This is very good news:

Joe Biden has declared that US security guarantees apply to Japan’s administration of the disputed Senkaku Islands, in the president-elect’s first significant foreign policy move related to China.

Yoshihide Suga, Japanese prime minister, said Mr Biden made the pledge in a 15-minute conversation on Thursday morning local time.

Long time readers of this blog know that I’m a huge supporter of the US defense treaties in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, which have produced the greatest period of peace in world history. Trump would frequently cast doubt on our commitment to NATO.

Trump was especially weak in his dealings with China, even going so far as to endorse Xi Jinping’s decision to put a million Muslims into concentration camps. I hope and expect that Biden will do much better. We should not go to war over human rights in China, but we should also refrain from excusing their outrageous behavior toward their own citizens in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

Trump’s unwise statements have reinforced the Chinese view that Americans don’t actually care about human rights in China, and that official statements that we do care are just posturing, designed to weaken the Chinese regime. That was Trump’s view, but I don’t believe it is true that all American governments are that cynical. Because of the damage done by Trump, the Chinese will now be even more firmly convinced that all American governments just use “human rights” as a stick to achieve other goals.

Biden’s next step should be to make it 100% clear that a Russian attack on Estonia is no different from a Russian attack on Iowa. It’s time to rebuild our alliances.

1. Perhaps the best way to summarize the decline of the GOP is that they don’t even know when they’ve won an election. There’s all this gloom and doom and handwringing in the GOP, even though they won. At least they won unless you are one of those people who only cares about the cult of the strong leader, and couldn’t care less about policy (a group that now seems to include most GOP voters.)

Here’s Matt Yglesias:

The Dems are not going to win those two Senate seats in Georgia, but even if they do it’s now 100% clear that there’ll be no court packing and no end to the filibuster. That means the Supreme Court will remain highly conservative for decades to come. The GOP won!

Biden won’t be able to get anything “progressive” through Congress. The GOP won!

Because the Dems have the presidency, the GOP will pick up seats in the next midterm. The GOP won!

But they think they’ve lost because the modern GOP cares nothing about policy, they just want a low IQ demagogue to “own the libs” with moronic tweets than they think are actually “clever”. That’s literally all they lost.

2. This election cements the banana republic status of the US. In the 20th century, only the 1960 election was viewed as somewhat tainted. (Not correctly; Kennedy won Texas by a pretty solid margin.) In contrast, all 4 presidents in this century were widely viewed as illegitimate. The Supreme Court “stole” the 2000 election. Obama wasn’t born in America, according to Trump and his followers. Trump’s election was due to Russian misinformation campaign on Facebook. Biden stole the election. It’s just never ends. The US has become a banana republic. How much evidence to you guys need before you finally admit that I’m right?

[Just to be clear, I view all four presidents as legitimate. I’m giving you the popular view among a very large minority of Americans.]

3. On Election Day, I suggested we might have a bad interregnum as in 1933. In early 1933, there were two basic problems. First, FDR refused to commit to the gold standard. This led to a run on gold and the worst three months of the entire depression. FDR also refused to work with Hoover on a bank rescue package, and there was a really bad run on the banks in February. (Back then; the new president took office in early March.)

Today the interregnum might hold up a fiscal stimulus package, and it might lead to a dispute over how to roll out any new vaccine, which slows the planning process. That’s nowhere near as bad as 1933, but I expect some grumbling from people who argue (correctly) that the interregnum is still too long.

4. Over at Econlog, I pointed out that the vaccine that Trump is taking credit for developing was actually developed by the children of Muslim immigrants to Germany. Hmm . . .

5. A few weeks back I used Bayesian reasoning to evaluate election eve charges of corruption leveled against Biden. I said we knew 6 months earlier with 100% certainty that those accusations would be made roughly a week before the election, so there was no new information to react to.

Similarly, we knew last month with 100% certainty that if Trump lost he’d claim the election was stolen and he’d refuse to concede for some time. Thus the press really should not report these facts in the news. Doing so is an insult to the intelligence of the American public. It implicitly suggests that Americans are not Bayesians, and are too stupid to have already known that Trump would claim the election was stolen and would refuse to concede.

The press should report new information, things we don’t already know.

6. All good Republicans believe:

a. Obama had little to do with the huge stock gains under his presidency.

b. Trump caused a huge stock market boom.

c. Biden’s election gave no significant lift to stocks.

And they are right on 2 out of 3 beliefs. Not bad!

7. Over at Econlog, I have a new post pointing out that Dems are the idea party and the GOP is the “thing” party.

8. There are millions of votes yet to be counted, mostly mail-ins from places like California, New York and New Jersey. The Biden lead will widen significantly. Please don’t put too much weight on the current national vote margin, or (inaccurate) exit polls, when making comments below. I’ll ignore your comment if you do.

Wisconsin still looks like the swing state, but it’s too soon to know for sure.

9. All of 2020, in one crazy headline:

Trump Adviser Leading Post-Election Legal Fight Has Coronavirus

10. So far, no commenter has been able to provide any evidence of widespread cheating. Nor has Trump. But “Questions Have Been Raised!!”

11. The NYT has an interesting map of vote shifts since 2020 (provisional due to some votes being still uncounted.) Here’s my take:

a. The Northeast shifted blue.

b. Much of the area west of central Nebraska shifted blue, with two exceptions. The fracking area of west Texas, and the Mormon areas of Utah and Idaho. The latter reflects the fact that Trump picked up GOP votes because McMullin was no longer running. In an absolute sense, Trump still underperformed in Mormon areas, relative to pre-2016 elections.

c. In much of the South and Midwest, Trump gained in rural areas and smaller industrial towns and lost ground in bigger cities, especially those with higher education levels. Trump also gained in Hispanic areas, a trend that will likely continue in future elections. In the very long run, the GOP’s best hope is to bring in lots more immigrants from Latin America. (Just kidding.)

PS. A few arrows may shift bluer as more votes come in, but probably not many.

Update: This map looks different, as it’s scaled by population.

It’s good that Trump lost, but there’s actually no reason to celebrate. Trumpism has not gone away, and is unlikely to do so.

Imagine a good friend that you trust returned from a long visit to Switzerland and told you that the fate of that country rested in next month’s election. A month later you read that the scary candidate lost a close election. How would you react?

Here’s how I’d react. I’d think, “Wow, I had always thought that Switzerland was a country that had its act together, where it didn’t much matter who was elected to lead the country. Now I wonder if Switzerland is in danger of becoming another Hungary.”

Here’s another analogy. I’m not exactly “relieved” if a sniper shoots a bullet through my bedroom window and narrowly misses me. I’m more nervous than ever.

Trump remains America’s most powerful politician, by far. He has both GOP politicians and GOP voters at his beck and call. If he takes a position on an issue, the rest of the party (except Mitt) will fall in line. Biden doesn’t have that power. The 2024 nomination is Trump’s if he wants it. If “Jeb!” wants it, Jeb must first get Trump’s approval. Good luck with that! Heck, he could probably deliver the nomination to Ivanka if he wished to.

Polls show that 81% of GOP voters want the next nominee to be like Trump, not like a typical politician. That person might actually be competent, and thus much more dangerous than Trump. Imagine an American version of Viktor Orbán, or Modi, or Erdogan.

When I was young, the Republicans and Democrats were actually pretty similar, except the GOP was more conservative and the Dems were more liberal. Going forward, we will have one basically evil party that is led by a right wing demagogic authoritarian populist politician, and one fairly normal center-left social democratic party.

And that’s the best case. If the racist “woke” people take over the Dems, then we’ll have two evil parties.

I’ve given up on American politics for the rest of my life. I see no hope for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, there’s much more to life than politics, and none of this affects me personally. Life will go on as normal, and America will remain the greatest economy in the world for quite some time, at least decades to come. There’ll be plenty more Japanese classic films and NBA games to watch, more trips like my month in New Zealand earlier this year. More books to read. Life goes on.

PS. During the 1990s, the little man in the picture below was a private citizen, with no official position. He was also the most influential person in the entire world:

Totally off topic: Someone in Vermont died of Covid yesterday—first time in more than 3 months.

You don’t need to look at all the various claims of electoral fraud to know that this election was not stolen (although doing so shows they are almost entirely without merit.) Rather one can easily establish that the election was not stolen merely by looking at the data.

First of all, Biden will win by 7 or 8 million votes. As far as I know, no one has ever claimed that election fraud occurs at the level of millions, at most it would be 100,000s, and even that’s highly implausible. That means that Biden really did win the election by perhaps 7 million votes. In that case, it would be shocking if he did not win the Electoral College.

Now you could argue that there was fraud in a few close states, and that that tipped the election to Biden. But in the end even states like Michigan and Pennsylvania won’t be all that close, so the most likely suspects would be Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona.

But why would a nefarious Democratic plot target Georgia? Before the election, both Florida and North Carolina looked like more plausible targets. And yet there are basically zero accusations of widespread voter fraud in Florida, where Trump did better than expected. And Trump did especially well in exactly the sort of corrupt places where voter fraud would be most likely to occur, if it occurred at all—Dade County.

Wisconsin is an even more far-fetched example. Republican conspiracy theorists focus on Milwaukee, but Trump lost because affluent areas around Milwaukee and Madison swung sharply to Biden, just as those sorts of areas did all across America:

But don’t be fooled by those big blue arrows near Milwaukee, those are shifts, not levels. Trump still easily won the suburban counties outside Milwaukee, just by less than in 2016. These are Republican counties, and they are also some of the least corrupt places in all of America. The idea that Biden would steal an election by getting strongly Republican counties in Wisconsin with a “good government” tradition to switch votes for him is laughable.

Now I suppose one could argue that even though Milwaukee didn’t move very much toward Biden, it was also corrupt in 2016. But cities like Milwaukee always go overwhelming Democratic, all across America and in every single election.

People need to use their brains. I don’t doubt that a handful of votes were stolen in this district and that, and that some of the stolen votes went each way. But Biden’s going to win by 7 or 8 million votes. With that margin it’s overwhelmingly likely that the tipping point states would favor Biden. This was not a stolen election.

Arizona also seems unlikely, as it’s not an old state with a long history of Democratic big city machines, rather it’s a young and growing state that’s very suburban and traditionally Republican.

Claiming the election was stolen when Biden won by 7 million votes is like claiming your card dealer was dishonest because you weren’t dealt a royal flush. People need to get a grip on reality, and learn some math.

PS. That big blue arrow northwest of Green Bay is an Indian reservation, with few people. Smaller blue arrows between Green Bay and Wisconsin’s western edge (close to Minneapolis) are modest size Wisconsin towns, with roughly 50,000 people each. Most rural counties have red arrows.

PPS:

Yes, Biden getting more votes than Obama is “proof” that Biden stole the election. And yet how could Trump be anything but a sore loser? He’s almost unique among human beings in having literally no good points. None.

Trump lost by a much wider margin that Mitt Romney, and to a far weaker candidate than Barack Obama. Pathetic.

And he may well be elected president in 2024.

I believe that the election outcome confirms two claims for which I was heavily criticized:

1. The Dems should nominate Biden. (I was told that Biden’s a weak candidate, a loser.)

2. Trump would have won if not for Covid. (Polls suggested otherwise.)

We now know that the polls were very misleading. Even with the huge lead in the polls, Biden probably only won by about 0.6% in the tipping point state.

Back in February, the economy was booming and the polls were considerably closer. In retrospect, Biden did not have even close to a big enough lead to overcome both the EC bias and the shy Trump voter bias. So as for all you commenters who pointed to the fact that Biden did have a lead in the polls even before Covid, your argument doesn’t show what you thought it showed.

Way back in March of 2019, Tyler Cowen had this to say about Biden’s chances:

As the information trickles out that the Mueller report probably will not end the Trump administration, it is worth thinking about how the broader landscape has changed, and who might be the winners and losers.

Politically, the biggest loser is probably Joe Biden.  The belief that he can run as the “safest,” most vetted Democrat against an ailing, politically destroyed Trump all of a sudden seems less relevant.  It now seems more important that Biden has run for president several times before, and never done extremely well, in part because he has not been an entirely convincing campaigner.  He’s never come close to winning the nomination.  He is a candidate of the past, for better or worse, but the dominant mood may not be one of restoration.  The Mueller report makes it clear that we really are in a post-Obama era, and that even Trump critics need to be thinking about what comes next rather than looking to the past.

That claim might look dubious today, but I suspect Tyler was partly right. The Dems were on track to lose the election if not for Covid. In a sense, Covid created the “ailing, politically destroyed Trump” that Mueller failed to produce. That made Biden the safe choice to run as “brand X” against a president who would basically be the only real issue in the campaign. Someone more dynamic but controversial might have lost.

Tyler continues:

Which candidates then are helped the most?  Most likely that would be the dynamic or potentially dynamic, relatively centrist Democrats, and that includes Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg (dynamic in a Mister Rogers sort of way), and Kamala Harris. 

Harris might have turned off men for the same reason that Hillary did. I like Buttigieg, but is the country ready for a gay president? I hope so, but I’m not sure. Biden was the safe choice. On the other hand, perhaps without Covid a candidate like Buttigieg might have been what it took. You take risks if you are behind, which was probably Tyler’s tacit assumption in 2019.

A month later Tyler had this to say:

Donald Trump ascended to the presidency because he mastered both worlds, namely he commands idiomatic American cultural expressions and attitudes, and also he has been brilliant in his political uses of Twitter.  AOC has mastered social media only, and it remains to be seen whether Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have mastered either, but probably not.

I think we need to be careful here. A political style can be successful in one dimension and unsuccessful in another. Trump’s wacky demagogic tweets during Covid-19 may have both firmed up support in his base and also cost him support among swing voters. It’s not either/or, both can happen at once.

Let’s not forget that this is one of the worst losses by an incumbent since 1932 (in the sense that his opponent will get over 51%). And unlike the first Bush and Carter (who also failed to be re-elected), voters gave Trump high marks for the economy. For an incumbent to lose by 7 or 8 million votes while simultaneously get high marks for the economy . . . well, has that ever happened before? I suspect the “Trump is a brilliant communicator” bubble has burst. He’s definitely brilliant at getting intense support for 42% of the population—and that’s a skill very few people have, to his credit—but even with the pro-GOP bias in the Electoral College, that’s not enough.