John Debay

Great article on how we compare Trump to previous historical figures.

The greatest civic danger, however, is complacency. Peddling certainty and solace, many historical analogies make beguiling but dangerous promises about what will happen next. When we compare Trump to George Wallace or Henry Ford, similar men who never became president, we feel worse about the Donald’s chances and better about ourselves. But historical analogies offer only the illusion of sense. And as they move things strange and shocking back to familiar terrain, as they reassure us that the past explains the present, many historical comparisons invite us to disengage. We know the script. We know how it ends. Instead of sparking our political imagination, the past can sometimes short-circuit it.

And later:

In medieval Europe, anti-Semitic rhetoric preached from pulpits led to real, bone-breaking violence against Jews. Crude sexual insinuations published by the French gutter press in the 1780s steadily corroded the political conventions shielding Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, making it possible for their subjects to imagine both revolution and execution. Germans supported Hitler in part because Nazism had become salonfähig, the socially acceptable stuff of polite conversation.

When Trump mocks the disabled or wishes that he could assault protesters or predicts riots should he be denied the nomination, he widens our shared sense of what is politically possible to think, say, and do. Here the past offers not a script so much as a crucial, destabilizing insight: Words, especially words uttered in public, can have incantatory power. They can summon demons.

And finally:

The Weimar Republic can be useful for the same reason: not for breezily labeling Trump an American Hitler, but to remind us more generally that political order can be remarkably fragile, civilization only skin-deep. After all, despite volatile economic conditions and the lingering trauma of wartime defeat, Germans in the 1920s lived under the most progressive constitution in the world: a radical democratic system of proportional representation, equal rights for women, and a guaranteed right to housing. Political disagreements worsened and polarization increased, but Germans had no reason to doubt that they lived in a modern, civilized country. It took only a few elections for the land of Beethoven and Goethe to succumb to its darkest instincts. Sheer disbelief kept many Germans from emigrating when they had the chance.

The past warns us that systems work until they don’t. Watching Trump prepare to seize the Republican nomination, it’s easy to surrender to a kind of civic paralysis that’s equal parts horror and glee. We should bear in mind, however, that this election is under no obligation to settle out safely. Political orders do not automatically sustain themselves.

Understanding that last sentence is so important.

(Via James Fallows.)

An interesting summary of how the GOP “elite” has become disconnected with its voters. Referring to The New York Times article published today that dives into this topic in more detail, this article in The Washington Post adds some analysis:

But this one anecdote captures this whole phenomenon as perfectly as any other that I’ve seen. Last March, GOP lawmakers met privately to figure out how to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which GOP elites support, to Republican voters who were suspicious of it:

For help, the lawmakers turned to Frank Luntz, the Republican messaging guru. For two decades, Mr. Luntz had instructed Republicans on how to talk about thorny issues. Do not say “estate tax.” Say “death tax.” Do not privatize Social Security. “Personalize” it.

Few issues were now as dangerous to them as trade, Mr. Luntz told the lawmakers, especially a trade pact sought by a president their voters hated. Many Americans did not believe that the economic benefits of trade deals trickled down to their neighborhoods. They did not care if free trade provided them with cheaper socks and cellphones. Most believed free trade benefited other countries, not their own.

“I told them to stop calling it free trade, and start calling it American trade,” Mr. Luntz said in an interview. “American businesses, American services — American, American, American!”

Most of the ingredients paving the way for the rise of Trump are on display here. GOP lawmakers, faced with the problem that economically struggling GOP voters might not believe freer trade would help them, asked for guidance on how to better message it. Luntz also personifies longtime Republican efforts to sell the GOP drive to end the estate tax (a boon mostly to wealthy families) and the longtime GOP drive to reform Social Security. Broadly speaking, the GOP elite agenda has included free trade deals, tax changes that would deliver windfalls to top earners, and entitlement reform that would reduce benefits, and for many years, Republicans have messaged these things as good for American workers.

Yes, many Democrats also have supported free trade deals, including the Obama-backed TPP, and yes, the Dem establishment is currently paying for that in the form of the Bernie Sanders challenge.)

But GOP voters don’t appear to believe this messaging any longer, if they ever did. A national poll of Republican voters conducted recently by political scientist Alan Abramowitz found that majorities of them favor raising taxes on the wealthy and oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare. The poll showed an overlap between Republicans who hold those positions and support Trump. Exit polls have also shown GOP voters are suspicious of trade deals.

I blame Democrats for not providing a more convincing agenda to these same voters as well. Blue collar people of any race or color — the “working American” — have been the natural constituency of the Democratic Party since the New Deal. They’ve been losing that demographic for years. Even though President Obama ran his 2012 re-election campaign with his focus almost completely on the middle class, they are not regaining ground because the policy benefits have just not been there (this is avoiding a whole conversation about whether an agenda can even be passed through a Congress controlled by the opposite party anymore).

The chaos of the Republican Party offers a unique opportunity to start winning some of that back. It’s unfortunate that this year, the Democrats are fielding a candidate who brings with her all the whiffs of oligarchy: family connections to the presidency, cozy ties to Wall Street, and great personal wealth built on leveraging connections when out of office.

Dick Nixon writes about the latest Trunp/Cruz feuding:

Calling Trump a “sniveling coward”? What the hell was that? Who “snivels”? What is it?

Say “son of a bitch,” like any man whose wife is attacked.

People would understand. But Cruz, who’d obviously rehearsed the line, came off like a ship’s captain challenging a brigand to pistols at dawn.

Then he refused to disown Trump if he’s the nominee, essentially admitting that Mrs. Cruz is less important to him than a shot at being Secretary of Commerce.

So Cruz is a ruthless, high-handed snob who’d sell his wife to get ahead. We all know it, but it’s another thing to see it live.

If the Enquirer story blows—and if it’s any kind of sophisticated leak, more evidence will come—some evangelicals will stay home. Others will give up and go with Trump.

But ugly wives, rumors, the whole sordid business—it’s not about winning a bloc. It’s about television.

Trump knows, as I do, that if you slip up on television, even once, the weakness is tattooed on your chest forever.

Rubio didn’t know how to fight, so Trump made him fight.

Cruz doesn’t know how to lie.

From President Obama’s speech at a fundraiser over the weekend:

We’ve got a debate inside the other party that is fantasy and schoolyard taunts and selling stuff like it’s the Home Shopping Network.

We’re shocked someone is fanning anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment. … We’re shocked! We’re shocked that someone could be loose with the facts. Or distort someone’s record. Shocked!

How can you be shocked? This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya — who just wouldn’t let it go. And all this same Republican establishment, they weren’t saying nothing. As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. They thought it was a hoot, wanted to get his endorsement. And then now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment.

What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. I mean, the reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time — that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts. That you just deny the evidence of science. That compromise is a betrayal. That the other side isn’t simply wrong, or we just disagree, we want to take a different approach, but the other side is destroying the country, or treasonous. I mean, that’s — look it up. That’s what they’ve been saying.

So they can’t be surprised when somebody suddenly looks and says, you know what, I can do that even better. I can make stuff up better than that. I can be more outrageous than that. I can insult people even better than that. I can be even more uncivil. I mean, conservative outlets have been feeding their base constantly the notion that everything is a disaster, that everybody else is to blame, that Obamacare is destroying the country. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. It’s not, we disagree with this program, we think we can do it better — it’s, oh, this is a crisis!

So if you don’t care about the facts, or the evidence, or civility, in general in making your arguments, you will end up with candidates who will say just about anything and do just about anything. And when your answer to every proposal that I make, or Democrats make is no, it means that you’ve got to become more and more unreasonable because that’s the only way you can say no to some pretty reasonable stuff. And then you shouldn’t be surprised when your party ultimately has no ideas to offer at all.

Via Twitter and The Washington Post.

Yesterday’s Nevada results continue to reflect the running theme of Trump’s candidacy:

While Rubio dances around the electorate’s resentments, Trump revels in them. On primary night in South Carolina, he tapped into their nationalism as he whacked at Mexico and China. “They’ve taken our [sic] jobs, they’ve taken our money, they’ve taken our everything,” he declared.

In this context, I think the term “nationalism” is unfairly pejorative. He’s getting at their economic insecurity. If one believes that at the end of the day, the only thing people really care about is whether they can provide for themselves and their families, and have the same expectations for their kids, then this is everything. Maybe you’re a very religious person, but you’ve also lost a job recently and only been able to replace it with temp work. Ted Cruz is selling the same old supply-side bullshit, which just redistributes more wealth to rich. But Trump is talking about slapping tariffs on Chinese imports. For whom do you vote? It seems like a no-brainer.

In each state so far, Trump has finished stronger among blue-collar voters than white-collar ones. And in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, exit polls show Trump’s support dropped with each additional education level a voter attained. Among non-college graduates, he topped 40 percent in the latter two states and scored a majority in Nevada.

“Whether someone has a college degree or not has become a major fault line in American politics these days,” noted Bolger.

As has been discussed many times before, that’s Trump support in a nut. Usually with “fringe” candidates (can that term be used to describe the Republican front-runner?), mainstream candidates co-op parts of their message to undermine their support. That hasn’t happened with Trump, which in some ways illustrates his point that the system is rigged against the little guy.

After Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire primary last week, I read two articles that are simultaneously very different and very accurate.

The first, by Ezra Klein. He goes after Trump for his obvious racism, demagoguery, and thuggishness:

Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.

Trump is in serious contention to win the Republican presidential nomination. His triumph in a general election is unlikely, but it is far from impossible. He’s not a joke and he’s not a clown. He’s a man who could soon be making decisions of war and peace, who would decide which regulations are enforced and which are lifted, who would be responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices and representing America in the community of nations. This is not political entertainment. This is politics.

This line of attack is obvious, but it’s also very important, and not spoken enough. Too many of the chattering class talk around what they know Trump really is but avoid calling him out directly. Or they only focus on the horse race itself, debating how the latest outrage will affect the polls, rather than the outrage itself.

The second article is more interesting. It’s an article by David Frum that hits at the why behind Trump’s victory.

On the Republican side, the upset was, if possible, even more stunning. For 20 years and more, Republican presidential contests have operated as a policy cartel. Concerns that animate actual Republican voters—declining middle-class wages, immigration, retirement security—have been tacitly ruled out of bounds. Concerns that excite Republican donors—tax cuts, entitlement reforms—have been more-or-less unanimously accepted by all plausible candidates. Candidates competed on their life stories, on their networks of friends, and on their degree of religious commitment—but none who aspired to run a national campaign deviated much from the economic platform of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth.

This year’s Republican contest, however, has proved a case study of Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed.” Republicans, it turns out, also worry about losing health care. They also want to preserve Social Security and Medicare in roughly their present form. They believe that immigration has costs, and that those costs are paid by people like them—even as its benefits flow to employers, investors, and foreigners. They know that their personal situation is deteriorating, and they interpret that to mean (as who wouldn’t?) that the country is declining, too. “Hope,” “growth,” “opportunity,” “choice”—those have long since dwindled to sinister euphemisms for “less,” “worse,” and “not for you.”

I truly don’t know how the Republican primary will turn out. Not long ago, I didn’t think Trump would win a single state, despite his poll numbers. Now we’re in a spot where if Trump can win South Carolina, it becomes much more difficult to see how he doesn’t go on to win it all.

Both views of Trump expressed above are serious stuff. It’s important to confront demagogues when they appear, but it’s also important that “meainstream” politicians stop ignoring the decline of middle class living standards and start addressing them head on.

Again relevant to the Trump phenomenon, here’s Robert Reich writing about yesterday’s seemingly positive jobs numbers:

The U.S. continues to add lousy jobs at a fast clip. Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed employers added 292,000 jobs in December, but the average hourly earnings from these jobs remained flat. Leading the pack was temp work, or jobs involving driving, health care, and construction. And the average workweek was only 34.5 hours. The underemployment rate – including part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want to work but have given up looking — held at almost 10 percent of all working-age Americans.

We’ve got in the habit of looking only at the number of jobs created, rather than what they pay or how secure they are. So today’s jobs report will be touted as showing “big gains.” But that’s untrue. Today’s report shows that low pay and growing job insecurity continue to undermine the American workforce – generating growing economic stresses for most, along with deepening frustration and anger.

Relevant to understanding [why Trump is popular]({% post_url 2016-01-02-the-bleak-reality-driving-trumps-rise %}):

"America’s middle class has lost nearly 30% of wealth" – @MarketWatch on our report https://t.co/piGdKVD1kP pic.twitter.com/ynaYwWyOal

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) December 10, 2015

Via David Frum.

If you want to understand Donald Trump, read this article. It pretty much nails the Donald Trump phenomenon:

In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.

Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.

Beneath the dry statistics of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that future emerging. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.

Few Americans know these statistics, but most of them are living the reality they represent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the economy has ceased to work for households at and below the middle. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that the median income for middle-income households is about where it was in 1997. For lower-income households, median income stands where it did in 1996.

When we look at wealth, the picture is even darker. Since the early 1980s, adjusted for inflation, the median net worth of upper-income families has almost doubled. For middle-income families, by contrast, the story has been stagnation: $96,000 in 1983, $98,000 in 2013. Lower-income families had under $12,000 three decades ago, and even less today.

It’s hard not to quote the whole thing. But the advice to the parties should be noted:

The message to the Republican establishment is clear: If you cannot find a responsible way of responding to the concerns of voters you have spent decades attracting to your party, you will lose control—and you will deserve to.

But there is also a message for the professional elites who have flocked to the Democratic Party: Cultural liberalism is not enough. Without a plan that offers the hope of a better life for Americans born to fewer advantages, populism, not progressivism, could capture the future.

“Cultural liberalism is not enough.” So often I feel like professional liberals only pay lip service to, or simply ignore, the structural problems of the economy. Instead they spend all their time on issues like climate change or gay rights, when millions of people are struggling to make ends meet. Those other issues are important, but how much will people care about climate change if they can barely pay their bills?

I still think Donald Trump will fail to win a single state, but the problems underlying his popularity are deep and real and hard to solve. If not Trump, it will be someone else, possibly worse, unless the mainstream parties start addressing these issues.