Unqualified Offerings

He’s “encouraging” embassies to switch events from other hotels to his, and his sons are selling access to him.

He should be impeached around 12:02 pm on January 20.

My own view is that the US shouldn’t be involved at all in the mess in Syria.  The most we should do is provide visas to refugees fleeing the violence.  It’s easy to chide me with “Now, now, this is a terrible thing, don’t you want to stop it?”  Of course I want to stop it, and I also want a world with no war and chocolate cake that has negative calories but all of the flavor of a calorie bomb.  Thing is, we don’t live in that world.  We live in the world where US involvement in the Middle East rarely leads to lasting improvement of conditions for innocent people.  We live in the world where US involvement in the Middle East mostly advantages US-friendly autocrats and South Africa…I mean, Israel.

But let’s look past my view.  Let’s look to the views of the people who liked Trump’s promise to be tough on ISIS and Iran.  I hope they understand that Donaldik Fyodorvich’s KGB handler is also a supporter of Assad, who in turn is very friendly with Iran.  Whatever you personally think the US government ought to do, the person who will presumably run it starting on January 20 is under the thumb of a man who backs the same side as Iran.

Nice going, guys.  You got played so blatantly it’s even more pathetic than an Oberlin student attending therapy after reading a mildly controversial book.

Federalist 68:

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention. They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment. And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors. Thus without corrupting the body of the people, the immediate agents in the election will at least enter upon the task free from any sinister bias. Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it. The business of corruption, when it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty.

…

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.

I’m so glad that we have the electoral college.  It prevents foreign powers from gaining influence in our government.  It distributes power so that some member of the coastal elite, like a big city businessman, can’t use their connections in the media to win the office.  It gives due weight to the interior of the country so that a New England Blue Blood (or the governor of a populous coastal state like Texas) can’t be imposed on people who would have preferred a guy from Tennessee.  And most importantly, it checks the passions of the masses so that a demagogue can’t sweep to power by playing to public fears.

I’m seeing reports from people who question the evidence for Russian involvement in the election.  I’m not qualified to judge the facts here, though I have to wonder where the smoke is coming from if there’s no fire.  But irrespective of what Russia did or didn’t do, it’s pretty clear what Trump will do:  Trump will appoint what is probably the most Russia-friendly Cabinet since the Tsarist era.  Even if the allegations of Russian involvement in the election turned out to be 100% mistaken, it wouldn’t change the fact that Trump’s cabinet will be remarkably chummy with Putin’s Administration.  It is a mistake to focus on the most covert, least public, and least provable aspects of what may be going on.  It is better to look at the disturbing things that are publicly known.

I’m not interested in an adversarial relationship with Russia; I think the end of the Cold War was an excellent idea.  But I’m also not dumb enough to think that Vladimir Putin should be a friend.  Our relationship with him should be respectful, cordial, and diplomatic, and when our interests coincide we should work together gladly (though with open eyes).  It requires reserve and careful judgment, and a keen distinction between our national interests, Russia’s interests, the interests of third-party states, and the pecuniary interests of people who seem averse to the concept of a blind trust.

My fear is that this will get derailed into “Well, nobody can prove a nefarious covert action, therefore everything is fine.”  Um, no.

Finally, some people are talking about the CIA’s mistakes regarding WMD in Iraq.  In fact, the CIA was at least initially reluctant to say there were WMD in Iraq, and only changed their official assessments after intense pressure from above.  The CIA is hardly a blameless or completely trustworthy organization, but of all the criticisms to level at them Iraq is the least credible.  This is yet another misdirection, blaming the CIA for someone else’s mistakes in one of those cases that they got things right.

One thing I admired about Bush’s 2004 campaign was that he was unwavering in his messaging on Iraq.  Sure, it was already turning into a disaster, but he just kept up 3 points:  Saddam was a bad man, removing him made America safer, and it was part of the War on Terror.  You might be firing up your keyboards to say that the first point is irrelevant, the second is false, and the third is only true in a definitional sense, but who cares?  What he said was far more coherent than any of what Kerry had to say about Iraq.  In that sense, I think this article about Trump’s campaign is dead on:

But when it comes to the economic platform in his speeches he remained disciplined and clear: he’s going to crush undocumented workers, roll back globalization, and cut taxes and regulations in DC. He has catch-phrases and symbols for each (the wall, rip up trade deals, drain the swamp), and it’s easy for his (white) voters to see how those line up with a better economic situation for themselves. As I’ve emphasized, this is what policy is, and Trump was fantastic at it.

What were Clinton’s three things to benefit workers? There was policy everywhere, but none of it clear for voters. An infrastructure deal, though would that even happen and didn’t Obama already try that? Anyway, Trump promised to do it twice as big. After that it wasn’t clear what was a priority.

…

It’s the first and most consistent thing he discusses. It’s implied it is a specific kind of job, a white, male, bread-winning manufacturing job. He doesn’t discuss “the economy” and how it could work for all, he doesn’t talk about inequality, he doesn’t talk about automation and service work; he makes it clear you will have a high-paying manufacturing job when he is President.

So what? Much of the Democratic platform is based on pushing through the fact that this political economy was anachronistic decades ago. As Daniel Rodgers writes, “Many of the economic planks in the Democratic Party program were not pitched” for Trump voters, who sensed the platform reflected that “that the culture wars had finally come home.” Family leave, child allowances, and universal pre-K acknowledge that we need to look beyond male breadwinners as the core economic unit. Fight for $15 is about turning service work into a decent, secure, working-class life. Efforts to try and disentangle commodities like health-care and retirement from employment run into the hope that employment would be sufficient to provide them. Voters won’t want to hear this.

This is the reality that Democrats have to engage with.  They didn’t feel the need to engage with it in the 90’s because they kept winning the White House with a Bubba.  They didn’t need to engage with it after 2000 because they only lost on a technicality.  They started talking about this sort of engagement with the White Working Class after 2004, but then 2008 and 2012 came and they elected and re-elected the First Black President.  It was easy to believe that there are new facts on the ground, a diverse new America that will shape the new electoral reality.

I don’t know what to say to people who want to believe that the factories will come back in force.  Hard truths delivered like foul-tasting medicine will go over about as well as the horrible genre of privilege think-pieces by the More Woke Than Thou set.  A promise to fight for people, in non-technocratic language, might work.  I’m pleasantly surprised by my conservative friends expressing sympathy for the Native Americans trying to resist a pipeline in North Dakota, in part because they’re talking about pollution of their own water, i.e. very direct and tangible harms.  Something that appeals to the need to be a provider will have to be part of the argument.  This article by Joan Williams is a surprisingly good place to start–when I hear “Director of the Center for WorkLife Law” I generally think of someone who’s going to tell me to be sympathetic to elite knowledge workers who want even more flexible hours than they already have, but she thinks beyond the elite bubble.

Whatever we do, we can’t just respond to him with shock over his style.  We have to respond to him on the tangibles, even if that means “normalizing” him.  Eminem became a millionaire by being the guy who elicited “Oh wait, no way, you’re kidding, he didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?” from culturally sensitive people.