Regular readers of this column will know how much I love David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, a near-future, science-fiction-ish, semi-dystopian work that is, in the words of its late author, “a very sad story about the pursuit of happiness.” Wallace got a lot of the details of his near-future wrong (there was no presidential election pitting Hillary Rodham Clinton against Rush Limbaugh—in fact, Mrs. Clinton ran against an entirely different portly, golf-addicted, Palm Beach populist blowhard with no friends) but he got a lot of the big ideas right: the centrality of online networks to our lives and the atomizing effects of screens, for one, and his titular plot device—a piece of video entertainment so entertaining that it is literally lethal is being unleashed on the United States as a weapon of mass destruction deployed by a Quebecois-separatist terrorist cell—is a wry literalization of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. Infinite Jest has the Organization of North American Nations; we have One America News Network—but whether it’s ONAN or OANN, the wankers are pretty much all the same.
I am still waiting on the experialism.
Imperialism you know—all real Americans do. Experialism, in Wallace’s imaginary future, is a kind of corollary political tendency: Parts of the United States have become so hopelessly polluted, so unbearably toxic and radioactive, that our clean-freak president (the fictional one, I mean, not the once-and-future germophobe in chief) has used nuclear blackmail to bully Canada into annexing the land, thereby liberating us real Americans from the befouled territory. The Quebecois separatists were already miffed, but that turned out to be a Gordie Howe International Bridge too far.
(There is a certain kind of woman out there rolling her eyes and saying to herself, “Infinite Jest, of course, I know the type.” And these ladies are … not wrong.)
I would be very, very surprised if Donald Trump could point to Greenland or Panama on an unlabeled map, and I’d bet $10,000 he could not lay a finger on Denmark without advice and assistance. But Trump has decided that it is of paramount importance to the United States to wrest control of the Panama Canal away from Panama and to wrest control of Greenland, a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, from Denmark.
Why Greenland?
Greenland is strategically located between the United States and Russia. So, there’s that. Of course, there are a lot of places strategically located between the United States and Russia: Iceland, Norway, Sweden … the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain … Ukraine. Most, but not all, of those countries have something in common with Greenland: There is already a U.S. military base there or formal U.S. access to local military installations. In fact, there are about 31 countries located somewhere roughly between the United States and Russia. Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson had the good sense to organize a dozen or so of those countries with an interest in the North Atlantic into a treaty organization, which they imaginatively named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO, the bulwark of the free world against Russia and aligned enemies, which Donald Trump has spent pretty much his entire political career micturating on from a great height. We don’t have to twist any Danish arms into getting them to help us against threats from Moscow—they’ve been doing their part since 1949.
Trump, Trumpism, and Trumpists are fundamentally unserious. That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. You’ve all encountered men who were drunk, angry, and stupid, who were not serious but may have been dangerous. Trump doesn’t drink, but these guys are the equivalent of that drunk, angry, stupid guy: dangerous, but not serious. You can see this in the so-called policy debates. You can see it in J.D. Vance’s imbecilic trolling. You can see it in the appointments: Fox News grotesques such as Pete Hegseth and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the game-show producer who is going to be “special envoy” to the United Kingdom, Robert Kennedy Jr. and other conspiracy kooks. The plan to annex Greenland—or to take back control of the Panama Canal—is unlikely to get anywhere past tweets and cable-news goofballery.
If the Trump administration were serious about Greenland and the strategic issues associated with it—which are real—Trump himself would be doing the opposite of what he has been doing since … forever … and work to fortify U.S. leadership in NATO and to build up the credibility and capabilities of the alliance itself. The Danes—and the Canadians—do not lack for valor, as they have shown on many occasions, but they are not adequately resourced, and hectoring them about spending x percent of GDP on national security isn’t going to change that. Yes, they need to spend more, but that is only the beginning of the challenge. The United States could have been spending the past 20 or 30 years working to change the military posture of our NATO allies and other European allies and helping—and prodding—the Europeans along the path to that “strategic autonomy” they are always talking about. But that would have taken resources—money, time, attention.
We also had an opportunity to build a free-world trade alliance excluding China as a counterweight to Beijing’s imperialist mercantilism—it was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Trump killed it. If the administration were serious about China, and in particular about economic competition with China and economic inference by Beijing, it would be building wider, deeper, more liberal, more active trading relationships among the democracies, especially among our most strategically important allies. But it isn’t doing that. Trade involves tradeoffs—that is the nature of trade—and the Trump administration has at its center Donald Trump, who is physically near the age for Depends but temperamentally still fit for Huggies. The great infantile “I want!” is what makes him—in spite of his risible endless claims to the contrary—an ineffective and frequently incompetent negotiator.
So, if the Trump administration isn’t serious about Greenland and Panama and whatnot, why talk about them?
In the democratic context, demagoguery has two phases: Before the election, the demagogic populist finds his enemies mainly at home: the supposedly corrupt or incompetent “elites,” the mythical “deep state,” all that. But after the inauguration, cleaning up that stuff becomes the responsibility of the new incumbent administration, and even for such gormless civic illiterates as those who populate the Trump movement, it is at least a little bit awkward for the president to protest that he is being frustrated by the ulterior machinations of an executive branch of which he is the chief executive. You cannot very well have your “unitary executive” and blame somebody else for the shenanigans of the bureaucrats who work for you. So the psychological locus of conflict must be shifted to foreign adversaries.
But you have to be careful about that. The effective demagogue will avoid shifting attention to some overseas challenge about which he might be expected to do something, any problem that might subject him to real judgment about whether he handled it well or that might expose him to anything resembling accountability. Trump isn’t going to lean into, say, Taiwan. But let the rubes believe that he’s working on something important in Greenland, which 97 out of 100 Americans do not know the first thing about, and that’s political treasure. They may remember from high school English that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
This isn’t going to be Ronald Reagan debating William F. Buckley Jr. on the Panama Canal. This is going to be Sean Hannity hyperventilating about Latin American “Marxists” between pharmaceutical advertisements. The current president of Panama (José Raúl Mulino) is, in fact, a conservative. He says “there is nothing to talk about” when it comes to control of the canal, and he’s probably right about that, but there is much for the United States and Panama to talk about, including northbound migration through the Darién Gap, which is not, as Donald Trump no doubt suspects, a place to buy cheap jeans in Connecticut.
The U.S.-Panama relationship is an important one if you actually care about trade and immigration. But Trump doesn’t care about those issues because—note well this part—they are issues, and he doesn’t care about those. Trump cares about Trump—his own power, wealth, comfort, opportunities to be flattered, etc.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There is nothing else to the man or his movement. There are no ideas and no issues, which is why people like Kevin Roberts always end up beclowned when trying to position themselves as the house intellectuals of a man who despises them both individually and as a class.
What Trump is up to vis-à-vis Greenland and Panama isn’t foreign policy or trade policy or anything of the sort—it is rhetorical experialism, an obvious and obviously dumb way to try to externalize the emotional focus of his incoming administration in a way that relieves him of the burden of doing anything of substance at home or abroad.
Words About Words
Hoo, boy, last week’s observations about “middle aged” seem to have hit a few people—people right around the age of 40—right in the soul. Yeah, I remember what that was like.
One interesting but wrongheaded contribution from a reader insisted, however, that 39 was not the final year of one’s 30s—that last year of one’s 30s, he insisted, is 40. That is so silly and so wrong that one could almost overlook the analogy that is being misapplied.
The year 2000, you may remember being told about 6,442 times in 1999, was not the first year of the 21st century—it was the final year of the 20th century. The first year of the 21st century was 2001, and the last year of the 21st century will be 2100. So it is true that your second decade of life begins at 11, not at 10, your third decade at 31 rather than 30, etc. [Note from author: On second reading, this part is, obviously, wrong. The broader point about calendar decades and colloquial age decades is correct, but, of course, you turn ten when you’ve completed your tenth year of life.]* But “thirties” doesn’t mean “fourth decade.” It means “a series of numbers running from 30 to 39,” a figure of speech rather than a matter of mathematics. (I have a correspondent who sometimes writes to inform me that such-and-such a numbers issue does not rise to the level of “mathematics” but is merely “arithmetic,” and I should write something about that sometime.) You’re in your early 40s—your earliest 40s—when you are 40.
Economics for English Majors
As with a recent discussion in this space about health insurance, it is worth repeating, in light of the terrible California wildfires, that insurance—all insurance—is a financial services instrument, not a tool of social policy. Insurance is there to provide you with a financial hedge against a certain risk, and insurers are able to do so only when they are able to effectively price the risk in question. You know how this works: Nobody really knows whether you are going to get lung cancer or whether you are going to get into a serious automobile accident, but actuaries know that for every x million people there will be y cases of lung cancer and z serious smash-ups, and they are pretty good at matching certain variables with increased or decreased likelihood of one of those unhappy happenings coming to pass. If insurers cannot price that risk, they cannot effectively provide insurance.
One of the main goals of politicians as a class seems to be stopping insurers from pricing risk—i.e., preventing insurance from working as insurance. Instead, what politicians want to do is to enact social spending by means of insurance regulation. That’s a big part of what the grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act (ACA) was all about—putting an end to “discrimination” by insurance companies, who have this manic need to take account of who is sick, who is more likely to get sick, who is less likely to get sick, etc., and to act on that data. The idea of the ACA and similar health insurance schemes is to in effect create one big pool of insurance by mandating that insurers cover everybody and cover them on more or less the same basis (a basis dictated to them by politicians) with the tradeoff that everybody be required to buy insurance, thereby forcing the young and the healthy to subsidize coverage for the old and the sick, in theory being repaid in a few years when they are the new old and sick. It doesn’t work very well if you don’t enforce the individual mandate—the mandate that everybody buy insurance—which we never did with ACA (unlike the ruthless Swiss, who have practically 100 percent compliance with their mandate). In the end, we got rid of the individual mandate altogether. We decided to eat dessert first and skip the vegetables entirely.
Something like that has happened with fire insurance in California. The state has, over the years, interfered with the workings of the property insurance marketplace where it comes to fire coverage, preventing insurers from raising premiums to economically appropriate levels, preventing them from canceling policies that they judged to be too high-risk, etc. As a result, many insurers simply stopped offering any fire coverage in the state. Fewer insurers meant fewer choices for consumers, higher prices, and less coverage, meaning fewer people among whom to spread the pain around. A classic vicious cycle.
The Wall Street Journal reports, with uncharacteristic imprecision:
The state accounted for eight of the 10 costliest U.S. wildfires through last year, after adjusting for inflation, according to Aon.
Despite those risks, its consumer-friendly laws for decades kept home-insurance rates relatively low, compared with the national average, industry data show.
Leading insurers have pulled back from the state, leaving many in the path of the fires with only bare-bones insurance provided by a state-sponsored insurer of last resort—or worse, no insurance at all.
Even before the fires were sparked, millions of homeowners in the Golden State, especially those in the path of the L.A. infernos, faced double-digit insurance-rate increases, nonrenewals or a dearth of any available private coverage.
Leading insurers, including State Farm and Allstate, have stopped selling new home-insurance policies in the state, saying rate increases approved by regulators were insufficient to cover their losses, including from the devastating wildfires of 2017 and 2018.
A question for the Journal reporters and their editors: Given the results—“double-digit insurance-rate increases, nonrenewals or a dearth of any available private coverage”—in what sense were California’s laws “consumer-friendly”?
“Consumer-friendly” and “pro-consumer” and such are just marketing slogans for politicians. If a regulation or a piece of legislation is, in fact, good for consumers, then we don’t need the politicians to tell us that—the markets will tell us, and so will the consumers.
There are two ways to go about this: We can let markets work, in which case California homeowners building in fire-prone areas—and particularly in expensive fire-prone areas such as Malibu—will pay a lot for fire insurance. In fact, they will pay, collectively, more than the fire damage costs in the long term—that is how insurance works. The insurers will not be popular—but the checks they send to homeowners after fires will be very popular. That’s one way to do things.
Another way is to decide that people who build in fire-prone areas ought to have their investments protected socially, that, in case of disaster, they should be made whole irrespective of whatever provision they made or didn’t make for the eventuality. Call it Medicaid for Malibu Mansions. California can tax people to support bailing out burned-out homeowners and then appropriate the money. The taxes will be about as popular as insurance premiums, and the tax collectors will be about as popular as insurance companies. But the checks the state writes to homeowners after disasters will be very popular. Of course, the money paid into the system through taxes will exceed, by some considerable margin, the cost of the damage itself—there will be administrative costs to consider, and in wet years the state will want to divert some of that money into other (surely worthy!) projects.
What will not work is expecting insurance companies to make homeowners whole while preventing them from making the business decisions that will make doing so economically feasible, and then denouncing the profit-seeking activities of profit-seeking enterprises as “greed” when the bill comes due.
Pick your pain.
Elsewhere …
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In Conclusion
I love California. I tried to move there once, but could only get as close as southern Nevada—California’s taxes, absurd housing costs, and busybodying about my property (including my firearms) was just too much. I think Los Angeles is one of the most interesting (and most enjoyable) American cities, and the Eisenhower Republican in me feels right at home in Palm Springs.
I hate to see anybody lose their home to a fire, of course, but one especially regrets seeing such lovely places wrecked. The California wildfire story has some policy aspects to it, but it is not mainly a policy story—neither for my progressive friends who want to use it for a homily about climate policy nor for my conservative friends who want to use it for a hectoring little lecture about California’s hostile business climate. (And I trust I have avoided doing that above. I have tried.)
California has had wildfires for a very long time and it will continue to. There are things we can do to make life better or worse, to improve or degrade Californians’ ability to adapt to the facts on the ground they inhabit. And the state of governance in California—in the state, in Los Angeles County, in the city of Los Angeles, in many other jurisdictions—is truly lamentable. Ronald Reagan once quipped that if the pilgrims had landed on the West Coast, then New England would still be a wilderness. I agree with the spirit of the remark.
I think if I were a 26-year-old smart so-and-so with political ambitions, I would move to California and make it my program to begin by rescuing the California Republican Party, the current leadership of which might very, very charitably be described as mediocrity on stilts. As it stands, Californians have their choice between public employee union factota in the Democratic Party and feckless Trump sycophants on the other side. Rebuilding the California GOP would be a real achievement. For somebody. Not me.
Correction, January 13, 2025: This newsletter has been updated with a note from the author.
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