I try to avoid commenting on U.S. politics – anything I say tends to anger at least one-third of the room. But from time to time the United States takes a turn that elevates its internal issues to international import. Of late, evolutions in the American political system has taken such a turn. So here we go …

The American governing system isn’t small. U.S. local, state, and national governments are the country’s first-, second-, and third-largest employers. Combined, their staff is more than 22 million. So long as Americans disagree over how to do things, parallel structures are required to manage those disagreements in the context of the governmental apparatus. Those parallel structures are the Republicans and Democrats. With people constantly moving in and out of office at various levels, the parties need their own deep bench of support personnel to bulwark candidates-turned-mayors and representatives and senators and governors and presidents. The American parties are not traditionally tools of ideology, but tools of governance.

One, among many, outcomes is that various private interests get involved in building that bench of support. That way they can influence government decision-making both indirectly (via lobbyists) and directly (via elected officials and their staff). That takes money, and for decades the folks with the most money in the political system were those in the business community. The result was a somewhat revolving door of business leaders giving cash and staff to the parties to get people into government. When those people left government they returned to business to make more money. Some of that money then flowed back into influencing the political parties and government, and so the wheel turned. It was pretty rare for a stark-raving-mad politician to rise to the top. Business hates risk and likes continuity. Staffing choices reflected that.

Critics called this corrupt — and they had a point. Throughout the 1990s a consensus built that there was too much money in politics. The campaign finance reform effort was designed to minimize, and ideally eliminate, large donations to political campaigns, and thus root-out the perceived corruption. This weakened the business community’s connection to the political process to the point that it really didn’t have a candidate in the 2016 presidential run. This is the first piece of the parties’ unravelling: the single-largest and most cohesive and most status-quo-vested wedge of the political system was shown the door.

The second piece was even more disruptive: technology. In the pre-PC and smartphone age your options for contributing to campaigns of any sort were limited. You could give your time, or you could write a check and send it via snail mail. Checks of $20 or less were barely worth the man hours required to process them, so not a lot of effort went into bushbeating. In 2000 the landscape started to shift. Electronic checks, online bill pay, and money-by-text steadily reduced processing costs to nearly zero, even as social media techs enabled fundraising campaigns to be spread by email, SMS, Facebook, and Twitter at negligible cost. There’s now room for the masses to play politics with their cash.

The third factor almost seems prosaic: redistricting. State legislatures dominated by single parties would redraw their congressional districts’ boundaries, excising or including this or that population to build up their party’s electoral presence in the House of Representatives. The majority of such districts are now “safe” seats.

This all makes American politics loud and messy.

• Courtesy of redistricting, the real competition for most House seats is no longer at the general election, but instead at the primary level among party stalwarts. That pushes the debate from the center to the edges.
• At those edges, single-issue-voter money comes hugely into play. While businesses are interested in stability and continuity, individuals have axes to grind. Most Americans find it sexier to donate to specific causes and issues than to political parties and general platforms.
• Single-issue penetration into both party and government politics polarized the system away from the consensus-building required to get on with the business of governing, and into razor-sharp disputes on issues of principle. Disagreement didn’t lead to bargaining and compromise, but was instead perceived as treasonous or flat-out evil.
• Social media’s presence in the news cycle enabled people with a lot of extra time to prat on endlessly about this or that issue, blissfully unmoored from social trends, economic developments, decorum, facts, or reality. Biased or even fake “news” — much of it generated by folks outside of journalism — is now par for the course.

In such an environment the parties are largely incapable of appealing to the political center (by definition the political center is made up of people who are not single-issue voters). The parties have devolved from being tools of governance to vehicles for narrowly defined ideologies. America has become a great place to have an argument, but without functional parties it is almost impossible to have a debate.

American political candidates now break along a simple line.

On one side are those who cater to the ideological extremes to harness the increasingly-radicalized party structure: people like Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Michele Bachmann. On the other are those who can exist independent of the party structure and run their own campaigns: the Bush family, the Clinton Foundation, Trump Inc., and even Barack Obama. For them the parties were useful in a supporting role, but all of them succeeded because of their independent wealth and/or gravitas. W. Bush won by coalescing the evangelicals into a voting block independent of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton manipulated the Democratic Party machinery, not the other way around. Barack Obama’s popularity was built on a social media network that co-opted the Democrats; once he was in office his connections with “his” party were cool at best. Trump could not only self-fund, he succeeded despite the Republican party.

At first the Republican Party got the worst of these changes. As a rule the business community is pro-Republican, so campaign finance disproportionally impacted their bottom line. In a double-blow the Democratic Party’s coalition is a much broader sweep of the American electorate. Reduce transaction costs and the Democrats’ larger party base can funnel a larger number of small donations. Before 2010 the Republicans were always the party that could raise more money. That’s now flipped, and Democrats have been able to use their superior financial position to fund ever-larger campaigns.

The Democrat Party stalwarts looked at this turn of events and got very excited about the 2016 presidential race. As America’s leftists tell it, American conservatives are a bunch of old white rich dudes who lord over the world. Campaign finance largely ejected them from the election process, which stripped the Republican party down to its racist, sexist, homophobic dregs. Beating those dregs in a general election would be child’s play because every single minority group in the country combined with the liberal Millennials would be able to sweep the field, eliminate the Republican position in Congress, and usher in a socialist utopia.

The Democrats got it completely right. Except how blacks would vote. And gays. And Hispanics. And unions and Millennials and women. They were wrong about everything. As a result Trump captured every single swing state except Virginia, and several blue states to boot. The Republicans now control both the presidency and Congress for only the second time since World War II. Barring some truly impressive breakthroughs in geriatrics they’ll also control the Supreme Court for another couple of decades.

What is fundamentally revolutionary in my mind isn’t what has changed, but what hasn’t. The technology has changed, dispersing political power far and wide. The way money is raised has changed, enabling the issue of the moment to dominate the Internet and airwaves and national debate. The parties have changed to the point of near irrelevance. But what hasn’t changed is that most Americans are still centrists.

Fully 42% of women, 30% of Hispanics, 45% of Millennials, and 33% of Californians voted for Trump. On the other side, 41% of men, 34% of rural inhabitants, 45% of people without high school diplomas, 25% of Mormons, and 43% of Texans voted for Clinton. The American political center endures, it is just now completely unmoored from the political selection and reporting process. And so it will remain until the American political parties can regenerate themselves.

That will take a lot of soul-searching. I hear encouraging bits. For the Democrats who aren’t part of those single-party factions, it has really sunk in that every election of the past generation that their candidate lacked charisma, they’ve lost. All those single-issue voters just can’t deliver success, because their screaming pisses off left-leaning moderates (not to mention everyone else). And since all but a half dozen of the Senate seats that will be up for grabs in the 2018 bi-elections are held by Democrats, they’d best get a move on unless they want to risk a generational blow out. For the Republicans willing to stand up to Trump, there’s already a realization that a party led by those rebelling against the order can’t rebel against their own order. The Trump election is a one-shot deal.

So it isn’t as bad as it seems…in the United States anyway. In the meantime, things are looking horrible for the rest of the world. The United States is the country that guarantees global security, global trade, and global energy. There are no single-issue voters who are interested in global management. America’s bandwidth to understand — much less discuss — what is going on in the wider world is nil until such time that the American political parties can regenerate themselves. Until then, the superpower that makes the world work is simply absent.

This isn’t a brag piece.

Many have credited me with predicting the Trump rise. To be clear, I never predicted Trump’s entry into politics, or that he’d win the Republican party nomination or that he’d carry the presidency.

But this is still a bit of an “I told you so.”

Everything about the American position in the international system is based upon the Americans holding together what we currently call the international order. Americans have been doing this since 1944. At that point the Americans re-forged the global system, shifting it from a series of warring imperial networks into a global system they personally managed. The Americans imposed global order — the first global order — and created free trade as a means of purchasing the loyalty of the Western and Asian allies, the defeated Axis powers, and in time Communist China. It was all about paying for alliance networks to contain and defeat the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended the Americans neglected to shift their policies. The Americans continued to provide global security and empower global trade, but did so without the requisite security quid pro quo.

People noticed. The Brazil/Russia/China/India boom could only happen in such a strategic moment in time. The euro could only exist when economics were protected and security was free. But it wasn’t just in the wider world that people noticed. Free trade isn’t really free. Free trade requires someone providing the physical security and global ballast and market access to indirectly subsidize the rest of the system. The Americans have provided that for seven decades, and for the last three decades they have done so without asking for anything in return. With the Trump rise, this whole thing is now in its final years. Perhaps in its final months.

The reason for the accelerated timeframe isn’t just temperament, although I agree TrumpTantrumsTM will certainly play a role. It is far more structural than that. The entire webwork of elite relations that maintains the free-trade system just found itself without access to the leader of the free world. It’s not so much that the new American president is populist, although that is definitely a piece of it, but that he is not really affiliated with either American political party or the overall American business community or any other institutions that are linked into international trade. Trump is a purely domestic entity, disconnected from U.S. governance at all levels. Presidential history isn’t my strong point, but I think the United States hasn’t had one of those since Andrew Jackson, another strongly populist president who didn’t think all that highly of the wider world. But Jackson didn’t inherit responsibility for the global system. Trump has. And if there is one point on which Trump has been consistent, it is that that responsibility will be abandoned.

Yet this isn’t all Trump. The United States has been moving this way for a good 25 years, and I’ve little doubt that even a President Hillary Clinton would have ended the global system one way or another. I have been saying for months that the primary difference to the international order of Trump versus Clinton is timeframe. Clinton would move the United States away from the international order in a relatively slow manner. Probably 4 to 8 years. Trump would do it in 4 to 8 months.

To me the timeframe never really mattered. One way or another the global system was going to breakdown and we would find ourselves in the Disorder. This allowed me to view the world from afar and focus on the structure. The details would take care of themselves in time.

Well, that mode of operation is now about as relevant as the Clinton family.

With a shorter runway, a few things have clarified.

• Almost everything from the Obama presidency will be undone by the end of January 2017. Obama has shown next to no ability/interest in having conversations with Congress, even with members of his own party. The only large law passed during his entire tenure is Obamacare, so only it cannot be undone with a few strokes of a pen. How that law is modified or unwound requires Congressional involvement, and since Congress remains in the hands of the Republicans, that too is on deck — it will just take a bit more time. Any international treaties negotiated by Obama — whether they be the Paris Climate Accords or the TransPacific Partnership — are dead.
• The World Trade Organization has less than a year to respond to what will undoubtedly be a tidal wave of U.S. cases. Should those cases not be dealt with in adjudication at a pace and in the way the new White House desires, the United States will start taking unilateral moves which will, in essence, obviate the global trade order.
• One of those first moves — which might not even wait for the WTO to try and act — will be to declare China a currency manipulator as well as revoke its status as a free market economy. Any countries that attempt to relabel Chinese goods are likely to be caught in a dragnet. This one push should be enough to throw China into its first recession in 30 years. The question now is whether or not President Xi’s political consolidation efforts have progressed enough that China can weather the resultant internal political and economic explosion.
• NATO is for all intents and purposes dead. Russia’s moves into Ukraine will increase, and broadscale Russian plans for its entire western periphery — everything from Latvia to Poland to Romania to Azerbaijan — will accelerate. The only way forward for Europe is for Sweden and Germany to massively rearm.
• Formal talks between the United States and the United Kingdom on some sort of post-Brexit trade deal will open. (Technically these are illegal under EU law, but what is Brussels going to do? Kick the Brits out?) The only question is whether these talks herald British entrance into NAFTA.
• The alliance with Korea and Japan will no longer require U.S. troops in those countries, and even that assumes the alliance isn’t ended outright. Both countries will have little choice but to beef up their power projection capabilities, which is highly likely to include nuclear weapons. A much more aggressive Japan ends China’s creeping power projection to the northeast.
• Alberta may have just gotten a fresh lease on life. One of those Obama executive orders that will be scratched out is the Keystone pipeline. Its construction will enable Albertan crude to access the U.S. refining network where it will be blended with light/sweet U.S. shale crude. The resultant blend will save U.S. refiners a couple hundred billion in refinery overhauls, resulting in lower cost gasoline for the country. It also just might provide Alberta with enough income to climb out of what would have otherwise been a multi-year recession. The question now is how much of that income will Ottawa take, and how Alberta will respond to the forced transfer.
• Mexico now has no choice but to work with Donald Trump. Since most of the migration that comes into the U.S. actually comes from Central America and not Mexico, the most constructive path forward will indeed be a border wall that Mexico will indeed pay for…but on Mexico’s southern border rather than its northern one. How Mexico City handles this issue will determine the future success of both Mexico and NAFTA.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get back to that book writing. Apparently I have less time to get these projects out than I had thought.

Think November will bring an end to the shenanigans of the 2016 election cycle? Don’t hold your breath.

If there is one thing that drives editors batty, it’s an author who can’t keep his grimy fingers out of the editing process. So for the past three weeks I’ve been backpacking through Yosemite and the Thorofare while my team beats the text of Shale New World into shape. We’re aiming for an October release. (BTW – free case of books for anyone who can come up with a sexier title. I’m dry.)

Anywho, I hiked in to my taxi-out lodge this morning, did some laundry (mostly throwing away clothes that should never be worn ever again), and started getting caught up on the world. All y’all have been busy: a near-coup in Turkey, a devastating attack in Nice, the Brits throwing yet more spanners into the European project, the Chinese economy in a nose dive, India’s central bank chief stepping down, Japan’s prime minister looking particularly wounded, Justin Trudeau’s hair still rockin’ and so on. So much to work with! (The world has been so very good to me this year!)

But by far the most notable item of the past three weeks happened just yesterday when Texas Senator Ted Cruz addressed the Republican convention. His supporters gave him a hero’s welcome, and when it became apparent that he was not going to support Donald Trump, the nominee, a giant auditorium full of Republicans…booed him off stage.

You can parse this dozens of different ways, and I’m certain that the pro-Trump crowd did everything they could to whip the crowd into a frenzy once it became clear that an endorsement wasn’t going to materialize — but the bottom line is that a speaker being jeered to stage left hasn’t happened at a Republican convention in the past several decades.

Most pundits are making hay about the disunified nature of the Republican Party and the impact it will have on the general election. I certainly agree this adds a bit more gravel to what is already a gritty process, but let’s be honest here. Did anyone really expect Senator Cruz, the person in the sitting Congress with the blackest track record for throwing anyone and their grandmother under any available mass transit vehicle if it served his personal interest of the moment, to not be an ass at the convention?

Get real. In this election such is par for the course.

Instead, there are three other things that I’m thinking.

First, as a national political figure, Ted Cruz is likely dead. You just don’t come back from a convention rejection. Unless the Tea Party splits off from the Republicans formally, we are done hearing from Mr Cruz at the national level. Your personal politics will tell you whether this is fabulous or disastrous.

Second, a deeper question is what does this mean for Cruz’s Tea Party movement? I’ve never considered a billionaire like Mr Trump to be a stable representative of a group that prides itself on being less well-off than the average American (and living nowhere near Manhattan). The illuminating item for me was when Trump supporters were so nearly-physically hostile to Mr Cruz’s wife, Heidi, that security had to escort her from the convention floor under the assault of jeers of “Goldman Sachs”. Needless to say, the Tea Partiers are having a bit of a leadership crisis. I’d expect an identity crisis to follow shortly.

But the true geopolitical issue is the third one: Cruz’s fall isn’t exceptional, but instead representative of the in-flux nature of the entire American political spectrum.

The two American political parties are in reality coalitions of coalitions, and the stability of those coalitions of coalitions has proved remarkably stable since 1935-1945.

Let’s start with the Right.

The Republican coalition is comprised of five pieces: national security conservatives, evangelicals, the business community, populists and pro-lifers. At first blush this doesn’t seem like a very large grouping. But what it lacks in size it makes up in cohesion; These five groups don’t contradict each other. Folks who use religion to guide their votes don’t tend to stress about business regulation, while voters who shoot from the hip (figuratively and literally) tend to not have strong opinions on abortion. It’s easy to construct a political platform that addresses the pet issues of all five groups without alienating any of them. As such the Republican coalition is a reliable one that tends to carry the day.

The Democrat crew is more motley: greens, socialists, unions, gays, unmarried women, blacks, under 30s and pro-choicers. They disagree on pretty much everything. Greens and unions fight over every aspect of industrial policy. Gays and blacks have wildly different views on what the term ‘civil rights’ actually means. The under-30s and socialists expect single mothers to help pay for their college debt. And there’s always the threat that if the rest of the Democrats manage to cobble something together, the pro-choicers will blow it up if their single-issue voting style isn’t respected. Now if a charismatic personality — say, a Barack Obama — can inspire the lot, the Democrats will breezily walk away with the election. Their numbers are simply so much bigger than the Republicans. But shy of such a unifying candidate the biggest obstacle to the Democrats is themselves.

This is how things have been for decades. Yet in this election cycle it has all blown apart.

Within the Republican coalition the pro-lifers simply don’t trust Trump, as he was pro-choice just two years ago. The national security conservatives remain furious with Trump for insulting U.S. military’s poster boy, veteran Senator John McCain. (The same crew also views Hillary Clinton, in her role of Secretary of State, to be the only person in the Obama administration to really “get it”.) The party loyalty of the evangelicals — who considered Ted Cruz to be their man — to Trump is, at best, suspect. And because of campaign finance reform the business community never had a candidate in the race in the first place. (Ironically by taking money out of politics we Americans have replaced it with a hefty dollop of crazy.) That just leaves the populists running the show and so that’s what Trump has ridden to the nomination.

If anything the damage is even deeper, if less obvious, on the Left.

The gays got most of what they were after with the Supreme Court settling the gay marriage issue, and in the aftermath of the Orlando attacks are thinking of immigration and national security in ways new and terrifying. Pro-choicers look at Trump’s record on abortion and don’t see all that much at stake this time around. Trump’s anti-free trade rhetoric is a siren song for organized labor, particularly in light that Hillary Clinton’s husband presided over the greatest expansion of free trade in recent memory. Working-class white men and unions—once the backbone of the party—seem to be favoring Trump over Clinton in several swing states. The socialists and under-30s were so vehemently pro-Bernie Sanders (and vehemently anti-Hillary Clinton) that many walked out of the rally when Sanders bowed to the inevitable and endorsed his rival. Many won’t bother to even show up to vote (I even have a pro-Sanders buddy who is considering emigrating not over the possibility the Donald moving into the Oval Office, but over “Crooked Hillary” sitting there.)

This motion isn’t bad for American democracy. In fact, it is perfectly normal. Parties change. They evolve. Sometimes they even die. Before 1935 it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who favored big government. Anyone remember the Whigs? Life moves on.

But new coalitions do not form overnight. The last time the Democrats and Republicans swapped factions it was the Great Depression and World War II, and that reshuffling took the better part of a decade. No matter who wins the election in November, the new president will neither have a functional party to rule with nor a function party across the aisle to negotiate with. U.S. politics are about to stall for a while.

Now spackle that atop what’s going on in the rest of the world.

The American security and economic commitment to the free trade era is what has enabled the world to evolve into its current form, making everything from the European Union to independent Africa to global energy markets to the Chinese Communist Party possible. It made this commitment to bribe up an alliance to confront the Soviets. The Cold War ended in 1989 and American foreign policy has been on cruise control ever since. Now, for reasons geographic, military, economic and demographic the United States is finally backing away from these commitments — a process on vivid display on both the American Left and American Right. As the scaffolding that supports the broader global system is pulled away, global structures big and small will collapse while the Americans ride off into the sunset, blithely unaware of the consequences in their self-contained continental system.

Even if Americans were internationally-minded, even if they were convinced that their economic and physical security were dependent upon international engagement, even if they could appeal to their better natures, the simple fact remains that for the next few years they will be obsessed with their domestic political restructuring.

In this light, whether the next president is someone with bad hair or Donald Trump just doesn’t matter very much. The Americans are going out to lunch — and it is going to be a long lunch.