The Open Society

When Karl Popper wrote the Open Society and Its Enemies, the principle "enemies" of the open society were the two extremes of facism and communism.   Both, of course, rely on "closed doctrines," which for the sake of brevity I'll define here simply as the belief that certain fundamental questions have been answered, once and for all, and deviance from that belief is both morally perverse and politically impermissible.  There is often a reliance on a core set of "texts" -- e.g. Mein Kampf or Das Kapital -- along with a set of "official" interpreters of those texts who serve as the final arbiters for any internal disputes.  "Closed doctrines" rely on and/or create an institutionalized  "insider/outsider" dynamic -- e.g. a "member of the Aryan race or not"/"a member of the Party or not" -- and while there are various and sundry labels attached to the "outsiders," they are variously defined not only as "enemies" of the moral well being of the people, per se, but as "enemies" of a state specifically designed to protect and enforce the virtue of the people.  "Enemies" require vigilance, both from an informant populace and from a surveillant state, as well as a means of isolating, punishing and/or eliminating those who contravene the closed doctrine -- e.g. Dachau and the Gulag.  Both the fascists and the communists exercised political power, and while it is easy enough to excoriate the totalitarian nature of both nazi-style facism and soviet-style communism, once in power, any closed doctrine will, of necessity, become oppressive in its demand for consent to the core belief, obedience to the official interpreters of that belief, and conformity to a set of moral and social norms.

The American experiment, or so I would suggest, is the attempt to articulate a "closed doctrine" that nevertheless creates an "open society."  Again, in brevis, it relies on a core text, the constitution, alone with a set of official interpreters of that text, the Supreme Court, who serve as final arbiters for any internal disputes.  The difference between the totalitarian and the American experiment lies in the separation of "powers."  While the Supreme Court is the final arbiter in the interpretation of the Constitution, it does not exercise legislative or executive power.  It cannot create law nor can it enforce the laws the land.  It's power, as such, is wholly "negative."  It can only "strike down" laws it finds in conflict with the core text, the constitution, and enjoin against their enforcement.  Moreover, the "closed doctrine" of the constitution attempts to institutionalize, not an insider/outsider dynamic, per se, but "tolerance."  The first amendment enjoinders against the establishment of a religion and curtailment of free speech, for example, specifically prohibited the creation of an insider/outsider dynamic relative to church or ideology.   Moreover, though it took some time and a civil war, the 14th amendment prohibited the creation of an insider/outsider dynamic relative to race.  "Enemies" still require vigilance, but they are enemies of the "closed doctrine" that creates the "open society."  Public officials are sworn to protect and defend not a religions, not an ideology, but the constitution of the United States which has institutionalized, to an imperfect degree, tolerance.  The president swears, in other words, to be intolerant of intolerance, a somewhat paradoxical position that is always fraught -- e.g. although the constitution specifies that I have a "right" to my religion as well as the "right" to official tolerance of my religion, if my religion requires that I be intolerant to a specific class of people (e.g. "blacks" or "jews") do I still have a "right" to my religion and the "right" to an official tolerance of my religion?  If I am a member of that religion, my answer will be "yes."  If I am a member of that class of people, my answer will be "no."  Such clashes of "values" are inherent to the open society. If the religion is not tolerated, they will feel oppressed.  If the religion is officially tolerated, the "blacks" or "jews" will feel oppressed. There really are few ways to reconcile the conflicting values.

The American experiment may yet fail along a fissure of conflicting values.  Before I touch on that, however, let me take a brief detour by saying that I believe the tide of American history has pushed toward greater and greater "tolerance" of human differences, and a good deal (though not all) of that "push" has resulted from "open markets."  Consider, for example, the curious case of Hobby Lobby and birth control.  On the one hand, insofar as "Hobby Lobby is a craft store chain that says it operates "in a manner consistent with Biblical principles," as CNN reports, "the company refuses to cover contraception methods for its employees that it views as abortive such as Plan B and Ella.  Hobby Lobby fought the Affordable Care Act's mandate that businesses pay for birth control all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won this week."  Although I find their "biblical principles" dubious, I have not seen fit to boycott Hobby Lobby, in part because there is an element of choice on the part of the employee -- that is to say, they can decide they share Hobby Lobby's values or they can decide to merely tolerate Hobby Lobby's values as a condition of employment, but in either case they decide to work at Hobby Lobby.    If Hobby Lobby suddenly found themselves unable to recruit employees within the "open market" because their health plans do not offer certain forms of birth control, THEY would need to decide whether their "biblical principles" or a broader "tolerance" came first.  I do not know, and honestly do not care, how they would decide, but should they find it difficult to recruit employees for that reason they would need to reconcile their now competing values.  On the other hand, although Hobby Lobby may operate "in a manner consistent with Biblical principles," I have never faced a religious test at the cash register of a Hobby Lobby and we are regular customers.  Should they wish to do so, they would likely lose that challenge at the supreme court, but they seem perfectly willing to "tolerate" my lack of faith when it comes to taking my money within the "open market."  Given that non-christians of various stripes represent a significant swath of the American market, one is unlikely to see a sign above the cash register saying "we refuse to serve buddhists and muslims, but especially atheists." 

In other words, I think Hayek is correct in seeing a link between an "open society" and "open markets," but that is just a more philosophical way of saying "money talks, bullshit walks," and it might help to press a bit deeper.  The American experiment, I've suggested, is the attempt to articulate a "closed doctrine" that nevertheless creates an "open society."  We want to assert that the open society is also a "free society," but it depends.  Hobby Lobby will claim, of course, that they want freedom to run their business in their way, and they want to be free from government regulatory regimes that would coerce employment practices they find objectionable.  Those employees who might not agree that Plan B and Ella are "abortive," however, might want to preserve their freedom to choose those products as their birth control, and might want to be free from an employer's regulatory regime of coercive employment practices.  It is, however, one thing to think of a corporation, where one can choose (or choose not) to work for them. It is quite another thing, however, to imagine Hobby Lobby's values extended nationally.  A government run by the "biblical principles" of a Hobby Lobby would limit the people's freedom to choose among the various forms of birth control, indeed might limit their ability to choose birth control at all.  It would not be unreasonable for those women who might want to seek abortion, or birth control that might appear to be "abortive," might also want their freedom from government regulatory regimes that would coerce reproductive practices they find oppressive.  So far as the American experiment is concerned, however, it is reasonably clear that Hobby Lobby's values should not extend nationally, insofar as their values are overtly religious and the "closed doctrine" of the constitution prohibits the establishment of a religion, a government run by biblical (or for that matter, Koranic principles) and as a result left the core conflict of values in play.  Those who subscribe to Hobby Lobby's values are nevertheless free to act on those values.  Those who do not are also free to act on those values.  Neither will be free from the values of the other, and as a consequence, if the "closed doctrine" of the constitution prescribes any value, it prescribes the reciprocal duty of tolerance each on the other. 

The tide of American history has pushed toward greater and greater tolerance of human difference, and part of that "push" has come from the constitution itself and the unarticulated, but nevertheless real duty of tolerance.  We want to assert as well that the open society is also an egalitarian and democratic society.  For the moment, I don't want to get side-tracked into the institutional differences between direct democracy and representative democracy, and there are real and important differences.  For the moment, however, let me just suggest that the reciprocal duty of tolerance itself implies a sort of "egalitarianism."  While I am sure Barbara Green, one of the co-founders of Hobby Lobby, would assert her values are better than my values, in part because they are divinely inspired, I would assert the contrary, and in the absence of an "official" interpretation, which would "decide" the question once and for all, we are left with something like "majority rules" to make governing decisions. "Majority rule" does not decide once and for all.  It merely captures the shifting sands under the prevailing winds of public opinion.  Such implies, of course, that one opinion is as good as another, but we all know that isn't actually the case.  Some opinions ARE better than others.  Occasionally, when teaching, I would be confronted with what students believed was a killing argument to set aside a failing grade.  "I am," they would argue, "entitled to my opinion."  I would answer, "yes, indeed you are.   You can choose to believe whatever you choose to believe.  You are also entitled to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, that demons impregnate young girls in their sleep, and that aliens will come an rescue us from our perfidy by whisking off the best of us to the planet Kronos, but you would still be wrong and would still get a failing grade from me."  For those who sincerely believe the question HAS been decided once and for all, the shifting ambiguity of "majority rules" will always be somewhat disheartening, particularly if the majority is simply and clearly wrong, but on whose authority do we call something "simply and clearly wrong?" I defer to the authority that accrues to verifiable evidence and peer reviewed science, others to the authority of divinely inspired testimony and texts, itself a conflict of values that cannot be decided "officially."  So, in the absence of an "authority," we are left with the reciprocal duty to tolerate, which for many becomes increasingly burdensome, which prompts the follow on question, "at what point does the reciprocal duty to tolerate itself become intolerable?"   

All of which brings me round to the argument by Andrew Sullivan.  I have to admit, it plays at the back of my mind for a variety of reasons, not least of which it scares me.   He begins with this description of a "late stage democracy:"

the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

This is, of course, a description of a social state that conservatives find as anathema, particularly, of late, anything that resembles the "rainbow-flag polity" of sexual freedom and gay rights.  One can wax more or less apocalyptic in what various conservative commentators have described as "moral decline," but conservative commentators, particularly those animated by religion, can identify the causes, and by implication, the remedies fairly easily.  As one, Susan Stamper Brown, put it, "America's moral decline began with Presidents Woodrow Wilson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR] and their arrogant defiance and blatant hostility toward the U.S. Constitution which inspired them to lead an insurrection from the Oval Office, effectively convincing good people that government dependence is a morally acceptable alternative to dependence on God, family, community and self."  I am not sure what exactly a "dependence on God" might resemble, particularly when family and community find themselves in dire straits like that of the Great Depression, but Brown's reading of the defiance and blatant hostility toward the U.S. Constitution is relatively common in conservative circles.  "Progressives understood the "God-factor" must be removed to accomplish their goal of secularization," she writes, "wherein religion loses cultural and social significance. In 1947, the Supreme Court, largely packed with FDR appointees, decided the First Amendment instituted a 'wall of separation' between church and state in Everson v. Board of Education. In so doing, they were able to separate morality and ethics from government and everyday life."  I am reasonably certain that FDR did not hijack the great depression for his real "goal of secularization," and would have found the notion laughable, in part because, as the supreme court affirmed, the U.S. government was already secular.  The closed doctrine of the Constitution does not allow for the "institutionalization" of religion, which in turn protects an "open society" wherein various forms of religion can flourish under the reciprocal duty of toleration.  It certainly does not separate morality and ethics from everyday life, insofar as Brown is free to follow whatever moral and ethical doctrine sees fit to follow.  Additionally, it does not separate morality and ethics from government, insofar as the shifting sands of majority rule would allow for the legislation and enforcement of various moral rules -- e.g. "thou shalt not kill" legislated and enforced as a "murder statute."  Indeed, one can argue that the U.S. is a christian nation, insofar as the christian religion is the majority religion, and with the outsize influence of any majority, it has influenced our political life for some time.  

Ultimately, however, what Susan Brown finds intolerable is the First Amendment -- that part of the "closed doctrine" of the constitution that specifically insures an "open society" where traditions other than the christian tradition must be tolerated.  Implicit to her argument, and to Sullivan's reading of Plato above, is the assumption that all morality and all ethics flow from authority.  One cannot cede authority to the shifting sands of majority opinion, because, well, they are shifty.  They lack "once and for all" authority.  As Brown writes, "The only way Progressivism wins is without the presence of absolute truth. Without it, morality is defined by ever-changing social whims; what's wrong today is right tomorrow. Truth is, it's impossible to define morality without a plumb line or divine standard."  For Brown, and those who think like Brown, there can be only one plumb line, one divine standard, and it is her version of evangelical christianity.  It cannot be the "divine standard" articulated in the koran and sharia law -- indeed, she finds it distressing that "mosques are being raised at record levels in towns and cities across America and Europe" -- and I suspect she would find the prevalence of the Torah equally distressing.  She would, in other words, have the "closed doctrine" of the constitution establish the "closed doctrine" of her religion, and her church as the only arbiter of "absolute truth," and there is a good deal of contorted historical revisionism to suggest the "founding fathers" intended a christian nation all along, an intention distorted and usurped by today's "progressives."  I don't know what Brown thinks of the current election (and honestly don't have enough interest to find out) but the ChristianPost, where she published her take on constitutional history, suggests that "as Trump and many Americans feel that the nation has become extremely divided, Trump contended that it can only be America's 'faith in God' and 'His teachings' that will reunite the country.  He stressed that 'we all come from the same Creator' and if Americans can remember that fact, 'then our future is truly limitless.'"  Of course, there are Americans like me, who do not see it as a given "fact" that we "all come from the same creator," and find it no more compelling than the notion that Gaea gave birth to Uranus, nor will I likely come round to a profession of "faith in His teachings," as such, at least not willingly, and so it will take an exercise of a different "authority" to "reunite the country."  It is a familiar sort of authority exercised by true believers,  for whom "failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges" is a crime punishable by death, as Socrates learned, and may have learned since and are still learning for a wide variety of Gods.    

I am suggesting that the tide of American history, with its ever increasing demands on our duty to tolerate difference, has pushed the evangelical christians and many conservatives beyond the limits of their tolerance, enough so that it threatens the American constitutional experiment in an open society bound by its duty to tolerate difference.  It is one thing for a methodist to tolerate a presbyterian, perhaps even a catholic or a norman  but a muslim?   It is one thing to tolerate interdenominational marriage, even to a degree inter-racial marriage, but gay marriage?   It is within this perceived climate of "moral decay," where there is no one recognized authority, that, as Sullivan goes on to argue,

a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.  He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

It is, of course, rather odd to see a very wealthy man, who has wallowed throughout his life in a tabloid hedonism, quoting scripture, as Trump did at the Family Research Council's Values Voters Summit.  It would be easy enough to dismiss it as mere hypocrisy, revving up a particular crowd at a particular place and time, and it might be enough to remind the cheering crowd at the values summit of another scripture, Matthew 19:23.  Nevertheless, I have also suggested that he relies on "a particularly obedient mob," and a "mob mentality" for personal affirmation, as a sort of viagra to his ego, but it is also serves to affirm that he is in fact the "authority," that the people (or perhaps more precisely, HIS people) affirm that only he can reverse the moral decay and make America great again.   He is "the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess," and a constituency who believes in "faith based authority" seems willing enough to place their faith in his sole authority.   

Though his argument is much more nuanced and much more historically convincing, Sullivan too sees an erosion of constitutional authority as the particular threat, particularly those aspects of the constitution that created a "representative elite" apart.  "The Founding Fathers had read their Plato," he suggest, and "To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power."  Many of those barriers exist in the difference between a representative democracy and a direct democracy, and the particular difficulty that we face is the continuing erosion of the former by the latter.   I won't detail the full extent of his argument, but most of the "hefty barriers" were the constitutionally defined aspects of representative government.  I am not a constitutional scholar, and though I suspect a bit of historical revisionism in Sullivan as well, he cites the electoral college as a case in point.  "The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected," he tells us, "but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures."  He goes on to tell us a bit later, that "the barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent."  Though In 2000, "George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math," for most Americans, the electoral college math is an archaic impediment to a more direct democracy, and for most Americans, particularly the democrats, the election result was deeply tainted, even more so because there followed "a partisan Supreme Court vote" that confirmed Bush's election.  As Sullivan notes, "Al Gore’s eventual concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis, but the episode generated widespread unease," and "not just among Democrats."  

Setting aside the issue of the electoral college, the most telling statement is the notion of the "partisan Supreme Court vote."  It is no secret that the constitutionally defined process for selecting Supreme Court justices has been set aside pending the partisan presidential election.  If the Supreme Court is the final arbiter, interpreting the "closed doctrine" of the constitution, then the next election does provide a set of  special circumstances:  "a particularly polarized electorate, the presumptive selection of an outsider candidate for the Republican Party, Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, an aging Court, and the Republican Senate’s unusual success in avoiding confirmation hearings to fill the Scalia vacancy," not to mention the possibility that the next president may appoint up to four judges, all have conspired to make the presidential election a high stakes election for the future of the country.  Many republicans feel it a sufficient reason for voting Trump in the next election.  As Trump warned conservatives "In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 28, "If you really like Donald Trump, that's great, but if you don't, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges. Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice.”  Which was followed by a tissue thin veiled threat of violence against those judges and/or Hillary Clinton by 2nd Amendment people.  Nevertheless, it leads some republicans to vote Trump on the possibility that "If Hillary Clinton wins, the Left gavels in a solid, lasting, perhaps even permanent majority on the Supreme Court. Every political issue has a theoretical path to SCOTUS, and only self-imposed judicial restraint has checked the Court's appetite and reach for two centuries."   David Frum writing in the Atlantic identifies six reasons why it is an insufficient reason for voting Trump, not least that "Trump commitments are notoriously worthless. The only thing you can be sure you get with Trump is … Trump himself. Every other offer is subject to cancellation without notice."  As Frum also notes, "Trump’s lack of understanding and interest in constitutional issues is notorious," and he has given every reason to believe that he will appoint justices to serve Trump's own narrow and opportunistic purposes.  Although he has battled with the party "elite" on numerous occasions, even assuming he makes nice and accedes to their choices for the Supreme Court as indicated by his list of potential appointees, it is unclear to me, given the predispositions of most conservatives today, that they will protect and defend a constitution designed to protect an "open society."   As a case in point, Don Willett, an elected judge on Trump's list, "helped defend the right of Texas to display the (Bible's) Ten Commandments and fought the liberals who tried to remove the words 'under God' from our pledgeof allegiance, his campaign said in a 2012 advertisement."  As Reuter's reports, "before becoming a judge, Willett was part of Texas' legal team that won a Supreme Court battle to display the Ten Commandments on a monument in the state Capitol despite opponents' concerns that it amounted to government endorsement of a religion."  While a relatively minor issue, one should remember that the 10 commandments contain the imperative that "thou shalt have no other gods before me," and its display in the building housing state government could only be interpreted as a government endorsement of a particular religious tradition, unless of course one tolerated as well displayed segments of the koran, the buddhist precepts, among other religious traditions.

Ultimately, I am suggesting that the real threat to our experiment in an open society comes in three successive stages, each precipitated by conservative recalcitrance.  The first stage, to use Sullivan's term, comes in "late stage democracy" when the duty to tolerate within a "progressively open" society transgresses the line and becomes intolerable.  Each successive line, of course, is met with those who would defend that line, and you have William Pryor, another justice on Trump's list, proclaiming that "a constitutional right that protects 'the choice of one's partner' and 'whether and how to connect sexually' must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia." Pryor said in a legal filing to the Supreme Court."  Although there are well established ways to differentiate between "the choice of one's partner" for gay sex, and the "choice of one's partner" for child pornography and pedophilia -- think consenting adults and the ability to give meaningful consent between adults -- one must nevertheless assume his outrage is real and sincere.   The second stage comes when a "would be tyrant" seizes the moment and offers himself as the "personified" answer to the conflicting values inherent to an open society.  If I am correct, if the constitution is a "closed doctrine" protecting the "open society," the third stage comes when the would be tyrant simply sets the constitution aside as irrelevant to the "new order," which Trump gives every indication would be his preference.  As Sullivan notes, "if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the man would obey: 'They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.'”  One should read this in the context of his latest statement that the Obama administration has reduced the current set of military leaders "to rubble" and that he would replace them with his own men.  Even assuming that he maintains the current "checks and balances," however, as Sullivan also notes, were he to win the white house, "he would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in Trump’s favor," and if his list is any indication of the composition of a Trump supreme court, there would be little need for fury.  He would nominate and the Senate would appoint justices who see the constitution, not as a closed doctrine protecting an open society, but as a closed doctrine subordinate to the absolute truth of a more comprehensive and compelling "closed doctrine," one that justifies racial, religious, and gender hegemony with the clarity of a strict authoritarian hierarchy that sets whites over colored, christians over non-christians, and men over women.   This election is a choice between two competing values, not the miscellaneous moral outrage at such things as gay sex or adultery, but between a democratic party (sometimes ineptly) defending our experiment in a constitutionally defined "open society," and a conservative party increasingly at war with its inevitable challenges and confusions, a conservative party willing to subvert constitutionally defined processes now for partisan outcomes later, a conservative party increasingly willing to embrace (or if not wholehearted embrace, then reluctantly submit to)  the proto-fascism of the so-called alt-right, and the list goes on.  Even if Trump loses or turns out to be as feckless as many politicians of late,  if he isn't the "extinction level event" for the open society that some of us fear, he nevertheless represents an oddly apocalyptic and messianic desire for an "extinction level event" that dominates one party of our two party system.  What will come of it is anyone's guess.  

Populism

I have been giving the dichotomy between populism and elitism some thought of late, and I'm still not sure I have come to terms with it.   David Ignatius has written a column titled "Clinton should stop pretending she’s not elite," which falls into the category of unsolicited advice to the candidate, and like most unsolicited advice, it may be good, but it may not be the best for the candidate herself.  Ignatius' advice comes in the wake of numerous stories touting Clinton's "populist tone."  CNN, for example, reported that "Hillary Clinton used the first major rally of her second run for the White House Saturday to make a populist case for her presidential campaign, declaring that the goal of her presidency would be to tip the nation's economic scales back toward the middle class's favor."  There are any number of assumptions behind this that may well be true, but are certainly questionable -- that the majority of American's are middle class, that their will reflects the "popular" will, et cetera -- but I will leave those questions behind for a moment and focus on the basic dichotomy, and what I believe to be a false choice, between populism and elitism.  

First of all, a confession.  Though I'm not sure what label to attach to myself, beyond generally "liberal." I am not a "populist."  Although I would like to believe that I favor political policies and stances that would represent a "good" for the vast majority of people, and that I have their best interests at heart, I am also absolutely convinced that the vast majority of people have little idea what is in their best interests.  The Trump candidacy is a case in point.  Although he has run his campaign as a "populist" he is, in the classic sense of the word, merely a self-seeking demagogue running a sales scam on the American people.  His funneling of campaign funds back into his various business enterprises should be sufficient evidence of that, but there is also the growing disgrace of the Trump University lawsuit to provide even more evidence.  The overwhelming appearance that he "bought off" the Florida attorney general with campaign donations earns a shoulder shrug, while the mere possibility that donors to the Clinton Foundation might maybe possibly have earned a "meeting" with the Secretary of State creates outrage.  It is, one supposes, the invidious moral distinction between being the "buyer" and being "bought" with a "more power to you" attitude toward anyone with sufficient where-with-all to be the "buyer."  Indeed, Trump has bragged about "buying" politicians, suggesting that "I've got to give to them, because when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass." One wonders if the American public has been a captive of the monied interests for so long that they exhibit some form of Stockholm syndrome?

Perhaps, perhaps not, but Trump is exactly what he seems to be, an opportunistic demagogue with little or nothing really to offer the American people except an overweening personality formed in extreme privilege and the dubious distinction of being an "outsider" to what many feel is a corrupt system.   He has posed little in the way of specific policy recommendations to purge the system.  Aside from his xenophobic rants, which are more popular among "the people" than we would care to admit, where he has posed more or less specific policies, they do next to nothing for the people.  The Tax Policy Center analysis his tax "policies" reveal that "his proposals would cut taxes at all income levels," which of course is always popular with the people, but "the largest benefits, in dollars and percentage terms, would go the highest income households."  The plan would improve incentives to "work, save, and invest," but the benefit from those incentives would be offset by a reduction of 9.5 trillion in federal revenues, which "could increase the national debt to 80 percent of gross national product by 2036."  It is, as the New York Times characterized it, "a boon for the wealthy," among whom Trump finds his place.  To pay for it, of course, there will need to be dramatic cuts to social safety net programs, which will hardly benefit the people, or cuts to the military.  The latter is unlikely insofar as he has already proposed increases in military spending.  While a kick ass military might serve to bolster national pride in the way that a kick ass football team bolsters university pride, the sorts of foreign adventurism we've engaged across both republican and democratic administrations has done little to bolster, and much to disrupt, our own and the European west's actual "homeland security."  We have become inured to the profits of military contractors and the continuing jingoism those profits promote in the much the same way that we have become inured to the salaries of coaches and the accompanying athletic spending at our universities, which, don't kid yourself, diverts money from actual education.  It has come to seem almost "necessary, given the threat of terrorism, never mind that one could convincingly argue that the greatest recruitment tool of "radical islam," or for that matter any other terrorist threat (to include the more home grown "radical christian" threats) is the US military, the increasingly "militarized" police, and the willingness to use both.  Go team.

I'd hate to think of myself as an elitist, but no matter how much I resist, I am swayed by the board argument of Andrew Sullivan and others who have argued for the Washington elite.  While there is always an argument to be made for democratic checks on the excesses of power and in many respects we need those checks now more than ever, it nevertheless strikes me that our federal government has grown beyond the committed amateur.  Part of the growth in government is no doubt unnecessary bloat, and a rational conservative party that believes in limited government is one of the necessary checks to the countervailing liberal notion that government can solve every problem.  Eisenhower's warnings about the military industrial complex came from a rational conservative ideology worried about the adverse effects of an over-weening military encouraging bloat among defense contractors.  When Mann and Ornstein can proclaim "it's even worse than it looks," and provide a convincing argument that "Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime," we no longer really have a rational conservative ideology or party.   We have what the fictional Will McAvoy called the "American Taliban."  

It is unconscionable, however, on so many levels, that we now have a Republican presidential candidate who is, if one takes him at his word, not only ideologically extreme, but contemptuous of even the barest hints of actual policy beyond his own whim.  His wife was accused of plagiarism during her convention speech, but Trump seems to get a pass.  As Politico reports, "his proposals on reforming the nation’s tax code and improving services for veterans appear to have been lifted almost verbatim from those of primary rival Jeb Bush."   It, of course, gets worse. Politico goes on to point out that on "NBC News’ “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on Wednesday night, Trump told moderator Matt Lauer that he has his own policy to defeat the Islamic State even though he will not say what it is and said recently that he plans to ask his generals to devise a policy in the first 30 days of his term (in the same forum, he asserted that the country’s generals “have been reduced to rubble” and hinted that he might replace most of them)."  That the moderator, Matt Lauer, the likable guy from the morning show, didn't call him out on this astonishing line of bullshit is itself unconscionable and he deserves the backlash he's getting, but it is perhaps even worse than it looks.   If the first step in a Putinesque putsch is to eviscerate the press, which the mainstream media seems to have cooperative done to themselves by treating Trump as a legitimate candidate for office, the second step is to secure the "loyalty" of those who have the monopoly of force, the military and the police.  

Of course, it is unthinkable that Trump, under the sway of someone like Bannon, might want to stage a Putinesque putsch.  It is just too reminiscent of all those conspiracy theories that have swirled around Obama -- literally unthinkable for most of us, but it seems those same republicans have, as they say, "thunk about it a lot."  As reported on MSNBC, Jade Helm 15 "officially consists of a series of training drills throughout the Southwest for about 1,200 special operations personnel, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs," but "conspiracy theorists operating on the fringes of the conservative blogosphere, however, have other ideas about what the exercise ... is intended to do – such as implement martial law, seize Americans’ guns, and imprison political dissidents."  Ted Cruz gave it sufficient credence that he felt it necessary to contact the Pentagon, and TPM reported that "the speculation reached such a fever pitch that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Tuesday asked the State Guard to monitor the exercise so that "that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed."  OK, so we have a state government's military monitoring the federal government's military in much the same way that we monitored the soviets during their military exercises.  It would be unthinkable, except that it wasn't so unthinkable for two prominent government officials, and here one has to suspect that there is more than a bit of projection going on -- that is to say projecting "their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others."

OK, so, we need institutional democratic checks on power more than ever, but then perhaps there is too much of a good thing.  That a significant portion of the American people could bring themselves to vote for the likes of Trump reveals why we may be suffering, as Sullivan would have it, from an excess of democracy.   The mainstream media is complicit.   Part of it is simply "reporting the conflict," the statements each candidate makes about the other with no follow-on obligation to the validity of the opposing claims.  On the upcoming debates, as CNN reports, "over the years, many presidential debate moderators have chosen to simply ask questions and let the candidates fact-check one another, believing it is the responsibility of the politicians to challenge their competitors.  Wallace has already said that he won't fact-check candidates because 'it's not my job to be a truth squad.'" If not the press corps and the media, then whom?  The American people?   They are very unlikely to read the follow up "fact checks" and are left with no more than "he said/she said." In the end, it would seem the prize goes to the more audacious, the more accomplished liar.   Or, to be a bit more charitable, on the presumption that both candidates are audacious, accomplished liars -- a narrative re-enforced by a media that must report "one bad thing" about each of the candidates for the sake of balance -- the prize goes to neither or both.  It leaves the people right where they began, entrenching their support for the candidate that affirms their pre-existing bias with nothing to pop their bubble.  

There is a meme common throughout discussions of Trump, that he has set the bar so low for himself that anything remotely resembling a legitimate candidate gets a sigh of relief that he's pivoting, that he's becoming more "presidential" because, for example, he can read prepared remarks off a teleprompter.  As Chauncy Devaga put it for Salon, "the 24/7 cable news cycle and the media’s corporate culture have fueled an obsession with creating a 'horse race' and a willingness to massage, distort and misrepresent events in order to sustain that narrative. For example, the media continues to manufacture 'scandals' about Clinton’s emails while ignoring or underplaying Trump’s misdeeds, from the buying of political influence and various documented acts of political corruption to his encouragement of election tampering by a foreign power, his questionable business practices and other instances of unethical behavior."  He goes on to say, "in all, this amounts to grading on a curve. Hillary Clinton is an A student being held to an impossibly high standard and punished for minor mistakes. Donald Trump is a D student, at best, who is being marked up to an A minus because the teacher is afraid of his parents." And that isn't a bias?

Beyond the assertions of character, however, Clinton has "expertise," developed through years of "experience" in how to govern.  Anyone who has been in the public eye for 30 years will have a mountain of history for critique, and one should critique it, but the obsessive concern with her email is not a critique, despite the fact that the approximately 14 million invested with no smoking gun, and  the equally obsessive concern with the Clinton Foundation is not a critique, which likewise has not uncovered a smoking gun.  It is a witch hunt, with all the sexist implications of "witch" intact.  If the smoking gun turns up, then OK, but the on-going narrative that the surfacing of additional emails might, maybe, could perhaps possibly reveal that smoking gun, but the notion that one might, maybe, could perhaps possibly get a whiff of spent gunpowder does not mean there was "corruption" at any level.  In the meantime, there is her "record" as a NY state senator, as the Secretary of State, and one should critique both, but the point being, there has been little or no discussion of her record even though there is a record of governance to critique.  

For Trump, there is no record.  He has no experiential expertise in "governance."  On the one hand, in the popular mind that may well be a "good thing," because experience in governance is experience in corruption, but it also assumes that running our country, with the complex structures of our government, is an "entry-level" position -- no experience required.  On the other hand, if one points to his successful business experience, then we should beware.  Being good at one thing does not mean one will be good at everything -- being an excellent mechanic does not mean one is automatically a successful neurosurgeon.  Nevertheless, it  actually is highly likely that he will lead the country the way he leads his business, and there have been plenty of exposes of his actual business record, to include the 2500 lawsuits over his failure to pay sub-contractors among no doubt other things, to bring that into question.  As Heather Digby Parton has more recently pointed out, his "business practices" have extended into his campaign practices.  His policy staff quit,  she writes, in part because he simply ignored them, preferring to plagiarize other republican policy positions, but in larger part because "it turns out that Trump," after making them "sign non-disclosure agreements but didn’t bother to pay them."  Moreover, "these folks are not alone.  Last week Huffington Post reported that Trump hasn’t paid his top staffers either. And some of them are resigning as well.  But frankly, these people only have themselves to blame. Anyone who reads the newspapers should know by now that Trump routinely doesn’t pay people who work for him.  He’s been sued literally thousands of times for non-payment. And nobody should gripe that he’s reimbursing his own [businesses and his own] children tens of thousands of dollars in campaign expenses either.  In every business venture, large and small, Trump gets his 'expenses off the top.'"

This post feels a bit like I'm ranting in the desert, but OMG!  There is a part of me that wonders why the people aren't outraged by Trump.  There is perhaps a reason why Trump holds large scale "rallies."  One cannot doubt that his narcissism needs the affirmation of an adoring crowd, but there is more to it than that.  He needs the mob mentality.  It is core to his success, and why he can seem "statesman-like" when speaking the President of Mexico, but a rabid bat when addressing a crowd in Arizona.  At the risk of being a pop psychologist, his rallies prey upon the characteristics of the "deindividuation" of the mob, and as Tamara Avant put it, "When people deindividuate, they are less likely to follow normal restraints and inhibitions and more likely to lose their sense of individual identity."   She points to behavior at sporting events, or concerts, as benign examples, but the mobs at Trump rallies always seem to be teetering at the edge of violence.  As a comment to her site put it, "I think that the truth of "violent mob" lies not in the cohesiveness of the group but in the anonymity that the group offers. But also the lure of the "mob" is from a sense of individual animus that has found it's common cause in the group."  There is no doubt that his rallies tap into an "animus."  Much has been made of the "disaffected, under-educated, white voter," and "the louder and more conspiratorial the propaganda of the mob for 'individual rights'" -- or perhaps more precisely the perceived loss of one's  "individual right" to racial and economic privilege -- the more it attracts those with an aggrieved sense of a stolen self, a set of grievances that find personal affirmation within the anonymity of a "like minded mob" that can target its scapegoats with impunity, particularly its scapegoat in chief, Hillary Clinton.  We are re-writing the preamble to the constitution to read, in effect, "we the mob, in order to form a more perfect animus, enact revenge, insure domestic division, provide for a common defense against the other among us, promote the welfare of the rich, and secure the blessings of liberty for only our kind and our posterity, do ordain ..."   That is why I'm not a populist, and support an elitist for the presidency.

Labor

Recently, I've come across two articles on labor and unions.  The first, and perhaps the most useful is by Thomas Kochan in the Conversation.  As its title suggests, "it's time we reinvented labor for the 21st century."  The second, by Moshe Marvit in the Washington Post, outlines 5 myths about unions. Both speak well of unions.  I haven't given a good deal of thought to unions, not since I worked at a large midwestern community college and had to deal with faculty unions as an administrator.  For the sake of honesty, from my administrator's perch, I found the late stage culture created by the union to be unnecessarily adversarial and malignant.  I felt, pretty much, as Obama must have felt over the latter part of his term, stymied at every turn.  Norman J. Ornstein, one of the author's of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” also had a column in Washington Post.  His column was titled "Forget your obstructionist policies.  They backfired."  

If you'll forgive a sort of detour and  personalization of my union experience, when Ornstein characterization of the republican congress resonates with me.  He writes:

We know that Republican congressional leaders, on the night of President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, chose a deliberate policy of uniting in opposition to all of his initiatives, even before he served a full day in office. Now we have a pair of blue-ribbon establishment Republicans fundamentally suggesting the same approach — one that has contributed to the decline of the Republican brand, the rise of Donald Trump, the weakening of GOP leadership and the growth of know-nothing radical anti-government sentiment — months before the election of a president.

Such was my experience on the limited scale of our institution with the American Federation of Teachers, and our college's local chapter.  Obama, of course, faced not only a political, but a racial animosity that is deeply unfamiliar to me except by analogy.  Before I arrived at the institution,  I found that my military background had been broadly discussed, in the most stereotypical terms.  They expected someone on the order of the character played by Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," 
and the union leaders clearly saw themselves in the role of Tom Cruise, the crusading lawyer who unmasked the colonel's arrogance and corruption.  They had already decided on a "deliberate policy of uniting in opposition to all of my initiatives" long before I had served a single day in office, even though some were clearly in their best interest.  The opposition was vehement, and on more than a couple of occasions, I even received death threats from union members (one a sketch of a pup tent with my title on the side and a grenade rolling toward it, with the script 'we know what to do with baby burners -- frag!').   Ornstein goes on to write that "hamstringing government while trashing any policies that actually get enacted almost inevitably works against the party of the president, which is held responsible for action and inaction in Washington."  I have to say that the institution's president, Michael Murphy, himself was ethically corrupt.  I learned later that he had encouraged the faculty union  conversation around my military background, had even stoked the fires, and he did it as a scapegoating deflection to survive in his position until his retirement date.  He survived, though I don't think he ever thanked me for being his "fall guy."

I mention this because the tactic may have worked for Murphy, but it didn't work for the institution.  To extend the analogy, it led to the progressive decline of the union brand.  Despite the efforts of the AFT, at the next board meeting, the conservative political connections of many board members led to an increasingly anti-union board.  One newly elected official, a tea party member with aspirations of high office, wore a t-shirt to board meetings that read "end faculty pay for play."  The obstructionist tactics of the union led to an equal but opposite obstructionism from their conservative adversaries, and instead of "problem-solving," the institution was stuck in "obstructionist limbo" for a number of years.  I say all this, not only to be honest with myself -- I understand in personally and viscerally why some republican legislators would be anti-union -- but I also have to admit that they are necessary.   Kochan reminds us that "on Labor Day, politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker," and they do so for "good reason. Not only have American workers made it clear they are fed up with being left behind as the economy prospers, there is a growing body of evidence that union decline is one of the key causes of wage stagnation and income inequality."  If we are to be a nation not only with liberty, but with prosperity for all, then we need strong unions.   As an aside, there is perhaps a growing body of unexamined evidence that union decline correlates as well with the growing ineffectuality and distrust of the democratic party, a core substrate of support that would help corral the white working class vote and alleviate some of the ethno-nationalist scapegoating that animates Trump's bid for president.  Regardless, as Kochan goes on to say, "the solution, however, isn’t to bring back the unions of yesterday."  They are dead and gone, and perhaps deserve to be dead and gone, but we nevertheless "need to create stronger business-labor partnerships for tomorrow."

Before I touch on Kochan's suggestions, let me touch briefly on Marvit's five myths about unions, the first of which is that "unions are for the working class only."  He notes "For decades, the percentage of professional workers in unions has grown, and now professionals are the majority of union members in the United States.  Conversely, the share of union members in traditional blue-collar jobs such as manufacturing and mining has diminished along with those industries."  Here it might be useful to drill down just a bit.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2015, the number of union workers was about evenly divided between the public and private sectors, with "7.2 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.6 million workers in the private sector," but that is only half the story.  As they go on to say, "the union membership rate for public-sector workers (35.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private-sector workers (6.7 percent)."  Increasingly, that is, unions are for public workers, with local government leading the way, with 41.3 percent of its workers represented by a union, to include mostly "employees in heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters."  Although I spent a portion of my career butting heads with the AFT, and I could detail their recalcitrance with great enthusiasm, I will say that, in general, teachers are over-educated and under-paid for the demands placed upon them.  Although the failures of the police have received much attention of late as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, I will say again that, in general, protective service occupations are significantly underpaid particularly for psychological demands that most of us would not or could not meet.  In both cases, though very different, the lure of the profession is not the salary, but something deeper.   Union membership for teachers and I suspect for police is not only, or not solely, about bargaining for salary and benefits, but also an affirmation of the "higher calling" that genuinely animates both professions.  

Why are unions losing ground in the private sector?   Well, for starters,  as noted, "median weekly earnings of nonunion workers ($776) were 79 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($980)."  The BLS does caveat this observation, but no matter how you slice the data, earnings are better for those represented by unions than for those who are not.  Contrary to much of the political rhetoric, private business does not exist to "create" jobs.  It exists to generate profit, and if it wants to remain profitable, it creates only those jobs necessary to the creation of profit.  Moreover, since jobs represent an expense, if it wants to remain profitable, it seeks to minimize the pay and benefits of those jobs necessary to the creation of profit.  Here, another slight detour through another Washington Post labor day article might be useful.    Robert J. Samuelsonsuggests that we should forget about the so-called "gig-economy" -- think Uber -- at least for now.  He tell us "the gig economy is overrated. It’s not the main engine of change. It accounts for only about 0.5 percent of employment, according to a new study by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger of Princeton University. That’s one half of 1 percent of all jobs or roughly 750,000 out of 150 million. The much larger change, the study found, lies in the replacement of traditional wage and salary jobs with what Krueger and Katz blandly call “alternative work arrangements.”  Katz and Krueger note that "the percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract company workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.1 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015."  Moreover, as they note in italics, "A striking implication ... is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements."  Why is this significant?  Well, as Samuelson suggests, "The new reality is how the old reality is being remade. We don’t really know why this happened. A plausible explanation is that the multiplication of alternative work arrangements was a consequence of the Great Recession, which created mass unemployment and shifted bargaining power to companies. People desperate for work can’t be too picky in their choices. Employers seized the opportunities to cut costs."   It's really that simple.  Samuelson notes that there is some good news and "that U.S. workers may be retrieving some of their lost bargaining power. The supply-and-demand dynamics for labor look more favorable. As the recovery has continued, the unemployed pool has shrunk. In August, the jobless rate was 4.9 percent, down from a peak of 10 percent. In addition, the retirement of baby boomers reinforces the competition for good workers, exerting upward pressure on wages and giving workers more choice." It is unlikely, however, given the "alternative work arrangements"that we will see a resurgence of the old-style bargaining power, the line of striking picketers outside the GM plant in Flint, and leaves open the question of just what would "institutionalize" new forms of bargaining power.

Marvit's myths two and three play together -- that is "workers can be forced to join unions" and "right-to-work laws would bankrupt unions."   He is right to point out that compulsory union membership has been illegal since the Taft-Hartley act in 1947, and that right to work laws seem to have little effect, particularly within the public sector.  He notes that, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in a brief before the Supreme Court, "union membership among union-represented workers has remained around 80 percent despite right-to-work policies passed in recent years."  I might suggest, as I suggested above, that this can be attributed at least in part to what might be thought of as more "guild" membership, an organization representing the challenges and values of the profession, rather than an organization devoted to collective bargaining and employee/employer dispute resolution.  One way of gauging this might be "strike participation."  As he notes, "although strikes are among labor’s strongest weapons, but they require a great deal of solidarity to ensure that workers don’t cross the picket line or that the union does not face a decertification vote following the strike. Between 1990 and 2015, the number of strikes declined by more than 90 percent, from 801 in 1990 to 72 last year."    Very often public employees are prohibited by law from striking.  What would a police strike, for example, look like.   Within the private sector, the exercise of old-style bargaining power through the strike has lost impetus, for any number of reasons, but perhaps central to them is the increasing fluidity of capital and the labor it finds necessary to profit.   I will return to this thought in a moment, but again we are left with the open question of just how unions can, in the absence of the old style strike, exercise their collective power. 

Although anecdotally limited, a look at actual teachers' strikes is illuminating.  They point toward organizations concerned more with challenges to the values of their professional guild, and also helps dispel Marvit's fourth myth that "unions help only union workers."  Marvit cites two examples, one being the "Chicago Teachers Union going on strike in part for increased libraries and other resources, " and "the St. Paul teachers union fighting to limit foreclosures during the school year for households with school-age children."  In the former case, a CTU position paper point out the rift.  They write that "Under state law, the union could only strike over wages, benefits, and parts of teacher evaluations. While these were the issues on the table, publicly, the union made its case as the defenders of public education."  Specifically, they demanded "smaller class sizes, stronger and better-staffed “wraparound services” like nurses and social workers, an enriching curriculum rather than one centered on standardized testing’s dictates, and provision of basic facilities like libraries in all schools, while proposing to fund these things through progressive tax policies including an end to regressive school funding based on property taxes and a financial transactions tax."  Their agenda, in short, was explicitly political.  It was articulated not for private benefit of the union membership, per se, but was a "coherent vision for education that had long been under attack by neoliberal Democrats [aligned with neoliberal Republicans] in Chicago and nationally," a neoliberal agenda that called for the increasing privatization of public education through, for example, charter schools.  in the latter case, the SPTU President Denise Rodriguez addressed an issue that could have come directly from the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, calling "on U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, which do business with the St. Paul Public Schools, to commit to limiting foreclosures on families that have school-age children during the academic year."  Again, their agenda was explicitly political, and was again articulated, not for the personal benefit of the school workers, but for a public good.  As was reported, "Rodriguez and SPFT member Lily Tharoor, a social worker, described abruptly losing students from their classrooms or school buildings after their families received foreclosure or eviction notices."  In both cases, they were, as professionals, expressing professional concern for their students within a broader public context.

Teachers can strike because they don't pose the threat of a public safety outrage in the way striking police or firefighters, and unlike many private sector jobs, they cannot, as yet, be outsourced to China or India.  The fifth myth concerning unions is that they serve as a bulwark against globalization. They would perhaps like to be a bulwark against globalization, and Marvit cites two examples of their express opposition to the "neoliberal" support for ostensibly laissez-faire "policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending.    The AFL-CIO, for example, states that the TPP “appears modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a free trade agreement that boosts global corporate profits while leaving working families behind.”  Likewise, the SEIU calls the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a secret trade agreement that must be stopped.”  As I have suggested elsewhere, we live in a global economy and have for some time.  To pretend otherwise is futile, but we have sacrificed a good deal to achieve the low prices at Walmart and Hobby Lobby that result from improved "efficiency" (read "profitability") of an international labor market.  As Robert Reich points out, there are at least three big realities, not one of which should be a surprise.   The trade agreements have exacerbated "inequality."  As he puts it, "in a society of widening inequality, the winners are often wealthier than the losers, so even if they fully compensate the losers, as the winners gain more ground, the losers may feel even worse off."  We do not compare ourselves to the workers of Cambodia, but to those who live in the house on the hill, behind the gates, and the invidious comparison leaves us feeling, well, under-compensated.   But, as he goes on to point out, "as a practical matter, the winners don’t compensate the losers. Most of the losers from trade, the millions whose good jobs have been lost, don’t even have access to unemployment insurance.  Trade adjustment assistance is a joke. America invests less in jobs training as a percent of our economy than almost any other advanced nation."  Unemployment and education  suggest ways of compensating, but of course most such "compensation" bumps up against the neo-liberal agenda of "fiscal austerity" and "reductions in government spending," and we wouldn't want to increase taxes to pay for such "compensation." And in the end, what really matters is one's paycheck and its efficiency.  Again, as Reich points out, "those whose paychecks have been declining because of trade don’t make up for those declines by having access to cheaper goods and services from abroad. Yes, those cheaper goods help, but adjusted for inflation, the median hourly pay of production workers is still lower today than it was in 1974."   

In the end, as Marvit laments, "despite the best efforts of labor, including large protests in the 1990s, globalization has largely continued apace, and U.S. workers have paid the price. According to the Economic Policy Institute, while NAFTA promised to create 200,000 new jobs for American workers, since its 1994 inception 682,900 jobs have been lost. Another EPI report found that international trade depressed wages for non-college-educated workers by 5.5 percent, meaning an annual loss of $1,800 for the average worker."  Where does that leave us?  Kochan notes that democratic candidates are calling for the re-building of American unions, but that may well turn out to be empty rhetoric.  "Since 1978 three major efforts to pass labor law reform to make it easier to form a union have been blocked in Congress. And there is no reason to believe this will change."  Moreover, even if the Trump phenomenon drives more voters to the democratic party, even if the congress is recaptured, and "even if unions started growing again, they would not be able to rely on their past sources of power to drive up wages."  All the reasons outlined above suggest that "there is just too much domestic and international competition, and it is too easy to move capital and jobs to lower-wage countries. That makes it much harder to use strike or unionizing threats to get businesses to lift wages or match negotiated increases."   So what to do?   Kochan suggests better education, negotiated public-private partnerships in infrastructure, and public investment in next generation technologies, but beyond that what he calls a "high road economic strategy:"

One attraction of the high road is that almost any community can start building it immediately. “Reduce waste, add value, capture and share the benefits of doing both, repeat” is the high-roader’s basic mantra, with clear imperatives for action. Start now to reduce the fantastic waste in your systems of developing skills, organizing work, producing things, and moving people and goods. Start now to map your regional economy to locate areas of potential competitive advantage, and develop those areas with the aid of more efficiently organized places. Start now to improve the adaptive and learning capacities and power of your democratic institutions, recognizing them not only as a force for representation and justice, but also wealth generation. 

Who couldn't support this?  I would suggest that the paths of hell are paved with good intentions, and high road economics is perhaps just one example.  At a high level of abstraction, one suspects, you would find unanimity.  Again, it's like "tax reform."  At a high level of abstraction, everyone supports the basic premise of "fair" taxes, but the devil is in the details, so too with the "high road."  What counts, for example, for waste in our systems of "developing skills?"  Education in the arts and humanities?   What counts as waste in our systems of producing things?  Hiring benefited employees when robots will do?  When capital "locates areas of potential competitive advantage," the development into more "efficiently organized places" is rarely to the benefit of labor.  Moreover, within political discourse, the devil appears as synecdoche, using a part to represent the whole, even if it isn't representative of the whole.   Within our current political discourse, "trade" and the problems with trade, refer to an institutionalized capitalism that benefits the few at the expense  (literally) of the many.   The power of "our" democratic institutions should be recognized, but at the moment it seems to be overwhelmed by the power of "their" institutions, which serve not as a force for "representation and justice," but as a force for undistributed "wealth generation."  

In Praise of Centrism: the Horseshoe Theory

As humbling as it may be, the moment one has an "original" thought, you can be sure someone, somewhere, has put it down on paper.   Last night, while listening to the Cubs game (they won) I was searching about the net and I landed for a moment on the RationalWiki site.  The original intent was to read an article on the so-called alt right, which I did, along with an article in Breitbart that also did some 'splaining, but the article that intrigued me was one on the "Horse Shoe Theory."   Although there seems to be some dispute about the theory's origin, it has been attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye, an erstwhile French post-modernist philosopher and friend to Jaques Derrida.  The RationalWiki article begins with the following statement: "The horseshoe theory in political science stipulates that the far-left and far-right are more similar to each other in essentials than either is to the political center."  

At the same time, I was thinking about Trump's so called "softening" on the immigration issue, which is a deliberate and clumsy attempt to move back to the center after residing for most of the primary season into the general election at the far right.  Politico reports Rob Stutzman, a GOP operative in California, saying “Nuance is antithetical to his brand, so shifts aren’t credible and make him look weak. Because he demagogued on immigration to win the primaries and mocked his opponents who had thoughtful policy positions on immigration, he has no credibility to soften, tweak or moderate his stance. Ironically, he’s hemmed in by the wall of rhetoric he built over the past 18 months, and now it’s his cell.”  As Clinton's never-ending email story amply illustrates, in the age of digital communication, Faulkner was even more right than he could have known when he wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  Every bombastic clip of Trump will survive on YouTube if nowhere else, and so one wonders what it means for someone like Trump to moderate a position.  As a man who built his "brand" on adversity to "political correctness," on a deliberate lack of nuance or policy wonkiness, on a "strongman" persona, but most of all on "authenticity," what exactly does his rightwing erection of the wall or his more centrist "softening" reveal the "authentic" Donald Trump?  In the end, probably neither.  Whether Trump has a clinical personality disorder, I am not qualified to say, but if he were a literary creation, I would say he resembles a narcissist's narcissist.  Hollow at the core, Trump loves, absolutely adores, not so much an authentic core Trump, but simply the crowd's cheering adoration of Trump.  Politico goes on to quote Rick Tyler, who served as a communications adviser to Cruz’s presidential campaign. “People are starting to mock Donald Trump now. ‘#AmnestyDon’ was trending on Twitter. And this is all self-inflicted,” Tyler said. “This is Donald Trump not having a core governing philosophy to guide him, and not understanding the entire electorate. He oversold all of this, but I'm not sure he even understood what he was selling."

All of which leads me to believe that Trump really has no interest in actually "governing," and sees it as a "task" that he can delegate to an appropriately sycophantic subordinate.  Having said all that, I do believe he desperately wants to win the election, as confirmation of his greatness, and his fall back position seems to be well to the right or perhaps more precisely a far right  authoritarianism that appeals to the adoring crowds that gather to hear him speak.  Salon, this morning, has a headline article titled "Desperation and Demagoguery: Trump play-acts as president in Mexico, then goes full nativist in Arizona."  The writer, Simon Maloy, goes on to tell us, "so what we’re left with is a campaign that spent Wednesday afternoon trying to shake up the race with a transparently desperate grasp for international legitimacy, and then spent Wednesday night stomping all over their own efforts by getting caught in silly lies and having the candidate go on an extended wallow in the nativist fever swamp," by saying things like "anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise we don’t have a country."  Centrist crowds don't stamp their feet, holler "build the wall" or "hang the bitch," or provide the sort of adoration that, like heroin, Trump seems to need.  Regardless what Trump may or may not believe,  and he may not believe in anything except perhaps his own "greatness," Trump reverts to the sort of authoritarianism that Putin would find comfortable.  Although Russia has been the American conservatives bug-a-boo for the last half century, displaced or augmented by radical islam, Trump seems to intuit that what he proposes for America is essentially its "russification."  With no sense of how he would actually govern, he simply proposes that he would be to the US what Putin was and is to Russia. 

And his crowds eat it up.  George Lakoff, along with others, have suggest that Trump appeals to a certain personality type, those who desire a strong or authoritarian "father" figure.  It may well be that extreme positions on the left and right are drawn to the authoritarian, and the writers for RationalWiki have given a longish list of similarities between the conservative hard right and the communist party of old, a good deal of which pertains as well to contemporary Russian leadership.  I won't work through the entire list -- it can be found on the site -- but a quick perusal should be sufficient to make the point that Lakoff and other's have made that Trump is not running on a set of policy proposals relative to specific "issues," so much as a authoritarian figure.  

• [Authoritarians] strongly endorse "tough on crime" policies and the death penalty, especially when "crime" can be  associated with a particular minority population -- e.g. the sensationalist headlines featuring crimes committed by immigrants on sources like Breitbart News.  
• [Authoritarians] strongly support "traditional values," meaning hardcore social conservatism, pro-life attitudes, and hostility to LGBT rights.  While thrice married Trump hardly represents "social conservatism," he has nevertheless endorsed most "traditional values."  On Wikipedia he is described thus:  "Trump describes himself as pro-life and opposes abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother.^[333]  The Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, praised Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees as 'exceptionally strong,' Trump has stated that he supports "traditional marriage".^[335] He opposes the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide,^{[335][336][337]} saying he thinks the decision should be left to the states.^[336] He would 'strongly consider' appointing Supreme Court justices that would overturn the ruling.^[338]"   
• [Authoritarians] have weaknesses for conspiracy theories.  ThinkProgress lists 12 conspiracy theories that Trump has demonstrably endorsed, ranging from "asbestos is safe" to the Clinton murder of Vince Foster, all of which have been substantially debunked.
• [Authoritarians] are reactionary in nature and extremely nostalgic for some sort of "golden age."  Trump's  reactionary pugilism is famously demonstrated by the back and forth around the images of Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump, which both Trump and Breitbart News defended with the playground assertion "he started it!"   Trump Although Trump is never clear on when America actually was great, his campaign slogan, "make American great again," directly invokes a nostalgia for a past (and lost) glory days.  
• [Authoritarians] support increasing spending on an even larger national defense while rarely questioning if it's necessary. Also, they both tend to admire "masculinity" and "militarism."  As politico reports, "He has, however, repeatedly called the military a “disaster” as a result of the policies pursued by the Obama administration and the GOP-led Congress, and he’s vowing to rebuild it. 'I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody — absolutely nobody — is going to mess with us,' Trump says in a 23-second video stating his position on 'the military' on his campaign website."
• [Authoritarians] make populist appeals to the lower classes, mainly by promising to cut their taxes, regardless of whether it will be done or whether it can be afforded.  As Wikipedia describes it, "Trump's campaign's tax plan calls for reducing the corporate tax rate to 15%, concurrent with the elimination of various business loopholes and deductions.^[345]Personal income taxes would also be reduced; the top rate would be reduced from 39.6% to 25%, a large "zero bracket" would be created, and the alternative minimum tax would be eliminated, as would the estate tax (which currently applies to individual estates over $5.45 million or $10.90 million per married couple).^[346]"
• [Authoritarians] have strands of anti-intellectualism, with intellectuals who question them being seen as "elitist," particularly the so-called "media elite."

There might be a couple of bullet points to add.  Along with the disdain for "intellectualism" is a corresponding disdain for "legal" or "policy-based" solutions to the perceived problem.  Back to the "immigration" issue, for example, as one commenter to the Breitbart article on immigration listed above put it, "So the first time they cross and get caught, it's a Misdemeanor and subsequent illegal crossings are a felony. Why aren't we treating these a holes to the benefits of being a felon at the very least and in this guys [sic] case a sex offender."[sic]  In response, another commenter wrote, "because we are wimps, letting progressive fk holes run this country into the ground."  Then too, along with the tendency to admire "masculinity" and "militarism," one might add the tendency to see violence as the principle way of solving problems.  Another commenter suggest that "we don't need a wall, we need some good men and women who can shoot straight. We're being invaded, so we should defend ourselves by means necessary."  His comment was echoed by several others, some more outlandish than others, and it is clear that most imagine the solution to be a strong man willing to exercise violence, as in "just let them roam the country side til Trump is elected."  Then too, the end, it probably doesn't matter if one is a left leaning authoritarian or a right leaning authoritarian, a christian authoritarian or a muslim authoritarian, so much as the tendency to demand a strong, unambiguous authority, which, when the center doesn't hold, ultimately becomes a totalitarianism differing only in its "justification" for the preservation of authority.

Centrism, however, is messy.  It is perhaps interesting to note that the Breitbart article only details the capture, with ominous hints that those apprehended represent only a fraction of the drug and sex offenders creeping into the US, but says nothing about what happened after the capture.  I doubt that they were sent running back across the border while a gang of red-necks used them for target practice in anticipation of the coming hoards, but I do strongly suspect that they were handled IAW the laws of the US, to include those that mandate due process within the legal system, which is messy, and rarely unambiguous, with the adversaries maintaining their adversarial stances long after a verdict has been rendered.   One can advocate for a harder line on immigration, both legal and illegal, as a matter of policy, but "authority" for the enforcement of that harder line must exist outside the whims of a single authoritarian person.  Fundamentally, the best conceivable way of insuring that there is, on the one hand, "authority," and that it rests, on the other hand, outside the whim of any particular person, is the "authority" vested in the rule of law.  Although imperfect, steps can always be taken toward its "perfection," which is what the founding fathers no doubt had in mind when they penned the constitution to a form "a more perfect" union.  One should note, they did not say "the perfect union," but "a more perfect" union, suggesting the possibility of an "even more perfect union."  

Centrism, or at least the centrism I endorse, is fact based and ultimately pragmatic.  For example, as reported by the Migration Policy Institute, who in turn cites "Mexico's National Survey of Occupations and Employment (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo, or ENOE), the emigration rate from Mexico (refers to emigrants leaving Mexico regardless of their destination, although most head to the United States) has remained steadily low in recent years, after experiencing a drop following the 2007-09 U.S. recession and global financial crisis. From 2008 to 2012, the emigration rate dropped from 6.4 migrants per 1,000 residents to 3.3 migrants.  It ticked up slightly in 2014 to 3.5 migrants per 1,000 residents."   One suspects, or least I suspect, other than the immigration of refugees, that much voluntary immigration can be attributed to economics.  The best way to reduce voluntary Mexican immigration, whether legal or illegal, would be to tank the US economy yet again, or perhaps preferably, to take steps assisting Mexico in the improvement of Mexican economy. 

I am not, however, advocating for the balance fallacy, whether in the positive, or as it is more often framed in political discourse, in the negative.   I have made no secret that Clinton is not my "ideal" candidate, and I wouldn't make a case for her if there were a viable alternative, but there isn't.  She is, in my estimation, the lessor of two evils, though even that mis-states the case, because it implies that her evil is somehow the equivalent of Trump's evil.  They are not.  Clinton represents centrism, and while on can have legitimate differences about her policy positions, there are no policy positions for Trump, and where there is the semblance of a policy position, it is either so ambiguous as to be meaningless, or a concoction out of thin air. As Jimmy Kimmel said, "A lot of these groups are insisting that I "present both sides of the argument", and I'm not going to do that either, because - well, for the same reasons that I wouldn't present both sides if a group of people decided that pancakes make you gay. They don't. And there's no point in discussing it."    Those who do "fact-checking" have labeled so many of his assertions as "false," "four Pinocchio,"  or "pants on fire," not because he was distorting or eliding facts to make a rhetorical point, as Clinton clearly does, but because he was simply making up "pancakes make you gay" sorts of assertions.   His "immigration" assertions can be "fact-checked" here.   It is irrelevant whether he believes them to be true, or whether swaths of the American people believe them to be true, if they are false, they are false.  No amount of conspiracy theorizing can make them true, and ultimately "there's no point in discussing it."  In the end, Trump offers only the authority of Trump, and for some that is appealing, but for me it is appalling.