This piece by Shelby Talcott at Semafor and the underlying Blueprint poll should be a wakeup call for everyone:

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

You don’t need to be under 30 to feel that way. The author continues:

Broadly speaking, Blueprint’s polling reveals young voters in America are not doing okay. But the pessimism about the country, its leaders, and more is also a concerning trend for Biden — whether he’s directly responsible for why voters feel the way they do or not, he’s currently in office during a time when many seem to be.

Perhaps unemployment is not the metric that should be considered. Maybe underemployment, working multiple jobs, and discouraged workers should be taken more into consideration. Certainly, dismissing these concerns is not a working strategy.

The jury in the trial of President Donald Trump in New York has completed their first day of deliberations.

I honestly have no idea what their verdict will be. Based only on what I’ve heard about the judge’s jury instructions I will actually be surprised if he’s acquitted.

Tom Friedman’s New York Times column today is a lament for the qualities our society once had but no longer does. He refers to them as “mangroves”, large trees along the shoreline that protect it, filter toxins and pollutants, and nurture wildlife.

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature. Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.

Most of the column is devoted to the decline of shame, something he characterizes as one of those mangroves, with a focus on the New York trial of Donald Trump. My reactions to the column are multiple including:

• He’s got the wrong end of the stick
• What did he expect?
• He’s about 30 years late

and I will try to explain why.

Cultural anthropologists have multiple ways of describing societies. Among them are the “guilt-shame spectrum” for identifying the different ways in which societies constrain the behavior of individuals. In general terms some societies do so by exploiting internalized guilt while others do so by using externalized shame. Historically, Western European cultures (including the United States) have been considered “guilt cultures” while most of the rest of the world have been considered “shame cultures”. I know that anthropologist Ruth Benedict contrasted American culture with Japanese culture using that distinction.

My key point is that historically we’ve never been a shame culture, we’ve always been a guilt culture. The question Mr. Friedman should be asking, rather than asking what has happened to shame, is why isn’t guilt restraining individuals from doing bad things in the first place?

Over the last 50 years dramatic changes have occurred in American culture. The role of mothers as the key individuals who inculcated cultural values in the young has eroded. Schools, which have been assumed to be picking up the slack, no longer do. That’s the implication of the cult of self-esteem that has overtaken them. If what you do is always just fine, you’ve abandoned both guilt and shame as means of constraining the behavior of individuals. in our present culture nothing has replaced guilt. Constraining individual behavior itself is apparently suspect.

I could list other factors. The decline of what I might call orthodox organized religions, e.g. Catholicism, Episcopalianism, High Church Lutheranism; that the overwhelming preponderance of the immigration to this country for the last 50 years has been from shame cultures, e.g. Mexico and Central America, China are among them.

Finally, to my last bullet point, where was Mr. Friedman when President Bill Clinton engaged in sexual activity with Monica Lewinsky in the White House? My recollection is that he was unconcerned about an erosion of norms but focused on the political implications and the implications for the presidency. That’s exactly how norms are eroded.

I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton and among the reasons that I didn’t was that I thought he was a low character, a view fully borne out by the scandal. I don’t expect presidents to be paragons of virtue, the worse for us. I think that paragons of virtue to not rise to the presidency but in my opinion cheating on one’s wife is disqualifying. Furthermore, my notion of contrition differs so radically from Mr. Clinton’s as to be irreconcilable. I believe that actual contrition means doing penance and an actual commitment to avoiding re-offending and the circumstances that could lead you to re-offend. Mr. Clinton comes from a very different tradition, apparently one in which you claim to be sorry and that’s that.

I need to preface this post, as I generally do, with the observation that I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020 and I do not plan to vote for him in 2024. There are multiple reasons including that I do not believe he is able to deliver but for me the main reason is character. I simply do not believe it is possible to be in the real estate business in New York City without shading the law at least a bit.

With respect to the various cases against Mr. Trump making their way through the courts, I am content, as usual, to let the legal system take its course. I don’t think the outcome in any of the trials is a slam-dunk or predetermined. That has left me without a lot of room for commentary.

I do have one question, however. What will the Democrats do if Trump gets through ALL of the trials without being convicted of anything?

Many (many) years ago when I was an undergraduate I took a year-long course in American diplomatic history. I spent the entire year arguing with the professor about his primary thesis which was that the United States does not have a foreign policy and never has had. My objection, to use the terminology I would use now rather than that I used then, was that the United States has an emergent foreign policy, formed from the various sometimes conflicting objectives of different individuals and organization in the country. The White House. The State Department. The Department of Defense. Individual diplomats in the State Department and officers in the Department of Defense. Companies with foreign trade. Individual Americans.

In a jeremiad in Foreign Affairs Hal Brands paints a very bleak picture of what an “America first” foreign policy would look like and do:

What would become of the world if the United States became a normal great power? This isn’t to ask what would happen if the United States retreated into outright isolationism. It’s simply to ask what would happen if the country behaved in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitive way as many great powers throughout history—if it rejected the idea that it has a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world. That would be an epic departure from 80 years of American strategy. But it’s not an outlandish prospect anymore.

Siding with my teacher of those many years ago I do not believe that the United States has ever had the policy that it had “a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world” and I honestly have no idea of where he would get such an idea. I would challenge Dr. Brands to explain how any of the following (starting after the conclusion of World War II) achieved that effect:

• The Korean War
• The Vietnam War
• The Gulf War
• Our intervention in the Yugoslavian civil war
• The invasion and 20 year occupation of Afghanistan
• The invasion and occupation of Iraq
• Our intervention in the Libyan civil war

and those are just to name a few. I can name a dozen other things that we did not do which might have had that effect but precious few that did.

I believe there are people in the State Department and Department of Defense who have a policy of primacy—not merely primacy from a global standpoint but primacy in every theater of operations. Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, etc. I think an argument can be made that each of the conflicts above was an assertion or attempt at assertion of primacy only tangentially related to “a liberal order”.

Take the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, for example. I don’t see how it had anything to do with a liberal order. I think that one could make a reasonable argument that the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan posed a mortal threat to the United States due to its support and hosting of terrorism. I did not make that argument but I think it was reasonable. I do not see how continuing to make that argument while allowing the Taliban to reassert control over Afghanistan is equally reasonable. That’s not to say that leaving was not the right choice. It was a terrible mistake from the outset.

We certainly didn’t further our interests. We spent a lot of money and lost a lot of lives, ultimately demonstrating that our efforts were futile against a determined native resistance, the opposite of primacy if anything.

Of all of the conflicts listed above only two, the Korean War and the Gulf War, had Security Council authorization, once again the opposite of a liberal order. In the case of Libya we had Security Council authorization to protect civilians but not to prevent the Libyan government from protecting itself.

Note, too, that all other major economies, e.g. UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, have been merrily pursuing their own national interests during the entire period. That raises a question I wish that Dr. Brands would answer. What does he expect to happen if the U. S. pursues a liberal international order as the basis of its foreign policy while every other country on the globe pursues their own parochial national interests? I would expect, well, pretty much what has happened. U. S. diplomatic and military primacy would fade as U. S. economic primacy at least from a relative standpoint declined.

None of the above should be construed as my voting for an “America first” foreign policy. More a renunciation of primacy and a few steps in the direction of non-interventionism with “America sometimes”.

Today is Jack’s second birthday. Take a bow, Jack!

With Kara gone Jack has become my daily walking buddy. We walk at least five miles a day together, more on weekends.

Jack combines considerable charm with willfulness. If he doesn’t want to do something, he won’t do it, darn you. The bowing behavior comes naturally. I believe it might be innate—his grandfather and, I believe, his father both do it, too.

I’m hoping this will be a big year for Jack. For one thing I’m hoping to take some pack hikes with him to get him started on his Working Samoyed title.

If you want to read a very good illustration of why I don’t think the Israelis are our friends, read this article by David Brinn in the Jerusalem Post. Of the two positions taken by Israelis in the article this is the more temperate:

The declaration by Norway, Ireland, and Spain calls for a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and all the West Bank won by Israel in the Six-Day-War handed over to the Palestinians.

As Salman Rushdie so astutely stated in an interview this week, any Palestinian state coming into being in the foreseeable future would turn into a terrorist state, run and manipulated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their like-minded goons – for whom a state is just a means in which to continue their holy war to eradicate Israel.

But if the geopolitical trend continues, that is exactly the situation we’re headed toward. Israel will soon be totally isolated, and even the goodwill of the United States will be helpless against an onslaught of a combined European/Russian/Chinese front that stands in silence in memory of Raisi and justifies Hamas barbarism with rewards of statehood.

When the world no longer cares about differentiating between the victims and the aggressors, it’s clear that a new normal has arrived and that Israel – not Iran or Syria – is a rogue state.

The slippery slope is speeding up, and it’s unclear whether there’s any way to put the brakes on to stop it.

For the first time in some 30 years since moving to Ma’aleh Adumim, built on land won by Israel in 1967, I’m worried that I’ll be forced to leave and move to Israel ‘proper.’

Of course, that will be an Israel with the North and South already unlivable, which will be impossible to defend. With a hostile Hamas-run country on the border, it’s only a matter of a short time before October 7 takes place again and again.

The other position is, basically, the Likud position.

I will repeat what I’ve said before. Israel is not our friend but Hamas is our enemy. The choice isn’t between good guys and bad guys but between bad guys and worse guys. Given a choice between an Israeli victory in Gaza and a Hamas victory in Gaza we should choose an Israeli victory. But our support for Israel should be something less than full-throated.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Mike Waltz and Mark Kelly write about the urgent necessity of rebuilding the U. S. maritime sector:

China uses the world’s oceans to pursue global supremacy, employing coercion and economic intimidation against weaker nations. In the South China Sea it has seized more than a dozen islands in waters claimed by its neighbors. China is using the islands as military outposts, which serve to choke off the region’s economic and natural-resources lifelines. Beijing’s games of chicken with foreign ships contravene international law, risk dangerous escalation, and deny freedom of navigation to American allies and partners.

Yet the Communist Party’s reach and intentions extend beyond regional waters. China has become the world’s top shipbuilder. It controls one of the world’s largest shipping companies and boasts the largest navy. It has built these capabilities with the help of massive state subsidies.

By flouting international standards of fair market behavior, China has secured nearly half the world’s shipbuilding market as well as control over port and shipyard infrastructure around the world.

In shipbuilding, according to a conservative analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Security, China offered $132 billion in subsidies to the shipbuilding and shipping industries between 2010 and 2018. These industries are buttressed by policies like debt forgiveness, low-interest bond issuance, equity infusions and barriers to foreign competition.

Let’s consider just one tiny aspect of China’s domination of U. S. shipping: ship-to-shore (STS) cranes. All U. S. ports taken together have a total of 250 STS cranes used to more containers from ships to the docks and vice versa. Of the 250 200 are from China, 80%. They’re all made by a single company, Zhenhua Port Machinery (ZPMC). Back at the beginning of the year there was a kerfuffle about the Chinese-made cranes being equipped with the ability to make or receive calls without the calls being made or detected by the users of these cranes. Security concerns were raised. The Biden Administration announced a number of security measures including a 25% tariff on Chinese cranes and the intention to replace all 200 of the Chinese-made cranes presently installed with U. S.-made cranes.

These cranes are expensive—around $10 million each. The amounts being discussed to replace them ($20 billion) are about right but that’s not all. We import food (15%), oil (43%), building materials (40%), and many, many other consumables, much of them from or through Canada and Mexico. Canada has a dozen ports with these STS cranes and Mexico at least a half dozen. To secure shipping we’ll need to subsidize Canada’s and Mexico’s replacement of cranes, too—they’re unlikely to do so otherwise.

And there’s a sort of ripple effect in the supply chain for these cranes—steel, electronics, copper, etc. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that we’d need to increase our steel production by about 2% (it’s been declining for decades). Then there’s iron, coal, etc. to make the steel. And that’s just for cranes. Not ships which the main subject of the linked article.

So simply building more STS cranes is not enough. It will take a major effort.

And that brings me to my real point. We only have a handful of alternatives. We can do what we have been doing for forty years which is wish for the best. We could make China into a vassal of the United States. That’s what you’re seeking when you demand that China abandon its own interests in favor of yours. I don’t believe we’re prepared for what that would require.

The United States could become a vassal of China. That would be hard on the U. S. but even harder on the countries of the Western Pacific. Or we could re-industrialize, regardless of cost or run-on effects.

You pays your money and you makes your choice.

A question I frequently ask, only rarely receiving an answer is what kind of a country do we want to be? The graphic at the top of this page from an article by Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff at Business Insider on the American middle class illustrates why.

A good place to start the discussion is with the definition used by Pew Research for “middle income”:

Broadly, Pew Research Center defines middle-class households as making two-thirds to double America’s median income. That adds up to an income range of about $30,000 to $90,000 for single Americans in 2020 dollars. But there are other ways out there that the middle class could be defined, as seen in a Brookings analysis of 12 definitions — including Pew’s.

Here’s how the middle class has been faring in America.

A single American making $30,000 to roughly $90,000 every year is middle-income, according to Pew. A household of two would have to earn around $42,000 to $127,000 to qualify.

Now let’s return to the graphic at the top of the page. Here’s the story it tells as I see it. 50 years ago the United States was mostly middle income with a relatively small percentage upper income and a quarter of the people lower income. Over that fifty years the number of those in the upper income tier has grown substantially as has the number of people in the lower income tier while the middle income tier has shrunk considerably.

The way I sometimes describe it is that we’re becoming more like Mexico.

What kind of a country would I like it to be? I would like for the lower income tier to have shrunk, the middle income tier to have grown, and the upper income tier to have grown a little or even stayed the same. I’ve also expressed my belief on how to get there: reindustrialization and less immigration by individuals with few skills and little or no English.