Cromwell

The last round of globalization should have been a win-win-win. Producers reduced their labor costs and increased their profits; consumers enjoyed lower prices; and displaced workers were supposed to be compensated by the producer and consumer groups, using the government as a channel, through direct repayments and effective training programs. The first two parts of the equation functioned as planned, but the third did not, and we are paying for it in the form of right-wing populism today. What went wrong?

A number of things. First of all, business owners who frequently believed they were job-creating supermen saw no reason to pay higher taxes to fund the programs necessary to compensate globalization victims, and they had the political clout to get what they wanted. To some extent, this was accomplished by feeding workers a steady diet of nostalgia and culture wars. For their part, the workers, whose social status depended largely on their previous employment, didn’t want government handouts; they permitted themselves to be convinced by opportunistic right-wing voices that the government had stolen their jobs, and that a vote for Republicans would bring them back. Finally, the displaced workers found it difficult to find jobs that fit their skills. It just isn’t that easy to turn a coal miner into a coder, and government funds for infrastructure and education in unremarkable rural areas don’t guarantee an economic rebirth.

Ron DeSantis’ new tag line is “Florida is the state where woke goes to die.” His intent is to use the power of the state to crush an ideology, however ill-defined. What does history tell us about his ability to accomplish his objective? Could it work in the nation as a whole?

If you’re the leader of a totalitarian state, the job is easy to define, if somewhat difficult to accomplish in practice: you identify the woke people and either shoot them or put them in prison. If you’re the head of state of a liberal democracy, it requires vast amounts of persistence, energy, and patience, probably over a decade or more. If you’re running an illiberal democracy, you will rely on measures that fall between these two poles: censorship; regulatory harassment; the loss of government benefits; and forced unemployment.

DeSantis, as you would expect, is choosing Option 3. Even he would probably shrink from Option 1, and he doesn’t have the time and patience for Option 2. Can it work, particularly in blue states? Probably only well enough to keep the right in power, which would be the actual ultimate objective. Just ask Viktor Orban.

When Republicans control the White House, they cut taxes on capital and watch indifferently as the deficit soars. When a Democrat is president, however, the GOP gets fiscal religion and insists the budget must be balanced. It is happening again. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

But even the deficit scold organizations concede that there is no realistic way to balance the budget in ten years. In the process of creating the now-mandated blueprint, the GOP House will have to propose huge cuts in defense, Social Security, and Medicare, because that’s where the money is. Cutting defense in these times looks like a huge risk; cutting Social Security and Medicare will disproportionately impact old white people who mostly vote Republican. The latter group has historically blown off claims from the Democrats that entitlements are at risk; it will be much harder to do that when the new blueprint is in place.

This is an enormous unforced error in the making. I doubt that any of the GOP presidential candidates, including Trump and DeSantis, will support it; after all, the electorate doesn’t really care about deficits. So what’s the point?

If it’s to get Democrats elected, I’m all for it.

If Clapton was God, Beck was the Holy Spirit.

C: The last time I called you together was before the election. What do you make of the election results and the aftermath?

M: I’m pretty happy about the election, but I’m concerned about the state of the Republican majority in the House.

S: I’m just the opposite. The election was a bust, but I feel really good about the House.

C: Why?

S: I’m obviously unhappy we didn’t get the red wave we expected. It would have been easier to burn it down with a majority in the Senate. But we have the House under control, and that’s probably good enough. McCarthy put the ball in our hands, and we’re going to run with it. Investigations, impeachments, and spending cuts for the undeserving poor–they’re all on the table now.

M: Winning the House means there will be no tax increases for the next two years. Losing the Senate means the nut jobs only have control of one of the legislative chambers. But the state of the House–good grief! Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moderate in this group! Just think about that!

S: That’s what’s so great about it. We’re really going to burn it down this time. Boehner and Ryan aren’t here to stop us this time.

M: So you think blowing up the economy by refusing to lift the debt ceiling is a good idea?

S: Absolutely! I don’t have any stocks or bonds, and I’m not on Social Security. What do I care? We need to send a message that everything should be changed.

M: Well, I do have investments, and I don’t want to lose them. Defaulting is totally unacceptable.

S: That’s why you’re a wimpy RINO.

C: Let’s talk about the debt ceiling. Will the Senate support raising it?

M: Yes. Mitch will make a deal the Democrats can accept. He thinks burning it down is terrible for business.

S: I agree. Mitch is a RINO wimp. He needs to go.

C: A minimum of five Republican House members will be required to raise the debt ceiling. Will they be there?

S: Over my dead body.

M: Probably not.

C: Why not?

S: Two reasons. Peer pressure, and no one wants to be the next Liz Cheney.

M: That’s exactly what worries me.

C: Then what?

M: Biden will find a theory and pay the bills, anyway.

S: We burn it down!

M: I’m out of here.

According to Michelle Goldberg, DeSantis has opened yet another new front in the culture wars by replacing the Board of Trustees of New College with a number of right-wing luminaries for the purpose of turning a famously progressive institution into a bastion of the right, similar to Hillsdale College. Professors and students who don’t like the new direction will be encouraged to leave.

The idea behind this presumably is to create a template for universities all over the country. Can it work?

Just limiting the focus of the discussion to New College itself, possibly, although collective bargaining agreements will make the immediate defenestration of the existing faculty difficult. On a more global scale, no, for the following reasons:

1. As I’ve noted before, academics are predominantly left of center for the same reasons that corporate CEOs are right of center: self-selection. There aren’t enough right-wing professors in this country to fill all of the jobs in academia even if you include thousands of opportunists.
2. The right has already lost Gen Z. How many students are going to flock to New Hillsdale to learn that climate change is a hoax, institutional racism is a myth, and the country needs more tax cuts for the wealthy?

The bottom line is that DeSantis and his ilk don’t really have the ability to transform higher education; they can only wreck it. They may be satisfied with that, but the country needs to resist it.

Let’s go with the Ukraine/World War I analogy for a minute. The abortive dash to Kyiv stands in for the failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914. The subsequent indecisive campaign in the Donbas looks a lot like the Race to the Sea and trench warfare in 1915. It’s now 1916. What does history say Putin will do?

1916 was the year the German military essentially took control of the government away from the Kaiser, transformed the economy to support the war, and completely mobilized the population to fight the Allies. Putin has already started down that road with his draft. The analogy breaks down somewhat with the economy, however; on the one hand, in spite of the punishing economic sanctions, Russia isn’t facing the equivalent of the British blockade, while on the other hand, Russia probably doesn’t have the existing industrial capacity to start cranking out all of the war material that it needs. As a result, Putin is trying to buy ammunition and weapons on the world market with his oil profits. That can only go so far; NATO’s productive capacity is far greater than his. Time is not on his side.

If we get to 1917, the analogy tells us Putin will escalate by attacking NATO supply lines; that would be the equivalent of unrestricted submarine warfare. Let’s hope it doesn’t go that far.

It’s easy to look at Biden’s record on immigration and find it, well, inglorious. From the perspective of the left, he has done little to ease the suffering of the deserving would-be immigrants; too much of the Trump machinery is still in place, and there have been no dramatic new programs to solve the ongoing problems. From the perspective of the right, the increase in border crossings is his fault; it wouldn’t have happened under Trump. Not much to cheer about there.

But let’s look at the bigger picture–what is the guy supposed to do? He is required to enforce the law written by Congress with the resources provided to him by Congress. He has no legal authority to create generous new amnesty programs for particularly deserving migrants. Even most of the right admits that the Trump system of deterrence by cruelty (at least in the case of family separations) isn’t appropriate. The criticism from both sides is, therefore, understandable, but it is not justifiable; nobody is proposing a plausible and better alternative.

Everyone knows the solution to the problem is a deal in which the right gets more border protection and the left gets a reasonable path to citizenship, particularly for Dreamers. Everyone also knows that the reactionaries in the GOP won’t accept that deal, and it won’t happen. As a result, the system will just blunder on, with only as much humanity as it can muster under difficult circumstances.

The book tells us that the Windsors are a dysfunctional family. From the historian’s perspective, this is not exactly breaking news. Remember Queen Caroline? Henry VIII? Henry II?

The difference, of course, is that political life in England was unimaginable without the monarchy in those days. Today, not so much, as Charles seems to understand, even if his mother probably didn’t.

But the UK needs some sort of a head of state separate from the PM of the day, and monarchist mumbo-jumbo probably brings in more money than it costs. That means the public dysfunction is not really a big deal in the larger picture.

In their completely different ways, both Charles and Harry are right; the problem with the monarchy is that it encompasses too many people. Focus the attention on the immediate family of the monarch and cut the other royal parasites loose to get real jobs and live unencumbered lives. That’s what Harry did.

If you do a survey of Russian military history from the Napoleonic Wars to the present, this is what you find:

1. It is quite common for the Russians to fight ineptly in the first stages of conflict;
2. Their performance tends to improve over time;
3. They do their best fighting on their home turf; and
4. They usually rely on manpower advantages, geography, and weather to overcome technological and tactical inferiority.

The conflict that is the most analogous to the Ukraine War during this timeframe, in my opinion, was the Crimean War, which was initially an imperialist adventure against the Turks, but ended as a war primarily against France and England, the two predominant European powers, in an area that is now claimed by both Ukraine and Russia. As we know, that war didn’t end well for the Russians.

The analogy to the current war is not perfect. NATO is not sending troops to fight directly with the Russians. Nevertheless, if you’re Putin, it should worry you, because if you insist it is an existential conflict, what happens if you lose?

A few weeks ago, I predicted that DeSantis would be looking for a face-saving way out of his dispute with Disney. The Hungarian Candidate will need the support of business to win the presidency; trampling on the free speech and property rights of a large (and much-loved) company isn’t exactly a good way to get it. Just make a deal and move on.

I was wrong. If my understanding of DeSantis’ new proposed legislation is correct, he has decided not to abolish the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but to put his appointees in charge of it. In effect, he’s telling Disney that he’s going to be running their Florida theme park.

If this is a serious proposal, and not just an opening bid, it isn’t going to end well for DeSantis. There are lots of Republicans out there for business to support. Why would they pick one who wants to boss them around?

Bolsonaro has reportedly moved into a rented house near Orlando. Well, of course he has. Every obnoxious domestic right-wing extremist already lives in Florida; why not open it up to tropical strongmen, too?

Look out Budapest–we’re coming for your crown!

I predict that Bolsonaro and thousands of his wealthy friends will stay beyond their legal right to do so and will become, in effect, illegal immigrants. Trump and DeSantis, who have zero compassion for poor, desperate women and children from Central America, will defend their right to be here, calling them true political asylum seekers. After all, they’re only illegal immigrants if they don’t agree with you.

If Marx was right about how history repeats itself, and the first event was a farce, doesn’t that mean the second event must be an even bigger farce? Based on today’s events in Brazil, the answer appears to be yes.

The January 6 wannabe insurrection had no reasonable chance of success without some extensive previous coordination with friendly elements of the military, but at least it took place with Congress was in session and doing something politically significant. The rioters in Brazil, however, attacked the office of the president when he wasn’t there, and invaded the legislative building when the legislature wasn’t in session. Their big accomplishment was to get on TV and damage some public property. What was the point of that?

Abortion is a wedge issue in today’s GOP, and federal abortion legislation isn’t going anywhere in the Senate, so even the most extreme GOP House members would be wise not to bring it up. The House is under the effective control of the Chaos Caucus, however, and nothing excites the base more than the abortion issue. In light of that, what happens next?

I think the base can be appeased in the short run with a wave of highly publicized, bogus investigations of Biden’s family and government, so I don’t think the issue will come up immediately. I suspect it will be a hot topic, however, before the end of the year.

Probably right after the Chaos Caucus votes to default on the debt.

My readers will know that I’m not generally an optimist by nature, so why am I so confident that inflation will ease this year? The answer lies in history.

The economic dislocations and resulting inflation caused by the pandemic look a lot like the adjustments required after the two world wars. The record shows that prices soared after both wars, as controls were lifted, production shifted back from military to consumer goods, and suppressed demand (fueled by excess wartime savings) was satisfied. In both cases, the rate of inflation returned to something far more normal after two years.

If the two-year rule holds, and I believe it will, 2023 should be the year the fever breaks.