Imagining Victory (with Noah Smith)

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Welcome to BED to DIFFER, the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charron syndicated columnist and policy editable work and I’m joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal Linda Chavez of Venice scanning center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Noah’s Smith, who also has a substack newsletter. His is called no opinion.

Nice little pun. So welcome to one and all we narrowly avoided, it seems a really damaging rail strike. It looked until Thursday morning as if that was a real possibility for the first time in thirty years. So credit to president Biden for you know, working the phones and seemingly averting that. What would have been, I think, it’s safe to say, pretty much a disaster for the economy if it had lasted any length of time.

So that frees us up to turn our attention abroad and to Ukraine, and their fabulous breakthrough. They did a counter offensive, cranian army east of Karkiv, and also made progress in the south towards Kersong. And gave hope and a glimmer of optimism to freedom loving people around the world Noah Smith, I’m going to start with you. You had a long post about this, and I’d like you to just set the stage of why you believe this war is important for liberalism and the free world?

Well, I mean, The main reason is just that in a liberal world, countries do not invade and try to conquer other countries. That is just not a thing that you can do. We’ve had since World War two, this norm of fixed borders, and that replaced the older idea of imperialism where the best empires should rule the territory because that’s to the benefit of the world. That was, you know, the idea a lot of people promulgated. After World War two, it said no, people should rule themselves.

If people want to be a country, they should be a country with borders that you’re not allowed to cross and that small nations should in many respects have rights equal to those are large nations, and that became the foundation of the post war liberal order, the the order we now call liberal. And that has been extremely effective at preventing the extremely damaging interstate wars that culminated with World War two Now it’s increasingly starting to happen again. We’ve seen some, you know, conquests. We’ve seen Azerbaijan and Armenia. But now the really big one is Russia trying to conquer Ukraine.

That’s a huge old style conquest and it really overturns. The post World War two order, and so it’s really good that it’s being beaten back.

Bill Galston, president Biden deserves a lot of credit. For his management of this matter. Don’t you agree? I mean, the he’s kept the alliance together. There were some cracks.

Of course, he has managed to get bipartisan approval for massive arms shipments to Ukraine He’s done incredibly well, I would say, and I wonder if you agree, except at the rhetorical level. He’s failed on the poetry, you know, of this moment, though he’s been very good on the prose. What do you say to that?

Mario Cuomo wants said that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose — Mhmm. — I think that wasn’t entirely right. Mhmm. I agree with you that there’s a prose component to governing as well. And that’s simply not this president’s strong suit despite the fact that the theme of this war is sciestly the theme that he’s been emphasizing in all of his foreign policy campaign speeches and also a series of speeches as president.

That said, I think for the present, there is no evidence that the American people are suffering from Ukraine. Fatigue, OkonTreyr, a very recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that even when the respondents were warned about higher fuel prices and other possible negative consequences from the war and Americans continuing support of it they were unmoved. And you had seven and ten saying, let’s keep on going. So at this point, you don’t need a lot of rhetoric to rally at least the civilian troops. I will also say that for the beleaguered multilateralist to form the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

The wisdom of working with allies, I think, has been amply demonstrated in this conflict. And there’s no reason to believe that this multilateral formula can’t apply equally well to the looming contests in East Asia. Where the administration has been very actively forming multilateral organizations to try to ring China and limit its ambitions.

And as general Mark Hertling commented on the Boart podcast this week, part of that multilateralism is that we have been working with the Ukrainian Army for many years, helping them with training and organization and so forth tactics strategy. And of course, it’s been leaked in recent weeks that the US has been very actively involved in giving them intelligence and whatnot. But, you know, we cooperate with a lot of military terries around the world, you never know when that’s going to be important, and it turned out to be incredibly valuable in the case of Ukraine, helping them to modernize their military. Damon so a few weeks back, we had Eric Adelman on, and we were talking about the challenges that this conflict places on our own domestic production of weapons. I mean, he would say, you know, we’re we’re running up against limits on our own capacity to produce things like javelins and so forth.

I mean, there’s only so much time and there’s only so many factories that can do it and so forth. But it’s also the case that we’ve been learning that as much as we have our constraints, the constraints that Russia has you know, just dwarf anything that we would need to worry about. I mean, they are really hard up against it. I mean, they have a manpower shortage. They have a material shortage.

Now we heard again these things have been leaked, but no reason disbelieve that they are shopping for arms from North Korea and Iran, China is not selling them arms because they don’t want to run afoul of the sanctions regime. So the Russians have a lot of problems.

They certainly do, and it’s certainly showing up on the battle field. It it really is a remarkable development. I mean, heading into this war, I don’t know who to blame other than myself, But, yeah, I I pretty much assumed that Russia would accomplish its goals on the battlefield here pretty quickly. That they were clearly much more powerful than the Ukrainians, and this would be over rather rather swiftly and with the rush victory and not only did that not happen, it’s dragged on for considerably longer than people at tended to anticipate now about eight months, and we finally have seen the decisive breakthrough that very well could lead to a Russian defeat. Now that obviously hasn’t happened yet.

Let’s see how far the Ukrainians can go. But the idea that a year ago if someone had come to me and said, by the way, Russia’s gonna invade Ukraine and Ukraine’s gonna win I would have said to you, what are you smoking? That’s that’s crazy. That that that’s that’s impossible. How could that happen?

And of course, Ukraine almost certainly would not have been able to do that without a tremendous amount of military help from the United States and NATO in general. So, you know, pat ourselves on the back for standing ground and helping them do it. But they did it. It’s their country. A Zelensky stayed in Kiev when there was, you know, all all kinds of reasons to get out and protect himself.

He could probably try to be general de Gaulle, you know, sending messages from Poland or somewhere else within the alliance try to buck up people’s spirits, but he stayed, risked his own life and livelihood. And the result has been breathtaking. Really, really impressive. And as for Russia, I’ll come back in my highlight of the week to something for people to to ponder along these lines. So I don’t wanna give away everything right now, but the extent to which Russia could be vulnerable goes well beyond, I think, what most analysts thought possibly a year ago.

You know, Russia’s a a big unwieldy place and it’s held together by as much as anything the threat of Russian military power emanating from Moscow. And the idea that that has first of all, been shown to be hollow even in the best of cases, namely before the war started. But that when this does finally, seemingly grind to a halt sooner rather than later with potentially a Russian defeat What is Russia gonna be left with exactly if some areas within the Russian Federation or on its periphery decide to flex their muscles? And try for more autonomy. Will Moscow be able to keep it altogether?

That’s an open question in a way that I, again, I don’t think a lot of people thought were was gonna be on the table for for consideration a year ago, and I certainly didn’t think it would be an issue.

Linda, there’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that Putin’s regime, while it’s similar to previous you know, authoritarian Russian regimes, whether they be czars or general secretaries, it’s different in that there really isn’t any source or locust of power outside of Putin himself. I mean, as Ann Applebaum pointed out in the Atlantic, at least in the USSR, you knew that the the leader could be deposed, for example, by the Polish bureau. But there’s no pullet bureau now. There’s nothing. I mean, so we don’t really even know how his fall from grace or from power could actually happen.

But at the same time, I’m kind of wondering, does it absolutely have to be the case that if he loses a war, he has to lose power. I mean, it happens. You know, people lose wars. And what do you think? Well, I don’t think we

know the answer to that question. We do know that we’re seeing people speak out. There were forty or more local officials who signed a two sentence letter this week at the beginning of the week to Putin basically saying he needed to step down. Now we don’t know what’s gonna happen to those folks. We know that some of the oligarchs who’ve spoken out against Putin have ended up falling from balconies going through windows having sudden heart attacks or heart

attacks? There’s a really serious balcony problem in Russia.

Yes, ma’am. Okay. Shadi, Washington, or something. I don’t know. But, you know, it’s so we don’t know what’s gonna happen.

I think it’s fair to say. But I also want to just issue with just a word of caution. Is somebody who very much supports what the United States is done in Ukraine and and actually would have called for more early during the war. We have had a nice balance of providing them the weapons they need. And those weapons, by the way, played a crucial role in essentially taking back in a matter of days what it took Russia months to be able to get control of.

So this is really stunning. But as with all wars. We don’t know what the next chapter is gonna be. We don’t know whether pushed into a corner like a rat Putin is gonna decide to go even, you know, nastier than he has so far. You know, we haven’t heard him talking too much about nuclear weapons recently, but he did say that some of the weapons that we’re talking about giving to Ukraine have provided to Ukraine long range missiles that could strike inside of Russian territory.

For example, are a red line for him. And so who knows what he’s going to do next? It’s not clear to me that you’re going to see him toppled even if he loses this war. But one thing is sure. We’re going into a rough period of the year.

We’re going into winter. And winters are hard and they’re hard to fight wars in. You know, I just hope that that the Ukrainians with their victories have sort of made the allies who have been supporting them be more confident that it eventually is gonna end well for Ukraine and that they will stay the course through a difficult winter where Europe’s economy is more fragile than the United states and they’re going to be, you know, facing shortages and and lack of heat. That is going to make it much more

difficult, I think, as as the war drags on. Yeah. The Ukrainian people have already suffered tremendously. And, you know, we cannot lose sight of the fact they’re probably going to suffer more in the winter because of shortages of power and water and food and Putin is aiming at power stations and and even water supplies. He, you know, in order to inflict pain on on the Ukrainian people.

But no, I’m gonna come back to you for the close here. I I heard Dmitry Al Paribic, who had accurately predicted the start of the war. Talking about Russia’s situation, and somebody asked him about the possibility of an escalation to nuclear, and he made a point that I found kind of reassuring he said he doubted it, not that, of course, Putin is above that morally. But first of all, it would alienate him completely even from those international actors who have been cooperating until now with him. But also, you know, he said it would be hard to sell to the Russian people, that the nation that you’ve been telling them for seven months is are your brothers and then part of your country, and now you’re gonna nuke them that would be a hard sell he thought.

So anyway, I just thought I’d pass that along and then ask if you want to just to close this out with a reflection on I loved something that you said in your piece because you were talking about how among some people on the right, their affection for for Russia was based on this idea that it was a bastion of traditional masculinity.

That’s right. You had the famous Russian military recruitment ad where the guys are doing push ups and acting all manly and such and such. Right? And — Right. — Matt Walsh, another conservative saying, wow.

You know, look how manly they are compared to our military. Now, of course, Ukraine isn’t our military. They do have quite a lot of women in the military. But the idea that that Ukraine is like a woke military is that’s made up. Right?

They’re just a pretty standard fighting force — Mhmm. — as is ours. As is America’s fighting force. You know, all this stuff about the woke military is just Americans making everything in the culture wars, insisting on transposing these in any culture wars that we focus on all day and that obsesses, you know, like, oh my god. And elf was black on on Lord of the Ring show.

To care. You know what I mean? Because we this is what we do. This is our national sport. This is these inane culture wars.

And we tried to transpose this onto who’s something military and that just didn’t work because in the military, that stuff doesn’t matter at all. You know, it matters as who drops an explodey thing on the head of whom. Right? And that’s and it turned out that that Ukraine was was pretty good at doing that. And that, you know, you can do all the push ups you want and bullets will go right through your, you know, bags.

Mhmm.

It says Yeah. Well, and and war does have a way of revealing the weaknesses of a society and what it has revealed about Russia’s, you know, how deeply corrupt and divided Russia is. And as one of your readers on your website pointed out, one of the things that these authorities carry any liberal societies are not good at is separating fact from fiction. Good. Alright.

And and, you know, right? And so they they dilute themselves and and sometimes that can lead to disaster as it has for Russia and Ukraine.

Absolutely. And, you know, I wanna relay a a little anecdote. This is not exactly about, you know, what you just said, but I think it’s somewhat related. I was talking to Camille Galliave. You know him?

He’s a very, very smart analyst of of industrial sort of supply chains and stuff. And also history, you know, he’s extremely knowledgeable guy originally from Russia, and he’s been doing work showing that Russian industry is weak blah blah blah. And he was talking to me and he said, should I do this for China too? I said, no. No.

No. Do this for the United States. Do this for us. Yeah. And he was just completely surprised.

I was he said why? I said because you know, you you don’t wanna you know, for Russia, it’s too late at this point, but you don’t wanna warn countries about the the weak points they need to shore up. You’re right. What you wanna share in order to warn your enemies above the weak points. You wanna warn us, America needs warning.

We you know, in the pandemic, we were caught flat footed because we were unable to make masks. Remember, we couldn’t make a mask, but you know what? We could make an mRNA vaccine, which China could not. We had the lipid nanoparticles and all this supply chain just ready to go. And it was this amazing victory where everyone is predicting that we were going to not be able to make enough mRNA vaccines.

There would be these huge supply bottlenecks. Nothing like that ever happened. We vaccinated everyone who wanted a vaccine in short order and people forgot about it. This amazing government triumph, but also industrial triumph of private supply chains too. Yep.

We could do this. China just couldn’t do this. They didn’t have the lipid nanoparticles and all that stuff. They didn’t have the technical expertise. So, like, we couldn’t make a mess.

They couldn’t make a vaccine. I would argue that we got the better of that trade, but it’s still it’s, you know, it’s it’s very important. It would have been good. Had we been able to make a mask? To look at our own Sure.

Yes. Absolutely. Yes.

Okay.

Let’s move on now to because we have more things to discuss. It’s a busy week. So this has been happening for several months now that Governor Greg Abbott and others have been busing thousands of migrants to New York, DC, and Chicago. And now Governor Rhonda Sanders has gotten into the act with two plain loads of migrants that he sent to Martha’s Vineyard, a little island vacation spot in Massachusetts, population, at least, you know, year round population, twenty thousand. They have one homeless shelter that sleeps ten people with one bathroom, but you get the point.

Governor Abbott also this week deposited two busloads migrants at the residence of vice president, Kamala Harris. Linda, this is performative politics, but with

a real edge of cruelty. Can they get any more disgusting? I wonder these those politicians First of all, it’s too bad that Governor DeSantis didn’t ship these folks to Martha’s vineyard a couple of months ago because Martha’s vineyard, like much of the rest of the country, has been experiencing a severe labor shortage. And can I remind our listeners that these people are not illegal aliens as you would hear if you were listening to Fox? Most of these people, if not all of them, are asylum seekers.

Yeah. And we have asylum laws in the United States that say, that when you apply for asylum, you are allowed to be given temporary entry. And while your asylum petition goes to the normal process. So these people are potential workers. We have a tremendous labor shortage going on in the United States.

I think, you know, yes, this is disgusting what they’re doing to not not so much the local communities as it is to the migrants themselves. Selves who basically, it’s a kind of bait and switch. You know, they’re told, OG come this way and we’ll put you on a bus or an airplane and we’re gonna get you a job. And and clothing and food and all of that stuff that they hoped to be able to get once they crossed into the United states, and then, of course, they end up in places that are totally foreign to them as certainly,

Martha’s Vineyard would be. Linda, can I Sorry, can I interrupt with a quick question though? Mhmm. So people say, well, you know, why should the border states have to bear all the burden of these people who come pouring across asking for asylum. And isn’t it true that the border states, first of all, they do get tremendous amounts federal funding to help with all this, but also they don’t.

I mean, these people are taken around to other parts of the country. It’s but the fact is these people were just dumped with no warning, with no heads up to the local governments or the red cross or anything. Right? And in fact, if the governors of these states were decent

human beings. They would have had their agencies reaching out to the states New York, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, and worked with those local jurisdictions to help essentially resettle these people. Now many of the people who are coming have family or at least acquaintances that can help them resettle and can help ease their path. And it might have been helpful if you know, Texas and Florida and Arizona and other places that have, you know, gotten into this act had gotten together. And help these people find their family members or acquaintances people from their villages or towns who they can help place them with.

But let me just say, you know, one of the things that’s most disgusting about this is that if you may recall back during the Trump years, we were very incensed at what was going on in Venezuela. And in fact, the Trump administration actually got involved and may have been supporting a change in regime in Venezuela. Well, some of these people who ended up on Martha’s Vineyard, are people who have come all the way from Venezuela, and they are people who have crossed in, you know, just the most unbelievable conditions across, you know, roadless areas that connect South America Central America, they have gone literally a thousand miles, more than a thousand miles on foot. And then they end up in the United States and this happens to them. So I I think these communities are responding well they are putting together emergency resources to try to provide food and housing to these people on a temporary basis.

But the most important thing is to get these people jobs. And frankly, the communities that help successfully do that are gonna find that these people are going to be contributors to our society. And I hope that particularly with the Venezuelans who are facing real persecution if they are returned to Venezuela? I hope they’re able to stay and stay on a more permanent basis. Howard Bauchner:

No, let’s can we take a detour for a minute? Because Linda raises an important thing. You know, Venezuela is an object lesson in how a country A pretty prosperous country, Venezuela, for many decades, was the wealthiest country in Latin America, can be destroyed by left wing populism.

Would you care to comment on that? What’s interesting is to look at the contrast between Venezuela and Bolivia, which are two countries that elected leftist, populist, leaders that in fact were allies with each other and call themselves socialist and look at the economic trajectories of the two. Now Venezuela, as we all know, suffered massive hyperinflation shortages collapse of economic output and basically reverted to, you know, eating rats or whatever. One of the most epic economic collapses of all time, whereas Bolivia grew quite strongly and reduced inequality and poverty quite robustly and never had any kind of collapse even despite the instability of a brief sort of attempted coup in the wake of a of an election a couple years ago. Even so, Bolivia continues to do well.

And so the thing is that you know, we don’t wanna wave our hands and say, okay. So it’s a it’s a socialist, leftist, populist, gonna destroy the economy because that’s not necessarily true because in Bolivia, They didn’t destroy the economy. They did fine. And it’s just about how you go about doing it and that what Chavez did and and is what Maduro, his successor, did in Venezuela, was uniquely stupid. You know, they did nationalize bunch of businesses sort of haphazardly and in a very politicized way.

And, you know, there were these random nationalizations that just destroyed conferences in the business community. That’s kind of classic socialist screw up. But what they also did was they raided the investment fund of the state owned oil company, which is already a state owned company, PDVSA, they raided its investment fund to do social programs. Now social programs are are nice you know, but this wasn’t sustainable and what happened was that output of the state owned oil company absolutely crashed so that even when oil prices recovered, Venezuela’s economy was in the tank and that is what started them on the road toward the hyperinflationary collapse disaster that we now see it was all about rating that state owned oil company. So there’s a which Bolivia did not do.

You know, Bolivia, a very mining dependent country, and it continued to allow its, you know, mining companies to invest. It’s really about investment versus consumption, more than it’s about socialism versus capitalism. It’s that Venezuela simply chose to throw a party at the expense of tomorrow and then eventually it was tomorrow.

Well, they also They also invaded private property rights in a major way. They nationalized. They they politicized the entire economic sector, and they drove out a big portion of their middle class that was responsible for a lot of

the prosperity. Wouldn’t you agree with that? Yes. That’s absolutely true. They did do this.

Okay. It’s it’s constructive to compared to Bolivia though, because Bolivia did do some nationalizations as well. They pretty much did it in a pretty systematic way, nationalizing mining companies that were not necessarily do you know, all they really did was sort of own land and and lease it out. They nationalized, like, large companies in a in a systematic deliberate way that did not end up causing the middle class to flee or causing the business class to fear for their property and flee etcetera etcetera.

Yeah. Okay. Damon, you you spend a lot of time on Twitter. The ferocious response to what happened here with the Martha’s vineyard, I think is illustrative of why we can’t have nice things in this country more. I mean, you know, just so much hatred dripping contempt, you know, oh, you know, now the wealthy are gonna have to bear the brunt.

You know, we’re bringing the border to them and, you know, the references to the rich people who live in Martha’s Vineyard and so forth. You know, not particularly helpful.

No. Although it certainly does verify that Ron DeSantis succeeded in trolling the Liberals with human props. That’s what he set out to do, and it worked bravo to him, I say, with acidic Venom in my voice. I mean, I my brand in a way as a commentator is to kind of advance the proposition that we all need to calm down a little bit and and kind of be a little less intense in our hatreds and have a little more equanimity. But I have to say that this story really just pisses me off.

I mean, I I when this broke last night, I just was I was pretty disgusted and especially to see, you know, old friends of mine in the conservative world kind of doing a kind of end zone dance about this act of gratuitous cruelty, as Linda pointed out, to migrants from Venezuela of all places and, like, no awareness of this or even caring about it. And also, like, then I came out and said some snarky, things about it on Twitter and people respond very, very angrily to me about this and really say, I’m sorry, but complete nonsense. Like, how about the fact that the governor of Massachusetts is a Republican? How about the fact that New York State is as blue as it gets, California is as blue as it gets huge immigrant populations. The population of New York cities just over eight million.

Three million of them are immigrants. I mean, what are they talking about? They think that only the border states have to deal with the the challenge of of admitting and assimilating and educating and then employing and collecting taxes from people who immigrate to this country, let alone migrants and refugees, which involves an even deeper kind of moral dimension to the issue. All of that just doesn’t matter, you know, the people who who were dancing around in the end zone on this, they they want their cruelties served up nice and cold, and they got it from Rhonda Santos, their hero who, you know, I still have to say, yeah, I’d prefer him over Trump, but man of our standards gone down when that’s what we’re left with is this is the guy. This is the guy who is gonna you know, pack fifty people on to some airplanes and send them up to Martha’s Vineyard a little island in the Atlantic.

No. That as well an immigrant population to receive them and help them, you know, find roots in in their new. Their new home. It’s just it turns my stomach just appalling. Yep.

Bill Galston, I don’t imagine that you’re gonna descend from this, but I have to say, you know, governor Abbott depositing two busloads of migrants in front of vice president Kamil Harris’ house. You know, I mean, no sense that these are actual human beings who may be thirsty, who have been on a thirty six hour trip, who need, you know, care. Some of whom may need medicine, whatever children. I mean, just a phenomenal cruelty and lack of fellow feeling. My colleague JBL said that that, you know, it’s completely unchristian for these so called Christian nationals.

I don’t

know. Nervous. After what has preceded my segment here, it’s not clear to me what there is left to say.

Let me let me ask you this. So so, you know, our silane system desperately needs reform. And guess what? There was a proposal by senators Susan Collins of Maine and Kirsten Cinema of of of Arizona, a Republican and a Democrat back in February that that would shorten the statutory requirement for how long in his asylum seeker has to wait before applying for work authorization. You know, because there are a lot of employers who are eager to hire people, but if they’re a silis, they have to wait and it’s something like a hundred and fifty days or something.

It’s a long time. That would, you know, in a in a better world, in a different world from the we inhabit, that would be sort of a common sense reform that, you know, would

at least deserve consideration. Right? Look, common sense and immigration reform haven’t belonged together in the same sentence for a decade now. And let’s not forget, it was the issue that propelled Donald Trump to victory in twenty sixteen. You know, if you’re talking about this populous, nationalist, conservative mindset, which is also an emotional setting, this is the epicenter of it.

And I don’t think anybody who read the article in the recent Atlantic magazine about the deliberate strategy, not inadvertent mistaken outcome of other strategies of separating children from their parents as an instrument of state policy I don’t think anybody who did that can be surprised by this smaller scale reprise of such tactics. And once we’re done denouncing this palpable cruelty,

I

think we’re all stuck with the question. Of how the heck do we get out of this? Because not only is this discracing our country in the eyes of the world, It’s also undermining our national well-being. Among other things, as many economists have pointed out, largely because of recent immigration restrictions. We are now millions of workers short of where we would have been at this time if the status quo anti on on immigration had prevailed.

And it is crazy. Not to try to turn this situation into some sort of advantage for the country by doing something on the work permit front. Employees have been crying out for employees to do the kind of work that these people can do. They haven’t been able to fill those positions for most the summer. I spent a few weeks on Cape God and the number of businesses were running shorter days and shorter weeks because they couldn’t find enough people.

That situation has been replicated all over the country. Yep. How on earth do we get from here to there? And we have to acknowledge that there are flaws in the system that generate grounds for mistrust and anger. Among people who are already prone to feel those sentiments.

And the Venezuelans are one thing. But there are a lot of economic migrants who probably don’t have a colorful asylum claim, but are crossing the border. Anyway, We may have stupid laws, but while we have them, the rule of law has to be preserved somehow until we change the laws so they’re less stupid. How can we do that, Tim? We really have to ask ourselves some hard questions here.

Let us turn to a kind of potpourri of other topics. We had News about inflation this week, and we had some primary results and some polls. Noah Smith, I’m going to come to you first. On the matter of inflation. I want you to help us understand the source of the current inflation because you know there was a lot of talk six months ago, nine months ago, whatever, that the inflation was at least in part the result of huge amounts of government spending, putting money in people’s bank accounts at a time when things were closed down and so that propelled a lot of spending.

But I would think that that sort of meal would have moved through the serpent by now. I mean, the price of gas has come down, but core inflation hasn’t really abated that much. What do you think is the cause of it at this stage? Well,

first of all, I think a lot of people thought, including me, mistakenly thought that government spending would have whatever effect it would have on inflation very quickly. In fact, people saved up a whole lot of money during the pandemic, and they saved up a whole lot of money after Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Yep. American Rescue Plan. Right?

And so So a lot of that pent up savings then appeared as a drop in savings rates to below typical levels. You know, people had all this cash that they have been saving up and suddenly they wanted to go out and spend and splurge. And so these demand effects that we talk about are not necessarily contemporaneous. They’re not they don’t necessarily happen at the same time as we do the spending. It’s not like in in the economic models, it is that way.

But the economic models are are often wrong. And so I think that there is still pent up savings that some people are spending. And and they’re spending it on things like rent, and we’re seeing rent go up a lot. But there are a lot of other things too, lots of local services that people are suddenly splurging on. I think there may be sort of the feeling of relief at the end of the pandemic, you know, now that COVID is basically endemic.

You know, the the end of, like, you know, lockdowns and and all that stuff and sort of the advent of vaccines. People are going out and spending more. So I do think that demand continues to play an important role here. And I think that the sort of supply based explanations, supply chains, snarles. You know, we’re having trouble shipping stuff from Asia through our creaky old ports.

And, yes, that was true. But those have been mostly worked out. Like, you know, the port of Los Angeles is now fine. Mhmm. All the the the ports are fine.

The the, you know, shipping costs dropped like a rock. And also, you know, there was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the increase in food and energy prices. The energy price increase from that war has mostly reversed. And the food price increase has slightly reversed. And so so that’s not it either.

So the only things left are either consumer demand or what we call de anchoring of inflation expectations. In other words, people have certain sort of gotten used to the idea now that inflation happens at like a six or seven percent rate of core inflation. People have sort of gotten used to the fact that now prices go up. And so now, they’re just sort of operating on autopilot where they just accept these price increases month after month because that’s the way it’s been for the past year. And if that is true, then what it needs to happen is the Fed needs to provoke a recession in order to snap people out of that.

Right? That’s the that’s the most costly scenario. The scenario where inflation expectations have just started to have have risen because people think, oh, you know, this is just seven percent is just normal now, whereas two years ago, they thought two percent was sort of the eternal normal. And that’s the scary thing, and that’s why the Fed will not stop hiking rates until it gets inflation back down even if that causes a recession. Right?

Bill Galston, a recession hurts as Noah points

out in his newsletter, a recession hurts some people. It hurts people who lose their jobs obviously. But it doesn’t hurt everybody, which is what inflation does. And so it’s unfortunate that we have such poor options for dealing with inflation once it gets going, but it does seem like the preferable answer is a recession versus just continuing inflation. What do

you say? Well, that’s what Jay Powell said out of Jackson Hole, and I think he’s gonna be as as good as his word. As you say, we’re stuck with no good options, but what we do know is this that a highly inflationary environment is incompatible with all sorts of things that are good for the economy in the long run. It also devalues things like public investments. We just passed this bidding infrastructure bill.

If cost of construction continue to rise at current rates, that bill is going to do a lot less good for the economy in the long term. Than it would if we had done our big infrastructure investments when we should have, ten years ago when interest rates were entering a period of record lows, all things together I don’t think the Fed has much of a choice. I don’t think the administration has much of a choice. The American people simply won’t tolerate this level of inflation indefinitely, and neither can the economy. And we’re stuck with the very traditional job of trying to mitigate the pain for those people who will disproportionately suffer from the recession.

But I suppose some Democrats could make the argument that we can live with higher levels of inflation. But I don’t think that’s going to be a winning argument politically. It never has been. Yep.

Damon, on the politics front. There’s been a bump, kind of significant bump up for Biden in approval. I don’t know if you saw that chart that was circulating online that showed the approval rating for US presidents along with the price of gasoline. And they’re they’re pretty close not perfectly aligned, but they’re pretty close. But in any case, his his sport recovered.

It was thirty six percent in July, now it’s forty five percent. And most of that rebound was because of Democrats.

I usually follow five thirty eights aggregate as my kind of gold standard to avoid, you know, being pulled in by any outlier poll. And according to that, metric, he was down around thirty seven percent a few months ago, and now is between forty two and forty three. So that’s not quite as wide of a jump as as you as you just stated, but it’s still a very dramatic one. If you look at those last two to three months, it it’s Biden just climbing a hill pretty consistently. And it is impressive and you’re right that it is largely connected to the line and gasoline prices.

So if if in the end of midterm elections in November go much better for Democrats than we were all assuming a few months ago, The decline in gas prices is probably the single biggest explanation,

but

it’s important to keep in mind the other things that we’ve talked about from time to time here on the podcast. The Democrats did finally pass their big bill this summer after it looked like it was pretty much dead. Finally, they got everyone on board and were able to pass something big that it had been having the effect of making Biden look pretty impudent for a while. And so I think that helps. It makes it seem a little bit less like he’s passive and sitting on the sidelines.

And while things go on around him. There’s, of course, also the, you know, kind of, outlandish candidates who are running in a number of Republican races. We have big really big races in a number son at contests where the Republican choice was a was both endorsed by ex president Trump and very much embraced by the satisfaction of the Republican base. And now that we’re headed into a general election, they’re they’re all kind of coming in underperforming. The polls might be a little skewed as they have been in recent cycles.

But they’d have to be pretty darn skewed for most of these folks to come in. I’m thinking of J. D. Vance ISA assume is going to pull out his race just because Ohio is now such a solidly Republican state usually by about eight points. He’s down in many polls by around that.

So it it could very well be very very close. But in the end, I assume he will pull it out. But, you know, masters down in in Arizona looks actually surprisingly weak. Peter Fields influence there. Definitely not necessarily having the best influence on the prospect for the Republican Party.

No doubt of one reason why Mitch McConnell model wasn’t coming in with all that much help. And Hersha Walker, I I, you know, Could they really lose Georgia? I don’t know. I I mean, Churchill Walker certainly seems like he’s gonna give a a real a real try to make sure the Republicans lose. So, you know, you have all of this together and the end result is here we are now just a couple months out from the midterms and the democrats Joe Biden look far more steady than one would hope.

And I guess the last point I’ll make looping back a little bit to the inflation conversation. If it is the case that we are facing the prospect of the Fed having to raise rates until we are thrown into a rather painful recession to reset expectations. Best to do it soon if the Democrats wanna get through to twenty twenty four and have a good fighting chance against Trump or whoever it ends up being on the Republican side. That means Twenty twenty three is likely to be a pretty bleak year both for the economy and for Democratic pollsters.

Linda, sixty percent of Americans when they go to the polls in November will have an election denier on the ballot. Some of the people who won just this week, we’ve got this Don Bullock in New Hampshire who believes that governor Chris Sununu, who by the way, is a Republican and one of the most popular governors in the country, thinks he’s a Chinese communist sympathizer. He is against vaccines, not not For any same reason, he’s against vaccines because he doesn’t want Bill Gates putting microchips in his body, and he believes that Confederate statues should be preserved because they are a symbol of hope, a symbol of inspiration, a symbol of moving forward.

Well, I’ll say more about Confederate statutes later in my highlight of the week but just in terms of Bulldog and the others who’ve won, you know, I know I sound like a broken record on this, but we have in part to thank the Democrats for these Yahoo! Getting the nomination in the various states. The Democrats spent about nineteen million dollars across eight states and primaries, and the very wealthy governor of Illinois spent an additional several million dollars, thirty four and a half billion dollars, I guess. So about fifty three million dollars spent by Democrats. To support election deniers in these races.

Now I know they think it’s smart politics. I know they think, oh gee, these guys will be easier to beat. You look at New Hampshire and you realize that the incumbent senator won by only about a thousand votes the last time around. So I don’t know that

we can assume that all of these people are gonna be defeated. Linda, let let I I agree with you about the about the democrats, you know, supporting these people, but you also have to give most of the blame to the Republican primary voters who just to vote for Well, of course.

But, you know

So long to

put that on the record. Yeah. Absolutely. But look, this kind of blind partisanship is destructive, whether it’s the, you know, Republicans behaving the way they do or democrats assuming that winning elections is what it’s all about. And we have no principles and that we’re going to put in place that maybe guide some of our actions yet.

Of course, it’s the Republicans who have nominated these Yahoo! That are principally responsible. And it’s Republican voters who are elevating these people to their standard bears in the November elections. But I do think that I I just can’t get around the fact that president Biden gives a speech on preserving democracy. All of us believe strongly in democracy, and then at least some Democrats, including apparently senator Schumer’s pack, who helps support this general And oh, by the way, it’s really interesting what happens when these people get the nomination.

Baldwin, who has been a an election denier from day one. I think he was in election denier even before it became popular. He he didn’t believe in previous elections having been fairly run. But suddenly, since he got the nomination, he spent some time going around the state in New Hampshire, and a lot of people are telling him That was a fair election in twenty twenty. And so now he’s having some second thoughts.

He even decided, you know, maybe Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States?

Who

would have thought yet?

Yeah. Okay, Bill, did you have a quick comment? Very quick. First of all, we’re live and second of all, we’re living in remarkable times. FDR at the peak of his power tried to purge his own party and failed.

Donald Trump as an out of power nationally unpopular former president is succeeding largely encouraging the Republican party of people who oppose him. Remarkable. That’s point one. Point two, on Biden’s job approval, I’ve been watching this for decades. I have never seen anything.

Like the past six weeks, six point jump in gallop, nine point jump in the Quinepiac, and then just today, a nine point jump in the AP Newark measure of Biden’s job approval. Something really big happened. And we need to understand why.

Yep. Those exit polls should be interesting. Alright. Well, thank you for all that. We will now turn to our highlight or lowlight of the week, and Linda, I’m gonna start with you.

Well, I said you’d

have to wait for the Confederate bases to come back as a as a topic. And in fact, my highlight of the week, it’s really good news. It was an article in the Washington Post by Paul Waldman and Greg Sergeant, and it was called how Trump lost one of his biggest fights and nobody noticed. And it was all about the renaming of US military bases in the United States that had been named for Confederate generals that others This week, apparently, Congress announced the completion of a report. It’s showing that removing the confederate names that these faces is probably gonna cost about sixty two million dollars but that’s money well spent.

And apparently, this is noncontroversial now except maybe for somebody like general Baldikou. Believes we ought to be emulating these confederate soldiers. I mean, one of the things that has always puzzled me about American politics is the reverence for the confederacy among people who consider themselves American patriots. The confederacy revolted against the United States of America, the people who fought in that war were deemed traders, and we should not be naming anything after them. At least of all, our military bases.

So this is my good news for the week.

Yeah. Bravo, Damon. Yeah. So I I don’t know if

I would call this a highlight or a low light in substance. Because it’s it’s disturbing and interesting and definitely something to ponder, but I’ll call it a highlight as far as it being a a really great piece of commentary. This is an opinion column in the London Telegraph by Ben Hodges, who’s retired American Lieutenant General, and he was also the commanding general of US Army Europe. He has an op ed titled prepare for Russia itself to disintegrate. Now I think he would admit that he’s extrapolating from current events out several steps in multiple directions.

So I can’t tell you if he would put the likelihood of the scenario. He spends out at thirty percent or point three percent. But it is a very smart column. He’s very well informed as you’d expect from someone who commanded US Army forces. In Europe, and he does spin out a really fascinating and possibly pretty scary scenario in which a really decisive failure by Russia leads to what I gestured in my remarks when talking about the Ukraine war.

Early in the podcast where the military might that Russia has used to kind of enforce state coherence on the Russian confederation simply dissolves and a series of potential hot points around the Russian Federation begin to heat up and spin out of control because there is a lack of will and capacity in the center to put them down. I mean, keep in mind, the Russian Federation is is a conglomeration of dozens, actually, over a hundred ethnicities. The parts of the Russian Federation that are actually Russian are quite small. And it expands over a territory that covers multiple time zones. I think what is the is it eleven That

might be right. That sounds right.

I thought it was eleven, but maybe I’m

thinking

back to Soviet times. It’s quite big. So the the idea that, you know, if Russia does endure a kind of vacuum of military power, and it’s apparent to all the world that it doesn’t have the capacity even to project power across its immediate border into Ukraine and successfully hold that territory on the eastern front of that country. The the message learned throughout the the Russian Federation could be one that leads in in truly amazing directions. And as again, as you’d expect, Hodges is very good also in in working out.

Why this would be a great threat to us among the control of the the nuclear weapons that are spread throughout territory. So definitely for any anyone who likes to think in in big geopolitical terms, this is a a really great column north wrestling.

Okay? Thank you. Bill Galston. Well, breaking news, Russia has eleven time zones. Thank

you. Thank

you. I thought so. Yep. Damon was right. And my high is weak.

Is a really emotional experience I had. When I saw Zelensky pop up at Isiam, That guy has guts to burn. I mean, that’s nine miles from the front. They were out in the square. A well aimed, well timed Russian rocket, you know, would have changed course of history, and there he was.

I think the guy in addition to being a leader is a public relations genius. He is the first feeder I’ve seen who knows how to use the instruments of communication from the most traditional to the most cutting edge, you know, to steadily prosecute both a military offensive and a diplomatic offensive and to move back and forth between them so they’re mutually supportive. Things may go sideways at some point, but right now he’s showing the world something that it hasn’t seen for quite time. They’re real leader.

I am so glad you mentioned that because I meant to touch on that in our first segment when we were talking about Ukraine and I skipped it. So thank you for mentioning that. Yeah. He is a remarkable world figure, the likes of which you don’t you don’t really see more than once every century or so. He’s quite quite the phenomenon.

And by the way, people know of him as being an entertainer and a comedian which he was, but he he’s also he’s has a law degree, and he’s a man of of many parts. So Alright. I would like to highlight instead of an article, I would like to highlight a book that I recently read. It is by the Legal Scholar Eric Posner. It’s called the Demagogue’s playbook.

Came out last year. It’s a terrific read. Very learned. It is about the history of demagography in the United States specifically. And he has some very interesting insights about certain themes that have always been a part of our history.

You know, the the conflict between populism and a leadership and so forth, they’re perceived a leadership fight over the Bank of the United States, over free silver, and course over race. And he cites some of the most egregious demagogues in our history QE long, many others, one I have to confess I had not even known about. But one of the very worst demagogues in our history is a guy named Tom Watson, who the historian, Sivan Woodward, said, was more than anyone else responsible for the revival of the Cuplex clan in the nineteen twenties, which at which time, by the way, it was at its peak in terms of power and members. In any event, it’s a fascinating book, very insightful, and of course, he does come to Trump and one of his points in the book is that, you know, we’ve had many demagogues. We never before had one as president of the United States.

And I’m just going to read a little section where he says, he’s talking about Watson, but he’s talking about all of them. He says the demagogue attacks in institutions because those institutions curb his power and he stirs up the negative emotions because only those emotions are powerful enough when collectively deployed to break the hold of institutional power. So the the he says that the what distinguishes a demagogue is not necessarily whether they lie or how much they lie, although, you know, that is part of it. But it is the nature of the lies. It is the attempt to discredit all institutions.

It is the attempt to scapegoat minorities and to direct anger in a, you know, vulgar mob like fashion to elevate one’s own power. That’s the mark of the demagogue. And of course, Donald Trump exemplifies all those traits. So anyway, it’s a fascinating book, a really good sort of lesson about about American history and about how the founders tried to guard against these tendencies and highly recommended. The demagogue playbook.

With that, I would like to thank our desk Noah Smith bank hold panel, our producer, Katie Cooper, and our Sound engineer today is Jason Brown, and I want to thank all of our listeners. We will return next week as every week.

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