There's much to vote on: local San Francisco ballot measures

Yesterday I worked my way through the 13 California state propositions voters are up against. Whew! 

Here I'll survey the 10 local measures San Franciscans face on the November ballot. A lot of discernment is asked of us. This exercise, as it always does, makes me wonder whether so much direct democracy -- direct legislating by the people -- has the results we might wish. But Californians like our system, so here we are again.

San Francisco local measures have letters, rather than the numbers used for the State offerings. Here we go:

Measure A: Proponents claim this one would clean up accreted inefficiencies and oddities in the current shape of city government, many derived from a 30 year old city charter which was a fix for the same sort of problems when we passed that one. City government has become a bit of a Winchester Mystery House, as anyone who has had to deal with it has discovered. Measure A is a complex set of tweaks and fixes supported by the current ruling establishment: Mayor Lurie and his tech bro and real estate sponsors. The outspent opposition is the Coalition on Homelessness. I confess to having a lot more trust in that organization than in the current city government. As I often feel, the devil will be in the details. I don't trust 'em. NO

Measure B: For a Public Bank ... this is my Supervisor Jackie Fielder's hobby horse. She has managed to line up Supervisors, labor, and civic organizations in favor. Seems worth trying. YES on B

Measure C: Increase City Contributions to the Housing Trust Fund. This is such a no-brainer that the only opposition are local Republicans. Anything that might increase housing availability for regular non-billionaires is okay by me. YES

Measure D: Would increase the number of voter signatures to get a measure on the ballot from 2 percent to 8 percent of the electorate. This looks to me like an effort to hobble direct citizen input into policy. I get the impulse. But I've run signature collection efforts. They are hard and expensive. Would legitimate grassroots efforts to put questions on the ballot be priced out? Quite likely. The big boys will always be able to pay to play. Let's keep San Francisco its fractious self. I'm a NO

Measure E: This one untangles city contracting processes. As with Measure A, I'm instinctively sympathetic. City government is an over-complicated mess. But do I trust the current powers that be? No, I do not. Guess I'm a suspicious NO

Measure F: Allows reorganization of city government by the present mayor and his corporate appointees. Again, I get the impulse. City government is a mess. It has accreted epicycles of poor management. But do we trust Daniel Lurie and his billionaire backers to preserve a San Francisco which represents the City's remarkable quirky diversity? I don't. Again, NO

Measure G: Reopen Sunset Dunes Park to cars. Hopefully this time will be the charm and this bad idea will finally go away. We've already voted it down twice. I understand there are folks who live in the Sunset District who find the park inconvenient, but this has been one of the great improvements to the city in the recent decade. NO

Measure H: Parcel tax to fund MUNI. We need public transport; this is a city, not a suburb. And so we have to pay for it. Only opposition is the Republican Party. 'Nuff said. YES

Measure I: Set aside part of a transfer tax on real estate sales of over $10 million too be used for affordable housing. This has an "only in San Francisco" feel. We passed a similar measure in 2020 but the current powers that be have evaded turning over and using the money. Housing and tenant advocates, community organizations, and some of labor support this one. Some construction unions say no. But really, let's make the richest us among contribute to the community's needs. YES

Measure J: Ensures the city gets a cut when big real estate deals happen through foreclosure. Transfers of commercial, industrial and large residential properties would trigger the tax. Seems reasonable. Nobody comes out against this expect Quentin Kopp (a name that will trigger longtime San Franciscans). YES

This survey highlights that Mayor Lurie and the billionaires think this election is an opportunity to use San Francisco residents' discontents to cut back on the vigorous citizen engagement with the local government which has always characterized this quirky, sometimes manic city. I, for one, don't feel that government by the plutocrats has earned our trust. (After all, I live in the Mission, turf they leave to rot.) So let's use the election to slap back at our overlords. 

Vote NO on D, E, and F and let 'em know, they must do better. 

Thirteen (!) California state ballot propostions for your perusal

It's that time again. California voters will receive our mail-in ballots this coming week. A responsible citizen therefore has to sort out a blizzard of direct democracy propositions and local ballot measures in order to cast a vote.

Frankly, as usual, many of these are things most of us should not be having to vote on; our elected leaders should sort out policy and take the consequences if we the people don't like the result. But people and causes with lots of money put their concerns on the direct ballot, and then it is our job to try to vote responsibly. Here I'll pass along how I come down on the state measures; your mileage may vary.

State Ballot Propositions

Prop. 1:  Authorizes $11 billion in bonds for housing affordability; it's always hard to tell whether anything real comes of these programs, but we have to try. YES

Prop. 2: Funds the State's "Rainy Day fund." State taxes bring in wildly different amounts year to year because some of our highest earners are gambling tech bros, financiers, and other inventing speculators. The Rainy Day fund enables the state to smooth out a wildly differing income stream. Voting for it feels like endorsing an undesirable boom/bust economy, but that is what California lives on. So YES.

Prop. 3: makes higher taxes on high income residents permanent to fund schools and healthcare. If we want a common good like education, we have to go where the money is -- and it is rich people that have it. The California Teachers Association came up with this plan. YES

Prop. 4: Allow state and local governments to establish public campaign funds. This is a good government measure, trying to reduce the dominance of big spenders in elections. The League of Women Voters and Common Cause like it. YES 

Prop. 5: Would reform the state's recall process so that if any office holder is recalled, the successor would be chosen in a separate election. Currently, choosing the successor is part of the recall itself; that's how we first got Arnold as governor. Recalls are messy money sinks, but this is probably a better process. Unenthusiasticaly, YES

Prop. 37: State loan program to help home buyers. Private enterprise isn't working? YES

Prop. 38: State bonds for cancer research funding.  This looks to be some particularly sympathetic researchers asking us to fund their work. The question why these folks and not others seems appropriate. I'm torn, but YES

Prop. 39: Require voter ID at polling sites. Californians get on the voting rolls by providing ID when they register. Why should everyone have to do that every time? This seems one more conservative effort to make voting harder for people who aren't good at navigating red tape. NO

Prop. 40: This would require the estimated 200 Californians whose net worth exceeded $1 billion at the start of this year to pay a one-time 5% tax. It was added to the ballot through the efforts of the union SEIU/Healthcare West. The establishment hates it. I suspect many people love it. Sure. Let's make 'em pay more. They have the money; too many of us don't. YES

Prop. 41:  This one is a poison pill which aims to undercut Prop.40's billionaire tax. It purports to limit everyone's taxes, but mostly aims to prevent the billionaires from having to pay up. NO

Prop. 42: Another poison pill aiming to kill Prop. 40's billionaire tax. This one reclassifies assets that would be used to calculate the taxable wealth under Prop. 40. Some very rich people don't want the Prop. 40 billionaire tax; as a result, you are voting on this. NO

Prop. 43: This would make it harder for cities and counties to raise local taxes by requiring a two-thirds affirmative vote rather than the current simple majority. The rich people want to put government out of business. Vote NO

Prop. 44: Seeks to ensure that community clinics spend ninety percent of their funds on patient care, not on administration or overhead. Proposed by the union SEIU/Healthcare West. Sure. Vote YES

I'll get to the local San Francisco measures (A through J!) in another post.

Can this legal system survive Trump?

Another day, another legal kerfuffle raised up by the Trump regime. Okay, I admit I probably read too many substacks written by lawyers. Naturally lawyers think legal proceedings are where it is at. For most of us, most of the time, there are plenty of other aspects of life of equal or greater importance -- perhaps whether the developing El Nino weather system is going to flood large parts of the California coastline this winter.

But like many others, I try to keep up with the legal deluge. This morning David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo laid out where he thinks we are; he's not optimistic about the courts as a defensive line against the authoritarian, but he tries to define what he thinks they can do -- which is more than nothing.

In the defining legal struggle of our time — whether the federal judiciary will sustain the rule of law long enough to preserve the essential core of a democracy for us to repair, rebuild, and re-enlarge after Trump II — the jury is still out.

Important developments in three different cases yesterday — the Alien Enemies Act, third-country deportations, and Trump’s collusive settlement with the IRS — point in very different directions.

On the face of it, not much unites the cases or offers a common theme or collective takeaway. But in stepping back and reviewing the last 20 months of Trump II legal battles, yesterday’s developments are datapoints in favor of a tentative working theory that appeals courts are slowly coming around to the urgency of the current moment.

In the first six months of Trump II, district judges were on their heels, caught off guard by the ferocity of the rampage against the rule of law and still tethered to old norms and expectations for the Justice Department that no longer held true. It was a brutal stretch of watching the Trump administration seize some key early wins and capture important legal ground.

After being collectively kicked in the teeth, district judges pretty quickly adjusted to the new reality — but appeals courts failed to back district judges in key respects, missed the urgency of the moment, and surrendered more ground to the lawlessness.

More recently, appellate judges have begun to turn, too. Two glimmers of hope yesterday came at the appeals court level, with the en banc D.C. Circuit looking poised to allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to resume his contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case and the 11th Circuit handing Trump a loss in his bogus settlement with the IRS.

That still leaves the Supreme Court, which — with a few notable exceptions — has been Trump’s greatest enabler. It played true to form yesterday with an emergency intervention that will allow the administration’s brutal third-country removals policy to continue past the election and until it rules after oral arguments in December.

Unlike the lower courts, the Supreme Court will not eventually come around. While we’ve already seen examples — most prominently on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the USPS mail-in ballots rule — of the Roberts Court refusing to endorse some of Trump’s worst excesses, the high court is too deeply compromised and its six-justice right-wing majority too invested in the GOP’s partisan fate to emerge as a reliable bulwark.

But the appeals courts may buy us some additional time by slowing the speed of the descent. 

Kurtz looks at reality unblinkingly in this. He neither dismisses legal struggle against fascism, nor puts excessive weight on what a democratic people under siege can win in the courts. Courts and the laws may not save us, but their work can set an honorable standard. They can impose friction on the authoritarian project. 

Besides, courts can avert some of the sheer cruelty of the Trump/Miller project. Erudite Partner and so many others work to accompany people trying to navigate the morass of immigration courts. There too winning time may all that can be achieved, but time can preserve human decency and even life.

And meanwhile, the anti-MAGA majority can work to stymie Trump in other arenas, most immediately in the November elections. We can do this. And then we rebuild and re-found this country.

Practicing citizenship

As we move into the election season, literally millions of Americans will be working to get other millions of Americans to exercise their right to vote. Volunteers will be traveling to heavily contested states and other will be working phones -- and also encouraging their local friends to do the election thing.

I've learned a lot from studying how people in different eras went about trying to get others to vote. Historian of African American life Dr. Jemar Tisby recounts how formally enslaved men organized themselves to vote in the former Confederate states after emancipation. 

For generations, most Black people had been locked out of meaningful political power. Enslaved people were treated as property under slave law, while even free Black people faced severe restrictions on citizenship and suffrage.

After emancipation, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 required the former Confederate states to create new governments based on male suffrage; the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, then prohibited denying citizens the vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

A.W. M’Callum, in Harper’s Weekly (June 22, 1867) | The National Park Service

Black men registered and voted in extraordinary numbers, entered constitutional conventions, helped elect new state governments, and won public office themselves.

But an enormous practical question lay beneath that transformation: How do you take a population only recently excluded from the democratic process and help people become informed agents in their own political futures?

One answer came in the form of Union Leagues.

The Union League, also called the Loyal League, began in the North in 1862 as a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln club for white men.

After Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Acts in March 1867 and enfranchised Black men across the South, Republican leaders turned the organization southward.

Campaigners understood that a huge project of teaching civic literacy was needed if Black men were to take their place as actors in American democracy. 

Donors underwrote the campaign. Paid speakers, both Black and white, swept through the southern states. Hundreds of thousands of Black southerners joined that spring and summer.

In October 1867, the Charleston Daily News counted no fewer than eighty-eight league organizations in South Carolina, which it said had enrolled almost every Black man in the state. ...

They held meetings at night in homes, churches, and schoolhouses.

They often had a Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an anvil or some other emblem of labor often lay on the table. A minister opened with prayer, new members took an oath, then the group got to work.

... The Leagues answered the era’s hardest question. How do you take a people who were “property” five years earlier and make them agents in their own political fate?

They did it in organized community.

White southerners who had held these Black men as property fought back against the Union Leagues.  

After the Civil War, many white people (North and South) could only imagine Black people using political power in the same way white men had—to dominate.

The white opponents of Reconstruction described Black political participation as “Negro domination.”

They portrayed a people who, just a few years earlier, had been excluded from citizenship as dangerous for organizing and using the rights they had just gained.

We generally remember the Ku Klux Klan as a racial terrorist organization, which it was. But its violence during Reconstruction also had a specific political purpose: to weaken the [interracial] Republican coalition, suppress Black voting and officeholding, and restore white supremacy. ...

Too often it seems as if the sins of the American past just keep coming around again. Where Black people are determined to practice their rights as citizens, recalcitrant officials still try to get in their way. In 2021, Georgia made it a crime to give voters water while they wait in line to cast a ballot.

The lengths to which people will go to vote and the lengths to which other people will go to stop them reminds us that voting is the vital center of citizenship, of belonging to the American project.

This is just too good ...

In Chicago on Monday, the hometown Bears took on the Philadelphia Eagles. As is customary at football games (unhappily in my view, but that's for another day), there was an introductory performance of the national anthem. The local team knew how to put on a good show. Take a look.

See the full 2 minute performance by Mariachi Herencia de México: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1096930372917065

Rather remarkably, after having lost their franchise quarterback to injury the previous week, Chicago won.

The NFL is filthy rich and the owners are horrible people, but the league knows where we're going as a society ... we're going together. I like that. 

An invitation to debate

So far, this delightful ad from Texas Democrat James Talarico who is contesting the state's' corrupt Attorney General Ken Paxton for a US Senate seat wins the prize for the season.

Paxton is kind of a nasty ghoul. Talarico knows how to present an attractive contrast. Which guy might you like to represent you? Polls say Talarico has a chance. 

Mourning a long time friendship ...

Like many Americans living (or in my case having formerly lived) near the border with our northern neighbor, Canada is near and dear to me. 

In my teens we drove across the border without a qualm, answering the question "where were you born?" from agents on each side of the the Niagara River bridge without a further thought. I would sail my little Sunfish across the river for a picnic lunch on the Ontario side. I listened to my elders report that during Prohibition, they'd sat on a porch by the river watching the US government revenue agents chase the Canadian rum runners. (You can guess who they rooted for.) When the exchange rate between the two countries warranted it, Canadians would flood shopping malls on our side, and vice versa. We watched Canadian as well as US TV, following ice hockey as well as baseball. I had relatives in Canada; it was only a slight exaggeration to say that it was an historical accident that we lived in Buffalo and not St. Catharines. 

So it is painful to share some observations from Brynn Tannehill, a US expat now resident in our northern neighbor.

As an American expat living in Canada, I have a front row seat to the destruction of the United States’ international reputation. It shows up in all sorts of little ways in my day-to-day life that most Americans wouldn’t see. 

Fuel prices here are even worse than in the Unites States, and oil is a global market. Regular 89 octane gasoline has climbed up again to $2.06 CAD per liter, which translates to about $5.60 USD per gallon. Every time my friends and neighbors see it tick upwards again, they lament that the Americans that did this, and they had no say in the matter. 

Every supermarket that isn’t American proudly plasters their windows with announcements that they’re Canadian-owned. Every product on the shelves at the market is labeled as to whether or not it was made in Canada. There is a social stigma attached to being seen buying a product that isn’t Canadian-made, and as the token American expat I’m far more conscious of being caught buying American than being outed as transgender.

Canadians themselves are leaving the US and returning to the motherland. I finally got the import safety inspection done on my car at Canadian Tire this week. The manager mentioned he was doing about 30 import inspections per month before Trump was elected, and now it’s more like 150. Almost all of them are Canadians returning from the US because the country has “lost its mind” and they don’t want to be there any long no matter how well their jobs pay. ...

She summarizes what the Trump regime has done to the relationship between the two nations:

To put how bad things are in perspective, Canadians hold more favorable opinions of China than they do the United States. Thirty-five percent of Canadian adults have confidence in Xi Jinping to do the right thing, while only 20 percent say the same thing for Trump. Along similar lines, only 34 percent of Canadians believe the United States respects the freedom of its citizens, down from 75 percent just a decade ago. 

Eighty-four percent of Canadians regard relations with the United States as negative, which is worse than the public opinion on Canadian-Chinese relations (64 percent negative) and on a par with Russia (85 percent negative). Given that Russia has spent years brutally invading and occupying Ukraine and committing countless war crimes, it’s hard to imagine that number dropping much further short of the United States actually attempting an invasion of Canada.

She concludes:

The number one message non-MAGA Americans should be taking away from the current Trump-induced debacle is it will likely take a generation of Americans electing normal, pro-Canadian leaders to start restoring the relationship and regaining trust. 

The other lesson Democratic leadership in the US should be taking away from this is that politicians who stand up to Trump, don’t obey in advance, and (politely) tell him to go F himself are extremely popular both with the Democratic base and the Canadian public. Showing a little backbone, and being willing to call Trump out for what he is, would go a long ways toward starting to repair the damage.

It's not only those of us on the US side of the border who are mourning our losses from Donald's idiotic bluster.

Rainbow Bridge between the US and Canada beside Niagara Falls

We live in a strange country

It's been hard to get enthused about the United States' 250th anniversary celebration. On the one hand, Donald Trump defiled the big day with a partisan political rally and a fireworks show that left the capital under a world-record smoke cloud. Serious people like Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. used the occasion honestly to ask why the nation has always hated our dark pigmented residents and citizens. 

Yale University historian Beverly Gage takes a light approach to exploring the nation's moment in This Land is Your Land: a Road Trip Through U.S. History. Her story of visiting many famous and obscure historical sites is quite simply fun, though not without sharp and novel observations.

As part of my academic training, I took a ... tempered and realistic look at the United States, with all of its contradictions and injustices. I also learned to be skeptical of self-congratulatory narratives: progress, manifest destiny, shining-city-on-a-hill exceptionalism. Historians tend to be myth-busters. ... With the country’s semiquincentennial—or 250th birthday—on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the proverbial ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, in the third decade of the 21st century. 

... I headed not for Washington, D.C., where recent mandates to teach “patriotic education” have precious little to do with the actual past. Instead, I set off to explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about their history. This book is a report of my travels: thirteen chapters in thirteen American places.

Gage's encounter with George Washington's accomplishments and his historic home at Mount Vernon begins with the story of a slave girl, Ona Maria Judge.  As a child house servant, she was carried by the Washington family first to New York City and then to Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania city was then home to more free Blacks than whites; it was the most anti-slavery corner of the new nation. When the Washington family prepared to return to Virginia after the general's presidency, Judge had other ideas.

On May 21, 1796, while the president and his wife were eating dinner, she walked out the door and never came back. By the time the Washingtons returned to Virginia, she was living and working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as a free woman, though Washington never reconciled himself to that fact.

In visiting the historic homes of the revolutionary generation in Virginia, Gage came to what she thinks is a broadly applicable conclusion about historical preservation and display: 

... Mount Vernon became a public destination thanks to private effort. In 1853, a South Carolina matron named Louisa Bird Cunningham happened to be traveling down the Potomac when, according to legend, she came upon Washington’s grand old mansion, bathed in moonlight. It was in rough shape. She worried that Washington’s legacy would be lost to the public for lack of upkeep and attention. 

“If the men of America have seen fit to allow the home of its most respected hero to go to ruin, why can’t the women of America band together to save it?” she wrote to her daughter, according to a display at today’s Mount Vernon. Thus inspired, they initiated the estate’s transformation into a public attraction. They also established what would become a central feature of historic preservation: It has often been women who have the vision, dedicate the time, raise the money, and do the work.

And in this iconoclastic vein, Gage's journey continues through the remnants of Andrew Jackson's Tennessee, frontier Texas and the Alamo, the astonishingly creative human energies of 19th century upstate New York abolitionists and women's suffrage activists, massacres of native people on the western frontier, and industrial strife in the nation's great cities. She recounts what took place and what remains in delightful prose, highlighting individuals both worthy and quirky.

What other historian would approach the country's invention of the atomic bomb by spending a night in a decommissioned missile silo, decorated to attract curious tourists? Outside Roswell, New Mexico, an entrepreneur has made the experience available to the curious:

The Atlas silos were accident-prone (though no nuclear explosion ever occurred). As a result, the program around Roswell lasted only a few years before being supplanted by superior technology. When military authorities pulled the missiles out in 1965, they left the silos behind: gargantuan steel-and-concrete bunkers hidden beneath the New Mexico desert. ... If I’m being honest, I was a little nervous about spending the night in an underground nuclear bunker all alone. ... 

From a distance, the silo is easy to miss, little more than a concrete platform flush against the landscape. But once [her guide] pulled open the big red steel door, leading down into the residential quarters, a whole underground world emerged. [Proprietor Gary] Baker has reconstructed the silo as a combination history museum and you-are-there immersive experience. It’s cold and deathly quiet, aside from the clanging metal sound that accompanies all human movement.  

Baker lives four stories down with his wife in a full-service apartment complete with running water and Wi-Fi. The Airbnb unit sits just above that. It’s a surprisingly cheery space, with a little kitchen adjoining the main living room, plus a bedroom with two single beds and a bathroom with shower. The kitchen comes fully stocked—which is convenient, since there aren’t many restaurants or grocery stores in silo country. Baker also provides plenty of subject-specific, period-appropriate reading material. I spent a few minutes flipping through Rockets and Your Future, a 1961 book aimed at persuading teenagers to enter the space business. The biggest wow in Baker’s underground lair is the silo itself, located just a few steps from the door of the guest apartment. 

... The missile is long gone, of course. But it’s not hard to imagine it sitting there, encased in its underground habitat, waiting for the chance to burst up through the surface and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

If the official celebration of the 250th anniversary leaves you cold, I can heartily recommend this truthful and quirky romp through the American past and present. Many of us need some cheering up about our country these days. Beverly Gage provides.

China rises. We suffer Trump.

 

So now we are in a moment when Donald Trump is making a big show of deference to China's President Xi. Xi is Trump's kind of guy, a personalist dictator, someone who replaced a collective leadership which bound itself to real limits despite claiming ultimate power over its country. The first among equals became top dog.

 

Trump is a weak imitator of his hero. American society remains resistant. In the photo, note Trump's full time sycophant Natalie Harp, her job to fluff his sick ego, trailing the big boys.  Sad.

 

Several weeks ago, New Yorker reporter Evan Osmos passed along a sober assessment of contemporary China. It's not alarmist; rather it's thoughtful.  Xi's China sees itself on top of the world, not without reason.

While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said. 

The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”

... Rush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said. 

If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.” ... To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.”

Yet Osnos reports that there are observers who don't see Trump's bow to China as indicating permanent global subservience. Rather we are spectators to a contest of somewhat precarious oligarchies -- this is unstable.

... Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that the international system the U.S. constructed after the Second World War—and ran, often to its benefit—is “definitely dead and beyond redemption.” He said that Trump’s dismantling of the country’s alliances signaled the end of the “willingness of the American public to play the role America has played for most of the last eight decades.”

But America’s diminished stature does not necessarily clear a path for China. Few people these days are enthusiastic about the prospect of a world dominated by either superpower. ...

... The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”

During the Cold War, as futurists on both sides of the Iron Curtain plotted to control the direction of history, another group coalesced around a more modest idea. Mankind 2000, as it called itself, was made up of European survivors of fascism who were wary of both Communist determinism and American hubris. They warned that man could be “absorbed by his machine” and declared, “The future belongs to all of us, not only to small oligarchic groups.”

Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future....

Scary, but not simple or inevitable. Oligarchs and aspiring monarchs always think they've solved the problem of pesky peoples who think they ought to get a say in how their lives are lived. Perhaps China's future is not so clear. New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, writing from Beijing,  sees a more complicated reality in the country he has watched develop for 30 years.

For China and its top leader, Xi Jinping, the biggest prize from a summit in Washington, notably free from confrontation, may be simple: time.

Time to cope with a housing market crash that has wiped away the savings of tens of millions of Chinese families. Time to deal with local governments running short of money as land-use revenue collapses. Time to make China even less vulnerable to economic pressure from the United States and other industrialized countries.

And perhaps most consequentially, time to prepare for the once-in-five-years Communist Party national congress next autumn, which will choose a new slate of top leaders to work under Mr. Xi.

“By trying to stabilize relations with the U.S., China can better concentrate on its own priorities,” said Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. ...

It ain't easy governing one of the most populated, fastest growing economies and societies the world has ever seen. China is big and on the rise, but its destination, and ours while in our relative decline, has not yet been written.

Timothy Snyder on virtue ....

I found this interesting and challenging. The eminent historian of Ukraine and eastern Europe is sitting in bunker near the frontline against Russia's invasion, thinking about meanings and moral virtue.

Moral Language (Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10) by Timothy Snyder

Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10

Read on Substack

Here's my abbreviated transcription: 

... it's alright to use moral terms in general. ... I'm trying to break through a certain taboo we have about acceptable ways of expressing ourselves on media .. on the ways it is acceptable to talk about politics or even society.  ... we find ourselves talking about interests and calculations as though those were real. ... But what about things like cowardice and courage?  ... Without terms like cowardice and courage, you can't talk about politics ... especially when you get down to a small family of oligarchs where human vices and virtues start to count for more than they would if politics were apportioned [characterized?] more neatly by ... the rule of law. ... It becomes necessary to use these kinds of terms to describe ...

I don't think you can talk about the leaders of the present administration without talking about greed. ... Greed is more real, more real than interests or calculations. ... And if we deprive ourselves of that language ... if we don't have a word for putting our commitments around a vice like greed, then we can't address it. ... we can't solve it. ... if the people who are greedy or avaricious ... if they parade it, they don't hide it, if they display it ostentatiously, what are we do?  

Because if we lack the word to describe what they are doing, they are changing reality. ... They are making things normal. And we are helping them because they are embodying ever more perfectly a vice. And we are embodying ever more perfectly the inability to describe that vice.  ... Together we are creating a politics [in which], let's say greed, becomes normal.

... terms like cowardice or courage are as much of our objective reality as terms like interests or calculations. And if we are afraid to use them, we're not actually describing any reality better, we're describing it worse. ... we may also be contributing to some of the vices we should be describing.  

 A few observations on Snyder's lesson for us -- perhaps I should call it his sermon. 

•  If they trouble themselves to look at the behavior of our rulers, most Americans seem to understand that we are seeing extraordinary violations a moral code so fundamental that it is hardly conscious. "Trump is a crook. He doesn't care who he hurts. They lie. They are careless of human life. They are cruel." This moral instinct either isn't there at all or, among a considerable majority, is simple and obvious. This moral repulsion accounts for the fact that right now polls show intense disapprovers of the Trump administration vastly outnumber intense approvers. The repulsion fuels intensity.

•  Among most people, approval or disapproval of politicians does include personal assessments about "interests or calculations." The huge example is folks' recollection that prices were lower under Trump I. But this assessment exists within a context in which hardly anyone believes that politicians are working for them, not for themselves. When you think the politicians are just transactional scum anyway, it's easy and adequate simply to weigh what they might do for you. But if you think pols should provide anything more than a cheap date, the moral repulsion kicks in these days.

• Snyder seems to me to be talking to, and about people, who cannot use moral language about the Trump regime for fear of showing themselves to be unsophisticated -- not savvy. In the media, and perhaps in academia, defaulting to "interests or calculations" when moral repulsion would be truer and more accurate looks to me like habitual timidity. Elite institutions too often reward pusillanimity, reward shaving the rough edges off uncomfortable truths. The Trump regime is showing that the often gray haired zealots of "No Kings" and the like may be the real sophisticates in our current moment.