Democracy

Problems with the Constitution

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There has always been plenty of talk about what is right and wrong with the Constitution of the United States. However much of that was on the back burner until recently. Now it is different. First we saw government collapsed into non-functional partisan chaos, and then Trump demonstrated that what we thought was a government of laws was actually a government of unenforceable traditions.

So what follows is a list of issues. I won’t say it is complete or well-organized, but the problems are all serious.

  • Open to dictatorial takeover

The Supreme Court was a terrible mistake.  There are no limits to its power, and it doesn’t even have to justify its decisions.  The Justices are chosen undemocratically and serve for life.  We’ve now seen they can even declare a President above the law, so that the entire Constitution is out the window.  It is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

  • Open to corruption (only works because of tradition, not law)

The entire electoral apparatus belongs to the states, where it is operated by partisan officials.  It is common practice to make voting difficult in opposition districts, but that is just the beginning. The whole voting apparatus is controlled by people who gain from controlling results.  It works if people are committed to democracy, but not otherwise.  Other democratic countries have established separate, nominally non-partisan organizations to administer voting.

  • Unrepresentative

The Senate is phenomenally unrepresentative.  Two senators per state means residents of small states have astonishingly outsize power.  At the very least, very large states such as California need additional Senators.  The problems of the Senate also affect the Electoral College, so that not only legislation but also Presidential elections are affected.

Then there is the whole question of gerrymandering. Computers have made this both easy and effective. The US Congress is currently so gerrymandered that very few districts have real elections. That severely limits democracy.

  • Doesn’t work for states

These is an urgent need for clarify the division of responsibility between the states and the federal government.  As an example, the federal government has traditionally backed up the states for emergencies of all kinds.  That is necessary because it has greater resources as well as the ability to run deficits if necessary (which many states can’t).  With both Covid and the operation of FEMA Trump decided he was either opposed or lukewarm about it, and that was that.  The Constitution has to be explicit about responsibilities.

  • Doesn’t work for the federal government

The federal government simply doesn’t work as intended.  We’ve reached an era of non-cooperation between parties, so government only works when a single party controls everything.  Between the “Hastert rule” in the House and the filibuster in the Senate, it’s easy to block everything otherwise.  That means the so-called separation of powers in government is largely non-functional  Furthermore the primary system for the nomination of candidates basically disenfranchises the political center, so that parties are by definition extreme.  That means government is either functionally blocked or unrepresentatively extreme.

  • There is no protection for governmental expertise

A functioning national government needs expertise upon which to base its conclusions.  For that reason Congress created a number of bodies intentionally buffered from Presidential politics.  More recently the Supreme Court has decided that any body working in the executive acts at the discretion of the President.  It is now impossible for anyone with necessary expertise to make a career in the federal government.

  • Unclear dividing lines between branches of government

The Trump administration is legislating by executive order, and the Supreme Court has decided that is okay.

  • The unspecified role of parties can undercut everything else

Everything about our two-party system is outside the Constitution.  So that, as mentioned earlier, we have a primary system that disenfranchises the political center, and there is nothing in the Constitution that has any bearing on it.  The Constitution needs at the least to say how elections work.  Anything not specified is vulnerable to corruption and takeover. Non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting is a possible step in that direction.

The Zero-Sum Trap

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It’s not unusual to talk about zero-sum games as a political issue. Probably the most common example is in international relations, where the Trump people treat countries as ordinary business competitors: what profits them is lost to us. That’s a false analogy as we’ll discuss later, but that’s not the main point here. What we want to emphasize is that the notion of zero-sum games—where all gain is someone else’s loss—is even more pervasive and dangerously wrong than commonly believed.

There are many kinds of zero-sum examples:

  • Our progress means taking it from someone else (as just mentioned)
  • Anyone else’s progress means taking it from us (racial progress means blacks taking from whites)
  • Hurting others means helping us (the party line with DOGE).

Notice the logic runs both ways: not only does our progress require hurting others, but also hurting others can be assumed good for us!

The issue is not that such things can’t happen; the problem is assuming that they always do. The chaos around DOGE produced wild enthusiasm in Trump’s base even though there was no logical connection to anyone’s well-being (either in theory or in the One Big Beautiful Bill). Moreover, paradoxically, all the publicity about DOGE viciousness seemed to increase confidence in the unstated zero-sum assumption. “Look at all the progress in the first 100 days!”

To start with it is not surprising that a zero-sum situation is more the exception than the rule: that two different phenomena are so directly related means there is an explicit causal connection, and the costs and benefits need to more or less match up. There are such connections in budgeting decisions for example. However the connections between tariffs and anyone’s well-being, for example, are so circuitous and filled with logical gaps that no one is trying very hard to argue for them. Instead promoters fall back on a kind of instinctive belief in the zero-sum game. The more Trump talks about making others poorer, the more it must be the path of progress.

It’s useful at this point to review just how far the tariff argument is from being true. What companies are the pillars of US economic strength? They are the big tech companies that dominate market valuations, earnings, and international influence. Just eight such companies represent 40-50 percent of market valuations. What is the basis of their success? Are they winning because they can make better cheaper products that anyone else can make, so that tariffs can lead to even greater success and lots of new good jobs for US workers?

Actually not. Those companies represent technological advances that led to monopoly powers in their chosen sectors (those sectors are now starting to merge, but that’s another story). They have clear profit advantages over businesses in competitive sectors, and in fact they can force those companies in competitive sectors to bid against each other to supply them. These are primarily software companies (so they are not well-counted in balance of payment figures that ignore services) and their reason for success is technological advancement—often predicated on government-funded basic R&D—and ability to attract the best and brightest from everywhere to contribute to their success. Such monopolies are actually not new. In the good old days of American manufacturing it was the high-tech of its time. We don’t get to choose where the money is.

Tariffs have little or nothing to do with this picture. Somehow tariffs are supposed to create a new golden age for factory workers, recreating the good old days. However that is without the technology advantages that fueled the wages, without unions, and after many decades of automation that mean far fewer (and more skillled) people are needed in production. Tariffs have of course been threatened as retaliation for restrictions on tech company activities in other countries, but those are different fights over different issues. None of this means extracting blood from evil foreigners will deliver gold to Trump supporters here.

How about the benefits of white racial dominance and the deporting of immigrants? Most of the arguments for those come down to “everything they’ve gained is taken from us”. That’s easy to believe (one thinks of Vance’s performance in the VP debate where immigrants were the answer to every issue raised) but is it true? You can certainly find examples, black people promoted for their race or professions where desperate immigrants have depressed wages. But that isn’t the same as the net effect of what has happened. You can’t argue that by assuming it’s true.

What made this country’s historical success is the (relative) freedom of US society from the centuries-old societal hierarchies elsewhere. Anyone could come here and succeed. The US pioneered mass education, and its own aristocracies just didn’t have the powers to exclude that existed elsewhere. We have prospered from everyone’s contributions, people of all races and from everywhere. That there are more people in the picture does not mean everyone is poorer; historically it has made us richer. Even today the immigrant population (including the illegal part) is paying taxes, using fewer social services, committing less crime, and staffing difficult jobs (in agriculture, eldercare, and construction) that locals don’t want to do. The big technology companies are filled with immigrants and children of immigrants who are making the country richer for everyone. (As is evident from any discussion of AI for example, this is more a matter of scarce talent than outsourced jobs.)

When you think about it each zero-sum argument assumes a static world where all that matters is dividing up a fixed pot of goods. That’s where the zero-sum comes in—who is giving or taking. But the picture is completely wrong. It’s not just that the overall pot is growing, it’s that the pot is being redefined entirely. And it’s that effort—the creation of the new pot—that will determine our success as a nation. And again looking at the new corporate leaders of our economy, that new pot (as noted) is being created in large measure by immigrants and children of immigrants of all races and nationalities.

(It’s important to be careful about the conclusion here. This isn’t an argument for uncontrolled immigration or even for what rules should be applied for who gets in. It’s also not an argument either for or against any kind of affirmative action. In both cases there are tradeoffs that have to be made rationally. Every country decides how many immigrants it can absorb annually, but that decision should not be based on false stereotypes of what those immigrants represent. In the case of affirmative action, you don’t want to create new forms of favoritism, but at the same time you need to find ways to prevent existing prejudices from perpetuating past discrimination. That those subjects are out of scope here doesn’t mean they can’t be addressed.)

Government’s task is providing the environment for both economic progress and well-being of the population. A key objective is equality of opportunity, as we need contributions from all. And it is up to government to see that the two objectives—for the economy and for the population—are both satisfied. That is always a political challenge.

Government structure is important. That the private sector will miraculously do it all is a myth understood perfectly even by Adam Smith. That myth only persists (without evidence) as an excuse for government to neglect its second objective—for the population. Expecting arbitrarily-powered dictatorship to be more dynamic and effective is even worse—for reasons that are already evident. Dictators make uncorrectable mistakes and ignore what they don’t want to hear. We’re cutting basic research in all domains and treating climate change as treason, exactly what we don’t need in a technology-based world economy. That hurts BOTH the economy and the population. By our own history, democracy is a good thing.

Finally we need to return to the issue we started with—international relations. Are nations just a bunch of business competitors fighting for market share? The answer is no, because we all share one world and there is an enormous (if not always recognized) common interest in making it work. Without thinking hard we are all confronted with the pressing problems of climate change and the ever-present threat of war. Chaos risks disaster. And there is a positive push also. Over the past decades we have proven that by cooperation (admittedly incomplete) we have been to grow the pot of benefits enormously for all. This could hardly be farther from a zero-sum scenario.

Zero-sum reasoning is a big problem, because it is instinctive and can be crucially wrong. We can’t prosper by believing life is all about fighting it out for advantage. If we want to be successful the task is to build prosperity for the future—for our entire population and for the world. Nothing says that’s easy, but it’s the only game there is.

Do We Neeed More Proof that Dictators are Bad for the Economy?

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When dictators make bad decisions no one can stop them. Here are a few:

  • Trump likes oil, so we’re doing everything possible to push fossil fuels in the economy, and eliminating anything to support sustainable energy.   We are even so petty as to take out installed car charging stations for government employees.  So we’ve pegged our economy and everything in it to fossil fuels, a future that is going away–not tomorrow but necessarily soon, whether we like it or not.  We’re not just a non-player in the coming economy (presumably the US auto manufacturers will be lucky if they’re picked up–instead of closed down–by the dominant Chinese players), we’re tying a weight around the neck of all our industrial production.
  • We’re killing any kind of government supported research.  We have made ourselves non-players in anything beyond current mainstream production.  If you ask business leaders how much basic research is done by the private sector they will tell you the answer is pretty much none.  Business deals with current and coming product.  We as a country will no longer be inventing the future.  We can ask the Chinese for help when we need it.
  • We have decided there is no need for competence in government employees.  Instead for the entire federal government all that matters in loyalty.  There are no more real government jobs—just political appointees.  If these are the rules of the game, there will be no more competence or help from Washington.  If you don’t think that matters you should look at the mess today.  That’s the tiniest piece of what is coming.
  • We have decided to convert all of our alliances to protection rackets.  Unfortunately we’re not the only game in town.  We have opponents in China and Russia.  They, not us, have understood there is strength in numbers.  We have given them an enormous present with no positives in return.  For Russia we have even descended to flattery.
  • Our now to be jettisoned international order was established to provide stability and reduce the danger of war. It wasn’t perfect but it gave us many years of growth and peace. The danger to growth has been much talked about, but the danger to peace less so. In this new era of every land for itself, all efforts to manage nuclear proliferation are now out the window. On the contrary, every country had better get its own nuclear weapons fast–or be prepared to face defeat. In our glorification of selfish greed we’re stupidly asking for disaster.

Many people have figured out these are mistakes.  But as long as this dictatorship continues, we as a nation we have no way to fix it.

The Only Thing New is That They’re Getting Away with It

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I need to return to Adam Smith’s quote from last time.  It’s so accurate it’s incredible.  First the quote:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants and manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 3)

All by itself this stands as rebuttal to the Republican Party’s standard argument: “We’re businessmen, so we’re good for the economy.” It seems businessmen are not so benevolent. Let’s look at the record—Adam Smith could hardly have been more to the point.

I’ll start with Obama’s first term.  George W. Bush left a mess so bad that it is only partially acknowledged.  The stock market crashed and the economy was shutting down (basically from what amounted to misguided deregulation of the overall banking system through mortgage-backed securities).  But that wasn’t the whole story.  Hidden behind the smokescreen of “neoliberalism” was the fact that essentially all of the job loss to China occurred either during Bush’s administration or with their crash. Just look:

That’s no accident. The Bush people refused to resist China’s WTO-prohibited trade practices (e.g. currency manipulation), because they were actively promoting off-shoring—since that’s what business wanted (e.g. about 70-80% of Walmart suppliers were in China).  In this case it’s tempting to say “deceived and oppressed” was coupled with pure incompetence, but that actually misrepresents a situation that Adam Smith understood perfectly.  Both the deregulation and the off-shoring were cases of business getting what it wanted without the necessary “suspicious attention”.

Obama’s job was to get us out of that mess, and he was well-underway when Republican decided that he might succeed.  That could not be allowed, since there was an election coming up.  So with the fabricated excuse of the “balanced budget amendment” rhetoric they essentially shut down government including all stimulus to the economy.  That meant jobs and income for many people.  They also blocked any aid to the millions of people who lost jobs from Bush’s off-shoring.  “Deceived and oppressed” is right on.

Now we get to Trump.  The “balanced budget amendment” rhetoric disappears instantly, and was replaced by a tax cut funded by a 2 trillion dollar deficit.  That was going to cure the last part of the recovery they had sabotaged.  However the economy was actually in pretty good shape, and as we noted last time the only stimulus that Obama ever got past the Republicans (in his first term) was on the order of $500 billion.  This needs to be emphasized.  We read articles about governments in Africa where department heads steal millions by handling their budgets as personal slush funds.  We in the US don’t do things like that.  We’re much more civilized.  Using the “balanced budget” ploy the Republican Party took 1.5 trillion dollars of benefits for its owners quite legally from the American people. If you want stumulus you’ve got to pay us first. “Deceived” is the very least you could say.

That money went straight to Wall Street.  It inflated corporate profits, so stocks went up.  But the companies didn’t spend that money on employees or the business, they used it for stock buybacks—a second kick in the pants for the market.  For the people in Adam Smith’s quote all you can say is—what a wonderful world this is!   

And they’re ready to do it again.  They’ve made up the fiction that inflation is all due to spending money for the benefit of the population.  Can’t do that.  Bad idea. Have to give it to us, and it will be Nirvana.

The next deficit is estimated at $4T.  Republicans have signed-on salivating—Will wonders never cease? (And that’s before the sweetheart deals with individual billionaires!) But that’s not the end of it. Trump’s new set of proposals (tariffs, deportations, tax cuts) is wildy inflationary, potential as damaging as what trashed the economy under George W. Bush—again what you get without “suspicious attention”. (It may be a side issue, but we even have a potential repeat of Bush’s banking debacle with all the cryptocurrency money behind Trump.) All of us have to hope it doesn’t happen.

Adam Smith did his job.  Can’t say we weren’t warned.

A Real Comparison of Economic Policies

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Since both Biden and Trump have records as President, the press is full of articles like this one attempting to compare their economic policies and evaluate the results.  Now that Harris has replaced Biden and announced a few measures, she’s in the game too.  Unfortunately most such articles completely miss the mark.

The reason is that you cannot judge anyone’s economic policy except in the context of the problems he or she faced.  And you cannot make any judgment of how good he or she would be as President now without assessing the problems we face today and comparing our needs against the candidates’ demonstrated approaches.

That may sound obvious, but I haven’t seen a single article that tried hard enough to be serious.  Let’s start with Trump.  Obama left the country in pretty good shape, but one has to understand that his whole Presidency was spent trying to recover from the 2008 crash.  In that he had done pretty well (compared to other western countries), but he had one serious problem:  particularly in his second term the Republican Party decided to sabotage the recovery.  Looking ahead to the 2016 election they essentially shut down government—promoting a “balanced budget amendment” as a reason to block all stimulus spending.  That left some work to be done with unemployment, for example. So that’s what Trump inherited—a good economy that had been throttled short of complete recovery.

As soon as Trump took office the “balanced budget amendment” discussion vanished, and Trump stimulated the economy with a 2 trillion dollar budget deficit.  That completed Obama’s recovery at enormous cost to the country. For comparison, the largest stimulus Obama was able to get through Congress (in his first term) was about $500 M.  The vast part of Trump’s $2 T did not go into jobs or corporate investment; it went into stock buybacks.  Trump bought maybe $500 M of progress with a $1.5T contribution to inequality in the US.  Further, despite all the talk of reviving manufacturing, US manufacturing (as a sector) was in recession before Covid hit.  Once Covid happened, Trump simply retreated from running the country.

Biden inherited a mess.  First we had to recover from Covid, so there was much time and effort spent on getting the vaccine to everyone.  In this the biggest single problem was sabotage by misinformation from Republicans in general and Trump in particular.  During Covid there was a series of bipartisan deficit-funded bills to keep the country running with progressively less Republican support.  Once recovery started, however, there were some big surprises.  In key areas supply and demand were badly mismatched—there was a massive shortfall in computer chips needed for cars and other big-ticket products, new patterns of demand appeared for housing reflecting living arrangements during the pandemic, and the shipping industry took many months to be fully back in business—causing shortages of all kinds of imported products.  There were also shorter-term spot shortages, which led to longer-term price increases from major suppliers happy to take the chance.

Biden’s last (Democrat-only) stimulus has been blamed for all inflation that followed Covid.  Many articles have been written about his terrible mistake—the money delivered to US families didn’t even cover the inflation of the following year!  That conclusion ranks with the “balanced budget amendment” for self-serving dishonesty.  Given the magnitude of those other inflationary pressures, there is no question that the stimulus payments covered considerably more than any inflationary effects of the stimulus itself (and inflation in the US was lower than anywhere else in the Western world—stimulus or not).  Biden was correct in deciding that there was a fair chance that the post-Covid recovery would not be painless, and that stimulus money was needed to help people. In so doing he violated the mantra that the Republican Party is most desperate to defend: “you can’t spend money to help people”.  Help only comes top-down, from money spent on us.  The best commentary on this subject comes from Adam Smith himself:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants and manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 3)

Before we leave this subject of inflation there is one more question that needs to be answered:  why, despite the huge budget deficit, was there no inflation under Trump?  The main part of the answer has already been noted—the country was not yet completely out of the 2008 crash.   There was no wage pressure, and people were not ready to spend.  Furthermore we had actual downward pressure on prices from those evil Chinese—all that cheap stuff in Walmart was keeping prices low.  By Trump’s third year there were signs of a rise in wages, but then Covid hit and that was the end of that.  As far as inflation was concerned, Trump was “saved by the bell”.  As we noted at the beginning, you cannot say anything sensible about a President’s economic policy without putting it in the context of the time.  Trump did not prove that he knew how to run up a huge deficit without inflation any more than he proved he could fight Covid with bleach.

Biden got the country going again and finally started rebuilding the country’s decaying infrastructure and  undertaking changes that will be required (whether we like it or not) for climate change.  He recognized the importance of education, although he was blocked from doing as much as is needed to provide opportunities for all (and the costs of his programs were hugely exaggerated).  Manufacturing is now in vastly better shape than under Trump.  He has also started with the task of finally doing something about decades of consolidations and monopolies during our period of non-enforcement of anti-trust laws.  It needs to be emphasized that anti-trust activities are NOT examples of overreach of government against the free market.  Even Adam Smith (again) emphasized the need to combat monopolies, and not just because they make things more expensive—they block innovative new businesses, make the country less competitive, and even weaken a nation’s military strength.

At this point it’s time to stop describing the historical context and consider where to go from here.  The first conclusion is probably the most important:  there is nothing in Trump’s historical performance that shows competence in managing the economy.  He gave himself (and his ilk) a big tax cut, that helped an artificially-stunted recovery (at very high cost), and avoided inflation only because of the incomplete recovery and because Covid bailed him out. That history is no recommendation.  We cannot let ourselves be tricked by the blindness of all of those economic analyses without context:  “Trump’s tax cuts led to full employment last time, so maybe they’ll be good this time too.”  ARGH!!

So the question of Trump’s economic competence comes down to his economic plans.  While Trump has been vague about many things, there are three items about which he has been absolutely clear:

  • A complete tariff wall around the US protecting all US industry, 10% overall and 60% on imports from China.
  • Deporting all undocumented immigrants, amounting to at least 11 million people
  • A huge tax cut modeled on his last one, currently estimated to cost $4 T.

The attitude of economists on this subject was summarized in a recent NY Times article:  not just bad but catastrophic.  We have to get used to that idea.  The fact that Trump got through his first term is not proof that he knows what he’s doing.  The plan can really be completely crazy.  Remember Trump’s six bankruptcies. Also, we have to get used to the idea that economic stability is not guaranteed.  The Brits voted for Brexit, and their standard of living took an immediate hit from which it may never recover.  This plan is actually worse.

We’ll go briefly through the items one-by-one

The Tariff Wall

Tariffs (including Trump’s tariffs from last time) are effectively a tax paid by the buyer in higher prices.  A universal tariff like this one is therefore massively inflationary and not just for imported goods.  Historically (and in Trump’s last term) domestic producers also have taken the chance to raise prices. Universal tariffs also invite retaliation and diminished US clout worldwide.  Given the level of consolidation in the US economy, the tariffs will significantly reduce competition and dynamism of business domestically, as many markets will be monopoly or cartel controlled.  And by isolating the US from developments elsewhere, it guarantees that the US will be left behind for any developments that don’t originate here, making us a second-class power.

Deporting 11 million people

These people are working today.  We’re eliminating the lowest tier of the workforce, with no obvious new population to take over.   Both the loss and the disruption are massively inflationary.  Many of those jobs may never be filled.  The Brexit people found that they had to import a whole new bunch of foreigners to replace the ones they were so happy to get rid of.

The $4T tax cut

The huge deficit is again massively inflationary.  The only reason that didn’t happen last time is that the economy was still short of recovery—which is not the case now.  Further the huge deficit would be on top of all other spending issues we will have to face, including for climate change and defense.  Businesses didn’t need it last time–they spent it on stock buybacks, not on investment in the business or on the employees. Last time’s claim that it would pay for itself proved completely untrue.

We are talking about a real hit to everyone’s well-being with no short-term path to recovery.  And that’s before even thinking about the threats to democracy.

Finally we need to end this with a look  at the other side.  If that’s what we’re getting from Trump what would we be getting from Harris?  After all we’re told she’s a wild-eyed radical.  Her running mate was so far left that he spent government money giving meals to school kids!

There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about anything close to a 4 trillion dollar deficit.   There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about engineering of people’s lives the way Vance is so eager to do.  Isn’t freedom from that sort of thing what made us different from the hated communists?

What is different is positive.   There is a role for government in making people’s lives better.  That means education, jobs, a future.  Harris’s initial proposal talks about aid for families with children and combating the kind of post-Covid price-fixing mentioned earlier. There is also a role for government in helping the private sector with things it doesn’t do well—like anti-trust, like educating the population for the jobs that need to be filled, like preventing business from croaking on climate change because doing something reduces immediate profits.  No one is talking about hurting business competitiveness, but it is the task of government to act in the interest of everyone.

This is an election where the country needs to reject what is radical egomania and return to what are in fact our long-time values.

Message for Business

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We’ve spoken here before about how the evangelical community needs to understand that Trump is not their guy.

However the issue is more general.  It’s too easy to dismiss evangelicals as disconnected from reality and perhaps swayed by self-interested leaders. In fact all of us have spent lifetimes insulated from the reality of authoritarian government.  The US elections and democratic system are certainly not perfect, but we the people still do have power.  It’s hard to recognize that once that goes, the world is different.

Even the well-heeled and well-educated business community has that problem.  Much was made of Jamie Dimon’s comment at Davos that Europeans in particular should stop worrying about Trump, because ultimately nothing serious was going to happen.  A recent Edsall piece pointed out that many other business leaders believe the same thing.  Like the Evangelical’s focus on abortion, the business focus on the Trump tax cuts has convinced business people that he’s their guy.

As Edsall’s article points out, the history of authoritarian takeovers tells another story.  Once government is unaccountable, what follows is massive corruption and shakedowns of all players.  That’s in addition to the whims and the uncorrectable mistakes of the leader.  Businesses–and in particular their leaders–have much to lose, as their counterparts elsewhere have found out to their shock and surprise.

For now Trump’s threats–combined with the taxcut carrot–seem to hold sway with much of the business community.   But the Trump people have made no secret of their plan to end democracy in favor of an  Viktor Orban-like regime.  As a threat, there is nothing in Biden’s program that comes close to matching that one.

Republicans and Guns

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With all the conversations about guns in this country, it’s worth being clear that the Republican Party is, was, and will ever be the party of guns. 

As we’ve noted before, the big donors to the party don’t care about guns—they care about money.   But guns are important as a means to that end.  Guns elect Republicans, and Republicans deliver tax cuts and relief from regulation.  All of that money has certainly pumped up guns as an identity issue.

However guns are not just one issue among many being promoted.  Guns are central to the whole Republican project.

Going back to Nixon’s “southern strategy” and before, Republicans are all about fear.  They have institutionalized and spread the long-term Southern terror of black insurrection.  There’s a big dangerous black man (or an immigrant) behind every tree, and he’s out to get you and your family.  Blacks control the Democratic Party, so it’s complicit.   Democrats want to take aware your guns and leave you exposed and unprotected.  Joe Biden refuses to help.  You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.  Republicans are the only thing between you and chaos.

As always in this election campaign the big issue is crime.  This isn’t about statistics or really addressing crime in any organized way.  It’s all about that big dangerous black man you have to be ready to shoot.  This isn’t a matter of convincing individual politicians–Republicans can never give up on guns.

The only option is to defeat them.

Civics

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There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”.  Reasonable except for the surprise at what happened.  Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption—whether we want to call it that or not—and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented.  The classic work on the subject, which got just about everything right, was written in 1860.  The only problem is that for all the intervening years many societies, including ours, have tried hard to avoid learning.

That blind spot brings up the subject of Civics—what is it that we all ought to know? That’s despite the fact that it’s hard to say the word Civics without wincing. My high school Civics course was a giddy paen to American democracy and its perfections.  One sentence sticks in my mind:  “Propaganda is a neutral term despite its unfavorable connotation; what makes it good or bad is what is propagated.”  Take that for wisdom.

But it strikes me that we can point to a few things that belong in a real Civics course.  I’m going to give three titles.  I’ll start with Max Havelaar (the just-mentioned 1860 classic) for international relations, to disabuse people of the notion that we can be white knights to go fix the rest of the world.  This is not a plea for isolationism, but for recognition that our interests will dominate and corruption will likely follow.  At the very least we should be suspicious about our motives and about the reality of what we create.

A second title is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.  This book has been around since 2016 and has had nowhere near the impact it should have.  It documents the very successful effort of the Koch organization to take over the political system in United States and reorient it to their objectives.  It explains most of what passes for incomprehensible in the press today—why the country has become ungovernable, why democracy is at risk, and how we got saddled with a mind-boggling Supreme Court. All of that was the plan from the beginning, and unless we’re clear on what happened, we’re not likely to be able to change it.

A third title is Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us. This book has some issues from trying to satisfy multiple constituencies, but its main message is clear: the different racial and other groups in this country have been turned against each other in a deliberate campaign of divide and conquer. And the only way to counter that is to recognize common interest and act for the common good. This was deliberate policy for Martin Luther King among others, but it’s not easy to do–group militancy will always fight it. However there is no alternative in taking on the powerful forces described in Dark Money.

Those books alone could give a big dose of reality to our political process. We can contrast that with what passes for Civics in public discourse today.

Most of what we hear about Civics today comes from the far right, where it’s back to the future–the contemporary version of what I had all those years ago with the John Birch Society. In the interim it hasn’t gotten better: this is still God’s country, above criticism and chosen to rule in His name. One particular feature worth noting is the weakness of the support for democracy. Democracy is defined as whatever it is that we’re doing, and it’s good because it’s ours.

On the left the world view is different, but fragmented. One person who does talk about Civics is the strange and (I find) worrisome figure of Danielle Allen.  Ms. Allen presents herself as standing above the messy political discussions of the day and as a pure advocate for civic virtue.  But her Civics lives in a world where there are no bad actors, and the primary issue is alienation of voters from the political system. In that world, the monumental importance of the 2024 election is hidden behind tales of civic involvement that ignore the real forces at work. In the end she’s cover for the people who have put us where we are.

For today, the kind of Civics outlined here doesn’t exist. But it’s worth recognizing that a real, substanitive Civics course is not so hard to describe. Maybe someday it could happen.