Cromwell

If the polls are right, Theresa May is about to lead the Conservatives to a fifth place finish in the EU elections. Her authority over her party has diminished to the point where even her attempts to use her resignation date as leverage are being ignored. And yet, she is planning to hold MV4 in the near future. Its chances of success are very poor.

For his part, Jeremy Corbyn has broken off talks with the government, because he still sees the collateral effects of an unruly Brexit as his ticket to power. Unfortunately for him: (a) he probably won’t get his general election; (b) since both parties are split on Brexit, a general election wouldn’t help to clarify the issue; and (c) he wouldn’t win the election, anyway, since the fear of a far left government is the one thing that unites the Conservatives.

At this point, the most likely outcome is a no-deal exit and BoJo as PM before the end of the year.

Is this a great country, or what?

The first debate is barely over a month away! Here is the advice I would give to the combatants:

1. Project strength. Be short, crisp, and unequivocal.
2. Don’t worry about answering the questions too directly. Use them as a platform for your talking points.
3. Be memorable. Have zingers prepared to use wherever possible.
4. Make everything about Trump. That’s what your audience wants to hear.
5. Absolutely do not give vague, rambling answers to questions and conclude by referring the audience to the plan on your website. No one is going to read it.

This format works well for Bernie Sanders, who has been through the mill many times, and who is a master of reducing complex problems to battles between the people and Big Something-or-other. For the more honest and intellectual Warren, it is going to be a serious problem. She isn’t going to be able to give the issues the time they really deserve when she’s on stage with nine or ten other people. She is going to have to work that out, somehow, or her dream is going to wither away even before the primaries start.

From rampant, dangerous wildfires to the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, climate change is already having a significant impact on Australia. And yet, a government that promotes the mining and sale of coal just pulled an upset and won the election.

Don’t you think there is a message in there for you, GND fans?

In the end, the most significant differences between a liberal democracy and a banana republic are these:

1. The executive in a liberal democracy follows court orders. The executive in a banana republic either stacks the judiciary or ignores it;
2. The press is controlled by the executive, either through legal or financial means, in a banana republic; and
3. Enemies of the executive are prosecuted for frivolous, partisan reasons in a banana republic.

To my pleasant surprise, the Trump administration has chosen to complain bitterly about adverse court orders, but not to ignore them–yet. It is clearly stonewalling legitimate efforts at congressional oversight, however, and we have plenty of evidence, particularly recently, that Trump is eager to prosecute his opponents, even with the assistance of foreign governments. We also remember his threats about controlling the media, and note Justice Thomas’ statements in support of that agenda.

The key figure in this process is William Barr. Based on his behavior and his reputation as an avatar for increased executive power, there is no chance that he will stand up against his boss in public for the essential norms of a liberal democracy. He will either: (a) slow walk Trump’s demands for political investigations; (b) openly express enthusiastic support for them, while doing nothing to effectuate them; or (c) actually embrace them and thus begin the process of destroying the republic.

At this point, do you really have any faith in him? Me, neither.

Matthew Yglesias thinks left-wing commentators spend too much time thinking and talking about the policy initiatives that have been proposed by the various Democratic candidates. With the filibuster and the Roberts Court in place, they have no realistic future. The key questions for the electorate, according to Yglesias, actually revolve around foreign policy and bureaucratic appointments, because those are the areas in which a Democratic president would have the most authority and discretion.

That is the voice of a true realo, and every word of it makes sense. If you accept it, the most appropriate nominee would be Biden, who has the most foreign policy experience and the biggest network of qualified potential appointees. If you prefer a more revolutionary approach, then the best choice would be Warren, who knows the bureaucracy inside and out, even if her ideas about foreign policy are unformed at best. For some reason, however, Yglesias undercuts his own message by maintaining that the Democrats need a fresh new spokesperson, not a retread. There is undoubtedly a case for that on electability, but not on qualifications.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. That’s the reason dramatic increases in the size of the federal government have been associated with crises–the Great Depression, World War II, and the 2008 Great Recession.

There are no guarantees that the current conditions will remain in place in November, 2020. Absent a fundamental change, however, the Democratic nominee will be facing an election in which real GDP growth and the unemployment rate are both around three percent.

It is imaginable, given Trump’s poor poll numbers, that a nominee who promises to bring decency and competence back to the White House, along with some incremental changes favoring working people over the wealthy, can win even in the face of the three percents. Is it plausible, however, that a Sanders or a Warren “revolution” can succeed without some sort of a cataclysm between now and November, 2020?

No.

One of my few vivid memories of the yearbook from my senior year in college is of a photo of a handmade sign saying “Nuke Iran Until It Glows in the Dark.” The sign did, in fact, accurately depict the intensity of feeling in the country in 1979.

Trump and Bolton will be relying on those memories to build bipartisan support for the upcoming war. Will it work? I don’t think so. Forty years is a long time; images of Carter and the hostage crisis will take a back seat to perceptions about Trump’s divisiveness and the Iraq War in the eyes of most Americans. In the absence of a truly compelling Iranian provocation, the blue team isn’t going to accept the legitimacy of the war, and there is going to be big trouble at home.

Imagine a scenario in which the UK is light years ahead of the United States in AI research. Would that alarm you? Would it keep you up at night? Of course not. But if you substitute China for the UK, the story is completely different. Why?

In all honesty, a little bit of it is probably racism. A much bigger part, however, is concern about the nature of the Chinese regime. We look at the Uighur camps, the black jails, the controls on the internet, the growth of the surveillance state, the abductions of critics of the regime, the construction on the fill islands in the South China Sea, and the use of economic ties for leverage against weaker countries and think, that would be us if China dominated the world. True, the Chinese wouldn’t insist that we live on collective farms, but this alternative doesn’t sound too promising, either.

If you pose this to a Chinese official, he will probably tell you that China is still a poor country that has no interest in dominating the world, and would undoubtedly fail if it tried. The problem is that the increases in the military budget and the aggressive rhetoric from the government tell a different story. How can we be sure that China’s ambitions are limited to economic growth and sovereignty over its borders? We can’t, really, so we have to prepare for the worst.

The answer to this, obviously, is for the Chinese government to dial down the nationalism and make a bigger effort to present itself as a friendly, peaceful neighbor. Will that happen? I doubt it; Xi is too invested in nationalism and repression to back down.

Israel doesn’t really want an American war with Iran, says the NYT. It’s only about applying maximum pressure to bring about regime change.

Right. And when that doesn’t work, what do you suppose Bibi’s Plan B is? Is it to thank Trump for the effort and just leave it alone?

The usually sensible Matthew Yglesias argues that Bernie would not be a disaster as the Democratic nominee or as president, because: he typically runs ahead of the nominee in Vermont; he was a largely pragmatic and successful mayor of Burlington; he can’t get the “revolution” through the system even if he wins the election; and he would have to rely on Obama holdovers to staff his administration. Is Yglesias right?

As far as he goes, yes, but he ignores the negative impacts of Bernie’s foreign policy, which is the other side of a Trumpian coin. Sanders promises to preach for left-wing values abroad without actually doing anything serious to restrain our adversaries or promote our interests. In practice, that probably means campaigning openly for Corbyn in the UK, acquiescing to Maduro in Venezuela, complaining about elected nationalist thugs in the EU and South America without taking any concrete action to dispose of them, and giving Xi and Putin the freedom to dominate their respective spheres of influence. That, my friends, would just be a disaster of a different sort; he would alienate our remaining friends and accomplish nothing.

Also, to make an obvious point, Vermont is hardly representative of America as a whole. It is closer to Switzerland than Oklahoma. Using Bernie’s performance there as a guide to anything is a clear mistake.

Could it be that he’s figured out that it isn’t a good idea to engage in absurd trade wars with your friends when you’re looking at a serious trade war with China and a possible shooting war with Iran? A first grader would have reached that conclusion months ago.

Like Marx, but two thousand years before him, Aristotle saw politics largely as the clash of interests among social classes that were largely defined by the distribution of wealth. Unlike Marx, Aristotle didn’t believe in dialectical materialism; he saw class struggle as a perpetual issue, and he advocated good government that would minimize it.

Whose vision of politics was more accurate? Dialectical materialism, for reasons that I have pointed out in previous posts, is an absurdity. The answer is Aristotle, by a mile.

Donald Trump is doing his best to persuade the world he doesn’t want to go to war with Iran. If you take him at his word, which is almost always a mistake, he is just waiting for the ayatollahs to call him to make a deal. One assumes his optimism on this score is based on his experience with North Korea.

Is North Korea a good analogy for Iran? No, because:

1. War with North Korea would be unimaginably costly for both sides. Iran doesn’t have that kind of weaponry; the worst it can do is drive up the cost of oil to the point of causing considerable pain throughout the world.
2. North Korea’s neighbors are desperate to avoid war. Saudi Arabia and Israel desperately want to drag us into one, because they will benefit from it far more than we ever could.
3. Trump kind of enjoys Kim’s outrageousness. The dour ayatollahs, not so much. For their part, the ayatollahs don’t have the kind of negotiating flexibility that Kim does, if they ever wanted to use it, which doesn’t seem likely.

Aristotle didn’t reject the Greek gods, exactly; he could see some social and political utility in maintaining public cults, so he never spoke against them. His view of the universe, however, didn’t have room for them, and he pretty clearly didn’t believe in them. He relied on logic and experience, both individual and collective, as his sources of authority. Since Greek city-states had tried a variety of different political systems, he analyzed them and laid out his opinions for what worked best under what circumstances. He never assumed that the purpose of politics was to serve God and not man, or that the political system of the day was divinely inspired and thus unchangeable.

Notwithstanding the rubbish you frequently read in right-wing history books, the most prominent Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians. They believed in a creator God who left men pretty much to their own devices. Their views on politics were based on their opinions of human nature, which largely revolved around concepts of class and material self-interest, not on revealed religion. Finally, they relied on the historical record regarding republics, including the Greek and Roman experiences, in the process of drafting the Constitution.

And so, when you read that James Madison ordered as many books as possible regarding the rise and fall of European republics to assist him in putting his ideas together, you are seeing evidence of Aristotle’s DNA in the American system.

Our erstwhile European allies are skeptical of the evidence that the Iranians or their proxies are directly involved in attacks on oil tankers. Why wouldn’t they be? Here’s the record:

1. We all know what happened with the evidence of WMD in Iraq;
2. Trump’s National Security Advisor has openly promoted war with Iran;
3. Trump has openly disregarded the wishes of the Europeans on the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal; and
4. Trump repeatedly threatens to impose ridiculous tariffs on the Europeans on specious national security grounds.

When we go to war with Iran, we’re not going to have any support from NATO; the only countries cheering us on (from the sidelines, of course) will be Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It isn’t hard to imagine Trump going into a rage over that, complaining bitterly that we spend billions on NATO and get nothing in return, and deciding to pull out.

Putin will be thrilled, as usual.