Meditations on today's world

I recently re-watched Ken Burns’ excellent 2014 seven-episode mini-series The Roosevelts; An Intimate History.  It reminded me again that Washington politics has always been nasty and brutal; just as many bitter accusations were flung about when Teddy Roosevelt decided to run for a third term as one sees in today’s news, and even worse followed Franklin Roosevelt all through his three terms. And the news media was just as biased then as it is today.  All that has really changed is the new and powerful echo chamber produced by social media, which locks people even more solidly into their (usually unexamined) prejudices and political biases.

Looking at Washington politics today, with Democrats endlessly and futilely wasting their time trying to bring down President Trump rather than trying to actually propose useful legislation or at least trying to position themselves to win the next election, and Republicans seemingly out to lunch (I have no idea what the Republican party stands for these days, and perhaps they don’t either), I am reminded of nothing so much as a bunch of undisciplined third graders on a playground squabbling over some senseless game.

Among the Democrats only Nancy Pelosi, minority leader of the House, seems to have her head on straight, I don’t much like or trust her, but she is undoubtedly a brilliant political strategist, and clearly understands that the endless calls by some of her colleagues to impeach the president on the one hand, and the naïve and disruptive behavior of “the gang” on the other hand are distracting her party from the serious business of trying to keep the House and win back the Senate. But she is having serious trouble keeping her party in line.

Among the Republicans only Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell seems to know what is important. He is tightly focused on getting as many “conservative” judges appointed as possible, to balance out the “liberal activist” judges that have been appointed over the past eight years. (I approve of this – laws should be made by a majority vote of elected legislators, not “created” by individual unelected judges to fit their political or social biases). He understands that presidential polices can disappear at the next election, but judge appointments will shape the judiciary, and hence the effects of legislation, for far longer. I have no idea what any of the other Republicans in the House or Senate are focused on.

But in the end we get the presidents and legislators we deserve – we who vote have put them in to office, and  those who don’t bother to vote have only themselves to blame if they don’t like who gets elected.  We humans are inherently gullible and easy to sway. This seems to be every bit as true of the “educated” elite as of the less-well-educated masses. Candidates know this and get themselves professionally “packaged” like products and promise us all sorts of goodies from the cookie jar, and if we are gullible enough to believe them then we have to live with the consequences.

Clearly the American political system is broken. But I suspect that is only a symptom of a much deeper problem in our society. Our educational system has clearly failed to educate the average citizen well enough to understand the economic and political issues they are voting on, or even to understand the logic of our political and government system (Why has civics been dropped from most school curriculums?). And it seems to me the advent of social media and the internet is turning out to be much more of a danger than an advantage to our society. Indeed, it seems more of a boon to purveyors of lies and fake news, to hackers who want to steal identities and data, and to organizations like Facebook that collect details about us to sway our votes or sell us products we really don’t need.  I watch the Millennial generation wandering about the world with their face buried in their iPhone playing games in virtual worlds (like Pokemon) and wonder how well they are prepared to deal with the harsh and unforgiving realities of  the real world.

I argued in a series of posts some months ago (here) that America had no external enemies who really threatened us, and that when our empire collapsed, as it surely will someday, it will probably be from internal failings, not external enemies. Perhaps this is the beginning of those internal failings

Is it really racism?

I have noticed over the years that when people accuse someone else of something, the accusation often says more about the accuser than the accused.  In particular, it never occurs to people to accuse someone of something they themselves have never thought of doing . So people tend to accuse others of things that are already on their mind.

Recall, for example, the rabid Clinton supporters who worried publicly during the 2016 campaign that Trump might not accept losing the election and would work to subvert the new president. These seem to be the same people who, when in fact Trump won the election, were themselves unable to accept the fact that Clinton lost, and are still working to subvert Trump.

So what about the current fuss about Trump’s admonition to the four female House members that if they don’t like the United States they should leave it and go back to their countries of origin? Was that really racist, as so many claim?   It was certainly rude and aggressive, but in fact no ruder or more aggressive than things that these four have said recently about Trump.

It seems to me that in making this claim that Trump is racist they may be exposing the fact that they themselves are racist. For example, they all seem to support Senator Cory Booker’s proposal to pay reparations to African Americans whose ancestors were exploited as slaves. Not to the descendants of Asian Chinese immigrants who were exploited in the 1800’s to build the railroads. Not to the descendants of white Irish men who were exploited to build the nation’s canals. Not to the descendants of Eastern Europeans who were exploited in sweatshops in New York and San Francisco. But only to those of the African race – in other words only to those of a particular race. Isn’t that blatant racism? (And by the way,. most of us have ancestors somewhere in the past who were exploited by someone)

Or what about the persistent liberal attack on “white privilege”.  Not “privilege” itself, WHITE privilege. That sure sounds like a racially-tinged statement to me.

I certainly wish Trump would censor his Twitter posts and behave in a manner more suitable to his office, but I think the charge of “racism” is being overused. In fact I notice that just about anyone who disagrees with the far left agenda these days gets automatically labeled as racist , which suggest to me that the far left is itself far more racist than they would like to admit, or perhaps than they even realize.

More reflections on the upcoming election

I suppose it is because I am re-listening to Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century that I got to thinking about 2020 election again. On the Republican side of course we have Donald Trump, who is unlikely to be successfully challenged for the Republican nomination. One thing can be said for Trump; he is authentic. That is, what we saw on the 2016 campaign trail is exactly what we got as a president, warts, eccentricity, twitter storms and all. No media expert “packaged” him. And in fact, to his credit, he has tried his best to fulfill all of his campaign promises, whether we agreed with them or not, which is not usual among politicians.

Moreover, he has addressed at least some of the outstanding problems the U.S. has faced and which previous administration of both parties largely kicked down the road – the flow of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers across the southern border, China’s unfair trade practices, the North Korean problem, excessive federal regulations, our endless wars in the Middle East, etc, etc. I don’t always agree with the way he has addressed these problems, but at least he has addressed them. He has not addressed issues like the coming disruption from automation and artificial intelligence, the growing income inequality, the burgeoning national debt, the increasing power of large corporations, or the increasing power of big data powerhouses like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

On the Democratic side the leading candidates, from which the eventual nominee will most likely be selected are Biden, Sanders, Harris and Warren. Thus far Biden, Sanders and Harris have offered no clue as to how they would approach these difficult problems, relying instead on vague populist promises to gift everyone out of the public purse (Medicare for all, free college, reparations for slavery, subsidized health care for illegal immigrants, etc, etc). Warren is more of a policy wonk - which may doom her candidacy, since most voters don’t read policy statements - but even her policies, as described on her website, are pretty vague “do good and avoid evil” statements.

Non-college educated conservative religious working class voters are often characterized (by liberals) as ignorant and ideologically hide-bound, and that in fact may be true of many of them. But the evidence suggests that college educated liberal coastal elites are just as ignorant and ideologically hide-bound. Certainly the policies the more leftist of them are supporting suggest they can’t do simple math and have very little understanding of history, economics or human psychology.

This leads me to surmise that the next election is not likely to change things fundamentally. If Trump is re-elected (likely at the moment, in my opinion, given the potential Democratic field), we will of course get more of the same – endless attempts by Democrats and the media to destroy Trump, a continuation of the muscular, if erratic, “America First” foreign policy, a business-friendly reduction in regulations and the powers of federal agencies, and a Congress still immobilized by partisan conflict.

If the Democrats take the presidency I assume we will now get endless attempts by the Republicans to de-legitimize the Democratic president – payback for the endless attacks on Trump. The same problems will still be there – China, North Korea, the immigration issue, the Middle East, etc., and Congress will still be largely immobilized by partisan conflict, which means that few if any of the populist programs promised during the campaign will have a chance of becoming law. And I assume whichever of these candidates wins the election, they will continue to focus mostly on domestic issues and ignore, to the extent they can, foreign policy. The possible exception might be Biden, but then I wonder if he will bring back into power the Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberal "liberal hegemony" foreign policy crowd that got us into the endless Middle East wars.

All in all, it seems to me Peter Zeihan’s prediction that America will largely withdraw from the world now that it is energy-independent is coming true, whichever party wins the next election. This probably reflects the increasing weight of the Millennial generation in the voting population. We may decry many of the things politicians do, but we need to remember that to a large extent the politicians in office are there because they represent the majority attitudes of we the voters who put them there.

Recommended: A New Americanism, Why a Nation Needs a National Story

There is an excellent article in the March/April 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs by Harvard historian Jill Lepore entitled A New Americanism, Why a Nation Needs a National Story. I think her argument is right on, especially the comment that if serious historians won't write the national story, it will be written by

"Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence. When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism."