…Hopefully DOGE learns: nothing will happen without fast purges, like Twitter in week 1. And government is a SYSTEMS problem: it’s people, ideas, institutions and tools in that order but executed together.
Some places need rebuilding, some places need closing, some things need startups. E.g do not try to ‘reform’ USAF to do drones properly, incentives force the senior people to sabotage intelligent action – set up a new Drone Force outside USAF with new legal authority and totally outside existing procurement, HR, budget etc rules, with incentives to focus on engineering and saving $$, not DEI and cost-plus rackets for Boeing!
The core disaster in western states is the creation of PERMANENT BUREAUCRACIES — as Palmerston said to Queen Victoria in 1830s, this alien European system would be a disaster in England, making responsibility of ministers FAKE.
That’s what we have: FAKE meritocracy, FAKE responsibility, FAKE Cabinet government
But a vibe shift is coming fast across the west – covid & Ukraine & the old system’s pathological failures are pushing people to face fundamental change is needed. SW1 is being forced to confront the Vote Leave agenda coming to DC because the old regime is imploding everywhere…
Trump
How to Invest Political Power
”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.
What’s the Matter with Wisconsin?
Curious about election result changes in one of the swing states, once Wikipedia had the final vote counts of the 2016 election (allowing a relatively simple copy to an Excel spreadsheet), I took a look at stats for Wisconsin’s two most recent presidential elections to see if I could spot signs of any trends. The exercise confirmed what I already knew about the divides in both parties – better than expected.
Stick a Fork In…
… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.
2024 Election Plus/Delta
Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.
- Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
- Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
- Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
- Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
- Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
- By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
- Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
- By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
- I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
- Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.