Im-Politic: Race, Conspiracies, and Double Standards

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2016 election, Courtland Milloy, David J. Rothkopf, Donald Trump, establishment, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, middle class, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, One Percent, racism, The Washington Post, working class

It’s more than a little strange to praise an establishment newspaper column that all but calls Donald Trump a racist. And yet the bar for simple sanity has sunk abysmally low for opinion journalists (who aren’t supposed to be objective – like their increasingly unprofessional counterparts in hard news). So it’s more than appropriate to tout the virtues of Washington Post pundit Courtland Milloy’s October 11 piece on charges that if the Republican presidential nominee loses the presidency, African-Americans and other minorities could face an “apocalypse.”

Milloy’s article contains the by-now standard accusation that Trump’s rhetoric has been “racist” (as well as “misogynist”). But he departs insightfully from the emerging conventional wisdom that many of Trump’s backers are such vicious bigots that they will respond to defeat at the polls by going on a violent rampage that targets non-whites of all kinds. In addition to disputing the claims that all or most or lots or too many of Trump’s supporters are racists, Milloy points to a lesson he argues African-Americans have learned about even seemingly hostile whites over the…centuries:

“[F]or those who are racists, their views may not lead to threatening actions. When blacks and whites work on jobs where cooperation is a matter of life and death — such as in the military or on a construction site — people, no matter their beliefs, tend to find a way to get along.”

Along the way, he lampoons contentions that Trump’s campaign is responsible for a significant rise in racism throughout American society.

Even more important, Milloy writes that even many Trump critics are missing “the villain that lurks in the shadows” for both minorities and whites in the middle and working classes, and in the ranks of the poor: “the extremely rich who own the politicians, manipulate Wall Street and exploit cheap labor worldwide at the expense of America’s working class.”

If that last phrase sounds familiar, it should. It revealingly mirrors Trump’s own latest line:

“For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind. Our campaign represents a true existential threat like they haven’t seen before,” Trump said.

“It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

As Milloy observes (approvingly), it also sounds a lot like what we’ve heard from the left wing of American liberalism since the “Occupy Wall Street” movement began (and of course before). In addition, this phenomenon has been the subject of extensive recent study – e.g., in a 2009 book titled Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making. And the author in this case is David J. Rothkopf, a quintessential establishmentarian who currently edits FOREIGN POLICY magazine.

Curiously, though, when these words come from Trump’s mouth, they’re simply ridiculed (as in this speech from President Obama last week), or they’re ascribed to historic anti-Semitism (as in this October 13 post).

Milloy offers vastly superior advice: urging black and white working-class people [to] come together and stop falling for these political con games….” Clearly, such cooperation is impossible to envision in the near-term future. Is it too much to hope that, by the 2020 campaign cycle, someone who deserves the adjective “presidential” might take on the challenge?

Im-Politic: A Flawed Guide to Modern Populism

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big government, boardroom liberalism, conservatives, Democrats, elites, free trade agreements, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, middle class, Noam Scheiber, One Percent, Populism, Republicans, Trade, working class

This morning’s Washington Post article on the new-found popularity in American politics of the label “populism” makes a crucial point:  The term is becoming so widespread among so many different kinds of politicians that it’s threatening to become meaningless. After all, if everyone is a populist, can anyone really be?

At the same time, it’s pretty stunning how many more legitimate reasons for populism’s proliferation have been missed by author David Greenberg, a Rutgers University historian.

Chiefly, the author expresses thinly veiled contempt for Republican leaders who have adopted the populist mantle. “Its promiscuous application [nowadays],” he writes, “has usually meant forgetting and forsaking key parts of the original Populists’ agenda. This year’s Republican candidates — an assortment of senators, governors, a surgeon, a CEO — may rail against Washington and claim to fight for the little guy, but in most cases, their view of government’s role in economic life couldn’t be more starkly opposed to the Populists’ ideals.

Yet Greenberg overlooks the fact that since the late-19^th century heyday of the original Populists, an impressive level of prosperity has become so widespread that a leading national economic challenge today is preserving a middle class worthy of the name, not creating one in the first place. One main reason is that “government’s role in economic life” has ballooned so dramatically. As a result, however, the defining characteristic of populism can no longer simply be support for yet more government spending.

Just as important, government’s immense scale – and consequent intrusiveness – combined with growing affluence, partly explains why conservatives who rail against this role do have some valid claim to populism. It also explains why this message resonates so powerfully among so many Americans who have not amassed fortunes of any size, and who believe that their lives – and their hopes for their children – have become more economically and financially fragile.

In addition, populism today is arguably broader than the big government-smaller government debate because two major sources of middle and working class economic anxiety – job-killing trade deals and immigration policies – are at best tangential to Greenberg’s framework.

To be sure, the author takes some Democrats and liberals to task as well for faux populism. But here his critique emphasizes style, not substance. Writing of Hillary Clinton, for example, he argues that because “symbolism matters in politics,” although she “can fairly claim to have voiced the concerns of those lower on the economic ladder, her years in establishment circles have made it hard for her to denounce a rigged system with the fire-and-brimstone zeal that the populist label suggests.”   

So Greenberg’s bottom line appears to be that a true populist today must not only stand for big government, but mainly champion society’s poorest. On the substance, this position is certainly defensible. But it’s an odd form of populism that doesn’t speak to the leading – and entirely valid – concerns expressed by a large demographic majority. Indeed, many prominent Democrats ,who worry about their party’s recent difficulties in winning middle and working class votes, will probably find populism a la Greenberg pretty deficient too.  

Moreover, the author’s priorities indicate that he’s mistaking populism for what is actually a phenomenon that New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber has brilliantly identified as “Boardroom Liberalism.”

As Scheiber wrote in a New Republic article last year, this political outlook is “a worldview that’s steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity. It takes as a given that government has a role to play in building infrastructure, regulating business, training workers, smoothing out the boom-bust cycles of the economy, providing for the poor and disadvantaged. But it is a view from on high—one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.”

I explained here why this approach of throwing a continuing and even growing stream of crumbs to the poor is as looney on the merits as it looks politically cynical. Too bad Greenberg doesn’t seem to have read Scheiber before submitting his draft to the Post. Going forward, I’d suggest that he, and others, use these tests of populism instead: Who’s really getting the one percent’s goat? Who’s viewed as a genuine danger to its power and privilege? Because you can bet that the powers-that-be – which of course includes the Washington Post and the rest of America’s media elite – are too smart to waste their time trashing, ridiculing, and otherwise trying to marginalize phony populists.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New Evidence of a Painfully Narrow – and Oil-Driven – US Recovery

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energy, growth, housing, Jobs, oil, One Percent, recovery, unemployment, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Want to understand the U.S. economy’s actual performance rather than rely on the doses of hopium so often served up in the Mainstream Media?  Then hightail it over to the National Association of Counties website.

The Association has done an absolutely jaw-dropping research job, examining the economic records of each of the nation’s 3,069 counties and figuring out which ones have experienced genuine economic recovery and which still lag behind. And kudos to The Wall Street Journal‘s Eric Morath for writing up the report and providing a handy-dandy summary.

The two big takeaways from the survey look pretty bearish to me. First, if you define full recovery as surpassing pre-recession bests in terms of job levels, unemployment rates, economic output, and home prices, only 65 of those 3,069 counties pass the test. That’s only about one in 47.

Second, fully 42 of the 65 recovered counties are in the energy-rich states of Alaska, North Dakota, and Texas. (Oddly, none are in Oklahoma.) That’s another sign of a development I’ve warned of previously – the overall U.S. economic recovery, and in particular the rebound in the productive sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, has depended heavily on the American energy revolution. And you know what’s been happening to energy prices lately.

As a result, Morath notes, none of the recovered counties has a population of more than 500,000. If you’re still wondering why most Americans say they’re not experiencing a bounce-back economically, look no further.

One interesting finding that wasn’t reported by the Journal – none of the 65 recovered counties is in New York, California, Maryland, or Virginia. That indicates that centers of the One Percent (e.g., New York City and Los Angeles), and regions that are kept afloat economically by federal government spending (the Washington, D.C. area), haven’t been stellar economic performers, at least on a county-wide basis.

I’m looking forward to digging into the data more deeply, and if you’d like to do the same – or just see how your county has fared – check out the Counties Association’s interactive map.

Im-Politic: Why Elizabeth Warren Needs to Become a Real Trade Warrior

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Elizabeth Warren, Financial Crisis, financial regulation, Im-Politic, Jobs, Main Street economy, Mainstream Media, offshoring, One Percent, Trade, trade Deals, trickle down economics, Wall Street reform

One of the most heartening trade policy-related developments of recent months has been Senator Elizabeth Warren’s growing interest in the issue. In addition to expressing concern that President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal will undercut the Wall Street reforms she’s helped spearhead, she devoted some lines to trade in her recent economics speech to the AFL-CIO that were more than mere talking points.

Given the Massachusetts freshman’s burgeoning role in Democratic party politics – and signs of some appeal to populist conservatives – these remarks represent one more small sign that much of her party is moving beyond stale, narrow cliches when talking trade. Indeed, they encouragingly echo a previous speech by her New York colleague, Chuck Schumer, a member of the Democratic leadership as chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Center.

Nonetheless, Warren and her colleagues have a ways to go before they develop a trade-related campaign pitch that both excites voters and yet isn’t completely trashed by the trade-liberalization-worshipping Mainstream Media.

That last point is worth elaborating on a bit. It’s not that voters will read in any detail the MSM’s descriptions of any candidates critical of trade and conclude that opposition to current policies disqualifies them from public office. It’s that constant MSM descriptions of such candidates as neanderthals and know-nothings and xenophobes and the like tend to saddle target politicians with a distinctive “fringe” or at best (hopeless) “protest candidate” label.  

In any event, it was good to see Warren, a la Schumer before her, in part blame the woes of the American middle and working classes in part on government decisions that “turned loose giant international corporations to…outsource more jobs.” Even better was Warren’s critique of “trade pacts and tax deals that let subsidized manufacturers around the globe sell here in America while good American jobs get shipped overseas.”

But Warren oversimplifies.  As a result, she needlessly leaves herself and other trade policy critics needlessly vulnerable to charges of being anti-capitalist, and misses a chance to knit together her domestic and international positions into the strongest possible political force.

The main culprit behind offshoring isn’t the “trickle-down economics” she villifies in the AFL speech and more generally. It’s a more specific set of trade policies that inevitably slow U.S. growth and therefore hiring by encouraging American (and other foreign) companies to supply the lucrative American market from foreign production sites that are much lower cost, lightly regulated, still heavily protected by (difficult-to-identify) non-tariff trade barriers, and (yes) often subsidized.

Moreover, precisely because recent trade deals and related policies have offered this sugar-sweet deal to U.S. companies, they inevitably have increased the pressure in America to deregulate dramatically in order to compensate – including on Wall Street. And if restoring or even raising U.S. trade barriers made investing abroad much less attractive to the One Percent (because selling the output to American customers would be that much harder) much more of the wealthy’s wealth would indeed trickle down to the rest of Americans. In that trade policy environment, new financial regulations could genuinely ensure that most corporate investment benefits the real Main Street U.S. economy and strengthens its foundations, rather than underwrite unproductive and even reckless Wall Street shenanigans.

Just as important, Warren needs to connect trade-induced offshoring with the onset of the financial crisis. As I’ve pointed out previously, she’d have plenty of world-class academic company. But it’s imperative to popularize the idea that most of the gains from offshoring went to third world populations who were still left way too poor to buy much of what Americans could hope to export them. Most of the losses, meanwhile, went to Americans whose consumption was still vital to fueling the nation’s and the world’s growth. When Washington decided to offset those income losses with oceans of cheap credit, bubble inflation and then bursting was guaranteed. So if Warren is genuinely determined to improve the financial stability of the American economy – as seems the case – then she’ll concentrate more of her energies on a trade policy makeover.

Because of her skyrocketing profile, Warren will be influencing the next presidential campaign whether she runs or not. Let’s hope she uses the opportunity not only to stoke populist emotions that should be heated, but to raise the odds that they’ll generate the most constructive change.