Democrats Have Shifted to the Extreme Left

Following-up from yesterday, "The Democrats' Left Turn."

At IBD, "It's Official: Democrats Are the Extremists Today":

It's Official: Democrats Are The Extremists Today https://t.co/dAzwBCGpju #tcot #tlot

— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) October 12, 2017

Everyone knows that the country is more politically polarized than ever, but most don't know why. Data from the highly respected Pew Research Center provides a definitive answer. It's because Democrats have moved sharply to the extreme left.

The Pew report — titled "The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider" — is the latest in a decades-long series of surveys it has conducted to gauge people's views on various key issues, including the size of government, immigration, corporate profits, race relations. The authors of the report note the "divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values ... reached record levels during Barack Obama's presidency. In Donald Trump's first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger."

Given the way politics gets reported these days, it's easy to conclude that the widening gap is the result of Republicans become more extreme in their views. That is, after all, a mantra among Democrats and the press. The GOP is the party of racist, sexist, xenophobic, right-wing extremists, we hear over and over again, while Democrats are but humble centrists.

The Pew data, however, make it clear that the shift toward the extreme has happened among Democrats, not Republicans.

This can be seen in dramatic fashion when you look at where the center of each party was in 1994, and where it is today. Pew used a 10-item scale of political values to determine ideological purity among those who claim affiliation with the two parties. The results show that while the Republican center moved only slightly to the right over the past 23 years, the center of Democratic part shifted far to the left. (See the nearby chart.)

Take a look at specific value questions Pew asks and you can see why.

Pew asks, for example, whether poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return. In 1994, 63% of Republicans agreed with this sentiment, as did 44% of Democrats.

This year, 65% of Republicans agreed — a 2-point increase — while just 18% of Democrats did — a 26-point drop.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Democrats used to believe that most people who want to get ahead can do so if they work hard. Today, just 45% of Democrats believe this. Among Republicans, the change was negligible — it went from 73% in 1994 to 77% today.

How about the question of whether racial discrimination is the "main reason many black people can't get ahead these days"?

In 1994, just 39% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans felt this way. That was 14 years before the U.S. elected a black president.

Now, after eight years of Obama in the White House, 64% of Democrats say racism is the main reason blacks can't get ahead, while 14% of Republicans do.

Claudia Lion Photos

At Drunken Stepfather, "Claudia Lion Invisible of the Day."

Russia's GRU Military Intelligence Service is Putin's Personal Political Instrument

At Der Spiegel, "Doing Putin's Dirty Work: The Rise of Russia's GRU Military Intelligence Service":

Russia's GRU military intelligence service has become a political instrument for President Putin -- in the poison attack in Salisbury, hacking against the West and even in dealing with his country's doping scandal. Lately, though, the secret service can't seem to stay out of the headlines.

Each autumn, Russia's GRU secret service celebrates its birthday. Falling on Nov. 5, the festival is officially called the Day of the Military Intelligence Agent and commemorates the founding of the Soviet military intelligence service in 1918. At the GRU headquarters, a modern, functional building located in northwest Moscow, the defense minister gives an inspiring speech, followed by medals for deserving employees.

This year, though -- on the GRU's 100th birthday -- the mood is far from cheerful. Instead of a party atmosphere at headquarters, the Defense Ministry held a crisis meeting instead. And it was apparently open season on the GRU. "Complete incompetence" and "unbridled sloppiness" were a couple of the accusations leveled at the agency, one journalist learned, and a jokester apparently even asked why GRU agents abroad "don't just put on budenovkas?" Budenovka is the name of the striking pointed caps adorned with the Soviet star that members of the Red Army began wearing in 1918.

At the moment, Russia's military intelligence service is having trouble staying out of the headlines. That in itself is a sign of crisis, given that spies generally prefer to keep themselves out of the news. Until recently, only a handful of people abroad even knew what the abbreviation GRU stood for: Main Intelligence Directorate. For most people, Russian intelligence was synonymous with the domestic FSB intelligence agency once headed by Vladimir Putin.

Leaving Tracks Everywhere

That, though, has recently changed, with new details about the GRU emerging on a regular basis in recent weeks. Whether it's the poison attack on ex-double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Britain, or a cyberattack in The Hague, the exposing of coup plans in the Balkans or the hacking of anti-doping agencies, of the U.S. presidential campaign, of the German federal parliament's computer network or of the Malaysian public prosecutor's office investigating the shooting down of an airplane over Ukraine, the GRU has been leaving its tracks everywhere. The series of blunders is surprising. But so too is the fact that this intelligence service has become so ubiquitous. Is it still even a military secret service or has it morphed into something bigger? And if so, how did GRU get there?

Andrei Soldatov also finds himself asking such questions recently. The Moscow-based journalist has spent years reporting on the world of the Russian secret services. Now, he no longer even understands it himself. He sounds a bit like a music critic who has been forced to listen to a jackhammer instead of a string quintet.

Until recently, the GRU had been regarded as professional, if not particularly squeamish. But the latest news -- such as the March 4 attack in which ex-agent Skripal was supposed to be killed in Salisbury using a neurotoxin -- has cast the agency in a different light. Two men suspected by the British in the incident claimed on Russian television that they had been nothing more than harmless tourists. The performance was ridiculously implausible, and it didn't take long for it to be refuted. The investigative journalism platform Bellingcat recently revealed that both are high-ranking GRU officers and recipients of Russia's highest government award, the "Hero of the Russian Confederation." The site identified the men traveling under the aliases Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.

Another clumsy operation also ensued in The Hague only one month after Salisbury. Four GRU employees attracted the attention of Dutch intelligence agents when they tried to hack the computer network of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from a parking lot. The four had entered the country with diplomatic passports and had been picked up at the airport by an embassy employee. Their computer still carried traces of an attack on an anti-doping conference. Soldatov describes the story as "a nightmare," adding that it is far more bizarre than the action in Salisbury. How, he asks himself, can a secret service act in such a dumb way? And what is going on in the heads of military officers who are sent to attack sports organizations rather than military targets?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the GRU's past. Since the dismantling of the Soviet Union's once all-purpose KGB, Russia has been home to a broad palette of intelligence agencies. The KGB's First Chief Directorate became the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency is regarded as chic and elegant, and it is located "in the forest," as its shielded headquarters are referred to in agent jargon. The KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate became the Federal Protective Service (FSO), which is responsible for providing protection to Putin and the Kremlin. The agency is feared primarily because proximity to Putin is synonymous with power in the country. The rest of the KGB became the Federal Security Service (FSB), the domestic intelligence agency. It's the best-known agency and it also took over KGB headquarters at Lubyanka Square. Unfortunately, it also adopted some of the Soviet secret polices' methods.

What makes the GRU so special is the fact that it is the only intelligence agency that has nothing to do with the former KGB and its legacy. It was and still is subordinate to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. It even possesses what amounts to its own army. The GRU's Spetsnaz brigades are elite troops trained for action in enemy territory. They also serve to attract new agents. Those who prove themselves in the GRU's Spetsnaz military service stand good chances of advancement within the apparatus.

This is why typical GRU agents differ from their civilian counterparts in the SWR foreign intelligence service. Broadly speaking, they typically aren't sharp analysts with good manners, but social climbers who lack finesse. Though they know how to bury an explosive device and feel more comfortable under enemy fire than in a provincial part of England. At first glance, the two Salisbury suspects, GRU officers Chepiga and Mishkin, seem to fit that mold. Both of them have traveled an impressive path from remote villages on Russia's fringe to the officers' clubs in the capital.

Diminished Influence

While KGB colleagues had to watch the monument to their idol Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the Soviet secret police, being dismantled on Lubyanka Square in 1991 and their authority later divided, the GRU didn't have to reform at all. The organization still doesn't even have its own press office. But the agency suffered all the more after Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000. Under Putin, the GRU lost influence relative to FSB, which became ever more powerful. And the radical Russian military reform beginning in 2008 struck the agency right at its core. Then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov initially stripped the GRU of the Spetsnaz brigades, the very thing that distinguished it from the other secret services. "The idea was to get rid of the Soviet legacy," says military expert Alexander Golts. "Serdyukov didn't foresee at that time that a new Cold War would break out."

It's perhaps no coincidence that GRU also had its power symbolically curbed at the time. The traditional abbreviation was shortened to GU -- from the "Main Intelligence Directorate" to the "Main Directorate" of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, even though the old designation has been retained in everyday usage. Meanwhile, the bat in the organization's original coat of arms, which some GRU veterans proudly wear as tatoos, was replaced by a carnation.

"They don't like Putin at the GRU," says Sergei Kanev, a prominent investigative journalist in Moscow. Kanev's reporting helped shed light on GRU activities in Salisbury. He helped expose supposed tourist Ruslan Boshirov as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and also discovered that officials at the Defense Ministry are furious at the GRU right now. "There were angry people at the weekend meeting," he says, adding that he learned about the atmosphere there from a reliable source. If Kanev's source can be believed, then President Putin already summoned GRU head Colonel General Igor Korobov to a meeting back in mid-September for a dressing down. Korobov is said to have collapsed at home afterward...

Still more.

Amber Lee's Offshore Winds and Warm Weather Forecast

Boy, it's freakin' hot out today, man. These are major Santa Ana conditions, and wonderful surfing weather.

If you're local, head down to the beach --- you can't beat this!

Here's the fabulous figured Ms. Amber, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

The Democrats' Left Turn

From Thomas Edsall, at NYT, "The Democrats' Left Turn Is Not an Illusion":

.@edsall: Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left. Can the party win that way? Does it have a choice? https://t.co/anbe0Pqop0

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 18, 2018

Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left, as liberals have displaced moderates. Self-identified liberals of all races and ethnicities now command a majority in the party, raising the possibility that views once confined mainly to the party elite have spread into the rank and file.

From 2001 to 2018, the share of Democratic voters who describe themselves as liberal has grown from 30 to 50 percent, according to data provided by Lydia Saad, a senior editor at the Gallup Poll.

The percentage of Democrats who say they are moderate has fallen from 44 to 35; the percentage of self-identified conservative Democrats has gone from 25 to 13 percent.

Well-educated whites, especially white women, are pushing the party decisively leftward. According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal on social issues has grown since 2001 from 39 to 61 percent. Because of this growth, white liberals are now roughly 40 percent of all Democratic voters.

While a substantial percentage of Democratic minorities identify as liberals, those percentages have not been growing at anywhere near the rate that they have for white Democrats, so blacks and Hispanics have not contributed significantly to the rising percentage of self-identified Democratic liberals. Over the past 17 years, for example, the percentage of black Democrats who identify themselves as liberals grew by a modest three percentage points, according to both Gallup and the Pew Research Center.

In fact, white liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues.

Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.

Among white liberals, according to Pew survey data collected in 2017, 79.2 percent agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.” 18.8 percent agreed that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition,” a 60.4 point difference, according to a detailed analysis of the Pew data provided the Times by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University.

Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition — in other words, blacks are more conservative than white liberals on this issue.

The dominant role of well-educated, relatively upscale white Democrats in moving the party to the left reflects the declining role of the working class in shaping the party’s ideology...

Still more.

I hate the use of "liberal" to describe these ghouls. They're leftists. Radical leftists, in fact.

When I teach ideology in my American government classes, I indicate that today's Democrat Party is a leftist party with a hardcore radical fringe. Think tech sector progressives, Hollywood leftists, and coastal elites. These idiots are not only driving the leftward tilt, they're destroying the country. Vote these people out. Put them down, hard. You life may depend on it.

Demi Rose Stuns With Giant Plunging Bikini Cleavage

At Fleshbot, "Fresh Links."

The Republican #WalkAway Movement.

This is really well done.

From Troy Worden, at American Greatness:

My latest for @theamgreatness, criticizing the Republican #WalkAway Movement. I'm looking at you, @JRubinBlogger, @MaxBoot, @BillKristol, @TheRickWilson, @davidfrum. https://t.co/kIXkP6hXKf

— Troy Worden (@TroyWerden) October 17, 2018

'Wrong Way'

Sublime, from Tuesday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM.

Times Like These
Foo Fighters
7:01am

Wanted Dead Or Alive
Bon Jovi
6:49am

Vacation
The Go-Go's
6:46am

Black Hole Sun
Soundgarden
6:43am

I Would Die 4 U
Prince
6:37am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac
6:33am

Tell Me Baby
Red Hot Chili Peppers
6:22am

Personal Jesus
Depeche Mode
6:19am

Bohemian Rhapsody
Queen
6:13am

People Are Strange
Various Artists
6:09am

Wrong Way
Sublime
6:07am

Who Is Karl Marx?

Here's Paul Kengor, for Prager University:



And flashback, "Bicentennial of Birth of Karl Marx, the Man Whose Ideas Killed Untold Millions."

'Laughter and enjoyment are out, emotional support are in, as Netflix's latest comedy special makes clear...'

From Scott Beauchamp, at AmCon, "Social Justice Warriors Aren't Funny":

What happens when you mix comedy with SJW progressivism? Whatever it is, it isn't comedy anymore: https://t.co/vWAJpahjO2

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) October 16, 2018

“Laughs are cheap. I’m going for gasps.” – Mac in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

There’s an older episode of The Green Room with Paul Provenza when the late Patrice O’Neal, arguably one of the best stand-up comics in recent history, gets serious for a moment, saying: “I love being able to say anything I want. I had to learn how to stop caring about people not laughing. Because the idea of comedy, really, is not everybody should be laughing. It should be about 50 people laughing and 50 people horrified. There should be people who get it and people who don’t get it.”

O’Neal gets right to the chaotic, trickster heart of comedy with that statement. Comedy at its best balances humor against shock–not necessarily vulgarity, mind you, but a sort of unsettling surprise. It’s a topsy-turvy glimpse at an uncanny, upside-down world, which, if the joke lands, provides a bulwark against torpor and complacency. Great comedy inhabits the absurdity of the world. It makes itself into a vantage point from which everything seems delightfully ridiculous, including (often especially) the comedians themselves. We wouldn’t need comedy in a world that wasn’t absurd. Perhaps that’s why Dante only included humor in his Inferno. There is no absurdity in paradise.

Unfortunately, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a comedy special recently released on Netflix, only embraces the non-laughter half of O’Neal’s dictum. It’s the very epitome of self-serious, brittle, didactic, SJW “comedy.” It’s not funny. And worse, it’s not meant to be. Gadsby, a queer Australian comedian, uses her “stand-up special” as a way to destroy the very medium she pretends to be professionally engaged in. Her basic argument is that, since comedy is by its very nature self-deprecating (true), people who define themselves as members of an oppressed minority shouldn’t engage in comedy because they’re only participating in the violence already being done to them by society at large.

As Soraya Roberts writes in The Baffler, “[Gadsby’s] performance is not comedy, in fact, but a rejection of comedy­–a medium she boils down to half-truths made up of tension (the set-up) and relief (the punchline), as opposed to the whole truth of storytelling’s beginning, middle and end.” It’s interesting to note here how Gadsby defines comedy down to a vapidly narrow set of very specific and au courant therapeutic concerns. “Laughter is not our medicine,” she actually says at one point in the show. It’s the same predictable posturing we’ve come to expect from mediocre talent riding the wave of SJW self-seriousness, a sort of emotivist mad libs. “Punchlines need trauma because punchlines need tension,” Gadsby harangues the audience. “I will not allow my story to be destroyed.”

The flaws of this sort of SJW anti-comedy are obvious. There’s no shock, no surprise, no wild current of absurd energy charging the room with tension. And so it’s a stretch to even call it comedy in the broadest sense. It’s more like a cross between a TED Talk and a gnostic sermon. But maybe more importantly, if Gadsby’s ideology is taken to its logical extreme, all comedy is verboten, because it would mean either that marginalized people are making fun of themselves (out) or that only non-marginalized people have “access” to “comedic spaces” (definitely out). And so the end game of this specious logic brought to the stage is the self-defeating conclusion that minorities simply don’t do comedy...

RTWT.

Rookie Georgia Gibbs (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

Heidi Heitkamp Looks to Be Crushed on the Shoals of Hard-Left Identity Politics

A great post from Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "As ‘Blue Wave’ Collapses, Desperate Democrat Denounced by Women":

.@PatriarchTree "As ‘Blue Wave’ Collapses, Desperate Democrat Denounced by Women." #HeidiHeitkamp #Democrats #Election2018 🤷‍♂️ https://t.co/B14N0HlRlm pic.twitter.com/rLSZWBjqaF

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 17, 2018

Heitkamp looks set to lose a seat Democrat have held since 1960 and why? Because in the post-Obama era, Democrats have made identity politics the sole basis of their electoral appeal. Democrats are the anti-white party and the anti-male party. Common-sense people outside the coastal urban bubbles reject this ideology of hatred, and yet the more they register their opposition to the Democrat agenda, the more the Democrats double down. If you opposed the dishonest smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh, you’re a “rape apologist,” guilty of defending “white male privilege.” The possibility that Christine Blasey Ford was lying (which is what the preponderance of evidence indicates) was automatically excluded from discussion, and anyone who argued on behalf of due-process rights was accused of “misogyny.” In essence, Democrats made the Kavanaugh hearings a referendum on radical feminist ideology, and were shocked they lost...

RTWT at the link.

Lily Allen Goes Out and About in Completely See-Through

She's a nice lady!

At Taxi Driver, "Lily Allen Goes Out and About in Completely See-Through Top."

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BONUS: Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx.

The NPC Meme is the Best!

This is the craziest thing ever, and boy did it make the Twitter administrative leftists mad!

At Zero Hedge, "4Chan Sparks Mass Triggering With NPC Meme; Twitter Responds With Ban Hammer":

Gawd this is hilarious. #NPCmeme 😂😝🤣 https://t.co/uJwBnTclTe

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 17, 2018

The "weaponized autists" at 4Chan have done it again, because they can; a new meme suggesting that liberals are soulless idiots who can't think for themselves has gone viral. The concept compares Democrats to "nonplayable characters," or NPCs - the recurring characters in video games with repetitive lines and limited knowledge. Lack of an "inner voice" is a dead giveaway that someone may be an NPC.

The NPC meme essentially meant to ridicule the post-election perpetual outrage culture in which liberals simply parrot the latest talking points from their favorite pundits, who do their thinking for them.

The 4chan version is a simple greyed out, expressionless face known as "NPC Wojak" - which has triggered the left so hard that Twitter conducted a mass-banning campaign for accounts promoting the meme, and the New York Times wrote an entire article trying to figure it out.

The Times writes of the Twitter bans:

Over the weekend, Twitter responded by suspending about 1,500 accounts associated with the NPC trolling campaign. The accounts violated Twitter’s rules against “intentionally misleading election-related content,” according to a person familiar with the company’s enforcement process. The person, who would speak only anonymously, was not authorized to discuss the decision. -NYT.

There is precisely zero evidence that the accounts were spreading "intentionally misleading election-related content," so we're just going to have to take Twitter's word for it.

Um, actually, I think leftists on Twitter just couldn't handle the lolz.

If you sincerely refer to living human beings as NPCs you are a fascist, an enemy of to your own species, and basically a complete shitbag person. Dehumanization is not some cool trend of thought by Caucasian as fuck grad students, it’s the capitalist erasure of ethics.

— ◉ (@brightabyss) September 14, 2018

Fascists adopt dog whistles so quickly that as soon as one becomes recognizable to the public (like SJW) they’ve moved on, it’s not coincidence, it’s plausible deniability. “NPC” is explicitly meant to dehumanize, they’ll take advantage of lack of recognition as long as they can

— Appropriating Mummy 🎃💀👻 (@DreddByDawn) September 15, 2018

The NPC meme hit Silicon Valley so hard that they’re planning on banning it. pic.twitter.com/KVN6IWSfK0

— Faceberg (@thefaceberg) September 26, 2018

John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis

At Amazon, John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

Don't Expect Big Democrat Wave Come November

A great report, at CNBC, "Don't expect a big Democratic wave this fall, a new CNBC poll says":

Don't expect a big Democratic wave this fall, a new CNBC poll says https://t.co/xI8rmjmSp5

— CNBC International (@CNBCi) October 15, 2018

With economic optimism soaring in the country, will Democrats be able to sweep to power in either house of Congress or will buoyant sentiment help Republicans keep hold of their Congressional majorities?

The latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey offers mixed signals, but leans against a wave Democratic election like that those that swept Republicans to power in 2010 and 2014.

The poll of 800 Americans across the country, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent, found a six-point Democratic lead on the question of who voters will choose in the November congressional elections. The 42 percent to 36 percent margin is not far from what pollsters would expect given the greater percentage of Democratic registered voters.

"A six point differential is not something that's going to cause a big electoral wave," said Micah Roberts, the Republican pollster on the CNBC poll, a partner Public Opinion Strategies. "Economic confidence that people have among a lot of groups is providing a buffer" for Republicans.

Indeed, the poll found that 48 percent of the public is optimistic about the current economy and optimistic it will get better, the highest level in the poll's 11-year history and more than double the 20 percent registered in the December 2016 survey. The poll, conducted Oct. 4th through the 7th, shows 83 percent of Republicans are optimistic but also 22 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Independent voters.

To be sure, control of Congress is often decided by the sum of local issues and candidates rather than national sentiment. And this time, several special factors could have a big effect: including more open GOP seats, greater Democratic enthusiasm and millions of dollars of outside money flowing into contested seats. And a lot can change in the remaining weeks before the vote.

Still, Jay Campbell, the Democratic pollster for the survey and a partner with Hart Research Associates, is skeptical of a wave for the Democrats, saying the six-point advantage is "not enough to suggest this is going to be a massive wave election a la 2010." Campbell did add that the survey found a large 17 percent of undecided voters who will be critical to the outcome.

Several other polls have found a double-digit lead for Democrats in the so-called generic ballot question, but the average for polls tallied by Real Clear Politics is just 7.3.

Working in the Republicans' favor is not only record-high optimism about the economy but also about the stock market and near-record high optimism about wage growth...

Still more.

Elizabeth Warren Releases DNA Test Showing 1/1024 Native American Ancestry

This has been the big story at Memeorandum all day.

See the Boston Globe (safe link), "Warren releases results of DNA test."

And at Twitchy, "MATH doesn’t add up! It gets WORSE for Elizabeth Warren and her DNA release (hint, she’s STILL Fauxcahontas)."

MATH doesn’t add up! It gets WORSE for Elizabeth Warren and her DNA release (hint, she’s STILL Fauxcahontas) https://t.co/IdMKPdokND

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 15, 2018

And from William Jacobson, at Legal Insurrection, "Elizabeth Warren DNA test does NOT prove she’s Native American, contrary to the hype."

Elizabeth Warren DNA test does NOT prove she’s Native American, contrary to the hype https://t.co/pzcnb2zsZP pic.twitter.com/24lnwn4lQZ

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2018

James Holland, The Allies Strike Back

This the follow-up to Holland's, The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941 (The War in the West).

At Amazon, James Holland, The Allies Strike Back, 1941-1943 (The War in the West, Vol. II).

What the Establishment Misses About Trump's Foreign Policy

From Professor Randall Schweller, at Foreign Affairs, "Three Cheers for Trump’s Foreign Policy":

No more Uncle Sugar, no more multilateralism, no more free riding: Three cheers for Trump's foreign policy. https://t.co/uteDMsvf9o

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 16, 2018

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election heralded nothing less than certain catastrophe. At least, that was and remains the firm belief of “the Blob”—what Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration, called those from both parties in the mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment who, driven by habitual ideas and no small amount of piety and false wisdom, worry about the decline of the U.S.-led order. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman forecast after Trump’s victory. Others prophesied that Trump would resign by the end of his first year (Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal), that he would be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in six months (the liberal commentator John Aravosis), or that the United States might be headed down the same path that Germany took from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. That last warning came from former U.S. President Barack Obama last December at the Economic Club of Chicago, where he invoked the specter of Nazi Germany. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly,” he said. “Sixty million people died, so you’ve got to pay attention—and vote.”

So far, the world has not come to an end, far from it. A year into Trump’s first term, the Islamic State, or ISIS—a fascist organization, by the way—had been virtually defeated in Syria and eliminated from all its havens in Iraq, thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to equip the largely Kurdish militia fighting ISIS in Syria and give U.S. ground commanders greater latitude to direct operations. All the while, Trump has continued the Obama doctrine of avoiding large-scale conventional wars in the Middle East and has succeeded where his predecessor failed in enforcing a real red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas in Syria by launching targeted air strikes in response. In North Korea, Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” has cut the country’s international payments by half, forcing Kim Jong Un to realize that his only choice is to negotiate.

On the domestic front, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent in May, a level not seen since the heady days of the dot-com boom—with unemployment at an all-time low among African Americans; at or near multidecade lows among Hispanics, teenagers, and those with less than a high school education; and at a 65-year low among women in the labor force. Meanwhile, on Trump’s watch, the stock market and consumer confidence have hit all-time highs, the number of mortgage applications for new homes has reached a seven-year high, and gas prices have fallen to a 12-year low. Finally, with Trump pledging to bring to an end the era in which “our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own,” illegal immigration was reduced by 38 percent from November 2016 to November 2017, and in April 2017, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 15,766 apprehensions at the southwestern border—the lowest in at least 17 years.

As his critics charge, Trump does reject many of the core tenets of the liberal international order, the sprawling and multifaceted system that the United States and its allies built and have supported for seven decades. Questioning the very fabric of international cooperation, he has assaulted the world trading system, reduced funding for the UN, denounced NATO, threatened to end multilateral trade agreements, called for Russia’s readmission to the G-7, and scoffed at attempts to address global challenges such as climate change. But despite what the crowd of globalists at Davos might say, these policies should be welcomed, not feared. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations marks a United States less interested in managing its long-term relationships than in making gains on short-term deals. Trump has sent the message that the United States will now look after its own interests, narrowly defined, not the interests of the so-called global community, even at the expense of long-standing allies.

This worldview is fundamentally realist in nature. On the campaign trail and in office, Trump has argued that the United States needs its allies to share responsibility for their own defense. He has also called for better trade deals to level a playing field tilted against American businesses and workers and to protect domestic manufacturing industries from currency manipulation. He is an economic nationalist at heart. He believes that political factors should determine economic relations, that globalization does not foster harmony among states, and that economic interdependence increases national vulnerability. He has also argued that the state should intervene when the interests of domestic actors diverge from its own—for example, when he called for a boycott against Apple until the company helped the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists who carried out the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California.

This realist worldview is not only legitimate but also resonates with American voters, who rightly recognize that the United States is no longer inhabiting the unipolar world it did since the end of the Cold War; instead, it is living in a more multipolar one, with greater competition. Trump is merely shedding shibboleths and seeing international politics for what it is and has always been: a highly competitive realm populated by self-interested states concerned with their own security and economic welfare. Trump’s “America first” agenda is radical only in the sense that it seeks to promote the interests of the United States above all...

Still more.