Cromwell

Lindsey Graham has once again come to Palm Beach to discuss the upcoming campaign with the man on golf cart, who only left him waiting a half hour this time.

T: Linseed! How are you doing?

G: I’m fine, Mr. President.

T: It’s good to see that at least one of my prominent sycophants hasn’t deserted me.

G: I couldn’t stand to lose the access. Or the free golf.

T: So why are you here?

G: We need to talk about the campaign. Some of your potential opponents are about to announce, and we have to put a strategy in place to deal with them.

T: Nobody has announced yet. They’re all RINO wimps.

G: Still–some of them probably will.

T: Name them off, and I’ll tell you how to deal with them.

G: Nikki Haley is supposedly going to announce in two weeks.

T: God bless her! She’ll help split the anti-Trump vote, but she can’t win. The base isn’t going to vote for a brown woman who sucked up to me and promised never to run against me. I’ll just ignore her and let nature take its course.

G: Mike Pence.

T: The first of the Killer Ps! He’ll get some votes from the ultra-anti-abortion crowd. I can’t really do anything about that. The rest of the base wanted to hang him. He’s no real threat to me.

G: Pompeo.

T: The other Killer P! He served under me and openly supported everything I said and did. All I have to do is remind the base of that. Besides, he has no charisma.

G: Larry Hogan.

T: He’ll get about ten anti-Trump votes in Maryland, but that’s it. The more of these guys, the merrier. All they do is split the anti-Trump vote. We encourage them–not discourage them.

G: Liz Cheney.

T: Ignore her. Refuse to debate her. She’s not a real Republican.

G: Marco Rubio.

T: He has too many scars from 2016 to run again. Anyway, I can make a deal with him. He can run the State Department in relation to Latin America just the way he did before. That’s what he really wants to do.

G: Ted Cruz.

T: I don’t think Ted has the nerve to run again. If he does, he’ll just be competing with the others for votes in the same lane. Of course, you could argue that Ted operates in his own obnoxious lane, but there aren’t many votes there.

G: Greg Abbott.

T: Do you really think the base is going to vote for a guy in a wheelchair? That’s even worse than being a POW. What a loser!

G: And, of course, the elephant in the room–DeSantis.

T: He’s the only real threat. Come back after he announces and I’ll tell you my plan for dealing with him.

Graham leaves.

Both the woke left and the reactionary right agree that the state and local police are an army of occupation directed at large minority communities. To the right, this is a regrettable necessity to protect “real Americans” from the predations of savages; to the left, it is an obvious and obnoxious manifestation of institutional racism.

Effective policing, of course, is only possible with the active support of the community. The trick, therefore, is to prove the extremists on both sides wrong.

According to Governor DeSantis, any references to Black History Month in any public school, local government, or even in the MSM will be prosecuted as a violation of Florida’s new “Stop Woke” statute. “This is just another way to promote diversity, which we don’t need in this state,” said DeSantis, who went on to explain that “America is for real Americans, and black people can’t be real Americans. Heck, their ancestors didn’t even want to be here. How can they be real Americans? Why would we take any interest in their history? Why would we want our kids to learn about it, when they could be using their valuable time reading about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson?”

Of course, this hasn’t happened. Yet.

You can’t make a plausible argument that birth control is murder, so it is perfectly possible for a red person to acquiesce to the one, but not the other. If your objective is to grow the domestic population (Douthat) or impose a severe sanction on sexual immorality (most reactionaries), however, birth control is a problem. It needs to go.

Douthat, as a conservative Catholic, undoubtedly opposes birth control and wants it to be banned, but I can’t remember him ever making that case in his NYT column. Why not? He probably thinks it is a bridge too far for his readers. He’s probably right, too; the vast majority of American Catholics ignore Catholic teachings on that issue.

Griswold notwithstanding, I suspect you are going to see some serious efforts in blood red states to ban birth control for the reasons listed above. Let’s hope so, because for the left, it will be the gift that keeps on giving.

Joe Manchin thinks he can be the honest broker in a deal between the Democrats and the House Republicans. He is confident that Kevin McCarthy will deal with him in good faith. Is he right?

When McCarthy talks to Manchin and Biden, he will do his best to sound reasonable. When he talks to MTG and Matt Gaetz, he will be a cheerleader for burning it down. You can’t trust anything he says, because his principal tactic for remaining Speaker is to tell every person he sees what he thinks that person wants to hear.

In other words, good luck, Joe. You’re going to need it. You’re not negotiating with McCarthy; you’re negotiating with the Chaos Caucus.

The “Only Blue Lives Matter” crowd believes that real Americans have an obligation to give state and local law enforcement personnel their unconditional support, regardless of what unfortunate atrocities they may commit in any given location, because they are the only line of defense between us and an urban minority population that is essentially made up of savages. The “Defund the Police” group, on the other hand, thinks the police are an occupying army that does more harm than good, and should be eliminated. If the number of crime victims goes up dramatically as a result, that is just acceptable collateral damage.

Both of these positions are ridiculous. What we need is effective law enforcement with community support, not an occupying or a demoralized army. More official brutality (racist or otherwise) is not the answer to crime; neither is indifference to victims.

The Ukrainians need tanks to go on the offensive, so it is hardly surprising they are asking for them. I felt last year that the request should be granted, as it is unlikely that the tanks would be used for operations within Russia’s borders. NATO has finally taken my decidedly non-professional advice. Ukraine fans shouldn’t get their hopes too high, however; tanks are most effective when massed, and it isn’t clear that they will be getting enough to make much of a difference.

The Ukrainians also want advanced fighters. I didn’t, and don’t, support this request. There is little evidence that the Russian Air Force controls the skies, fighters are very expensive, extensive training for pilots would be required, and we don’t exactly want the Russians shooting our planes down and reverse engineering them. The costs outweigh the benefits in this instance.

Richard Nixon might have lacked anything we would call charisma, but he was our first successful culture warrior. His positions on school integration, drug use, and anti-war demonstrations sound a lot like predecessors of DeSantis’ war on wokeness. They worked, too; DeSantis, whose gruff, standoffish personality somewhat resembles his, is undoubtedly hoping for a similar result.

There are two major differences between the two, however. First of all, Nixon had vast experience dealing with other, more compelling issues; the culture war thing was just an opportunistic add-on to an already full resume. By contrast, we have little idea of where DeSantis stands on the genuinely important issues of the day. Nixon also made some token efforts to unite the country, because he knew it was part of the job. DeSantis won’t do that; he will just feed red meat to reactionaries and oppress everyone else.

Whatever else you might say about Trump’s response to the virus, the vaccine was created on his watch, so he is entitled to some credit for it. As a result, you would think he would be attacking DeSantis for questioning the value of “his” vaccine. Instead, he is essentially calling DeSantis too responsible for locking down his state during the early stages of the pandemic. What’s going on here?

It’s simple: Trump sees swagger as such an integral part of his appeal that he would rather be strong, irresponsible, and ineffective than prudent and successful. That’s why he wouldn’t wear a mask even if it put both his health and his re-election in jeopardy.

Without Twitter or the unconditional support of Fox News, Donald Trump is a paper tiger. Nevertheless, as of today, he has no official opposition in the race for the GOP nomination. DeSantis has an excuse for this, as he clearly wants to polish his anti-wokeness resume during the legislative session before he announces, but most of the rest of the potential contenders don’t. What conclusions should we draw from this?

First, that Trump’s opponents are still afraid of him. Second, that a paper tiger might as well be a real one if you don’t have the courage to confront him. Finally, do you really want to send someone who is afraid of a hostile tweet to take on Xi and Putin?

We all know that Donald Trump is completely transactional. He demands loyalty, but gives none. He believes in power, not ideals. He only cares about himself.

So what do you make of Trump’s fury at the pro-life absolutists? This otherwise intensely idealistic group made a profoundly corrupt deal with the man on golf cart in order to get a compliant Supreme Court. Now that they have what they want from the Court, their message to Trump seems to be, what have you done for me lately? There are other, more attractive fish in the sea.

Their lack of loyalty proves that they are as transactional as he is, which only serves him right. Turnabout is fair play.

Republicans traditionally draw a clear distinction between tax cuts (good, because they provide incentives for investment, and taxation is theft, anyway) and spending (wealth redistribution is bad and strengthens the hammock of dependency). As a result, their efforts to cut the deficit always focus on spending. Does that make sense?

No, because the deficit doesn’t know if it is growing due to spending increases or revenue shortfalls. Furthermore, many of the programs enacted during the first two Biden years were actually framed as tax cuts. The stimulus, for example, was a tax cut. So are most of the green energy provisions of the IRA.

The fact is that the GOP doesn’t really care about this bogus distinction; what it wants is tax cuts on capital, not targeted tax cuts designed for purposes dear to the left. It will fight to increase taxes on people and programs it dislikes.

A black man has been murdered by out-of-control cops in Memphis, and the usual culture war narratives are already spewing forth. From the woke left, we hear this is more proof that America is irredeemably racist, and that the police are oppressors who should be defunded; from the authoritarian right, we are told that the guy is responsible for his own death, and that the real villains are the people who demonstrated afterwards. Never mind the fact that the cops who did the killing were black, and that the tapes apparently show absolutely no sign of violent resistance; those facts inconveniently get in the way of a good story.

Let me ask you this: would this murder have taken place if the victim had been white, and if it had, would it be a national story? We don’t know. We just don’t. We don’t even know if George Floyd would have died if he had been white. We just know that the policemen responsible for these actions acted outrageously and viciously for reasons only truly known to them.

The standard narratives don’t help. This is a single event of extreme brutality. It doesn’t stand for all of America, and it probably doesn’t even stand for the whole of the Memphis PD. It doesn’t prove that the system is racist, and it doesn’t prove that the system isn’t racist. If we want the answer to that question, we will need a lot more than one data point.

Proudhon famously said “Property is theft.” (Well, he said it in French.) He had something of a case for this statement in 1840, because the predominant form of wealth was land, and the rich couldn’t very well claim to have created it; if you were a land baron, chances are that some family member in the distant past used force or guile to steal it from its previous owner. Today, of course, land is not the primary kind of wealth, and we recognize that ideas, management expertise, and capital help to create value, as well. In today’s world, therefore, Proudhon is clearly wrong.

The GOP turns Proudhon on his head; it believes taxes are theft. To the average Republican, capitalists are job-creating superyachts, and the rest of us are just dinghies drafting in their wake. Every investor is Henry Ford or Steve Jobs; he should be celebrated and taxed as lightly as possible. That, of course, ignores the fact that a large percentage of capital is inherited, and the rest of it would be useless without courts, infrastructure, law enforcement, and an educated labor force, none of which was created by the self-proclaimed “makers”. Someone has to pay to build, operate, and maintain all this stuff. It might as well be the rich, who benefit disproportionately from it; after all, they have more to lose from feeble government than you and I do.

The bottom line is that the labor theory of value is incomplete, but so is the idea that capital is solely responsible for economic growth. Both have legitimate claims; neither has a monopoly on justice. The task of government is to strike a balance that provides adequate incentives for entrepreneurs and a reasonable degree of protection for everyone else.

MBS is the power behind a semi-feudal hereditary monarchy; Xi is the head of a bureaucratic state driven by a 19th and 20th century ideology. They don’t seem very similar at first glance.

But they are both autocrats, and they have something else in common: they can’t stand dissenters. And so, while MBS ultimately permitted women to drive, he imprisoned women who fought for the very same right; similarly, Xi changed his covid policies in response to public demonstrations, but he is going after anyone who went out on the street to demand those very same changes.

Are you surprised? That’s what autocrats do. As a matter of self-preservation, they may take public opinion into account, but conceptually, they don’t view it as relevant.