Elections

Lessons From the British Election

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“Boris” by Raymond Wang is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

There is no way to avoid talking about the horrors of the British election.  With the confirmation of Brexit and the triumph of Boris Johnson, we have all stood witness to the disgraceful demise of a nation now left only with dreams of past glory.

For us though the important question is about what it means for our own election.  On that point the discussion has been generally limited to one question:  Does it say we should worry about the Democrats going too far to the left?  That one is hard to decide, since Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn was so unpopular for his own sake. 

However, that being said, there is still much to discuss.   We propose three points:

  1. Catastrophes not only can happen, but will happen if we don’t watch out for them.

The Democratic debates thus far have played out largely as conflict between the center and left wings of the party.  That means essentially all of it has been fought in the never-never land of post-Trump.  That’s not the same as working on viable strategies to win.

This will be a very tough election, fighting the Fox News, the Electoral College, incredible amounts of Republican money, and all the (legal and illegal) powers of incumbency.  Most candidates have done a reasonable job in providing position papers for what they stand for.  They need to tell us how they’re going to win.

  1. We need to recognize that the electorate isn’t convinced of the urgency of change.

In Britain, Corbyn’s big socialist revival was not so much wrong as a non sequitur.  What actually was all this trying to solve?  Why was it an argument for change?  It was ultimately a declaration of irrelevance.

We have a similar problem.  The very first question of the very first debate has never been adequately answered.  Elizabeth Warren was asked (more or less): “Why are you proposing all these changes when—by all polls—the vast majority of Americans think the economy is doing fine?”  That’s a question for all Democrats—what is it that’s so bad that we need change?

Warren’s answer—about radical inequality—was nowhere near strong enough.  It essentially said that all those people who answered the polls were just wrong.  But no one else has done better.  Healthcare was a great issue for the midterms—that’s something broken that we’re going to fix.  But it’s not enough to unseat Trump.  Impeachment doesn’t touch peoples’ lives directly—it’s about an abstraction called democracy.  Even climate change comes across as an abstraction, although it’s part of what’s needed.  Democrats need a short, clear reason why people need to worry that there is something that needs fixing.

That’s a bar to be passed before we can begin to get traction with specific plans for change.  Until then, like it or not, “fundamental structural change” will be a negative.

  1. We have to keep this a referendum on Trump.

Corbyn pretended Brexit wasn’t the main issue and went off with his own program.  The public was unwilling to follow.

Regardless of how broadly we see the issues, this election is about where Trump is taking the country.

We need a well-defined Trump story to challenge Republican claims of a great rebirth of the American economy.  Even on trade they’ll do what worked for George Bush on Iraq—we’ve been through all the pain, don’t miss out on the rewards!

That means we need to show what four more years of Trump will actually mean.  And how to meet the real challenges for our future.  It seems helpful to think in terms of personal and national issues for the voters:

Personal well-being

Healthcare (complete failure of vision)

Decline in good jobs (manufacturing, good jobs in general)

Education (no initiatives, no funding)

Income inequality (all growth for the rich)

Guns (unsafe to be in school!)

Climate change (what world for our children?)

Women’s rights trampled (bodies owned by the government)

⇒ Worse life for everyone but the protected few

National well-being

Eroding technology dominance (science marginalized)

New businesses sacrificed to old (Net Neutrality)

Losing out with climate change denial (ceded primary position to China)

Weakness with China and North Korea (situation is worse than ever before)

Nuclear proliferation (a danger in all directions)

Racism and divisiveness undermine our strengths (just what Putin ordered)

Demise of democracy (our major source of prosperity and power)

=>  Welcome to the Chinese century

 

That’s where we’re going.  For our own dreams of past glory.

The End of Democracy

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“STATUE OF LIBERTY” by airlines470 licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Who knew it would be so easy?  In Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” he needs real violence for a fascist takeover of the country.  In fact it took almost nothing at all.

We were lulled into complacency.  The institutions setup at our founding had lasted hundreds of years.  They weren’t perfect, but at least we had regular changes of power.

It turns out there was much we overlooked.  It’s easy to make a list now:

–  The Constitution functions only as it is interpreted by the Supreme Court.  A Court majority willing to exercise power can do almost anything.  For starters:  corporations are people; the first amendment precludes any control of money in politics; voting rights are not guaranteed.  Appointments are for life, and reasons for decisions are arbitrary and non-reviewable.

– The President and Senate have complete power over lifetime appointments of judges.  There are no controls on job requirements or procedures for appointment.

– The Attorney General is a creation of the President and can interpret laws in any way that the Supreme Court allows.  He, together with the Court, can quite legally be the President’s enforcer.

– Going one step farther, the impeachment process has laid bare the biggest threat of all, that there is no Constitutional check on a President whose party controls the Senate and will support him as a matter of principle.  Who is left to enforce the law?  In such a case the Constitution becomes a dead letter, supplanted by the whim of the dictator.

There is an old and probably apocryphal story that the mathematician Kurt Gödel, on reading the Constitution to prepare for his US citizenship interview, told Einstein that he was shocked to discover a path for a fascist takeover.  Einstein told him to shut up and get on with it.  It seems Gödel was right.

However institutions are only a part of what we missed.  Apparently the founding fathers were well-aware that in human history democracies have been rare and short-lived.  However as creatures of the Enlightenment, they were rather optimistic about the workings of the human psyche.

With that too there is much to go wrong.

– It turns out that people aren’t terribly rational.  They are intensely tribal and unwilling to change opinions based on facts.  Both advertising experience and economic theory have shown that there are many techniques to successfully manipulate opinions.  Two examples:  the brain confuses ease of access with truth, so that repetition works great; people process issues in bunches, so that opinions about abortion translate conveniently to opinions about tax rates.

– It turns out that even perceptions of factual reality are easily manipulated.  We no longer directly perceive reality; reality is what we glean from the information streams around us.  In the US we already made a terrible mistake (deliberately pushed through under Reagan) to remove the fairness doctrine on television—clearing the way for Fox News and other propaganda channels.  Now we have an even more serious problem with social networks.

– Finally and most fundamentally we’ve misjudged people’s commitment to democracy and fairness.  What we’ve found is that there may have been a commitment out of habit, but it was no more than skin deep.  If you can be sure of winning all the time, why even consider giving it up?  Democracy is just one more item on the list of things where “I just don’t have to care.”

Is there a way back?

Based on history, it seems we need two things:

– A unifying figure as President, to function as a creature for change.  It helps if the person is not too directly tied to factions.

– A renewed commitment to the non-legal underpinnings of democracy.   That is, to the unstated rules of cooperation that made democracy work for 200 years.  Much as you might like to, you just can’t legislate everything.

We like to think about Athenian democracy as a model (ignoring that Athens was in fact a quite unrecommendable imperialistic power).  After the rise of demagogues, they did in fact take the first step back, but they never managed the second.

We’ve been a much more successful democracy than they were, but we’re now at the same juncture.  The 2020 election is perhaps our last chance.

This is not just about an abstract idea of democracy.  With Athens it was the end of economic dominance and everything they stood for.  Same for us too.

Thinking About Manufacturing

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There seems to be a lot of confusion about manufacturing.

We’ll start with a few slogans that pass for generally-accepted truth:

  • Manufacturing is the core of the US economic base.
  • Restoring manufacturing is key to the viability of the US working class.
  • The Chinese have gutted manufacturing in the US.
  • The continuing decline of manufacturing is another indication of the failure of Trump’s economic policies.

One indication that something might be fundamentally wrong in all of that comes from looking at trends in the service and manufacturing sectors over the past twenty years:

mfg_in_gdp_wbsvcs_in_gdp_wb

To say the least, it looks like there is something more fundamental going on than politics or even globalization.   Manufacturing has been declining relative to services for many years and in a big way.  It’s not just because of China, and it’s not even just in the US:

mfg_in_gnp

The US has been undergoing a massive migration from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a services economy. One problem is that we don’t really have a good vocabulary to talk about that situation.  The term “services” goes from McDonald’s to Google.  But in any case manufacturing is no longer the core of national economic success.  Think about television.  The sets have become so cheap that only huge volumes can cover the low margins.  But every major company you can think of wants to get into content to run on those sets.  There are hardly even any DVD’s manufactured for that stuff anymore!

We’ve talked here before about software.  All of the leading high tech companies (including Apple) are software companies.  Software companies produce product without manufacturing.  And that’s only one of the reasons such companies can be very profitable:

– They typically sit on top of the value chain (or even, like Facebook, have only software as output)

– They tend to have monopoly power (because dominant players can afford to spend more on R&D)

– They tend to have high barriers to entry and effective customer lock-in

The world economy today has increasingly many highly-profitable dominant software companies.  Some like Google produce software; others like Apple rely on a world-wide agglomeration of highly-competitive businesses producing to their specs.  Our current national success is that we have lots of them.  Our military strength depends on their technology.  The Chinese are sensible enough to understand that’s where they want to be too.  Even in biotech—where there has to be manufacturing—you’re still talking about largely high-skilled operations in companies with a large emphasis on R&D.

 

It’s a little strong to say it, but it’s closer to reality than most of what we hear:  mass employment in manufacturing is like mass employment in agriculture—it has had its day.  The migration is as extreme as what happened a hundred years ago.  And we’re better off thinking about the consequences than blaming it all on the Chinese or trying to outdo each other with promises to make it go away.

That point of view is widely held (based on the figures), but somehow it hasn’t managed to penetrate public discussion.  That’s not surprising for the Trump people, since they’ve been making it all up from the beginning.  For the left it’s different.  Traditional socialism has always had an industrial flavor that is hard to give up.  Unions and trust-busting are good, but they won’t bring back the past.  Forcing businesses that take federal research money to do manufacturing here will help some but not enough to reverse the trends.

(For the left, one particular paper has been frequently cited to show manufacturing job loss is reversible.   That paper concluded that the large manufacturing job losses from 2000 to 2010 were not due to automation here.  However, for its purposes it only examined companies that remained here and checked how many robots they had.  Nothing was said about the reasons any single company had left.)

The question then is what we should do.  The key is to start considering what we see around us as reality:

  • A long-term trend of decline in manufacturing
  • Very profitable, highly technical, non-manufacturing monopolies
  • Complete neglect of domestic services for the public good

We’ve talked about those trends here before.  As we’ve noted, some of the monopoly power is structural, so it’s not clear how far we’ll get with breaking them up.  However, monopoly power means companies are far from cost-sensitive, so the last thing we need to give them is more tax breaks.  On the contrary what’s crucial is learning to tax them, and we’ve got Apple as proof of how tough that can be.

In this picture the public sector has two important roles:

  1. Preparing the country for success in the world economy. That means infrastructure of all kinds, including education and child care as much as roads and bridges. The private sector won’t do it.  But—with an appreciation for the role of government derived from the second world war—we used to do a better job of it ourselves.
  2. Making sure the wealth of the monopolies gets translated into benefits for the population. This is another case where the private sector can’t act for its own good. Henry Ford famously wanted his employees to be able to buy his cars, but that’s certainly not the ethos of today. This doesn’t mean free money, it means employing people for the unfilled tasks needed for the public good.

We need the public sector to be the means of addressing the country’s unmet needs with resources from gilded-age inequality.

It’s worth pointing out that we have been wasting resources on a spectacular scale.  Under George W. Bush we fought a $3T war with no identifiable benefit and underwent a privatization effort (including tax cuts) that ultimately produced a near-depression.   Under Obama the Republican Congress shut down government, retarding recovery and preventing the public sector from doing any of the jobs just described.  Under Trump the primary achievement has been another $2T of tax cuts, with a jump in inequality and a deficit big enough to prevent any of the infrastructure work from getting done.  That the tax cuts went straight into stock buybacks is a clear indication of irrelevance.

It is instructive to think back to the time when the country underwent the last such a drastic economic change, when we went from an agrarian to an industrial society.   People had a hard time then thinking about it.  They got tied up in an irrelevancy—the silver monetary standard—and it took a long time before the real problems of corporate power and inequality were addressed.  A contemporary Henry Demarest Lloyd expressed his frustration this way: “The free silver movement is a fake. Free silver is the cow-bird of the reform movement. It waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices and labor of others, and then it lay its own eggs in it, pushing out the others which lie smashed on the ground.”

We have something of that problem today.  The long-standing decline in manufacturing is a continuing but unacknowledged reality.  Instead we spend our time blaming it on the immigrants, or the Chinese, or the elites, or some combination of everyone else.  Until the blame game stops we can’t begin to decide how our economy really needs to work in the world we’ve got.  For climate actions we worry about coal miners, but there are many others in the same boat.  There is an international aspect too:  we’re too busy looking for villains to spend time on making the system work for global prosperity.

For our part we think it’s time for the public sector to come in from the cold.   In any case it’s time to stop talking about free silver.

 

 

 

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

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enlightenment

There haven’t been any book reviews on this site before, but Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is something of a special case.  This is a political book with a message that doesn’t quite fit into the current political environment, and it includes a large body of relevant history.  Not surprisingly, Pinker finds Trump antithetical to the Enlightenment precepts he is defending.  But he also finds plenty of guilt to go around.

To start with, the book seems to have two competing objectives:

  1. Validating the fact of human progress and documenting how it has been achieved. This is really a call to action based on humanistic goals.
  2. Providing reasons for optimism about the future. This is different—good things that are going to happen for reasons such as demographics, outside the scope of specific human actors.

On the face of it, a reader expects the first subject to be primary, if only because (at this point in time) you expect any political book to end up with recommendations for what to do.  But that’s not quite where Pinker is going.  He’s trying to view history not just as a demonstration of what works, but also as a way to understand where things are going longer term.  Since the two objectives are different, it helps to treat them one-by-one.

On the first subject, Pinker does a remarkable job of demonstrating the successes that humanity has achieved—In the longer term, in the last century, and in the past few decades. This involves health, security, standard of living, and many other quantitative measures of human welfare.   Much of this is unfamiliar because, as he says, this kind of thing just doesn’t make news.  The book is worth reading for this part alone.  Pinker does a good job of demonstrating progress and what is responsible for that progress:  science, rationality, and a broad-based desire to create a better world for everyone.  It is hard to argue with the historical fact that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

In passing Pinker tries to dispose of past arguments against enlightenment humanism.  As examples:  Humans are inherently irrational (except when they want to make a point).  Humanism is a white racist production (its advocates were on the anti-imperialist side).   Science ignores human values (just plain not true).

Predicting the future is harder, and overall I’d say that Pinker is not well-served by his desire to make things look positive.  He tries to say that nuclear war is improbable, but we know that just one outlier is bad enough.  He treats the climate change movement as a kind of hysteria, because science will just take care of it in time (based on mostly anecdotal evidence).  He views the populist phenomenon as a brief episode of backsliding until more liberal generations take over from the ones now on the verge of dying out.

So in the end it seems a shame that the future predictions tend to dominate discussions of the book, when it’s the first part—the defense of progress—that is its greatest contribution.

And then there is the question of the call to action.  What Pinker espouses is humanism—the broad-based, rational process that has delivered progress.  The problem is that humanism doesn’t have a political party.

Pinker points out that much of the political process just doesn’t work:  Issue-based movements systematically deny progress for fear of losing momentum (even though that means they frequently get caught in the bind of asking for more money to continue going nowhere).  Discussion of issues is based on faulty statistics and dishonest patterns of argument.  Democracy as a whole is not as rational or responsive as we would like to think (the chapter on that subject is well worth reading).  He gives plenty of examples of bad behavior on both the left and the right.  Both sides contributed to the grim view of reality that was instrumental in producing Trump.

So where do we go from here?  Individuals can learn to be more rational in their behavior and in their evaluation of what they see and read.  They can work with the flawed organizations that are fighting bad actors such as Trump.  They can involve themselves with specific issues and help to push them along.  All told—incremental change but no miracle solution.

That’s actually the optimism of the book.   There’s no silver bullet, but the process has worked thus far.  And hopefully we will keep it going.

Strange Revisionist History

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You can almost call it a conspiracy.   The right and the left have decided to rewrite the history of the last election in remarkably similar ways:

The Right:  The election was a thumping rejection of everything liberals stand for.  The public was finally given the opportunity to say so, and it rejected the administrative state and all its policies, both foreign and domestic.

The Left:  The election was a thumping rejection of centrism and its coddling of the right.  Trump’s core voted for him, because the Democrats have become too close to Republicans in outlook.  Other traditionally Democratic constituencies either went to Trump or didn’t vote for the same reason.   The only way to save the country is for the party is to return to its ideological roots on the left.

For starters, one of the most outrageous events in the history of the United States has disappeared from the narrative—the FBI’s deliberate effort to throw the election.   They got away with it, and we may never know what was behind it.   What’s more, of all the elections in recent history, this has got to be the one least fought on the issues.   By all reports, Hillary Clinton’s emails were the only subject on the news for the last two weeks prior to voting.  In fact one of the many national myths that died in this election was the place of truth in our much-vaunted free press.  Finally the Trump phenomenon itself has been whitewashed out of existence.

This is not a trivial matter, because it affects where we as a country go from here.  What follows is a quick summary (from the outside) of what the election was about and what conclusions should be drawn from it.

 

The basic story of this election was simple.  The Clinton campaign tried to make Trump’s character the major issue in hopes of attracting bipartisan support.  Other specific issues came out primarily during the debates, where she was successful (Clinton won the first and third, and tied the second), but not so often after the debates were over.  The focus on character seemed to work well at first, in particular with the discovery of the Trump sex tape.  But it was undermined by the (unsupported) innuendo of the first FBI letter—she was just another crook.  By then it was too late to change tactics, because the press was obsessed with her emails.  More innuendo in the second FBI letter sealed the deal.

For Trump voters this election was a religious experience.  For the rest Clinton’s emails were the issue.  Republicans now voted Republican, the effect of the Russian leaks was amplified, Sanders voters and misogynists had their fears confirmed, and the belief that Clinton would win made for general Democratic complacency.   With the character issue gone, too many people bought Trump’s simplistic economics—“he’s a businessman, I’ll make a buck” or else just didn’t vote.   One example statistic—at Penn State less than half of students registered prior to the election actually voted.  In swing states Clinton lost 4.5 percentage points of advantage in the two weeks following the FBI letter and lost the election by less than 200,000 total votes in four states.  This was so close that even Jill Stein was significant in most of them. (See here for a detailed discussion of factors influencing the election.)  Republican control of Congress was another side of the same coin.

It remains to talk about the Trump phenomenon.   Donald Trump is a demagogue outside the limits of what either party has produced in the recent past.   He is a professional huckster and promised salvation.  He created scapegoats and whipped up his audiences so that they were ready to kill. You can argue that Democrats should have done more for his target population (although the Republican Congress essentially shut down the government for six years), but in the election no honest proposal would have competed with Trump’s lies.  Demagogues are a real problem in a democracy.  A chilling thought is that in Athens, our original model for democracy, once they elected a demagogue it was never possible to go back.

 

This is not to deny that the Clinton campaign made mistakes, but that wasn’t why she lost.  This is my list, always easy after the fact:

– Excessive focus on Trump’s character.  I would have liked more issue-oriented ads.  People needed to understand the reasons to fear Trump’s “change”.  (But that would have complicated a non-partisan appeal.)

– Handling the FBI letters.  Clinton should have taken the high ground—welcomed the examination of her letters as a way to settle the email issue once and for all.  Contrast with Trump’s taxes.  (But the innuendo was still there, and at the time no one could believe that the FBI itself was corrupt.)

– Despite Trump’s comment, Clinton wasn’t nasty enough.  She and the Obamas liked to say “when they go low, we go high”.  This was not a time for class.  She should have gone after Trump as a businessman, with testimonials from the people who denied him financing.  At the end of the campaign Clinton talked about bringing the country together; Trump talked about locking her up.

– Countering Trump’s tweets.  This is a strategy problem going forward.   Tweets seemed to keep Trump on people’s minds much better than traditional grass-roots organizing.

– Top-down campaign.   As canvassers we were told not to change a word of the canvassing scripts, and there was little interest in our impressions of the voters’ concerns.  Trump’s people had ears to the ground.

 

Some Conclusions

– This was not a campaign on the issues, and we shouldn’t pretend it was.  There was no mandate to take the country to the land of the alt-right, and also no proof that the Democratic Party does or doesn’t need ideological changes.

– A major influence on this election was corruption in the FBI—an unimaginable failure of our criminal justice system—and we had better worry about what that says.  The concern is not just for elections but more generally how governments can use the FBI against opposition.   (Anyone who questions the corruption should reread the Comey letters. There have been many explanations of why the letters were written, but none explain the carefully crafted—and unsupported—”she’s a crook” innuendo.)

– The core Trump supporters are not going to change allegiance any time soon regardless of what we propose.  They’ve been promised salvation, and they’ll wait a long time for it.   As one book on group violence puts it, fanatical allegiance may grow out of economic issues, but once it gets going it has a life of its own.  We should understand their problems,  but they’re not going to help in 2018.

– Not all Trump voters are the same.  Those is a good chunk of traditional Republicans who were given a reason to ignore what he is.   Those people are harder to get now that they voted for Trump, but they’re not like the Trump core.  For 2018 if they are worried enough—and they ought to be even on economic grounds—they will come.

– Many things had to go wrong for Democrats to lose this election, starting with the FBI.  The election was so close, just about any one of them effectively decided the vote.   Here is one list:

– First FBI letter

– Russians and Wikileaks

– Misogyny

– Bitter Primary fight

– Second FBI letter

– Obama’s decision not to mention the Russian investigation of Trump

– Belief that Clinton would win (further suppressed vote)

There is no question that an inclusive Democratic party can win.  The biggest issues going forward are voter restrictions (Kobach) and gerrymandering.

– We should not take this election as proof that we need to remake the Democratic Party based on what made Trump successful.  Trump won by lying, not because he had a better solution.  What we do need to do is be preemptively sensitive to all constituencies who have problems.   By the time there is a Trump in the picture he will be hard to beat.

– We have a responsibility to address the problems of Trump core voters, and those problems are both hard and pervasive.   Trump’s win is clear evidence that this is fertile ground for demagogues (here and elsewhere).  It is a real challenge to develop workable, salable economic policy.

– Finally, on a more mundane level, there is clear evidence that campaigns have changed.  The effectiveness of Twitter shows we need to go back to first principles about what works.  This has become a scary, high-tech business, and we had better be sure we’re equipped for the fight.