Let’s make one thing very, very clear: increasing the amount of rare earth metals mined and processed in the U. S. is a strategic necessity. It’s not a question of “whether”. We must. Given that this primer on why we’re content to let China dominate rare earth metal production and processing by José Rodríguez Jr. at Jalopnik is worth a read. Here’s a snippet:

Big auto in the U.S., along with the current administration in Washington D.C., are both about to experience growing pains as we pivot to EVs. The problem of missing microprocessors can’t even start to scratch the surface of other issues electrification will run into, namely those of rare earth mining and processing.

The U.S. will now have to choose between adding much-needed mining and processing capacity for the rare earth minerals that EVs need, or risk letting other countries dominate that sector, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Adding mining capacity is a dirty endeavor, as the residents of a South Texas town articulated in the FT report, saying “Hello, more pollution.”

Reducing pollution in the U. S. by offloading the effort to China is perverse—it doesn’t result in a net decrease in pollution but the opposite. It just puts it out of our sight and beyond our control. And it doesn’t just provide a problem for the auto industry but for the production of solar cells and wind turbines as well. If you want more EVs, solar power, and wind power and less pollution, we’ve got to be much more self-reliant on rare earth metals. Simple as that.

Today I’ve been musing about the data presented at two sites: the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Tracker site that displays a map showing the COVID-19 vaccination rate by state and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s tabular reckoning of vaccination rates by race or ethnicity (and state).

The first thing that jumps out at you from the Mayo Clinic’s map of the percentage of fully vaccinated people by state:

is a sharp Red State-Blue State dichotomy. Since it supports the “stupid, ignorant Trump supporter” trope, that explanation has been fully embraced by the Creative Class Blue State dwellers that comprise a large proportion of web users but I think that, once you dig a little farther into the data cf. the KFF table, it’s clear that is at best a superficial first order approximation of what we’re seeing. Just to cite one example of what I mean the correlation between vaccination rates for white people in Red States and black people in those same states is quite close. Indeed, percentage black and Hispanic population is a better predictor of vaccination rates (they are inversely correlated) than whether Republicans or Democrats dominate the state.

The relevance of per capita income by state should also be noted. Mississippi and Alabama have the lowest vaccination rates and are also the poorest states. That suggests that educational attainment and how you earn your living are factors as well. Those are weakly correlated with intelligence but only weakly. Just as one anecdote the smartest guy I know came from a blue collar family. He got a PhD in mathematics and spent 15 years as a math prof before taking a job as a software developer because the pay was better.

To my eye the factors appear to be preference, location, income, politics, how you earn your livelihood, race or ethnicity, educational attainment, and intelligence in roughly descending order of importance and those are unquestionably interrelated. How you craft a strategy for encouraging more people to get vaccinated is anybody’s guess. Preferences are hard things to change. So, for example, I think that public service announcements with a wide array of black leaders from all walks of life (politics, sports, entertainment, religion, etc.) is a prudent step but how effective it will be I couldn’t say.

I’m in material agreement with Andrew Latham’s post on U. S. grand strategy at 1945. In it he makes three points:

1. The U. S. post-war grand strategy is, if not dead, on its last breath.

Whereas the period from 1990 to about 2010 was characterized by the historically anomalous circumstances of unipolarity and the dominance of a single set of (liberal) norms, rules and institutions, the period since then has been defined by the return of multipolarity; the emergence of a serious challenge to the liberal or rules-based order; and the continuing erosion of American military primacy. In short, over the past decade or so we have witnessed the resurfacing of what might be called the “deep structure” of international relations: a condition in which states, operating under conditions of anarchy, compete for power – and perhaps even dominance – in the diplomatic, military and economic domains.

Although it has yet to sink in, this new geopolitical reality has rendered the US grand strategy of liberal internationalism – first conceived in the 1940s, but only fully practicable since the end of the Cold War – effectively obsolete. That grand strategy, of course, had two main elements: upholding and defending the liberal international order (ends) and maintaining American primacy (means). The former entailed creating a dense network of US-led liberal institutions, advancing liberal-democratic norms, promoting liberal economic systems, and universalizing liberal conceptions of human rights. The latter involved maintaining a margin of hard- and soft-power superiority necessary to police and defend that liberal international order against all comers.

But the liberal international order, if not quite dead, is certainly on its deathbed, and American primacy is fast slipping away in the face of China’s multifaceted military buildup.

2. The return of great power competition is calling a competing grand strategy, restraint, into question.

But while the return of great power competition has effectively ended the checkered career of liberal internationalism, it is also calling into question one of its main competitors, the grand strategy of restraint. In connection with grand strategy, of course, the term restraint can be used in at least two registers. First, it is sometimes used as a hypernym covering a family of approaches to foreign policy that are less enthusiastic about maintaining global primacy or policing the liberal international order. That is not the way I am using it here. Rather, I am using the term solely to refer to restraint proper – that is, to a grand strategy that assumes that the US inhabits an extremely favorable security environment in the post-Cold War world, that this environment is the product of forces other than American primacy, and that the United States, therefore, does not require the world-spanning system of military alliances, bases, and deployments to maintain a liberal international order that either doesn’t exist or is self-sustaining.

And just how has the return of great power competition rendered restraint just as passé as liberal internationalism? Simply put, like liberal internationalism, restraint was an artifact of the post-Cold War unipolar moment. In that moment, the United States as the sole superpower faced no peer competitor.

3. “Blunting” is a viable alternative to the alternative.

My argument is that the only viable strategic path forward is a specific form of the traditional realist one of balancing – one that Rush Doshi in his recent book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order has labelled “blunting.” According to Doshi, a blunting strategy would involve denying China hegemony in its home region, undermining Chinese efforts to assert its leadership regionally and globally, and preventing China from dominating the global commons, including not only the high seas, but space and cyber as well. As Doshi argues, such a strategy would have military, political and economic dimensions, for it is in precisely these domains that China is seeking to build its own forms of control. The goal of such a strategy would be essentially defensive – to prevent the emergence of China as either a regional or global hegemon.

I do have a few disagreements with him, however. For one thing I disagree with his assessment of American grand strategy. In my view American grand strategy, unlike the grand strategies of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, or China, is an emergent phenomenon. It has certain aspects, e.g. free transit of the sea, but other aspects, notably American hegemony is not properly an American grand strategy but one embraced by American elites which is not entirely the same thing and, I would argue, the source of much mischief.

I have always argued for a balance of power rather than American hegemony and I don’t believe that I’m the only one: as Mr. Latham notes, it’s the classic realist grand strategy. I would add that competition with China is not an issue only for the United States. There are three, even four candidates for Asian hegemony and, as Highlander put it, there can be only one.

And, as I have repeatedly contended, American hard and soft power are both downstream from American economic strength. If we continue our relative economic decline, great power competition will be the obvious emerging consequence. However, relative economic decline is a choice rather than an inevitability.

More people strongly object to ranked choice voting, as this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Vin Weber and Annette Meeks illustrates:

Minneapolis was once known for its innovative and progressive policy solutions. It produced national political leaders such as Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale. In the past year, however, Minneapolis has become better known as a badly managed city adrift in politically correct mob rule. How did this once-great city fall so far so fast?

In 2009, Minneapolis adopted ranked-choice voting, then an untested method of electing city officials. It was sold to voters as a way to increase voter participation and improve the tone of political campaigns. In fact, it has had little positive effect on campaigns and their messaging, and voter turnout remains low. The corrosive effect of ranked-choice voting on democratic legitimacy is partly to blame for Minneapolis’s current dire condition.

In Minneapolis’s 2017 mayoral election (which was the third using ranked choice) voter turnout was only 43%. The victor in that 16-way race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after six rounds of counting that took 24 hours to complete. He became mayor despite being the first choice of only 25% of voters.

Mr. Frey’s most notable first-term achievement was doing nothing last May while rioters burned and looted more than 1,300 buildings, causing an estimated $500 million of damage. He implied that destroying the city was a justifiable social-justice action. When a police precinct was burned to the ground, he showed no special concern. He did make time for a live television interview on MSNBC.

I’m not sure that the conclusion I would draw from that is that “ranked choice voting helped wreck Minneapolis” but that today’s progressives are not cut from the same cloth as yesterday’s liberals and are so incompetent at executing the basic responsibilities of government they should not be allowed near the reins of power. I could provide any number of examples of just how different Mr. Frey is from either Hubert Humphrey or Walter Mondale. I don’t think you can blame ranked choice voting for that.

The editors of the Washington Post declaim that the events on January 6 of this year were, indeed, an insurrection:

The Justice Department announced this week that law enforcement authorities have arrested more than 535 people, an average of about three every day since Jan. 6. The rioters did $1.5 million of damage to the Capitol building. The insurrectionists allegedly assaulted some 140 police officers. So far, authorities have charged 50 people with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. But far more appear to have been involved: The FBI is still trying to identify more than 300 people investigators believe committed violent acts, including more than 200 believed to have assaulted police officers. These were not tourists.

Court documents unsealed Thursday, relating to the June 30 arrest of four Florida residents, provided harrowing details of some of these alleged assaults. One of the defendants allegedly “charged the line of police officers and began throwing punches.” Another allegedly stole a police officer’s shield after he pulled the officer down the Capitol steps, then charged into a police line. And another allegedly thrust a flagpole into an officer’s chest, before raising it over his head and apparently striking an officer in the back of his head. The attack resulted in the death of one police officer, and 138 were reported injured.

These are just a few of countless examples of mayhem that have emerged since Jan. 6. Indeed, the alleged violence was not just directed at police. Authorities have arrested six people for assaulting journalists or destroying their equipment.

Prosecutors also argue that the havoc was far from spontaneous, assembling evidence that far-right activists planned for violence, even preparing a “quick reaction force” site. Testimony from alleged participants suggests that members of the Oath Keepers stashed guns in a Virginia hotel, brought paramilitary gear, used military-style formations to assault the Capitol, conducted tactical training meetings in advance of Jan. 6 and moved to erase what they described as “all signal comms about the op” afterward.

Because Republican senators rejected a Jan. 6 commission, some questions about the assault might never be answered definitively, such as exactly what Mr. Trump did and did not do while insurrectionists attacked lawmakers. But prosecutors are showing that this was not some run-of-the-mill riot; it was a violent incursion into the nation’s seat of government conducted by dangerous extremists and encouraged by the president, who asked them to descend on Washington. This should not be another issue for partisan disagreement. No American should minimize or forget the horror of Jan. 6.

I condemned the actions immediately and I object strongly to mob action for whatever reason but I’m not sure the editors have made their case.

What actually happened on January 6? For some of those involved I have little doubt that they did, indeed, see it as an insurrection but I also suspect that was a very small number of those who participated and the editors are tarring with far too broad a brush. It was unquestionably mob action which instantiates why I am chary of protests full stop. There is frequently a very narrow line between protest and violent mob action. I think that those engaging in violence against persons or property should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

I think we learned a lot from the events of January 6. There are those among us willing to use violence to achieve their political ends. The Capitol Police are a bunch of old, sick men incapable of maintaining order in the Capitol. Another was just how timorous and cowardly the members of Congress are.

Here are some snippets from Andrew Sullivan’s latest offering, responding to the question what has happened to him?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

[…]

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

[…]

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

I see a strong analogy with a point I’ve made in the past. There are only two known strategies for allocating resources: a market system and a command system. A market system is not perfect; it does not result in outcomes that any of us would consider decent but its outcomes are far superior to those in command economies which are always catastrophic. Not only are they authoritarian and violent but they result in horrifically misplaced allocations of resources. It wasn’t missiles and tanks that brought the Soviet Union down; it was blue jeans from the West, it was Russia’s chronic inability to provide the good and lives its people wanted.

Consequently, we maintain a market system, tinkering around its edges on an ongoing basis to remedy its manifest injustices. It is a meticulous, exacting, unending process. Not “one and done”. A complete absence of state control is not good but as a general rule more state control is not an improvement.

Similarly, there are only two known orders for organizing societies: a liberal order and a totalitarian order. While the liberal order may be imperfect, not delivering the results you want as quickly as you want them, it is far superior to its opposite. A liberal order can tolerate those who oppose it; a totalitarian order cannot.

It’s hard to imagine a less propitious location for a major city than Chicago other than, perhaps, St. Petersburg in Russia with which it has much in common. Both were built on swamps, on the banks of major bodies of water, and are notorious for bad weather. No “city on a hill” this. It’s pretty much the opposite.

Chicago’s history since its very founding has featured a struggle with the water, famously variable. This history was punctuated by heroic engineering efforts starting with the Illinois and Michigan Canal (whose building may have brought my Irish ancestors to Chicago) to the raising of downtown Chicago about eight feet (by hand) to reversing the flow of the Chicago River to the most recent, the Deep Tunnel project, started about 50 years ago and still under way. If you’re interested that history is recounted in an article in the New York Times, mostly notable for its eye-catching photographs and graphics.

I’m not sure the authors made their point which I gather is that Chicago is threatened by anthropogenic climate change. Not that anthropogenic climate change is no risk but it’s just one among many risks and in the case of Chicago water has been a risk that has reared its head roughly every 20 years since 1834. Obviously, the reason that Chicago must deal with such challenges is less climate change than its location. What I believe the authors miss is why Chicago can’t address such problems as emerge in the same way as it has in the past: with sweat and money.

The late Mayor Richard J. Daley dubbed Chicago “the city that works”. Why has Chicago stopped working? I’m open to other explanations but I think it’s because Chicago has changed from a city dedicated to providing jobs for ordinary people to a city dedicated to providing compensation to past and present public employees beyond what the private sector would have provided. To whatever extent that’s the case it is an instance of the “cat and rat farm” I’ve mentioned before, a form of perpetual motion scheme which like all such schemes can never work.

While I agree with Ed Kilgore’s assessment of the risks in the present situation in his piece in New York Magazine, I’m not sure I agree with him about its sources:

I’d argue we are at another big inflection point. It’s more likely the country will turn left or right than achieve major compromises. That today’s conservatives are frantically trying to suppress popular majorities by exploiting anti-democratic features of our system or, worse yet, by denying such majorities exist is a pretty clear sign of which way the wind is blowing. If the authoritarian strain in Republican politics exemplified by Trump morphs into the kind of reactionary movements that crushed parliamentary democracy entirely in Europe nearly a century ago, perhaps we will long even more for the phony solidarity of an imagined bipartisan past, when backs were slapped and deals were cut in Congress and justice and progress were denied.

More likely, we are destined in the very near future to acknowledge and resolve our differences by choosing sides and having it out. That’s far healthier than denying those differences or blowing up the whole system to avoid defeat.

As Kevin Drum documented in the post to which I linked last week, the aggressors in the struggle are progressives. How else do you explain the situation in Portland? Who are the “oppressors” there and how are they conservatives?

I also wonder what he means by “having it out”? If he means each side whatever they may be trying to impose their views on the other by force, how is that justified under anything resembling a liberal order?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Joe Lieberman appeals to President Biden and, implicitly, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to “save the infrastructure bill”:

I worked closely with Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for decades. They’re both great people and skilled legislative tacticians, and they apparently think this strategy is the only way to hold their fragile majorities together and give all Democrats at least some of what they want.

I hope they rethink their strategy. President Biden has agreed to an infrastructure proposal with a bipartisan Senate group and the House Problem Solvers Caucus. Linking it to a separate multitrillion-dollar partisan reconciliation bill would likely end with passage of neither. The American people wouldn’t soon forgive this failure, and they’d blame Mr. Biden and Democrats because we’re in the majority.

That risk became clearer last week when Mr. Biden went to Wisconsin to advocate for the bipartisan agreement, which would be the largest federal infrastructure investment since the creation of the Interstate Highway System 65 years ago. The president said the plan would create millions of good jobs and ensure America can compete with China. It would replace 100% of the lead water pipes that go into 10 million homes and 400,000 school across America, repair roads and bridges, upgrade the power grid, close the digital divide, make U.S. coastlines more resilient against climate change, and entail the largest investment in public transit in American history.

In other words, the president’s essential message in Wisconsin was that this is a historic plan every American should be very excited about, while the message from Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer in Washington is that we can’t have this infrastructure plan until Congress is done debating and voting for a separate, controversial, costly bill that may or may not pass months from now.

He concludes:

If it all falls apart, Americans will be fuming and they would be justified in their anger. They won’t understand or accept why leaders in Washington couldn’t say yes to a deal protecting their kids from lead-tainted water, making bridges and highways safer, improving mass transit, growing the economy and creating jobs.

In the first paragraph cited Sen. Lieberman makes the essential observation. The Speaker and Senate Majority Leader are struggling to keep their own caucuses in line. The concern is well-founded. I have heard multiple pledges from various members of the House to vote against the bill unless it includes their pet cause. Some of these causes are “poison pills”, all but guaranteed to ensure no Republican support.

I suspect the question will be one of choosing between party unity and bipartisan agreement. Don’t be surprised if party unity wins the tug o’ war.