Despite, Thanksgiving

This may be the hardest year to give thanks.  Not only because a convicted felon was elected President, but because I lost my mother this year, my wife has been dealing with her mother declining, and my daughter's production company closed its doors.  It has been a hard year in many ways, but the only way to get through this madness and the sadness is to hold onto the good stuff.  And there was good stuff this year despite all the bad stuff.

 

 

The year started with two amazing trips back to back.  I got to ski Hokkaido with my sister, her boyfriend, and his kids, and then I got to join my brother in a couple of the most magical places with my cousin, his wife, and his kids joining us in the second place for two days of great rides.  I am very thankful both my sister and brother as well as my cousin for enticing me into such fun trips.  

I am very grateful to the two H's that dominated my winter: Humboldt and Hertie. The former funded my time in Germany for three months in 2024 and three more in 2025, and the latter was a terrific host last winter and again next winter.  It was a great environment to get a sense of what Europeans were thinking, to get feedback on my work, and to do research in both Berlin and Helsinki.  Oh, and being based in berlin for three months gave me opportunities to do some more travel--Vienna for a talk, parts of Germany for Hertie events, southern Germany and Italy with Mrs. Spew, and some Austrian Alp skiing.

 

I am very grateful for a very supportive family.  We got together twice in the aftermath of my mother's passing--a short shiva in NYC and the first wedding of the next generation.  Much solace to grieve in company and then to celebrate some love.  Oh, and the wedding had llamas!

I am thankful for the summer providing some quick distractions from the sadness: a CDSN edited volume workshop (on which I am quite behind in editing), a great ERGOMAS conference in Stockholm, and then a few days at the NATO summit in DC with my favorite NATO expert and former podcast co-host.  

I was quite glad to see family again in late summer in western Canada as the summer family vacation was reset to Vancouver and Victoria.  I had been to the former a few times, but my first Victoria trip plus heaps of time with my two sisters, my brother, and a couple of nieces. 

The fall brought a heap of CDSN fun.  I am so grateful for the great team that does all of the heavy-lifting especially Melissa and Sherry.  We did a heap of great stuff--the Summer Institute, the book workshop, helping IUS-C, all of the podcasts, and it only works with so many people sharing their expertise and enthusiasm.  And I have had to ask a lot more from everyone as we start the process of seeking funding for another 3 or 7 years.  The grants require a lot of teamwork and a lot of time from many people, and I am so very thankful to have such great partners in this endeavor.

Oh and the fall brought back the 1980s!  First my 40th high school reunion and then Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce!  

My family has faced much stress this year, so I am most thankful for their resilience.  The only way out is through, and we know that some parts are going to get harder.  Other parts hopefully will be less stressful and more fun.  We are now planning ski trips and another Eurotrip for Mrs. Spew.  

Oh, and we can bake our way through it, of course. My sister made 7 pies for today, while I am 60% of the way through my cookiefest.  I hope you and yours are having a great Thanksgiving.

So It Begins: The Military and Massive Deportation

We have now entered the find out phase of the election--who will be appointed to what positions?

We might be feeling some relief that relatively sane sycophants like Marco Rubio are being named to Secretary of State.  That Kristi Noem is awful, but can she actually manage the Department of Homeland Security.

But on the other side, the truly awful are getting into key positions.  Stephen Miller, who is the most hateful and hated Trump player, will be Deputy Chief of Staff, which means he will be close to Trump all the time.  Tom Homan, who was a key player in family separation under Trump 1.0, is now back.  Listen to him:

incoming Trump "border czar" Tom Homan on Fox Business says he expects the military to be involved in his mass deportation

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 10:07 AM

Which raises the question of what roles the US military might play in massive deportation:

1. Special ops, as Homan suggests, to go after the cartels.  Which means the US is waging war inside of Mexico and perhaps against Mexico.
2. Providing the external cordons of sweeps for those that are being deported.
3. Building the concentration camps and perhaps providing some of the guards for these places until the contracts can be written to provide private prison companies with sweet deals (who will be checking which companies grease which decision-makers?)
4. Repressing protests as people start to realize the scope/scale/cruelty of the deportation.

 The US military will follow lawful but awful orders.  The special ops stuff will not face resistance, I think, as this fits into their skill set and does not deviate from the kind of missions they have done elsewhere.  Plus we have had a shit ton of pop culture tell us that special ops are great for killing drug dealers.  Building concentration camps?  Fencing and pitching tents?  Part of the day job, and won't be seen as problematic until it is too late.  

It really is about 2 and 4.  What is involved with this?  Sending MPs into push protestors around?  Easy to imagine.  Sending in regular troops to confront large groups of protestors?  I have a research assistance looking into the literature on when democratic militaries repress or refuse, so I don't know right now what will happen.  Indeed, no one knows, because it is never clear what will happen when troops are giving orders to fire upon civilians until the decision point is upon us.  

I am fully engaged in doomerism, but pretty much any massive deportation pathway leads to cruelty and death.  Whether it causes a full-scale crisis in American civil-military relations where the military either defies the civilian authorities or engages in large scale repression of the public is not clear.  But the odds are far greater than they should be.  I am waiting to see who is named Attorney General and who is named SecDef, as those are the key appointments that will signal how massive deportation will be conducted and how much the military will be dragged into and torn apart by it.

 

Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce

 Such an awful week, but it ended well for me and Mrs. Spew.  For her big birthday, I splurged on tickets to see Bruce Springsteen.  I have been to less than 10 rock concerts in my life as I tend to fall asleep--watching people make music just doesn't entertain me much, but I figured Bruce would be an exception.  And I was not wrong. 

Bruce and the E Street Band put out so much energy that even in the very last row at the back of the arena, I could not help but have more energy at the end of the night than at the beginning.  And that is despite weathering one of the more severe colds I have had.  

I am not a musician (Oberlin let me in to prove they don't discriminate against those with no musical ability), so I can't speak to the musicianship of the band.  All I can say is that they have great stamina and passion as Bruce would do the count for the next song as the previous song was still echoing in the arena.  The choir occasionally took breaks, but for much of the concern, the band and especially Bruce just kept going and going.

I was surprised it took about 1.5 hours before he told his first story (and the only one) of the night.  It was about how his first bandmate from his first band died recently.  Yep, Bruce is sensing his mortality, especially with the loss of two members of the band (Clarence Clemons has been replaced by his nephew).  But he sure doesn't play like a 75 year old.  I hope I have about 25% of his passion and energy and physical fitness when I get there.

I never saw him live before, so I never thought of him as a talented guitarist, but he did some excellent work there.  The kazoo?  That I knew a
bout.  

Bruce didn't yank up a young woman to do Dancing in the Dark, but he did bring up a boy and had him sing a bit.  Nope, the kid was not a good singer, but the moment was special nonetheless.  

It is easy to rank this concert given how few I have seen.  It was either the best concert or second best to Billy Joel in London or San Diego.  I am glad I got a chance to experience the 2.5 hours of Bruce in person.  

And, yes, I was a bit surprised by one of the encores, but it is close enough to be seasonally appropriate, but I can't seem to be able to post my video of Bruce singing Santa Claus is coming to town.
 

Looking for Upside? CDSN's Domestic Ops Rock

Niru, Manu, and some of the other participants.
The post workshop dinner is not way we do this
but it is not not why we do this.

 This has been a crushing few days, and the hits will keep on coming.  But I can take some solace from the work we have been doing over the past few years.  Three years ago, the CDSN received funding from the Department of National Defence's MINDS program to address "Global Emergencies and Canadian Resilience."  That year, the MINDS program wanted research networks that addressed, among many other challenges/priorities, global health, supply chain vulnerability, the new NATO climate security centre of excellence, and domestic emergency operations.  We are coming to the end of this three year grant, and our next MINDS network grant application will focus on other stuff as DND's priorities have shifted.

 

Our CDSN Post-Doc,
Manu Ramkumar gave a
great talk on the
Singapore case

So, this was the last of the three workshops in Toronto run by Nirupama Agrawal, a professor of disaster management at York University, on what we can learn from Canada's domestic emergency operations.  She keeps bringing together military folks who are the key connections in Ontario with Ontario emergency management people, Indigenous folks who are involved in this stuff, academics, and municipal folks who do this stuff.  I finally attended one of her workshops as she kindly did not schedule it this time as the same time as US Thanksgiving.  

I am so grateful to Niru.  She got her students involved, they did a great job of running the day.  It was held in the Royal Canadian Military Institute, where I got to stay overnight.  It is a funky place, with lots of displays, libraries, bars, and history.  See the pics below.  I did guess during my talk that there are no displays of domestic emergency ops, and I was mostly right.  There was some stuff about the Canadian Rangers, who are northerners who play multiple roles as the eyes and ears of the military in the Arctic, but not anything else.

Why does that matter?  Well, I opened my intro talk with a discussion of what the CDSN is and does, and then talked about Canadian civil-military relations.  My usual shtick that the military wants to be autonomous and has more autonomy than most democratic militaries, and that the civilians are not doing much oversight.  When it comes to domestic ops, there is a basic disjuncture--the military doesn't want to do it and it successfully gets it listed at the bottom of the priorities of every defence policy document, and the population values this stuff quite a lot.  The civilians in government do not seem to be interested in getting this preference through to the military.  

After I spoke, we had a number of speakers who have real experience in this stuff, and I learned that there is far better coordination and lessons learned among the various actors.  I still am not sure how much Ontario is really picking up its share of responsibilities on this (there is a basic temptation for the provinces to shirk since they don't have to pay the bills when the CAF does the work even though the CAF could bill them--politically impossible to do so).  The military folks there were super sharp and had good stories to tell about how things play out in such efforts.  There is definitely room for improvement as the CAF is always asked to do more than their assigned tasks when they do engage in a domestic op (hey, can you take my appliances out of my flooded basement?).  

 

 

 

WWI flag with the scars of battle

Once again, the biggest challenges are how to deal with natural disasters that affect the Indigenous communities since the history of settler-ness means these places have poor infrastructure and are vulnerable to disasters.  Yanking them out in an emergency and evacuating them may be preferable to their being killed, but it is a crappy way to live.  So, there was some discussion of some efforts to improve their capacity to protect themselves.

 

 

I am very, very pleased and proud of what Niru and her students have accomplished.  This grant is ending, but we will certainly stay in the Niru business in one way or another, and our civ-mil stuff will ponder the domestic ops of it all.  I am just very grateful for the accidental networking that led to this partnership.

 And now a few random shots from our tour of RCMI:

An original copy of the letter
Ike sent the troops on the eve of D-Day

 

Display of women at war
featuring future CDS
Jennie Carignan

Display of Carignan's A-stan gear

 

 

Mea Culpa 2: Return of the Cruel

 Once again, I got the election wrong, spectacularly so.  Was confirmation bias the key?  Partly but mostly too much and too little comparative analysis.

Too much: yes, people were pissed at inflation, but it is down now and this government did better than any other at getting their country to a soft landing quickly.  Also, best wage growth for middle and lower class folks in decades.  But, nope, Americans don't think comparatively.  They were pissed about inflation and not elated about the low unemployment.  That Biden avoided a recession got no rewards.

Too little: turns out every democracy in 2024 had the incumbents losing and by big numbers.  Harris's loss was smaller than all, which might give her some due and undue credit.  US institutions and polarization limit how much she could possibly lose. 

Which gets us to the real puzzle of the election: why didn't Democrats turn out? Harris got something like 14 million votes less than Biden.  Trump got fewer votes than 2020.  All Harris really needed was to get something like 5-6 million less than Biden.  Perhaps I was deceived by the reports of my friends doing get out the vote stuff and by the fact that the Harris campaign did a lot of GOTV stuff and Trump's was run by Musk (who sucks at everything besides getting attention).  So, why did Harris not get as many votes as one might have expected:

• Incumbency.  The thing I got most wrong in my prediction post is that I thought she successfully flipped the script and positioned herself as the change candidate and Trump as the incumbent. Nope, nope, nope.
• Abortion/Dobbs didn't have the same magic on turnout this time as 2022.  Why?  I am guessing that it was partly due to the referenda that were supposed to generate turnout.  Instead, people didn't understand that these referenda would not actually protect their states from an anti-abortion government--they thought they got their umbrellas via these referenda so they could go out in the rain.  
• Racism and sexism.  Men of all kinds voted against Harris.  That a second woman lost to a clearly disqualified/unqualified man requires some consideration.  Trump won his gamble that his racism would not be problematic to men who didn't want a woman in the White House.
• No one cares about VPs.  Walz was fun, but only helped in Minnesota, JD Vance was awful but no one cared even though he has the best chance of any recent VP of becoming President.  
• Our pop culture heroes don't matter.  Beyonce, Taylor, Lebron don't move the needle.  
• The aforementioned split tickets--NC should have dragged down the GOP, but perhaps what happened was that queasy Dems knew that the Dem gov candidate would win and then didn't show up to vote for Harris.

The flip side is how could people vote for a convicted felon who also happened to be an insurrectionist.  Turns out Jan 6th didn't move the needle. Last year's inflation (and yes, prices haven't dropped, but they don't without some suffering) matters more than the threat to democracy.  What matters more to Trump voters are change, rejecting the status quo, resentment, fear, and ignorance.  Seeing a young woman say that Trump wouldn't ban abortion was just appalling.  That people don't understand what mass deportation really means is partly on the Dems but mostly on the media but also on the voters themselves.  They don't care about that or the cruelty directed at transpeople.  Yes, we only have two real choices, but showing displeasure at the status quo meant voting for the cruel and the corrupt.  That should have made a difference, but it didn't so that says much about a good hunk of the American electorate.

Which leads to this: that so many future targets of mass deportation voted for the party of mass deportation is just horrifying and appalling.  That Latino men might think they are immune because they are citizens, because they were here before the Anglos, because their families immigrated legally, whatever is even worse wishful thinking than I induldged in before Tuesday.  Empowering racist cops and sheriffs (and maybe militias?) to enforce mass deportation means lots of false positives--that people who are not undocumented migrants--will get swept up and sent to places that don't have due process and assume that those incarcerated don't have full citizenship rights.  Sure, people will learn to carry birth certificates and passports just to leave the house (papers, please!), but asshole cops and sheriffs can just take the docs and toss them aside and deny they have done so.  The people who will be enforcing the mass deportation sweeps are going to be the worst people, and they will have immunity (see Project 2025).  The camps don't have to be set up by super competent people.  They will have crappy sanitation and they will overcrowded and they won't be safe in summer (no AC) or in winter (no heating, little shelter).  And people will die due to reckless disregard (this is how concentration camps work) while the US govt spends a tremendous amount of its political capital and leverage forcing countries to accept the 10 million.  

People didn't take Trump seriously last time, but he did do a heap of bad that has been memory holed. His big campaign promises of banning Muslims and building a wall happened even if it was a shitty wall. I fully expect a weaponized Department of Justice and mass deportation to happen.  And both will be so very destructive including to those that voted for Trump.

Yes, I am angry.  Not just at myself for my wishful thinking and confirmation bias, but at the Democrats who didn't show up and let this happen and to the Trump voters who cared more about imaginary fears of an immigration crisis, who didn't care about a competent government doing much to improve things despite a Congress blocking its way, and who didn't mind either the cruelty aimed at trans people or the corruption and bullying of Trump and his people.

So, no, I am not sleeping well.  I am not sure how long this nightmare will last.  Our best hope is that we have a real election in 2 years which changes Congress so that it stop some of the worst excesses and that the GOP gets tossed in 4 since the pattern of the last three elections is tossing out whichever incumbent.  But that aforementioned weaponization of DoJ might mean that political opponents get arrested so that elections become farces.  That is how competitive autocracy works. 

Third time's a Charm? Prediction time

 

I made a big prediction in 2016 and got it wrong.  Of course, I couldn't anticipate that Comey would tip the scale at the end, but I underestimated Republicans selling out their souls for some power.  So, should I avoid making a prediction now?  Should I put up a pessimistic one to be safe?  Nope, it is time to be ruthlessly optimistic again.  Plus I was right in 2020.  50% is a great batting average or a great 3 point percentage.

So, I shall list my reasons for optimism before putting up my prediction:

1. At the top of the list: the Republicans have under-performed in every election since 2016.  Really.  Yes, they got seats in the mid-term in 2022 but less than they should have.  Why?  Because the reality of Trump really sucks and the further spinning of the GOP from the mainstream to the far right is actually, yes, not so popular.  
   
2. I almost had this first: Dobbs.  I think Dobbs and then the passion for far right legislation--severe abortion bans, anti-IVF proposals, even anti-birth control stuff--will energize women voters far more than the potential of such stuff eight and four years ago.   Plus so many states literally have abortion on the ballot via referenda including key states like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida,   I am tempted to list the corruption and arrogance of the Supreme Court separately, but I will just leave it here.  
3. Many factors above and below: no Democratic complacency.  The near panic about Trump winning should drive turnout.
   
4. Efforts to pander to Black and Latino misogynists have been undercut by the Haitian immigrant crap of a few weeks ago and of the Madison Square Garden fiasco.  The polls always exaggerated how many Black men were going to swing towards Trump.  Yes, misogynists are going to vote for Trump, but that was pretty baked in before Biden dropped out--Trump is THE candidate for  women-haters.  MSG may have put Florida in play as Puerto Ricans will turn out against Trump in a big way.
   
5. Kamala Harris has run an amazing campaign.  She is the change candidate despite being the incumbent VP.  That takes some terrific political acumen, discipline, a great team, and, yes, Trump exhaustion.  She is also, yes, a far better candidate than either Trump or Biden--smart, attractive, dynamic, younger, with a great story about who she is.
   
6. Tim Walz.  His debate performance wasn't great, but he is fantastic in interviews and at rallies.  
7. JD Vance.  Just a repellent asshole who has negative charisma.  Because so much has happened in the past couple of months, we forget how much he turned people off.  And he still does.  I almost think he puts Ohio in play for the Presidential level as the entire state has regret about electing him to be their Senator.
8. Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Lebron, Bad Bunny, and all of the rest of the elites of our culture are on the same side.  Folks may discount this stuff, but it matters at the margins.  Who does Trump have?  Hulk Hogan.
   
9. Trump's ground game sucks. We know this.  Elon Musk "helping" is not a help.  Folks vastly overrate Musk's skills at anything, and he certainly does.
10. The GOP helped to kill its base via its anti-vax stances.  We have good stats showing that more Republicans died in the pandemic... for a reason.
11. The fucking fundamentals.  In 2016, the Dems had been in power for eight years and the economy was ok.  In 2024, the Dems have been in power for four years and people aren't tired of them yet.  Not like they are tired of, yes, Trudeau, or, yes Trump.  Oh, and the economy is one of low unemployment and low inflation.  Folks may blame Biden for the bout with inflation--things are more expensive now but the rate is no longer zooming up--but the economy is actually pretty great at the aggregate level, especially when compared with all of the other democracies.
12. There are so many shitty Republican candidates that will drag down the vote in a variety of states: Arizona as Kari Lake, NC with Mark Robinson, and so on.  This might be repeating #1.
    
13. The electorate keeps changing.  Yes, the Republicans keep courting the conservative immigrants via religious appeals and such, but their hate of immigrants matters quite a bit.  Sure, it is a grand American tradition to close the door behind you a la Musk, but the electorate is less white than it once was.  Not because of any Great Replacement plan or dynamic, but because the US remains an attractive place to live despite what the GOP is doing to it.
14. The national security stuff.  Yes, I overestimated it eight years ago, but since then Trump has stolen secret docs and kept them at his golf club and so on.  Which leads to
15. There were Never Trumpers in 2016, but the Republicans for Harris seems to be much more of a thing.
16. Because of January 6th.  That should have ended Trump's political career.  It didn't, but it does move the needle.  It should be at the top of the list, and it is a sad recognition that it is not...
    
17. The polls?  Seems to be the case that they are converging on a close race because they don't want to get it wrong.  I also think #1 matters here.
    
18. The early numbers are mostly encouraging--about turning out, about women turning out, about swing states.
19. Speaking of early reactions, Trump's social media stuff in PA is suggestive--that their internal polling suggests the state is lost.  
20. Will enough voters remember that Trump fucked up the pandemic?  I hope so.
21. Trump is frickin old. Biden got pushed out because he was seen as too old.  Trump has lost his mojo and is low energy.  He really has run the shittiest campaign this time.  Small crowds that leave early, fewer rallies. And people are just tired of him and tired about talking about him.  Time to move on.  Some would say we are not going back. 

 

 

 

I still think Nevada will go Dem, but I am not as confident.  Between the abortion referendum and Kari Lake sucking so much, Arizona is going Dem again.  NC?  Always tempts us, but this time they have a horrific Gov candidate that will help push the state over the top.   

Senate?  I haven't followed this as much--the map is brutal this time as these are the folks who won in 2018, Trump's midterm.  So, more Dem seats.  WV is lost, Montana is probably as well.  I am not worried much about Arizona.  I think the Independent wins in Nebraska.  I'd love to see Cruz and Scott lose in Texas and Florida.  Not likely but not out of the realm of the possible.  Oy.

The House?  Since I think Harris is going to do quite well in the general election, I think the Dems pick up the House.

 PS I didn't mention the Arab American vote because it is not a cause for optimism.  I have no idea how they will break at the end.  All I do know is that Trump would be far more awful for that community in the US and would not be any better and probably worse on Gaza/Palestine than Harris.  But these folks are rightly angry about the US arming Israel's disproportionate response to Oct 7.  Oh, and the Jewish vote?  Probably not moving radically in one direction or another despite the GOP being the party of far right anti-semitism, which is far more dangerous than left-wing, students protesting Israel.