The bizarre internecine war between the "Sohrab Ahmari" and "David French" factions of the US conservative movement that was kicked off by Ahmari's condemnation of "David French-ism" is likely completely incomprehensible to those not expert in the idiosyncrasies of American political debate.  But two bits of background, one contemporary and the other more historical, can help readers make sense of it.

The current-day context for the dispute is the breakdown of the Reagan-era alliance between the white working-class and commercial-class wings of the conservative/Republican coalition.  As I explained four years ago, the rise of Donald Trump signified that this alliance, which had rested on an exchange in which the white working class gained commercial-class support for its traditionalist social views, and in return supported libertarian pro-business economic policy, was in serious jeopardy.  The white working class, I argued, was no longer satisfied with this tradeoff, and their economic plight, severely exacerbated by the economic crisis of 2008, necessitated, in their view, a greater say for them in the combined coalition's joint economic direction.  This dissatisfaction placed them on a direct collision course with their pro-business allies, who naturally have their own very firm ideas regarding economic policy, as well as interests that are significantly in conflict with those of their blue-collar alliance partners.

Trump's victory, and his subsequent enactment of working class-friendly policies on trade and immigration, have further alienated libertarians and pro-business conservatives. Many of them have responded by declaring political war on Trump--and implicitly, on his working-class supporters, some of whom in turn have declared such "never Trump" conservatives to be traitors on a par with their arch-enemies, the white-collar professionals in the liberal Democratic alliance's "progressive" wing.  (The irony, of course, is that virtually all of the prominent commentators on both sides of this debate are, demographically speaking, highly educated professional writers and journalists--that is, a perfectly natural fit for the "progressive" cohort.)

Ahmari's attack on French, then, is best viewed as a Trump faction supporter's call to arms against his recalcitrant libertarian allies, who, he claims, have betrayed the alliance with their insufficient anti-progressive militancy.  Now, Ahmari is a firebrand Catholic, and his focus in his manifesto is cultural, not economic:  he accuses anti-Trump libertarian conservatives of treating progressives not as bitter enemies, but only as political opponents, in the battles over cultural issues such as abortion and religious freedom.  But then again, French, an outspoken Christian and cultural conservative who has been a tireless legal advocate for conservative free speech rights on campus, is an extremely odd target for Ahmari's cultural broadside--or, rather, would be an odd target, if his true preoccupation were cultural activism rather than tribal factionalism.

Why, then, does Ahmari couch his attack on French in terms of the latter's allegiance to "classical liberalism", rather than fire off a straightforward partisan attack on pro-business conservatives' refusal to embrace wholeheartedly the working class-centric Trump economic program?  The answer lies in the second, more longstanding element of this dispute's context:  American political culture's ambivalence about (if not outright hostility to) democracy.

In most of the world's democratic nations, democracy itself takes center stage in political debate:  factions argue about policies on the understanding that the electorate are the ultimate and proper arbiters of government's direction, and that their interests and preferences (however unsophisticated) are necessarily paramount.  But American democracy was founded over two centuries ago, when democracy on a national scale was still a new and somewhat ill-understood concept.  And to America's revered founding fathers, the essence of democracy wasn't so much the basic principle of ensuring government accountability through popular sovereignty as it was the art of defining a delicately engineered system of political mechanisms which, if designed to perfection, could produce optimally wise, efficient and effective government--irrespective of the inevitable defects and perverse wishes of a selfish, ignorant, fractious democratic rabble.

Unfortunately, American political culture has enshrined this oddly abstract vision of government into a kind of dogma, with the result that (a) most educated Americans have little use for democracy, and incessantly seek out means to suppress or circumvent it in the name of one or another public good, and (b) arguments about policy take the form of grand philosophical debates about the ideal society, and the ideal structure of government to implement it--again, irrespective of the will of the people as expressed through their electoral choices.  The result is what one might expect of policy debates untempered by the moderating influence of the democratic spirit:  all the noisy pomposity of clashing abstract absolutes, replete with the sort of extreme pronouncements and radical calls to action that make normal citizens cringe.

And so it is with Ahmari's jeremiad:  to him, it isn't radical progressives with their ludicrous, freedom-crushing policy proposals--or even wealthy, selfish plutocrats with their libertarianism and accommodationism towards popular opinion--that are the problem, but rather "classical liberalism" itself, whose political neutrality and respect for democracy fail to prohibit a priori the enactment of morally repugnant (in Ahmari's eyes) laws and policies.  Now, Ahmari never quite gets around to explaining what he would replace democracy with.  But the mere fact that he is arguing on this structural level about what amounts to some factional bickering between two ostensibly allied conservative cohorts, illustrates just how badly American founder-itis has infected the nation's political debate, obscuring the democratic essence of partisan disputes and eliding discussion of the obvious democratic approach to resolving them.

Why The Higgs Boson Is like Pornography

I few years ago I wrote about my scepticism concerning the CERN Large Hadron Collider and the discoveries they are supposedly making. I pointed out that the OPERA group was getting results by fiddling with the equipment, so how do we know that CERN isn't generally doing the same thing? This is important since no one else can build their own LHC and replicate experiments. One would hope that CERN would announce that the maintenance of their equipment is done at arms length from the people who run experiments on it, but I haven't seen this.

It turns out, however, that the situation is a good deal worse than I thought. I had naively assumed that equipment fiddling was the only source of human subjectivity in these experiments. I imagined that the experiment to find the Higgs boson would work as follows. The experiment would involve two programs, both of which would have been vetted by physicists across the world. Program 1 would run the equipment, collecting certain data (it's impossible to keep ALL the data). Program 2 would then run on the collected data, concluding the presence or not (or perhaps a probability) of a Higgs boson. A more complicated version of this would have a single program running the experiment and collecting data in an interactive fashion. In any case, once the program(s) had been written (and the equipment certified), humans would be out of the loop: there would be no subjectivity.

Apparently, it turns out that humans have to be in the loop. Apparently, the Higgs Boson is much like pornography: you know it when you see it. The process of identifying the Higgs Boson is completely subjective, but physicists will know it when they see it. But instead of scrapping the whole project, they come up with an absurd, barely comprehensible type of "blinding" that supposedly stops experimenters from consciously or subconsciously cheating in some way. They don't know what the Boson is supposed to look like in the data, but they know that they can't get away with identifying just any old stuff in the data as the Boson, so they have a complicated way of making sure that experimenters agree on what looks Bosonish without cheating somehow.

This all reminds me a bit of "climate science" (not to be confused with climate science). Some very clever people are able to detect a "human signal" in just about any weather they don't like, as well as in any small amount of warming. They cannot reliably predict any such signal, but they know it when they see it.

It's been a long time since I've seen such a completely wrongheaded interpretation of current events gain as much popularity as this Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan on college admissions fraud.  Flanagan exhibits multiple colossal misunderstandings of the political and social conditions leading to the fraud, which she attributes to affluent parents' sense of "entitlement":

Huffman, like all of the other indicted parents, was expressing an attitude I first encountered not in the great books, but in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, when Sally dictates her endless list of toys to Charlie. “All I want is what I have coming to me,” she tells him; “all I want is my fair share.”

Now, there's a sense in which all criminals demonstrate reprehensible arrogance by acting as if they're above the law.  But Flanagan isn't referring to their lawlessness:

These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone...They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege.

  Apparently, in Flanagan's eyes, affluent parents express their sense of entitlement not through languid decadence, or arrogant condescension, or expectation of effortless success, but rather by applying themselves with frenetic, single-minded determination (not to mention extraordinarily lavish spending) towards securing their children's future.  (She describes their efforts as "campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor".)  Presumably she attributes similar smug entitlement to equally determined but less affluent parents--say, Asian "Tiger Mothers"--as well.  In fact, she even attributes it to, of all people, working-class white Trump voters:

They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.

A couple of decades ago, Flanagan's lumping together of affluent Californian "Trump haters" and hardscrabble Midwestern Trump fans might have made slightly more sense.  As ICBW readers are well aware, the alliance between wealthy entrepreneurs (though not the professionals and showbiz types who figure so prominently in this scandal) and working-class whites used to be quite strong.  But it's been deteriorating for some time now, and the rise of Trump signaled its complete dissolution.  For Flanagan to treat both cohorts as linked enemies today is not just hyper-partisan nastiness (poor whites "were used to having the fattest piece of all"?), but also seriously outdated politics.

On the other hand, her disdain for her erstwhile liberal allies--the affluent professional class--signals her much sharper awareness of the deep schism in her own tribe's ranks, between those same professionals and more radical progressives like herself.  While she derides the former for constantly "bitching about admissions", Flanagan, a dedicated English teacher whose family's "god was art, specifically literature", extols elite colleges' "deep attention to the issue of enrollment management; the more elite the institution, the more likely it is to be racially and socioeconomically diverse."  (It's unclear whether she counts those colleges' flagrant discrimination against Asians as a form of "diversity" or just good "enrollment management".)

This allegiance to progressive academia explains the huge blind spot evident throughout the article:  Flanagan's stubborn denial of the obvious moral parallels between admissions fraud and its perfectly legal cousin, "enrollment management".  Flanagan stoutly defends universities against claims that their avaricious leeching of billions of dollars from wealthy (and not-so-wealthy) parents desperate to see a prestigious degree bestowed upon their children just might be disturbingly similar to what certain corrupt athletic coaches were doing:

  As off-putting as most of us find the role that big-ticket fundraising plays in elite-college admissions, those monies go toward programs and facilities that will benefit a wide number of students—new dormitories, new libraries, enriched financial-aid funds are often the result of rich parents being tapped for gifts at admissions time. But the Singer scheme benefits no one at all except the individual students, and the people their parents paid off.

 To most of us, of course, spending money on a whole classful of entitled children of exactly the parents Flanagan has been roasting for so many long paragraphs doesn't seem all that much more altruistic than spending it on a single such child.  But the real difference is who, in practice, gets a cut of that spending, in the form of increased income and comforts: not a single scamming coach, but rather a bunch of professors, graduate students, college staff and administrators--that is, people very much like Caitlin Flanagan.  Most of them no doubt share Flanagan's progressive politics, as well as her devotion to her family's cultural quasi-religion.  They no doubt also see their comfortable academic sinecures as the perfectly natural and merited fruits of the "generosity" of the many parents collectively extorted out of their savings by a voracious academic cartel, in return for nothing more than a job credential certifying that their children have demonstrated their suitability for white-collar employment--primarily by successfully navigating a grueling, corrupt admissions process.

And if one dares even suggest that these academic types' social contribution might not necessarily justify their (and their institutions') stranglehold on the nation's pocketbooks, or that perhaps they haven't always been the most high-minded and selfless stewards of their incredibly valuable and lucrative collective credentialing authority?  Expect to hear an outpouring of outraged indignation from Caitlin Flanagan and her educator friends, of the sort that bespeaks a far deeper and more unjustified sense of...entitlement, than any wealthy Beverly Hills parent of a high school senior could ever hope to muster.

The April Fools' Day edition of the ICBW podcast is now available to foolish listeners everywhere! In part 1, we discuss the recent academic admissions fraud scandal; part 2 covers Jussie Smollett, the Mueller report, and the logistics of terrorism; and part 3 revisits LTEC's current romantic obsession, Elizabeth Holmes.  Listeners are as always invited to participate belatedly in our April Fools' festivities by leaving their comments, foolish or otherwise, below.

The Valentine's Day edition of the ICBW podcast is now available (apologies for the delay).  In part 1, we discuss various recent and not-so-recent incidents of public figures getting into hot water, including the Virginia follies and Ilhan Omar's tweets, as well as a selection of "me-too" cases.  In part 2, we discuss the Green New Deal in the context of partisan realignment, and ponder what competence means in various high-status jobs.  As always, listeners are enthusiastically encouraged to prove they exist by commenting on this post.

It's time for the entry you've been waiting for all year (hopefully while doing other, more productive things in the meantime):  the annual ICBW predictions post.  As always, we begin by reviewing last year's predictions:

• The long-awaited stock market crash and resulting recession (or at least one quarter of negative growth) will finally arrive this year.  The main market indices will end up below their levels of January 2017, thereby retroactively validating my prediction for this past year.  Real estate and oil prices will fall as well, although not by as much, since their markets aren't nearly as frothy.  And there will be no massive financial near-meltdown this time, since stock market asset ownership isn't particularly highly leveraged.

No recession, but the market is indeed down for the year.  The Case-Shiller real estate index peaked this summer and has been falling since, while oil prices are down substantially on the year.  Overall, not a bad performance (for once)...

• In addition, blockchain-based monetary instruments will completely collapse, never to recover (although more bubbles in similarly worthless ad hoc quasi-currencies will no doubt occur at some point in the future).  Megan McArdle has written a nice pair of summaries of why Bitcoin and its imitators are doomed to fail, whether as payment systems or as currencies.  I would add only some history: these technologies are actually the hybrid offspring of two previous failed ones--anonymous "e-cash" of the 1980s and peer-to-peer ("P2P") distributed data storage systems of the 2000s.  Both of these predecessors fooled a shocking number of advocates into believing in the viability of systems whose only remotely plausible attraction was the promise of evading government regulation and law enforcement, and that are otherwise in every way inferior to more mainstream alternatives.  Blockchain-based currencies have merely followed in their footsteps.

Not sure if a two-thirds decline in Bitcoin prices over the course of 2018 (to less than a quarter of its peak early in the year) counts as a complete collapse, but the end is certainly impending.

• Donald Trump's popularity will bounce around (or just below) the 40% level throughout the year, defying predictions of inevitable collapse but nevertheless staying well below the break-even point.  Parallel investigations into both the current and previous administrations' alleged interference with law enforcement investigations will result in either bombshell revelations of scandalous malfeasance or overhyped non-issues, depending on one's partisan allegiance; in any event, neither will generate consequences of any legal significance. However, a political consequence will be a massive defeat for the president's party in the November midterm elections, similar to those experienced by his predecessor:  Democrats will take both houses of Congress by small margins--gaining hugely in the House, and narrowly in the Senate despite having far more seats up for election in the latter chamber.  This will of course intensify legislative gridlock, which in any event will have existed since at least the first midterm election of the previous administration.  (A possible exception is an immigration compromise this year, in which a limited amnesty is traded for enhanced border enforcement.)

The GOP managed to keep the Senate, and even increase its holding by a couple of seats, and the possible immigration compromise was discussed, but ultimately failed to materialize.  Otherwise, this prediction held up pretty well.

• The Iranian regime will suppress the domestic protests against it within weeks using ruthless violence, but the extent of the unrest will push the regime to restrain its foreign adventures somewhat in order to focus on internal security.  For example, the mop-up operations in Syria will continue and be largely complete by the end of the year, but the shift towards anti-Israel (and anti-Jordan) activity will be put off for this year at least.  Hamas, on the other hand, will try mightily to instigate conflict with Israel, without enough success to ignite another full-scale "grass-mowing" operation.

This one was strikingly on-the-mark, I'd say.

• Meanwhile, North Korea will quickly fade back into irrelevant obscurity, as will the Jerusalem embassy move, which will make leisurely progress without being officially completed by the end of the year.  Instead, attention will shift to the conflict between Turkey and the various Kurdish entities along its borders, with the US increasingly aligning itself against an increasingly assertive, belligerent and anti-Western Turkey.

Donald Trump was the clear wildcard in this one--his affection for Turkey's Erdogan, reminiscent of his crush on Putin, has apparently motivated him to side against the US' traditional Kurdish allies.

• Concern about academia will shift from its toxic politics and chaotic environment to its dire financial straits, as the economic downturn causes a collapse in enrollment, particularly at expensive private colleges, with alternatives such as community college, apprenticeship and online education beginning to look comparatively far more attractive to prospective students.

This trend has clearly begun, but as an annual prediction it may have been a bit premature.  Look for it to become more conspicuous in future years, though...

• The NFL will experience a bounce-back season in the fall, with attendance and viewership recovering markedly despite (or perhaps partly because of) the difficult economic situation.

A rare spot-on prediction about popular culture...

And now for my guaranteed-predictable 2019 predictions:

• The US economy will slow markedly starting in early-to-mid 2019, though not into recession territory.  The stock markets will continue to decline throughout the year, rallying late but not by enough to prevent an overall negative year.  Real estate prices will also continue their decline, but oil prices will rebound modestly from their recent lows.
• President Trump's approval ratings will continue their stable modestly-underwater trend throughout 2019.  There will continue to be multiple non-stop investigations--this time including Congressional ones--of the president's activities, but they will result in no immediate legal jeopardy to the president himself, nor will he be impeached by the House of Representatives.  Numerous White House staffers and cabinet members will be investigated and prosecuted, however--including by politically ambitious state prosecutors unconnected with Congressional or Department of Justice investigations.
• The frontrunners for the Democratic Party presidential nomination at the end of the year will be the most viable candidates from the party's "mainstream" (read:  minority) and "progressive" (read:  upper-class/would-be upper-class) wings.  Kamala Harris and Kirstin Gillibrand are the current favorites for these respective roles.
• In Europe, "Hard Brexit"--without a negotiated deal--will come to pass, with far milder consequences than opponents are predicting.  As a result, British PM Theresa May will survive in office through 2019--partly out of Tory fear of the electorate, and partly out of the inability of her divided party (mirroring the pre-Trump US GOP's business/blue-collar split) to coalesce around an acceptable alternative.  Meanwhile, the EU will calm its many internal rebellions by acquiescing to greater immigration restrictions across the union.
• Justin Trudeau will win a comfortable majority in the coming Canadian federal election.  (Canadians usually re-elect their prime ministers at least once if they don't completely screw up on the job.)  Likewise, Benjamin Netanyahu will win re-election and remain in office through 2019, although a corruption indictment will be delivered against him, and its resulting legal process will drag on through the year, hanging over his political career without actually ending it.
• The combination of US withdrawal from Syria and increased Turkish intervention there to suppress the Syrian Kurds' territorial ambitions will turn the Syrian conflict into a Turkish-Iranian one, with the two would-be hegemons unable to work out an acceptable partition of the now-recolonized country.  Russia will recapitulate its historic rivalry with Turkey by siding with Iran, and the US will thus be pushed by its NATO commitments and geopolitical interests into siding with Turkey, despite the many tension-generating issues dividing the two countries (which may in turn be assuaged somewhat by this partnership).  Meanwhile, the US will reduce, if not eliminate, its involvement in Afghanistan, and refocus its energies on other geopolitical threats, such as China.
• Louis CK's comeback will spark a minor explosion of politically incorrect comedy, as stand-up comedians escalate from complaining about politically driven constraints on their material to actively rebelling against them.  The change will mark a tipping point in cultural acceptance of leftist censorship, since comics are by nature conformist barometers of consensus opinion, rather than the daring vanguards of forbidden ideas they are often portrayed as being.  (Laughter, as I've explained in the past, is a product of comfort and reassurance--often following surprise and/or discomfort--and comics must therefore provide reassurance in their punchlines to succeed.  They do so, in most cases, by catering to audiences' consensus beliefs and prejudices.  Thus if comics feel confident in mocking and flouting the rules of political correctness, then rejection of those rules must have achieved a high threshold level of consensus among comedy audiences.)

As always, readers are enthusiastically invited to comment on these predictions, perhaps providing their own in response.  If yours turn out to be more correct than mine, then I promise to turn over all my earnings from this blog to you!

The Thanksgiving edition of the ICBW podcast is now available, with apologies for the delay in posting it (and for my annoying cough throughout the recording).  In part 1, we discuss the recent election and populism; in part 2, we delve into the oddity that is the White House Press Corps; and in part 3, we cover "Sokal 2.0", plus a bonus topic:  US Middle East policy.  As always, readers are invited to join in the discussion via the comments link, or by shouting very loudly and angrily while listening.

The all-new, 100% Kavanaugh-free September edition of the ICBW podcast is now available.  Part one covers recent revelations about backroom goings-on in the Trump White House, and part two, inspired by Jeremy Corbyn, discusses mainstream political movements' willingness to forge alliances with groups exhibiting highly unsavory characteristics such as anti-Semitism.  If you need a break from sordid accusations against judicial nominees, we're here for you...

British Jews are growing increasingly alarmed as evidence mounts that British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and many of his circle of high-ranking party allies have engaged in virulently anti-Israel statements and actions, some of which have at least plausibly been labeled as crossing the line from anti-Zionism over into anti-Semitism.  Corbyn and his defenders have generally stood their ground, denying the anti-Semitism charge while acknowledging their support for various stridently anti-Israel organizations--including ones, such as Hamas and PFLP, that are openly and unabashedly terrorist (not to mention anti-Semitic).

This nitpicking debate over at what point these Labour activists' virulent Israel-hatred becomes anti-Semitism quickly becomes tedious, all the more so given that it's essentially beside the point.  Hamas and the PFLP aren't evil merely because they're anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic--they're also violent, totalitarian and terrorist, and treat both Palestinians and Westerners with exactly the same ruthless, cavalier brutality that they mete out to Israelis every chance they get.  And the Corbynistas in the Labour party don't lavish their affections solely on Palestinian terrorists--they're also unstinting in their love for the brutal dictators ruling Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Russia and numerous other countries.

In fact, their anti-Israel animus is only one minor facet of an entire worldview that supports violent anti-Western totalitarians both abroad and at home, with the aim of undermining the stable, capitalist, democratic order that stands in the way of their real ultimate goal:  limitless power.  Uninterested in standard democratic politics, in which they'd have to woo British voters by promising and delivering on broadly popular, successful policies in order to earn power, they instead imagine themselves seizing control of the country much the way their Venezuelan friends did, and their other radical allies hope to do--by infiltrating and bullying unelected institutions, both government and private, into subservience; courting identity-based client constituencies particularly amenable to undemocratic (and even violent) political methods; and suppressing political rivals, by fair means or foul, to limit the alternative options available to other voters.  And that is why British Jews--and everyone else, for that matter--are well-advised to take note of Corbyn's unsavory anti-Semitic international allies when deciding whether or not to support him.

Texas senatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke's spirited defense of NFL players who kneel during the pre-game national anthem echoes the now-standard argument that the players' actions are merely intended to call attention to the important issue of police violence. This is pure gaslighting, of course:  kneeling for the national anthem has a clear symbolic meaning--refusal to show respect for the country and its symbols--that no flood of grandiose invocations of the police-violence red herring can ever negate.  If a group of counter-protesting NFL players decided to burn a cross on the field before a game, for example, claiming that they were simply expressing outrage at disrespect for the flag by fellow players, nobody would be fooled about the hideous, racist meaning of their gesture.  Likewise, to claim that it's a mere coincidence that original kneeler and Fidel Castro supporter Colin Kaepernick happened to choose refusing to stand for the anthem as his form of protest, rather than some other gesture that might have been a bit less overtly and unmistakably anti-American, is simply preposterous.

A somewhat more plausible argument in the kneelers' favor is to invoke the players' free speech rights.  After all, nobody doubts that ordinary citizens have the legal right to congregate in a public place and join together in kneeling for the national anthem, however insulting it may be to patriotic observers.  But do they have the right to do so without retaliation from their employers--in this case, the NFL and its teams?  And does it matter whether their protest occurs at their workplace--an NFL field, prior to a game--or away from it?

The answer to these questions is in fact far from a matter of consensus these days, as the Eich and Damore cases in the information technology industry have amply demonstrated.  My own preferred convention would be for (private) employers to be considered free to regulate employee speech in the workplace as they see fit, as long as they treat any non-work-related speech as none of their concern.  Hence, in my view, The NFL should declare that players are free to protest police violence--and kneel for the anthem, if they choose--off the field, on their own time, with no employer-imposed consequences.  But the league should also be free to set rules for on-field behavior, including during the national anthem before games.

Reasonable people can, of course, differ on the right balance between the value of individual free speech and an employer's prerogative to set criteria for employment.  Unfortunately, thoughtful debate about that balance is in this case largely drowned out by transparently dishonest rhetoric about the plain meaning of an unambiguous gesture.

The Canada Day edition of the ICBW podcast is now available, with part one covering the US Supreme Court (LTEC for, Dan against), part two covering immigration and children in cages (LTEC for, Dan against), and part three discussing various frauds and grifters, with a very obvious, natural jump to the topic of research funding (LTEC for, Dan against).  As always, responses via comments on this post are most welcome, as possible evidence that someone might actually be listening...

I have argued in the past that rioting and similar forms of mass violence are almost always a matter of license--that is, that a certain fraction of the population are generally eager to riot if the opportunity arises, and will gladly do so if law enforcement authorities start showing signs of being unable or unwilling to catch and punish them for it.  An excellent analysis of this phenomenon can be found in Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs", an account of the author's personal experience hanging out among British soccer hooligans during the 1980s.  Buford describes the elaborate instinctive dance that a mob of ruffians would collectively engage in with the police, constantly probing and testing to gauge the response, and seizing on any slight failure to keep the crowd completely in line as a chance to break out and begin wreaking mayhem.  His key point is that such violence doesn't arise from desperation, or righteous anger, or personal anguish over unhappy circumstances, but rather from many young males' strong visceral attraction to it, combined with the lack of sufficiently forceful efforts on the part of the authorities to stop it.

This exact same dynamic applies to the non-physical battles being fought across partisan political lines these days in the US.  Pundits are fond of attributing such events as the mobbing of Republican power couple Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao, the expulsion of Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a restaurant, and harassers disrupting the (separate) restaurant meals of Trump administration officials Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen, to the desperation of Democrats unjustly deprived of power, or characterizing them as a natural response to Trump's and his followers' own frequent displays of incivility.  What these interpretations miss is that incivility is like thuggery:  there is no need for an explanation for why people indulge in it, because in fact plenty of people naturally take great pleasure in it.  If they are indulging in it today where once they wouldn't have, it's because they believe that they now have license to do so--that is, that their incivility will result in no significant negative consequences for them.

And where does that license come from these days?  Primarily from the country's political polarization.  In a nation so divided, both sides are "cocooned" with a uniformly like-minded cohort that protects them and even cheers them on while they direct their worst incivilities at the "other side".  In other words, like all wars, this one has broken out because both sides, in their insularity, believe they can win.

Of course, at most one side can be correct on that point, and it will likely take some sort of resolution--either a victory by one side, or an unmistakable, prolonged stalemate--to persuade one or the other side to sue for peace.  Until then--or until the extreme isolation between the sides somehow begins to ease of its own accord, perhaps for economic or demographic reasons--we can expect plenty more and far worse outbreaks of incivility, egged on by like-minded partisans on both sides.

The May edition of the ICBW podcast is now available.  In part 1, we discuss a recent Munk Debate on "political correctness", and in particular one of its participants, Jordan Peterson.  In part 2, inspired by Peterson's psychological ideas, we explore various theories in the fields of psychology and evolutionary biology.  As always, listeners are encouraged to respond with their thoughts via the "comments" link.

The April 2018 edition of the ICBW podcast is now available--we discuss Syria (and American Middle East policy more generally) in part 1, and Facebook (with a digression into academic radicalism) in part 2.  As always, listeners are invited to respond via comments, rather than more violent methods.

The kerfuffle over Louis Farrakhan's ties to prominent figures in the Women's March organization and the Democratic party has numerous people--particularly Jews--wondering why so many leftists have trouble distancing themselves from a notorious anti-Semite (not to mention racist, anti-feminist, homophobe and religious extremist).  Of course, they're asking the wrong question--the more fundamental question is why so many leftists are so friendly with Farrakhan in the first place.

After all, the views he espouses--that women should remain at home, subservient to their husbands; that homosexuality is a sin; that racial segregation is good and desirable--have earned the Nation of Islam the Southern Poverty Law Center's designation as a hate group.  It's hard to imagine another organization with such far-right-wing views being on such good terms with prominent leaders of the American left.

A popular answer (or excuse, depending on one's perspective) is political pragmatism (or cynicism, depending on one's perspective).  Former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, for instance, argued that politicians must sometimes meet with those they disagree with--like Farrakhan--in the interest of "trying to get things done".  But while this argument might justify occasional furtive negotiations over proposed alliances of convenience on specific issues of mutual interest, it hardly explains the Democratic Party politicians' frequent friendly powwows with Farrakhan--let alone the Women's March leaders' gushing, fangirlish encomia to him.

Then again, the Nation of Islam isn't the only extremist form of Islam with that American leftists seem to find politically congenial despite its apparently diametrically opposed views on virtually every major partisan issue.  Radical Islamist organizations such as CAIR, MPAC and even the Muslim Brotherhood also have had friendly relations with the Democratic Party, especially the Obama administration.  Again, these organizations' views seem antithetical to the professed positions of the Democratic Party figures who are hobnobbing with them.  What, then, explains the friendliness?

Under the "ideological" model of democratic politics, in which political parties and factions are united by shared principles and beliefs, this sort of alliance makes no sense at all.  But if one views ideologies as nothing more than contrived pretexts for mutually beneficial coalitions among tribal factions, then it's completely understandable.  Certainly Farrakhan, a charismatic leader of a cult-like organization that exercises strong control of its members, is an attractive partner for any party, given his ability to deliver a captive voting bloc to any party willing to lend him the respect and prestige that he craves.  And the Democratic Party in particular, with its collection of race-, gender- and ethnicity-focused constituencies, is at this point practically built on the model of transacting perks for votes with identity-political movement leaders who can deliver those votes. In fact, it's a natural extension of the party's tradition of urban "machine" politics that has dominated several US cities for over a century.

Most people would consider this kind of identity politics highly corrosive to democratic accountability, since voters judging politicians based purely on racial or ethnic loyalty are likely to be more tolerant of incompetence, corruption or otherwise disastrous governance than voters whose affinities are based on a more clear-eyed understanding of self-interest.  (Consider, for example, the racial loyalty that animates the core supporters of the current US president...)  Fortunately, identity politics, like most other kinds, follows a cyclical trend, and we can hope that its current resurgence will eventually peak and subside, as it did in the case of African-American militancy following the wave of the 1960s-1980s.

The first ICBW podcast of 2018 is now available--we discuss "the memo" in part 1, Aziz Ansari's very bad date in part 2, and the Bitcoin/blockchain bubble in part 3.  Listeners are, as always, encouraged to respond via comments (although, to be fair, merely listening is a formidable achievement in itself)...

The year having seemingly flown by with astonishing speed, we find ourselves once again at the moment when the world celebrates its collective act of metaphorical rebirth:  I'm referring, of course, to the publishing of our annual ICBW predictions post.  As always, we begin with last year's reckless prognostications:

•  All that stuff I predicted about last year's economy will apply this year.  (Or next year--see above.)  If you object that such a prediction is non-actionable, keep in mind Bernard Baruch's (possibly apocryphal) aphorism:  "I made my money by selling too soon"...

To clarify, I predicted "a new recession in the 2016-2018 timeframe" at the beginning of 2015.  Obviously, this prediction hasn't yet panned out, but I remain optimistic, so to speak (see below).

• The right-wing resurgence in Europe will continue in 2017, with several more countries electing new nationalist, anti-immigration governments.  Brexit negotiations will begin in earnest, but will not complete this year.  Continuing sporadic terror attacks will be joined by increasingly frequent and more severe incidents of nativist violence against immigrants.

Not a difficult prediction, of course, but pretty darned accurate.

• Donald Trump's first year in office will be very similar to his predecessor's:  lots of "I won" bluster, but very few legislative accomplishments, apart from one or two bipartisan ones driven by Congress with Democratic cooperation.  (The Republicans will not abolish the Senate filibuster, although they'll keep the limitations on it instituted by the previous Democratic Senate.)  Neither Obamacare nor immigration will be addressed legislatively, although many of the Obama administration's executive actions in these areas will be reversed.  Reaction to Trump's usual bombastic pronouncements will be overwhelmingly partisan, and his approval ratings will therefore track his partisan support, which will hover within the 40-50-percent range. 

Mostly accurate, except for a couple of details: the recent tax bill appears to have done away with the Obamacare individual mandate, and Trump's support has consistently dipped below 40 percent.  

• Trump's foreign policy will sound radically different from his predecessor's, but will in practice be similarly quiescent and timid, at least militarily--although thankfully without the open courtship of avowed enemies (with the exception of Putin's Russia) and sabotage against pro-US friends.  For example, despite the new pro-Israel tone, US reaction to the recent anti-Israel UN resolution will be much more muted than the current torrent of threats suggests.  Any funding cuts or formal status changes to the US' UN membership will be confined to ineffective token gestures, and the US embassy will end up not moving to Jerusalem this year.

The Trump administration has actually been mildly more assertive in foreign policy than this prediction anticipated, driving a UN budget cut, at least announcing an intent to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, courting Saudi Arabia, adopting a more aggressive posture towards enemies such as Russia and North Korea, and speaking out in support of the Iranian protesters.  It will be interesting to see whether it will be able to sustain this assertiveness in the coming years, and apply it to more challenging cases such as Turkey (see below).

• Both ISIS and the Syrian rebellion will continue to weaken, but will not yet disappear by the end of 2017.  As the Assad regime consolidates its hold, pro-Iranian proxies will be freed up for increased attacks on Israel, and Sunni radicals as well, seeking a less ruthless target, will start turning towards Israel in earnest.  Some minor attacks will occur, to which Israel will respond harshly.  Meanwhile, the corruption investigation against Bibi Netanyahu will take many months to complete, and likely won't be completed by the end of this year.  In any event, ultimately no charges will be laid.

The Bibi prediction has held up so far.  Some have claimed full victory against ISIS, although the completeness of its obliteration is as yet unclear.  The most interesting deviation from this prediction, though, is the formation of a moderate Sunni anti-Iran bloc that at the very least prefers to downplay conflict with Israel as a distraction.  Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah, meanwhile, so far looked far more interested in mopping up and consolidating their control of Syria this past year, presumably postponing their confrontation with Israel until that task is complete.

• Venezuela will collapse further into failed-state status in the Zimbabwe mold, with a corrupt and incompetent government using brute force to suppress opposition amid continuing economic collapse.  Meanwhile, the American opening to Cuba will do nothing for its population's destitution, and economic failure will lead to significant popular unrest in Russia, Iran and Egypt.

The Venezuela and Cuba predictions were easy.  There was only a tiny bit of anti-Putin noise in Russia, and Egypt looked pretty quiet this year, but the people of Iran, ever keen to avoid embarrassing this blog, came through in the end.  

• The next Star Wars film will not be named either "The Force Gets Dressed" or "Rogue Two".

Perhaps it should have been...

And now for this year's crop of predictions:

• The long-awaited stock market crash and resulting recession (or at least one quarter of negative growth) will finally arrive this year.  The main market indices will end up below their levels of January 2017, thereby retroactively validating my prediction for this past year.  Real estate and oil prices will fall as well, although not by as much, since their markets aren't nearly as frothy.  And there will be no massive financial near-meltdown this time, since stock market asset ownership isn't particularly highly leveraged.
• In addition, blockchain-based monetary instruments will completely collapse, never to recover (although more bubbles in similarly worthless ad hoc quasi-currencies will no doubt occur at some point in the future).  Megan McArdle has written a nice pair of summaries of why Bitcoin and its imitators are doomed to fail, whether as payment systems or as currencies.  I would add only some history: these technologies are actually the hybrid offspring of two previous failed ones--anonymous "e-cash" of the 1980s and peer-to-peer ("P2P") distributed data storage systems of the 2000s.  Both of these predecessors fooled a shocking number of advocates into believing in the viability of systems whose only remotely plausible attraction was the promise of evading government regulation and law enforcement, and that are otherwise in every way inferior to more mainstream alternatives.  Blockchain-based currencies have merely followed in their footsteps.
• Donald Trump's popularity will bounce around (or just below) the 40% level throughout the year, defying predictions of inevitable collapse but nevertheless staying well below the break-even point.  Parallel investigations into both the current and previous administrations' alleged interference with law enforcement investigations will result in either bombshell revelations of scandalous malfeasance or overhyped non-issues, depending on one's partisan allegiance; in any event, neither will generate consequences of any legal significance. However, a political consequence will be a massive defeat for the president's party in the November midterm elections, similar to those experienced by his predecessor:  Democrats will take both houses of Congress by small margins--gaining hugely in the House, and narrowly in the Senate despite having far more seats up for election in the latter chamber.  This will of course intensify legislative gridlock, which in any event will have existed since at least the first midterm election of the previous administration.  (A possible exception is an immigration compromise this year, in which a limited amnesty is traded for enhanced border enforcement.)
• The Iranian regime will suppress the domestic protests against it within weeks using ruthless violence, but the extent of the unrest will push the regime to restrain its foreign adventures somewhat in order to focus on internal security.  For example, the mop-up operations in Syria will continue and be largely complete by the end of the year, but the shift towards anti-Israel (and anti-Jordan) activity will be put off for this year at least.  Hamas, on the other hand, will try mightily to instigate conflict with Israel, without enough success to ignite another full-scale "grass-mowing" operation.
• Meanwhile, North Korea will quickly fade back into irrelevant obscurity, as will the Jerusalem embassy move, which will make leisurely progress without being officially completed by the end of the year.  Instead, attention will shift to the conflict between Turkey and the various Kurdish entities along its borders, with the US increasingly aligning itself against an increasingly assertive, belligerent and anti-Western Turkey.
• Concern about academia will shift from its toxic politics and chaotic environment to its dire financial straits, as the economic downturn causes a collapse in enrollment, particularly at expensive private colleges, with alternatives such as community college, apprenticeship and online education beginning to look comparatively far more attractive to prospective students.
• The NFL will experience a bounce-back season in the fall, with attendance and viewership recovering markedly despite (or perhaps partly because of) the difficult economic situation.

As always, readers are invited to dispute these predictions, or propose their own alternatives.  But keep in mind the old Danish saying:  "It's difficult to make predictions--especially about the future"...

The holiday edition of the ICBW podcast is now posted--just in time for the holidays!--and ready for your holiday listening.  In this episode, we discuss the rash (so to speak) of sexual misconduct accusations plaguing prominent public figures (part 1); the Lindsey Shepherd "star chamber at Wilfrid Laurier University" caper (part 2); and the recent US policy announcement on Jerusalem (part 3).  As always, we cannot be held responsible for any damage resulting from your listening...

Apparently we haven't learned our lesson yet, because the third ICBW podcast is now available.  We discuss all things free speech-related in part 1, and all things climate-related in part 2.  As always, listeners are encouraged to use the comments feature of this blog to respond as they see fit (within the bounds of basic decency, of course)...

An internal screed circulated inside Google complaining about its "diversity" policies has generated an enormous amount of noise, both for and against (including by some opponents who seem determined to prove it accurate).  Most interesting to me is the document's claim that dissenting views about these policies are actively suppressed within Google.  As I pointed out a couple of years ago, such suppression is usually a symptom of an unaccountable organization, insulated enough from performance standards that it can be hijacked by political agenda-pushers with impunity.  One wouldn't normally think of Google that way, but in fact it makes almost all its money from its Internet advertising business, and many of its other technologies--employing the majority of its employees--may therefore be developing an unaccountable culture similar to that of nonprofit organizations, where various abstract ideals--including political ones pushed by internal factions for their own reasons--compete to replace the bottom line as the primary decision-making factor.

As for the public reaction to the episode, I'm frankly amazed at the number of people--on both sides of the issue--who seem to think that how Google evaluates its current and prospective engineers is a public policy matter, subject to political approval in the same way as, say, oil pipeline proposals.  One could argue that this is a natural extension of non-discrimination law, which first gradually expanded to include such concepts as "disparate impact", which effectively restricts how employers may evaluate job candidates in the name of achieving racial parity in hiring.  But I can't recall a previous instance where such concepts were applied in a white-collar professional context, where evaluation of talent is so crucial to success.  (Imagine, for instance, if medical practices were required to tailor their hiring and evaluation standards to suit current political conventions.)  I personally don't care whether Google adopts an outstanding, average or catastrophically bad set of hiring criteria for its technical employees.  But I shudder to think what will happen to the US economy if companies in general are forbidden to focus on competence in hiring even for positions requiring advanced skills and training.

The second ICBW podcast is now available for your listening...er...pleasure.  We discuss the latest Washington follies, and wonk out on medical care and "AI risk".  Part one can be found here, and part two here.  As always, readers are welcome to add to the discussion via comments on this post.

David Brooks' latest column on class in America is typical of his keen social insight, but perhaps most interesting for what it tactfully omits, rather than what it actually says.  Most of the attention has focused on his discussion of the cultural signals that upper-middle-class Americans use to identify themselves--and thus, implicitly, to exclude everyone else--in both social and workplace contexts.  But the column actually begins with a look at how hard America's elite class works to pass its status on to its children, particularly by pouring enormous resources into education.

And that's where the tactful elision comes in.  Historically, aristocracies have always constructed elaborate systems of social signals to distinguish themselves from commoners, for a simple reason:  such signals are far easier to pass on to descendants reliably than the kinds of traits--intelligence, talent, discipline, diligence--that would allow those children to attain elite status based on merit alone.  Consider accent, for instance--long at the core of the British class system's social sorting process.  The most worthless wastrel can be taught a posh accent simply by being raised among others speaking in it, while only a few talented mimics are capable of overcoming a childhood steeped in lower-class argot.  Americans, as it happens, aren't nearly as attuned as the British to the subtleties of speech--most Americans can't pinpoint a countryman's place of birth more precisely than, say, "South" or "not South", let alone his social status, by listening to his accent.  So members of the American elite instead instill class markers in their children based on domains they're more deeply immersed in:  pop culture and politics.

Of course, America's upper-middle class thinks of itself as meritocratic--college-educated, industrious, talented and ambitious.  And that was largely true of the high achievers of the postwar and baby-boom generations, most of whom climbed the ladder of success on their own merits.  But much of today's upper-middle class is third- or fourth-generation, and regression to the mean is an awfully hard trend to combat, even with the best schools and neighborhoods.  And that's why this aristocracy, like the ones before it, is--as Brooks deftly observes--forced to fall back on cultural signals, rather than truly admirable traits, as its class markers.

What nobody seems to have noticed about this past Friday night's bombshell about a Republican "opposition researcher" trying to obtain the contents of Hillary Clinton's private email server from Russian hackers, while claiming high-level connections in the Trump campaign, is its striking similarity to another recent story about the 2016 election:  that of the so-called "Steele memo".  Consider:

• Both stories center on a middleman figure of questionable ethics who is nominally independent of a presidential campaign, but in practice clearly associated with it.
• In both cases, that middleman, seeking to obtain damaging information about the opposing candidate, is happy to reach out to highly dubious sources--even at the cost of being manipulated by Russian intelligence agencies.  (This aspect of the Steele memo is rarely noted, presumably because it is widely assumed that the Russian government was entirely on Trump's side, and therefore uninterested in planting damaging information about him with Westerners.  Even if the first part of that assumption is true--and it's actually a matter of hot debate within the US intelligence community--the value to the Russians of demonstrating an ability to create and control a flow of damaging information about Trump in the event of a Trump victory should be completely obvious.)
• In both cases, the effort foundered for lack of confirmable information, and yet took on a life of its own later on, with large segments of the press acting exactly as if the operation had in fact been a complete success, and a great deal of verifiable, damaging information obtained.

At this point, there's really no need to belabor the obvious point that the mainstream press has yet again demonstrated itself to be hopelessly partisan, adopting diametrically opposite interpretations of parallel fact patterns in a way that consistently favors the Democrats and harms Republicans.  A more interesting lesson, I think, is the extent to which partisans of both parties treat the rules around "opposition research" as a kind of kabuki theater, in which nominally independent surrogates for the parties handle the unsavory business of digging up dirt on opponents--sometimes by extremely disreputable means--while maintaining only just enough distance to satisfy legal and political obligations. 

In this sense, opposition research is similar to gerrymandering, large-donor fundraising, manipulation of ease or difficulty of voting, and many other seamy aspects of US politics:  partisanship in the US is so strong, and respect for democratic principles so weak, that "fair play" rules--such as the ones that impose limits and transparency on campaign expenditures--are uniformly treated as mere formalities to be circumvented by one's own side, and perhaps occasionally used as legal weapons with which to harass the other side.  Until those attitudes change--an unlikely prospect, given how deep-seated they are in the American body politic--American democracy will no doubt continue to be plagued with its current rampant levels of corruption and dysfunction.

Fourteen years ago, I noted that the primary function of high culture has always been to allow society's elite to use their wealth and leisure to distinguish themselves from the "philistines" beneath them on the social ladder.  By using their position to educate themselves in the finer points of high culture, I argued, members of the elite can signal their status to each other, and exclude the less sophisticated from their circle.  I identified Matthew Arnold as one of the early advocates of this use of high culture, but observed that a modernist bohemian variant of it thrived in contemporary America.

Since then, though, a rather odd thing has happened--even odder for the complete lack of notice it's received:  highbrow culture has effectively disappeared from American society.  Magazines like the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, which were not long ago full of dense book reviews of even denser academic tomes on serious artistic and cultural topics, are now dominated by political screeds and fluffy pop culture roundups.  The self-important urban intellectuals Woody Allen used to lampoon, who once dropped references to great authors and obscure foreign films, now banter about subscription TV series and mass-market movies on Twitter.  And an imploding academia, obsessed with inclusiveness and identity politics, generates its endless stream of impenetrable humanities papers primarily on contemporary politics and pop culture, and not even on modern avant-garde art--let alone the classics.

Although the cause of this collapse is uncertain, I have a hypothesis: that this dumbing-down of intellectual elitism is a natural consequence of the expansion of the elite during the 1990s boom to encompass both the wealthy and the white-collar upper-middle class. An "elite" that encompasses twenty to thirty percent of the population can't possibly distinguish itself by deep cultural erudition, and must inevitably make do with cruder class distinctions, such as tastes in television and preferred pop culture references.  For the "serious" writers and academics who seek to make a living fostering and directing the shared culture of this elite, it is therefore no longer effective to champion obscure, inaccessible artists that their target audience has neither the time nor the inclination to study and appreciate.  Instead, they must focus on the level of cultural knowledge this audience is capable of collectively absorbing:  low-to-middlebrow commentary on low-to-middlebrow fare.

We have a new treat for our readers:  the inaugural ICBW podcast is now available for your listening pleasure (or whatever other emotional response it happens to produce in you).  In part one, found here, LTEC and I cover two topics:  Trump and the current state of the university.  In part two, found here, we discuss the strangely polarized, or tribal, character of modern political thought.  Comments are, as always, welcome.

Henry Farrell's article in Democracy Journal on the British Labour party and its recent Corbyn troubles includes a remarkable omission:  it manages to discuss radical party leader Jeremy's Corbyn's rise in the context of the last several decades' history of internal Labour party politics without even once mentioning the name, "Michael Foot".  In one sense, the omission is understandable--after all, if one wants to blame Corbyn's disastrous ascendance on a series of changes in Labor's procedural rules, as Farrell does, then it's hard to explain how an equally disastrous proto-Corbyn could have risen to party leadership before any of those procedural reforms were enacted (not to mention his being the primary motivation for those reforms in the first place).  But  to someone familiar with the history, Farrell's analysis looks like a textbook case of denial, conjuring up an implausible theory to avoid confronting the deeper issues that have allowed two different unelectable radicals to seize control of the party within 35 years.

These deeper issues stem from an interesting property of the "left" and "right" coalitions I discussed recently in the context of the Trump phenomenon:  their constituent factions are not always in mutually harmonious balance.  At its healthiest, a coalition is a collection of constituencies that are each granted policy primacy in the areas that are their respective priorities.  The so called Reagan coalition, for example, offered law and order and military strength to its white blue-collar constituency, deregulation and tax cuts to its business constituency, and culturally conservative positions to its religious constituency.  The Obama coalition similarly offered identity politics to its minority constituency, cultural liberalism to its young urban constituency, and credentialist, crony-capitalist economic policies to its white-collar professional constituency.

At times of political weakness, however, a coalition can become unbalanced, with defections leaving one core constituency dominant.  This effect can snowball, with activists pushing the coalition farther and farther in the directions favored by its remaining stalwarts, chasing even more members of other constituencies away.  In the early 1960s, for instance, the post-Eisenhower revival of the old New Deal coalition under Kennedy and Johnson reduced the "right" coalition to little more than its business wing, which then promoted arch-libertarian Barry Goldwater to the Republican nomination, with disastrous results. 

Similarly, the decline of organized labor in the industrialized world has left the affluent white-collar professional class as by far the dominant political force in the "left" coalition in most countries.  In Britain, when Margaret Thatcher smashed the unions, the Labour party rallied around academic far-leftist Michael Foot; and again today, having lost much of the working class to the populist right, it rallies around far-leftist Jeremy Corbyn.  Whether the "left" coalition in the US, having lost much of its non-minority blue-collar constituency to Donald Trump, will now follow the British Labour party's lead into political radicalism, will be the one of the more interesting political questions of the Trump era.

It's annual prediction posting time!  On the happy occasion of 2016's end, we first revisit last year's predictions, before launching into next year's...

• The US economy will stall this year, as trouble abroad (in China, Canada, and other oil-based economies) hurts exports and the Fed's tentative forays into non-zero interest rates burst various mild bubbles in the stock and other asset markets.  The stock market and real estate markets will fall, interest rates will remain very low, and the price of oil will not rebound significantly from its current lows.

As usual, I was early on this one--eight years into the business cycle, another recession is inevitable, but predicting its exact timing is very difficult.  The previous year, I expected it to occur within the subsequent three years, and took a chance on it being in 2016.  Perhaps this will be the year (see below)...

• Immigrant-related issues will continue to distract the continent from the greater threat of disintegration due to the incoherence of its monetary union.  Hence bailouts of bankrupt southern members will continue as a quid pro quo for cooperation in stemming the flow of Middle Eastern and African migrants.  Meanwhile, rightist, populist, nativist parties will continue to surge across the continent, jettisoning many of the domestic and foreign policies anchored into place by the previously-dominant bureaucracy/union/activist/corporatist coalition.  (Hostility to Israel will of course be one of the few policies to survive the purge.)

My most accurate prediction of the year, I'd say.

• Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will narrowly win the presidential election over Republican nominee Marco Rubio, with the crucial Republican-vote-diverting assistance of third-party candidate Donald Trump.  However, the Republicans will maintain their Congressional majorities--just barely, in the case of the Senate.

I completely botched my presidential prediction, of course, but I'm in pretty good company in doing so.  And my congressional prediction was spot-on.

• The stalemate in Syria will continue mostly unchanged, tying down the main pro-Assad participants (Russia, Iran and Hezbollah) as well as the anti-Assad ones (Turkey, Saudi Arabia) while the US largely stays on the sidelines.  ISIS will continue to weaken under the pressure of its many enemies, and its big terrorist "successes" of 2015 will be repeated very sparsely if at all.  On the other hand, Israel will find itself increasingly drawn into the fray in support of the Sunni rebel side, as the Iran/Assad/Hezbollah axis intensifies its drive to establish a front along Israel's Golan Heights border with Syria. Finally, the Kurds will once again be in the region's crosshairs, as Iran, Turkey and ISIS all increase their pressure on them, each for its own reasons.  The Obama administration will sit that one out as well, leaving the Kurds in a precarious state.

Generally in the right direction, but a bit off on magnitude.  Russian scorched earth tactics have been more effective against the Syrian rebels, ISIS has managed to generate more terrorist attacks against the West, Israel has been more hands-off in Syria, and the Kurds have been under less pressure, than I predicted.

• The current "stabbing intifada", consisting mostly of random Palestinians spontaneously attacking random Israelis with knives, will evolve into a complex game in which the Palestinian Authority attempts to carefully calibrate the level of violence so as to keep Hamas and other radical groups occupied without provoking a major Israeli crackdown.  Ultimately this strategy will fail, and at some point Israel, responding to one or more high-casualty attacks, will launch a major "lawn-mowing" operation in the West Bank to round up terrorist organizations hiding out in PA-run areas.  World condemnation will follow, although European vituperation will be milder than usual, as a result of the new terrorist-hostile political environment there, as well as greater Israeli willingness to take active measures to counter European meddling.

The small-scale attacks appear to have eventually subsided, due to some extent to surprisingly effective Israeli countermeasures.  

• Disney will announce that following the huge success of "Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens", Star Wars Episode 8 will be entitled, "The Force Has Breakfast".

Personally, I like my title better...

And now for this year's shots in the dark:

• All that stuff I predicted about last year's economy will apply this year.  (Or next year--see above.)  If you object that such a prediction is non-actionable, keep in mind Bernard Baruch's (possibly apocryphal) aphorism:  "I made my money by selling too soon"...
• The right-wing resurgence in Europe will continue in 2017, with several more countries electing new nationalist, anti-immigration governments.  Brexit negotiations will begin in earnest, but will not complete this year.  Continuing sporadic terror attacks will be joined by increasingly frequent and more severe incidents of nativist violence against immigrants.
• Donald Trump's first year in office will be very similar to his predecessor's:  lots of "I won" bluster, but very few legislative accomplishments, apart from one or two bipartisan ones driven by Congress with Democratic cooperation.  (The Republicans will not abolish the Senate filibuster, although they'll keep the limitations on it instituted by the previous Democratic Senate.)  Neither Obamacare nor immigration will be addressed legislatively, although many of the Obama administration's executive actions in these areas will be reversed.  Reaction to Trump's usual bombastic pronouncements will be overwhelmingly partisan, and his approval ratings will therefore track his partisan support, which will hover within the 40-50-percent range. 
• Trump's foreign policy will sound radically different from his predecessor's, but will in practice be similarly quiescent and timid, at least militarily--although thankfully without the open courtship of avowed enemies (with the exception of Putin's Russia) and sabotage against pro-US friends.  For example, despite the new pro-Israel tone, US reaction to the recent anti-Israel UN resolution will be much more muted than the current torrent of threats suggests.  Any funding cuts or formal status changes to the US' UN membership will be confined to ineffective token gestures, and the US embassy will end up not moving to Jerusalem this year. 
• Both ISIS and the Syrian rebellion will continue to weaken, but will not yet disappear by the end of 2017.  As the Assad regime consolidates its hold, pro-Iranian proxies will be freed up for increased attacks on Israel, and Sunni radicals as well, seeking a less ruthless target, will start turning towards Israel in earnest.  Some minor attacks will occur, to which Israel will respond harshly.  Meanwhile, the corruption investigation against Bibi Netanyahu will take many months to complete, and likely won't be completed by the end of this year.  In any event, ultimately no charges will be laid.
• Venezuela will collapse further into failed-state status in the Zimbabwe mold, with a corrupt and incompetent government using brute force to suppress opposition amid continuing economic collapse.  Meanwhile, the American opening to Cuba will do nothing for its population's destitution, and economic failure will lead to significant popular unrest in Russia, Iran and Egypt.
• The next Star Wars film will not be named either "The Force Gets Dressed" or "Rogue Two".

As always, readers are encouraged to add their own predictions as comments on this post.  Until you've tried it, you can't really appreciate the truth of Niels Bohr's aphorism:  "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future"...

In December 1996, a Florida couple with Democratic party ties illegally intercepted and recorded a cellphone conversation in which House Speaker Newt Gingrich discussed strategies for handling the Congressional ethics charges he was facing, and provided it to a Democratic congressman, who passed it on to a Democrat on the House Ethics Committee.  The tape was also later leaked to the press, most likely by one of those members of Congress or someone on their staff.  The Florida couple were eventually charged and fined, and Gingrich paid a penalty to resolve the Ethics Committee's complaints against him.

In June 2004, a newspaper and television station successfully sued to unseal the court records of the divorce proceedings of Illinois senatorial candidate Jack Ryan and his wife Jeri.  The records had been sealed by mutual agreement, and both parties opposed the unsealing, but a judge ruled that the public's right to know outweighed the privacy of the parties to the divorce, including the divorced couple's minor-age son.  The records turned out to be highly embarrassing to Ryan, who ultimately lost his Senate race--to, of all people, a fellow named Barack Obama.

In May 2012, some comments by presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser were surreptitiously video-recorded, and the contents of the recording passed on to a journalist for a left-wing magazine.  (It was later revealed that the video was recorded by a member of the catering staff at the event, although in a second surreptitious video recording, a Democratic party operative claimed--with unknown credibility--that the Romney video recording was actually an "opposition research" project carefully planned by his organization.)  The private comments proved to be highly embarrassing to Romney, and appear to have contributed to his later loss in the presidential election that year.

These events, along with many similar ones in the recent past, provide some important context for the recent controversy over the Russian government allegedly trying to interfere in the US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.  For the precedents clearly illustrate that

• Embarrassing and damaging private information about politicians often becomes public by less-than-admirable means, at the hands of people who don't always have purely high-minded and disinterested motives.
• Even when such information is obtained unethically or illegally, the issue of punishing and deterring unethical or illegal behavior can and should be separated from the question of whether the information so obtained should be made public. 
• There is a broad consensus that the democratic process is generally better served by such information being made public--regardless of the moral quality of either the means of, or the motivation for, publication--than by suppressing it out of respect for the privacy or well-being of public figures and their families.

The Russian "interference" story fits very well with these past precedents.  Foreign hackers connected with the Russian government allegedly compromised Democratic Party email servers, then published their most embarrassing contents via Wikileaks, with the intention (according to the CIA--the FBI apparently reached a very different conclusion) of helping Donald Trump win the presidential election.  Based on past examples, then, we should consider the exposure of this private information to be a generally good thing, and stop sounding the alarm about the impending doom of American democracy at the hands of Russian intelligence.  After all, embarrassing private details about American politicians are revealed all the time, by all sorts of people with all sorts of motives, and we generally consider such revelations to be beneficial, not detrimental, to democracy.

Now, there are certainly aspects to this story that are very concerning.  For one, that the Democratic Party--or for that matter virtually every public-sector, nonprofit-sector or private-sector organization in the country--is so easily penetrated by foreign government cyberespionage agencies is without question grounds for great concern, although obviously more of a technical security matter than a political one.  It has also been noted that both the Trump and Clinton inner circles during and after the election were populated by a disturbing number of top people who have at one time or another had personal or commercial interests directly linked to one or another foreign government.  Congressional investigation into whether any of these past ties are sufficient to jeopardize American national security would certainly be most welcome.  Finally, it's to be expected that at least some of the released emails were doctored or fabricated by the Russians for effect, and some definitive findings regarding their authenticity would be useful--again for the sake of a better-informed public.

But the idea that unsavory characters revealing embarrassing information about candidates for public office endangers the very survival of American democracy would be unthinkable were the information in question not, as it happens, helpful to a character as despised as Donald Trump (or harmful to one as beloved as Barack Obama).  There's no evidence that the published emails had any significant impact on the election or on general trust in government among Americans.  And as the above examples illustrate, the hyperventilation in the press about this whole episode smacks more of partisan bias than serious concern for democracy and the national interest.