At Foreign Policy Emile Simpson sees a major political realignment taking place throughout the developed world:

Brexit and Trump were not anomalies, accidents of political history that can be explained away to maintain the integrity of the inherited notion that “normal” politics involves competition between a center-left party and a center-right party. Rather, in my view, they are symptomatic of a paradigm shift in the configuration of Western political life, one which has only just started.

Consider the familiar political category of left and right, which since 1945 has provided the basic organizing category of political differentiation in Western democracies across the vast majority of issues. Although the language of left and right dates to the French Revolution, the category started to take substantial political meaning in the late 19th century, and was forged over the following decades on the anvil of intense political fights over industrialization in the West, and all the changes in economic, social, and political relations that came in its wake.

The crucial point is that left and right are symbiotic, because they represent both sides of the argument over the problem of industrialization, over which there are good arguments to be made on either side. It is the interaction of these arguments set up by the mediation of the left-right categorization that produced sensible compromises across a whole range of issues.

I’m not entirely sure that’s what’s going on. I think what we’re seeing has more to do with the nature of greed.

Greed has no limits but the rate of economic growth does. When there’s lots of economic activity the desires of the powerful go barely noticed. It’s not that they’re not greedy. It’s that the greed is hardly noticed.

But when economic activity slows the underlying avarice that was there all along stands out more starkly. The entire developed world has experienced more than 50 years of great economic activity. There have been ups and downs but the trend was up.

But now that’s slowed down. Maybe the brakes are only on temporarily. Maybe it’s permanent. The guys at the top still demand their cut. A hundred million here and a hundred million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

NBC News complains about access to President-Elect Trump:

In a highly unusual move, President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday night left his Manhattan residence without notifying the reporters covering him or giving any indication of where he was going.

The maneuver seemed to deliberately limit access to the media.

The only way the press eventually ascertained his whereabouts was after a Bloomberg reporter, who happened to be dining at the 21 Club, tweeted a photo of Trump and some of his transition team in the Midtown steakhouse.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks later told NBC News. “He is having dinner with his family.”

Wife Melania, daughter Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump were all at the restaurant.

I welcome this sort of scrutiny. I look forward to much, much more.

I hope the scrutiny and commentary are fair and unbiased but IMO unfair and biased scrutiny and commentary are better than none at all.

In the light of Mr. Judis’s and Mr. Texeira’s op-eds, I strongly recommend that you read Sean Trende’s assessment of the track record of the “emerging Democratic majority” hypothesis at RealClearPolitics:

If you take a long view of American politics, they are exceedingly stable; a party may jump out to a lead if the other party presides over three years of economic decline (as Herbert Hoover did from 1930 to 1932) or runs for re-election amid 9 percent growth (as FDR did in 1936), but we tend toward a 50-50 nation. Even the supposed New Deal coalition was bedeviled by contingency; in 1938, Republicans nearly won the popular vote for the House; in 1940, FDR trailed in the polls until Hitler invaded Poland; in 1942 Republicans won the popular vote for the House by four points; from 1946 to 1958 they were roughly at parity with the Democrats. Our tendency as humans to attempt to find order in chaos leads us to overlook these contrary data points, and to find continuity in the high points for Democrats. But this leads us to miss the forest for the trees.

Analysts should have been skeptical of the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis because the party dominance that proponents of the theory – especially of the “hard” version of the theory – were suggesting was essentially unprecedented in American history. That doesn’t mean that something like that couldn’t happen, or that it can’t happen in the future. It just means that we shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t.

To believe in the “hard” version of the hypothesis you’ve got to believe in governing philosophies that have not materialized, numbers that aren’t there, the irrelevance of contingency in American politics, the primacy of identity, and that Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims will provide the same sort of reliable voting blocs that black voters have over the period of the last three-quarters of a century.

Intolerance, overreach, and outright racism among a white voter interest group could cause other interest groups to make common cause. That’s what I mean by a worst case scenario. But even that is unlikely to be permanent. Whiteness is malleable. Once upon a time the Irish, Italians, Catholics, and Jews were not thought of as white. Some people still don’t think they are but nowadays most Americans would think you were nuts if you said that the Irish weren’t white.

Judis’s co-author, Ruy Texeira, still believes:

Here’s one way to think about the 2016 election. We are witnessing a great race in this country between demographic and economic change that’s driving a new America, and reaction to those changes. On November 8, with a tremendous burst of speed, reaction to change caught up with change and surpassed it.

But is that advantage sustainable over the long haul, as change continues and reaction has to run ever faster simply to keep pace? Probably not. Those old legs will give out eventually, though we do not know exactly when. In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is.

Looking back from 2032, we are far more likely to view the 2016 election as the last stand of America’s white working class, dreaming of a past that no longer exists, than as a fundamental transformation of the political system.

Soon after Mssrs. Judis and Texeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, Democrats took control of the House and the Senate in a surge that reached its apogee with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Since then they’ve lost the House, Senate, and presidency and now hold majorities in only a third of state legislatures.

Mr. Texeira should hope that the sort of interest group power politics he advocated doesn’t come to pass. If it does the numbers don’t support his dreamed-of permanent Democratic majority.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out Europe’s problems:

The eurozone economy expanded 0.3% last quarter, according to data released Tuesday. Um, hurray?

We don’t begrudge Europe news that, by recent growth standards, qualifies as good. France notched quarterly growth of 0.2% while Italy clocked in at 0.3%, which is better than the zero and negative numbers from earlier this year. The growth in Europe’s third- and fourth-largest economies helped offset Germany’s worse-than-expected 0.2%.

Still, it’s worth noting that these figures are the best that Europe’s major economies seem capable of achieving even as European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi has provided the sort of stimulus that our Keynesian friends have long demanded: Negative interest rates, a devalued euro (down by around 24% from a 2014 high of $1.40), and purchases of corporate and government bonds to the tune of €80 billion per month.

Nor is that all. The eurozone has enjoyed dramatic energy-price declines, mercifully not entirely muted by that euro devaluation. This helps explain how German consumers have been able to keep their economy chugging, as lower global prices offset the ruinous expenses of Berlin’s green-energy boondoggles.

and go on to ask where’s the growth? I’ll provide two answers. First, part of “Europe’s” growth was an illusion. It was German growth propelled by the Chinese purchasing Germany’s “factories in a box” to build factories to satisfy Western consumption and by borrowing-driven consumption in the eurozone periphery, e.g. Greece. There isn’t enough Chinese consumption to fuel European economic growth and there won’t be unless the Chinese authorities have a dramatic change of heart. Think that’s going to happen? Me, neither.

Second, deadweight loss. The inefficiencies of their system are growing faster than the underlying economies. It’s fun while it lasts but the party’s over now.

Writing at the Washington Post John Judis makes an essential point:

Many Democrats have believed that a coalition of minorities, millennials and single women would help create a new Democratic majority for years to come. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was counting on it.

But the “rising American electorate,” as it’s called, failed to carry Clinton across the finish line. It didn’t even come close. According to national exit polls, among Latino voters she fell six points from President Obama’s numbers in 2012; she dropped five points each among 18-to-29-year-olds, unmarried women and African Americans. Together, these groups made up the same percentage of the electorate in 2016 as they had in 2012. Some of the battleground-state figures are even more striking. In Ohio, Clinton was 13 points behind Obama among 18-to-29-year-olds. In New Mexico, she fell 11 points among Latinos.

Why did the Democrats’ strategy fail so miserably? Ultimately, because they overestimated the strength of a coalition based on identity politics.

IMO the very worst thing that could happen to American politics is if the white working class starts voting as an identity group. If present trends continue, do you know when non-white voters will outnumber white voters in the United States? Never. The future won’t save identity politics.

I’ll give John Judis the last word:

But Democrats can’t win elections simply by appealing to the identity groups of the rising American electorate. These groups don’t add up to a sure majority unless one assumes the Democrat wins near-unanimity among them and the Republican only bare majorities or less among Republican-trending groups. Besides such traditional GOP constituencies as farmers, small-business people and managers, three groups of voters have become increasingly Republican: the white working class, defined as whites without a four-year college degree; whites with a four-year college degree but not an advanced degree; and seniors. While the proportional numbers of the white working class have been shrinking over the past few decades, they remain formidable, particularly in battleground states, and the numbers of four-year-degree whites and seniors have not been declining.

I think that Danielle West’s op-ed in the Washington Post has the kernel of a good idea:

Since Donald Trump won the White House without winning the popular vote, cries have risen that the electoral college should be abolished. Millions have signed an online petition urging electors to choose Hillary Clinton despite their states’ vote for Trump. This is a wrongheaded path for dissent. The electoral college shouldn’t be abolished. It enshrines an important principle — protection of the rights of a minority — in our Constitution. A popular majority unhappy with the presidential results should make its weight felt not by taking to the streets but by taking back electoral politics — relearning what it means to win elections for state legislatures, governorships and Congress.

She goes on to advocate a “blue Tea Party movement”. I guess that depends on what she means by “Tea Party”. If she means a left populist movement to put more power in the hands of an elite few, that’ll never fly.

As Woody Allen put it years ago 80% of life is showing up. That means showing up not just at protests or quadrennial elections but for midterms and organizing for better candidates as well. There are news reports that the protesters in the streets didn’t bother themselves to vote and that Colin Kaepernick, the pro football player who created the flap over not standing for the national anthem, isn’t even registered to vote. Protest without bothering to do the basics isn’t just futile, it’s nihilism. If you leave it to the professionals, you’ll get what the professionals deign to give you.

Now here’s an idea I could get behind from Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist:

One sector of that coalition is the one that includes those who were attracted to what they believed his foreign policy to be — restraint about when and where the United States fights wars coupled with a clear path to victory when we do.

If that is Trump’s position, Guiliani and Bolton would be odd choices, and Paul fleshed out his opposition here. Webb, however, would be a fine pick. Ward observed that many of Webb’s talking points at GWU “match up quite well with objections to Bolton made by Rand Paul today.” They also match up well with things Trump said on his campaign to victory, such as his comment that “NATO expansion has created new environment in terms of how it works…Many new members are clearly protectorates rather than allies.”

How about State than Defense? I’d’ve preferred Webb over any of the other candidates running for president.

Today is my mom’s birthday. I didn’t forget. I’ll never forget.

I just didn’t have anything to say that I haven’t already said.

In a couple of weeks, when my slides and movies have been converted, maybe I’ll have some more pictures to show you. It’s been a half century since I’ve seen some of them.