Let's normalize *nt*s*m*t*sm: Part 1 of... oy...

Part 1: What did you expect?

The basic plot of 21st century USA can be explained by "what the hell did you expect?" We could go through the whole plot of my adult lifetime of American history and make the results a result of "what the hell did you expect?"

But the nomination of Zohran Mamdani takes us back to original sins of this third age of the modern US, and the original sin is Clintonism and its compromises.

Bill Clinton was both a very good President and a disappointment. He basically governed like what we used to think of as a Republican: a pragmatic, responsible conservative of the type that used to be represented by Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge. This Arkansian from nothing governed like New England old money: low-risk, consensus, fiscal thrift, and compromise everywhere. The paradox is that Clinton probably saved us from right wing ideologues taking us over much sooner. Reagan was fresh in the American mind, and in 90s US was basically a right wing country. Had Clinton governed like Lyndon Johnson, Republicans would have nominated a right wing demagogue in 96 like Pat Buchanan, and Clinton would be trounced.

America's lived under threat of a Trump moment since 1994, and most people only awoke to it in 2016. Somwhow, most people had no idea how we landed there: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?!?!?!

In 1999, Clinton lifts the Glass-Steagall Act, thinking regulations on bank investments would put us on bad competitive footing with the Japanese (remember when they were our big economic threat?). This allows banks to play Candyland with our money. Profits for corporate investors go through the roof at the expense of middle class people who can no longer afford anything but the most conservative investments, along with stock prices skyrocketing the cost of the entire economy: once there are so many corporate profits, corporations have to charge more to keep up with the competiition, so every material cost goes up for houses, cars, appliances, electronics, manufacturing, and labor. America gets so profitable that nobody can afford anything anymore. It seemed sensible to many at the time, but ultimately, what did you expect?

In 1994, Clinton enacted the Crime Prevention Act: 100,000 new policemen, tough sentencing for light crimes, and new prisons to house the lawbreakers. This puts kids who have no idea what they're doing behind bars for decades, creates a whole African American class of 'prisoner families' without fathers who can help raise their children, which creates whole new generations of criminals, and raises America's prisoner total past a million and a half. It gives rise to a whole new industry of government contractors to build prisons. It gives policemen the green light to enforce laws by any means necessary, and incentivises judges to be trigger happy as interpreters of law on conviction and sentencing (that's the charitable interpretation of what judges did...). Crime was truly harrowing before this act, and the act was highly successful. Even so, what did you expect?

Most disastrously, Clinton was tasked with the herculean labor of overseeing the Russian transition from Communism to liberal democracy. As it seemed a given to so many that socialism and democracy were incompatible, Clinton insisted on privatizing Russia's government holdings immediately. Inevitably, the people who profited most from this were the earliest investors who knew what Russian resources were most valuable. This lead to the rapid wealth accumulation of those with insider information, meaning a relative handful of high level communist bureaucrats and KGB/intelligence officers, who became so disproportionately wealthy that they could run the Russian government behind the doors of their corporate offices. Thus was born the Russian oligarchy. What the hell did you expect?

Christians have it right. There is no life without original sin. Every solution requires compromise and results in compromise. There are no permanent solutions, only lesser evils for greater goods, and often we can only giess what those lesser evils are. If we're lucky, the solutions last for generations, as FDR's have, but great solutions require great sacrifices, and no sacrifices are greater than world wars. Clinton had many, many compromises to conservatives, but without those compromises, our generation would have grown up in the world of Donald Trump, and our children might have grown up in worse.

But there was one issue on which Clinton did not compromise to conservatives, maybe he compromised to liberals instead.

One of Clinton's first great accomplishments, and it was towering, was the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993. Or as Jews always called it, "The Peace Process." The Palestine Liberation Organization would become the Palestinian Authority and take control over disputed territory over a period of five years which would then comprise a Palestinian state. At the end of the five year period would come further talks about the status of borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

The very idea of peace in the Middle East seemed like an impossibility since Gallipoli and the fall of the not particularly peaceful Ottoman Empire. Clinton almost cracked the code, and he would have if not for the messy humans who had to follow it and their all too neat beliefs.

It's possible to impose peace on people who want war, but not without threats against all the things they care about, and any threat misapplied only increases war's chances.

In response to the Oslo Peace Accords the Israeli right mounted resistance in every corner within walking distance of them, particularly the orthodox communities. For the next two years there was nearly a rally a day agitating to resist peace, and not only resist peace but resist the leader who imposed it, and not only resist the leader but overthrow him, violently.

I don't know what the Palestinian zeitgeist felt like in those years, but it would seem that Palestinians were no less turbulent over the issue, and two little known Islamic resistance groups took to the rarely encountered act of suicide bombing as a means to further poison Israel against Rabin's push for peace: the resistance groups were called Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. If their push was successful, they knew that Israel would take retribution, which would further poison Palestinians against any solution with two states.

With every suicide bombing more Israelis called for an end to the peace process, and a surprising number of Israelis seemed comfortable with a particularly final solution to it. The solution came on November 4th, 1995, when Yitzhak Rabin left the stage after a peace rally, and Yigal Amir put three bullets into the person who will define heroism for me for all the days of my life.

But peace was never a full solution, nor was it supposed to be. Even the best Middle East peace would only last a generation or three, but those two generations would be a golden age, they would buy Israel time to develop unimpeded, so that when war next came, more could be saved and there would be more to save.

Clinton tried again with the next elected Prime Minister from Israel's Labor party, Ehud Barack. The effort to empower peace was even more extreme, more desperate, and resulted in still more desperate extremism. Many more suicide bombings, many more rallies inciting violence against Arabs. At the end of it, The Peace Process only resulted in twenty-five years of war. Those who wanted war craved it all the more. What did we expect?

One man who subtly encouraged Rabin's assassination was the leader of the right wing Likud opposition: a steamrolling smooth talker named Benyamin Netanyahu, not yet fifty, and already endowed with a brass narcissism that seemed to know that he would change the course of history in a manner that would erase Rabin. Netanyahu knew that even as controversial as he was, Rabin, described by Clinton as 'one tough sonofabitch' would be a tougher opponent than Rabin's foreign minister, Shimon Peres. Six months later Netanyahu eked out his first victory. Of his six victories so far, four were squeakers.

Rabin was no politician. He was a general, perhaps Israel's greatest, and he was a statesman. He clearly did not understand politics, but he understood the mentalities of leaders, and he particularly understood strategy.

Rabin did not view peace like a peacemaker, he viewed it like a military man. All the dictators next to Israel paid lip service to Islam, but none were true believers. Whether in pockets of East or West, their ideology was something called pan-Arabism, which had the ultimate aim of uniting all Arab peoples under one cause, one banner, and presumably, one nation. But were they to unite under one country, the question remained: under who's leadership?

These dictators were Arab nationalists, but more fundamentally, their ideology was themselves. During a period when Israel was the little democracy that could, it made perfect sense to use Israel as a rallying cry for their people: occupiers, killers, thieves, infidels. But once Israel was a capitalist nation with money to burn, it made more sense for these dictators to ally with Israel than oppose it.

But the reason for all this, the reason the peace process was and remains a necessity, is to isolate a country beyond their borders who could not be bought and cannot be bought. The aim of pan-Arab dictators was corruption, but the aim of Iranian mullahcracy is the resurrection of the Caliphates and the eviction of the infidels, with Iran as the ruler of the entire Islamic world. For fifty years, they've set their goals not in years but in eternity, and their goal was and is the spread the Iranian interpretation of Shi'a Islam around the world.

But until that glorious time when such goals are made tangible, the most important goal of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the eviction of Israel from Jerusalem. Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock is where Mohammed is believed to ascend to heaven. The second goal is the eviction of Jews from Islamic land. However unfeasible, however unbelievable, this goal is more important to them than their own citizenry, precisely because it's a goal that inspires their citizenry to a holy cause, and distracts then from their own material poverty. They say exactly that, and they mean it. Believe them.

No amount of money can buy Iran's ayatollahs off, and until the Islamic Republic is overthrown, no amount of time will distract them from their cause. The only limitation for their ambition is the incompetence caused by such an impractical worldview. The more totalitarian leaders control their population with impossible dreams, the more their people's reality is squalor, corruption, public incompetence. What did they expect?

Life is about transition, and all successful solutions are transitions between one problem and another. There is only one permanent solution, and eventually it comes for us all.

There are only temporary solutions, and anyone promising a permanent solution is asking to exploit you.