In a piece at Bloomberg Matthew Yglesias argues that Green New Deals, carbon taxes, or even lesser measures targeted at decarbonization will go nowhere. He blames the American people:

If you’re a climate hawk, it’s easy to be mad at politicians for their timidity in the face of an urgent crisis. But there’s also genuinely no point in asking ecologically minded elected officials to fall on their swords and lose elections over unpopular ideas, turning over control of the government to people whose ideas are much worse. All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.

I think he’s missing something basic. Yes, the voters are a roadblock to the “climate hawks'” agenda but that’s because they’re approaching the problem in the wrong way or maybe trying to solve a problem other than the one they claim to be. Why the opposition to nuclear power? Why is carbon capture given such short shrift? Why so much emphasis on electric vehicles when small diesels might produce even fewer carbon emissions than EVs over their productive lives, don’t depend on technological breakthroughs that may never arrive, and would be more immediately useful without requiring vast investments in recharging stations, transmission lines, etc.?

I think there’s a soup of wishful thinking, conflicts of interest, errors, and bad assumptions being made by politicians that are impediments at least as serious as popular reluctance. Start with this question: why ask people to sacrifice?

It may seem like a contradiction of my previous post but it isn’t actually. At Politico Natasha Korecki, Christopher Cadelago, and Ally Mutnick zero in on an aspect of the unfolding situation in Afghanistan more likely to affect Americans in the near term: how will it affect Democrats’ chances in the mid-term elections?

The cataclysmic series of events over the last several days marked the most devastating period of the Biden presidency, and it comes at the precise moment when a growing number of Americans were already fearful of inflation and doubting Biden’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economy. Now, Biden’s credibility on the world stage is on the line.

It all adds up to a troubling political scenario for Democrats, who had held up their president as a seasoned international statesman, the “adult in the room” who promised to reverse what they viewed as the reckless policies of former President Donald Trump.

We’re going to see a lot of polling over the coming weeks and months. Here’s what I predict they’ll show:

• Most Americans don’t care about foreign policy.
• Most Americans don’t give a darn about Afghanistan or its people one way or another other than vague sympathy but those who care do so loudly and intensely.
• Many commentators will argue whichever way helps their preferred political cause.
• However, advertising works. The longer and more agonistically the media complain and wring their hands over the situation in Afghanistan the more likely Americans are to say that they care about it.

There are tremendous ironies in the “Big Lie” trope that’s being used these days. Most people especially those who use the term don’t realize it was coined by Adolph Hitler (in Mein Kampf). Each side thinks the other is the perpetrator of the Lie. But it’s the media that is actually most responsible for perpetrating Big Lies.

All this by way of saying that if the media manage to keep the Afghanistan story alive, it could well doom Democrats’ chances of holding the House and Senate.

I can’t bring myself to link to any of the browbeating, Monday morning quarterbacking, prevaricating, sophist balderdash being written about Afghanistan today. I’ll limit my comments to this. The Taliban are Afghans. They plan to stay in Afghanistan. We didn’t.

There’s lots of blame to go around and I hope fingers will be pointed at, among others, our intelligence agencies. We will hash and rehash Afghanistan over the period of the next 40 years. Not a word that is said will change the facts.

You might find this piece by Anastasia Kapetas at The Strategest, speculating about what will happen after the Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan, which largely consists of quotes from David Kilcullen whom I’ve quoted here before, interesting. The author makes three points:

1. The Taliban are better-prepared to govern the country than they were 20 years ago (!) but not much
2. The Pakistanis are pretty happy with the situation—the Taliban are their guys, they’ve been supporting them for years
3. The Chinese are hand in glove with the Taliban as well

Here’s a telling quote from that last section:

‘It’s clear that China has anointed the Taliban as Afghanistan’s next rulers,’ says Kilcullen, pointing to the public meeting in July between China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Mullah Barader, the head of the Taliban political committee.

But at the most recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, also in July, Wang signalled that China’s support might be contingent on the Taliban helping counter Uyghur groups, IS-K and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

More broadly, China is intent on preserving its resource investments in Afghanistan. And although its Belt and Road Initiative doesn’t encompass Afghanistan, it is an important transit route across Central Asia to other nations like Iran, with which China has just inked a 25-year economic and security agreement.

But can the Taliban be a trusted partner for Beijing?

Kilcullen says many Uyghur militants who were fighting in Syria have gone back to Afghanistan. ‘So how the Taliban treats those groups will an indicator. Will they hand them over to China, or keep them in reserve for leverage?’

As I’ve said before I’m sort of two degrees of separation from Dr. Kilkullen. I’ve never met him personally but his godmother is an old friend of mine.

At RealClearPolicy Joseph Bessette and Andrew Sinclair observe that American popular support for the death penalty remains high:

The Pew Research Center recently reported that 60% of Americans support the death penalty for murder. Gallup, which has been asking Americans about capital punishment since the late 1930s, gauges current support at 55%. These are clear majorities but well below the modern peak of around 80% in the mid-1990s. Political choices have begun to reflect this systematic decline in support. Despite championing the death penalty in the 1990s, President Biden joined nearly every other Democratic presidential candidate in calling for its abolition in his 2020 campaign. Virginia (in 2021) and Colorado (in 2020), both states trending towards the Democratic Party, recently abolished the death penalty.

Although the two of us disagree about whether capital punishment should be public policy in the United States, we agree that a nuanced approach is required for understanding public opinion on this issue. The standard type of death penalty question, asked over and over again for more than half a century, leaves policymakers, scholars, and citizens with an incomplete picture of support, or potential support, for the death penalty. We are far from the first to observe that the answer you get depends on the question you ask. We have begun a project, though, of systematically trying to understand what these different responses can tell us about how many American voters support capital punishment.

Both Gallup and Pew ask a generic question. Gallup asks, “Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?” Although Pew gives more options to measure level of support, its question is otherwise nearly identical: “Do you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” Other polling organizations tend to ask versions of this question as well. Yet, these questions do not distinguish between most murders and the specific kinds of aggravated murders that make someone eligible for the death penalty in the 27 American states that retain capital punishment. If you oppose the death penalty for most murders, but not all murders, how would you answer the generic question?

The authors’ research suggests even stronger support than that:

Our first question takes a different approach than the Gallup question. We ask if the respondents “support the death penalty for the crime of murder” but provide three options: (A) “I support the death penalty for most or all types of murder”; (B) “I support the death penalty only for the most aggravated murders”; (C) “I oppose the death penalty for most or all types of murder.” The weighted responses are: 35% supported for most or all; 35% supported for the most aggravated murders; 22% opposed for most or all; and 8% declined to answer these questions. Among the 92% of respondents answering the question, 38% supported for most or all and 38% supported for the most aggravated murders. Thus, 76% expressed some kind of support and 24% opposed the death penalty for most or all murders. Even if every one of the respondents who declined to answer the questions was truly a death penalty opponent (an unlikely event), that would mean only 30% opposed the death penalty for most or all murders, although half of the supporters want it restricted to the most aggravated murders.

For our second question, we asked respondents whether they favored the death penalty for any of fifteen specific types of murder commonly found in death penalty statutes and among those sentenced to death in the United States. Almost half of the respondents who opposed the death penalty on the first question, when given this list, selected at least one crime from it. Of all the respondents who answered these questions: 86% selected at least one crime, including 80% who selected “raping and murdering a child” and 75% who selected “killing dozens of people as part of a terrorist attack.” At the low end, only 49% selected “killing someone in the course of a robbery.”

My own view is that the death penalty is awarded too casually in the U. S., particularly in some states, e.g. Texas. I think it should not be applied in most cases but that proportionality requires it be available at some point. I guess that makes me a B.

While I don’t think that either crimes or punishments should be determined based on opinion poll, I do find it interesting that the Democratic leadership is as out of touch with the American people on this subject as it clearly is.

In the Chicago Tribune Rick Pearson, Gregory Pratt, and Bill Ruthhart dig into the details of Chicago’s impending redistricting:

Today, there are 12 Latino aldermen on the council — longtime Southwest Side Ald. Ed Burke, who is under federal indictment, represents the 13th majority-Latino ward. There are 20 Black aldermen on the council, with two representing majority-white wards on the North Side.

The City Council has seen dramatic turnover in the last decade, with 35 of the 50 wards — 70% — electing a new alderman. After the 2019 election, the City Council for the first time in its history no longer had a majority of white aldermen.

Chicago has 50 wards. Per the 2020 Census Chicago’s population is 31% white, 30% Hispanic, and 29% black. The remaining 10% are divided among all other ethnicities. You do the math. In the present climate I think it will be tough to justify 17 seats in the City Council held by blacks let alone 20. It’s a zero-sum game and there just aren’t enough Hispanic voters to garner a third of the seats. Historically, a black-Hispanic coalition has been elusive in Chicago.

Benjamin Kerstein has another of what strikes me as an important post at Quillette, on America’s impending “crack-up”. Here’s its opening:

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

I spent some time working in other countries as well but my reaction has been somewhat different from Mr. Kerstein’s, more closely related to G. K. Chesterton’s:

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

My experiences in Germany and the United Kingdom led me to appreciate the U. S. all the more. He reminds me more of the critic’s remark on the Russian writer, Turgenev, when another critic praised him as “having his eye fixed on Russia”, the less friendly critic responded “How? Through a telescope?” (Turgenev had been living in Germany for some time.)

I won’t try to summarize his post, leaving that for you. Here’s what I think is a telling sample:

What we are being offered, then, from both Left and Right, is not very much. Nevertheless, they are sincere in their beliefs, fervent in their advocacy, and often fanatical about their messianic ambitions. All this presents a terrible dilemma, because both sides are dedicated to ideas that cannot possibly meet the challenges of the current moment. Worse, they are determined to thwart and destroy their rivals’ ambitions. And there is every reason to believe that neither side will remain standing once the inevitable collision occurs. Perhaps only sane people will be left to pick up the pieces, and a more pragmatic and cooperative zeitgeist will prevail by default. If so, the mess the sane stand to inherit will be exceedingly difficult to clean up.

Is there, then, a way out of this? Is there an outcome that might settle accounts? There are first the apocalyptic scenarios. These come mostly from the MAGA Right, which could double-down on the “Flight 93” mentality it adopted in 2016, reject the republic altogether, and attempt to destroy it. This would probably mean one of two things. The first of these is secession, which is already being, if not considered, at least seriously debated in certain circles. So far, this idea has not been developed beyond some kind of mooted “secession of the counties,” in which conservative rural America simply separates itself from progressive urban America and seizes either near-total autonomy or outright sovereignty, subject to no laws but those it deems amenable.

It is difficult to see how this could be achieved or sustained. A secession of the counties has no precedent in American or indeed world history, and its advocates have presented few details as to what it would look like. It would probably amount to America’s partition into Bantustans, with urban islands locked inside a vast rural outback. How taxes would be paid or services rendered by some kind of federal government—if such a government continued to exist at all—is difficult to imagine. Trade between these various entities might be practicable, but then so would war. Rural autonomies would likely be heavily armed and raise their own militias and even armies. The result, in other words, could be something like a failed state—a kind of American Somalia in which the government is powerless and warlords reign over disconnected cantons. It is highly unlikely, in other words, that a million flowers would bloom.

[…]

There may be reason for optimism in the percentages, however. MAGA and Wokism remain, in many ways, deeply unpopular. According to Pew, last year only 15 percent of Democrats described themselves as “very liberal,” while this April an NBC News poll found that only 21 percent of American adults had a “very positive” view of Trump. As Biden’s election demonstrates, there is still a solid majority of Americans who have remained sane in spite of everything. Unfortunately, unlike activist zealots, they are not organized and are preoccupied with their own lives. Work and children take up most of their time, and they have neither the inclination nor the energy for the kind of fanaticism that drives their enemies. If they could coalesce into a movement, however, and take to the streets, the town halls, and social media in order to demand an end to extremism and a return to competent and pragmatic government, they might be able to finally impose some sanity.

Alternatively, things could get worse. A lot worse. From my vantage point on the Mediterranean, I cannot say that this is necessarily the most likely scenario, but it is likely enough to be terrifying. More than anything else, I fear a rapid shift of the Overton Window. Whether because of Trump, social media, economic and cultural discontent, or numerous other reasons, things are now being said that were previously relegated to the shadows of the unthinkable. Most of all, the possibility of an end to the republic itself is beginning to be spoken of, and once such a thing becomes thinkable, it is by no means impossible that it may also become reality. Legitimacy has been given to the idea that America may be finished, and that this may even be a good thing. No republic can survive if the vast majority of its citizens no longer believe in it, and it does seem that more and more Americans no longer believe in their republic.

Read the whole thing.

I am as concerned as he about the state of liberal democracy in the U. S. I agree that neither the activists of the Left nor the Right have much of use to offer but I also fear those useless ideologues hold the “commanding heights” of their respective sides and are unlikely to be displaced.

What will the fate of the “infrastructure bill” be?

1. Speaker Pelosi will successfully hold her party together and both the “infrastructure bill” and the $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure bill” will pass and be enacted into law in reconciliation.
2. They’ll pass the House but will fail in the Senate for one reason or another.
3. The “infrastructure bill” will pass the House and will be enacted into law.
4. The “infrastructure bill” will pass the House with some but not all of the provisions of the “human infrastructure” bill and be enacted into law in reconciliation.
5. Neither bill will pass the House.

I have no idea what will happen—it could be any of them. I hope it will be C (which I think is already excessive). My gut tells me D but it could even be A. Or E.

I don’t think there’s any cut-and-dried answer to that question. The experience in California, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, and other states that have legalized recreational marijuana does not support the claim. This piece by Vanda Felbab-Brown at Brookings musing on whether drug legalization in Mexico will reduce the power of the country’s gangs is not encouraging:

U.S. states where recreational cannabis use has been legalized have all needed to grapple with the persistence of large black markets in cannabis and to generate substantial resources to countering it. In the city of Durango, Colorado alone, for example, almost US $80,000 was dedicated to maintaining compliance with the state’s marijuana laws and dismantling illegal grows. That money goes to training of officers since the complexity of the marijuana laws does not make identifying all violations easy, as well as to communication and forced-entry equipment. Enforcement doesn’t come cheaply anywhere. It requires criminal investigators, enforcement program managers, dedicated district attorneys, zoning enforcement officers, environmental officers, crime analysts, deputy sheriffs, and community services officers. In California’s Stanislaus County, revenues from the legal cannabis industry generated an estimated US $3.1 million in the 2019-20 budget year, while the county’s cannabis-related costs amounted to US $1.4 million. But in fiscal year 2020-21, the anticipated cannabis-related costs for the county reached US $3.2 million while revenues were not expected to increase from US $3.1 million, an actual loss for the county.

However compelling your theory or benign your intentions, neither makes any difference. What do make a difference are the empirical results.

I suspect that as more states legalize recreational marijuana or the non-medical use of other drugs the argument will shift from legalization to deregulation and the abolition of taxes. Since, just as has been the case with the legalization of gambling, those have been sweeteners which have persuaded some legislators to the cause. It will be interesting to see how the arguments shift.

The dirty secret of Prohibition is that it worked. It reduced the rate of alcohol abuse and destroyed the saloon culture that had previously prevailed. I don’t think that anyone can seriously contend that the rate of drug abuse will decline with legalization or that the poor will benefit from more drug abuse. I do think that drug legalization will have an effect on gang activity, just not the one its proponents claim. My suspicion is that a lot of the most horrific acts of gang violence have been facilitated by the weakening of inhibitions produced by the use of recreational drugs.