Kissinger's Finally In Hell

 This take sort of looks at the role that realpolitik played in shaping US foreign policy under Kissinger. The basic idea was that nation's don't have ideals, they have interests and needs that must be prioritized over anything as mushy as "values". Jimmy Carter was elected president because of the stench of Watergate hanging over the GOP, but his actual policies that he is known for today were a direct repudiation of Kissinger's amoral foreign policy. That Rosalyn Carter and Henry Kissinger died so close to each other (and Jimmy looks soon to join them) is one of those quirks of timing.

If you want a catalog of Kissinger's crimes, I recommend Spencer Ackerman or Erik Loomis. Because he lived so long, there were more than a few gleeful obituaries in the can and ready to run. This quote is critical for me in evaluating Kissinger:

Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger was the armchair quarterback who loved to make grand plans and did not care one fuck about the people who would die as part of his stratagems. 

There are aspects of Ackerman's takedown that are a bit over the top, even for me and my hatred of Kissinger. For me, it's the idea that realpolitik is the only proper tool in a nation's foreign policy toolbox. There are actual times when a state needs to act in its interest, even if it's not according to the rules the US established after WWII. I think drone-killing Al Qaeda is just fine. Beats invading countries. Ackerman also makes a supercilious point about Biden blaming Afghans for their government's collapse as being from the "Kissinger playbook." That's stupid, the Afghan government collapsed because it was a terrible and illegitimate government despite two decades of efforts by the US to make that not so. Whatever.

Kissinger's realpolitik did have positive results: in opening China and facilitating détente. However, the idea that American foreign policy should be divorced from American values of democracy and self-determination is exactly what leads to results like Cambodia and Chile. 

When nations fight wars, they tend not to care a great deal about the niceties of the "rule based order" as we are seeing in Gaza. What distinguished Kissinger was not just Cambodia and Laos but his actively looking for OTHER places - removed from Vietnam - to practice his fuckery.

Anyway, I'm glad he's dead and I'm sad Shane McGowan is.

What's Covid Been Up To?

 I woke up with a scratchy throat and a cough, which pre-2020 would've been just another late November day. Ya get colds! Whaddya gonna do 'bout it?

However, Covid is still out there and still lethal - albeit in much reduced numbers. Balloon Juice's Anne Laurie puts together a weekly update. The CDC keeps reporting data, too. The reality is that Covid is still killing about 1,000 a week. That's striking for two reasons. The first is that red states are almost certainly fudging their numbers for the stupidest possible reason: To pwn the libtards. The second is that we have a new 9/11's worth of deaths every three weeks and no one gives a shit.

Every respiratory virus explodes during this time of year. It's the nature of how cold weather impacts our nasal membranes and the retreat indoors. Covid is now endemic as opposed to a pandemic, so it's around and killing people. Given the politicization of vaccines, let's hope the viral wrath falls heaviest on those who militantly refuse to get vaccinated, because they are not only risking their own lives but speeding the spread of the virus in general. 

Since January 2021, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown, as Republicans have decided that vaccines are a deep state conspiracy. Be a shame if instant Darwin made a visit to those whose cultish devotion to freedumb risked all our lives.

At any rate, one has to wonder about the electoral impact of Covid. We've seen Democrats outperform expectations since 2020, and I do believe that 1/6 and Dobbs is driving that. However, is there a demographic event under the surface where older Republicans are dying of Covid at a disproportionate rate?

Brain Worm

 Josh Marshall is a thinker I admire, precisely because he's a trained historian who took up journalism and not a communications or English major who read a history book once. His understanding of the current faux history of Israel is correct. There's a leftist academic theory about "colonizers" which can really mean anything the theorist wants it to mean. This is the critical paragraph:

One of the features of this variant of the “settler colonialism” construct is that any resistance by definition is justified. The purpose of this is to collapse any idea that the current round of violence began with or was triggered by the October 7th attacks. One side of the conflict (Israel) is incapable of acting in self-defense because they are inherently the aggressor — by definition and in all cases. The ubiquitous claims of “genocide” are fruit of the same totalizing ideology. As argued a few weeks ago, claims that what is happening today in Gaza is “genocide” not only conflict with the most basic definitions of the word and the relevant parts of international law. They amount to a premeditated slander, one among many examples of equating Zionism, for all its flaws, with some of the greatest tormentors and torments Jews faced in the 20th century. It is understandable that some people unfamiliar with the details and definitions may gullibly buy into that formulation given the now lopsided number of fatalities on each side. But it is worth noting that the “genocide” claims began in the first 48 hours after October 7th, when the distribution was reversed.

I'd go a bit further. The very idea of settlers and colonizers and such is a recent invention, stemming from studies of the Global South and 19th century imperialism. When imperialism collapse from 1945-1965, the expectations were that the post-imperial parts of the world would rapidly catch up. That hasn't exactly happened. Latin America and Asia have made the most progress in the last 60 years. 

Latin America mostly threw off imperialism in the early 19th century. It was incredibly poorly governed until recently, at which point - surprise! - things got better. If your perspective is that the Global North is irredeemably evil, then Latin America's poor governance is likely caused by US neo-imperialism or maybe the intergenerational trauma of colonialism. What it does in effect is excuse poor choices made by those governments. Take import substitution industrialization. That turns out to be a pretty poor way to develop your economy, yet - through no moral fault of their own - many Latin American countries chose that and the results were bad. If you want to foist the responsibility for that poor decision onto the United States, then you exempt those governments from the necessary introspection and reforms needed to see the sort of progress we are currently seeing in places from Mexico to Chile.

Asia chose better economic development models (and benefitted from American largesse during the Cold War) and saw better outcomes. India chose poorly, but then started to choose better about 25 years ago and their economy has taken off. What did they choose? Economic liberalization, which Leftists hate. Look, neoliberal economics can be absolutely brutal, but it works. It's exploitive, but it also raises billions from grinding poverty (which was also exploitive, by the way). Neoliberals are "bad people" but they also know what they are doing, and it turns out various forms of economic liberty do work. Keep an eye on China - the noteworthy counterexample - as it contends with the limits of its own economic model.

The "settler/colonist" model of thinking of the developing world is a pernicious way to infantilize and excuse bad decisions made by ruling elites in those countries. Africa is the clear example, and Africa faces a host of geographic problems that makes everything harder, but the Middle East has managed to take a stranglehold on the world's most important commodity and turn it into indoor ski resorts in the desert while exploiting what is essentially slave labor.

If your great great grandfather was "Palestinian" (no such label really existed until recently) and therefore you're a Muslim Arab, you'd much rather be living in Tel Aviv than the West Bank. You live in a democracy with a thriving economy; you can vote; you have civil rights, albeit you face a shit ton of prejudice. For various reasons, very much including Israeli behavior, living on the West Bank is worse. 

As Marshall notes in his essay:

It is also one of the most common attributes of such conflicts that the losing or weaker party often holds the most maximalist narratives and aspirations. It is almost part of communal identity. Deficiencies of power in the present are compensated with claims of grandeur and power in the future. This is one of the many reasons why the stronger power usually has to take the first step. Resolving things requires setting most of those narratives and aspirations to the side to arrive at some way to live together in the present. But if that’s the baseline set of assumptions then no resolution is really possible at all. 

Maximalist demands helped derail plans for a Palestinian state in 1998 and 2007 (along with the untimely death of Israeli leaders willing to "take the first step." 

The ultra-Zionist argument is repellent. It's ethnic cleansing mixed with actual genocide. The ultra-Palestinian argument is also repellent for exactly the same reason. The only possible peaceful solution is the two-state solution. However, as long as maximalists are making demands based on poor understandings of history, everyone is trapped in a cycle of violence.

Look, human history - from the very, very beginning - is a history of migration and conflict. No one - and that includes indigenous populations - has held their land since the beginning of time. Native Americans fought and killed and moved people off their land well before 1492. Yes, the scale was different afterwards, but the fundamental dynamic is that stronger groups seize lands from weaker groups. The only way to short circuit this historical dynamic is through boring, establishment liberalism.

You Don't Have To Post

 Jon Chait talks about how - especially post-George Floyd - we expect comments from various institutions about current events. It takes about ten minutes of thought to realize that this is weird. Why should I care what a university president thinks about the Ukrainian or Gaza conflicts? Especially at universities, there is a sort of conflict-centric way of looking at everything. We have to know what everyone in "authority" thinks so that we can boycott or protest accordingly.

What I think Chait typically misses in these polemics is that it's such a very small section of college students (to use this example) who drive this nonsense. It's part of a dynamic whereby the whims and desires of every young person is suddenly what institutions should heed. Of course, young people are idealistic. That's good. They are not, however, known for their wisdom. That's normal. Trying to keep up with where you need to stand on any particular issue on any particular day is exhausting. 

Kids should absolutely protest. It's an important part of their discovery of who they are and what they believe. The idea that everyone needs to drop everything and agree with them because they protest is not, however, a cultural prerogative. 

The Information Problem

 Ron Brownstein has a solid analysis of the state of the presidential campaign at this moment. This paragraph stood out to me:

Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

This is not necessarily a bad strategy. Negative polarization should, in the end, help him overcome resistance from his own 2020 voters who have now soured on his presidency.

The problem, for me, is how and why many of the Democratic coalition voters have soured on Biden.

I look at Biden's presidency, and I see a remarkably successful one. I see truly impressive legislative achievements on climate and infrastructure. I see the successful sponsoring of the defense of Ukraine and the beginnings of an industrial policy that will return high tech manufacturing to our shores. While inflation is high, it's lower than just about anywhere else in the G20 group of nations. 

Biden has enjoyed a truly impressive substantive agenda and I think if/when he wins a second term, he would see the benefit of that. Things like infrastructure spending or a successful war on inflation don't show up for a few years. When I see that people trust Trump on the economy more than Biden, it drives me insane, and it shows how problematic the way people view things like the economy is, when making electoral decisions. Trump didn't do shit for the economy, except inherit the Obama Recovery. 

When I read this take on the Reagan Revolution, it makes me fear more than I have been for Biden's electoral prospects. There were a lot of reasons why the economy of the '70s was no problematic, but the decision to embrace Reaganomics was ultimately detrimental to American society. Embracing Trump would be catastrophic, and if people did so because they thought the economy was better under Trump...Jesus.

Yes, inflation is high, but the proximate causes of that inflation were the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. If we are going to blame Biden for pandemic related inflation, then we should blame Trump for pandemic related unemployment. The fact that we are sitting on full employment should outweigh inflation, and the fact that it doesn't is genuinely concerning for the prospect of making an informed choice on who the next president should be.

There's some pretty clear indications that Biden's support for Israel is hurting him with young voters. Hopefully, the Hamas war ends in the next month or two and Biden can use some of his accumulated leverage in Israel to negotiate something better for Palestinians, not that I think that will help him exactly. Some of it is the myopia of leftists. You have Arab Americans saying that they can never vote for Biden...when the alternative is a man who would gleefully lock them into concentration camps before deporting them. Maybe that changes. 

The striking thing, though, is that it seems that Biden is being held responsible for things like Dobbs and the Supreme Court striking down his student loan programs. My guess is that people want him to "do something" about Dobbs, but since he can't, they downgrade his job approval but will vote for him next year anyway. Biden is losing the "vibes" war, and he's uniquely poorly suited to fight on that front as the public facing parts of the presidency are what he's worst at. 

How Americans feel about the economy is fundamentally divorced from how president's actually impact the economy. Yet it makes a massive difference in how they vote. Biden's economic record is probably superior to any other head of government in the period from 2021 until today. The fact that it doesn't seem to matter is distressing.

ADDITION: The fact that Biden engineered a hostage exchange and cease fire in Gaza is something that he will get absolutely zero credit for among the class of voters who are threatening to tacitly destroy American democracy by allowing Trump to win the White House.

Identity Politics and Horseshoe Theory

 The basic idea of Horseshoe Theory is that the further you go to the extreme right and left, the more they actually bend around and mirror each other. Much of this is simply how much disgust the extreme right and left have with the status quo. You are out there on the fringes, precisely because "normie" politics is broken in your estimation. 

One thing I've noted recently, though, is how much "identity" politics fuels this horseshoe dynamic. Basically, identity politics takes the quip "All politics is personal" and turns that into the overriding ideology of the group. What's important is not tax rates, public spending, public goods or foreign policy. No, what's important is that you are part of X group and that means more than any tangible outcome. Voting and organizing with the tribe is the paramount concern.

We see this, certainly, with the Trumpenproletariat, whose embrace of their Christianist politics overrides even their attachment to basic ideas surrounding democratic governance. But that's exactly the point, Liberal democracy must be pluralistic. It must organize itself around actual ideologies surrounding the proper balance between freedom and equality. It's ideally rational, at least in theory, and people decide whose policies will improve their condition.

Trumpist politics have precisely none of that. There was famously not even a platform in 2020 and his platform in 2024 is pretty much "destroy our enemies". Biden is running on a policy platform of mild industrial policy, mild wealth redistribution, climate mitigation and reproductive freedom. Trump has expanded from "Lock her up!" to "Lock them up!"

It's not just Trump either. In Argentina, they've elected a madman with ideas that can charitably be described as lunacy. The freaking Dutch, with a long history of pluralism, have given the most seats to Geert Wilders, one of the avatars of European anti-immigrant populism. Then there's Brexit and obviously the Israel-Hamas war. 

It's the latter that has galvanized a sort of unthinking identity politics in America with absolutely bizarre statements about "indigenous rights" that fall apart at the slightest prodding and analysis. Hamas is awful. Netanyahu is awful. But once you've decided that your identity means that you're pro-Palestinian, then your critical filter for how awful Hamas is gets turned off, in much the same way that the critical filter for Trump voters gets turned off when you point out that Trump is literally one of the worst Americans to have ever lived.

Pluralism is hard. Yet, that is arguably the reason why America has emerged as the strongest country on earth. Our willingness to improve to at least try to live up to our ideals means that while we do engage in anti-immigrant movements, they tend not to succeed in the long run. Still, keeping an America where everyone is valued seems critically important to me.

What that means in practice is that while you absolutely should be proud of your ethnic identity, you also have be committed to principles that extend beyond that. What we see with ethnic identity politics in the end are concentration camps. Maybe they are run by the Far Right. Maybe they are run by the Far Left. In the end, however, people of the wrong group wind up oppressed. Our own history has shown this with Natives and Blacks. 

I can understand why it's easier to hate the status quo than work to do the incremental work of improving conditions for people through coalitional politics. Revolutionary rhetoric is intoxicating. 

However, if we understand that revolutionaries look as much like Trump as some romanticized version of Che Guevera, maybe we'd be a little less likely to erect the barricades.

Does Protest Work?

 David Wallace-Wells takes a run at the last decade of social and political protest to try and determine if protest actually achieves anything.

My own take is that "protest" rarely does work. Those idiots who glued their hands to the Macy's Parade route are not changing minds. Too many of the radical protests are not at all intended to change minds but signal righteousness. On the other hand, the fact that the protests exist often signifies that the issue is important. Wallace-Wells mentions that climate protests have led to significant legislation surrounding climate. 

Broad concerns about climate are not, however, limited to the protestors. I have not and likely will never go to a climate protest, yet I think it's currently the second most important issue facing the US (after Trumpism). The climate measures that Biden has embraced have won my loyalty, even if I think those idiots throwing soup on Van Gogh are, indeed, idiots.

There's also the Code Pink protests. Do we really think that people turned against Iraq because of Code Pink had some protests? The most persuasive case might be that Occupy did reorient people towards caring about wealth inequality, yet I bet there are a non-negligible number of Trump voters who care about wealth inequality, because that's their lived experience. 

Too often, I think protests are roosters taking credit for the dawn.

What's more, the reality of massive backlash absolutely exists. I remain convinced that the Defund the Police nonsense cost Biden support among enough middle class Black and Latine voters to prevent him winning North Carolina and Texas. The chaos unleashed by anarchists is often the best friend rightists have. 

Wallace-Wells and others would do well to revisit Crane Brinton's old work about "Thermidor" or how revolutions inevitably slip back into the forms that existed before. True change, enduring change comes in steps. It's frustrating and slow, but it's also why liberal democracy - for all its myriad faults - remains the best form of government. 

On JFK

 Today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy. 

That assassination has been a subject of morbid fascination and collective trauma for those who lived through it. It touched off a decade of turmoil in America that saw additional assassinations, massive civil unrest and ended with Nixon's resignation. It is natural to see the event as a great calamity. What is was, undeniably, was a great tragedy for the Kennedy family and a shared national trauma.

Historically, however, it's possible to see his death as the trigger for a great deal of public good.

Kennedy was not a popular president while alive. The White Protestant South was not happy with a Catholic who tolerated Martin Luther King. That's why he was in Dallas that day. His re-election was anything but secure.

His death ushered into the White House one of the most complicated and complex men to ever work from the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson was an asshole, but one of the most successful assholes the presidency has seen. Backlash over the assassination and the tragedy of a relatively young man's death led to a massive landslide for LBJ and Democrats 11 months later. That landslide brought us, in no particular order:

- Medicare
- Medicaid
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964
- The Voting Rights Act of 1965
- The Immigration Act of 1965
- Head Start
- PBS, the NEH and the NEA
- the Department of Transportation
- increased support for the poor
- economic development in the rural South

It's doubtful all of that happens without Kennedy's death. Maybe a few things happen, but the Great Society would never have been launched without Kennedy's assassination. (As for Oliver Stone's suggestion that JFK would've kept us out if Vietnam, Bissh please.)

The reason I offer this is that we are going through tumultuous, unsettled times ourselves. From the perspective of history, Kennedy's death made possible incredible reforms that transformed this country in myriad ways. 

Doomerism suggests that Trumpism is the death of American Democracy. Perhaps. It is scary. Yet, it might also usher in a countermovement that advances the cause of equality in the same way that the Great Society did.

You simply can't discern the sweep of history while you're in it.

Free Speech Nonsense

 One weird cudgel the Rightist forces in America keep swinging around recklessly is a warped idea of free speech. As a refresher, free speech is about limiting the government's ability to police and ban political speech. Threats, for instance, are not considered legitimate political speech, despite making up the bulk of Trump's campaign speeches.

Anyhoo, one of the reasons that Elon Musk lit $44,000,000,000 on fire was to insure that Twitter remained a "free speech zone." Now, Musk is suing Media Matters for reporting on his various fuckery as being, in fact, his various fuckery. Musk did what all Rightists do and filed his suit in the Kangaroo Kourts district of North Texas. Meanwhile, Trump is doing something similar, suing media companies for reporting what is undoubtedly the truth about the cash problems of Truth Social.

I have never been entirely on board with the online criticism of the New York Times, but holy shitballs, this is terrible. Here's a sample graph:

In 2016, he was a long-shot candidate with little to lose, and his broadsides were often paired with schoolyard taunts that drew laughs from his audiences. Four years later, Mr. Trump’s approach became angrier as he sought to cling to power, and his term ended in a deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol.

OK, he was the same malevolent authoritarian in 2016 that he is today. The only thing that's changed is that he lost the 2020 election, creating a narcissistic wound that he is compensating for with increasingly unhinged language. The reality is that he ran against "the media" in 2016, but now he realizes that should he reacquire power in 2024, he will need to truly stamp out any media criticism. He has always been an authoritarian goon, but he realizes that he missed an opportunity to crush American democracy on January 6th and he's all in.

The idea that "Wow, this is a new Trump" is kinda deranged. It feeds into the criticism of the Times that they just don't get Trump. What's more, some of the first people up against the wall if he wins will be the reporters for the Times and the Post. 

I guess we should be glad they are awakening to the threat now rather than next fall. 

Anarchic Economics

 So, Argentina just made a choice, likely a bad one. They got in their time machine and went back to 2016 and elected a right wing populist who's more interested in "move fast and break shit" than in actually making a measured decision about economic matters. The ultimate own goal of the right wing populists was Brexit, which the country is still struggling with. However, as Yglesias lays out, we got a look at Trumpist economics and it sure looks like we got a little lucky.

As Yglesias points out, Trump's basic economic message is highly inflationary. Tariffs, immigration restrictions, tax cuts...these all lead to inflation, and prior to Covid, that was fine. We got lucky, sorta, because that was a time of low interest rates. Enter Covid and the energy crisis from Ukraine and suddenly we have to care a bit more about quelling inflating prices. He notes, accurately, that higher interest rates have a disproportionate impact on both housing and the federal debt. The government has to pay the same high interest rates as consumers do.

Trump's economic plan for a second Trump administration would be awful. It would add jet fuel to inflation, right as we appear to be getting it under control. (The paradox of the moment is that the high interest rates designed to tamp down inflation seem to be fueling inflation in the housing sector by restricting supply.)

Where I disagree with Yglesias and agree with Martin Longman's analysis of Argentina is that macroeconomics are hard to understand. The basic idea that a president has control of interest rates or rising energy prices is a good example of the disconnect between perception and reality. Paul Campos has something he calls the Ariana Grande theory of politics. The gist of it is that few people really pay attention to politics, in much the same way a middle aged man pays little attention to current pop music. Just as he sorta knows who Grande is, he really doesn't now her oeuvre or what makes her popular. For most people, that's how they approach politics.

Put more succinctly, people vote vibes, not white papers on economic policy. In this telling, Argentina's baffling decision to elect ANOTHER right wing populist nutjob with terrible hair does make sense, because Argentina has been misgoverned and in economic turmoil for a long, long time. Javier Milei's promise to shatter economic orthodoxy is likely going to end poorly for Argentina, but for the average person, the status quo is really, really bad. (We are planning a trip down there this winter, and I'm a bit conflicted now.)

The question that needs answering by the Biden re-election team is what measures they can take to get people to see what's GOOD about Bidenomics as much as it is to scare them about the looming catastrophe of Trumponomics. The fascism stuff, the abortion stuff...yeah, hammer that. But people think the economy was better under Trump. It sorta was, but for reasons that had little to do with Trump, and his current plan looks awful.

It's Still Not Genocide

 My son and his girlfriend are all aboard the Israeli (and Joe Biden) Genocide train. Some of this is the crappy definition the UN has proffered. Basically, if you have civilian casualties during a war, you're doing genocide. That demeans and degrades the term. Israel and Hamas have traded atrocities, with Hamas planning civilian casualties and Israel being brutally indifferent to them.

As usual, frankly with all people but especially the younger folk, there is a lack of historical perspective. The original Israeli-Palestinian conflict set a pattern of the Israeli military easily handling Palestinian forces. When Egypt, Syria and others joined in, Israel still came out of top. As a result, opponents of Israel tended to rely on terrorism to accomplish...well, it's not clear they accomplished anything. Terrorist attacks allowed Israel to never feel fully secure, which I suppose was the point. Efforts to create a Palestinian state increased under Bill Clinton, Dubya Bush and Barack Obama, but after 2006 they were effectively DOA with Netanyahu in charge.

At some point in the long running terrorist campaign against Israel, the Israelis developed a doctrine that was basically, "If you launch terrorist attacks from your area, we will respond disproportionately. It's not 'an eye for an eye,' but 'a hundred eyes for an eye.'" I'm sure those reflexively opposed to Israel will call this an atrocity or genocide or something. What it is, is the doctrine of deterrence. 

Deterrence is basically making a conflict unthinkable, because the consequences will be too dire. The most famous (and successful in its way) form of deterrence is nuclear deterrence. Nuclear armed states have very clear lines around what they can do to each other, as we are seeing in Ukraine. Israel's promise of massive retaliation was designed to change the calculus around terror attacks against Israeli civilians. The point of terror attacks is that they are cheap, splashy and tough to defend against. The retaliation doctrine dramatically raises the stakes for groups that think killed a few Israeli citizens will help their cause. 

What's important to note is that Hamas knew this when they launched their October 7th massacre. This is why I say that dead Palestinians are a feature not a regrettable outcome for Hamas.

All of this is really about two different ways to see the world. The UN with their paper declarations is largely about the "Liberal" view of diplomacy and military affairs. States can work out their differences through deliberation and common cause. The "Realist" view is that this is all soft bullshit and only power matters. 

Which one is correct? They are both right; they are both wrong. Depends on each situation. 

For the last 60 years, the Realists have tended to have the better argument about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Recently, agreements between Israel and Arab states have shifted to hopes that a more Liberal perspective can dominate the foreign affairs of the Middle East. October 7th returned us to the Realist perspective. 

What matters is power and deterrence. That's what Israel is doing right now. Making another October 7th unthinkable. The problem is that tolerance of naked realist policy is pretty low in places where Israel would usually count on support. They may be the biggest bully on the block, and that might have worked in the 1970s and '80s. It's unclear if that will work anymore.

On Pro-Palestinian Protests

 I really recommend this Josh Marshall essay. Maximalist rhetoric - whether from SJP or Zionists - is simply an invitation to more bloodshed.

Inflation

 I'm travelling and needed to get a leaky tire fixed. Sitting in the waiting room, I heard two people talk about prices. It was interesting in that they were saying they "couldn't eat out every night." Were people eating out every night in 2019? Nevertheless, inflation is a real issue, less so because of actual economic conditions than vibes, but there are underlying aspects of inflation that make it tricky.

The first fact is that inflation has returned to "good" levels. The economy is growing, wages are rising and that entails some mild inflation. The problem is that prices are rising from their inflated levels vis a vis 2019. A 2.5% inflation rate on a higher basis feels like more inflation. It will take a year or more for people to normalize the new price structure.

The second issue is housing. My tire shop friend was talking about how he keeps chickens. About a year ago, we saw a massive spike in egg costs that was not only part of the overall inflation picture, but was accelerated by avian flu. There were simply fewer chickens. Now, there are enough chickens, because it only takes a few months to turn chicks into layers. Housing is waaaaay stickier. Plus, we have raised inflation rates to tackle inflation.

These high interest rates have done a good job of corralling inflation, but if you're in the housing business, it's been brutal. High rates mean that average people can't buy housing. (You can add in private equity buying homes to be Airbnbs, he typed from his Airbnb.) This makes it really hard to find financing to build new housing, and the lag time between wanting to build housing and actually having new housing units is a lot longer than turning chicks into layers. Plus, if you own a small home and want to upgrade, you really can't afford the new mortgages, so you stay in your small home. This means that smaller, cheaper homes aren't even on the market.

The decision to avoid a recession was likely the right one. Given the energy crisis created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we could have had the sort of stagflation that Europe is seeing, if we hadn't have stimulated the economy the way we did.

Still, we'd better hope that people's perception of inflation starts to change over the next 9 months. Just to make sure about next November.

Deep In Trumpsylvania

 The wife and I are National Park aficionados and she had never been to Great Smoky Mountain, our nation's most visited park. We have spent the last two days staying in a cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, and this is the heart of Trump Country. Is there offensive anti-Biden merch everywhere? You bet there is! Is the average skin tone somewhere between alabaster and sunburned? Why, yes it is! Are there Confederate flag earrings for sale? Need you ask?

Look, these people are not demons. They are almost always incredibly nice to you as individuals. But hoooo boy, I'm not sure how any of them survived Covid, as they seem to be a walking inventory of co-morbidities.

In America, it certainly seems as if health is a strong predictor of class standing. The smoking, the gargantuan amounts of calories, these are going to have impacts on their lives. It's not really a surprise that the opioid epidemic hit these communities the hardest, as they certainly don't seem that healthy to begin with. 

I doubt there is anything that can be done about this, as there's a belligerent, defiant streak here, but it really doesn't have to be this way. 

These are good people poisoned by bad ideas. 

Bummer

 Joe Manchin's retirement means that the margin for error in next year's Senate races is pretty damned small.

Hopefully Dobbs helps flip a few red and purple states.

More Grumpy Old Man

 Martin Longman examines the controversy over the required teaching of To Kill A Mockingbird in Washington State schools. I agree with him that allowing each teacher or school to teach or not teach the book is the right decision, but the arguments made against requiring the book were terrible. The idea that the book does not represent the Black experience or speak to a Black audience is accurate. Neither, presumably does Huckleberry Finn, Crime and Punishment or The Scarlett Letter. The idea that a book must speak to your experience is simply a faulty way of looking at literature. If anything, you read to expand your understanding of the world beyond your personal experience. 

The idea that To Kill A Mockingbird does some sort of harm or is pernicious towards a student is part of the overall balkanization of education. Now, should Washington State schools also teach Beloved or The Bluest Eye? Abso-fucking-lutely. Not because it would necessarily validate the lived experience of Black students but precisely because it might expand the horizons of White students.

The world does not exist to make you feel good about yourself. It does not exist to place you in the center of your own universe. Education should make you intellectually uncomfortable.

Tea Leaves

 Last night's election results were pretty damned good for Democrats. (And my wife won re-election to the town council!) The immediate question is what this means for NEXT November.

Reading a few different accounts, the analysis I'd offer is this.

- Last night's showing does not preclude Biden struggling for reasons specific to Biden - namely his age and the unfair estimations of his handling of the economy.

- It does suggest that the polity is not lurching rightwards on social or economic issues. Those wedge issues are helping Democrats.

The argument that the Anti-Biden Democrats are making is that Biden is actually a drag on the ticket and replacing him with some version of himself that's 15 years younger would mean an easy victory next year. I guess that's plausible as a thought exercise, but who is this mythical Younger Biden that can sate every Democratic constituency? If "inflation" is the reason that Biden is polling below Generic Democrat, then wouldn't Harris be tarred with the same brush? 

The counterargument is basically that Biden will be the nominee and Trump will be the nominee. In that matchup, the hypothetical Generic Democrat is not on the ticket, but you have to choose between an old Biden and an old and openly fascist Trump, who might very well be in jail. The results from last night shows that people are generally not outraged by the status quo, as incumbents did pretty well. The only aspect of the status quo that they are outraged by is Dobbs. Trump is indirectly the author of Dobbs, and hammering him (and Mike Johnson) on this issue should only help Biden.

I do think that Biden's soft polling comes from two sources. The first is the famous aphorism, "Democrats need to fall in love, Republicans only need to fall in line." Even if Biden were a decade younger, he's not going to make Democrats swoon, but as the election gets closer, they will turn out for him. The second is the general fickleness of the younger voters that put him in the White House, in particular. There are a number of reasons why his numbers are soft with them, which I simply don't think will hold water for 12 months, again when contrasted with Trump (or even DeSantis). Young people don't like his Israeli policies, but wait until they hear what Trump and Generic Republican has to say about Palestinians and Muslims in general.

The most salient takeaway from last night is that the social issues that Republicans thought could win them control of the federal government are not going to work. While people cite inflation as being awful, consumer confidence is kind of all over the place, giving a mediocre but not bad reading on the economy. Even a slight improvement in people's estimation of the economy could turn the policy landscape decisively against Republicans. 

Of course, people don't vote policy, they often vote "vibes". Even so, the "vibes" of electing Trump again would have to be fairly unappealing. People - I do believe - when faced with Grampa Joe and Agolf Twittler will pick the boring old guy over the revanchist fascist.

The polls weren't wrong about the 2023 election. But the polls about 2024 aren't predictive yet.

I Guess I'm A Grumpy Old Man

 Kids these days...

Yglesias takes a look at the illiberalism of today's youth. I think I mentioned having a conversation with my son about Hamas that was truly disturbing. Josh Marshall noted that a lot of kids get their "news" from Tik Tok and that could explain some of the stark opinions the under 40 crowd have about this conflict.

However, there's some fertile ground there, with Ruy Teixeira takes on how "identity politics" has led to some poisonous ideas: 

Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

I've certainly seen some of this on my end of academia. I think there's some important truths in intersectionality, in terms of being empathetic to other people's perspectives borne of lived experience. Teixeira went on to attack Ibram Kendi's anti-racist work. I greatly enjoyed Stamped from the Beginning, but his subsequent work on ideas for policy have been...impractical and I think counterproductive. He goes on to attack the idea of equity, which is that we need equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity. 

I do think that equal opportunity is both preferred, but hard to achieve. How can we determine how structures are thwarting our idea of equality? It's tough, and I think elements of CRT and Kendi's work are helpful. What they are not is absolute truth. What's more, I don't agree with equity (equality of outcomes) as a principle. Few Americans do, I would wager. Equity has been tried and...it's track record is not great.

Yglesias does push back on the particularly vitriolic Teixeira piece. He returns, of course, to his NIMBY hobby horse, but as a way of illustrating how "equity" is usually just bullshit, too. He notes that, for instance, closed schools hurt poorer (and therefore minority) communities, but leftists tended not to care. In part that was to support teachers, which I think Yglesias totally ignores, but it was also a reaction to Trump not taking Covid seriously. 

A better example is how the Climate Left continual fucks up actual ways to improve the climate situation, most notably by shuttering nuclear power plants. Efforts that the Climate Left would want to put in place to combat putting carbon in the atmosphere would disproportionally effect poorer communities, which skew towards people of color. Hell, the very reason Biden isn't leading in the polls is because people wish things cost as much as they did four years ago. Never mind that people are earning more and buying more and consumer confidence is high, they don't like that things cost more, and now the Climate Left wants to jack up the price of energy? Where's the equity there?

The problem with much of this Leftist identity politics is that you start to see obvious conflicts between agendas. Inter-factional warfare is and always has been the standard of behavior amongst the Left in any polity, but now that they have a bit more power than they typically have, we are seeing how dysfunctional it can be to make policy decisions based on academic ideas like equity. Whose equity? When?

Back to Hamas, the idea that October 7th was "justified" because Jews are, what, White is historically bonkers. Every country is born in blood. Israel is no exception, but it is a recognized state and an actual democracy with civil rights and liberties. Hamas is a terrorist organization linked to Iran and Russia. How in the hell can anyone who has a "Hate has no home here" sign in their yard support Hamas? Because they have decided that Israel are "oppressors" and Hamas is therefore justified in committing atrocities based on that "fact."

The reality of Israel's occupation is way more complicated than that. The occupation is wrong and should end, but that should not lead to Hamas running Gaza. We saw what ISIS did when they took over places, and Hamas would be pretty similar. To pretzel oneself into supporting Hamas because Israel is wealthier and more powerful than Palestinian communities is to reach for the single assumption that the occupation is the entire and sole reason Palestinians are poor. Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority are not good at governing. And Israel is also wealthier and powerful than Jordan, Lebanon, Syria...you name it. Why? Because goddamnit, liberal democracy works.

Some of this is cyclical. However, the stakes going into the 2024 election are so catastrophically high that we have narcissistic ideologues like Cornell West running spoiler campaigns and grifts off the outrage of young people who have been trained to expect equity rather than equality from a world that it never, ever going to accommodate them.

I'm reminded, in the end, of the excesses of Campus Leftism in the 1960s that helped spawn a backlash that led to Nixon and Reagan. While both of those men were horrible presidents, their threat to American Democracy was slight. Trump's threat is real and imminent.

Is Trumpism Facism?

 Paul Campos looks at Umberto Eco's essay on what constitutes fascism and sees a lot of overlap, but not a perfect match. He revisited that today, too.

I've always been a little reticent to describe Trumpism as pure fascism, but the label - while somewhat inaccurate - felt much more appropriate after 1/6. 

Christo-fascism, White Christo-Nationalism...They don't exactly roll off the tongue. I think identifying the importance of a form of political evangelism is critical to understanding Trump. The obvious unreasoning nature of the movement has its same roots in much of evangelical belief, in fact it's a triumph of "belief" over reason and evidence.

There have obviously been fascist movements in America since fascism emerged as an ideology in the 1920s. However, the presence of White Nationalism is as old as the republic. I actually think that most instances of religion being used as a political organizing tool is actually not about religion as a doctrinal or dogmatic principle, but as a stand in for a form of ethnic conflict.

Anyway, Trump's assault on the Constitution is part of the unreasoned belief that America is a White Christian nation and while it has roots in America, it really needs to be rooted out next November.

Weaker of the House

 My Johnson...sorry, Mike Johnson...is about to run into the same problem every Republican Speaker has faced since the emergence of the Chaos Caucus in 2010: Republicans don't understand that our government is designed to run on compromise, and therefore we are going to get an unnecessary government shutdown around the holidays.

While Longman places this at the feet of the House caucus, I think it's worth considering how almost no one values the idea of compromise anymore. In fact, before the Chaos Caucus took over last fall, the Democratic House and the nearly evenly split Senate managed to pass a bunch of compromise bills (the so-called Shadow Congress). They only did so because no one was paying attention. As soon as the idea of some sort of compromise legislation became public, it would be impossible to pass.

We have this rickety, archaic 18th century form of government that isn't working because one party assumes that marginal control of one half of one branch means they get to call the tune. There are echoes of this in leftist complaints about Biden not being able to give everyone a pony, but it's much stronger on the right. Put another way, there is no way the House GOP's behavior would pass a middle school civics class.

Defenseless

 Trump's day in court was largely an unstated admission that he has no legal defense. Some of it is his aspirational mafioso personality, but a lot of it is that he has no real legal defense in any of his cases. His only chance is to run out the clock, shoot for mistrials and hope he gets re-elected so he can make his myriad crimes go away.

As Aaron Blake notes above, this should make for close reading by the other judges overseeing all of Trump's other trials (OK, not Cannon, she's a hack). Trump is going to come in, behave like the thundering, suppurating asshole that he is and hope he can get a mistrial, which will push things off until after he (hopefully for him) gets re-elected.

Yeah, I've seen the Times poll. I do think a lot of those young people come home if it's Biden v Trump. But I know it will happen if he get convicted of a crime.

Spite Voting

 Great thread here on the self-defeating calls from Muslim leaders to either boycott voting for Biden or even voting for Republicans. I had a similar discussion with my eldest son, who's so pissed about even the existence of Israel (based on bullshit, online information) that he says he doesn't want to vote for Biden. It's a long time to election day, and I doubt that this will hold as a position for a full year, but if you care about the plight of Palestinians, then you cannot vote for Republicans/Trump, and if you don't vote, you are effectively voting for Trump.

Does it suck that your choices are one guy who's a supported of Israel who wants to see a two state solution and one guy who wants to ban Muslims from traveling to this country and nuke Gaza? Yeah, it does. But that is the choice.

Anti-Semitism and the Left

 Josh Marshall has a thoughtful essay on the rise of anti-Semitism since October 7th. There's one point I'd like to expand upon that's been intruding on my thoughts recently. Why have campuses become such hot beds of frankly odd theories about how the world works? 

In Marshall's piece, he notes how odd it is to refer to Israel as a "colonial" nation. A colony is, by definition, when one country overthrows and takes political control over another territory that it has no plans to annex. It will always be separate from the imperial center. Israel has no external imperial center. There isn't another Jewish state somewhere imposing imperial control over Palestinians. And if you believe that, then you're probably engaging in anti-Semitic tropes about shadowy Jewish power.

There are all sorts of leftist theories about how everything, everywhere is about racial subjugation, which allows them to force a very inapt racial lens on Israel. Most of the debates about Critical Race Theory are nonsense, since it's a very specific legal theory. What does begin to approach a true argument is that there are a lot of academics in the "justice" field who do apply CRT to everything. 

Now, there are certain really good applications of CRT. For instance, grandfather clauses were used to exempt Whites from literacy tests under Jim Crow. The actual text never mentioned race, but as CRT argues, you have to look beneath the text and see if race actually does motivate these laws. Same with voter ID laws that disproportionately effect poorer minorities who might not have drivers' licenses. 

I think the flaw comes fundamentally from how especially advanced academics seem to work. If you go to college and get a BA or BS, you'll certainly focus on certain things and most students are in college looking for fungible skills. My sons are studying architecture and probably some sort of business oriented field. Now, I don't like this! There's a lot of value in a classic liberal arts education that gets lost with simple pre-professional training and accrediting. 

However, once you start on your Masters or PhD in a field - especially the Humanities and Social Sciences - you really have to start digging absurdly deep into theory and very specific applications of those theories. Sure, you have to guard against confirmation bias and a host of other cognitive fallacies, but it's all but inevitable that you become a partisan of your academic theoretical perspective. As Marshall notes in his essay, Israel is not Jim Crow America or Rhodesia; it's its own thing. 

And therein lies the rub. If you've studied post World War II liberation movements, then Palestinian liberation is just the same thing in a different context. 

But it's not. The context matters.

So you have people in thrall to their theories - usually fairly left wing, because that's where the approval of the academy does lie - who force new experiences through old theories. 

I sit at the intersection of two, really three, different academic fields of study. I specifically study US History, Comparative Government and now International Relations. Can I pinch hit and teach a course on Bourbon France for a colleague? Sure. It's high school. But those are my fields.

International Relations is really about the study of theories used to explain the world. I started in college as wanting to major in IR, but the preference for theories that ultimately failed to account for how things always work was frustrating my teenaged brain. Comp Gov exists at the intersection of theory and case studies. You have various theories about how different governmental types might work and then you compare them to see what's similar and what's different. In US History, I have to know Colonial History and the end of the Cold War.

So, in September I'm teaching early revolutionary America in one class then turning around and teaching the basic terminology of political economy. In December, I'm teaching the case study of democracy in India and Reconstruction America. In May, it's Realist Foreign Policy concerning the UN during A block and race relations of the '80s and '90s in B Block.

All of this means that if I try and become a true expert on one thing, I'm lost when it comes to the other 97% of my teaching. In many ways, that's not true in college, and certainly not PhD programs. 

Being a "generalist" or perhaps more expressively a true student and teacher of the liberal arts means that I'm not locked into any theoretical perspective. What's more, when I think about whether I would've liked to get a PhD, I generally think, "nahhh." I like being able to bounce from topic to topic. However, there are very much people who love to dive really deep into a subject and become a true expert. 

Isaiah Berlin referred to "foxes and hedgehogs" when describing learners. I'm a fox. I know a little bit about a lot of things. A hedgehog know a lot about one big thing. A fox's knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep; a hedgehog is an inch wide and a mile deep. As a fox, let me say that we absolutely need hedgehogs. I want my oncologist to be a hedgehog. It's pretty clear that "academia" preferences hedgehogs. 

A social scientist once compared the predictive ability of foxes and hedgehogs and foxes turned out to be must better prognosticators, primarily because they were so much more comfortable with doubt. 

I think that's where I'm going with all this. Hedgehogs are legitimate experts on a subject matter and their expertise clouds them to the fact that they really aren't very comfortable with the complexity and messiness and unpredictability of the actual world.

The Israel-Palestine situation is not complex, not nuanced. It's paradoxical. Both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. Both have a right to press for or preserve their existence in the face of violence. Hamas is awful. Netanyahu and the Israeli Right is awful. The idea that a neat theory about race or colonialism applies here is simply not true. The intractability of this issue is because of this fundamental paradox.

I would bet that if you spoke to academics who studied the Middle East or adjacent fields, they would tell you this. It's the people who have developed their expertise elsewhere and especially those who have access to a "little theory" who are making the maximalist claims in a situation that really does need that right now.

The Party Of Ideas

 Back around the time Reagan ascended improbably to the presidency, there was a coterie of right wing thinkers, generally lumped into the bin of neoconservatives, that provided an intellectual veneer for the broadly libertarian, nationalistic and vaguely racist policies that distinguished Reaganism. They called the Republican Party at the time, the Party of Ideas.

Jon Chait has found the similar group for Trump. I have used the term "party of ideas" ironically to describe a party with one policy idea: cut taxes and regulatory burdens on the rich. That's pretty much been the only thing that holds the Republican Party together. Trump really only accomplished one legislative goal: a massive tax break. The idea that the Chaos Caucus could actually pass legislation by compromising with the Senate and/or White House is laughable on its face. 

What's more concerning is whether Chait is right in predicting that the strain of anti-democratic, anti-liberal (as in liberty) thought on the right is poised to take over the entire Republican Party. It's certainly tempting to see the entire GOP as being the Cult of Trump and okey dokey with January 6th. The voices within the electoral arm of the GOP who opposed Trump's illegal and unconstitutional power grab have mostly been driven from office. They've either lost primaries or retired before they could. 

I guess as an optimist, my feeling is that the GOP is about 40% authoritarian, 40% traditional Republicans (still sucky) and 20% clueless partisans. I also think that a decisive repudiation of Trumpism both in the courts and at the polls would go a long way towards breaking the ascendency of naked authoritarianism on the right. 

Now, all right wing politics have a tendency towards hierarchies and authoritarianism. The hallmark of rightist politics worldwide is a contempt for democracy. The roots of the Red-Brown coalitions or horseshoe theory is the contempt the Far Left and Far Right have for the mundane and often frustrating work of electoral democracy. The most striking example of this is how American and European leftists have taken a shine to fucking Hamas. "Queers for Hamas" appears to be a real thing, not a sly piece of satire. 

This contempt for democracy is, in its own way, understandable for people who have no historical vision and perspective. Yes, democracy is frustrating. It leads to compromise, which has been accurately described as a condition by which you don't get what you want, but are assuaged by the fact that the other side didn't get what it wanted either. 

The new First World Problem is that you can generally get exactly what you want all the time. I just went to Amazon and I can get Icelandic Cod Oil delivered to my home by Sunday. I don't really know if that's usually tough to find, but I'm guessing you can get just about anything you want in a consumer experience delivered to your door. We have online leftists decrying their poverty while ordering DoorDash. 

All of this means that we have a polity that increasingly wants everything they want right now. On the right, this consumer power is directly contradicted by their increasingly irrelevant cultural power. The culture has completely turned against "traditional values," especially if those traditional values turn out to be bigoted. Since so much of conservative politics has become culture war issues, this series of defeats means that they see the culture and therefore the political landscape as irreparably lost. The idea expressed in the "Flight 93 Election"  acknowledges how the cultural and political landscape is moving away from traditional cultural conservativism, so therefore they must seize and hold power, regardless of the will of the people. Does anyone doubt what the result would be of a national plebiscite on Roe v Wade would be?

If the optimist in me is right, Biden wins reelection, Democrats hold the Senate and regain the House, precisely because the GOP has become authoritarian - Dobbs, 1/6, Trump's crimes - and the GOP has an internal reckoning. When the Democrats went into the long exile of 1968-1992, they moved to the center with Bill Clinton. The tragedy of 2016 was that Trump won such a fluke election and convinced the normie GOP that he had some secret sauce. His secret sauce was the misogyny that swirled around Hillary Clinton in Rust Belt working class communities. 

If the GOP gets whupped next November, it will be because of Dobbs and all the various issues surrounding 1/6. It will be because a majority of Republicans have decided that Trump represents their last hope against not only Democrats but democracy. Hopefully, that starts the GOP upon the road to Damascus and their redemption as a center-right party.

Keep An Eye On Retirements

 Two fairly establishment Republicans are retiring in the wake of the Chaos Caucus Dysfunctional Clown Show. Some of this is simply personal disgust with what the GOP has become, maybe most of it. But if they are seeing polling and fundraising numbers that have them alarmed, that's another reason to retire.

The public polling we see has proven in the last 8 years to be pretty meh. The internal polling is usually more rigorous. So, keep an eye out for more Republican retirements. It could be disgust with the authoritarian cult of Trump, but it could be that they see a tough road ahead and would rather retire than lose.

Biden And Israel

I like Jon Chait's analysis of what Biden is doing with regards to Israel and what it means for American politics. As I mentioned yesterday, the fractured nature of our civic life has tended to pit people against each other, taking maximalist positions often tied to identity politics. It isn't just a policy position people hold, but something intrinsic to who they are as a person.

What Biden is doing feels largely correct, given that we only see the public facing parts of the policy. The public embrace of Israel and condemnation of Hamas was right. What I believe - reading between the lines - is Biden's subsequent efforts to rein in the most extreme responses from Israel are largely not working, but we can't know what the IDF would be doing if Biden had not first embraced them.

What's more, Palestinian civilian casualties are a goal of Hamas. That's why they attacked Israel on October 7th; that's why they place military targets in hospitals and refugee camps. Doing that - human shields - is a war crime, but it's not nearly as dramatic a war crime as when Israel hits those targets without considering the cost in civilian lives. 

I would hope that if the IDF doesn't start getting its shit together and stop hitting refugee camps that Biden can use his early embrace to then more forcefully condemn Netanyahu's pogrom against Palestinians.

Finally, Chait is right that the idea that Muslim Americans would look at Biden's embrace of Israel and conclude that they should vote for...Donald Trump is just baffling. 

UPDATE: Martin Longman does a good job of pointing out how everything is just awful and there are no good options for Biden or really anyone. The reality is that this is a perfect storm for critics. They have no responsibility for proposing a plausible solution, the existing situation is terrible and everyone is pissed at everyone.

NPIs

 Nothing brings out Bad Yglesias more than Covid Hot Takes. The fact that he's channeling Nate Silver, himself a fountain of Covid Hot Takes, isn't a promising start. His argument seems to be that things like masking and social distancing didn't work, but his argument is muddled, because he often points out that they did work. As he notes, the bans on large gatherings was a good idea, but we had a mess of rules and enforcement for things like masks and dining.

Then he says, and this is his hobby horse, that school closings were bad. How much of this is because he has a school age kid...I don't know. But the argument that banning large indoor gatherings was good, but schools should have been open is nonsensical. 

When we opened in the fall of 2020, it was with a LOT of trepidation and precautions. As a boarding school, we could effectively isolate large parts of the population - the boarders. We created "pods" of kids who could be together and we tested every person on campus every week. Many students were remote, as we had to teach in hybrid classes. Now, the broad point that this was "bad schooling" does, I think, hold water. We continue to see gaps and lags in student learning, especially incoming students. So even with a hybrid system, we saw learning loss. 

The solution to this was not to open schools, but to build into schooling an additional year for Generation Covid. Some students could navigate independent learning better than others, and maybe they wouldn't need or want that additional year, but you can't argue that banning large gatherings is good...and then argue for packing students into classrooms. Sure, the students would likely be fine if Covid broke out among them, but they would bring the disease home and the teachers would get sick. A lot of teachers are older, frankly, in many public schools. 

So, banning large gatherings is good to save lives, but lets reopen schools and if some teachers die, well...whatever.