Radical opposition

Question: why did so many voters choose Trump?

Discussion: Donald Trump is an extremely unappealing person, whose personality, private behavior, business career, and public programs are all odious. In addition, his association with racists, crazed right wingers, and fantasists would seem to label him as mostly crazy.  Yet voters elected him President. How can that be?

To be sure, there was widespread and vehement hatred for Hillary. Many voters were credulous believers in what Fox News and Rush Limbaugh fed them. Some voters thought Trump, or the Republicans, would make money for them, or prevent abortions, or block the borders, or do some other thing they wanted.

At bottom, though, perhaps the simplest and best explanation is that they voted for Trump for the same reason that even more voters voted for Obama. What? Well, consider. Why do voters favor one politician over another? Most politicians promise exactly the same thing: I will make you richer and happier. How so? Voters mostly don't know, or don't think they know, or don't care. Many don't believe the politicians one way or the other, and most don't feel interested in or capable of analyzing the political issues. For the vast majority of voters, then, it comes down to who they think the politician is.

Answer: But why, then, pick a horrible man like Trump? And how can he compare with the noble Obama? Well, what the two have in common is that they both represent radical change. With regular politicians it's basically all bla, bla, bla. They would do this, they would do that, they would do the opposite. How? Never mind, it's too complicated even when spelled out. Nobody really cares. But Obama and Trump personify dramatic change--Obama because he's black, handsome, young, eloquent, and radically opposed to his predecessor; Trump because he's authentically the disruptive lout that he is, and radically opposed to his predecessor.

Sic semper tyrannus publicae

Trump Pro and Con

Trump Pro and Con

I am a serious liberal. I have spent much of my life as a civil rights, consumer, and environmental activist. I admire Hillary Clinton and strongly supported her for President, and believe that the widespread hatred and distrust of her is the product of persistent, extreme and dishonest Republican disparagement. And I found Donald Trump personally repugnant, spouting cruel, ignorant and dangerous views, and totally unqualified for any political office, much less the Presidency.

But Trump won a near-majority of voters, regardless of whether or not the electoral college system, Russian hacking and James Comey’s remarks threw the election to him. Since I respect the voters, that victory has made me rethink a lot of my liberal assumptions, both about Trump himself and about the policies that America now needs.

Trump’s Character

Let me start with Trump himself. I think his boastfulness, his constant self-reference, his repeated exaggerations and falsehoods, and his ostentation are odious. But that’s as much a prejudice about his lifestyle as a moral or political condemnation.

Let me explain. Consider first his retrograde and contemptuous attitude toward women. It is certainly unfair and unpleasant, and hardly what we want from a leader, but as a matter of private behavior it is merely contemptible—not dangerous or criminal. Like many men of his age with arressted development, his notions of manhood are primitive, selfish and competitive.

The racism, sexism, and hostility to immigrants that permeated his campaign and his personal history are, by contrast, deeply troublesome for a President. Although I doubt that Trump privately subscribes to these prejudices, it hardly matters: he certainly uses them for his own political advantage, unleashes hate crimes and public violence, and is advancing cruel and harmful policies.

Some of Trump’s repeated dishonesty is explainable as sales puffery that he has persuaded himself to believe, and some falsehoods may be honest mistakes, actual beliefs based on what he learns from the far-right bubble in which he apparently swims. Moreover, we know that many of Trump’s falsehoods are uttered to protect his self-image as a “winner,” and therefore more a compulsion for him than an evil calculation.

Nevertheless, as a candidate and now President, the falsehoods he relays in tweets and off-the-cuff remarks, or through his compliant press secretary, are inexcusable and deeply disturbing. It may be true, as journalist Salena Zito memorably said, that the press took candidate Trump literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters took him seriously but not literally.  But the press takes him literally because his position gives great credibility to what he says, and consequently his falsehoods distort reality for many people, damaging relationships and democracy.

Trump’s Positions

With his cabinet and advisory selections, we now see that Trump’s administration will be perhaps even more radical than his rival Republicans would have chosen. From a liberal perspective, the administration has now made it clear that it aims to implement many of Trump’s campaign hints and promises: to cancel Obamacare, destroy unions and employee legal protections, demolish environmental protections and dismiss the Paris Accord on global warming, promote coal and oil, privatize public education, deregulate Wall Street and industry, eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allow unlimited industrial consolidation, deport millions of illegal residents, terminate voting and other civil rights protections, make an enemy of China, cancel or render inoperable existing trade agreements, favor Russia and Putin, and possibly scuttle the Iran deal, NATO and the EU.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s inauguration speech showed frightening hints of authoritarianism. He asserted, as does every dictator, that his oath of office was a pledge to serve “the people.” But we live in a constitutional Republic, and Trump’s oath is actually to defend the constitution, the bulwark that protects the people. And immediately thereafter he virulently attacked the press.

From a liberal standpoint, then, the Trump administration appears set to overturn traditional American norms and values, trash the liberal world order, and even threaten the continuation of real democracy in the United States. As my admirable contemporary James Fallows recently wrote in The Atlantic, “I view Trump’s election as the most grievous blow that the American idea has suffered in my lifetime.”[1]

On the other hand, Trump was the first major political figure to understand how frustrated and cheated American employees and active business owners were, and also to understand how to use social media and blogs effectively, bypassing the fact checking of a mostly critical media. Whatever his actual net worth and business success may be, and however dubious his ethics and personality, Trump proved to be an original and ingenious politician. So what might his administration actually do?

I will discuss the possibilities under three headings: economy, rights, and international relations.

Economy

As I see it, the crucial economic question is whether Trump’s policies will rescue American workers from the disappearance of good-paying jobs and the stagnation of wages that has crushed so many families and communities since the Reagan Presidency, or will his policies instead accelerate the process.

Since the Reagan Administration, American business has consolidated to an enormous degree, and as a recent Council of Economic Advisors brief puts it, “Several indicators suggest that competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors, including the decades-long decline in new business formation and increases in industry-specific measures of concentration. Recent data also show that returns may have risen for the most profitable firms.”[2]

Thomas Frank’s recent book, Listen Liberal, argues powerfully that the Clinton and Obama administrations joined those of Reagan and the Bushes in ignoring these developments and actually diminishing the power of labor. As a result, nothing has checked the growing disparity between the shares of productivity flowing to labor, on the one hand, and to top managers, owners and financiers, on the other.

Trump promises to reverse this trend. We don’t yet know whether, apart from publicity stunts, Trump will actually take measures to improve the lot of working people. To do so would mean flouting long-standing Republican traditions and harming the immediate financial interest of his business supporters. But Trump’s disruption of the traditional relationship between Democrats, Republicans, and labor, and the support he got from working people, are important factors suggesting he might radically revise the traditional political positions and take useful measures to benefit workers. It’s at least conceivable.

Apart from jobs and income disparity, the two factors most often cited as potentially troubling in a Trump economy are the impact of his tax policy and the impact of his foreign trade policy. The received wisdom is that the tax policy will result in sky-high deficits while primarily benefiting the privileged, but we don’t actually know yet what he will propose. So speculation seems to me premature.

In the early days of his administration, Trump’s likely impact on trade has become clearer. We know that he wishes to rewrite trade agreements, raise tariff barriers against importing American products manufactured abroad, and provide a tax holiday for corporate profits stored overseas. In short, Trump’s stance is that the US has allowed itself to become an international commercial sucker, and he wishes to reverse that trend.

Although I am ignorant about the details of trade agreements, I agree with both Trump and Bernie Sander that they have largely ignored the grievous costs to workers, their families, and their communities. Free traders argue that more jobs are created than lost by such deals, and the population’s benefit from resulting lower prices exceeds the cost to those workers who do lose their jobs or have to accept lower-paying ones. But a focus on the workers themselves ignores the lasting impact of job loss, and the effect on families and communities.

How might Trump’s stance work out well? For a start, he seems to be compelling American manufacturers to reconsider plans to move jobs abroad. Perhaps, then, Trump is re-setting the rules under which American producers of consumer goods can operate, and perhaps this will in fact be highly beneficial.

With respect to trade relationships, I hear a lot of noise about China and Mexico, but have not seen any actual measures suggested. Perhaps jawboning will work here as well. I do understand that a trade war with China would be very damaging to us as well as to them, but the threat of such might get us better terms, and reduce our payment gap. As to the tax holiday idea, I think there could be less costly ways to force the repatriation of overseas profits, but decades have passed without any action at all. Consequently, I think Trump’s suboptimal approach would be better than continued inaction, and perhaps when fleshed out by Congress may be much better.

The massive deregulation of business that Trump plans will have immediate bad effects, to be sure. But the path of regulation that our country has followed since World War II cannot really continue to coexist with a risk-taking, entrepreneurial, and competitive economy. Deregulation is not an acceptable answer, but it can be a necessary first step. Regulation by administrative agency rule has become and continues to grow so slow, complex, out of date, and onerous that it seriously stifles smaller businesses and risk-taking initiatives, and with each passing year it gets worse. Better forms of regulation can replace what we have in many instances, and perhaps Trump’s deregulation initiatives will ultimately lead in that direction.

Rights

I see no good results in the field of rights, including constitutional law. My best hope is that the committed anti-abortion lawyer whom Trump appoints to the Supreme Court will be more committed to the constitution and fairness than some of the current conservative occupants. It may be that the Court will not want to create the political firestorm that would follow overturning Roe v. Wade. But a Jeff Sessions Justice Department will be more opposed to than supportive of the rights of minorities, women, or immigrants. I do not see a Labor Department or NLRB supporting unions and employee rights. I do not see the EPA, the Dept. of Energy, or the departments that operate our national forests and parks protecting the environment. And I do not expect Net Neutrality or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to survive under this Presidency.

International Relations

An important Republican criticism of President Obama’s policies was that he did not strongly enough support US interests abroad. The argument that a more strenuous foreign policy would have been better has also been made by the likes of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. With Mr. Trump we will see how that works, and I cannot rule out that it will be better. For instance, Trump’s complaint that our NATO partners don’t pay their fair share rings true, and why shouldn’t we make sure that they do? On Israel and the Palestinians, the reality is that none of the last three administrations has made things any better. Perhaps a radically different approach will work. I am not averse to trying.

Conclusion

The election was a triumph for Trump and a powerful statement of protest from his supporters. I have therefore done my best to overcome or suppress my prejudices, to put aside my misgivings and understand how matters look from their point of view, and to see what good might come of his Presidency. This essay may well be seriously mistaken in its hint of optimism, but it's the best I can do.

That said, I think we are entering a time of both domestic and international danger. Many people will unquestionably suffer grave injury from the avowed policies of Trump and his cabinet, and the possibility that some of his policies on the economic and international front will work out ok is rather small. At the moment, however, I prefer to hope for the best instead of fearing the worst.

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[1] James Fallows, “Despair and Hope in Trump’s America, The Atlantic January 2017

[2] Council of Economic Advisers Issue Brief, “Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power,” April 2016, p.1

The President's Farewell Address

               President Obama delivered his farewell address last night exactly ten days before Donald Trump will give his own speech accepting the presidential handoff. While no one knows exactly what Trump is going to say, the contrast between the two public appearances is likely to be stark. Trump undoubtedly  will begin to moderate the surly persona he cultivated on the campaign trail, but Trump has little choice but to continue mainly being Trump. This means that what we'll probably hear from him in just over a week will be fairly angry and unpleasant. It will be interesting to see whether he can muster the discipline  to stick to the polished rhetoric of a script that writers would have been at work crafting for him at the very moment the outgoing president was at his podium in Chicago. I'm guessing Trump will try but will prove unable with any consistency to resist his ungracious impulses.

               Obama was Obama too. But speaking as someone who voted against him twice and would do so a third time were he able to run again, I say this in admiration. He and his party have been deeply humiliated in the recent election, and the course of least resistance for him would have been retreating into partisan vitriol. Indeed, I'm sure the bitter left wing of his party was urging him to do exactly that in order to jump-start their own ascendency at this critical juncture.  
  
               Yet he stayed true to what seems to be his nature, which allows him to rise above all this and speak in a tone worthy of the high office he's held these past eight years.  He did return to his home town for the speech,  and he pushed a few partisan hot-buttons - brief references to LGBT and climate change won him the loudest applause of the night - but most of what he said was deeply patriotic, in the most positive sense of the word,  and meshed well with the best of American political rhetoric that's been composed since George Washington's day. He didn't appeal to unity as such but to tolerance and a willingness to embrace sharp differences in the pursuit of solutions to the nation's problems. He warned against arrogance and the temptation to caricature opponents. There was a great deal of warmth in the speech and not much of fear or resentment.

               It's ironic in a way that this speech occurred  in Chicago at the time that it did.  Like other American cities, Chicago has seen a recent upsurge in racially-charged violence that is being egged on by radical factions. Just days before the President's address,  four black teenagers in Chicago kidnapped and tortured a mentally-disabled white guy while laughingly shouting anti-white and anti-Trump taunts at him. The perpetrators felt emboldened enough to live-stream the whole thing on Facebook, short-circuiting any claim that the incident was being made up or blown out of proportion. Like so may other incendiary scenes nowadays, the clips are there on the Internet for all to see.

               The political Right will attempt and is attempting to blame this sort of thing on Obama and his Party, in much the way elements on the Left have always tried to tag Republicans with responsibility for encouraging the depredations of Klansmen and neo-Nazi skinheads.

               It says a great deal about the President that he made use of his last formal appearance before the nation to lead all of us away from this mode of thinking. Without betraying his own partisan principles as a Democrat, he's telling  us it's OK and even a good thing to oppose one another in the pursuit of our beliefs, but to stop demonizing. It's my own prediction that things are about to get much worse for all of us, and heeding this advice will serve us well.

               At the very end of the hour-long presentation, the President warmly embraced Joe Biden, one of the many political rivals he bested over the years, calling him a friend and brother. This was all good teary-eyed political theater, but I read it as entirely sincere.

               He then spent several minutes praising his wife Michelle. At one level, this too was theater and traditional American family-values stuff, but on a more politically significant level, its seemed reasonably clear to me that he was doing his last bit to position her as heir to his mantel. She herself has repeatedly forsworn any personal political ambitions, but ritualistically turning away the crown is another American tradition that dates back to George Washington. After her stint as Secretary of State, even the hyper-political Hillary Clinton claimed to lack any interest in the Presidency.

               Neither Washington nor Mrs. Clinton were sincere in their disclaimers, and I doubt that we've heard the last from Michelle Obama either. She certainly did deliver the best speech to be heard at either of the nominating conventions this past summer.

               Unless Mrs. Obama decides to abandon the broken Democrats and head some sort of pragmatic and centrist third party, I'll never be voting for her. However, listening to her husband speak yesterday, and considering everything going on around us, it did occur to me that we could do worse.

Why Democrats Lose: Reply to Mark

I appreciate Mark’s effort to discuss Democratic failures. I disagree with many of his points, and agree with some. 

1) I disagree with his dismissal of “exogenous factors” like bad campaign management, voter intimidation (and suppression), and fake news as explanations for the disaster of 2016. As someone wisely wrote in a recent letter to the NY Times, when a basketball team loses a game by, say, 96-97, there are any number of sufficient causes for the loss: a missed foul, an injury, a poor substitution, a bad referee call, etc. The same is true for the election result, especially when you add such other “exogenous factors” as FBI Director Comey’s last minute intervention and the one-sided hacking, presumably at Putin’s behest, of Democratic emails.  Since Hillary won the popular vote by a large margin, virtually any of the “exogenous factors” could have won it for Trump.

I do agree that the Democrats have grave faults of their own, well worth examining as key factors in the long, otherwise inexplicable failure of the Democrats to defeat a Republican Party that has become a cheering squad for the rich, and at least since Reagan has proven corrupt, nasty, and dishonest. But many of his points are wrong.

2) Mark’s comments about the overweening size and cold-blooded nature of the government echo a consistent Republican refrain. The size is factually incorrect: from 1962 to 2014 federal civilian employees increased by a total of 8%, whereas the US population grew 65.7%.[1] But it’s popularity has less to do with facts than with a consistently repeated claim emanating from the mostly large businesses that dislike controls on their false claims, pollution, employment discrimination, monopolization efforts, and workplace safety.[2]

3) Likewise factually incorrect is Mark’s statement that “Government's ability to manage complex processes inevitably reaches a point of diminishing and then negative returns.” [his italics]. This sounds plausible, but there are many modes of regulation. The techniques that work in a small and simple system must change as the system does, and on the whole that’s what happens. There is no inherent reason, apart from political opposition, why regulation cannot continue to adapt as it always has. The real point of difference is that Republicans believe in the honesty, decency, and voluntary law abidingness of businesses whose priority is to make a profit in the short term, and Democrats do not.

4) Mark’s discussion about medical care is likewise inaccurate. He says “modern medicine is tortuously complex and requires decentralized decision-making and on-the-ground engagement by an array of skill disciplines. Medical service thus by its nature defies top-down regulation.” Again, Mark expresses a fairly simplistic view of regulation. If he were correct, the medical care systems that prevail in virtually every other developed nation would all be considered failures. In fact, by the available measures most of them do a better job at something less than half the US cost. Moreover, even Medicare and Medicaid in the US make adjustments for differences in medical practices and local expenses. The complexities of the US system are, rather, due to the Republican insistence on private, employer-based medical insurance in place of a simple government-financed approach. Likewise, the so-called failures of Obamacare are largely due to the opting out or refusal to extend Medicaid by many Republican governors, and the implacable opposition that Republican Congressmen have mounted to the entire program, making the normal post-legislation adjustment process impossible.

5) In one respect, though, I agree with Mark’s diagnosis. He notes that Obamacare became a short-hand for every nuisance and gripe about medical care, and that this followed from Obama’s misconception of public perceptions. I think that Obama’s failures in the realm of explanation and persuasion are the most serious faults of his administration, and this is one example.

6) I also agree with Mark’s claim, in discussing the EPA, that liberals can be at least as dogmatic and irrational in the pursuit of their goals as conservatives. I don’t know that EPA regulations actually exemplify the point,[3] but I do believe that the point holds true in many contexts.

7 Now let us consider Mark’s belief that Democrats are losing elections because “they have abandoned their legitimate mission of being empathetic champions of humanity and have instead become tagged as the party of pitiless bureaucracy.” This claim has some credibility with me. Perhaps the party has become tagged as the sponsor of pitiless bureaucracy. I have not heard that before, and it has not come up in the various books that I have read about the supporters of Trump. But being “tagged” is certainly the type of emotionally laden, media-savvy charge that could well have taken place, and would certainly resonate. I also think Mark has a point because it echos the thought-provoking claim in Thomas Frank’s recent book Listen Liberal that Democrats have become the party of professionals and disregarded their traditional base of unions and working people.

8) Finally, there is a sense in which I sort of agree with Mark’s last point, that “by smugly belittling any serious politician to their own right, the Democrats threw away this election and cleared the field for Trump.” The sense in which I agree is that Hillary did not campaign on the issues. Perhaps she tried, but much of her time, and certainly her most attention-catching efforts, were devoted to ad hominem attacks on Trump, rather than discussions of the policies she advocates. This was utterly inexcusable as a campaign tactic, since exactly this approach had led Trump’s primary opponents to doom. Her campaign managers should have known this, and Hillary herself should have rejected any advice to proceed in this manner.

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[1] In 1962 there were 2,514 million civilian employees of the federal government. In 2014 there were 2,726 million. See OPM.gov, Historical Federal Workforce Tables, Total Government Employment Since 1962, https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/, During the same period, the US population grew from @185 to 308.7 million, according to the Census and the Statistical Abstract.

[2] They would rather play states off against each other in a pitiless race to the bottom than be subject to uniform federal regulation.

[3] Mark argues that the EPA does not factor cost into its regulations. I don’t believe this claim, as

the use of cost-benefit analysis is required of the EPA by executive order, and I don’t think the EPA flouts it. “President Reagan also recognized the problem of unaccountable regulatory agencies. He responded by issuing an executive order in February 1981 that required executive branch agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA, to perform CBAs before issuing major rules.” Conservative Reform Network, Requiring Cost-Benefit Analysis for All Regulations,” 9/27/15 at http://conservativereform.com/requiring-cost-benefit-analysis-for-all-regulations/

Why Are Democrats Losing Elections?

               Democrats seem to have a hard time understanding why they ever lose elections. In their own estimation they're endowed  with charm, high intelligence, competence, compassion,  and of course the most progressive ideas about everything. On top of it all, their campaign platforms invariably offer up tons of free and subsidized services that should have the hoi polloi voting overwhelming Democratic majorities into every level of government.  Yet,  in addition now to having lost the presidency and both houses of Congress, they control only 38% America's governorships today and a minority of state legislatures. What's going on?

Cognitive Dissonance

               Suffering from a debilitating cognitive dissonance,  Democrats often seize on exogenous factors like inadequate funding or, as Keith has now suggested, (American Counterpoint 12/27/16) lousy campaign management to explain their poor showings.  The point seems odd given that Mrs. Clinton had the experience, connections and money to have constructed the most formidable campaign staff in the history Western democracy. And if her executive skills were so poor that she squandered all this, one wonders why anyone ever would have wanted  her in charge of the Federal Government.  Democrats also drag in rationales like voter intimidation or, more recently, the voguish trope of the day "fake news", as though news distortion was somehow a Republican invention suddenly  making its way past the liberal media's honest watchdogs.
               What many Democrats privately believe, and a few openly say,  is that Americans collectively are simply too stupid to know what's good for them.  Yet the more self-reflective Dems understand this flip attitude to be unsatisfactory.  The politically savvy among them also realize that such arrogance is part of what put them into electoral jeopardy in the first place. Hence, in addition to all the hand-wringing among Democrats and shallow gloating among Republicans,  there is an honest search currently underway in both parties to decipher the genuine signals coming out of this bizarre election.

Fear Of Cold And Distant Power

               In one of my recent postings (American Counterpoint 11/24/16) I enumerated certain of the issues I feel hurt the Democrats. Now I'd like to approach the question from a more macro vantage point. More than any other national election in my lifetime, this one was dominated  by politicians openly appealing to people's fears and hostilities. On the surface this negativity made little sense in light of the fact that conditions which might normally give rise to it - extreme economic turbulence  or active external threats - have been mostly absent for the past few years. Yet by 2016 people of many different persuasions were feeling angry and afraid, with Bernie Sanders channeling outrage from the left and Trump rallying nativist factions on the right. The common denominator among the malcontents on both sides was a fury with remote and self-serving power.

The Counterbalance Itself Becomes Dead Weight

               Historically, popular anger has tended to work in the Democrats' favor,  since they have always positioned themselves as the humane anti-Establishment party there to protect people against everything in their lives that was cruel.  The Democrats aren't what they used to be, however, in part because overweening  power has shifted guises too. The original Progressive rationale for  Federal Government expansion, championed by both Roosevelts during the first half of the last century,  was to build an empathetic counterbalance to the dominance of Wall Street and Big Business. What modern-day Democrats have failed to grasp is the extent to which Government has now itself become the cold-blooded Establishment, dwarfing the size and power of even the largest corporations or banks. The traditional David-vs-Goliath rhetoric always favored by the Party's politicians has grown increasingly strained over the years and, today, has become a political liability for them because it compounds the Party's other failings with the sin of hypocrisy. They themselves  nurtured the creature that has grown up into such an ogre and now has a threatening life of its own.
               In my 12/24 posting I mentioned health care and environmental regulation as two of the key issues that worked against Mrs. Clinton in the recent election. Both of these can be understood  better now in the context of the overarching  problem that Government's ability to manage complex processes inevitably reaches a point of diminishing and then negative returns.

Doomed Overreach

               Healthcare services are among the most fundamental of human needs. Medicine touches all of us in the most intimate manner and often at times when we're feeling most vulnerable. Government health insurance programs were designed to reassure people that their medical needs would always be met and at prices they could afford to pay. However, modern medicine is tortuously complex and requires decentralized decision-making and on-the-ground engagement by an array of skill disciplines. Medical service thus by its nature defies top-down regulation. Yet bureaucratic  insurance programs in general and government programs in particular have little choice but to impose top-down rules. Insurance makes everything appear free or nearly so to consumers, removing them from their normal role as cost-control guardians. This dynamic both encourages people to seek more services than they need, and it incentivizes health-care providers to accommodate and then overcharge. Insurance programs have to impose discipline or soon face insolvency.
               Yet the system is too convoluted for universal rules to work effectively. Anyone who has ever laid eyes on the dictionary-size CPT manual (for Current Procedural Terminology) that has become the bible in medical billing offices everywhere in the U.S. has seen the discrete tip of the iceberg. The whole iceberg is massive, mutating and expanding relentlessly. Small medical practices are becoming a thing of the past as  factory-style operations are necessary to manage billing and legal compliance. Patients, doctors, and nurses alike are feeling alienated within the system and the burnout rate is high. Providers are quitting the system at the very time increased insurance coverage is pushing up demand for their services. 
               Compounding the problem is the fact that frightened and angry patients often  turn to  lawyers to redress grievances. The legal industry, somewhat out of control today in its own right, is eager for the pricey business and happy to oblige. High legal risk incentivizes providers to order otherwise unnecessary procedures to ensure legal protection for themselves should a case, fairly or otherwise,  fall under legal scrutiny. The medical system itself thus has morphed into something akin to a viral epidemic, with problems feeding on themselves and triggering new problems.

Monkey On The Democrats' Back

               The term "Obamacare" was coined derisively by critics of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. However, driven by his trademark overconfidence and believing at the time he had a political winner on his hands, Obama himself cheekily co-opted the term. Soon "Obamacare"  was in universal use to characterize everything the President and his allies were trying to do to fix the healthcare system. What this meant, of course, was that he had now put his personal brand on the problem,  even though he didn't cause it,  and when unhappiness with the system only deepened on his watch, the monkey naturally climbed onto his back. Everybody struggling to get appointments with overworked doctors,  or to decipher arcane insurance forms,  or to figure out why premiums were rising and coverage for needed services was being denied,  could find a ready scapegoat in Obamacare.   And when Mrs. Clinton made the decision to embrace his legacy with such enthusiasm, this unwelcome monkey was part of the baggage that transferred itself from his back to hers.

Saving Humanity

               Energy is another fundamental human need into which the Democrats, in their mode of chronic overreach, have chosen to insert themselves. The Environmental Protection Agency was actually founded under the authority of a Republican president, Richard Nixon, and it's mission was to protect the nation's vital natural resources - land, air, water, and forests - from reckless exploitation and careless abuse. However, in one of the more extreme manifestations of mission-creep that has ever occurred with a Federal agency in this country, the EPA  assumed increasingly ambitious responsibilities.
               After Barak Obama took charge in 2009, the EPA reinvented its role and positioned itself grandly it seemed as humanity's protector against climate-induced extinction.  Since no cause on Earth could be more important that this surely,  the EPA felt empowered to begin issuing sweeping restrictions on utilities and fossil fuel companies in the apparent belief that that no cost was too high to help accomplish even marginal gains in the war against global warming.
               If allowed to run unchecked for too long, such an approach would undermine the American economy for the sake of improvements that even the EPA's own scientists acknowledge will have little real impact any time soon. More and more would always be necessary before material progress was even a possibility, promising a grim and hopeless future rather at odds with the President's optimism. In a democracy, such disruptive measures should naturally encounter constructive opposition, but the Obama Administration resorted to apocalyptic rhetoric to justify its reliance on executive orders bypassing both debate and appeals.
               Nearly all Americans today support some degree of environmental regulation, and most have an open mind on the issue of climate change. However, the majority is repelled by the dogmatism of the true-believers who have found a home for themselves on the left fringe of the Democratic Party and within the EPA itself. Certain of these people are quite open about their ambition to eliminate fossil fuels entirely and their desire furthermore to put an end to discussion. The doctrinaire refrain that "climate science is settled" rings as falsely to most people as the rightwing claim that the whole thing is a hoax.

Franz Kafka Saw It All Coming

               Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Czech writer who lived in obscurity during the early years of the twentieth century. Professionally he worked in the boring recesses of a German insurance company, and in his fiction he created a surrealistic world where hell manifested itself as a kind of humdrum cosmic bureaucracy. His characters were helpless against unseen forces which held absolute power and ruled via irrational orders delivered by bland functionaries.  Kafka became popular because this vision struck a chord in the growing numbers of people who in their normal lives were coming up against bureaucracies that seemed unfeeling, threatening and insurmountable. In Kafka's day, this was the world of early bureaucratic capitalism, and it would soon metastasize into the Nazi and Communist totalitarianisms that were to overwhelm his homeland.
               Getting back to the question of why our Democrats in this country are losing elections, I believe the most fundamental reason is that  they have abandoned their legitimate mission of being empathetic champions of humanity and have instead become tagged as the party of pitiless bureaucracy. Obamacare and the climate change juggernaut are but two examples of how the Democrats identify legitimate social problems but then attack them with a crusading zeal that inevitably bogs down in high costs and endless, ineffectual mission-creep.  The impulse to double-down in response to failure  is generally stronger among Democrats than the willingness to re-think a problem.

Paranoia Digs Deep

               One of the most disturbing features of the recent election was the weirdness of it all and the feeling on both sides that dark forces were at work behind the scenes. Overwrought bloggers on the right and left alike seemed fixated on conspiracy theories in general and, in particular, on the idea of the Deep State, which they all believe to be a kind of hidden government behind the visible government,  controlling politicians and functionaries like puppets. Franz Kafka would have recognized the vision.  Such irrational paranoia on both sides aggravated the partisan virulence of the campaign and is now threatening to make the aftermath poisonous.
               Many left-fringe Democrats believe in the Deep State idea, and I think that in the end their party suffered from the notion more than did the Republicans. Mrs. Clinton's long experience actually worked against her here because it could be construed as prima facie evidence of her connection to the Deep State, which frightened many of her own supporters. Had Jeb Bush won the Republican nomination, his family history would have exposed him to the same suspicion among voters who might otherwise have been favorably inclined towards him.
               Donald Trump, on the other hand, made much of his own virtuous independence. In the primary campaign he savaged virtually all of his Republican opponents for being in somebody's pocket, and in the general  election he was merciless in his attacks on the well-connected "Crooked Hillary". He managed to make his own half-baked grasp of policy issues actually work in his favor because it positioned him so obviously outside the Washington mainstream compared to the wonkish Mrs. Clinton.  He convinced many voters to see him as the political free spirit he claimed to be. Breezily waving all complexity aside and promising easy solutions to the nation's problems, Mr. Trump looked like just the guy finally to bull-charge his way through bureaucracy and make our lives simple again.
               It's my judgment that, by smugly belittling any serious politician to their own right, the Democrats threw away this election and cleared the field for Trump. I'm tempted to say it serves them right now to have him as their president, except for the fact that the rest of us are stuck with him too.