Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, March 18, 2024

Party-State

 A structure in nominally communist states like the Soviet Union and China is the creation of the party-state, whereby the party controls the apparatus of the state. For instance in China, Xi Xinping is the Party Chairman AND the President, because he is the head of the party and the head of state. For every entity of the state, like the People's Congress, there is a corresponding and controlling party entity like the Party Congress. This is done to retain all the levers of power within the party and render the state as a neutered tool to implement the party's will.

Anyway, Donald Trump's latest purge of the RNC sure shows all the signs of a similar dynamic, but in this case, he is subsuming the Republican Party to his cult of personality and, most likely, criminal enterprises. As Marshall notes, the nominee controls the Party. That's understood. Strategy is coordinated between the presidential candidate and the party committee. The only reason to purge the RNC and install unqualified family members is because you want to use the RNC as an ATM for your hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. 

So there's two ways to see this: the good news and the bad news.

The good news is that if he really follows through and turns the RNC into the ATM, then a few things will happen. First, big money donors will stop giving. They aren't fools. They will give to the RSCC and the RCCC and individual candidates, but many will simply despair and not give. What money does flow into the RNC is extremely unlikely to work well towards electing Republicans. If this fall is as close as it appears to be, that's good news.

The bad news is that the Republican Party is increasingly simply a cipher for Trumpism. At some point, the grip that this demagogic, authoritarian con-man has to be broken. We cannot continue to have every election be a contest between those who respect democracy and those who don't. Sure, at some point Trump will die and that cult of personality will die with him, but the degradation of one of the two parties is deeply troubling.  

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Despair And Authoritarianism

 I think I mentioned a discussion I had with a college friend in Argentina who welcomed Javier Milei because he felt the apple cart needed to be overturned and a chaos agent was required.  Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend who lamented the state of the world in so many ways. The thread that connected them was this sense of doom and futility. This is the first step towards abandoning democracy.

This Twitter thread lays out so many ways that the world is improving. The basic thesis is "Yes, the world isn't perfect and 'X' is bad, but we are making remarkable progress towards solution 'Y'." Take climate change. In the thread there are numerous examples of breakthroughs in energy storage, access to lithium and hydrogen and geothermal energy. However, even if we brought all of that online tomorrow, the world would still continue to get hotter for another decade or so, until existing carbon was removed from the atmosphere. The news on climate is promising, but not to the degree that the crisis has passed.

It seems we are wired to need the instant gratification of immediate results. The internet has its plusses and minuses, but few can argue that it has not completely reshaped the world. It was basically invented in 1983, yet it really didn't start to enter our lives until the late 1990s. It feels like we are in a similar pattern with technology now.

Additionally, we are so much richer today than we were 40 years ago. Global inequality has shrunk dramatically, even if we have the troubling concentration of wealth in a super-class of billionaires. My friend yesterday said that we managed to grow up, sitting in the back of a station wagon with no seatbelts while our parents chain smoked in the front and we didn't die. True, but plenty of people did. Today, the stench of cigarette smoke is a jarring exception rather than the miasma through which we move. We have cars that can seat 6 and get 35MPG with crazy amounts of user friendly tech. Go back and drive that 1986 Honda Civic; your preference for it is nostalgia, not fact.

Of course there are problems. Big problems, but we tend to blow them up into catastrophes. Take Gaza. That is a wrenching humanitarian crisis brought about by two awful entities - Netanyahu's right wing government and Hamas' theocratic terrorism - but calling it "genocide" is intended to elevate it to the levels of the Holocaust or Cambodia. It simply...isn't. It's awful, and we should be doing everything we can to end it and bring lasting peace through a two state solution. But it simply isn't genocide, and calling it that is designed to create this sense of catastrophe that extremists need to justify eroding democracy.

Joe Biden ran on getting things back to normal. Sadly, that proved beyond his reach. Not because he didn't try, but because we have become addicted to the doom spiral.

We have met the cognitive enemy and he is us.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Endorsements

 I'm reading a book on the Republican Party of the 1960s and '70s, called Rule and Ruin. In it, the prominence of newspaper endorsements is the most "foreign" thing. The dynamics of a Republican Party fighting between its moderate and ultra conservative wings is slightly different from today, if only in the sense that the ultra conservative, actually reactionary, forces have so thoroughly won.

Given the widespread collapse in trust in empirical authority of any kind, the idea that an endorsement from the Times or the Detroit Free Press would matter seems silly and largely is. However, there is a new trend in endorsements that's very real: Astonishing numbers of people who worked with Trump refuse to endorse him. That number now includes Mike Pence, but it also includes almost all of his national security team and most of his Cabinet.

This ought to be the lead story in every newspaper in America. A significant number of people who worked most closely with Trump feel he should not be president. Both Dick and Liz Cheney - about the apotheosis of American conservatism - refuse to endorse him, with Dick calling him the greatest threat to American democracy in his lifetime.

And yet...

While you have to admire the actual courage that it takes to endure the inevitable death threats from MAGAts and the end of your political career that refusing to endorse Trump entails, almost none of them will endorse Joe Biden. Sure, the Cheneys and Pence and John Kelly have almost nothing in common politically with Biden, except their abhorrence of what Trump is and stands for. I get that a second Biden term could - gasp - lead to higher taxes on the rich and more regulations on business and maybe some more assistance for the poor and middle class. It could lead to a reversal of Dobbs, which would matter to someone like Pence, I guess, though that would require an unlikely number of Democrats in the Senate. 

If Trump is who you say he is, then you have to endorse Biden. Simply withholding your endorsement is words without deeds.

In 1864, the future of the American Experiment was in grave doubt. In response, War Democrats - those who supported a victory over secession and disunion - joined with Republicans to create the Union Party. The young Republican Party temporarily ceased to exist. Something like that needs to happen this fall. Hell, call it the Union Party. It's that important. 

A Defense Of Liberalism

 As someone over 30, I admit to struggling at least a little with the increase in Trans rights activism. As a liberal, I believe in freedom and debate. As we saw on numerous yard signs and bumper stickers: We believe in science here.

Jon Chait has been a consistent critic of extremism, which is a characteristic of liberals. He has taken a position on Trans Rights that are broadly liberal: We should be cautious about transitioning children until we have more evidence. We should also be worried about how activists on either extreme hijack the debate.

As a liberal, I fully support gender affirming care for children, but care that stops short of easy transitioning. I arrive at this position after 30 years of working with adolescents. Gender affirming care that entails counseling and therapy to help someone with gender dysphoria through adolescence can then become sex reassignment when they become adults. We don't let teenagers rent a car, why should we allow them to make a potentially permanent decision? Put biologically, their prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed and they are poor judges of future consequences.

However, I do not in any way deny the right of young people with gender dysphoria to define their gender in however they wish. I admit that I don't understand it; it's completely alien to my own lived existence. But I am empathetic to the need to define one's identity for oneself. 

The extraordinary gains that Trans Rights have made have allowed more people to question gender roles and define themselves as they see fit. The idea that waiting until your 18 to transition represents an assault on their human rights is not "following the science."

Chait's crusade against activist extremism was tiresome at first. How can you complain about campus leftists when Trump and the Trumpenproletariat exist? However, he's absolutely right that extremism - which is to say positions far outside the mainstream - do tend to engender their own backlash. As I've argued before: Revolutions always fail; they snap back into the forms that existed before in slightly altered forms. 

Sensible moderation does not let you fundraise off outrage. It tends to reject outrage as emotive and unreasoned decision making. Yet sensible moderation - Let kids define their gender as they see fit and if they ultimately define themselves in a way that requires transition, they can do so as adults - is a position that makes the most sense, given what we know today.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Drivers, Start Your Engines

 It's time for Alvin Bragg and now Fani Willis to bring legal accountability to Donald Trump. Ideally two convictions in NY and GA will finally move the needle away from "Biden is old" to "Trump is a criminal".

I saw a video of a social scientist arguing that the most important person of 2023 was Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His argument was that he was able to quell inflation without triggering a recession. He further argued that "inflation causes revolutions" which is a provocative but compelling argument.

Yet low levels of inflation remain problematic at over 3%. The best case for Biden was that inflation was under control and people begin to see real wages turn into greater economic security. That does not seem to be happening, even accounting for the lag between good economic news and people's gut level understanding of that good news.

So...yeah...jail.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Hey, Anarchists?

 Do you want to know what happens when your vision of a stateless society comes to fruition?

Haiti.

The Slow Drumbeat Of Doom

 Obviously, one of the drumbeats of doom is for Democrats with a lot of early public polling showing a dead heat with a slight Trump edge. However, the predictive power of polls this far out is historically weak. There's also the trend for shitty GOP pollsters like Rasmussen to flood the zone and warp the polling averages. Lots of polls have Biden losing huge amounts of ground to Black and Gen Z voters that seems...dubious. 

Still, it remains sadly possible that Trump wins in November. I can't believe that's true, but the data suggests it is. I don't think it will happen, but it could.

One other thing that looks very likely is that Democrats should gain control of the House. In fact, that could happen sooner than you think. Ken Buck's retirement next week was done for two reasons. The first was that this will lead to a special election in his district that a Republican will likely win, but that will create an incumbency advantage for whomever wins over feral howler monkey, Lauren Boebert who is switching to his district. Basically, he's retiring to fuck over Boebert, who he understandably loathes as an avatar of the chaos and idiocy of the Republican House. 

TL;DR: Everyone in the House GOP hates each other and doesn't even want to be around each other.

Buck's retirement also further reduces the razor thin margins in the House. Right now, there are 218 GOP members and 213 Democrats. There is a special election coming up that could boost Democrats to 214. Still, the House GOP caucus is a Covid outbreak from losing their majority. As Chip Roy (R-TX) put is, there is no reason to reward the GOP with control of the House

If there was some way for the Democrats to have control of the House for a few weeks this spring you could get the Ukraine package passed, a new budget and maybe a Roe bill (which would die in the Senate, but whatever, it would lay clear stakes for November).

The topline story of Trump possibly being reelected is depressing as hell. It's depressing because of how manifestly unfit he is for dogcatcher, much less president. However, the GOP itself is pretty toxic, too. Hopefully, that will seep in before the real polls open.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

I Hate That Guy

 There are SOOOOOO many reasons to hate Donald Trump, I'm not sure I landed on this one, but it really bugs me. Trump is an idiot, which is not a reason to hate him. He's an idiot who thinks he's a genius, which is also not a reason to hate him, but makes him especially annoying. 

In Jon Chait's latest anti-anti-anti-Trumper screed, he takes to task a writer at the WSJ who makes a nonsensical claim that Trump and Biden are effectively the same on Ukraine. It's an obviously bullshit argument. However, when Chait quotes Trump, it brings to mind one of his many rhetorical tendencies that I absolutely freaking loath. It's the "It's so easy, I could do it in 24 hours.?" 

This is a straight pull from the populist playbook. Ross Perot was another practitioner. The idea that complicated problems have simple solutions is incredibly corrosive of good government. There might be simple things that could improve a complex situation - say removing the cap on the Social Security tax - without completely solving them. 

There is no simple solution to Ukraine beyond one side emerging victorious. There is no simple solution to Gaza either. "Permanent ceasefire now" is just stupid. A permanent ceasefire is called "peace" and again both sides need to agree to it. 

Trump's "I could solve Gaza in 24 hours" schtick just fucking infuriates me, perhaps precisely because it feeds into the Dunning-Kruger effect that so many of his cultists have.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Is The Worm Turning?

 Recently, we've seen somewhat better showing for Biden in some polls. There are still so weird ass shit results, like Biden and Trump being almost tied among Blacks and young people in some states. Still, it's a dead heat apparently, for reasons that elude logic.

The Biden counteroffensive began with a vigorous State of the Union address and the lunatic response by Katie Britt. The simple fact remains is that the "vibes" somehow favor Trump, because people have fond memories of low inflation in 2019. When it comes to policy and actual governance, oh boy howdy.

Josh Marshall lays out a case that Trump's cognitive decline has been hiding behind his rage. Back in 2016, Trump had the salesman's instinct to tell his audience what they wanted to hear. He'd meander about and then talk about Hillary's emails, the chant of "Lock her up" would begin and he would bask in the waves of approbation from the crowd. 

As Marshall notes, he's lost the thread. Some of that is because of the epistemic closure of Trumpistan. In 2016, he was speaking to Republicans; in 2024, he's speaking to Cult 45. He's so deep up his own diapered ass that normal people listening to him would be shocked at the babbling nonsense that dribbles from his piehole.  

The latest example of this is his offhand remarks about cutting Social Security and Medicare. That's likely something he's picked up from the Claremont Institute freakshows that populate his orbit. On some level, he likely understood "Wait, I'm not sure I meant to say that" but he's incapable of admitting that he was wrong, so he will likely double down on that in coming days. His cultists will fall dutifully in line, but the few remaining normies in politics will be deeply concerned. Trump's feedback loop as become dark and threatening, but also incoherent and cryptic. 

The GOP response (not Britt's weird drama camp monologue) to Biden's speech was that he was too shouty, TOO energetic. As so often happens, they believe their own bullshit. (Yes, leftists are the same way, but whatever.) They thought Biden was senile. I just read excerpts from the Hur depositions and he does not demonstrate senility at all. 

Back in the halcyon days of 2010-12, the GOP coughed up some deeply weird people like Christine O'Donnell, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. O'Donnell seemed to believe in witches and Akin thought a woman's body could "shut that whole thing down" if she became pregnant from rape. The GOP has so committed itself to Trumpist extremism that they are nominating a similar slate of whackjobs. Check out the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, if you don't believe me. 

As the GOP falls deeper and deeper into its own Trumpist navel, the disconnect with the American public should become clearer and clearer.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Paying The Piper

 David Graham at The Atlantic has a good rundown of why Trump's impending fines are a very real problem for him. Basically, Trump has maintained a secretive, closely held business model for the Trump Organization. It's opaque; we don't know who he owes money to or how much. This is obviously not ideal for someone who got security briefings for four years. Trump's indebtedness would have disqualified him for a normal security clearance.

Trump's legal standing is weak, but he might get a temporary or partial reprieve as he tries to scrounge up the money. However, there's another chance that Letitia James starts seizing and auctioning off his properties. The first proceeds from that auction go to lien holders. So if she auctions off a building for $60m and there are $30m worth of liens on it, he's lost a property and only had half the value applied to his fines.

Graham ends by noting that Trump has seemingly managed to go his whole life without paying for the consequences of his many misdeeds. Doomerist progressives will complain that he will likely get away with again.

I'm not so sure. The money people don't fuck about.

Bye Kristen

 Kirsten? Christine? Kyran? Karen?

David Roth and Albert Burneko give Sinema the political obituary she so richly deserves.

I didn't LOVE Joe Manchin, but I understood that he was from West Virginia and had to represent them somewhat. I think he largely did what he believed was right and I disagree with what he thinks is right.

As Roth and Burneko point out, what distinguished Sinema was her complete absence of principles.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

There's Something Happening Here

 But what it is ain't exactly clear.

There has been a consistent - remarkably consistent - pattern of primary polling consistently undercounting Nikki Haley's support in the primaries. Part of the reluctance of pollsters to really address this comes, I think, from failing to look at Trump as a de facto incumbent. Off the top of my head, the last time an incumbent president lost, then ran again, was Grover Cleveland. That was well before polling existed. So pollsters are really struggling with how to model a primary electorate where you have a de facto incumbent (Trump) who is not the actual president.

Josh Marshall tries to make some sense from the general polling landscape, but one observation he makes that I think is important when looking at polling right now is that a LOT of polling is a referendum in March on Joe Biden. Now, I am on the record with thinking that Biden is doing a great job, with the exception of Israel, and even there, I think my disagreement is a matter of degrees rather than a difference of principle. However, the "vibes" are bad and Biden takes the brunt of that as president. 

In a fundamentally uncontested primary, Biden is racking up huge wins against Generic Challenger and a small but real protest vote. Trump is also running against Generic Challenger in Haley who is a bog standard Republican in a lot of ways: she's anti-abortion, pro-tax cut, pro-deregulation. The fundamental difference between someone who voted for Haley and someone who voted for Trump is whether they believe the 2020 election was legitimate. 

If "the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord" then a consistent third of Republicans are in revolt against the warlord. This also fails to capture the independents, including (often but not always) GOP leaning independents. In a closed primary, if you still have Trump facing a considerable revolt, that is fundamentally a revolt over January 6th and Trump's anti-democratic agenda. 

Elliot Morris at 538 has a breakdown of why polling primary voters is hard. One thing he notes is that getting people to respond at all is hard, but especially now. Here's his take:

My theory is that most of these primary polls pulling samples of voters from voter registration lists are missing moderate crossover partisans and first-time voters. Additionally, we know that people who are highly motivated to participate in polls (the "weirdos") also happen to be the most politically and ideologically extreme Americans. That's a recipe for polling bias in primaries, where weighting to party, past vote and polarized demographic benchmarks does not control for the partisan consequences of overrepresenting politically engaged Americans.

That highlighted bit is key. The most polarized, ideological voters in the country are Trumpists and Biden's Leftist critics. However, we also know that the new Democratic coalition includes a LOT of college educated voters, who tend to vote in "off" year elections - this has been the go-to explanation of why Democrats have outperformed since 1/6 and Dobbs. College educated voters tend to be frequent and engaged voters, but they are also not necessarily the sort of engaged ideological voter that Morris is describing. 

Biden's path to victory absolutely runs through winning the normie voter. We know Trump's cultists will crawl over molten lava to vote for their Mango Mussolini. We also know that in a perfect world every single Democrat and Democratic leaning voter would prefer that Biden were a decade younger. However, we also can see that Trump has real liabilities even within a normally compliant party.

Here's the most important thing, I think, to look at. Haley has suspended her race without endorsing. There are still more primaries to come. She will still be on the ballot. How many Republicans will still vote for her out of protest over Trump's insurrection? It's not Dobbs that has Republicans upset (maybe a few, but not 30%), it's Trump's criminality both on 1/6 and <gestures wildly at everything>. 

Yesterday on Twitter, Nate Silver - who's on a "Joe Biden is old and losing" jihad - flagged Biden saying that "his last five polls showed him winning." Silver said this represented a complete misunderstanding of what the polling was saying and showed the public polling that has shown Biden to be consistently a few point behind. Except Biden said "his polling" not the Times or Fox or freaking Rasmussen. "His". Unless he was committing a gaffe, that suggests that their internal polling is showing something different than the public media polls.

Our wretched cable nets continue to post things like "85% of Trump voters would still support him if he was in jail." Of course they would. It's a cult!

Trump won't win by winning his cultists, and there is some evidence that he is really struggling to hold down even what few normie Republicans still exist. 

Sunday, March 3, 2024

The Crazy

 Donald Trump has said some crazy shit over the years. He's now mainlining absolute lunacy. Now, he's talking about denying federal funds to schools that require ANY immunizations. The idea that MMR or measles or Whooping Cough vaccines are damaging is, of course, lunacy. However, one thing Trump is good at is telling his cultists what they want to hear. He picks up on the rhythms of his Volksturm rallies and regurgitates it back. As Trumpistan falls further and further into its own navel, you get increasingly bonkers positions like this.

It's time for - maybe, just maybe - this to get as much media attention as Joe Biden's age. There was a poll out showing that Donald Trump, who was found to have committed sexual assault and created the conditions to overturn Roe v Wade, is effectively tied with women. I would guess that wider coverage of Trump's insane ramblings MIGHT have an impact on that.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Rodents Of Unusual Size

I haven't been paying much attention to the Hunter Biden saga, because it pretty clearly looked like bullshit from the jump. Biden fils is an addict and his behavior has often been problematic because of that. As many others have said, the inquisition of Hunter Biden has convinced me not to vote for him. His father's dedication to his troubled son has improved my opinion of Joe.

Yesterday, Hunter appeared before the clown show that is the House GOP. His answers were credible, specific and would have resolved an honest inquiry, especially in conjunction with the revelations that most of their "dirt" on Hunter came from Russian sources. 

However, I also realize that the lockstep nature of the Right means that the screeching nonsense from Russian assets like Gaetz and Comer, plus the rank idiocy of most House GOP members will be imbibed fully and completely assimilated by our Fox-addled fellow citizens.

I'm not 100% sure how representative democracy can survive a post-factual, post-truth landscape. Destroying the very idea of facts and truth is the first step towards authoritarianism and it sure seems like we are on our way.

Friday, March 1, 2024

This Is Alvin Bragg's Moment

 The indefensible decision for the Supreme Court to hear Trump's bullshit immunity case in late April rather than yesterday (if at all) means that the most consequential case facing Trump - Jack Smith's January 6th case - will not go to trial before July at the very earliest. This is really bad news, as the ability to prevent a nakedly dictatorial caudillo from winning the election sure seems to hinge on a felony conviction. The reason that this is so is...insane, but here we are.

Which brings us to the two state cases against Trump. At the moment, of course, Trump has been found guilty of fraud in three separate incidents: Trump University, the Trump Foundation and now the Trump family business. He has been found by a jury to have committed sexual assault and defamation. Colorado and possibly Illinois are trying to kick him off the ballot for being an insurrectionist. The Supreme Court's decision to short circuit the trial about his attempts to launch a coup means that there are three remaining cases.

One, the Georgia case, is tied up in the poor judgment of Fani Willis, but that one could go to trial sooner rather than later. The classified documents case is under the supervision of Trump's de facto defense attorney, Judge Loose Cannon. Sneaking under the radar is the NY case that Alvin Bragg brought.

The case drew some harumphs from various legal scholars, because it has a novel theory at the heart of it. Basically, Trump falsified financial documents to hide his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (and I think others). This constitutes a violation of federal campaign finance law, but by falsifying documents in New York to cover up a federal felony, Trump committed a felony under NY law. This mixing of federal and state law is now being evaluated by the judge. 

Providing the prosecution can prove that Trump falsified those records (and there's some worry that Michael Cohen is too central to their case), and the legal theory holds up, then Trump could be convicted before Memorial Day. 

However, it IS the weakest of the three felony cases, because of the somewhat novel legal doctrine. Bragg is stretching a bit. 

This is like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, but on the other hand, they really did put Capone in jail. 

The most hilarious result would be a Trump conviction, but with a minimal prison sentence of 6 months. This would put him in jail through the election, releasing him just in time to face the more serious charges.

Ideally, the Georgia case gets fast tracked and attains a conviction, but Bragg's case has the clearest route to a trial. In fact, Trump's team is hoping to win an acquittal, which would be be damaging to the overall message that Trump is a massive crook. Hopefully, a New York jury can find a way to overturn the disastrous decision of the Supreme Court to effectively preclude a federal trial before election day.