Tag Archives: U.S. politics

Whitewater

Politico says Trump plans to dredge up the Whitewater scandal that dogged the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. The Whitewater scandal is just tiresome – you can read about it here. Basically it was a failed deal to develop some vacation homes in the hills of Arkansas. The actual scandal had something to do with the Clintons maybe twisting some arms to get loans to the developers. It was investigated throughout the 90s, a few people actually went to jail for short periods of time related to the loans or obstruction of justice, but there really was nothing even close to a case made against either Clinton.

Compare this to the plots to murder Fidel Castro, the U.S.-backed military coups against elected governments in Central and South America and all over Asia, the secret and illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Iraq, and this little “scandal” looks really silly. I hope the 90s are not starting up again, but you can see the beginnings of that with the “email scandal” and the “Bengazi scandal”. It has been refreshing that there has really been no whiff of scandal in relation to Obama, unless you count “Obama is a Muslim” or the birth certificate thing, but those are beyond silly, just childish. The drone strikes and special forces activity around the world are questionable of course, but then political “scandals” don’t usually involve these matters of actual life and death, do they?

“take on Wall Street”

According to the Washington Post, there is a new movement forming called “take on Wall Street”.

the group expects to galvanize support for breaking up the big banks and reviving a version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented the combination of commercial and investment banks. It is also expected to push for a transaction tax, which would force some Wall Street traders, particularly high-frequency traders, to pay a fee every time they buy or sell a stock or bond.

 

terrorism and U.S. elections

This Washington Post article was written after the Paris attacks of fall 2015. It says that after a terrorist attack these things happen:

  • concerns about terrorism increase suspicion and even intolerance directed at migrants, refugees and Muslims.

  • On average, leaders who are Republican, male, and have relevant national security experience tend to be viewed as more competent.

  • terrorist threat advantages Republicans more than Democrats, in part because Republicans are traditionally perceived as better able to handle issues related to national defense.

  • Leaders who are both female and Democratic may…experience the most negative political consequences of terrorist attacks.

  • Hillary Clinton is likely to be bolstered by the foreign policy experience she gained as secretary of state and by her tendency to take stands that are more hawkish than those of Bernie Sanders.

  • Trump is a bit of a wild card, however. His bold style may be appealing in a context of threat. However, he may be hurt by his lack of any significant foreign policy experience

In other words, nobody knows. The general election is going to be interesting, and if god forbid there were to be major terrorist or geopolitical events it will be even more interesting.

Trumpism, fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, etc.

This article, from Salon write Robert Sharp, makes some interesting points about the Trump phenomenon. Even if he falls flat in the general election, what the experts say is inevitable (and I want to agree, but we have all been wrong about everything so far…), his success raises some disturbing questions about the mindset of the population and where the country could be headed in future decades. To summarize, the article says that by offering a return to past glory, but offering no specifics, Trump allows each person to hear what they want to hear, visualize their own personal utopia, and imagine that everyone around them agrees.

While Totalitarian regimes present themselves as harbingers of a better future, they do so by appealing to the perception of a glorious past that has since been lost due to the mismanagement of the existing politicians. Thus Hitler referenced a Wagnerian vision of Germany as the source of two of the world’s great Reichs in order to present his Third Reich as a continuation of German greatness. Similarly, Mussolini invoked the orderliness and domination of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy in order to restore an ancient pride that would lead to a new prominence on the world stage. Such leaders follow a common pattern, in which they blame any failures of their society on the incursion of Others, who lack the purity of the true members of the nation-state.

While the details differ, the call to action carries a consistent refrain: the totalitarian leader promises to make the country great again, to return it to past glories that have long since been lost.

In many ways, calling Trump supporters an analog to the rise of Nazi Germany is too easy, and far too dismissive. However, there is this one obvious similarity. Hitler and the Nazi party appealed to a people who believed that their Golden Age was past them, and that the world was moving on without them. The appeal of the nationalism that was offered was that it would allow a return to greatness, a necessary repeal of all of the policies, both externally imposed and internally permitted, that had led to their fall. Trump offers a very similar message, and he couches it in a way that allows his followers to fill in the blank. Whatever version of the good life they believe existed in their parents’ or grandparents’ day, that is the world that Trump plans to recreate. It is a compelling narrative, because it is their own narrative, and each individual gets to tell his or her own story while simultaneously believing that everyone else around them is thinking the same thing.

Scandinavian equality

Recently I wrote a post about how it seems ludicrous to blame the United States’s problems on an excess of democracy, if democracy is defined as equality. I also suggested that a reasonable definition of democracy should include a consensus building process, which is not just rule by majority vote, but a method to choose policies that almost everyone can accept even if they are not everyone’s first choice.

Well, the Scandinavian democracies at first glance seem to achieve equality, consensus, wealth, and peace. I want to believe in that, and to believe that we could learn its secrets and bring them to the United States. Here is a dissenting view though, in a new book about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway:

After the Second World War, Scandinavia seemed to create model societies, free of corruption and intolerance, moral, compassionate and fair. The Danish people had bravely defied their Nazi occupiers throughout the war and saved almost all of the nation’s Jews. In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published a groundbreaking critique of the racism faced by African-­Americans in the United States. Myrdal’s study, “An American Dilemma,” greatly influenced President Truman’s executive order to integrate the United States military, the Supreme Court’s ruling on behalf of school desegregation, and the creation of the modern civil rights movement. In 1964, Gunnar Jahn, a former leader of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, handed Martin Luther King Jr. the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. Jahn expressed the hope that “conflicts between races, nations and political systems can be solved, not by fire and sword, but in a spirit of true brotherly love.”

Today, the third-largest political party in Sweden has the support of racists and neo-Nazis. The leading political party in Denmark is not only anti-immigrant but also anti-Muslim. And the finance minister of Norway, a member of the right-wing Progress Party, once suggested that all the Romany people in her country should be deported by bus. In “One of Us,” the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad explores a dark side of contemporary Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring Breivik, a mass murderer who killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, as a protest against women’s rights, cultural diversity and the growing influence of Islam.

I don’t necessarily buy this. There are problems in every country, and I think the countries of northern Europe (I would throw Germany and the Netherlands into the mix) have quite possibly done the most anywhere to try to solve them and create the best human societies they can. I don’t think they claim to be utopian, only to be striving for utopian ideals. Most impressively to me, they try to build consensus not by keeping outsiders at bay and trying to remain homogeneous, but by allowing diversity and then trying to deal with it, which is the harder path. Because they have chosen the harder but potentially more rewarding path, there is a visible right-wing backlash developing. I think something similar has happened in the United States – the intolerant minority has become more vocal and visible as we have become more tolerant and pluralistic overall. This doesn’t mean there aren’t vulnerabilities – if the intolerant element becomes large and active enough to gain real power, bad outcomes are obviously possible. Economic stagnation, violence and fear can all increase the risk of bad outcomes.

What a Dick!

Ouch, doesn’t this seem just a bit harsh? Well, maybe for anyone who is not named Dick Cheney.

in retrospect it is hard to say that Cheney’s decisions were anything but deeply prescient, and one thing is certain: The invasion ended Islamic terrorism and did not create a civil war that ironically allowed al-Qaida to flourish in an area where it had no prior presence, ultimately begetting an even more dangerous and inhumane splinter group called ISIS that continues to threaten American lives to this day.

Many speakers at Thursday’s event commented on the unique courage demonstrated by Cheney’s willingness to commit thousands of young American soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines to death or permanent incapacitation abroad despite his admission that he intentionally avoided military service when he himself was a young man during a time of war.

Cheney was also praised for his ethical decision not to arrange for a company which had very recently paid him tens of millions of dollars and in which he had “a continuing financial interest” to become one of the largest beneficiaries of United States federal spending in Iraq. One can only imagine the repercussions if he had actually done something like that.

Here’s to Dick Cheney!

 

too much democracy?

Andrew Sullivan has written a somewhat ridiculous article in New York Magazine called Democracies end when they are too democratic.

Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And 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…

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

That’s an entertaining tale, but it’s somewhat silly to suggest the United States has “too much democracy”, if you define democracy as equality. For a long time we have had rule by a stable triumvirate of elites – a civilian government elite, a big business elite, and a military/security/intelligence elite. The big business elite pays off the politicians and bureaucrats in the civilian government so they can produce the propaganda to stay elected, the civilian government makes sure the rules are written unfairly in favor of big business so they can make enormous profits at the expense of the rest of society, and the military/security/intelligence elite gets a huge share of our national resources and free reign to do just about anything it wants abroad, in exchange for not overthrowing the civilian government which it could easily do any time. It’s been a very stable three-legged stool.

In the past there has been just enough upward mobility for those of us in the general population to look the other way and buy into the propaganda enough to keep the system stable. Most of us can’t join the true elite, but the middle class have been able to train in professions and become moderately wealthy, while the working class have been able to get jobs that pay enough to join the middle class. The poor have been too few and too divided to organize politically. I think what is starting to happen is that this system of upward mobility is starting to break down now on a large enough scale that a significant chunk of the population is no longer buying into the propaganda and supporting the elites, and the whole political system is starting to teeter. I think it’s due partly to economic factors outside our control, like automation, and partly due to the short-sighted greed of the elites who are insisting on gobbling up a larger and larger share of a pie that is no longer growing as fast as it once did, if all. Environmental factors may be starting to play a role too, although I am still unsure of that.

True democracy, to me, would be a system that allows us to come to a consensus on policies that most of us, not just a majority but almost all of us, can accept, even if these policies are not everyone’s first choice. In a U.S. context it also has to be about true equality of opportunity, if not equality itself. How can anyone look at what is going on in our society and political system and think we have “too much democracy”?

April 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. government’s dominant ideology of free trade and globalization may have roots in U.S. government propaganda designed to provide hidden subsidies to Japan and Korea, our Cold War allies in Asia. And resulting financial deregulation in the 1990s may have been the beginning of the end for the U.S. empire.
  • A new study says that ice melting in Antarctica could double sea level rise projections in the long term. Meanwhile, in the short term, the drought in Southeast and South Asia is getting more and more severe.
  • Robert Paxton says Trump is pretty much a fascist. Although conditions are different and he doesn’t believe everything the fascists believed. Umberto Eco once said that fascists don’t believe anything, they will say anything and then what they do once in office has nothing to do with what they said.

3 most hopeful stories

  • Brookings has a new report on encouraging innovation in the water sector. A lot of it is just about charging more, and it should be fairly obvious why that is politically controversial even if it is the right thing economically. But the report did have an explanation of decoupling (p. 28) which I found helpful. Decoupling is an answer to the puzzle of how a utility can support conservation without losing its revenue base.
  • The U.S. Department of Energy says the technical potential of solar panels is to supply about 39% of all energy use. And electric cars may be about to come roaring back in a big way.
  • Better management of agricultural soil might be able to play a big role in carbon sequestration.

3 most interesting stories

Robert Paxton on Trump

Back on the “Trump is a fascist” topic, I think I recently took an article by Robert Paxton, an expert on who is a fascist, and used it to try to make the case that Trump is a fascist. Well, from an interview in Slate here is Paxton himself on the topic:

First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book. “Making the country great again” sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn’t in serious decline, but he’s able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That’s another one. Then, there’s a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media…

I think there are some powerful differences. To start with, in the area of programs, the fascists offer themselves as a remedy for aggressive individualism, which they believed was the source of the defeat of Germany in World War I, and the decline of Italy, the failure of Italy. World War I, the perceived national decline, they blamed on individualism and their solution was to subject the individual to the interests of the community. Trump, and the Republicans generally, and indeed a great swath of American society have celebrated individualism to the absolute total extreme. Trump’s idea and the Republican plan is to lift the burden of regulation from businesses…

The other differences are the circumstances in which we live. Germany had been defeated catastrophically in war. Following which was the depression, which was almost as bad in Germany as it was here. Italy was on the brink of civil war in 1919. There were massive occupations of land by frustrated peasants. The actual problems those countries addressed have no parallel to today. We have serious problems, but there’s no objective conditions that come anywhere near the seriousness of what those countries were facing. There was a groundswell of reaction against the existing constitutions and existing regimes.

So the original fascism was openly anti-democratic, about subordinating individuality to the state, and it seems unlikely for any American politician to openly campaign on these ideas. Does that matter? It was also about going back to perceived glory days when the state was much stronger and people were more united. In that sense, it makes sense that in the U.S. a fascism would be based on our national myth of rugged individualism and the equal opportunity to “pursue” happiness, which maybe implies that if you have the natural talent and/or make the effort you deserve to succeed, while those who lack those things do not.

And anyway, the original Italian brand of fascism was not really based on ideology – it was more style over substance as described here by Umberto Eco:

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement…

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of
thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)? …

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Speaking of style over substance, I’ll link to one more article that I found fascinating, describing a theory that Donald Trump honed his skills at firing up a crowd through his involvement in U.S.-style professional wrestling. Now, I do want to say that I find it slightly offensive to imply, as I think this article does, that fans of certain low-brow entertainments and sporting events tend to be stupid and impressionable, with fascist tendencies. I think most rational, tolerant adults can compartmentalize reality and entertainment in two parts of their brains, and choose to enjoy entertainment and sporting events with no effect on our politics or civil lives. It’s relaxing. You get the joke, the same as if you chose to be entertained by a night of standup comedy where completely outrageous things are being said. But with Trump, you get the idea that not everyone gets the joke.

Here’s one last link I want to provide, just for my own later reference. This is a Fresh Air interview with the author of a new book on Franco’s Spain, which is a part of the pre-World War II European fascist story and a major gap in my personal education.

Blowback Economics

I’m nearing the end of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Towards the end he makes some novel economic arguments that I will have to think about. Basically, he argues that the rhetoric of free trade and globalization that arose after World War II was at first political in nature, acting as an ideological counterweight to communism. It supported a geopolitical strategy which was to get industry off to a fast start in Japan and later Korea, open the U.S. market to their exports and allow their economies to grow quickly, creating strong Cold War allies in Asia. The U.S. itself was highly industrialized, growing fast, and its markets were by far the largest in the world, so at first it could absorb these exports and drive growth abroad just fine. But over time, Japan and Korea grew large relative to the U.S., and other economies like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong began to copy the model, and later the nations of Southeast Asia and of course China. Johnson argues that the U.S. kept its own markets open without insisting that these countries do the same. The result was the slowing of growth in the U.S., loss of the industrial base, loss of well paying blue collar jobs, and inner-city and small-town poverty. Meanwhile, he argues that because labor costs stayed low in Asia, which by now western multinational corporations were insisting on, the middle class in Asia was not growing fast enough to be able to afford the things they were making. With the U.S. stagnating at the same time, the U.S. couldn’t afford to buy all the things being made either. All this led to manufacturing over-capacity in Asia and under-demand globally, which he sees as leading directly to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. So in his view, the free market, free trade ideology we somewhat take as a given now began as a cynical propaganda campaign, which outlived its usefulness with the end of the Cold War. He blames the financial industry for pushing the system over the edge, but does not see financial speculation or risk taking as a root cause. Publishing in 2000, he suggests that 1997 may end up being seen by history as the high water mark of the American empire, after which it went into decline.

Like I said, I have to think about all this. For one thing, while the U.S. might have directly subsidized the rise of Cold War allies like Japan, Korea and Taiwan to some extent, you certainly can’t make that same case for China, which followed almost exactly the same trajectory a bit later. And the economic theory behind free trade is pretty elegant and appealing. You can’t base a national economy on subsidized, inefficient domestic industries forever and expect to remain competitive. You need to adapt to change rather than resist change. On the other hand, you need strategies to slow the rate of change so you have time to adapt, retrain as many workers as possible, educate the next generation of workers, build public infrastructure that allows the private sector to operate efficiently, and provide a safety net for those who are still left behind. The U.S. clearly failed to do these things, at least in the city centers and small factory towns that used to depend on heavy industry. To some extent I think Chalmers is right that we believed our own Cold War propaganda and let ideology prevent us from taking the measures that would have allowed us to adapt better.