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Former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford, who announced his Republican presidential campaign at the beginning of September, is cutting through the heated political climate to remind his party of an old but looming issue.

During a Monday night appearance on The Daily Show, Sanford said, “Whether I’m successful or not, I think we need to have a conversation about where we’re going as Republicans and where we’re going as a country.” When asked by host Trevor Noah the areas in which Republicans have lost their way, Sanford spoke of the issues that were once “hallmarks” in his party’s national conversation.

Sanford began with spending and the national debt, saying that both have “spun indeed out of control” under President Donald Trump. Sanford also added that regardless of personal feelings over the methods Republicans used to address both issues in the past, there was a time when “Republicans were recognized for trying on that front.”

Sanford also compared Trump’s praise of the economy under his presidency to a family carrying out a facade of prosperity while secretly dealing with insurmountable credit card debt.

Will Republican voters be swayed by Sanford’s fiscal message or has Trumpian nationalism fully taken hold in the party?

“It’s either all the conversations I’ve had over the past 25 years of politics in the [House of Representatives] and two terms as governor, either they didn’t matter and they weren’t real or they were,” he replied.

Sanford’s in a tough spot. Despite years of calling for a more fiscally responsible government, he became one of the first casualties of the Trumpism that has overtaken the Republican Party. Though he advocated for more limited government, Sanford was an early critic of Trump’s demeanor. Not only did he lose his reelection bid in 2018, but his loss appeared to be indicative of the power of the new Republican Party.

As Reason reported last year, the Associated Press also found that rather than campaign on successful tax cut legislation, ads for Republican midterm challengers focused heavily on support for Trump and the border wall, even in states that do not touch the southern border.

“We wish [economic policy] got the pitchforks out,” GOP ad maker Will Ritter told the AP. “It doesn’t.”

Sanford acknowledged this reality in his Monday interview. He mentioned that he believed his campaign would uncover whether or not fiscal values remain important to Republican voters.

Even if Sanford attracts supporters, he’ll still need to overcome party politics. A handful of state Republican officials have canceled their primaries in support of Trump.

The full interview can be watched here (interview starts at 18:56).

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Today is the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, which marks the occasion when the Communist Party seized power in the world’s most populous nation. The regime established then remains in power today, and is holding a massive celebration. But today is more properly an occasion for mourning. It is an appropriate time to remember the horrific injustices of the government that committed the biggest mass murder in the history of the world, and numerous other injustices and atrocities.

Though it gets nowhere near the level of attention it deserves, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was in fact the biggest mass murder in all of human history. I discussed its enormous scale here:

Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao’s Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

“Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.”

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation….”

The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter’s work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao’s part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to “merely” starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.

 

What happened in the Great Leap Forward was similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union and other communist regimes when agriculture was collectivized. But the death toll in China was much higher than anywhere else.

While the Great Leap Forward was the biggest atrocity committed by the PRC, it was far from the only one. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 also took millions of lives. And there was no shortage of other instances of official repression and mass murder during the Mao era, ranging from the brutal conquest and occupation of Tibet (which persists to this day) to numerous purges.

After Mao died in 1976, the regime liberalized much of the economy and eased up on repression. The resulting economic growth was impressive and helped lift millions out of poverty. But it is important to recognize that most of this progress was the result of the government’s ending some of its own previous oppressive policies. For example, much of the economic growth occurred because rural Chinese were freed from being forcibly confined to collective farms, and allowed to move (relatively) freely to other parts of the country, where there were better opportunities.

Post-1976 China is far less awful than it was under Mao’s rule, and the regime no longer adheres to many of the tenets of communist ideology, which has largely been supplanted by nationalism. But severe oppression nonetheless persists. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is only the most famous example. The regime has also forcibly displaced tens of millions of people for various “development” projects, including over 1 million forced out of their homes just to build the facilities for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The cruel “one child” policy for a long time imposed  state control over one of the most intimate aspects of private family life.  in addition to its inherent injustice, the that policy have created serious social and economic problems that the regime will find it hard to overcome, including a serious gender imbalance in the population, and a rapidly aging work force.

And, of course, the government continues to be a one-party dictatorship, with severe limitations on freedom of expression. I got a first-hand view of some of this when I was a visiting professor at a Chinese university in 2014.

Sadly, under the rule of President Xi Jinping, the government has become much more repressive over the last few years. It has established massive detention camps in which hundreds of thousands of members of the Muslim Uighur minority have been confined for purposes of “reeducation.” The regime’s increasingly intolerant nationalism is bad news for other minorities, as well. Even the tiny community of Kaifeng Jews has been targeted for harassment and persecution.

There has also been a crackdown on real and imagined dissent even among Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group. The closure of the Unirule Institute—a  widely respected think tank critical of regime policy—is just one of many examples. I gave a talk at Unirule’s offices in Beijing back in 2014—something that sadly would no longer be possible today. China is also trying to repress the liberal democratic protest movement in Hong Kong, in a dramatic confrontation that has captured the attention of the world.

The horrific history of the PRC is notable for exemplifying the evils of both of the ideologies that have caused enormous harm around the world over the last century: communism and nationalism. The regime’s gradual transition from the former to the latter, while still being a brutal dictatorship, is a textbook example of how the two have many common flaws.

The unspeakable death toll created by the PRC doesn’t necessarily prove it has been the very worst government in history. The numbers are so high in part because the Communist Party ruled over such a large population, and stayed in power for many years. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot had ruled over a comparably large population over a similar length of time, it is entirely possible they would would equaled or even surpassed Mao Zedong’s dubious record. It is also possible to argue that genocide—mass murder inflicted based on race, religion, or ethnicity—is qualitatively worse than mass murder whose victims are chosen because they are “class enemies” or political dissidents, or just obstacles to the implementation of the regime’s ideology. I don’t buy this theory myself, but I can understand the sentiment behind it.

But even if the PRC is “merely” one of a handful of contenders for the title of worst regime in human history, rather than the clear winner of that dubious title, its awful record is still worthy of mourning. And such remembrance should be combined with a determination to learn its lessons, and use them to prevent the repetition of similar horrors.

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More meddling from foreign countries was reportedly sought by the Trump administration. Revelations about “quid pro quo” requests President Donald Trump made to Ukraine’s president appear to have opened the floodgates on stories about Trump trying to make self-interested political deals with foreign leaders.

This includes asking the Australian prime minister for help poking holes in the Mueller report, The New York Times reported yesterday, and it includes having his attorney general ask leaders in Australia, Italy, and elsewhere to investigate the CIA and FBI’s handling of Trump-Russia collusion fears.

Like Trump’s chat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the conversation with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison “shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests,” the Times said, continuing:

The discussion with Mr. Morrison shows the extent to which Mr. Trump views the attorney general as a crucial partner: The president is using federal law enforcement powers to aid his political prospects, settle scores with his perceived “deep state” enemies and show that the Mueller investigation had corrupt, partisan origins.

Meanwhile, Barr himself was reportedly talking to British intelligence authorities, Italian officials, and folks in the Australian government about the FBI and CIA’s actions leading up to the 2016 U.S. election and motivations for Trump-related inquiries, according to The Washington Post and “people familiar with the matter.”

“The attorney general’s active role also underscores the degree to which a nearly three-year-old election still consumes significant resources and attention inside the federal government,” notes the Post.

Combined with the actions undertaken by Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in Ukraine, we see “a kind of two-front war” happening, write Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Katie Benner. While Barr looks backward, seeking information to challenge the idea that Russia had anything to do with Trump’s 2016 victory, Giuliani is focused on finding dirt to help Trump crush Biden in the presidential election next year.

FREE MINDS

“Twenty-five years after the infamous 1994 crime bill, too many criminal justice groups are simply reimagining mass incarceration.” A powerful op-ed from Derecka Purnell, a human rights lawyer, and Marbre Stahly-Butts, executive director of Law for Black Lives, calls out the timidity of current criminal justice reform efforts, which often still center on interventions by police.

“The reality is this: The police fill prisons,” they write. “We can’t repair the harm that the 1994 crime bill has done by promoting mass incarceration without reducing the size and scope of the police.” And yet, “politicians promise jail closings even as they increase police budgets—and, as a result, arrests.” People see the fault in old drivers of mass incarceration and yet, faced with any new or persistent social problem, still turn to cops, arrest, and imprisonment as first solutions.

FREE MARKETS

Why trade with China when its government perpetuates horrible human rights abuses? Simple, writes Scott Sumner: “Politics is the answer, trade is the solution.”

Free markets and international trade promote peace and liberalization, while isolationism and poverty make authoritarianism worse.

“Hundreds of years of human history strongly suggest that trade makes people better, both at the individual level and the national level,” writes Sumner. “History shows that if you want to bring peace and freedom to the world, trade is one of the best ways of doing so.”

Whole thing here.

QUICK HITS

• Another case of the U.S. Justice Department bravely catching traitors created by the U.S. Justice Department.
• A proposal in Nye County, Nevada, would confine women working in the area’s legal brothels to the brothels, stipulating that they only leave the premises “for six (6) hours per ten (10) day” period.
• “The power of the Ukraine revelations lies in their simplicity,” writes Politico columnist Renato Mariotti, warning Democrats against getting “greedy” with the impeachment inquiry.
• Gen Z and millennial Americans say they want a European-style democratic socialist state. And yet “Europe’s young are less progressive—or ‘woke’—than their American contemporaries,” suggests The Atlantic. “A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists…and they are emphatically not socialists.” In fact, “they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality.”
• If you haven’t watched this Saturday Night Live parody of the Democratic presidential debates yet, you should:

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