable,” such as defunding Obamacare. Biden will refuse, and then . . . a financial disaster lurks.

While this is going on, the Supreme Court will be blowing up our ability to control guns, pollution, and climate change, and may be reversing course on gay marriage. It’s not a pretty picture.

In the longer run, the Democrats could win the presidency again in 2024, but the potential for a renewed constitutional crisis is very real. In addition, the playing field tilts towards the GOP in the Senate races, and the filibuster will still be in place. The likelihood of using the federal government to solve our very real problems will thus be minimal for the foreseeable future.

We know the right wants to blow up liberal democracy and Orbanize America. How long will it take before the left loses faith in the system, as well? To that question, I have no answer.

Both Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat think young adults should have children in spite of the dangers created by climate change. Klein believes the future will be a rich and exciting place as the result of technological change; Douthat, on the other hand, contends that the bomb presented a much more daunting challenge than climate change, and argues that the baby boom of the late forties and fifties was the result of optimism tied to a religious revival. Is Douthat right?

Unfortunately for Ross, Jesus is not the answer to this question. Compare the condition of the country today with where we were in the late 1940s. After our national triumph over fascism, the GIs returned to a prosperous land which contained a staggering percentage of the world’s productive capacity. The Russian bomb was a threat, but only a conditional one; it had no impact on everyday life. Why wouldn’t you be an optimist under those circumstances? Today, by contrast, we have just lived through the Great Recession and an ongoing pandemic, China is becoming a greater threat than the USSR ever was, and our liberal democracy is under an existential threat from the far right, which refuses to appreciate that the system is already stacked in its favor. Finally, the damage done by climate change, unlike the use of the bomb, is inevitable, and will only get worse. You would have to be very brave or very foolish to be an optimist today.

There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to be a pessimist in the current environment. I will discuss two of them in my next posts.

About a week ago, I was reading the transcript of an Ezra Klein interview with Reihan Salam, a right-wing intellectual working for the Manhattan Institute. Salam is practically bubbling with market-based ideas for making America a better place to live. He represents the acceptable face of the GOP.

After I finished reading the interview, however, I could not help thinking that Salam is just kidding himself for a living. The GOP has zero interest in policy. A plurality of its voters–the reactionary core–doesn’t want to make life in America better; it wants to make it as miserable as possible for the 51 percent of the population that voted for Biden. Most of the rest care only about tax cuts and deregulation; they will only embrace reforms that don’t cost them money.

Salam’s ideas, regardless of their merit, are going nowhere. He is just another useful idiot for the folks who would be happy to turn America into an ash heap as long as they can rule over it.

For years, I advocated giving white Christian nationalists the carve-outs they demanded in order to buy time and stave off their more dangerous demands. It occurred to me last night, however, that after January 6, appeasement of some of the more militant members of the group is no longer a plausible course of action. A loud and growing segment of the Reactionary faction of the GOP is no longer satisfied with carve-outs. It wants a guarantee of permanent power, and it wants to use government to stifle the left, the First Amendment be damned.

There is no appeasing those folks; they have to be fought with their own weapons. That doesn’t mean it is a good idea to poke them or provoke them unnecessarily. Nor am I suggesting that the center-left is obligated to advocate for woke positions which don’t have the support of the majority of Americans; on culture war issues, finding the sweet spot in the center makes more sense. Direct assaults on liberal democratic norms, however, cannot be tolerated, and should be at the heart of the 2022 and 2024 elections, to the extent that any given GOP candidate supports them.

As I’ve noted many times before, the McConnell Project works just fine under our current system. For that reason, Mitch is not a counterrevolutionary. He need not, and does not, support Orbanization.

But would he stand in its way? No, for the same reasons he won’t object to eliminating the filibuster as soon as a national abortion ban becomes a realistic possibility; he prizes party unity over everything, because it is the key to remaining in power. Orbanization may not be necessary for his agenda, but it is not inconsistent with the agenda. And so, if and when the time comes, he will be on board.

In other words, if a newly elected President Trump decides to take actions that are clearly unconstitutional in order to stifle dissent in 2025, don’t expect any help from Mitch. He will just change the subject and talk about how awful the libs are.

McConnell has acknowledged that a Senate vote on a nationwide abortion ban is “possible,” but he says he will oppose abolishing the filibuster to accommodate it. Why shouldn’t we believe him?

Because he values party unity over the filibuster. A House in which the GOP has a majority is going to pass an abortion ban. The vast majority of GOP senators will also support a ban. Do you really think he’s going to stand in their way, if they have more than 50 votes and a friendly president in the White House?

If you do, you need to explain why McConnell voted against impeaching Trump after January 6, and why he says he will support Trump as the party’s nominee if necessary in 2024, even though he knows Trump despises him.

In the end, Mitch will cave, and justify his position by saying the Democrats were going to do it at some point, anyway. He just beat them to the punch.

Skyrocketing gas prices, in a sense, should be welcomed by the environmental community; after all, how better to discourage driving? The political reality, however, is much different. Why?

As with the previous post, for two reasons. First, the prices aren’t actually discouraging much driving, due largely to pandemic revenge travel. Second, the left is undoubtedly going to pay a serious political price for them. Anything that puts the gas-guzzling GOP back in power is a bad thing, on balance.

What this points out is that we need a clean energy plan with a legitimate transition period in order to avoid too much short run pain. Anything that requires the American people to put on a hair shirt, even for a limited time, is going to be political poison.

BoJo and Trump clearly have a lot in common; both are cynical, opportunistic culture warriors with a far greater interest in narrative than truth. For all that, I despise Trump much more than BoJo. Why?

Two reasons. First of all, BoJo is basically a romantic–a figure out of a previous century, like Disraeli or Churchill–who sees himself as a pivotal figure in his country’s history. Trump, on the other hand, only sees himself; he couldn’t care less about America. Second, BoJo comes across as a bit of a good-natured airhead, while Trump makes it clear that he hates the half of America that doesn’t suck up to him. That part of his personality is not an act.

It feels like liberal democracy in America is in an endless downward spiral. The reactionary right responds to the Twitter left with state government repression, which provokes another blast of wokeness, which inspires another round of lib owning, and so on. In the meantime, the federal government can’t get anything done as a result of the many undemocratic features of our system. At the present rate, we could be looking at something like the end of the Weimar Republic in ten years: street battles between young woke people and right-wing militias, calls for major constitutional change, and rule by decree in Washington. Is there a way out of this mess?

Yes–an alliance between liberals and genuine conservatives (mostly big business interests) against the extremists on both sides. You could call it the Macron coalition. It works in France–why not here?

It can’t happen unless the moderate right is willing to ditch its reactionary allies, stop asking for more tax cuts, stand up for liberal democratic norms, and propose plausible market-based solutions for problems such as climate change. So far, that isn’t happening.

As I’ve noted before, the Macron approach isn’t ideal, because it drives everyone who dislikes the government into the camps of the extremists. It can buy time, however, until the old angry white reactionaries leave the scene. That’s what we need more than anything else.

You would think, with the demise of Roe just around the corner, that religious reactionaries would be in the mood to celebrate. But no! According to Nate Hochman, a social conservative commentator, religious reactionaries are in a crouch, desperately trying to carve out a bit of space for themselves in an increasingly hostile America. They have allied themselves with more secular, nationalist reactionaries (Hochman calls them “conservatives,” but they are anything but), and are enjoying some temporary political successes as a result, but they are the junior partners in the deal, and it may not end well. Is he right?

Hochman’s analysis is based on two undeniable facts. First, there was a clear dichotomy in the 2016 primaries between Cruz and Trump voters; the former were more actively religious and disliked Trump’s open displays of immorality. Second, church attendance in America is falling off a cliff. Gen Z doesn’t have much use for Christianity, largely because it is associated with the political views of people like Cruz and Trump (and Hochman, for that matter).

Hochman, however, ignores surveys which indicate that Cruz voters were actually more supportive of Trump in office than Trump voters. It is also incorrect to argue that religious reactionaries are playing rope-a-dope and are only pleading for carve-outs. Their leaders have made it clear that they will no longer fight a rear-guard battle; they want to impose their values on America regardless of the state of public opinion and the workings of the Constitution. They have become enthusiastic supporters of insurrection and Orbanization.

Hochman is right, however, about one thing–this won’t end well for the religious reactionaries. In ten years, there won’t be enough angry old white guys to keep Gen Z under control. The future doesn’t belong to the old. Just ask King Lear.

One of the biggest problems of the current administration is that it doesn’t have an effective salesman. I suspect some of this is by design–Biden has deliberately avoided doing anything that makes him look like Trump–but part of it is due to Biden’s weakness as a public speaker. How can the Democrats deal with this problem?

The logical option is Harris. If she isn’t up to it, someone else will have to step in, or the GOP will fill the vacuum. My best guess would be Warren; after all, as we know from the 2020 campaign, there’s nothing she enjoys more than a good fight with the right.