Diane Labrosse’s Post

I rarely get political here (or anywhere), but if you live in the US and are an open-minded, undecided voter, you owe it to yourself to read this Substack essay and the companion essay, The Rational Case for Trump, by Maxim Lott. (If you already have your mind made up, both are still worth reading.) In The Rational Case for Harris, his friend, Sean Culleton, makes a strong case for why she should be president. In the other, Lott makes an equally strong case for Trump. The case can be made for either, and these essays spell out why in great detail. https://lnkd.in/gBSk6Y_d

For those willing to deal with a dose of reality, I would suggest finding or buying a copy of today's Wall Street Journal and reading all three of the editorials. I don't have the time or space allowed on Linkedin to summarize all of them, but I will give you a taste of what you would get if you spent the $5 and bought a copy or read it for free at your local library. The lead editorial is titled "Joe Biden's Sad Presidential Legacy." This editorial comes out prior to the Democrat National Convention which starts today and which promises to be an extravaganza of toasts to the outgoing president of the United States whose last service to his Party by cutting off his run for re-election might be his greatest achievement. The editorial contains lots of reasons why Biden's should be considered failed presidency. But, I will just quote the last paragraph. Regardless of whether Harris or Biden wins in November "They will inherit a country more divided and dispirited than when Joe Biden was elected. That is the unfortunate legacy of the Biden Presidency." Next up, "A Dangerous Time for the Jews." The conclusion of the editorial reads defeating antisemitism would be helped if at the Democrat National Convention "Harris denounced the anti-Israel voices in her party that are increasingly antisemitic. This dangerous time for Jews will become more so unless leaders stand up to the haters." Lastly, "The Chicago Model for Democrats." And I quote, "Delegates can see progressivism in action from crime to the schools." Chicago is a mess as the editorial points out. How do Democrats explain it? All three of these editorials point to the absolute failure of the Democrat Party to confront its record. It is a shabby record of broken promises, failure, division, and decline. Yet, this week will be one long celebration mostly based on smoke and mirrors. Kamala is riding high in the media. Joe according to Nancy Pelosi deserves to be on Mount Rushmore. And Chicago is a show place of Democrat good intentions and progressive governance. It is all a tissue of lies and misrepresentations that require suspension of belief which I suppose only the most educated can muster and compartmentalize. Democrats and their media clones are calling it a winning formula. I call it dreck for the masses.

Bestsellersworld.com has posted a review for Wisdom and the Baobab Tree by Edward R. McMahon Reviewed by Daniel Ryan Johnson Wisdom and the Baobab Tree is a story set in a foreign context that manages to hit close to home for readers in the United States, as well as readers throughout various other parts of the world. Set in the fictional African country of Kombonia, the book explores the struggle of a country to fully embrace democracy. While the nation has been a democracy in name for a few decades when the book begins, true democratic elections have never taken place.  Much of the story is told through the eyes of American Adam Edwards, who is in the country working for the Center for Democratic Progress, an independent organization with funding from the U.S. government. The purpose of his mission in Kombonia is to help ensure the elections coming at the end of the year are fair and democratic. He is tasked with sharing the knowledge gained by the U.S. and other nations in their experience with democracy to help create a framework for a true democracy to succeed in Kombonia. While Wisdom and the Baobab Tree portrays a nation that is just beginning its democratic journey, many of the challenges this fledgling democracy faces reflect issues present in U.S. politics, as well as other nations with a long democratic history. Political violence, threats to a peaceful transfer of power, distrust in the electoral process, election interference, and a deep divide between different population groups are key issues addressed throughout the book that many democracies throughout the world are facing today. When drawing these parallels between the challenges regarding democracy in Kombonia and the United States, author Edward R. McMahon takes several different approaches. At some points in the book, these similarities are subtly hinted at, while, at other times, he clearly connects the dots for the reader. While Wisdom and the Baobab Tree shows how challenging it can be to build and maintain a democracy, especially in times where trust in the media and the information we receive is incredibly low, the overall tone of the book is a hopeful one. It shows that while there will always be struggles along the way, there is a path forward, that the checks and balances of the democratic system are necessary to ensure human rights, and that the system must constantly be reevaluated to ensure it works for the modern age.

Today's lead editorial in the WSJ is a stunner. You have heard Donald Trump slam Kamala Harris as being a "communist." This kind of rhetoric gets Trump in trouble all the time with the media, who consider this mere "name calling." But if you read the WSJ editorial it is hard to come away with any other interpretation for what Harris and the Democrat Party have planned for America if she is elected and has majorities in the House and Senate to help her pass her agenda. The WSJ calls the Harris agenda "The Democrat Party's Project 2025." And the subtitle is "It's platform offers a vision where the answer is always the government." The WSJ goes through a series of the proposals which lead it to this conclusion. I don't have space here to detail them. But, the sum and substance is as the subtitle suggests. There isn't anything that the country or the people can do for themselves that the government can do for them. As the WSJ explains, "The platform is a peek into an economic worldview in which the government is the answer, almost no matter what the question. While private businesses are always "gouging" or adding "junk fees," or otherwise trying to rip somebody off." And the government is empowered and exists to protect the American people from private industry. Under Joe Biden, the mantra from far left academic legislators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren was the need to control "big tech, big pharma, big banking, etc." Now under a Harris administration, you can just delete the adjective "big" and assume that every mom and pop grocery, eatery, and other small business will be the subject of more regulation, more taxation, and more anti-business jaw boning designed to intimidate them into squeezing their profit margin to zero. It is a prescription for private industry in this country to all run as government corporations like the Postal Service. Frankly, the Democrat platform would make Karl Marx smile. According to Marx, the entrepreneur sets up a production process and aims to maximization of profits, however, he is not deserving of the surplus value that is generated from the process, since the source entity of that profit is the wage worker who has been exploited in the equation. I'd say we have a match here between the Democrats theory of business and that of Marx.

Read Now - In my latest post I address the line Governments have crossed in the Covid 19 period, pushing democracy into Chaos. This post is part of my recent book "The Slow Walk to Tyranny". https://lnkd.in/dqH7x66h

I have a new book review up on The Irish Story about Dermot Meleady's "Shifting Sentiment: Press Opinion in Ireland's Revolutionary Decade 1914-23". It is a very interesting book, giving the perspective of Ireland's Revolutionary Decade from the perspective of contemporary press opinion. It convincingly challenges simplistic readings of early 20th Century Irish history, showcasing the complexity and uncertainty of a deeply turbulent period for those that lived through it. https://lnkd.in/epuA4Wm7

https://lnkd.in/gs6VAAtk "THE POWER OF SPECIAL INTERESTS Interest groups have not always been as American as apple pie. James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 focused on factions, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Surely such a group should be suppressed. But no; Madison believed the costs of suppression in liberty would outweigh any benefits. He argued the size of the new nation and competition among groups would preclude the dangers of a majority faction. Madison believed majorities would vote down any malign proposals by minority factions. The public and some scholars have disagreed with Madison on the latter point. Surveys indicate the public believes “special interests” have too much influence in Washington. Economists have offered sophisticated analyses supporting a similar normative conclusion. Mancur Olson argued that the economics of organization foster policies that favor particularistic groups over the larger public. The Chicago School emphasized the likelihood that regulated industries would control their regulators. Gordon Tullock and later analysts in the Virginia School proposed that interest group efforts wasted resources by creating monopolies sanctioned by the state. Lobbying itself wasted resources in the struggle over rents. In general, the economists’ critique of interest groups suggested government failure might be more pervasive than market failure. Political scientists have been more divided about interest groups than economists. Pluralists saw politics as a struggle among groups; the winner wrote laws legitimated by government. Pluralists tended to approve of groups as a way to represent citizens and control government. Others argued that lobbyists provided members of Congress with information vital to their re‐election efforts. Some critics of pluralism pointed out that not all interests — especially the poor — were represented in the group struggle. The struggle among groups obscured the reality of elite rule. Others argued that pluralism had replaced the rule of law made by legislatures with groups competing for the favor of administrative agencies. Empirical analysis In Lobbying and Policy Change, Frank Baumgartner and his co‐authors offer new information about these old debates. They randomly selected 98 issues in which interest groups were involved and followed them from 1999 to 2002. The authors then identified the “sides” on each issue; a side was “a set of actors sharing a policy goal.” For the 98 issues, they found 214 sides comprising 2,221 advocates."

I'm thrilled to share some exciting news. After several years of research and writing, my new book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, is finally on the brink of publication. The book makes the case that while we currently face a threat to democracy from a candidate who openly pledges to destroy it, we have been here before. In particular, I look at five past presidential threats to democracy--from John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon. Although The Presidents and the People is about a very real current danger, it is also a book about hope. Throughout, I suggest that "we the people" form "constitutional constituencies" to recover democracy by enlisting candidates and future presidents to repair the damage done by their predecessors. I was gratified by its starred pre-publication review from Publisher's Weekly, which describes the book as "an invaluable breakdown of present-day concerns in an illuminating historical context." Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Social Sciences and Politics at Princeton University and the author of On Populism, further affirms its importance: "Rarely can a book be called indispensable, but here the term applies. It is crucial to remind citizens why they should not lose hope, especially at a time when the specter of autocracy grows globally." The book is due for release on July 2nd, but your support in this crucial pre-release phase is immensely important. I'm reaching out to you, my LinkedIn friends, in the hope that you might consider ordering a copy of my book now. I've had a chance to discuss the book with many of you and look forward to more discussions about it. https://lnkd.in/evmzaFX9

🚨 New book chapter with Kaare Strøm! We review the incidence, duration, and performance of minority governments—those seemingly rare cabinets that govern without a majority. Turns out, they're surprisingly common and remarkably successful at the polls! https://lnkd.in/euC6geyt

A sound recording of my book launch (opening talk and discussant contributions) is now available via the following page: Book title: 'Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination' (Palgrave 2023) https://lnkd.in/eduwH3VM