Solid Singles

North Carolina has just been declared for Trump. He is also almost certain to win Alaska whenever the Alaskans get around to counting the rest of their votes. Decision Desk puts the count at Biden 279 and Trump 229. The expected flurry of law suits has commenced.

Here are the states in play:

State	EV	Margin
GA	16	12,566
PA	20	45,291
MI	16	146,137
WI	10	20,557
NV	6	36,274
AZ	11	14,746

Not exactly a big blue wave.

In baseball there are some players who swing for the fences every time they are at bat. Great to have on your team, but usually inconsistent. For a manager, a guy who gets on base consistently is often more valuable. With the sorts of fairly small numbers which could flip states to Trump, while it is certainly entertaining to try and knock out 800,000 absentee ballots in PA, it is much more efficient to look for ways to pick off 50,000, or 5000 a few times. All the more so in Georgia and Arizona.

From a legal perspective, judges are far more likely to declare the votes of the dead invalid, than to adopt a statistics based argument that a bunch of ballots turned up at 4:00AM all marked for Joe shouldn’t count. There is room for the high concept stuff and it should certainly be argued; but there is every chance states will be decided by eliminating demonstrably illegal ballots from the count pretty much one by one.

There are four obvious categories of ballot to challenge: the dead, the non-resident, the non-citizen and the ineligible because of age. To do this requires a hand recount and an audit for eligibility. It is not a big ask and it is one which has already been granted in Georgia.

Legally, there is a big difference between asking a judge to invalidate a swath of ballots and asking that same judge to require a recount and audit. No judge wants to order the removal of hundreds, maybe thousands of ballots some of which may, in fact, be perfectly valid, on the basis that they arrived late or were counted unobserved. The burden of proof in those homerun style actions will be, rightly, enormous. But requiring that each ballot be scrutinized for eligibility will have a much lower burden of proof as the consequences will be much less broad. (And, yes it would be nice to take a look for more “glitches” in the software.)

The headline cases with Rudy and world class lawyering are great and I hope that they proceed simply because they will hold the rather nasty practices of big city Democratic machines up to scrutiny; but for Trump to win he needs 41 Electoral College votes.

Grinding out singles isn’t glamorous, but it wins ball games. Especially close ball games.

The Art of the Steal

People much closer to the scene of the crime(s) are looking very closely at how ballots are being counted and how ballots arrived to be counted in the US Presidential election. It is going to take a while.

Rigging an election is tough. Somehow you have to get enough ballots in the count for your guy (and get rid of the other guy’s, if possible). Mail-in voting made this, in principle, easier as there are all sorts of ways to get ballots which have been mailed out ranging from simple theft to outright purchase. The trick being to avoid over egging the pudding, that is bringing in more ballots than are plausible.

But it is more complicated than that. What do you do with down ballot races – every ballot will have a congressional race and some will have a Senatorial race and other items to vote on. Moreover, because of Congressional Districts you can’t really just roll in with a couple of hundred thousand “generic” ballots. If you want to cheat in Philadelphia you need ballots which have the correct Congressional races on them.

With mail in votes there is also the added problem that the person ostensibly mailing them in a) needed to be alive, b) at a specific address at the time the ballot was sent. These are checkable facts so, if you are going to steal you need to get them right.

If you want to add a couple of thousand ballots to the count, none of these issues will be insurmountable. But the whole thing gets a lot more complicated and prone to detection if you need to add tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots to drag your man over the line.

As things get more complicated the likelihood of detectable errors increases. So does the number of people who have to be in on the “steal”. Every additional person increases the risk of detection.

Was 2020 stolen for Biden? I don’t know and neither do the Trump people; but, if it was, there is every chance that the theft will be detected in one or more states with a bit of scrutiny. At this point, the Trump lawyers are attempting to have the Courts require that scrutiny. The precedents set back in the Gore/Bush election suggest that the Supreme Court of the United States will be perfectly willing to make such orders as are required to “true the vote”.

If the steal is on the scale of hundreds of thousands of votes it will almost certainly be proven and those tainted votes could be excluded from the final count.

What then? Nothing good I am afraid. The Democratic faithful will demand that every vote be counted, the Republicans will say, except the illegal ones. Do overs in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona would be one way out; but the logistics would be a nightmare.

The problem with cheating is that it ruins the game for everyone.

Interesting Day

#1 UK Election. Polling puts Boris 9.5 points up. But “polling” ain’t what it used to be and national polls in a 600+ seat race are more than a little useless. Boris is counting on voters a) wanting the end of the waffling on Brexit, b) not wanting Corbyn anywhere near Number 10. I think he is right on Brexit but I am less convinced that Corbyn is that toxic. Corbyn is certainly anathema to the old-time conservative voter, but to the kids, the ethnics and the tribal, Corbyn is not so scary. In fact, his old school Marxism and refusal to condemn terrorists, whether Irish or Islamic, puts him in stark contrast to the smoother, Blairite, Labourites. Corbyn is not a moderate and there is a sizable fraction of the voting population who will see that as a good thing. We’ll know soon.

#2 The Impeachment Follies. The Democrat’s lame attempt to impeach President Trump has dropped any pretence of bi-partisanship or basic procedural fairness. The articles themselves disclose no crimes, high or low, and are being torn apart in Committee. This weekend I suspect the GOP will be aggressive in attempts to get more moderate Democratic Representatives to either vote against or abstain when the Articles come before the full House. Given that the chances of the Senate convicting, never very good to begin with, collapse with these weak accusations, smart Democrats are surely looking for a way out. Censure is one alternative. Another is to actually defeat the Articles as they stand.

The biggest problem the Democrats have is that Trump is absolutely sure he did nothing wrong and nothing that the Democrats have managed to come up with shakes that position. Worse, the eternally combative Trump actually seems to be enjoying the process. He always knew he would be impeached if the Dems got control of the House and so he is well prepared to counter punch. The GOP may find Trump distasteful but they have rallied round and there is no appetite, on the Articles at least, to impeach a sitting President eleven months from an election.

It is great fun, however, watching the Republicans on the Committee bringing up Hunter Biden’s coke habits and uttering the taboo name of the “whistleblower” who wasn’t. Apparently, the betting is that Mitch McConnell wants any trial in the Senate to be short and sweet with very little investigation or exposure of the Democrats or the deep state they represent. However, the Congressional Republicans are having a grand time smearing the Bidens and underscoring the Democrat’s arrogant disregard for even the minimum procedural fairness. I can imagine Nancy Pelosi hoping that toad Nadler will get this over with quickly.

#3 Andrew Scheer. I didn’t vote for Scheer and I have no interest in the man. His resignation from the CPC leadership for whatever reason is a reasonable outcome of a disastrous campaign. His unfitness to lead was underscored by his willingness to hire Warren “Lying Jackal” Kinsella to go after Bernier with a bogus PPC=Racist campaign.

The CPC will now go through a year or two of trying to figure out how to “move to the center”. How to win the hearts and minds of assorted urban ethnic groups and how to appeal to women. They have plenty of mushy, urban, centerists – of both sexes and all genders – to choose from.

Unfortunately, the likely criteria for winning the CPC leadership will be a) can beat Trudeau, b) will not scare the ethnics, gays, ladies and the easily spooked Millenials. The idea that there might actually be conservative principles such as balanced budgets, limits on immigration, respect for provincial rights and support for a growing Canadian economy, will be largely absent from the CPC beauty contest coming to a city near you.

This is, frankly, a huge opportunity for the Peoples Party and Max Bernier. The brain trust at the CPC, fresh from its success in hiring Warren Kinsella, is going to go all in for the reddest, most inclusive, most climate friendly leader it can possibly find. The logic will be that you have to win in Toronto and places like Alberta and Saskatchewan are always going to be safe CPC territory.

Max needs to present a principled, conservative, platform and start rallying the real conservatives on the Prairies, in the interior of British Columbia and in the many parts of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes where Liberals and Liberals-lite are unwelcome options.

Could have had Max…and there is no reason why we can’t.

Update: So Boris won bigly. A working majority, many seats taken from Labour. Corbynism rejected and the pound went parabolic. Corbyn manage to lose bigger than Michael Foot – who was a lot smarter and far more fun, though deeply on the left. Momentum is saying it was a “Brexit” election and they are not wrong. But it was a rejection of Corbyn’s waffle on Brexit and his radical leftist positions and the base anti-Semitism the Labour party has fallen victim to. It was also an embrace of the intelligence and wit of Boris. Now he has his own mandate. He can get Brexit done and move on to the real issues facing the United Kingdom.

Andrew Scheer remains “resigned” (eventually). The red and pink Tories are lining up to take the position. The possible candidates are all of pinkish hue and interest me not a bit. I don’t think you beat the Liberals by being a slo-mo Liberal. Max has a huge opportunity.

But the winner of the interesting day was Jerry Nadler adjourning the Judiciary Committee without a vote on the Articles of Impeachment. The scuttlebutt is that he did this to ensure he gets on TV when the Committee passes those Articles.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps Nancy Pelosi has been counting votes and realizes that those Articles enjoy a bare majority of votes in the House. Or worse. They are remarkably dumb and Pelosi has noticed that Trump seems to be saying, “Oh please, Mr. Fox, don’t throw me into the brambles.”

Trump, along with Boris, likes jokes. He enjoys making fun and he has a fabulous sense of humour. It is one of the things which distinguishes the happy warriors on the right from the earnest, po-faced, scolds of the left.

The Strange Death of Tory England

Well, not actually “Tory” but I wanted the headline to line up with George Dangerfield’s 1935 classic The Strange Death of Liberal England. Dangerfield took a close look at the political chaos which engulfed England just prior to the beginning of WWI when, he argues, the spirit of progressivism was largely eliminated from English politics. Essentially, the gentry progressivism which had dominanted both the Liberal and Conservative parties since Victoria’s day was crushed between the class politics of the Labour Party, the intractable problem of Ireland (specifically Ulster) and the demands of the Suffragettes. The subsequent mass murder of the British Officer class in the trenches of France meant that there was very little left of the spirit of liberal progressivism by the end of the war.

In a few hours we will find out just how well Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party have done in the European elections. Given that the party was only launched six weeks ago, anything over 20% of the vote will be astonishing but the bookmakers and pollsters are seeing numbers north of 30%. Farange is being seen as the most significant English politician of his generation.

The resignation of Theresa May because of her failure to get a “Brexit deal” no matter how lame through the House of Commons has opened up the Prime Ministership and the leadership of the Conservative Party. The party itself is significantly split between Remain leaning, establishment MPs and Leave supporting Conservative Party members. It seems clear that were it left up to the Conservatives in Westminster there would be no Brexit at all. The country may have other ideas.

Across the aisle, the Labour Party is lurching off in all directions. It is pretty much impossible to get a straight answer from Corbyn as to what the Party’s position is on Brexit. I am reminded of MacKenzie King’s marvellous circumlocution, “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.” Corbyn’s problem is that the more lumpen of his supporters, particularly outside London, are full-throated in their support of Brexit while gentry Labourites cannot imagine who let these dreadful people into the party. Corbyn’s position is further complicated by the rise of a Jacobian ultra faction in the form of Momentum demanding a clear “Remain” stance or, at the very worse, a Second Referendum.

The great Brexit wars in England are as much cultural as they are political. Elites, the media, the academy and some sections of the business community are fervent Remainers as much for social signalling reasons as for any political analysis of the Remain position. Supporting Remain is simply what “smart” people do and who does not want to be smart?

Brexit supporters are more about downmarket ideas like “votes matter” and “politicians should do what they promised to do”. They are immune to the elite argument that the Referendum voters had no idea that Brexit meant leaving Europe or that Brexit supporter’s votes should be discounted because they are all old, white, racists and other clever arguments which make sense in BBC studios if nowhere else.

“Liberal England” died because its political class, smug in its sense of moral and intellectual superiority, could not imagine that the Labour movement, much less the gels prattling on about “votes for women” were even slightly serious threats the liberal, progressive, established order. Within a decade that order was swept away by war and radical political reform.

“Tory England” by which I mean the upper levels of the Conservative Party, the media, the academy and much of the non-Momentum Labour Party is walking towards the same fate. The luvies were quite right to understand the Brexit Referendum vote as a vote against uncontrolled immigration, political correctness and political hypocrisy. But their reaction which was to dismiss Brexit voters as unworthy of the new, enlightened, modern England was a huge, strategic error. That error was compounded by the House of Commons being unwilling to actually reach agreement on a deal to leave the EU.

All of which has given Mr. Farage and the Brexit Party an unprecedented chance to remake the politics of England. First, by providing a measure of the anti-EU, anti-Westminster sentiment in England. A rock hard 20% would be destabilizing, but if the Brexit Party manages 30% or better, Farange becomes the effective kingmaker of the Conservative Party.

The Brexit Party currently does not have any seats in the House of Commons (though that may change). What it does have is a well oiled, motivated, mass organization. How that organization is deployed in the next General Election – which could be coming up very quickly as Labour has promised to welcome the incoming Conservative leader with a no-confidence vote – is very likely to determine which party attains government and which leader becomes Prime Minister.

There are, perhaps, fifty seats in England that the Brexit Party could win outright in a General Election. But there are several hundred more where Conservative or Labour Remain supporting MPs would be vunerable to defeat if the Brexit Party ran a candidate. And there are many seats where Brexit supporting MPs of both parties would be very grateful if the Brexit Party refrained from running.

The current Parliament has refused to implement the clear results of the Brexit Referendum despite have been elected in a General Election to do juist that. For Brexit supporters the tactical defeat of Remainers – either in straight up contests or by running or declining to run spoiler candidates – is Job #1. Farage understands this. The question is which of the Conservative leadership candidates is bright enough to realize that Farage and the Brexit Party are the key to the survival of the Tories in England?

Let’s first see how big a noise the Brexit Party and Farage make in a few hours.

UPDATE: Winner? Obviously Nigel Farage and the Brexit party with 31.7% of the vote and on track to take a minimum of 21 of the MEP positions. Second place to the Lib Dems who provided a refuge for all those decent people who were simply appalled at that dreadful Farage chap and worried about their ability to reach their summer homes in Tuscany. (Greens picked up 3 seats for much the same reason.)

Biggest loser? Right now the Conservatives are running at 9.2% of the vote for 2 MEP positions. Total disaster. But Labour did not do all that much better getting a mere 13.9% of the vote and going down to 7 MEP positions. Where Labour was really beaten up was in London where the metro elite defected in droves to the Lib Dems.

There will be more results coming in but at this point, it is safe to say that neither Labour nor the Tories have much to look forward to in British politics if they stay with the politics of flannel mouth on Brexit. There is much commentary about how the “Remain” vote Lib Dem+Labour+Green was larger than the Brexit vote but in the coming general election run on first past the post, those percentages will be uninteresting.

As I said, the question is whether or not the new Tory leader can cut a deal with Farage to ensure that Leave Conservatives have a clear run at their seats. Which means that leader has to be commited to real Brexit.

If the Conservatives elect another squish leader, the Brexit Party has nothing to lose running strong candidates in close-fought constituencies and hoping i) that rank and file Tory supporters will vote Brexit, ii) that the Lib-Dems, Labour and the Greens will hoplessly split the Remain vote.

A serious Tory leader will have already been on the phone to Farage who is, right now, and for the next few months, the most powerful person in British politics.

 

And it’s Coach Kavy for three points

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a long way from the socon’s dreams of kicking Roe to the curb. He has a gold-plated resume, is judicially conservative in the best sense of that term, was in the Whitehouse on 9/11 and will be tough to defeat in the Senate. American legal beagles will have fun with some of his decisions and they are welcome to it. What I am interested in is how Trump has evolved.

Kavanaugh is a savvy pick. He’ll have all the Republicans – even the lovely lady Senators worried about Roe – and including the RINOs because of his Bush connections. He has fairly limited exposure in terms of red flags to the dwindling minority of Democrats who take Supreme Court nominations seriously. (He is, of course, Hitler to the loonies, but so would anyone Trump picked.)

Which means that, unless there is a tape of his grabbing someone’s nether parts, he’ll be confirmed and Trump will take the easy win. This is smart.

The difference between a professional and an amateur is in what they do when it is fourth down, six yards to go, on the thirty-five yard line with a 14 point lead going into halftime. Sure, you could run the touchdown play and rack up the points. But a pro will kick the field goal. It is the percentage move.

Trump has four months to the mid-terms. Winning the Senate should be fairly easy, but the House of Representatives is a bit more of a struggle. Being able to point to a string of victories – Gorsuch was a win, Korea was the beginning of a win, the unemployment rate and the worker shortage are wins, the black and Latino unemployment rates are big wins, a few days of summitry may turn up some wins – with which to build momentum. And a pro will anticipate losses – Mueller, even without an actual crime, is hurting, so are unneeded trade wars and the price of gas seems to be going up – and will understand that he has to take the hits.

But going into the locker room at halftime with a 17 point lead is way better than being ahead by a couple of touchdowns. Apparently, Trump gets that.

Winning the game means being re-elected in 2020. Being able to point to solid, confirmed, SCOTUS appointments will be a big part of that re-election campaign.

Things just got real

Justin Trudeau, in a bizarre performance at the final press conference of the G-7 conference, managed to thoroughly piss off Donald Trump. To the point that Trump called him dishonest.

Now the Donald is going to be occupied with North Korea for the next few days and, at a guess, having withdrawn America’s consent to the G-7 communique may simply forget Trudeau’s deeply cowardly remarks. (It is cowardly to say things about a person when they have left the building when you had the opportunity to say them to that person’s face.) That is the best Trudeau can hope for. More likely, Trump will have detailed a hard man in a suit to run the numbers on Canada’s trade with the US and find out just how many cars we send south every year. These are not hard answers to find and when those numbers go back to Trump there is very little to stop him from dropping a 25% tariff on those cars.

I said over at Kate’s that the Americans see trade negotiations as business, the Canadians see them as politics.

From a business perspective, a 25% tariff on cars made in Canada will lead to more cars being made in the US. The transition will be a bit uncomfortable for a number of large US companies but in the overall American economy, it will be a blip.

In Canada? In Canada, more specifically Ontario, the destruction of the auto industry would be a full scale, all hands on deck, disaster. Realistically, the auto sector is Ontario’s largest private sector employer and the largest manufacturing sector. Being priced out of the US market would kill tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.

Trump has taken the measure of Trudeau and his tiny, annoying, Minister of External Affairs, Chrystia Freeland and concluded they are featherweights. Which means that Canada is potentially screwed because Trump has no faith in our leadership. You don’t call people dishonest publically if you plan to do business with them.

It is unlikely that Trudeau will be aware of just how badly he has failed for a few days. The Canadian media are heavily invested in a narrative which has Justin standing up to the big, bad, Trump. Trudeau’s tone-deaf advisors are, no doubt, revelling in the fact they got lots of “gender” language into the communique.

It will take a few days for the more sober side of the media to realize what peril Trudeau has put us in. And a few more for the geniuses in the PMO to figure out that Trump is not playing the same game as they are.

When they do figure it out the question will arise, “What the fuck do we do now?”

As I am quite sure Butz and his posse read this blog I have a simple suggestion.

Normally, I would have suggested they get in touch with Simon Reisman who negotiated both the Auto-Pac and NAFTA. Alas, Reisman is dead.

Second best by a long shot? Brian Mulroney. A man I have next to no time for but who a) managed to get Canadians onboard for NAFTA, b) was a quite successful Canadian Prime Minister, c) is wired into both Trump World and broad swaths of corporate America.

If Trudeau could get Mulroney to do it Mulroney would be going into the US with a serious, well thought out, everything on the table, pitch. Likely starting with first principles – no tariffs, no subsidies, no non-tariff barriers. Be prepared to dump dairy and end transhipment of Chinese steel. And pitch it to the Trump people as the template for the deals which could be made with the EU, Japan, India and so on. (China is a whole other thing.)

The key point here is that Canada has to move, and move quickly, away from the finger-wagging politics of gender inclusion and climate change to a hard-nosed business approach to getting the best deal we can with an America which is now willing to put its own interests first.

Our leverage is that, while Trump is perfectly willing to talk tough, he also seems to like having a few friends. Canada, notwithstanding our dolt of a PM, has been and could be the staunch friend Trump needs.

Mulroney might just be able to pull this off. Here’s why:

[Back story: Peter Newman released a set of transcripts of Mulroney “unbuttoned” without Mulroney’s consent.]

The problem of monoculture

I used to live in one of the most productive forestry areas in Canada. It was the perfect growing environment for trees, especially conifers. And it was, as the expression goes, a “tree farm”. Every forty years the forest owner would come in and cut down hundreds of acres of trees and then, assiduously, replant them. All the trees were of the same species and all were, depending on where they were in the cycle, exactly the same height. Miles and miles and mile of Douglas Firs. The monotony was only broken in the small areas which were set aside either as old growth or as stream allowances. There you’d find cedars, broadleaf maple, arbutus and many other species. But that was only a tiny, less than 1%, of the land. It was a monoculture and very efficient if you were trying to maximize the growth of what the companies call “fiber”.

A political landscape can become a monoculture. Essentially only a limited range of ideas are allowed to flourish, ideas outside that range are suppressed or, more often, ignored. Within a political monoculture you may have a variety of parties but each is limited to the ideas within the range. Preferment – as it was called in a gentler time – is limited to people who accept the limits of the landscape.

This sort of political monoculture can persist for several generations and produce statesmen of varying talents all of whom want to accomplish one or another of the central tenets of the monoculture in preference to the others; but all of whom are in agreement as to the limits of acceptable political discourse. In a stable society this sort of acceptance of the limits of debate can make a lot of sense and create a political world in which the essential stability is preserved. A concept which is philosophically attractive to a certain sort of conservative in the small “c” sense of that term.

There are three threats to the monocultural forests where I lived: fire, blight and economics. Fire is obvious and would be a threat to any forest no matter how diverse. (We’ll leave questions of regeneration to ecologists and foresters.) Blight, whether mold or insect, is a huge threat because of the complete lack of diversity. Economics are a threat because what you planted forty years before may not be in demand forty years on. Fire is a rapid threat, blight a medium term threat and economics a constant threat.

A political monoculture has its own forms of threat but they all come down to a challenge to the stability of the society in which the political monoculture has been operating. The problem for the political monoculture is that, pretty much by definition, the assumption of stability is axiomatic. Asking questions going to the assumption of stability is outside the terms of the monoculture. So those questions and the policy prescriptions which flow from them will either be suppressed or ignored.

What can challenge the assumption of societal stability? A wide variety of things. Demographic decline, the erosion of the society’s economic foundation, runaway economic inequality, external threats or the internal inability to manage problems as they arise all can challenge the stability assumption. So can technology, communications and failures to adapt to changing conditions. If a large fraction of the society is rendered powerless or redundant, stability can be challenged.

The problem a political monoculture has is that it lacks even the vocabulary to address such systemic challenges.

Of which, more, later.

 

 

They’re all at it

My friend Phil wrote to ask what I thought of the current groping scandal engulfing his home state Senator Al Franken. Truth to tell, I don’t think much of any of the current groping/molestation/sexual assault/rape charges flying around. I would love to say that I was shocked and appalled, but I’m not. Not because non-consensual sexual activity is ever acceptable. It isn’t. Rather because, short of going full Mike Pence and never being alone with a woman who is not your wife, every man is open to the accusations and in the current climate of “I believe the woman” has no possible comeback. Worse, the “crime” has been defined down to such a degree that the British Minister of Defence felt compelled to resign over a “knee grazing” incident which a) happened inadvertently, b) did not outrage the owner of the knee in question, c) occurred fifteen years ago and went unremarked ever since.

Lots of pixels have been spilt making fine distinctions between assorted levels of groping, outright assault, feelings of discomfort and so on. Even more have died in trying to discern what level of historic evidence should be required before a man loses his career, is shunned by his colleagues and is replaced by Christopher Plummer.

Frankly, I think it is all a huge waste of time in almost every case. Sen. Franken was idiotic enough to have a picture snapped of his grope (which was not, by the way, the worst allegation made against him). In most of the other cases, the evidence is ten or twenty or even forty-year-old memories of encounters where drugs and drink were ubiquitous and modern standards of “sober, enthusiastic consent” were unknown. Of course, there were power imbalances; Monica did not arrive in the Oval with a penchant for cigars. And Bill was simply following in the footsteps of JFK and LBJ. Was he wrong? Of course, he was, so was Jack Kennedy getting blowjobs from 19-year-old interns. Harvey Weinstein, pig that he is, was in the tradition of Hollywood producers stretching back to silent films. (Kennedy’s father among them.) No one could possibly be surprised.

As to the furor surrounding Judge Moore, there is only one accusation which I consider disqualifying if true and that is the outlying charge that Moore took a 14-year-old girl back to his home and tried to become intimate with her. I say outlying because all the other initial instances were with girls old enough to consent and whose testimony suggested that Moore was pretty much a gent throughout. (And yes, there is lots creepy about a 32-year-old guy taking a 16-year-old girl out. But that, to my mind is not disqualifying if the behaviour has not continued.) [The woman with the yearbook – and Gloria Allred as her lawyer – is not plausible until she turns the yearbook over for handwriting analysis. Right now I suspect she is Moore’s best chance to discredit all the stories.] But the Moore matters all turn on evidence which is 30 or 40 years old and which has only come to light a month before a hotly contested election. He has a perfect right to push back.

And so it goes. Right this instant, as at the height of the Salem witch trials, a denunciation becomes a conviction in the flick of a tweet. Plausibility is now a matter of sheer numbers with 5 apparently being the magic number.  There is no defence and heartfelt contrition, as Sen.Franken is discovering, is not enough. The Salem witch trials burnt themselves out but not until 19 people had been hung and one “pressed” to death with heavy rocks. They ended for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was that “spectral evidence”, essentially dreams and hallucinations, was no longer accepted at face value.

At a certain point, and I suspect we are getting close to that point, the rush to accuse men of sexually inappropriate (and what an awful word that is) behaviour on the basis of shaky, historical, evidence will collide with the entirely devastating consequences for the men so accused. Sheep will be sorted from goats. Rapists like Clinton or Weinstein will, finally, be flung into outer darkness. So, I am afraid, will goofs like Al Franken who are dumb enough to have incriminating photos floating around. But the evidentiary standard is going to tighten as well. Dim chanting of “I believe the woman.” will be replaced with, “No ruin without evidence.”

But there are a few things we can learn from the current hysteria. First, very powerful men take advantage of that power. This is a reminder, not news. A nodding acquaintance with Roman history, or British or French monarchs, or the biography of Lloyd George or Asquith for that matter, not to mention Kissinger’s aphorism that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” will serve to confirm this fact. Reading Keith Richard’s wonderful autobiography, Life, will serve to confirm this in another sphere.

Second, power is situational. The VP marketing for a tiny company may be in a position of relative power vis a vis his staff and the vendors who want to sell to that company. It is a pretty sure thing that if you looked at the conduct of 100 such VPs you’d find a few, perhaps more than a few, who after a few drinks got very handsy indeed.

Third, none of this is a secret. We all knew. We all know. And “we” in this case includes women as well as men. Which is why I am not shocked nor, realistically, should anyone be who has spent time in the business, entertainment or political worlds. In fact, just day to day life will throw up instances of men using position to “get at” women. It is wrong and disgusting but it is also the way of the world and knowing that is part of growing up.

Optimistically, it is possible that the current generation of men, as they enter adulthood will have absorbed more egalitarian principles. But I doubt it. Against all the schoolmarm indoctrination about “appropriate” behaviour and “sober, enthusiastic, consent”, are ranged the full impacts of internet porn, hip-hop culture and a thoroughly sexualized media and advertising industry. Worse, the feminist doctrines of female sexual emancipation have created a Tinder culture where women are just as likely as men to swipe right and hook up. Obviously not every woman is on the hunt, but enough are to complicate things.

Even more complicating is the fact women have been known to use their beauty to get ahead.  The wonderful, and very beautiful, Nancy Huston writes,

“My beauty has gotten me many places, to some of which I very badly wanted to go, and to some of which I did not want to go at all. Over the years, I’ve watched it attack and corrode borders, then take me with it into foreign territories. Borders are ideas erected between age groups, social classes, all sorts of hierarchical entities, in order that society may function as predictably and as decently as possible. They are not solid brick walls. Beauty eats them away. This is the truth; we’ve all seen it happen, though it happens differently in different places” Dealing with What’s Dealt (excerpt)

While I am quite certain the current mania will pass, the underlying issues of sexuality, consent and power are not being addressed. Nor do I think they will be. Like a lot of other human behaviour, it is pretty much impossible to come up with top down rules governing sexually charged behaviour between adults. I suppose a company might make it a firing offence to be alone with a member of the opposite (or same, because, gay) sex. But I can’t see that working very well and, fairly quickly, it would be routinely ignored. And would a rule against older men dating younger women get off the ground? Should we go back to the days of chaperones? (Which, in the current climate, maybe an emerging Hollywood profession.)  I don’t think any set of rules dealing with sexuality will work.

A more promising avenue is an ethical philosophical commitment to treating all people as ends in themselves. Whether it is sex or business or school gate acquaintanceship,  it makes sense to treat people with kindness and respect rather than as mere instruments. This sort of approach would take a long time to gain traction but, in the long run, solves a lot more problems than just sexual misbehaviour. It is more than a little utopian but it is something you can teach your children right now. It is also something which HR departments, schools and universities,  can use in place of the brain dead “zero tolerance” dogma which gets in the way of a healthy business or learning environment. Best of all, it provides a framework for conduct and a scaffold for dealing with misconduct. It recognizes that “all or nothing” is an entirely inhuman way of understanding human behaviour.

A commitment to treating people as ends in themselves would also provide a means for individuals to redeem behaviour which fell beneath that standard. Instead of mouthing platitudes, Sen. Franken, possibly with the help of an applied ethicist, could set about making amends to the woman (well, women, it appears) he groped and, in the process, actually set his sights higher. Even criminal acts, such as Clinton’s or Weinstein’s rapes, while attracting criminal sanction, could also involve making amends.

I am deeply skeptical about the efficacy of any top down “rules” for behaviour; but I am deeply optimistic that men and women can learn simple, universally applicable, ethical principles and apply them in day to day life. We may not always meet those ethical goals, but having them at all is a good first step.

 

Bannon 1, GOPe -5

Judge Roy Moore is about the last person I would want to see in the US Senate. But, and here’s the thing, he has the right friends and, more importantly, the right enemies. He thrashed swamp creature Luther Strange in the Republican runoff primary tonight.

No doubt he will bring his God-fearing, fundamentalist, Christian principles to Washington and enjoy a richly deserved obscurity in a back corner of the Senate. All of which does not matter.

The fight here is against “business as usual” in Washington and a win for McConnell backed Strange would have been all about continuing the dysfunction which is Washington politics.

Steve Bannon understood that and went all in for Moore simply for the message it would carry.

The message was received loud and clear by Tennessee Senator Bob Corker who announced he was not running again in 2018. As a RINO, Corker was pretty certain to be primaried. So he quit. A number of other quasi Republicans are expected to do much the same thing in the next few weeks.

The Moore win, in the face of a 30 million dollar campaign and the lukewarm endorsement of Strange by Trump (apparently under pressure from the useless GOPe), has made Bannon and Brietbart the single most imposing political machine in the US. It is dedicated to Trump but the old Trump, not the shiny new, Democrat-leaning, confection of the generals and the Kushners.

Now, from what I can see, Trump hates losing. He hates making mistakes. Supporting Strange for a handful of McConnell’s magic beans was a mistake. But, and here is the thing, Bannon is smart enough to let Trump climb down with Grace. However, Bannon is not going to stop in Alabama or Tennessee. Leaving out Tennessee, there are seven Republican seats in play. Several RINOs need ejection.

At a guess, we have seen the last time Trump is going to intervene in a primary fight where Bannon has a preferred candidate. It didn’t work this time and there is no reason to believe it will work in other races. Which leaves the table open for Bannon to run against GOPe wherever they pop up. Flake in Arizona is the obvious target, but there are several others.

Bannon has Mercer money, lots of it, available for the right fights. He has Breitbart. He has an all-star cast of deplorables from Sarah Palin to Phil Robertson to Nigel Farage (which I think is hysterical). He has an agenda which actually contains policy. Most of all he has the fact that the Senate and House Republicans can’t seem to get anything done even with a sitting President.

As Trump’s adventures in football are demonstrating, Trump knows how to keep his base onside; but Trump without Bannon is an empty suit. Fortunately, Bannon is well aware of this and is taking full advantage. The Generals and the GOPe leadership may think they have the Donald in harness but they couldn’t deliver in Alabama and it is unlikely Trump will risk another humiliation at the hand of his biggest, and smartest supporter.

Some whacko Alabama judge won a runoff election tonight, Steve Bannon gained control of the electoral fortunes of the entire Republican Party. Bannon was wasted inside the White House. It was like asking Captain Kidd to command a Royal Navy Man ‘o War, he could do the job but never be comfortable in the position. Now Bannon is loose.

Sheep from goats

The mayhem in Charlottesville was pretty much locked in when the Swastika was unfurled and neo-Nazi chants about Jews filled the air. The antifa people are usually exaggerating when they go on about how nationalist=white supremacist=Nazi, but in Charlottesville that reasoning was not wrong.

Here’s the thing: if Nazis, real live Jew hating Nazis, join your protest and you let them, their stench will infect everything you do. Over on the left people are at pains to distance themselves from BlackBloc whack jobs. The right needs to do the same thing with Nazis.

This is not a question of free speech or free association: the Nazis have a perfect right to both; rather it is a question of whether of not the resurgent right wants to accept Nazis tagging along for the ride. If the right and alt-right people are OK with Nazis in their midst then they will simply lose the vast majority of their supporters. However, if they make it very clear that Nazis are unwelcome they can carry on an build support. And by “making it clear” I mean to the point that Nazis at right wing gatherings are more likely to be punched by alt-right people than antifa.

If the Nazis want to organize their own demos they can go right ahead; but the serious right need to make sure that there is no place for Nazis on the right side of the aisle.

(And, just to avoid confusion, America’s own KKK needs to be bunged in the same barrel as Nazis.)