Time for liberals to stop acting out and get real

Once again, for the third time in recent months, the Democrats have lost another special election, this time for the Montana House seat vacated by new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke   Of course the usual suspects in the media are once again trying their best to paint it as somehow positive for the Democrats – arguing that they didn’t lose by as much as they expected, so the GOP must be in deep trouble.  It’s a pathetic argument, and reflects how completely out of touch some of the media talking heads are with the real world.

Meanwhile Democrats continue to flail away at the Trump administration, outraged that Trump’s son-in-law might have been trying to establish a private back channel to the Russians (a common practice in diplomacy used by all previous administrations, including Obama’s), outraged that he fired FBI director Comey (even though they themselves wanted to fire him), outraged that he proposes to cut the budget and downsize the government (even though we are going half a trillion dollars a year more into debt with the present budget and government size).  Mostly it looks to me like spoiled children acting out.  

We badly need an effective opposition party – there are things the Republicans want to do that ought to be effectively opposed; there are issues that need a serious and honest public debate. But the current Democratic Party isn’t that effective opposition party, which is why they have been losing elections all across the country for the past decade. I am beginning to see serious speculation in the press that the Democratic Party is on its way to extinction, and considering how inept, corrupt, and out of touch the party machinery has been recently I think it is a real possibility.  Political parties have gone extinct before when they simply no longer had a message that appealed to enough voters. It might be happening again.

There are certainly enough opportunities for a new political party to gain traction – one that paid attention to the health of the economy as the engine that drives everything else, one that attended to the displacement of workers by automation, one that attended to income inequality and the economic plight of the working middle class, one that got real about government spending and reducing – or at least not further increasing - the national debt.  These used to be the sorts of down home things (except perhaps for the debt issue) that Democrats worried about, before they got lost in the trendy cultural issues of the wealthy coastal liberal elites.

If Democrats don’t get real sometime soon, and face up to an honest reassessment of their messages and policy proposals, and try to reach out to those “deplorables” who used to be a reliable base for them, I think they will continue to lose elections and soon be largely irrelevant on the American political scene.  And that would be dangerous for the country – we badly need an effective and realistic opposition party.

Recommended: Anti-Trump Democrats Invite Chaos

I see today's Wall Street Journal agrees with my previous post. See Anti-Trump Democrats Invite Chaos.

Are we watching a Coup D'etat?

There is a piece in yesterdays Federalist site entitled We Are Watching A Slow-Motion Coup D’etat. Now the Federalist is right-leaning, so I would normally discount much of what they say as biased. But in this case I think they may be on to something real.

I suggested months ago before the election that the entire Washington establishment - the ruling elites and their supporters in the media, Republican and Democratic alike - was against Trump because as an outsider he threatened their cozy incestuous little world. Once he was elected, to the shock and dismay of those who thought they had defeated him, and began to upset their world for real, the bureaucracy - the so -called "deep state" - really turned on him, and the attacks have been incessant since then. He has certainly given them openings with his sometimes intemperate tweets and contradictory statements, but they have gone far from those minor transgressions to fabricate damaging stories and leak classified information to destroy not only Trump but many of his cabinet members and staff.

One symptom of how bad this situation is is the amount of leaked information appearing in the press. Even private conversations from the Oval Office over the telephone with foreign leaders gets leaked within hours to the press. Even highly classified information is leaked. Clearly even the intelligence community is in on these attacks. Governing effectively requires a lot of private conversations and even private deals - there is no way the government can function if even the most private discussions get into the press within hours.

I am beginning to think we really do have a government crisis here - and it's not Trump's crisis - its the crisis of a government bureaucracy that has gone rogue - decided that it knows better than the voters and is determined to unseat a government the voters elected - if by a narrow margin.

As I have said before, this election was a revolt of the working class  (the real working class, not the poor that the liberals so often label as the working class) against the elites.  If the elites destroy Trump - the representative the working class voted for - I think we will have a real constitutional crisis.  Trump wasn't my choice for president (neither was Hillary), but he was lawfully elected. If he is deposed by these attacks, than democracy will have been thwarted and we are no longer a democratic society. That ought to worry all of  us a lot!.

If there were a one-day strike…..

Here is an interesting thought experiment.  Suppose all the elites – the high income, college-educated people who run the country – went on strike for a day? What would happen? Professors might not turn up at their classes, CEOs and their executive management teams would not turn up, and it might be hard to complete a commercial real estate deal or sue someone. A few TV shows would not have their on-screen talent. Congress wouldn’t be in session and some big business meetings might not occur. Would anyone even notice?

Now suppose all the working class people went on strike for a day. There would be no public transportation – no busses or trains or planes or taxies. Stores, including grocery stores, would have to close because there would be no clerks, but then there would be no deliveries of new stock anyway since truck drivers would be on strike too. Of course there would be no mail or package delivery. If your power or phone or water or sewer or cable system went down, no one would fix it. If your car broke down there would be no one to fix it. If you house caught on fire, there would be no fire department to help. If you had a heart attack or an accident there would be no ambulance service for you. If you were robbed, there would be no police department to turn to. There would be no radio or TV, and movie theaters would be closed, and of course all streaming media would be unavailable. Gas stations would close, but they wouldn’t be getting gas supplies anyway because there would be no truck drivers. Nothing would get cleaned, or repaired, or installed. Hospitals and doctor’s offices would close, because there would be no nursing staff. And on and on and on……….

Yet the elites run the country and make most of the money.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

The real disaster

Liberals, and especially the liberal media, are doing their best to convince us that the Trump administration is a disaster and that Trump ought to be removed from the presidency. I would suggest that if they succeed in destroying his presidency, that will bring on the real disaster. Certainly Trump is unorthodox, and he wouldn’t be my choice for the job, but he was elected because of the extreme reaction of a large portion of the voting public against a system they see as favoring the elites and neglecting the working people – as discussed in the book recommended in my previous post. If they succeed in destroying the Trump administration, I think the political reaction will be vicious, even more vicious than what is going on now, further poisoning the already poisonous political atmosphere in Washington  and I fear for the stability of our nation. Liberals in the Democratic Party need to pay attention to why they are losing elections and how they can recover their working class base, rather than just flailing away mindlessly at the Trump administration.

In fact, from where I sit, the disgusting and unseemly food fights in Congress and the media over things like whether the Russians tried to affect the election (of course they did, just as we try to influence their elections – get real!) or whether Comey ought to have been fired (yes, Obama should have fired him a long time ago) are childish distractions from the nation’s real problems – a massive and growing debt, crumbling infrastructure, growing income inequality, etc, etc.  This is a case of the media fighting over the arrangement of the deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.

If there is a disaster, it is that our political system is so broken that politicians are acting like cage fighters, bent on destroying each other at all costs, rather than acting like legislatures and running the country wisely. And that the media is participating in, and even fueling, this destructive behavior.

Recommended: White Working Class

From the conclusion of Joan C. Williams new book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (ISBN 978-1633693784) , a serious look by a competent liberal academic at the dynamic that defeated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.  I think she has nailed it. I strongly recommend this book as you try to understand what is happening, not only in America but in Europe as well (emphasis mine):

this book describes a relationship gone bad: that be­tween the white working class and the PME (Professional-Managerial Elites) . Empathy is a good place to start, but remedying this relationship will require more. Like all good family therapy, it will require not just that the family “troublemaker” learn to behave. What’s amiss is the family dynamic that cast the “trouble­maker” in that unhappy role. Changing that dynamic re­quires change on the part of the family members who are “not in the wrong.”

 It’s a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss “the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,” this is a rec­ipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. If you like what that dynamic is doing to the country, by all means continue business as usual.

I don’t, for two reasons. The first is ethical: I am commit­ted to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. Another key message is that elite truths don’t make sense in working-class lives. Working-class truths do, and my hope is that I’ve provided a window into why. If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.

 Once the elite cast the white working class outside of its ambit of responsibility, the elite did what elites do. They ignored those who print their New York Times, make their KitchenAides, tell them at the doctor’s to undress from the waist down. The professional class first stopped notic­ing, and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness.

The more rabid liberals are trying their best to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump, in hopes that they can replace him (eventually) with one of their own. My reading of the situation is that if they succeed, the mass of people who voted him in will see this as the elites destroying one of their own, and it will redouble their fury at the elites, with disastrous results for the Democratic Party and dangerous results for all of us.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

There are several useful "laws" of organizations, humorous but often accurate, including:

-  the Peter Principle (1): people will be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, and will then remain there, and it's corollary: over time all positions in an organization will come to be filled with people who have reached their level of incompetence.

- Parkinson's Law (2): Work will expand to fill the time allotted, and its more recent logical consequence, bureaucracies will inevitably grow without bound.

- Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior (3): organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.

I have just come across another that seems important.

In 1911 German sociologist Robert Michels proposed "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" (4) - all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. Or, in shortened form, every organization, no matter how how it was originally organized, will end up primarily serving the interests of  an elite few.

That is certainly true of every large organization I was in, and it certainly seems to be true of our American government.

References:

1. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, by Laurence J. Peter

2. Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration, by C. Northcot Parkinson

3. http://www.craiglarman.com

4. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, by Robert Michels

FBI Director Comey's firing

The liberal politicians and press are outraged at Trump's firing a few days ago of FBI Director Comey, even though they themselves were calling for him to be fired only a few weeks ago, because of his last-minute opening and then closing of the Clinton email investigation in the few days just before the election. Apparently when liberals called for his firing it was sensible, but when Trump actually does it it is a threat to the nation. The level of hypocrisy in politics these days - from both liberals and conservatives - is breathtaking.

Actually, I think he should have been fired a long time ago. By law, the FBI is only supposed to investigate, not make prosecution judgements. So in the Clinton email case, the FBI was, by current rules, suppose to just present their findings to the attorney general, who would decide whether to prosecute or not. His public announcement of the investigation's findings (itself highly unusual and highly improper), and then his announcement that the findings didn't justify prosecution were completely out of line and against current government procedures and rules.  And of course the investigation itself was very strange indeed - no grand jury, no subpoenas, cozy deals with Clinton staff about what questions couldn't be asked, agreement that staff laptops (and the evidence they contained) could be destroyed, etc, etc  All in all I think he was a serious detriment to the FBI, and it was high time he was replaced..

The Core of the American Political Problem

I have been listening to the arguments over the new Republican health care bill, and it occurs to me that the issue really boils down to the same issue that divides the country on most political issues: we want lots of nice things but we don’t want to pay for them.

People want to subsidize insurance for the poor, but they don’t want to pay for it with higher taxes

People want pre-existing conditions to be covered, but they don’t want to pay the higher premiums insurance companies would have to charge everyone just to stay in business.

People want whatever plan they have to cover the costs of the best (and most expensive) medical care available, but they don’t want to pay the higher premiums that would entail.

There is no free lunch. If the government subsidizes lots of people’s insurance, the money has to come from somewhere. That was the core problem with ObamaCare, and ObamaCare solved it, not by raising taxes, but by borrowing yet more money and growing the national debt – one reason the national debt almost doubled under the Obama administration.

If we went to a single-payer (ie – Government) insurance system, as many liberals would prefer, the money would still have to come from somewhere. The logical place would be higher taxes, but no one wants that, and no politician seems prepared to point this out.

This, it seems to me, is at the root of many political issues: we the American voters want more than we are willing to pay for. Many European countries, more socialist in nature, tax their people heavily to provide all the state-provided services. Americans just are not willing to be taxed that much.

Recommended: California Progressives Fail the Immigration Test

The article California Progressives Fail the Immigration Test is interesting, especially as California touts itself as the beacon of progressive government in the face of the rightward drift of the rest of the country. As the author points out, California has been ruled almost exclusively by progressives for years now, so it is a fair test of their policies. But in fact, California is in a bad way, even by the measures progressives care about - social mobility, education, income inequality, etc.  That ought to cause progressives to re-examine their policies, but of course it doesn't.

Recommended: How Democrats Lost Their Way - And How They Can Find It Again

David Ignatius has an interesting piece in today's Washington Post: How Democrats Lost Their Way - And How They Can Find It Again. He talks about Charles Peters and his new book "We Do Our Part".  The essence is along the lines I have been suggesting - that the Democrats have to lose their fascination with and dependence on the wealthy coastal elites and reconnect with the workers in flyover country who were once the base of their party.

The interesting question is: can they do that? Or are they now too embedded in the coastal ultraliberals and their issues to move back to the center?

The Greenland ice loss issue

This week’s Economist has an alarming short article about the tremendous loss of ice in Greenland over the past year. Well, maybe….  It seems the Economist was a little selective in what data they reviewed.  Readers who really care might want to read the article What the Economist Didn’t Tell You about Greenland Ice in the Cato Institute Blog. Links to the original Economist articles can be found in the Cato Institute blog posting.

And if the whole global warming issue is a concern to you, you might also want to read the article The Limits of Knowledge and the Climate Change Debate. And perhaps the article A Climate of Science Deception which refutes the government's claim, widely reported in the press, that Atlantic hurricanes have been getting worse, presumably due to global warming, a claim based on presenting a carefully chosen subset of the data.  Also their white paper Climate Models and Climate Reality: A Closer Looks at a Lukewarm World. 

The Cato Institute's position is that the world is indeed warming (they are not climate change deniers), and that human activity is certainly a contributor to this warming, but that the climate science is nowhere near as certain of the likely outcomes as the press releases would suggest, that the climate models and the economic models built on them, and therefor the policy positions advanced on the basis of these models are highly suspect.

America as a corporation

American corporations are required by law to file annually a Form 10-K, which exhaustively details the business's operations, including its expenses, its true profits or losses, its risks, etc, etc., etc.  A short article in this week's Economist has alerted me to the fact that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's sometime CEO, has launched a website which is, in effect, a Form 10-K for the US government. It can be found at https://usafacts.org.  The Economist article can be found here.

It is worth perusing this site, because it gives an interesting view of our government's operation. I have just begun to explore it, but already I am impressed.  And the Economist article gives a nice summary of what the government's Form 10-K reveals.