I agree completely with the conclusion Lance Morrow draws in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. The political stories being told by both of our major political parties, their “narratives”, are sadly in need of refurbishment. Here’s his peroration:

Update the archetypes. Ditch the sanctimony. A country may be destroyed by indulging its archaic premises and the smug, self-righteous stories it tells itself.

For my taste he dwells too long on the Democratic narrative, glossing over the Republican narrative to some degree. Here’s the closest he get to a side-by-side comparison:

A master theme of the left (stated approximately): The Orange Man is the Red Queen of White Supremacy. A favorite on the right: In regions of the left’s many weirdnesses, men are women, and women men—whatever their hearts desire. Men have babies, and women probably don’t exist at all.

I would analyze it this way. Each side has both a positive and a negative narrative.

The Democrats’ positive narrative is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, expanded to include not just gender but preference. He does a pretty good job of synosizing both here:

That civil-rights morality play, unambiguous and righteous in its story lines, succeeded almost too well in its effects. It offered a titanic clash of archetypes. A consensus of the storytellers ordained that the Good Guys were of one type—the pure of heart, the selfless elites, saints and martyrs, all of them virtuously leftist in their politics and soon, in the Vietnam time, to make up the armies of dissent against that misbegotten war. The Bad Guys represented another type: They were rednecks, bigots and white supremacists. They became, in the fullness of time and in the eyes of the left, the followers of Mr. Trump. The storytellers’ crude but powerful version said that the villains of that earlier time morphed, over generations, into the deplorables of MAGAland.

He doesn’t offer a comparable synopsis of the Republicans’ narrative. Let me try. The positive narrative is that government should deal with the needs of ordinary people—safety, security, prosperity—and much of that can be accomplished by reducing the scope of government. The negative narrative is that Democrats are dishonest, elitist, self-serving, and out of touch, not just with the needs of ordinary people but with reality itself.

I detect a kernel of truth in each of those narratives. For my own part I would find the Democrats’ narrative more compelling if gender dysphoria were removed from the DSM. I would find the Republicans’ narrative more compelling if they were offering solutions other than tax reduction for an array of problems not being addressed by the private sector. Please take note: those two narratives are remarkably close to Megan McArdle’s assessment: “the party out of power is crazy; the party in power is smug and out of touch”.

The other matter on which I wanted to remark is the attack on author Salman Rushdie in New York. The perpetrator of the attack seems to have been a young man of Lebanese descent, a second generation American. It would be a reasonable guess that he acted in fulfillment of the decades-old fatwa issued against Mr. Rushdie.

I think it was the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who said “We thought we were getting workers but we were getting people”. In an early post of mine I documented at substantial length that although immigrants leave much behind when they come to the United States they bring with them customs, cultures, preferences, and prejudices.

Last week a man was arrested in Albuquerque for a rash of murders of Pakistani men. The sense of chagrin when the perpetrator turned out to have been another man of Pakistani origin rather than a white supremacist was nearly palpable.

My point in this post is that with the total percentage of immigrant population at an all-time high we should not be surprised at some of these immigrants or their children acting out sectarian, ethnic, or class grievances they brought with them but are quite foreign to the United States.

And, of course, that not all anti-Muslim or anti-Asian violence in the United State is the activity of white supremacists.

There were a couple of things I wanted to remark on yesterday but never got around to. The first is the ongoing kerfuffle around the search of Donald Trump’s residence in Florida. These are observations I have made before but they bear repeating in this context.

I have no problem with President Trump being prosecuted to the full extent of the law but it’s not entirely clear to me that he has broken any law here. There is a document being circulated, a blanket declassification of all documents taken by Trump to his residence. If genuine it would seem to defuse the charges being leveled at him regarding mishandling of classified documents. Even if reclassified by President Biden it doesn’t seem to me there’s anything prosecutable there (no ex post facto laws).

Furthermore I have already expressed my view that searches of the residences and private offices of former presidents should be routine and IMO that should be codified into law. That would defuse charges of selective or partisan enforcement.

Finally, AG Garland had better have some specific charges to level against the former president. If he doesn’t the complaints of persecution by the FBI would seem to have some merit.

I have also expressed the view that the FBI should have been abolished long ago. At this point every executive agency has its own armed enforcement unit, in many cases their own SWAT teams. In that context it isn’t entirely clear what purpose the FBI serves.

Meanwhile in his Washington Post column Josh Rogin considers why Beijing overreacted to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan:

China’s overreaction and retaliation toward Taiwan following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit shows that the leadership in Beijing is now focusing on taking the island by force, not through peaceful reunification as it has long claimed. Chinese President Xi Jingping’s strategy has moved from winning Taiwanese hearts and minds to inciting fear and loathing.

Although China seems to be finally winding down its military exercises around Taiwan, a week after Pelosi visited the democratic island, China’s drastic responses and ongoing punishments mark the beginning of new era of heightened danger. China canceled three military-to-military dialogues and suspended several bilateral cooperation programs on topics ranging from climate change to counternarcotics.

I’m going to be bold enough to disagree with Mr. Rogin. I don’t believe that Beijing overreacted at all. If anything they’ve underreacted although it’s really too early to tell how they’ve reacted.

What would we think if Ohio’s governor gave V. Putin a hero’s walcome in Columbus? I doubt that President Biden would be very happy about it. That’s more the way the Chinese see Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan than the way Mr. Rogin is framing it.

And then there’s the optics of it. From the Chinese point of view the visit was disrespectful to the Chinese—an insult.

I don’t know Speaker Pelosi went to Beijing at President Biden’s behest as some have claimed, whether he supported her visit, or whether she was playing a lone hand. I suspect he supported the visit since he could have stopped her official transport just by saying “no”.

Whatever the case we are lurching down a path to greater hostility between China and the United States and the implications of such hostility are far from predictable.

In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria tries to dig into the lessons we should have learned from our experience in Afghanistan:

What explains how so much energy, effort, blood and treasure yielded so little? The report lists many reasons — incoherent strategy, lack of patience, unrealistic expectations, insufficient monitoring — all of which shine a light on specific failures. One of the report’s conclusions is that U.S. goals were often contradictory. For example, the United States pumped billions of dollars into the economy while trying to end corruption. It wanted to weaken warlords and militias, yet would also rely on them when it wanted to establish security quickly. It wanted to end opium production, but not take away farmers’ incomes.

But these do not feel as if they get at the core of the problem. After its defeat in 2001, the Taliban regrouped and steadily gained ground from approximately 2005 onward. The report documents that “enemy-initiated attacks” rose from about 2,300 in 2005 to almost 23,000 in 2009, and never again dropped below 21,000, despite various changes in U.S. strategy, tactics and troop levels.

The key point, as he touches on later in the column, is that the Taliban were Afghans fighting to secure their own view of Afghanistan. We were invaders. To put it in more contemporary terms, the Taliban were the Ukrainians. We were the Russians. It didn’t matter that some of the things we were fighting for, like educating Afghanistan’s women, were good things which some Americans continue to lament are beyond our grasp. They weren’t what the Taliban or, indeed, many Afghans wanted. That some Afghans did want these things is also irrelevant. There were always plenty who were willing to fight to prevent them.

And they would continue to be there in one, two, five, ten years. We always had one foot out the door.

I don’t believe that any lessons were learned in Afghanistan because you can’t be open to learning when you think you have all of the answers.

Yesterday Attorney General Merrick Garland issued some remarks on what is variously being called a “search”, “raid”, or “siege”. If anyone thought such a statement would calm the situation, they must be disappointed. From AG Garland’s statement:

Just now, the Justice Department has filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida to unseal a search warrant and property receipt relating to a court-approved search that the FBI conducted earlier this week.

That search was of premises located in Florida belonging to the former President. The Department did not make any public statements on the day of the search. The former President publicly confirmed the search that evening, as is his right.

Copies of both the warrant and the FBI property receipt were provided on the day of the search to the former President’s counsel, who was on site during the search.

The search warrant was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause.

The “property receipt” is a document that federal law requires law enforcement agents to leave with the property owner.

The Department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former President’s public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter.

Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy

President Trump responded by insisting that the warrant be made public. Whether that would quell the rumors about the search is anybody’s guess. There has been speculation, reported by CNN, that they were looking for documents related to nuclear weapons.

David Brooks has devoted his New York Times column today to a lament that the FBI may have delivered the 2024 presidential election to Trump:

Why is Donald Trump so powerful? How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president? Is it his hair? His waistline? No, it’s his narratives. Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.

The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.

It simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.

Into this situation walks the F.B.I. There’s a lot we don’t know about the search at Mar-a-Lago. But we do know how the Republican Party reacted. The right side of my Twitter feed was ecstatic. See! We really are persecuted! Essays began to appear with titles like “The Regime Wants Its Revenge.” Ron DeSantis tweeted, “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” As usual, the tone was apocalyptic. “This is the worst attack on this Republic in modern history,” the Fox News host Mark Levin exclaimed.

The investigation into Trump was seen purely as a heinous Regime plot.

George Will, no supporter of Donald Trump, too, has devoted his Washington Post column to the search:

In one way, this week’s behavior by the FBI and the Justice Department was not unusual, unfortunately. Hardly a day passes without some government entity vindicating historian Robert Conquest’s axiom: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Remember the Pop-Tart pistol boy? The 7-year-old chewed his pastry into the shape of a gun and said “Bang! Bang!,” so his school suspended him and urged all parents to discuss the “incident.” Remember the 5-year-old girl who was labeled a “terroristic threat” and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she talked about shooting people with her Hello Kitty gun that shot bubbles? How did we reach this point where so many adults flinch from acting the part by practicing prudence?

This nation is running low on an indispensable ingredient of a successful society: trust, in institutions and one another. This week was another subtraction. Garland has said about the Justice Department, “We will and we must speak through our work.” Actually, his political duty is to explain and justify his work more thoroughly than he did in his minimalist statement Thursday afternoon.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal muse:

The warrant may shed some light on the reasons for the search, but it will be only one side of the story. Mr. Garland was at pains Thursday to say his department is doing all this by the legal book, and that no one is playing politics. But the AG is clearly trying to deflect anger at Monday’s unprecedented search of a former President’s home without having to elaborate on the legal case he is pursuing.

It’s nice to hear Mr. Garland say he personally signed off on the search. But it’s a little much to hear him lecture the country that it’s beyond the pale to criticize the FBI. After the Russia collusion fraud, the Steele dossier con, the misleading FISA requests for the Carter Page warrants, and the Robert Mueller whitewash of all of that, there are plenty of reasons for Americans to take a don’t-trust-but-verify attitude to the bureau. This isn’t disdain for the rule of law. It’s well-earned skepticism.

By sanctioning the Mar-a-Lago search, Mr. Garland has broken a political norm that has stood for 232 years. He had better have enough evidence to justify it in the end, or he will have unleashed political forces and a legal precedent that Democrats as much as Donald Trump may come to regret.

I think there are plenty of misconceptions here to go around. The FBI has never been above politics. Not in the 114 years of its existence. I doubt that the risk of its having transmogrified into our equivalent of the Stazi is an unlikely but not impossible risk which could be mitigated with civil service reform. IMO it is above all a bureaucratic organization.

I also think that if, as some have claimed, the objective of the search was to disqualify President Trump from seek elective office in the future, those who long for such an outcome will be disappointed. Not only would they need to prove intent, it would need to be on a crime that was within the Constitutional bars to seeking office. Congress lacks the authority to add to those by statute.

One last point. The search has not materially changed the betting odds for the 2024 presidential election. Trump is favored to win with Ron DeSeantis second, and Joe Biden third.

I found this post by David Goldman AKA “Spengler” from Asia Times via MENAFN thought-provoking. His basic point is that the only time we have seen such large declines in productivity as we are presently seeing was during periods of high inflation. He makes some points with which I disagree. For example

In addition, the Federal government in the late 1970s and early 1980s spent 1.2% of GDP on federal R&D, funding the invention of the Digital Age. Tax cuts on income and capital gains provided the incentive for entrepreneurs to bet on these new technologies, creating the longest peacetime expansion in American history.

There are several things in that with which I disagree. First, I don’t think it’s was the federal R&D spending of the late 1970s and early 1980s that produced the “Digital Age”. IMO the federal contribution was earlier than that in the 1960s. DARPANet, the progenitor of the Internet, was first operational in 1969. The PC boards and semiconductor research that led to the “Digital Age” was in the 1960s, too. What happened in the 1980s was the enormous private investment in personal computers and networking. The reason for that was obscure then and it remains obscure. I can show you contemporaneous articles in business and technical magazines musing about it.

The part of his post that I really wanted to highlight was this:

The worst labor productivity decline on record during the second quarter of 2022, meanwhile, points to long-term and persistent inflation. Output per manhour in the nonfarm business sector declined by 2.2% at an annual rate. Think of it as the economic equivalent of long Covid.

We haven’t seen labor productivity declines of this magnitude since the 1970s, during the last great wave of inflation.

Why? He doesn’t really answer that. My observation from that chart is that the trend has been down for 80 years.

I think that like most things that’s multi-factorial with explanations including:

• Increasing reliance on the service sectors of the economy for growth. Services don’t increase in productivity very quickly if at all.
• Public and private overinvestment in services, see above.
• Declining returns on investment
• Shortfall in private investment, cf. above
• Treating the absolute number of jobs as a mark of success. That inclines policy to encourage minimum wage jobs and the productivity of minimum wage jobs is low, practically by definition.

My opinion is that if we want to stop the decline in productivity it will take changes in a lot of things including trade policy, immigration policy, and tax policy. Said another way it will be hard but that’s what we need to do if we want wages to rise.

While I materially agree with Michael J. Roman’s post at RealClearEnergy, the thesis of which is that there will be niches for both electric vehicles and internal combustion engines for the foreseeable future, I’m afraid it won’t be good news for climate activists. Here’s his conclusion which contains most of the meat of the post:

Simply put, that road which we mentioned is paved with good intentions, is not one lane; it is more like a multi-lane highway where EVs and ICEs must share the lanes for decades to come. Exit ramps for the ICEs are a long way down that highway, and in the meantime both automotive technologies will continue to advance. And while they do, they will support the transportation needs of motorists as they journey to their net-zero destination. As my little grandkids like to ask on a road trip, “Are we there yet?” My answer is simple: “No, kids, not yet, but don’t worry, we will get there.”

I’m less convinced than he that production of EVs can be scaled up as quickly as proponents seem to think if at all. I think that hybrids will be more practical than EVs even in the niches for which EVs are well-suited at least as long as I will live.

At Just Security Craig Martin lays out the legal requirements and case for the extrajudicial killing of Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Here’s a snippet:

Let us acknowledge up front that Ayman al-Zawahiri was the second-in-command of al-Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States – which were heinous crimes, terrorist acts, and amounted to an “armed attack” against the United States under international law.

Nevertheless, his killing some 21 years later requires a legal justification under international law. What is more, the drone strike also constituted a use of force against Afghanistan, with which the United States is no longer engaged in an armed conflict – and so that too requires legal justification. This essay briefly reviews the international law regimes that are implicated (leaving aside entirely the domestic law considerations, such as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force), and some of the questions regarding the lawfulness of the strike that arise under each regime – and argues that these questions are important.

The TL;DR version is that the legal justification is pretty shaky. One of the problems with being a signatory to international conventions is that it limits your freedom of action. Or brings doubt on your bona fides as being dedicated to the rule of law.

He concludes:

There is a real risk that this action, like the killing of Soleimani, will be seen as the action of a hegemon taken in utter disregard for the laws that it demands that others obey. With the war raging in Ukraine, and claims of Russian war crimes and the crime of aggression much in the news, perceptions of double standards in the operation of IHL and the jus ad bellum regime put the international rule of law at risk. There is much at stake here. This killing must be explained.

It is a fact that more countries trust Russia and/or China than trust the United States. If you’re wondering why that may be, this is it.