1. Niall Ferguson:
My sole contribution to the statute book of historiography — what I call Ferguson’s Law — states that any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Hapsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%. Extrapolating defense spending on the assumption that it remains consistently 48% of total discretionary spending (the average of 2014-23), the gap between debt service and defense is going to widen rapidly in the coming years. By 2041, the CBO projections suggest, interest payments (4.6% of GDP) will be double the defense budget (2.3%). Between 1962 and 1989, by way of comparison, interest payments averaged 1.8% of GDP; defense 6.4%. (Sources: niallferguson.com, bloomberg.com)
2. If elections were held in Israel now, Benny Gantz's National Unity Party would come out the strongest, with 28 Knesset seats, a Channel 12 poll published on Sunday found. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party would garner just 24 Knesset seats – down from the 32 it received in the November election. All together, the poll gives 63 of the Knesset's 120 seats to the opposition bloc, and just 52 seats to supporters of Netanyahu. The poll projected the third-largest party to be opposition leader Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid (down from 24 in the previous election), with Religious Zionism weakening by three seats, falling to 11. (Source: haaretz.com)
Public-opinion polls offer another vivid measure of Democratic discontent over the war and the U.S. approach to it. In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, almost two-thirds of Democrats said they opposed sending further military aid to Israel. In a CBS News/YouGov national poll released Sunday but conducted before Saturday’s hostilities, most Democrats wanted the U.S. to support Israel if Iran attacked it. But two-thirds of Democrats again opposed weapons transfers to Israel for the war with Hamas, and nearly half said Biden should push Israel to entirely end its military action; another fourth of respondents said he should encourage it to wind down the campaign.
These negative opinions about the war, and Biden’s approach to it, have been especially pronounced among younger voters. That points to a third central measure of dissension within Democratic ranks: widespread campus-based protests. One telling measure of that challenge for Biden came earlier this month, when the president of the University of Michigan issued new policies toughening penalties against disruptive campus protests.
The fact that the leading university in a state that is virtually a must-win for Biden felt compelled to impose new restrictions on protests underscored the intensity of the activism against the Gaza war. Protest “has been pretty persistent since October,” Ali Allam, a University of Michigan sophomore active in the TAHRIR coalition leading the campus protests, told me. “I don’t know very many people who are planning on voting for Biden, because they have seen time and time again, he is a person who says, ‘We’re concerned about the situation,’ and yet he continues to sign off on providing more and more weapons. And that is just not something young people are willing to get behind.”
Michigan is a somewhat unique case because of the state’s large Arab American population, which provides an especially impassioned core for the protest movement. But the student hostility to the war has extended to a broad range of left-leaning younger voters that Democrats count on. In Michigan, for instance, some 80 campus groups are part of the TAHRIR coalition, including organizations representing Black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish students, Allam said. Ben Rhodes, who now co-hosts a popular podcast aimed primarily at liberal young people, Pod Save the World, sees the same trend. “It’s not just Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, or foreign-policy lefties,” he told me. “It’s this kind of mainstream of the young part of the Democratic coalition.”
As Biden advisers point out, the other recent Democratic presidents also provoked internal opposition in Congress or in polls to some of their foreign-policy decisions. But it’s difficult to identify an example under Carter, Clinton, or Obama that combined all three of the elements of Democratic discontent Biden is now facing. (Sources: poll.qu.eu, cbsnews.com, theatlantic.com, cnn.com)
4. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Like many of his fellow Democrats, Ben Tulchin, a former pollster for Senator Bernie Sanders, is worried about President Biden’s chances against Donald Trump this fall. And like many Democrats, he is nervous about Biden’s current level of support among some core Democratic constituencies.
But Tulchin is warning any Democrat who will listen about one particular thing they might not have thought of: the possibility that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will wind up siphoning off two traditionally Democratic voting groups — Latinos and younger voters — this fall….
Tulchin, a veteran pollster from San Francisco who has worked for a wide range of Democrats including Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, is worried his party is too narrowly focused on using Kennedy’s ties to the anti-vaccine movement as a way to discredit him. He has been listening to what Kennedy is actually saying on the campaign trail, which he described as a heavy dose of anti-establishment, anti-corporate economic populism.
In other words, Tulchin is hearing a variation of the Sanders message that sold so well to younger Democrats and Latinos.
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