I'm back to San Francisco, refreshed mentally though not physically, after nearly two weeks as a tourist in Mongolia with a delightful small group of women. (Women Who Explore if you are curious; great company.)
More than half the national population of 3.5 million lives in the city. Younger people flock to the modern metropolis; older people continue the rural herding life which is what we were introduced to. Out of 244 countries in the world, Mongolia's population density ranks 240th. There's a lot of beautiful land and not that many people. Though green and pleasantly warm in the late summer, Mongolia sees temperatures of -20°F in winter and UB averages 29°F for the full year.
Living today in our declining US empire, it was instructive to encounter this smart, proud, welcoming people whose history has taught them that empire comes and goes.
And Mongolians do welcome the world; we returned to UB in time to see signs for the COP17 UN conference on climate change in the central plaza.
 |
| With Director Enkhmaa Enkhbold |
Tonight -- the first Tuesday in August -- we'll find out who won the Michigan Democratic Party primary for the chance to contest an open US Senate seat in November. Polls and tea leaves tell us it will be a win for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens. If it comes out as expected, the good Doc with the fighting agenda will have knocked off the perfectly adequate candidate of the professional Democratic class. There will be rejoicing in one camp and hair pulling in the other.
Journalist Paul Waldman offers some smart and thoughtful commentary on this year's intra-party kerfuffles.
... While centrists often complain that Democrats are trapped in their self-reinforcing bubbles and disconnected from reg’lar, salt-of-the-earth Americans, nearly all the centrists that I’m aware of are just as disconnected, if not more so.
They live in Washington or other major cities, they’re immersed in politics, and they suffer from the Pundit Brain ailment that makes its victims believe ordinary voters have coherent ideological beliefs and respond to subtle changes in the policy-based appeals candidates make. There’s something else going on, too: Their view of the political world is dominated by their contempt for the far left, which convinces them that what we used to call hippie-punching is the cleverest of political strategies.
This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in many normie Democrats I know who live in very liberal places. They can’t stand Trump, of course, but the people who really drive them up a wall are the ones they encounter all the time where they live: the lefties. ...
... the reason is familiarity. If you’re a mainstream Democrat who lives in San Francisco or New York, you almost never encounter MAGA-hatted, immigrant-hating, misogynistic far-right troglodytes in person. You see them online, you know they’re there, but you don’t have to pay more than a moment’s attention to them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, far-lefties are everywhere in your actual life, and everything you find annoying about them is right in your face, all the time. ...
Yup. I recognize that condition, being a long time San Franciscan. That's not the world of most Michiganders -- well maybe in Ann Arbor. It not easy for those of us who live, by choice, in blue state bubbles to imagine what these things look like beyond our context, just as other Americans don't get how we live.
I hope lots of blue staters really do what I've done in the past and many plan to do this year: take some time to go talk election with people in more contested places. The candidates have to meet the people where they are, and volunteers can to.
The British opinionater Timothy Garton Ash is not one to hold back his thoughts. He seems to have been on a visit to our shores. A long time observer of the condition of democracy in Europe, he has summed up where he thinks the US stands under the rule of the Orange Toddler. We don't look very promising... but just maybe ...
The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.
V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. ...
... As I saw in Hungary this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see....
... As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?
Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. ...
What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach.
If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning. ...
We don't need a pretentious Brit to diagnose this. But perhaps it should be bracing to know this is how we look to a friendly observer of democracies.
... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.
The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.
The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years.
Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s.
... Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past. ...
We're faced with a president and a mob that don't want to learn, who experience contradictory realities as assault on their very being. Tough luck, MAGA. Reality doesn't work the simple way you wish it did.
