Some reflections from an unapologetic Rip Roaring Zionist, an Urban Scavenger for the unexpected. Stephen Darori (#stephendarori,@stephendarori) is a Finance and Marketing Whiz,Social Media Publicist, Strategist ,Investor. Journalist,Author, Editor & Prolific Blogger.
The conservative movement is understandably in a state of anxiety. Donald Trump was not their candidate. The key issues of his campaign were not those in which the Right’s leading thinkers had invested their efforts. The major organs of conservative opinion distanced themselves from his candidacy, only allying with him tactically, and in many cases never abandoning the “Never Trump” rallying cry. They breathed a sigh of relief after the election brought many conventional Republicans to power along with Trump, and Trump’s cabinet selections have been largely reassuring to the Right. On the whole, conservative opposition to Trump has simply transformed into professions that conservatives will have to keep a close eye on the new administration’s policies in order to make sure that they do not depart too far from past Republican efforts.
But the sources of conservative anxiety are not about to go away. From his Inaugural Address onward, Trump has continued the argument of his presidential campaign—that prioritizing American economic and military security is of higher priority than ticking items off the movement conservative wish list. And if conservatives follow the path of judging the new administration simply on the basis of their past goals, they will be missing a generational opportunity to reshape American politics along newly cross-partisan lines. Such a cross-partisan position would be very different from the “centrism” that currently masks a set of uniformly neoliberal policies. The political upheavals of 2016 point to the possibility of another sort of centrism: a broad political constituency wanting a well-defined country able to offer its citizens security, a sound economy, and brighter future prospects. The basic character of such a cross-partisan political shift is not a secret—progressives should also want to protect American workers and distribute economic gains more broadly—even if its details remain up for negotiation.
At an intellectual level, however, many self-described conservatives remain within a framework originally designed for the Cold War and later updated, after its end, for what everyone assumed would be the safe triumph of global capitalism. They refuse to recognize that the political circumstances which gave rise to that platform, originally called “fusionism” to describe the linking of market liberals with traditional conservatives, no longer obtain. Instead the basic integrity of the American polity has been put under stress by economic policies justified in the name of global markets but unjustifiable in their effects on many local communities. American foreign policy seems confused in both its ends as well as its means. The moment is thus one of retrenchment along political lines that ordinary citizens want and need. This sentiment will not be going away soon. To adjust to it and guide it responsibly, thoughtful statesmen on both sides of the aisle will have to review the trajectory that got them here, for it also contains the path out.
Analysts and commentators now take for granted that the citizens who were ignored behind the Democratic Party’s former “Blue Wall” had experienced a plight that led them to vote for Trump. In the media, a shift of tone came about almost overnight, from doubt about whether ordinary Americans had really suffered from economic and political globalization in the last generation to regret that their certain suffering had caused them to cast such a desperate vote. But this sudden interest in the conditions of forgotten workers (and would-be workers) in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin has not yet translated into a different vision of what American conservatism should be—and, mutatis mutandis, progressivism. That’s because Cold War conservatism established a program whose preservation became more important than preserving the country. In his typically direct way Trump challenged not merely parts of the conservative program but its perspective: “Folks,” he said in April 2016, “I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?”
Preserving one’s country is not a uniquely partisan goal, even though the two parties see the country in different ways. When the basics are going well, the parties can return to the interminable debate about whose second-level goals are more pressing. The ordinary voters who delivered the election to Trump thought otherwise. Many but far from all considered themselves conservative. Instead the virtues of loyalty and patriotism propelled them to select an unlikely candidate whose aims they considered urgent. They wanted to preserve their country just as Britons did when they disregarded the stated positions of their parties in a transformational referendum. If conservatives cannot appreciate why this situation changed and why they were ill prepared to grasp it, then “conservatism” will deserve to wither on the vine. Conservative Intellectuals and the (Old) New Majority
That today’s anxieties began life as yesterday’s confident new suggestions is a common occurrence in political history but one that is always difficult to face. When William F. Buckley Jr. started a project to unite market liberals opposed to New Deal institutions and patriotic Americans opposed to progressive social programs and cultural liberalism, the political movement it would lead did not yet exist. His long-term goal in founding National Review in 1955, as Lee Edwards noted recently in National Affairs, was “the development of a political movement.” Only later, first in 1964, did the conservative movement field a presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
Crafting a new majority was a political effort in search of intellectual justification. The effort to build that structure began, as Jason Stahl explains in his book Right Moves, during the postwar period of regnant liberal technocracy, and the new Republican constituency included interests and backgrounds more complicated than the stuff of intellectual debates. And, as Donald Critchlow wrote in 2013, “After much testing, the GOP responded to these broad [postwar] economic, social, and racial changes by becoming the party of low taxes, pro-business policies, strong national defense, preservation of family values (including regulation of social morality), and ultimately affirmation of equality of opportunity in opposition to preferential treatment based on race or gender. As a result,” he concluded, “an expanded white middle class drifted toward the GOP, first at the presidential level and eventually at state and local levels.” That middle class was to be the hoped-for new majority, the marriage of family-values women and their commercially successful husbands.
To unite the disparate groups of traditionalists and libertarians, Frank S. Meyer at National Review outlined the elements of an intellectual synthesis he described as fusionism. Meyer’s argument was straightforward, but it was intended as a temporary political alliance rather than as a distillation of the essence of “conservatism.” Since liberty was required for the exercise of virtue, Meyer argued, those committed to the defense of churches, families, and Western culture more broadly could join a liberty-centric political program. Since securing liberty was the final purpose of government, he could satisfy the libertarians as well. But that satisfaction only took the form of a practical agreement to work together on common political causes. On the intellectual level, the traditionalists did not accept Meyer’s starting point and the libertarians grew ever less interested in his calls to maintain liberty’s basis in virtue.
By the 1980s, politics had solved the tension that otherwise occupied conservative thinkers, by delivering a majority that neither market liberals nor social traditionalists had any hope of delivering on their own. “Fusionism” was simply the best available intellectual justification for the political alliance between social conservatives and economic classical liberals that had been achieved by Republican strategists. In the face of bristling opposition to market economies and traditional mores from the Western Left and from Soviet Communism, the fusion of free markets and sound morals seemed eminently sensible as a practical political strategy.
Beginning with the Reagan presidency, a new conservative intellectual and political apparatus began to trade upon the GOP’s finally successful postwar reorganization. The New Majority was receptive to conservative ideas, and conservative institutions began to propagate them widely. In addition, conservative think tanks were no longer mere participants in the marketplace of ideas but had become a new site of power themselves. Yet, at the same time, the debates internal to conservatism effectively stalled out. The fusion of the Republican business class with its reliable new Southern base had succeeded, and its success meant that the old intraconservative debates were politically neutralized, with the upper hand going to the think tanks and journals that had signed on to the fusionism then ascendant. With the Heritage Foundation at their head, the think tanks of the American Right rolled out fusionism not only as a component of understanding the (temporary) New Majority, but as the essence of conservatism itself—something few if any conservative thinkers had ever really held. More than anything else, fusionism became the term of art applied to the disparate postwar conservative intellectual movement. But since almost no conservative intellectuals accepted its terms, it was an ironic rather than a real descriptor.
The year 2015 saw the unlikely republication of Frank S. Meyer’s 1964 volume on fusionism, What Is Conservatism? To his credit, Jonah Goldberg in his foreword to the new edition rightly calls the book a “successful failure”: only Frank Meyer and Bill Buckley were fully committed to the fusionist enterprise. The book’s other writers lined up to point out the distinctiveness of their positions and, implicitly at least, to critique the fusionist project. Ironically, however, no one outside the journals and institutes of movement conservatism was likely ever to hear of fusionism. Ordinary voters do not vote on the basis of intellectual syntheses but rather on the basis of their perceived interests and the campaigns that match them.
Nevertheless, “National Review remains an essentially fusionist enterprise,” as Goldberg explained in a 2015 essay. Republicans have run and won elections on different iterations of the fusionist synthesis (along with the infusion of neoconservative ideas) for three decades. Reagan had cited Meyer as a definitive influence on his conservatism at the very outset of his administration. For today’s movement conservatives, the National Review consensus is no longer merely a prudent—if always intellectually tenuous—political compromise, but has come to define conservatism itself.
Yet the fusionist project had lost its constituency well before even Mitt Romney’s failed attempt to muster bored Republicans into giving him their votes. Movement conservatives’ anxieties over new challenges to fusionism are, therefore, not surprising, though they are misunderstood. Their apprehension arises not from new critiques of fusionism—for they are not new—but from the concern that the conditions which made fusionism a politically powerful synthesis no longer obtain. The Conservatism of Things
In many ways, American conservatism has been a victim of its own success in creating civil society institutions to reflect and advance its fundamental commitments. Our political associations have been very effective in propagating their political agendas among a country-wide audience, much more effective than the (fewer) comparable associations in Europe, for example. But precisely because movement conservatism was so successful in building the architecture needed to carry forward the agenda of the post-Nixon GOP, it missed the moment at which its concerns separated from the base entirely. It is also no coincidence that the most vocal defenders of the fusionist status quo come from the professional political classes with the most to lose.
To borrow Marxist terminology, the conservative superstructure came about to articulate the disparate political elements of the GOP’s New Majority. The triumph of the U.S. at the end of the Cold War, however, marked the end of that Republican base as it had been understood and explained by the conservative superstructure. To be sure, the Republican base—in no small part excited by the new talk radio stars who reinforced them as a constituency—made several apparently dramatic political statements after the Cold War, in 1994, 2000, and 2010. But its relationship to the policies which had previously sparked economic growth and strengthened American security was already being frayed. After victories in three straight presidential elections from 1980 onward, the GOP had little to offer economically in the 1990s other than accession to new free trade agreements, tax cuts that were either irrelevant to most voters or totally implausible, cheerleading of the tech and housing bubbles, and cutting entitlements. In foreign policy, post–Cold War “conservative” efforts were reinvented under the guise of furthering the global democratic order that appeared to have won a decisive victory. Meanwhile, lip service continued to be paid to the religious Right, though it was offered with increasing reluctance.
Since Republican fusionism was a patchwork ideology all along, it is strange to see Trump’s political positions characterized as a grab-bag of populist proposals in contrast to what Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti recently called “the mainstream of the intellectual conservative movement.” If anything, it is the mainstream conservative platform that has devolved into a checklist of incongruent planks now that the underlying conditions which afforded it some coherence as a political strategy no longer apply.
Continetti describes Trump’s basic message—regaining control of our borders, renegotiating trade agreements to our advantage, and pursuing an American interests-based foreign policy—as “not the conservatism of ideas but of things.” Such a conservatism, he says, can be distinguished from consciously adopting the approach of Burke or Disraeli or Hayek. As a description of Trump’s own lack of interest in major political thinkers, Continetti’s description is perfectly apt. But the current situation is not one in which movement conservatism has ownership of “ideas” whereas Trump has a concern for “things.”
Articulating any political program requires appraising the political situation on the ground and coming up with appropriate strategies to preserve what is good in them and improve what is better. Of course, the need to maintain key features of the American regime means that certain things—the preservation of due process, for example—are a part of every American political program. But in 2016 Americans sensed that both parties were failing to guarantee basic aspects of sovereignty, security, and equality that the American polity was formed to preserve. Restoring each of these requires “ideas” as much as Cold War conservatism did.
The 2016 campaign demonstrated that the interests and strategies of well-established conservatism have passed their peak effectiveness. The present circumstances offer few points at which the expectations of Cold War or Nineties conservatives are even relevant. For fusionists, the political scene does not display a conflict between central planning and the spontaneous order described by Hayek. A form of market liberalism has essentially triumphed in the Western world and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Both Republicans and Democrats have simply been debating what form that market liberalism will take. Yet their common faith in global markets left both sides doubtful that trade agreements were instruments that required careful planning to preserve American economic and strategic advantages. At the same time, a form of social liberalism has carried the day in American culture at large. As Charles Murray showed, American elites and the lower and middle classes put together different combinations of religious belief and family practice. Economically stagnant regions with comparatively high religious belief ironically fare less well in standard markers of family stability. Whether we speak of changing family structures or simply the loss of belief in them, however, the phenomenon is real.
Meanwhile, to the extent that the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling determined the law of the land in June 2015, the culture wars are essentially over. But the fallout has not been as either the Right or the Left expected. For the well-established Right, the disappearance of the most divisive social question since Roe v. Wade—same-sex marriage—was supposed to be a palate-cleanser for Republicans used to paying obeisance to social conservatives. They could then turn back to pressing issues that Paul Ryan identified but which had no popular constituency: repealing Dodd-Frank and cutting entitlements. The Left meanwhile realized that its expectation of further progress implied that Obergefell could not be considered a sufficient victory, and so has pressed on with matters of concern to ever smaller groups.
Republicans and Democrats alike, in other words, hoped that Obergefell would beat a path back to their core issues. In public, the Republicans would lightly touch up the regulatory state and the Democrats would make war on the last vestiges of prejudice. Just out of public view, though, they would unite to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership and work further toward the endgame of comprehensive immigration reform. Without the candidacies of Sanders and Trump, the issues that actually concerned a vast but neglected segment of the American public would have been left to the side. All the while analysts were hoping that these candidates were simply exceptions, and that voters whose inarticulate views were now being voiced would go back to casting reluctant ballots for party-chosen favorites. Rediscovering Civic Friendship
Since the election, a growing number of analysts have awoken to the realization that for many Americans things are not well. The conclusion of the culture wars has not brought the triumph of Republican economic wonkery and Democratic clientelism, but has instead uncovered the fact that many left-behind Americans had tuned out from the culture wars long ago. This time around, the culture war was finished before its conclusion was ratified by the Supreme Court: Obergefell tracked a shift in public mood and then solidified it. On the economic front, the Trump and Sanders campaigns signaled that the post-2008 recovery was much more anemic than the press indicated. After Joe Biden declared the “Recovery Summer” so long ago in 2010, the financial press largely followed the Obama administration’s interpretive cues. The plight of working-class Americans did not suddenly begin in late 2015. Yet in 2016 attempts to describe their plight deployed fatalistic terminology: the Atlanticwrote about “The Original Underclass,” and J. D. Vance wrote a plaintive Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) for parts of America that appeared to be doomed.
Those who voted for Trump were not only those in economic difficulties. In the cities and towns of America’s Midwest, everyone has an interest in seeing revitalization, not simply those who are less well off. This potential element of civic friendship escaped the notice of those who tarred Trump’s Inaugural Address as “divisive.” Instead he spoke of civic solidarity among all those with an interest in seeing their cities and regions prosper. Those in more prosperous coastal or large metropolitan areas have an interest in regional success, as well. Many Americans have vacated their home towns out of necessity, not out of choice.
The Court–Country split, commonly used to describe the division of early eighteenth-century Britain, has also made a reappearance in current analyses, beginning with Angelo Codevilla’s 2010 essay in the American Spectator. Katherine Cramer of the University of Wisconsin introduced a similar analogy (without referring to the British example) to describe Scott Walker’s 2012 ascent to the Wisconsin governorship. Her new book, The Politics of Resentment (University of Chicago Press, 2016), portrays Walker as a clever politician able to appeal to rural anxiety, even though she argues that Democratic policies would have served the rural poor better. While her argument rightly draws attention to the plight of rural areas, she also unintentionally explains Scott Walker’s failure at the national level. Though she is too optimistic that Democratic redistribution programs would make a decisive difference in the lives of the rural poor, she is right that the mainline Republican agenda, typified by Walker, had little to offer them. When given the alternative to choose a vulgar dealmaker who spoke directly to their concerns with solutions that seemed plausible, those voters went to Trump in droves.
Ross Douthat also resurrected the Court–Country analogy in a New York Times column of 2013. “There really is,” he wrote, “a kind of ‘court party’ in American politics, whose shared interests and assumptions—interventionist, corporatist, globalist—have stamped the last two presidencies.” But as he also noted, Bolingbroke’s original Country Party failed, and the modern Republican Party had not yet shown itself “interested in governing” in any convincing way. Douthat was referring to the Republicans’ tendency to wage grand struggles that it could never win, like the repeal of Obamacare under Obama, rather than advocating smart solutions that offered tangible improvements.
Though Douthat was surely right that a Republican Party “interested in governing” would have done better than the posture-striking party of 2008 and 2012, the 2016 election showed that Republicans were out of touch with a more fundamental dissatisfaction in the electorate. The new position of reform conservatism, articulated by Douthat and National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, has been a worthy effort to articulate what a moderate governing agenda would look like—for a Republican Party narrowly able to win over entrenched Democratic interests. But the moderate Burkean inspiration for moderate reform works when times are going moderately well, and only then. Our regime’s successful endurance made it difficult to see the growing pressures and stresses that had been building in the last few decades. Many reformist conservatives mischaracterized Trump’s support as a form of “nostalgia” for a long-lost time during which the rising tide lifted all boats. But this portrayal of Trump’s support made them inattentive to the effects of offshoring and financialization on the American economy. At the moment when ordinary Americans were simply feeling that matters ranging from markets to immigration to national security had gotten out of control, the reform conservatives could not frame a program matched to the situation.
What actually propelled the candidacies of Trump and Sanders was the sense among their voters, right or wrong, that the candidates were interested in them—not just in power or policies, much as those are necessary. Yet the signs that voters in the forgotten parts of America had been forgotten were written all over the mainstream economic press before Trump’s campaign. “Badly educated men in rich countries,” read an Economist headline in 2015, “have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism.” “After 200 years,” runs a more recent Economist leader, “the machinery question is back.” “The new divide in rich countries,” claims yet another headline, “is not between left and right but between open and closed.” Another explains that “high-flying cities, and the successful firms they contain, are detaching from the rest of the economy.” “The Fed,” added the Wall Street Journal in August, “is a case study in how the conventional wisdom of the late 1990s on a wide range of economic issues, including trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled.” If all these things are true and have been true, it should not have been a surprise that candidates would be successful who tapped into voters’ anxieties. Even the smartest, post-Reaganite conservative policy thinking won’t inspire voters who want old-fashioned recognition. The Loss and Reassertion of Political Control
Behind the most prominent headlines about the Trump and Sanders campaign lies the difficult economic reality chronicled a few pages deeper in the daily papers. While market liberalism has triumphed in and indeed constructed the developed world, the form that liberalism has taken is specific and not accidental. The capitalism we chose to make has been one driven by financialization—by the quest to put all land, labor, and capital in financially manageable and tradable form, and to promote that trading as our expertise. That effort has combined with the insistence on lessening borders’ effect on market activity, with the favor given to white collar labor over blue, and with a culturally ambitious Left that casts aspersions on traditional mores. We chose to soften the role of borders in the U.S. and Europe, to send working-class jobs abroad, and to make universities spend their prestige on battling privilege. We have chosen to favor those with the greatest flexibility to leave their home towns, to switch from manual to mental labor, and to relax about the importance of family structures, inherited religions, and other cultural tropes. This world is one of our making. It is not a fait accompli, it is not on track to conquer the rest of the world, and we are not out of decisions to make.
Even if Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had not come along, the tendencies that are pressuring our established political arrangement would not have abated. Donald Trump was not responsible for the fact that the ability to out-earn one’s parents has dropped precipitously from 1970 to today. Those left behind as we built our current economy would eventually have found other vehicles for their distress, perhaps ones even more strident or more vulgar. The language of good governance, of constitutional sensibility, and of principled conservatism (or liberalism) is designed for the ordinary political world of constitutional settlement. Yet in constructing the economy we have now, we knew very well we were designing something that would be markedly different from what came before. We wrongly assumed, for a variety of reasons, that the new economy would proceed smoothly. Now that it obviously has not, our elites have no excuse to pursue the same strategies.
The elites who bought the “End of History” hypothesis have been the most shaken by Trumpism in the United States and “populist” movements elsewhere. Once they concluded that Trump would be an authoritarian and demagogue, they reasserted what they saw as the fundamental elements of a functioning commonwealth. But supporters of Trump and Sanders were doing exactly the same thing. Faced with a political process no longer responsive to or even aware of the stagnation of a middle class once ever improving, those voters grabbed for what they saw as the lost precondition of politics: political sovereignty. It is true that modern comforts are so great that a recession today would not be felt as the Great Depression in its time. But since modern society tells us we are sinking unless we are rising, merely treading water—trying harder and harder just to stay afloat—is an indignity. The social revolution and the spread of family dysfunction add failure to indignity. Sexual freedom itself has become a form of privilege for those who know enough to manage the consequences of their liberties in the freest but most controlled ways.
The construction of modern states has always involved both the assertion of sovereignty and the development of rational administration, from the days of Louis XIV through that of Jean-Claude Juncker. The U.S. and Europe have enjoyed so much success in establishing stable polities, however, that they have assumed the assertion of sovereignty was a thing of the past. Management and governance could replace rule and the struggle for power: such was the fond hope of those who built the structures of regional and global “governance.” By their own self-understanding, however, “management” and “governance” are designed to keep critical aspects of the economy, state administration, and security from being “politicized.” They are incapable of being experienced by citizens as a place of political activity where democratic citizenship matters. Insulating economic policy from “political” questions means that ordinary citizens increasingly lack any means of redress when management goes bad. The “political” level on which such management takes place, in the hands of transnational administrative bodies and arbitration panels, cannot be found on the political compass of ordinary life. Contrary to its purpose, depoliticization raises the political stakes of economics and security whenever their management does not go according to plan. When something has been precariously removed from political control, the reassertion of political control over it takes forceful forms. Empires have been built and then collapsed, borders have been drawn and redrawn, without any example having been given that borders will simply disappear after being forgotten.
Consider these words, seemingly characteristic of the 2016 primary campaign: “There is no substitute for making things, as long as Americans use computers, wear clothes, drive autos, build with steel, play video games—in short, do everything.… Debt, not wages, allowed Americans to continue to consume. The rest of the world, beginning with Europe, Japan, the Asian Tigers, and now China did not mind because U.S. demand was their growth machine. This cannot continue. But to return to making things will require new investment, labor, and trade policies.” Are these the words of a 2016 stump speech?
In fact they are the considered judgment of an eminent American historian. Judith Stein, a professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, put the matter that way in her 2010 book Pivotal Decade, whose subtitle argues that the U.S. “traded factories for finance in the Seventies” and has been adjusting (or paying the consequences) ever since. In some cases, she suggests, our attention to tax rates and inflation indirectly promoted the shift away from production and toward the service economy, of which financial services are a part. More often than not, however, we decided that the service sector was the way of the future, that spending on education would produce higher incomes, and that improved financial services—easier access to credit, mortgages, and rising stock portfolios—would compensate for our declining productivity elsewhere. In the ninth year of a still questionable recovery (must we have merely a recovery?), we have to face directly the question of improving America’s productive economy without using automation or trade liberalization simply as excuses. The arc of history is not going where its predictors claimed, but rather back toward the nation-states, which have never really been left behind. Obstacles to Realignment
Policymakers, economists, and political strategists know that even more trends lurk beneath the surface with uncertain consequences. Recent advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics point in an uncertain direction. The advent of self-driving cars has already begun in some cities, and likely heralds a more contentious fight than the arrival of Uber did in the cities hostile to it. Many industries, such as the textile industry, remain resistant to automation. The only certainty is that blithe invocations of labor’s ability to regroup and take up another human task will not be a sufficient guide to the political difficulties that could result from automation. Simple promises to return jobs from overseas will be difficult to keep when the labor market at home and production methods abroad have both changed. Yet most political and intellectual leaders still have not shifted from a smug assurance about globalization’s inevitability toward practical thinking about the role we want labor, production, trade, and borders to play in the future.
The difficulty in shifting the range of opinion on these matters stems from several primary sources. Intellectually, what hampers sound decision-making is the belief that present trends, as we understand them, constitute a direction that we must follow and even encourage. Each party focuses on different trends, but both operate within a frequently historicist framework, wrongly assuming that events have reached a point at which political action is useless or even impossible. The regular dismissal of calls to restore broad participation in American manufacturing as “nostalgia” is a telling—but politically obfuscatory—symptom of this latent sense. While it is almost impossible for any political campaign not to trade in some nostalgic rhetoric, seeking to renew America’s manufacturing base or preserve her standing in international relations requir
es no nostalgia at all. Insistence that Americans resign themselves to stagnant economic growth, higher-than-reported consumer inflation, delayed adulthood, and scrambled job prospects is a political platform that convinces no one. What Americans ever voted to make their country one of banking executives on the one hand and Walmart clerks on the other?
Second, the relationship between party constituency and political platform has become obscured by the growth in civil society dedicated to political advocacy. When a political platform is successful in preserving and improving the conditions of a party constituency—as many aspects of Reagan’s agenda did in the 1980s—it’s only natural to take that platform as a permanent playbook. But that natural tendency has been exacerbated by ongoing donor support for legacy conservative think tanks that have reinforced that superstructure in ways that are now counterproductive. How to resolve this bind is no secret. Closer attention by politicians and strategists to the character and needs of their constituencies would likely result in different political proposals. Such an approach is obviously insufficient on its own for articulating what that agenda should be. But the preference given by the Right to postwar market thinkers has proven clearly insufficient in generating the virtues of prudence that would enable politicians to judge between doctrinaire neoliberalism and the political interests of their constituents.
For those interested in the possibility of a political realignment, the signs are all around, at home and abroad. In Europe on the morning of June 24, 2016, the continent awoke to the news that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union. Writing in the Spectator the next day, Toby Young wondered whether the alignment of interests in the Leave campaign foretold a political reconfiguration in Britain. Leave was supported by Tory traditionalists and rank-and-file Labour voters. Remain was supported by the London-based Tory and Labour elite, as well as the City of London, Scotland, and Northern Irish counties on the Irish border. “One of the oddities of the referendum campaign,” Young pointed out, “was the emergence on the centre-right of an anti-Establishment alliance between a middle-class, educated elite” and the Euroskeptic working class. Between 2005 and 2015, he noted, support for Labour in the skilled working class dropped from 40 to 30 percent, while among the working class and the unemployed it dropped from 48 to 37 percent. If the British parties were reconfigured to reflect their current national constituencies, he suggested, we might find a national party of Tory traditionalists and Old Labour, a party of metropolitan liberals, one of libertarians, and one of the Far Left.
Elsewhere in Europe such reconfigurations are already in place or are on the horizon, often for disparate reasons. In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) party combines national solidarity interests and Christian democracy in its platform, reflecting both Polish traditionalism and social welfare principles essential for its constituency. In the currently scrambled French political scene, as Guillaume de Thieulloy recently explained it, one “could see the right-wing candidate promoting some center-left policies; the Socialist candidate promoting center-right policies; or the National Front candidate promoting far Left policies”—a shifting of line unusual by American standards. Though these countries have a different experience of national identity from our own, they face common threats from those constructing institutions of global governance that dismiss nation-states and borders in toto.
In the United States such a reconfiguration was a clear possibility throughout the 2016 election cycle. As early as August, Jeffrey Anderson in the Weekly Standard wrote that “essentially every issue favors Trump.” It’s not as though this reconfiguration surfaced only in 2016: it attempted to make itself known before. “Against all evidence,” complained David Frum in the January/February 2016 issue of the Atlantic, Republican donors and politicians “interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.” George Will was thus right to note in September that movement conservatism had become “an orphan in an indifferent world.”
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, conducted December 12–15, 2016, showed that the electorate had already become uninterested in political repetitions of orthodox conservatism of the sort that were found in Ted Cruz’s campaign. “When Trump supporters were asked why they voted for him,” the Wall Street Journal reported on December 20, only “1% said the most important reason was to advance traditional Republican policies. By contrast, more than one-quarter said the prime reason was to improve the economy, while 23% said it was to put America first rather than focusing on other countries. Some 21% said it was to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.” Including the 18 percent who wanted to “change business as usual in Washington” and the 5 percent who voted in order to “take a tough approach on immigration,” 94 percent of Trump voters responded to the basic appeals of his campaign, in spite of a relentless effort by the Republican establishment to wage the campaign on the grounds of Republican orthodoxy.
Republican and many Democratic voters were voting on the basis of fundamentally conservative impulses. The desire to improve the economy, put America first, and take a firmer line on immigration all express “conservative” instincts in a more fundamental respect than that promoted by Cold War conservatives and their Nineties holdovers. The preservation of the American body politic and the conditions for its flourishing is not only not a given, but has been thoroughly damaged by the Right’s pursuit of global markets and military adventurism, and the Left’s alliance with urban progressive constituencies that lack real traction. Trump’s election showed that these elementary conservative instincts were shared by a significant portion of the electorate outside those who had voted for “orthodox” Republican candidates in recent elections. “In counties that are or were manufacturing-dependent,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “Trump did an average of 8.5 points better than prior nominees. Elsewhere his advantage was 6.2 points.” Three Pennsylvania counties flipped from voting Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, along with 10 in Ohio, 22 in Wisconsin, 12 in Michigan, and 31 in Iowa—including many like Luzerne in Pennsylvania, which swung by 25 points. That Trump accomplished swings of this degree even with the mainstream Republican intellectual elite set firmly against him indicates what is possible if statesmanlike Republicans and non-ideological Democrats close ranks.
Republican strategists flatter themselves when they assume that in the coming years they will be called upon to leaven the new “populism” with “conservatism,” for neither is an adequate or coherent description of the political position to which it points. During the 2016 primaries, most Republican intellectuals rejected “Trumpism” as something intrinsically at odds with what they mistakenly called conservatism. But the terms of analysis were simply asking to be recast. Trump’s voters wanted to conserve and restore the greatness they perceived had been unnecessarily lost through mistaken policies that were being justified in nonpolitical terms. Favoring open borders, unilateral free trade, and the establishment of unaccountable transnational political structures could not be done with reference to preserving the American polity. When large corporations consider themselves beyond the reach of national sovereignty, established conservatism’s failure to object signals that it is not a conservatism worthy of the name. Toward the Radical Center
“Ever since” the Reagan presidency, as Lee Edwards recently wrote, “conservatives have sought another Reagan with his fusionist philosophy to carry out the objectives of a more limited constitutional government, an untrammeled free market, and a restoration of Judeo-Christian values in our society.” Both the neoconservatives and the reform conservatives sought to shake up Republican politics by offering different and related approaches. None other than David Brooks in a 1997 article in the Weekly Standard called for a new agenda of “national greatness” (echoing Thomas Pangle), an agenda aimed at improving the administration of a large national government and carrying out America’s civilizing mission abroad. During the second half of the Bush administration, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam launched the reform conservative movement designed to open up, through reforms of the regulatory state, a space for Americans to arrange their own affairs as they have always done, through the family and through praiseworthy organizations of civil society. Theirs has also been an effort to offer needed reforms beyond Reaganism—an effort whose importance has not diminished, but whose goals and scope are perhaps insufficient to attract a politically significant constituency.
What has passed as political centrism in recent years was a mixture of social liberalism (at least, limited resistance to social liberalism’s further advance) and economic globalization. This platform earned the name centrism only as a description of the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram of positions held by Washington-based policy experts and their coastal backers. Democrats offered participation in the further advance of progressive social arrangements for a constituency mixed of urban elites and legacy working-class voters. Republicans offered rhetorical objection to the progressive social agenda and deployed patriotic rhetoric in defense of economic policies primarily benefiting the business elite. The constituency supporting this form of centrism is small when considered geographically, and smaller than it seems even in the coastal regions dedicated to it. The forms of argument deployed to defend this centrism never appeal to the political interests of most Americans because their goals lie beyond the scope of national politics: borders must be erased for the sake of global humanitarianism and for the needs of global business.
But the interests of ordinary American Democrats and Republicans are markedly different from this supposedly centrist agenda. The expression of their interests looks radical only because the insistence on justifying policy proposals in terms of what is good for the nation and its constituent states is a departure from recent norms. Shifting away from checklist conservatism and identity-group progressivism will still not easily lead to agreement on an appropriate national policy agenda. The objections of old-line liberals against identity-group progressivism will not suddenly make them comfortable with the rhetoric of American greatness. And checklist conservatives will still present arguments against the economic rationality of proposals such as a border-adjusted value-added tax. But a Republican Party set simply on the implementation of tax reform, a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and gesture-based tweaks to American trade policy will lose badly in 2020. And if the next election leads to a victory of the Democratic candidate, it will not be because of the sudden relevance of coastal identity politics and celebrity progressivism.
The political realignment under way stems from a dislocation between constituency and platform on the left as well as the right. The implementation of global trade agreements, vacillation and weakness in defense of American interests abroad, policy preference for the service sector (whether financial or blue collar)—these efforts have put citizens at a disadvantage on both sides of the aisle. Yet a campaign message that had virtually no policy articulation from established think tanks swayed a decisive portion of the electorate. Enterprising politicians: seize the day. Policy professionals: refocus. The old platforms have already adjourned, sine die.
In a month’s worth of tweets from President Trump, perhaps none has packed more punch than his assertion that the “FAKE NEWS media ... is the enemy of the American People!”
The expression “enemy of the people” carries dark echoes of history, dating back to Roman times. The most brutal regimes of the 20th century invoked the phrase in sending millions to die.
For Mr. Trump, the use of such inflammatory language is clearly metaphorical. But in upping the rhetorical ante in his longstanding attacks on the Fourth Estate – specifically, as he said in his Friday tweet, the “failing” New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN – Trump is playing a game with potentially far-reaching consequences.
Public trust in media is at an all-time low, according to Gallup; reporters face a level of hostility from an administration not seen since President Nixon.
How the media work through this challenge will affect not only how this insurgent presidency is portrayed, but also how the American public sees the role of the press – as a biased meddler or an essential pillar of American democracy.
But it’s not all bad news for the media.
“In fact, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, Donald Trump is not the man who will kill the mainstream media. He is the man who could save it,” writes Amol Rajan, media editor at the BBC.
Paid subscriptions to news outlets have jumped during the Trump presidency. The New York Times reports a surge in digital subscriptions – 276,000 in the fourth quarter of 2016, the single best quarter since 2011, when its pay model launched.
Donations have spiked to the nonprofit investigative outfit ProPublica and to liberal standard-bearer Mother Jones. Online-only outlets have seen a surge in Web traffic, boosting ad revenue. CNN, perhaps the cable channel most reviled by Trump, reports 2016 was its best year for viewership.
How Trump has caused the media to overheat
Trump, the one-time reality TV star, clearly relishes performing for the cameras – including when sparring with reporters. He said as much in his pugilistic tour de force of a press conference last week.
“I sort of enjoy this back and forth, and I guess I have all my life,” Trump mused, before tossing in another dig at the press. “But I’ve never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media.”
Before becoming president, Trump was famous for answering his own phone; back in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, he even posed at times as his own publicist.
As president, he has in some ways been more available to the media than his predecessor, frequently coming to the back of Air Force One to talk to the reporters traveling with him. At other times, he flouts convention by attending a public event without bringing the press “pool" – a rotating group of journalists who cover the president's daily activities.
Some of Trump’s media habits might be amusing if they didn’t involve the serious business of the presidency. Add to the mix his un-joking expressions of hatred toward the press, beginning early in his campaign, that raised the possibility of violence against reporters.
But even as he toys with journalists, his ultimate intent is clear: to use them as a foil by setting them up as “the opposition party.”
His declaration last Friday that certain major media outlets are “the enemy of the American people” was the logical conclusion of a long rhetorical escalation. Some media watchers have urged the press to focus on his actions, not his words. But with Trump, who recognizes the power of language, that’s not necessarily the best approach.
“Don't over-react or rage at every Tweet: good advice,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, tweeted Monday. “Pay attention to what he does, not what he says: dumb advice. Often, words are deeds.” Standing up for media's role in a free society
For some in public life, Trump’s “enemy” tweet was a bridge too far. Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, who has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal critics within the Republican Party, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that such talk is “how dictators get started.”
“In other words, a consolidation of power,” McCain elaborated. “When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I'm not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I'm just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”
Such a cautionary note may seem over the top. But across the media landscape, Trump’s attacks are being treated with dead seriousness. Conservative columnist Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal calls Trump’s approach to the media and to facts “darkly brilliant” – by effectively asserting that facts don’t matter.
How media can better tackle Trump's hostility
Reporters, too, are tackling Trump’s hostility head on. Some are trying to soften him up. “Just for the record, we don't hate you. I don't hate you,” CNN’s Jim Acosta, embroiled in a longstanding feud with Trump, told him at last Thursday’s press conference.
Others are standing by their journalistic brethren with the hashtag #NotTheEnemy, highlighting the important work reporters do in holding officials accountable, bringing injustice to light, and covering wars, at times losing their life.
Linguist George Lakoff appreciates journalists’ effort to defend themselves, but says they’re going about it in the wrong way. By putting the word “enemy” in the hashtag, they’re reinforcing the very concept that Trump is promoting – and thus, they are unwittingly helping Trump make his point.
It’s all about the “frame” – the way a subject is characterized, writes Professor Lakoffof the University of California, Berkeley, on his blog. “Avoid the language of the attacker,” he writes, “because it evokes their frame and helps make their case.”
After 30 days in office President Trump has done one thing for sure: He’s polarized American voters more than any US chief executive of the last 30 years.
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents loathe his performance, per approval polls. But Republicans and Republican leaners remain as happy with Mr. Trump as ever. They’re not swayed by what critics see as chaos in the executive branch.
This is a reminder that most of the people who put Trump in office are content to wait and see how his policies develop. He promised to fix border security, beat ISIS, stamp out crime, drain the D.C. swamp, and give people great health care. Trump supporters want to see if those things happen – or not.
“A whole bunch of people voted for this president, not because they liked him, not because they condoned his behavior, but because they thought that he was going to be able to make a difference. You’re not going to know that in 30 days,” said analyst Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, making this point on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Overall, Trump’s job approval numbers aren’t positive. As of Monday, 44.6 percent of voters approve of what he’s doing as president, according to the RealClearPolitics average of major surveys. His disapproval is 50.5. That nets out to a negative 5.9 percent, an unprecedentedly low rating for someone who’s only been in office a few weeks.
But behind this number is a wide split. Look at the sub-findings of a recent, large Pew Research survey: only eight percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents approve of Trump’s current job performance. That single digit is the lowest such figure in over 30 years, Pew notes.
But Pew’s findings also show that 84 percent of Republicans and Republican-tending independents do approve of the job Trump’s doing. That’s pretty close to the percentage of Republicans who voted for the GOP candidate last November.
The partisan difference there is so large it is almost as if they are looking at two different candidates. And many on both sides say they are set in their views. Fully 75 percent of those polled said they approved or disapproved of Trump “strongly.” That’s a measure that Barack Obama, as president, never matched.
“The intensity of the public’s early views of Trump is striking,” concludes Pew.
What could change such entrenched feelings? In a word, Russia. Upward of seven congressional committees are now investigating some aspect of Russia’s alleged involvement in US politics. Any findings that link Trump or his campaign closer to Moscow, or cast doubt on Trump’s past statements on the matter, could crack his solid GOP support.
Or, on the positive side for Trump, action could make a difference. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and Washington Post blogger/pundit Chris Cillizza don’t agree on a lot. But last week Mr. Limbaugh said on his show that Trump could fix a lot of his current problems by just buckling down and moving ahead full speed on his domestic agenda. Focus on repealing and replacing Obamacare, then passing tax reform, fixing the nation’s infrastructure, etc.
Mr. Cillizza then said that this advice is smart. Since his first week, Trump’s been beset by sideshows and missteps of largely his own making, to mix a couple of metaphors. He’s slowed down. Revving up the legislative gears could keep his base happy and quiet the critics.
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“If history is any judge (and with Trump it’s always possible that it’s not), Trump’s presidency will be judged by the state of the economy and how well he is perceived to have achieved the goals he laid out in the course of the 2016 campaign,” Cillizza wrote last week.
And remember that at least for now, Trump needs little if any Democratic cooperation to govern. That’s because Republicans hold majorities in both chambers of Congress. Sure, the congressional GOP could turn against him, and it is entirely possible that Trump might light off an intramural feud with a firecracker tweet. But, as noted above, actual Republican voters remain highly supportive of the president. That’s a big reason why House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have responded in only a muted way to President Trump’s controversial behavior, from his wild press conference of last week to his branding of the media as “enemies of the people.”
A by-the-numbers look at some of Donald Trump's early activity as president:
(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
A by-the-numbers look at some of Donald Trump’s early activity as president:
—24: Executive orders and memoranda signed. That includes orders to withdraw the United States from Trans-Pacific trade deal, impose a federal hiring freeze and reduce regulations related to the health care law enacted under former President Barack Obama.
—1: Executive orders blocked. An order to ban travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations was blocked by federal judges. Trump is expected to issue a new order next week.
—4: Bills signed into law. They include a bill to halt a regulation blocking coal mining debris from being dumped in nearby streams.
—6: The average number of tweets per day from personal account @realDonaldTrump.
—25.1 million. Twitter followers for @realDonaldTrump.
—15.5 million. Twitter followers for official account @POTUS.
—4: Visits from foreign leaders. (Britain, Japan, Canada, Israel.)
—1: Canceled visit from foreign leader. (Mexico.)
—1: Supreme Court nomination. Judge Neil Gorsuch.
—2: Failed personnel choices. Andrew Puzder withdrew as the nominee for labor secretary; Michael Flynn was ousted as national security adviser.
—14: Cabinet-level nominations approved, out of 24 total.
—39: Percent of respondents who approve of Trump’s job performance in Pew Research Center poll conducted Feb. 7-12.
—3: Weekend trips to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Trump press conference reveals long game. Media still scrambling to save and practice the First Amendment. The Thursday News Conference was a first..... never before was a US President heckled in his own White House .
Strategic. Planned. Effective.
That's what my initial headline in response to President Donald Trump's unexpected press conference held on Thursday at the White House......The President himself joked that the headlines would instead read "Donald Trump Rants And Raves At The Press."
While that may be true, he certainly did a lot more than that. And whatever headline you’ve read since that press conference finished, it doesn't matter. What much of the press still fails to realize, even after a humbling repudiation of their coverage and predictions on election night, is that President Trump accomplished something on Thursday that is more than what any headline could summarize – he seized control of the narrative, reinvigorated his message, and energized his base, all with an eye on 2020.
We know that President Trump doesn’t feel the media does a good job of keeping his message intact. Instead, he believes the media is hateful, unfair, takes him out of context, and misinterprets his jokes. And in many instances, he’s right.
There seems to be a constant drumbeat against him rather than unbiased coverage of him. There is a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) condescension and judgement that lays just beneath the surface of so many of the headlines and analysis surrounding the President. And because of this, President Trump’s eagerness to bypass the media and speak freely and directly to his supporters makes complete sense, so he announced a rally in Florida this Saturday. (This is also why he still uses, and will never stop using, Twitter.)
It is the Trump rally that epitomizes his understanding of the American public. But President Trump must have felt that waiting until Saturday was simply too long of a wait, with a sudden and last minute change to his schedule on Thursday, replacing a Sean Spicer press briefing with a President Trump press conference.
The President’s anxiousness and eagerness to speak directly to the people makes sense. A federal appeals court ruled to maintain the stay on his temporary travel ban. General Michael Flynn’s unexpected resignationis sparking a GOP led inquiry into the administration’s connection to Russia. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and “bowling green massacre” mishaps. Staff leaks. The GOP’s refusal to confirm his Labor Secretary nominee. These are not the stories one wants to wake up to after less than a month in the White House.
Of course, the President could have just sent Sean Spicer out again on Thursday for his usual press briefing. But the President’s very real reasons to feel anxiety over recent events gave him the instinct to know that only he could go out there and begin to fix this mess. So he did.
In Thursday’s presser he was, at times, bombastic, dynamic, angry, irreverent,disjusting, funny, disorganized,chaotic, temperamental, attacking, thoughtful, and committed. What about that is different from the man we’ve seen since he entered the race in June of 2015? Nothing.
Yet when it was over, it left the media scrambling, confused and desperate to find the right headline amidst the hundreds of possible takeaways. All while America left with a reminder of the man who took the country by storm to claim victory in 2016.
And yet, the media still hasn’t figured it out. The reaction and fallout from Thursday’s press conference amongst the press simply affirms the president’s basic and underlying message to the American people: “the media hates me and doesn’t understand you.” Until the media steps down from and out of their ivory tower, they will continue to create an environment for this message to resonate and ring true with Americans.
On Thursday, the President took back hold of the reins, re-centered his message and took a small step towards victory in 2020.
What's behind the turmoil in Trump White House (+video)
In the administration's first month, Washington is already abuzz about which high-profile adviser will leave first. Security adviser Flynn is reportedly in hot water because he may have misled Mike Pence has now resigned ater bearly a week in office.
President Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, may not be long for his job. That story line, of a top adviser apparently less than candid about his conduct, seems to have legs.
There’s also buzz in Washington that White House press secretary Sean Spicer may be in trouble, and questions, too, about the performance of chief of staff Reince Priebus. The Flynn story has more traction than the other two, but the sum total is the appearance of a White House in turmoil, and a president new to government struggling to find his balance.
So here’s the question: How much of the early ferment at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue stems directly from Mr. Trump himself – in both his management style and his lack of government experience – and how much is the typical settling-in that any new administration experiences? The answer may be, all of the above.
“The turmoil is not normal,” says Cal Jillson, a presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It is true that every new administration has a shakedown period…. But we’ve never seen it in quite such an early and tumultuous way. It’s still the first month, and we’re already talking about which of the highest profile advisers will leave first.”
President Obama’s first national security adviser, James Jones, lasted less than nine months, and his first communications director, Ellen Moran, only three months. As happens in any enterprise, some new hires just don’t work out.
Insurgent management
But with Trump, there are complicating factors to layer on. His is an insurgent presidency, whose stated goal is to shake things up. And so he may be less inclined to listen to voices of experience in his effort to disrupt the status quo. In addition, Trump’s management style is to bring competing power centers into his midst, as a way to surface new and creative ideas, say people who have studied his business practices.
Still, it’s one thing to operate that way in a privately held corporation, and another to bring that style into the White House. Trump the executive has a history of being mercurial, according to people who have studied his management style.
“Rather than magisterial and decisive, Trump the actual boss swings wildly between micromanaging meddler and can’t-be-bothered, broad-brush, big-picture thinker,” writes Michael Kruse in a Politico profile of Trump last summer.
“He is both impulsive and intuitive, for better and for worse. He hires on gut instinct rather than qualifications; he listens to others, but not as much or as often as he listens to himself,” Mr. Kruse writes.
The story of General Flynn, who had been fired by the Obama administration as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, may be a case in point. While at DIA, Flynn reportedly made enemies with his bosses at the Pentagon and with a rival spy service, the Central Intelligence Agency, according to NPR.
Flynn’s clashes with Obama administration officials may have been a plus for Trump, and chalked up to politics, not a sign of a potentially troublesome employee.
Now Flynn faces a flood of questions over contact he had with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, before Trump took office. In conversations with Vice President Pence and other senior administration officials, Flynn initially denied discussing sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak, then said later that he may have.
Did Flynn mislead?
Obviously he noew acknowledges he did. He resigned today becoming another #OyVeyDonaldTrump hiccup and the first high ranking Trump appointment to resign.
Such a discussion on sanctions may violate a US law that bars private citizens from interfering in foreign policy. But the immediate issue is whether Flynn misled top-level US officials. The most troubling sign yet for Flynn’s employment prospects came Sunday, when senior White House aide Stephen Miller declined to say that Flynn still had Trump’s confidence.
“It’s not for me to tell you what’s in the president’s mind,” Mr. Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
CNN reports that Flynn previously stated that he has “no plans to resign and no expectations that he will be fired,” but “the knives are out” for him within the administration.
Perhaps the second-most-endangered member of Trump’s top advisers is Mr. Spicer, the press secretary. His debut in the press room quickly became the stuff of legend, when he stepped out in an ill-fitting suit and reamed out the press without taking questions, reportedly leaving Trump less-than-satisfied. Spicer has since settled into a routine with his daily briefing, calling on a range of reporters – including many from conservative media – and sticking less to the usual mainstream outlets.
Spicer still mixes it up with reporters who push back and try to ask follow-ups. And Melissa McCarthy’s hyperkinetic lampooning of Spicer on “Saturday Night Live” is said to keep Trump on edge over his spokesman. Complicating life for Spicer is the fact that he is also serving as communications director, a more strategic role usually held by someone who works behind the scenes. Critique of Priebus
Questions about Mr. Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, have come out, too. Over the weekend on CNN, Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, CEO of conservative Newsmax Media, knocked Priebus’s performance, saying “there’s a lot of weakness coming out of the chief of staff.”
Mr. Ruddy later pulled back on his negative assessment. And there’s no indication that Trump hiself wants to replace Priebus.
More likely, Ruddy’s critique was a cry of frustration that his friend’s early weeks as president have gone less than smoothly, more than that Priebus is about to get tossed to the curb. After all, Priebus is former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a valuable lifeline between the Trump White House and the Republican establishment.
But with Trump – whose most famous line from his days on reality TV is “You’re fired!” – there are no guarantees.
So far, Trump has behaved as if he believes that millions of voters chose him because they wanted to enrich his family and not theirs.PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN WALSH / THE AP
Kleptocracy (from Ancient Greek κλέπτης (kléptēs, “thief”), κλέπτω (kléptō, “steal”), from Proto-Indo-European *klep- (“to steal”); and from the Ancient Greek suffix -κρατία (-kratía), from κράτος (krátos, “power, rule”; klépto- thieves + -kratos rule, literally "rule by thieves") is a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service.
If there had been any ambiguity about how far Donald Trump was prepared to press his role as President in service of the business interests of himself and his family, it was laid to rest on February 9th by his most visible surrogate, Kellyanne Conway. “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would say,” Conway now famously said on Fox News. “I’m going to give a free commercial here: Go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online.”
This stunning promotional message (for which Conway was reportedly “counselled”) came after Trump publicly scolded the retailer Nordstrom, which made what appears to be a routine business decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s fashion line due to underperforming sales. Other retailers had already taken steps to reduce the Ivanka brand’s prominence in their stores; the discount chains T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s sent notes to their employees last week, according to the Times, instructing them to stop promoting the merchandise separately and to mix it in with other labels. Neiman Marcus, a more upscale chain, said that is was phasing out Ivanka’s jewelry from its Web site. (The jewelry is still available at Lord & Taylor, along with the label’s clothing, shoes, and handbags, which are also sold at Macy’s.) According to Nordstrom, sales of the brand had been declining “steadily” during the last year—and especially since September, 2016—while other estimates showed sales plummeting at several retailers. That is hardly surprising given that its target customers are young professional women, many of whom have recoiled from Trump’s overt misogyny. Judging from his public messaging, Ivanka’s father, the President of the United States, feels that corporations should set aside their own economic interests if their business decisions might hurt his family. So far, Trump has behaved as if he believes he has a mandate to act this way, as if millions of voters chose him because they wanted to enrich his family and not theirs.
It’s difficult to keep track of the ways in which the norms and ethical standards that have long governed the personal financial interests of the President have been breached in only a short time. Trump amassed enough Electoral College votes to become President without releasing his tax returns, leaving Americans in the dark about the sources of his earnings and his debts, and the urgent question of to whom, exactly, he is beholden. Shortly after Election Day, he declared that he was exempt from ethics and conflict-of-interest rules (which in some areas is technically true). On January 11th, Trump’s attorney stood behind a podium at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and pointed to a table stacked with manila folders: Trump would be resolving his enormous, unprecedented business conflicts, she assured the American people, by placing his ownership of the Trump Organization into a trust and leaving the operational management in the hands of his two sons. Ethics experts said at the time that the measures fell laughably short, because Trump already knew what businesses the company was involved in and would still be collecting its profits. Since then, it has become clear that even those thin measures were largely cosmetic. The trust itself, theTimes reported, will be overseen by Trump’s oldest son, Donald, and his longtime company C.F.O. As its name—Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust—suggests, it can also be undone at any time.
The Trump Organization has not gone out of its way to assuage concerns about overt profiteering: Trump’s Palm Beach golf club is moving ahead with plans to double its membership prices; the President is using his Mar-a-Lago golf club as a venue for hosting foreign leaders; the head of Trump Hotels has discussed plans for a massive domestic expansion; and the company continues to own the Trump hotel in Washington, which is located in the Old Post Office, in violation of a lease prohibiting federally elected officials from benefitting from it financially. More recently, it emerged that the Defense Department and the Secret Service were considering leasing space inside Trump Tower in New York, in order to provide security services to Trump and his family, effectively paying the President rent.
Although the new President has taken some steps to distance himself from his finances, including selling his public stock holdings and resigning from several of the family enterprises he was involved with, he has largely shown himself to be indifferent to critics of his conflicts, including the legal scholars and former White House ethics lawyers who filed a lawsuit on January 22nd alleging that taking payments from foreign government entities at his hotels and other properties violates the Constitution. As part of his plan to address these ethics problems, which threaten to create endless distractions for his Administration, Trump volunteered (in his words) to hire an ethics monitor to insure that nothing inappropriate happens.
For companies, the hiring of an ethics or compliance monitor often happens under different circumstances. Typically, after a company has been charged with fraud, or money laundering, or, possibly, with having been infiltrated by organized crime, the government will impose such conditions as a prerequisite to settling the case. The arrangement allows the Department of Justice to make certain that a company continues to uphold its side of the deal.
It appears that Trump, by calling for an independent ethics monitor to watch over his company, was trying to evoke those sorts of agreements—but what he has done, voluntarily, is far less than what a compliance-monitor agreement with the government would require.
Normally, the selection of a monitor is a rigorous process, and includes rules to insure that the monitor has an arm’s-length relationship with the entity being monitored. In addition, the government usually has the right to approve the person who is hired for the job. “There’s a certain amount of transparency—you can’t just pick and choose whomever you want,” Stephen Fishbein, a partner with Shearman and Sterling, who has served as a corporate compliance monitor himself, said. “If Trump wanted to do something similar, it would be a fairly elaborate setup. He wouldn’t have complete discretion on who it was, and there would be a written public document that would explain what the rules of the road are.”
Because Trump is undertaking the measures at will, he can pick whomever he wants. And the people the Trump Organization has chosen reflect, to some extent, Trump’s apparent attitude toward conflicts of interest. Bobby Burchfield, a litigator with the law firm King & Spalding, in Washington, D.C., was named as an independent ethics adviser to the Trump Organization; part of his job will be to review the company’s business transactions and make sure they don’t pose any conflicts. Burchfield is an experienced lawyer, but hardly a neutral one: he’s a longtime ally of the Republican Party, having represented George W. Bush during the vote recount in Florida, in 2000, and serving as chairman of Crossroads G.P.S., the Karl Rove-backed dark-money fund-raising machine. In 2015, he was named the Republican Lawyer of the Year by the National Republican Lawyers Association.
Perhaps even more troubling, Trump’s company also appointed its own attorney, a longtime Trump Organization executive named George Sorial, as its chief compliance counsel. The job, according to Sorial’s public statements about his plans, will be to insure that the company does not take any actions that could be perceived as exploiting Trump’s position as President. Sorial is deeply enmeshed in the company: he has been employed by Trump since 2007, and worked on the Trump University fraud litigation, which the company settled for twenty-five million dollars. Unlike official Justice Department oversight, which would require the monitor to report on the company’s behavior to the government, there is no indication that the Trump Organization’s internal or external ethics officers will be sharing their activities with the government or the public. In other words, Americans will continue to be uninformed as to Trump’s business conflicts, except when he decides to broadcast them on Twitter.
There was so much going on in President Donald Trump’s first week of presidential decrees that it was hard to keep track of it all. The most acute problem, in that it immediatelyaffected people’s lives, was the executive order issued on Friday that banned entry to the United States for immigrants, refugees or visitors arriving from a list of certain Muslim-majority countries designated as having terrorist activity. On Saturday when it became clear that the ban was taking effect immediately and people were being denied entry or told at their point of origin that they could not board U.S.-bound planes, all hell broke loose.
Nobody understood the rules. Passengers were being held and interrogated. Chaos ensued at international airports all over the country. Protesters gathered en masse at terminals to show their solidarity. Immigration lawyers arrived to help detainees and their families navigate a system that nobody understood — because it was arbitrary and constitutionally dubious. The world reacted with disbelief.
Finally several federal judges issued stays, for a variety of reasons, in response to suits filed by civil liberties and immigration attorneys around the country. Even hawkish constitutional experts were appalled.
It was a shocking moment in American history.
But we shouldn’t have been too surprised. Trump had promised to bar Muslims from entering the country during the campaign, famously making a speech after the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack, saying it had to be done until the U.S. “could figure out what the hell is going on.” He modified his remarks later, apparently at the urging of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who bragged that he had told Trump he could bar Muslims from gaining admittance only by nationality rather than religion (while offering priority to those practicing a different religion) or he would run afoul of the Constitution. Now the Trump administration has absurdly proclaimed that it was just following former president Barack Obama’s lead (an assertion refuted by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.)
On Saturday it soon became apparent that the order did not just apply to refugees or even visa holders but was also being used to deny entry to legal U.S. residents — green card holders who had been out of the country. It wasn’t long before leaks filtered out of the administration that Trump’s senior strategist, former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, had personally overruled a Department of Homeland Security’s official finding that such legal residents would not be included in the ban. After an uproar, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly finally clarified that legal residency would not be “a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations,” basically meaning that individuals would not be denied entry and deported simply for being legal residents instead of citizens. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of Trump’s supposed party, wryly observed: “You have an extreme vetting proposal that didn’t get the vetting it should have had.”
The situation remains confused and fluid. But the fact that Bannon had the ability to do what he did suggests that he’s going to use his power to advance his white nationalist agenda. And his power is growing substantially. While the Muslim ban got most of the attention over the weekend, it was also revealed that Bannon had been named a permanent member of the National Security Council, even as the administration denied that status to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence.
When asked to explain this, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on ABC’s “This Week” that “the president gets plenty of information from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” and pointed out that Bannon is a “former naval officer” with a “tremendous understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape that we have now.” Bannon left the service in 1983.
Indeed, Bannon’s “understanding” of the world is exactly what has people concerned. Bannon has become Trump’s most influential adviser and (along with Stephen Miller, a former aide to attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions) seems to be guiding Trump toward his goals, even if the president is clueless about the details or the ramifications. Bannon is a radical white nationalist whose main objective, as he has openly admitted, is to blow everything up — essentially to destroy the existing social and political order. What that leaves us with after the smoke clears is anyone’s guess, since he is notably vague on the endgame.
Recall that a year before he joined the campaign, Bannon was telling people that he was Trump’s unofficial “campaign manager” and was quoted in an email as saying, “Trump is a nationalist who embraces [Sen. Jeff Sessions’] immigration plan.” Nonetheless, as recently as last summer Bannon told Vanity Fair that Trump is a “blunt instrument for us. I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”
At this point, it seems obvious that it doesn’t really matter. Trump is a narcissist with a very few simple bedrock beliefs, most of which intersect nicely with Bannon’s propaganda and tactics — which happen to intersect with global right-wing nationalism, manifested in the U.S. as the alt-right. This movement was well described by Vanity Fair’s Henry Porter in an article about Trumpism and Brexit:
They mistrust the political establishment and elites, in general; their rhetoric on immigrants is sometimes openly racist; they have a longing for past glories and the old order of things; they are very, very angry; and they present new levels of immunity to verifiable facts and expert opinion.
That worldview is reflected in far right movements and parties in the U.K. (the UK Independence Party), Germany (the Alliance for Germany), the Netherlands (the Party for Freedom) and France (the National Front), among others, and some of these movements have also been cultivated by the Russian president Vladimir Putin. (There is evidence of his government’s attempts to meddle in European elections, in a similar fashion to what allegedly happened in the U.S. during the recent presidential campaign.) This is the worldview that is likely to inform President Trump on policy.
You can see this perfectly manifested in the first week’s orders on (nonexistent) voter fraud, immigration and deportation policies. The ban on Muslims from certain countries has particular national security implications, in that experts believe it will be a splendid propaganda tool for ISIS and will drive a wedge between the U.S. and many of its allies — something that fits perfectly with Bannon’s overall “blow it up” philosophy.
As Bannon said last summer, Trump is just a “blunt instrument” and at this point it doesn’t matter if he “gets it” or not. In his new role as Trump’s Rasputin, Bannon is now in a position to literally make his dreams of destruction come true.
One of the great things about economics is that it is devoid of all mysticism. Every person, good, service, and dollar is treated equally — nothing is special or above the rules. There’s nothing about the supply of or demand for apples that is categorically different from that of oranges. Since every good or service demanded by anybody is scarce, economics treats apples, oranges, computers, haircuts, education, and health care in the same way. There is not a special branch of economic theory that only applies to health care. Economists may focus on health issues, but they use the same basic set of tools as economists who focus on energy, or any other area for that matter. Does Health Care get a Pass on the Laws of Economics? This was the root of the disagreement between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders in this week's CNN debate on Obamacare. Cruz (for all his faults) defended the view that health care is not special when it comes to economics. Sanders seemed to think that if he could just proclaim that health care is a right proudly enough, new doctors, hospitals, drugs, and medical equipment would fall from the sky, equally portioned out across the population of the United States. At one point, Sanders asked Cruz, “Is every American entitled, and I underline that word, to health care as a right of being an American? Yes or no?” The implication was that the only thing holding Cruz back from agreeing with him was Cruz’s own misanthropy or cowardliness. Cruz held his ground and espoused a view of rights that says “you have a right for government not to mess with you” and cited the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights as examples. Notably, economic theory as a wertfrei science has nothing to say about rights. Economics cannot answer the question, “Who ought to have this doctor?” or “What should insurance companies charge various people?” Voluntary Exchange and Giving Provides for the Best Result What economics can say, however, is that voluntary exchange is the only way scarce goods find their highest valued use. Sometimes the highest valued use of a good or service is charitable giving. According to the OECD, the United States is ranked #1 for voluntary private giving (11.1% of GDP), which far exceeds that of the next highest countries: the UK (5.0%) and the Netherlands (7.1%). One can only guess what these figures would be without a giant government crowding out effect. Sanders’s emotional argument hinges on what happens to people who cannot afford health insurance. But his answer is one that can only yield worse outcomes for people who cannot afford health insurance. Amy and Bob Want To Help Charlie Consider an economy of three people: Amy, Bob, and Charlie. Amy has $100 to her name, Bob has $50, and Charlie only has $5. Amy and Bob don’t like how Charlie isn’t able to pay for some items they consider necessary to live a decent life. Amy would like to give $25 to help Charlie, and Bob would like to give $10. Charlie, of course, is happy to receive any help. Now consider two ways of distributing the funds to help Charlie: one democratic method and one voluntary method. A democratic method would involve the three voting on a standardized distribution scheme, meaning one person may end up having to give more than they desire or less than they desire. Of course, any difference in the latter case can be made up with voluntary, private giving which is still legal. The three must also pay for the ballot box and the forms for income reporting, among other bureaucratic fees. Amy, who is put in charge of the process, is also paid to manage the whole ordeal. In the end, the actual amount that ends up in Charlie’s hands is less than what Amy and Bob originally wanted Charlie to receive, and, adding insult to injury, someone may have been forced to give more than they wanted, meaning they are worse off. The best case scenario for this democratic method would involve a law that forces people to give exactly as much as they would give voluntarily. But even in this unlikely case (especially once expanding it to a population of 300+ million people), extra funds are still required to go through the voting and redistribution process. In the voluntary giving method, Charlie directly receives exactly as much as each individual cares to give. Even if Amy decides to set up a charity organization that specializes in getting funds to Charlie, Bob can decide whether or not it is effective in helping Charlie and decide how to give his $10 accordingly. What this means is that we do not need political “solutions” to any problem involving resource allocation. Nobody likes starvation, illiteracy, or untreated medical ailments. To the extent that we dislike these, we give out of our own abundance, and the especially generous can go even further. The government can only disrupt this process by crowding out charitable giving and serving as an inefficient middleman. The best-case scenario for Sanders’s plan is one that is worse than what would exist without a single government intervention in health care.
