Impending Apocalypse

Let me resurrect an old philosophical trope for what I hope will be a brief comment on the "presidential" debate that occurred the other night -- the difference between "being" and "becoming."  There is a difference between "being" president and the interminable process of "becoming" president.  I suspect that Hillary Clinton will be good and who knows? perhaps even great at "being" president, actually governing the country.  Like Thomas Friedman, "I am not enamored of Clinton’s stale, liberal, centralized view of politics, but she is sane and responsible; she’ll do her homework, can grow in the job, and might even work well with Republicans, as she did as a senator."  Having said that, she is not particularly good at "becoming" president.  Although there is a rough consensus that she "won" the overall debate, there is still a lingering sense of disappointment that she didn't deliver the final pin prick to pop the over-inflated Trump ego.  One commenter to Friedman's article summed it up nicely, writing: 

No question Trump is a disaster, but Hillary needs to be much more agile in the ring, and close out this everlasting election. There were several opportunities for her to take a swing and she did not. Something like... "Donald, your policy proposals are about as thin as the gold-plating on your Trump Tower marquee..." ...and defend the economy of the Clinton and Obama years where appropriate. They were a hell of lot better than the bubble and bust of the "W" tenure. And defend the necessity for appropriate regulations. Do we want to live in a world of lead poisoned kids, or a world without wild salmon spawning in streams. Don't put us to sleep with wonky proposals, but articulate how her policies have and will affect all of us with visceral examples.

By her own admission, however, she lacks the rhetorical campaign skills necessary to the task of "becoming" president, which, in the end, may scuttle her chances of "being" president.

In a world of identity politics, however, I wonder how much of what I'm saying can be attributed to my own hidden expectations around gender.  A white male has quoted to men, Tom and Joe, as a comment on the sole woman in the rhetorical room.  Which reminds me, I do have a tenancy to "man'splain" things, as Lora is quick to point out when I lapse into patronizing and condescending lectures on the obvious.  Not unlike our attitudes on race, it can be a bit disconcerting when the normal hierarchical structures are up-ended, and perhaps Tom, Joe and I just can't help ourselves as we pontificate on "weaknesses" which may not be "weaknesses" at all.  She didn't deliver the final prick (and neither did she "schlong him," "hose him," or ... you get the idea) but rather endured his bluster, his interruptions, his rants, his growing irritation until he had fully revealed himself for what he is and what he will be in the oval office.  The Times summed it up nicely,  "On Monday night, those women got to see Mrs. Clinton stand up to that common hazard of working while female: the sexist blowhard, the harasser.  When Mr. Trump began by addressing Mrs. Clinton as 'Secretary Clinton,' saying, 'yes, is that O.K.?,'" he was playing a role that men have imposed on women,  "chivalry" or "gallantry," all of which is predicated on the assumption that a woman's happiness needs the protection and rescue of a man who, after all, wants you "to be very happy."  "Mrs. Clinton," however, "laughed off the condescension. But she wasn’t playing along — she was awaiting her moment. After nearly 90 minutes, it came."  When asked what he meant when he meant by saying "she doesn't have a presidential look," Holt and then Trump gallantly held open the door for her by saying, what any knight errant would say, "she doesn't have the stamina."  She walked through, and shut the door behind her, taking away the last word, with a sentence that summed it all up nicely, thank you very much:  “Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”  Not only did she up-end the gender stereotypes about a "man's work," but subtly turned her worst recurrent nightmare, the endless inquiry into the emails, into an asset, an emblem of her endurance and stamina.

She may be better at this nasty business of "becoming" president than Tom, Joe and I believe.   She ticked up in my respect several notches at any rate.  Of course, ultimately it may not matter.   The Times may have this right as well, "Mr. Trump’s misogyny is unlikely to turn off his core supporters." There are various reasons why it might not matter, not least of which is the resentment born of up-ended status and the continuing erosion of privilege.  "His bullying of Mrs. Clinton," after all, is nothing new, and we have watched her being bullied throughout her career, without, I might add, much sympathy -- much unrequited suspicion, but little sympathy.  She's the wife of a philandering husband suspected, metaphorically speaking, of having her own affair, and we have spent what? close to 14 million dollars trying to prove it, without one conclusive "in flagrante delicto" shred of proof.  Although Trump paraded his gallantry by mentioning that he did NOT mentioned the stain on Monica's dress for the sake of the children, thereby mentioning it, we seem determined to believe that she MUST be as guilty as her husband, that there must be a stain on her pant suit as well, and so the suspicions carry forward.  My apologies for the "icky" metaphor, but this has been one "icky" election, so I won't mention that Trump, despite his small hands, is the hugest exemplar of marital fidelity, and we need only ask John Miller or John Barron, both very close associates of Trump,  about Ivana, Marla, Carla, Melania, or perhaps any other woman whose name ends in "a" -- we need only ask John or John about his upright marital stamina, his hard presidential look, and I'm sure they'll be happy to tell us.  

Beyond the ick, while there is some legitimacy to Trump's "critique of her reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his remarks on the effect of globalization on jobs," and his critique  may legitimately "play well with white men reeling from technological change, job losses and addiction," ultimately I think it comes around to resentment over what is perceived (falsely) as a zero sum game, an "I-win-you-lose/you-win-I-lose" game -- that is to say, "amid this upheaval, some have come to believe that when minorities, immigrants and women make gains, it pushes them further behind."  It isn't surprising, of course, that a politician -- a political hack, to use Trump's word -- would use resentment to capture votes.  As Factcheck points out, however, Trump said that President Bill Clinton 'approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.' Actually, the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush.  President Clinton signed the legislation to implement the agreement. Trump also said NAFTA 'was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry.' Actually, economic studies say NAFTA’s impact on U.S. jobs has been small."  Which tells us two things -- that the push toward a more inclusive economy represented by NAFTA had then what is rare today, bi-partisan support -- that we have lost sight of the fact that we're talking about our neighbors immediately to the north and to the south ... oh, yes, to the south.  Trump hammered home the point about Ford moving it's small car manufacturing to Mexico.  What Trump failed to mention, however, is that the move to Mexico reveals something equally rare today, the effects of a negotiated union contract.  As factcheck also point out, the Detroit Free Press reported that “the automaker made a commitment to invest $9 billion in U.S. plants and create or retain more than 8,500 jobs as part of a new four-year contract with the UAW. Of that, $4.8 billion goes to 11 facilities in Michigan.”   Of course, this is all complication and nuance.  Those with a zero sum mentality would ask why lose ANY jobs to Mexico without asking about the knock off effects of an improved Mexican economy on other hot button issues like, say, immigration.  Trump's wall may not have any actual foundation in reality, but it does have symbolic foundation in resentment -- a resentment of the jobs flowing south and a resentment of the immigrants flowing north. 

In the end, it may well be the resentment that matters, which brings me to the matter of style.  As opposed to Clinton's periodic sentences spoken at a deliberate pace with measured pauses to allow comprehension, many have noted the odd incoherence of Trump's rambling "word salad."   In a jibe at Trump, Slate even asked for help in diagramming one of his sentences.  On the page, it was an incoherent ramble, but as Tara Golshan points out in a Vox article, his style is principally oral.  "Their seeming incoherence stems from the big difference between written and spoken language," she writes.  "Trump’s style of speaking has its roots in oral culture. He rallies people through impassioned, targeted conversation — even if it doesn’t always follow a clear arc."   This helps us understand in part why Trump seemed so ineffectual at the debate when he has effortlessly rallied his crowds.  At the debate, one should note that the crowd wasn't JUST a Trump crowd, and for the most part (with a couple of exceptions) they obeyed the rules and kept silent.  At his rallies, it is purely a Trump crowd.  Protestors and others who might distract from the mob mentality are famously escorted out, sometimes after violent expressions of disapproval, which in turn feeds the mob as Trump infamously has so often brought the "impassioned disapproval" to the attention of the crowd.  As George Lakoff has suggested, his speech patterns may even stem from his New York City upbringing. "[The] thing about being a New Yorker it is polite if you finish their sentences for them. It’s a natural part of conversation."  And as Golshan goes on to say, "that conversational style can be effective. It’s more intimate than a scripted speech.  People walk away from Trump feeling as though he were casually talking to them, allowing them to finish his thoughts."  Moreover, "when Trump’s audience finishes his sentences for him, the blanks are filled with sentiments that resonate: fears of joblessness, worries about the United States losing its status as a major world power, concerns about foreign terrorist organizations.  Trump validates their insecurities and justifies their anger."  Trump started the debate using familiar speaking strategies, and perhaps he seemed more effective at the beginning BECAUSE the patterns were familiar, but he could not sustain the energy without the feedback loop of the mob roaring their disapproval of the person now standing next to him on the stage, after Obama, the next bug-a-boo symbol of their accumulated resentments.

Can we move past a politics of resentment?  Probably not.  While one can certainly question Trump's religion, and for that matter the religion of those who seem to resent everyone but white christians, there is a religious edge to his resentment.  As I've suggested before, Trump is the savior come to warn others of the impending apocalypse.  As reported by Politico, “We’re gonna make America greater than ever before,” Trump told supporters during his rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We can do that. But if we don’t win this election, it’ll never happen. I’ll tell you what, we’re never gonna have another shot. This is it. The tables will be turned. Then it’ll be too late.”  The tables will be turned?  Of course, we don't need to ask "by whom?"  We can finish his thought, by religious minorities, by ethnic and racial minorities, by women, and, of course, by the politicians sensitive to their needs.  At one level, of course, we recognize the rhetorical device here as a common sales technique -- it's the special offer that expires unless the buyer makes a decision right now -- it's the appeal to pick up that phone and call right now, because in minutes prices will never be so low again.  One can see the clock ticking down of QVC.  At another level, it is a sales technique borrowed by evangelical religion -- you think you'll live forever, but the end may come sooner than you think -- you should fall to your knees and accept Jesus right now, because who knows? you might be run over by a bus and then it'll be too late and you'll suffer the pains of hell forever.  Evangelicals may feel that "that they have no genuine champion in the presidential race and that the country has turned its back on them," as the NY Times reports, but Trump has appropriated their language and, let's be completely honest, much of the fear, rage, and resentment that flows through their language, particularly their inability to tolerate those who do not share their culture and belief system.  He has appropriated as well as their deeply felt sense of the always imminent apocalypse.  While "Americans are anxious about the economy, jobs and terrorism," the Times reports, "conservative Christians say they fear for the nation’s very soul.  Some worry that the nation has strayed so far that God’s punishment is imminent." 

Indeed, despite the demonstrable fact that the economy is getting incrementally better, with new and better paying jobs on the increase, we nevertheless feel a sense of imminent financial collapse.  Even including the lone actors who seize on radical agendas as a pretext, those of us who live in Mountain Home are much much more likely to be killed by a deer bounding in front of our pickup than an actual terrorist.  So why the sense of imminent apocalypse?  It seems to be in the air and, frankly, I feel it too, though I would not ascribe the source to gay marriage or transgender rights or the imagined enactment of sharia law, but to Trump and the resentment that he feeds and feeds upon.  He will blow the trumpet and bring on the apocalypse.  I am astonished, and continue to be astonished, that he has ANY support, much less the level of support that he does have.  Astonished, and frightened.

Race to the Finish

I have to say, for the first time in my life, I feel shame at being an American.  I could understand how half of America could support someone like George W. Bush, and I could better understand how half of America could support someone like Mitt Romney, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how half of American can support someone like Trump.  Are we so benighted?  so puerile?  that we cannot see him for what he announces himself to be?  Although I believe, and many others believe, this elections should be about the economics of state, more and more and more it appears to be about something else entirely -- a referendum on race and ethnicity.  A good deal of time an effort has been expended on trying, as Zack Beauchamp recently pointed out in Vox, that "The conventional wisdom is that the economic losses suffered by working-class people throughout the developed world explain the rise of [Donald Trump and] this new right.  Hundreds of thousands of jobs are estimated to have been lost due to free trade pacts in recent decades, with industries like manufacturing absorbing much of the pain."  A good deal of vituperation has been leveled at the "elites" of both parties, my own included, but the economic order they brought into being and helped to perpetuate contributes to the malaise, but is not the culprit -- race and our resentments around race explain it much better.

We have had a national holocaust museum for some time, and on our last visit to Washington, Lora and I visited it.  It was a profoundly moving experience -- particularly looking on the pile of shoes taken from the victims, some of them children's shoes not unlike our granddaughter's shoes --  it was, however, an experience tinged with sanctimony.  At the time, looking on, I could believe "never here."  I could believe the American people were "special" and would not fall victim to our own hatreds, but the Trump campaign, more than anything else, has disabused me of that wildly idealist picture of America.  Our own national museum for the holocaust sees fit to have on its home page, the film "Anti-Semitism Today" and we have Samantha Power (US Ambassador to the United Nations) reminding us that "it would be a grave mistake to view antisemitism as something that merely affects the Jewish people.  Antisemitism is a form of discrimination against citizens that affects all of us. You do see antisemitism correlating with an intolerance generally.  That is fundamentally going to constitute a threat to the kind of discourse and tolerance that are the bedrock of our democracies."  One need only peruse the web sites of the far right, or the comment section of Breitbart, or the tweets and re-tweets of the Trump campaign, and it becomes clear enough that a more "traditional" anti-semitism has joined hands with an anti-muslim and an anti-immigrant sentiment to produce the likes of Trump.

Yesterday, president Obama dedicated America's first national museum for black history.  It is, perhaps, telling that the holocaust museum came before the national museum for black history, but one can say better late than never.  The photographs of the jews in concentration camps still has the power to shock today, and the conflict with the nazi's of Germany is still a living memory, though it persists among an ever diminishing score of increasingly elderly veterans, but the horrors of our own slave trade and the civil war that ended it are now over a century and a half in the past, and there are very few photographs to commemorate its horrors.  Perhaps the museum will help begin to heal our deepest national wound, perhaps not, but it is instructive to read the full text of Obama's dedication.   It's moving and erudite, and reminds me how much I will miss his voice.  At one point he tells us, the museum and our national history "reaffirm that all of us are America ― that African-American history is not somehow separate from our larger American story, it’s not the underside of the American story, it is central to the American story. That our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs, but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy, and how we’ve been able to remake ourselves, again and again and again, in accordance with our highest ideals."  After, one suspects, a pause for emphasis, he adds, "I, too, am American."  It seems to diminish the statement, but I'm sure Obama was cognizant that it would be heard against the backdrop of the so-called "birther" campaign perpetuated by Trump, the reminder that African-Americans did not begin as full citizens of this nation, and that, even after 150 years of halting progress and the election of our first black president, we must doubt that president's citizenship, as though he were carried over on a slave ship from Kenya.

The day Obama was elected Lora and I were proud of my country.  We kept the front page of the Chicago Tribune as something to show our granddaughter.  Though she was too young to fully appreciate its significance, and it has long since faded from her memory, to remind her that she was alive and witnessed that day.  We were that proud, on that day, before the relentless and conspiratorial assault to "take back the country" began, before the abject middle-school puerility of this election cycle with its talk of penis size and how "hot" the respective wives were, before the threats to "the kind of discourse and tolerance that are the bedrock of our democracy," before we seemed to abandon "our highest ideals."  One expects a measure of petty bickering in a campaign, ascendency by "gotcha," but this campaign sets a new low, at least within my living memory.   Both Lora and I are military veterans, but I will let Roger Angell speak for us.  He endorses Hillary Clinton, and recites the familiar litany of Trump's malignant statements, but pauses and says 'I stick at a different moment—the lighthearted comment he made when, in early August, an admiring veteran presented him with a replica of his Purple Heart and Mr. Trump said, 'I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.'”  Like Angell, neither Lora nor I saw combat, though we came close on a couple of occasions through out combined 25 years of service, but I share Angell's incredulousness.   "What?" he asks, "Mr. Trump is saying he wishes that he had joined the armed forces somehow ... and then had died or been scarred or maimed in combat?"  Perhaps he didn't know what the purple heart represented and thought it represented an award to servicemen for successful battle against STDs.  Regardless, whether ignorance or narcissistic indifference, "it impugns the five hundred thousand young Americans who have died in combat in my lifetime, and the many hundreds of thousands more whose lives were altered or shattered by their wounds of war."  The only acceptable response, and the response I would have given, is this: "I am not deserving of this award."

Neither is Trump remotely deserving of the presidency.  While one would like to blame his rise on economic factors, "a vast universe of academic research" as Beauchamp points out, "finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the "losers of globalization" aren’t the ones voting for the likes of Trump and elsewhere. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference.  Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards."  Unfortunately, recent events here have exacerbated the racial divide.  We are all aware of the events surrounding the killing of Keith Lamont Scott.  His death follows the killing of several other armed and unarmed black men, none of whom seemed to be a direct threat to the police who shot them, at least one of whom was shot while physically restrained, face down, on the ground.  As I write this, we are into the seventh day of protests in Charlotte, and like many Americans, I am conflicted.  As the Huffington Post reported, benignly, "Protesters rallied outside a Carolina Panthers game in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday, marking the sixth straight day of demonstrations."  Although police were present in riot gear, for the most part the protests were peaceful, and "some football fans expressed solidarity with protesters, while others jeered and seemed to intentionally bump into them on their way to the stadium.  Lance Tzlaff, a Vikings fan from Minnesota, said he had no issues with protests as long as they didn’t involve destructive activity.  'They can do whatever they want as long as you don’t interfere with others' he said.  Bryan Chacka, another Vikings fan from Minnesota, agreed and said protests lose their power if they turn violent.   'They go fuck shit up and they lose their case. You lose the power behind the movement,' he said."  How can one disagree when "at least one person died in a related shooting, and several officers and residents were injured?"  How can one disagree when "several stores in downtown Charlotte were vandalized, prompting Gov. Pat McCrory (R) to declare a state of emergency and the mayor to declare a curfew on Friday?"   Of course, it's easy enough to think "they go fuck shit up" when one is not subjected to the daily bumps and indignities of systemic racial disparities.  When they begin breaking glass and targeting police, when they lose the aura of "civil disobedience" and become actual threats to community, such protests cannot help but seem self-defeating and self-destructive.  It justifies calling forth the police in riot gear to defend, as one protester put it, "a system that was created for white men by white men," or as our presidential candidate calls it, "law and order."  

Racial profiling itself is real, and the fear, the resentment and the rage born of racial disparities in the justice system are also real.  For the police, the fear makes any black man a threat to their safety and the resentment and rage makes them a pre-emptive target for violence.  Conversely, for the black community, instead of being there to protect and serve, the police themselves become at best a source of harassment, at worst an oppressor, but in either case a threat to their safety and well being.  The daily bumps and indignities turns resentment into rage, turns the "protector" into a pre-emptive target for that rage.  As another protestor put it,"it’s a thing ― and just because others haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it’s not real. We live it every day, so it needs to stop.  No lives will matter until black lives matter, too.”  Racial profiling will do nothing to stop the violence, and yet, we have a presidential candidate calling again for the very embodiment of racial profiling, the very embodiment of racially motivated policing, stop and frisk.   The New York Post suggests that "the hyperventilating about Trump’s comment still says a lot more about his critics than him," though just what I'm not sure, given his tendency to racially motivated bombast.  There are perhaps good reasons to be concerned about stop and frisk, not least the effects on policing itself.   If we're honest with ourselves, stop and frisk is not a policing technique that we are advocating for ourselves, and let's be especially honest, the white community would be outraged if police suddenly started doing random traffic stops for no apparent reason, ordered them out of their vehicles and began searching their persons invasively.  It's a technique that we're advocating for "them," those who live in poor and mostly non-white communities -- those who live in neighborhoods characterized as a place where "you get shot walking down the street."  As Jesse Singal reports, however, "for years, civil-rights and community advocates had complained that stop-and-frisk had effectively turned some neighborhoods — usually poor and nonwhite ones — into occupied territories rife with unnecessary, tense interactions between neighborhood residents and the police."  While the increased presence of police in declining neighborhoods can be helpful, as Singal goes on to point out, "if the neighborhood’s residents are scarred from their stop-and-frisk experiences, are they going to welcome an incoming wave of police who look just like the police who were hassling people for peaceful stoop-drinking not too long ago, who made getting to the bodega and back unmolested a roll of the dice?  There’s a reason smart, progressive crime and policing experts often talk about the importance of trust, of building bonds with the community being policed. People don’t want to live in high-crime neighborhoods. They want to help. But it makes it harder for them when they feel like their own dignity or safety is being threatened by the very people there to protect them."

And so we have the black-live-matter protests, and so too we have the very predictable backlash.   While the Huffington Post among others report and decry the police violence, Breitbart News reports "at least one Black Lives Matter protester in Houston was reported to yell 'F**k blue lives' while others chanted 'Pig, pig, bang, bang.'"  It is perhaps not surprising that police too feel themselves under siege.   The Huffington Post showed at least one protester, holding up a sign reading "it ain't a crime to be armed," and he was in fact openly carrying a side arm, while in the background another protester sported a t-shirt emblazoned with "fuck the police."  Such will do little to win over the hearts and minds of the typical "deplorable," those who exist in the echo chambers of their own bigotry, but then why is it the responsibility of the black minority to "win over" the worst exemplars of the white majority?   Openly or implicitly threatening gun violence, likewise, reinforces the already acrid sense of threat, and will bring a predictable response, more police violence against the black community, armed or unarmed.  Unlike the white majority's possession of guns, THEIR possession of guns,  is a problem. The white majority defends the right to "self-defense." Against thieves.  Against thugs.  Against rapists.  Although there is a radical fringe  of the white majority who see the police as a threat --  the federal police, not their local sheriff -- most of the white majority would find it inconceivable that one needed a weapon for self-protection against both the criminals, who have guns, and the police, who have guns.  In the black community, the prevalence of guns ARE a problem.   Eric Konigsberg of New York Magazine ran a story about "Brownsville, murder capital of New York City" where he pointed out the stop and frisk encounters between citizens and police were intended "most urgently meant to get guns off the streets."  Nevertheless, it was not a particularly effective tactic.  "In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns," surely a small percentage of the guns floating around Brownsville.  Nevertheless, we live in a country where indeed "it ain't a crime to be armed,"   We live in a country where the Breitbart readers who are most alarmed at the implicit violence of anti-police rhetoric are the same Breitbart readers who most vehemently defend unlimited gun rights.  Missing the point that police are supposed to bring living souls to justice, missing the point that police aren't really supposed to shoot anyone, criminal or not, one Breitbart reader suggested "criminals shoot innocent people, cops aren't supposed to. Some of the dead blacks were criminals, some weren't.  Everyone should want the police to stop shooting innocent people."  Another immediately responded, "shoot 'em all and let God sort them out."  We live in a country where the innocent are "collateral damage" are caught in the crossfire between the presumptively guilty.

So again, I would like this election to be about economics, and there is good reason to be hopeful about the state of the economy.  Patricia Cohen headlines a story "millions in U.S. Climb Out of Poverty, at long last," and goes on to write "Poverty declined among every group. But African-Americans and Hispanics — who account for more than 45 percent of those below the poverty line of $24,300 for a family of four in most states — experienced the largest improvement."  Why?  "Government programs — like Social Security, the earned-income tax credit and food stamps — have kept tens of millions from sinking into poverty year after year. But a main driver behind the impressive 1.2 percentage point decline in the poverty rate, the largest annual drop since 1999, was that the economy finally hit a tipping point after years of steady, if lukewarm, improvement."  Although we might wish that african-americans had less than a 24.1 percent poverty rate and the hispanic-americans had less than a 21.4 percent poverty rate -- both in excess of the 13.5 percent overall rate -- it nevertheless brings into questions that our black communities are in the "worst shape ever, ever, ever." Better incremental progress than no progress.  It also brings into question that a majority of blacks live in crime-ridden, drug-addled, welfare-dependent squalor when 75.9 percent are above the poverty line, some considerably above if Ben Carson is an exemplar.  Still, many WANT to believe and consequently WILL believe that nearly all blacks live in chaos, and why?  In part, no doubt, because it re-enforces a sense of white paternalism.  In its benign form, of course, it justifies those "government programs" that help shield people from the worst effects of poverty, but in its less benign forms it justifies the oppressive measures that are signaled by language like "law and order."  In its less benign forms it leads someone like Cliven Bundy, to pontificate on video, 

I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.  And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

And so, in the mind of Cliven Bundy and many others like him, there were two great mistakes in our history of race.  The first was the civil war and the emancipation of the slaves, the second was civil rights and great society legislation.  There are critiques one could level at the "great society" imagined by Johnson, not least the moral hazard associated with welfare dependency, but it takes a hugely benighted view of American history to think that slaves had "a family life" and were happily "doing things" like picking cotton or that "government subsidy" is somehow worse.  I doubt that Cliven or his acolytes will ever set foot in the new national museum for black history -- in part because he would see it, I'm certain, as just more "government propaganda" -- for those less provincial, however, maybe-possibly-perhaps, the new museum will help minimize the number of those holding such malignant misconceptions.  

If we really want to appreciate rise of Trump, however, we need to look past the tax plan or the bluster on trade.  It doesn't hurt him, and some pundits felt that his strongest forays in the first debate against Clinton were his rants on trade agreements, but even more "we need to appreciate the role of resentment: the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn't previously held it ...  a change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups."  Indeed, one might even argue that his rants on trade were an expression of resentment, the sense of lost national power, in the form of jobs, slipping into the hand of the Mexicans and the Chinese -- a sense reinforced by the legal and political status of the trade agreements.  Trump's apocalyptic view of American decline is predicated on resentment through and through -- resentment of the "political hacks," but mostly resentment of the changing political status of minority populations.  If Obama had simply moved in next door, there still remains the possibility of white flight, because, as someone I love put it, blacks are "like locusts.  They move in and destroy neighborhoods."  There will be no shaking this belief, in part because she witnessed it in Detroit as she grew up.  Obama, however, moved into the White House, and there's no moving away from that, and no reason for many to believe that he isn't doing for the nation what blacks have done for the neighborhoods of America.  Beauchamp suggests that "members of dominant groups simply believe they deserve to be the dominant force in their societies, and resent those challenging their positions at the top of the pyramid."  He cites the academic, Roger D. Peterson, who suggested that "any group that’s been dominant — well, it’s not that easy for them not to be dominant anymore."  Far from ushering in a "post-racial era," as some of us had so naively hoped for his election, he simply gave a face to the resentment already simmering throughout America -- he exemplified in the most amplified way possible the changing political status of minority populations and the felt sense of improbability and injustice that accompanied it.  

And so, round we go round we go round, with no apparent way to break the vicious circle.  We are an armed camp of resentment, and if anything will bring this nation to its destruction, it will be our inability to move past the civil war and break the cycle of resentment.

New Liberal Economics

I have made the claim, now repeatedly, that the discussion of a laissez faire vs controlled economy is misplaced.  At issue is never the wholesale abandonment of government control, but of specific controls, captured in specific rules, laws, or regulations.  Think, as a quick example, of intellectual property laws.  Neither the pop singer who has written a new number one hit nor the pharmaceutical  company that has invented a new "life-saving" drug wants to abandon the government created and government enforced copyright or patent laws.  Indeed, if anything, they would want them "strengthened" to prevent poaching on their intellectual property.  On the other hand, neither the pop singer nor the pharmaceutical company wants "restrictions" on how much and how long they might profit from their intellectual property.  It is, however, one thing to own a pop song, another thing to own a life-saving drug.  Market based restrictions on how much and how long a pop singer might profit seem "sufficient," in part because of the fickle tastes of the masses.  A pop song may be inordinately popular, reap inordinate profits, but risks are great (very very few pop songs reach those heights) and "shelf-life" limited (this week's number one is quickly displaced by next weeks number one).   As the recent epi-pen controversy suggests, however, market based restrictions on how much and how long a pharmaceutical company might profit seem "insufficient."  One can live without the latest pop song and forego its purchase, but insofar as a particular drug is "life-saving" for a given afflicted population, the pharmaceutical company essentially holds that population hostage so long as they have sole rights to the intellectual property in the drug.  It seems to be in the best interests of the population as a whole to place some restrictions on how much and how long they might profit.  In short, when the pharmaceutical company speaks of laissez faire economics, they are not asking for the abandonment of government controls and protections on patents -- indeed, time-limiting patents are one way of regulating "how much and how long" -- rather they are objecting to those specific set of government created and enforced rules that might limit their profits. 

At a very, very high level of abstraction we can debate the relative merits of the free vs the controlled economy, and this debate might be useful on a number of fronts, but it tends to distort the "political" debate.  Here again, I have made the claim, now repeatedly, that there exists a "status quo" -- that is to say, at any given point in time, the full set of rules, regulations and laws that govern the exchange of products and services within the economy  -- and short of wholesale revolution, of the sort experienced by the Russian people now twice, where the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, there is really ONLY meddling with the "status quo."  Any particular "meddle" will have greater or lessor effect, and some of the effect cannot be anticipated, but I am suggesting on the one hand that we have created the so-called economy, and on the other hand that the "political" questions are relatively simple.  Positively, who will benefit and how from any proposed "meddle?"  Negatively -- who will be adversely affected and how?  

Of course, the political question does not "justify" itself, and the justification for any particular meddle, with its particular set of winners and losers, will penultimately be pragmatic and utilitarian, but ultimately ethical and/or moral.   Strong patent laws are a pragmatic incentive to develop new and potentially profitable patents (e.g. new life saving drugs) and those incentives, despite some price gouging, can have a utilitarian effect (e.g. more lives saved).   The pragmatic and utilitarian justifications, however, do not answer the broader and more "categorical" ethical and moral questions (e.g. is it "right" to extract high rents from a vulnerable population).  The "justification" for any particular economic meddle will always be a "compromise" between the pragmatic/utilitarian and the ethical/moral questions.  Having said this, very often, the pragmatic/utilitarian effects can be empirically measured. Do strong patents actually have a positive pragmatic/utilitarian effect?  I'm not aware of any such studies, but this seems to me a question that can be answered with verifiable evidence.  If, for example, empirical evidence suggest little little positive incentive for strong patent laws (or no more than, for example, government sponsored research) then a "compromise" that protects patents that result would be less and less "conscionable" on the assumption that most would find it at least questionable to extort high prices from a vulnerable population.   Altogether, the specific meddle, along with its utilitarian and moral justification, constitute "policy" designed to address "issues."  

This is a very quick sketch, no doubt rife with untested assumptions, but such is my understanding at a very "macro" level, and so far I have seen little or nothing to dissuade me from this point of view.  Little did I know that I was articulating what amounted to the fundamentals of a "new liberal economics."  Mike Konzel on Vox has suggested that "the 'new liberal economics' is the key to understanding Hillary Clinton's policies."   I am not entirely convinced of that headline claim, but as he puts it, "the new liberal economics makes several claims," and he lists three, which I do find convincing:

1. Inequality is not a regrettable but inevitable byproduct of an efficient economy, nor a temporary, self-correcting trend. It’s driven by policy choices, and new choices can make a difference.
2. The economy will not simply bounce back from any weaknesses, as was assumed under Alan Greenspan’s Great Moderation. Rather, there are deep structural problems that include a global savings glut and unwillingness by US companies to make investments.
3. "Nudging" the private market is not always the best way to deliver core goods and economic security. Deploying government services directly can be more effective.

It might be worth exploring each of the three, beginning with the first.  To suggest, for example, that inequality "is driven by policy choices, and new choices can make a difference," more or less states my main point that, "at any given point in time," there is a given status quo.  I've put scare quotes around "any given point in time," simply to suggest that the given status quo is historical.  Meddling in the past brought it to its current state, and meddling in the present will bring it to a new state. having said that, however,  neither you, nor I, nor anyone else gets to create the status quo whole cloth.  We inherit it, and in that sense it's current state, along with its panoply of winners and losers, is "given."  I use the term "meddle," with its slightly pejorative overtone, because any change to the status quo will have its effects, some anticipated, some not.  It seems clear enough that the current inequality has had a number of "causes," most of which stem from policy decisions that began in the Reagan years and have continued more or less unabated since -- the so called neo-liberalism.   I do believe that Reagan's goals were an "efficient economy," and given the prevailing climate throughout the cold war, at odds with the controlled economies of the evil empire, it is not surprising that he would equate an efficient economy with laissez faire policies of "supply side" economics -- that is to say, removing any government regimes (taxation) and resisting any institutional regimes (collective bargaining) that would impede corporate profits.  It was justified on the utilitarian assumption that all would benefit from the resulting "strong" business community -- that is to say, the "trickle down theory."  The unanticipated result was widening inequality.

As Konzel points out, "one of the big takeaways in Thomas Piketty’s much-discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century was that deep gulfs of inequality are the historical norm, and the relatively low inequality of the mid-20th century was in fact an anomaly."  As a consequence, there is no reason to suspect that inequality will "self-correct," and good reason to suspect that it will persist unless specific political action is taken to correct for it.  Behind all this, however, is the moral assumption that inequality is "bad," equality "good."  Consequently, inequality is at issue, is something that must be addressed.  Part of the "historical norm" has been a shift in our moral assumptions, from the notion that inequality was part and parcel of a natural (usually God given) order of things -- some were born high, others low.  The enlightenment philosophy of Locke, Rousseau, and others made this notion into problematic, and we still haven't solved all the problems of our divergence from the historical norm of "natural inequality."  Within the US, for example, as a default position, the notion of "natural inequality" was recast from "heritable" or God given position in the hierarchy to a "merited" or self-made position in the hierarchy -- the notion that the "natural" endowments, the "genius" of a particular character, intelligence, and "industry" held some back, and advanced others  to positions of wealth and/or power.   Regardless, foundational statements, like Jefferson's "all men are created equal," almost automatically bring inequality, particularly an "unmerited," heritable and hence self-perpetuating "aristocracy," into moral and ethical question.  

Having said that, the sources of inequality can be subjected to empirical evidence, and Piketty et al have done just that, though inconclusively.  As they point out, "there have been many discussions both in the academic literature and the public debate about the causes of the surge in top incomes, there is not a fully compelling explanation."  They see two main streams of argument, market driven changes vs. institution driven changes.  The market-driven changes fall in line with the default position within US moral reasoning and "posit that technological progress and globalization have been skilled- biased and have favored top earners relative to average earners."   Implicit in this are a couple of utilitarian notions -- that the new techno-global order requires people with particular skill sets, and because those skills are both scarce and in demand, the market has driven specific incomes up -- that maintaining high incomes, despite market forces, is necessary to serve as an incentive for the best and brightest to pursue careers in the new techno-global order.  One hears the latter, particularly in the finance industry, as a justification for out-sized bonuses and compensation packages.  Having said this, however, market drive changes, along with their justification, are undercut empirically because "they cannot account for the fact that top income shares have only increased modestly in a number of advanced countries (including Japan, Germany, or France) which are also subject to the same technological forces."  The institution driven stories, as they go on to point out, "posit that changes in institutions, defined to include labor and financial market regulations, Union policies, tax policy, and more broadly social norms regarding pay disparity, have played a key role in the evolution of inequality."  One suspects that this is true, but as they also point out, "the main difficulty is that 'institutions' are multi-dimensional and it is difficult to estimate compellingly the contribution of each specific factor."

Nevertheless, we are left with the imperative to do "something" to address inequality, and most policy statements would meddle with the tax code -- e.g. reversing the decreases in the marginal tax rate on the rich.  As Piketty, along with others have pointed out, there is strong "international evidence [that] shows a strong correlation between top tax rate cuts and increases in top income shares in OECD countries since 1960."  Which brings us to Konzel's second point, particularly the "deep structural problems that include a global savings glut and unwillingness by US companies to make investments."  High corporate profits alone are not sufficient to spur the sorts of investments that create economic growth.  In the absence of demand, any profits are not invested, but simply set aside which points to the "global savings glut."  In the absence of demand, to maintain any profit, any operating expenses (to include wages/salaries/benefits) are curtailed, but at the same time the resulting "savings" remove most incentives for corporate boards to hold the line on salaries for those who make the so-called tough decisions, insofar as any "excess" capital isn't needed for investment and expansion.   The sorts of retrenchment that follow on "weak demand," can be self-perpetuating, insofar as the pressure to maintain profit results in further cuts to operating expenses, further job loss, which in turn further weakens demand.  As the economy spirals downward, it becomes more and more "extractive" -- that is to say, more and more of the people's income is expended on the absolutely necessary "core goods" of food, shelter, fuel, medical care, et cetera.  If the economy reveals a "self-correcting trend," it is this spiral toward an "extractive equilibrium," where the people are allowed just enough to maintain social order and any "excess" accrues to an "elite."  

I'm inventing terms whole cloth, and I see complications even as I write, and I suspect there is nothing new in my argument, nor the notion that normal human greed and arrogance motivate "elites" to push just beyond an "extractive equilibrium," and the result is one form of revolution or another.   I would suggest also the notion that the "extractive equilibrium" is relative both within and between societies, for various cultural and historical reasons, and that the "elites" are pushing the boundaries of tolerance within the US.  If one senses a decay in the "social order," there is a tendency, mostly perverse, and mostly "supported" by the "elite," to assign blame to various minorities within the population (immigrants, blacks, jews, poor whites, muslims, or gays) or threats from without (communists or radical islamic terrorists).  One can see it within conservative party platforms within the US, where the economic meddling of "supply-side" economics corresponded with an increasingly strident "social conservatism," the result being our current election cycle where an unabashed member of the "elite," supporting a continuation of economic meddling of "supply-side" economics, is running on a platform that disparages immigrants as well as ethnic and racial minorities while openly courting the alt-right (aka white nationalist) vote.  If one senses decay in the "social order," however, I might suggest that the "elites" are pushing the boundaries of "extractive equilibrium."  Though it has gained greater ascendency on the right than the left, with the rise of the Tea Party and the candidacy of Trump, it is not a "right wing" phenomenon   One sees it in broad-sides directed at the "insider elites," what Robert Reich enumerated, for example, as the "six principles of the new populism" common to both the left and right.

I am suggesting two things: first, although the more "liberal" policies of the Obama administration have slowed the downward spiral toward and beyond an "extractive equilibrium," they have not reversed the spiral.  The affordable care act is a case in point.  Although it expanded access to a "core good" of health care, one suspects it did not fully arrest or reverse the expanding share of household income expended on health care.  Second, a knee-jerk return to more "supply side" economic policies will not make matters better.  On the contrary, one suspects it will exacerbate the downward spiral toward an extractive equilibrium more or less initiated by Reagan, continued by the first Bush, and with the complicity of Bill Clinton's welfare reforms, setting the stage for the second Bush and the great recession.  Consider, for example, the job market.  Although the job market and wages have rebounded under the more "liberal" pressures of the Obama administration, one still suspects the quality of the "jobs" leave something to be desired and haven't quite up to pre-recession levels.   Moreover, as Konzel points out, "a return to the "elite" consensus," common to both Reagan era conservatism and Clinton era liberalism, the assumption "that the labor market basically worked for people who really wanted jobs and who had acquired a reasonable set of skills" is no longer quite operative.  The emerging techno-global order not only put a premium on certain skill sets, it has also virtually (pun intended) obliterated other skills sets.  Uber's experimentation with self-driving cars is famously a case in point.  It will eventually eliminate the need for taxi-drivers.  The skill-bias of the techno-global order creates a few highly skilled jobs requiring high levels of education to replace many moderately skilled jobs requiring minimal education.  One might argue that "weak median income growth had to be the result of people lacking the right education and motivation," and a necessary policy prescription might be to increase access to the "core good" of education for those sufficiently motivated and intelligent to achieve it, but it will not be sufficient.  There are clearly other, number-driven, "deep structural problems" that need to be addressed for those newly marginalized by the techno-global economy.  

So what is needed? One thing, of course, is the direct investment of government revenues, particularly as a short term measure to replace and repair a crumbling and antiquated infrastructure.  There could be a whole blog post (actually whole books) dedicated to the subject of "infrastructure" and its neglect.  As portions of Florida begin to feel the effects of the melting ice caps, global climate change itself has changed the nature and urgency of the need, but we do not really need to engage in those deeply political issues to address infrastructure needs and it seems to be an ideal place to make public investments in projects that would pass conservative muster.  It is not direct "welfare," and so avoid the moral hazard associated with "free-loading." Much of the work would be sub-contracted through private firms, no doubt improving dramatically the profits of their owners and likewise the  the job prospects of precisely those workers displaced by the techno-global economy.   Moreover, because it improves job prospects, one would hope for ancillary effects, particularly increased demand of the sort that might actually induce investment.   The difficulty, of course, is more symbolic than actual.  It is a "new deal" remedy.  If Reagan and his Hoover era economics is the second son of god, FDR is the first son of lucifer and even the mild form democratic socialism he advocated the work of hell.  

Another thing, of course, is the so-called "public option," particularly in education and health care.  Here again, one cannot do it justice in a blog post, and we have flayed the dead horse of public health care options into dog food, but education?  If we really believe, as Hoover put it, that "we build our society upon the attainment of the individual," then we should "safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability and ambition entitle him."   After that, the race, so to speak, goes to the swift.  Again, as Hoover put it, "it is as if we set a race.  We, through free and universal education provide the training of the runners; we give them an equal start; we provide in the government the umpire of fairness in the race.  The winner is he who shows the most conscientious training, the greatest ability, and the greatest character."  Though one might argue that "free and universal education" is available, but the condition of some schools beggar the notion that mere availability provides an "equal start."  

Beyond that, however, a change in thinking is required.  Setting aside the opprobrium associated with race and immigration that is animating the current presidential race, there is a good deal of Hoover still in the republican party.  Although historical analogies are never exact, the deep structural issues we face are not unlike those faced by Hoover.  As Hofstadter put it in 1948, "the country was over stocked with savings to be invested and goods to be sold," but the accumulated wealth of the wealthy could not "find good investment outlets in industries that were rapidly saturating their markets," which in turn "drove capital into speculative channels."  Nevertheless, we still have an economy "based upon expansion in consumers' goods, and more than any other it was dependent upon sustained consumption."  Although we watch consumption with some anxiety, particularly around the holiday seasons, like Hoover, the republican party continues to deny "that there was any serious maldistribution of wealth in the United States," and insisted that the American consumer still had the means to consume.  Indeed, as Hoover put it in The Challenge to Liberty (1934), efforts to redistribute wealth is still characterized as a "socialist" strategy "of those who are anxious to destroy liberty."  Having said this, however, it is instructive to look at a Brookings Institution study, America's Capacity to Consume, also published in 1934.  As Hofstadter summarized:

The nation's 631,000 riches families had a total income considerably larger than the total income of 16,000,000 families at the bottom of the economic scale.  From the standpoint of purchasing power, these 16,000,000 families, the Brookings economists concluded, had incomes too small even to purchase "basic necessities."  Such was the potential market at home during the years when Secretary Hoover had been working so hard to expand American markets abroad.

We are not there yet, but one suspects that given a continued emphasis on supply side economics, we will get to an "extractive equilibrium" and perhaps push beyond where the people no longer have incomes sufficient to purchase "basic necessities" and "core goods." 

It is questionable, however, if a change in thinking is even possible for the Republican party.  The so-called Kansas experiment in supply side economics is a case in point.  As Eric Zorn writes for the Chicago Tribune, Kansas Governor Brownback had "been elected in the tea party wave of 2010 and, with the enthusiastic backing of Republican legislative majorities."  Given the mandate, he "launched a 'pro-growth tax policy'" which consisted of "dramatic cuts for business and high-earning individuals."   He promised the measures would be "a 'shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy' that would create thousands of jobs and boost funding for schools and local governments."  It was, in other words, a field test "of the supply-side theory that the best way to raise more tax revenue is to cut taxes and jolt the economy into overdrive."  It did not go well:

• The Congressional Joint Economic Committee reported earlier this year that Kansas had just 9,400 new private-sector jobs in 2015 (out of 2.6 million nationwide). U.S. Department of Commerce data show that, prior to Brownback's tax cuts, Kansas ranked 12th in the nation in personal income growth; after the tax cuts it fell to 41st.
• A handful of school districts in the state had to close early last year for lack of funds, and the state Supreme Court has had to issue orders requiring Kansas to cough up enough money to pay for K-12 education.
• In March, Brownback cut $17 million in funding, 3 percent, from the state's six public universities in response to revenue shortfalls. In April, he announced that he was going to have to delay a $93 million contribution to the state pension fund, prompting Moody's Investors Services to downgrade Kansas' outlook from stable to negative.

Again, there is more of Hoover in our republican party than they might care to admit.  Brownback's ideas weren't going well at the end of his first term, so instead of changing course, he doubled down.  One could say of him, what Hofstadter said of Hoover, "because ... his program should have been successful, he went on talking as though it were, and the less his ideas worked, the more defiantly he advocated them," even though the income necessary to consumption declined, the educational foundation for equal opportunity declined, and the economic security of the elderly declined.  Although Kansas went from being a potential "model" of conservative economics to a "cautionary tale," and yet -- and yet! -- the conservative prescription for what ails us is to model the nation on Kansas.

A change in thinking is needed. To what exactly, I'm not precisely sure.  I do know that we're at a crossroads similar to that faced by Woodrow Wilson when he penned The New Freedom in 1912, suggesting that "industry has ceased to be free because the laws do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak."  While no saint, particularly in his racial attitudes, Wilson recognized that "the power of accumulated capital was 'in the hands of a comparatively small number of persons' who 'have been able in recent years as never before to control the national development in their own interests.'"  Faced with his own version of "too big to fail," there was a centrism in his thinking, an attempt to sail the ship of state between the scylla of the plutocrats and the charybdis of the masses, but he articulated a government where "every new policy proposed has as its immediate or its ultimate object the restrain of the power of accumulated capital for the protection and benefit of those who cannot command its use" -- that is to say, he suggested the "business of government is to organize the common interest against the special interests."  As I and others have suggested, the current business of government is precisely the opposite, particularly in the legislative branch, where the inordinate and climbing costs of running an election campaign make our legislators particularly beholden to that panoply of special interests willing to donate cash, strings attached, to their campaigns.  So, step one, and question one for any candidate for federal office:

• The reform of campaign finance and conduct.  I am suggesting not only a limit on the amount of campaign spending, but also time limits on the conduct of a campaign.  I would not be apposed to an "election tax," or a public option for the finance of both state and federal elections.   

Wilson did not mean "to strike at any essential economic arrangement," though he did recognize that "you can't find your way to social reform through the forces that have made social reform necessary." Even conservative thinkers, like Samuel Goldman recognize that doubling down on failing agendas.  He tells us that, "after the end of the Cold War, which was claimed, I think reasonably, as a conservative success, it appeared not just to conservatives but to virtually everybody that a program of deregulation and free trade really did benefit almost everyone."  He admits, however, that "For the last 10 or 15 years, that hasn't seemed to have been the case. George W. Bush, as we all know, brought the country into two inconclusive and at least one unnecessary war. The economic package that was associated with conservatism stopped delivering the goods."  Consequently, "since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied. It took a while, as these things always do, but that dissatisfaction has found a focus in Trump, who says to people who may think of themselves as conservatives, 'I don't think we are being served, and our wars have been disasters.'"  

The question of war and peace I will leave to another post.  I will suggest, however, that a viable economic conservatism is necessary -- one focused on the fiscal restraint necessary to moderate not only our foreign military adventurism, but also misplaced zeal for domestic reform.  Taxes, however, are not evil in and of themselves, nor is the so-called "public option." Indeed, if my initiating assumptions are true -- that the whole notion of "socialism" vs "free markets" is a false dilemma -- that there is only a given "status quo" that inevitably and inherently serves some interests better than others -- that the "policy" question is "who benefits" from the existing rules/regulations/laws that make up the "status quo," and likewise "who benefits" from any proposed "meddling" with the "status quo" -- then, step two, as Wilson put it, is to drive

• "all beneficiaries of government policy and demand of them by what principle of national advantage, as contrasted with selfish privilege, they enjoy the extraordinary assistance extended to them."

Konzel celebrates Hillary Clinton's embrace of "demand side economics," where one wonders "whether the labor market is tight enough to give workers real raises," and  "whether private firms can make the investment necessary to grow the economy"  -- where one asks "what the government can do to keep the economy out of recessions" and sees "joblessness and weak income growth," for example,  "less as an individual failure and instead a market-wide one."  All of which is to the good, and may be necessary to the future of our country, but it is insufficient.  Unless we develop the political will to take step one, we really cannot take step two.  The business of government will continue to organize the special interests against the common interests, the middle class will continue to be "squeezed out" in a downward spiral toward an "extractive equilibrium" where the masses have "incomes too small to purchase even the 'basic necessities.'"  All of which plows the ground for the demagogue, or worse, who takes the general dissatisfaction hostage to enlarge his own privilege, dispenses "blame" with great largess,  revels in "social disintegration" as an opportunity to exert "strong leadership."  All of which should sound ominously familiar.  

Ferris Bueller On Privacy and Transparency

Lora and I are private people.  This would likely surprise some, since there is little or nothing that we would want to hide.  Our so-called "lifestyle" is very conventional, and it's detailed description would be boring in the extreme.  Nevertheless, we are private people, who keep mostly to ourselves, and among other things, it was our sense of privacy that dissuaded me from taking the next step and becoming a college president.   I would have been fine doing president, but being president, with its constant exposure in the public eye, was more than we could bear.  Also, I should add, because we were private, there was always the assumption that we must actually be hiding something.  I have some sense of what Clinton must go through on a daily basis, with the conspiracy theories that swirl around their ankles like acrid fog in an old horror movie, because even in the shadow of the president, there was plenty of speculation about our "private" lives.  Once, sitting at a graduation ceremony with the president's wife, Lora was asked, "what do you do when he beats you?"  She was incredulous, and no doubt her expression of incredulity lent some fuel to the assumption that I beat my wife, but there you have it.  Someone, somewhere, to fill in the blank, had started the rumor that I beat my wife, no doubt inventing imagined scenarios out of whole cloth, and the president's wife, my boss's wife, believed it.

Part of the reason I am writing this blog is its "public privacy."  It is public, completely public, and if anyone wants to know what I am really thinking, there it is, on full display.  Many of my neighbors in this relatively small town in a thoroughly red state would be aghast if they learned what I "really" think -- that I find religion to be a perversity inciting more hate than compassion, that I find most of the conservative agenda to be a smoke screen for cramped minds in cramped places, that I find about  "freedom" and their vaunted self-reliance, particularly economic self-reliance, a scam designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the growing disparity between those who are exploited and those who exploit, and no matter how much one dislikes Clinton, no matter how "sick" you might think she is, Trump is an unmitigated monster who revels narcissistically in his monstrosity.  Of course, no one reads it because no one cares what I "really" think.  At the outside, I have had eleven views on any given day, so I am speaking, so to speak, to an empty room, which in most ways is fine by me.  I'm not sure I need (or want) eleven million followers to affirm my existence, and I write this to keep my mind active and to discover, after all, what I really do think. I have thought about going back and correcting for some of the inconsistencies in my thought and expression, expand on some of the personal allusions (like "open society" in my previous post) but then thought better of it.  It's not a polished monograph, and the act of discovery, even if it is captured in writing, is bound to be filled with fits and starts.

I have been thinking about privacy, of late, in part because of the "controversy" around Clinton's health.  Our health information is normally considered "private," though this seems to run counter to a human instinct.  I have had complete strangers, in the line at Walmart, volunteer excruciating detail about their health.  I could speculate about why this may be the case, and part of it may simply be their need for empathy, a need that has worn thin on family and friends that "have their own problems."  Nevertheless, HIPPA confirms our "rights to privacy" when it comes to medical information, and from every cop show on every network we are also aware of the doctor patient privilege.  So it is that Dr. Oz, that all but fake physician, who has agreed to be a pawn in a publicity stunt, can say "The metaphor for me is, this is a doctor’s office, the studio,” Oz said. “So I’m not going to ask him questions he doesn’t want to have answered, and I also don’t want to talk about anybody else.”  Perfectly reasonable, and the general practice, though in the perverse double standards that have been applied to this election, Clinton has been roundly criticized for not disclosing her pneumonia, partly on the rationale of the  "public's right to know," partly on the rationale that her instinctual privacy just made things worse for her, fueling various conspiracy theories about health issues that make her unfit to serve.  As for the conspiracy theories, the Washington Post reports, "according to Sean Hannity's "medical A-team," the Democratic nominee was wracked by seizures. According to Ted Noel, an anesthesiologist with no expertise in Parkinson's disease, Clinton had Parkinson's disease. According to Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, both sites linked regularly by The Drudge Report, Clinton was followed by a medical "mystery man."  The Drudge Report itself had promoted an Internet poll conducted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — a fringe group that questions whether HIV causes AIDS — as proof that doctors were coalescing around the theory of the candidate's declining health."  The belated revelation that she had pneumonia, because it was "belated," brought criticism from Andrea Mitchell, nominally a supporter, who suggested, "'The whole issue of transparency and this only reinforces all of the conspiracy theories.  I mean, we’ve all been trying to fact-check and pointing out that there’s nothing wrong with her.'"  The Clinton campaign's fumbling of the news led to a series of similar analyses — all of them taking for granted that any Clinton misstep would encourage conspiracy theorists."  As indeed it did.

Here, though he has long been in the public eye as a "reality TV star," Trump has been held to the standard of a "private citizen," not only on his health records --releasing essentially a doctor's note clearing him to participate in the presidency not much different from a doctor's note clearing a young person to participate in athletics -- but also on his tax records.  His rationale for not releasing his tax information is unmitigated hose hockey.  As USA today reports it, "Donald Trump says he isn't releasing his tax returns yet because they are being audited, though the Internal Revenue Service says that's no barrier to disclosure."  There are various questions that a release of his taxes might answer -- does he make as much as he claims to make, has he contributed to charity what he has promised to contribute, does he have 'compromising' business operations in Russia and the middle east, has he actually even paid any taxes, et cetera.  Clinton, on the other hand, has been held to the standard of a "public citizen," to an extreme unimaginable before the digital age. One understands that those who seek the benefits of being in the public eye must endure its scrutiny.  While we might tut-tut the lurid fascination with the private lives of the celebrity class, even empathize to a degree when their privacy is violated in unconscionable ways, but there is nevertheless the lingering taint of self-approbation when the ethical imperative "be careful what you wish for, you might get it" is ignored.   That one must be "transparent" and expose what others might consider private information -- like one's tax returns and medical records -- if for no other reason than to avoid fueling the sorts of conspiratorial scandals that now come with the territory.  Of course, what goes round comes round, and now Colin Powell has been hacked, revealing him to be a bit more human than we would have liked to believe.  As the NY Times reports, "a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” as well as "his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton." His disdain for Trump stems from the usual sources, the virtually unvarnished racism that animates his campaign, but his peeves with Clinton are more political.  Again, as the NY Times reports, "in a series of exchanges, Mr. Powell lamented efforts by Mrs. Clinton’s “minions” to drag him into the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server by claiming he had advised her on the issue.  'H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,'  Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.'"  

Character minefield?  Beyond simply the political ineffectiveness of trying to hide what can no longer be safely hidden, Clinton has been accused of a "secretive" and "mendacious" character.  The developing non-scandal of the "emails" serves as proof of her "secretive" and "mendacious" character, and they do so even if the emails themselves reveal nothing particularly earth shattering.  Nevertheless, she has revealed the "requisite" information -- her medical records and her tax returns -- Trump has not even revealed the requisite.  The potential pay-for-access scandal that surround the Clinton Foundation, which by most accounts does good in the world, gets the furrowed eye-brow treatment while the more serious pay-for-play scandal that surrounds the Trump Foundation's illegal donation to the Bondi campaign barely registers. The character mines that Powell laid out, describing "the Democratic presidential nominee as having 'a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational,'" would seem to be the character traits necessary for a presidential run.  Clinton has "a long track record," with the inevitable ups and downs of a lengthy track record, but one might also cast that as experience.  Would a discerning board hire a CEO for a Fortune 500 who has no track record at all in business?  Likewise, one should hesitate at hiring a CEO for the country who has no governing experience at all?  Trump, of course, has no track record as a public servant, only his business record as a self-servant, but "business" (and perhaps military service) get a sort of "pass," perhaps on the mistaken assumption that the "business of America is business" and can be "run like a business."  Clinton may indeed have "unbridled ambition," but what of Trump?  Mr. Powell might lament "that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” but Trump's well acknowledge narcissism also gets another sort of "pass" on this ethical flaw as well.  Clinton may well be "greedy," demanding and getting exorbitant speaking fees, but Trump is not?  If anyone exemplifies the inverse moral universe of Gordon Gecko where "greed is good," Trump is your man.  As he funnels campaign funds into his private business ventures, even his run for the presidency exemplifies "greed" at its starkest, but here again he gets a sort of "pass."  It takes no real analysis to see a double standard at play between Trump, the private citizen, and Clinton, the public citizen, just a sort of passing observation.   Clinton, of course, must be enormously frustrated.  As Trump becomes more and more "public," it seem the very things that fuel animosity toward Clinton seem to fuel admiration for Trump. 

As the on-going hacks of Clinton and Powell demonstrate, increasingly we live is a "post-private" world, where the "private" becomes "public" at a click.  For already public figures, our response is one of apathy, in part because they asked for it.  For most of us, who give our silent assent to our own surveillance every time we search the internet or use a customer loyalty card, our failing privacy is likewise a matter of apathy.  We receive some modest benefit from revealing our interests or shopping preferences because the search engines can better anticipate the other things that might interest us as well as the occasional "discount."   For the most part, those of us with modest habits as "private" citizens have little or nothing to hide.  We can rest in the assurance that those surveilling us, to include our own government, would find us of little interest.  Thor Benson, writing for Salon, quotes Edward Snowden, "saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say,” and indeed, most of us have little or nothing to say, and even if we do, it is lost within the conflicting babble of democratic incoherence.  This is, after all, a free country and we are entitled to our opinions, and so we post them  with abandon on our face-book page or in blogs.  

Imagine a worst case scenario, just for a moment -- the sort of scenario imagined by Andrew Sullivan, echoing Richard Hofsteader, analyzing the writing of our founding fathers, who feared nothing more than an excess of democratic passion giving space to the demagogue who makes his move by taking over a "particularly obedient mob."  As Hofsteader put it, quoting John Taylor, 

A cardinal tenet in the faith of the men who made the Constitution was the belief that democracy can never be more than a transitional stage in government, that it always evolves into either a tyranny (the rule of a rich demagogue who has patronized the mob) or an aristocracy (the original leaders of the democratic element).  "Remember," wrote the dogmatic John Adams in one of his letters to John Taylor of Caroline, "democracy never last long.  It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."  

Some of the double standard that pertains to Trump and Clinton can be attributed to gender stereotypes -- the presidency requiring a viral male as opposed to a softer, weaker, nurturing female.  As much, I think, can be attributed to the disdain with which we have come to hold the "elites."  Trump gets a "pass" because, for good or for ill, the American public can identify with him.  Even if we see him as a villain, he is a familiar villain, of the sort we ostensibly "love to hate," the extroverted rich kid who plays class clown much to the exasperation of the principled "elites."  His vices are the private vices of self aggrandizement made public, the sort of vices we all would share had we the gumption and means to do so.  Who doesn't want the gold plated penthouse and a cheerleading super-model spouse?  The private limo and the obsequious minions?  If we can't actually be him, well, we can join his entourage.  Sullivan notes "one of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out.  She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. 'We want to see Ivana,' Palin told the paper, 'because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.'  On the other hand, there is more than a whiff of sanctimony and conceit about Clinton, the A student whose hand shoots up at every question, the "goody two shoes" who volunteers obsessively for every thankless task.  Indeed, there is something too good to be true about the Clinton Foundation, so surely, surely! there must be more too it, some hidden self-interest, some nefarious self-profiting purpose beyond simply "doing good," and so the private emails get scrutinized publicly to find it, all the while demanding greater transparency of the already crystal clear.  Who wouldn't want to take this sanctimonious goody two shoes down a peg a two?  We really shouldn't be too surprised that Trump continues to get "passes" while Clinton move gets scrutinized "two ways from Sunday," but it will be this "double standard" that wastes the time and effort of the government, exhausts its credulity, and eventually murders democracy.   

One shouldn't look too hard at historical parallels, but the last "great recession" is now pretty much a thing of the past, as it was when Jackson climbed to prominence, and yet as Hofsteader put it, quoting John C. Calhoun, it brought to the fore 

an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the union, enormous multitudes in deep distress, and a general mass of disaffection to the Government not concentrated in any particular direction, but ready to seize upon any event and looking out anywhere for a leader.

The recession brought to the fore the immense and growing disparities between the very rich and the rest of us.  While it would be disingenuous to claim that we are in "deep distress," and the economy is getting better, there remains a sense of exasperated hope and lingering malaise that can (and really should) be attributed to acts of government, a system "rigged" in ways that neither the supporters of Trump nor the supporters of Sanders fully explained, but a system "rigged" against them nevertheless by the political and the economic and the media elites.   "The general mass of disaffection of the Government" should be a call for better government, better leadership, but instead "looking about anywhere," it gives us Trump, the rich kid who plays class clown, thumbing his nose not only at the democrats, but at his own party's elite as well.  Everyone wants to be Ferris Bueller, playing the system against itself for his own amusement, getting away with metaphorical murder in the process.  No one wants to be his sanctimonious younger sister Jeannie, the good girl who cannot understand why she doesn't get credit for actually being good, who resents Ferris' popularity and wants to "out" him.  In the end, however, even Ferris Bueller recognized that his last gasp adolescent "day off" was a temporary aberration, that he would actually have to grow up and govern his life, but if Trump's always impending "pivot," his always imminent turn to "the presidential," is any indication, one suspects Trump believes he can actually govern on the Ferris Bueller principle, just making it up as he goes along.  What is it, aside from the wall, that we actually expect of Trump aside from the implicit promise to "shake it up?"  

In the meantime, we have the double standard, which leads Heather Digby Parton and others to lament that Trump "continues to get away with his many scandals, lies and shady business ties" while Clinton is pilloried on "a presumption of guilt for any possible appearance of impropriety."  Although he has failed to release his tax returns, made a circus side-show of his medical records, and used the"faux" announcement of his shifting position on Obama's birth place to stage a media promo for his newest branded hotel -- a position that was ludicrous in the first place and is now perhaps even more ludicrous -- nevertheless "54 percent believe Trump is the more transparent to only 37 percent for Clinton."   Johnathan Allen, reporting for Vox, detailed a five part dynamic that governs the reporting on Clinton, which for the most part lays out the double standard in operation.  He points out that "The Clintons have been under investigation for about 25 years now. There's little doubt they've produced more information for investigators, lawyers, and journalists about their finances, their business and philanthropic dealings, and their decision-making processes in government than any officials in American history. ... They know there's a good chance that any expressed thought will become part of the public record and twisted for political gain."  And while I think Clinton (Hillary, not Bill) is more like me than not -- an introvert who would be fine "doing" president, but less so "becoming" president with the degrading onslaught of opposition claims, and "being" president, with its constant exposure in the public eye -- it's nevertheless understandable "why the Clintons have a bunker mentality when it comes to transparency."  It captures them in a vicious cycle where "their paranoia leads them to be secretive, and their secrecy leads Republicans and the press to suspect wrongdoing. That spurs further investigation, which only makes the Clintons more secretive. The paranoia and persistent investigation feed each other in an endless cycle of probe and parry" that so far has revealed little except perhaps "carelessness," even "extreme carelessness," but certainly nothing illegal.  


But Trump gets a "pass."  He is about as unlike me as a human being can get -- an extrovert who has proven himself adept at "becoming" president, but who would be as disastrous at both "doing" and "being" president as he was for his own casinos.  Moreover, he represents just about everything that I find morally and ethically loathsome.  I honestly don't know if it is a signal of America's "decline and moral degradation," as one reader of Parton put it, but I do think he's right when he suggests that one "can lay out all the evidence in the world that Trump is corrupt. It's all out there, his veterans charity scam, his dirty dealings, his refusal to release his taxes," and in that sense he IS the most transparent candidate ever, "but [his voters] won't care, because they admire someone who breaks the law to make money and caters to their inner bigot."  Perhaps, and I do think there's been a lot of that catering to that "inner bigot," but I also think he caters to their inner Ferris Bueller, someone who flouts and "plays" an ineffectual system, as they say, "right under their noses."  For Ferris, however, it was just school, but Trump is "playing" a bigger and more consequential system.  The reader cites an article for Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, who writes, "Given Trump’s broad and demonstrable contempt for the rule of law, people who take the breaking of laws seriously are less than charmed by the whole 'I’m too cool to be constrained by your stinking regulatory state' bluster."  Of course, the "stinking regulatory state" has been a staple of conservative derogation for some time, and few on the right would mourn its passing, except that they have something very specific in mind, the regulatory state that "protects" the people like the Federal Trade Commission, or the Consumer Protection Agency, or from their frame of reference any sort of regulatory interference that "impedes" the accumulation of, the retention of, and the return on capital.  The conservative right is concerned for "minority rights," but not, to use a phrase from Hofsteader, those "chiefly of interest to the modern liberal mind," the "rights to dissent" and "least of all [the rights of racial or] ethnic minorities."  They are mostly concerned with the "propertied minority," the so-called 1%, and those "rights" that protect that  "minority privilege."  They not against the rule of law, particularly those laws that keep an unruly minority populace orderly and well ruled.  Their derogation of the "stinking regulatory state" is simply frustration that the 1% minority cannot exercise 100% control over the legislative privilege they feel, by rights, should belong to them.  As Lithwick goes on to write, "for anyone who still believes that this is a government of laws, not men, the man who persistently signals that the laws are a hassle has proven pretty terrifying," and this would include the conservative cognoscenti who see a Trump on the verge of inciting an unruly populace to mob violence, but also a Trump who plays fast and loose with ALL the rules, even those designed to protect their capital interests, so long as it gets the crowd dancing to his tune, Danke Shane.  Lithwick cites the Hoover Institution’s Richard A. Epstein,  writing for  the New York Times, 'when it comes to the rule of law, “Trump doesn’t even think there’s an issue to worry about. He just simply says, whatever I want to do, I will do.'”  She also cites UC–Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has written that “Donald Trump’s views on the law and the legal system are truly frightening.”

Why?  What happens, for example, when the promised "greatness" fails to materialize, and it will inevitably fail to materialize, when "the people" are no longer amused with Trump's "twist and shout?"  I will leave it to your imagination, but let's just say, the line between the class clown and the spurned and spiteful class bully is a narrow one.  If Trump believes in "majority rule," it is a perversion of Thoreau's "majority of one," and the rule of one Trump is as questionable as the rule of one Kim Jong-il.  Given Trump’s stated admiration for one authoritarian dictator after another, “should Trump become president, no one would be safe from his toxic mix of bullying through law and acting above the law. He would replace rule of law with what Chinese scholars call rule by law,” and it would of course be Trump's law.  It is then that the power of the surveillance state comes to the fore.  As Burton points out, "the top presidential candidates have not spent much time talking about privacy, but we do know some things about how they might handle surveillance and other privacy issues."  On the one hand, it is likely a reflection of her character, the ambitious introvert's impossible desire to keep the substance of her private life private, but "Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton supported the USA Freedom Act, which was meant to rein in the surveillance started by the Patriot Act."  On the other hand, the "Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears eager to use surveillance powers.  He has proposed surveilling mosques, and he’s said he supports the idea of mass domestic surveillance being done by the National Security Agency."  Mass domestic surveillance?  To what end?  Perhaps to find those "dissenters" who are no longer amused by his antics?  As Sullivan points out, "at rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual."  When the "rising rage of the collective identity" can vent itself against the dissenter with government sanction, whether covert or overt, it becomes something much more ominous.  Again, as Sullivan points out, simply taking him at his word, "Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect," and it doesn't take too many demonstrations before the populace gets the idea that it's better to keep one's dissent wholly private, not only away from the public arena, the public media, but with the government's ability to "hack," from the "private" media that can unaccountably be made suddenly "public" -- the face book page, the google email account, the cell phone, the digital universe that keeps constant tab on us.