Recommended: Vox article

I find it interesting to watch the really hard Supreme Court cases, especially those in which two fundamental rights are in conflict. In recent years the conflict between anti-discrimination and religious beliefs has posed some really interesting and challenging problems, of which the Hobby Lobby case (can an employer be forced to offer birth control coverage to workers if they have religious objections to birth control?) and the Masterpiece Cake case (can an artist, a cake decorator, be forced to provide a same-sex-themed wedding cake if they have religious objections to same-sex marriage?) are examples. In both cases, the right not to be discriminated against is in opposition to the right to practice one’s religious beliefs, making really difficult and interesting case law.

Naturally conservatives and liberals complain reliably if the decision doesn’t go the way they want it to. Conservatives worried that the Supreme Court was too liberal and discriminated against religious beliefs, while liberals complain that the court is now too conservative and gives too much weight to religious beliefs. In fact I think the justices tend to work hard to find acceptable compromises in these difficult conflicts of interests.

In this regard, for those who might be interested in this, there is a good article this morning on the Vox site entitledThe fight over whether religion is a license to discriminate is back before the Supreme Court . Of course the title is biased toward the liberal view, since Vox is a liberal site, but the article does a very good job of detailing the history of such cases, and the logic behind the rulings.

Scalia (a conservative, at that) made a good point when he observed in a ruling "To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is ‘compelling, is permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’”. On the other hand, the Constitution attempts to protect every individual’s right to follow their religious beliefs. At the moment the issue is around discrimination against LGTBQ+ people, but the issue will probably eventually also grow up around some Muslim religious practices as well, where Sharia law comes in conflict with Anglo-Saxon common law

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Firing the Acting Director of National Intelligence

Watching the media fuss over President Trump’s firing of Acting Director of National Intelligence Adm. Joseph Maguire, and his replacement with Ambassador Richard Grenell, I am reminded of Henry Kissinger’s comment that “Even a paranoid can have enemies” Trump is certainly paranoid, but just as certainly he has real enemies among the government bureaucrats that comprise the “deep state”.  It is hardly surprising that he would want to replace those trying to bring him down with leaks, well-timed releasees of embarrassing information, and the like with people more loyal, if not to him personally at least to the office of the President. I’m sure any other president would do the same, and would be foolish not to.Trump's methods are a little bizarre sometimes, but his actions seem to me perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.

Now that we know much more about the dubious provenance of the Steele document, the fabricated claims of Russian or Ukrainian support for Trump in the last election, and the FBI’s less-than-honest presentation to the secret FISA court to allow them to surveille a member of Trump’s campaign, it is not surprising that he doesn’t trust the intelligence community or the FBI. Of course the Russians are trying to meddle in our elections, just as we try to meddle in theirs. They weren’t very effective in the last election, despite the attempts of liberals to blame their embarrassing loss on Russian interference. They probably won’t be very effective in this election either, at least compared to the far more virulent and effective disinformation campaigns being waged on social media by domestic activists and campaigns.

There is also a lot of hand-wringing in the media about the exit of so many senior foreign policy and intelligence people. I don’t see it as much of a loss to lose the foreign policy establishment that so mishandled Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, or that got us into the endless Middle East wars. I don’t see it as much of a loss to lose the intelligence establishment that missed anticipating most of the important world events of the past few decades, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring uprisings. Institutions can get ossified and bound by groupthink, and need occasionally to be cleaned out and given a fresh start.  Whether the people who replace those who have left will be any better is an interesting question which only time will answer, but certainly a new start was overdue.  

Recommended: If Biden's not up to it, someone should have said so

There is a perceptive piece on the Vox site this morning entitled The Democratic establishment is doing a really bad job of stopping Bernie Sanders. I think the author is correct - the "diversity" that Democrats are so proud of, with up to 25 candidates crowding the field at one point, has fragmented support and funding for the moderates, leaving a clear lane for Sanders with his socialist message to outspend them all and win the nomination. But of course, as I said in a previous post, if the Democratic establishment does succeed in stopping Sanders, it will probably lose a significant proportion of his supporters at the polls.

Recommended: James Carville interview on VOX

Just so readers know I'm not the only one who thinks the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot this election, Democratic strategists James Carville just gave a blunt interview to the liberal Vox site which can be read here. Carville was Bill Clinton's lead political strategist in his campaign, among other highly successful efforts, and he really knows his stuff. I think his points are right on.

And as long as I am recommending things, with Bernie Sander's momentum building, let me recommend a very good piece back in December by David Brooks entitled I Was Once a Socialist,Then I Saw How It Worked. He is quite accurate about the failing of socialism. Like all utopian ideas, socialism doesn't take account of human nature, which is why it is always inefficient and eventually corrupt.

Democratic delusions

There is something almost pathetic about the frantic attempts by Democratic spin doctors and liberal media pundits to somehow put a good face onto the mess the Democrats have gotten themselves into. The impeachment effort failed, but it sure boosted Trump’s chances of re-election – his popularity is now at an all-time high, recent polls show more people now identify as Republicans than as Democrats for the first time in ages, and he has received a massive infusion of campaign donations from a hugely energized base.

Beyond that, the economy is booming, wages are up especially for workers at the bottom of the economy, unemployment is at a 50-year low, and Democrats keep insisting simultaneously (a) that the economy is terrible, and (b) that the fact that the economy is wonderful isn’t due to anything Trump has done. Meanwhile a majority of Americans polled think they are better off this year than they were under Obama.

It looks increasingly likely either (a) that Sanders will be the Democratic nominee, which will pretty much lock up the election for Trump, or (b) the Democratic establishment will find a way to deny Sanders the nomination, which will so enrage his followers again that they will either stay home or vote for Trump (as about 1 in 11 apparently did in 2016), which will pretty much lock up the election for Trump.

The trouble with spinning propaganda is that if it is good enough one starts to believe one’s own fables. I suspect that is what is happening to Democrats. The media is full of liberal pundits and columnists telling liberals what they desperately want to hear, about how much trouble Trump is in and how the winds are so favorable for Democrats to take back power in the next election. The truth is that while Trump is a thoroughly unprincipled man, he is far, far better than any Democrat currently running at reading the public mood and playing to his base. Liberals, following their emotions rather than their reason, have been underestimating him all along, and are still underestimating him, and it is going to cost them the next election if they don’t get real and face up to the very difficult task ahead of them.

I remember the old Jewish saying: “Don’t pray for a new king; he might be worse than the old one”. I would be delighted to see Trump replaced by a pragmatic, principled, competent moderate of either party. But an ideologue full of impractical revolutionary ideas, especially one who is so ignorant of recent world history that he/she thinks socialism solves all problems, doesn’t fit that description.

Well, Peter Zeihan has been arguing for some time now that both parties are falling apart, which happens from time to time, and that it takes a decade or so for them to reshuffle themselves into their new configuration of coalitions, which may or may not carry the old party name. We are apparently still in that process, which is why both parties are still in chaos making openings for outliers like Trump and Sanders.

Recommended: Why We're Polarized

Ezra Klein’s 2020 book Why We’re Polarized is a very, very good but very, very unsettling book. If, like me, you have always believed (a) that rational discussion can bring people together, (b) that more information makes people reason better, and (c) that smarter people (like us) are harder to fool than dumber people, this book is going to be very upsetting. Packed with statistics and provocative psychological and sociological studies, Klein argues that when our self-identity is threatened, facts and logic take a distant second place to defending our identity and the group we identify with. And smarter people are not immune from this, they are just better at building rationalizations for what they feel they need to believe to preserve their identity. The problem we have today is that for many people, both liberals and conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, politics has gotten wound up with our self-identity.   

Klein discusses the positive feedback loop that is driving polarization – people are polarized, so the media polarizes to gain readership (what outrages, leads), which polarizes politicians and political institutions as they try to win votes, which in turn polarizes people more. This summary, though, hardly does the book justice; there is a wealth of history (eg. how did the parties get so polarized in the first place) and interesting side issues as well. This book is well worth reading if you want to understand what is driving politics today.