Iran Explainer

 Good piece by Martin Longman about the echoes of the 1978 revolution in today's protests. All the stuff about the 40 mourning cycle is spot on.

One thing I would add: the Shah fell because the military refused to support increasingly brutal crackdowns. Longman argues that the Revolutionary Guard will not turn on the regime, because they literally are the regime. What this leaves out was the role America and Jimmy Carter had in reining in the worst responses the Shah could have reached for. We encouraged reform and, as Tocqueville said, "the most dangerous moment for a bad regime is the moment it tries to reform itself."

There is no external force that can rein in the Revolutionary Guard. There is only the clerics - the ulema - who can break with the regime and deny it legitimacy. Iranian clerics are not monolithic.

If the Iranian regime falls, it will fall the way every other Iranian regime has fallen since 1900: because the ulema decides it has had enough.

Global Sadness

 David Brooks argues that we are in a growing tide of "global sadness" based on global polling. The main culprits are - he and the author he cites claim - loss of community, food insecurity and simple physical pain.

Loss of community I can totally see. We are a balkanized world of isolated people in crowded spaces. Social media ironically exacerbates this by amplifying those feelings of being alone in a crowded world. Food insecurity is surprising, given the decrease in global poverty, especially at the poorest levels. Same goes for physical pain.

I wonder if we aren't looking at a "relative deprivation" model where people are measuring themselves against a global elite whom they see on their TVs and other devices. A farmer in Nigeria had no way of knowing what life was like in London; now he does. 

I heard a line the other day, "Comparison is the thief of joy." We are constantly measuring ourselves against impossible standards. That can't help but make us miserable, and the worst part is, we do it to ourselves. 

I don't know what to do about this, but unhappy people are revolutionary people (look at Iran). Revolutions are usually more destructive than constructive. Not sure where we go from here.

How About Some Good News?

 Climate is looking better.

It's Time

 Putin is making a blustering speech about how the West is to blame for the war in Ukraine. He's making his usual vague threats.

I have a hunch we will be seeing Ukraine launch their fall offensive soon. They rested and regrouped by the September offensive and they have three possible axes of attack: Donetsk, towards Melitopol and grinding down Kherson. Personally - without knowing shit about the dispossession of Russian defensive positions, I would think a strike towards Melitopol and then moving west towards encircling Kherson would force Russia to withdraw or risk being surrounded. Liberating the Zaporizkzhia nuclear power plant would also be a huge plus.

Or maybe Russia has that area well defended. Still, they need to make more gains before the winter sets in, and I would expect something sooner rather than later.

Yglesias On His Shit Again

 While I find Yglesias interesting some of the time, at others he's a great example of the flaw of Philosophy majors becoming policy guys. By that, I mean the reliance on deductive reasoning. Philosophers have a set of ideas that they use to understand the world, but that can lead to forcing the world through that lens. I think I've written about the Fox and the Hedgehog before, but basically a Fox knows many small things and the Hedgehog knows one big thing. Foxes are much better at predicting the future, because their broad range of knowledge exempts them from a sort of Dunning-Kruger knock-on effect. They know what they don't know, but they also know a lot of other little things. They are better with uncertainty.

Yglesias' Big Idea is in his book One Billion Americans, and he tends to focus enormous time to arguing about NIMBYism and other restraints in American population growth. He's absolutely right that America should be embracing more immigrants, but he tries to force the current China/US economic warfare through this lens and it just feels off.

Additionally, I think we already HAVE one billion Americans, but not in the way Yglesias typically argues. If you add up the population of the United States, the EU, Japan and various post-colonial British countries, you get close to a billion people. There are obvious political implications for increased global connectedness that manifest in jingoism that we saw in Brexit, but the Global West is a thing, and we are seeing that in real time in support for Ukraine. 

This is why the current status of the United States is such an important inflection point. The world need the US to be a global force for democracy and some aspects of free markets. Trumpism repudiates not only democracy at home, but democratic ideals abroad.

Foolish Vs Evil

 There have been two examples of Left wing activists stepping on their own Johnsons recently. In the US, it's a letter from the Progressive Caucus that Josh Marshall thinks was leaked by the Quincy Institute to advocate for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. First of all, it's Ukraine's war to negotiate or not. Secondly, any negotiated settlement would have to include the pre-2014 borders. Since Russia won't go for that, what's the point? No one is "for" the war, they are for a Ukrainian victory, because this is a historic crime against them.

In Europe we have a bunch of dingbat climate activists throwing soup and potatoes on paintings and then gluing themselves to shit for reasons. What does this have to do with climate change? Of anything it discredits people who are actually trying to address the problem via guilt by association. 

Foolish, short-sighted efforts like this are par for the course for a certain segment of activists. It's the attention, it's "getting the message out there" in ways that short-circuit actual policy goals.

Meanwhile, GOP activists want to end democracy, kill their political enemies and enforce birth control bans.

So...same thing really...

Rishi Sunak

 Britain will have a Prime Minister of South Asian descent. While the Conservative Party was poisoned by Brexit, it's worth noting that all three female PMs in Britain's history were women and now their first PM who is not ethnically "British" (English, Welsh or Scottish) will be a Conservative as well.

The Conservative Party has some bad ideas. Liz Truss and Brexiteers had the worst ideas. But they don't lean into racism and sexism to win elections, so good for them.

The Chairman

 Xi Jinping has succeeded in overturning Deng Xiaoping's structural reforms of the Chinese Communist Party that have been in place since Mao's death. Deng put into place a party leadership structure that was inclusive of the various factions within the Party and required the regular rotation of leaders. No General Secretary could serve more than two five-year terms. The Politburo Standing Committee was made up of the various factions within the Party and was intended to end what Mao called "Reds over Experts." Mao had favored ideological purity over technocratic competence, and Deng turned that around. The result was the "Chinese Miracle" of 1990 until today.

Xi has ended the rotation in office and has picked a Politburo based on loyalty to him rather than factional representation or expertise. What is so incredibly striking about all this is that we have real-time evidence of the failures of this sort of ideological purity and personal loyalty over expertise in China's most important ally, Russia. A few years ago, Putin put someone who was actually competent in charge of his military, but when that guy called out corruption, he was sacked. We are seeing the consequences of that in Ukraine.

Dictatorships trade short term efficiency for long term flexibility. The absolute fustercluck in Britain is chaotic, but it also represents a Tory government that should not be in power being removed from power. Liz Truss should not be Prime Minister, so she will not be Prime Minister. If Rishi Sunak becomes PM, he has two years to turn the country around, or he will be bounced from office. (If it's Boris Johnson, I can't imagine how they escape dysfunction leading to an election.)

Democracies give up the messy dramas playing out in Westminster, but they also allow for the correction of mistakes. Xi's elimination of even the "behind closed doors dissent" will most likely weaken China in the long run. His Zero Covid policy is already a disaster that a more flexible CCP would have walked away from. Xi can't and won't.

Please Read This

 Paul Campos on attention seekers vs fame; narcissism vs validation.

Where Does My Dread Come From?

 I've been optimistic about Democratic chances in the midterms until quite recently. My optimism was based on Dobbs and how Democrats were outperforming the polls in actual election results. Three things have changed my mind.

The first is the unrelenting a dire emails I get for fundraising. I "get" why they are scaring us into contributing. However, I don't think left of center people necessarily respond well to fear-based appeals. That works great on right of center people, but I just worry it will depress turnout in an election that will fundamentally turn on getting your voters to the polls.

The second is that Republicans latched on to two stories: inflation and crime. Those were the issues that elevated Reagan and they are impervious to "well, actually" factual appeals. Crime is down, but because we observe everything, videos of people committing crimes proliferate. Inflation, while real, is a global phenomenon. This is not a Democratic policy failure, but that simply won't matter.

Finally, the dire emails mesh with a sense of Republican triumphalism and predictions of a Red Wave. Of course, the polling is terribly unreliable and both sides are locked into their epistemic bubbles.

My hope in September was that the GOP's awful candidates, the persistent grip of Trumpism and the inability to squeeze any more gerrymanders out of the House would allow the Dems to beat back the historical tide. When the GOP did not abandon Herschel Walker, I began to wonder what they were seeing. The idea of Walker actually being a US Senator is just appalling. He's  brain damaged and mentally unwell.

Yet he's got a real chance of winning. I don't know what to say about that.

As I've Been Saying

 For a long time, I've argued that the "conservative" movement is simply not conservative in any meaningful sense. It's deeply reactionary. As Paul Campos notes, the jackbooted authoritarians at The Federalist have finally come out and identified as such.

The Revanchist Right has told is exactly who they are. They want forced birth. They want to guy Social Security and Medicare. They want to outlaw same sex marriage. They want to kill prisoners whose guilt may or may not exist. They want to punish corporations and individual citizens who disagree with them.

As Campos notes, if you really believe the shit about Biden being a Socialist who's trying to turn your kid trans, then this form of anti-democratic politics makes sense.

What's depressing is that we are about to hand one of the branches of government to these authoritarian theocrats because of global inflation and scare stories about crime.

Sadly Hilarious

 Liz Truss was outlasted by the lettuce. In what is now the shortest tenured prime ministership in history, Luz Truss managed to screw up in just about every possible way a "leader" can. Truss was always a rank opportunist, but the thing about being a PM, is you actually have to be good at your job, or your party will sack you.

One of the funnier Tweets I saw this morning was Anthony Scaramucci himself saying that Truss lasted 4.5 Scaramucci units. (In case, you forgot, the Mooch was brought on board Trump's White House to solidify their communications department and lasted 10 days.) The thing is: Trump's manifest dysfunction and incompetence was visible to everyone close to him. The number of McMasters and Kellys and even Barrs with "tell all" memoirs about what a shitshow Trump was are thick on the ground. 

But we were stuck with him.  And if Republicans do as well as I fear in a couple of weeks, we may set up his return to power.

In Britain, if the PM becomes a liability...well, ask Liz Truss.

All of this - every last bit of it - is a byproduct of the Brexit fiasco. Brexit was absolute shite policy that the wiser heads in Parliament wouldn't touch. But David Cameron thought he could puncture the anti-EU bubble with a referendum. Instead, he has damned near wrecked his country and certainly his party. Brexit gave us the clownish farce of Boris Johnson and now the complete erosion of basic competence of Truss.

Brexit also was the bellwether of Trump. Based on nativist and racist assumptions about immigrants and the non-English, Brexit was a populist pack of lies pushed by cynical assholes like Nigel Farage, for whom racism was both a deeply held belief and a ploy for power. 

The Conservative Party - at least its Parliamentary members - mostly knows that Brexit was a terrible idea and is destroying their country's economy and place of standing in the world. Still, in much the same way the GOP catered to Trump (Mitch McConnell after the election of 2020: "What does it hurt to humor him?") the Tories catered to the whims of the rural Britons who don't like seeing someone wearing a hijab on High Street. The GOP can't cross Trumpists; the Tories can't cross Brexiteers.

In a democracy, ideally the electorate looks at how a party intends to govern, they look at how they have governed in the past and they make a reasoned decision based on that evidence. 

Britain is supposed to avoid this sort of farcical incompetence, but Brexit forced them to "make a cheese submarine." In America, the "thermostatic elections" means that we are about to give a party that has manifestly no idea how to govern and no real desire to learn how to govern control of at least the lower house of our legislature. To the degree that they have ideas, they are unpopular and awful (cutting Social Security and Medicare). Once in power, they will cut off aid to Ukraine and force a sovereign debt crisis. And it just won't matter.

To the degree that "conservatism" consisted of ideas about economic "freedom" and empowering the entrepreneurial class...OK, it was mostly bullshit, but it was coherent bullshit. 

Now "conservatism" is no more than some angry old White Dude and his angrier wife standing in the middle of the road screaming at his imagined enemies while he lights the world on fire around him.

Ugh.

The Future Of The Anti-Trump Coalition

 Greg Sargent has a nice rundown of how the anti-Trump majority that showed up in 2018 ad 2020 could be fraying. My hope was that the inroads that Democrats made in the suburbs could result in a near-term permanent majority, as those voters tend to vote. Even with the absence of Trump on the ballot, the batshit insanity of the GOP would - I hoped - cement them into the Democratic column. Gas prices, inflation and crime - the Unholy Trinity that gave us Reagan - imperils that.

There's still a hope that Dobbs has locked in an anti-GOP - as opposed to anti-Trump - majority. However, I just don't know. Polling seems pretty much trash these days, so we will find out on Election Day.

What The Hell?

 Two stories on different sides of the Atlantic. 

British pilots are helping China understand Western military aircraft.

Retired American officers are helping Saudi Arabia and other despots.

Some of this is the obvious revolving door between government service and lucrative "consulting" gigs that I guess make sense as a de facto pay day for serving your country.

The problem is that the world appears to be realigning. China, certainly, is not a friendly power. Especially with Xi Xinping's consolidation of power into his own hands and not that of the party. Saudi Arabia is just a toxic force in the world right now. 

We are seeing why Western militaries are superior to Despotic militaries in the way a newly democratic Ukraine with Western aid has been able to hold off an force back Russia. You can see why despots would want to tap into that knowledge, but also why the US would want to keep that knowledge to themselves. 

So, I'm Worried

 Anand Giriharadas has a piece on how to counteract the politics of fascism. It's really good and I agree with most of it.

However, it's a little late for it now. The Republicans have a compelling "story."  Crime and inflation. A lot of it is racist, especially the crime stuff. But crime is a real problem. Inflation is not Biden's fault, as it's a global phenomenon, and inflation in the US is better than most places.

But gas prices are what they are. More concerning is the narrative about crime, because it activates the fear based part of the brain. Crime is actually down a bit (at least murder is) but it feels up and that's more important than facts. This also feeds into the "defund the police" label that Republicans have hung around elected Democrats, with an assist from some activist groups.

Anyway, Democrats need to hold the Senate and they may still do so, because Republicans have nominated a bunch of lunatics. But I had hope for a hidden Blue Wave from Dobbs, and I don't think that's happening anymore.