Expecting Joe Biden to be a centerist was a fool's game. He has tacked with the Democrat Party winds since the beginning of his mediocre political career. Biden was the same man in 2019 that he was in 1987, and any point in-between. Small intellect, low morals, serial plagiarist and fabulist, mean, petty, vindictive.
Is energy an important issue to you?? Would you be surprised to learn America is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas and we are now energy dominant?? And this is only a few years after Trump’s 15 days to slow the spread led to a record number of oil and gas bankruptcies…so that seems to me pretty solid evidence Biden has governed as a “centrist”.
Lol, do you actually follow this sector? We all remember when ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon, Valero, Phillips 66 and Conoco all went bankrupt when ... oh ... wait. Only a few much smaller and more aggressively leveraged companies had to get reorganized, and many of these were holding company conglomerates that took harder Covid-related hits in their other sectors, for example, move of the big ones in '21 were primarily real estate investment companies, and the office building crisis happened worldwide.
Did you know that the largest "oil and gas" bankruptcy during that time was ... Hertz? Yes, the Hertz rental car company which also owns Dollar and Thrifty. A subsidiary also rents a lot of various kinds of trucks and equipment to the oil industry, which for whatever bureaucratic reason is past whatever threshold such that it gets their bankruptcy counted as one in the "oil, gas, and mining" sector. That's kind of like saying that because you rent a room to an actor you are "in the movie business".
Hertz did indeed get hit by a decline in activity in the energy sectors, but, duh, they got hit much harder by the fact that no one was renting cars, and with other major disruptions to the automobile sector. The next largest bankruptcy - Seadrill - was less than a third as large and resulted from a bad deal in their prior re-org in the previous industry downturn combined with bad results in Angola (totally Trump's fault, naturally).
So your "led to a ... " is just tribalist political-determinism.
Those bankruptcies are about as much as Trump's fault as it was Obama's fault that there were a similar number of mining, oil, and gas bankruptcy filings at the end of 2015 and during 2016. Which is to say, it obviously wasn't either of their faults.
Oil company bankruptcies, not just in the US recently, but historically, and also globally in countries led by very non-Trumpy leaders, are extremely well correlated with - get this - sudden unexpected drops in the price of oil.
Wow, who could have guessed that?!
In 2014 WTI spot was nearly $100, then by 2016 it was under $40. Lots of bankruptcy filings. Then it happened again. In 2018 prices were around $70, and this collapsed to under $20 at one point because of COVID and, again, lots of bankruptcy filings.
It's as if there's some totally new and unprecedented tendency in very volatile markets to get into manic enthusiasm phases with high prices blowing up bubbles and with some companies recklessly building high price expectations into their plans as 'new normal', then going on to make riskier investments while taking on the maximum amount of debt only barely sustainable at those high prices. Some haters say that even ordinary people got into trouble this way once upon a time with their homes and mortgages.
And then - hang on to your hat - when the prices turn the other way, "The tide goes out and we see who's been swimming naked," those risky plans collapse, and the businesses which were the most overextended suddenly can't pay dividends and just as suddenly can't make their interest payments or find anyone willing to roll them over into new additional debt.
The big players in the industry don't do this and so don't go bankrupt, it's only the smaller companies that get into trouble this way. The next time prices take a sudden dive it will happen again, and if you want a sure bet, it's that the press will blame this on whoever is President at the time but only if he's a Republican.
“Gasoline prices are now 5, 6, 7 and even 8 dollars a gallon,” the former president said. “By contrast, under the Trump leadership, my leadership, inflation was nonexistent, and we had gasoline down to $1.87 a gallon.”
Here's my prediction......future historians will not be pondering whether - in the 2020s - The Constitution was breached in spirit or in letter....they will be pondering just what this Trump Derangement Syndrome was actually made of.
The fact that there has been so much monkeying around with the procedure by which we traditionally voted - is the chief reason people no longer feel that voting is legitimate.
They see that one side of the aisle has pressed for "expansion" of a franchise already available to the citizenry, that shouldn't have required expansion as the government should have no interest in who turns up to vote, or in what regard people hold the institution as against their private concerns. "Politicization" is not a legitimate government function.
One side has in some places initiated very long voting periods before the first debate has even been held; they've pushed for the US Mail which can no longer even successfully perform a vacation mail hold, or an address change request without hacking*, to be in charge of universal ballot-by-mail; they've pushed for absentee voting for more and more classes of people, even those who say they can't be at the poll "some" of the umpteen hours the poll is open; they've endorsed and performed ballot harvesting in those places where they want to harvest votes - which would have been considered ridiculous banana republic stuff to even a recent generation ...
In my locale, you can submit a mail-in ballot, then come to the poll anyway because you're so keen on voting, throw a fit when reminded you did so, and be allowed to vote a second time. Sure, your second vote may go in a provisional pile - but man, that provisional pile: what a treasure that is in the wrong ("right") hands. Unobserved, on election night, in that locked room ...
Ditto if you've never registered to vote, have no ID, don't know your address - indeed if you say your name is Valentine Smith and you arrived from Mars yesterday.
And despite the technology we now use to vote, which should have made tabulating it easy and fast, somehow all this extra voting-around-voting has made it impossible to do what America used to readily do: announce with certainty the winner of the presidential contest the day after the election. No, that's not strange at all!
And yet it is the rubes whose fault all this is? - that trust has broken down, when somehow we now do less well than Mexico at this?
We just let 6 or seven million people march into the country. Or rather the left did. We're supposed to ignore this, though, and trust. And trust. And trust. If some of the more unsophisticated/unstable among us go to the shiny white building and break some windows - well, that's all according to plan too. Couldn't have gone better. Gives the Capitol something to run on TV in a permanent loop.
Give me a break.
*I filled out a change of address form on the USPS website when we moved 3.5 years ago. I noticed we didn't get much mail after the move. Presently I noticed we weren't getting bills, bank statements. I really noticed when I looked at my bank account online and saw that my address had been changed to one in the Bronx. I went to the bank and asked why on Earth they would have changed my address without request, without anyone signing anything, when my husband and I had both been required to be present in the building to change it before we moved, which we had done. (Heck, you have to show ID just to deposit a check.) They explained that the USPS had let them know I had an address change, to the Bronx, and the USPS is a trusted partner whose behests they follow.
I then inquired at the USPS. They were a little sheepish. When someone sees you have filled out a change of address online - they know you are moving and they can change it to another address. You know, online. It's a thing.
I agree with Levin. Neither side is trying to play by the rules. Republicans should recognize the gross defects of this candidate and disqualify him in their minds. The man's actions around the last election's validity have revealed his character as unfit for office. The same abuses in action can be said for the broader Democratic Party in their response to Trump then and now.
Both parties have sunk so low that neither deserves our support. I am not sure which electoral outcome will be worse, but I suppose we will be getting the Christmas we deserve.
“One can hope that the majority of Americans would prefer to see Levin’s spirit of the Constitution restored. That is why they are so despondent over the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch.”
Trump and Biden are just proxies - it would help if the bien-pensants and Commentariat could see that, instead of being obsessed with the personalities. Isn’t it in fact a rematch between the people who believe Government should serve them and those who think the people should serve the Government and selective Peter should be robbed to pay for collective Paul? Trump is a symptom of that division, long in the making, which has seen a large sector of the population silenced, ignored, reviled, made poorer amid Government fiscal incontinence, to pay for votes.
As for ‘the majority of Americans’ - that is an unsupportable claim since around half (at least) voted for Trump in two elections and probably will next time. The ‘despondent’ Americans are those who fear Team Trump - those silenced voices, the Bible-thumping, gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, deplorable, low information red necks - might win, but would be quite happy with four more years of Joe Big Guy 10% and Team Ruination.
"Instead, all I can see is escalating whataboutism. 'How can you expect me to compromise with you after you did X?'"
Please explain the difference between negative 'whataboutism' and positive calling out of hypocrisy, bias and double-standards. On the one hand, "two wrongs don't make a right." On the other hand, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Or maybe the question should be, what should one advise for a response to X. More complaining about X? In games, it's the credible threat of at least proportionate, punitive tit-for-tat retaliation that maintains an equilibrium.
In general the notion of a liberal political order as one resembling trial at court or a debate society and in which factions can iron out their rivalrous interests in a manner constrained by equally-applicable standards, traditions, rules, and norms is not sustainable without every violation opening the door to penalty such as the threat of having just such transgressions launched against oneself when the shoe is on the other foot. The same hold true (theoretically) for violations of the laws of war that removes the protections of those laws from those who violate it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to disparage at least some of that with whatever 'whataboutism' is supposed to mean, but again, is there really any test for when reasonable and justifiable refusals to submit to double-standards crosses the line? My nomination for word to go into retirement with the end of 2023.
Well said though I'd be the first to admit I think whataboutism is a positive thing; it's just a slight people use to hide abuses of discretion and the folk that take issue with that. I'm also pretty positive the overwhelming majority is highly against the SCOTUS sticking to the letter of the law. Imagine the mass outrage tomorrow if the SCOTUS actually learned the definition of "shall not" or "make no"; likewise words like "speedy", "impartial", "excessive", "retained".
The rest though, spot on especially with the sad but true "we can hope" because it admits it's just that, hope, not reality.
I seem to remember some people saying that the GOP should have kept Trump off the ballot in 2016, by denying him the opportunity to run in the Republican primaries. That's not a Constitutional issue of course, but one could make the same appeal to the spirit of Democracy or the spirit of a Political Party representing the wishes of its voters instead of its insider elites only paying lip service but in fact constantly conspiring against those preferences. One can say a party has the right to do what it wants, but then the question is whether it also has the right to lie about what it wants.
The left could resort to divisive tricks, and still probably lose, or they could run a much better candidate who isn’t going to push 90 soon. It seems they’ve made their choice.
It sounds like Yuval Levin believes that the Biden administration represents the "spirit of the Constitution." This sounds like partisanship on his part (or Trump derangement syndrome, which is essentially just single-election partisanship). Good analysis and good commentary tries to understand and represent the best arguments of both sides.
Your quote from Levin makes it clear that he opposes what seems like the gimmickry of local authorities trying to use the 14th Amendment to influence a presidential election--presumably because he doesn't agree with the Colorado judges' interpretations of the letter of the law, etc. This is a step toward seeing both sides. Is there also a case to be made for challenging local manipulations of election procedure that facilitate election fraud, especially when those manipulations do not follow the letter of the law? Beyond that, is there a case to be made for defending the secrecy of the ballot and verification that each voter marks his or her own personal ballot, as opposed to promoting vote by mail?
Levin's comment is spoiled by his misunderstanding and mischaracterization of President Trump's actions in response to an election ridden with gross fraud. He just doesn't want to believe that a presidential election could be stolen, but they have been. In 1960 there was insistent denial that the Kennedy election was fraudulent, but it eventually has become acknowledged that that was the case.
It will probably eventually become acknowledged that the 2020 election was as well, long after it makes any difference.
That's not the only thing spoiling his comment. There is also the obligatory boilerplate "he was an unfit president, lacked the character necessary for the job, bla bla bla ..". Can't these so-called conservatives even come up with different wording to say the same thing over and over again? For the life of me, as flawed as he is, I fail to see how Trump is any less fit to be President than Biden or any of the other characters who have occupied the office in recent decades (oh, pardon me, I guess pointing out that Biden is a senile crook is whataboutism). I can't say whether it is deliberate on his part, but one side effect of Trump's unpresidential demeanor is how effectively it highlights the yawning gap between the phony character/demeanor of his political opponents and the adverse effects of their policies and actions on this country. Finally, with regard to what Kling characterizes as Biden's 'stubborn approach' to issues like immigration and student loan debt (maintaining the pretense that Biden is running the ship), this approach is itself a response to Trump's election. They realized that the 'simmering the frog' approach was not viable, so they had to turn up the heat to do as much damage as they could in the shortest time possible.
Trump's saying sharply critical things about his opponents is supposedly unpresidential. Democrats have called very Republican president from Coolidge on Nazi or Hitler, but somehow, this is never considered unpresidential.
This is an excellent post Arnold. Thanks once again. There are deep underlying problems within our country. Your last paragraph is apropos and accurate, but I’m still optimistic.
We should start by making a list of root causes. Certainly the decline in religious participation is part of the cause here. I would say that people are busy working, making money to pay for all the stuff they want. There is a lack of cohesiveness in neighborhoods across America. People aren’t coming together in communities, in private groups like they traditionally have. I’m speculating here, because I don’t have data to show any trends, but it seems that people are wandering separately, trying to figure what to do and how to do the stuff they want to be doing. They have things they want to be doing, (see Peter Gray’s post from today), such as reading, learning, writing, engaging in meaningful dialogue; overall doing things that bring a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction. But there is a void in our communities: a lack of motivational and organizational force; a lack of positive energy that brings people together.
My guess is that we’re on the verge of a renaissance, and right now we’re in a bad place due a void created by old fashioned religious beliefs, stale urban planning, career centrism, and public school conformism. Conformity is a huge theme in all this. In our social institutions we’re missing polite, conscientious heretics and creative can-do entrepreneurs. Where are the secular prophets? Politics and government are largely to blame, but politics is not a cure. You say it better in your last paragraph.
All of this has made us ignorant about the Constitution - ambivalent - and divisive in how we use it and talk about it. My observation is than almost no one wants to talk about the Constitution. It’s a dead-end in conversations. There is no organic, positive dialogue at the local level about the Constitution. It’s too rarely discussed in school, church, neighborhood, private gathering, email, social media, almost everywhere.
So you’re completely right in your last paragraph.
But be patient: the renaissance is coming. Change will come from the very bottom, with very simple steps, through emergence; through the butcher, the brewer, and the baker. Through technology. Through innovation and improvement in ideas. Through small positive steps in homes, churches, schools, clubs, gyms. It’s impossible to stop all of these small improvements. They’re distributed in the extended order that Hayek and Smith wrote about. The ultimate resource is the human mind. I’m eager to see what improvements will come next.
The Dem deep state/ managerial elite, really believe they are both smarter and more moral. High IQ folk who convince themselves that socialism is good are not so smart, and never really moral.
Thales Academy - Over 6,100+ students and growing. https://www.thalesacademy.org They teach Austrian economics, character formation (Top 15 Outcomes), classical education, offer a pre-engineering track in high school, all for about 1/3 of the cost of public schools.
Challenger School - “Challenger now has 27 campuses in five western states serving more than 10,000 preschool through eighth grade students annually.” Take a tour and observe the depth of learning here about freedom, discovery, entrepreneurship, Austrian economics, and the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
UATX - “UATX will renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education, by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism. Our graduates will make important and enduring contributions to the advancement of liberty and the betterment of society.”
New College of Florida - “Our community-forging core courses connect the Western canon to the challenges of the information age.” https://www.ncf.edu/about/mission-values/ Copy and paste the New College model in other states.
The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change. Y E. Kirsten Peters
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life by John G. Miller
It takes work to be positive because so much news is negative, but remember, there are billions of people solving little problems everyday. These solutions add up and outweigh the new problems that are being created by those in government. And some solutions multiply progress. This is why life expectancy has increased so dramatically in the past few hundred years. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.
There are going to be crises, but study each of these crises—WWII, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Great Depression, COVID, the War on Terror, and you’ll see that the positive trends continue. We weather each of these crises and things continue to get better. People find work-arounds and solutions.
Even the most pessimistic works (e.g. Crisis and Leviathan) are no match for the optimism that comes from studying human ingenuity. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs
Levin, like Kling, dislikes Trump and hates that so many Americans voted for him. I think Most personal character flaws are true BUT also true of Biden, Hillary, and Obama. After a sophomoric list of insults, the one big justification for Trump hate now is his claim that the election was stolen, followed by a big Stop The Steal protest which became a small riot, ending almost immediately after a big cop took out his gun and shot and killed the small, unarmed, but trespassing Ashli Babbitt.
The FBI entrapped some dumb Trump supporters into a kidnap scheme against Dem Governor Gretchen Whitmore. I believe there were Fed assets among the protesters encouraging illegal acts.
Trump wanted a huge peaceful protest, for his big ego. There was no insurrection.
Nobody has been charged with insurrection.
Kling seems to think that deep state censorship of the truth does not mean the election was stolen, and Levin fails to even mention it. They censored H Biden’s laptop information about Biden corruption and illegal behavior. They censored in order to affect the voting, in order to steal the election.
Censoring the truth is wrong, and is a common tactic of not-really democracies who have elections which they make sure are won by the dictator.
Or, it’s wrong but not really, like speeding just a little. “But officer, I’m sure I was going less than 10 mph over the limit.”
When a ref makes a bad call, the wrong team might win.
The election was stolen, tho I can’t prove it. But those claiming it wasn’t stolen also can’t prove it wasn’t, nor show the 65 million mail-in envelopes to allow checking and auditing. Most Trump supporters believe as I do, that it was stolen. Levin believes it wasn’t, with a total lack of doubt and in full belief of fair play by Obama weaponized FBI which, in 2016, was willing to claim false Hillary funded mud was true in order to illegally spy on the Trump campaign.
Did he believe the NYT for 2 years of Fake News Collusion Hoax? No mention of how Obama did far more damage to the spirit of the Constitution than Trump.
Happy New Year, tho I expect to be outraged often by NeverTrumpers thru the election, which I sadly expect to be stolen again. And the Dems will continue stealing elections until more candidates complain about it more effectively.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but are more likely to result in cooperation, and agreement that they’re both wrong. Trump looks like the needed bad guy the Dems need to experience to get to more positive future cooperation.
Expecting Joe Biden to be a centerist was a fool's game. He has tacked with the Democrat Party winds since the beginning of his mediocre political career. Biden was the same man in 2019 that he was in 1987, and any point in-between. Small intellect, low morals, serial plagiarist and fabulist, mean, petty, vindictive.
Is energy an important issue to you?? Would you be surprised to learn America is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas and we are now energy dominant?? And this is only a few years after Trump’s 15 days to slow the spread led to a record number of oil and gas bankruptcies…so that seems to me pretty solid evidence Biden has governed as a “centrist”.
Lol, do you actually follow this sector? We all remember when ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon, Valero, Phillips 66 and Conoco all went bankrupt when ... oh ... wait. Only a few much smaller and more aggressively leveraged companies had to get reorganized, and many of these were holding company conglomerates that took harder Covid-related hits in their other sectors, for example, move of the big ones in '21 were primarily real estate investment companies, and the office building crisis happened worldwide.
Did you know that the largest "oil and gas" bankruptcy during that time was ... Hertz? Yes, the Hertz rental car company which also owns Dollar and Thrifty. A subsidiary also rents a lot of various kinds of trucks and equipment to the oil industry, which for whatever bureaucratic reason is past whatever threshold such that it gets their bankruptcy counted as one in the "oil, gas, and mining" sector. That's kind of like saying that because you rent a room to an actor you are "in the movie business".
Hertz did indeed get hit by a decline in activity in the energy sectors, but, duh, they got hit much harder by the fact that no one was renting cars, and with other major disruptions to the automobile sector. The next largest bankruptcy - Seadrill - was less than a third as large and resulted from a bad deal in their prior re-org in the previous industry downturn combined with bad results in Angola (totally Trump's fault, naturally).
So your "led to a ... " is just tribalist political-determinism.
Those bankruptcies are about as much as Trump's fault as it was Obama's fault that there were a similar number of mining, oil, and gas bankruptcy filings at the end of 2015 and during 2016. Which is to say, it obviously wasn't either of their faults.
Oil company bankruptcies, not just in the US recently, but historically, and also globally in countries led by very non-Trumpy leaders, are extremely well correlated with - get this - sudden unexpected drops in the price of oil.
Wow, who could have guessed that?!
In 2014 WTI spot was nearly $100, then by 2016 it was under $40. Lots of bankruptcy filings. Then it happened again. In 2018 prices were around $70, and this collapsed to under $20 at one point because of COVID and, again, lots of bankruptcy filings.
It's as if there's some totally new and unprecedented tendency in very volatile markets to get into manic enthusiasm phases with high prices blowing up bubbles and with some companies recklessly building high price expectations into their plans as 'new normal', then going on to make riskier investments while taking on the maximum amount of debt only barely sustainable at those high prices. Some haters say that even ordinary people got into trouble this way once upon a time with their homes and mortgages.
And then - hang on to your hat - when the prices turn the other way, "The tide goes out and we see who's been swimming naked," those risky plans collapse, and the businesses which were the most overextended suddenly can't pay dividends and just as suddenly can't make their interest payments or find anyone willing to roll them over into new additional debt.
The big players in the industry don't do this and so don't go bankrupt, it's only the smaller companies that get into trouble this way. The next time prices take a sudden dive it will happen again, and if you want a sure bet, it's that the press will blame this on whoever is President at the time but only if he's a Republican.
“Gasoline prices are now 5, 6, 7 and even 8 dollars a gallon,” the former president said. “By contrast, under the Trump leadership, my leadership, inflation was nonexistent, and we had gasoline down to $1.87 a gallon.”
Here's my prediction......future historians will not be pondering whether - in the 2020s - The Constitution was breached in spirit or in letter....they will be pondering just what this Trump Derangement Syndrome was actually made of.
Sorry, working link: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/trump-and-biden-fear-the-king-of
My friend already worried about constitutional challenges to trump, and she's a supporter: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/138989757?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
The fact that there has been so much monkeying around with the procedure by which we traditionally voted - is the chief reason people no longer feel that voting is legitimate.
They see that one side of the aisle has pressed for "expansion" of a franchise already available to the citizenry, that shouldn't have required expansion as the government should have no interest in who turns up to vote, or in what regard people hold the institution as against their private concerns. "Politicization" is not a legitimate government function.
One side has in some places initiated very long voting periods before the first debate has even been held; they've pushed for the US Mail which can no longer even successfully perform a vacation mail hold, or an address change request without hacking*, to be in charge of universal ballot-by-mail; they've pushed for absentee voting for more and more classes of people, even those who say they can't be at the poll "some" of the umpteen hours the poll is open; they've endorsed and performed ballot harvesting in those places where they want to harvest votes - which would have been considered ridiculous banana republic stuff to even a recent generation ...
In my locale, you can submit a mail-in ballot, then come to the poll anyway because you're so keen on voting, throw a fit when reminded you did so, and be allowed to vote a second time. Sure, your second vote may go in a provisional pile - but man, that provisional pile: what a treasure that is in the wrong ("right") hands. Unobserved, on election night, in that locked room ...
Ditto if you've never registered to vote, have no ID, don't know your address - indeed if you say your name is Valentine Smith and you arrived from Mars yesterday.
And despite the technology we now use to vote, which should have made tabulating it easy and fast, somehow all this extra voting-around-voting has made it impossible to do what America used to readily do: announce with certainty the winner of the presidential contest the day after the election. No, that's not strange at all!
And yet it is the rubes whose fault all this is? - that trust has broken down, when somehow we now do less well than Mexico at this?
We just let 6 or seven million people march into the country. Or rather the left did. We're supposed to ignore this, though, and trust. And trust. And trust. If some of the more unsophisticated/unstable among us go to the shiny white building and break some windows - well, that's all according to plan too. Couldn't have gone better. Gives the Capitol something to run on TV in a permanent loop.
Give me a break.
*I filled out a change of address form on the USPS website when we moved 3.5 years ago. I noticed we didn't get much mail after the move. Presently I noticed we weren't getting bills, bank statements. I really noticed when I looked at my bank account online and saw that my address had been changed to one in the Bronx. I went to the bank and asked why on Earth they would have changed my address without request, without anyone signing anything, when my husband and I had both been required to be present in the building to change it before we moved, which we had done. (Heck, you have to show ID just to deposit a check.) They explained that the USPS had let them know I had an address change, to the Bronx, and the USPS is a trusted partner whose behests they follow.
I then inquired at the USPS. They were a little sheepish. When someone sees you have filled out a change of address online - they know you are moving and they can change it to another address. You know, online. It's a thing.
Just like that.
Oh. Should anyone wonder: the bank was not Bank of Podunk - it was Chase Manhattan.
I agree with Levin. Neither side is trying to play by the rules. Republicans should recognize the gross defects of this candidate and disqualify him in their minds. The man's actions around the last election's validity have revealed his character as unfit for office. The same abuses in action can be said for the broader Democratic Party in their response to Trump then and now.
Both parties have sunk so low that neither deserves our support. I am not sure which electoral outcome will be worse, but I suppose we will be getting the Christmas we deserve.
I'm beginning to believe that certain people on the left will only understand the gravity of what they are doing when it finally happens to them.
Example: A Red state prohibits a democrat from legally running for public office. The outrage would be explosive and immediate.
Not even then would they understand
“One can hope that the majority of Americans would prefer to see Levin’s spirit of the Constitution restored. That is why they are so despondent over the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch.”
Trump and Biden are just proxies - it would help if the bien-pensants and Commentariat could see that, instead of being obsessed with the personalities. Isn’t it in fact a rematch between the people who believe Government should serve them and those who think the people should serve the Government and selective Peter should be robbed to pay for collective Paul? Trump is a symptom of that division, long in the making, which has seen a large sector of the population silenced, ignored, reviled, made poorer amid Government fiscal incontinence, to pay for votes.
As for ‘the majority of Americans’ - that is an unsupportable claim since around half (at least) voted for Trump in two elections and probably will next time. The ‘despondent’ Americans are those who fear Team Trump - those silenced voices, the Bible-thumping, gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, deplorable, low information red necks - might win, but would be quite happy with four more years of Joe Big Guy 10% and Team Ruination.
"Instead, all I can see is escalating whataboutism. 'How can you expect me to compromise with you after you did X?'"
Please explain the difference between negative 'whataboutism' and positive calling out of hypocrisy, bias and double-standards. On the one hand, "two wrongs don't make a right." On the other hand, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Or maybe the question should be, what should one advise for a response to X. More complaining about X? In games, it's the credible threat of at least proportionate, punitive tit-for-tat retaliation that maintains an equilibrium.
In general the notion of a liberal political order as one resembling trial at court or a debate society and in which factions can iron out their rivalrous interests in a manner constrained by equally-applicable standards, traditions, rules, and norms is not sustainable without every violation opening the door to penalty such as the threat of having just such transgressions launched against oneself when the shoe is on the other foot. The same hold true (theoretically) for violations of the laws of war that removes the protections of those laws from those who violate it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to disparage at least some of that with whatever 'whataboutism' is supposed to mean, but again, is there really any test for when reasonable and justifiable refusals to submit to double-standards crosses the line? My nomination for word to go into retirement with the end of 2023.
Well said though I'd be the first to admit I think whataboutism is a positive thing; it's just a slight people use to hide abuses of discretion and the folk that take issue with that. I'm also pretty positive the overwhelming majority is highly against the SCOTUS sticking to the letter of the law. Imagine the mass outrage tomorrow if the SCOTUS actually learned the definition of "shall not" or "make no"; likewise words like "speedy", "impartial", "excessive", "retained".
The rest though, spot on especially with the sad but true "we can hope" because it admits it's just that, hope, not reality.
I seem to remember some people saying that the GOP should have kept Trump off the ballot in 2016, by denying him the opportunity to run in the Republican primaries. That's not a Constitutional issue of course, but one could make the same appeal to the spirit of Democracy or the spirit of a Political Party representing the wishes of its voters instead of its insider elites only paying lip service but in fact constantly conspiring against those preferences. One can say a party has the right to do what it wants, but then the question is whether it also has the right to lie about what it wants.
The left could resort to divisive tricks, and still probably lose, or they could run a much better candidate who isn’t going to push 90 soon. It seems they’ve made their choice.
It sounds like Yuval Levin believes that the Biden administration represents the "spirit of the Constitution." This sounds like partisanship on his part (or Trump derangement syndrome, which is essentially just single-election partisanship). Good analysis and good commentary tries to understand and represent the best arguments of both sides.
Your quote from Levin makes it clear that he opposes what seems like the gimmickry of local authorities trying to use the 14th Amendment to influence a presidential election--presumably because he doesn't agree with the Colorado judges' interpretations of the letter of the law, etc. This is a step toward seeing both sides. Is there also a case to be made for challenging local manipulations of election procedure that facilitate election fraud, especially when those manipulations do not follow the letter of the law? Beyond that, is there a case to be made for defending the secrecy of the ballot and verification that each voter marks his or her own personal ballot, as opposed to promoting vote by mail?
Levin's comment is spoiled by his misunderstanding and mischaracterization of President Trump's actions in response to an election ridden with gross fraud. He just doesn't want to believe that a presidential election could be stolen, but they have been. In 1960 there was insistent denial that the Kennedy election was fraudulent, but it eventually has become acknowledged that that was the case.
It will probably eventually become acknowledged that the 2020 election was as well, long after it makes any difference.
That's not the only thing spoiling his comment. There is also the obligatory boilerplate "he was an unfit president, lacked the character necessary for the job, bla bla bla ..". Can't these so-called conservatives even come up with different wording to say the same thing over and over again? For the life of me, as flawed as he is, I fail to see how Trump is any less fit to be President than Biden or any of the other characters who have occupied the office in recent decades (oh, pardon me, I guess pointing out that Biden is a senile crook is whataboutism). I can't say whether it is deliberate on his part, but one side effect of Trump's unpresidential demeanor is how effectively it highlights the yawning gap between the phony character/demeanor of his political opponents and the adverse effects of their policies and actions on this country. Finally, with regard to what Kling characterizes as Biden's 'stubborn approach' to issues like immigration and student loan debt (maintaining the pretense that Biden is running the ship), this approach is itself a response to Trump's election. They realized that the 'simmering the frog' approach was not viable, so they had to turn up the heat to do as much damage as they could in the shortest time possible.
Trump's saying sharply critical things about his opponents is supposedly unpresidential. Democrats have called very Republican president from Coolidge on Nazi or Hitler, but somehow, this is never considered unpresidential.
This is an excellent post Arnold. Thanks once again. There are deep underlying problems within our country. Your last paragraph is apropos and accurate, but I’m still optimistic.
We should start by making a list of root causes. Certainly the decline in religious participation is part of the cause here. I would say that people are busy working, making money to pay for all the stuff they want. There is a lack of cohesiveness in neighborhoods across America. People aren’t coming together in communities, in private groups like they traditionally have. I’m speculating here, because I don’t have data to show any trends, but it seems that people are wandering separately, trying to figure what to do and how to do the stuff they want to be doing. They have things they want to be doing, (see Peter Gray’s post from today), such as reading, learning, writing, engaging in meaningful dialogue; overall doing things that bring a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction. But there is a void in our communities: a lack of motivational and organizational force; a lack of positive energy that brings people together.
My guess is that we’re on the verge of a renaissance, and right now we’re in a bad place due a void created by old fashioned religious beliefs, stale urban planning, career centrism, and public school conformism. Conformity is a huge theme in all this. In our social institutions we’re missing polite, conscientious heretics and creative can-do entrepreneurs. Where are the secular prophets? Politics and government are largely to blame, but politics is not a cure. You say it better in your last paragraph.
All of this has made us ignorant about the Constitution - ambivalent - and divisive in how we use it and talk about it. My observation is than almost no one wants to talk about the Constitution. It’s a dead-end in conversations. There is no organic, positive dialogue at the local level about the Constitution. It’s too rarely discussed in school, church, neighborhood, private gathering, email, social media, almost everywhere.
So you’re completely right in your last paragraph.
But be patient: the renaissance is coming. Change will come from the very bottom, with very simple steps, through emergence; through the butcher, the brewer, and the baker. Through technology. Through innovation and improvement in ideas. Through small positive steps in homes, churches, schools, clubs, gyms. It’s impossible to stop all of these small improvements. They’re distributed in the extended order that Hayek and Smith wrote about. The ultimate resource is the human mind. I’m eager to see what improvements will come next.
I like this optimism, but don’t believe it.
The Dem deep state/ managerial elite, really believe they are both smarter and more moral. High IQ folk who convince themselves that socialism is good are not so smart, and never really moral.
Here are at least a dozen things to help with optimism - on a multitude of topics, but most importantly on education.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley https://www.econtalk.org/ridley-on-trade-growth-and-the-rational-optimist/
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly https://www.econtalk.org/kelly-on-technology-and-what-technology-wants/
My Beautiful Bubble by Bryan Caplan https://betonit.substack.com/p/my_beautiful_buhtml
The Mystery of the Kibbutz Ran Abramitzky. People don’t like socialism when they live it.
Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/attractions/magic-kingdom/walt-disney-carousel-of-progress/
Thales Academy - Over 6,100+ students and growing. https://www.thalesacademy.org They teach Austrian economics, character formation (Top 15 Outcomes), classical education, offer a pre-engineering track in high school, all for about 1/3 of the cost of public schools.
https://www.thalesacademy.org/assets/docs/the-thales-way-bob-luddy.pdf
Challenger School - “Challenger now has 27 campuses in five western states serving more than 10,000 preschool through eighth grade students annually.” Take a tour and observe the depth of learning here about freedom, discovery, entrepreneurship, Austrian economics, and the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
https://www.challengerschool.com
The History of Concealed Carry
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_the_United_States
How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice by Robert Pondiscio
https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/#delve-deeper
UATX - “UATX will renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education, by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism. Our graduates will make important and enduring contributions to the advancement of liberty and the betterment of society.”
https://www.uaustin.org
New College of Florida - “Our community-forging core courses connect the Western canon to the challenges of the information age.” https://www.ncf.edu/about/mission-values/ Copy and paste the New College model in other states.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-fight-for-new-college
The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change. Y E. Kirsten Peters
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life by John G. Miller
It takes work to be positive because so much news is negative, but remember, there are billions of people solving little problems everyday. These solutions add up and outweigh the new problems that are being created by those in government. And some solutions multiply progress. This is why life expectancy has increased so dramatically in the past few hundred years. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.
There are going to be crises, but study each of these crises—WWII, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Great Depression, COVID, the War on Terror, and you’ll see that the positive trends continue. We weather each of these crises and things continue to get better. People find work-arounds and solutions.
Even the most pessimistic works (e.g. Crisis and Leviathan) are no match for the optimism that comes from studying human ingenuity. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs
Among the transgressions listed is "the tactics used to pass Obamacare" (?!)
Bog standard legislating process if ever there was one. It needed 60 votes in the Senate!
Levin, like Kling, dislikes Trump and hates that so many Americans voted for him. I think Most personal character flaws are true BUT also true of Biden, Hillary, and Obama. After a sophomoric list of insults, the one big justification for Trump hate now is his claim that the election was stolen, followed by a big Stop The Steal protest which became a small riot, ending almost immediately after a big cop took out his gun and shot and killed the small, unarmed, but trespassing Ashli Babbitt.
The FBI entrapped some dumb Trump supporters into a kidnap scheme against Dem Governor Gretchen Whitmore. I believe there were Fed assets among the protesters encouraging illegal acts.
Trump wanted a huge peaceful protest, for his big ego. There was no insurrection.
Nobody has been charged with insurrection.
Kling seems to think that deep state censorship of the truth does not mean the election was stolen, and Levin fails to even mention it. They censored H Biden’s laptop information about Biden corruption and illegal behavior. They censored in order to affect the voting, in order to steal the election.
Censoring the truth is wrong, and is a common tactic of not-really democracies who have elections which they make sure are won by the dictator.
Or, it’s wrong but not really, like speeding just a little. “But officer, I’m sure I was going less than 10 mph over the limit.”
When a ref makes a bad call, the wrong team might win.
The election was stolen, tho I can’t prove it. But those claiming it wasn’t stolen also can’t prove it wasn’t, nor show the 65 million mail-in envelopes to allow checking and auditing. Most Trump supporters believe as I do, that it was stolen. Levin believes it wasn’t, with a total lack of doubt and in full belief of fair play by Obama weaponized FBI which, in 2016, was willing to claim false Hillary funded mud was true in order to illegally spy on the Trump campaign.
Did he believe the NYT for 2 years of Fake News Collusion Hoax? No mention of how Obama did far more damage to the spirit of the Constitution than Trump.
Happy New Year, tho I expect to be outraged often by NeverTrumpers thru the election, which I sadly expect to be stolen again. And the Dems will continue stealing elections until more candidates complain about it more effectively.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but are more likely to result in cooperation, and agreement that they’re both wrong. Trump looks like the needed bad guy the Dems need to experience to get to more positive future cooperation.
We should start by outlawing political parties as a means of monopolizing political power.