Deja Vu?

Progress is making new mistakes, not repeating old mistakes. I fear the Democrats may be about to repeat an old mistake in the upcoming election.

The 2016 election was the Democrat’s to lose, and they managed to lose it. Partly it was because they picked a weak and flawed candidate in Hillary, and partly it was because they didn’t have a very compelling message, but mainly it was because they seriously underestimated (a) the anger of a large portion of the voters, including especially among what should have been their base, the middle American working classes, and (b) Trump’s effectiveness at appealing to that anger. Hillary’s contemptuous and elitist dismissal of middle Americans as “deplorables” was probably the last nail in the 2016 coffin for the Democrats.

A competent Democratic party would have done a serious post-loss assessment, realized that they needed to reshape their message to broaden their appeal beyond the wealthy, college-educated coastal elites to regain at least some of the working-class base in middle America. Did they do that? Not that I can see. Instead of moving more to the center to improve their appeal to patriotic, religious traditionalists the party went further left and has been pushing policies that appeal to the secular elite, not the working class. Perhaps that was inevitable, since so many of the Democratic leaders these days are themselves part of the wealthy secular elite.

In finally coalescing behind Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat, the party did at least avoid the suicidal option of going to the extreme left with Bernie Sanders. But Biden is a fairly weak candidate, with lots of baggage. The assumption, apparently widely held among Democrats, that he can win simply because he is not Trump is, I think, naïve.  Trump may be incompetent at governing, but he is not incompetent at marketing; in fact he is very, very good at marketing, and Democrats underestimate him at their peril, as 2016 showed.

Part of the problem is that both political parties are in serious disarray, undergoing the sort of major reshuffling and realignment that occurs every few decades. The Democrats are in the middle of a bitter existential battle between the moderates and the more extreme left, and the Republicans seem not to know what they stand for anymore. That means that neither party at the moment has the sort of experienced, consistent and competent leadership that it would have in more normal times, nor the sort of coherent message that such leadership would provide.

The polls suggest that this election is still Biden’s to lose. FiveThirtyEight, the most reliable polling site, gives Biden a 70% chance of winning at the moment, but that is just about what they predicted for Hillary at the same point in the 2016 election. Betting odds, which are usually a fairly good predictor, have the two much closer. The composite betting odds compiled by FiveThirtyEight are down to Biden 50.9 vs Trump 48.6 as of today - essentially a tie. Democrats need to temper their confidence and up their game, and not necessarily believe all the positive spin that the mostly liberal media is feeding them.

They have not addressed their glaring mistake in 2016 of ignoring the concerns of the working classes, and many of those people are even more distressed now, out of work because of COVIID.  And Democratic hesitancy to deal effectively with, or even condemn, the destructive riots and looting in some of our cities over the past few weeks, or the rising crime rates, is not going to help them.  

There is a certain deja vu feel to this election. Democrats may be about to make the same mistake that they made in 2016.

Why listening to the mainstream news isn’t useful

Nassim Taleb has argued, persuasively, that listening to or reading the daily news doesn’t make one better informed. Indeed it can actually make one less well informed. There are lots of reasons for this, among them that most news organizations have become “political operatives with bylines” for either the political right or the political left. Nor has it helped that most mainstream newsroom have drastically reduced their reporting staffs, relying instead on picking up and rewriting material from other, often unreliable, sources (like the propaganda put out by other governments).

I thought of this as I read yet another piece in the New York Times, by another not-very-well informed journalist, about what a military threat China poses to the U.S. Balderdash!!

China uses 14 million barrels of oil a day, as of last year. If China went to war it would need even more to sustain its military operations. It produces about 4 million barrels a day from domestic wells, and has to import the remaining 10 million barrels a day to keep its economy running, its factories producing, its farms well fertilized, and its internal transportation system operating. And where does that oil come from? Mostly the Middle East, thousands of miles away along sea routes easily disrupted not only by the American navy, but even by the navies of Japan or Indian.  Cut that route and any Chinese military effort will quickly grind to a halt.

Then there is food. China has limited good farmland. China needs to feed 21% of the world’s population (1.4 billlion people) on only 7% of the world’s useable farmland.  China imports over $100 billion in food each year. In a pinch it could – just barely – feed its population a meager diet of domestically-grown rice and grains in a year with a good harvest. Where does the rest of the food come from? Again, from thousands of miles away (the US and Brazil are the largest sources) along sea routes easily interdicted by the US navy.

China has lots of other vulnerabilities, but these two alone make it clear that China poses no real military threat to the US, no matter how many advanced weapons they show off to a credulous American media. So why does a reporter from what is supposed to be the nation’s leading newspaper not know this? And how much of the other stuff reported in the mainstream media is equally as naïve, uninformed, or biased beyond recognition by the journalist’s ideological bias?

COVID Plans

Congress managed to put together a $1.8-2 trillion (depending on how one measures it) rescue package to blunt the initial economic effects of the COVID pandemic. That helped for about the first 60-90 days. But the pandemic hasn’t gone away. In fact in some parts of the country infections and deaths are still spiking.

What I find interesting, and disconcerting, is that neither political party seems to have any long-term plan for dealing with the economic disruption. Congress is fighting over another short-term fiscal stimulus, which is certainly needed. But again, it is just short term (and they can’t even agree on that). But this is a huge long-term problem. Lots of businesses, especially small businesses that make up almost half of the US GDP, have closed their doors permanently. And lots of large businesses, especially in the travel and leisure and services industries, are in the process of downsizing drastically, which will have a huge impact on unemployment. Where is the long-term thinking about how to deal with this?

It is another indication of how dysfunctional our government has become. It would be easy to blame Trump for all of this (and he certainly hasn’t been any help), but that would be shortsighted and naive. This dysfunction has been coming on for a long time, decades at least, and is certainly one of the things that has driven the populist uprising that put Trump in office, for better or worse.