Mitchell Zimmerman: Democrats would be stupid to try ‘to work with’ an increasingly depraved GOP
A QAnon emblem (upper left) is raised during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol by Trump cultists. The extreme-right, bogus-conspiracy-based QAnon group has become a particularly violence-prone part of the Republican Party.
— Photo by Elvert Barnes
Trump supporters/cultists at the “Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017
Via OtherWords.org
Unity and bipartisanship sound wonderful. But can anyone explain how “building bridges” to today’s GOP will get anything done?
Republicans now demand “unity” even as many embrace the big lie that President Biden stole the election from Trump — and even after some cheered on the attack on the U.S. Capitol that killed five.
But the bigger difficulty is that there can be no reasonable compromise between those determined to confront the crises America faces and those who deny that the problems exist — and have indeed aggravated them.
Consider the key challenges: climate change, racial injustice and the coronavirus pandemic.
Climate change is upon us: violent superstorms, rising seas, flooding, wildfires, new diseases. But the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not about the best ways to reckon with climate change. They’re about whether climate change is real at all.
President Trump, with support from the rest of the Republican Party, called climate change a “hoax,” actively promoted fossil fuels, and reversed every step taken to stave off climate disaster. There is no “working with” the party that is working directly to worsen the problem.
Likewise for racial bias in American life. This past year massive, multiracial protests against racist police violence and impunity swept the nation, and much of white America finally accepted that racism and white supremacy are ugly realities.
But not the GOP. The Trump-led party cozied up to the “very fine people” who unleashed racist violence in Charlottesville and to the racist street gangs Trump urged to “stand by” until he could fire them at the Capitol.
Promoting white racial resentment has been key to the Republican playbook for decades. So don’t ask the fox to work with the farmer to keep the chicken coop safe.
Finally, should Democrats look for middle ground with Republicans in responding to the pandemic?
Donald Trump made the lethal, worldwide contagion a partisan issue when he claimed it was another hoax and instructed his faithful to fight mask-wearing and social distancing. He developed a movement dedicated to sabotaging the COVID-19 response, threatening public health officials, and demanding businesses reopen whatever the human cost.
Even as Republicans promoted the “liberty” of Trump’s followers to infect others with COVID-19, they opposed strong action to help those tens of millions of Americans facing lost jobs, foreclosure, eviction, and hunger.
Why are Republicans so set against our government protecting us from the consequences of the coronavirus? It’s not really about deficits, which they happily exploded with tax cuts for the rich and bloated Pentagon budgets.
Their real fear is that President Biden’s big response might actually work. They’re counting on Americans continuing to suffer, which may bolster Republicans in the next elections.
So forget about working “with” Republican political leaders.
“Unity” to solve our key problems isn’t possible. Nor is it necessary. Instead, the Democrats should exercise their power without begging for support from Republicans.
Voters gave Democrats the power to put their program into effect. They should seize the opportunity to move boldly, with or without the losers. The voters will get to see how that works out and decide in the next election whether they like what they got. That’s how democracy works.
America desperately needs effective government. If it is “partisanship” for the Democratic Party to provide that without the pretend cooperation of Republicans, let’s have more partisanship.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.
Chris Powell: Democrats might make sure GOP survives; revolving door keeps spinning for Conn. politicians
MANCHESTER, Conn.
As he skipped the inauguration of his successor and shuffled off to his resort in Florida, has Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party? Some political observers think so and of course Democrats hope so.
Trump's petulant and even seditious exit from office did him no credit. But then he did not do so badly in the popular vote and the Electoral College, and even landslide defeats in presidential elections seldom knock a major party down for long.
Herbert Hoover led the Republicans to a landslide victory in 1928 over Democrat Al Smith but himself was ousted in a landslide by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932.
Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was derided as far too conservative and was clobbered by Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democrats in 1964, but the Republicans still won the next presidential election, with Richard Nixon.
George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, was derided as too liberal and lost big to Nixon and the Republicans in 1972, but the Democrats still won four years later with Jimmy Carter.
The reversal of party fortunes in these cases was largely a matter of self-destruction. Hoover turned a stock market crash into the Great Depression. Johnson escalated and failed to win a stupid imperial war. Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, got caught in criminality. (Even so, Nixon's appointed vice president, Gerald Ford, nearly won the 1976 presidential election for the Republicans anyway.)
Both major parties have influential elements that many voters find objectionable if not repulsive and yet gain big roles when their party is in power. So it is not hard to imagine such elements bringing trouble to Joe Biden's new Democratic national administration even as the Republicans at last may be relieved of the daily embarrassments of Trump's demeanor, especially since, out of office, much civil and even criminal litigation may keep him busy. Additionally, Republicans in Washington may rediscover that being in the minority makes taking potshots easy, far easier than governing.
Will the Biden administration self-destruct with corruption, incompetence, failure, or politically correct nonsense? Maybe not, but with the Democratic margins in Congress being so thin, the new administration may have to be unusually successful to avoid losing control of both houses in the elections two years hence, since mid-term elections usually go against the president's party.
In any case, while good government is good politics, good government seldom lasts long, so defeated parties tend to revive faster than expected.
xxx
Having just left the speakership of Connecticut's House of Representatives, former state Rep. Joe Aresimowicz, D.-Berlin, has quickly moved into a position with Gaffney Bennett and Associates, which calls itself Connecticut's leading government relations firm. Connecticut's “revolving door” law prohibits Aresimowicz from lobbying legislators and government agencies for a year, but obviously the firm believes that he can bring in a lot of good business anyway.
Aresimowicz's transformation may dishearten advocates of the public interest but it's not unusual. The Connecticut Mirror notes that three former House speakers are already lobbying or working for firms that do government relations. The Mirror might have added that a former state Senate leader heads Connecticut's biggest teacher union.
As a legislator Aresimowicz himself was employed by a government employee union. While this presented more than the typical potential conflict of interest most legislators face, it was perfectly legal, since the legislature is nominally part-time work, most legislators must hold other jobs, and Aresimowicz's constituents knew who he was when they elected him.
Former state legislators aren't the only ones drawn to government employment in Connecticut. Many journalists have left news organizations for public-relations positions with government agencies or businesses. Indeed, there now may be more former journalists in government P.R. in Connecticut than there are news reporters.
Government is just where the money is these days. Former legislative leaders don't go to work for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, or Audubon Society, nor do former journalists. There always has been and always will be more money in subverting or deflecting the public interest than in pursuing it.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
David Warsh: Time to build new public data infrastructure
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
“Philosophy? Philosophy? I’m a Christian and Democrat — that’s all.’’ Franklin D. Roosevelt responding to the question “What is your philosophy?” as quoted in Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, by David Kennedy.
It’s a commonplace that every new presidential administration arrives as a policy omnibus, with all kinds of venturesome policy entrepreneurs aboard. Campaign managers, financial backers, friends of the president and vice president, Cabinet members, Congressional committee chairpersons and their staffers, lobbyists, opinion shapers in the media – all bring agendas and, in the pell-mell of the first hundred days, seek to put them in motion.
It will be decades before we know what the Trump presidency was all about. But Biden, if he wins, will take office, with only one certainty. The Democrats will once again be the party of Innovation. Starting with candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, the Republican Party managed to wrest away the mantle of change: deregulation, globalization, supply-side economics, all that. But after the monumental stumble that has been the Trump presidency, the GOP must rebuild itself as the party of conservatism or go out of business.
Trump himself may have arrived with a headful of ideas, but in the event he is defeated after a single term he is headed for obloquy greater than that of Herbert Hoover as a president who didn’t show up. Should Trump win a second term, of course, that’s another story.
Green New Deal? Tax restructuring? Pandemic crisis management? Health care and Social Security repair? Immigration status reform? Supreme Court appointments? Which of a thousand possibilities will blossom into fact? There is no way of knowing today. As a gauge of the Biden administration’s long-term success, however, consider a modest suggestion. What about commissioning a National Data Service to stand with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, Space Force, Public Health Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as the nation’s ninth uniformed officer corps?
The pre-history of the Space Force is instructive. As far back as 1961, then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara designated the Air Force as the lead military service for space. But not until 1982 was an Air Force Space Command created, in connection with the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a satellite-based laser weapons system abandoned after some testing. Satellite reconnaissance became part of the War on Terror after 9/11. And in March 2018, President Trump embraced the independent Space Corps idea in a public speech. He signed a statute in December 2019 establishing it. Around 16,000 active-duty Air Force personnel and civilians are assigned to it.
Public data collection in the United States is a much older service. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution requires the enumeration of the nation’s population for purposes of establishing representation in Congress. The first Census was conducted in 1790, and at ten-year intervals ever since. New statistical agencies were added as needs arose, for banking, agriculture, labor, safety, manufacturing, transportation, health, medicine, and so on. When the War Department (as what is now the Defense Department was previously called) needed planning data for World War II, the Commerce Department turned to the National Bureau for Economic Research, where Simon Kuznets was developing National Income Accounts. Most countries have a single statistical agency; the U.S. has 13 major agencies and hundreds of smaller programs.
The current system has needed an overhaul since the mid-1990s, when Janet Norwood, then Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote Organizing to Count: Change in the Federal Statistical System. Today it is judged to be broken. Old-fashioned survey techniques are outdated in the age of the Internet. Concerns for privacy and confidentiality have sent costs soaring. The 2020 Census is expected to cost $48 a head to collect in constant dollars, as opposed to $5.50 in 1960. And political meddling has become a problem in the last four years. Manipulation of pandemic statistics has made headlines in recent months. And, having failed to exclude non-citizens by requiring them to identify themselves as such, the Trump administration decided to end the Census four weeks early, in August.
A high-level blueprint for building a new public data infrastructure appeared over the summer. Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto (MIT Press), by Julia Lane, of New York University. A native New Zealander, now a U.S. and U.K. citizen as well, Lane earned a PhD from the University of Missouri in the 1980s, taught, worked for the World Bank for a decade, taught again for another 10 years at American University, managed the economics department at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, and rotated through four years at the National Science Foundation as a senior program director. She subsequently founded a series of programs for the American Institutes for Research, and eventually the Coleridge Initiative, a rapidly growing research and training collaborative, before settling down as a high-end professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Policy. “It’s a golden moment,” she writes, to rethink the system, retaining its best aspects – trust, professionalization, continuity – while designing new systems of measurement, putting them to work, and making them widely available
Will it happen? It’s a long road, a matter for experts backed by diverse constituencies in government and private enterprise. But if ever a highly technical program was worth setting out, manifesto-fashion, in a short and readable book, it is this one. An age of Big Data is upon us. Shouldn’t a government run by a Party of Innovation bend to the task of creating a National Data Service?
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
David Warsh: Trump's stain is indelible, but....
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Watching the GOP convention last week, I had the feeling that there were two versions of the Republican Party on the program. One was a personality cult built around Donald Trump and his children, The other professed to be an open, vibrant aggregation of all sorts of people sharing all kinds of concerns: foreign competition, immigration, religion, education, health care, military service, taxes, red tape.
The first party’s convention culminated in an extravaganza straight out of The Hunger Games, in which the coronavirus pandemic had happened long ago. The second convention resembled a non-alcoholic version of the Democratic Party. All that was missing was inequality and climate change.
If Trump loses the election in November, will he go away? Of course he won’t. his tweets will continue as he seeks to retain his hold, But the acknowledgment last week of the existence of that second congregation made it possible to believe that the Republican Party might regain possession of itself sooner than expected.
Certainly, that is not the conventional wisdom, “Whether Mr. Trump wins or loses in November, he now owns the Republicans,” wrote columnist Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “They are now prisoners of the Frankenstein they helped to create.” Ross Douthat, of The New York Times, wrote, “Even if he loses, his power will probably ebb only slowly, if at all.” The FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo notes that some Republicans warn that, even if he loses, there is nothing to prevent him from running again in 2024. In that case, asks an influential Trump critic, “Which Republican would be able to defeat him in a primary?”
That’s easy. For that ghost Republican a party seeking cross-over voters in a future election, the most attractive would be Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. A point often missed about Trump’s 2016 insurgency is that many of his positions now appeal well beyond his vaunted “base.” An idiot-savant is a person who has a mental or learning disability but is extremely gifted in a particular way, such as the performing of feats of memory or calculation, Trump’s disability is characterological, but his political judgment has, in several instances, been acute, in both their popular appeal and their substance (though never their execution).
Thus tougher trade policy with China, more coherent immigration controls, prudent assessment of America’s foreign wars, realistic relations with Russia are broadly popular positions. Add a revenue-neutral carbon tax to the platform – that being a well-established Republican ambition, at least in policy circles – and the differences between the two parties would turn on their plans for social spending, tax equity and cultural inequities.
What happens next will depend on the margin in the November election. If Trump wins, or loses by a very narrow margin, all bets are off. If Joe Biden wins by a substantial margin, expect the maneuvering among Republicans to begin immediately. Whatever happens to the Senate in 2020, the key to the 2024 Presidential election may be what happens in the Senate elections of 2022, when 22 Republicans seats will be at risk, compared to those of a dozen Democrats. Would-be presidential candidates must wait to see what happens then.
Biden’s age would make him likely not to run for re-election. Vice President Kamala Harris vs. Nikki Haley would be a most interesting matchup in 2024, one that could go a long way toward restoring a degree of civility to American politics. As the 2016 primaries demonstrated, party machinery tends to swing behind whoever is thought to be capable of delivering a victory. Under certain circumstances, it is possible to imagine a GOP rostrum in 2024 featuring George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, members of the Reagan, McCain and Cheney families — and no Trump anywhere in sight.
Can Trump be expunged from American politics? Deleted from the record? Of course the answer, again, is no. The stain is indelible. But with some luck, Donald J. Trump will be consigned to the chapter of history books in which he belongs, along with Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Huey Long and sundry other anti-democracy people of the 20th Century. It is a pleasant thought, at least, for the last Monday in August.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
James P. Freeman: Mass. 'Vanderpump Republicans' will never be in the majority
You must feel for Charlie Baker.
The incumbent Massachusetts governor must feel like Lisa Vanderpump, the matriarch of reality television’s Vanderpump Rules. Described in a New Yorker profile as “elegant and inscrutable,” for six seasons she has remained, observers say, above the debauchery and debris of a drama based upon the shenanigans of its wayward and intoxicated cast. Vanderpump is a kind of detached and absolved participant. Likewise, for four years, the thoughtful and reserved popular political patriarch has witnessed the unhinged vaudeville repertory that has become the Bay State GOP. Another dreadful drama: Vanderpump Republicans.
Sensible observers must feel that Republicans will never again be in the majority in Massachusetts.
For political reality is something incomprehensible to local arrested development agitators -- and their national cousins -- who have hijacked with hijinks the Party of Lincoln. And they have abandoned authentic conservative values (guiding principles, core philosophies) for hate-mongering, willful ignorance and fact-free ideology. All in the name of the Party of Trump.
President Trump, supposedly "draining the Washington swamp '' but actually drowning in his own, has done something remarkable in American politics. He has hyper-nationalized and simultaneously hyper-factionalized the Republican Party. In Massachusetts, Baker governs but Trump presides.
How else to explain the rise of Bay State Republicans Ron Beaty and Scott Lively?
Beaty, a tidal wave of bombast and bluster, is a Barnstable County commissioner who is running for the state representative seat in the 5th Barnstable District. He is challenging Republican incumbent Randy Hunt, a genuine conservative and the antithesis of Beaty. Hunt is civil, intelligent and, given the dearth of like-minded public servants, probably lonely; he is also not a convicted felon.
Beaty, whose Facebook and Twitter accounts boast his laughable conservative credentials, spent more than a year in federal prison for threatening to kill President George H.W. Bush and other politicians in the 1990s. A Trump wannabe, he recently asked if David Hogg, a Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor, was a “fascist wannabe.” And, last October, Beaty tweeted that the #MeToo movement was “nonsense.” There is now an effort to recall him from his Cape Cod seat.
Then there is the fire and brimstone pastor from Springfield who is also a fire starter.
Knowing full well in advance his shameful acidic past, Republicans at their state convention last month still gave Lively enough votes to challenge Baker for this fall’s gubernatorial primary. They encouraged, in the words of Boston Magazine, a “world-renown homophobe,” and author of The Pink Swastika, to assert the ludicrous claim that he “represent[s] the full-spectrum conservative perspective of Republicanism” in Massachusetts. Whatever that means.
Lively, an anti-abortion, anti-tax, pro-Trump vulgarian, bizarrely wrapped himself in the drapery of Ronald Reagan who, Lively said, “stood for social and fiscal conservatism.” (Who will tell him that Reagan also signed into law in 1967 California’s Therapeutic Abortion Act (becoming pro-life later on) and, in the 1980s, created massive federal deficits?) Still, Reagan possessed a certain grace and temperament unknown to Lively, who touts himself as an “authentic conservative” and a “true Republican.” Well.
Beaty’s and Lively’s respective resumes and outbursts should automatically disqualify their candidacies. Instead, acquiescent Republicans essentially affirm them. And their values-systems. At their peril.
The official voice of Massachusetts Republicans, massgop.com, says, with the breezy élan of a tourist brochure, that it promotes “our conservative values.” What exactly are those values? Baker is respectable and a gentleman but no conservative. In fact, Baker never says he is a conservative. The others, meanwhile, emphatically and repeatedly proclaim they are conservatives. Absent loud denials, the inclusion of the word “conservative” by the state party implies endorsement for Beaty and Lively.
In her May 10 email bulletin, MassGOP Chairman Kirsten Hughes makes no mention of Beaty and Lively. She prefers to silence them. Bullies need to be confronted, not silenced. (At least WBUR’s Meghna Chakrabarti, to her credit, challenged Lively; and Baker sharply rebuked Lively after the convention vote.) No worries. Hughes happily finger points, like an admonishing adolescent, by transferring blame to the “Democrats’ toxic culture,” and how they will be “held accountable” for “tolerating” and “creating” this kind of “corruption.” So there… That settles that.
Beaty, Lively, and Hughes -- and others masquerading as conservatives -- need a history lesson.
Today, Trump self-identifies as a conservative; therefore, he must be a conservative. As a consequence, conservatism lacks definition, like a giant amoeba. Now, conservatism is what you say it is. As many of Trump’s 52 million Twitter followers, born of political mitosis, defensively attest. We’ve devolved from when political identification was rooted in philosophy and principle, which informed policy. In 2018, it’s mostly about personality.
Who needs reason when you’ve got emotion? And social media?
The long arc of modern conservatism began with Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and likely ended with William Buckley (1925-2008). For many Republicans today, they never existed.
Burke was deliberative, restrained by a sense of morality, and was suspicious of radical reforms. He espoused the virtues of prudence, moderation and character. And he would write of the Trump Revolution as he did of the French Revolution: “The levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things.”
For all of Buckley’s accomplishments -- and there were many -- biographer Alvin Felzenberg writes that he “took special pride in the success he had in keeping that movement free of ‘kooks,’ ‘crackpots,’ racists and anti-Semites.” Ten years after Buckley’s death, his movement has seemingly collapsed and fractured: Extremists are dismantling accepted ethoses after their hostile takeover.
Greg Weiner, contributor to the journal Law and Liberty, brings much needed clarity to these recent developments. In the summer of 2016, he wrote of a Republican Party that underwent a “lurching metamorphosis” from its commitments to “constitutionalism, free trade, and chivalry” to “royalism, protectionism, and vulgarity.” He also anticipated that the “good sense” of the institutional Republican Party would be tested to constrain the future president. “A premise,” he concluded, “that the party’s leaders like principles more than they like power, especially as the latter is embodied in the Presidency.”
That premise is lost on those who embrace the likes of Beaty and Lively.
The last time that both chambers of the Massachusetts General Court were controlled by Republicans was in 1954, three years before candidate Lively was born. Sixty-four years later, party leaders -- and their ilk of faux-conservative enablers -- will not see so much as a slight reversal of their Republican super-minority status in 2018. That may be fitting as residents rightly associate the party with Beaty and Lively, whose presence complicates the efforts of a party desperately searching for members and voters.
Baker may have angered conservatives for acting moderate -- his original sin? --in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by three to one. But he acts as a mature realist, too. (Buckley called conservatism “the politics of reality.”) Some say the rise of local fringe candidates is a form of protest, expressing an anti-Baker sentiment. Arguably, though, it reflects more of a pro-Trump sentiment. Trumpism has become a sort of liberation theology for pretend conservatives who see themselves as the oppressed class among establishment Republicans. And Trump is their liberator.
Baker's re-election seems certain but no one should be surprised if Republicans lose legislative seats in Massachusetts this year. Having long ago discarded fundamental truths, and with the probability of losing more electoral power, what’s left for the pitiful Bay State GOP?
Vanderpump Republicans should be cancelled before Vanderpump Rules.
James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former banker. He is a former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal, The Cape Codder, newenglanddiary.com, insidesources.com, golocalprov.com and nationalreview.com.
Giles Knight: Wacht auf, America
The race of the Republican Party as we have known it toward oblivion has been orchestrated by a new social order called “Trumpism,” which in spite of the name is not really new but rather consists of old-fashioned nationalism and authoritarianism with a fascist streak.
Donald Trump has become the messiah for many people who feel left out economically and socially by those in power or “the system.” The complain angrily about foreign economic competition, the media, immigration and, of course, the current government in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s bombastic, hate-filled speeches seem to be just the right ticket to usher in a “new America.” Whether the “new America” is the same as “make America great again” we do not know yet, but his actions during this campaign bear a passing resemblance to other fire-breathing demagogues, such as Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Mussolini and one of the most famous of all, Adolf Hitler, to name a few.
Go back to the 1920’s in a war-shattered Germany when a fellow named Hitler attracted a fanatical following with rousing speeches and programs for making Germany “great’’ again. Nationalism, bigotry and militarism were his main messages.
How did he win over one of the most civilized countries in Europe? Remember that at that time Germany was in bad shape economically. People wanted to believe his oratory and what better way to make them believe than to find scapegoats to blame for their troubles. Taking top ranking on his list were theWestern Allies (the U.S, Britain, France and a few others), a relative lack of living space in the densely populated country, and least understandable, Jews and other people not of “pure Aryan origin.’’
The SA (Stormabteilung or Assault Division) was founded by Hitler in 1921 and was made up of angry, unemployed people, thugs really, who abused and even murdered those speaking out against The Leader.
After Hitler’s arrest by the Weimar government, in 1924, he wrote a book in prison called Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which outlined in detail his idea of a new Germany. He followed the script exactly until his suicide, in 1945. His career resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
By 1925, he also began to be concerned about his ability to control the SA, which had grown large. And so he established the SS (Schutzstaffel or “Protective Echelon’’) as his personal bodyguards.
The SS made the SA look like choirboys in putting down opposition. He appointed his close associate Heinrich Himmler as SS leader in 1929, thereby resulting in a more loyal, tightly organized group reporting directly to him.
Things did not go well for the SA when on June 30, 1934, some of its leaders were killed by Hitler’s people --- “the night of the long knives.”
Then, on Nov. 9-11, 1938 hundreds of communities in Germany experienced wholesale destruction and looting of Jewish stores and businesses -- “Crystal Night” or “Night of the Broken Glass.” By this time most of the newspapers and radio stations were effectively closed down, or taken over by the Nazi regime, ensuring that everyone followed the party line, and the SS, along with the Gestapo, became the chief unit of surveillance and terror in Germany.
The SA was eventually combined with the SS, which, in turn, was incorporated into the German army as the Waffen SS. It grew into a huge force of hundreds of thousands, including such notable units as the Death Head Division, which oversaw concentration camps. All military people and many civilians were forced to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler.
The most fanatical and elite SS Division was the Adolf Hitler Division, which caused havoc in numerous battles against the Allies. Many of these fellows met a timely end during “the Battle of the Bulge,” in December 1944, preferring to die rather than surrender as Allied air power obliterated their armored vehicles.
Hitler’s policy of intimidation illustrates how quickly democracy can be destroyed by someone who controls the masses.
This brings us to “Trumpism” in America. Mr. Trump is not a replica of Adolf Hitler, but he exhibits some disturbingly similar characteristics. The most obvious is his ability to sway masses of people by appealing to their grievances. His animated, dramatic power of delivery puts his followers into almost a fanatic frenzy.
This tactic is typical of most demagogues, and was a major reason for Adolf Hitler’s unexpected success. Recent horrifying video clips of a Trump rally show American college students raising their right hand arms in a Nazi salute in answer to Mr. Trump’s request for a loyalty pledge.
Other characteristics of Mr. Trump are worth noting, including a policy of one man, one rule, a vindictive and hair-trigger personality and a belittling attitude in general, but especially against those who disagree with him. And his many business dealings show enough lawsuits and other disagreements to raise serious questions about his honesty. His vicious rhetoric ensures that he will meet with antagonism globally.
The good thing is that presidents do not run the federal government alone. There are also Congress and the federal courts. However, the president can have great deal of influence on the other two branches of government. Trump’s extraordinary ability to mesmerize parts of the American public could easily be used to bring Congress and the Supreme Court under his brand of rule. True, his views deserve to be heard in a democracy. But does his brand of democracy fall under the letter and spirit of the Constitution in all respects?
When groups follow the siren song of a messiah, social unrest follows, and while history does not repeat itself exactly, it can, as Mark Twain said, rhyme.
Fiery speeches filled with hatred, intolerance and authoritarianism can not help but lead to domestic and global unrest. America is the strongest country. The real danger we face lies within, not outside. We know what happened to Nazi Germany. A fanatical leader persuaded the country to follow him, assisted by intimidation by such groups as the SA and SS.
“Wacht auf” in German means “wake up’’. We should look very closely at “Trumpism” as our election process continues. Every American must ask him or herself: “Do we really want this type of person representing our country, the Constitution and the world’s pillar of democracy?
Giles Knight is a retired international equity mutual fund manager.
David Warsh: Of Ross Perot, Donald Trump and 'the China shock'
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party is nearly complete. I was as slow as the next guy to see in coming. But now that the fox is almost in charge of the chicken coop. I have some ideas about why it happened, and why just now.
Let’s go back to the last time a billionaire decided to run for president. That was 1992, when software entrepreneur H. Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate. I was able to refresh my memory thanks mainly to a useful conference volume, Ross for Boss: The Perot Phenomenon and Beyond (SUNY Press, 2001), edited by Ted G. Jelen, of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. This comparison last September by John Dickerson of Slate was prescient.
Perot was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1930, the son of a cotton broker. An Eagle Scout, an Annapolis graduate, a star salesman for five years for IBM Corp., he quit in 1962 to found a software firm, Electronic Data Systems. In 1984 he sold the company to General Motors Corp., its principal client, for $2.4 billion. Four years later he and his son started a second firm, Perot Systems Corp. They sold it to Dell Inc., in 2009, for $3.9 billion
During the 1980s Perot became absorbed in POW/MIA issues in Vietnam. By the early ’90s, he had become involved in many of the larger controversies of the day. During 1991, he appeared regularly on popular television talk shows, criticizing presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush for having failed to balance the federal budget. He portrayed Washington as being in the grip of lobbyists, many of them working for foreign interests. He criticized trade agreements. He denied having presidential ambitions.
In February 1992, Perot appeared on Larry King Live to encourage citizens to nominate him by petition in 50 states as presidential candidate of the Reform Party. He proclaimed his lack of political experience as an asset. He promised to spend as much as $100 million of his own money – more than either party could expect to raise in those days well before the Supreme Court struck down spending limitations – and argued that meant he couldn’t be bought. By June, he was running even with Bush and Bill Clinton in most polls.
That same month he got in an argument with two high-profile political consultants who urged him to immediately launch an expensive advertising campaign, and, when one of them resigned, Perot asserted that he, too, would withdraw, explaining that he felt that he had revitalized the Democratic Party by threatening to enter the contest. A barrage of negative publicity followed. Perot was ridiculed as eccentric and judged to be a quitter.
In late September Perot returned to the race, “for the good of the country,” in time for three televised debates among the candidates in October. This time he emphasized opposition to the pending North American Free Trade Agreement, and warned of the “giant sucking sound” accompanying jobs lost overseas. He spent nearly $50 million in a month on “infomercial” advertising, much of it in states that he had no hope winning.
Perot received 19 percent of the popular vote in the November election, but failed to win a single state and received not a single vote in the Electoral College. Clinton slipped past Bush with 43 percent of the popular vote. Martin Nolan, chief political correspondent for The Boston Globe for 30 years, remembers, “Perot did not defeat GHWB electorally, but more by draining attention. He made the incumbent president a ‘low-energy’ candidate.”
Four years later Perot was back, this time as the official nominee of his Reform Party. This time he polled fewer than half as many votes. He left politics and returned to the relative obscurity of the business world.
Perot’s role in galvanizing support for budget-balancing measures is still hotly debated. The Clinton administration, the Federal Reserve, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission all played a part (the FCC by facilitating the rapid build-out of communications technology and the Internet).
In any case, by the end of the ’90s, the federal budget was balanced. Perot’s criticism of trade-liberalization measures found little traction, though. The North American Free Trade Agreement became law in 1994, and the following year the World Trade Organization replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Perot’s greatest influence was probably that described by his running-mate in 1992, Adm. James Stockdale: “Ross showed you don’t have to talk to [ABC’s] Sam Donaldson to get on television…. American candidates can now bypass the filters and go directly to the American, people.” Subsequent independent presidential candidates have included Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader.
Fast forward to 2016 and Donald Trump. Much has changed since 1992.
Exhibit A is an important new essay by a trio of labor economists, arguing that trade theorists didn’t well understand what was happening in the world these last 35 years – particularly the last 10. Read “The China Shock,’’ by David Autor (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), David Dorn (of the University of Zurich), and Gordon Hanson (of the University of California at San Diego) is headed for the authoritative Annual Review of Economics. They argue that theorists failed to anticipate how extensive dislocations would be, especially in the U.S.:
“Just as the economics profession was reaching consensus on the consequences of trade for wages and employment [that they would be modest], an epochal shift in patterns of world trade was gaining momentum. China, for centuries an economic laggard, was finally reemerging as a great power, and toppling established patterns of trade accordingly. The advance of China…has also toppled much of the received empirical wisdom about the impact of trade on labor markets. The consensus that trade could be strongly redistributive in theory but was relatively benign in practice has not stood up well to these new developments.’’
Talk about an inconvenient truth! Is Donald Trump right? Were we fools to liberalize so quickly? I don’t think so. The short-term and medium-run costs are clearly greater than had been expected: Poorer cities are remarkably slow to adjust, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed, and unemployment rates high, for a decade and more.
But is the world a better, safer place than when it was divided into market economies, communist nations, and Third World growing ever-so-slowly, if at all? Steven Radelet, of Georgetown University, makes the case in The Great Surge, the Ascent of the Developing World (Simon and Schuster, 2015). In Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard/Belknap Press, 2016), Branko Milanovic, for many years lead economist at the World Bank, describes the stresses.
In any event, it appears that most of the hectic global transition is over. Today it is China that is contemplating layoffs. The greatest gains from trade almost certainly lie ahead – but for whom?
Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan/George H.W. Bush speechwriter who for many years has been an influential columnist for The Wall Street Journal, describes the new contest as between the “protected” and the “unprotected.” She recently told Karen Tumulty, of The Washington Post, “We are witnessing history. Something important is ending.”
What has already ended, I think, were the 50 wonderful years after 1945 in which the United States, having emerged less scathed from World War II, was more or less unchallenged as the world’s only economic superpower – a long splendid day in which the eight years of the Reagan administration constituted the late afternoon.
How might Trump do with issues like these in the general election? Again, Marty Nolan: “In ’92, Perot prospered in cold, remote country: Maine, Minnesota, Alaska. He was zip in the late Confederacy.” If you look at the maps of exposure to industrial competition in “The China Shock,’’ it’s the Midwest and the Southeast where the trade shocks have hit hardest. Slim chance that Trump would, like Perot, go away with a goose-egg, if he is the nominee.
That said, I fully expect Hillary Clinton to win in November. She has the right language to succeed: The task now is to fill in what has been hollowed out. If Trump is its candidate, the trick for the GOP to learn as much as possible from this election to shed the heavy burden of ideology that Trump has lampooned, to abandon the absolutism of recent years in favor of practical compromise – either that or fade into history.
So it seems possible, even likely, that Trump’s campaign will prove helpful to straightening things out between the parties. I think Paul Krugman got it exactly right when he wrote the other day: “We should actually welcome Trump’s ascent. Yes, he’s a con-man, but he’s also effectively acting as a whistle-blower on other people’s cons. That is, believe it or not, a step forward in these weird, troubled times.”
To which I can only add, yes, that’s so, as long as Trump is defeated soundly enough to discourage a third such billionaire in the future, one who might be smarter than the first two.
David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.
Don Pesci: Political monopoly and the plight of young men
Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, has been a one-horse town since 1971, when the last Republican mayor, Ann Uccello, was recruited by then President Richard Nixon to serve in the U.S. Department of Transportation. Since that time, more than 44 years, Hartford has languished in the grip of the Democratic Party hegemon. Hegemony always has and always will produce aberrant and corrupt government, largely because in one-party systems there are no political checks and balances, the administrative state is captive to an easily manipulable single party, and there are fewer eyes looking through the windows.
Former Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, convicted and sent to prison on numerous corruption counts, once again is running for mayor in his old bailiwick; and three years after former Hartford Mayor Edie Perez had been convicted of corruption, an appellate court has overturned his hastily arrived at conviction.
The Perez case now lies before Connecticut’s Supreme Court, three of whose justices have been appointed by Gov. Dannel Malloy, the nominal head of Connecticut’s Democratic Party.
In addition, Mr. Malloy has appointed three justices to Appellate courts and thirty-nine judges to Superior Courts. The wheels of justice in Connecticut grind exceedingly slow, and so there is little chance that Mr. Perez will any time soon follow in the footsteps of Mr. Ganim and announce his candidacy for his old mayoralty seat.
More than four decades is a longtime for any hegemon. It seems proper at this late date – better late than never – to ask what progress, or regress, Hartford has made during these years of one-party rule?
Although Mr. Malloy and his crime czar, Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Mike Lawlor, lately have tried to take credit for a national drop in crime rates, Connecticut cities need much improvement.
Based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report statistics released in September 2013, three Connecticut cities were listed among the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States with populations fewer than 200,000: New Haven was second, Hartford fourth and Bridgeport sixth. Among the Top 101 cities with the highest percentage of single-parent households in a population of 50,000 plus, Hartford ranked number two, and we know from reliable studies that single parent households in urban areas link with disruptive social pathologies such as teenage pregnancies and the incarceration of young males.
Researcher Sara McLanahan, at Princeton University, suggests that boys are much more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by single mother. Her study shows that even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity, boys raised in single parent households are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than boys raised within a traditional intact two parent household. Hartford is now the murder capital of New England. As July gave way to August, Everett Scott, 47, was brought to Hartford Hospital with a hole in his chest, apparently another drug-related murder. He did not survive. The usual meeting was held, attended by the usual politicians, who promised to do something. In 2014, there were 19 homicides in Hartford; in the first seven months of the 2015, the death toll was 19.
From the back of the room, Pastor Sam Saylor called out, “We stand at the number 19... In 2012, on Oct. 20, a 20-year-old boy, my son, died. Here we are now at the end of July facing number 20." For the benefit of the politicians seated at a table at the front of the room, Mr. Saylor asked his audience, “How many of you have lost a loved one to gun violence?" Twenty five hands were raised.
The politicians -- among them U.S. Representatives John B. Larson, and Elizabeth Esty -- no doubt well intended, nodded empathetically. Fewer illicit guns among drug dealers might be helpful; the General Assembly already had promulgated to little purpose new gun laws regulating sales among the sort of people in Connecticut who do not join drug gangs, and such regulations obviously had not diminished the death tally in Hartford. More cops might help. Call in the National Guard?
For obvious political reasons, one is not likely to find among Democratic or Republican Party campaign planks measures that will redress this problem; the war on young blacks in cities is a hard political nut to crack, because it would require a courage and honestly politicians find it difficult to muster. It would require, among other things, an acknowledgement that all the palliatives we have over the years thrown at the problem have worsened the lot of young blacks and Hispanic boys.
The black protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952, was a specter because people refused to see him. The plight of boys and young men in early 21st Century is likewise invisible.
Don Pesci (donaldpesci@comcast.net) is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.
David Holahan: Past time to lower the minimum wage!
If raising the minimum wage would hurt business, as the Republican Party insists, then it stands to reason that lowering it from $7.25 an hour would help business. And since the business of America, as President Calvin Coolidge said, is business. What are we waiting for?
How about $5, perchance $3? That would be like a steroid injection for our sluggish economy. As a college student in 1970 I spent one summer working for a vegetable farmer and earned the base pay of $1.45 an hour. The minimum wage for farm workers then was lower than that for the rest of the workforce ($1.60), presumably because we could nibble fresh produce while we worked in the blazing sun or driving rain.
Business has taken so many big hits over the years it’s a wonder there are any entrepreneurs left. The compulsory six-day, 12-hour a day workweek is long gone. One of the first strikes in American history advocated for the 10-hour workday. Good times!
Child labor is now taboo, too, at least in this country. My fraternal grandfather began earning his keep at the age of ten in a Pennsylvania coal mine. Little people worked cheap and their tiny bodies and nimble hands allowed them to get into tight places where grownups couldn’t go.
Once the minimum wage was zero, zilch, nada, nil. For centuries slavery greased the wheels of commerce here and abroad. It wasn’t simply that free labor was good for plantation owners. Enslaved people represented collateral for commercial investment, profits for insurance companies, a lucrative market for New England beef and dried cod, and a potent stimulus to expanding global trade.
As hard as it will be for some readers to believe, it was the Republican Party that brought this business-friendly era to a screeching halt. To be fair, the “Grand Old Party” was in its infancy back then and wasn’t nearly so Grand. It has come a long way, blindly siding with business over labor in almost every instance since, fighting tooth and nail against most of the provisions that have shaped modern labor practices.
And the GOP is still fighting – and not just against increasing the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. In Maine, Republicans recently tried to loosen restrictions on longstanding child-labor laws so teenagers could work longer and later on school nights (11 p.m.) and for considerably less than the minimum wage. Talk about progress!
But mainly, Republicans are pushing back against Obama et al., who are arguing that it is time to raise the minimum wage. The Democrats anti-business rant goes something like this:
- Inflation has effectively decreased the current minimum wage (which is not indexed to the cost of living as Social Security payments are) by more than 11 percent since 2009.
- To equal the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage circa 1968 would mean a current figure of $10.69, according to the Congressional Research Service.
- Lowest-wage Americans need the extra money just to survive and will spend every penny of it on goods and services, thereby stimulating the economy more than tax breaks for the rich, who already have everything money can buy.
Republicans reply pithily that businesses are people, too. If you don’t believe them just ask the U.S. Supreme Court.
My grandfather and I survived the coal mines and the farm. I went back to college. Michael Holahan was rescued from a life underground by an uncle who was a priest and put him to work for the parish.
In my grandfather’s day things were simpler and regulations were few and far between. There were states that didn’t require children to attend school but let them be put to work in mines and factories. Was that so bad?
David Holahan is a freelance writer who lives in East Haddam, Conn.
Don Pesci: Nader's nattering in Conn.
VERNON, Conn.
Ralph Nader once again is prowling the countryside saying things that are not so much wrong as passé. He does this because he himself is passé. Consumer advocacy, Mr. Nader’s specialty, reigns supreme everywhere in Connecticut, which only a short while ago sent to Congress the nation’s first consumer-protection senator, Dick Blumenthal, a little stiffer than Mr. Nader, but made from the same ideological cloth.
Not having kept up with the times, Mr. Nader seems to be laboring under the illusion that both major political parties in the United States “continually reject even considering cracking down on corporate crimes, crony capitalism or corporate welfare.”
Not at all true. In fact, the fight against crony capitalism may play a significant part in the Connecticut gubernatorial race this year. Guess which one of the parties has rejected crony capitalism? Hint: It isn’t the party of Jefferson, Jackson and the Nutmeg State's late and iconic Democratic boss, John Bailey. Is it not curious that the sharp-sighted Mr. Nader could have failed to notice that real capitalists have an aversion to fake capitalists?
In a column that appeared in The Hartford Courant, Mr. Nader, who appears to be supporting Jonathan Pelto for governor this year, asks rhetorically, “What if they [both major political parties] reject a proven, superior way to educate children? What if they refuse to consider an end to unconstitutional wars or to a grotesquely twisted tax system favoring the rich and powerful — to name a few of the major agenda items not even on the table for discussion by the two parties?”
Apparently, Mr. Nader’s “superior way to educate children” is the same as Mr. Pelto’s superior way to educate children -- which, for reasons not mysterious, is the same as the education lobby’s superior way to educate children. This method involves unlinking education outcomes and salaries, the rejection of testing to measure educational outcomes, and supporting without question or hesitation extravagant union demands, however much they strain taxpayers' ability to pay.
It may surprise Mr. Nader, but Steve Forbes -- to be sure, a successful businessman (via his family's Forbes Magazine) and therefore suspect -- long ago supported a flat tax that even redundantly wealthy progressive tax supporters such as Warren Buffett would pay. Other Republicans favor a fair tax. The idle rich love progressive taxation because they alone are able to afford pricey tax lawyers to exploit a tax code awash in exceptions, which is why, come to think of it, Mr. Buffett’s effective tax rate is less than that of his secretary.
Republican libertarian heartthrob Rand Paul, who most recently has called for demilitarizing the police -- police, mind you -- is the opposite of a warmonger, and the U.S. Constitution has played a major role in Tea Party gatherings. One gasps at the thought that in some important respects Mr. Nader may be at heart a closet Randian Republican.
Mr. Nader’s fire in his column is pointed in two directions: at the Journal Inquirer newspaper, of Manchester, which from time to time has spanked his backside, and at the notion that spoilers are spoilers.
Jon Pelto, for most of his life a Democrat, has entered this year’s gubernatorial contest as an Independent. Some reporters and commentators have noted that Mr. Pelto might well end up “spoiling” the campaign of Gov. Dannel Malloy, who prevailed over his Republican challenger, Tom Foley, in his first gubernatorial campaign by an uncomfortable razor-thin margin.
In preference polls, Mr. Malloy noted recently, the needle hasn’t moved a jot since the first Malloy-Foley gubernatorial campaign. Mr. Foley once again is challenging the sitting progressive Democratic governor and, marvel of marvels, the notion has been bruited about that Mr. Pelto’s Independent campaign might “spoil” Mr. Malloy’s progressive re-run against Mr. Foley – meaning that Mr. Pelto may draw a sufficient number of votes from Mr. Malloy so as to cause him to lose his gubernatorial election bid. A similar brief has been filed against Joe Visconti, once a Republican and now an Independent who is challenging Republican Party hegemony on the right. Among some eccentrics on the left, the irascible Mr. Nader in particular, it has now become inadvisable to state the bald truth – which is this:
Jon Pelto’s presence in the gubernatorial race is designed to move Mr. Malloy further left, while Mr. Visconti’s presence in the gubernatorial race is designed to move Mr. Foley further right. Neither of them have a snowball’s chance in Hell of becoming governor. If either of them were successful in actually winning the gubernatorial contest, the victor will have been a successful spoiler.
The chief defect in Mr. Nader’s complex character is that he does not know when to stop protesting; this is the disabling defect of the entire Western World since the beginning of the Protestant Revolution, which helped lead to the Enlightenment. The protesters do not know when they have won; they continue protesting until all their gains have been lost.
Mr. Nader lives in Connecticut, the most progressive state in what used to be called, before the near total victory of the administrative state, the American Republic. He has won. He should go home, pop a beer, watch a ball game, and celebrate the destruction of the Republican Party in Connecticut.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political columnist who lives in Vernon, Conn.