Month: June 2018

The Supreme Court overturned years of precedent yesterday and decided that states had the authority under the Commerce Clause to tax online retailers with no physical presence within the jurisdiction.  The basis for the decision was the change to the national economy created by internet sales.

That makes perfect sense, but there is more than that going on here:

1.  The case illustrates the absurdity of using an originalist approach in many kinds of constitutional disputes.  An originalist would logically have to go to the historical record to determine what James Madison said about the internet.  The likelihood of finding any thing useful, alas, is pretty small.
2.  The 5-4 vote mostly, but not completely, mirrored the liberal/conservative split on the court.  I don’t think the liberals took their position based on their concerns about state overreaching and the Commerce Clause;   I’m pretty sure their votes were a statement about the importance of stare decisis in other fields, abortion being the most obvious.

I read an article a few days ago (unfortunately, I can’t place it) in which a former Obama staffer said that the anti-establishment messages of Obama and Trump, if you stripped out the latter’s racism and “America First” rhetoric, were similar.  Was he right?

No.  Obama had plenty of support from leaders of the Democratic establishment during the 2008 campaign, and he never attacked them.  His campaign wasn’t an insurgency as much as a promise to get past Hillary’s perceived divisiveness and heal the country’s partisan wounds.  Even he would concede that his efforts along those lines were a miserable failure, because it turned out that Hillary was not really exceptional, after all; the GOP views all Democratic victories as illegitimate, because Democratic voters aren’t real Americans.

Ross Douthat sees an essential continuity between Trump and Obama in that both rejected the interventionist impulses of the foreign policy establishment.  Is he right?

Yes and no, but mostly no.  It is true that neither is a neo-conservative, and that both want to limit the footprint of America’s military involvements overseas.  Obama, however, believed in the Pax Americana;  he just wanted it on the cheap, and sought to provide it through the creation of rules and the use of alliances, with American military involvement serving only as a last resort.  Trump thinks the Pax Americana is for chumps, prefers the company of dictators, and threatens trade and nuclear wars to obtain leverage for bilateral deals with friends and foes alike.

On the whole, the differences are far more compelling than the similarities.

When Donald Trump thinks about the world, he only sees himself.  He has no sense of reverence or his own fallibility; skyscrapers inspire him, not mighty mountains or vast deserts.  People aren’t reflections of God;  they are simply objects to be manipulated at his whim.  Ethics and rules are a con; wealth and power are the only things that matter.  The strong survive; the weak fall by the wayside; and isn’t it better that way?

This view of the universe isn’t just the complete negation of Christianity–it rejects all notions of religion–even paganism.  In the end, that’s why the religious right’s embrace of him is so appalling, and why any suggestion that Trump is a “baby Christian” is so ludicrous.

Donald Trump takes great pride in being unpredictable, but in some respects, including the following, he is very predictable, indeed:

1. Politics is an exercise in mobilizing your base, not in building consensus, which is a waste of time better left to wimps and fools.  If you are constantly on the attack, triggering liberals and the MSM, and forcing people to choose between you and the fearsome Other, you can maintain a practical majority in the country, whether you have one on paper or not.
2.  The point of negotiating is to win, and the best way to win is to find and exploit leverage.  That can best be done by taking extreme positions and threatening to shoot hostages.   Talking about nukes and trade wars is consequently very much on the table, even if your predecessors didn’t have the balls to do it.

Trump’s position on family separation is obviously consistent with both of those principles.  The mere fact that it polls poorly and looks bad on TV is of no consequence to him;  in the long run, he thinks it will help him.

The Democrats need to remember that the enemy isn’t simply Trump–it is Trumpism, as described above.  Electing a left-wing version of the same phenomenon would not be much of an improvement.

Paul Krugman has written two columns in the last few days comparing the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana, and finding that both were sustained by soft power.  He’s right;  empires are initially won by force, but they can only endure if the conquered parties accept that the conquering party is a superior civilization in some way.  Once that disappears, decline is inevitable.

The two were also different, however.  The Roman Empire was created for the direct purpose of exploiting the native populations, and was maintained by respect for a common culture.  The Pax Americana, on the other hand, did not involve much self-interested military conquest, and was sustained more by respect for America’s political institutions and sense of restraint than by any love for our culture, although that does exist in some ways that have little to do with our government.

The Roman Empire largely fell because it had to stop growing;  as a result, there was no more land and booty to be distributed to the population.  It appears that the Pax Americana will die because our present government simply no longer accepts its burdens, and would much rather do business with ambitious strongmen than with our erstwhile allies.

One occasionally sees efforts to analogize Trump and Henry VIII.  And with good reason, because they had plenty in common:

1.  Wealthy, domineering fathers;
2.  A strange sort of charisma;
3.  A lust for cheap popularity (think Empson and Dudley here);
4.  A love of pageantry and the military;
5.  Difficult, unstable relationships with women;
6.  Laziness, and a short attention span;
7.  A penchant for firing people (Henry usually had them killed); and
8.  An affinity for manipulating people, particularly in old age.

The two are different, however, in that Henry had a strong (if amazingly convenient at times) conscience, and was a committed Christian.  He would have completely rejected Trump’s single-minded focus on power and leverage.

Personally, I think the better Trump analogy is to Kaiser Wilhelm II, but it’s a debatable point.

It occurred to me while reading an article about the politics of Brexit that the splits in the Conservative Party mirror those in the GOP, as follows:

1. The Reactionaries voted for Brexit as a way to protect the fish-and-chips ideal of the UK–one with better jobs for white workers and fewer immigrants and vampire squid bankers.
2.  The PBPs opposed Brexit because it is undoubtedly going to cost them money.
3.  The relative handful of CLs voted for Brexit because they think it will turn the UK into a low regulation, free trading Singapore-on-the-Thames.
4.  The CDs are less concerned about Brexit than about ending austerity, helping the victims of globalization, and keeping Corbyn out of office.

No wonder Theresa May looks as beleaguered as Paul Ryan!  Their challenges are very similar.

 

In the face of data showing that a majority of white women voted for Trump, there is an article on Vox asking whether the Democrats will be “brave enough” to run a woman against him in 2020.

It’s a fair question, but I would frame it differently:

1.  In the era of #MeToo, is running a woman a net vote-getter in a presidential election?
2.  If the answer to #1 is no, would it be prudent to risk four more years of Trump in order to make a point about the electability of women?

Here is how I would respond:

1. Everyone knew what kind of a jerk Trump was in 2016, and white women voted for him anyway.  Why would 2020 be any different?  #MeToo is, with rare exceptions, a tool that will only be used against liberal men.
2.  The stakes are way too high to make that kind of a point.

When Reagan died, The Economist ran a cover story identifying him as the “winner of the Cold War.”  I ripped that cover off, because I didn’t accept that proposition.  I still don’t.

Ultimately, the claim for Reagan’s “indispensability” is that he completely transformed the American political landscape by changing the GOP from a modest pro-business party focusing on balanced budgets to the swaggering, tax cutting, socially reactionary party that it is today.  It happened because most people associated the recovery of the early 1980’s with his tax cut, not with interest rate decreases engineered by the Fed.  Whether they were right or not is beside the point;  in this case, perception is reality.

None of that would have happened if George H.W. Bush had come up with a snappy retort when Reagan said he paid for the microphone in New Hampshire in 1980.  The big tax cut wouldn’t have happened, the recovery would have occurred anyway, and the GOP and the nation would be completely different today.

In other words, while Reagan was a far more attractive figure than Donald Trump in virtually every respect, the road to Trumpism runs through him.

 

FDR brought us through two enormous national crises:  the Great Depression and World War II.  Was he indispensable?  The answers are probably and certainly, in that order, for the following reasons:

1.  The Great Depression:  Roosevelt called out Hoover for failing to balance the budget in the 1932 campaign.  He didn’t have any innovative ideas on economic issues.  What he did have was a willingness to try just about anything, because, unlike Hoover, he thought the dangers of inaction to American liberal democracy were greater than the costs of experimenting and failing.

You can break Roosevelt’s actions into three groups.  His welfare state legislation was helpful to his contemporaries and obviously has stood the test of time.  His Keynesian fiscal and monetary actions were only intermittently successful, as he was not completely committed to them.  His corporatist legislation simply didn’t work.  Much of it was struck down by the Supreme Court; the country was better off without it.

Was there anyone around who, realistically, could have done better?  Certainly, there were no Republicans.  I think you have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

2.  World War II:  Roosevelt was a brilliant war president.  He saw the dangers coming and did his best to prepare the country even though the population was predominantly isolationist before Pearl Harbor.  He managed to provide Britain and the USSR with a lifeline through Lend-Lease in spite of, not because of, public opinion.  He picked excellent military leaders and stuck with them.  He succeeded in mobilizing the economy for war to a greater degree than had ever been imagined.  The Allies never fell out over war aims, as could easily have happened, while he was president.  Finally, most of the international institutions that were created to keep the peace after the war were conceived during his administration.

No one else could have done all of this.  FDR passes the indispensability test with flying colors.

Marco Rubio and other GOP figures have been complaining about a double standard with regard to Cuba and North Korea.  Rubio thinks the (obviously left-wing) MSM was uncritical of Obama’s willingness to make nice with Raul, but far too skeptical of Trump’s approach to Kim.

Are they right?  There are clear similarities:  in both cases, the US decided to reach out to Communist dictators after decades of efforts to isolate them had failed to remove them from power.  The difference is that, while the attempts to isolate the Kims had not resulted in regime change, they were, in fact, treated as pariahs by the rest of the world, whereas America’s hard line on Cuba had no support elsewhere.  In other words, it was the US, not the Cubans, who came out of the wilderness by restoring diplomatic relations.

Not to mention, of course, that the charge of hypocrisy can be leveled at the GOP just as well as at the media.

Lincoln owes his reputation to some remarkable displays of humanity and to his oratory, which was as groundbreaking for its day as it was brilliant.  Of all of the figures in American political history, you could count the number of people who even approached his gift with language on your hands.

As a war president, his record was mixed.  On the positive side:

1.  He did a good job of mobilizing the obviously superior resources of the Union;
2.  He managed to keep Britain and France from intervening;
3.  He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, which helped define the Union’s war aims and won the support of abolitionists at home and abroad; and
4.  He succeeded in positioning the Confederacy as the aggressor, which also helped win support from neutrals at the beginning of the war.

On the down side, his grasp of military strategy was limited, and his taste in leaders left a lot to be desired.  In particular, he should have fired McClellan far earlier than he did.

Would, say, a President Seward have won the war?  Given the Union’s considerable material advantages, my guess is yes, but we’ll never know.

You can’t–or, at least, I can’t.  The other Founding Fathers remain influential today largely because of what they said, but Washington is still significant because everything that he did mattered.  While he made plenty of tactical mistakes, most notably in the New York and Philadelphia campaigns, he won enough battles to keep the army together even in the worst of times.  He could easily have used his prestige to turn himself into a dictator and his country into a banana republic, but he didn’t.  He played an important role in the Constitutional Convention.  He hired Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury and supported him against his opponents.  He wisely avoided war with Great Britain and France.  He was an important symbol of national unity at a time of intense factional strife.  Finally, he set a precedent by giving up power voluntarily and peacefully after two terms.

Was anyone else available who could have done all of this?  Absolutely not, and his contemporaries (even the Republicans) knew it.  You can, therefore, easily make the case that of all of the Founding Fathers, Washington was the most indispensable.  Our debt of gratitude to him is immeasurable.

 

There have been several articles since Tuesday’s primaries about how the GOP has become the POT (Party of Trump).  And with good reason–it’s true.

The essence of the POT is that it stands for nothing other than the caprices of one man.  What happens when he’s out of the picture, which, regardless of the outcome of elections, will happen sooner or later?  What do you stand for then?