Garbage People

 Jon Chait notes that the "appeal" of Ron DeSantis was that he would give Republicans everything they loved about Trump without all the side drama and dysfunction. That has not been the case, as he has run a dysfunctional campaign himself and has crooks and creeps all up in his shit. 

The conclusion that Chait leaves unstated is that Trump's dysfunction was largely attributed to his own host of personal foibles. What we are seeing from DeSantis' own dumpster fire is that this dysfunction extends beyond Trump's many personal flaws. 

The far right in this country is full of garbage people. They are not fundamentally smart or competent. Many of them are grifters who are simply trying to bilk ignorant cultural warriors of their spare money. Few of the "professionals" in either campaign have real principles; they are there for the lucre. Those that are true believers are largely ignoramuses. 

Anyway, the presidential polling is still neck and neck.

Chait also notes that Nikki Haley is the latest on whom the establishment GOP has bequeathed its mantle. I think this sums it up nicely:

The trouble for Haley is that the faction she is rallying is inherently bounded. The Establishment wing is limited not only in size but also by the intense hostility it inspires among the party’s Trumpier voters. She is following a formula that can propel her into consideration for the vice-presidency, or position her to step in if Trump is felled by heart disease, but gives her little chance to actually defeat the party’s reigning cult leader and self-styled president-in-exile. Whatever you might say about the hapless DeSantis candidacy, it is at least built upon a recognition of the actual state of the Trump-era GOP. Haley’s candidacy is less a way of dealing with the party’s problems than an attempt to pretend they don’t exist.

In a sane world, Biden would have a 20 point lead on Trump. In a sane world, he'd be running against Nikki Haley next year.

Guess what kind of world we live in.

America Has A Christianist Problem

 Paul Campos looks at an interview with Tim Alberta and notes the following:

I believe a massive mistake that many liberals and leftists make is to fail to take into account that tens of millions of Americans support Trump not because they’re “bad people” in some generic psychological/ethical sense. This reduces the deepest structural forces in our society into a matter of defective individual character. Leftists ,of all people, should recognize the absurdity of such an analysis. Rather, a very large number of Trump supporters genuinely hold beliefs about the nature of the world that logically entail unwavering support for Donald Trump.

This is Trump’s white Protestant evangelical base, and these people aren’t going to magically disappear one day, despite their own belief that they actually will. How to co-exist with them is, shall we say, an increasingly complicated problem.

There you have it.

Seriously, WTF?

 Moms For Liberty is yet another one of these astroturf conservative movements designed to rile up the rubes. They are responsible for a lot of the angry school board meetings over the past few years. They gin up outrage over any material in schools that they deem "grooming" or sexually aberrant. 

So, it is with zero surprise that we learn that one of the founder of Moms For Liberty is involved in kinky sex shit and her husband is an accused rapist.

Kissinger's Finally In Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's Covid Been Up To?

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

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

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

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

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

Brain Worm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Marshall notes in his essay:

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

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

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

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

You Don't Have To Post

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

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

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

The Information Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity Politics and Horseshoe Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Protest Work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On JFK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Speech Nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anarchic Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Still Not Genocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pro-Palestinian Protests

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