Commentator

Midterm Fears, Ukraine Aid Fears, Liz Truss, Assisted Suicide

HOW BAD WILL THE MIDTERMS BE?

Pretty bad. New polling shows that voters are increasingly concerned about inflation and crime - core GOP issues. The sense is that a whole raft of circumstances that should swing in the Democrats’ favor - Dodd, the Inflation Reduction Act, student loan forgiveness, the glorious Ukrainian counteroffensive - simply don’t matter nearly as much to swing voters as the price of groceries or gas.

There’s not much to be done at this stage - the Democrats will stagger to the finish line and see how bad the damage is - but sooner or later the Democratic Party truly needs to begin reckoning with everything it’s doing wrong (which is a lot) and begin the hard work of making itself comprehensible to regular voters.

Catherine Cortez Masto on the campaign trail in Nevada

I came across a couple of interviews this week from savvy Democratic operators ripping into the party’s messaging problem. This has been the real issue - going back to the Tea Party; to 2016 - and, unfortunately, the focus on ancillary explanations for electoral defeats, the Koch brothers ‘astroturfing’ the Tea Party, Russian ‘troll farms,’ etc, has allowed Democrats to ignore the critical problem (so well understood by South Park) that too many of their candidates tend to speak in wonk-soup while the new breed of Republicans sound like people.

Lis Smith, senior advisor to Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, told Persuasion, “The number one piece of advice that I give to candidates—and it shouldn't be this complicated—is to just be normal: talk like a normal person, communicate in simple ways and with simple concepts.” This wasn’t necessarily a problem of background - Buttigieg was a Rhodes Scholar, as was Bill Clinton, but both of them figured out how to do it - as it was of candidates getting the wrong advice, of finding themselves entombed in various liberal echo chambers. “And so, you do see staffers who come out of this advocacy world, who have surrounded themselves with people who only share their worldviews—who think like them, talk like them, and live in bubbles where they don't communicate with normal people. I think that distorts how politicians talk,” Smith continued.

Stan Greenberg, Democratic ‘pollster supremo,’ was even more coruscating in an interview for Politico. “It’s our worst performing message,” Greenberg said of Democratic candidates’ focus on the Biden administration’s accomplishments - as opposed to the what-is-the-government-doing-for-me-this-second bread-and-butter issues that voters actually care about. “I’ve tested it. I did Biden’s exact words, his exact speech. And that’s the test where we lost all of our leads. It said to the voters that this election is about my accomplishments as a leader and not about the challenges you’re experiencing.”

But the messaging problem - as real as it is - obscures an even deeper issue, that the Democratic Party doesn’t truly have a base, doesn’t exactly stand for anything. In the election that I worked in as a Democratic field organizer, what became obvious to me was that the Democrats were the union party - that’s where the organization, the energy, really came from. (My initial introduction to party politics - this had been as a little, little kid - was of an adult, in a very Left neighborhood, being asked what the difference between the parties was, and the adult had replied, “Democrats are the party of regular people like us and Republicans are the party of the rich.”) And that may have been reductive but it was wonderfully effective messaging - versions of that idea sustained the Democrats for a full century, and there’s something of that, in amberized form, that may have propelled Biden to the presidency; the sense at the end of the day that he had a good heart, that he really was with the people.

But unions in America have been in terminal decline, and what that’s meant is that Democrats are a party without a home. Spend time in the American interior and it’s obvious that Democrats are batting with several strikes against them - they are the party of taxes, the party of regulation, the party of promising governmental reform that never seems to come, the party of the coastal elite, and, now, the party of ‘defund’ and of the woke revolution. These are all terrible handicaps to be playing against - and, as far as I can tell, all that keeps Democrats competitive is the sense among some swing voters that the Republicans are even worse. (But, still, this is not really a good party platform, and the current political reality, let’s face it, is of the country’s best and brightest losing consistently to people who believe that pizza restaurants house pedophile rings and that forest fires are caused by Jewish ‘space lasers.’)

Basically, there are two directions for the party to go in. One is to consciously rally behind candidates who are normal, who get it - c.f. Fetterman and his tattoos - which means also junking the ‘career politician’ types, Biden, Newsom, Harris, Pelosi, etc, who have become just about everybody’s association with the Democrats. The other tack - more weighty - is the Bernie Sanders direction. If the Democrats are going to have any connection with voters, they must develop some sort of resonance on economic issues. That means getting people’s pain and pushing robust governmental measures - e.g. increase in the minimum wage, conversations around the Child Tax Credit or various forms of UBI, investment in infrastructure, some rhetoric about bringing jobs back to the heartland, and, probably ultimately, anti-corporate and anti-Big Tech rhetoric (although that seems to be a few years off as an issue).

The Fetterman direction

Democrats will always be the party of government and that means certain handicaps - they are forever playing with strike one against them as the party of taxes - but it is possible to turn that position to advantage. The Progressives (big ‘P’) did it at the turn of the 20th century and they did it with an effective vilification of corporate interests and, eventually, with muscular, tangible governmental interventions in the economy. Strangely, people seemed not so bothered about potential tax raises when Bernie ran because they felt that his heart was in the right place, that he represented the people against the Fed, the banks, the corporate interests.

The Sanders direction

All of this is for the Monday morning quarterbacking after the midterm results - for now, the Dems pretty much just have to keep talking about Dodd. But the point is worth noting - that the party is not in a sustainable place if it loses all resonance with voters every time gas prices go up. I remember, in my field organizing stint - also contending with rising gas prices - and being given a set of talking points promising ‘middle class tax cuts.’ It was meaningless - the candidate I was working for, the Democratic Party, would never have any follow-through on ‘middle class tax cuts’ - but the candidate, a perfectly savvy veteran politician, was doing the best with what she had. What she had, unfortunately, was really not good enough - and, as much as we were improvising at that time, it was clear that, eventually, some pivot was needed, for Democrats to recognize that they have lost their place as the party of the unions, that they need a new vision to get workers back.

THE FRAGILE AID TO UKRAINE

The great consequence of a Republican takeover of the House - something I hadn’t really thought through before this week - may well be an attempt to interdict the U.S.’ military aid to Ukraine.

I guess I hadn’t really thought about it because of all of the Ukrainian flags I see every day, because support for Ukraine just seemed like such a bipartisan issue, and I’d read so many op-eds about how Ukraine’s fight had restored core values of American democracy.

But there really is no underestimating the perfidy of the modern GOP. And Kevin McCarthy, in an interview, indicated that, after the election, the American people might just lose interest in Ukraine. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he said. “It’s not a free blank check. They’re just not going to do it.” While McCarthy’s slavish devotion to the will of the people is commendable - of course, as potential House Majority Leader, he wouldn’t have any control over the cutting of that check - the more immediate impulse towards isolationism would appear to be the urge to do the exact opposite of whatever the Biden administration does as well as the long-standing dance between the American right-wing and Putin.

The limitlessly perfidious Kevin McCarthy

Experts have tended to insist that it’s not really likely that an ascendent GOP would cut significant aid to Ukraine - and run the risk of taking on the political blowback of a Russian victory - but Liz Cheney, who really has been the year’s political MVP, minces no words on McCarthy. “At every moment….when McCarthy has had the opportunity to do the right thing or do something that serves his own political purpose he always chooses to serve his own political purpose,” she said on Meet the Press. “For somebody who has a picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall of his office in the Capitol, the notion that now Kevin McCarthy is going to make himself the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party is just a stunning thing.”

And McCarthy’s obeisance to the will of the American people is a fairly soft version of others towards the right who are more direct about looking to wrap the whole thing up. Trump wrote a month ago on Truth Social, “Get a negotiated deal done NOW. Both sides need and want it. The entire World is at stake. I will head up group???” And that other great statesman Elon Musk has out of nowhere - the reasonable-enough speculation, backed by sources, is that Musk had been in contact with Putin and was simply relaying a proposal - tweeted a potential peace deal, giving Russia pretty much everything it could want, annexation of Crimea and fresh referendums in the disputed Eastern regions.

Elon Musk’s peace tweet

It’s hard to know what to make of all of this - I don’t know if McCarthy is bluffing; if Musk’s Twitter account has actually been turned into a back-channel negotiation between Russia and the West - but there have been some pieces out recently doing the sort of retroactive reporting that I like so much and revealing that, not so surprisingly, ongoing Western aid to Ukraine rests on a less solid foundation than the Ukrainians might like.

Joshua Yaffa, for The New Yorker, got a surprising number of senior defense officials, both on the U.S. and Ukrainian side, to discuss various calculations in the procurement of NATO weaponry throughout 2022. The picture doesn’t change all that from what’s been reported been elsewhere - the overall sense is that U.S. intelligence assessments closely mirrored Russia’s; and, from a tactical point of view, Putin’s decision to invade wasn’t as crazy as it was subsequently revealed to be. The CIA director William Burns found, on a secret trip to Moscow in November, 2021, that Putin already had his mind made up. “Putin thought Zelensky a weak leader, that the Ukrainians would cave, and that his military could achieve a decisive victory at minimal cost,” Burns reported. And that was the consensus of the U.S. brass as well. “We thought it might take a few days longer than the Russians did but not much longer,” a senior Defense Department official told Yaffa.

The story of the war - as one has to keep repeating - has very simply been the ineptitude of the Russian military, long-standing corruption within the armed forces and a basic inability to adapt to bad news or to facts on the ground. “We presumed they had their shit together, but it turns out they didn’t,” the same Defense Department official continued. And that assessment made the United States tepid in its initial weaponry support. The Ukrainians (this was my experience when I was there) fully expected betrayal by their Western partners - or at least the soft pedaling that characterized the U.S.’s response in 2014 and Germany’s in 2022 - but, by late April, with the failure of the Russians to take Kyiv, the United States defense establishment agreed to send upgraded weaponry. “Austin called and said the decision has been taken [to supply heavy artillery],” Ukraine defense minister Oleksii Reznikov told Yaffa. “I understood we crossed a certain Rubicon.”

There is the strong sense that that support was contingent always on Ukraine continuing to win, on its being the politically expedient decision, and not overly provoking Putin. It was never unconditional and was never practically courageous - the whole effort worked because the Russian advance on Kyiv proved so inept and because Putin was surprisingly tolerant of the arms shipments. “Russia was the frog, and we boiled the water slowly, and Russia got used to it,” said Yaffa’s Defense Department official.

I have the suspicion, though, that Yaffa was getting a bit of a sanitized version of events on the sensitive topic of active aerial surveillance of Russian targets. “That’s a major field where the U.S. is helping us,” said Mykola Bielieskov, defense expert at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, putting things very demurely. That intervention means - as Yaffa more forthrightly writes - “that U.S. spy satellites can capture snapshots of troop positions anywhere on earth….that U.S. military spy planes, flying along the borders, augment the picture…..that intelligence intercepts can allow analysts to listen in on communications between Russian commanders.” In other words, complete domination in the realm of military intelligence.

That domination does not, absolutely does not, extent to targeted attacks on Russian generals, writes Yaffa. “There are lines we drew in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia,” a senior Biden administration official told him. “We are not trying to kill generals.” But that denial directly contradicts a New York Times report from May, which printed a similar demurral on the killing of Russia’s highest-ranking uniformed officer Valery Gerasimov before adding, “But American intelligence was critical in the deaths of other generals, officials acknowledged.” There may be some sanitization also on the role that U.S. trainers played in the strengthening of the Ukrainian military in the years prior to the war - a story that I continue not to see reported anywhere.

The takeaway is that the course of the war was, from the beginning, almost impossible to predict. “Our plan was our one tiny chance for success,” a senior Ukrainian military official told Yaffa, referring to the initial plan to hold Kyiv at all costs and to cede territory in the east. Russians assumed that the invasion would be a walk-over; Americans assumed that the invasion would be a walk-over. The Americans get only a certain amount of credit for maintaining weapons supplies in that stage of the war - and then more so over the course of the summer. And what that means is that a change in the political winds - GOP control of Congress, above all - could potentially undo the Pentagon’s gradualist and not-altogether-full-throated aid for the Ukrainians.

TRUSSED OUT

I guess the reaction to Liz Truss’ resignation is a feeling that it’s so refreshing, so quaint, for modern politics to actually be about governance, for politicians to be held accountable for things like monetary policy. It’s also - I’ve been thinking this a lot the last few years - a testament to why the parliamentary system may, in the end, be better than what we have: an executive branch that can’t be tossed out in the same way, that’s always on the verge of some sort of domineering control.

Truss’ downfall happened so fast that the press hasn’t really had time to digest it. The sense is that the Tories had buyers’ remorse right away. It was like being in a cult, one Tory MP told The Guardian. “That is literally what it’s been like,” another agreed. “It’s such a sense of relief. I just thank God it’s over.”

What brought Truss down in the end were a set of ‘unforced errors’ so ridiculous that they’re almost not even worth discussing - the home secretary sending government documents from a private e-mail; an incident of MP-dragging in Parliament, with some Tories dragging others into the chamber to vote on a motion that wasn’t, in any case, likely to pass. As The Guardian put it, “This debacle cemented the view in MPs’ minds that this was a government that could not even get the basics right, and had to be ejected as soon as possible.”

A happy moment in Liz Truss’ premiership

What seems really to have been the issue - although the Tory MPs have mostly been polite enough to not say it directly - is that they just couldn’t stand Truss’ personality. There was a degree of sprucing-up her image during the leadership contest but, once in, the personality clashes became constant. This issue had dogged her through her life - Politico found a university classmate to describe her as “incredibly annoying”; The Guardian compared her to a “1980s Amstrad computer” - and the Tories seem, within an incredibly short period of time, to have decided that they just couldn’t deal with her. The best piece I’ve read so far on Truss’ tenure - The Telegraph’s ‘Liz Truss: The Human Hand Grenade Who Tragically Blew Herself Up’ - traces both Truss’ rise and fall to a personality turn she took around 2017 when she was demoted as justice secretary and decided that from that point forward she would give no quarter on anything. “She felt that her biggest mistake was that she didn’t listen to her own judgement,” said a former advisor quoted by The Telegraph. “From that moment she developed a ‘fuck it’ mentality. It was like, ‘I am going to be me. And I’m going to believe in myself.’” That sensibility - which seemed to mirror Trump’s and was part of the wisdom of that political era, the idea, as Truss’ colleague David Laws says, that “it is better to be noticed even if it is for the wrong things” - led at the same time, though, to an inflexibility that eventually ruined her relationships with her party colleagues.

Liz Truss at Oxford

To a surprising extent, though, the headlines have all been about the economy and monetary policy - an understanding that Britain is in an economic freefall and that doctrinaire libertarian market policy simply can’t work given Britain’s debts and the realities of centralized banking. The Spectator writes, “The irony is that, despite having campaigned against the Treasury orthodoxy and talked about reviewing the Bank of England’s mandate, Truss has handed these institutions more power than they have had in living memory…..The Truss blow-up has discredited the idea of borrowing to fund permanent tax cuts for a generation.”

The great question becomes if the Truss tenure basically invalidates libertarianism as a philosophy of governance. My assumption is that it doesn’t - that the libertarians will find ways to say that Truss was a unique case; that the really startling failure of her administration proves nothing - but the adults-in-the-room have been surprisingly unequivocal in saying that the sort of fiscal policy advocated by Truss was always going to cause the market to tank. “Markets are not in charge. Governments and central banks are,” said Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, in an interview with the BBC. “Markets respond to the announcements made by government and central banks. And central banks have lost control of inflation, government has lost control of the public finance; it’s not surprising that markets respond to that.”

In other words - respect the market; respect the banking system; no libertarian gimmicks. Truss ended up being betrayed by the market that she had so fervently championed - and which turned out to be directed by the government after all.

CANADA’S ASSISTED SUICIDE PROGRAM

I was genuinely very upset by this excellent Common Sense piece on Canada’s assisted suicide program. The reporter, Rupa Subramanya, speaks to a wide number of people considering or undergoing the application process for Canada’s robust MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) program and finds that a) it’s way too easy for an application to be processed successfully and b) far too many people are considering state-sanctioned suicide as a casual alternative to fairly run-of-the-mill life pains.

It’s not as if there hasn’t been reporting in the mainstream media on the controversies surrounding the gradual expansion of MAiD. Here is how a New York Times piece called ‘Is Choosing Death Too Easy In Canada?’ discussed MAiD: “Although the Canadian law was hotly debated in 2016, when it was originally enacted, it has won broad public acceptance since then, with polls showing strong support. But the change in the law….allowing an assisted death if the person is suffering from a chronic painful condition, even if that condition is not terminal…..has reignited debate over the system. In March the law will expand again, to apply to people with some mental disorders.”

The tone of the piece makes it seem as if the program, while controversial, is tightly regulated, subject to all sorts of scrutiny. “A Parliamentary committee of lawmakers is studying what standards should govern [the mental disorder] cases,” The Times writes, and quotes the chief executive of Dying With Dignity Canada as saying, “The reality is [that doctors] risk losing their medical license, if not criminal charges, if they’re not following the rules.”

That sort of decorum is far removed from the story of Margaret Marsilla, a Toronto woman who logged into her 23-year-old son’s e-mail account and discovered that he had been approved for MAiD and that his death was scheduled for two weeks away. The messages sent by Joshua Tepper, the doctor performing the ‘procedure,’ did not read as if he were very concerned about losing his license or about a Parliamentary inquiry. “Hii,” he wrote. “I am confirming the following timing: Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” And to a follow-up question from her son about whether a dog could be brought into the space, he replied, “Dogs are welcome in the space as long as there is someone there who will be responsible for them during the time at MAiDHouse.”

In other words - completely routine; just another medical procedure. Marsilla called Tepper pretending to be a patient with an identical set of issues as her son - diabetes, blindness in one eye - and had a similarly matter-of-fact exchange. Tepper ran through a list of requirements, told her he had “patients a lot similar to you.” Tepper offered to do an assessment with Marsilla. Marsilla asked if she should ‘come in,’ but that was unnecessary effort for the standard of the MAiD program. “We do them remotely, often by video of some type: WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime, something like that,” Tepper told her.

So - no attempt to talk the patient out of it; a completely pro forma assessment - and, in the case of Marsilla’s son, a 23-year-old signed up for assisted suicide by the government of Canada.

Rupa Subramanya

Many of the conversations with patients considering MAiD really are heart-rending. Kiano Vefaeian, Marsilla’s son, refused to forgive her after her intervention - she launched a social media campaign to expose MAiD, which led to Tepper declining to perform the procedure. “KIANO I love u,” Marsilla wrote to Vefaeian on Facebook. To which he replied, “No you don’t. You were adding to my pain and suffering, and for that I curse you.” And, to her follow-up, “I love u And I want to talk to u,” he wrote, “You know what I need.” And Cheryl Romaire, the subject of The New York Times’ piece, said, “It felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest” of MAiD’s decision to approve her for assisted suicide after an initial rejection.

But Supramanya digs around and finds a number of interviewees who are considering MAiD not because of existential loss-of-the-will-to-live, let alone a physical condition that ‘cannot be remediated,’ but simply because they’re hopelessly broke. “There’s a tipping point where you can’t afford to live,” Les Landry, a 65-year-old man from Alberta, told Supramanya. “MAiD is the new society safety net.” Victoria Cowie, a 21-year-old engineering student from Ontario, took a hard look at the budget, and told her mother, “Mom, I don’t think we can survive. We have to apply for MAiD.” And, even more unnervingly, as Supramanya writes, “It had not been lost on government officials that MAiD could save them a good bit of money” - and the Parliamentary Budget Officer in 2020 issued a genuinely macabre report noting that MAiD would cut health care costs by $66 million.

As a liberal - and I still am, I think, a liberal - I find it incredibly difficult to understand how the Left does this to itself. In the Obamacare debates of 2009, the Tea Party types were roundly reviled for insisting that Obamacare included ‘death panels.’ Well, in Trudeau’s Canada, there really are death panels - or a perfunctory assessment by MAiD doctors with wildly perverse incentives to perform more ‘procedures.’ The political optics alone - a social media campaign like Margaret Marsilla’s was inevitabe - would, one would imagine, dissuade Parliament from expanding eligibility to those with far-from-life-threatening physical maladies as well as those with ‘mental disorders.’ But liberals - I’ve found - have a really terrible tendency to get caught in certain ideological ruts. There is a case for euthanasia for end-of-life care and there is an ethic holding that autonomy and dignity are of greater value than the mere preservation of life. “MAiD is about relieving suffering, respecting human dignity, and recognizing the inherent right for individuals to make decisions affecting their health and even their death,” a MAiD defender, Derryck Smith, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, told Supramanya. All fair - but there’s a sense that liberals allowed themselves to get backed into horribly toxic positions. There is a difference between euthanasia for the terminally ill and euthanasia for a depressed 23-year-old or for a 21-year-old who is having trouble making ends meet. In deferring automatically to the autonomy position - or to the nasty corollary that there is a right to opt out of pain and that the medical establishment has an obligation to provide a path out of suffering - the liberal camp loses any sense of proportion or of an underlying moral compass.

Euthanasia is really tricky. There probably is a place for it. There’s no question at the same time that the slippery slope problem is overwhelming. But the real issue here isn’t policy but ideology. You can’t just defer to the wishes of patients; to the practices of the medical establishment; to (apparently) the dictates of Parliamentary cost-cutting. Government is there to make moral choices. And, as far as suicide goes, I get a little Old Testament - a sense that there was wisdom in all of the major axial religions imposing a stringent prohibition on suicide (understanding that it does happen but refusing to condone it in any circumstances whatsoever). And I don’t see any reason why a government can’t be as stringent - to say, in effect, that we understand your pain, that suicide attempts do happen, but, very simply, and for every moral reason in the world, governments can’t be in the business of helping its citizens to die.