Cromwell

Historically, Communist leaders have typically preferred dealing with hardheaded American businessmen and right-wing politicians over left-leaning idealists and intellectuals, because they found the former group to be more predictable, more willing to reach mutually beneficial agreements, and less annoying over human rights issues. As a result, a fairly substantial number of people in China looked forward to Donald Trump’s presidency; for all of his obvious foibles, here was a man who enjoyed doing deals, and could be easily manipulated.

That was then, and this is now. In practice, the Chinese have found that Trump is completely capricious, largely because he himself has no idea what he wants. Hence, the long and pointless trade war, and the danger of worse to come.

Would the Chinese rather have Warren or Biden? It’s a mixed bag. Trump is discrediting American leadership with our allies and making their system look more attractive to the rest of the world. In addition, Warren in particular would undoubtedly make human rights a much bigger irritant in our bilateral relations. On the other hand, the trade war is undoubtedly hurting their economy, and a Democrat might put an end to it. The likelihood of stumbling blindly into World War III would also be much lower.

My guess is that they choose not to choose, and will remain neutral, both in private and in public. That’s what I would do in their position.

William Barr is a right-wing ideologue, a master of spin, and a pusher of envelopes. He answers, in theory, to both the president and the American people, but for his purposes, only the former really matters. As a result, he is running around the world trying to get friendly foreign leaders to provide evidentiary support for a conspiracy theory about American intelligence services and the 2016 election that is ridiculous on its face. He is unlikely to succeed, but Trump will give him credit for trying.

Barr has some sense of ethics, so he quickly had the DOJ respond negatively when the rough transcript of the Ukraine phone call indicated that Trump would make him available to cooperate with the “investigation.” And there have been no purely political, frivolous prosecutions of Trump’s opponents yet. The operative word is “yet.”

Our system will not work properly with a politicized DOJ. Barr has already moved us several steps in that direction, but the damage, to date, is manageable. Will he at some point cross the line and destroy the very foundation of our system by weaponizing justice in the manner of a latter-day Stuart monarch? We’ll see, but if Trump wins a second term, the danger will go up exponentially.

Like his friend and mentor, John McCain, Lindsey Graham attempted to be a strong and independent voice on the right. Like McCain, Graham was bitterly critical of Donald Trump prior to the 2016 election. But unlike McCain, Graham decided to play the insider game and suck up relentlessly to Trump in the hope that it would win him influence in matters of foreign policy. He was very open about making this bargain with the devil in an interview about a year ago.

Today, Graham is one of Trump’s most vocal defenders, even in the face of admissions that Trump used his office to demand inappropriate political and legal favors from Ukraine. You have to wonder what McCain would have thought of that. Actually, you don’t have to wonder; you already know.

And for what? Can Graham point to any actual successes in foreign affairs? Has Trump suddenly become a neocon under his tutelage? Obviously not.

At the present rate, Graham is in danger of being portrayed in history books as one of the men who helped midwife fascism in the United States. I hope he considers that when, as is likely, he has to vote on articles of impeachment in a few months.

The Chinese Empire lasted about 2,000 years, so when it comes to imperialism, this isn’t their first rodeo. How does the new empire compare to the old one?

The old one was backed by military force, and the ability to pay off barbarians was a key component, but its most important feature was the conspicuous superiority of Chinese civilization, which ultimately converted and swallowed up barbarian invaders. Today, no one particularly admires the Chinese political system. Fear of Chinese military power matters in the South China Sea. However, the most important element, by far, is money.

The Chinese have been successful in buying plenty of support all over the world. The problem with that approach, however, is that you can’t buy everyone, and some people refuse to stay bought. What do you do then?

History tells us that when the investments of imperialist nations are threatened by political instability, they typically respond with military force. The Chinese have yet to face that situation, but it’s going to happen in the future, and don’t expect them to deviate from the pattern, their self-righteous rhetoric about non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries notwithstanding.

The last three standing are likely to be Biden, Warren, and Sanders. How will that turn out?

It depends on whether Warren succeeds in portraying herself as the sensible one in the middle, or whether she continues to compete with Sanders solely for progressive votes. If the former, she probably wins; if the latter, Biden wins, because his lane is wider, and he will have no competition. It’s that simple.

Is Warren capable of moving to the middle? Sanders is making it easier for her by drifting even further to the left. There is definitely room there if she plays her cards right, but it will require some tactical and rhetorical dexterity. It certainly hasn’t happened to date. We’ll see.

China is a colossus. It has the world’s second largest economy, and it is catching up fast. Its armed forces become more imposing every day. It has money to burn, and spends it buying influence all over the globe. Mess with it at your peril.

But China is a poor country, too. Its GDP per capita is nowhere close to, say, Taiwan’s, let alone ours. Large swaths of it belong in the Third World. It is consequently entitled to special treatment from international organizations, such as the WTO.

The rich land, poor land tightrope was always difficult to navigate, and is particularly so today, since Xi is more fond of bluster than his predecessors. The end of this is in sight; the rest of the world isn’t going to cut the poor victims of imperialism any slack anymore. And it shouldn’t; today’s China is once again an imperial power in its own right.

Ukraine was always the big black cloud hanging over Joe Biden’s head. It was inevitable that someone was going to use his son’s business activities as evidence that he is a swamp creature who wouldn’t provide enough ethical contrast with Trump to be a suitable Democratic nominee in 2020. The only real questions were who and when.

As it happened, his son is a minor player in a drama that features an abuse of power by Trump. That’s a big break for Biden, and an opportunity. None of the other Democratic candidates are going to touch the issue with a ten foot pole now, and he could end up as a more, not less, sympathetic figure when it is all said and done. It all depends on how he handles it.

My best guess at this point is that Ukraine will move the needle slightly in Warren’s favor, but not much. We’ll see.

Any Chinese person who is my age lived through, and remembers, the Cultural Revolution; his parents also survived the Great Leap Forward. The quality of his life has improved immeasurably over the last 30 years. That will buy the CCP a lot of gratitude and forgiveness for its mistakes.

Most Chinese people are not my age, however. Young adults have never known a China that wasn’t growing at a minimum of 6 percent per year. It would be natural for them to take Chinese economic success for granted, and to react strongly if things start going wrong, as they will, at some point.

In short, Xi and the CCP are building a monster of expectations, and they are going to have to keep feeding it. Things could get ugly if they don’t.

It is fair, I think, to call Bret Stephens a neo-conservative. He has an intense belief in liberal democratic values, particularly when regressive tax cuts and deregulation are sprinkled in, and he thinks America has a moral obligation to evangelize for them. Limited government and individual rights, in his view, can and will work everywhere.

That is, everywhere except Egypt. Stephens thinks the only choices on the menu in Egypt are a variety of kinds of dictatorships, of which the military kind are the best. Stephens has some qualms about the Sisi government, however. He doesn’t believe Sisi has the finesse to keep the genie in the bottle forever, and he suspects the dictator who will inevitably follow him will be much worse. On that point, he is probably right, given that Sisi has done everything in his power to delegitimize liberal democracy as an alternative.

What is the basis for the Egyptian exception? Stephens doesn’t bother to explain, but the answer is obvious; his overriding interest is in the security of Israel, and military dictatorships in Egypt have historically helped the Israelis in two ways. First, they have no qualms about using force to keep the lid on with regard to pro-Palestinian sentiments; and second, they give Israel a stronger moral claim to America’s friendship. When American and Israeli interests diverge, the Israelis can always play the liberal democratic solidarity card against the Arab dictatorships they actually support, and it generally works.

Does this sound almost absurdly hypocritical to you? Of course it does. That’s why the Israelis rely on American surrogates like Stephens to provide the open defense for Arab autocrats, rather than doing it themselves; they can’t afford to be seen with dirty hands.

Based on a few hundred years of history, we Americans think time is on our side. We believe that events have proven the superiority of our liberal democratic model, and that a political system based on limited government and individual rights will always deliver more prosperity, creativity, happiness, and freedom than an authoritarian system. It’s a natural law of sorts. We are, in short, Whig historians.

That was before Trump, of course. The Chinese, with a vastly longer history, see the world in a different light. To them, time has a circular as well as a linear component. China has been down over the past 150 or so years, just as it was at the end of many other dynasties, but it is currently on the rise, and it is predestined to regain its accustomed position as the dominant power in its region, if not the whole world. That, too, is the natural order of things.

Two powerful countries with the belief that the arc of history bends their way. In all likelihood, only one can be right. It’s a combustible situation, to say the least.

Donald Trump is a monster in human form. He cares nothing for his party or his country–only his ego. He is profoundly, and willfully, ignorant of anything that happens outside his own orbit. He sees the country as just another incarnation of the Trump Organization, and believes the presidency is a prize to be savored and exploited–not a public trust. He divides the nation on a daily basis purely in his own interest. He has been a complete disaster as president.

But you knew that, and so did everyone with any sense in 2016; the swing voters in 2020 will be the people who chose to believe the best about him three years ago, and have presumably lost their illusions in the interim. The Ukraine affair consequently won’t show the country anything we haven’t already seen. The impeachment process, therefore, won’t really be about Trump; it will be about the GOP, and where it stands on his abuses of power.

I’m willing to bet that virtually every GOP senator privately views Trump as being completely unfit for office. Are they willing to stand up for the country and the Constitution? Or are they too fearful of the base to do anything but acquiesce to this ever-worsening pattern of behavior? And if the latter, how will the GOP be able to look the voters in the eye after Trump is gone?

It’s hard to be optimistic, but it’s early days, and at a minimum, any Republican member of Congress who supports Trump in the impeachment process will have to explain to the voters why he thinks it was ok for Trump to coerce a foreign government to provide assistance to his campaign. The backlash against the GOP after Watergate was pretty fierce. It could happen again.

Bernie Sanders has an Elizabeth Warren problem; while her background and intellectual roots are vastly different than his, her specific policy ideas are not. She is clearly taking control of the progressive wing of the party. How can he turn things around?

As I’ve noted previously, the most logical way to make the “revolution” happen is to move to the right on cultural issues to accommodate reactionary workers, but Sanders won’t do that. Nor will he deign to make himself a more effective identity politician. No, his solution is to move even further left and hope that Warren won’t follow him.

Bernie’s previous ideas about addressing inequality, largely through a massively beefed-up inheritance tax, were constitutional and relatively moderate. His new wealth tax has all of the defects of the Warren proposal, and then some. It’s also too late.

My best guess is that, by moving left, Sanders will cause Democratic voters to view Warren as more of a centrist than she really is, which will be of enormous benefit to her in the later stages of the race. Moving that far left may win him back a few progressive votes, but it is not a plausible path to the nomination.

There was no real distinction between the monarch’s public and private interests in early medieval times; the entire country was theoretically owned and disposed of by him, and his household servants had enormous public responsibilities. The evolution of the public/private distinction took centuries, and was enormously important, from a constitutional perspective.

Donald Trump didn’t get that memo. Predictably, he views the US government as being the Trump Organization on a grand scale. Everyone in it, including the State Department and the DOJ, works for him personally, not the nation. Anyone who works against his interests by complying with the law is a traitor, and should be executed.

In a way, Trump’s obtuseness is the real story here; he barely even made any effort to cover up this outrageous abuse of power, because he thought it was self-evidently OK. In reality, it is Mueller, Part Deux, with the elements of the new crime mostly confessed.

Now there are only two remaining questions: will the whistleblower’s allegations be corroborated; and what will the GOP do in response? More on that in subsequent posts.

ISSUE #1: REALISTICALLY, CAN TRUMP BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE THROUGH THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS? No. Next question.

ISSUE #2: THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE EXERCISE? To gather facts and make them public; to set an appropriate standard for future presidential behavior; and to send a message to Trump and all foreign powers that Congress will respond forcefully to illegal meddling this time.

ISSUE #3: HOW BROAD WILL THE INQUIRY BE? There are two ways to handle impeachment: either confine it to the Ukraine question; or load all of Trump’s abuses of power on a train and see what happens. The leadership appears to be going with the first option, which makes sense, because it will result in a much quicker resolution.

ISSUE #4: WHY THE NEED FOR SPEED? Do you really want impeachment dominating the 2020 election campaign? It would only benefit Trump.

ISSUE #5: IS TRUMP THE INEVITABLE WINNER HERE? Not necessarily. Yes, impeachment will fire up his base, but they’re pretty fired up already, so that doesn’t matter much. The real question is how the swing voters will react. If the House approaches the issue in a sober and moderate way, and the facts look bad for Trump, the ultimate winner could be the Democratic nominee. Anything that looks like a completely partisan witch hunt, on the other hand, will clearly benefit Trump. Democrats, be forewarned.

Ken Burns wants to build bridges between blue and red America. The clear intent of “Country Music” was to prove to blue people that country is worthy of their respect and admiration. He did that by focusing largely on artists with crossover appeal and country’s roots in African-American music.

Did he succeed? To some extent, yes. He convinced me, for example, that Hank Williams, who in some ways is a grotesquely modern figure, should be viewed as a writer of classic American songs, not just a tragic country artist. He also made a strong case that Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash have deep roots in blue as well as red America. On that point, I didn’t require a lot of persuasion.

Those artists were exceptions, however. Country music wasn’t particularly political until the culture wars, but the mainstream clearly took sides in the 1960’s, and never changed. Notwithstanding the efforts of some progressive country artists–most notably, some of the women–the quintessential country fan today is a white guy with a Trump sticker on his pickup truck. Nashville makes a huge amount of money pandering to that audience; there is no reason to believe that will change any time in the future. And so, in my eyes, the program, in spite of its obvious merits, was only a partial success.