Archive for the ‘Blowing Sunshine’ Category
Racism, Business and Winning
I was reading through the comments in the Washington Post article “How the NFL Blocks Black Coaches“, and this comment drew my attention:
I was not aware the NFL has affirmative action buried in its mission statement. Let’s be realistic. A .500 season is not what the fans want. If so, it better be supported with an slick near-term winning plan. It matters not the color of the Head Coaches or Position Coaches. Win Baby, Win is the mantra. Also, The NFL now has no time to deal with racism. The league is in a highly funded and focused plan to build a lucrative gambling platform. NFL football is a large audience form of entertainment. Thus Amazon’s entry into the market with Thursday Night Football live steams. I suspect the company will also get a chunk if the gambling revenue too.
The part about the lucrative gambling platform is interesting; unfortunately, it is out of scope for this essay. I will say that I want no part of the sports betting action, and leave it at that.
There were several reader responses based on this logic:
- An NFL team is a species of what we discussed in microeconomics as a firm.
- Firms exist to maximize profit.
- In order to maximize profit, the management of the firm must make cold, rational decisions daily, allowing nothing to get in the way of profit maximization.
- An NFL team maximizes profit by winning games and championships.
Item 1 is, by definition, true. The rest are easily challenged by anyone with real world experience.
Plenty of businesses exist to make life comfortable for the owners or executives. They want to make just enough money to keep the lights on.
Every day, in Corporate America, management teams are making decisions for reasons other than profit maximization. As Art Klein described in Who Really Matters, organizations are run by what he called a core group, and, unless the wolf is at the door and his breathing is audible inside, the people in the core group frequently make decisions to better their own lives rather than to better the financial results of the firm.
Even if the owner of an NFL team is focused on financial results, there are many ways to achive that. For the 20 years ending with the 2021 season, the Raiders had 121 wins and 200 losses. They only made the playoffs 3 times. They moved, yet again, from Oakland to Las Vegas. Yet the team is now estimated to be worth $5.1 billion. The Raiders make $549 million on personal seat licenses; the purchaser is paying for the opportunity to pay more money to actually get a ticket to see a game. The team leads the NFL with $119 million in actual ticket revenue and has an enormous engine marketing licensed products bearing their logo. It is not necessary to have a winning record to keep this machine running.
Racism is bad for profit maximization and business effectiveness. The decision maker is deliberately reducing the candidate pool using criteria having nothing to do with the ability or demonstrated record of the applicant. It does not follow, however, that a decision maker would avoid racism simply for that reason.
There is a lot of material in the Washington Post article. I am not weighing in on the overall merit of the arguments the authors make. Read the article and consider it for yourself. I will say that I believe any commercial business that had the kind of evidence marshalled against it that the Post writers have provided would be in front of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
My point here is that arguments of the form “team owners wouldn’t do that because it would be bad business” do not stand up to real-world experience.
Conservative Has No Meaning
What principles do I have in common with Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Matthew Whitaker, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert?
Absolutely none. No common ground whatsoever. Zilch. Zippo.
All the above named persons spoke at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
- Matthew Whitaker has been openly critical of the principle of judicial review by the Supreme Court of the constitutionality of the actions of the legislature and executive branches, as established in Marbury v. Madison, and stated in 2013 that he believed states have the right to nullify federal laws. Also, let us not forget his pronouncement that “abuse of power is not a crime,” which, while strictly true, is irrelevant to the subject of impeachment.
- Josh Hawley served as Senate henchman to overturn the 2020 election. He wants you to know that he has no regrets.
- Matt Gaetz is little better than a hit man.
- Lauren Boebert is the other congresswoman (besides Marjorie Taylor Greene) who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory.
And, towering over the whole shindig, the featured speaker and golden Moloch, Donald Trump. Here I was thinking that self-restraint was a cornerstone principle of conservatism. Trump has no discernable principles other than his own self-gratification.
Photo credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
This is what the Lord says:
“What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they strayed so far from me?
They followed worthless idols
and became worthless themselves.”
— Jeremiah 1:5
I can find no principles that anyone who ever advanced conservative thought would recognize as conservative. Rule of law? No, they want to be ruled by the Great Leader, subject to his daily whims and vindictive impulses. Limited government? Not hardly; they have a king wannabee and high priests such as Whittaker and Sanders. Equal rights for all citizens? No chance; they want to take over the swamp, not to drain it. Under the leadership of Trump, Gaetz and Boebert, they are reviving the Know-Nothing Party (which also was rife with conspiracy beliefs).
The priests did not ask,
‘Where is the Lord?’
Those who deal with the law did not know me;
the leaders rebelled against me.
The prophets prophesied by Baal,
following worthless idols.
— Jeremiah 1:8
Rick Scott had some interesting remarks at CPAC:
There are plenty of people in Washington who were hoping that we can go back to regular order. Go back to where the Republican Party used to be. They want to retreat to a safe space.”
[Source: Fox News]
Scott’s position is that the Republican Party cannot go back to the condition it was in before 2015. He elaborated on this in an interview with Chris Wallace. When Wallace asked if the Republican Party is still the Donald Trump Party, Scott replied, “It’s the voters party. I mean, it always has been the voters party.”
Scott is correct that there is no going back to the pre-2015 Republican Party, which the grassroots hates. However, there is a missing dimension in Scott’s analysis: leadership.
There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.
— Attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874).
Giving in to the segment of voters who are most ignorant and prone to magical thinking is not leadership. Yes, there was a lot not to like about the former Republican establishment. Voters were dissatisfied, but that dissatisfaction can be channeled in a number of different ways. I can understand being dissatisfied; I cannot understand being so desperate as to give a con man the keys to the house.
Scott is currently the point person in the Republican Party leading the effort to retake Congress, so big talk is part of his job description. However, before getting to far ahead of himself, he might want to take a close look at Cobb County, Georgia. The county is a suburban county northwest of Atlanta; Marietta is the county seat. Cobb County used to be reliably Republican; in 2012, Mitt Romney carried the county with 55.25% of the vote. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won the county with 56.34% of the vote. Two months later, in the Senate runoff, Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both carried the county, with Ossoff scoring 56% of the vote and Warnock doing even better. Democrats have also won in important local offices. If Republicans cannot retain such suburban strongholds, their future in the Senate does not look promising.
I can now say with certainty that the term conservative has no remaining ideological meaning. It joins the term liberal, which has had no meaning for the past ninety years. They are just labels for office seekers. They are merely advertising words, no different in effect than the old General Motors trademark phrase, “The Mark of Excellence.”
“Long ago you broke off your yoke
and tore off your bonds;
you said, ‘I will not serve you!’
Indeed, on every high hill
and under every spreading tree
you lay down as a prostitute.”
— Jeremiah 2:20
These people can have the term conservative. When they are through with it, no one will want it. They will foul anything they touch.
I’m with Stupid
There is a tendency among Americans to assume that most other Americans are idiots. This may be universal; I haven’t spent enough time in other countries to comment. The belief that most other people are stupid is dangerous, and I shall explain why.
This idea has a long tradition, with roots that can be found in Plato’s Republic. The ideal society, he argued, would be ruled by those most qualified, and would direct others to spend their time and energy on pursuits that the ruling elite thought were worthy. Through the twentieth century, there have been a large number of persons who expressed their displeasure at the rest of us for how we put our increasing disposable time and wealth to use. Some of them were caustic, such as Mencken; others simply despaired of us.
No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
— H. L. Mencken, “Notes on Journalism“, 1926.
The position that the majority of people are stupid is seductive. It an easy position for which to assemble evidence. All one need do is drive around in traffic in a metropolitan area.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
— George Carlin
When one decides that the majority of other people are stupid, one can stop wasting time and energy trying to persuade them. The effort is a fool’s errand, a bootless exercise. Democracy — yes, yes, a noble idea, but what can we achieve it when so many people are so stupid? The don’t get it, they won’t get it, no power on earth is going to make them get it. We will just have to put all power in the hands of the vanguard who do get it. Temporarily, of course.
When you look at historical examples, such as the early Soviet Union, the vanguard did not get larger as the tribunes of The People took power and proved the correctness of their doctrines. No, the vanguard continually shrank. In the Soviet Union, a nation then over 120 million people, the vanguard contracted to a pulsating circle around one man: Joseph Stalin. This is not a historical accident, but an inevitability.
The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.
— David Oglivy (1911-1999)
Neither intelligence nor smarts are linear. My parents used to sneer privately at a family friend who was an engineer but “couldn’t change a spark plug.” Did he need to? He made enough money to have someone else do that for him. He made an economic decision to invest his time in other ares than auto maintenance.
Now I can’t change the spark plugs in my truck because I can’t physically reach them. I would have to lift the cab off the chassis. Where does that leave me?
The willingness to consign other people en masse to the wastebasket of tasteless stupidity is seductive and dangerous. The concept offers a ready handle for the intellectual bully and con artist. Of course, I am one of the smart and tasteful people, and you can verify your membership in the club by agreeing with me. As for them, well, what can one expect? Certains l’ont, d’autres pas! You’re not one of them, are you? Once we have established that you don’t want to be lumped in with them, there is no limit to what I can put over on you. I have you by the nose.
Not only is the belief that we are surrounded by stupid people dangerous, it isn’t true. Because someone has different priorities than I do, or allocates her time differently, or has different aspirations, it does not follow that she is stupid.
When I was in high school, I knew peers who were taking functional math and barely passing that. Yet, they could devise schemes for cutting school and getting away with it. They weren’t stupid. They had been told how stupid they were by adults and were living down to expectations. I don’t doubt that there was also some element of self-assertion involved, as Paul Goodman described in Growing Up Absurd: “I won’t, you can’t make me.”
A child surrounded by adults telling him how stupid he his will usually conform to those expectations. If he is to prevail against this pressure, his best chance is to have an adult who believes in him visibly and publicly in his corner. If he doesn’t have that, he is going to need outstanding reserves of fortitude, will and individuality.
And still the family survives. It has survived all manner of stupidity. It will survive the application of intelligence.
— Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914), p. 235.
Are voters stupid? Maybe they are poorly informed, but whose doing is that? Don’t we have a public education system that is supposed to teach them what they need to know to discharge their duties as citizens? After over a hundred years of high-sounding goals and exhortation — going back to Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education — where are the results?
Intelligence has its own pitfalls. There are many people who are intelligent, but far fewer who have ever studied how to use that ability properly. Many intelligent people are verbally fluent, but their arguments are, on close examination, specious.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
— George Orwell, “Negative Nationalism”
It does not follow that the person having greater intelligence, higher learning or more expertise necessarily has a better ability to create effective public policy in all circumstances. This is not an anti-intellectual position, but a recognition of historical events that have occurred just in my lifetime. There is a reason why David Halberstam titled his history of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ conduct of the Vietnam War The Best and the Brightest. The men he profiled were recognized as such, with the right educations and the right credentials, and they still lost their way.
In the end, stupid is in the eye of the beholder. Resist the urge to infer stupidity on others who do not start out with your beliefs.
Maladministration Or Abuse of Power?
Even before the presentations at the Senate week, Alan Dershowitz had been making the rounds, drawing a straight line between maladministration and abuse of power. It is important to understand the distinction.
Madison was right to object to maladministration, saying, “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Democrats thought that G. W. Bush was practicing maladministration; after the 2006 elections, in which Democrats gained both houses of Congress, they could have impeached Bush for maladministration. Republicans took control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014; they similarly could have impeached Obama for maladministration. If maladministration were grounds for impeachment, we would devolve into a parliamentary system, as Dershowitz correctly observes. Any President who lost the confidence of Congress would be out on her or his ear.
So we have to make a distinction between abuse of power and mere maladministration. The English Civil War established that abuse of power was not tolerable in our political life. It further separated us from politics on the European continent, where people often shrug and accept despotism. We were willing to do what many of the Europeans were not: fight for our rights.
If it were only my own particular case, I would have satisfied myself with the protestation I made the last time I was here, against the legality of the Court, and that a King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth: but it is not my case alone, it is the freedom and the liberty of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties. For if power without law, may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or any thing that he calls his own.
— Charles I at his trial for treason, January, 1649
Charles I always maintained that he was above the law, and only God could call a king to account. Parliament said otherwise, and he was beheaded on 30 Jan 1649.
There is a contract and a bargain made between the King and his people, and your oath is taken: and certainly, Sir, the bond is reciprocal; for as you are the liege lord, so they liege subjects … This we know, the one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign; the other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if this bond be once broken, farewell sovereignty! … These things may not be denied, Sir … Whether you have been, as by your office you ought to be, a protector of England, or the destroyer of England, let all England judge, or all the world, that hath look’d upon it.
— Judge John Bradshaw, replying to Charles in his trial.
The story of Charles I was part of the English Constitution that preceded the American Revolution and formed the legitimate foundation for the rebellion. You can read Bradshaw’s rejoinder, substituting America for England and directing it at Parliament rather than the King. In the 1765 debate in the Virginia legislature over the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry referenced the experience of Charles I, which he expected all legislators would know and understand. While there was no verbatim record, his remarks have come down through history as:
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles his Cromwell and George the Third my profit by their examples. Sir, if this be treason, make the most of it.
It is manifestly clear that all of the Founders understood the meaning of the English Civil War and rejected the concept of a regal President who could declare “the law is in my mouth” and make it stick.
Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
We the People have strayed far from the ideals of the Constitution. We allowed the development of an imperial Presidency. We allowed the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to wither from disuse. We allowed Congress to delegate its powers to the Executive, or to independent agencies with no practical political accountability to anyone. We allowed a President and his court to intimidate the Supreme Court into going along with this back in the 1930s. This has been going on for decades, longer than most of us have been alive. We sold our birthright cheap to a strong person who promised to lead us out of one national emergency or another.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. The façade only stood up as long as presidents were content to respect the norms of political conduct as they had evolved over the past century. Now we have one that manifestly does not; he told us so during the 2016 campaign.
The idea that abuse of power is not grounds for impeachment is ridiculous on its face. It does not deserve a serious refutation. Nevertheless, the distinction that Dershowitz raises, while he tries not to, is important. Abuse of power cannot be simply political conduct with which Congress disagrees. There has to be a meaningful standard that raises it from the politically controversial to the constitutionally mendacious. Where is that line to be drawn?
How to Screw up an Impeachment
The Democrats are making a mess out of the effort to impeach Donald Trump. This has fewer and fewer prospects of ending well for the country.
I am not saying that there is no merit to the argument that Trump should be impeached — I will discuss the merits later in this essay. Neither am I saying that there is no path to successful impeachment and conviction. I am saying that the Democrats are not on that path, for these principal reasons:
- Preference toward preaching to the already converted;
- Inability to tell a story that is meaningful to people outside the Acela Corridor;
- Attempting to impose a judicial template on a political process;
- Distrust by a large number of voters.
I have addressed the issues of voter distrust of the Democrats and issues some voters have had with journalists prior to 2015. I will summarize these by saying that many voters do not trust the motives of people calling for impeachment.
Progressives excel at preaching to the choir. They can make a very convincing case to people who already start by accepting Progressive principles. For those that do not already buy into the Progressive agenda, not so much.
To be fair, Donald Trump’s shtick only works for people who are also already predisposed to believe it. However, the Democrats are the people who must win hearts and minds if the impeachment effort is to succeed. They have to figure out how to advance the ball. Otherwise, any impeachment dies in the Senate.
For years, Tom Steyer has been campaigning to raise popular support to impeach Trump. On his website explaining the campaign, he accused Trump of Engaging in Reckless (foreign policy) Conduct and Violating Immigrants’ Right to Due Process. These two charges are highly illustrative of the nature of the Democrats’ overall approach.
Many of Trump’s supporters would argue that Barack Obama was the person who really engaged in reckless foreign policy conduct. They wanted someone who would go about the business differently, and they sure found their guy in Trump. Is his way better than the methods used by Obama or George W. Bush? We can discuss that, and it would be a good discussion to have, but it’s still a distraction from the matter at hand. Trump is the guy in the White House now. We don’t forfeit the right to call him to account because of what his predecessors did or did not do.
You could argue that Trump really has no discernable foreign policy. But what makes his conduct so far out of bounds that it merits an impeachment charge? How is it different in scale from, say, FDR’s attempts to support Britain and his imposition of an oil embargo on Japan in 1941? Many American isolationists were angry about that at the time. How do we tell what are normal policy differences, as compared to an impeachable dereliction of duty?
This is going to shock some people, but there are Americans who believe that immigrants don’t have the right to due process. You find that objectionable? Work on convincing them why granting immigrants due process rights is better for the country, in terms your audience will understand. This does not mean simplifying your language to the fourth-grade level; it means building a logical argument up from premises they accept, not premises you accept. Steyer simply takes as read that “cruel and unusual imprisonment of children and their families” is unacceptable and interprets the administration’s actions in that light. Steyer even shows that he understands that, “This policy was meant to deter families from attempting to cross the border.” You want to argue that the policy is not going to work, because these people are running from conditions far worse than we could ever cook up? Fair enough, argue it. Support your argument with evidence. Don’t plan on just reiterating it, because other people are not buying it yet.
It would be one thing if the Democrats showed that Steyer’s approach is not representative of their mindset, but quite the opposite is true. Anyone who does not already accept Progressive principles is just some knuckle-dragging rube emerging from the forest. The general Progressive pattern for discussing politics with people who don’t share your values is:
- Get on your high horse and act like anyone who doesn’t accept your premises is a sociopath.
- Impute repugnant beliefs to your opponent to force her/him on the defensive (e.g., “you just hate poor people”).
- Call your opponent extremist names (e.g., racist, misogynist, homophobe).
- Engage in intellectual bullying (e.g., “everyone knows John Rawls established that inequalities should benefit the least advantaged”).
- Discount anyone who still does not bend to your will; they are stupid and irredeemable.
This is not, by design, a methodology for reaching people where they are and building consensus.
The Mechanics of Impeachment
We can see that there are an abundance of Congressional representatives who used to be prosecutors, because their mental model for impeachment is a grand jury and they swear up and down that their motives are not political. This is ridiculous; impeachment is a political act. The Democrats are trying to take the politics out of politics.
I don’t want ordinary citizens tried on a political basis (or a social basis; we have too much of that already). The prosecutor shows his case to a grand jury, who does or does not issue an indictment. If the defendant is indicted, he goes to court and has the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. There is no place for a prosecutor to demonstrate leadership by inventing charges against everyday citizens who had broken no law, as Mike Nifong did in the Duke Lacrosse case. Nifong was ultimately disbarred for his handling of the case.
A public official is different, because public officials can commit misfeasance, which is the wrongful exercise of lawful authority. It is not a crime, and does not involve criminal activity. In the classic misfeasance case, the offender scrupulously avoids criminal acts, but still acts in breach of his duty of care to the office he occupies. The accusation of misfeasance requires political leadership on the part of the accuser, who must show that the accused willfully put his own interests above those of the people he serves. This, in turn, requires that the accuser must persuade others that he has correctly identified the interests of the people he serves, and must demonstrate how the actions of the accused were deliberate and harmful.
The Democrats occasionally make forays toward this objective, but their hearts are clearly not in it. For example, Hakeem Jeffries was on Chris Wallace’s show last Sunday. He started to tell the right story:
Madison indicated that the House should serve as a rival to the executive branch because the Founders didn’t want a king, they didn’t want a dictator, they didn’t want a monarch. They wanted a democracy.
OK, most of them didn’t want a democracy, either, but they did want a republic with representative government, consent of the governed and an accountable executive. But then Jeffries lapsed back into the specifics of this one incident, involving aid to Ukraine:
We’re here at this moment right now because the president decided to pressure a foreign government to target an American citizen for political gain, and at the same time withhold $391 million in military aid from a very vulnerable Ukraine, which is an ally to the United States and is still at war with Russian-backed separatists in Crimea.
The defenders of the president will argue, among other things, that this specific incident does not merit impeachment. Round and round we will go.
This is why the Mueller investigation was such a fizzle. The investigation was not the “nothing-burger” Trump partisans claimed it to be. Mueller was smart enough, however, to present his investigative findings and stop there (he didn’t want to be Ken Starr when he grew up). He correctly determined that it was above his pay grade to reach a conclusion as to whether the facts he presented in his report merit impeachment. That is the job of Congress, and the Democrats in the House don’t seem to want to do it.
Instead, they are going all over hell and half of Georgia, looking for a criminal act to hang around Trump’s neck. If they keep baiting him like this, they may eventually get one, but they don’t need one to justify impeachment.
Proper Grounds for Impeachment
Abuse of power is not a crime.
— Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker
This is at once completely true and utterly irrelevant. As described above, abuse of power need not involve any criminal act at all. Nevertheless, are we going to tolerate abuse of power? It is certainly legitimate grounds for impeachment. It had better be, or we’re up the creek.
This president is impersonating a divine-right monarch. The Anglo-American political tradition does not turn the government loose with no restrictions. Our political ancestors fought and died to uphold this doctrine. Whether your biological ancestors came from England, Ireland, Nigeria or Colombia, this is a valuable political tradition that we must uphold.
No learned lawyer will affirm that an impeachment can lie against the King … one of their maxims is, that the King can do no wrong.
— Charles I at his trial for treason, 1649.
The Founders were well aware of Charles’ attempts to be a despot. They would have laughed anyone out of the room who had advocated the position that the president can do no wrong. The absence of language proscribing abuse of power in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution is because it never occurred to them that any American would argue in favor of presidential abuse of power.
Trump has demonstrated a pattern of expansive abuse of presidential power. Supporting evidence comes not only from the current incident where he sought to shake down the Ukrainian government, but his expansive use of emergency powers to defy the will of Congress and build his wall. His everyday language demonstrates that he cannot separate his office from his person: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Objections
I know that readers are going to have objections. Let me get out in front of some.
Trump is trying to overcome the Deep State and restore America to the people. Impeachment is the final, desperate act of the swamp that Trump is fighting to drain.
Trump is only interested in draining the swamp long enough to throw the current residents out and install his coterie in their place. Maybe you are tired of seeing David Gergen stand up in front of his Kennedy School of Government wallpaper and express his exasperation with the Trump Administration. Is Jared Kushner an improvement on Gergen? I think not.
Elizabeth Warren is also having problems with the Establishment. Democratic donors are afraid she will lose the general; more importantly, they are terrified that she will win and enact the policies she is talking about. They are not going to sit there and wait for the hammer to fall on them. They are going to take countermeasures. The bigger they are, the harder they hit.
I have never seen a political success model built upon multiplying your enemies. Sure, Trump has enemies because his stated goals threaten their power and perquisites. He adds more enemies because his shtick depends on him being surrounded by enemies. He adds still more because he gets his jollies from humiliating people. That adds up to a lot of enemies. He has an astonishing ability to defy political gravity, but his day of reckoning is coming.
Trump is the only thing standing between us and a Democratic takeover, where they will destroy the economy, recreate the nanny state and redistribute wealth from the deserving to the undeserving, slicing off a healthy piece for themselves.
That’s one hell of a champion you have selected. He has at most five more years, if he does not go down in flames before then. When he goes, to whom will you turn? You will be discredited because of your support for this abusive con man. The persuadable middle of the electorate will not listen to you, because they will remember how you made excuses for Trump. They will throw the keys to the country to the Democrats in reaction, and it will be even worse than you imagine.
This is all happening because Trump is not an experienced politician, and the Washington establishment is jumping on him because he does not know all the political moves.
I am continually amazed by the ability of the Trump following to make excuses for him. If you want to play in national politics, it is your responsibility to learn the political moves. If you can’t be bothered to do that, you deserve what is coming to you.
The impeachment is unfair because the Republicans are not being allowed to call their own witnesses.
I have seen this movie before. It will also be unfair because Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan don’t get to smack Hunter Biden around the committee room on national television, and because Nancy Pelosi hasn’t stood on her head in front of the Lincoln Memorial and whistled “Dixie”.
I know this game. Trump will make up objection after objection as to why the impeachment is invalid, and his defenders will breathlessly try to keep up as the story changes from day to day. Trump was telling the truth, for once: he is the team. Other people will go out on a limb for him today, and he will saw it off behind them tomorrow.
Speaking of the truth, I know you are tired of hearing it, but Trump couldn’t care less about it. He is post-truth. He uses words to paint verbal pictures and influence people for whatever purpose he has right now. If you’ve ever read Atlas Shrugged, you may remember the phrase the expediency of the moment. The expediency of the moment is what Trump is all about. Kiss accountability goodbye. How can you hold a politician accountable when you can’t believe anything he says?
We may want to rewrite the presidential oath of office to include some language about recognizing that truth corresponds to reality. Meanwhile, we have this situation to deal with now.
Our Survey Says …
Why are political surveys wrong so often? Bob Seeman took on this question, and provided a good starter set of answers addressing common biases in surveying. Survey providers strive to overcome these biases, with varying degrees of success.
I want to introduce a more systemic problem that has crept in over several decades: the fragmentation of mass society in America.
Every time I look at the methodology of a national political survey, the sample size is between 1,000 and 2,000 respondents. Before 1980, that used to work. We thought we had come to the End of Ideology, where political questions were largely settled, and what we had to resolve was the means of implementing those settled answers.
Ideology began its comeback in June 1978, when Howard Jarvis led California Proposition 13 to successful adoption. It was in full display in the 1980 election, evidenced by the Reagan Democrats.
Prior to 1980, the New Deal Coalition was still a reliably dominant mass voting bloc. As the linked article states, it began to show cracks in 1968, but it wobbled on through the 1970s. By 1980, it completed splintered.
Before 1980, pollsters were trying to find the mass of the American consensus. If your poll result said that 70% of Americans agreed with a particular assertion, you probably had a useful result. Maybe a wider sample would show that only 60% of Americans agreed with the proposition, but it would still be a majority.
Since 1980, the American consensus has completely atomized. Consumer marketers are having problems keeping up as well. Zip Code market segmentation was invented around 1990. It was also a shock to marketers that a statistically significant number of guys who bought their suits at Brooks Brothers would buy their socks at Wal-Mart.
For comparison purposes, there were about 150 million adult Americans in 1980. There were about 190 million adult Americans in 2016. Simply scaling the number of respondents proportionally is not the answer.
At this time, a sample of 2,000 adults is not adequate to predict the thoughts and behaviors of 190 million American adults. Polling organizations are going to have to radically increase their sample sizes, at least until new consolidating trends emerge.
Offshoring Our Drug Problems
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (still known as CDC) estimated in 2016 that over 10% of all Americans aged 12 or had used any illicit drug in a month, and 2.3% had a “nonmedical” use of a psychotherapeutic drug in a month.
The War on Drugs has been going on literally since Rob and Laura were on prime time. What are we getting for our efforts? How do we even discuss recreational drug use intelligently? It’s a complicated and emotionally loaded subject; I need a drink.
Origins
Back in 1900, recreational drug use was legal. No one had even thought of criminalizing drugs at the federal level. The primary active ingredients in Coca-Cola at that time were cocaine and caffeine (the Coca-Cola company denies ever including cocaine in Coca-Cola).
The Progressive movement of 100 years ago included many proponents of what we now call scientific racism. This had a cultural dimension: the claim was that these Others, who included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Asians, Negroes and Hispanics were going to spread crime and disorder, undermine American democracy and even ruin the genetic future of the country. Maybe “real Americans” could be trusted to moderate their use of substances like cocaine and opium, but these degenerate Others could not.
In response to these pressures, inflated by lurid stories of crazed, drug-sodden minority men run riot and — wait for it — assaulting white women, Congress passed some legislation. The centerpiece was the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which heralded the entry of the federal government into regulation of drug use.
This act also enabled a black market in drugs, which is still with us to this day. Any business student should be able to explain this. The enforcement of laws against drug use creates a barrier to entry for competitors who supply drugs. Criminals have to be sufficiently organized to managed the additional risks and spread the corruption so that they can operate in such an environment. Unorganized criminals cannot compete effectively.
The Psychology of the War on Drugs
For most of the 20th century, when people used drugs recreationally (or got drunk on alcohol), they did not assert that theirs was exemplary behavior that should be a model for everyone. Quite the opposite; there was something furtive and a little shameful about getting high. It was done behind closed doors. It was not something you wanted to do in full view of your in-laws, co-workers or fellow parishioners.
Nevertheless, there are people who are prone to get high or smashed every chance they get. It is beyond the scope of this essay to get into the nature of addiction, and I am not a subject matter expert on that, anyway. I am taking it as given that you have a subset group of people who are prone to addiction by nature or nurture, and a larger group that will make rational decisions about how to spend their day. There are enough of these people to create the statistics that I cited at the beginning of this essay, leading people to say that we, in America, have a Drug Problem.
Cognitive Dissonance
How did nice, proper, well-intentioned people like us get a Drug Problem? It does not compute. The situation, particularly when you or someone in your family is involved, present a contradiction between your beliefs about people and your observations of facts. This contradiction is emotionally charged and resists resolution.
Situations like this are known to provoke cognitive dissonance. The facts have to change, because the beliefs are not subject to question. It cannot be that we brought a Drug Problem upon ourselves. Why would we do that? It’s not who we are. There must be some outside force that is preying upon us.
Splitting and Projection
Defense mechanisms beget more defense mechanisms. How to rationalize the apparent facts and still uphold existing beliefs?
The next step is splitting: break off this undesirable aspects from ourselves. In order to recover our psychological equilibrium without facing the contractions, there really are not many alternatives.
Having split off these negative aspects from ourselves, what do we do with them? We have to find some Other onto whom we can project them. Looking at the history, it should be no surprise that Hispanics are a popular target.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
— Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for President, 16 Jun 2015
See? He doesn’t really hate Hispanics. It’s just that the Drug Problem has to be somebody’s fault. It can’t be ours, because we’re Americans! Don’t take it personally.
We never did get clarity on this question: in what way is Mexico sending people? Does the government have policies to select people to emigrate? Do people gather in the town square and choose whose turn it is? Does a Mexican unemployment office have a rack with little pamphlets addressing such topics as How to evade US immigration and What to say when people ask where you grew up? Someone please explain this to me.
Supply and Demand
As an economist, I want to start with the positive aspects of the illegal drug business — what is happening — rather than the normative aspects — what ought to be happening. Especially since we don’t have agreement on what ought to be happening.
The Supply Side
The campaign against drugs puts extensive effort into restricting the supply of illegal drugs into this country. Government agencies routinely announce big drug busts and high-value seizures of contraband. Yet, anyone in this country who wants illegal drugs knows how and where to obtain them.
To set up an organized crime ring to bring drugs into America, you really need several things:
- People who are willful;
- People who are enterprising;
- People who are violent;
- People who want to make a buck and don’t particularly care how;
- Access to sources of supply.
Any society has criminals. Among these are people who are willful, enterprising and violent. They want to make a buck and they don’t particularly care how. The people who don’t want to make a buck that badly just sit around being poor, and the people who care how they make a buck don’t go in for crime.
So Latin America has criminals who, being criminals, meet the first four requirements. Being in Latin America, they have access to sources of supply. All the boxes are checked. It’s not a moral failing caused by being Latin American.
For the longest time, Colombia was a world leader in the production and processing of psychoactive drugs. Colombian cartels were making cocaine at a cost of $1,500/kilo and bringing it to the US, where the estimated 2014 street price ranged as high as $50,000/kilo. Ask anyone in the distribution business her or his opinion of a business venture with a 3,000% gross margin.
The US government has leaned on Latin American countries to curb the production and exportation of illegal drugs. This policy has generated a large quantity of ill will down in Latin America. Even farmers growing coca, who are not engaged in any practice that is illegal where they operate, resent the expectation that they will discontinue a profitable operation because the gringos can’t control their own consumption of drugs.
The cartels have started strategic expansion. They have targeted the so-called Central American Triangle: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. These countries are not only geographically closer to the target market, but they offer an attractive operating climate for a criminal cartel, including poverty, corruption, weak public institutions and public distrust of government and the police. Violence has exploded in these countries:
| UN Office on Drugs and Crime | |
| deaths by intentional homicide, 2017 | |
| Nation | Deaths per 100,000 people |
| El Salvador | 82.84 |
| Guatemala | 27.26 |
| Honduras | 56.52 |
| United States | 5.35 |
| Canada | 1.68 |
| Japan | 0.28 |
| United Kingdom | 1.20 |
| France | 1.35 |
We have basically farmed our Drug Problem out to these countries. The cartels are (further) destabilizing these states. The states don’t have the means to cope effectively. Throwing the gang members in prison just increased the effective control of the prisons by the gangs.
These developments have materially altered the flow of people out of these countries. The typical migrant used to be an adult male who wanted to find more remunerative work, often to remit money home to his family. Now, we are seeing entire families on the move. People outside of cities are typically rooted to the land, and only consider leaving in numbers when a massive, terrifying threat such as the Red Army bearing down on them.
People in the Central American Triangle are facing such a threat, in the form of the drug cartels. These cartels are violent, they actively recruit and they demand tribute from local farmers and businesses. The murder rates in these countries illustrate the collapse of social order the cartels have brought about. One percent of the people who had been living in Guatemala and Honduras in September 2018 have left for the United States. Through the War on Drugs, we have built an umbrella over these cartels, allowing them to turn Latin American countries into failed states.
The Demand Side
We still prosecute people here for possessing or distributing illegal drugs. However, we know that there are several problems with the incidence of prosecution. A kid in the inner city is far more likely to go to prison for possessing drugs than is a kid in an affluent suburb. Prosecutors often go after persons having low-level or incidental involvement, who are easy to nail, rather than the serious drug dealers, who have the money to get a good lawyer.
Then we have to discuss the processes for making addicts. OxyContin is an opioid painkiller. introduced in 1996. The number of opioid prescriptions written in the US has quadrupled since then. After five days of continuous use, a person is much more likely to become dependent on opioid painkillers. Then, after the prescriber cuts the patient off, the patient goes looking for underground sources. The street price of heroin is lower than the street price of black market opioid pharmaceuticals, so the patient switches over to heroin.
By any sensible measure, the War on Drugs has not curbed demand. Nor is it going to. I am not calling for increased prosecution of drug addicts, because that not only denies treatment to people who need it, but is going to result in more of the same misapplied consequences I have just described.
So What Do We Do?
I know people who have had family members become addicted to drugs. I can barely imagine what that must be like to live with. I understand why people who have been through that experience would want to restrict the supply of illegal drugs by any means available.
However, we are not going to control drug addiction by restricting supply; we will simply maintain a black market with no quality controls. Furthermore, the operators in that market now have so much money that they can compete with national governments, challenging the government’s monopoly on violence and imposing their own tax collection. We are making failed states in the Americas, and producing the human wave of migrants that our own border protection services cannot handle.
We must admit that the War on Drugs, as currently conceived, is destined to fail. It has produced unacceptable levels of human casualties and we are nowhere near our objectives. It is a foreign policy disaster, with consequences that will go on for decades.
Such an admission will mean reviewing the conditions that make drug abuse a rational choice for many people. It requires a deep dive into autonomy, personal choice and consequences. That discussion will make many people’s heads hurt; the issues that caused all the cognitive dissonance have not gone away. But we cannot continue politically, economically or morally with the policies we have in place.
Partisan Politics
We are told that we are in a time of partisan politics. We hear people saying, “It’s not about left and right; it’s about right and wrong.” The very word politics appears to have dirty connotations. Some people want to do The Right Thing, but other people undermine them through politics. How are we to interpret all this?
Politics
Politics is the term for the activities involved in determining what a group of people are going to do as a collective. It can be conducted well or badly, for high principles or base motives. Politics itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. To have collective action, the individuals in the collective must have some means of determining whether the collective should engage in that action or not.
There has to be a process that everyone buys into in which the decision is made and everyone who didn’t agree with the decision accepts it. Otherwise, the group flies apart the first time a contentious issue has to be resolved. The group can anoint someone king and do whatever the king says. The group can create a central committee, where committee members represent various constituencies. There are different ways of categorizing the governance of a collective, but all have varying strengths and weaknesses in confronting a common and repeating set of problems in the collective life of the group.
Beyond Politics
In the Age of Reason, people sought to work out great questions on a rational basis. One of the great projects of the period, also known as the Enlightenment, was: How do we govern a nation, which is a collective, and work out collective goals equitably and from rational principles? People were no longer willing to accept governance on the basis of either divine commands or natural law derived from religion. There were too many religions, and people recoiled from 150 years of Europeans killing each other over choice of religion.
Ultimately, Enlightenment philosophers hoped to work out a single optimal way to determine how everyone ought to live, both individually and collectively.
An example of a plan for the individual was Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus. The zenith of the plan for the collective was described in 1878 by Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of the more famous Karl Marx. Although writing well after the Enlightenment ended, Engels captured the nut of the aspiration for society:
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.
The government of persons takes in politics, law and systems of justice. According to Engels, they become superfluous because we know the one right answer to questions such as How should we live together? Then life is simply a matter of implementation. We wouldn’t need politics if we all had unity of thought, arriving at the same answers to such questions. All citizens would unanimously agree on the answers to what are now contentious political questions, and we could just use techniques from decision science and operations research to figure out how best to get from here to there.
If you are reading this and thinking that this is not going to really happen before the Second Coming, I agree with you.
Progressivism
I have resisted calling the people on the American left Liberals. I consider it far more justified to identify them as Progressives, because of their faith in capital-P Progress.
In terms of making a better life for everyone, I am entirely invested in progress. Progress has worked child mortality down in the US from over 46% in 1800 to under 1% lately. I invite anyone who doesn’t like progress to have oral surgery the old-fashioned way, with a jug of hard liquor. However, many Enlightenment thinkers went farther than considerations of material welfare. They hoped that progress would reveal the one truth that would realize the vision Engels articulated, so that we would know the Right Answers to political questions.
That hope is never gone away. It is why they talk about being on the right side of history. If history is going in a particular direction and events will prove that theirs is the path to more harmonious living and greater human happiness. But events never prove anything; if they did, people would not be talking about democratic socialism, which has always been the gateway to totalitarian socialism. Jonah Goldberg created a short video demolishing the “wrong side of history” argument.
The Non-Partisan Expert
Walter Lippmann was an early thought leader in Progressivism, a co-founder of The New Republic. In 1922 he wrote Public Opinion, which many people still study today. Chapters XXV and XXVI of the book called for a separation between knowledge processing and policy formation. Lippmann envisioned a government organized so that non-partisan experts would study issues, analyze alternatives and present policy makers with alternatives, “not caring, in his expert self, what decision is made.” He called for a hard wall of protection around the experts, with no political accountability and no avenue for the policy makers to cut off the funding for the experts when the experts tell the policy makers what the latter do not want to hear.
However, the expert who was totally indifferent to what decision is made would be a crazy person, not suitable for employment. Experts are people, too, and citizens at that. They have their own points of view. When the experts are in control of the generation of alternatives, the policy maker gets the alternative the expert wants the policy maker to have. The expert has the real power here.
Lippmann praised the British Foreign Office as the organization “in which the divorce between the assembling of knowledge and the control of policy is most perfect.” In actual practice, this degenerated into the character of Richard Wharton, the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office in the British satirical television series Yes, Prime Minister. Wharton judges the readiness of other persons to make foreign policy based on mastery of details, such as the capital of Chad and the national religion of Cameroun. He explains to another civil servant how he manages the elected foreign secretary:
[Bernard] was concerned that the FO produces only one considered view, with no options and no alternatives.
In practice, this presents no problem. If pressed, the FO looks at the matter again, and comes up with the same view. If the Foreign Secretary demands options, the FO obliges him by presenting three options, two of which will be (on close examination) exactly the same. The third will, of course, be totally unacceptable, like bombing Warsaw, or invading France.
One further option is occasionally used: encouraging the Foreign Secretary to work out his own policy. The FO then shows him how it will inevitably lead to World War III, perhaps within 48 hours.
The experts don’t have to be malicious. They don’t even have to conspire. Simply draw your experts from a consistent pool with the same background, such as well-connected top graduates of top-tier universities. You will get a group of experts who all consider the same set of alternatives out of bounds, completely unsuitable for presentation to the policy makers. It’s called groupthink.
The experts are not wrong for having viewpoints and opinions of their own. Something would be wrong with them if they didn’t. However, it is totally unrealistic to expect pallid, indifferent behavior from them. If you turn them loose and leave them in control of the alternatives that the policy makers see, the experts assume control of policy.
The Public Interest
Another evergreen approach to get “above politics” is to invoke the public interest. What I want is in the public interest; your objections are because of your special interest. How do we differentiate these? The public can’t speak for its collective self. Even polls are of limited value. They are dependent on the question being asked and the alternatives presented, which would make the pollsters the experts as previously described (this is, by the way, a problem that direct democracy can’t overcome).
To have a public interest, you must have a priestly class capable of interpreting it. We have many persons offering to shoulder this onerous burden, but they don’t agree with one another as to what the public interest is. At least some of them must be false prophets who would seduce, if possible, the very elect. I am suspicious that all of them are. There is an old rule in business that when two managers who report to you call each other idiots, you should believe them both.
Taking the Politics out of Politics
Hannah Arendt, writing in The Human Condition, divided all human activities into labor, work and action. Labor includes all the repetitive tasks needed to stay alive and maintain the condition of clothing and shelter. Work is making things, and leaves behind durable work products.
Action is activity directed at influencing others. She shows how the ancient Greeks formed the polis to allow free men to assemble and take action to influence the community. The process by which these actions occur is politics. Arendt notes that tyrants, who wanted to deny political participation to the people, would conspire with the artisans to turn the agora from an arena for politics into a bazaar for buying and selling. [pp. 159-160]
When people make statements calling for setting politics aside and solving problems, they implicitly assume that the solution to the problem is known, as if someone had the answer key somewhere. This is a call to take the politics out of politics. People may believe that they know the solution; that is well and good. They must persuade the rest of us, and that takes politics.
Arendt showed that actions result in chains of further actions from other citizens in response. A person can open an issue, but cannot unilaterally close it. Thus, autocrats and oligarchs try to limit the combinatorial explosion of actions in response to their actions. Xi Jinping Thought attempts to limit the field of public discussion. More traditional tyrants try to restrict entry into the agora.
There is no “above politics.” Everyone has their own point of view. To prevail upon a nation to accept that view, a person must either take action and engage in politics or have and use coercive force.
Clause 61: The Pushback Blog 