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Monday, July 22, 2019

We spent much of the past week arguing not about whether Donald Trump is a racist -- some might prefer not to discuss it, but hardly anyone doubts or denies such an abundantly settled fact. A week ago we faced what struck me as an artificially inflated schism between Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and the more determined reformers in "the squad," but that division vanished instantly thanks to their common enemy -- Trump, for starters, and the racism he and his party so naturally indulge in. Pelosi may be jealous of the squad's popularity with the Democratic base, and she may be overly concerned with her reputation as a Washington power broker. But the fact is that since the 2018 election, the right-wing media has been most obsessed with raising alarms over the squad. Given that context, Trump's tweets strike me less as recurring racist bluster (to which he's certainly prone) than as confirmation that the Republicans' campaign strategy for 2020 will be to try to turn every local election into a referendum on Ilhan Omar. Pelosi knows that better than anyone, because Republicans have tried for years to make her the public face of Democratic-Socialist-Liberal dread.

Most important piece below is Matthew Yglesias's Trump's racism is part of his larger con. I didn't quote from it, but could have quoted the entire piece. Just read it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump met a lot of refugees and seemed to learn about their crises for the very first time. By the way, the refugees he met were pretty carefully selected (by Sam Brownback?) to appeal to administration prejudices ("Rohingya in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, and Yazidis in Iraq").

  • Puerto Rico's week of massive protests, explained.

• Andrew J Bacevich: The decline of our nation's generals: "Once powerful titans of policy, today no one knows who they are. Given all the mistakes they've made, is it any wonder?"

• Peter Baker, et al.: Trump employs an old tactic: using race for gain.

• Emily Bazelon: Justice John Paul Stevens had some things to say before he died: Actually, a review of his book, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years. Stevens died last week, at 99.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • "Send her back" is where racism and authoritarianism meet: "The viciousness isn't an accident. It's what Trumpism is really about."

  • Trump and the dead end of conservative nationalism. I've scanned through this twice and have no idea what the concept is, probably because conservatism and nationalism these days have little to offer other than bitter and vindictive reactions against whatever they find offensive. Trying to define either as a coherent ideology is hopeless. Merging them both into a synthetic (much less unifying) movement is even more ridiculous. Related:

    • Park MacDougald: What the hell is 'national conservatism' anyway?

    • Jacob Heilbrunn: National conservatism: retrofitting Trump's GOP with a veneer of ideas.

    • Eric Levitz: National conservatives want cultural dominance not 'social cohesion'.

    • Osita Nwanevu: Conservatism nationalism is Trumpism for intellectuals.

• Peter Beinart: By Republican standards, almost nothing is racist.

• Jared Bernstein: What economists have gotten wrong for decades: "Four economic ideas disproven by reality." This starts with the so-called "natural rate of unemployment" ("NAIRU" to its fans):

  The natural rate of unemployment that AOC questioned is one such idea (more on that below). There are three others worth singling out:

  • that globalization is a win-win proposition for all, an idea that has deservedly taken a battering in recent years;
  • that federal budget deficits "crowd out" private investments; and
  • that the minimum wage will only have negative effects on jobs and workers.

  Economists and policymakers have gotten these ideas wrong for decades, at great cost to the public. Especially hard hit have been the most economically vulnerable, and these mistakes can certainly be blamed for the rise of inequality. It's time we moved on from them.

  By the way, not every economist bought into these ideas, even in their heyday. George P. Brockway (1915-2001) was especially critical of NAIRU (see his short collection Economics Can Be Bad for Your Health as well as his masterpiece, The End of Economic Man). John Quiggin wrote about much of this in Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (2010). By the way, when Joe Biden became Vice President, he picked Bernstein as his economic adviser. I'm not a Biden fan, but that was a smart and gutsy pick at a time when Obama was hiring economists like Larry Summers. Back in 2008, before his appointment, Bernstein wrote an insightful book called Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries).

• Jamelle Bouie: The joy of hatred: "Trump and 'his people' reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America."

• Aleia Fernández Campbell: The House just passed a $15 minimum wage. It would be the first increase in a decade.

• John Cassidy: There is nothing strategic about Trump's racism.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Welcome to the post-post-corruption era of the Republican Party. Takes a detour from its original subject -- Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta's temporary and more permanent replacements (the former a Jack Abramoff associate, the latter Antonin Scalia's son, Eugene) -- to review the Party's checkered history both for and against corruption.

    Conservatism never fails, Rick Perlstein archly observed at the time; it is only failed. . . . It is almost impossible to overstate how much weight conservatives placed on corruption as their diagnosis of failure. This conviction led straight to their Obama-era posture as a "reformed" party of pure fiscal conservatism. . . . Pizzella may not lead the agency for long, and by Trump-era standards, of course, his offenses barely register as scandals at all. The Trump administration is shot through with corruption, from petty grifts like Cabinet members abusing their expense accounts to legislation written by and for lobbyists. The president himself is taking payoffs from corporate lobbyists and foreign governments through his Washington hotel and other properties.

    The party's whole post-Bush backlash against corruption and deficit spending, and the notion that those values are antithetical to conservatism, has been forgotten. ("Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore," Rush Limbaugh casually declared. "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around.") Having fulfilled its use by giving Republicans a reason to absolve their ideology of any role in Bush's failure, they discarded it.

  • Republicans baffled why Trump keeps saying racist things.

• Jane Coaston: The Trump racism spin cycle.

• Jelani Cobb: Donald Trump's idea of selective citizenship.

• Chas Danner: Trump shows yet again that he can't even pretend to reject racism.

• Tom Engelhardt: Planet of the surreal: Turning 75 in the Age of Trump.

• Eric Foner: The Supreme Court is in danger of again becoming 'the grave of liberty'.

• Masha Gessen:

  • The weaponization of national belonging, from Nazi Germany to Trump.

    By turning unspoken assumptions into hateful rally chants, Trump is not merely destroying the norms of political speech but weaponizing them. He is cashing in on the easy trick of saying out loud what others barely dare to think. But his supporters are also enforcing the prohibition on his opponents' taking part in the conversation -- as when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reprimanded for calling Trump's speech "racist" on the House floor. Trump has initiated a radical renegotiation of belonging in this country and then monopolized it. This is what happens first: a political force seizes the power to define themselves as insiders and certain others as intruders. This is done in the name of protection of the motherland, which the newly marginalized are said to hate. Everything else follows.

  • Trump, Pelosi, and the Squad are fighting over who belongs in government.

• Susan B Glasser: "I'm winning": Donald Trump's calculated racism.

• Michelle Goldberg:

  • Defenders of a racist president use Jews as human shields: "Trump's bigoted attack on four congresswomen of color has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism."

  • Please, Pelosi, fight Trump, not the Squad.

• Tara Golshan: Mark Sanford is willing to run against Trump for president if people start talking about the debt.

• Emily Holden: Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does in a year.

• Caroline Houck: Mark Esper, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, explained: Key point: "former top lobbyist from Raytheon."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Trump's racism is pushing away the voters he needs in 2020. I don't really buy this. Past history shows that Trump's economic beneficiaries (almost exclusively stock and business owners) care very little about his race messaging. On the other hand, people who have no economic stake in his policies but support him for cultural reasons need reinforcement, which comes not so much because they identify with racism as that they fear and loathe the sort of people who get offended over such. That's in a nutshell why his support figures have increased (marginally, for sure) as nearly every Democrat/Independent has been blasting him.

  • Susan Collins's approval rating dives as reelection contest approaches.

• Catherine Kim: New polling indicates Republicans actually like Trump more following racist tweet controversy.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump says US Navy destroyed Iranian drone.

  • Boris Johnson, the frontrunner to be the UK's next prime minister, explained. Related: James Butler: Boris Johnson is how Britain ends.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Deficit Man and the 2020 election. Contrasts Deficit Man with Tariff Man, both Trump attempting to lead the economy, and argues that so far the economic stimulus caused by running high deficits has limited the damage caused by Trump's tariffs. Overall prognosis for the Trump economy is "meh."

  • Racism comes out of the closet: "The dog whistle days are apparently over." Well, that's what happens when you elect the dog.

  • Trump and the merchants of detention: "Every betrayal seems to profit the president and his friends."

  • Trump is losing his trade wars.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Moderate Democrats warn that AOC is distracting from their nonexistent message.

  • 15 ways President Trump has hurt the American worker: Old piece (Sept. 4, 2018), linked from article above, but worth recalling. Of course, a current piece could easily be expanded to 30 ways.

• PR Lockhart: The racism in Trump's attacks should be impossible to deny.

• German Lopez: Cory Booker's latest criminal justice reform bill takes aim at life imprisonment.

• Ella Nilsen: House votes to hold AG Barr and Commerce Secretary Ross in contempt of Congress over census citizenship question.

• Anna North: How 4 congresswomen came to be called "the Squad".

• Jeremy W Peters/Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Trump sets the 2020 tone: like 2016, only this time 'the Squad' is here.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • The EPA's new 'no surprise' policy protects everything except the environment.

  • This was a fascist rally down to its bones.

  • The unholy trinity of voter suppression is having a no good, very bad week: Kris Kobach, J Christian Adams, Hans von Spakovsky.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Michael Cohen documents unsealed as Trump hush money investigation concludes.

  • Jeffrey Epstein's connections to Donald rump and Bill Clinton, explained.

• Jonah Raskin: Paul Krassner, 1932-2019: American satirist. I should note that I started reading The Realist shortly after I dropped out of high school, so Krassner played an outsized role in my discovery that there are other ways of understanding the world than had been drilled into my tiny brain by the official guardians of virtue.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "Incredible patriots" is the new "very fine people": Trump defends racist chants.

  • "Send her back!": Trump's attacks on Ilhan Omar -- and the response to them -- represent a new low.

  • Trump claims he tried to quell "send her back!" chants. The video says otherwise.

  • It wasn't just Ilhan Omar -- Trump disparaged 8 women during his speech in North Carolina.

  • "What's your ethnicity?": Kellyanne Conway's defense of Trump's racism isn't helping.

  • Trump's threat to investigate Google isn't based on evidence. It's based on Fox News.

  • Trump says he's not concerned about being racist because "many people agree" with him.

• Jeffrey D Sachs: America's economic blockades and international law: I'm not sure who Sachs thinks has been calling Trump an isolationist, but at least he rejects that label. What's different about Trump isn't the degree the US engages with other countries but the terms of alliance and intervention. From FDR through Obama, the US has generally tried to find agreement on areas of mutual interest, often trading economic help for joint security. Trump's intent is to put American (by which he often means his personal) interests first, reducing everyone else to paying tribute for some degree of privilege within the US-directed world order. If it seems like little has changed under Trump, that's mostly because the US position at the top of the informal world order has, at least since WWII, been rooted in the relative size and wealth of the American economy (although these days it has largely transformed itself into global financial networks, which nation states have little effective power to regulate). Where his predecessors preferred to build alliances based on mutual interest, all Trump sees is the power to extract profit. In the past, NATO was presented as a trade: member countries would open themselves up to global capitalism, and in turn would receive security guarantees. (Indeed, the "carrot" of capital investment was probably more decisive to expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe than fears of Russian aggression.) On the other hand, Trump views NATO as a protection racket, and wants to do what any gangster/boss would do: raise the tribute. As an authoritarian, Trump much prefers his sticks to carrots, much as he'd rather be feared than befriended (not that he minds having friends, as long as they are properly submissive). Short of risking his bloated military, the most powerful stick he has at his disposal is the economic blockade (sanctions), which he's employed more aggressively than ever before (e.g., North Korea, Iran, Venezuela). So far, nothing disastrous (for the US, anyway) has come of this. None of the targeted countries have submitted, but few (if any) nominal allies have yet decided to buck US authority and circumvent the sanctions, so Trump appears to be in control. However, you have to wonder how long China, Europe, Russia, India, Japan, etc., will continue to kowtow to a thin-skinned, thankless bully like Trump.

• William Saletan: Is Trump a racist or a narcissist? Here's a puzzle even Saletan can solve: "He's both." But aren't those just facets of an even broader and deeper sociopathy?

• Theodore Schleifer: A plan to fix inequality would target CEOs who make 100 times more than their employees: CEO pay has been a useful metric for measuring inequality for several decades now, but the most one can hope for by narrowly targeting it is to muddy the metric. CEO's represent a small sliver of the very rich, and as such a small sliver of the money that a more general program could tax. I think it's long been clear that the main reason boards have moved so strongly to increase CEO pay has been the desire to make CEO's act more like owners and less like managers: to focus more on short-term profitability, while allowing more risks to long-term stability.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren's latest Wall Street enemy: private equity.

• Matt Taibbi: CNN's debate lottery draw is a new low in campaign media: "If you cover elections like reality shows, you will get reality stars as leaders."

• Robin Wright: Iran's eye-for-an-eye strategy in the Gulf.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The controversy over Bernie Sanders's low-paid field staffers, explained.

  • Trump's racism is part of his larger con.

  • Trump's racist tirades against "the Squad," explained.

  • The controversy over whether the media should call Trump's tweets "racist," explained.

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