Tom Hull: Tom Hull - on the Web

Seems like a good day to print out my accumulated file of scraps and links, making use of the one-day window between yesterday's initial attempt at a catch up Book Roundup and tomorrow's regularly scheduled Music Week, before checking out for cataract surgery on Tuesday, and whatever disoriented recovery follows that.

I quit my long-running weekly Speaking of Which posts after the election, figuring I had shot my wad trying to exercise what little influence I might have had, and realizing I had little stomach for what was almost certainly to come. I've usually done a pretty good job of following the news, but I've never been a junkie. I learned early on that the sure sign of addiction was that withdrawal was painful. My wife and her father were news junkies. We took a long car trip to the Gaspé Peninsula once -- quite literally the ends of the earth -- and I noticed how twitchy they became as they were deprived of their news routines (so desperate they clamored even for bits of radio in French they hardly understood; I, of course, had my CD cases, so I usually resisted requests for radio). This became even more clear to me when I spent 4-6 weeks in fall 2008, in Detroit working on her father's house after he passed. I only noticed that the banking system had collapsed one day when I stopped to pick up some food, and glimpsed a bit of TV news where I noticed that the Dow Jones had dropped 5000 points from last I remembered. I had no clue, and that hadn't bothered me in the least.

So I figured I could handle a break, especially in the long stretch of lame duck time between election and inauguration, when speculation ran rampant, and everyone -- morose, paranoid losers as well as the insufferably glib winners -- would only double down on their previous expectations. I had made plenty of pre-election predictions, which would be proven or disproven soon enough. I made some minor adjustments in my final post, nothing where I could that the doom and gloom wasn't inevitable, but also remaining quite certain that the future would be plenty bad. As I was in no position to do anything -- and, let's face it, all my writing had only been preaching to the choir -- I saw nothing else to do.

And I've always been open to doubts, or perhaps just skeptical of certainty. So when, just before the election, my oldest and dearest comrade wrote -- "From what you wrote, I think the Republicans/Trump are not as evil as you think, and the Democrats are not as benign as you hope" -- I felt like I had to entertain the possibility. I knew full well that most of my past mistakes had been caused by an excess of hope -- in particular, that the far-from-extravagant hopes I once harbored for Clinton and Obama had been quickly and thoroughly dashed. (Curiosly, Biden entered with so little expectations that I found myself pleasantly surprised on occasion, until his war fumbling led him to ruin -- pretty much the same career arc as Lyndon Johnson, or for that matter Harry Truman.) Of course, I could have just as easily have favored the Republicans with hope. On some level even I find it hard to believe that they really want to destroy their own prosperity, or that their wealthy masters will allow them to sink so low.

I also understood a few basic truths that advised patience. One is that most people have to learn things the hard way, through the experience of disaster. This really bothers me, because as an engineer, my job (or really, my calling) is to prevent disasters from happening, but the temptation to say "I told you so" rarely if ever helps, so it's best to start over from scratch. (FDR's New Deal wasn't a masterplan he had before the Crash. His only firm idea after the Crash was that government should do something fast to help people. He found the New Deal by trial and error, but only because he was open to anything that might work, even ideas that others found suspiciously leftish.)

The second is that what people learn from disasters is very hard to predict, as the brain frantically attempts to find new order from the break and dislocation -- which even if generally predicted often differs critically in details. What people "learn" tends very often to be wrong, largely because the available ideas are most often part of the problem. To have any chance of learning the right lessons, one has to be able to respond to the immediate situation, as free as possible of preconceptions. (By "right" I mean with solutions that stand the test of time, not just ones that gain popular favor but lead to further disasters. Japan's embrace of pacifism after WWII was a good lesson learned. Germany's "stab-in-the-back" theory after WWI wasn't.)

The third is that every oppression or repression generates its own distinctive rebellion. Again, there's little value in trying to anticipate what form it will take, or how it will play out. Just be aware that it will happen, prepare to go with (or in some cases, against) the flow. (Nobody anticipated that the response to the Republican's catastrophic loss in 2008 would be the Tea Party -- even those who recognized that all the raw materials were ready to explode couldn't imagine rational beings doing so. This is a poor example in that the disaster felt by Republicans was nothing more than hallucination, whereas Trump is inflicting real pain which even rational people will be forced to respond to, but that only reiterates my point. And perhaps serves as a warning against paranoid overreaction: the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, was a real event which caused real pain, but Israel's lurch into genocide, which had seemed inconceivable before despite being fully overdetermined, is another example.)

So I knew not only that the worse Trump became, the sooner and stronger an opposing force would emerge. And I also knew that to be effective, it would have to come from somewhere beyond the reach of my writing. I may have had some ideas of where, but I didn't know, and my not knowing didn't matter. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that yesterday's Democratic Party leaders are toast. The entire substance of their 2024 campaign (and most of 2020 and 2016) was "we'll save you from Trump," and whatever else one might say about what they did or didn't do, their failure on their main promise is manifest. But I'm happy to let them sort that out, in their own good time. I'm nore concerned these days with understanding the conditions that put us into the pickle where we had to make such terrible choices. And putting the news aside, I'm free now to go back to my main interest in the late 1960s -- another time when partisan politics and punditry was a mire of greater and lesser evils, when the prevailing liberalism seemed bankrupt and defenseless against the resurgent right -- which is to think up utopian alternatives to the coming dark ages.

More about that in due course. But in everyday life, I do sometimes notice news -- these days mostly in the course of checking out my X and Bluesky feeds -- and sometimes notes. They go into a draft file, which holds pieces for eventual blog posts (like this one). I used to keep a couple dozen more/less reliable websites open, and cycle through them to collect links. I still have them open, but doubt I'll hit up half of them in the afternoon I'm allotting to this. So don't expect anything comprehensive. I'm not doing section heads, although I may sublist some pieces. Sort order is by date, first to last.

Mike Konczal: [02-02] Racing the Tariffs: How the Election Sparked a Surge in Auto and Durable Goods Spending in Q4 2024: "An extra 188,500 total cars sold anticipating Trump's tariffs?" I've been thinking about buying a new car for several years now, but simply haven't gotten my act together to go our shopping. Usually, waiting to spend money isn't a bad idea, but this (plus last week's tariff news) makes me wonder if I haven't missed a window. I still have trouble believing that the tariffs will stick: popular opinion may not matter for much in DC, but the companies most affected have their own resources there. By the way, Konczal also wrote this pretty technical but useful piece: [02-14] Rethinking the Biden Era Economic Debate.

Janet Hook: [03-18] Michael Lewis's Case for Government: Lewis's The Fifth Risk was one of the best books written after Trump won in 2016, not least because it was the least conventional. Rather than getting worked up over the threats Trump posed to Americans, he focused on the people who worked for the government, in the process showing what we had to lose by putting someone like Trump in charge. His The Premonition: A Pandemic Story took a similar tack, focusing on little people who anticipated and worked to solve big problems on our behalf. This reviews his new book Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a set of profiles of government workers mostly written by his friends.

Thomas Fazi: [03-24] Europe's Anti-Democratic Militarization: "Europe is being swept up in a war frenzy unseen since the 1930s. Earlier this month, the European Union unveiled a massive $870-billion rearmament plan, ReArm Europe." The proximate cause of this is Trump, whose election lends credence to doubts that the US will remain a reliable partner to defend Europe against Russia. These fears are rather ridiculous, as the US is almost solely responsible for turning Russia into a threat, but also because the reason the US became so anti-Russia was to promote arms sales in Eastern Europe (and anti-China to promote arms sales in East Asia, the main theater of Obama's "pivot to Asia"). There are many things one could write about this hideous turn -- Europe has been ill-served by its obeisance to America's increasingly incoherent imperial aims, so the smart thing there would be to become unaligned -- but one key point is that the center-left parties in Europe have given up any pretense of being anti-war, anti-militarist, and anti-imperial, so only the far right parties seem interested in peace. Even if they're only doing so because they see Putin as one of their own, many more people can see that interventionism, no matter how liberal, is tied to imperialism, and they are what's driving refugees to Europe. You shouldn't have to be a bigot to see that as a problem, or that more war only makes matters worse. Or that "defense" is more temptation and challenge than deterrence.

Jeet Heer: [03-25] Group Chat War Plans Provide a Window Into Trump's Mafia State: "American foreign policy is now all about incompetent shakedowns and cover-ups." On the Jeffrey Goldberg "bombshell", the events he reported on, and the subsequent brouhaha, which is increasingly known as the Signal Scandal (or Signalgate), more focused on the lapse of security protocol than on the bad decisions and tragic events those involved wanted to cover up. Jeer reduced this to five "lessons":

Darlene Superville: [03-27] Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with 'improper ideology': Oh great, not only are the federal employees who act as custodians of our national history subject to arbitrary dismissal and possibly rendering, now they have to spend every day of the next four years arguing with Trump's goons about political correctness!

Liza Featherstone: [03-28] Welcome to the Pro-Death Administration: "From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn't really government's business anymore." Title was too easy, given the anti-abortion cult's "pro-life" conceit. Still, although there are certain kinds of death the Trump administration unabashedly favors -- capital punishment, bombing Yemen, providing blank check support for Israeli genocide -- the clear point of the article is the administration's extraordinary lack of concern for public health and any kind of human welfare. What's hard to say at this point is whether this frees them from any thought about the consequences of their actions, or their thoughtlessnes and recklessness is the foundation, and carelessness just helps them going.

Saqib Rahim: [03-28] Trump's pick for Israel Ambassador Leads Tours That Leave Out Palestinians -- and Promote End of Days Theology: Mike Huckabee, who started as a Baptist minister, became governor of Arkansas, ran for president, and shilled for Fox News, has finally found his calling: harkening the "end of days." Most critics of America's indulgence of Israeli policy find it hard to talk about Christian Zionist apocalypse mongering, probably because it just seems too insane to accept that anyone really believes it, but Huckabee makes the madness hard to ignore. That he's built a graft on his beliefs with his "Israel Experience" tours is news to me, but unsurprising, given the prevalence of conmen in the Trumpist right. On the other hand, "erasing Palestinians" is just par for the course. Huckabee's own contributions there have mostly been symbolic, which doesn't mean short of intent, but as US ambassador he'll be well on his way to an ICC genocide indictment. Too many more horror stories on Israel to track, but these stood out:

Jackson Hinkle: [03-31] tweet: Entire text reads: This is one of the most evil people in history." Followed by picture a smiling (and younger than expected) Barrack Obama. I don't know who this guy is, but he obviously doesn't know jack shit about history, even of the years since his subject became president.[*] But the bigger problem is what happens when you start calling people evil. It's not just that it throws you into all sorts of useless quantitative debates about lesser or greater evils, the whole concept is akin to giving yourself a lobotomy. You surrender your ability to understand other people, and fill that void with a command to act with enough force to get other people to start calling you evil. But to act with such force one needs power, so maybe what's evil isn't the person so much as the power?

[*] Hinkle appears to be a self-styled American Patriot (note flag emoji) with a militant dislike of Israel, succinctly summed up with a picture of him shaking hands with a Yemeni soldier (Google says Yahya Saree) under the title "American patriots stand with Yemen," along with meme posts like "Israel is a terrorist state" and "Make Tel Aviv Palestine again." So I suppose I should give him a small bit of credit for not inventing Obama's "evil" out of whole cloth (like Mike McCormick, whose latest book on Obama and Biden is called An Almost Insurmountable Evil), but all he does is take sides -- his feed also features pure boosterism for Putin and Gaddafi, as if he's trying to discredit himself -- with no substance whatsoever.

In other words, everybody's right, let's try it all, only, you know, win this time. The thing is, this prescription is pretty much what Harris tried in 2024, and somehow she still lost. Her approximate grade card on these five points: 70/90/90/80/90 -- sure, she could have bashed the rich more, but they reacted as if she did, and Bregman pulls as many punches on this score as she did, so it's hard to see how they could have landed; and her "big tent" extended all the way to Dick Cheney -- the people who were excluded were the ones who had misgivings about genocide (although I suppose the Teamsters also have their own reason to beef).

The problem is that even when Democrats say the right things -- many advocating policies which on their own poll very favorably -- not enough people believe them to beat even the insane clowns Republicans often run these days. Their desperate need is to figure out how to talk to people beyond their own camp, not so much to explain their better policy positions as to dispel the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and establish their own credibility for honesty, probity, reason, respect, and public spirit.

Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen through introspection. (I remember describing 9/11 as a "wake-up call" for Americans to re-examine their consciences and resolve to treat the world with more respect and care -- and, well, that sure didn't happen.) As Bregman's list of oracles shows, the standard response to a crisis of confidence -- which is the result of the Harris defeat, especially for anyone who believed she was saying and doing the right hings -- isn't self-reflection. It's a free-for-all where everyone competes with their own warmed-over pet prescriptions: the names in 1-4 have been kicking their policy ideas around for years, looking for any opportunity to promote them (although only Sanders and AOC have any actual political juice, which Bregman wants to tap into but not to risk offending his neoliberal allies; 5 is another reminder to water down any threat to change).

If Democrats can't figure out that war is bad, not just morally but politically, they will lose, and deserve to lose, no matter how bad their enemies are, even on that same issue. (Sure, it's a double standard: as the responsible, sensible, human party, Democrats are expected to behave while Republicans are allowed to run crazy.) If Democrats can't figure that much out, how can they convince people that public services are better than private, that equal justice for all is better than rigging the courts, that protecting the environment matters, and much more?

By the way, I've read Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, and found it pretty weak on both fronts. (Original subtitle was The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, which was later changed to And How We Can Get There).

I also saw a tweet where Bregman is raving about the new book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I wrote a bit about the book for an unpublished Book Roundup, which I might as well quote here (I'll probably rewrite it later; I haven't committed to reading it yet):

Jessica Piper/Elena Schneider: [04-02] Why Wisconsin's turnout suggests serious trouble for the GOP right now: 'Democrats keep overperforming in down-ballot elections, and the Wisconsin results suggest it's not just about turnout." I knew that night that Musk's attempt to buy a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin had failed, but I hadn't looked at the numbers, which were pretty huge.

I'm also seeing tweets about and by Randy Fine, a Republican who won a House seat from Florida this week. About: "AIPAC's Randy Fine calls for 5 year prison sentences for distributing anti-Israel flyers, calling it a hate crime." By: "There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood." I can kind of understand, without in any way condoning or excusing, where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir are coming from, but I find this level of callousness from Americans unfathomable (and note that Lindsey Graham is one reason I'm using the plural).

Matt Ford: [04-03] Take Trump's Third-Term Threats Seriously: Don't. It's hard to tell when he's gaslighting you, because lots of stuff he's serious about is every bit as insane as bullshit like this. The first thing here is timing: this doesn't matter until 2028, by which time he's either dead or so lame a duck that not even the Supreme Court will risk siding with him. But even acknowledging the threat just plays into his paranoid fantasies, a big part of what keeps him going.

Bret Heinz: [04-03] Rule by Contractor: "DOGE is not about waste and efficiency -- it's about privatization." I'm not sure I had a number before, but "Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year's elections." That's a lot of money, but it's tiny in comparison to this: "Overall, Musk's business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support."

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-04] Roaming Charges: Welcome to the Machine. Tariffs, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have to provide a sublist of tariff articles, so I might as well hang it here. Personally, I've never had strong feelings on tariffs or free trade. I have long been bothered by the size of the US trade imbalance, which went negative around 1970, about the time that Hibbert's Peak kicked in and the US started importing oil. I thought that was a huge mistake, that should have been corrected with substantially higher gas taxes (which in addition to throttling consumption and reducing the trade deficit would also have had the effect of blunting the 1970s price shocks). In retrospect, a tariff would have had a similar effect, and probably stimulated more domestic production, which would have had the unfortunate side effect of making oil tycoons -- by far the most reactionary assholes in America -- all that much richer. But tariffs aren't very good for equalizing trade deficits: by targeting certain products and certain nations, they can lead to trade wars, which hurt everyone. A better solution would be a universal tax on all imports, which is keyed to the trade balance. That clearly identifies trade balance as the problem, with a solution defined to match it, and disincentivizes retaliation. Perhaps even easier would be to simply devalue one's currency, which makes imports more expensive (without the clumsiness of a tax) and exports cheaper. But no one talks about these things, probably because few of the people involved seem to worry much about trade imbalances. They have their own reasons, and they don't want to talk about them either.

The classic rationale for tariffs is to protect infant industries from competition from cheaper imports. This makes sense only if you have a national economic plan, which the US has traditionally refused to do. (Biden has actually done things like this; e.g., to promote US manufacturing of batteries, but Trump has no clue here. Republican tariffs in the 19th century effectively did this, although they never called it this.)

Nor do I regard the issue as especially major. I think the people who have sounded the alarm over Trump's tariff plans have often exaggerated the danger. While the immediate effects, like the stock market tumble, seem to justify those fears, if he stays the course, businesses will adjust, and while the damage will still be real, it won't be catastrophic. But it seems unlikely that he will hold out. The reaction from abroad just goes to show how much American power has slipped over recent decades. When Biden was sucking up to Europe and the Far East, they were willing to humor him, because it cost them little, and the predicability was comforting. Trump offers no such comforts, and is so obnoxious any politician in the world can score points against him, or become vulnerable if they don't. While backing down will be embarrassing, not doing so will be perceived as far worse. I don't think he has the slightest clue what he is doing, and I suspect that the main reason he's doing it is because he sees it as a way to show off presidential power. That still plays to his fan base, but more than a few of them are going to get hurt, and he has no answer, let alone sympathy, for them.

David Dayen: [04-04] No Personnel Is Policy: "The Trump administration is accomplishing through layoffs what it couldn't accomplish through Congress."

Elie Honig: [04-04] Trump's war on big law. Not that I have any sympathy for the law firms Trump has tried to shake down -- least of all for the ones who so readily surrendered -- but this is one Trump story I had little if any reason to anticipate. Trump must be the most litigious person in world history -- James D Zirin even wrote a book about this, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. One good rule of thumb is that anyone involved, even inadvertently, in 1% of that many lawsuits is unfit for office.

Nina Quinn Eichacker: [04-05] The End of Exorbitant Privilege as We Know it: Some technical discussion of the pluses and minuses of seeking trade surpluses, noting that the advantages aren't large, and that for an economy as large as the US the costs of running persistent deficits aren't great -- barring some unforseen disaster, which leads to this:

But what the Trump administration seems to really be trying to do is demolish that exorbitant privilege, by torching any desire from countries around the world to purchase goods from the US, and to form economic alliances that insulate them from the chaos coming from inside the US government. People ask me all the time whether I think that there's a point at which the US could have too much debt, and I've always said that something really catastrophic would have to happen for the US to be deposed as the currency hegemon of the world. Now I think we're teetering on the brink, and I hate it.

The author also notes: "Will these tariffs lead to more manufacturing? They're a painful way to get ther, with a lot of degrowth along the way."

Adam Tooze: [04-07] Chartbook 369 Are we on the edge of a major financial crisis? Trump's Chart of Death and why bonds not equities are the big story. I can't say I'm following all of this, but I am familiar with the notion that equity and bond markets normally balance each other out, so the idea that both are way out of whack seems serious. And the odds for the "Trump is a genius" explanation are vanishingly small.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday working outside on my shed. I got the screening done on the door side, and got the ramp treated with linseed oil and firmly attached to the shed -- it had been loose all these years, slid out of place, and was rotting around the edges, so work I've long been meaning to do. I expected a cold front on Wednesday to disrupt my work. We got some rain when it came through, and a tiny bit of snow when it settled down towards freezing.

I was plenty sore from the work, and wanted no part of the cold, so I resolved to stay inside and fiddle with trivial computer tasks. I updated software, which involved rebooting and restarting Firefox. I found I had a bunch of extra tabs open to various articles that looked promising, so I thought, why not just plug them into one of my Daily Log notebook entries, so I can close them. Then it occurred to me that it would be a bit easier just to create a blog post for them. It wouldn't be part of a series, just a scattered one-shot, like my recent Hobsbawm posts. I didn't finish in one day, so took a second. So this is it.

Pieces are sorted by date, with some clusters underneath a lead article. The tabs were mostly opened based on links from X or Bluesky, or sometimes from mail. I've made very little effort to sort through my usual array of sources. I've rarely looked for further articles, and haven't singled out any topics I wanted to pick on. I don't have any real agenda here. I'm just seeing where the wind blows me.

Semler focuses more than I would on economic effects of war -- coming out of WWII, many Americans (especially Democrats) saw guns and butter not as exclusive but as linked, although the effect has steadily reduced over time, especially participation. On the other hand, the risks associated with foreign wars have grown, and support for politicians who have blundered into wars has dwindled. Even if Biden wasn't in his 80s, his inability (or unwillingness) to end wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine cast doubts on his competency.

Semler does make points about the end of pandemic relief measures as a contributor to widespread economic hardship. Democrats did a very poor messaging job around them: first in not taking adequate credit for the measures -- which Trump only agreed to because the stock market was tanking -- and in not blaming Republicans for loss. Granted, they were meant to be temporary, but most worked well enough they should have been refashioned into more permanent programs. Had Democrats campaigned on them in 2022, they might have gotten a more favorable Congress, and extended them further, leading to a better story for 2024. A better Congress (including ending the filibuster) could also have implemented measures for limiting price gouging and excessive interest rates -- failing to do so, which one could blame squarely on Republicans (and a couple lobbyist-owned "Democrats"), had a big impact on the 2024 election. Instead, Democrats campaigned on the status quo as their big accomplishment, instead of as a work in progress where the big obstacle is too many Republicans in power.

Semler's big thing is making charts ("visualizing politics through a class lens"). Some more recent posts:

Rhoda Feng: [01-28] Pulled in All Directions: Review of Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I don't watch his TV show, but I have read his two previous books -- Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) and A Colony in a Nation (2017) -- and in both cases was impressed by his ability to take big subjects and focus them into tight arguments. This could be another one, but the topic risks being too amorphous to focus on -- I'm reminded of James Gleick's Faster, another great idea that the author, coming off a series of brilliant books, couldn't quite handle. Unclear from the review how much he made out of it, but picking Apple as a villain was a start I can relate to.

Thomas Frank: [02-19] Why the Democrats Fear Populism: Interview by Nathan J Robinson, of the author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), which taunted Republicans for never delivering on their promises (and inadvertently turned them into a more more dangerous party), and Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016), which chided Democrats for their own failures to deliver promised change (much less successfully), and which tried to remind Democrats that populism was originally a party of the left. Like Frank, I'm a history-minded Kansan, so I know the Populist Party, and have deep sympathies for them -- unlike your fancy elites (including Hofstadter), who tried to write the people off as bigots and fools.

Eric Levitz: [03-01] The twisted appeal of Trump's humiliation of Zelenskyy: "Why some conservatives took pride in a national disgrace." I don't think there is any issue where mainstream Democrats think they have a bigger popular advantage over Trump than Ukraine/Russia -- and are more wrong about it. Most Americans want to see the war end, either because they understand that war is bad for everyone or because they realize that a prolonged stalemate is all risk with no possible reward. But Ukraine has become an issue that the so-called Defense Democrats are very passionate about, and not just because many of them blame Putin for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss. They had already pivoted against Putin from back when Clinton was Secretary of State, seeing the vilification of Putin as their meal ticket to another profitable Cold War, but with Putin's "election interference" and Trump's surprise win, they increasingly came to see Trump and Putin in each other's image. While Republicans had few problems with using Russia as a threat to sow fear and sell arms to Europe, they started to react when Democrats made Zelenskyy out to be their hero in impeaching Trump.

While Biden and Zelenskyy generally escaped blame for Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Biden had little trouble getting Republican votes to funnel massive amounts of arms to Ukraine, Biden's nonchalance about ending the war eventually trademarked the Democrats as the war party, paving the way for Trump's 2024 comeback win. Although there was no reason to think that Trump would be anything but worse than Harris on Israel/Palestine -- anyone who voted against Harris on that count did so from sheer spite, in total disregard for what was well known by then about Trump and his backers -- it wasn't unreasonable to hope that Trump would be able to put the Russia/Ukraine war to rest. That he hasn't done so shows us that he's as deluded in his own way about the war as Biden is in his. But also that he'd rather play the conflict for his fans than to do anything serious about it.

By the way, I think Levitz's explanations for Trump's "twisted appeal" are off base. Trump's performance -- and let's face it, the whole thing was staged as such -- appealed to his base because they want to see Trump in full bully mode. That's big part of why they voted for him. And Trump knows that his berating of Zelenskyy will drive Democrats crazy, reinforcing their commitment as the war party. (Which, needless to add, has once again worked like a charm, as when Slotkin spent a big part of her Trump rebuttal speech on Ukraine when she could have attacked Trump on firmer grounds.) I really doubt that Trump cares one whit about Bannon's Putin-friendly International Brotherhood of Fascists. (Bannon may well make good money off his hustle, but the autocrats themselves are mostly content to rule their own roosts: after all, their real enemies are their own people.)

Needless to say, just because Levitz misunderstands Trump doesn't make Trump right. (The right doesn't love Putin or Modi or Millei, not like they love Trump; at most, they envy that they are able to do things to their enemies that Americans cannot. They probably don't love Netanyahu either, but the envy there is really severe.) As diplomacy, Trump's performance was a complete disaster. He could have worked Zelenskyy over in private, then took a deal to Putin that could have let everyone come off smelling, well, not great but a good deal less rotten. As it is, he's squandered a big part of his influence with Zelenskyy, while exposing himself to the argument -- which admittedly doesn't bother him, because it's central to his Trump Derangement Syndrome defense -- that he's in Putin's pocket. Not only has he blown his chance to act as the great mediator -- and probably pick up a Nobel Peace Prize, like Teddy Roosevelt did for brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 -- he's given both Zelenskyy and Putin fresh angles to break up NATO, or at least to cut the US out of the equation. (Which would be a big deal, as the whole reason for NATO these days is to sell overpriced US arms to countries that don't need them. And arms sales was a major focus of Trump I, although Biden far exceeded him in that regard.)

Some more articles from Vox, which used to be my primary go-to source, but often these days I can't read at all:

Kenny Stancil: [03-05] The Case for a Shadow Cabinet: "High-energy progressives can provide a compelling daily account of everything going wrong and coordinate opposition to the Trump-Musk nightmare." I've mentioned this before -- I loved the idea first time I heard of it as regular practice in the UK -- and endorse it once again. One thing I would do is instead of staffing it with Congressional office holders, I'd set up non-profit foundation (which, sure, one would have to guard against donor capture) and hire experts and staff for each position. Democrats need a go-to person on each issue, all the more so as Trump "floods the zone" with his bullshit.

Stephen Prager: [03-05] You Really Can Just Do Things: "When Republicans take power, they abuse it. When Democrats take power, they refuse it." I've probably see a hundred pieces urging Biden to use executive powers to just sign an order, which he failed to do out of some respect or fear for some "norm" somewhere. One thing we're likely to see more and more of is arguments that Democrats should be willing to do any arbitrary crap that Republicans try, but the brands are so asymmetric that it's not even clear that's a good idea, let alone that it would work. Much will now depend on whether the Republican-packed courts will side with Trump, especially on cases where there is no precedent that they should. Democrats don't have that margin for error. Even though Biden did less than many Democrats wanted, much of what he did do didn't get past the courts.

Jeffrey St. Clair: [03-07] Roaming Charges: Political Personality Crisis in America: He's the one "pundit" I have been reading consistently during the long winter of discontent. Here he starts with a Max Horkheimer quote, after a title that recalls the late David Johansen.

John Ganz: [03-07] The Juggler: "Understanding Trump's Economic Moves." Title comes from a line from Marx, about Louis Napoleon III, also the subject of his "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce":

PS: I should also have mentioned this article by Baker (either here, or elsewhere where I mention Ezra Klein's interview with Daniel Shor): [03-18] Ezra Klein, David Shor and Elite Excuses: The Hermetically Sealed TikTok Influencer. Klein claims that the New York Times bears no responsibility for Trump's win because most Times readers voted for Harris, so Trump must have won elsewhere. Baker disagrees, and points out numerous cases where the Times distorted Biden's record on Afghanistan and the economy, framing issues in ways that could extend way beyond their direct readership. While looking at Baker's articles, also note:

[03-21] Patent Monopolies: The Biggest Tax No One Knows About "I have to give the right lots of credit here, they transfer more than $1 trillion a year, an amount close to half of after-tax corporate profits, from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from govdernment-granted patent and copyright monopolies, and no one even talks about it."
[03-21] Donald Trump Declares April 2 "Tax Day": Tariffs.

Kayla Gogarty: [03-14] The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces: "A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the top 10 online shows assessed are right-leaning." That supposedly was a big part of Trump's success, but Trump would be the natural beneficiary of rage-fueled pitches to folks with little grasp of issues and little concern for their effects on others. I've seen arguments that we need to create our own counterprogramming to fill this space without own bullshit. On the other hand, consider:

John Ganz: [03-17] There Was Never Any "Fascism Debate". Maybe not a debate in the proper sense, but there certainly was a lot of blathering, with lots of people spouting their pet theories while talking past one another. Even this article, which is subtitled "They Refused to Engage," manages to slip past its supposed opponents without landing even glancing blows. I don't know why I keep being drawn into this question, but after kicking this article around, I finally broke down and ordered Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a 2024 book edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, even though it's missing as much as it includes. (I ordered the cheaper pre-election hardcover as it appeared to be identical to the post-election paperback, although the post-election case has gotten much more compelling.) So I'll probably write more about this in the future -- indeed, I probably already have elsewhere.

One side comment here for now: after Scott Lemieux mentioned "professional anti-anti-Trump pundits," I recalled Dan Nexon's comment here on "the anti-anti-Trump left," I started wondering what the hell (or more specifically, who) they were talking about. I don't have a good answer (although I made some notebook notes in researching). Provisional conclusion is that no such people exist, as least in significant quantity. It's possible that some confusion is caused by two other groups: right-wing trolls who react to criticism of Trump by belittling the critics (e.g., by diagnosing them with Trump Derangement Syndrome), possibly because they can't think of any credible defense of Trump; and those who are so focused on the evils of US foreign policy that they ignore or (naively, I suspect) defend Trump's schizophrenic posturing. The trolls may be "professional pundits" (in the sense of getting paid to spout nonsense), but they are not from the left. I have doubts about the others, too, but the solution is not to simply counterattack but to respond with clear thinking.

Of course, you don't have to be a leftist to oppose Trump. Pretty much everyone has plentiful reasons if only they can cut through the thicket of propaganda and bullshit to see them. We leftists are just much quicker to seeing Trump and his followers for the danger they present, because we sense immediately that they want to kill us, while non-leftists are often in denial until it's too late. There only was one Hitler in history, and he set an impossible standard for other would-be Führers to live up to, but once you allow that there can be a current generalization beyond the historical specifics of his club with Mussolini, you can start to discern the type, and to see analogies take shape, evolve, and permutate. And within that framework, you can anticipate actions, ask questions, consider how best to stop him (and realize how important it is to do so). Nobody is going to change their mind about Trump just because you -- or for that matter, John Kelly -- call him a name. But you might decide that he's crossed some line and become so dangerous that you need to overcome your reluctance to form a Common Front to stop him. And you might recall that even that sacrifice isn't guaranteed to work.

Part of the problem is that very little (if any) of what we grasp of current events can be perceived as such. It is filtered through our memory and far-from-perfect understanding of history. Here one big problem is that most people don't remember much, and much of what they've been told is wrong. Even the history of Nazi Germany, which is about as famous and notorious as anything 80-90 years old can be, is recalled by very few people, and most who have even an inkling do so through distorted clichés -- like the oft-repeated capitulation at Munich. But those of us who do know some history are likely to start wondering whether Jan. 6 wasn't Trump's Beer Hall Putsch -- an unlikely thought at the time, but where else have we seen the coddling of criminality by the courts, leading to installation in power arranged by rich elites and the abuse of that power not just to "violate norms" but to run roughshod over law and order? Maybe you can find some better-fitting obscurity, but no other analogy gets the blood pumping faster than fascism.

PS: I also ran across this (partly because Bessner seemed to be tagged as an anti-anti-Trump leftist):

Connor Echols: [03-18] Oligarchy in overdrive: "Two months into his second Term, Trump is making mere plutocracy seem quaint." There's a chart here where 48% of "likely voters" say the US is moving toward oligarchy.

Matt K Lewis: [03-17] Democrats have four theories to beat Trump. Wish them luck: Actually, wish them better theories. I'm a sucker for clickbait like this because I've thought a lot about tactics over the past year, both upside and downside of November 5. And while I don't claim to have the answers, it's pretty clear to me that these aren't them:

Eventually, rather than picking one, he throws his hands into the air and calls for a combination of all four. But read the fine print and watch them disintegrate: "This is the Tik Tok era, baby." "If they want to win, they need to talk like normal human beings again." "Politics is now show business, and Trump understands this. He's not a candidate -- he's a spectacle." Democrats need "someone like The Rock, Mark Cuban or Stephen A. Smith." (Link added for Smith, because I had to look him up, which in itself makes me doubt he's a "rock star.") And remind me again how effective Cuban was on the campaign trail with Harris?

Joel Swanson: [03-18] What Are We Allowed to Say? "How Trump's Department of Education has made it harder for me to teach Jewish Studies." The idea, of course, is to make it difficult to teach anything that goes against the Trump party line. The campaign against anything or anyone that remotely smacks of Woke or DEI is just the first front of attack, an easy way to show who's the boss now, without having to split many hairs. I didn't say "any" here, because as this article points out:

This is problematic for both obvious and subtler reasons. (Designating Jews as a privileged class sets them up for further backlash, as the author notes in his discussion of "the court Jew," although I can think of further examples; doing so to deflect criticism of genocide is disingenuous and even more likely to backfire.) Among other things, this article pointed me to several other pieces worth noting:

Kenny Stancil: [03-19] DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans: I haven't been following news and/or opinion site for months now, but based on rare sampling it's possible that The American Prospect has been the most reliable source of solid news about the extraordinary damage the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people. Some headlines:

Robert Christgau: [03-19] Xgau Sez: March, 2025 (also here): I mention this for the lines: "I'm a patriotic democrat/Democrat. So is almost everyone I know except a few out-and-out leftists." I must be one of the latter, because I hardly qualify for the former -- I haven't made a show of being patriotic since Boy Scouts (although I did eventually concede to stretch my legs at ball games -- it's not like I need to make a point at every opportunity), and I only registered capital-D when I realized there was no alternative. Still, nice to be acknowledged and respected, even though I'm not sure I've ever swayed his position on an issue.

On the other hand, I haven't tried all that hard, because I don't think we're far apart in principle. When he describes Trump as a "vindictive, pathologically resentful, racist greedhead," he's not just accurate, but speaking from values we share. When he says "barely literate" and "evil" I understand but would have put it differently. There are plenty of literate fools, notably his VP. I make a distinction between ignorance (what one doesn't know) and stupidity (what one knows that is wrong), and Trump is off the charts in both dimensions. But what bothers me most is that Trump has somehow managed to turn his mental defects into some kind of superpower: not only does it do no good to expose his idiocy, it seems to make him stronger.

As for "evil," that's a word I'm very wary of: it's been used way too often not just to decry bad acts from bad intentions, but to imply that the only recourse is to kill the evil-doer. The characterization of Saddam Hussein, or Putin, or all Palestinians, as evil has often been an argument for war, and an excuse to avoid negotiation, because how can peace coexist with evil? While acts can be judged on their own merits, intentions are much harder to understand, and people who throw the word around rarely seem to make much effort. On the other hand, as a writer, I sometimes find myself looking for some succinct word to sum up bad acts committed for no good reason, and "evil" is pretty tempting. Is Trump evil? Well, he certainly does a lot of bad things for bad reasons, and the more power you give him, the worse he gets, so it's easy to see why people might think that.

The one thing I would caution on is against confusing the person with the power. When I was a tyke, I learned that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Maybe the problem with Trump isn't so much that he is evil as that his accession to power -- first his wealth, then his fame, then his votes, and now his cult of the Unitary Executive Theory -- has allowed his fairly common animal spirits to overflow and to instigate bad acts, unfettered by his dearth of heart, soul, and brains. While I don't believe that Evil exists as a force on its own, Trump is as worthy of the word as anyone. (The historical standard for Evil is probably Adolf Hitler, who as a person, disregarding historical details, differs from Trump mostly in having considerably more brains. Whether Trump turns out worse or not so bad is still undetermined, but the main variable is power.)

Unwinding from that aside, the "vindictive . . . evil" quote actually came in response to a different question, one where the reader concluded, "I'm truly concerned for your soul," after "And you have no idea how despicable and damaging your ideologies are or how deficient your understanding." I'm tempted to say zero -- this reads like a quantitative question -- but perhaps the more important point to make is that ideas and understanding are personal, so only affect oneself, and as such have negligible effect. Ideology is not something everyone has a personal edition of. An ideology is a set of beliefs that is presented to others. That, too, tends to have little if any impact, unless one's arguments are extremely persuasive -- which is almost always because they are already widely shared -- or because one has the power to impose ideology on others. The obvious example (and certainly uncontroversial) example here is Stalin, but as far as ideology goes, in America most power is soft, proportional to one's fame, money, and institutional clout. Judging from metrics like X followers, Christgau can reach about 10 times as many people as I can (8000 vs 600), but Christgau has a pretty small following, compared to other people on the left I follow, like Astra Taylor (35k), Robert Wright (49k), and Nathan J Robinson (125k). Someone who's actually famous, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has 12.7M followers, so 20 for every one who follows Robinson. And she trails way behind Musk (219M) and Trump (102M, plus more on his own network -- 10 million?), but at their level, the more important advantages are in money and clout (including lawyers and lobbyists on call, media contacts and influencers, direct and indirect hires, extending in Trump's case to the whole CIA).

The only thing the letter writer has to worry about Christgau (or for that matter, the whole left, from top to bottom) is that our "ideology" might make more sense to ordinary voters than the much more widely disseminated fulminations of the rich and powerful.

PS: Here's an extra paragraph I wrote earlier but decided I didn't need in place. An earlier draft was more nitpicky about Christgau's terms, which reminded me of a common complaint about leftists who obsess over language (often derided as "political correctness," "virtue signaling," and/or "cancel culture"): I don't think it helps to go around "correcting" the language of people who have basic good intentions. Doing so makes you look snide and morally supercilious, and risks adding you to the list of grievances of people who could, if you didn't make such a point of insulting them, become allies. The right-wing reaction to "political correctness," "woke," etc., is a cynical scheme to politically exploit the tendency of some people on the left to criticize others over language. But just as I don't feel like correcting those who should have spoken better, I also don't blame those who do insist on correcting for their excess principle-driven zeal. To pick one obvious example, while I personally try to speak very carefully about Israelis and Palestinians, I can't blame any Palestinian for overstepping my mark, because deep down the complaint they're trying to express is a valid one.

Jasmine Mooney: [03-19] I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped: "I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky." I have no idea how many stories like this are coming to light -- Mahmoud Khalil's is by far the most publicized one, probably because the Trump goons figure that targeting a Palestinian gives them the best possible spin on a policy they intend to target far more broadly, and indiscriminately. The Wikipedia page on Khalil notes: "Several journalists and human rights organizations have noted similarities between this law and McCarthyism." No doubt, but this is much more similar to the CIA "renditions" of suspected terrorists on foreign soil -- except that it's being done here in America to legal residents. McCarthyism, as far as I know, never involved kidnapping. It was a systematic program of slander, meant to bully people into "naming names," encouraging discrimination against those named, and thereby spreading the slander, aiming at isolating and marginalizing the entire political left, solidifying support for the anti-communist Cold War, and dividing and demoralizing the labor movement. The Trumpist campaign against DEI and other signs of "wokeness" has more in common with McCarthyism, at least as concerns its individual targets, although the political agenda is much the same. Related here:

Within days of the Gaza uprising of Oct. 11, 2023, I concluded that Israel has crossed whatever line separates genocide from whatever it is you call the state of menace and siege that existed in Gaza from the 2006 withdrawal until then: "occupation" didn't seem right, with no ground presence, and no semblance of control, but the barriers Israel erected between Gaza and the world, along with the threat of instant death always present (and periodically illustrated, lest anyone doubt Israel's resolve). Baruch Kimmerling got the concept right in his 2003 book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, but it takes some effort to realize just how thin the line is between stripping a people of all political rights and killing them. It now seems clear that as soon as Sharon sealed the border Gaza was fated to end this way. The only question was timing. When would some small group of Palestinians to flip their switch from patient cruelty to frenzied slaughter? Or when would the pervasive racism of Israelis finally erode their inhibitions against committing genocide? The Oct. 11 revolt was marginally larger and more invasive than previous acts of desperation, but that hardly explains the qualitative shift in Israel's behavior. Under Netanyahu, Israel was already aching to take it all, to finish Gaza off once and for all. They hardly debated at all.

Since the uprising I wrote about the genocide every week until I shut down Speaking of Which after the November election. (By the way, my original term was the more literal "prison break," but the desperation behind it reminded me more of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1944, when doomed Jews finally fought back against Nazis -- I won't even claim any irony to the sides, as that had flipped 20, 40, possibly 60 years ago.) Since then, I haven't even checked out my most reliable source, Mondoweiss. I knew what to expect, including that the nominal ceasefire of Biden's last days in office wouldn't last once Trump returned. In particular, I predicted that Trump would approve of the eventual forced transfer of the last Palestinians in Gaza to somewhere. (Ok, I wasn't thinking of Uganda, but sure, I get the joke, even if I don't laugh.) And yes, even on this, his absolute worst issue, I already miss Biden. So this article just explains one small bit. I don't feel any need to search out more, although I did have one open tab, so I might as well slot it here:

Up-to-date information on Israel's latest major siege of Gaza -- dubbed Operation Protective Edge, at least in English (the Hebrew is closer to Solid Rock) -- is scarce and hard to sort out, especially since Israel sent ground troops into Gaza. The latest totals I have are that since July 8 Israeli forces have killed 303 Palestinians, while 1 Israeli soldier and 1 Israeli civilian have died. (The latter, by the way, would easily have met Israel's criterion for declaring a Palestinian a "militant" in the propaganda battles over who killed whom. The former was killed by an Israeli tank shell, "friendly fire." It's worth recalling that a third of the Israeli soldiers killed in 2008's Operation Cast Lead were killed by fellow Israelis.) [A later report now says 341 Palestinians have been killed, with 40,000 people "internally displaced" -- i.e., bombed out of their homes.] One of the more pointed stories I've read recently was reported here by Richard Silverstein:

Stories like that are going to be harder to come by since NBC pulled its correspondent from Gaza (who broke that story), Ayman Mohyeldin. CNN also pulled one of its reporters, Diana Magnay, after she reported on how Israelis camp out on hills near the Gaza border to watch and cheer the bombardment. That kind of damage control helps Israel avoid embarrassment, but only temporarily. [The uproar over Mohyeldin has since convinced NBC to send him back to Gaza.]

Past Israeli incursions (2006, 2008, 2012 -- the frequency is reflected in that choice Israeli phrase, "mowing the lawn") have always been met with appeals and pressure for ceasefire, but the Obama administration has been shockingly cavalier about the slaughter and destruction this time. Part of this may be the full court press of the Israel lobby, not least that Obama has been serially beat up by Israel for nearly six years now, but part may also be due to Obama's desire to escalate US involvement in the wars in Iraq and Syria, plus all the reckless hawkishness on Ukraine, plus the 15 people just killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan. They say, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Evidently, Obama is way too busy making war to spare a few moments to plead for peace. And if the US doesn't step up to restrain Israel, who else can?

It's wholly predictable how Israel's current operation will end. Like all of its predecessors going back to 2006, it will end in a ceasefire with Hamas as firmly in charge of Gaza as ever, with Israel in possession of the keys to a ghetto containing 1.8 million trapped, terrorized people. Many buildings will be destroyed, including critical infrastructure -- electric power, sewage treatment, water treatment, hospitals, roads, food resources. A few hundred Palestinians will have been killed, and a few thousand injured -- some intended targets but most just unfortunately in the way, and some like the children on the beach just capriciously targeted by bored soldiers who know that no matter what they do they'll never be punished.

Israel will have destroyed a few tunnels, and the rocket stockpiles will have been more or less depleted -- not that they were ever a threat anyway. (Both sides seem to tacitly agree that the symbolism of Gazans defying Israel and shooting rockets over the walls matters much more than the scant damage they cause.) But in the end the cumulative weight of atrocities will embarrass Israel, as should the increasingly genocidal emotions the war is stirring up among Israelis. Israel is on the verge of losing whatever sympathy and support they had built up -- especially in Europe, but even in the US (with the exception of Congress) they are losing their grip. So they'll wind up about where they started. At least that's Israel's best-case scenario. They could hit some world opinion tipping point -- like they did with Turkey in 2008. Or they could give in to their hawks and crank the war machine up, moving from hundreds to thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinian deaths. Or they could ignite a sympathetic intifada in the West Bank, which could link up with ISIS. You can't predict what will happen once you go to war.

One thing that's lost in all the chatter about rockets and atrocities is that there is a very simple solution to the Gaza problem (and hence to all those rockets and atrocities): just cut Gaza loose from Israel and let the people there fend for themselves. For many years, debate over how to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been divided between a "1-state solution" and a "2-state solution." In the latter there are separate Israeli and Palestinian states alongside each other, dividing up the land of the former British mandate of Palestine. Most scenarios call for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, and a Palestinian state to be created in the remaining 22% of the land: the small Gaza Strip on the west and the larger West Bank (including East Jerusalem) in the east. Other variations are possible, including "mutual land swaps" (which the "Clinton parameters" and the "Geneva Accords" specified) or Israel just keeping more (the de facto result of Israel's "illegal settlements").

In the "1-state solution" Israel keeps all the land, but also has to grant full and equal rights to all the people living on that land. This has the great advantage of avoiding dismantling the settlements or transferring any additional people, but means that Israel, which prides itself as "the Jewish state," would wind up with a rather large percentage of non-Jews, perhaps even a majority. Most Israelis -- at least most Israeli politicians -- don't like either "solution": as Levi Eshkol described the conquests of the 1967 war, "we received a very nice dowry [the land], but we don't really like the bride [the people]." Since then, Israel has devised a sophisticated system for taking the land while excluding the people, denying the latter even basic human rights, corralling them into ever tighter ghettos, and hoping they'll just go away. The cost of this system is that the conflict grinds on forever: for Israel, this means paying for a huge military and police state, engaging in a propaganda war that eventually turns self-deluding, and suffering the corrosive morality of militarism and racism; for Palestinians it means living under a system of extreme regimentation and regulation, one that degrades their humanity and denies them opportunities all people expect as a human right.

Most Israelis, in short, want no solution. They accept their lot as a people that has been oppressed for millennia because they believe that their state (and only their state) can defend them, and must do so now and forever more. Anyone well acquainted with Jewish history can appreciate that position, but most of us recognizes that we are not doomed to endlessly replicate the past: that conflicts can be resolved fairly and equitably, and that when they are they disappear into the depths of the past. The prerequisite for any solution is to see it as possible. Unfortunately, that's been the undoing of both "1-state" and "2-state" solutions: many Israelis reject the former because they can't stand the idea of sharing their state with so many Palestinians, and they reject the latter because they feel that would mean the end of the Zionist project of reclaiming their "promised land."

For some time, Palestinians have indicated they would be happy with any solution. Political elites may tend toward "2-state" because that would carve out a state they could control, while the less ambitious may just welcome the opportunity to participate in Israel's prosperous economy without the present discrimination and conflict. But either way they have been at the mercy of Israel's rejection of any sort of solution, at best hoping that some higher power (like the US) will weigh in to support their aspirations. They problem there is that at the US becomes ever more inequitable internally, it becomes ever less sensitive to the human rights of people elsewhere, and that leads to this current hideous stalemate.

On the other hand, there is no reason for stalemate on Gaza. In 2005, Israel (under Ariel Sharon) withdrew from and dismantled every one of its settlements in the Gaza Strip, and since then there has been no effort on Israel's part to recolonize Gaza. It should be clear to everyone that Israel has no interest in Gaza -- at least, other than the "security threat" an independent Gaza might create. The West Bank and Jerusalem are complicated places where it is hard (if not impossible) to resolve the conflict, but Gaza is simple: Israel doesn't want it, and any interest Gazans have in uniting with a Palestinian state in the West Bank is something that can be dealt with if/when such a state is created. Why not solve the one piece that can be solved now, and cut Gaza free of Israel?

This seems to obvious to me that I'm astonished that no one is pushing the idea. The closest I've seen to a discussion along these lines is the Hamas ceasefire proposal, which promises a 10-year truce in exchange for the following ten provisions:

Most of these points are completely reasonable, things that Israel should agree to in any case. They highlight that the basic problem that Gaza has faced since 2005 has been the stranglehold that Israel (and to some extent Egypt) have had over Gaza, and how that's been used to keep Gaza from developing a normal economy and everyday life. In exchange for a more normal life, Hamas is offering a truce -- which is to say, no rockets or mortar shells launched over the wall, and no tunneling under the wall. The demands fall short of sovereignty for Gaza, but they do try to substitute UN for Israeli supervision, and as such they offer some hints as to where Hamas would be willing to limit Gazan sovereignty. One can easily build an independence proposal on top of this ceasefire proposal, and reasonably expect that it would be agreeable to Hamas, the current de facto governor of Gaza.

I think this covers six or seven of Hamas' ten points. It allows Gaza to develop a normal economy and civil society. There should be no cases where Israelis continue to hold power over residents of Gaza. Israel's security concerns are satisfied in several ways: by limiting the military power of the West Palestinian state; by outlawing a wide range of military hardware; and by imposing a substantial cost to the state for any acts by Gaza residents which actually harm Israeli life and/or property. On the other hand, Israel is similarly penalized for any hostilities against Gazan life and/or property. If these schemes prove insufficient, it's always possible that Israel could withdraw from the treaty and declare war on West Palestine -- the agreement does not in any way limit Israel's warmaking capability, nor for that matter does it reduce whatever deterrence Israel enjoys from its overwhelming firepower advantage. I didn't include anything about Hamas' demand that Israel back its tanks away from the border because I thought that level of regulation unnecessary -- all that is really necessary is that Israel not fire tank shells, or any kind of ordnance, into Gaza. As long as they are not used, where Israel parks its tanks is of little practical concern.

The imposed constitution is something Gazans may not appreciate, but it greatly expedites the transition to self-rule, and it provides reassurance in many ways that the resulting government will remain democratic and will respect individual rights of all its citizens. The constitution should be broadly open to a mix of capitalist and socialist approaches, to be determined by the legislature. (I suspect this will actually prove to be a bigger sticking point with American ideologists than the lack of a sharia foundation will be with Muslims, although the latter will likely get more print.) The constitution should eventually be amendable, although perhaps not for 10-20 years (subject to UN approval) to give it a chance to work.

The matter of donor money is also critically important, both because it is urgently needed and because it provides an elegant insurance system to reinforce the peace. Personally, I think a lot of that should come from Israel, which I regard as solely responsible for the destruction and degradation of life in Gaza especially in the last decade (although really going back to 1948), but fat chance of that, so the world needs to step up. Eventually, of course, the money will run out and West Palestine will need to stand on its own economy. It is important, therefore, that the government build an efficient tax system. I haven't said anything about currency, figuring that's a detail other people are more competent in. The other especially important thing I've left out is water. I wanted to minimize the burdens imposed on Israel, but some fair allocation of the miniscule Gaza watershed is essential.

There will no doubt be other technical issues to work out. Some may be best worked out bilaterally between Israel and West Palestine. Questions like permits to pray at Al-Aqsa certainly fall in that category. While that may be something Gazans care deeply about, it doesn't strike me as a war-or-peace issue. To gain any agreement, the international community (not least the US) is going to have to put pressure on a very recalcitrant Israeli government, and that's easier to do if the demands are minimal and separable. Israel's security policy regarding Gaza is both malicious and demonstrably ineffective, so that has to change. But while it would be a nice thing to allow more personal travel between countries, that isn't a necessary condition for peace. The only necessary conditions for peace are to stop the bombing, the shooting, the blockade, and to allow all people on all sides to live a normal life. That's what this proposal does.

The decision to disband Hamas in Gaza is largely cosmetic: it will simply make everyone more comfortable to bury past terrorism with the agreement. It also allows Hamas to go on in the West Bank, doing whatever it is they are doing. I thought about adding more strictures separating West Palestine groups from any sort of work in the West Bank. The fact is that after agreement the conditions will be very different and incomparable. The question of refugees is one that may need more thought, as it is one thing that remains a common problem for a free Gaza and an occupied West Bank, but it is a thorny problem, here at least best swept under the rug.

One reason no one talks about a Gaza-only solution is that at least some people on both sides have been seduced by the notion that it is possible to come up with a "final status" resolution. Arguing against this is the fact that no one has come close, but also the more general point that nothing is ever really final. So I think one of the basic principles of resolving this conflict is that we should always do what we can when we can do it, then take stock and consider problems remain and what else can be done about them. I have no doubt that a Gaza-only solution will help move all sides closer to an eventual West Bank solution.

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