Elections have consequences

 I will not be joining in the post mortems on the election campaign. I have no insight into the mind of someone who wasn't sure if Trump would be better or worse than Harris and was persuadable by the right set of ads. Nor am I an expert in reaching people who pay no attention to politics. Some of the commentary I've seen appears to consist of people claiming that if only their issue had been made the focus, everything would have been fine; but a lot of it is arguments that I'm simply not qualified to judge. One thing I will say though is that if any of it is accurate, then most of the rest must be wrong or irrelevant.

In 2021 I expected that by now Donald Trump would be broke, in jail, officially suffering from dementia, or dead. Possibly more than one; or avoiding one by means of another. This is the kind of prediction that you can keep making and eventually be right, but all of them could have happened:
 - he has been fined enough money that it could plausibly bring down whatever house of cards he has running with his business. That fine may survive, but I doubt it; and now that he's president again it will certainly not send him broke.
 - he could have been jailed on a number of counts, but all of them were delayed long enough that he has effectively escaped accountability.
 - he is clearly suffering from early stage dementia, and by 2028 I think he will be visibly worse than Biden is now. But staff can prop up someone like that for a long time (as we have seen in multiple cases over recent years) and it will only affect him politically if *his supporters* take it seriously. The Trump cult will do what it takes not to notice.
 - I didn't actually have assassination attempts in mind and I very much hope none happen during his term; that would be a disaster. But he's a fat slob who eats too much McDonalds and doesn't believe in exercise; a stroke or a heart attack are always on the cards.
As much as he deserves all of them, only a health crisis will take him off our hands now.

These coming four years will be a lot harder than the first four - just having to do something like that again is bad enough, but Trump will be much worse this time.

• last time we could hope that he was old and uninterested in the job (as opposed to the position, which he loves). This time he knows he needs to put loyalists in place if he wants to keep the position, and he will warp US institutions much more vigorously to make it happen.
• last time we could hope that he just wanted to be treated as important; this time he's brought in a lot of people who are young and ambitious to make the country over into a frankly right-wing white Christian Nationalist state.
• last time we could hope that voters would see what an incompetent he was and vote him out at the end of one term. This time we know that they will not, and are willing to forgive even attempts at insurrection. Will term limits hold? Maybe it doesn't matter if he can give his Project 2025 supporters enough control of the voting system.
• last time we could hope the judiciary would limit his actions. This time he already has three personally appointed supreme court justices and will likely add two more. And they have already shown they are willing to warp the law for him even without him in power.
• last time we could hope the Republican party would stand up for itself. This time all the people who were most willing to do that have been driven out or folded up.

Trump will not be starting fresh; he will begin doing damage very much where he left off.

It will be a long four years (or however long it ends up). Will he invade Panama or Greenland? Impose ruinously destructive tariffs? Leave NATO? Destroy institutions like the FDA? Which ones are just clouds of squid ink, and which ones are serious? Trump was never a coherent policy thinker, dementia will not have improved him, and the removal of guardrails will make it more likely that random ideas just end up getting implemented.

I would like to see this as a mini-series so that:

• I can satisfy my curiosity about exactly which hare-brained/horrific schemes get implemented
• I can show it to people who thought Trump was a great idea, before they get frog-boiled into accepting it all
• I can get it over with in a few hours
• It doesn't really happen to actual human beings.

So here's a few markers to come back to in four years. Let's see if I am optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic:

• deportations will not get near 20 million or whatever; instead it will be "whoever the local cops don't like", with carveouts for industries who employ illegals but are good at lobbying or rich enough to pay bribes
• significant numbers of US citizens will be caught up in deportation sweeps and some will be deported before they can sort things out
• the US will not invade Canada or Greenland, but might invade Panama. This will make the canal more expensive not less.
• Trump will effectively abandon Ukraine. The Europeans may support them enough to keep them going, but either way China will attempt to occupy Taiwan during this term in the expectation that the US will make no serious effort to stop them.
• Tariffs will be a byzantine mess of corruption and exceptions
• Trump will do something important and bad that conservatives currently dismiss as a left-wing fantasy and will later claim is perfectly acceptable.

Meantime I will be trying as much as possible to tune out the constant garbage, and waiting to see what actually goes wrong.

Vote Harris

When Trump won in 2016, I thought the best we could immediately hope for was basically a Republican administration; or that a disastrous Trump administration would make it harder for another more dangerous version of him to succeed. Ironically enough I made the analogy of a vaccine.

When he ran again in 2020 I was surprised by how much damage he had been able to do in four years with incompetent and corrupt appointments, but thought that there was a limit to how much more damage he could inflict in four more years because "He doesn't have a goal in mind apart from making money and he won't last long." If he'd won in 2020 that might have been true; just as in 2020 he didn't start getting ready to steal the election until too late, he might have neglected the problem of term limits in 2024 until too late.

But that's not what happened. He lost, and spent two months discovering that to flip an election takes more than just a couple of phone calls and some threats to the right person. And now he's had four years to think about how to be ready next time - or more accurately he's had four years to accumulate people around him who know how to be ready. So it won't matter that he's old and suffering cognitive decline; the next person will not need to study his methods and work out how to appeal to his fan base. Trump will die in office (however long that takes) and hand over to somebody a system where they no longer need to appeal to voters if they can appeal to the people in charge.

Trump has a goal now, and that goal is "be president for life". He doesn't care what damage he needs to inflict to do that and he doesn't care who helps him or what will happen after he is gone. Even if he does nothing as president but sit and watch TV for the rest of his life, his legacy will be damage that can only be repaired at enormous cost.

In 2020 I said "Vote like your life depends on it" and enough people rejected Trump to give us a chance to do it again. What the GOP needs and deserves - has done for the last eight years - is the kind of thrashing that makes a generation of party strategists flinch at the thought of it. It's an indictment of the political system in the US, particularly on the right, that Trump is allowed to run after an attempted insurrection and that this is even likely to be a close election. But a Trump defeat is extremely important no matter how close and the more people vote that way the more effective it will be. Every vote counts.

Getting rid of Trump won't fix anything, but a second Trump presidency would make all of our problems worse.

Vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket. Vote for America.

They are already coming for you

 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

 

The world would be a better place if this kind of sentiment was unnecessary; if all people would speak out for others out of common humanity with no need for any kind of threat to themselves. Many people do, but sometimes it is not enough. There are always reasons why it is too hard right now, and the rest of us need reminding that the choice is not between fighting or not fighting - it is between fighting now with allies or fighting later without.

But it leaves out an important aspect of why authoritarians should be resisted when they come for "them". Even if you are of the purest and most unimpeachable stock, who would always be on the right side of the barbed wire. It's not that they might come for you - it's that they will always be coming for someone because they have no better ideas.

They don't have a health plan, or an infrastructure strategy, or a way to improve education or lower the crime rate. Genuinely good policy is hard work and takes persuasion and care, and it will improve the lives of a great many people who are simply not relevant to them. Demonizing outgroups is a shortcut to power that takes far less effort, and what it tells you is that the authoritarians will make the entire country worse off through incompetence or malice - it doesn't really matter which. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time, he just announced that he had.

If the authoritarians get in, they will keep finding out-groups to go after to hide the fact that they have nothing to offer and it will only stop when the general population declares that they've had enough. The more entrenched they are, the harder and more destructive that will be for everyone.

The time to fight the authoritarians is when they are weakest, and that means now. Even if they like you, they will still ruin you.

Don't encourage them

 When Russia decided to invade Ukraine I was one of those who did not expect the conventional war to last more than a few weeks. The commitment of the Ukrainian defenders - and the intelligence they've shown - has been inspirational. Sure they've been given a lot of weaponry by other countries, but the Afghans have just finished showing us that all the weaponry in the world won't help if an army isn't willing to fight.

More than just delaying the Russians, Ukraine's bravery allows everyone else the opportunity to provide more help. There's time to train on new weapons; we can be confident they will not just be handed over to the Russians (indeed, weapons given to the Russians seem more likely to end up in Ukrainian hands than the reverse).

And make no mistake - it is in everyone's interest (including most Russians, ultimately) for the invasion to be an expensive failure. A world where such an unjustified war of conquest is repelled with help from many other countries, is a safer world for us all. Let the next autocrat think very hard about invading a neighbor for whatever reason; let them worry that the whole world may gang up on them. As well as the Ukrainians are doing, the whole thing is a mess of death and destruction.

But there's worse to Putin's aggression here than just this war. A long time I go I was critical of the US invasion of Iraq because (among other things) it encouraged other countries to get nukes. If the US accuses you of trying to build them, you either open your pockets like Iraq and get invaded, or test one and tell everyone to go away like North Korea. That's bad, but it's limited. It's a defensive move (at least by example); and the US gave no hint of using its own.

By contrast Russia gave Ukraine guarantees of territorial integrity in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons. They have now broken this agreement and invaded. In addition, they threaten (in not-so-subtle ways) to use nuclear weapons if others intervene or if they appear to be losing in their illegal war of conquest. The message this sends to others is very clear: you cannot trust anyone else to leave you alone; get nuclear weapons. And worse: if you have nuclear weapons you can invade your neighbors with impunity.

However true these things may have been before in theory, we now have a clear example to point to. If Russia's invasion is a success by any measure, it will set a clear precedent that no country can ignore. But if the world bands together to repel it that will also set a precedent - for peaceful countries that they need not acquire their own weapons, and for autocrats that they will not be worth the expense and opprobrium.

The result of this war will have a huge effect on the world of the future, and in working out our response to it all the risks of proliferation should be included in the scales.

Cultural appropriation is good

Cultural appropriation is a good thing.

Appropriation is how culture works. It's what culture *is*. It's why I can read the works of Greek philosophers, saved by Muslim scholars, translated into a Germanic language written with a Phoenician alphabet on an American computer network with a machine built in east Asia. It's why I am not spending my days as a hunter gatherer (or by now, more likely dead). Pick whatever examples you like - Cultures that don't appropriate things they like from other cultures are rare; and mostly extinct. It goes both ways, too; over the millennia both conqueror and conquered (as well as more ambiguous interactions) have taken useful things from each other.

Sure it is bad to grab small recognizable bits of other people's cultures for the purposes of mockery, or to whip up hate. But we can call that out for what it is - mockery and hatred - instead of trying to make an offense out of something that is as intrinsically human as any of the things we try to use as definitions. And if you see someone trying to grab a bit of another's culture and doing it badly - help them! Tell them what they have missed! And if they refuse to learn or fail to improve... that's their loss, or possibly their considered decision. Every generation appropriates some of the previous generation's culture and makes up some of its own; every generation complains that the next is getting it wrong.

The "appropriation" complaint usually comes from eager defenders of some minority's rights against the dominant hordes. But there's an inverse version of the same complaint that comes from people who I can best sum up as bigots. It's usually aimed at underprivileged minorities, and it goes something like "if these people don't like our culture, they shouldn't be using iPhones/electricity/cars etc. We invented those". But they didn't invent those things either. Very few people have invented anything so dramatic. Some people who spoke the same language as the bigots invented them, perhaps, or people with roughly the same skin tones, or who worked in the same country. Chances are that the bigots would be very unhappy at being forced to adopt the same culture as the actual inventor of their favorite thing, and would find it impossible to simultaneously adopt the culture of more than one or two big inventions.

So go ahead. Make your rock and roll with a tune pinched from Bach and lyrics from Li Bai. Put a bagpipe solo in. Make a Bollywood style video clip for it but use Samba dancers. If it sounds good, it IS good.

Vote like your life depends on it

I said four years ago that the main task of a political party is to do the work of identifying capable candidates for office who fit its creed. That way supporters can vote the straight ticket, without having to vet each one themselves. A political party that chooses incompetent candidates deserves to lose other races as well. The party that chose Donald Trump then deserved to lose; choosing him again means they deserve to be destroyed.

I said in 2016 that the best we could probably hope for from Trump was a standard Republican administration. I expected that the party would be able to do the work of selecting competent officials and the sheer inertia of a functioning government would mostly keep him in line and keep things working. And I wondered if he might surprise us by doing something well. Mind you, I used the phrase "once he gets into office and confronts the realities" and that really does show a complete misunderstanding of the way his mind works.

In some ways Trump has been better than I feared, but mostly because of incompetence. He proved unable to remove Obamacare even with Republican majorities in both houses. Largely because he was unable to even pretend to have anything better to offer, and there was enough public pressure on the margins to get Republican senators to block it (or alternatively, because the GOP knew it would be a disaster and allowed blocking votes from those with the most to gain from them). After four years, and all the sabotage he's committed on it, the court case is still in progress.

He has not started any major wars. He courted disaster in North Korea, and tried very hard to start a war with Iran, but was not nearly as organized as Bush was with Iraq. To be fair I think it is Republicans who want an Iran war; Trump just wants to pose with military hardware. I wondered if he would be able to get somewhere with North Korea because he's a bully and might understand how to get inside Kim Jong Un's head, but he was too lazy to do any work himself and the North Koreans saw him coming a mile off.

Mostly he has followed a standard Republican line - tax cuts for the rich, service cuts for the poor, regulation cuts for big business, and nothing that might result in action on climate change. All layered over with unconcealed racism and divisiveness. Saying the quiet part out loud, as it is described; being open about what the GOP usually only hints at.

What surprised me the most was the decay he has been able to inflict on the US system of government. Where his appointments are not outright corrupt they are incompetent, because sooner or later a competent official will tell him something he doesn't want to hear. Even the weather bureau! I really thought it would take longer for him to do so much damage, and I don't know what would be left after another four years.

And then there is the pandemic. Tailor made for Trump. He could have brought in travel bans, called out the army, commandeered big corporations, blamed foreigners and "those dirty people". But he was just purely incapable of listening to advice and he botched it all and is still botching it. He is still mocking the wearing of masks! Just by standing aside and letting people get on with it the US response would have been so much better, and the polling numbers for people like Cuomo show that he could have been sailing to re-election if he had done even a workmanlike job.

And this is what really scares me. After all of this incompetence, he still has a viable chance at another term. He has a huge supporter base that won't hear a word against him, and a large number of states that will vote clear majorities for him in November. Never mind the vote suppression, a president as historically bad as Trump should be trailing by double digits in solid red states.

There's a limit to how much damage Trump can do in four more years because he doesn't really care about any of this and he is now quite old. He doesn't have a goal in mind apart from making money and he won't last long. But he is showing the way for the next Trump. The competent one, who believes in ethnic nationalism or a proper theocracy. Who chooses good officials and almost always listens to them. Who uses a dog whistle instead of a foghorn. Who lies by design instead of by reflex. The one with a plan.

And that is why Trump needs to lose badly this time. He needs to lose so badly that he takes a lot of Republicans with him. America needs him to be a cautionary tale, that parties shy away from emulating. Politicians need to flinch if they find themselves compared with him.

Vote. Vote like your future depends on it.

Update, since 2020 is so hard to keep up with: The worst case is if Trump has a really mild dose of Covid-19 and shakes it off quickly; we would soon find out if there was anything else he could do to sabotage the response. Simply dying would potentially take the edge off whatever electoral defeat he suffers. But a serious case that puts him in the ICU that could cause a lot of his supporters to start taking it seriously, and that could save thousands of lives. Another way he can serve this country as a cautionary tale.

Competence matters

I expected a Trump administration to kill a lot of people, but I thought it would be by repealing the Affordable Care Act and putting a fig-leaf (or even nothing) in its place. Or perhaps starting the war with Iran that the Republicans have been wanting all this time. I still think the person who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is whoever convinced Trump that Obama intended to go to war with North Korea, thereby guaranteeing that Trump would avoid doing that if it was at all possible. The Republicans have done a lot of damage to the Affordable Care Act and are trying to do more; but they couldn't summon the nerve to actually just throw it out. Trump seemed to be trying to get a war with Iran (maybe just in time for November?).

And then... this happened. A pandemic seems tailor made for Trump. A noted germophobe, and someone who would just love closing borders. If he'd acted sooner and done things that would have fit right into his agenda, he would now be looking like a genius. He had the information in time; US intelligence gave warnings long before a lockdown would have worked.

I underestimated the degree to which the Trump administration has destroyed the capacity of the US government to wield expertise and get things done. My hope was that Trump would spend his term playing golf and bloviating about how wonderful things were. But his combination of ignorance and pride means anybody competent who works for him must talk nonsense or get fired. And it turns out that a competent government is important.

I have been thinking a lot about this quote from George Orwell's essay "In Front Of Your Nose":

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Trump has bumped into reality, and the United States is paying the price. In six months we get the chance to express our disapproval, and we need to take it.