There is no deal

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Welcome back to Loaded Dogma, an Australian political blog. I have not posted for ten years. I will try not to leave ten years until the next entry.

I have been moved to blog again because I wanted to get out in full my theory as to why the Iran war is not going to end any time soon. In the spirit of Hemingway, I will try to use brief and spare language.

Donald Trump believes in bilateralism. This is at the heart of his Art Of The Deal manifesto, albeit mostly ghostwritten and not made explicit in the text. This is why his people continue to fail at the Middle East peace process in general, and ending this war in particular.

The Iran war is a three-cornered contest: Israel, Iran and America. Trump's preferred negotiating technique is not to get all three parties in a room. It is not even two combatants in a room. His people talk to Pakistan, the Iranians talk to Pakistan, and they come to separate agreements with different text, with Israel not part of the process.

That is great for creating instant headlines and generating short-term media hits, as Trump is enjoying right now. A deal has been agreed upon, shout the headlines and newscasters. Except... there is no "deal".

There is a list of demands and concessions that the US agreed to. There is a similar but different list Iran agreed to. There is no "deal" that merges the two. Newspapers and TV are lying on Trump's behalf. They are mugs.

Baudrillard (pictured) would recognise this terrain. The peace deal is a simulacrum, existing in media coverage but not actually on paper anywhere, let alone agreed to by warring parties. Trump wants it to be hyperreal in the Baudrillardian sense, but over time the glimmer fades and we realise its ephemerality.

We as witnesses are not searching for truth here; we yearn for solidity. None presents itself.

Stronger than the foundations of the Earth!

Right then, so about those American politics they've got down there.

As with the recent boringness of Australian politics, there hasn't actually been much change from the situation I posited more than two years ago whereby Hillary Clinton has the presidency in the palm of her hand. The rise of Donald Trump was unforeseen by anyone, pretty much, even though early polls from the moment he started running indicated he should have always been considered the massive favourite. Not even Nate Silver trusted those polls. The resultant slow and delectable implosion of the Republican Party in the Battle of the Seventeen Armies hasn't changed the fact that abided from before that orange swan event: that Hillary is destined to become the queen of the world.

Or, at least, that's the narrative being pushed by much of the left at the moment. There are many examples, but here's one from Lawyers, Guns & Money:

And don’t kid yourself: Trump is a terrible general election candidate. I’m not basing that on the head-to-head polls, which show Clinton thumping Trump; they generally aren’t very predictive this far out, and while they might mean more than usual this year because of how well-known both candidates have been for so long, there’s no way of knowing that ex ante. Rather, it’s that 1)the Democrats have a structural advantage in the electoral college all things being equal; 2)his unfavorable ratings are insanely high, putting him in a major hole and negating Hillary Clinton’s own high unfavorables, which should have been a major opportunity for the GOP; 3)Trump is almost certain to mobilize a high minority turnout; and 4)giving sexist boors enough rope is one thing that Clinton does really well. I would never say that it’s impossible for a major party candidate to win an election under the current partisan configuration, but Clinton is a yooooooooge favorite.

I don't disagree with the logic, I suppose, but surely the left can't get that lucky? There must be some event or reason out there in the near future which will bob up to prove that we Can't Have Nice Things, especially after eight years of the best president I am likely to see in my lifetime. The fundamentals are all pointing towards Hillary in this cycle, but then they all pointed away from Trump in the GOP primary and the fundamentals were shown to be fundamentally weak, as Silver found out to his discredit. And we have the signal example of the most recent UK election to show us that polls are not infallible either.

We have over twenty weeks to wait until the first presidential debate. I think the thing that most instils faith in me that the rout is on is that so little has changed in the polls for so long with these two. Both Clinton and Trump are completely known quantities at this late stage of their public careers. There's not much at all that is going to change anyone's opinion of them that they haven't already heard, so all the shouting in the interim is likely to mean precisely nothing. It's been a bit of a trend in politics in what I have called the Great Interregnum, this resolute obstinacy in the public domain. Clinton is the immovable object, and Trump is an eminently resistible force. It will be fun watching him and his supporters headbutt brick walls from now through to November.

Turnbull in a phonebox

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Two moments of non-elite partisans communicating to party elites of the right have seemed most meaningful to me since I last blogged.

First, the moment in the second US Republican debate where Jeb Bush claimed that his brother George W. "kept us safe", to which the wingnut audience at the Reagan Library burst out into unanimous applause. The idiocy of this assertion in the context of 9/11 and dozens of Benghazi-level embassy and consulate attacks is lost on these ideologues in their media bubble of epistemic closure, and the message to GOP elites is to ramp up the crazy because that's what gets the base excited. Thus we will probably get another government shutdown this year, with Congress in chaos and no competent candidate willing to grasp the poisoned gavel of the Speakership to replace the failed John Boehner.

Second, the moment in the most recent Australian Liberal Party conference when Malcolm Turnbull rolled out a canned line that every Liberal leader runs with at such times, to the effect that the Liberal Party is superior to the other side because it doesn't have factions. The attending LNP hoi polloi - some of whom were the factional elites who installed him as Prime Minister in the party room, but most of whom were rank-and-file members aligned with one of the factions - laughed him down with a scornful tone. This gut reaction not only put a lie to Turnbull's bald statement, but signalled that we don't go for that sort of bullshit in this country, not even in right-wing politics.

The upshot of this is that the Republican Party is descending into the murky territory of actually being unfit to govern and an electoral majority of the public realising this truth, whereas the Liberal Party still has a hope of running the public sector without completely buggering it up. We tried the Third Way of Rudd-ism and it was found wanting in terms of implementation, allowing the Utopia-style APS bureaucracy to rise to the level of its incompetence in the absence of firm hands being on the departmental levers. Now we will give Turnbull the wheel and see if his brand of cheerful waffle managerialism masquerading as techno-wonkery can do any better.

Prior to the decisive spill, I had been building a case over the previous year or so about how Scott Morrison would be the next Liberal leader. The Libs decided to go with Turnbull, with Morrison's faction delivering the key swing votes in the party room, which led to the heated Ray Hadley 2GB interview in the days afterwards. It is blindingly obvious that Morrison could have put his hand up to be the champion of the Abetz/Andrews religious nudge faction but demurred, trusting that he will be the next Liberal leader to win an election when Turnbull fails. I won't go so far as to guarantee it, Andrew Elder style, but I agree with Morrison's calculations.

Meanwhile, the Turnbull government is now ensconced, albeit he has been mostly busy launching policies put in place by Abbott and hasn't had time to do much off his own bat. Honeymoon polls have been mostly underwhelming, going as low as 50:50 already without the leader having actually made a contentious decision yet.

I am not sure how Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy figures that Turnbull will shift the party to the right. Colour me skeptical about Turnbull delivering on the promises Abbott abandoned. Turnbull has promised a more consultative PMship with participation from Cabinet - but he stacked Cabinet with younger wets and purged it of Abetz and Andrews. Turnbull may not have a mandate to shift the party to the left either, though, given promises he has made to Morrison's faction and the Nats to uphold key Abbott policies.

I have not seen anything to dissuade me from the notion that Turnbull is as hamstrung on policy as Abbott was. This government has been a lameduck administration from the start, we've just exchanged caretakers. Turnbull doesn't even have any culture wars to wage to distract the Liberal luvvies. If and when he actually starts making any decisions, one of two things will happen. If he moves to the right, watch his polls plummet immediately. If he moves to the left, watch the party room destabilise (and then the polls plummet later).

Labor and labour, Democrats and demography

If we are indeed in an era where identity politics wins elections, and the right is the natural winner of such contests because it's well versed in operating sans policy, what is to become of the left? This is the focus of a lot of navel gazing in America right now post the disastrous midterm elections. For example, this NYT piece lays out a battle between the populism of Elizabeth Warren and the elitism of Hillary Clinton. I've written before about elitism versus populism, which I think is the most important political dialectic of our age, so I'm very much on board with that characterisation of the situation.

The first possible solution is to do nothing. And yes, there are valid arguments for waiting for the cycle to turn by itself. Especially in America, the current trend of old white people having a disproportionate say in politics is an artefact of the Baby Boomer generation growing haggard and conservative. The boomers have dominated politics and general society since the 1960s, and this is their last struggle before their bulge finally disappears from the other end of the Python Stomach Of Demography. The Tea Party is filled with boomers who enjoyed the fruits of the welfare state, including free education in some cases, but they don't want to share the wealth any more and can't see the point of planning for beyond their own mortality. In the face of harsh electoral reality of voting patterns, it's a perfectly legitimate tactic by Generation X to shrug our shoulders, sigh and bide our time until we can wave the most selfish generation in history goodbye as they roll past in their pine boxes. We've waited this long, a few more years won't be so bad.

If you read a lot of American leftist bloggers - and I have been doing so lately - the clamour is now to embrace Warrenite populism, otherwise known as class warfare.

The Democrats will still keep the presidency most of the time and the Senate at least some of the time, but our country will remain stuck, our government will remain dysfunctional, and the people will suffer. The Democrats have to address middle class economic and social anxiety, and that means they have to focus on class more than race. This isn't a recommendation that the Democrats make winning over the elusive white male voter their top priority, at least not in the ways this has been attempted in the past. It's a recommendation that the Democrats begin focusing heavily on the issues that are making middle class folks from all backgrounds so anxious. I'm talking about the fact that people can't afford college, that their kids can't afford to move out of their homes, that formerly "good" neighborhoods are being decimated by opioid addiction, and that our infrastructure is crumbling.
Government action can't be seen as a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the poor or from whites to minorities, but as investment in our communities that used to be made as a matter of course.
The Democrats have to wage what the Republicans derisively call "class warfare" or this country is going to remain hopelessly polarized with no way in sight to stop the rise in income inequality.

There has been a lot of angst in the US left about the loss of the white male voter, as the Democrats have failed to offer the middle class worker much in the way of a helping hand even as the economy recovers from the 2007 crash. Wages remain stagnant, the recovery has produced a lot less jobs than previous such periods, and the guilty parties in the banks have not been punished while the middle class continues to suffer. Some of these things are not the fault of Obama, I know - I'm no supporter of the Green Lantern theory. Many Democrats are nonetheless just another part of the Washington village elite these days - albeit less of them since the Blue Dog Democrats were obliterated in the midterms - and the lack of a groundswell of support from elected officials behind Obama's jobs programs which are stuck in the GOP-blocked Congress speaks to their priorities. Warren isn't going to run for president, though, and the Clintons aren't known for being particularly leftist. I have a sneaking suspicion that Hillary will jump significantly to the left in the peaceful coronation that will be the Democratic nomination process for 2016 before stepping to the right during the campaign. She remains in control of the destiny of the party, so the conversation the left is having is mostly about where she will take it.

One other, related solution has been raised by various leftist bloggers: resuscitating unions. Newsflash: that's a dead parrot. Now, it's true that the right and the left used to be champions of capital and workers respectively, and that it is a big problem that the left's politicians in Western countries have moved away from unions and towards business, and this has caused a disconnect between the middle class and the left. Nevertheless, a reversion to the old Marxist dialectic is not going to work. Unions don't have solutions for the dilemmas of the future. As an example, witness this argument by Erik Loomis against the mechanisation of work. His postulation is that a Star Trek post-scarcity society is far less likely than a Player Piano scenario where automation removes human dignity.

Sure, such a technological utopian near future could free us all from work and allow us to live the creative lives of leisure we all think we deserve. Hey, that’d be great! It’s also totally ridiculous to think that is the outcome here. Far more likely is the exacerbation of what we are already seeing: a new Gilded Age of extreme income inequality as the global 1% completely controls everything and the global 99% is a threat that is put down with police power. I have to say that anyone who says this is not the likely outcome is probably ignoring how power operates and the insatiable desire of the rich to horde resources.

Erik has spent too much time living in the moment of the Great Interregnum, and has not lifted his head and remembered that it is possible to disrupt power. I lived through the 1990s as I believe Erik did, so he should recall that the wheel of history may grind slowly, but it does turn in the long run. Eternal corporate zaibatsus are not inevitable. He and other leftist bloggers make dark jokes about tumbrels dragging the 1% of the New Gilded Age to the guillotine, and for good reason because the French Revolution is another salient example of how elite overreach will always fail.

Erik's piece could have been written by some reactionary old racist in the 1850s playing up fears of the Yellow Peril. The White Australia policy was largely driven by unions reacting against Asian immigration, just as the Tea Party is reacting against Latino immigration in the present day. Substituting machines for non-white humans does not improve the underlying argument. The union reactionaries were wrong then, and the anti-robot nativists are wrong now. The correct conclusion is that Asians, Latinos and androids all add to the sum total of wealth in a society, and fighting against their advent is the wrong war to wage. Better to focus on the distribution of wealth than prevent the accumulation of it.

He's right, though, that the future doesn't hold much in the way of power among workers. When there are no workers left to unionise, what use are unions? The left has to move on past the old bearded German, not to abandon the principles of protecting the middle class from the depredations of capitalism but to seek other ways of accomplishing the same outcome in less combative fashion.

Thus we come to perhaps the most tantalising prospect: the left as technocrats. In this scenario, the government does not stick rigidly to a single ideology, but acts like a market research firm. If leftist ideology doesn't work under the microscope of A/B testing to maximise whatever outcome the public wants (and/or is good for it according to a more amorphous definition of leftism), try another one until something does work. The Piping Shrike has long thought that Labor's technocrat moment has passed since a brief era from 2007 to 2009 under Kevin Rudd, but I'm not sure that is quite true. His position on this required him to pooh-pooh the Gillard government's achievements almost in entirety, which seems to me to be rather uncharitable, and constantly praise Rudd for his anti-politics posturing (which produced short term electoral results) when it became clear that his technocracy skills were severely lacking. Rudd disrupted Labor's old way, but he didn't have a Third Way worthy of the name to replace it.

My vision of the solution takes some elements from all of these approaches. This post is already too long, though, and it will have to wait for my next post, which will be this blog's 100th.

UPDATE: Apologies to Erik, who reacted on Twitter my above comments rather strongly. I did not mean to imply that he was racist in any way. I will not amend the text, but I will explain here that I was using rhetoric to try to make a point. Evidently I made the point badly, and I should have been more sensitive to the implications of using such an argument. Sorry, mate.

No policy for you! Seinfeld identity politics

There are a lot of parallels between Australian and American politics at the moment. Last year, Tony Abbott won government by running an almost entirely negative campaign, such that he has no meaningful mandate to accomplish any policy goals of his own once in power. This year, the Republican Party gained control of the Senate in a wave election fueled by a similarly Seinfeldian campaign about nothing, dominated by short-term non-policy issues.

Last year, Abbott's main policy was that he wasn't Julia Gillard; more cogently, he represented an older, whiter, more traditional set of values than the progressive feminists and watermelon greens. This year, the GOP's main policy was that none of its politicians were Barack Obama; specifically, very few of them were non-white or were younger than baby boomer age.

Last year, Abbott swept into government despite the electorate largely preferring the left's policy platform. This year, Republicans now enjoy control of both houses of Congress despite America as a whole (as opposed to the minority who vote in mid-terms) consistently polling favourably towards the Democrats' policies.

So we come to the rise of what is called "identity politics". Policy doesn't mean much in this framework. Who you are is much more important than what you say or do. Tribalism has been used in politics to further policy ends, but this is tribalism as an ideology in itself. There is an argument to be made that this is just tribalism being used as a pretext for running far-right ideology, and there's something to be said for that since I'm sure there are operatives who think that way. Just as Seinfeld was a show ostensibly about nothing but really about the self-centred obsessions of borderline autistic arseholes, identity politics is now being used as a front for the Koches of the world to further their ideological goals. The effect is the same in any case: old white guys running the show and doing what they like.

It's a cliche of Australian politics by now that since the Hawke/Keating era, the big policy reforms have all been accomplished and there are no "low-hanging fruit" left, thus policy-based politics is bloody hard yakka. Most posts by the Piping Shrike riff off this meme, along with the related one about unions ceasing to be relevant and thus rendering Labor without a mission. The right never really had a mission either except to oppose the left, so they should be vastly more experienced at governing without policy.

However, it's much easier to run identity politics in America with its sharply delineated white, black, Latino and Asian communities, which despite generations of effort still remain segregated to a significant degree. Here in Australia, Abbott is reduced to the rather feeble formulation of "Team Australia" to push his version of identity. Pauline Hanson literally wrapped herself in an Australian flag, and Abbott's attempts to figuratively do the same just make him look rather lame. At least John Howard's green and gold tracksuits came from a genuine place in his heart, and didn't try to exclude anyone. It's just another example of Abbott's tin ear.

During this Great Interregnum, as the world (apart from China) deleverages together, we are in a global Green Room, waiting for the show to start. What's the next act? Is it China imploding? Is it Hillary Clinton turning the tide against austerity? Is it Germany losing its fear of Weimar-era inflation and removing their economic jackboots from the earholes of Europe? Is it a massive El Nino to finally remove all doubt as to the effects of climate change? Cue the bass guitar and synth riffs, and we'll find out after the break.

Wave comes in, wave goes out

The quantum entanglement of the quants over the 2014 midterm elections in America has collapsed, in the form of a wave for the Republicans. Sam Wang and Nate Silver were locked in a polarised battle of spin over which side had momentum. Wang's position was that the polls all showed that Democrats might hold the Senate. Silver pointed to the correlation of the "fundamentals" of midterms which all favoured low turnout which would lead to a particular result favouring the GOP.

Silver tries desperately not to run up the score, Bill Belichick style, in his declaration of victory, but the numbers he quotes (graphed above) do not lie: the poll of polls was off by four points. Only one US federal election in the last twenty years has been skewed to the Democrats at anything like that level.

The post-mortems are coming thick and fast with all sorts of post-justifications. This one from Lawyers, Guns and Money is representative, if only for this sarcasm-laden retort from the comments section:

The objectively smartest political strategy for the Democrats to pursue is to push for a platform that just happens to line up with the preferences of the author. I don't believe I've ever read a piece like this before on the internet.

Yes, there is a lot of talking one's own book in these post-mortems, which makes finding worthwhile analysis more difficult. There have been the Captain Obvious pronouncements about the adverse map in mostly red states, the Boomer-heavy demographics of the turnout, and the lack of motivation to vote for hope and/or change. In fact, it may be that not much at all can be concluded for the long term, unless a Supreme Court justice dies in the next two years. Waves come and go, as Markos Moulitsas explains with palpable disgust. There have been some weaksauce attempts to pin the losses on Hillary Clinton, but the map is much more favourable in 2016, and the tide will inevitably turn.

I think digby digs a little closer to the reason for that four point discrepancy.

Nobody seems to be talking about it today but ISIS and ebola and the Border and Ferguson were all huge stories in this campaign and I have to think these stories may have inspired the GOP turnout more than they're being given credit for. They are classic fear motivators for the conservatives and the timing was very good. I would not be surprised if they played a part in making the GOP victory as substantial as it was. And this could be a factor in 2016, so stay tuned.

My suspicion is that the polls aren't skewed as such, they just don't capture very late shifts in mood. Just as the wingnuts complained about Hurricane Sandy being a late boost to the Democrats in 2012, the left could have a justifiable whinge that the Ebola outbreak, building on the aforementioned scare stories, led to a more scared and conservative electorate, and/or scared off people who self-identified to polling outlets as "likely voters" into discouraged non-voters. Why didn't it show up in the polls before election day? How can I prove this conjecture? I can't, I suppose, unless I had control over some expensive polling infrastructure. That Schrodinger's cat will have to stay in its box.

Hawks enjoy back-to-back flagwaving

Not much posting lately, for which I apologise. Three month old firstborn child, you understand. Not that much of long term interest has been happening in Australian politics lately. It's been all terrorism this, war that. YAWN! It is all entirely predictable, and plays perfectly into Tony Abbott's obvious desire to pick up right where John Howard left off. In keeping with the Abbott era's complete lack of originality, the war is even in the same place.

The war hawks have been dominating the media just like the Hawthorn Hawks dominated the AFL grand final, mainly because in both cases the opposition just didn't show up. Bill Shorten did not have any wiggle room, because the polls were always going to favour the PM at the start of a war. Shorten has to bide his time and rely on the inexorable turning of public opinion once the grim realities of war become apparent, as they always do eventually to shame the chickenhawk granny bloc into changing their minds. At the moment, Shorten is playing Ryan Schoenmakers to Abbott's Tom Hawkins, and ISIS keep bombing the ball long to the square for the Speedo-clad Tomahawk to grab easily and bang through for goal after goal. Would Anthony Albanese have been the Brian Lake equivalent, a more capable operator who can take on the gorillas and nullify the threat? The supply from midfield is too great at the moment. (I think I've waterboarded that analogy enough now.)

As with the Schoenmakers situation at my beloved Hawthorn, the only emotion I have in watching Abbott strut about the national stage saying stupid things and not being punished for them is exasperation at how easy it all is for him. The beheadings are horrible, yes, but it's just way too simplistic to use them as an excuse for jingoistic nationalism as a pretext for war. Bill Clinton was never seriously punished electorally for his Kosovo bombing campaign under somewhat similar circumstances, because the troop losses were minimal and the war only lasted a handful of months; can the current coalition get as lucky? The facts are different in this case, as this one won't be over quickly, the world is paying much more attention, and it's a different era where YouTube is as much an instrument of militarism as RPGs. Even if there aren't a heap of body bags containing Western soldiers, a My Lai situation is more likely in this theatre.

The timing is wrong for Abbott on this one. By the time the next Australian federal election rolls around, the Iraqi quagmire will have had a good two years to drag him into it. Interestingly, it will probably coincide with the 2016 presidential election in America, with the looming Hillary Clinton era promising a war hawk wonderland. Will Obama be able to wrap up the ISIS bombings before the voters in the Western coalition get disenchanted, like Bill Clinton did for Kosovo? I doubt it.

Roof caves in on Gillard reno troofers

If this was the sort of poliblog that was in the live cattle business - carving up fresh meat for a ready audience of like-minded noddie merchants who want to have their prejudices confirmed in tasty fashion on a daily basis - I would probably spend a lot of time making fun of Michael Smith, whose career has gone seriously downhill in the last two years since being sacked from Fairfax for smearing Julia Gillard. His post yesterday about Gillard's appearance at the Trade Union Royal Commission had it all: emotion-based reportage, incredulity in the face of stark facts, conspiracy theorising, empty posturing, flailing aggro, and a comment thread full of hilariously butt-hurt insanity.

While a dispassionate observer might wonder what all the fuss is about, the truthers can not be swayed from their conviction that Gillard is guilty of the most heinous crimes. Witnesses have been leaned on, lawyers are protecting one of their own, the commish has been nobbled... it's all straight out of a Jon Grisham movie. The ultimate theory put forward by Smith, and taken up with desperation in the comments, is that the Royal Commission is merely a sideshow, a fishing expedition, to fuel the ongoing investigation into the AWU WRA by the Victorian Fraud Squad.

I would remind the court of public opinion that the AWU scandal is over the sum of $400,000 (admittedly in mid-1990s dollars, so that's about $680,000 in 2013 money according to the RBA inflation calculator). The TURC is budgeted at $53.5 million. Add that to the cost of all those detectives from the Fraud Squad swarming all over this cold case for years with precisely zero to show for it after all this time. At this point, the person most likely to face charges is Kathy Jackson, the right's favourite "whistleblower" and friend of the H.R. Nicholls Society.

Today is also the 40th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon, which lead one US blogger to reminisce that it was the last time that the system worked. This is not technically true. Since Nixon (and in Australia, since the Dismissal), time and again the right has subsumed its guilty conscience and used the system against the left despite no crimes having been committed - Bill Clinton's faults were a private matter, and Gillard has evidently done nothing to warrant charges. It "works" to the extent that it provides a taxpayer-funded platform for the right to smear the left for years on end, with no accountability. The system continues to fail when it comes to right-wing leaders: witness the lack of a need for a pardon for any LNP politician involved in the AWB wheat-for-oil scandal, which involved over $220 million in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime.

One mustn't get too cynical about these things, nonetheless. That's what being a truther is ultimately about: feeling like you and your mates are the only ones possessing the True Vision of reality, and the rest are sheep who don't accept your blinding insight. False consciousness is a powerful but ultimately futile distraction.

Hate to the left of me, haters to the right

Reading this WaPo piece on exactly how Americans hate the Republican Party, it put me in mind of similar polls on Obamacare, which also enjoys poor ratings. In both cases, while the headline number is rather low, when you break it down to opposition from the left and opposition from the right, a more interesting picture emerges.

"Not all of the opposition to the health care law comes from the right," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Thirty-eight percent say they oppose the law because it's too liberal, but 17% say they oppose it because it's not liberal enough. That means more than half the public either favors Obamacare, or opposes it because it doesn't go far enough."

The WaPo points out that the same effect for right-wing politics implies that the GOP still has a comfortable set of "fundamentals" for the 2014 mid-term elections in America, since those who hate the Republicans from the right are presumably still going to vote for them. This is the reason why every poll analyst who includes fundamentals in their poll model, which is pretty much everyone except Sam Wang, still forecasts control of the US Senate shifting to the GOP despite the raw polls saying otherwise.

This sort of granularity in polling is sadly rare in Australian polling, with the likes of Essential and Newspoll not doing enough in this area - but at least they're still going, unlike Nielsen which Fairfax just cut. I suspect that Bill Shorten's low popularity has a significant hate-from-the-left component: Essential puts his dissatisfaction rating at 16% of Labor voters, compared to 9% disapproval of Abbott by LNP voters. How would the election of Anthony Albanese as Labor leader have changed this dynamic? The left would have been much happier with him, and I don't think he would have done much different in policy terms than Shorten is doing now. Albo might even have raised some objections to the folly of war.

The doctrine of the Stupid Shit Funnel

Lest I be accused of running a hate site against Club Troppo after my previous article criticising aspects of their wonkery, today's Troppo joint on the West's reaction to ISIS is excellent.

Whose going to win if the West gets entangled in this maelstrom? Well for a while it will be our fearless leaders as their chest thumping arrests their slide in the polls and simplistic News Corp pundits who love a good war, but in the end the West will once again waste blood and treasure.
And the winners? Well I bet Vladimir Putin reckons he’ll be a winner as the West gets distracted and weakened in the Middle East – but no we’ll feel the need to have a go at Putin after this one.  Our last hurrah quite possibly
No I think It’s pretty clear that when all is said and done the winner will be the nation who best absorbs a lesson from  Sun Tzu’s Art Of War.  “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”  That nation, appropriately will be China.

This Rex Ringschott piece is of a piece with this other piece in the Atlantic detailing the always-wrong perma-hawks who dominate US media, and when you piece them together it forms a jigsaw of G.W. Bush era recidivism, where no lessons from the failed Iraq and Afghanistan forays have been learned at all.

Having said all that, I am not going to connect the dots and narrow down the focus to Halliburton, Blackwater and crony capitalism in the military industrial complex. I acknowledge that there is a genuine philosophical underpinning to the neo-con thought process on this one. It is, as Ringschott mentions, the "simplistic moral argument" of the sanctity of human life. The slaughtering of Western journalists is a terrible thing (albeit that Muslim journalists were slaughtered in exactly the same way weeks before and the West ignored it). It reminds us that ISIS is committing atrocities on innocents, as Saddam Hussein did, the Taliban did and Al Qaida did. Opposing these people seems like a "good" thing to do, even if you don't want to touch the concept of them being "evil". Lives can be saved; not just Christian lives but Muslims and those of many other faiths and races.

I am on record as having some sympathy with that viewpoint, as in the asylum seeker debate. One should always pay respect to a credo which has as its foundation the primacy of human existence. In the case of asylum seekers, the figures are in and the deterrent, while individually abhorrent, has been shown to work to prevent the rush of asylum seekers by boat, and remove the prospect of hundreds of horrific deaths at sea. It seems rather mercenary to balance one poor bastard getting septicemia or shot in a prison riot with hundreds of corpses in the Arafura Sea, but that's the equation we're faced with and I'm prepared to accept the utilitarian argument from the right on this issue.

In the case of war in the Middle East - and in most other regions where rival superpowers funnel weapons to opposing sides and let them fight it out as proxies for their imperial ambitions - the figures are also in, and the effect of starting the Iraq war was to destabilise the region and cause more deaths than it would have saved. Specifically, the rise of ISIS is everything to do with George W. Bush's decision to remove Iraq's power structure, ship tonnes of ordnance to the Iraqi theatre and then leave all that firepower in the hands of underprepared locals who have mostly abandoned their posts or been mown down.

The lives that Australia and other Western nations have saved directly through combat boots on the ground were then forfeited when they left. Ah, the right might say, so it's Obama's fault for withdrawing troops? First off, that was a withdrawal signed off by Bush before Obama came to office, as part of setting up an independent Iraq. Second, how long is the West supposed to occupy Iraq for? Are we actually there to "liberate", or is the right's paternal instinct too strong to let the kids leave home?

Funnelling arms to Iraq has only caused more bloodshed, not less. It's as if the right wants to go against Obama's "don't do stupid shit" doctrine by doing all the stupid shit it can, but funnelling that shit into foreign war zones where their ideological beliefs can be tested in experiments using other people's lives. The Stupid Shit Funnel has been poised over Iraq and Afghanistan for a long time, raining down a steady stream of weaponry and armoured vehicles, and now it's also making detours to Ukraine.

Ringschott's conclusion - that the winners would be those who don't play, China in particular - dovetails nicely into my conclusion from my discussion with Noah Smith. Winners don't do war.

PS: I am seeing that "blood and treasure" phrase around a hell of a lot lately. It's 2014's version of "known unknowns" in trendy military jargon that pundits use to make them seem like insiders. Also, the word "wus" is not spelled correctly; it's either "woos" or "wuss". This concludes today's instalment of Slang Nitpickery!

Like a Reagan cowboy

After the recent shooting down of passenger flight MH17 with around 300 dead by Ukrainian separatists and/or the Russian military, Sinclair Davidson posts Ronald Reagan's speech on passenger flight KAL 007 after it was shot down by the USSR military in 1983, later calling it "forceful and inspiring". This is an echo of similar posts at Hot Air, RedState and Fox News comparing Reagan's strong words with the cautious early reaction of Barack Obama, which already has the tabloids incensed.

As usual, the right is ignoring the facts in favour of a partisan narrative. As Crooks & Liars details and the Monkey Cage blog at the WaPo annotates, Reagan's reaction was rated at the time by the right wing media as inadequate and weak, gadding about on horseback on vacation in Hawaii for days while the bodies of the American victims were still warm. In fact, Reagan eventually did nothing except continue his previous policy of economic opposition to the USSR without direct military engagement, which is pretty much what Obama has been doing against Russia in the wake of Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea.

It is refreshing to see such a debate go on without reference to domino theory, which has been thoroughly discredited since it failed to predict the encroachment of communism in the 1980s. There has also been a lot of sighing from the American left about the preponderance of Dubbya-era reprobates in the media talking up re-engagement in Iraq and/or the Crimea. I am as sanguine about that as I am about the IPA's ubiquity on the ABC: these are free countries, they're allowed to have a voice, and we're allowed to laugh at them.

Reagan may have been a lot of things, but one thing he was right about was how to fight an empire: economically, with any military troops on the ground to be confined to smaller proxy battlegrounds. Obama learned that lesson, and he's already putting the Reagan playbook into practice by squeezing Putin with sanctions, using the tragedy to further pressure the EU to join the US in applying sanctions. As is only proper.

China is too big to fail

I was retweeted by Brad Delong today for linking to Stephen Koukoulas' latest missive on the results of the current Liberal federal government's campaign of talking down the domestic economy: it looks like it has worked as retail sales have tanked and we're about to enjoy the same sort of quarterly handbrake effect that the US has just endured. This lead to a short (of course) Twitter conversation with Patrick Chovanec about China, which lead to this observation which interested me.

@m0nty for much of the rest of the world, end of China's investment boom is net positive story (relieves deflation, opens up net demand)
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) July 3, 2014

Chovanec is a Chinese expert of some renown, a former employee under Bill Kristol and a former colleague of Paul Ryan. His blog is interesting reading, in that it is an ongoing attempt by a conservative theorist to understand why this is the Asian Century, and how this is going to lead to China belting the bejeesus out of America in both economic and political power games (if not actual war). He is a bear (despite his protestations), as a conservative academic looking at China must almost inevitably be to jive his beliefs with the ongoing economic and social experiment happening before his eyes based on what he must see as an unworkable melding of private and public control from above. China is still a command economy for the most part, only using those elements of capitalism which are useful for its centrally-determined agendas. As Chovanec notes on his blog, control is actually getting more concentrated among power elites not less. Despite all this, China continues to grow like topsy and it's winning a lot of the contests it enters - like currency wars and its increasingly dominant position in Africa.

Chovanec has issued dire predictions of calamitous domestic Chinese bubbles, as have many watchers over the years, but if the Chinese miracle is merely a mirage then it hasn't dissipated yet. For instance, after he spent a lot of energy talking about how the local real estate "bubble" was ready to pop, it surged again early in 2012, leading to a series of posts floating up reasons as to why stentorian bears like him were so wrong. From the Australian perspective, where it seems apparent that China's restrictions on multiple home purchases are probably why Chinese investors have invaded the Australian real estate market in such numbers to treat empty dwellings like gold deposits, there doesn't appear to be much of an end in sight to the Sino-Australian real estate boom.

Chovanec has also been quoted on recent movements in the heavily subsidised Chinese solar cell industry, as in this NPR interview, and here I think is where his own insights illustrate what is going on.

INSKEEP: So what do the Chinese do now?
(LAUGHTER)
CHOVANEC: Well, what they probably do is they dig deep dig into their pockets – the pockets of the central government – and bail out these companies. Because what they’re really afraid of is, you know, we've seen this over the past couple of months, that even relatively small companies, when they fail in China they're so intertwined in terms of their credit relationships and the local economy that essentially everything's too big to fail.

Just as the TARP bank bailout and the auto bailouts worked perfectly in America, so it appears that China has avoided a series of pitfalls from inefficiencies in its system by temporarily socialising the losses and keeping long-term-viable businesses out of bankruptcy. This is the positive side of too-big-to-fail. Keynesianism is all about smoothing out the peaks and troughs of economic happenstance to prevent long-term damage to the livelihoods of the relatively powerless workers who would otherwise have their careers thrown on the scrapheap of history, for the benefit of the economy as a whole.

No doubt there is an argument that China's socialisation of losses from Suntech et al is a different situation to TARP and the auto bailouts, since the latter actually made a profit in the end and there might not be such an easy denouement to the Chinese solar cell industry's woes. Similarly to the National Broadband Network in Australia - I'm talking about the original Labor vision, not the emaciated joke it has become under the Liberals - governments are in an unique position to invest in such projects and secure a solid rate of return, because they can accumulate many more benefits from positive externalities than do private corporations. Even if the NBN or Suntech were to represent paper losses on their own balance sheets, the indirect public goods from universal broadband in Australia or the popularisation of solar cells on roofs across China could very well translate into higher taxes from increased general production, or a decrease in spending on policing or environmental cleanups.

Under certain circumstances, where it is done for solid Keynesian reasons, TBTF works. Chovanec and those of his ilk like to say that Chinese leaders don't really know what they're doing and lack a coherent direction for the future, but so far in the 21st century they have been kicking ass and taking names in both economic and political realms. Australia may be inside a rapidly shrinking bubble as the bears say... or the lucky country may have just been lucky one more time.

Piketty populism and Clive Palmer

Just as economists seem to be talking about nothing else but Thomas Piketty and inequality these days, it seems to me in reading political blogs that little else is more important in politics right now than the ongoing debate between populism and elitism. Yes, even more important than discussion of war in Iraq, because arguably that debate is just another aspect of the ongoing backlash against the elites.

The reaction of the American left to the American right's utterly predictable hawkishness on Iraq is to tell those wrongheads to shut up, as summed up by Paul Waldman and quoted favourably across the left poliblogosphere over there last week. After 9/11, political elites in the west enjoyed the effects of populism as they were able to channel the public's unfocused anger into support for a war on an unrelated target. George W. Bush is now universally reviled as the worst president in that country's history, which means the hawk agenda of the elites who benefited from his largesse is now similarly repudiated in the electorate.

For its part, the right these days seems to be trying to turn "populist" into an insulting epithet, much the same way as they have tried to tarnish the word "liberal". (They lost that one, as opinions inexorably turned in favour of liberalism on issues like gay marriage and abortion.) This is a reversal from a few years ago when populism benefited Dubbya, or in Australia when it lifted Pauline Hanson from obscurity into flag-draped power. In the age of Piketty where elites have over-reached, the right now condemns populism because the people actually want liberalism.

In democracies, it is not sustainable for a major party to attack populism over the long term. Will the right rediscover a blend of populism and ideology that will rescue their terrible poll numbers? While there is always a stream low level stories of racism and other right-wing populist techniques which supply the US leftist blogs with fresh meat on a regular basis, there is no discernible Hansonism in Australia at the moment, and that is because Clive Palmer seems to be going down a different road, as in this op-ed in the Fairfax papers yesterday.

How long will it be until this country gets a government that cares about its people? To serve in Parliament and to serve your fellow citizens should be the highest calling in our society. But that's not how the nation views those in Canberra. Rightly so. 

Australia needs to project what we might become. The problems we have in this country have been made by Australians and they can be solved by Australians.

It is pure populism without much ideology, and none of the xenophobia of Hanson. The consequences of the actions he sets out here would variously disappoint both left and right - he talks a lot about raising benefits and investing in education as well as blocking direct action, but he sidesteps the question of whether he will block repeal of the carbon tax.

Palmer is still playing small ball, nevertheless. Worthy as are his stories of pensioners and war widows, there is no vision there. The ultimate implication of this approach will be that if Palmer succeeds in blocking the nastier elements of Abbott's agenda, he will lock in the Rudd/Gillard legislative legacy for a generation. Seeing as the Abbott administration passed only seven bills in its first seven months, signs are that he and his parliamentary team don't have the skills to accomplish much in the House.

The Palmer United Party is still struggling for life at the moment, and the urgency which this brings to their policy pronouncements is a stark contrast to the inertia caused by factional divisions in both major parties. Tony Abbott is playing the tired old game that John Howard played before him, but as with Bush the public have seen it all before and we're not getting fooled again. This time, we demand more adherence to reality from our political leaders, more attention paid to what is actually happening to real people in the community.

The Green & Gold Lantern Theory of the Prime Ministership

Ezra Klein details the Green Lantern Theory of the American presidency, something which the US Left uses constantly to bash Barack Obama. In short, the theory is that even though the US Constitution built in all sorts of safeguards against executive power including vetoes all over the place, filibusters, congressional conventions and other rules to stop the President shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips... if the President just closed his eyes and pointed his superhero equipment at the baddies they would be vanquished and all of the comic book theorists' pet policies would be enacted by magical Marvel fiat. Thus you have wailing like this Jesse Eisinger piece, attacking Obama from the left for not passing financial industry reform laws, as if that was going to be possible via a click of the fingers.

In Australia, the talk is similar when the Prime Minister can't get his agenda implemented, but mostly we talk about a democratic "mandate". For instance, Alan Moran has a whinge today about Tony Abbott's failure to bone the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and other green instruments of the Gillard administration, which were established through acts of Parliament and would require the consent of either the Greens or Clive Palmer for repeal bills to pass the Senate. His view is that the green industry has "sandbagged" the CEFC and other encouragers of environmental investments which the right dismisses as "green hedge funds". The comments are filled with utter stupidity, ranging from calls for Cyprus-style bank account confiscation to Thailand-style martial law.

If Tony Abbott has a mandate, it is to implement Labor's policies, at least for this term. That is the corner he boxed himself into by promising not to cut most of the Labor spending areas. He will have to deal with Palmer as the founding fathers intended back in 1901. There are good reasons why America, England and Australia have safeguards in their constitutions to give competing mandates to politicians in different chambers, and bestow veto powers upon them. The end result should be a centrist compromise, if both sides are willing to make concessions. This is not Russia where you can send Clive to the gulag, much as the right might wish. Abbott is not a superhero, and nor is he a supervillain. He will have to find common ground with at least one other member of humanity on this one.

-ghazi, straight from the khazi

Following on from yesterday's thoughts on the death of Joe McCarthy, I fully endorse the Balloon Juice idea of dropping the stale, tired "-gate" suffix and using the fresh, wired suffix "-ghazi" to entitle every new bullshit political scandal that comes along. Referencing Benghazi over Watergate only underlines how relatively pissweak are the confected outrages of the right these days. Thus:

• Battghazi - the failed attempt to pin deaths in the home insulation program on Kevin Rudd;
• Blewittghazi - the failed attempt to pin AWU corruption on Julia Gillard;
• Ashbyghazi - the failed attempt to pin sexual harassment charges on Peter Slipper.

Of course, the ICAC investigation of the $3000 bottle of Grange that eventually brought down Barry O'Farrell was not Barryghazi and deserved the inevitable Grangegate moniker, because it actually did stand up to scrutiny and scored a killing blow on its intended target. The -ghazi suffix should be reserved for pseudo-scandals that never go anywhere. Which is a specialty of the right these days.

McCarthy is dead.

Via Steve from Brisbane comes a link to a Fairfax piece on why the home insulation program royal commission has been a political flop. The yarn is full of unsourced quotes from Labor insiders, so its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt, but there's a kernel of truth there.

As with the endless IRS and Benghazi inquiries in the American Congress, there is a point after which these witch hunts become tiresome and pointless. That point is usually when the prosecution runs out of new evidence and can't find anything that clinches the case, which has already happened in the case of the IRS and Benghazi situations, and already happened long ago with the HIP and with the union corruption royal commission that is also ongoing. The right can point to Fairfax, the ABC and other "left-leaning" outlets and how they fail to report the proceedings of these hearings as an abrogation of journalistic duties, but if there's nothing newsworthy to report, why should they be reported when they have devolved into grandstanding show trials for partisan consumption only?

The height of this practice of using politicians to prosecute for partisanship was of course in the McCarthy era, but it should really have run its course when the US Congress impeached Bill Clinton. In America, these Clayton's scandals are still ginned up to fuel wingnut money raising ventures through constant email bombardment and newsletter rants, despite a near complete lack of basis for ongoing investigation. In Australia, where thankfully we haven't seen the rise of a massive partisan political services industry, there doesn't seem to be much reason for wasting all this taxpayer money. Waste, though, has never actually worried this government when they are pursuing their selfish goals.

Short Kicks: Is everybody happy?

- On one hand, we have the right saying that the market will decide so we don't need anti-discrimination laws to prevent gays having weddings in Arizona from being denied service by cake bakers. On the other hand, we have the market deciding that anti-gay discrimination is bad in Boston as the beer industry sides with its customers in gay bars, yet the right is up in arms in horror at the supposed misuse of market power. Which is it, wingnuts?

- The backlash of snark (snarklash? backsnark?) against the New New Media continues, with Wonkette making fun of Vox.com's launch video featuring Matt Yglesias in an admittedly terrible Happy Hammond style tartan blazer, Ezra Klein slammed for hiring a self-hating gay columnist clickbaiter, and Balloon Juice fact checking Nate Silver's allegorical use of a fox as FiveThirtyEight's new logo. The unresolved sexual tension is getting rather steamy in the Web media industry in America at the moment, leading up to the launch of these new titles. Pity we don't have anything like that happening in Australia - chatter about the Saturday Paper since its launch seems to have disappeared.

- Stephen Koukoulas is still swinging the cudgel lustily on behalf of his prediction that the economy is going to turn around and rate cuts will happen this year, maybe as early as May, and he's had plenty of material to work with from recent economic data. His prediction is that in 12 months' time, interest rates will be a full point higher and the Aussie dollar back at parity. That set of numbers would have major implications for the Australian economy as our manufacturing base would continue to be hollowed out, which would blow out budget expenditures. Would revenue bounce back, though? Only if Joe Hockey raises taxes, and/or closes loopholes like the Double Dutch/Irish lurk used by Google, Apple and other multinationals. Given that this government's policy is evidently to do absolutely nothing until they get a mandate after the next election, I would advise not holding one's breath.

Steve Kates whistles, cats go feral

I am not going to make a habit of dissecting RMIT economist Steve Kates' posts at Catallaxy Files here at LD because he doesn't deserve the attention, but occasionally he surprises me by pushing the boundaries of brainlessness beyond what I thought he could get away with. Today's Kates post on the Ukraine situation which leads with the theory that the President of the USA hates America plumbs remarkable depths of idiocy.

It is also a signature example of a Cat OP cat-whistling hard and the strays coming a-gamboling with slobber drooling from their lolling maws. So far in the comments, there have been positive references to:

• the theory that this is all a ploy to deliver Israel to the PLO, or something;
• John Titor, the fake time traveller from 2036 whose predictions included the US being in a civil war right now that ends with three billion dead;
• Aleksandr Dugin, whose theory published at National Review is that Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler complete with a love of mysticism and a belief that Atlantis was not only real but influences world events to this day;
• Angelo Codevilla, a neo-Machiavellian super hawk who seems to be auditioning to be Kissinger Mk II in a Palin administration;
• investment advice from troll JC on what commodities to go long on to take advantage of the situation;
• a drive-by troll calling himself LABCR-TV who runs the line that Obama is actually a puppet of unnamed shadowy rich people;
• CL saying the stupidest extremist thing he can think of and claiming it is God's honest truth, which he does constantly in every Cat thread.

When even self-labeled imperialist Mk50 is "bemused", things must be getting amazingly dumb. (I dislike the word "derpy", which some would use here - sounds too much like it's making fun of the disabled.)  I like the Cat best when it's getting maudlin and introspective, not this distasteful freak show. DrBeauGan makes me smile at the end of a defeatist rant about how we're all rooned already:

All we have is a bunch of old farts moaning about it.

Quite.

In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen!

The American left has reacted to recent opinion polls depicting Hillary Clinton as the unchallenged successor to Barack Obama - unassailed by credible opponents on left or right - with ambivalence, as in this rumination by Booman Tribune or this conflicted conversation at Balloon Juice.

The argument goes like this: we know Hillary has astoundingly good numbers across all demographics and would walk into the White House with control over both houses on Congress if they hold up, but we all flocked to Obama last time because she wasn't left enough for us, especially on foreign relations (i.e. she's a hawk), and we're apprehensive of the desperate mudslinging that will result from GOP reactionaries faced with their worst nightmare. The left would all love for another Obama to rise up from relative obscurity and save them from the terrifying prospect of Galadriel, um I mean Hillary with the full power of the One Ring, um I mean the Red Button.

The closest analogue to a Frodo who would shoulder that burden is Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, who appears to be the Moneyball candidate with much talk of his Nate Silver-like reliance on stats and deep analysis. Elizabeth Warren isn't running, the one person who was most Obama-like among a fairly weak set of contenders. O'Malley as VP would be interesting, as it would give the left something to hold onto for a succession plan.

No, it looks like America is going to have to come to terms with Obama trudging off to the White Ships as Hillary ascends the throne, and the left suspects they are not going to like the "all shall love me and despair" bit all that much. It's not that Galadriel with the One Ring would have been evil, per se, just that living in a country with a Lawful Neutral monarch is not much fun. Though it would be cool if she developed those blue wavy CGI effects to liven up the Correspondents Dinner.

Climate denier Mark Steyn turns law denier

Fellow Catallaxy Files exile Steve from Brisbane has had his Opinion Dominion blog linked by Yank Canuck wingnut footsoldier Mark Steyn for an article mentioning the fact that Steyn has fired his lawyers from his defamation defence against Michael Mann over comments surrounding climate change and the IPCC. Steyn supporters have flooded in to the comments to prosecute the case on his behalf, without a single invocation of the inoculatory abbreviation IANAL.

Patty Villanova said...
If you will read the motion that Mark Steyn recently submitted to the court on his own behalf, you will readily see the reason he dumped his lawyers- he is by far a more brilliant writer than anyone on his team. His understanding of the legal principles and his ability to convey the essence of the case is worthy of any legal scholar. He doesn't need the attorneys, he's doing a better job on his own.

Steyn thus joins such noted legal minds as Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan, DC sniper John Allen Muhammad, 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, cult leader Charles Manson, serial killer Ted Bundy and Jack "Dr Death" Kevorkian in representing himself in American courts. Things didn't turn out so good for those guys. Like Moussaoui, Steyn doesn't care about procedures and process and just wants his day in court, so he's given up on preventing the case going to trial.

Steyn has a history of hating on lawyers, having once put the sword to the legal team behind a lost case of his friend Conrad Black. Like local clone Andrew Bolt in the infamous s18C case on articles published in News Corporation papers about so-called white-skinned Aboriginals, Steyn's current case has been complicated by the efforts of his employer National Review, which Steyn accuses of wasting half a million dollars of fiat currency already for no result. Unlike Bolt, if Steyn loses this case then he's going to be up a for a motzah. One wonders if his decision to ditch the silks is money related, in part. All Bolt had to put up with was a public humiliation; Mann could put Steyn out of business.

From one ranga to another: best of luck Mark, you're going to need it.