While most Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a triumph over the Soviet Union, most Russians saw it as a victory of their own common sense over a senile and inept regime that had run out of money and ideas and had lost its appetite for repression.
After Mikhail Gorbachev opened up the Soviet media, the contrast between socialist and capitalist economic systems had become too apparent.
.. Then came an American mistake: triumphalism, rather than congratulating the Russian people on their victory over authoritarian rule, and using a short window of opportunity to offer Russia sufficient economic aid to ease the pain of a collapsing economy.
.. Every time Russia attacks a former Soviet republic, the confrontation is portrayed as a proxy war started by America against Russia.
.. Now Mr. Putin, who is known to bear grudges, appears to be disrupting Mrs. Clinton’s own presidential campaign with “active measures.”
.. Mr. Putin has long dreamed of a new Yalta-style agreement to let Russia and America divide Europe again.
.. An angry and declining Russia is far more perilous than an ascending economic power like China.
A Cure for Trumpism
The case for a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.
.. We didn’t see Trump’s apotheosis coming. But in our 2008 book, “Grand New Party,” we pointed out that despite its “party of the rich” reputation, the Republican Party increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters’ problems and concerns.
.. America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America.. So what should the Republican Party offer them instead? The best answer is a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home... With the exception of Rand Paul and the partial exception of Ted Cruz, the consensus critique of President Obama from not-Trump Republicans often seemed to be that he should have kept more troops in Iraq and kept more troops in Afghanistan and sent more troops to Libya and intervened in Syria andsent more arms to Ukraine and expanded NATO’s presence in the Baltics and been more willing to bomb Iran and ….. And the ease with which Trump crushed Jeb Bush, in particular, suggests that it will continue to resonate until Republican leaders become more selective in their hawkishness, more comfortable with five simple words: Invading Iraq was a mistake... But when you dig into survey data, immigration skepticism seems to be rooted as much in concerns about how quickly immigrants assimilate, whether they rely on welfare programs and whether they compete for American jobs as it is in racial or cultural anxiety... should explicitly try to attract immigrants who will be in a strong position to provide for their families in a difficult economic environment. It should encourage a market in which employers have to compete more for less-skilled labor, to slow the alarming retreat from paying work among native-born working-class men... Nothing unites elite conservatives more than their support for bringing entitlement spending under control. But by frequently insisting that he’d never cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, and basically endorsing universal health care, Trump has put himself on the side of millions of grass-roots Republicans... The party will still back tax cuts for the middle class and revenue-neutral tax reforms. But there should be no new income tax cuts for households earning $250,000 or more... A politics that stresses national solidarity isn’t just the best way to keep Trump voters from tearing down the party’s tent. It’s also the most plausible path up from white identity politics to a one-nation, pan-ethnic conservatism... Some liberals believe that this kind of shift is basically impossible — that racism and right-wing politics are so deeply intertwined that any Republican populism will just end up defending welfare for white people, that any “immigration in the national interest” proposals will descend into “Mexican rapists” one-liners on the campaign trail.Sadly, Donald Trump has offered powerful evidence for the liberals’ perspective. But if the Republican Party hopes to recover from his destructive rise, it has no alternative except to try to prove them wrong.
Fear, Loathing and Brexit
My rough calculations, which are in line with other estimates, suggest that Britain would end up about two percent poorer than it would otherwise be, essentially forever. That’s a big hit.
.. impacts of Brexit would be uneven: London and southeast England would be hit hard, but Brexit would probably mean a weakerpound, which might actually help some of the old manufacturing regions of the north.
.. For that is the most frustrating thing about the E.U.: Nobody ever seems to acknowledge or learn from mistakes.
.. The E.U.’s failures have produced a frightening rise in reactionary, racist nationalism — but Brexit would, all too probably, empower those forces even more, both in Britain and all across the Continent.
What I Got Wrong About Donald Trump
If there was anything that should have signaled that “this time would be different” from the very start, it was 17: the number of Republican candidates who entered the race.
.. It created a huge collective action problem, in which none of the Republican candidates had a clear incentive to attack Mr. Trump — just their rivals for their niche of the Republican Party. The effect was to legitimize Mr. Trump as an ordinary candidate and to damage the others.
.. The race narrowed to three candidates only after two-thirds of all of the delegates to the Republican convention had been awarded. It became a one-on-one race only after Mr. Trump had effectively secured the nomination.
.. But what wasn’t really discussed was what ultimately happened with Mr. Kasich. He was strong enough to prevent Mr. Rubio from consolidating the center-right of the Republican Party, costing him states like Virginia on Super Tuesday. But he wasn’t strong enough to become a plausible contender in his own right, like Mr. McCain in 2008.
.. This could just be the result of a simple analytical error: conflating opposition to ideologically consistent conservatives with an affinity for establishment-backed candidates.
.. Either way, I thought the party’s establishment could count on these voters, and instead they were among Mr. Trump’s strongest backers in the end.
.. His limited resources were irrelevant — he had unlimited free media.
.. An even bigger surprise was the complete failure of Republican elites to firmly and consistently denounce Mr. Trump. It’s why I thought he was done after his comments dismissing John McCain’s status as a war hero; I thought a “chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record” would follow, but it simply didn’t.
It never did.
..If the Republicans had delegate rules like those of the Democrats, Mr. Trump would not yet be the nominee. He would be counting on superdelegates.
..Two-thirds of all of the delegates were awarded in the 45 days after Iowa, making it important for the party to narrow the field quickly in a year when it was not positioned to do so.