Depraved?

 Peter Wehner decries the glorification of Luigi Mangione and the dehumanization of Brian Thompson. 

I get it. Insurance companies do suck, but that cannot be a call to murder, and the bizarre "logic" of "social murder" advanced by Jia Tolentino can be expanded to include "anything I don't like." 

Perhaps I'm reading too much into my own son's support for strikingly anti-Israeli statements and Mangione, but I have to wonder about the basic moral calculus of the online generation. They seem primed for extremist positions, because extreme statements and actions are the online currency. I remember my son lauding the guy who lit himself on fire over Gaza. That guy accomplished exactly nothing. His death was meaningless, an expression of mental illness disguised at sacrifice. 

Or maybe I'm just forgetting what it's like to be young.

It's Not About Policy

 Matthew Yglesias coined the term Pundit's Fallacy to capture the idea that pundits tend to think that the reason something happened is because it aligns perfectly with what they've been saying all along. In his case, Harris lost because of zoning restrictions that make housing too expensive.

I think the corollary to this is something I've been saying for a while now: Policy does not move votes. The decades long war of the Republican Party on the idea that government can actually do things has worked to degrade the idea that when you vote for a person or party that you will be "rewarded" with policies you like. My eldest son say "everyone is corrupt" which is true in the sense that the political system is awash in money, but the actual workings of government - especially the federal government - are largely free of corruption. This, of course, is going to change in three weeks.

Paul Campos looks at the impact of Dobbs on the 2024 election, and it's striking. You have a remarkable shift in people's behaviors because of Dobbs, namely vasectomies and tubal ligations among men and women under the age of 35. That's a holy shit moment. Fertility rates are dropping perhaps because of the new landscape in women's reproductive health.

However, when you look at the actual voting patterns of young women - comparing 2020 and 2024 - what you see is just baffling, if you believe that policy moves votes. Here's the comparision:

Among women over 65, Harris improved over Biden by one point.
Among women 45-64, Harris did seven points worse and did not reach a majority.
Among women 30-44, Harris did the same as Biden.
Among women 18-29, Harris did six points worse, though still winning 61%.

So, young women of child bearing age did not vote for Harris in the numbers that they did for Biden, all the while dramatically curtailing their actual ability to have children through tubal ligation.

If your explanation for voting behavior is that people vote for their interests and the assumption that if their side wins, those interests will be rewarded with policies, this makes zero sense.

If your explanation for voting behavior is that people hold inchoate and irrational beliefs about all sorts of shit and they don't actually expect the winning side to really address their concerns, it makes perfect sense.

I await an explanation of how Harris going on Joe Rogan would solve this.

James Earl Carter

 I actually met Jimmy Carter when I was quite young, as my dad was in Georgia politics when he was governor. I remember staying up past my bedtime to hear the rollcall at the 1976 convention when he was nominated.

I've read two remembrances that are interesting in how they approach him. The first, by Heather Cox Richardson, is laudatory. It's a list of the many attributes and accomplishments of The Man From Plains. More interesting, though, is Paul Krugman's take, which was that Carter was an unusually unlucky president. He was saddled with four critical burdens.

The first burden was inflation, which had its roots in both Nixon and Johnson's combination of social and military spending. The second was a cascading series of energy shocks at a time when the US was unable to extract enough oil to counter the embargoes enforced against them. The third was the somewhat mysterious drop in worker productivity, which created a drag on the overall economy. The fourth was Iran, and that was the only one with some plausible connection to his own actions as president. The economic headwinds that helped sink Carter predated him or were largely outside of his control.

In his response to these crises, Carter probably did the right things for inflation and energy, though not enough to save his presidency, because these were large, structural problems that required years to fix. Inflation required a grueling recession early in Reagan's presidency to fix. The hikes in interest rates needed to tame inflation were incredibly punishing. Energy, too, would require decades of work to make America begin to embrace both energy efficiency and increased production, especially of alternative energy sources. 

The third issue of worker productivity was poorly understood at the time and apparently not really understood any better today. Carter, as a rural Southerner, was not especially interested in the plight of workers and the previously solid marriage of union voters and the Democratic Party was strained in ways that it's likely never recovered from (though to compare Carter and Reagan is to compare night and day).

Iran, perhaps more than anything, sank him. If the hostage rescue effort had succeeded, who knows, he might have won the 1980 election. When I read anti-Carter pieces like Erik Loomis's, I'm struck by how blind they are to the actual dynamics Carter faced. Loomis suggests that Carter was wrong to focus on inflation, when it was pretty clear that inflation really was destroying American wealth.

I look at Carter, and I see a natural reaction to Nixon. Most do. Carter was the anti-Nixon in every way possible. Hell, he was also the anti-Kissinger. Nixon, though, needs to be understood as the  true architect of the modern GOP. It was Nixon who began the long outreach to Whites upset with the 1960s - not just the racial issues, but gender, hippies, what have you. Nixon couldn't give a shit about domestic policy, as long as it helped him win re-election. However, Nixonian politics definitely tapped into the exhaustion with decades of reform that stretched back to FDR. 

Carter was an interlude of that process of rejecting the New Deal and post-war liberalism that came to define the next quarter century. It was a politics that rejected addressing racism and prioritized wealth over labor. Within the context of that, Carter was as good we got. Without Watergate, there is no Carter, because America was moving to the right pretty quickly.

Loomis' critique is right about Carter being a poor manager or rather a micro-manager. While Biden will, no doubt, be lazily compared to Carter, they couldn't be more different. Biden was whatever the Democratic Party asked him to be; Carter was going to remain the outsider, even if it doomed him.

Of course, the best you can say about Carter is that he was a shining example of a man who truly lived his faith. In this era of religious charlatans, including the president elect's hawking bibles, it is tough to imagine someone who really lived the central message of the gospels in public life, like Carter did. His post-presidency will remain legendary and rightly so.

Biden's statement on Carter echoed something I had heard about him before. Jimmy Carter believed we were a great nation because we were a good people. His unfairly maligned "malaise speech" was an expression of his worry that we were sacrificing our goodness for immediate material comfort. 

Where's the lie?

As Donald Trump - whose post-presidency includes trying to end American democracy - prepares to retake the White House and empower the absolute worst people including himself, maybe it's better that Carter's death has happened now. Carter was perhaps not suited for being president, as he did not work with Congress well or tell the comforting lies that make a man popular. Carter was honest and decent, but also proud and prone intellectual and moral arrogance. He was ambitious and lived a life of selfless service. 

He was complicated in ways that the coming kakistocracy is not.

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. 

Whither China?

 Krugman takes a look at the economics of deflation, and compares Japan's experience with what China appears to be headed towards. Europe, also, might be facing a deflationary crunch, as their working age population withers and they simultaneously turn towards anti-immigrant politics. And, yes, we are too, but we can reverse that at some point. 

The tension appears to be between technological advance and the greying of the population. Workers become individually more productive as technology improves, but you have fewer workers. Japan experienced the economic effects of late stage demographic transition, and they seem to have come up with a solution. (And Krugman lost me a bit as to how they did that.)

The three largest economies in the world - the US, China and the EU - are all staring down the barrel of this same phenomenon. The JD Vances of the world want to solve it by restoring some sort of bullshit Traditional Family where the mom is a broodmare pumping out tow-headed crotch spawn. The obvious solution is a guest worker program, because we have an abundant supply of people who want to come here and work, but that seems a non-starter until we flush Trumpism from our politics.

China, however, is the immediate issue, because unlike the US and EU, their economy is big but not "wealthy" in the sense of a broad middle class. They will struggle to consume their way out of deflation (and a reminded that deflation is bad). 

The central advantage of democracies is - fortunately and unfortunately - the tendency towards course correction (whether you want to correct or not). Democracies are better capable of reversing course if the direction is manifestly bad. Autocracies can struggle with admitting they fucked up. 

China has gone from a government with a paramount leader of a large party state to true personal rule. Xi has destroyed the safeguards that Deng put in place to prevent the rise of another Mao. Xi loves Mao, but I wonder if he can admit to himself just how disastrous Mao's economic manias were. 

If China's economy does enter a deflationary spiral, that will have global economic impacts. Keep an eye out...

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.

Your Spiteful Christmas Present

 I hope your day is soft focus miracle of loving togetherness. 

But if you want something bitter with your eggnog, this is pretty funny. Basically, Elon Musk's grand ambition is to colonize Mars, right. That's his "Big Picture" goal. By aligning himself with one political party, he's destroyed that. Or, more likely, he will try and do Mars on the cheap and it will be a suicide mission.

Here's hoping he's the one on the mission.

Krugman Wonks Out

 Paul Krugman moved from the Times to Substack, and I'm already a fan. The format allows him to include charts and graphs in a very economics professor/popularizer of economics way.

Doomed

 This is why the Times still matters. It's a deep expose of the failure of American counterinsurgency efforts in Kunduz province in Afghanistan. 

Its focus is the decision to empower local warlords to fight the Taliban, even though those warlords had reputations for lawless brutality. Since Americans had few insights into Afghan culture, they were simply operating under the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." The problem is that, fundamentally, their remit was not to defeat the Taliban, it was to build a viable democratic Afghanistan. 

Funding warlords meant that centuries of blood feuds were supercharged by US weapons and money, creating the failed state that predated America's chaotic withdrawal in 2021. The militias had no sense of fighting for "Afghanistan" and instead fought for their own plunder, to settle scores and to wrest control for themselves. This provided the perfect opening for the Taliban. 

Among the many scourges of war is the anarchic effect it has on governance. Civic order breaks down, as killing and violence becomes routine. Afghanistan has always been more a geographic expression than a political one. It's a multiethnic state with as many vendettas as there are valleys. 

The US never understood this. In the brief aftermath of deposing the Taliban, the decision to pivot towards Iraq before finding and killing bin Laden deprived American forces of the ability to disarm these militias. Fighting that war "on the cheap" (at least in terms of manpower) was the fatal flaw in our efforts in Afghanistan, and that decision was made by 2003.

Biden was 100% right to pull the plug and deserves very little of the blame for what happened.

The Status Quo And What's To Come

 Joe Biden and thus Kamala Harris were hurt by the unfair perception that they were in charge during much of Covid and therefore responsible for things like school closings and inflation. The American economy is the envy of the world and it sure looks like Trump is going to fuck that up. So, it's important for people to feel good about the economy now, so they feel the brunt of Trump's economic shocks appropriately. The worst thing that could happen politically for Dems is if Trump doesn't do what he says he will.

In international relations, we have something similar, but less obvious. Many poorly informed people feel the world is falling apart. Again, I think the post-Covid societal dynamics have created an effect similar to sloshing a bowl of water around. Some of it is spilling over the edge and this has created some odd disruptions. 

The pre-eminent stories are Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, and the former looks bleak. It doesn't look like Ukraine will regain its lost territories and will be forced to sue for peace.

In the Middle East, things are moving very fast and very chaotically. Hamas is beaten to shit; Hezbollah has been decapitated; Assad has fled; the Iranian regime can't keep the lights on. I'm not certain Israel has completely won that conflict, because they have taken a very real hit in terms of public perception of the very legitimacy of the existence of Israel (not that they give a shit). There is no question that Iran's Axis of Resistance has gotten the living shit beaten out of them. 

Enter (re-enter) Donald Trump, who understands on one level that his rural voters are not interested in fighting wars, but a man whose imperial vanity presumes some desire to conquer. If we were about to hand off to President-elect Harris, I think we might be optimistic that the people of Syria and Iran might see not just regime change but positive regime change. As it is, I feel it's inevitable that Trump will engage in some act of belligerent militarism. Let's take some of his words at face value:

- Re-taking the Panama Canal. If he does this, Sheinbaum opens the gate for migrants to move through Mexico to the US. An area - central America - that has beginning to see a little more stability gets thrown into more chaos. The revulsion around the world and the hemisphere would be complete. This is Putin-level shit.

- Greenland. WTF? His obsession with Greenland is really, really weird. 

- Annexing Canada. You know what? Go for it! Canadians are more liberal than Americans on a lot of issues. A Canadian/US merger would insure Democratic majorities for the next 40 years. Not going to happen, but please proceed.

- Attacking Mexico. I'm worried this is going to happen. Could it help reduce the cartels? Anything's possible. Shooting it out with gangsters rarely works, but the US military is a categorical difference. Again, the impact on world and Western hemisphere opinion would be catastrophic.

- Attack Iran. If there are sane heads in the Pentagon, and they need to attack somewhere to placate this gibbering moron, a series of strikes in Iran would appeal to a faction of military leaders (as long as there are no boots on the ground). Would the strikes extend the life of the religious regime or hasten its demise? Most likely the former. Letting Iran (or Russia) collapse under the weight of sanctions would be the best outcome. 

The thing is, there's no way to predict what's coming. The world is beginning to regain its post-Covid equilibrium, and this chimp is going to start flinging pooh everywhere. 

Every Allegation, Etc

 The phrase "every allegation is a confession" has always served me well when talking about the GOP in the age of Trump. This occurs to me, as we hear that the party aligned with QAnon has, for years, countenanced Matt Gaetz as a member of Congress. 

"He's a pederast, Dude."

Gaetz's moral unfitness for office has been apparent since he slithered on the scene, with large numbers of Members apparently knowing what a scumbag this perv was.

And yet...

The fact that Donald Trump nominated a recidivist sex criminal to be Attorney General of the United States - forget that he withdrew him because even the GOP couldn't choke this one down - should be a scandal of the greatest magnitude. Yes, Biden pardoned his son. If you think these two things are remotely similar, I don't know what to say. 

In a normal political party, Trump's nomination of a rapist would lead to the end of Pete Hegseth's nomination as Secretary of Defense, as Congress asserted its muscles. Since the GOP has become a Cult of Personality around as reprehensible a figure as this country can cough up, I don't know if this will shame any of them. 

The idea, though, that Democrats are the real threat to children, because they believe gay and trans people should be free from persecution, while their president nominates an actual statutory rapist just goes to prove that the fundamental problem with the American electorate is that far too many people combine shitty information with low reasoning skills.

I Think I'm In Trouble

 My wife wanted to go someplace warm with "things to do" and I may have suggested the Florida Keys. We walked down Duval Street and I think she's regretting taking my suggestion.

The Message

 The chaotic nonsense that Musk unleashed on Congress was full of sound and fury and signifying...something? As Marshall notes (and I've started to see a few Democratic politicians adopt this framing) this is increasingly Team Billionaire vs Team Normal People. Trump and Musk share an appetite for drama in which they are the main character. They are also fucking idiots. 

About a month ago, I noted that authoritarianism is not the ends, it is the means. The end is corruption. The rank corruption about to land in DC is going to be horrible, but it is ultimately reversible. 

The other observation someone shared is that authoritarians are almost always on some level not very bright, or at least not very wise. 

The seeds of their own destruction are there, as long as we make sure the sprouts get enough sunlight.

Holidays

 After a grueling couple of weeks, I just finished what I hope is my last work until we return in early January. After a year's sabbatical, it was a rough readjustment to working every damned day (including Sundays, damnit). The school is also going through some transitions under our new Head. Meanwhile, we are about to buy a plot of land to build a retirement home on, while hoping Trump and his assorted idiots don't destroy the country or economy. My wife decided that she wasn't up to a regular Christmas, which she usually pours a lot of work into. So we are all off to Florida to lay in the sun. (We have a house sitter, so don't think you can break in, Wet Bandits.)

Anyway, Happy Holidays. May your days be merry and bright.

Finding Out

 The incredulity many Americans greeted Trump's reelection was a product of knowing who the Republicans and Trump really are, instead of who the play on the teevee. The price of eggs is more important than a women's autonomy over her own body...as long as no one knows that this is at stake. So, Republicans surfed on the fact that most Americans rightly believe that Trump has probably paid for multiple abortions in his life, so he's not really a zealot. 

This works, only if you ignore the rest of the GOP.

Meanwhile, the GOP's complete disinterest in governing for the good of the broadest swath of the American people is already on display as these fucking morons have torpedoed their own Continuing Resolution, because Musk something something. 

The markets are responding to the fact that Trump is actually still talking about doing the things that he's totally going to do. A government shutdown isn't going to ease their fears.

Fran Lebowitz once said, "You don't know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't." In a certain light, Elon Musk is just as stupid - except for the few things that he does sort of know a little about. We have to remember that Musk was a rich nerd who became a venture capitalist and then bought up good companies and gave them goods ideas (batteries!) and the engineers solved the problems for him. Whatever smarts he does have, they do not really apply to the public sphere. He's a profoundly weird dude, likely on the spectrum and he does not know shit about shit when it comes to public policy. 

So, he blows up a good deal that would allow the government to stay open for the holidays because he's a "disrupter" which is Silicon Valley for "huge suppurating asshole." That he appears at the moment to be the actual president is a fascinating new development in "Populism."

It's going to be a chaotic and unpleasant four years. And Republicans will actually take the blame.

Duh.

Musk And Trump

 Josh Marshall looks at the power dynamic between Trump and Musk, as revealed by the killing of the continuing resolution by the latter. 

Marshall and others have presumed that eventually Musk and Trump will come to blows, because Trump is not a guy to share the limelight. Musk is also just as mercurial and even weirder than Trump. I think that's probably true. 

However, I have real questions about Trump's physical state. Where he is? He looked like shit on the campaign trail, but he won the election in large part to stay out of jail. He achieved that. Why not simply cede control of the executive to Musk? Why not bask in the pomp of the office and let him do the work?

I guess we shall see.

Fighting The Kakistocracy

 We are going to be governed by the absolute worst people for the next four years. We know that, because (waves arms around). The question Democratic strategists have to wrestle with is how best to fight it.

Betty Cracker wonders why the public seems so tolerant of rampant corruption. The answer to me is that the typical low-info voter thinks all government is corrupt. In the broad sense that money in politics is corrupting, there's a point there. The murder of campaign finance laws by the Supreme Court was really, really bad. Trump's egregious pay-for-play will be unprecedented since at least Warren Harding's administration, and Harding himself did not direct the corruption. The easy, dumb cynicism of "their all corrupt" lumps in the fact that Democratic politicians speak before donors with Trump auctioning off government jobs.

There's some question about which fights Democrats should engage with. There's one camp arguing that you show a willingness to work with Republicans now, so that when they do terrible things later, you can tut-tut and reluctantly conclude that Republicans have - gasp - lied about wanting to help the working class. I think in normal times, that makes sense, as an antidote to the GOP's new populist rhetoric. However, you literally ran on "Trump is a threat to American democracy" because Trump is a threat to American democracy. How does one "work in a bipartisan fashion" with Trump? I get that Democrats have to compete in swing and GOP-tilting electorates, but that's a hard circle to square.

Meanwhile, the relative gumption of Justin Trudeau and Claudia Sheinbaum shows two different ways of dealing with Trump. Trudeau has taken the approach of flattering and cajoling Trump's infamously fragile ego as a means to ameliorating his worst vengeance. This is a process that Josh Marshall called becoming a "dignity wraith" whereby you offer up your manhood in the hopes of placating Trump and his eviscerates you anyway. Ask Lindsey Graham. Meanwhile, Sheinbaum has said, "Fuck this guy" and Trump has ignored her, while belittling Trudeau.

I do think one idea that I and others have had is that we need a few billionaires and a million small donors to create a legal defense fund to help ease the cost burden of those whom Trump is going to sic Kash Patel on. 

The strategies that worked from 2017-2019 are unlikely to be equal to this moment, yet that seems to be the position of many DC Democrats. Baffling.

Senioritis

 Every spring we talk about "senioritis" when the Seniors are checked out and barely paying attention after mid-April.

mistermix talks about another form of senioritis: the perverse system of seniority in the Congress that rewards people for longevity over ability. Now, I'm one of the most senior faculty at our school, having been here 25 years. Would I like it if that longevity and presumed wisdom were more honored? More heeded? Damned straight! However - as the hiring process for administrative posts have proven - there is no guarantee for long tenure. 

So, I largely agree that having antediluvian ranking members is not a great idea. We need people who have energy and fight. We don't need more Merrick Garlands. 

There should be a senior member steering committee of Gray Hairs to consult with, but let the combat be borne by those more suited for it.

The Crux Of What's Coming

 The fundamental difficulty in assessing Trump is that there has been a wide disconnect between his bombastic rhetoric and his actual actions. At least that was the case from 2017-2020. January 6th saw his actions match his threats. Those of us paying attention noted that Trump's main lesson from his first go 'round was that he was thwarted by the "deep state" and needed loyalists and sycophants to enact his malevolent will. 

The result was the myriad pieces we see today about people who voted for Trump to "secure our borders" but assume that he isn't going to actually deport Jose, because Jose is a good dude and not one of the "bad ones".

At the business elite level, the assumption was that the tariffs were just more bluster.

That might not be true. He might actually go through with his trade wars.

The response to many of us after the shocking result on Election Night - more shocking in many ways than 8 years prior - was, "OK, you've fucked around, time to find out." 

If Trump really goes through with his two most important ideas - tariffs and deportations - then we will be firmly in the "find out" phase for all those salt of the earth, common clay of the New West who thinks he's going to be good for them, because he will run the country like one of his businesses.

Drones And The Information Landscape

 There have been a lot of breathless social media posts and even real news stories about drones covering America. Almost all of them have turned out to be airplanes. 

One thing I've noticed as a teacher, certainly, is the fallacy that access to information is the same as access to knowledge. I will ask students - who have their laptops open - what is the relative GDP of the United States and Mexico, for instance, and they look at me as if I started speaking Turkish. The idea that you could simply look that up so that the class discussion could continue is foreign to them. Sure, when there's a paper to write, they are all about the Google, but simply looking stuff up?

This relates to discussions we had with our eldest son, who gets a lot of news from TikTok and Instagram and equates that with major news outlets because "they're all biased." This allows for people to get in a lather about drones over the eastern seaboard that are simply the landing lights of planes.

What's worrisome is that we have a lot of "obeying in advance" from the plutocrats who own our major media outlets. Bezos s contributing to Trump's inauguration; the owner of the LA Times is censoring headlines; CNN and the WaPo are run by former Murdoch guys; ABC bent the knee. 

This had my wife in a lather this morning about the end of democracy. Democracy is a spectrum, not a fixed state. Americans living today lived under Jim Crow. Was that "democracy"? Not really. We are definitely headed for a period of imperiled democracy, and while I think federalism and American values of individualism will thwart authoritarianism in the end, I am worried, too, and it's because of how piss poor our information landscape is.

Social media has democratized, not knowledge but information, and that allows for mis- and disinformation to spread. That's how you get people saying they voted for Trump because he will help them with their health care situation.

UPDATE: David Roth nails it. He especially notes how the differing responses from Republicans and Democrats sums up the current state of the two parties.:

You can see, in these representatives’ respective responses to this little flare-up of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not quite competing visions of government. Kim goes out of his way to show that he takes these concerns seriously and allows that there may be something there before promising to do his level best to find out what it is; Van Drew goes on TV and talks the wildest shit he can, and then goes on YouTube, puts on a somber face, says “fear has no place in responsible leadership,” and keeps right on talking it.

Biden's Legacy

 It was always kind of embarrassing when people on Twitter called Biden "the best President of my lifetime" considering many of them were old enough to be there for the Great Society and few recent presidents have a legacy as powerful as the Affordable Care Act. I'll concede that Bill Clinton's legacy is complicated by more than his sexual immorality. Still, he was a pretty impressive president.

Biden's legacy was riding on Harris' victory. If she won, he would vault a little further up the "rankings" as empowering the first female president by selflessly stepping aside. Now, his decision to hang in the race until it became obvious he would get smoked will hang over his head and legacy. The likely only way that Democrats would've won this fall is if they had nominated someone from outside the Administration - one of those Midwestern governors.

However, presidents have one last stab at legacy writing as the days of one's term winds down. Trump's legacy would have been January 6th if Merrick Garland had been alive, but alas.

One of the perverse things I heard during and after the campaign was that Trump's felony conviction would help him among some voters. It seemed deeply racist, but...maybe? Trump has made a few nods towards pardoning real people, but as per usual with Trump, most of his efforts have come to the benefit of his rich friends.

Biden has started issuing pardons and clemency, and many of these are around non-defunct marijuana laws. Taking some tangible steps to alleviate the stigma of non-violent drug offenders - especially around marijuana - is a nice step. 

Biden will get no credit for it, but still.

More interesting, to me, is Kirsten Gillibrand's idea to simply declare that the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified. The logic is interesting. The ERA was sent to the states in 1972 where it lingered without accruing the necessary 3/4ths approval. Some states still ratified after the seven year window closed. The seven year window, however, is a Congressional limitation and not part of the Constitutional procedure for ratification. The 27th Amendment, relating to Congressional pay raises, lingered for almost two centuries without an expiration date before being ratified in the '90s. 

The merits of Biden instructing the National Archives to accept the ERA as the 28th Amendment are clear, even if many of its provisions have been folded into our understanding of the 14th Amendment. It also explicitly says "sex" so protections for transgender people are not included. 

So, it's not 100% clear that the ERA would significantly alter anything real.

What we can guarantee, though, is a counter-reaction from the the Republican Party. They will likely fight it because of Cleek's Law. There is a decent chance it will go down in flames when it reaches the SCOTUS.

And that's the point. 

Democrats are typically not very adept at these sort of messaging stratagems. The best ones lean into pre-existing perceptions of the party. That's why Harris' "transition surgery for prisoners" hurt her. It's not a big deal, but it reinforced perceptions that she was an out-of-touch San Francisco liberal, even her positions on many other things were not that far left. 

Forcing Republicans to kill a banal statement of equal rights for women seems like such a no-brainer.

So they either reflexively attack a worthy addition to the Constitution, or Biden gets one last small victory in a career that was remarkably supportive of women.

North Carolina

 The Tarheel State is following the infamous example of Wisconsin as a swing state that has gerrymandered its legislature to prevent Democrats from winning seats in a 51-49 state. Donald Trump won 51-48, but Josh Stein won 55-40 over Black Nazi Mark Robinson. Democrats won the Lieutenant Governor's office, the Attorney General, Secretary of State and Superintendent of Schools. All in very close races. It's a true swing state, as educational polarization has moved college educated voters towards Democrats.

The House delegation is 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. The State Senate is 30-19; the State House 71-48. The House delegation is accomplished by having three super Blue districts (D+35, +46, +47) and a bunch of Republican districts that are R+14 to 17. There's a similar dynamic in the State House where Dems run unopposed or have over 60% or even 70% of the vote and Republicans win in the 50s and low 60s. Classic "cracking and packing".

Gerrymandering is arguably a greater threat to democracy in America than Donald Trump. Trump has four years to fuck things up, and he definitely will. But the inability of Americans to have a legitimate choice in their legislative elections means that there is no check on executive power. If North Carolina and Wisconsin were not so gerrymandered, we would have a Democratic House of Representatives. 

You have to think Democrats would pick up two seats from North Carolina, but Wisconsin is worse. Wisconsin has two Democratic House members in D+40 and D+52 districts. Republicans range from R+3 to +29. This is in a true 50-50 state with a Democratic governor and Senator. However the State Senates and House's gerrymanders have been ruled unconstitutional under the Wisconsin constitution. 

Yes, there's a lot of "work" that Democrats have to do after this election. One priority should be getting anti-gerrymandering amendments into state constitutions. The focus should be on ballot initiatives in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. Arizona, in particular could offer a couple more swing districts and even Ohio might open up another district.

We have seen and we will see that the Republican Party is incapable of legislating. This narrow House majority will likely fail to write any of Trump and Musk's egregious ideas into law. Gaining and cementing control of the House has to be a Democratic priority, and yet the party has been wedded to the White House focus for too long.

Cerberus Economics

 Here's a credulous piece from the Times about Trump's presumed economic plan. Basically, Trump wants, are you ready for it, 3% economic growth, the national debt to be 3% of GDP and to add 3 million barrels of oil a day to America's energy output.

Meanwhile, in the real world, he's also planning on deporting a bunch of people, which would slow growth and reduce the tax revenue that even undocumented workers pay into the system. He's also proposing tariffs that will raise the price of goods and slow economic growth. He is proposing tax cuts that will explode the debt, again. If American oil companies produce 3 million more barrels of oil a day, the price of oil will fall below where it needs to be to reward the sort of drilling that is needed to add those 3 million barrels.

In short, Trump is promising a bunch of bullshit that he has no ability to deliver on. The sad part is that his failures will not register with people who consume our bullshit news media (to the degree that they consume non-celebrity news at all). So, Trump will fail to do what he promised, but it is unlikely to make a huge difference to the sort of voter who voted for Trump because he's a "straight shooter."

Josh Marshall wrote about this in a different context - health care policy:

I’ve written a few times recently about Donald Trump’s ability to stake out and hold territory in the public mind, the public attention span, with threats that he likely (though not certainly) can’t make good on or won’t even have the attention span or care enough to focus on. So he’ll end birthright citizenship or he’ll jail his opponents. Or maybe not. It’s part of his ability to always be taking the initiative on that mutable and uncanny territory where media narratives and old fashioned reality become a common fabric. He acts and keeps acting and his opponents react and keep reacting.

I was reminded of a central example of this this morning, something that happened again and again in his first term. He muses publicly about his sole and unchallenged right to make some decision or choice that in practice he knows nothing about. Usually he has no right to make that choice. Often he has no ability to make that choice. The fact that he has no ability to make such a choice in any remotely informed way adds to the angst many feel hearing his comments. It’s the essence of the power, a multiple-layered onion of gaslighting and itself a factor in keeping everyone off balance. It is, and is intended to serve as, a kind of meditation and magnification of his arbitrary power, how we’re all living not just in his world but in his will.

Trump truly is the master of post-factual politics.

{Chef's Kiss}

 This is what's coming. Yes, there will be awful people like Pete Hegseth elevated beyond their moral scope, but the other thing about Hegseth is that he is cut from the same cloth as Masoud Boulos. He has zero credentials for running anything more than a banana stand.

In Trump's first term, he began with people who were fairly far right, but basically capable of running their departments. Jeff Sessions is a neo-Confederate, but he's a COMPETENT neo-Confederate, in the sense of being able to run the Justice Department. Jim Mattis was a COMPETENT choice to run the Pentagon. Amazingly, even Steven Mnuchin turned out to be able to do his job with some crediblity.

Trump's desire to avoid the "Deep State" by appointing loyalists will lead to the "Derp State" of manifestly unqualified people running important government agencies. 

If we are lucky, their incompetence will be the doom of Trump and his allies' plans to dismantle the New Deal, the Great Society and the entire 20th century administrative state.

Still, putting an obvious grifter in charge of something as uncomplicated as the Middle East will, I'm certain, turn out great.

This Is Interesting

 A discussion (about a discussion) about the assassination of the United Health Care executive. It ends with a point about how wealth is both more unequal than it was around the post-war boom and more conspicuous. I remember "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and it was mostly about the garish taste of celebrities. Now, we have people who are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and they flaunt that more than ever. The death of this human being is subsumed by those feelings of outrage. 

The Do Something Morons

 Linked to the previous post, I really hate the people who screamed bloody murder when Biden pardoned his son and not other people. "Why isn't Biden doing everything at once, the way I want him to."

Well, piss off.

The Trumpist "Left"

 Can go pound sand. 

If there is a bigger set of credulous morons, I don't think I can think of them off the top of my head.

The thing is, there is a subset of men - and it is almost entirely men - who are sucked into a sort of Manichean worldview where there is "corruption" in our institutions and therefore the person who is attacking and dismantling our institutions is some sort of ally. Honestly, this is the saga of the guy who shot the health insurance exec. It's confusing unfair with illegal or even just corrupt. 

Institutions are flawed and in constant need to repair and reform. Destroying them is not going to go the way you think. 

For years, Martin Longman has been articulating that anti-monopoly should be the Democratic version of populism, and I think he's being proven prescient. 

Delusions

 This is a fascinating piece in The Atlantic about Native Hawaiians' desire for independence. It proceeds from a place of historical truth: American plantation owners overthrew the sovereign government of Hawaii that eventually led to it's annexation by the United States. However, it elides the fact that - unlike in a true colony - Hawaii became a state. Hawaii is not Puerto Rico or Guam; it enjoys the same sovereign rights as Virginia or Massachusetts. 

Hawaii was "stolen" in a fair reading of the word, but it seems also fair to say that there are statute of limitations on such crimes. At some point, Hawaii - like the Dakotas - passed from Native to American. The crime existed, but the ability to redress that crime has faded away into history. 

The idea that Hawaii will somehow become an independent nation again is largely delusional, though the article concludes with some Hawaii nationalists predicting the collapse of the United States, which is possible if very unlikely. That delusion, however, is rooted in exactly the form of solipsistic thinking that typifies the sort of leftist thinking that has both polluted "the discourse" and helped re-elect Trump.

Among the dumber things that we have embraced recently is "naming acknowledgments" where meetings are begun by saying "We gather here on Nipmuck land..."

No. 

They lost it.  It's sad for them and there is place for learning about that and a need to do so, but migratory conflict and displacement predated European arrival. People are conquered. That happens. People are displaced. Unraveling that is frankly impossible, and requires a "sins of the fathers paid for by the sons." You cannot simultaneously argue that all Palestinians are guiltless in the crimes of October 7th, but all Whites are guilty in the crimes of the 1890s in Hawaii. 

What's more, "naming acknowledgements" are the most obvious and farcical form of performative slacktivism. In the article, Brian Schatz is quoted at length about how he simply can't be bothered by fanciful concerns about independence that isn't going to happen, when there are real, tangible problems that Native Hawaiians face. You can bemoan those problems as being rooted in Hawaii's annexation, but that solves exactly none of the real problems that Native Hawaiians face. 

For instance, there is one faction that wants Native Hawaiians given the same rights as Native American tribes. They should have tribal lands where they are somewhat sovereign. Yet for some, this is a distraction from complete independence. What's more, I defy you to argue that the reservation system for Native Americans has been an unalloyed good for them.

There is a curious intellectual force at play in many of these arguments that somehow being morally right is, in itself, a condition that creates victory. There's something weirdly childish in this impulse. "This isn't fair!" as a political strategy. No shit it not's fair. Politics is the competition over and exercise of power. Power doesn't give a shit about "fair" unless the powerful decide that it does. "Fair" didn't lead to the Nuremburg Trials, the combined military might of the Allies did.

This doesn't even account for the subjective nature of morality itself. Hawaii is dependent on external food supplies; independence without guaranteeing the continuation of that - not to mention the hundreds of millions, even billions that the US military funnels into the Hawaiian economy - would led to an economic catastrophe. Expelling Whites and limiting tourism would leave Hawaiians rulers of a smoldering wreck of a place. While it seems many of the Hawaiian Nationalists welcome this, who exactly are they speaking for beyond themselves?

This is exactly the sort of zero-sum identity politics that created the broad backlash to what has otherwise been a striking few decades for what we might call "cultural liberalism." Gay marriage is commonplace; generalized sexism is not as accepted as Trump's election suggests it might be and is far less than it once was; we are legalizing pot and gambling at remarkable rates. However, fanciful ideas like somehow expelling the United States from Hawaii is exactly the sort of head scratching nonsense that makes the Left - and in guilt by association the Democratic Party - seem desperately out of touch with the American people's day to day concerns. 

More Enshittification

 One of the country's worst robocallers has died. Awww.  Anyway.

The thing about technology is that it's obviously quite wonderful in the right hands, but the the right hands are usually crowded out by the wrong ones. When the Internet came of age, the assumption was that it would "democratize knowledge" as everyone would have access to what had previously been locked up in library stacks and archives. Suddenly you could access the Library of Congress from Omaha.

Except instead the Internet became about sharing pictures of your dinner, trolling people and porn.

Robocalls are a great example of someone finding a new technology and using it to make people progressively miserable. It's not War, Famine, Pestilence or Plague, but it just makes life a little bit worse. Enshittification. What's more, the outright scamming that went on with robocalls was made possible by lax regulation.

The Biden Administration and Democrats in general worked for the last four years to lessen that process. Buttigieg and the Transportation Department attacked all sorts of immiserating things that airlines do, like hidden fees and cancelling flights. Airline travel is, in fact, the beau idyll of enshittification, as airline travel is amazing and wretched at the same time. 

The point, broadly, is that Democrats are a party of governance working - to the best of their knowledge and ability - to make things marginally better. Republicans are the party working to dismantle that. "Government is not the solution to your problems, government IS the problem" has been their operational mantra since Reagan rolled into the White House. While it is true that excess government regulation can be burdensome, the net effect can be positive.

Right now, I'm trying to negotiate a Treasury Department website to register a family LLC. I'm getting an error message that I've already registered it. The problem is, I need a BOIR number (don't ask). The bigger problem is that there is no human being who I can talk to to resolve this issue. 

In short, depriving the government of funds and outsourcing tasks to contractors contributes to massive hassle like this that contributes to people hating the government which helps elect Republicans.

What is clear is that the coming four years will see a massive increase in this sort of crap, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario could include the following:

- Another pandemic during a period when public health has been politicized by internet trolls.
- A crypto or other type of bubble during a period when financial oversight has been stripped away to placate the techbros.
- AI "disrupting" professions and industries that hollow out jobs.

The common theme is that we have an increasingly right wing tech sector - especially the vulture capitalists that sit atop that ecosystem - and they could have an outsized influence on this new administration. This is a group of dorky techno-libertarians who are the living manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect and Elon Musk is their living god. 

One of the interesting dynamics we are seeing is the normalization of Trump, in that many people have figured out how to play this moron through endless flattery. He is also 80% blustering bullshit, so who knows what he will really, actually do? Maybe he deports millions of people, but more likely he deports tens of thousands and declares that he has solved immigration. Trump doesn't really "do" policy.

But these broligarchs do, or at least they flatter themselves in thinking that they do.

Trump is an impulsive, incompetent moron who is easily swayed by those whispering paeans to his greatness is his ear. The cast of characters who will staff his administration absolutely include terrifying figures like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, but there is also a going to be a lot of wealthy people making things worse for the majority of Americans because it makes things better for them.

If Democrats were serious about creating their own brand of populism, that is the opportunity to do so. 

Focus on the broligarchs.

Violence Is Bad, Actually

 When the United Health CEO was gunned down in the street, there was a certain shrugging among many - myself included, I confess - and outright celebration in some quarters. The widespread perception that American health care is needlessly difficult and expensive is rooted in some reality, though it's simplistic to lay all the blame on insurance companies. American doctors and pharmaceutical companies are the highest compensated in the world and are very protective of that. Still, insurance companies very often suck.

The assassin turned out not to be the vanguard of the long awaited leftist revolution, but a Unabomber adjacent, right wing tech bro. His political leanings are no doubt all over the map, but like the would-be Trump assassin, he's another alienated young man who resents his lack of specialness and lashes out in a flamboyant way. 

Oddly, this links in my mind to this Yglesias piece about the "New Cold War." In it, he laments that the emerging Cold War between the US and China has dire consequences for humanitarian goals in the developing world. America's own muddled, self-centered and transactional foreign policy under Trump accelerates a complication of American policy that promotes democracy. Meanwhile, China builds infrastructure for authoritarian regimes in Africa.

What this means in general is that what used to be called "brush wars" - small, violent conflicts in developing world countries - are on the rise. 

However, we have to look at the broader context of bigger wars - notably Ukraine and whatever we want to call the ongoing conflict in the neighborhood of Israel. The legitimation of violence spirals into all sorts of unknown outcomes. 

In Ukraine, that country seems likely to have to cede large swaths of territory for peace, but meanwhile, Russia is also suffering economically and among its allies in Africa and the Middle East. The loss of Assad is a real blow to Russia. Meanwhile, in the broader war between Israel and Iranian proxies - started by Hamas - the Iranian proxies are reeling and Iran is back on its heels. Meanwhile, Israel is cementing its status as a pariah nation in some corners, even as it decimates Hamas, Hezbollah and now watches as Assad topples.

Violence - whether ostensibly revolutionary like the health care assassin or wars of choice - often unleashes forces that tear at the civic fabric within and between nations. It leads to unexpected outcomes that surprise even the most farsighted. 

Maybe we will look at recent events in 15 years and see a smaller but more prosperous Ukraine well integrated into Europe, and burgeoning democracy in Syria. 

I have my doubts. 

How Much Of It Is All Bullshit?

 Trump has been making a few press appearances after being mostly radio silent since the election, and he said he would pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. I think we should assume that will happen on January 20th or 21st. It sucks, but historical memory is long.

He also said that the members of the January 6th Select Committee should go to jail.

Now, pardoning the insurrectionists is "bad" because they are criminals, but the president has broad (too broad) pardon powers. If he does that, it's bad and skeevy but not the end of the world.

Going after members of Congress is where we start to bleed from "bad" to bad. The thing is, when Trump says they "ought to be in jail" that's likely more of his blustering bullying bullshit. There is no legal reason why he can jail them, even if Kash Patel is head of the FBI.

There is some thought to Biden preemptively pardoning anyone who might be on Trump's "enemies list." What I'd rather see is some billionaire creating a legal defense fund to fight blatantly political prosecutions. The power of the government is not dictatorial but size. They can exhaust you financially by bringing cases against you. The preemptive pardons would feed into Trumpist narratives about his enemies "crimes" but do we care? 

It's not my skin in the game, but I would rather they fight this out in court. That will be the evidence of the Orbanization of America.

The Wheel

 In economics, there's a pretty solid pattern over the past 40 years. Republicans break the economy - overheating it with tax cuts and deregulation - and then Democrats come in and fix things. Trump inherited the Obama recovery and coasted on that until Covid wrecked the economy. Biden led the most successful economic response to that and now the economy is booming. Let's see what happens with tariffs, deportations and crypto bubbles.

There less of a pattern in foreign affairs, but Trump will again inherit a reasonably favorable foreign policy map. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, with the sanctions finally taking a bite. The Russian military showed in ass in Ukraine, as NATO's JV weapons have stymied the much larger and better armed Russian army. If enough Russia hawks are in Trump's cabinet, maybe Ukraine can find a negotiated peace that allows them some long term security.

Meanwhile, if there's a country in worse shape than Russia, it's Iran. Their clients in the so-called Axis of Resistance are crumbling left and right. Hezbollah is largely beaten to dust; Hamas is a shadow of its former self and now Assad has capitulated in Syria.

This is good news, right?

The problem is that we are looking at a wounded Russia, and wounded powers are more likely to do rash things than secure ones. Syria is free from Assad's boot at its neck, but as we have seen repeatedly in the Middle East, when governments collapse, the state often collapses with them. Syria could become Lebanon in steroids with competing warlords. It could become Iraq: a fragile, flawed democracy. It could become Afghanistan as religious fanatics seize power and persecute those of insufficient faith. 

Assad was awful, but there's no guarantee that Syria benefits from his ouster and this could require more Israeli intervention which will supercharge the anti-Israeli global left. The instability on its borders will thwart efforts to oust Netanyahu.

Right before October 7th, Jake Sullivan infamously said that the Middle East was not a priority for US. Now we are seeing the devastation of Gaza, the destabilization of Lebanon and the potential collapse of Syria. In the past, the US has been the indispensable nation in brokering peace in that fraught neighborhood. That seems...unlikely with Trump's collection of foreign and security policy naïfs at the helm.

The wheel of history is always turning. The anti-incumbent mood of the advanced democracies has led to a sense of "throw the bums out" regardless of what comes next. Let the "disrupters" have a turn. 

Now, as the old structures crumble, can the disrupters, the chaos agents, find a path to stability and peace? I obviously have my doubts.

The problem with chaos agents is that they are excellent at breaking things, but building things is hard. Trump famously stopped building things because he kept losing money at it and went into branding instead. He couldn't build an apartment building, but he could slap his name on one. 

Well, the wheel is turning and he will have his name slapped on whatever is coming next.

Toxic

 The DOGE bullshit is beginning to lay the groundwork for cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran's benefits. As Josh Marshall lays out, it seems doubtful that Republicans have the votes for this in the Congress, but this is EXACTLY the solution to the messaging problem that Democrats claim to be concerned about.

This should be every Democratic talking head and politician's constant talking point from now until there's an up-or-down vote on Musk and Ramaswamy's plan to immiserate Granma. Yes, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard have to be opposed, but they will not move public opinion for those dreaded low information voter. Suggesting that Republicans will cut entitlement programs is a quick way to backfoot the entire party and force the inevitable showdown between Musk and Trump.

This Is A Hard Job To Love

 When it's December and you have coaching, competitions, end of semester rush to grade, make up exams, conduct review sessions, give the exams, grade the exams, write the class comments, write the advisor letters, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Standards

 As of now, Trump's first choice for Attorney General has withdrawn. Another minor appointee pulled out when he learned what the job actually was. The consensus is that Pete Hegseth is circling the drain. 

All of this has happened before a single confirmation hearing. 

As such, the Senate has torpedoed two of this five worst picks without getting a speck of blood on their shoes. This - hopefully - means that at least two other uniquely unqualified and dangerous nominees - Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel - could be lost during confirmation. 

I know there are people who would like to see RFK, Jr jettisoned, but I think he makes it through, simply because Republicans don't give a damn about public health. They ostensibly care about national security - well, some of them do - and Gabbard and Patel are really terrible picks under any normal scrutiny.

All of which brings us to today's installment of "Imagine If A Democrat Did This." Segments of the press are still harrumphing over Biden's completely understandable pardon of his son, as if the Hunter Biden case wasn't political to its core. Hunter should have been allowed to finish his plea deal, but it was scuttled by Republicans, so the pardon is right on the merits. 

But let's imagine a scenario where Harris has seen her AG and SecDef already blown up over allegations of pedophilia, rape, alcoholism and sexual assault. Imagine the 24/7 firestorm in the media. 

The standard to which Trump is held by the press and by extension the public is the greatest national failure of our time in Trumpistan. 

Big Tent

 Yglesias engages in some of his own "pundit's fallacy" which is when political prescriptions tend to conform to one's existing beliefs. For him, it's a constant stream of pro-YIMBYism. 

Still, it seems like one big takeaway from the electoral loss is that Harris passionately affirming her support for transition surgery for prisoners really hurt her. For me, it was less that people are lining up to hate trans people, as it is that her apparently ardent support for this showed she cared more about this than high prices. The fact that she ran very heavily on attacking high prices and did not run on transition surgery for prisoners seems like an important part of the story. All the ad did was put her in the box of "California Woman of Color Who Is Way to My Left On Social Issues."

It was pretty clear that Harris' people saw this, too, which is why she touted owning a Glock and spoke of a lethal military. 

The broader hobby horse of a lot of center-left journalists, including Yglesias and Chait, is that too often Democrats have prioritized intra-party harmony over occasional heterodoxy. That seems roughly true.

The idea of "cancel culture" is, of course, not unique to the left. Conservatives want to cancel all sorts of shit, yet the stigma comes from what James Carville called "Faculty Lounge Politics." 

An example of this is Senator Fetterman's vocal and militant support for Israel. That's not really in line with where the leftward parts of the party are, but as Bob Casey's recent narrow defeat proves, you have to allow Fetterman some latitude on this. It's obvious he really cares about it, and lots of people do support Israel. 

It seems to me that a lot of this dynamic comes from the dogpiles of social media. Every statement can be picked up and made an instant battleground. Famously, some kids at Oberlin complained about the banh mi in the dining room being cultural appropriation. I doubt very seriously that this is a position held by most students even at Oberlin. Every nutty position held by every attention starved college militant can become today's "main character." 

It's pretty clear that the solution to this should be in the candidates Democrats rally around. Bill Clinton's "Sista Souljah" moment only worked because he was a moderate Southern Democrat. The ideal candidate for me in 2028 is a male midwestern governor with a military record who is good on TV. That person doesn't exist, unless Pete somehow becomes governor of Michigan or Walz improves his extemporaneous speaking skills, but that's the person whose positions or communication skills matter less than what they look like on the debate stage. 

In the meantime, Democrats and left of center folks need to stop quibbling over how committed they are to certain strategies and more to broad goals. In essence:

- Climate change is very important, but we need clean energy abundance for our economic future not de-growth, and the steps we do that should be negotiable.
- Every person should be treated equally and with some compassion, and that includes everyone from trans people to Seventh Day Adventists.
- We need to make it harder for bad people to get guns, while respecting the rights of safe gun owners.
- We need to make sure someone with only a high school degree can get a job that allows them to own a home, given their own hard work and merit.

Aligned Federalism

Back when Trump was elected in 2016, I urged Blue States to band together in compacts to resist Trump's worst policies and impulses. The Atlantic is making the same case here and to a certain extent the ACLU is making the case here. 

The other side of this is that a lot of Blue states and cities need to get their shit together and govern better.

What The Hell Was THAT?

 South Korea went through some things. Their Trumpy president tried to seize extraconstitutional power and it fell on its face. Yoon is part of the misogyny to authoritarianism pipeline that explains at least a part of Trump's appeal, and he is certainly part of the broadly authoritarian populism that rests on various grievances. 

Honestly, the willful decision to ignore the role that gender played in Trump's victory is baffling. Trump won 3,000,000 more votes than he did in 2020. Harris won 6,500,000 fewer votes than Biden. This was not simply a Biden-to-Trump phenomenon, it was a bunch of people who refused to go vote for Harris. In 2016, it was a low turnout election with Clinton receiving about 9,000,000 fewer votes than Harris and 15,500,00 fewer than Biden. 

Sorry, but Democrats should be very wary about running a woman in 2028. As the party of "women" they need to avoid doubling down on that identity, if they want to win enough male votes to actually win the election and pursue policy goals that benefit women. In Nigeria, the most successful candidates are those that represent one ethnic group, but come from the opposite group. The idea is that the party is the policy, the candidate is the vehicle.

Anyway, Korea was able to smack down the autogolpe attempt fairly easily.  President Yoon was already embattled, because he did unpopular things. He resorted to the attempt to seize dictatorial powers precisely because he was unpopular. Ideally, Trump's popularity wanes quickly as he does bad stuff and then America's semi-authoritarian party remembers than it is American after all.

Time To Stop Licking Our Wounds

 After the emotionally crushing defeat, I was fine with people who wanted to retreat from the fight a bit for a while. It was soul-crushing to think about what Trump 2.0 might mean; it remains soul crushing. It made sense to just turn off the news until mid-January. Getting worked up about Matt Gaetz wasn't - as it turned out - necessary. I think the vultures are circling Pete Hegseth and he will be replaced soon - apparently by Ron DeSantis. 

Freaking out about RFK, Jr's brain worm making health policy is absolutely legitimate, but we can't fight every battle. We have to know when and where to fight, and I think we know which terrain is favorable.

We already have a few of the Wingnut Caucus talking about slashing entitlements. Democrats need to "go ham" on this. Stop talking about the appropriateness of Dr. Oz and start talking about what he might do to Medicare and Medicaid. 

Democrats are not a natural opposition party, in that Democrats go to Washington to do things rather than to obstruct things. So you have Jared Moskowitz joining the DOGE conference, which I suppose isn't the worst thing in the world, as long as he's prepared to storm out at the appropriate moment. You join these things now and then loudly break with them, saying that what they are planning is cruel. The reason to "be bipartisan" in December is so you can loudly break with it in February and March. 

Lots of folks noted that Trump's re-election was more like 2004 than 2016, in that 2016 felt like a fluke, whereas 2004 was a clear choice. Bush began talking about his "mandate" and then proceeded to promptly a thoroughly shit the bed by trying to privatize Social Security and dragging the culture wars into the Congress by focusing on Terri Schiavo's end of life care. Trump has few deep ideological commitments, and Rep. McCormack notes that even as he wants to slash entitlements, Trump is likely less than enthusiastic. In fact, the Wingnut Caucus pushing unpopular issue and Trump knee-capping them to become more popular is very on brand for him.

Trump's perverse ability to escape consequences for his poor and unpopular decisions is the belief that he doesn't really believe anything he says, depending on what the issue is. This is most true about abortion rights, where most people think - probably accurately - that he's pro-choice, and then they ignore that he picks a bunch of theocrats for the bench. 

A central failure of the media during the campaign - and there were many - was in not focusing more on Project 2025. Trump said he didn't care about it, and maybe he doesn't, but it seems fairly likely to be a blueprint for at least the first year of his administration. If so, people will be surprised to discover that Trump is an actual Republican pursuing actual Republican goals.

For the Democrats, they need to scream bloody and consistent murder when he does.

Making America Weird

 There's a lot of weirdness in Trumpistan. This is an inevitable byproduct of populism, which is driven by feelings of inadequacy in a culture that centers on expertise. Elite expertise - even ostensibly benign expertise like medical experts - is suspect because it comes from "elites".

The most obvious example of this is, of course, RFK Jr's crazy ass shit. This is part of the strange "wellness culture" that exists around sundry forms of quackery. Almost all of these are various forms of fraud or ignorance, though there is some evidence around what could be called non-western medicine. What's more, people feel unhealthy because as you get older your body starts to decline. It's called aging and people are scared to death of it. The idea that there is some secret sauce to keep you young and healthy is very appealing and people will divorce themselves from reason in its pursuit. 

Ironically, "Big Pharma" might have unlocked a true "miracle" with these semaglutide medicines like Ozempic. This has led to an online backlash because taking a pill that gives you all sorts of health benefits - weight loss, diabetes, addiction - is "cheating" instead of eating a bonkers diet and chopping four cords of wood every day or whatever nonsense these nutballs come up with.

The implications for public health from RFK and his crew of loons are real. People will die needless if he really starts attacking vaccine mandates. Children, children will die. However, there are other forms of weirdo nonsense that imperil us for the next four years.

I remain convinced that we will have a Crypto bubble before 2028. Crypto is a perfect example of broligarchic, glibertarian nonsense. Money has more or less always been a product and function of the state. Coins bore the heads of caesars, kings and emperors. The ability to manage one's currency is fundamental to modern economics. Crypto is an attack on this function and posits that removing this from the realm of the state will...something? Freedom? Freedumb?

Basically, Crypto is the perfect bubble asset, as it is based on nothing but the agreed on value of it. While Crypto-Bros would argue the same is true of a fiat currency, that ignore the extraordinary wealth and power of even the weaker states. 

My fundamental rule for economics is that anyone who says "This time will be different" is a fool, and we know what happens to a fool and their money. Pouring wealth into the random asset of Crypto will grow a bubble - it's inevitable. We've already seen one Crypto bubble, and when the next one bursts, it will take down bigger financial institutions.

Then there is AI. This is less Populist weirdness and more Tech-Bro, but we are moving headlong towards a technology that has the potential to destroy large segments of the economy. If we really do deport millions of people, people like Musk will try and replace them with robots. 

What could possibly go wrong?

At the root of this populist moment around the world is the access people now have to all sorts of knowledge, but they have access to it without wisdom or context. Also at its roots is the broad dissatisfaction with the world. 

My own theory is that life has literally never been easier, and we simply aren't wired for that. Our brains - wired for threats and deprivation - are running underloaded and hot. We see peril where it doesn't exist, because we are wired to look for it. This accounts for our Anxious Age, and in this time of societal anxiety, we look for solace in certitude. The problem is, actual science is uncertain - that's what makes it science. Doubt, revision, challenging...all of those are essential to intellectual growth. 

Populism replaces that skepticism with ferocious certainty. Trump is both profoundly ignorant and profoundly confident. A man those close to him have described as an idiot projects brilliance to a people who saw him on their TeeVee play a savvy business man. 

Populist moments in history tend to fade, because they tend to fail. The American Populist movement of farmers in the late 19th century gave birth to a Progressive movement that centered technocratic governance. 

While history does not strictly repeat itself, we can hope that it once again rhymes.

Whither Ukraine?

 Trump's incoming national security team sends mixed messages about Ukraine. Some are Russia Hawks like Rubio and Waltz, others are Putin stooges like Gabbard. It's also unclear how much Trump feels he owes Putin this time around. 

The Russian economy is in deep trouble, as the war stretches on. Sanctions take time to work and they are now working. Ukraine's biggest problem at the moment is likely manpower, but they are talking about ceding large swaths of territory for NATO membership. I doubt that flies in the White House or the Kremlin. Of course, it's unclear what Trump's plans are for NATO. Frankly, bilateral alliances with countries like Poland could make more sense for Ukraine as a backdoor to NATO.

When Trump's win was declared, I sent a text to our "adopted" Ukrainian son: "I fear for both our countries."

Are They Serious?

 Joe Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter, seems right on the merits. It was a bullshit case to pursue beyond the plea deal. Hunter deserves the penalties he was assessed but he does not deserve additional criminal penalties.

There are actually people out there saying that this gives Trump "permission" to pardon all sorts of people. 

Are you kidding?

Trump is going to pardon every January 6th person in prison. He's going to pardon his cronies from past crimes. He's going to pardon them when they commit crimes in the future. He's probably going to pardon himself and wager that the Courts won't check him. The idea that Biden's actions will somehow give Trump license to do shady stuff is just unbelievably naïve and the purest form of bothsides I've ever seen.

UPDATE: Martin Longman and Josh Marshall are, as per usual, right.

Jesus

 Pete Hegseth's mother sent her son a blistering email about his treatment of women. Let's take a sample:

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,”

and

 “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

She wrote the email in the middle of her son's divorce in 2018 and sent a copy to her daughter-in-law who may or may not have sent it to the Times. His mother concludes:

“It’s time for someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women,” she wrote. “We still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character.” If the email “damages our relationship further,” she added, “so be it.”

So, in a "sane world" Hegseth is done. He might, in fact, be done. That's all pretty freaking awful and corroborated by other instances of behavior. In previous administrations, this would be a 24-7 news story. I can remember Bill Clinton losing an Attorney General nominee because she hadn't paid Social Security for her nanny. Things like that used to be the standard and president-elects took a blow to their reputations for not vetting someone properly.

Meanwhile, Trump nominates just the absolute worst people and the media reports it...then lets it drop.

Let's Hope December Will Be Better...

 November obviously began...poorly. We have spent the rest of the month careening around Trumpistan and his desire to stock his Cabinet with uniquely unqualified and contemptuous people. As for me, the Thanksgiving was a bit rough for reasons I need not get into, and now we have the three week sprint of wrapping up classes and all the grading that comes with that, giving exams and all the grading that comes with that and then comments, with some longish wrestling days thrown in. Should be a gas!

Pray for me now, a sinner, in the hour of my need.

Down With The Broligarchy

 Alexandra Petri has some of her usual incisive fun by taking on Elon Musk. 

One of the strategic conundrums Democrats are facing is how to find their own populist voice to counteract the right wing version. While I think Trump 2.0 will be awful in lots of ways, it might also not be, in the sense that we are seeing with his threatened tariffs with Mexico. He blustered, Sheinbaum called him out, they spoke, now he's claiming victory, which is effectively the status quo. Democrats will need to do something positive to counter-message this.

I think taking on the Silicon Valley Broligarchs is an excellent place to start. 

You'll need to be clear that you are attacking the libertarian monopolistic venture capitalist class and not the concept of technological advancement. These people have some very weird ideas, and the degree to which Musk becomes the face of Trumpistan, the better. The fact that the one thing we know they will do is cut taxes on the very rich and deregulate every industry that they can is fodder for the message.

Martin Longman has long touted an anti-monopolist message for small town America, where entrepreneurial opportunities are squeezed out by Walmart and Dollar General. If we add the idea that Silicon Valley is out to rot your brains and siphon away your money, we will lose some PAC money, but gain the sort of message that should appeal to average voters. 

The House Divided Against Itself

 With Gaetz gone and Stefanik and Waltz headed to the administration, it looks like the House will be 215-217 for at least a few months. All but one race is called, and the Democrat leads in that to get them to 215. (FWIW, on election day Pelosi said they were going to win the House, and that's the first time she has counted votes wrong.)

Unfortunately, all three come from districts where they won over 60% of the vote so the special elections that tap their successors will almost certainly return a Republican to Washington. Special elections have favored Democrats and there could be the thermostatic effect, which could both make those votes close, but it's VERY unlikely that Dems actually flip those seats. 

What this means in the short run is that any single House Republican has the ability to squash legislation. The only legislation likely to pass this Congress is an extension of Trump's tax cuts. The extent and depth of those cuts are now contingent on whichever House member wants to draw a line for fiscal sanity. Efforts to write cultural war bills are DOA in a House that closely divided with a handful of GOP members from places as diverse as Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, Alaska and Arizona winning by close margins in a favorable environment for Republicans.

The House GOP caucus will be slightly more governable with Matt Gaetz gone, but Lauren Boebert, Marjorir Traitor Green and sundry other whackaloons will still be there from the last House, which had a somewhat larger margins and was still a hot mess.

Once again, the incompetence of the Trumpist legions remains our best defense.

We Are, In Fact, Heading Back

 I have long argued that the Republican Party is no longer a "conservative" party but a reactionary one. It is not concerned with sustaining and defending the status quo, so much as turning back the clock to an imagined bygone era.

It seems, naturally, that Republicans are going to take another swipe at repealing or defunding the Affordable Care Act. I would guess that Collins and Murkowski are, once more, no votes in the Senate, but the faux populists like Hawley are unlikely to join them. John Curtis, the new Senator from Utah, was once a Democrat and the ACA could fit within the communal values of the LDS. Jim Justice, the new Senator from West Virginia, is also a former Democrat and has a state unusually dependent on the ACA. In the House, the margin is likely to be razor thin and three defections could sink the plans to kill it.

However, defunding Medicaid within the ACA is almost certainly on the table. Repealing the regulatory reforms of ACA seems unlikely, both because it can't get around the filibuster and because it helps middle class families like ours with things like keeping our sons on our insurance until they graduate college. Throwing the Poors off Medicaid to pay for tax cuts is exactly the sort of things that get Republicans tumescent. 

There are a host of things like this that are going to happen. Pete Hegseth, if confirmed, will toss transgendered service people out of the armed force. I can even see Dreamers deported, which could be a terrible loss to our country. The regulatory state will be gutted, environmental standards will be rolled back. 

It will be depressing.

Here's the thing, though. We will be going back in time years, maybe decades. If it immiserates people to the degree that I think it will, that will create a backlash. Elections are run at the state level and the House will change hands in 2026, maybe even the Senate if it gets bad enough. It happened last time.

Eventually, we will crawl back out of Trumpistan and can start reviving the reforms that he kills. Progress isn't linear, it can be reversed, but the reverses can be reversed, too.

ADDED: I don't know how far Republicans will go towards further restricting abortion, but the existing regimes in certain states will lead to both deaths and the flight of OB/GYNs from those states, leading to more deaths.

Mexico And Canada

 Trump has blustered that he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, as opposed to a 10% tariff on China. This raises questions about what his intentions are that are largely moot. Trying to ascribe strategy to this guy is pointless. It's all "Made For TV" policy.  

It sounds like he's basically using tariff policy to address immigration and drug smuggling. I'm sure Canada is off in the corner looking around saying, "WTF?"  

Here's the tricky part, which of course escaped his wee brain. Two-thirds of the fruits and vegetables that we import come from Mexico. Much of our winter produce comes from there, and he will be imposing his tariffs on January 21st. If you crash the Mexico agriculture sector, you will create more migrants to the US. Right now, few of the cross-border migrants are from Mexico; they mostly come from Central America and the Caribbean via Mexico. So, your plan to cut immigration via tariffs could very well lead to more immigration.

What's more, the Mexican administration is unlikely to help stem migration - as it has been for a few years - if the US has declared economic warfare on it. As for drugs, Mexico has been trying for 20 years to get a handle on drug cartels and the results have been both dismal and lethal.

Of course, the most likely outcome is this:

- Trump levies tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
- Certain companies bribe Trump to exempt their goods from those tariffs.
- Some prices spike.
- People get unhappy.
- Trump declares that no more migrants and fentanyl are coming into the country, despite evidence to the contrary.
- Faux News declares that migration and drug trafficking have ceased. 
- Cult 45 has collective orgasm.

Remember, the authoritarianism is just the cover for the corruption and the incompetence is a byproduct of the corruption.