I wanted to call attention to what I thought was a nice turn of phrase in Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, lamenting the decline in standards on both sides of the aisle. After several paragraphs decrying President Biden’s extraordinary blanket pardon of his son she turns to the income administration:

Now to the incoming administration’s slippage of standards, the exotic cabinet picks that veer from “that’s a stretch” to “that’s insane.” The more exotic nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Kash Patel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mehmet Oz at Medicare and Medicaid Services—don’t have backgrounds that fit the jobs. Taken together they look like people who want to blow things up.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Back in 2020 I thought that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump were presidential caliber.

What does Mr. Trump think that qualifications for cabinet offices are? Maybe President-Elect Trump thinks that “blowing things up” is a primary qualification.

As I see it there are several different strategies for managing the federal government. My preference is what I call “prudent stewardship” but that requires a lot more knowledge, industry, capability, and skill than any recent candidate for president has possessed. That alone calls the present structure and scope of the federal government into question.

Ms. Noonan continues:

But these nominees seem as if they want a demolition derby everywhere. That isn’t a plan for progress but a recipe for unproductive chaos—nonstop, systemwide, all agencies involved.

I would add that her critique of the Department of Defense severely understates the problem. Readiness seems to be a peripheral issue rather than the central one as it should be. And we have far too many flag officers for a peacetime military.

Here are her remarks on “the deep state”:

It isn’t new. All modern democracies have them. J. Edgar Hoover was the deep state. He was appointed 100 years ago by Calvin Coolidge. “The building always wins” isn’t quite as true in Washington as “the house always wins” is in Vegas, but it’s close. The thing is to manage the mess by picking strong, seasoned, experienced people to lead the agencies, not hotheads but cool hands. Blow everything up and you’ll just wind up surrounded by debris.

Here’s her conclusion:

Senate Democrats may think they have a bonanza coming with all the explosive confirmation hearings, but it may not be that simple. They should probably keep one word in mind: backlash. Like the one that followed the past year’s court cases against Mr. Trump. Beating up nominee after nominee in hearing after hearing will leave some of the public thinking the Democrats are embarked on mere obstructionism, partisans shooting down every nominee for merely partisan reasons. Mr. Trump’s foes have a way of overreaching. It has turned out to be lucky for him. Democrats will have to choose their targets, too.

Which means some wholly unqualified people will likely get through. I guess that’s the ultimate strategic purpose of flooding the zone.

All this feels crazier than it has to.

The editors of the Washington Post have come out in opposition to Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, urging President-Elect Trump to pick someone else:

Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s planned nomination to become defense secretary reflects a failure of vetting by President-elect Donald Trump. Mr. Hegseth lacks the temperament, judgment, character and experience to lead the world’s most complex and lethal military organization. Fortunately, Mr. Trump has several better options to manage the Defense Department and its 3 million employees who would sail through the Senate and serve as good stewards of the Pentagon.

Here are their alternative recommendations:

Mr. Trump has other options, even if imperfect, who are largely aligned with his desire to modernize and transform the military. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa would fly through. She’s a combat veteran who has spoken of her own experiences with sexual assault and understands the need to project American power overseas. Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida is slated to become national security adviser, but he would be a solid choice for defense secretary. Other names in the mix include Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, though the GOP cannot spare the departure of any more House members, as the party will hold only a narrow majority in the chamber next year. Another option being discussed is Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official and close ally of Vice President-elect JD Vance.

One name Mr. Trump has reportedly been floating to associates is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who served as a Navy lawyer before running for Congress. Mr. DeSantis has the requisite experience and relishes the cultural battles that Mr. Trump apparently wants Mr. Hegseth to fight. He has also shown a willingness to assert his independence at times, which is why we’d be surprised if Mr. Trump gave him such an important role. But, for all our disagreements with him on policy, Mr. DeSantis would be far better than Mr. Hegseth and probably could be confirmed — barring disqualifying new information from the confirmation process.

I have literally no opinion about any of Mr. Trump’s appointments. I don’t think they’re particularly important. Trump clearly does not adhere to Ike’s staff management approach to the presidency. I believe he wants to call all of the shots himself, something I think is actually impossible for a job as gargantuan as the presidency, and is frustrated that he can’t make his approach work.

I have no idea whether Mr. Hegseth is good, bad, or indifferent. I also have no idea how I would go about determining that. No third party reports can be relied on. Equally I have no idea what people think the qualifications of cabinet officers are. AFAICT the only qualification is that they need to be native-born citizens to meet presidential succession requirements.

I wanted to take note of Walter Russell Mead’s most recent column in the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Mead writes:

The collapse of Mr. Assad’s poorly trained army of sullen conscripts humiliated the regime. The loss of Aleppo has wounded it. Before civil war wrecked the Syrian economy, Aleppo was the country’s commercial capital. It’s where Mr. Assad kicked the rebels to the curb in four years of bitter warfare starting in 2012. The regime’s 2016 victory in Aleppo signaled to the world that Mr. Assad was here to stay.

Now a loose coalition of rebel groups has retaken the city as Mr. Assad’s demoralized forces flee in disorder. Russian and Syrian war planes are strafing rebel-held territory and supply lines, but the rebels continue to advance. While nobody knows how this ends, there are important lessons here for policymakers around the world.

Dr. Mead points to three lessons that might be drawn from the situation in Syria:

• The uses and limits of military power
• Israel is an excellent ally, and the U.S. benefits when we support it.
• How to deal with Russia

What Dr. Mead does not accomplish in the column is to explain why we are aiding the Syrian rebels? I think we are repeating the error we made in Libya.

For liberal interventionists that Assad is a bad guy is enough reason. But the world is full of bad guys and we aren’t trying to oust all of them.

Furthermore, what happens if Assad is removed? Either he will be replaced by another Alawite dictator who will keep doing exactly what Assad has been doing for the same reasons or by a Sunni radical Islamist. Remember Al Qaeda? Those were radical Sunni Islamists. Rationalizing that by saying they aren’t Islamic State is a distinction without a difference. They are still worse guys than Assad.

The reasoning for neocons is pretty similar. I can come up with no earthly reason (other than conspiracy theories) for us to aid the Syrian rebels.

It can’t be because it weakens the Russians. We started aiding the Syrian rebels before the Russians started helping Assad. The causality actually goes the other way. The Russians are helping Assad because we are helping the rebels.

I also question this assertion from Dr. Mead:

Moscow wants to be a global power, and that creates vulnerabilities that the U.S. and our allies can exploit.

I think that’s incorrect. The only thing that makes Russia a “global power” is nuclear weapons. Otherwise, it’s a regional power and there isn’t much we can do about that. Russia’s region is pretty enormous. Aleppo is only about 1,300 miles from Moscow—it can be flown in a couple of hours and driven in three or four hard days. It makes sense for the Russians to be concerned, especially when we’re aiding the rebels.

The best outcome we can hope for from aiding the rebels is chaos. I don’t believe that chaos actually works to our advantage. It certainly doesn’t work to the Syrian people’s advantage.

Yesterday Eileen O’Neill Burke was sworn in as Cook County States Attorney, replacing the execrable Kim Foxx. The editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim:

Speaking specifically about domestic violence after swearing in newly elected Cook County judges, Evans on , “There are gaps in the system that I hope we can work on with the incoming state’s attorney.”

O’Neill Burke’s solution to those “gaps” is clear: Those charged with committing violent crimes will be presumed dangerous, and her office will be asking Evans’ judges to protect the public from them while their cases are adjudicated. How will Evans respond? Will he wait for more tragedies like Beldie’s killing to take action, judge by judge? Or, will he nod to the public’s desire, reflected in O’Neill Burke’s election, for a tougher approach to violent crime?

Under the landmark SAFE-T Act, the 2021 law (amended in 2022) that ended cash bail in Illinois, prosecutors and judges play huge roles in keeping dangerous people off the streets as they await trial. A judge can’t order a defendant detained if prosecutors don’t first make the request. And then, when prosecutors do ask for detention, judges have to agree. Any mistake from either party can lead to tragedy.

The system can’t be foolproof. As Evans noted in his interview, “Humans are running the system,” and they aren’t perfect. But we surely can do a better job of protecting the public than we have been doing.

What does doing a better job constitute? It means putting the concerns of victims before those of accused criminals (or paroled criminals, for that matter); it means displaying zero tolerance for the carrying or use of illegal weapons; it means protecting women when they’re threatened by their partners or ex-partners.

In those respects and more, Eileen O’Neill Burke has started to check all of the right boxes.

As I have pointed out before one of our greatest present problems is that the police, states attorney, and judges all need to be aligned. Ms. Burke appears to have her head screwed on right and, based on the quoted remarks, at least some judges are starting to come around as well.

We’ll see.

I found the graph above, sampled from John Halpin’s latest post at The Liberal Patriot, sufficiently eye-opening that I wanted to pass it along. Here are some of Mr. Halpin’s remarks:

For example, in a comprehensive post-election survey of 4800 working-class voters conducted by PPI and YouGov (including oversamples in the battleground states of AZ, GA, MI, WI, and PA), Republicans outperformed Democrats across every indicator of party leadership and values. As seen in the charts below, pluralities or majorities of working-class voters overall viewed Democrats as “incompetent,” “out of touch,” “not on my side,” “weak,” and “untrustworthy.” In contrast, 50 to 63 percent of working-class Americans viewed Republicans in this election as “competent,” “in touch,” “on my side,” “patriotic,” “strong,” and “trustworthy.”

To date most of the reactions of the election results by Democrats that I’ve read have suggested that tweaking the messaging or a better “get out the vote” campaign would have resulted in victory.

Mr. Halpin’s remarks continue:

If Democrats want to be honest with themselves, they will admit that their party is no longer the historic voice for blue-collar, working-class Americans. The Democrats’ national party brand is sadly a pathetic shell of its former self.

Whether it’s just a false perception or not it looks to me as though many Americans believe that the Democratic Party is the party of government. People who work for the government, want to work for the government, get paid by the government, or want to get paid by the government.

There’s a question that I’m seeing in quite a few places: who’s running the federal government? IMO the answer to this is incredibly simple. The federal government is running the federal government and doesn’t much care for interference from elected leaders (called in some sectors “the temporary help”).

As I read David Dayen’s post at The American Prospect, “What is the Democratic Party?”, a thought came to mind. I recommend Mr. Dayen’s post. This is the meat of the post:

Democrats have an unwieldy coalition of progressives and moderates, consumer advocates and Wall Street bankers, environmentalists and labor organizers, muscular foreign-policy promoters and pacifists, people who want the party to be about tax fairness and health care and abortion and democracy and any of about a hundred other silos. Little stitches together these priorities, outside of being a jumble of words on a page.

In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent. In that void, the other side fills in the blanks, and the public, absent any other information or clear definition, tends to believe them.

but here’s the snippet I want to focus on:

Here it’s worth thinking about the two actual realignments in American politics in the last century: Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nobody would confuse the two, although Reagan was an FDR Democrat when he joined the Screen Actors Guild, a union he would eventually lead.

Roosevelt defined government as an interventionist force to limit the economy’s excesses and protect the vulnerable; Reagan redefined government as an inefficient yoke on the backs of the people. But the two realigners shared an ability to convince voters that they believed in something. Trump has a vision, however wrongheaded it is, and however lacking it may prove once put in contact with reality. The Democratic vision, however, is more distant, more ephemeral, too constructed in a lab to be seen as authentic.

That zooms in on an important question. What is the federal government for? I believe there are several different views, sometimes contrasting, sometimes conflicting, sometimes held all at the same time.

1. Something approximating the Founders’ vision: a forum for managing conflicts among the states peaceably while handling defense and foreign policy and guaranteeing a small number of rights.

Remember “limited government of enumerated powers”? I don’t believe there is any way to return to that vision at this point. The best we can do would be to pare back some of the federal government’s roles that go too far beyond its limits.

2. A tool for redistributing income from “the rich” (however defined) to the needy (however defined).

What is the “tax fairness” to which Mr. Dayen alludes above? If he means that the top 1% of income earners should pay taxes equivalent to the portion of the national income they receive, we’re already there. They pay considerably more than that. As I’ve mentioned before IMO our problem is not with the top 1% of income earners but with the top 10% of income earners, far too many of whom are highly dependent on payments from the federal government in one form or another. I for one would like to see a federal government that was more energetic in constraining big businesses. Something to chew on: there are very few “natural monopolies”. Most monopolies are granted by the government in one form or another and most big businesses depend on monopoly power.

3. An employment program, particularly for people with college or post-graduate degrees.

It’s not surprising to me that people with college or post-graduate degrees support Big Government. Many of them depend on Big Government for their livelihoods.

4. A way of advancing social agendas

I for one do not believe this is a legitimate role for the federal government (or government at any level) at all.

5. A method of gaining power, riches, and privilege

In the light of recent developments I see no way that anyone could deny that there are people who see the federal government this way, indeed who see government at every level this way.

I want to commend Matt Taibbi’s latest post on the FBI to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly. In the first phase of this nightmare, between 2001 and 2016, the post-9/11 Bureau used the pretext of an enhanced counterintelligence mandate to throw off some mild restraints that had been placed on it the last time it had to be slapped down, i.e. after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. The second phase of its transformation took place after the election of Donald Trump, when the Bureau remade itself on the fly as a kind of government-in-exile, empowered by an outpouring of public and media support to view itself as a counterweight to the Trump government.

In addition to Mr. Taibbi’s main complaint which is that the FBI’s becoming a sort of Stasi is an irresistible temptation, I believe there are other issues which deserve some reflection. When the FBI was founded and empowered more than a century ago, the federal government was small and manageable. Now there are nearly 70 different agencies in different departments that are armed and have police powers. Consequently, not only is the is the FBI dangerous to a liberal democratic order, it is redundant and its authority overlaps with scores of other agencies.

The “talking heads” programs this morning were largely devoted to how awful Trump’s appointees have been, particularly Kash Patel. But there was also some attention devoted to the Democrats’ soul-searching on why they lost.

I don’t think it’s a mystery. Kamala Harris was a weak candidate. She was a weak candidate when she ran for president in 2020. She was a weak candidate when Biden picked her as his running mate. She was a weak candidate on her own steam as president. Furthermore, she either refused or was unable to separate herself from the Biden Administration so she had the baggage of his record to deal with AKA “anti-incumbency bias”.

The Democrats badly needed someone who was not part of the Biden Administration. I believe that such a candidate might actually have beaten Trump.

As it was not only did Harris get fewer votes than Biden in places that Biden carried in 2020, Trump actually carried some areas that Biden carried in 2020. Trump won in one precinct in Chicago, the first time a Republican has carried a Chicago precinct in decades. At least to my eye that suggests a graver problem than a turnout or messaging problem.