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Joe Biden and the Democrats supported a substantial increase in the minimum wage at a national level; Donald Trump opposed it. Trump won Florida. A state constitutional amendment increasing the minimum wage passed, with over 60 percent of the vote. How can this be?

Identity politics and culture wars, of course. The Florida electorate prefers the Democrats’ position on virtually all issues relating to taxation, spending, and the economy, but won’t vote for Democrats, because they are they are supposedly the party of socialism and political correctness. That prevails over mere economic concerns under all but extreme circumstances.

So how do the Democrats deal with this? By confronting the culture war issue directly, instead of ignoring it, as they have in the past, including this year.

American policy–or, rather, policies–towards Ukraine during the Trump era are the other side of the Russia coin. On the one hand, the foreign policy establishment pursued a wholly conventional approach of supporting Ukraine against Russian ambitions and pushing for reforms to make the government more effective; on the other hand, Trump raged against Ukraine and tried to blackmail its government into investigating his political opponents. The dissonance was deafening.

As with Russia, the conflict disappears the day Biden takes office. The new administration will only pursue the State Department line. The Ukrainian government will undoubtedly breathe a sigh of relief; it will no longer be a football in the world of American politics.

Maintaining national unity in a liberal democratic state is far easier in the face of a compelling, dangerous external enemy. I don’t think it is a coincidence that politics in this country started to become more polarized shortly after the demise of the USSR. So what could replace the Russians in the foreseeable future?

It could have been, and should have been, the virus. If Trump had possessed an ounce of sense and intellectual flexibility, he would have worn a mask and made fighting the virus an overriding national priority. Americans would have responded favorably even if he had failed. He didn’t try, however, and the rest is history.

The Chinese? Maybe. Getting tough with them is popular with both parties; to the extent that China is a partisan issue, it involves means, not ends. The question is whether Trump has already irrevocably divided us on foreign policy. That remains to be seen.

Boris Johnson has clearly identified his brand of populism with Trump’s. The British are worried that this will damage their relationship with the US after Trump’s defeat and departure. Is their concern justified?

No. Unlike, say, Netanyahu, Boris never crossed the line by openly advocating for Trump’s re-election. In addition, he took positions on issues like climate change and Iran that conflicted with Trump’s. Finally, the links between the two nations are very strong. They will survive the transition easily.

The better question is whether the UK will have the same degree of influence on the US, regardless of who is in power, after Brexit. The most likely answer is no. The UK was a useful cultural and ideological bridge between the US and the rest of the EU; in less than a month, that will be gone, and the UK will find its new isolation to be less than splendid.

As I’ve noted before, Trump’s greatest “accomplishment” in office has been to convince his own party that he alone stood between them and cultural (and possibly physical) annihilation. As a result, surveys show that Cruz voters from 2016 supported him even more strongly than his own primary partisans as his term went on.

But what happens now? If he runs for president in 2024, how is he going to convince GOP voters that no one else can save them, when they somehow managed to survive four years with Biden? It’s going to be a tough sell.

Erdogan and Putin have more in common than I suspect they would like to admit. Both are, of course, strongmen with little regard for liberal democratic norms; both preside over struggling economies; and, possibly as a result, both are being increasingly aggressive in their respective backyards. They are currently engaged in proxy wars in Syria, Libya, and the Caucasus. These conflicts typically end in agreements between the two without regard to the concerns of NATO or the other powers in the region. But will they always, particularly in light of Putin’s clear advantage in military strength, if NATO is left out of the equation?

This is happening largely because Trump had no interest in using American power to maintain some semblance of order in the region or to save liberal democracy in Turkey. When Biden takes office, he will have to decide whether to try and force Erdogan to dampen his foreign ambitions, restore democracy, and play nice with the rest of NATO. While it is clear that Biden is far more skeptical of the Sultan than Trump was, I’m not sure his actual policy will be that much different. Keeping Erdogan on side requires a lot of energy that needs to be devoted to more pressing concerns–most notably, China.

2020 had it all.

Pandemic spring; election fall.

We live in interesting times

The Chinese say–and they aren’t lyin’.

____________

Trump went down, and we rejoiced.

The quiet middle found a voice.

You couldn’t call it a blue wave

But, for now, our nation’s saved.

_____________

We’re at home and doing fine.

Our Europe trip died on the vine.

We’re spending more time on our deck.

The view is great, so what the heck.

_______________

We’ve retired; our work is done.

We chucked our jobs to have more fun.

I have more time to walk the dog

And do more posting on my blog.

______________

2020–what a year!

Deliverance is finally here.

It’s just eight weeks until he goes

And you won’t have to hold your nose.

In the end, it was the pandemic that cost Trump the election, but probably not for the reasons that you (and he) think. It isn’t because his response was inept, and cost (at a minimum) tens of thousands of lives; America would probably have forgiven him for that if he had truly behaved as a “wartime president.” It was because he told us every day that he didn’t care; his priority was the economy and the stock market, not the lives of the elderly and front line workers.

George W. Bush screwed up the response to Katrina, but what really killed him was the apparent indifference in the photo of him in the airplane flying over the disaster. As I’ve noted before, the public doesn’t necessarily expect you to solve their problems, but they have to know your heart is in the right place. Trump failed that test and justly paid the price for it.

Once a year, Maureen Dowd lets her brother hijack her column to make a pitch for the GOP. This year, he made the claim that Trump, like other reactionaries, “unapologetically loves America.” Is that true?

Of course not! We’re talking about Cadet Bone Spurs here–the man who thinks that sacrificing your life for your country makes you a sucker. The man who is doing his best to trash liberal democracy in America. The man who would be the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare if he had the skill and the energy to create the authoritarian regime that he openly prefers.

Donald Trump and his biggest fans don’t love America. They hate the people who don’t unconditionally support “America,” a fictional entity run solely by and for white Christian men. That isn’t patriotism; it’s anger, delusion, and naked self-interest.

If you wanted to describe Trump’s Syria policy in one word, it would be “indifference.” Trump didn’t have the slightest interest in the geopolitical implications of the conflict or the vast misery that resulted from it. He just wanted to get America out of the picture as soon as possible. If Putin and Erdogan were determined to make deals and run the place, so much the worse for them.

Biden won’t be oblivious to the situation, but don’t expect him to make any dramatic changes in American policy. He probably won’t withdraw the handful of troops we use as a tripwire to maintain some minimal leverage there, but he won’t intensify our involvement, either. It is simply too late for that.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump made it clear that illegal immigrants were America’s enemy. It was appalling, and it had consequences, but at least they weren’t American citizens. They genuinely were outsiders.

Things are different now. Today, the enemy is within–the “radical left.” That’s infinitely more dangerous to the health of our system, because it justifies extraconstitutional means to save what Trump defines as “America”: his side in the culture war.

Addressing this kind of division will be Biden’s most pressing, and most difficult, task upon taking office. If he fails, the system itself is at risk.

The Know Nothings, of course, were an anti-immigrant nineteenth century American political party. For obvious reasons, they are frequently analogized to today’s GOP.

It is my understanding that some Republicans are attacking Biden’s cabinet choices on the basis that they are members of the intellectual elite, not proper populists. Leaving aside the fact that Trump frequently boasted about the Ivy League credentials of his appointees, that’s taking the concept of Know Nothing to an entirely new level.

Democrats have been beating themselves up for the underperformance of their House and Senate candidates since the November 3 election. Instead of focusing on the mistakes allegedly made by the losers, I think it is useful to reframe the question. Why did millions of Americans–most likely, Republicans and independents–choose to vote against Trump, but for Republican congressional candidates?

When you put the question that way, the answer is obvious–the public blamed Trump, but not the GOP as a whole, for the absurdly inadequate response to the pandemic. That was a perfectly reasonable position for the electorate to take. It’s not as if Mitch McConnell was encouraging people to eat bleach.

If I’m right, and I think I am, the battle between progressives and centrists after the election has been pointless. In all likelihood, the only thing the Democrats could have done differently was to obstruct the big bipartisan bailout package and hope the GOP took the blame for the ensuing misery and unemployment. That kind of decision is not within the DNA of the Democratic Party. It just wouldn’t have been right, even if the GOP, in the same position, probably would have done it without hesitation.

“Godfather II” is unusual in that it is both a sequel and a prequel. There is a good reason for that. In the prequel section, we see that the Mafia arose in America to meet a variety of needs of a vulnerable minority. In the sequel section, Italian-Americans are no longer powerless, and the mob is an anachronism. While Vito Corleone made himself a patron by providing services to his community, his son devolves into an unprincipled thug who seeks wealth and power at the expense of everyone around him, including his family. There is no longer any social value in him or his organization.

I couldn’t help but think about this as I watched the fourth season of “The Crown.” The English monarchy obviously began its life as the very real source of all political power. By the end of the 17th century, it mostly existed because it was the cornerstone of a highly hierarchical society which would have been in danger of flying apart without it. When the hierarchical society expired, the purpose of the royals became purely to serve as symbols of unity for the entire country. They are born to be human flags, not people. Is it any wonder that many of them rebel against this constraint, even if the other side of the bargain is wealth and privilege?

The monarchy will be in good hands with William, and will clearly outlive me. I’m not sure it will last forever. At some point, it will be the monarch himself, not just a remote family member, who decides he can’t live with the restrictions, and then what? Can the system survive another Duke of Windsor in a more democratic age? Maybe not.

As I’ve noted before, if you want to succeed in dragging your medieval country into modernity against its will, you had better be on a par with Peter the Great or Frederick the Great. MBS looks more like Mohammed the Mediocre; his “accomplishments” include starting a bloody and inconclusive war in Yemen, attempting to hijack the government of Lebanon, and murdering a prominent journalist with strong ties to your most important ally. It’s hard to see anything great in that.

Nevertheless, MBS has his heart in the right place in some respects, it is still early in his career, and his country is too important to be rejected or ignored. Saudi Arabia will continue to be an American ally of sorts while Biden is president. The days of unconditional love and the blank check, however, are over. It will be strictly business for the next four years.