For those living in Western societies, especially in the English-speaking countries today, it can often seem that political stability, economic growth, and a standard of living unmatched in human history resulting from this combination is as natural as night following day. After all, in the last 150 years in America and roughly 300 years in the U.K., there has not been a serious sustained crisis of governing legitimacy. To be sure, there have been ineffective governments (and monarchs) during this time, but these systems have shown themselves adept at evolving over time to meet the changing needs and demands of the population. In the case of the U.S., just the fact that the Republican Party and the Democrat Party have been the only two relevant political parties during 150 years of an electoral system that is largely the same (since the Civil War) is something that cannot be matched anywhere in the world. In other words, if someone passed away in 1870 and was brought back today, only in the U.S.  would they see a democratic system largely the same as the one that they left in 1870.

Given that this achievement is so rare, one would think that it would be celebrated. But in the U.S., it would seem that this achievement has led to complacency of the governing class. By taking this state of affairs for granted, the governing class has taken its positions for granted and has largely ignored large swaths of the population, which has led to today’s crisis in governing legitimacy.

Don’t ever doubt it. We are in a massive crisis of legitimacy, and it really doesn’t seem that the political class gets it. To listen to many, it seems as if they think that Donald Trump is the problem. If they can just get rid of him, then things can go back to their natural order. In fact, these folks remind me of the first phase of the financial crisis when real estate values started to decline sharply, but banks hadn’t yet started collapsing. During this period of a few months when things were slowing down but had not yet reached crisis levels, folks were hopefully asserting that a 10% decline in real estate values meant that we were near the market bottom. Like the political class today, they viewed the situation as transitory and that it was just a matter of getting this cyclical downturn over with and go back to making money again. After all, in 25 years we had only experiences 2 relatively mild downturns. Economic growth & a rising tide that lifts all boats was the natural order. They couldn’t yet appreciate that they were on the cusp of a generation-defining economic cataclysm.

The problem that we have today, I think, is one of perspective. We are used to looking at historical time periods from a distance. And in viewing factors that seem obvious in hindsight, it can be hard to appreciate that those in the moment couldn’t necessarily appreciate the changes that they were living through until much later. Because of the unusual stability of our system, it doesn’t seem that our political class fully appreciates what is happening, likely because we don’t have experience living with unstable political/economic systems.

Consequently, it appears that we have a situation where one-half of the political spectrum (the left) appears to think that it can effectively either culturally suppress & delegitimize, if not actually outlaw, many (if not all) of the views/desires of the other half of the political spectrum (the right). This thinking can only exist where the stability of the system is taken for granted. Anyone else would see immediately that an attempt to marginalize/outlaw roughly half your population (especially when that particular half is armed) while at the same time maintaining the political stability, economic growth potential, and geographical integrity of that society is doomed to failure.

The problem isn’t just that your society will break apart into separate enclaves. It is that the process of breaking apart can be violent, vicious, and damaging to point that the economic and political potential of the society will never be the same. Put more bluntly, many who are alive at the beginning of the process won’t be after the process has played itself out.

In addition, as the Soviet Union showed us, a seemingly stable, built-for-the-ages system can unravel within a very short period of time. This happens when a governing class either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t address the fundamental problems of its people. A governing class that is failing in this regard, in a democratic system at least, gets Donald Trump. A governing class that continues to ignore the warning that is President Trump may wake up one day to find that it governs nothing. In other words, loss of governing legitimacy will ultimately mean loss of governing power. Not through an election, but through a process that will be undoubtedly unstable, possibly quick (we can hope), and likely very ugly.

Now that Donald Trump has passed the 6 month mark and the continuing campaign to make his governing impossible continues, we are witness the celebrated nullification of federal laws on a scale unprecedented since the Civil War from “Blue State America”. In fact, one could make the case the California is drifting towards secession; that state’s permanent Democrat governing class not wanting to be forced to enforce laws or conduct policies with which they disagree.

Which means that it may be time for the Red States to bolt for the exits and secede on their own from “Blue America”. One might question why Red (aka Republican) states would want to dissolve the country when they have more power nationally top to bottom than at any time within the last 100 years. They have the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, a sort of majority on the Supreme Court, complete governing control of 25 states and partial control in another 24. How could this, of all moments, be the right opportunity to exit?

This assertion rests specifically on three realities. The first is that the bureaucracy, far from consisting of disinterested, non-partisan, technocrats who are only executing the policies voted on by Congress, is full of liberal, liberal-left, and left-wing ideologues who necessarily move law in a left-wing direction, no matter who is in power (sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but generally always in the same direction). This means that regardless of elections, there is a permanent governing class in Washington, and that governing class is center-left. The result is that “taking our country back” isn’t going to be accomplished by elections alone, and our democratic choices, to the extent that they are center-right democratic choices, are bound to be hobbled, hindered, or stopped, whereas center-left democratic choices & policies will be implemented happily. The result has been, and will continue to be, a government that reflects the priorities of the political left, regardless of election results. To the extent that the Republican parts of the country want to live in country that either A.) reflects Republican priorities or B.) reflects the priorities of the voters, whether right or left, this won’t be accomplished by remaining part of the United States.

The second reality is that the left part of the political spectrum really does view the right side as deserving of second class status. They really don’t think that the Republican Party has the right to govern when it wins elections, except perhaps occasionally to the extent that a significant part of the Democrat Party signs off on a piece of legislation. A lot of the anger and fury regarding Trump’s win and the continued attempts to render him ineffective or to remove him from office by any means necessary has to do with the left side not really accepting the right side as an equal partner with equal political rights in the American experiment.

The third reality is that the left is in a rebellious mood and is using all means, fair & foul, to undo the election. From launching a campaign to intimidate the Electoral College into making Hillary President, to rioting to prevent conservative speakers from speaking on campus, to actual discrimination against conservative viewpoints on public university campuses, to judges overruling Trump policies just because it is Trump (as opposed to it being unconstitutional), the tactics of the left are seen as legitimate by them, and will be seen as illegitimate when (and there will be a ‘when’) they are employed by the right. You can be sure that the police won’t told to stand down when right-wing rioters are bashing the heads of left-wingers in.

The fourth reality is that once the left has control of the government again, they show every indication of being willing to use the power of the state to crush, persecute, and abuse those they don’t like (in some cases even those on their own side), in ways probably unprecedented in American history, with the exception of slavery. To that end, any attempt at secession with a left-wing government in charge is likely to be met with state-sanctioned force that could easily morph into a Civil War, ending the American experiment in a wave of bitter violence.

Given all of this, now when Republican power is at its zenith in roughly a century, would be the ideal time to secede. With so much political power concentrated in Republican hands at this moment in time, the Red states have something to bargain with to achieve a peaceful secession. In other words, lacking the political power at this moment to make the Red states comply with its wishes, Blue America has an incentive to allow the Red states to go their own way. At another point in time, the Red states may find themselves being governed by people who firmly believe that they deserve to be second-class citizens, and breaking away will be much messier. With that in mind, Red America might want to give serious consideration to formally declaring their independence.

Those currently arguing that the U.S. need not go to war to disarm North Korea are relying on the assumption that the U.S. can simply deter North Korea from actually using its nuclear arsenal based on our experience with the Soviet Union & China. On the surface, this argument has a lot to recommend it. Firstly, launching missiles at us or our allies would result in the annihilation of North Korea and presumably the death of Kim Jong Un and his family. Secondly, the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy was successful with the Soviet Union and has continued to be so with Russia and China. And of course, there is the inherent rationality behind it; namely why would somebody blow up their own country? So as a strategy, it is assumed that MAD is bound to work.

But what if it doesn’t?

What if after, say, 10 years of building out his nuclear arsenal and building atomic bombs that he isn’t deterred? What if his strategic calculus is different than the China and the Soviet Union? What if, unthinkably, he was willing to accept the destruction of his country? While this might not be the most likely end point of a MAD strategy pursued vis-à-vis North Korea, it is important to recognize that there are not insignificant differences between the geopolitical calculus of China & the Soviet Union/Russia on one hand and North Korea on the other.

1.)    China and the Soviet Union were geopolitical players even without nuclear weapons.

Simply by the size of their conventional military in the case of the Soviet Union and the size of their population in the case of Communist China, these two countries were going to be geopolitical players and were/are always going to be difficult (if not impossible) for the West to conquer conventionally. While they developed a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver them, at the very least this was done in order to prevent (from their perspective) potential nuclear blackmail by the United States. But by their very size and relative geopolitical position, a nuclear exchange caused by a first strike from the Soviet Union/China that resulted in the annihilation of the United States would also have resulted in the annihilation of the Soviet Union/China as well. Because the of quasi-religious nature of communist ideology present in the Soviet Union/China, the person(s) launching a first strike wouldn’t see themselves as destroying the United States and capitalism, but rather as going down in history as the person(s) who destroyed an emerging beautiful paradise (Soviet Union/China) that was going to advance mankind to unknown heights. The goal of bringing into existence a communist paradise on earth would only be served if the United States was destroyed while its adversaries remained intact. MAD created a strategic situation where this outcome was impossible, and so there was no benefit to launching a first strike.

2.)    China and the Soviet Union are/were run by political parties, and the leadership of these countries were drawn from those ranks.

What this means is that those who arrived at the top echelons of power had moved up through the ranks, had made alliances with others, done business with others, and had developed networks and connections that reached across the country. They had, at some level, developed a certain loyalty to their friends and the population in general. Understanding that even if they survived an annihilating nuclear strike their friends (and family) would not, actually served as a deterrent at some level to launching nuclear missiles except as an extremely last resort; an act to be undertaken only if one believed oneself to be under attack & with nothing left to lose.

Unfortunately, neither condition 1 nor condition 2 is present in North Korea. Without nuclear weapons, nobody is going to give a smidgen of thought to Kim Jong Un. While analysts are asserting that he wants nukes to prevent an outside attack in order to prevent his regime from being overthrown (which is certainly a likely motivation), I think short-shrift is being given to the motivation that possessing nukes also means that a tiny country, that is weak in so many ways, actually has to be handled with a seriousness completely out of proportion to its strength in other areas. In other words, North Korea with nukes matters. North Korea without nukes doesn’t.

In addition, there is the fact that North Korea is not governed the way the Soviet Union was and China is. Kim Jong Un didn’t get his position by rising through the ranks of the Party over many years through political skill and coalition building. He was awarded the position through heredity. North Korea, for all of its pretense at being a communist society, is really a monarchy/mafia-style state.  What this ultimately means is that Kim Jong Un’s friends & family (i.e. the people who he really cares about) likely consist of a relatively small number of people; perhaps a small enough number who could be holed up in a nuclear proof bunker deep enough underground to be able to survive a nuclear attack by the United States. Why this matters is that the ability of Kim Jong Un to be deterred from launching a destructive preemptive strike on the United States, once he has the nuclear capability to do so, depends upon whether it is more important to him personally to govern over a small, insignificant but for the possession of nukes country, or whether it is more important for him to go down in history as the man who destroyed the sole (Western) superpower and therefore irrevocably changed the course of world history.

At this point then, the question moves to whether he actually could destroy the United States through a nuclear attack. The answer to this question is that he couldn’t today. But someday (perhaps in 10 or 20 years) he would be able to do so if he is allowed to grow his nuclear arsenal. Perhaps by that time missile defense technology will advance to a point to where the U.S. would be impervious to missile attack, but we are not there now. If North Korea today had 100 nuclear missiles capable of striking any point on the U.S. mainland and launched them all at once, they would have the power to destroy the U.S. Sure, missile defense would destroy a few, but not nearly all of them. Even if one in five got through, enough to blow up the 19 largest cities in the U.S. plus Washington D.C., I don’t think one needs to doubt that the U.S. would effectively cease to exist as relevant country, along with 10% of its population and much of its finance (New York), technological dynamism (Silicon Valley), energy dynamism (Houston, Dallas), industry (Los Angeles, Chicago), and government (Washington D.C.).

All of this is not to say that Kim Jong Un and his nuclear missiles can’t be deterred through a MAD strategy. It is just to say that I don’t think that this strategy is as straightforward as it might appear to be on the surface. North Korea today is a different animal than either the Soviet Union or China. The geopolitical dynamics and governing structure are completely different, and the success of a strategy of MAD depends largely on the psychology of one man; a man that we don’t have a lot of information on. A MAD strategy could still work, but it is much riskier than what one might suppose.

Although the U.S. (and allies) are currently reviewing military options for dealing with North Korea, a conflict that would ultimately result in the regime being eliminated, one must also consider what the reaction of China and Russia are likely to be. There are unconfirmed reports that both Russia and China have begun feeding additional troops & equipment into the border area with North Korea. If true, then it means that either A.) The troops are preparing to deal with the anticipated flood of refugees from American attacks or B.) that Russia and China would launch their own invasion of North Korea once American attacks started.

With the commencement of an American/South Korean invasion, it would be clear to military leaders in Moscow & Beijing that whatever else might happen, the North Korean regime as it has existed for the last 65-70 years is finished. This means from Beijing’s (and to a lesser extent Moscow’s) perspective that their buffer state against having an American friendly government sitting on their border (and perennial thorn in America’s side) is about to disappear. Consequently, one or both China and/or Russia may opt to invade North Korea on their own in order to keep U.S./South Korean troops from advancing all the way up to the Yalu River (the border with China). While this would not be a repeat of the original Korean War in which Chinese troops pushed America back and effectively reconquered North Korea, it would mean that an American advance in the North would be halted by the presence of Chinese/Russian troops. In order to advance further and take all of North Korea, the Americans would essentially have to go to war with China/Russia, which of course we will not do.

One goal of the invasion would be to the secure the nuclear sites, which are in the north of the country, before U.S. or South Korean troops arrive. The reason is that if South Korea seizes the nuclear facilities, China & Russia will effectively have an America-friendly nuclear power sitting on their doorstep. This would be the worst of all possible outcomes from the Chinese perspective. This will mean a shift in the balance of power in East Asia away from China and in America’s favor.

The second goal of the invasion would be to gain control of as much territory as possible. In other words, keep the U.S. and South Korean troops as far south as possible. While it is unlikely that China and Russia would believe that they could hold onto Korean territory (i.e. maintain a smaller buffer zone between their borders and the new, more northern, “South Korea” border), holding Korean territory would give them a say in post-war negotiations as to what the re-united Korean peninsula would look like (i.e. regarding future American military bases, etc. etc. etc).

China has been trying to prop up the North Korean regime because it acts as a buffer with South Korea and it causes the U.S. headaches. Faced with losing these advantages, China (and possibly Russia) is likely to take action to try and salvage as much as they can out of the situation. As ironic as it may seem, China and Russia could end up joining with the U.S. and South Korea in ultimately taking out the North Korean regime.

Of course, they could also sit tight and simply decide to deal with the inevitable stream of refugees. But faced with a collapsing regime, there would be many benefits that would accrue to Russia and China by joining in on the invasion. Therefore, I think that that this would be their likely course of action.

As the rhetoric has heated up and North Korea has launched missile test after missile test, it has become obvious to even the most obtuse that there is no way that North Korea is going to give up its nuclear weapons peacefully. While this has been obvious for years, diplomats have been pretending (and hoping) that somehow, in spite of everything, North Korea could be talked out of its nuclear weapons program. This was always going to be unlikely given the last 20 years of world history which has taught dictators that those with nuclear weapons survive and those without might not. However, now that the North is coming closer to a ballistic missile that could possibly carry a nuke to the U.S. mainland, kicking the can down the road and hoping for a diplomatic miracle doesn’t seem to be a viable option any longer.  While a military intervention is going to create major geopolitical, economic, and social havoc, allowing the North the capacity to threaten the U.S. with nuclear blackmail constantly is simply not something the U.S. can countenance.

So to that end, what sort of military pressure can the U.S. bring to bear to topple the regime and end the threat.

The Battlefield:

The first things to recognize is that apart from its missiles, the only major threat to major population centers that the North possesses is its artillery, which in some cases is only 35 to 40 miles away from the capital, Seoul. Neutralizing this threat in the first hours of the conflict would need to be a major priority. But even so, despite predictions from people who don’t know what they are talking about, North Korean artillery would not be able to flatten Seoul. So, taking these threats into consideration, how would a military attack on and destruction of the North Korean regime actually play out?

The Start:

The first thing is that the war needs to start suddenly and without warning. Although starting by launching cruise missiles at a military parade in broad daylight would have the advantage of likely taking out Kim Jong Un and much of his military brass in one fell swoop, the war should be started at night with soldiers in their beds. The artillery positions nearest Seoul, as well as missile launch sites, need to be saturated with high explosives within the first minutes, and to the extent possible, rendered inoperable. Furthermore, cruise missiles should be launch at critical infrastructure (bridges, electricity grids, radar facilities, roadways, military airfields, civilian airfields, etc.) to disrupt movement, and if possible, jam cell phone signals and radio communications. Especially airbases need to be rendered inoperable by cratering the runway making them unusable and by destroying as many planes on the ground as possible. In short, the North Korean air force needs to cease to exist quickly.

The Next Step:

A military build-up on the Korean Peninsula would be noticed and allow the North Koreans to prepare for war. This makes the next step tricky, because you don’t want them mobilized for war when the attack happens. A well-noticed build-up would allow us to have everything we need in place thereby making the invasion more effective and the ultimate outcome all but assured. However, it would allow North Korea time to marshal its forces and calibrate its missile and artillery to meet the coming invasion and to inflict as much damage (including nuclear damage) as possible by a regime who is dying anyway. They might even be provoked to try and launch a preemptive invasion of the South to try and take over the South before we had enough forces built up in the area.

Consequently, the best option would be to launch a sudden, amphibious 1944 France-style invasion along the western coast of North Korea. The objective would be to try and cut off Pyongyang from the rest of the country. Encircling Pyongyang and cutting off communications with the outside world to the extent possible can hamper the ability of the regime to direct the battle. Faced with losing everything, the regime could disintegrate and take out the dictator on their own. In any case, being cut off from the chain of command means that the army will find it difficult to conduct any sort of operations beyond a local static defense. A society like North Korea where one wrong decision can mean the end of your life has very likely created an army not used to taking initiative. In a fast-moving battle, they simply won’t be able to react quickly to changing circumstances.

In any case, an immediate threat to Pyongyang could, to the extent that the North Korean army was still capable of launching offensive operations, force them to turn their attention to combating the threat to their own capital as opposed to launching an invasion of the South. While much is made of the 1 million man North Korean army (roughly 2/3’s of which is located near the frontline De-Militarized Zone (DMZ)), South Korea has a 500,000 man army itself. Its equipment is superior to North Korea and it would likely be able to effectively defend South Korea from any attempted invasion from the North.

Actual Ground Invasion:

In fact, the South Korean military would likely be called upon to conduct an invasion of the North relatively shortly after the start of hostilities to push the North Koreans back from Seoul. The South Korean forces would likely be more flexible and able to conduct fast-moving offensive operations. While the going would be tougher as the Korean terrain doesn’t lend itself easily to fast moving armored formations (like the deserts of Iraq), the complete control of the air that the U.S. will have achieved means that moving north will be much easier than the terrain would likely otherwise allow. In addition, South Korean logistics systems will be largely intact thereby furthering advance.

During this time, psych-ops such as dropping leaflets and transmitting other messages to North Koreans urging them to surrender should be done. Having plenty of food on hand and logistics systems in place to handle these prisoners will be key.

Nuclear Facilities & Mobile Missile Launchers:

The largest difficulty with any of this is the fact that the nuclear facilities are largely in the northern part of the country and difficult to get to. These facilities will have to have their own section dedicated to neutralizing them. The launch sites can be obliterate, even perhaps by using our own tactical nukes, although I don’t think we would have to go that far. But air assets would need to be standing by for the duration of the war to make sure none of these missiles left their launching pads.

The bigger challenge would be the mobile missile launchers. Tracking these down and destroying them would be a job for the special forces. In Iraq in 1991, special forces teams had some success in tracking down and destroying mobile Scud missile launchers that Saddam was using to attack Israel. But he was also able to get off some launches as well. Given that some of these mobile launchers could have a nuke on it, the detection and elimination of these is of paramount importance.

The Likely Result:

Although much is being made of how large the North Korean army is, the simple fact is that militarily it simply would not be able to stand-up to overwhelming military assets that the U.S. along with South Korea would be able to bring to bear. I suspect that within 72 hours to 168 hours (3 to 7 days), the North Korean military would cease to function as a coherent fighting force. The country has been living off its glory from a war that was fought 65 years ago. And even then, North Korea was effectively beaten but was bailed out by the Chinese at a time when the U.S. and opposing militaries (Chinese and Soviets) were more evenly matched. There won’t be a Chinese army crashing across the Yalu River to push the Americans back to the 38^th Parallel and prop up the North Korean regime this time.

Furthermore, even putting up some sort of token military or guerilla resistance assumes that the population has a belief in the government or system on whose behalf it is fighting. In addition, in order to function in a fast moving battle space requires that junior officers be able to take initiative to changing conditions on the ground. The simple fact that taking initiative in North Korea is a good way to get yourself killed by the regime means that North Korean society simply isn’t one that is going to produce a military capable of operating flexibly in battle outside of approved channels. With much (if not all) of the communication channels (and possibly leadership) disrupted or eliminated within the first hours, the ability of the North to mount any kind of defense will be seriously curtailed.

The unknown piece is whether North Korea will be able to get off a shot with its nukes. That is the major risk in this operation.

The Aftermath:

The aftermath of a conquered North Korea would be difficult to predict. A country that has been abused, brainwashed, and malnourished for 3 generations leaves nobody who would even know how to operate in the modern world with a modern economy. The effects of the last 70 years will still be seen 100 years from now. Initially, the fortified border would need to be maintained to avoid having North Koreans streaming to the South. A new North Korean government would have to be set up to maintain order, under the auspices of the U.S. and South Korea. With a breakdown in the distribution system, famine might be wide spread. We really don’t know.

Whatever happens, it would certainly be a complete mess. But with the regime in the North being what it is and having access to the weapons that it has, leaving the status quo is looking like less of a viable option.

(Turning Points Appear To Be Reversible, But They Aren’t)

This is the second installment of a two-part series

So, if Donald Trump isn’t reversible, why not? The first reason has to do with the way people are reacting to his election. Whatever the months since the election have shown us, they have shown us first that personality and temperament aside, Donald Trump is a generic Republican in many ways. In other words, most of what he has actually done (as opposed to his rhetoric) are things that virtually any Republican President would have done. To the extent that his actions and policies have differed from other Republicans, they have differed in a leftward direction (personal support for gay marriage and no desire to make it illegal again, less free trade, etc). The continued resistance on the left is not to a fascist (to the extent that term means anything other than “something I hate”), but rather to a Republican President. From the attempts to intimidate the Electoral College, to judges overruling the travel pause (don’t call it a ban, because that is not what it actually is) simply because Donald Trump issued it, people are refusing to accept the outcome of a legitimate election. Given that there is no evidence that Russia “hacked” the election in the sense that they manipulated vote totals, this election was legitimate.  What people are doing is actually refusing to accept, as Americans have traditionally done, an outcome inconsistent with their desires. Instead, we get leaks, protests, and mob violence, precisely the sort of things that one sees in banana republics. The fact is that this just gives license to those on the other side who will do the same things, and feel justified in doing it the next time that their candidate does win. We don’t go back from that.

The second reason is that the factors that led to Donald Trump have been building for decades. I am not just talking about sections of the country that have been ignored as jobs have moved overseas, it is also the cultural snobbery comes at these folks through the national media and film industries that has been grating. After George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, in large part from a surge in what the press dubbed “values voters”(i.e. religious, traditional people), the press started to make some noises about trying to understand these folks. Nothing came of it. Instead, the press and the cultural elite have been content (and in some cases gleeful) in describing these struggling people as backwards, hateful, misogynist, and stupid for holding to a whole laundry list political opinions and values that the elite has no use for. These folks sense that the elite hate them, wish they weren’t there, and that the elite feel these folks deserve to be mocked, abused, and have bad things happen to them for thinking the way that they do. Furthermore, these folks feel put upon for holding values and opinions that virtually all of America held 30 years ago (and in the case of same-sex marriage, a position that virtually every Democrat leader held at some point in their lives). In short, they feel mistreated, and the cultural elite honestly do give off the impression that these forgotten people deserve to be mistreated.

The third reason we aren’t going back is that the institutions of government are more and more being politicized and being turned against one specific segment of the political spectrum. The IRS, a feared organization, has been used to suppress conservative political activities for several years. And even if you don’t believe that to be the case, conservatives do, and that is all that matters. Conservatives have tended to be the law & order party. Believing that you are being targeted for no other reasons than your political beliefs is a quick way to learn contempt for governmental agencies and the people who inhabit them. And recently, an attempted mass assassination for Republican members of Congress was basically minimized by the FBI as a political matter. Again, perception is everything, and the perception of many on the right is that law enforcement doesn’t really give a s**t if conservatives get shot. The point is that conservatives are ceasing to view the U.S. government as legitimate. Those on the left are yelling that Donald Trump is “Not My President”. Increasingly those on the right are starting to look at Washington and think “Not My Government”.

In conclusion, the deterioration of the socio-political environment in this has been driven by a decline in trust. Although trust in institutions has been declining for 40 years, most of this decline (politically speaking) was in the area of politicians. However, now it appears that large fractions of conservatives are starting to lose faith in the fundamental fairness of the governing institutions themselves. This sort of trust is not easy to rebuild and would require a shake-up in very people staffing these agencies, the likes of which no Western country has seen. This is not likely to happen. Consequently, the country that we had before has changed irrevocably, with all of the baggage that is likely to bring.

(Turning Points Appear To Be Reversible, But They Aren’t)

Part A

As the news cycle heats up, hysterical pronouncements abound, and people try and make sense of how Donald Trump could have won the election, it is becoming clear that the U.S. may be experiencing a historical turning point.

While this might seem obvious to some, others seem to think that if we can just dispose of Donald Trump somehow, things will return to the way things were before. A true historical turning point though isn’t just that things change or that a historical event has happened, it is something (or a series of somethings) that occur that completely change a country, a region (or the world) to such an extent that what things were like before is totally different from what things are like after. True historical turning points are not one-off events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. While those might change a way thinking that eventually lead to different policies than would otherwise be the case, they don’t fundamentally change everything.

An example of a true historical turning point would be the start of WWI. Yes, it was started by an assassination, but the magnitude of the change that this would lead to was not understood at the time. When WWI started, people assumed that it would be a relatively short, quick affair that would be over, and then things would largely return to how they had been before. But after 4 years, the entire map of Europe was different and many countries had entirely different governing structures than what they had only a few years earlier. Roughly 75 years after the start of WWI, Eastern Europe would again experience a historical turning point with the collapse of Communism. The governing AND economic systems that existed in these countries during and after the communist period so totally different as to be unrecognizable from each other. People were truly living in a completely different country from what they had been just a few years earlier.

An for the U.S., of an historical turning point would be the Great Depression + WWII. With the expansion of government and a Supreme Court that allowed the government to enter into areas of American life that it had not been before, the country was, over time, fundamentally changed in a way that what went before was completely different from what went after.

The thing about historical turning points is that they seem, initially at the time, to be temporary and/or reversible changes when in fact they are not. The WWI generation thought that the war would be temporary and that things would return to their ‘normal’ path. They had no idea that an aristocratic system that had held sway in many countries, in some cases for hundreds of years, was to be swept away forever. It was just viewed as “let’s just get through this insanity as quickly as possible, and then return to our lives”.

In the case of the changes to American governing assumption wrought by the New Deal and WWII, Republicans in the 1930’s thought that they would be able to overturn them when their turn in power came. The problem was that never really came for 40 years, at which time the changes were an indelible part of the American government structure, rendering talk of “small government” laughable. So ingrained were they that the first non-war hero Republican President (Richard Nixon) actually expanded upon them. In other words, Republicans had accepted to a large extent the governing assumptions of their opponents.

In 1990, some hardliners in the Soviet Union thought that they could launch a coup, replace the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and restore the Soviet Union to what it had been. Their plan, it seemed, was to grab control of the government, close the borders, and basically reverse with the stroke of a pen what Gorbachev had done over the prior 5 years. It seemed so simple, but it wasn’t. The Soviet people were no longer cowed by their government, and the troops were no longer willing to take directives from a few jokers who nobody had ever heard of. People and troops went out into the streets and brought the coup to an end. Basically, the historical turning point had been reached passed, but some had not yet recognized this fact.

The reason that these changes seem to be reversible is that those trying to reverse things back to some earlier point don’t seem to appreciate the deeper social forces that are creating the visible change that they are trying to reverse. In the case of the Great Depression, small government conservatives didn’t seem to understand that the economy wasn’t working for a lot people and that people, in some cases, were starving. Talking about Constitutional restrictions on the power of the federal government don’t mean much to people who are feeling economic anxiety regarding where their next meal is coming from. All they see is that one group of people is attempting to help them and another group is attempting to stop the first group. Furthermore, when the second group’s President (Herbert Hoover, a Republican) appears to be the one that caused the mess, it is hardly surprising that Democrats had a lock on the White House (with the exception of a singular, centrist war hero in Dwight Eisenhower) for nearly 40 years. By the time Republicans were electable nationally again, they were comfortable adding to the size of government and the historical transformation was complete.

Another example of this is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Communist governments in Eastern Europe simply weren’t working for large swaths of the population. Because of the tight media control that those regimes had, the West (and the rulers themselves) didn’t really understand how bad things were for ordinary people. On the outside, the regimes looked stable and strong enough to last 100 years. Then, suddenly it seemed, people lost their fear of the government and began to go and protest in the street. And within a very short time, regimes that looked to be set for the ages were gone. While this process was going on, some people thought that they could stop or reverse it, but they couldn’t. The factors driving the process was irreversible.

(In the next installment, we will look more specifically at the historical turning point that we are now living through).

(Whenever the solution is always the same, you have stopped thinking)

For those looking for answers as to why the U.S. has arrived at the political polarization point that it has, one could do worse than look at intellectual bankruptcy as a leading cause. There can little doubt that since at least the end of the 1980’s, the U.S. has been seriously misgoverned. Policy has been unimaginative. Failure and mediocrity have become entrenched (think education), the Federal Reserve has inflated two financial bubbles (the jury is still out on whether we are in a 3^rd one), bad actors who caused the financial crisis have been bailed out while the middle-class taxpayer has been left holding the bag, a botched health reform bill, bureaucratic abuse has run rampant and often nobody is even indicted, let alone convicted. All of this has culminated in the election of Donald Trump, an act that has left the same people who brought us the mess above scratching their heads as to why anyone would choose that guy.

Usually mis-government has intellectual bankruptcy as one of its culprits, and this case is no exception. The world has changed radically over the last 30 years. You can’t go to work without computer skills. The internet has allowed us to have constant entertainment, personalized to each individual. We can watch news events happen nearly live on T.V., our phone, our computer, etc.; something unimaginable in 1987. The world moves faster. Changes that might have taken 50 years in an earlier time period now takes 5 years. And yet, our thinking about problems has remained the same as it was 40 years ago.

On the right, economic policy can be boiled to two concepts: Fewer regulations & tax cuts. The right as it currently exists (or at least as it existed up until Donald Trump) simply kept touting Ronald Reagan’s policies that tax cuts would cure all economic woes (and add revenue to the government coffers to boot). While this is not as insane as it sounds, Reagan’s tax cuts did spur some economic growth and increased tax revenues, Reagan was operating under unique political-economic conditions which allowed for that state of affairs. That won’t happen under all economic conditions, and yet the right has been happy to parrot that for the last generation as some sort of cure all.

On the left, getting the government involved is the solution to every problem. In this view, problems can just be legislated (or regulated) away by decree. Over the last 80 years, the left has essentially been touting an expansion of FDR’s policies. Whatever the problem is, government is the solution. Missing in this worldview is any appreciation for the inertia and inefficiency inherent in all large organizations. A large organization is often not an efficient or effective organization. While government has produced some good, where it is most effective is where there is a blindingly obvious need that people can see with their own eyes, and there simply isn’t another organization capable of intervening. Under most other conditions, government is often slow and ineffective. But just as the right views less regulation & tax cuts as some sort of cure all, the left views government spending and regulation as the same thing.

The result of this simplistic thinking is that the two sides have learned to stop thinking and start hate each other. The left views the right’s attempts (more in rhetoric than in practice) of cutting government spending and regulations as a heartless attempt to hurt people or leave them twisting in the wind, and the right views the left’s love of government command and control solutions as a secretly harbored totalitarian desire to rule over people. These hardened perceptions aren’t helped by media (including august outlets like the New York Times (last endorsed a Republican for President in 1956) and the Washington Post (has never endorsed a Republican for President since its founding in 1877)) who act as if one political party has all of the answers on everything and the other party is wrong about nearly everything.

Consequently, our political class has provided us pre-packaged solutions to everything. Whatever problem pops up, the solutions proposed are largely the same (with some modifications for the unique circumstances under which the reform is being proposed).

Contrast this with real life. We make decisions everyday at home or at work in which a solution is accompanied by a problem in the manner of trade-off. Sometime we may need to spend more on X. Sometimes we need to spend less on X, and more on Y. As our situation changes, we change. Sometimes, we even do the opposite of what we did before. We don’t blindly continue on doing the same thing when our situation has changed to where the previous practice is no longer appropriate. That is how life works. But the political class (and the media outlets) would have you believe that the solution is simple with no-tradeoffs, ever. And also that once you start spending on something, you can never reduce it even though it is no longer relevant to the current situation.

A final sign of intellectual bankruptcy is the following. In 2028, if the United State survives that long, there will be an election for President.

1.)    We don’t know who the candidates will be.

2.)    We don’t know how the world will look geo-politically at that time.

3.)    We don’t know the economic challenges that we will be facing.

4.)    We don’t know what the big issues of the day will be that will have captured everyone’s attention.

5.)    But we do know that the Washington Post and The New York Times will be endorsing the Democrat for President.

6.)    And we know that Rush Limbaugh (if he is still around) will be endorsing the Republican candidate.

This is NOT the characteristic of an intellectually vibrant society. It IS the characteristic of a politically polarized society. Which is what we have today.

With the election of Donald Trump, the election in France which brought an independent to power, Brexit, and other movements, it is becoming increasingly clear that something in the West has shifted. While I suspect that it will take decades to fully understand the epoch that we are currently living through, some of the political fights indicate that at least part of the problem may be that a segment of the Western political class has forgotten the purpose of government. This matters, because government, by setting the conditions under which an economy and a society conducts itself, is key to whether a country is ultimately stable (without which broad economic prosperity among the population cannot be achieved). Although the political-economic fights of the last 70 years or so have focused on policy minutia (this tax rate vs that one, more/less social welfare spending, more/less environmental regulation, more/less defense spending, more/less education spending), the rising dissatisfaction with the political class seems to be generated in part by a lack of fundamental understanding of government’s purpose.

Although governments have grown more sophisticated over thousands of years, the real purpose of a government has not changed since that time when three groups of cavemen from different caves came together and formed a crude governing unit. Specifically, these individuals concluded that they would be better able to fend off attacks from other groups of cavemen (and the occasional saber-toothed tiger) if they came together as one. They agreed to cede some of their sovereignty in exchange for a promise of help from the other groups in the event that they were attacked (either by outside groups, or by a member of their own group). In exchange for this promise of help, the governing unit was promised loyalty from all of the individuals. Although governments have become more and more sophisticated and societies have become more and more complex, this promise of protection is still the bedrock upon which the states’ claim on the loyalty of its citizens rests. This “Protection In Exchange For Loyalty” deal exists whether the government is monarchical, oligarchical, tribal, feudal, fascist, communist, socialist, democratic or republican (or anything else).

Today in the West, many in government appear to have forgotten this simple fact. While those that argue for border security, travel pauses (known to some as travel bans), deportations, and other restrictions are depicted as morally reprehensible, these people are doing nothing more than demand that their government stand up for them against people who are not citizens. Immigration, legal or otherwise, imposes costs (and benefits) on a society. While a government may decide that a certain immigration policy is best for the country as a whole (for a whole variety of political-economic reasons), changing situations over time will dictate that an immigration policy be loosened or tightened.

Today, many in the elite appear to be taking the position that keeping foreign immigrants out is an immoral act and should be condemned. There is no doubt that the importation of Muslim immigrants into Western societies has created a method by which terrorism has been imported, even if not all Muslims are supporters of the terrorists. And yet, the response to this terror by Western governments has been to mouth platitudes about not giving into hate, condemning those calling for a more robust response (including halting immigration from certain areas) and deportations, and then ignoring things until the next attack. The assertion that the West is just going to have to learn to live with terrorism is an admission that the political class, as it currently exists, has no real intention of seriously performing its duty.

Which is to say, the governments in the West, and the governing class as a whole, are losing legitimacy. The underlying social contract of all governments (protection for loyalty) is being violated by certain parts of the political establishment and the political class. Unless they rediscover the loyalty that they owe as the governing class to their own citizens (and I fear that time may be growing short on this), politics in the West will become more and more unstable, and will eventually become revolutionary as citizens shift their loyalty to a movement or governing structure that will stand up for them.

Revolutions, by their nature, are unstable. And this is not good for safety, or economic prosperity.

With the federal bureaucracy and the much of the media in seeming revolt against and working actively to thwart or nullify the outcome of a Presidential election, it is worth looking at what tends to cause political revolutions. Political revolutions/Secession (or civil war outbreaks) occur under many circumstances. They may be peaceful, such as the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe in 1989. Or they may be violent, such as the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in Cuba. Likewise, a divorce of a country may be peaceful, such as when Czechoslovakia peacefully broke up into two countries (The Czech Republic and Slovakia). Or it can be violent, such as the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

But one factor that must be present anywhere for a revolution to occur is that the political legitimacy of the government (and its institutions) must be called into question and denied by a significant fraction of the population. Often, governmental legitimacy (generally accepted right to make the rules that govern society) is taken for granted. In fact, governments that lose legitimacy and are toppled often don’t seem to realize that they are losing legitimacy right up until the moment that the mob storms the palace. In the late 1980’s, everyone assumed that the Soviet Union would be a permanent fixture on the geopolitical landscape, and yet in the space of 1 congressional election cycle, it was gone. Political legitimacy can be easy to take for granted. But once it is gone, there is almost no way to get it back.

So, what causes a government to lose legitimacy? Ultimately, it occurs when the government fails to perform on some basic function of the implied social contract. Although revolutions may claim that they are “fighting for freedom” against an illegitimate government, governments that are dictatorial can be quiet stable and legitimate despite their lack of freedom. People might go out into the street yelling about freedom of the press, but the press might not have been free for 50 years. The people didn’t just wake up one day and realize, “Dang, the press really isn’t free. We ought to do something about this”. No, the government was considered legitimate even though it squelched press freedom, because it had an implicit agreement with the population that allowed it to do so. In other words, we get to control the press, as long as we also do X. It is when it fails to do X (or X, Y, and Z) that it loses legitimacy and then faces the prospect of being overthrown by the population.

So the question is whether the U.S. government losing legitimacy. By this I don’t mean specifically the Democrat or Republican Parties. I mean is the EPA, the IRS, the VA, the Treasury, etc; the organizations that make up the government and are staffed by the same people no matter whether the R’s or the D’s are in power.

I think the answer is absolutely yes. The election of Donald Trump itself is an indication of a massive loss government legitimacy. People like Donald Trump don’t get elected (or even run competitively in a losing effort) in countries with high levels of institutional legitimacy and trust. (Note that we are seeing a crisis of legitimacy across the Western world with the current President of France not belonging to either of the major parties, Brexit, the fact that the next Prime Minister of Italy might end up being a comedian, etc.). So what is it in America that has caused the government to lose legitimacy? I believe that there are several factors.

1.)    Lack of border security.

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to “build a wall”. Border security has been an issue in the United States for at least 20 years at some level. Controlling borders and protecting the population from outside threats is the first source of legitimacy of any government, whether familial, tribal, monarchical, feudal, fascistic, communistic, oligarchy, democratic or any other form of government that one might dream up. Governments were first formed as a method to better provide protection to the members, citizens, subjects, etc. But for the last 20 years (at least) the U.S. government hasn’t really seemed too interested in controlling the border. It has treated those who want the border controlled as a nuisance, or as a bad, horrible people for wanting that. Concerns over illegal immigration (or illegal immigrant crime) have been scoffed at, dismissed, ignored, or condemned, by people who likely aren’t personally impacted by the costs. And note that it isn’t that these people are demanding new laws; they are demanding that existing laws be enforced.

This policy of non-enforcement isn’t cost free. People who are here illegally end up in waiting rooms in hospitals. They end up in schools. They end up competing for jobs. And they end up committing crimes. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the first 3 on that list; things which don’t make the illegal immigrant a bad person, citizens do bear the cost of this through higher taxes, longer waiting times to see a doctor, and in some cases having to accept a lower wage and some economic insecurity, and in some cases being the victims of a crime; all things that the law says that they shouldn’t have to. Given that the government doesn’t seem willing to stand up for these citizen’s, it loses legitimacy.

2.)    De-industrialization of America.

Over the last 50 years, many parts of America have seen jobs shipped off-shore and nothing comparable has taken their place. This has in part been caused by free-trade agreements as well as increased environmental regulation. And note that the trends in these area is towards freer trade and more environmental regulation. This is not to argue for or against the overall desirability of such things; it is only to say that while support for free trade and environmental regulation might make people in Silicon Valley and Berkeley, California feel good about themselves, the costs of these policies are economic disruption and downward mobility in the lives of other people.

3.)    Lack of visible government spending & anti-tax sentiment.

Although taxes are not popular with anyone, history has shown that people are willing to pay taxes if they see some benefit to it. And by “see some benefit” I don’t mean intellectually knowing that government spends on the military, schools, roads, welfare, Social Security, etc., I mean that they see some benefit in their day to day lives.  For large areas of the country, they don’t see any benefit. While there are reasons for this, the primary one being a Supreme Court ruling in the 1960’s stripped rural areas of their political power, the fact is that government spending has largely ignored rural and small town America for nearly half a century. So the sense is that the government taxes me and I see no benefit is very real.

4.)    Government malfeasance with no real consequences.

The IRS denying the rights of conservative Tea Party groups to participate in the political process with nobody being held responsible. The VA delaying services to veterans, lying about it, falsifying records, and nobody being held responsible. A judge overturning an executive order of a President, while implying that the same order would acceptable coming from another President. These and other situation contribute to the sense that government doesn’t function, that some people are above the law, and that rules are not applied equally.

Perfect justice doesn’t exist in this world, and countries can go on and be stable in the presence of some injustice as long as they are doing other things correctly. For example, the Chinese Communist government has essentially made the deal that it can have the monopoly on power and use political repression as long as it delivers economic growth and prosperity. So far, it has worked out.

However, in the case of the U.S., the list of grievances above are hitting a lot of the same people. These people are being taxed while seeing little benefit, their views and ability to participate in the political process are illegally squelched and nobody is held accountable, their government won’t enforce laws that protect them from foreigners and won’t initiate laws to try and protect their jobs. In short, the law, in many ways, simply won’t protect them. They can participate in elections, get laws that they want passed, they can get their man elected, but still watch the permanent government try and thwart him in pursuing an agenda that will make their lives better. In short, you and people like you have no right to government, even when you win elections. This is behavior that delegitimizes a government.

While such a government can remain somewhat stable and broadly legitimate when it treats say, 10% of its population like this (think the Coptic Christians in Egypt), it cannot remain stable when it treats 40% of its population this way. And it REALLY can’t remain stable when that 40% is armed. People pay taxes and follow rules, even those that are to their disadvantage, because they see the people and the processes that make and enforce the rules as legitimate. If a large fraction of America ceases to see the government as legitimate, they will cease following rules that don’t benefit them and there is not enough enforcement to make them comply (think speed limits).

The government has been behaving in ways that destroy its legitimacy for some time now. Without a radical change in how it operates, the types of conditions that lead to revolution or secession will become more and more acute.