Author: TarheelDem

Here is the Wikipedia entry for James McGill Buchanan.

George Monbiot of The Guardian reports today about what, accidentally found after Buchanan’s death, has shown the darker side of this George Mason University economist and exposed the dark side of his “public choice” theory.

George Monbiot, The Guardian: A despot in disguise: one man’s mission to rip up democracy

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

There’s your very public demonstration of public choice theory right there.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan’s work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential”. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms”. (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia”, allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment.

So here we are with our “new intelligentsia” installed in power.  No doubt they saw 2016 as the fight to the death between liberalism (what Clinton actually was despite the hedging) and public choice conservatism in which the billionaire class said a radical “No” to the US Constitution.

What has fascinated me about conservatism for fifty years is how much it modeled its strategies and tactics on what it learned about Leninism-Stalinism and its institutions, strategies, and tactics during the propagandizing of the post-World War II Red Scare.  The conservative tracts would get almost histrionic about how we are doomed because the cap-C Communists are conducting a campaign of stealth that does this and this and this.  And then in the 1970s, the followers of that conservatism were setting up to do the very same things—for capitalism.  And coincidentally for power and for wealth.

Well, the game has been exposed.  In the 1960s there was a Fifth Column in America. It was “conservatism” through which wealth sought absolute power.  And over 48 years struck down one check or balance after another until now the GOP has absolute power in the national government and many state governments.

And in Kansas and other states Buchanan’s public choice theory, crafted to sabotage school desegregation, has created one disaster and era of misery after another.  And it still runs on in Europe, having brought Greece to its knees, fractured the European Union, and now taking a second pass at France.

Putin in his grandest days in the Soviet KGB could not have imagined a more clever strategy of destruction than the call for “Pure Capitalism” and “Freedom for Property”.  The Bundys, those “sovereign citizens” are just high on Buchananism without realizing it is intended only for the wealthy.

Buchanan and his department did do very well, including getting the books of his African-American colleague Thomas Sowell placed in almost every library in America , often as the only general books on economics.

And Buchanan’s ideas, propagated by the business media, and the conservative mediasphere, permeate most of American conversation about economics and economic policy.  The create invisible blinders and fetters that intend to keep the New Deal from ever happening again.

One of the big disconnects that I noticed during the years I worked with agencies engaged in LBJ’s War on Poverty is that there was abundant individual listening and recognition of what was happening and what was possible and what were likely to be solutions, but there were little institutional listening that could guide policies, programs, and resources to help.

Some of my daughter’s friends in international health over the past decade have the same experience of their “helping” careers.

This American life shows exactly how that plays out in Appalachia. Joshua Wilkey is going beyond asking that all us folks in the peanut gallery be our compassionate selves and listen.

Joshua Wilkey, This Appalachia Life: My Mother Wasn’t Trash

Actually I suspect that Pepe Escobar leans to the country to whose sources he next expects access.  He covers Russia, China, and other Eurasian countries.  He is good at representing their public point of view.  That public point of view is a bit of news in itself; it says what the official sources want the world to believe.

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times: Putin and Trump stage-manage a win-win meeting

The subtitle is a stretch: “With a ceasefire in southwestern Syria in the works, meeting proves diplomacy beats demonization.”

It is a stretch because it extends to all of the G-20 diplomacy the two public points of the Putin-Trump meeting from both readouts.

For those keeping score, this is a Russia propaganda point:

Still, from the toxic, overwhelmingly Russophobic Beltway point of view, that dystopia masquerading as a summit – the actual G-20 – was a mere backdrop; the only thing that mattered in this parallel G-2 was confirmation of an obsessive narrative; Russian interfered in the US elections.

This is another. Will the US give up its ambition of regime change in Syria? That’s the point.

The real test for a possible reset will be the US-Russia ceasefire in southwestern Syria. Tillerson and Lavrov had been discussing it for weeks now. And it’s a Russian idea.

Obama and Putin, Kerry and Lavrov, had a reset in US-Russia relations after Russia persuaded Assad to give up his chemical weapons and the US arranged verifiable destruction of the weapons in Germany.  A reset in US-Russia relations is a matter of diplomacy.  It is the content of future joint policies that bear scrutiny.  One that Escobar doesn’t mention is the US-Russia cybersecurity effort.

Then the Russian readout of the details:

Essentially, that would lead towards American/Jordanian peacekeeping forces near the Golan; Damascus allowing Iranian and Russian peacekeeping forces around the capital; Turkey ensconced between Jarablus and Al-Bab in the north with Russians around them; and the Americans in the northeast all the way to Raqqa alongside the Kurdish YPG.

And Russian expectations of the result:

In a nutshell; a regional balance of power which, assuming it holds, might slowly lead towards a final all-Syria settlement.

Finally, what are the contingencies in the Russian view:

Jordan – and Israel – are not warring parties in Syria, and yet the deal directly concerns them. It’s not clear whether US forces will have to be back to Jordan. It’s not clear how the ceasefire will complement the Astana negotiation – the actual top frontline decider – involving Russia, Iran and Turkey. It’s not clear whether Daesh will be eradicated for good. It’s not clear whether the Pentagon will stop sporadically attacking the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

The Russians are not assuming the US (Trump) cleared the deal with its allies but trust with Tillerson in the room that they did.  Other contingencies are from processes still in motion.

Then the news that did not register on US consciousness, so attuned only to US involvement instead of US interests.

Xi repeatedly extolled the “strategic alliance”, or “the fast-growing, pragmatic cooperation”, or even the “special character” of China’s ties with Russia.

Putin once again pledged to support the New Silk Roads, or One Belt, One Road initiative (Obor), “by all means”, which includes its interpenetration with the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).

The Russian Direct Investment Fund and the China Development Bank established a joint $10 billion investment fund.

A fairly standard diplomatic statement, a reaffirmation of a previous agreement on a joint project, and a commitment of funds (conveniently translated to their dollar value).  Or do the banks themselves earmark that amount of their offshore dollar assets and deal in dollars?  Is this a confession that the BRICS countries still are dependent on US dollar dominance in global currencies?

One OBOR project is underway:

Gazprom and China’s CNPC signed a key agreement for the starting date of gas deliveries via the Power of Siberia pipeline; December 20, 2019, according to Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller. And that will be followed by the construction of Power of Siberia-2.

China and Russia are pursuing the same energy policy the US has been pursuing — building more pipelines.  Seems everyone is looking to the export market.  What does that say about the global prospects for oil as renewables start to contribute more energy to economies?

Lest you think that peer powers are headed toward peace, Escobar reads out this obvious diplomacy:

They kept discussing a military cooperation roadmap.

And at a closed Kremlin meeting the night before their official summit, in which they clinched yet another proverbial raft of deals worth billions of dollars, Putin and Xi developed a common North Korea strategy; “dialogue and negotiation”, coupled with firm opposition to the THAAD missile system being installed in South Korea.

Xi, in an interview to TASS, had already expounded on US missile defense – an absolute top priority for the Kremlin – “disrupting the strategic balance in the region”.

Missile defense is indeed disruptive of MAD (mutually assured destruction) strategic architectures as they signal to an adversary that one is intending a first strike that can be survivable enough to win on the follow-up. The create a game mindset in which pre-emptive war is the payoff point, not that countries mechanically follow game theory options.

But pre-G20, Trump and Tillerson were saying that the time for dialog and negotiation were running out.  Notice here that Russia and China do not have an interest in a nuclear-armed rival who can strike all of their cities no matter how much a client it acts like now.

The US, US media, and US public don’t recognize the reality of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a mutual defense organization for Eurasia, much like NATO is for the North Atlantic.  It is a reality and the nations within it are beginning to coordinate national security strategies more closely. Although seen as a mechanism of Chinese power, Putin’s intentions for use of the SCO are not analyzed beyond the idea that it is a major rival of NATO.

This was Putin and Xi’s third meeting in 2017 alone. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Astana, Putin had already hinted that this one, in Moscow, would be “a major event in bilateral relations.”

The giveaway: that’s where they not only deepened their joint strategy for Eurasia integration but also coordinated their common approach to Trump at the G-20. This is what a strategic partnership is all about.

What Obama grasped about NATO that Trump has turned his back on.  There is a need for a more fuller discussion of how mutual defense pacts can actually become a pathway to reduction of militaries instead of vehicles of the Great Game of empire.  That requires that the institutions conduct diplomacy with each other, probably through some UN mechanism that preserves national sovereignty and focuses on technical questions about national security architectures.

Putin and Lavrov have intelligence services that read US media and understand what is going on.  Unlike the head of state and foreign minister of the US.

Considering the toxicity levels in the Beltway, Putin and Lavrov went to the G-20 harboring no expectations that a package deal could be achieved between Russia and the US.

They knew this would be a strictly political meeting – and not economic; an easing of sanctions was out of the cards.

Plus Trump and Tillerson communicated what they should expect in setting up the meeting.  Normal diplomatic courtesy.

Here’s the Russian propaganda again. “Sanctions don’t matter. Look at our autarky.”  When you manage your economic information, it’s kind of easy to pull of this stunt.  In the US we have competing private opinions of US economic activity that fog up the situation.   Seems that both are effective management in an information war.

They also knew there’s not much Trump could offer to the Russian economy. This exhaustive report sets the record straight.

Even under sanctions, Russia should expect a “handsome recovery”, with an expected growth of 3% to 4% in 2017. There has been an “extraordinary decrease in the share of oil & gas revenue in Russia’s GDP.” Russia has “the lowest level of imports (as a share of the GDP) of all major countries.” And the clincher; Russia “must focus on China, the East, and the rest of the world.”

Now you understand why the Obama administration named 44 individuals closely associated with Putin for sanctions instead.  In other words, this economic prosperity avoids punishing the people instead of the leader.  So the only question now is what Putin will do for the US in exchange for eliminating sanctions.  The current US news narrative is that he will steal another election for Trump.  I think the American people deserve more out of Putin than that.

BRICS diplomacy as an alternative to US international economic domination did get Xi’s and Putin’s attention at the G-20:

That’s already happening. At the BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G-20, they called for a more open global economy and for a “rules-based, transparent, non-discriminatory, open and inclusive multilateral trading system

What Russia and China want is WTO 2.0.  What rules? How will transparency be guaranteed?  And does non-discriminatory give a free pass to state production, oligarchic combine, government-sponsored enterprises?  Those questions are more important than the stigmatizing the proposal as being from Russia or China.  The TPP was not transparent, patently discriminated against China (it’s very purpose), and was indeed rules-based.  So you see where this proposal is coming from.

The Russian propaganda sum-up talking points:

Putin and Lavrov faced Trump and Tillerson knowing full well that

political factions in the US won’t waiver in their mission to keep the tension with “peer competitors” Russia and China at a very dangerous level.

At the same time, they knew Trump and Tillerson really aim for a reset – incipient as it may be at the start.

Syria is an ultra-complex case where the sphere of influence is mostly Iranian but the hard, cold facts on the ground and in the skies are mostly Russian. With this ceasefire deal, it’s as if Putin and Lavrov are inviting a losing Washington to be part of a solution that satisfies – sort of – all parties, including Israel and Turkey.

Trump did not make any substantial concessions in Hamburg, at least according to what both Tillerson and Lavrov volunteered to disclose. The Beltway is barking that Trump gave Putin a win. As usual, they’re wrong; Putin and Trump stage-managed a win-win.

Yes, exactly like JFK and Krushchev in 1961 in the reset after the Francis Gary Powers U-2 got shot down over the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Eisenhower administration and Eisenhower got exposed as a (shock! a symptom of the zeitgeist) a liar.

Some people remember when we so trusted our Presidents not to lie to us that we were shocked when they did.  Now, we would be shocked when the current President tells the truth. (Or says anything consistently.)

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing: The W3C has overruled members’ objections and will publish its DRM for videos

The key point.  It was also a key objection to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as well.

The DRM advocates at W3C rejected this. After a perfunctory discussion, they walked away from the negotiations and proceeded to ignore anyone at W3C or on the web who disliked the idea of corporations getting to boss around librarians, accessibility workers, security researchers and innovators.

And yes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee did go with the corporations.

Now we have the ruling: Berners-Lee has overruled every objection, or declared them to have been met, or declared them to be out of scope. The web will get standardized DRM for videos, and new startups who want to follow in Firefox’s footsteps or Netflix’s footsteps, or Comcast’s footsteps, or iTunes’s footsteps will be frozen out of the standardized web-video world.

Private licensing relations have globally replaced international copyright law for media, and they are now going to be enforced by a common digital-rights management standard designed by the vested actors and ratified by Sir Tim.

Someone is going to have to invent an internet protocol that does not monetize information for there to be free flow of information again like the ending days of the print age.  Libraries, users of scholarly journals, and artists doing mashups now have to pay not the creators of the information but the corporate holders of the information as property.

Time for scholars to refuse to publish without adequate compensation.  I don’t know what the remedy for free libraries are; they might disappear altogether under the cost load of DRM-regulated media.  And the artists are back to inventing yet a new form of media.

Monetization without well-crafted regulation leads to crapification.

Thus the airlines, and now the internet.

My fellow North Carolinian hits again on the behavior that has been causing Democrats to lose, lose, lose.  Tom Sullivan on the Democratic consulting fraternity/sorority and the money they have wasted for over a decade.

Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: All in the Family

Of course the deflection of this analysis will align along ideological lines and imagining that a local or state candidate can’t possibly know their own local or state issues without being put in the approved DC Democratic frame.

Or it will pretend that it’s all a matter of a sense of purity.

Or it is from people who have not put themselves in action with a lot of effort time after time for candidates they had trouble promoting for reasons that they themselves understood.  And oftentimes it wasn’t the candidate, it was the campaign.

“But the candidate is responsible for the campaign.  And managing that is a key part of allowing the public to see how they will operate as a politician in office.”

The Catch-22 of Democratic Party politics, and Sullivan lays out exactly the hard complexity of the contradiction when money becomes the all-singing, all-dancing process of marketing politics.

And institutions get sapped of their money, manpower, and motivation through outright expensive foolishness.

First principle: Democrats should not be subsidizing media who sole purpose is defeat of Democrats.  Ergo, Democrats should not have expensive media consultants with kickback agreements with production companies.

Second principle: You can’t go negative on your opponent until you  have thoroughly sold the requisite number of voters to win on your own abilities.  Prematurely attacking without a positive position blows back big time.

Third principle: Democrats cannot succeed doing exactly what Republicans do.  Their constituency expects better of them.

Have you not seen these three principles violates recently?

Why is it that these expensive consultants didn’t catch these fundamental errors?

Might it be that they are going through the motions and cashing the checks.

It is not just the money. It is a culture. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas wrote about it a decade ago in “Crashing the Gate.” They begin one chapter with a quote by a Republican operative:

    “I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”

The one time when Democrats should do what Republicans say they do.  Markos was right.  And that was before the seduction of the fraternity for bloggers became so powerful.  The sense of being inside the gates.

The key point:

Putin lies as a display of power. Only powerful people can lie and get away with it. The more blatant the lie, the greater the show of power when your listener cannot or dare not contradict you.  

Authoritarians have a standard operating procedure.  This is one of the key points.  Those who enable this enable the other elements of an authoritarian state, including its use of police power.

The US media, and especially the print media, are playing as foil and enabling this by not daring to report what is factual and true as counterpoint but leaving everything as a matter of opinion.

A very curious statement about a head of state:

Putin is a persuasive speaker because his arguments are internally coherent once you accept his premise that Russia always means well.

And what US Presidents had that Trump completely misses.

Oliver Stone seems to have treated Putin the way the US media treat Trump.

Except for scenes like this:

That said, nobody could properly prepare to quiz Putin about his work, because nobody outside the inner circle of the Russian government has much idea of what Putin does all day, nor how his power is exercised. How does a small man with highly polished shoes persuade a nation of 144 million people to live in awe of him? When Putin invites Stone into the Kremlin situation room to observe what he says are his daily video-linked conversations with regional and Defense Ministry officials, it is impossible to tell whether the banalities they exchange–“Right now there are no traffic jams in the Ural Federal District”–have been scripted for the occasion, or whether that is what the governance of Russia is like most of the time.

The hope post-Yeltsin had to do with safety:

There is a touching moment when Putin thinks back to his appointment as acting prime minister in 1999. His main concern, he says, was “Where to hide my children.” Russia in those days–to some extent even now–was The Sopranos writ large. A respectable adversary was one who might kill you but not your family.

In 2001 I sat by chance behind Putin’s two daughters at a recital given by the violinist Vadim Repin in the Moscow Conservatory. Even with bodyguards on either side of them, their presence in public was an act of daring. In those days it was possible to invest at least some hope in a president who allowed his daughters out to enjoy Beethoven.

The fact that most in the US don’t know about Putin’s family speaks of politics in Russia, but it also speaks of how the leader is framed for US audiences.  The stereotype of the Russian bear is a geopolitical statement and theory that sometimes gets in the way in the same way as some other nations framing of the US as the home of the ugly Yanqui.  Too bad that Trump is trying his best to live up to the stereotype.  Putin, like Krushchev, is doing the opposite.  That worked well for Krushchev in 1962 at the height of the blowback from his biggest strategic miscalculation.

It is hard to say when authoritarianism ends and exactly how it comes to pass.  For Spain it was the restoration of the monarchy that brought a democratic constitutional monarchy like many other in Europe.

Who knows what these trends portend or really what Putin’s reaction to them will be.  Some authoritarians under the right kind of pressure have given way to more democratic forms in practice.  Given the experience in the Duma under Yeltsin and the general economic collapse of Russia in the mid-1990s, not to mention the conversion of the major managers to oligarchs effectively through the theft of former state property, Putin is likely to hold the reins tight.  Too tight, and there is change:

It is, of course, not only on the American side that things change. If Stone had gone to the Kremlin this past week he would have had to maneuver his way past some of the biggest anti-Putin demonstrations in years, led by the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, as Masha Gessen reported on June 14. For Stone, Putin is still the miracle worker who got Russia back into working order after it had collapsed under Yeltsin. But for most of the past decade the Russia economy has been undermined by low oil prices and the cumulative effects of corruption and cronyism. Navalny’s rise strongly suggests that fatigue with Putin is growing to the point at which a serious political challenge is becoming possible–or, at least, a challenge might be possible if Putin did not control the political process, and if intransigent critics of Putin did not have an awkward habit of ending up dead.

In all this, it is good to remember that Russia has parity (by intention and agreement) with the US in nuclear weapons.  The trend so far has been toward further reductions.  When conditions permit the next round are uncertain, given the need for an enemy as the Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan wars grind on without a definite conclusion. An enemy that can rally the American people to transcend their political and cultural differences.  That is a dangerous combination.

At the moment Putin is the only Russian head of state available to bargain with.

More shenanigans: from Texas and North Carolina.  But coming to a red state near you soon.

Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: The only good local democracy

As far as politicians are concerned, you know what the rest of that sentence is.

The alternative ending is “one that elects me again and again.”

Marcy Wheeler says succinctly one of the things I’ve been yammering about since last November but apparently not connecting either with Democrats or the Democratic establishment:

That’s all the more true given the investment Democrats have made in the Russian narrative. If Russia tampering with our vote is so important, then why is Republicans doing the same, much more aggressively and effectively, not worth the same effort?

Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: Democrats need a plan for voter protection

It is the fact that so many people are so complacent about Republicans stealing votes and so worked up about whatever it is the Russians actually did do, if our benighted intelligence agencies ever deign to tell us peons, that is the important reality of 2016.  That it is getting worse even as Chuck Schumer drones on and Nancy Pelosi plans for 2018 is beyond worrying.

Kris Kobach seeks to have state secretaries of state and boards of elections provide him with a database of personal information on every registered voter in the US, including the last four digits of their Social Security number.  Welcome to Stasiland.  I’m surprised he didn’t ask that state vital records cross-link to each voter’s mother’s maiden name.

Now I’m going to pull an Arthur Gilroy on ya: Wake the fuck up!!!

Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch (via Informed Comment): What will Happen when Trump’s Dupes Find Out?

Andrew Bacevich is an excellent national security analyst, good enough to be wrestle with when he has contrary opinions.  Worth reading the entire TomDispatch post.

Sample:

Unlike President Trump, I do not pretend to speak for Everyman or for his female counterpart.  Yet my sense is that many Americans have an inkling that history of late has played them for suckers.  This is notably true with respect to the post-Cold War era, in which the glories of openness, diversity, and neoliberal economics, of advanced technology and unparalleled U.S. military power all promised in combination to produce something like a new utopia in which Americans would indisputably enjoy a privileged status globally.

In almost every respect, those expectations remain painfully unfulfilled.  The history that “served for the time being” and was endlessly reiterated during the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama no longer serves.  It has yielded a mess of pottage: grotesque inequality, worrisome insecurity, moral confusion, an epidemic of self-destructive behavior, endless wars, and basic institutions that work poorly if at all.  Nor is it just WHAMs who have suffered the consequences.  The history with which Americans are familiar cannot explain this outcome.

Alas, little reason exists to expect Becker’s successors in the guild of professional historians to join with ordinary Americans in formulating an explanation.  Few academic historians today see Everyman as a worthy interlocutor.  Rather than berating him for not reading their books, they ignore him.  Their preference is to address one another.

And here is where it gets very interesting.

In effect, professional historians have ceded the field to a new group of bards and minstrels.  So the bestselling “historian” in the United States today is Bill O’Reilly, whose books routinely sell more than a million copies each.  Were Donald Trump given to reading books, he would likely find O’Reilly’s both accessible and agreeable.  But O’Reilly is in the entertainment business.  He has neither any interest nor the genuine ability to create what Becker called “history that does work in the world.”

Most historians will now start asking, “How do I get public libraries to start buying my books in multiple copies and putting them in the history section?”

Bacevich goes on:

Yet as events make it apparent that Trump is no more able to run a government than Bill O’Reilly is able to write history, they may well decide that he is not their friend after all.  With that, their patience is likely to run short.  It is hardly implausible that Trump’s assigned role in history will be once and for all to ring down the curtain on our specious present, demonstrating definitively just how bankrupt all the triumphalist hokum of the past quarter-century — the history that served “for the time being” — has become.

And then he makes the point many on the left have also been making that is being resisted by the “there is no alternative” center:

When that happens, when promises of American greatness restored prove empty, there will be hell to pay.  Joe Doakes, John Q. Public, and the man in the street will be even more pissed.  Should that moment arrive, historians would do well to listen seriously to what Everyman has to say.

What is tragic (there still is tragedy in the current farce) is that there is an amazing assortment of “Everyman” historians writing about the historical experience of Everyman, even in the post-Cold War era.  Many are non-technical (in the historian’s sense), well-written, and solidly based on documentary and documented oral history information.  There are cultural histories, social histories, as well as traditional political, military, and 1% histories (great men).

But what do you see in the history sections of public libraries?  Gigantic Civil War sections and sections about World War II. Much smaller sections on everything else.  Almost nothing about the period between the Constitution and the controversy over slavery.  Nothing between the Civil War and World War I (when a lot of labor history occurred, as well as the development of Jim Crow laws,) and nothing about the New Deal.  For post-World War II, there are retained current events books and no systematic histories.  Sprinkled in are the books of the conservative protected class – Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Amity Schlaes – all grinding their particular axes against liberalism.

And yet, there are good, potentially popular, well-documented histories out there.

It is not the historians who are keeping them off the shelves. However, Bacevich is correct.  It must be the historians who stand ready when the break in the narrative comes.  Is anybody preparing for that break in the narrative in any other way than a restorationist one?

Tom Sullivan has a very thoughtful analysis of the outcome of GA-06.

Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: Collective Sigh

This is on target.

But there is also the improving “their electoral infrastructure” part of Marshall’s equation. There is certainly an over-reliance on a priesthood of consultants, data geeks, and technological terrors for solving what are essentially human relations problems. Voters are human beings, not data points or cattle to be herded. It might help if campaigns treated them as such. But if my area is any indication, there is also this. Few county organizations have built up the institutional memory and skills for running effective get-out-the-vote programs year to year, mid-term to presidential to municipal. Activists age out of high-intensity campaign work and take what they’ve learned (if anything) with them. Many smaller counties rely on national coordinated campaigns to parachute in every four years (if they do) to tell them what to do when the ambitious twenty-something staffers don’t know themselves.

Winning an election is not just a contest of ideas; it is a contest of skills. At a meeting recently, one county Democratic officer expressed interest in learning about all these “high-tech” tools we use. I think that meant computers. Democrats need an upgrade from the grassroots up as much as from the top down.

Welcome to the real world after the death of the donkey.  That is, Democrats in most Republican majority areas are fighting against a negative perception of their brand, carefully cultivated over three decades.

That factor seemed to be worth 5%-10% to Republicans in an otherwise close race.  In 2016, it likely made the difference in a lot of states.  The brand itself is a lead weight.  That’s why 2014 and 2016 were existential elections for both parties.  And why Trump is the lead weight for the Republicans (the only sign of hope).