David Brooks on Moderates and Democrats

Brooks has a column today entitled Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away The dynamic pulling the party leftward.  Here I respond to the points he makes:

According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.

My opinion is that Americans have no great love for their private health insurance.  Insurance is mostly a pain in the ass. Americans just want to get medical services with a minimum amount of expense and hassle.  Our system is more complicated than it needs to be as can be seen by comparison with the systems in other countries such as Canada.

Second, there is the economy. All of the Democrats seem to have decided to run a Trump-style American carnage campaign. The economy is completely broken. It only benefits a tiny sliver. Yet in a CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say that the economy is very or somewhat good. We’re in the longest recovery in American history and the benefits are finally beginning to flow to those who need them most. Overall wages are rising by 3.5 percent, and wages for those in the lowest pay quartile are rising by well over 4 percent, the highest of all groups.

Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus that inflicts the Trumpian right. They take a good point — that capitalism needs to be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it so one gets the impression they want to undermine capitalism altogether.

There is some validity to this point, but it ignores both the unfairness and the unsustainability of the current system.  I disagree with Brooks about the extent of reform needed.

Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.

I agree with Brooks on this point.

Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist v. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1 percent. This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.

But the big divide in America is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. It’s between the top 20 percent and the rest. These are the highly educated Americans who are pulling away from everybody else and who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to make sure outsiders can’t catch up.

If Democrats run a populist campaign against the business elite, Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things. After all, he is actually despised by the American elite, unlike the Democrats.

 A few thoughts on this:

1. Sanders also seems to be despised by the American elite.  If Brooks thinks that is necessary to win a populist campaign against Trump, then Brooks should consider Sanders.
2. Brooks claims that "Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things".  I don't agree with this and Brooks doesn't provide any supporting arguments or evidence.  While some portion of people unsatisfied with the status quo (populists) are no doubt against the educated elite, others are no doubt against specific policies which have proven ineffective or worse.  

Finally, Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

I disagree that Democrats spend little time criticizing Trump's lack of civility (and I disagree that that's a criticism from the right).  I do agree that many progressives are angry and ill-mannered.

The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.

Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.

I suggest looking along the populist-elite dimension in addition to the left-right spectrum that Brooks uses.

Brooks famously opined that the success of the 2003 war in Iraq would lead to a generation of political moderation in the United States -- just the opposite of what actually happened as he acknowledges today.

I want moderates such as Brooks to have a home in the Democratic party.  I encourage Brooks to more seriously consider some of the populist Democratic ideas.  Populism is a natural reaction when the elites make mistakes.

Democratic Presidential Debates

1. Warren
2. Sanders
3. Buttigieg
4. Booker
5. Harris
6. Gillibrand
7.  
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10.  
11.  
12.  
13.  
14.  
15.  
16.  
17.  
18.  
19. Biden
20. Marianne Williamson

Warren is the favorite for the nomination because she is the most acceptable to both the Hillary and Bernie camps.  Biden bombed, and will soon leave the race.  Sanders was solid, as were the next tier of challengers including Buttigieg, Booker, Harris, and Gillibrand.  

Harris loses points with me for mentioning the party line on Russia. 

Putin and Immigrant Babies

This is the content of a post this morning at a liberal blog I read: 

My only question: If you're not having nightmares over what is happening at the border, why not?

This amazes me.  Of all the problems in the world, this is the one that should be giving me nightmares?  

I can only attribute this perspective to desperation.  A large segment of the Dem/liberal population views issues on the basis of their potential appeal to the mainstream American.  One issue where Trump has caved in the past was that of separating families of would-be-immigrants at the border.  The mainstream media was flooded with images and stories have little children being separated from their parents, and eventually this was too much even for Trump.  So there is encouraging precedent on this issue for the liberals.

I see this as similar to the focus of many liberals on Putin as the bad guy.  The military/intelligence "deep state" is also anti-Putin, for the most part, so liberals see this as a winning position -- uniting liberals and conservatives against Trump.

These attitudes strike me as both inauthentic and counterproductive for Democratic success.  The scale of human suffering of the would-be-immigrants is a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering caused by U.S. policies related to Venezuela and Yemen, or the risk to all human civilization from the renewed Cold War.  Climate change, species extinction, and plastic pollution are all existential threats. 

With regard to Putin, I believe that he is on the right side of the conflicts in Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, just as he was right about Iraq in 2003.  As veteran Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen says, 

Who Putin Is Not -- Falsely demonizing Russia’s leader has made the new Cold War even more dangerous.

In today’s Russia, apart from varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been. (When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an “appalling human rights situation in Putin’s Russia,” they should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?) ...

Putin has adopted a number of “anti-corruption” policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin’s oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But branding Putin “a kleptocrat” also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing...

Viewed in human terms, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men, life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the “kleptocrat” Putin had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.”

Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as “a KGB thug,” regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a “mafia-state boss.” This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss, because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it...  According to the American Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered—41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82—41 under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still–partially corrupt post-Soviet economic system, not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters.

 I strongly recommend the entire column by Cohen.  I think he makes a good case that the demonization of Putin by American liberals is misguided.

My opinion is that the U.S., not Russia, is the biggest threat to global peace.  Moreover, as demonstrated in the 2003 Iraq War, this is often a bipartisan failure of American politics.  Rather than confront our own deep state, many liberals find it expedient to blame an insidious foreign power.

Similarly, the U.S. has been an ineffective global leader in responding to problems such as global warming, pollution, financial inequality, and human rights.  Our support for international institutions and initiatives to deal with these problems has been inconsistent at best.  This is the real abomination of the Trump presidency -- pushing American exceptionalism at the expense of authentic global problem solving.  

National exceptionalism is inherent to our system of democratic nation states.  It's not surprising that both Republicans and Democrats often favor national, as opposed to human, rights.  The attention being given to immigrant detainees in the U.S. is admirable in this respect.  Each human life deserves respect -- the millions of suffering Venezuelans and Yemenis as much as the thousands of detained would-be immigrants; the victims of bipartisan policies as much as the victims of partisan policies.

The immigration issue is founded on the failure of U.S. sponsored states in Central America.  Hillary Clinton, for example, intervened as Secretary of State in support of a military coup in Honduras:

In 2009, when a military coup deposed President Manuel Zelaya at the insistence of the country's Supreme Court, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton supported the government that was installed by the coup. While Clinton was running for president, she argued, especially to Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez, that the coup was at least nominally constitutional, and that supporting the deposing of Zelaya was the least-bad option. That remains debatable, but what does not remain debatable is that Honduras subsequently descended into the present chaos.

I support the Democrats as the more reasonable of our two major political parties.  I want the Democrats to focus on the real problems and avoid the cheap shots at Putin and at Trump for detaining would-be-immigrants.  These are distractions from serious problems, and will ultimately backfire, in my opinion. 

We have already witnessed the Democrats expending extreme amounts of energy in supporting the Mueller investigation and, now impeachment, on the basis of that investigation.  Since this is not going anywhere, the turn to immigrant rights is seen as a shortcut to getting rid of the despised Republican president.  But this risks playing into Trump's hands.  Illegal immigration is not a politically winning position.  Protecting minority rights is important, but works best when accompanied by concern for what benefits the majority.  That, after all, is the essence of democracy.

Solutions

In a previous post, I commented on  a column by David Brooks entitled It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption, What the Mueller report says about our world.  Brooks concludes that the society is being attacked by nihilism, getting people to believe the system is rigged leading to a power vacuum where the unscrupulous can get away with various bad deeds.

And today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.)

Brooks offers no solutions in that column, but I know from reading him in the past that he is favor of more civility in public discourse, as well as bi-partisan dialog.  I agree with him wholeheartedly on these points.

The mainstream media can help get the country moving back in the right direction by more comprehensively and objectively covering issues involving "intelligence".  As I noted here, the mainstream media, including especially our newspapers of record (the NY Times and Washington Post), are not covering important facts and opinions regarding some of the most important issues facing our country.  Instead, the mainstream media is feeding us selective facts according to our supposed national interests as determined by the defense/intelligence establishment.

Here's an article from May 2017 that discusses the NY Times lack of coverage of various non-establishment perspectives:  Six Ways the New York Times Could Genuinely Make Its Op-Ed Page More Representative of America.  The article notes that the paper of record doesn't employ a single columnist who supports Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.

With regard to the Washington Post, it ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours leading up to a crucial Democratic presidential primary debate.  In February 2019, in the space of 48 hours after Sanders declared his candidacy for the presidency, the Post churned out four negative pieces.

So my take is that the mainstream media bears some responsibility for the Trump nightmare.  By supporting the establishment line and not giving voice to legitimate points of view in favor of change, they opened the door for legitimate populist distrust of status quo institutions.  Since Trump came to power, they have compounded the problem by taking a partisan line unsupported by the evidence with regard to investigation of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.  The mainstream media has thus given legitimacy to the nihilistic operations of Trump and his contingent.

Until such time as the mainstream media improves in this respect, I suggest that the solution is to seek the truth more independently, and to support populist candidates with a greater respect for the truth.  Support alternative media.  Withdraw support from the mainstream media.

Why do people read the NY Times?  Are they aware of alternatives?  Personally, I read the Times on occasion and watch NBC News nightly because these media operations have big budgets and standards, so they are able to provide relevant information and screen out a lot of not so credible stuff.  On the other hand, I find that there are many small media outlets on the Internet that cover the gaps and misinformation emanating from outlets such as the Times and NBC.  But it takes time and a certain comfort level with the Internet to do this, and many people apparently do not consider this a high priority.  Many would rather protest what the mainstream media tells us to protest (Trump), than to protest the mainstream media itself.  Obviously there's a need for and room for both.  But we've reached the point where the media (e.g. David Brooks) is telling us the media is the problem.  With a little more self-awareness, people like Brooks would probably be fired as have so many dissenting journalists.

So it's up to us to speak out against the mainstream media bias in favor of the status quo.  Of special urgency is the need to question the use of military/intelligence sources as sources of truth with regard to foreign affairs.  Let's hear what Tulsi Gabbard has to say and evaluate it fairly. 

It is natural that the establishment media will support the establishment economic and military/intelligence leaders.   Having been under attack for decades by the likes of Fox News and other right wing populists, we now see the establishment media responding in kind by eschewing objective reporting in favor of blatant partisanship.  The first step in restoring civil national discourse is to turn this around and deal with Fox News, Bernie Sanders, and Tulsi Gabbard in a more objective fashion.  There is no doubt a time for partisan warfare, but that should be after all other options have been exhausted. 

We are better off pulling together as a nation to the extent possible, and the principles of Getting to Yes can be useful in this regard: 

1. Separate the People from the Problem:  Yes, Trump is a pathological liar.  That doesn't mean that intelligence services are giving us the unvarnished truth with regard to conspiracy with Russia.  
2. Focus on Interests, not Positions:  Yes, we are interested in equal application of the law.  But, this is a pervasive problem in the U.S. as opposed to an isolated case of Trump obstructing justice.  Perhaps we should consider more seriously the legitimate issues raised by populists on both the left and the right.
3. Invent Options for Mutual Gain:  Instead of digging into a renewed Cold War, perhaps we should be more open to working with Putin and Russia, for example.
4. Insist on Using Objective Criteria in Decision Making:  The upcoming election provides a good opportunity for us to hold leaders accountable by electing better leaders.  The president is already accountable to the people as he must face reelection.  The intelligence agencies cannot always be relied upon to be objective as they are not always accountable for their actions and operate in secrecy.

Focus on the goal of a free and open society where majority rules, and minority rights are protected.

Our Press Sucks

I've become convinced that the newspapers of record in the U.S. are propaganda outlets for elements of the government and intelligence slash military services.  The lack of coverage on a number of recent new stories exemplifies this:

• U.S. Propaganda Regarding Venezuela Proven False
• Lyme Disease Spread from  U.S. Biological Weapons Facility on Plum Island, NY
• Exposé in "The Hill" challenges Mueller, media
• Ten Points I Just Can’t Believe About the Official Skripal Narrative
• Steele and Skripal: A Unified Theory
• Big Dots — Do They Connect? Steele and Skripal Revisited
• Why has Britain given such a warm welcome to this shadowy professor?
• The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate

The mainstream media occasionally hints that they know better.  The NY Times eventually confirmed the alternative press finding regarding the Venezuelan aid truck fire (first bullet point above), although it was mostly ignored subsequently.  One article above is from a mainstream newspaper, The Guardian.  With regard to one of supposedly key sections of the Mueller report, Taibbi points out that the NY Times published an in-depth analysis consistent with the exposé in The Hill.  However, these are the exceptions.

I have to agree with Taibbi:  

MSNBC burned up countless hours obsessing over the Manafort-Kilimnik relationship. You can find the tale discussed ad nauseum here, here, here, here, and in many other places, with Kilimnik routinely described on air as a “Russian asset” with “ties to Russian intelligence,” who even bragged that he learned his English from Russian spies.

CNN has likewise done a gazillion reports on the guy: see here, here, here, here, and here. Some reports said Manafort’s conduct “hints” at collusion, while Chris Cilizza said his meetings with a “Russian-linked operative” were a “very big deal.” Bloviator-in-chief Jake Tapper wondered if this story was “Game, Set, Match” for the collusion case. Anytime a Democrat spoke about how “stunning” and “damning” was the news that Manafort gave Kilimnik poll numbers, reporters repeated those assertions in a snap.

I could go up and down the line with the Times,the Washington Post, and other print outlets. Every major news organization that covered Russiagate has covered the hell out of this part of the story. But the instant there’s a suggestion there’s another angle: crickets. 

Russiagate is fast becoming a post-journalistic news phenomenon. We live in an information landscape so bifurcated, media companies don’t cover news, because they can stick with narratives. Kilimnik being a regular State Department informant crosses the MSNBC-approved line that he’s a Russian cutout who tried to leverage Donald Trump’s campaign manager. So it literally has no news value to many companies, even if it’s clearly a newsworthy item according to traditional measure.

Incidentally, Solomon’s report being true wouldn’t necessarily exonerate either Kilimnik or Manafort. It may just mean a complication of the picture, along with uncomfortable questions for Robert Muller and embassy officials who dealt with Kilimnik. That’s what’s so maddening. We’ve gotten to the point where news editors and producers are more like film continuity editors — worried about maintaining literary consistency in coverage — than addressing newsworthy developments that might move us into gray areas.

Our press sucks. There are third-world dictatorships where newspapers try harder than they do here. We used to at least pretend to cover the bases. Now, we’re a joke.