Seeking A Non-Fiction Alternative to Trumpism

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We can guess what the 2018 and 2020 elections are going to be about. Trump, and his obsessions. Dark people trying to infest America. Freeloading allies, or former allies. Unfair trade imbalances. Coal miners versus elites and the Dark State. Good guys and bad guys, us and them, winners and losers.

We also know what they ought to be about. Fixing what’s wrong with this country. Improving our education system and reforming immigration laws to produce and attract the workers we will need to compete in a global economy that we can’t wall ourselves off from.

Shoring up alliances that protect us from enemies, not going it alone. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, again the better to compete. Protecting ourselves and our institutions against cyber war, cyber crime and intellectual property theft, another competitive issue.

It also ought to be obvious that we need to ameliorate the extreme imbalance between haves and have-nots. They undermine belief in our democracy, capitalist economy and a just society. That includes, but is not confined to, a tax system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich while piling debt ever higher which makes sensible investment in the future impossible.

And yes, saving the earth from a climate catastrophe that will make existing problems — economic and political conflicts, waves of migration — look trivial by comparison.

Much of the Trump agenda is designed to deny these problems exist, while his policies tend to make them worse. His tax cut didn’t just enrich shareholders at the expense of workers, but is adding megatons to a debt bomb waiting to explode. It was good for Trump’s family and his donors, but not for the country’s survival.

If he and his enablers got their news anywhere besides Fox, Breitbart and kindred fantasists, they would have been unable to ignore the alarms being sounded about these issues in studies like “An Extraordinary Time,” “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” “Tailspin,” “Squeezed,” and “The Birth of a New Aristocracy” in a recent issue of “The Atlantic.”

In it, Matthew Stewart shows that the top 0.1 percent of the people had 10 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1963, but by 2012 those 160,000 families accounted for 22 percent. His New Aristocracy is the next 9.9 percent who control 58% of the nation’s wealth. That leaves a scant 20% for the bottom 90 percent of the population.

The New Aristocrats are the professional and managerial class — bankers, doctors, lawyers, executives. And as they have consolidated wealth, they have also entrenched it. With rising inequality comes diminishing social mobility.

Stewart show how a slanted tax code, a weakened social safety net, and demographic sorting by Zip Code leads not just to access to better schools, healthcare, and opportunities for the haves but barriers to entry to wealth-producing profession for the have-nots.

The result is a top 10 percent ensconced in safe havens and the bottom 90 percent in a an economic trap. In Stephen Brill’s “Tailspin,” he defines these classes as the protected and the unprotected.

Trump was right, the fix is in. Yet his policies have only made it worse. Not everyone was conned. The counties that voted for Clinton in 2012 accounted for 64 percent of GDP, those who voted for Trump for 36 percent. But, if the New Aristocrats don’t want to live in Trump’s populist paradise, they need to encourage the Democrats to pursue policies that promote a better deal for the 80 percent.

Our future also depends not just on addressing inequality, but on thriving in an era of technical and scientific innovation. While Trump purges his government of science-based policy, China and other competitors are forging ahead.

The nascent field of quantum computing is expected to be world-changing. The United States is investing $300 million in its pursuit, but China has allocated $1.2 billion to wining the race. This is eerily reminiscent of the Space Race of the 1950s except we are playing the part of the lagging USSR.

China is also emulating our behavior after WWII when we made alliances and investments round the world. Now Trump is turning his back on that legacy while China is investing in its Belt and Road project — buying and modernizing ports around the world, investing in huge agriculture projects in Africa, connecting itself to markets in Europe and Asia with a network of high speed rail, the better to compete for markets.

A recent article about a European bioscientist who has been doing research in the United States is telling. His government supported grant money dried up and he sought backing elsewhere. It came from China where he has relocated his lab. Multiply that by ten, a hundred, a thousand and you have what used to be called a brain drain. In addition to quantum computing, China has prioritized huge investments in neuroscience, AI, genetics, cybersecurity, robotics, big data.

While Trump undermines our environmental protections with an EPA that has banned the use of the words “climate change,” our competitors are armoring themselves against rising seas, shifting crop habitats, invasive species, epidemic diseases and their carriers. It is easy, and necessary, to blame Trump for his misguided policies, but are any Republican candidates pushing back, and are any Democratic candidates doing more than blaming. Are they offering an alternative vision of the future.

When the Republicans have chosen to be the party of fiction, with their cries of fake news and fake science, it in the responsibility of the opposition to be the party of reality, to educate voters about the real issues we face, the stakes for our future and the measures the government needs to enact if we are to survive and prosper in the future. Where are the Non-Fiction candidates?

Trump And Melania Don’t Care, Do U?

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Not since the gymnasts of the Summer Olympics have we seen a flipflop like that of Trump’s 180 on separating the children of detainees from their parents. He signed the executive order reversing the policy only hours after the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General said it was impossible for the president to do so, even though they had put in place just days earlier.

Since then the enormity of the dysfunction and heartlessness has only become more apparent as the government struggles to discover where the children have been stowed and how to reunite them with their refugee parents. But another question lurks in the shadows which may be important in the future. What caused Trump to do a humiliating about face?

Was it because 1) Congressional Republicans read him the riot act, 2) Ivanka and Melania told him it was mean, 3) political advisors told him the the ugliness of the policy might imperil a Midterm win for their party, 4) longtime Republican stalwarts like the Chamber of Commerce, rightwing propaganda mills, Fortune 500 companies, and donors recoiled in revulsion, 5) polls of its unpopularity spiked, 6) moral leaders from the Pope on down to the local pulpit preached against it?

It matters since anything that succeeds in reining in the Bully-in-Chief’s baser instincts is worth adding to the arsenal of democracy. But, in fact, no deep analysis is required to discover what motivated Trump’s epic fold. He is the most transparent villain since Simon Legree. He telegraphs every punch, blabs everything he ought to be covering up, and lies as transparently as a five-year-old with his hand in the cookie jar. Trump’s inability to put a sock in it is why his attorneys don’t dare let him talk to Robert Mueller.

So, why did he back down so embarrassingly and publicly, signing the executive order with his familiar scrawl that looks like the polygraph of a guilty suspect denying a crime. He told us himself. When it came to the border you had a Hobson’s choice, according to him. If you are “pathetically weak, the country’s going to be overrun…And if you are strong, then you don’t have a heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps I’d rather be strong.”

Perhaps? Of course he chose to be “tough” and “strong,” his two favorite words, once Attorney General Sessions, Chief of Staff Kelly and inflame-the-base policy guru Stephen Miller recommended the policy. It was supposed to be so draconian nobody from South of the Border would ever come near the Rio Grande again. And, for a president who doesn’t read, can’t tell truth from fiction, trusts almost no one, and has no patience for explanations involving complexity or nuance, this cruel policy had the advantage of being impossible to misunderstand — like a punch in the face.

Sadly, for Trump, all he really cares about is video, preferably of himself. But the video of the weeping, abandoned, terrified children was God awful. Soon he was saying, he didn’t like “the sight or the feelings of families being separated.” Does that mean he has a heart, after all. No. It means the response of people who do was so swift and so negative that it looked like it would be bad for him. Thus, the U-turn.

But, too late, the bad pictures just keep coming, including of Melania, dispatched to visit a particularly photogenic, buffed up shelter to mime compassion. Alas, she wore a faux graffiti-daubed “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” coat which seemed to suggest her mission was all a fraud. And on her best day the First Lady has only about a tenth of the warmth of an Oprah. She’s more like a better dressed clone of the icy Kirstjen Nielsen. And, of course, the lost children story keeps spinning out with more horrific video of detention conditions likely to emerge.

The main lesson going forward is that in Trump’s world, and our own, it’s all about the pictures. Henceforth, those hoping to counter Trump can forget about op-eds, talking heads, panel discussions. stump speeches. logic reason, or morality. Get some video. Don’t show pictures of Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke but of America despoiled, children (or in a pinch the family cat or dog) poisoned by polluted water, locked out of National Parks, panting for breath due to the polluted air.

Show us the starving children of unemployed coal miners, the weeping toddler alongside the casket of her star athlete sister, dead of opioids prescribed by the team doctor. And when choosing images to unite the country in Trump’s America, great care must be taken to make all the victims of dysfunction and disruption handsome men, attractive women and darling children who are blond and blue-eyed.

I showing us the looming danger of, say, rising sea levels caused by Climate Change, polar bears won’t cut it, though they are acceptable Aryan bears. But many people look at wildlife and say “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” No, we need video of the homes of Scandinavians sinking beneath the waves as they sob on the roof as fetchingly as Liv Ullmann might. Show us people as pale as Ivanka suffering due to Trump policies, then Fade to White.

Silence Of The Shams

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Some talking heads on the tube found it befuddling that Paul Ryan was maintaining a studious silence concerning a policy that many find cruel and unusual, separating parents and their children at the border. I’m only a scribbling finger, but it didn’t surprise me.

Ryan’s tenure as Speaker of the House has been characterized by no profiles in courage, rather slavish parroting of Trump era prejudices. The last time he spoke ill of Trump was during the campaign, not since he has assumed power.

Ryan tried to fire the House chaplain for a heretical prayer asking that lawmakers make efforts to see that “there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

He has failed to prevent House members like Devin Nunes of the Intelligence Committee from undermining the separation of powers by acting as tools of the White House to prevent investigation of Russian interference in the 2018 election.

His confused defenders claim he was once a nice fellow and that having announced his retirement at the and of the present term ought to free him to do his duty and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He has literally nothing to lose by speaking up.

I found this naiveté laughable. Ryan has often seemed an innocuous budget nerd, but his gospel has always been tilted more toward Mammon than toward God. He is a ruthless acolyte not of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, but of Ayn Rand. He is 180 degrees from the egalitarian, compassionate faith of the present head of his ostensible church, Pope Francis.

By their fruits you shall know them. His faith has always been in supply side economics, cutting taxes and the government programs they pay for. He believes those rich enough to donate to the party deserve to prosper and to do onto their poorer brethren whatever they can get away with.

Since he’s still got six more months left, in which to jam through more legislation to aid the deserving rich and increase the burden on the undeserving poor, he can ill-afford to risk the chance by speaking out against Trump’s war on immigrants or any other atrocity the administration hatches. As Sen. Corker said, no one dares to poke the bear.

Ryan’s silence on his president’s lunatic anti-free enterprise assault on global trade alliances that have enriched Republican donors seems more peculiar at first. But in fact, Ryan has got plenty to lose by standing on principle, even the principle of libertarian greed.

Why? Because Ryan has never had a job that wasn’t political since working at McDonalds and driving the Oscar Mayer wienermobile as a student. Thereafter, he was an intern for his home state senator, then a legislative aide, a speechwriter for Jack Kemp’s libertarian propaganda shop, the legislative director for far right Congressman Sam Brownback (who later proved supply side economics a fantasy when he enacted it and ruined the economy of Kansas as governor). And of course, his twenty years in the House.

What he’s got to lose by crossing Trump is gainful employment beginning in January when he’ll be out of a government job for the first time since he was 22. Once, he could have looked forward to a lucrative chance to cash in as a lobbyist, think tank propagandist, or Fox News analyst. But times have changed.

Ryan will be a retired, ineffectual, timid, former speaker who left government voluntarily because he feared angry Janevillians might just throw him out for failing to take care of their economic well-being. He’s damaged goods, especially since his brand of optimistic, peppy Reagan and Kemp era delusion is a far cry from the dark zealotry of the American carnage, isolationism, anti-trade, anti-immigrant, nativist, detention camp, dictator-embracing party of Trump.

By saying nothing, by offending no one, by favoring expediency over morality, opportunism over principle, Ryan may be keeping his options open but at a high cost in reputation and self-respect. Especially since he is never going to fit in with the Bannonite, pitchfork-wielding crowd.

And he’s far from alone. If history remembers Ryan and his generation of Republicans, it won’t be as patriots but as enablers of the destruction of the same institutions they claim in their campaign ads to revere. And all to give a tax cut to billionaires who didn’t need it, the same people who outsourced the jobs whose loss fed the rage of voters who gave us President Trump. This is the House that Ryan built.