2016's parting lesson: Elites aren't the problem - elitism is

I argued when 2016 began that this would be the year that democracy either triumphs or collapses. Now as 2016 draws to a close, it's time to hazard an initial verdict: democracy has indeed triumphed, but in such a way that betrays both its promise and its peril as opposing faces of the same coin.

We have witnessed over the course of this past year just how difficult the democratic experiment of governance really is, as the fundamental reason for this inherent difficulty has finally been laid shockingly bare: human beings can have very strong differences with each other.

We now live in an openly acknowledged "post-truth" world, where the very facts of life themselves are no longer universally agreed upon. Some would argue that this situation is hardly new: it's always been the case that opposing values, worldviews, and belief systems tend to produce contrasting understandings of particular events or circumstances which impact the common human family. What 2016 has demonstrated, however, is that objectively observed or reported facts are so superseded by the subjective interpretations that establish their context for any particular individual in question, that even the most irrefutable factual contradictions of one's preferred narrative can become so irrelevant as to be practically no better than blatant falsehoods.

In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.

Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.

As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.

The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.

Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.

As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.

That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.

Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.

Obama seals positive legacy embracing Trump's rise: Donald take note

Yesterday, for the first time ever, Barack Obama formally met face-to-face with the leader of a counterinsurgency that has placed his legacy squarely in its cross-hairs for much of its stunning ascension to the doorstep of power.

The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.

Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).

Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.

Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.

His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.

As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.

It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period

In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.

Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.

It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.

Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:

1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse

There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.

Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.

What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.

If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.

Downed by a big Weiner? If this is politics 2016, who needs reality TV?

Even the most outlandish political satire would have a tough time rivaling the surreal developments now unfolding in the final week of the presidential race.

Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?

And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?

You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.

Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.

So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.

No, the Philippines isn't kicking America out for China

Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.

But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?

There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.

But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.

In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.

That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.

It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.

There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.

How America's becoming polarized like Syria

One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.

What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.

Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.

The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.

Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.

The election lost, Trump pivots to making country ungovernable

It's obvious that Donald Trump has lost the election. Even his diehard supporters know it - in fact, his diehard supporters in particular should be aware of what's truly happening. They've consciously essentially given up winning the race, because their goal is radically shifting to something far more negative but carrying potentially far greater long-term impact: making the country ungovernable from status-quo Washington.

If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.

Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.

The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.

But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.

Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.

Uh-oh: Is Obama finally blundering into a suicidal confrontation with Russia?

Tomorrow, president Obama will once more get grilled by his national security team to finally order an utterly insane strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite the clear warning that a nuke-brandishing Vladimir Putin has now given him that this would certainly draw Russia into direct military conflict with the US.

In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.

Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.

What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.

Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.

So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.

But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.

That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.

As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.

Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.

So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.

As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.

The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.

If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.

In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.

Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.

American global leadership will be fundamentally reset by January 20

Aleppo has pretty much fallen, says Donald Trump in last night's second presidential debate: at least one presidential candidate seems to be getting sensible advice and intelligence from the military and intelligence community concerning the true state of affairs now unfolding in Syria as the Obama administration decides conclusively to sit on the sidelines of the main theater of the Syrian civil war, even though that all but means conceding victory to the despised regime of Bashar al-Assad in the nearly six-year-old conflict.

He goes on to reiterate the rather obvious: Just who do we think we're really backing over there? And who are we to think that we can't or shouldn't work with the Russians against ISIS? The subtext is obvious: True, the Russians haven't been focused on ISIS in their campaign in Syria to date, but that's because they see the Assad regime in Damascus as the legitimate entity that should regain control of all of Syria by eventually reclaiming what ISIS now holds in that country. We don't have to pretend we like Assad at all - or Putin for that matter - but isn't it about time we just come to grips with reality already?

From last night's debate, it's obvious that whoever replaces Obama in the White House on January 20 will inherit a reshuffled world order (or disorder you might say) in which reduced American leverage and influence in key strategic hot spots will be a solidly established fact on the ground. This will have happened with very little notice by the American public precisely because we never perceived it our vital interest to remain the top dog in those regions indefinitely anyway.

This doesn't at all mean the end of our superpower status; rather, it heralds a reset of the scope and nature of American global leadership.

We used to be the world's undisputed police officer - the universal enforcer of rules and standards which we ourselves largely created in the first place. In the post-Cold War era (1989-2014), this was largely because our military and economic supremacy over everyone else was so overwhelming that we could impose with ease a grave price for defying our edicts.

Going forward, however, we won't be primarily responsible anymore for military security or even economic stability in some of the most important geopolitical regions.

In the Middle East, it's already become clear that a Russo-Iranian axis has supplanted our own traditional alliance with Saudi Arabia as the most vigorous and dynamic dual partnership shaping the regional security equation. The Saudi-Iranian proxy wars in Syria and Yemen since 2013-14 have left little doubt as to which of the sectarian archrivals is the stronger and rising party in the heart of the Islamic world. One can argue that this is in no small part because Moscow has thrown its own weight behind its own client in Tehran far more than we have behind ours in Riyadh; yet the cool and cunningly calculating Vladimir Putin would not have done this had he not dispassionately assessed that the regional sectarian wind has been blowing strongly in Shiite Iran's favor to begin with.

Tellingly, simply staving off Iran's short-term acquisition of a small nuclear arsenal by no later than this year has forced the Western and Gulf Sunni alliance to concede so much strategic headway to the ayatollahs that it's easy to dismiss - per Mr. Trump - the whole nuclear deal of 2015 as an unqualified disaster even worse than the conflagration of preemptive war that it's temporarily averted. Even so, this all shows how deep is the structural strategic shift: because nobody dares invade Iran (invasion and occupation being the only sure way to end Iran's existentially dangerous nuclear weapons ambitions once and for all), we're left with a bargain that basically buys a little extra time to prepare for the likely eventuality of a nuked-up Islamic fundamentalist regime anyway; but thus far, it's the hardliners of Tehran who have seemingly made far more of the concessions granted them than we have of the reciprocal allowances they've made in return.

The lack of US and Western strategic leverage is far more glaring with regards to Russia itself: since Moscow's military might is so fearsome, the West's containment strategy against its aggressive backlash towards the liberal post-Cold War order has always been exclusively based on economics; but this is where the entire mercantilist calculus has arguably been irrevocably altered by the rise of China.

As its advanced remodernized arms industry shows, Russia retains plenty of technical and industrial prowess to sustain a sword and shield befitting a great power with worldwide interests; its economy looks puny only largely to the extent that it's measured by a Western consumerist yardstick to begin with. If one instead takes the view of Russia as a quintessentially militarist state whose economy is naturally primarily geared towards a massive armed posture anyway, in some sense Moscow has rarely appeared more formidable to its Western rivals than it does today. And the key to this is its budding alliance with Beijing.

China has utterly cornered global heavy industry and manufacturing. Its recent slowdown has if anything highlighted just how predatory its stranglehold on the smokestack mining and metals sectors has become vis-à-vis the global economy at large. Far from the old creaky economic engines of yesteryear, these as ever remain the backbone of any economy's tangible underlying strength and hard power. Where the West and the US retain their advantages in cutting-edge innovation, this advantage has been systematically eroded by the sheer economy of scale that China has brought to bear in virtually all traditional industries - it is scale itself that has become innovative and disruptive with Beijing now playing for keeps.

Russian and Chinese core military technology has closed the gap with American superiority enough over the past decade that long-term US arms dominance is no longer a given; yet even more troubling than the closing of the qualitative hole is the fact that the US seems to suffer more acutely than either of its near-peer counterparts in cost efficiency of producing and procuring the newest weapons systems. The bureaucratic waste and lard that chokes and clogs the Pentagon is now seemingly more problematic for Washington's aims of maintaining global strategic dominance than is any particular slowdown in technical innovation: a quite natural result of the gutting of American heavy industry (read: metals and mining) that can be laid squarely at the feet of Sino-mercantilist aggression since the dawn of the century.

So the US and Western Europe now have economies geared so much towards consumerist excesses and dissipations - cheap pleasures of the flesh and even cheaper vanities of the spirit (i.e. the social media-voyeurist phenomenon) - that it's little wonder they appear so soft and ineffectual in their response to robustly expanding Sino-Russian (even Iranian) spheres of influence.

The US military used to be able to deploy with credible force all over the world - even in the immediate neighborhood of traditional great powers - because its military-technological advantage could ensure quick and easy victories largely devoid of casualties. Since that is no longer the case, American military power has been reduced to the mercy of the general willingness of its populace to stomach the very real risks and costs of warfare in both human and economic capital; it thus follows that simply because the American public still doesn't even know where places like Ukraine or Syria are on the map, Washington is left with virtually no capacity to back up its diplomacy in these contested zones with any plausible threat of waging war.

The Philippines under its new loose-cannon autocratic president Rodrigo Duterte already sees this: his sudden indication of realignment with China and Russia in the defense realm isn't so much to spite the US as it is to prudently hedge bets. With Moscow now reactivating its long-range strategic assets in the Far East and joining Beijing in naval exercises in the disputed China Seas, little confusion can remain for long as to the purpose of such saber-rattling: to ultimately decouple even South Korea and Japan from their American protector and compel them into making separate strategic accommodations with the Eurasian giants. This of course on top of Russia's similar aggressive posturing which has recently intensified in Europe: by dangling the threat of a new nuclear arms buildup against NATO, Moscow means to raise the price of the Western alliance's pledge to protect its new eastern upstarts in the former Soviet bloc so high that it can strain the internal politics of these far more socially conservative (and hence potentially hostile to Washington and Brussels) countries to breaking point. And that's not even accounting for the increasingly likely hostile takeover of even core EU members France and Germany by right-wing neo-fascistic and xenophobic political forces and parties; to add to the preponderance of both extreme right and left-wing movements now becoming chronic on the EU periphery (Italy, Spain, and Greece).

The creeping reality of a reset of American power and leadership will firmly and quite automatically restrict whatever the future president will be able to accomplish or even declare as goals. Whereas Donald Trump seems to grasp the depth of the change already occurring, Hillary Clinton will before long be confronted with it in no uncertain terms as well.

Thus, on January 20, the 45th chief executive will just as likely acknowledge a new world calling for a new style and even substance of American leadership, as he or she will merely repeat the stale old mantras of "strengthening our alliances" and "rebuilding our military." What Washington will likely have to offer the American people by that date goes far beyond refreshed diplomatic and defense contacts across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and shiny new toys for our troops: the country needs to recalibrate its very mission in the world. That world is already resetting in a way that will never again respond to the standard post-Cold War playbook, because the new post-post-Cold War period is truly upon us. If America will not reset the modus operandi of its still enormous power of its own accord, the world will have forced a reboot on it anyway.

Why it's Trump's to lose now (seriously)

An expert who has successfully predicted every US presidential election since 1984 forecasts a Trump victory on November 8.

His historic-scientific "keys to the presidency", a 13-point system, posits that if the incumbent party (Democrats this year) fails on six or more of the following points or "keys", it will lose the White House to the challenging party. As such, he notes five guaranteed strikes already against Hillary (highlighted red), with a sixth possible (orange).

1. Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. 

If anything, one can easily see how things are actually considerably worse for Mrs. Clinton. I would personally add four more key strikes (or near strikes) against her:

2. Bernie seriously challenged Hillary for the incumbent party nomination.
6. Per capita GDP growth in Obama's second term clearly tailed off compared to his first term (notwithstanding a bump in household income last year).
8. We've seen plenty of social unrest reminiscent of the sixties just in the past year and a half.
10. Syria has been a fiasco and it's only getting worse - and the Democrats won't be able to keep it off the election's radar.

Finally, key 13 is another questionable: Donald Trump sure is charismatic, and though he may not be a hero at all, much of the electorate seems to want a villain anyway.

So by this coldly scientific-historic assessment, it's actually Trump's to lose now. And few of us doubt how he'll lose - in fact, why he's still trailing in the polls.

Why Republicans shouldn't complain about Trump's embrace of Putin

The scandal that the Republican establishment is making out of Trump's embrace of Vladimir Putin is yet another sorry attempt to paint the GOP as more moral and principled than it actually has been in practice. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans alike have a long history of embracing left-wing and right-wing authoritarian regimes, respectively, as "friends" or even "allies"; dictatorship itself is never the cardinal sin as far as Washington is concerned - opposition to typically partisan US interests is.

Just as Republicans during the Cold War wholeheartedly supported right-wing paramilitary thugs and murderous reactionary juntas in Latin America as "freedom fighters" against the existential threat of international communism, their Democratic counterparts were equally enamored with the violent Marxist or Maoist insurrectionists that fought against them, whose own records of governance and human rights whenever they did seize power were anything but benign.

In fact, Trump's dalliance with Putin merely exposes the naked self-interest of our foreign policy without inhibition - with democracy and human rights only secondary concerns - which our political establishment has for so long tried to hide. As with everything else this election year, they just can't cover it up any longer, and that's why they're in a tizzy.

For instance, we have an entire cottage industry in the defense and intelligence establishments that has been in cahoots for decades with the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia - a government and society that can only be described as undemocratic, unrepresentative, and in important ways less socially progressive than Putin's Russia or even rival theocracy Iran. But don't expect anyone in the political and economic establishment on either side of the partisan divide - from Hillary Clinton herself to all our standard congressional Republican defense hawks who rely on customers like the Saudis for their local pork-barrel weapons-making jobs - to complain much about the Saudis' notorious second-class treatment of women (which has admittedly marginally improved in recent years).

Similar things can be said about our relationship with China, although as with Russia, China's inherent geopolitical incompatibility with our global dominance means that its authoritarian excesses are likewise more scrutinized than those of a close ally like Saudi Arabia.

In fact, Russia is politically and socially freer than China, yet because we're not as economically intertwined with it, it's more of an adversary than China; China in turn is politically about as closed as Saudi Arabia and socially more liberal, yet because the Saudis are our main proxy in the Middle East and rely on our protection, we simply don't have the strategic and defense cooperation with the Chinese as we've had with the Saudis since the 1970s.

In the new post-post-Cold War era, Republicans in particular should be breathing a sigh of relief that we're finally coming out of a self-stifling period of trying to be what we can never be on the world stage: a referee governed strictly by our highest idealistic principles. The truth is, we've never secured the freedoms we cherish by siding only with those with identical or even generally like values as ourselves. The real world has never worked that way. Trump's realism with respect to Putin - even if mixed with an uncomfortable personal affinity with a foreign strongman - is another blast of fresh air.

Pope Francis' Pharisaic past is key to his present radicalism

In his three and a half years as pontiff, Pope Francis' groundbreaking change of both tone and teaching - his progressive and even radical shift - is both a confirmation of the broader state and direction of the world, especially the Judeo-Christian Western world, and also a harbinger of how a new equilibrium between tradition and progress will be sought.

More specifically, however, it's also a reflection of his own personal history and clerical career, which in itself is something of a microcosm for the kind of adaptation and evolution that a modern believer has had to face in the twilight of the second millennium AD and turning of the third. Few of Francis' critics appear particularly aware of how deeply his past shapes everything he says and does as the successor of Peter, for if they did, they'd probably be less surprised or at times even scandalized.

For starters, the erstwhile Jorge Bergoglio comes from a strictly conservative social and spiritual background. Despite a loose period of life as a typical young adult in Peronist Argentina in the late fifties and into the sixties, his early faith remained grounded in a traditionalist view of liturgy and moral teachings, passed on to him by his middle-class parents, during a formative period in which the Church around him lost much of its flock to far more progressive versions of both, many of which ended up straying badly from important longstanding dogmas.

As such, the pope knows quite intimately what his conservative and traditionalist critics are really made of: like St. Paul when he was originally the zealous Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, Francis wasn't merely conservative or traditionalist himself, but quite an active partisan in his fundamentally reactionary beliefs.

That alacrity was largely why, only a few short years after his ordination to the priesthood in the Society of Jesus at the age of 33, he found himself appointed the national director of the illustrious Jesuit order at the very height of its embrace of so-called "liberation theology" throughout Latin America.

With an emphasis on quasi or even overtly Marxist social justice ideology, liberation theology effectively reduced Jesus to a Che Guevara-like egalitarian crusader, and the Church effectively to a countercultural socialist workers' and peasants' movement that swore an atavistic allegiance to him. This was anathema to established Catholic teaching, and the young Father Bergoglio fought passionately to suppress it both within the Jesuit order and throughout the broader Church in Argentina throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

He found himself naturally aligning with the right-wing military government that seized power and launched a so-called "dirty war" of violent persecution against left-wing political and social dissidents in 1976, which lasted until its fall from power in 1983 and claimed thousands of lives in extrajudicial torture and executions. This exposed him to later charges of complicity in the state-sanctioned suffering of progressive members of the Argentine clergy, especially his own liberal Jesuit order itself.

Disgraced in the wake of the reestablishment of socialist rule in the 1980s, the now middle-aged Father Bergoglio was largely ostracized both within the Jesuit community and the wider Church. He could have withdrawn into a lifelong resentment and bitterness, but instead took the trial as a higher calling for deeper conversion. It was, figuratively speaking, his meeting with the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. The year was 1986, and his change of heart was sealed by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the "Undoer of Knots" - as is well-documented in his own recollection.

To this day, Pope Francis can proudly point to his youthful zealotry in defending Catholic tradition when it was most inconvenient and unpopular to do so, much like Paul could boast of the faith of his Jewish fathers even long after his powerful turn to the superior way of Christ. He has long overcome all self-guilt and shame over his role in purging the Church of those he perceived to be heretics, because in his discovery of the boundless mercy of God, he has recognized that reconciliation - both with oneself and one's enemies - is the very essence of the Gospel.

And so his papacy is all about tearing down walls and building bridges. For an ancient institution that has for so long been defined primarily by its barriers to free entry and movement - by its heavily guarded gates and imposing ramparts - that's bound to rock the boat, and quite dramatically at that.

Ultimately, the Catholicism - indeed, the Christianity - that Francis is evangelizing is about the final dissolution of all that divides and alienates humanity both from itself and from God. Where his opponents and detractors accuse him of tolerating sin and immorality, his radical outlook points to just the opposite: true holiness and virtue are only attainable when the individual soul is stripped of all its natural and even supernatural defenses and safeguards - that is, from its primeval disordered tendency towards fearful self-preservation - and is thus unshackled to embrace the Divine Providence in its rawest and most undiluted form.

What's behind Trump's resurgence: utter bankruptcy of status quo

So what's behind Trump's shocking resurgence in the polls, barely three weeks after the entire establishment and mainstream media had written him off as the complete joke they'd always hoped he really was?

Well, obviously we're seeing what potential there is with better campaign management - one that shifts gears to bridging divisions instead of fanning them. But more fundamentally, we're seeing the ever fuller exposure of the utter bankruptcy of the status quo in Washington and more generally the elite ruling class as a whole.

This is far, far bigger than Hillary's specific credibility problems which only seem to get worse and worse in regards to the deleted State Department emails and the "pay-to-play", "non-profit" Clinton Foundation...at issue here is ultimately the very legitimacy of the system itself - or more specifically, the way it's gamed or "rigged" to favor a select few vested interests and interest groups with the right access channels.

Our democracy has been "captured" by all manner of corporate and special-interest lobbies for so long now, which has so glaringly segregated our society into relatively few "haves" and a far wider cross-section of "have-nots", that the very notion that we should just continue "business as usual" is becoming anathema to much of the electorate. And critically, this is especially true of the largely independent-leaning center, which has long seen through the deceptive veil of our increasingly pointless culture and ideology wars to recognize how an effective duopoly of national politics has systematically entrenched a virtual monopoly of the most deep-pocketed rentier-plutocrats.

As this long-running exposé of our country's particularly polished form of corruption reaches an ever broader audience with ever intensifying scrutiny, the likes of Hillary and the political establishment of both parties is getting their butts grilled...and unless they have a genuine change of heart, this is just the beginning of their pathetic meltdown.

In the past, they could hide behind the tried-and-true excuses: "We're still the best country in the world!", "Everyone still wants to come to our country!", "Democracy is still the least bad form of governance compared to all the others!"

The reason this defense is crumbling is that even the most compelling apologies for the status quo have their limit - and if we haven't reached it in the 2016 election cycle, we're pretty darn close.

We're collectively a society heading in the wrong direction - effectively regressing towards second or even third-world standards and practices, however gradually and insidiously...this is completely unacceptable, not least because much of the poorer developing world is in fact experiencing an improvement of governance just as we're experiencing a decline.

In this environment, it might hardly matter to the Democrats that their lame-duck incumbent is enjoying stellar approval ratings (50+ percent) for a lame-duck in an election season; it's becoming entirely possible for a cool-headed, independent-thinking voter to respect Obama in his twilight months yet also conclude that some radical break is needed with the status quo.

When something's broken or bankrupt, no amount of kumbaya or good feelings can substitute for a dangerous conviction that those responsible must be held accountable and can't be allowed to keep doing what they've done before.

What's really behind Trump's resurgence is that Hillary and the Democrats have already made their most compelling case - that America remains the exceptional and indispensable nation...as if that deeply ingrained belief wasn't the source of our disillusionment with the country's current state to begin with.

Conservatives should admit racism exists, but liberals should stop overblowing it

One of the most honest confessions I've personally ever heard was from an Italian priest, who matter-of-factly echoed Obama's own admission that racism is in our common DNA: "We all have our deep prejudices...we are profoundly racist."

For years, too many conservative Republicans have been in denial that racism still exists in America - and that blanket denial is reaching the point of absurdity.

But that's largely because, for years, the liberal consensus in our popular culture has elevated racism to a particularly horrible sin - way out of proportion to its true degree of detriment to personal character in the overwhelming majority of cases.

It shouldn't be particularly hard for a typical white conservative to just utter a common self-observation: "I'm selfish like everyone else and yes, I have a tendency to stick with my own kind and have suspicion of those who look different from me; and yes, sometimes I feel good about myself holding other groups in contempt; but I know this is wrong."

It's a lot harder to do this, though, when the liberal mainstream media strictly enforces a code of ethics that all but character-assassinates the very hint of bigotry.

When conservatives (white or otherwise) deny the overwhelming evidence of the continued existence of racism, minorities and liberals should recognize that it's predominantly (by no means universally) a backlash against the overwhelmingly one-sided magnification of racism as a uniquely terrible evil among other human weaknesses all in itself. Somehow the words "Hitler" and "Nazi" are ever lurking around the corner - as if there's no line between harboring bigoted thoughts and opinions and actually acting on them in the most extreme ways.

When both sides focus exclusively on the mutual accusations and denials that divide them, they'll never see their own deeply internalized falsehoods which rob them of peace, not just with others, but ultimately with themselves.

A little self-accusation can sometimes go a long way.

US must exploit divisions between dictators, not bridge them

Iran's stunning rebuke of Russia earlier this week - revoking Moscow's just-announced airbase on its territory - should be an encouragement to the free world that the emergent authoritarian axis is anything but united.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Maoist China became bitter enemies as both consolidated respective spheres of influence and no longer felt threatened by the prospect of direct US aggression, knowing that Washington would at most fight proxy wars (i.e. Vietnam), and even then relatively halfheartedly because they were a great ocean away. This same dynamic of the natural antipathy of dictatorships towards each other - they're only conveniently allied against the free world when they perceive it to be the greater common enemy - can readily be leveraged to America's advantage today, as well.

But this requires a fundamental shift in US thinking befitting the transition from the post-Cold War to the post-post-Cold War period. From 1989 to 2014, the sheer force of the supposed "end of history" made US foreign policy almost exclusively based on a conviction that free-market democracy both can and should be spread to the rest of the world through active economic and political initiative.

Since 2014, however, with Russia's seizure of Crimea and aggressive intervention in eastern Ukraine and Syria, along with China's creeping annexation of the East and South China Seas and Iran's dramatically escalated assertiveness in expanding the "Shia crescent" across Mesopotamia and the Levant, the US liberal project has been confronted with serious setbacks to which Washington's still preponderant hard power superiority (in economic and military terms) appears to have no sufficient answer. That's naturally because, as ever, these far-away affairs simply don't entail core American interests to the same degree as for the great Eurasian powers.

More recently, Turkey's assertion of autonomy from the US and NATO - striking out on its own now in northern Syria against both ISIS and the Kurds - conclusively shows that even longtime American allies feel an unmistakable need to take more proactive charge of their own security affairs, even if it means more naked pursuit of sheer Machiavellian interests that are fundamentally at odds with the progressive US worldview.

Going forward, this means US global influence will depend on skillfully playing off autocratic or autocratic-leaning regimes against each other, rather than still trying to democratize or liberalize them. The US must exploit divisions between dictators and strongmen-type democrats, not bridge them.

Of course, it's out of the question to abandon altogether the long-term goal of global free-market democratization and political and social liberalization: these are as ever worthy eventualities to pursue. But the US needs new leverage over its rivals and even friends: it can't be seen to keep retreating by drawing red lines it knows it can't enforce.

The authoritarians must be made to recognize that they're actually better off with a strong US presence in their neighborhood, so long as it's not an imperious one, because the alternative is to revert to the traditional mode of great-power confrontation and unstable systems of alliances that have dominated civilizational statecraft for millennia, and which reached their destructive crescendo in the two world wars. Not only would this benefit America from a hard-power, realist strategic perspective: it also ensures the continuation of American soft-power influence in what could otherwise devolve back into decidedly regressive and reactionary societies and cultures.

Trump or Hillary, either way "helicopter money" is coming

Years from now, when the US economy is in much better shape, in all likelihood the savior will be recognized as "helicopter money."

In fact, this solution is so glaringly obvious that both presidential candidates are unabashedly arguing for it - even if they're sticking to the conventional terminology of "fixing roads and bridges" and "well-paying jobs."

There's actually nothing new about helicopter money - not just the concept itself, but even its practice. It just hasn't had a particularly good record: more often than not, wholesale printing of massive quantities of fiat paper currency has led to runaway inflation, so it's quite natural that the very thought of stashes of $100 bills falling from the sky conjures up other, scarier images, i.e. of women in early-1920s Weimar Germany carting wheelbarrows full of deutschemark notes to buy their groceries.

But the global economy has changed, thanks to China: to keep the economy humming there, the authorities are quite literally "raining helicopter money" yet again on the property and infrastructure sectors, much like they did in 2009. Many instinctively argue that this is merely delaying the day of reckoning for the country's already unsustainable debt bubble, but that analysis largely depends on the assumption that the advanced economies, particularly the US, won't follow suit.

America's experience with quasi-helicopter money has actually had big bright spots. We basically spent our way out of the long-term industrial recession of the 1930s by churning out tens of thousands of guns, tanks, trucks, planes, ships, etc. to beat the Axis powers during World War II. It was this drastically elevated level of manufacturing capacity that also powered the postwar economic boom whose foundation was a vastly expanded infrastructure (i.e. the interstate system) and cheap housing (i.e. Levittown and Trump Sr.'s development projects).

The reason this earlier bout of federal spending-led economic revival can't be considered genuine helicopter money is that we were still tied to the gold standard: the Bretton Woods accord of 1944 pegged the US dollar to the yellow metal at $35 per ounce, which was rather easy at the time because America enjoyed a huge surplus of gold holdings from its overseas allies which wanted the safety of an ocean barrier for their precious bullion. But even with this peg, in fact the Fed and the Treasury throughout the 1950s were already debasing the greenback to stimulate growth and investment: both foreign and domestic appetite for US debt easily outstripped the gold supply, with the result that well before the notorious fiscal strain of LBJ's social welfare crusade and military intervention in southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, we were already borrowing our way to prosperity.

That early postwar history (1945-1970) - the tender and formative years for Trump, Clinton, and their fellow early baby boomers - is the era that both parties now look fondly to as one of a rather successful government-sponsored economic development effort, despite its obvious flaws (i.e. racial discrimination) and near-total reliance on private corporations for the actual work that was done. It was a period of rising productivity and wages for ordinary assembly-line hands, owing in no small part to the far greater political clout of labor unions than in the last few decades.

Of course, those days can never be brought back, let alone improved on - or can they?

Significantly, orthodox finance and economics' opposition to the notion of helicopter money has eased of late, and this has been reflected in the fact that the opposing party platforms have essentially converged on the idea, with a common acceptance now of its philosophical essence, even if they continue to differ on the specifics of policy implementation.

The fact is, it's already been raining helicopter money on Wall Street for years - it was just a matter of time before even Wall Street would open up to redirecting some of those showers to Main Street.

Even taking into account the American Society of Civil Engineers' interest in promoting as much civil engineering work as possible in this country, their widely publicized infrastructure report card leaves an unmistakable impression of the urgency of broad infrastructure upgrades across virtually all 50 states. So yes, that's potentially lots and lots of jobs.

It's arguable, though, just how well-paying they'll be - and in fact how much of a real boost to overall economic growth such a major round of neo-Keynesian pump-priming will actually achieve in today's national and global environment.

State by state, the results can be expected to vary considerably. Some states are already doing far better than everyone else at funding the upkeep of their own road networks and bridges. But these tend to be the very exceptions that call into question the necessity of deep federal involvement and initiative in juicing the economy to begin with - and they're proud of it.

Realistically, although helicopter money from Congress will be a great shot in the arm to the most cash-strapped states that can least afford to renovate their tottering public utilities, such aid must be tied to structural reforms, especially non-financial sector deregulation, at the state level. Red tape hasn't merely inflated the cost of business in all too many states, but it's also sucked untold millions of dollars into the dead-end pockets of bureaucrats - far from those of firms and consumers from whence they'll circulate back into the real economy far more efficiently. By the same token, the federal government itself had better trim down its own leviathan of rules and taxes that stifle the vitality of the real economoy, even as it ramps up and improves much-needed oversight of the big banks and the financial sector generally.

There's the rub. The economy clearly needs an injection of cash into real economic activity, as opposed to the past eight years of propping up asset values to promote so-called "wealth effects" for investors. Yet just as free-market conservatives must drop their deep ideological aversion to any form of public stimulus, so must redistributionist liberals concede to the superior ability of small businesses and ordinary individuals to deploy such stimulus on their own behalf. For too long, a corrupted brew of big government and big business has colluded to squeeze Joe Sixpack and Mom & Pop Shop; for this powerful alliance - borne of the Progressive movement of a century ago - to redeem itself, it must now collaborate as intently to return to the American people what's rightfully theirs as it has already done to usurp it in the first place.

Hillary or Trump, next president will face dictators on their own terms

As the US general election gears up following the party conventions, the two polarizing candidates are delineating diametrically opposing visions of not just America, but the world at large.

Yet in fact, regardless of the rhetoric between now and January 20, the incoming 45th US president will be faced with a fundamentally altered global environment characterized by a combination of strengthened autocratic regimes and seemingly gridlocked and ineffectual democratic allies - on top of what will probably remain a deeply divided society right here at home.

That means that Trump or Hillary will be facing such strongmen as Putin, Xi, and Erdogan largely on their own terms, with little pretense that anything can be done in the standard geopolitical ways to pressure them to loosen or moderate their regimes or even block the spread of their illiberal influences regionally.

After a quarter-century of US military and economic hegemony since the end of the Cold War, Washington can no longer count on military primacy in eastern (possibly even central) Europe, nor on economic primacy in east and southeast Asia. Should the Russo-Chinese strategic partnership blossom into a full-fledged alliance, it would put enormous pressure on the lesser powers of the Eurasian supercontinent to fall in line at least partly with Moscow and Beijing, which in the contemporary ideological and geopolitical environment automatically means a loss for Washington.

The loss would be far worse if traditional US allies in Europe and Asia become so skeptical of American commitment to defending and promoting liberal democracy and free markets that they increasingly strike out on their own to deal with the resurgent dictatorships, whose threats feel ever more immediate to them even as American assurances feel ever more distant.

That being said, there's bound to be quite a difference in the optics of a Clinton versus a Trump response to this unprecedented challenge to US influence on both the Atlantic and Pacific flanks of Eurasia. Whereas the latter will seek to cut deals as quickly as possible - largely on the dictators' terms - to prioritize stability and mutual non-aggression even at the expense of liberal evangelism, the former will seek to shore up the buffers of global democratic liberalism (even seizing chances to expand them) even if it heightens tensions with autocrats.

In either case, however, the underlying reality will be unmistakable, as it already is: active, tangible US power and freedom of action are increasingly constricted across both great oceans, and Washington is bound to find itself, sooner or later, dealing with opposing or even hostile political systems with no illusions left that they can be brought (or brought back) to its liberal consensus anytime soon.

While Trump is gambling that America can "win" for its own security by preemptively conceding those battles which are too difficult and refocusing on a few common issues shared by democracies and dictatorships alike, Hillary hopes that a renewed resolve can buy enough time for both the country and its allies to reinvigorate their domestic progressive institutions to such a degree that the exceptional "American way" will become attractive again, even to dictatorships.

In fact, some combination of both approaches is most likely to yield the best results.

Trump and his supporters should be under no illusions that US disengagement from the world is even possible, let alone desirable; paradoxically, the aim of any partial pullbacks of military or economic efforts should be to increase overall US influence (by highlighting its necessity), not diminish it.

Likewise, Hillary and her camp must realize that having the best ideas and ideals isn't a license to keep underachieving in terms of actual results; not only must America choose its battles more selectively than ever, but it must engage in them with an ever greater attention to what its own popularly mandated priorities actually are (to avoid over-committing and thereby under-delivering).

America can easily retain its global leadership role and in fact do a much better job at it. The silver lining of the present crisis is that the world's only superpower - openly acknowledged by both Russia and China as such, even taking into account their own recent resurgences - must now think and act smarter, not harder. Far from a sign of weakness, to face dictators on their own terms will prove America's exceptional gift - and the dictators themselves will recognize it.

Cruz sticks to his guns, but it's not 1976

Ted Cruz was Ted Cruz again last night...the firebrand Lone Star Senator again proved that his hallmark is defiance in the face of unpopularity.

This will go down well for those who still value the purity of principle - conservative principle - above everything else. Say what you want about Cruz - you can't deny the man's stubborn integrity and independence.

Problem is, this isn't 1976. Cruz and like-minded movement conservatives are taking a huge gamble: a bet that when the smoke clears from the Trump train wreck, that they'll be back in vogue with the angry GOP base.

That could turn out to be wishful thinking - even if the Trump train does become said train wreck between now and November.

The world has changed beyond recognition since Ronald Reagan took the reins of the contemporary conservative movement in his inspiring performance at the RNC in 1976. Yet like Jay Gatsby, much of the movement essentially thinks that the party's only problem is that it's not trying hard enough to repeat the past.

Cruz has now become their point man - and their ideological mooring is radio host Mark Levin, whose growing fan base among all age groups suggests that this strain of dissent is hardly a fringe viewpoint.

Trump himself will eventually take all this in stride, if he isn't already. He seems more interested in nabbing center-leaning independents and even poaching anti-establishmentarian leftists from Bernie Sanders than in securing the purist segment of the base.

That's probably because he can reasonably count on at least 70-80 percent support from them anyway at the ballot box: the lack of endorsement from the likes of Cruz and Levin doesn't mean in the least that they won't loyally close ranks behind the Republican ticket when it actually counts. It's as if he can take them for granted in much the same way establishment Democrats like Hillary have taken the black vote for granted for years.

So depending on how smart you think Trump is - and this blogger for one thinks he's much smarter than the rest of us - the whole Cruz drama last night may have been an elaborate setup. He may well have figured that Cruz is actually more useful to his cause by remaining fiercely autonomous - and drawing much criticism upon himself in the process - than if he seemed to compromise for once in his life.

Trump doesn't want to give the impression that conservatives automatically must water down their ideals and expectations to help put him in office. He needs the movement and that part of the GOP electorate to eventually converge on Mike Pence's pragmatic take right before the decisive Indiana primary on May 3: Cruz is better, yes, but go with your gut.

That's what Cruz himself effectively said last night - and he's caught hell for it.

Which gives Trump the opportunity, somewhere down the line, to play the peacemaker/unifier role by cutting "Lyin' Ted" some slack - and grudgingly endearing himself to conservatives who otherwise can't stand for him, or even stand him.

Good economy won't hurt Trump (or help Hillary)

The conventional wisdom that Donald Trump needs a bad economy to win the presidency - i.e. that a good US economy between now and November will hurt him - is likely to be the latest in a long line of common establishmentarian assumptions that will be rendered invalid in this election. And ultimately, probably the most important.

The fact of the matter is, just look at the messenger himself: Donald Trump, a flamboyantly wealthy business mogul, isn't exactly the kind of guy you'd think would be complaining about a rotten economy. That tells you something: this isn't about the absolute level of prosperity or poverty in America, but 1) the direction that things are going, 2) the structural obstacles that have become entrenched in preventing a much higher level of general well-being for the populace as a whole, and probably most importantly, 3) the distortions that even our prosperity is causing in society and culture.

Make no mistake: the American dream is still alive and arguably quite well. If you take a glass-half-full view of the Millennial generation, it's quite remarkable that half still believe in it - their actual experiences since the Great Recession would easily lend to a gloomier outlook. Tellingly, even those who don't believe in it appear as likely to be skeptical of its moral and spiritual value as opposed to just plain cynical that it's actually achievable. If you take a more holistic view, an unmistakable picture emerges: whilst older Americans are more confident about the economy and material well-being, they're the ones most upset about the country's social and cultural milieu; by contrast, younger Americans are less gung-ho about their temporal welfare but resoundingly more positive about how the country's faring and where it's heading overall (undeniable exceptions notwithstanding).

That means that 2016 already exhibits a different dynamic between economics and politics than previous elections. Not too long ago, it was still possible to consider politics as effectively a function of economics; today it's becoming just as valid to consider economics a function of politics.

That's because the mythic "capitalist free market" has long ceased to exist in any meaningful form, true to its ideologically pure pedigree. But even more to the point, it's become obvious that even if the material benefits of globalization have outweighed its material costs, this strictly materialistic criterion for assessment is no longer credible.

If you were to sum up in just one word not just America's but the general global backlash against the international financial-corporate cartel-elite, it's alienation.

Stunningly, this quintessentially Marxist term is hard to dismiss in a world that has been utterly dominated by the transnational capitalist ruling class for a generation; and to the extent that they and their spokesmen and apologists are now ignoring this reality, they are effectively digging their political graves.

By alienation, in today's postmodern, post-industrial context, we fundamentally refer to the distance and aloofness of the global economy's modes of wealth transfer and production from its actual rank and file of not just workers - whether blue-collar or white-collar - but especially consumers too; it's the effective reduction of Joe Sixpack to just one more class of economic commodity not even so much for his muscle and toil, but for his consumption of what the powers-that-be choose to feed him with ever more detached or remote processes which don't require his participation.

Remarkably, this is a very old concept (and reality) which in the age of internet-driven globalization has acquired a particularly virtualized and impersonal - to the point of being faceless or roboticized - character. It's the ultimate triumph of "capital" over "labor": the steady abolition of the latter by the former, whereby the latter is rendered so superfluous and expendable by the former that it's effectively transformed from worker to dependent. Or, as "capital" progresses towards its final irrevocable victory, "labor" becomes "torpor", if not "stupor."

Behind the subpar economic numbers in the latter phases of the Obama recovery, it's this deeper metamorphosis of the societal condition that's arousing the populist backlash of Mr. Trump. A "good" economy is no longer to be judged merely by its production and consumption stats, but also by its production and consumption ethic. It's the global financial-corporatist ethic of maximizing the black bottom line that's allowed the economy to look really "good" regardless of its consequent structural socioeconomic inequities and extreme concentrations of real power and influence in very few hands, which makes a complete mockery of the vaunted democratic process.

And that's what this whole rebellion against the Republican - and Democratic - establishment is all about.

Trump is asking for our vote, not our blessing

I write this because I'm somewhat disturbed that there are still conscientious Christians out there who won't vote for Donald Trump even though they know Hillary Clinton is a far less palatable choice for their values and beliefs.

My simple message is this: Trump is asking for your vote, not your blessing.

Our president is not our priest or pastor: the role of the office is principally temporal and of the material order, with spirituality a guiding light, for sure, but not the overriding concern that dictates what can or should be done down to the minutiae of each decision or act.

In an ideal world - definitely not the sin-tainted one on this side of the last judgment - we won't have to bother with characters like Trump because there won't be any dangers or challenges that require the style and flexibility of leadership that more often than not comes in a less-than-exemplary moral package.

Consider our military. We wouldn't even need one if we had no enemies with the capability and/or intent to harm us. But the fact is there are, and while it's always a worthy cause to negotiate for lasting peace where possible, in the meantime we need plenty of head-bashers and a**-kickers. You have to be alive to even have the chance to do a deal; and the stronger your physical position vis-à-vis your adversary, ironically the more you can achieve without resorting to additional violence.

We don't expect our troops - especially our best men and women who bear the brunt of the fighting - to be such nice guys and gals, do we? I sure hope not!

And ultimately that's what the presidency is: commander-in-chief. As St. Paul would say, there's a reason that human authority is symbolized by a sword - of course it so happens that the one wielding it is less than likely to be a great example of loving your enemy, but in a world full of sin it's a compromise that God is perfectly willing to allow.

We want a commander-in-chief who can actually do very difficult things and get those under him to actually do difficult things, too. What we don't want is a flabby moralist who, under the guise of being "enlightened" and "open-minded", is just another pansy terrified of political incorrectness and bad poll numbers.

So in conclusion, my fellow Christians still reserved about or downright hostile to Trump: just ask yourself what your vote actually means - what the presidency itself actually is. In the end, if you're crystal-clear about what it is you're actually granting to the candidate you vote for - and what you're not - your conscience shouldn't bother you at all at night.

Catholic conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect

The firestorm of criticism from conservative Catholics over Pope Francis's controversial statement that a "great majority" of sacramental marriages are "null" has exposed the very heart of the crisis of the Church: namely, that countless millions of Catholics are receiving the sacraments without sufficient spiritual instruction or maturity.

In the strict sense, of course, the Pope's critics have a point: the mere fact that 60-odd percent of Catholic marriages in the West end up in separation (to avoid the term "divorce") doesn't render these sacramental unions invalid to start with. That would deny both the power and the universality of sacramental grace, which as Christians (Catholic or otherwise) we must firmly believe is ultimately independent of human will and actions (i.e. sin or rebellion).

On the other hand, it's undeniable that faith can't work like magic - at least, not in most cases. No less than a child must be continually instructed according to the Catechism for years after first communion and/or confirmation, in order to constantly acquire habits of life that conform to it and shed those that don't, a new married couple must constantly work to maintain and improve their actual state of matrimonial union - an endeavor typically requiring very conscious and deliberate choices to forgive faults which, outside the sacrament's protection, are simply impossible to repair.

That's where it's crucial to really grasp the context of the "provisional culture" that the Holy Father repeatedly speaks of: it's the provisional culture that renders traditional and orthodox conceptions of marriage and family far less exclusively influential than they used to be.

To put it bluntly: asking many couples and families to stay together in this day and age is effectively asking them to suffer more than they would if they split apart. This societal and cultural dynamic simply didn't exist before the era of mass consumerism and women's participation in the workforce.

This is what Catholic (and other Christian) conservatives never seem to understand or, even if they do, concede: where they believe that it's the attack on the family that has corrupted the culture, the reality is that a corrupted culture has severely weakened the family.

In other words, conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect, and because they misidentify the source of the powerful forces arrayed against the traditional family, they're always reduced to a highly reactive kind of defensiveness which betrays a deep insecurity, sometimes even bordering on quasi-Apocalyptic foreboding, over the state of the world they inhabit. And the pontificate of Francis has left them distressed to see that even their own leadership has somewhat moved on from such an inflexible nihilist view of God's creation (tainted though it may be).

Anyway, I'm hopeful that sooner or later even conservatives will start reconsidering their self-imposed exile from the realm of contemporary social realities.

Trump's a flip-flopper but not a hypocrite

How is it that Donald Trump can seemingly get away with so much flip-flopping and lack of political consistency?

The answer is deceptively simple: Trump has never pretended to be anything other than a narcissistic egomaniac, anyway. In other words, even with all the flip-flopping, he's not a hypocrite - he's just being The Donald. The same standards and expectations that apply to any normal politician simply don't to someone whose whole life has been a reality TV show of private profiteering to start with.

So where, for instance, orthodox conservatives consider Trump's donations to the Clintons during his long years as a New York Democrat as anathema, his fans muse that he's carried Bill and Hillary around like pocket change.

In the end, Americans want genuineness in their candidates, even if it's a genuine lefty-loony like Sanders or a genuine confidence artist like Trump. What more and more of us can't stand is the mask of altruism of the ruling-class left and the mask of ideological and moral purity of the conservative right.

Don't worry, Donald Trump isn't a wannabe dictator

Financial Times argues that Donald Trump's rise merely caps off what's become a global trend of the resurgence of strongman politics, which has introduced authoritarianism even into established democracies.

While the stylistic similarities between autocratic personalities such as Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping are unmistakable, this fear that America is flirting with fascism in a prospective Trump presidency is wildly overblown.

True, the 2016 GOP primary race has shown that the "middle American street" has become more responsive to neo-collectivist, nativist and nationalist populism than to the increasingly stale rhetoric of "limited government", "free markets", and even (individual) "liberty" itself. This is why some leading conservative figures - including renowned radio host Mark Levin - are still disturbed by Trump's leadership, even after most of the party rank and file and even elite establishment has at least become resigned to it (if still largely hesitant to positively support it): they perceive in it a unique threat to "American exceptionalism", which for them is ultimately the notion that this law-loving country is uniquely well insulated against the baser passions of the lynch mob.

But Trump is very much a creature of the American system, and he has absolutely no interest in tearing it down to imitate Russia or China. Rather, he has merely exposed the sorry reality that our nation isn't working so well anymore, and that this is actually a consequence of a toxic brew of both too little democracy (i.e. regulatory capture by massive banks and corporations) and too much democracy (i.e. partisan bickering and gridlock by elected politicians). Both ills must be confronted and remedied: walls must be erected where bridges are the problem and bridges must be built where walls are the problem. And there's no reason this can't be done completely democratically and within the due processes of our great Constitution.

That being said, these are extraordinary times, and in the American context, they call not so much for extraordinary policies as for extraordinary politicking within an electoral and representative framework underpinned by free flow of news and information. Trump's abrasive style and contempt for niceties make him come off as an authoritarian, but in fact those who fear him might want to ask themselves: Am I so deeply in thrall to my own convictions of how our republic should work that I can't stand being shown up by a shameless narcissist?

US presidential hopefuls better be thinking really big about China

When Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes US president come January 2017, this is what the new leader of the free world will be dealing with on the global stage:

One Belt One Road (OBOR):

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB):

The sheer scale of Beijing's global economic (and hence geopolitical) ambitions presents the US with an arguably greater challenge than either the anti-fascist struggle in World War II or the Cold War against the Soviet Union. From the above maps, it's obvious that Beijing intends to dominate the traditional heartland of world politics - the Eurasian supercontinent.

In its latest play for global supremacy, its largest state bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), has acquired a flagship secret UK gold vault from Barclays in London - instantly adding up to 2,000 tons of physical gold to Beijing's sovereign oversight (if even just a small fraction of it under Chinese ownership or lease) out of a global total physical gold supply estimated at only 35,000 tons, i.e. scooped up access control of nearly 6 percent of the whole planet's gold stockpile.

The Donald, interestingly, has bragged about ICBC's presence as a major tenant in Trump Tower. This is the kind of news that gets him riled up more than ever: while the White House and Pentagon remain preoccupied with the charade of a standoff in the South China Sea, the communist dictatorship is seizing direct control of the Western financial system piece by piece, right under our noses.

Donald's already accustomed to thinking big about China - he's now compelled to think even bigger. And Hillary had better follow suit.