Im-Politic: Elites’ Learning Curve on Populism is Still Largely MIA

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American Enterprise Institute, asylum seekers, Brookings Institution, chattering classes, David Brooks, establishment, Europe, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, migrants, migration, Open Borders, Populism, refugees, The Guardian, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, working class

While we’re still (I hope!) in a Thanksgiving frame of mind, let’s not forget to give thanks to America’s ever clueless bipartisan political establishment and chattering classes. As just made glaringly obvious by a Hillary Clinton interview and a New York Times pundit, these utterly intertwined – and indeed incestuous – elites not only mostly remain just as dumbfounded about the developments that have triggered the rise of populism in the Western world as they were the day after Donald Trump became president. They helpfully keep reminding us of how little they’ve learned – and therefore how completely undeserving they are of returning to power.

Clinton’s obliviousness (again) came through loud and clear in a lengthy sit-down earlier this week with the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper. According to the Democratic presidential nominee, whose inept campaign strategy and transparently canned messaging helped key Mr. Trump’s victory, Europe “needs to get a handle on migration.”

That contention’s hard to argue with. But Clinton’s main reason was anything but. According to the former Secretary of State, European leaders’ overly “generous and compassionate approaches” to migration “lit the flame” that have “roiled the body politic” and strengthened the positions of Trump-like populists who have used “immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity….”

In other words, Clinton apparently has no concerns that a massive influx of migrants – or refugees, or so-called asylum-seekers, or even economically motivated immigrants – could drive down wages for the working class or lower income cohorts of a country’s native-born population, or wind up admitting criminals and terrorists from violence-ridden regions, or swamp a country with newcomers either ignorant or actively contemptuous of its cultural values (e.g., its treatment of women).

She’s simply advocating that establishment politicians do the proverbial – but never well defined “something” – to keep on the fringes counterparts who are mindful of the above, and completely legitimate, concerns. In fact, Clinton’s continuing contempt for such leaders, and their followings, is made clear by her contention that populist voters are defined by

“a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.

“The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality.”

In other words, “deplorables,” anyone?

If anything, New York Times columnist David Brooks is even brain dead-er on the lessons of 2016. On Thanksgiving day, the paper posted a column of his contending that at least some of America’s establishment has been “chastened” by populism’s successes, and recently has been “working together across ideological lines” to “build the bipartisan governing coalitions” that “pay attention to actual Americans and actual solutions” to the problems that have so divided the nation.

One of his prime examples? A joint effort by the establishment liberal Brookings Institution and the establishment conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to develop policies aimed at “Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

On the one hand, it’s good to see that Brookings and AEI aren’t simply dismissing American populism’s main political base as racists and xenophobes. Even better: The report they’ve just issued recognizes job and income loss resulting from offshoring-friendly trade deals and other wrongheaded globalization-related policies as major sources of working Americans’ economic decline and political anger. And the recommendations for trade policy fixes are pretty good – even including an endorsement of unilateral U.S. tariffs in certain situations. In fact, combining these ideas with many of the more purely domestic policy proposals in the study could make a real difference.

On the other hand, the study’s authors decided to ignore the impacts of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, because they regard “the perception that immigration is responsible for what ails the working class” as “mistaken.”

And some skepticism is warranted on the trade front as well. After all, experts from both think tanks have been among the strongest critics of Trump administration trade policies – no doubt because so many of their donors are businesses that profit from the trade status status quo, and (in Brookings’ case), many of the very foreign governments in the same category.

But what I found especially revealing was Brooks’ description of the report. It ignored the trade recommendations completely and zeroed in on the measures that, unless accompanied by trade and/or immigration policy overhauls (at least), would wind up as an approach that essentially substitutes various forms of welfare for work: “wage subsidies, improved parental leave, work requirements for some federal benefits, child care tax credits.”

And by the way, of course Brooks endorses the study’s calls for more government aid for education that reduces the current emphasis on sending all young Americans to four-year colleges and increases the emphasis on “career education and training.” That’s fine except that there’s little point to vocational type training if family wage jobs keep fleeing overseas or becoming ever lower-wage jobs because immigrants keep supercharging the labor supply.

Nor have any of the education boosters ever responded to two related points I made in my globalization book, The Race to the Bottom: First, people all over the world as just as capable of being retrained and reeducated as Americans; and second, governments all around the world know this, especially in countries with such immense labor surpluses that they’ll long be able to under-sell American workers.

Brooks closes his article by wondering whether the United States contains “enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways” to lead the nation successfully. The Brookings-AEI report provides some grounds for optimism. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Brooks himself.

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Im-Politic: The U.S. Mainstream Media Keeps Merging with the Political Class

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ABC News, chattering classes, Democratic National Committee, Donna Brazile, Im-Politic, Jonathan Karl, Mainstream Media, This Week with George Stephanopoulos

If you want a revealingly stomach-churning-inducing example of much of what’s whoppingly wrong with the nation’s intertwined media and political chattering classes – and a big reason for Donald Trump’s presidential victory – check out a video of yesterday’s edition of ABC-TV’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. The episode was capped by a sit-down joint interview by guest anchor Jonathan Karl of Newt Gingrich and Donna Brazile.

What’s outrageous about this? That’s the same Donna Brazile who unmistakably took advantage of her position as a CNN political analyst to leak presidential debate questions to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. In other words, it’s the same Donna Brazile who is nothing better than a common thief.

Now it isn’t the fault of Karl or ABC News that Brazile is still interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. That’s on the party. Nor is it the fault of Karl or ABC that Brazile’s sense of ethics is so perverted that she’s refused to apologize for the misdeed. That’s on her. What is the fault of Karl and ABC is giving this crook a national forum and treating her like some venerable sage – with Karl failing even to mention her perfidy.

Clearly, America’s political culture has traveled far from the notion of the press as watchdog of the public interest. But what Karl’s treatment of Brazile demonstrates – yet again – is that the problem only secondarily stems from the liberal bias of which the media is widely accused. The fundamental problem is a pro-establishment and pro-conventional-wisdom bias that originates less in ideology (for it’s bipartisan) but in sociology.

For whatever their personal backgrounds, Karl and Brazile (and so many other Beltway denizens) now belong to the same class, live the same kinds of lives and in the same kinds of neighborhoods, socialize with the same kinds of people – and often get invited to the same cocktail and dinner parties. As a result, they too often share the same kinds of values – especially about personal and professional norms of behavior. They thus tend to overlook all but the most flagrant (and highly publicized) transgressions. As Karl has just demonstrated, they even tend to act protectively of each other’s interests. And of course this mutual admiration society and support network takes on special importance in years like the one just past, when outsiders start breaching their common fortress.

Back in ancient Roman days, the poet Juvenal is credited with asking what’s become one of the most important questions in political philosophy and day-to-day governance: “Who guards the guardians?” Karl’s session with Brazile once more reminds Americans that the Mainstream Media has become all but structurally incapable of playing this role.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: New Year, New President…New Anti-Terrorism Policy?

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border security, Center for a New American Security, chattering classes, Daniel Benjamin, Daniel Henninger, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, internationalism, ISIS, Middle East, neoconservatism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, terrorism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump

For me, one of the biggest reasons for optimism for 2017 is the election of a president ready and willing to kick over the obsolete crockery of American foreign policy and grand strategy. President-elect Trump still has to come up with his own comprehensive answers to the question, “What would come next?” His signature foreign policy speech of the campaign made that clear enough. It contained elements both of the genuine, nationalist, down-to-earth “America First” approach that I believe is urgently needed, and of the grandiose internationalist, even neoconservative blueprint that I believe must urgently be scrapped.

It’s entirely possible that this tension will complicate the new administration’s foreign policy for years to come. One reason is a simple as personnel. Because the nationalist bench is so thin, finding enough bodies to staff all the senior jobs that need to be filled will require Mr. Trump to rely on many conventional thinkers. Another has to do with the inherent difficulty of big transitions. Barring a catastrophe, they rarely happen overnight – and in many cases shouldn’t.

But because the challenge is so formidable, the overhaul effort can’t start too soon, and Americans have just received several reminders that the place to start is with fundamental geopolitics – and specifically, with my own observation that America’s immensely favorable location on the globe is an almost completely neglected diplomatic asset that Washington should try to capitalize and maximize, not seemingly intentionally squander. Put simply, those two oceans matter decisively, and coupled with the nation’s staggering treasure trove of resources and continental scale, argue compellingly for seeking progressively less, not more, global engagement. And as I’ve written, nowhere is this truer than regarding the fight against global terrorism.

In my view, little could be clearer or more promising for a geographically isolated country like the United States than the need to focus anti-ISIS etc efforts on keeping terrorists out of the country. Will a border enforcement-centric anti-terrorism policy work perfectly? Of course not. Is it a better bet for American security than pretending that even defeating ISIS will rid the dysfunctional Middle East of extremism forever, or even a few years? Or imagining that in any foreseeable future, that sad region can be turned into something other than a swamp for breeding more jihadism? That’s a total no-brainer.

But as indicated in a recent column by The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger, America’s chattering classes have a long way to go in learning this lesson. According to Henninger, the terrorist attacks that have hit the United States lately show that “This is what it means to live as a target. What are we going to do about it? Wrap ourselves in two protective oceans?”

Moreover, a Google search quickly turned up a May report by the Center for a New American Security that reminds how deeply ingrained in the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment this belief is. According to the authors – described as “an extraordinary [and thoroughly bipartisan] group of scholars, practitioners, and journalists”:

“The best way to ensure the longevity of a rules-based international system [itself kind of a dicey notion that desperately needs rethinking] favorable to U.S. interests is not to retreat behind two oceans, lower American standards, or raise the tolerance level for risk. The proper course is to extend American power and U.S. leadership in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East….”

Nonetheless, some reasons for optimism appeared last year as well. One of the most notable: An essay in Politico by Daniel Benjamin – a former Obama administration counter-terrorism official. Writing in March, Benjamin observed sagely that “While the jihadist threat is genuinely global, it is by no means equally distributed. ”

And one main reason cited by the author?

“The United States still has the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here. As we found on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate his underwear on a flight bound for Detroit, our aviation security, no-fly lists and intelligence need constant updating. But we have made major strides. By contrast, Europe, with its weak external borders, nonexistent internal borders and a migrant crisis that has brought close to a million and a half migrants into its borders, faces multiplying perils.”

And although clearly the United States has decided to “fight the terrorists over there,” Benjamin perceptively observes that it’s also made notable progress securing the border:

“One big reason why the chances of a Brussels or Paris-like attack are lower here is that we’ve been working flat out to reduce the threat for almost 15 years, since 9/11. With one of the worst extremism problems in the West, Britain has gone hard at this as well. But the same cannot be said for our Continental cousins. The United States has spent upwards of $650 billion on homeland security since 9/11. No comparable European statistic exists, but judging by law enforcement, border security and other agency budgets, the overall figures are much lower.”

I’ve been careful to argue that these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and that one form of military operation in the Middle East can contribute significantly to U.S. security – at least until border controls are even stronger. That’s a campaign of anti-ISIS harassment, conducted through the air and with special forces on the ground, aimed at keeping the group off balance enough to prevent the consolidation of an Afghanistan-like base for staging September 11-scale attacks.

A somewhat larger scale anti-ISIS effort has made important progress in disrupting the group’s capabilities over the last year. But the victory will be pyrhhic if takeovers of terrorist strongholds like Mosul and Raqqa generate claims of “mission accomplished.” Benjamin is right to warn against U.S. complacency. But that’s likeliest to be prevented if the hard, unglamorous, continuing work of better securing the border moves to center stage in Washington’s anti-terrorism policy.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Badly Needed History Lesson on Trade and Wages

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2016 election, chattering classes, David Frum, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Immigration, imports, labor force, Populism, Republican Party, Republicans, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, wages, William Jennings Bryan, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

David Frum has played an invaluable role during this presidential campaign in explaining why the rise of soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been such a deserved rebuke to the party’s out-of-touch establishment. His indictments of the GOP’s Washington-centered chattering class have been especially devastating since he comes out of the party’s Bush wing.

That’s why I was so surprised to read Frum’s claims in a Saturday Wall Street Journal article that the kinds of economic nationalist trade policies Trump says he favors were harmful to American workers when they were in effect during in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Comparing Trump to the leading political maverick of that era – Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan – Frum contends that “The great irony of [the 1896 election] was that Bryan was more right than wrong about his central issues” including freer trade, which “would have enhanced consumer purchasing power at a time when wages were growing slowly.”

The problem is, the best data we have tells exactly the opposite story: In the days when America’s (mainly Republican) presidents determinedly shielded American industry from foreign competition, the country’s workers saw their paychecks grow strongly.

As detailed in the U.S. government’s authoritative Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, from 1900 to 1929 – when the Great Depression struck – the annual earnings of U.S. employees adjusted for inflation increased by a total of 68 percent. The closest version of these figures available that covers a comparable period of time is the Social Security Administration’s average annual net compensation series. It shows that this measure of pay – during a period when U.S. trade flows have been almost unprecedentedly free – was up nearly 121 percent between 1990 and 2014.

Free trade wins hands down, then? Not by a long shot. First, those more recent statistics haven’t been adjusted for inflation. Second, during that 1900 to 1929 period, U.S. workers might have been protected from imports, but for most of those years, they were exposed to record increases in immigration – which all else equal tends to suppress wages by increasing the supply of labor.

In fact, according to Historical Statistics, before World War I’s outbreak greatly reduced immigration opportunities from Europe, the prime source region, the arrival of these newcomers regularly increased the labor supply by between 1.10 and 2.87 percent. (This figure counts only working-age immigrants who are recorded as boasting occupations.)

Total legal immigration inflows into the country recently have been roughly one million, and some 20 percent are not working age. In addition, they represent a much smaller share of the total national workforce – which currently numbers about 144 million.

It’s true that the labor available to domestic employers has been augmented as well by a sizable illegal immigration inflow. But even taking this population into account, legal immigration-fueled labor force increases in the early 20^th century were considerably higher than in the first 15 years of this century. Then, the rate of growth typically hovered around 2.50 percent annually. Since 2000, it’s only topped two percent annually once (in 2014), and has ranged from that 2.19 percent increase to a 3.76 percent plunge during the recession year 2009.

No one’s saying that policies that succeeded 100 years ago will succeed today. But the historical record remains clear. Despite unprecedented immigrant-dominated increases in the labor force, when Washington curbed imports, American workers’ pay still tended to rise healthily – and at rates most of their descendants would envy.

Im-Politic: Trump Re-Brands “America First”

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2016 election, America First, Brexit, chattering classes, China, Donald Trump, Im-Politic, isolationism, Larry Summers, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, protectionism, Trade, World War II

OK, Donald Trump has just given a long-awaited speech outlining his global trade policy. Not that his overall inclinations haven’t long been clear. And earlier in the campaign, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee put out an impressively detailed China trade position paper.

But since most of his other remarks have consisted of generalities (i.e., he’d make great deals), and have often been expressed in the form of off-the-cuff answers to reporters’ questions (as with his contradictory statements on tariffing Chinese imports), a comprehensive description of a global approach containing at least some specifics was unquestionably needed.  And given the trouble Trump encountered due to his latest bombastic comments about so-called “Mexican judges” and the like, the timing couldn’t have been better for a shot of gravitas.  

Although it wasn’t the speech I would have written for him, it should be clear to any fair-minded observer that Trump passed this test with flying colors. In fact, he just gave by far the best speech on trade more broadly that Americans have heard – at least since the current, offshoring-focused era of U.S. trade policy-making was launched in the early 1990s by adding Mexico to an existing American agreement with Canada and creating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Granted, the bar for recent trade speeches is rock-bottom low. And the negatives of Trump’s deserve considerable attention – and will receive it tomorrow. But one positive worth pointing out immediately: Trump has gone toward putting a positive stamp on the slogan “America First.”

There’s no doubt that his political opponents in the chattering classes, as well as more even-handed journalists, will mindlessly keep regurgitating the mantra that these were the watchwords of the isolationist movement that they blame in part for the outbreak of World War II. But there’s also no reasonable doubt that Trump provided a re-branding of this motto inspiring enough to resonate powerfully and favorably both in the ranks of his supporters and among undecided voters in the working and middle classes.

As Trump declared, his version of America First entails the American people taking “back control of their economy, politics and borders” and choosing “to believe in America.”

He continued, “We lost our way when we stopped believing in our country. America became the world’s dominant economy by becoming the world’s dominant producer.

“The wealth this created was shared broadly, creating the biggest middle class the world had ever known.”

“But then America changed its policy from promoting development in America, to promoting development in other nations.”

To be sure,Trump blamed foreign countries that engage in predatory trade practices for the devastation suffered by much of America’s manufacturing base and workforce. But he also singled out “a [US] leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”

And he closed the address with a veritably Reagan-esque flourish:

“On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, we are going to put America First again.

“We are going to make America wealthy again.

“We are going to reject Hillary Clinton’s politics of fear, futility, and incompetence.

“We are going to embrace the possibilities of change.

“It is time to believe in the future.

“It is time to believe in each other.

“It is time to Believe In America.

“This Is How We Are Going To Make America Great Again – For All Americans.

“We Are Going To Make America Great Again For Everyone – Greater Than Ever Before.”

In fact, there are signs in the post-Brexit world that even sophisticates are at least approaching this bandwagon. According to one leading establishmentarian, writing as the British vote totals were coming in, “The political challenge in many countries going forward is to develop a ‘responsible nationalism”. It is clear that there is a hunger on the part of electorates, if not the Davos set within countries, for approaches to policy that privilege local interests and local people over more cosmopolitan concerns.”

Translated into plain English: No less than former Clinton Treasury Secretary and top Obama economic adviser Larry Summers is going America First.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Fearless Foolishness on Terrorism

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2016 election, chattering classes, Donald Trump, Immigration, ISIS, Michael Tomasky, Muslims, Orlando, Orlando attacks, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris attacks, refugees, September 11, terrorism, The New York Times

Ever since the September 11 attacks, I’ve worried that a sizable share of the American public, and especially its chattering and media classes, has lost the instinct for self-preservation. Michael Tomasky’s column in the June 18 New York Times epitomizes this trend – and the extra oomph it’s acquired over the few months, thanks in part (but only in part) to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s free-swinging presidential campaign.

Tomasky, editor of the “journal of ideas” Democracy, got off on a wildly wrong foot with his description of the politics of terrorism since September 11. In his view, it’s a story of successful “fear-mongering” that began with former President George W. Bush’s “talk of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds” and launch of the second Iraq War, but that might be coming to an end with what he views as strong public push-back against Trump’s statements following the Orlando shooting.

No one should support fear-mongering. But has the post-September 11 American political and policy scene really an example of Republicans “whipping the electorate into a state of frenzy about this or that threat”? Here Tomasky’s resort to social-science-y jargon becomes even more exquisitely revealing than that jaw-dropping belittling of an event that killed nearly 3,000 people (from 93 countries) and injured thousands more.

As the author explains it, fifteen years ago, unscrupulous right wing demagogues exploited fear’s ability to lead voters to “embrace more conservative positions than they might otherwise have.” Even worse, in Tomasky’s view, they took advantage of the tendency of “people who start imagining their own death [to] begin to sanction extreme measures to prevent it from happening.”

Apparently, it’s unacceptable to Tomasky and to those Americans who consider their country’s reactions to terrorist violence to be excessive, that outbursts of mass murder spur widespread demands that U.S. leaders go beyond business-as-usual to save their compatriots’ lives and their own.

If you believe Tomasky et al don’t deserve this accusation, then tell me how you would explain his contention that the most sensible reaction to September, 11 nowadays – and one he’s pleased to report is spreading – is a shoulder-shrugging recognition that “we have joined the world, the weary and beleaguered world, and learned that anything can happen anywhere, anytime”?

This stunningly blasé attitude clearly also lies behind Tomasky’s condemnation of Trump’s statement, following last November’s Paris attacks – and a mere two week before the San Bernardino, California murders – that “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule.” And even though 49 more innocent Americans were killed by an ISIS follower in Orlando, Tomasky is still preaching (literal) fatalism.

Indeed, here, evidently is his greatest terrorism-related worry right now: that “a different kind of terrorist attack this fall — one actually orchestrated by the Islamic State, say, or spreading death more randomly — may produce a more traditional fallout than Orlando.” Translation: Americans may become even more insistent that their leaders figure out how to keep them safe. Thankfully, this school of thought wasn’t prevalent in Massachusetts in 1775 – unless Paul Revere was a fear-mongerer, too?

Tomasky’s article is not completely off the wall. He rightly notes that “You can’t stoke fear if you can’t also reassure. It won’t work. If you want to make people scared and force them to turn to you as their protector, you have to demonstrate that you are worthy of being that protector.” He just as rightly observes that Trump hasn’t passed that test of leadership beyond his base.

The author also makes the entirely legitimate point that some of the post-September 11 Bush policies – chiefly the second Iraq War – have backfired in major ways. (He would have placed himself on stronger ground, however, by acknowledging that under Bush, nothing remotely approaching a September 11 repeat took place, and that throughout his term, the 43d president urged Americans not to turn either on their fellow Muslim citizens or on Islam in general.)

But it’s impossible to read Tomasky’s piece objectively, add in its complete lack of alternative policy proposals, and not conclude that his top priority is to help foster the emergence of a “political golden age when inducing fear will never work.” (Yes, that phrase is a verbatim quote.) You needn’t be a Trump-ite, or support blanket Muslim immigration and refugee bans or other unworkable ideas, to recognize that in a still-dangerous world, a dose of fear is essential for survival itself – and that 63 Americans killed by Islamist-inspired attackers in the last six months alone is an unmistakable sign that current U.S. terrorism strategy urgently needs some more of it.