Stuff to Read

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At The Atlantic, Michael McFaul writes that Trump Is Demolishing Four Pillars of American Power (gift link). You may recognize McFaul as a big-shot foreign policy guy and academic who is a frequent guest on MSNBC.. The article begins:

In less than a year, President Donald Trump has drained many of the most important sources of American power. He is unwinding the country’s alliances, degrading its principles, walling off its economy, and subverting international institutions that serve its interests. The speed of the onslaught has made grasping all of its perils nearly impossible, especially as China and Russia pose a growing threat to the United States. But if you want to begin to see how much Trump has eroded America’s ability to win today’s great-power competition, consider the last one.

The United States won the Cold War for at least four major reasons: It built stronger partnerships than the Soviet Union did. It championed ideas about democracy and human rights that the world found more compelling than the Kremlin’s communism. It bolstered a global financial order that advanced American goals. And its open economy outperformed the Soviet Union’s closed one, allowing the U.S. to support a superior military.

Today America faces a different kind of Cold War, one in which China plays a bigger role than Russia. But these same four pillars will almost certainly determine the outcome. A prudent leader would reinforce them; Trump is bulldozing them.

McFaul elaborates from there. Worth reading.

Trump is in Asia right now. He’s supposed to have a summit with Xi Jinping this week. Xi wants to press Trump on U.S. policy toward Taiwan. If I were Taiwanese, I’d be terrified.

Speaking of why people should be terrified — Trump did not have a good day in Japan. He seems to have lost track of where he is. He was with Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, but he just kind of wandered off.

Read on Substack

I’m worried for Taiwan. Also in Asia, Trump spoke to U.S. troops stationed in Japan and went on and on about how he wants to send them into U.S. cities.

“We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled,” Trump said, while delivering a campaign rally-style speech to service members at the Yokosuka Naval Base. “And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities.”

“We’re not going to have people killed in our cities,” he continued. “And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”

Homicide rates had already dropped considerably in Chicago in the months before Trump sent in federal agents pretending to be troops. Whether Trump’s storm troopers are making any difference to the crime rate remains to be seen.

See also Josh Marshall, There Is No Democratic Future Without Supreme Court Reform (gift article)..

There is no future for civic democracy in this country without reforming the Supreme Court. Putting that more specifically, the only way to recover from Donald Trump’s rapid lunge into an authoritarian American future is a future point at which Democrats regain control of the federal government — a trifecta — and institute a series of laws which cut off the channels Trump has exploited to get us to this point. That doesn’t solve the problem of Trumpism. The core issue is that very large minority of Americans who support his style of autocratic government. But that cuts off many various paths Trump has used to build a presidential autocracy under the thin cover of law. 

One of those reforms, he says, is to ban partisan and racial gerrymandering. A future Democratic Congress could do that.  This was attempted in 2021, in fact, but the Massive Obstacle known as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stood in the way of letting Dems kill the filibuster rule. But even if such a bill were passed, John Roberts’s court could still gut it the way the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.

Meanwhile, Trump allies are telling him to declare one of his fake emergencies so he can (allegedly) take control of the midterm elections to make sure Dems lose. Thanks loads, Manchin and Sinema.

9 thoughts on “Stuff to Read”

    • "I’ve been trying to find some reliable news sources for what’s going on in Gaza. All US and Israeli media have to offer are reports by “embedded” reporters who collect information distributed exclusively by the far Right Israeli government and the IDF. You all will remember this reality tv show from the Iraq War, where reporters were only permitted if they came with US “minders” who fed them propaganda, which the embedded reporters then spoon-fed Americans. It was all a pack of lies.  It seems the ceasefire is mostly holding, but without anyone interviewing or even putting eyes on affected Palestinians and reporting information sourced solely from rabidly anti Palestinian sources I don’t think any of us know. But I hope it’s true. I’m just not willing to rely on Jared Kushner or Netanyahu to tell me what’s true. I’ll keep looking."

      https://heymistermix.com/p/right-wing-makes-everyone-less-safe

       

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  4. I found the article below fantastic and a good diagnosis of our current intellectual/psychological malady. It makes me understand why the wingers can just follow these story-lines, like murdering potential fishermen good/due process bad… vaporizing boats useful/international order useless, as a hallucination of reality based on an intellectual shift back to a pre-modern, medieval way of processing information. 

    If you read it, let me know if my quick analysis is sufficient. 

    Good read:

    https://thebaffler.com/salvos/we-used-to-read-things-in-this-country-mccormack

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    • This is a great article, thanks! I'm glad at least one nation on earth – China – still values literacy. I'm also glad I came of age before the smartphone.

      When I was earning a living in software, we were faced with choosing a new installer technology (the software that creates an installation package a customer would launch to install our product onto their pc).

      The choice came down to InstallShield – a product from the last century, and the new kid on the block, Advanced Installer. They are functionally the same, and work the same way. Each has a significant learning curve. The older InstallShield's documentation amounted to dozens and dozens of pages of dense, written text, with few illustrations and no videos. The new kid ably used images, videos, and as little text as possible to make the point. One was clearly Stone Age and the other from the Modern Era. We picked the new kid and never looked back.

      It drove home the point of how much mental work it used to be to assimilate a long form mass of text – whether it's technical documentation or James Joyce – and how much our brains can atrophy if we no longer have to engage with it.

      It has huge political ramifications, as the decline of newspapers / rise of simple-minded right wing idiocy illustrates. Chris Hedges has written a lot about this.

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      • Yep, that looks like a tome on the same subject. 

        At my town-job we use software that has zero text help docs, all videos. I hate it. I find that after fumbling though the help search and then scanning the videos, it is just worth the time to find a work-around or a manual solution instead of working through the videos which seem to be the illusion of documentation. 

        There is also the oft-cted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

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