There are a disturbing number of articles and blog posts about the difficulties or need for secession these days. Henry Olson’s column in the Washington Post is one example of the genre:

Many Americans are increasingly concerned that our national heritage, our democratic republic, is seriously in danger. A new poll from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics confirms that we have reason to worry — and that the fault is in ourselves, not our political stars.

We can see the signs of the fraying bonds of citizenship all around us. The increasingly hostile tone of mainstream political speech. The inability of our two parties to find common ground in cases of clear national interest, such as raising the debt ceiling. The way that leaders of each side accuse the other of intentionally subverting the election process to ensure their hold on power. The fact that partisans increasingly isolate themselves in information bubbles where they only hear their side of an argument and often only the extreme elements of that side.

That’s why the Center for Politics poll is so worrying. It surveyed 2,000 voters on a host of issues related to democratic health, especially how each viewed members and leaders of the other party. It found that large numbers of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters view the other party with fear and contempt.

The most frightening findings show that supermajorities of voters in each camp believe the other side is bent on destroying the country. More than 80 percent of Biden and Trump voters agree that elected officials of the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy.” More than 70 percent of both sets of voters believe that some extreme media voices on the other side should be censored “despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.” More than 75 percent of Biden and Trump voters believe that Americans who strongly support the opposite party also threaten the American way of life. In short, politics has stopped being about how to govern a shared country and is more about a naked, “Lord of the Flies”-style struggle for power.

and so is James Joyner’s most recent post at Outside the Beltway:

Vast swaths of the country are essentially unpopulated forests, farmland, or deserts. (Both of the live maps at the USA page are interactive.)

The point of all of this is that, like it or not, there is no plausible way for Red or Blue states to secede. As has been noted here more than once, the real divide isn’t Red states and Blue states but rural and urban.

Still, the starkness of the divide is something to see. Moreover, turning to a debate that’s been ongoing in the comment section here for some time, despite the fact that the Republican Party has undeniably been more aggressive in bending the rules to get what it wants and thereby thwarting the democratic process, supporters of both parties have strong authoritarian tendencies.

In the past I have highlighted the reasons for all of this: the enormous financial rewards of increasing centralization, a decreasingly logical and increasingly visual society leading to highly agonistic modes of expression, financial subsidy of such expressions by social media, the facility for dispersed organization provided by social media, and loss of consensus due to an increasingly diverse society, just to name a few. I agree with James that the best ways of addressing the increasing division are devolution (reducing centralization and returning power to the states) and greater tolerance of a diversity of preferences and opinions. I also agree that there is little prospect of either happening for the reason I’ve underscored.

What strikes me are the responses in the comments sections. I would like to suggest that people are thinking about the prospects for civil war entirely wrong. Bowing to the need for more visual expression, let’s consider a couple of movies. The climactic scene of The Patriot, a Mel Gibson movie about the American Revolution, the scrappy rebels form a battle line opposite the redcoats and, through a series of clever tricks, outmaneuver them. There are similar scenes in The Red Badge of Courage and practically every other movie set in the American Civil War ever made.

A civil war won’t be like that. It will be more like Mad Max or maybe Blackhawk Down. Mad Max depicts a world in which civil order has simply collapsed. No real reason is given for it. Nuclear war? Fuel shortage? Just for the heck of it? It doesn’t really matter. Chaotic gangs kill, loot, and terrorize. Whom do they attack? Anyone in their path.

Not dramatic in the sense of pitched battles. And it’s already going in. The disorder in Portland continues with both left and right arguing in favor of it. Here in Chicago we’ve got broad daylight shootings in the middle of downtown. It’s not just that order has broken down but that the will to preserve order has been eroded.

As to the practicality issue emphasized by James, have people never heard of “ethnic cleansing”? It’s a phenomenon that isn’t just conducted at the national level. It goes on block by block with neighbors turning on neighbors. Thinking it can’t happen here because most states are in fact Purple States is being overly optimistic. Start thinking breakdown in order rather than maneuver warfare. Mad Max rather than The Patriot.

And speaking of other priorities you might not have heard about this incident:

Short version: a running gun battle, filmed with a video camera by a following car, going on in broad daylight in an area near the Loop.

One bystander was shot and seriously injured.

There are several things which need urgent attention in Chicago:

• We need to get rid of the mayor. She’s obviously not up to the job.
• We need to get rid of the Cook County States Attorney. She is uninterested in enforcing the law.
• If the present police chief can’t do his job, get rid of him, too.

Daylight gun battles? C’mon, people.

And James Pethokoukis has some advice for Democrats in The Week:

Americans haven’t seen a lot of successful governance lately, from the Iraq War to the global financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic. And while I’m no fan of the $3.5 trillion bill, it would reflect incredibly poorly on American democracy — both domestically and internationally — if we can’t even fill a few potholes, strengthen a few bridges, and promptly raise the debt ceiling so financial markets stay calm and the United States doesn’t look like an utter laughingstock. Progressives need to pass something here if they don’t want to help turn their fascism fears into self-fulfilling prophecy.

So if progressive Democrats have to settle for a far smaller social spending bill — perhaps with means testing of new “universal” programs, for instance — they should grab the opportunity, right after they vote overwhelmingly for the infrastructure bill and the debt hike. American democracy will thank them for it.

When I was a kid my dad was the president of our street’s homeowners’ association. Every weekend he would go out with a wheelbarrow full of blacktop and a tamping tool and faithfully patch holes in the street that ran in front of our house. I should check to see if he expensed the blacktop to the HOA.

Contrary to Mr. Pethokoukis’s suggestion if we don’t “fill a few potholes” it will be because we have other priorities—in good part higher standards of living for politicians and other public employees. The reason that trust in government is waning is not because we can’t manage to fill a few potholes but because we do manage to have politicians who end up with lavish retirement homes in the Bahamas.

Predictably, the editors of the Wall Street Journal are enthusiastic in their support of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s negotiating position on the spending bills presently being debated:

Progressives are furious with Mr. Manchin, and with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, for refusing to go along with the Bernie Sanders entitlement dreamscape. As an act of retribution, they’ve threatened to scuttle the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that the two Democrats negotiated with Republicans.

Mr. Sanders wants the House to defeat the infrastructure bill, a Biden priority, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to delay going to the floor again Thursday because she lacked the votes to pass it. Unless it passes, the moderate liberals who support the infrastructure bill will know they’re riding in the back of the party bus.

Not so Mr. Manchin, who has the leverage in a 50-50 Senate to ride in the front, maybe even to drive the bus. They can’t afford to lose his vote, yet the left and the White House have behaved as if somehow the West Virginian would roll over in the end.

Mr. Manchin has been sending signals for months that his support has limits. First he refused to break the Senate filibuster. Then he said he couldn’t support $3.5 trillion because it’s inflationary and the economy no longer needs the help. Then in our pages he called for a “strategic pause” on the spending bill to debate specific policies. He might as well have been Ted Cruz for all that Democratic leaders paid attention.

Then, in statements and remarks Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Manchin laid down markers that Democrats can no longer ignore. He won’t support more than $1.5 trillion in new spending. He says “social programs must be targeted to those in need, not expanded beyond what is fiscally possible.” He’s willing to raise some taxes, but nothing like what’s in the $2.1 trillion House Ways and Means bill.

They see Mr. Manchin as engaged in a rescue mission for Democrats, saving them from their own excesses:

Unlike Mr. Manchin, we think even $1.5 trillion more in spending is far too much after Congress has spent $5.4 trillion in the last year. More than the amount of new spending, and even more than the tax increases, the real danger is from the many new entitlements demanded by the left. Even if they start small, they will always grow. And even if they are phased out to fit a 10-year budget window, they will never be repealed.

These entitlements are the largest stakes as Democrats try to pass whatever they can without a voter mandate. They would corrode the federal fisc and entrench government from cradle-to-grave. Meantime, Mr. Manchin is trying to save Democrats from themselves.

Many Democrats, particularly House Democrats, are complaining bitterly about how undemocratic it is that one (or two) senators can hold their and the Biden Administration’s agenda hostage. I find their definition of “democratic” somewhat eccentric, apparently 50%+1 majoritarianism with themselves setting the rules on how the votes are allocated.

As a thought experiment I think it’s useful to speculate on how the administration’s “infrastructure bills” would fare if divided into individual initiatives and subjected to national votes. Judging by the polling information I have seen some would pass while some would fail. The limitation on the deductibility of state and local taxes would probably survive. True, traditionally-defined infrastructure spending would survive. Spending programs for which most of the proceeds would go to the upper middle class probably would not.

My own view is that as policy matters the limitation on the deductibility of state and local taxes should remain, corporate tax rates should not be increased, and the marginal rates on higher income individuals should be increased to make up for shortfalls. Infrastructure spending should be focused on improving the capability and durability of the electrical grid. Bridge and road repair, much of which will inevitably devoted to local conmuter traffic should be much more limited. Elon Musk seems to be improving rural broadband with only a bit of help from the federal government. Refurbishing and modernizing ports should be given more attention rather than less. Further subsidizing higher education, daycare, and healthcare should be avoided.

The editors of the Washington Post rush to the defense of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell against the verbal assaults of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

Ms. Warren’s critique centered on Mr. Powell’s oversight of banks. She charged that the chair has overseen deregulation that makes another 2008-style financial crisis more likely — weakening “stress tests” that banks must undergo to prove they can cope with a downturn, for example. Without urgent federal aid, Ms. Warren pointed out, big banks would have lost $300 billion when the economy turned south last year, challenging their balance sheets.

Mr. Powell responded that the banks could have endured those losses “without difficulty,” and that is in part because of the stress tests Ms. Warren argued are deficient. The chair also expressed willingness to revisit the decisions about which Ms. Warren complained. The Fed has far more tools now than it did before 2008 to police the financial system. To be sure, Mr. Powell has not used them as aggressively as Ms. Warren would prefer. But former senator Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the authors of the landmark Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, wrote two weeks ago that “these were not major attacks on the legislation, and nothing in Powell’s performance contradicts his assertion that he supports the basic framework we put in place.”

Clearly, there is a difference of perception here. Sen. Warren sees her job as to bully and harass banks while Mr. Powell sees it as his job to assuage and mollify them. I will leave it as an exercise for the interested student to decide why both of those may be the case.

My own view is that Mr. Powell has been a lousy Fed Chairman, the latest in a series of lousy holders of that position going back decades. Yes, regulating banks is his job. It’s also his job to keep prices stable and maximize employment. In the immortal words of Dr. Phil, how’s that working out for you? QE has been tried and found wanting but it’s been remarkably successful in producing tremendous wealth inequality in the U. S. Banks aren’t failing at the rate they did 13 years ago but they remain on life support. We’re experiencing the highest inflation in a generation and a reduced level of employment participation.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry about these comments about the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings from the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Underwhelming is the most charitable way to describe the World Bank’s contribution to reducing global poverty over 75 years. And now the organization’s most useful service, its annual Doing Business ranking, has been shelved, thanks to some untoward lobbying by China.

The survey, first published in 2003, “measures aspects of business regulation affecting small domestic firms located in the largest business city of 190 economies.” It covers a wide range, from registering a business to resolving bankruptcy. This massive undertaking involves nearly 50,000 experts across the globe, and its conclusions guide perhaps billions of dollars of investment.

But an independent investigation by the law firm WilmerHale has concluded that former World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva and other leaders pressured staff to improve China’s Doing Business 2018 ranking. World Bank management commissioned the probe after data irregularities were reported internally last year. The report says China rose seven places after the changes. China ranked 31st in the 2020 report, which was ahead of Switzerland in 36th. Does that sound plausible for a regime that considers business a servant of the state?

There are so many problems with the Doing Business rankings it’s hard to know where to start. Not to put too fine a point on it but it’s completely bogus. Of the 100 largest cities in the world 20 are in China, more than any other country. India comes in #2 at 9 with the U. S. #3 at 6. Most of the cities used in the rankings don’t even make the list of 100 largest cities. Many wouldn’t even make the list of 200 largest cities.

China’s largest city, Shanghai, has 26 million people. That’s more than all of the higher-ranking cities in the index put together. Wellington, New Zealand, one of the cities used the rankings (New Zealand ranks highest), has 212,000 people. I don’t honestly see how a meaningful comparison could be made. That’s not just comparing apples to oranges, it’s comparing watermelons to blueberries.

But there is an interesting question that emerges from this story: why would the Chinese authorities care? There is an answer and it’s one that should be kept in mind. For the Chinese authorities it’s not enough for China to be the best or the biggest, China must also be perceived as the best and the biggest. Once you recognize that it explains a lot.

In her latest column in the Washington Post Catherine Rampell provides some advice to the Democrats that sounds good superficially:

Democrats have a few options for paring down their plan. They could decide to prioritize which programs they most want and leave some others on the cutting-room floor. They could also keep most everything that’s already in their current plan but execute an across-the-board haircut, so each individual program is smaller.

That is: They can decide to pass fewer new programs, at full funding levels; or a lot more programs on the cheap (or with early expiration dates, etc.). I support the former: Do fewer things, better; not more things, poorly.

but in practice is completely unreasonable. The reason: their majority is terribly, terribly weak. They don’t hold a majority in the Senate at all—it’s tied 50:50. In the House their caucus outnumbers the Republicans by just 8 votes.

A rule of thumb in party politics is that very narrow majorities empower the most extreme members of their respective caucuses. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the Congress today. Bernie Sanders, who isn’t a Democrat at all but caucuses with them, is the effective leader of the Democratic caucus there while the House is being whipsawed between the progressives and the moderates.

Neither can they afford to alienate their donors by increasing their taxes or by abandoning their pet projects. Consequently, their only path forward is to do the opposite of what Ms. Rampell is advising, try to appease everybody, and accept the risk not only that they’ll appease nobody but that nothing they’re trying to do will actually be accomplished.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing a lot of complaints about how undemocratic it all is. More on that in a later post.

You might want to read this interview by Bari Weiss of Glen Loury. The man certainly understands polemic. I suspect he’s been the target of it frequently enough over the last 40 years. Here’s a snippet regarding racism:

BW: The word racism has been redefined, particularly by Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, it’s no longer about personal bigotry. It’s about any system that results in disparity. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school culture system, it is evidence in and of itself that racism is present.

GL: That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He’s not mincing words about it. What it brings to mind is George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words fall in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words. I don’t know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. That’s a silly book, “How To Be an Anti-Racist.” Kendi’s formulations are sophomoric. They don’t bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He’s not standing on any literature. He’s not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It’s pablum. It’s froth on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we’re content with that kind of analysis. When civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of black people like a machine, our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven’t got a word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to what matters in black lives.

All of it makes me sad because I’d genuinely like conditions for black folk to improve as well as relations between the races. There are too many people whose livelihoods depend on black poverty and increasing hostility between the races for that to happen.

I think that Tyler Cowen must be experiencing some of the same things as I. In a piece at Bloomberg he declaims:

If the biggest news is what’s not being talked about, then my candidate for the most neglected story would be President Joe Biden’s plan for $3.5 trillion in new government spending. Crazy as my hypothesis may seem, given all the stuff about Biden’s agenda on the internet, there has been remarkably little policy debate about it, and remarkably little attempt to persuade the American public that this spending is a good idea.

He goes on to lay out the case that the conversation has been articulated in purely partisan terms with little regard for its political, economic, or social implications. Here’s the telling part:

…what we read is that if you’re on the blue team you want the number to be 3.5, but a few Democrats are holding out for something lower.

and he concludes:

Another possibility, more depressing yet, is that the main debate is now about political power and tactics, rather than policy per se. Squabbles over symbols are more common than disagreements over substance, and the influence of various interest groups matters more than the strength of any argument. My evidence for all this may be only anecdotal. But I fear it heralds broader and very negative political trends. Is America now more a polity of force than a republic of ideas?

As we become an increasingly visual society through the power of television and the Internet and with social media further encouraging the development, I honestly don’t see how anyone would expect anything else. Logical discourse increasingly succumbs to highly agonistic expressions and appeals to loyalty to the faction.