The MBA Presidency

Fareed Zakaria has an op-ed about Trump as a failed manager. He makes the somewhat contested claim that Trump does a good job with the "bully pulpit" aspect of the job, noting that Trump gets his "message" across, even if that message is hateful and incoherent. Trump has failed to manage the crisis in the way other heads of government have.  (Zakaria makes the point that American presidents are actually Constitutionally weak offices, which largely gets ignored in our analysis and popular understanding of how government works.  But it's important to note that a functional Congress is essential to governing well and we have only had a functioning Congress for four years since 2006.)

The two aspects that Zakaria glides over is the essential role of the Republican "governing" philosophy in this catastrophe and the link to Trump's repeated failures as a businessman. As I've argued repeatedly, the GOP is essentially uninterested in the process of governing. This is why they are unable to pass a Covid Relief bill in the Senate. The hard work of trade-offs and compromises is simply incompatible with the way they operate.

Trump's failures as a businessman are well catalogued.  Trump is a guy who went bankrupt in America trying to sell Americans steaks, football and gambling.  He's a salesman whose only real product is the family name that he brands incessantly without actually doing any of the real managerial work that is required to build buildings. 

It's worth noting that George W. Bush was also an MBA graduate, and he, too, was an inept manager. He invaded two countries and then mismanaged both of them into failed state status. He let an American city drown. He exploded the national debt. He allowed the worst terrorist attack in our history to occur on his watch. He allowed his VP to establish a torture regime in violation of our laws and national values. He let a massive housing bubble build during his presidency that wrecked the global economy. Yes, he's not the open sewer of a human being that Trump is, but he was an awful, awful president.

There has been a strain in American politics going back to at least the 1920s of electing titans of industry to "run the country like a business."  What a wretched fucking idea that turned out to be.

If You Thought 2020 Was Bad....

Jon Chait dives into why Trump has called for delaying the election and why he can't. He notes Trump's long standing authoritarian impulse - nurtured from the gilded cradle of the stupid little rich boy. As of this moment, Trump will lose. I don't know how much the GOP will stick their neck out to save him.

My worry is not that Trump somehow rigs the election or manages to stop the election from happening. Rather, he will stir up an absolute tsunami of conspiracy theories that will trigger a wave of domestic terrorism.

After Ruby Ridge and Waco, the federal authorities have largely taken a hands-off approach to armed rightist protesters. That's why they feel fine snatching protesters off the streets of Portland and shooting less than lethal projectiles into the Wall of Moms. That's why they did not respond to armed militias threatening violence in Michigan the same way.

Frankly, I wonder if we do need a little violence to bleed this out. I wonder if we don't need to arrest and imprison more right wing terrorists.  Fuck comity. We are going to see assassination attempts on Joe Biden's life. We are going to see federal buildings bombed (or attempted to be bombed). It's coming from the mouth-breathing Deplorables whether we want it to or not.

Magnitude Of Our Failure

Josh Marshall lays out the relative scale of outbreaks and concern over Covid in other countries. As he notes, Germany is responding aggressively to an outbreak of 639 cases. But if you break it down into percentage of the population, Germany's outbreak is less than three times New York's. Florida's is 43 times worse.

People would've died from Covid if someone other than Trump was President. People would've died in Anthony Fauci was president, simply because Americans are profoundly stupid and stubborn about science and government actions.

But it absolutely did not have to be this bad.

Chait Pens An Epitaph

This paragraph from Jon Chait's latest is the perfect summary of Trump's presidency:

The Trump administration’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus, like many of the administration’s crimes and blunders, combined a broader Republican ideological failure with Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic pathologies. The broader ideological failure is the right’s paranoid rejection of science and empiricism, which has been building up for decades. The unique Trumpian contribution — one that almost no other Republican president would share — is an almost sociopathic indifference to the well-being of Americans who didn’t vote for him.

It accurately captures how Trump combines the very worst of Republican politics (though perhaps underplaying their contempt for all government action, not just science) and the very worst of Trump's wretched lack of humanity.

The Kitchen Sink

The Post makes a solid argument for ending the rampaging pandemic that is burning through parts of the country: throw everything at it for two months. We had a faculty meeting last night and our school doctor - who is not be nature an optimist about things like this - was quite optimistic that we could have a safe re-opening of school...if everything complied with the three requirements: masks, distancing and hand washing. 

That's it.  That's the whole shebang. That's what it would take to get life back to normal like the rest of the developed world.  We would still have outbreaks - like South Korea and Germany are having. But they could be managed if they were small and sporadic.  We are clearly getting better at treating the disease, but the best cure is prevention and we know how to prevent it.

The problem - of course - is the rampant anti-intellectualism that defines the modern GOP. Rather than work with, elevate and support medical professionals, they are feeding the fever swamps of Covid-denial and conspiracy theories. Trump's entire self-interest would be to create a national masking policy. If he wants to get re-elected, he should've committed to that months ago. 

He won't. He can't.   And millions of dain bramaged Foxbots will follow his every word.

Trump is a broken, hollow shell of a man without the brains God gave a Labrador Retriever. That makes him the perfect avatar for tens of millions of Americans.

The Vaccine

The Good News is that it looks like we will have at least one vaccine by the end of January, if not sooner. Two uncertainties remain:

Who gets the vaccine first?

How effective will it really be?

The answer to the first question is, of course, me.  I should get the vaccine first.  OK, OK, medical personnel and first responders should go first, but honestly, teachers over 50 should be pretty high on the list. If you're going to jam me in there with a bunch of teenagers who won't mask, I would like some protection please.

We know everyone won't take the vaccine which will limit its effectiveness. Even an "effective" vaccine might not wipe out Covid the way polio or smallpox was wiped out.  Honestly at this point, just give me better odds of not getting too sick, and I'll be thrilled.

The secondary stressor of this pandemic is the extraordinary uncertainty that clouds everything.  It seems natural that the vaccine would fall into that uncertainty window, too.

The Other Side Of Portland

This is a provocative piece from the head of the Portland chapter of the NAACP. He makes a point that I had tried to make back in early June about the ability of white people to co-opt the BLM movement. While I disagree with his criticism of the "Wall of Moms", I do agree that for many of the protesters in Portland who have been targeting various building for vandalism are probably not doing so out of a profound respect for the sanctity of black lives.  They are doing it because they want to overthrow the government...in some way.

A few hundred cosplay anarchists in Portland kept some of the protest energy alive, but ultimately the protests became the end unto themselves. Plutocracy, capitalism, Trump, Covid, liberal democracy, police brutality...it was all roughly the same to a certain cadre of protesters.

This gibes neatly with the piece by John McWhorter excoriating the White Fragility phenomenon. I have to confess that while I have heard DiAngelo speak, I have not read her book. It's unfair to base my criticism on the depiction of her work by others. However, she certainly does seem to be offering a sort of "Calvinism without the Grace of God." We are all irredeemable sinners...and that's it.  That's the tweet.  There's not even the hand of an angry God. Salvation from the sin of racism is effectively closed to you if you're white.

The performative self-flagellation of DiAngelo and the white anarchists creating spectacle without a program are not centering the needs of the Black Lives Matter movement. The burbling subcutaneous rage of the Trump years and the continuing unrest from the 2008 economic collapse have combined with the catastrophic response to Covid-19 to create anger that is basically co-opting George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery's deaths to channel their own sense of anger and outrage.

The George Floyd Moment has created some real - of largely symbolic - change. Mississippi changed its flag; military bases look like they will be re-named, the Confederacy is, at long last, finally being defeated. Last night the entire rosters of the Nationals and Yankees took a knee during the national anthem.

We haven't addressed the substantive concerns of BLM though. Police reform, criminal justice reform, the debate over reparation...these aren't going anywhere with Trump as President and McConnell as Majority Leader. States and cities are making some progress, but police unions are working to subvert them as we speak.

The explosion of rage in late May and early June has wrought some real changes, but the work now is the unpleasant, painstaking and largely unsatisfying work of legislating, compromising and seeing well-intentioned reforms falter.

How will Naked Athena help there?

Good Read

This is a good piece in the WaPo about what this moment might mean in the history of our country.

One reason that America has remained a global power for so long has been its culture of improvement. We are endlessly striving to make the country better. Even conservatives wanted to improve the country, even if it was just the military or the business climate.

Up until Trump.

Biden's basic job will be repairing institutions that have been tattered from years of abuse.

Grifting Operators Party

The GOP is a criminal enterprise.  Every day is a new revelation about Trump, but this rot extends to the GOP in other places as well.

The Letter

A year ago...oops, sorry, it was two weeks ago... a letter appeared under the Harper's masthead about assaults on free speech. It was a fairly anodyne, generalized statement in defense of the free exchange of ideas.

It unleashed a shitstorm.

Zack Beauchamp has a nice summary of the debate here, and this WaPo piece covers similar ground, but gives a bit more context. (Full disclosure: a friend of mine, David Greenberg, is a signatory.) The basic contours of the debate Beauchamp lays out nicely.

Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash. Yet virtually everyone agrees that certain speakers — neo-Nazis, for example — do not deserve a column in the paper of record.

This is a fairly "Inside Baseball" dispute that is more over HOW and WHERE voices are heard rather than WHOSE voices are heard. The criticism was largely from - honestly - less prestigious writers and intellectuals who can't believe that people like JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell or Margaret Atwood are really worried about "free-speech" or simply "consequence-free speech."  The inclusion of Rowling is telling, because of the backlash she's received for her retrograde views on transgender issues. For the critics, the letter was simply whining by elites who don't like the fact that people on Twitter can call them out for lazy or hurtful arguments.

While that might have informed some signatories, there have been some data points about disproportionate backlash against a few people. The most prominent case in favor of the Harper's letter is the David Shor case. Shor tweeted a peer reviewed study from 1968 that linked civil unrest to GOP victories. This enraged some BIPOC members of Civis, where he worked. He was fired.  Civis will not say if he was fired for that Tweet, but if he was, that is a real case of "cancel culture."

The problem is that after that case there isn't a great deal of evidence for "cancel culture." Banning Milo Yaniwhatshisface from a campus isn't "cancel culture," it's refusing to let someone speak who embraces neo-Nazi and racist views. I think that's fine. I think criticism of prominent writers is great.

I've tried in my Twitter-life to engage people in a respectful way. (Two examples: I had a discussion about race and the Revolution with a Bancroft Prize winning historian that started as tense but became illuminating. The other day I tweeted something that was wrong, the author corrected me and I thanked them, and they "liked" the thanks.) The default of social media is antagonism and venom. It's SO hard to maintain a climate of open inquiry.

The Vox piece interviews Regina Rini, a philosopher who has a book coming out on microaggressions. Her next book is tentatively titled Democracy and Social Media Are Incompatible.  That's a shitty title, but the idea seems to be accurate.

I don't think we need to ban challenging ideas, but we need to account for how social media is warping our public discourse. That strikes me as a good place to start.

An Accurate Reckoning

The Sierra Club is coming to terms with John Muir's racism. I didn't not know about it, but it also comes as absolutely no surprise. Pretty much all you have to say is "White person who lived in America from 1877-1940" and I'm pretty sure you can find something appalling in their written record. This is the problem with "presentism." It establishes a standard that it is impossible for past figure to uphold.

If someone were to trash 19th century doctors for not using antibiotics, I think we would all scratch our heads and wonder what the hell this person was talking about. A 19th century doctor would have zero idea what antibiotics are. Much the same thing can be said for racism among white people until the Second World War.

Yes, there were some White people who held mildly racially progressive views by today's standards. John Dewey and Jane Addams and a few others. But even they would not be "anti-racist" by today's definition.

Racism was simply the unexamined status of America in the long period between Reconstruction and the Second World War. (I'm guessing the Holocaust and the Cold War combined to create a reckoning in America about the distance between our creed and our actions.) Basically, when looking at the past and past figures, you have to identify what racism is.  Is it a personal choice? An individual way of looking at people? Or is it a system of norms and values passed down through culture? Is racism an individual sin or the sin of the culture?  If it is the latter, then the racism of a Muir or a Wilson or a Roosevelt or a Ford is hardly to be a surprise.

When we have a "reckoning" about these past figures, we need to understand that what we are judging is less the individuals than the society that created them. Excoriating Muir or Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt or Henry Ford neither advances our understanding of how systemic racism works nor accurately leads to an understanding of that time period.  Much better to begin with an understanding of HOW racist America was during the Jim Crow era (and not just to Blacks), and then show how it could warp just about everyone. (Muir was a bit of a crank and didn't like most people, so I'm not sure about how relevant that is in this case.)

Edward Abbey - a natural heir to Muir - was asked about what "the problem" was with Native Americans. Why were they so poor, so prone to alcohol abuse? His response was that the "problem" with Native Americans was that they were just the same as everyone else. In other words, strip someone of their land, religion and culture, relegate them to reservations and impoverish them and anyone would wind up in rough straights. Similar things can be said about the "problem" with racist Americans during the Jim Crow Era. If all you are raised on is white supremacy, how - exactly - do you not become a white supremacist? One reason the Civil Rights Movement was successful was because the very means of protesting gave tangible lie to white supremacy.

If we want to understand racism, we shouldn't just point our fingers at past figures, cluck our tongues and shake our heads in disgust. We should understand how powerful racism can be when it penetrates all aspects of a society. We should not excuse Muir, Wilson, Roosevelt or Ford, but rather we should use them to demonstrate why the entire system was designed to produce people who felt this way. Otherwise, all we are doing is making ourselves feel better about our own rejection of retrograde beliefs without really examining the systems in place today.

Money

Trump has spent almost a billion dollars since 2017 to get re-elected.  He has an average Job Approval rating of -13.8 (42.1% approve, 55.9% disapprove) and RCP has the polling average for the horserace at Biden 49.3% and Trump 40.7%, whereas 538 has the average at Biden 50.4% and Trump at 41.6%.

In other words, Trump has spent close to a billion dollars to be in the worst polling position of any incumbent president.

I would guess much of that money has been spent on his rallies and padding accounts at Trump properties. Trump has routinely used campaign funds in illegal ways, such as his inauguration slush fund. We shouldn't be surprised that he would funnel money to himself.  Similarly, Trump is surrounded by people who are as morally compromised as he is. There is little doubt that they are lining their pockets, too.  Witness Brad Parscale's demotion after the Lincoln Project drew attention to how he has enriched himself at the Trump campaign's expense.

Let's refresh the facts: Donald Trump was given millions of dollars by his father (much of it illegally). He managed to lose money in America on gambling, football and steaks. He created a reality TV personality that was entirely fictional. He has never been a good businessman and is likely up to his eyes in foreign debt obligations. He managed to win in 2016 by running an inside straight with foreign interference and benefitting from misogyny. Seven high ranking members of that campaign have been found guilty in a court of law. He has alienated a majority of Americans.

As things stand now, he will lose decisively in November. 

Money can't buy everything.

American Impotence

Jon Chait has a lengthy piece on the war between the GOP and evidence-based policy making. It catalogs (again) the ways in which the GOP has become a handmaiden of anti-science, anti-reason politics. It also note that America was ranked as being the best country in the world to withstand a pandemic (on paper) to having the worst response in reality (because of Trump).  Here's an interesting quote:

One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.S. somehow couldn’t implement. American “scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on, but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” observed another.

There were always going to be American deaths because of Covid, because Trump is not unique among Americans in his disdain for science. If Hillary Clinton had carried Michigan and Pennsylvania, we'd still be having mask protests and Covid parties.  Remember, the Tea Party freaked out because Obama wanted to give people health care. But it wouldn't be this bad.

It didn't have to be this bad.

How About Some Good News?

Looks like the Oxford vaccine trial showed that the vaccine was safe and that it created both antibodies and a T-cell response.

The Bizarro World Of Trump Counterfactuals

I read something on Twitter that was simultaneously true and ridiculous.

Imagine if Trump - back in March - had led an aggressive, science-based response to Covid-19. Imagine that the horrific days of the NYC-centered outbreak had still happened, but Trump had led a successful campaign to stop it there, implemented a massive bailout program for business and launched an airtight national shut down for two months that effectively suppressed the virus.  Under those circumstances, you could see a plausible re-election strategy for Trump. He rose to the greatest challenge of his presidency and some waverers would return to the fold. His negatives are still high so it would be a close election, but one he could plausibly win.

If Trump has a "positive" character trait, it is likely consistency. Trump doesn't waver, he doubles down. Trump is - above all - Trump. Imagining a Trump who listened to science, put off short term gain for long term rewards and asked of himself and his country to sacrifice for the common good is to imagine a Trump that isn't Trump. Now, I could imagine a Trump imitator in the GOP who will almost inevitably come later - Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson come to mind - who weds the sociopathic appeals to white grievance with a base level of competency. Trump's not that person.

His incapacity for change is what endears him to his crowd of sycophants and acolytes in Cult 45. His insistence on attacking and doubling down is what makes him a "fighter" in the eyes of his cult members. Expecting something different is folly.

Biden looks to be ahead by anywhere from 10-15 points. He has substantial leads in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and is within the margin of error in Georgia, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Taking just the substantial leads (and the Clinton states) and he has 318 electoral votes.  Add the margin of error states and it's 414 electoral votes.

That would be different if Trump wasn't Trump is a pretty weak argument.