Mike

How to Invest Political Power

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Roger Kimball writes:

”The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.”

I will take it a step further and state the Democrats know how to leverage power, in the form of transient electoral majorities, for their long-term strategic advantage. To paraphrase Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats do not let a majority go to waste.

The great historical examples of the past 100 years are FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, each enacted after electoral landslides that conferred Democratic control over the White House, Senate, and House. Social Security and Medicare, enacted during the New Deal and Great Society, are the twin colossi of the welfare state both in terms of dollar amounts and their political invulnerability. With their existence, the Democrats gain a structural political advantage over the Republicans.

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“Evil Amazon”

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Josh Treviño regarding the Mexican cartels:

“It is evil Amazon, really. They’re logistic firms with small armies attached that will profit from whatever they can and increasingly take on the characteristics of insurgency.”

I think the Amazon comparison is apt, but Treviño pulls up a bit short because it’s more than just logistics. Amazon has proven to be a master of leveraging existing capabilities in order to exploit new markets. There is of course its e-commerce transformation from an online bookstore to selling just about everything under the sun. Then there was its leveraging the last-mile delivery and now using its expertise in data centers to develop AWS and enter the AI market.

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Welcoming Hitler to the White House and Other Thoughts

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First, watching a smiling Joe Biden welcome Trump back to the White House caps off an eight-day period of whipsawed memory-holing. Leave aside that just a few weeks before, Biden was reported as calling the man next to him a fascist, the media has been legitimizing the American Hitler’s victory on a daily basis by alternating between breathlessly reporting his nominations and wailing about why they lost.

That’s not how you go about stopping Hitler.

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Day Two of the Trump Administration

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Now that the Election is out of the way, Trump can focus on hitting the ground running next January. I hope there is “shock and awe” as he gets down to the serious work of getting the country back on its feet.

There is a lot of work to be done on important things like trade, immigration, ripping the bloated national government down to the studs, and national security. I bet Trump is going to have a stack of executive orders to sign on Day One to address those urgent national issues.

However, there is also time and slack to pursue secondary objectives meant for delivering some well-deserved justice after the past four years. Call it payback, call it game theory, but hopefully after we re-establish some order we can all be friends again. Not only that but some of things are just the right thing to do, for all Americans.

The best part is that these initiatives have all the right enemies and all can be done mostly through the Executive Branch.

First some nice things:

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The Day After

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Some thoughts on last night

First, I think what happened (so far) is the most optimistic election result that anybody could have hoped for. Electoral college? Popular vote? Senate majority and growing? Probably keep the House with expanded majority? Yes, please. Trump’s margins may shrink and the growth in seats in the Senate and House may stall to something less than spectacular but this was an amazing result.

Second, I bet the Democrats will develop a strange new respect for the filibuster and federalism. Always remember in our system where ambition is to be checked with ambition, the reason you keep the filibuster around is not out of some sentimentality but rather because you will find yourself needing it one day.

Third, on the Powerline podcast last night Steve Heyward speculated if this was the election that finally marked the shift from the traditional media model to podcasts. Maybe though we’ve been waiting for that death for a while. There was a lot of chatter in the past about how social media was going to be the one to torpedo the “SS Traditional Media” (keep in mind the Russian influence hysteria of 2016 centered on their purchase of ads on Facebook).

Fourth, I would imagine this is finally going to mark the fall of the House of Obama and maybe even get him to move out of Kalorama. That’s okay, I’ve heard he was renting anyway.

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