The Battle

In his most recent Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead declaims that the assassination attempt on President Trump has pushed the United States in a more Jacksonian direction:

Mr. Trump is part of a strain of American politics that Andrew Jackson brought to power in 1828. In domestic politics, Jacksonians are skeptical of big business, hate the political and social establishment, and demand “common sense” solutions to complex problems. They support the military but not an officer class seen as distant from the values and folkways of the nation—West Point stuffed shirts in the 19th century, “woke generals” today. They assume the political class is deeply and irreformably corrupt.

In foreign policy Jacksonians feel no need to spread democracy around the world. Instinctively realist, they view the United Nations and international law that would bind the U.S. with fear and contempt. Absent serious threats against America, Jacksonians have little interest in foreign affairs. But when the U.S. is attacked, they believe every measure is justified in its defense. Jacksonians don’t regret assaults on civilian targets during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Relentless warfare against terrorists is justified; most Jacksonians support Israel’s war in Gaza and believe the U.S. should respond to terror with the same vigor.

and

Jacksonian America likes strong leaders, even those like George Washington and the two Roosevelts who come from elite backgrounds and whose policy preferences don’t always align perfectly with Jacksonian ideas. Jacksonians are deeply skeptical of most politicians; Jacksonian faith and loyalty, once given, can be enduring. This gives Jacksonian leaders flexibility on policies; the base will often follow where they lead.

Saturday’s events made America more Jacksonian and gave Mr. Trump an unbreakable hold on Jacksonian America. On the one hand, the assassination attempt reinforced the sense that Jacksonian America is under siege. On the other, Mr. Trump’s fist-waving defiance and determination quieted any doubt about his personal courage. Attacks on him from the political and journalistic establishments will only boost his standing with his followers and inflame Jacksonian hatred of elites.

While I agree with his assessment of the reactions of the Jacksonians who already support Mr. Trump, I think he’s wrong about the rest. I think that the assassination attempt will further reveal just how Jacksonian Mr. Trump’s supporters are but I doubt it will convert the Wilsonians who dominate Democratic politics to become Jacksonians.

I think the battle lines are already drawn. The relatively small number of undecideds may lean more towards Mr. Trump as a result of the assassination attempt. I further doubt that the anodyne remarks about comity will persist. In 2001 by November the New York Times had already abandoned the more tempered remarks it was making in September and was going hammer and tongs against President Bush. The calls for unity will quiet soon.

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I Don’t Get It

Like most people I was appalled at the assassination attempt against President Trump. You can only turn the temperature up so high before someone somewhere boils over. I was also relieved when the identity of the would-be assassin was revealed. It could have been much, much worse.

There are quite a few things being said in reaction to the incident that I simply don’t understand. For some Mr. Trump’s immediate reaction, shaking his fist and shouting “Fight!” were signs of strength and determination. For others they were indications of the things they don’t like about Trump. Where you sit depends on where you stand.

I also do not believe that politicians will eschew negative advertising. Believing they will do so is naive. The reason they use negative advertising is that it works. President Biden did not suspend the campaign of negative advertising against President Trump that was about to be unleashed because he suddenly thinks that President Trump has suddenly become a good guy or because the incident has convinced him that a milder, more civil campaign is what he must do but because he and his advisors realize that a harshly negative campaign against Trump in this moment will be too sharp a contrast with the pleas for civility they’re making. I doubt that the editors of the New Republic are contrite about portraying Trump as Hitler on the cover of their magazine.

What I think is actually happening is that, if anything, this incident is revealing how hardened the battle lines have become. I’m afraid they will only become harder.

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Suicidal, Realistic, or Romantic?

In her regular Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan characterizes the Democrats’ options in their reactions to President Biden’s determination to remain in the presidential race as either suicidal, realistic, or romantic. According to Ms. Noonan the suicidal route is Ridin’ with Biden: he will be defeated by Donald Trump, taking some number of Democratic House and Senate members with him gaining a likely prospect o naming two additional Supreme Court justices.

“Realistic” is inducing Mr. Biden to end his candidacy and:

The realist route, if Mr. Biden ultimately steps aside, is to limit debate, forestall trouble and anoint Kamala Harris as the new nominee.

Here’s the “romantic” strategy:

The romantic route is to take personal responsibility and push the president to step aside. What follows is the Hail Mary pass: Say a prayer, throw the long ball and see who catches it. Devise a process—mini-primaries, open convention, figure it out—that lets the people of the party decide. Devise a formula whereby delegates can choose from five or six candidates. But open this thing up, anoint no one.

I think the Democrats are likely to stay the course. The president certainly will—the prospects for him, his family, and his staff are pretty bleak if he doesn’t. Note, too, that it is in the nature of a politician to believe that a) he/she is the best candidate for the job and b) he/she can win. If it weren’t they wouldn’t be politicians.

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A Difference of Opinion

Based on the conversation coming out following the recent NATO conference, there is a substantial difference of opinion over the level of threat that Russia poses to NATO. President Biden as recently as in his press conference last night proclaimed confidently that, were Russia not stopped in Ukraine, it would go on to Poland and, possibly, others. The counter-argument is articulated at Responsible Statecraft by George Beebe:

Does Russia in fact harbor intentions of military conquest against NATO member states? Given the caution Putin has exercised so far in the Ukraine war in avoiding direct attacks on NATO members, the answer is probably no.

And there is a very understandable reason for this caution. As my colleagues Anatol Lieven and Mark Episkopos and I point out in a new Quincy Institute brief, one does not have to delve very deeply into the conventional military balance between Russia and NATO to realize that the Russian military would be badly outmatched in any war with NATO and would have good reason to believe that an attack on any individual NATO member would quickly turn into a conflict with the alliance as a whole.

As the Quincy brief explains, “NATO has a greater than three-to-one advantage over Russia in active-duty ground forces. … The alliance has a ten-to-one lead in military aircraft and a large qualitative edge as well, raising the possibility of total air superiority. At sea, NATO would likely have the capacity to impose a naval blockade on Russian shipping, whose costs would dwarf current economic sanctions. While Russia has clear superiority over individual NATO states, especially in the Baltics, it is extremely unlikely it could exercise this advantage without triggering a broader war with the entire NATO alliance.”

The actual behavior of our NATO allies casts more light on the subject. From Statista military spending for 2024 is:

Lithuania, the former Soviet Baltic country with the largest GDP, is spending just over 2% of GDP on defense. Taking its cue from Germany and France rather than Poland, it is spending just enough to discourage complaints about free-riding. The most recent admissions to the pact, Sweden and Finland are doing the same while substantial economies like those of Canada, Italy, and Spain are spending under 2%. The U. S. is spending more as a percentage of its much greater GDP than any country except Poland or Estonia.

At Geopolitical Monitor Bilal Bilici argues that NATO has been a bargain for the United States:

There are no unpaid dues, bills, or invoices among NATO members, no one owes any debt to any other member. There is the commitment of 2% of GDP to be spent on defense, which was agreed at the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales, and actually, we have seen the strongest growth of defense spending among members in the past several years. This year it is expected that twenty-two out of the thirty-two total member countries will meet or exceed the 2 percent target, including France and Germany.

However, if we must look at NATO from a transactional basis, then we should consider return on investment. Far from being a burden on the US taxpayer as argued by the isolationists, the United States has benefitted enormously from the alliance.

Firstly, in terms of raw defense spending, the United States has not expended budget on behalf of other nations. In fact, without NATO, US defense spending would in fact have to be much higher. Thanks to NATO, the United States is better prepared to defend itself and is able to apply its resources more effectively. The common funding mechanisms and joint military exercises on NATO ensure that member nations share the costs of defense, which helps mitigate the financial strain on a single nation. Additionally, the standardization of equipment and interoperability among NATO forces means that the U.S. can operate seamlessly with its allies, enhancing overall military readiness.

Secondly, the US benefits from the position of leadership in the global economy. By leading NATO, the United States maintains significant influence over global security policies and initiatives. This leadership role allows the U.S. to shape the strategic direction of the alliance, ensuring that its interests and values are represented on the global stage. In particular, we are seeing the emergence of coordinated defense industrial strategies among NATO allies, including the European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS), which aims to lay out a framework not only to dramatically increase manufacture of munitions, but to compete globally in technology, innovation, agriculture, and energy.

Lastly, there is the simple face value of deterrence from attack. A mutual defense treaty with such a large, geopolitically important bloc greatly improves US national security at a much lower cost than going at it alone.

There’s something missing from Mr. Bilici’s piece: numbers. I have no idea how you can determine return on investment without calculating either costs or benefits. I can’t argue that NATO has not been a tremendous bargain for a number of our NATO allies, particularly Germany and, notably, since Mr. Bilici is a Turkish politician, Turkey. I think it has provided some benefits to the U. S. There are also two words missing from Mr. Bilici’s piece: readiness and preparedness. Given the notable unreadiness of most of our NATO allies’ militaries what would they need to spend to have the level of preparedness actually required? And how can you calculate ROI without taking that into account?

I also can’t help but agree that if you estimate the benefits as boundless regardless of cost NATO would be a good deal. However, I honestly don’t see how the United States can provide the sort of defense our NATO allies would require in the absence of considerably increased expenditures by those allies so their militaries have higher levels of readiness without re-establishing bases in many of them which would require not only expanding our military and what we’re spending on it but increasing our industrial output to supply them.

The need for more spending by those allies if the core of Robert Peters’s post from the National Security Journal, hosted by Heritage:

The United States has been saying for almost 20 years that Europe needs to do more. In 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned European leaders that “if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” A decade and a half later, less than two-thirds of NATO members have reached that mark.

This represents a deep unseriousness on the part of many Europeans when it comes to security issues. Europe can either accept to live with a Russia that is able to outgun and therefore threaten Europe, or it can choose to re-arm and deter further Russian aggression within Europe. As noted earlier, many nations in Europe are already moving to higher defense budgets, but more must be done—and urgently.

The good news is that Europe has the resources to easily deter Russia. It has the required manpower, the wealth, the technology, and the industry.

It simply has to make the choice to do so.

The open question is why should they? If the benefits of defending our NATO allies is as great as Mr. Bilici implies, wouldn’t we keep right on doing it regardless of what they spend? That certainly seems to be the conclusion at which they have arrived.

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Preparedness

I found Curtis L. Fox’s assessment of the military preparedness of our NATO allies at the Military Review very informative:

The United States has always occupied a preeminent position in NATO due to its vast military and financial resources (the table provides a useful comparison). Apart from the United States, the bulk of NATO combat power was historically provided by the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. But much has changed in recent decades. Are Germany, France, and the United Kingdom capable of deploying heavy ground forces in a timely response to the eruption of a major military confrontation with Russia? Are there other important hard power contributors to NATO?3

The short answers to his questions are all “no”. Of the most powerful countries only the United Kingdom has the highest level of preparedness (I was wrong in thinking that only France was). Germany’s military is a charade. Even the UK’s military is greatly reduced in its ability to project force.

The most reasonable conclusions are that they don’t really think that Russia is an existential threat but they wouldn’t object to the United States shouldering a disproportionate share of the responsibility for defending our allies. I question whether we can without the industrial base to support us. My claim is that military power is downstream from industrial strenght.

I still think my question is the right one: what would it take to bring the militaries of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom up to the necessary level of preparedness and strength. 2% of their GDPs? 5%? The erosion certainly can’t be remediated in the short term.

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Existential Threat?

At the Center for European Policy Analysis Kurt Volker is outraged by what isn’t on the agenda of the NATO Summit:

One might think, therefore, that at the July 9-11 gathering of NATO heads of state and government — a meeting marking 75 years of the world’s most successful military alliance — the number one issue would be the plan for victory and the restoration of peace in Europe.

One would be wrong. There will be no talk of doing whatever it takes to win the war, of defeating Putinism, and of inviting Ukraine to join NATO as quickly as possible. Instead, the summit has already been pre-planned to take only modest, incremental steps to support Ukraine, while deliberately avoiding the most fundamental questions.

This low bar was set and rigorously enforced by the United States and Germany, despite pleas for a more robust posture by several NATO allies. Washington and Berlin have made it clear that the key goal is not to provoke Putin and to avoid escalation. His defeat is still not the objective.

Mr. Volker has his own proposals:

The remedy to all these fears would be for the NATO summit to send a clear and unambiguous message to Vladimir Putin that despite the uncertainties in American leadership, NATO has the strength, resolve, and resources organized behind a clear plan to ensure Ukrainian victory, Russian defeat, and the restoration of peace in Europe.

Ideally, NATO would make clear it will give Ukraine everything required to expel the Russian invader, with no restrictions on the types of weapons provided or their use, other than conforming to international law.

Allies should establish a massive fund for expanding defense industrial production and procuring supplies for Ukraine, based on established NATO cost-share formulae. Allies should provide direct assistance in extending air defenses over western and southwestern Ukraine. Allies should assist with demining and guaranteeing freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. And NATO should begin the process of admitting Ukraine as a member, just as the European Union has done by opening accession talks with Ukraine.

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have all been roiled by political unrest recently. In which of those countries were the voters upset that their governments weren’t providing enough aid to Ukraine? If you guess “none”, you would be right.

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Both?

Is the Republican Party dominated by idiots or does it have its finger on the pulse of today’s voters? Both? At the Washington Examiner Quin Hilyer laments the lightweight economic planks in the 2024 Republican platform:

The Republican National Convention policy committee’s draft platform, released July 8, is an anemic little thing compared to what once was expected from party conventions.

Maybe its thinness and vagueness will prove to be smart politics because it will give critics fewer targets to nitpick, and also because the public’s attention span these days has atrophied to embarrassing levels. Let it be noted, however, that lengthy, program-specific platforms in the past certainly were no hindrance, and quite arguably a real aid, for Republicans to win landslide elections.

This year’s platform runs just 16 pages, with lots of white space. Most of its promises amount to frothy wish-casting. By comparison, the 1980 convention platform, part of Ronald Reagan’s massive victory in which he carried 44 of 50 states, ran for 75 densely packed pages.

For example, the 1980 platform had a nearly 500-word section on “small business.” This year’s draft doesn’t even contain the words “small business.” In 1980, Republicans devoted more than 2,000 words to energy policy. This week’s platform handles energy in just 65 words.

Yesterday I touched on something that has been a recurring theme here, something I call “visualcy”, the transition from a literate society to one that relies on visual media, e.g. video, graphics, for information By “literate society” I don’t just mean one in which the people can read and write but one in which people rely primarily on the written word for information. The characteristics of literate societies (by comparison with pre-literate societies) include the inability to follow abstract logical arguments and agonistic modes of expression. My thesis has been that modern society resembles pre-literate ones more than it does a literate society. Add short attention span (which I blame on television) and you’re pretty much describing our modern society.

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Leading Indicator


The “Sahm Rule”, pictured in a graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve above, was designed as a real-time leading indicator of recession. Here’s the description of our present situation from the American Institute of Economic Research:

In this morning’s US Bureau of Labor Statistics data release, the U-3 unemployment rate increased 4.1 percent in June 2024, rising by one-tenth of a percentage point above the forecast rate. The U-3 rate measures the percentage of the civilian labor force that is jobless, actively seeking work, and available to work, excluding discouraged workers and the underemployed.

This uptick triggers the Sahm Rule, a real-time recession indicator, suggesting that the US economy is in, or is nearing, a recession. The Sahm Rule, developed by former Fed economist Claudia Sahm, is designed to identify the start of a recession using changes in the total unemployment rate. According to the rule, a recession is underway if the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.50 percentage points or more, relative to its low during the previous 12 months. With the June 2024 U-3 rate of 4.1 percent, the average of the last three months being 4.0 and the lowest 12-month rate of 3.5 percent in July 2023, this criterion has been met.

While not going so far as to predict a recession they conclude:

While more data will be required to confirm the Sahm Rule indication, the impact of accelerating prices, interest rates at their highest levels since 2007, and commercially suppressive pandemic policies have probably caught up with US producers and consumers.

Yesterday I pointed out that the relationship between full-time and part-time shops suggested recession. Here’s another leading indicator.

I honestly don’t know what is going to happen—we’re in unknown territory. The U. S. economy has never been exposed to such a large debt overhang in peacetime, particularly with the economy as deindustrialized as it is now. The political instinct will be to spend more, especially during an election year, which would push in the opposite direction as Fed policy.

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Digging Into the Unemployment Rate

I don’t follow the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Report as faithfully as I used to. My loss of interest started when I understood how unempirical the numbers they are reporting are. However, this month’s caught my interest when I read that the number of full-time jobs decreased by 1.6 million while the number of part-time jobs increased by 1.8 million so decided to dig into it a bit. The first thing I wanted to show you was this, the age-adjusted figures for full-time and part-time employment over time:

The numbers are noisy to be sure but the trend certainly looks more characteristic of the leading edge of a recession than of boom time. You might also be interested in the video version of Ms. Nash’s presentation:

This graphic also strikes me as interesting:
Statistic: Unemployment rate in the United States in May 2024, by industry and class of worker | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista
I’m not exactly sure what to conclude from that bar chart but I’m more confident in something you cannot conclude from it. We don’t need more workers in Agriculture or Leisure and hospitality but we may in the highly subsidized Education and health services.

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The Most Deadly Weekend (Updated)

Here in Chicago the 4th of July weekend has historically been the one weekend of the year with the highest number of homicides. Based on the statistics produced at Hey,Jackass! 2024 has already exceeded the number of homicides in the two prior years and may well exceed the number in 2021 and 2022. 17 people have been killed and 81 wounded. And that doesn’t include the man who blew his own head off with fireworks.

With Sunday night left to go who knows how high the tally will climb?

Update

The final tally is 19 killed, 85 wounded. As awful as that is it’s actually a relief that the number killed does not exceed the number in the Fourth of July weekend of 2021 or the Fourth of July weekend of 2020.

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