Month: August 2020

It’s telling that one of the few speakers at this week’s Republican National Convention who directly addressed President Donald Trump’s trade policies ended up inadvertently undermining the White House’s case for protectionism.

The speaker was Debbie Flood, owner of the Melron Corporation, an architectural foundry and machine shop in Schofield, Wisconsin. “We really make things, and we love it,” Flood explained in pre-recorded remarks aired Thursday.

Flood’s speech followed a predictable line of argument. In the early part of the 21st century, as China became a global manufacturing force, she watched as orders dwindled away. “When we lost nearly 50 percent of our business to China,” she said, “we wonder how a small company like ours could continue to compete.” She accused Joe Biden of being indirectly responsible for the damage to her business, because he’d supported efforts to normalize trade with China and to bring China into the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, even though those actions “were hurting American companies like ours.”

This argument has been, essentially, the root of Trump’s economic nationalist agenda for the past four years. Trump believes that increased trade with China has been a losing prospect for the United States and that the political establishment has been complicit in letting China “continue stealing our jobs, ripping us off, and robbing our country blind,” as the president said in his acceptance speech later that night. He has erected new barriers to trade with China—though they’ve mostly been ineffective—and has promised to take even more aggressive action if re-elected.

Given all that, you’d expect Flood to tell us how Trump’s intervention in the global marketplace has saved her business, or at least allowed her to regain some of what she’d lost.

Instead, her story took an unexpected turn.

“We are tenacious and we’re creative,” she said. “We took a risk and purchased a 3D printer. 3D printing technology allows us to do things that China can’t. Now, we can take a customer’s idea from sketch to sample to production in just a few weeks. This opened up new opportunities for us.”

In short, Flood argued that increased competition from China forced her company to innovate, to invest in new technology, and to seek out new customers. Instead of making the case for protecting American businesses from overseas competition, she ended up essentially offering the opposite.

Flood’s brief remarks highlighted the economic and intellectual contradiction at the center of Trump’s “America First” economic strategy. The president and his supporters claim that our businesses are the most successful in the world and that our workers are the best to be found anywhere; then they immediately suggest that the only way American companies can survive is with expensive and expansive government protection.

In reality, outsourcing low-level manufacturing to other parts of the world has allowed American manufacturing to reach new heights. You wouldn’t know it from watching the Republican convention this week—or the Democratic convention last week, for that matter—but the United States is a global manufacturing powerhouse. The narrative about declining manufacturing jobs has been outdated for years.

American manufacturing has never been more valuable than it is now. America’s industrial production last year was 48 percent higher than in 1995, according to the Federal Reserve. The number of American manufacturing jobs bottomed out at 11.4 million in 2010, at the depths of the Great Recession in 2010. Jobs in that sector had grown by 12 percent since then, before sharply declining this year as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered factories and disrupted supply chains.

Outsourcing low-end manufacturing has allowed America to focus on manufacturing more expensive goods while maintaining access to cheap consumer goods that are now mostly made elsewhere. That shift has had negative consequences for some individuals, but those human costs can be addressed without the large-scale reorientation of global supply chains envision by Trump and others on the right, such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).

Meanwhile, businesses can adapt to changing economic circumstances—as Flood’s did—better than governments can. Trump’s trade policies have had huge unintended (but not unexpected) consequences for the very American manufacturers that Trump believes he is helping. More than two years after his trade war with China began, the most obvious consequence has been increased costs for American businesses that make them less competitive in the global market.

Unfortunately, the president doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson. In his acceptance speech, Trump promised to wage his trade war even harder in his second term. If reelected, Trump said, he would seek to “provide tax credits to bring jobs out of China back to America.” He also threatened to “impose tariffs on any company that leaves America to produce jobs overseas.”

That, too, is telling. Tariffs are not imposed on specific companies or their products, but on whole categories of imported goods. If a company that builds widgets moves their widget factory to Denmark, for example, the president can’t put tariffs on that company’s widgets without also imposing tariffs on all other widgets imported into the United States from Denmark.

Trump sees tariffs as a magic wand that can accomplish anything he wants. In fact they are a dull sword—a relic that’s difficult to wield effectively and that cuts both ways. Unfortunately, the president doesn’t appear to be ready to put the sword down.

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America crossed a grim threshold this week. The Marshall Project and the Associated Press calculate that there have now been 1,000 COVID-19 deaths across the state and federal prison systems. Of the people who died, 928 were inmates and 72 were prison staff.

There have been at least 108,000 reported COVID-19 infections among inmates, and the rates can vary wildly from state to state: Less than 10 percent of California’s prison population has reported infections, while 30 percent of Arkansas’ population has. You probably shouldn’t use those numbers alone to determine how effectively prisons have responded to the outbreak: There are other variables, like how long it took for prisons to start widespread testing and how they’ve managed the infections. There has been a big spike in newly reported infections in prisons in July and August, but reported deaths are stable and about half what they were in April and May.

Research published in early July found that COVID-19 infection rates among prisoners were 5.5 times that of the general population. The death rate (39 per 10,000) among inmates was also higher than the death rate (29 per 10,000) among the general population. Again, this can vary wildly from state to state. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, report lower infection and death rates among its inmates than in the general population.

In California, the consequences of poor prison COVID policies are still playing out in San Quentin State Prison. California’s oldest prison had been doing very well at keeping the coronavirus at bay, reporting no infections at all until May. But that month, several prisoners were transferred to San Quentin from the Correctional Institute for Men in Chino. The Chino prison had seen a massive outbreak and several deaths, and this was supposed to relieve overcrowding. But the transferred prisoners were not properly tested and quarantined, and so San Quentin had an outbreak too.

When Reason first noted this new infection cluster at the end of June, there had not yet been any COVID-19 deaths at San Quentin. Now, less than 90 days later, there have been 26 deaths, and San Quention has bypassed Chino to have most deaths among inmates in the state. This month a San Quentin prison guard also died of COVID-19.

When we critique politicians who try to shower themselves with undeserved glory for their COVID-19 responses, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, we tend to focus on their poor grasp of risks at both ends of the spectrum—in Cuomo’s case, pushing the infected elderly into nursing homes while shutting down parks and other outdoor spaces. The problems in the prisons deserve more attention, but it often takes a back seat because of people’s attitudes toward prisoners.

But prisoners are in a position where they depend almost completely on government competence in a pandemic for their survival. And this should matter to you even if you don’t particularly care about criminal justice reform (though it’s certainly worth thinking about the facts that almost all of our biggest infection clusters are in prisons and that America has the world’s highest incarceration rate). The people who are most dependent on government competence are getting infected at a higher rate and dying at a higher rate than those who are not. What does that tell you?

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Donald Trump, who four short years ago was viewed by many GOP operatives as an erratic outsider, has just been re-nominated as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer. But whether he wins or loses, can a party without any guiding principles survive?

How do old political parties die, and how are new ones born?

Imagine a political party that has lost its ideological coherence and is torn apart by various warring factions. Then an outsider and celebrity candidate emerges with no fealty to the party’s policy agenda and with no previous political experience. He goes on to connect with voters and retake the White House.

That’s exactly what happened in 1848, when the Whigs backed Zachary Taylor.

Political scientist Philip Wallach, a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, published a 2017 paper on the parallels between Taylor and Trump.

“Taylor was a very disruptive force for the Whig Party,” says Wallach. “His victory was, of course, something they were very excited about, but he didn’t govern in exactly the ways they would have preferred.”

While Trump raised his profile by projecting a bellicose demeanor on primetime television, Taylor was a celebrated general who won a key battle in the Mexican-American War. And like Trump, he tried to redefine his party in his own image and refused to pledge fealty to party principles.

Taylor “even thought about rebranding [Whiggism] as ‘Taylor Republicanism,'” says Wallach.

But Taylor’s efforts at redefining Whig principles were doomed by a preexisting divide over whether slavery would be allowed in new territories. Both the Whigs and their primary competitors, the Democrats, waffled, which created an opening for single-issue third-parties such as the anti-slavery Liberty Party and Free Soil Party, as well as the nativist Know-Nothing Party.

After Taylor’s untimely death in office, the fractured Whig Party “bled to death,” as historian Michael Holt put it, losing too many voters to the Free Soil and Know-Nothing parties. And out of that carnage rose the Republican Party, united by the conviction that slavery should have no part in America’s future.

What does the death of the Whigs tell us about the prospect of breaking up our modern two-party duopoly?

“In 2020, we have two parties that have delivered us candidates, both of which are more destructive than they are constructive,” says evolutionary biologist and podcast host Bret Weinstein, who is trying to engineer the candidacy of an independent to go up against Biden and Trump.

Weinstein sees a parallel with the mid-19th century in that voters are again open to alternatives.

“This is, in some sense, the natural outgrowth of the fact that the parties long ago stopped serving the interests of the American public,” says Weinstein.

Weinstein, who’s best known for his viral confrontation with student protesters at The Evergreen State College after he objected to a call for all white people to leave campus for a day, believes that the two major parties are in thrall to far-left and far-right fringes and elite donors, causing them to neglect a majority of Americans.

“For many reasons, the natural thing is for Americans to unify under some banner in order to regain power over the policymaking structure,” says Weinstein.

Weinstein launched an initiative called Unity 2020, which intends to use online crowdsourcing to nominate a center-left and center-right candidate to run and govern as a team. He says by circumventing the usual political process, candidates will avoid being so easily corrupted.

“We have all been told that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” says Weinstein. “I have long thought this is nonsense. What we do have is a system in which power tends to be awarded to people on the basis that they are corruptible.”

But in the 19th century, there were fewer obstacles to challenging the major parties.

“For a third party to be able to get some votes was much easier,” says Wallach. “It just had to be able to print ballots and distribute them to a network of supporters….Nineteenth-century politics were just much more open and fluid than our politics today.”

With the election less than two and a half months away, whoever’s nominated by the Unity 2020 ticket is unlikely to make it on many ballots, and Weinstein declined to articulate a plausible path to victory.

“We are certainly too late with respect to the standard process of collecting signatures to get on the ballots of all 50 states, but that’s not the only way this can be accomplished,” says Weinstein.

The Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen, is on track to getting on the ballot in all 50 states, and she says she offers a better path forward than either Trump or Biden.

“People are realizing that they don’t have the choices that they used to have. And I think they’re getting fed up with government telling them at every turn what they can do,” says Jorgensen.

But Wallach is skeptical that a third party can disrupt our modern duopoly.

In the 19th century, minor parties like the Free Soilers won local and state elections and congressional seats, which the Libertarian Party has mostly failed to achieve. In 2016, after getting more attention than any Libertarian candidate in history, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson won just over 3 percent of the popular vote when going up against Trump and Clinton, two historically unpopular candidates.

A third party or independent candidate has never triumphed in a modern presidential election, with the strongest contender being former President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign under the Progressive Party banner. The self-funded billionaire Ross Perot’s run in 1992 eventually spun off the Reform Party, which never won a national election but did become the site of Donald Trump’s first foray into presidential politics.

“That leaves us wondering, where would [a successful] a third party come from?” says Wallach.

He believes that, based on the death of the Whigs, to be successful the Libertarian Party would need to win in statewide races and then merge with defectors from a collapsed Democratic or Republican Party.

But Weinstein is betting that digital media have opened new channels for a Unity ticket to bypass traditional gatekeepers, as outsider candidate Andrew Yang did in the Democratic primary.

“Andrew Yang would potentially not have gained our attention had it not been for this alternative media network,” says Weinstein. “He certainly rose spectacularly in the public imagination at the point he showed up on Joe Rogan’s ….There is something of similar or greater magnitude to the major networks that are operating under a different set of rules.”

And while there’s no single issue dividing the nation that’s on par with slavery in the time of the Whigs, Weinstein does see historical parallels.

“We are dealing with the very same issue in a different form in 2020. The thing that caused the civil war is simply not fully resolved,” says Weinstein.

While Weinstein is supportive of some aims of the Black Lives Matter movement, he believes its emphasis on racial identity foments dangerous divisions—for different reasons, but in similar ways, as racist movements on the far right.

“We are now seeing a movement that wishes to place race back at the forefront of our political thinking and, frighteningly, that viewpoint seems to be shared by those on the far left and the far right,” says Weinstein. “We cannot remain cohesive as a nation if we are attacking each other on the basis. That the only thing we need to understand to know what team we are on is the color of our skin or our gender.”

Jorgensen believes it’s government intervention that exacerbates many of our divisions, including racial ones, pointing to the Rosa Parks story as a historical example.

“A rural black woman stood up and refused to sit in the back of the bus,” says Jorgensen. “That was a government-run, government-owned bus. And so it was the government who was putting us in this ‘us versus them’ situation.”

While their strategies and analyses differ, Weinstein and Jorgensen both agree that the status quo cannot hold.

“I’d say everything is at stake in this particular election. And what we’ve been delivered is two different failure modes,” says Weinstein. “I think the problem is either case is unacceptable. And when one finds that situation, we have to look for a third way. And in this case, if it’s considered radical, so be it. It’s simply time.”

Jorgensen says that Americans feel fundamentally disempowered by the infringements on their liberties that a poor federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused.

“Americans are frustrated because they don’t have any control over their own lives,” says Jorgensen. “And all they know is that it’s the two old parties that are making them feel this way.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Opening graphic by Lex Villena.

Music by Stanley Gurvich licensed by Artlist.

Photo credits: CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; DNC via Sipa USA/Newscom; Tetra Images Tetra Images/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom ; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Leah Millis/Reuters/Newscom; Leslie Spurlock/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jeremy Hogan/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Antonio Perez/TNS/Newscom; Nuri Vallbona/Reuters/Newscom; Leah Millis/Reuters/Newscom; Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/Sip/Newscom; Gary I. Rothstein/UPI/Newscom;  David R. Frazier/DanitaDelimont.com “Danita Delimont Photography”/Newscom

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