We would like to believe that principles, ideals, our better angels dictate our behavior, but most of the time for most people the guiding star is self-interest. We may deny it or sugarcoat it, but even that dissembling is self-interested. The truth hurts.
The central insight of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” was that market economies work because everyone is energetically pursuing his self-interest. The Founding Fathers, no fools, constructed a government designed to control one powerful self-interest by balancing it against another.
In President Trump we have a supremely self-interested character, as his entire career and every utterance attests. He was not elected on the basis of idealism but because enough voters, and Russian cyberwarriors, thought putting him in charge would benefit their self-interest.
Arguments against him on moral, ideological, political grounds have been ineffectual. As long as his voters, the donor class, and his party thinks his presidency is in their interest he will escape impeachment and win re-election. Nagging doubts about the longterm effects of Trump’s policies on the economy, geopolitics, or the environment don’t matter. The self-interest that counts most is today’s, not that of me in 2030 or my grandchildren in 2050.
Trump’s technique is to scare people with real or imagined threats, then pretend he has fixed them or blame his opponents for preventing him from doing so. Remember the existential threat posed by a nuclear North Korea? Kim says he’ll dismantle his weapons in a lovely note. Problem solved. China cheating us on trade and stealing our intellectual property? A big, beautiful tariff. Terrorist caravan? Wall, wall, wall.
But what if Trump’s presidency ceases to be a great TV sequel to “The Apprentice,” and starts impacting the real, everyday self-interest of millions of Americans in a painful way? Suddenly their self-interest may be indistinguishable from the public interest.
Democrats are presented with a teachable moment, but have failed to exploit it. Trump standing up to fake terrorists looks strong. Chuck and Nancy expressing compassion for government workers missing a paycheck looks weak. The average Joe could care less. His experience with government workers is probably confined to a cop pulling him over for speeding or waiting at the end of a long line at the DMV.
Instead, they should take a page from the Trump playbook and scare the voters silly. No government? No tax refunds from the IRS. No cancer cure from NIH. No protection from weird new epidemics from the CDC. No check on polluters by the EPA means poison water like Flint and poison air like China.
There are foreign powers and sects, not to mention plain vanilla criminals, that wish us ill. Might they not be finding it tempting to mess with us now that our guard is down. The border is patrolled by unpaid people and the airports protected by unpaid TSA inspectors. Are they as likely to be as vigilant, or to be worried about their mortgage payment. Skeleton crews in Air Traffic Control has airlines alarmed about safety aloft, and the unpaid union employees have sued for the pay they are owed.
What if the biggest danger confronting us is not too many immigrants but too little government? And the dangers from Trump aren’t confined to his wall obsession, his shutdown, and his threats of a national emergency. He is already a national emergency for many people.
The attempt to destroy Obamacare terrifies millions with pre-existing conditions who may lose insurance coverage. That is self-interest at the most primal level.
Some 300,000 soybean farmers who couldn’t sell their crop, thanks to Trump’s trade war with China, are in debt and may lose the farm. They didn’t vote for this. Tariffs have also been bad for the self-interest of workers in jobs that rely on imported steel and aluminum. And those who see the prices of the new car and big screen TV rise because Trump couldn’t do a deal will also suffer economic pain.
Plutocrats who pocketed a huge tax cut may also face huge losses if Trump’s reckless policies manage to close foreign markets to our goods, raise prices on raw materials, crash the stock market, slow growth, or bring on a recession. When their self-interest is harmed, they may chose a different recipient for their donations and new priorities for their lobbyists to pursue.
Will millions of members of the active armed forces and veterans begin to feel, as Gen. Mattis did, that their self-interest and that of the country are not being well-served by a president who pulls out of Syria to please a Turkish dictator and who spouts the revisionist Russian history of Vladimir Putin?
It is time to make the case that American life is better when the government tends efficiently to the thousand and one little necessities that we take for granted — food and housing assistance for the poor, our personal protection from the military, TSA, the FBI, agents at the border.
Under Trump, a majority of cybersecurity workers who protect us from hacking are furloughed, as are most in the DHS office for countering the import and use of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, and biological. Not to mention the SEC guard dogs who keep markets safe from criminal meddling. Is an absence of protective guardrails in your self-interest?
Instead of being an unobtrusive servant, under Trump government has become a real life, daily TV version of “Survivor” or “24” with Putin and Mueller in supporting roles, and it’s exhausting. Wouldn’t many find it in their self-interest to get their kicks again from movie thrillers, wrestling, rap concerts or betting on the big game rather than betting their country’s well-being on a capricious president?
In 2016, 62.9 million Americans thought a vote for Trump was in their self-interest. How many now feel their interest might be better served if a different, more stable character occupied the Oval Office? President Pence, unless Mueller’s got the goods on him too? President Romney? A Democrat — Warren, Biden, Brown, Harris? Anyone but Agent Orange, whose self-interest and that of the people increasingly diverge.