It’s Looking Like the 1930s

By Seth Cropsey

Thursday, November 09, 2023

 

With the Middle East primed for a conflagration, American policy-makers must recognize two realities. First, the United States is embroiled in a major Eurasian rimland war, one that must be fought and won to preserve American power. Second, the benefits of fighting forward — and fighting limited small wars rather than purely focusing on “the biggest threat” in Asia — are on full display in the Middle East today. The U.S. must stay the course in Europe and the Middle East to win the struggle for Eurasian mastery.

 

Russia, China, and Iran have forged an entente with clear resemblance to the Axis of the mid 20th century. These new revisionist powers share a number of strategic objectives with their historical forerunners. They chafe under the restrictions of an international system that refuses to grant authoritarian states the right to aggrandize themselves at the expense of smaller neighbors. They seek to dominate their regions to ensure their long-term economic control over the world around them, primarily for domestic purposes. And they espouse ideologies — Russian national fascism with its syncretic blend of racial hierarchy and Soviet nostalgia, Iranian Khomeinism with its universalist demands and antisemitism, Chinese totalitarianism with a cult of personality — that are inimical to liberalism, representative government, and prudent and balanced rule.

 

The revisionist powers have a series of unmistakable coordination problems, however. This is natural for actors with structurally similar but intellectually distinct ideologies and, in turn, an unbounded desire for power and expansion. Again, they resemble the 20th century’s revisionists, a coalition equally divided over fundamental strategic questions. Until the Nazi invasion of France, Italy strongly considered defecting from the Axis. Mussolini’s essential failure was his lack of recognition that the German partnership severely limited his freedom of action. Japan, despite having joined the Berlin Pact, looked with unease at German escalation against the Soviet Union. The Soviets, meanwhile, were squarely within the revisionist camp and joined the Allies only by virtue of necessity after the Nazis invaded the USSR. Otherwise, Stalin would have been content to let the Germans topple England while the Soviets dealt with Japan separately.

 

Of the three ideologies, only Iranian Khomeinism has legitimate universalist appeal, by virtue of its religious bent. Russian national fascism is too rooted in Soviet symbolism, mythologized Russian history, and Slavic-Aryan racial theories to attract long-term support beyond the Russkiy mir (the ideologically and geographically defined “Russian world”) and receives limited support within it. Chinese totalitarianism has yet to transcend the specter of Mao Zedong. Even if Xi Jinping is a committed Stalinist in practice, in principle he and his intellectual coterie grasp the need to articulate an alternative to Maoist or Stalinist communism, given the emptiness of post-1970s Marxism.

 

The result is that, while all three powers can be extraordinarily flexible in their choice of partners, Russia and China cannot but view each other with suspicion, since neither can articulate a framework that accommodates the other’s role. Both revert to discussion of “multipolarity” and “democracy,” by which they mean an international system that protects illiberalism and leaves will to power unchecked. This allows for tactical partnerships with Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and increasingly Pakistan and Brazil, for either legitimate ideological or cynical political reasons, along with growing coordination with one another and with Iran. But mutual suspicion remains paramount.

 

Far weaker than China economically and, at this point, militarily, Russia seeks to avoid vassal status even as it maintains a strong relationship with Beijing. Indeed, while Chinese electronics are essential to sustaining Russian economic and military capabilities — and while China undoubtedly would see Russian success in Ukraine as furthering its own objectives — Russia has resisted providing China with access to its territories in the High North and, equally critically, turned increasingly to North Korea and Iran for sustainment. Russia and China are not currently at odds in Central Asia, but at some point the vast resources compressed between Beijing and Moscow, combined with the proclivity of regional capitals to balance between poles, will spark friction. Moreover, it is very unlikely that Russia wants to play second fiddle to China. The grandiose Russian mission of supposedly saving civilization from Western decadence and Nazism already rings hollow. Serving as China’s decrepit gas station would be all the more humiliating.

 

The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, tacitly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine only for instrumental reasons and has been consistently circumspect in its approach to European affairs. The U.S. and Europe have signaled strongly enough that they support Ukrainian sovereignty and see Russia as a threat to convince China that unequivocal support for Russia would trigger a profound economic decoupling, with economic consequences at least as severe for China as for the West. A decoupling is probable, regardless of whether China moves against Taiwan. But the CCP must balance its desire to snap the American regional security system with the recognition that China is in the middle of an economic crisis, which is symptomatic of a more severe sociopolitical crisis stemming from low birth rates, a shrinking population, and a materialist-capitalist culture, embraced by urban Chinese, that generally eschews martial sacrifice despite the attempt by Xi Jinping Thought to inculcate an appetite for national struggle. Moreover, there is an obvious incentive in Beijing to weaken Russian cohesion. If Moscow understands that China’s goal is to make it an imperial vassal, then the CCP must play its hand with care. Vassal status requires that Russia be weak enough to accept manipulation and be psychologically broken or co-opted enough to pretend that subjugation is in fact power. While an opportunity for China to overturn the American security order may arise in the future, it does not exist at present and will come into view only if Russia is exhausted enough in Ukraine.

 

Historically, Iran and Russia have had friction over objectives in the Levant. Iran sees its Levantine expansion as a springboard to dominance of the ummah (the global Muslim community). Russia’s position in the Middle East, by contrast, is oriented strictly toward Europe. It could disrupt the U.S. alliance system and place high-value military assets in the region to stress NATO’s southern flank. Today, Iran is the most crucial of Russia’s partners, given its role in the sanctions-evasion pipeline and its provision of military technology to Moscow. Yet regardless of the outcome of the Ukraine war, Iran’s aggrandizement poses an obvious threat to Russian leverage over oil markets and to Moscow’s ability to dictate terms in its relationship with Tehran. And if Iran can dominate the Middle East and forge the ummah into a coherent political unit, it will have tools to disrupt and co-opt Russia’s 14 million Muslims, as well as Muslims in Central Asia.

 

Alliance coordination is difficult for democracies and dictatorships. But democracies have the essential advantage of open and intelligible political systems that mitigate fear and misperception, something that dictatorships lack by design. Russia, China, and Iran know that parceling out the spoils of America’s Eurasian position would not be enough to satisfy each power. Even if the revisionists were victorious, conflict among them would be guaranteed, meaning that the advantages the revisionists gain by coordination now would be offset by the dangers of supporting a potential near-future adversary.

 

***

 

This is relevant because of the demands that strategic sequencing place on foreign and defense policy. Great powers must, in some manner, prioritize among threats. Even the 20th-century U.S., industrial titan though it was, could not sustain with equal resources the European and Asian theaters of the Second World War. America faces three revisionists today. It can defeat all three if it acts in concert with its allies, but it cannot wage three high-intensity wars at once.

 

Russia’s assault on Ukraine and Iran’s developing assault on Israel, of which the Hamas massacres on October 7 were the probable opening move, are both gambits for regional power. Russia still seeks to absorb Ukraine (and along with it Moldova and Belarus), dominate the Caucasus, peel Turkey off from the Western camp, and take the Baltic states, thereby creating a political-economic bloc capable of challenging the West directly. Iran is waging a war of attrition against Israel that is meant to soak it in casualties and destroy its economy. By destroying the Jewish state’s political foundations and, concurrently, attacking U.S. installations throughout the Middle East, Iran hopes to gain Islamic control of Jerusalem and use it — and its victory over the U.S.–Israeli alliance — to attract all manner of Islamists to its banner, catapulting it to leadership of the Islamic world.

 

Counterfactuals are undeniably impossible to prove. Yet the reasonable observer of international events can compare the current situation with an alternative in which the U.S. did not support Ukraine’s struggle against Russia and Moscow overran Ukraine in a few months. Iran would have moved against Israel at some point. Although it is unknowable whether the barbarism of October 7 would have been replicated in another time line, the irreducible antagonism between the imperialist Iranian theocracy and the nationalist Jewish democracy made war inevitable.

 

Absent the current European war of its own making, the Russian military would still have free forces capable of expeditionary deployment, including missile-armed warships and modern attack submarines, strike aircraft, and mobile air defenses. It would also have an airborne force of four divisions and three brigades, along with several special-operations units able to deploy quickly to an adjacent theater. And Russia’s presence in Syria would remain robust. It is entirely conceivable that a Russia unconstrained by the Ukraine war would be capable of deploying strategically significant air and ground forces to the Levant and naval forces to the eastern Mediterranean in a manner akin to the 1973 Arab–Israeli War.

 

In 1973, the Soviets surged naval assets to the eastern Mediterranean, ultimately deploying nearly 100 warships and submarines to pressure the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Soviet and U.S. forces constantly probed each other, conducting an intense reconnaissance competition that both sides saw as a prelude to open warfare. Soviet operational and technical advisers supported Egyptian and Syrian forces throughout the war. Soviet commandos executed raids on Israeli territory to capture Israel’s Western-supplied military equipment. And Soviet pilots disguised as Egyptians or Syrians may well have flown combat missions, much as disguised Soviet pilots fought in Korea. Moreover, the Soviets seriously and credibly threatened to intervene against Israel, placing the Soviet Airborne Corps on high alert, embarking Soviet marines and transporting them to the eastern Mediterranean, and increasing the readiness of tactical air forces in the southern USSR. 

 

The point of the intervention would have been to rescue Egyptian forces from certain destruction. After the first cease-fire broke down, the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army and were just 60 miles from Cairo. The Soviets would not have accepted the military and political humiliation of a major regional ally. The United States’ response, putting U.S. nuclear forces at DEFCON 3, convinced the USSR of American resolve, defusing the crisis. But a Moscow more willing to take risks might well have sparked a hot war.

 

A similar move today, if Russia had the forces to make it, would have different objectives. Rather than trying to rescue an overextended ally, the Russians would seek a contest of strength, daring the U.S. to come to Israel’s aid in the face of Russian military power. Absent the damage the Ukraine war has caused, Russia could almost certainly put together a surface action group of several cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. Its Kilo-class submarines could deploy to the eastern Mediterranean. It could surge fighter and strike aircraft to positions in Syria, along with air defenses meant to prevent an Israeli first strike and make an American move against Syria prohibitively costly short of all-out war. Its airborne forces could be placed on high alert for rapid airlift into Syria as well, potentially menacing U.S. positions in Syria and Iraq. Wagner Group mercenaries working with Russian military intelligence could hammer American bases throughout the region. And all the while, one could expect a steady stream of Russian nuclear threats.

 

It is entirely unclear how this contest of strength would play out. Such a deployment would display the same Russian qualitative and logistical problems seen in Ukraine today. But in any case, the U.S. would be less combat-ready absent the Ukraine war, while Europe, currently divided over its response to the Middle East crisis, would speak with one voice against American intervention.

 

Today, Russian ground and airborne forces have been mauled in nearly two years of brutal combat through a marriage between Ukrainian skill and heroism and Western arms. Russia’s tactical air forces are badly damaged. Its strike aircraft are overwhelmingly dedicated to operations in Ukraine. Its navy is unable either to leave port or to transit from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And it has no spare air and missile defenses that it could rush to Syria to disrupt an Israeli or American offensive move.

 

The Middle Eastern crisis is likely to escalate, at minimum through an Iranian-planned, Hezbollah-executed rocket bombardment of Israeli infrastructure and population centers, and potentially through a ground incursion into the Golan Heights. Attacks on U.S. bases and warships have already begun and will continue. Yet however brutal this war becomes, the U.S. will not need to deal with a second Eurasian revisionist intervening militarily. Indeed, Russia’s only response to the current Middle Eastern crisis has been to deploy a handful of aircraft armed with hypersonic missiles to patrol the Black Sea, a move meant to spark hysterics in the Western commentariat, not to shift the military balance.

 

***

 

America’s adversaries can choose the time and place of their attacks on the U.S. security structure in the Eurasian rimland. But the U.S. also can manipulate the situation. By sustaining Ukraine, the U.S. has ground down Russian capabilities and thereby provided the U.S. far more strategic flexibility in the Middle East. Similarly, neutralizing Iranian capabilities in the coming months will make it far easier for the U.S. to sustain the Indo-Pacific balance in the coming years.

 

The Indo-Pacific balance is, of course, trending in the wrong direction — China is more powerful in the region now than at any point in history, making Chinese attempts to revise Indo-Pacific political arrangements more probable. Yet the idea that China can hurl a bolt from the blue is fanciful, given the sheer scale of the effort that would be needed to take Taiwan even if the U.S. did not intervene. China may pursue a phased strategy of pressure and disruption, such as increasingly deploying naval vessels to circumnavigate Taiwan, sending fighters and bombers around the island, and using merchant vessels like fishing trawlers to violate U.S. partners’ territory. But this would carry risks as well — it would erode People’s Liberation Army strategic and operational surprise. An all-out attack rather than a gray-zone campaign — which does not use military instruments but includes cyber, economic, and disinformation measures — likely would be identified weeks to months prior, even during a period of pressure. Regardless, then, an attentive United States can marshal its allies and mobilize for conflict. America will have far more of these allies, and far more economic potential to mobilize in a war, if it preserves a favorable balance in Europe and the Middle East.

 

The alternative is to husband resources only for the large war, a strategy the democracies pursued in the 1930s. British appeasement stemmed primarily from a fear of major war, but the French consistently convinced themselves that husbanding resources and biding time would ultimately put Paris in a better position against Berlin. The result was the fall of France and Hitler’s near-domination of Europe. The U.S. must take note today and hold the line throughout the Eurasian rimland.

C.A.A. On Vacation

The C.A.A. will be on vacation for two weeks. There may be sporadic posts during this time, however, and regular posting will resume on November 30th. 

What Time It Is

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 13, 2023

 

Six months ago, in honor of the senator’s entry into the Republican primary, I wrote a newsletter titled “How Tim Scott Wins.”

 

It wasn’t as embarrassing as it sounds. The subhead was “He doesn’t. Unless …”

 

The “unless” part had to do with the fact that Scott was well-funded and positioned to leverage the GOP electorate’s recurring interest in black candidates. Herman Cain and Ben Carson each led briefly in the polls in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and Scott was far more accomplished politically than either. His famous likability would wear well on the campaign trail, too.

 

If any challenger was set to have a “moment” in the race at Trump’s expense, the senator looked to be it. “It’s easy to imagine Scott creeping up in the polls on the strength of aggressive ad spending,” I wrote, “then capitalizing on the first primary debate to launch himself into contention.”

 

Oops.

 

It was the other South Carolinian, Nikki Haley, who transformed strong debates into a modest polling surge. As of this weekend, Scott sat at a feeble 2.5 percent in the national average and had no prospect of clawing back conservative voters from the rising Haley. On Sunday night, he surrendered to reality and suspended his campaign. 

 

He underperformed, but he was always a longshot and May’s newsletter recognized it. Re-reading it this morning, this line stood out: “Trump has built a base of fanatic messianic support on the right preaching that America is terrible and only he can save it. Scott, essentially, is arguing that America is wonderful and his ascension to the Senate in the first state to secede from the Union before the Civil War proves it.”

 

That was true and remained true throughout the campaign, making Tim Scott a weird match for his party at this moment. His frequently touted “sunny optimism” is overstated—the “shining city on the hill” message came with dark caveats—but he’s a throwback insofar as he seems to believe that the cure for what ails the country lies chiefly outside of government. Less economic regulation and more religious faith: That’s the Scott philosophy.

 

That message might have won him the nomination in 2008 or 2012. In 2024, it mainly served to communicate that the senator, to borrow the post-liberal lingo of the hour, doesn’t “know what time it is.”

 

Let’s talk about vermin.

 

***

 

The day before Tim “Mr. Sunshine” Scott dropped out of the primary, the runaway frontrunner in the race commemorated Veterans Day as one does, by promising to “root out” the subhumans who are weakening his country from within.

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within” is as succinct a summary of populist demagoguery as a human being can formulate. Along with the reference to “vermin,” it’s the “sort of language that has historically resulted in mass graves,” journalist Radley Balko wrote, correctly.

 

A few hours after posting it, Trump nonchalantly attended a UFC event with Kid Rock and Tucker Carlson in tow (again, as one does) and received a hero’s welcome.

 

Later the Washington Post asked his spokesman whether the statement didn’t sound a bit, well, Mussolini-ish. An indignant Steven Cheung called the question “ridiculous” and accused Trump-hating reporters of grasping at straws because, and I quote, “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” 

 

The problem of how seriously to take Trump has bedeviled his critics from the beginning of his political career, but in 2023 it has a new dimension. Judging by his own rhetoric, Trump’s become the most overtly fascist major-party candidate in American history, yet he’s trouncing respectable opponents like Tim Scott in the Republican primary and would likely defeat Biden if the election were held today. How can that be? Do American voters agree with the right about “what time it is”? (You wouldn’t know it from last week’s election result.) Or have they not realized yet what they’re getting themselves into?

 

Perhaps doomsayers like me are taking the “vermin” statement too seriously.

 

Trump is, after all, a buffoon and a notorious blowhard. His first term was spent chatting up all sorts of audacious plans that never took off, whether because he lost his nerve or was talked out of them by cooler heads. At various times he allegedly weighed withdrawing from NATO and from Afghanistan, firing Robert Mueller, shooting illegal immigrants in the legs as they approached the border, and installing Jeffrey Clark as attorney general to carry out his coup plot. None of it happened. Even the wall turned out to be mostly hype.

 

He also might not have any idea of the political provenance of the term “vermin.” Philip Bump remembers that Trump’s first ex-wife accused him of keeping a book of Hitler’s collected speeches by his bed, but ex-spouses say lots of things that aren’t true. I lean toward Jay Nordlinger’s view that his choice of phrase is probably more a coincidence—of sorts—than a deliberate reference to fascism’s glory days. Trump isn’t an ideologue so much as he is a personality type, and that personality type will invariably intuit its way to viewing enemies as “vermin” and “human scum.”

 

It’s not a personality type anyone should want in charge of a military, but I don’t think he’s making any sly historical references. A candidate willing to moderate on matters like abortion and entitlements for the sake of electability wouldn’t knowingly roll out Joseph Goebbels’ greatest hits in other subjects, would he?

 

It’s natural for those of us who fear we know “what time it is” to stare at the clock and rationalize why it can’t be accurate. (Or to scapegoat the media for not telling the time more accurately.) Trump doesn’t mean what he says! Even if he means it, he won’t try to act on it. Even if he tries to act on it, he’s too incompetent to pull it off. And even if he’s competent enough to pull it off, the courts will stop him.

 

A few weeks ago my colleague Sarah Isgur wondered on The Dispatch Podcast whether Trump staffing the Justice Department with authoritarian cronies won’t turn his second term into an elaborate, endless exercise in excuse-making. His inept post-liberal lawyers will draft all manner of dubious unlawful orders and get slapped down by one originalist judge after another, leaving the White House to whine impotently that they can’t get anything done because the courts won’t let them. They’ll be paralyzed legally by their own unconstitutional ambitions.

 

If that’s what happens, I’ll have been wrong in thinking that I know “what time it is.” Team Trump dutifully obeying judicial rulings amid lots of grumbling would be a better outcome than I expect. 

 

I don’t think I’m wrong, though.

 

***

 

There’s no way to know what the average Republican voter does and doesn’t know about the specifics of Trump’s more recent fascist ambitions. Presumably not much given the general disinterest about the primary.

 

But he’s doing his best to educate them.

 

On Monday The Atlantic’s David Graham published a long list of Trump’s most illiberal comments from the past few months. I’d already forgotten some of them; there are simply too many day-by-day to keep them all in mind. What’s remarkable isn’t just the volume, though, it’s how transparent Trump’s been in the thick of a contested primary about his plans to turn the power of government against his enemies.

 

That makes it easier to rationalize away the things he says as blowhard-ery, ironically. An average person engaged in something shameful will cover it up or dissemble about it. The fact that Trump speaks publicly with bravado about his malevolent designs has the effect of conditioning his audience into believing he must not mean it—or that there mustn’t be anything shameful about what he wants to do. If there were, he wouldn’t admit to it.

 

It’s always been a perverse strength of his that he schemes in plain sight. The fact that the coup plot of 2021 played out on social media, tweet by tweet, surely made it harder for some to recognize it as a coup plot and easier to see it as an earnest attempt to unrig a stolen election. The fact that he insists openly, even now, that he has a right to the classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago surely leads many to think there must be something to his argument. He wouldn’t be so brazenly defiant if he knew he had done wrong.

 

His transparency about his plans normalizes and minimizes them. We frogs boil slowly.

 

He’s been transparent in another way. As Dan Drezner notes, many of the news stories bubbling up lately about Team Trump’s hair-raising goals for a second term are quoting sources on the record, by name. Those sources mean business and they want voters to know that they mean business, enough so that they’re effectively signing their names to the project they’ve undertaken.

 

A New York Times story published on Saturday described their hope of building “huge camps” to house millions of illegal immigrants whom they intend to round up in a massive national crackdown. Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, gave an interview to the paper for the piece. A new Axios report describes a huge vetting effort to ensure that staffers in the next Trump government are “loyalists willing to stretch traditional boundaries” of government when their leader gives the order to do so. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is quoted in that one.

 

This is the essential difference between Trump 2016 and Trump 2024. His operation today is an actual political project staffed with post-liberal ideologues to a degree it simply wasn’t before.

 

Seven years ago, Trump was more of a celebrity phenomenon than an ideological one. He had his nationalist priorities—tariffs, NATO skepticism, and of course the wall—but he benefited enormously simply from being the “not Hillary” candidate on the ballot. He was still enough of a normie Republican to sign a massive tax cut into law in 2017 and bring figures like Larry Kudlow and John Bolton into his administration. His post-liberal brain trust didn’t extend much further than Steve Bannon and Miller.

 

He and everyone around him have been radicalized since then. Much of the radicalizing they did themselves, like when they concocted a dolchstosslegende about the “rigged election” of 2020 and then let the propaganda feedback loop in which they exist brainwash them into believing it. They were radicalized further by the drumbeat of indictments against Trump this year, which probably cinched the Republican primary for him. Both episodes taught them that personnel is power: He didn’t have the right people in place inside the government to carry out his coup or to obstruct the attempts to prosecute him and now he’s in all sorts of trouble.

 

In a second term, his plans will focus heavily on correcting that mistake—even on the federal bench, perhaps, to the extent he’s capable of making that happen. Total unaccountability requires the cooperation of the bureaucracy. Personnel is everything.

 

And because it is, that means many more people than Trump himself are now invested in carrying out his plans. Trump himself may be lazy, easily distracted, and persuadable by rational actors, but he’s building an organization of fascist apparatchiks that will make sure those who surround him in a second term will encourage his worst impulses instead of thwarting them.

 

All of those apparatchiks “know what time it is.” They’re being selected based on their ability to tell the proverbial time. Listen to Bannon.

You don’t need to take Trump seriously or literally if it makes you feel better not to do so, but take Bannon seriously. And Miller. And Kevin Roberts, and Jeffrey Clark. There are many, many stakeholders in the post-liberal project; Trump is their vehicle, and they intend to put him to good use.

 

So often we’re told with respect to Joe Biden that we’re not voting for a man, we’re voting for a retinue of more radical advisers who are pulling the strings in his name. With Trump, increasingly it seems we’ll end up with the same thing.

 

***

 

There are two ironies to the state of the race. One is that Trump’s most devout supporters and most devout critics have reached a consensus on “what time it is.”

The other is that Donald J. Trump, fascist avatar, is well positioned at the moment to be … the “normalcy candidate” in next year’s race.

 

I suspect that swing voters who momentarily prefer him to Joe Biden do so because they believe a Trump presidency will transport them back to 2019, not unlike the way many who preferred Biden to Trump in 2020 believed a Biden presidency would transport them back to 2015. If you don’t follow politics closely, your memories of Trump’s first term might consist of little more than “great economy, no wars, could do without the tweets.”

 

If he wins the election, it’ll be because voters preferred “Trump normalcy” to “Biden normalcy.” Only afterward will they find out the hard way that there’s no “Trump normalcy” to return to.

 

Consider what the first few months following the next election might look like if Trump wins. The GOP’s imminent plans to smash or hollow out various institutions would dominate news coverage; Trump would float dubious figures for key cabinet positions, then appoint them as “acting” secretaries if the Senate refused to confirm them. His first executive orders would be aggressive, to set a tone; they’d be challenged in court and Trump would lose on one or more, triggering a constitutional crisis if he opted to defy the ruling.

 

Massive protests would greet him. Mark Esper, his former defense secretary, was asked recently whether Trump might respond by invoking the Insurrection Act and mobilizing the military. He sketched this scenario:

 

I think if something like that were to happen right after an inauguration in January 2025, I guess, look, there would not be a civilian chain of command in place at that point in time, first of all, to push back. So there would probably be an acting secretary, he or she would then have to decide whether or not to implement that order. Otherwise, the military chain of command would be intact. Now look, there’s another option too. Most often, people go to the active duty, but there’s nothing that prevents the president from asking a governor, a friendly governor, to mobilize his national guard to assist as well.

 

What American troops would do once they’re ordered to suppress a protest is anyone’s guess. I suppose it depends on whether they know “what time it is.”

 

That’s what voters should expect, but certainly aren’t expecting at the moment, from the so-called “normalcy candidate” in the race.

 

Wherever it goes, I assume most Republican voters will go along with it. Whether or not they know that Trump has taken to describing his enemies as “vermin,” they’ve been conditioned over seven years to treat his whims on policy as acceptable right-wing dogma and to disregard any moral or civic critique of him as proof of liberal sympathies. (Which is why neither Ron DeSantis nor Nikki Haley will make an issue of his fitness for office, of course.) If Trump and his brownshirt advisers want to get rough with the “vermin,” forcing the right to take sides, there’s no doubt which side most will take.

 

Until then, it should be the collective task of those of us who “know what time it is” to make sure the electorate understands that it’s far later than they might think. We can’t stop anyone from supporting Trump, but we can make sure they do it with their eyes open. When this is over, don’t let anyone claim they didn’t know what they were voting for.

Everything You Need to Know about Hamas’s Hospital Operations

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

 

What would you like Israel to do about the Hamas operations under the Al-Shifa hospital complex and other hospitals in the Gaza Strip?

 

A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and its equipment to that spot.

 

The decision before Israel is to either attack the Hamas targets underneath hospitals while attempting to avoid civilian casualties, or to leave the Hamas operations intact. Attack, and you run the risk of higher Palestinian civilian casualties, even greater outrage on the world stage, and even more propaganda victories for Hamas, painting the Israelis as cruel monsters. Hold back, and Hamas gets to keep more of its men and arms safely in place to fight another day and plot more massacres.

 

For those who wonder if Hamas really does operate underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, here’s an account from Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, back in 2008:

 

At Shifa Hospital on Monday, armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls. Asked their function, they said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.

 

In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late twenties asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head. A bit of brain emerged on the other side of his skull.

 

Hajoj, like five others who were killed at the hospital in this way in the previous 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges, and when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

 

Another account from El-Khodary in 2009 described a young Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter demanding he be treated first, ahead of civilians, even if their injuries were more severe:

 

A car arrived with more patients. One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.

 

“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors.

 

He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.

 

“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”

 

A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.

 

“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.

 

“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”

 

Like everything else in the Gaza Strip, it appears that the hospital’s operations were intertwined with Hamas — a deliberate strategic choice to make the line between military operations and innocent civilians as blurry as possible.

 

Here is the account from CNN’s Nic Robertson, embedded with the IDF as it investigated another hospital in the northern part of Gaza city, the Al-Rantisi children’s hospital:

 

The Israeli military’s focus on hospitals in Gaza is growing more intense with a spokesperson inviting news media to visit a medical center for children on Monday, where he alleged parts of the basement had been a Hamas “command and control center” and may have been used to hold hostages.

 

A CNN team embedded with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and was shown guns and explosives in one room located beneath Al-Rantisi children’s hospital on Monday, which IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari termed as an “armory.”

 

He also pointed to a chair with a rope next to it and a piece of women’s clothing, which he said would be tested for DNA, and a makeshift toilet.

 

The implication is that this is one of the spots where Israeli and/or international hostages were being held. Separately, the IDF tweeted, “Beneath the Rantisi Hospital in Gaza, IDF forces found a room where Israeli hostages are believed to have been held. The calendar found in the room marked the days since October 7 Massacre with the title “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’ name for their horrific attack on Israel.”

 

If you want the IDF version of the footage, you can find it here; Hagari points to the captured explosives, vests with explosives for suicide attacks, hand grenades, Kalashnikov-style rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades.

 

“People shooting RPGs from hospitals! This is Hamas! Firing RPGs from hospitals!  The world has to understand who Israel is fighting against!” Hagari fumes.

 

Hamas still holds about 240 hostages, including nine Americans. While the exact number is not known, it is believed to have grown by one, because one hostage, a woman who was nine months pregnant, is believed to have given birth in captivity. In the footage with Hagari, there is a baby bottle near the chair in the basement.

 

Back to CNN’s report:

 

CNN was shown a shaft, about 200 meters away from Al-Rantisi, which Hagari claimed was located next to a Hamas commander’s house and also a school.

 

Wires leading into the shaft provided power to the tunnel from solar panels fixed onto the roof of the Hamas commander’s house, he also said.

 

“We [put] a robot inside the tunnel and the robot saw a massive door, a door that is in the direction of the hospital,” Hagari said.

 

In Robertson’s report, he kneels by the four rather old-looking, likely Kalashnikov-style rifles lined up on the floor and notes, “These guns alone have potentially huge implications for Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s apparent push to take control of them. The International Committee for the Red Cross say that hospitals are given special protection under international humanitarian law during a time of war. But if militants store weapons there, or use them as a base of fire, then that protection falls away.”

 

Hagari and the IDF forces also showcased a motorcycle found in the basement, with a bullet hole in it, contending it is one of the motorcycles used in the October 7 massacre.

 

By the way, I know it’s de rigueur to bash CNN in conservative circles, but let’s acknowledge that Robertson is sticking his neck out by reporting from an active war zone, with the IDF and Hamas fighting just down the street, letting us see the war-torn landscape and inside the hospital. Robertson agreed to IDF rules to not show the faces of Israeli soldiers or any sensitive military equipment. CNN says the IDF did not have any editorial control over what Robertson and his camera crew reported. Much like Clarissa Ward’s excellent reporting from the ground in Afghanistan and Ukraine, this is what CNN does best. CNN deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, but when there’s a foreign crisis going on somewhere else in the world, CNN brings out its A-game.

 

Have you ever tried to do something mildly dangerous — standing on a high ladder, putting up the Christmas lights on your roof, or something like that — and your spouse tells you, “Be careful”? As if you were not being careful already, and needed to be reminded of the risks that you’re extremely aware of, because you’re the one actually up there and trying not to fall?

 

That’s more or less President Biden’s message to Israel right now:

 

Q: The hospitals in Gaza — have you expressed any specific concerns to Israel on that, sir?

 

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know I have not been reluctant in expressing my concerns what’s going on. And it is my hope and expectation that there will be less intrusive action relative to the hospital. We’re in contact, and we’re — with — with the Israelis.

 

Also, there is an effort to take this pause to deal the release of prisoners, and that’s being negotiated as well with — the Qataris are engaged and – So, I remain somewhat hopeful. But the hospital must be protected.

 

Hey, that’s a hospital, fellas! Be less intrusive and more careful! Gee, thanks, Mr. President. What would we ever do without you?

 

By contrast, let’s note the unusual moral clarity from U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller yesterday, observing that if Hamas did not make the deliberate choice to hide under hospitals, no one would be in this grim situation:

 

Number one, you heard Jake Sullivan on TV yesterday say that we don’t want to see hospitals be the subject of crossfire. We want to see the civilians who are sheltering in hospitals, the civilians who are being treated in hospitals, including babies in hospitals, be protected. Civilians are — hospitals are legitimate civilian infrastructure; they should be protected. At the same time, I would say Hamas continues to use hospitals as locations for its command posts. So this is — we talk about difficult issues; this is a very difficult issue.

 

We don’t want to see civilians caught in the crossfire. We would love to see Hamas vacate the hospitals that it’s using command posts immediately. We would love to see all the people that are calling for Israel to take steps to protect hospitals call for Hamas to vacate the hospitals, and stop using civilians as human shields. We would love to see Hamas take some of the fuel reserves it’s sitting on and use that to supply hospitals in northern Gaza. We would love to see Hamas have taken the fuel that Israel offered it yesterday — that they declined — for use at al‑Shifa Hospital. So, it’s a very difficult situation. And I would say, as a principle ––I’ll just restate what I said at the top — we do not want to see civilians caught in the crossfire.

 

Here are Sullivan’s comments on Face the Nation that Miller referred to:

 

JAKE SULLIVAN: Well, Margaret, without getting into intelligence information, we can just look at the open-source reporting that Hamas is using hospitals, as it uses many other civilian facilities, for command and control, for weapons storage, to house its fighters. And this is a violation of the laws of war.

 

That being said, Margaret, the United States does not want to see firefights in hospitals, where innocent people, patients receiving medical care are caught in the crossfire. And we’ve had active consultations with the Israeli Defense Forces on this.

 

Does Sullivan think the IDF wants to have a firefight in a hospital?

Mike Johnson Has a Kevin McCarthy Problem

National Review Online

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

 

The speaker of the House is supporting a continuing resolution to fund the government at current spending levels for a few months. Some Republicans oppose the continuing resolution. With only a handful of Republican votes to spare, the speaker might have to rely on Democratic votes to pass the continuing resolution and avoid a government shutdown.

 

No, this editorial isn’t from September. Speaker Mike Johnson is already finding himself in roughly the same position Kevin McCarthy was in.

 

Congress must pass a funding bill by the end of this week, or else the government will shut down. The House was not working most of last week, and over the weekend, Johnson introduced his idea for a “laddered” continuing resolution. Four of the twelve appropriations bills would be funded at current levels through January 19; the other eight would be funded through February 2.

 

Johnson says this approach is beneficial to fiscal conservatives because it prevents the oft-practiced yet ignominious congressional tradition of passing massive omnibus spending bills around Christmastime when members just want to go home and aren’t paying attention to what they’re voting for. But enough GOP House members have already said they would not support Johnson’s proposal to sink it. They oppose it because it doesn’t include spending cuts.

 

So if Johnson wants to pass his laddered CR, he will need to rely on Democratic votes in the House. This was the grievous sin that supposedly necessitated Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the speakership a little over a month ago.

 

Clearly, there were other issues at play, including McCarthy’s overall relationship with the conference, which is very different from Johnson’s, and the apparently unquenchable desire among a handful of GOP members for attention. And Johnson has not yet passed the CR with Democratic votes, and hypothetically could change course.

 

But reality hasn’t changed since McCarthy was speaker: Republicans have a slim majority in the House, and Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate and control the White House. Large spending cuts aren’t politically possible. Government shutdowns aren’t effective ways to enact spending reforms and have failed every time they’ve been deployed for that goal. Republicans don’t benefit politically from shutdowns, either.

 

Congress should do its job and pass the twelve appropriations bills like the budget process it created demands. Congress should also pass spending cuts to get the deficit under control. But neither of those things is going to happen this week. Congress isn’t going to turn around decades of fiscal negligence by Friday, and nobody has offered a serious counterproposal that would do so.

 

Getting the CR’s timing away from the holidays is a tiny victory for fiscal conservatives, but we don’t see the prospect of anything bigger coming from this round of negotiations. Republicans should pass a CR this week to avoid a government shutdown and live to fight for spending cuts in a few months.

 

In the intervening time, Johnson should assemble a conservative budget proposal that outlines what should be cut and how. Republicans should communicate to voters why the current size of the deficit is a problem, how the deficit contributes to inflation, and why higher interest rates are bad for taxpayers. Republicans could include authorization for a bipartisan commission to study the debt and propose long-term solutions, a proposal Johnson has said he supports.

 

Undoing the government’s spending problem is going to take time, and it will require bipartisan buy-in. That means fiscal conservatives must think beyond the current spending window, and they must not blow up House leadership for doing what is, for the time being, simply a reflection of political reality.

If Biden Doesn’t Have the ‘Capacity’ to Do the Job, He Shouldn’t

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, November 13, 2023

 

In Politico, Jonathan Martin has authored a long feature titled “Here’s How Biden Can Turn It Around,” which, before it gets into the nitty-gritty of our president’s present political predicament, contains this remarkable passage:

 

2024 will be an extraordinary election, and it demands extraordinary measures.

 

That’s in part for reasons Biden refuses to accept: his capacity to do the job. The oldest president in history when he first took the oath, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents. He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press. Biden’s bid will give new meaning to a Rose Garden campaign, and it requires accommodation to that unavoidable fact of life.

 

I must stop Martin right there. This is not “extraordinary”; it is disqualifying. If, as Martin proposes twice in the space of a single paragraph, Joe Biden lacks the “capacity to do the job” in a manner that allows him to “govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents,” then he cannot be the president of the United States. As is his wont, Martin is more focused on the “campaign” part of the equation, but, relative to the “govern” part, that doesn’t matter. If what Martin describes is true — and judging by what we can all see with our own eyes, it clearly is — then the question before us is not whether Joe Biden can win a second term, but how long it will take before he triggers a constitutional crisis.

 

Martin writes of Biden: “He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press.” I would invite you to read that line again: “His staff doesn’t trust him to even try.” In our system of government, the flow of power cannot be configured that way around. Joe Biden is the president of the United States; Joe Biden’s staff works for him. If, because Joe Biden “does not have the capacity” to be president, Joe Biden’s staff is in charge of Joe Biden, then Joe Biden is not the president of the United States, and we have a foundational problem of democratic accountability. Were Biden to win again, the considerable powers laid out in Article II would be granted to Joe Biden, not to his staff. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would take the oath of office. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would be expected to sign or veto legislation, issue pardons, and nominate officers and judges. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would enjoy the position as sole commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. In our partisan era, it can be tempting to think that control of the White House flits between “Republicans” and “Democrats.” But it does not. It moves between people. If, indeed, Joe Biden cannot handle the job, then he is ineligible to be among those people.

 

As a practical matter, it is difficult to guarantee this arrangement when a president who is unable to perform his duties is already in office. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a terrible stroke and, instead of resigning, encouraged his wife, Edith, to usurp both the will of the voters and the Constitution’s separation of powers and become acting president for more than a year. The White House website describes this as if it’s no big deal: “After the President suffered a severe stroke,” its page on Edith Wilson records, “she pre-screened all matters of state, functionally running the Executive branch of government for the remainder of Wilson’s second term.” PBS, by contrast, makes clear what actually happened: “Protective of both her husband’s reputation and power,” the outlet relates, “Edith shielded Woodrow from interlopers and embarked on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilson’s staff, the Cabinet and the Congress.” Were Joe Biden to be so afflicted, it would be tough to prevent a repeat. But that is a wholly separate question from whether Americans ought to reelect the man for another term. When Martin describes “how Biden can turn it around,” he is not addressing the remaining 14 months of Biden’s first term, but outlining how Biden can win reelection and remain president for the next five years, two months, and seven days.

 

Stop and look at those numbers: Five years, two months, and seven days. That’s 1,895 days. It’s 62 months. It’s 270 weeks. It’s 45,480 hours, or 2,728,800 minutes, or 163,728,000 seconds. If Joe Biden is not trusted by his staff now, how do we think things are going to be as those years, months, weeks, days, minutes, and seconds count down? What sort of pieces will be written in Politico two years from now, in November 2025? How will Biden be described in 2027? What level of autonomy and drive can we expect from him in 2028? If it wishes to, the American public can return Joe Biden to office in November 2024. He ought not to be asking it to do so. Jonathan Martin proposes that, to be successful, Biden’s campaign must “accommodate” the president’s enfeebled state, but he never quite follows that conceit through to its logical conclusion, which is that if Biden’s campaign is too much for the man, then so, quite obviously, is the presidency. Unencumbered by the professional responsibility to ignore what sits directly in front of us, the rest of us should refuse to make the same mistake. The demand that Joe Biden is now making of the American citizenry is not reasonable, and there is no good cause for any of us to pretend otherwise.

Joe Biden Has Gotten Terrible Advice

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 06, 2023

 

The level of anxiety settling over the Democratic political landscape could be measured in the frenetic reaction to the weekend’s polls from within quarters friendly toward the Biden White House.

 

Sure, the New York Times confessed, the Siena College survey the Times sponsored finds Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by a healthy margin in five of the six swing states it covered. But a supplemental analysis elsewhere in the paper argued that, while Trump’s criminal indictments have yet to undermine his political position, “around 6 percent of voters” in those six swing states said that “if the former president is convicted and sentenced . . . they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden.”

 

Biden’s weakness among young voters in particular today is unlikely to translate into affirmative support for Trump next year, writes Times analyst David Leonhardt. Biden’s age may be a political disadvantage, but Trump’s own advanced years may neutralize the problem in voters’ eyes. And there’s always “the Roe factor,” which Democrats expect will convince their party’s likeliest voters to get over their misgivings about Biden. But the Times survey suggests that a contest between dueling personalities or one that is dominated by divisive social issues is one Biden will lose. Across all six states, voters, by two-to-one margins, said their vote would be determined by “economic issues” like “jobs, taxes, or the cost of living” rather “societal issues.”

 

A CBS News/YouGov poll of likely voters published Sunday cements the impression that Biden’s troubles are rooted in Democrats’ policy preferences and cannot be swiftly remedied. Whereas only 18 percent of respondents said a second term for Biden would leave them “financially better off,” 45 percent said the same of Trump. Just 31 percent told pollsters a Biden victory would “increase peace and stability” overseas whereas 47 percent said the same about a second term for Trump. Voters dealt Democrats a gut punch when a near-majority (49 percent) told YouGov pollsters that Trump would be more likely to preside over a colorblind administration than Biden.

 

All told, it’s not hard to see why 51 percent of voters in CBS’s poll said they’d back Trump in November 2024 versus Biden’s 48 percent. But not to worry, said CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes in relating the alleged thinking among Biden operatives. “They insist that this is not alarming,” she observed. “They said that former president Obama was trailing in some polls one year out from his own reelection day as well, and things turned out just fine.”

 

However brave a face they try to put on in their public communications, it’s a safe bet that Biden staffers do find these dire poll numbers “alarming.” But it is their mess: Biden wouldn’t be in this position if he hadn’t let his closest confidants talk him into capitalizing on the Trumpified GOP’s surprising weaknesses in the most imprudent ways.

 

It’s certainly possible that Biden never meant a word of it when he described himself as a “transition candidate” and promised his presidency would serve as a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. It’s not inconceivable that Biden’s political team saw a middling talent like Kamala Harris not as insurance against an attempt to usher the president off the political stage but as a worthy successor. But if Biden’s allies were engaged in a confidence game, it sure fooled its marks. “It is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president,” Politico declared in 2019. Indeed, the sense that Biden would be a one-term caretaker president was reinforced by the 2020 election results, in which voters extracted Trump from the White House with surgical precision while leaving much of the GOP not just intact but stronger. Biden’s progressive critics spent the rest of 2020 bemoaning a dreadful stalemate that would compel him to govern like the moderate he pretended to be.

 

But when Republican candidates lost both Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early 2021, the GOP’s weaknesses were finally revealed to Biden’s coterie of flatterers. With the Congress now in Democratic hands, Biden took a languid meeting (“I could have gone another two hours,” Biden reportedly told an aide) with a group of high-profile historians who reportedly urged the new president to reach for the stars. Biden was said to be receptive. As Axios’s Mike Allen observed of Biden’s response to Doris Kearns Goodwins’s probing solicitations, “I’m no FDR, but. . . .”

 

Biden didn’t govern in quite the Rooseveltian or Johnsonite ways his admirers may have hoped. Worse, he governed like Joe Biden. The president sought and secured a nearly $2 trillion “Covid-relief plan” that represented the “biggest investment” in Democratic social priorities since World War II. He pursued another $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan designed to shore up “racial justice,” the “care economy,” “learning environments,” “adult literacy,” and “labor protections.” And he tried for another $3.5 trillion comprehensive progressive-social-engineering bill retailed under the “Build Back Better” banner. He managed to convince his fellow Democrats to pass only some of the spending that some intrepid analysts warned, correctly, would have an inflationary effect. But Biden’s allies wanted the president to go big, and big — for good or ill — is exactly what they got.

 

Biden entered office convinced by the activist class of the need to “heal the damage” the Trump administration had done to America’s self-conception with his tough border policies, but the president was persuaded to stay this rocky course by the ideologues in his orbit. The internal arguments over how to police the border swiftly evolved into arguments over how to house and provide for new arrivals, and the voices that argued for tougher policies toward asylum seekers were shouted down. Biden has subsequently presided over what Customs and Border Protection figures suggest is the worst border crisis in American history.

 

Biden took the oath of office determined to end American involvement in Afghanistan, and he did so in the most shambolic way imaginable. But the president’s instinct to play peacemaker also led Biden to ease sanctions targeting Russian and Iranian interests in his first year. Biden rewarded Putin’s aggressive posturing on Ukraine’s borders in 2021 with a face-to-face summit — a gesture the Kremlin reciprocated by inaugurating the worst land war in Europe since 1945 just months later. The Iran-backed October 7 massacre of Israelis was planned to coincide with Passover, the Jerusalem Post reported this week. But Israeli interrogations of captured Hamas terrorists indicate that the raid might have been “delayed due to informal negotiations with the United States which led to $6 billion being freed up for Iran in September.”

 

In 2022, when terrible candidate selection led the GOP to sacrifice an election year whose fundamentals were favorable to it, Biden once again internalized a variety of erroneous conclusions about the political environment. “His advisers sound almost giddy, using words like ‘miracle’ and ‘biblical’ to describe the election,” Times reporter Peter Baker related. One Biden advisor “called the president ‘beyond confident’ and compared the midterm victory to somehow managing to escape the slaughter of the Battle of Little Bighorn.” Biden’s team went to work mapping out “what a 2024 campaign would look like,” mistaking the bullet Democrats had somehow dodged for a demonstration of the party’s dexterity.

 

Maybe Biden was talked out of being someone he is not. Maybe his advisors merely indulged Biden’s instincts. Either way, the president did not govern like a placeholder president with no discernable mandate. He shot for the moon. The results of his ambition are a world on fire, an economy defined by unacceptably high consumer costs, and a pervasive sense of insecurity among those who walk America’s streets.

 

All this hubris now haunts the president’s party. Today, Biden is staring down the barrel of a historic humiliation — the prospect of a loss to a one-term president who left office in disgrace and may be forced to campaign for the White House again with a felony conviction to his name. By all accounts, the president has been privy to a lot of bad advice. If the idea that Trump’s unsuitability will save this White House from a legacy-staining rebuke has any purchase with Biden, we must conclude that Biden is still in the market for more of the same.

Jacobins, Y’all

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 13, 2023

 

WACO, Texas—Apostle Claver Kamau-Imani, as he prefers to be known, gives every indication of being the real deal. He is a Christian activist who spent years working with addicts and the homeless in Houston, and his is one of the few black faces you will see here at the first big confab of the Texas Nationalist Movement, a group that is institutionally committed to seeking the independence of Texas as a sovereign republic apart from the United States—Texit, as they call it.

 

Beyond the core of Texit true believers, it’s mostly just MAGA in Western wear from Cavender’s and Boot Barn, the detritus of various suburban Tea Party groups and Trumpist organizations and QAnon cultists that have moved on to the next obsession. Weirdly enough, surprisingly few of them are Texans of any meaningful tenure—a fair number of them are Californians radicalized by COVID-19 lockdowns and tall tales of stolen elections, people who arrived in the Promised Land about two days ago. But Apostle Claver Kamau-Imani is not one of these—he is a son of Beaumont and a fifth-generation Texan, and while he makes no apologies for his Christianity or the generally Christian character of the movement he represents, he is working hard to be inclusive, emphasizing that Texit welcomes Muslims, Sikhs, and all people of good faith. 

 

“Not everybody is going to be a tongue-talking, cast-out-a-demon-in-a-second Pentecostal,” he says. Truth be told, he seems to be the only one in the room, which is pretty much what you’re expecting it to be: overwhelmingly white, old, middle-to-low income, lots of disabilities. But the attendees have good manners: Almost all of the hat-wearing men remove their hats for the apostle’s invocation, and this is a room with some people who are pretty serious about hats. The news of the day being what it is, the apostle begins with a prayer for the people of Israel, asking God’s blessings on the nation.

 

“Texans love Israel,” he says.

 

“Nooooooo!” screams one member of the audience. 

 

“We love the Jewish people.” 

 

“Noooooo!” comes the same insistent voice. 

 

The organizers look down intently at their Tony Lama boots, as though inspecting them for scuffs, and everybody else pretty much glances furtively around sideways like somebody who had the chorizo breakfast tacos just let one rip in church—which is, in a sense, what had just happened. Where would radical politics be without emotional flatulence? The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) has been making a pretty obvious effort to cut down on its kook factor, but the truth remains—they’re kooks. Some of them are very smart and well-intentioned and good-hearted kooks—and most of them are unfailingly polite kooks—but they are kooks nonetheless. I can’t be the only person to whom it has occurred that the TNM motto could be—with eyes on the Red River to the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south—“from the river to the sea.” These kooks are mostly not Jew-hating kooks, of course, but the vocal presence of at least a smattering of Jew-hating kooks is not exactly a big surprise.

 

Some of these kooks are kooks in denial. 

 

***

 

“We’re not the tinfoil-hat people anymore,” proclaims Daphne Armour, who rejoices in the title “chief of staff” of the Texas Nationalist Movement. “Now, we’re the belle of the ball. People who wouldn’t talk to us three years ago are talking to us now. We’re the mainstream.” A fellow in overalls and a “Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President” cap approves. Here in Waco (because of course it is Waco) at Bare Arms Brewing—where you can sip house-made beer and choose from a menu of smoked mac ‘n’ cheese, smoked beer cheese nachos, smoked jouled BBQ sandwiches, smoked tacos, smoked chicken wings, and smoked smores for dessert—the TNM folks might very well constitute the mainstream, and Daphne Armour, bright and gregarious, seems right at home. 

 

But does she know about the black pope and what he’s up to these days? 

 

Because Graham Moore is ready to talk about the black pope. The black pope—the nickname sometimes given to the superior general of the Society of Jesus, i.e., the top Jesuit, is behind a lot of things, apparently. “He resides in Venezuela, you know,” Moore tells me, as though this explains everything. The current Jesuit superior general in fact lives in Rome, as you would expect, but it wouldn’t be terribly weird for him to live in Venezuela—he is Venezuelan, he was born in Venezuela, and previously he was the head of the Jesuits in Venezuela. You get a lot of little factless factoids like this from the conspiracy-minded.

 

Moore goes on to inform me that every modern prime minister of the United Kingdom has been a member of the Fabian Society—well, no, he backtracks, but every Labour prime minister, “except for the one who was Jewish.” (The U.K. has had only one Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory.) But the factless factoids keep rolling: The black pope is behind the refugee charity Care4Calais, too, which is part of a plot to flood parts of England judged “too English” by the (ubiquitous!) “Marxists” with refugees and illegal immigrants. Though the Jesuits are generally very supportive of refugees and immigrants, Care4Calais has nothing to do with the Society of Jesus; far from a black-pope project, the organization was founded by Clare Moseley, a British accountant who had a bad run at the group, her leadership marked by allegations of sexual and financial impropriety—shenanigans, sure, but of non-Jesuitical origin. Also, Moore says, the U.K. government is running a massive censorship operation in the United States—well, no, but there’s a former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who works on policy at Meta—and … it goes on and on.

 

Moore isn’t just a fringe kook hanger-on—he is a presenter at the conference, the leader of the English Constitution Party (which boasts “hundreds of members”) who came from England to talk about national self-determination. The English Constitution Party folks were happy with Brexit, but Brexit was just a good start for them—the next step, in their dream, is the exit of England from the United Kingdom. Why? “One million white English girls raped by a different people and a different culture,” Moore informs a rapt room. Nobody asks how a white English girl gets raped by a culture. Apparently this is one of those self-evident truths we hear so much about. The great demon for Moore isn’t swarthy illegal immigrants, but the villains who are inflicting said swarthy illegal immigrants on the English—the British. The English are a nation, Moore says, while the British are only a political union, and, in Moore’s view, a political union is a rotten thing to be: “The British Union, the European Union, the American Union, the Soviet Union—all the same thing.”

 

That’s a big applause line—for people who think of themselves, above all, as patriots. There’s a Jeep outside with a big TEXIT sticker on it and a veteran-celebrating “Land of the Free Because of the Brave” spare-tire cover, which is a weird juxtaposition: Hooray for Texas secession, and hooray for the army that kicked the snot out of Texas the last time Texas got big ideas about seceding. The United States is pretty much the Soviet Union, Moore says, and so is the United Kingdom, but nobody has thrown him in a gulag yet—he’s here, at the Waco Convention Center, where there’s Dr Pepper and Whataburger within easy reach, after a direct flight to Austin, and just nowhere near a labor camp. Don’t look too hard at the contradictions, or you’ll get dizzy.

 

Moore is a cordial and affable Londoner (he will remind you of every hilariously National Front-ish taxi driver who ever has taken you from Heathrow to Kensington) and a tinfoil-hat guy of the first rank. The English, he points out, have been a nation for more than 1,000 years, while the British have been around since only the 18th century. But he has an odd interpretation of English history: As a matter of historical fact, the English became the nation he celebrates in A.D. 927 precisely through the formation of a political union, as Æthelstan conquered the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and formed what we now call England—a united kingdom, if you will, before it was part of the United Kingdom. Many of those Anglo-Saxon peoples were at least as different from one another as modern Englishmen, Welshmen, and Scots are—the folks up in York, e.g., were Vikings. And, of course, the notion that the English are a nation in the old sense Moore means—a people intimately conjoined by language, ethnicity, culture, religion, and a long shared history—doesn’t survive about two minutes’ experience of London. Moore acknowledges that and fumes that this situation, too, is the fault of the damnable British.

 

***

 

What you say about London you could say about Houston, San Antonio, or El Paso. The notion that Texans at large have a shared culture is preposterous. Texas has a whole bunch of distinct cultures: the Deep South culture of the southeastern parts of the state (of which the Cajun culture of Houston and its environs is a tributary), the hybrid Anglo-Tejano culture of the Rio Grande Valley, the westward-facing culture of Big Bend and El Paso (which isn’t even in the same time zone as Dallas or Houston), the basically Midwestern culture of Dallas and much of North Texas, a Panhandle that has more cultural connections (and economic links and even family ties) to Kansas and Colorado than it does to Uvalde or Port Arthur. Some Texans live maritime lives on the Gulf of Mexico, while people in Lubbock get nervous and confused when confronted with a body of water bigger than a cow pond.

 

But a lot of the TNM folks don’t seem to quite get that, possibly because they are from California, not Texas. (California has its own secessionist movement, one whose leaders are very keen to swear up and down that they are not Russian stooges in spite of all the Russian stoogery in the mix. The Texas independence movement has Russian connections of its own.) Texas nationalism is just thick with Californians. One of the senior guys at TNM moved to Texas from California when he retired in 2021, and now he wants to tell Texans how it’s going to be on some big question—like which country they are going to be citizens of—while posing in a cowboy hat that makes him look like he just won it by knocking over some milk bottles at the state fair. You’d think that he’d wait a bit before getting that bossy. To borrow from the late great Lewis Grizzard, “Nobody cares how you used to do it in Riverside. If you don’t like how we do it here, Delta is ready when you are.” Another TNM leader is a D.C.-born IT guy who just moved to Texas this year, which shows a whole lot of however you say “chutzpah” in Texan. It takes all sorts, I guess, but the Texas Nationalist Movement’s big confab attracts a surprisingly small number of, you know, Texans. 

 

On the other hand, it does attract a lot of crypto guys. 

 

In fact, the welcoming remarks at the beer-and-barbecue shindig the evening before the formal opening of the conference were a lot heavier on crypto stuff than on Texas independence. Matt Frazier—CEO of a company incorporated all of nine months ago and “a visionary in non-profit fundraising technology … founder of the Texan Token, and a crypto YouTube influencer with 10K subscribers”—welcomes the assembled Texas nationalists with promising talk about 10,000x (“not 10,000 percent,” he affirms, “10,000x”) returns on crypto investments and, in the next breath, begs for donations so that the organization can raise the $35,000 it needs to pay the vendor gathering signatures to put a Texas-independence question on the next ballot. All these guys making 10,000x on their crypto plays, and nobody can write a check for the price of a nicely equipped Toyota Corolla?

 

Seems weird, no? 

 

It gets weirder. Frazier claims to receive messages directly from God—messages like who he should partner up with in business and where he can find divine messages hidden in his house, in this case a few of those old state quarters in a Xanax bottle, which he interpreted as divine advice to put his crypto-entrepreneurship into the service of the Texas independence movement, because, obviously!—but he’s basically out there scrounging around for sofa-cushion change to fund the divinely appointed revolution. “We are going to see something extremely important in Texas,” he says with the utter self-assurance that will be familiar to anybody who has seen this show before. “It is inevitable, because it is not the will of man. Texas independence is divinely appointed.” The revolution also promises to be “personally financially transformative” for those who get on it in time. “You can build great relationships, get rich in the process, and help the TNM,” he says, because we are now living in a world of “abundance, not scarcity. Scarcity is man-made.” Sound sketchy? “This is not some MLM,” he says, assuming—with good reason!—that everybody knows he means “multi-level marketing” scam. And, so: “I’m not asking you to buy soap.” 

 

***

 

There’s more crankery and ass-hattery afoot in the exhibit hall, of course: People who want to sell you devices to improve your blood with “beneficial frequencies,” people who think you are being poisoned by Wi-Fi. No, for real:

 

Sheila [Hemphill] is an earnest seeker of the Truth and a relentless advocate to right the wrongs she encounters. In 2011, she became a certified health consultant. She trained in nutrition and frequency therapeutics, which led to her aid in a joint research project between NASA and a frequency technology company. In 2012, she went to battle with the City of Brady over smart meters. She championed an amendment to the city charter to include utility customer rights via the Texas Local Government Code, 9.004. With extensive training in electromagnetic fields (EMF) and an understanding of their influence on the human body, she was deeply troubled over the lack of oversight by the FCC and FDA to regulate EMF exposure from WIFI and now 5G.

 

There’s vaccine stuff and coronavirus stuff, of course—do you know about the Omega Brief?—and essential oils dealers and a guy selling knives, because there is always a guy selling knives. 

 

And then there’s the Texas independence stuff. 

 

Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, is an unusually well-practiced politico for a group such as this, and he will talk your ears off about the polls. And the polls are pretty interesting: SurveyUSA, a research firm with an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight, found that 66 percent of “regular voters” in Texas—and 60 percent of its overall Texas sample—answered “yes” to the question: “Would you support Texas peacefully becoming an independent country along with other conservative states? Or not?” That’s not precisely Texit (the question was put to voters in several states about their own states) but it is pretty close. Some 77 percent of self-identified conservatives did, too. On the question, “Would you support or oppose the idea of Texas holding a vote to find out whether voters want Texas to peacefully separate from the U.S.?” the breakdown was 50 percent in favor, 30 percent opposed and 21 percent undecided. And 60 percent said that the U.S. government should let the state go if that’s what its voters want. Apply the obvious caveats—this is a hypothetical question, not a present reality, and people, especially conservatives circa 2023, answer poll questions in a way that is as much sociocultural signaling as it is an honest statement of preference.

 

“If Texas independence goes on the ballot today, it wins,” he says. He isn’t obviously right, but he isn’t obviously wrong, either.

 

I ask him the obvious questions: Why secession instead of something less radical, like a more robust and flexible understanding of federalism? He scoffs. “How’s that working out?” I reflect that there are lots of hard things in politics that take a long time to do—it took 50 years to get from Roe to Dobbs, and it may take several decades more to forge a democratic consensus on a more humane abortion policy. The fact that we have found it difficult and frustrating to do something relatively modest, I add, is hardly an argument for abandoning the modest project in favor of something that is radical and disruptive, not to mention many orders of magnitude more difficult. But Miller isn’t buying it. 

 

“What people need to know,” he says, “is that this is happening. It isn’t something way off in the future.” Bills for the first part of the Texit referendum have been filed in the state legislature. It is a two-part thing: The first part is a question about whether the people of Texas favor a vote on independence, and the second part, down the line, would be the independence vote itself. Because Texas does not have an initiative-and-referendum process for the general-election ballot, this will appear, if it appears, as a question on the Republican primary ballot, and possibly as a question on the Democratic primary ballot, too, which will be hilarious—or maybe not. As Miller points out, the polling for Democrats is better for independence than you might expect: Texit support in that SurveyUSA poll tilted Republican, but it was 77 percent for Republicans and 54 percent for Democrats.

 

But even for Miller, who is very focused on his issue, Texit is a kind of capacious vessel into which fortified versions of standard right-wing complaints are poured and mixed up with a witches’ brew of kookery: eye of newt and toe of Klaus Schwab. (George Soros gets some boos, but repeated references to Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, draw actual hisses.) Asked about the issues that drive him, Miller responds with familiar Republican stuff: debt and deficits, the border, inflation—with the additional factor that he believes the federal government to be unreformable and irretrievably corrupt. You know: The United States must be destroyed to save it, to save constitutional government and liberty and our culture, the great fruits of which are … judging by the room, diabetes, despair, and some not-super-great singer-songwriter stuff from a guy who sounds like Lou Reed if Lou Reed grew up in the suburbs of Houston. 

 

I want to like these people, mostly. Sure, a few of them are grifters and con artists, and some of them are hate-addled weirdos who shout “Nooooooo!” when someone expresses goodwill toward the Jews. It is striking, though, what a parallel reality they live in: There’s a guy who asks me about Joe Biden’s executive order mandating the replacement of the U.S. dollar with a digital cryptocurrency, and he seems genuinely puzzled when I tell him that my best guess (accurate, as it turns out) is that this did not, in fact, happen. I ask him if he read about that on Facebook, which of course he did. Another fellow, one of those Californians, tells me that 2020 was his breaking point. I ask, “Why 2020? Was it the election, or what?” He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Were you in the United States in 2020?” he asks. “Did you not notice that we turned into a Gestapo state?” It never seems to occur to any of these folks that an actual Gestapo state would not let them use the Waco Convention Center to stage a conference to denounce the Gestapo state and plot their escape from it, and that in an actual Gestapo state they wouldn’t be congregating in the Hilton next door but in a concentration camp. I have seen our government behave very badly—right here in Waco, in fact, some years ago!—and, if you ask me when I’m in a mood, I’ll tell you that some of the facts about which there is no real dispute are more worrisome to me than the fictions that command the attention of these poor, desperate, confused, angry, and anxious people trying to convince themselves that they are the spiritual heirs of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. These are, after all, my people: Texans. Americans. Fallen children of Adam in need of a Redeemer.

 

But I also want to fight them. Their politics are genuinely stupid and toxic and, at times, positively wicked. The question of secession was settled at Gettysburg by the blood of better men than any of these. And, as somebody who didn’t just move here from California, I am not ready to concede Texas to these kooks. Stephen F. Austin and Juan Seguín and William B. Travis and San Jacinto and bluebonnets do not belong to these crackpots, and, if anything, there are a good many figures from the other side of the political aisle—Ann Richards, Lyndon Johnson, Natalie Maines, Willie Nelson, etc.—who have a better claim on representing what Texas is really about than the Church of Crypto Jesus guy does. Graham Moore stood in front of a crowd of self-proclaimed Texians and Texicans and scoffed at the notion that the Civil War was about slavery, a position that would have been recognized for the complete and utter bulls—t it is by Sam Houston, among others. These guys are like the right-wing populists who call themselves “patriots” but hate everything about their country and hate most of the people who live there. They want to live in a Texas that exists only in their minds—one that is nothing like what the actual Republic of Texas was like for all nine years of its brief existence and nothing like the Texas that actually exists here in the real world today, the one where Beto O’Rourke got 48.3 percent of the vote against Ted Cruz in 2018. The one where Austin is, where San Antonio and Dallas are. 

 

Back in the exhibit hall, some guys are distributing pamphlets by the late libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who once dreamt of forging a hippie-redneck alliance—the post-Vietnam Left marching with the David Duke populists—joining the extremes against the hated mainstream. I am reminded of what one prominent son of a Texas oilman (and grandson of the sheriff of Duval County), William F. Buckley Jr., wrote in his obituary of Rothbard: “Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.” These guys believe in Texas and liberty and a God who pretty much agrees with them on all the big issues, a God who sometimes tells them where to find a divine message hidden in a Xanax bottle. 

 

Waco, ye gods. Where else?