Sunday, August 7, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I want to start with a paragraph from John Lanchester: Brexit Blues:

Immigration, the issue on which Leave campaigned most effectively and most cynically, is the subject on which this bewilderment is most apparent. There are obviously strong elements of racism and xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment. All racists who voted, voted Leave. But there are plenty of people who aren't so much hostile to immigrants as baffled by them. They feel left behind, abandoned, poor, ignored and struggling; so how come immigrants want to come here, and do so well when they get here? If Britain is broken, which is what many Leave voters think, why is it so attractive? How can so many people succeed where they are failing? A revealing, and sad, piece in the Economist in 2014 described Tilbury, forty minutes from London, where the white working class look on resentfully as immigrants get up early and get the train to jobs in the capital which, to them, seems impossibly distant. 'Most residents of the town, one of England's poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital as fly to the moon.'

The evidence on immigration is clear: EU immigrants are net contributors to the UK's finances, and are less likely to claim benefits than the native British. The average immigrant is younger, better educated and healthier than the average British citizen. In other words, for every immigrant we let in, the country is richer, more able to pay for its health, education and welfare needs, and less dependent on benefits. They are exactly the demographic the UK needs.

Not sure of the numbers, but offhand this sounds like a pretty fair description of immigrant America as well -- maybe there is a slightly larger slice of unskilled immigrant workers because the US has much more agribusiness, but a lot of the immigrants I know are doctors and engineers, and I suspect that immigrants own a disproportionate share of small businesses. One widely reported figure is that Muslims in America have a higher than average per capita income, so it's hard to see them as an economic threat to the middle class -- they're part of it. One thing we do have in common with Britain is that anti-immigrant fervor seems to be greatest in places with damn few immigrants. (Trump's third strongest state -- see below -- is the formerly Democratic stronghold of West Virginia, which is practically hermetically sealed from the rest of the US.) Whether that's due to ignorance and unfamiliarity or because those areas are the ones most left behind by economic trends -- including the ones most tied to immigration -- isn't clear (most observers read into this picture what they want to see).

Lanchester makes another important point, which is that the Brexit referendum succeeded because the single question cut against the grain of the political party system: "To simplify, the Torries are a coalition of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out." I suspect that if we had a national referendum on TPP you'd see a similar alignment against it (and it would get voted down, although the stakes would be far less). On the other hand, Trump vs. Clinton is going to wind up being a vote along party lines, not an alignment of outsiders against insiders or populists against elitists or any such thing.

Some scattered links this week:

  • David Auerbach: Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President: Long piece, finds an analogue for Trump in Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities, left incomplete by the author's death in 1942:

    The character who concerns us is Christian Moosbrugger, a working-class murderer of women who becomes an object of fascination for many of the characters in the novel and of the Vienna they inhabit. During his trial for the brutal murder of a prostitute, he becomes a celebrity, due to his cavalier and eccentric manner. [ . . . ] His "discipline" is akin to Trump's nebulous "art of the deal," not a teachable trade but an esoteric, innate property that makes him better than others -- a Macguffin. Trump is not a murderer; unlike Moosbrugger, he does not need to be. Trump was fortunate enough to begin with his father's millions and the ability to achieve dominance without physical violence. For Moosbrugger, violence was the only option available to him. Moosbrugger is no more a "murderer" than Trump is a "politician." They perpetrate amoral (not immoral) acts not out of their characters but out of a lack of character.

    Of course, if Trump becomes president, he will become a murderer -- much like Obama before him, by signing off on the assassination of alleged enemies (and, to use a time-worn phrase, fellow travelers). GW Bush and Bill Clinton too, but they had a head start as governors signing death warrants for condemned felons.

    I also like Auerbach's line:

    Trump's political rise is a product of the commodification of attention. As the ballooning of new media and analytics have facilitated the microscopic examination of consumer attention, the analysis has been performed with indifference to the consequences of that attention. Just as Donald Trump does not care why he is loved, worshipped, and feared -- no matter what the consequences -- we have seen massed content production turn to clickbait, hate clicks, and propaganda in pursuit of viewer eyes. By mindlessly mirroring fear and tribalism, the new media machine has produced a dangerous amount of collateral damage.

    It seems like it took a couple years after he became president before psychologists started probing the mind of GW Bush, but now we are already blessed with Dan P McAdams: The Mind of Donald Trump -- better safe than sorry, I suppose. Here he is just getting warmed up:

    Researchers rank Richard Nixon as the nation's most disagreeable president. But he was sweetness and light compared with the man who once sent The New York Times' Gail Collins a copy of her own column with her photo circled and the words "The Face of a Dog!" scrawled on it. Complaining in Never Enough about "some nasty shit" that Cher, the singer and actress, once said about him, Trump bragged: "I knocked the shit out of her" on Twitter, "and she never said a thing about me after that." At campaign rallies, Trump has encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters. "Get 'em out of here!" he yells. "I'd like to punch him in the face." From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents "disgusting" and writes them off as "losers." By the standards of reality TV, Trump's disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.

  • Gabriella Dunn: Bipartisan frustration over Kansas disability system: 'Legislature be damned': Part of Gov. Brownback's program for making Kansas a model state for emulation all across America and for resuscitating his presidential ambitions was his program to harness the magic of private enterprise to "reform" the moribund bureaucracy of the state's Medicaid program. He called this stroke of genius KanCare. Now, well, it's worked about as well as the rest of his programs:

    The Medicaid system has been riddled with problems recently. More than 3,000 disabled Kansans are on waiting lists for services, and the state says a seven-year wait is typical.

    The state also has a backlog of applications for Medicaid that started mounting a year ago when the state switched the computer system used to process the applications. The committee was told on Thursday that nearly 4,000 Kansans have been waiting more than 45 days for their applications to be processed. In mid-May that number was above 10,000.

    Part of the art of shrinking government "to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub" is to pick on areas that most people don't immediately recognize what's happening. Slacking off on maintenance is one such area, and helping people with disabilities is another. Things have to get pretty bad before they get noticed, and even then the full impact is hard to absorb. Still, even Kansans have started to wise up. For one thing, see GOP Voters Stage Major Revolt Against Brownback's Kansas Experiment. Not really as "major" as one might hope, but until this year Republican primaries have been killing fields for our so-called moderates. This year six Brownback-affiliated state senators, including Majority Leader Terry Bruce, got axed, as did Tea Party favorite Rep. Tim Huelskamp, one of the few "small government" conservatives in Congress to oppose such real government threats as NSA's domestic spying programs -- but his real problem was agribusiness, who flooded the primary with some $3 million in mostly out-of-state dark money. (Huelskamp spent a couple million himself, largely from the Koch network.) Not mentioned in the article is that Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn, who unlike Huelskamp has no redeeming virtues, was also knocked off -- again, his ideological fervor ran afoul of local business interests. On the other hand, the Democratic primary was a very depressing affair, with hardly any competent candidates rising to challenge the unmitigated disasters wrought by Brownback and company.

  • Diana Johnstone: Hiroshima: The Crime That Keeps on Paying, but Beware the Reckoning: Each August 6 marks yet another anniversary of our bloody inauguration of the age of nuclear destruction. I found this bit, following an Eisenhower quote expressing misgivings about dropping the atom bomb, interesting:

    As supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower had learned that it was possible to work with the Russians. US and USSR domestic economic and political systems were totally different, but on the world stage they could cooperate. As allies, the differences between them were mostly a matter of mistrust, matters that could be patched up.

    The victorious Soviet Union was devastated from the war: cities in ruins, some twenty million dead. The Russians wanted help to rebuild. Previously, under Roosevelt, it had been agreed that the Soviet Union would get reparations from Germany, as well as credits from the United States. Suddenly, this was off the agenda. As news came in of the successful New Mexico test, Truman exclaimed: "This will keep the Russians straight." Because they suddenly felt all-powerful, Truman and Byrnes decided to get tough with the Russians.

    In his book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, Gar Alperovitz argued that the US used the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to intimidate Russia. This twist is more plausible: that having used it for whatever reason, it then installed an arrogance in Truman and his circle that made them more aggressive in postwar diplomacy, and that made Stalin more defensive (which in turn, in some cases, made him more aggressive -- e.g., in Berlin and Korea, although in both cases he was largely provoked to lash out).

    Also on Hiroshima, see Ward Wilson: The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan . . . Stalin Did. By the way, I wrote more about Hiroshima in May 2016 and August 2015, and several times earlier (e.g., August 2008).

    Of course, the question of presidential control of "the nuclear launch codes" came up with respect to the notoriously thin-skinned and impulsive Donald Trump, who's been quoted as repeatedly asking his "security advisers" why we can't use nuclear weapons, and who's clung to the "never take options off the table" cliché so tenaciously it's hard to rule out any place he might not bomb. Relevant to this is Jeffrey Lewis: Our Nuclear Procedures Are Crazier Than Trump, arguing against the current "launch under attack" strategy which gives a president "a four-minute window to decide whether or not to initiate an irreversible apocalypse." I would add that I think that the only nation that has ever actually used nuclear weapons against civilian targets, the US should be going out of its way to reassure the world that won't happen again. Instead, Trump and his ilk are so insecure they feel to need to remind the world how terrifying they really are.

  • Seth Stevenson: If Sean Penn Were the Democratic Nominee: Possibly the dumbest political article of the year, and that's saying something. The whole idea is counterfactual, counterlogical even: "Imagining a world where the wackadoo candidate is in the other party" -- I guess they can dream, but the fact is that the Republican Party has actively embraced fantasy and myth and carefully channeled rhetoric while decrying science and, you know, that "reality-based" stuff, like facts, so there's little there to guard against unhinged candidates -- indeed, at least half of the original field of sixteen qualified. The closest thing to "wackadoo" on the Democratic side was Jim Webb, who didn't even make it to Iowa. As for Penn, you can look at his Wikipedia page to get a thorough list of his political activism, but as far as I can tell his main transgression against political correctness has been a tendency to get too close to officially despised foreign leaders like Hugo Chavez. I can't say as that sort of thing bothers me (in which case he suggests Kanye West, or "Ben from Ben and Jerry's") -- the point is he assumes there must be some balance on the Democratic side no matter how wacko the Republicans get, and second, he wants to show that a great many Democrats would follow that "unfit, paranoid, unstable Democratic nominee" as blindly as most Republicans are following Trump.

    Of course, this article assumes other fallacies. One is that the individual at the head of the ticket should matter much more than the party the ticket represents. I think nowadays that's largely due to the Commander in Chief fetish, itself due to the fact that the US is (and has been for 75 years now) a state perpetually at war all around the world. We tend to assume that having a decisive Commander in Chief has a huge effect on how effectively those wars are prosecuted, where in fact the built-in, unquestioned forces behind those wars usually winds up dictating how tragically foolish presidents wind up. An older view is that the personal moral character of the president matters a lot, whereas it rarely counts for anything. What we get instead are parties -- each president brings a whole layer of administration into power, and leaves behind a cohort of judges, and those choices are mostly tied to party. So to the extent that parties represents blocks of voters, why is it so strange that those voters would back their party regardless of how qualified and capable the ticket head is? Obviously, a lot of people who vote for Trump will really be voting for their party, some in spite of the candidate, but that applies (perhaps even more than usual) to the Democratic side as well. In neither case does it represent a serious misjudgement. However, only on the Republican side does it reflect a belief in complete nonsense and hysteria unrooted in interests or even reality.

  • Some more election links noted:

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