Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.

The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing: 

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):

Postmortem Note

Certainly looks like I was completely wrong about the presidential polls, in general, or at least the relation between the polls and what was going to happen. I'm still not convinced the race was ever as close and immobile as they kept portraying it, through all the turmoil from June to now. It's easier to talk about what did happen, which is clear from the NBC exit poll: it was the last-minute undecideds, so beloved of the media, probably the lowest propensity voters of all, who really did decide the election, "breaking" for Trump in the last week, after a period, mainly in September and October, when the main event was Democrats and Democrat leaners allowing themselves to get excited about the freshness and novelty of Harris and Walz, and the departure of Biden made the awfulness of Trump briefly more apparent.

But the majority of the voters decided Trump's awfulness didn't matter, in the finding of the AP VoteCast, a massive survey of 115,000 voters, and there's an element of incipient fascism in that:

Nearly 6 in 10 said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, a reflection of his criminal convictions, his often inflammatory rhetoric, his sexist remarks and actions and his denial of the 2020 presidential election results that fed into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Slightly fewer than half said Harris did not possess the morality to be president.

This Is Not a Prediction

 

Daniel Drezner suggested there had been a perceptible change in the vibe around the presidential election in the last few days, driven perhaps in part by a change in the Harris campaign's rhetoric: after all these weeks of calling themselves the underdog, they've started allowing themselves to look confident: "We are on track to win this very close race," says campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon. Harris in her new stump speech says, "Make no mistake: we will win." 

That's a strategic decision, no doubt—there comes a moment when being the underdog stops paying off and you want your voters to start feeling they're on a bandwagon of winners, and this was a logical place to make that transition, but there's more to it than that. There's a fire in Harris's and Walz's rally crowds that's like when they were first introduced to the audience in late July and early August, while Trump's malevolent juggalos (as opposed to the musical Juggalos, who don't seem at all malevolent and have given Harris the nod) are plainly dwindling in these final days, as in the scene in Reading shown at top.

I can't at this point imagine Trump winning, and I mean that literally: I should be able to imagine it, I normally have a pretty decent imagination, but my mind just won't go there. 

Maybe it's one of those self-care moves, a sign of mental health even. I can always start imagining it again tomorrow if I have to. We've been preparing for it for two years at least. But for now, imagining Harris winning is so much easier. I'm not saying she will win, I'm just saying she should. If the world makes sense, you know, which is not an easily defended prior assumption and I'm aware of that. I understand she could lose; I'm just not imagining how it happens, or why, for the time being. 

They're running such a technically good campaign, for one thing. "Flawless" is the word that keeps coming up (googling "Harris campaign flawless" returns 850,000 results). They have raised inconceivably huge amounts of money—I'll go back to protesting against that sooner or later (and Obama for breaking the public financing system in 2008)—and they've spent it with discipline, whereas Trump has had difficulty raising money and spent far too much of it on paying his legal bills (that goes back to a while ago, but he's still doing it). 

Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Literary Corner: Making the Hell's Angels Look Nice

 

Désiré Ntwayingabo, a refugee from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo who settle in Dayton in 2010, and works there now for the city as a community engagement specialist, at a World Refugee Day event he and his team organized in June 2023, via Spectrum News 1 in Columbus.

From a fundraiser with Texas governor Greg Abbott  in Aspen,  Colorado, August 10, $25,000 to $500,000 a couple, of which The Guardian obtained a recording. For money like that, you get to hear the former president say "fuck". The first piece is about a party of 22 Congolese migrants to the United States he claims to have met at some point; the second his encounter with Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the first attempt to assassinate Trump on July 13.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

 

I. I Hate to Use That Foul Language

We said, ‘Where do you come from?’
They said, ‘Prison’.
‘What did you do?’
‘None of your fucking business what we did.’

You know why? Because they’re murderers.
I hate to use that foul language.
These are the toughest people.
These people are coming in from Africa,
from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts
the parts where they’re rough,

and the only thing good is
they make our criminals look extremely nice.
They make our Hell’s Angels look
like the nicest people on earth.

II. I'd Much Rather Have My Husband

So they’re going to get millions of dollars
but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman,
I handed her the check –
we handed her the check–

and she said, ‘This is so nice,
and I appreciate it,
but I’d much rather have my husband.’
Now, I know some of the women
in this room wouldn’t say the same.

I know at least four couples.
There are four couples, Governor,
that I know and you’re not one of them.
At least four couples here
would have been thrilled, actually.

There is obviously no reason to think Trump has ever interacted with a large group of migrants from Congo, let alone that they told him they came to America "from prison", let alone addressed him so rudely. The idea of Congolese must come from the story of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, accused of roasting and eating their neighbors' dogs and cats, for which Christopher Rufo found some video evidence, except it turned out that the migrants in question were not Haitian but Congolese, in Dayton rather than Springfield, and the video was an evident fake (sounds like a Radio Yerevan joke!).

All he's retained of the story is that there are Congolese somewhere in the US (there's a big community in Dayton in particular), which must have shocked him a lot, and he's made the rest up out of his congested head, probably mostly from the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba in 1980, the only time as far as I know when a foreign government really did "send them" to the States, and rumors flew that some of the boat people might be prisoners and mental patients, which was probably not true, though many of them were undesirable from President Castro's point of view, gay, ill-educated, political detainees, or Black. That was a time when a relatively young Trump was still capable of learning something—the wrong thing, of course—and the source of many things he thinks he knows now.

On Mrs. Comperatore, I can't find any evidence that he's ever presented her with a check, or met with her personally at all—he did speak with her on the phone at least once, and he may well have contributed to the gofundme, though he's not listed in the report of celebrities (Dana White, Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock) who did. On the joke about how some women would be pleased if their husbands got shot to death at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, four of whom were at the Aspen dinner, not including Mrs. Abbott, I have no words.

Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power. pic.twitter.com/McbdBNwUyq

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) October 2, 2024

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive:

State of the Race

I'm on a bit of a very refreshing holiday and finding it hard to focus on the realities, but this seemed especially hilarious: 

Per CBS News, 

A company called TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, which is licensing Trump's name for the watches, lists its address as a suite located in a building in Sheridan, Wyoming, the same address as the company selling Trump's $499 sneakers. The suite is near a Wendy's fast-food location and Sherwin-Williams paint store. 

New York's Chas Danner and Matt Stieb have reported of the sneaker operation, however, that the Sheridan company that licensed Trump's name for the sneakers, 45FootwearLLC, as well as the company that did the digital Trump trading cards, is the creation of an "asset-protection consultant" called Andrew Pierce, who specializes in creating LLCs for clients who could like to keep their transactions inside layers of misdirection, apparently quite a big business in Wyoming (see Pandora Papers), in these cases the not-at-all illegal fact that Trump actually owns the businesses himself, and the buyer of these cheap sneakers from a "low-cost Asian country", smelling of glue (that's said to be a bad sign) and marked up something like 900%, who probably thinks he is benefiting the Trump presidential campaign, or the equally dubious Tourbillon watches, is actually giving the money straight to Donald. 

And with those those kinds of markups, he's definitely got the tariffs covered, if the goods are subject to any.

Then there's the way he's restructured the Republican National Committee, taking the management away from that loyal tool Ronna McDaniel and turning it over to his daughter-in-law, the aspiring pop singer Lara Trump, and Michael Whatley, whoever that is (he's a North Carolina lawyer and an election denier). They are pledged not to use the party funds to pay Trump's legal fees, for whatever that's worth, but they've allocated their energies in a sort of weird way, devoting themselves mostly to fighting against the election results before the election takes place, with 120 lawsuits in 26 states, while the party's normal get-out-the-vote activities have been wholly outsourced to outside groups, Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, the "America First Works" run not by political operatives but by theoretically sane celebrity veterans of Trump's old cabinet (Linda MacMahon and Larry Kudlow), and most splendidly a superPAC aligned with former genius Elon Musk, AmericaPAC, which is said to be doing most of the work but adopting a somewhat peculiar strategy, aimed at a relatively small number of unlikely voters:

What She Needed to Do

Portrait of the candidates as baffled uncle and skeptical niece. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty. 

When Vice President Harris opened up in her first debate response—to the fairly stupid but utterly predictable question whether Americans are "better off than they were four years ago", I was somewhat dismayed by the way she completely ignored it, choosing to answer a completely different question instead, with a peculiar mix of autobiographical detail and Clintonian numbers:

So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

But it's astonishing, looking back at it, how many necessary things she accomplished with that, in the first two minutes: 

• sketching out her character, as an ordinary American raised by a single mother with the help of a day care provider (loved, and also properly paid for her work), which has given her a feeling for what ordinary Americans need and a motivation to help them get it, for the benefit of those in the audience that had barely heard of her before July and still doesn't know much of anything about her; 
• establishing her readiness to talk about policy with details, numbers and all, for the benefit of the moderators whose preparation has led them to believe that she's going to keep it vague and airy, and precisely the kind of wonky detail they hate at the politics desk, because they find it so boring;
• establishing the contrast with her opponent, who is focused on helping his fellow billionaires and their giant companies, as he has shown in the past and as he plans in the future; and
• spooking the opponent personally with a description of his tariff proposals that he may not even be able to recognize—it's import duties, paid by the American importers of foreign goods—effectively a sales tax, since the importers normally pass the cost on to their customers, but not literally a sales tax, while Trump keeps implying idiotically that it's paid by the governments of the exporting countries, which he should understand better considering all the import businesses he theoretically ran in his TV star days (Israeli vodka, Slovene cocktail glasses, Turkish furniture, Chinese neckties and eyeglass frames, etc.—of course he was just a licensee pretending to run the businesses for the show, and they were all failures), a description that immediately goads him into opening with a ridiculously ignorant lie:

First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on.....

No, "other countries" don't pay a dime. And while the money paid by US import businesses is real, it's hardly important: it's up from about 1% of annual federal revenue from 1946 to 2017 to 2% (compared to 49% for income tax), and that's not the reason the Biden administration has held on to them. Tariffs haven't been a significant source of revenue since the income tax was introduced by a Progressive movement a bit over a century ago (it's imaginable that Trump learned from his rightwing father that income tax is an attack on the wealthy, and that's the reason he's convinced tariffs are the solution to every problem).

The only reason for imposing tariffs nowadays is as the (post-neoliberal) Biden administration uses it, for the encouragement of domestic industry, but combined, unlike the Trump tariffs, with an effective industrial policy of the kind Republicans regard as an abomination and which Trump and his minions wouldn't know how to begin in any case (Trump's own tariffs on imports from the EU as well as China are best known for China's retaliation against US agriculture—92% of the "billions and billions of dollars" they brought in went to compensating US farmers for the losses Trump policy had caused them).

Via.

FWIW.

Moreover, Harris did have an answer to the "are we better off" question, which she got to in response to Trump's freakout Gish gallop, which ran in a matter of seconds from tariffs to inflation to a rant on "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums" before he remembered he was supposed to be talking about the economy. 

"I'd love to" talk about the economy, Harris replied:

Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess. 

So you can't complain that she didn't answer—she just chose to do it in her own time, after getting Trump to define his own character, as ignorant, delusional, and vicious, and did it with a list of charges that placed him as the defendant in what would amount to a trial, and took control of the occasion. 

Really, as Rebecca Traister suggested, she took control of it the minute she came on stage and marched over to Trump's podium introducing herself as if she were the host ("Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate") and forcing him to shake hands.

It was a stunning performance. It was by far the most entertaining presidential debate I've ever seen, and by far the most useful (both at the same time: the faces she made for the camera when Trump was speaking were funny, but they were also instructive, assisting with the fact checking; leading the audience to distinguish Trump the liar from Trump the fool, libelous Trump from psycho Trump, the sneaky one from the one who was just tired and lost). (It's only fair to mention that the moderators did an unusually good job of keeping the candidates on the subject and checking the facts themselves.)

It didn't, as many of the pundits complain, provide a very clear sense of how Harris's presidency will differ policy-wise from Biden's, but I don't understand why it should; she's not running against Biden, she's running against Trump. Josh Marshall likes to say she's making Trump the "incumbent", the representative of the discredited establishment, in order to present herself as the change agent, and some think that's a little too paradoxical, but I think it meets the psychology of the moment, in terms of the Lacanian picture I sketched out a couple of weeks ago. Economically, Biden (or "Biden-Harris") rescued the nation from the calamity of 2020; psychologically, Biden's term is the afterwardsness in which we began to realize how traumatized we've been, and we may irrationally blame him, in the form of the psychoanalytic transference, but it's Trump we're suffering from—it's Trump who abused us, and he really is the incumbent in that sense.

As to whether the debate worked or not for the Harris campaign, whether she "did what she needed to do" as the horserace pundits always put it, I don't know, but I think there are reasons for being hopeful, and I don't mean the current picture in the polls, or for that matter the parade of Bush-era endorsements for Harris, most recently from that old reprobate Alberto Gonzales, or last week's statements from Liz Cheney and her father the abominable former vice; not that there's anything wrong with those in and of themselves, it's the responsible thing to do, given Trump's known incompetence and criminality, and Trump opposes some things in national security and foreign policy where the "bipartisan consensus" is so fundamental that at some level I agree with Dick Cheney (like "the US should have multilateral economic and security alliances"); but I can't quite bring myself to see it outside the context of Liz Cheney's broader project of rehabilitating the Republican Party by pretending Trump isn't really one of them, that he's some kind of horrific invasive species from somewhere entirely different. I may get back to that a little later.

The Liz Cheney endorsement that startled me was the one for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, because it's a direct attack on the party as it is, in the rebarbative person of Senator Cruz: she wrote,

There are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism [the C-SPAN transcript says "elections and nihilism" first, but never mind that]—denialism. It is important that we beat them too. I think one of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people. Often, when you go in to vote you don't have the choice. I want to say specifically here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous serious candidate running for the United States Senate. [Applause.] It's not Ted Cruz. [Laughter.] [Applause.]....You might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith. In this race, that is Colin Allred.

And because she gives a nod to the idea that Allred might conceivably win, pinned in Cheney's explanation to Trump's and Vance's (and by implication Cruz's) misogyny, and its connection to the reproductive rights issue: "Women around this country, we've had enough," she said. It seems like a more conventional endorsement, in which she'd not only like him to win, but personally hopes to help.

The things that are giving me the most hope at the moment have to do with how bad the Trump Republican party is, in every sense of the work, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive to voters, especially on the abortion issue. 

There's the  arrogance of Donald Trump saying he doesn't have to prepare for a debate being matched by his vice presidential candidate:

A reporter asked Vance how he was getting ready for the [October 1 debate with Walz] at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

He answered: "The way I'm doing debate prep is by spending time with these fine people—this is how I do debate prep."

That didn't work out so well for Donald, JD, you might want to rethink it.

There's the awful quality of so many of the GOP downballot candidates, especially for the Senate, to the despair of the National Review, with only two seats likely to flip to the Republicans, West Virginia and Montana (but Montana is looking iffier for them, with the Republican, ex–Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy falling from multiple lying scandals to financial scandal to racism scandal).  

There's the turnover of the national committee from Ronna McDaniel (a horrible person, but a professional) to Trump's daughter-in-law focusing on her imaginary music career and outsourcing the party's entire GOTV program to pikers with no experience like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. I'm personally convinced Trump is continuing to milk the party to pay his own and his henchmen's legal fees. It's as if they're so confident in their voter suppression efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that they don't need GOTV:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.

They're so bad at everything else, maybe they're not really good at voter suppression either.

Meanwhile, since the coming of Kamala Harris, there's an explosion of new voter registrations, especially among the 18-to-34s and among those particularly among women:

Voter registration surged 700% after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, according to the CEO of a nonpartisan voter engagement organization....Hailey noted significant registration increases in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the end of the week following Biden’s announcement, Vote.org had recorded more than 142,000 new registrations nationwide....

(who don't show up in the likely voter polls because they'll be voting for the first time). 

This phenomenon is plainly connected to the issue of abortion, which is also the subject of ballot measures in 10 states, including some with important Senate races with repellent Republicans: Montana (Tester vs. Sheehy), Arizona (Gallego vs. Lake), Missouri (Kunze vs. Hawley), and Florida (Mucarsel-Powell vs. Scott). Plus Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. the unspeakable Bernie Moreno), which had its referendum in 2023, which that state's vile legislature has decided to ignore, and the voters really ought to punish them for it

I'm convinced there could be a Blue blowout in November that polls couldn't have predicted—not that there will be, because it's unpredictable, but that it's really possible, between the joy of the Democrats, the worthlessness of the Republicans, and Harris's emerging pro-freedom campaign.

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Literary Corner: Ripcord

Image via Kalson.

In Conclusion, America Has Always Been a Nation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

.....But with voting, one of your most important things you can do, maybe in many ways, your most important, they don't want to approve voter ID. That's because they want to cheat, But until then Republicans must win, We have to win this election. Most important election ever. We want a landslide that's too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone, you know, and vote, vote early vote, absentee, vote on election day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, And again, Christians get out and vote just this time, you won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, you won't have to vote any more. My beautiful Christians. I love you Christians, I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've got to get out and vote in four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good. You're not going to have to vote. In conclusion, America has always been a nation, one built and sustained by Americans of faith. It was faith that led the Pilgrims to cross an ocean and settle this majestic continent. It was belief in our creator that led the patriots to defend their liberties in the war for independence. It was faith in America's God-given destiny that pushed the pioneers to journey west and it was trusting God that led generations of American believers to end slavery, defeat fascism and communism, and make this into the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower, and its strength.......

This somewhat longer piece of the transcript than you may have seen before provides a lovely illustration of how Trump's strange rhetoric works like a parachute jump, with the teleprompter text, in this case clearly by Stephen Miller, serving as a kind of ripcord to break his free fall and float him safely to earth.

He's clearly exhausted at this point in the speech—he's been going on for nearly an hour—and he's tumbling into truly insane-sounding babble; there on the screen in front of him is the rescue message: "In conclusion..." and he leaps for it, almost coming to grief at the complicated grammar of Miller's first sentence ("America has always been a nation built and sustained..." breaking him after the first six words) but recovering quickly enough and finishing the peroration on how America will become great again on November 5 without serious mishaps.

I think people have been overinterpreting the apostrophe to the beautiful Christians here, by the way, when they tell us it's Trump confessing to his evil plan to cancel the 2028 elections, and maybe all future elections. He may have such plans, and JD Vance's monarchist mentor the former Mencius Moldbug certainly does, but that's not what Trump is talking about. 

To know that, you have to do something the political reporters aren't willing to do, which is to look above the particular soundbite to the speech as a whole. Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ("And by the way, Christians have to vote, you know, I don't want to scold you, do you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don't vote like they should. They're not big voters") and one piece of paranoid fiction he's been retailing for at least eight years, that our elections are plagued by illegal or somehow just bad voting, because our laws on who gets to vote, after the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are too lax in some way he's not really able to clarify, but when he says he's going to "fix" it, what he means is explained earlier in the speech ("But I say look, we got to fix our laws on voting. We have to start with voter ID"). The beautiful Christians must put themselves out now, even if it means indulging in the suspect early voting and absentee voting, precisely so he and Congress can change these "ridiculous" laws—

Christians are a group that's known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election. Just give us and get us into that beautiful White House, vote for your congressmen and -women, vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better, this country will be great again like never before. You've got to vote and I've said it before and I'll say it again. November 5th, which is a period really because you're allowed to vote early, they have early voting, late voting. Everything is so ridiculous. We should have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and certification of citizenship, and that's what we're striving for. But voting actually starts on September 6th in North Carolina, a great state. We're doing very well there....Then it's Pennsylvania toward the end of September and it's various states in September...

—and in 2028 beautiful Christians won't have to stress themselves out any more. That's the message Trump is trying to convey: please ignore all that stuff I told you about early voting, that is, I was right, but you should do it this year anyway, and if you do enough of it this year you won't have to do it again.

The program he's hoping to implement being very precisely the one proposed in this year's Republican platform, almost as if he was reading it off the teleprompter (as he may well have been)

We will implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens.

(solving the imaginary problem of noncitizen voting, which almost never happens, but of course making huge trouble for the 10% of US citizens who have trouble proving their citizenship, who are of course mostly relatively poor, and therefore more likely to vote for Democrats). The standard Republican effort to reduce turnout.

This isn't, again, to suggest that no Republicans are plotting to overthrow the US electoral system altogether, as we know they are. Though they aren't the same as the ones working to overthrow it now, in case Democrats win in November: 

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

What I think we need to understand is that Trump Republicans are working now not just on the "two-pronged" effort to plan for whether they win (Project 2025) or lose (January 6 redux) but on a whole layer cake of strategies, to which Trump himself is not entirely privy; he is personally too stupid to play a decisive role, though he is enough of a loose cannon that he might wreck their plans at any moment. You can't take anything he says seriously, let alone literally, though you should always look in what he says for evidence as to what the state of play is, as far as he's been allowed to see it by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and Claremont Institute and other intellectual stakeholders who are squirreling over the actual work. Trumpism is more than poor Trump, the grinning pumpkinface, their only representative of 2020s rizz. He himself is more like a kind of stochastic candidate—you never know what he'll come up with next—but it's never as interesting as it looks.

DEI

 

IDK I really like women who laugh. Talking to UNITE HERE at Culinary Union Hall, Las Vegas, photo by Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mrs. Vance isn't laughing:

Here's somebody who went to Yale from freshman through J.D. and picked up an M.Phil. in modern history from Clare College, Cambridge, along the way, and has clerked for Judge Kavanagh before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts after he was, and has been a really high-powered lawyer with a bicoastal practice (Los Angeles and Washington) at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, described as a "top contender in the cool, woke category" of law firm in 2019, when

Munger has elected eight new partners, and 60 percent of them are women or lawyers of color. What’s more, three of the new partners...took parental leave during the year they were up for partnership—and one of them is a male. The audacity!

(She quit the firm last week after her husband was nominated to be the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, not because it was too woke there, but maybe to get more in line with her husband's well-known policy positions,

It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more "freedom" in the paid labor force.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 29, 2021

so she could spend more time with her kids in the family's third home, in Ohio, the state for which the husband has been serving as freshman senator since January 2023. Of course their kids' daycare isn't crap, but the finest money can buy.)

I don't know that you'd want to call her a diversity hire herself, though she is a woman of color (Dravidian by "race", the child of Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh). I'll bet she has had a terrific work ethic and fabulous grades throughout her education and career, and I'm told her admired writers include Zadie Smith and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt she's fully qualified for every school and every company that's taken her on.

Nevertheless, when she's thinking about civics, as in the tweet above, it's pretty much at a mediocre seventh-grade level. I mean it's embarrassing. 

I know it's common for presidential candidates to claim their VP choice is just the best possible person for the job, as if there was a qualifying exam and they just picked the one with the highest score, but are you seriously believing them? Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? 

That isn't how it's done. Picking a vice president is a complex job, weighing a number of different factors. First and foremost, of course, should be whether the person is qualified, in intellect and temperament, to step into the presidency in the event of a disaster, as Quayle and Palin really weren't, and Democratic candidates generally are, like Mondale or Gore (though there was the Eagleton blunder, really an injustice, willingness to seek help for mental illness should be taken as a good sign, not a bad one; and John Edwards turned out to be an awful blunder, though the guy did give great speeches). Then, it's nice if they bring some political benefit to the ticket, typically geographical: John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Catholic, went for Texan Lyndon Johnson to help quiet the nation's Know Nothing fears (though Johnson also brought extraordinary influence over Congress, which greatly helped him, after Kennedy's killing, to push through the JFK agenda). Johnson in turn chose the Minnesota hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey, as Carter would later choose Mondale.

Then there are ideological contributions: Reagan picked G.H.W. Bush to appease the people who feared his ideas on economics were too crazy ("voodoo economics", as Bush had called it during the campaign), Obama picked stalwart old Joe Biden in part for similar reasons, reassuring the public that the Black man wouldn't be too radical (ironically, Biden as president was able to bring much more radical ideas forward than Obama had been). Trump is too stupid to be able to think this way, but Paul Manafort (not just a grotesque criminal but also a skilled Republican operative, which is not a contradiction) did him a solid in 2016 by literally forcing him to pick the pious Indianan Mike Pence, bringing across the white Evangelical community that has become the most loyal component of the Trump coalition, with its bizarre but sincere belief that Trump is what Jesus wants—Trump really wanted an outer-borough insult comic like himself, New Jersey's Chris Christie, I believe because he thought standing next to Christie made him look slimmer. 

Freed from the restraint of people who know what they're doing, this year he's made a historically bad choice, chameleon JD Vance, performing as Trump's Mini-Me (a different approach to accessorizing Trump, perhaps), and bringing in not a single vote over and above the votes Trump was already guaranteed to get, and a résumé considerably thinner than Sarah Palin's was (we like to call her a "half-term governor", but that was her fourth election, after one for Wasilla city council and two for Wasilla mayor, while Vance is as of yet a one-third term senator who's only ever gotten elected, and barely, in a thoroughly red state against that idiot Tim Ryan, once), and apparently a colossally bad public speaker (unlike Kamala Harris, whose much-maligned laughter is generally associated with something that's funny, his seems to be a response to losing his train of thought as completely as Biden did that one time during the "debate", and he did it a lot more than once). But he's descended from Kentucky "hillbillies", and that's what he was chosen for. That's the opposite of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But it certainly is what it looks like when you go with race instead of qualifications.

Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for, even Carter didn't really think of it, presidential candidates have typically sought vice presidents who could find something to do with their time while they waited for the president to die. His choice of Al Gore, another wonky white guy from the non-deep South, was wildly unconventional, but the two complemented each other, with their different temperaments and subjects and their similar culture, and formed a real partnership, and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something [though as commenter Aardvark Cheeselog suggested after this was posted, the hollowing out of the civil service and massive privatization that ended the "era of big government" was not a great thing]. W. Bush's equally out-of-the-box naming of a fellow Texas oilman pretending he was from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, to compensate for his own lack of education and experience and interest in the job, didn't work out so well, of course (I always say Bush really wasn't such a terrible person, but in so far over his head it took him six years to realize how badly he was doing, when he got his father's lieutenants in to rescue him from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by then it was too late to save the presidency, as the mortgage-backed securities crisis loomed), but it reinforced the pattern.

Obama's selection of Biden in 2008 seemed like an attempt at a conventional response to an extraordinary situation ("here's an old white guy to calm you down, we won't do anything that Black"), but it was also meant to compensate for real gaps in Obama's preparation, in foreign policy and national security questions, not that those were the only ones where Biden played a role, and it was extraordinary. Biden deserves credit for it too, for his willingness to look like the administration's comic relief; he was an essential element in Obama's thinking, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't that interested in glory—he was interested in making the policy work.

And Biden's selection of Kamala Harris is on that model: he certainly chose her for her political reach into a world no US presidential candidate had ever tried to reach before—not only women, as Mondale had tried to do in 1984 with the choice of Geraldine Ferraro, but Black women, the element of the party to which he owed his own elevation after the South Carolina primary in 2020; but also for a personal reason, as we know, because his son Beau, as Delaware attorney general, had really partnered with Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, to get stuff done, during the foreclosure crisis of 2011-12:

In her memoir, Harris called him an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”

Biden chose Harris for an extraordinary reason: not just for the obvious reasons that had prevailed, I don't know, since 1832, when Andrew Jackson picked New Yorker Martin van Buren; because he knew her as a family connection, with his beloved dead son. If a "DEI hire" is a bad thing, that's not what this was.

Which is more than can be said for the vice presidential candidacy of "JD" Vance, now acknowledged in the Trump camp (writes Tim Alberta) to be a dumb, arrogant political mistake

born...of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter

(the "base" being that white working class that Vance, the rich Peter Thiel protégé, supposedly represents), which Trump is now regretting, while he unexpectedly faces Harris, who I'm sure he sincerely despised as a "DEI hire", as a skilled, smart, vigorous opponent. LOL.