Im-Politic: Why U.S. Progressives Need to Become Nationalists

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America First, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, free trade agreements, globalism, Im-Politic, Immigration, labor unions, nationalism, New Balance, offshoring, Populism, progressives, third world, Trade, Trump, white working class, working class

Tiny groups of individuals shouldn’t be mistaken for entire movements, or even significant factions of movements. Therefore, I don’t want to make too much of those Trump haters who burned their New Balance sneakers and/or slammed the company on social media because it stated that the election as president of a strong trade policy critic would be good for manufacturers seeking to make most of their products in the United States, like itself.

At the same time, the backlash against New Balance sheds lots of light on serious problems in the ranks of American progressivism that contributed to Trump’s triumph and that will need to be solved if the Left end of the country’s political spectrum is to win working class loyalties and convincingly claim populist chops.

Let me start with a little story (one of my father’s favorite phrases!). Back in the late-1990s, when President Clinton had requested new trade negotiating authority from Congress, I attended a meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters of activists seeking to block his ambitions. Early at the session, we agreed that we should explain to legislators and the public what kinds of trade policies we favored, not simply what we opposed, and someone (not me) suggested something along these lines as a unifying theme:

“The main purpose of U.S. trade policy should be to promote healthy growth for the American economy and higher living standards for the majority of the American people.”

That didn’t seem terribly controversial to me. But several hands immediately rose in protest. A representative of the Maryknoll Sisters made clear the objection. Why, she asked, were we ignoring the well-being of the rest of the world?

To his credit, the American labor leader who was running the meeting tried to argue that, however much he sympathized with her point, it was axiomatic that the first obligation of the U.S. government was to promote and defend the interests of the American people. But he didn’t make the argument very emphatically, and many of the others around the table – who came from left-of-center organizations – were even more conflicted. I tried to shore up the first speaker, but quickly realized I was in the greatly outnumbered and spent the rest of the session listening.

I don’t remember what the final version said, and doubt it was ever made public, but the phrasing of that opening point was definitely watered down. On my way out, some folks who worked for labor union offices outside the Beltway came over to me and asked, as they were shaking their heads, “What the heck was that all about?” I replied, “You’ve just learned a valuable lesson about American liberals. Many don’t believe that American workers’ interests should come first.”

They’d actually gotten many such lessons throughout the 1990s. As the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration turned U.S. trade policy into an exercise in offshoring, not domestic growth, their progressive critics decided that the best way to resist was to spotlight the harm this new strategy would inflict on workers and peasants in the developing world as well as in the United States. In fact, the third world and its grievances turned into a prime focus of those who famously protested the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

This approach made some tactical sense, as many liberals in Congress clearly were not constitutionally inclined to buy an America First trade policy. But although there are any number of ways in which U.S. trade policies could be changed to create more situations of mutual benefit between rich and poor countries (see this recent article for an example), the progressive stance also reflected a refusal to recognize that many hard choices have confronted – and still confront – the nation on trade.

In public policy trying to please everyone tends to wind up pleasing no one. So substantively, this wishful thinking was a formula for confusion at best. Politically, the impact was far worse: The progressives wound up muddying and therefore weakening the message trade critics were trying to send to the public.

Small wonder that even though the critics won some procedural trade fights during the 2000s, even after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, President Obama managed to secure Congressional passage of three new free trade agreements. Not until a major politician forthrightly vowed to prioritize American interests in trade policy making did the powerful globalization status quo meet its match – and then some.

Based on their initial post-election statements, it seems that progressive leaders realize that rejecting the option of working with Mr. Trump on trade policy would be the height of folly. That is, it seems that they’re implicitly rejecting the notion that the President-elect is so odious that a company that employs American workers despite powerful pressures to offshore should be condemned not for endorsing the whole of his candidacy, but simply for noting that his election would likely aid those efforts.  Therefore, big changes on the trade front seem inevitable above and beyond the collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

Yet even the progressives’ leaders still face a towering obstacle in their own quest to regain the votes of the millions of working class voters – probably like many of those New Balance workers – who deserted their party’s standard bearer last Tuesday night. They have no chance of succeeding if they continue describing all forms of common sense immigration policies as bigoted. And for those of you who think that I’m just talking about the white working class, keep in mind that the phrase “union household” also describes this constituency.

In other words, during the 2016 elections, progressives in part tried to convince Main Street America that they would gain from a massive increase in the nation’s supply of unskilled labor through both amnesty and the powerful magnet effect it would generate. And at the same time, if these working class voters worried about the resulting downward pressure on wages, along with the effects on the nation’s cohesion of surging bilingualism and its security of newcomers from the culturally medieval Middle East, they were condemned by the Left as nativists, racists, and even worse.

The pointed references to Mr. Trump’s alleged xenophobia by both Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (earlier in the campaign) show that their faction of American politics has much to learn on this score. Until they understand that real U.S. populists can’t be globalists in this day and age, they’re likely to continue wandering the political wilderness.

Im-Politic: The Day After, Part II

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2016 election, African Americans, Bernie Sanders, consumer confidence, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, exit polls, Hillary Clinton, Hispanics, Im-Politic, labor, NAFTA, polls, TPP, Trade, trade laws, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, white working class

It’s the day after the day after in America, and I’m still stupefied by the advent of the Age of Trump. I have absolutely no inside info on what to expect in the way of policy recommendations from the transition team or the new administration, so I’ll be just as eager as anyone for the hints and trial balloons to emerge.

But continuing with the theme of yesterday’s post, I believe it is possible to identify some important questions that major actors in American politics – and the voters they’ll keep trying to reach – will need to grapple with. Let’s focus today on the Democrats and their allies and constituencies, since they face the most obvious challenges:

>At least one piece of the conventional wisdom about Hillary Clinton’s failings strikes me as being right on target – especially since the emails exposed by Wikileaks make clear that her senior advisers spotted it as well: She never developed a clear, compelling positive message.

It’s not that “Stronger together” isn’t a positive idea, and no doubt had some appeal at a time of deep national division. But this slogan begs the question “Stronger together to where?” Regularly, Clinton suggested that she meant “to the 1990s,” when her husband was president. Many Americans – particularly in the chattering classes – do indeed view the period as a time of unprecedented prosperity along with peace. To many others, however – especially in working class precincts – the decade evoked memories of job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA. And of course many others were reminded of a string of scandals, both real and alleged.

In fact, I’d take the critique of Clinton’s message one step further. Even though her campaign website and many of her speeches were filled with any number of specific proposals, they were quickly replaced on the campaign trail, and especially in her ads, by a non-stop assault on Trump’s character and qualifications for the Oval Office. Clinton’s defeat strongly indicates that you can’t beat even a deeply flawed something with nothing.

>In fairness to Clinton, however, her messaging problems might have been related to a genuine quandary she faced. Democrats have styled themselves, and often acted like, the Party of the Common Man. As I and others have written, when it comes to issues like trade, demographic changes in Democrats’ ranks seem to be clashing with this relatively populist identity, and Tuesday night’s results indisputably show that the party has the majority of the white working class.

Indeed, according to the preliminary evidence, Clinton’s performance among union voters was feeble by the standards of recent Democratic presidential candidates – despite labor leaders’ vehement opposition to Trump. And keep in mind that nearly half of this electoral bloc is comprised of government workers, who naturally tend to favor the freer spending Democrats. As a result, Clinton’s backing from members of private sector unions was probably much weaker still.

So the Democrats face a fundamental choice, and it could well have rhetorically crippled an undecided Clinton. Will they turn their backs on private sector union members, possibly also in the belief that America’s changing population profile is steadily reducing their political importance? Or despite the gulf between private sector union workers and younger, better educated Democrats on issues like trade (along perhaps with immigration and those amorphous but crucial cultural and values issues), will they try to bring them back?

>Nonetheless, major Democratic constituencies and their leaders – including the unions and the party’s progressive wing – still loudly oppose America’s current approach to trade. But as mentioned above, they’ve been almost hysterically anti-Trump, to the point of incoherence.

If they’re serious about overhauling trade policy, it’s time for these folks to wake up and turn the partisanship down. They’ll soon be getting a president who supports most of their major and longstanding trade positions, including opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sanctioning China for currency manipulation, rewriting NAFTA, and using U.S. trade law more energetically to fight predatory foreign practices.

Working with Mr. Trump, they can achieve these goals. Remaining in spiteful high dudgeon could doom reforms they’ve sought literally for decades. Statements by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and from organized labor, are promising signs that these progressive leaders are open to cooperation with the incoming Chief Executive. Assuming that these declarations are serious, it’s time for the rest of the movement to fall in line and recognize that for the first time in modern U.S. history, the White House looks to be on their side.

>Finally (for now), nothing could be clearer about the 2016 election returns than the serious flaws they’ve revealed in the so-called science of polling. But politically focused surveys aren’t the only soundings apparently needing major surgery. Many of the best known economic surveys arguably were way off base as well.

For example, many polls – including this week’s exit polls – show strong public support for some form of legalization for illegal immigrants. Can this finding be reconciled with Mr. Trump’s win? Other surveys have revealed a notable warming of Americans’ views of free trade and recent trade agreements. That’s also hard to square with this week’s actual results – and would have been even had Mr. Trump lost by a respectable margin.

Also deserving of greater scrutiny – surveys of consumer and other forms of economic confidence. They have strongly tended to show significant improvement since the depths of the last recession, which isn’t hard to understand. But even their general claims of a simple return to pre-recession levels or, in some cases, better, ring false in light of this week’s voting.

One possible explanation is the gap identified by some researchers between rising optimism by African-Americans and Hispanics and the more downbeat views of whites. But if so, why did Trump fare much better among the latter than widely predicted, and why did he best 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney with both groups even though the economy was considerably weaker four years ago?

I can’t emphasize enough, however, how tentative my observations are, and how long my (and so many other) questions will defy confident answers. My only certainty so far is that election night this week was the most important historic event I’ve ever experienced. (I was born at the end of 1953.) I just wish I knew whether for good or ill.

Im-Politic: The Elite Media Bash the White Working Class Again

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Appalachia, black working class, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Klein, Mainstream Media, offshoring, Primary Colors, TIME, Trade, urban poverty, white working class, William Julius Wilson

Recent Gallup findings show that the news media’s approval ratings with the American people lag those of every other national institution except for Congress and big business. That is, the public says it has more confidence in the nation’s schools and banks, among others, than in “newspapers” and “television news.” Moreover, Americans’ opinions of the press keep getting worse all the time.

After reading Joe Klein’s new Time magazine column on the mounting woes of America’s white working class, I can only wonder why the media’s numbers are even this good.

Klein shot to media superstar status by exploiting his chummy ties with the Clinton political team to write an adoringly leering anonymous novel about the 1992 presidential campaign. Primary Colors was packed with so much inside information that the national chattering class echo chamber was abuzz for years trying to decide whether it was written by a Clinton staffer. (President Clinton’s own musings on the matter didn’t exactly hurt.) Klein lied repeatedly to fellow journalists about his authorship, but on the verge of being outed, finally confessed in mid-1996 – several months after the best-seller was published.

Since journalism says it values honesty and independence from power, you’d think that Klein would have been disgraced and ostracized. Instead, not only did Primary Colors fly off the shelves and win a movie deal for the author. But his career thrived outside Hollywood, too as he “became a columnist at the New Yorker magazine, then edited by [celebrity-worshiping] Tina Brown, the wife of Harold Evans, the head of Random House, which published Primary Colors” before landing his current gig at Time.

So after literally decades of cruising in the chattering class’ most glamorous circles, you’d think that Klein might be a little hesitant about commenting on the state of working class whites in Flyover America – and that whatever he wrote might express at least a little sympathy. But you’d be wrong.

According to Klein, the recently spotlighted spread of “sexual profligacy, drug dependency, violence, indigence and a free-range sense of helplessness that leads to irresponsibility” in regions like (but not restricted to) Appalachia have little to do with economic trends like “the departure of manufacturing jobs.” Instead, as with the presence of these pathologies in the African-American community – which he claims is also mistakenly attributed to (and excused by) job and wage loss in the liberal canon – the real problem is “a bottom-up crisis of individual responsibility.” Even more conveniently from lofty perches like Klein’s, this malady is “largely beyond the reach of public policy.”

Apparently it’s beyond Klein’s ken nowadays that “habits of indolence–the inability to show up to work on time, the refusal to follow orders on the job, the preference to hang out at a home often subsidized by the federal government” might have something to do with the reality that after entire careers of meeting all these standards of responsibility, tens of millions of working class Americans of all races have been rewarded by entire industries being offshored with Washington’s active assistance, or destroyed by predatory foreign competition as American leaders looked the other way. P.S.: The vast majority of Mainstream Media journalists were loudly applauding the entire time.

It’s also clear that Klein is completely unfamiliar with the findings of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who has painstakingly shown how the loss of good industrial jobs in urban America has fueled much of the social breakdown experienced by black families and communities. I presented Wilson’s key conclusion in a May, 2015 post and it’s worth considering again today:

“The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

Wilson’s analysis – which of course is as relevant to the white working class as to the black – undoubtedly sounds obvious to anyone who has depended on employment day in and out at a factory or similar facility that generated family-wage jobs. For jet-set journalists like Klein, who at most drop in occasionally on this world – usually for a little local election-year color – and who not so coincidentally benefit handsomely from cheap imported goods, not to mention cheap legal and illegal immigrant labor, it’s much easier to blame the victim.

Im-Politic: Should Hillary Clinton Give Bill the (Campaigning) Heave-Ho?

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2016 elections, Bill Clinton, border security, bridge to the 21st century, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic terrorism, Jobs, reeducation, retraining, San Bernardino, Saudi Arabia, Tashfeen Malik, terrorism, Trade, white working class

If I were Hillary Clinton, I’d be having big second thoughts about how extensively I’d want to use husband Bill Clinton as a surrogate in her presidential campaign. For the former president keeps – I assume unwittingly – laying all sorts of traps for the still likely Democratic nominee on the super-sensitive and explosive issues of the economy and immigration-related threats of terrorism. This report of a an appearance Bill Clinton made yesterday in New Jersey shows why his stumping is so problematic for Ms. Clinton.

Take the economy. Although at the 2012 Democratic convention, Bill Clinton made a politically brilliant case for the Obama administration’s economic record, he sure sounded more downbeat at Union College: “All over the world there is stagnant economic growth, stagnant incomes, rising inequality and deep arguments over what to do about our increasing diversity,” he contended. Since the United States remains part of that world, this indictment sounds an awful lot like it includes President Obama’s second term – which former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in no position to condemn.

Bill Clinton also claimed to recognize a major component of America’s economic failings – the worsening plight of the white, working class that has helped foster the rise of presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump. In Mr. Clinton’s words, “We all need to recognize that white, non-college-educated Americans have seen great drops in their income, have seen great increases in their unemployment rate, have seen drops in their life expectancy….”

Trouble is, his credibility on these issues lies in tatters. In part, he’s a fatally flawed messenger on this score because the job- and wage-killing trade deals he spearheaded as president starting with NAFTA deserve such blame for white plight (along with undercutting minorities’ progress). Similarly the former president’s vague call that Trump supporters and the like “be brought along to the future” echoes his utopian presidential promise to help Americans harmed by trade liberalization by building a “bridge to the twenty-first century” constructed of retraining and reeducation programs.

Nor did Bill Clinton help his wife’s cause by insisting (in the reporter’s words) “that fortified borders and immigration bans can’t prevent terrorism.”

According to the former president, “The last serious terrorist incident in the United States occurred in San Bernardino, Calif. Those people were converted over the internet.” But although that seems clear for Syed Rizwan Farook, it’s anything but for his wife, Tashfeen Malik. While still living in her native Pakistan, Malik reportedly “attended the Al-Huda Institute in Multan, part of a chain of women-only religious schools in Pakistan.” Al-Huda says it aims to promote a peaceful message, but it’s “known for its puritanical interpretation of Islam” – an interpretation that’s played a decisive role in fostering terrorism both theologically (by promoting intolerance) and institutionally (through activities sponsored by the Saudi theocracy that champions such reactionary values).

Indeed, Malik also reportedly changed dramatically following a trip to Saudi Arabia several years before immigrating to the United States. And speaking of her entry into America, Republican Members of Congress have charged that Malik’s visa application was never properly vetted by U.S. immigration authorities.

Mr. Bill Clinton’s other comments on immigration and terrorism issues ranged from the ignorant to the inane. Apparently the former president thought he could definitively establish Trump as a kook by noting, “You can build all the walls you want. You can build them all across Canada; they got a bunch of foreigners in Canada.” But even under President Obama – no immigration hard-liner – “The US-Canadian border [has] increasingly [become] a national security hotspot watched over by drones, surveillance towers, and agents of the Department of Homeland Security.”

And kooky is the only apt description for President Clinton’s suggestion that such border security measures are pathetically irrelevant because “You could not keep out the social media.” In other words, because all dangers can’t be prevented, all prevention efforts are pointless.

President Clinton could well find his campaign mojo again before the November elections. No politician who has won the presidency twice should ever be underestimated, much less counted out. But time keeps getting shorter, and unless Mr. Clinton ups his game soon, his new boss might soon have to send him the Trump-ian message, “You’re fired.”