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Good Friday Morning! Leave it to the President to drop an important announcement the night before I send out this newsletter. 7 pm Thursday evening, South Korea announced at the White House that President Trump was accepting an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. If you missed that, you can watch the announcement here. I have a column coming out today with the Conservative Institute about that story. I’ll cover a little bit of that analysis here. I’ve also written a more extended essay/response to a column in the Washington Post about why now is a good time for the US to try socialism. Links follow.
New this week at the Conservative Institute
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A New Axis of Evil is Threatening America
Depending on your age, you may or may not remember President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech where he laid out the “axis of evil” in the world. It consisted of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And while Iraq as a state actor is no longer a threat, Iran and North Korea remain. They’ve combined with Russia to create a new axis of evil that tries to remove US influence from the world stage.
Cancel The Tariffs and End Crony Capitalism
In this piece, I lay out my general argument against President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. In a general sense these amount to taxes on the economy that will end up hurting American workers. Furthermore, we’ve already tried tariffs on these same resources from 2002 – 2003. It was a failure then too.
The North Korean Problem Returns
As I mentioned above, I have a full-scale column coming out today. Look for that on the Conservative Institute’s website; they usually publish my pieces by the afternoon.
Part of the reason I think North Korea wants negotiations now is that the sanctions are working, as is our pressure on China. The Wall Street Journal did an in-depth look at how sanctions were impacting North Korea: “China, Finally, Clamps Down on North Korea Trade—And the Impact Is Stinging.”
A quick summary of the impacts: China has restricted trade with North Korea, which threatens to send the North Korean economy into a deep recession. The food supply is also shrinking, which threatens to send North Korea back to a 1990’s famine situation. Combine all of that with the Kim regime’s dwindling hard cash reserves, and you get favorable conditions for convincing North Korea to negotiate.
One of the sources I quote and rely on for my column is Nicholas Eberstadt’s excellent essay in Commentary Magazine, “The Method in North Korea’s Madness: A monstrous regime’s rational statecraft.” He thoroughly explains how North Korea has survived as long as it has, and how the Kim regime has kept its nuclear ambitions. The entire piece is excellent, but it’s helpful to know the following passages:
Kim Jong Il’s North Korea was trapped in deepening depression for most of the 1990s. We will know how close the place came to total economic collapse—to the sort of breakdown of the national division of labor that Germany and Japan suffered at the very end of World War II—only when the archives in Pyongyang are finally opened. Throughout the 1990s, in any case, heavy industry was largely shut down, with inescapable consequences for conventional military forces. The death spiral for the war-making sector redoubled the importance to the regime of the nuke and missile programs, both as an insurance policy for regime survival and as the last viable military instruments for forcing the South into capitulation in some future unconditional unification.
In retrospect, it is clear that Pyongyang had no intention of desisting from its quest for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, even as it played Washington and her allies for aid for years by pretending its nuclear program might be negotiable. Yet also in retrospect, the slow tempo of nuke and missile development under Kim Jong Il’s rule has to be considered a surprise. Any serious weapons program requires testing to advance—yet Pyongyang managed just one long-range missile launch in the 1990s and only three during his 17-year reign. The Dear Leader also oversaw two nuclear tests before his death in 2011—but only toward the end of his tenure, in the years 2006 and 2009.
Why this hesitant tempo if nukes and missiles were a central priority for the North Korean war economy? Although other possible explanations come to mind, the obvious one has to do with financial and economic constraints. Ironically, despite his vaunted “military-first politics,” North Korea’s nuke and missile programs may also have been inadvertent casualties of Kim Jong Il’s gift for stupendous economic mismanagement. (True, North Korea could undertake expensive nuclear projects internationally, such as the undeclared plutonium reactor in Syria that was nearing completion when the Israelis leveled it in 2007—but that was apparently a cash-and-carry operation, bankrolled by the Dear Leader’s friendly customers in Iran.) …
North Korea appears to have turned the economic corner not on the strength of new or better domestic economic policies, but rather on breakthroughs in international aid procurement. Pyongyang figured out how to work the West’s international food-aid system: Between 1997 and 2005, the year before its first nuclear test, it was bringing in an average of over a million tons of free foreign cereal each year, ending the food crisis. It is tempting to regard this as “military-first politics” in action, for military menace played an important role in the international community’s solicitude. It is impossible to imagine a helpless and stricken sub-Saharan population obtaining “temporary emergency humanitarian aid” on such a scale, for such an extended duration and with so very few conditions attached.
Central to this upswing in food aid and other freebies from abroad was the fact that North Korea got lucky with the alignment of governments in Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo. For a while, the leaders of this consortium of states were commonly willing to underwrite an exploratory policy of “sunshine” or “engagement” with the Dear Leader by offering him subventions and financial transfers. To secure his June 2000 Pyongyang Summit with the Dear Leader, for example, South Korea’s then-president had hundreds of millions of dollars secretly wired to special North Korean accounts—thereby committing crimes under South Korean law (for which he later issued pardons).
In the event, the “sunshine”-aid influx that may have rescued North Korea at its darkest moment would wane after its clandestine uranium-processing project surfaced in 2002—but the nuclear crisis that revelation triggered also made possible the next big round of North Korean international aid-harvesting.
After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Beijing—alarmed by the possibility that the U.S. might also engage in a similar military confrontation with neighboring North Korea—organized and convened a “six-party talks” diplomatic process, ostensibly for deliberations over North Korean denuclearization, to cool things down. While the subsequent years of talking quite predictably led nowhere, North Korea’s price of attendance was apparently a steep increase in economic support from China.
It’s important to note the two things that have kept North Korea afloat: the ability to manipulate money and resources out of China, and the aid they’ve received from the West. The sanctions and pressure pushed by the Trump administration directly hit these main areas.
But, and this is a big but, North Korea likely believes it can wiggle out of these sanctions, as it has in the past, by making fake promises and getting free aid and money from South Korea and others. Letting them escape from these negotiations would be a mistake.
I don’t know how Trump can corner them into an agreement that gets rid of their nuclear ambitions, but he has to accomplish something better than the previous administrations. Both for the security of Asia, and to send a message to Iran that they’re next.
We Have Tried Socialism – A Response to Elizabeth Bruenig
A note: This essay will get expanded a bit more and flexed out into its place on the site. As part of her responses to others, she’s raised some reactions that bear mentioning below. One of which is the overall moral case of socialism vs. capitalism. I haven’t fleshed that out yet.
Elizabeth Bruenig is one of the better columnists for the Washington Post. She wrote a column recently, “It’s time to give socialism a try,” that set the Twitter mobs afire – which admittedly, takes very little. She’s a self-avowed Christian socialist, which means she and I are going to disagree about nearly everything on the solutions front, though not on some of the critiques of society, as I’ll get into below.
The central critique I have with the overall piece is that if a person takes every single every single criticism, she has of capitalism, both generally and the US-specific version, as true, do those criticisms amount to enough to replace our entire economic system completely? I don’t think so.
The image I have in my head is of Lady Justice, blindfolded, balancing the scales of justice, except this time she measures capitalism vs. socialism. I’d wager if you took the full weight of her argument, accepted it as true, and then weighted it against what I’d call the intrinsic defects of socialism, you’d still choose a capitalist society. The flaws of socialism outweigh the deficiencies of capitalism to such an extent that they make our flawed Trump-era seem utopian in comparison.
Her first criticism focuses on modern liberalism, not progressivism. This critique has merit, and her division of liberalism and progressivism is also correct:
In the United States, we’ve arrived at a pair of mutually exclusive convictions: that liberal, capitalist democracies are guaranteed by their nature to succeed and that in our Trumpist moment they seem to be failing in deeply unsettling ways. For liberals — and by this I mean inheritors of the long liberal tradition, not specifically those who might also be called progressives — efforts to square these two notions have typically combined expressions of high anxiety with reassurances that, if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright.
Hanging on and hoping for the best is certainly one approach to rescuing the best of liberalism from its discontents, but my answer is admittedly more ambitious: It’s time to give socialism a try.
Contemporary supporters of liberalism are often subject, I think, to what I call “everyday Fukuyama-ism” — the idea, explicitly stated or not, that the end of the Cold War really signaled the end of history, and that we can only look forward to the unceasing rise of Western-style liberal-democratic capitalism. (As the leftist scholar Mark Fisher recounted: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”) This assumption is reflected in the blindsided, startled unease of liberals in the era of President Trump: “There are moments when everything I have come to believe in — reasoned deliberation, mutual toleration, liberal democracy, free speech, honesty, decency, and moderation — seem as if they are in eclipse,” Andrew Sullivan recently lamented in New York magazine. “For the foreseeable future, nationalism is likely to remain a defining political force,” Yascha Mounk fretted this weekend in the New York Times; “liberals should strive to make nationalism as inclusive as possible,” he warned.
On this point, especially the “everyday Fukuyama-ism,” we agree. I’d extend that critique over to the right, where I reside.
To understand what she’s saying there, it might help to know a bit more about Francis Fukuyama’s theory. He is famous for his essay and book of the same title: “End of History and the Last of Man.” Primarily, he believed that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the final evolution of humanity and government:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
His view got accepted throughout the political science field, especially among liberals. His theory is relevant because it directly contradicts Karl Marx, who also believed in stages of history. Marx thought that capitalism was the pre-cursor communism, as the final evolution of human government.
Marx argued capitalism would burn itself out, and once we entered late-stage capitalism, people would revolt according to class and form a communist society (he asserted all of this on a scientific basis). Fukuyama took the position that the fall of the USSR put the final nail in the coffin of Marx’s stages of history.
But what Fukuyama, and others like him, argued was that the West’s version of democratic-capitalism represented the new final evolution of history. And the rest of human history would be an upward trek that further realized this concept.
On this front, I think Bruenig is correct, both about liberalism, and I’d argue it’s also true for some conservatives. They believed they had achieved final victory over all forms of tyranny and that all that mattered now was tweaking public policy, like fine-tuning a car. The election of Donald Trump, the rise of far left and right groups across Europe, and the new communist dictatorship re-emerging in China does enormous damage to the idea we’re at the end of history. And, ironically enough, Fukuyama echoed some of this in an interview last year.
Where I differ, not with Bruenig but with the thinkers above, is that I don’t buy the linear view of history above. I tend to follow a more classic approach where things are circular (anacyclosis), or history is full of ebbs and flows. And I think this is true whether or not you believe in a Christian worldview with God at the center of everything.
In Christianity, God calls Himself the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. No matter what position you are in time, there is God at the centrality of it all. Genesis tells us, in the beginning, God. And at the end, it’s the same: God. If you drew that as a straight line, you’d end up right back where you started, the Creator of the universe who is unchanging. All of human history stretched across a timeline that still begins and ends with God, who is also active everywhere else along that timeline.
In a secular sense, it doesn’t make any sense to assert an end to all human government. If you take evolutionary theory seriously, you know things evolve because of unexpected changes in an environment. Neither Marx, Hegel, Fukuyama, or anyone can predict what changes would have to occur to trigger the next stage of human government. In 500 years, techno-police states could be all the rage where all modern morality gets wholly flipped.
In short, utopia isn’t coming. It’s not coming in the form of Marx’s communist paradise or Fukuyama’s liberal future. They can’t predict what the next stage of evolution will become. And as we’ve seen plenty since Marx, a class is but one means people use to identify themselves. The odds of that one classification being the primary identifier for all revolutionaries is zero.
All of that is a digression from Bruenig’s column. Where we agree is that liberals put too much faith in the inevitability of their future, and are shocked to see things crumbling around them (incidentally, liberals made the same mistake in electoral politics, as Sean Trende pointed out). Which brings us to her critique of capitalism and her solution of socialism:
I don’t think business-as-usual but better is enough to fix what’s broken here. I think the problem lies at the root of the thing, with capitalism itself.
In fact, both Sullivan’s and Mounk’s complaints — that Americans appear to be isolated, viciously competitive, suspicious of one another and spiritually shallow; and that we are anxiously looking for some kind of attachment to something real and profound in an age of decreasing trust and regard — seem to be emblematic of capitalism, which encourages and requires fierce individualism, self-interested disregard for the other, and resentment of arrangements into which one deposits more than he or she withdraws. (As a business-savvy friend once remarked: Nobody gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they’re doing.) Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.
That capitalism is inimical to the best of liberalism isn’t a new concern: It’s a long-standing critique, present in early socialist thought. That both capitalism and liberal governance have changed since those days without displacing the criticism suggests that it’s true in a foundational way.
Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist, I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.
And here is where I’d restate my criticism above: presume, for the sake of argument, her entire critique of capitalism is true, is that enough to remake the US into a socialist country? I’d argue no, and I’d say the criticism she lays out on capitalism is far more descriptive of what happens in a socialist state.
Note here; I’m not saying Bruenig is calling for a return of Lenin or Stalin. What I’m saying is that there are problems of socialism, predating even Marx, which is endemic to the entire project. Take any socialist nation that’s ever existed, the individual is erased and becomes an economic unit that exists for the sole purpose of preserving of the state. The state determines everything you do, everything you are, everything on behalf of the betterment of the government.
Alienation does exist in capitalism, it’s true. But in that capitalist system, you own your work, labor, and time. It is yours to do what you want. Also, capitalist systems have proven they’re capable of creating and sustaining communities that provide everything capitalism lacks. Whereas under socialism, you can’t have those things because everything is centralized.
Plato and Polybius observed that a state could take three basic forms, with good and bad versions. There’s the rule of one, the rule of a few, and the rule of the many. The good forms of these are monarchs, aristocracies, and democracies. The bad forms are despots, oligarchy, and mob rule. Over time, they observed, it was inevitable for any good form of government to devolve into the bad.
Capitalism and socialism can get overlayed onto any of those types of governments. And what we’ve seen, time and time again is that capitalists that free their economies are better than socialism under any of those types of governments. And if Donald Trump is one of the worst versions of capitalism that can exist, the worse versions of socialism make him look like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
The drive towards socialism infects humanity in a way that amplifies the very worst impulses of humanity, whether its a king, republic, or democracy. Socialist kings become dictators. Socialist republics look like politburos. And socialist democracies trample on minorities in horrific ways (see any write-up of the French Revolution and how they tortured and murder people).
I want to return real quick and highlight Bruenig’s solutions:
Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist, I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.
What she’s saying here is a democracy should choose how these things happen. But we’re presuming these solutions come from a benevolent form of democracy and not mob rule. Take one look around you right now, at the world today, especially the rising forces of populism, and ask yourself if these people can be trusted to kindly and gently decide how to take capital and property from one person, and divest to everyone else?
If you say no to this populist movement, then you’re back at square one, depending on a time when the populace is “good” to a point where they correctly enact socialism. I’d wager that time never comes.
Which is why I don’t see a need to implement socialism. We have tried it. It’s failed. But when we’ve attached capitalism to the institutions of federalism, we’ve unlocked more economic potential in 200 years than all the other forms of government combined, and obliterated socialism at every turn.
I agree with Bruenig and can understand why certain liberals see Donald Trump and modern populism as a sign society is seriously off-track. I don’t admit that we’re so far gone that it means we need to jettison the entire project. In fact, I’d argue freeing things up more and strengthening our federalist institutions would fix the country more than socialism.
Best links of the week
The Autumn of the Oscars – Ross Douthat, The New York Times
You Can Be Pro-Life and Pro-Woman – Natalie Goodnow and Bobbie Ragsdale, Kennedy School Review
The Gun Control Fight Is a Fight For Equality – Sarah Jaffe, The New Republic
Trumpism Is a Psychology, Not an Ideology – Jonah Goldberg, National Review
Parkland kids can protest, but they don’t know what they are talking about – Jonah Goldberg, USA Today
The Quiet Radicalization of the Democratic Party – Noah C. Rothman, Commentary Magazine
EXCLUSIVE: Meet the Conservative Parkland Massacre Survivor the Media Has Largely Ignored – Guy Benson, Townhall.com
Did Lax Obama-Era School-Discipline Policies Enable the Parkland Shooter? – David French, National Review
How to Defeat Populism – Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review
We’re All Fascists Now – Bari Weiss, The New York Times
Millennial Women and Marriage – Jennifer Murff, The Institute for Family Studies
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
The Romance of Ordinary Marriage – Nathaniel Blake, Public Discourse
Satire piece of the week
Good news, comics fans! Marvel is stepping up for diversity in a major way. From now on, whenever Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk, he’ll briefly turn into a Honduran man first.
Finally! It’s about time we had a superhero be Honduran for a few seconds before changing into someone else.
Marvel says its goal is to improve representation in comics by having more characters that are minorities for short periods of time. “America is a diverse melting pot, so it only makes sense to have superheroes that occasionally aren’t white for a bit,” said Editor-In-Chief C.B. Cebulski. “We’re excited to tell stories from fresh perspectives, like that of a Honduran man who turns into the Hulk just moments after Bruce Banner had turned into him.”
Thanks for reading!