It's Funny 'Cause It's Not

"Trump was only interested in investigating Hunter Biden because if his deep concerns about corruption," has to be the most laughable assertion of this troubled era.

Monopoly

There is one major economic issue that might unite the right and left if we ever get a marginally functional government again: monopoly. The article uses a great example of how Americans get worse service at higher prices than other countries: the internet.  Internet service providers are routinely awful and expensive at the same time.  Given how consolidated telecommunications companies are, this is hardly surprising.  Monopoly and consolidation have a cost in medicine as well.

Back in 1912, Wilson and Roosevelt squared off over the issue of how to manage increasing consolidation.  Roosevelt won the argument in the long term, by arguing that government regulation was the best way to accommodate inevitable consolidation.  After the Reagan Revolution attacked the idea of the state, Wilson's argument was proved right.  As he put it:

If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it. Are you going to invite those inside to stay inside? They don't have to get there. They are there. 

We need a more vigorous regulatory state, but ultimately, unless there is competition, we will just trend back into the hands of oligarchs once Republicans take power again.

The Great Mystery

Why is Elizabeth Warren an afterthought in this race?

I get it that people hate "women of a certain age," and they are gunshy after Hillary's experience in 2016. 

But she's much better at politics than she is given credit for, and she would be the best president of the five main remaining candidates.  (Sorry, Joe, you're done.)

Meanwhile the purported frontrunners - Sanders and Buttigieg - have something in common: neither one has really accomplished anything tangible in their lives as public servants.  Of course, that says more about Sanders at this point.

Our Best Hope

The Trumpists are deeply, deeply stupid. That doesn't help with elections, because a lot of people are deeply, deeply stupid, but whatever.

Susan Collins Can Go To Hell

What are we to think of Senator Collins and her deep, deep anguish over acquitting Donald Trump? She said that Trump had learned his lesson, like Trump ever learned anything in his adult life.  She said he would behave better.

Barely two weeks have gone by and Trump and Bob Barr's efforts to corrupt the Department of Justice proceed apace and in the open.  Meanwhile, he's now admitting that he sent Giuliani as a bag man to Ukraine.

Trump is a problem, but he's not THE problem.  The problem is the GOP.

Bloomberg

He cannot be the nominee.

He cannot be the nominee.

Injustice

There are multiple long and medium term troubles caused by the rampant ill-government and corruption of the Trump Administration. While the focus has been on Trump's reactionary judges, an equally large concern is the decline of competent civil servants. There has been a mass exodus from the State Department, for instance.

Nothing is more concerning as we lead up to the 2020 election than the apparently complete co-optation of the Justice Department. In the aftermath of Nixon's abuse of the Justice Department during Watergate, certain reforms were instituted to insure that the DOJ could not be "politicized."  Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening now.

Authoritarian regimes routinely use a politicized legal process to discredit their opponents.  Putin routinely locks up opposition candidates that threaten to get embarrassing vote totals, much less openly defeat him.  Xi Xinping uses kangaroo courts to thwart domestic political rivals.  Trump is clearly angling for the same sort of Justice Department that will act as his personal legal team rather than serve as impartial servants of the law.

Hopefully, a Democrat wins next November, and we are able to pry Trump's fat ass out of the Oval Office.  However, a great deal of reforms that someone like Bernie Sanders is proposing are dependent on a Senate that is unlikely to help him out. Instituting governmental reforms, however, might be something that Republicans could support, once Trump is out of power.

Then again, betting money on Republicans to do the right thing is a great way to lose money.

The Winnowing

Trump won the GOP nomination without ever really winning 50% or more in early contests, because the GOP field was so large and ideologically diverse (for them).  By the time the contests got to point where it was a clear choice between Trump and a normal Republican, the choice was already made.  (Some of that was GOP primary rules about delegates.)

The Democrats, I think, face a problem that's similar.  Sanders has many appealing qualities, but he's been surprisingly unvetted for such a nationally prominent candidate.  Democrats can't attack him for fear of upsetting his hard core fans. Republicans are gleeful about running against him, and I think there are reason why the should and reasons why they shouldn't.

As New Hampshire made clear last night, Sanders active support within the party seems capped at about 25%.  He won 60% of the vote in NH in 2016, because it was basically him or Hillary.  Seems like more than half of that vote was "anti-Hillary" rather than pro-Bernie.  Sanders has benefitted from a fractured center-left field.  At this point, Biden looks done.  If so, he needs to drop out quickly to allow the center-left to solidify around a "not-Bernie."  In a two person race, I don't think Sanders wins the nomination, probably not in a three person race (though it would depend on which three are left).  With the departure of Yang and Bennett, the field is pretty well set with a top-4 and Bloomberg off in the wings. If Nevada forces Biden from the race, then we are really getting into the true competition.

Everything up to this point has just been preamble.

New Hampshire

Bernie will win.  But by how much?  And how much water is Biden taking on?  Is the Klobuchar boomlet for real?  Is Warren poised for a surprise finish or a finish to her aspirations?

Honestly, I'm exhausted by the whole damned thing.

1945

Maybe it's because I just taught the failure of the Versailles treaty, or more like it's the news, but I find myself thinking about the end of World War II, and how certain things were assumed then that we are in the process of forgetting.

First, we assumed - in the smoldering firelit of Dresden and Hiroshima - that wars were no longer feasible as a means to an end.  Therefore, we must prevent wars.  Europe and Japan, in particular, imbibed the lesson that nationalism leads to toxic national policy and eventually war.  For 75 years, they have worked to bleed nationalism from their country's politics. Now, we see the rise of nationalism in certain countries - especially Russia and China - and we see the rise of ethnonationalism in countries like Britain and the US. These historical lessons are bad ones, but our blindness to our past leaves us exposed to repeating the errors of our great-grandparents.

We also created structures to try and prevent war.  The UN and NATO, in particular, yoked humanity to a common goal of mutual defense.  NATO created a frightening tension with the Warsaw Pact, but that tension "worked" to prevent war.  Similarly, Bretton Woods created a system of open trade and global economics that smoothed the competition between countries. Those systems are now derided by the Populist Right and Left.  They ignore the reality that trade wars precede shooting wars.  That you don't shoot your customers, and therefore the more we hold in common, the less likely we are to go to war.

The lesson from the Internet Age is the balkanization of the human experience and a turning away from the great liberal faith in shared institutions. Yes, the institutions are flawed, some terribly so.  And institutions are hard to change, so the terribly flawed ones stick around longer than they should. But the anarchic global politics of the 1930s leads in horrifying directions.

I've struggled to decide whether Trump is truly the threat he seems to be or whether we are trapped in the immediacy of his uniquely horrible personality.  The Twitter hysterics that predict the election will be cancelled if it looks like he will lose, for instance.  The litany of issues is impossible to fully catalogue, but here's a stab at some of them: children in cages, corruption, environmental short sightedness, poor treatment of people of color, anti-gay bigotry, anti-immigrant bigotry, fascists marching in American cities, emboldened white supremacists, isolationism and turning our backs on our historical allies.

Here's the catch: all of these things represent realities in our past.  Was America really a democracy under Jim Crow?  Have we ever fully lived up to our ideals? Haven't we always been suspicious of "foreigners"?

One of Barack Obama's finer rhetorical touches was his idea that the promise of America lay not in our perfection, but in our desire to create a more perfect union out of a flawed one.  Obviously, Trumpism is terrifying, but more so for this idea that we will completely undermine our democratic institutions.  We have flirted with fascism before.  We beat it then, but not easily and not all at once.

I worry that paralyzing fear will consume us.  How can we be angry without being afraid?

What Has Happened To The Party of Goldwater?

Jon Chait lays out how Trump has turned the GOP into an authoritarian party. The arguments made by Trump's legal team in the Senate were appalling on their face.  Most Senators didn't really embrace them, but by voting to deny witnesses and acquit Trump, they have effectively sided with the president against the Constitution.

GOP Never Trumpers like Max Boot, Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson are furious at the abandonment of their (now former) party's principles.  For years, the GOP was able to pretend that they had ideals beyond the continued control of the levers of power.

What's striking about all this is that both the Democrats and Republicans have largely felt that the other side is wrong in every way possible.  For evidence based Republicans, the Democratic criticisms have been borne out in front of their eyes.  But for Republicans, every allegation is simply projection or a political tool that works in any given moment.

That cynicism could be the end of our experiment in self-government.

More On Romney

Yes, Democrats savaged him in 2012, because it was a campaign.  Some savaging is to be expected. 

But Romney always represented the version of the GOP that the GOP tells itself it is.  A pro-business, low-state involvement, socially moderate center-right party. Trump - and Romney by opposing him - has exposed what the bulk of the GOP actually is: a party of white grievance.

Also worth remembering: in 2012, Mitt Romney got 47% of the vote. In 2016, Donald Trump got 46%.

Romney

Remember when Republicans had principles?

Romney does.  Read the speech.

The Business Cycle

Trump has one main advantage as we begin to actually see the 2020 presidential contest take shape.  The economy is doing quite well.  However, the economy has been doing quite well since 2009 bottomed out. It took a long time to grow out of the Great Recession, but the growth did start almost 11 years ago. Growth does not continue indefinitely.  Unfortunately for Democrats, Trump and the Federal Reserve have been engaged in a "sugar rush" economy.  Massive, deficit-fueled tax cuts for the rich combined with low interest rates have created a boomlet within the growth cycle.  The question is: can it last?

First, no one should root for a recession, but the boom inevitably is followed by a bust.  As 2008 showed, if the bubble gets too big, the resulting crash is all the more painful. Better to correct sooner rather than later.  However, the Fed has largely stripped itself of tools to address any future recessions.

Simply put, the best hope for Democrats is a quick recession that kicks off this spring.  Fall is the typical time we see massive corrections, and that would largely doom Trump's re-election bid, but since the Fed has few interest rate adjustments left to make, it will require fiscal stimulus to get the economy going, and that takes a while.  That would likely make 2022 into a repeat of 2010.

If the economy continues to hum along, Trump could still lose.  But it would be best if the sugar rush economy went into a brief dip.

Silver Lining

Amidst all the chaos radiating from Iowa, maybe now we can get rid of the archaic caucus system.  It was terrible before technology screwed everything up.  And given how Iowa and New Hampshire's whiteness has warped the early primary, it would be nice if Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina all had a primary on the same day to start the nominating process.