Gee, liberals are upset…

Liberals are upset that Donald Trump’s administration is ramping up the deportation of illegal immigrants; that his administration is actually going to follow the law and deport people who aren’t supposed to be in the country, just like most other nations in the world do.  Following the law; what an outrageous concept! Certainly not something the Obama administration did with immigration.

Liberals are upset that Donald Trump is going to leave it to the states to decide the transgender  bathroom issue. What an outrageous concept – that perhaps Americans in different states are different enough that a big brother one-size-fits-all federal rule doesn’t work. That perhaps Colorado doesn’t see a problem with public marijuana smoking but Iowa might. That perhaps California is less up tight about bathrooms than Maine. That perhaps Wyoming worries less about gun ownership than New York. That perhaps not everyone in the nation agrees with liberal orthodoxy. Amazing! Who would have thought it?

Liberals are upset that Trump’s executive order barred Syrian immigrants for 120 days, while vetting procedures were reviewed. I guess they thought Obama had a better process – he barred almost all Syrian refuges for years. Liberals are also upset at the 50,000 a year cap on refugees, even though that was essentially the same cap under George Bush and under all but Obama’s last year in office.

Liberals are upset that Trump still wants to build a wall on the Mexican border.  I guess they object to his finishing the 700+ mile wall that the Obama administration already started. Oh, I guess if Obama did it is was OK, but if Trump does the same thing it is outrageous.

There are valid things to complain about in this new Trump administration, but the liberal complaints about just about everything he does are wearing thin, and making the liberal political class (and the liberal media that feeds on it) look pretty hypocritical.

Recommended: Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

Samuel Huntington, who died in 2008, was a liberal Harvard professor of political science. In 1996 he published a controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (see my book list in the sidebar) in which he argued that the coming century would see conflicts along the borders between major cultures and civilizations. The liberal academic world didn’t like this view, which clashed with the current groupthink best expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that history had come to an end and the world would now settle down into a more or less permanent state of peace and liberal democracy. With the resurgence of Russian and Chinese expansionism, and the Middle East religious wars, we now know that Huntington was right and the liberal academic fantasy was wrong.

Fast forward to 2004 and Huntington published his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, referred to in Hanson’s piece The End of Identity Politics recommended in my previous post.  Again his argument went against the current academic politically correct thinking, and again he was roundly criticized for not supporting the current multiculturalism fad.

His argument is complex and nuanced and one should read the whole book to get the full force of his position, but in short he worried that the current trend of identity politics, of multiculturalism, of encouraging groups to separate out into tribes (LGBTQ, Hispanic, Afro, women, Asian, etc, etc) was a dangerous path. That what had held America, a land of immigrants, together was the adoption of a more or less common identity as Americans, wherever we all came from originally, and to destroy that was to invite the sort of Balkanization and civil tensions (even civil wars) that have plagued other nations with unassimilated and resentful immigrants in their midst (think of the EUs problems right now).

The book is highly relevant right now, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, an event which has exposed the sharp cultural divisions in the country between the largely costal liberals and the more conservative rest of the country.

Recommended: The End of Identity Politics

Victor David Hanson has another thoughtful piece today worth reading: The End of Identity Politics. America is a nation of immigrants, yet it has succeeded up to now in avoiding the Blakanization and resulting civil strife that so many other countries are facing, because all those immigrants welded themselves within a generation or two into Americans, with a single common language and a more or less common culture. They ceased to be Irish or Polish or German or ..or...or and became "Americans"

Identity politics threatens this process, because it encourages people to see themselves first and foremost as some special, separate group, not like other Americans. Democrats in particular, and Obama and Hillary Clinton especially, thought this was a useful useful political lever (it was for Obama, but not for Hillary Clinton). But it is a dangerous road that leads to the sort of divisions that can bring down a nation.

Recommended: Trump and the Crisis of the Meritocracy

Glenn Reynolds has a perception piece in today's USA Today: Trump and the crisis of meritocracy. It goes along with what I have been saying about the "establishment" going crazy, not so much because of Trump's proposed policies, many of which have been proposed by previous presidents and are in fact supported by at least half the nation, but because he threatens the ruling elite - the insider "meritocracy" that runs the country and fancies itself smarter than the rest of the country.

Trump's election certainly highlighted the growing divide in the nation between the cultures of the better educated urban coastal communities and the cultures of the more rural, working class remainder of the country, a divide that has been growing more obvious over the past decade or two, but hasn't (until now) gotten the attention of the insular political elite.  Reynolds points out that this sort of divide has brought down empires before, and may well bring down America if we don't find some resolution to it.

Assessing the Trump administration thus far

It’s a little hard to assess how President Trump is doing so far since the liberal media and Democrats are doing everything they can, including creating fake news, to make things look as bad and chaotic as possible.  Yes, a judge has put his immigration executive order on hold, just like judges did with several of Obama’s executive orders. Yes, a couple of his nominees have had to withdraw, just as happened with Obama (remember Charles Freeman?). Yes, one of his staff, Michael Flynn, had to resign over some improprieties, just as in the Obama administration (remember Katherine Archuleta, Julia Pierson, David Petraeus, Erik Shinseki or Kathleen Sebelius, among others?).

As Scott Adams says in one of his recent blog postings, there are two movies running in people’s heads. The liberals, who desperately need to think Trump is failing, see disaster and chaos. Trump supporters, on the other hand, see a guy who is making a few rookie mistakes, but moving ahead smartly to deliver on exactly the campaign promises that got him elected - something new in Washington politics.

Of course Trump is an outsider up against the entire Washington establishment and massive Federal bureaucracy, who will do everything they can to prevent him from disturbing their cozy insider’s world or disturbing their groupthink assumptions.  I fully expected them to sink him before the nomination, but clearly he is a lot smarter and shrewder than anyone expected, and thus far demonstrably smarter and shrewder than the establishment. But the underhanded (and in fact, probably illegal) leaking of classified telephone taps by the intelligence community to sink Flynn shows how far the establishment will go to preserve their power and perks.

It’s too early, of course, to tell how he will do, but some of his early moves seem promising to me, and apparently Wall Street investors think the same thing, since the stock market is rocketing upward. For example, he seems to be willing to acknowledge that the Cold War with the Soviet Union is over and we face a different, though still troublesome, Russia, something the establishment foreign policy community still can’t seem to accept. And he seems prepared to drop the establishment fictions about the Israeli-Palestinian problem, since it has been apparent for years they were not helpful. And he has finally gotten NATO members to face up to meeting their commitments of devoting at least 2% of their GDP to defense (only 5 of the 28 members do that now), instead of just getting a free ride from America

But more to the point, he is moving rapidly to address the economy by cutting regulations (did you know that the Obama administration added 20,646 new regulations over his 8 years, 81,640 pages worth in just 2016!!!), and reforming the tax system (the Federal Tax code is now over 74,600 pages long!!!).  Whether these moves will work is not yet clear, but at least he is trying something new.

So on balance I am cautiously optimistic.  Of course he still has the same character flaws he had as a candidate – a thin skin and a short temper and a tendency to shoot from the hip (though some of that may be tactical). But it is not clear to me that these will, in the long run, interfere much with his effort to reform Washington. He has put pretty competent people, most of them also outsiders, into key positions in his administration, and they may well make the difference.

As I said in an earlier post, the state if the economy is the most important thing - everything else hangs on it - and the liberal’s real nightmare will be if he manages to actually boost growth from Obama’s anemic 2% into the 3-4% range. And he may well manage that.

Activist judges vs strict constructionists

So the current battle over Trump’s immigration order is a good example of the difference between “activist” judges and ”strict constructionists.” The language of the relevant law is completely unambiguous. It reads:

8 US Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens (full text can be found here)

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

There is no question at all from this section of the US Code that the president has the authority to do exactly what Trump did, irrespective of whether one thinks it was wise or not (and I make no judgement here about that). But Federal Judge James Robart didn’t like what Trump did, so despite the very clear language of the law he interpreted it “creatively” to justify putting a stay in place. And the appeals court which is hearing the case may do the same, since two of the three judges also appear to be “activist” judges.

That is the difference between an “activist” judge, who tries to get the result he/she wants, vs a ‘strict constructionist”, who follows what the law says, whether he/she likes the result or not. Of course it doesn’t help that Judge Robart gave little justification for his ruling.

People love “activist” judges when they rule the way people want them to, but of course they can just as easily bend the law to results people don’t want. Personally, I think laws ought only to be made and changed by elected representatives, not by unelected judges.

Where is the Democrat’s strategy?

 If there is one thing that stands out to me about this election and its aftermath it is that the Democrats appear to be completely rudderless, completely devoid of any effective plan for going forward. Democrats in the Senate seem to be driven by their most extreme and noisiest liberal followers to useless posturing, like last night’s 24 hour talkathon against Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, a stunt they knew from the beginning was ineffective (she was approved this morning), or like boycotting committee hearings (Republicans just approved the nominees anyway).

The Supreme Court nomination battle is another example of how rudderless the Democrats appear to be. Judge Neil Gorsuch is about as highly qualified as any nominee could be.  When he was appointed to the Federal Appeals Court in 2006 the Democratic-majority Senate confirmed him with a unanimous voice vote. He is a strict constructionist replacing Scalia, a strict constructionist, so his appointment does not change the recent balance of the Court. There is zero chance that Trump would have appointed a liberal, any more that Clinton would have appointed a conservative, so there is no surprise here. And he will be confirmed, even if the Democrats force the Republicans to use the “nuclear option” and change the Senate rules, something they can do with impunity because the Democrats unwisely already did it first under Obama, and promised during the campaign that Clinton, when elected, would do it again to to get her nominee approved.

So a sensible Democratic strategy would be to grumble a bit publicly about his being a conservative, just to placate the more rabid liberal base, and then let him get confirmed. Save the real battle for the next possible nomination which might indeed change the current balance of the court. If instead Democrats decide to go scorched earth on this first battle, which they can’t win, they are weakening themselves for the next battle, which may well be far more important.  If the Democrats had anyone thinking about long term strategy, this would be obvious.

It may be true, as some writers have recently asserted, that the liberal’s core problem is that they love to make themselves feel better with mass rallies and cute saying on signs, but are unwilling to do the hard, day-to-day talking and listening to people one-to-one, especially with people who may not agree with them. As near as I can tell the noisy protests, covered extensively by the liberal media, seem to be doing nothing effective about converting more people to their cause.

Fundamentally, Democrats desperately need to expand their base. That is the clear lesson from the tremendous losses they have suffered over the last decade at both the federal and the state levels.  And expanding the base means reaching beyond their current “true believers” to new people.  So doing things that just make the current base feel better is not effective – in fact some of the more over-the-top stuff that is going on now is probably driving people away.  It certainly drives me away. I agree with liberals on a lot of the issues, but I am reluctant to put the government back into the hands of people who appear to be so inept, so illiberal, so much like petulant children, and so lacking in any perceptible strategy. 

Recommended: How Democrats are getting played

I like the Daily News the piece today How Democrats are getting played. It says about the same thing I just said in my preceding post, but in football terms, which seem appropriate as Superbowl Sunday approaches.

Democratic strategy

I want to talk more about Democrats and the Democratic Party.  As a political independent, I am always worried when one party becomes so weak. Our system works better when the two parties are in balance. Both have good ideas, and both have nutty ideas, but when they are more or less in balance the good ideas from each side tend to come to the fore in moderate compromise, and the nutty ideas tend to get restrained by the other party. When one party becomes too dominant, the extremes in that party begin to get too much power.

Why am I focused now on the Democrats? Because the Republicans, having won a no doubt temporary majority (though hardly because of their own efforts), currently have little incentive to change, though they badly need to, while the Democrats, having been defeated so decisively at both the state and federal level over the past decade, finally have an incentive (one hopes), and a desperate need, to do some serious soul-searching.

So if I were a serious Democratic strategist, trying to figure out how to recover some of the voter base the Democrats have lost over the past decade and begin again to win some elections, what might I pay attention to?

First, the shift of the Democratic base toward the more secular liberal costal urban areas has lost a lot of the more religious voters. The facts are, according to a 2014 Pew Research study, that while there has indeed been a drop in religious affiliation over the recent decades, seven in ten Americans still profess to be religious, largely Christian. So from a strategic point of view,  dismissing and ridiculing religion (as Obama did with his snide “clinging to guns and religion” comment) is not a smart move. And simply blindly opposing some of the religious views that really matter to this group, like halting abortions, is a serious mistake. It would be far wiser and more effective to work to understand their point of view, and try to find middle-ground accommodations with them.

Second, the traditional blue-collar small-town Democratic base is in terrible trouble, hollowed out by automation and globalization and urbanization. Democrats lost this block to Trump because he acknowledged their plight, while Democrats, focused on the better-off urban liberals and their issues, just ignored them.  It not at all clear how to help them, and nothing Trump does will restore more than a few of their jobs, so they are a voting segment the Democrats could someday recover, but not if they keep referring to them as dumb, racist, sexist “deplorables”. That is block of something like 40-50 million voters the Democrats have alienated and ceded to the Republicans by default, and they can’t afford to do that if they want to win elections.

Third, the Electoral College matters. Democrats keep harping on the fact the Hillary won the popular vote to make themselves feel better, but that is irrelevant – Electoral College votes are what mattered. And whatever the arguments for or against the Electoral College system, it isn’t going to change any time soon, It would take an amendment to the Constitution to change it, and the vast 85% of rural and small-town America isn’t about to disenfranchise themselves by voting for such an amendment and giving away yet more power to a few urban centers and a few more populous states.

The Democrat’s current problem, at the federal level, is that while they have a large urban liberal base, it is mostly concentrated in just a few states and large coastal cities. That gives them popular vote numbers, but not enough Electoral College votes. And in fact, while that was not the original reason the Electoral College was constructed the way it was, it does have the effect of requiring presidential candidates to appeal to and attend to the concerns of a broad swath of America, and not just to voters in a few populous states and big cities – which in my opinion is a good thing. So any successful Democratic strategy has to win over a lot of rural and small-town Americans with conservative, religious, nationalistic, patriotic family-centered values.

In that regard, the current liberal freakout over things like Trump’s immigration policy isn’t helping their cause in the long term. This is an issue Trump voters cared about, cared about enough to overlook some of Trump’s more unsavory personal traits and vote for him anyway. For their own long term good, Democrats would do far better to acknowledge the concerns and fears of these voters and find a stance that shows some accommodation to those concerns.  All the current liberal hysteria is doing is pushing those voters further away from the possibility of recovering them to the Democratic Party.

Fourth, repeated studies have shown that America as a whole is politically centrist, very slightly biased to the conservative side. And the slight conservative bias is probably largely due to the individualist nature of American society. That means Democrats can win when they are more or less centrist. But it also means going far left, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrant would like to take the party, is not a winning strategy in the long run. (and Republicans should note that going far right isn’t a winning strategy for them either).

The Democrat’s current problem is that the base they largely depended on in this last (losing) election, the well-educated, ultra-liberal, heavily secular, internationalist, urban voters, have nothing but obvious and publically expressed disdain for the conservative, rural and small-town, largely religious, nationalistic and patriotic, working-class voters – the “deplorables”.  And those rural and small town voters in turn have nothing but equal disdain for the liberal urban voters.  Yet to win Democrats need both. Democrats have got to find a way to forge an alliance between the two groups, to find common ground and mutual respect and understanding between them.

Fifth, Democrats have got to back off of the cultural issues and focus more on the economy. It's not that women's rights and LGTBQ issues and refugee issues and  racial issues don't matter. They do matter, a lot. But a well-off urban liberal with a secure job and a home in a safe gated community can afford to worry about these trendy cultural issues; an unemployed steel worker in a decaying Midwest town is focused on more urgent issues, like paying the bills and affording medical care and keeping the family safe from the local drug gang. So long as the Democratic party remains captured by the relatively wealthy Hollywood set and urban corporate liberals, it will remain insensitive to the economic needs of the working class base it needs to recover.

The question is, can Democrats make these course corrections in time, or are they going to continue on their current self-destructive course?