Category: Inequality

Are Trump and Sanders a Ripple of Populism, or a Wave?

Since sophomoric jokes have failed to derail Donald Trump’s presidential campaign (e.g., running silly pictures of Trump, mocking his soundbites while ignoring his policies and his authoritarian condemnations), let’s try understanding what’s happening.

So, is Trump a problem, or just a symptom of the problem? And folks, what is the problem? The Donald captured the essence of “the problem” in his Super Tuesday victory speech: (Brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

People in the middle-income groups are making less money than they were 12 years ago. And in her speech, [Hillary Clinton] said, ‘they’re making less money.’ Well, she’s been there with Obama for a long period of time. Why hasn’t she done anything about it?

Trump for the win! He asks a question that neither Hillary Clinton, or the Establishments of both parties, have a satisfying way to answer (so far), something like what we said about John Kerry being “for the war before he was against it.”

The nation’s real problems are those articulated by Bernie Sanders, but he is not a messenger who can win in the fall. But his popularity, and that of Donald Trump show that we are looking at the swelling of a populist wave in America. Maybe it is still far from the beach; maybe it is just a ripple. We will know in November, but early signs are that the wave could be big when it hits us.

Consider Trump’s victory in the Massachusetts primary – 310,847 voted for Donald Trump. That gave him 49.3% of the vote in a five-candidate race. A pretty overwhelming endorsement, even considering that independents can vote in either primary, and many use that option to vote against a candidate.

The next day, Massachusetts’ Republican Governor Charlie Baker refused to endorse him. He said that he did not vote for Trump on Tuesday and:

I’m not going to vote for him in November.

Charlie Baker is immensely popular with pretty much every segment of the state’s voting population; his job approval numbers are about 70%. He’s perceived as highly competent at running the government, he’s socially liberal, and people just plain like him. So, Baker doesn’t need the Trump wing of the GOP.

Trump isn’t going to carry Massachusetts in November, Clinton and Sanders totaled 1,190,500 votes between them. But the current populist resurgence will not end with Bernie’s failure to win the Democratic nomination, or with a Trump general election loss in November, because the underlying anger isn’t going away. Remember that Trump and Sanders totaled 897,500 votes in MA, to Hillary’s 603,800. From Fabius Maximus:

Populism’s resurgence has, as always, terrified our ruling elites and their servants. Since most journalists don’t understand it, Campaign 2016 is a series of surprises to them.

Maximus goes on to say that from the start of Trump’s campaign, the similarities between Trump and Andrew Jackson were obvious: Trump’s isolationist foreign policy (but bellicose towards threats), his hostility to minorities and Wall Street bankers, his concern for the poor, his appeal to national greatness — these same views also astonished the elites in 1830 when Andrew Jackson rode the wave to the White House. The 1830 elites despised Jackson like today’s elites despise Trump today.

Jacksonians were the first populists in America to gain power. Even today, their strain of suspicion of federal power, skepticism about both domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign aid abroad), opposition to federal taxes, but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies) continues.

These “Crabgrass Jacksonians” constitute a large political bloc in America. Crabgrass Jacksonianism sees the contemporary homeowner working on his/her modest suburban lawn, as a hero of the American story.

The Establishments of both parties may have fun demonizing their populists, but they ignore the similarities between the strategies of Trump and Sanders, and the appeal both have to significant numbers in both parties. Separately, progressives and populists are weak. If they can be combined as they were at the time of the New Deal, they can be a huge force for change.

US News reports that historical patterns and political data all show that the real presidential election battle takes place in just seven states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire. Based on recent Clinton vs. Trump head-to-head polls in these seven states, Trump is within striking distance of winning the general election against Clinton.

For those who believe a Trump presidency is not really possible in today’s America, you may want to re-think that proposition.

That populist wave may be closer to the beach than you think.

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It’s Always Groundhog Day in America

Do Conservatives Have a Learning Disability? A few who read the Wrongologist are convinced that Wrongo is just a clueless, woolly-headed Progressive who hates America and the baby Jesus. None of that is true, except for the Progressive part.

From Krugman’s Monday column:

Marco Rubio has yet to win anything, but by losing less badly than other non-Trump candidates he has become the overwhelming choice of the Republican establishment.

PK points out that Rubio:

• Proposes tax cuts, like completely eliminating taxes on investment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing zero in federal taxes.
• Proposes tax cuts that would be almost twice as big as George W. Bush’s as a percentage of GDP, despite the fact that Republicans have spent the Obama years warning incessantly that budget deficits will destroy America, any day now.
• Insists that his tax cuts would pay for themselves, by unleashing incredible economic growth. Never mind the complete absence of any evidence for this claim, or that the last two Democratic presidents, both of whom raised taxes on the rich, presided over better private-sector job growth than Mr. Bush did.
• Called for a balanced-budget amendment, which makes no sense, since he is calling for budget-busting tax cuts. Also this amendment would have been catastrophic during the Great Recession, when deficit spending helped bring us out of a crash.

Finally, Marco Roboto said a few days ago that it’s “not the Fed’s job to stimulate the economy” (although the law says that it is precisely their job). Krugman closes with: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

In short, Mr. Rubio is peddling crank economics. What’s interesting, however, is…he’s not pandering to ignorant voters; he’s pandering to an ignorant [GOP] elite.

It doesn’t require a Nobel Prize in Economics to see the entrenched divisions in our politics. But let’s focus today on the great coup by American Conservatism, convincing its followers that personal opinion counts for as much as any fact.

We live in an America that Conservatives have turned into an oligarchy. The system has been gamed to support the interests of the wealthy. Politicians are able to choose their voters through a cynical, manipulative gerrymandering re-redistricting process. The idea of “one man, one vote” has, via Citizens United, been turned into a largely meaningless exercise in which those with big bucks and an agenda pay to propagandize the American voter, many of whom are far more comfortable reacting emotionally, than thinking critically.

Conservatives like Rubio (and the rest of the GOP) have retreated into a content-free bubble, where they manufacture truth on the fly to suit their purpose. You know this since few on the Far Right put forward cogent, supportable arguments for their ideas, instead lazily relying on a smug arrogance which allows them to laugh off opposing ideas, as does Mr. Rubio.

The problem is, the vast majority of our electorate are largely oblivious to the nuances of the underlying issues. What information they have is derived from main stream media, or right wing propaganda organs, or social media.

Data are boring and unacceptable: My belief is superior to your data or to my own education. It is easier to just vote for the candidate promising to make America Great Again, ignoring the reality of the deep and nuanced causes of our problems.

The rigidity of the Republican doctrine on taxes as outlined by Rubio looks like an alternate version of the movie, “Groundhog Day“, where Bill Murray experiences a time loop in which he repeats his experience until he corrects the problems that had landed him in limbo.

Sadly, in the GOP alternative version, they begin every presidential election cycle with a demand for lower taxes. The tax policy of the previous four years has no effect on this mantra. Nor do the economic trends of the time alter their robotic claim that lower taxes will cure all difficulties. In the Conservative view, a smaller tax bite will trigger an economic boom that offsets the costs of GOP tax cuts to our budget.

In the GOP version of “Groundhog Day”, the GOP doesn’t learn from its mistakes. Unfortunately, this means the entire country suffers from the inability or unwillingness of Republicans to learn from experience.

It’s time to turn off Fox News and set out on a walkabout in the reality-based world.

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What NH Should Teach Us

The popular vote in NH was about 521,000. Of that number, 278k went to Republican candidates, and 243k went to Democrats. Bernie led all candidates with 145,700 votes, with Trump second at 97,300 votes. Hillary was third at 92,530.

For the record, the 2008 turnout was: 287,342 for the Democrats and 238,979 for the Republicans.

The media is all over the demographics of the NH primary, and how Bernie won all segments except for people over 65 years old, and those who make more than $200k, both of which went to Hillary.

But one headline from NH ought to be that the Dems performed 15% worse than eight years ago, while the GOP performed 14% better than they did when a NH resident (Romney) was on the ballot!

In Hillary’s post-primary speech, she said that there isn’t a huge difference between the two Democratic candidates. Bernie talked about how the party had to come together down the road to prevent a White House take-over by the GOP.

But are these candidates that similar?

Let’s hear from Benjamin Studebaker, who says that Sanders and Clinton represent two very different ideologies, a neo-liberal view represented by Ms. Clinton and an FDR big government program viewpoint represented by Mr. Sanders:

Each of these ideologies wants control of the Democratic Party so that its resources can be used to advance a different conception of what a good society looks like…This is not a matter of taste and these are not flavors of popcorn.

Studebaker thinks that Hillary is ideologically similar to Barack Obama, describing that in 2008: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War. On economic policy, there never was a substantive difference. The major economic legislation passed under Obama (Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act) did not address the structural inequality problem that the Democratic Party of the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s…existed to confront.

In fact, while inequality decreased under FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ, it has increased under 3 Democrats: Carter, Clinton, and Obama. It also increased under 3 Republicans: Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

Now comes the Hill & Bernie show. Sanders is not running to try to implement a set of idealistic policies that a Republican-controlled Congress will block; he is running to take the Democratic Party away from its current leadership that is unwilling to deal with the systemic economic problems that have led to wage stagnation and the shrinking of the middle class in America.

But can he be successful? David Brooks said in the NYT:

Bernie Sanders…has been so blinded by his values that the reality of the situation does not seem to penetrate his mind.

OK, that must mean that Sanders has no shot. The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party cannot be reclaimed by the FDR/LBJ types, or that if it is reclaimed, it will lose in 2016.

But, in the 1968 and 1976 Republican primaries, a guy named Ronald Reagan ran to take the Republican Party back from the Richard Nixon types who went along with the Democrats on welfare and regulation. He was bidding to return the Republicans to their 1920’s Conservative roots. Everyone in the 60’s and 70’s knew that Reagan couldn’t pull that off. But he did.

How? Yesterday, we spoke of Movement Conservatism, where Republicans built a conceptual base, a popular base, a business base, and an institutional infrastructure of think tanks, and by the 2000s, Conservatives again controlled the Republican Party.

So, one lesson from the NH primary is that the contest for the 2016 presidential nomination is not just a contest to see who will lead the Democrats, it’s a contest to see what kind of party the Democrats are going to be in the coming decades, what ideology and what interests, causes, and issues the Democratic Party will prioritize.

The Republican Party faces exactly the same problem in 2016.

And these facts make the 2016 primaries far more important than in any other recent election.

This is about whether the Democratic Party is going to care about inequality for the next decade. We are making a historical decision between two distinct ideological paradigms, not a choice between flavors of popcorn.

Choose carefully.

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