Cromwell

Effective gun control will never happen in America, for two reasons. First, the political system will never allow it, due to the identification of guns with the core values of the Republican Party, the filibuster, and the Supreme Court’s view of the Second Amendment. Second, even if you could somehow overcome all of the political hurdles, there is no practical way to enforce any such regulations. There are just too many guns, they are too easy to conceal, and their owners would respond with violence.

So, if you’re a law-abiding person who fears violence, what options are left? The only plausible choice is to arm yourself, even if you object to guns on principle. And so, in the end, the GOP will win; the country will have to rely on good guys with guns to stop the bad guys with guns.

Of course, the GOP’s definition of a bad guy with a gun probably includes liberals as well as criminals. That part may not work out so well for them.

Trump, Cruz, and the NRA quite naturally see no connection between the recent massacres and America’s incredibly lax gun regulations; instead, they attribute mass killings to “evil.” Since America is more, not less, religious than other comparable countries with no mass killing problem, our exceptionalism cannot logically be traced to poor values education. So where, then, did the evil come from? The only plausible answer, from the perspective of the right, is that the 1619 Project crowd is correct: America is an inherently evil empire.

And you thought they were flag-waving chicken hawks!

David Brooks thinks that red people have a communitarian view of morality, as opposed to the self-autonomy model used by blue people. Since he typically writes with a sociological bent, this is not surprising. Is he right?

He’s close, but not exactly right. The roots of red morality are authority and tradition. Authority, of course, comes primarily from religious scriptures. To the average reactionary, it is self-evidently correct and non-negotiable. Not coincidentally, it is also often self-interested; those in positions of power have every reason to think highly of tradition and authority.

The red views of morality have their historical origins in the medieval world, in which the purpose of political systems was to create a society of which God would approve; the interests of individual people were of no significance in this intellectual world. Blue morality has its roots in the world which came after Catholics and Protestants battered each other relentlessly, but inconclusively. I will discuss its premises and origins in a post tomorrow.

On the GOP leader named Cruz.

He just loves to be making the news.

When the subject is guns

And the cameras run

He will say something stupid on cue.

If you’re Mitch McConnell, the American political system is working just fine, thank you. The electoral system is biased against the left, and the filibuster prevents them from getting any sweeping social legislation through the Senate, but tax cuts for business can be approved through reconciliation. There’s no need to blow anything up. Life is good.

But if you’re a reactionary, life is about to get a lot more frustrating. Sure, on paper, you might be able to ditch the filibuster to get a national abortion ban approved, but your larger objectives of permanently transferring power to white Christians and shutting up the woke left are going to run into trouble with the judiciary immediately. How are you going to impose Christian values on the country without getting rid of the First Amendment and forcing regime change on blue states? It can’t be done under the current system.

You need to scrap the Constitution–at least, the longstanding interpretations of it– and start from scratch. How can you get there? It will take a ruthless, single-minded reactionary as president and something he can plausibly call an emergency. You can probably rely on the Supreme Court, the military, and your militias to take care of the rest.

Progressives think the deck is stacked against them. They’re right. The combination of the Electoral College, the unrepresentative Senate, and relentless GOP gerrymandering has made it very difficult for the Democrats to win elections regardless of public sentiment. Then, even if they do, the filibuster prevents them from moving much significant legislation through the Senate, and a right-leaning Supreme Court threatens to invalidate anything they can accomplish. It’s very dispiriting.

For all of this, the left, unlike the right, has shown faith in the system and the rules of the game. How long will that last? Will the evolving majority continue to tolerate minority rule even if it means, for example, that nothing can be done on inequality, guns, and climate change? Will the left simply lie down for an openly insurrectionist GOP in the long run?

I don’t think so.

It’s January 2023. The GOP has won narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. The first order of business for the House, of course, is to please the base by voting for a national prohibition on abortion. The bill passes quickly and goes to the Senate.

McConnell is in a difficult spot. He knows he’s going to look like a hypocrite if he acquiesces to the repeal of the filibuster. His overriding priority, however, is to maintain party unity, so he’s willing to go along with the vast majority of his party even if he has to swallow his principles if the bill has a chance to become law. The problem is that the votes simply aren’t there to get the job done. Collins, Murkowski, and Manchin aren’t going to vote to repeal the filibuster, and Romney is on the fence. Furthermore, Biden clearly isn’t going to sign the bill even if it passes. It isn’t going to happen–at least, not now.

McConnell isn’t going to expose himself to allegations of bad faith unless he can actually accomplish something important to the base. Both the bill and filibuster reform consequently die quietly in the Senate. Real action won’t happen until 2025 at the earliest.

If you ask someone who claims to be “pro-life” (we’ll call him Ted) why he opposes gun regulations, he will tell you, in effect, that freedom for law-abiding people is more important than the protection of life. But if you then ask him why he wants to crush the freedom to have an abortion, he will tell you that he believes human life is sacred.

Yeah, right! What he really means is that he believes in a hierarchical society, with God at the top, white Christian men immediately below Him, and everyone else way below that. The purpose of government, in his eyes, is to keep things that way. Scripture and self-interest coincide.

Years ago, I turned “American Woman” into “American Putin” for Trump. Now is the time to use it to give Ron DeSantis his due.

AMERICAN ORBAN

American Orban

Stay away from me.

American Orban

Brother, set me free.

__________

Don’t want you hanging around no more.

Don’t want to see your shadow no more.

Don’t need your anti-woke machine.

Don’t need your ugly Disney scene.

Culture wars can hypnotize.

Go tell someone else your lies.

___________

Now Orban, stay away.

American Orban, listen to what I say.

____________

Parody of “American Woman” by the Guess Who.

Due to its ideological commitment to self-reliance over governmental solutions, and its close ties to fossil fuel interests, the GOP is incapable of proposing and supporting any viable approaches to climate change. As a result, people will die in hurricanes and wildfires at an increasing rate, and the GOP will have nothing to offer them except thoughts and prayers. They are just collateral damage–unfortunate, but a price worth paying.

The situation with guns is exactly the same. Yesterday’s Texas school massacre demonstrated yet again that a good guy with a gun–and there are millions of them in Texas–won’t stop a bad guy with a gun until he has killed plenty of innocent people. What will come of this? Nothing, because the kids are just collateral damage in the eyes of Republican lawmakers. Since guns are right-wing icons, not objects, reactionaries will never give them up, no matter how high the price, unless, of course, the left arms, too, in which case all bets are off.

Once upon a time–and it wasn’t that long ago–the GOP was operated by and for business interests. Its primary concern was to limit the size, intrusiveness, and cost of government. The record will show that, over the last forty years, it was largely successful.

But that was then, and this is now. Today’s GOP is run by reactionaries, whose principal concern is to hijack government to fight and win culture wars. The GOP now believes in arbitrary interventions in the market in order to accomplish that purpose. It is also a force for instability and unscripted constitutional change, which is even worse for business than high taxes and heavy regulations.

If, as seems likely, the GOP wins control of both houses of Congress in November, a terrifying debt ceiling crisis is likely to result, with all of the risks that brings to investors and business interests. Will that prevent PBPs from supporting Republican candidates in November? Probably not, so don’t feel sorry for them if the inevitable occurs thereafter.

Marco Rubio thinks the tariffs should stay, as they give us leverage with the Chinese. Of course he does! He’s the architect of our unsuccessful attempt to depose Maduro with sanctions, and he still believes in the Cuba embargo. Hey, just because it hasn’t toppled the Cuban regime in its first sixty years doesn’t mean it won’t work tomorrow.

The tariffs are stupid. The cost of them is borne by American consumers, not the Chinese. China isn’t even abiding by the managed trade agreement that was the product of the tariffs. Shooting yourself in the foot does not create leverage.

The only reason Biden hasn’t jettisoned the tariffs by now is that he fears the political repercussions of looking soft on China. Well, how about looking soft on inflation? Why not take advantage of the inflation rate and use it as a pretext to ditch the tariffs? If the GOP wants to talk about being weak on China, he can respond by calling them inflation doves.

It’s an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. Let’s hope he takes advantage of it.

Opinion polls consistently show that Americans think their personal financial condition is very good, but that the economy as a whole is terrible. Paul Krugman is struggling to make sense of this apparent contradiction. Can we help him out?

The sense of personal well-being is based on savings and asset prices. The value of homes, in particular, has soared, so if you are an owner, your net worth has gone up substantially. The stimulus has helped, too. You never had it so good.

But opinions regarding the economy as a whole are not based on asset prices, or wage increases, or the low unemployment rate, but on the day-to-day experience with inflation. Most Americans have not been through an inflationary period before, and they don’t like it.

Finally, the media, including left-leaning TV networks, have focused exclusively and simple-mindedly on the evils of inflation. You never hear anything about the low unemployment rate, or on the fact that debtors are actually gaining from inflation. Every day, the story is the same–poor Americans can’t make it with rising prices.

Two items of considerable importance today:

1. Biden announced the creation of a watered-down version of the TPP. Since the significance of the TPP always revolved around its geopolitical, not its economic, impacts, that’s a step in the right direction. How big a step it is remains to be seen, given that agreement on trade rules tends to depend on increasing access to American markets, which has not been promised here. Let’s just hope we don’t have to listen to a lot of unjustified whining about it from the protectionist left.
2. Following a practice that most people would consider unfortunate, Biden got ahead of his skis and said, in response to a question, that America would provide military assistance to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. The bureaucracy immediately walked that back and announced that American policy on “strategic ambiguity” had not changed. The divergence between Biden and his staff on key foreign policy issues is starting to resemble the one between Trump and his advisers. The difference between the two presidents is that Biden tends to react emotionally and be too honest in response to questions, without really meaning to change American policy, whereas Trump genuinely disagreed with his advisers on many critical issues and said so. So far, the divergence between Biden and his staff does not appear to have done any lasting harm; perhaps it can be used as a form of good cop, bad cop.

There is still no resolution of the Chinese tariff issue, which, in my opinion, has been one of Biden’s greatest failures. More on that tomorrow.

As anyone who has priced the cost of international travel can tell you, airfares for flights to Europe have skyrocketed. There are several reasons for this, none of which have anything to do with the Fed: the failure of the airlines to react in a timely manner to the increased demand following the waning of the pandemic; increased gas prices; and the amount of excess savings generated by pandemic restrictions and the relief bills. What can happen to eliminate the problem?

Nobody borrows money from a bank to finance a vacation. To the extent trips are being financed by balances on credit cards, the interest rates were already so high, any increases will go largely unnoticed. Nothing the Fed can or will do will matter.

The problem will be solved by consumer resistance to the high prices. That’s how we’re handling it.