Three Good Things About Trump's Win

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I have never been a fan of Donald Trump and I do not share my countrymen's evident trust in him to make America great again, but here we are: He is about to become the 47th President of the United States.

If he does not completely undercut any of the following by hiking tariffs to the moon, enabling RFK, Jr. to destroy biotech and agriculture, intemperately plunging the United States into a war with China, or making any number of huge, stupid moves he will soon be able to make, there is potential for some good to come of a second term.

I'll list three things off the top of my head:

• There will at least not be active opposition to much-needed education reform. Trump is no laissez-faire capitalist. He will not bring principled opposition to government control of education to the table. There will be no carefully thought-out plan to get government out of education.
  
  But there is grassroots movement in favor of measures that attach tax money to children, rather than government schools, allowing parents more say in their education. This will improve some lives now and could lead to better things.
  
  Trump's past appointment of Betsy DeVos as head of the Department of Education augurs well for this movement to gain momentum undisturbed, and potentially grow into a real push for separation of academy and state.
  
  I doubt as favorable conditions would exist under Harris, beholden as she would have been to public sector unions.
• Energy policy should improve. Although he did not conceptualize them as such, Trump was hostile to leftist anti-energy freedom policies in his first term, and there is reason to think that some of his new advisors will have been influenced by the thinking of energy freedom advocate Alex Epstein. Since all industries depend on energy, any movement towards freedom in that sector will benefit our economy as a whole.
• There will be less far left 'woke'-type influence in government. "Reparations," for slavery, or at least any push for them from the federal level, should be dead in the water for a while.
  
  If the oxygen isn't cut outright from DEI, that far-left fad will at least get less encouragement from the federal level.
  
  If there is a move to, say codify gender reassignment surgeries on minors as child abuse (or at least make them much harder to get), Trump would probably sign it into law.

Please do note: These are off the top of my head and based on my fallible memory, so they're vague and devoid of substantiating hyperlinks.

But they'd be vague anyway. Trump is not principled or organized, as we saw when he rightly backed out of the nuclear deal with Iran -- but then did essentially nothing to prevent the theocracy from continuing to develop nuclear weapons.

He could likewise in this term hobble our economy so much from tariffs that he more than cancels out whatever good a freer energy sector could bring.

Much will depend on the quality of his advisors, so while he may well, for example, get 'woke' out of our government educational institutions, he won't work to privatize them unless pushed to, and could well simply replace that quasi religion with traditional religion, as our courts are already paving the way to do.

I do not wish to minimize what I think is overall a bad development for freedom in America, but a second Trump presidency is the hand we have been dealt. We should learn it and play it as best we can.

-- CAV

Who Bleeds Less Wins. Hoping It's Harris.

At RealClear Politics is a piece on what Democrat operatives think it will take for Harris to win today.

In this close race between two historically terrible choices, I'd summarize the whole piece and say it's the same thing it will take for Trump to win today, but in the other direction: Who loses less support than the other among voters who would normally vote for that candidate's party?

Well, duh, Gus! you might say. All elections are about winning more support than the other guy.

Sure, except in this election, we have one candidate running a negative, fear-mongering campaign and the other failing to run a convincing positive campaign. This is occurring against a backdrop of each party being controlled by its worst elements and choosing its candidate accordingly: Republicans ran a foreshortened campaign schedule so no one could gain traction against Trump and the Democrats hastily chose Harris when it became clear Biden would lose on fitness grounds alone.

This leaves each party having given short shrift to persuadable voters and taking its usual bases for granted, while seeing votes from those bases migrating. To the operatives, it looks like this:

[T]hough polls show Trump set to make historic inroads with voters of color, several longtime Democratic pollsters are dubious that it will show up on Election Day.

"It could well prove to be a mirage as Black voters rally down the stretch around Harris's historic candidacy," said Roth Smith. "Frankly, I have seen this mirage before in my own polling for campaigns that thought they were making gains among Black voters, only to see those voters coalesce decisively behind a Black candidate on Election Day. Harris could also stymie any improvement Trump was hoping to see among Latino voters, helped by the moronic "island of garbage" comments Tony Hinchcliffe made about Puerto Rico, which activated an entire new set of Latino voters and prominent figures against Trump in the closing week of the election. Holding her ground among those two voting blocs is probably enough to deliver Harris a win, full stop."

And Roth Smith added there was another key demographic, one that has received far less attention that others this election season: college-educated white men. From 2016 to 2020, white college-educated men moved 11 points toward Democrats, with even more dramatic gains in critical swing states. They were the most-improved group for Democrats both nationally, trending 11 points more Democratic between 2016 and 2020, and in key swing states, including jumping eight points into the Democratic column in Nevada, 14 in Michigan, 15 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and a whopping 43 points in Georgia.

"It is one of the craziest and least-discussed stories of what happened in 2020," Roth Smith said. "Nearly half of the college-educated white men in Georgia switched their vote from Trump to Biden. If she can keep moving in that direction and not lose ground elsewhere, I think she will win. Actually, I take that back. Not 'I think.' She will win."

What's going on was summarized quite well yesterday by Objectivist philosopher Gregory Salmieri, who was commenting on a common meme, pictured below:

The author believes his use of this image to be protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

These two memes make the same mistake. They assume that there's some single left-right spectrum along which people (or the country) are moving. There isn't. What's happening is that the loonier elements in each of two opposing tribes are becoming more prominent and alienating others who then turn to the opposite tribe.

So, in addition to the two terrible candidates, we have something like a political realignment going on and making it hard to predict what will happen.

Also worth reading are Salmieri's thoughts about the rioting after the last election. He adds:

More specifically re this election: Harris is beneath contempt. She's attempting to straddle every fence -- including most despicably the question of whether to support or denounce Israel's war of self-defense against the Gazans. She's flirted the worst elements of mainstream leftist politics when she thought it was expedient and drifted away from them (without denouncing them) when it became clear how unpopular they are. But her form of viciousness is (disgustingly) par for the course today. It's just one more small dose of the poison that's been sapping America's vitality for decades.

Trump is something different. The dominant features of his political career have been emotionalistic outbursts against the separation powers and the free press, going weak in the knees over dictators, indulging in arbitrary flights of fancy, and brazenly evading easily established facts. All of this did enduring damage to America during his tenure in office -- damage that can't be measured on the scale of one or two election cycles. And he's only gotten worse since. Such a man's return to the Oval Office is a serious and unique threat to American freedom. [bold added]

May the lesser evil win.

-- CAV

Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election

Over at Capitalism Magazine appears "Anti-Trumpites for Trump," by Leonard Peikoff, which I think is the best case that can be made for voting for Trump in tomorrow's election. I read this after viewing an interview of Peikoff by James Valliant on the same topic, and find the piece both a better presentation of that case, and easier to to comment on.

Specifically, the piece is better at laying out the positive case and is far better at acknowledging some of the many problems with Trump.

(This said, in neither place does Peikoff address Trump's disturbing and disgraceful admiration of dictators like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. Is Trump a power-luster -- or does he think the only way to "save America" is to become a dictator himself? There is no comfort if either explanation applies, and I struggle to imagine an explanation that doesn't reflect badly on him.)

Yaron Brook makes best case for Harris on his podcast, within the episode titled "Why I'm NO on Trump," which is embedded below.

As I told a friend yesterday, I'll be casting a vote for Harris, but I can't summon a clarion call to do so: The choices are that atrocious, as I think one can gather from a couple of comments I'll make on the Peikoff piece.

Peikoff, to my understanding, argues that Trump genuinely loves America and, although he does not deeply understand what makes our country great, he will fight for it. Trump is, at an imperfect, sense-of-life level, for example, pro-capitalist, anti-woke, and pro-American self-interest. (Peikoff lists off these positives under "Trump's analysis of Americanism," and then gives "some Trumpian negatives.")

As I have myself have allowed in the past, Trump may well be, in a very imperfect, mostly emotional way, pro-American.

That said, I am very concerned that the combination of some of the weaknesses of Trump and the Republicans, both of which Peikoff acknowledges, could more than undercut any positives.

For example, Peikoff notes:

Trump is not an intellectual. He is often an emotionalist in voicing his viewpoint. If he feels an emotion strongly, especially in defense of what he regards as justice, he can say outrageous things that have no bearing on his policies. For example, when he was convinced that he was cheated in the election of 2020, his statement about the Constitution amounted to the assertion, "the courts be damned!" But, in the end, he left office peacefully.

Unlike Harris' assaults on the Constitution, Trump's assertions were a matter of outrage -- he believed that the election had been stolen -- and he saw himself as fighting for America.

In contrast, of course, Harris would alter the nature of Supreme Court itself, end the Electoral College, destroy the filibuster, and anything else that might limit the government's power. The threats from Harris to the founding documents are philosophical in nature, not just verbiage, but permanent and fundamental changes, with all of the practical consequences this implies.

Set aside that Trump persists in claiming that he did not lose the 2020 election: It was, in fact, Pence's refusal to cave in to Trump's demand not to certify that result, just as it was that election officials in Georgia didn't "find" more votes for him that made this demand irrelevant.

And as I believe Yaron Brook notes in his podcast, there are plenty of other instances of Trump being stopped from acting on his impulses by the people who were around him during his first term.

Trump's impulses may have often had no "bearing on his policies," but an important part of why they didn't would be absent in a second term: Considering the intellectual influences on and statist orientation of his awful vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance -- not to mention the numerous people from Trump's administration who will not work for him again, who will there be to hold him back from doing something that could destroy the Republic?

Peikoff himself would have to admit this problem, based on how he answers the argument that a heavy Trump loss would force the GOP to rethink its recent trajectory:

Some Objectivists claim that if Trump loses that will "cleanse" the GOP. I would ask them the following:

1. Who is this Republican who could magically transform the GOP?

2. After four or eight years of Harris, what would be left of the American system, individual rights, freedom of speech, honest elections, et al.?

Who is this Republican indeed?

If there is nothing better waiting in the wings, there is nothing better restraining Trump, either.

This is a great point, and has helped me understand why I can't offer a full-throated endorsement one way or the other. Whichever party loses is, in today's irrational, anti-freedom cultural and political climate, more apt to double down on what caused them to alienate pro-freedom and centrist voters than to question it.

So, yes, the election won't "cleanse" anything, so we're down to the question of which side buys more time for America to change course: In my view, however horrible Harris is, at least she still has to go through Congress to enact the worst parts of her agenda. Because of this, she is more an ally of the American system, even if for nefarious reasons, than Trump is.

Trump, as Brook has pointed out, can unilaterally sledgehammer the economy by raising tariffs on his own. Trump's unpredictability/impulsivity can be an advantage, as Peikoff points out, but it can also destroy the American system without decent advisors around him to calm him down. He has tried to once, and he's a safe bet to do so again.

There will be no decent advisors, as far as I can see the second time around.

So yes, while the left is attempting to destroy America from within, at least it is using our system against us. Trump could well destroy that system and, with it, America.

-- CAV

They Sure Grow up Fast

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. My son did a great job on his Beetlejuice costume and makeup. "My son, the Tim Burton fan, as Beetlejuice," is what I captioned the shots I sent around.

His school allowed costumes during the day, yesterday, and he told me that people kept asking him who he was -- and not as in which character are you? (I was tempted to post a photo of him here, despite my blog policy because he was almost unrecognizeable.)

I remember holding him as a baby during writing time like it was yesterday.

Compared to his sister as a baby, he slept like a log.

Image by Laura Rivera, via Unsplash, license.

2. My daughter's been using AI to study algebra, by having it create word problems.

The way she described using it sounds like good way to study: She has to understand the material well enough to give it instructions, and she has to evaluate whether it's a good problem. Then, of course, she has to solve it.

She's been breaking curves for her class, just like her old man did, and is a regular on the honor roll.

3. My son and I sometimes watch true crime shows together. Once, during a Forensic Files rerun, he volunteered the following heuristic for eliminating the guilty party: If someone's being interviewed about the crime, that person is innocent.

It's not always true, of course, but I thought it was observant.

4. Coming full circle: The kids started cotillion classes a few weeks ago. (Yeah, I didn't know what they were, either, until my New Orleanian wife brought up the idea.)

The kids find them interesting, and I think it's a great idea, based on my early acquaintance with my wife.

We were in the same loose social circle of graduate bioscience/medical students. I found her self-confidence very attractive, but was somewhat puzzled and miffed by our friendly, but very short conversations. I always wanted to keep talking, but she'd politely excuse herself and go elsewhere.

She was working the room as she had learned to do in her cotillion classes. My wife naturally projects confidence, but I'm sure the classes helped her there, too -- on top of this repeatedly leaving me wanting to talk more with this pleasant, intelligent woman.

I now jokingly "blame" her classes for her ensnaring me in her charms, and am glad my kids will learn proper adult etiquette.

-- CAV

Responding to 'Thank You for Your Service'

Although it was a long time ago and I very rarely mention my past military service, I still sometimes receive thanks for it on such occasions as Veterans Day. Although I remember feeling vaguely unsure of how to reply the first few times, I ended up landing on Thanks for your support as my default reply.

Apparently, I wasn't alone. Advice columnist Annie Lane fielded the question once, and gave a gracious reply that further prompted other veterans to offer their thoughts and suggestions.

Annie Lane's first reply follows. I especially like the last sentence.

Image by Ben White, via Unsplash, license.

First and foremost, I want to say thank you for your service. Take a moment to let that gratitude sink in. Think about why they're saying "thank you"; it's because you made immense sacrifices and put your life on the line for your country. That's something for which we are all deeply grateful.

One meaningful way to respond could be to acknowledge your fellow veterans. You might say, "It was an honor to serve alongside such brave men and women." This not only accepts the gratitude but also highlights the shared bond of those who served with you.

If you feel that the person's comment is especially sincere, you could respond with something like, "Thank you, I really appreciate you recognizing my service." This can create a more genuine connection and reflect how much their acknowledgment means to you.

Ultimately, your response should be whatever feels right and authentic to you but know that their gratitude is heartfelt and well-deserved.

The second letter includes other possibilities, including the usual short answer I eventually settled on.

The question can seem a little tricky for those of us whose convictions adhere to or are influenced by the thinking of Ayn Rand, since we regard selfishness as the virtue motivating our decision to defend American freedom -- while, colloquially, many or most people will call it selfless, a sacrifice, or the like.

The key here, I think, is to remember that the place of goodwill this is coming from is more important than the exact words. This is why I like my short reply: It acknowledges the gratitude without offering lip service to bad philosophical ideas or obligating oneself to engage in a deeper conversation that the other person probably isn't interested in. At the same time, it is courteous and leaves the door open to keep talking, if doing so for whatever reason and at whatever level makes sense.

-- CAV

The 'Dead Baby Strategy' of Islamists

At Capitalism Magazine is an article by Alan Dershowitz about Yahya Sinwar's deliberate use of civilian casualties to sway public opinion in the West about Israel's war against Hamas.

I give Dershowitz a mixed review.

On the one hand, it's about time someone called out news media for its negligent or complicit reliance on the casualty figures Hamas has been putting out during the war:

As a patron of organizations like Hamas, this adult male is responsible for every single death caused or necessitated by the actions of his proxies. (Image by khamenei.ir, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

Without the support of the media, this strategy would not succeed. It requires that the media report Hamas-generated civilian casualty figures uncritically and without investigating the underlying components of the reported figures.

So the media report approximately 43,000 dead Palestinians. Although they could easily distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths, Hamas refuses to do so. Instead, they distinguish between male adults, women and those who they describe as "children." They fail to acknowledge that many of these so-called children were also combatants. Hamas lists anyone under 19 as a child, regardless of whether they are 15, 16, 17 or 18-year-old terrorists who have been recruited and trained by Hamas to murder Israelis. They do the same with women, conveying the impression that only men are terrorists.

Moreover, they fail to distinguish friendly-fire casualties that resulted from rockets fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups whose rockets have a high failure rate, with many landing in Gaza.

They suggest that all non-Hamas members are innocent civilians. But many non-Hamas "civilians" were directly involved in the massacres, rapes and kidnappings of October 7, 2023. Others cheered on these barbarians as they returned to Gaza with their live and dead hostages. Still others allowed their homes to be used to imprison hostages. Many contributed to Hamas financially and in other ways. Then there are the human shields -- some voluntary, some coerced -- who died as a result of deliberately being placed in harm's way pursuant to the Sinwar strategy of maximizing civilian deaths.

Dershowitz goes on to estimate that, of the 40,000 casualties claimed by Hamas, perhaps 10,000 were actually civilians.

That may be true, and there is some value in debunking the way Hamas has been reporting casualties, but the discussion about civilian deaths will never move to the level it needs to without asking the question: Why is Israel being condemned at all for civilian deaths?

The way to answer this question follows from the thinking of the late John David Lewis, as he lays out in his seminal work, Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History:

Moral ideas as they relate to war must not be conflated with the rules associated with deontological just-war theory -- for instance, of proportionality and absolute prohibitions against attacks on civilians. Such rules divorce ends from means, and are often considered by their advocates to be absolute strictures apart from context and consequences. In this moral framework, the goals of each nation are granted no import in evaluating the conduct of the war, and those fighting to maintain a system of slavery become morally equal to those fighting for freedom. That such rules can become weapons in the hands of an enemy who is fighting for conquest, loot, or slavery is said to be irrelevant to the categorical commandment that each side follow those rules regardless of result. But surely we should question moral rules that exempt a belligerent from attack because he hides behind civilians whom he intends to enslave. The moral purpose of a war -- the goal for which a population is fighting -- sets the basic context for evaluating a conflict and determines the basic moral status of the belligerents. Those who wage war to enslave a continent -- or to impose their dictatorship over a neighboring state -- are seeking an end that is deeply immoral and must not be judged morally equal to those defending against such attacks. It is vital to evaluate the purposes of a war when evaluating both the means by which that purpose is being pursued, and the social support for those directing the war. [footnotes omitted, bold added]

As you can see, the whole idea that a nation defending itself -- like Israel -- should be condemned for any civilian deaths is questionable to start with.

Not only that, as Lewis notes elsewhere in the book, part of the successful prosecution of a war of self-defense entails breaking the will of a belligerent population to continue fighting.

This raises the issue of popular support for the war among the civilian population of Gaza: To the degree that they support what Hamas is doing, they both deserve and need to suffer the consequences of what they are trying to bring to Israel.

In short, not only is Israel not to blame for civilian casualties, civilians are owed no quarter whatsoever, much less the coddling and aid they have been getting in this war. (Tragically, this means that some truly innocent civilians must suffer and die. But that is on Hamas, its Iranian puppetmasters, and its other supporters and sympathizers.)

As laudable as it is to name Sinwar's despicable strategy -- shared worldwide in the name of "compassion" by Islamists -- it is not enough. We have to take the next difficult step of admitting that civilian deaths are, tragically, a necessity of self-defense for good societies.

Until the West admits that innocents will die if it defends itself, and realizes that it is not to blame, it will remain paralyzed in the face of the Islamist barbarians it should have defeated decades ago.

-- CAV

Will the Supremes Open Another Can of Worms?

Over at Vox is an article about a Supreme Court case that could overturn a longstanding precedent of rejecting a legal theory called the independent state legislature doctrine (ISLD).

The case arises from a Republican-led challenge to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling that voters whose mail-in ballots have been rejected may cast ballots on Election Day.

Despite the remedy sounding like common sense, the decision was narrow, and the piece explains why the ruling wasn't as straightforward as it might seem. Against this backdrop and the obvious assumption that Democrats would have an early voting edge in this swing state, the GOP asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the decision.

What is interesting is on what grounds they are doing so, namely the legal theory mentioned above:

Image by Joshua Woroniecki, via Unsplash, license.

In its strongest form, the ISLD claims that each state's legislative branch has exclusive authority to determine how federal elections are conducted in that state. That means that a state governor cannot veto laws governing federal elections, even if the state constitution typically allows the governor to veto bills passed by the legislature. It means that states cannot alter their election laws through ballot initiatives or referendums. It means that state courts cannot enforce state constitutional provisions that protect the right to vote. And it even calls into question state court decisions interpreting state election laws.

In Genser, the Republican Party doesn't go to any of those extremes. But they do claim that by interpreting Pennsylvania law to permit the impacted voters to cast a ballot on Election Day, the state supreme court robbed the state legislature of its supposedly exclusive authority to write election laws.

But even in its weaker forms, the ISLD is dangerous. The last time an independent state legislature doctrine case was before the Court, in Moore v. Harper (2023), an array of conservative luminaries and former top national security officials warned the justices to stay far, far away from the ISLD, lest they destabilize America's entire system for choosing its leaders. That included a brief on behalf of retired admirals, generals, and service secretaries -- some of whom held high-level political appointments in Republican administrations -- who warned that the ISLD "undermines election integrity and exacerbates both domestic and foreign threats to national security." [links removed, bold added]

As the piece explains, the legal theory is based on a reasonable-sounding, but anachronistic reading of the term legislature in the Constitution:

When the Constitution was drafted, the concept of a popularly elected legislative body was a relatively new innovation, and the word "legislature" did not always refer to a body, like the US Congress, which was defined as the "legislative" branch of government. Instead, it meant, in the words of one 1828 dictionary, "the body of men in a state or kingdom, invested with power to make and repeal laws."

I am no legal scholar, but this sounds plausible to me, and the court has rejected ISLD for over a century.

As if it is not ominous enough that the Court is even bothering to take this case, Vox explains how Chief Justice Roberts may have carved out an excuse to overturn the precedent within a recent dissenting opinion.

And don't forget: This same Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.

-- CAV