Cromwell

If you ask a reactionary why he gets so worked up about illegal immigration, you are likely to get two responses. Let’s analyze them:

1. THEY TAKE JOBS AWAY FROM REAL AMERICANS AND DEPRESS WAGES: Most of the numerous studies on this subject don’t support that argument, even under historically normal conditions. Today, we have a labor shortage, which has resulted in inflation and declining real wages for many “real Americans”, so the argument has no validity whatsoever.
2. THEY ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT THAN WE ARE, AND THEY WILL SWAMP OUR CULTURE: As the Democrats have learned to their cost over the last two elections, Hispanics are not culturally monolithic. However, as a generalization, it is fair to say that they are socially conservative but believe government should play a large role in improving the lot of its citizens. That is exactly what reactionaries believe, as well. In addition, some parts of Hispanic culture have become embedded in ours, as well. The clear us and them distinction made by reactionaries consequently makes little sense.

The bottom line here is that the purported rationales aren’t very compelling. That leaves you with racism and the annoying sound (to Americans) of spoken Spanish. Those, I’m afraid, are what really motivate most reactionaries.

At first glance, Benedict and Donald Trump appear to have nothing in common. Benedict was highly literate and articulate. He had a well-developed ethical system that wasn’t based on power. He wasn’t narcissistic or corrupt. He gave up power with grace. Above all, he wanted desperately to strengthen the establishment, not to burn it down. All of these factors weigh heavily in his favor if you compare the two.

But Benedict, like Trump, believed in drawing lines and excluding people who did not completely buy into his program. Just as Trump sees a distinction between “Real America” and people like me, Benedict wanted to enforce the line between traditional Catholics and everyone else. In Trumpian terms, he threw red meat to his base and showed little interest in reaching out to anyone else. As a clerical politician, he was a one-trick pony, and a failure, just like the man on golf cart.

Benedict’s papacy did not extend into the Trump years. You have to imagine that he would have been an AAT–appalled by Trump’s personal shortcomings, but grateful enough for his reactionary rhetoric and judicial choices to keep his mouth shut. He would be a DeSantis supporter today.

Paul Krugman thinks the allegedly brilliant Elon Musk is making an obvious mistake by going full MAGA on Sewer and thereby alienating the primarily blue person customer base for Tesla. Is he right?

Yes, and it’s actually worse than that. The average flamboyant right-wing businessman can count on reactionaries to come to his aid by buying his product if he is attacked from the left. In this instance, however, the red base is totally committed to fossil fuels. It is never going to embrace electric cars just to bail Musk out; coal miners and oil executives are much more important.

Musk is in danger of finding himself a man without a country. A man without money would come next.

In commemoration (celebration?) of Former Papal Guy’s death, I’m going to do an entire weekly series on Benedict’s thought and legacy. You may wonder why the life of an old man who hasn’t been pope for ages is worthy of such attention. I won’t leave that question unanswered.

There are two reasons. First, Benedict’s ideology was, and remains, a source of inspiration for many prominent figures of the New Right. The arc of GOP thought is currently bending in their direction, so they can’t be ignored. Second, I am quite certain that Benedict, in a different time, would have had me burned at the stake for insisting upon the primacy of logic and experience over his personal authority. Even Xi and Putin wouldn’t go that far, to say nothing of Trump and DeSantis.

It’s a lot to forgive–way too much, in fact. I will discuss it in more detail throughout the week.

These will be the biggest stories of 2023:

1. RUSSIA/UKRAINE: Both Putin and NATO will escalate slowly and in a reciprocal way, without moving the needle much. By the end of the year, there is some momentum for a reasonable diplomatic settlement, as a total military victory for either side seems less and less plausible.
2. TURKEY: With an election coming soon and the economy in trouble, Erdogan stirs the nationalist pot in order to divert the attention of his voters. A war with Greece looks imminent for a time, but the usefulness of the crisis ends, so Erdogan slowly pulls back from the brink.
3. CHINA: See “Turkey” above, with Taiwan replacing Greece and without the election part.
4. IRAN: Given that Iran is now effectively an ally of Russia, a war to stop the export of weapons, eliminate the nuclear threat, and weaken the power of the regime to control dissent would make some sense on its face. Biden really doesn’t want another Middle East war, however, so it doesn’t happen.
5. NORTH KOREA: With all possible diplomatic solutions exhausted, and an aggressive war unthinkable, the US and the rest of the world quietly faces facts and learns to live with Kim’s nukes.

DONALD TRUMP: To live under an ethical system that isn’t based solely on power.

RON DESANTIS: To develop some empathy for the 50 percent of Americans who don’t agree with him on issues involving race and sex.

PROGRESSIVES: To read the Serenity Prayer every day. Their agenda is going nowhere for the next two years.

KEVIN MCCARTHY: To grow a spine.

JOE BIDEN: Since DeSantis, not Trump, is likely to be the GOP nominee, to make plans for an early retirement. Barring that, to build a time machine.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: To paraphrase Chris Christie during Sandy, to get his ass out of Ukraine.

XI JINPING: To chill out and loosen up a bit. It’s in the best interests of himself, his country, and the world.

THE RIGHT-WING MAJORITY ON THE SUPREME COURT: To keep the counterrevolutionary stuff to a dull roar to preserve what is left of the Court’s legitimacy.

AYATOLLAH KHAMENEI: To die as soon as possible in order to free his people.

JUST ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE: Happy New Year!

Here they are. Don’t take them to Vegas:

1. DEBT CEILING CRISIS: After about a month of excruciating twists and turns, a revolt of the handful of moderates in the House results in a deal with only symbolic gains for Republicans just before the deadline.
2. IMPERIAL SUPREME COURT: The counterrevolution lives! The Court eliminates affirmative action in school admissions (with language likely applying its reasons to other forms of affirmative action), gives federal courts effective jurisdiction over only those election issues that favor Republicans, destroys Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, and permits the litigation on Title 42 to continue. There is plenty of grumbling about the Court’s legitimacy, and judicial reform emerges as a key issue in the 2024 election.
3. INFLATION/INTEREST RATES: Inflation eases. The Fed continues to talk ferociously, but decides not to cause a deep recession in order to bring the rate down from about four to two percent.
4. BIDEN RUNS: While DeSantis has emerged as the clear GOP favorite, Biden ignores my advice and runs without meaningful opposition from the left.
5. DESANTIS RULES: A large and motley crew of Republicans runs for president, most of them figures from the Trump days. They are still standing at the end of 2023, but it is clear from all of the polls that the race boils down to Trump and DeSantis. Their relationship has gone from strained to poisonous, to the benefit of everyone whose brain operates in the 21st century.

At all points during my lifetime–probably, at all points since the end of the Thirty Years War–the pope of the day has faced a choice: do I embrace modernity, emphasize the softer parts of Christ’s message, and reach out to my ideological opponents; or build walls, enforce discipline, and hang on desperately to what I’ve got? This division corresponds nicely to the red-blue split in American politics.

Francis is a blue pope. Benedict was the quintessential red one. In what he would have considered a better time, he would have burned heretics with gusto. Like Trump, but with less justification, he always sounded fake when he talked about love and compassion. He wanted to kick your ass if you didn’t fall into line. In the end, the world kicked his.

The New Right will be devastated; leaving aside his age and infirmities, Benedict would have been the perfect head of state for the theocracy they want to build in America. Me, not so much. I will miss Benedict about as much as I miss Scalia, with whom he had much in common.

I made six predictions for this year on New Year’s Day, all of which addressed major themes for the year. I was clearly right about three items: the virus gradually became endemic; the Democrats were not wiped out; and a smaller version of the BBB did pass. I was clearly wrong about Trump waiting until 2023 to announce his candidacy. I was debatably right about the state of the economy, although interest rates have gone higher than I anticipated, and will go higher still. I was mostly wrong about foreign policy; there was no war with Iran, but Russia did, in fact, invade Ukraine.

So I’m good, but hardly perfect. That’s not exactly a surprise. Keep that in mind when I post my predictions for 2023 over the next few days.

Consider just the ripple effects of the Ukraine war. Food and gas prices soar all over the world. Inflation results in higher interest rates and imperils governments. Germany and Japan agree to massive defense spending increases. Finland and Sweden apply to join NATO. All meaningful political opposition is crushed in Russia. Extreme American right-wingers support Putin against NATO, partly because the brutal Russian military isn’t “woke.” It’s an impressive list.

And those are just the secondary effects of the war. The main event is the attempt by a small, flawed democracy to retain its independence from Putin’s fascist, imperialist state. A lot of people have expended a lot of energy to analyze the war in different terms, but it really is that simple. This is a battle of good against evil, and evil has to be resisted, or it will continue to push the envelope.

Time Magazine got it right. Zelensky is the Man of the Year for 2022. It was a no-brainer.

It’s January, and the new House of Representatives has been seated, but the GOP can’t find a majority for the new Speaker. Countless votes are taken, but the extreme right-wing dissidents are dug in, so nothing changes. Finally, McCarthy reaches out to a handful of moderate Democrats, who agree to support him on one extremely important condition: he has to promise a vote on a clean bill lifting the debt ceiling even though the majority of his caucus won’t go along. McCarthy agrees, wins the election, and keeps his promise. A handful of GOP moderates votes to lift the debt ceiling, and a crisis is averted.

Do I really expect this to happen? Of course not, but hope springs eternal, particularly in a new year.

The Title 42 and student debt cases have a lot in common. Both involve unusual exercises of executive power based on the pandemic; in both cases, red states have challenged the use of that power; and in both cases, standing is going to be a major issue. There are significant differences, however. In the Title 42 case, the states are objecting, not to the use of pandemic powers, but to Biden’s decision to stop using those powers; the standing question in the Title 42 case relates more to the timing of the state objections than to the nature and degree of the injury; the states have a much better argument on the merits of the student debt case; and the Supreme Court is processing the cases differently. The student debt case will be decided in its entirety in short order; the Title 42 case has been broken up and will be slow rolled.

How will these cases be resolved? The Court should find against the states on the standing issue in the student debt case, but it won’t; Biden and the students will lose on both the process and the merits. On the Title 42 case, I can’t believe that even this Supreme Court will find that Biden has some sort of legal obligation to continue to use extraordinary pandemic powers under the changed circumstances, so I expect the government to “win” the case in the end. The Court, however, is clearly determined to put off that decision to the last possible moment in order to avoid inconveniencing the red states. Biden’s “win” will, in reality, be a loss for the asylum seekers, fair play, and the rule of law.

The red states involved in the Title 42 litigation weren’t parties to the original proceedings. Worse, and even more importantly, they transparently have no case on the merits. Given their indifference to fighting the pandemic at home, they cannot plausibly argue that the CDC acted capriciously by determining that Title 42 is no longer defensible as a public health measure. A “normal” Supreme Court would not, therefore, have involved itself in this litigation.

The current Supreme Court, however, is anything but “normal.” It extended the stay, pending a final decision on the red states’ right to intervene in June. It did not agree to hear the case on the merits at that time; if the Court finds that the red states had standing, the merits will be considered by the Court of Appeals on a slower track. As a result, the final decision on the case may be over a year away.

In other words, five justices have decided to slow roll this case in order to keep the stay in place as long as possible even though they have to know that the asylum seekers will ultimately win on the merits. The Court is trampling on the rights of litigants purely for purposes of political expediency; even Biden, whose lawyers said all the right things in public, is probably quietly relieved.

Sounds like Korematsu for the 21st century, doesn’t it? If push comes to shove and your rights are at stake, you can’t rely on this Court to defend them if it is politically inconvenient.

Kevin McCarthy begged GOP senators to vote against the omnibus bill in the hope of pushing it into the laps of the new GOP House. It didn’t work; the bill passed the Senate with plenty of GOP support. In fact, the vote wasn’t even close. What do we learn from that?

Two things. First, that an impending blizzard just before Christmas is a wonderful tool to get politicians to concentrate. Second, that GOP senators have very little confidence that the new GOP House will behave reasonably and responsibly. They are, of course, correct about that.

Assume, for purposes of argument, that the American economy has adjusted to the impacts of the war and the pandemic. Supply chain issues are a thing of the past. Gas and food prices are no longer soaring. The traditional balance between spending on goods and services has been restored. As a result, inflation has declined to about 3 or 4 percent.

But that number is still uncomfortably high by the standards of the last 30 years. It is being driven by two phenomena. First, wage increases are still outpacing productivity gains as a result of labor shortages. Second, many companies have discovered that Americans will pay more for their products than they previously suspected. Profits are consequently increasing, the stock market is doing well, and consumer demand remains at a relatively high level.

What can be done to resolve these issues? The obvious response to labor shortages is to liberalize our immigration quotas. That, of course, is a political non-starter. American consumers can start refusing to tolerate unwarranted price increases as their pandemic savings dwindle. Finally, the Fed can try to destroy consumer confidence by raising rates to the point that stock, bond, and real estate prices are crushed. That’s the real danger in 2023.