Dan Erwin

Why Trump Is a Lot Weaker Than He Thinks

Again and again my acquaintances, liberal and even some of my Republican friends are running scared about what Trump is doing to our democracy and its institutions. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ignoring the mess Trump has created or even its impact on our culture, but I find that some, perhaps much, of the fear is overwrought.

So, one way to understand what’s going on in the US is, first, to step out of our democracy and look at parallels around the world. Trump is not unique, but in many ways comparable to what’s going on in other countries. Tom Carothers and Richard Youngs, specialists in foreign policy at the Carnegie Institute, published an article in Foreign Affairs in April 2017 about nations like Russia, Holland, Turkey and Indonesia where illiberal democracy is supposedly on the rise.

There’s no question that democracy has lost its momentum. That’s seen in the fact that there are only a handful of more electoral democracies in the world today than at the start of this century. It’s also true that many older democracies, like the US and the UK, are troubled.

There are a number of issues, however, that impact this gloom and doom. One issue is the theory that democratic transitions naturally move in a positive direction—and that established democracies don’t fall backwards. To a degree, these beliefs are driven by unconscious beliefs in evolution, a gross misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Back in the mid-twentieth century, George Gaylard Simpson, a giant of 20th Century biology, observed in a 1964 article in the journal Science that the fossil record shows very clearly that there is no central line leading steadily, in a goal-directed way, from a protozoan to man. Instead there has been continual and extremely intricate branching, and whatever course we follow through the branches there are repeated changes both in the rate and in the direction of evolution. Man is the end of one ultimate twig...

Harris, Warren and Biden Are Going to Get Eaten Alive by Trump

Most Democrats assume that Harris or Biden--and perhaps Warren--can beat Trump in a debate. The fact of the matter is that in a debate there's a high potential that all three of these lawyers will get eaten alive by Trump. The successful prosecution of both Barr and Biden by Harris, many also think, is illustrative of what she can do with Trump. That's profoundly flawed thinking. The problem with all four of them (Barr included) is that they work on the basis of lawyerly assumptions. What do I mean by that? I'll explain--and also reveal why Harris, who did so well with Biden and Barr, cannot work her magic with Trump.

It's all about assumptions. Lawyers inevitably come to the party with rational assumptions and act like a judge is watching. The fundamental assumption that all three of them bring is that by asking questions you can expose the weaknesses of the opposition. In other words, the opposition  has to answer a question in some form that can then be analyzed or rejected.

But the big problem these lawyers face in dealing with Trump is...