#^d 2019-01-13 #^h Weekend Roundup
For many years now, I've identified two major political problems in America. The most obvious one is the nation's habit and obsession with projection of military power as its leverage in dealing with other nations. As US economic power has waned, and as America shed its liberal ideals, it's become easier for others to challenge its supremacy. In turn, American power has hardened around its military and covert networks, placing the nation on a permanent war footing. This near-constant state of war, since 1945 but even more blatantly since 2001, has led to numerous social maladies, like domestic gun violence and the xenophobia leading to the current "border crisis."
The other big problem is increasing inequality. The statistics, which started in the 1970s but really took off in the "greed is good" 1980s, are clear and boring, but the consequences are numerous, both subtle and pernicious. It would take a long book to map out most of the ways the selfish pursuit and accumulation of riches has warped business, politics, and society. One small example is that when GW Bush arbitrarily commanded the world to follow his War on Terror lead ("you're either with us or against us"), he was assuming that as US President he was entitled to the same arbitrary powers (and lack of accountability) corporate CEOs enjoyed.
I used to wonder how Reagan was able to affect such a huge change in America despite relatively sparse legislative accomplishments -- mostly his big tax cut. The answer is that as president he could send signals to corporate and financial leaders that government would not interfere with their more aggressive pursuit of power and profit. Reagan's signals have been reiterated by every Republican president since, with ever less concern for scruples or ethics or even the slightest concern for consequences. All Trump has done has been to carry this logic to its absurdist extreme: his greed is shameless, even when it crosses into criminality.
Still, what the government lockout, now entering its fourth week, shows, is that we may need to formulate a third mega-ailment: we seem to have lost our commitment to basic competency. We should have seen this coming when politicians (mostly Republicans) decided that politics trumps all other considerations, so they could dispute (or ignore) any science or expertise or so-called facts they found inconvenient. (Is it ironical that the same people who decry "political correctness" when it impinges on their use of offensive rhetoric are so committed to imposing their political regimen on all discussions of what we once thought of as reality?)
A couple things about competency. One is that it's rarely noticed, except in the breech. You expect competency, even when you're engaging with someone whose qualifications you can properly judge -- a doctor, say, or a computer technician, or a mechanic. You also expect a degree of professional ethical standards. Trust depends on those things, and no matter how many time you're reminded caveat emptor, virtually everything you do in everyday life is built on trust. We can all point to examples of people who violated your trust, but until recently such people were in the minority. Now we have Donald Trump. And sure, lots of us distrusted him from the start of his campaign. He was, after all, vainglorious, corrupt, a habitual liar, totally lacking in empathy, his head full of mean-spirited rubbish.
On the other hand, even I am shocked at how incapable Trump has been at understanding the most basic rudiments of his job. There's nothing particularly wrong with him having policy views, or even an agenda, but the most basic requirement of his job is that he keep the government working, according to the constitution and the laws as established per that constitution -- you know, the one he had to swear to protect and follow when he took his oath of office. There have been shutdowns in the past -- basically ever since Newt Gingrich decided the threat would be a clever way to extort some policy concessions from Bill Clinton -- but this is the first one that was imposed by a president.
His reason? Well, obviously he's made a political calculation, where he thinks he can either bully the Democrats into giving him something they really hate ($5.7 billion so he can brag about how he's delivering that "big, beautiful wall" he campaigned on) and thereby restore his "art of the deal" mojo from the tarnish of losing the 2018 "midterms" so badly, or rouse the American people (his base, anyway) into blaming the Democrats for all the damage the shutdown causes. Either way, he feels that his second-term election in 2020 depends on this defense of political principle. Besides, he hates the federal government anyway -- possibly excepting the military and a few other groups currently exempt from the shutdown -- mostly because he's bought into the credo that "politics is everything, and everything is politics" (which makes most of the Democrat-leaning government enemy territory).
On the other hand, all he's really shown is that he's unfit to hold office, because he's forgotten that his main job is to keep the United States government working: implementing and enforcing the laws of the land, per the constitution. One might argue that using his office for such a political ploy is as significant a violation of his trust as anything else he's done. Indeed, one might argue that it is something he should be impeached for (although that would require a political consensus that has yet to form -- not that he isn't losing popularity during this charade).
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Trump's Hannity interview reveals a president out of touch with reality:
But this is the crux of the matter. He doesn't consider this issue very important. It's not important enough for him to offer Democrats anything of substance in a legislative swap, and it's not important enough for him to have bothered to learn anything about the issue or even develop a specific proposal. He is imposing huge costs on a huge number of people, but he personally is suffering nothing more than the indignity of hanging out in the White House.
And he's so unselfconscious that he actually threw himself a pity party in the midst of all the problems he's causing. There's no apology here for the inconvenience, followed by an explanation of why he's doing it. Because he's not sorry. He wants us to feel sorry for him. And that, in some ways, is the most disturbing thing of all.
Yglesias focuses on the workers who aren't getting paid, but there are much larger potential costs to many more people if you can factor in the work that doesn't get done, and the signals not doing this work. Much of what the government does is meant to keep companies honest and trustworthy. Losing that doesn't seem to bother Trump, and indeed most people may not notice the loss -- until it's too late.
FBI agents' union slams Trump, says the shutdown is harming national security.
The more Trump talks, the less likely it is he'll get his precious steel slats: "To get things done, the president needs to shut up." That Trump keeps trying to make political hay out of the lockout suggests he's only concerned with the political optics. (On the other hand, if it isn't talked about on Fox & Friends, is it even real to him?).
Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020: "Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage." In particular, "Why nominate another Iraq hawk?" With Clinton on the shelf, it's hard to think of any Democrat with more easily attacked baggage than Biden. (John Kerry has similar problems -- some exactly the same. And sure, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel were on track to catch up, but they're already pretty thoroughly discredited.) Biden is a guy that some in the media enjoy touting and that most Democrats would settle for, but no one really likes him. (You do know that Leslie Knope's "hots" for him was a joke, don't you?)
It's not just that Biden, despite his currently strong polling, would make for a weak candidate if he runs. The entire spectacle of once again re-fighting every intraparty battle from the past two generations of Democratic Party politics would be bad for almost everyone at a time when Democrats should be talking about their ideas for the future rather than raking over the past.
The shutdown is intractable because Trump's wall is ridiculous and Republicans know it: "Conservatives won't trade the wall for anything good because they know it's a bad idea.".
Taxing the rich is very popular; it's Republicans who have the radical position: "But TV news anchors are rich."
Networks giving Trump free airtime on Tuesday refused to air Obama's 2014 immigration speech.
The "skills gap" was a lie: "New research shows it was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause." Nothing on who knew better at the time, although I suspect that when I start looking around, Dean Baker and Paul Krugman will have something to say on that.
Peter Baker: Trump confronts the prospect of a 'nonstop political war' for survival.
Russell Berman: The impact of the government shutdown is about to snowball.
John Cassidy:
Coral Davenport: Shutdown means EPA pollution inspectors aren't on the job.
Tom Engelhardt: Living on a quagmire planet: "Honestly, this could get a lot uglier."
Trip Gabriel: Before Trump, Steve King set the agenda for the wall and anti-immigration politics.
Masha Gessen: Searching for a substantive response to Trump's hateful speech: "Shutting down the government over the border wall is to policy what writing a pouty letter to Kim Jong Un is to diplomacy, and the leader of the Senate opposition should have no part in elevating it." Then Gessen finds the response she's looking for, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
The one thing that the President has not talked about is the fact that he has systematically engaged in the violation of international human rights on our border. He has separated children from their families. He talked about what happened the day after Christmas -- on the day of Christmas, a child died in [Customs and Border Protection] custody. The President should not be asking for more money to an agency that has systematically violated human rights; the President should be really defending why we are funding such an agency at all. Because right now what we are seeing is death, right now what we are seeing is the violation of human rights, these children and these families are being held in what are called hieleras, which are basically freezing boxes that no person should be maintained in for any amount of time. . . . He is trying to restrict every form of legal immigration there is in the United States. He is fighting against family reunification, he's fighting against the diversity visa lottery. . . . This is systematic, it is wrong, and it is anti-American.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Unthinkable: 50 moments that define an improbable presidency: I'll just list them, and you can go to the page for links and details:
Saddest thing about this list? I didn't have to look any of them up. Second saddest thing? The umbrella didn't even make the cut.
Rebecca Gordon: Confronting "Alternative Facts": "A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump."
Greg Grandin: Bricks in the Wall: A history of US efforts to fortify the border with Mexico, starting in 1945 with a 10-foot high chain link fence that stretched 5 miles near Calexico, CA, built with materials that had been used in Japanese-American internment camps. Grandin has a new book on the subject: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
Glenn Greenwald: As Democratic elites reunite with neocons, the party's voters are becoming far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans: I can't help but think Greenwald has cherry-picked a few facts here and turned them into a gross slander of the Democratic Party base.
Jack Healy/Tyler Pager: Farm country stood by Trump. But the shutdown is pushing it to the breaking point.
Sean Illing:
Why so many people who need the government hate it: "Everyone benefits from welfare. Here's why most people don't know that." Interview with Suzanne Mettler, author of The Government-Citizen Disconnect. Pull quotes:
"If individual citizens withdraw from public life, the only people in society who have power are those with lots of economic power."
"We have to find a way to recapture that sense of the government as an instrument of good in our lives, and we have to stop thinking of it as the enemy."
"If we become more and more anti-government, we're against ourselves. We're against our own collective capacity to do anything."
Trump's ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Interview with Craig Unger, author of House of Trump, House of Putin.
Paul Krugman:
Trump's big libertarian experiment: "Does contaminated food smell like freedom?
"Government," declared Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address, "is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Republicans have echoed his rhetoric ever since. Somehow, though, they've never followed through on the radical downsizing of government their ideology calls for.
But now Donald Trump is, in effect, implementing at least part of the drastic reduction in government's role his party has long claimed to favor. If the shutdown drags on for months -- which seems quite possible -- we'll get a chance to see what America looks like without a number of public programs the right has long insisted we don't need. Never mind the wall; think of what's going on as a big, beautiful libertarian experiment.
Seriously, it's striking how many of the payments the federal government is or soon will be failing to make are for things libertarians insist we shouldn't have been spending taxpayer dollars on anyway.
Elizabeth Warren and her party of ideas: The tide has turned:
Today's G.O.P. is a party of closed minds, hostile to expertise, aggressively uninterested in evidence, whose idea of a policy argument involves loudly repeating the same old debunked doctrines. Paul Ryan's "innovative" proposals of 2011 (cut taxes and privatize Medicare) were almost indistinguishable from those of Newt Gingrich in 1995.
Meanwhile, Democrats have experienced an intellectual renaissance. They have emerged from their 1990s cringe; they're no longer afraid to challenge conservative pieties; and there's a lot of serious, well-informed intraparty debate about issues from health care to climate change.
Eric Lach: The corrupting falsehoods of Trump's Oval Office speech.
Dara Lind: Trump's advisers push for emergency declaration -- while assuming it'll be stopped in court.
German Lopez: Democrats need to think way bigger on guns: Doubts about focusing on background checks.
Dylan Matthews: All 20 previous government shutdowns, explained. In my introduction, I blamed the phenomenon on Newt Gingrich, but most of these were prior to 1985 (mostly when Reagan was president). This doesn't go into further threats made by Gingrich and later Republican threats aimed at Obama, although it does include the 2013 shutdown. Related: Javier Zarrancina/Li Zhou: The astonishing effects of the shutdown, in 8 charts.
John McWhorter: Trump's typos reveal his lack of fitness for the presidency.
Greg Miller: Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: Ocean warming is accelerating faster than thought, new research finds:
As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer. They have slowed the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere.
"If the ocean wasn't absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land would heat up much faster than it is right now," said Malin L. Pinsky, an associate professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University. "In fact, the ocean is saving us from massive warming right now."
But the surging water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.
Brad Plumer: US carbon emissions surged in 2018 even as coal plants closed.
Andrew Prokop:
How the big new New York Times scoop changes our understanding of the Trump-Russia probe: "In May 2017, the FBI opened an investigation into whether President Trump was working on Russia's behalf."
Aaron Rupar:
Amanda Sakuma:
Eric Schmidt/Mark Landler: Pentagon officials fear Bolton's actions increase risk of clash with Iran.
Adam Serwer: Trump the toddler: "The president is pursuing a child's strategy for getting what he wants."
Aditi Shrikant: National parks are getting trashed amid the government shutdown. This strikes me as one of the most telling stories of the lockout. I've spent a lot of time working late in offices, and as such I've noticed people coming in to clean them up every night. It turns out that it takes a lot of work to keep any place inhabited by humans from turning into a dump, but most office workers, clocking in and out on expected schedules, never see that.
Emily Stewart:
How Trump could use a national emergency to get his border wall, explained: "He has broad leeway to declare an emergency, frankly, whether one exists or not."
Republicans worry Trump's national emergency could set a new precedent for Democrats: "Tomorrow, the national security emergency might be, you know, climate change."
Dominic Tierney: The US isn't really leaving Syria and Afghanistan: Author sees mostly technical problems, largely because the US military is much better at building bases than dismantling them -- especially when it wants to do one and not the other. There's also the problem of not having a coherent plan let alone viable allies. And up and down the command chain there are people who can't be trusted not to fake a crisis or provocation if it serves their agenda. Whenever you give someone like John Bolton the opportunity to explain what Trump means, it's likely to spin around 180 degrees.
Alex Ward: The government shutdown is hurting America's diplomats -- and diplomacy.
Benjamin Wittes:
Robin Wright: Pompeo and his Bible define US policy in the Middle East:
Pompeo's speech had three dimensions: it was anti-Obama, anti-Iran, and in favor of so-called traditional allies, as Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group and a senior National Security Council staffer in the Obama Administration, told me. "The first reflects a politicization of foreign policy for which it is hard to conjure up a precedent. The second an ideological obsession that does not comport with reality. And the third an implicit celebration of an autocratic status quo that masquerades as a tribute to stability. Pompeo's self-proclaimed message was that America is a force for good. Whether that ever was the case, his speech was proof that, today at least, it plainly is not."
For more on Pompeo's speech/mission: