America's Crashing Clown Car - Part 3

(A Continuation My 5/27 and 5/10 Postings)

A Storm Of Money

          Many Republicans are, and should be, embarrassed by the fact that for all their posturing about budgetary discipline, it's been under their presidents that much of the fiscal profligacy has occurred in recent decades. They have tended perversely to embrace tax cuts and high defense spending at the same time, without showing much more real interest than their Democratic colleagues in limiting the growth of entitlement programs or the size of the nation's costly administrative bureaucracy. Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, in 1985 even resigned in protest at this hypocrisy. Stockman's gesture achieved little, however, as Reagan's Vice President George Bush was elected his successor and continued in much the same vein.

          It was only when Democrat Bill Clinton came into office that the long running economic expansion initiated under Reagan began throwing off enough tax revenue that the seemingly permanent deficit began to shrink. In 1998, the deficit actually turned to surplus for the first time in a generation and remained there for the last three years of Clinton's presidency. This embarrassment of riches even got to the point where some economists fretted that a shortage of Treasury securities loomed and potentially threatened the stability of the banking system.

          They needn't have worried. Bush's son George W. was waiting in the wings, and his presidency brought about a return to sharply rising deficits and the consequent renewed supply of Treasuries. Furthermore, his presidency ended with a scary financial crash in 2008 that was followed by a severe and prolonged recession.

          Barak Obama, his successor, entered office in the midst of this mess and ushered in four years of trillion dollar-plus deficits. While his policy was on one level engineered to stimulate the doddering economy, it did so by throwing money around to political constituencies who had been clamoring for it all along anyway. The Democrats, now in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, felt finally free of fiscal constraints. They started behaving like happy weight-watchers who had just been told it was healthy to gorge at their favorite smorgasbord.

          Obama was a widely-admired President - even I liked him - but his actual policies were never as popular as Party stalwarts believed. His coattails quickly wore thin and the Democrats lost control of the House in another two years, and then the Senate four years after that. The resulting legislative gridlock meant that trillion-dollar deficits seemed like a thing of the past, although deficits remained high both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GNP.

Trump Arrives 

          Donald Trump always had the instincts of a crony-capitalist and he was never in the least bit serious in his occasional throwaway lines about cutting deficits. During his 2016 campaign he even let slip the notion - surely unvetted by his advisors and probably even by Trump himself prior to the parting of his lips - that he would eliminate the debt aggregate itself during the spectacular eight years of his approaching two-term presidency!

          Orthodox Republicans quickly had cause to join their Democratic friends in bemoaning the President's lies. He never had any problem whatsoever with either big government or its associated debt burden. What actually started happening the day he assumed office was a resumption of the upward sloping deficit trend line. It in fact took only three years for the budgetary shortfall once again to cross Obama's famous trillion-dollar mark, and this while the economy remained strong and before COVID-19 blasted onto the scene!

          When the virus did hit, all stops were kicked loose. No politician of either party seemed ready to express any skepticism regarding the scale of expenditures needed. Even AOC herself in March had warm words of praise for the President's early covonovirus proposal, albeit with the hastily-considered proviso that her Party planned to "bump it up a little". Dem radicals appeared stunned into momentary comity as the enemy President was suddenly suggesting outlays that exceeded what only months earlier had been the stuff of their own fondest dreams.

          The dust is as of yet still far from settling on all this, but current estimates suggest that the 2020 deficit will approach $4 trillion, nearly quadrupling estimates that only earlier in the year had already been sounding over the moon. Furthermore, no one is seeing much light at the end of this tunnel, and fairly optimistic consensus guesswork has those trillion-dollar-plus budgetary holes continuing out about as far as the academic eye can see. Far from being scaled back or even stabilized, the debt aggregate appears to be growing at an accelerating pace.   

The Siren's Song 

          Economists have never agreed about deficits. They have no consensus formulas telling them when a fatal line is being approached. Conservatives have always talked about all deficits as reckless steps down the primrose path to hyperinflation. Liberals on the other hand, citing Keynes, have regarded them as policy devices necessary for heading off downturns, albeit mostly ignoring his caution about their use during expansionary periods. Generations of serious policymakers have indeed treated deficits as tools, while keeping a wary eye on their dangers if pushed too hard.

          Serious policymakers, however, are being crowded aside in the current environment. Desperate times breed desperate ideas.

          There is a relatively new school of economic thinking that styles itself as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Its spokespeople include Randal Wray, Bill Mitchell, Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton, and others. MMT's central idea - not an idea at all really, but a simple fact - is that all the world's central banks, including America's Federal Reserve, are now free of gold or any other fixed standard. These banks can thus at any time create unlimited quantities of new money, and always stand ready to do so whenever the volume of maturing debt exceeds the roll-over capacity of bond markets. Short of irrational political interventions, default is thus rendered impossible. Debt is nothing to worry about and neither are deficits.

          I became aware of these writers a number of years ago and took comfort in the knowledge that hardly anybody seemed to be taking them seriously. However, I remember thinking at the time there would be hell to pay one day should they ever start finding ears within the Democratic Party. Left-fringe ideas for unlimited government could stop sounding so silly if those show-stopping funding constraints could just be made to disappear.  

Have You Heard The Good News? 

          Well, MMT has now proclaimed these constraints to be illusions, and the Party's suddenly-prominent neo-socialists have indeed opened their ears to the good news. Bernie Sanders and AOC have both publicly embraced MMT, seeking to rescue it from the cold waters of crankishness and to reel the what-me-worry theory into the warm political mainstream. Proposals for omnivorous programs like their Green New Deal and Medicare For All are being positioned for the first time as doable schemes. Indeed, they can be paid for without even raising taxes, and hence does MMT shore up this most common angle of attack against the new socialism. It all sounds great.  

          I'm not trying to belittle the MMT theorists. They are in fact sophisticated analysts with a sound grasp of how our monetary system works. Most of them are primarily academics, but some also have pragmatic real-world experience. Warren Mossler, for example, is a hedge fund founder and automotive engineer. He also once operated a broker-dealer, and this experience provided him an insider's perch overlooking Fed operations and the mechanics of the American monetary system. He has a deeper understanding of this stuff than most economists or politicians of any persuasion. Hence, when he talks about the ease of money creation, he knows exactly what he's getting at, as do most of his MMT colleagues.

          The problem with these folks, however, is that having understood the power of unlimited governmental authority, they have allowed themselves to become seduced by it. It's not surprising then that they're now finding common cause with our neo-socialist politicians, who have long been enthralled by the promise of government free of impediments. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek but revealingly, Mosler titles his web homepage "The Center Of The Universe". And in the style of a true self-referencing zealot, he's even proclaimed a doctrine he calls "Mosler's Law", which goes: "There is no financial crisis so deep that a sufficiently large fiscal adjustment cannot deal with it". No wonder Bernie and AOC are coming to love this guy and his colleagues.  It wouldn't surprise me if Trump too, lover of HUGE things that he is, might himself be secretly falling under MMT's spell. With the power of unlimited money, his great accomplishments could be written in the stars for all eternity.  

The Deadly Cost Of Free Money 

          Economic life, however, is not so simple. All developed economies are sprawling systems functioning via a virtual infinity of moving parts. No person, party, philosophical faction or government can see any more than a small fraction of the whole picture. However, no entity at any level is forced to operate completely in the dark either, because they have small points of light to guide them in their decision-making. These lodestars are prices, which in theory allow all players in the system to acquire goods and services they need in a manner that optimizes supply and demand. Stuff in relatively short supply is expensive, while anything flowing freely out of mass factories or God's green earth is cheap. Furthermore, for many goods and services, high prices stimulate production which then lowers prices again and contributes to general abundance.

          This is bedrock free market dogma, and the problem with it is that, while prices generally do perform their allotted function, the job they do is imperfect due to the many distorting factors that are at work. As our liberals would correctly point out, extreme disparities of wealth pervert pricing because uber-rich consumers buy more stuff than they need and thus make it more expensive and less available for everybody else. Liberals, like many conservatives, would also make the case that big, inefficient corporations add to the problem, since they often undertake wasteful mass projects that exceed their managerial capacity. They consume resources and drive up prices often without adding enough value to compensate.

          What liberals generally fail to acknowledge, however, is that seen in this light, governments behave like the biggest corporations of all. Often with good intentions, they undertake the kind of mass projects to which only governments can aspire, but that even the best of managers would be unable to control effectively. The purpose that budget constraints serve is to limit the ambition of government program managers and their allied politicians to initiatives they have at least some hope of being able to administer.

Our Achilles Heel 

          Hence, when the Socialist-MMT alliance proclaims budget constraints to be illusionary, they draw attention to the Achilles Heel long hidden in plain sight at the heart of our economic system. This is that the Fed's capacity for unlimited money creation has deadly potential if ever coupled with our government's unlimited capacity for high-cost experimental problem-solving.  

          Dollars dumped lavishly and carelessly into medical care, direct transfers, environmental and energy projects, infrastructure and just about any other imaginable program or subsidy would destroy the vital pricing signals that allow our system to function. These points of light, these lodestars, would grow progressively dimmer until decision-makers at all levels would find themselves reduced to operating blindly. This is what happens when central banking excess undermines an economy's mechanism for rational pricing.

          This already dangerous problem then becomes explosive when we consider that America's Fed is not just any central bank, but is the source of the mighty U.S. dollar. As the world's primary reserve currency, the dollar is the modern monetary equivalent of gold, and the bank wielding the power to spin it out of thin air is able to operate like a cabal of alchemists. Former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, paraphrasing his predecessor Charles de Gaulle, characterized the dollar's power as America's "Exorbitant Privilege". 

          Looked at in this light, it is not all that hard to understand why chronic deficit spending has not yet led to ruinous inflation. America's bonds are forward contracts on its currency, and the world has for generations accepted this currency as though it were equivalent to gold.  By thus absorbing  our excess dollars, the global economy protects us from what would otherwise be the inflationary consequences  of  our monetary policy.

          The problem is that the rest of the world is not as gullible as we have apparently come to believe. Our fellow nations will not go on receiving dollars into their own monetary reserves if it becomes apparent to them that we are blowing our precious currency out the door like confetti.

          What our neo-socialist politicians, now encouraged by their MMT brain trust, are advocating is nothing less than the selfish and reckless abuse of America's Exorbitant Privilege.

Are We At The Tipping Point? 

          Even though economists have no formulas warning them when the monetary tipping point is approaching, the framework for considering the question is actually pretty simple. For nations, as for corporations, almost any debt burden is manageable so long as the debtor's resources are expanding. This is why, in the corporate world, leveraged buyouts (LBOs) can succeed for cases in which the target company is growing steadily. A seemingly insurmountable debt burden becomes progressively smaller in relative terms over time, until eventually the healthy firm easily absorbs its servicing cost.

          The situation is not so sanguine, however, when the firm encounters business adversity and begins to shrink. Under these circumstances, the arithmetic reverses itself and debt looms ever larger relative to the declining cash flow available to service it. If the pattern persists, bankruptcy is the only possible end game.

          Now, as the MMT folks love to point out in their lectures, nations aren't corporations and do not file for bankruptcy. Assuming debt that is denominated in their own currency, nations can and will always create new money to service it and hence technically can never default. The problem for nations occurs when the volume of new money necessary for this purpose begins to undermine the currency's value and the debt gets repaid in money that has lost its purchasing power. This point becomes the functional equivalent of bankruptcy.

          Now let's get back to the current COVID-19 crisis. Everyone seems aware of the fact that our economy is in some trouble, but I have to wonder if people are really coming to grips with how truly cavernous the hole is that has just belched open in front of us. The recent trillion dollar-plus deficit projections still assume a fairly robust economy. Yet what we are now experiencing is not only not a robust economy, nor even a normal recession, but the first stage of a deep and probably sustained depression. No one knows yet what the numbers are going to look like, but some estimates suggest that GDP could drop as much as 9% in the current year - exceeding the worst of the much ballyhooed "Great Recession".  And it will keep dropping if the economy is unable to re-open out of fear for the virus.

          The current U.S. federal debt aggregate is around $25 trillion and is now more than 100% of GDP. This ratio does not in itself have to represent an impossible burden, but quickly does so if the depression we're in sustains itself and our tax base continues to shrink.

          It's not completely far-fetched at this point to think of the U.S. economy as the sovereign equivalent of a corporate LBO. And like a leveraged company encountering a slump, the U.S. entering a depression will find that even its existing debt burden will grow relatively bigger and bigger with time.   

          And the existing debt burden is unfortunately only the starting point. In addition to the routine deficits now accumulating at a trillion-plus each year, a host of other potential claims beckon: 

• State and local governments are grappling with their own budgetary holes, some of them quite severe.
• State unemployment funds are already failing, and more are threatened if jobs don't come back and temporary furloughs become permanent.
• Public and private pension funds, which became a scary focal issue during the last recession, will again face shortfalls should stock market lose its currently inexplicable buoyancy.
• Our banks, while better capitalized than in 2008, may start to totter again.  

       

           All of these entities will appeal for federal subsidies as needed to ensure their survival. And it's not in Trump's nature, nor that of Congress, to resist such pleas. 

          Oh, and one more thing, interest on the federal debt - already a material budget item - threatens to explode when the bond and money markets awaken to the fact that inflation risk is not so non-existent as everyone seems to assume nowadays. And when inflation does return, it is likely to accelerate quickly, even in the midst of the economic downturn.

          The debt resulting from all these factors will be monetized because there is no practical alternative. Higher taxes cannot pay for it even if there was political will to attempt this option.

          The Fed is universally recognized as the backstop now for everything, and it will not hesitate to do whatever is needed to avoid systemic collapse. And why not, when the necessary money can be created in seconds by a few keystrokes entered into the the Fed's omnipotent computer system?

          I lack both the expertise and the stomach to add all this stuff up, but as Bob Dylan explained to us half a century ago, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. 

 This certainly sounds like a tipping point to me. 

  And we intend to hold a Presidential election in the middle of it all? 

America's Crashing Clown Car - Part 2

(A Continuation my 5/10/20 article. 

The following was originally posted on 5/17/20 but inadvertently deleted. We're reposting it here  with today's date. The reference in Keith's 5/21 piece is to this article.

Where Are The Democrats Heading? 

            The Democrats' presidential primary campaign has been a struggle between its left wing and its traditionalists. The Party has a problem, however, in that while it's radicals are providing the political force vitale, the Dems' only hope of winning the election seems instead to be in renouncing extremism and presenting a more moderate image to the public. Their debates have been awkward affairs in which the two sides have danced around one another in an effort to keep the radical energy alive and somehow still establish a winning framework for the election.

            The Party has chosen to allow their young NY congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to become the public face for the rising generation of Democrats, and she seems proud of how far out onto the left fringe she has been able to skate. The Party, always prone to hero worship, has even seen fit to bestow upon her one of their coveted three-letter acronyms, usually reserved for their icons. Though barely out of her twenties, she is now "AOC" and stands in the revered company of FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK, and LBJ. Someone is certainly busy marketing her career, and she has become a superstar.

Uncle Bernie 

            Bernie Sanders is a pivotal resource for the Party right now. His avuncular and sometimes even lovable persona reassures the public, even though his politics are extreme by the standards of any past political norms in America. This is, after all, a man who in his youth was a vocal fan of the old Soviet Union and who more recently has had words of praise for the Chavista Government still running Venezuela,  despite horrific evidence there of how his political principles play out in the real world. He has performed invaluable service to the radical wing of his party simply by mainstreaming the term "socialist", which historically had always been a third rail for politicians in this country. It is that no longer.

            Many of his followers today are young enough to be his grandchildren and few of them have the historical knowledge to question Uncle Bernie when he tells them it's now OK to be a socialist. He tempers the reality by describing his ideology as "democratic socialism", although not many seem to pick up on this as the a contradiction in terms it is. If the "Bernie Bros" were familiar even with fairly recent history, they would realize that the thuggish Mr. Chavez wrapped himself up that same Orwellian banner.

            Sanders is, of course, only a transitional figure. His age and poor health have always precluded any serious chance for him to win the Party's nomination this year. However, he holds the power singlehandedly to cost the Democrats this election should he urge his followers to bolt the Party or even simply stay away from the polls. He's not a stupid man, and his objective all along cannot have been actually to win the Party's nomination, but rather to gain control of its direction.

Enter Joe Biden 

            It was revealing, after all the bitterness transpiring between the rival camps, how quickly Sanders swung into line behind Joe Biden as soon as his erstwhile rival appeared to sew up the nomination. Such sudden warmth can only mean that the behind-the-scenes deals had already been made between the two camps. The leftish faction will control the Party's agenda and substantially populate any future Biden administration. The easy rapprochement also probably means that the neo-socialists will own the now all-important choice of his running mate. Everyone knows that, should Biden be elected, his VP might soon look forward to an important promotion.

            Joe Biden is a decent man who has always represented the best the Democratic Party has to offer. While left of center, he's shown respect for his opponents and earned theirs in return. He is, however, a shell of himself at this point and can hardly string five words together without losing his train of thought. He has dementia and would, if elected, be incapable of exerting much will of his own. He would be tightly controlled by the real powers behind his Presidency, who would not be moderates.

            The Party strategists certainly realize the potential disaster they face throwing a man in his condition into the rough-and-tumble of a Presidential campaign. It is my belief that right now they are surely racking their brains in an effort to bring another candidate forward to replace Biden. This jarring development would be highly dangerous for their Party and for our country, but they may well choose to risk it. They will be unwilling to sacrifice a victory that, once again as in 2016, they believe to be now within their grasp.

Election In A Firestorm 

            So what we have this year then is a Presidential contest between a blowhard opportunist on one side, and either a broken man or a last-minute mystery candidate on the other. This burlesque was already taking place against a backdrop of anger and general cynicism, but a new destabilizing factor has now emerged. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a primal emotional panic everywhere and, as an oddly under-appreciated side effect, suddenly forced the national unemployment rate to the highest level ever recorded by the Bureau Labor Statistics. Unemployment is now higher than even during some years of the Great Depression.

            In past generations, national crises have generally united Americans in the fight against a common enemy. Predictably, what's happening now instead is intensifying partisan warfare. Whatever one thinks of Trump's actions so far in combating the emergency, there is absolutely nothing he could have done that would have avoided the bitter attacks being leveled at him by his opposition. Any correct move would have been quickly overlooked in the eagerness to throw light on his next mistake.

            Following Rahm Emanuel's famous advice, our Democrats are seeking leverage from the current crisis and not letting it go to waste. In the vanguard is the strident young AOC, who seems to be taking her cues from the Leninist playbook and it is calling for something akin to a general strike. Once again, the nation's vital energy is being sucked away into the vortex of ugly politics at the very time it's most needed for rational problem-solving.

The Minefield Between Now And November 

            While it is probable that the viral pandemic itself will be receding six months from now, my judgment is that its economic impact will by then be only gaining traction. Small to mid-sized businesses are the lifeblood of our economy, and many of them are being forced to shut down and to furlough their employees. And of those shuttered companies, many will never re-open, leaving employees and operators alike stranded and angry.

            To address the problem, Trump and Congress are suddenly on common ground in their desire to pour oceans of money on it. They're debating only about whether to spend a lot or a whole lot or a whole lot more. And given the magnitude of the collapse, even most free-market advocates are agreeing that massive governmental action is called for now. Most understand that the current implosion is not a normal economic downturn that might reasonably be expected to self-correct. This is instead analogous to a medically-induced coma that requires electro-shock therapy to restore functionality.

            Pushing the metaphor a little further, however, the critical question becomes whether the sick body has the vitality anymore to withstand such treatment.

            The federal budget deficit has been a political bugbear for generations now. Deficit spending has been with us since the earliest days of our republic, when Alexander Hamilton, against strident opposition, forced through federal assumption of the states' Revolutionary War obligations. Part of Hamilton's vision was that this sweeping act would bind them all to the economic development of the new nation, and it worked. Federal debt, once a bitterly controversial idea, has been with us ever since except for a few years during the 1830's when President Andrew Jackson triggered a depression by paying it all off.

Sword Of Damocles 

            Afterwards, the budget deficit ebbed and flowed over the years, but the trend line has been ineluctably up. The consequent debt aggregate has kept expanding. The deficit spiked sharply during the 1930's as government battled the Great Depression and spiked even higher during the WWII years. The great economist John Maynard Keynes provided a theoretical framework explaining why all this was OK at the time, and our politicians - who have their own reasons for embracing federal expenditures and tax cuts - responded warmly to Keynes' way of thinking.

            What they conveniently overlooked was Keynes' proviso that deficits were constructive during economic downturns, but not during expansions, when surpluses were needed as a means both for keeping inflation at bay and holding the aggregate debt down to a manageable level. No responsible economist has ever argued that debt could spike up and up forever without eventually destroying the economy and the currency.

          The only serious debates have been over how to identify and avoid that tipping point.

Two widely accepted, often-conflicting ideologies drive much of today's political animus:

The conservative ideology is based on the concept that freedom of economic action underlies prosperity. At its extreme, this view prioritizes public policy that supports businesses operating in free markets, and discourages public policy that constrains business behavior. An extension of this ideology is the sacredness of individual freedom of action.

The liberal ideology is based on the concept of protecting the community: the family, the clan, the tribe, the State, the nation, and even the world.

As an aside, I would note that the term "liberal" is often applied to both ideologies! To many economic thinkers, "liberal" and "neoliberal" refer to free markets; a liberal, then, is one like Mises, Hayek, Friedman, or Ayn Rand who advocates free markets. In today's politics, however, a liberal is almost the opposite: one who accepts freedom of economic action as the basis for prosperity, but would impose constraints for the sake of community protection.

With respect to Mark's latest posting, I would only say that the above conceptual understanding of our political differences makes more sense to me than Mark's rather conspiratorial approach. Hence, although Mark infers a cabal of Democratic (liberal) conspirators using a mentally defective Joe Biden as a Trojan horse to gain control of the country, I see the coming election as a choice between an erratic Republican candidate who has no concern for any community outside some members of his own family and who has no competence in dealing with the problems of communities, against a slightly older Democrat who respects freedom of economic action as the engine of prosperity, but is also surrounded by and responsive to people who are very good at public policy and who himself has great proven interest and competence in dealing with the policies that protect communities.

Mark seems to think that any Democrat, even the most conservative of the primary candidates, threatens radical changes to the fabric of American society, changes that would destroy both prosperity and liberty. Where we disagree, I think, is about which candidate for President represents such radical change.

Cyber crime

A Response to Gail Collins in the NYT 5/14/20

I love Gail Collin's merry take, even on such disasters as our President and the policies of his party. But when all is said and done, taking rhetorical pot shots doesn't do much, aside from reminding us of the administration's faults.

My question is this: what can those of us who fear and dislike Trump's character and the Trump's policies say to the decent people who still support the President and believe what he says about the virus? How can we speak to them, not just to ourselves, in a respectful way that allows hope for agreement? I don't mean compromising our understanding of the facts or our moral principles. I mean initiating joint conversations. Many of those who believe in Trump have reasons for doing so. Perhaps a respectful hearing and a civil way of speaking or writing will allow us to sometimes reach some common ground. If not, as both Trump and McConnell have recently intimated, a second civil war is looming.

America's Political Clown Car Is About To Crash

          My friend Keith and I founded this blog nine years ago. In our Statement of Purpose at that time we characterized our objective as "to post opposing views on a variety of political and economic issues and to encourage their resolution through constructive debate."  Idealistically, we went on to enthuse that "legitimate and useful common grounds can be found when people with different views and understandings listen to each other and synthesize new ideas from their pragmatic contributions."  Neither of us was under any illusion back then that America's  political dialogue was likely to elevate itself dramatically any time soon. What we failed to foresee was how dangerously instead the raucous party was preparing to accelerate downhill.

           The blog has been mostly quiescent for the past three years. Keith can speak for himself here, but the reason for my own passivity is that I no longer relish politics as I once did, and hence debating is no longer as much fun. I find it painful to watch  television news anymore, and even print journalism is distasteful. All sources seem biased in one direction or the other, some of them grotesquely so, and hidden agendas proliferate everywhere. The "search for truth" has become instead a search for confirmation of pre-existing opinions and for factual or pseudo-factual weapons with which to bash the other side. "Fake News" is the defining metaphor of our  era, and each side seems oblivious to how egregiously it has allowed willful distortion to corrupt its own intellectual grounding.

          However, Keith has suddenly emerged from the quiet in a flurry of three postings over the last month. As usual, he has written well and made some  provocative and  even partially accurate points, but then allowed himself to wander onto less secure ground. I can feel some of the old contrarian zeal rising back up in me and will come out of retirement here, at least briefly. Maybe I can coax my friend back to a semblance of reason. In his three posts he's thrown more material against the wall than what I have the patience to address in detail, but there are couple of salient threads, so let me go after these.

What Is Trump?

           Let me start with his 4/19/20 post where Keith accuses me of "tenacious adherence to the tenets of Trumpism". Holy Moly! I'm pretty sure he's just baiting me here because he knows better, but let me go through the motions of taking the comment seriously. As Keith well knows,  I didn't feel I could stomach either Trump or Hillary in 2016 and, after considering a personal election boycott, chose instead to cast a quixotic and half-facetious vote for Gary Johnson.

          I've followed Donald Trump's career for longer than most of his current critics, and while I feel I know him better than they do, it happens that I mostly agree with the manner in which they size him up:  He's a liar, a bully, a cheat, and, in my opinion, seriously over-rated even as a businessman. He's also an illogical thinker, an atrocious public speaker, a compulsive self-promoter, and probably the weirdest man ever to hold the office of President. However, and let's be clear about this,  he's also not a Republican in any ideological sense of the label. He opposes free trade, is a neo-isolationist, and fails to give even lip service to fiscal prudence or limitation to the size of government. In fact, he supported his then-friend Hillary Clinton and identified more-or-less as a Democrat as late as 2008, even though, to be fair about it, he was no more a principled advocate for that party than he is now for what's left mine. 

          He was an opportunist who understood what was happening to the Republican Party and simply commandeered it, rather like a bottom-feeding sea creature taking up residence in an abandoned shell.

          Nonetheless, during the Kavanaugh hearings I made the decision to vote for Donald Trump in the next election. This twist was driven not at all by any change in my attitude towards Trump, but rather by my growing horror at what I saw coming to life among his opponents. The hearings provided a public stage for what I saw as pre-totalitarian behavior.

Playtime Revolution

          I went to college during the 1960's and attended a large Midwestern university which during my final year was almost entirely shut down by left-wing student protests and a strike among radical teaching assistants. Professors attempting to conduct classes were shouted down and protests turned violent, staying that way with varying degrees of intensity throughout my final semester.

          One sunny morning my girlfriend and I walked to our local Kroger to buy groceries, only to find the store reduced to a charred ruin. Marauding leftists had burned it to the ground the night before. Months later, a University research center doing work for the military was bombed and a graduate student was killed there after having chosen the wrong night to work late.

           Radical thinking pervaded the campus,  and not only did few people speak up to condemn these crimes, but the local culture hummed to life with enthusiasm for what was interpreted as advent for the long-heralded Revolution about to transform America into a socialist nation.  Cuba was the model and Che Guevara the prophet.

          I myself remained mostly on the outside of all this, although my friends and I  flirted with the ideology. I read a fair amount of radical literature and continued to do so even after I had come to understand the problem with it all. I developed an intellectual interest in totalitarian thinking because I wanted to understand better the weird hypnotic hold it gains over people. I read the entire first volume of Marx's Das Capital, most of Lenin's major tracts, some of Trotsky's work, and even several articles penned by Joseph Stalin, who while being  better known today for his dungeons and mass murders, was also a surprisingly prolific author. Wanting to see the best of the other side, I then waded through large sections of Hitler's Mein Kampf, even though I lacked the stomach to take in this foul, rambling tome in its entirety.

          The common denominators I discovered in all this literature were a murderous self-assurance and an intolerance for dissent of any kind or even traces of ambiguity. The argot employed by these writers teems with demeaning imagery applied to opponents: vermin, rats, insects, lice, filth, and so forth. The objective in all cases was the dehumanization of adversaries,  intended as the necessary first step towards their elimination.

Show Trials

           One dimension  of totalitarianism reached its apex in Hitler's death camps. Another dimension, however, found its logical culmination in Stalin's show trials. These, of course, were not trials at all. They were propaganda spectacles designed to humiliate opponents -  some real, most imagined - and to serve as a warning to anyone even considering opposition to the regime or to Stalin personally. Charges were often invented out of whole cloth or else built around preposterous exaggerations. Victims had been browbeaten behind the scenes and often tortured in order to extract groveling confessions for crimes never committed. They had been dehumanized, and the verdicts against them were predetermined.

 

          With all this in mind, it's perhaps not hard to understand the atavistic premonitions I experienced as the Kavanaugh hearings got underway. Triggering these inquisitions was nothing more substantial than a 35-year-old repressed memory that had once been coaxed out of a young psychotherapy patient! The therapist, who was a partisan Democrat with political connections, passed the story along to activist lawyers who in turn passed it on to politicians, who for their part were looking for any promising angle from which to sink the Kavanaugh nomination. 

          The usual drumbeat commenced and a few other seemingly collaborating stories materialized - Kavanaugh had, after all,  once belonged to a fraternity - but there was nothing of a material enough nature to justify the juggernaut that now rumbled into motion. The American nation was for weeks on end dragged through a debilitating spectacle during which Kavanaugh and his family were subjected to the most vicious and salacious kind of personal attacks while an overwrought media blared non-stop coverage. The judge's wife had to remove their young daughters from the hearing room at one point because of what they were being exposed to. The entire Kavanaugh family was being dehumanized.

          Due process eventually prevailed, of course, and Kavanaugh was confirmed.  Yet the political blood lust that had been unleashed only grew in intensity with the subsequent impeachment hearings that targeted Trump directly. Once again, virulent  stories surfaced which revealed unsavory behavior but failed to rise to the level needed by the prosecutors to achieve their goal.  The narrative kept shifting as Democrats struggled for anything promising to stick. It was as though they were hoping that by making Trump appear vile enough, lacking all humanity,  any old charge would suffice.  

          They finally settled on an apparent back-door agreement between the Trump administration and the Ukrainian government to trade aid for political favors.  This was an ironic focus given, of all things, Joe Biden's own well-documented  behavior in his role as point-man for the Obama Administration's Ukraine policy. This hypocrisy was waved breezily aside, however, as the Democrats charged excitedly forward.

          It was, of course, all for naught in the end. Nothing had turned up that crossed the threshold into the realm of impeachable offence, and Trump was exonerated. The impeachment campaign had begun literally as soon as he assumed office in 2017. It had continued for over three years, consumed tens of millions of dollars and countless man-hours. It completely pre-occupied the news media and, most damagingly of all, distracted all branches of our government from genuinely serious issues in need of  their attention. Yet it arrived only at the dead end which had beckoned from the start. It had accomplished nothing.

Aftermath

          What the sorry spectacle did succeed in doing was utterly to poison political waters that beforehand had already turned dark. There is an old spiritual adage about the self-destructive nature of hatred. It is that hatred corrupts the hater and, without him even knowing it, gradually turns him into the very image of his bete noire. "Hater"  has, like "Fake News", became one of bywords of this destructive new era, and we have become a nation of haters. It's just that we all seem to believe hatred arises only from the other side.  We ourselves walk around blameless and avoiding mirrors.

          I find it alarming that we're about to hold another Presidential election in this environment. The two-party system in this country has evolved over the years in a manner designed to force diverse political factions to cluster around two separate poles and to smooth out their differences before submitting rival positions to the voters. The theory underlying this system,  a good one in my judgment, is that most factions get input into one platform or the other and afterwards have a stake in the outcome of any elections they're able to win. The truly dangerous factions become marginalized in the process because their potential support is co-opted  by groupings willing to eschew violence and exert influence through civil negotiation. While still allowed free speech, the extremists remain on the fringes where they're capable of doing only limited damage.

End Of The Democratic Party

          Our Democratic Party has a proud heritage.  A couple of years ago in an article I posted on the origins of America's modern political parties  (American Counterpoint, 11/9/17), I said that the Democrats had come to stand for "inclusiveness and the application of government power to ensure everyone got a fair share of the nation's growing prosperity".  I described the Republicans, in contrast, as champions of "responsible hard work, self-reliance and economic freedom." I said at the time, and still believe, that the natural tension between these two sets of aspirations is healthy. They have in the past,  when managed by responsible and skilled politicians on both sides, strengthened the nation and made it a better place.

          Those days appear to be long gone. As already discussed, the Republicans have turned the keys of their party over to a man who has no principles, traditional or otherwise, and who instead is driven by only an undisciplined  strain of personal ambition. The Democrats, for their part, have done something that in my judgment far worse - they have turned their party over to their own extremist  fringe.

(I'll continue these observations, and get back to Keith, in a second posting soon to follow)