Note to readers

    New posts have been delayed while I am reading a long, detailed, and remarkable relatiovely new work of history.  This will lead to a long post, maybe more than one, which should appear later this week. Stay tuned!

           

Some thoughts about the election

 One might argue that I should wait until after Tuesday's debate to post these thoughts, but I am going to go ahead now.  Things could happen in the debate that would change the race, but the vast majority of voters are so entrenched that they may very well not.  Meanwhile, thanks to Nate Silver, whose forecasts I check every day, I have some thoughts that I want to share.

Since August 23, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race, Trump's chances of winning have been steadily increasing.  He passed Harris (who had leapt over Trump almost as soon as Biden dropped out) on about August 28, his rate of growth has increased this month, and Silver now gives him a 61.5 percent chance of winning the electoral college.  That does not mean, of course, that he's going to win 61.5 percent of the popular or electoral votes, and it hardly guarantees him victory.  Any gambler will tell you that 38.5 percent chances happen all the time.  But it means that if you wanted to bet on the outcome of the election today you would be better advised to bet on Trump, and that it's Harris who has to gain ground now.

The second thing that jumps out from Silver's figures is that this will be one of the very closest elections in the electoral college in our history.  Leaving out the disputed 1876 election, the closest was 2000, when George W. Bush won 271 electoral votes to Al Gore's 267 (one of whom abstained in the actual voting.)  Not only Florida, but also New Hampshire would have swung the election to Gore that year.  Silver now estimates that Trump is likely to win 278 electoral votes to 260 for Harris.  And his projections for three critical swing states--Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are almost exactly 50 percent.

And thirdly, it's highly possible that we may repeat the experience of 2000 and 2016, when the Republican candidate lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college.  That will happen in Silver's most likely scenario right now, and he finds that Harris has to win the popular vote by more than 2 percent to have a better than even chance of winning in the electoral college.  That leads me to my first point.

If in fact Harris wins the popular vote but loses the election, Democrats will denounce the outcome as illegitimate.  Because the Republicans have already won twice despite losing the popular vote, leftist Americans now reject the electoral college as undemocratic.  I too would favor replacing it with a two-round popular vote requiring a majority to be elected and eliminating all but two candidates in the second round, as in France, but I would like to push back against the idea that our electoral map gives the Republicans an advantage that they would not otherwise have.  We actually have no idea who would win presidential elections decided by the popular vote, because under that very new rule, the campaigns would be entirely different.  Today the voters in all but about seven states know that their individual vote is essentially meaningless, because one candidate or the other will surely win their state overwhelmingly.   The parties, who know that, don't bother to campaign or run ads in the vast majority of states either.  Perhaps the strongest argument for changing to a popular vote system is that all our votes would suddenly count.  That, it seems to me, would encourage, or even compel, candidates to compete for a much broader spectrum of voters.  It could easily increase the turnout of Texas Democrats and California Republicans in presidential elections.  It would certainly once again force candidates to campaign all over the country.  But we do not know how it would affect the balance between Democratic and Republican votes, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.  And on the debit side, in our current climate, the problem of controversies over voter fraud would get even worse.  Voter fraud could be a hot issue in every state of the union, instead of only in the handful of states that are genuinely in play.  

Because Democrats regard a Trump victory as illegitimate on its face--not because of voter fraud or complaints about voter fraud, but because they reject everything Trump stands for--they have been desperate since 2016 to find some reason that would invalidate it.  I agree that a victory would be catastrophic, but I am trying to be realistic about how it might come about.  The six key swing states--Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are an interesting mix.  The first three are sun belt states with increasing populations, while the last three are declining Rust Belt states. Many voters in the first three, one might hypothesize, don't feel they need a Democrat in the White House, and it is well documented that many voters in the last three don't think Democrats in the White House have done them any good.  Many in all of them reject a lot of the cultural positions that Democrats increasingly take. That, I would argue, is why Harris at this moment is in grave danger of losing the election.

If she wins the status quo will continue.  The Democrats are likely to emerge from the election without at least one house of Congress in their hands, and that will make passing any significant legislation impossible. They will not be able to codify Roe v. Wade in federal law--although I am hopeful that the democratic process will secure abortion rights in most of the states of the next few years, which would be a very good outcome.  Harris is rapidly emerging as a neoliberal in the Clinton-Obama mode, which means that inequality will continue to grow.  Her foreign policy is therefore likely to remain conventional as well--even as the American public becomes less and less interested in its world role.  Harris is not the problem, but it's unlikely that she will be the solution.  I'm voting for  her.

The Trump Campaign

 When you watch Donald Trump at one of his rallies these days, you see that his heart is no longer in it.  He looks old, tired, and eager to be somewhere else.  Two days ago, an interesting op-ed in the New York Times gave me a possible explanation for this.

The author of the piece, Juleanna Glover, a mid-wave Gen Xer, is described by her Wikipedia entry as "an American corporate public affairs consultant, tnrepreneur, former Republican lobbyist and political strategist."  She now runs an agency that advises leading Silicon Valley companies.  She has looked into the accounting, such as it is, for contriobutions to Trump's campaigns in 2020 and again this year.  Of the $780 milion that the Trump campaign spent in 2020, she reports, nearly $516 million was spent by a freshly created company, American Media Consultants, which has never provided an itemized accounting of what happened to the money.  Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump was reported to be the first president of the company, and Jared Kushner and a deputy of Lara's husband Eric helped set it up and run it.  Last March, the AP reported that Trump had made a fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee that diverted contributions to the Save America PAC, which has been paying Trump's legal bills, then estimated at $76 million over the last two years.  Another private company, Red Curve Solutions, has apparently received $18 million that it used to pay Trump's legal bills.  So far, a deadlocked Federal Election Commission has failed to investigate any of this. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign's advertising spending seems to be lagging way behind his opponent's.

It seems to me quite possible that Trump does not really care very much about becoming president again, and that he undertook this campaign mainly to keep campaign contributions coming in, much of which are apparently being diverted to other purposes.  Ironically, the legal cases against him, which some undoubtedly hoped would drive him out of the race, may have influenced him to go on with it.  (To be fair, Glover also reports that the Biden campaign spent a much smaller amount on Biden's legal bills relating to the discovery of classified documents in his home.)  It is sad that this story had to be broken by an op-ed writer rather than a team of reporters at the Times or any other major newspaper, but now the door is open.  I hope more reporters will walk through it.

The Fast Moving Election

 The Democratic Party was on death ground in July after the disastrous presidential debate, and the party leadership rose to the occasion.  Led once again by Nancy Pelosi, they forced Joe Biden, who had a less than 30 percent chance of defeating Donald Trump according to Nate Silver, to withdraw.  Kamala Harris, as I think I made clear, was not my favorite candidate, but the party instantly coalesced around her and she has risen to the occasion.  Her delivery of her acceptance speech was oustanding, and as Nate Silver (of whom more later) has pointed out, she almost entirely omitted gender or race from her presentation and said nothing about sexual orientation or gender identity.   I personally see a certain appropriateness to her nomination.   Indian-Americans are now the most successful ethnic group in the United States per capita, and her Indian-American mother, she made clear, was by far the biggest influence on her young life, and taught her the lesson that earlier generations of immigrants took to heart: don't complain, just achieve.  I have noticed Indian-Americans popping up in all sorts of powerful positions in recent years and Kamala Harris is now the most distinguished of those.

The problem that she still faces, however, emerges from an op-ed in today's New York Times by James Pogue, based upon conversations that Pogue has been having with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.  Since at least 2016 the Democrats have presented themselves as the party of the status quo threatened by Donald Trump and a Republican revolution.  The status quo has been very good to the professional classes that dominate the Democratic Party, but it has been much less good for ordinary Americans regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation, and they know it.  Harris is now talking vaguely about recreating an "opportunity society," but that strikes me as another way to emphasize education as the road to advancement, even though education is getting worse, not better, while continuing to saddle young people with large debts.  Trump now seems to be self-destructing and becoming even shriller and more bitter, and it could be that the nation is sufficiently sick of that part of our policies to abandon him in significant numbers.  That, however, is not happening yet.

I now subscribe to Nate Silver's substack and get his daily election forecast.  Yesterday's forecast gives Harris only a very marginal edge--a 53.2 percent chance of winning the electoral college, compared to 46.6 percent for Trump.  That means that out of 100 simulations of the election based on all the data at Silver's command, Harris won 53--and that is only a tiny bit better than your chance of winning a coin flip.  Among battleground states, Trump has a more than 60 percent chance of winning Georgia and North Carolina--which, to repeat, doesn't mean he will win 60 percent of the votes there, and certainly doesn't rule out a Harris win in those states--while Harris has a better than 60 percent chance in Wisconsin and Michigan, despite her problems with Arab-American voters there.  Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are virtual tossups, with Trump barely ahead in Arizona and Harris barely leading in the other two.  This projects overall to a 281-257 electoral vote majority for Harris, which would shift to 276-262 for Trump were he to win Pennsylvania, as he easily could.  That's why Silver still regrets the choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro  All these figures could change a great deal ten or eleven weeks, but as it stands now, Trump certainly might still win, and any Harris victory would be close enough to set off another round of post-election disputes for which Trump supporters have been carefully preparing.

The Pogue article encouraged me because Chris Murphy, now only 51, sounds like he might turn out to be the younger successor to Bernie Sanders that we definitely need.  Apparently such Democratic skeptics can only be elected in very small states, which is one reason we are lucky to have some (and they are by no means all Republican, including Vermont, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire.)  Essentially he is recognizing the fundamental point that Thomas Piketty stressed a decade ago:  that under unregulated capitalism, capital grows faster than the economy as a whole, thereby making the rich richer while most of the rest of us stand still.  Harris knows that inflation and housing shortages are hurting ordinary Americans but is only putting forward vague, potentially palliative solutions to these problems.  We appear to lack both the intellectual and political requirements to build the several million new houses that we need in the way that we did after the Second World War, and we have trusted the Fed to control inflation since the mid-1970s.  Our current era, as many have noted, resembles the Gilded Age, and it took more than half a century for the values of the Gilded Age to give way to those of the New Deal. It could take that long again.  If Harris can defeate Trump, however, it may mean that our politics have at last hit bottom.

1914 again

 Having decided to discuss the Middle East once again, I reviewed the two posts I made last October, only weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the war.   The first analyzed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather pessimistically, arguing that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian leadership really wanted peace and a two-state solution in the long run, and suggesting that under the circumstances, they had a responsibility to try to keep the level of conflict as low as possible.  It occurs to me now that talk of a two-state solution has been designed to do that.  The Israelis have however continued to wage a remarkably destructive war that has left most of Gaza uninhabitable while hundreds of thousands of Gazans--if not more than a million--move their tents from one camp to another.  The Israeli government does not seem to want a cease fire, even though its military leadership recommends this.

Meanwhile, as a long New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins shows, a new low-level conflict between Hezbollah and Israel continues along the northern border.  Hezbollah immediately began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas, and Israel immediately began striking back.  Tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese have had to abandon their homes along the border.  Everyone seems to agree that Hezbollah would stop this particular campaign in response to a cease-fire in Gaza, but its long-term threat would remain.  And they now, I think, have the capability to threaten the existence of Israel.  I do not mean that they could destroy Israel, but they apparently have so many sophisticated rockets that they could make large parts of Israel look the way Gaza looks today if they fired them all off.  Israel would in turn destroy much of Lebanon, but the damage Hamas could inflict, it seems to me, would decisively undermine the ideological foundation of the Jewish state: that it provides unique safety for the Jewish people.  So many Israelis, it seems to me, would decide that the Zionist experiment had failed and would emigrate to the West that the survival of the nation would be called into question. 

The underlying problem, as I wrote then, is the failure of much of the region to accept Israel's existence.  Here some history tells a very sad story.  About 40 years ago, a young Israeli diplomat named Nimrod Barkan explained some of the diplomacy of the early Jewish state.  Facing the unremitting hostility from the Arab states that surrounded it, Tel Aviv had cultivated relationships with the largest non-Arab states in the region:  Ethiopia, Iran, and Turkey.  The last two of those nations were also allies of the West.  Beginning in the 1970s, of course, Israel made peace first with Egypt and then with Jordan, and more recently it established diplomatic relations with some Gulf states.  Iran, however, went totally over to anti-Zionism after its Islamic revolution in 1979, and has become the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.   Turkey has also become more Islamic and is now a declared foe of Israel.   And Iran has provided both with the missiles that have put the Israeli population under permanent threat and could in fact destroy a good deal of the country.

In my opinion, Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the Congress left no doubt that he feels that Israel, with the help of the United States, should remove this threat through wars with Hamas (ongoing as we speak), Hezbollah (threatening to become total at any moment), and Iran itself.  Meanwhile he has made Gaza uninhabitable while Israeli settlers, often backed by the Israeli Army, continue to squeeze the Arab population of the West Bank into smaller and smaller territory.  And that brings me to the analogy I drew in the second post last October between the current situation and the European situation in 1914

My analogy, which disturbed some readers, cast Israel as the 21st-century counterpart of Austria-Hungary, a state of the second rank threatened by its neighbors and by internal conflict with ethnic minorities.  The Israeli situation is in some ways just as precarious, since the Arab and Israeli populations of the territory from the Jordan River to the sea are nearly equal, and Israel is split between left- and right-wing Israelis in the same way that Austria-Hungary was between Austrians and ethnic Hungarians.  Israel reacted to the Hamas attack the way Austria-Hungary decided to respond to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, by trying to crush the source of the attack.  It did so with the backing of the United States, just as Austria-Hungary did so with the backing of its ally Germany.  War broke out almost immediately in July-August 1914 because the Germans, for their own reasons, were more than willing to risk a European war.  The United States has tried unsuccessfully to get Israel to halt its war in Gaza because it fears a wider war involving both Hezbollah and Iran.  Israel is however continuing to provoke those nations with assassinations, and Netanyahu, to repeat, talked in Washington as if he would welcome general war.

Iran does not seem to want that war, all the less because it has a new president who reportedly wants better relations with the west.  Yet I am afraid that if the war does break out, the United States will come in on Israel's side.  A few years ago an excellent Frontline documentary showed that the United States and Iran were perilously close to a strike on Iran's nuclear capability during the Obama administration.  It seems that if full-scale war between Iran and Israel broke out, the United States would side with Israel and might well join in the fighting itself.

We should remember that the 1914 crisis was the last of a number of disputes between Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, and Serbia, backed by Russia.  Crises over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908-9 and over Serbian expansion in the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 did not result in war because cooler heads prevailed in all the major capitals.  They are not prevailing in Israel now, however, and things could change at any moment within Hezbollah and Iran.  The major powers, including Russia, seem to be trying to preserve the peace, but the danger of general regional war is very real, and that in turn could easily escalate into world war.