At RealClearWorld David Benson writes about the implications of a trade war between China and the U. S.:

If Beijing attempts to accommodate American demands, it risks domestic unrest as its economy contracts. If China refuses to accommodate changes, then it risks a punitive American response, potentially producing a trade war it cannot afford. China cannot even threaten to cut off production access in the long term, as Washington could simply return to the TPP to fill that need.

The United States, for its part, is similarly positioned. Domestic pressure demands adjustment of the Sino-American trade relationship, but any attempts to put direct pressure on China risk blowing up that relationship, destabilizing China and imposing significant costs on the American consumer. Importantly, no change in global trade is guaranteed to return American manufacturing jobs, either.

Consider the following tabulation of WTO claims over the last ten years:

Many of these claims are actually counter-claims. The United States files a complaint against China; China files a counter-complaint against the United States.

If you were to weight the claims by GDP, some obvious offenders emerge (Argentina, Indonesia, Russia) but something else does, too. There’s already a trade war between the United States and China. We just aren’t fighting our side very effectively.

As has been oddly the case with our real, live, shootin’ wars, the complaint about trade wars mostly come when we try to win.

Once again I find myself in agreement with The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel. From her column in the Washington Post:

For years, many progressives — including me — have called for taking our movement to the states. Yet Democrats have prioritized maintaining control of the presidency while giving short shrift to state-level infrastructure. Meanwhile, Republicans have invested heavily in winning state legislative and gubernatorial races, which has allowed them to advance conservative policies across the country and seize control of congressional redistricting. Heading into 2017, there are 68 legislative chambers under Republican control, 34 Republican governors and a record 29 Republican state attorneys general. It’s painfully clear which party’s strategy has been more effective.

It must be said that’s no task for someone who only wants to work for ten months every four years. It’s a daily grind, month after month, year after year and will require something that most progressives seem to find anathema: compromise.

You can’t just rely on a phone and a pen to effect your programs for you. You’ve got to compromise. You must persuade. You must deliver.

The balance of David Brooks’s column in the New York Times is just a preamble to the single sentence highlighted below:

Those of us in the opinion class have been complaining that Trump voters are post-truth, that they don’t have a respect for expertise. Well, the experts created a school system that doesn’t produce skilled graduates. The experts designed Obamacare exchanges that are failing. Maybe those of us in the professional class need to win back some credibility the old-fashioned way, with effective reform.

Just saying “give us a free hand and we’ll fix everything”, the usual retort, isn’t nearly good enough. And it’s what every tyrant has said since the dawn of time.

Accomplishing that will require listening. Is the “professional class” up to it? Why listen when you already know it all?

I’ve been thinking about the U. S.’s accepting refugees and I’ve come up with an analogy that I think captures my thoughts.

If the residents of progressive strongholds like Scarsdale, New York, Dover, Mass., or San Rafael, California want to accept refugees, I won’t stand in their way. I think they should take as many refugees as they care to from wherever they care to accept them.

However, if the good burghers of those municipalities want to settle these refugees in Birdseye, Indiana or Bauxite, Arkansas or Bear Dance, Montana, I think the very least they can do is ask the residents’ of those villages permission. Having more votes isn’t nearly enough.

It’s like inviting guests out to dinner and then sticking the people at the next table with the check. That’s not philanthropy. It’s rude at the very least.

I have a question about this story, reported in the Daily Express:

Michael Skråmo was handed more than £53,000 (50,000 Kroner) despite fleeing to war-torn Syria with his wife and four small children.

The 31-year-old regularly appeared in propaganda videos, posing alongside Kalashnikov assault rifles with his children.

Now going by the name of Abdul Samad al Swedi, the family are thought to have lived off Swedish state handouts of £627 (5,814 Kroner) a month.

It took more than a year for the country’s welfare agency, Försäkringskassan, to update their records and payments were made for at least eight months after they pledged their allegiance to the bloodthirsty regime.

Doesn’t that make Sweden a supporter of jihad?

You know, if you repeat that a couple thousand times, that’s about all that DAESH would need to stay afloat. About 6,000 Europeans are estimated to have joined DAESH.

The Economist wonders what could possibly explain the surge of nationalist feeling, not just in the United States but in much of the developed world?

It is troubling, then, how many countries are shifting from the universal, civic nationalism towards the blood-and-soil, ethnic sort. As positive patriotism warps into negative nationalism, solidarity is mutating into distrust of minorities, who are present in growing numbers (see chart 1). A benign love of one’s country—the spirit that impels Americans to salute the Stars and Stripes, Nigerians to cheer the Super Eagles and Britons to buy Duchess of Cambridge teacups—is being replaced by an urge to look on the world with mistrust.

Happily, they also provide an explanation in the form of the graph above. Another factor, not considered by The Economist, is that the new waves of immigrants may not feel the same pressures to adopt the language, customs, and manners of their new homes as immigrants did in the past. They may not even look at them as their homes. Skype and Facebook keep their connections to the Old Country firm and bright.

Some of the new immigrants, like Germany’s and Sweden’s new guests, may feel an affirmative obligation to transform their foster countries rather than be transformed by them.

From my perspective Sweden and Germany are late-comers. In 1960 4% of the American population was Hispanic. Today 16% is. That’s an enormous change over a relatively short period of time.

I don’t think we can or should turn back the clock. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the deplorables, Hispanics, and blacks link arms and say “this far and no farther”.

Let me put it this way. Right now our foreign born population comprises its highest percentage in nearly a century and possibly ever. Under the circumstances which do you think is most likely. We will accept (as a proportion of population)

1. A lot fewer immigrants than we have over the last 30 years.
2. Slightly fewer immigrants than we have over the last 30 years.
3. About the same proportion of immigrants as we have over the last 30 years.
4. Slightly more immigrants than we have over the last 30 years.
5. A lot more immigrants than we have over the last 30 years.

I think the answer is B for demographic, social, and political reasons. I think that Germany’s answer is very likely to be E.

Joel Kotkin has the core of an interesting idea at The Daily Beast:

In contrast to the old Democratic notions embraced by the likes of Harry Truman or the late California Governor Pat Brown, today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like.

What strategies would counter the would-be neo-feudal masters? Here are some proposals: make energy cheaper and more abundant, stop subsidizing the new aristocracy, require higher standards of proof to import so-called “knowledge workers”, break up monopolies, have the Justice Department go after their zoning restrictions as illegal segregation.

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The purpose of the “fourth wall” isn’t to protect the audience from the performers. It has two purposes. First, to create a special place where, as Coleridge put it, the willing suspension of disbelief may take place. Secondly, it protects the performers from the audience.

My advice: ixnay on the ambushesway. The stage is your safe space. Unless you want every performance to become a real-life re-enactment of the country western bar scene in The Blues Brothers. Maybe I ought to go after the chicken wire concession.