Particularities & Generalities about Ryancare

Trump is settling into the background noise (as we can only hope), while the real players are in the Congress and the Cabinet. Trump may hold a triumphal self-promotion event in the Rose Garden to celebrate getting an Obamacare repeal bill through the House of Representatives, but that is only a stunt because a new bill will be crafted in the Senate that may look very different from the bill Speaker Ryan got through the House. Remember that Trump’s election was itself a fluke, not a trend, much less “a movement”, as he likes to put it. Journalists like to tie his election to Brexit, which had its distinct sources in the failures of the European Union, and to tie it to Marine Le Pen, but look what happened to her.

So we have to look elsewhere than to Trump to find out what is happening in government, and an insight into, at least, how politicians argue about health care policy was available yesterday at, among other places, George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show on ABC. Politicians and journalists, first of all, when they talk about policy issues, by and large do not these days begin with axiomatic statements that they then apply to the particulars of Ryancare. They do not argue about whether people do or do not have a right to health care, even though, by the way, Ryan made it clear that if people don’t want insurance, they shouldn’t be forced to get it, and so people have no right of coverage, even if they do have a right of care, which means that they can always go to emergency rooms where the costs will be picked up by insurance companies and state governments. But Ryan does not too much refer to first principles because outright saying that healthcare is a luxury purchase rather than a right might make him seem hard hearted. So he prefers to appear as someone who is just making health insurance better.

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Citizenship & Voting

Voting is an ineluctable part of citizenship in a modern representative democracy. But Jefferson thought that it was very difficult to be a good citizen who casts a responsible vote even if he also thought that every yeoman farmer (who was white) should have the vote. Jefferson proposed universal elementary education so that citizens would be literate enough so that they could evaluate whether the candidates would represent their interests. That would enable a lot of people to vote and at the same time vote sensibly. The history of voting behavior in the United States, however, suggests that there are a great many things that interfere with the voter offering up in his or her vote his or her best judgment about what is good for his or her faction and for the nation as a whole, and so the promise of democracy as a system of government which justifies itself as having been empowered by the people is called into question.

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Democratic Presidential Timber

For those of us who participate in the Hot Stove League of presidential politics or, to switch the metaphor, who await the arrival of our spring planting seed catalogues in mid-winter, it is never too early to estimate the horseflesh that will compete in the Derby (to add a third metaphor to a single opening sentence). My early judgment is that there are many capable Democrats, seasoned by executive or legislative experience, but that none of them have the added oomph of an outsized personality that Trump seems to have made the only qualification for a Presidential nomination or victory, and that may be Trump’s only contribution (if we are so lucky) to American political history. Let us review the tout sheet.

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Misplaced Hopes for the Midterms?

Democrats read special congressional elections, such as the soon to take place runoff in Georgia’s Sixth between Ossoff and Handler, as tea leaves by which to forecast the 2018 Midterm elections. They have set high hopes on taking back the Congress because the Congress will do nothing or because Trump will do something awful in the meantime. How could anyone who voted for him (aside from his true believers) not be disappointed by the actuality of his Presidency and so overcome whatever were the motives that led them to vote for him in 2016? Moreover, there is the ever looming prediction that sooner or later the demographics of the South will catch up with it and return it to the Democratic column because the South is so far better educated than it was in the past, has put its regional issues, especially those of race, aside, and Hispanics and Blacks and retirees from the North will all contribute to swinging the South to being part of what will become a permanent Democratic majority. So Democrats look forward to the deliverance of the country to them. But I am not sure it will happen and I want to explain why.

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Nothing Happening

Have you noticed that nothing much has been happening in Washington since the attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare went down to defeat? Yes, there was the two day interest in the raid on the Syrian airfield, but that was a mild response not readily criticized because of the atrocity that had led to it and leaving everything in the middle east still unresolved. And there was the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which was never much in doubt, the Senate left in no greater disarray than it had been beforehand. But do you notice that Trump is not as much in the headlines as he used to be, when he dominated every news cycle with his tweets and outlandish claims? He may actually be trying to govern, but is finding that it is not that easy, “more complicated than anyone thought”-- which is to say, more complicated, it turns out, then only he thought. The legislative agenda is frozen. Trump people do not know how they can put together the Republican votes for a tax bill or for an infrastructure bill anymore than they could find a way to a health care bill. And so the tabloid papers no longer put Trump on the front cover but on the inside pages, leaving the usual crimes and accidents to attract the eyes of readers. The prison on Riker’s Island is scheduled to close and starlets show off their legs. It isn’t easy being President if you are not doing very much and if you have cut down on outrageous tweets in the hope of appearing more Presidential.


Another way to say this is that what has changed in the past few  weeks is that foreign policy has returned to normal, to the central tendency it had taken from Bush 41 through Obama, the exception being Bush 43, who went off the rails in Iraq and had, earlier, been too unwilling to commit American troops in Afghanistan. The rest stays the same. Relations with Russia are testy, just as they have been ever since Putin took power. We cultivate Arab dictators, though Trump is more fulsome than Obama would have been in his support of Sisi, probably because Trump does not know how to modulate his tone. Trump nowhere acknowledges his campaign contempt for the Iran Nuclear Deal, perhaps because he has been told that no better deal could be forged. Syria remains the same dreadful civil war into which the United States will not intervene, even if Trump, like Obama, drew a line against chemical weapons. And the North Koreans continue to develop their atomic weapons, Trump no better able to stop that than any of his predecessors, and we shall see what happens when North Korea presents a clear danger to the United States, and whether the Congress or the American people are prepared for decisive action of one sort or another. And so talking heads give sighs of relief that nothing really bad has happened so far in foreign policy and are amazed at his surrender to the foreign policy establishment. Today, Trump said NATO was ok and that China would not be cited for currency manipulation. Hurrah! The standards are dumbed down since Bush 43. Just don’t be foolish, and from Trump something foolhardy was and remains a fear.

Syrian Decision Time

In one sense, the government is operating as it is supposed to in its response to the Syrian atrocity. The National Security Council will offer up to the President a number of practical ways to respond to the Syrian use of chemical weapons. These will be well considered by the foreign policy professionals. President Trump, for his part, has fulfilled his role by announcing a change of policy based on his gut response that chemical weapons require a response even if just a few days before he had said that Assad’s regime is not his concern. That changed sense may or may not reflect what the American people think and they will form their own judgment, partly on the basis of how successful are the military efforts that are likely to be made. Will the loss of American pilots lead the American people to think a military option was bound to be a failure? Will the Russians dumping Assad lead the American people to think a military policy was a success? These are the moments when a President wins or loses, his own judgment and reputation and style of governing in the dock.

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Two Congressional Hearings

The two hearings that have dominated the news at the beginning of this week, the appearance of the head of the FBI to announce to the House Intelligence Committee that there was an ongoing investigation of the connections between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and the appearance of Judge Gorsuch at the Senate Judiciary Committee before a vote takes place on his nomination to be a member of the United States Supreme Court, is that neither of these hearings was necessary. Both were occasions that simply demonstrate that Congress thinks it is doing business when it holds hearings. These people love any occasion when they are able to sound off, although it is also possible that most of them couldn’t absorb information if it was presented to them only in the form of documents.

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Culture and Taxation

It is certainly possible for Liberals and Conservatives to engage in a public policy debate about what items should be collectively purchased, like armies, through government taxation, and what items, like luxury cars, should be a matter of individual purchase, money for the item directly out of the consumer’s pocket rather than out of the tax dollars paid into the general fund for the government to spend as it wishes. There are difficult cases. Should the upkeep of a car be included in the welfare budget for a rural person who needs a car to get around, much less to get a job? Should everyone pay for parks even if only some people use them? The issue of what is the proper kind of purchase arises at the moment with regard to building infrastructure. Should it be by the government through what would at the moment be very low interest bonds? Or should it be by private investors who use tax incentives to go into the business of building toll roads? I would prefer direct government purchase of roads, and that is the Liberal preference, though until recently it was also the Conservative preference, Eisenhower having financed the interstate highway system in the Fifties with government money, even if the building of the railroads some seventy-five years before that was only indirectly financed by the government because the government provided free or very cheap and very broad rights of way to the railroad barons of the time.

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Ryancare

The reason Republicans don’t care how the Congressional Budget Office scores the Republican healthcare plan to replace Obamacare is that they are under the illusion that the free market, if left to its own devices, will come up with ways to lower the cost of insurance and so allow more and more people to keep coverage. Let insurers sell policies across state lines, which means that they will offer policies that are so bare bones as to be useless, but people will have become “free” to choose the plan they prefer. The truth of the matter, to the contrary, is that the idea of the free market failed to explain or prevent other economic problems, like the Great Recession and what to do about the ten percent of the population that probably can’t hold down places in the work force, and the market model is just as wildly inapplicable to medical care. Even back in the days of horse and buggy medicine, when the town doctor could do little but set bones, see you through a bout of an infectious disease, or tell your family that you were dead, doctors engaged in a sliding scale of fees, charging their poorer patients less than they did their wealthier ones, accepting a few chickens as remuneration for attending a farm family. The poor depended on charity wards and free clinics or went without. All this at the same time that late nineteenth century capitalism was developing a system of standard prices openly advertised as such so as to rationalize merchandising. You didn’t haggle over the price in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. It was different at the other end of the ladder. George Bernard Shaw, in “The Doctor’s Dilemma” shows Harley Street physicians out to make a buck by selling useless nostrums and surgeries for made up diseases to their patients because they could get away with it. Going to a doctor was like going to a spa is today for the self-pampered rich. The best that could be said of it was that it did no harm.

 

 

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Trump's Rebellion

Samuel Freeman, in the latest number of “The New York Review of Books”, gives an adequate but hardly inspired presentation of the Frankfurt School, that group of German intellectuals which advocated a cultural Marxism that became very popular in this country during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, but which seems less and less relevant to contemporary concerns. Why could we have believed that Madison Avenue was the arch-enemy of all that was holy, when all it was out to do was sell deodorant? “Madmen” was very good at parodying the supposed insights of advertising men into the American psyche, which was more interested in moving to the suburbs and putting their kids into college than in whether Doris Day played a virgin just once too often. Freeman, however, insists on making what has become almost an obligatory reference these days in “The New York Review of Books” to the Trump election. He says that the Frankfurt School got the hang of the kind of authoritarian leader Trump is: an enemy of reason tied up with demagoguery and capitalism both at once. But that is to take just the wrong reading of Trump, who is neither an ideologue nor the prisoner of capitalism but is out there on his own, hardly even aware of the radical right forces he has empowered to do their own bidding rather than his.

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What the Future Holds

Let us construct a plausible narrative for the future of the Trump Administration, that being possible because narratives can be predictive. They are not just the conventions through which stories are told but also discoveries about chains of causation as those apply in human endeavor, sometimes a story coming back upon itself and sometimes just enlarging upon itself. Werther just can’t let go of Charlotte and devote his life to translating Ossian, and neither can Raskolnikov let go of his guilt, while Dickens is filled with new beginnings, and Jane Austen’s new beginnings are always with the same people rediscovering their ties to one another.

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The Almost State of the Union Address

President Trump’s address to Congress last night was a dull affair. That is because he was trying to sound Presidential and so gave his standard stump speech without the insults and so came across as a dullard, the speech without any rousing rhetoric or programmatic weight. The talking heads that afterwards opined on the speech caught its gist quickly. Trump had drawn back from the offer of legalization to undocumented immigrants that he had hinted at earlier in the day and had pinched some of Paul Ryan’s talking points about what the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare would look like, but was hardly committed to that. Nor had Trump specified how to pay for an infrastructure program when the key issue there is whether to fund it through what would be very low interest bonds, which the Democrats would support, or through tax breaks to financiers, which the Democrats would not support. Trump could not bring himself to avoid telling lies, as when he said that the money from the European countries to pay for their own defense is just rolling in, because such money would not be payments to the United States but increases in their own defense budgets. Maybe Trump, as is his wont, was just speaking loosely, and so was not so much lying as misunderstanding the issue. Commentators mistake him by thinking there is much more there than there is. Chuck Schumer says Trump says one thing, his Populist message, and delivers another, which is a right wing program, but that is to mistake him as having a message at all rather than just a set of slogans that he endlessly repeats, those tied together only by Trump’s own meanness, not any ideological cogency. That’s all there is, folks. Stop expecting more.

The Mass Deportation

Well, we had to wait a month into his term for President Trump to do something really outlandish, and he finally has. He has issued deportation orders that could affect a majority of the eleven million or so illegal aliens in our midst because it seems that he is willing to deport even those who have engaged in such minor infractions as lying to an employer about their immigration status, and so the President is going far beyond the deportation of serious felons that was government policy when Obama was President. Trump also wants to scale up the number of agents available to do the job so that it can indeed be done. So much for those who said it would be impossible to deport all those people. It can be done. If you want to do something terrible, you can find a way, and also believe them when they say they are going to do it. Millions and millions of people are going to have their lives disrupted, perhaps irreparably, by being dumped into Mexico, even if they originally come from nations in Central America, Mexico not wanting them and perhaps not providing them with resettlement services unless the United States pays for those. Fat chance. So we are facing a major catastrophe. Rescinding the Obama doctrine on people using the bathroom of the sex with which they identify is a bad and inhumane policy, but it affects very few people while the deportation orders affect, as I say, up to ten million people.

 

The only ones spared by the Trump deportation orders are the DACA children, though they might lose their parents to deportation. In retrospect, which means a few years time, this entire episode will be seen as inhumane as Andrew Jackson moving the Cherokees west, but in the meantime, arguments are made that Trump is, after all, just keeping a campaign promise, and that nations, after all, have to defend their borders. Well, he also promised to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem but better judgment prevailed. Why create problems where there are none? And the idea of carefully protecting our borders against immigrants is less than a century old. Immigrants entering through Castle Garden, which was the entry point to New York before Ellis Island was established, just signed in and went on their way to local hotels and rooming houses. And at Ellis Island the main concern was communicable disease. Vetting of immigrants did not start until after the First World War. Americans should be proud of their tradition of open borders even if we do need to vet against Islamic terrorists, but we already do that, so what is the problem?

 

So far, the President has been bluster without consequence and I had hoped but not really thought that he would content himself with that. Even the order halting immigration from seven mostly Moslem countries made a certain amount of sense. A President has a great deal of leeway in determining what is and what is not a threat to the country. He can include in his calculations a hunch about where or from where an attack might take place. So it was not unreasonable to think that the seven unstable countries might be the source of attacks even if they had not been so until now, and it was reasonable to exclude Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the ban because those are erstwhile allies, whatever their histories. Consistency in principle is not the most important thing in foreign policy. We enlisted Vichy generals and admirals and made supposed common cause with Stalin all in order to win the Second World War. So why pick an additional fight with Pakistan when we don’t have to. Yes, the ban on immigrants may have made life inconvenient for some people, delaying them in their travels, but not for all that many, and virtually any act of foreign policy is going to inconvenience some people, and that is not enough reason to not go ahead with it. Yes, it was bad policy because some people were indeed inconvenienced and, more than that, frightened that they would never get to this country, but the new version of that travel ban should get rid of the obvious clinkers, like keeping out people who were already holders of green cards. So, all in all, the real problem with the ban was that there was no real point to it, no real danger that it avoided, all of it just the product of Trump’s simplistic imagination to do something no matter how irrelevant it is to the problem at hand so long as it suits his sense of what is right, which means find a way to punish people for what he takes to be the bad behavior of the world.


But this deportation edict is worse than that. It not only addresses a problem that doesn’t exist, which is that illegal immigrants bring crime with them, when in fact they commit crimes less frequently than American citizens, but instead provide workers necessary to the country because they fill jobs American citizens are unwilling to fill, but because the orders bring with them a great deal of real suffering to a great number of real people, all to salve Trump’s conscience that it is just not right for illegals to be here at all. The infliction of gratuitous suffering would seem to be the opposite of justice but it is in fact the substance of justice. Think of the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust, both launched in the name of solemn principles and undertaken with the sense of more in sorrow than in anger (look at the Nazi propaganda of the time), but really undertaken to alleviate in draconian manner a problem that did not exist.

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"I Inherited a Mess"

The most startling quote from President Trump’s notably vituperous press conference last week was not his jousting with the press the way Nixon, in his last days, had jousted with the likes of Dan Rather. Instead, it was the remark that provided the New York Times with its headline the next day: “I inherited a mess”. This was not one of Trump’s many lies. Rather, it showed just how bad his judgment is on foreign policy, even if there are many voters who agreed with him about a point he had been making since the Eighties, which is that the government makes disastrous foreign policy choices all the time. For Trump, gloom and doom is a reflex reaction; for the population as a whole, I take it, it is because they have such a short term memory that they forget how bad things have been and also have a very poor imagination for conceiving just how very bad they could become again.

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One or Two States

The self inflicted crises in the still less than one month old Trump Administration keep coming so fast and furious. There was the immigration ban, now pushed out of the news, though there still remains on the table whether the scale of deportations has increased since Trump took over. There was the Flynn resignation, the furor over which suggests that that there is much more to be said about the connection of the Trump campaign and the Trump Cabinet with the Russians than has yet been made public, but that insiders already know there is something to it, for otherwise why care so much that one official proved unsuitable for his job. Then there is Netanyahu coming into town to announce with the President that the time of the two state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over, to be replaced, possibly, by a one state solution. This, actually, may be a good idea, even though the New York Times dismisses it simply because it is not what has been United States policy for twenty years now. Let us sort out the meaning of the proposal, Netanyahu, we may assume, fully comprehending what this initiative is while the President, as usual, falls for a phrase and can’t look beyond that.

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A Democratic Resurgence

Democrats are down in the dumps that they lost the Presidency to such an unworthy contender. It is one thing for Hillary to have lost the Presidency the first time to Barack Obama, who is so charming that he could have won a third term if he had been allowed to run. After all, the economy is chugging along and foreign affairs are under control, Obama having declared the Middle East a place to stay out of. But it was quite another thing for her to have lost to Donald Trump, the most unqualified candidate in history, who is boorish and inarticulate even if also outspoken. The Donald, all the prognosticators said, would have to pull an inside straight to win, and that is just what he did.

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What To Do With the Supreme Court

Democrats are wondering whether and how fiercely to oppose Donald Trump’ nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Some say he is too far to the right; others say it is revenge time for Republican blockage of Merritt Garland who was nominated by Obama but never given even a hearing before the Republican controlled Senate. As Rachel Maddow pointed out, approval of Supreme Court nominees has become particularly contentious since Gore v. Bush, but it goes back to the denial of a seat to Robert Bork, who was extremely well qualified, a quality which Trump pointed out about his own nominee last night. So the debate is about Senate politics. Should the Democrats oppose the nomination and possibly get the Republicans to change the rules, which is the so called “Nuclear Option” because it would mean that so many of the customs by which the Senate operates would no longer be respected by one side or another and the Senate might well as a consequence grind to a halt.

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The First Week

The things the President has done during the first week of his Administration are mainstream Conservative or largely symbolic and so do not yet set forth changes of policy that are as radical as the Trump posturing would have the citizenry believe, though it is also the case that really bad things may well arrive in our future, and so justify Liberal forebodings. Trump is, for the moment, instituting the policies he campaigned on, which is something for which new incumbents of the Presidency usually receive compliments because they have remained true to their promises, but Trump’s campaign issues were largely jokes, not of serious moment, and so it is largely of no consequence that he is carrying them out.

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The Radicalism of Donald Trump

No one knows what Donald Trump will do when he assumes office this Friday, which for me and the people I know seems like the first day of the Apocalypse, the sun darkening at high noon and the ghosts of FDR’s euphonious arch-villains, “Martin, Barton, and Fish”, arising from crypts beneath the Capitol Visitors Bureau to carry out their job of stripping America not only of Obamacare and what is left of the Great Society but also of the legislation that goes back to the New Deal and to the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt. The Cabinet appointees said about as much in their confirmation hearings. The nominee for Interior Secretary talked about how much he admired Theodore Roosevelt but also said we have to rethink the use of national lands so as to allow for more drilling. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services made clear that he wants to gut Medicare. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education wants to reverse the seventy year old Supreme Court decision that government cannot support parochial education for children. So what his ultra-right Cabinet wants to do is clear, but what Trump wants to do is not.

 

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Untrustworthy People

 All people are to some extent or other trustworthy. We trust people to keep their word or show up at work or to respect a confidence-- most of the time. It would be very difficult for social life to proceed if this were not the case. We would find ourselves in some feral case of society, a Hobbesian world where all doors had to be locked, people always asked to show their credentials, people always looking over their shoulders, unless there were an all pervasive state to look to the enforcement of what are generally considered normal states of freedom or lack of fear. And all people are also sometimes or other untrustworthy in that they lapse in picking up things at the store, can be unfaithful to their spouses, and in many different ways shade the truth to leave an impression that does not square with the truth.  

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