Depraved?

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

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

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

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

It's Not About Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Earl Carter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where's the lie?

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

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

MAGAt on MAGAt Violence

 The term of art often used to describe Trumpistan is kakistocracy: rule by the least competent and worst people. We now see that coming to the fore before Trump has even been inaugurated. Paul Krugman (who I think I will be linking to a lot) lays out the contours of the internecine warfare between the MAGA Brownshirts and the Broligarchic Libertarians. Once again, the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party is the go-to explainer for people who voted for Trump only to discover that he isn't actually their friend.

Josh Marshall hits on something else. Yes, this is a Steve Bannon/Laura Loomer vs Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy cage match pitting one horrible set of people against an entirely different set of horrible people. Rooting for injuries, etc.

However, this ignores the key player in this drama. Much like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Trump is not on the stage, but central to the drama. As Marshall notes and I think it true, Trump is already a spent force in so many ways. He's old and was never really smart to begin with. He learned almost nothing from his previous four years in office. He looks and sounds exhausted. Now, he's term limited. 

One of the key acts in this drama was Trump's recent experience being sidelined by Elon Musk over the government shutdown. Musk drove that whole monkey boat, until Trump emerged, grunted a few things to help resolve it and then started babbling about Greenland and Panama in order to re-center the narrative on him. Now, almost immediately afterwards, the narrative has again escaped his control. 

Central to this is that Trump believes almost nothing, beyond a deep belief in Donald Trump. Everything - and we mean everything - is a transaction that Trump "will" win by being Trump. The government shutdown was interesting, in that Musk really wanted his Chinese investments protected. He blows up the deal, gets them protected (Trump does not get his debt ceiling ask) and then the whole thing goes away. That was very Trumpy: chaotic and fundamentally corrupt. 

The problem is that there are two hugely obnoxious and important wings of Trump's coalition that have an irreconcilable difference on H1-B visas. Being a huge collection of privileged assholes, they have set upon each other hammer and tong. Since Trump revels in vulgar, brash name calling, they have aped their Orange Jesus and started throwing slurs at each other. 

It's honestly glorious.

Trump, ultimately holds the balance of power. To this point, he has been reluctant to really call Musk on his bullshit, but hating foreigners will ultimately clash with his other core belief in privileging wealth over everything else. Since he presumably won't be elected again (laughs nervously and nods at the 22nd Amendment) he has no need of anyone's votes. Musk, Ramaswamy, Bannon, Loomer...they are trying to create political movements. Bannon's Right Wing Populism cannot coexist with Musk's Arrested Adolescent Libertarianism.

Meanwhile, there is a steady drip of stories from the Red Hinterlands of people who look aghast at what Muskaswamy are planning to do. Who cherish their immigrant friends (who aren't the bad ones). The impulse from many, including myself, has been to sit back and weather the storm as Trump embarks on disastrous policies, and then kinda sorta hope that those cascading disasters land hardest on Red America, dependent as they are on Big Gubmint handouts. That makes me feel bad about myself and my country though.

Rooting for the chaotic disaster of MAGAt on MAGAt violence, however, is glorious. 

Whither China?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malthus and Empire

 This piece by Paul Krugman explores why empires - like the one Trump is seemingly proposing - are not worth the cost. There was the mercantilist argument centuries ago, that gold was money and therefore balance of trade was wealth, so empires were needed to insure favorable balances of trade. As Krugman notes in passing, this was based on a Malthusian view of the world.

Thomas Malthus famously argued that societies (or rather economies) would expand to the limit of their food supply and then begin to starve to death or fight wars for more food, all of which had the effect of bringing the population back into balance with its food supply. Malthusian economics of scarcity are no longer really a thing, as the industrial revolution and the industrialization of agriculture rendered old limits on food supply obsolete. 

Neo-Malthusians, if you can call them that, apply Malthus' Economics of Scarcity to energy and fresh water today. Energy can be addressed via renewables and nuclear energy, but we seem to have hardened into partisan and ideological stances on that. It's not just America, Germany shuttered their nuclear power plants to bad effect. 

Still, there's always a Malthusian Dark Lord lurking about, explaining why scarcity is about to lead to societal collapse.

At certain times and certain places, there is no doubt that these Malthusian concepts do come into play, but globally speaking, it is not a problem of capacity, but a political problem as to why we don't solve these issues. 

All of which is a winding road that leads me to the various Edge Lords and Trad shitpoasters who populate the internet. They are embracing this Malthusian idea of scarcity and collapse, which is why they point with glee to every tragedy as the precursor for the moment the old order crumbles and they arise through their very special specialness to become our new Overlords, because they read a book on farming or some shit. 

The other form it takes is manifested in the novel I'm reading, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I'm about a third of the way through it, but it's about someone trying to infiltrate a sort of enviro-anarchist group. So far, it's her machinations interspersed with the musings of the sage who inspires the eco-terrorists (if that's what they turn out to be). He waxes rhapsodic about Neanderthals, for instance.

Beginning, in some ways, with Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (a book I couldn't finish it was so bad), there is this romanticized version of pre-history where people were awesome until they settled down and started farming. In fact, agriculture did start this Malthusian cycle of growth and collapse centered on the food supply. The idea, though, that this Malthusian constraint did not apply to hunter-gatherers is absurd. Bands of nomads were not kept small with meticulous family planning. It was infanticide or the disruption in menstruation that hunger can bring. People started farming because it gave them steady access to food. 

Yes, there were many downsides to this, especially the domestication of animals that vectored disease into humans. It also led to that Malthusian dynamic of growth and decline - a growth that did not happen under the old hunter-gatherer economy. 

So, Malthus - an economist very few study or take seriously anymore, except as an historical relic - is still alive. He's alive in the eco-doomerism of those who think it's all going to unravel and we are a few decades away from Mad Max. He's alive, also, in the typically right wing fantasies of those who imagine this collapse leading to their elevation as emperors of the new order. 

He's also alive, maybe, in Donald Trump's view of Imperial America. I say maybe, because I really believe all this blathering nonsense about Canada and Greenland and Panama is just Trump trying to prove that he's president and not Elon Musk. That's 90% of his motivation. He calls the tune and the media starts dancing.

However, the fact that these bonkers examples were his distractors is because Trump's vision of the economy is very much from Malthus' time. It's a mercantilist zero-sum economy, and fuck you, Adam Smith. It's about tariffs as protectionism regardless of the economic costs, and tariffs only work - to the degree they do - when married to empire.

When I described Trump as a reactionary in previous years, I was thinking he wanted to take us back to the 1950s. I was wrong. He wants to take us back to the 1850s.

Your Spiteful Christmas Present

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

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

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

Krugman Wonks Out

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

Doomed

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Status Quo And What's To Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Allegation, Etc

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

"He's a pederast, Dude."

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

And yet...

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

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

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

I Think I'm In Trouble

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

The Message

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

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

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

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

Holidays

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

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

Finding Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duh.