Stromata Blog

Laugh of the Day

John Kirby has the unenviable job of serving as flack for Joe Biden’s National Security Council. The Defense Department’s just-released annual report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” aggravated his woes. Its discussion of Communist China’s use of “a wide range of diplomatic tools throughout 2021 to erode U.S. influence globally and subvert U.S.-backed security partnerships” includes this:

PRC officials and state media outlets also repeatedly condemned the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited the withdrawal as evidence that the U.S. is an unreliable partner and declining power.

It’s only one sotto voce sentence, but it calls up recollections that must be painful to Foggy Bottom denizens who boast of their “smart power”. Mr. Kirby was sent out this morning to convince the world that, far from being a sign of weakness and unreliability, the American scuttle from Afghanistan was a triumph. Asked by Fox News about the DOD assessment, he declared (cross-talk omitted):

Nations like China and Russia took a look at what we did in Afghanistan . . . and had to marvel at the speed, the efficiency of the effectiveness [sc. with which] that very small number of troops are able to move that many Afghans safely out of that country. No other nation in the world can do that.

Even if one forgets about the chaotic scramble to get onto flights out of Kabul and the thousands of Americans and Afghan allies who were left behind, an evacuation under fire is not an impressive display of military prowess. Nor is it a testament to American reliability that our soldiers slipped away in the night, abandoning bases without notice to the Afghans, leaving billions of dollars of equipment behind, and rendering it impossible for the Afghan army and air force to continue effective combat operations. For those afflicted by amnesia, here is one of the many contemporary summaries of the debacle.

“No other nation in the world can do that.” Once we have identified the “that”, it is certainly accurate to say, “No other American President would have done that.”

As for John Kirby, he has clinched this year’s Baghdad Bob Award.

“Christian Nationalism”: An Imaginary Menace

“Christian Nationalist” has become a popular pejorative in certain circles, and it is a specter that some people profess to find menacing. A book by two sociology professors, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, claims that “over half of the United States population embraces Christian nationalism to some extent”. And what is “Christian Nationalism”? The authors provide a definition:

Simply put, Christian nationalism is a cultural framework – a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems – that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. But the “Christianity” of Christian nationalism is of a particular sort. We do not mean Christianity here as a general, meta-category including all expressions of orthodox Christian theology. Nor will we use terms such as “evangelicalism” or “white conservative Protestantism” (to the extent that these represent certain theological-interpretive positions) as synonyms for Christian nationalism. On the contrary, the “Christianity” of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion. As we will show, it includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. Understood in this light, Christian nationalism contends that America has been and should always be distinctively “Christian” (reflecting this fuller, more nuanced sense of the term) from top to bottom – in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values, and public policies – and it aims to keep it that way.

The authors classify roughly half the country as “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of this dire mindset. Their empirical evidence for that astonishing proposition rests on the results of a survey that asked whether and how strongly (on a “0” to “4” scale) respondents agreed with these six propositions:

The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.
The federal government should advocate Christian values.
The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.
The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.
The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.
The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.

Christian Nationalists were presumed, quite reasonably, to agree with all of these statements except the third. Here is what the results looked like:

A whole one percent got a score of “24” by giving every presumed Christian Nationalist position a “4”. The most common scores (slightly over seven percent each) were zero and 14. Just about exactly equal numbers fell to the left and the right of the Laodicean median score of 12. The conclusion that flows naturally from these data is that most Americans don’t have strong opinions about these supposedly diagnostic positions.

But even if some huge percentage of the country were 24’s, would it follow that they fit within the authors’ concept of Christian Nationalism? Can one logically leap from support for government advocacy of “Christian values” (which include, let us remember, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount) to “nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism”?

The logical mistake here should be apparent even to a sociologist. Professors Whitehead and Perry are guilty of the “fallacy of the undistributed middle”, which concludes that two classes are identical because they share some characteristic. “All men are mortal. All dogs are mortal. Therefore, all men are dogs.”

Let me illustrate with a different set of propositions:

The rich don’t pay their fair of taxes.
Corporations should serve significant purposes other than making profits for shareholders.
Government regulation of markets is essential to preventing domination by monopolies.
The government should do more to promote economic equality.
Economic progress has been largely the product of government action.
Labor unions are necessary to protect workers from exploitation.

Asked to rate agreement with those statements on a zero to four scale, a dogmatic communist would score very high, but so would a great many run-of-the-mill liberals. Using the Whitehead/Perry methodology, a large proportion of the American public would be labeled “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of communism.

Alternatively, an anarcho-capitalist would score zero or not much above, as would many run-of-the-mill free market conservatives. Does America therefore have a large cohort of “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of the thought of Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand?

Returning for a moment to “Christian Nationalism”, Lenin, Stalin or Mao, who constructed regimes unparalleled in horrific religious persecution, would have emphatically rejected the supposed Christian Nationalist diagnostics. Look again at the chart’s “rejecters” and “resisters”, nearly half of the respondents. Are they “accommodators” and “ambassadors” of banning expressions of faith, destroying houses of worship and executing believers?

If Christian Nationalism is truly the all-pervading intellectual aether of progressive nightmares, it shares a characteristic with the more famous luminiferous aether of 19th Century physics: It is undetectable. Aside from the rather nutty Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s hard to think of any self-identified Christian Nationalists in the American public square. The most extreme real-world advocates of breaking down walls between Church and State don’t go any further than wanting to reintroduce anodyne nondenominational prayers into public schools. As for a foreign policy founded on aggressive support of Christian interests (surely a sine qua non of a policy both Christian and nationalist), we are so remote from that idea that the U.S. government is barely willing to take notice of persecuted Christians, while scarcely anyone, in or out of government, cheers, as a true Christian Nationalist surely would, for persecution that governments carry out in Christianity’s name. (Rep. Greene, one notes, is an isolationist.)

The “Christian Nationalist” label is simply a smear, the left-wing parallel to “All liberals are really communists”. Progressives may denounce the memory of “McCarthyism”, but they have no qualms about adapting it to their own cause.

Why Do Leftists Hate Uncles?

The White House has twitted (why hasn’t it yet migrated to Mastodon?) a list of “some talking points when ‘that Uncle’ comes ‘at you’ about @POTUS”. I leave mockery of the substance (and it is eminently mockable) to others. What immediately strikes me is the assumption that “Uncles” (capitalized to emphasize the menace, I suppose, like “The Thing”) are particularly prone to start disruptive arguments at family gatherings.

I am an uncle myself, several times over, and I can say with confidence that the most disruptive thing I’ve ever done at a Thanksgiving feast is hog more than my fair share of the stuffing and dark meat. I also know scores of uncles, some of them my own, who are models of gentlemanly conduct on all occasions. No doubt there are fathers’ or mothers’ brothers who are rotten apples in the kinship barrel, but so too does the barrel contain annoying sisters and cousins and aunts.

So why do uncles get singled out when progressives send around their festal sound bites? The superficial answer is that most uncles are persons who were “assigned” to the male “gender” at birth and have stuck with it rather than celebrating fluidity. There’s also the fact that paradigmatic uncles are exemplars of toxic masculinity (Uncle Sam), the unequal division of wealth (Uncle Scrooge and Rich Uncle Pennybags) and racism (Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben).

Still, those explanations seem to me inadequate. Doesn’t the real offense lie in the fact that, in a world where humankind is a cancerous growth that aggravates Climate-Related Disasters and thus threatens the planet, no uncle is an only child. They are, by definition, brothers and hence unnecessary to the Utopia where birth will be the rare exception to abortion. Progressives who glimpse uncles are, I surmise, overtaken by rage against these despoilers of Gaia. Uncles are ideal villains for a day marked by such evils as meat consumption, carbon-emitting travel, homage to English colonizers and inattention to the urgent need to save our democracy by outlawing misinformation and hanging Donald Trump.

By the way, I killed a few excess brain cells reading “President Biden’s Top Accomplishments” as proclaimed by Chief of Staff Ron Klain. Under the heading “Despite global challenges, WE’RE MAKING PROGRESS”, one sees, “And NO taxes on people making above $400K – he kept his promise”. Maybe Slow Joe isn’t alone in his dotage.

Feasting in the Davos Dystopia

The New York Times e-mail promoting “best vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes” bore the subject line, “This vegetarian Thanksgiving feast looks as good as it tastes”. Here’s the accompanying photo:

It probably tastes exactly as good as it looks. At least, it doesn’t feature a diverse variety of insects.

Quote of the Day

Jim Geraghty:

I tried telling liberals that they’re going to hate DeSantis, but they would hate him within normal parameters, not the all-consuming, paranoia-inducing, identity-defining obsessive hatred that has filled their lives since Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016. By and large, liberals didn’t want to hear it. Almost no one wants baby steps or small improvements anymore; everyone believes that utopia or dystopia lies just past the next election.

The Great Climate Giveaway

As you may have heard, a United Nations convocation called “COP27” (an appropriate acronym for a body that seeks to police the lifestyles of us lesser beings) has established (that is, has agreed to engage in talks about someday establishing) a fund to compensate poor nations for the damage allegedly inflicted by Global Warming Climate Change Climate-Related Disasters. Joe Biden, following the Hobbit custom of giving presents to others on one’s birthday, has promised to kick in a billion dollars (to be provided by American taxpayers, not taken from Jim and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling profits). A billion dollars doesn’t sound like much these days, but it’s only earnest money. The Dystopia Mafia wants much, much more.

Last July, a Dartmouth professor and one of his graduate students published a paper, “National attribution of historical climate damages”, that purports to quantify the costs that high-carbon-emitting nations have inflicted on the rest of the world. As summarized by an enthusiastic and credulous CNN report:

Researchers in a new study have put actual dollar figures on economic harm caused by the countries most responsible for the climate crisis, and the ground-breaking data could serve as a starting point for legal action against the world’s wealthiest nations.

The Dartmouth College study found that just five of the world’s top emitters of planet-warming gases – the United States, China, Russia, India, and Brazil – caused around a $6 trillion loss in gross domestic product from 1990 to 2014, adjusted for 2010 dollars, or about 11% of total global GDP.

The study also shows the US and China – the two biggest contributors to the climate crisis – individually caused global economic losses of more than $1.8 trillion each during that same period.

Despite much statistical jargon, it is pretty obvious that these conclusions are derived from speculation piled on top of surmise piled on top of guesswork, but even if they were unassailable, the paper’s methodology has a glaring and fatal flaw. It estimates how much richer the negatively impacted countries would be if the United States and other major carbon emitters had emitted much less in the past and yet had become just as rich. The hidden premise is that America’s $15 trillion economy would be the same size if coal, oil and natural gas didn’t exist.

That scenario is absurd. Without the use of fossil fuels for the past century or so, what is now the “First World” would be direly impoverished, and all the countries that Climate-Related Disasters affect would be poorer, too. Much of such wealth as they have is attributable to their dealings with rich countries: exports, offshored services, remittances from citizens working abroad, tourism, foreign aid. A true accounting would look not just at what climate change subtracts but at what energy produced by fossil fuels adds.

The point of analyses like the Dartmouth duo’s is not, however, to gauge economic consequences. Rather, they seek to furnish a rationale for turning the global economy into a gigantic lottery in which the winning tickets have been assigned to favored “victims” and responsibility for making the payouts has been imposed on alleged transgressors. There could be no surer way to cast away the economic progress of the past two hundred years.

Red Shift, Blue Shift

In the post immediately below, I expressed puzzlement at the Republican Party’s underperformance in this year’s House elections. The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats are concentrated in urban centers, where they rack up Soviet-like majorities. Republicans, on the other hand, are spread out. They win seats by smaller margins but win more of them. That wasn’t the case in 2022: GOP candidates got more votes in toto, but the resulting minuscule majority of Congresscritters was in many ways the product of good luck, such as the New York Court of Appeals’ unanticipated rejection of a Democratic gerrymander (turning a likely five seat loss into a three seat gain), rather than good demographics.

Michael Barone, whose knowledge of the American electorate is unsurpassed, suggests that the demographics are shifting beneath the parties’ feet. He contrasts 2022 with 2012, when Republicans won 234 seats in the House while narrowly losing the overall popular vote. This year, a popular vote lead of about four percentage points yielded somewhere between 220 and 222 seats, just over the majority threshold of 218.

The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters – Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals – have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.

The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Bush and Obama were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. That enabled Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. But Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Biden, with 51% in 2020, raised that number to 226. . . .

You can see the evidence [of reduced clustering] from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80% or more, whereas only three Republicans did.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity – 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80% or more.

Why has Democratic clustering diminished? For reasons that aren’t hard to fathom. People who can are leaving the misgoverned central cities, and those who remain are less likely to see any reason to vote, when their choices are criminal-friendly Democrats or demonized Republicans.

Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 – down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania; down 15% in Detroit’s Wayne County, but up 6% elsewhere in Michigan; down 12% in Milwaukee County, but up 1% elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24% in Chicago’s Cook County, down only 8% in Chicago’s collar counties and downstate.

Where do people who leave failed cities like Chicago and Detroit go? Moving to another central city is hardly likely to be attractive. What’s the point of trading Chicago for Philadelphia? The realistic alternatives are either purplish suburbs around the big cities or red areas like Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Mr. Barone notes that blacks have been moving in large numbers to the Atlanta suburbs, a big reason why the Democratic Party is more viable in Georgia than anywhere else in the Deep South.

What the voting data suggest is unsurprising: Conservatives emigrate to areas where conservatism is already strong. Liberals have few well-governed liberal bastions to choose from, so they go to politically marginal jurisdictions, where most of them retain their voting habits and help Democrats win swing districts.

While it appears that the era during which the GOP could leverage small overall vote advantages into large House majorities is over, Mr. Barone sees a bright silver lining:

Thus, the Republicans’ 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.

However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. But relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of Donald Trump’s backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn’t.

Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.

Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.

A Republican President with a closely divided Congress wouldn’t be Paradise, but there are plenty of less attractive scenarios.

A Week After the Day After

We now know that the Republican Party has emerged from the 2022 midterm elections with what may be the narrowest House majority in history and that the party’s best hope in the Senate is a continuation of the 50-50 de facto minority of the past two years. The Internet is naturally awash in analysis and recriminations sparked by this unexpected outcome. Far it be from me to add to the clutter, but I do have some observations.

First, although we don’t yet have final vote totals (California will, it seems, be counting until Christmas), it is clear that Democrats targeted their votes much more “efficiently” than Republicans. GOP House candidates drew three or four million more votes than Democrats yet won only a scintilla over half the seats. That is a reversal from 2020, when a Democratic edge of nearly five million votes yielded a similarly bare majority. (House election statistics for 1920 through 2020 are available here.) The explanation of that result is intuitively obvious: Democrats congregate disproportionately in a small number of urban area and “waste” votes on candidates who face no serious opposition.

Explaining the 2022 result is more difficult. Republican voters didn’t suddenly become more concentrated. The map still colors the vast majority of the land area of the United States red. Somehow, though, this year saw Republican candidates in close contests consistently stumble inches short of victory. This is a conundrum for which I have no solution. 

Second, there is general agreement that Democratic candidates benefited markedly from the vast expansion of mail-in voting, a “temporary” Covid-motivated expedient that now shows signs of becoming permanent, perhaps all but universal. Mail-in balloting is an abomination. It turns secrecy into a figment (anyone who bribes or intimidates a voter can watch him fill out his ballot) and offers tempting opportunities for fraud. A small experiment by a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist illustrates how easy it is to cast a ballot in someone else’s name:

For the past two elections, Nevada sent mail ballots to all registered voters, unless they opted out. That means around 1.8 million ballots went out. Well more than 1 million won’t be returned. Previously, a voter could request an absentee ballot for any reason. That’s more secure because ballots went only to those wanting to vote by mail.

With that many ballots floating around, there are obvious security concerns – it’s much easier to get ahold of someone else’s ballot. Someone could vote for their spouse or child who doesn’t care about politics, but was automatically registered at the DMV. In apartment complexes, ballots of previous residents have ended up in the trash. A postal worker could pocket ballots. There’s not exactly an airtight chain of custody.

Election officials, however, claim there is no need to worry. They have asserted signature verification helps prevent someone from successfully casting a ballot that doesn’t belong to them.

As I did two years ago, I tested that theory this election. I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter than copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope. They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot.

It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.

If signature verification worked, all 11 of those ballots should have been set aside for mismatched signatures. Instead, six were accepted. That’s a greater than 50 percent chance of being accepted. When I did this experiment in 2020 with nine voters, eight had their ballots accepted. That was an almost 90 percent acceptance rate.

The writer suggests a fix: “To verify absentee ballots, Georgia requires a unique identifier, such as the last four digits of a driver’s license number.” That would be an improvement, though it offers no protection against bribery and intimidation – or against computer hackers or corrupt officeholders who are able to gain access to the DMV database.

The only real cure for the infirmities of vote-by-mail is to limit the practice to circumstances in which there is no feasible alternative, such as military personnel stationed abroad and individuals who cannot get to the polls for medical reasons. It’s obvious, though, that, so long as mail voting is perceived by one of the major parties as a trump (or perhaps I should say “anti-trump”) card, reform will be impossible.

Therefore, the Republican Party should work vigorously to change that perception. There’s no reason why GOP candidates can’t encourage their supporters to vote by mail, go from door to door in “red” neighborhoods “harvesting” ballots (where legal) and publicize the locations of ballot drop boxes. Once the playing field is less tilted, people who still pay attention to good government may be able to spur a consensus in favor of the real, physical ballot box.

Third, the evidence that Donald Trump is a dead weight on the political party of which he claims to be the leader continues to grow. Dan McLaughlin has delved into exit poll data, which has limitations but strongly supports Trump-skeptical conclusions:

[Trump] is viewed unfavorably by a solid majority of the midterm voters nationally (by a 19-point margin of 58 percent to 39 percent), and in every state polled, even places such as Texas (52 percent disapproval to 45 percent approval), Ohio (53 percent to 44 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent) that he won two years ago. . . . And across the board, the voters who viewed Trump unfavorably voted in vast margins for the Democratic candidates. Outside of Florida and New Hampshire, Mike DeWine in Ohio was the only one of these candidates to get more than 20 percent of the vote from people with an unfavorable view of Trump (DeWine still lost those voters 69 percent to 31 percent). . . .

Twenty-eight percent of voters said they were casting their ballots to oppose Trump, while only 16 percent said they were casting votes to support Trump. Thus, the anti-Trump voters outnumbered the pro-Trump voters by 75 percent. If you run the numbers, Democrats won 59.3 percent of the combined vote of the two groups. If both groups had stayed home, by contrast, the remaining 58 percent of voters who said that Trump was not a factor in their vote broke 58 percent to 40 percent for Republicans – a whopping 18-point win that would have satisfied even the wildest fantasies of the Big Red Tsunami.

The same story appears in race after race. In 16 of the 19 races polled, voters who cast their ballots without reference to Trump made up a majority, between 51 and 56 percent of the vote. In the other three (the North Carolina Senate race and the two Arizona races), they were just under half. In 18 out of 19 races, those voters supported the Republican candidate, frequently by wide margins. Among voters who didn’t cast a ballot with Trump in mind, Kari Lake won by 36 points, Blake Masters by 28, Adam Laxalt by 22, Don Bolduc by 19, Tim Michels by 17, Tudor Dixon and Dr. Oz by seven apiece, and Herschel Walker by six. Only Doug Mastriano was a bad enough candidate to lose on his own merits. But in each of those races, the anti-Trump voters swamped the pro-Trump voters by a wide enough margin to cancel that out.

The moral? So long as Donald Trump is a figure whom voters care about, Republicans will be running steeply uphill.

Fourth and finally, much of the doom and gloom currently circulating is wildly exaggerated. Pace Senator Hawley, a party that holds half of each house of Congress isn’t ready for a funeral shroud. A disappointment is not a debacle.

Addendum: Sean Trende, who knows as much about matters psephological as anyone, offers some answers (albeit not complete) to the riddle of why the GOP gained far fewer House seats than would have been predicted on the basis of its share of the popular vote.

A Progressive’s Constitution

Briahna Joy Gray, who was the press secretary of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential campaign, contends that Joe Biden’s “loan forgiveness” plan was never intended to take effect. In her opinion –

They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out -- knowing it wasn't going anywhere bc they relied on faulty legal authority.

Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn't do this intentionally.

As you probably know, last Thursday a federal judge ruled, in Brown v. U.S. Department of Education, that the President has no authority to forgive student loans without Congressional approval. The Administration has defended its action against a barrage of lawsuits not by arguing that Congressional authorization isn’t needed but that no one has the right to take the question to court.

The Brown plaintiffs found an ingenious way around the Administration’s theory (as summarized in the court’s opinion) “that no one has standing to challenge the Program because where the government is providing a benefit, nobody is harmed by the existence of that benefit” (which implies that the President has unlimited power to provide benefits to anyone and to any extent that he wishes). The plaintiffs’ counterargument was that they are student borrowers whose loans the Administration had not purported to forgive and that the Department of Education’s failure to allow the public to comment on the action before putting it into effect, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, deprived them of their opportunity to make the case for more favorable treatment of their own indebtedness. The court held that these facts resulted in a concrete injury that can be redressed by a favorable court decision. Those are the elements needed to establish standing to bring a lawsuit.

Standing is a complex and contentious subject. Discussing the merits of the court’s opinion in Brown goes beyond the scope of this post. What interests me at the moment is Miss Gray’s reasoning. Back in December, she declared, “Biden absolutely does have the power to cancel all student debut by executive order. No congressional involvement required.” After Brown, she elaborated, saying that the President “could’ve immediately canceled student debt instead of making it a means tested program, in which case there wouldn’t have been these opportunities for people to obstruct”. The Brown plaintiffs, for instance, would have lacked standing, because their loans would have been “forgiven”.

Note that her analysis doesn’t rest on the Constitution but only on the idea that the Constitutional mandate “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law” can, through clever maneuvering, be rendered unenforceable, in which case, she evidently believes, a progressive President has no duty to abide by it.

Briahna Joy Gray is just one progressive, but does anyone imagine that she is an outlier? We’ve heard a lot this year about how “democracy is in danger”. Doesn’t the enthusiasm of a large political movement for arbitrary, unconstitutional executive action carry a whiff of dictatorship?

Biden After Tuesday

The midterms defied expectations and, contrary to my prediction, are sure to strangle the Democratic “push Joe out” campaign in its cradle, especially if, as is not at all improbable, the Georgia runoff leads to another 50-50 Senate split. If that happens, the Democrats will need a Vice President to break ties, and Kackling Kamala is the only Veep they’ve got or will be able to get.

The problem is that the President’s mental decline is palpably accelerating. One may (and should) sympathize with a man facing the seventh and last of Shakespeare’s ages of man (“second childishness, and mere oblivion”), but sympathy is no argument to keeping him in the most important office on the planet. In an article bluntly titled “Biden’s Lost Marbles”, Jim Geraghty lists many, but not all, of the President’s recent mental stumbles.

Back in July 2021, as the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was ending in disaster and Biden’s public appearances were limited to short statements and he was refusing to take questions, John Ellis, formerly of the Boston Globe, summarized how it was acceptable to acknowledge Biden’s age and mental condition if you used certain euphemisms.

“Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from ‘young old’ to ‘old,’” Ellis wrote. “Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. ‘He’s lost a step or two.’ Or: ‘He’s lost something off his fastball.’ You’re not supposed to talk about it. If you do, and you’re a Democrat, you’re scolded for aiding and abetting the enemy. . . . The problem is that it’s there for all to see. Pretending not to see it is untenable.”

And yet the White House pretends no one can notice Biden wandering around oddly at public events, see the vacant look in his eyes at times, or hear the meandering stories and mumbling. Anyone who has watched a parent or relative succumb to the ravages of age is familiar with the sad, inevitable decline. Biden is not well, and he’s not going to get any better. The presidency ages the most energetic and dynamic of men, and Biden was not among them when he took the oath of office.

The President does, however, retain the last faculty to go: a stubbornness that refuses to acknowledge the inroads of time. He has become the White House Norma Desmond. We must hope and pray that our country doesn’t share the fate of Joe Gillis.

Keep Despair Alive!

Matt Labash, whose journalistic career was set back by his refusal to jump onto the Trump Train, has, one might think, every reason to rejoice when conservatives repudiate Donald Trump. (The latest is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, who two years ago chaired Black Americans to Re-elect President Trump.) But Mr. Labash is not at all a happy man, and it doesn’t sound like he wants to be.

What you’re probably already reading elsewhere is a lot of dopey analysis (no hyperlinks, sorry – I don’t wish to single anyone out for foolish wishful thinking after our long national nightmare) that holds that Ron DeSantis is about to wrest control of the party from Donald J. Trump, on account of the predicted Red Wave being more like a modest red eddy. As if Trump will suffer for this setback. After he already hasn’t suffered for losing two popular votes, the electoral college (in 2020), and helping lose the House and the Senate when they were on his presidential watch. Not to mention encouraging his own Capitol to be sacked, and his vice president hanged. So good luck with that theory. I don’t share it.

It’s true, of course, that pixel pushers’ opinions don’t necessarily reflect or influence the ballots of flesh-and-blood voters. We don’t yet have any post-election polls pitting Trump against DeSantis (or Pence or Abbott or Youngkin or Haley or Noem or anyone else on the GOP’s extraordinarily strong bench). It’s conceivable that Mr. Labash is correct when he writes, “DeSantis, if he is to win, ultimately has to break off adherents to a personality cult, when the cultist-in-chief is still alive and kicking, and is already pillorying Ron DeSantis to his sheeple.”

On the other hand, the “personality cult” originated in The Donald’s self-portrayal as an almost mythical “winner”, a title that his victory (over the most hapless Democratic candidate since John W. Davis) seemingly confirmed. The subsequent losses that Mr. Labash cites could be overlooked or excused or explained away. Nobody except progressive advocates of plebiscitary government pays much attention to popular vote totals in Presidential elections. Midterm Republican losses in 2018 followed a well-established historical pattern. It was possible to believe that defeat in 2020 was the product of a “steal”. The Democrats’ Senate victories in Georgia in December 2020 were supposedly Brian Kemp’s fault. And so on. Although the excuses and explanations were decreasingly convincing, no single failure was enough to start a preference cascade; Trump endorsements could still propel candidates with dubious political skills to victory in Republican primaries. But the load on the camel’s back was getting heavier and heavier.

Three factors, I believe, turned the “Red Trickle” into an anti-Trump torrent. First, the expectation of a Red Tide, even a Red Tsunami, was universal. Second, its non-appearance conspicuously resulted from the defeats of candidates who owed their places on the ballot to Trump (and, to be fair, to not-so-covert Democratic campaigning for “Mega-MAGA” candidates in the primaries). Third, Trump instantly reacted like a loser. Contrary to widespread Internet opinion, Trump voters are human beings rather than zombies. They have struggled against adversity or have witnessed the struggles of family members and friends. They have to deal with people who won’t take responsibility for mistakes, bully anyone who crosses them, brag of their own prowess, expect others to do their bidding and, in general, believe that the world owes them unearned loyalty. Not many of them hold a high opinion of people like that.

The latest Trump tantrum came this afternoon: a syntactically confusing and eccentrically capitalized e-mail to supporters. As John Hinderaker comments, “This would be an embarrassment coming from a twelve-year-old. Time to get Trump off the stage before he does further damage to our party and our country.”

A Few Words About Stromata

Here you may read my thoughts on this, that and the other thing.  Stromata in koiné Greek meant “miscellany”, and that is what this blog is intended to be. (In modern Greek, the word means “mattress”, although, unlike some book publishers, I do not intend my output to serve as a substitute for sleep aids.)

My intention (but not ironclad rule) is to post on Wednesdays and Sundays – perhaps early in the day, perhaps late, perhaps the evening before. One must try not to fall into ruts. If you find my commentary interesting or entertaining, thank you. If you loathe and despise it, you may tell me so in the Comments, or you may look for enlightenment elsewhere.

Announcement: I have just published Strange Tales for Strange Times, which collects stories that I’ve been publishing piecemeal, corrects typos and other infelicities, and adds a new story. For the moment, it is available only on Kindle, though I’ll arrange for publication in dead tree form if sufficient demand appears.

The price is only $2.99, practically free in this inflationary epoch. Reviews, favorable or not, are much appreciated.

Some of the individual stories are also available separately on Amazon, mostly for 99 cents each.

N. B.: From now through March 13th, and probably for a few days longer, I will be extremely busy working on the semiannual update to Matthew Bender’s Employee Benefits Guide. That’s my excuse for irregular posting. If it’s not good enough, I’ll think up another.

 

A Preference Avalanche Buries The Donald

Approximately 36 hours ago, Donald Trump was the single most powerful figure in the Republican Party. He boasted about his poll numbers compared to other GOP heavyweights. “There it is, Trump at 71. Ron De-Sanctimonious at 10 percent. Mike Pence at 7; oh, Mike Pence [is] doing better than I thought.”

Even among Republicans who weren’t huge fans of the former President, there was barely concealed resignation, a feeling that a Trump try at emulating Grover Cleveland would sweep aside any competitors. Even commentators who were eager to see Governor DeSantis head a “Stop the Donald” movement seemed to have little confidence that it could succeed.

What a difference a night of disappointments makes. Perhaps there is some Internet haven where Trump loyalists are blaming Republican defeats on Mitch McConnell and nodding along with Trump’s own pre-election analysis: “Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” If there is such a place, it is well hidden. Jim Geraghty has singled out a statement that encapsulates what has suddenly become the prevailing mood. Tim Anderson is one of members of the Virginia House of Delegates who was elected along with Governor Youngkin. He had a reputation as “an outspoken Trump Republican”. There’s nary a of RINO on his campaign website. Here is the statement that he issued this morning:

While it appears likely Trump will announce he is running for President – I will not be supporting him.

While Trump was President, we lost a supermajority in the House of Delegates, a majority in the Senate and in 2019 Democrats controlled all state government for 2 years – radically changing Virginia. After Trump lost, the GOP gained Delegate seats back and won all 3 statewide offices. I call this the Trump effect. One thing Trump does very well in Virginia is mobilizing the left to vote against him and anyone who supports him.

I care about Virginia more than anything. Trump running for President is the absolute worst thing that can happen to Virginia state politics. We must take a different direction and the Virginia GOP and Republicans must divorce from Trump – for the sake of Virginia and for the sake of the nation.

I am going to take the first step and say these things publicly that I know many of my colleagues think. It’s a new day. It’s time to move on.

Democrats held seats in the 7th and 10th this year because voters would rather the country be on fire than vote for Trump’s party. Never again.

Like Trump, Love Trump or Hate Trump – if you care about Virginia and conservative values – we must all move in a different direction.

It would be easy to consume millions of pixels quoting similar sentiments from people who thought well of The Donald until the electoral audit made it clear that he has flung away all the good will earned by (most of) his policies as President. John Hinderaker of PowerLine, who has mixed praise for Trump’s accomplishments with worries about his temperament, put it this way:

The Democrats played Trump like a violin, and he joined in enthusiastically because his megalomania blinded him to political reality. He is a loser. . . .

Trump is toast. He has a few fanatical followers, most of whom were never reliable Republicans or even consistent voters. They can go down with his ship if they want to. But the rest of us need to look ahead and begin the process of choosing a vastly better candidate in 2024. That will be a low bar.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Donald Trump himself is oblivious to the avalanche.

I await an addition to the Downfall parodies: “Hitler is informed that Ron De-Sanctimonious is now the favorite of the 2024 Presidential betting market”.

The Country That Got Covid Right

Something to take my mind off what looks like a middling mid-term election.

During the Covid panicdemic, Sweden was the outlier among developed countries. It didn’t ignore the disease completely, but it kept society and the economy going to a far greater extent that anyone else. For that, it was vilified.

Now enough time has passed and enough data have been gathered to make it possible to evaluate how well different countries did in limiting excess mortality. Lots of attention has been paid to deaths from (or with or adjacent to) Covid, but policies that reduce deaths from one cause and increase them even more from others are failures. The best measure of success is how deaths compared to what would have been anticipated in the absence of Covid. On that point, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has assembled the evidence. The chart below, derived from OECD data, tells the story:

As the chart shows, Sweden didn’t do all that badly in Covid mortality, although conclusions are muddled by the varying ways that countries attribute deaths to Covid. In excess mortality, however, the Swedes were the champions. Perhaps geography played some unidentifiable role. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland all did very well, too. But the Swedish lead is well outside any conceivable margin of error. The cumulative excess death percentage over the three-year period was one-eighth that of the United States.

Let’s remember this the next time an epidemic comes along.

Random Election Notes

Collected here are interesting items that I happen to notice during the evening. I promise no penetrating insights. For those, I recommend Henry Olsen’s highly well-informed twitter feed. For a combination of insight and entertainment value, there’s always Vodkapundit. The material below is in reverse chronological order. Times are Pacific Standard Time.

• And now it is time for bed. It’s sad to see such bright prospects shattered, but the cause is not lost, only postponed.
• 9:30 p.m.: In my home state of Washington, there is no good news. Patty Murray, a useless barnacle on the Senate, has been unsurprisingly reelected to one of the seats that Republicans might have won in a Red Tsunami, and there is a serious risk that the Dems will gain a House seat. A Trump-endorsed candidate ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, IMHO an excellent Congressman, after she voted in favor of the second Trump impeachment. With 65 percent of the vote in, the Democrat, a soi-disant moderate (no doubt as phony as the rest of that ilk), is leading 53%–47%.
• 8:40 p.m.: At this point, pessimistic observers doubt that the GOP can gain a Senate majority. Dr. Oz is running behind Trump’s 2020 numbers in several Republican-leaning counties: a likely Republican loss, and there are as yet no pick-ups anywhere. The silver lining is that control of the House (not in serious doubt at this point) will limit Joe Biden’s ability to damage the country and will dampen the hopes of Democrats who want to retire him before 2024. The results also reflect badly on Donald Trump’s political judgment. He can’t deny that his handpicked candidates performed miserably in what ought to have been a spectacular Republican year.
• 7:45 p.m.: So far, it doesn’t look like the Democrats are getting annihilated. They held two or the three possible GOP pickups in Virginia, kept a seat that they seemed likely to lose in Rhode Island (but still finished ten points behind Biden’s 2020 result in the same district), prevailed without much of a fight in the New Hampshire Senate race and allegedly have won the Colorado race, though almost no votes have been counted there. There’s a pretty good chance that control of the Senate will turn on a runoff in Georgia (though this time Donald Trump won’t be trying to sink the GOP). Nonetheless, the huge splits between mail-in votes and election day votes makes it hard to be certain what has really happened. Well, with one exception: Florida has flipped from purple to bright red. Both DeSantis and Rubio won by landslide margins (currently 59.5% DeSantis, 57.8% Rubio). The margins were similar in all other statewide races. Republicans won 20 of 28 Congressional seats, up from 16 of 27 in 2020.
• 6:55 p.m.: Another tidbit from Henry Olsen: “Meanwhile, in NV with 15 minutes to go registered Republicans are massively outvoting registered Dems - UNLESS Dems are disproportionately dropping off ballots at drop boxes today, which don't get collected until the polls close. This is an example of why tonight is SOO HARD.” And why we may not know how far the red tide has come in until sometime tomorrow, if then.
• 6:15 p.m.: The crowd at Ron DeSantis’s victory celebration is reportedly shouting, “Two more years!”
• 6:10 p.m.: From the Babylon Bee, America’s only reliable news source: “Record Numbers Of Voters Show Up To End Democracy”.
• 6:00 p.m.: Mercer County, New Jersey, is a Democratic stronghold. All of its voting machines are currently out of order. Incompetence does as much to bollix elections as conspiracies. It would be nice if we took voting seriously enough to do it right.
• 5:45 p.m.: Henry Olsen notes that reading tea leaves is harder than usual this year: “I'm not tweeting as much tonight because the massive bifurcation between D-heavy mail and R-heavy ED makes it much harder to extrapolate from partial returns. Will keep following and let you know as races start to take shape when plenty of both types of votes are in.”
• 5:05 p.m.: With none of the GOP-voting Panhandle results yet reported, Ron DeSantis is 15 points ahead of Chameleon Charlie Crist.
• 5:00 p.m.: The New York Times twitter feed has posted “5 ways to soothe election stress”. I hope that it helps their readers.
• 4:55 p.m.: The first House seat to change hands this evening was Florida’s 7th District, where the Democratic candidate was ahead by six percent with 71 percent of the vote counted. Then came the ballots cast on election day. With 93 percent counted, the Republican leads by six.
• 4:45 p.m.: A real Donald Trump quote (see and hear it here) about how credit should be allocated for Republican victories and defeats: “Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” I await claims that this is one of those “deep fakes” we keep hearing about.
• 4:30 p.m.: Henry Olsen reports that the DeSantis and Rubio are leading in the early voting returns from the most strongly Democratic parts of Florida, including Dade County. It’s going to be a short election night in the Sunshine State.
• The very first race to be decided comes from Guam, which has elected a Republican delegate to Congress for only the second time in its history. Don’t tsunamis start in the Pacific?

Those Masterly Biden Tacticians

The Washington Post, doubtless prompted by State Department officials who are Leaking As Instructed, has reported that the Administration wants Ukraine to show the world that it is willing to negotiate with Russia (non-paywalled summary here). The aim isn’t, however, to bring about actual talks between the warring parties.

“The request by American officials is not aimed at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, these people said. Rather, they called it a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.”

What better way to maintain the support of war-worried friends than to announce to readers of the Post that you have launched an insincere peace initiative?

Not that a sincere peace initiative would be any better. It would only feed Tsar Vladimir’s belief that the decadent West will give up if he just fights on long enough. When one is fighting Joe Biden and his coven of America Lasters, that belief isn’t as absurd as it ought to be.

Joe Biden Gets the CNN “Fact Check” Treatment

There could be no clearer foreshadowing of the coming campaign to ease Joe Biden out of office than the strange new disrespect shown by CNN’s “fact checker”. For the first time ever, the President’s statements are being evaluated as if he were a Republican.

“Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims” embraces nine items. Some are the sort that any semi-honest fact checker would have to rate as false: Gasoline prices weren’t over five dollars a gallon when Biden took office. He didn’t get Congress to pass his student loan giveaway “by a vote or two” or by any other margin. The tax cuts enacted in 2017 didn’t benefit “only the top one percent of the American public”. The Biden spending splurge hasn’t reduced the federal debt.

The interesting fact checks are those of the kind ordinarily reserved only for the GOP, namely, those that attach “false” labels to allegedly false conclusions based on undeniably true statements and to trivial factual muddles. For example, it is true that the 2023 increase in Social Security payments will be the largest in many years. (The fact-checked statement says ten; the actual number is forty-two. The President was unwontedly modest.) That Biden presents the increase as an accomplishment of his Administration is a dubious interpretation, but the conclusions to be drawn from facts are outside the fact checker’s bailiwick.

On the trivial side is Biden’s claim that he has traveled “17,000 miles” with Communist dictator Xi Jinping. That’s an obvious muddle – untrue but insignificant.

Combining both facets of bad fact checking is the response to “Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.” CNN sniffs that 3.5 percent unemployment is only tied for the lowest in half a century, then points out that the other months with that low a figure were during the Trump Administration, before the panicdemic struck. Once again, the error is trivial, and the “fact check” – assigning significance to it because “Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record” – is argumentation rather than blue penciling.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I think that CNN outargues Biden at every point. But a month ago, it wouldn’t have argued with him at all. Soon, I imagine, it will begin highlighting the spoors of his diminishing mental capacity. And then the guy whom Art Buchwald called “the Great Mentioner” will begin speculating about primary challenges, voluntary retirement, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, perhaps even Impeachment. The Left’s Overton Window is opening. Joe soon will feel the breeze.

Update (November 7, 2022): CNN isn’t alone. This morning, the Washington Post’s fact checker awards President Biden “a Bottomless Pinocchio”, which sounds like a description of a Meta avatar. (If you don’t want to pay for access, you can read a summary here.)

I begin to wonder whether Slow Joe will make it all the way to 2023.

Warning People That They’re Being Discriminated Against Is Racist!

So says today’s Seattle Times in a story headlined, “Mailers spur debate over claims of discrimination against Asian Americans”. The America First Legal Foundation, about which I know not a thing (the Times says that it “is led by Stephen Miller, former senior advisor to President Donald Trump”), has sent a leaflet “to voters in Washington and across the country this week, appearing to target Asian American voters”.

One side of the mailer says that President Joe “Biden and the left want to decide who gets hired – and who gets fired according to their skin color,” and features pictures and headlines from news stories.

The other side says “Joe Biden and left wing officials are engaged in widespread racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans … even though it’s against the law.”

The reporter then quoted various Democratic partisans, who declared that such statements were “racially divisive and inflammatory” and “attempting to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other communities of color”. A Republican Party official married to a Filipino was given a sliver of space to say that her husband “kind of just agreed with it” and that both of them opposed affirmative action. Aside from that, all was denunciation.

Guess what was never mentioned: the two cases that the Supreme Court heard last Monday challenging Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s blatant discrimination against Asian-American applicants, a practice energetically defended by the Biden Administration. According to the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, an Asian-American applicant to Harvard in the upper ten percent of academic performance has a worse chance of admission than an African-American applicant in the bottom 40 percent. Indeed, the Asian-American admit rate is below all other groups in every decile.

Might not a mention of that litigation furnish a scintilla of context? Is it possible that Asian-Americans are in fact targets of discrimination by the woke identitarians who nowadays dominate the Democratic Party? Or is the only acceptable “anti-racist” response to close one’s eyes tightly shut?

Democracy’s Fake Defenders

Do true defenders of the right of the people to choose who will govern them consistently oppose measures designed to ensure that ballots are cast only by legally qualified voters, that no one votes more than once, that how individuals vote is secret from everyone but themselves, and that ballots are secured against tampering after they are cast? The absence of those precautions is the hallmark of pseudo-democratic regimes – and the gospel of an array of Democratic office holders and seekers who profess to be defending “our democracy” against the menace of “election deniers” and “mega-MAGA Republicans”.

Nothing undermines the legitimacy of an ostensible democracy more swiftly and thoroughly than a widespread belief that “what counts isn’t who votes, but who counts the votes”. What gives heft to conspiratorial claims about the 2020 Presidential election is the sloppy way that it was conducted. If it weren’t for the ease with which non-citizens and ineligible felons can register to vote, the failure of many states to keep registration lists up to date, the widespread absence of ID requirements at the polls, the “black box” nature of electronic voting machines, and mail-in ballots’ inherent lack of secrecy and security, “stop the steal” would resonate only in the most paranoidly partisan corners of Internet.

The “our democracy” crowd’s premises aren’t hard to discern:

• It is better for ten fraudulent or illegal votes to be cast than for safeguards against them to deprive one legitimate voter of his ability to cast a ballot.
• The people who conduct elections are so pure in heart that they can be counted on not to condone cheating.
• Accurate voter registration lists are of no real importance. No one would dishonestly vote in more than one place or pretend to be a voter who had died or moved away.
• No one who wants to pressure, bribe or intimidate voters would ever go so far as to fill out or even look at their ballots before they were mailed.

My own home state of Washington provides interesting evidence of this “see no evil” mentality. All voting is by mail, and ballots are mailed to everyone on the voter rolls. They are returned in envelopes that show the voter’s name and address on the outside. Ballots are not placed in a second, sealed envelope void of identifying markings. Instead, there is an “optional [emphasize optional] security sleeve”, which voters are warned not to tape or seal:

Votes thus are not shielded from any poll worker who feels an impulse to look at them after the outer envelope is opened. If one believes in the purity of election officials, that isn’t a problem. Why should we care who knows how we voted? In fact, why have secret ballots at all? Elections aren’t all that important, are they?

They won’t be, if democracy’s fake defenders get their way.

After the Cyburricane

Typepad, which has reliably hosted this small blog for 15 years or so, suffered a nervous breakdown in the middle of last week and is only now recovering. For several days, I couldn’t post anything, and Stromata was inaccessible to readers most of the time. The situation seems to be improving, though the latest word from the Typepad Status Site (less than 20 minutes ago) is, “We're aware there are still issues to address. Our teams continue to work tirelessly to get everything back in working order. We'll update in a few hours with any new information we have.”

Regular (well, not too irregular) blogging will resume soon.