Tag Archives: U.S. politics

more Peter Turchin on Trump

Peter Turchin doesn’t really believe in grass-roots popular movements. Behind any apparent popular movement, he sees a “counter elite” competing for dominance over the current elite. In the present moment, this means the Trump movement vs. what I would call the center-right consensus of the last three decades or so.

The initial state of shock is now transforming into a more active phase, judging by a surge of recent mainstream media editorials and statements by various establishment figures who call for “mobilization,” “mass protest,” “national civic uprising,” and “revolution” (in my terms, counter-revolution). In a recent post on Racket News, Are We in a “Soft” Civil War?, Matt Taibbi provides an impressive sample of such calls to action. (In my view, we’ve been in a soft, that is, relatively non-violent, civil war since 2016. Now it is a revolution.) …

He then goes through the different ways the revolution could proceed: (1) assassination, (2) impeachment, (3) “sectional secession” – the example given is California refusing to follow federal orders, Trump sending in troops, and the governor mobilizing national guard, (4) a “color revolution” – the example given is CIA operatives Trump has fired organizing an apparent grass-roots movement, (5) military coup, (6) “the inertial scenario” which basically means Democrats trying to resist through traditional legislative and election politics, (7) “suppression by external Great Powers”, and (8) restoration by an internal faction (King Obama! okay, that is my example). He says #6 looks most likely but is not likely to be successful.

One can imagine combinations of these. If shadowy forces are plotting under #4, an apparent grass-roots movement can be combined with a not entirely free and fair election (hello, Ukraine and many other countries where the CIA has mucked about). You can imagine a not entirely free and fair election where the military steps in supposedly on the side of the constitution and announces resumption of the normal constitutional process in a year or two, which may or may not happen (hello, Thailand and many other countries).

Turchin says #7 is unlikely, but I wonder. No country is going to mount a full frontal military assault on the United States, I don’t think. But our federal government is deeply dysfunctional and incompetent, and while we may be able to bump along during relatively normal times we will not be able to respond competently to an unexpected emergency. If I were a competent enemy of the United States, I would mount a cyberattack or terrorist attack of some sort, cover my tracks, and frame some obvious public enemy (like Iran or China) for the crime. With an incompetent response, it might not take much to trigger a meltdown of systems like the financial system, power grid, food distribution system, etc. Even without a malign actor out there, it is doubtful our country could handle something like a major earthquake.

To be clear, I am hoping against hope that my country can muddle through the next 3-4 years without a major crisis it can’t handle.

the US “R&D ecosystem”

This article from “chinatalk.media” (which I know nothing about) explains how the US R&D pipeline has always been a partnership between universities, the private sector (including, in some cases, closely regulated monopolies like Bell Labs), and the government. It has been the envy of the world and emulated by others, including by China. Basically, the federal government funds basic research through universities that there is not a clear market for yet. In some cases, it creates a market through its procurement ability which incentivizes the private sector to take the risk of taking nascent scientific breakthroughs from the universities and bring them to market.

To better understand today’s landscape, we need to trace our steps back about 70 years and examine how the American research ecosystem was conceptualized. The original model positioned universities to conduct curiosity-driven research funded by the federal government, while American industry focused on transforming that research into applications.

There were certain industrial monopolies created by the government that also conducted basic research, which Alex can address more comprehensively. However, the overwhelming majority of basic research happened in academia — universities created as land-grant institutions or those existing before the war. This system served us remarkably well, as basic research developments from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s bore fruit 10, 20, 30, or 40 years later. The nature of basic research doesn’t necessarily have an immediate application, but applications may emerge years down the line.

Agencies like the National Institutes of Health fund more applied research on medicines and can point to tangible outcomes — specific drugs developed with NIH funding. The NSF, conversely, funds basic research that may not demonstrate tangible benefits for decades, as happened with neural networks.

What madman claiming to love our country would try to break this? He would have to be either extremely ignorant or a traitor to our country.

news coverage of protests in the U.S.

I’m still thinking about Charlie Stross’s concern about U.S. protestors being targeted. I don’t doubt that there was surveillance present at the recent protests, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the technology exists to track people. But the news coverage of the event was very muted here in the U.S. compared to what people might have seen abroad. The BBC headline was Anti-Trump protests held in cities across the US. But here in the U.S., many people I spoke to were not even aware they were happening. I happened to be aware because I am on a text list for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign supporters, which still seems to exist and get used by mainstream Democrats from time to time. (So if there is in fact a cross hairs, I am most likely already in it.) But anyway, I turned on the local news that day in my city, which is a big city and definitely one of the protests sites, and the local protest was not only not the lead story, it was never mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the news broadcast (which was much more local TV news than I normally subject myself to.) Sure enough, leading news outlets in the U.S. including the New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News seem to have intentionally minimized the event.

So either it was a small event not worthy of much coverage, or there was some censorship here. It was not a tiny event. In my city (Philadelphia), I know they closed off four blocks of a major downtown street, and I heard eyewitness accounts of people who were there. (I would have liked to be there but I can plead child care issues. Lack of child care is a pretty effective way to suppress political energy among working parents.) Anyway, this article from Fair.org, which is a left-leaning organization, offers some facts and figures:

  • 1400 cities
  • “At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.”

500,000 people spread over 1400 locations works out to an average of 400 per location. So say you had a few thousand at the larger protests. A few thousand people sounds like a lot, but spread over a few city blocks it is not exactly going to go un-noticed but it may not attract a huge amount of attention. The 2020 George Floyd protests in Philadelphia were estimated at 50,000 – 80,000 people, and those were impressive. I tend to think we may have spent a generation’s political energy on those, and it is questionable what we got. Besides more awareness of police violence, an important but narrow issue in my view in terms of the number of people affected, we possibly got some tangible reductions in the prison population, which is something.

The Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade crowd this year was estimated at 1 million people. That is a big, borderline dangerous crowd and gives a sense of how packed with people it is possible for the city streets to get.

Project 2025 Tracker

Anonymous parties have put together a Project 2025 Tracker. They pulled out and listed all the individual policy recommendations in the document, and are trying to track which are complete, in progress, or not started. As I write, they put the agenda at 42% complete.

I would break the recommendations down into three categories: (1) Christian/White Nationalism, (2) Homophobia, and (3) Rich and Powerful/Big Business Giveaways.

March 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.

Most hopeful story: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.

comparing MAGA to European right-wingers

This (paywalled) Financial Times article compares survey results in the World Values Survey by political party. What is really striking to me is that the U.S. right is off the scale compared to the German, French, or Italian “far right” parties we are hearing about in the news. I didn’t dig into all the details but if this is a survey of the public based on their stated party affiliations, it is possible the right-wing politicians in Europe are much farther right than their respective publics. It is also interesting that this result shows the German right as left of center, while the Australian, French and UK left are right of center. So I am taking all this with somewhat of a grain of salt without understanding all the details, but still it shows that survey responses of the U.S. public identifying with MAGA are way out there.

some policies to combat inequality

This article in the blog Urbanomics has some ideas on what can be done to combat rising inequality. The blog is India focused, but the suggestions are more or less general.

  • Increase minimum wage.
  • Increase labor’s bargaining power “through institutional (unions, workplace management councils, etc.) and regulatory measures. At some time in future, broad caps on the salary and compensation ratios across levels becoming a norm cannot be ruled out.”
  • Stop exempting gig and contract work from various laws and policies [things like not requiring the entity hiring them to provide health care and other benefits?]
  • Labour-intensive sectors should become the focus of industrial policy. Scarce resources should not be wasted on low-labour-intensity sectors like semiconductor fabrication or data centres… internships, apprentices, reduction in EPF and other costs, wage support for new entrants, industrial policy support through employment generation-linked incentives, etc. [this one is more in a developing country context I suppose]

All this seems…complicated…to me. But maybe these are politically feasible policies. Simple but maybe politically infeasible policies would be to just raise taxes on the rich and powerful and redistribute the proceeds to the masses, as cash, services directly provided by the government, or services indirectly subsidized by the government. In the U.S., perhaps taxes wouldn’t have to be raised as much as we think if we shifted away from some of the massive hidden subsidies we already have – low capital gains tax rates, the cap on social security payroll taxes, deduction of mortgage interest, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, gas taxes that support highways but not public transportation, and many others. All of this would be politically difficult, of course. But with the Democrats seemingly having become the party of no big ideas, perhaps there is not so much to lose if somebody were to start proposing some.

The Atlanta Fed’s “GDP Nowcast”

The Atlanta Fed has a spreadsheet model that tries to forecast the U.S. GDP growth rate in real time. Right now, it is showing a sudden, sharp contraction. When I see something like this in any model, I first check the math to see if something got broken. Second, I check the input data for anything missing or otherwise weird. Assuming the Atlanta Fed has a functioning procedure for these checks before it makes its results public, here are some other possible explanations.

First would be the sudden contraction in government spending and general economic anxiety caused by the amateur economic policy the current U.S. administration is implementing. But it’s hard to believe this would be so sudden, and if it were true you might expect to see it in the stock market. The stock market is in fact down about 5% over the last month, which is a lot, but not the kind of discontinuous collapse shown by the Atlanta Fed.

J.W. Mason, and economics professor, suggests it may be caused by a sudden surge of imports as companies try to beat the clock before tariffs hit. Net imports get subtracted from GDP, which I guess makes sense because they represent a flow of money out of the country in exchange for goods and services produced in other countries. He explains though that this could just mean the goods are stockpiled in warehouses to be distributed over the next few months, in which case GDP growth should just bounce back to trend.

There is another theory involving gold. This is the same source (Mason) quoting a report by Goldman Sachs.

most of the widening in the trade deficit since November has been driven by higher gold imports … as participants in the gold market sought to insure themselves against potential tariffs on gold. Although this may seem like a frontloading effect ahead of potential tariffs, these imports are for the most part … being shipped to the US on the off-chance that physical delivery of the gold is required,… Importantly, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) excludes most gold imports when calculating the imports component of GDP. ….

The same reasoning applies more generally to front-loading by retailers, wholesalers, and producers ahead of tariff increases. Because these developments are unrelated to US production, they should have little net effect on US GDP. In the case of non-gold goods, higher imports should be offset by higher inventories in the national accounts. In practice, it is possible that front-loading exerts a modest drag on reported GDP because imports… tend to be measured more accurately than inventories. We suspect this dynamic is playing out now to some extent… But because front-loading these imports now implies fewer imports later, we think the net effect on 2025 GDP growth should be small.

This is largely over my head, but again it suggests some short-term accounting effect rather than something going on in the real economy that would have an imminent impact on employment and prices.

federal courts vs. the executive branch

I wondered what happens when a federal judge issues a contempt order.

“Well, the court, a judge, has tools available to him or her,” Gertner said. “In the first instance, they can cite the parties in front of them for contempt. They can impose fines, of course. Since one of the parties arguably here is Elon Musk, it’s not clear that fines are going to make a particle of difference. There’s even the possibility of imprisoning someone until the order is followed…”

“All of these are obviously empty threats with respect to the defendants,” she said. “In this case, the marshals would have to enforce whatever orders the judge entered. The problem is that the Marshals Service is under the Department of Justice, and if Trump wanted to fully not comply, he could direct the Department of Justice not to comply.”

If a state judge issued a contempt order against me, a local police officer or county sheriff’s deputy or state police officer would show up at my door. At the federal level, this would be a U.S. Marshall apparently. But the U.S. Marshalls fall under the Department of Justice. If the President ordered the Attorney General not to comply with a court order, the Attorney General would have an awkward decision to make. Presumably, every agency is going to have a team of lawyers giving them advice on the potential consequences of various courses of action, and they are going to make their decisions. Even then, one wonders if the President could pardon someone (even himself) issued a federal contempt of court order. Or appeal to the Supreme Court, and then we find out if they are as corrupt as some of us suspect they are. At this point, the Constitution is done and the next steps would have to be mass civil action or a military coup. All these things seem unthinkable in the United States, but the trend seems to be toward increased thinkability.

January 2025 in Review

Well, January was a doozy. Here goes:

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.

Most hopeful story: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: AI agents – coming soon to a computer near you.