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Not Trump. He can’t plausibly claim to be the victim of a partisan witch hunt after seven GOP senators voted to convict him. The images of the riot will haunt him for the rest of his political life.

Not the GOP. It is still officially the POT (Party of Trump), with some isolated dissenters who are looking at primaries in 2022.

Not the country. The GOP has shown, yet again, that impeachment is a broken reed. If Trump had shot a man in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, they would have found some pretext to acquit him.

Not the rioters. Trump sold them out. Any attempt they might make in a future judicial proceeding to use Trump’s words to justify their behavior will fly in the face of Trump’s legal arguments.

The Democrats? Maybe. They put on a convincing case and widened the split in the GOP. They exceeded expectations by getting seven GOP votes (I predicted five several weeks ago). In the end, though, they didn’t get what they asked for, in spite of everything.

The correct answer to the question is “nobody.”

If you lived in western Europe during the Cold War and you had any sense at all, you knew what awaited you if the USSR successfully invaded your country: a drastically lower standard of living and a police state. As a result, the NATO allies could be relied upon to back America in the Cold War, notwithstanding the occasional row about, say, Vietnam, Suez, or missiles in Germany.

China presents a completely different kind of issue. The Chinese are not a looming military threat to the Europeans, and they don’t aspire to force EU residents into collective farms. The Chinese objectives are far more limited: to prevent any criticism of their regime; and to turn Europe into what amounts to an economic colony by fostering dependence on Chinese markets and products.

The bottom line is that European support for American diplomatic and trade initiatives directed at China cannot be taken for granted. Rebuilding our relationships with the Europeans will take some hard work. Scrapping tariffs would be a good start.

They openly lied, took words out of any reasonable context, and insulted the jurors. They showed little or no concern for the victims of the assault. It appeared that they were more interested in playing to the base than winning votes for acquittal.

Yes, Trump’s lawyers put on a case that only the man on golf cart could love. The only thing they left out that would have made it more obnoxious was an argument about voter fraud. Are you surprised?

Of course not.

The prevailing GOP doctrine on economic issues can be described quite simply: take money and power away from workers and the government and provide more “freedom” to business. Why? Because workers and the government are too inept to know where and how to invest their money, of course. Businessmen know how the world works. They will invest wisely; the productive capacity of the nation will soar; and everyone will prosper.

That’s the theory. Under some circumstances, there may even be some merit to it. Under today’s conditions, however, here is the result:

1. The tax and regulatory “freedom” granted to business, when combined with technological change and globalization, has resulted in a hollowing out of America’s middle class, and an ongoing shortfall in demand.
2. With few people except themselves in a position to buy anything, the wealthy invest in dollar store chains and government securities. They do not create new businesses with their cash mountains; instead, they squeeze rents out of the ones they already have by using their political and economic power, and they drive up the price of existing assets by competing for them.
3. The public sector is starved of investment. Infrastructure suffers, even when it is essential to economic growth. The logical response to a move towards a knowledge-based economy is to put money in education, but the wealthy view all kinds of public expenditures as inherently wasteful, and refuse.
4. Any attempt to bring the welfare state up to date through increased taxation of the wealthy is attacked as “socialism” and crushed by using superior contacts and resources and ratcheting up culture war issues.

But danger lies ahead for the beneficiaries of the current regime. Business interests have lost control of the GOP, largely due to its failures to help voters who don’t look like them; after all, you can’t eat culture wars. Economic nationalist ideas which threaten “freedom” are on the rise in both parties, and the legitimacy of the political system that protects property is in question.

Sometimes, you have to be wise enough to give ground in order to save what you value the most. There are some indications that elements of the business community are beginning to understand that. How far will that go, and how long will it last? Based on the events of the last forty years, it’s hard to be optimistic.

The House managers have done a good job putting the events of January 6 in historical context and connecting the dots between the rioters and Trump. They also appear to be winning the public relations battle. Now it is up to Trump’s attorneys.

They cannot avoid selling out the extreme right. Expect plenty of denunciations of the rioters. You can also expect plenty of partisan attacks on Democrats for allegedly doing the same thing, which is patently false. When it’s all done, Trump will have lost some support on both the left and the right of the GOP, but not nearly enough to be convicted. Will he retain enough fans to be the frontrunner in 2024, if he really wants the nomination? Probably.

The country was highly industrialized–the workshop of the world. The bulk of the economy was controlled by private businessmen. Inequality was soaring, with a lukewarm response from the government. The safety net was minimal, in order to save money; the government simply put the onus on individuals and families to protect themselves. Labor unions were controlled by the state. The government valued stability and prosperity above everything else; cries for economic justice from struggling workers were mostly ignored.

So what would Marx say about China? That it is ripe for revolution, of course! Chinese workers, you have nothing to lose but your iPhones!

I can’t help wondering how Trump’s attorneys plan to use their allotted time. There is no point in rehashing the constitutional argument that was fully addressed on Tuesday. Parsing Trump’s specific words at the rally and arguing they don’t constitute incitement can’t take very long. What else do they have to talk about?

I understand they will be showing video of Democrats saying provocative things about Trump, albeit in a completely different context. Will they shade into the argument that the election was stolen? I suspect they will find it difficult to avoid bringing up that explosive topic unless they are willing to rest after an hour or two.

Marx was an economic determinist. He argued that a nation’s political system and culture were driven by its economic system, which was defined by the type and ownership of the means of production. A capitalist society, characterized by large manufacturing companies with middle class owners, would thus have a political system run for the benefit of the middle class. And so on.

The irony of the Chinese system is that the political “superstructure” is thoroughly communist, but the economy is predominantly capitalist. A genuine Marxist would say that is impossible, but there it is, for all to see.

What does it show? That the CCP isn’t really Marxist, and that economic determinism is wrong.

The facts aren’t in dispute, the law is not particularly complicated, and the outcome is not in doubt. As a result, I’m only watching bits and pieces of it.

For me, the most interesting development of the first day was the fact that eleven GOP senators voted against procedural rules that were approved by both parties and by the Trump defense team. The motley crew of rules opponents included all of the men who are believed to be running for president except Tom Cotton. One has to assume they think they can sell voting against the rules to the base as a ringing protest against the trial itself. Why? If Trump had no problem with the rules, why would the base care?

Viewed from a distance, the history of the USSR looks like a series of pendulum swings from repression to liberalization and back again. Thus, War Communism led to the NEP, which led to Stalinism, which led to Khrushchev’s partial liberalization, which led to Brezhnev’s lukewarm Stalinism, which led to Gorbachev, who lost control of the situation during a liberalization campaign and presided over the implosion of the country. You can look it up.

That didn’t happen with China. Why not? First, the CCP had the advantage of learning from the Soviet experience, and was determined not to repeat it. Second, the CCP was much bolder and imaginative than the Soviet leadership. It essentially scrapped most of the economic elements of communism, while retaining the political elements of centralized control. It worked; the nation prospered, while the CCP maintained its monopoly on power.

Of course, orthodox Marxist thought holds that what the CCP accomplished was logically and historically impossible. More on that irony in my next China post.

Ben Sasse argues that unconditional fealty to Trump is not conservatism. He’s right, of course; the pathetic thing is that it took a lot of courage for him to say it. How in the world did we get to this state of affairs?

I’ve discussed the devolution of the GOP at great length in previous posts. I have a new series on the topic, focusing on the impacts of several key personalities, planned for next month. For present purposes, there are two important things to remember:

1. The GOP hasn’t been a genuinely conservative party since it embraced Newt Gingrich and his bomb throwing and decided tax cuts for the wealthy were the solution to all economic problems, regardless of the underlying circumstances. In other words, conservatism hasn’t been part of the GOP equation for over 25 years. The last real GOP conservative of any consequence was George H. W. Bush.
2. Trump’s great “accomplishment” has been to convince the vast majority of GOP voters that he was the only thing standing between them and the destruction of their idea of America. He did this with his tweets and rallies and in cooperation with the house organ of the Reactionary faction of the party: Fox News. That’s how the “weird worship” came about– the reason Mitt Romney, the standard bearer of the GOP in the 2012 presidential election, is a pariah within the party less than a decade later.

Think about that last sentence for a minute. It shows you exactly how far down the GOP has gone, and how fast.

It was the summer of 2023. The GOP race for the nomination had just begun. The field was crowded, as Trump had ultimately decided not to run. Virtually all of the candidates, of course, were doing everything they could to win over his supporters.

Militia activity had increased, and was becoming more brazen and organized. There were widespread concerns that the relationship between the militias and the GOP was starting to resemble that between the IRA and Sinn Fein, to say nothing of the Nazis and the SA. As a result, one of the first questions asked of the candidates at the initial debate was about militia activity.

Predictably, only Ben Sasse was willing to condemn the militias. Marco Rubio, always a weathervane in such matters, responded to the question by attacking what he called the “radical left” and praising the “patriots.” The militias got the hint, and stepped up the violence. The left began to arm in response. It was clear that 2020 had only been a dress rehearsal; 2024 was the year that America would truly choose to remain a liberal democracy, or not.

Imperial China thought it had two kinds of neighbors: barbarians and vassal states. The barbarians were people whose culture was only minimally impacted by China; they had to be overawed, paid off, or crushed. The vassal states were small neighboring states whose culture had been largely shaped by China. They were given substantial autonomy as long as they openly acknowledged their conceptual subservience to the Chinese government.

So what would happen if, say, China overcomes American resistance and gains effective control over the South China Sea navigation routes, thereby putting its foot on the throats of the Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese? They will have to decide to fight or submit. If they submit, the terms of their surrender will probably look a lot like the lord/vassal relationship of imperial times. They will be permitted to run their internal affairs without much interference as long as they don’t take any actions that negatively impact Chinese interests.

There should be two bills. The first should be, essentially, a disaster relief bill; it should pass quickly, and with bipartisan support. It should include the following: an extension of unemployment benefits and pandemic business relief until the early fall; adequate funds to open schools and expedite testing and vaccinations; and state and local government relief. It should not include checks to individuals.

The second bill would be a purely partisan initiative, and would pass through reconciliation. This one would include permanent expansions of the welfare state, some sort of increase in the minimum wage, and funds for green infrastructure. Most of this would be paid for by tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. It would take longer, but that’s OK; it isn’t a response to an immediate emergency.

Unfortunately, the scheme I have just described is not happening. There are basically two reasons for it. First, the GOP incorrectly continues to view state and local aid as some sort of inappropriate bailout fund for blue states. Second, the Democrats have fallen in love with the $1,400 checks, which they apparently view as a big vote winner after Georgia. If they were an incentive to the GOP to vote for the disaster relief bill, I could swallow them, but they have become something completely different, and less savory.

We are going to end up with a mishmash. It’s not going to help with the second bill, and the impacts of the individual checks are ultimately going to be negative, both politically and economically.

Most people associate Reagan with “Morning in America,” but that was just the second act. The first was a deep recession caused by the Fed in order to crush the prevailing inflation expectations. It was a grim time, most vividly depicted in a series of movies about salt of the earth Americans losing their family farms. The Democrats consequently won the 1982 elections by a large margin.

My fear for the Biden recovery plan, and the political landscape that follows, looks something like that.