Daniel McCarthy

The world has many island nations, and sometimes the United States counts itself among them. We have water on either side of us, and though we share our big island with Canada and Mexico, neither poses any threat. America is immune to invasion, a castle surrounded by the safest of moats. This wasn’t always so, and it isn’t really true today, unless we forget about Hawaii and our Pacific and Caribbean territories, most of which would be easy prey for other states if they weren’t under our sovereignty. In the earliest days of the republic, we shared the North American continent with outposts of Europe’s leading powers: France, Russia, Spain and Britain.

Not long ago I attended a gathering of young White House and congressional Republican staffers. Conversation turned, as you might expect, to the prospects for the GOP in Georgia’s two Senate runoff races in January — races that will swing control of the chamber if Democrats win them both. Only one young man dared to say the unsayable: not only would the GOP lose those races, but it should lose those races for the party’s own good. His points were sharp, even if no one was entirely persuaded. There would indeed be a silver lining to losing the Senate majority, and while few Republicans will wish for that, Trump voters will have some consolation if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler go down next month.

America’s longest war has just entered its 20th year. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. Now, nearly a decade after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Afghan war continues. And everyone expects that if the Americans ever leave, the Taliban will return to power. Yet the Taliban who take charge will not be the same as those who harbored bin Laden. The median age in Afghanistan is around 19 years old: half the country’s population was born after the war began. The US is not fighting a limited reservoir of Taliban militants; it is fighting a cultural force that has renewed itself over a generation.

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Biden voted for the biggest and most foolish intervention of that era, the Iraq War of 2003. He has not so much repudiated this act as tried to exculpate himself for it, claiming that in voting to authorize military force he didn’t think military force would be used. This is not credible on its face, and not the way anyone understood the vote at the time. It was as clear a vote for war as any vote has been since World War Two.

Americans hate the Supreme Court. You wouldn’t think so from a look at the polls, which usually show that the court is far more popular than the elected branches of government. But history tells a very different story. The conservative movement as it exists today was formed in large part as a reaction against the liberalism of the Supreme Court under chief justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger — both of whom were Republicans, as it happens. The progressive movement of the early 20th century and the populist movement of the late 19th century were also spurred to varying degrees by the character of the Supreme Court at the time, which was seen as conservative and elitist. Franklin D.

What would happen if Americans voted on different days? Suppose Republicans voted on Tuesday and Democrats voted on Wednesday. Would this be better than everyone voting on the same day? Would it be more fair and less confusing? Like hell it would! One reasonable complaint Republicans had about the 2000 presidential elections — famously decided, in the end, at the Supreme Court — was that some television networks called the State of Florida for Al Gore before polls had closed in the westernmost Florida Panhandle, which lay in the Central Time Zone, an hour behind the rest of the state in the Eastern Time Zone. Declaring a winner prematurely amounted to telling Panhandle voters not to bother casting their ballots.

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around?

Joe Biden’s range of emotional expression has narrowed with age – when he wants to convey feeling now, he shouts. Anger is the only thing that gets through, even when he’s trying to be hopeful or inspiring. And his acceptance remarks at the Democratic convention were well short of inspirational: the nominee didn’t seem tired, but his words did. From the first day of the convention, viewers had to wonder, ‘Why is Joe Biden the nominee of this party?’, a party that neither looks nor sounds like the almost octogenarian ex-VP. Biden has testified to his friendships with segregationists in the Senate. He was the sponsor of a historic anti-crime bill.

News of Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate was greeted by everything but the popping of champagne corks by my right-wing friends at lunch. The consensus of the policy wonks, policy makers, businessmen and journalists at my table was that Harris is good news for Donald Trump. ‘She’s unlikable’ and ‘she’s a cop’ were the instant reactions — though if Harris really were a cop, and not a former prosecutor, she might find some support among Americans horrified by the riots in Chicago, Portland and everywhere else that’s succumbed to left-wing Democratic control. I expected Harris all along, ever since Biden imposed a sex test on his list of potential running mates.

‘Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,’ ABC News recently tweeted. The wording was perfect — better than any satire as an illustration of the corporate media’s biases. These biases have lately come at cost for CNN and the Washington Post, both of which have paid to settle the suits brought against them by Nick Sandmann, a Covington Catholic High School student whose life they nearly destroyed last year. But the corporate media cannot be embarrassed into mending its ways, neither by its own risible tweets nor by lawsuits from the people harmed by its misreporting.

American politics is getting senile. Donald Trump and Barack Obama were both elected as agents of change, repudiations of an ancien régime represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. But after eight years of Obama, Hillary Clinton inherited the Democratic party anyway. Frustrated with just how little had changed, voters clutched for a more radical alternative in 2016 — and they found it in Trump. Now, if polls and betting markets are to be believed, the country is on the verge of turning its back on Trump. But if he does lose in November, his defeat does not promise to be a source of renewal — not when the alternative is a 77-year-old former vice president.

Jeff Sessions had more than just Donald Trump against him in his bid to win back his old Senate seat. He was also facing a Republican party that has been destroyed and remade — in Alabama as elsewhere — severing old relationships and affections. Contrary to what almost all of President Trump’s critics and a great many of his supporters believe, however, the new GOP is not simply Trump’s party. It’s a party that still includes most of the old interests, only newly networked and re-routed. The party is like an ingot that’s been melted down and recast, still the same but no longer familiar. As far as voters were concerned, the same could be said of Jeff Sessions himself. Sessions was a senator for 20 years.

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

Dolphins returned to the canals of Venice during the COVID-19 lockdown, and neoconservatives are returning to the Democratic party. Bill Kristol and his colleagues at the Bulwark support Joe Biden for president, even though an anti-Trump Republican of sorts briefly jumped into the race. Michigan congressman Justin Amash earned the esteem of the Kristol crew when he collaborated with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump last year. But the Bulwark feared that if Amash was on the ballot as the Libertarian party’s presidential nominee, he’d take votes away from Biden.

In Chicago last weekend 82 people were shot, 22 of them fatally. Between May 2019 and late May 2020, homicide claimed the lives of over 300 black men in the city. That’s not a police brutality problem, that’s a problem of insufficient police power being deployed to stop violent criminals. If the death of one man, George Floyd, while under arrest in Minneapolis is cause for nationwide protests, why don’t the deaths of hundreds of George Floyds every year prick the conscience of protesters that much more?Better yet, why don’t the antifa kids who are mighty bold with the police go and toss bricks at the gangbangers in Chicago? Because unlike the police, the gangs will shoot them dead.

That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the next black suspect to die in police custody. That’s the lesson so far from the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. Arson and luxury looting are not the most obvious ways of fighting racism or police brutality, but at this point riots are a ritual. ‘Antifa’ means bourgeois bolshevism — college-educated mock revolutionaries performing to a predictable script. This is the most sterile rebellion any country has ever seen. Far from terrifying the establishment, it reflects exactly what is taught in schools and preached over the airwaves and in respectable op-eds.