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.