The Democratic Party

I have mentioned before that I think it is essential for the American political process to have two healthy, viable political parties so that each can keep the excesses of the other in check. The last election showed that the Democratic party had become seriously dysfunctional, controlling the smallest number of governorships and state legislatures across the country since the 1920s, and losing both the House and the Senate, as well as the Presidency.

Unfortunately nothing seems to have improved since then. Democrats keep hoping for a “blue wave” to emerge somehow in the midterm elections to win them back control of Congress, but there is little evidence thus far of that happening. Meanwhile they have continued to make serious tactical mistakes that come back to bite them. They are almost powerless to block the appointment of a second conservative Supreme Court judge to replace the retiring Justice Kennedy, largely because of tactical mistakes they made in opposing the first nominee, now Justice Gorsuch, and in Harry Reid’s unwise decision years ago to kill the filibuster for judicial nominations. And the left-wing activists uncivilly haranguing administration figures in restaurants and theaters and on TV is just increasing the red state voter turnout.

The three current most serious tactical mistakes are the following:

1. Democrats have no persuasive program to offer in the upcoming elections. We all know what Trump is offering, whether we agree with it or not. Who has any idea what the Democrats are offering?  How long has it been since you have heard a new proposal from Democrats? Just being “against Trump” is not a program, nor is it enough to win elections.  

2. Neither the liberal media nor Democratic politicians have caught on yet that Trump is playing them with his outrageous Twitter comments. Like waving a red cape at a bull, they charge blindly and futilely at each new comment, glorying in their outrage and supposed moral superiority, but accomplishing nothing. Meanwhile, Trump eats up the free media coverage and dominates the news cycles, just as he did in the primaries and during the election

3. They are still making the fatal mistake of underrating Trump, just as they did during the election. They love to call him an idiot, which makes them feel superior but blinds them to the strengths he has and that they need to overcome. Love him or hate him, Trump is no idiot; in fact he is extraordinarily good at reading the sentiments and concerns of his voter base, and at political persuasion. One would think that the last election would have taught Democrats that lesson, but there is an arrogance in the left that seems to keep them from seeing the obvious sometimes.  

My own reading of the situation is that the Democrats will continue to be in trouble until and unless they can get some young new Millennial blood into their upper ranks. They are a party being led by tired old politicians with tired old programs and tired old ideas about how to win votes. But those tired old politicians, Nancy Pelosi foremost among them, seem to be determined to hold power until it is pried from their cold dead fingers.

That is too bad. We badly need a vital and healthy liberal party to keep the nation in balance, and the current Democratic Party isn’t cutting it

Supreme Court ruling on Travel ban

The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration's travel ban in a 5-4 decision. The media and political reactions have been predictably partisan, though it is clear some of the journalists and politicians haven’t actually read the opinions.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Roberts, and is a closely reasoned 39 page (and I think correct) argument, with short concurring opinions by Justices Kennedy and Thomas. Justice Sotomayor wrote an impassioned and emotional dissent (which she read from the bench) which Justice Ginsberg joined, and Justice Breyer wrote a more scholarly dissent which Justice Kagen joined. All of these can be found in their entirety here.

I think it is a correct decision because the relevant section of the law, Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act reads:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by

proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

The wording is absolutely unambiguous. It provides for no consideration of the President’s motives or his thought process. It simply says that he can use his judgement in making the decision, and so the court was correct to overrule the lower court judges, who based their rulings on presumptions about Trump’s motives or biases. In fact I seriously doubt that Trump actually has any personal animosity toward Muslims in general – it was just a useful political tool in the wake of 9/11 and the jihadists attacks around the world.

There can certainly be reasonable arguments about whether the policy was wise, and in fact Justice Roberts wrote “We express no view on the soundness of the policy”. But there is no question that is was legal, and it is not the function of the unelected judges of courts to decide whether polices are wise or not, just whether they are legal. It is Congress’s prerogative, with elected representatives, to decide if a policy is unwise, and to write laws to change or restrict that policy.

In that respect Justice Sotomayor's impassioned and emotional dissent is a little disappointing. It was unworthy of her as a Supreme Court Justice.  I certainly respect her passion for social justice, which she is free to express as a private individual, but it is inappropriate in the context of a judicial ruling, which should be based on the law, not on ones’ personal political or social leanings. Judges of course are human, and do have personal political and social leanings, but justice is supposed to be blind – they are supposed to put those personal preferences aside and rule on the text of the law. And Supreme Court justices are supposed to be a model for the rest of the system. That is the context in which I say that Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was disappointing. 

Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion was interesting. He calls into question the legality of district federal courts issuing universal rulings, that is, rulings that affect the entire country instead of just the district the court covers. Both the Hawaii court and the D.C. court used universal rulings to halt the administration’s implementation of the orders. I think Justice Thomas has a point. There appears to be no statutory authority for a district court to issue a universal ruling.

 

About illegal immigrants

There is, as usual, a great deal of emotional over-reaction and misinformation about the current Trump administration “zero tolerance” approach to illegal immigration – to people sneaking across our borders.  First of all, by law people can’t be just sent right back across the border – they need to appear before an immigration judge first. Second, on the basis of a 1997 federal court decision that strictly limits the government’s ability to keep children in immigration detention - demanded incidentally by liberals some years ago - children can’t be jailed with their parents.

So the administration can do two things – they can simply let illegal immigrants go free with their children (since the children can’t be detained), or they can detain the families together, which is prohibited by the court decision. If they let illegal immigrants go free, we essentially have no border controls at all. If they detain the families together they have violated the court order.

So liberals are outraged at the process of separating families. But what do they propose to replace this? It was liberals, after all, who objected originally to detaining children with their parents. And it is liberals, after all, who insist that illegal immigrants have due process before they are shipped back across the border.

I understand that for liberals, especially those suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome”, this is a wonderfully emotional issue to feed their endless outrage. But practically, what do they propose to do about people who sneak across our borders illegally with their children? Nothing? Germany tried that approach with their illegal immigrants, and it is breaking up the EU and may well sink Angela Merkels’s administration.

Illegal immigration is a serious issue, and a difficult one. Past administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have for the most part ignored the issue, which is why we are in the fix we are in today.  Liberal outrage at the moment is part of the problem, not part of the solution. If liberals have a better solution, they ought to propose it.

Recommended: Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter

Scott Adams, who is the author of the Dilbert cartoons among other things, won fame or notoriety (depending on your outlook) for predicting, beginning 18 or so months before the election, contrary to almost all other pollsters and political experts, that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination and that he would win the election. Adams was not a Trump supporter (nor was he a Clinton supporter), but he did perceive that Trump had extraordinary persuasion skills. Persuasion skills are a field Adams has studied for years, and coincidentally that he uses to make his Dilbert cartoons seem so universal.

This is a book in which Adams seeks to explain the persuasion techniques that Trump, and eventually Clinton as well, used in the campaign, and why Hillary’s mostly didn’t work and Trump’s mostly did. If you are emotionally committed to believing that humans are mostly rational, you won’t like this book. If you are emotionally committed to believing Trump is an idiot (and turned his father’s million dollar loan into 3.8 billion dollars just by luck, and beat both the Republican and the Democratic establishment to win the election just by luck), you won’t like this book. If, on the other hand, you would like to learn about the persuasion techniques that are being used on all of us every day by astute politicians, marketers, advertisers and salespeople, and that probably won Trump the election, this is a great place to start.

The Trump-Kim meeting

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met, and there are the usual recriminations and dire predictions from those Washington politicians and pundits who feel the desperate need to find something wrong with anything Trump does.  In fact, of course, this is just the opening gambit in what will no doubt be a long and complex negotiation over the coming years. Both sides made conciliatory moves that didn’t really cost them anything. Kim “destroyed” a nuclear test site that was already unusable after his last nuclear test apparently collapsed much of its underground infrastructure. Trump halted the annual joint US-Korean military exercises, which were in any case just posturing showpieces, and expensive ones at that, but didn’t  in any way reduce the strength of the joint US-Korean forces.  

Nothing really has happened yet. Kim hasn’t given up his nuclear weapons program and Trump hasn’t eased the sanctions one bit. But both sides got a propaganda coup for their bases, and certainly a dialogue has now started, which is better than war. I would expect Kim to drive a hard bargain, and I would expect Trump to drive just as hard a bargain. No doubt there will be further posturing ahead, with one or both sides walking away from the negotiations from time to time, just like hagglers in a Middle Eastern market (as Trump has already done once). And no doubt Washington insiders and the media will continue to “view with alarm” every step.

But in fact Trump has managed to do what his predecessors were unable or unwilling to do – bring Kim to the negotiating table. That is a laudable first step. Let’s see where that takes us.

Recommended: Worldmaking

David Milne’s 2015 book Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy is a historical review of American foreign policy organized around nine administration figures whose views have shaped our foreign policy since before World War I, beginning with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s views on sea power, and going through people such as Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama. Milne details the constant back-and-forth struggle between Wilsonian idealism, neoliberal interventionism and pragmatic realpolitic in America foreign policy, depending on which personalities are entering or leaving the political stage at any given point.

Besides giving wonderful portraits of the key players and how their upbringing shaped their views, Milne details the endless infighting within the various administrations as these players struggle for policy dominance and political leverage. It is remarkable how often deeply and passionately held views by these intelligent and highly educated people have turned out to be wrong – it ought to be a lesson in humility to all of us.  Statecraft is not a science, despite academics calling it “political science”; statecraft is a very human art, heavily dependent on skills in persuasion, in understanding opponent’s cultures and world views, in knowing history, and in negotiating. Milne is very good at helping the reader see how these skills succeed – or fail – with the people he discusses.

This is not a light read, but it is well written and well worthwhile in that it gives perspective to today’s leaders and today’s geopolitical issues. And part of that perspective is to realize again that the dismay with Trump's policies in some quarters is no worse than the dismay of some people for Woodrow Wilson's policies in his time, or Theodor Roosevelt's in his time, Ronald Reagan's in his time, or for that matter for Barak Obama's during his administration. There is a deep and schizophrenic division among Americans between our ideals and the realities of the world, and whichever happens to be the dominant policy at the moment always seems to lead opponents to expect the imminent end of the world. Perhaps as we mature as a culture this will eventually mellow into a more reasonable understanding of the cycles of history.

Is the UN ineffective?

An acquaintance, reading the last post, objected that the world has been relatively peaceful since the UN was formed after World War 2, and that, they argued, was due to the presence of the UN.

“Relatively” is a relative term. The US alone has been in 14 wars since World War 2. The world at large has been in many more (250+ by some estimates). Indeed, there are 63 wars of various sizes going on right now around the world. The US wars thus far are:

1950-1953 – Korean War (as part of a coalition)

1961 – Cuban invasion

1961-1973 – Vietnam War

1965 – Dominican Republic invasion

1982 – Lebanon (as part of a coalition)

1983 – Grenada invasion

1989 – Panama invasion

1991– Gulf War (as part of a coalition)

1993 – Somalia invasion

1994 – Haiti invasion

1994-1995 – Bosnia (as part of a coalition)

1999 – Kosovo (as part of a coalition)

2001-present – Afghanistan (as part of a coalition)

2003-present – Iraq (as part of a coalition)

I argued in my previous post that the UN has been relatively ineffective at preventing wars. I rest my case.

The lessons of history

I have been reading a lot of history lately, and a lot of geopolitical material. Some of these books I have already recommended; some will get recommended in future posts. But the essence that I have distilled from this study can be summed up in several points:

Wilsonian internationalism – the belief that somehow we can get nations to deal ethically and rationally and morally with one another and thus avoid war is still alive and well in the American political landscape, and it is still as unrealistic as it was in Woodrow Wilson’s day. Like all utopian visions, it would work if only humans would behave differently than humans actually behave. The UN is a case in point. It certainly gives a lot of bureaucrats from around the world (mostly drawn from the wealthy elites in their countries) a cushy well-paid job in New York, but looked at pragmatically in fact it doesn’t get much done. It has run a few relief efforts that were worthwhile, though at outlandish costs and with astounding inefficiency, but there is certainly no evidence that it has ever prevented a war.

Neoliberal interventionism, the philosophy that has led us to getting mired in endless Middle Eastern wars in the name of “spreading democracy” and “nation building”, as naïve a set of principles as one could imagine, has clearly failed, though its proponents don’t seem to be able to admit that. And beyond that, it is draining the resources of the nation and wasting lives. Nassim Taleb’s principle that it is immoral to make policy if one is insulated from the consequences – no skin in the game – certainly applies here. These interventions have resulted in massive civilian deaths and displacements, but  the Washington policy makers who instituted them can live their well-paid lives entirely unaffected  by the death and destruction they have brought about, and perhaps even largely ignorant of the effects of their policies.

In the end, the pragmatic “realpolitik” view – that nations each look out for themselves first and foremost, and that the politicians and rulers who lead these nations look out for their own self-interests first – seem to me to best fit the observed facts of history and the observed nature of human beings. This is certainly a Hobbesian view of the world as a continuous, and sometimes brutal, competition between nation-states, but it seem to me the most realistic and the most in accord with history.

Given that, I think that the US strategy that George Friedman argues we have been following for  about the last 100 years, even if our leaders weren’t always aware of it, is correct. Keep the nation militarily strong, keep the economy healthy and try to keep a balance of power elsewhere in the world so that no coalition of nations arises powerful enough to threaten us. By the luck of geography and history we have become an empire whether we like it or not (and whether we will admit it or not), and it won’t last forever. But with some care and a pragmatic foreign policy it may last at least another century or two.

Trump’s America-first approach makes sense in this regard, even if his execution is highly erratic and often based on incorrect facts. At least it makes more sense than Obama’s unrealistic Wilsonian approach (think, for example, of his attempted “Russian reset”) or Bush’s neoliberal interventionist approach. (think, for example of the Iraq “nation building” debacle).  It would be nice to have a less erratic leader than Trump, but at least he seems to understand that his job first and foremost is to look out for the health of America, and that is more than some of his recent predecessors seem to have understood.

The Future of War

Some years ago I recommended George and Meredith Friedman’s 1996 book The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World Dominance in the 21^st Century (see my book list in the sidebar under 1996). As I have been doing with other Friedman books lately I have gone back to re-read it, because Friedman is unusually perceptive and I get a great deal of new insights rereading his works.

I am struck again by Friedman’s description of the lifecycle of weapons systems, and in particular his definition of “senile” weapons. A “senile” weapons system is one that still does its intended job, but has grown wildly expensive to make survivable in the current battlefield.

Think, for example, of the bomber. The B52 bomber cost about $14.3 million each 1955, and we could afford to build 744 of them. The current replacement is the B-2 bomber, which carries a much smaller ordinance load (40,000 lbs vs 70,000 lbs), and flies slightly slower, and has a shorter range (6,897 miles vs 8,800 miles with full load) but is so stuffed with sophisticated equipment to help it survive in today’s battlespace that it costs $1.157 billion a plane, and we could only afford to build 21 of them.

Or think of manned fighter planes, whose pilots in evasion can manage at best a 9 g turn (9 gravities before they black out) and mach 1.6 speed (1.6 times the speed of sound), while some of the missiles they are trying to avoid can manage mach 5 and pull 100+ gs in turns.  

Or think of today’s aircraft carriers that still carry about the same number of aircraft as a World War II carrier, but now need a flotilla of five or six of expensive Aegis destroyers ($1.6 billion each) and one or two Virginia class attack submarines ($2.68 billion each) just to protect it. Note that this wildly expensive flotilla of defensive ships adds nothing to the carrier’s offensive power; they just exist to keep the carrier afloat.

Or think of tanks. The best American tank of WW2 was the M26 Pershing tank, at a little over $83,000 a copy and weighing about 40 tons. Today’s equivalent is the M1A2 Abrams tank, at about $6.2 million each, and weighing over 60 tons. Yet the M1A2 tank is essentially the same thing – a mobile artillery piece - that the M26 was.

We are still building aircraft carriers (at $13 billion a copy) even though today’s new intelligent ship-killer cruise missiles, at a few million each, can probably sink them or at least put them out of action, especially if a number are launched at once to saturate the defensive systems. We are proposing to build a new bomber (the B-21), even though the best current anti-air missiles can probably bring it down, and the next generation of missiles will certainly be able to. We are still building tanks, even though a relatively inexpensive anti-tank missile can destroy them. We are spending a fortune building new F-35 fighters that are still limited to 9 g turns because they still carry a human pilot.

Throughout history militaries have been slow to adapt to new technologies, and it seems to me that is what is happening now. Clearly intelligent, unmanned weapons are going to dominate the battlefield of the future. Clearly we as a nation – wealthy as we are – can’t afford to keep building increasingly expensive weapons systems that really don’t project that much more offensive power than their predecessors. Especially since we are already running a half-trillion dollar a year deficit.  It is worth rereading this Friedman book to get some clarity on this issue.