Month: June 2022

No amount of pumping iron or stretching out will ever help you weather a swift kick in the nuts, let alone repeated blows in rapid succession.

America’s supreme court is on a roll. After a week in which it scrapped women’s constitutional right to an abortion and gave an expansive interpretation of gun rights, it has issued yet another momentous ruling—one that will have far-reaching consequences for the government’s ability to curb the greenhouse-gas emissions that are heating the planet.

That’s why I can simultaneously be completely unsurprised by the Supreme Court’s string of catastrophic rulings and as mentally prepared for them as it’s possible to be, and still be doubled over in howling pain.

It’s hard to choose which blow hurt the most. A mass elementary school shooting followed by a major prohibition on regulating gun ownership? Watching the right reap their reward for hijacking a Supreme Court seat from President Obama and hypocritically rushing to replace Ruth Bade Ginsburg on the court by overturning Roe v. Wade? Or seeing them defang the federal government’s ability to address climate change?

It’s straight despair built on despair, made all the worse by the fact that nothing can really be done about any of it.

I see people lashing out, which is understandable, and blaming various Democrats for being ineffectual, but I have to confide in you that I’ve known all this was coming in roughly the terms that it has now arrived, and I’ve known it for a long time. And a lot of this is done to dumb chance.

A bad ballot design in Palm Beach County, Florida delivered the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. Antonin Scalia dying too late and Ginsburg dying too soon, delivered two more seats on the Court to the Republicans. An idiotic letter from James Comey perhaps led to two additional seats (in addition to the Ginsburg one) to the Republicans.

I’ve been torn apart knowing that today’s America was coming and that a lot of it wasn’t something that could be avoided.

Relatedly, my entire analysis of the 2020 primary between Biden and Sanders was based on the realization that the real president would be Joe Manchin, and I told you this until it got boring. That was the least fun analysis I’ve ever had to spoon out, precisely because it was based on a realistic nihilism.

The way odds work, we’re due for some good fortune for a change. I’m hoping we get some, because there ain’t a whole lot else that can give us a productive path forward. We lost a long time ago, and people didn’t understand it at the time. Now they’re all waking up, but it’s too late. In some ways, we never had a chance.

Part of me just wants to hang it up and pass the baton to someone with more optimism and will to continue, but I know I have some reserves somewhere, if I can just get a moment to gather myself and find them.

I appreciate Bret Stephen’s effort. The New York Times columnist analyzes the Trump fanbase from that standpoint of well-known cults like the Moonies and the Branch Davidians, and asks what might make them finally realize that their hero is a fraud. And, obviously, to do that kind of inquiry, you want to talk to cult experts and psychologists. I’m not saying it’s an unworthy exercise, but my feeling is that Trump’s following will move on when one of two things happen.

First, if any possibility of a Trump restoration is removed, he’ll no longer be seen as a potential savior. This could happen because Trump dies or if his candidacy in 2024 is made impossible either through conviction for sedition or impeachment with a prohibition on seeking future office.

The second way Trump’s cult can dissolve is if someone or something comes along with more appeal or promise. The less electable Trump seems, the more likely it is that an alternative will appear preferable. But time can play a role, too. This is important to remember because on one level it doesn’t matter if Trump’s loyal following disappears if the Republican Party is prepped to carry on with his basic strategy after its gone. We don’t want one of the two major parties in America to reject the legitimacy of elections, for example, or to remain committed to a post-truth world where politics are driven by conspiracies and hateful populism. Trump’s movement is fascist, and the Republican Party is in the thrall of Trumpism. The problem is that the GOP is virtually synonymous at this point with the Cult of Trump, and that has to change.

So, it’s wrong, in my opinion, to think solving the Trump cult problem is a solution in itself. But the element of time means that the underlying causes that give Trumpism its appeal can be detached and splintered from a right/left or red/blue dichotomy. A very large percentage of Trump Republicans did not see any appeal in the Republican Party before Trump came along. That’s because the GOP was seen as a party for fat cats and coastal elites who didn’t give the slightest crap about the common man. The party is different now in that its coming into conflict with traditional Republican organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and relying more on white nationalist brownshirts and militia members. But that’s just a reorganization of the electorate, with the better educated and affluent drifting towards the Democrats, while working class whites consolidate with the Republicans.

I’ve said many times that if white working class voters are given a choice between fascism and an urban/suburban professional class party, they’ll choose fascism every time, and that means support for democracy, the outcome of elections, and the peaceful transfer of power will erode. Small-town and rural America needs a left-wing that feels like home to them, that’s driven by their own residents and leaders, and that prioritizes their issues. That’s how fascism is splintered and defeated.

I warned about this for years before January 6, but maybe it’s clearer now. We can deprogram people out of Trumpism, but we can stop letting the fascists operate unopposed. The change won’t be seen overnight, but it will eventually lead us out of this treacherous impasse.

The week between my last post and this one feels like an eternity. The events in the US and across the world? Wow. Just wow. Just when I thought 2022 couldn’t get any weirder or uglier, 2022 says “hold my beer.”

I thought I’d showcase a bit of Richard H. Kirk’s work. He was a former member of the industrial music combo Cabaret Voltaire. They made their share of interesting LPs back in the day, and their last three LPs would point the direction that Kirk was heading. This is just one of many solo Kirk tracks you might stumble upon. There are some really amazing tunes to be found, whether in his own name or one of his pseudonyms (e.g., Sandoz).

A lot of music that got classified as ambient around the mid-1990s was this odd combination of soothing with a hint that something disturbing was beneath the surface.

Alrighty then. The bar is open and the jukebox mostly works. And just remember what Hunter S. Thompson once said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Cheers.

With respect to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that Donald Trump tried to choke out his own presidential limo driver and routinely threw food and dishes in fits of rage, there are four kinds of people who will have very different reactions.  Hutchison is the former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, so she was in a position to witness these things or in some cases hear about them second hand moments after they occurred.

One group will simply disbelieve Hutchinson because Trump says she’s lying, even though she testified under penalty of perjury. Another group will not be in the least surprised because her testimony confirms everything they already believe about the disgraced ex-president. A third group will be genuinely surprised, not because they had a high opinion of Trump but because they didn’t think he was quite this bad. And the last group, which perversely intersects with the first, will believe every word of the testimony but think it was the “perfect” reaction to having the election stolen from him. They’ll love Trump even more.

There’s a reason Trump once referred to himself as “a very stable genius.” It’s because he’s a complete basket case and a certifiable dunce. To insist on the opposite isn’t necessary unless the charge is a widely acknowledged truth.

It amazes me that so much effort is apparently necessary to demonstrate that Trump was intent on staying in office on January 6, 2021 and that all his preparations and actions on that day were in furtherance of a naked coup attempt. That he knew his effort was unlikely to succeed is what made him emotionally unstable, and that he still convinced himself it might work is what makes him a dunce.

I have no patience for anyone who wants to count the angels dancing on a pin to decide whether any crimes were committed. A coup attempt is a crime. It’s the most serious crime you can commit. You can’t argue that you had some justification for it because you were sincerely deluded. No self-respecting system of justice would accept that excuse.

I don’t care what he did with dishes or who had to clean it up. I care what he did to the country and want to know when it will be cleaned up. Ms. Hutchinson thoughtfully helped the White House valet clean ketchup off the Oval Office dining room walls, but she needs our help in cleaning up the larger mess.

Her testimony was very helpful, but it cannot come to nothing. Swift and unforgiving action must come next.

Steve Peoples and Aaron Kessler of the Associated Press have examined voter registration data in 43 states over the last year and report that over a million people have changed their party affiliation to join the Republican Party. The pattern is nationwide but most pronounced in the suburbs.

A million sounds like a huge number but divided by forty-three, it’s only 23,256 voters per state. This is very bad news for the Democrats, but more for the suburban problem than the absolute amount of party-switchers. That’s because the Democratic majority in Congress is built on formerly Republican districts in the suburbs.

I’ve been warning for more than a decade now that the Democrats’ reliance on an urban-suburban coalition is built on sand. There’s probably no easier wedge in politics than the divide between urban and suburban interests. This is most easily understood by asking why elites and many immigrants left cities in the first place and settled in the unplowed fields surrounding them: independence from urban political machines, fear of crime, better quality education, a desire not to mix with other races, religions and ethnicities. These factors, along with the ability to take advantage of the freedom and space the automobile provides, have always defined the cultural and political tensions between cities and their suburbs.

The Republicans brought these antagonistic groups together by pursuing an aggressively anti-urban southern populist agenda that offended the sensibilities of the white collar professional class, and non-white non-Christian suburbanites of all stripes. The GOP also demonstrated colossal incompetence on national security (9/11 and Iraq), core government functions (Hurricane Katrina), the economy (the Great Recession) and public health (the COVID-19 epidemic). With the exception of the rally-around-the-flag 2002 midterms, suburban voters punished the Republicans in every case.

But now the tide is turning. Suburbanites are unhappy with how the Democrats handled school shut-downs during the height of the pandemic. They’re noticed an uptick in crime, especially urban crime, as the worst of the pandemic has receded. High inflation and supply chain problems are souring them on the Democrats’ management of the economy. Meanwhile, the suburbs many be increasingly diverse and socially liberal, but GOP has found areas where there are still divides, especially on attitudes towards policing and transgender issues.

The Democrats cannot survive erosion in the suburban support, especially if they’re suffering some urban slippage too. And this is largely because they have given up on a populist agenda that can compete with the Republicans’ white nationalist, conservative Christian chauvinist appeal in small towns and rural areas.

Democrats keep hoping that suburbanites will notice that the GOP is running on an anti-Democratic fascist program and stay loyal, but there is no evidence this is happening. It appears that the opposite is happening. We could soon be back to the 1980’s when Reagan won 49 states in his reelection bid against Walter Mondale, except this time we’ll be handing over power to latter-day Nazis.

It was probably not the most opportune time for the Republicans to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling because that will reshuffle the deck. It’s possible that it will halt the suburban erosion of support for the Democrats or even reverse it. The general trend, however, is extremely grave. There is simply no way to avert the threat through an urban/suburban alliance alone.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with a scene from the Navajo reservation, between Cameron and Page, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Since last time I have completed the butte, buildings and far rear. The painting is now complete.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

I had to familiarize myself with the legal doctrine of willful ignorance in order to understand the merits of Rich “Starbursts” Lowry’s argument that Donald Trump should not be indicted for any crimes. There are a lot of non-lawyers and non-psychologists who are saying it’s impossible to tell what Trump actually believes versus what he pretends to believe out of self-interest, and this is supposed to matter a great deal for whether or not he’s legally culpable for his misconduct.

Now, suppose that Trump decided to light fire to his own tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And suppose that prosecutors wanted to charge him with second degree arson, which involves lighting fire to a building when people are inside. A defense against this charge, even when the arson is admitted, is that Trump did not subjectively believe that anyone was inside the building.

You might ask how this is possible. He owns the building. He worked in it for years. He has a residence there and he knows that the building has many residences and businesses. The building has security guards. There is never a time when Trump Tower is completely empty. But maybe he didn’t see any people inside when he lit the fire and somehow convinced himself that there was no one was inside.

But let’s take this further. Imagine that he spent weeks before the fire telling anyone who would listen that his building was empty. It’s true that he was repeatedly corrected about this misperception. People in a position to know better told him over and over that his theory was unsupported by the facts. But he didn’t accept their expert opinions. He blew off the doorman and the fire marshal and countless employees who told him he was wrong.

He was invited to take a walk through the building so he could see that it was teeming with people, but he would just change the subject and continue to insist that no one was there.

So, when he lit the fire, he might have sincerely believed that no one was presently inside, but mainly because he is crazy. Believe it or not, this might be good enough to win him an acquittal.

For Rich Lowry, this kind of insanity is a defense against his effort to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power. To begin with, Trump has the appearance of being sincerely deluded about voter fraud costing him a second term in office.

One of the most discussed possible indictable offenses is obstruction of a congressional proceeding. This requires corrupt intent, meaning that Trump didn’t believe his own claims and was lying about massive voter fraud.

The January 6 committee has made much of people around Trump, especially then-attorney general William Barr, telling him that his claims of fraud were bogus. That doesn’t mean that Trump credited these advisers. In fact, he vehemently disputed their analysis.

Now let’s say that Kimberly Guilfoyle handed a folded up piece of paper containing white powder to Donald Trump Jr., and Trump Jr. then took that package across state lines and gave it to Lawrence Kudlow. If changed with a crime, Trump Jr. could argue that he never verified that he was transporting an illegal drug and therefore did not know he was breaking the law. But the doctrine of willful ignorance allows a judge to instruct a jury that Trump Jr.’s failure to verify the character of the substance is not a defense. There’s really not a way around this involving the assertion that Trump Jr. is crazy and convinced himself it was baby powder. If he had a reasonable suspicion that he was giving cocaine to Kudlow, that’s enough to convict him.

Unless, maybe, if dozens of people warned Trump Jr. that it looked like cocaine and tasted like cocaine and that Guilfoyle and Kudlow have reputations as giant fans of cocaine, and he gave every appearance of disbelieving them.

Who’s to say that Trump Jr. wasn’t genuinely out of his mind? Who can say that the disgraced ex-president isn’t stark-raving mad?

After Trump has spent his adult life exaggerating, twisting and obscuring the truth to suit his interests and ego, it is almost impossible to distinguish between his legitimate self-delusions and his deliberate deceptions. On top of this, he is naturally prone to conspiratorial thinking. No one is going to be able to establish his state of mind with any certainty, and it’s my guess that he could pass a lie detector test making all his various allegations of fraud, even if they contradict one another.

There’s clearly something wrong with the law if this is how it works. It’s one thing to say that you’re not guilty because you have some mental condition that prevents you from understanding reality. But here we have a standard that says that you can’t depend on your ignorance if you deliberately took steps to avoid learning the truth. To be sure, Trump did this at times. Former Attorney General William Barr testified that Trump showed no curiosity about the evidence disproving all of his voter fraud claims. But in a more general sense, Trump was exposed, repeatedly, to evidence that his claims were false. Specifically, lawyers and prosecutors and investigators looked into the allegations and told him they lacked merit. We rely on experts all the time to give us knowledge. How do you know you have diabetes? Because the lab results say you have diabetes. How do you establish whether or not voter fraud cost you an election? You ask the appropriate experts to investigate.

Trump did ask for these investigations, he just didn’t like the answers. If you don’t believe your diabetes diagnosis and refuse treatment, the result will not go well for you, and if you argue that you distrust doctors and lab reports, that won’t mean you aren’t responsible for your own poor health outcome.

Trump went further than this, however. He asked the investigators to declare they had found fraud where none existed. In effect, he asked for fake lab reports. He wanted the Justice Department to say they had found irregularities  that they had not found, and he wanted Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia to find him votes that did not exist. Lowry has an answer for this, too. He argues that Trump has support for his conspiratorial thinking about Georgia’s election from his own White House lawyers.

Even if we credit this as a defense in that specific incidence, what this boils down to is the idea that Trump cannot be proven not to believe the election was stolen from him and therefore is not culpable for all manner of fraud, let alone injury, death, and an attempted coup. This cannot be right.

In part, it’s wrong because Trump is guilty of a lot more than some narrow statutory offense for which sincere, but deluded, belief can serve as a defense. This isn’t limited to a second degree arson case. There are people who have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for their role in Trump’s scheme.

More than this, I can’t avoid paying my debts by simply asserting that I do believe I owe anyone money. Holding (or pretending to hold) sincerely wrong opinions isn’t some blanket way to escape justice. If Trump has a defense based on his mental defectiveness, then he must assert that defense. There is plenty of evidence that he knew he lost the election and a staggering amount of evidence that he was informed of this fact from experts and should have accepted their verdict. Lowry tries to wipe this all away by saying it’s almost impossible to “distinguish between his legitimate self-delusions and his deliberate deceptions.” Leave that argument for Trump’s lawyers. Maybe they’ll have some luck with it, but we can’t fear such nonsense.

I completely reject the idea that Trump should not be indicted because he’s got an ironclad “self-delusion” defense. Lowry is on better footing when he argues that the prosecution of Trump will be divisive and create troubling precedents, but failing to prosecute him will have all the same pitfalls, without even the hope for justice.

We’re at a point now in history where we’re inclined to assign enormous courage to anyone on the right who resists pressure to be the biggest possible asshole. The latest example is Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Cornyn once served the attorney general of Texas, and also on the state’s Supreme Court. Today, he serves as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s deputy.

On May 24, 2022, 19 elementary school students and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde, Texas with an AR-15 assault rifle. Understandably, Cornyn believes that there should be some kind of federal response. There’s debate about what measures might be most effective in preventing future slaughters in our schools, as well as other public spaces, but the impulse to try something is just normal human nature. Only extreme assholes would disagree.

Polling indicates that most Republican voters want something done, but the default position of Republican activists is that all efforts to limit access or otherwise regulate gun ownership are completely unacceptable. To even discuss the possibility of such things is enough to turn a GOP politician into a pariah. That’s why Cornyn was lustily booed at the Texas Republican state convention over the weekend.

Nonetheless, on Monday, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was unveiled. The bill is not revolutionary, but it is an actual federal response.

The 80-page bill, called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, would enhance background checks, giving authorities up to 10 business days to review the juvenile and mental health records of gun purchasers younger than 21, and direct millions toward helping states implement so-called red-flag laws, which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous, as well as other intervention programs.

The measure would also, for the first time, ensure that serious dating partners are included in a federal law that bars domestic abusers from purchasing firearms, a longtime priority that has eluded gun safety advocates for years.

Senators agreed to provide millions of dollars for expanding mental health resources in communities and schools in addition to funds devoted to boosting school safety. In addition, the legislation would toughen penalties for those evading licensing requirements or making illegal “straw” purchases, buying and then selling weapons to people barred from purchasing handguns.

On Tuesday, the bill passed a key procedural test, earning 64 votes to overcome a filibuster. The success was largely due to Cornyn’s decision to take a lead negotiating role. In the end, even McConnell voted to advance the legislation, and it will almost definitely pass and be signed into law by President Biden.

Cornyn has (or should I say, had) an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, but apparently two classrooms of dismembered kids were sufficient to change his mind about being a complete Second Amendment fanatic. Maybe (although I wouldn’t bank on it) Cornyn even felt some responsibility for the slaughter and a corresponding duty to make amends. Maybe he isn’t the kind of person who can look the surviving parents in the eye and tell them that he intends to do absolutely nothing to prevent a recurrence.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Cornyn is willing to take some flak, and now he’s getting glowing press for his political courage. We’re seeing this a lot. John McCain was praised for refusing to destroy the Affordable Care Act and replace it will essentially nothing. Republican election officials are being praised for not throwing out Biden-Harris wins in their states and unilaterally declaring Trump-Pence as the winners. Pence himself is held up as a paragon of virtue for not beginning a civil war in a desperate effort to keep himself in power.

Why is there such tremendous pressure on Republicans to be maximum assholes? A look at the platform of the Texas Republicans easily demonstrates that assholery is now the guiding principle of the right. It’s not enough to oppose gay rights, you have to call people “abnormal” and discriminate against them. Against all evidence, you have to declare Biden’s victory “illegitimate.” If it takes courage to be part of such an organization, then you should just walk away.

Our standards are so low that we’re actually undermining the standard of decency. Sure, Mike Pence and John Cornyn did the right thing, but in a limited circumstance after a long period of being perfectly stellar assholes. There’s no evidence or Eason to believe they won’t continue to be rank assholes on nearly every issue going forward.

But we’re so desperate for ordinary good human behavior from our leaders that we feel compelled to praise these bastards to the heavens, if nothing else to encourage more people to occasionally act in the public interest. And, sadly, we’re probably right to do so.

I am back from a bit of hiatus. To the extent I had time, I followed some news. At some point, I just have to decompress. If you’re here, I see you.

This is a Pharoah Sanders track from the early 1980s that I find especially tranquil.

Enjoy.

The bar is open and the jukebox is practically unlimited.

Cheers!

The 69th Congress of the United States which sat in 1925-26 was part of a Republican trifecta. Unsurprisingly, and consistent with President Calvin Coolidge’s laissez faire philosophy, its first priority was a giant tax cut for the rich. But the GOP didn’t stop there. They kept themselves busy passing major reforms to labor law, regulating budding  industries in radio communications and commercial aviation, overhauling the passport system, and, for the first time since before the Great War, spending big money on federal building projects. At the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Republicans were the Establishment, and while they were for “small” government, they were the government. In this last respect, the did not resemble the party of Newt Gingrich and the 1994 Republican revolution, or what the GOP looks like today. They didn’t hate Washington DC or suffer from some paranoid inferiority complex.

However, the Republicans’ time in the sun was nearing its end. After the elections of 1932, the GOP would only control the House of Representatives twice (each time for a single term) until Gingrich took the Speaker’s gavel in 1995. The Senate was much the same, although they did enjoy a majority from 1981-1987 during the Reagan administration. In that half-century out of power, Republicans did not get to chair congressional committees or decide how federal monies would be spent. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan never had a trifecta and always had to negotiate with Democrats. Congress became something different to Republicans. It became an enemy to be destroyed rather than project in building America to their specifications. They lost any memory of how to exercise power except as the opposition, so once in the majority again they were ill-equipped and basically disinclined to use the federal government for good.

That’s what I immediately thought about when I read that the left had won the presidential election in Colombia. Gustavo Petro will become the first leftist president in Colombia’s entire history. I definitely like a lot of what I see in Petro’s platform, but I wonder if he’s capable of governing. I wonder how much of the pathology of the modern GOP is just a natural consequence of conservatism and how much is a hangover from too much time spent in opposition.

Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime legislator, won Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday, galvanizing voters frustrated by decades of poverty and inequality under conservative leaders, with promises to expand social programs, tax the wealthy and move away from an economy he has called overly reliant on fossil fuels.

His victory sets the third largest nation in Latin America on a sharply uncertain path, just as it faces rising poverty and violence that have sent record numbers of Colombians to the United States border; high levels of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon, a key buffer against climate change; and a growing distrust of key democratic institutions, which has become a trend in the region.

Americans are familiar with distrust in institutions. The left has had the most reservations about the intelligence and law enforcement arms, which adopted a harder anti-communism stance than Democratic congresses during the Cold War, and which actively tried to thwart advances in civil rights. The right has historically been more suspicious of the federal government’s tax and regulatory powers, and the agencies’ efforts to promote civil rights. On the whole, though, it’s the right that is distrustful of “democratic” institutions, especially now with respect to the Trump-inspired skepticism about election integrity.

We’ve seen this play out in our own history in somewhat predictable ways.  When Bill Clinton became president, he had almost no interest in the CIA, took little care in who he appointed as director and refused to meet with him. Under presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the Republicans often showed more interest in dismantling government agencies, or at least defanging them, than in getting them to work with more efficiency and effectiveness.

For Colombians on the left, the agencies and institutions of government have always been outside their domain. Most often, those institutions have been less servants of the people than servants of oppression. So, now the Petro administration has to fill these positions and run these agencies which it distrusts. In return, the agencies undoubtedly distrust the newcomers.

The administration also has to manage the all-important relationship with the United States, which has been a longtime and stalwart ally of the right in Colombia. To understand how fraught this might be, consider that Mr. Petro began his political life as a member of the 19th of April Movement, a guerrilla organization that in 1976 kidnapped and murdered the president of the Confederation of Workers of Colombia, labor leader José Raquel Mercado, for the alleged crime of “collaborating with the CIA.”

How revolutionary will Petro be? How far can he go before powerful interests both at home and abroad line up to destroy him?

One sign of hope came from the gracious concession of his opponent. It was something Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s supporters can only envy.

[Rodolfo] Hernández swiftly accepted the results on Twitter.

“I hope that this decision that has been made is beneficial for everyone,” he said in a video address on social media. “I hope that Gustavo Petro will know how to lead the country, that he will be loyal in his discussion against corruption, and that he will not disappoint those who chose him.”

Just imagine if Trump had said something similar instead of leading a deadly insurrection against Congress.

But success for Petro will not be easy. As in the United States, the right will be in a state of shock at seeing vice president Francia Márquez take power, as she’s the first black woman to hold such a position of power. They have never been in the opposition before, let alone had to contend with a possible ban on oil exploration. And they worry that Petro may take too much power for himself, particularly if his agenda is thwarted by a divided legislature.

But some fear that Petro’s policies, including his proposal to ban new oil exploration, could destroy Colombia’s economy. Others say a Petro presidency could test the country’s long-running but fragile democracy. He has said he would declare an economic state of emergency to combat hunger if elected, a proposal criticized by some constitutional law experts.

Analysts worry about his willingness to work around Congress and other democratic institutions to push through his agenda. Others predict he will not be able to deliver on his promises with a divided legislature.

I’ve often been critical of the progressive left in America for being reflexively anti-establishmentarian to a degree which interferes with effective campaigning and governance. But it’s really the anti-government paranoia of the right that’s more destructive to good government. In both cases, it’s really a function of being too long on the outside looking in.

The best outcome for a nation and a people is not when the Establishment is defeated and ripped down to the studs. The best outcome is when the Establishment, meaning the experts and elites in and out of government, are operating at a high level and self-confidently building a positive future.

When one party is long in power and the opposition too long on the outside, the transition can very painful or lead to disintegration. I still think America is disintegrating in large part because the right was too long out of power in the mid-20th Century and stopped being a good faith partner in the American project. I hope the same is not true about the left in Colombia, no matter how good their intentions.

I also hope that the United States works constructively with the Petro administration to ease their path rather than acting as a reactionary opposition. We need to be very flexible about how we adjust not just to their climate agenda, which the Biden administration should theoretically support, but importantly on the war on crime, drugs and corruption. If the Petro administration has radically different ideas about these things, and I suspect they do, we have to be open-minded and accept that it will disrupt longstanding agreements and arrangements.

In the broader war against fascism, the arrival of the left in Colombia could be helpful, provided that they have some success and stick to democratic principles. The results out of France are actually of more concern. As I predicted, the fascists there are rapidly becoming the main alternative to Macron.