Month: February 2018

Here’s how it could all go wrong:

1.  Multiple realo candidates split the realo vote during the primaries.  The Democrats consequently nominate a fundi, who promises to roll back the entire Trump tax cut and to use the money for massive new spending programs, including single-payer.
2.  Alarmed by the anti-business tenor of the Democrats’ campaign, Michael Bloomberg decides he has to take the plunge and runs for president.
3.  The CDs and disaffected PBPs who might otherwise support the Democratic candidate are put off by the tax increase and promises of new spending and vote for Bloomberg.
4.  The Reactionaries, as usual, vote for their values, not their economic self-interest.  They stick with Trump.
5.  Some moderate Democrats vote for Bloomberg.  The new voters who are supposed to deliver the revolution do not show up (they never do).
6.  As a result, in spite of his unpopularity, Trump wins a smashing victory in 2020 over a divided opposition with 40 percent of the vote.  The madness intensifies.

Assume, for purposes of argument, that conditions in 2020 are pretty much the same as they are now:  there is no war or recession, and Trump’s approval ratings are around 40 percent.  How will the Democrats go after him?

The task, in a nutshell, is to either entice large numbers of new voters into the system, or peel off enough 2016 Trump voters to prevail.  Conceptually, there are two ways to do this:

1.  The Competence Coalition:  The objective here is to win over the CDs and some disaffected PBPs–particularly suburban women–who held their noses and voted for Trump in 2016 because they simply couldn’t swallow Hillary.  The candidate in this scenario would be a realo, and the program essentially would be to restore the Obama status quo, with the exception of the tax cut, whose more popular features would be retained.  No new large spending programs would be proposed.  The focus of the campaign would be on putting an end to Trump’s corrupt, divisive, incompetent, and faux populist administration.  “Stop the madness” would be an appropriate slogan.

In other words, it is the 2016 Clinton campaign, minus Hillary, and with four years of experience with Trump.

2.  Vive la Revolution!  In this scenario, the Democrats nominate a fundi, who blows off the CDs and PBPs and attempts to win by flipping the Reactionaries on economic issues and by bringing new voters into the system.  The Democratic platform proposes to roll back the entire Trump tax cut and to use the money for new spending programs, including single-payer.  The premise is that a full-throated left-wing platform is necessary to motivate the opposition.  Trump is attacked primarily as a faux populist who sold out to Wall Street.

This is the Sanders scenario.  How it ends will be discussed in my next post.

The Trump tax cut is a gamble at two levels.  In the short term, the GOP is hoping that the small increase in net earnings that most people will experience will give them a boost in the 2018 elections even though the bill will cost other people money and primarily benefit the donor class.  In the long run, the hope is that the bill will encourage new investment to the point that productivity and wages will rise dramatically and the deficit will actually fall.

Will it work?  The evidence thus far predictably indicates that most of the corporate tax cut will be spent on dividends and share repurchases, not on new investment.  As a result, asset prices will rise and inequality will increase.  The scene will thus be set at some point for the next Great Recession, not a productivity boom.

The eminent conservative Edmund Burke was once quoted as saying that society was a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn.  What he meant by that was that we live on the intellectual and physical capital given to us by our ancestors, and we thus have a moral obligation to pass on that, and perhaps a bit more, to succeeding generations.  Risky experiments that threaten the species’ inheritance are not, therefore, a good idea.

The current GOP clearly does not believe that.  The Trump tax cut essentially is an invitation to party today at the expense of our children, who will have to deal with the implications of a much larger deficit.  The GOP’s stance on climate change is to do nothing in the face of pending disaster because it might reduce our standard of living slightly in the short run.  It’s the opposite of conservatism.

 

Trump apparently told the world today that he would have run into the school to protect the students even if he didn’t have a weapon.

How could he, with the bone spurs that kept him out of the military?

Billy Graham learned fairly early on in his remarkable life that it was a mistake to drag religion into partisan politics.  It was ironic, then, that a few days after Graham’s death, a man named David Brody had a column in the NYT that essentially said that Trump, regardless of his personal weaknesses, was the evangelical movement’s best friend, because he delivered consistently on the “macro” level.

Evangelical Christianity, at this rate, is becoming the white nationalist wing of the GOP at prayer. That has two impacts, both extremely negative, on our country. From a political perspective, it means that the left is viewed not just as misguided, but as the devil’s spawn, which makes compromise and bipartisanship much more difficult.  On the religious side, the association with Trump is bound to accelerate the decline of Christianity in this country, particularly with younger people.

With his fixation on “macro” issues for Christians, Brody is basically saying that Christians aren’t out to save souls;  they’re just another right-wing interest group, like the NRA and the Chamber of Commerce, protecting their own endangered sphere and imposing their views on the rest of us by force.  They will pay for it in the end, and, in all likelihood, so will we.

In the winter of 1984, Sarajevo was the center of the sports world.  It is where Katarina Witt and Torvill and Dean worked their magic.  Eight years later, it was a war zone, and the Olympic facilities were nothing more than a macabre reminder of what had been.  The city is still trying to recover today.

The same fate, only exponentially worse, could befall Pyeongchang, and soon. The best solution to the conundrum has always been a Chinese-inspired coup, but that doesn’t seem to be on the table.  Barring that, the only hope for Korea is for Trump’s ability to blame his predecessors for his failure to stop the North Korean nuclear program to overcome his desire to lash out and salve his wounded pride.

If you live in Korea, and that’s all you have going for you, you should be very worried.

For the better part of the George W. Bush administration, the CDs were riding high.  Compassionate conservatism was in vogue at home, and the country was promoting democracy abroad.  Then it all came crashing down;  the Iraq War was a disaster, the economy tanked, and the CDs took the blame.  The Republican Party turned right, and “compassion” came to be viewed as foolish or wimpy. That’s where we are today;  the CD faction in Congress can be counted on your digits.

As I’ve noted before, the demise of the CDs is directly tied to the rise of partisan gridlock, and is unhealthy for this country.  Can it be reversed?

Yes, and history tells us how.  Newt Gingrich and his Fox-friendly crowd were a dress rehearsal for Trump.  They overreached and were punished for it at the ballot box.  Bush was supposed to be the antidote for that.

In other words, it’s fairly simple.   If Trump somehow succeeds, the GOP will continue to follow his lead.  If he fails spectacularly, the party will turn on him and go in a completely different direction.  The final decision will be in the hands of the voters.

Day after day, I post about the ideological divisions in the Republican Party.  At some point, you may wonder exactly what it is that keeps the GOP together. What is the lowest common denominator?

Tax cuts.  CLs and PBPs love them, and the other two factions acquiesce in exchange for conservative social legislation.  That is the bargain which keeps the GOP a single party.

Abortion runs second.  Only the CLs have a principled objection to abortion restrictions, and the fact is that there are relatively few voters who identify with CL ideology on social issues.  Even Rand Paul, who toes the libertarian line on drugs, has problems with abortion.  As a result, the party, as a practical matter, is relatively united on that front.

That’s pretty much it, which is why the GOP struggles to do very much other than cut taxes when it is in power.

Madison didn’t believe that a bill of rights was necessary, but, having promised one during the ratification process, he thought it was essential to deliver, and he did.  The Second Amendment was obviously part of that process.

The Second Amendment was a product of the issues of the day.  Many Americans who opposed the Constitution were concerned that the increase in federal power would result in the creation of a large standing army, which in turn would represent a threat to individual liberty.   Madison wanted to assure those people that militias would remain a viable alternative to a standing army in order to build confidence in the new system.  The Second Amendment was designed for that purpose.

I think it is fair to say that Madison would be shocked at the notion that the government was powerless to protect school children from automatic weapons as a result of his hard work.

Here’s where the factions stand on gun control legislation:

CLs:  Increasing the power of the state to reduce individual liberty is always wrong.

Reactionaries:  God, guns, and guts made America great.  You have succeeded in taking God out of the public sphere, but you will never have my gun.  Never.

PBPs:  We don’t really care, but we rely on Reactionaries and CLs for support on tax cuts.  This is payback.

CDs:  Jesus didn’t exactly promote gun ownership and the slaughter of children in the New Testament.

And so, on this, as on so many issues, the party is divided, but the Reactionaries, as the largest faction, drive the train.

In a post some years back, I posed a question about how Jeffersonian principles should be applied in a Hamiltonian world.  The question was appropriate, because Jefferson’s vision of America, while accurate and eminently successful in the short run, clearly failed in the longer term.  We do not today live in a country of small, independent, yeoman farmers.

For Madison, on the other hand, there was a place for everything in America, as long as the overall picture was balanced.  He didn’t have the issues with cities, manufacturers, and merchants that Jefferson did;  he simply didn’t want them to run the country unchecked.  He also believed that reasonable people could disagree without being personally disagreeable, and that politics was an essentially rational business.

Barack Obama was a Madisonian through and through.  Donald Trump, alas, in his own perverted way, is a Hamiltonian.  The two represent the national superego and id, respectively.  They will probably do battle in perpetuity.

The nation is a better place when Madison’s heirs are in charge, but that only happens intermittently.

Make no mistake–the NRA is an obnoxious organization.  It takes extreme positions, and hardly ever backs down.  It appears to think guns belong everywhere:  stadiums; bars; schools, whatever.  It continues to generate new access issues in order to give itself a reason for existence.  It contributes practically nothing positive to American society.

And yet, it is not to blame for the legislative deadlock on gun issues, because it doesn’t spend that much money on lobbying.  It doesn’t have to.  The NRA is successful because a large percentage of the Reactionary faction of the GOP views guns, not as objects, but icons:  symbols of strength, cultural pride, traditional religious beliefs, individualism, and limited government.  Taking away guns is similar to spitting on the cross for these people.

That is why it is so hard for them to compromise, even in the face of repeated school massacres.  You can make deals about objects, but symbols are a different matter altogether.

I think I can say with complete assurance that Alexander Hamilton would have despised Donald Trump:  his laziness; his lack of intellectual curiosity; his corruption; his empty egotism; his tinpot authoritarianism; and his lack of principles.  To Hamilton, Trump would have been a third-rate version of Burr, who, at least, had a valid claim to be a war hero.

It has to be conceded, however, that the two do have some things in common:  a New York background; a chip on their respective shoulders; a flair for publicity; and a taste for good-looking women.  With Madison, however, Trump had absolutely zero in common.  You can be sure that Madison would have despised him, too.

For the modest, reserved, hyper-rational Madison, the Trump parade would have been the last straw.  It represents everything he feared and tried to prevent in American politics.

Wilbur Ross has given Trump three choices on aluminum and steel imports: targeted tariffs; across-the-board tariffs; and import quotas.  Option four, of course, would be to do nothing.  Which will he choose?

Any of the first three options, of course, will probably start a trade war.  It will drive up prices of American goods, damage our relationships with our allies, and invite retaliation, thereby costing jobs, not saving them.  On the other hand, protectionism plays well with at least a large part of his base.  In any battle between tribal loyalty and the national interest, you can be fairly sure that the former will prevail in this administration.

Trump has already shown that his favorite negotiating tactic is to take hostages and blame the other side when he shoots them.  I would expect him to announce that import quotas will be imposed if the rest of the world doesn’t clean up its act, in his eyes, within a specified number of days.  Then we will move to what I think is his end game–managed trade.