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Category: Trump Diary (page 1 of 4)

Trump Diary: Election Eve

There is surprisingly little left to say about Donald Trump. He has proven to be remarkably consistent in who he is, and people’s reactions remained remarkably consistent even in the face of some severe events. I wondered four years ago what it would take to have the bottom fall out of Trump’s support, and I still wonder that now.

Whether it’s Trump’s embrace and abandonment of everyone from Steve Bannon to John Bolton, his endless ability to bring out the worst in both his supporters and his opponents, or his careful management and exploitation by Mitch McConnell (the true Machiavellian here), Trump ceased to surprise many years ago. With impeachment, China, COVID-19, Amy Coney Barrett, right wing protests, left wing protests, and anything else, Trump has always turned to the same playbook and things have played out exactly as one could have predicted.

After an initial period of massive uncertainty during which it was uncertain how far the Trump team’s authoritarian tendencies would go, the would-be revolutionary Bannon faction was slowly purged from Trump’s sphere, and a sense of limits was established. Talk of executive branch coups died down, at least until this year. The Trump presidency settled into a regular cycle of constant pushing at the margins and endemic corruption, but little in the way of active dictatorship. Trump prefers things to come easily to him. When they don’t, he either ignores them, or when he can’t (as with COVID), he turns to self-pity rather than grand schemes.

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, they’re highly thought of, but nobody likes me? It can only be my personality, that’s all

Donald Trump, July 28, 2020

Trump remains exactly what he was. In mid-2016 I compared him to Robert Musil’s Moosbrugger, calling him a non-politician with primeval charisma but an indifference to rationality and semantics.

Trump has no motive other than to be the dominant and not the dominated. The GOP convention paraded a roster of fearmongers to put people in a desperate and anxious frame of mind, all the better to paint Trump as their savior. Yet Trump offers no concrete plan of action, nor does he secretly possess one: he offers only the spectacle of himself.

Moosbrugger and Trump are, ultimately, only whom the rest of us perceive them to be. Such figures only desire that we perceive them as great. Because they are empty in and of themselves, they are constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for anything they do, or of having any intuition that words and thoughts should accord with an external reality. Trump’s profound and sweeping ignorance of all things outside himself serves his narcissism; knowledge would only put constraints on his ability to be what people want him to be and what people will love him for: “So there he sat, the wild, captive threat of a dreaded act, like an uninhabited coral island in a boundless sea of scientific papers that surrounded him invisibly on all sides.”

Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump

Subsequent events only reinforced my impression of Trump:

Because Trump reacts to appearances, and cares only about his own appearance rather than accomplishing anything in itself, an issue truly does not register with him until it is public. And once it is public, he can’t let it go, whether it’s his 3 million popular vote loss or the size of the crowds at his inauguration. The news media, in turn, mindlessly feed this bottomless hunger by magnifying whatever the object of Trump’s angst is so that he sees it even more. It’s a codependent feedback loop.

February 14, 2017

His neediness and insistence on recognition in the absence of accomplishment became an active impairment to actual accomplishment.

Trump is driven by insecurity and narcissism to the point of constant distraction. Even leaving aside the wiretapping craziness, he apparently has a great man chart comparing himself to Obama, and he doesn’t feel he’s stacking up well.

March 14, 2017

With the decline of the Bannon faction, I raised the question of whether Trump would let himself become an establishment stooge or whether he would lash out against those who sought to use him for their own ends, McConnell and Paul Ryan chief among them.

Second, there is Trump himself, hobbled, humbled, and humiliated, but still defective and unpredictable. For now he seems to be guided by Jared Kushner above all in his desperate turn toward Goldman Sachs and McMaster, but when this turn fails to yield him love and success, as it will, it’s difficult to predict what will come next. At the center of the Trump administration remains the void himself, reluctantly allowing himself to be remade in the establishment mold, but still fundamentally incompetent and narcissistic and stuck in the midst of a party at war with itself.

April 22, 2017

Trump chose to become a stooge. The establishment Republicans still do not like Trump and consider him a pain, but they fundamentally made peace with him and brought him more or less under control. Republicans complain far less about Trump now than they did in 2017. That, more than anything else, is how pseudonormalization prevailed, and how a constant stream of Never Trumpism and petty scandals replaced a genuine factional war within the Republican party. Despite an inability to pass meaningful legislation beyond the tax bill, the Republican party as a whole won many battles in the early years, the judiciary chief among them, and winning heals.

And the stoogedom was likely decisive in letting pseudonormality prevail over periodic crisis points. The most significant one in the post-Bannon period was the firing of James Comey, treated as a constitutional crisis at the time, now a distant memory as merely the beginning of a blandly uneventful impeachment–itself a distant memory. At the time, I inclined toward believing that Comey’s firing would still recede into pseudonormalization.

Yet despite Trump’s engorged persecution complex and the sclerotic executive branch, I’m skeptical that we’ll reach the crisis point soon. Things could still calm down and we could return to another pseudonormalization period.

May 19, 2017

When that proved true, future “crises” lost their punch and relevance, even as they happened. By October, the cycle seemed established:

Patterns that were set in place by April or May have played out without too much alteration in the underlying dynamics.

For the news, this means alternating cycles of “Trump has done something newly awful and unthinkable” and “Trump is for the moment behaving and merely being his usual bad self” (palace intrigue, governmental incompetence, etc.). 

For the administration, it means alternating between the creeping whiff of Muller’s detectives and ham-fisted attempts to accomplish anything whatsoever.

For the country, it appears to be a slowly increasing sense of detachment, as the promises of revival or totalitarianism fail to be realized. Even when an escalating event occurs, such as with Charlottesville or North Korea, there is no longer a sense that any tipping point has been reached.

October 16, 2017

And so it has remained. The most severe effects of the Trump administration are likely to be felt years down the line, not immediately, a consequence of the ongoing internal destruction of a government that once functioned rather well.

…and the Opposition

If there is one assessment that does need to be brought up to date, it’s that of the opposition. I have long said that Trump brings out the worst in both his supporters and his opponents, by enabling a damaging sort of Cortisol Politics:

Cortisol politics produces rhetorical excess and insincerity, sloganeering generated by the moment. It causes words to lose their meanings. It turns politics into an intrinsic game of manipulation, since reason is bypassed in favor of emotional appeals, primarily to negative emotions.

Cortisol Politics, July 8, 2018

That has proven true to a depth beyond which I’d conceived. Trump has nurtured a resistance “movement” that has often turned into a performative pantomime where righteous speech trumps meaningful action. There was a remission after the midterms and the change of power in the House of Representatives provided a symbolic and occasionally meaningful mooring for those who bemoaned an all-Republican government, though much of what the Republican wanted could be accomplished in the Senate and Presidency alone. But the election brought it back in full force.

If you believe that at least some of Trump’s excesses could have been tempered by smarter action on the order of the initial fight against the travel ban, then the majority of the last four years have been a cause for disappointment and even despair, as impulsive recrimination has replaced strategic thinking.

Schrödinger’s slogan (c/o David Shor)

A slogan such as “Punch a Nazi!” simultaneously communicates empty machismo and blatant insincerity, neither especially inspiring. Complementing it were “We don’t really mean it but maybe we do” slogans like “Defund the police!” and “ACAB,” and amorphous calls for reparations, which functioned more as triggers for internecine conflict than rallying cries. Reparations holds particular resonance because its most prominent early advocate, Ta-Nehisi Coates, admitted to millennial uplift intent:

When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, March 20, 2019

The inflated hopes of reparations and “Pack the Court!” are partly just a consequence of cortisol politics, but also an indicator of the tension and exhaustion of constant political awareness. Some good may nonetheless come out of this hot air, but the missed opportunities are galling.

I continue to think that the main target of attack should have been Fox News, which functions as the main buoy for positive opinions on Trump. For those who find this to be too selective, I’d happily sacrifice CNN and MSNBC as well if Fox News went with them. The failure of the “resistance” to focus on the institutional strength of Fox News, instead engaging in a cult of anti-personality around Trump, led to a colossal waste of effort.

But faced with the pseudonormalization of Trump, the “resistance” collapsed into increasing incoherence and infighting. No factions were immune. Bernie Sanders, having run a shockingly effective insurgent campaign in 2016, ran a far less successful one in 2020.

Into this enervated bouillabaisse came Joe Biden, the face of Delaware, the DLC, and everything else the left wished to leave behind. The forced enthusiasm for him is more transparent than it was for Hillary Clinton four years ago. For vice president, Biden chose a figure who had attacked him for not supporting busing, only to effectively renounce busing herself the following day.

“I think of busing as being in the toolbox of what is available and what can be used for the goal of desegregating America’s schools,” she responded.

Asked to clarify whether she supports federally mandated busing, she replied, “I believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district.”

In a tweet Wednesday, Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield knocked Harris for her response, writing, “It’s disappointing that Senator Harris chose to distort Vice President Biden’s position on busing — particularly now that she is tying herself in knots trying not to answer the very question she posed to him!”

Harris says busing should be considered, not mandated, AP, July 4, 2019

A small incident, but one that sums up so much of the state of Democratic politics. The only more apt choice for VP would have been Condoleezza Rice.

Combined with the corporate coopting of fashionable resistance (MSNBC, Gillette, Oreo, you name it) and the resulting free advertising that can bypass even the most stringent adblocker, the rule for the left/resistance/opposition has become less “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” than “The master’s tools are great for remodeling the master’s house.”

The problem may ultimately be many people’s inability to accept the lack of control over the intrusion of national politics into their lives, an intrusion made incessant and violating by the ubiquitous presence of online media and cable television. Thirty, even 20 years ago, you could escape from the news for most of the day–you often had no choice but to do so. Now to do so requires active effort and one which most people do not take. The constant reminders of the existence of an unacceptable fact (Trump’s presidency, or for the other side, the supposed threat of forces arrayed against Trump) instill the conviction in many individuals that they can actually affect this fact in a meaningful, macroscopic way, and that therefore they must do so.

People want to feel good about themselves. The avenues society provides for doing so can be productive, non-productive, or destructive. Over the last four years, the actual causal efficacy of feel-good action has sharply declined across the board, even as people’s demand to participate in such action soared. An anonymous insider in Occupy echoed this problem:

One veteran organizer involved in New York’s Occupy movements, who asked not to be named, said, “Occupy is outside the authority of existing institutions. It’s a magnet for people who are needy and even pushy, abusive, and exploitative.”

Arun Gupta, Seattle’s CHOP Went Out With Both a Bang and a Whimper

The result has been a mutant politics combining the most ineffectual aspects of liberalism (empty utopian platitudes and lifestyle activism) and leftism (exclusionary and elitist self-policing and casual sanctioning of violence), resulting in a torrent of self-defeating sanctimony which has exhausted even its advocates—especially its advocates, in fact. Tired of chasing chimeric scandals to no gain, tired of punching Richard Spencer while Mitch McConnell runs the table, a once-promising self-organizing “resistance” ultimately has very little to its credit. The mobilization against the travel ban at the beginning of Trump’s presidency remains its greatest achievement, and one worth remembering.

If the upcoming election is disputed or stolen, perhaps the resistance will recapture some of the focus and efficacy it possessed in early 2017. It is a slim hope.

Trump Diary: Trump Alone

Political media coverage over the last few months seems to have become more superficial than ever. I think this owes to the collective sigh of relief after the Democrats took back the House of Representatives, which took some of the pressure off of the tension between the tones of Apocalyptic Proclamation and Traditional Horse-race. So the coverage of Trump’s Game-of-Chicken government shutdown focused primarily on the latter, with a vague smidge of the former.

Which is to say that the most important stories are receiving far less coverage than facile ones. We hear much about Gillette advertising campaigns and McDonald’s lunches. We hear a lot less about John Bolton’s plans for war with Iran. This is very much the usual order of things, but as Trump supposedly represented a break with the usual order of things, the increasingly inessential nature of most media either shows how little we’ve learned or how little control we have over the doings of our own institutions.

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Trump Diary: Cortisol Politics

Trump brings out the worst not just in his supporters, but also in his opponents.

For years, I watched as the rhetoric of talk radio and Fox News was assimilated into the Republican party. It homogenized Republican discourse and kept up a level of anxiety over everything from terrorism to healthcare to Barack Obama himself. The left (and that elite part of the center that now considers itself part of the “resistance”) had its own sub-discourses, but aside from Obama’s fleeting inspirational moment in 2008, there was no common thread that kept Democrats, liberals, and leftists attuned to a single issue. Not even the Iraq War was sufficient. For a genuine mass left movement, you have to look back to Vietnam.

That has changed with Trump. Opposition to Trump personally has become the unifying thread. Standard Republican policies are far more terrifying under the auspices of Trump than they otherwise would be.

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Trump Diary: Midterm Election Breakdown

Midterm elections historically result in the opposition party gaining ground as voters grow disaffected with the President. No one knows whether that will hold true this year. This is partly because of the unprecedented (in modern times) degree of polarization in the electorate, and partly because of Trump himself.

It’s still worth remembering Trump’s fundamental continuity with Republican politics, if not with its leadership. Trump’s raw, resentment-driven brand of nativist politics beautifully massaged the existing Republican base that developed out of the Southern Strategy, talk radio, and the Tea Party. But his appeal is evidently so much more visceral than most any other recent politician that his approval (and disapproval) ratings have been far more consistent than George W. Bush’s were.

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Trump Diary 13: Kill the Poor

Which Congressional representative is scariest?

  1. The Hack: votes to cut health insurance for millions in order to please donors, party elders, and constituents.
  2. The True Believer: votes to cut health insurance for millions on the belief that deregulation and the free market will lower prices so that all will be insured for even less.
  3. The Paranoid Patriot: votes to cut health insurance for millions to stop America from turning into a socialist dystopia.
  4. The Character Builder:  votes to cut health insurance for millions because entitlements encourage laziness and unemployment.
  5. The Pruning Hook: votes to cut health insurance for millions because the uninsured are a drag on America and should be discouraged from reproducing or living.

I don’t have an answer, but on a gut level I fear the Hack the least. The Hack does not terrify me because a self-interested politician with flexible principles stands the greatest chance of bending to public and private pressures and making compromises. A politician who acts out of iron dogma, paranoid fear, or moral puritanism is likely to stick to their guns well past the point of self-interest.

(There is room for a sixth sort of politician, the Rational Guardian, who considers the evidence and votes out of well-considered, disinterested rationales, but such creatures do not exist.)

Much of the GOP’s stress over the last year stem from its representatives being strewn across all five types. Even in the absence of Trump, the varying motivations would have caused trouble for any attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, even as political pressure from various sides demands that a repeal be passed. The same sort of stress is plaguing the tax bill currently, but the looser political requirements around such a bill (“cut lots of taxes” vs. “repeal a specific bill”) make passage in some form far more likely.

So while the off-year elections constituted a vague repudiation of Trump, they haven’t changed the calculus for the Republicans terribly much. The Democrats won governorships that they absolutely needed to win, which was more cause for existential relief than celebration, and they made huge gains in the Virginia legislature, though the ramifications of those gains are uncertain, as Virginia has been turning decisively “blue” for some time thanks to suburban DC spillover. The real story resides in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and it has yet to be told.

The Republicans, in turn, have set about trying to accomplish exactly what they would have tried to accomplish had any non-Trump Republican been elected. Assuming that Trump doesn’t start a war or blow up the world, the party’s projects will have far more lasting political impact than Trump will. (Trump’s lasting impact will likely be psychological and agonistic—traumatically so.)

The two most important projects, which are attracting far less attention than Trump’s most comically useless moves, are the tax bill and the Federalist Society’s plan to pack the federal courts with conservative apparatchiks. If Republicans can get even part of the court-packing scheme through, they will be in a position to rout non-Republican/non-Federalist governance on a far greater level than has been seen to date.  And judges, more than any other sort of politician, tend not to be Hacks. A great many Federalist Society sorts are indeed True Believers.

But at the moment, the tax bill looms far larger, as potentially the most consequential piece of legislation since the Affordable Care Act, which it easily dwarfs in impact. And there, it’s the Pruning Hooks that may win the day. They may be smaller in number, but they are attuned more closely to real trends rather than imaginary dogma. The tax bill marries all five types of representatives, but its ultimate effects will, I suspect, be those that the Pruning Hooks wish for.

II.

Our world functions on commerce. Many call it “capitalist,” either to praise it or deride it, but the term is so wide that it says little about how the global economic system actually sustains itself. The word “neoliberal,” aside from suffering from chronic misuse, is too narrow, as there is much about our current world system that Keynes or Hirschman would support. So I will just call it the global economy.

There are two requirements for the global economy to continue to function, broadly speaking, as it has since the Industrial Revolution.

  1. There must be modest growth, on average, in the medium term.
  2. The average net contribution of a human life to a national economy must be non-negligible.

If the concept of investment is based around robbing future Peter to pay present-day Peter, there’s little trouble around the temporal redistribution of funds as long as future Peter is far richer.  That is, as long as growth continues. (“Capitalism: it’s temporal socialism!”) When you start having second- and third-order financial products around such expectations, there’s still no problem as long as everyone continues to believe that future Peter is wealthy beyond belief.

If our collective faith in future Peter falls, our present economy declines. This is, in part, what makes nativist movements dangerous: they appeal not to any sort of economic progress but to resentment and zero-sum games. They accelerate contradictions, in other words.

Economic hawks take a more atomistic view to these issues. They look not just at countries, but at individuals. Rather than seeing economic progress as a gradually rising tide, they see a contest between those individuals who raise the tide and those who drag it down. The apportionment of these responsibilities is something of a subjective measure, since it’s as much a function of money you have as work you do, and you are judged not on the proportion of your money you spend but on sheer total. Regardless, the hawks fixate on those whose GDP contribution is negligible, which would be the poor.

There have been two infamous formulations of hawkish dogma. One was Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment in 2012, referring to the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax (though many are still subject to payroll and state taxes), and are thus seen as being a drag on the progress of the nation. It still baffles me how anyone could have though that Donald Trump possessed an iota more compassion for that 47 percent (much less compassion for anyone who is not him), but a sucker is born every minute.

The second was the Wall Street Journal’s  “lucky duckies” editorial of 2002, arguing against tax relief for the poor.

The most recent data from the IRS, in 2000, show that the top 5% coughed up more than half of total tax revenue. Specifically, we are talking about folks with adjusted gross incomes of $128,336 and higher being responsible for 56% of the tax take. Eyebrows raised? There’s more. The top 50% of taxpayers accounted for almost all income tax revenue — 96% of the total take.

Almost 13% of all workers have no tax liability and so are indifferent to income tax rates. And that doesn’t include another 16.5 million who have some income but don’t file at all.

Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education.

This complicated system of progressivity and targeted rewards is creating a nation of two different tax-paying classes: those who pay a lot and those who pay very little. And as fewer and fewer people are responsible for paying more and more of all taxes, the constituency for tax cutting, much less for tax reform, is eroding. Workers who pay little or no taxes can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else. They are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.

All of which suggests that the last thing the White House should do now is come up with more exemptions, deductions and credits that will shrink the tax-paying population even further.

To me, the explanation for the shifting tax burden is that the rich got a lot richer and inequality has skyrocketed, not that the income tax system unfairly privileges the poor. If you own 50 percent of the country, you probably should pay 50 percent of the tax. Romney and the WSJ ignore those arguments, instead fixating on how people should have “skin in the game.” They argue, with perfect cynicism, that if the Republicans raise taxes on the poor, the poor will be more likely to vote Republican.

The Republicans may be about to put that to the test. The GOP tax bill looks to be “Requiem for the Lucky Ducky,” fixating on a huge corporate tax cut at the expense of deductions, exemptions, health insurance subsidies, and quite a bit else. If it passes, the Republicans may not need total control of Congress or the presidency after 2018, since the bill will be terribly difficult to undo.

But why? I think it is ultimately the Pruning Hook.

III.

The National Review‘s Kevin Williamson was brutally honest last year when he excoriated poor white working class communities. (Excoriating poor non-white communities is mostly superfluous in such circles.) For all the GOP’s supposed evangelism of white working-class values (and Trump’s pandering to them), the GOP’s ongoing relationship to them is better captured by the Never-Trumper Williamson in Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction, taking Garbutt, New York as his whipping boy:

The Washington Post’s “Wonkbook” newsletter compared the counties Trump won in the so-called Super Tuesday primaries with the demographic data and found trends that will surprise no one who has been paying attention (and certainly no one, I hope, who has been reading this magazine). The life expectancies among non-college-educated white Americans have been plummeting in an almost unprecedented fashion, a trend not seen on such a large scale since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the social anarchy that prevailed in Russia afterward. Trump counties had proportionally fewer people with college degrees. Trump counties had fewer people working. And the white people in Trump counties were likely to die younger. The causes of death were “increased rates of disease and ill health, increased drug overdose and abuse, and suicide,” the Post’s Wonkblog website reported.

The white middle class [sic] may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible…The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.

I think this deserves to stand alongside the Lucky Ducky editorial as a statement of purpose among Republican elites (e.g., Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell,  House Republican leadership, the majority of Republican senators, the Federalist Society, the Kochs).  The two messages Williamson delivers to Trump’s base are, “You contribute nothing,” and “You’re going to die.” In other words, they are a drag on America. They’ve had their chance, and they blew it. (Williamson does not really expect them to move.) Social Darwinism must take its course, just as it should take its course on the urban poor. Prune the tree of prosperity.

IV.

Ironically, the left increasingly agrees. When it comes to poor white Trump-voting areas, the right wants these communities to die out because they’re economically worthless and unproductive. The left wants them to die out because they’re racist, sexist, and morally backwards.

For both Republican and Democratic elites, a vote for Trump has come to be seen as a civic disqualifier. Two political contentions—(1) Trump voters were motivated not by economics but by racism; and (2) there is no such thing as a “good” Trump voter—have become articles of faith among the intelligentsia on both sides.

These contentions echo Williamson’s argument: nothing happened to them. What’s unusual, however, is that the left rejects superstructural Marxist arguments that view individual beliefs as a consequence of macrohistorical currents (racial, economic, or otherwise). Rather, both right and left have embraced a Protestant individualism, seeing the 2016 election as a test of one’s soul.

This shift, from a structural to an ethical view of human agency, is one of the most important shifts in leftist discourse in recent decades, shifting away from theories of radical change and toward the policing of individual human souls. I analyzed it in depth in #JeNeSuisPasLiberal: Entering the Quagmire of Online Leftism:

Leftism’s Embrace of Moralism

 

V.

The right, however, is prepared to give up on a lot more people as well, since their criteria is broader. I was struck, when I interviewed Newt Gingrich, by both his wild optimism as well as his indifference to individuals. He conceives of a future for the United States, but one that does not give much consideration to many of today’s (or tomorrow’s) Americans, who will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Like the tax bill, this attitude unnerves me. It utilizes Protestant moralism as a vehicle for anti-humanist socio-political engineering.

The trend that the more visionary Pruners see, I believe, is that both requirements for the functioning global economy may be put under pressure. Low growth and increasing automation will result in many, many more human lives becoming economically negligible. The long-term goal of Pruner Republican tactics is to “discourage” the propagation of “negative [human] assets” and ease these existing negative assets into death—by cutting their benefits and lifelines.

This, however, does set the stage for populist demagogues to appeal to pure resentment (racial or otherwise). Trump is a false prophet in this regard, as he is happy to go along with the Pruners’ plans, but also serves as a troubling augur—specifically, that Republican voters may continue to vote the wrong way in primaries. Which is yet another reason why the more visionary Pruner elites see it as increasingly urgent, via mechanisms such as the tax bill and court-packing, to kill the poor.


Appendix: The Hawk Calculus

One of the main themes of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (my review here) is that there is a widespread belief in there being an ongoing, average 4% annual GDP growth. Piketty believes that the optimistic expectation of 4%, as opposed to the historical average of 2% over the last 200 years, is unwarranted, because the 4% average in the last half of the 20th century stemmed not from integral changes but from the massive asset destruction of World War II, which allowed subsequent reclamation in the post-war decades. He predicts a reversion to a 2% average and harsh adjustments relating to the reconfiguring of expectations: in particular a ballooning of inequality as investment return chronically exceeds real growth (his r > g formulation).

But even the calculation of GDP numbers is laden with uncertainty. The IMF claimed 3.2% global GDP growth in 2016. The World Bank claimed 2.4%. That’s a significant disparity, mostly owing to unreliable data from developing countries. But both put the United States and other developed countries as hovering around the 2% growth rate for the near term.  These days, China contributes about 15% of global GDP (for comparison, the United States contributes around 23%), but China contributes a far larger proportion of global GDP hopes and expectations.

IMF: Real GDP Growth (%)

 

World Bank: Real GDP Growth (%)

 

One of the underlying causes in the shift in economic rhetoric over the last 25 years has been the declining contribution of US workers to global GDP. Initially, it fueled the push for globalization. Now, it fuels increasingly angry rhetoric on all sides. By itself, the proportion is not damning; GDP is always positive, after all. What gets economic hawks up in arms is when these numbers are weighed against government spending.

Ironically, the uptake from Piketty’s critique on the right has been to devalue lives. This makes sense given the hawkish tendency to see lives in terms of “human capital.” A graph like this, from Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth, would appear to both Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi as an indicator of the limits of the growth-driven dynamo. But to the hawk, it only speaks to the need to streamline capitalism further. And “streamline” is a polite word.

from Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Annual Growth Rate of Alternative Real Income Concepts, Actual Outcomes 1920–2014 and Projected Values 2015–2040 (Gordon)

 

Williamson’s attack on Garbutt, NY is based on the numbers showing that its residents consume more government money than they produce. Combined with the marginal and dwindling GDP contributions that left-leaning sorts like Piketty and Gordon anticipate, communities like Garbutt in Williamson’s view threaten the United States economically (by consuming resources better used toward growth) and electorally (by voting the wrong way). Their GDP contribution was the leavening ingredient that made them palatable to the hawks. As their productivity dwindles, they become increasingly malignant.

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