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.

Inflation

 I'm travelling and needed to get a leaky tire fixed. Sitting in the waiting room, I heard two people talk about prices. It was interesting in that they were saying they "couldn't eat out every night." Were people eating out every night in 2019? Nevertheless, inflation is a real issue, less so because of actual economic conditions than vibes, but there are underlying aspects of inflation that make it tricky.

The first fact is that inflation has returned to "good" levels. The economy is growing, wages are rising and that entails some mild inflation. The problem is that prices are rising from their inflated levels vis a vis 2019. A 2.5% inflation rate on a higher basis feels like more inflation. It will take a year or more for people to normalize the new price structure.

The second issue is housing. My tire shop friend was talking about how he keeps chickens. About a year ago, we saw a massive spike in egg costs that was not only part of the overall inflation picture, but was accelerated by avian flu. There were simply fewer chickens. Now, there are enough chickens, because it only takes a few months to turn chicks into layers. Housing is waaaaay stickier. Plus, we have raised inflation rates to tackle inflation.

These high interest rates have done a good job of corralling inflation, but if you're in the housing business, it's been brutal. High rates mean that average people can't buy housing. (You can add in private equity buying homes to be Airbnbs, he typed from his Airbnb.) This makes it really hard to find financing to build new housing, and the lag time between wanting to build housing and actually having new housing units is a lot longer than turning chicks into layers. Plus, if you own a small home and want to upgrade, you really can't afford the new mortgages, so you stay in your small home. This means that smaller, cheaper homes aren't even on the market.

The decision to avoid a recession was likely the right one. Given the energy crisis created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we could have had the sort of stagflation that Europe is seeing, if we hadn't have stimulated the economy the way we did.

Still, we'd better hope that people's perception of inflation starts to change over the next 9 months. Just to make sure about next November.

Deep In Trumpsylvania

 The wife and I are National Park aficionados and she had never been to Great Smoky Mountain, our nation's most visited park. We have spent the last two days staying in a cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, and this is the heart of Trump Country. Is there offensive anti-Biden merch everywhere? You bet there is! Is the average skin tone somewhere between alabaster and sunburned? Why, yes it is! Are there Confederate flag earrings for sale? Need you ask?

Look, these people are not demons. They are almost always incredibly nice to you as individuals. But hoooo boy, I'm not sure how any of them survived Covid, as they seem to be a walking inventory of co-morbidities.

In America, it certainly seems as if health is a strong predictor of class standing. The smoking, the gargantuan amounts of calories, these are going to have impacts on their lives. It's not really a surprise that the opioid epidemic hit these communities the hardest, as they certainly don't seem that healthy to begin with. 

I doubt there is anything that can be done about this, as there's a belligerent, defiant streak here, but it really doesn't have to be this way. 

These are good people poisoned by bad ideas. 

Bummer

 Joe Manchin's retirement means that the margin for error in next year's Senate races is pretty damned small.

Hopefully Dobbs helps flip a few red and purple states.

More Grumpy Old Man

 Martin Longman examines the controversy over the required teaching of To Kill A Mockingbird in Washington State schools. I agree with him that allowing each teacher or school to teach or not teach the book is the right decision, but the arguments made against requiring the book were terrible. The idea that the book does not represent the Black experience or speak to a Black audience is accurate. Neither, presumably does Huckleberry Finn, Crime and Punishment or The Scarlett Letter. The idea that a book must speak to your experience is simply a faulty way of looking at literature. If anything, you read to expand your understanding of the world beyond your personal experience. 

The idea that To Kill A Mockingbird does some sort of harm or is pernicious towards a student is part of the overall balkanization of education. Now, should Washington State schools also teach Beloved or The Bluest Eye? Abso-fucking-lutely. Not because it would necessarily validate the lived experience of Black students but precisely because it might expand the horizons of White students.

The world does not exist to make you feel good about yourself. It does not exist to place you in the center of your own universe. Education should make you intellectually uncomfortable.

Tea Leaves

 Last night's election results were pretty damned good for Democrats. (And my wife won re-election to the town council!) The immediate question is what this means for NEXT November.

Reading a few different accounts, the analysis I'd offer is this.

- Last night's showing does not preclude Biden struggling for reasons specific to Biden - namely his age and the unfair estimations of his handling of the economy.

- It does suggest that the polity is not lurching rightwards on social or economic issues. Those wedge issues are helping Democrats.

The argument that the Anti-Biden Democrats are making is that Biden is actually a drag on the ticket and replacing him with some version of himself that's 15 years younger would mean an easy victory next year. I guess that's plausible as a thought exercise, but who is this mythical Younger Biden that can sate every Democratic constituency? If "inflation" is the reason that Biden is polling below Generic Democrat, then wouldn't Harris be tarred with the same brush? 

The counterargument is basically that Biden will be the nominee and Trump will be the nominee. In that matchup, the hypothetical Generic Democrat is not on the ticket, but you have to choose between an old Biden and an old and openly fascist Trump, who might very well be in jail. The results from last night shows that people are generally not outraged by the status quo, as incumbents did pretty well. The only aspect of the status quo that they are outraged by is Dobbs. Trump is indirectly the author of Dobbs, and hammering him (and Mike Johnson) on this issue should only help Biden.

I do think that Biden's soft polling comes from two sources. The first is the famous aphorism, "Democrats need to fall in love, Republicans only need to fall in line." Even if Biden were a decade younger, he's not going to make Democrats swoon, but as the election gets closer, they will turn out for him. The second is the general fickleness of the younger voters that put him in the White House, in particular. There are a number of reasons why his numbers are soft with them, which I simply don't think will hold water for 12 months, again when contrasted with Trump (or even DeSantis). Young people don't like his Israeli policies, but wait until they hear what Trump and Generic Republican has to say about Palestinians and Muslims in general.

The most salient takeaway from last night is that the social issues that Republicans thought could win them control of the federal government are not going to work. While people cite inflation as being awful, consumer confidence is kind of all over the place, giving a mediocre but not bad reading on the economy. Even a slight improvement in people's estimation of the economy could turn the policy landscape decisively against Republicans. 

Of course, people don't vote policy, they often vote "vibes". Even so, the "vibes" of electing Trump again would have to be fairly unappealing. People - I do believe - when faced with Grampa Joe and Agolf Twittler will pick the boring old guy over the revanchist fascist.

The polls weren't wrong about the 2023 election. But the polls about 2024 aren't predictive yet.

I Guess I'm A Grumpy Old Man

 Kids these days...

Yglesias takes a look at the illiberalism of today's youth. I think I mentioned having a conversation with my son about Hamas that was truly disturbing. Josh Marshall noted that a lot of kids get their "news" from Tik Tok and that could explain some of the stark opinions the under 40 crowd have about this conflict.

However, there's some fertile ground there, with Ruy Teixeira takes on how "identity politics" has led to some poisonous ideas: 

Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

I've certainly seen some of this on my end of academia. I think there's some important truths in intersectionality, in terms of being empathetic to other people's perspectives borne of lived experience. Teixeira went on to attack Ibram Kendi's anti-racist work. I greatly enjoyed Stamped from the Beginning, but his subsequent work on ideas for policy have been...impractical and I think counterproductive. He goes on to attack the idea of equity, which is that we need equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity. 

I do think that equal opportunity is both preferred, but hard to achieve. How can we determine how structures are thwarting our idea of equality? It's tough, and I think elements of CRT and Kendi's work are helpful. What they are not is absolute truth. What's more, I don't agree with equity (equality of outcomes) as a principle. Few Americans do, I would wager. Equity has been tried and...it's track record is not great.

Yglesias does push back on the particularly vitriolic Teixeira piece. He returns, of course, to his NIMBY hobby horse, but as a way of illustrating how "equity" is usually just bullshit, too. He notes that, for instance, closed schools hurt poorer (and therefore minority) communities, but leftists tended not to care. In part that was to support teachers, which I think Yglesias totally ignores, but it was also a reaction to Trump not taking Covid seriously. 

A better example is how the Climate Left continual fucks up actual ways to improve the climate situation, most notably by shuttering nuclear power plants. Efforts that the Climate Left would want to put in place to combat putting carbon in the atmosphere would disproportionally effect poorer communities, which skew towards people of color. Hell, the very reason Biden isn't leading in the polls is because people wish things cost as much as they did four years ago. Never mind that people are earning more and buying more and consumer confidence is high, they don't like that things cost more, and now the Climate Left wants to jack up the price of energy? Where's the equity there?

The problem with much of this Leftist identity politics is that you start to see obvious conflicts between agendas. Inter-factional warfare is and always has been the standard of behavior amongst the Left in any polity, but now that they have a bit more power than they typically have, we are seeing how dysfunctional it can be to make policy decisions based on academic ideas like equity. Whose equity? When?

Back to Hamas, the idea that October 7th was "justified" because Jews are, what, White is historically bonkers. Every country is born in blood. Israel is no exception, but it is a recognized state and an actual democracy with civil rights and liberties. Hamas is a terrorist organization linked to Iran and Russia. How in the hell can anyone who has a "Hate has no home here" sign in their yard support Hamas? Because they have decided that Israel are "oppressors" and Hamas is therefore justified in committing atrocities based on that "fact."

The reality of Israel's occupation is way more complicated than that. The occupation is wrong and should end, but that should not lead to Hamas running Gaza. We saw what ISIS did when they took over places, and Hamas would be pretty similar. To pretzel oneself into supporting Hamas because Israel is wealthier and more powerful than Palestinian communities is to reach for the single assumption that the occupation is the entire and sole reason Palestinians are poor. Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority are not good at governing. And Israel is also wealthier and powerful than Jordan, Lebanon, Syria...you name it. Why? Because goddamnit, liberal democracy works.

Some of this is cyclical. However, the stakes going into the 2024 election are so catastrophically high that we have narcissistic ideologues like Cornell West running spoiler campaigns and grifts off the outrage of young people who have been trained to expect equity rather than equality from a world that it never, ever going to accommodate them.

I'm reminded, in the end, of the excesses of Campus Leftism in the 1960s that helped spawn a backlash that led to Nixon and Reagan. While both of those men were horrible presidents, their threat to American Democracy was slight. Trump's threat is real and imminent.

Is Trumpism Facism?

 Paul Campos looks at Umberto Eco's essay on what constitutes fascism and sees a lot of overlap, but not a perfect match. He revisited that today, too.

I've always been a little reticent to describe Trumpism as pure fascism, but the label - while somewhat inaccurate - felt much more appropriate after 1/6. 

Christo-fascism, White Christo-Nationalism...They don't exactly roll off the tongue. I think identifying the importance of a form of political evangelism is critical to understanding Trump. The obvious unreasoning nature of the movement has its same roots in much of evangelical belief, in fact it's a triumph of "belief" over reason and evidence.

There have obviously been fascist movements in America since fascism emerged as an ideology in the 1920s. However, the presence of White Nationalism is as old as the republic. I actually think that most instances of religion being used as a political organizing tool is actually not about religion as a doctrinal or dogmatic principle, but as a stand in for a form of ethnic conflict.

Anyway, Trump's assault on the Constitution is part of the unreasoned belief that America is a White Christian nation and while it has roots in America, it really needs to be rooted out next November.

Weaker of the House

 My Johnson...sorry, Mike Johnson...is about to run into the same problem every Republican Speaker has faced since the emergence of the Chaos Caucus in 2010: Republicans don't understand that our government is designed to run on compromise, and therefore we are going to get an unnecessary government shutdown around the holidays.

While Longman places this at the feet of the House caucus, I think it's worth considering how almost no one values the idea of compromise anymore. In fact, before the Chaos Caucus took over last fall, the Democratic House and the nearly evenly split Senate managed to pass a bunch of compromise bills (the so-called Shadow Congress). They only did so because no one was paying attention. As soon as the idea of some sort of compromise legislation became public, it would be impossible to pass.

We have this rickety, archaic 18th century form of government that isn't working because one party assumes that marginal control of one half of one branch means they get to call the tune. There are echoes of this in leftist complaints about Biden not being able to give everyone a pony, but it's much stronger on the right. Put another way, there is no way the House GOP's behavior would pass a middle school civics class.

Defenseless

 Trump's day in court was largely an unstated admission that he has no legal defense. Some of it is his aspirational mafioso personality, but a lot of it is that he has no real legal defense in any of his cases. His only chance is to run out the clock, shoot for mistrials and hope he gets re-elected so he can make his myriad crimes go away.

As Aaron Blake notes above, this should make for close reading by the other judges overseeing all of Trump's other trials (OK, not Cannon, she's a hack). Trump is going to come in, behave like the thundering, suppurating asshole that he is and hope he can get a mistrial, which will push things off until after he (hopefully for him) gets re-elected.

Yeah, I've seen the Times poll. I do think a lot of those young people come home if it's Biden v Trump. But I know it will happen if he get convicted of a crime.

Spite Voting

 Great thread here on the self-defeating calls from Muslim leaders to either boycott voting for Biden or even voting for Republicans. I had a similar discussion with my eldest son, who's so pissed about even the existence of Israel (based on bullshit, online information) that he says he doesn't want to vote for Biden. It's a long time to election day, and I doubt that this will hold as a position for a full year, but if you care about the plight of Palestinians, then you cannot vote for Republicans/Trump, and if you don't vote, you are effectively voting for Trump.

Does it suck that your choices are one guy who's a supported of Israel who wants to see a two state solution and one guy who wants to ban Muslims from traveling to this country and nuke Gaza? Yeah, it does. But that is the choice.