Im-Politic: Trump-ism Without Trump for America as a Whole?

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"Defund the Police", allies, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, court packing, COVID 19, Democrats, election 2020, enforcement, Executive Orders, filibuster, Green New Deal, Huawei, human rights, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, judiciary, lockdowns, mask mandate, masks, metals, multilateralism, Muslim ban, Phase One, progressives, Republicans, sanctions, Senate, shutdowns, stimulus, Supreme Court, tariffs, taxes, Trade, trade wars, Trump, unions, Wuhan virus

Since election day, I’ve spent some time and space here and on the air speculating about the future of what I called Trump-ism without Donald Trump in conservative and Republican Party political ranks. Just this weekend, my attention turned to another subject and possibility: Trump-ism without Mr. Trump more broadly speaking, as a shaper – and indeed a decisive shaper – of national public policy during a Joe Biden presidency. Maybe surprisingly, the chances look pretty good.

That is, it’s entirely possible that a Biden administration won’t be able to undo many of President Trump’s signature domestic and foreign policies, at least for years, and it even looks likely if the Senate remains Republican. Think about it issue-by-issue.

With the Senate in Republican hands, there’s simply no prospect at least during the first two Biden years for Democratic progressives’ proposals to pack the Supreme Court, to eliminate the Senate filibuster, or to recast the economy along the lines of the Green New Deal, or grant statehood Democratic strongholds Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A big tax increase on corporations and on the Biden definition of the super-rich looks off the table as well.

If the Senate does flip, the filibuster might be history. But big Democratic losses in the House, and the claims by many veterans of and newcomers to their caucus that those other progressive ambitions, along with Defunding the Police, were to blame, could also gut or greatly water down much of the rest of the far Left’s agenda, too.

CCP Virus policy could be substantially unchanged, too. For all the Biden talk of a national mask mandate, ordering one is almost surely beyond a President’s constitutional powers. Moreover, his pandemic advisors are making clear that, at least for the time being, a sweeping national economic lockdown isn’t what they have in mind. I suspect that some virus economic relief measures willl be signed into law sometime this spring or even earlier, but they won’t carry the total $2 trillion price tag on which Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have insisted for months. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of relief being provided a la carte, as Congressional Republicans have suggested – e.g., including popular provisions like some form of unemployment payment bonus extension and stimulus checks, and excluding less popular measures like stimulus aid for illegal aliens.

My strong sense is that Biden is itching to declare an end to President Trump’s trade wars, and as noted previously, here he could well find common cause with the many Senate Republicans from the party’s establishment wing who have never been comfortable bucking the wishes of an Offshoring Lobby whose campaign contributions it’s long raked in.

Yet the former Vice President has promised his labor union supporters that until the trade problems caused by China’s massive steel overproduction were (somehow) solved, he wouldn’t lift the Trump metals tariffs on allies (which help prevent transshipment and block these third countries from exporting their own China steel trade problems to the United States) – even though they’re the levies that have drawn the most fire from foreign policy globalists and other trade and globalization zealots.

As for the China tariffs themselves, the latest from the Biden team is that they’ll be reviewed. So even though he’s slammed them as wildly counterproductive, they’re obviously not going anywhere soon. (See here for the specifics.) 

Later? Biden’s going to be hard-pressed to lift the levies unless one or both of the following developments take place: first, the allied support he’s touted as the key to combating Beijing’s trade and other economic abuses actually materializes in very convincing ways; second, the Biden administration receives major Chinese concessions in return. Since even if such concessions (e.g., China’s agreement to eliminate or scale back various mercantile practices) were enforceable (they won’t be unless Biden follows the Trump Phase One deal’s approach), they’ll surely require lengthy negotiations. Ditto for Trump administration sanctions on China tech entities like the telecommunications giant Huawei. So expect the Trump-ian China status quo to long outlast Mr. Trump.

Two scenarios that could see at least some of the tariffs or tech sanctions lifted? First, the Chinese make some promises to improve their climate change policies that will be completely phony, but will appeal greatly to the Green New Deal-pushing progressives who will wield much more power if the Senate changes hands, and who have demonstrated virtually no interest in China economic issues. Second, Beijing pledges to ease up on its human rights crackdowns on Hong Kong and the Muslims of Xinjiang province. These promises would be easier to monitor and enforce, but the Chinese regime views such issues as utterly non-negotiable because they’re matters of sovereignty. So China’s repressive practices won’t even be on the official agenda of any talks. Unofficial understandings might be reached under which Beijing would take modest positive steps or suspend further contemplated repression. But I wouldn’t count on such an outcome.

Two areas where Biden supposedly could make big decisions unilaterally whatever happens in the Senate, are immigration and climate change. Executive orders would be the tools, and apparently that’s indeed the game plan. But as Mr. Trump discovered, what Executive Orders and even more routine adminstrative actions can do, a single federal judge responding to a special interest group’s request can delay for months. And these judicial decisions can interfere with presidential authority even on subjects that for decades has been recognized as wide-ranging – notably making immigration enforcement decisions when border crossings impact national security, as with the so-called Trump “Muslim ban.”

I know much less about climate change, but a recently retired attorney friend with long experience litigating on these issues told me that even before Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court, the Justices collectively looked askance on efforts to create new policy initiatives without legislating. Another “originalist” on the Court should leave even less scope for ignoring Congress.

The bottom line is especially curious given the almost universal expectations that this presidential election would be the most important in recent U.S. history: A deeply divided electorate could well have produced a mandate for more of the same – at least until the 2022 midterms.

Im-Politic: Biden as National Soul-Saver?

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cancel culture, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Democrats, election 2020, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, left-wing authoritarianism, Michelle Obama, morality, politics, progressives, stimulus package, Trump, Trump World, wokeness, Wuhan virus

This Joe Biden thing about “a battle for the soul of America” and “restoring the soul of America” — I’ve never liked the self-righteousness of it from the start. And the more I’ve thought about it since Election Day, and especially as the odds of his becoming President seem to grow, the more worried I get, and the more troubled you should be, too. Two reasons stand out.

First, it’s far from clear that the Democratic nominee has thought through the demographics of his ambition. It’s of course clear that what he means by soul-restoring is that Donald Trump’s election as President – or perhaps more specifically his supposed trafficking in racist and other despicable dog whistles – means that something about America morally has gone badly off-track. But what and among whom exactly? Surely he doesn’t believe that his own soul needs to be restored. Ditto for other Trump opponents.

But what about Trump supporters? Let’s assume for a moment that his personal ethical antennae are finely tuned enough to guide the nation’s as a whole. He’s now promising to be a President for all Americans – including the Trumpers. But if their souls are at best badly corrupted (and at worst, no longer exist at all), then why should he take any of their concerns into account, at least until some semblance of what he considers an acceptable moral fabric is somehow regenerated?

As a result, unless he believes that most of Trump World has simply been duped, and that the scales will steadily drop from their eyes after he’s out of the White House, his recent urging that his compatriots recognize that “We are not enemies. We are Americans” is just as incoherent. After all, when one side of a political contest has no collective soul, then clearly their differences with their moral superiors entail more than (presumably acceptable) disagreements over, say, levels of taxing and spending, or the terms of a trade agreement, or defining foreign policy interests. After all, people lacking a soul, or whose soul is badly broken, are far worse, or qualitatively more difficult to contend with. Arguably, they aren’t even human at all, but something genuinely debased. How can reason and persuasion possibly work with the likes of them?

The second reason for concern about Biden’s rhetoric follows logically from the first. Precisely because consigning large numbers of Americans into the soul-less or broken-soul category clearly precludes dealing with them via conventional political means, this belief indicates that the former Vice President doesn’t even believe that he’s operating in the political realm at all – at least when it comes to Trump supporters. Instead, he’s an agent of virtue itself whose objectives are spiritual – and thereby rule out the idea of significant, and perhaps any compromise.

To be sure, there will remain areas of public policy where meaningful compromise is relatively – e.g., taxing and spending and particularly economic stimulus while the CCP Virus is in pandemic mode. But as has been seen in the stimulus debate so far, both parties in Congress have tried to use such legislation to advance goals not so conducive to give-and-take (e.g., the question of whether illegal aliens should receive any relief).

Everything known about Biden’s temperament also indicates that he’s a compromiser, not a crusader, by nature. Indeed, at various times during the campaign, that’s what he’s claimed he would do.

But there also remain areas of public policy that have never been conducive to meaningful compromise – like immigration, and social issues like abortion. In this vein, one of my own principal worries is still that whatever Biden thinks personally, he’ll lack the spine to resist progressive Democrats pushing their increasingly authoritarian impulses and consequent determination to make Cancel Culture The American Way (along with ever more woke Big Business).

He may also lack much interest in pushing back against the kind of anger and sanctimony and intolerance expressed so congently yesterday by, e.g., Michelle Obama – who tweeted, “Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division.”

Perhaps because the former First Lady is hardly the most extreme member of the Democratic Party, she also added, “We’ve got a lot of work to do to reach out to these folks in the years ahead and connect with them on what unites us.” But she deserves to be asked the same question posed in this post to Biden – from this standpoint, how much important common ground could exist with supporters of “lies, hate, chaos” etc.? Moreover, Biden himself has said that this soul-restoring business was what motivated him to seek the presidency again in the first place. (See the article in The Hill linked above.) So maybe lately there’s a lot more common ground between him and the progressive authoritarians than widely realized.

Here’s one way Biden could begin to ease concerns like this whether he becomes the next President or not. He could spell out in reasonably concrete terms just which of the motivations that have fueled two massive national Trump votes he does view as legitimate – and therefore where he’s ready in principle respond with more than tokenism. Unless and until he does, literally tens of millions of Americans will be perfectly justified in assuming that Biden’s talk of national unification and reconciliation is completely hollow, that they’ll return to Forgotten American status (and maybe worse), and that their own and the nation’s best future hopes rest with making sure he’s a one-term President, too.

Im-Politic: Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, free expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, impeachment, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, police killings, Populism, progressives, regulations, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine Scandal, Wall Street, wokeness

Given what 2020 has been like for most of the world (although I personally have little cause for complaint), and especially Washington Post coverage of endless early voting lines throughout the Maryland surburbs of the District of Columbia, I was expecting to wait for hours in bad weather to cast my ballot for President Trump. Still, I was certain that Election Day circumstances would be a complete mess, so hitting the polling place this week seemed the least bad option.

Hence my amazement that the worst case didn’t pan out – and that in fact, I was able to kill two birds with one stone. My plan was to check out the situation, including parking, at the University of Maryland site closest to my home on my way to the supermarket. But the scene was so quiet that I seized the day, masked up, and was able to feed my paper ballot into the recording machine within about ten minutes.

My Trump vote won’t be surprising to any RealityChek regulars or others who have been in touch with on or off social media in recent years. Still, it seems appropriate to explain why, especially since I haven’t yet spelled out some of the most important reasons.

Of course, the President’s positions on trade (including a China challenge that extends to technology and national security) and immigration have loomed large in my thinking, as has Mr. Trump’s America First-oriented (however unevenly) approach to foreign policy. (For newbies, see all the posts here under “[What’s Left of] Our Economy,” and “Our So-Called Foreign Policy,” and various freelance articles that are easily found on-line.). The Biden nomination has only strengthened my convictions on all these fronts, and not solely or mainly because of charges that the former Vice President has been on Beijing’s payroll, via his family, for years.

As I’ve reported, for decades he’s been a strong supporter of bipartisan policies that have greatly enriched and therefore strengthened this increasingly aggressive thug-ocracy. It’s true that he’s proposed to bring back stateside supply chains for critical products, like healthcare and defense-related goods, and has danced around the issue of lifting the Trump tariffs. But the Silicon Valley and Wall Street tycoons who have opened their wallets so wide for him are staunchly opposed to anything remotely resembling a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies and especially technology bases

Therefore, I can easily imagine Biden soon starting to ease up on sanctions against Chinese tech companies – largely in response to tech industry executives who are happy to clamor for subsidies to bolster national competitiveness, but who fear losing markets and the huge sunk costs of their investments in China. I can just as easily imagine a Biden administration freeing up bilateral trade again for numerous reasons: in exchange for an empty promise by Beijing to get serious about fighting climate change; for a deal that would help keep progressive Democrats in line; or for an equally empty pledge to dial back its aggression in East Asia; or as an incentive to China to launch a new round of comprehensive negotiations aimed at reductions or elimination of Chinese trade barriers that can’t possibly be adequately verified. And a major reversion to dangerous pre-Trump China-coddling can by no means be ruled out.

Today, however, I’d like to focus on three subjects I haven’t dealt with as much that have reinforced my political choice.

First, and related to my views on trade and immigration, it’s occurred to me for several years now that between the Trump measures in these fields, and his tax and regulatory cuts, that the President has hit upon a combination of policies that could both ensure improved national economic and technological competitiveness, and build the bipartisan political support needed to achieve these goals.

No one has been more surprised than me about this possibility – which may be why I’ve-hesitated to write about it. For years before the Trump Era, I viewed more realistic trade policies in particular as the key to ensuring that U.S.-based businesses – and manufacturers in particular – could contribute the needed growth and jobs to the economy overall even under stringent (but necessary) regulatory regimes for the environment, workplace safety, and the like by removing the need for these companies to compete with imports from countries that ignored all these concerns (including imports coming from U.S.-owned factories in cheap labor pollution havens like China and Mexico).

I still think that this approach would work. Moreover, it contains lots for folks on the Left to like. But the Trump administration has chosen a different economic policy mix – high tariffs, tax and regulatory relief for business, and immigration restrictions that have tightened the labor market. And the strength of the pre-CCP Virus economy – including low unemployment and wage growth for lower-income workers and minorities – attests to its success.

A Trump victory, as I see it, would result in a continuation of this approach. Even better, the President’s renewed political strength, buoyed by support from more economically forward-looking Republicans and conservatives like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri, could bring needed additions to this approach – notably, more family-friendly tax and regulatory policies (including childcare expense breaks and more generous mandatory family leave), and more ambitious industrial policies that would work in tandem with tariffs and sanctions to beat back the China technology and national security threat.

Moreover, a big obstacle to this type of right-of-center (or centrist) conservative populism and economic nationalism would be removed – the President’s need throughout the last four years to support the stances of the conventional conservatives that are still numerous in Congress in order to ensure their support against impeachment efforts.

My second generally undisclosed (here) reason for voting Trump has to do with Democrats and other Trump opponents (although I’ve made this point repeatedly on Facebook to Never Trumper friends and others). Since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy for the White House back in 2015, I’ve argued that Americans seeking to defeat him for whatever reason needed to come up with viable responses to the economic and social grievances that gave him a platform and a huge political base. Once he won the presidency, it became even more important for his adversaries to learn the right lessons.

Nothing could be clearer, however, than their refusal to get with a fundamentally new substantive program with nationally unifying appeal. As just indicated, conventional Republicans and conservatives capitalized on their role in impeachment politics to push their longstanding but ever more obsolete (given the President’s overwhelming popularity among Republican voters) quasi-libertarian agenda, at least on domestic policy.

As for Democrats and liberals, in conjunction with the outgoing Obama administration, the countless haters in the intelligence community and elsewhere in the permanent bureaucracy, and the establishment conservatives Mr. Trump needed to staff much of his administration, they concentrated on ousting an elected President they considered illegitimate, and wasted more than three precious years of the nation’s time. And when they weren’t pushing a series of charges that deserve the titles “Russia Hoax” and “Ukraine Hoax,” the Democrats and liberals were embracing ever more extreme Left stances as scornful of working class priorities as their defeated 2016 candidate’s description of many Trump voters as “deplorables.”

I see no reason to expect any of these factions to change if they defeat the President this time around. And this forecast leads me to my third and perhaps most important reason for voting Trump. As has been painfully obvious especially since George Floyd’s unacceptable death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the type of arrogance, sanctimony and – more crucially – intolerance that has come to permeate Democratic, liberal, and progressive ranks has now spread widely into Wall Street and the Big Business Sector.

To all Americans genuinely devoted to representative and accountable government, and to the individual liberties and vigorous competition of ideas and that’s their fundamental foundation, the results have been (or should be) nothing less than terrifying. Along with higher education, the Mainstream Media, Big Tech, and the entertainment and sports industries, the nation’s corporate establishment now lines up squarely behind the idea that pushing particular political, economic, social, and cultural ideas and suppressing others has become so paramount that schooling should turn into propaganda, that news reporting should abandon even the goal of objectivity, that companies should enforce party lines in the workplace and agitate for them in advertising and sponsorship practices, and that free expression itself needed a major rethink.

And oh yes: Bring on a government-run “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate – and maybe prosecute – crimes and other instances of “wrongdoing” by the President, by (any?) officials in his administration. For good measure, add every “politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled” the Trump “catastrophe,” as former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has demanded. Along with a Scarlet Letter, or worse, for everyone who’s expressed any contrary opinion in the conventional or new media? Or in conversation with vigilant friends or family?

That Truth Commission idea is still pretty fringe-y. So far. But not too long ago, many of the developments described above were, too. And my chief worry is that if Mr. Trump loses, there will be no major national institution with any inclination or power to resist this authoritarian tide.

It’s reasonable to suppose that more traditional beliefs about free expression are so deeply ingrained in the national character that eventually they’ll reassert themselves. Pure self-interest will probably help, too. In this vein, it was interesting to note that Walmart, which has not only proclaimed its belief that “Black Lives Matter,” but promised to spend $100 million on a “center for racial equality” just saw one of its Philadelphia stores ransacked by looters during the unrest that has followed a controversial police shooting.

But at best, tremendous damage can be done between now and “eventually.” At worst, the active backing of or acquiescence in this Woke agenda by America’s wealthiest, most influential forces for any significant timespan could produce lasting harm to the nation’s life.

As I’ve often said, if you asked me in 2015, “Of all the 300-plus million Americans, who would you like to become President?” my first answer wouldn’t have been “Donald J. Trump.” But no other national politician at that point displayed the gut-level awareness that nothing less than policy disruption was needed on many fronts, combined with the willingness to enter the arena and the ability to inspire mass support.

Nowadays, and possibly more important, he’s the only national leader willing and able to generate the kind of countervailing force needed not only to push back against Woke-ism, but to provide some semblance of the political pluralism – indeed, diversity – required by representative, accountable government. And so although much about the President’s personality led me to mentally held my nose at the polling place, I darkened the little circle next to his name on the ballot with no hesitation. And the case for Mr. Trump I just made of course means that I hope many of you either have done or will do the same.

Im-Politic: Final Grades on the Final Debate

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battleground states, climate change, crime, crime bills, election 2020, energy, fossil fuels, fracking, green energy, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, marijuana, narcotics, natural gas, oil, presidential debates, progressives, racism, systemic racism, Trump

I got something massively wrong about the second (and final) presidential debate of 2020. I thought that my frantic live-tweeting covered every important aspect of the Thursday night event. Upon reading the transcript, I realized there was lots more to say.

Let’s start with the 30,000-foot picture. There’s no question that President Trump performed more effectively than in the first debate. Even his most uncritical admirers, like Fox News talker Sean Hannity, have conceded as much (Check out the video of his post-debate show, in which he acknowledges that long-time Republican political operative Ari Fleischer was right in faulting Mr. Trump’s first debate performance as too overheated.)

But there are plenty of questions left unanswered about the second debate’s impact on the Presidential race. For the record, I’m sticking with the assessment I offered after the first debate: Given his lead even in most battleground state polls, because the Trump campaign and other Trumpers (including Hannity) had set the bar so low for “Sleepy Joe,” all Biden needed to do was show up and not screw up massively in order to win.

Those battleground polls have tightened somewhat, Biden’s perfectly fine first debate performance raised the bar for the second debate, and I’m far from thinking that the race is over. But I’d still rather be in Biden’s shoes than in Mr. Trump’s. And time keeps running out for the President. All the same, it’s important to remember that we haven’t seen any major post-debate nationwide or battleground polls come out yet, so there’s simply no hard evidence to go on at this point.

The time-is-not-the-President’s-friend point, though, brings up my first new debate-related point: Mr. Trump’s improved performance alone (whether he “won” or not either on points or according to the public), indicates that he erred in rejecting the Commission on Presidential Debate’s offer to hold the second debate virtually, due ostensibly to CCP Virus-related reasons.

Especially if Mr. Trump had by that time begun heeding the advice of supporters urging him to dial it down (which isn’t at all clear), he lost an opportunity to square off again against Biden in real time. And although there’s no adequate on-line substitute for the atmosphere and resulting pressures of in-person encounters, the President did lose a valuable opportunity to reassure voters unnerved – rightly or wrongly – by his first debate tactics.

Getting down to specific points, on Thursday night, two issues really do demand further discussion. First, I might have been mistaken in my tweeted view that the Biden comments on natural gas fracking and energy (and related climate change) policy wouldn’t be terribly important.

I did agree that the former Vice President did nothing to help himself in key energy states like Pennsylvania, where voters might worry that his various positions – and the prominence of staunch fossil fuels opponents in Democratic ranks now – would guarantee relatively rapid closures of the coal mines and gas and oil fields that created so much employment in their regions. But I stated that, because these subjects had been aired so thoroughly already, few energy voters’ minds would be changed.

What I clearly underestimated was the impact of an extended discussion of energy and climate subjects before a nation-wide audience. If I’d been right, why would the Trump campaign have almost immediately put out an ad spotlighting Biden’s assorted statements on these topics. And why would the Biden campaign have spent so much time trying to explain the Biden position?

Looking at the transcript helped me understand why energy- and climate-related anxieties in the energy states might have been elevated by the Biden debate remarks. For on the one hand, the Democratic challenger insisted that he was “ruling out” “banning fracking” and claimed that

“What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money in doing it, but it’s a transition to that.”

And whereas previously, Biden had responded to a primary debate question about whether fossil fuels would have any place in his prospective administration by declaring “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those. Any fossil fuel,” on Thursday night, the former Vice President referred to transitioning from “the old oil industry”–presumably to some (undefined) new kind of oil industry.

Nonetheless, it would be reasonable for energy states residents to question these assurances of gradualness and transformation instead of elimination given Biden’s continued contention that “global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” that “we’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to ten years,” and that the energy sector in toto needs “to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025.” Last time I checked, that’s only five years from now.

Moreover, given the notable split within the Democratic party on climate change and energy issues between progressives and centrists, the Biden statements suggesting that major fossil fuel industries will survive during his administration in some form could depress turnout in their ranks for a candidate who clearly needs to stoke their enthusiasm.

The second set of issues I should have tweeted more about entails crime and race relations. I think Biden deserves a great deal of credit for calling “a mistake” his support for crime bills of the 1980s and 1990s that, in the words of moderator Kristen Welker “contributed to the incarceration of tens of thousands of young Black men who had small amounts of drugs in their possession, they are sons, they are brothers, they are fathers, they are uncles, whose families are still to this day, some of them suffering the consequences.”

He was also correct in pointing out that President Trump – who quite properly pointed to some noteworthy achievements of his administration on behalf of African Americans – took a sweepingly harsh line on crime himself in previous decades.

But two positions taken by Biden should disturb even supporters. First, his argument that “It took too long [during the Obama administration] to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States,” clearly throws his former boss under the bus. In fact, he also implicitly blamed Obama for the failure to resolve the problem created by children living the United States born to illegal immigrant parents.

The second such position was Biden’s argument that “No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail.”

I personally can support this view when it comes to hard drugs. But marijuana? For whose use so many American blacks have been jailed – and so many more than white Americans? (I’m not a big fan of the American Civil Liberties Union these days, but the data in this study are tough to refute.) Mandatory (government-funded?) therapy for potheads? That could use some rethinking.

But like I said at the outset, I expressed views on many other debate-related subjects on my Twitter feed (@AlanTonelson). So there’s no substitute for following there, as well as checking in with RealityChek, for the most up-to-date thinking on the election — as well as everything else under the sun.

Im-Politic: The Debate and the Current Danger

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Blob, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, globalism, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Never Trumper, Populism, presidential debate, progressives, Trump

As difficult as it might be to believe that the verbal knife fight of a presidential debate held Tuesday night changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign, it’s increasingly clear to me that it changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign.

Politically speaking, that’s bad news for President Trump. After all, however flawed the national and, more important, the state polls might be, they’re virtually all saying that Democratic challenger Joe Biden is in the lead. Yes, there may be a significant hidden Trump vote out there, comprised of folks who either are too embarrassed to tell canvassers their real preferences, or too mistrustful of strangers, period. Yes, an enthusiasm gap does seem to favor the President. Yes, both nationally and in some key swing states, the results are tightening. But the hidden vote hypothesis remains a mere hypothesis. Anti-Trump sentiment could well overcome the lukewarm feelings about Biden. And the narrowing hasn’t been major or uniform as best as I can tell.

Therefore, for the debate to have helped the President, he needed to throw the former Vice President considerably off his game, or Biden needed to stumble into major trouble on his own. Neither happened. And since Mr. Trump and many of his backers set the expectations bar for Biden so low with their constant “Sleepy Joe” refrain and insistence that the 77-year old Democrat was losing his marbles along with too much of his physical energy and stamina, Biden’s at-least-perfectly fine coherence and energy level earned him a solid passing grade, and for now surely reeassured many voters worried about his capacities.

Interestingly, in this vein, the Trump performance displayed almost no interest in overtures of the President’s own aimed at enhancing his appeal beyond his base. One possible exception: For the first 20 minutes or so, the President was actually even-toned and on-message. But for whatever reason (some successful early baiting by Biden, frustration with moderator Chris Wallace, surprise at Biden’s performance, an inability to maintain self-control, or some combination of these), Mr. Trump eventually reverted to quasi-rally mode.

So it’s evident that, unless he decides to become more “presidential” (for lack of a better word) – a tactic that may well be way too late to convince any late deciders in any case – the President will continue to bank mainly on achieving two goals: first, amping up the (considerable) base to ensure astronomical turnout; and second, convincing some in key Democratic voting blocs that Biden can’t be trusted – as with his Tuesday night dig that Biden’s rejection of the Green New Deal proper means that hes “lost the Left,” and his Kamala Harris-like attacks on the former Vice President’s record on racial issues. Not that the first claim in particular can possibly be reconciled with other Trump allegations that his opponent will let “Socialism” run wild. But in American politics, consistency doesn’t necessarily equal effectiveness. At the same time, if the aforementioned polls are generally accurate, this Trump tack hasn’t paid off sufficiently yet.

But pure politics and the debate’s impact on the election aside, it’s also important to deal with fears that the event’s rancor once more revealed an American political system that can no longer produce leaders with both the competence and the personal qualities needed by any society to remain reasonably united – and therefore adequately successful by any measure. Of course, Mr. Trump and his supporters seem to have generated the greatest concerns along these lines, but there’s no shortage of worries that Biden is simply (as per the Trump statements above) a pawn of equally angry and reckless groups on the Left.

What, however, is new to say on these scores? The country was deeply and angrily divided before Mr. Trump was elected. It’s been deeply and angrily divided now and obviously will remain so after November 3. America’s most successful Presidents – the ones to whom the nation is most indebted – have been unifiers and motivators across the political spectrum. Mr. Trump has failed abjectly here – and revealingly, he’s failed despite a solid pre-CCP Virus record on that supposedly supremely important political issue, the economy.

Whether you believe he’s fanned these flames or not (and his regular use of violent words and phrases to describe what he’d like to do, or see happen, to some opponents clearly qualifies in my view), his interest in mollifying any critic’s legitimate concerns is nowhere to be found. He appears to have no clue how many women and for how long (a) have been victims of sexual assault and harmful, derogatory physical and verbal treatment of all kinds and (b) how they and others are genuinely pained and outraged by the (unpunished) behavior revealed on the “Access Hollywood” tape and alleged in several other cases, and by appearance-based insults of women (whose vulnerability to such verbal abuse has mattered so much more than that aimed at men simply because society and culture have been so thoroughly sexist for so long).

Moreover, although it may technically be true that the United States has cured itself of most truly systemic racism, he’s equally insensitive to the impact of cursory denials of these claims, and of how African Americans could validly point out that, contrary to the Trump MAGA campaign slogan, the nation wasn’t remotely “Great” for them for most of its pre-Trump (or pre-Obama) history. (I’m aware that former President Bill Clinton invoked the same idea, but Trump hard-liners need to do better here than such “What About-ism.”)

Nevertheless, lots of What About-ism is justified when it comes to the reactions – and previous records – of so many Trump critics. Unless they should be absolved of all blame for the nation’s current hot mess? As I’ve urged so many Never Trumpers since the President began his first run for the White House in 2015, it’s not enough to decry his various offenses. The best way to defeat him and insure against any Trumpist revivals (whether led by Mr. Trump or not) is to address seriously the genuine grievances that created so much of his base in the first place. To this day, however, the Never Trumpers have not only failed miserably or shown no signs of learning curves whatever. They’ve bent over backwards and turned cartwheels – often in some of the most deluded and/or dangerously unethical ways imaginable – to justify remaining in deep denial.

How do I count the examples? They include:

>the glaringly obvious effort to politicize intelligence and law enforcement agencies to sabotage his presidency with Russia collusion charges that turned out to be not only phony but look to have been planted or spread by the camps of both his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and of the late globalist neoconservative Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona — among others;

>the literally hysterical drive to impeach Trump based on an almost completely routine instance of diplomacy and foreign policymaking;

>the utterly shameless leaking and fabrications – by career bureaucrats and establishment Republicans with whom Trump needed to staff much of his administration for lack of a large enough cadre of talented and experienced populists and America Firsters – that helped foster and sustain these anti-Trump campaigns;

>the eagerness of the Mainstream Media to swallow the leakers’ claims on these and other subjects, and propagate them without any meaningful, on-the-record corroboration;

>the adamant refusal of McCain and other card-carrying members of the globalist bipartisan foreign policy Blob to admit to the disasters their strategies produced (the Iraq nation-building effort, their gushing and often bought-and-paid-for support of the rise of China), and to acknowledge the possibility of viable alternatives;

>the mind-bogglingly hypocritical attacks on the Trump China and other tariffs by Congressional Democrats and labor leaders who spent literally decades calling for the exact same policies in order to improve working- and middle-class economic fortunes;

>the transformation of support for more lenient but still sane immigration policies into thinly-disguised support for an Open Borders approach (epitomized by the backing of every Democratic candidate at this primary debate for providing free government healthcare to illegal aliens);

>the full-throated endorsement by growing numbers of progressives and other Democrats of dangerously divisive identity politics, education as outright propaganda, and authoritarian curbs on free expression;

>and perhaps most tragically ironic of all, the now common calls for anti-Trump and other forms of violence by Democrats – including Biden.  

All of which leaves much of the country with a dispiritingly Hobson’s Choice. I continue making it as I have since it became apparent that Mr. Trump was in the 2016 race to stay: If I could have chosen anyone in the U.S. population to stand for a critical mass of the public policies I’ve long supported, Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been in the first 95 percent of my choices – for all the inexperience and personality-related reasons that were on everyone’s mind.

But against virtually all expectations (including my own) he prevailed against a large, experienced Republican field. And for the reasons described above, his Democratic opponent struck me as being both unacceptable on most issues and dwnright scary on the intangibles.

Four years later, I see the same situation – though my fears about Trump’s opponents now go way beyond Biden himself. So I’ll make the same choice. I’m also left with these observations and (unanswered) questions, which first appeared in a 2018 article in connection with U.S. foreign policy, but which apply to all other major issues as well:

“….American elections have brought to power any number of mainstream politicians, and through them any number of policy operatives, skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable enough to maintain the status quo competently and even effect important reforms. And as shown by Trump’s election, the White House can be won by an outsider with avowedly disruptive ambitions who is largely unfamiliar with Washington’s formal and informal levers of power (and lacking an advisory corps large and savvy enough to at least partly tame the federal bureaucracy).

“But what is still unknown is whether a leader unconventional enough to develop or support truly innovative foreign policy ideas can rise to the top through the current political system and all of its stay-the-course influences and incentives. Equally uncertain—can the world outside mainstream political and policy circles produce a leader both willing to think and act outside establishment boxes, yet versed enough in its ways to achieve transformational goals? And perhaps most important of all: can the nation produce such a leader before war or depression make overhaul unavoidable.”

Im-Politic: Close Encounters with Virus Authoritarianism

Tags

authoritarianism, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, masks, progressives, Riverdale Park, social distancing, virtue-signalling, wokeness, Wuhan virus

As RealityChek regulars know, I’ve resisted the temptation to make this blog about me personally, or about my family and friends, except when personal experiences shed light on some broader subject or controversy. Last Thursday alone, though, produced two of those exceptional situations, at least as I interpret them. And both have to do with the problems and pressures created by the sweeping anti-CCP Virus regulations still in force in so many states and localities.

In the interests of fairness, I need to point out that (just in case many of you don’t already realize) that for some time I’ve viewed the lockdowns and shutdowns imposed throughout the country way too all-encompassing. As I’ve written, although excessive caution was understandable and even necessary early during the pandemic, since then, governments should have had enough learning ability to recognize (a) that restrictions were best focused on the most vulnerable segments of the population, and (b) that the comprehensive nature of the lockdowns and shutdowns were becoming a cure whose economic costs were comparably serious to the disease, and were creating their own major public health dangers to boot. (See, e.g., here.)

Even so, I wasn’t exactly loaded for bear Thursday when I left my house in the D.C.-area Maryland suburb where live to walk the three blocks to the local weekly farmer’s market. My town, Riverdale Park, is getting way too woke for my tastes – including a decision to let illegal aliens vote in local elections if they’re all of 16 years old and can present some kind of evidence that they’ve resided in the area for a grand total of 45 days. But filled with woke characters and illegals as the market tends to be, I especially look forward to going because the produce and specialty items offered tend to be excellent values, and because most of the vendors (who don’t seem to be locals) are easy, informative, and sometimes even fun to deal with. Moreover during this Virus Era, the market is a badly needed opportunity for in-person human contact, and an equally cherished reminder of pre-Virus normality.

Because of state and county social distancing requirements, entry onto the market grounds is regulated (by volunteer staff who deserve admiration for their civic-mindedess), so customers need to stand in line six feet apart until the proper density is achieved. I’m fine with that, as well as with the obligatory mask-wearing. What I was not the least bit fine with was what happened once I began shopping for some vegetables, and specifically began inspecting the tomatoes for bruising and other problems.

Behind me, from the line of customers still waiting to get in, came the demand “Hey! Stop touching all those tomatoes!” For a moment, I could scarcely imagine that I was the object of this fellow’s ire, but upon realizing I was the sole tomato shopper at the moment, turned around and saw him again shout something like, “Keep your hands off the tomatoes!”

Still in partial disbelief, rather than respond with something like “Mind your own business” or something more emphatic, I simply asked him “How else am I going to see if they’re OK or not?” To which he replied, (seriously) “I’m sure the fine people who run this stand wouldn’t offer us bad produce.” I agree, by the way, that the vendors are fine people. But frankly, it’s bad enough that the masks greatly complicate the essential task of sniffing fruit (including tomatoes) to make sure that they’re ripe. Now it’s verboten to turn them upside down to make sure they’ve survived their trip from the fields in reasonable shape?

With my bewilderment not entirely having faded, but recognizing that this late-40s-something white male wearing a roughly color coordinated baby blue baseball cap, mask, and T-shirt wasn’t going to do anything to stop my tomato inspection, I decided to create a teachable moment of the incident. So when I was finished (and had chosen some genuine beauties that were not as banged up, like some of their counterparts), turned around and advised him, “It’s called the eye test. Think about it.” (Of course, it’s also the “feel test.”) 

As is often the case, I spent the next half hour or so going coming up in my mind with better, and even genuinely devastating, rejoinders. (E.g., “Ever heard of washing produce?” “Ever think that I might have tested positive?” “Can I see your badge?”) But as routine as these “if only” exercises have become for me, I actually do regret not telling him to buzz off.

That’s partly because there were no “Don’t touch the merchandise” signs posted and I was obeying all the other rules. It’s mainly, however, because even the best such detailed, substance-specific points obscure how his behavior perfectly epitomized the kind of arrogant, self-righteous busy-body impulses that so many self-styled progressives are flaunting now that the pandemic has ostensibly validated their longstanding determination to impose sweeping controls over all realms of human behavior – especially for the good of those less enlightened of course.

While I was steaming and reenacting on my walk home, I quickly found myself in another possible encounter with this kind of progressive Virus Authoritarianism. At least that’s how I interpreted it. The normally busier of the two streets on my way home (not that it’s usually very busy) was absolutely devoid of people. Until a block ahead of me another pedestrian appeared. Because he was wearing a back-pack I assumed he was a student of some kind, and once he came close enough, I also saw he was masked. I wasn’t – once I left the crowded market area, I removed mine, and I was out-of-doors with no one near me, so why endure the discomfort?

In any event, this other pedestrian wore the covering even though there was no one in sight from where he was coming, and there was no one behind me, either. That’s his right, of course, and to maintain social distancing, I conspicuously swerved to my right as he approached. He moved a little to his right, and although I didn’t recognize him, I was all set to say “Hi” by way of nodding my head or giving a little wave of my hand because that’s what social-butterfly-me does in these situations. But when I saw how resolutely he was staring straight ahead, seemingly set on avoiding eye contact, I concluded that a friendly gesture wouldn’t be reciprocated. And it seemed reasonable to assume that he was very upset that I wasn’t masked – despite the fact that, as I just mentioned, the street was otherwise empty.

Even if he wasn’t, I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth he was masked in the first place. No supposedly settled or any other kind of science has deemed masks necessary in these kind of state-of-nature circumstances, where distancing couldn’t be easier. Was he aggressively virtue-signaling, like Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden seems to have in comparable situations? But to a non-existent (except for me) audience?

But as I implied, his attitude could have been just my imagination.  Maybe virus irritableness is getting to me.  More evidence may come my way when I visit the market this coming Thursday. And when my hands will be all over the produce again.

Im-Politic: Why Biden Can’t Run Even as a Fake China Hawk

Tags

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Asian-Americans, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, China, Code Pink, Democrats, election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Jeet Heer, Joe Biden, Judy Chu, labor unions, Larry Summers, progressives, racism, Rashida Tlaib, Sherrod Brown, The Nation, Trade, Trump

I know I just wrote about how dreadful Joe Biden’s China policy record has been for decades. But the former Vice President is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, and he could well be sitting in the Oval Office next January. So it’s eminently newsworthy to report that any hopes that a President Biden would recognize these disastrous mistakes, and generally speaking try to continue President Trump’s policy of reversing them, are now lying in ruins.

Specifically, it’s become clear in recent days that any Biden effort to keep his newly made promise in a political ad to “hold China accountable” for its role in unleashing the CCP Virus on the world is going to prove totally unacceptable to his party’s progressive wing – whose support he’s acting like he needs desperately to win in order to defeat Mr. Trump.

Moreover, it’s been reported that one of the campaign advisers chosen by Biden is Larry Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama administration chief White House economic aide who has always championed reckless trade and broader economic expansion with the People’s Republic. Worse, during the Obama years, Summers was a major obstacle opposing ideas like sanctioning China for its protectionist currency policies – which would have gone far toward stemming the extraordinary increase in Beijing’s economic and therefore military power that took place while Barack Obama occupied the White House. In other words, the Biden campaign will be powerfully shaped by the Democrats’ centrist wing – and its own long record of enabling China.

If you doubt that Summers still backs coddling China, check out this 2018 post – which shows him turning intellectual backflips trying to excuse Beijing’s massive theft and extortion of American intellectual property, and to claim that the Obama policies succeeded spectacularly in bringing China to heel.

The stances of Democratic progressives are less well appreciated – but at least as important given this faction’s success in pulling Biden and other Democratic centrists to the Left this year on a host of issues. Moreover, don’t forget how if they’re unhappy enough with Biden, many of them will stay at home on election day and, as in 2016, help hand victory to Mr. Trump. At the same time, the progressives’ story it’s a more complicated story than the centrists’.

It’s more complicated because two of the progressives’ favorites – Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont – are definitely supporters of tougher and, more important, smarter U.S. China policies. That’s especially true of Sanders, who has voted against every U.S. effort to integrate the American and Chinese economies more widely and deeply during his long career on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, it’s also true that neither Senator made China a major issue during their presidential campaigns this year.

And one main reason is surely that none of the progressives’ other leading (and younger) lights seems especially interested in China. Commendably, they have condemned China’s horrific repression of its Muslim Uighur minority. But ask yourself – when’s the last time Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, condemned the People’s Republic for the trade and intellectual property and investment policies that have stripped the United States of much of its manufacturing base and hammered the wages of manufacturing workers? I couldn’t find any such statements.

Ditto for Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib – and she represents a Detroit area district whose economic distress owes significantly on China-related and other trade policy failures. But you won’t even find these words on her website.

But although much of the Democratic Left has had little to say lately about China and trade, signs have abounded that it’s royally ticked off about Biden’s CCP Virus ad – in some cases because of their alleged potential to stoke anti-Chinese bigotry at home, but also because they supposedly blame China for U.S. virus-related losses that they insist are really President Trump’s fault.

Most of this pushback so far has come from Asian-American activists in Democratic ranks who don’t hold political office. But it’s also come from California House Democrat Judy Chu, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Does anyone believe she’ll face much resistance here from the rest of her party?

And non-Asian American progressives have ripped the Biden ad, too – including influential pundit Jeet Heer (national political correspondent for one of the progressives’ flagship magazines, The Nation); Sanders campaign surrogate Josh Fox; and Code Pink, the women-led progressive grass-roots group.

In theory, the Democrats’ still-powerful labor union base could prod Biden to lay out a credible plan to combat China’s many threats to American interests. But its representatives, at least, have been quiet about the virus and its implications. In fact, judging from this recent op-ed piece, its spokespeople seem at least as determined to blame Trump administration blunders for the country’s CCP Virus woes as they are to blame pre-Trump China-coddling and enabling trade policies. Indeed, one of the labor Democrats’ Congressional leaders, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, seems to adopted a “Biden uber alles” position during this campaign, even on China policy.

Yet although both Democratic centrists and progressives will be strongly pushing Biden to soft-pedal criticisms of China for the rest of this presidential campaign, this approach is likely to flop so badly with the American electorate in general (as shown in a post earlier this week) that it’s a natural for President Trump to exploit. And if a Trump campaign hammering China themes creates even more incentive and/or pressure for the President to maintain his hard and smart line against Beijing, it won’t just be his political career that benefits. It will be the entire nation as well. Maybe even the Democrats will start opening their eyes.

Im-Politic: Bernie’s Conspiracy Charges are Wrong (So Far)

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Bernie Sanders, caucuses, Democratic Party, Democrats, election 2020, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, moderates, primaries, progressives, Super Tuesday

As must be clear to RealityChek readers, I’m no fan of Joe Biden’s. What may be less clear is that I have a soft spot for Bernie Sanders. That’s largely because the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont is the only one of his party’s current presidential candidates that I’ve dealt with personally – and in small meetings on the subject, and generally speaking, he’s been terrific on U.S. trade policy.

But even though I’ve always considered the former Vice President’s record on this key matter – and most others – miserable (see, e.g., here), it’s clear now, in the wake of the Super Tuesday Democratic primary results, there’s no case to be made that the party’s establishment-arians are effectively rigging the campaign against the more left-leaning Sanders, either because they abhor his policies or because they think he’ll blow the chance they see of defeating President Trump and performing well in House and Senate races this fall.

Instead, yesterday’s voting, along with the totals from earlier primaries and caucuses, show what polls have consistently found: Most Democratic voters have remained moderate, or at least so describe themselves. Relatively few view themselves as being “very liberal. And these Democrats, as so many candidates have pointed out, “don’t want a revolution.”

Of course, because politics and policy are never totally, or even largely, separate, the results of Election 2020 can also be read as supporting an alternative interpretation, but one that’s also been consistently found in opinion surveys: Even many Democrats who might align best with Sanders (or other progressive candidates, like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren), seem to be voting for moderates because they view them as the best hope for ousting Mr. Trump.

Moreover, the Democratic results debunk another major belief about Democratic primary voters in another curious way. The conventional wisdom has long held, and maintained this year, that activists closest to the party’s left-wing fringe would dominate turnout – or at least vote at rates considerably greater than their actual representation in Democratic ranks. (Similar conclusions have been drawn about Republicans, as this popular textbook demonstrates.) But the clear majorities voting for Biden and other moderate candidates throughout the campaign to date indicate that even many progressive voters are holding their ideological noses and pragmatically backing the candidates they believe will perform best against the President this fall.

And perhaps most interestingly, the Super Tuesday and other results place in an unusually interesting light the Democratic Party’s recent shift to the progressive end. Not that the shift hasn’t taken place. But at least according to the Pew survey linked above and this Gallup data series, it’s still left moderates and liberals with a slim majority. And these voters seem to be turning out this election year.

Two big related questions remain, though. First, there’s no doubt that moderate Democratic candidates like Biden and recent drop-outs Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana mayor, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, thought that the progressives held the upper hand in primary voting. That’s why they’ve pandered so heavy-handedly on issues like race relations and gender identity and immigration issues. Now that the Super Tuesday votes are (nearly all) in, will survivor Biden tack back to the center?

Second, even if he does, has the former Vice President made too many far-out statements on such matters already that they’ll still be effective ammunition for President Trump?

I don’t doubt that if the Democratic establishment thought that it needed to or could rig the process against Sanders, it would. Recent history makes that clear. I also understand that the quick campaign exits and Biden endorsements of Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar look suspicious to Sanders World (and maybe to much of its Warren counterpart?). And of course, if Biden falters for whatever reason (health, a genuinely troubling gaffe, his son Hunter’s fishy activities in Ukraine and China), this establishment could spring into action in the back rooms once again.   

But at this point, unless you’re totally paranoid, you need to recognize that the Democratic primaries are reflecting what the party’s voters, not its bosses, want. And their obvious message is that moderate Joe Biden is “the One.”

Im-Politic: Elizabeth Warren, Nationalist?

Tags

Elizabeth Warren, Emmanuel Macron, global poverty, globalization, Im-Politic, nationalism, progressives, Seattle WTO protests, third world, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Whatever its historical roots, “nationalism” has recently become a dirty word. Among the dangers embodied by this concept, as determined by political correctness authorities such as France’s (politically besieged) President Emmanuel Macron, it’s “a betrayal of patriotism. By saying ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.”

How stunning, therefore, to read Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech on U.S. foreign policy. According to this definition, the Massachusetts Democratic Senator, progressive heroine, and likely 2020 presidential hopeful, is a card-carrying, selfish, immoral (amoral?) America First-style nationalist – at least when it comes to international trade and related globalization issues.

Skeptical? Just read the Warren transcript. On the one hand, she admitted that “The globalization of trade has opened up opportunity and lifted billions out of poverty around the world” – which by any standard is a pretty remarkable achievement. Yet on the other hand, Warren condemned the “trade and economic policies” behind this epic success for failing to deliver “the same kind of benefits for America’s middle class.”

In fact, she emphasized, “U.S. trade policy has delivered one punch in the gut after another to [U.S.] workers and to the unions that fight for them.”

It’s true that, elsewhere in her speech, Warren briefly referred to revamping American trade policy to ensure “that workers are meaningfully represented at the negotiating table and build trade agreements that strengthen labor standards worldwide.” But much more often, she lambasted agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) for encouraging “outsourcing jobs to Mexico.”

In other words, either such outsourcing somehow failed to ameliorate poverty in Mexico (even though Warren credits it with uplifting the poor elsewhere), or she assigns little importance to achieving that goal. In either case, Warren has some major explaining to do.

Also fascinating about Warren’s speech: If it’s to be taken seriously (never a sure thing when it comes to politicians’ rhetoric), it would represent a significant, and in my view, welcome change in progressives’ take on trade, globalization, and what’s fundamentally wrong with them.

For since these issues became front-page news during the debate over NAFTA, at the start of the 1990s, critics to the left-of-center have proclaimed that U.S. trade and related policies would remain unacceptable unless they boosted living standards everywhere, not just in America – and that they had betrayed workers in developing countries as completely as their counterparts in the United States.

American progressives’ emphasis on the devastation created in the third world by U.S.-spearheaded trade arrangements came to a head during the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999 – as did the companion belief that win-win solutions for workers and consumers everywhere should be and could be the very raison d’etre of the global economy. And as indicated by this 2015 statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it remains their party line today.

The point here is not that no conceivable form of globalization can ever produce globe-wide benefits. Instead, it’s that the road to mutual gain is unlikely to proceed in a straight, smooth, uninterrupted line, and that without recognizing that hard choices are likely for the foreseeable future, and that those global benefits may not be distributed evenly, the worst of all worlds is all too likely.

So here’s hoping that her speech is evidence that Warren is becoming aware of these at-least-likely complications, that she’ll start prompting such globalization realism on the American Left – and that she won’t be deterred by apologists for a failed status quo who, along with most of her fellow progressives, have been reduced to portraying nationalism as part of the problem, rather than potentially part of the solution.

Im-Politic: What Kamala Harris Didn’t Tell You About the Founding Fathers and Immigration

Tags

Declaration of Independence, Founding Fathers, Fourth of July, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Independence Day, Kamala Harris, progressives, slavery

Freshman (person?) Democratic Senator Kamala Harris of California clearly thought she had made a slam dunk point in the national immigration debate on July 4, when she sent out this tweet:

“A reminder this Fourth of July: it was eight immigrants who signed the Declaration of Independence. Happy Independence Day.”

And lots of the Twitter-verse evidently agreed, for the tweet received more than 132,000 “Likes” as of this morning. The messages she sought to send and that they received were clear:  Anyone who diverges from the Open Borders gospel they’re preaching is ignorant of and maybe even opposed to fundamental American values, especially like inclusiveness and diversity; and these supposed nativists either don’t know or don’t want others to know that the foreign-born have made outsized contributions to the country’s historic success.

Unfortunately for Harris and her fans, she should have done a little more research. For it turns out that most of these eight immigrant signers of the Declaration shared another characteristic that’s consistent with another claim often pushed by many of Harris’ fellows on the progressive Left: that the Declaration signers and the Founding Fathers generally were white racists who have at best little to teach the nation today. (Click here, here, and here for some examples – the latter from a University of Michigan Law School professor, no less.)

Specifically, no less than five of the eight immigrant Declaration signers were slave-holders. Here’s the evidence for Button Gwinnett of Georgia and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania (both born in England, rather than in one of the thirteen colonies); for George Taylor of Pennsylvania (born in Ireland); for John Witherspoon of New Jersey (born in Scotland); and Francis Lewis of New York (born in Wales).

Even worse, two of the five (Morris and Lewis) were significant players in the slave trade.

Of course, many of the remaining 48 Declaration signers who were born in the colonies owned and/or traded slaves, too, along with other Founders. And why should anyone be especially surprised? All were products of their time. Some were honest enough with themselves to recognize the self-evident conflict between slavery on the one hand and the principles of liberty and freedom and equality that they espoused on the other. Some weren’t. Nor should this observation be the least bit surprising: Where they were born was completely irrelevant.

As for the Open Borders crowd in general, it needs to admit that, ethically speaking, in its view there’s no difference on average between foreign-born Americans, native-born Americans, immigrants, and aspiring immigrants either. You can throw in refugees and asylum seekers (real and fake) as well.

Let’s of course by all means continue to have a robust debate on U.S. immigration reform. But let’s focus on genuine policy dilemmas, like economic impact, financing the costs, proper assimilation measures, and national security screening, instead of trying to write a morality play. Dropping the immigration fake history (and Harris is hardly the first such trafficker in this genre) would be a great place to start.