Cromwell

Trump contemplates that there will be massive new exports of “American energy” as part of his trade deals. This suggests that the price to domestic users will increase. But Trump insists that domestic prices will remain low, which would deter investment into new sources of energy. How is this possible? Hope for the best.

The deportation of millions of essential workers will logically result in failed businesses, wage increases, and price increases. How can those be avoided? Through rapid mechanization, presumably involving robots and AI. How can we be sure that will happen? Hope for the best.

Trump demands that foreigners invest more in America. He wants an end to trade deficits. He wants the dollar to remain the world’s currency of choice, but to be weakened. Oh, and he wants low inflation and interest rates, too. How are these incompatible objectives to be achieved? Hope for the best.

There were only two possible outcomes of the ill-advised Alaska summit: a bad deal or no deal. For the moment, the Ukrainians, our NATO allies, and our diplomatic bureaucracy hold enough sway with Trump to keep him, not just from giving the store away, but forcing Zelensky to surrender.

The optics of the meeting were awful, however. There is every reason to believe that Trump really wants to make the bad deal and move on–just not right at this moment.

Evidence of the new administration’s cultural affinity with the Confederacy increases every day. The irony, of course, is that opposition to tariffs was the second most compelling issue for the Confederate states–right behind slavery. Trump wouldn’t approve of that.

Oh, and William McKinley, his role model, actually fought for the Union in the Civil War, if memory serves me correctly.

As I noted in my last post, the bulk of the Vance Claremont speech revolved around Mamdani and his supposed “communism.” For his part, Mamdani has made vocal opposition to Trump a key part of his brand, so it is highly likely the two will being going back and forth at each other with great gusto if Mamdani wins the election. Then what?

It is only too easy to imagine Trump, using his LA and DC experiences as a template, declaring some sort of public safety emergency and sending troops to New York.

I can see it now–Pete Hegseth’s neo-Confederate army of Christian soldiers parading up Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. It would be the ultimate triumph of reactionary values over progressives. It would be Little Rock in reverse.

Most of the public attention paid to Vance’s speech at Claremont revolved around the legacy American issue. I will probably have more to say about that in the future. The biggest single segment of the speech, however, was an attack on Mamdani, who, according to Vance, is a communist.

Vance was speaking to a group of relatively sophisticated right-wingers, so they probably understand that mildly increasing taxes on the wealthy, running a few grocery stores, and making buses free does not exactly amount to taking control of the means of production. Let’s take this critique a step further, however. Donald Trump is governing as the CEO of corporate America. He is demanding personal control over large segments of our economy through golden shares, new investment funds supposedly to be run at his discretion, tariff policy, and social media attacks on disfavored companies. Does this not make him more of a “communist” than Mamdani?

The ancient Greeks thought that the Muses were the source of ideas. Many contemporary artists believe they reveal, rather than generate, ideas through “channeling.” My personal view is that ideas are typically produced when people divorce themselves from their senses, as in dreams. It’s clearly a debatable point, and one that may never be resolved.

AI is hyperrational. It doesn’t have a subconscious. It isn’t capable of divorcing itself from reality and receiving revelations. As a result, it cannot replace natural intelligence; in fact, the classical definition of man as “rational animal” may have to be replaced by referencing emotions and the subconscious.

Large factories with machines operated by workers represented the cutting edge of technology when Marx was writing in the middle of the 19th century. To Marx, they were the end of history. Europe, led by the UK, would see more and more of them; the advent of the factory created a new class division between the owners of the means of production and the people who ran the machines; the owners would exploit the workers; the numerically superior workers would ultimately rise and throw off their chains; and the classless society would be the end game.

Marx, like most of us, was a lousy prophet. He didn’t foresee the extension of the franchise to workers, progressive taxation, the creation of the welfare state, or the shift towards services in advanced economies. As I’ve noted before, the means of production for the wealthiest men in the world is now a laptop computer. Factories filled with masses of burly workers are a relic of the last century, and nobody really believes in communism today–not even the Chinese or the North Koreans.

But AI puts a new twist on an old question. Marx argued that an economy dominated by factories and mass production inevitably led to the exploitation of the working class by a handful of capitalists. AI, on the other hand, could cause inequality to soar by making tens of millions of workers irrelevant. What happens then? Do we see a revolution led by the newly unemployed workers, a vast expansion of the welfare state, or something else? What would Marx say today?

Biden and Trump would agree: Ukraine will never have the manpower to take back large areas of captured territory; and including Ukraine in NATO is not worth the risk. Does that mean their objectives are fundamentally similar?

No. Biden was determined to preserve as much of Ukraine’s sovereignty as possible. He wanted to make sure that any decision to trade land for peace was made by the Ukrainian government, not the outside world. The level of aid given to Ukraine was designed to increase the Ukrainian government’s leverage during the inevitable negotiations. Trump, on the other hand, wants peace at virtually any price. He thinks Russia is a natural American ally; Ukraine is the principal obstacle to that alliance. His objective, therefore, is to make a deal with Putin with minimal outside input and to use his leverage on Ukraine to make it stick.

Less developed nations frequently use the military to perform law enforcement functions, for three reasons: it centralizes authority in the head of state; the army is frequently viewed as less corrupt than the police; and the army is better at busting heads than the police. What could go wrong?

Plenty. Busting heads doesn’t win you lots of friends in the community, particularly if some of those heads are innocent; the military doesn’t have training in police tactics and may rely on blind force rather than intelligence; the head of state similarly has no particular competence in the field; and the military isn’t necessarily less corrupt than the police. That’s why this tactic rarely works.

Of course, Trump isn’t militarizing America because we are suffering through a crime wave; he simply wants to show people in blue areas that he’s the boss. Think of a dog using his pee to mark a spot as an analogy here.

The actress Sydney Sweeney stars in an advertising campaign touting her “good jeans/genes.” A few crazed left-wing commentators on social media interpret this as support for white supremacy. Right-wingers on social media pick this up. Ultimately, the story winds up on Fox News and becomes a national issue. Even though no prominent Democrats say anything about it, the entire party is tarred with the extremist position. The right wins another battle in the culture wars.

The left, on the other hand, has no similar mechanism to attach neo-Nazi views held by a handful of extremists to the entire GOP. To some extent, this is due to the fact that the top of the left-wing media food chain takes journalistic responsibility more seriously than Fox News. Nevertheless, something has to be done about it, or the blue team will always be playing defense in the culture wars, because there is no practical way to make its extremists shut up.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: A few days after I referred to the “Joan of Arc problem” in a post, Ross Douthat covered some of the same ground in an NYT column. The difference between his discussion and mine is that he used Joan as the jumping off point for speculation about the motives of a providential Christian God, while I find the concept logically absurd. More on that in a few weeks.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl from the eastern part of France. She had no special training or education that would set her apart from millions of other peasant girls. But she received what she believed to be directions from three saints to contact the Dauphin and save France from the English. She went to the French court, identified the Dauphin there in spite of his disguise, rejuvenated the French resistance at Orleans, defeated an English army there, and began the process which ended with a complete French victory, excluding only Calais. How could this happen? It sounds miraculous.

I have read attempts to explain all of these events in purely rational terms. Taken collectively, they are implausible to the point of being ridiculous. The simplest, and almost certainly best, explanation is that Joan was, in fact, inspired by someone or something paranormal. If you accept that was the case, I do not see how you can accept the notion that matter in motion is the ultimate reality.

But who were the voices in Joan’s head? Was it God, the three saints, or something else? More on that in a future post.

In both cases, the parameters of a plausible and fair deal are perfectly obvious to all of the parties. The deals never happen because they come with risks that the principal parties view as being unacceptable.

What could change that? For the immigration issue, it would have to be a resounding defeat for the GOP in 2026 and 2028. For the West Bank, it would be some sort of dramatic change in the balance of power in Israel’s backyard. Potential revolutions in Egypt and Jordan come to mind.

Trump meets Putin in Alaska

T: Vlad the Impaler! Good to see you again, man!

P: It’s always good to be back on what was Russian soil. The Tsar was a fool to just give it away.

T: But Alaska has always been American.

P: Say what?

T: George Washington kept his troops there during the winter when he was fighting the British. That’s why they were so cold.

P: That’s fake news. Who told you that?

T: Sarah Palin, I think. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard.

P: You should know better than to listen to your intelligence people. Trust me, not them.

T: I do, Vlad, I do. If you say it’s fake news, it must be.

P: Now, let’s talk about Ukraine.

T: A real estate deal! I love it! No one knows more about real estate deals than me!

P: There’s more to it than that, of course.

T: Not really. What are your terms?

P: In order to keep you happy, I will no longer insist on Ukraine giving up land they still hold. Of course, what’s mine remains mine forever.

T: That’s good, Vlad. I can go along with that.

P: Can you make Zelensky go along with it?

T: He has to. He doesn’t have the cards. You and I do.

P: Ukraine can never be part of NATO.

T: I’m on board with that. The last thing I want to do is go to war with you over some insignificant piece of territory on your border.

P: Right. Think of Ukraine as Russia’s Canada–your 51st state.

T: I’m good with that.

P: No NATO troops in Ukraine–ever.

T: OK so far. I can make that happen.

P: No American weapons in Ukraine, even if the Europeans buy them, and no assistance from America or Europe with the creation of Ukrainian defense industries. Ukraine must never be a threat to Russia again.

T: I can promise we won’t give anything away. The rest of it, I’m not sure. I’ll have to talk to the Euros about that.

P: There’s no peace in Ukraine without that commitment, and you don’t get your Nobel Peace Prize.

T: I need to think about that one.

As I noted in a previous post, Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, made the case for Trump’s tariffs in an NYT column a few days ago. How much of what he said was true, and what was false?

Here is my analysis:

1. TRUMP HAS UPENDED THE SYSTEM OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE: This is true. Trump has no regard for international organizations or attempts to create wins for everyone. He wants American dominance, and he wants the rest of the world to acknowledge its subservience to him. Using huge tariffs as a form of bilateral leverage is his principal means of getting the point across.
2. TRUMP HAS IMPROVED AMERICAN ACCESS TO FOREIGN MARKETS: Partly true. Improving access for exports was never his primary goal; otherwise, he would have accepted the zero-zero offers that were made early in the negotiations. In addition, alienating consumers in other countries with bluster is not a particularly shrewd way to market American products, and it remains to be seen if lowering already minimal tariffs and eliminating a few health regulations will have a meaningful impact on American exports. With all of that said, it is clear that the agreements have improved access to foreign markets at least a little bit.
3. THE PROVISIONS IN THE AGREEMENTS RELATING TO INVESTMENT ARE ENFORCEABLE: Mostly false. The agreements aren’t even remotely done yet, and what we know about them is hardly encouraging. The Japanese don’t accept Trump’s version of the investment vehicle, and the EU isn’t even pretending that its “commitments” can be imposed on the private sector.
4. THE INFLATIONARY IMPACTS OF THE TARIFFS WILL BE LIMITED AND TRANSITORY: TBD. American businesses have largely been eating the tariffs to date or have dealt with them by stockpiling inventory. Now that the system is more or less in place, it is highly unlikely they will continue to accept lower profits for years to come. That means increased inflation; whether it will result in an inflationary spiral remains to be seen. It could go either way.

Trump is basically a used car salesman with ego and anger management issues; he habitually pretends that everything is great and under control when it isn’t. As a result, he continues to tell us that only foreigners pay his tariffs and that they are making us rich. In keeping with the party line, an NYT column written by Trump’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, says almost nothing about price increases and assures us they will be minimal and transitory.

Right. If Trump could be honest about his tariffs for just a few seconds and tell us that the short-term pain will be more than justified by the long-term gain, the American public might be more understanding. As it is, an electorate that has become more sensitive to inflation over the last few years and remembers Trump’s promises to bring prices down during the campaign will be more inclined to believe its eyes than the president’s sales patter.