Recommended: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Donald Trump

For those of you who watch YouTube videos, I recommend Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Donald Trump.  It is very funny, but also a pretty good indictment of the man as a presidential candidate.

Recommended: Why Donald Trump?

The FiveThirtyEight site has a thoughtful and interesting piece today: Why Donald Trump. The author, Clare Malone, explores the Trump appeal across the nation and puzzles about his unexpected popularity with a significant segment (but not a majority) of the American electorate.  It's worth reading and thinking about.

The choice

In the 1964 presidential election, while I was still in graduate school, I voted for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater. I liked Goldwater, and I thought many of his conservative ideas had merit, but I was convinced (brainwashed?) by the Johnson campaign ads that Goldwater was an extremist who would expand our involvement in the Vietnam War. Remember the Goldwater slogan “In your heart you know he is right”, and the Johnson campaign rebuttal “In your guts you know he is nuts”. Of course Johnson won in a landslide, and then promptly expanded our involvement in the Vietnam War, with the disastrous and long-lasting aftereffects we all now recognize. It was an early lesson in my political education.

I was suckered once again with the first Obama campaign and the eloquent promises of “hope and change”.  Seven years on and the Dr. Phil question is relevant: “how’s that hopey-changey thing working for you?”.  In fact what we got from Obama was a lot more eloquence but neither hope nor change, and it was perhaps naïve of us to expect either hope or change from an untried community organizer freshman Senator with no experience in business or in dealing with a legislature.  In the event, Obama has proved unusually inept at dealing with Congress (remember his attempt at a “grand bargain” on the budget?), or even with the members of his own party, and unusually naïve in foreign affairs (remember the “Russian reset”, or the Cairo speech to the Muslim world, or his “JV” assessment of the ISIS threat?).

Now in this upcoming election we are faced with a real dilemma – try an outsider (Sanders, Trump) to try to shake up the incestuous and increasingly incompetent ruling establishment, or naively believe the promises of an establishment politician (Clinton) despite her poor record and seedy and greedy personal reputation.

This election is no longer about Democrats vs Republicans, nor even about liberals vs conservatives.  It is about the 1% vs the 99%, the incestuous, interlocking ruling elite (politicians, CEOs, Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers, mainstream news organizations, and all the ancillary think tanks and lobbyists that feed off of them) vs the rest of the country.

Both Trump and Cruz repulse me, both for their political, economic, and social views and for their increasingly degrading personal behavior. But their election might – just might – shake up the establishment and make it begin to be more responsive to those living in flyover country (ie – the rest of the nation).  

Hillary repulses me as well.  She gives lawyers a bad name, and may even be indicted as a felon before the election.  If she is not, it will be yet one more proof that the Washington power elite are so corrupt and so self-protective that members can get away with anything. If elected, she will almost certainly just maintain the status quo, and the establishment will go on corrupt and self-serving and oblivious to the problems of the rest of the country as before.

All in all, as I think about the miserable choices we all face this election cycle, I am tempted to vote for the outsiders, terrible as they may be, in hopes that the shockwaves to the establishment will wake them up and perhaps scare the living $%#@&% out of them.  What our aristocrats need now, perhaps, is the sight of a few pitchforks in the streets.

Recommended: Hillary’s Soft Despotism

Along with my previous post noting the rise of a huge unelected American bureaucracy that controls many aspects of our day-to-day life, see the Wall Street Journal article Hillary’s Soft Despotism. Though anti-Clinton in tone, the issue is the same whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House.  Both parties bear responsibility for this massive and expensive bureaucracy, and for the burdens it places on all Americans, and for the abuses which occasionally occur.

What the Constitution intended

It’s important in these turbulent times to recall once in a while why the framers of the American Constitution wrote it the way they did.  Remember that they had just escaped the clutches of what they perceived as a tyranny under the English monarch, and they were well aware of the autocratic governments that ruled much of the rest of the world.  They wanted something different – they wanted a version of democracy with a great deal of individual liberty.

What the framers of the Constitution feared more than anything else was the re-emergence of a tyranny in America, so they devised a pretty good plan for avoiding that – they divided up the power among a number of independent power centers, so that each would be kept in check by the others.  First, they limited the power of the federal government, leaving most of the power in the hands of State governments, so that the states could keep a check on the federal government.  Then, in the federal government, they divided up the power four ways – among the executive branch, the House, the Senate, and the judiciary.  In theory, no one power center could get out of hand because all the other power centers would work as a check.

Now, some 200 years later, this system is beginning to fail precisely because the original intent of the framers of the US Constitution has been eroded in a number of significant ways.

First, over the past 50 years or so the power of the states has been diminished relative to the federal government. Today federal law invades all sorts of issues that used to be the province of the states.

Second, starting mostly under the New Deal of the 1930s a whole new unelected branch of government has grown up under the executive – the massive federal bureaucracy. And this unelected branch makes and enforces the regulations that rule most of our lives and businesses. 

Third, increasingly over the past couple of decades the President has arrogated to that office more and more of the powers that were originally intended for the Congress, to the point where the President these days can effectively take America into a war without Congressional approval.

Yesterday we had the President speak in favor of requiring companies to install secret back doors into all consumer communication devices so that the government could always see what people were saying or writing – so much for the Constitution’s fourth amendment prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures”.  And this was in defense of a demand made, not by any elected body, but by the FBI, part of the massive unelected bureaucracy of America.

The writer C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1958 book The Evolution of Political Thought argued that democracy was an inherently unstable form of government, which would inevitably morph into autocracy and then tyranny. The history of democracies and republics certainly suggests that is true (think of the Roman Republic, for example). We, the American voters, had better be vigilant, because we seem to be headed the same way, though in our case the tyranny may come initially from the bureaucracy, not from an individual.

Recommended: Donald Trump is not a fascist

The Telegraph (London, England) has a perceptive piece this morning that puts some perspective on the Trump phobia that is beginning to emerge: Donald Trump is not a fascist, and violence is nothing new in American politics.

As the author points out, most of the things people are afraid Trump would do as president have already been done by "establishment" Republicans and Democrats - get us into and keep us in endless Middle Eastern Wars (Bush and Obama), deport masses of illegal aliens (Obama), torture people (Bush), force us to buy stuff we don't want (Obama), kill innocent people with drones without a declaration of war (Bush and Obama), etc, etc.  The elites on the right don't like him because he isn't committed to pushing their religious and social views on everyone else.  The elites on the left don't like him because he isn't "politically correct" and doesn't subscriber to their "victim-centered" view of the world. (Looked at that way, he doesn't seem so bad).

Not mentioned in the article, but often mentioned in attacks on him is the claim that he is not very knowledgeable about foreign affairs. He admits it, and says he will hire smart people to tell him what he needs to know.  In fact, no recent president has been very knowledgeable about foreign affairs - they all rely on experts.  The only difference is that he admits it freely, while the rest try to cram briefing books before debates so they will look like they know more than they really know. Neither Bush nor Obama (nor Bill Clinton, for that matter) can point to outstanding results in their foreign affairs endeavors (Bush and the Middle East Wars, Obama and the "Russian reset" with the Crimea takeover, Bill Clinton ignoring Al-Qaeda's rise).

Anyway, it's a good, thoughtful article.

More on Free Trade Agreements

I’ve continued to think about the argument in the previous post that free trade is really the fundamental issue driving the Trump campaign. As I said in that post, up until now I have bought the argument of the academic economists and political elites that free trade is a good thing. Now I am not so sure.

Free trade, which means the free movement, without tariffs, of goods and labor between nations, does a number of good things.  It expands the markets for corporations.  It increases competition, which tends to drive manufacturers towards more efficiency. It moves manufacturing jobs to lower-wage nations, which (a) reduces the manufacturing costs of those goods and (b) improves the lot of those foreign workers, who otherwise might have to take lower-wage jobs. Indeed, outsourcing work to lower-wage nations has been one of our most effective modes of foreign aid, lifting millions in other nations from poverty and providing the training that enabled them to climb to steadily better-paying work.

All this is obvious, and is the basis for the “conventional wisdom” among academic economists and politicians that free trade agreements are good.

The problem, though, is that free trade has moved a lot of US manufacturing jobs to other nations, leaving many areas in the US, including particularly the “Rust Belt”, in serious trouble, with very high unemployment rates. Now in theory (according to economic models) all those people who lost their manufacturing jobs ought to be retraining themselves for “higher value-add” work, like programming computers.  The problem is that those neat economic models, dreamed up by academics who probably never even met a blue-collar worker, are based on a simplified, fanciful view of the world. An out-of-work 50 year old machinist with a family and a mortgage is probably not in a position to go “retrain” himself as a programmer, nor to move himself and his family to wherever programming jobs are available. Nor, in fact, may he be intellectually capable at his age of learning an entirely new skill like that. And even if he did learn to program, he would probably have trouble competing with younger programmers who could typically be hired at a lower wage.

So yes, free trade may make goods less expensive and more affordable at the local WalMart.  But if a family doesn’t have any income, it hardly matters that the washing machine costs less – it is still unaffordable.

Outsourcing, made possible from free trade agreements, isn’t the only structural problem here.  Automation is having much the same effect.  Manufacturers are finding that robots are a lot cheaper than human workers in the long run – they work 7x24, don’t get sick, don’t need benefits or retirement plans, don’t strike for higher wages, and don’t need lunch hours or bathroom breaks.  Of course, now white collar jobs are also beginning to be replaced by automation. Who needs an expensive lawyer if software can write a perfectly good legal will for you? Who needs an expensive accountant if Quickbooks software will do the job at 1% of the cost?

So the underlying question that the isolated, out-of-touch, wealthy political elites in neither political party have even begun to address, and probably don’t even yet recognize, is that the American economy depends on people having incomes, one way or another. Free trade and automation may be good in theory for producers of goods, but if people have no income, they can’t be customers for those goods.

Henry Ford was smart enough to pay his workers a much higher than average wage, just so that they could afford to buy his cars.  Something like that may be necessary in the American economy.  Tariffs may not be the answer – they tend to isolate producers from foreign competition and therefore let them stay inefficient.  But something has to be restructured so that we retain jobs – and incomes – here in America, or our economy will go south pretty quickly.  Indeed, that may be in large part why the economy has recovered so slowly and so incompletely over the past eight years.

Recommended: Why Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump.

Donald Rank, writing in the US Edition of The Guardian, has one of the better speculations on Donald Trump's appeal. Read his article: Why Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. It is trade policy that is the fundamental basis of Trump's appeal, he argues, not racism.

I have always bought the pervasive argument of our political and academic elites, Republican and Democratic alike, that free trade agreements are good things.  And they are good things - for corporations, and for workers in lower-wage nations, and for politicians and those wealthy people who support and fund them and get stock dividends.  But as Rank points out, such agreements are frequently disastrous for US blue-collar manufacturing workers.  And that, he argues, is the real root of the growing voter support for Donald Trump, boorish and racist as he may be.

This is an interesting perspective, and one I haven't seen elsewhere. And it raises some interesting questions in my mind - just what obligation does the political system have to preserve domestic blue-collar jobs, even if that is not the "optimal" economic answer? And can the US economy ever recover if a substantial portion of its workers are put out of work by such agreements?  And can any political party long survive if it ignores this problem, as both major parties seems to be doing?

The “establishment” problem

The problem with an “establishment” of any sort, in any field, is that it gets too comfortable in its assumptions, its thinking, its ways of doing things. It seems to me that is what is happening in the Republican party right now, and is part of the reason it seems so bewildered in its attempts to stop the Trump juggernaut. He doesn’t fit the “establishment” model, and so they don’t know what to make of him.

Republicans of all stripes are spending their time launching vitriolic attacks on Trump in a (so far ineffectual) effort to stop his progress to the nomination.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them yet to stop and think about WHY voters are turning out for him in such numbers.  After all, Trump is where he is now because he appeals to a lot of voters. The other presumptive Republican candidates are where they are (mostly nowhere) because whatever it is they are trying to sell, nobody is buying!

“Establishment” conservative politicians have been promising us smaller, less expensive, less intrusive government for several decades now, but when they are actually in power they grow the government.

“Establishment” conservative politicians have been promising to cut government spending and reduce the national debt for several decades now, but when they are actually in power they increase government spending and increase the national debt.

“Establishment” conservative politicians have been promising to restore American freedoms for decades now, but when they are actually in power (especially after 9/11) they have instituted the most significant and intrusive government surveillance program we have ever had, and done so largely in secret at that.

“Establishment” conservative politicians have promised to get the government out of our private lives for decades now, but when they are actually in power they have tried to use the government to impose their own religious views on the country on abortion and gay rights and similar issues.

The list could go on, but you get the drift.   The Republican “establishment” has consistently made promises they didn’t keep. Some they probably couldn’t keep, and so should never have promised in the first place. Nevertheless, I think the core problem here is that a lot of people no longer buy the tired old promises of the “establishment” people.  It’s not clear that Trump is any better, or any more honest, but at least he isn’t trotting out the same old promises that we all now know no politician is actually going to keep.

And in fact this is much of the same problem on the Democratic side, which is what feeds Bernie Sander’s appeal and explains the distinct lack of enthusiasm, even among the faithful, for Hillary Clinton.

Until some smarter-than-average politician begins to understand what is really driving voter discontent, and figures out a way to address it effectively instead of just trotting out the same old tired promises, the “establishments” in both parties are going to continue to be in trouble.