2020 watch: Dems Head for Worst-Case Scenario
Judging from polls before and after the recent presidential debates, J.T. Young at The Hill believes “Democrats are headed for a worst scenario: nominating an uncompetitive far-left candidate.” Their establishment figure, Joe Biden, failed to gain ground and even lost some support. And no other “establishment” candidate — not Steve Bullock, John Delaney nor John Hickenlooper — is picking up steam. “Democrats,” asserts Young, “clearly want a nominee from their left,” and that’s a big problem, because they “may need an establishment candidate to maximize their chance of beating Trump.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton “the quintessential establishment Democrat,” won 52 percent of moderates — and still lost. “How,” he wonders, “is a Democrat from the left” going to attract even that much backing in 2020?
From the left: A Tax Fix for Gun Control
Saul Cornell has a novel idea at The Atlantic: Instead of banning assault weapons, tax them. “Taxation offers one of the most promising and underutilized tools to change the calculus of gun violence in America,” he writes. “Few Americans realize that guns and ammunition are already taxed to pay for conservation efforts,” and gun owners have tolerated the levies for years. Likewise, a “market-based strategy” could be used “to reduce the number of guns in circulation by effectively raising the price of ownership.” Right and left could never agree on the scope and purposes of the Second Amendment. But taxation as a means to reduce the overall number of military-style weapons in circulation, Cornell argues, is a good middle ground.
Foreign desk: China Shows Its Real Face in Hong Kong
As Westerners watch Communist China grapple with an uprising in Hong Kong, they should be alert to “what China has in mind for the rest of the world,” warns James Jay Carafano at Fox News. The apparent betrayal of the “one country, two systems” plan put in place in 1997, when Britain returned the territory to China, is only Beijing’s most “recent encroachment.” There has actually been “a long string of promises broken by the communist regime” — as when China violated UN sanctions against North Korea (after voting for them) or when it flaunted “commitments to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea” to grab international waters. All in all, “Beijing has a well-deserved rep for playing fast and loose with the rules,” Carafano concludes, and its behavior in Hong Kong should be “a warning to the world.”
Iconoclast: Uncle Joe’s Tip-Toeing at Senility
Presidential hopeful Joe Biden “is confused about everything and everyone virtually all the time,” snarks The Week’s Matthew Walther. “He doesn’t know the difference between Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher — or between the latter and Angela Merkel.” Add his subpar mental acuity to his old-age semi-senescence, and you get Biden saying “things that are absolute gibberish — ‘truth over facts,’ ‘the nation that Barack Obama proved toward bends toward justice.’ ” These things, Walther argues, “are signs of cognitive decline that will be familiar to anyone who, like me, spends a good deal of time in the company of people who are roughly Biden’s age.” We can’t pretend that Biden’s “mental abilities are irrelevant to his presidential campaign,” Walther insists. And it’s time for a few Democratic bigwigs to “pull Biden aside” and “ask him to stand down.”
Nationalist: A New Time for Choosing
“Nationalist or globalist? Somewhere or anywhere?” Those are the fundamental choices facing the United States in the 21st century, contends Chris Buskirk at American Greatness. And not just the United States: “Western civilization itself is at a crossroads across the globe.” The choice is whether we rule ourselves or are ruled by unaccountable “bureaucrats like those governing the EU from Brussels,” “corporations loyal to themselves but not to their countries or their fellow citizens” and “so-called NGOs like the misleadingly named Open Society Foundation.” The latter “lack both the legitimacy and the charisma to rule by acclamation. They’re terrified someone will find out and replace them.” Conservative nationalists, he concludes, should “build institutions and develop leaders to do just that.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board