Month: December 2019

Emmanuel Macron is the antithesis of a populist. A member of the French elite from the day he started attending ENA, he is a rigorous and sometimes imperious intellectual and problem solver. Never for him the Trumpian approach of making decisions solely based on the musings of his gut.

Macron and his party have essentially occupied all of the space in both the right and the left center. Therein lies the potential problem; his principal opponent in the next election is bound to be a populist, because the establishment has no plausible candidate to challenge him. What if he loses? What happens to the EU, and the euro? Would the current political system even survive the election of an irresponsible populist?

Let’s hope we never find out.

David Brooks divides the American electorate into three groups: a reactionary “proletariat” comprised of Trump-supporting working people concerned about threats to their values and position in society; a “precariat” of socialist millennials stuck in the gig economy with limited wealth, prospects, and security; and a middle group exhausted by Trump and his excesses, but worried that the alternatives could be worse. Is he right?

As is typical with Brooks, there is some truth in this concept, but not enough. My reactions are as follows:

1. Trump’s core supporters are retired people and small business owners, who, in Marxian terms, are petit bourgeois. Calling these people a “proletariat” is misleading at best.
2. A large majority of millennials have regular jobs and are not dependent on the gig economy.
3. The exhausted middle actually contains a wide range of ideological positions, as described below.
4. The “proletariat” is larger and far more influential politically than the “precariat.” Only one of them is a danger to our liberal democratic system, and it isn’t the “precariat.”

It would be more accurate to divide the American electorate into four groups: a small group of social democrats, which includes, but is larger than, the Brooks “precariat;” liberals, who believe in evolutionary changes to the system, not a revolution; conservatives, who prefer to keep things the way they are, if at all possible; and reactionaries, who want to make the white patriarchy great again through any means necessary. In this scheme, conservatives and liberals match up with the Brooks exhausted middle, and may well have more in common with each other than with the extremes, but they do not agree on the pace of change, and it is unclear whether they will unite to get rid of the current administration. The conservatives are the swing voters. We’ll see.

Donald Trump’s style is pure populism. He uses Twitter to communicate directly with his supporters, eschewing the gatekeepers in the media. He attacks independent institutions constantly and seeks to bend them to his will. He goes on and on about “the swamp,” although what he apparently means by that is anyone who disagrees with him or attempts to follow the law and established practice. He despises experts and makes decisions based purely on intuition. He lies and defies established norms on a minute-by-minute basis. His followers love him for it.

But, at least on domestic issues, Trump is mostly a standard fare GOP politician on substance. Tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor, conservative judges, and deregulation all the way, baby! The GOP legislative leadership tolerates him, in spite of his ethical flaws, because of it.

Task one for the Democratic nominee will be to point out this yawning contradiction between style and substance. Will it work? We’ll see next year.

Elizabeth Warren had a hardscrabble background. Her shtick is to complain about the “rigged” system and to bash billionaires. She is proposing lots of new programs to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. That makes her a perfect populist, right?

No, because she is a Harvard Law professor who is justifiably proud of her own intellect, and she loves wonks. Every one of her innumerable plans has a team of prominent wonks behind it. Wonks and populism go together like oil and water.

Every time Warren opens her mouth, in spite of her valiant attempts to sound empathetic, she undercuts her populist economic message. She would make a far better president than Bernie Sanders, but Bernie, with his gruff, straightforward way and his disdain for wonks, is a far more authentic populist.

Today, William Jennings Bryan is usually thought of as the hapless defender of religious fundamentalism against Clarence Darrow during the Scopes trial. In his day, however, Bryan was a fiery populist colossus fighting for cheap money and the increased regulation of business–most notably, railroads. That’s a left-wing agenda. How could the two mix?

Populism is an attitude, not a specific program. Populism doesn’t recognize any consistent difference between right-wing and left-wing measures. A populist wants to take on the establishment and use the powers of the government to help the benighted little guy. More often than not, that requires economic measures which we would associate with the left. The bottom line, therefore, is that the inconsistency that we would perceive here is in our own minds, not Bryan’s.

With its low growth, huge debts, shaky banks, and dysfunctional political system, Italy owes little gratitude to its establishment. As a result, it has not just one, but two, prominent populist parties, which makes it unique in Europe.

Five Star is a populist party without a fixed ideology that focuses on process. Five Star’s idea is to bypass the usual establishment gatekeepers by using the internet and direct democracy. The League, on the other hand, is a typical right-wing populist party that blames everything on the EU and illegal immigrants. The two actually combined forces in government for about a year, but it didn’t work, and now Five Star, much diminished in popularity, is allied with the conventional left.

A party with such fluid ideological positions–just a critique of the process–was always destined to be more a factor in opposition than in government. Five Star probably won’t survive more than a few more years. The League, on the other hand, is sort of thriving even though it is out of power, and you can expect it to be a major player during the next election.

The essence of populism is that a large number of people come to believe that an entrenched, venal, and corrupt establishment is governing for its own benefit, rather than for the citizenry at large. Populists seek to overthrow that establishment through elections. The newly-elected government then, in theory, remakes the bureaucracy and other supposedly independent institutions (most notably, the judiciary and the media) to be more responsive to the public will.

Populists can come from both the left and the right. They distrust experts and believe that most complex problems have simple solutions. They put their faith in strong personalities, intuition, and will rather than systems and abstract thought.

Populism is an attitude, not a specific ideological program; populists can be either mostly right or wrong, depending on the circumstances. I will be putting populism in its contemporary and historical contexts over the next week.

Over the last week or so, the WaPo has been publishing articles about official documents it has called the “Afghanistan Papers.” Both the title and the contents suggest an obvious resemblance to Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. The lies disclosed in the Pentagon Papers were a huge legal and political issue; the Afghanistan Papers, on the other hand, have caused little more than a collective shrug to date. Why the difference?

For several reasons:

1. No one with any sense really believed we were winning in Afghanistan, anyway. The public learned its lesson from Vietnam.

2. Afghanistan is not really a partisan issue, as presidents of both parties were responsible for the war.

3. All of the soldiers in Afghanistan were volunteers. Things might be different if we had a draft.

4. Casualties have been much more limited than they were in Vietnam.

5. The war, at least initially, was justified by 9/11. It is the continuing presence there that is much more debatable.

The real battle here is between the military and diplomatic blob on the one hand and politicians from both parties who have long doubted the value of the war. Trump may be able to use these leaks as a basis for cutting and running, but he won’t want the blame when the Taliban march into Kabul. That’s the ultimate deterrent to withdrawal, and it is still in effect.

An identity voter chooses someone who reminds him of himself. A values voter opts for someone whom he believes is on his side against the evil other, whoever that may be. The two concepts often overlap, but are not identical.

You might think that it would be difficult to find average voters who identify with a billionaire developer and casino owner from New York City, but lots of these people exist–angry white men with an excess of testosterone who have come to believe that the world has dealt them an unfairly bad hand by putting a higher value on intellect than physical strength. Trump’s anger, swagger, bad taste, and limited vocabulary resonate with these men. A Trump values voter, on the other hand, probably believes that the man on golf cart is the only thing that stands between them and some sort of PC hell. It’s not the same thing, although there are millions of people who meet both definitions; the values group typically voted for Cruz in 2016, but are among Trump’s strongest supporters today.

It’s not hard to understand why Elizabeth Warren’s core group of supporters consists of highly educated, progressive white women like her, or that Biden voters tend to be elderly moderates. The one who doesn’t fit is Bernie Sanders, whose strongest supporters are young people voting their economic self-interest who don’t look like him at all. Unlike Warren voters, however, they skew towards the poorly educated, and in many cases, Biden is their second choice. Once again, identity prevails over ideology, at least to a limited degree.

Regardless of her intellectual and campaigning strengths, Warren is a disaster from an identity and values perspective, because she has no appeal to the obvious groups of swing voters. The Democrats would be wise to remember that next year.

The many similarities between these two venerable old lefties have been commented upon many times, not least by me. Joe Biden is arguing that the result of the British election is, therefore, a cautionary tale for American progressives. Is he right?

Progressive pundits will argue that Brexit was a decisive factor in Corbyn’s demise, and that Corbyn is well to the left of Sanders in any event. Both statements are true, but Remain was actually more popular than Leave, and the British electorate is well to the left of ours.

The bottom line is that the UK has proved for the umpteenth time that banking on a huge pool of disaffected voters to rise up to vote for socialism and the “revolution” doesn’t work. It won’t work for Sanders, either. Fortunately, that will be established in the primaries; unlike the British, we won’t have to wait for the general election to see the train wreck.

The crushing Conservative win is bad enough, but I predicted it a long time ago, and one can at least hope that Boris will be less of a thug with a comfortable majority. The real tragedy, however, is that the Lib Dems did so poorly. Labour is still, even with Corbyn as its leader, the predominant party of the left.

The UK needs a responsible center-left party, just as the US needs a decent center-right party, and doesn’t have one. As long as Corbyn remains Labour’s leader, and he clearly doesn’t plan to step down anytime soon, that simply cannot happen. If left-leaning British voters won’t desert Labour even under these circumstances, what hope does the country have for a plausible opposition party in the future?

I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, House impeachment blues.

You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.

The trial is approaching fast, and now I’ve got to choose.

Should I put on witnesses, and which ones should I use?

______________

Sure, I used some pressure on the leaders of Ukraine

To put the screws to Biden and to maximize his pain.

My phone call was perfecto, and I don’t need to explain.

If I could go back in time, I’d do it all again.

__________________

I’ve got the blues.

The Russia sequel blues

Mueller vindicated me

And gave me an excuse.

Election is approaching fast

And I intend to win.

Politics ain’t beanbag

And losing is a sin.

A man named Philip Terzian argued in the NYT a few days ago that Donald Trump really isn’t that different than his predecessors. He finds Trump’s domestic policy to be consistent with standard GOP fare, his foreign policy to be rooted in Taft era thought, and his pugnacious tweets to be essentially similar to combative statements from the two Roosevelts. Is he right?

Not really, because he omits several Trumpian qualities that are truly unique:

1. His dark view of America;

2. His complete lack of interest in telling the truth;

3. The numerous ways in which he is unapologetically corrupt;

4. His overwhelming egotism;

5. His rejection of any concept of public service;

6. His rejection of expert advice in favor of messages from his ample gut; and

7. His rejection of liberal democratic norms both at home and abroad, and his enthusiastic embrace of dictators.

There is no precedent in American history for any of this. None whatsoever. Terzian is kidding himself.

As the saying goes, not only is the past not dead, it isn’t even past. That is certainly true of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

There would be no reason to talk about reparations today if the cotton plantations had been broken up, and the land redistributed to the freed slaves. There was a strong moral case for doing that, and it had some support from Radical Republicans. It didn’t happen, however. Why?

Three reasons. Racism was part of the equation, but I doubt it was the biggest part. Respect for constitutionally protected property rights, and fear of a slippery slope, was a factor. The biggest problem, however, was war weariness. There would have been no way to enforce the redistribution without maintaining a massive military presence in the South for an indefinite period of time. Given the costs of the war, and its apparent success, was it really likely that the taxpayers of the North were going to agree to that? Obviously not; they wanted to bring the boys home and get back to normal as quickly as possible. Can you blame them?

And yet, things might be so much better today if they had stayed the course. Pay me now, or pay me later . . .

As anticipated, there are only two stated grounds for impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Good! To the extent there are any political benefits from the process, we’ve already seen them; there is no point in gilding the lily. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to run the primaries and impeachment concurrently; it’s not fair to the candidates or the voters. Let’s force the issue, put the GOP on the record supporting corruption, and move on to the campaign.

So how will the trial be run? As far as I can see, there are four models:

1. Rely solely on the written record;

2. Use a mix of the written record and a few carefully selected live witnesses;

3. Let it rip. Subpoena the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, and anyone else you can find, and make the case for Ukrainian corruption and Trump’s complete innocence; or

4. Call Rudy, Pompeo, and the rest of the gang and see where it goes.

I strongly suspect the choice will be #2. McConnell wants to put on enough of a show to convince the American public that the GOP is taking the allegations seriously, which rules out #1. Trump may talk a good game on #4, but his lawyers will ultimately persuade him that it would be a dreadful mistake. Finally, there won’t be a majority of the Senate to support #3. #2 wins by default.