Nothing But Words

Kai and James riding a mini bike in Denver

Kai and James riding a mini bike in Denver25-Nov-2004 14:52Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 7.1, 5.40625mm, 0.004 sec,

Kai and Maria spent Thanksgiving in Denver with her folks and her sister Yoko. I was supposed to go too, but I came down with a nasty flu before my flight was scheduled to leave, and I didn’t feel well enough to travel (her dad is ill, so it wouldn’t have been good for me to be around him anyway). They had a really good visit. Kai particularly enjoyed riding James’ mini bikes (James is Yoko’s boyfriend) – see the video below.

I was down and out for about 36 hours, and then I felt surprisingly good. I still had another day and half before Maria and Kai came back, so I got a lot done on our 3rd floor renovations. I built a closet in the room that will be our new bedroom (there wasn’t one before) and ran new electrical lines. I still have to finish tearing out the highly flammable fiber board walls (from what I’ve learned, there was a brief period of time, decades ago, when it was actually legal to use wood fiber board for wallboard). Once that’s done the drywallers can come put up the new walls.

Framing for the new closet I’m building in the 3rd floor master bedroom29-Nov-2004 19:36Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.01666666 sec,	I’m about halfway through tearing out the old wallboard in this picture – the boards were actually wood fiberboard, which is a real fire hazard29-Nov-2004 19:37Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.01666666 sec,	The new electrical wiring I put in the 3rd floor29-Nov-2004 19:38Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.01666666 sec,
Kai and Tony (“Jiji”) watching TV at Yoko’s place in Denver25-Nov-2004 17:01Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.01666666 sec,	James’ mini bikes25-Nov-2004 14:24Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.002 sec,	Kai and James riding a mini bike in Denver25-Nov-2004 14:51

“I miss voter fraud” – John Stewart, The Daily Show

While there have been numerous reports of voting irregularities on election day, there were no massive, widespread failures of electronic voting machines, and no evidence emerged indicating manipulation of the electronic vote totals. And so concern over e-voting has disappeared from the news. But this wasn’t a vindication of e-voting – it was more like dodging a bullet. It’s been amply demonstrated that e-voting machines are prone to failures or are susceptible to data manipulation (see Newsweek’s Black Box Voting Blues, the Washington Post’s Electronic Voting Raises New Issues, and my previous post on this).

Picture in your mind a close, hard-fought election. Imagine a successful, nefarious plot to rig the totals from electronic voting machines, and then imagine the plot is exposed after the election. It’s not possible to do a recount, because the voting records themselves were manipulated. Imagine if this happened in Florida in 2000. The tangle of state and federal rules (or lack of rules) in this unprecedented situation would provide no obvious guidelines on what to do.

So what would happen? Would there be calm and rational discussion of the options? Don’t bet on it – there’d be people in the streets, and an incredibly nasty, drawn-out legal battle, the result of which would not bestow broadly accepted legitimacy on the winner. You need look no further than the current crisis in Ukraine. The Christian Science Monitor described it as “a key test for a fledgling democracy.” It would be a test for even the oldest democracy, where there are no clearly defined procedures concerning what to do if the validity of the votes themselves are in doubt.

What’s been lost in the heated discussions about electronic voting is that it’s potentially superior to any mechanical system, so long as it leaves a paper trail. Even some of the electronic machines currently out there – when handled competently – demonstrate this potential. They can almost completely eliminate the “undervote” and “overvote” problems that lead to “spoiled ballots” which are never counted. There were 1.9 million of these in 2000, and the vast majority of them were from heavily Democratic minority districts. See the Miami Herald article Touch screens reduced spoiled ballots. In fact, it was the tens of thousands of spoiled punch card ballots in Ohio that led some to argue that Kerry would have won Ohio if it were possible to reliably count them (see Greg Palast’s Kerry Won Ohio).

However, poorly designed and implemented electronic systems are no better than poorly designed and implemented mechanical systems – see Analysis reveals flaws in voting by touch-screen. I’ve been designing and developing web applications since 1996, including systems that deal with confidential financial and personal data, so I know a thing or two about electronic security and interface design. What’s maddening to me is how badly written the software is in most of the electronic voting machines (see the Newsweek article above). I used to work at E*Trade, and compared to online stock trading (or even ATMs), meeting the requirements for a secure, reliable, recountable, and easy-to-use voting system just isn’t that hard. So why are the e-voting machines so bad?

1. All decisions regarding the purchase and evaluation of these machines happens at the local level. Frankly, most of the folks on local election boards don’t have the expertise to set performance and security requirements for e-voting machines, nor do they know how to properly test the machines once they receive them. I’m not questioning the dedication of these folks, but I doubt the vast majority of them have a strong background in human-computer interface design or electronic security. Assessing voting machines isn’t like comparison shopping for a TV: not understanding what goes on inside a TV doesn’t seriously limit your ability to choose one well, but the same cannot be said for a voting machine.
2. We’re currently relying on the free market to create these machines, and that’s a bad idea. A free market entails multiple suppliers competing for buyers, and over time the bad products are weeded out, the good products win market share, and overall product quality increases. For how many elections will we endure this market clearing process? How many of our elections will be handled by badly designed systems as market forces eventually lead us to the good ones? With the inner workings of the machines considered trade secrets, how can they be effectively assessed? And who exactly is the “customer” who decides whether a system is good or bad? At the very least, national standards should be established indicating a minimum set of requirements that all e-voting systems must meet. Believe it or not, right now there are no such standards. Maybe we could start with a regulatory scheme similar to what Nevada has for its gambling machines (see this New York Times editorial).
3. It doesn’t take a lot of analysis to realize that a quality, nationwide e-voting system would favor the Democrats, as spoiled ballots would be virtually eliminated. I’d be willing to bet that if Gore had won in 2000, or Kerry in 2004, they would have pushed harder for the development of such a system than Bush has. Bush came into office in 2000 under a cloud, and had to at least make a semblance of an effort on this front. Two years later, the Help American Vote Act was passed. Even though a multitude of problems have been discovered in the e-voting machines it spawned, have you heard anything in the past two years from Bush or the Republican Congress about fixing them?

Three years too late, I bring you At the Drive-In. I only started listening to these guys recently, but they apparently broke up in 2001 (a couple years ago, my friend Pat W suggested I check them out – I just got around to it…). I actually know very little about them, other than a review I just found of their last album, Relationship of Command. This week’s song, Pattern Against User, is the second song on that album.

I’d say their sound is like Fugazi’s, but more dense, with no pretense of minimalism. Lyrically, the closest thing I can think of is Skinny Puppy. That’s right…compare the lyrical style of, say, Hexonxonx (Skinny Puppy’s ode to the Exxon Valdez) to One Armed Scissor, and you’ll see what I mean.

Sorry for the short review. I’ve been sick the past few days and my brain ain’t workin’ so well right now…

I’ve been posting pictures of my house, so I thought I’d put up some pictures of the place where I spend the other half of my waking hours: my office. To preserve the “plausible deniability” of my co-workers, they are not in any of the pictures (actually, you can see pictures of them on the School of Medicine IS site – each time you click “reload” you’ll get a different set of pictures).

We moved into our current space a couple of months ago. We’re in the Medical School’s Anatomy-Chemistry building, so we’re surrounded by research labs. It’s an improvement over our old space, which was an old dorm that was converted to offices. There were three of us to a room. Now we share one large space, so I get to see the rest of the people I work with more regularly.

Bathroom Graffiti – in a building full of research scientists, this is what passes for bathroom graffiti. Pathetic. (It reads “How old are these bathrooms? 1926 – Thank you”)
Mascot – this is the squirrel that visits my window most mornings		Yoshinoya – my requisite desk toy is a Yoshinoya model. Yoshinoya is a Japanese fast food joint (what makes it different from American fast food is that it won’t kill you)
Office Space – We all got to provide input on the layout of our new space – we emphatically rejected cubicles

The content of my blog has become quite unbalanced over the past few months: lots of posts about politics, occasional posts about the family, and not much else. So I’m introducing a new feature: the Song of the Week (the link is on your right). I’ll post songs you’ve probably never heard before, and I’ll try to keep a good mix of genres. But most of what I’ll post will be at least a few years old, as I’ve fallen out of touch with the music scene that used to absorb a lot of my time (I even DJed back in the day). I’m hoping that my posts might spark some suggestions for new music I should check out.

The inaugural song is “Chaiste” by Steroid Maximus, from the album Ectopia. Some Steroid Maximus songs sound like Looney Tunes scores, others like Big Band numbers, some make you think of noir detective films, and others make you feel like you’re watching a 50s sci-fi/horror flick. Some even make you think of all those things at once. One reviewer described Ecotopia as “the perfect soundtrack to a Terry Gilliam film that has never been made.” That just about nails it.

“Chaiste” is probably not the best song on the album – it’s the 11th of 12 tracks, and it’s not as complex as some of the other songs – but it’s the one I happen to be enjoying right now. It has a driving rhythm that’s unlike anything else on the album.

I’m not entirely sure how the Steroid Maximus tracks are constructed, but I think they’re a mixture of original recordings and samples from other sources. On Saturday Kai and I were watching Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and while Godzilla was stomping on Tokyo, the soundtrack contained a horn section that I recognized from one of the songs on Ectopia. There is an undeniable coolness factor in sampling from a Godzilla movie. It also cast the song in an entirely new light for me….

Steroid Maximus is a one-man band, and is one of many projects by J. G. Thirlwell. Here’s a brief bio, and a long interview. I prefer Steroid Maximus to most of his other incarnations mainly because Steroid Maximus songs never have any singing. Thirlwell creates these unreal soundscapes, and putting a vocal track over them brings them back to reality in a way that is, for me, unsatisfying. I prefer to just listen to the instruments, and then let my imagination construct its own narrative.

When we moved into our house last year, I noticed that the walls on the third floor had an odd texture to them, and that they had very noticeable vertical lines (but not quite the kind of lines that I’ve seen before on bad drywall taping jobs). My guess was that the previous owners had painted over wallpaper. I didn’t mind if the walls weren’t perfect, so I wasn’t too worried about it. (I should point out that the third floor is not original to the house – the first two floors have nice plaster walls).

Lats month, I started on a new project: I was going to run new electrical lines on the 3rd floor, and paint. Not only are the existing electrical lines old, but when the third floor was added, they just ran the new electrical lines off the existing second floor lines. That means we’ve got 5 rooms all on one circuit, which is asking for trouble. My plan was to pop off the baseboards and run the new lines behind them, so I wouldn’t have to make too many holes in the walls.

When I removed the baseboards, I could see what the walls were made of, and I learned why they looked the way they did. They weren’t made out of drywall or plaster – they were made out of particle board (a type of board that essentially consists of glued together sawdust). And those funny lines? They sealed the gaps between the boards with….duct tape. Whoever did this work was a fool. Building the interior walls out of wood is a huge fire hazard. You could put a match to them and then watch the house burn down mighty fast.

So all the walls on the 3rd floor have to come down, including in the stairwell. As you can see in the picture, the demolition is underway. I’ve discovered that it’s a lot harder to tear out particle board then drywall. If you try to cut it with any kind of motorized saw, it kicks up a huge amount of dust – even worse than drywall. If you try to pry it off the studs with a crowbar, you end up just tearing out a tiny piece where your crowbar is. After some trial-and-error I came up with a reasonably good technique – I pry the board free all along one stud, and then get my hands behind it and slowly work it back and forth. That loosens up the nails and I can pull the board apart in fairly big chunks. In some spots they went crazy with a nail gun though – putting nails every couple of inches – so some of it is slow going.

Putting up new drywall for the entire 3rd floor is too big of a job for just me. Once I’ve got the demolition done and the new electrical lines in, we’ll dip into our line of credit on the house to hire someone to install new drywall. We had other plans for that money, but something as hazardous as this has to come first.

It’s always an adventure.

Yesterday was our first cold day of the season. For my friends in California, that means the temperature was around 30, not 50. After five years living in Santa Cruz, four years in DC, and then five years in the SF Bay Area, I’m enjoying living in a place that has four distinct seasons (both DC and Northern California only have two seasons: summer and winter – they’re both nice in CA, and miserable in DC). The only season I don’t like here in PA is the summer – too hot and humid. But the spring and fall are very pleasant, and I like having snow in the winter. While I sometimes miss the perpetual pleasantness of the Bay Area weather, having real seasons lends a certain rhythm and a distinct emotional quality to each part of the year.

With age, your perception of time changes – it goes by much more quickly than when you’re young. I think what triggers the change is the end of your formative experiences. For example, I could instantly tell you which years I spent in middle school, high school, and college. But with grad school and subsequent jobs, I’d have to do some math in my head – or maybe look at my resume – to tell you exactly what I was doing in any given year. The exceptions would be my wedding and the birth of Kai, since those were experiences that happened after college which were truly unlike anything I had previously encountered. What keeps the earlier memories vivid is the fact that there are so many that involve experiencing various things for the first time. So as you get older and the truly novel experiences in life become more infrequent, the days tend to blur into each other – maybe dying brain cells have something to do with it too. The changing of the seasons counteracts the tendency towards bluriness – it prods you to stop, look around, and appreciate what you see.

All that from looking at some leaves on the ground.

“You’re all in the process of making history,” Kent boomed in a clarion voice. “This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done — kick some butt.” Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, speaking to the Marines preparing to assault Fallujah

February 1968: The Battle for Hue wages for 26 days as US and South Vietnamese forces try to recapture the site seized by the Communists during the Tet Offensive. Previously, a religious retreat in the middle of a war zone, Hue was nearly leveled in a battle that left nearly all of its population homeless. PBS Vietnam War Timeline

It was the single worst battle of the war. There were over 10,000 people killed in that battle. Terence Smith of PBS’ Newshour, discussing the Battle for Hue

Within a few weeks of the Battle for Hue, General Westmoreland requested 206,000 more troops, and the My Lai massacre happened.

Let’s hope I’m pushing the Sgt. Major’s Hue analogy too far.

Footnote: my link for the Kent quote goes to an AP story posted on the Fox News site. What’s interesting is that there are two different variations of this paragraph out there, and it’s not clear which is the true AP version. The Fox version says “Kent boomed in a clarion voice” whereas other publications of the same paragraph (see the Seattle Times version) simply say “Kent told a crowd of some 2,500 Marines.” I’m curious as to whether the clarion call version is the original, or if that’s a Fox embellishment.

Over the past several days I’ve submitted this article to various publications, hoping that one of them would pick it up. But I didn’t get any takers. So I present it to you here…

You have to hand it to Karl Rove, George Bush’s senior political strategist. He has created a new form of politics, and it needs a name. Let’s call it Neo-Populism. After Kerry’s loss, Democrats have been scratching their heads in bewilderment. They know that if Al Gore had been President these past four years, and the same events had unfolded on his watch – huge job losses, exploding health care costs, ballooning deficits, massive increases in non-defense discretionary spending, a seemingly intractable mess in post-invasion Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Osama Bin Laden still at large – Gore would have been buried in a landslide by almost any Republican opponent. So how did Bush not only survive this election, but win by over three and half million votes?

He won because of Rove’s neo-populist strategy. To understand what that is, a useful point of comparison is perhaps the greatest of all American populists, Louisiana’s Huey Long. As he rose from railroad commissioner, to Governor, and then to Senator, he was repeatedly indicted, impeached, and plagued with corruption scandals. But none of these slowed his rise to power, or dented his popularity. He was so successful because he masterfully exploited the traditional means of populism: in a state that was predominately poor, rural, and under-educated, he provided free textbooks to schools, and employed thousands to pave roads and build bridges all across the state. He also engaged in aggressive class warfare, advocating a “Share Our Wealth” program on the Senate floor and proposing a limit on the size of personal fortunes. With these means he achieved the ends of populism: a large core of unshakable supporters whose personal faith in him was almost bulletproof.

George Bush has achieved the same ends, but through entirely different means. Obviously, Rovian neo-populism has nothing to do with the class warfare associated with the traditional practice of American populism. It is instead a fascinating blend of three emotive elements: charisma, a transformational vision of America, and fear.

An essential ingredient of any populist movement is a charismatic leader. Huey Long was a lawyer and a brilliant orator, yet he cultivated the image of a (drunken) buffoon. His critics mocked this persona and did not understand its appeal. But his followers loved it. George Bush cultivates an image of plainspoken, forthright Texan swagger, mixed with a strong dose of Evangelical faith. As with Long, his followers love it, and his urban, overeducated opponents do not comprehend it. When you listen to ardent Bush supports, their excitement is palpable – one of us is running the White House.

But who is “us”? A populist leader pulls in his supporters with a rousing, bold agenda. Huey Long limited his to class warfare, but Bush’s is multifaceted. He is seeking to transform the role of government, and the place of America in the world, in almost every respect. From massive tax cuts, to a unilateralist and pre-emptive foreign policy, to advancing the agenda of social conservatives, Bush and the GOP have succeeded in stealing the “big tent” label from the Democratic Party. The Pat Buchanans of the party are excited about the social agenda, the Arnold Schwarzeneggers applaud the business-friendly policies, the William Kristols celebrate the foreign policy, and the Rudy Giulianis trumpet the strong leadership imagery. The latter is particularly important – the persona of the resolute, unwavering leader is the glue that holds this coalition together.

In the post-9/11 world, neo-populism replaces class warfare with the politics of fear. The Bush campaign featured repeated reminders that terrorists might explode a nuclear bomb in one of our cities (hint: vote for our guy to keep you safe), and even suggested at one point that voting for the Democrat was tantamount to inviting another terrorist attack. The campaign also rode on the fears of social conservatives – that activist judges and the “liberal elite” are pursuing an agenda that will ultimately lead to nothing less than the destruction of American morality. In both foreign and domestic policy, the politics of fear encourage the “you’re either with us or against us” mentality.

The Democrats have what it takes to successfully challenge neo-populism, but they haven’t realized it yet. After the Democratic primaries, the Bush campaign quietly confessed they were glad John Edwards didn’t emerge as the candidate, because they understood the political power of charisma. After the election, some Democrats have suggested moving to the right on social issues, seeing it as the only way to compete for “moral values” voters. But it is vital to not equate divisive wedge issues such as the recent marriage protection initiatives with the broad values of Christianity. The Democratic Party must reclaim the “big tent” label on an agenda of hope and unity, not fear and division.

Why was my election prediction wrong? I did call 10 of the 13 swing states correctly, which would have been a respectable showing if two of my three misses weren’t Ohio and Florida

Rather than focus on specific political issues, I think it may be more helpful to look at this in emotional terms:

Fear: in my post on 11/1, I took into account some of the fear factor and lowered my original prediction for Kerry’s margin of victory. But I didn’t take it into account enough. While I could understand the desire to not change leaders during a war, in my gut I just didn’t really believe that anyone would buy into the cartoonish idea that electing Kerry was tantamount to inviting terrorist attacks, or that he would let the UN dictate our foreign policy, or that he would somehow find a way to bungle the war in Iraq more badly than Bush has. But it appears that many lent some real credence to the “Kerry is weak and misguided” cornerstone of the Bush campaign.

The question is whether our political discourse can survive the “Rove-ization” of campaigns. Each campaign Karl Rove has managed for Bush has been accompanied by a nominally unassociated character assassination squad. With the run against Ann Richards in Texas, it was a whisper campaign that she had surrounded herself with “avowed homosexuals.” In the primary fight against John McCain, it was talk that he had been brainwashed by the Viet Cong and had a black baby out of wedlock. And with Kerry it was the Swift Boat Vets. All these moves are intended to play to the fears and prejudices of many, and the unfortunate lesson is that they work amazingly well. My concern is that there’s nothing to stop this sort of thing from becoming the norm for all major campaigns.

Anger: much of what fueled Kerry’s support was anger against Bush. But evidently anger isn’t enough. After a terrible summer, Kerry ran a competent campaign in the end, but it lacked the “vision thing” that has fueled other successful Presidential campaigns against an incumbent (Carter had one in ’76, so did Reagan in ’80, and Clinton in ’92). Also the right has spent years fueling anger among its base against the ethereal “liberal elite” that apparently control everything and are eroding all the moral values of our country (I even heard one caller to a radio talk show fret about the “oligarchy of activist judges” that were out to destroy Christian values). In the end, both campaigns benefited from the anger running through their core constituencies.

Values: part of the reason Kerry didn’t articulate a vision is that Democrats don’t know how to talk about values anymore, while at the same time the Republicans have become experts at it. This is predominately a Christian nation, and you may be surprised to learn that there are probably as many liberal Christians as conservative ones. The Democrats have not only failed to unite them, they’ve virtually ignored them. In contrast, the Republicans have been brilliant at selling their party as the political home of moral virtue. While Kerry was ok at talking about health care, jobs etc. in programmatic terms, he didn’t effectively connect them to overarching moral and social themes.

Integrity: I’m not going to touch on the actual integrity of the candidates – instead I want to focus on the perception of their integrity. I think Bush received a lot of support from people who disagreed with his policies, but saw him as a man of integrity and a devout Christian. The past several Democratic candidates have suffered from the opposite problem: folks agreeing with their policies but turning away from them because of their public personas. Clinton had zipper problems, and both Gore and Kerry were perceived by many as panderers. For Gore and Kerry, much of that perception had to do with how well the Republicans pushed it, but the reason they pushed it in the first place is that they knew it was a weak spot.

Turnout: it looks like the main reason I called the election incorrectly was the big Democratic turnout I anticipated didn’t materialize. While turnout was high, it was high across both parties, lending no relative advantage to Democrats. For example, the 10-to-1 advantage in new Democratic voter registrations vs. Republican registrations in Ohio did not lead to an advantage in turnout that was anything close to that. Prior to this election, someone who was registered was very likely to vote. This is because registering usually required some effort, which meant someone who bothered to register by their state’s deadline (typically 30 days prior to the election) was someone who was already motivated to vote. The massive voter registration drives for this election, however, broke that motivational link between registration and voting. With volunteers practically knocking down doors to register people, getting on the rolls became a very easy thing to do. It looks like a good number of the newly registered did vote, but even more of them did not. James Carville once said: “You know what they call a candidate who’s counting on a lot of new voters? A loser.” He made that statement in “normal times,” before this election cycle. While there were a lot of new voters in this election, it looks like both sides brought them out in roughly equal numbers.

The Electoral Map: rural communities and social conservatives were once at home in the Democratic Party. As recently as 1988, Michael Dukakis lost big time, but he still carried West Virginia, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Kerry lost Iowa, barely held Wisconsin, and West Virginia wasn’t even on the table. The entire upper Midwest is trending Republican and probably won’t be reliable territory for Democrats in the future. The only safe bets for Democrats these days are big cities near water, the African-American vote, the overeducated, and maybe the unreliable youth vote. That’s just not enough to convincingly put together a winning electoral college map. The Democrats were once the “big tent” party, and at this point they need to win over new constituencies and become that again if they want to survive as a truly national party.

The Future for the Democratic Party: they need more candidates like Barak Obama and John Edwards: they come across as sincere and even inspirational when talking about issues and about values. What other prominent Democrats can you think of who can do that? If the party is smart they’ll seek out candidates like these guys. The proof of this point is the confession of the Bush campaign that they were most worried that Edwards would win the Democratic primaries (and the candidate they were least worried about was Dean). My concern is that, after such a bitter campaign and a close defeat, the Democrats will be tempted to take a hard turn to the left and hope that Bush self-destructs. That may be great for firing up the base, but this election demonstrates that the base just isn’t big enough anymore to win Presidential elections.

The Future for the Republican Party: the Republicans papered over their internal splits to support Bush in this campaign. If Bush had lost, you’d see them doing the same soul-searching that Democrats are now doing. But since they won, they’ll just keep plastering more paper over the rifts. The old-guard internationalists and isolationists have – at least for now – lost to the neo-cons. The deficit hawks have lost to Bush’s tax-cutting agenda and to Congressmembers who are drunk on power, increasing non-defense discretionary spending faster than any administration in recent memory. And the small government wing of the party has lost to Bush, who promised $3 trillion in new domestic spending in his Convention address. Other than tax cuts, name an issue that Republicans agree on these days. How far can the social conservative agenda be pushed before the coastal Republicans (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chafee) cease to recognize their own the party? How much longer will John McCain and the Club for Growth-type folks tolerate the flood of red ink? How much longer will the isolationists (think Pat Buchanan) and the internationalists (think Colin Powell) acquiesce to a unilateralist, militaristic foreign policy? We’ll see how they do at holding it all together.