The US-Canada Trade War

President Trump has announced new tariffs:

25% on all Canadian imports, closing the loophole on imports valued at less than $800, with a lower 10% rate for energy, i.e., oil & gas
25% on all Mexican imports
10% on all Chinese imports, on top of the targeted tariffs Trump introduced in his first term (and which President Biden first retained and then expanded)

These tariffs are much larger than the tariffs Trump imposed during his first term. Those tariffs were targeted – they affected specific industries Trump was hoping to reshore. This is a broad-spectrum approach. It’s a strategy you use to force another state to make concessions in other policy areas. What is Trump trying to do? And will he succeed?

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Medicare for All: Requiem for a Dream

I have a new piece out with Sublation on the failure of the left to remain faithful to Medicare for All. There’s no paywall. You can read it here: https://www.sublationmag.com/post/medicare-for-all-requiem-for-a-dream

The Function of Marianne Williamson’s Candidacy

Marianne Williamson is running against President Biden in the Democratic primaries. As I write this, she is the only declared candidate, though Biden has given every indication that he will run for a second term.

I don’t have anything against Williamson personally or against her religious views. But there is a lot of evidence that Williamson is a weak candidate who cannot mount a competitive primary campaign against Biden. In this piece, I will present this evidence to you, and I will make the case that Williamson’s candidacy creates the illusion that the primary is being contested when in fact there is no meaningful left-wing opposition to Biden within the Democratic Party. This is not to suggest that Williamson herself intends to create this illusion or has any negative intentions of any kind. Nevertheless, her decision to run allows party apparatchiks to pretend the party is ideologically diverse and welcomes internal dissent when in point of fact it does not.

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A Covid Christmas Prophecy

A number of people have asked me why I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog lately. There are three key reasons:

My father, Paul Studebaker, died of prostate cancer in August, at the age of 67. The months leading up to his death were very arduous, and it’s taking some time to get wind back in my sails.
I am quietly working on a very big project, and it’s taking a lot of my available energy.
The dominant political issue for much of the past two years has been coronavirus. It is very hard to write anything about coronavirus that has any value, because most people’s positions on coronavirus are irrational.

I want to say a bit more about #3, and then I want to make a prediction.

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A Second Term for Trump is Better Than Beto

There have been a number of pieces outlining how very conventional Beto O’Rourke is. They point out that as a member of congress he was a New Democrat–part of a caucus committed to moving the Democratic Party to the right on economic policy. While many centrist Democrats performatively pretend to support single payer or tuition-free college, O’Rourke wouldn’t even sponsor legislation on these issues for the political capital. Instead, he actively worked to undermine Dodd-Frank and weaken our financial regulations. Just this week, O’Rourke was quoted attempting to distance himself from the “progressive” label, nevermind “democratic socialist”. When asked if he identifies as a progressive, O’Rourke said:

I don’t know. I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels.

The Jacobin and Current Affairs pieces I’ve linked you to will give you the whole rundown, in greater detail than I have the time or patience to produce myself. I am now going to make a much more provocative argument–I’m going to make the case that we would be better off sticking with Donald Trump in 2020 than electing Beto O’Rourke.

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