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The election told us–or, perhaps, reminded us–about three features of American politics:

1. The culture wars and the unequal geographic distribution of power create the framework for our system. Urban and suburban residents whose vision of America is a tolerant multi-racial liberal democracy vote for Democrats; exurban and rural residents who think of America as a white Christian country under threat from other races and cultures vote for Republicans. The former group is a clear majority of the country; the latter enjoys disproportionate power, in spite of its minority status, due to the workings of our federal system and the Electoral College.
2. Trump’s failures with the pandemic, attacks on our political system, and obvious personal shortcomings ultimately swayed just enough votes to cost him the election. That they were not sufficient to create a blue wave is a testament to the overriding importance of #1 above.
3. The idea, much cherished by the left, that there is an army of left-leaning apathetic voters who are just waiting to be mobilized is false. Unprecedented efforts to get out the vote by both parties resulted in something close to a deadlock. Millions of the previously apathetic voters turned out to be Trump supporters, not closet socialists. Bernie, Liz, and AOC, take notice.

During the Trump era, this country had two wildly different approaches to Russia. While Trump openly fawned over Putin and did his best to legitimize Russia’s behavior, the State Department continued to operate as if nothing had changed in the White House. As a result, American sanctions and ongoing aid to Ukraine are still in place. Russia did not receive any concrete benefits from Trump’s outrageous behavior.

The dissonance will end the day Biden takes office. Will he seek to retaliate for Russia’s intervention in our elections? Probably not. Putin may have the ethics and skills of an organized crime boss, but he isn’t the devil, and there are times when you have to do business with him. Biden is a grown man, and he will understand that.

Everyone expects–and with good reason–that Trump will abuse his pardon power between now and Inauguration Day. But will he pardon himself? What about his family and cronies?

If he were planning to head off into the sunset, I have little doubt that he would pardon himself and everyone around him who remained conspicuously loyal. Remember, however, that this is a man who still maintains that his Ukraine call was “perfect;” as far as he’s concerned, he’s never done anything wrong. In addition, acceptance of a pardon would constitute a blot on the record of the recipient, many of whom, like Trump himself, still have political aspirations of some sort.

And so, it won’t happen. The pardons won’t go to him or his inner circle; they will go to more distant figures who provided services to him at one point or another.

For most incoming presidents, with limited international contacts, it’s the Secretary of State, who serves as his window to the world. In Biden’s case, given his vast experience, that is unnecessary. He already knows everyone and what he wants.

No, the most important hire for Biden will be his Attorney General, whose first task will be to suck Barr’s political poison out of the DOJ. Our journey back from a banana republic to a genuine liberal democracy starts there.

Look for Biden to pick someone who is highly respected on both sides of the aisle. He won’t be a Republican, but he won’t be an abrasive partisan, either.

Doug Jones, perhaps?

Bush 41, Bush 43, Clinton, and Obama all tried to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions with a mixture of carrots and sticks. To that end, all of them attempted to pressure or persuade China to use its unique leverage with the regime. Unfortunately, all of them were unsuccessful. The North Korean threat did nothing but increase with time.

Trump tried a different approach: freewheeling personal diplomacy. In practice, this meant legitimizing Kim in exchange for a slowdown in the nuclear program. This approach ultimately didn’t work, either. The program still exists, with no end in site.

So what will Biden do? The legitimacy genie is already out of the bottle, so it can’t be used as a negotiating tool. My guess is that, under the new circumstances, Biden will have no objection to meeting with Kim, but that the element of unpredictability which existed under Trump will be removed. If any meetings take place, they will be preceded by the usual extensive staff groundwork.

In the end, probably none of it matters. The bottom line is that diplomatic and economic pressure don’t work with the North Koreans, and that the costs of a preemptive strike are prohibitive. Ultimately, we will have to live with a nuclear North Korea, and use standard deterrence principles to avoid war, if the regime remains (wrongly) convinced that the nuclear program is a guarantee of its survival.

Biden’s cabinet picks thus far, predictably, are highly competent, moderate veterans of the Obama administration who will undoubtedly be confirmed even by a Republican Senate. There will be no Betsy DeVos in this crowd–just lots of the deep state.

It’s so . . . conventional. It’s so . . . Biden.

After four years of pointless chaos, ain’t it great?

Like many people, I thought the relationship between Trump and AMLO would be poisonous and dangerous. That did not happen, largely because Trump’s fire was trained on immigrants from Central America, not Mexico. In the end, Trump settled for a renegotiated NAFTA that was little different than its predecessor. Life went on pretty much as before.

Still, Trump added an element of volatility that was clearly undesirable. Biden will eliminate that. Everyone on both sides of the border will be grateful.

On the 46th president Joe.

His quest has just two months to go.

Trump thrashes and sues.

In the end, he will lose

And the race will have gone to the slow.

Biden, like most Democratic presidents, is determined to make his cabinet “look like America.” How important is that? Let’s consider three propositions:

1. HAVING A DIVERSE CABINET GUARANTEES THAT THE PRESIDENT WILL HEAR A WIDE RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES: Not really. Most cabinet members don’t have significant influence on the president’s decisionmaking process on a day-to-day basis, and just providing ethnic and sexual diversity doesn’t in any way provide assurance of a range of opinions, particularly in a party with a fairly well-defined agenda.
2. HAVING A DIVERSE CABINET SENDS AN INSPIRING MESSAGE TO AMERICANS THAT MEMBERS OF HISTORICALLY POWERLESS GROUPS CAN MAKE IT, TOO: That only applies to very visible positions. Providing diversity among Supreme Court justices, for example, might matter. But do you think that anyone is inspired by Elaine Chao? How many people even know what she does?
3. MAKING A SPECIAL EFFORT TO DIVERSIFY THE CABINET ELIMINATES WELL-QUALIFIED APPLICANTS AND THUS REDUCES COMPETENCE: This isn’t like filling a local government post, with a small number of potential applicants. There are over 300 million people in America. Even if you limit yourself to, say, black women, the pool of qualified applicants will be large enough that competence won’t be a problem.

My conclusion? Diversity is meaningful to some activists, but not really to the country as a whole, either pro or con.

For Netanyahu, the Trump administration was the gift that kept on giving. Move the embassy to Jerusalem? Check. Recognize the annexation of the Golan Heights? Yes, sir! “Mediate” by applying pressure to the Palestinians? We’re on it. Tear up the Iran deal? But of course. Work out deals for recognition by Arab countries? You can count on us! Acquiesce to settlements? Coming right up!

Bibi, of course, was only too happy to reciprocate. The identification of the Israeli and American right is now complete.

Well, the party’s over, and the hangover is about to start. Biden himself is too moderate to make any kind of break with the Israeli government, but there are plenty of people in his party who have come to despise Israel for multiple reasons. That will be a big problem for both sides.

Biden isn’t going to move the embassy back, and I don’t expect him to say much about the Golan Heights. He’s not going to do anything to stop the Israelis from fighting a low intensity war against Iran in Syria. But he will return the US to its traditional role of being an independent mediator with the Palestinians, and he will try to recreate the nuclear deal, although that will be difficult, in light of changed circumstances. They won’t erect any statues of him in Tel Aviv.

A Bagehot column in a recent issue of The Economist makes the case that Princess Diana brought a more emotional style to British politics that endures to this day. The author thus sees a direct line between Diana and Boris Johnson. I’m a little bit skeptical of that thesis, but it suggested another one to me that has application here as well as the UK.

Populism, like its big brother nationalism, is more of a feeling than an idea; it is romantic, not classical. The whole point of populism is to exalt sentiment, belief, and will over reason and expertise. It cannot be refuted with logic–only results.

If you accept that populism is a romantic concept, you may find that in a sense reassuring, because the history of art tells us the pendulum inevitably swings back at some point. The down side is that the populists can do a tremendous amount of damage while they’re in control. If you don’t believe me, just think about the thirties and forties.

Mike Pence did it by being oily and obsequious. Mike Pompeo was angry and combative. Both apparently had the same objective, however: to position themselves to be the American Maduro by providing unconditional loyalty to Chavez–er, Trump.

The problem with this approach is that it would only work if Trump won in 2020, and was viewed as a success when he left office in 2024. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. So now what? Why would the GOP electorate choose the second rate acolyte of a loser in 2024?

Neither Pence nor Pompeo has the man on golf cart’s gift for owning the libs on Twitter. They have nowhere to go on their own merits. As a result, their hopes have to rest on a Trump comeback in 2024. That is, to put it mildly, a long shot.

Landlords worry that tenants who are on the verge of being evicted will trash the house out of spite on the way out. That, in essence, is what Trump and his minions appear to be doing to the country right now. The virus is out of control, there is no leadership on the issue from the White House, and now Mnuchin is making it harder for the Fed to do anything to combat the recession for no obviously good reason.

Will Trump try to stick us with an unnecessary war as a parting gift, too? The possibility cannot be completely dismissed.

Lincoln started his political career as a Whig, so it is only appropriate that he turned into a Whig historian. His reinterpretation of American history in the Gettysburg Address as a narrative of ever increasing equality, inclusion, and freedom is pure Whig history. It has also been enormously influential, most notably in the speeches of MLK and Barack Obama. The objections in the 1619 Project notwithstanding, it is still the prevailing opinion in America today.

But is it true? The historical evidence is mixed. If you look at purely economic issues, you can hardly argue that increased equality has been a hallmark of American history. What you find is the following: a period of relative equality, due to the ready availability of land, for white people (not slaves, obviously) prior to the Civil War; the temporary crushing of the plantation economy and the freeing of the slaves during the war; the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of enormous corporations and plutocrats in the late 19th century; some slight mitigation of inequality as a result of reforms in the early 20th century; a period of massively increased equality arising from the Great Depression and World War II; and a long era of increased inequality after 1980, due to the victory of GOP supply side economics. The evidence is more consistent with Piketty than the Whigs.

The political part of the story is a bit more encouraging. Here, you see relative stability (minus the slavery issue, of course) up to the Civil War; the massive, mostly unanticipated experiment of Reconstruction; the ultimate termination of black inclusion during Reconstruction; expansions of popular voting rights during the early 20th century; and the victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Today, however, the GOP is trying to turn back the clock and limit voting to its constituents, without admitting that it is doing any such thing. It is not foreordained that these efforts will fail; in fact, they will probably become more pervasive, under the bogus rationale of “fraud,” as the result of the 2020 election.

So, on balance, was Lincoln right? In the economic sphere, no. In the political sphere, broadly, yes, but the gains cannot be taken for granted, and are under attack even today.

Here are two uncontroverted facts about the 2020 election:;

1. Commercials for GOP House and Senate candidates typically focused on what I would call the Twitter left–rioters, looters, advocates of political correctness, and socialists.
2. The ostentatiously moderate Joe Biden ran ahead of his party’s House and Senate candidates.

The initial conclusion that you probably draw from those facts is that the left is responsible for the poor showing of the Democrats in the congressional races. But is that really true?

The truth is more complicated than that, as follows:

1. The lack of a blue wave similar to 2008 is due primarily to the economic factors I discussed in a previous post. Most notably, PBPs who turned against the Republicans when the market tanked and their house values collapsed in 2008 had little reason to do so this time. Their votes were not primarily motivated by calls to defund the police or pay reparations, but by what they perceived to be Trump’s success on economic issues.
2. Since the GOP candidates put so much emphasis on culture war issues and the radical left in their commercials, you have to think that those issues made a difference in some swing districts.
3. But the radical left to which the GOP candidates referred consists of Twitter activists, not prominent Democratic politicians. Even the much-reviled AOC is hardly a leader of the movement to defund the police.

The bottom line here is that blaming prominent left-leaning politicians is a mistake, while blaming activists is fair, but a waste of time, as they cannot be controlled. The Democratic leadership needs to pull itself together and move on.