Solving Problems

 Kamala Harris and others have come out and said that should Democrats win control of the House and Senate next week, they should not focus on impeachment. The argument is that Democrats will have been elected to fix things, including the War in Iran, tariffs and "affordability." 

There are a host of problems here. The first is that almost all of Trump's deeply unpopular actions have either at their root or branch the connecting issue of corruption. If you want to address his tariff powers, you also have to look at how he's squeezing companies for bribes to repeal tariffs in their specific industries. There is fundamentally no profound distinction between solving affordability and ending Trump's abuse of power.

Next, there is the simple math of what even the most profound of Blue Tsunamis can bring. Let's say that it's just an absolute crushing defeat for Trump. Not just Mississippi and South Carolina, but Arkansas flips Senate seats. Harris and other would note that if you get to, say, 58 Senate seats that this isn't enough to remove Trump from office. This is accurate. However, it's also still not enough to override a presidential veto. What's more, fundamental to Trump's abuse of power is his contempt for laws passed by Congress and his refusal to abide by court decisions. As an autocrat, he cannot work within the separation of powers. Focusing on "affordability" isn't going to lead to "solutions" anymore than impeachment will lead to removal. 

The essential burden that Democrats face is that they are a party devoted to government actually working and our system makes it difficult to make things work. What's more, you can pass a really impressive and beneficial program like the Affordable Care Act or nutrition assistance programs and agent provocateurs can simply gin up some small borderline act of corruption to try and discredit the whole project. The perils of running on "doing something" is that when you have partial power - and the system is set up so that one party always has partial power - you can't actually do anything. If el Sayed and Nixon win their Senate races, they aren't going to be able to pass Medicare for All at least until 2029 and likely not even then.

So arguing that Democrats should not focus on impeachment because it won't actually remove Trump doesn't make sense, because Democrats won't be able to really do anything until 2029.

Finally, people are pissed. The smooth brained swing voters are inherently distrustful of both parties. They are - seemingly - pissed at Trump because things suck. Democrats will not be able to make things magically not suck in January, no matter how many seats they win next week. They will have to show that they are prepared to hold corruption accountable. They will have to investigate everything WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY PASSING BILLS THAT TRUMP WILL VETO OR SIMPLY NOT IMPLEMENT. You can do both! I know Mike Johnson didn't believe in actually having the Congress meet, but you can stay in DC and legislate while ALSO investigating and impeaching.

The criticism from the insurgent left is that institutional Democrats are wimps. El Sayed has some serious political deficits, but he understands the need for combative politics. Even someone as mild mannered as Ossoff gets that. If Harris can't see that and if Chuck Schumer can't see that, then we are right back where we were in spring of 2021, when we let Trump slide for January 6th. 

Impeach him for murdering fishermen in the Caribbean. The impeach him again for accepting bribes. Then impeach him again for Iran or for not supporting Ukraine as required by law. 

MAKE HIM FUCKING MISERABLE.

Lawfare Is The Stupidest MAGA Neologism

 When the Biden DOJ began - slowly, oh so slowly - to investigate and prosecute Trump for his many crimes, his partisans screamed "Lawfare! They're weaponizing the Justice system!" The reality, of course, is that Trump WAS guilty of crimes. We know this because he was fucking convicted by a jury in NY. The other indictments never made it to trial, but there's a pretty good chance that he would have been convicted. 

The Lawfare idea was an example of two different aspects of MAGA. The first is that every accusation is a confession. Trump has treated the DOJ as his own private law firm to sue, bully and persecute his enemies. The other day, they went looking for a third indictment against James Comey. They couldn't even get an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson. 

The second is the idea of muddying the waters so thoroughly that you can't distinguish the actual criminality with the firehose of scandals and quasi-scandals and outrages that flood your media. They are seeking to inoculate themselves from future prosecutions, by complaining about what is effectively their own behavior. Launch vindictive prosecution after vindictive prosecution and then you can complain that every prosecution is vindictive. 

This even has international implications, with the recent treatment of Flavio Bolsonaro. MAGA screams about criminal entering the country illegally, then illegally bring in a criminal. Not just Bolsonaro, but the Tate Brothers qualify as opening the doors for right wing criminals. 

This drives home the fundamental truth of Trump and MAGA: this is a group that is completely devoid of principles. Trump has always been intensely transactional in his relationships. A wife is not life partner (ha), best friend and helpmeet, but an ornament that exists as long as she looks good on his arm. A business deal is only successful if it screws over the other guy. Political figures only exist to serve him. 

The idea of "justice" as an abstract principle is so foreign to the marrow of MAGA that it cannot even occur to them that people might want to prosecute people "on their side" for crimes. Democrats aren't perfect, but they have moved pretty quickly to disown Graham Platner, Eric Swalwell and Bob Menendez when their misdeeds became apparent. Meanwhile, MAGA wants to shove Ken Paxton - a cartoonishly evil character - into a 6 year Senate term. Is he a criminal? Almost certainly, but he's on the team.

What's more, a criminal investigation of Paxton is not about finding whether he committed crimes but "lawfare." 

Recently, Elissa Slotkin said that there needed to be criminal investigations and prosecutions of low level MAGA people to dissuade the lawless behavior that is swirling through the People's Government. The equation was inherently conservative: If you have committed a crime, you should fear prosecution. It was not, however, "Conservative" in Wilhoit's Law, which says, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." 

In MAGA, the in-group is, well, MAGA. The law should protect them from swarthy brown criminals, but not bind their own rampant criminality. 

If History is to be our guide, there will come a reckoning for MAGA. Perhaps it starts in a few days. Perhaps the true reckoning comes in 2029, but it will come. When it does, there will be voices suggesting that prosecuting the tsunami of corruption would be bad because Trump engaged in frivolous prosecutions and prosecuting him and his cronies would be the same. These are terrible voices and we should punch them in the fucking mouth. 

Collapse

 Richardson cheerily relates the circumstances of the Market Crash of 1929. Krugman, meanwhile, looks at the situation from today forwards. 

The three things Krugman looks at are a possible stagflation cycle, a liquidity trap caused by the bursting of the AI bubble and a debt crisis. All three are very, very bad. 

The stagflation argument has to be linked - though Krugman doesn't do so explicitly - to rising energy costs. The Iran war has caused energy prices - and therefore the price of everything that requires oil to be produced or shipped - to spike, and as businesses begin to price this in, that can create rising prices, even as the economy does not grow. There is some evidence that we are seeing to productivity gains related to AI, but the real economy - as opposed to the stock market - does not seem to be growing at the same rate as prices are rising.

The liquidity trap is related to the AI situation, because if that's a bubble (and it sure seems to be) and it bursts, the US is not in a great position to escape the downturn with monetary stimulus, because interest rates are already fairly low. We could spend our way out, but that leads to the third risk, which is a debt crisis.

It seems unlikely that the US could enter a debt crisis - France might -  because of the way the dollar functions. But the extraordinary costs of borrowing means that interest payments on US debt are rising at a time when we already have problems with revenues - Thank, Republicans! - and, oh, yeah, we are fighting a war with Iran.

Krugman also notes that there are risks we can't see. He talks about how Covid screwed everything up without warning, but what about a massive hack or crash of the digital world because of AI. That seems far more likely than SkyNet becoming self aware and wiping out humanity.

What goes unstated by Krugman, but Richardson nods at, perhaps without realizing the connection, is that we have absolute fucking morons running things in DC. Andrew Mellon's policies were a leading cause of the Great Depression, blinkered as he was by ideology. Trump is both blinkered and an idiot. The creatures he surrounds himself with warp themselves into his image. 

If any of these risks become reality, we don't have anyone in the Executive branch who seems capable of pulling us out. 

The market crash of 1929 didn't lead immediately to the "Great Depression." It led to one crisis, then another, most of which were met with poor or underwhelming responses. A depression was likely inevitable by the spring of 1929, but the Great Depression was created after October of '29.

Buckle up.

Taking Down A Warlord

 One hallmark of state dysfunction is the presence of warlords or regional powers within a country that are unanswerable to the national government. As state capacity declines, petty local rulers step into the gap and become powers unto themselves, unaccountable to the popular will.

Elon Musk should now be seen as a warlord within the teetering structure of American democracy. His decision to throttle Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine represents a form autonomy on matters of national security and national policy making that should be denied to any individual. You cannot have some ketamine-fueled autocrat unilaterally deciding whether a US ally - acknowledged and supported by the US Congress - has access to strategic assets.

What's more, Musk has done something that contemporary business leaders typically eschew: he has aligned himself not just with one political party, but one political figure. Some of this is the nature of Trump, who requires personal fealty, but some of this is Musk's complete simpering ignorance of how politics works in the US. Parties swap control of power, and that means that smart executives play both sides, give to both parties. Musk has wrapped himself so tightly around Trump that he's not really giving Democrats any reason NOT to go after him, once they have subpoena power. 

Musk's reputation as a genius is overblown. He has some decently profitable companies in Tesla and SpaceX, but their net profits are fairly low compared to their stock valuation. Tesla's P/E ration is a little over 350; SpaceX is somewhere between 160 and 225. Those numbers are...insane. Back before the tech start-up revolution, a safe P/E usually wouldn't exceed 20-25. Anything more than that would be considered intensely speculative. 

What's more, Musk's "safest" company is obviously SpaceX, because they have largely taken over satellite launches and Starlink is a genuinely impressive achievement. That company, though, is largely dependent on government contracts. What's more, if he's operating outside of governmental oversight and control, then he risks having the entire enterprise seized on national security grounds, and if he loses even a part of SpaceX, the whole enterprise collapses. 

Tesla is already getting hammered by people abandoning his cars in favor of companies not owned by megalomaniacal douchecanoes. Tesla's profits have declined 43% last year. People more on the left side of the spectrum are generally more likely to want to buy EVs and he's pissed them off all over the place. Europe has already hammered him and is trying to develop an alternative so SpaceX and Starlink. China obviously wants no part of ceding autonomy to someone who is not controlled by the Chinese state. If Musk loses cover in America, he's going to spend some time in the barrel.

Given that DOGE's murder of USAID is likely leading to the premature deaths of 100,000s of children, I'd say whatever brings this colossal colostomy bag to heel is a good thing. 

Polls And Narratives

 The follow-on revelations about Wedgewood polling add context to what we already know, but are not likely to be the end of what we will know. Wedgewood produced fake polls as a "social experiment" to see the impact of these fake polls on narratives. OK, so that's...bad. There is at least some evidence that this might have tilted close races, including the Michigan Senate race. Elliott Morris, who has been doggedly pursuing this story, suggests that the prime mover behind these polls was a Republican operative, but it might also be some degenerate Kalshi gamblers trying to sway "prediction markets."

The two big examples is that perhaps they tilted the Michigan race to Abdul El-Sayed and they certainly tried to tilt the Wisconsin race to Hong. Hopefully AES wins, because I think the Senate would be a better place with his perspective, but he could very well be an electoral underperformer in a Blue year. Hong thankfully lost, as she looked doomed in the general election. 

Ratfucking has always been a Republican prerogative, going back to Nixon. In Trumpistan, the reverence for the democratic will of the people is irrelevant, so ratfucking seems the least of things to worry about. Still, with Trump hitting historically low popularity numbers, the question is beginning to emerge about whether it will be a Blue Wave or Blue Tsunami. The numbers are reaching 2008 levels of anger at the GOP.

Ratfucking is all they have.

Getting a reform agenda through both Houses of Congress and past Trump's veto pen will be nearly impossible, but Democrats do need to be thinking seriously about reforms. A few places they should be looking:

- Ending partisan gerrymandering. This - and many other areas - are where legislation intersects with Court reform. Simply outlawing partisan and racial gerrymandering might not survive this Court's arbitrary constitutional interpretations, but they have to try.
- Campaign finance reform. This, too, will likely run afoul of the Court absent reform. At the very least, transparency laws need to exist.
- Prediction Markets. We have a gathering gambling scourge across multiple cultural avenues, but they need to ban gambling on political outcomes, even if they can't ban gambling on sports.
- Establish criminal penalties for fraud. This would include AI deep fakes, but also the Wedgewood nonsense. Electoral democracy cannot survive in a landscape where the very idea of objective truth is absent.

It's a lot and they won't get a lifted finger of help from the GOP. All they have is fraud and ratfucking. 

Wired For The GOP

 Over the years, Josh Marshall has argued that the DC Press Corps is "wired for the GOP." He doesn't mean that individual reporters lean towards Republicans. What he means - if I recall his argument correctly - is that there is a sort of horse-race, inside-baseball tilt to the way that they cover politics. This leads to focusing on the tactics of a electoral competition, rather than the impact that one side's policies may have.

Another way this shows up, obviously, is in the bothsides framing that preserves neutrality in voice. However, bothsidesing things is not neutral. By elevating certain stories over other stories, the media takes a side without "taking a side." The best example remains the stories in October of 2016 about Hillary Clinton's email practices, while dropping the story of Trump bragging about sexual assault after a few news cycles.

The other example is the process of "nut picking." There are some crazy opinions out there, on the left and the right. In order to flip the Michigan Senate seat, Republicans are trying to draw a straight line between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and the podcaster Hasan Piker. Piker has some legitimately obnoxious positions and statements, some of which fall into the "shock jock" category, some of which are the noxious rhetoric of the Very Online Left. El-Sayed has tried to distance himself from those positions, but I think he likely hasn't been forceful enough to completely sever himself from Piker, which is why he seems to be running behind the national climate.

On the other side, we have - well - the President of the United States saying legitimately insane things that would somehow be more damaging if they came from someone who wasn't the President of the United States - especially if it came from someone aligned with the Democrats. Even you want an apples to apples comparison, there's Elon Musk. Musk is an open White Supremacist and eugenicist. He has some frankly insane positions that are passed off as genius. He is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the election, because he's landed so firmly in Trumpistan that a Democratic government will feel compelled to clip his wings - wings that are feathered with US tax dollars.

In trying to figure out why Trump won election after January 6th, Paul Campos lists three possibilities. The first is that people believe Trump when he says the 2020 elections was rigged. These are, of course, MAGA voters. I don't think that holds water as a portrait of the electorate that actually swung the 2020 race.

The second is that they knew he was lying but didn't care; the third is that they didn't even know he made these lies. Look, I think there are a lot more people in that third category than there should be. Maybe a better way to think of them is that they didn't understand WHY those lies about the 2020 election were so profoundly important. If so, that is the shared fault of the media, civic education and basic informational literacy. 

To me, the real problem is likely the second group. These are people who think that "all politicians lie" and "all politicians are corrupt." If you begin from this basic position, then Trump is "just like the rest of them" - even if you admit that maybe, just maybe he's MORE of a liar and MORE corrupt than most - it's really just a difference in how much lying and graft he does. But since all politicians lie and steal, then why not Trump?

This, to me, is the real failure of our media institutions. In an effort to bothsides political disputes, they show someone like Bob Menendez or Graham Platner and make them the equivalent of Trump, without noting that Democrats abandoned both of the former and Republicans have created a cult of personality around the latter.

Which Punches Will Land?

 Elliott Morris pisses on everyone's cornflakes this morning by noting - correctly - that a "normal" polling error could mean that Democrats only come out of the election with 47 Senate seats. Of course, a similar error in the other direction could mean 56 Democratic Senate seats. His point being that polling errors are routine and a lot of races are very close. If we wind up with an underperformance on election day, the question will obviously be: why?

Let me begin by saying that I don't think that will happen, but I remain chagrined by how wrong I got it in 2024. Trump, though, routinely overperforms his polling. Republicans since 2016 have underperformed a bit when he's not on the ballot. What's more, the fundamentals and the things voters overwhelmingly say that they care about all run against Trump and the GOP.

The two main things that people tell pollsters that they're upset about a prices and corruption. These numbers are not within any margins of error either.

Corruption stories are coming faster and faster from an administration that is staffed by people who are either corrupt by nature or look around themselves and realize that the old rules don't apply anymore.  Meanwhile, inflation is getting worse, shows no signs of getting better and are entirely a byproduct of two of Trump's two signature policies: tariffs and the Iran war.

This environment should spell a Blue Tsunami. What's more, you have really terrible individual candidates in places like Texas and Kansas. Even in red districts in blue or purple states, you have bad candidates that can drag down the whole ticket. What is the motivation for a Republican leaning voter to go out and vote for Ken Paxton? The GOP candidate for governor in Colorado is literally insane, but will that impact down ballot races like Lauren Boebert - herself a weak candidate?

Trump has always benefited from Steve Bannon's firehose strategy. If there is a different outrage happening every day, the media can't focus on one. Trump gets away with all sorts of shit using this dynamic. However, people still get the sense that everything has gone to shit. They see what's happening with prices. They see what's happening with the East Wing and the Reflecting Pool. They may not say that they are upset about any one specific thing, but the accumulated weight of all this is beginning to tell.

But hell, we've been so bitterly disappointed by the basic intelligence and comprehension of the average American voter over the past decade, I hate to think we have to rely on them again. Hopefully, the sheer tonnage of issues - issues that they say that they care deeply about - will finally tip things over. That Republican partisans will just stay home in disgust, that independents flood the ballot box on behalf of Democrats, and - the one thing I'm sure of - Democrats will crawl over broken glass to vote these fuckers out. 

Boutique, Concierge Treason

 Both Richardson and Krugman take aim at Elon Musk's efforts to prevent massive GOP losses by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into dark money and other forms of campaign spending. I've been generally more skeptical of the idea that big money can save a bad candidate, especially in a bad political environment. However, there are two issues.

The first is that Democrats have greatly expanded the map in terms of competitive races. They seem to be leading in Alaska and Kansas, not to mention Texas. There are some vibes and data that places like South Carolina or Nebraska might be razor close. If Musk and other billionaires can make a 1-3% difference in the vote by spreading lies about transgender communists coming to make you wear a mask, then that might be the difference in those races. 

The second is that this represents the deeper pathologies of the hyper-rich of Silicon Valley. While the folks working at those companies are likely as liberal as most people with college degrees in the STEM areas, the Tech Lords are a weird-assed bunch of freaks. What's more is that they don't seem to understand the wheel of history. They are acting as if they will be immune from blowback from supporting Trump. 

The Gulf emirs, Netanyahu, various normie Republicans who all thought that they could deal with Trump have learned that he destroys everyone who comes into contact with him. He chews you up and spits you out, uses you and discards you. If that weren't enough, Democrats - I hope - will remember their perfidy when we have a trifecta again. These techbros are deeply unpopular, and like the earlier iteration of Robber Barons, they have so tightly aligned themselves with the Republican Party, that a broad progressive movement should keep the receipts and take them down.

It's similar to the Trump-Netanyahu axis of evil. As long as Likud rules Israel, I don't think a Democratic Administration can treat it as anything less than a hostile power. Same goes for Musk and the other cretins who were swept along with the tide of technological advancement but believed they were the moon itself.

Corruption

 There have been more and more stories of the overwhelming corruption of the Trump Administration coming out recently. The problem is and always has been a polluted information ecosystem where most Americans simply don't interact with the news. In some ways, who can blame them? Why would you subject yourself to the firehose of misery and trauma that constitutes the daily news? In fact, learning about how corrupt the Trumpists are would just make people more miserable. The farrago of outrage is how Trump survives. First, it means no story really develops legs and penetrates the veil of ignorance that most Americans cocoon themselves in. Second, it helps weave that veil, because "the news is just so horrible." Then, when you have a Democrat like Bob Menendez, it allows the media to run with a Man Bites Dog story and deepens the cynicism of the electorate.

There was an interview in the Times about our postliterate society. People CAN read and read all the time, but in short snippets that don't require much cognitive effort. The torrent of short-form video also degrades the ability of people - especially but not exclusively kids - to actually read for meaning. I'm certainly discovering that my students struggle to understand the actual meaning of what they are reading. They tend to glance across the surface of it. I ask how many read more than one book for pleasure over the summer and one kid in each class raised their hand. 

When the Whigs spoke of "corruption" they meant a rot in the entire system. I fear that we now have that form of corruption in our entire society. Trump's graft is corruption that is enabled by the corrupted nature of our shared discourse, reduced to Trump's trolling videos and misleading social media posts.

Democracy only works with an informed populace and we are both angrier and more ignorant than we have been in a long, long time. 

Debtor's Prison

 David Frum - a conservative conservative, not a Republican/Trump conservative - make the case that among the myriad crisis brought by Trump and the GOP, the looming issue of debt is perhaps the most critical. Trump - who made a living off declaring bankruptcy - seems to want to do the same with the United States. The result would be catastrophic, but hey, why should we worry that Trump would do something stupid and self-destructive.

The rise in interest rates are going to hit everyone. This is...bad, and the next Democratic President will have to be a Bill Clinton-type who can extricate us from this disaster and then reap no goodwill for doing so until his presidency is over.

Armageddon

 HCR summarizes Michael Luttig's argument that the GOP will simply try to end American democracy rather than let a Democratic Congress be seated. It's important to realize that the GOP will need near unanimity in both Houses to pull this off. It's not a question of Trump just leaning on Mike Johnson - he will need to have the complete House GOP caucus behind him.

The language used at last week's Snooze-apalooza where Trump got his fragile ego coddled was certainly alarming. However, it really is the case where he says a bunch of shit, and you can't tell if he's planning January 6th or threatening to invade Greenland. He's insane, and his public ramblings are most likely quite different from what the mass of Republicans are prepared to execute in his name. 

When it comes to things like Luttig's dooming, I am also of two minds. We probably should be bulletproofing everything we can for not just November, but January, when the new Congress will be seated. On the other hand, I really don't like the idea of doom being in the background of people's minds when it comes to exercising their franchise.

I know, for instance, that I've been very reluctant to contribute to Democrats, because I'm sick to fucking death of the apocalyptic text messages. More than happy to give what I can, when I can. But STOP FUCKING TEXTING ME ABOUT HOW EVERYTHING IS GOING TO SHIT UNLESS I PITCH IN $20, $50 or $100 TODAY.

Someone needs to sit down with Johnson and a host of these other Weak Creatures and lay out an alternative. If Trump tries to stop this election from occurring or from being certified, then we need to talk about secession. The Northeast and Pacific Coasts can break off and - in an ironic twist - join Canada.

UPDATE: Martin Longman points out that Trump is doing everything he can to antagonize voters. Pundits will seek the deeper strategy that Trump is pursuing, but I think he's just big mad and angry at the voters and telling them to fuck off. There's no one around him capable of telling him just how poor his instincts are. 

The Stay-At-Home Voter

 Elliott Morris has been running polls that show something that makes visceral sense. Trump was returned to power in 2024 by low information voters who were broadly unhappy with the state of the economy (and were likely unhappy with a liberal Californian woman of color, but that's my own slant). Those low information voters - Paul Campos calls them Ariana Grande Voters - felt that Trump could magically return us to the economy of 2019. The fact that this was always utter bullshit ties into the fact that these are low information and low engagement voters. I would wager very few of them understood the inflationary pressures that tariffs and deportations would create. 

The Trump-apalooza random rally in Dallas the last two days was designed to motivate those low information voters to get out and vote. I would guess that Republicans are seeing polling that shows the shape of the electorate moving against them. Democrats and unhappy Independents are going to vote; they are extremely motivated. Whereas they are likely seeing that some of their 2024 voters aren't planning to vote.

What Morris is saying is that getting those people to the polls - by centering Trump of all people - is likely to backfire. I certainly hope that's true. I would love it if the GOP did a robust Get Out The Vote effort that wound up turning out voters who vote for Democrats and Independents. 

Still, I really do think that a large factor in the November election will be voters who voted Republican in the last few cycles, but feel (justifiably) betrayed and decide to skip the election entirely. I think that's what the GOP is seeing and why they gambled on using Trump to rally their support. Vulnerable people running for actual office have shunned the event in Texas. Unsurprisingly. Only Trump seems not to understand how unpopular he is.

"Economic Anxiety"

 Krugman looks at the recent local election in Germany that put AfD in power in Saxony-Anholt. He hits on something that has been noted before, but needs to be constantly recalled. There is a LOT of overlap between people who feel economically disadvantaged and people who rely on racism to explain why. In Europe, Orban in Hungary, Le Pen in France and AfD in Germany all rely on anti-immigrant politics to try and win elections. In fact, you can go back to the pre-World War II United States and see a ton of overlap between people who were upset by what they perceived as declining status and a hatred of immigrants.

There is a superficial logic to this, as you can imagine adding workers to a workforce would mean fewer jobs for people who already were in the workforce. Except economics is pretty clear that immigration leads to economic growth. This - not tax cuts for the rich - is the rising tide that lifts all boats. 

What I find interesting is that there have been some clips going around from some Socialist convention held in the US recently, and it's a bunch of weirdo positions on things like "weight loss is health genocide" or "criticizing me is basically slavery." The original criticism of "socialists" like Bernie Sanders was that Democrats had stopped putting the needs of working class voters at the top of their priorities. Now, the DSA has disappeared down the rabbit hole of what James Carville calls "faculty room politics." Basically, if you don't want to put your gender pronouns in your email signature, you're Adolf Hitler.

It would be nice if there really was some sort of magic button we could push that unified everyone against the oligarchs who have enshittified the world. In fact, fear makes people hateful and we shouldn't be surprised that Saxony-Anholt voted for Nazis than we should that the dying small towns of America vote for Trump.

Power Doesn't Panic

 I read Richardson, as I do every morning, but then didn't find anything to add. However, thinking about it, it occurs to me that many of the actions of Trump and his minions give off a reek of panic. The efforts to stop mail-in voting, the floundering around in Iran, the chaotic building spree that winds up going off the rails like the Reflecting Pool fiasco...there seems to be a mad thrashing about.

Trump has started musing in that unfiltered way of his that he's mortal. Maybe all the vibes and rumors of health problems are real; he certainly looks like shit. 

However, while we know he's a malevolent force in our country and the world, there is something panicky about his actions. He's rushing shit like the Arch de Trump and the ballroom, because he knows he's running out of time. Maybe it's health, maybe it's November.

Power doesn't panic. Power controls. Trump is spinning out of control.

That comes with risks - huge risks - but it also suggests that even his Swiss Cheese mind is aware that things are unraveling and he's scared.

Labor And Capital

 Richardson runs through the founding of Labor Day in the United States (and the backlash to a worker's political movement). One of the enduring mysteries in some quarters is why America never had a "Labour Party" (aside from the weird spelling). The best explanation is that workers had the vote far earlier than their counterparts in Europe and the Anglophone world. As a result, they joined existing parties rather than invest themselves in union movements that then merged with a political party once property restrictions on suffrage were removed.  In fact, the reluctance of Britain to extend the suffrage was likely a fear of the number of working class voters and what their votes might do to Britain. Mostly the result was that everyone get health care.

HCR has a quote from the Times in the 1880s arguing that everyone who works is a worker:

The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”

I've seen this argument recently from - of all people - DSA types who want to make sure that their main demographic - college and post-college educated white people - don't feel threatened. "No, no, no, we aren't talking ACTUAL socialism. Just Vibe Socialism." I suppose that's a nice "big tent" approach, but I think it misses the actual issue.

There is a clear schism between people who work for wages and people who work for a salary. A lot of salaried jobs require a college degree, and that salary comes with benefits, usually. Even if you are "only" making a $55,000 a year salary, chances are you get health care and other perks. The whole compensation package is, just that, a package. If you work for $25 an hour, your pay is roughly the same, but you might not get the same benefits package.

Fair enough.

The real divide today though is not between wage earners and salaried employees. It is between wealth and income. You can earn $150,000 a year but not own enough stuff to be truly wealthy, especially if you are young. 

What Richardson did not talk about in her piece was that during the unrest from the laboring classes, one proposal from both Populists and Progressives was a graduated income tax. You earn more, you pay more. This was supposed to retard the growing accumulation of wealth from income.

In 2026, we have abandoned the idea that taxation can address inequality. We still mostly support some spending to address poverty (not most Republicans, but most Americans), but while we have a graduated income tax, we do not tax capital gains in the same aggressively progressive way. 

I don't know if Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax will work. I feel confident the Supreme Court will strike it down, but I also don't know precisely how it will work mechanically. How do you really assess wealth?  How can you tax a home the same as a stock portfolio?

Still, if we are going to arrest and rebuke the slide into oligarchy, we have to start somewhere. Encouragingly, we did it before.

November

 I don't think - within the context of January 6th - that it is an exaggeration to say that the future of the American Republic is on the line this midterm election. Given that context, it's tricky to brush aside the threat that Trump could pose at any step of the election process. We are already seeing him attack voting by mail. We hear dark whispers of ICE at polling places. We've obviously seen the mid-decade gerrymandering.

My take is that there are legitimate threats, but that we need to take a deep breath. Republicans can see the polls, but there is a real question as to whether Trump actually sees unfavorable polls of whether Natalie Harp prevents him from getting bad news. The behavior from a lot of Republicans is that they know they are going to get pummeled and they are preparing themselves for that. Even Trump seems to be aware of that. We don't see the behavior of people who have it fixed so that they can't lose.

The two biggest threats are overall voters suppression and efforts to void the election after the fact. The first is very real, I fear, as Republicans will use the bullshit excuse of voter fraud to justify targeting Democratic constituencies. They won't and can't cancel elections, but closing polling stations and setting up ICE checkpoints near those polling stations could depress voter turnout. However, anti-Trump voters are INCREDIBLY fired up, and I hope there will be an effort to circumvent those measures. For instance, if you vote by mail, you better turn your ballot in in person.

Efforts to void the election after the fact - January 6th Part II - seem less likely to succeed. The idea will be to caterwaul about voter fraud and delegitimize the election in order to placate the cultists surrounding Trump. Hardcore Trumpists are already predisposed to distrust objective reality, so that will work as an effort to keep Cult 45 happy. 

However, are there enough Republicans in Congress to actively take measures to end American democracy? The number isn't zero, which is appalling, but I don't think it's more that dozens in the House and fewer in the Senate. As we saw with the pre-riot January 6th actions, only a handful of Republicans supported Trump's fabulist claims. Also, given the nature of cults, the loyalty of MAGA lies with Trump, not the GOP. Having a Democratic Congress isn't going to provide the same motivation that existed with "Stop the Steal." 

It's objectively not great. We shouldn't be having these discussions. However, I do think that Democrats will take the House and probably the Senate. I think there is a groundswell of anger out there over Trump's naked corruption and manifest incompetence. I think his supporters are dispirited and many will stay home. 

Hopefully that will be enough.

In 1951, as American troops moved largely unopposed up the Korean peninsula after the Inchon landings, Stalin reportedly sighed and said, "I guess the Americans will be on our borders." (Korea shares a small border with Russia.) Even Stalin bent to reality, though Mao decided to throw hundreds of thousands of troops into the conflict. My point is simply that even dictators surrounded by sycophants often bend to reality.

Tax The Rich

 Krugman's weekend explainers are always pretty good, but today he looks at the decline in tax enforcement under the GOP going back to the 1980s. The story - unsurprisingly - has been that whenever possible, when Republicans have the trifecta, they slash enforcement measures by the IRS. The people most likely to avoid or evade taxes are the very rich. They have both the motive and means to create tax shelters or pass-through corporations or offshore accounts to avoid paying their share of tax. The tax code itself is legally crafted to preference capital over wages, and when you add various legal and illegal measures, the very rich pay a much smaller share of their yearly income or wealth than do people who earn most of their money through wages and salary.

When you hear various left wing populists talk about Medicare for All or expanding program X, they typically don't talk too much about where the money will come from, as they have learned from Republicans not to care about the national debt. However, we really are starting to get to a place where government borrowing to finance the debt is crowding out private borrowing, which is one reason why interest rates remain high. 

Closing the tax avoidance gap will by itself will not fund the progressive wish list. Particularly Medicare for All will require broad-based taxes to fund a broad-based program. You also likely need some version of a wealth tax to target the multi-billionaires, but again, this likely won't fund everything you want to do.

The thing is the billionaires have largely chosen their side. They are lining up behind Trump, because his own lawlessness and disregard for the public weal mirrors their own. Google just changed Lake Ontario to Lake America on Google Maps, which strikes me as a terribly short-sighted decision on the part of a company that is ripe for anti-trust prosecution under a Democratic administration. You could squint and see an argument that Democrats should go too hard after billionaires to prevent them from giving all their money to the GOP - most corporations balance their campaign contributions to preserve access to both sides. The billionaires have chosen their side, and like Trump himself, they aren't likely to be challenged on this by the murmuring minions who surround them.

Writing tax enforcement into law will help a lot. I would think you should also craft a treaty with the EU to standardize tax enforcement, because there will absolutely be efforts to hide wealth offshore. The Panama Papers were proof of that. Creating a universal enforcement regime and a universal suite of consequences would go a long way to stopping the descent into oligarchy. If Sergei Brin decides to avoid paying his taxes, and Google pays the price along side him, would he still avoid taxes?

Unravelling the corruption of Trumpistan will not be easy, and the Supreme Court will try and stand in the way. However, that has to be a major focus of the next Democratic trifecta. 

Losing Wars

 Trump and Hegseth lost the Iran War, because they don't understand war properly. They think the expensiveness of a weapon's system is what matters. It's like the old Spinal Tap joke ("But this one goes to eleven."), where you can't even see the stupidity of the metrics that you're using. With Hegseth's hard-on for "lethality" he completely missed that wars are inherently political acts and leading a democracy to war requires public suasion first and foremost. Sometimes (Pearl Harbor, Fort Sumter, 9/11) that suasion is handled by your enemy. Trump/Hegseth never made a case for the war, they just did it, trusting that the disparity in military budgets would carry the day. It has been the political will and the ability to leverage cheap drones that has led to an Iranian victory (and it leading to a Ukrainian one, as well).

Of course, the Iran War isn't Trump's only ongoing war. His trade war with Canada is now accelerating. Like the previous example, Trump's fundamental stupidity means that he doesn't understand the basic dynamics of the situation. The US and Canadian economies are mixed together; trade wars make zero sense. Like with Iran, it's a question of political will. Canada is united, the US is not. What's more this will have its biggest impact in states close to Canada. Are their important elections in Maine, Michigan, Alaska and Wisconsin, I wonder? Are farmers' votes important in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas?

I know I've beaten this dead horse to a bloody pulp, but Trump doesn't understand the process of creating a policy, because he spent his entire adult life running a company of about 10 people, bullying other people and then going bankrupt. He never had to do real horse trading or compromising; in fact, he finds those things contemptibly weak. 

When Trump looks at the smoldering mess he's making, he blames it on Biden. This isn't just his malignant narcissism. This is his entire way of doing business over the past 50 years. Nothing his fault; attack, attack, attack; deflect, deflect, deflect; never admit weakness. Character really is destiny. Ignorance really isn't bliss.

If Democrats and independents wind up sweeping through elections in the Great Plains and along the Canadian border, it will be because Donald Trump has dragged us into wars that we did not have to fight, with goals that were unrealistic in the most optimistic projections and have been waged with a fecklessness that would shame a toddler.

The Post-Reality Party

 A lot of pondering has gone on about whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of the decline of the GOP into a cult of idiocy. We know Trump is - by the standards of the Oval Office - a very stupid man. Josh Marshall relates how Trump made his money not through skill but through legal bullying. Trump is also incredibly unversed in the basic contours of liberal democracy as a concept. So, yeah, Trump is dumb; Trump is the center of a cult of personality; that cult of personality is super dumb. 

However, this cult of unreason does very much precede Trump. Reagan wasn't nearly as stupid, but he was also not some genius. That largely goes for both Bushes. They were...fine...in terms of intelligence compared to the average, but they also had long experience in government - unlike Trump. They were, in essence, trained in civic government. Trump is not, which is why he's an authoritarian goon.

The cult of unreason, though, can be seen in Reagan and Dubya, as Krugman points out with regards to budget math. Reagan bent a little to the reality that cutting taxes would not create so much growth as to pay for themselves. Bush 41 was even more responsible in that regards. Bush 43, however, was the same sort of spender that Trump has been. If a few hundred votes in South Florida had been counted differently in 2000, the fiscal situation in the US would be sterling. Gore would not have had a Democratic Congress, so spending would have remained low. There's a 50-50 chance that the Gore national security team stops 9/11, the way they did the Millennium bomb plot. Even so, they likely would not invade Iraq with that catastrophe hopefully avoided.

Maybe Obama and Obamacare doesn't happen in that world. Or maybe healthcare becomes such an issue it gets addressed without the collapse of support for Bush 43 from 2005-2008. 

The fiscal situation of the United States would be immeasurably better, and that really can't be debated.

A bunch of dumb ass voters, though, would continue to insist that Republicans are better for the economy, because...ugh.

Debt

 Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have a long discussion about the exploding national debt. Basically, the important thing is the ratio of debt to GDP and Trump's massive explosion of the debt has knocked us into an unhealthy place economically. The absolute number - $40 trillion - is eye-grabbing, but it's the ratio that's key and that is bad. Because economic growth is stagnating and possibly the start of stagflation that means the debt is growing up while much of the economy is a bit moribund. Take data centers out of the equation and things get really grim, really fast.

The obvious question then is: What is to be done? Both Bernstein and Krugman are pretty liberal, so neither one wants to embrace Austrian austerity. Ideally there are ways to get more revenue by taxing the rich and increasing enforcement of existing tax laws. There are likely a lot more ways to tax capital gains progressively, too.

However, one thing I've never seen anyone mention about trying - in 2029 - to increase social programs AND reduce the debt is the role that health care plays in everything. It's considered politically toxic to raise taxes on the bulk of the middle class, because they are struggling. Taxing them would work counter to the affordability issue that many see as Democrat's best lever. (I still think that corruption is lever number one, but affordability is right behind it.)

However, if we offered a public option in Medicare/Medicaid. that both individuals and corporations could access, we could shift what we currently spend on private insurance to the public programs without raising "taxes." People buying the public option would be replacing their Aetna premiums with Medicaid premiums. Most likely this system would be a hybrid, with most basic care being administered through tiered Medicaid/Medicare but then private insurers would allow for more boutique care and things like vision and dental. This is pretty common in countries with "universal" coverage. The same could be true here.

Ideally, the public option could raise revenue for the single most expensive part of the budget - healthcare - without being a "tax." 

Unless I'm missing something, which I wouldn't know, because I'm missing something.