Warren and Sanders win the debate

In last night's debate, the moderators set John Delaney to attack Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He did so by calling Sanders and Warren's plans "fairy tale economics." (Plans like theirs have been successful in Europe, which is a real place and not just a location from fairy tales. I actually went there recently and it was very nice.)

Warren's counterattack won the night: "I don't understand why anybody goes to the trouble of running for President of the United States, just to talk about what we can't do and shouldn't fight for." I don't understand why Delaney ran either, but I'm glad he did, as footage of Warren annihilating dim-bulb centrists was something the world needed.

There was also a nice moment when Tim Ryan interrupted Sanders to question whether Medicare for All would cover the things he claimed. Sanders' reply that it would -- "I wrote the damn bill!" -- had the audience applauding and Ryan silently seething on the split screen.

(In 2009, Tim Ryan initially voted to prevent Obamacare from covering abortion. Nancy Pelosi did something -- I don't know what -- to make him back down and support abortion coverage on final passage through the House. Then in 2015, he tried and failed to organize a centrist campaign against Pelosi as Democratic leader. As I'm probably the internet's biggest Pelosi fan, seeing Bernie give Ryan a good whacking was deeply gratifying for me.)

Both Sanders and Warren need to solidify their positions as second choices for each others' voters. Attacking boring moderates who are polling near zero is a good way to do it, as they have few fans for you to alienate. From what I can tell, Sanders and Warren genuinely like each other, as makes sense for ideological people who share an ideology. And it totally works as strategy.

After the debate lineups were announced, I remember Kathleen Geier wishing that Sanders and Warren would join forces against various annoying centrists. It sounded too good to hope for, so I tried not to hope for it. But it really does make sense, and it actually happened! What a wonderful night.

Brexit in Poundland

With Boris Johnson as Britain's new Prime Minister and no-deal Brexit a serious possibility, the British pound is collapsing. A dozen years ago, I visited Britain when the pound was worth $2. The Brexit vote knocked it to $1.35. It rose when people thought they saw ways out of the problem, but right now it's down to $1.22.

This could add to the ugliness of Brexit. Just at the moment when trade disruptions make imported goods hard to get, they become even harder to get because the currency you use to buy them has lost value.

There's a chain called "Poundland" that runs a British equivalent of American dollar stores. The name also seems to me like good slang for post-Brexit Britain. And if bad things happen to the pound, things could get bad in Poundland.

The House rebukes Trump

House Democrats unanimously voted to condemn Trump's racist attacks on four minority Congresswomen. The resolution passed, with four Republicans and newly independent Rep. Amash also voting yes. I'm glad to see this, for many different reasons that I'll tell you about.

 -The moderates did their part. There are 36 Democratic representatives from Republican-leaning districts. (Because of gerrymandering, Democrats need to hold at least 17 Republican districts to keep a House majority.) I wouldn't have been confident that freshman Democrats from South Carolina and Oklahoma districts 10 points more Republican than the national average would vote to rebuke Trump's racism. But they did. It speaks well of them and bodes well for future votes, including House passage of major legislation in 2021.

 -The House works. Democrats have been frustrated with the lack of action against Trump from the House. But in general, the problems aren't coming from inside the House. Impeachment accomplishes nothing while McConnell runs the Senate. Trump's new lawyers (Bill Barr, Emmet Flood) have deflected House subpoena attempts into court battles. Senate Democrats have let the House down when they need to work together, as on the border funding bill. But this is something House Democrats could do themselves, and they did it unanimously.

 -The Pelosi-AOC relationship is weird, but it's working. To pass anything in 2021, Pelosi has to cultivate relationships with Dems from Republican districts. These relationships are fraught, because the moderates are all afraid of attack ads tying them to Pelosi. Pelosi can reduce the burden on them by looking more moderate, which she now can do by making grouchy noises at AOC occasionally. But later when the focus is on Trump's racism and Pelosi won't mess up her position, she'll defend AOC against Trump. If all goes well, Pelosi uses AOC to keep the moderates happy and in office, and then squeezes votes out of them in 2021 like she did in 2009-2010 and 2005, this time to pass AOC's priorities. It's a good way for a parliamentary leader and a forward-thinking policy intellectual to play off each other.

 -This was important for America. In telling four minority Congresspeople, three of whom were born in the US, to go back to where they came from, Trump was trying to elevate racial divisions over our common bonds as fellow citizens. Any good future for America depends on us not doing this. Our worst crimes -- slavery and the genocide of Native Americans -- resulted from the dominance of the forces that Trump is trying to normalize again. Having the House formally push back against Trump's racism was an important defense of the only values under which America can flourish.

Defeating Republican gerrymanders in 2020

Exactly one year after Anthony Kennedy submitted his letter of resignation from the Supreme Court, his replacement was part of a 5-4 majority decision to stop the Supreme Court from overturning partisan gerrymanders. Today we move further towards an America where most people support Democrats, but vote suppression, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and the Electoral College together result in permanent Republican rule.

This probably would've happened whether Trump or some other Republican (Ted Cruz, say) was President. The force behind this decision came from Republicans as an institution. It keeps them in office and helps them achieve their ideological goals, so it's what they're going to do. When Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination, this is one of the things he was hoping for.

The best way forward now is simply to focus on winning in 2020 as much as possible. It's a redistricting election, so whoever controls state legislatures and governorships gets to decide how districts are drawn, without the Supreme Court getting involved. This Sam Wang tweetstorm has a bunch of good ideas.

State legislative races can be good entry-level offices to run for. Conventional wisdom is that you need $20,000 to be competitive as a candidate in Kansas, and $50,000 would be great. Obviously many people won't have that much money lying around, but it's within the means of people who have had some career success. This article has four profiles of first-time candidates, three of whom ran for state House.

Some states have public financing programs for state legislative campaigns. If you're not in a state with public financing, and you're interested in running, send me a message! I might have money for you.

If you're not cut out to be a candidate but you know someone who is, maybe talk to them about it. Encouraging your friend to run for state legislature might be the deed that prevents Republicans from strangling American democracy.

The illusion of Joe Biden's electability

The Vice President doesn't do much, so the office suited Joe Biden well. Our calm determined overachieving President needed a warm-hearted goofball sidekick, and Biden was a perfect fit for the role. Republicans didn't really care to attack him either -- much better to go after Obama. So his poll numbers rose, and pundits praised his electability.

Biden isn't nearly as good at being a Presidential candidate. He lost in 1988 despite having the most early money, and lost in 2008 when he was one of the more experienced Senators. Message discipline and generally avoiding sloppy campaign mistakes are not his strengths.

One aspect of electability is: how good is the candidate at running for President? It's one you can emphasize a little less in making decisions, because a candidate who's really bad at running will usually crash and burn before the voting even starts, and you won't have to think about them.

But it may help to explain why the two successful Democratic Presidential candidates I've seen were the young upstarts of their times. If Bill Clinton and Barack Obama weren't good at running, they wouldn't have made it through the primary. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton got their nominations more through institutional support than on the campaign trail -- and they lost general elections.

(I also wonder if it helps to fake out the right-wing media. National Republicans had been smearing Hillary for 15 years before the 2008 election, and they were all locked and loaded to do it again, and then... that's not Hillary! That's... some black guy? When you nominate someone they didn't expect and haven't propagandized against, they might not be able to get their work done in the few months they have.)

But this is all to say -- the idea of Biden as especially electable is probably an illusion. His numbers were inflated by being in a role that turned his weaknesses into strengths, and now they're going back to being weaknesses. Better to have someone who does things right during the election and moves upwards than the person who came in at the top.

Different parties

Under Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders), we'd still have Obama's Iran deal. There's more disagreement here among Republicans. Under Ted Cruz, I'm pretty sure war would have begun. Donald Trump backed out of war at the last moment.

The old Republican establishment liked the far cruelty. Trump overthrew them, so now we get the near cruelty instead. One would blow people up far away, the other would tear children from their parents and throw them into dungeons here in America.

This is why it's easy for me to devote so much attention to partisan electoral politics. The consequences of Republican victory are that bad, and even if they're sometimes different across Republicans, they're always really bad. So it's worth discovering what you can about how to help Democrats beat them.

Warren could work out well

Apparently Democratic centrists are seeing Elizabeth Warren as an acceptable candidate. If "Warren as compromise nominee" is defeat for Bernie the candidate, it's a victory for Bernie the movement. He moves the Overton Window for her; she moves the party to him.

She's just better, in lots of ways. As has been noticed, the best at plans. And better at procedural reform.

She wants to get rid of the filibuster. Bernie doesn't -- a common position among the more senior Senators. This is vexing because it'll block his agenda. You won't get 60 Senators for Green New Deal and Medicare for All. You need to pass them with 50. The filibuster doesn't do much to impede Republicans, because they can just rip out the funding from our programs with 50 in the budget (which is immune to filibusters).

Some of my friends on the left side of the Democratic Party may dream of crushing their rivals on its right side in a primary. Having them compromise behind Warren is probably better. Having your intraparty rivals reconciled and falling in behind you makes it easier to defeat Republicans and enact policy.

Remembering Duke Cunningham's bribe menu

It might get topped by Trump Administration revelations in the near future. But before it does, I thought I might let tell you the wildest corruption story of my time following American politics.

Back in 2005, Duke Cunningham was a Republican Congressman from California. Mitchell Wade was a defense contractor who found every chance to bribe him. When Cunningham was selling his house, Wade bought it for $1.675 million. Shortly afterwards, Wade's firm started getting tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The house was back on the market for $975,000 months later. That amounts to a $700,000 bribe.

The smaller bribes were more garish. In DC, Cunningham lived on Wade's docked 42-foot yacht. Cunningham would shop for expensive stuff he liked (Persian rugs, a used Rolls-Royce), and Wade would pay for it. Prosecutors uncovering the corruption found a strange memo on Cunningham's office stationery, in his handwriting:

What is this? My friends, it's a bribe menu. To complete the bribe for $16 million in contracts, Wade gave Cunningham control of the boat, which cost $140,000. For each further million in contracts, Wade would have to bribe Cunningham $50K. But after getting to $20 million in contracts, Wade would have to pay only $25K for each million. If you didn't know that you could get volume discounts in bribing corrupt politicians, well, that's the sort of information I'm happy to provide.

The prosecutors' document described it as "malversation unprecedented in the long history of Congress" which is some pretty serious... malversation? I've never heard that word before. Anyway, Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison. 

But is he a blue whale or a right whale?

While it would be pretty neat if Trump were colluding with the Prince of Whales, I’ve never believed these deep state conspiracy theories.

Ethnic nationalism before and after the Cold War

I wonder if the rise of ethnic nationalism in recent years is simply a reversion to what was historically normal up until the Cold War.

This history is extreme in its horrors. Ethnic nationalist conflict in the first half of the 20th century included World Wars and genocides that killed tens of millions. For centuries before that, colonial empires enslaved and committed genocides against native peoples. The greatest slaughter occurred under governments whose ideologies were those of peoples with one blood -- the Third Reich, the Belgian monarchy, the British Empire, and everyone who sent their young men to die in the trenches of World War I.

With the Cold War came more universal, abstract ideologies. One might fight for communism against capitalism, or for democracy against dictatorship. These ideologies suited the purposes of decision-makers in Moscow and Washington, and made for better advertising to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who were rising in power after the end of colonialism. For obvious reasons, developing-country folk were an implausible market for Russian or American nationalism. But you could get them interested in communism or democracy.

When the Cold War ended and its banners were put away, the strongest political units in the world were still national rather than international. So it was easy for the old flags of ethnic nationalism to come out again, for whatever reasons people had flown them before. That's what we're seeing now.

Will new versions of the old horrors come back with them? This may be the great and terrible question of our time. I hope that global economic changes will help to dampen conflict -- for example, the rise in prosperity after the end of colonialism and the necessity of international cooperation in the modern economy. But there are reasons for pessimism too, as technology lets us harm each other much more easily than we could before, whether through war or climate change. And if the past is any guide, we can fall very far.

My role models for such times tend to be the old scientists -- in philosophy, I guess the flavor would be sort of Vienna Circle. They enjoyed the clever weird ideas of their smart friends from different countries, and faced their collapsing world more with public-spirited Enlightenment optimism than cynical postmodern world-weariness. I think their sort of liberal internationalism wins in the end -- well, there's optimism for you. But win or lose, those are the people I identify with in times like these.