BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-14 Th
Trump has inserted his S.A. & S.S. stormtroopers into Republican legislators' brains; Thomas More: "But for Wales?"; selling your soul to get into "þe room where it happens" never works; very...
Trump has inserted his S.A. & S.S. stormtroopers into Republican legislators' brains; Thomas More: "But for Wales?"; selling your soul to get into "þe room where it happens" never works; very briefly noted; & Daniel Matamala pushes back on þe whitewashing of Pinochet & þe “Chicago Boys”, Mark Gongloff rightly defends þe scientific process, Oliver Willis reminds us þt all Republicans who left þe party since the 1990s are still very bad guys very late to þe picnic, Ashly Frawley got but still needs therapy, & I briefly note…
MUST-READ: Strange Days Indeed:
Trump has inserted his S.A. & S.S. stormtroopers into Republican legislators' brains.
Adolf Hitler had his street mob, his S.A., and his S.S. to overthrow the constitution of Germany’s Weimar Republic—he had found his Hermann Göring, his Ernst Röhm, his Heinrich Himmler, his Reinhardt Heydrich, and had put them to work.
Donald Trump had not the energy or the ruthlessness to find and promote any such, perhaps because his lizard-brain was cunning enough to recognize that such men are very dangerous not least to their bosses.
So when Trump wanted to stage a coup he had no such weapons—no one to spirit Pence out of the Capitol, put Grassley in the chair, and then guide Grassley’s hand to bring down the gavel to disqualify electoral votes while the mob raged outside or inside the chamber.
And yet Trump did and does have his S.A. and his S.S.: They are inside the heads of nearly every single Republican legislator.
And that matters, a lot:
Seth Cotlar: ‘I'm sorry, but if I'm a freaking US Senator and I make calculations about how to vote based on whether the supporters of the leader of my party might kill me or my family, then I'd probably do some soul searching about the party I've chosen:
‘“Some of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a function of the same old perverse political incentives—elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump's second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family's safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn't change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can't do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right…”
[…]
‘In 5 years, Romney went from his party's POTUS nominee to a pariah, a self-described "turd in the punchbowl" in the Senate GOP. He spends $5000 A DAY to protect his family from the wrath of the fans of the guy who followed him as GOP POTUS candidate. What's happened to Romney is such an indictment of the pathologies of the GOP's political culture. Trump gives a rambling speech to the GOP Senate caucus in 2019, and when he leaves the room breaks out in laughter. And then almost no one dares criticize him even gently. These blustering, preening fools like Cruz or Cotton or Hawley who talk so tough on TV, and then cower like terrified toddlers before the supporters of a leader they know is an incompetent fool. Contrast Romney's plight with how most Democrats think about Obama or Hillary Clinton or heck, even John Kerry. It's not like they're beloved by all, but they don't lose sleep worrying about grassroots Democratic assassins…
McKay Coppins: Romney: A Reckoning <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTZXZF4K>
ONE VIDEO: But for Wales?…
ONE IMAGE: You Sell Your Soul to Get in þe Room Where It Happens…
…but after that you never get the chance to do anything that matters:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Angus Deaton: How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair: ‘A Nobel Prize–winning economist reflects on the dire consequences of libertarian economics…
Zeke Faux: my book NUMBER GO UP is out today: ‘The crypto boom—the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen…. By the end, I was in Cambodia investigating crypto-fueled human trafficking, and at SBF's Bahamas penthouse…. @eosnos says, "I, quite literally, couldn’t put it down—and I don’t even care about crypto."… From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined…
Noah Smith: The next phase of globalization is going to be awesome: ‘Electronics is the most important industry for both supply chains and globalization, because it’s complex, because it’s high-value, and because it’s light…. If you’re in electronics, Altasia seems like it’s clearly the place to be…. A second important piece… is heavy industry…. Whether or not countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam can compete in heavy industry will depend a lot on their industrial policy…
Economic History: Doug Jones: First farmers: ‘8.80 – 8.33 thousand years ago…. Agricultural populations… replace hunter-gatherers, even though they are probably worse fed and sicker on average. The DNA evidence shows that in Europe it’s mostly replacement we’re talking about, not just the spread of new technologies…
China: Brad Setser: Will China’s Economic Slump Be Contagious?: ‘SHousehold consumption… incredibly low… central government has essentially no debt…. The obvious response to a downturn is to use the fiscal capacity that the central government retains to directly help households…. China has shied away.… Folks at the top, President Xi included, just don’t believe in it…
Helen Thomas: The EV car crash is a warning for Europe’s industrial transition: ‘China is so far ahead in the electric vehicles market that its competitors are trailing in the dust…
Political Economy: Rana Foroohar: America’s New Right is moving beyond Reaganism: ‘Reagan summed up the Republican party mindset…. Markets, not politicians, knew best, and the more power the private sector had relative to the public one, the better…. Trustbusting could now become a more bipartisan issue…. That Republicans are now turning away from trickle down economics is something business should pay close attention to…
Neofascism: Just let the AI do it: ‘I’m glad that Romney is speaking up. Hell, I voted for Romney 1.0 as gov of MA. I also watched his transition from moderate, pro-choice, Republican to “self-deporting”, “so many moochers”, severe Conservative and now (I guess) back - all in the service of his own power. Not sure that he is exactly the paragon that is being portrayed everywhere. Zoomer Antimillenarian: “He stood up when it really, really counted, and he's kept it up for years…
The Murder of Democracy in Chile, 50 Years Later: ergopraxis: ‘Classical liberalism, the brand of liberalism where you equivocate between a regime that tortured schoolgirls for practice, raped political dissidents with dogs, and tortured and murdered tens of thousands, with a democratic government whose policies led to decreasing real wages…
Continuing Politics by Other Means: Daniel W. Drezner: America's Underground Grand Strategy: ‘Farrell and Newman make clear… many of the tools U.S. policymakers developed in response to 9/11 are the tools that Washington is now deploying against other great powers…. Slowly, and without ever really thinking through what it was doing, the United States transformed the subterranean networks that tied the world’s economy together into an underground empire, where it could listen in on the world’s conversations and isolate its enemies from the world economy…
NOTES & SubStack Posts:
An awful lot of people here trying to whitewash how bad and stupid the economic policies of Pinochet’s first decade were: There was no “economic miracle”. And to the extent that you claim that Chile’s post-1985 economic policy path could only have been produced by a murderous dictatorship, you are telling lies to cover up for a murderous tyranny. Saying that only Pinochet kept Chile from following the Venezuelan or Cuban road is a poor argument. Allende was, first and foremost, a democrat. Chavez and Castro were not so. And Venezuela had oil and Cuba had Russian aid to prop up the economy. Here Daniel provides some pushback:
This was really bizarre: author blows off referees asking him to consider other causes of wildfires than global warming, and then accuses his journal editor-and-refereeing process from keeping him from writing about how wildfires had other causes than global warming. And, of course, this loon is then lionized by the “sensible right”:
The good Republicans… became Democrats in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh took over. Some—Pete Domenici comes to mind—ran a con game as reasonable people who you could talk to in private and who only toed the Republican party line in public so they could keep being “in the room where it happens”. But it was actions that mattered. And the same applies here to Mitt Romney and company. Remember, as Romney is lionized this month, the soft bigotry of low expectations applies not juist in spades but in hearts, diamonds, clubs, and major arcana as well to Mitt Romney’s current position:
This is absolutely horrifying. Somebody badly needed therapy then—and, I would argue, needs therapy now:
Jones:
But then the Yamnaya came along with the triple technologies of lactose tolerance, riding horses and wheeled vehicles and Indo-European languages are spoken as a first language from Alaska to Bengal and as a second language everywhere.
Deaton,
I agree with everything except that the Libertarian" position is a misreading specifically of Smith. I think a more common route to that position is the odd utility function that maximizes income with no distribution weights GIVEN any arbitrary distribution of assets (although they would claim it is just the result of "non-coercion."