Tag Archives: liberal hysteria

Memoirs of the Addams Administration 7.

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Democrats are unhappy with the outcome of the November 2016 presidential election.  It is easy to understand why.  With the House and the Senate already in Republican hands, winning the White House offered the only way for Democrats to check potential Republican legislation and to prevent Republican control of judicial appointments that will control the interpretation of laws for a generation.  So, their fallback positions have been to allege that Trump is an authoritarian and to raise the possibility of impeachment.[1]  Democrats have been quick to characterize President Trump’s behavior as “crazy.”[2]

In a recent Twitter post, President Donald Trump called the mainstream media (MSM) “the enemy of the people!”  One journalist quickly analogized Trump to Hitler, Mao, and Lenin, who all used the same phrase.[3]  (He left out the noted Scandinavian tyrant Henrik Ibsen, who seems to have originated the phrase.)  Another journalist argued that Trump seeks a country where “there is no such thing as truth.”  Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), who has eclipsed David Brooks as the Republican-Democrats-love-to-quote, said that attacking the press is “how dictatorships get started.”  Picking up on Senator McCain’s line, one journalist argued that President Trump’s long-running and now-escalated criticisms of the MSM constitute “something new and potentially dangerous for our democracy.”[4]  How so?  Is journalism a bulwark of democracy that—like Joe Friday—is committed to placing “just the facts” before voters?  Are journalists going to bend before the broken wind of criticism emerging from the White House?  Is the MSM going to lose credibility in the eyes of the Americans who have been fleeing from the MSM’s print and digital formats in immense numbers for two decades?  A recent Gallup Poll reported that less than one-third (32 percent) of Americans have “a great deal” or a “fair” amount of confidence in the media.  This seems to be the lowest level since whenever they began tracking this issue.[5]

President Trump added Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster to his team as National Security Adviser to replace Michael Flynn.  McMaster is a highly-regarded-in-some-quarters combat commander, counter-insurgency expert, strategist, and military intellectual.[6]  Although the New York Times has castigated the Trump administration as “packed with radicals and amateurs,” so far as national security goes, the reality is different.  McMaster fits into a larger pattern.  Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were all lauded for their achievements in their previous fields of endeavor. [7]  Mattis, Kelly, Tillerson, and McMaster have all distanced themselves from policies proclaimed by President Trump.[8]  One issue here is whether the settled culture of official Washington can tolerate non-traditional experts—military officers and business executives—as leaders of important agencies.  A second issue is whether only non-traditional experts—military officers and business executives—can make Washington work.

[1] Impeachment would put the conventional—but extremely conservative—Vice President Mike Pence into office.  I’m not sure that it would alter conditions for the better for Democrats.  So, I’m not sure that they are thinking about things in a clear-headed way.

[2] “Trump: the sanity question,” The Week, 3 March 2017, p. 16.  In any event, see: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2017/02/17/bug-eyed-with-fear-and-vengeance/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

[3] At some point, an intrepid researcher is going to have to go back to figure out where the name-calling originated.  Neither side seems able to achieve a degree of objectivity on the relationship.  See: “The War of the Roses” (1989, dir. Danny DeVito).

[4] “The press: Are journalists ‘the enemy of the people’?’ The Week, 3 March 2017, p. 6.

[5] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 3 March 2017, p. 17.

[6] To declare a personal interest, I once heard General McMaster speak.  I thought at the time—it was a juvenile response—that I would follow him into the mouth of Hell.  I have not changed my position.  See also: Thomas Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (2013) on the tribes within the army.

[7] Really, who would you rather have negotiating on behalf of the United States, the former head of a ferocious oil company or the guy in the pink tie?  See: http://www.bourncreative.com/meaning-of-the-color-pink/

[8] As has Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  King Frederick the Great of Prussia once proclaimed that “I and my people have come to an agreement.  They may say what they want and I may do what I want.”  What if the reverse situation prevails here?

“Bug Eyed with Fear and Vengeance.”

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In the opening scene of The Hamlet[1], Ab Snopes strides across his future landlord’s barnyard, then tracks manure into the front hall.  His behavior, and that of the whole scabby Snopes clan, deteriorates from there on across a trilogy of novels.  When David Mikkelson needed a user name for a group, he picked “snopes.”  Soon, impressed by the amount of sheer nonsense he encountered on the internet, he and his wife started a fact-checking site called Snopes.  To this day, the site tracks manure into the front hall of many internet fantasies.

Recently, the editor at the Snopes site reportedly told The Atlantic[2] that the majority of political false reports and rumors now come from or are aimed at liberals.  To follow one example ripped from the pages of Snopes, in February 2017 a story circulated that Donald Trump had met Vladimir Putin at an exclusive Swiss Alpine resort in June 2016. The story originated with three newly-created “fake news” sites.  “Redirects subsequently put in place for these fake news sites demonstrate that they were established as a promotional effort for the psychological thriller film ‘A Cure for Wellness’.”[3]

In similar fashion, surveys of Democrats conducted in July and November 2016 revealed an increase in a disposition to believe conspiracy theories from 27 percent to 32 percent.[4]  Political psychologists suggest that a belief in conspiracies is a coping mechanism on the part of people who have lost power or status in some fashion.  Thus the same survey that found an increase in Democrats’ conspiracy belief also found a decline in Republican conspiracy belief from 28 percent to 19 percent.[5]  As one academic expert on George Orwell put it, “people are hungry for frames of reference to understand this new reality.”[6]

Perhaps one sign of the post-election state of mind among Democrats is to be found in the surge of sales for “dystopian classics.”  George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 topped the sales charts at Amazon.com.[7]  Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here[8] and Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, came close behind.  Sales of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1984) jumped 30 percent in 2016 and 100,000 copies were printed in the three months following the election.

It has been suggested that alarmed Democrats are turning to works of fiction because non-fiction journalism can’t keep up with reality.  It isn’t for want of trying.  To take one example, one “The Interpreter” column in the New York Times offered “scholars of authoritarianism” a platform from which to compare Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, and Rodrigo Duterte.[9]  Will all this turn out to be incitement to some rash act?

[1] William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940).

[2] Which was read by a reporter at the New York Times, who quoted the Snopes editor in a story which I read and am now trying to write about for the blog which you are reading.  Just laying out the provenance here.

[3] See: http://www.snopes.com/trump-putin-switzerland/  The film was produced for Regency Films, owned by Amon Milchan.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnon_Milchan

[4] Brendan Nyhan, “More Democrats Turn to Conspiracy Theories,” NYT, 16 February 2017.

[5] It is curious (to me anyway) that in July 2016, essentially equal percentages of Democrats (27) and Republicans (28) were disposed to believe in conspiracy theories.  I wonder if that is just a result of an election campaign and that the numbers are lower between elections?

[6] Alexandra Alter, “Fears for the Future Prompt A Boon (sic) for Dystopian Classics,” NYT, 28 January 2017.

[7] Understandably, sales of his Homage to Catalonia (which details the murderous behavior of the Communists to their fellow-leftists during the Spanish Civil War) and The Road to Wigan Pier (which lambast middle-class contempt for the values and behavior of working people) failed to budge.

[8] The novel commonly is taken as an attack on Huey Long, the Louisiana demagogue and rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt until Long’s assassination.

[9] Amanda Taub, “The Travel Ban and an Authoritarian ‘Ladder of Violence’,” NYT, 2 February 2017.

Memoirs of the Addams Administration 5.

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Immigration occupied the spot-light.  On the one hand, the Trump Administration’s ill-prepared travel ban got banned itself by a federal judge in Seattle, soon backed up by the Appellate Court of the 9th Circuit.[1]  On the other hand, the president got into an ugly spat with the prime minister of Australia.  President Obama had struck a bargain with Australia to take in 1,250 refugees, and President Trump ungraciously agreed to honor the deal even as he was trying to ban immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries.  Media attention—in the United States and Australia—highlighted the president’s boorish behavior.  Little noticed in the scrum was Australia’s own sweeping ban on refugees from selected countries.  Refugees trying to reach Australia are intercepted at sea to prevent them from ever setting foot on Australian soil.  That would allow them to apply for asylum.  Instead they are diverted to “detentions centers” (i.e. prison camps) in places like Papua-New Guinea and Nauru.[2]

Far more important than these eye-catching events, however, was the proposal from two Republican senators to cut the number of “green cards” issued each year from 1 million to 500,000.  Immigrants, broadly defined, create about half of new start-ups.[3]

The president issued executive orders for a review of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act regulating Wall Street, and the not-yet-implemented Fiduciary Rule.[4]  Observers dispute whether Dodd-Frank offers a reasonable safeguard against the stupidity of bankers or imposes crippling burdens on American business.  Possibly it does both.  Worse, what if it does neither?

As for the Democrats, it seems widely agreed that they lost many former voters to Donald Trump because those voters found that the Democrats had moved too far to the left.  The party’s solution for now appears to be to hold fast to Democratic loyalists.  One columnist argued that they “will not tolerate any sign of accommodation” with the administration.  What they want, said another, is “total resistance” to the president.  The trouble is that the Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House.  They are poised to take control of the Supreme Court as well.  The president nominated Neil Gorsuch to take the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia.  Democrats are calculating whether it makes sense to try to filibuster a vote on Gorsuch.  What the Democrats have been able to do is to use parliamentary procedure to slow down the confirmation of Cabinet members and to stage showy demonstrations, both in the streets[5] and in the corridors-of-out-of-power.  This hardly represents a long-term strategy.

The New York Times characterized the president’s fuming about the judge’s stay on his immigration order as an assault on “the most dependable check on his power.”  A columnist in the Washington Post situated the president’s continuing denunciations of journalists within his larger effort to weaken anyone or anything that “place serious, meaningful limits on his power.”  Another lampooned “Trump’s bug-eyed retreat into fear and vengeance.”[6]  Trump’s not alone.

Largely unremarked were signs that Trump may have begun to learn something.   Chief-of-staff Reince Priebus may be winning his power struggle with Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.  The president has moderated some diplomatic positions as well.[7]  Still, “many’s the slip….”

[1] See: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2017/02/07/the-selective-immigration-pause/

[2] “How they see us: Australia stands up to Trump,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 15.

[3] “Boring but important,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 6; “Noted,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 16.

[4] “Trump takes aim at Dodd-Frank,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 5.

[5] “Rowdy constituents,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 7

[6] “Travel ban challenged in court,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 4; “Democrats: Should they become the ‘party of no’?” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 6.

[7] “The White House: An internal power struggle,” The Week, 17 February 2017, p. 16.

Memoirs of the Addams Administration 1.

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From 1945 to the very recent past, the United States led the capitalist world toward negotiation of an open world economy.  In recent decades, that policy has come back to bite the United States as Asian countries became ferocious competitors.  Eighty percent of trade-related job losses can be attributed to Asian countries (China, Japan, South Korea).  However, public hostility has focused on the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the least offending agreement.

In 1992, President George H. W. Bush completed the negotiations for NAFTA.[1]  The agreement ended tariffs and non-tariff barriers between Mexico, Canada, and the United States.  This would allow the free flow of assets across national borders.  Soon afterward, President Bill Clinton got the treaty passed by Congress.

“Comparative advantage” (a term in economics) suggests that low-wage, low-skill Mexican workers will manufacture one sort of product,[2] and high-wage, high-skill Canadian workers will manufacture another sort of product.  This seems to be the case under NAFTA, as Mexicans produce dashboards and Canadians produce transmissions for final assembly by Americans.  There’s nothing innovative about this.  Asian manufacturers have been doing the same diversification of the supply-chain thing for a while.  American manufacturers had to adapt to stay competitive.

Was NAFTA good deal for Americans?  Well, the United States now exports to Mexico goods worth 3.5 times as much as in 1993, even allowing for inflation.  On the other hand, Mexico still has run a trade surplus against the United States that amounts to $60 billion a year.  How many jobs—if any—did that amount to?  In the eyes of economists, NAFTA encouraged a migration of American “jobs” from lower-skilled and lower-paid to higher-skilled and higher-paid.  The political problem is that “jobs” are not the same thing as “workers.”  The “workers” who lost “jobs” didn’t shift into the new “jobs” that needed “workers.”  Instead, it seems somebody else—within the United States—got those new jobs.  This shift is not much discussed by political figures and media analysts.

So, trade experts and displaced American workers agree that it was a flawed deal.  It could be improved.  How and at what cost?  First, as is the case with “Brexit,” any country can withdraw from NAFTA by giving notice six months in advance.  Then further negotiations would define the new relationships between Canada, the United States, and Mexico.  However, what the Trump administration may be aiming at is a simple re-negotiation of terms.  Now Canada and Mexico have begun to establish positions for such talks.

The exact issues to be dealt with in any re-negotiation are complex, even if they become household words—in a small number of households—over the next several years.  “Country of origins,” “de minimus” exports, and Value Added Tax (VAT) rebates are all issues on which the Trump administration’s trade negotiators seek accommodation.  Conversely, the Mexican negotiators are going to claim equality-of-status with Canada when it comes to things like easy access to the United States for Mexican truckers and Mexican workers.

None of this is going to be painless.  Anything that comes out of the negotiations will be disruptive.  NAFTA itself has been painful and disruptive.  Then come the Asian economies.

[1] Neil Irwin, “Will NAFTA Be Attacked With Tweezers or a Hammer?” NYT, 26 January 2017.

[2] To further complicate matters, the basic components of the dash might have been manufactured in really-low-wage China (outside NAFTA), then exported to Mexico (inside NAFTA) for assembly for export to the United States for final assembly.  Thus, both Mexico and Canada serve as pass-throughs for counties not party to NAFTA.