As you may recall from high school physics, the Michelson-Morley experiment was an experiment to measure the properties of the aether, the substance that was supposed to fill space. It is probably the most famous failed experiment in history. The experiment failed to prove the existence of aether.

We are in desperate need of a Michelson-Morley experiment for history. Either there is no “arc of the moral universe” or it doesn’t “bend toward justice”. Andrew Michta’s article at The American Interest is about the resurgence of hard power politics in the world and here is its kernel:

It is time to admit that at the base of the current Western predicament lies a series of fundamentally misguided assumptions about what matters most in the international system. The so-called liberal international order was never the result of some inevitable process leading to enlightened statecraft; rather, the liberal democratic ascendency was a byproduct of the emergence of the United States as the most powerful nation on earth after the Second World War. America’s status as the world’s greatest democracy for the past 70 years enabled it to imbue the global rulebook with its values and institutions. Notwithstanding talk of “soft power” and rules-based systems, national security and hard power are no less vital today than they were at the moment of that system’s creation.

Sadly, the world as we find it is about power and control. It might have helped if so many countries, notably Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China, had not promoted their own interests at our expense. Now everyone is horrified at the prospect of the U. S. looking after its own interests rather than theirs.

If there were only more consensus about what our interests actually are we’d be in good shape.

There is an extremely interesting column at MarketWatch from Philip Van Doorn. I’ll bet you weren’t aware of this:

Here are some interesting numbers about the S&P 500, according to data provided by FactSet.

• Among the S&P 500, 250 stocks were down 20% or more from their all-time closing highs (adjusted for splits and spin-offs) as of the close on Oct. 15.

• 162 were down at least 30% from their all-time highs.

• 113 were down at least 40% from their all-time highs.

• 69 were down at least 50% from their all-time highs.

Another interesting little factoid. Of the 26 S&P stocks that have reached all-time highs in the last five years, all have declined by 50% or more since then.

As I have been pointing out for some time, when you say “the stock market is at an all-time high”, what you’re really saying is that a handful of stocks are more important than ever. Too big to fail, anyone?

I don’t think that Megan McArdle quite understands what’s actually going on in American politics these days. From her latest Washington Post column:

If the Blue Wave collapses before it hits shore, Democrats may need to ask whether #MeToo and other forms of identity politics are really the wave of the Democratic future.

Democrats have been waiting for that wave to crest for a long time, at least since the 2002 publication of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book’s modest thesis suggested that demographic trends would increase traditional Democratic constituencies while slowly shrinking the GOP’s base, as long as Democrats could find a way to hold their then-current coalition together.

By 2016, many saw that as prophecy: All they needed to do was wait for the GOP’s atavistic denizens to die off, leaving the country to those on the right side of history.

Yet salvation keeps failing to arrive. We now have the most diverse electorate in American history. If the strong version of the EDM thesis were correct, not even gerrymandering, voter suppression and untimely FBI announcements would have handed Republicans enough power to tip the electoral college in their favor. The prophecy failed. And still, a whole lot of folks seem to be waiting for history to vindicate them.

A quick glance at actual history shows that it doesn’t have a “right side” where Democrats can dwell; it doesn’t mechanically hand out power to the morally superior, or to the smartest, or to those with the best manners. Elections are won by those who assemble the biggest coalition of citizens to deliver votes where they’re needed.

But the reality was quite apparent in the report I posted on yesterday. Progressive Activists only comprise 8% of the country. They’re not going to achieve persistent electoral victory without attracting more Americans to their banner any more than the 6% of Devoted Conservatives are but the views of the Progressive Activists are much more divergent from those of other Americans than those of the Devoted Conservatives are. If the Democratic Party becomes a permanently progressive activist party, not only will there not be an emerging Democratic majority, they’ll struggle to remain relevant.

You know, I think there’s a point that Republicans who are chortling over Elizabeth Warren’s apparent own goal on American Indian ancestry. It’s exemplified in this post by Katie Pavlich at The Hill:

Democrat obsession with skin color and gender as a strategy is starting to fall apart and recent cultural events show us how. Nov. 6 is just around the corner and the battle lines for presidential votes are already being drawn. For Democrats, those lines are being crossed as women and minorities vote on interest, not on identity politics.

Incoherence has never been a barrier to electoral success. If you repeat a nonsensical claim often enough and angrily enough, people will come to accept it. For goodness sake, I seem to recall a successful presidential candidate who did just that.

Democrats are unlikely to abandon identify politics in the foreseeable future. Identity-based grievance is what’s holding their diverse coalition together. As long as they can cling bitterly to it, the various segments of their coalition may not notice that their varied interests are actually in competition with one another.

After a lengthy lament about the Democrats’ lack of a unifying message in his piece in The New Republic, Alex Shephard accidentally lurches into a very interesting observation:

Israel argued that “Democrats have it wrong that they need a national-message template in the first place. Past elections have shown that the most effective messaging is local and specific to each district.” This year’s election seems to be proving this true, or at least Democratic candidates are campaigning as if it is. By and large, they are running on a single issue. It’s not impeachment or collusion or corruption or #MeToo; it’s not even specific to Trump. The election, for many Democrats, is all about health care.

That’s certainly true here in Illinois. Just about every Democratic candidate for statewide office is running on health care, either emphasizing his or her support for the Affordable Care Act or criticizing his or her opponent’s position on treatment of pre-existing conditions.

I can’t help but wonder if Republicans, in their obsession with “repealing ObamaCare”, a goal that remains beyond their grasp, have unwittingly done Democrats’ political advertising for them.

Sadly, none of these political pitches come to terms with the genuinely hard questions that lurk behind making health care a right. If you can save one kid’s life by spending a million dollars and a thousand kids’ lives by spending $1,000 each, which do you do? If your answer is “both”, where do you get the money? And how do you handle the reality that there is no maximum level of spending? To the best of my knowledge no OECD country has an actual right to health care; all limit access in some way to control costs.

At The Conversation Paul Griffin addresses an important question. Do carbon taxes work?

Carbon taxes were in effect in about 25 countries as of 2018

Studies, however, indicate that greenhouse gas emission reductions from carbon taxes have been mostly underwhelming.

Researchers generally use two approaches to draw this conclusion, by either building a “counterfactual” model of what the past experience would have looked like with no carbon taxes or by comparing emissions before and after the introduction of a tax with controls for reasons for emissions changes other than a carbon tax.

For example, a 2016 paper examining several studies of emission reductions in 16 countries and two Canadian provinces found an average reduction in carbon emission intensity and energy use of less than 1 percent per year. British Columbia, though, was at the upper end of the emission reduction scale, with emissions per capita falling by as much as 9 percent.

He does not even mention two of the gravest problems with carbon taxes: they are regressive and carbon emissions rise geometrically with income rather than linearly. In other words they only really motivate people who can’t do anything about emissions.

In his column at the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead takes a position opposite to mine regarding Saudi Arabia:

The Saudi transformation is not going smoothly. Aramco’s privatization has been delayed and the ambitious Vision 2030 goals for economic renewal seem increasingly elusive. MBS’s foreign policy looks more chaotic than inspired, and the blunder in Istanbul was not the first false step. The arrest of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri last year and the failed diplomatic standoff with Qatar were not the strokes of a master. Nor is the kingdom’s ill-planned and poorly executed Syria strategy or its intervention in Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster without notably advancing Saudi interests.

The Khashoggi affair is more of the same. But more than other MBS-era blunders, this episode may be an existential threat to the international prestige he has been working assiduously to build—even as the Saudis appear to be cooking up an exculpatory cover story.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, flying to Riyadh at short notice to bring some order to the chaos, is well acquainted with the hard facts of the Middle East. He knows the crown prince’s Saudi Arabia is not an authoritarian caterpillar metamorphosing into a liberal butterfly. But neither are Turkey and Iran. And on crucial issues, U.S. and Saudi interests are aligned. The U.S. wants to ensure that no single power, inside or outside the Middle East, has control over the world’s oil spigot. That means Saudi Arabia must remain independent and secure.

There are two things the U.S. should not do. One is sweep Mr. Khashoggi’s murder under the rug. His disappearance has damaged Saudi Arabia’s standing, including in Congress. Mr. Pompeo needs to deliver a clear message that this behavior weakens and ultimately endangers the alliance. He should not be deterred by Saudi threats. Like the American Confederates who overestimated the power of King Cotton in the 1860s, the Saudis tend to overestimate King Oil’s power today.

But to do what the Iran-deal chorus and the Erdogan and Muslim Brotherhood apologists want—to dissolve the U.S.-Saudi alliance in a frenzy of righteousness—would be an absurd overreaction that plays into the hands of America’s enemies. It could also stampede the Saudis into even more recklessness. France was not expelled from the European Community or NATO in 1985 when its agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing an innocent man in the process.

Without lionizing, ostracizing or enabling MBS, Mr. Pompeo needs to get to the heart of the matter: Saudi insecurity. To restore balance and sobriety to its foreign policy, Saudi Arabia needs to calm down, and only the U.S. can provide the assurances to make that possible. Among other things, this entails coordinating with the Saudis (and the Israelis) on a policy aimed at containing Iran and stabilizing the region. It also involves encouraging the economic transformation the Saudis seek at home. Even as he responds with appropriate gravity to a serious provocation, Mr. Pompeo must give Saudi authorities the confidence that sober and sensible policies will bring continuing American support for the kingdom’s independence and reform.

The Saudis are insecure because they’re hated and they’re hated for good reason. These are people who chop off hands for theft, practice slavery, and execute people for witchcraft. The only credible argument for maintaining our relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the intelligence they provide and any intelligence they provide us is tainted. It is guaranteed to serve their purposes. Their interests and ours rarely coincide.

There is no place for them in the 21st century and most certainly not in America.

I see that the editors of the Washington Post are coming around on Saudi Arabia:

Start with the oil. Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, supplied 9 percent of U.S. petroleum imports in 2017, or about 960,000 barrels a day. But thanks to the shale revolution, the United States is essentially energy independent: It, not Saudi Arabia, is now the world’s largest crude-oil producer. Last year, U.S. daily oil exports averaged 6.38 million barrels, or nearly seven times the Saudi imports. If the Saudis cut back production or boycotted the United States, they could temporarily drive up prices, but the beneficiaries would be U.S. shale companies, which over time would fill the gap — and deal a devastating blow to the Saudi oil industry.

As for arms sales, someone needs to brief Mr. Trump on the actual results of the promises made to him when he visited Riyadh last year. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution sums it up, “The Saudis have not concluded a single major arms deal with Washington on Trump’s watch.” Moreover, an end to supplies of U.S. spare parts and technical support, something Russia cannot provide, would quickly ground the Saudi air force. That would have the welcome effect of ending a bloody bombing campaign in Yemen that a U.N. investigation concluded was probably responsible for war crimes.

and all it took was the murder of one of their own. That they perceive Jamal Khashoggi as one of their own is itself a sad commentary. He was a journalist but not a good guy.

Whatever measures they would take in the “fundamental reshaping of the relationship” would be pale by comparison with what I would do which would include ejecting the members of the Saudi royal family presently in the United States, preventing them from re-entering, and canceling the visas of Saudi clerics receiving stipends from the Saudi government.

In his New York Times column this morning David Brooks talks about a new report, “The Hidden Tribes”, from the organization More In Common:

Every few years one research group or another produces a typology of the electorate. The researchers conduct thousands of interviews and identify the different clusters American voters fall into.

More in Common has just completed a large such typology. It’s one of the best I’ve seen because it understands that American politics is no longer about what health care plan you support. It’s about identity, psychology, moral foundations and the dynamics of tribal resentment.

The report, “Hidden Tribes,” breaks Americans into seven groups, from left to right, with names like Traditional Liberals, Moderates, Politically Disengaged and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most active groups are on the extremes — Progressive Activists on the left (8 percent of Americans) and Devoted Conservatives on the right (6 percent).

These two groups are the richest of all the groups. They are the whitest of the groups. Their members have among the highest education levels, and they report high levels of personal security.

The seven groups identified in the report are:

• Progressive Activists (8%)
• Traditional Liberals (11%)
• Passive Liberals (15%)
• Politically Disengaged (26%)
• Moderates (15%)
• Traditional Conservatives (19%)
• Devoted Conservatives (6%)

I read the whole report, found it interesting and engaging, and it brought forth a number of observations on my part. The first was unsurprising to me and shouldn’t surprise anyone who reads much at The Glittering Eye: I don’t fit neatly into any of those “tribes”. I am empirical and rational in my approach not ideological. In varying degrees I fit into Moderate, Politically Disengaged, Passive Liberal, or Traditional Liberal but neither Progressive Activist nor Devoted Conservative.

Second, the report distinguishes between “the Wings” and “the Exhausted Majority”.

Third, consider these two graphs sampled from the report:

I have taken the liberty of highlighting Progressive Activists on each graph. What do you notice about them?

Here’s a similar graph on which I’ve highlighted Devoted Conservatives:

Keep in mind that the “chattering classes”—people in journalism, entertainers, college professors and the like—are overrepresented in among Progressive Activists.

We are not nearly as divided as some would like to imagine. There is actually considerable agreement. There is a very noisy, wealthy, small, and predominantly white minority trying to convince us that we’re divided.