It’s A Little Like A Train Wreck

So inevitable, so awful you shouldn’t watch. But you do. I was weak this morning.

That’s Marc Thiessen.

But his latest WaPo column, in which he makes the mistake of trying to boost President Trump by comparing him with his own Party’s arguably biggest mistake, President Nixon, is useful in that it’s diagnostic of the many problems of the current iteration of the Republican Party. He even provides a lovely summary of some of its Holy Tenets:

So, in many ways the Trump presidency is like deja vu all over again. Except that Trump is, at least for conservatives, arguably a much better president than was Nixon. While Nixon had a mixed record in Supreme Court appointments, Trump has, so far, given us two of the strongest conservative justices in modern history. While the chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, bragged that, under Nixon, “probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” Trump has given us a historic regulatory rollback. While Nixon boasted over dramatic cuts in defense spending, Trump has enacted historic increases. While Nixon’s 1969 tax reform increased taxes, Trump’s reforms have cut them. While Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, Trump has unleashed our forces against the Islamic State and has halted the withdrawal from Afghanistan begun during the Obama administration.

Nixon also showed us that our constitutional system of checks and balances works, and that if the president crosses a constitutional line, the rule of law will prevail. And while Nixon resigned over Watergate, we still don’t know how the Russia inquiry will turn out. It may well be that there was no criminal conspiracy with Russia. Even knowing what we know about Watergate, the United States would not have been better off with George McGovern as president, just as we would not be better off today with Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Shall we extract the Holy Tenets?

1. A conservative XYZ is a good XYZ. A corollary to the entire cancerous team politics tenet which I’ve discussed at nauseating length, it’s wrong on so many levels in the SCOTUS scenario, as well as just about any other. I’ll list just a few for brevity’s sake: It suggests the judiciary should be politicized; that political orientation is far more important than judicial competency; and that, if you don’t like the judicial results, just replace the bleeding judges. That last is itself the result of the Holy Tenet that the Party Can Never Be Wrong Because God Is Behind It. So sorry, sometimes you’re just in the wrong. Fact is, liberals and conservatives can both screw things up, or get them right. A sober commentator wouldn’t actually be mentioning Gorsuch (IJ) or Kavanaugh for at least 5 years. Gorsuch has barely had a term, and Kavanaugh? Two weeks.
2. Regulation is always bad. It’s become the most dangerous refrain in American Republican politics, with apologies to Hillary. Regulation impairs corporate profit. Well, yes, sometimes it does. It’s helpful to return to the basics of society and remember that profit is a goal of the private sector, not the public (or government) sector. Government exists as a protective mechanism for society, from outside invaders, and, just as importantly, from internal mistakes. The are typically human behaviors which negatively impact other members of society. In the intentional category we can dump most crime, and in the unintentional category we can put a few crimes, pollution, and other behaviors such as reckless driving. In the broadest sense of the word, regulation is how government goes about its business in the internal mistakes category.

   Regulation, like any tool, is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Is a hammer good or bad? Depends on its use. Same with regulation. If Thiessen thinks regulation is always bad, let’s get rid of all murder statutes and see how well society works out in the long run. Yeah, nod along with me.

   But, as noted, Republicans use the word regulation to mean regulation of the private sector, and then claim that’s bad because it impairs corporate profit. The trick here is to refuse to accept the implicit metric of profit as the appropriate measure of regulation. It’s not. If you have the time and attention span – most of us don’t – go read my link concerning sectors of society. While I don’t think I ever addressed metrics explicitly in one place, it’s implicit. We often, mistakenly, judge the success of a company by its profitability. But here’s a good party (the one with horse ovaries) question for the businessman loudly opining what government needs him to run it right: What’s an appropriate profit margin for government? Yeah, he’ll sputter, because his metric – his favorite, all-important metric – has no application in the context of the government.

   I spoke of brevity earlier, so I’ll cut this short: discovering the metrics of government is one of the most important jobs of the citizen, because only then will they know if their elected officials and their functionaries are doing a good job. Strong military? Sure. An effective, uncorrupt police? Yeah. No regulation so all the companies are more profitable? Gotcha. Monitor and protect the lakes, the rivers, and, while you’re at it, CO₂ content of the air. That’s the duty of government.

3. The military needs more money. We’re used to the old trope, a Republican Holy Tenet, that Democrats are weak on defense and the Republicans are strong, but that’s just propaganda – and damaging propaganda at that. It’s a rare politician, wannabe or paid, that isn’t for more money for Defense.

   Defense serves an existential purpose, yes. But the military does not produce things of general consumer use, and the research required to develop new military war machines only develops useful things for the consumer by accident, and, at least as of 40 years ago when I did the research, not at the same rate, per $, as does the space program. My point? I recall in my libertarian reading that economists generally see Defense as a drag on the economy, not a general boost. Sure, start a new munitions plant and it’s good for the town its in – until it shuts down and its toxic waste must be found and dealt with. But that doesn’t translate as good for the country. Those people could have been making, say, smartphones, rather than bullets. Bullets that sit around and do little (but see fleet in being).

   So the trick is to determine the proper level of funding for the military, along with the composition of the military (Dreadnaughts? No. Best bombers? Yes.) For me, the fact that we outspend the next 7 countries suggests we’re overspending. China, three times larger than us, is #2, and has about a third of our budget.
   We’ve been at war for nearly 20 years now, and if you want to talk about drains on the economy, the military is a big one. Both Democrats and Republicans generally favor perpetually bigger military budgets, but Nixon understood that the military was a drag – and that’s why he celebrated being able to cut the Defense budget. Perhaps we should follow that example, rather than follow the Holy Tenet.

4. Taxes are evil. No, simply no. There’s the Kansas debacle. There’s the thought experiment – if taxes are evil, let’s drive them to zero and bask in the paradise of … ooops, you’re dead because a murderer got you. No cops or prison guards.

   Government services must be paid for, period end of sentence. At its heart, that’s a conservative (but not Republican) tenet. This has economic ramifications (see: Kansas debacle, above), for, if the services are inadequate, then corporations have trouble operating, and those that can will withdraw.

   Borrowing, to a point, works, but many economists are worried that the current level of Federal borrowing is distorting the economy, which makes it harder to predict and manage. I’m not an economist, but I know enough not to be captive to the “government budget” is the same as a “family budget” false analogy.

   I’ll stop here on this topic because the link above also discusses very briefly the application of bell curves to taxation levels, so go read that if interested.

5. We could have won Vietnam. Only if we wanted to be barbarians. ISIS, on the other hand, is relatively weaker, with a weaker ideology. Beware simplistic false comparisons. The military, under Obama’s direction, had them on the run, and fortunately Trump didn’t meddle overmuch. The real trick is to keep them extinguished.
6. Nixon was better than McGovern. An unanswerable question. Maybe McGovern would have been wonderful. But it betrays the Party’s own insecurity when it’s forced to claim its criminal President was better than a hypothetical President.
7. Hillary’s evil! Sad, sad, sad. She’s evil, and yet every investigation of her has turned up … nothing. Investigations led by hostile Republican leaders with prosecutorial chops … nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. She’s been investigated something like ten times. Nothing, wash, lather, repeat, nothing.

   Her real offense? Her husband, President Bill Clinton, was a better politician than all of them put together. I never liked Bill, though I voted for him twice as a political independent, but he was undeniably better than his opponents, be they named Dole or Gingrich or Bush.

   So when Thiessen claims we’re better off with Trump than Hillary, it pays to remember that virtually every professional group associated with the government, including national security groups, endorsed Hillary in the 2016 campaign, not Trump, and Trump has turned out to be a national security disaster.

   It pays to remember that Hillary has been a success at just about everything she’s worked at, with the notable exception of the Clinton health plan.

   It pays to remember that Trump has been a failure at just about everything he’s worked at, with the notable exception of his TV show, The Apprentice.

   So, if you’re an intellectually honest person, do you go with the guy with failure to his name and lies as his background, or the woman with success to her name and no scandals attached, despite determined efforts by the Republicans to attach them?

   Thiessen’s shallow intellectual roots are showing when he states this Holy Tenet.

A Party built, in part, on the above tenets isn’t viable over the long term. Ossified, paranoid, and using deceit to keep its members in line, the Republican Party will need to be burned down before it can be rebuilt into a respectable governance candidate.

And that’s bad for America. The leaders of the Republican Party have really let the Country down.

Let’s hope the rebuilding starts on Tuesday.