I really don’t want to post about Donald Trump so I’m going to avoid it to the best of my ability. That means I won’t treat you to any of the posts I’ve been drafting, e.g. how Donald Trump is like Empire but I suspect you’ll be able to carry on without them.
I do plan to continue posting about politics. I just heard George Will mourning that if Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, the Republican Party will no longer be a conservative party. He’s behind the curve. The Republican Party hasn’t been a conservative party for some time. It’s been a reactionary party, an anti-government party, a Right Bolshevik party, the Chamber of Commerce’s party, and a white people’s party for some time but it hasn’t been a conservative party or, indeed, a party of small government in any meaningful sense for decades.
If you doubt that, think back on just what Ronald Reagan’s conservative accomplishments were. I think you’ll find, possibly somewhat to your surprise, that there weren’t any. He cut taxes without cutting spending in one of the most Keynesian policy moves of the last half of the 20th century, not a conservative action.
Or think about George H. W. Bush’s or George W. Bush’s conservative actions. You’ll have some difficulty because I doubt there were any. The Americans With Disabilities Act? (George H. W. Bush) No Child Left Behind? (George W. Bush)
Did any of those three Republican presidents roll back the growth in the federal government or even streamline it? Did they eliminate any federal departments, an evergreen promise in Republican stump speeches? Balance the budget?
The Democratic Party is struggling to become a programmatic party and it is, indeed, a struggle. You can hear the struggle in Bernie Sanders’s stump speeches. Everybody know his numbers don’t add up and that there are insurmountable difficulties in making the changes he wants to make.
If the Republican Party is the party of the Chamber of Commerce, the Democratic Party is the party of government bureaucracy and neither is a particularly attractive prospect. Detroit and Chicago, along with many other large American cities, aren’t teetering on the brink of ruin because public employees aren’t paid enough or because taxes are too high and regulations too constraining. That’s why there’s a percolating popular revolt in progress which crosses ideological bounds.
And that’s the nature of the political transformation I think is under way. The Republican Party must decide whether it is to be the white people’s party or not. The Democratic Party must decide if it is the party of the bureaucracy. If you think of the struggle as ideological, you’re going to miss the action.
While I think you get a lot of this correct, I am a bit unsure about some of it. On being conservative, I think that there are some conservatives who have truly believed, and still believe, that if you cut taxes (especially for rich people) the economy will grow fast enough to offset those cuts. Of course, we have lots of experience to show that is not true, but ideology does not always confirm to facts. So, I think that a lot of conservatives would claim that cutting taxes alone an not worrying about spending is a conservative action. That it is not sustainable does not matter. (Just like a lot of Bernie Sanders ideas don’t seem fiscally sustainable.)
For the Democrats, I think bureaucracy is just the means to the ends. No country has achieved first world medicine with affordable costs w/o significant government intervention. If you value equality across races and sex, that has not been achieved anywhere w/o significant govt intervention. The risk is going too far and trying to solve things with govt that it cannot solve or shouldn’t.
At any rate, follow the money. If you think governance actually has influence, who has benefitted and is still benefitting from our policies? Who is not?
Steve
I can see you don’t live in Chicago.
Yes, there’s one born every minute. I don’t think that the party establishment believes that or even cares.
All of it comes down to what do you really want Washington to do for , and at the same time, to, you. I think we are going to be going through a manufacturing and transportation revolution as profound as the agricultural revolution. And we are not the buggywhip manufacturers who must be retrained, we are the horses who have no more reason to exist. Huge fortunes are being made, but there is no logical reason for the super wealthy to hire or in any other way help, the teeming millions of worthless souls at the bottom. Gate them out, tune them out, and if they complain, brand them all racists, set them against one another. Black thugs, soon to be extinct worthless white males and their worthless families, violent Mexicans who come here to get rich by selling meth to our kids. Who matters, and to whom? That’s a personal decision, and I’ll go extinct when I’m damn good and ready.
What’s happening today is a consequence of the conservative abandonment of reality. The problem with reality is it doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, it persists.
Conservatives have supported free trade, opposed any rise in the minimum wage, pushed the destruction of unions, pushed to deregulate the financial industry, cut taxes for the top earners, fallen hook line and sinker for ‘trickle down,’ favored a peculiar version of ‘immigration’ that just so happens (magic!) to be very good for the rich and very bad for working people.
Now they want to know why their economic lives have flatlined. These are stupid and sanctimonious people who cared more about screaming “murderer!” outside an abortion clinic than they did about their own family’s well-being. They let their gun obsessions be manipulated. They absorbed thousands and thousands of hours of blatant lies from Limbaugh and Fox News, filled their little heads with bullshit, and now can’t understand why life has sort of moved on past them.
Evolution, that’s why. Stupidity and rigidity and tribalism and delusion are not survival strategies in the modern world.
The Democrats have a very different problem: we are pretty much out of people to liberate. We are down to trans folk now. I think that’s about it. And if we aren’t ‘liberating’ someone we don’t really know what we’re about, other than acting as the party of the bureaucracy, something like what I understand the Congress Party to be in India.
There is a dialectic here. Ideally the two parties play off each other, pointing out and exploiting errors by the other side, with conservatives acting as ballast and liberals as sail. They’re supposed to keep us steady, we’re supposed to move us forward. They’re meant to be the grumpy curmudgeons, we’re supposed to be the ones forever wanting to try the newest flavor of ice cream.
This dialectic broke down when Ronald Reagan took office and the GOP went from being the green eyeshade party to being the Star Wars, Shining City on a Hill, Hollywood, triumphalist, USA! USA! USA!, anti-government, pro-billionaire, deregulation party. It was Nixon who sold the GOP’s soul, but Reagan who scooped out their brains. They’ve been a zombie party ever since because their ideas. . . sorry, their “ideas”. . . turned out to be baloney. Absolute nonsense. Nixon made it a white person’s party and Reagan made it a sucker’s party. And the suckers are so thoroughly suckered they still worship the man who set in motion their destruction.
Democrats have problems, but sorry, there’s no comparison. We’ve got a nasty cold; they’ve got late stage cancer. We still have a party, we still have shared goals, we are still connected to the real world. Those people have lost their damn minds, and their current predicament is entirely their own fault.
I’d love to find a way to reach out, to listen to them, to try and help them. But it’s pretty hard to help people who refuse to accept consensual reality. There’s no dealing with people who will again and again and again cut off their nose to spite their face. No cure for stupid.
To a point, cutting taxes should free money for investment in the means of production, and this increased production will lead to increased taxes. In a financialized economy, this does not happen. Production is increased by cutting costs, but more importantly, the most profitable good produced is money.
The money is in the form of credit (not debt), and not all credit is equal. Some credit and debt is afforded special treatment in the tax code, and this is beyond any treatment as capital.
The economy requires the existing credit base to be rolled-over or replaced, and it needs new credit created to expand. In addition, any debt needs to be serviced, and the profits go to the owners of the credit. So, the rich get richer, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Take all their money, and the expansion stops. Start printing checks, and watch the monetary meltdown.
I suspect that what is going on in the US and worldwide is a prelude to a monetary based event(s). If I am correct, the dividing lines will be between credit based money systems and hard or semi-hard money systems. People with intangible assets will migrate into the credit based camp. People without assets will do better in a hard or semi-hard system, but people with a mix of tangible & intangible could go either way.
It will be an “Cross of Paper” movement.
This convention will be the Republican’s equivalent of 1968; the right vs. itself, fracturing into a multi-decadal conservative decline. Democrats will attempt to maintain identity as a Third Way type center-right party but it appears to me a major political and demographic re-alignment is underway with young Americans of all ethnicities being overwhelmingly to the left of the liberal establishment. Whateve the outcome of this election we’re in for a rough decade (as we were after 1968 until the rise of Reagan) after which a new order will have sorted itself out and established a new political paradigm.
Ben:
The Dem youth is always to the left – they aren’t paying the bills yet, and Bernie is offering to make college free. It’s always fun to spend money you don’t have to earn, and it’s sexy to imagine that passion and justice will carry the day. But Bernie Sanders is a 24 hour president. On Day One he sends a bunch of bills to Paul Ryan, on Day Two Paul Ryan says no. And that’s it for Bernie Sanders.
Two years in Sanders will have accomplished absolutely nothing. He’s famously against compromise, famously devoted to his voting record of perfect rectitude. So he can win, he can demand, and that’s it, all done. By the time this becomes clear, Bernie’s supporters will have graduated and be looking for jobs and Bernie will be old news.
The reason to ignore the youth vote is that youth don’t yet know what kind of voters they are. That will be decided far less by whatever their favorite hipster professor has been teaching, and far more by their economic and personal circumstances. Don’t forget, there are a couple dozen hippies still in existence in Santa Cruz and the Haight, but 99% of them turned into committed materialists living in McMansions and driving SUV’s full of spoiled children to private schools.
The young are way to the left of conventional liberals, as Ben notes, and they are willing to think in terms of class rather than markets. So in ten years the constant refrain of Big Government is going to be disappearing, and in another ten it will be gone.
And there’s another thing. It’s hard for the oldsters still thriving under the sign of Reagan to get, but dealing with the IRS has become a far better experience than dealing with any number of corporations. Calling someone the party of bureaucracy means nothing. There’s no innovation elsewhere–only gauntlets of people intent on screwing consumers. Government employees are at least in theory on the side of the citizen.
Same thing goes with taxes. The resentment that turned citizens into taxpayers is a historical relic. The idea that it’s unfair for my money is going to help you–an undeserving loser–this will be done for, mostly because the people in whom it is expressed in the rawest form–the petit bourgeois–are becoming the people who need more and more help.
Michael,
Even if Millennials become more conservative, they aren’t going to turn into their parents, any more than their parents turned into their grandparents. Everything leaves a mark. Look at how many Boomers turn to 1968 and 1972 to explain the present.
Michael, there is a political cyclicality in American politics. One cannot say that FDR, Truman and Johnson did not understand “paying the bills” yet they championed and to a considerable extent succeeded in establishing an American welfare state (not to be confused with state welfare). This progressive policy trend hit its height during Johnson’s administration and then collapsed after a fratricidal conflict between liberals and the left while the right surged to dominance in the late 1970s and peaked during the administration of George W. Bush.
Sanders’ campaign successes aren’t going anywhere: they demonstrate the influence of older, more conservative Americans and special interests are in terminal decline. This is the end of the Reagan Revolution whether Democrats who have modeled themselves upon him (Clinton-Obama-Clinton) like it or not. The only surprise is how many thought that revolution would last forever.
God, I get pissed. Everyone talks about this or that on the backs of the taxpayers. I’ve been a taxpayer for fourty five years. I’m also a trucker, paid into central states pension fund for thirty five years. Now, my pension fund, run by the government is broke. It’s not just me, I could gratefully die today, but I have family who depend on me.
On the backs of taxpayers? the Iraq war, two trillion dollars, on the federal credit card. The subprime mortgage crisis? 700 Billion dollars on the credit card. We are dues paying teamsters but in 2008, we went to a democratic house, senate, and President with our concerns. and were turned away despite our support of Obama’s campaign.
Democrats and Income Inequality. (From his new book)
….Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages go nowhere, and the free-trade deals keep coming.
The standard explanation for the Democrats’ failure are the rise of the right, which is supposed to be in league with the devil, and the way money-in-politics works its ugly will. I have described both of these in previous books. But as explanations for the Democrats’ failure they are ultimately inadequate, as is the favorite pundit theory that our Federal government is simply incapable of making big, sweeping turns.
What I propose in this book is something else: that the Democrats are a class party in the most basic sense of the phrase, and that the socioeconomic group whose interests they represent most enthusiastically–the satisfied and prosperous professional class–simply doesn’t care all that much about income inequality.
In addition to the startling and/or obvious facts I present to support this theory, “Listen, Liberal†contains: A look back at the “New Politics†and “Neo-Liberal†movements, a searching examination of the achievements of the Clinton presidency, a visit with the “creative class,†a conjecture or two about Obama’s fascination with tech, a Clinton Foundation event MC’d by Hillary herself, and of course a trip to Martha’s Vineyard.
…Taken as a whole, it is an attempt to understand the epidemic of liberal disillusionment as a genuine phenomenon rather than just to brush it off. It’s a meditation on a time in which middle America has crumbled, Wall Street has prospered, and hopeful liberals found themselves betrayed again and again and again.
“It’s hard for the oldsters still thriving under the sign of Reagan to get, but dealing with the IRS has become a far better experience than dealing with any number of corporations. ”
I take it you’ve never been audited – a luxury youngsters don’t know much about. Also, most people have to rely on corporations or paid professionals to interpret the IRS tax code, so there’s that irony as well.
Steve,
“For the Democrats, I think bureaucracy is just the means to the ends. No country has achieved first world medicine with affordable costs w/o significant government intervention. If you value equality across races and sex, that has not been achieved anywhere w/o significant govt intervention. The risk is going too far and trying to solve things with govt that it cannot solve or shouldn’t.”
If that’s true, then why are Democrats uninterested in effective governance? That’s one of the great dissonant aspects of the Democratic party – a faith in the power of government to do good things, but a lack of effort or interest in making government effective or accountable.
Finger-pointing is the popular political game of the day. Even though dems have been in charge for quite a while, they continue to blame their adversaries on why things aren’t going much better. Why is that?
If more government made things better why, now that we have more government, aren’t things better?
Obama came in as a bi-racial, new-age kind of president, claiming that there were no blue or red states, just the United States. I thought that was an encouraging salvo. However, we are more divided, hostile, and hateful than we were 8 years ago. To blame it all on one party is simply insane! A good leader, like a good parent, is supposed to put salve on cuts and bruises, not deepen the injuries. The current leader, though, has been absent in heading this kind of skilled, bi-partisan governance.
People, like Gray, are real and numerous out there in America. Pensions are unreliable if not gone. Deficits and debt are as far as the eye can see, while Bernie and Hillary only want to pile on more. It’s a dismal, dark horizon that faces so many people out there, as the social progressives continue to bicker about how bad conservatives are for the country.
Give me a break!!!
…in the meantime dissenters of the Castro regime continue to be arrested in higher numbers since the first of the year. And, Cuba is being sanitized for the arrival of Obama, his family and entourage This is our president who empathizes with the poor but overlooks human rights issues.
Here’s a backup piece to the above post: Dissidents Rounded Up And Arrested In Cuba One Day Before Obama’s Arrival.
“I take it you’ve never been audited – a luxury youngsters don’t know much about. Also, most people have to rely on corporations or paid professionals to interpret the IRS tax code, so there’s that irony as well.”
Heh. A 148 page tax return would suggest the code is out of control. Not to mention the arrogance:
You lived in NY, so you owe NY taxes.
No I didn’t.
Yes you did.
But I didn’t.
Prove it.
Well, here are real estate transaction records.
Well, we say you lived in NY.
Thousands of dollars later:
You’re right. Our bad. You did live in CT. Never mind…….
Guarneri
Your experiences are not universal. You have a lot of money; most people do not. They’re filing their tax returns on TurboTax and getting a small refund. They buy a house, have a job, a 401K, and pay a mortgage and have kids and that’s their fiscal history. They don’t have three homes and differing sources of income and real estate they’re renting out and substantial long term capital gains to dick around with.
The GOP was able to sell the concerns of the very wealthy as everybody’s concerns. It worked, until it did not.
The good news is there is no great conspiracy or cabal of whatever controlling anything. The bad news is there is no great conspiracy or cabal of whatever controlling anything. The people in charge, those with power, or the authority to affect your life are usually clueless. They follow the herd, and if the consensus is that 2+2=5, and if tomorrow it changes, they will change as if it was supposed to be that way.
Here is the thing. We all do it. Everybody shuts down parts of their brain for some part of the day. Some do it more than others, and some who do it less can still function. It takes a lot of brainpower to become an expert on every subject, and even becoming competent enough to make educated guesses about a subject takes a lot of work.
In many cases, people convince themselves that what they are doing is in the best interest of the person they are doing it for. Even if what they are doing is apparently causing great harm. Many of the people burning witches really believed they were doing the right thing. The only way to drive out the devil was through fire, and it was better to die a painful agonizing death than be condemned to hell.
What was ostensibly a mechanism of mercy was often (and in many places almost exclusively) used for political or personal ends. So to with much of government and its effects. There has never been any time when an individual could truly rely on anybody to make the all the major decisions in their life, but trying to do it yourself is not easy either.
The government, bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, and crony capitalists have an incentive to rig the system. They may not think they are being unfair, but what they think is beside the point. If the results of their actions is unfair, then the system is unfair.
On the other side, we are told that the marketplace will fix everything. On the extremes we are informed that almost all regulations are unnecessary because the market will punish those who do harm. They claim that the reason there are problems now is because with regulations everybody relies on the government without checking out anything.
In order for this to work, you would need to become at least competent enough to be able to make judgements about the products and services you consume. You would need to know the history of a company, its hiring practices, its supplier’s history, and so on. Taking a trip to another city would require a month or more to plan, and when all the planning was completed, something might have changed – a new CEO, a new supplier, etc.
You are caught between these two extremes, and each political party is not willing to cede any ground. You are either in their camp or not, and they try to calculate how much pain it will take before you will capitulate to them. This is their strategy. For the Democrats and black voters, it is even worse. They have infantilized them.
I bring up monetary issues because they are the root of many of the problems. According to most monetary theory, what is happening today and the last eight years should not be happening, but what has happened with jobs and automation and trade should have happened by now. Something is wrong, very wrong, and both sides refuse to admit it. It is even verboten to raise the possibility.
Free-trade should have created more jobs. Automation and the Information Technology economy should have created more jobs. Republicans are mad because the people who are being affected are a little pissed-off, and the Left is them because they had the audacity to think for themselves.
Many people think of the Roman Empire when they think of Rome, but there was a Republic before there was an Empire. The upper class of the Republic thought they were above it all and that they were untouchable. History tells us otherwise.
The Rome was powered by slaves. The taxes were never enough. They needed to expand in order to keep the lights on, but it takes money to administer an empire. The wealthy were not producers, and therefore, there was little reason to allow them to keep their wealth.
Having some money, but not enough money was a good way to earn oneself an invitation to commit suicide, after leaving everything to the emperor.
A country, nation, or empire that does not support itself by producing wealth through internal value added goods and services will eventually collapse. The framework (skeleton if you will) will not be strong enough to support the society.
Importing goods from China while everybody kicks back and lives the good life may seem like a wonderful idea, but even if it were possible, it would eventually lead to the collapse of the framework supporting the US. It might not result in a catastrophic collapse, but collapse it must.
The idea that wealth will insulate some people should by this time have become apparent, and the idea that the government “bread and circuses” will solve the problem by placating the masses. The masses are not the problem. They have nothing, and they are easily placated.
The problem are the wealthy who do not produce but have the ability to foment trouble. In a society with a collapsed framework, they become the most vulnerable, and it is not the masses they need to fear. The wealthy will eat each other. The masses are just along for the ride.
Among the poor, everybody is equally poor, but among the wealthy, nobody is equal. Except for the one most wealthy person, everybody else has somebody above them, and in a world where wealth buys power, everybody except that one person is no better off than the poorest person.
When rich Republicans start to lose money, they turn to the government to protect them, and when they want money, they turn to the government to help them take it away from other rich Republicans. Rich Democrats are no better, and Wall Street loves them for it.
The best part is that the wealthy, free-trade, socialized monetary system, unregulated banking system folks will deride this all the way until they disembowel themselves in the hope that their wife and children may be allowed to live in poverty as opposed to a long and agonizing death that their more wealthy peers have suggested would be the outcome. The masses are not really that imaginative or gruesome.
But, what do I know? Nobody seems to have noticed. The more you have. The more you have to lose. The farther the fall.
Tasty,
That was quite a circular philosophical stroll through the repetitious patterns of politics as you see them.
“You are either in their camp or not, and they try to calculate how much pain it will take before you will capitulate to them.”
….and that’s probably why so many have re-registered as independents, as they are receiving no satisfaction, voice, nor benefits remaining either a loyal democrat or republican.