Those Mean Old Disestablishment Blues: Why it’s so hard to put Humpty-Dumpty together again

Dreary old Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by almost three million votes, despite being deeply loathed by millions of voters, many of whom held their noses and voted for snatch snatchin’ Don. Post election, Trump’s poll ratings have never reached the 45% mark, despite a booming stock market and a steadily expanding economy. So why are Nervous Nellies like me so nervous re 2020?

Because the dreary old establishment, which dreary old Hillary so fully represented in so many ways, fell here in the U.S., as it has in so many countries around the world, because the establishment had many grievous flaws, flaws which the establishment quite honestly cannot see. When the economic collapse of Greece threatened to bring down the entire European Union back in 2008-2009, economist Paul Krugman recalled how, when the EU was first being put together, he warned his European colleagues, over and over again, of the manifest and manifold dangers of a common currency. As Krugman tells it, he received nothing but condescension for his pains. Europe had taken things up another level, or two, or three, and a poor American like Krugman just couldn’t keep up. He was probably just jealous, jealous and unable to comprehend the subtle strength of European soft power, that would push the pushy Yanks from center stage and let the spotlight of civilization return to Europe, where it always belonged. The same myopia, I fear, possesses Obama/Clinton-style neo-liberalism, while the bag and baggage of both the Bernie Sanders paleo-liberals and the William Kristol “conscience neocons”, few in number but (often) loud in spirit, could easily prevent the formation of an effective anti-Trump coalition.

It’s fair to say that the woes of the Establishment, both at home and abroad, are not all deserved. In the U.S. in particular, the deep hostility that has developed over immigration is almost entirely irrational—irrational and racist—in character, driven by the spectacle of terrorism at home and abroad and economic stasis if not decline since 2000. But in other areas—universal health care, the environment, the ever-burgeoning obsession with political correctness and “privilege”, unexamined faith in “big government,” and a continuing commitment, or at least acceptance, of an aggressive global presence by the U.S. that is intolerant of any “competition”—the Democratic establishment seems set to continue with its old mistakes.

The Obama Administration did not deserve the “rage” felt by many in the middle class at proper and effective counter-cyclical spending in response to the Great Recession. But it foolishly exacerbated this rage by seizing on the swollen anti-Bush majorities in Congress to push through the great liberal dream, universal health care. This was scarcely Obama’s doing alone. The House Democrats were unhappy with the Senate bill that eventually became law not because it went too far, but because it did not go far enough. But it was undoubtedly Obama’s persistent leadership that pushed the final package through, leading to the disastrous 2010 congressional election, duplicating perfectly the disastrous 1994 congressional election following the Clintons’ disastrous attempt to “ram through” universal health care—the election that gave the thuggish Newt Gingrich the national stage and ushered in the era of near-permanent Republican majority in the House of Representatives, a majority that has grown ever more irresponsible and corrupt over time.

Obamacare was and is neolib rather than paleolib universal health care, but neither brand of Democrat is willing to realize that universal health care, no matter how it’s packaged, is poison to the middle class. Virtually all Democrats are convinced that anything “universal” is a no brainer to everyone, except, well, Donald Trump. But it isn’t. Most middle-class people have health care via their employers or Medicare. They can see perfectly well that “universal health care” simply means that the government is going to take resources away from “their” programs and give it to “not them”—welfare cheats of every description and hue.¹ Bernie Sanders’ powerful performance against a stumbling Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries has given the paleoliberal wing of the Democratic Party more energy than they have possessed in decades, and the paleolibs are already pushing the Party further to the left on health care.

Obama and his establishment pals blundered with even greater persistence, I think, on the issue of environmentalism, really Obama’s favorite issue, the one that most provoked his imagination and the one he most enjoyed talking about.² On this one, he drank the Kool-Aid by the gallon. This was a man who really wanted to save the planet. And millions of well-heeled, well-organized Democrats agreed with him.

Environmentalism is the opium of the upper-middle class, transporting them into a world where “science”—science itself!—proves that they should be in charge. There is no doubt that there is ample scientific evidence to prove that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, and that it will have detrimental effects in the future, but this evidence provides no real guidance as to what “must” be done, and, above all, no proof that the endlessly prophesied apocalypse is approaching. And, in fact, the irrationalities of the environmental movement are endless—the decision of coastal liberals in both New York and California to ban fracking, for example—eliminating the sort of blue-collar jobs that liberals supposedly love, and keeping the price of natural gas from falling even lower than it already has, which would lead to the more rapid replacement of coal-burning power plants than has taken place while also stimulating economic growth.³

If environmentalists were really concerned about, you know, the environment, they would embrace fracking, and they would embrace nuclear power (which, as Reason’s Ron Bailey explains, is a double no-brainer). And they would also embrace genetically modified organisms. (Again, Ron Bailey is the man with the facts.) The worst nightmare for environmentalists, of course, would be a low cost method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, meaning that we wouldn’t have to change our evil ways at all!

Many mainstream liberals—like Hillary Clinton, for example—are, I think, environmentalists of convenience. They see the conviction of the many million earnest true believers as a horse they can ride towards a neo-socialist future, a great problem that (naturally) only government can solve, and one that is, conveniently enough, less difficult, in many ways, than that of poverty and racism. Neolibs like Clinton and Obama (who clearly is a true believer when it comes to the cause of the environment) are attracted to what might be called “billionaire environmentalism”, which enlists the sympathies of the Democratic donor class, interested both in protecting their vacation “homes” and obtaining tax credits for their various fabulous business projects. For many environmentalists, however, the primary motivations are both a love of the “innocence” of nature and a deep hatred of corporate America—“Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, and big whatever. It is the same longing that prompted the socialists of the past, but now the beneficiaries are seals and polar bears rather than the poor⁴—because cute, furry animals are easier to love than the poor.

While environmentalists say they follow Science, in fact they follow “Nature”, which is something very different. The obsession with “Nature” is what causes so many environmentalists to obsessively reject GMO, along with pesticides and any number of other methods of intervening in natural processes to the benefit of human beings. The fascination with Nature is essentially irrational—the belief that, if we could only follow Nature perfectly, we would live in perfect health forever, as though perfect health were “natural” when in fact sustained perfect health is quite unnatural, while disease and death are both natural and inevitable. It is not surprising that Steve Jobs may have shortened, and possibly even ended, his life by first pursuing “holistic” treatment for his pancreatic cancer before pursuing conventional treatment.

Probably the uniting belief of all Democrats is the efficacy of big government, the power of government bureaucracies to both analyze and resolve the largest problems facing society. But the historical record here tells a different story. It’s true that Republicans did everything they could to hamstring the Obama Administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but the disastrous debut of that program was still disgraceful. One essential test of an effective bureaucracy is whether bad news traveled upwards, and the Obama Administration failed that test completely.

The repeated failures of big government—the constant tendency of bureaucracies to turn into little more than patronage machines—is on frequent display at the state and local level, and has cost the Democrats repeatedly, as government costs more and more and delivers less and less. In recent years, the Democrats’ beloved mass transit has received numerous black eyes—in New York City, for example, where it costs $3.5 billion to lay a mile of subway track, where the average subway worker enjoys a total wage and benefit package worth $150,000 a year, and where every train has two drivers, while every other system in the world gets by with one. The New York subway is so bad that even New Yorkers in Washington, DC have stopped talking about it.

The Nation’s Capital, of course, has little to brag about as well. Like New York, the city’s Metro system has suffered repeated embarrassments, but the biggest failures have involved the city’s school system. Recent revelations have shown that the bureaucrats running the DC schools have treated the system as their own private preserve, breaking the rules to put the needs of their own kids first. A recent renovation of the city’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts, budgeted at $70 million, had a $100 million overrun. Then it turned out that a large percentage of the schools’ students weren’t residents of DC. Worst of all, there was a pattern of massive absenteeism among most high school seniors, many of whom should not have been allowed to graduate.

There’s more bad transit news from California, where the state’s “bullet train” is perhaps five years behind schedule and, of course, billions of dollars over budget. I wonder when Paul Krugman will do a column on this one.

The burgeoning public sector has a particularly negative effect on the poor because both state and local governments are desperately seeking revenues via sources other than taxation, which leads to heavier and heavier fines for trivial offenses and more aggressive enforcement of the laws defining such offenses. Poor people often can’t afford to pay these fines, losing their drivers’ licenses or ending up in jail, or both, as governments struggle to pay bureaucrats’ salaries and pensions.

In every case, of course, public employee unions are a significant part of the problem, but the rise of Bernie Sanders’ paleolibs is pushing the Democratic Party even closer to the unions. Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations were notoriously cool towards the teachers’ unions, but educational “reform” appears to be a dead letter in these times, with “liberals” more concerned with protecting jobs⁵ and “conservatives” (and parents generally) wanting their kids to be under less pressure. The Democrats can only hope that the Supreme Court will have mercy on them and supply some “tough love” in the form of a decision that will allow public employees to opt out of paying union dues and thus weaken the power of unions, allowing/forcing Democrats to seek support elsewhere.

It’s a tragic fact that the greatest cause of modern liberalism—racial, and now sexual, equality—has curdled into the contemporary obsession with “privilege”, which often explicitly rejects the basic tenets of liberalism—the devotion to free speech and free thought. The “multiculturism” of the modern academy—a debased version of what a true multiculturism could and should be—forbids dissent and aggressively rejects the notion of objective truth in order to facilitate the mini-empire building of petty academics. As with any fashion, the fashion for combating privilege and abolishing microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other colonialist sins provokes an unending cycle of one-upmanship—everyone struggles to top the topper. Privileged groups—e.g., students at the elite colleges and universities—are under the greatest pressure to denounce their privilege, both to excuse and to justify it, with the palm inevitably going to the most privileged of all, who have the most privilege to reject, Proust’s “wit of the Guermantes” refurbished for a new age and a new hypocrisy.⁶

The constant din of denunciation of patriarchical colonialist bullshit in the modern academy has become part of the intellectual atmosphere for even (generally) clear thinkers like Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, who links approvingly to this call from Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, “arguing” that since Charles Murray⁷ wrote a racist book a couple of decades ago he shouldn’t be allowed to speak at a college. Because who wants to hear things you don’t agree with? And why should people who irritate you be allowed to speak?

However “left” the Democrats swing when it comes to “privilege” they unfailingly swing to the right when it comes to foreign policy and “defense”. For decades—in fact, for generations now—Republicans have lied about the Democratic record on defense. The recent grotesquely bloated, budget-busting, deficit-exploding spending bill that slid through Congress was widely hailed, almost without dissent, for “rebuilding our defenses”—defenses that in fact are far too overbuilt, and have been so for decades, a subject upon which I have railed for a full decade, with, of course, no effect.⁸ In fact, our defenses have never needed to be restored—our defenses were fine under President Carter, and the massive increases engineered by Ronald Reagan were simply a waste. In fact, even under Carter, defense spending was “generous”, or at least so I argue in this rather pointless diatribe on the subject of a forgotten book by Harold Brown, secretary of defense under Carter.

It was the Reagan Administration that instituted the Republican tradition of treating Democrats as absolute ninnies on all defense issues, refusing to support any kind of international agreement agreed to by a Democratic administration on principle. To a great extent, Democrats have acquiesced in the caricature that Republicans have created of them, striving to be at least 98% as “tough” as Republicans. And why not? Liberal voters simply have no interest in foreign affairs. Virtually all Republicans, and many independents, support whatever is proposed as “tough”, and the Democrats toddle along after, as long as there aren’t too many body bags involved. Even worse, the few liberals who do care about foreign affairs are almost exclusively Hillary Clinton style hawks, almost as devoted to “regime change” as Republicans, although they long for the fig leaf of international cooperation and alliances, while the Republicans long to rip the fig leaf off.⁹

Democrats vote for increased defense spending because it “creates jobs” (just ask Bernie Sanders!) and because they can use increases in defense spending to leverage increases in domestic spending, so everybody’s happy. The fact that Democratic “policy” is thus defined as increases in government spending as an end in itself, and that Democrats effectively buy into a “Forward” foreign policy that guarantees unending tension everywhere around the globe—justifying, of course, unending increases in defense spending—escapes notice, because who doesn’t like spending money?

Allies, anyone?
Democrats—particularly the Thomas Frank/Bernie Sanders paleolibs, say they want to reclaim white working class voters for the Democrats, but the party’s strong allegiance to the cause of both black and Hispanic Americans makes it difficult to believe the party can move very far to reclaim those votes. In many cases, the party shouldn’t want to, because many of these voters want to “vote white”, oppose anything that helps people who aren’t like them.

Thomas Frank, “passionate” author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and other tirades and a “classic” paleolib, never tires of insisting that if only the Democrats would go back to those wonderful New Deal programs that helped everyone we would also go back to the good old days when the Democrats won every single election. Frank and friends forget, even though many liberal historians have repeatedly reminded them, the extent to which the New Deal was the White Deal.¹⁰ Those big, “comprehensive” social programs like Social Security, minimum wage, maximum hours, unemployment insurance, etc. didn’t cover the black (and white) sharecroppers of the south and the migrant “hired men” in the north and Midwest, didn’t cover waiters and waitresses, didn’t cover domestic workers. Furthermore, (and a big “furthermore” it is, too) the working class didn’t have to pay for the New Deal (except for social security). Back in the day, working class folks paid almost no taxes, federal, state, or local, except social security.

The ”White Deal” continued in the post-war years. Employer-provided health insurance went largely to unionized workers, largely white and was (naturally) unavailable to the same classes of workers who were excluded by the old New Deal programs. The GI bill, which only gave assistance to veterans with an honorable discharge, shortchanged blacks, who, thanks to rank discrimination within the military, were far more likely to leave the service without one. Federal housing assistance, largely operated in conjunction with the GI bill, discriminated openly against blacks.

The great New Deal coalition broke down in the sixties, when liberals finally began in earnest to break down the racial barriers that had existed in American society for a good 350 years. This happened even before the sixties riots, which drove millions of whites from the big cities. Frank and Sanders and the rest of the “old line” paleocons want to paper over this divide, dealing with it by pretending that it doesn’t exist.⁹ This is why Sanders, in his campaign, insisted endlessly that all our problems are “economic”. But the “new socialists”—young people energized by Sanders’ campaign—though they’re happy to have their student loans canceled, are also the loudest purveyors of “wokeness”, exactly what the guys in the baseball caps don’t want to hear. Similarly, the fascination, and indeed fetishization, of environmental issues among liberal elites is almost guaranteed to drive working class voters away.

What “angry whites” say they want are those beloved manufacturing jobs, that provided middle class incomes while requiring only working class skills. But those “manufacturing” jobs were really union jobs—it wasn’t the job but the union that made the job pay. Most of the jobs are gone, thanks not to foreign competition but to automation, while the unions are gone as well, thanks to globalization, and they won’t be back, no matter what the liberals say. The answer—not emotionally satisfying, but practicable—is to engage in “open” economic redistribution by use of a greatly expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that would turn $10 an hour jobs into $15 an hour jobs, and $15 an hour jobs into $20—helping the bottom 40% of the population by increasing taxes on the top 20%. Whether this can fly politically I have no idea, but this is a real solution. I fear that too many Democrats would rather dream about a rebirth of unions than take such a practical step.

An alternative to the “angry whites” is the “rich whites”, the country club Republicans, the Mitt Romney/George Bush crowd, who stood by as Donald Trump trashed them and their party and sort of wished that someone would do something. Well, they’re still standing, and still wishing. While Republican politicians occasionally make indirect criticisms of Trump, they won’t confront him directly. And after spending decades basically trying to wreck Democratic Party, working themselves up to a state of sheer animal hatred at the prospect of Hillary Goddamn Clinton in the White House, it’s a little hard for them to realize that they were, well, totally wrong and that they’ve made peace with a monster. So it’s not likely that many will have the courage to join a party they’ve spent their careers demonizing. Of course, it’s always possible for cowards to develop courage, and when I see it I’ll be glad to believe it. But it’s “suggestive” that even when Trump directly attacks free trade, one of the cornerstones—if in fact not the keystone—of the new global order, Republicans in Congress aren’t willing to do much more than sigh in private. The occasional criticisms of Trump voiced by people like House Speaker Paul Ryan (retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan) may be no more than positioning for future employment in the big, wide, wonderful, post-congressional world of bipartisan lobbying.

Of course, it’s not all bad
Well, it isn’t. With less than six months to go before the election, the Democrats are likely to take the House of Representatives. And one can wonder, with Paul Ryan gone, how the House Republicans can function. With good luck, Democrats can take the Senate, though with bad luck they can fall further in the hole. Trump is so volatile, short-term predictions don’t mean much. But even if he only serves a single term, he will damage the country’s government as it has never been damaged before.

Afterwords
I’ve rather neglected the neocons, whom I referenced earlier in this piece. Some neocons find it difficult to resist Trump’s uncritical embrace of Netanyahu’s Israel but others do not, recognizing Trump’s tribalism and corruption as the rejection of all their ideals. They are, in addition, still fearful that Trump’s isolationist instincts—“why are we wasting all our money on those fuckers?”—will overcome his compulsive bellicosity and that on some casual impulse he will give away the store. On another level, the growth of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, often explicitly antagonistic to mainstream Judaism in the United States, is putting new strains on the Jewish community in the U.S., with the possible effect of increasing Jewish attachment to the Democratic Party at the same time that the Republicans become the “party of Israel.”

Still, it’s not surprising that some neocons, like William Kristol, are still longing, pathetically, for a Republican challenger to Trump. It will be difficult to go, cap in hand, to a party that you have unconscionably vilified, calumniated, and sabotaged for a quarter of a century.

I’ve previously moaned about “Modern Times” here.