Cromwell

The Founding Fathers–if you put them on a graph, the line would run from Hamilton on one end to Patrick Henry on the other–disagreed ferociously on the role and power of the central government. The one thing they all agreed on, however, was their fear and disdain for demagogues and men on horseback. They were all familiar with classical history, and they knew the type. They figured that the system they were creating would one day be tested by someone like Donald Trump.

The latest issue of The Atlantic features a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington. I can’t stop staring at it, because it is a truly remarkable face. I can imagine it asking me if I’m ready to do what’s necessary to preserve the government he did so much to create. Are we about him let him down? Are we so weak and subservient that we need “protection” from a man who is only running to keep himself out of jail and to force the half of the country that hates him to kiss his ring?

I will do my part on Tuesday. I hope you will do the same.

Trump may not be a secret CL, but Elon Musk is a very public one, and he is a prominent supporter of the man on golf cart. He has been telling the world that he can find trillions of dollars of waste in the federal budget; one assumes that means everything except the defense budget, the money required to prosecute Trump’s enemies, and subsidies for Tesla and SpaceX. Mike Johnson has also made some comments about putting a blowtorch to the administrative state. Could we actually be seeing the CL revolution in the making–an American Milei moment?

There are just four tiny problems with this hypothesis. First of all, America is not Argentina; we have two percent inflation and four percent unemployment. Second, Trump has no history as a budget cutter. Third, if the Republicans win control of both houses, they will have tiny majorities, and some of the centrists will be unreliable on budget issues. Finally, unlike Milei, Trump has done nothing to prepare the electorate for enormous budget cuts. The public reaction to what Musk insists is just a dash of temporary pain will be intense, indeed.

We are seeing relatively few ads tied to particular candidates. Instead, we are being inundated with commercials supporting or attacking the state constitutional amendments pertaining to recreational marijuana use and abortion. It’s almost enough to make you miss Mark Robinson.

The most interesting thing about the ads opposing the amendments–particularly the ones on the abortion question– is that they focus completely on the fine print, not the gist of the issues. DeSantis isn’t trying to defeat the abortion amendment on the basis that personhood begins at conception, presumably because he knows public opinion won’t follow him on that point. Instead, he’s trying to argue that the amendment goes too far in this way or that (e.g., late term abortions and parental consent); the implication is that a more limited version might be OK and could be on the table in future years.

LOL. DeSantis and his friends are being dishonest here. They know perfectly well that the Florida GOP is never going to back down on what they view as positions essential to the Godly Society. So what else is new?

Franco wasn’t charismatic; in fact, as the story goes, he was so icy that Hitler was afraid of him. He came to power by using the army, not a mass party or a large band of violent thugs. He didn’t create a cult of personality. He didn’t try to make Spain great again by invading South America. And yet, he was unquestionably a fascist.

Most of the definitions of fascism focus on the common characteristics of the Hitler and Mussolini movements and ignore Franco. They shouldn’t. That’s why my definition of fascism is simpler: the pursuit of reactionary goals by extraconstitutional means.

Honesty compels me to tell you that there are numerous similarities between Trump and Hitler. Hitler’s angry, sarcastic speaking style reminds one of Trump. Like Trump, Hitler was attempting to recreate a mythical golden age in his country’s history. He was lazy and liked to pit his followers against each other (imagine Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels in “The Nazi Apprentice”). He was, shall we say, not too concerned with telling people the truth. He rejected the advice of experts and relied on his intuition, which he viewed as being infallible. He tried to overthrow the government in a shambolic coup attempt but faced few legal consequences for it. Finally, he never won a majority of the vote in a fair election–not that it mattered in the end.

But Trump doesn’t have an SA. He’s much older than Hitler, and has less time left to implement his vision, such as it is. He’s far more driven by personal grievances than a monstrous ideology. He’s not a warmonger. His country is not staggering economically. America under the McConnell Project is still governable; the Communists are not the alternative. The differences thus exceed the similarities.

I think.

Power abhors a vacuum. Since the McConnell Project has made it virtually impossible for Congress to pass meaningful legislation–it can barely keep the lights on–real authority has passed to the judiciary and the states. Most of the publicity, of course, has focused on red state efforts to limit “freedom” to reactionary white male Christians, but some blue states have retaliated with mirror image legislation. The country was already splintering; Mitch has made things worse, although that was probably never part of the plan.

A big part of the Trump agenda will be to bring the liberal parts of the judiciary and the blue states under heel, since they will be the most active participants in the resistance. To what extent will he succeed? To what extent will the McConnell Constitution survive him? We will only find out if he wins.

Joe, Dr. Jill, and Hunter are at the White House, discussing the campaign.

JILL: You dropped out about a hundred days ago. How are you feeling about that?

JOE: It was kind of like the stages of dealing with death. I was angry at first. Now I accept it. Kamala has a fighting chance, and I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy to deal with Trump and the state of public opinion. Plus, I don’t have the pressure of being the only one standing between the country and fascism anymore. It’s a weight off my shoulders.

HUNTER: But Dad, you saved America from Trump before. You would have done it again. Besides, the party and the country owed you! You were entitled to run again!

JOE: That’s Trumpist talk, son. The country didn’t owe me power. In a liberal democracy, power is a privilege, not a right. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go.

JILL: I think it’s for the best. And I think America will ultimately recognize what you accomplished. It will just take some time.

JOE: If there’s one thing that really bugs me, it’s that the country doesn’t appreciate everything we’ve done. All the polls say Americans think they’re worse off now than they were in 2020. That’s just not true.

JILL: They blame you for inflation, which wasn’t your fault.

JOE: It’s a bunch of malarkey. Inflation was a worldwide phenomenon. They even had it in Japan. We came back from the pandemic with the strongest economy in the world. And even Kamala can’t persuade the people that we did a good job. At this point, she isn’t even trying.

JILL: It’s really frustrating. Trump gets a pass for the pandemic unemployment, even though his response was ridiculous and chaotic, but you don’t get a pass for pandemic inflation.

JOE: I don’t get it. I really don’t.

HUNTER: Dad, we really need to talk about a pardon before you leave.

JOE: It’s too early, son. Let the process play itself out. You might not need one.

HUNTER: But you know I’m the victim of political persecution. No one else would have been prosecuted for those offenses.

JOE: There’s some truth to that. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe Trump would agree to pardon you if he wins.

JILL: Perhaps if Trump wins, you could offer to tell the DOJ to drop the charges against him in an effort to bind the nation’s wounds in exchange for a pardon for Hunter. It would be a good way to start the new presidency. Trump would actually come across as a unifier.

JOE: That’s an interesting idea. I hope Kamala wins and it never comes into play, but I’ll keep it in mind if things go the wrong way.

In an interview with Ezra Klein in yesterday’s NYT, Ramaswamy tells us that Trump is threatening to impose universal tariffs solely as a temporary expedient to force our friends to lower theirs. He also advises us that, after the border is under control, Trump will support efforts to liberalize the immigration system to bring in hordes of foreign talent. Finally, Trump will put a torch to the welfare state, reduce the national debt, and drive our workers out of the hammock of dependency. In short, Trump isn’t a Reactionary; he’s a secret Conservative Libertarian. He may have personal issues with Paul Ryan, but his hidden ideology is Ryan on steroids.

You may interject at this point that Ramaswamy is deluded, and that his version of “Trump” belongs in a libertarian comic book. Trump wants to bring back the economy of the 1950s and force people to suck up to him, not create Galt’s Gulch. I agree, but there is a larger point here; Trump has convinced an extremely wide range of extremists with very different dreams that he is on their side even though he has an extensive record that proves them wrong. The first step in creating the new shining city on the hill, whether it be the Godly Society or the techno-aristocracy, is to pull down the corrupt bureaucrat-ridden system we have today. Trump’s powers of destruction are an indispensable phase of the revolution.

Loud backup beepers most of the day, every working day. Countless large trucks rumbling through our subdivision, damaging our roads and endangering pedestrians. A lost view of the river. Changed community aesthetics. Swarms of noisy employees.

Those are the impacts of the construction of just one enormous house in our neighborhood in a period of over a year. There is nothing in it for us except inconvenience. It disrupts our quality of life and gives us nothing positive in return.

The YIMBYs clearly have a case for more housing, but they don’t appear to understand that while additional residential development may be in the best interests of the community as a whole, it imposes nothing but costs on the surrounding owners. The answer to this is for government and developers to provide benefits to the neighborhood in mitigation for those costs. I suggested two ways of doing that in a post about a year ago. I wish the YIMBYs would embrace one or both of them.

As I’ve noted many times before, the McConnell version of the Constitution, based on the Electoral College, Republican gerrymandering, the filibuster, and reactionary judges, makes it extremely difficult for the left to win and exercise power. That is the principal reason the Harris campaign isn’t promoting an ambitious agenda for the next four years.

But polarization and the filibuster work to slow down the GOP to some extent, as well–at least at the federal level. Trump’s agenda relies mostly on executive action, not legislation, but the time will come when he will want to legislate, as well. Then what?

McConnell is now an outsider within the GOP. There will be efforts made to get rid of the filibuster. In addition, Trump will almost certainly be violating court orders on immigration issues in order to please his base. Both of these developments will throw the viability of the McConnell Project into question.

The ultimate beneficiaries of reactionary activism may well be the left. The Supreme Court will be less of an obstacle to fundamental reform if Trump establishes a right to ignore it, and the filibuster won’t be a problem if the GOP gets rid of it.

There was a time–possibly during my lifetime–when people relied heavily on the local newspaper for their political opinions, having few other sources of news. Those days are gone, probably never to return. As a result, there is a case to be made for refusing to provide endorsements; after all, if you aren’t going to sway public opinion, and you may piss off a large portion of your readership, what’s the point?

But the timing of Jeff Bezos’ decision not to endorse in the presidential race makes it clear that his motivations were completely different; he was afraid of angering Trump, and he didn’t want to face any form of retaliation. Read your own paper, Jeff. Democracy dies in darkness; it also dies when powerful people cut deals with authoritarians to save their own skins.

The Conservatives were crushed in the UK election. Extremists on both the right and the left dominated the French one. The German left-leaning coalition is clearly heading for electoral disaster. Now even the Japanese Liberal Democrats have lost their majority. All over the world, it seems, the electorate is angry. What appears at first glance to be a wave of populism is actually an attack on incumbents, regardless of who or where they are.

For all that, Harris has a roughly 50 percent chance to win next week. Why? For three reasons. First, the American economy is in good shape in spite of what most voters say in public. Second, the American electorate is more polarized on cultural issues than its Asian and European counterparts, which creates a high floor and a low ceiling for both parties. Donald Trump is the third reason. He inspires intense opposition in a way that the leaders of parties in other countries do not.

For better or worse, Sherrod Brown is a genuine economic populist, unlike the faux kind that the Republicans keep running out against him. He has been airing biting commercials describing his latest opponent as a wealthy car salesman who will say anything to get elected. He is more likely than not to win, even in an Ohio that is now deep red.

What is the message here for Democrats? Joe Biden did his level best to pass himself off as a similar champion of labor, but he wasn’t rewarded for it. Part of that is because he was (wrongly) held responsible for inflation, while Brown, as a mere senator, was not; part of it was Biden’s inability to command the stage and persuade the public that his record on the economy was a good one; and part of it was the fact that Biden had to speak for booming blue states as well as struggling red ones. Populism doesn’t play as well in California as it does in Ohio.

The Israeli strike on Iran was limited to suitable military targets. It is unlikely to lead to a wider war. Why?

Because the Israelis figure they can handle the proxies by themselves, but they need the active support of America before they go after the head of the snake. Biden won’t give them a blank check. Harris probably won’t, either. Would Trump? My guess is yes, but, for all of his personality issues, he’s not really a warmonger, so the answer is TBD.

Agrarian populists made three demands in the 1890s: increased regulation of the railroads; a larger money supply; and free trade. This platform was perfectly sensible and was completely consistent with the economic needs of the farmers. Most of it became law in the long run.

Today, the descendants of the 1890s populists are among Trump’s biggest supporters, because he assures them that they, the hardworking white Christians, are true Americans, and we are not. But Trump’s agenda includes the deportation of illegal immigrants, business deregulation, and tariffs, more or less the polar opposite of what the 1890s populists required. The former will deplete the agricultural workforce; the latter will invite retaliation against American farm products and thus dry up export markets. If the Trump agenda is implemented, therefore, it will be an economic disaster for his strongest constituents.

But we know how this story ends. Trump will reward them for their loyalty. Huge sums of our money bearing his name will be sent to them as compensation. The formerly self-reliant farmers will become wards of the state at our expense, while continuing to lecture us about how anyone who supports a robust welfare state isn’t a real American.