For My Three Raving Fans
INTERNATIONAL:
1. Finland is now part of NATO, and Sweden will eventually follow suit once Erdogan is done negotiating over the status of various Kurdish groups up north. This is a big deal because, while it does nothing to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine or the Caucasus, it adds VAST border regions right next to Moscow that would have to be defended in case of future Russian aggression to the West.
2. China signed trade deals in Renminbi/Yuan.
Yawn.
No, the U.S. is in no economic danger from this whatsoever. The USD is the world’s reserve currency because it’s “the cleanest of the dirty shirts.” As shitty as the USD is, it’s a significantly better vehicle for international commerce than the Euro, the Yen, and certainly better than the Yuan, which isn’t even fully-convertible, but operates under strict export controls.
China prefers it this way, and so do the rest of the BRICS.
The BRICS are mercantilist powers with little to no domestic demand to speak of, with the exception of India, which is gradually growing in a way that avoids the Japanese and Chinese models in favor of slow and steady domestic development (but also so corrupt that unless it undergoes a major cultural shift economically, it will never become a superpower. India is different, and going to stay that way). Mercantilist powers are all about exports, and if you cannot hold the world’s “reserve currency” and be a primarily export-driven economy. Period. The End. Because demand for your currency invariably means your currency increases in value, which causes your exports to be less competitive compared to similar products produced by countries which happily keep their own currency values lower.
The U.S., economically speaking, would love it if another global currency became competitive with the USD, because it would mean we would no longer have to keep running major deficits to make sure there was enough USD sloshing around to meet global demand. But for that to happen, the country with said currency will have to have massive internal/domestic economic demand.
Welcome to the 21st century, folks. The only two nations with the demographics to try to grow into that status are India and Indonesia. India doesn’t want the role, and Indonesia is breath-takingly corrupt, with an educational system that makes Baltimore Public Schools look “pretty darned okay” by comparison.
“But what about France?” I was asked in some private correspondence. Well, it’s pretty simple, and comes down to two things. Demographics and Culture. Culturally, they cut a deal that works for them and moved on. “France has no allies, only interests” isn’t a put-down: it’s a bedrock principle of French foreign policy. If the U.S. “lost” geopolitically, France would return to being a colonial empire within a decade, or else implode trying, because unlike most of the rest of Europe, it’s demographically stable. And since “France,” like the United States, understands itself to be a political construct rather than an ethnic one, as racist as France can be (hoo boy), Future France would give not a single bother if Frenchmen and French-women of Malian or Algerian ancestry were attending the Sorbonne and being primed for roles in high-level governance overseeing the Future French Mercantilist Empire (over North Africa and as much of Europe as they can dominate). Like the U.S., political France sees emigration into France as a long-range “I win button,” and is willing to put up with whatever short-term problems that creates along the way.
DOMESTIC: 2024 Presidential Elections
Okay, here’s what’s up.
(Side note for those following it, and relevant only bc it affects DeSantis in the primaries: The Mouse screwed the pooch when Bob Iger publicly admitted on the last investor’s call that there’s no daylight between the Disney Co and the Reedy Creek Special Tax District. Reedy Creek was originally established so that Walt Disney and his company could build a city, not just to build a park. Epcott was supposed to be wayyyyyy more than just a theme park. So round one, DeSantis, round two, Disney, and unless DeSantis completely screws the pooch in court, round three will be DeSantis By Knock-Out. Now see below for why none of this actually matters.)
As I’ve mentioned several times (and this is common knowledge among those who follow this stuff closely), Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both Cult of Personality politicians, more-or-less Messianic-type leaders for people whose active political support has a lot less to do with hard facts than it does what these two promise.
Important Definitional Note: I am not referring to Casual Party Voters, or oppositional “I’ll vote for this dude because I think that other dude is way worse. It refers to politicians and activists who actively work to advance the candidates in question. Remember that voters are not necessarily (nor even usually) party members. “Votes for Republicans [due to cultural or economic interests]” is not the same as “is a Republican [aka actual member of the party apparatus or constituent-group-activist].”
As Peter Zeihan (not precisely a Trump fan, to put it oh-so mildly) notes, Sanders, when pressed on the math, has admitted many times that his socialist agenda’s math doesn’t work. That doesn’t matter, bc socialism is not just a form of governance, it’s a civic religion. That’s why Progressives have “no enemies to the left.” Going “too far left” in the context of a civic religion is like saying that somebody might be “too moral.” (This is also why, when we separate political left-and-right-wing political violence, violence from-the-left is overwhelmingly represented by Bernie Bros. Religious Leftists, say, unlike “the economic socialist futurists of Finland,” find it very easy to “Other” anybody who isn’t singing from their hymnbook. See Also: “the cancel culture wars” on the left). It’s a category error in thought. But unlike Team Red, the Democratic Party’s nomination party isn’t actually “democratic” in the small-d sense of the word, because the Democratic Party As An Institution gets a vote, and has the ability to put its thumb on the scale to determine how nominations work.
This is why, unlike the Republican Party, the Democrats were (barely) able to avoid a hostile takeover by Bernie Sanders’ leftists. The party as an institution knows that most democratic-leaning voters are not Progressives: they’re Liberals. And liberals don’t consider freedom of speech “problematic,” and in general are much less interested in identity politics than they are in whatever creates maximum inclusiveness and egalitarianism without trampling on individual rights.
The problem for the Democrats is that the internal activist energy is 100% Progressives, and their liberal candidates are pretty unappealing to active Team Blue Primary Voters. Biden will be the nominee not because Democratic-leaning voters love the guy, but because “he’s good enough for now” (unlike Harris, who the Party hoped would grow into her role, and who hasn’t — Team Blue Horror Stories about Harris are widespread within the Beltway). Biden has real aging and severe cognitive problems, but this is, in its own way, and advantage, because he can be run by handlers who are very competent. In the process, if Sanders ages out without empowering his acolytes on the hard left to seize real institutional power, the Democratic Party will be able to gradually shift back to being a liberal party rather than a Progressive one, while keeping enough Progressive constituents happy with specific reforms that the party doesn’t tear itself apart.
The alternative is that Progressives take over the party and continue to absolutely hemorrhage minority voter sympathy in the Blue Urban Zones. This is political suicide and the Party As Institution knows it.
The Republicans have a different problem. Trump is in many ways like Biden. They’re both old-school, late-80s-style Labor Democrats, and their foreign policies are shockingly consistent (Biden’s fp has largely consisted of converting Tweets to Actual Policy). I just pissed off every tribalist voter reading this (on both sides), but a dispassionate view will show considerable consistency.
The Republican Party’s problem is that Trump did manage to take over the party for four years, that he operates as a cult of personality valuing loyalty over everything else, that independent voters are disgusted by the guy, and that he has enough votes to win Republican primaries so long as there are more than two candidates in the race.
Add to this that Democrats know that Trump is a loser on the national stage and attempt to empower him at every turn for that reason, and the electoral math as it stands now is inexorable: Trump beats out the Republican Field, goes to the General, and the Democrats hold their nose for Biden again, but still wipe the walls with the Republicans, probably in a blow-out.
The challenge for Republicans is clear: how do they get rid of this guy without accidentally walking right into his playbook? Because make no mistake, Trump will happily ride to ruin politically so long as he’s center stage. He’s not a Republican any more than Bernie Sanders is a Democrat.
Now: everything stated above is public knowledge for those who actually follow this stuff. Anybody screaming right now is either a frustrated activist, or a tribal partisan hooting angrily over the bonfire because there wasn’t enough cultural disdain heaped on “enemy party ignorant and also stupid bad people of choice.”
The resulting questions are mostly pretty boring. But ponder this possibility: : what happens if Sanders’ voters vote tactically, and back Trump in the general?
(passes out blood-pressure medicine to all his progressive friends)
Remember that the Bernie Bros aren’t fighting against the Republicans. They’re permanently at war with anybody who’s not a Progressive, and Team Red is by definition evil for these guys, just like Progressives are Inherently Evil to right-wing religious voters — see also the absolutely casual hate each side’s proponents casually express on Facebook. Gorbag and Shagrat are mostly full of shit, and their primary characteristic is that they don’t realize that everybody else isn’t.
But politically, Progressives are fighting against the Democratic Party Institution/”Establishment” so that they can finish the take-over Bernie Sanders almost managed to pull off, and render the Democratic Party as a Progressive Party where its activists don’t have to worry about constantly getting knifed in the back by “the neo-liberal gerontocrats.”
The only way that can ever happen is if the Democrats go down, hard, with it being very clear that the neo-liberals are getting dissed. And make no mistake, more Republican judicial nominees isn’t something Progressives want. But Trump is a populist, not a conservative, and some of what populists do (such as fighting against the insurance industry so that people can find out the difference between what medical care costs and what’s being actually billed), is, on a class-war basis, completely compatible with Progressive Goals. In some ways moreso than Reid and Pelosi, both of whom larded up the Healthcare Affordability Act with massive insurance-industry give-aways that gave lip-service to single-payor medicine, while actually enacting policy that knee-capped it. Remember, besides minimum-wage increases, that’s the main issue that Sanders ran on in his bid to take over the Democrats.
And after four more years of Trump’s megalomania, the pendulum will swing back towards Team Blue… and possibly a Team Blue where Pelosi Inc. has retired, and The Squad And Its Fans are finally in the driver’s seat on policy.
I don’t think this will come to pass. Unless Trump screws up so hard that his Populist Messianic Believers ditch him for DeSantis, I think we get another four years of what we have now, with the post-Trump Republican Party emerging from Re-Alignment as a Populist-Conservative Party, and the Democrats the Technocratic Party representing its current major constituents: environmental activists, Wall St., the Tech/Entainment sector, and affluent urbanites.
We’ll see!