From time to time I’ve pointed out that American politics at least in part consists of the parties swapping positions every so often. At The Week Michael Brendan Dougherty has noticed it, too:

Partisanship requires a certain level of hypocrisy. Republican Congresses and the conservative media put on their green eyeshades and become budget hawks during Democratic presidencies, then abandon such fiscal principles in favor of big new spending commitments when Republicans are in the White House. We’re seeing this play out in real time now: After eight years of railing against President Obama’s deficit spending, the GOP Congress seems ready to embrace Donald Trump’s big ideas about infrastructure spending.

Democrats have a version of this hypocrisy as well. It’s on foreign policy.

He’s saying that as though it’s a bad thing. He goes on to explain:

The sheer scale of U.S. engagements astonishes. The Pentagon recently posted its annual report on U.S. military bombings. In total, the Pentagon claims the U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries. Most of them were in Iraq (12,192) and Syria (12,095). Five other Muslim countries were further down the list: Afghanistan (1,337), Libya (496), Yemen (34), Somalia (14), and Pakistan (3). Even this very specific-seeming tally undercounts the reality. Each strike can involve multiple bombs. And this doesn’t count the totality of the U.S. role in bombings, such as providing targeting data and refueling plans in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

By themselves, the numbers are an indictment of Obama’s foreign policy. Eight years ago he campaigned against the “distraction” of the Iraq War, and on finishing the job in Afghanistan. His presidency began with a scheduled drawdown of American forces in Iraq and a “surge” in Afghanistan. But, faced with ISIS outrages and an Iraqi government on life support, Obama dramatically increased American air power there. While he embraced that distraction, Afghanistan got no better. The U.S. surge reclaimed more territory from the Taliban, but as the Obama surge faded, the Taliban surged in return.

We presently have “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and possibly other places in the Middle East and West Asia as well.

I look forward to considerably more Congressional oversight of U. S. foreign policy than we’ve seen in the last eight years not to mention the last twenty-five, thirty, or fifty years. A president who’s despised by the Democrats and distrusted by many Congressional Republicans gives me at least some wan hope of the that.

What lessons should we have learned from the entire experience of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? I think that one of them is that, if you want a healthcare reform program to gain popular support, don’t promote subdividing care. Most Americans are not directly affected by the PPACA; they think they pay for it without benefiting from it although the reality is somewhat different.

Another is that bipartisan support for new social programs is obligatory if you want the program to persist beyond the sitting president’s term of office.

Volkswagen U. S.’s regulatory compliance officer has been arrested by the FBI, reports the New York Times:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a Volkswagen executive who faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, two people with knowledge of the arrest said on Sunday, marking an escalation of the criminal investigation into the automaker’s diesel emissions cheating scandal.

Oliver Schmidt, who led Volkswagen’s regulatory compliance office in the United States from 2014 to March 2015, was arrested on Saturday by investigators in Florida and is expected to be arraigned on Monday in Detroit, said the two people, a law enforcement official and someone familiar with the case.

I consider this a step in the right direction and I sincerely hope that the former president of Volkswagen U. S. follows him into the dock.

Either Sarbanes-Oxley should be enforced or repealed but regardless “I’m too incompetent to know what’s going on in the company I’m supposed to be running” should not be a valid defense.

I thought it might be useful to get some perspective on Noah Smith’s remarks about U. S. colleges and universities at Bloomberg:

In an unfettered market, spots at universities are rationed by price — those who pay, get to go. But in a world of price controls, the limited supply of college education has to be rationed by some other mechanism. That mechanism, inevitably, is grades and test scores. Lower-income students who do well in high school — such as me, once upon a time — will get a free ride to a brighter future, while those who don’t put up the requisite numbers will be left to the dubious mercy of the high-school-only job market.

To me, that doesn’t seem like a huge improvement. Yes, students who get better grades generally get more out of college, since they tend to have a stronger educational ethic and to be smarter in the first place. But in today’s polarized job market, a nerd-ocracy seems only slightly more desirable than a plutoocracy. We should figure out a way to deliver a brighter future to the kids who don’t quite get a top SAT score.

My recommended solution is to focus on increasing the number of college spots available. Those could be four-year university slots, or vocational education — a mix of both would probably be best. But the key is that supply should go up.

In the United States today there are about 4,000 degree-offering institutions of higher education. In Germany there are 70; in France there are roughly 200; in the United Kingdom there are 130.

Does it sound as though there are too few American institutions of higher learning?

Before I turn to the end of Greg Ip’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the revolt against globalization, I want to remark on this passage:

This is also when globalists overreached. In 2000, Mr. Clinton blessed China’s entry into the WTO. Echoing Truman, he predicted China’s membership was “likely to have a profound impact on human rights and political liberty.”

It didn’t. China adhered to the letter of its WTO obligations while systematically violating their spirit with discrimination against foreign investors and products and an artificially cheap currency. A wave of Chinese imports wiped out 2 million American jobs, according to one widely cited 2016 study, with no equivalent boom in U.S. jobs linked to exports to China. Meanwhile, China became more repressive at home and antagonistic abroad. By behaving quite differently from other members of the global trading club, China has undermined support for it.

The emphasis is mine. The problem with the highlighted statement is that it isn’t true. China has not reduced the opacity of its banks or achieved the level of foreign ownership of Chinese banks both of which were included in the terms under which China was admitted to the WTO. It has routinely failed to enforce the intellectual property rights of its trading partners. Additionally, as I have documented, China has repeatedly violated its obligations under the WTO in a way that can’t be explained by the size of China’s economy or any explanation other than China will not allow its international agreements to stand in the way of its goals.

Here’s the conclusion of the op-ed:

Above all, globalists should not equate concern for cultural norms and national borders with xenophobia. Large majorities of Americans, for example, welcome immigrants so long as they adopt American values, learn English, bring useful skills and wait their turn. Australia’s low tolerance for illegal immigration helps to maintain public support for high levels of legal entrants.

“We’ve created this false dichotomy that if you’re not for open borders, you’re racist,” says Avik Roy, president of the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a former adviser to Republican presidential candidates. “There is some sort of middle ground between a nationalist and globalist approach,” Mr. Roy argues.

There’s a genuine lack of meeting of minds between “Davos man” and the rest of us. It could be rectified by compelling globalists to live in the world that the rest of us do, one without Black Cards, Admiral’s Clubs, Sidwell Friends Schools, or gates or walls around their residences.

At Bloomberg Mark Whitehouse produces the chart above characterizing it as an illustration of President Obama’s “jobs legacy”. What’s wrong with the graph above?

I couldn’t work this observation into my last post so I’m sticking it here. As a person I am only mildly partisan and not at all ideological. I do not ask whether a policy is orthodox, what its impact on me might be, or even if it’s Good and True. I ask “can it work?”

I do not believe that you can look at our large cities and arrive at the conclusion that what we’re doing is working.

Republicans, with unrestrained Schadenfreude, point to how long many of these cities have been Democratic strongholds without proposing alternative solutions or even being willing to mount opposing political campaigns in the face of entrenched opposition.

Here in Chicago there hasn’t been a credible Republican candidate for mayor in decades. To my eye failing to mount opposing campaigns while decrying your opponent’s failures is nihilism.

Democrats for their part have been overwhelmed by ideological blinders and self-interest. Having lost sight of their goals, they redouble their efforts.

I found Angelo M. Codevilla’s article about Antonio Gramsci, the Gramscian takeover of the media and education, and political correctness at the Claremont Review of Books interesting even if he goes a bit overboard at times. You may, too, particularly if you don’t know anything about Antonio Gramsci.

So, for example, I think that he goes overboard in his identification of progressivism with communism. I think that as a matter of historical fact in the United States progressivism arose as a strain of liberalism and that today’s descendants of liberalism are libertarianism and progressivism, libertarianism more concerned about freedom and progressivism about producing social good.

How can a very diverse society maintain any cohesion? How can it function? The answer based on the values of the Enlightenment was through tolerance and moderation. The present answer, by enforcing standards that preclude contradictory expression, has a basic failing: it can’t work. There are limits to how rapidly societal norms can change without chaos and any system that is self-organizing but not self-limiting requires being able to change societal norms an unlimited number of times at unlimited speed.

In his wonderful essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, Pat Moynihan reminded us of several things. One was that for a society to exist, it must have certain norms and those must be knowable:

In one of the founding texts of sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that “crime is normal”. “It is”, he wrote, “completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist.” By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards.

The other was that the rights of individuals and the needs of society required an equilibrium:

Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that weakens societal standards. Might it not help if we could all agree that there is a dynamic at work here?

Instead of “liberal” I believe today we would say “libertarian”. Does anything today correspond to Dr. Moynihan’s characterization of “conservatives”?

It’s starting to become surreal here in Chicago. Today the police shot a suspect dead on a Metra train in Deerfield. The Tribune reports:

Police shot and killed a murder suspect during a shootout aboard an outbound Metra train late Friday night in north suburban Deerfield, according to authorities.

No officers or passengers were wounded in the gunbattle aboard the Milwaukee District North Line, though several officers did suffer minor injuries dodging gunfire from the suspect, officials said.

And take a gander at this footage, courtesy of Fox Chicago, of a fight at Cook County that sent five to the hospital:

Here’s how the Sun-Times reported it:

Five Cook County Jail inmates suffered injuries – including multiple stab wounds – in a fight Friday afternoon in the jail’s maximum-security division.

The fight broke out about 1:30 p.m. among detainees in Division 9, Cook County sheriff’s department spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said. Jail staff brought the fight under control and recovered several weapons.

Five detainees were taken to hospitals to be treated for their injuries, which included multiple “puncture wounds,” Ansari said. Four of those hurt were in custody for murder charges while the fifth was charged with armed robbery.

I don’t know what to say.