The Trump Years

I am a student of history. I tend to ignore the world I live in favoring to view instead the world we will all one day look back on.  How will history remember Trump?

I think 20 years from now Trump will be as distant (possibly even way more distant) than Bill Clinton is to people now; kids today probably only know Clinton as Hillary's husband, though I don't think that view will last long into the future. I think 20 years from now Trump will still be hated--I suspect "Trump" will be a buzzword for universal disgust for the rest of my lifetime. But will we recall everything that he did and/or everything that happened during his term in the Oval Office? I doubt it, because the hatred for Trump never needed a reason to begin with, so why would we bother to catalog his efforts? 

The historian's eye view will look back on Trump's presidency, I think, with as much of an emphasis on the anti-Trump rhetoric as to Trump himself. Trump courted the anti-Trump media, one of the rare Republicans that actually enjoys being the villain and feels like getting tarred in the media all day is a sign of his success. To be sure, Trump will likely never develop any real defenders in the future but the further we get away from this time, the harder it will be to distinguish, say, the George Floyd protests from the January 6th siege on the Capitol.  It will all look like one continuous four year struggle of social unrest with blame going all around. (*) Beginning with the FBI wiretapping the presumptive national security adviser or the calls for Trump's impeachment before he was even inaugurated! Moving through the all day every day anti-Trump media rhetoric, the first impeachment (which failed to remove him from office and actually resulted in more votes for Trump in 2020 than he received in 2016) and culminating in Trump's embarrassingly clumsy and self-serving handling of his failure to win reelection.  Future historians will just lump it all together as the collective media-driven angst of the American populace finally driven over the edge by Covid-19. 

Will we look back on January 6th with shame and revulsion? I suspect not. Outside of tying it to Trump's legacy--which, again, needs no actual events to be recalled--I doubt the siege on the Capitol will be remembered any better than any of the other previous sieges on the Capitol (**). Watching the gravity-inflected voices of the chattering media trying to make this seem like the next 9/11 is mystifying to me because it's the exact opposite: we just watched Lebron James dribble the ball off his foot and we're acting like he just hit the game winner at the buzzer. The "siege" accomplished nothing, because there was nothing accomplish. 

And rather than being one of those indelible cultural moments that everyone will forever remember (9/11 for contemporary adults, the Challenger for my generation, JFK for my parents, Pearl Harbor for grandparents), I think this will fade because the sheer range of what people saw (and will see) is too diffuse to actually make sense of. There's video of cops letting people into the Capitol, video of cops fighting to hold people out, video of cops taking selfies with rioters, video of cops shooting and killing a rioter. Even in the future they will not know how to draw that fine line between carnival and circus. Even in the future they'll see real violence but they'll also know that these people were not mowed down by a hail of bullets, nor were they really any threat to anyone but themselves (and the cops). 

The reason those rioters weren't mowed down by a hail of bullets (on live television, no less) was because that would've been a far more traumatic experience for the country than what actually happened. And what actually happened? According to Chuck Shumer, upon returning to the Senate floor to perform the business of January 6: "As we reconvene tonight, let us remember in the end all this mob has really accomplished is to delay our work by a few hours.  We will resume our responsibilities now and we will finish our task tonight. The House and Senate chambers will be restored good as new and ready for legislating in short order." Rarely has Senator Shumer taken the words right out of my mouth, but that is precisely what I was thinking as I watched the Senate reconvene that night. 

This is one of the many weird little moments of American history that people forget about because in the world of politics there is always something new to take up our attention and only future historians actually look back to figure out what took place. It will be noted in the public record that windows were smashed, a police officer was killed (***), as was one of the rioters, and the House and Senate took a few hours longer than usual to perform its daily business. 

If this is the worst the pro-Trump hate-driven redneck right wing nationalists has to offer, then we have nothing to fear. Likewise, if Black Lives Matter can produce nothing more than a few dozen rowdier than normal public gatherings every summer, then the Republic will not soon die. The Media speeds up the wider recognition of these spasms of action so they hit with greater intensity but they burn out quickly because no one is in enough agreement to actually affect any actual change. The Media holds the key to the dreaded 'mass mobilization' because it can reach so many people so quickly; but it draws so many people in so many different directions that there is no coherent center and violence peters out quickly. (How many more generations until the People learn to tune out even the Media itself?)

We fear the tinderbox event that will ignite a wider conflagration but what we see instead is a constant simmering of vague antagonism that will likely never subside but I think won't combust (any time soon). We were born of crisis and we have lived in crisis every day since. Our politics is the non-stop need for crisis and the wider our society grows, the wider and wider the crises--real and imagined--will grow, as well. We drive each other to panic, it's just what we do. But we don't go to extremes because we are such a diverse nation with so many voices in so many stages of life, so many socioeconomic levels, so many different stages of educational and professional attainment, that we are pulled to and fro but never in any particular direction. So many voices louder than ever--and what do you know?--they don't agree on anything. That's not Politics, that's just how Life works.

I think what Trump wanted on January 6th was for his band of drunken redneck slobs to go down to the Capitol and stand around outside looking all menacing. If violence erupted with cops, then fine, he can say, 'my people get beat up by the cops, too!' I don't think he expected cops to open the barriers and just let people in (a brilliant gambit, still not sure who to credit for that: let the rowdies inside, let them show the world how much they truly respect the United States Congress). And the rowdies had no plan because they've never understood how anything works and they didn't know what they were supposed to do anyway (****), so they mostly bumbled around like ugly Americans and then when a single shot was fired, they scattered like roaches with the light on. 

I can see calling these rioters "Insurrectionists" because I can believe that some of these people actually believed that that's what they were doing; but that doesn't make what they did an "Insurrection". What would have been "insurrectioned" that day if the rioters had succeeded? Is there any scenario where any actions taken by those rioters would've resulted in a transfer of gov't power? No. So while we can be horrified and reviled by the shameless display of stupidity, thinking of it an as attempted overthrow of the gov't is pretty ignorant to what gov't overthrows have typically looked liked throughout history. Any gov't that would've fallen to the January 6 rioters is no gov't at all. Is this an insurrection?

The point was to protest the electoral college (suddenly making the Left the defenders of a system they've never liked) and put pressure on Mike Pence in hopes of crushing his political hopes and dreams. But the actual procedural reality of these moves is nil. None of these things are how elections work.  

Look, here's how the two-party system operates: at the end of the day the secret handshake committee has decided that Democrats and Republicans will not fuck with elections. The peaceful transfer of power is held up as the highest ideal and both parties have pledged to this. If they think they can steal an election, they will, but deep down the parties understand that all they have is the force of their corruption and that there are limits to that. So they have agreed to let election results go pretty much uncontested. The election of 1960, for example, may have been a steal, but it was stolen fair and square (*****). What about Bush v Gore, I hear you say. Well, that was an election that was so fucking close they actually had to bust out procedure. The election of 2000 is not an example of a 'steal' but of a deadlock that actually had to be adjudicated in dusty and forgotten methods. 

Trump's complaints about the 2020 election results, though clearly self-aggrandizing, were not really out of bounds legally speaking. It isn't for Yahoo News to determine whether Trump's claims were "baseless", it is for the courts to decide and if Trump--or any other contestant--wants to challenge the vote in any of the 50 states, that is legal and permissible and might even be successful (although I doubt it, because that's not what the parties want). If the Republican Party really wanted to keep Trump, I think some of his legal challenges would've succeeded--there would've been managers, commissioners, aldermen, supervisors, county blah blahs found to corroborate his claims. That shit didn't happen because the Republicans were cognizant that the election results were not going to be overturned and that Trump's efforts were abhorrent to the secret handshake about the peaceful transition of power. 

But Trump never gave a shit about two-party politics--that's the whole reason he won in 2016. Trump was out for Trump and the party apparatus wasn't coaxed by his bullying. I believe this is why Trump didn't campaign as hard as he could have in the senate run off elections (fuck the Republicans, they didn't do anything for me! What do I care if they lose the Senate?), making for a weird end to his term: his popularity swamped the Republican Party and when he chose to forsake them, he left them completely out of power in his wake. 

As for contesting the election, that is Trump speaking to his base. You read "base" and think politics, but I would suggest no. Trump never wanted to be president, never cared about the presidency, never cared about this two-party bullshit. He is always out for his own brand, which demands non-stop growth of popularity. Contesting the election is just something he had to do to convince his people that he was trying. But he's ready to be a public citizen again, he's ready to be out of the shackles of the White House. Or...at least he was...until January 6th. His followers were so ineffective and stupid they got Trump impeached again, banned from Twitter (the REAL punishment) and may well have tied Trump forever to the booger eaters and conspiracy theory whackos (and I mean the ones that even the conspiracy whackos think are whackos!) and finished him for good. The post-Presidency plan was to go back to being a self-important media shill. But January 6th showed his enemies he has no real power, played out his supporters as a bunch of out of touch weirdos and may well have gotten him banned from running again (******). January 6th finished off the political career of Donald Trump and it was his own fuckin' fault. He played with fire and eventually it burned up everything he had. 

I'm all for the second impeachment. Unlike the first one, which I found frivolous, pointless and shamelessly political, this one strikes me as exactly what the impeachment was designed for. And though I think the wording of the Impeachment is a bit clumsy, I understand the desire to act quickly while the public mood is so decisive. And of course this is not a legal trial but a purely political vote, so while I'd personally rather see some real legal language in this piece of posterity, I also acknowledge that that isn't required and as time is of the essence, I'm willing to let it go. 

And it deliciously places the dagger in Mitch McConnell's hand. I never thought McConnell liked Trump and I bet he's no more eager to have Trump blathering on about 2024 than anyone else is. McConnell is the ultimate representative of the two-party handshake system I described above. And Trump was always a threat to that order and to McConnell's beloved Republican Party. Now McConnell has the chance to string up Trump's carcass, gut the fucking pig, bleed him out on the floor of the Senate and say, 'I never liked that piece of shit, he was never one of us and if you're offended by what I just did, then go vote Democrat.' (*******)

I suspect McConnell's request for a two-week recess is so that the Republicans can clear out the Trump wackos and bringing back some semblance of order to the GOP. If so, then gutting Trump like a strung-up hog is absolutely the way to go. The Republicans can shed themselves of the dead weight in a clear and decisive manner and I suspect there are plenty of Republicans that are more than happy to rid themselves once and for all of Trump (off the top of my head I can think of one named Melania). 

The harder the Democrats work to make the January 6th siege look like 9/11, the more they give Trump and his booger-eating followers a lever to come back in 2024--we're powerful, they're afraid of us!. But if they don't play this up for all its worth, then the Twitter Left will feel 'disrespected'--remember the Liberal Media that hated Trump never particularly liked Biden. But if the Democrats stand aside and let the Republicans do it, it could provide some of that 'unity' that politicians love talking about so much. Removing Trump's ability to run again vastly decreases his blathering power in the coming years. And while getting Trump out of office was never that meaningful, running him out of Twitter might be the real death knell. He's melting like the Wicked Witch he always was. 

When Twitter/Facebook/etc banned Trump basically what they were saying was they thought they could survive just fine without the traffic that Trump was driving. And while the Liberal Left spent every day for the last four years sipping the Trump cocktail, Twitter is confident that Twitter has taken over enough that people will just keep Twittering even after Trump is gone. I suspect Twitter is correct. 

Now is the time for Trump to prove how popular he actually is by forming his own media empire...except that this Capitol siege basically just showed that his following ain't enough. And what political cronies he may have taken with him are surely abandoning him as fast they can. What will be remembered in political circles is the way he baited potentially violent throngs of people into going after Mike Pence. That is an impeachable offense! Even a criminal offense! That is something that will finish off Trump for good in Washington. (And I wouldn't be surprised if it turns Pence into a more beloved figure in Republican insider circles)

Liberal media can keep Republicans from getting too popular but can't create a Democrat consensus at the same time. Realistically this is called 'checks and balances', though ordinary citizens just think of it as nobody getting what they want. I've long believed that Politics is the province of charlatans and fools; now after the Trump years, I can add booger eaters and unsatisfiables to this list as well. Umbrage taking is deep in our lineage and it is annoying and gross and I can't believe we still do it. Americans talk a lot of shit considering how much pearl-clutching they do.  

It isn't Trump that made me numb, it was the anti-Trump. Listen, I never cared about Trump, I never liked Trump, I never supported Trump, I never voted for Trump, I never sought out Trump. And I don't spend much time at distinctly right-wing media centers, so it wasn't pro-Trump blather I heard all day. It was the anti-Trump monolith that drove me so far away from the Left. The Left hated on Trump all day every day without ever bothering to differentiate the important stuff (reckless and stupid trade war with China) from insignificant nonsense (Stormy Daniels). There were many many many good reasons to hate Trump and I don't think the Left ever bothered to come up with one because they have no need for objective reality. They hated Trump not for anything he actually did but for merely being elected. 

The Good/Bad news is this: this is how it is supposed to work. We've somehow come around to believing that "Democracy" means we're all supposed to agree with each other, when in fact the opposite is the case: we are free to disagree with each other without everything falling to shit. I can hear the reply: "But it has fallen to shit!" To which I'll say, "Meh." When Rome had a bad day, there'd be 500 dead bodies in the drinking water that night; we haven't had anywhere near that many casualties after an entire year of virtually non-stop unrest across America, not even from a storming of the Capitol building itself! The Media makes it seems as if the world is ending because the Media needs to be re-created every single day. (The screen is not the reality, it is just a screen) 

We just had an election where more people voted--in more ways!--than ever before and despite a sitting president openly questioning the results, we managed to have two more run-off elections and swore in a new Congress and a new President. And yet we're told that Democracy is dying and our system is broken. What, exactly, is "broken"? And if you think all the turmoil was just because of Trump, wait til you see a Congress full of Democrats--300 liberals in a room together will never agree on anything. 

You know what our elections gave us? A House and Senate so close that they will have to make compromises to get shit done. And a President and a Senate Minority Leader that have known each other their whole lives--indeed, I can't think of a President and a Senate Minority Leader that were so close (LBJ and Everett Dirkson, I suppose). I think Biden and McConnell, if allowed by the liberal media, can actually get a lot of shit done. And in the House I think the far Left wing will get pushed aside, especially if they attack Pelosi (hey, man, they were built to question authority and now that Trump is gone, who you think they're gonna be questioning?), meaning reaching across the aisle in Congress might actually become a thing again. 

We've been told over and over that America's is politically divided and gone to the extremes; quite the opposite, ladies and gentlemen. The election of 2020 stunted the woke socialist agenda and discarded Trump simultaneously. The extremes were neutered and we've been pushed back to the center. But the Media relies on crisis, Politics relies on crisis, so when good things happen, no one is allowed to notice.

Trump exploited innate crisis all the way to the White House and then all the way back out again. Trump is the effect, not the cause. The longer it takes us to realize that, the more time and money we will waste. In short...nothing has changed, nothing is different, our society is as vibrant as ever. And Democracy has never been stronger. Is that good news or bad news? You decide.

I will now repeat my mantra: the gov't was here when you born, it will be here when you die, it doesn't care about you and it couldn't even if it wanted to. Devote your time and your energy to the causes you believe in instead of politics. And stop believing in gov't, it just makes you prone to overreactions.  

(*) Culminating, of course, with Coronavirus--the real culprit for the last 12 months of unrest. Will Trump be blamed for it? In Liberal media, absolutely he will. But historically speaking, do we blame Woodrow Wilson for the Spanish Flu? No, nor should we. Pandemics happen all the time, they are impacted little by the powers that be. 

(**) This is my new favorite piece of historical trivia that I'd never heard before. Granted, this is during the Articles of Confederation period that even the most ardent students of American history never pay any attention to. But it does show why Washington DC was created--and why turning it into a state is not necessarily in Congress's best interest.  

(***) Say his name: Brian Sicknick. This man is a true patriot who died for his country. Will the name Brian Sicknick forever be enshrined and whispered in hallowed halls every January 6th? I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible. 

(****) This is the case against Trump "inciting" the rioters. Have you ever read a transcript of Trump's ramblings? I think you'll notice very quickly that he does not speak in complete sentences, he does not communicate complete thoughts. He is a cypher, an empty vessel onto which you can project your own anxieties. The Liberal Media spent four solid years projecting on to Trump whatever it wanted and, to my mind, what we refer to as "Trumpists" were reacting to the anti-Trump rhetoric, which is much more cohesive and easier to understand than Trump himself. The Trumpists never cared about Trump save that he solidified a left-wing opposition to which the Trumpists could themselves take opposition. Trump was never worth paying attention to, I never understood why anyone would even bother to like or dislike him. Trump is a meaningless shit-talking weirdo, I've been telling you that for years. How can anyone listen to him for very long and think that he is still worth listening to? 

(*****) We don't remember 1948 or 1968 or 2004 that way but I'm not sure why not, they were all close enough to summon chicanery.

(******) Whether or not Trump actually wants to run again in 2024, pretending like he does surely would've been the core of his rhetoric for the next coupla years. He has to look like he wants the White House back even if he doesn't (and really, why would he?).  

(*******) Not as unrealistic as you might think. The far-off fringes of the populace don't know the difference between Right and Left, between Democrat and Republican and if they think that Black Lives Matter means we're allowed to blow up shopping malls and shit, well, I wouldn't be shocked to see even the white supremacists finding common cause with anti-white supremacists (which is just a testament to what pointless fucking drivel the concept of race is to begin with).

RCEP With China Minus India: Spotlight On ASEAN

RCEP

Last week at the most recent ASEAN conference, China announced that they would be joining RCEP (Regional Cooperative Economic Plan). The previous video features the stuffed shirt talking head hot takes from India and Japan. RCEP becomes the largest free trade agreement in the world covering 30% of the world's population and an equal amount of global GDP--and that's without India, who has flirted with RCEP over the years but ultimately (for now) backed away. RCEP is currently: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. 

But...no USA (*).  

You may recall that in 2016, US presidential candidates Trump and Clinton agreed on pretty much only one thing: that the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) was a bad idea for American workers and both poo-pooed the idea of joining in--even though it was Hillary Clinton that initially put the organization together while Secretary of State under President Obama. The whole point of the TPP was to create an East Asian trade block that would be aligned against China but Trump was against this because of his rabid anti-China policy (uh...wait that doesn't make any sense) and Clinton caved in the face of the Bernie Bros that (for whatever reason) think global trade is somehow bad for American industrial production. *sigh* Even when Americans have the right idea they manage to talk themselves out of it. 

So instead of an American-based free trade coalition spanning vast chunks of human population arrayed in opposition to China, now we have a China-based group without the need of American economic muscle behind it. Between the Bernie crowd and the Trump idiots (**), I'm certain I'm in the minority when I say this is a colossal wasted opportunity for USA. And likely an all-out triumph for China. 

Instead of TPP, Trump pursued a trade war with China built around unilateral tariffs--which would've been greatly aided by a TPP-like organization but somehow he didn't see it that way. My personal belief is that Trump's anti-China rhetoric was merely a staged attempt to create a détente with China going into the 2020 election and that the first three years of tariffs were really just a pantomimed attempt to gin up rapprochement. (***) But once Covid-19 appeared, the hope of détente with China evaporated. So instead, Xi Jinping has moved on with other plans: testing nuclear weapons again, cracking down on Hong Kong, picking fights with India, continuing to grow a military presence in the South China Sea and snatching the free trade bonanza the Americans let wither on the vine. 

About 15 minutes into this video, Ambassador Fujisaki refers to the 1990s-era belief (mostly in USA) that expanding trade with China would bring about a democratic revolution among Chinese workers/consumers. To further flesh out this belief that he refers to, I went back to "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner from the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs (****). The authors say things like, "Growth was supposed to bring not just further economic opening but also political liberalization...with a burgeoning Chinese middle class demanding new rights and pragmatic officials embracing legal reforms...for further progress." But "(r)ather than becoming a force for greater openness, consistent growth has served to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party". I think it's fair to say the first sentence was a popular belief in American foreign policy circles in the 1990s and that the second sentence is a popular belief in current American foreign policy circles. 

So, in short, the Americans believed that expanding economic cooperation with China was a necessary post-Cold War step to make sure that Chinese growth came with an American imprimatur and that over time the growth would create a more liberal, open Chinese establishment that would fall in line with Western democratic capitalism. We had become accustomed to pictures like this. We saw China's leadership as capable only of oppressing the in-born desires of millions--billions--of good hearted Chinese people that yearned only to buy more stuff (I mean, it's not insignificant the man in this iconic picture carries a grocery bag, is it?). And we saw ourselves as a force for good by way of infiltrating the Chinese economy and allowing a newly burgeoning middle class to demand more democratic representation. (Or perhaps we saw the opportunity to co-opt the inevitable economic expansion of China and to get rich off of China getting rich....there's that, too) 

But when Xi Jinping came to power in 2010 and then retained power in 2015 (and will be granted another 5-year term any day now), something previously unconstitutional in China, Americans began to wake up to the idea that the grand design of democratic capitalism wasn't taking hold as it should. Indeed, the power structure seems all the more powerful because the last 20 years of Chinese economic growth hasn't produced a middle class but a thin layer of super-rich private citizens eager to wed themselves to the CCP's hold on the culture. Oh...yeah....there has to be a middle class to have a middle class revolution.

For my part, I never really bought the idea back in the 1990s. China has been China for more than 3000 years and the only hint of democracy they've ever had was a brief flirtation with Republican gov't in the early 20th century that was not popular, not successful and is likely considered their lowest point in the last 3000 years (at least by the Chinese themselves). The people of China have been ruled by the imperial Middle Kingdom since before the beginning of time--yeah, check it out: Chinese history kicks off with several hundred years worth of a dynasty that no one's sure even existed. The Emperor emerged from the mythological primordial ooze of life itself and that's all they've ever known. And--here's the thing Americans will NEVER understand--the Chinese people are...pretty cool with that. They don't mind it, they rage against it every once in a while but nothing else has ever replaced it. So expecting the Chinese people to rise up and demand more self-determination is gonna take some time. Like, a lot of time. Like, I dunno, a thousand years...? The idea that two decades of selling Chinese people Wal-Mart bedsheets was gonna completely reverse several millennia of culture...uh...never made any sense to me. Americans are beholden to iconic images like the one above, but I gotta tell ya: you don't control a billion and a half people with a line of tanks.  

Frankly, it just shows a misapprehension on the part of the West of how China works. We look at the Chinese Communist Party and see only the Communist part and totally neglect the Chinese part. I would suggest the CCP functions pretty much just like the Confucian bureaucracy that was the spine of the last thousand years of the Middle Kingdom. Hell, I would suggest the CCP is way more enlightened, egalitarian, forward-looking, responsible and inclusive than the Confucians ever were. So what the Chinese people have is already light years more advanced than what their ancestors would've expected from their emperors. Furthermore what they have is not actually something that we would recognize as "Communist". The way the CCP operates in China is not at all how Communism has ever been practiced anywhere else--and certainly not what Karl Marx would've imagined (an agrarian peasant rebellion was not what Marx had in mind (*****)).  

Actually what Americans think of as Communism is just Authoritarianism with a fancy name on it. In the west we fear Communism for its authoritarian tendencies and we use Stalin and Mao as the examples; but the authoritarianism in both cases pre-dates Marx and has little to do with top-down Marxist economics. When we say that Communism has never worked, that isn't really true: it's never been tried. When the Russians latched on to Marxist thought, they were working within a tradition of brutal authoritarianism and they saw the opportunity to push the Czar out and grab that authoritarianism for themselves. Stalin grabbed power and glommed onto Marxist ideas about committees and class warfare, neither of which really come from Marx, but I see no evidence that Stalin had any interest in the economic precepts of Marxism. I am convinced that Marxist top-down economic doctrines are doomed to failure but I am not convinced the failure of the Russian Soviets was because of Marxist economic dogma. As for the authoritarianism, it wasn't a product of Marxism, it was already there, the Czars ruled with an iron fist long before Karl Marx was born (******). Stalin was born from a tradition of Czarism more than Marxism and Mao represented a new type of Middle Kingdom rather than being the Marxist ideal.

As for the economics, the reason Americans fear it is because we are born of commerce and bristle at any notion of fettering it. In America we have created not a worker's paradise but a consumer's paradise: it is still not uncommon to find items in your local grocery that are cheaper than the lands they came from. That's because we're awesome and those other places suck and the likely reason those other places don't have the options that Americans have is because there is some top-down authority keeping the citizenry from full self-expression. We have a tendency to call this "Communism", whether or not that is actually the case. Thus, we equate Communism with Authoritarianism and Capitalism with Democracy: it is only in a free economy than we can have a free society (or something like that). And, the thinking goes, the expansion of Chinese economy must necessarily be joined with the expansion of civil liberties and voting rights, while a decrease of Chinese Communism will produce a decrease of Authoritarianism. We have come to see these things as two separate poles and presume the rise of one will spell the doom of the other. But this isn't necessarily so. I never bought that Chinese capitalism would lead to freer gov't because I think the gov't and the economy are two separate and distinct paradigms. And in this case it shows our fundamental misunderstanding of Communism. 

The Chinese are doing something that no one else has ever done before: they're actually following Marxist economic ideology. The authoritarianism has been there for thousands of years but their recent forays into global trade are because Marx says quite explicitly that Communism derives from Capitalism. Marx says you must indulge entrepreneurial industrial Capitalism in order for Communism to arise (re: you have to create wealth that so that you can then have wealth to control). Thus, the Chinese have allowed a greater expansion of market activity and wealth creation among the citizenry over the last 30 years because that's what Marx says to do--not because it seeks to adhere to American-style capitalist democracy. Capitalism will morph into Socialism, then Socialism will morph into Communism. I think Marx is probably right (*******) but whereas in the West we fear the steady decrease of individual choice due to the imposition of more and more top-down economic activity, in China they already have the top-down activity and are trying to bring the relative wealth of the citizenry up through a burst of macroeconomic activity. In the long run, the Chinese will either become prisoners of the endless chase for economic growth or they will actually achieve the Marxist Utopia (which is basically just Europe before the French Revolution). Neither of those options sound very "Chinese" to me but they gotta do something, I guess. 

And so here we are at a juncture of history where the Chinese are expanding their economic frontiers and reaching out to their neighbors (something they've done very little of in 3000 years), while the Americans are acting like trade is bad for workers. Yes, I was skeptical back in the 1990s of the political liberalization the Americans promised would happen, but I did kinda believe that Chinese people would get used to having choices and that would filter into the Party structure on the local level. Not on the national level, because that is now and will forever be just a room full of chain smoking old men making the decisions for a billion other souls. But I did think and still do that on the local level the reach of the CCP will actually--perhaps in spite of itself--give more people more opportunity to exert some bottom-up control. But that would be relatively invisible to American eyes and probably have little to do with the foreign policy/foreign trade powers of the Party. So while I didn't really buy it back in the day, I think it's much too early to say the liberalization didn't work because even if it does work, foreigners probably won't be able to tell. And it'll take a while before it works anyway, maybe not a thousand years but probably something like a hundred years. 

Marx was not talking about Russia, Marx was certainly not talking about China. Marx was talking about England--and by extension America. Marx presumed that the Capitalism Americans so cherish will eventually devolve (evolve/devolve? You decide) into Communism: a world where all the economic decisions are made by a handful of old men in committees telling everyone else what will be available to purchase. I understand Marx's point: as economic growth binds social structures together, an overarching abstract power will naturally arise on top--indeed, may be forced to arise--in order to smooth the flow of resource distribution. But Marx (like Einstein) was wedded to a steady state universe. For some reason he didn't account for economic expansion, so his notion that wealth would entropically rise to the top is not quite how things work. Also the notion that economic power and political power are the same thing is frankly not how America ever worked.

Granted, the super rich in America become super richer all the time but they don't hoard that wealth, they put it back into the markets. Indeed, the rich people are the ones creating the wealth that drives all economic growth. So while Marx was correct that a handful of rich people would control all the money, he was mistaken in that it would be controlled by a gov't force. It is not. That is private wealth put to private ends and the aim of of private wealth is to create ever more private wealth, which is not at all what a gov't would do. And Marx's notion that a gov't committee would be the best source of resource distribution is...man, as wrong as it could be!

Only private wealth can create capital; the gov't produces merely inflation. "Helping" people through gov't demand doesn't help anyone because it doesn't create sustainable economic structures, it just creates inflation. A sugar rush is fine for a while but it isn't nutrition, it won't keep the body from dying. Likewise, gov't spending can be an occasionally worthwhile stopgap but it does not provide nourishment. Only markets build into the future.

The American Congress is ruled by a series of committees but frankly the sheer amount of wealth it controls is pretty piddly compared to the private wealth in our capital markets. The politicians (and the politically minded citizenry) are fighting over tax dollars, which by definition is a tiny percentage of the overall economy. They can be as Marxist as they like, it'll actually have a pretty minimal effect on the wealth redistribution that happens all day long in the American economy. The politicians like to act important--and the citizenry is eager to make them appear important--but they're pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. They have the ability to waste a lot of time and money but not much more than that--they certainly can't make money or invest it. Congress's only real economic power is making money go away. Congress is absolutely invested in helping the citizenry be more productive (re: produce more capital) because that's where the wealth comes from. It doesn't come from the gov't. Wealth can never and will never come from gov't spending. That's just as true in China as it is in America. 

The Russian Soviets didn't care about economics, they cared only for the maintenance of their iron fist, generally by cowing people into silence and inactivity. China, too, has a long history of just shutting people up rather than dealing with their desires. In America we blame the political structure but frankly it doesn't do much because it actually effects a pittance of the overall spending. Marx's assumption that gov't power is real power is only true when you follow the top-down economic structures that Americans have always eschewed. But the idea that Capitalism and Democracy go hand in hand is not plainly obvious. I think its quite possible to have free economies in a tyrannical state and loads of democracy in a top-down economy. Market forces are latent, permanent and exist regardless of the particular ruling authority; ruling authorities can make economies worse but they have no power to make them better because economy comes from the People not the State. 

The fact that we've lumped all of these ideas in a single stew is an unnecessary complication that clouds our vision of objective reality (an effect of Media, I'd say). It makes Americans think that our politicians should do more and then complain when they try to do anything. And it makes us fear any other country in the world doing anything because we see competition as a zero-sum game rather than a source of continual growth. 

I've long been "soft" on China, even though I didn't buy the 1990s-era rhetoric of Chinese capitalist democracy. The Chinese people have been empowered over the last few decades but that doesn't mean they have much political participation. Yeah....because they don't want it. They like American-style improvement of standard of living but they think our politics is stupid and corrupt (and I agree). But I believe that China's continued growth and international influence is coming whether we like it or not--and, personally, I like it. I do not fear it and I think economic growth in all places is good because it empowers the citizens, the individuals, the People, even if has the unfortunate by-product of making States seem more powerful than they actually are. 

But it's hard to wrap my mind around a China that yearns for free trade while in America our politicians are clamoring for the cancellation of student loans; while I agree that our method of financing higher education is shameful and stupid, using the gov't as a mechanism to release people from their contractual obligations is precisely the opposite of what our gov't should be doing (and would be ruinously expensive for the higher educational opportunities of future generations). When American Liberals dream of a "better world", they are invariably thinking only of a more expensive one...and then expect the price to be paid by someone else. For some reason, they think that's what Socialism is but I bet they wouldn't if they ever read Marx.

(*) You will notice that North Korea and Taiwan, the two inescapable lightning rods of Pacific Asia, aren't there, either. But why isn't Bangladesh in the RCEP? 

(**) Obama gave lip service to TPP in 2016 but I suspect this was simply because he knew it was a losing cause. I thought at the time that Congress might've wanted TPP so much that they would actually let Obama have a little victory on the way out, but either Obama didn't care enough to take up the offer or Congress didn't care enough to extend it. Instead, the presidential candidates both talked Americans out of its usefulness...and we got a lame-ass trade war instead. *sigh* The business of America is business and we forget that at our peril.  

(***) I think Xi Jinping was on board with this plan. Enduring three years of an American tantrum for the prospect of 4-5 years of American support probably looked pretty good to him So, in case you're trying to read between the lines, I would suggest this shows that Covid-19 is absolutely NOT a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the global economy because I think it actually hinders what Xi wanted to do going forward. Or if this is some kind of devious plot, it is anti-Xi plot more than an anti-American one. 

(****) I started this post on Aug 29, 2018 initially with my thoughts on Foreign Affairs Mar/Apr 2018 essay "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner.  But...I'm a lazy guy, picked this back up based on recent events.

(*****) I kept trying to convince my Chinese Political History professor that in an agrarian economy the farmers control the means of production, but he never bought it. I still (sorta) believe it but I still have no way of making anyone else believe it. Like I still believe that when looking at a US electoral map, it's easy to point out that the red states produce little of the overall GDP but how can you not notice it's where all our food comes from? Do you honestly think that's insignificant? 

(******) I'd say it's an outgrowth of the Golden Horde. Prior to the Mongols ransacking Russia circa 1250, there were democratic movements in that area, there was the attempt to make the leadership responsible to the citizenry. The Mongols ruled not merely with an iron fist but went out of their way to humiliate local Russian leaders and for 200 years brutally repressed any kind of movement at all. When the Muscovite princes were able to finally shake off Mongol rule around 1450, they took on the tenor of that bone-crushing leadership and that's the way it's been ever since in Russia. At to that end: Yeah, I know you're not gonna dig this but Vladimir Putin is easily the kindest, sweetest most benevolent leader they've ever had. I would say by a fucking longshot, he's the most enlightened leader they've ever had. Russia today actually has something that could be referred to as a middle class....when in the last thousand years was that even a possibility?

(*******) Though I don't agree with his rationale. To Marx economic growth will necessarily create an underclass that can only be cared for by the State and the State will then have to collect more and more from the citizenry to account for the left behind. I think the actuality is different: I think the upwardly mobile citizenry want more than they want to pay for and will think that gov't spending will be able to provide more and more. Thus, wealthy gov'ts will steadily drift toward Socialism and ultimately Communism through the force of ever-growing debt obligations. Politicians in charge will take on more and more spending as a means of holding on to power. But as gov't accrues more purchasing power, it will continually depress its own currency and all other markets. And in the long run we'll end up with dwindling consumer choices and more expectation of the gov't to make our choices for us. Kinda the same but Marx thought of helping the poor within a world of economic growth while I see it as steady decrease of economic growth as the people have fewer and fewer choices that only makes life tougher for the poor. 

PS -- Here's the Chinese stuffed shirt talking head hot take version. I think its noteworthy that they close by allowing the Singaporean representative to remind everyone that RCEP does not keep these Asian nations from militarily hedging against China (oh yeah: militarism is another separate and distinct paradigm that I didn't even touch on here). The agenda for the Americans is clear: guns but not butter. 

Election 2020 (The Aftermath)

Ahhhhhhhhhh....it didn't feel like this was gonna happen but I gotta say this is just about the perfect outcome. The woke socialism message was firmly rejected--and so was Trump! It was a 2-for-1! In the end (end-ish) it was exactly what Wall Street prayed for and, again, probably the perfect outcome for the country. It's like waking up on Xmas morning and realizing you don't have to go to the dentist. There was no Blue Wave as Republicans won more governorships and state legislatures and even won seats in the House and will likely maintain their slim majority in the Senate, while the Democrats held their majority in the House  and took the bully pulpit of the White House, allowing them to pretend like they run the place. Joe Biden has $11 trillion worth of proposed spending (*) and--with or without Mitch McConnell and 51 Reps in the Senate--there's no way he's passing anywhere near that much. Glorious gridlock! 

And an announcement of a Covid-19 vaccine on the way? Oh man, it's like a Led Zeppelin concert on a Xmas morning.

Trump still has to fight this result and there are theories of an ace up his sleeve, which isn't impossible. But Trump's biggest decision right now--the toughest decision of his life--is figuring just how/when to concede. He's never had to concede before (multiple bankruptcies don't require an Oscar speech, apparently), and graciously doing the right thing is kinda off-brand for him. But I've come back around to where I was on the eve of the 2016 election: Trump now has time to go back to building a media empire where he can trash Joe Biden and Rupert Murdoch in equal doses all day long. So if you think this is the end of Donald Trump, *long sigh*, no...no, I don't think so (**). I think now he has room to be louder and more obnoxious than ever before. Stifling him in the Oval Office actually shut that dude up for four years. But he has to fight for a while before he concedes so he can at least pretend like none of this is his fault and if he concedes without fighting then his fans will be let down. Never forget: Trump was our first wrestling POTUS. 

The most irritating part of the recent election cycle was the constant drumbeat about the decay of democracy, how we have to defend our yadda yadda yadda. That kind of fear-mongering is the last refuge of a scoundrel--only in politics does bullshit like that get rewarded! But, since everyone else brought up the topic, there is a serious drawback of democracy as a form of gov't that never gets discussed: a propensity toward deficit spending. Why? Because politicians are just entertainers who will say whatever they have to say to win your love but know full well that they're going to be replaced soon enough. So, like the GM of a sports franchise, they know their lifespan is short and won't think twice about trading away future draft picks or minor league talent in hopes of winning now. A GM with a target on his back does not care about the #1 pick five years from now because either he will be gone (likely) or he will be cemented in the organization by that time (unlikely, but hey, that's the dream, right?). Notice that other forms of gov't do not work that way. A tyrant has to go to the bank over and over and over again and they have the power to say no and they will eventually. The productivity of our working class is such that we've been able to get away with foolish spending since the end of the Civil War; that productivity will eventually run out....but when? So for now it will be gridlock but with increased gov't spending. 

The problem is we call everything "politics". Then we confuse politics with "government". Then we act like the POTUS runs the gov't. So everything rides on the POTUS, when in fact that dude is far away as Siberia or the Middle Ages. This is the danger of our collective ways: we fall prey to blaming and blame-shifting rather than rationally ascertaining problems and solutions. The POTUS ought to be the most boring bean counter we can find, when instead we go out looking for a megalomaniac rock star that can woo people rhetorically, as if that has anything to do with being president. We've totally disconnected becoming president from being president in a way that produces--thankfully--mostly just mediocrity. The job of POTUS is hard, why do we then make it harder by demanding that the POTUS also be popular? What good is that? The problem of American democracy is it encourages the citizenry to think they have to like everything. They do not and the sooner they realize that, the sooner we could actually hire the right people for these jobs instead of simply the most attractive liars (and we'll also be more able to ignore the shit we're not interested in instead of hating on it).

Trump has shown us our future: POTUS is merely a douche with a Twitter account now. Our polity has truly joined the 21st century. I'm not on Twitter myself, but every liberal I know is glued to Trump's Twitter like its a nicotine delivery device. They made him awfully popular--and will keep him relevant even after he's gone!--seems like they must like him a lot. Remember: most real conservatives still giggle/scoff at the word "Twitter", so it ain't your racist grandma giving Trump all that attention. And while Twitter has the power to raise nobodies into somebodies, it is a bitch goddess that takes away as it gives. Can any politician on Twitter ever truly be popular with more than 50% of the country? I don't see how that's possible. (The heart of Cal Ripken Jr. with the iron fist of J. Edgar Hoover...? Yeah, see that doesn't work at all) 

Social media is our society now. We live not in a state of nature but in a state of media. We can deny it, we can try to go back to the old way, but that's not how progress works (then again, most people who call themselves "Progressive" strike me as merely backward-looking). Twitter empowers the People, not the politicians. Unfortunately, the People can be talked into awful spending habits and sometimes buy into bizarrely nonsensical bullshit, so Twittering them into a frenzy could be the downfall of our nation....just throwing that out there. 

Earlier in the year I wrote a bunch of blog posts about what I call 'digital citizenship'. The idea is that once your gov't fully protects your right to be on-line and to maximize your data, then frankly that'll be all we need to the gov't to do. The people can maximize their earnings and experiences and the gov't would be simply the thin gray line where business runs into regulation and/or adjudication (and politics will stay in the home, where it belongs). This will allow people to vote online, pay their taxes online, educate their kids online, etc., with the proper protection of the gov't as the guarantor of contracts (the only thing we actually need the gov't to do, I would suggest). The Libertarians have a tradition of fearing the power of gov't, but that was in a state of Nature; in the state of Media, we need to be protected from each other far more than we need to fear the central authority. Identity theft is the scourge of the future, but what is identity but gov't details? I'm not worried about the gov't stealing my identity--the gov't is the force that cements my identity--I'm worried about my neighbors, professional rivals, vengeful strangers, psycho assholes, bored trolls, radical no-good-niks, old girlfriends, foreign powers, etc. The gov't at this stage is the least of our worries (except, of course, for the deficit spending that erodes the value of our work). 

These thoughts are not political--indeed, what do we even need political parties for any more? It is a matter of wedding the Constitution with modern technology. Technology is outstripping gov't power. 

For example, some wag on Reddit posted the other day that Joe Biden was not in fact the "president-elect" until after the meeting of the Electoral College and that the media is....I dunno....hypnotizing us or something. Now, technically he is probably correct: in the old days the election really wasn't decided until the electors met and did their secret handshakes and all that shit. But now we expect to know who won on election night--that is a function of technology, not politics or mind control. We have the ability (well, we almost do anyway) to know who will win by the end of Election Day and communicate it all over the world. This was not possible in the 19th century, it is possible now. The Constitution isn't to blame for not keeping up with the technology, it is the technology that must align itself with the Constitution. And calling Joe Biden the President-elect before the meeting of the Electors is merely a blip of scheduling, not a coup d'etat. 

The People are now nearly fully empowered. All we need is for gov't spending to dry up and interest rates to track true economic activity and everything'll be great....oh yeah, none of that is happening any time soon. This is some O. Henry shit right here: we have already sold out our future right as we're ready to take control of it. 

The moves of Congress and the Fed (and how that meshes with Wall Street, foreign investment, and American consumers), are going to be far more influential, meaningful and pervasive than anything the President does in the next four years. 

I wrote in the previous post that I would prefer four more years of Trump. I stand by that but I can't say as I was ever too enthusiastic about it. Trump doesn't do much I particularly like, indeed he is so uninteresting that I find him quite easy to ignore as there is nothing he can say that could possibly impact me. What I feared was an onslaught bent on out-Trumping Trump and I don't think that's gonna happen. Neither of these candidates matter because we are in service to the Fed-run economy for the foreseeable future. (***) Since the Presidency doesn't matter, if the American people prefer a nice guy to dole out their daily press briefings, then that's fine with me.  

Democracy has never been more robust (robust!) and never more sadly useless. All this voting, all these procedures, all these courts (oh yeah, I think that's coming) and states, and it's the same dumb way to choose a leader and the same dumb choice between two old-ass white guys. Hey, don't blame me--I voted for Corn Pop.

(*) By contrast Hillary Clinton had $2 trillion of spending proposals in 2016. Joe Biden needed every vote, might as well promise everyone the moon.

(**) I hesitate to even write this but it struck me as plainly obvious the other day and now I have to get it out. Here's the scenario: for three years Biden rolls along, not too high, not too low, but after Trump the world sorta appreciates the even keel-ness of the Biden White House. Then, he dies. And going into the 2024 election is President Kamala Harris running for re-election. That's how Trump comes back. I don't otherwise see him being interested in trying to navigate the party politics for 2024 because I think the Republicans are already divided against him and the fear that he would energize the Democrats would be prohibitive....unless he's running against Kamala Harris. Trump thinks he can beat her and I'm not sure he's wrong. And I think the Republicans would have to kick the tires on that proposition because I don't see anyone else out there on the Republican side ready to take a crack at 2024. 

(***) Jerome Powell doesn't remind me of Oliver Cromwell, but could a usurper rise from the Fed to basically take over the country? Or has that already happened? 

Election 2020 (The Pre-Game)

What Joe Biden thought 2020 was gonna be: Look, kids, Bernie just isn't gonna make it, you gotta go with me. And to all the newcomers, get on board with me, there's room for all of you and none of you are ready to do it on your own so I'm your best shot. I'm the leader, I got the money, everyone knows me, Obama loves me, and I can beat Trump. Everyone just get behind me, I'll give jobs to all (most) of you and I'll get you into the White House. All you gotta do is get behind me, tell everyone how great I am and that they need to vote for me. I am the great unifier! Believe in me and we will crush this idiot Trump!

But the Democrats couldn't get over their own fine grained selfish disappointments (the epitome of white privilege) to pull together. (Beware the "inclusive": they never agree on anything) Nancy Pelosi used Biden as a puppet in her Impeachment hearing, AOC never got on board with Biden or the "normal" wing that runs the Democratic Party, the young Progressives have yet to flock to the Biden camp, Obama waited til the bitter end to throw the full weight of his support to Biden, and Biden was bullet absorber #1 in the primary debates. And even though he got smoked in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden was comfortably in control by the third primary. The pundits would say it was only because the rest of the party couldn't build enough of a coalition against him; but I would suggest he was the only candidate the whole time. The first two primaries were a showcase for everyone/everything else the Democratic Party has to offer and it all led back to Joe Biden. No one wanted him to win and even when he did win, no one wanted to give him the credit. Biden walks ahead of the grumpiest bunch of brats in American history--and that's no mean feat.  

What Donald Trump thought 2020 was gonna be: Make a big trade deal with China in the Spring; Wall Street loves it, unemployment hovers near all-time lows; pull troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; unveil a series of normalized relations with Israel; lure Russia and China into a tripartite arms limitations treaty. That's what he had set up in front of him. Turning China from a great enemy into a great friend, a new bigshot deal with Russia, Wall Street fat and happy, Israel gaining some significant victories, taxes lowered, (bond markets limping along), soccer moms are happy and the churches will never vote for a Democrat anyway, so everyone's happy--or at least not unhappy enough to wanna do anything about it--and pulling troops out all at the same time. He pulled off some of that stuff anyway but if that had all gone his way you gotta admit: that's not bad, at home and abroad.  And even if he did fail, it does suggest that perhaps he had much more of a broad sense of leadership in the world than we ever really got to see. (Oh...and we'd probably be in a decent size standoff with Iran...but even the fly he built into the buttermilk didn't turn out right, as even that has yet to materialize)

Then Covid-19 comes along and wrecks all of it. 

China goes back to being an enemy, to blame for all the ills of the world (literal and metaphorical). Russia is more estranged than ever--and breaking off arms treaties without actually doing the follow up isn't necessarily a great idea. Turns out the Israeli lobby isn't as powerful as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. Europe never did develop any fondness for Trump, nor did Canada or Latin America. But if he'd pull off his vision, it would have worked....but this just shows why entrusting so much power to shape the future in the hands of a single POTUS is something we should take more seriously than ever having someone like Trump to be considered. He walked us into a trade war with China with the intention of pulling his punches going into the election, turning a concocted crisis into a generational victory, then throwing down a 'peacemaking' kinda deal for Xi and Putin and pleasing Wall Street, the generals and America's allies all at once....except that Covid-19 kept him from completing his vision, so now everything's half-finished right when he suddenly needs support (and he's left his presumed successor with a pile of god awful tariffs on China that Trump himself probably meant to get rid of). Trump is such a fucking cursed dude--how the fuck did we ever let him get elected? 

Trump's potential for reelection was based not on anyone liking Trump but on Trump being so successful that the world would have to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, that's not how American politics works. You have to be liked, not respected. Nobody really gives a shit what you accomplished--and most 'accomplishments' are just phony baloney positioning anyway. And Trump is not well-liked--least of all by the 'Trumpists' (*). And whatever the state of his 'plans', Covid-19 came along and upended all that.

I believe it was Jamelle Bouie who pointed out that a crisis like Covid-19 would be a godsend for most politicians. All you gotta do is look solemn and talk like you're in church at Xmas time. A scared captive audience that just wants to hear some soothing words is what most politicians dream of because that such a moment requires the blandest possible human to speak. A nice haircut with some harmless platitudes and everyone will be reassured and tell you how caring you are. But Trump is incapable of even that basic political opportunism. So instead he treats Covid-19 like it's Tuesday night at Wrestlemania and he'll defeat the disease but ridiculing its white trash girlfriend. 

But the complaint that Trump bungled the coronavirus is itself pure cynicism: what Trump bungled was his chance to make himself look like a nice guy. The idea that the POTUS is going to stop a viral pandemic is delusional, there was little for Trump to do except self-aggrandize--he failed at his best chance to win unparalleled support! The coronavirus was a states' issue not a federal one (**), I suggest there was very little for the POTUS to do and not much different from any other POTUS in the same position (although most any other POTUS would've handled the self-aggrandizement with more grace). And...wait...isn't Trump going on TV and telling everyone what to do exactly what we're supposed to be afraid of...and that's precisely what he did not do when the time arose...?

To me, the disgusting part of Trump's response was the severe lack of testing, which is something I think he could've been at the forefront for encouraging people to seek out and enforcing localities' ability to offer. I don't know what the POTUS can actually do but at least his bully pulpit could speed up the market mechanisms for more testing, more evaluation, etc., to properly understand how the virus was moving and its effects, to separate the spreaders from the at-risk population. But he seemed to think testing would merely make him look bad--it probably would, but that's no reason not to do the right thing anyway. Trump made it clear that getting reelected was more important to him than America. And no was surprised by this. 

Then when the George Floyd protests took over in May/June, Trump's powerlessness was as big as the great outdoors and he showed that POTUS has little control over situations like what happened to George Floyd or the response to what happened to George Floyd. There was nothing Trump could do but try to weather the storm, which looked impossible at the time. But the protests which started off with such force and such mainstream support actually accomplished...not much. The calls for police reform morphed into an attack on statues and a bizarre thrust toward the "Karens" of the world and then just sorta melted away into ordinary summertime frustrations, as the People shook off the coronavirus and went back to their lives. 

Americans: easy to incite but impossible to satisfy, so even rioting in the street bores them. Though I would say Americans looked more likely to register and vote and do all that shit more than usual and that's probably just the way of things now: more divisiveness will likely bring more voters into the electorate, which is the first step to modernizing the process. 

As for Biden, he was able to loll the summer away in his basement doing very little campaigning, instead relying on Trump to self-combust, which was pretty much the correct strategy. Biden brought in Kamala Harris as a running mate, which was the obvious move: at this time last year she struck me as every Democrat's second favorite choice, making her a virtual lock for the VP slot no matter who the candidate turned out to be. Biden has taken on Buttigieg to his team but has more or less ditched all the other comers that chose to attack him (rather than fall in behind him) back in Iowa. To my mind this shows that Biden never really had any more faith in the next generation of Democrats than they had in him--if he did, he'd be holding Kamala up for Attorney General rather than Vice President! He'd be telling you Cory Booker is gonna be a great Secretary of Housing or Beto O'Rourke is our next UN Ambassador or Stacey Abrams will be our new VP, but he's not doing any of that. And all those non-Biden candidates are mostly all just gone. Yeah, Democrats, you may hate Biden but he's easily the best you got and that was always true. 

The Democrats hate Trump but they've done nothing but attack him since he arrived and frankly I think their attacks have come up wanting. They suggest only one thing: Democrats don't like Donald Trump. Yeah, I get that...is there more to this? They were wiretapping General Flynn before the inauguration and tripped him up with the sort of ticky-tack nonsense that federal prosecutors do all the time. They spent two years on an FBI-driven investigation that yielded...some Russian Facebook accounts (are those even illegal?). They impeached him without even bothering to prove a crime. I'm no fan of Trump but do you honestly think the engine of our gov't is solely built for rival politicians to wage war on each other? 

And...wait...if they don't like Joe Biden, then what's the point? They hate Trump but really what they're saying is they want a president to be likable. They need to like the POTUS but then their nominee is a guy they don't even like....? So the Dems didn't want to vote for Hillary in 2016 and they don't want to vote for Biden in 2020 and really all they want is a president that they like. When you realize that the "Trumpists" only like Trump because he riles up the people that hate Trump, then the vacillations of the Democrats becomes, to my mind, all the more unforgivable. They've done nothing but attack Trump as hard as they can and yet they still can't get excited about their own guy...what do they want? 

They're gonna hate-vote Trump back into office because they love hating him so much. And they'll continue to hate him and read his Tweets hourly after he's out of office, so its not like this is even an attempt to get rid of Trump. Just a chance to hate on him a little louder than usual. 

Personally I couldn't give a shit about the POTUS being likable--indeed, I think it's weird to wanna like your leaders! If this summer has taught us anything it is that liking your leaders simply means future generations will tear down their statues. (And why the fuck do we build statues of people that ruled over us, anyway?)  I am suggesting that Trump does have a larger sense of his image that goes beyond his twitterings and that being hate-followed can be very lucrative (shit, man, got Trump all the way to the White House, there's really no reason why that should've happened). 

Trump is an unlikable a human being as I think I've ever seen. He goes way above and beyond most assholes and I understand completely why the left/liberals/Democrats don't like him. I get that, I understand...I just don't care. To me the fact that Trump is unlikable is a meaningless detail. I don't care that I don't like the POTUS and I don't understand why anyone needs to. And even though Biden seems like a much nicer guy, that does not instill me with any greater desire to vote for him. 

Rather than reminding me of 2016 (when Hillary (***) was such a sure thing to beat Trump that Democrats didn't even bother to vote for her), this reminds me more of 2004: George W. Bush was exceedingly unpopular and John Kerry seemed a shoo-in to wrest the Presidency away from him...but then forgot to win the election. Trump is so uniquely unpopular that this scenario might not play out, but I wouldn't be surprised. If all Biden has to offer is that he's not Trump, that doesn't mean much to me. It doesn't mean anything at all really. 

Democrats have attacked Trump from Day One (well, before Day One actually) and all they've done is remind everyone that Trump is an asshole, which we already knew. Even the relative corruption they've uncovered is really just the clumsiness of an unskilled politician--which suggests his corruption is actually less than average! They've done nothing to establish a different way of running the gov't, merely that they'd prefer someone more in line with their cult of personality. But hating on Trump is all the Left has to offer and it is no better than it was on Election Day 2016. Trump makes everyone him around him stupid and the Democrats have only gotten dumber in the last four years. 

Covid-19 has turned everything upside down. And what we're just now realizing (right?) is that it hasn't even happened yet. The Fed and Congress have been over-promising since March, which has forestalled economic turmoil for this year (though I would expect end of the year profit-taking to be pretty severe this December). But January 1st is a whole new ball game and if the infections are rising again, then more lockdowns, more mask turmoil, and more volatility in the markets, all that stuff. So at best, we've pushed off til next year the true economic impact of the coronavirus; at worst, we've done the same thing with the virus, too. 

USA has avoided the rising tide of viruses and pandemics over the last 20 years or so but Covid-19 hit us squarely in the crotch. You're free to believe that your gov't is gonna save us from that but I don't see any reason to believe the gov't has that power (or inclination). Viruses have bedeviled humanity since before it looked anything like humanity, governments are much more recent by comparison. As the population rises and the temperature rises, seems like we should be having pandemics a lot more often, so social distancing and wearing masks will likely be long term effects. And elections will come and go--each the most important of your lifetime!

Meanwhile, Congress this year has passed multiple trillion dollar spending bills. The Fed has tripled its debt load!

The Congress/Fed tandem is vastly larger and more influential than the POTUS. That is our future, regardless of who wins the election. And there's still no arms deals with Russia, nor trade deals with China, and Brexit guarantees you pretty much gotta re-do Europe, too. Oh, and war with Iran can break out at a moment's notice. And we just had our single highest day of new cases of Covid-19.  

The good news as we go to election day: look, man, I know it seems like everything's falling apart but actually I think the noise itself suggests more participation by individual people, the People are more powerful than ever. And that is the great leap forward for Humanity, not the outcome of any particular election. The fact that there is complaint in the world is a result of more people being heard. Complaint is not mitigated by growth because there is always someone that wants more and will voice that desire; complaint never goes away regardless of how secure/rich everyone becomes. Indeed, as lives become better and more numerous, the amount of complaint should skyrocket. The scary images you see on the TV would be a lot scarier if the doomsayers were actually right.   

Truth be told: I'd prefer four more years of Trump. Because I love Trump? No, good lord, what's to love? It is that I fear what comes after Trump more than I fear Trump. And term limits allow us to have Trump serve his time and leave rather than being vanquished and giving his successors a mandate they shouldn't rightly possess. Also, I kinda hope that four more years of Trump will show us that the power of Twitter is greater than the power of the Presidency and perhaps we will properly bring ourselves in line with the real power (re: social media) instead of the endless exhortations of piddling politicians. Social media allows the People to rule (for better and for worse). 

I don't dislike Joe Biden--that is, I seem to like him better than most Democrats do! But I don't have any great faith in his snake oil and the fact that he's a nice guy means nothing to me. More than any election of my lifetime this is a referendum on the deep bench of the parties in that I think it's extremely possible that both Trump and Biden are dead four years from now. So you're really betting on the supporting cast as much as the main players. (I've seen more of the Democrats, therefore I like them less)

I think the main player is Twitter. And the supporting cast is the People. Merely a matter of waiting for the People to realize how much social power they already have--and how little political power is worth in an age of tripled debt loads and a viral pandemic that we still haven't stopped. 

It's the economy, stupid. It always was, it likely always will be. What a gov't does is collect taxes from a citizenry and then provides services (or more accurately, the assurance of services, not the actual services). We can argue about the color of our skin or our hair or our shoes or our bandannas or our favorite politicians or commentators. Or we could acknowledge that the gov't doesn't do any of that stuff, that all of that shit is a product of political media and not a product of gov't itself. Instead of having the substantive public debate about infrastructure spending (and raison d'etre), politics encourages cultural mudslinging between the hippies and bluenoses, a story as old as off-Broadway theater. What a gov't does is collect taxes from a citizenry in promise of providing certain amenities to enhance the productivity of the populace.  

Economic productivity is the point of gov't service. It wants us to make more money (re: create more value) and what Covid-19 has done has tripled (at least!) our commitment to this way of life in the form of Fed promises to keep interest rates unnaturally low if need be and Congress's quest to spend more and more on "relief" (****). But who the POTUS is...has never mattered less to me than right now. More than ever the POTUS is a channel I can change whenever I like. 

(*) There are no "Trumpists". This is something that Left wingers say because they need icons, they need cult of personality to sway their passions. Conservatives do not. Liberals need a movement, conservatives do not. Liberals have things they want done, conservatives have things they don't want done. The Left needs personalities and acolytes, the Right does not need any of that stuff. The Right basically wants nothing and nothing doesn't require any activity, any movement, any anything. The Left needs movements and it thinks in terms of movements because as a natural minority, it needs a swirl of passions to create enough volatility for them to find success; the Right needs nothing at all, wants nothing at all and will live with nothing at all if that is what is offered. The "Trumpists" like Trump for his ability make Leftists lose their minds...and nothing else. As long as Leftists gladly lose their minds over Trump, he is dangerous to them but as soon as the Left figures out to ignore him....Trump will be gone.  *poof*

(**)  For the federal gov't as a whole 2020 will simply be an anomalous year in taxation income. Nothing more. It won't even be a significant blip in terms of population. Yet another reason why expecting the federal gov't to do...anything...is unrealistic. It's too fuckin' big to notice your piddly problems. (200,000 dead is a 'piddly problem', you ask? Yes. To a gov't that was here when you were born and will be here when you die, 200,000 dead means nothing. Waiting for it to solve your problems is like waiting for the sky to give you rain: it'll do so when it god damn feels like and not until)

(***) A weird counterfactual on the nature of power to ponder: Personally I think Biden could've/would've beaten Trump in 2016. I think he had a better chance to hold together Obama voters than Hillary Clinton did. I think Biden could've peeled away some of the white voters that went to Trump, whereas Hillary thought her advantage among women and African-Americans was enough. Okay. Now think of it this way: if Biden had won in 2016, he would likely be looking pretty good going into 2020, and what if Hillary had stayed Secretary of State? What if Hillary had seen the State Dept as her fortress and dug in?  She stays all 8 years under Obama and then potentially has another 8 years under Biden...what could a single individual accomplish in 16 years of running the State Dept? She could've had a major effect on USA's foreign policy leading into the entire 21st century. Instead "power" meant running for President, even though the coalition wasn't actually there and she bungled all forward progress for her party. What is political power? Does 16 years in the State Dept equal 8 years in the White House? Can owning the State Dept have a wider, deeper effect than just being another ol' POTUS?

(****) I'd like to leave off with something like good news...here's my best shot at it. I've longed believed that the next great global economic downturn would pull countries down together in such a way that the subsequent economic boom would be of astronomical proportions. The 2007-8 crisis wasn't uniform enough worldwide to tug down on all economies in a similar way. But Covid-19 is. The entire global economy is getting pulled like a sheet and when it straightens back out, it'll grow and grow and grow like a fuckin' beanstalk....at least, I hope it does because the alternative is not worth pondering (think Weimar Germany but with fewer night clubs). The spring 2020 moves of the Fed and Congress will either snap the American economy in half or it'll be the catalyst of the next giant leap of the global economy. I'm betting on growth--because the other side is not at all appetizing. 2021 will suck, it might suck real bad. But think about it: by 2022 USA, China, Europe, Russia, the Arab World, India, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Latin America and everyone else that I left out will all be on economic upswings that will swell like no other economic surge ever in history. I'm talking decades of worldwide growth. Or that's the hope anyway. I've been waiting for it and I think this is it. 

The Protests: Where Do We Go from Here?

On May 25, 2020, a man named George Floyd died of asphyxiation while being sat upon by a Minneapolis police officer. (*) The death of Floyd was video taped and as the horrific images washed around the internet, public outrage bubbled over into a series of protests first in Minneapolis (where the officer's precinct was burned to the ground, along with an unfinished housing project) and then around the country and even around the world.

The protests in some cases have been perfectly peaceful, in other cases there has been violence, confrontation and looting. I thought many of the cops were particularly aggressive exacerbating the confrontations but video images are never as complete as you'd like to think, so I won't go too far down that alley except to suggest that the images of looting and destruction aren't perhaps as obvious as they first appear either. At any rate, whatever your political persuasion, there is plenty of video evidence of....whatever you wanna see.

People say 'this time is different' but I'm old enough now to have heard that phrase a million trillion times and I gotta say, most of this doesn't look all that different to me. What happened to George Floyd happens routinely in America (and everywhere else, for what it's worth) and the reaction to his death does, too. This is hardly the first batch of protests I've seen and generally they fizzle out because people never really understood what they were protesting to begin with. Crowds are motivated by large abstract causes often times based around a single event or image or concept, but as time wears on the abstractions and the imagery fall away from each other and no one can quite articulate what they ever felt. As the paradigms get tangled, the problems and the solutions overlap in a way that isn't clear and could even become unproductive, reinforcing the tangle rather than loosening it.

The wrinkle in this current situation is Covid-19. Ironically the thing we obsessed over for three months and then discarded without a second thought is the real agent of change coming in the form of economic dislocations which haven't taken shape yet. The changes are coming--and don't be fooled by the recent market rally, that is not a sign of recovery but a sign of 'irrational exuberance'. We won't really get the full effect until the fall and then probably into next spring. The fact that this is an election year makes the turmoil even more confusing and the outcome even harder to see coming. (**)

I'm relatively optimistic. There's still enough time before the election that the energy could dissipate, but I suspect...well....this time is different. (Oh shit, I kinda walked right into that) The idea that protests in the street or even real widespread reform are going to end racism....well, no, that's not a function of marches in the street. But it could lead to reforming police departments across the country which would be a great outcome. Would it end violence against black citizens? No...uh....no. Racism and police departments are not synonymous, one does not imply the other, reforming one does not necessarily reform the other. So while race in this paradigm is, I think, a canard, it could still be a useful one.

The difference this time is I'm hearing the correct rhetoric--which ironically almost never happens!--and the energy underneath all of this seems genuine enough that perhaps this could lead to worthwhile change. A few things in the air I'd love to see happen:

1) Outlaw police unions. Absolutely! They should never have been allowed to exist to begin with! The only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples--the good apples don't need unions. (***).

2) Outlaw no-knock raids. If any police force ever does anything like this they better be prepared to walk into court with a wealth of irrefutable evidence that violence or danger to the public was imminent. And they better bring all their body camera footage. (The FBI could still use this technique and while I don't trust the FBI to be perfect and I do trust them to get the fucking address correct!)

3) Reform qualified immunity. This one is a little tougher to pull off because the State has to maintain a monopoly of force, thus its agents can't be truly independent--indeed, you don't want them to be, you want the State to control them and take the blame when they fuck up. Okay. But their agents (re: cops) can still be held to judicial standard in keeping with the sensitivity of their positions. I heard one suggestion that cops should be forced to own malpractice insurance like doctors: I don't think this is realistic to the position of law enforcers as it would give the cops the right to not do their jobs ('Oh, I don't like that neighborhood, I don't care if dispatch wants me to go, I'll pass'). The cops are cops, they're not normal citizens. Making them truly independent is not in keeping with what a police force is: it is a representation of the State, backed by the State, and controlled by the State. Losing that would lose all shape to what police protection actually is.

4) End asset forfeiture. I'm thinking mostly of War on Drugs type bull shit here. Seizing the assets of people accused--not convicted, ACCUSED!--is pure theft (or as Libertarians call it: taxation without representation). Armed goons from the State taking your stuff should never have been the norm.

5) Body cameras. This is a bit of double-edged sword in that if a cop shows video footage of you committing a crime in court, well, you're done, pal. The public defender ain't gonna help you out. And, again, video footage is not always the easiest to interpret. But the cops need to understand that body cameras protect them! Cops need to see body cameras as a means of establishing their credibility and warding off liability. The Cops need to be constantly proving that they are correctly administering their duties and cameras (and other monitoring systems) are the way to do it.

6) More civilian oversight boards. Okay, protesters, this one's on you: you've shown that you're capable every few years of marching in the streets to demand someone else solve your problems, are you ready to show up every Monday morning for a volunteer job of mediating between cops and criminals? Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually get your hands dirty doing the civic work. And, that's right, for little or no money. Do you love your community enough to do this? Because no one else is going to do it--this is not something you slough off on a gov't agency. Civilian oversight is the heart of any worthwhile change we're going to see. (****)

7) How about civilian parole boards that work like jury duty? I imagine a system where each potential parolee has an advocate to make the positive case and an advocate to make the negative case and a civilian panel to 'yea' or 'nay' every one up for parole. This already happens somewhat but the process could cast a wider net and lure more civilians in, which would deepen our understanding of who the real dangerous criminals are and who is ready for another chance at freedom. Again, if the civilians want control, they have to step up and be responsible for these things--and until they do they are at the mercy of politicians and their mouthpieces characterizing the agenda.

8) Keep going on prison reform. It seems to me we should be giving prisoners every opportunity to get out of jail. And, well, really what I'm suggesting here is further punishing the ones that neglect these opportunities. I'm not in favor of getting rid of prisons, I wholeheartedly believe that there are human beings that are too violent to be around other people. But my gut is that prisons contain vastly more than just those violent offenders and that the rest are in danger of becoming worse rather than better. Some sort of testing or something could be used to separate the un-reformable people from those that truly want to return to the outside world.

9) More home incarceration and monitoring. I suspect this is the way of the future regardless of the current unrest because this is purely a function of technology. It will be cheaper and easier for everyone involved if most criminals are confined to their homes and monitored remotely (this still would not apply to violent offenders, but most everyone else doesn't really need to go to prison). The downside of this is that judges could become trigger happy if they feel like there's no cost to incarcerating people, they may toss out sentences like candy and we could end up with a massive amount of citizens basically in quarantine and with a long record of petty bullshit. 

10) I'm down with de-funding various police departments. It should be noted here that 'de-funding' doesn't mean getting rid of police departments, rather it means reforming or reconstituting them, which in some locations is probably long over due. But in other locations that may not be useful at all. All this policing stuff is extremely local, so thinking of this as a blanket reform is probably not realistic. Also this is probably the kind of concept that won't find much purchase at first but may continue to percolate for the next few decades, this could become a slow motion reform movement where some communities see it as a salvation and others see it as unnecessary.  

11) I don't really know how to go about reforming this but I think the problem in the courts over the last 40-50 years is plea bargaining. First time offenders are expected to plead guilty and take the punishment rather than arguing their case on its merits. The effect of this over time is devastating: our judicial system is built on precedents and if the precedent is the accused is supposed to accept guilt without a proper defense then no one is doing their jobs. Prosecutors, defenders, judges and juries become agents of paperwork instead of actually building a judicial infrastructure--which is the whole point of that third branch of gov't. This is incredibly slanted against the poor--blacks, especially--who basically abrogate their own defense because that's what they're told to do rather than fighting for justice. This is why we have overcrowded prisons and this is why way too many people are getting serious time (or other ramifications) for mostly petty nonsense that the system shouldn't even worry about. (*****)

12) More cops with less guns. The pandemic had the glimmers of where local police departments should allow themselves to go: more community involvement with the elderly, the infirm, and others that are at the margins of society. Police departments should seek to be proactive in reaching into their communities in a way above and beyond simply apprehending criminals. Local police could be at the vanguard of coordinating civic participation in a way that is not directed at 'bad apple' police officers and doesn't require any guns. When you get into a car accident and you need an officer of the law to fill out the proper legal paperwork, you don't need that guy to have a gun on his hip--how does that help anything? The fact that the police feel the need to show off their deadly force as a means of earning the respect of the community is precisely what the community fucking hates about them! Yes, when guns are the only answer for enforcing the law, that needs to come from agents of the State. But until that force is required, that force needn't be on display.

People suggest that changing the composition of city and police department leadership is crucial and in certain cases I suppose that's true. But that's a largely political observation that I don't have much knowledge of since each police district is going to be distinct. Having more black mayors, for example, is fine with me but I seriously doubt that will change much on its own and since the necessity for these changes is entirely local, just voting for (fill in the stupid partisan bullshit you believe in) across the nation doesn't strike me as of any use at all. I'm fine with change but those changes are local, will be local and must be determined locally, so suggesting that this is necessary everywhere--and will be effective everywhere--is just empty rhetoric.

In a contemporary political sense, I would suggest ending the protests immediately but keeping the peaceful marches going periodically right up to election day. The key is to keep the spirit of the George Floyd protests alive while keeping the chaos to a minimum without being overtly political. When you insert politics you also insert the equal and opposite politics, and now you've got a soup of nonsense rather than a coherent message. The politics will handle itself and if the protests lose their shape, then that's when it becomes a detriment rather than a boon to one's political wants and needs. And I think seeing celebrities and other public intellectual types keeping that fervor alive is better than politicians positioning themselves in relation to it.

As for the election in November, well, I don't see it as nearly as important as most commentators simply because these are city/county/state issues more than national ones. Blaming/crediting the president (or the president wannbe) is just missing the point that the White House doesn't really have much contact with local police forces. But whoever you're voting for, keeping these protests going is probably necessary. 

(*) On March 13, 2020 (the day the Covid-19 lock down began if memory serves), Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed by Louisville police officers during the course of a no-knock raid seeking a drug dealer; police subsequently admitted they had the wrong address. To my mind this is an even more egregious offense but as there is no video evidence (*ahem* that we know of) this hasn't had quite the same impact on the recent protests.

(**) I think it's a bit weird that the Flu Pandemic of 1919 killed huge numbers of people worldwide and affected huge numbers more...and is virtually invisible in the literature of the time. Movies don't mention it, the theater and music of the time don't dwell on it, nor does the poetry or the politics. Just because it's effect is massive does not mean history will properly record it or culture will hold on to it. Indeed, how will the current pandemic appear in the next decade's worth of books, movies and music?

(***) Ditto with teachers unions, they should be next on the chopping block. Let me repeat: the only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples. Or didn't you realize that schools are every bit as racist, self-serving, and ineffective as the police?

(****) Combine this with a 25-30 hour work week and...are you getting more interested? With more and more people working from home cutting down on travel time...this sweetening the deal for you? More gig economy jobs where you set your own hours...ready to give more of that extra time to your community? This is where the nature of work is going which will leave a lot more time for volunteering and other civic participation--and I don't mean marching the streets! I mean actually doing stuff.

(*****) The recent obsession with the 13th amendment, for example, is totally lost on me. The prisons are not the meaningful part of the justice process, they are the last stop of it. That's not the problem--the problem is the first day in court. If you bungle that, you're in trouble. Most of the 13th amendment reexamination seemingly revolves around private (or for-profit) prisons, but again, that isn't the problem at all--and focusing on that is a really unfortunate waste of time. I don't pretend to know how private prisons work but it seems to me that gov't has monopsony power meaning the prison company has no market power whatsoever in the relationship (except the gov'ts naturally move very slow and are at the mercy of sudden changes). The relative ownership of the facility is irrelevant. If the gov't actually ran its own prisons does that somehow guarantee better treatment? That was never true in the past, don't know why it would be in the future. If the prison company was a joint stock company and all the stock was owned by black people, would that make a difference in the life of black prisoners? No, not necessarily. Was life better for black people in America before the advent of private prisons? No. You don't end up in prison because prisons exist, you end up in prison because your lawyer didn't get the job done. And plea bargaining is another way of saying your lawyer didn't get it done. You need to fight the battle in the court, fighting it in the prison is too late. (Incidentally as an side to this footnote: I'm not opposed to prisoners being allowed to work inside of prison if they are fairly compensated, but they should not be forced to work; I believe each citizen's surplus value is their god-given possession until they die, something the gov't should nurture rather than capture)