Civil Horizon
Free Thoughts, Adequately Expressed

In two recent posts – Policy Differences and China on the Ballot, I laid out the principal policy reasons that I support Trump over Biden. In a third (all three are linked below), I Just Can’t Restrain Myself, I set forth the reasons I think Biden’s character is low and his intellectual capacity pathetically inadequate for the job. In this post I will astonish – and no doubt infuriate – my progressive friends by explaining why, to my own astonishment, I have come to genuinely admire President Trump’s character.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I did not vote for Trump in 2016...

One of the most important questions that we face in this presidential election cannot be decided by us alone: does CCP-led China view itself as our business partner and/or as an implacable enemy of the ideals our system of governance embodies – and of our nation insofar as Xi believes that we stand in the way of his ‘China Dream’?

All we have the power to decide is how we see that great nation and what that implies about how whoever we elect as president should handle our mutual trading relationship, our alliances with other countries and our military needs. China may not be on our ballot, but the candidates who are embody starkly different perceptions of, and approaches to, the dragon.

China’s government has made no secret of the fact that it prefers Biden over Trump – and no w...

Joe Biden was never a bright light.

What were his accomplishments, in what sense was he ever a leader, in his long decades as a legislator? None and never. And he made many very public mistakes of the telltale ‘this guy will never learn’ variety.

For example, when Biden first ran for president, 32 years ago, did he actually think he was going to get away with giving a major, televised speech in which he plagiarized one by, and arrogated the life story of, Neil Kinnock? Really? Long years after that fiasco, had he not learned enough to know that when he boasted – with absolutely no basis in fact – about his academic scholarships, multiple degrees and high class standing, that those fabrications could and would be checked? He told another tall one about having attended an HBCU ju...

We know that progressives despise President Trump; they consider him a liar, a bigot, a would-be authoritarian and, above all, a vulgarian. And we know that conservatives don’t think much of Joe Biden; they (we) think of him as being stupid, borderline senile and craven.

Let’s try to set aside these character judgments – on both sides – for a few minutes, so we can take a look at their differences on some of the policies that are likely to eventually make differences in our lives.

1. Entitlements

Notwithstanding the pressure that the demographically-driven growth in Social Security and Medicare outlays is putting on the nation’s finances, Trump has consistently cast himself as a defender of these gargantuan entitlements...

Notwithstanding the usual wisdom of betting markets, which have Biden as a heavy favorite, I believe that not only will President Trump be re-elected, he will trounce his opponent.

Biden’s chief strengths are that he is widely perceived as a nice, moderate fellow and that he is not Donald J. Trump, who is neither nice nor moderate. Those strengths carried the day in the Democratic primaries, mostly because the party’s leaders were terrified of the alternatives, and they, with an assist from our nation’s current travails, have given him a commanding lead in the polls. If the polls and betting markets are right, he can coast to the finish line, which appears to be his present strategy.

Before focusing on Biden’s weaknesses as a candidate, perhaps we should look at the bigger pictu...

John Maynard Keynes famously parried a question about the possibly adverse long term effects of some policies he was recommending by remarking, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Decades later, in reference to Keynes’s comment, William F. Buckley, Jr. quipped “Well, now he’s dead, we’re not, and we’re living with the consequences of his mistakes.”

Buckley’s retort highlights what should be, but all too often isn’t, an ongoing constraint on decisions by governments and businesses: a consideration of the possible consequences of their choices out beyond the personal horizons of the individuals who are directly involved...

Lenin is said to have remarked that “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” The behavior of Western elites in recent years affirms the shrewdness of his prediction; we have been selling an awful lot of rope to China.  

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It’s more complicated than that, you say: nobody in China wants to hang American businesspeople. Fair enough, they don’t. Provide the American business people with cheap labor and sell American consumers things, sure; not kill them.

Oh, one has to put up with a certain amount of IP theft to do business with the Chinese, to be sure, but the upside is there: cheap labor, great logistics and an enormous potential market...

Over the last few days, I have been responding to questions about my support for Trump in the comments section of the most recent post. Both of the exasperated questioners are friends of mine who can’t quite believe that I would support a president whom they (with varying degrees of passion, I think) consider loathsome. It seems that though we share the same citizenship and love of country – to say nothing of our friendships with each other – we have completely different presidents.

Their president is a compulsive liar, an unstable man whose childish antics might be amusing if he didn’t have executive power. He was plainly guilty of abusing his office for political gain and almost certainly has been playing footsie with Putin for years...