Politics

Midterms and Mayhem

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Abstract: A “red wave” midterm election seems about to occur. Notwithstanding the apparent (relatively) recent precedent of the 1994 midterms, the eight weeks from Tuesday 8 November 2022 to Tuesday 3 January 2023 may become the most challenging period to date in the entire history of the American constitutional order, not excepting the “Secession Winter” following Tuesday 6 November 1860. A broadly similar situation would almost certainly exist if the relative positions of the major political parties in the US were reversed. Even with alarming possibilities in view, this post is intended to promote constructive apprehension, not mere fearfulness.

Like all good students at our eponymous institution, you get the theoretical elements first, then more practical aspects, and falsifiable predictions at the end.

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What is the Purpose of a Senator

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Dr. Oz is a bit weird, and I’m bothered by his apparent mixed loyalties.  Still, I’m pulling for him.   I assume a good heart surgeon learns, processes, acts.  And apparently he did very well.   Secondly, I only watched one of his shows but he listened closely to his guest (with a certain modesty, as in his response to Oprah).  I like patents – we need people who  analyze, define, and solve problems.  We are less sure of what he will be than we are of more conventional candidates.  Still, a life time of work done well make it less of a gamble.

Then there’s Fetterman – with remarkably few accomplishments, he would fight crime and increase energy with flailing, contradictory slogans.  His party praised his “performances”.  But senators reason, and it is the reasoning before the vote, the give and take with opponents, that defines a Senator’s value.   A Senator is, after all,  joining one of the great, if not the greatest, of deliberative bodies.  Some, we hear in their ads, still see that role.  But is that even a majority?  And how much do the parties differ?

His party wanted to own his vote.  Their job is to elect sufficient pawns to give a majority.  Then, they give up the power of their vote to the leaders who give up theirs to the swamp, leading to a populace more and more restless and less and less able to fight free of the octopus.  And so it matters little that Fetterman can not deliberate.  In his stabs at making an argument for his candidacy, he says he’ll be the 51st vote.  Of course.   Not as a representative of Pennsylvanians.  That vote and not that voice is what made him worth millions.   And so he is elected by the party, not the people.

We can’t possibly know what Oz will be like as senator; however, we all know what Fetterman will be.

And is his role as cipher all that different from Biden’s?  Or even the without-the-excuse of a stroke or senility, Kamala Harris?  How much applies to other members of Congress, some even more visibly impaired (Diane Feinstein, for instance).

Fuck you. Shut up.

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That’s the Democrats’ message to Trump supporters. As Michael Anton puts it in They Can’t Let Him Back In:

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
 
Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

“No matter how you vote…” – let that line sink in. When was the last time an American political party or movement so vehemently expressed such a sentiment about a large bloc of American voters? (Perhaps it was Democrats re black voters in the pre-civil-rights South.)

And it’s not only the Democrats. The Republican leadership seems more eager to make demoralizing (to their own side) compromises with the Democrats than to fight them on issues that are important to the Republican base.

Neither the establishment Democrats nor the establishment Republicans will acknowledge that they are the problem and that Trump and his voters are symptom rather than cause. Suppressing symptoms tends to make the underlying problem worse. Nonetheless our political establishment remains dead set on continuing to anathematize Trump and to tell his supporters they have nowhere to go. This is not a sustainable situation and sooner or later something will have to give.

(I wrote this post before the FBI raid on Trump’s house. The news about the raid emphasizes the points I tried to make here, to put it mildly.)

Lex adds:

The Democrats similarly are disregarding their base who were desperately in favor of Bernie Sanders. But they managed to prevent him from getting nominated and co-opted him.

Ordinary Americans are not having a good time and they are not happy. Both party establishments are afraid of their own bases, with good reason.

How to turn a recession into a Depression.

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The Fed has confirmed that we are officially in a recession. The actual decline in GDP is higher, though. It is at least -1.6%

What caused the Great Depression? Amity Schlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man” suggests that Roosevelt’s “Regulatory Uncertainty” was a big part of the cause. How were businessmen supposed to plan when policies changed from month to month ? The Roosevelt “Brain Trust” could not decide what might work. Some were good ideas, like the CCC which took young men off the street, helped them get into condition and did many worthwhile projects. Some, like the National Recovery Association, were Fascism which was popular in the 1930s.

Now, we face a disastrous shift in the national focus to imaginary threats like Global Warming. This has become all powerful among politicians because none of them know any science and the science people have become dependent on government funding. Fear is a great driver of government money. Climate science has become a rich field through flogging the unskeptics with fear of global warming. It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence of global warming or any of the other alleged threats. The super rich, like Barack Obama, are still buying waterfront estates no matter what they tell their followers.

Here is a proposal that might help.

Central planning always fails, but the utopian visionaries implementing the plans cannot admit that they are at fault. A scapegoat must be found. As a leading example, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to mass starvation, the official blame was placed on “saboteurs” and “wreckers.”

Our current-day analog is the centrally-planned replacement of our very large, inexpensive and highly functional energy system, mostly based on fossil fuels, with the alternatives of intermittent wind and sun-based generation, as favored by incompetent government regulators who don’t understand how these things work or how much they will cost. Prices of energy to the consumer — from electricity to gasoline — are soaring; and reliability of supply is widely threatened.

All of which brings our President forth to blame the current price and supply issues in the energy markets on anything but his own administration’s intentional efforts to suppress the functional fossil fuel energy. One day the scapegoat is Vladimir Putin; another it is “companies running gas stations,” who stand accused of price gouging.

One possible solution is to use the states as experimental laboratories.

With federalism in energy policy, we can have New York forging ahead with its “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act,” and California doing the same with its SB 100 — both of them seeking to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity, and then to force all energy consumers to use only electricity for their supply. Will that work? If New York and California are successful, they will be a model for the rest of the country to follow. Congratulations will be in order. If they fail relative to other states — that is, if they see energy prices soar, or frequent blackouts or shortages of needed energy — then it will be obvious to all that it was the green energy that failed, and not that there were “saboteurs” or “wreckers” or “price gougers,” who after all could have attacked the other states as well.

Well the Feds allow this? Probably not with the current regime in power.

Fortunately, the red states are not just going along with this kind of thing any more. This will be a critical battleground over the next five to ten years.

We will see after the election. Many Republicans are in thrall to the climate hoax.