I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about the many complaints about misinformation and disinformation in politics. Has there been more of it in period leading up to the 2022 midterms or are they about the same as usual? Misinformation and disinformation are intrinsic to American politics—they go all the way back to the acrimonious campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the very first real presidential election. There are still some claims made in that election that people believe.

Ending misinformation and disinformation would mean the end of American politics as it’s been for 200 years. Ending the disinformation and misinformation of the “other guys” while leaving that of “your guys” alone would be even worse.

From Our World in Data via a piece in Bloomberg by Niall Ferguson comes the graph above. The spike in 2014 almost undoubtedly represents the combination of the war in Syria/Iraq and the war in Ukraine.

I thought of titling this post “Pax Americana” but it seems to me that’s too self-aggrandizing. I don’t know how to characterize it.

I settled on “you will miss it when it’s gone” and gone it all but certainly is. The deaths in the war in Ukraine alone exceed any year since the 1980s.

I find the lack of balance and proportion in journalism these days very wearing and I’m searching for alternatives. Here are two I’ve found so far:

Ground News

This aggregator site is distinctive not only in that it lists left, center, and right coverage of the news but in that it attempts to assess the bias of each source.

Tangle

This site appears to aspire to be something along the lines of Vox.com without the bias.

Please propose other alternatives, I’ll evaluate them, including them to the list as necessary.

At Politico Caitlin Emma provides a preview of what the agenda of an incoming Republican Congress is likely to be:

Roy is also a member of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House GOP lawmakers. It released a budget plan in June that proposes making Trump-era individual tax cuts permanent and gradually raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, among other major changes.

As should be needless to say I have severely mixed feelings about that. I suspect that when push comes to shove the only thing that Republicans will be able to agree on will be that taxes should be cut.

IMO the “Trump-era individual tax cuts” were fiscally irresponsible and our economic situation is worse now if anything.

Additionally, I am waiting with bated breath for the Social Security Trustees’ 2023 report. I can’t help but imagine that the nearly 10% increase in Social Security Retirement Income payments will result in moving the exhaustion of the trust fund forward. Labor force participation rates are significant in that, too. The only real question will be whether exhaustion is one year or two years closer.

And this must play a role as well:

Find more statistics at Statista
When Social Security was put in place in 1935 full SSRA was 65 and life expectancy was 60. Now they are 70 and 79, respectively. Obviously, the program is no longer serving the purpose for which it was intended but has expanded in scope substantially. On the one hand pushing the full Social Security retirement age back to 84 would be inhumane but leaving it at 70 doesn’t look workable, either. I think what we really need is multiple different public retirement programs but that’s probably politically impossible.

The Medicare trust fund is in even worse shape. The insolvency date is 2028. There should be little doubt that it, too, is in need of reform but that will be even harder politically.

In the end I’m guessing that the Republican leadership will chicken out on entitlement reform but push making the Trump tax cuts permanent.

Noting the record number of “encounters” at our southern border, the editors of the Wall Street Journal finally address a point I have been making here for years, namely that the failure to secure our borders undermines the case for legal immigration:

The U.S. needs to tighten its rules on asylum to send the message that not everyone in the Western hemisphere can come to the U.S., but the Biden Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress won’t act.

By the way, these are the migrants you read about who are bused or flown from the border to cities across the country. Most of those flights and buses aren’t sent by GOP Governors. They’re sent by the Biden Administration, which wants to ease the pressure on border regions. But that’s why mayors such as Eric Adams in New York are declaring emergencies as they cope with the new arrivals.

All of this represents an American political failure, of which there are many these days. It is also doing great harm to the cause of legal immigration. The perception of an essentially open border is building a political backlash in favor of more restrictionist immigration policies. The bitter truth, which the left won’t admit, is that Mr. Biden’s border failure has done more damage to the immigration cause than Donald Trump’s policies ever did.

The percentage of immigrants in the United States at present is the highest it’s been in a century, when it was at the highest level in our history. At that time the United States essentially slammed the door on new immigrants.

I believe that countries have carrying capacities for immigrants, that ours is higher than most, but that we have reached that carrying capacity. I think we need a guest worker program with a specific focus on Mexican workers. I think we should be accepting more refugees and legal immigrants. Together I think those things mean that we need to reduce the number of people here illegally. I don’t think a wall would be effective because I think that walls are only as effective as the most corruptible border agent. My preferred solution is very tight employer-based restrictions on the employment of workers here illegally, similar to those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with substantial penalties for violations That’s what I want.

What does the Biden Administration want?.

For all of the pontificating about how undemocratic our political system is and how much better a strictly majoritarian system would be, I’m not seeing any calls for direct democracy. Has anyone wondered why? I would think that if you believe in a strictly majoritarian system (1/2 + 1 votes rules) that direct democracy would be the ideal.

After cataloguing how the polls have shifted in favor of Republicans over the last month, in his most recent New York Times column David Brooks summarizes his take:

To understand how the parties think the campaign is going, look at where they are spending their money. As Henry Olsen noted in The Washington Post last week, Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should be safe — places that Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.

If Republicans are competitive in places like that, we’re probably looking at a red wave election that will enable them to easily take back the House and maybe the Senate.

So how should Democrats interpret these trends? There’s a minimalist interpretation: Midterms are usually hard for the president’s party, and this one was bound to be doubly hard because of global inflation.

I take a more medium to maximalist view. I’d say recent events have exposed some serious weaknesses in the party’s political approach&#133l

Here are the bullet points he goes on to point out:

• It’s hard to win consistently if voters don’t trust you on the top issue.
• Democrats have a crime problem.
• Democrats have not won back Hispanics.
• The Jan. 6 committee and the warnings about MAGA fascism didn’t change minds.
• The Republicans may just have a clearer narrative.

Some of the poll results I’ve seen lately have been startling. More than 30% of Hispanic voters favoring Republicans. 15% of black voters favoring Republicans. It seems to me that’s a real problem for Democrats. For the last 20 years they’ve benefited from demographics; if that is reversing it’s not clear to me how they’ll reverse it. Appealing to young voters isn’t enough—there aren’t enough of them. And young voters don’t remain young voters forever. If Gen X is shifting towards Republicans, impelled by issues like the economy, crime, and the schools, it seems to me that the Democrats’ trouble is even greater.

In case anyone wonders I think the tail has been wagging the dog for a long time. Progressives aren’t even a majority of Democrats let alone of likely voters and yet the progressive ideology has become the guiding star of the party.

I liked this post at Time by Peter T. Coleman. Here’s the setup:

Early this summer, I emailed a neighbor of mine, whom we’ll call David, and asked him to go for a walk with me in the park. Although we had lived in the same building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than a decade, we had previously only shared pleasantries with one another in the elevator. But this neighbor’s political views diametrically opposed my own. Given the dire, toxic, runaway path to civil war our nation is currently on, and as a professed conflict mediator, bipartisan bridge builder, and depolarization pundit, I felt it incumbent on me to reach out and try my best to walk my talk. My spouse also talked me into doing it.

I thought my decades of training as a conflict resolution scholar and mediator of difficult moral disputes prepared me for just such encounters. But I spent most of the hour before our date in distress in my bathroom.

When I greeted David in front of our building, he also appeared ill-at-ease. Nevertheless, we headed toward the park for a brief jaunt, anxiety in tow.

On our way, we chit-chatted about our families, and then I explained to him my reason for reaching out. I said that I was increasingly worried about the political divisions in our country and the growing odds of extreme political violence. I was doing my utmost to better understand different perspectives on the situation. He replied, “You mean, you don’t know any Republicans you can talk to.” When I hesitated, he added, “Any Republicans that like Trump, that is.”

“That’s about right,” I admitted.

Nominally, the piece is about how we can avoid a civil war in the United States.

I don’t think we’re going to have a civil war in the sense of pitched battles of organized troops. I do think that things are going to become increasingly stressful and, to crib a word from an earlier post, chaotic. More like Mogadishu than Gettysburg.

My prescription would be a little different than Mr. Coleman’s. I’d recommend three steps:

• Listen more and talk less.
• Respect each other.
• Look for points of agreement.

One more suggestion from basic optimization theory. Pick one stressor and reduce it. It might not be the most significant stressor. Picking the easiest might be the most worthwhile. Each reduction in stress will make the next step easier. We’ve been doing the opposite for the last 50 years.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger argues that the biggest issue in the midterm election is chaos:

What, exactly, are these midterm elections about? The 500-pound bear in the room is inflation. Still, I don’t recall another recent midterm when so many discrete issues were filtering through voters’ minds. Crime, abortion, recession, energy prices, the border, schools, Ukraine and, not least, Joe Biden.

We live in chaotic times. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the country’s right-direction number bouncing along the bottom at 26.7%.

The plausible default theory of the election is that inflation running above 8%—raising consumer prices and eroding wage gains—pushes everything else into second-tier voting concerns.

Perhaps, but midterms under a new president are inevitably a Rorschach blot on the nation’s life during his first two years. While Mr. Biden’s approval rating has ticked up in recent polls, it has been awful, falling below 40%. My view is that some portion of his bad approval is discomfort over Mr. Biden’s mental state. But people aren’t going to vote for Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance or anyone else because of Mr. Biden’s teleprompter gaffes.

I keep wondering what voters make today of the 2020 presidential election. Not the contested result. Mr. Biden won. But one reason Mr. Biden narrowly won is that he pulled over independents and disaffected Republicans by running as a moderate alternative to his party’s progressives—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Mr. Biden’s moderate, “normal” presidency didn’t last past Inauguration Day. His switcheroo to progressive standard-bearer for the Sanders-Warren-Pelosi policy goals was startling. A lot of voters who decide close elections have to be wondering about the difference between what they wanted and what they got.

What’s left? Abortion was hot after the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs decision but looks to have moved off the front burner. I’m hard put to see any toss-up election being decided by playing the Trump/MAGA card, though Mr. Trump could still produce a Halloween surprise for GOP candidates.

As for Mr. Biden, by attaching his presidency so wholeheartedly to his party’s political left, he has elevated the midterm importance of issues like crime and the border.

Progressive criminal-justice theories are running side by side with a crime surge in cities and suburbs. Virtually no new-generation prosecutor has been willing to make a midcourse correction. Democrats own it.

I’m not sure that Americans are worried about chaos so much as that many of us long for things to return to normal whatever that means. We’re looking for transformation less than not so much drama. I was reminded of this:

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

That quote is from a speech given in 1920 by Warren G. Harding. That would make it a century old. Recovering from a pandemic? Check. Economic upheaval? Check. Concerns about war? Check. It seems we have come full circle.