Digest 38: Starmer or Trump?
If, hypothetically, on Thursday coming, you had to vote for either Starmer or Trump, who would you pick?
I’ve just gotten back from Civic Future’s annual conference, The New Wild West: Progress in an Age of Disorder.
It comprised a series of impressive and stimulating panels, such as the following:
It was capped at a nicely sized crowd (~Dunbar’s number), and over a day and a half, you could actually meet the majority of people.
The above question is one I’ve been putting to many the past few days, including at the conference (which was very cross-party/politically diverse): hypothetically, if you had to vote for either Starmer or Trump, who would you vote for?
Asking (mostly British) people… particularly after a drink, more than not say Trump.
I should note: this has been done in an extremely non-rigorous way. (I would love to see someone with a big and relatively neutral audience do a poll on this before Thursday.)
But it makes me think, despite the disaster for the Democrats on Thursday, the US is actually in better political shape than the UK.
From the conference itself…
- Some points from Samo Burja in the first panel were great. Those in power fail to acknowledge “inconvenient truths” (I like this phrase a lot). Fail to update on evidence (when things they’re trying prove not to work). And have an immense failure of imagination generally. In conversation afterwards, Samo encouraged vastly more experimentation on a state/regional level – which I am in ready agreement with.
- The most counterintuitive point I took away was from Tanner Greer. I asked him: Is it not good for Westerners to spend more time in China? Would this not help ease tensions? (Him having lived there for several years.) And he said no, living there actually made him more hawkish, not less. (He acknowledges this is not the case for everyone, but it was strongly for him, and several others he knows.)
I’m hoping to go to China in October. We’ll see if it makes me more hawkish…
- The young fellows I got chatting with (who have just been through the first Civic Future programme) were immensely sharp, and spoke extremely appreciatively about the programme – and already are a great reflection of it.
I encourage people to check out Civic Future; to go along to their events; apply to their fellowship; and support all that they’re doing. Very appreciative to have been invited.
Dominic Cummings has been right about a lot
Things happening in the world right now seem a surprise to many. But ought not to be if you’ve been reading Dominic Cummings’s Substack the past three years.
A remarkable tally of big things Dominic has gotten right:
- He wrote in September 2021 that Trump would run again and do extremely well – when this was hardly on the radar of anybody.
- He wrote in November 2022 there was a high chance Biden would be forced to step down. When I began saying this to friends around the time (and wrote myself off the back of it: “To me, it seems close to 50/50 Biden stands down of his own accord in a way people are yet to articulate.”), the vast majority at the time said “no way”.
- Dominic, March 2024: “Sanctions have, as I said would happen, failed to achieve their goals with Russia… and have boomeranged to strengthen anti-Establishment political forces across NATO and Eurozone economies.” This, evidenced in France, has quickly come to fruition.
- Shortly after the 2022 leadership contest, Liz Truss would implode immediately and violently. (The “coming Kami-Kwasi collapse”.)
- Over a year ago, that the Conservative Party would get decimated – when this did not seem at all likely/nobody in the mainstream was saying it. (And the PM’s advisors were oblivious.)
- He was warning about Russian troops amassing on Ukraine’s border in November 2021.
- And going back to November 2014, Dominic said with clairvoyance: “I personally think it’s possible all three leaders [Cameron, Miliband and Clegg] will be gone in the next 18 months.” I can only imagine the betting odds one would have got for that at the time. But it was proven correct.
If you want to know what’s happening, and what’s likely to happen, put down traditional media and read Dom. His political foresight is unparalleled.
2024’s stupidest smear campaign
The firestorm around Nigel Farage saying the West might have given Putin cover to invade Ukraine is even more dense than smearing scientists in 2020 for saying Covid might have come from a Wuhan lab.
Why? Because in Wuhan there was still an element of speculation.
Whereas what Farage said is a matter of official diplomatic record.
Bill Burns – former US ambassador to Russia, and present serving CIA Director (#3 most intimate aid to President Biden) – wrote in his 2019 book:
Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.
There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of NATO membership for either state [Ukraine and Georgia]. In Washington, however, there was a kind of geopolitical and ideological inertia at work… Key European allies, in particular Germany and France, were dead set against offering it.
It’s equally hard to overstate the strategic consequences of a premature MAP [Membership Action Plan] offer, especially to Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).
Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
If, in the end, we decided to push Membership Action Plan offers for Ukraine and Georgia, I wrote, “you can probably stop reading here. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”
No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine.
The expansion of NATO membership stayed on autopilot as a matter of U.S. policy, long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally meant to reflect interests morphed into interests themselves, and the door cracked open to membership for Georgia and Ukraine—the latter a bright red line for any Russian leadership.
Editors of our prestige media completely memory-hole this. In their coverage, they try to pass off the above history as simply one John Mearsheimer article in 2014 – as if it’s a theory based on a single rogue academic. Or worse, “repeating Putin’s propaganda”.
As the above shows, it is official US diplomatic record.
Is there a counterargument? Of course. Professor Stephen Kotkin:
We of course cannot know the counterfactual of what would have happened without NATO expansion. But Farage said this himself in the interview.
The phrase “fake news” grows on me by the day. Our traditional media increasingly live up to it.
Further, when I listen to podcasts with prominent British editors/presenters, I am struck by the fact that they seem capable of thinking only through the lens of a political campaign. “He [Farage] is doubling down on this ‘line’… He seems to be trying to emulate Trump.”
It doesn’t occur to them someone might just be stating a basic point of history.
The New Yorker and US publications are willing to talk about the actual history. As is UnHerd in the UK. But otherwise, in respect of Ukraine, the editorial standards of British publications have fallen off a cliff.
Why is our media establishment incapable of skimming a 2019 book by Biden’s third most intimate advisor? Is it severe echo chambers and editors having their head in the sand? Trying to help their mates in power – using any attack they can, historically obfuscating or not, to go after Farage? I don’t know. It continues to baffle me.
Airbrushing this from history and trying to cause uproar around it is extremely dumb, and only plunges Britain’s foreign policy in a yet worse direction.
How much are we being lied to?
The funniest tweet I saw following Thursday’s debate. 😂
The White House press secretary has, for months, been saying, “He [Biden] is sharp. He is on top of things.” And going so far as to say real videos of him looking lost/stumbling/falling are deepfakes.
As Steve Hsu has said…
The greater problem is, this is happening inside the bureaucracies of power, not just in the media
The following is a fascinating clip (~2 minutes) with Paul Wolfowitz, talking about US military dismissiveness in Iraq:
This guy Gary Anderson has it all figured out. He’s a retired Marine… I brought him on as a consultant. He spoke about this [his theory] in Baghdad. And someone said, ‘That’s Vietnam. This is not Vietnam.’ And showed him the door. The military was oblivious.
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How to get the people who know what they’re talking about, and have the best track record, steering policy for the better?
This is the great problem of our time.
Thank you for reading.