Banality of the day: By definition, governments produce winners and losers. In democratic polities, like America, elections produce governments. So yes, elections produce winners and losers.
In this one, notwithstanding I’m not an American. I’m a loser. Last night I lost a $100 bet with my wife. Not only did she predict Trump would win; she also predicted he’d take the popular vote. A couple months ago I lost a chess game to a five year old girl. But at least she wasn’t smug about it. I’d like to apply for a divorce, and maybe the courts would recognise my wife’s smugness as an irreconcilable difference. But I doubt our friends would. So I guess I’m stuck. But now to the more trivial consequences:
In the culture war that’s been raging for a couple of decades now, last night was a serious setback for wokeism. So score one for the good guys, by which I mean my side. But notwithstanding six out of seven plebiscites took their states in what we pro-Choicers regard as the right direction, last night remains a serious setback for women’s reproductive autonomy. How so? Because the pro-Life lobby will now reverse its anti-federalist strategy and press to remove abortion rights from the states, repositioning them with what is now a more sympathetic federal administration. And at the risk of sounding woke, I’m on the side of women’s reproductive autonomy.
As I’ve noted in a previous entry, worries about tariffs and deportations are both just hyperbolic awfulising. Rhetoric aside, there can’t be across-the-board tariffs on imports. Why not? Because America doesn’t grow bananas. So Trump’s “favourite word” will have to die the death of a thousand qualifications. And as for imposing prohibitive tariffs on Chinese EV imports, no, doing so would not encourage EV production in America. By eliminating competition it would just raise the cost of EV to pretty much put the kibosh on their consumption in America. So while the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels, America will be left to continue choking on its exhaust. Good news for existing auto workers, but bad news for environmentalists. So as I say, winners and losers.
And the same can be said of mass deportations. American agriculture and small business – and therefore the consumers they serve – would starve and shrivel without cheap migrant labour. So these deportations would have to be highly selective. And that ‘selektion’ would create a legal and administrative bureaucracy that would require as many if not more functionaries than deportees.
On the other hand, the GOP can only count on a majority in the Senate for two years. So sometime before the midterms Trump will inveigle Justices Thomas and Alito to retire so he can replace them with two much younger conservative Justices, thus ensuring a conservative Court for decades to come. Not a happy prospect for a third generation marxist like me. Well, at least were I an American.
I suspect Trump will make good on his promise to pardon both the January 6 felons and, of course, himself, thereby doing serious damage to the rule of law. Once again, winners and losers. Well, what of it?!
But the most dire losers will be the Ukrainian people. Trump has promised to defund Ukraine’s war effort. Europe could take up the slack, but it won’t, because Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” was too long ago to trigger the requisite Santayana advice. So probably before Inauguration Day, Russia will settle for just a tad more than what it’s already taken, and begin eyeing its former Soviet era republics for Russian minorities in like need of rescue.
Final flotsam. For the GOP JD Vance will be the candidate in 2028. Final jetsam. For the Dems Kamala Harris won’t be. As Bill Maher would put it, “New Rule. A man is allowed two shots at it. A woman gets only one!”
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Don’t divorce Pam.
What makes you think that the the Republicans will try to abolish abortion nationwide? Not even Project2025 calls for that. It does call for banning federal funding of abortion through Medicaid. But Trump has disavowed (sincerely?) Project2025 anyway. The Republicans didn’t get the electoral boost from Dobbs they were hoping for in 2022. Maybe they were satisfied with allowing some states to ban it, even though it cost them. Sometimes things are done for deeply held principles at political cost. But you can’t burn yourself politically twice. I think we’ve heard the last of abortion federally.
Promotion of EVs is not done to keep us from choking on our own car exhaust. Existing pollution controls on gasoline and diesel cars largely look after that. Rather, the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions (which no one chokes on or is even aware of) in hopes of abating climate change. Punitive tariffs on cheap imported EVs that even poor people might buy would demonstrate that the Administration is not serious about climate change, which we know anyway. Americans don’t seem to be interested in EVs just as a way to avoid paying gasoline taxes. Too much squeeze for the juice. Probably everyone who wants to buy an EV has already bought one. An idea whose time has come, and gone, unless your country is seriously passionately committed to Net Zero by 2035, which America is not.
Immigration, and deportation of those they don’t want, is another one of those wicked problems. Immigration seems to dilute the criminality of the native born and there is little reason to to restrict it as long as the economy can provide jobs for them. The only immigrants for sure to vote Democratic are those that are going to go on welfare, which again, they take advantage of less exuberantly than the native-born. (Question: Why are so many non-elderly native-born Americans “on Social Security”? Since surely not pensions they must be disabled, right? But, as George Carlin quoted a challenge by a guy in a wheelchair when he, Carlin, emerged from a disabled toilet stall, “You don’t look disabled!” (Carlin’s riposte was, “I was when I went in there!”)) So there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to oppose immigration and lots of reasons why it’s necessary. Even for Republicans. Most immigrants are young Hispanic men, who voted for …. Trump! Not a single childless cat lady among them. But you have to be seen to be doing something about the border.
Best wishes!
Leslie
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I think pro-Lifers, wherever they live, are sufficiently offended that abortion is taking place just across the state line that they’d love to see it criminalised nation-wide. So I DON’T think they’re content to rest on their Dobbs laurels. But I suppose time will tell.
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