Politics, hatred, utopia: I should have seen this coming

“I think he showed us how it’s done.”  My lunch companion was a 30-year-old Yale grad, an up-by-his-bootstraps denizen of Rochester’s inner city with political aspirations.  He was talking about Donald Trump and how the left would defeat him. I confess I am not very glib. That’s why I write this blog.  It may take me a dozen drafts over 4 or 5 days to concisely express my opinion.  So, my response to this young progressive was… wait for it… nothing!  I was dumbstruck. 

I’ve always thought that society’s reaction to our boorish, prevaricating president would be a return to civility.  But my young friend was spot on as last year’s elections proved.  Using the Twitterverse as a platform, the AOC contingent (if I may call it that) became ascendant.  And, their success has brought outrageous ideas (70% marginal tax rates, Green New Deal) into mainstream media discussion.  Like Trump, AOC has become the “brand” of her party according to Peggy Noonan.  Her essay (Congress’s Mean Girls Are Trump’s Offspring) in the Wall Street Journal asserts, “[t]hey believe that to be enraged is to demonstrate seriousness. It is to show that you understand the urgency of the moment, even if others don’t.”

Still I wonder where the line of acceptable behavior is drawn.  I guess it’s somewhere on the spectrum of nasty women who make their living by being, well, nasty.  Samantha Bee is okay, but Kathy Griffin is not.  There’s a line between them somewhere, right?

Following President Trump’s election, I was astounded at the public reaction of those who supported his opponent and thought she had it in the bag.  His outrageous behavior, boorish manners and policy lunacy was outmatched by street protests, hate-filled messages and the media’s obsession with him.  “He’ll be reelected because liberals will overplay their hand,” I would tell anyone who would listen.  Not many did. And, now, I am not so sure I was right. 

Hatred has transformative power.  It can make the innocuous into the menacing. And, menace provides moral empowerment, which in turn leads to totalitarianism.  In a conventional society, laws are designed to protect people and their property.  In a totalitarian society, laws are designed to move society toward utopia.  Successful extremists can always define utopia. One extreme would have us erect barriers to free trade and reject immigrants while the other would open our borders and exercise government control over private enterprise.  The reaction by each cohort is to accuse their opponents of either being Nazis (Hitler) or socialists (Lenin).  Those who gain political power by conjuring hatred can and will do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals (as both Hitler and Lenin showed us).  

America desperately needs leadership that stands for sanity and moderation, not demagoguery.  Those whose political fortunes rely upon judging, lecturing and disdaining may resonate with a segment of the public but not with the “Exhausted Majority.” Despite the best efforts of the media, most people do not follow politics with rapt attention.  They are more concerned about paying their rent and the rising cost of healthcare and sending their kids to college.  

The question now is how to get the genie back in the bottle.

WHO WILL LEAD?

What I’m reading

Economist Brian Beaulieu says we’re in the third phase (Caution!) of the economic cycle. We may be on the precipice of recession – or maybe not….  In a 1 minute 43 second video, the Hoover Institute provides an alternative to a carbon tax called "Low Carbon Pollution Standards"….  David Brooks of the NY Times tells us that the media have become scandal mongers (once the province only of tabloids).  

#justanoldwhiteguy

It’s old news now but I’ve been thinking about the mob that semi-attacked Tucker Carlson’s home last fall. If so-called progressives want to be the anti-Trump, shouldn’t they stop behaving like the anti-Christ?

China is eating our lunch and is ready for dinner

Even among those who think President Trump is wrong, oh so wrong, about nearly everything, there is a grudging admission that some of his observations about China are correct. “China is eating our lunch!”  They have subsidized their own industries while creating obstacles to US companies wishing to enter their markets and they steal our intellectual property.   If Trump can make progress on those issues, he will have served us well.  

But it’s China’s long game that troubles me.  They are likely to make concessions to Trump because the global trade paradigm feeds their coffers. In spite of the capital flight of recent years, China still has over $1 Trillion in US Treasuries on deposit in the Bank of China.  They are using that capital to fund a long-term strategy to build a China centric supply chain with outposts in developing nations hungering for foreign investment. In addition, they are investing in military technology to bypass the US as our military budget has declined precipitously since 2010. 

Americans tend to take our global hegemony for granted.  The US long game from its founding was Manifest Destiny, expanding the nation from one coast to the other and extending our buffer zones across two oceans. It took about 150 years to achieve this position and the commitment of Cold Warriors to maintain it.  We’ve been so secure for so long that we can’t imagine it might change nor can we imagine impact when it does. Now, that hegemony is in jeopardy as a defense strategy based upon aircraft carriers and foreign military bases is undermined by American withdrawal, reduced military budgets and foreign powers investing in asymmetric capabilities like cruise missiles and cyberwarfare. 

Enter Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) who now proposes a China style national industrial policy for the US. He would protect American manufacturing, restrict capital flows and change the tax code to incentivize technology companies to invest in R&D.  Senator Rubio might be looking at how Japan used its industrial policy to become the world’s second largest economy over 40 years following WWII (they are third behind China now).  But it’s noteworthy that policies that worked well during their rise from the ashes have not served them well since.  The senator should also brush up on economics.  Comparative advantage still works. Competing with China in manufacturing may sound nice to American labor unions; however, our real advantage is in technology and innovation. And the best way to support innovation is for government to get out of the way.  

A better (non-Trumpian) approach would be to create economic alliances with China’s other competitors, such as India, South Korea and Japan and to invest in military technology to counter China’s cyberwarfare military expansion.  We should also expand our economic development initiatives in Africa, the continent most likely to grow economically in this century.  Initiatives of this nature won’t fit into the brevity of an American electoral cycle. For the U.S. to play a long game to counter China, a president will have to clearly define our strategy (Manifest Destiny 2100?) and work to gain bi-partisan support.  Such a plan must include strategies for economic development in the U.S. that will rebuild communities through investment in infrastructure, education and workforce development. Failing to do so will undermine political support for such an initiative in the long term.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect such long term thinking or leadership to emanate from the current resident of the White House. 

WHO WILL LEAD? 

What I’m reading…

… "A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking”:  I was inspired to read it in the wake of the author’s death.  Now, I’m not sure I’ll make it to the end.  I haven’t studied physics and math since college and wonder why I should start again… “Reimagining Mobility: A CEO’s Guide”:  a report from global consulting company, McKinsey & Co., describes how autonomy and electrification will affect automotive transportation over the next decade or two… “Is the Campus Free Speech Crisis Overblown?”: an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal featuring comments from college students on the topic. 

The Poll

Well, the poll favors the short form of essay that I’ve experimented with since the beginning of the year.  (It’s still open if you’d like to vote.) However, the vote was close, and my wife voted for the short form. Maybe we should disallow her vote since she’d just like me to shut up.  What do you think?

Crowdsourcing the news… Trump vs. Republicans… How you like it

Crowdsourcing the news

About the time we were to take off, Southwest Airlines made the announcement that the TSA had ordered the evacuation of our terminal at Orlando International Airport.  What happened next was surprisingly orderly. There was no panic or press of the crowd.  Everyone simply grabbed their stuff and headed to the tram that returned us to the main terminal.  We made new friends, exchanged cynical wisecracks and did as we were told without much fuss.  It took about an hour before we – thousands of us – were back in line to go through security again.  

Naturally, the bureaucracy did what it always does: give orders without telling us what happened or what to expect next.  Also, naturally, the crowd turned to their smartphones.  Rumors abounded.  There were gunshots.  There was a fire.  As it turned out, neither of those were true.  How do I know?  Well, first the Miami Herald posted a story with lots of gaps describing the possible suicide of a TSA employee who jumped from the balcony of the airport hotel. He hit the floor so hard that it sounded like a gun shot and everyone started running, including the TSA employees who were scanning passengers and luggage.

A more complete report was posted on the website Heavy.com.  Being careful to cite the source of each quote, they simply compiled a story from social media posts.  The first of them was used by both the Herald and Heavy.  It included a Tweet from Kindy Segovia who posted a picture of the mob including yours truly (that’s me in the black sweater below the N in Hudson News).  Everything worked out okay and we were on our way after a rescreening and a three- and-half-hour delay.  

I was struck by how a complete picture emerged whereby every social media post constituted pieces of a puzzle.  The Herald’s caution in quoting unknown sources yielded a less complete picture than Heavy.com who was careful to use quotation marks around what people had posted, misspellings included.  I was reminded of a scene from the movie “Absence of Malice,” in which Paul Newman’s character tells off a reporter played by Sally Field.  “You don’t print the truth,” he says.  “You print what people say.  There’s a difference.  The truth’s not that easy to come by.”

Trump vs. Republicans

I recall a wise quote from Cokie Roberts, daughter of two members of Congress and veteran pundit. “The only way to do business in Washington is ‘as usual’,” she averred.  In other words, disrupters beware.  You won’t know what happened to you until it’s already happened.

Was Donald Trump done before he started?  The common wisdom is that veteran Republicans rolled over and played along with the current resident of the White House.  They voted with him over 90% of the time.  Matthew Glassman, a Senior Fellow at the Government Affairs Institute, takes a different view.  “In reality,” he says.  “Republican legislators have hidden their influence, purposefully disguising a weak president with little clout on Capitol Hill while also preserving party unity.”

His essay in the New York Times outlines the strategy: they have simply declined to take up his agenda. During the last Congress, there were no votes on the border wall, immigration policy or protectionist trade policies.  Wary of publicly stating their opposition and incurring the wrath of both him and his stooges at FOX News, they simply work against him by not acting.

On those matters requiring action, they have quietly dismissed his ideas.  Hence, he proposes cuts to non-defense spending and Congress delivers a budget that does the opposite.  It will be interesting to see how the dynamics change with Democrats in control of the House. 

How you like it

Regular readers will have noticed that I switched formats around the first of the year. Previously, I wrote long essays exploring ideas that interest me.  Lately, I’ve been writing shorter pieces that summarize my thoughts with less in-depth research. So, I’d like to know which format you prefer.  Please take a moment to answer this one-question survey: Click HERE.

WHO WILL LEAD?