Monthly Archives: June 2017

Favored Few

June 26, 2017 – 11:10 am

There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

– Franklin Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination” (1932)

This week’s featured post is “Turn the Page“. It’s my suggestion for Democratic messaging in 2018.

This week everybody was talking about the unveiling of McConnell’s secret ObamaCare repeal bill

There are several good summaries of what’s in the bill, but the two main facts you need to know are:

As the husband of a cancer survivor, I worry about pre-existing conditions. Atlantic‘s summary:

Simply put, the Senate bill will open the door to states forcing people with pre-existing conditions into segregated markets that will lead them to pay far, far higher costs than everyone else.

The bill doesn’t allow insurers to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions directly, a point you’ll hear a lot from its defenders. However, an insurance company can structure its offerings to herd healthy people into bare-bones plans that cost little, but don’t cover the kinds of things people with pre-existing conditions are likely to need, like prescription drugs. (To keep her cancer from coming back, my wife takes a drug that costs thousands per month. So far insurance has covered almost all of that.) Plans that offer more complete coverage will then appeal mainly to the very sick, and their premiums will sky-rocket accordingly.

This is the flip side of a Republican claim that sounds sensible on the surface: Rather than mandate the same coverage for everybody, their bill lets people choose the coverage that makes sense for them. As a result, though, healthy people leave the insurance pool that pays for more extensive coverage, leaving only sick people.

On the question of whether it has the votes to pass, no one is even asking the 48 Democratic senators to vote for it; Democrats were completely shut out of the drafting process and the bill is going straight to the floor with no committee hearings. So far five Republicans have said they’ll vote against it “in its current form“, which could mean their votes are available if they can get a concession or two to assuage their angry voters. Several others have expressed concerns which James Fallows interprets with some cynicism:

So far in 2017, “concerns” from GOP Sens has always meant, “I’ll make sure the bill/nominee winds up with 50 votes.” Any diff this time?

Norm Ornstein believes that McConnell designed the bill with intentional problems that various recalcitrant senators can take credit for fixing, thus justifying their “reluctant” vote.

FWIW, the betting markets are split on the repeal of various ObamaCare provisions.

I have thought all along that smart Republicans wouldn’t want the bill to pass, because then they’ll own the ensuing disaster. You can keep voters from knowing what’s in a bill before you vote on it, but once it becomes law they’re going to find out. As Ross Douthat put it:

The Obamacare replacement that the House sent to the Senate might as well have had a note scrawled across its pages: Save us from ourselves.

But neither would any individual politician want to be seen as the reason the GOP’s highest-profile promise gets broken. So the smart move is to make someone else the fall guy for killing ObamaCare repeal.

First the House Freedom Caucus was on the hook. Then they renegotiated the bill in a way that passed the buck to House Republican moderates, who caved, passing the buck to the Senate. Now Senate conservatives and moderates are maneuvering against each other. If neither blocks the bill, then the onus will fall on the House again to accept the Senate’s changes. This game of chicken will be lost either by some handful of Republican congresspeople, or by millions of Americans who won’t be able to afford the insurance they need.

Probably the best outcome for Republicans politically is for the House and Senate each to pass a bill, and then blame each other for why no bill makes it through both houses. Then their candidates can tell the voters: “I voted to keep my promise, but those jokers in the other house screwed us up.”

Medicaid: Democrats need to remember that the very poor have been successfully demonized as lazy bums looking for handouts, but the working poor — the couples struggling to raise kids on some combination of just-above-minimum-wage jobs — still have a lot of public sympathy. Those are the people Medicaid expansion has helped, and they’re the ones the Republican bill will hurt.

I don’t know if he thought it up himself, but I just saw somebody comment on Facebook: “Hail Mary, full of grace, please leave Medicaid in place.”

Meanwhile, ObamaCare itself is more popular than it has been since 2010.

 

and the Georgia special election

Democrat Jon Ossoff lost 52%-48%. You can make the same excuse Democrats have made in the other special election: It’s a Republican district; Tom Price won it in 2016 by over 20 points. Still, Ossoff had gotten 49% in the jungle primary, and netting that extra 1% didn’t seem like it should have been that big a lift. But it was. (BTW, his 48% Tuesday doesn’t necessarily mean that he lost support; turnout was higher. Ossoff got 124K votes Tuesday, versus 92K in the primary.)

Georgia-6 is a well-educated suburban district where Trump won by only 1%. So the Ossoff-wins theory was based on two ideas: (1) Republicans who voted for Trump reluctantly are ready to turn against him. (2) Voters who have turned against Trump are willing to take it out on the whole GOP (or possibly they’re just too dispirited to show up to vote). But that didn’t happen, at least not in sufficient numbers.

Nate Silver’s crew “plays the Democratic blame game“.

natesilver: For me, there are basically three prototypes of campaigns that Democrats will need to run in 2018: (i) anti-Trump; (ii) anti-Republican; (iii) anti-incumbent.

I think Georgia 6 ought to have been an anti-Trump campaign, given that Trump is a much bigger liability in Georgia 6 than the GOP overall is and that people are doing pretty well there economically.

For me, there’s lots of room for populist progressives to do well as anti-Republican and anti-incumbent messengers. I actually don’t think they’re ideal as anti-Trump messengers, however, which is what you needed in this district.

The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy more-or-less agrees:

In a district as red as Georgia’s Sixth, the disheartening truth is that Ossoff probably wouldn’t have done better had he run to the left. While many Republicans have some misgivings about Trump, they have even more serious misgivings about voting for a Democrat. According to that same opinion poll in the Journal-Constitution, just one in three Republican voters said that they were supporting Handel to express support for Trump. What motivated them, they said, were traditional Republican issues: taxes, government spending, and illegal immigration.

but I’ve also been thinking about the role of religion in politics

In Friday’s NYT, Daniel Williams published an op-ed that drew a lot of comment, “The Democrats’ Religion Problem“, which concludes:

Only through a willingness to ground their policy proposals in the religious values of prospective voters will they be able to convince people of faith that they are not a threat to their values but are instead an ally in a common cause.

I’m debating whether to write a more complete discussion of this next week, but I think this article drew attention because it simultaneously points to an important issue and gets it wrong.

The bigger problem, which hits Republicans in exactly the same way when they talk about science, is establishing authenticity. Voters want to know that what you’re saying is not just a talking point that you could reverse tomorrow, but is rooted in values that come from a part of your identity that has some staying power. (Fleshing out the science analogy: When I hear a politician dissemble on global warming, it makes me wonder what evidence he wouldn’t be able to rationalize his way around. Does truth actually mean anything to him?)

The point shouldn’t be that all politicians need to learn how to talk about God, even if they don’t really believe. It’s that if you can’t use the language of the old-time religion, which is the traditional way to express deep-rooted values, how are you going to communicate that depth?

In other religion-and-politics news, the Southern Baptists condemned white supremacy.

and you might also be interested to know …

The Washington Post had a big Trump-and-Russia story Friday, outlining what the Obama administration knew about Russian interference in the election and when it knew it. The general theme is that Obama could and should have done more in response, but was worried what else Putin might have up his sleeve and believed that Clinton would win anyway.

The most interesting new fact:

The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

So the plan came all the way from the top, and had Putin’s personal attention. And somehow our side knew that.

California failed to move forward on a statewide single-payer healthcare plan. Nevada’s governor vetoed a buy-into-Medicaid plan that basically would have given everyone in the state a public healthcare option. Vermont made an earlier unsuccessful attempt at single-payer.

In an economy so dominated by interstate or international corporations, I have a lot of doubt about whether single-payer can be made to work at the state level. I’m rooting for somebody to prove me wrong.

Another place where I hope to be proved wrong: I’m generally skeptical of technological solutions to environmental problems — clean coal, geo-engineering, and so forth. But a carbon-capture plant just opened in Switzerland.

That Carrier plant in Indianapolis that Trump “saved” just before he took office? They’ll be laying off 338 workers in July, and another 290 just before Christmas. And the $16 million Carrier pledged to invest in the plant? That’s paying for job-killing automation, not for new production that creates new jobs.

Important story in yesterday’s NYT about the collapse of retail in rural areas. My hometown (Quincy, Illinois) is exactly the kind of place the article is talking about: Once a manufacturing town, it remade itself as a regional center. Its new economy is largely based on the regional hospital, the area’s biggest community college, and a cluster of big chain stores that draw customers from a 30-40 mile radius. (Many of the even smaller towns within that radius have seen their retail completely dry up. It’s hard even to keep a local convenience store going.) That base then supports other commerce (like restaurants and small boutiques) that maybe you wouldn’t drive 40 miles for, but you will visit because you’re in town anyway.

That new economy isn’t collapsing yet, but you can see the strain as people get more and more stuff from Amazon and other online retailers that have no local presence. Home Depot and Old Navy may not hire as many people or pay them as well as the old factories did, but working there beats being unemployed.

Chris Mooney writes in the WaPo about the effects of climate change on the coral reefs of the Florida Keys.

Ecologists describe the 360-mile-long Florida Reef Tract as a global treasure. It is the world’s third-largest barrier reef, although much less famous than Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

But less than 10 percent of the reef system is now covered with living coral. Scientists anticipate that as early as 2020, it could be in line for almost yearly bleaching events, in which heat stresses upend the metabolism of corals, in some cases killing them. The reefs experienced back-to-back major bleaching events in 2014 and 2015.

… “When I was a child in the ’60s, the water was so clear I used to think of it as being Coke bottle blue,” said Stafford, citing the colored glass some Coke bottlers used. “And the reef was so healthy, all the coral was very alive. I don’t recall even thinking about bleaching or coral death or coral diseases back then.”

Killing the reef habitat is not just a moral catastrophe, it’s an economic problem for an economy based on tourism. Fighting global warming might cost jobs in West Virginia, but not fighting it costs jobs in Florida.

Jared is back from the Middle East and it turns out that Israeli/Palestinian peace is actually a hard problem. Who knew?

Murray Energy founder Bob Murray wasn’t going to be the focus of John Oliver’s piece on coal mining, but then his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to try to intimidate Oliver. This was the result. (The Murray segment starts around 12:45. Be sure you don’t miss the closing.) And yes, Murray is suing.

After the Knicks drafted Frank Ntilinkina Thursday, Nate Silver fantasized about them re-acquiring Thanasis Antetokounmpo. Then they could

play a lineup of Ntilinkina, Antetokounmpo, Kuzminskas, Porzingis, and Hernangomez and lead the league in Scrabble points for the foreseeable future.

and let’s close with a lesson in bad writing

The humor site McSweeney’s gives step-by-step instructions for getting from a simple, active sentence like “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” to the more obscure “Speed was involved in a jumping-related incident while a fox was brown.”

In a similar way, the article points out at the end, “A police officer shot a black person.” can turn into “The St. Louis County Police Department was involved in an officer-involved shooting after officers came under heavy gunfire.”

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Turn the Page

June 26, 2017 – 9:51 am

Since Ronald Reagan, America has lived under a regime of conservative ideas that Democrats have sometimes been able to resist, but not to overcome or replace. That aging regime is ready to fall, but Bastilles never storm themselves. The Democrats’ 2018 campaign needs to be negative, but not personal: Bad as he is, Trump is just one example of the larger problem.

I keep hearing two theories about how Democrats can retake Congress in 2018 and start retaking the country. The first is to run against Donald Trump, who is an embarrassment to the nation, is historically unpopular, and may turn out to have committed impeachable offenses. The second is to run on a clear, positive agenda that can win back the working-class voters who have wandered away from the party of FDR and into the hands of the current huckster-in-chief.

Each approach has its virtues, and either would probably produce some gains in 2018, as mid-term elections usually do for the party out of power. But neither is quite right. Neither reflects the way that major change happens in America.

Beyond anti-Trump. The pure anti-Trump message is the easiest one to see through. The reason it’s not enough to run against Trump is that Trump isn’t the whole problem, not by a long shot. Yes, he’s corrupt. And yes, it’s dangerous for the country to have a president who understands so little about what presidents do. But think about the worst of what’s going on right now: trying to pay for a major tax cut for the rich by kicking millions of the working poor off Medicaid, undoing what little President Obama accomplished on climate change, and (though this isn’t getting nearly as much attention) sinking ever deeper into the quagmire conflicts of Syria and Afghanistan.

Just about any Republican president would be up to more-or-less the same stuff. A generic Republican president — picture President Pence, if you need a specific face — would also be favoring employers over their workers, letting big corporations manipulate the marketplace, looking for ways to make it harder to vote, insisting that God created exactly two totally distinct genders (and that only opposite-gender couples can form a real family), favoring Christianity over all other religions, and portraying the inner city as a war zone that needs an occupying force of militarized police (collateral damage be damned).

“Trump is bad” is not an argument against any of that stuff. If you’re an anti-Trump Republican, “Trump is bad” becomes an argument for keeping Speaker Ryan in place as adult supervision.

We saw in Tuesday’s disappointing special election in Georgia that Trump’s unpopularity isn’t necessarily contagious. In a historically Republican suburban district that nonetheless nearly went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Jon Ossoff was a fresh young face with none of Hillary’s baggage. And yet, running against Karen Handel rather than Donald Trump, he couldn’t do quite was well as Clinton did (partly because Handel managed to reverse the demon-association playbook on him and run against Nancy Pelosi).

Major change doesn’t happen in America because the voters dislike one guy, even if that guy is the president. The root problem is the conservative worldview, the one that has been ascendant since Ronald Reagan. It won’t stop being ascendant just because Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing and can’t control himself.

Beyond our-policies-are-prettier-than-your-policies. But that raises an interesting question: How does major change happen? If you look at American history, a new national direction is never the result of a beauty contest.

If voters still more-or-less approve of the governing worldview, they never abandon it just because somebody else’s new ideas sound better. If they believe that the basic philosophy of the recent past still has promise for addressing the nation’s problems, they may occasionally choose a new face or opt for a pause while the country consolidates recent advances [1], but they won’t respond to calls for fundamental change. [2]

Big change, the kind we associate with names like Lincoln and FDR, happens because the public decisively rejects the ideas that have come before. Only then does a new way of looking at government have a chance to catch on. [3]

It’s important to understand what decisively reject really means. It doesn’t just mean that public stops buying the arguments in favor of those ideas. It means that the public loses patience with the very attempt to justify them. When a set of ideas has been decisively rejected, you don’t have argue against them any more; simply pointing out that these are the old, rejected ideas is enough.

FDR. So in 1932, the Great Depression was raging and Herbert Hoover was unpopular. Franklin Roosevelt probably could have won just on that. But if you look at Roosevelt’s speech accepting his nomination, he doesn’t mention Hoover’s name, or refer to him individually at all. He talks instead about “Republican leaders”, once mentions “the present administration in Washington” and twice more refers to “Washington” as short-hand. The case he makes is not against Hoover personally, but against the larger Republican worldview that had shaped the country since 1921, and whose roots went further back into the late 19th century.

There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

Once elected, he didn’t reach out to the Republican Party, he destroyed it for a generation. They represented the “malefactors of great wealth” who had driven the nation into the Depression in the first place, and their worldview prevented the government from helping ordinary people.

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent. …

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

What Reagan did to Great Society liberalism. The last major paradigm shift in American politics was the transition from Carter to Reagan. It was Reagan who established the defining principles of the Republican Party we know today: low taxes (especially on the wealthy), strong defense, alliance with the Religious Right (under the label “family values”), and less regulation of business. [4]

In 1980, as in 1932, the sitting president was unpopular: Inflation and unemployment were both high. (Traditional economics had said that was impossible, creating a national uneasiness that maybe nobody knew what to do.) Americans had been held hostage in Iran for a year, and Carter could neither negotiate their release nor rescue them militarily. Japan was winning the battle of international trade.

Like Roosevelt, Reagan did not just run against Jimmy Carter, but against the liberal orthodoxy of the previous decades. In his First Inaugural Address he laid out the story that conservatives are still telling: The boundless energy and creativity of American business will produce abundance for all if only government would get out of the way.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. …  If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

After Reagan, Democrats couldn’t just be liberals. Suddenly they were tax-and-spend liberals, big-government liberals, or some other discredited species. The first and best argument against a new government program was simply that it was a new government program: Of course it wouldn’t achieve its objectives, would cost more than the wildest estimates, and would entrench yet another bloated bureaucracy. Conservatives didn’t have to make that argument; after Reagan, it made itself.

You could still hear the Reaganite echoes when ObamaCare was labeled “a government takeover of healthcare“. No evidence was needed to show that such a “takeover” would be bad. That went without saying.

Where Obama failed. In 2008, President Bush was unpopular. But more than that, his failures were deeply bound up in the failure of Reagan-era conservatism: Bush’s tax cuts built a deficit without unleashing growth. When government regulators got out of the way, Wall Street bankers turned mortgages that should never have been approved into a multi-trillion-dollar tower of worthless securities (whose AAA ratings fooled the market just long enough to crash the economy, make the banking system insolvent, and endanger the retirement savings of middle-class Americans). Our strong-but-fabulously-expensive military proved to be good at breaking countries, but not so good at putting them back together or preventing the resulting failed states from exporting terrorism.

Obama won a landslide victory and brought big majorities in Congress along with him. But he failed to charge Bush’s personal unpopularity or the crisis Bush left behind to the massively overdrawn account of the conservative worldview. He did not proclaim the end of the Reagan Era and made no attempt to chase the old orthodoxy’s defenders off the public stage, as Roosevelt and Reagan did in their day. If he had succeeded in doing so, there would be a new set of epithets that every conservative candidate or proposal would have to struggle out from under, terms like Iraq invader or bomb-everywhere Republican or sub-prime conservatism or free-the-wolves deregulation or middle-class-destroying cuts. (Those are just off the top of my head; no doubt professionals could do better.) Those labels would be as instantly disqualifying as tax-and-spend liberal was in the 1980s.

Obama’s failure to turn the page is why conservative nostrums (that events have disproved again and again) are still popping up in the ObamaCare-repeal debate: Getting government out of healthcare will unleash the creativity of the marketplace to yield better coverage and care for consumers; yet another big tax cut for the rich will create the good-paying jobs that none of the previous tax cuts did; the millions who will be thrown off of Medicaid — mostly working-poor families who are struggling to get by on minimum wage or slightly more — are Takers who are about to get a much-needed lesson in personal responsibility, giving a break to the massively overtaxed and overburdened Makers who support them.

After the horror of Bush’s Great Recession, the tax-cut-and-deregulation Great Recession, no one should be able to say such things with a straight face and without shame.

Turn the page. After nearly 40 years, American political discourse still takes place in the rhetorical universe created by Ronald Reagan. Our world is still haunted by the ghosts of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, job-killing regulations, initiative-crushing taxes, and poor people whose will to succeed has been sapped away by their dependence on government. The heroic entrepreneur still fights his eternal battle against the villainous bureaucrat. Private-sector spending on Mar-a-lago memberships and gas-guzzling jet-skis and AK-47s is productive, while public-sector spending on parks and roads and libraries is wasteful. A private-school teacher is a hard-working professional, while a public-school teacher is a blood-sucking parasite.

This rhetoric is aging badly and losing its hold. Republicans at some level know this; that’s why their ObamaCare-repeal bills in both houses have had to be jammed through quickly with as little national attention as possible. You don’t do that if you believe in what you’re doing. If you think you have a compelling argument, you make that argument in the brightest spotlight you can find.

But aging regimes don’t fall of their own weight. Somebody has to push them down. The Bastille never storms itself.

The 2018 campaign needs to be negative, but not personal. You can propose Medicare-for-everyone into this environment if you want, and if you can manage to control the narrative well enough to keep everyone calling it that — even after you get outspent 5-1 or 10-1 — you’ll probably win. But if instead your proposal gets transmuted into a bureaucracy-bloating, tax-increasing, debt-busting, big-government takeover of the economy, you’ll probably lose.

Democrats can’t shy away from conservative rhetoric, and we can’t hope that it will just slip people’s minds if we change the subject by presenting our own solutions. We have to confront it directly: We’ve been living in a conservative era for nearly 40 years, and that is what has destroyed the middle class.

That central point needs to be backed up with direct rejections of conservative nostrums: You can’t cut your way to prosperity. Nobody succeeds in a failing community. Money isn’t speech. Fear creates violence, and cruelty will always rebound; more prisons won’t make you safe, and more invasions will just cause more terrorism. More freedom for the rich and strong means more servitude for the poor and weak. The free market destroys the middle class. The environment is economic; we are part of Nature, and if we destroy Nature we destroy ourselves. (Again, these are off the top of my head and professionals could do better. The important thing is to express similar ideas in a uniform way, so that voters will know they’re hearing the same point from many voices.)

Trump’s individual outrages and the specific problems of this or that policy should always be interpreted expansively: Specifics should be presented not because they are important in themselves, but because they anchor the larger critique. Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s typical. The ObamaCare-repeal bill isn’t just a bad policy, it’s the logical product of a bad philosophy.

Party unity. A handful of Democrats will feel left out by this message, because they hope to appeal not just to people who have been voting Republican, but to people who still believe in the Reaganite worldview. That seems like a fool’s errand to me.

But the vast majority of candidates, progressive and centrist alike, should be able to work with this national message. The positive proposals they present can be tailored to their own philosophies and their own districts. (Bernie Sanders, for example, knew better than to run on gun control in Vermont. Similarly, a rural district in Kansas, full of towns where there’s one convenience store and one gas station, both struggling, is not the place to run on a $15 minimum wage. Higher, yes; $15 no.) Some will vaguely want to increase access to healthcare while others will post a detailed 50-page plan on their web sites. As candidates succeed or fail with these specifics, other candidates will or won’t imitate them.

Some candidates will want to appear with Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, while others will invite Joe Biden or Cory Booker. But very few candidates will find themselves forced to run against the national message, or to choose between the national party and the voters they hope to represent.

Old and new. It’s hard now to remember how fresh Reaganite conservatism sounded in 1980. Whether you agreed with it or not, it started new discussions and opened new possibilities for experimentation. But what was once young and supple has become old and rigid. Discussions shut down now, because powerful organizations have staked out positions that brook no debate: There can be no new taxes. Nothing can be done about gun violence. We can’t talk to Iran. Defense spending can only go up.

That’s what old regimes look like. They’re brittle and have no room to maneuver when new problems appear. New voters come of age looking for insight, and hear only dogma. It may be hard to say exactly what should come next, but it’s easy to see when it’s time for an old worldview to go.

It’s time.

[1] The new faces I have in mind are Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, both of whom represented their party’s acknowledgement that the game had changed, and did not reverse the country’s course. Eisenhower let New Deal programs like Social Security stand, and Clinton yielded to a key point of Reaganism by announcing that “The era of big government is over.” A “New Democrat”, as Clinton sometimes called himself, was a Democrat who had learned the lessons of the Reagan Era.

[2] This a political analogy to the process Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: As long as researchers believe that the old paradigm is still fruitful and can still lead to new solutions to important problems, new paradigms don’t get a fair hearing.

The political scientist most connected with this idea is Stephen Skowronek, who introduced the concept of “political time“. Basically, he breaks American history down into a series of multi-decade eras, each dominated by its own widely accepted view of what government is about. Each president grapples with problems within that era’s political orthodoxy, which he either promotes or resists. As the era proceeds, the ruling ideology becomes more rigid and unwieldy, until it collapses under an attack by a repudiating leader, who then “resets the political clock” and begins a new era.

[3] Lincoln is a particularly good example here, because the change he is remembered for — ending slavery — isn’t what he campaigned on. Point 4 of the 1860 Republican platform explicitly denies any intention to roll back slavery in the existing slave states, and rejects military force as a means to do so:

That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

What the election of 1860 represented was not an endorsement of abolitionism, much less of a future where free blacks could vote and be assured the due process of law. Instead, it represented a rejection (on both sides) of the political climate that had endured since the Missouri Compromise of 1820: The country could no longer lurch from crisis to crisis as moderates like Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Stephen Douglas worked out complicated deals to maintain the North/South balance of power.

So the America that came out of the Civil War was fundamentally different than the America of 1859, but not because Lincoln designed a new set of policies and sold them to the electorate.

[4] These ideas are so entrenched inside the GOP that even when Marco Rubio campaigned on the need for “new ideas”, he simply repeated Reaganite orthodoxy.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (27)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 26, 2017 – 8:21 am

For a month or two I’ve been expressing skepticism about the different messages Democrats might adopt in 2018, without offering an alternative I believe in. (Last week, I was skeptical about the progressive message.) This week I’m finally going to stick my neck out.

The two main message proposals I’ve been hearing are (1) to go hard against Trump as an individual, all but making the election a referendum on impeachment, and (2) to push a positive progressive agenda full of very specific proposals: single-payer health care, $15 minimum wage, and so on.

The strategy I’m going to promote later this morning is that the 2018 campaign has to be negative and has to make use of Trump’s personal unpopularity, but the target has to be the whole conservative movement, not Trump personally. Through both Republican and Democratic administrations, we’ve been in the Reagan Era for nearly 40 years, and the result has been to destroy the American middle class. Trump may be a uniquely annoying individual, but his policies have been doctrinaire conservatism. The healthcare proposal, which would throw millions of the working poor off of Medicaid to give yet another tax cut to the very wealthy, is typical.

Individual candidates will want to supplement that denunciation with specific positive proposals tailored to their own districts, but the national message has to be negative: It’s time for the conservative era to be over.

The article will be called “Turn the Page”, and it builds on the “political time” theory of how change happens in America: You have to destroy the old regime and delegitimize its dominant ideas before you can start a new era. I’ll project it posting around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary discusses the Senate healthcare bill (which finally de-cloaked like a Klingon warbird ready to attack the working poor), the Georgia special election, the latest on the Russia investigation, and a number of recent articles worth looking at: the Democrats’ “religion problem”, climate change’s effect on Florida’s coral reefs and the tourism industry of the Keys, and the collapse of small-town retail. It should be out by noon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

From Words to Bullets

June 19, 2017 – 11:51 am
Every thought burns into substance
Every dream turns into something on a t-shirt
Every glance becomes a romance
(One little word and you can’t keep it in your pants)
They float above us like a cloud
And no one knows where the rain will end up falling
Every force evolves a form
Every urge leads to something you can sit on
Every force evolves a form
Every impulse ends up as something you can hang your hat on

– Shriekback, “Every Force Evolves a Form” (1992)

This week’s featured posts are “Political Violence is Our Issue Too” and “Why I’m Still Skeptical about the Progressive Revolution“.

This week everybody was talking about the Scalise shooting

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has never been my favorite congressman, for what I still think are good reasons. But I wish him a full recovery. If democracy is about anything, it’s about resolving our differences without shooting at each other.

The larger issues that come out of this shooting — how fake news and wild rhetoric contributes to violence — are covered in a featured post.

and obstruction of justice

Wednesday The Washington Post reported that the special counsel is investigating Trump for obstruction of justice. Trump took it well, going on a Twitter tirade against his own assistant attorney general: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”

Humorist Andy Borowitz nailed Jeff Sessions’ testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee: “Man Ravaged by Amnesia Somehow Able to Hold Down Demanding Legal Job“. Sessions’ testimony boiled down to three assertions: (1) He didn’t do anything wrong. (2) If he did do something wrong, he has no memory of it. (3) He’s not going to answer any questions about conversations he had with Trump, but he refuses to state any legal grounds for not answering.

Mike Huckabee proved a couple years ago that he must have flunked high school civics. More evidence this week is his defense of Sessions’ non-answers:

Dems act like they never heard of atty/client privilege; AG is top atty in Exec branch; serves and not stooge of Congress.

The attorney general is not the president’s lawyer. He is managed by the president, but he works for the United States. What worries me most about Trump is his third-world-dictator tendency to personalize authority that is supposed to be institutional. As president, Trump leads the executive branch, but he doesn’t own it. Commentators like Huckabee do a disservice to the country when they encourage that delusion.

More legal misinformation came from Newt Gingrich, who seems to have forgotten that he supported an obstruction of justice charge against President Clinton.

Technically, the president of the United States cannot obstruct justice. If he wants to fire the FBI director, all he has to do is fire him.

That’s nonsense, and the correct principle is not hard to understand: Even when an official is exercising legal powers, motives matter. Legally, the highway cop who pulls you over for speeding has the discretion either to ticket you or to let you go. But the why matters: If he lets you go because you gave him $100, that’s illegal.

Same thing here. Trump has the legal power to fire the FBI director. He doesn’t need a good reason; if he’s just grumpy that day and wants to take it out on somebody, that’s enough. But if he has a bad reason, it might be illegal. In particular, if he did it to shut down an investigation into possible crimes committed by himself, his friends, or his administration, he has obstructed justice.

and Philando Castile

Last July, Castile was driving with his girl friend in a suburb of St. Paul when a policeman in Minnesota stopped them, believing they “just look like people that were involved in a robbery.” (Castile had been stopped at least 46 times in the previous 14 years.) Castile had a license to carry a gun, and had a gun with him. According to the girl friend, the policeman asked for Castile’s driver’s license, Castile told him there was a gun in the car, and when he reached for his wallet to get his license the policeman started shooting. Friday, a jury found the officer not guilty of manslaughter.

Vox has a good summary of the case and the larger issues it raises. It includes this graphic:

I hate to second-guess juries, since I didn’t hear all the evidence and they did. But Castile really seems to illustrate the problem of police and black people, especially young black men. Castile, in fact, wasn’t the burglar they were looking for. Nobody can pinpoint exactly what he did wrong, but now he’s dead. This kind of thing happens a lot. If you’re parenting a young black man, what can you tell him that will keep him safe?

I was surprised to discover that David French of the conservative National Review also has problems with the verdict. (His colleague Robert Verbruggen doesn’t. Castile’s death is “a tragedy”, but what can you do?)

I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

The Castile case also illustrates what I’ve called “the asterisk in the Bill of Rights“: Constitutional rights don’t apply to blacks in the same ways as they do to whites.

The NRA, for example, seems reluctant to comment on this apparent disregard for Castile’s 2nd Amendment rights. Slate‘s Leon Neyfahk puts it bluntly:

On its face, the Castile case would seem to have all the trappings of a cause célèbre for the NRA. The group’s most fiercely held belief is supposed to be that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be burdened—let alone killed in cold blood—by repressive agents of the government just because they want to protect themselves and exercise their Second Amendment rights. … If Castile had been white instead of black, the NRA would have been rallying behind him and his family since the moment of his death, and fundraising off his memory for the rest of time.

The Castille verdict contrasts with a guilty verdict in what seems to me to be a much more nebulous case: Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy were two depressed teens who only met a handful of times, but texted back and forth constantly over a two-year period. Roy repeatedly talked about killing himself, and while Carter initially encouraged him to seek treatment, eventually she accepted his claim that what he really wanted was to be dead. They discussed suicide techniques together, and when Roy texted that he was backing out of his planned attempt (he got out of a truck filling with carbon monoxide), Carter called and urged him to go through with it, which he did. Friday, a Massachusetts judge found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter. This seems weird to me in lots and lots of ways.

and the Virginia primary

The Democratic side of the primary was supposed to be the story: It was billed as a “battle for the soul of the party” between the establishment-supported Ralph Northam and the Sanders-and-Warren upstart candidate Tom Perriello. (More about that in the other featured post.) But that turned out to be a surprisingly easy Northam victory.

The real story turned out to be on the Republican side.

What shocked observers instead was the Republican primary, where Corey Stewart — a Confederate sympathizer and onetime campaign official for Donald Trump — came within just 1.2 points of beating former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie.

Vox interviewed political scientist Quentin Kidd:

A lot of us, in our analyses, made a fundamental mistake. We assumed that because Trump’s approval ratings were so low in the state, there was no way someone like Stewart could have a chance at winning the primary. But what happened tonight is that the 37 percent of Virginia voters who said Trump is doing a good job came out and voted for Cory Stewart in a Republican primary. They’re still a potent force.

The other conservatives — the Republicans who don’t think Trump is doing such a good job — they didn’t come out as much and vote for Ed Gillespie. In the end, it’s partly an enthusiasm thing. There’s far more enthusiasm on the “populist,” “rebellious” side of the party right now then there is among the middle of the party.

And that suggests that congressional Republicans might be in trouble in their primaries if they break with Trump. The Republicans disillusioned with Trump might be too depressed to vote.

and you might also be interested in …

A few Senate Republicans are grousing about the secret process Mitch McConnell is using to push ObamaCare repeal forward, but they’re going along with it anyway. Here’s how McConnell plans to get the proposal passed.

People looking for a precedent for this no-hearings no-debate approach to a major bill have reached back to a Wilson-administration tariff bill. That’s how unusual this is.

Oh, that stuff during the campaign about Trump doing some hard negotiating with the drug industry and getting prices down? Never mind.

He’s rolling back some of Obama’s opening to Cuba, and he’s doing it in a way that hurts his business competitors. Coincidence?

Stuff at Whole Foods is already priced high enough; imagine offering 27% above market price for the whole company. That’s what Amazon did Friday, making a $13.7 billion offer.

Paul La Monica at CNN Money thinks it’s a brilliant move.

The key to this deal is that it shows the genius of [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos. Of course, it’s too soon to say whether buying Whole Foods for this amount of money will be a success, but keep in mind: No one was even speculating that this deal was going to happen. … This just goes to show that Bezos is thinking about things that no one else on the planet is even considering.

Maybe there is some amazing plan here — the NYT speculates about what it might be — but it’s also possible that Bezos has too much money to play with and too much time to think about bizarre things to do with it. (You know who else does things that no one else on the planet even considers? Darwin Award winners.)

One problem springs to mind immediately: Amazon is all about undercutting on price, while Whole Foods is about charging top dollar for something presumed to be better. I’m not sure how that mixes.

In some sense, though, even Amazon’s $42-per-share offer represents a mark-down: Whole Foods stock peaked around $65 in 2013. The high-end grocery market has gotten much more crowded and competitive  since then. (Wegmans, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and other similar chains have all expanded, plus farmer’s markets and other boutique food sources.) And publicity like this John Oliver segment in 2015 didn’t help.

but we should be paying more attention to Trump’s appointments

The people he has nominated to the National Labor Relations Board might make nearly impossible to unionize.

and let’s close with something prescient

That cabinet meeting where all the secretaries took turns praising Trump reminded me of something out of the Third World. And it underlined just how well Trevor Noah had Trump pegged in 2015.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Why I’m Still Skeptical About the Progressive Revolution

June 19, 2017 – 10:37 am

My social media bubble has drifted well to the left of center, so I hear a lot of frustration with the Democratic Party — particularly with the centrist Clintonite wing that has dominated the DNC in recent years, during which the party has lost the White House, both houses of Congress, and vast numbers of seats in state legislatures. The solution is supposed to be for all those people to get out of the way and let the progressive Bernie-supporting wing of the party take over. Hillary Clinton in particular should just go away, and anybody involved in the DNC in 2016 should follow her. The Left is where the youth and energy of the party are, and it has the kind of bold proposals that might get disaffected voters to the polls. Look what Jeremy Corbyn just did in the UK.

I’m almost there. The critique — lost elections at all levels — is inarguable. And I long for a more visionary approach to the future. Take gun control as a neutral example that cuts across the Clinton/Sanders line: All Democrats — and most of the rest of the country — can agree that our current gun laws are stupid. The fact that we don’t even do universal background checks on gun purchasers is insane (and so are some of the people who exploit the loopholes in the system and buy guns). But in the Ideal Democratic Future, what is the relationship between American citizens and guns? Does anybody have an answer for that?

But I have to admit, on almost every other issue progressives have a clear advantage on the vision-of-the-future front. Again and again, the centrists get lost in the next-small-step argument and never get around to saying where they want to go. But conversely, while progressives are clear on the Big Idea, they’re often vague about what the next step is. (After Congress rejects his single-payer healthcare plan, does President Sanders have a Plan B, or does he just wait for the next Congress?)

So while I’m rooting for the progressives, let me tell you exactly where I get stuck. All my political life, the left wing of the Democratic Party (and the non-Democrats who reject the party for not being liberal enough) has been suffering from the delusion that it’s more popular than it actually is. Again and again, I have heard that somebody like Ralph Nader or Dennis Kucinich represented what the American people really want, and then seen them get something like 2% of the vote. And then, in the next election the same people would come back and tell me the same thing, as if the last election never happened.

Polls. Why do they think this? It’s not purely wishful thinking; there are polls that say the same thing. If you ask about specific issues, and phrase your questions right, you can get sizeable majorities of the American people to agree with liberal positions.

In early 2015, for example, 68% of Americans told pollsters that the rich don’t pay enough tax; only 11% thought the rich pay too much. This February, a 60%-38% majority said the government should “make sure that all Americans have healthcare coverage”. Last year, 63% described their response to “Medicare for all” as either “very positive” (36%) or “somewhat positive” (27%). In 2013, Gallup found 72% support for “a federal government program that would spend government money to put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs”.

Early in 2015, the Progressive Change Institute polled a wide range of issues: 71% supported letting anyone buy in to Medicare. 70% were for a “Green New Deal” to create millions of clean-energy jobs. 63% favored free community college. 70% would expand Social Security benefits. 61% wanted a special prosecutor to investigate all police killings. And more.

However, you can also get different results if you ask different questions. In 2013, a WaPo/ABC poll found 61% support for an across-the-board 5% cut in federal spending. That’s a fairly consistent pattern: As an abstract concept, government spending is unpopular, even while spending on particular programs has broad support. And while majorities always think the rich should pay more tax, nobody thinks that they themselves are rich — and hardly anybody thinks people like them should pay more tax.

So it’s naive to think that you can get those 60% or 70% majorities by running on a progressive platform. You’d get those majorities if you ran on a progressive platform, and then managed to control the narrative of the campaign so that the eventual vote turned on the issues where you have large majorities behind you.

But that never happens. Just ask Hillary; I don’t think she expected to spend the last week of the campaign answering questions about the FBI. In 1988, Dukakis had Bush nailed on the issues — so the Bush campaign invented an issue out of nothing: They were for the pledge of allegiance and Dukakis (they claimed) was against it. They won.

The 2016 primaries. Bearing that history in mind, what did 2016 really tell us? On my social media feed, I often hear the story told this way: Bernie was the people’s choice, but the Democratic establishment pushed Hillary through in spite of her unpopularity.

And here’s my problem with that story: If the people had really wanted Bernie, they could have voted for him. That’s what happened where I live in New Hampshire (where I dithered, and then voted for Bernie myself). If the power of the establishment works anywhere, it should work in the early primaries, when the upstart candidate seems most unlikely. But Hillary’s initial advantages in name recognition and money and endorsements got her only a tiny victory margin in Iowa, and then got her clobbered in New Hampshire, where Bernie got 60% of the vote and won every county.

From that point on, the race was a free-for-all. And Bernie lost that free-for-all: His total primary vote was 13.2 million, compared to Clinton’s 16.9 million. That loss can’t be attributed to some fluke of the process: He also never caught Clinton in the national polls. For a couple weeks in mid-April he got within a point or two, but then Clinton started to pull away. The late-breaking trend was entirely towards Clinton, climaxing with her 7-point win in California, a state which fits the Sanders profile as well as any.

Sanders supporters who don’t go in for a DNC-stole-the-election conspiracy theory often blame the media: Sanders couldn’t get his message out. The articles about him didn’t focus on how great his proposals were, and instead drew too much attention to stereotypes like “Bernie bros”.

But a campaign never gets the media coverage it wants. Clinton certainly didn’t. The same Harvard study that pointed out how little serious media attention Sanders got in 2015 also showed that the attention to Clinton was almost entirely negative.

Whereas media coverage helped build up Trump, it helped tear down Clinton. Trump’s positive coverage was the equivalent of millions of dollars in ad-buys in his favor, whereas Clinton’s negative coverage can be equated to millions of dollars in attack ads, with her on the receiving end.

The 2016 general election. Yes, I often hear, but Clinton lost to Trump and Sanders would have won.

I don’t think that’s clear at all. Yes, Hillary would have beaten Trump if she’d gotten Jill Stein’s votes, which almost certainly would have gone to Bernie if he’d been the nominee.

But there’s another third-party possibility everybody forgets: When Bernie was surging after New Hampshire, Michael Bloomberg considered running, perhaps because he saw a big hole in the center if it came down to Trump vs. Sanders. But by early March, after the Southern primaries had given Clinton a significant delegate lead (and the day before Sanders’ surprise win in Michigan put him back in the race for a few weeks), Bloomberg backed out. So don’t compare Trump/Clinton/Stein to a Trump/Sanders race where Sanders gets all the Stein votes. Instead picture the Trump/Bloomberg/Sanders race. How many votes does Bernie lose in the center that Hillary got? More than Stein took, I’ll bet.

After a defeat, everyone sees what went wrong, so there have been a lot of articles about what a bad candidate Clinton was. But you also can’t forget this: Hillary was the only candidate in 2016 who beat Trump in a debate, and she did it all three times. That’s not a judgment call: She actually got a bump in the polls after each one. I don’t think we can just assume Sanders would have done as well.

The Tea Party parallel. When the Tea Party popped into existence in the spring of 2009, it was largely an astroturf phenomenon. Yes, there was public anger on the Right, animated by fear of what the new Obama administration might do (and also by some fairly thinly veiled racism). But the message was spread with Koch money and the early rallies given unlimited free publicity by Fox News.

But eventually it turned into a Frankenstein monster that got away from the people who hoped to control it. Rather than a simple Republican rebranding operation — it’s hard to remember now just how defeated the Republicans were after 2008 — it turned into a faction that took the Party away from its previous establishment. John Boehner rode the movement to the speakership, but then was forced out by it. Jeb Bush had all the same advantages going into 2016 that Clinton did, but got nowhere with them. The Trump presidency is the ultimate result: The Tea Party is his base.

So the Tea Party demonstrates the vulnerability of party establishments, and it also gives a road map for an insurgency to take control: win elections. In 2010, Marco Rubio was an insurgent candidate aligned with the Tea Party. He beat Florida’s sitting governor (Charlie Crist) in a primary for the Senate nomination, then won a three-way race in the fall against Crist and a Democrat. Ted Cruz had a similar path to the Senate in 2012, upsetting the sitting Republican Lieutenant Governor in a primary. In 2014, a Tea Party candidate beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary.

In short, after their horrible 2008 defeat, the Republican establishment did not just step aside and surrender the party to the upstarts. The Bush dynasty, for example, did not just go away. Tea Party candidates had to win the GOP at the ballot box. Can progressives do something similar on the Democratic side?

Prove it to me. I keep hearing that the Democratic establishment is completely out of touch with the voters. It raises no enthusiasm. It has no vision for how to regain power. The progressive agenda, on the other hand — Medicare for everybody, free college, $15 minimum wage, taxing the rich, breaking up the big banks, and so forth — is where the people are. Bernie is the most popular politician in the country.* The progressives have all the energy and momentum.

If that’s all true, then it shouldn’t be hard for candidates to run on that progressive agenda, with the support of progressive heroes like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and win elections. In particular, primary elections against those tired old DNC-supported candidates should be easy victories.

So far that’s not happening. Why not?

We just had a test in Virginia, a swing state that Clinton won in 2016 by a surprisingly large 5.3%. The two candidates in the Democratic primary for governor were probably not that far apart in reality, but the race got framed as a progressive-vs-establishment contest. Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam lined up the all the big-name Virginia Democratic endorsements, while former Congressman Tom Perriello ran as an outsider with a populist message. Sanders campaigned with Perriello, and Elizabeth Warren endorsed him.

It was supposed to be close, and then it wasn’t: Northam won by 14%.

I’m still waiting for a breakthrough progressive win. So far I’m getting claims of moral victory and excuses about establishment power. A progressive candidate for Congress lost the Montana special election — but he did well in a red district and the DNC should have done more for him. (Tomorrow we’ll see an opposite test: John Ossoff is running as a centrist in a red district outside Atlanta.)

Maybe revolution is the wrong metaphor. Northam won in Virginia by adopting a lot of the progressive platform and some of its rhetoric, as politicians will do when the national mood shifts. That’s an evolution, not a revolution.

The real test will be the 2018 primaries. I hope progressives give those primaries a real Tea Party effort: Don’t just stand on the sidelines and complain that the establishment didn’t give you good candidates. Run your own candidates, and put all that youth and energy behind them.

If you do that, you might win, but you also might lose, because the Left always believes it’s more popular than it actually is. If it turns out that’s still true, then the only way to get to a majority is to find allies that you can pull partway towards your agenda. That would be evolution rather than revolution. But it would still be change.

* Getting back to my control-the-narrative theme, I wonder how Bernie’s national popularity is holding up this week, when his name keeps getting mentioned in the context of the Scalise shooting. I think it’s completely unfair to blame Bernie for something done by an obscure volunteer for his campaign, and the Scalise shooting has nothing to do with the Sanders agenda, but political narratives are unfair.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (65)

Political Violence is Our Issue Too

June 19, 2017 – 8:21 am

Political violence is a problem, we’re tempted to think, but not for us.

After all, our candidate wasn’t the one who openly agitated for violence at his rallies, excused his criminally violent supporters as “passionate“, or hinted about his opponent’s assassination. Our congresspeople don’t assault reporters. We don’t use guns as props at our demonstrations, or carry banners about the Tree of Liberty needing to be watered by the blood of tyrants. (The guy on the right was protesting outside an Obama townhall meeting in 2009.) We don’t call for our opponents to be shot for treason. Our senators aren’t encouraging us “to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical”.

No, no, that’s not us. We build on the nonviolent heritage of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Freedom Riders. The day after Trump’s inauguration, we brought millions of people into the streets without any violence. (I was on Boston Common with a couple hundred thousand others. The most confrontational thing I heard was Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey saying to Trump, “We’ll see you in court.”)

Yeah, those other guys need to be more careful, so that they don’t encourage Islamophobes to kill people on public transit, or promote conspiracy theories that result in gullible guys shooting up pizza places or getting into gun battles with cops on their way to shut down the heart of the Great Plot.

But not us. We’re OK.

And then shit happens.

Wednesday, James Hodgkinson started shooting at Republican congresspeople as they practiced for an annual charity baseball game against Democratic congresspeople. (In other words, while they were doing maybe the least offensive thing some of them have done all year.) House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was hit, along with a staffer and two police. He was in critical condition for a couple of days before being upgraded to serious.

Hodgkinson died after being shot by police, and so far we don’t have a note or other statement explaining his actions. But the political motivation seems obvious: He volunteered for the Sanders campaign in Iowa. He made anti-Trump comments on social media. He came all the way from Illinois, so he didn’t just happen to be in that park looking to shoot some random person. During his attack, he had a list of Republican congressmen in his pocket.

To me, as a liberal, this looks anomalous. But it doesn’t to conservatives, who blame liberals for a number of attacks we don’t identify as our own: like the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, or of two other police in New York City. The shooters appear to have been motivated by revenge against police in general for police shootings of blacks. We protested the same shootings, so they must be with us. Ditto for violence in Ferguson and Baltimore after the Michael Brown and Freddie Gray killings; liberals were also angered by those killings, so conservatives pin the violence on us.

Then there are the antifa (i.e. anti-fascist) and black bloc (named for their style of dress, not their skin color) street fighters who battle against similar right-wing hooligans. (That strikes me as a case of mutual myopia: Each side sees the thugs on the other side, and conveniently overlooks its own.) Some conservatives even blame us for attacks by Muslims. We’re the ones who stick up for Muslim rights and protest when Trump tries to get tough with them, so the killers in Orlando and San Bernadino are our people too.

If you’re a liberal like me, chances are this sounds nutty to you. And mostly it is. I have never advocated assassinating police officers or street fighting or nightclub massacres or gunning down congressional ballplayers, and I don’t consider those actions to be a rational extrapolation of anything I did advocate. I can’t see that Bernie Sanders bears any responsibility for the fact that some guy both supported his campaign and tried to kill the House majority whip. And the mere fact that you don’t want the University of California to help Milo Yiannopoulos spread his hateful message doesn’t implicate you in the Berkeley riot.

But now I do have to concede something: I need to offer other people the same kind of understanding I want for myself.

So I need to say this to conservatives: You may believe that Islam poses some unique threat to the American way of life (and I may disagree with you), but that doesn’t make you responsible for the Portland guy who yelled racial slurs at two Muslim women and then killed two guys who tried to defend them. You may interpret the 2nd Amendment differently than I do, but that doesn’t make you an accomplice to every mass shooting. You may believe abortion should be illegal, but that doesn’t equate you with the people who assassinate abortion doctors or shoot up Planned Parenthood clinics.

And yet, I don’t want to let off the hook everyone (on either side) who hasn’t actually pulled a trigger. You can’t say “somebody ought to kill that guy” and then claim innocence if somebody does. You can’t put out a wanted poster saying a doctor is “wanted by God” and then absolve yourself after someone delivers him to God. You can’t pose with a facsimile of someone’s bloody head, and express shock if someone bloodies the real head. If you invent and spread baseless conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, you are implicated if someone believes you and responds in a way that might make sense if the theory were true.

Staying involved without contributing to the problem is a tricky line to walk. It’s just as important to understand what the problem isn’t as to understand what it is.

The problem isn’t “extremism”, if that word just refers to views well outside the mainstream. The kind of libertarianism that wants to privatize the streets and zero out all anti-poverty programs is extreme. Confiscating all fortunes larger than $1 billion would be extreme. Amending the Constitution to ban all privately owned firearms or to make Christianity the official religion would be extreme. And yet, these are all proposals that people might debate rationally, without killing each other.

The problem isn’t that people are taking politics too seriously. Politics is serious. Politics is whether we go to war. It’s whether sick people get care. It’s whether your children get educated or have a shot at a job someday. It’s whether your town gets rebuilt after the hurricane, whether our food is safe to eat, or if we’ll be prepared for the next epidemic. It’s serious. It’s worth arguing about. It’s worth obsessing over, even. It’s worth getting out on the street and continuing to make your demands after the authorities say no. Taking politics seriously isn’t the problem. Serious people can have debates without killing each other.

Violence is different from seriousness or extremism. It comes out of dehumanization, out of believing that your opponents are so evil that they can’t be reasoned with, and that your side’s victory is so important that if you lose you might as well pull the Temple down on everyone. It comes from feeling cornered, like if you lose this battle you have nowhere to retreat to, no chance to find more persuasive arguments and win another day.

Lots of people in America are feeling that kind of despair. Anything you say in public, you have to figure that some desperate person is going to hear.

What goes on in those desperate minds? One of the creepiest novels I’ve ever read was John Fowles’ The Collector. It centers on a young man who wins the lottery and uses the money to pursue his fantasy: He quits his job, remodels his house to include a prison cell, kidnaps an attractive young woman, and keeps her there, hoping she will come to love him. As she get more desperate to escape, eventually she dies, and then he decides to find someone else and start the process again.

What I found most disturbing about the novel was how much I could identify with the the root fantasy: Someone who doesn’t notice you might still come to love you, if somehow circumstances could be contrived to throw you together. I’ve had that fantasy, and yet it never led to kidnapping or imprisonment or death. Probably all that would have been needed to prevent the novel’s tragedy was one good buddy, who over a beer would hear some version of the daydream before it ever hardened into a plan, appreciate it on the level of pure fantasy, and then wistfully say, “Yeah, but that would be crazy. It wouldn’t turn out well.” The Collector doesn’t have that friend and never hears that comment.

Similarly, I think many of us have, at one time or another, fantasized about being an avenging hero. That’s my best guess as to what James Hodgkinson thought he was doing: Those evil Republican congressmen would go on perpetrating their villainy, until some hero stopped them. And when he did stop them, crowds would cheer.

As we live more and more inside our separate bubbles of social media, it becomes increasingly difficult to picture people in distant bubbles as anything other than villains, and all too easy to imagine a cheering crowd. And I think we’re all just a little less likely to find ourselves having that beer with the buddy who says, “Yeah, but that would be crazy.”

I believe this new reality puts an extra responsibility on us. Not to be less serious or less intense. Not to shade our views in the direction of the Center, wherever that is. Not to stop criticizing things that are actually wrong or working to correct them. But definitely to avoid letting someone else believe that we will be in the crowd that cheers their avenging hero fantasy.

I think that means avoiding images and metaphors of violence, whether it’s Kathy Griffin’s severed-head photo or Sarah Palin’s congresspeople-in-the-crosshairs graphic. It means not dehumanizing opponents, and not exaggerating their misdeeds — or making some up out of whole cloth. It means challenging the people on our own side whose rhetoric crosses the line. And it means being, whenever we can, the sympathetic voice that keeps violent fantasy within its proper bounds, and restrains it from morphing into a plan.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (14)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 19, 2017 – 7:57 am

For a long time, I’ve been pointing to conservative violence and conservative violent rhetoric. So it was a shock to hear that someone I probably would have agreed with on a lot of issues had gone to the park where the Republican congressional baseball team was practicing and started shooting.

Public shootings should be wake-up calls, and so I spent a big chunk of this week thinking about what people like me need to wake up to. As usual, I think conservatives went overboard in their responses, acting as if violence were a purely liberal problem they have nothing to learn from. I don’t see any reason to give in to that view, and yet I don’t want to dodge the issue with the kind of yeah-but-the-other-side-is-worse response that we hear far too often from both sides. I still think the other side is worse, but so what? That doesn’t absolve us from working on our piece of the problem.

The result of that meditation is this week’s first featured post, “Political Violence is Our Issue Too”. It should be out shortly.

The other thing that caught my attention this week was the Virginia gubernatorial primary, which was supposed to be a neck-and-neck battle for the future of the Democratic Party between an establishment candidate endorsed by all the top Virginia Democrats and an upstart progressive supported by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The establishment candidate won easily.

That outcome cemented a set of doubts that has been growing in my mind for some while: I keep hearing the argument that the progressive revolution has all the youth and the energy and is the wave of the future, and that the out-of-touch centrist establishment just needs to get out of the way. But I wonder: When is all that youth and energy going to start translating into votes?

Not being all that young myself, I’ve lived through a lot of liberal crusades. From McGovern to Nader to Kucinich, I keep running into the delusion that the Left is far more popular than it actually is. So with regard to today’s progressive movement, I’m in a prove-it-to-me mood. Somebody’s going to have to win something, preferably something the establishment can’t win, before I’m going to take all this rhetoric seriously.

I think about the Tea Party, and about Trump, who I regard as their candidate. Nobody got out of the way to make room for them. They took over the Republican Party by winning elections. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable test. Anyway, much more of that argument will appear at around 10 EDT in the second featured post “Why I’m Still Skeptical about the Progressive Revolution”.

Look for the weekly summary to be out about noon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (3)

Getting Away

June 12, 2017 – 10:12 am

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

– Harry Frankfurt “On Bullshit” (1986)

This week’s featured post is “Social Capital and Inequality“, where I review Ryan Avents new book The Wealth of Humans.

This week everybody was talking about James Comey

Like many Americans without a 9-to-5 job (and maybe a few at work), I was glued to the TV Thursday morning during Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Full transcript here.)

I don’t pretend to be unbiased, but I thought Comey was a compelling witness. He answered a lot of questions with a direct yes, no, or I don’t know. He didn’t seem to be trying to build his legend. (“I don’t want to make it sound like I’m Captain Courageous,” he said in response to Senator Rubio’s questions about why he didn’t confront Trump more directly.) While refusing to reveal the content of the FBI’s investigation or any classified information, he never sounded like a bureaucrat finagling a way around some legitimate question. When asked something difficult, he often started with “That’s a good question” before proceeding to give a thoughtful response.

In addition to legal implications of his testimony, I thought Comey very clearly established that the Trump’s relationship with him was not normal. In a few short months, he had more one-on-one conversations with Trump than he had with the president during the entire Bush and Obama administrations. And from the first meeting, he felt a need to document what was said because “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting.” (He’d had no similar worry about Bush or Obama.)

Republican senators were left to make what seems to me to be a very bad case: Sleazy as it was, Trump’s attempt to influence Comey doesn’t rise to the level of obstruction of justice, and he was doing it to protect a friend (Mike Flynn) rather than to cover his own wrong-doing. Matt Yglesias reacts:

Congress is supposed to oversee the executive branch and police not only legal misconduct but political misconduct, like perverting the legal process to benefit his friends and allies.

Instead, congressional Republicans have chosen to stand on the ground that it’s okay to order an investigation quashed as long as you do it with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge — even if you follow up by firing the guy you winked at. And they’re standing on the ground that it’s okay to quash an investigation as long as the investigation you quashed targeted a friend and close political associate, rather than the president himself.

That’s a standard of conduct that sets the United States up for massive and catastrophic erosion of the rule of law, not only, or even especially, because the president is behaving corruptly, but because Republican Party members of Congress have chosen to allow it.

I occasionally flashed back to the meeting Bill Clinton had with Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the investigation of Hillary’s email server. Both Clinton and Lynch came out saying that they didn’t discuss the investigation, but what if Lynch had reported that Clinton said the same things Comey reported Trump saying: asking if Lynch wanted to keep her job in the next administration, and saying he “hoped” she could let Hillary off? Would Republicans put a benign interpretation on those words then?

And then there’s what’s been called the “toddler defense“. Here’s how Paul Ryan puts it:

He’s new to government. And so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI, and White Houses. He’s just new to this.

He’s also not “steeped in the protocols” about profiteering and other forms of corruption, or how to deal with allies. I guess it’s totally unreasonable of us to expect the President of the United States to understand his job, or to seek advice about the things he doesn’t know. (If only the Democrats had offered us a real alternative, like maybe a candidate who had been training for this job her whole life.)

Also, as a response to Comey the toddler defense is bogus on its face: The reason Trump insisted on all the witnesses leaving the room before pressuring Comey was that he knew he was doing something wrong.

Congressional Republicans are also letting Trump get away with a non-responsive nothing-to-see-here approach towards the whole Russia affair. A lot of the most suspicious elements of this scandal have been left completely unexplained: Why did the White House wait 18 days to fire Michael Flynn, after they’d been warned he might be compromised by the Russians? Why was Jared Kushner meeting with somebody from a Putin-connected Russian bank? Why did so many of Trump’s people either lie about their meetings with Russians or neglect to mention them when asked? And then finally, why was Comey fired? There was an unbelievable explanation right away, but Trump contradicted it later, and now the question has been left hanging.

Many people talk about the story as if it were he-said/she-said. But it isn’t even that, because Trump hasn’t offered any explanation at all.

Ezra Klein finds a method in the madness of Trump tweets: Trump’s primary mode of argument isn’t lying, it’s bullshitting. (Believe it or not, that’s a technical term, defined in the seminal essay “On Bullshit“.)

Lies are an effort to win an argument. Bullshitting is an effort to dominate coverage of an argument, to crowd out the truth, to distract the media with topics you prefer. Trump is very good at bullshitting. And since he doesn’t have a good counterargument to offer against Comey, he’s falling back on what he knows.

A number of people have noticed how many themes from sexual harassment cases appear: The boss maneuvered a 1-on-1 meeting and made inappropriate suggestions. Later, Comey asked his immediate supervisor not to leave him alone with the boss, but the supervisor just shrugged. When he tried to ignore the unwelcome advances and just do his job, he got fired. And now that he’s complaining, the people who hear his complaint  interpret his “confusion over how to respond to a shocking request … as a signal that nothing happened”.

Robin Abcarian wrote in the LA Times:

Is there a working woman alive who cannot identify with poor James Comey right now? The former FBI director’s boss tried to seduce him. When the seduction failed, his boss fired him. And then called him “crazy, a real nut job.” … Trump thought he had some kind of bromance going with Comey. He wined him. He dined him. And because he is transactional to his core, he expected a little somethin’ somethin’ in return.

and Nicole Serratore in the NYT:

Mr. Comey, you are not alone. How many of us have played over and over in our minds an encounter that suddenly took a creepy, coercive turn? What did I say? Were my signals clear? Did I do something ambiguous? Did I say something compromising?

Cait Bladt invents a scene from the closed hearing that followed Comey’s public testimony.

SENATOR BLUNT: Mr. Comey it is a straightforward question — you wore that suit knowing it would appeal to men like Mr. Trump and then when it did and he hugged you, you acted like it was shocking and appalling, correct?

Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara tells a similar story of being creeped out by Trump’s overtures, backing away from him, and then being fired.

A former FBI agent now a dean at Yale Law School focused on a different aspect of Comey’s testimony:

In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey, it was always to discuss how the investigation into Russia’s election interference was affecting him personally, rather than the security of the country. He apparently cared little about understanding either the magnitude of the Russian intelligence threat, or how the FBI might be able to prevent another attack in future elections.

Right-wing media covered a very different hearing from the one I saw.

Trump said Friday that “100%” he’d be willing to testify under oath. But Trump says a lot of things, and I seriously doubt he will ever do this voluntarily. US News‘ Robert Schlesinger:

it wasn’t so very long ago that Trump was issuing seemingly iron-clad guarantees that he would release his tax returns

John McCain’s incoherent questioning was the sad sidebar of the Comey hearing. Twitter exploded with speculation that McCain is suffering from dementia.

I’ve had an irrational affection for McCain ever since he ran against Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. McCain in 2000 had incredible mental stamina. Some days he held four or five two-hour townhall meetings; one day I was at the fourth one, and he fielded everything thrown at him, always trying to answer the question asked rather than seguing into canned talking points.

The senator I saw on TV Thursday was not the same man. And that’s unfortunate, because McCain has seemed like the most likely Republican senator to start the process of backing away from Trump,

and the British election

Prime Minister Theresa May called for a new election with the idea that the timing was favorable and she’d expand her majority, strengthening her bargaining position going into the Brexit negotiations with the European Union. It didn’t work out that way: Her Conservative Party (the Tories) started with 331 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, and wound up with 318 instead.

That’s less than a majority, but it appears that she’ll stay in office after working out a deal with the Unionist Party, which has 10 seats and represents what used to be the Protestant faction in Northern Ireland’s civil war.

The party is likely to have a lengthy wish list of demands in return for its support for a Conservative government, including the outright rejection of any “special status” for Northern Ireland in the EU after Brexit.

In other words, the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland will be a hard border, not the soft border that currently exists because both sides are in the EU. How Catholics will take that remains to be seen, but The Independent is worried about maintaining the Northern Ireland peace agreement.

It’s intriguing to try to map British trends onto the United States, especially given that last summer’s Brexit vote can be read as a harbinger of Trump’s victory. If you make that translation, the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbin almost pulled off what Bernie Sanders hoped to do: by turning Labour away from its Tony Blair (i.e. Clintonist) past and swinging further to the left, he drew major support from younger voters, got people to the polls who don’t usually vote, and even got a slice of UKIP (i.e. Trump) voters.

But he still didn’t win. This is where mapping UK elections onto the US gets tricky: Because the UK doesn’t have a two-party system, you don’t need anything like a majority of the votes. (Brexit, with its binary choice between Remain and Leave, was a better approximation of a US election.) The vote totals of both the Tories (42%) and Labour (40%) would have been enough for a landslide in some previous elections. In Tony Blair’s last election in 2005, for example, his Labour Party got 35% of the vote and won 355 seats. But a Sanders-like candidate who got 40% of the U.S. vote would suffer a catastrophic defeat. So the parallels have limited value.

and Wonder Woman

I haven’t seen the Wonder Woman movie yet — given the past DC movies I expected it to be terrible; apparently it isn’t — but the discussions surrounding it are fascinating.

First, there are the howls of reverse sexism directed at theaters that have scheduled a few women-only showings of the film. (Whatever other issues might arise, it was a good business decision. The screenings sold out quickly.)

As regular readers probably know, I’m skeptical about the whole concept of reverse discrimination (i.e., discrimination against some dominant group). Too often, what feels like reverse persecution is just the strange feeling of being treated like everyone else, a phenomenon I first discussed in 2012’s “The Distress of the Privileged“.

The main thing that’s problematic about all-male or all-white clubs or schools is that they can become tools for a dominant group to maintain its dominance. (If business deals are made over golf, excluding women from a golfing club excludes them from those deals.) So I guess I’d be suspicious of women-only events in those rare settings already dominated by women — say, at a convention for nurses or elementary-ed teachers — where men might already feel like outsiders. But I’m not seeing how a women-only Wonder Woman screening helps women consolidate some unfair advantage.

Back in 2014, Sian Ferguson of Everyday Feminism explained the purpose of safe spaces. The slam on safe spaces is that they are echo chambers for people who want to avoid ever hearing critical ideas. But when your group has an actual oppression problem, you can never go very long without facing criticism. The point of a safe space isn’t to avoid criticism forever, it’s to get away from it for a few hours.

As a rape victim, I am constantly exposed to the notion that I deserve to be blamed for my trauma. … The assumption my safe space makes – that I should not be blamed for my rape – is already challenged constantly by most of society.

I doubt that women who attend superhero movies are unexposed to male points of view on superheroes, including Wonder Woman.

Stephen Miller gives an account of sneaking into a women-only screening and nobody caring. He liked the movie. Ben Pobjie is joking (I think) when he warns that “male corpses will litter the streets”. And I’m pretty sure that “Confirmed: 31 Women Contract Lesbianism after Female-Only Viewing of Wonder Woman 3D” is satire.

Second, the question of whether movies are changing: Can a woman director make a summer blockbuster about a female character? I liked Michelle Wolf’s comment on The Daily Show.

You know when it will feel like women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a bad superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one. Men get chance after chance to make superhero movies. No one left crappy Batman vs. Superman saying: “Well, I guess we’re done making man movies.”

And finally, a controversy I never would have anticipated: Gal Gadot (pronounced Guh-DOTT), who plays Wonder Woman, is a Jewish Israeli. Should she count as white? This turned out to be a major topic of discussion in some Jewish circles. Dani Ishai Behan argued that the historic oppression of Jews and the continued existence of antisemitism makes Jews people of color; subsuming them into “white” erases them. Noah Berlatsky doesn’t dispute the present reality of antisemitism, the history of oppression, or the significance of Jewish identity, but countered that in the context (of people of color complaining about the few roles available to them and the few positive characters they resemble) the point is disingenuous.

Gadot is, after all, playing a white character; she was clearly cast because people see her as white. The argument that she was a person of color was transparently made in bad faith; it was meant to distract from actual POC folks asking for better representation.

and you might also be interested in …

For years, Kansas has been the proving ground for conservative economics: Tax cuts will create jobs, lower rates will increase revenue rather than diminish it, and so on. The results have been bad. Since Governor Brownback’s tax cuts in 2012, growth has been sluggish, and the end result has been not just intractable deficits, but also pressure to make up the difference by spending less on education and highways — a trade-off voters would never have approved if it had been submitted to them all at once. (“How about this? You give up good roads and schools, and the state’s credit rating goes down, but the rich get to pay less tax.”)

Well, that nightmare might be ending. After several attempts, the Republican-led legislature finally succeeded in overriding a Brownback veto to reverse much of his signature tax cut. This is a hopeful sign for the two-party system in America: Republican does not necessarily mean crazy; if something clearly doesn’t work, eventually voters see it and politicians respond.

The open question is how far this goes. Kansas will elect a new governor in 2018; moderate and conservative candidates are already angling for the Republican nomination. And if moderate Republicanism makes a comeback in Kansas, could the same thing happen nationally?

For whatever it’s worth, given that he might say the opposite tomorrow, Trump finally endorsed NATO’s Article 5, the one that pledges all NATO countries to defend each other. But Trump is still pushing the bogus idea that NATO countries spending less than 2% of their GDP on defense “owe” something to somebody.

Betsy DeVos is just as bad as Democrats feared. She wants public-funded private schools whose backers will be able to make unlimited amounts of money off the taxpayers, while not protecting LGBTQ students from bullying or harassment. Collins and Murkowski voted against DeVos’ confirmation as education secretary, but all the other Republican senators have to answer for this.

Good Atlantic article about Trump’s policy-free administration.

The secret of the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.

TrumpCare was written by Congress; Trump and his HHS secretary played virtually no role. The “Trump tax cut” is vacuous; Congress will have to fill in all the details. And last week was supposed to be “Infrastructure Week”, when the administration rolled out its plan to create jobs by rebuilding the country’s worn-out public infrastructure. But the plan is mostly just a wish that other people — states, cities, profit-making corporations — will do good things. The administration has no specific projects in mind and offers little-to-no money to pay for anything.

The NYT verified something I had surmised a few weeks ago: Trump still hasn’t replaced any of the U.S. attorneys he fired.

The Bill Cosby trial is happening.

but we need to keep paying attention to health care

In America as we used to know it, if you didn’t hear any news about a major piece of legislation, that meant it had stalled. We’re used to the idea that legislation goes through hearings, committee votes, and a series of public proposals that eventually converge on a bill, which then gets debated over several days or weeks before being voted on. Each of those events is supposed to generate headlines, so if you don’t see headlines, nothing much is happening.

Well, that’s another way that Trump’s America is different from the one we’ve been living in all our lives: The AHCA (a.k.a. TrumpCare) went through the House almost in secret. Versions were worked out in closed sessions within the Republican caucus, the hearing process did not consider any amendments, and the vote happened too fast for the Congressional Budget Office to analyze the final proposal. It wasn’t going to happen and then suddenly it was done.

Oh, but the Senate would be different, everyone said. Well, not so much.

[Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell is speeding toward a vote, with the goal of passing a healthcare bill the last week of June, before the Fourth of July recess.

Republicans have said there will be no committee hearings or markups for the bill, a major departure from the standard Senate process. Instead, the bill will go straight to the floor for a vote.

Democrats fear the legislation will be kept secret until just a couple of days before the vote, to minimize time for opposition to build.

If things were working in the usual American way, all the attention Trump and James Comey are getting would keep TrumpCare from raising the energy it needs to pass. But McConnell has come up with a different method: He’s using Trump the way a pickpocket uses a distracting partner: Trump grabs your attention like an obnoxious drunk in a bar, and McConnell quietly sneaks up behind you and steals your health insurance.

But what about the Republican moderates who were supposed to save the country from the worst excesses of the House bill? They’ve gone silent. As Josh Marshall generalizes: “The GOP moderates always cave.”

So especially if you live in a state with a Republican senator, you can’t wait for the newspapers to tell you when it’s time to take action. Whatever you can do to keep Republicans from taking health insurance away from tens of millions of Americans, you need to do it now.

and let’s close with something incredibly efficient

Do you have 20 minutes to review the history of the entire world?

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (10)

Social Capital and Inequality

June 12, 2017 – 8:38 am

Inequality is different this time, because the rich are usurping a different kind of capital.

For a long time, most thinkers in the West accepted poverty as natural. As Jesus said: “The poor you will always have with you.” But by 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing an entire discourse on the origin of inequality and blaming it largely on the practice of recognizing land as private property.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Thomas Paine, who in many ways was the most radical of the American revolutionaries, observed the contrasting example of the Native American tribes — where he found no parallel to European wealth or poverty — and came away with a more nuanced model of the connection between inequality and landed property, which he published in 1797 as Agrarian Justice. He started in much the same place as Rousseau:

The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, 
and ever would have continued to be 
THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man 
would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest 
in the property of the soil, 
and in all its natural productions, 
vegetable and animal.

But Paine also recognized that the development of modern agriculture — which he saw as necessary to feed people in the numbers and diversity of activities essential to advanced civilization — required investing a lot of up-front effort: clearing forests of trees and rocks, draining marshlands, and then annually plowing and planting. Who would do all that, if in the end the harvest would belong equally to everybody? He saw private ownership of land as a solution to this problem, but believed it had been implemented badly. What a homesteader deserved to own was his or her improvement on the productivity of the land, not the land itself. If the land a family cleared became more valuable than the forest or marshland they started with, then the homesteaders should own that difference in value, but not the land itself. [1]

Society as a whole, he concluded, deserved a rent on the land in its original state, and he proposed using that income — or an inheritance tax on land, which would not be as clean a solution theoretically, but would be easier to assess and collect — to capitalize the poor.

When a young couple begin the world, 
the difference is exceedingly great 
whether they begin with nothing 
or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, 
and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; 
and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way 
of becoming useful and profitable citizens.

Paine argued this not as charity or even social engineering, but as justice: The practice of privatizing land had usurped the collective inheritance of those born without land, so something had to be done to restore the usurped value.

In one of my favorite talks (I published versions of it here and here), I extended Paine’s idea in multiple directions, including to intellectual property. Just as Paine would buy a young couple a cow and some tools, I proposed helping people launch themselves into a 21st century information economy. Like Paine, I see this as justice, because otherwise the whole benefit of technological advancement accrues only to companies like Apple or Google, reaching the rest of us only through such companies. A fortune like Bill Gates’ arises partly through innovation, effort, and good business judgment, but also by usurping a big chunk of the common inheritance.

Avent. And that brings us to Ryan Avent’s new book, The Wealth of Humans: work, power, and status in the twenty-first century. There are at least two ways to read this book. It fits into the robot-apolcalypse, where-are-the-jobs-of-the-future theme that I have recently discussed here (and less recently here and here). Avent’s title has a double meaning: On the one hand it’s about the wealth humans will produce through the continued advance of technology. But that advance will also result in society having a “wealth” of humans — more than are needed to do the jobs available.

Most books in this genre are by technologists or futurists, and consequently assemble evidence to support a single vision or central prediction. Avent is an economic journalist. (He writes for The Economist.) So he has produced a more balanced analysis, cataloging the forces, trends, and possibilities. It’s well worth reading from that point of view.

But I found Avent’s book more interesting in what it says about inequality and social justice in the current era. What’s different about the 21st century is that technology and globalism have converged to make prosperity depend on a type of capital we’re not used to thinking about: social capital. [2] And from a moral point of view, it’s not at all obvious who should own social capital. Maybe we all should.

What is social capital? Before the Industrial Revolution, capital consisted mainly of land (and slaves, where that was allowed). By the late 19th century, though, the big fortunes revolved around industrial capital: the expensive machines that sat in big factories. The difference between a rich country and a poor one was mainly that people in rich countries could afford to invest in such machinery, which then made them richer. On a national level, industrial capital showed up as government-subsidized railroads and canals and port facilities. (The Erie Canal alone created one of the great 19th-century boom towns: Buffalo.) A country that could afford to make such improvements became more productive and more prosperous.

In the 20th century, the countries that rose to wealth — first Japan and then later Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — did so partly through investment in machinery, but also through education. An educated populace could provide the advanced services that made an industrial economy thrive. And so we started talking about human capital, the investments that people and their governments make in acquiring skills, and intellectual capital, the patents, copyrights, and trade secrets that powered a 20th-century giant like IBM.

That may seem like a pretty complete list of the kinds of capital. But now look at today’s most valuable companies: Apple and Google, either of which might become the world’s first trillion-dollar corporation in a year or two. Each owns a small amount of land, no slaves, and virtually no industrial capital; Apple contracts out nearly all of its manufacturing, and a lot of Google’s products are entirely intangible. Both employ brilliant, well-educated people, but not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of them. They have valuable patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc., but again, intellectual property alone doesn’t account for either company’s market value. There’s something in how all those factors fit together that makes Apple and Google what they are.

That’s social capital. Avent describes it like this:

Social capital is individual knowledge that only has value in particular social contexts. An appreciation for property rights, for example, is valueless unless it is held within a community of like-minded people. Likewise, an understanding of the culture of a productive firm is only useful within that firm, where that culture governs behavior. That dependence on a critical mass of minds to function is what distinguishes social capital from human capital.

Social capital has always existed and been a factor of production, but something about the current era, some combination of globalism and technology, has brought it to the fore. Today, a firm strong in social capital — a shared way of approaching problems and taking action that is uniquely suited to a particular market at this moment in history — can acquire all the other factors of production cheaply, making social capital the primary source of its wealth. [3]

Who should own social capital? Right now it’s clear who does own a company’s social capital: the stockholders. But should they? Avent talks about Bill Gates’ $70 billion net worth — created mostly not by his own efforts but by the social organism called Microsoft — and then generalizes:

People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

Stockholders — the people who put up the money to acquire the other factors of production — currently get the vast majority of the benefit from a company’s social capital, but it’s not clear why they should. We usually imagine other forms of capital as belonging to whomever would have them if the enterprise broke up: The stockholders would sell off the land and industrial and intellectual capital, while the employees would walk away with the human capital of their experience and education. But the company’s social capital would just vanish, the way that a living organism vanishes if it gets rendered into its constituent chemicals. So, rightfully, who owns it?

Another chunk of social capital resides in nations, which are also social organisms. The very real economic value of the rule of law, voluntary compliance with beneficial but unenforceable norms, shared notions of fairness, trust that others will fulfill their commitments, and general public-spiritedness — in other words, all the cultural stuff that makes a worker or firm or idea more valuable in America or Germany than in Burundi or Yemen — who does it belong to? Who should share in its benefits?

Bargaining power. Avent does not try to sell the conservative fairy tale that the market will allocate benefits appropriately. Under the market, what each party gets out of any collective endeavor depends on its relative bargaining power, not on what it may deserve in some more abstract sense.

Avent proposes this thought experiment: What if automation got to the point where only one human worker was required to produce everything? Naively, you might expect this individual to be tremendously important and very well paid, but that’s probably not what would happen. Everyone in the world who wanted a job would want his job, and even if he had considerable skills, probably in the whole world millions of people would share those skills. So his bargaining power would be essentially zero, and even though in some sense he produced everything, he might end up working for nothing.

Globalization and automation, plus political developments like the decline of unions, have lowered the bargaining power of unskilled workers in rich countries, so they get less money, even though in most cases their productivity has increased. As communication gets cheaper and systems get more intelligent, more and more jobs can be automated or outsourced to countries with lower wages, so the bargaining power of the people in those jobs shrinks. That explains this graph, which I keep coming back to because I think it’s the single most important thing to understand about the American economy today: Hourly wages tracked productivity fairly closely until the 1970s, but have fallen farther and farther behind ever since.

Companies could have afforded to pay more — by now, the productivity is there to support a wage nearly 2 1/2 times higher — but workers haven’t had the bargaining power to demand that money, so they haven’t gotten it. [4]

A similar thing happened early in the Industrial Revolution: Virtually none of the benefits that came from industrial capital were shared with the workers, until they gained bargaining power through political action and unionization. The result is the safety net we have today.

Just as workers’ ability to reap significant benefits from the deployment of industrial capital was in doubt for decades, so we should worry that social capital will not, without significant alterations to the current economic system, generate better economic circumstances for most people.

Who’s in? Who’s out? When you do start sharing social capital, whether within a firm or within a country, you run into the question of who belongs. This is a big part of the contracting-out revolution. The janitors and cafeteria workers at Henry Ford’s plants worked for Henry Ford. But a modern technology corporation is likely to contract for those services. By shrinking down to a core competency, it can reward its workers while keeping a tight rein on who “its workers” are. No need to give stock options or healthcare benefits to receptionists and parking lot attendants if they don’t seem essential to maintaining the company’s social capital.

Things shake out similarly at the national level: The more ordinary Americans succeed in getting a share of the social capital of the United States, the greater the temptation to restrict who can get into the US and qualify for benefits — or to throw out people that many of the rest of us think shouldn’t be here.

Avent would like to see us take the broadest possible view of who’s in:

The question we ask ourselves, knowingly or not, is: With whom do we wish to share society? The easy answer, the habitual answer, is: with those who are like us.

But this answer is bound to lead to trouble, because it is arbitrary, and because it is lazy, and because it is imprecise, in ways that invite social division. There is always some trait or characteristic available which can be used to define someone seemingly like us as not like us.

There is a better answer available: that to be “like us” is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia.

Can it happen? Much of the Avent’s book is depressing, but by the time the Epilogue rolls around he seems almost irrationally optimistic. For 200 pages, he has painted as realistic a picture as he could of the challenges we face, whether economic, technological, social, or political. But as to whether things will ultimately work out, he appears to come around to the idea that they have to, so they will. So he ends with this:

We are entering into a great historical unknown. In all probability, humanity will emerge on the other side, some decades hence, in a world in which people are vastly richer and happier than they are now. With some probability, small but positive, we will not make it at all, or we will arrive on the other side poorer and more miserable. That assessment is not optimism or pessimism. It is just the way things are.

Face to face with the unknown, it is hard to know what to feel or what to do. It is tempting to be afraid. But, faced with this great, powerful, transformative force, we shouldn’t be frightened. We should be generous. We should be as generous as we can be.

[1] The arbitrariness of this becomes clear when you consider mineral rights. If my grandfather homesteaded a plot of land, which in my generation turned out to be in the middle of a oil field, what would that wealth have to do with me that I would deserve to own it?

[2] If the term social capital rings a bell for you, you’re probably remembering Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which appeared as a magazine article in 1995 and was expanded to a book in 2000. But Putnam used the term more metaphorically, expressing a sociological idea in economic terms, rather than as a literal factor of production.

[3] Henry Ford’s company probably also had a lot of social capital, but it was hard to notice behind all those buildings and machines.

[4] Individual employers will tell you that they’d go bankrupt if they had to raise wages 2 1/2 times, and in some sense that’s true: They compete with companies that also pay low wages, and would lose that competition if they paid high wages. But that is simply evidence that workers’ bargaining power is low across entire industries, rather than just in this company or that one.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles, Expand Your Vocabulary | Tagged | Comments (11)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 12, 2017 – 7:19 am

In my continuing effort not to get swallowed completely by the Trump/Russia scandal (which seems overdue for a name, like Watergate or Teapot Dome), I’m continuing to read what’s-going-on-with-the-economy books. This week I want to tell you about The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent of The Economist. This can be read as a where-are-the-jobs-of-the-future book, which I’ve reviewed several of in the last few years. But I was more interested in Avent’s explanation of the recent increase in inequality: Technological and geo-political change has made social capital the decisive factor of production. And since few of us really understand social capital and our culture has no shared understanding of who should own it, the wealthy have been free to usurp all its benefits.

I’ll put that insight into the context of Rousseau’s and Thomas Paine’s writings on inequality, as well as one of my own favorite talks “Who Owns the World?” That’s the very reduced version of my review of the book, which will appear by 9 a.m. EDT as “Social Capital and Inequality”.

Of course the weekly summary will return to Trump/Russia, and in particular James Comey’s testimony last Thursday. There’s also the British election to discuss (reminding you that last week I passed on Nate Silver’s observation that anything could still happen). I didn’t really have to cover all the fascinating discussions that spin out of the Wonder Woman movie, but I couldn’t resist. A bunch of other things make it into the short notes, and I call special attention to Mitch McConnell’s attempt to sneak ObamaCare repeal past the public without hearings, before closing with a video reviewing the entire history of the world in less than 20 minutes.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)