What Comes Next?

This should be a theme of discussion - Trump has largely destroyed the old order of the past 75 years. The old-school liberals might continue to fight some kind of rear-guard action to protect the institutions and processes but the foundational trust has been shattered and will take a generation at a minimum of careful rebuilding. The centrist liberals need to seize this opportunity to decide what gets built on the ashes in the United States. And there is a very real likelihood they will not even get to CHOOSE, they will have a selection of bad to worse choices placed in front of them...

- International military position of the US: NATO, our Asian allies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), Israel, the Middle East. Do we want to espouse our "values"? Realpolitik? Isolationism? What does the world look like if the US simply withdraws? Can it? Does the world WANT us to?

- Finance/Trade: free movement of labor to match free movement of capital? Tariffs to match the exploitation of labor and environment? Do we still want the US Navy patrolling sea lanes for the benefit of our allies and protecting world trade? Do we want to continue to financialize every single aspect of business? Should there be a limit on the amount of wealth any single person can possess?

- Closed/open society: jus sanguinis vs jus soli? A hybrid? How much immigration? Do we want only the "best and brightest" foreigners? Does that mean we are causing a brain drain overseas? Is this brain drain possibly permanently hobbling other countries and indirectly boosting corrupt strongmen?

- US Budget: more parochial for sure but let's be honest... we're heading for a crack up in 15-20 years. Whether it takes the form of default to US bondholders or a default to the citizens on promises made (hi social security & medicare!), something is going to break. For the moment, our largest federal debt holders are in a bit of a roach motel problem but nothing will force them to continue to buy our debt. So where does that money go? ECB? BoE? BoJ? Some combo of all those?

It feels a little like we might be living in the period from WW1 to WW2 where the order of the old empires (Tsarist Russia, British Empire, etc.) was completely swept away and what emerged was our reality for the past 75-ish years. It would be great if some political group had enough power to rationally consider these issues instead of viewing them entirely through the lens of oppositional politics (i.e. "own the libs!!" vs "all Trump stuff baaaaad"). I'm not sure that group exists at the moment.

(This post has been sitting in my drafts for 4 months now, but with missiles flying I figured might as well add it.)

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