Cromwell

I’ve been watching a docudrama called “The American West” on Amazon Prime over the last week. It’s a bit oversimplified and hokey, but the acting is good, and the characters are vivid. I recommend it.

Anyway, while I was watching it, it occurred to me that I was looking at the Republican world view: an America soaked in testosterone, marked by anarchy and violence, in which the most important qualities were strength and self-reliance. It is the opposite of the welfare state.

There are three problems with the use of the analogy in today’s world. First, the old West died quickly, because it outlived its usefulness. Anarchy is bad for business. Second, there is no rugged individual solution to problems like the pandemic and climate change. Finally, Wyatt Earp wasn’t a whiner. Donald Trump is.

GOP candidates used to talk a great deal about the importance of nominating judges who would exercise judicial restraint. You don’t hear that anymore. Why?

For two reasons. First, the GOP is now under the effective control of the Reactionary faction, which wants to roll back the clock, not preserve the status quo. Judicial activism in the form of overturning precedents is necessary to achieve that goal. Second, the GOP has more or less given up any attempt to win the support of a majority of Americans, and now prefers to suppress votes to remain in power. Why would Republicans support a judicial philosophy that calls for deference to the popular will, as expressed through legislation, if they think the country is run by an immoral majority?

The USSR presented a very serious military and ideological threat to the countries of Western Europe during the Cold War. No reasonable person could look at the regimes of the Warsaw Pact and wonder what his fate would be if the USSR were to move the Iron Curtain to the west. And so, in spite of occasional objections and ambivalence, the US could rely on its NATO allies when push came to shove.

China presents a very different challenge for the EU. It is not a military threat, and it does not seek to overthrow any European government. At worst, it seeks to turn the EU countries into economic dependents, and to stifle any criticism of its political system, its human rights practices, and its foreign policy. As a result, the US can’t expect the same degree of support from its NATO allies that it received during the Cold War.

What does this mean for American foreign policy? That the EU nations will be of very limited assistance in dealing with Chinese military activity in Asia—hence, the Australian submarine deal. We will need help from our Asian friends, not Europe, in confronting those challenges. You can consequently expect America to slowly and quietly pull some of its resources out of NATO, and to turn the responsibilities for dealing with Russian aggression over to the Europeans. Second, the focus of America’s diplomacy with the EU relative to China will be on economic matters of mutual interest, not military issues. Third, the EU is going to do its best, for business reasons, to avoid choosing between China and America. The real point of decision will be on tech issues with national security implications. How will the mop flop here? Only time will tell, but it is likely that the EU will not be united on these matters.

People my age will remember the old Fram oil commercial in which a mechanic told the audience they would have to pay him now or later. Climate change is a lot like that; the bills are already coming due, but will get much worse in the future. If we don’t invest in green energy today, the remedial costs will be incalculable.

The GOP can’t bring itself to accept this trade-off, partly for ideological reasons, and partly out of short term self-interest. They could embrace a carbon tax with offsets, avoid any other interference in the market, and reasonably claim to be responsible. Instead, they are going to pay the electoral price in the longer run, and more severe intrusions into personal freedom will be required to address the inevitable disruptions caused by rising temperatures.

Thomas Edsall wrote a typically windy column about the relationship between racism and opposition to abortion rights a few days ago. The reality is that the two run in parallel, and are often found in the same people, but are not identical.

The syllogism on abortion typically runs like this:

1. God is a man. The Bible says so.
2. Man was created first. He is the default, as it were, and consequently has the right to rule.
3. Eve ruined everything by succumbing to Satan, and persuading Adam to do likewise.
4. Women, following Eve, are responsible for all sexual sins through their ability to tempt men from their adherence to God’s law. As a result, their behavior must be strictly controlled by men. Prohibiting abortion is an obvious part of that package.

If this sounds like something the Taliban would say, so be it. When you combine these attitudes with lost status for men in the knowledge economy, you have a formula for instability.

On the Democrat Senator Joe.

I can’t tell just which way he will go.

Dispensing with coal’s

Not a plausible goal

For his state is bright red, as you know.

Some left-leaning commentators view the limitations on the SALT deduction in the Trump tax cut as progressive, because they impact wealthy people in blue states. I don’t agree, for two reasons: first, it is fundamentally unfair to require anyone to pay taxes on funds that he does not own or control, because they are legally obligated to the government; and second, because the SALT limitation was a gratuitous attempt by red state Republicans to injure people in blue states. It was spiteful, pure and simple.

Hurricane season always comes with a call for blue states to bail out the climate change deniers in the red Gulf Coast states. If I were a blue state member of Congress, I would demand an end to the SALT limitations for my constituents in exchange for disaster relief. The national solidarity street should run both ways, or neither.

A recent issue of The Economist was largely devoted to discussions about the evils of the illiberal left. The magazine acknowledged that the right is a bigger threat, but had nothing else to say about the danger from that quarter.

I will fill in the gaps for you:

1. While the illiberal left takes philosophical positions that are debatably false, the illiberal right accepts “facts” that are demonstrably false.
2. The illiberal left does not have a following among prominent members of the Democratic Party. The last American President is the leader of the illiberal right, and he has plenty of company.
3. The base of the Republican Party is unambiguously illiberal. The leadership has no interest in persuading it to change its views. Democratic voters chose a liberal to represent them in 2020.
4. The illiberal right supported an attempted insurrection. The Twitter left has never attacked liberal democracy in this country.

I don’t have much use for the illiberal left, but it should be obvious why I don’t waste much time and energy worrying about them.

The happiest man in America today is Gavin Newsom. The second-happiest is Terry McAuliffe, because Newsom just proved that running vigorously against Trump and the extreme right still works in blue states in 2021.

Whether it will continue to work in 2022 remains to be seen. In the meantime, the Trump playbook—exploit procedural advantages, whip up the base, and whine about a rigged election—has fallen short again. Will the GOP learn anything from the experience? Don’t hold your breath.

Standing directly in front of the man who expedited her nomination in the waning days of the Trump era, Justice Barrett argued yesterday that the Supreme Court is not a partisan institution, and that the public doesn’t understand the difference between politics and judicial philosophy.

Tell that to Justice Garland. I’m surprised Mitch didn’t burst out laughing.

To reiterate, it is true that most of the Supreme Court’s business is not partisan in a narrow sense, and that differences in jurisprudence matter, even among the members of the right-wing majority. It is also true, however, that the GOP has very clear positions on culture war issues, that these issues are often decided by the Supreme Court, and that Barrett was put on the Court specifically for the purpose of deciding the issues in favor of the GOP. To deny that the Court is a partisan institution at this point is to be willfully blind.

For the GOP, during the campaign, the economy was everything. Even staunchly “pro-life” Republicans called for the elderly to live normal lives and risk death for the sake of GDP and the Trump re-election effort.

Today, with a free, effective vaccine in place, it’s all about personal freedom, not the economy. Refusing the vaccine, of course, has the collateral effect of making Biden’s record look worse than it should. Coincidence? Possibly not.

If we were back in 2020, do you think for a minute that the GOP would be tolerant of anti-vaxxers, and so opposed to mandates? This is cynical, opportunistic libertarianism, not the real thing.

If you’re a CEO of a large American company, your primary interest is in maximizing profits and share prices. There are basically two ways to do that. One focuses on costs; keeping wages and taxes down obviously helps. If all businesses succeed in this, however, the result is inadequate demand and the dollar store economy. The alternative is to increase wages and deepen the welfare state in order to boost domestic demand. This is the crux of the Biden plan.

Business wants it all—low taxes and wages, but lots of workers and high demand. That can’t happen. As a result, the choice has been made. The dollar store economy, it is.

Right-wing critics of the new mandates argue they will just make the anti-vaxxers dig in. There is clearly some truth to that. Does that make the mandates a bad bet?

No. Biden is assuming that: the hard core vaccine opponents can only be motivated by sticks at this point; the number of people who will get the vaccine purely as the result of the mandates far exceeds the number who will now never get it for ideological reasons; the economy will improve as a result; and the mandates will have the strong support of the large majority of the population that took the vaccine and resents the irresponsibility of the anti-vaxxers.

My guess is that all of these assumptions are correct.

I have decided that I will no longer obey traffic laws when I am driving in red states. They are an infringement on my personal freedom. My car, my choice.

But, you say, I will be endangering other people if I just start running red lights. So what? It’s all about me, and my rights! I have the power, and the willingness to use it. If you can’t deal with that, just stay off the roads.

Osama is best considered as the political and intellectual heir to the anarchists who terrorized Europe and America around the turn of the 20th century. He thought that the 9/11 attacks would cripple the Great Satan, leave the Western world rudderless, and inspire Muslims to create the universal caliphate. Twenty years later, how does that look?

Osama was a failure, and not just because we killed him years later. While America overreacted to the attacks, engaged in imperial overreach, and is somewhat diminished on the world stage, the beneficiary has been China—not exactly a friend of militant Islam. The Islamic fundamentalists have discredited themselves all over the globe. Terrorism is on the wane. The world is far better prepared to deal with it. The universal caliphate, like the anarchist utopia, is still a distant dream; it is authoritarian government that is on the rise.