The Cost Of Incompetence

 I've argued repeatedly that an underrated peril of Trump and the general Republican Party being able to control government is the long slow (and now accelerating) erosion of governing competence. Martin Longman makes the case that Lindsay Graham - despite his myriad flaws and failings - was one of the final pillars of the GOP that had at least some vague desire to keep the lights on.

Now cometh the pestilence. Typical GOP stupidity looks at basic health and food safety measures as communism or something, so we gut the agencies responsible for preventing screwworm or hamstring the ability of the relevant agencies to track foodborne illness. Trump has always governed like a Facebook rant from your crazy uncle but now he's doing shit like opening up drilling and mining in endangered habitats, which is just venomous, but also likely really stupid.  Same goes with the various cuts to public health measures: Who exactly is asking for this shit?

You can be "pro-business" and still assume that government regulation is possible and necessary. One of the ideas about regulation that the Progressive Movement argued for was that it would create a level playing field where everyone would follow the same rules. Now there are no rules and no reason not for some businesses to engage in a mass rush to the bottom.

So, if you're keeping track, under Trump we have had three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We have had the Pale Horse of death under Covid; the Red Horse of war in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere, and now the Black Horse of famine is saddling up. 

The White Horse, is the Anti-Christ, a charismatic figure who will corrupt the world, so maybe we've had all Four. 

Still Winning

 Democrats are winning the messaging and the war for public opinion over the shutdown. People don't trust Republicans on health care, which is why Dems focused on that issue. That, and it's a genuine catastrophe for tens of millions of people of they don't fix this problem.

Victory can lead to victory, which is the entire mindset of Trumpism. It doesn't matter if your policies are actually good, so long as you're perceived as "winning." I think in the long run this is bullshit, but puncturing the perceptions of victory is important. (See the previous post about mocking ICE with inflatable costumes.)

There are some other axes that Democrats can win on, because they gibe with how people already think about the two parties. One is the closeness of billionaires to the GOP. 

There are clips of farmers, especially soy bean farmers, talking with real despair about the current market for their crops. Most of them accurately note that Trump's trade wars are the reason why they can't sell their crop to China. I've been waiting for the Trump bailout of farmers, but so far it's only been hinted at.

We are, however, bailing out Argentine, more specifically techno-libertarian darling Javier Milei. Even worse, it seems pretty obvious that we are doing so primarily to bail out hedge funds that bet on Milei.

As kids starve in Africa, as American farmers file for bankruptcy, Trump and Bessant are bailing out hedge fund guys to the tune of $20,000,000,000. 

I wouldn't run that ad everywhere, but I would smother the farm belt with this. "You can't sell your crops, the local hospital is closing, but we are spending $20 billion to bail out hedge funds." It's not only true, but it's the sort of attack that people are already primed to believe is true.

Lethal Stupidity

 IRL friends or long time readers may know that I had a very serious case of Covid during the Delta wave. I was hospitalized, then went home, then re-hospitalized, then airlifted to Mass General, then nearly sent to the ICU before I spent three days laying prone to avoid being intubated. For whatever reason, when I got the Pfizer vaccine I did not have the typical reaction of feeling like shit for a few days as my immune system adapted. Since then, I've had a few cases that have responded well to Paxlovid, but today I got my booster because Covid sucks and because it has a serious impact on my colleagues when I'm out of work for a week.

When I went in, I had to have an "existing medical condition" in order to qualify, since I'm not 65. I guess luckily I have borderline high cholesterol, so they gave me the shot.

As we know, Florida has ended required vaccines for school children; RFK has crippled the CDC and attacked the idea of vaccines in general. All of this was, of course, predictable. RFK is a vaccine skeptic who lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearing and then did exactly what he always wanted to do: eviscerate arguably the most successful health measure in human history - rivalled only by antibiotics. 

(Let's pour one out for irony, as Florida is saying that people shouldn't have vaccine mandates because "their body, their choice" as they strip abortion rights away from people.)

This extends beyond Covid. Childhood vaccines - a literal health care miracle - will be reduced in uptake in red states like Florida. This will lead to a return in measles and many older people have declining immunity from their own childhood vaccines, so they will be vulnerable. Measles, mumps, rubella will all spread from Florida to other states as herd immunity declines. It would be just if this was simply a case of FAFO, but people who can't take vaccines or people with compromised immunity or people with reduced immunity because it's been decades since they were vaccinated are all at risk.

I'd like to believe that there will be consequences for people like RFK but the best I can hope for is that he dies of a treatable disease, because he won't face consequences in our corrupted court system.

What's Next With Martial Law?

 As Trump's job approval spirals near historic lows, even before the economic cost of his policies is levelled, he seems to be doubling down on military takeovers of local governments.

Much of this is performative. Unlike the masked goons in ICE, the National Guard isn't particularly juiced to become Stormtroopers for Trump. The argument that this is supposed to "normalize" armed soldiery on street corners could be true, or it could be that he's just hoping for a violent response to allow him to crack down further on any dissent. Certainly, deploying troops to Chicago would fit his blinkered view of American Carnage and the hope that some dumb gang member shoots at a Guardsman. 

This is all illegal, of course. Congress returns soon, and in addition to dealing with Epstein, they will have to address the DC takeover. Republicans have a seven seat majority today but that number falls to five by September 23rd after special elections fill empty seats in Democratic districts. That means that four Republican House members or four Republican Senators are all that's needed to end this bullshit "emergency."  In the Senate, I think this could be an issue that unites Collins, Murkowski, McConnell and Paul. A similar mix of what passes for moderates (Don Bacon?) and libertarians in the House could make a coalition to end this.

We can see the lawlessness of the Trump Administration in their moves to deport Kilmer Abrego Garcia again, even as he awaits trial. This is a blatant violation of Garcia's rights, just as the first deportation was. They arrested him after his court hearing, because of course they did. This is not about enforcing the law, but creating precedents for violating it. 

If courts rule that Trump's martial law attempts in California or possible future attempts in Illinois are illegal (which they are), what happens next? The Abrego Garcia case shows that they are unconstrained by judicial rulings. Intimidation is the only law they follow.

In all this, of course, is the supine Republican Congress.

Dying For An Ideology

 At least since the French and American Revolutions, people have fought and died for ideologies - some good, some bad, some terrible. 

What's striking about today is not that Americans are dying in a struggle to preserve or advance an ideology. They are effectively committing suicide in deference to the ideology of every Republican president since Ronald Reagan.

Good Government Matters

 Cynics will say that "All politicians lie" or "Both political parties are the same."

They are wrong, especially on the second point, which should have become obvious even before the OBBB passed.

There are two ways in which Republican governance is actively hurting the country - today and in the long run.

The first is that, as Krugman notes, the OBBB guts clean energy funding and tax breaks. This is so manifestly bad policy that it staggers belief. Clean energy is more cost effective than the dirtier forms of energy, while being far more environmentally sound. It's difficult to tell whether this is simply a matter of Cleek's Law or an inefficient and somewhat corrupt giveaway to fossil fuels industries.

The second is simply bad governance, which is a hallmark of Republican rule. Because the post-Reagan GOP has decided that "gubmint bad, taxes worse" we get hollowed out and poorly run public services. In our town, the corrupt/incompetent ruling Republicans decided not to pay the nearby city from which we get our water the market rate. For years. Just didn't pay. Now the town owes tens of millions of dollars after two court losses, and the Republican plan seems to be "appeal the case again, while not setting aside money for when they lose again." Rather than raise water bills a few years ago, they simply plugged their fingers in their ears and stomped their feet hoping the problem would go away.

A far more lethal example just played out in the horrific floods in Texas. As Richardson summarizes, the local officials did not put in flood sirens, because it was expensive. Now, maybe a 100 or more people are dead. Maybe the Trump cuts to NOAA and NWS are also responsible, but the official position of Kerr County officials on installing a flood warning system was "Taxpayers won't pay for it."

Further in the article, you get this perfect GOP response to a tragedy:

Current city officials on Sunday did not discuss the earlier deliberations over warning systems. Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, sidestepped a question about the effectiveness of local emergency notifications, telling reporters at a news conference that it was “not the time to speculate.”

This is the response to school shootings, floods, any crisis that occurs, because GOP policies facilitate them happening, "Don't politicize it!" "Thoughts and prayers."

Of course, the two themes come together. The floods are "historic" and "once a century" which seems to happen a lot, and most climatologists have been saying that crazy weather is exactly the immediate impact of global warming. 

But, by all means, let's gut clean energy. 

The proper role of government is to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves. This is more or less what Lincoln said many year ago. Even then there was an understanding that government action could be more than the libertarian limits of public safety. Governments could actively improve things, usually be aggregating resources. If Kerr County was too poor to put in a warning system, the state government could have helped. 

Guess who runs the state government.

In the end, the solution would likely have been that federal funds - voted into the budget by Democrats and paid for by wealthier blue states - would have been needed to build a system that might have saved those people's lives. Everything Republicans do - from Reagan to Dubya to Trump, from Gingrich to Delay to McConnell to Johnson - stands in opposition to the idea that government can save and improve lives and Trump and Congressional Republicans are bringing this theology to our national government.

Tallying The Body Count

 Paul Krugman talks with Jonathan Gruber, the health care economist who helped design the ACA, about the impact of the OBBB. What will the impact of this shit sandwich be on American health? The short answer is that we kind of won't know until it settles out.

The biggest hurdle is that they have made really stringent and frequent paperwork to stay on Medicaid. Since Medicaid covers a lot of people at the lower ends of the socio-economic ladder, that's a lot of people who simply won't be able to navigate the Byzantine paperwork. (One suggestion they make is for someone like Mamdani to propose a corps of people who will go through poor neighborhoods and help people fill out the forms.)

One underreported hurdle that I had not heard about was that they are going to hit states with hurdles to prevent them from using taxation of health care providers to smooth some of the edges off gaps in coverage. Basically, blue states have been playing a shell game with state taxes to cover up some flaws and the bill will end that.

The whole dynamic of rural hospitals is getting noticed, but what about urban hospitals in poorer communities? Waterbury, Connecticut is a poor town and they have two hospitals that serve this corner of the state. I could certainly see one of them closing soon, despite being a teaching hospital for Yale Medical School.

One stat Gruber noted was that for every 800 people that you cover with insurance, one fewer person dies. If we see people losing health care at the rates that are predicted, then 25,000 people will die per year that would not have otherwise died. 

Another statistic that they discuss is the role that government funding has made in creating the American economy. Obviously, I'm typing this on a computer and posting on the internet, two things created from the seeds of government spending. The Human Genome Project, for instance, cost the government $3 billion. Today, the biotech economic activity that was generated from that creates $6 billion in tax revenue every year. Another study suggests that for every $1 the National Institutes of Health spends, it prompts $8 of private spending and $3 of stock market value.

Among the most deeply engrained ideas on the right - the thing that unites Trump even with Thom Tillis or Mitt Romney -  is that somehow government spending doesn't count. Sure, there's the bogus "waste, fraud and abuse" line, but that's just cover for "none of that stuff is legitimate in the first place." The problem is that Keynes' basic formula for total demand includes government spending as being equal to consumer spending or business investment. In fact, it's probably more efficient in generating overall demand.

Both the OBBB and the Trump-Musk assault on the federal workforce and the impounding of funds by Trump all create a void in the heart of the American economy. The recent jobs report somehow says that government payrolls increased in the last quarter, which seems...dubious, and we should not assume that the current Executive Branch is telling the truth. Pulling all of this government spending out of the economy: Medicaid cuts, R&D cuts, firing public sector workers, the knock-on effects at the local level from all of the above: this is going to retard economic growth. 

Republicans can decry the fact that our economy is reliant on some level of government spending, but being peeved does not alter the math. 

Between the slowdown in trade prompted by Trump's tariffs, the impounding of existing funds for everything from education to medical care, the reduction in almost all government spending except for immigration enforcement and the overall instability in capital markets from the careening nature of policy under Trump, I again can't see a scenario where we don't enter a recession sooner rather than later.

Normal Republicans Also Suck

 There has been an effort (and I get it) to reach out to "normal" Republicans in order to create a schism between the old GOP and the MAGA cancer that is eating at American civil democracy. As long as MAGA controls the GOP, we are at the mercy of a handful of voters as to whether we careen into authoritarianism.

However, the recent budget that has emerged from the House GOP is a reminder that the normal agenda of the Republican Party is terribly cruel.

There is an argument that people like Yglesias won't let go of: that Trump moderated on some of the worst and least popular ideas of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I suppose there is truth that those low information Trump voters are primarily concerned that Republicans won't cut their Social Security and keep their farm subsidies flowing. To a certain degree, Trump has kept a few of those red lines, but that has created a budget structure that is untenable. 

The fiscal wreckage that they are about to unleash is really catastrophic. Despite the Doomerism, I really think that much of what Trump is doing actually can be undone fairly quickly - a couple of years. Wrecking America's credit might actually produce the collapse of America that Trump claims to be trying to avert.

Federal workers are really, really important. Most Republicans disagree with that basic premise of public service. They have turned Reagan's quips about government being the problem to an organizing philosophy that is incompatible with 21st century society.

There are no "good Republicans."  The ones who might be are fast becoming independents. 

Breaking: America

 Richardson takes her usual meander through the day's news, but she focus this time on the Doge/Musk Axis. In particular three interrelated things.

First, these is the massive violation of privacy that Musk is committing by downloading and centralizing personal data within Federal computers. Second, there is the degradation of air traffic control, which is going to be a huge issue as soon as we have another plane crash. These narratives start to spin up and they become unstoppable. Third, there is the way Musk is enriching himself by doing the first two parts. (I do hope that if we have democratic elections again and Democrats win a landslide, they go after Musk and seize Starlink and SpaceX as compensation for his crimes.)

Obviously, the most immediate concern would be air traffic control, as people could die. My sister flew through Newark last week and she had a 5 hour delay. We have a trip planned in early June to Europe to celebrate our son's college graduation and I'm not a little worried about getting on an airplane again.

At the moment, we are balanced on a precipice. Trump is blowing up global trade and we are likely a few weeks from emptier shelves. Air traffic control seems to be in some sort of crisis. India and Pakistan are on the verge of war that could kill millions. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is laser focused on harassing trans people and "ending woke" whatever that means in the moment.

The summer is usually a quieter time in politics and economics. I can remember though in 2008 how unsettling all the background noise was - the collapse of some banks, weird fluctuations in gas prices - in anticipation of the true collapse in the fall. We are already in the unsettled time, waiting for the whole thing to crumble down. 

Tr(i)ump(h) of the Will

 Richardson points out how Trump represents the logical end point of 45 years of Republican rhetoric about government being the problem in American life. There was an argument you could make about regulation in 1980 being too high and there is always room to tweak regulations after they've played out in the real world. 

But this rhetoric wasn't about governance, it was about winning elections. It relied on a myth of American rugged individualism symbolized by the cowboy - Reagan's leitmotif as president. The cowboy - the rugged loner - could dispense justice easily and brutally without the niceties of law. If you want an antidote to this idea, I recommend Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

As Richardson notes, Trump's form of rugged individualism isolates America itself. It's one thing to lie to voters in Mississippi that the government does nothing for them, when Mississippi in fact gets a ton of federal money. It's one thing to use that lie to funnel wealth upwards.

It's another to leave the country - the country that created an international system that benefitted itself and the world - fundamentally alone on the international stage. Or worse than alone, we cuddle up to Putin and Bukele while insulting Canada and Japan.

Great work everybody.

Vaccines and MAGA World

 Yglesias looks at vaccines, especially in light of the fact that a child died of measles yesterday. I had my flu shot, but we had a terrible flu season, I coach wrestling which makes it easy to vector and sometimes a vaccine is imperfect. 

In order for vaccines to work most effectively, we need as many people as possible to take them. Vaccines - arguably the greatest advance in the history of medical science alongside antibiotics - work both by reducing your vulnerability and by preventing spread. If 95% of people are vaccinated, then a disease can't get momentum or mutate as easily.

Left unsaid in Yglesias' analysis is the fact that the anti-vax movement has now taken up residence in the political right in this country. This is part of the broader ideological sorting of certain groups. Gone are the heterodox parties of the mid-20th century, instead every single anti-government crank now has a home in the GOP. 

What's more, we can see in this antigovernmental movement a rejection of common cause. We get vaccinated to protect ourselves, but we also do it to protect others. The selfish, self-centeredness of the political right that has always been a part of their DNA was then catalyzed by the Covid measures taken to keep people alive.

Selfishness is not considered a virtue in any culture and in some it's the gravest sin. It makes sense that it would find a home in the GOP.

The Worm Is Turning

 GOP members are being confronted at Town Halls even in deeply Red districts.

The operative question is whether they will listen or just stop holding town halls.

One of the reason so many of us were despondent after the election was that 2016 was a fluke of the Electoral College, but 2024 he somehow won a plurality of the vote. For people who pay attention to the news, who can tell you what Project 2025 is, who understand the 34 felony convictions, Trump's election  was a betrayal of American ideals by the American voter. Our fellow citizens decided to hand power to That Guy. 

My feeling has always been that the combination of low information voter, general anti-incumbent mood globally, and the latent, unexamined misogyny of the American voter led to Trump's victory. What we are seeing in a lot of very Red districts is that Federal programs are actually pretty popular - in fact, especially in Red districts. This is why Republicans have always run on antigovernment grievance but never actually cut the size of the government in radical ways. If you're one of these Congresscritters from a rural district you've been fulminating about "foreign aid giveaways" for decades, but you haven't actually cut USAID, because USAID buys food from your constituents.

If you want a nice summary of Trump's falling approval ratings and Musk's toxic personality, check out Richardson.

Big Bad Gubmint is a handy boogeyman to stand in for racial prejudice. Farm subsidies are fine, but SNAP and school lunches are not, despite the fact that they are literally two sides of the same coin, and despite the fact that those benefits flow to poorer, redder districts and states.

As Josh Marshall noted, Elon Musk is both unpopular and unhinged. He's a ketamine-addled billionaire at a time when literally no one likes billionaires. He's slashing indiscriminately and recklessly through important programs.  However, he's not Trump. His mad antics have created an avenue for soft Trump supporters to move away from Trump and the GOP. "I'm angry at Musk but disappointed in Trump" is the first step towards "I am voting for Democrats in 2026 to rein this madness in."

This Could Be The Fulcrum

 Der Muskenjugend have infiltrated the Social Security Administration. That could be the weak spot in their plans to radically downsize the government. The existing downsizing could take months or even years to be felt by the public at large -  though the number of air traffic incidents could claim their attention - but if seniors miss a Social Security check, that could be huge.

Yglesias's big blind spot when writing about Trump is that he assumes that policy is the reason why Democrats lost. It seems possible to me that the reason Democrats lost is that America isn't ready for a female president, and that includes quite a lot of female voters. However, his point that Trump moved away from the economic platform of Paul Ryan is probably sound. Part of that was not touching Senior Entitlements. Elon Musk, being in many ways an idiot, has no such compunctions. 

I'd hate to see the misery that would be caused by people missing crucial checks, but as I've said repeatedly, America has fucked around and they are going to have to find out.

Heightening The Contradictions

 Invaluable chronicler of Trumpistan, Heather Cox Richardson, has a post about what might be called the FDR Consensus. The basic idea was a fundamental shift in the role of the government in people's lives. Prior to FDR, the prevailing philosophy of government was expressed by Grover Cleveland, when he said that while the people should support the government, the government should not support the people. This headed off calls for a robust safety net and government regulations to improve the lives of normal Americans.

The Reagan Revolution was a backlash against "Big Government" that had its roots in racial resentment over the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the 1960s. Broad macroeconomic trends created by welfare spending, the Vietnam war and rising energy costs meant that the '70s saw inflation that was far, far worse than what we have recently experienced. This - combined with the foreign policy embarrassments in Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere - led to a palpable sense of American decline, one might even say American Carnage. It often feels like Donald Trump wee lizard brain is stuck in the dystopia of 1970s New York.

The point being that Reagan's election was caused by a lot of things, but mostly a reaction to the perceived failures of the New Deal/Great Society state. In fact, only a modest portion of the problem was caused by the expansive welfare state, the Reagan forces interpreted his victories as mandate to crush that New Deal state. However, once in Washington, the New Deal/Great Society state proved more popular than they had presumed. 

Destroying it via legislation has always been a non-starter.

Which brings us to President Elon Musk and King Donald. Trump has always understood that the fanaticism present in the Paul Ryan budgets was politically toxic. As raving liberal Dwight Eisenhower once said, the political party that destroys Social Security would cease to exist.

What Musk is doing via his coup is destroying that state via illegal executive actions, illegal firings and illegal impounding of funds. 

The eventual outcome of this will be a backlash to the backlash, as Red Staters realize that Big Government actually helps them quite a bit. In the meanwhile, people will die from preventable diseases, perhaps from breaches in national security. A recession seems inevitable if Trump and Musk continue down the road they are on. People die from recessions.

Maybe then Americans will realize that the presidency is not fit for a reality TV show and his billionaire puppet master.

A Bigger Threat Than Trump

 The people around him are a bigger threat to democracy than Trump himself. All the Project 2025 fascists are certainly angry little fuckers trying to create a monarchical form of government in America

But it's Elon Musk who is currently the gravest threat to American democratic governance. I think we all know that at this point. When Trump was president before, I noted that Trump - unlike every single other president before him - had zero experience in either public service or the military. Trump had never taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution before he did on January 20th, 2017. He didn't "get it". 

Musk gets it even less. He's the same autocratic tycoon-type as Trump, but he's steeped in the family legacy of apartheid and all that that entails.

The good news is that - for the moment - Musk does not have the same cult dynamic as Trump. Yes, there are Muskovites. They tend to be the tech bros wannabes. Not a large group. Musk is deeply unappealing as a person in ways that - for some reason - Trump is not.

The more Democrats can run against Musk the better. He will absolutely break some shit that cannot be broken, and when he does, Musk can be the anchor to drag down Trump and the Republican Party.

The Fifth Risk

 Michael Lewis - of The Big Short fame - wrote a book about the early Trump administration of 2017 called The Fifth Risk. The basic idea is that Trump and the GOP want to hollow out the 20th and 21st century administrative state. As Josh Marshall notes, this desire to hollow out the state bureaucracy is the one common thread uniting the factions of MAGA, Christian Nationalism and Muskovite techbros. 

Basically, Trump 1.0 failed to achieve what it wanted because America has a government built on the premise of avoiding harm. This does have the effect of making it inefficient, but that inefficiency is part of the design. It prevents too much power accruing in any one spot and therefore distributes public goods more fairly. Think of the DMV. Everyone has to wait in line; it's very democratic.

If Musk and Trump are successful in hollowing out the administrative state, then we are screwed for the foreseeable future. There will be some Katrina level catastrophe or worse. There will be a 2008 crisis or worse. As long as we have elections, that should lead to Democrats winning control of the government. Even after that happens, you will have to de-Trumpify the government and replace his loyalists with qualified people. Qualified people might be hard to find, given how they are being treated by the Republican Party.

One of the great delusions of the techbro, libertarian right is that government is some sort of burden, when in fact it smooths out so much of lives travails. The ease of 21st century life is invisible, because we take it for granted that the power stays on, the drinking water is clean, the road are paved, the schools are open, air traffic is safe, the dollar is sound. Musk and Trump's plan imperils all of that.

Bootlickers

 Recently, Mark Zuckerberg decided to end Meta's "woke" policies of being nice to its employees and respectful of the truth. Marshall says this decision won't age well. These companies that have bent over backwards for Trump and MAGA are making a pretty risky gamble that Trump's plurality of the popular vote represents some sort of trend, rather than a last gasp of some culture war crap. Yes, the identity politics of the left got out of hand, but that message seems to have been actually received.  Meanwhile, the GOP seems hellbent on doing some crazy shit.

Now, much of that won't wash, but even trying to do it will elicit a backlash. Again, if Trump does what he says he wants to do, he will wreck the Goldilocks Economy.

What's more, all this Real Murica bullshit evades the fact that the coastal elites are what make America great. It is, in fact, America's constant work at trying to become a better version of itself that makes us the dynamic power in the world. It's also why some of the most egregious examples of "woke" are likely going to go away. 

The general gestalt of America - namely that we are a really nice people - isn't going away. With Trump "cruelty is the point" but that's why he's been largely unpopular, despite the partisan advantages he enjoys. 

Companies that decide to be cruel to their employees - and that's at the heart of what a lot of these companies are doing - will find it hard to retain those employees. Car companies don't have LGBTQ people in their ads to be "woke", they do it to sell cars. 

What's more, I certainly hope if Trump follows through on his vindictiveness and punishes his foes, that the backlash is immediate and sincere. Even more so, though, I hope that Democrats don't fall into the Merrick Garland trap in 2028, should they regain power in the face of oligarchic support for Republicans.

As these techbro libertarians pick a side, let's remember that when we hold the levers of power again.

Silicon Death Valley

 Josh Marshall uncovered what might be the genesis or at least the feedback loop of Trump's Greenland nonsense. As you might expect, it has some link to his new friends in Muskylvania. The techno broligarchy is now calling so much of the tune, because of Musk's corruption of Twitter (and potentially Zuckerberg's corruption of Meta). With Musk now the Grima Wormtongue of Donald Trump, the whispers of this idea of stateless living now has a proponent - I guess - in the White House. My guess is that Trump really has no interest in creating a libertarian non-state state. 

This really brings us back to the techno sociopathy of Silicon Valley. Let's go back and remember that Musk, Peter Thiel, Peter Sacks and the like are not engineers, though they likely understand more engineering than most. They are venture capitalists who have made a killing off the "next" technology. This has created a massive, billionaire fueled Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby they think because they acquired Tesla or built PayPal that they are the finest humanity has to offer. 

It's Social Darwinism with ones and zeroes. 

Like Social Darwinism, this movement if fundamentally un-democratic. Since most states at least give a façade of democratic legitimacy (the People's Republic of Korea), the norm of democratic government is fairly hard to escape, and if you wanted to escape it in 2025, that means, well, Russia or North Korea, which isn't a great place to be.

As a result, you have these techbros masturbating to fantasies of creating their own states. Or, again, anti-states. Musk doesn't want to be the Neil Armstrong of Mars, he wants to be the Cortez. He wants to live on Mars, surrounded by sex robots and other drones who will keep him alive in a simulacrum of imperial splendor, without having all those pesky human slaves to keep an eye on. 

Look, states were created in Europe as a successor to empires, then exported that idea through their own imperialism. The reason why the rest of the world kept states even as they expelled Europeans, was because states just work. 

I do hope that these tech weirdos go off and live in their libertarian non-state somewhere. 

The rest of us would be better off.

MAGAt on MAGAt Violence

 The term of art often used to describe Trumpistan is kakistocracy: rule by the least competent and worst people. We now see that coming to the fore before Trump has even been inaugurated. Paul Krugman (who I think I will be linking to a lot) lays out the contours of the internecine warfare between the MAGA Brownshirts and the Broligarchic Libertarians. Once again, the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party is the go-to explainer for people who voted for Trump only to discover that he isn't actually their friend.

Josh Marshall hits on something else. Yes, this is a Steve Bannon/Laura Loomer vs Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy cage match pitting one horrible set of people against an entirely different set of horrible people. Rooting for injuries, etc.

However, this ignores the key player in this drama. Much like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Trump is not on the stage, but central to the drama. As Marshall notes and I think it true, Trump is already a spent force in so many ways. He's old and was never really smart to begin with. He learned almost nothing from his previous four years in office. He looks and sounds exhausted. Now, he's term limited. 

One of the key acts in this drama was Trump's recent experience being sidelined by Elon Musk over the government shutdown. Musk drove that whole monkey boat, until Trump emerged, grunted a few things to help resolve it and then started babbling about Greenland and Panama in order to re-center the narrative on him. Now, almost immediately afterwards, the narrative has again escaped his control. 

Central to this is that Trump believes almost nothing, beyond a deep belief in Donald Trump. Everything - and we mean everything - is a transaction that Trump "will" win by being Trump. The government shutdown was interesting, in that Musk really wanted his Chinese investments protected. He blows up the deal, gets them protected (Trump does not get his debt ceiling ask) and then the whole thing goes away. That was very Trumpy: chaotic and fundamentally corrupt. 

The problem is that there are two hugely obnoxious and important wings of Trump's coalition that have an irreconcilable difference on H1-B visas. Being a huge collection of privileged assholes, they have set upon each other hammer and tong. Since Trump revels in vulgar, brash name calling, they have aped their Orange Jesus and started throwing slurs at each other. 

It's honestly glorious.

Trump, ultimately holds the balance of power. To this point, he has been reluctant to really call Musk on his bullshit, but hating foreigners will ultimately clash with his other core belief in privileging wealth over everything else. Since he presumably won't be elected again (laughs nervously and nods at the 22nd Amendment) he has no need of anyone's votes. Musk, Ramaswamy, Bannon, Loomer...they are trying to create political movements. Bannon's Right Wing Populism cannot coexist with Musk's Arrested Adolescent Libertarianism.

Meanwhile, there is a steady drip of stories from the Red Hinterlands of people who look aghast at what Muskaswamy are planning to do. Who cherish their immigrant friends (who aren't the bad ones). The impulse from many, including myself, has been to sit back and weather the storm as Trump embarks on disastrous policies, and then kinda sorta hope that those cascading disasters land hardest on Red America, dependent as they are on Big Gubmint handouts. That makes me feel bad about myself and my country though.

Rooting for the chaotic disaster of MAGAt on MAGAt violence, however, is glorious. 

Malthus and Empire

 This piece by Paul Krugman explores why empires - like the one Trump is seemingly proposing - are not worth the cost. There was the mercantilist argument centuries ago, that gold was money and therefore balance of trade was wealth, so empires were needed to insure favorable balances of trade. As Krugman notes in passing, this was based on a Malthusian view of the world.

Thomas Malthus famously argued that societies (or rather economies) would expand to the limit of their food supply and then begin to starve to death or fight wars for more food, all of which had the effect of bringing the population back into balance with its food supply. Malthusian economics of scarcity are no longer really a thing, as the industrial revolution and the industrialization of agriculture rendered old limits on food supply obsolete. 

Neo-Malthusians, if you can call them that, apply Malthus' Economics of Scarcity to energy and fresh water today. Energy can be addressed via renewables and nuclear energy, but we seem to have hardened into partisan and ideological stances on that. It's not just America, Germany shuttered their nuclear power plants to bad effect. 

Still, there's always a Malthusian Dark Lord lurking about, explaining why scarcity is about to lead to societal collapse.

At certain times and certain places, there is no doubt that these Malthusian concepts do come into play, but globally speaking, it is not a problem of capacity, but a political problem as to why we don't solve these issues. 

All of which is a winding road that leads me to the various Edge Lords and Trad shitpoasters who populate the internet. They are embracing this Malthusian idea of scarcity and collapse, which is why they point with glee to every tragedy as the precursor for the moment the old order crumbles and they arise through their very special specialness to become our new Overlords, because they read a book on farming or some shit. 

The other form it takes is manifested in the novel I'm reading, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I'm about a third of the way through it, but it's about someone trying to infiltrate a sort of enviro-anarchist group. So far, it's her machinations interspersed with the musings of the sage who inspires the eco-terrorists (if that's what they turn out to be). He waxes rhapsodic about Neanderthals, for instance.

Beginning, in some ways, with Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (a book I couldn't finish it was so bad), there is this romanticized version of pre-history where people were awesome until they settled down and started farming. In fact, agriculture did start this Malthusian cycle of growth and collapse centered on the food supply. The idea, though, that this Malthusian constraint did not apply to hunter-gatherers is absurd. Bands of nomads were not kept small with meticulous family planning. It was infanticide or the disruption in menstruation that hunger can bring. People started farming because it gave them steady access to food. 

Yes, there were many downsides to this, especially the domestication of animals that vectored disease into humans. It also led to that Malthusian dynamic of growth and decline - a growth that did not happen under the old hunter-gatherer economy. 

So, Malthus - an economist very few study or take seriously anymore, except as an historical relic - is still alive. He's alive in the eco-doomerism of those who think it's all going to unravel and we are a few decades away from Mad Max. He's alive, also, in the typically right wing fantasies of those who imagine this collapse leading to their elevation as emperors of the new order. 

He's also alive, maybe, in Donald Trump's view of Imperial America. I say maybe, because I really believe all this blathering nonsense about Canada and Greenland and Panama is just Trump trying to prove that he's president and not Elon Musk. That's 90% of his motivation. He calls the tune and the media starts dancing.

However, the fact that these bonkers examples were his distractors is because Trump's vision of the economy is very much from Malthus' time. It's a mercantilist zero-sum economy, and fuck you, Adam Smith. It's about tariffs as protectionism regardless of the economic costs, and tariffs only work - to the degree they do - when married to empire.

When I described Trump as a reactionary in previous years, I was thinking he wanted to take us back to the 1950s. I was wrong. He wants to take us back to the 1850s.