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.

Academia and Journalism Again

 I've talked a lot about what has gone wrong both with academia and journalism in recent decades.  In recent weeks, I have run across two spectacular examples--one from each of those professions--that really make my point.  

About six weeks ago, Lawrence D. Bobo, a professor and dean of social sciences at Harvard, published a very controversial op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, arguing for limits on criticism of university adminsitrators (like Lawrence D. Bobo) by faculty and staff.  I had some sympathy for his position--I agree that it is better not to have intra-university fights in public--but like almost everyone else, I rebelled against the idea of formal limits on expression or punishments for violating them.  Bobo attacked some colleagues, including Larry Summers, for encouraging donors and politicians to intervene in university matters.  I on the other hand want to discuss some other very revealing parts of his op-ed. Here are four key paragraphs.

". . . .it is critically important that faculty play a role in educating students about the history and nature of social protest — its successes and failures, when it is ethical and when it is not. Boycotts, teach-ins, sit-ins, walk-outs, and marches are venerable tools for expressing grievances and pressuring institutions.

"Students should learn about the premises that guide and undergird non-violent direct action protests. They should learn about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. They must also learn from the example of heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis to recognize and accept the fact that breaking the law is likely to involve consequences, including the risk of arrest.

"Modern student protest appears less and less likely to target major non-University events, businesses, or government bodies. Rather, they’re comfortably situated in the confines of college campuses, directing demands for change at university administrators and boards of directors.

"While this certainly draws in media attention, it is flawed. Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights."

Born in 1958, Bobo was in elementary school during the great protests of the mid to late 1960s, but these remarks essentially try to institutionalize the spirit of that time.  Now of course, any political history of any era should include the history of mass protests, but Bobo evidently wants to make the technique of mass protests an essential part of college curriculums.  This clearly implies, first of all, that society suffers from profound injustice, and secondly, that we cannot rely upon established democratic processes to fix it.  It encourages the idea, so dear to 60s activists, that institutions are inevitably corrupt and that virtue only exists outside them among oppressed groups. 

Bobo does balance his deep belief in protest with an attempt to protect universities against it, but to do so, he ignores a lot of what happened in the late 1960s.  Not content to protest against the Vietnam War--more often than not, without burning their draft cards--students in those days turned against anything that smacked of war on campus, such as the ROTC program at Harvard, which was abolished for several decades beginning in 1969, a most unfortunate step.   Most importantly of all, he is endorsing the idea first stated in the SDS Port Huron statement of 1962, and recently repeated by historian and former Harvard president Drew Faust in her memoir:  that universities are the best place to begin sweeping social changes, and thus should be judged by their contribution to them.  That has given professors, particularly in the humanities, a license to structure their courses around their preferred political causes, rather than basing them on what has happened and what has been written in the past, or on preserving and extending the western tradition, which has become a target of intellectual and social change.  And those developments have completely alienated one whole political party from universities as they now exist, with increasingly significant consequences.  It is also largely responsible, in my opinion, for the eclipse of the humanities as major pillars of the college curriculum.  

And on the journalistic front, my new exhibit comes, almost inevitably, from the dean of US op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, who has won three Pulitzer prizes over the last forty years.  Since at least 2002, as Friedman's official biography makes clear, he has explained to us at regular intervals how the world's problems--and especially the Middle East conflict--could be solved if everyone were as smart as he is.  He is still boasting of his advocacy of a broad Arab-Israeli peace deal in 2002, despite its failure ever to happen.  Early this week, he fantasized that Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to a joint US session of Congress might adopt the Friedman program in toto, including an immediate cease fire deal in Gaza and an agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for "credible, good-faith negotiations [with the Palestinians] with the explicit goal of a two-state solution, with mutual security guarantees."  This would also pave the way, he wrote, for a broad alliance against Iran.  

Netanyahu gave his speech yesterday to rapturous appaluse from every Republican and a good many Democrats.  He spent so much time on the idea of the anti-Iran alliance that I wonder whether Friedman had some advance information about it.  But he said nothing whatever about a two-state solution.  He insisted that Israel must retain security control over Gaza when the war is over--that is, sovereignty; he declared that Jerusalem must never again be divided; and he said nothing at all about the West Bank, where settler terrorism and gradual ethnic cleansing have accelerated since October 7.  Friedman in his column repeated the myth that Netanyahu doesn't dare offer peace to the Palestinians because of the "crazy far-right members of his cabinet," rather than admit that Netanyahu isn't interested in any such deal himself.  Even before October 7, Netanyahu presented the UN General Assemby with a map of the region that showed the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean as part of Israel.  Friedman suggested that Netanyahu offer a two-state solution to the Palestinians between July 28 and October 27, when the Knesset will not be in session, and his coalition will not be able to overthrow him.  I would advise Friedman not to hold his breath.

The great expansion of universities in the post-Second World War period vastly increased the size of our professional intellectual class, which includes both academics and journalists.  This new class has arrogated themselves the role of Plato's philosopher kings, whose superior wisdom would give them the right to govern the rest of us.  Simultaneously respect for elected officials has fallen to the vanishing point.  And sadly, when the world refuses to obey the dictates of our many Bobos and Friedmans, they simply take this as evidence that the rest of humanity, sadly, is not yet as smart as they are.

The Fall of the Demoratic Establishment

 A new Democratic establishment has ruled the party almost unchallenged for the last 32 years, beginning with Bill Clinton.  Its prophet was Gary Hart, who nearly defeated the last candidate from the earlier Demcratic establishment, Walter Mondale, for the nomination in 1984 by explicitly repudiating the New Deal legacy and appealing to young yuppies instead of industrial workers and their families.  Bill Clinton, the first new Democratic president, governed as a fiscally responsible Republican, working with a Republican Congress for most of his term.  The Democrats have become the party of the meritocracy, and our meritocracy of professionals sees itself every bit as entitled as any aristocracy ever did.  The increasing importance of social issues, including women's rights and gay rights, increased the Democrats' sense of moral righteousness even as it cut them off from large segments of the population.  Meanwhile, their strength among Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the population, convinced them that demography would keep them in power for the indefinite future.  

The first indication of weakness in the new establishment came in 2008, when Hillary Clinton, the establishment's designated candidate, crashed and burned against a fresh face, Barack Obama.  Coming to power in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in 80 years, Obama could have set the country on a new course and revived some of the principles of the New Deal, but he turned out to be an establishment acolyte, as his appointment of Larry Summers showed.  He agreed that the economy had to be rebuilt from the top down, not from the bottom up, and his failure to do much for the unemplyed in his first two years cost him the Congress.  He also essentially adopted George W. Bush's strategy in the war on terror, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, orchestrating more disastrous regime change in Libya and in Egypt (twice), and eventually resuming the war in Iraq.  The establishment got another brief shock in 2016, when Silent generation leftist Bernie Sanders outpolled Hillary Clinton in the initial primaries, but the DNC managed to ensure her nomination.  Then it turned out that the blue wall was vunlerable, and the Republicans, who had turned on all their establishment candidates, beat the Democrats, who had stuck with theirs.

The election of Donald Trump, I now believe, had a dreadful effect on the Democratic Party and its media supporters.  It increased their feeling of moral righteousness ot a whole new level and persuaded them that they deserved victory merely by virtue of not being Trump.  It also encouraged them, both before and after 2020, to rely on legal processes to ruin Trump's career, no matter what the mass of the American people felt about him.  Trump's worst enemy as president, in actual fact, was himself, and he did enough to alienate the public, particularly after the pandemic struck, to make him vulnerable in 2020.  The Democratic nominating process in 2020 has been understudied, in my view, and exactly how Biden managed to be nominated is not yet entirely clear. As I have mentioned many times, his own earlier attempts to win the nomination, in 1988 and 2008, had ended in disaster, but the vice presidency earned him new name recognition and access to leading Democratic donors that now served him well.  He was lucky that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren divided the left wing vote in the early primaries, and that Kamala Harris bailed out before the first primary, leaving him in position to pick up the black vote.  By the time of the South Carolina primary he was overwhelmingly the establishment candidate and he cruised to an easy victory.  And he won a solid electoral college victory thanks to wins in six key close states.  After Trump tried and failed to overturn the election result and underwent a second impeachment, everyone seemed to assume that the Trump threat was over.

Once in power, Biden issued a string of executive orders reflecting the concerns of "progressive" Democrats, mandating diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government and supporting transgender rights.   In his first three years, 66 percent of his federal judgeship appointments were women and 66 percent were nonwhite.  He continued the Trump strategy of fighting the economic effects of the pandemic with unprecedented infusions of federal money, and he had no strategy when high inflation followed.  He and his immigration czar Harris did nothing for a long time to reduce illegal entry into the country, and they have done nothing to alleviate the worst housing crisis since the end of the Second World War.  His infrastructure bill has yet to show many results, and his bill to deal with climate change--disastrously renamed the Inflation Reduction Act--passed only after he made significant concessions to the fossil fuel industry.  And for all the talk of the 2022 Congressional election as a victory for the Democrats, the Republicans actually won the national popular vote for House candidates by 3 percent, and were therefore somewhat unlucky to emerge with such a small majority.  Last but not least, his near-total support for the Netanyahu government in Israel has cost him support among Arab-Americans--key in Michigan--and young people.

And sadly, Biden's sense of entitlement has now taken over his life, making it impossible for him to acknowledge that he is no longer fit to be president, and thus needs to end his candidacy.  Like Trump,. he now casts himself as the one indispensable man.  According to a source deeply involved in Democratic politics, he will not even talk to anyone now who wants him to drop out of the race.  The assassination attempt on Trump has taken the spotlight off of his decision, and the clock is ticking.  Biden's insistence that he should--or must--be the candidate insults both the candidates who could replace him and the Democratic electorate as a whole.  We can, and need to, field a competent candidate.  Yet he may not get one.  And every day that passes increases the odds that if Biden does drop out, he will give way to Harris--another establishment darling who has never demonstrated real appeal to the American people, but whom much of the Democratic elite believes deserves the White House because she is a black woman.

74 percent of the nation feels--correctly--that Biden is too old to be president.  He trails in nearly every poll in big states, and additional states such as New Hampshire and possibly even New York are coming into play.  The Democratic elite is too sclerotic, it seems, to do what has to be done--despite the laudable efforts of Hakeem Jeffries to make it happen.  And despite all the Democrats' apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump, I honestly don't think they care that much whether they win or lose.  They are part of our wealthy elite and will still survive and prosper.  Apparently, they still need at least one more hard lesson.