The will to do what the other guy won't.

Jack Smith buckled. Yes, he can't prosecute a sitting president and yes, Trump would certainly have the charges dropped by his AG once he takes office. But there was no need to drop the charges other than from the justifiable fear that Trump would not only fire him, but do everything he could to ruin him. Of course Trump may still do that since that's why he is; spiteful, vengeful and thin skinned.  SO as he as almost always done, Trump managed to play the system to his advantage.  Anyone else would be locked up my now for doing what he did; and many of the Jan 6th rioters are).    

Perhap this line from "The Usual Suspects" explains how Trump got to where he is today:  

"They realized that to be in power you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't." 

Those who think that checks and balances will keep him from his most egregious excesses are deluding themselves. And for those in his cross-hairs, anyone who he perceives as having wronged him, the next four years are going to be "difficult".   

Corporate censorship at Vistaprint

 

Vistaprint's customer care (apparently doubling as content police) wouldn't print this tee shirt.  It's a replica of one I wanted to buy in Las Vegas but didn't have time. The text reads:

"I don't need sex. The government f*cks me every day"

I added the * to avoid being explicitly offensive but apparently that's still too much for the prudes at Vistaprint, where, obviously, no one uses offensive language. 

Side note - it's unclear what the objection was.  Is it the word "fuck" which, BTY, appears, albeit relatively infrequently, in The Economist? Or is it the use of the word in relation to our government?    

Lame duck? Not yet

E.J. Dionne suggested in his opinion piece today that because this must be Donald Trump's last term, the Senate, and the GOP more broadly, will not be quite as comploientt as Trump might have wanted.  That's wishful thinking. Trump doesn't play by the old rules, rules that tended to restrict political leverage to the political sphere. He is quite prepared to use any means possible to get his way, whether it be whipping up public fervor against his enemies or using the legal system to harass them.  Neither are likely to diminish in potency any time soon. In his campaign, he clearly signalled intent to use the Department of Justice to harass his political opponents. And as the undisputed and charismatic leader of the MAGA movement, his power to apply pressure and ultimately to incite violence against his enemies doesn't depend exclusively on being president, as he ably demonstrated on January 6th 2021.  He has plenty of time to threaten and if needed punish anyone who gets in his way; and as he has said so, explicitly, there can be little doubt that he will. 

Pushing the envelope

This week Donald Trump picked John F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense and Gabbard for director of National Intelligence.

It was always on the cards that none of his pick would be made on the basis of fit or competence, but in these four at least that may be two other motivating factors. The first is to create an early loyalty test for those that require Senate confirmation which these four do.  Not only do not of these candidate have the qualifications or relevant experience for the posts, they are also known public figures that are lightning rods for public support from the MAGA movement, and ire and angst from liberals. Their notoriety creates pressure on the Sante as they decide which way to vote.  Those who chose not to support Trump's picks will be marked 'personae non grata' and the consequences for their futures should not be underestimated.   

The second is to create a straw man for subsequent picks should his fist be rejected.  By nominating the most extreme candidates first Trump may be offering them as sacrifices to garner an obligation from the Senate to confirm subsequent appointments. 

Whoever finally takes up theses posts, one thing is clear; they will not be the political insiders or career civil servants one would normally expect.   

Misconstruing Donald Trump

For nine years we have tended to think of Donald Trump as a real estate mogul turned politician, and as chief executive of a business empire and then of the country.  Perhaps that's part of why the Democrats lost last week. We saw him at his rallies as he tried out new nicknames for his opponents; much of the media coverage was dismissive and condescending.  But rather than thinking of his rambling speeches as policy proposals and position statements, perhaps they are better viewed as comedy routines that he was refining in real time in much the same way that stand-up comics refine their material on the comedy circuit.  Moreover, while the Democrats use consultants to test their messaging with small focus groups, Donald Trump gets feedback from a much bigger group (albeit with a selection bias) and gets paid by his rally attendees for the privilege.

Gales of creative political disruption

In one of the many immediate post-election opinion pieces someone compared Trump's policies to the "gales of creative destruction", a term coined by the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter in his 1934 book "The Theory of Economic Development"[1].  It's an interesting but ultimately flawed analogy.

While social media can bee seen as the technological shift that has created the context for innovation in the political area, there are two critical differences. 

First in business there are clear outcomes that determine which experiments fail and which succeed. The process of variation, selection and retention (which the strategy literature borrowed from evolutionary biology) relies on the selection of the more fit experiments to be retained; but it's unclear that in politics there is a strong relation between measurable outcomes and retention.  (While James March argued in Exploration and Exploitation"[2] that too swift a convergence on one solution precluded experimentation that could 1) lead to a more advantageous position on a hilly (rugged) landscape and 2) prevented adaptation to a slowly changing context, abandoning any connection between the quality of outcomes and retention is more  even problematic).

Second, Schumpeter envisioned a large number of entrepreneurial experiments from which one might emerge as a winner, and has Tushman and Anderson[3] have suggested, would for a period become the dominant paradigm. The analogy to the political arena is that at any point in time there is generally only one experiment, not many, and there can be no cross-sectional comparisons by which to select a more fit approach.  This analogy becomes more disturbing when one realizes that 99% of new ventures fail. That's why logical incrementalism[4,5] is a safer course.  

[1] Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

[2] March, J. G. (1991). "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning." Organization Science 2(1): 71-87.

[3] Tushman, M. and P. Anderson (1986). "Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments." Administrative Science Quarterly 31: 439-465.

[4] Lindblom, C. E. (1952). "The Science of Muddling Through." Public Administration Review 19(2): 77-88.

[5] Quinn, J. B. (1980). Strategies for Change; Logical Incrementalism, Richard D. Irwin.

How to stem the tide?

Just as it did in 2016, Democrats are "going to have to do some soul searching" to understand why their candidate lost to someone who none in their party thought should be electable; but he was - elected.  

In the 16 hours since the presidential race was called for Donald Trump by the AP, major print media platforms have generated page after page of analysis, reflection and recrimination. And just like 8 years ago, there's an almost unanimous call to fundamentally rethink the Democratic party's messaging and policy priorities; but the party is no more likely to turn back the tide of disillusion that is now so clearly sweeping the country than it was then. 

Was is Biden's fault for seeking a second term? Was it the shortness of Harris' campaign? Or the tactical errors in favoring the "ground game" over social and digital media?  The answer certainly includes "all of the above".  Yet that seems to ignore the larger question: how is it that Trump's messaging resonated with more voters than Harris' ?  

The answer it seems to me stems from the increasing isolation of the governing class, particularly on the left,  from the concerns of everyday people.  Is it right to care more about middle class transgender rights than the struggles with poverty in rural communities, even though they are white.  The notion of "white privilege" doesn't sit well with (white) voters in rural communities who are also living paycheck to paycheck. 

Decades ago, the Democrats were the party of the working (in the US 'middle') class while the Republicans were the party of business.  But that's changed.  Now the Republicans claim to speak for the working stiff, while while Democrats spend their time in identitarian classification.  What they have overlooked to their cost is just as now all white people are racist and reactionary, not all people of color are progressives. 

I was stuck by this the cartoon from the Washington Post. The one thing that might help is missing from the suggested "coping mechanisms" - Listening to those you think you  disagree with.  It's something we all need to do more if but most of all its something the political class need to start doing.  Without becoming more responsive to people's everyday concerns the tide will not turn.

Today, the sun rose

I didn't watch the election results as they came in yesterday; they wouldn't have changed had I done so. This morning I got up as usual a little after seven. The sun had risen, Jack, Puggles and Louis were asleep on my legs and the litter boxes needed cleaning. The world was much as I'd left it yesterday: the leak in the spare bathroom was still dripping as was the one on the patio and my to-do list was no longer (or shorter).

All that had changed with Trump's reelection was definitive confirmation of what I had long suspected: that "this is not who we are" is complete bollocks.  For whatever reason over half the country doesn't seem to have a problem with the lies, the racism, the misogyny, the bullying and threats that Trump so proudly displays.  For me, it's is a sad reflection on our collective values but it is who the majority of Americans really are, despite the coastal elites wishing it were not.  

And when Trump leaves the White House in four and a bit years, his values (or rather his lack thereof) will endure; others will replace him in his image.  Like trust, trampling norms and discarding values in a race to a more primitive, visceral, primal bottom is far easier, and happens far faster, than collectively developing and maintaining them.  

The only positive aspect of the outcome is that Trump won the popular vote and the race decisively so we are spared the two months of bickering, uncertainty and ultimately violence to which he subjected us four years ago.  I am thankful for that very small mercy.

The Time is Now

"In the morning when you rise Do you open up your eyes, see what I see? Do you see the same things every day? Do you think of a way to start the day Getting things in proportion?

Have you heard of a time that will help get it together again?  Have you heard of the word that will stop us going wrong?"

These are Jon Anderson's lyrics from "Time and a World" (both the 1970 "Yes" song and eponymous album).  They seem apropos today, November 5th, 2024, as we finish voting in the what feels like the most consequential (and nail-biting) election in my lifetime.   

The moment seems surreal.  Donald Trump announced his intention to run again almost two years ago to the day.  Some (and I was one) thought that after his failed attempt to overturn the results the 2020 election, not to mention his various other legal woes, he wouldn't run again. But whether it was because he needed to to avoid criminal prosecution, or whether he could not admit defeat, or whether he couldn't bear to step away from being the center of attention, he did.   

Perhaps it's not entirely her fault, but Kamala Harris isn't an inspiring candidate. She makes much the same kinds of silly promises politicians often make, appealing sounds-bites but without any details to let you make any assessment as to their practicality. "I'm going to bring down the price of groceries". Seriously? How exactly are you going to do that Madam Vice President?  It's more specific than Trump's "I will fix everything on day one" but no less patronising in its own way.  Certainly, hers has been a short campaign, but she appeared quite unprepared in terms of messaging and that's not altogether comforting.   

So why did I vote for her? My answer is "consider the alternative".  It's a tragic reflection of the terrible state of politics in this country that this is exactly the same "lesser of two evils" justification as motivated my choice to pull the lever for Joe Biden four years ago. 

Last night Seth Meyer listed all the seemingly disqualifying events and characteristics any one of which in normal times would have ended Trump's second run. The list is long, too long to enumerate here, so I'll try a thirty thousand foot view (hopefully not from from a Boeing 737 with a missing door). 

Let me start by admitting there are some things I think he did get right.  China is a threat to the US, both geo-politically and economically. And his focus on illegal immigration, however abhorrently articulated, has brought overde attention to a festering problem that Congress has ignored for decades. He called out Europe for its over-reliance on America to protect the world order.  And despite promoting Ivermectin and bleach as cures for covid, he deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed which got the vaccine into circulation remarkably quickly.  Kamala, in contrast, seems to stand only for pro-choice and "I'm not Trump".     

So why not give him a second chance? For me it boils down to four things: competence, character and motivation, governance and lastly tone.  While he does have clear broad goals, he has shown no interest in the nuance of different policy choices. A CEO who can't be bothered with the details doesn't seem like a good idea. Many of those in his first administration who worked with him make the same point. 

Second there is a question of motivation. He sought office (I think) to garner the attention he seems to crave, because people told him it wasn't possible, because he saw it as a way to enrich himself and his family, and because he likes to wield power.  Now, like Bibi Netanyahu, he wants the office to avoid criminal prosecution. And that's not good.  

His plan to politicise the civil service and his promises to use the levers of power to pursue his political enemies is deeply worrying. We've already seen, in the Washington Post's decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, how just the threat of retaliation has changed the political landscape. 

Finally there is tone. While not entirely alone in this, he has coursened and debased political discourse, reducing it to childish insults that make some feel good and others angry; but they do not inspire, or elevate, educate or inform. They set an example of uncivilised behavior that reduces us to our most primitive, visceral, primal instincts.  He is in short an uncivilised and un-civilizing influence on society.  

I appreciated the eight years of calm under Obama, the feeling that the president was someone who was smart, engaged and who cared deeply about the country.  And as John Oliver noted yesterday on the Late Show, we've lived with Trump's omni-presence since 2015; nine years of bluster, lies, disparagement, childish insults and threats.  To me, it feels like some ghoulish zombie who continues to lumber on, crawling out of the muck, the cesspool of its cruel, vindictive mind, every time it appears to triped itself up with yet another self-inflicted wound.   

Today seems surreal because only in my worst nightmares could I have envisioned electing someone like Trump to any office, let alone the presidency, not just once but twice.  Yet here we are; and there is a real chance (50/50 according to the polling) that he will be.   

But the problem in American politics isn't only Trump; it's a more fundamental failure of the system that with some exceptions (Obama being one) provides us with unappealing choices.   

It's in part structural (the primary system of choosing candidates) and in part financial, the enduring problem of campaign finance.  When politicians spend half their time trying to raise money, they are forced to rely on lobbyists for both money and policy direction; and they seems unable to craft policy choices that reflect the areas of common concerns most people have. So instead they trivialize issues and demonize their opponents; and in doing so they erode trust in the institutions that underpin society.  

So whoever wins this cycle, this seems to be where we're headed.