In The News (7)

Trump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him. There still will be a place for principled Republicans. ...............  If you look closely, there are actually four different Republican factions today: principled conservatives, pragmatic conservatives, unprincipled conservatives and Trump cultists. In the principled conservatives camp, I’d put Romney and Murkowski. They are the true America firsters. While animated by conservative ideas about small government and free markets, they put country and Constitution before party and ideology. They are rule-abiders. In the pragmatic conservative camp, which you could call the Mitch McConnell camp, I’d put all of those who tried to humor Trump for a while — going along with his refusal to acknowledge the election results until “all the legal votes were counted” — but once the Electoral College votes were cast by each state, slid into the reality-based world and confirmed Biden’s victory, some sooner than others. ............... The unprincipled Republicans — the “rule-breakers” in Charney’s lingo — are led by Hawley and Cruz, along with the other seditious senators and representatives who tried to get Congress to block its ceremonial confirmation of Biden’s election. Finally, there are the hard-core Trump cultists and QAnon conspiracy types, true believers in and purveyors of the Big Lie. I just don’t see how these four camps stay together. 

The great mall of China Why retailers everywhere should look to China That is where they will see the future of e-commerce .............. For a century the world’s consumer businesses have looked to America to spot new trends, from scannable barcodes on Wrigley’s gum in the 1970s to keeping up with the Kardashians’ consumption habits in the 2010s. Now they should be looking to the East. 

The next big thing in retail comes with Chinese characteristics Chinese apps are to 21st-century shopping what American malls were to last century’s 

The End of the GOP  It is easy to forget that the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure that freed slaves only as a military exigency and only in those states in rebellion against the Union. If the Civil War had not dragged on long enough for the 13th Amendment to finally escape the House of Representatives, many of those men and women set free by Lincoln’s proclamation might very well have been forced back into manacles. ...............  It wasn’t Chief Justice Earl Warren who desegregated the schools: It was President Dwight Eisenhower, who deployed the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to get it done. But Eisenhower thought Brown was a bad decision and came to regard his appointment of Warren as chief justice one of the great blunders of his presidency. That skepticism about Brown was superseded by his conviction that it is the duty of the executive to enforce the law rather than to make it unilaterally, as a dictator. .................  Many progressives who once embraced the expansive view of the Supreme Court championed by Warren et al. must currently be rethinking that stance. ........... Lincoln, for his part, bitterly noted that if he had listened to the radicals in the early days of the Civil War or in the lead-up to it, then the war almost certainly would have been lost with the defection of the border states. The result would have been the preservation not of the Union but of slavery — and not merely its preservation but almost certainly its expansion. As a moral question, we might be with John Brown, even while we concede that as a political question Abraham Lincoln had the better case. ................... The United States is a nation founded in revolution — that’s what treason is called when you win — with a long history of resistance, sometimes violent, to duly constituted authority. .............. The largest U.S. corporations by market capitalization are firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Tesla; by revenue, the top of the list comprises Walmart, Amazon, ExxonMobil, Apple, CVS, and Berkshire Hathaway. Which of those firms is led or owned by Republican-friendly, conservative-leaning activists? ............... The radical conservatives described by Buckley were “those who have not made their peace with the New Deal,” as he put it in 1955, unlike Eisenhower and his clique. ............. Donald Trump is the candidate of the 9/11 Republicans, whose politics is Kulturkampf and whose style is paranoid. (It is not for nothing that the worst and most embarrassing of his sycophants described 2016 as the “Flight 93 election.”) .................  Donald Trump, an avid conspiracy buff — 9/11, vaccines, Barack Obama’s place of birth, etc. — found himself in a petri dish practically tailored to his cultural DNA. .............. Trump had been, until five minutes before seeking the Republican nomination, pro-abortion and pro-gun control. ...........  Patriotism? He is a funny kind of patriot who cheers the sacking of the seat of government by barbarians carrying enemy flags. Republican radicals once stood for resistance to the worst kind of tyranny. Today’s Republican radicals stand for tyranny itself, for junta government, and they march under the banner of the very tyranny the Republican Party originally was constituted to oppose. ......... In 2016, I wrote that the likely outcome of a Trump presidency would be the end of the Republican Party as we had known it.......  In 2016, I wrote that the likely outcome of a Trump presidency would be the end of the Republican Party as we had known it. And so it ends for the Grand Old Party: From abolition to anarchy, from republicans to rabble, a bloody-minded, homicidal gang in thrall to the very democracy John Adams warned us about. A dog in this condition would be put to sleep. It would be a piece of mercy.