Back in April, when the BBC talked to Thomas Homer-Dixon, chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, about the prospects for the collapse of Western Civilization, they were told that things do not look good.
The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
I guess you can call that an updated version of the four signs of the Apocalypse. These nonlinearities aren’t so much causes of our current problems as they are consequences of them. Many have noted how the invasion of Iraq cascaded into the Syrian civil war, and also how a drought brought on by climate change contributed to the disintegration of Syria’s political consensus. The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by relatively few experts but came about as a natural consequence of a failure to adequately regulate financial instruments. And both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are widely regarded as hard to foresee consequences of growing income inequality and anxiety about immigration and refugee patterns.
For Homer-Dixon, there are echoes in all of this of the end state of the Western Roman Empire:
Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.
Maybe this is the very definition of alarmist, but it doesn’t feel like something we can afford to be complacent about. It seems more like an invitation to awaken from the dream-state most progressives (including myself) were living in during the Obama years when things appeared to be stressed by moving methodically in a generally positive direction. Of course, there was a lot of concern about all of these issues and whether we were reacting with enough coordination and urgency to meet our challenges. Efforts to mitigate Climate Change were criticized as inadequate, and the same could be said for regulating Wall Street. The Occupy Movement was a visible expression that income inequality was not improving. And the Middle East continued to disintegrate causing a massive refugee crisis that Europe was struggling to manage. Nonetheless, we had leadership that understood these challenges and was working on them with varying degrees of success. We weren’t ready for the nonlinearities that were hidden just off the horizon. Perhaps the clouds looked ominous, but almost no one forecast how quickly the storm would arrive.
Of course, there were exceptions and we can now point to a few individuals who were especially prescient. I liken these people to the folks who were early in seeing the direction Europe was headed in the 1930’s. Back then, the progressive view was shaped by the experience of the First World War which looked in retrospect like a lot of death and expense for what was ultimately a spat among elite royal families, rapacious imperialists, and nationalist shit-stirrers. The default position in the United States was of isolationism and non-intervention.
Franklin Roosevelt had an appropriate level of foresight and alarm but he didn’t have unity within his own party. Once he decided that the challenge required him to run for an unprecedented third term in office, he began to move beyond traditional partisanship in an effort to rally the country to the challenge. To give one example, he asked for the resignation of his Secretary of War, Harry Hines Woodring, because he opposed helping supply the United Kingdom for their fight against the Nazis.
A strict non-interventionist, Woodring came under pressure from other cabinet members to resign in the first year of World War II. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes met with Roosevelt at least twice to call for Woodring’s firing, but FDR was at first unwilling to do so, instead appointing outspoken interventionist Louis A. Johnson as Woodring’s assistant secretary of war. Woodring and Johnson were immediately at odds, and quickly reached the point where they refused to speak to each other.[8] On June 20, 1940, Roosevelt ended the struggle by finally firing Woodring, replacing him with long-time Republican politician Henry Stimson.
Even more strikingly, FDR hired Frank Knox to serve as the Secretary of the Navy. This was remarkable because Knox had been Alf Landon’s running mate four years earlier. To put this in today’s terms, imagine if Barack Obama had been sufficiently alarmed about the foreign policy myopia in his own party and the need to unify the country for a coming struggle that he had put Sarah Palin in charge of our naval fleets.
On one level, this comparison is ludicrous. Frank Knox was a capable person. Sarah Palin is not a capable person. Still, on another level, it is a one-to-one comparison.
It might be more useful to imagine what a newly-minted President Mike Pence might do to reunify the country. If he tapped Joe Biden or Tim Kaine to serve in his cabinet we’d begin to see a more appropriate parallel.
I’m fully aware that Mike Pence is no more Franklin Roosevelt than Sarah Palin is Frank Knox, but that shouldn’t prevent me from pointing out how a previous president responded to a situation where the country wasn’t prepared for the coming storm and elements of his party were living in denial.
If this country still has enough of a pulse to rid itself of Donald Trump before it is too late, it will be Mike Pence’s job to try to patch something together from what is left. If he acts like everyone expects him to, he’ll only be a modest improvement. If he’s smart, he’ll realize that he needs to unify the country. He’ll see how climate change and income inequality are contributing to disintegration and conflict and resource wars.
I know it’s more likely that he’ll do none of this. Gerald Ford tried to bring the country together by putting people like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in charge of his administration. That’s about what I’d expect from Pence, with retrograde attitudes about human sexuality thrown in to make things maximally divisive.
Still, we’re in a deep hole and our commander in chief is clearly insane. We can’t go on like this, and we have to take one small step after another to climb out. If he gets the chance, and I hope he soon does, Pence should look back at FDR to find a role model for how to act in a situation of similar national and civilizational peril.
After forty years of unbroken propaganda whose sole purpose was to divide the country into irreconcilable camps, “unity” is off the table. It cannot be achieved by a Grand Coalition of party leaders, because the respective party constituencies would not accept it. Neither can it be achieved by any other means, including an overwhelming external threat, because there is no such threat that the two camps could agree upon an interpretation of.
The propaganda might have been prevented, but as it wasn’t, no incremental solutions exist.
Nickolas Kristoff had an excellent column over the weekend. He noted, as I have here, that globally things are actually getting better at a rapid pace.
So this idea that the world is heading to some sort of Apocalypse, or that comparisons to the 1930’s are in order is simply absurd beyond belief.
For some reason people want to believe disaster is near. In economics ZeroHedge gets millions of hits. And yet the economic advice for over a decade has been stunningly wrong.
There are good reasons to wonder about the long term prospects of liberal democracy. For over 40 years the standard of living of most Americans have been stagnant. One can find no period pf prolonged stagnation in the history of democratic government. This in turn has discredited the establishment – which opens the door for demagogues.
But the election of Trump isn’t some death knell of American democracy. Bad things will happen no doubt. They already have.
But the idea America is headed to hell is just wrong.
Columns like this reflect the bubble the politically active live in. In the real world it is nonsense.
your complacency about Trump now extends to the Middle East, the E.U. and western progressive consensus, climate change and war and resource refugees?
if you don’t see our entire postwar project as imperiled, what would prove it to you?
the refugees will grow, climate change will assure that. and the response will be the opposite of liberal, especially if income inequality continues on this pace.
but Trump is proof enough. we’ll be lucky to survive this guy as a species.
More virtue signaling from Kristof. I get it — he’s really really concerned about the poor and the children and all those third-world diseases the rest of us do not pay attention to. And maybe too, he wants everyone to know what a wonderful optimist he is.
Probably millions more poor and millions more children might have been a lot better off had this liberal interventionist and others in positions of influence not argued for the war in Iraq, the intervention to topple Gaddafi in Libya, and now, for the trifecta, regime change in Syria.
Sorry but Kristof lost all credibility with me no later than Libya. His glass half-full cheeriness would be encouraging except that his narrow focus on some positive indicators cannot nearly overcome the rather sobering list of daunting issues facing this country and the world.
His writings are not persuasive, and his appearances on Bill Maher also are underwhelming. Other than that, fine fine fellow.
Anyone who blathers on about regime change in Syria — still! — shouldn’t be listened to for anything regarding world affairs. You’re an ideologue stuck hopelessly in a narrative that no amount of evidence can pierce. Libya was in the midst of a revolution. Libyans polled wanted intervention. Whether it was wise, just, or legal is another question, but stop lying and skirting the actual issues at hand to pretend that we just waltzed in and toppled Gaddafi.
The juxtaposition of the course of the civil wars in Libya and Syria and the related human suffering should cause anybody who promotes non-intervention on the grounds of human welfare to take notice. I opposed the intervention in Libya at the time but watching Syria burn I’m no longer convinced of my position.
Same. I opposed intervening in Libya exactly because I feared it would prolong the war and cause more death, even if I knew I was sentencing the people to live under a tyrant. And maybe seeing Gaddafi get taken out hardened Assad’s own resolve. I don’t know.
Obama sacrificed the Syrian people for better relations with Iran and the nuclear deal. He thought he could not stop the war and intervening to try would make it worse and scuttle the nuclear deal — lose, lose, lose. 400,000 deaths and millions of displacements later, he judged wrong, as the Syrian state doesn’t even exist anymore anyway.
But the left is stuck in a timeline where it’s always 2003, and did you know Iraq was a mistake based on false pretenses? Seeing the same thing happen with Venezuela. Why should I stand with the Venezuelan state over the Venezuelan people? It’s not 2002 anymore, and it’s not a coup attempt by middle class reactionaries.
Lefty anti-imperialist: did you know that the lines and borders drawn in the Middle East were made up by white men who occupied the region?
Also lefty anti-imperialist: Assad has the right to protect his sovereign borders and murder his people with impunity and Russia’s help because he invited them.
I don’t like this framing because it implies only the US and Obama have any agency. It’s not really a case of Obama deciding wrongly, as he did push in response to Assad’s first chemical weapon attack to gather domestic and international support for regime change (which at the time I also opposed). And he didn’t get it. Remember the Libya intervention had broad support even including many Middle East nations. So regardless of whether or not it was the right decision in the abstract in the context of the time it just wasn’t going to happen.
Legalistic cover for what Obama deemed in US interests, as did every institution such as Brookings: Assad staying is better for “stability”. The Libyan international framework was not for regime change, it was NFZ to stop what some defined as an imminent genocide.
It’s a lot more than legalistic cover. It’s reckless and foolhardy to undertake military action when our closest allies oppose it, congress refuses to endorse it, and domestic opinion is against it. Among other things it does damage to international institutions that we rely on to prevent future wars. I could go on for a while in this vein but as you know we saw a lot of these consequences as a result of the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The Decline of the West, a perpetual anxiety for the past 90 years, based in part on the West’s inability to keep war from destroying its own economies and infrastructure. At least the Cold War was managed not to destroy the West’s infrastructure, but victory meant the ascendancy of the political factions that did not believe that government should care for infrastructure.
Typical decline of Rome scenarios emphasize first the unwillingness of affluent Romans to serve in the legions as the once did. As the legions got staffed with allied foreigners, they became less Roman and more Empire. And then major taxpayers decided that they did not need to pay for the legions or for local protection; they could take care of themselves on their country villas, thank you very much. And the peoples that the legions were fighting began rolling back the Roman Empire, striking Rome itself in brief destructive raids. I’m sure someone can work out a whole bunch of parallels with sole superpower US and its European NATO allies.
To say that progressives have demanded too much and then expect Pence to turn into FDR is a kind of bold assertion. There is no bipartisanship in the offing from the Republican party. They are not engaged in politics; they are engaged in war to destroy FDR liberalism and Democrats.
Pence is not the Gerald Ford type. And Gerald Ford did not have the leadership character to patch American up after Watergate. America did not get patched up because the culture war was beginning and being inflamed by various well-funded conservative alliances. Our current situation is the consequence of much money and effort spent in politics instead of in policy. We have succeeded through policy in destroying our own infrastructure in transportation, education, and communication. What was the attraction for people elsewhere has been so crapified that we are close to developing country service levels on air travel, internet, and education systems.
The West, however, is not the world. As the US leads the Atlantic community into becoming a backwater, China is investing trillions of yuan into Eurasian infrastructure to integrate Eurasia like the US was integrated between 1880 an 1960.
The sad part of this is that the US sees that as a threat, not an opportunity, and seeks a military strategy to disrupt it from happening. At the same time the US does nothing about climate change that will stress all economies and increase tension.
The march of folly continues; there is no leadership of the credibility and authority of FDR. And there will be no victorious war to save the West once again. Germany is already negotiating with China on infrastructure that of necessity will go through Russia and other countries.
The fracture zones of conflict in the world are rapidly changing as the US is stuck in the illusion that it is still the sole superpower. To the extent that this is a general delusion of politicians, the military, and business leaders not facing up to the mess they have created, it will be impossible to arrest the anxiety about decline. That way leads to ever more craziness.
Mattis or Tillerson are much more likely to rise to the occasion than Pence, but they are ill-placed to do anything useful.
I don’t sense any strategy whatsoever from Trump, and Obama’s strategy was anything but military, so I have absolutely no idea where you’re getting this from.
As to the United States doing nothing about climate change — yup, the federal government has been taken over by deniers who’ll halt or reverse as much as possible of efforts on that level, but at the state and local level there’s a lot being done, from towns encouraging not just recycling but composting, energy efficiency in municipal buildings and vehicles; state programs for energy efficiency, pushing utilities to find greener solutions for power demands, and so on.
Just one example: http://www.mass.gov/eea/energy-utilities-clean-tech/green-communities/
Utilities serving the state are being pressed hard to help meet the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which is having measurable effects: http://www.mass.gov/eea/air-water-climate-change/climate-change/massachusetts-global-warming-solutio
ns-act/
Is it enough? Of course not; but “doing nothing”? Baloney.
US military doctrine for 100 years has seen Eurasian integration as a geopolitical threat. The geopolitical theories of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman are foundational in training of foreign service and national security personnel. George Orwell satirizes those theories in his geopolitical sections of 1984. “We have always been at war with East Asia” abruptly changes to “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” In both cases the motivation for war is prevent Eurasian integration with Europe, which would unify the “Heartland”.
The push for war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria of the neoconservatives aims to block the potential for a new Silk Road for China having a Mediterranean port termination (among other more immediate objectives). The US seeks strategic interests of control of trade flows from Asia to Europe to serve the interests of US corporations and allied European and local business interests.
Obama’s strategy was not exclusively military and the face of it was non-military. He could not ignore the interests of a large and bloated national security infrastructure. But that is not where the decline of the West anxiety comes in. It is Trump’s ascendancy and the faction of the national security state that he brought to power that creates the anxiety. And it is Trump who is protecting the fossil fuel industry and sabotaging any attempt at moderating climate change or mitigating its effects.
I have no idea how you’ve been shielded from knowing the obvious differences in the Trump administration from the Obama administration. Or have ignored how the national security bureaucracy frustrated Obama’s positive developments even to the point of encouraging the Congress to invite Netanyahu to try to spike the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran.
The Pivot to Asia was about securing the maritime Silk Road to international trade instead of it becoming the coastal route of a new Chinese empire. That was what spawned the 2014 announcement of China’s One-Belt-One-Road overland infrastructure development strategy. China will not have its trade with Western Europe contained by the US as trade of the Soviet Union was during the early years of the Cold War.
Trump himself has no strategy. His generals however have a very explicit anti-Iran and anti-China strategy. What is interesting is the interplay between the White House and the national security bureaucracies on Russia and on the Middle East. The White House, and likely to the extent he has any policy Trump himself, have a maverick view of Russia and Middle East policy, tacking one way and then another. G-20 in Hamburg should be somewhat clarifying about the state of the world five months into the Trump administration. My suspicion is the the US is moving to the periphery of international politics, mainly as a Trump policy and his personal abrasive style.
That’s, uhh, quite the parenthetical. The “other, more immediate objectives” clearly drove policy, while the aim of blocking a new silk road is a fringe policy view largely promoted not by US policy setters but by anti-western conspiracy theorists.
I have no idea what led you to invent this perceived ignorance in response to my remarks.
Well, this is somewhat accurate. The US clearly desires and benefits from open shipping lanes and trading agreements throughout the Pacific and would absolutely oppose Chinese efforts to restrict or control maritime trade in the region. TPP was pursued in service of this goal. The idea that Chinese trading ability is itself restricted by such efforts is… not particularly credible. US access to markets doesn’t harm Chinese access to markets.
The blatant anti Americanism is a big reason progressives can’t win rural areas.
If you want to win the white working class, best not trash your own country, or associate with those that do.
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This.
It’s bad enough to have the rightwing noise machine thundering away at their caricature of how dismissively, arrogantly unpatriotic the left is; it aggravates the problem when the left goes out of its way to confirm the stereotype.
Listening to their advice would be a good way to never win again, anywhere.
Even here in CA.
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You want us to clap harder so America’s power as the world’s sole superpower will come back?
Bush-Cheney squandered that power. Mitch McConneel, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and a bunch of lobbyist-bought members of Congress got their more war and more spending but opposed President Obama every time he worked to regain actual US power (as opposed to using military force) in the world. With one exception — the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia in 2010.
And now Trump seeks magical thinking to restore what he now has further sacrificed.
To point out that the US is no longer the sole superpower in the world but just one of maybe five powers is now somehow anti-American instead of realistic. Having the most expensive military in the world, that is increasingly based in more places with more missions, and not accomplishing the long-term objectives of any of them very well in fact diminishes US power more that picking missions carefully would do. US policymakers and Congress have actually made the US weaker in the past 16 years than had they had a more restrained response to events.
Starting the old Cold War litmus test of “pro-American” or “anti-American” shows how far from public understanding of foreign policy and arguing over the merits of public policy we have gone.
It really reflects the anxiety that someone will use an insignificant blog comment as a scourge to whip up the notion that Democrats are unpatriotic.
My response to that. It is Republicans who have squandered and continue to squander the power of the US to influence events in the world. And they do it by giving the generals almost everything they want and then force their own agendas on the US military.
Meanwhile the failure to pay for the actual costs of war and the bloated military have caused the erosion of transportation, education, and health–three key components of national economic power.
But that’s OK. Keep calling me names. Keep hinting that I’m somehow disloyal.
In the end, I have very little control over how US power is squandered or used creatively and neither do most of you. We are all a captive audience in this current handbasket to hell.
It’s parroting anti-american conspiracy theories, like the claim that the US policy toward China’s economic rise has been a military one or that the US engages in wars in SW Asia to prevent China from building roads (O.o) that are seen as anti-american. Observing that we’re in a multipolar world or that the Bush Administration’s policies catastrophically fucked up our international respect, standing and capabilities is not anti-american and it doesn’t come off as anti-american.
US policy toward’s China economic rise has been economic, diplomatic, and military to the extent that the military sees the economic rise as a threat and to the extent that long-term geopolitical theoretical commitments shape US policy.
Roads, railroads, ports and other infrastructure are really dual-use (military and civilian) construction. After all the interstate highways in the US were funded under the National Defense Highways Act.
There is no doubt that part of China’s motivation to have better transportation throughout China is to strengthen the position and the control of the Chinese Communist Party and the National People’s Liberation Army. But at this point in China’s economic history, the commercial benefits are significant. The only security concern motivating internal deployment is likely Xinjiang. The infrastructure development brings the -stans within the joint sphere of China and Russia under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Nonetheless, US analysis will rate Chinese sponsored infrastructure in a worst-case basis by what it potentially could support if Chinese policy were to become hostile. That worst-case scenario is often conflated with current Chinese behavior in ways that causes the US to be much too quick to see a threat where other nations do not. That is not an anti-American statement; that is a statement about one of the things that has caused the US to lose power in the world through actual test of force.
The impact of infrastructure interconnection between Afghanistan and Lebanon, even if Chinese built would advantage Iranian commercial interests and power in the region. US ally Saudi Arabia apparently is very adamant about that not happening. The Saudis and Turkey, like Israel, have a substantial lobbying presence with Congress.
Finally, as members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organizaiton (the founding members), which operates for its governments like NATO does for the Atlantic Community, Russia and China would have presences in Syria. Much of the effort to oust Assad has to do with reducing Russia’s presence in the Middle East. Add China and you have the expansion of two powers to the Mediterranean. Fine on commercial and protection of the global commons bases, but again cropping up in the Pentagon’s worst case scenarios as troubling.
It is not too far a speculation to think that there are some in the US national security establishment who would take a position of benign neglect to an “Islamic State of Khorasan” organization setting up in the Tora Bora region as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan. After all, the US left Afghanistan in the 1990s with a nascent al Quaeda forming. And Bzrezinski’s brilliant plan was to give the Soviets their Vietnam in Afghanistan. So brilliant that it came back to give the US its second Vietnam (or is that third Vietnam).
So now we are back with a third Vietnam syndrome and Ken Burns about to put up an 18-hour history of the Vietnam War based on US and Vietnamese documents and history. And those who want to keep Americans divided are already out there talking it down to make sure that reconciliation of views can never ever happen.
I do not “parrot”. Neither conspiracy theories nor conventional views. There is a world outside the US and there are media outside the US. Even the biased ones clue you in to their agenda. And have occasional references to fact. I used to put some of that up raw within a diary thinking that people here could sort out what was useful from what was not. In the past year, I’ve seen a pressure for conformity and common narrative that comes from where? The US premier mainstream media? The folks that gave us Judy Miller and James Risen (to take two contrary examples). The folks that gave us Woodward and Bernstein in Watergate and approved CIA leaks over the Bezos era? Which mainstream narratives do you want me to privilege as fact?
Because of the agendas of self-appointed information warriors, this is a difficult time for ordinary citizens to make informed decisions. I do the best I can with the range of opinion and reporting globally that I access on the internet.
Some do not like the fact that I report that there is a world outside US borders, with nations whose interests are not exactly the same as those of the US but are nonetheless also legitimate to consider. That position used to be considered diplomatic wisdom before we learned so much about covert operations and got cynical about the motives everyone and everything.
BTW one of the contentious facts coming from Ken Burns’s documentary apparently is that the Vietnam War had 58.000 US deaths and 3 million Vietnamese deaths. Vietnam at the time (South and North together) was a country of 30 million people. Burns finds that number tragic and the result of US high-tech methods. Others find that the result of political cleansing after the fall of Saigon. I maintain that both taken together are tragic. “We meant to bring democracy and prevent a commmunist takeover.” tragic.
One hopes that at some point we will learn from our tragedies and mistakes and stop beating up on the messengers.
Well said.
No telling what our Pentagon/CIA masters (apparently also Trump’s master) have in store for the ME generally, but based on their curious, reckless conduct in Syria in recent years — deliberately enabling IS/AQ to an alarming degree, the more to destabilize Assad, their primary objective — almost no outrage would surprise me. And with the latest Preview of Coming (False Flag) Attractions gov’t news releases about Assad’s alleged imminent use of sarin gas, I don’t expect Trump & Co are cooking up something good.
Thx also for the heads up about the Burns doc, as I rarely watch PBS these days and would likely have missed it. Not much reason to watch — they’ve been corporatized and emasculated, relative to their early years.
I’ll probably check out the scuttlebutt on Burns’ doc, but for me, 42 yrs after the fact, I’m less interested in reconciling views than in getting history right. Especially with an 18-hour doc going out over public television, probably with the book/ebook tie-in.
I hope it’s more than just 18 hrs of the usual droning talking heads, roughly 9 hours for the hawk and dove sides, resulting in a big muddy false equivalency draw. I should think by now the verdict is in that the war was a massive mistake from the beginning.
But it’s PBS, not known for courting controversy, and Burns, the corporate-backed filmmaker also not known for courting controversy, so I’m not setting the expectations bar too high.
Not to mention Michael Gordon, co-conspirator with Judy on Iraq, and currently at work trying to get us further into Syria. The US public is being played yet again. And, yes, hard not to notice all the conformity-enforcers here and there, the ones quick to accuse dissenters of lack of patiotism and excessive Putin worship. The counter by Rbt Parry and others of a New McCarthyism, this time by the Left, are spot on.
This is much closer to reality, though the idea that the US opposes infrastructure development throughout SW Asia is just wrong. And it’s very far away from your initial statement.
Obama tried to counter China’s infrastructure move into Eurasia by the TPP. China is spending or loaning significant money to build out Eurasia. You can decide if TPP was adequate to counter that. China seems to be building out an infrastructure to build a business and cultural base. It has been said that China is spending more that the US and Europe combined. That sort of spending is likely to improve their trade.
Trump wants to spend a trillion dollars on it by allowing private investment, since he is fearful of national debt. Plus he wants to cut spending. That plan is not likely to fix our major problems of income inequality and jobs. GDP growth will remain stagnant.
It’s not likely to get more than a few toll roads in red states either. You’d be surprised how quickly a trillion-dollars of boondoggles can appear.
Trump is among other things not fearful of any debt. Trump and the Republicans use anxiety about the national debt to prevent the government doing anything (cough, socialism) except military Keynesianism. What they are fearful of is losing power to a Congress that will restore progressive taxation that will have the effect of reducing the national debt. Remember that Clinton balanced budgets and Gore campaigned on reducing the national debt to $500 billion by the end of his first term. The Bush-Cheney administration’s first act was to ensure that tax cuts sent the deficit and debt back up again.
Infrastructure works when it lowers the cost of doing business (as interstate highways did or as the internet did in the 1990s). More toll roads for profit are not necessarily going to lower the cost of doing anything.
If he runs a deficit, the debt increases. I doubt he is ok with that. Also, he has a public- private infrastructure to keep the government debt out of it and spread it around to his friends. Plus he has already cut spending.
Balancing the budget is one of the dysfunctional things we do. But most politicians seem to think lowering the debt is the holy grail.
God, I love this place!
Reading the comments makes my day.
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Of the two points under discussion, one can debate the ongoing trajectory of Western Civilization (and in my view it surely doesn’t look good), but it doesn’t look like too many here believe Stoneface Pence would be willing and able to play FDR…or even Gerald Ford, haha. The “conservative” movement has poisoned the well far too thoroughly.
Indeed, hapless calls for “unity” are now likely to be met with a cascade of rotten tomatoes, if not barrages from the hoarded private arsenals of automatic weaponry—from sea to shining sea!
People keep telling Trump to stop tweeting. They mean it. It’s good advice.
Doesn’t mean that they think it will happen.
One of thousands of differences – FDR wasn’t a nihilist.
I’d say the opposite of this is true! Why should we want to get rid of Trump and have Mike Pence instead? He’d be much worse, because he’s only sane by comparison with Donald Trump. His ideas are only less stupid and crazy than Trump’s by a slight degree. But, the national trauma that would be created in forcibly removing the President from office would automatically create this irresistible urge to “show their bipartisanship by coming together to solve problems.”
Only Republicans are in charge, Mike Pence would be President and the Hon. Granny Starver is Speaker of the House, while Tudor Turtle is Senate Majority Leader. Democrats would have to move to the right to prove their “bipartisanship” only NOTHING that Pence, Ryan or McConnell want isn’t evil. Compromising with them can only lead to evil and hardship.
They want to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, privatize social security, de-regulate Wall Street opening us all up to another massive economic depression, and pay all the money to the top 1%. That’s their agenda, along with promoting various disastrous foreign wars and destroying our ties with vital allies and generally undermining world cooperation.
Going along with any of that is just flat wrong and disastrous. The Democratic party must not agree to any of this monstrous agenda, but stand firm for sanity and prosperity. They must say “this is horrible and wrong and we are completely opposed to it all! If we are given power we will reverse all of it and restore cooperation to foreign relations, regulation to Wall Street, and sanity to the White House.”
Only they can’t do that if Mike Pence is in the White House smiling and asking “the nation to come together to achieve our mutual agenda.” Only there is no mutual agenda. There’s the Right-wing agenda of ignoring global warming, reimposing Jim Crow,destroying democracy and fomenting foreign wars. And then there’s an agenda of not doing those things.
We don’t need to come together, we need to nail trump to a cross and hang him around their necks like an albatross. And then we need to take power and undo everything these maniacs are doing to America. And we can only do that if we aren’t stained with wretched compromises with evil – like raising the minimum age of Medicare – just less than Republicans want to, in exchange for some illusory compromise that will mean nothing to struggling families.
This is roughly like saying that we shouldn’t take the grenade away from the two year old because his thirteen year old brother will be able to throw it further.
I know you think one of those is “less apocalyptic” than the other. I’ve always disagreed with that analysis. All we’re talking about here are different kinds of crazy. Sharia Mike’s stems from being a member of the American Taliban and don’t discount his ability to do “do the crazy” just as well as the Popular Vote Loser. It’ll be a different kind of crazy but the apocalyptic potential will be no less.
I think Betty Bowers puts it best:
GOP policy goals will be retrograde with Pres. Trump, Pres. Pence or Pres. Ryan, but two of those three seemingly are not narcissistic madmen.
Trump constantly undermines himself by his stupidity, anger and inability to hold his tongue. Pence doesn’t. He’s far more dangerous.
Try and imagine an alternative universe in which Trump didn’t exist and Mike Pence was President. We would be saying exactly the same things about President Pence as we are about Trump, but Pence wouldn’t commit obstruction of justice and probably a lot of tax fraud when anybody gets around to looking at it.
President Pence would be so strong he might get re-elected. Right now, Trump would be defeated. Neither of them can be tolerated in government.
But, don’t worry. Trump isn’t going anywhere any time soon because the GOP won’t impeach him. So, he’s the gift that goes on giving.
The instant we get another competent, centrist, liberal-talking president most progressives (including myself) will fall into a dream-state in which things appear to be moving methodically in a generally positive direction.
It’s easy to talk about what challenging steps Pence should (and won’t) take. But we can’t even look back to the Obama years with any real critical insight deeper than ‘holy fuck that was a lot of Republican obstruction’ and ‘maybe Obama didn’t shout about said obstruction quite enough’. We have no clue what we could’ve, or should’ve, done differently–if anything. Most of us would say we made a few tiny errors on the margins, but that’s it. Maybe that’s true! But if so, it means we’re powerless to change this descent into self-destruction and have to rely on the kindness of extremist cleric Pence.
The instant we get another competent, centrist, liberal talking presidential CANDIDATE, many of those calling themselves the left will do everything they can to prevent him/her from winning.
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That “centrist” remark means that you’ve just pinned a bull’s-eye to yourself and invited AG to attack you.
That is very possibly true. And it’s either because they’re bad and stupid people, as I suspect you believe, or because they think (maybe wrongly!) that a competent, centrist, liberal-talking president is not sufficient to actually address some of our most pressing problems, and will in fact only lead to complacency among the left as a few very serious problems get dangerously worse. (And others are made marginally better!)
Well, or both. Maybe they’re bad and stupid AND believe that.
I’ll take an Obama over a Trump every time. I’ll take a Clinton over a Trump. Every. Friggin. Time. When the left turns on its candidate(s) as insufficiently pure, it hurts our side and helps the other. Decisive? No. Damaging? Yes.
Do I want more done than what we’d get with a centrist? Damn right. I also want a sound horse, a sound body, and a winning lottery ticket, and will settle for a paddock pet, a replaced hip, and enough income to get by. Because I recognize reality when it’s kicking me in the face.
So would I. So would everyone who is rational. So what? To the unending amazement of the Democratic Party, ‘rational voters’ is not a winning coalition. And as I’m sure you’d agree, when the party turns on its left flank(s) as too pure it hurts our side and helps the other.
(You would agree with that, right?)
I recognize reality when it’s kicking me in the face too, and the reality is that what we are doing is not working. Despite people saying, over and over and over (as if it’s some novel insight) that competent sane establishment centrism is preferable to malicious racist unstable authoritarianism–obviously, obviously, obviously–the reality is that competent sane establishment centrism is not able to reverse the slow destruction of our political system and perhaps our world.
It’s still better than Trump! I’d rather eat a fistful of sleeping pills than slowly roast to death. But it gets a bit old, people bragging about how realistic they are for reaching for the pills. We need to do better. We need to do different. Defensively howling ‘but we’re better than the other guy!’ while manifestly and absolutely true, does not work. That’s reality, if we’re willing to recognize it.
Want better? Yes. Do better? Yes. All divisions amid the left/Dem coalition stop sniping at each other? Hell yes. Doesn’t mean complacently going to sleep when we get half a loaf, means we keep working to get the other half. Does not mean we take the half loaf, shit on it, and throw it away, while telling the people who broke their backs getting the half loaf that they’re useless tools of the establishment.
And as to that “slow destruction of our political system and perhaps our world”? The truth as I see it? It’s inexorable at this point: our empire is in its decline and headed for its fall; our democratic institutions are being irreversibly corrupted and diminished; global climate change is already past the tipping point; never mind a centrist administration, we could get the most progressive president and Congress the left could hope for elected in 2020 (but won’t) and it would still be too late to do anything more than ameliorate the harm as much as possible. Which is still preferable to wasting time and energy in pointless internecine warfare.
Well, I hate to be such a ray of fucking sunshine and all, but that’s how I see it. Doesn’t mean quitting and going off in a corner to suck our thumbs; means trying to fix things just as hard as if it would be enough to turn the tide regardless, but not wasting time on hopeless pie in the sky or self-delusion. That’s what being realistic means to me.
See, but it also doesn’t mean telling the people who broke their backs working to get the other half that they’re useless purity pricks, either.
I have exactly this same conversation with the other ‘side’ of this debate, and almost nobody can acknowledge that both ‘Team Settle For Less’ and ‘Team Hold Our Breath Till We Turn Blue’ are necessary … and are on the same team.
The right doesn’t have this problem. On the right, Team Realist just mouths the pie-in-the-sky stuff that keeps Team Aspirational happy, and they do it because they are realists. And it works. The Overton Window doesn’t move itself.
And this is why we’re getting our clocks cleaned.