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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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☁ INAUGURATION THREAD ☁

I was going to post this to encourage Americans to participate in our show of civic unity. Let the messages of unity and American exceptionalism wash over you. Pay no mind to the commentators muttering about President Biden's last-minute preemptive pardons, or to the persistence of each Democrat speaker in reminding everyone that the Constitution exists and definitely binds the hands of the executive, too.

Kavanaugh has sworn in VP Vance. Now for the President.

Here's to four uneventful years. May the new administration succeed in delivering on their promises.

Edit: some of these promises kind of suck. I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

Carter already did something stupid over the panama canal - this would be just correcting his mistake.

Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.

The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.

To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier

(emphasis mine)

Thanks for the link, read the whole thing. Very entertaining.

What surprised me is that Carter was an outsider at the time. A lot of recent politics made me think Trump was one of the first true outsiders. Apparently not the case.

Carter was exactly the sort of politician normies say they want to see as a leader. It's rather sobering to observe how that all worked out for his legacy.

The actual policy legacy of the Carter administration (as opposed to Carter's personal reputation) held up pretty well given that we are now 45 years out.

The unambiguous successes include:

  • Volcker as Fed Chair, inflation tamed primarily through monetary policy
  • Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.
  • The Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt
  • Transferring primary responsibility for defending South Korea from North Korea to South Korea, where it properly belongs
  • An unusually clean White House

Things Carter changed with impacts decades later even if conservatives don't like the result:

  • The Chrysler bailout
  • Setting up the Education Department
  • Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group
  • Head Start
  • Modest tightening of environmental laws
  • A deal with Panama which allowed US shipping access to the Canal while avoiding the expense of maintaining a garrison in the Canal Zone.

Things which still looked like a success after 10+ years where we probably shouldn't blame Carter for his policy continued beyond the point of usefulness:

  • Supporting the muhajadeen to quagmire the Soviets in Afghanistan
  • Normalising relations with Red China (including the continued-to-this-day policy of informal recognition of Taiwan).
  • The Superfund law for dealing with the worst cases of land contaminated by industrial pollution.

Good ideas which Carter couldn't get past Congress, but is right with hindsight:

  • Spending discipline, and in particular the idea that the Executive should identify specific wasteful spending and ask Congress to cut it.
  • Natural gas deregulation (Congress took so long to pass the legislation that the benefits were felt after Carter left office, but with hindsight this is Carter's greatest achievement)

Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.

Setting up the Education Department

Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group

Can you explain why you see those as good decisions?

The last 2 are changes which have had long-lasting effects that Carter would presumably have wanted given that he was a Democrat. Whether they are good decisions is a fairly straightforwardly partisan issue, then and now. But from the point of view of Presidential legacy, successfully changing policy in your preferred direction in a way that sticks is an achievement.

The Carter transport deregulations are all good because they significantly reduced costs to individuals and businesses.

The US trucking industry has a serious problem of truckers ageing out of business and scarcely getting replaced, which is supposedly the long-term consequence of Carter's and Reagan's deregulations turning it into an unappealing career choice, as I've read on the interwebz.

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