Monthly Archives: September 2023

We Got to Get Out of This Place If It’s the Last Thing We Ever Do.

Posted on by
Reply

            Just under one-sixth (16 percent) of Americans trust the Federal government.[1]  It isn’t just the government institutions that are troubling people. 

In an “a pox upon both your houses” evaluation, a recent CBS poll found that 54 percent of Americans see the Republicans as “extreme,” and the same percentage see the Democrats as extreme.  These two groups overlap to a degree, with 28 percent disapproving of both parties.  About the same number, 26 percent, say that having more political parties would make solving our problems easier.[2] 

            President Joe Biden hasn’t had the kind of calming effect that he seemed to promise during the 2020 campaign.  Partly, this may stem from his left-of-center policy program.[3]  Partly, it may stem from the appearance of new problems (Ukraine), the enlargement of pre-existing problems (refugees at the border), and the return of old problems once considered settled (abortion).  Partly, it may stem from the refusal of so many Republicans to let go of Donald Trump in spite of 6 January 2020.[4] 

A recent Pew poll found that 55 percent of Americans are angry about the current political situation and 65 percent are exhausted by it.  A mere 10 percent are excited about the political situation.  A little more than a quarter (27 percent) of Americans think that the political system as a whole is working “very” well or “somewhat” well.  That implies that almost three-quarters (73 percent) think that it is NOT working any flavor of “well.”  Most (63 percent) aren’t confident about its future (or Don’t Know, which seems to me to be the same thing as not confident).  Most Americans, some 64 percent, say that a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 is proof of a “broken” political system.  On the one hand, two-thirds of people doubt that Joe Biden would have the physical or mental capacity to serve as an effective president in a second term.  On the other hand, better than half of Americans think that Donald Trump would be all too active and able in pursuing his goals in a second term. 

            Reading these figures, it is easy to believe that “America is desperate for a new beginning.”[5]  Trouble is that, while “America” may be ready, “Americans” are not.  If they were ready, Donald Trump would not have a 40 point bulge on the Seven Dwarves.  If they were ready, Joe Biden would have been persuaded to spend more time with his Addams-like family.  No serious insurgency has broken out in either party.  Instead, we’re waiting for the Grim Reaper to solve our problems.  In an Age of Medical Marvels at that. 

            Still, when and if it comes, what will that “new beginning” look like? 

[1] It is unclear exactly what people understand by “the Federal government.”  Do they mean all three branches or do they mean one or two branches of the government.  The bureaucracy of the Executive Branch can seem awkward and incapable, and even autocratic.  Congress is a monument to paralysis through divided government, and draws careerists like flies to…sugar.  The Judicial Branch has been the scene of politicization for decades as it has become a means to by-pass legislative impasses.  Now, over half (54 percent) of Americans distrust the Supreme Court.  The “Impeach Early Warren” bill-boards of yore have given way to the “Impeach Clarence Thomas” op-eds of today. 

[2] Nothing in European political systems, where this is common, suggests that it would make things better. 

[3] That program has involved a further expansion of deficit spending as part of his Inflation Act, his reliance upon reconciliation to ram through major legislation, and his resort of rule-writing to impose controversial policies. 

[4] I doubt that many Republicans would have accepted any of Biden’s actions as legitimate, even if he had continued every single Trump administration policy.  They want Orange Man. 

[5] William Galston, “America Is Desperate for a New Beginning,” WSJ, 27 September 2023. 

A World of Woe.

Posted on by
Reply

            The United States led the creation of a post-Second World War international system.  It initiated the creation of the United Nations (UN), the Bretton Woods international economic system, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the strategy of “containment” of aggressive Communism.  Along the way, the United States joined with its chief allies in an effort to create a “rules-based international order.”  This has been a remarkable achievement. 

            Now these achievements face new threats.[1] 

The UN is much disliked because it is much misunderstood.  It could never be a “world government,” merely a dignified place in which the great powers met to work out deals.  Other offices of the UN have sought to deal with improving living standards and health, and with assisting an ever-growing wave of refugees from political upheaval in the non-Western world.  Even this limited, useful role seems beyond its scope in recent decades. 

“Free trade” headed the agenda of economic policy makers for many decades after the Second World War.  Some of the greatest triumphs of that agenda, raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while promoting continual renovation of the advanced economies, finally raised a storm of reaction.[2]  The huge waves of unwanted immigrants swamping the borders of the United States and the European Union has become a divisive force in the democracies.  The immigrants are propelled by especially poverty in their home countries. 

Great powers—Russia and China—and middling powers—Iran and, North Korea—have embarked on campaigns against the American-led order.  Military power and the willingness to use it characterize this effort.  The Russian attack on Ukraine, the Chinese threats against Taiwan, and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs all pose grave dangers.  It has proved difficult to discover effective responses to these threats.[3] 

Authoritarian governments are acting effectively on their agendas in some parts of the world.  Elsewhere the collapse of government is increasingly obvious.  Drug cartels seem to have the upper hand over nation-states in parts of Latin America.  In much of North Africa radical Islamist groups are hard to distinguish from criminal gangs in places where government has collapsed.  Libya offers a good example, but similar things are happening across the Sahel.[4] 

We face a host of troubles that resembles the Thirties.  Can we muster the resources and the resolve to sustain that better world the West once created? 

[1] Walter Russell Mead, “World Disorder Is Spreading Fast,” WSJ, 26 September 2023. 

[2] First the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), then the admission of China to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on favorable terms were seen as massively disruptive forces in the domestic economies of the advanced economies.  Progress had halted and even gone into reverse. 

[3] Neither the European countries nor the United States wants a shooting war with anyone.  There is always the danger of a nuclear war following on a conventional war.  Economic sanctions and as much military aid as possible has been provided to Ukraine, which serves as a Western proxy.  China is a military and economic threat, but it is also a major trading partner for many countries.  Reorienting trade is contentious, while rebuilding the military power to back-down any Chinese threat will take time and money that may not be available.  The Obama administration’s deal to pause Iran’s nuclear development both made sense and had a certain Mr. Micawber aspect to it.  Plastering North Korea with economic sanctions achieved nothing, but a pre-emptive attack on its nuclear program would just open a huge can of worms. 

[4] The logical conclusion will come when the first criminal enterprise became the actual ruler of a sovereign state.  People used to joke that Monaco was a “sunny place for shady people.”  What if it happens in Mexico?   

Some Choices.

Posted on by
Reply

            Walter Russell Mead, who comments on foreign affairs for the Wall Street Journal, discerns several long-term shifts underway in international affairs.[1] 

            First, Europe continues to decline as a force in world politics.  This can be seen as the latest stage in a long-running process.  The “European Civil War” of 1914-1945 wrecked the basis of European global power.  The Eastern and Western parts of the Continent then found themselves bound to alliances with the Soviet Union and the United States.  However, in Western Europe, dramatic post-war economic modernization and the construction of the European Union (EU) allowed a revived role.[2]  

Now it seems that the wheels have come off in a serious way.  It’s possible to point to all sorts of current problems: the collapse of French influence in Africa; the EU’s confrontation with a Turkish Republic that uses refugees as a weapon; and the dangers to Germany posed by China’s automobile industry, and to all Europe by its trade practices.  More fundamental, says Mead, are the rapid aging and eventual shrinking of Europe’s population; all the policies and incrustations that have produced a low growth economy; the follow-on effect of robbing national security to pay for social security; and the surrender to wishful thinking in diplomacy. 

            Second, there is the “emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the U.S.”  This should not be misunderstood as a real reflection of Indian economic or military power.  What matters much more is that Europe’s long-term decline has created a tension between the rising nations of Asia and the “South,” on the one hand, and international institutions in which European countries are over-represented, on the other hand.  The advance of India represents an entering wedge for other countries.  Their ambition is a “reform” that shoulders aside the doddering countries of Europe. 

            Third, China, Russia, and some follower-countries are intensifying their challenge to the “American-led”[3] post-1945 world order.  Part of their effort—as it was in the Cold War—is an attack on the existing, Western-dominated, international institutions.  This is intended to play to the ambitions and frustrations of the Indo-Pacific and Global South. 

This convergence of factors creates a dilemma for American policy makers.  It is likely to take some time to resolve because it requires making painful choices.  Mead, a not-unfriendly critic since the start of the Biden Administration, chooses to emphasize the “woke” agenda of current American diplomacy.  The Administration assigns great importance to the Democratic causes of climate-change, human-rights, and democratic government.  The trouble is that most of the countries that need to be courted don’t assign the same importance to these issues as does the Administration.  If anything, they resent being harped-at by American progressives.  Which will you have? 

There is also the far more important issue of American national reconstruction.  No one seems to speak for higher taxes, lower spending, trying to shift values and culture, and pursuing national reconciliation.  Yet those issues matter too, and perhaps most of all. 

[1] Walter Russell Mead, “The G-20 Reveals a Shifting World Order,” WSJ, 12 September 2023. 

[2] All the same, the post-war fantasies of Charles de Gaulle seem absurd.  Even French historians and policy-makers must be circumlocuting their way around calling him “not very realistic,” to use Stalin’s judgement. 

[3] “American-led” always makes me think of “first among equals,” a label claimed by Octavian. 

The Towering Inferno of Our Time.

Posted on by
Reply

            “The Towering Inferno” (dir. John Guillerman, 1974) was an epic disaster movie about a fire in a Los Angeles skyscraper.  It had an all-star cast and was nominated for eight Academy Awards.  More importantly, it was the highest grossing movie of the year and earned back fifteen times what it had cost to make.[1] 

            Fifty years on, it’s ripe for a remake that adapts the story to the issues of our own time. 

On the one hand, New York City has entered a doom spiral.  The Covid pandemic popularized working from home.  Now it’s hard to get people back in the office.  This imperils the business models of both property developers and big cities like San Francisco and New York.  Big cities depend on big and dense populations with a large share of high-income earners.  Dense crowding leads to small living units; small living units and busy professional lives push people out to restaurants, theaters, galleries, bars, concerts, and museums.  These service industries employ masses of people who can barely afford to live in the molten core of American urbanism.  Then there are the vast numbers employed in the construction industry and all its myriad up-stream suppliers.  Decades of continual growth have led banks to loan immense sums of money to developers.  If people don’t come back to the office, then this skyscraper of cards will crash. 

On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people want to come to America to escape their “shithole countries,” just as did the ancestors of all other Americans.  In the years since the the financial crisis of 2007-2009, a flood of humanity has been entering the United States across the southern border.  After relentlessly criticizing Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, Democrats have seen their own “Remain in Texas” policy fail.  Texas and, to a lesser extent Arizona, have been bussing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to major “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco, Washington, DC, and New York.  Now the counties surrounding New York City have been trying out a “Remain in Manhattan” policy.  New York mayor Eric Adams is loudly complaining that the city’s shelters and services are swamped; he has—so far unavailingly—demanded assistance from the federal government.  Agonizing policy choices for progressives abound.  Where to house these distressed people?  How to pay for housing and all the other services they need without gutting every other part of the city budget?  How to non-coercively assimilate them into American life?  What if they just keep coming?  How will New Yorkers respond?  

The story is set in the recent future.  It weaves together these two strands of problems in the story of “The Towering Inferno.”  The unstoppable influx of impoverished immigrants continually increased the demand for more cheap housing.  Developers have fallen so far behind in their payments on loans, that they have begun to default.  The banks are left owning increasing valueless collateral and lose all interest in maintaining the buildings. 

Developer Peter Rockman appears on the scene as a God-send.  Himself an immigrant from Ukraine, he proposed creating huge numbers of affordable housing units in the vacant floors of under-utilized office buildings.  Construction companies and banks began to see him as a lifeline.  His vision tempts the owners of one tower building into supporting his experiment.  Rockman has a darker side.  His real intention is to flood the towers with immigrants far greater in number than his permits allow, then to rack-rent the tenants.  He expects the impoverished tenants in his Tower of Babel to cause the remaining businesses to flee, permitting him to buy the building at a fire-sale price.  He backed up his appeal with corruption and black-mail to get the necessary permits to repurpose and reconstruct the buildings.  Tenants who complain soon encounter Mike Malik, Rockman’s terrifying Director of Tenant Welfare. 

Over the course of a few years, the planned apartments are sub-divided and open spaces are filled with hovels built of packing crate and palettes; rats scurry along the corridors piled with garbage; without air-conditioning in summer, the tenants have smashed holes in the windows; without heat in winter, the holes are plugged with rags or covered with boards; much of the wiring and electrical fixtures are stripped out; fires for light, heat, and cooking have scorched the floors, the plumbing has failed; criminals seize some of the apartments as bases for their businesses and to prey on the other tenants. 

            The tenants prove not to be the sheep Rockman expects.  They come from Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.  The story focuses on three of them: a Guatemalan woman fleeing with her children from a drunken and abusive husband who belongs to the MS-13 gang; a Senegalese veteran of ISIS who has lost his faith in “jihad”; and a young couple from India who have run away from looming arranged marriages.  All have hell-hounds on their heels: the MS-13 gunman, two ISIS scalp-hunters, and the elder brothers of the runaway couple. 

Rockman and the Mayor combine forces in an effort to restore their reputations.  An upper floor is transformed into an event-space, with several express elevators restored so that guests can bypass 80 floors of squalid nightmares.  To inaugurate the new venue, the Mayor will attend a gala celebration honoring the casts of some of the television shows set and filmed in New York.  Members of the casts of “Law and Order,” “Blue Bloods,” “Seinfeld,” and “Sex and the City” will attend.  Among the other dignitaries is the British Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Steven Martin-Short. 

Things go terribly wrong.  On the one hand, the Hell-hounds arrive in deadly pursuit of the migrants/fugitives.  Mayhem erupts in different parts of the vertical homeless encampment.  On the other hand, and as a result, fire sweeps through the middle floors on the night of the gala.  The staircases become chimneys. 

Who will live and who will die?  How will the city choose to help those in danger?  The second half of the movie focuses on the struggle for survival of the residents and top-floor guests, and on the heroic efforts of the FDNY. 

The firemen confront a nighttime re-run of the 9/11 Twin Towers disaster.  Blue-eyed men running up the steps toward death.  Swarms of helicopters land on the roof to evacuate the well-heeled, dodging around the news helicopters filming those waiting below in a macabre version of the Oscars’ red-carpet show.  “Look, there’s Tom Selleck!” 

In the fight for survival, the immigrants exhibit the determination and ingenuity that led them to break with their own pasts and gain entry to the United States.  In contrast, the Hell-hounds fall from their inability to abandon the “old ways,” to think anew and act anew. 

In a brief closing scene, New York City donates the burned-out hulk of the building to the Mohegan Tribe as a subsidiary of their reservation in Connecticut. 

[1] The Towering Inferno – Wikipedia