Recommended: What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Distinguished Rutgers historian Jackson Lears has a good piece in the January London Review of Books entitled What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking. As he points out, liberals and the liberal media are still convinced  Russia somehow caused the election of Donald Trump, despite the fact that no evidence has yet emerged to support this claim. And he laments, as I do, that this narrative apparently has diverted liberals from the necessary self-examination as to why they really lost the election.

More than that, many liberals are actively hostile to any attempt to have a reasoned, evidence-based  discussion about this issue. It is part of the remarkably illiberal form of liberalism that has emerged recently, which includes shouting down campus speakers they don't agree with, and demonizing anyone who dares to question the reigning liberal orthodoxy.  This certainly isn't the liberalism I believe in.

Recommended: Anatomy of Failure

From the preface to Harlam Ullman's new book Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts:

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1991, remarkably, the United States has been at war or engaged in significant military conflicts and interventions for over two-thirds of the intervening years. . . . .Wars and conflicts in Iraq in 1991; Somalia, 1992-93; the global war of terror, and Afghanistan, 2001-present; Iraq, 2003-present; and Syria and Yemen since 2006 represent a total of nineteen of the past twenty-six years in which the nation's armed forces have been engaged in combat! . . . The only outright victory in the past six decades was the first Iraq War in 1991

Ulman sets out to examine why we have failed so consistently in our military adventures. This is an important book, not only to understand why we have failed so consistently in the past, but to understand what must be done to prepare the nation for the uncertain and highly dangerous future we face. Certainly the inexperience of our recent presidents in both parties (with the possible exception of the first President Bush) is a factor, as is the outdated Washington groupthink of the advisors they had and still have to draw on. But Ullman argues for a more comprehensive approach to building national strategy, based on a better understanding of our opponents and a more aggressive use of red teams to question and test the assumptions underlying our decisions to go to use military force.

A year of the Trump administration

As we come to the end of 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, what have we learned?

Well, clearly Trump himself is often his own worst enemy. He often undercuts his own efforts with contradictory and ill-timed Twitter postings.  On the other hand his Twitter postings do give him a direct line to the 34 million followers of his Twitter account, most of them probably his solid base, and most of them probably largely in agreement with his opinions. On balance I think his Twitter postings probably help him more than they hurt him, despite the sneering opinions of the media talking heads, because they let him bypass the largely anti-Trump spin that the mainstream media give almost anything he says or does.

In terms of the economy, which is probably the single most important factor in the upcoming midterm elections, the numbers look good. Blue collar wages are up in 2017 by between 3% and 4%, depending on the sector.  US third quarter 2017 growth is up to 3.3%, much better than the anemic 1.5-2% growth over the Obama years. Unemployment has dropped to 4%, the lowest level in many years. Companies are planning to repatriate trillions of profit dollars parked overseas, and investment is up significantly. This may or may not be due to anything this administration has done, but voters will give Trump and the GOP the credit for it anyway.

And they managed to pass the tax bill which will actually reduce taxes for most taxpayers next year, despite the rather hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi that this is the end of the world. It has some reasonable things in it, like capping the state tax deductions and the mortgage interest deductions at middle class levels, and reducing the corporate tax rate to something in line with the rest of the world. Of course actually we really need to increase taxes to cover our massive annual federal deficit, but neither party is going to do that in today’s Washington.

There is of course a predictable amount of hand-wringing about Trump's reduction in the staffing of agencies like the State Department and the EPA. But realistically, with a half-trillion dollar a year federal deficit, these departments - and all other federal departments - need to be trimmed in size. Sure the things they do may be desirable, perhaps even important, but if the taxpayers aren't willing to pay enough taxes to support their size, then their size needs to be reduced. 

In foreign affairs, the Trump administration has managed to get China more actively involved in restraining North Korea’s nuclear and missile advances, which is more that Obama managed to do. The last round of UN sanctions was supported by both Russia and China, which shows some serious backroom negotiating with them, again more than Obama ever managed to do. Of course the sanctions may still not work – Kim has clearly decided that nuclear weapons are the only way to ensure the survival of his brutal regime.

The party in power typically loses seats in the midterm election, so Trump may lose control of the House in the midterms, and perhaps even the Senate. But the constant claims by Democrats that a “wave” is building seem to me based more on wishful thinking than on reality. Democrats still have no new and appealing messages or programs to sell voters, they are still split down the middle between the extreme populists (Sanders, Warren, etc) and the more moderate Democrats, they are still led by increasingly out-of-touch old guard leaders (Pelosi, Hoyer, etc), and they still haven’t gotten real about their demographic problems, or even about why they lost the 2016 election.. 

In fact it seems to me Democrats are still largely clueless. They are so focused on being part of the “resistance” that they have passed up several opportunities – most recently with the tax bill – to offer some bipartisan support in exchange for protecting some of their own high priority issues. Since they publicly announce that they will oppose anything the Republicans propose (including, by the way, some things that they supported under Obama), there is no incentive for Republicans in Congress to try to deal with them. As a result, since everyone knows they will reflexively oppose anything proposed,  they get shut out of any negotiations over bills, which is poor strategy on their part. They would be far smarter to offer potential Democratic votes in exchange for some concessions on the issues that matter to them. But they are being driven by ideology now, rather than pragmatic political tactics, so they are losing.

With respect to the endless investigations of Trump collusion with Russia in the election, I note that to date no actual evidence has yet surfaced, despite the increasingly expensive Muller investigation. But a good deal of evidence of improper activities in the FBI, in the intelligence community, in the Obama administration, and in the Clinton campaign has emerged and continues to emerge daily.  Democrats may yet come to regret opening this can of worms. It may end up hurting them more than it hurts Trump.

So on balance I would say the Trump administration has thus far not been as bad as one might have feared (nor as good as Trump promised), and has even done a few good things here and there. But the Democratic party, and the elite liberal world in general, is still in terrible shape, seemingly having learned nothing from this recent defeat. And that is worrying.

Recommended: A World in Disarray

Richard Haas is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a onetime Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, among other high profile assignments. His new book A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order is very, very good. He reviews the emergence of the world order - World Order 1.0 -  that has prevailed roughly since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and which is now beginning to break down, and he speculates, in the latter part of this book, on what a new world order - World Order 2.0 - might look like, and what American foreign policy ought to be to help arrive at a workable new world order.

In my previous post I suggested that America (and indeed, the whole world) faced a tsunami of exceedingly difficult problems.  One of the components of this presumed tsunami is the disruption of the world order, so this book is a good follow-on to Luce's book recommend above.  A dispassionate (ie- nonpartisan) view of American foreign policy in recent administrations, both Republican and Democratic, would suggest that those administrations (ie. presidents and the policy advisors who shape their policies and views) have been largely out of their depth, wasting inordinate amounts of money and lives and American influence and soft power on fruitless military adventures in the Middle East. The second Bush administration got us into the Middle Eastern quagmire, the Obama administration fumbled badly and naively both the so-called "Russian reset" and the rise of ISIS, and the current Trump administration thus far seems no better, and perhaps worse.

This is a book well worth reading for those who care about our foreign policy.

Recommended: The Retreat of Western Liberalism

I woke up this morning thinking about the approach of a tsunami as a metaphor for America today. The public, beguiled by the media and the twittersphere, is fascinated with the glittering trash and diverting scandals revealed in the newly uncovered beach (Trump, Brexit, the Middle East wars, identity issues, Russian collusion in the election, FBI collusion in the election, Trump again…..), and apparently completely oblivious of the tsunami that caused the beach to be uncovered in the first place and is about to overtake them.

What is this tsunami? It is a combination of things.  America now has a national debt of over $20 trillion, which ought to be frightening enough, but we have unfunded future pension obligations in excess of $127 TRILLION, far more than there is any possible hope of ever paying. So if we think today’s political world is upset, think of what will happen politically, and to the economy, when there is suddenly no more money to pay the pensions of tens or hundreds of millions of retired people!

Then there is the rise of China and India as world powerhouses currently set to eclipse America both economically and politically. That will certainly upset the smug Washington groupthink. And then there is the rise of a remarkably illiberal form of liberalism in America, which segregates us rather than unites us, which extols the virtues of presumed victimhood, which largely rejects the cultural and religious community-focused ethos that formed this nation in favor of a more self-centered individualism, and which has apparently forgotten John Kennedy’s wise inaugural words “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” And the growing and increasingly restive underclass of American workers who are being left behind as income inequality grows, and who, as this last election showed, can seriously upset the political world.

Go is an exceedingly complex game, much more complex than chess. It was minor news that Google’s AI program AlphaGo defeated Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie. What ought to have received more attention than it did was a subsequent story. AlphaGo was reset to only know the basic rules of Go, and then it played itself millions of games a day for only three days, at the end of which it was more powerful than the version that beat grandsmaster Ke Jie, had evolved, from scratch, most of the strategies that human players evolved slowly over 2000 years, and several new ones no human has thought of yet. Think about the implications of that for your job in the future.  And China has committed to be the world leader in this field, and put serious resources and education behind that commitment. Think of the implications of that for America in the future.

There are perhaps another dozen or so trends like this that may significantly affect the future. It is hard to predict exactly how it will all play out because from this point, while still in the middle of it, it is hard to see how much effect each trend will contribute or what unexpected side effects will emerge (and there will be unexpected side effects). But it is certainly clear that the total effect will be a massive disruption of American life, and American politics, as we know it now.

All of which is leading up to the recommendation of Edward Luce’s new book The Retreat of Western Liberalsim. This will not be a comfortable book to read, but it is important if one is trying to understand, and survive, the deeper forces – the tsunamis – that are building. Luce is a journalist and columnist for the Financial Times, and author in 2012 of Time to Start Thinking, a book which anticipated exactly the sort of politics of resentment that drove Brexit and the Trump election. He is worth listening to.

The tax “re-arrangement”

It may be a bit premature to talk about the pending tax bill, because it certainly isn’t a done deal yet. The House and Senate need to negotiate the differences in their bills, and there are a few issues that may yet sink the whole thing considering the disunity among the Republicans. But my guess is that it will pass, if only because the Republicans need SOMETHING to point to out of this unproductive Congressional session.

But it is a bit much to call it “tax reform”. “Tax re-arrangement” (as in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic) might be a more accurate term. Yes, corporate taxes will drop, not that that makes much differences to huge corporations like Apple or GE who have long ago figured out tax dodges so that they pay little or no taxes. (Apple apparently has managed to pay as little as 0.008% on some of the profits it stashed in Ireland). Yes, there will be a modest cut for the middle class, and more for the wealthier, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the wealthy pay most of the tax in the nation, so mathematically any tax cut helps them more.

But that is hardly reform. There are still 75,000+ pages of special interest deductions, exemptions and loopholes in the IRS regulations, and as near as I can tell this tax bill does nothing about them. So it is hardly “reform”.

And of course, as popular as tax cuts are, in truth the nation needs a big tax increase, not a cut. The federal deficit this year is estimated to be $666 BILILON – yes BILLION.  That is how much new money we borrowed in 2017 to add to the $20+ TRILLION – yes TRILLION, thousands of BILLIONS – the US already owes.

To put that $666 BILLION in perspective, in 2016 the entire non-defense discretionary spending – everything the government spent to run all its departments and agencies and discretionary programs – was $600 BILLION.  And everything we spent on defense was $585 BILLION.

Democrats of course are outraged (they seem to be permanently outraged these days – it’s getting tiresome) that it may add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. But somehow Obama’s adding $10 trillion to the deficit over his eight years seems never to have bothered them. Ah well, hypocrisy is never far away in Washington politics, in either political party.

The Trump announcement about Israel

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is just breathtaking. The reaction to Trump’s announcement that the US (eventually, not now) will move its embassy to Jerusalem is a case in point. Arab leaders are predictably voicing dramatic disapproval, but I doubt they will do much more than that because frankly they don’t really care much about the Palestinian situation except as a useful lever now and then to divert their public from their own domestic problems. Anyway, they are far more worried right now about ISIS-like jihadist movements and Iran’s growing influence in the region, and are highly unlikely to seriously offend the US when they depend heavily on us for support in their quest to restrain the Iranian and ISIS threats.

Nor are Arab leaders (outside of Iran and its supporters, like Russia) likely to provoke Israel at a time when they have discovered a common enemy (Iran) and have begun behind the scenes to work together to share intelligence and perhaps more. Not that they will admit this to their strongly anti-Israel populations, but they are pragmatists. It is an Arab saying after all, that the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend (for the moment, at least)”

The Palestinians and their various jihadist support groups, like Hezbollah, of course will try to stir up trouble and violence against Israel (why? Israel didn’t make the announcement, the US did.) in a futile effort to be relevant again, but they aren’t relevant.

European leaders and UN officials will issue sanctimonious one-sided proclamations demonstrating once again that European anti-Semitism is far from dead, or even buried very far below the surface. Never mind that it was the virulent anti-Semitism of Germany and its enthusiastic supporters in occupied nations like France that produced the Holocaust in the first place. Absent that virulent anti-Semitism much of the population of Israel would probably be living happily in the European nations their parents fled, and that their families enjoyed before the death camps.

The US foreign policy experts all claim to be dismayed that this will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What peace process?  One president and Secretary of State after another has tried fruitlessly, and often fairly naively, to bring peace to these two, and we are no further along than we were 40 years ago.  Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are anywhere near ready to negotiate for a true settlement, and everyone who understands the region knows it. The Palestinians have been and still are governed (to the extent they are governed at all) by fairly ruthless, yet fairly incompetent leaders who can’t give up the impossible dream of exterminating Israel totally, and who can’t even get together themselves (hence Hamas in the Gaza Strip vs Fatah in the West Bank).  The Israeli government depends on coalitions which always include some ultra-orthodox parties who will never agree to give up an inch of what they consider their true homeland. So again, what peace process? That annual sham US leaders go through to pretend they really care?

It is perfectly obvious to all that Jerusalem is in fact the capital of Israel, and has been for a long time. All branches of the Israeli government are located in Jerusalem, including the Knesset the residences of the Prime Minister and President, and the Supreme Court. Of what use then is the longstanding fiction that it isn’t?  And in fact it should be the capital.  It is the central city of the Jewish people. Jews would no more stand for it to be divided than the Arab world would stand for Mecca, the central city of Islam, being divided. 

Democrats profess to be outraged, yet it was their own President Clinton who signed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which ordered the embassy moved to Jerusalem, though he issued waivers to keep the act abeyant.  It was President Barack Obama himself who declared in a 2008 campaign speech, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”  Apparently it’s OK for Democratic presidents to make campaign promises about Israel they don’t keep, but if a Republican president, and especially Donald Trump, actually does what he promised to do on the campaign trail, and follows a law actually passed by a Democratic President, it is outrageous.

As I say, the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is sometimes breathtaking. I worry about a lot of what Trump does, but this seems like a perfectly sensible and long overdue action, perhaps finally shaking up the longstanding, unproductive, and largely anti-Semitic world foreign policy consensus to maintain a fiction about Israel, a fiction none of them would tolerate for a moment about their own nations.

Recommended: I’m A Liberal, And I Agree With Sean Hannity That American Journalism Is Dead

The Federalist has a piece by Saritha Prabhu, a part time freelance writer for the Nashville Tennessean, that sums up quite well what I have been saying about media bias. The piece is entitled I’m A Liberal, And I Agree With Sean Hannity That American Journalism Is Dead.

Media bias isn't new, and in fact it has been around all along, on both the left and the right. One can read history and find outright media bias back in the 1890's newspapers. But what is relatively new is (a) the almost complete dominance of mainstream print and TV media by the left, and (b) reporters and editors dropping any pretense of being even-handed, and becoming outright political activists, almost entirely for the left. Reporters used to at least make a pretense of being even-handed and objective, and if they didn't their editors would rewrite the story to make if look less partisan, as a matter of protecting the reputation of the newspaper or TV news show.. That standard seems to have gone by the wayside in this election. 

Of course, as Prabhu points out, if you agree with the bias it doesn't look like bias at all. So that we have this great liberal echo chamber running, in which reporters and Op Ed writers tell liberal readers what they want to hear and what they want to believe, and Democrats continue living in never-never land rather than facing up to their very real electoral problems and trying to figure out how to recover the voting base they lost in this last election.

Frankly, I'm disgusted by the whole thing. This administration has real problems, and needs an unbiased media to hold it to account (and so does the last administration, by the way). But the mainstream media has gone so far off the rails that it is thoroughly ineffective at this task. The left is deceived by the media, and the right no longer trusts it, so what is the point of it?

Recommended: The Tragedy of Liberalism

There is a startling perspective in a piece by Partick Deneen in the Fall 2017 issue of the Hedgehog Review, entitled The Tragedy of Liberalism. Deneen is an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame University, and author of several good books, including Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontent, and Democratic Faith.

I won't try to summarize this article , which is long and scholarly with lots of subtle points. But I strongly recommend it, as it gives an entirely new perspective to the current conservative-liberal battles.