Month: September 2017

My wife and I spent the Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  It was my first visit;  I was impressed by how attractive the city is.  I was also impressed by its dynamism and resilience;  the industries that originally drove the local economy are essentially gone, and yet the city thrives, and the skyline continues to evolve to this day.

You know that there were plenty of losers as the city evolved, but you never hear anything about them.  That leads to today’s question:  why did Trump’s embrace of the losers of technological change and globalization succeed, when previous losers went unheard?  Here are my hypotheses:

1.  Feelings of entitlement have grown as time has gone on.  If your job disappeared in the 1920’s, for example, you didn’t look to the government to bring it back;  you just moved on.  Decades of prosperity and increased government involvement in the economy have changed that;  in addition, years of developing roots in a community make it that much harder to leave.

2.  The welfare state hasn’t kept pace.  Capitalism creates wealth, on an aggregate basis, but it doesn’t come with any guarantee that the wealth will be shared fairly.  The alliance between the PBPs and the Reactionaries, whereby the latter provide votes for benefit and tax cuts in exchange for protection from the supposed predations of “those people,” has resulted in massively increased inequality since the early 1980’s.  The Trump victory can be viewed as an effort by the Reactionaries to drive a harder bargain with the PBPs.  They are likely to be disappointed, and the outcome is going to be explosive.

The North Korean regime, which has no interests other than its own survival, clearly views its ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons as being some sort of a guarantee that it won’t go the way of the Libyan government.  I’ve noted before that this analysis is faulty, and that nuclear weapons didn’t exactly win the Cold War for the Soviet Union.  There is another historical piece to this puzzle, however.

There is little doubt that George W. Bush genuinely (if incorrectly) believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.  It would have been impossible for him to sell the Iraq War to the American public without that belief.  And so, the US went to war with Iraq even though its government fully believed that it would be confronting an enemy with weapons of mass destruction.  In effect, the illusion of those weapons caused the war and the downfall of Saddam Hussein.  He would probably still be alive today if he had come clean and made it clear the weapons did not exist.

In light of this, does it really make sense for Kim Jong-Un to put such faith in his nuclear program?  I think not.

 

I don’t doubt for a minute that there are enough votes in both the House and the Senate to pass a reasonable stand-alone legislative solution to DACA.  That would require Ryan and McConnell to rely primarily on Democratic votes, just as they always do when it is time to keep the government open and raise the debt ceiling.

Immigration divides the GOP like no other issue.  If the Reactionaries were to go off and create their own party, it would probably be in response to immigration legislation.  And so, if you’re waiting for the Republican leadership to do the right thing and permit a vote on DACA legislation, you could be waiting a long, long time.

Harvey wasn’t Katrina, because geography didn’t make southeast Texas the deathtrap that New Orleans was.  Nevertheless, Harvey will have a significant impact on our politics, as follows:

1.  There are potential benefits to strong leadership.  Not botching the response to Harvey, which would include defaulting on the debt or shutting down the government at a time of crisis, would be a nice start for Trump and the GOP.  You wouldn’t think that would be a lot to ask, but it’s 2017, after all. . .

2.  Rugged individualism, as a political credo, doesn’t get you very far after a hurricane.  Republicans can expand the government to fight wars without looking like hypocrites because swagger is such a big part of their identity, but they struggle to deal with recessions and environmental disasters.  And so, you have the spectacle of Ted Cruz begging for money from the federal behemoth he so purports to despise.

3.  What’s the price of climate change?  If you just had your house ruined by Harvey, how do you feel about the notion that your loss is the price that has to be paid for others to continue to enjoy the benefits of a fossil fuel economy?  Is the GOP going to come right out and tell people a measure of annual hurricane damage is OK if it means a few GOP voters in West Virginia get their coal mining jobs back?  Not bloody likely. That’s why it’s just easier to deny climate change altogether;  the alternative of admitting a problem and doing nothing to solve it is politically unpalatable.

While Trump is polling dismally, he takes some comfort in the ongoing rise in the DJIA.  At least he has the confidence of the investor class–the country’s “winners”–right?

Even if you assume (I don’t) that he won’t drag down the economy with some appalling foreign policy decision or a vast increase in the size of the deficit, the fact is that the market is going to face a significant correction at some point in his term.  What happens then?  Will he stand before the country as a strong, confident leader and provide the necessary reassurances?  Or will he panic like a man on golf cart and start insisting that the Fed and Congress do something, anything, to solve a problem for which he, of course, is not to blame?

You can probably guess which option I’m taking.

 

I will be on vacation for a few days.  Posting will resume next Tuesday.