#^d 2018-04-01 #^h Weekend Roundup
I was prepared to skip this weekly exercise completely: I spent most of the last week preparing for my sister's funeral (or "celebration of life" as the official title went) and related social gatherings. But with the last such event ended this afternoon, and with various guests taking their leave, I found myself wanting to do something "normal." Not that much of what follows can be considered "normal" in any other regard. I recently read Allen Frances' Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, which fell rather short of its titular ambition. Although there are occasional references to commonplace psychology, he mostly focuses on ubiquity and persistence of "delusional thinking" -- mostly defined as failure to recognize a long list of liberal political creeds. I don't have much quarrel with his platform planks, but I'm more suspicious of economic/class factors than psychological ones. Where I think insight into psychology might be helpful is in trying to model human behavior given the complexity of the world and our various limits in apprehending it. It's certainly credible that psychological traits that were advantageous in primitive societies malfunction in our changing world, but how does that work? And what sort of adjustments would work better?
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: The 4 stories that drove this week in politics: David Shulkin is out at Veterans Affairs; Oklahoma teachers are going on strike; Conservative media feuded with Parkland students; Trump gave a weird speech: "one of the rambling, factually challenged addresses for which he's famous. . . . Trump will continue to walk the line between dishonest, uninformed, and inarticulate in a way that keeps people guessing." Other Yglesias pieces:
Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can't wake up: "Diving back in kind of reminds me of Charlton Heston waking from his space travel to discover that he's on a planet run by orangutans. Except instead of orangutans, we have the Republican Party."
Ousted VA secretary blasts privatization in a New York Times op-ed: The effect, I think, is to frame his firing as a policy dispute. Sure, there is a major policy divide between an ideological faction that wants to privatize VA health care and those, including virtually all veterans groups, who like the current fully socialized system. The privatisers were able to push Shulkin out not by winning their policy argument, but by characterizing Shulkin as insufficiently loyal to Trump.
Let's not repeal the 2nd Amendment: Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens wrote an op-ed: Repeal the Second Amendment -- not a new idea as Stevens previously included changes to the second amendment in his 2014 book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. Yglesias argues that even under the precedent-setting Heller ruling, which Stevens dissented from and cites as reason for amending the constitution, there is still a lot of leeway for sensible regulation of guns -- indeed, much more than there is political will to implement. Moreover, just as Heller reversed over a hundred years of precedents, Yglesias proposes that new Supreme Court justices could reverse Heller. As a practical matter, he's probably right.
John Williams will likely be the next president of the New York Fed: "He's got a track record of poor forecasting and weak regulation."
Stormy Daniels' 60 Minutes interview raises 2 critical questions she can't answer:
- How many other sexual partners has Trump paid hush money to?
- How many foreign intelligence services know about one or more of these women?
Dylan Curran: Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you.
Barbara Ehrenreich: It Is Expensive to Be Poor.
If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.
Joy Crane/Nick Tabor: 501 Days in Swampland: "A constant drip of self-dealing. And this is just what we know so far . . ."
Thomas Frank: Dow dreamers show Trump's war on elites is pure fantasy: On Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett.
Ann Hulbert: Today's Rebels Are Model Children: "The young protesters now on the march are responsible and mature -- and they're asking adults to grow up."
Stephen Kinzer: Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan Dictator Convicted of Genocide, Dies at 91.
Jen Kirby: Here are 6 of the most bizarre things Trump said in his infrastructure speech.
Anna North: How Trump helped inspire a wave of strict new abortion laws.
Richard Silverstein: IDF Murders 17 Gazans, Wounds 1,400 in Great Return March Protest; also Robert Mackey: Israel Opens Fire on Palestinian Protesters in Gaza; Trump Envoy Blames "Hostile March"; also James North: 'NY Times' covers up Israel's killing of nonviolent protesters along the Gaza border; and Philip Weiss: A brief, unhappy history of Israeli massacres.
Matt Taibbi: Is the Two-Party System Doomed?: Reflecting on a comparative politics essay (US, France, UK) by Thomas Piketty called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right. I don't quite get it, but:
But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician once deemed "two horses with the same owner."
From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't see or understand the levels of resentment out there.
Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery -- how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system -- that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.
Taibbi notes that Trump at least took advantage of the resentments of the excluded, even if all he had to offer were lies. It's likely to be hard to pull that off again given his track record, but worth recalling that the only thing that made him seem credible in 2016 was how completely the Clintons had been discredited.