At Harvard Business Review Gautam Mukunda provides a strategic framework for actions by Democrats to try to emerge from what is possibly the party’s weakest position since it became a political party. His strategy has four distinct fronts:

• Oppose Trump-supported popular measures, e.g. his infrastructure bill.
• Support Republican elite-supported popular measures, e.g. increased defense spending.
• Oppose Trump-supported unpopular measures, e.g. substantial decreases in legal immigration.
• Oppose Republican elite-supported unpopular measures, e.g. Medicare privatization, and blame Trump for them.

I think it’s far more likely that Democrats will take a purely oppositional approach and oppose everything supported by any Republican, ignoring the political reality that Americans see the country as going in the wrong direction by substantial margins but less so that at any time in the last four years (and then only for a short period—the 4th quarter of 2012). In other words Americans still hunger for change.

I think there are two problems with Dr. Mukunda’s proposed approach. First, he assumes without providing evidence that marginal Trump voters are the same as independents in general. What if they aren’t? It’s the entire linchpin of the strategy.

He also assumes, without evidence, that the circumstances of Democrats and Republicans are symmetrical, i.e. similar strategies will have similar effects. But Democrats are the party of government or at least seen to be such and strident opposition to Trump and/or Republicans by bureaucratic Washington encourages that view. What if a federal government that continues in its dysfunction is blamed on the Democrats?

As I read this post at Bloomberg on how the Netherlands has become increasingly anti-immigrant, this passage leapt out at me:

This being the Netherlands, a trading nation that prides itself on its ability to find a consensus, this tug of war will eventually result in some kind of compromise. Though Wilders probably won’t govern after the March election since no big party wants to form a coalition with PVV, Niemoeller expects his strong showing to shift the national consensus. “We have these almost mystical changes,” he says. “Our elite changed to a 60’s liberal mentality in one summer. We went from rejection to acceptance of euthanasia in one summer — nobody could see why. So maybe we’ll end up agreeing that Islam is a big problem in the same way.”

I’ve written before about the differences between large, extremely diverse countries like the United States and small, homogeneous countries like some of the ethnic states of Europe. Sometimes whole countries aren’t unlike a large, extended family.

One of those differences is that opinion has tended to be uniform but that does not necessarily mean unchangeable. It means it can turn on a dime.

He may be finding himself without a political home. From his recent New York Times column:

Go ahead and denounce Trump’s lies and bigotry. Stand firm against his disastrous policies. But please don’t practice his trick of “otherizing” people into stick-figure caricatures, slurring vast groups as hopeless bigots. We’re all complicated, and stereotypes are not helpful — including when they’re of Trump supporters.

But what if the problem isn’t Trump but the 46% of voters who voted for him? And is it any wonder that I’m concerned that civil war is the logical outcome of our present political circumstances?

At The National Interest there’s an interesting article on NATO from Belgian professor Tom Sauer. Here’s a snippet:

NATO’s post–Cold War track record is dismal, which is not surprising, given the nature of the beast. Apart from the Balkans, which are more or less stable (although tensions are flaring up again these days), the NATO military interventions in Afghanistan and Libya are a complete failure. Thirteen and six years after NATO’s intervention, respectively, these states have hardly stabilized. On the contrary, Afghanistan and Libya are breeding places for terrorists. Again, this should not come as a surprise, because collective defense organizations are not meant for carrying out peace-building operations.

The biggest mistake, however, was NATO expansion. It is hard to refute the thesis that the Ukraine crisis is the result of interference by NATO and the EU in Russia’s spheres of influence. A red line was crossed, in the eyes of Moscow, and Russia had repeatedly made that position clear in advance. NATO expansion also contradicted Western promises. On the basis of these oral guarantees, in February 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev gave the green light for German reunification talks. And what did the West do? Expand NATO. Not just once, but twice. At the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008, President Bush even pushed through (against the wishes of the Europeans) a third extension, namely the promise to include Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. What did he expect Russia would do? Just take notice and agree?

More fundamentally, the West made the mistake after the end of the Cold War not to include Russia into the Euro-Atlantic security architecture on an equal basis. Contrary to positive examples in 1815 and 1945, the loser of the Cold War was left alone. Instead of replacing NATO with a regional collective security organization, the West kept NATO artificially in existence—and Russia in the dark. Ironically, the Baltic states, which wanted to feel more secure by becoming NATO members, are now feeling less secure. All this was predicted in the 1990s by foreign-policy giants like George Kennan and Paul Nitze.

IMO we need to be able to consider NATO critically rather than in Aristotelian, black and white terms. A NATO in which the United States bears all the costs of an increasingly interventionist collection of countries with competing interests is not of infinite worth nor is it of zero worth.

We also need to do a cost-benefit analysis of Lord Ismay’s waggish description of NATO’s original mission—”to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. We’ve already abandoned the last of those objectives.

Brian Hamilton, co-founder of Sageworks, writes at USA Today:

The arrogance of the tech world (I’m in it) is that we believe we are immune from the basic laws of economics. We are physicists who have created our own world in which we jump off a building and expect not to fall or, if we do fall, we expect someone else to catch us. Moreover, we are enabled by others (like bankers) who ought to know better that we are not worth more simply because we are tech people or “cloud people” or people who wear Steve Jobs smart-guy glasses.

I have never heard a good argument as to why tech companies should be valued more than, say, a dry cleaner or a construction company.

I’ll offer him one. Tech companies are unlikely to see the expense side of their ledgers grow directly with their revenues. The real question is whether they have any prospects for revenues.

And those are precisely the reasons that as a society we shouldn’t be as interested in tech companies as we are. By concentrating wealth they aggravate our problems.

You know, if you only count the income side of the ledger, as Kevin Shih does at The Conversation in his post in support of increasing immigration, the argument in favor will prevail every time.

As I have said innumerable times before I think we should have a skills-based immigration policy along the lines of those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I also favor more federal oversight to ensure that importing workers is not used as a device for pushing domestic wages down. I also support greatly increasing the number of work visas available to Mexican citizens. “Comprehensive immigration reform” stands athwart such commonsense policies screaming “Stop!”

I wish that Dr. Shih would write another article on the net gains or costs of immigration looking solely at immigrants without high school educations or even moderate command of the English language. I suspect that I will never see it.

In his most recent Washington Post column on the fiscal problems presented by public pensions, after noting Illinois as an object lesson, George Will remarks:

The generic problem in the public sector is the moral hazard at the weakly beating heart of what Walter Russell Mead calls the “blue model” of governance — the perverse incentives in the alliance of state and local elected Democrats with public employees’ unions. The former purchase the latter’s support with extravagant promises, the unrealism of which will become apparent years hence, when the promise-makers will have moved on. The latter expect that when the future arrives, the government that made the promises can be compelled by law or political pressure to extract the promised money from the public.

This game, a degradation of democracy, could be disrupted by laws requiring more realistic expectations about returns on pension fund investments, or even by congressional hearings to highlight the problem. But too much of the political class has skin in the game.

Unlike most Illinois cities, Chicago bears the full burden of the public pensions, whether for teachers or other public employees, it has offered over the years. But Chicago can’t solve its problems on its own, not with the barriers the state has placed in its path. The city does not have the power to impose an income tax or city earnings tax, moves which in all likelihood would drive more businesses out of Chicago. The state constitution, supported by Illinois Supreme Court decisions, insists that not only must public pensions be paid they cannot be reduced.

Consequently, Chicago will need help from the state.

At the Washington Post Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Jim Kessler concur with my analysis. Winning 100% of the vote in a handful of counties or even a handful of states is not the path to victory for the Democrats:

“Demography equals destiny” also presumes voters are static beings with unwavering ideologies and consistent voting behavior. But voters aren’t merely reflections of their demographic characteristics, and it’s insulting to treat them that way. Young voters and voters of color aren’t monolithic liberal blocs who will always and reflexively support Democrats. As noted in our report, 44 percent of millennials call themselves independents and only 30 percent are liberals. Among Latinos, 37 percent are Independents and only 28 percent liberals. That means 7 in 10 within these rising American electorate groups consider themselves moderate or even conservative.

That is why we sometimes see dramatic shifts in voting. Independent voters went for Democrats by 17 points in 2006 then supported Republicans by 18 points just four years later. This changeability is evident at the presidential level as well. While Clinton won basically the same number of voters as President Barack Obama did in 2012 (both just under 66 million), there was tremendous voter volatility underneath the surface. A stunning 403 counties that voted for Obama at least once flipped to Trump. In 28 states, the margin of victory for either Trump or Clinton moved decisively from 2012 — by five points or more. Clinton actually outperformed Obama by more than 1 million votes in New York, Massachusetts and California and underperformed him by 3 million votes everywhere else. These are not the presumptively partisan decisions of an electorate driven to vote based on static demographic characteristics. They are the messy result of a push and pull with voters of all demographic stripes who aren’t in the bag for either side.

I believe that the road to relevance lies through good governance. Indiana may be Republican because it’s heavily white but good governance helps to keep it Republican. There are both Democrat-dominated states and Republican-dominated states on the lists of both well-run and poorly-run states. Affiliation won’t prevail forever. Minnesota is even whiter than Indiana and it was run by Democrats. Whatever they were doing worked. Then it stopped working and eventually the people turned elsewhere.

As a famous Illinoisan once said, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Even in Illinois. I guess the question is whether those you can fool are a majority of the voters.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal weigh in on Illinois’s ongoing political kabuki:

The deal now being crafted in the state Senate would increase the state’s flat income-tax rate to somewhere around 5% from the current 3.75%. That is close to the increase the state endured in 2011 when former Governor Pat Quinn raised the income tax to 5% from 3%. That tax hike partially expired (declining to 3.75%) on December 31, 2014 and Democrats say restoring it is the secret to solving the state’s problems.

That’s hilarious since the years of an elevated income tax produced one of the country’s weakest state economic recoveries, with bond-rating declines in Chicago and staggering deficits statewide. The state has a $11.9 billion backlog of unpaid bills and $130 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, according to the state’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

In 2011 Senate President John Cullerton said the point of the temporary hike was to pay pensions, “pay off our debt [and] to have enough money to pay the interest on that debt.” But the roughly $31 billion it generated made hardly a dent. Since 2011 the unfunded pension liability in Illinois has grown by $47 billion, even as the tax hike was mostly spent on pensions. Meanwhile, Democrats won’t change the state constitution to allow for pension reform that won’t be overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court.

I’m not opposed to a tax hike out of hand but there are limits. Here in Chicago if my property taxes double every triennial assessment as they did this time around it will drive me out. I can’t afford that. Very few can and it hits the poor the worst of all. Even those who rent rather than own are affected by increases in property taxes.

Thinking that absent any pressure to introduce reforms that would actually help the state of Illinois our state legislators will act out of public spiritedness requires the willing suspension of disbelief in our fiscal drama. We don’t just need higher taxes. We need a prospering economy and the smaller tax base as 40 years that Mike Madigan’s Speakership has brought us makes our problems that much harder to solve.