Cromwell

It will come as no surprise to serious observers that the implementation of Brexit is not proceeding smoothly. Among other things, the UK government is flirting with reneging on the required soft Irish Sea border with the EU, and the predicted paperwork nightmare is slowing trade and driving up costs.

Fortunately for BoJo, the pandemic is putting these issues in the shade, but that will not last forever. Then what? The newly freed UK will have to deal with the following problems:

1. LOST GDP: At some point, the British public will start to notice that growth is being stunted as a result of Brexit. Growth isn’t everything, but it certainly isn’t nothing.
2. CONFLICTING VISIONS AMONG THE BREXITEERS: Brexit was sold to liberals as an opportunity to turn London into Singapore-on-Thames: an agile, minimal state open to engagement and investment with the entire world. Unfortunately, most Leave supporters saw the referendum as a means to be protected from the same forces of change and creative destruction that are so embraced by liberals. The two visions are mutually exclusive. Something is going to give.
3. SCOTTISH NATIONALISM: The Scots have a strong argument after Brexit and the last election that the UK government no longer speaks for them. There is little doubt that a second independence referendum would pass if it were held today. It won’t be, but the resulting friction will be an ongoing theme of the current administration.

How can these issues be resolved? I will throw out some ideas in two future posts.

The attitude of American conservatives towards government can be summed up in two words: it sucks! It can’t do anything right. It favors the weak and unfortunate over the strong and productive, and it takes away your money and freedom for all the wrong reasons. It can’t even do things that everyone wants properly. Better to dismantle it and give all of the money and power to rich businessmen who can get things done; then watch America soar!

The problem is that some problems simply refuse to be solved by rugged individuals. Then what do you do, if you’re a conservative? Here’s the menu:

1. PRETEND THE PROBLEM DOESN’T EXIST: The classic example of this is climate change, of course, but others include the rise of China (it’s about to implode, because, logically, it has no right to exist) and the pandemic (just ignore it and get on with your life).
2. CHANGE THE SUBJECT: Who cares about the pandemic? The real problem is Mr. Potato Head!
3. IF THE FIRST TWO FAIL, ACCEPT THE LOSS OF POWER TEMPORARILY AND DO YOUR BEST TO SABOTAGE THE DEMOCRATS’ RESPONSE: This was the GOP’s response to the Great Recession.

As a philosophy of government, this leaves something to be desired.

BoJo’s response to the pandemic has been a bit chaotic, because, well, BoJo has a chaotic brain. That led me to ask the question: how would Thatcher have dealt with the virus?

It’s an interesting question, because the evidence can take you in two completely different directions. On the one hand, Thatcher was driven and competent, listened to technical experts, and certainly was capable of imposing authority on her people when necessary. On the other hand, she obviously believed in economic freedom, and would have had issues with running up deficits to compensate people for enforced inactivity. Which of these trends would have prevailed?

My best guess is that Thatcher would have understood that her usual philosophical tool kit wouldn’t work in a pandemic, and would have reacted accordingly. We’ll never know.

The Whig Party, which essentially was an updated version of the Federalist Party, which in turn reflected the views of the late 17th and early 18th century version of the Whigs in the UK, died because it was split by the slavery issue. Some commentators have suggested that the current version of the Republican Party could be heading for the same fate. Are they right? How could it happen?

A GOP split is unlikely, but not completely impossible. The split, if it happens, would take place along factional lines–Reactionary vs. PBP. It could occur if the PBPs conclude at some point that there is no reasonable possibility of getting their beloved tax cuts and deregulation from the Reactionaries, as they always have in the past. There are, in turn, two ways this could happen:

1. The Reactionaries could completely abandon their support of tax cuts and deregulation in favor of a more populist, interventionist economic policy designed primarily for the benefit of white workers; or
2. The GOP could suffer several massive defeats, thereby convincing the PBPs that a party built on Potato Head politics has no future and cannot deliver the goods.

The latter looked possible immediately prior to the 2020 election, but is a very long shot today. The only real hope is #1–“national conservatism.”

If you’re Boris Johnson, and you’re being honest, how do you make the case for Brexit today? Here’s how I would do it:

“The EU has been ungovernable for years as a result of the addition of the former Warsaw Pact countries. There is no common sense of purpose, and no leadership. Its institutions don’t work, as evidenced by its failures with vaccination. There is no solution to the problems of the illiberal democracies and illegal immigration. The division between the wealthy Teutonic countries and everyone else is getting worse, not better. It lurches aimlessly from crisis to crisis. It’s a mess.

Do you really want to be yoked to these folks? Because if you are, you’re going to be expected to come up with the cash to paper over the cracks.

We may be poorer than we needed to be as a result of Brexit, but at least we aren’t required to take responsibility for an expensive loser organization that has no idea what it wants to be, other than not the US and China. In the long run, we’re better off charting our own course. We know who we are and where we’re going.”

Are you persuaded?

I read a typical right-wing screed against “cancel culture” in our local newspaper on Sunday. As usual, the writer roundly condemned “the left” for its hypocritical lack of support for free speech.

Also as usual, the writer didn’t identify “cancel culture” with any prominent Democratic politician, because no such politicians exist. Joe Biden? Please! Bernie Sanders? He doesn’t even like the idea of kicking Trump off Twitter. Elizabeth Warren and AOC? They would rather own the cons than shut them up.

The bottom line is that, notwithstanding what you typically hear from devotees of Fox News, the mainstream of the Democratic Party has no interest in any form of “cancel culture.” “Cancel culture” is a product of a relative handful of Twitter activists: latter-day Rosas and Martins fearlessly waging war for social justice with their thumbs. They’re very noisy, but their importance mostly lies in their attractiveness as targets for the right.

The Democrats will at some point be required to put some distance between themselves and the Twitter left. This means making a concerted effort to clarify that they: do not support “defunding the police;” can live comfortably with the removal of Confederate statues, but not memorials to the Founding Fathers and Lincoln; do not agree with censoring the right on the internet, with the possible exception of speech that has no protection under First Amendment jurisprudence; and do not completely buy into the version of the history of America articulated in the 1619 Project, although they do not dismiss it, either.

The famous quote about NATO was that it kept the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. The European unification project, which culminated in the EU, was designed to do the latter two things, and succeeded. But times have changed. What is the EU for today?

Here are some possibilities:

1. TO DEFEND LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES: Have you been to Poland or Hungary recently?
2. TO PROVIDE A DECENT QUALITY OF LIFE FOR ALL EUROPEANS: I have just described a transfer union. The Germans, among others, aren’t into that.
3. TO PROMOTE FREE TRADE AROUND THE WORLD: Wrong again! The EU countries have lots of protectionism in their DNA. It will become more visible now that the UK is gone.
4. TO PROMOTE EUROPEAN CULTURAL VALUES AROUND THE WORLD: And what might those be?
5. TO PROVIDE VITAL SERVICES TO ITS RESIDENTS: What, like vaccines?

Here is what the EU actually accomplishes:

1. It provides a mechanism that effectively mediates disputes among its members, and thus prevents European wars;
2. It permits the relatively free movement of people, goods, and services within its boundaries; and
3. It is large enough to be a third major independent player in world affairs, along with the Americans and Chinese.

The modesty of those three rationales should tell you that any future efforts to deepen the EU in the future are likely to fail. The EU is what it is: a chaotic mess that continues to stagger forward because there is still a vital, if limited, place in the world for it. Appreciate it for that–not what it’s not, which is a nation-state similar to the US.

Some of the words of praise for the COVID rescue bill are veiled attacks on Obama from the left for the inadequacy of his stimulus. Is this justified?

While it is clear in retrospect that the 2009 Obama stimulus was too small, much of the after-the-fact criticism of it is unjustified, for the following reasons:

1. The economy was in free fall at the time Obama took office. The output gap was skyrocketing. No one knew, in real time, exactly how large it would become. Biden, on the other hand, has inherited a stable, slowly improving economy. Conditions, therefore, are quite different.
2. Biden has the advantage of seeing how the GOP reacted to the Obama stimulus legislation. In particular, he knows that getting additional money from Congress in the future is a tougher sell than Obama thought it would be. He doesn’t have to operate under any illusions about the GOP’s willingness to cooperate in the national interest. We’ve seen that movie before.
3. Biden also has the advantage of knowing that some kinds of stimulus don’t work as well as they were advertised in 2009. Most notably, the public works portion of the Obama stimulus bill was not terribly successful, contrary to the nation’s experience during the Great Depression.
4. The temporary expansions of the safety net in the Biden bill may not survive, and the Biden Bucks checks may cause the economy to overheat. It is too early to evaluate those portions of the legislation.

Angela Merkel wears two hats. As the elected leader of the largest and most powerful nation within the EU, she is expected to maintain a steady, unambitious course and impose German frugality on the spendthrifts. As the unelected head of the EU, she is required to put her own country’s interests aside and work for the common good. Is it any wonder she struggles to reconcile these tasks?

Merkel is the antithesis of a visionary. She has no great and enduring dream for the EU. She is very skilled, however, at finding the lowest common denominator, and fending off existential crises. Whether it be Russia, China, Trump, immigration, recession, or the euro, she has always managed to keep the EU afloat, even if it doesn’t have much of a direction.

So what happens when she leaves? The EU’s institutions don’t work very well. There is little sense of a common purpose. Macron has a vision, but insufficient clout to make it happen. The divisions between the tightfisted, prosperous Teutons and the struggling, big spending Mediterranean countries, and between the liberal and illiberal democracies, aren’t diminishing over time. Will her successor have the same ability to patch the holes in the ship of state?

Probably not, which means more rough times ahead.

Barack Obama didn’t want any part of the culture wars. His speeches were filled with totally sincere calls for unity, and he did his absolute best to avoid provoking angry white people. His status as the first black president, however, made him the embodiment of the conflict with the reactionary right, which for the first time could easily imagine power slipping through their fingers, and responded accordingly.

Obama’s failure to unite the country, through no fault of his own, was the biggest disappointment of his presidency. Trump, of course, made dividing the country by ratcheting up the culture wars and owning the libs his calling card, so things have only gotten worse since 2016.

Some commentators have attributed Biden’s success with the COVID bill to his reluctance to engage on cultural issues. Whatever truth there is to this argument, understand that it is not a new tactic. Biden is simply better positioned to lower the temperature than Obama was by virtue of the fact that he is an old, unthreatening white guy.

Consider the impacts of the smartphone. Nobody except Steve Jobs knew we needed them, but once they were invented, they took over most people’s lives (not mine–I don’t have one). They give us instant access to everything from breaking political news to cat videos. We can communicate around the globe at the speed of light and at minimal cost. Our attention spans are much shorter; we crave constant stimulation, and mostly get it. It is a different world than the one I knew as a child, for better and for worse.

Marx was right about the impacts of technological change on culture, but wrong to focus exclusively on the means of production and the class system. In reality, immensely important cultural changes can result from innovations in the means of destruction (think of the social and political changes that arose from the widespread use of guns), the means of transportation, and the means of communication–not just the means of production.

If you talk to a self-styled conservative, he will probably tell you that the root problem with liberalism is that it incorrectly treats all people as overly rational, materialistic, atomized actors. It is our values and traditions, not individual material self-interest, that motivate the vast majority of our actions. The political system needs to reflect that, and traditions, however irrational they may appear at first glance, are entitled to a strong presumption of correctness, as they represent the collective wisdom of the nation over time.

Fair enough, under normal circumstances. But what happens when the culture and traditions evolve, particularly in a way that conservatives can’t embrace? What do conservatives have to fall back on when the world starts moving way too fast, and in the wrong direction?

Either some form of racism or absolute religious values that have been rejected by the majority of the population. That’s exactly where American conservatism is today. As a result, our “conservatives” don’t actually want to conserve anything; they want to return to a white Christian Brigadoon that never really existed, and certainly doesn’t today.

As I’ve noted on several occasions, there are two models for America’s involvement in Afghanistan. In the Korean model, we keep troops in the country indefinitely in order to maintain what amounts to a stalemate; in the Vietnam model, we cut the best face-saving deal we can, withdraw, and hope for the best, while fully expecting the worst.

Trump clearly preferred the Vietnam model in Afghanistan. Left to his own devices, Biden appears to agree with him. Should he follow Trump and adhere to his agreement with the Taliban? Here are the relevant questions:

1. Is the Afghan government likely to survive an American withdrawal, regardless of the terms of any power sharing agreement with the Taliban?
2. What are the costs of maintaining a small number of troops in Afghanistan?
3. Are the Afghan government’s chances of surviving likely to improve over time if we stay for a few more years, and then leave?
4. Does the strategic importance of Afghanistan justify keeping troops there and not, say, in Yemen or Somalia?

The clear answers to these questions are no, not much, no, and probably not. They cut both ways in the argument.

This is a difficult call. If you’re Biden, you don’t exactly relish the thought of being the guy in power when the rebels take control of Kabul. The results are likely to be horrific, and you can’t count on the GOP accepting that this is the inevitable outcome of an agreement reached by Trump. After acquiescing in Trump’s position on withdrawal, you know they’re going to beat you up as “the man who lost Afghanistan.”

In my opinion, the least worst option is to insist on virtually flawless compliance by the Taliban with the Trump agreement, and to use any reasonable pretext to keep our troops in place to maintain the stalemate. It’s hardly a perfect solution, but none is available.

I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, Trump hangover blues.

You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.

A rabble stormed the Capitol, and Trump just lit the fuse.

Attacking our democracy; for that, there’s no excuse.

______________

“The system’s rigged against us!” Trump and his minions cried.

His allies took him at his word, and several people died.

The Congress was deliberating, but we had to hide.

Now my party’s split in two; Trump caused the great divide.

__________________

I’ve got the blues.

The furry Viking blues.

Liberal or illiberal?

My party has to choose.

The system’s there for us to work

I’m a master of the game.

So breaking all the furniture

To me sounds kind of lame.

Some commentators argue that Biden’s success with the COVID rescue bill is attributable to his unwillingness to engage on culture war issues. Is that true?

Not really. Biden’s lack of interest in throwing culture war bombs is due to the following:

1. He’s an old guy who thinks extreme partisans on both sides of the culture war are full of crap;
2. He also believes (correctly) that the national interest is best served by lowering the political temperature after the events of the last four years. That is what he means by “unity;” and
3. He hopes that the benefits of the COVID bill will win over reactionary voters who are concerned more about pocketbook issues than identity politics.

Refusing to engage on culture was not, therefore, a tactic to win approval of the rescue bill; in fact, the GOP voted unanimously against it. To the extent that culture and the COVID bill are logically related, the lines of causation run the other way.