Seriously, why did we not sell tickets? If only our national election had been pay-per-view for the rest of the world, we could have wiped out the national debt. However, while viewers around the world seem to be lapping up our national reality TV show, are we, the citizens of the US, going to get anything out of it?
Specifically, are we going to get the thing we need most and have enjoyed least this century: effective government? We have too much deferred maintenance to fix, too much deferred leadership to generate and too much deferred reimagining to undertake to wait another four years to solve our biggest problems, especially in this age of accelerating technology and climate change.
If we will have indulged in almost two years of electoral entertainment and pathos just to end up back where we were, only worse, with even more venomous gridlock in Washington, it would not just be emotionally depressing, we will really start to decline as a nation. When we forfeit governing our country strategically at the national level for this long, inevitably the roof will start to leak and the floors will start to buckle.
However, how can anything good come from a campaign where the entertainment is increasingly X-rated and where the winner will be so morally injured — because of the hatchet wounds that were inflicted by the loser or that were self-inflicted?
What needs to happen for this election-drama script to end differently, or at least not so tragically?
For starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die. I do not say that as a partisan. I say that as a citizen who believes that the US needs a healthy center-right party that offers more market-based solutions to problems; keeps the pressure on for deregulation, freer trade and smaller government; and is willing to compromise. However today’s version of the Grand Old Party is not such a problem-solving party.
We have known that ever since the Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, quit, not because he could not work with US President Barack Obama, but because about a quarter of House Republicans, the so-called Freedom Caucus, were simply not interested in governing and had made his job impossible.
For the sake of the country, this version of the Republican Party has to be fractured, with the extreme far right going off with the likes of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Tea Party, US Senator Ted Cruz — along with all the right-wing TV and radio gasbags who thrive on chaos — leaving behind a moderate center-right bloc, which, hopefully, one day would become the new Republican Party.
However, it will need to nurture a new base, one inspired by a Jack Kemp spirit of conservative innovation, not by Trump dog whistles of anger, xenophobia and racial enmity.
CRUSH TRUMP
Toward that end it is particularly important that Trump be crushed at the polls to send the message inside the Republican Party and out that someone of his poisonous ilk can never win in the US, and to strip him and his loyalists of any argument that the election was rigged.
At the same time, we have to hope not only that Democratic US presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the national election, but also that Democrats retake at least the US Senate, so she has some real leverage to forge trade-offs with a more sane Republican Party to start fixing things: putting in place common-sense gun laws, like restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, requiring universal background checks and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun; borrowing money at near-zero interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure; replacing some income and corporate taxes with a revenue-neutral carbon tax to stimulate more clean-energy production; fixing Obamacare; and implementing sensible immigration reform and responsible tax and entitlement reforms.
The bigger Clinton’s margin of victory, the less dependent she would be, I hope, on the left wing of her party, and the more likely she would work with Republicans, as she vowed during the last debate, by “finding common ground, because you have to be able to get along with people to get things done in Washington.”
I say “hope,” because I do not know who the real Hillary is — the more US Senator Bernie Sanderish one speaking publicly or the more former US president Bill Clintonish one who spoke privately to Goldman Sachs.
The nightmare scenario — ruling out, God forbid, a Trump victory — is that Clinton wins with a slim majority and the Republicans hold the House and the Senate. The Democratic left would have a stranglehold on Clinton while Trump, who would start his own TV network and movement, would keep the Republican base in a state of permanent anger, intimidating every Republican lawmaker who contemplated compromise. If that happens, the US would be adrift.
One more wish. Within hours of the leak of the Access Hollywood video showing Trump saying vile things about women, WikiLeaks, which seems to have become an arm of Russian intelligence, leaked Democratic Party e-mails meant to embarrass Clinton.
The Clinton camp suggested that Russia was trying to tilt the election to Trump. If so, crushing Trump at the polls is the best way for Americans to say to Russian President Vladimir Putin: “You can manipulate your elections, but you can’t manipulate ours.”
However, please, Lord, let that not be the only good thing to come out of this election.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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