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Technically, I’m a Boomer, but I never felt like one. I grew up in the seventies, not the sixties. My attitudes were shaped by Watergate, inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis, not Woodstock, Vietnam, and the Summer of Love. It’s not the same thing at all.

As a result, I think I’m fairly well qualified to mediate between Gen Z and my own generation. Over the next several days, I will be evaluating the merits of the claims Gen Z makes against the Boomers, some of which have considerable merit. In the meantime, however, I’m going to have a “get off my lawn” moment and get my prejudices against millennials out of the way:

1. OUR MUSIC WAS BETTER THAN YOURS: With a few very notable exceptions (Florence and the Machine; London Grammar), I find most popular millennial music to be thin, formulaic, and tiresome. A hundred years from now, people will be listening to our music, but not this stuff. I would bet the ranch on it.
2. YOUR MOVIES ARE LOUSY, TOO: Aren’t you going to run out of Marvel characters anytime soon?
3. GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF YOUR PHONE!: And stop texting naked pictures of yourself. That’s just stupid.
4. YOU DIDN’T INVENT GAY RIGHTS, RIGHTS FOR RACIAL MINORITIES, AND FEMINISM: Boomers put these causes in the mainstream, not you. You’re just taking them to another level.
5. TATTOOS ARE UGLY: Wait until you’re my age, and then you’ll understand.

There. I’ve done it. With that out of the way, I’ll start with climate change tomorrow.

Demonstrators are out in force in Lebanon and Iraq, with similar and justified complaints about ineffective and corrupt government. Could it be the beginning of a new Arab Spring?

I doubt it. Ineffective and corrupt government is the product of factions dividing the spoils. It is the price of peace in those two countries.

European history tells us that, over the long run, religious factions can be overcome by nationalism. It takes a long time, innumerable deaths, and stalemate, however. I don’t think either Lebanon or Iraq has reached that stage yet.

The harshest, and most truthful, thing you can say about Jeremy Corbyn is that he unites his enemies and divides his friends. The right will vote Conservative to keep him out; the moderate left is repelled by his ambivalence about Brexit and his anachronistic socialist views. Labour will likely pay the price for it next month.

But Corbyn has one big card to play in the election. You could even call it a trump card, because it comes in the form of the American president. Trump is the living embodiment of every negative British caricature of an American; he’s loud, crass, overbearing, materialistic, and ignorant. The British–even the traditionalist right–naturally despise him. BoJo, on the other hand, is clearly identified with him, and the Tories look more like a Trumpist party every passing day.

If I’m Corbyn, I would hammer on this issue every day on the campaign trail. It might even get some people to forget about his innumerable issues as a potential PM.

(In order to prove his point, Donald Trump shot a man on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight. The House has impeached him. The trial begins.)

CHIEF JUSTICE: How do you plead?

TRUMP: I am above the law. Impeachment is unconstitutional. I can only be removed from office by the vote of a majority of the true (meaning, white) citizens of America. That, of course, will never happen.

GOP SENATORS: We can’t go that far, but we say there is no evidence that Trump shot anyone.

DEMOCRATS: We have a hundred witnesses who saw him do it.

GOP SENATORS: Yeah, but they’re all Democrats. This is a purely partisan witch hunt.

DEMOCRATS: Half of them were Republicans.

GOP SENATORS: OK, so he did it, but it was fully justified. It was self-defense. The guy was a progressive. He could have been trying to shoot our beloved president.

DEMOCRATS: All of the witnesses will testify that the man was unarmed, and presented no threat to Trump.

GOP SENATORS: OK, so he did it, and it was unjustified, but the guy didn’t die. Trump doesn’t shoot well enough to kill him. That isn’t bad enough to justify removing him from office and undoing the results of the last election.

(They vote, and Trump is acquitted on those grounds, although he is fuming that the GOP senators didn’t accept his defense, and he is plotting his revenge.)

Bernie may be a left-wing troglodyte with a brain stuck in the 1960’s, but occasionally he gets well ahead of the curve. Medicare-for-all is an obvious example, but so is the American-backed Saudi war in Yemen, which Sanders opposed before it was cool. He deserves credit for that.

But Bernie goes too far when he puts the Saudis in the axis of authoritarians, and makes his opposition to their regime personal. Yes, I have a huge issue with giving a blank check to Saudi adventurism. No, I don’t see any big moral difference between the Saudi and Iranian regimes; that was true even before the Khashoggi murder. But Saudi Arabia is obviously a major player in both the Middle East and world oil markets, and its interests cannot be ignored. In addition, even though they are being imposed in an authoritarian way, the MBS reforms are popular at home and should be welcome here.

The bottom line is that the Middle East is a messy and complex place, lacking clearly defined saints and villains. In one way or another, we have to do business with all of them. Not writing blank checks for one side or the other is not the same as singling them out as an enemy.

So the House seems prepared to impeach.

An end to our nightmare’s in reach.

The red base doesn’t care;

Says the crime’s just hot air;

So the process will end with a screech.

The Warren plan is out, and my predictions were right on target. She hired some of the best health care wonks around to prepare a plan based on assumptions that often range between aggressive and ridiculously optimistic. The plan consequently indicates that we can have the maximum version of Medicare for all without a tax increase on the middle class. Right, and Brexit would be easy and painless, too.

This is just the beginning of the questions for Warren–not the end. Since the real political issue with M4A is risk aversion, not cost, one has to ask whether the release of this plan has improved its chances of success. The answer is no, because the holes will be pointed out by Republicans and realos alike, and everyone who fears the worst will assume that, in the real world, their taxes will be increased substantially to fill them. The optimistic assumptions in M4A also bring into question the integrity of the assumptions in Warren’s other plans for pessimists like me. Politically, in my opinion, this is an own goal for the progressive side.

Yesterday’s issue of The Times featured a cartoon of Jeremy Corbyn pointing a starter’s pistol at his own head and saying “On your Marx! Set! Go!” That pretty well says it all for me.

The election will actually incorporate referenda on three separate issues:

1. The merits of the Brexit deal;
2. The conduct of the government in the process of negotiating the deal; and
3. Corbyn’s extreme left-wing platform.

It is perfectly possible–in fact, very likely–that Remain could win on the first two issues, but lose the election for the third reason. The Remain vote is certain to be split between the Lib Dems and Labour, while the vast majority of Leavers are going to vote for Boris, not the Brexit Party. Expect a smashing Conservative victory that represents the state of public opinion on Corbyn, not Brexit.

Then what? There will be big constitutional problems with Scotland and Northern Ireland. The transition period with trade and the EU will only last a year, and there is no guarantee that any agreement the parties can reach will be beneficial to either side. 2020 will consequently be a year that calls for great finesse on the part of the new government. Unfortunately, Boris is more into showy populism, flip-flops, and bluster than finesse.

This is the really tough one, because both sides perceive that so much is at stake, and there is so little middle ground. Both sides implicitly accept that the blue team has won the war, but that is where the agreement ends. To Big Blue, the righteousness of their cause is self-evident, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot, a bigot, or both. The red team, on the other hand, looks despairingly into the PC future and sees itself constantly stigmatized at best and legally oppressed at worst. A few even go so far as to predict Christians will wind up in death camps if they don’t fight back now with every tool at their disposal.

You can dismiss this as hysteria and projection, and there would be some truth to that, but the fact is that these people represent about 30 percent of the electorate, so they cannot be ignored. Given a perceived choice between fascism and annihilation, they will obviously opt for the former. In some ways, they already have, by providing unconditional support to a man who doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what it means to be a Christian just because he shares their enemies.

So what can be done? Big Blue triumphalism needs to be muted. The leaders of the Democratic Party need to make it clear, over and over again, that they don’t view Christianity as just another form of bigotry, and that they respect red values even when they don’t agree with them. It might even be necessary, for tactical reasons, to create some limited opt-outs in civil rights legislation to accommodate right-wing Christians.

If that sounds like feeding the alligators, it’s better than having them feed on you. Are you listening, Elizabeth?

Donald Trump’s neocolonialist, funhouse realpolitik foreign policy is an outlier even in his own party, let alone in the country as a whole. So what would a consensus foreign policy look like? I would say it would closely resemble Obama’s, except that it would be more overtly hostile to the Chinese, and it would involve even less foreign military intervention. In particular, we would stop sucking up to dictators, peacefully promote liberal democracy and human rights, reduce the absurd concern about trade deficits, embrace our allies instead of repelling them, support useful international institutions, and comply with agreements instead of tearing them up.

Wouldn’t that be a welcome change? Even Lindsey Graham should prefer it to what we have now, although he would never admit it.

The D.C. crowd apparently chanted “Lock him up!” at Trump during a World Series game. There has been a fair amount of angst about this among some left-wing commentators. Is it justified?

In my opinion, no, purely due to the context. When crowds shout “Lock her up!” at Trump rallies, they are directing their opinion to someone who is in a position to do exactly that, which is a threat to our (pre-Barr) depoliticized law enforcement process. There was no one at the game meeting that description. Trump wasn’t exactly about to lock himself up.

The chant was nothing more or less than a spontaneous expression of disgust with the current administration which was fully justified by the present circumstances. People who are concerned about protecting the integrity of the system should be focusing more on public statements by the Democratic candidates regarding Trump’s guilt and their desire to prosecute him than on this kind of activity.

Anyway, Fox News apparently edited out the chant in its footage of Trump’s appearance, and he probably thinks that everyone at the game loved him, because that’s what he always thinks.

You can make a good argument, as David Leonhardt does, that health care is getting far too much time and attention during the debates. However, as an illustration of the philosophical differences between realos and fundis, health care plans are hard to beat. That is undoubtedly the reason the debate moderators like to lead with that issue.

Elizabeth Warren has decided to release a detailed health care plan in the next few weeks. While we obviously don’t know its contents yet, we can safely assume the following:

1. Warren loves wonks, and they love her. As a result, you can expect the plan to be molded and endorsed by some of the best health care wonks in the country.
2. Nevertheless, it will be based on assumptions that are highly questionable, simply because that can’t be helped.
3. Warren will expect her critics to defer to the expertise of her wonks. They won’t; instead, they will hire their own wonks, who will reach vastly different conclusions.
4. The dispute over the merits of the Warren plan will be the focal point, other than impeachment, of the campaign. The public will believe whatever it wants to believe.
5. In the meantime, the risk aversion issue will hang out there, and nothing about the Warren plan will resolve it, because plans are one thing, and hard reality something completely different. The public understands that. Warren doesn’t; she thinks the combination of will and enormous brains can solve any problem. Just like the best and the brightest and Vietnam, right?

Americans aren’t stupid; they know their health care system is terrible. They are, however, generally risk-averse; they’re afraid (not without reason) that any attempt to completely remake the system by the government will actually leave them worse off. Add the hundreds of billions of dollars in vested interests on the part of providers and insurance companies to the equation, and you have a recipe for stasis. That’s where we are right now.

So how would you go about building a consensus for meaningful change? You would start by assuming that only incremental reforms are realistically possible. You would then move on to the low-lying fruit, such as controlling drug prices. You could take some of the proceeds from tax increases on the wealthy and use them to cut copayments within the framework of the existing system. Finally, you could at least consider adding a public option; that’s about as far as the envelope could be pushed, and even that might not be possible.

Like many other realos, I suspect, I would be happier if one of the Biden replacements caught fire. Historically, the Democratic Party has always fared better with a young, sharp, and vigorous nominee. But, for a variety of reasons, that hasn’t happened this time, and there isn’t much reason to believe that it ever will.

At some point, the only realistic choices will be Biden and Warren. For me, it will be around the November debate. Until then, it is still ok to hold on to my money and dream the impossible dream . . .

It wasn’t that long ago that Supreme Court nominations were viewed as legislative nothingburgers. If you don’t believe me, consider that Earl Warren, Harry Blackmun, and David Souter were nominated by Republican presidents, and Felix Frankfurter and Byron White were nominated by Democrats.

But that was then, and this is now. The culture wars, with their vast legal implications, have polluted the nomination and confirmation process. Both sides view control of the presidency as a life and death matter for their values. The stakes have become much too high, and the hearings are almost uniformly ugly.

Mitch McConnell is grimly driving right-wing judicial nominations through the Senate in the hope of creating a permanent barrier to future left-wing legislation. Some Democrats have responded by proposing to pack the Supreme Court. That is exactly the wrong response. It will further damage the reputation of the Court and invite retaliation in kind from the GOP; it would also deepen the divide between blue and red in a way that threatens the stability of our country.

The correct reaction is to try to find a way to make the process less, not more, political. I would suggest two measures: bring back the filibuster for judges in order to avoid the appointment of radicals on either the right or left; and change the Constitution to provide for limited and staggered terms, so every president has the ability to appoint some justices, and the loss of any particular election does not represent such a catastrophe for either side.

It’s a long shot, to be sure, but it would be worth trying.