David Ignatius hasn’t been the first to point this out and he probably won’t be the last. From his latest Washington Post column:

The “Chinese model,” as enthusiasts sometimes describe Beijing’s autocratic system for dictating policy, can look eerily successful — until you consider catastrophic events such as the recent coronavirus outbreak.

China’s response to the epidemic that began in Wuhan nearly two months ago shows some advantages of its police-state approach, and some severe disadvantages: Chinese authorities can commandeer resources to build a hospital in 10 days. But by stifling bad news and even arresting vigilant doctors, they create deep distrust at home and abroad, risking their ability to be effective.

Chinese people simply don’t believe their government. They know that government health data is suspect, just like China’s official economic numbers. And just as all success is attached to President Xi Jinping, so is every failure. China may be racing into the future, but its bungled response to the coronavirus outbreak is a reminder of how suddenly it can stumble.

It isn’t just hospitals. The Chinese authorities can muster the resources to cause whole cities to be built within a remarkably short period. What frequently goes unmentioned: those cities were frequently not built to whatever standards are in place and they may fall down as quickly as they went up.

He continues:

The public’s distrust of the government emerged in interviews conducted this week by an American business executive who worked in Shanghai for three years and who shared with me conversations with former colleagues there. These Shanghai residents expressed deep skepticism about official data, which as of Tuesday showed more than 23,000 cases and 490 deaths.

“I personally doubt the numbers are accurate. I believe there are lots of missing cases, especially in rural area,” said one of the Chinese residents. “I think there are definitely miscounted numbers as some people died before there were cases diagnosed,” said a second. “Don’t trust the official numbers,” bluntly cautioned a third.

That raises another question. If the Chinese don’t trust the Chinese authorities, how much should we? How do we maintain a trade relationship with China while mitigating the risks that inevitably brings with it?

He concludes:

China’s command economy, managed by a one-party dictatorship, has achieved miracles in recent decades. In comparison, an open and contentious democracy like the United States can sometimes seem like a losing proposition. But we’re now witnessing a striking reminder of the need for open sources of information and public officials who aren’t cowed by political pressure.

Is such openness consistent with continued rule by the Chinese Communist Party? I don’t see it. And I think the CCP would gladly trade economic growth for continued rule. China’s present economic “miracle” was largely a means to that end.

I honestly don’t know what to say about the Washington Post’s editorial on the State of the Union speech:

The broadest measures — gross domestic product growth, wages and labor force participation — all point in varying degrees in the right direction, with the most sensitive indicator, unemployment, at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent. The laws of politics decree that incumbent presidents take the blame for negative economic conditions and the credit for positive ones. In that sense, Mr. Trump’s posture, in an election year, is entirely conventional. But the true State of the Union after three years of this otherwise unconventional presidency cannot be measured so straightforwardly.

They go on to admit the economy is growing more rapidly than the one Trump inherited, question the degree to which that has anything to do with Trump policy, criticize Trump’s trade wars, and muse over the sustainability of the present growth.

Here’s their conclusion:

Mr. Trump overtly asserts his total innocence in all respects, even as he implicitly tempts Americans with a subtly different proposition: to accept his behavior, and his conscious efforts to divide the country, as somehow necessary trade-offs for prosperity. This is as false as it is Faustian; trust and consensus are essential ingredients of a modern, efficient economy, not to mention indispensable to a thriving, durable Union.

What would be the basis of such a consensus? Democrats have rejected Trump’s presidency since November 2016 and the first impeachment bill was submitted in the House in June 2017. They have insisted on Trump’s perfidy since the very start.

If there was one message that came through loud and clear last night it was that there will be no such consensus, at least not among politicians, as long as Trump is president.

President Trump’s re-election campaign has begun in earnest and its opening event was the 2020 State of the Union speech. However depicted by the media, that is not unusual. Every quadrennial SOTU is a campaign event. After the customary recitation of accomplishments and a recital of objectives, the now-customary shout-outs were kicked up a notch into sort of a mash-up between the SOTU and a reality show.

Notable in the SOTU were Nancy Pelosi’s re-writing of the customary introduction, President Trump refusing her hand, its highly optimistic tone, bestowing on Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the return of a father long on deployment in Afghanistan to his family, and, after the speech had concluded, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tearing up of her printed copy of the speech. I don’t think I have ever seen such hatred of a political figure as was evident last night.

I quickly did a survey of the fact-checking sites this morning. Most of the checking going on was not checking the facts but the interpretations of the facts. Now we’ll have breathless, glowing declamations about the speech from the president’s supporters and angry, bitter criticisms from his opponents.

I will only contribute one fact-check of my own. Early in the speech Mr. Trump said:

And for all these reasons, I say to the people of our great country, and to the Members of Congress before me: The State of our Union is stronger than ever before!

As was evident from the cheering Republicans and the stony-faced Democrats, I don’t think there has been as much division in the country since the Civil War. The state of the economy is strong but the state of the union is angry and divided.

Today the editors of the Wall Street Journal warn about the potential impact on the U. S. economy of the coronavirus outbreak in China:

Some of President Trump’s advisers may want to wall off the U.S. and China into separate spheres of influence, but the novel coronavirus is showing the futility of economic quarantines. Like it or not, the Chinese and world economies sniffle and cough together.

Commodities prices sank on Monday amid news that the coronavirus and resulting economic contagion are spreading. U.S. crude oil prices have fallen 20% over the last three weeks as Chinese oil demand is expected to fall by two million barrels a day and global economic growth forecasts have plunged. Copper is down 13%, and iron and steel prices have tumbled.

More than 20,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed worldwide—an eight-fold increase over the last week—and experts say hundreds of thousands may not yet have been diagnosed. Two dozen or so countries have reported cases, and many have restricted travel from China to limit the contagion. Companies are evacuating employees from China.

Most businesses in Wuhan where the virus originated have shut down as China has quarantined 56 million or so people in the province of Hubei. Businesses across the mainland are extending the Lunar New Year holiday or directing employees to work from home. Apple, McDonald’s, Levi Strauss and Starbucks have temporarily closed stores.

U.S. manufacturers such as Ford, Apple and Tesla have temporarily halted production. One-sixth of Apple sales and nearly half of chip-maker Qualcomm’s revenues come from China. So do 80% of active ingredients used by drug-makers to produce finished medicines. Because China is the world’s largest manufacturer and an enormous consumer market, the economic freeze will disrupt supply chains and reduce corporate earnings.

I think they’re wrong or, at the very least, exaggerating but let’s dig into that a little bit more. First, these words

80% of active ingredients used by drug-makers to produce finished medicines

are made in China should fill you with dread. Just a few years ago food ingredients from China adulterated with melamine killed who knows how many dogs? To this day we don’t know whether it was an accident, malice, or fraud. There is materially no legal recourse for damage done by Chinese suppliers. We can stop doing business with them. That’s about it. Despite that experience not only most pharmaceutical active ingredients but nearly all food additives, i.e. anything that changes a food product’s taste, look, or nutritional content, is produced in China.

Who should bear the risks of supply chains that run through China? As I pointed out some time ago 98% of the economic surplus realized by that is captured by producers not by consumers. The answer is obvious: producers should bear the risk.

How much will a one week suspension of production cost Ford, Apple, or Tesla? A two week. I submit that it will cost them nothing or, at most, the costs will be temporary. I would also suggest that if those producers don’t have enough inventory to hold them through a brief hiatus they are being reckless.

Finally, I don’t recall the editors of the WSJ ever warning that there were risks associated with doing business with Chinese suppliers. Hoocoodanode? Being dependent on sole sources is a risk, too, and the reality is that all too frequently multiple Chinese suppliers are actually a single supplier with multiple nameplates. How would you ever know?

Let me also add a wisecrack I heard years ago. With the aid of a computer in a matter of seconds you can make a mistake that would have taken years to make in the past.

According to my Iowa friends the Iowa Democratic caucuses are always chaotic but last night’s appear to have been even more chaotic than usual. That’s one of the reasons I have been making the assertions I have about them. Institutional support is highly important in such an environment. And software that hasn’t been tested adequately? You astonish me. There are multiple types of software testing, the most basic of which is called “smoke testing”, a test of whether it runs at all. With the pressures for quick and inexpensive development these days it is not unheard of for software to be released into the field without even having been smoke tested.

Apparently, due to software problems with the mobile app that was being used to tabulate the more complicated than usual results and greater than normal chaos, official results in the Iowa caucuses are still not available. CBS News reports:

As Monday turned into Tuesday, there was no victor in Iowa. There weren’t even any official results.

As the campaigns came to learn, the Iowa Democratic Party found “inconsistencies” in reporting the three sets of results it promised to deliver. The information was to come from precinct captains, who were to report it through a newly developed app. But they ran into trouble as caucuses finished.

“In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” the Iowa Democratic Party said in a statement. “The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

Early Tuesday, the Iowa Democratic Party chair said results will be provided “later today,” although he did not specify what time. Price said he wanted to emphasize this is a “reporting issue, not a hack” and “this is why we have a paper trail.”

Earlier, a backup option for precinct captains to report caucus results — a hotline — ran into its own issues.

When CBS News attempted to call the Iowa Democratic Party Caucus Hotline, a recorded message said, “Thank you for calling the Iowa Democratic Party’s Caucus Hotline. All of our operators are currently busy. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. We look forward to talking to you soon,” before playing hold music.

One precinct captain who was trying to report his results was on hold for an hour and had apparently just gotten through to the IDP — with CNN listening as he was about to report his results — when the party hung up on him on live television.

This wasn’t an isolated incident.

I think it’s going to be a long year.

Any predictions for the Iowa caucuses? I’ve already presented mine: either 1) Biden 2) Sanders with the others following after or 1) Sanders 2) Biden with the others following.

I wanted to mention some remarks made by Rahm Emanuel yesterday, presumably in reaction to Sanders’s ongoing strength, on ABC News This Week:

Well, here’s what I think is a real challenge for Democrats on the eve of Iowa. What is the bigger threat for our party? And I come to this point, which is, are we going to nominate somebody that can’t win? Or are we going to risk a rupture in the party that is irreparable? And the real question in front of us is those two questions. Now, in 1992, ’96, 2008, 2012, and in 2018, the Democrats showed a formula for winning nationally. And the question is, are we going to follow that formula, or throw the playbook out and try something different? And I’ll say one thing about Bernie Sanders. His playbook is no different than Donald Trump’s. Both rely on the fact that you don’t need fickle swing voters, that, if you just talk to your base and energize the people that should vote for you, you can win.

He returned to that point twice again. I think he’s fighting the last war—that’s yesterday’s news. Go back and take a look at the network graph I linked to last week. Sanders’s supports are not just a threat of a schism in the party. They are in fact a schism. When you have elected officials complaining that the Democratic Party is a rightwing party, as is the case now, there is clearly a problem.

The Democrats’ problem is that they may not be able to win without Sanders’s supporters, who in 2016 did not just swallow and pull the Democratic lever, and they may not be able to win with them.

You will discern a number of themes you have heard before in Michael Barone’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on why the predicted Democratic majority hasn’t emerged, at least not yet:

The Democrats lost to Donald Trump and may do it again. How did the world’s oldest political party, which has won four of the past seven presidential elections and received popular-vote pluralities in two more, find itself in this pickle?

One symptom of the party’s ailment is that its four top-polling presidential candidates in national surveys are in their 70s and No. 5 is a 38-year-old former mayor of a city of 102,000. Why haven’t others risen? Where are the candidates with demonstrated appeal to critical segments of the electorate? One answer is that over the past decade the Democrats have had a tough time electing candidates beyond heavily Democratic constituencies.

The decision to enact ObamaCare in 2010 despite its obvious unpopularity—forced through by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over President Obama’s doubts—not only cost Democrats the House but helped prevent the election of Democratic senators and governors in marginal states and produced Republican legislative majorities that dominated redistricting after the 2010 census. It may be reasonable for a party to risk seats to achieve a major policy goal. But the 2010 losses were massive, and current Democratic complaints about health care suggest ObamaCare hasn’t been a policy success.

The Democratic Party has always been a coalition of out-groups. For almost a century after the Civil War it was an awkward alliance of Southern segregationists and Catholic immigrants. Until the 1930s, it had a hard time finding plausible presidential candidates because most of its prominent officeholders were Southerners or Catholics, then considered unelectable nationally. But in 1932 they had a New York governor who was firmly Protestant and a fifth cousin of the popular Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

Today, with its four top contenders from the heavily Democratic Northeast—Delaware, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York—it has a similar problem. Delaware and Vermont were competitive states when Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders first sought office in the 1970s. But neither man has faced a competitive statewide race in decades.

Representing a one-party constituency tends to breed habits of complacency, which have been exacerbated by widely circulated prophecies that demographic changes will give the Democrats a reliable national majority. A careful reading of these “ascendant America” prophets— Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in 2002, the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein and pollster Stanley Greenberg more recently—makes clear that these trends don’t operate automatically.

To prosper from demographic change, a party has to address the issues of the day convincingly and field candidates with appropriate strengths. It also needs to avoid unnecessarily alienating old constituencies. An acquaintance with history shows that when a party gains support from one growing group, the opposition party can gain even more from groups with opposing views even if they’re getting smaller.

That’s what happened in 2016. Rising percentages of Hispanics and Asians and the increasing liberalism of college graduates and unmarried women were supposed to help carry Hillary Clinton to easy victory. Instead they were offset by sharp declines in Democratic support from white voters without college degrees in Rust Belt states from Pennsylvania through Iowa, and in Florida with its many Rust Belt retirees. And as the New York Times’s Nate Cohn argued persuasively that year, noncollege whites are a significantly larger share of the electorate than exit polls have indicated—even if their numbers are slowly declining.

including that non-competitive districts make you complacent and complacency makes you stupid. One of the effects of being concentrated in the cities in safe districts is that it allows you to overestimate your strength.

One factor that Mr. Barone misses is that the very same criticisms could be made of the Republicans. They, too, are geographically concentrated and mostly are elected from non-competitive districts. What the polls tell you more than anything else is that both parties are declining while those who don’t see themselves in either political party are increasing as a proportion or the population.

Update

I had intended to conclude the post above with this thought but it slipped my mind this morning. Many years ago I heard an amusing take on the effect of television on politics to the effect that in California a political party was two people and a television set. Social media has resulted in a continuation of that process with a difference. They have resulted in a sort of perpetual Festivus, celebrated with the airing of grievances and feats of strength, typical among the feats of strength being ganging up on people with whom you disagree. I do not think this is a benign trend and it is clearly disrupting the political parties.

In political science Duverger’s Law is that first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts fosters the emergence of two party systems. Our system certainly appears to support that hypothesis. The uncomfortable conclusion is that however unrepresentative or, indeed, fractional our political parties may be without major structural reform we’re stuck with the political parties we have.