Category: reason

The Need for Ideological Diversity in American Cultural Institutions

1. Political identity is increasingly important to Americans.

2. Concomitantly, Americans increasingly disdain people “on the other side.” For example, only 50% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats were sure it would not upset them if their child married someone of the other political party. One can reasonably assume that this statistic would be worse if one asked “progressives” about “conservatives” and vice versa.

3. In a healthy liberal democracy, intermediary institutions serve as buffers between the public and the state, and give the public institutions and individuals to identify with and trust beyond partisan politics.

4. In the electoral realm, our two warring political tribes are roughly split, both in terms of strong partisans and their ability to win over less partisan voters.

5. In the cultural realm, however, major mainstream institutions are dominated by the broad left, with the more-radical left increasingly gaining ground within the left. Such institutions include the legacy media (or “MSM”) such as the New York Times and NPR; the arts; Hollywood; the organized bar and many other professional associations; universities; the K-12 educational establishment, to include most elite private schools; corporate bureaucracies, particularly at growing tech companies; and even professional sports, once a bastion of implicit conservatism, has increasingly gone woke.

6. One can debate the causes of this dominance, whether it’s a result of differing career preferences among conservatives and liberals, geographic concentrations of each group, discrimination by the establishment, gaps in intelligence and education between liberals and conservatives, and any combination thereof. That is all irrelevant to where I’m going with this.

7. As these institutions have become more and more dominated by progressives, conservatives have been fleeing them, for example, watching Fox News or OAN rather than listening to NPR. This gives these institutions even less reason to worry about being dominated by progressives, and further increases progressive domination. (As an aside, I was recently part of a conversation on Facebook in which a bunch of very well-educated libertarian-leaning academics were discussing how we used to enjoy NPR despite its liberal slant, but that it’s become so unbalanced, one-sided, and overtly ideological that it’s like listening to a propaganda station and we listen a lot less if at all. If this is how urbane libertarians with much cultural commonality with the NPR staff thinks, imagine what your small-town evangelical Christian conservative thinks…)

8. At some point, many right-leaning people begin to think of these major cultural institutions at best as things they don’t have a stake in, and at worse as “the enemy.”

9. It’s not a healthy development in a liberal democracy for a large group of citizens to reject the major intermediary institutions of society, as it leaves them prone to demagoguery, conspiracism, and, not to put to fine a part on it, fascistic appeals, as the essence of fascism is to try to create a direct emotional connection between the state and its leader and the public at large.

10. We have seen this play out, I don’t think I need to elaborate on that. We are fortunate that the demagogic leader was more or a narcissist than an actual fascist.

11. The institutions noted above in “7” should try to assimilate right-leaning people into their staffs. Imagine, for example, if major universities had even 10% conservatives in their Humanities departments, or the New York Times and NPR had 10% conservatives among their reporters. This would have a few salutary effects. People on the right wouldn’t feel that these institutions are trying to exclude them entirely, which is in fact an increasing trend (recall how employees at the Atlantic revolted when the company hired Kevin Williamson); employees on the right are more likely to address, even if in non-ideological terms, issues that people on the right care about (say, news reporting about harassment of Christians abroad, or the latest big gun convention); and it would make the tone of what these institutions do less hostile to the right. On the latter point, there is much ideological discrimination in hiring in the legal academy. But my Federalist Society friends almost universally state that they are treated fairly once they get a job, and that their mere presence at a faculty meeting or hiring committee meeting tends to tamp down more overt displays of hostility to conservatives.

12. Note that my claim is not (a) that these institutions lean too far left, because I have no objective measure of that or (b) that conservatives “deserve” representation at these institutions in some moral or normative sense.

13. Rather, I am concerned about institutional legitimacy. When you have a country divided into two tribes, and one tribe increasingly dominates most major cultural institutions, regardless of why, those institutions will gradually lose legitimacy within the other tribe.

14. Imagine instead of liberals and conservatives, the U.S. was divided between Catholics and Protestants. Each group did about equally well in elections, but the Catholics dominated the media, the arts, the universities, and so on. Would this be socially healthy, or a recipe for future civil conflict? If a demagogue–a former Catholic, no less–arose among the Protestants talking about the fake Catholic news and insisting that the Catholic establishment was going to, and eventually did plot to prevent his election, would you expect all the Protestants to believe the establishment from which they are excluded, or would a significant fraction be inclined to believe “one of their own?”

15. For the reasons stated above (and I repeat) our major cultural institutions should try to assimilate right-leaning people into their staffs and leadership. How they would do so, on what terms, and how they would overcome the objections of their own tribe are beyond the scope of this post. But the first order of business is to recognize the problem, and try to overcome it. (And, by the way, not by hiring from among the 2% or so of the population that is strongly libertarian leaning like I am, which would not do much to resolve the underlying problem.)

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The Need for Ideological Diversity in American Cultural Institutions

1. Political identity is increasingly important to Americans.

2. Concomitantly, Americans increasingly disdain people “on the other side.” For example, only 50% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats were sure it would not upset them if their child married someone of the other political party. One can reasonably assume that this statistic would be worse if one asked “progressives” about “conservatives” and vice versa.

3. In a healthy liberal democracy, intermediary institutions serve as buffers between the public and the state, and give the public institutions and individuals to identify with and trust beyond partisan politics.

4. In the electoral realm, our two warring political tribes are roughly split, both in terms of strong partisans and their ability to win over less partisan voters.

5. In the cultural realm, however, major mainstream institutions are dominated by the broad left, with the more-radical left increasingly gaining ground within the left. Such institutions include the legacy media (or “MSM”) such as the New York Times and NPR; the arts; Hollywood; the organized bar and many other professional associations; universities; the K-12 educational establishment, to include most elite private schools; corporate bureaucracies, particularly at growing tech companies; and even professional sports, once a bastion of implicit conservatism, has increasingly gone woke.

6. One can debate the causes of this dominance, whether it’s a result of differing career preferences among conservatives and liberals, geographic concentrations of each group, discrimination by the establishment, gaps in intelligence and education between liberals and conservatives, and any combination thereof. That is all irrelevant to where I’m going with this.

7. As these institutions have become more and more dominated by progressives, conservatives have been fleeing them, for example, watching Fox News or OAN rather than listening to NPR. This gives these institutions even less reason to worry about being dominated by progressives, and further increases progressive domination. (As an aside, I was recently part of a conversation on Facebook in which a bunch of very well-educated libertarian-leaning academics were discussing how we used to enjoy NPR despite its liberal slant, but that it’s become so unbalanced, one-sided, and overtly ideological that it’s like listening to a propaganda station and we listen a lot less if at all. If this is how urbane libertarians with much cultural commonality with the NPR staff thinks, imagine what your small-town evangelical Christian conservative thinks…)

8. At some point, many right-leaning people begin to think of these major cultural institutions at best as things they don’t have a stake in, and at worse as “the enemy.”

9. It’s not a healthy development in a liberal democracy for a large group of citizens to reject the major intermediary institutions of society, as it leaves them prone to demagoguery, conspiracism, and, not to put to fine a part on it, fascistic appeals, as the essence of fascism is to try to create a direct emotional connection between the state and its leader and the public at large.

10. We have seen this play out, I don’t think I need to elaborate on that. We are fortunate that the demagogic leader was more or a narcissist than an actual fascist.

11. The institutions noted above in “7” should try to assimilate right-leaning people into their staffs. Imagine, for example, if major universities had even 10% conservatives in their Humanities departments, or the New York Times and NPR had 10% conservatives among their reporters. This would have a few salutary effects. People on the right wouldn’t feel that these institutions are trying to exclude them entirely, which is in fact an increasing trend (recall how employees at the Atlantic revolted when the company hired Kevin Williamson); employees on the right are more likely to address, even if in non-ideological terms, issues that people on the right care about (say, news reporting about harassment of Christians abroad, or the latest big gun convention); and it would make the tone of what these institutions do less hostile to the right. On the latter point, there is much ideological discrimination in hiring in the legal academy. But my Federalist Society friends almost universally state that they are treated fairly once they get a job, and that their mere presence at a faculty meeting or hiring committee meeting tends to tamp down more overt displays of hostility to conservatives.

12. Note that my claim is not (a) that these institutions lean too far left, because I have no objective measure of that or (b) that conservatives “deserve” representation at these institutions in some moral or normative sense.

13. Rather, I am concerned about institutional legitimacy. When you have a country divided into two tribes, and one tribe increasingly dominates most major cultural institutions, regardless of why, those institutions will gradually lose legitimacy within the other tribe.

14. Imagine instead of liberals and conservatives, the U.S. was divided between Catholics and Protestants. Each group did about equally well in elections, but the Catholics dominated the media, the arts, the universities, and so on. Would this be socially healthy, or a recipe for future civil conflict? If a demagogue–a former Catholic, no less–arose among the Protestants talking about the fake Catholic news and insisting that the Catholic establishment was going to, and eventually did plot to prevent his election, would you expect all the Protestants to believe the establishment from which they are excluded, or would a significant fraction be inclined to believe “one of their own?”

15. For the reasons stated above (and I repeat) our major cultural institutions should try to assimilate right-leaning people into their staffs and leadership. How they would do so, on what terms, and how they would overcome the objections of their own tribe are beyond the scope of this post. But the first order of business is to recognize the problem, and try to overcome it. (And, by the way, not by hiring from among the 2% or so of the population that is strongly libertarian leaning like I am, which would not do much to resolve the underlying problem.)

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“The First Amendment Is Interpreted by the Courts, not Tech Companies”

In Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff, decided Thursday by Judge Roger T. Benitez (S.D. Cal.), plaintiffs sued two Trustees of the Poway Unified School District for blocking plaintiffs’ comments on the District’s Facebook and Twitter pages. (This is similar to the Knight First Amendment Institute suit over President Trump’s blocking some commenters from the @RealDonaldTrump account, though here the account was clearly an institutional governmental account, so there was little doubt that the blocking was governmental action.) The defendants argued that they were objecting to what they effectively saw as repetitiveness by plaintiffs, rather than their viewpoint:

Christopher Garnier began posting on Defendants’ Facebook pages when he believed they were not satisfactorily responding to his emails and other communications. None of Plaintiffs’ comments used profanity or threatened physical harm, and almost all related to PUSD. Plaintiffs’ comments were not commercial in nature. However, Plaintiffs acknowledged their posts were often repetitious. On Facebook, Christopher Garnier made the same comment on forty-two posts made by O’Connor-Ratcliff. On another occasion, Christopher Garnier posted the same reply to every tweet O’Connor-Ratcliff posted within approximately ten minutes. This involved repeating the same reply 226 times….

[T]hese replies[, though,] would only be visible by (1) visiting Christopher Garnier’s Twitter feed or (2) clicking on a tweet on O’Connor-Ratcliff’s feed to which Christopher Garnier replied…. Moreover, not all of Plaintiffs’ comments were the same. O’Connor-Ratcliff’s documentary evidence shows Christopher Garnier posting more than 20 unique comments and Kimberly Garnier posting more than 15 unique comments in response to O’Connor-Ratcliff’s original Facebook posts. Plaintiffs testified they repeated comments because they wanted to reach other Facebook users who might only look at one particular post made by Defendants. By repeating their message on each post, Plaintiffs reasoned, they would raise the issues that mattered to them involving PUSD to a broader audience.

Judge Benitez concluded that (1) the blocking was “content-neutral[],” because “Defendants[] blocked Plaintiffs due to the repetitive manner of their posts, [not] the negative content of those posts,” but (2) the total block of the plaintiffs was no longer valid even as a content-neutral restriction because “[w]hile blocking was initially permissible, its continuation [3 years after the original repetitive posting] applies a regulation on speech substantially more broadly than necessary to achieve the government interest.” But in the process the judge made this observation:

One final note on content-neutrality is appropriate. Both parties argue that Facebook and Twitter’s community standards support their claims. Defendants assert that Plaintiffs’ comments violated those community standards by “engag[ing] with content at very high frequencies.” Plaintiffs respond that O’Connor-Ratcliff attempted to bring these posts to Facebook’s attention, but that Facebook took no action against them. Plaintiffs argue Facebook’s inaction confirms Plaintiffs’ posts did not violate Facebook’s community standards, and therefore, the comments should be considered protected speech.

Notably missing from these arguments, however, is citation to authority approving the use of Facebook or Twitter’s community standards in analyzing whether the First Amendment is infringed. The Court declines the invitation to do so here. The First Amendment is interpreted by the courts, not tech companies.

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“The First Amendment Is Interpreted by the Courts, not Tech Companies”

In Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff, decided Thursday by Judge Roger T. Benitez (S.D. Cal.), plaintiffs sued two Trustees of the Poway Unified School District for blocking plaintiffs’ comments on the District’s Facebook and Twitter pages. (This is similar to the Knight First Amendment Institute suit over President Trump’s blocking some commenters from the @RealDonaldTrump account, though here the account was clearly an institutional governmental account, so there was little doubt that the blocking was governmental action.) The defendants argued that they were objecting to what they effectively saw as repetitiveness by plaintiffs, rather than their viewpoint:

Christopher Garnier began posting on Defendants’ Facebook pages when he believed they were not satisfactorily responding to his emails and other communications. None of Plaintiffs’ comments used profanity or threatened physical harm, and almost all related to PUSD. Plaintiffs’ comments were not commercial in nature. However, Plaintiffs acknowledged their posts were often repetitious. On Facebook, Christopher Garnier made the same comment on forty-two posts made by O’Connor-Ratcliff. On another occasion, Christopher Garnier posted the same reply to every tweet O’Connor-Ratcliff posted within approximately ten minutes. This involved repeating the same reply 226 times….

[T]hese replies[, though,] would only be visible by (1) visiting Christopher Garnier’s Twitter feed or (2) clicking on a tweet on O’Connor-Ratcliff’s feed to which Christopher Garnier replied…. Moreover, not all of Plaintiffs’ comments were the same. O’Connor-Ratcliff’s documentary evidence shows Christopher Garnier posting more than 20 unique comments and Kimberly Garnier posting more than 15 unique comments in response to O’Connor-Ratcliff’s original Facebook posts. Plaintiffs testified they repeated comments because they wanted to reach other Facebook users who might only look at one particular post made by Defendants. By repeating their message on each post, Plaintiffs reasoned, they would raise the issues that mattered to them involving PUSD to a broader audience.

Judge Benitez concluded that (1) the blocking was “content-neutral[],” because “Defendants[] blocked Plaintiffs due to the repetitive manner of their posts, [not] the negative content of those posts,” but (2) the total block of the plaintiffs was no longer valid even as a content-neutral restriction because “[w]hile blocking was initially permissible, its continuation [3 years after the original repetitive posting] applies a regulation on speech substantially more broadly than necessary to achieve the government interest.” But in the process the judge made this observation:

One final note on content-neutrality is appropriate. Both parties argue that Facebook and Twitter’s community standards support their claims. Defendants assert that Plaintiffs’ comments violated those community standards by “engag[ing] with content at very high frequencies.” Plaintiffs respond that O’Connor-Ratcliff attempted to bring these posts to Facebook’s attention, but that Facebook took no action against them. Plaintiffs argue Facebook’s inaction confirms Plaintiffs’ posts did not violate Facebook’s community standards, and therefore, the comments should be considered protected speech.

Notably missing from these arguments, however, is citation to authority approving the use of Facebook or Twitter’s community standards in analyzing whether the First Amendment is infringed. The Court declines the invitation to do so here. The First Amendment is interpreted by the courts, not tech companies.

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Trump Promised a ‘Good and Easy To Win’ Trade War, Then Lost It

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President Donald Trump’s declaration on March 2, 2018, that a trade war with China would be “good and easy to win” remains one of the defining moments of his four years in the White House.

That’s only because of how wrong the claim turned out to be. It deserves to live on in infamy alongside George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech and Barack Obama’s “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” promise. Like those, it oversold a complex, messy policy as simple and straightforward. Trump naturally took that presidential hubris to another level, and he paired it with unprecedented policy naivety. If winning a trade war were as simple as tweeting victory into existence with fake statistics, faulty economics, and the veneer of toughness, Trump likely would have succeeded. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

As he leaves office on Wednesday, Trump deserves some credit for reorienting America’s economic and foreign policies to recognize the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to freedom around the world. But his approach—which amounted to little more than levying higher taxes on $460 billion of imports and forcing Americans to foot the bill—was an abject failure. Here are five reasons why Trump lost his trade war.

Misunderstanding How Tariffs Work

Tariffs are taxes applied to goods imported into the United States. This is a simple, basic fact, and it has not been altered by nearly three years of Trump administration efforts to redefine how tariffs work or who pays for them.

Trump has been enamored by the potential use of tariffs to reshape the global economy for decades but he’s apparently never bothered to learn much about how they work. In Trump’s mind, the tariffs were all about creating leverage—making it more expensive to import goods from China, for example, should make China more willing to negotiate on other economic issues. That’s not entirely wrong, but it ignores the self-inflicted wounds caused by Trump’s tariffs, which drained an estimated $57 billion annually out of the U.S. economy in the form of higher consumer costs while simultaneously making it more difficult for businesses to expand.

Trump’s ignorance about tariffs was translated into official administration policy—which is how we got embarrassing moments like this incredible attempt by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to ignore reality:

Listening to the Wrong Advisers

Before moving ahead with tariffs on Chinese imports in the summer of 2018, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative held a series of hearings in which businesses that would be affected by the new import taxes could be heard. The weeklong affair was probably the most depressing scene of the entire trade war: Hundreds of business owners marched one by one before a committee of bureaucrats, each given five minutes to make their case.

Most of them delivered the same message: Tariffs wouldn’t meaningfully impact China’s exports but would place an undue burden on American businesses that import finished or component parts from China. Even business owners who were philosophically supportive of Trump’s decision to confront China said they disagreed with the administration’s tariff-based tactics.

Instead of listening to the businesses that would be on the front lines of the trade war, Trump appointed Peter Navarro, a failed progressive politician from California with no business experience, to oversee his trade policies. Navarro supplied plenty of anti-China bluster in TV appearances that surely satisfied the cable news–addicted president, but he provided little serious economic insight to an administration desperately in need of some.

Assuming Retaliation Wouldn’t Happen

The quality of Navarro’s economic analysis should have been apparent from the very start of the trade war. On the same day that Trump fired off his infamous “good and easy to win” tweet, Navarro appeared on Fox Business Network to issue an equally comical prediction: “I don’t believe any country is going to retaliate for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world,” Navarro said. “They know they’re cheating us, and all we’re doing is standing up for ourselves.”

China, of course, did retaliate. It drastically reduced agricultural imports from the United States. In 2017, the last year before the trade war began, China imported more than $19 billion in American farm goods, which fell to $9 billion in 2018 and rebounded weakly to $13 billion in 2019. Exports to other countries have been unable to make up the difference, leaving American farmers in the lurch.

The Trump administration responded by spending more than $28 billion in new farm subsidies to mitigate the totally predictable mess it made. By the end of 2020, federal payments accounted for one-third of all American farm income—as Trump’s trade war bailout was piled atop existing subsidies. Rolling back those payments will be politically difficult for future administrations, so they might be here to stay.

Angering Allies Instead of Working With Them

During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed 12-nation trade agreement that was a work-in-progress holdover from the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump launched his trade war by nonsensically declaring that steel and aluminum imports from places like Canada and Europe were somehow threats to U.S. national security.

All of that made a difficult confrontation with China more complicated than it otherwise would have been. A go-it-alone strategy was meant to project America’s toughness but a multilateral approach that lowered tariffs on imports from countries that compete with China would have been more effective.

Ironically, Trump also left America less capable of standing up to China in other ways—the president was reportedly hesitant to condemn China’s takeover of Hong Kong and was unwilling to speak out against China’s abuse of Uighurs because doing so might hurt trade negotiations.

Failing To Use Appropriate Metrics To Determine Success

From the start, Trump and his top trade advisers have used a single statistic as their guiding star for the trade war: America’s trade deficit. Like with tariffs, Trump seems to misunderstand the basic economics that drive trade surpluses and deficits—the difference between the value of goods imported from and exported to the rest of the world.

But if the trade deficit is how the president wants to be judged, so be it. America’s trade deficit was $49 billion in March 2018, the month Trump announced his trade war.

In November 2020, the most recent month for which full data is available, the trade deficit was $68 billion—just slightly down from a 14-year record high set in August of last year.

By Trump’s chosen metric, his trade policies have failed.

By other metrics, they don’t look too good either. American manufacturing—one of the sectors that was supposed to benefit—had fallen into a recession even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Phase One” trade deal with China was little more than a limited attempt at repairing some of the trade war’s damage. China doesn’t seem to be respecting the deal anyway. Besides, there won’t be a second phase.

Lastly, it’s worth considering that the trade war was always more about domestic politics than anything else. Having won the White House on a promise to overturn the conventional wisdom about the value of the free exchange of goods and people across international borders, Trump’s confrontation with China was always at least partially a way to signal to the Trumpist base that their man was fighting—even if they were collateral damage—and deserved a second term.

Chalk that up to a failure, too.

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Trump Promised a ‘Good and Easy To Win’ Trade War, Then Lost It

ibpremium866414

President Donald Trump’s declaration on March 2, 2018, that a trade war with China would be “good and easy to win” remains one of the defining moments of his four years in the White House.

That’s only because of how wrong the claim turned out to be. It deserves to live on in infamy alongside George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech and Barack Obama’s “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” promise. Like those, it oversold a complex, messy policy as simple and straightforward. Trump naturally took that presidential hubris to another level, and he paired it with unprecedented policy naivety. If winning a trade war were as simple as tweeting victory into existence with fake statistics, faulty economics, and the veneer of toughness, Trump likely would have succeeded. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

As he leaves office on Wednesday, Trump deserves some credit for reorienting America’s economic and foreign policies to recognize the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to freedom around the world. But his approach—which amounted to little more than levying higher taxes on $460 billion of imports and forcing Americans to foot the bill—was an abject failure. Here are five reasons why Trump lost his trade war.

Misunderstanding How Tariffs Work

Tariffs are taxes applied to goods imported into the United States. This is a simple, basic fact, and it has not been altered by nearly three years of Trump administration efforts to redefine how tariffs work or who pays for them.

Trump has been enamored by the potential use of tariffs to reshape the global economy for decades but he’s apparently never bothered to learn much about how they work. In Trump’s mind, the tariffs were all about creating leverage—making it more expensive to import goods from China, for example, should make China more willing to negotiate on other economic issues. That’s not entirely wrong, but it ignores the self-inflicted wounds caused by Trump’s tariffs, which drained an estimated $57 billion annually out of the U.S. economy in the form of higher consumer costs while simultaneously making it more difficult for businesses to expand.

Trump’s ignorance about tariffs was translated into official administration policy—which is how we got embarrassing moments like this incredible attempt by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to ignore reality:

Listening to the Wrong Advisers

Before moving ahead with tariffs on Chinese imports in the summer of 2018, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative held a series of hearings in which businesses that would be affected by the new import taxes could be heard. The weeklong affair was probably the most depressing scene of the entire trade war: Hundreds of business owners marched one by one before a committee of bureaucrats, each given five minutes to make their case.

Most of them delivered the same message: Tariffs wouldn’t meaningfully impact China’s exports but would place an undue burden on American businesses that import finished or component parts from China. Even business owners who were philosophically supportive of Trump’s decision to confront China said they disagreed with the administration’s tariff-based tactics.

Instead of listening to the businesses that would be on the front lines of the trade war, Trump appointed Peter Navarro, a failed progressive politician from California with no business experience, to oversee his trade policies. Navarro supplied plenty of anti-China bluster in TV appearances that surely satisfied the cable news–addicted president, but he provided little serious economic insight to an administration desperately in need of some.

Assuming Retaliation Wouldn’t Happen

The quality of Navarro’s economic analysis should have been apparent from the very start of the trade war. On the same day that Trump fired off his infamous “good and easy to win” tweet, Navarro appeared on Fox Business Network to issue an equally comical prediction: “I don’t believe any country is going to retaliate for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world,” Navarro said. “They know they’re cheating us, and all we’re doing is standing up for ourselves.”

China, of course, did retaliate. It drastically reduced agricultural imports from the United States. In 2017, the last year before the trade war began, China imported more than $19 billion in American farm goods, which fell to $9 billion in 2018 and rebounded weakly to $13 billion in 2019. Exports to other countries have been unable to make up the difference, leaving American farmers in the lurch.

The Trump administration responded by spending more than $28 billion in new farm subsidies to mitigate the totally predictable mess it made. By the end of 2020, federal payments accounted for one-third of all American farm income—as Trump’s trade war bailout was piled atop existing subsidies. Rolling back those payments will be politically difficult for future administrations, so they might be here to stay.

Angering Allies Instead of Working With Them

During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed 12-nation trade agreement that was a work-in-progress holdover from the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump launched his trade war by nonsensically declaring that steel and aluminum imports from places like Canada and Europe were somehow threats to U.S. national security.

All of that made a difficult confrontation with China more complicated than it otherwise would have been. A go-it-alone strategy was meant to project America’s toughness but a multilateral approach that lowered tariffs on imports from countries that compete with China would have been more effective.

Ironically, Trump also left America less capable of standing up to China in other ways—the president was reportedly hesitant to condemn China’s takeover of Hong Kong and was unwilling to speak out against China’s abuse of Uighurs because doing so might hurt trade negotiations.

Failing To Use Appropriate Metrics To Determine Success

From the start, Trump and his top trade advisers have used a single statistic as their guiding star for the trade war: America’s trade deficit. Like with tariffs, Trump seems to misunderstand the basic economics that drive trade surpluses and deficits—the difference between the value of goods imported from and exported to the rest of the world.

But if the trade deficit is how the president wants to be judged, so be it. America’s trade deficit was $49 billion in March 2018, the month Trump announced his trade war.

In November 2020, the most recent month for which full data is available, the trade deficit was $68 billion—just slightly down from a 14-year record high set in August of last year.

By Trump’s chosen metric, his trade policies have failed.

By other metrics, they don’t look too good either. American manufacturing—one of the sectors that was supposed to benefit—had fallen into a recession even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Phase One” trade deal with China was little more than a limited attempt at repairing some of the trade war’s damage. China doesn’t seem to be respecting the deal anyway. Besides, there won’t be a second phase.

Lastly, it’s worth considering that the trade war was always more about domestic politics than anything else. Having won the White House on a promise to overturn the conventional wisdom about the value of the free exchange of goods and people across international borders, Trump’s confrontation with China was always at least partially a way to signal to the Trumpist base that their man was fighting—even if they were collateral damage—and deserved a second term.

Chalk that up to a failure, too.

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Dysfunctional and Disorderly at Home, the U.S. Must Stop Meddling Abroad

nationalguard

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was supposed to go to Europe last week. His trip is now canceled.

The State Department says that’s because there’s work to be done on the presidential transition—a Taiwan visit by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft was canceled on the same basis. But Reuters, citing multiple diplomatic sources from the U.S. and Europe alike, reports Pompeo’s plans changed “after Luxembourg’s foreign minister and top European Union officials declined to meet with him.”

Their reasoning, Reuters notes, was not that Pompeo is part of a lame duck administration. It was that these longstanding U.S. allies were “embarrassed” to host Pompeo after this administration’s role in the violence in Washington this month—violence Pompeo condemned but for which he assigned President Donald Trump and his enablers no responsibility. Trump is a “political pyromaniac,” said Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s minister for foreign affairs. It is hardly surprising he would not be interested in meeting with Trump’s emissary.

This snub should be a lesson for Pompeo personally but, more importantly, for U.S. foreign policy writ large: Our own house is not in order, and Washington has no business policing the world or forcibly remaking other countries in its own image. That image is a mess.

This is true even if Reuters’ sources are incorrect and American diplomats really did stay home to work on the transition. The transition needs attention because it has not been peaceful. It has not been respectable. It has not been a model for other countries to imitate.

The storming of the Capitol, which left five people dead and dozens more injured, is the direct result of Trump’s self-serving deception about his election loss. “The president of the United States fleeced the American people,” as freshman Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “People have been lied to for two months now. It’s disturbing. It led to this violence.”

And while it’s true, as Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) said, that “none of this would have happened without the president,” Trump is not exclusively to blame. He was necessary but not sufficient to produce the chaos we saw in Washington. Trump’s behavior in this crisis, as has often been the case throughout his presidency, is predated by many of the dysfunctions to which he contributes.

The public resentment and negative partisanship, the prioritization of power over truth, the sense of grievance and injustice, the belief that crucial political rights and freedoms have been denied—all this existed in our polity before Trump made the leap from reality television. They were intensified this year by the pandemic, the election, and high-profile cases of police brutality. And they will persist after Trump is no longer in office. Our own house is not in order.

And our foreign policy contributes to that disorder. Two decades of war in the greater Middle East, a vast and coercive sanctions regime, and maximalist approaches to diplomacy have all proven counterproductive, strategically disastrous, and inhumane. They sap resources, both intellectual and fiscal, that should be conserved for domestic concerns. Washington has spent trillions on regime change and nation building and attempted to make distant nations fall in line with its wishes. Meanwhile, here at home, all our politics disintegrate.

This is not to say an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy would be appropriate if only Washington could run it better. On the contrary, as then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued on Independence Day of 1821, the United States should be an exemplar, not a coercer: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams charged. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

That we could combine example and coercion was the hubristic assumption that undergirded the interventionism of the postwar era generally and the post-9/11 era specifically. But our military-first foreign policy of trying to dominate international affairs has been detrimental to our own politics and governance. It has eroded our civil liberties, exacerbated our fears, run up our national debt, and distracted us from pressing problems at home.

Now, we have troops sleeping on the floor in our Capitol so they can safeguard the inauguration this week, and tiny Luxembourg is embarrassed to meet with our top diplomat. Does that sound like a nation that should be playing world police?

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Dysfunctional and Disorderly at Home, the U.S. Must Stop Meddling Abroad

nationalguard

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was supposed to go to Europe last week. His trip is now canceled.

The State Department says that’s because there’s work to be done on the presidential transition—a Taiwan visit by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft was canceled on the same basis. But Reuters, citing multiple diplomatic sources from the U.S. and Europe alike, reports Pompeo’s plans changed “after Luxembourg’s foreign minister and top European Union officials declined to meet with him.”

Their reasoning, Reuters notes, was not that Pompeo is part of a lame duck administration. It was that these longstanding U.S. allies were “embarrassed” to host Pompeo after this administration’s role in the violence in Washington this month—violence Pompeo condemned but for which he assigned President Donald Trump and his enablers no responsibility. Trump is a “political pyromaniac,” said Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s minister for foreign affairs. It is hardly surprising he would not be interested in meeting with Trump’s emissary.

This snub should be a lesson for Pompeo personally but, more importantly, for U.S. foreign policy writ large: Our own house is not in order, and Washington has no business policing the world or forcibly remaking other countries in its own image. That image is a mess.

This is true even if Reuters’ sources are incorrect and American diplomats really did stay home to work on the transition. The transition needs attention because it has not been peaceful. It has not been respectable. It has not been a model for other countries to imitate.

The storming of the Capitol, which left five people dead and dozens more injured, is the direct result of Trump’s self-serving deception about his election loss. “The president of the United States fleeced the American people,” as freshman Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “People have been lied to for two months now. It’s disturbing. It led to this violence.”

And while it’s true, as Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) said, that “none of this would have happened without the president,” Trump is not exclusively to blame. He was necessary but not sufficient to produce the chaos we saw in Washington. Trump’s behavior in this crisis, as has often been the case throughout his presidency, is predated by many of the dysfunctions to which he contributes.

The public resentment and negative partisanship, the prioritization of power over truth, the sense of grievance and injustice, the belief that crucial political rights and freedoms have been denied—all this existed in our polity before Trump made the leap from reality television. They were intensified this year by the pandemic, the election, and high-profile cases of police brutality. And they will persist after Trump is no longer in office. Our own house is not in order.

And our foreign policy contributes to that disorder. Two decades of war in the greater Middle East, a vast and coercive sanctions regime, and maximalist approaches to diplomacy have all proven counterproductive, strategically disastrous, and inhumane. They sap resources, both intellectual and fiscal, that should be conserved for domestic concerns. Washington has spent trillions on regime change and nation building and attempted to make distant nations fall in line with its wishes. Meanwhile, here at home, all our politics disintegrate.

This is not to say an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy would be appropriate if only Washington could run it better. On the contrary, as then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued on Independence Day of 1821, the United States should be an exemplar, not a coercer: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams charged. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

That we could combine example and coercion was the hubristic assumption that undergirded the interventionism of the postwar era generally and the post-9/11 era specifically. But our military-first foreign policy of trying to dominate international affairs has been detrimental to our own politics and governance. It has eroded our civil liberties, exacerbated our fears, run up our national debt, and distracted us from pressing problems at home.

Now, we have troops sleeping on the floor in our Capitol so they can safeguard the inauguration this week, and tiny Luxembourg is embarrassed to meet with our top diplomat. Does that sound like a nation that should be playing world police?

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To Avoid More Political Violence, Allow Americans to Escape Each Other’s Control

zumaamericastwentynine066934

Thousands of National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital as I write, hoping to ensure that the scheduled transition of power from one president to the next comes off without renewed violence. That sight—unusual for the United States—underlines the fact that millions of Americans no longer support the political system or believe it derives its powers “from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence puts it). It also strongly suggests that it’s time to try something new if the government under which we live is to be anything better than a resented force at war with much of the population it rules.

The militarization of Washington, D.C., comes after the January 6 storming of the Capitol —a shocking event with as-yet to be determined repercussions that was actually supported by a fifth of voters and 45 percent of Republicans, according to post-riot polling. Perhaps that’s not as surprising as it should be; well before the ginned-up controversy over the presidential election results, only 24 percent of voters believed the government had the consent of the governed (53 percent disagreed), as reported by a 2018 survey. Maybe the real marvel is that we avoided a January 6-style event for so long.

We’ve built toward this point for years. While the Trumpists’ storming of the Capitol was an unprecedented rejection of the established procedures for transferring power, it built on trends. From the contested, but peaceful, 2000 election, to the boycotting of Trump’s 2016 victory by dozens of Democratic members of Congress as other opponents rioted blocks away, Americans have moved toward belief in the legitimacy of elections only if their side wins. At some point, we were going to see an outright refusal to accept a loss, which is what occurred on January 6.

And there’s no reason to expect that people will lose their distaste for political defeat in future political contests.

How could Americans be accepting of electoral losses when many view their opponents as immoral and unpatriotic and see them as enemies of the country—to the point that the major factions are defined by their hatreds? “Democrats and Republicans … have grown more contemptuous of opposing partisans for decades, and at similar rates,” notes a November 2020 paper on political sectarianism. “Only recently, however, has this aversion exceeded their affection for copartisans.”

To a large extent this is because politics has become combat, with election victors using their control of government agencies to torment losers.

“It is more and more dangerous to lose an election,” economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. “The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide.”

No sane people would consent to a political system that works as a weapon against them; they would try to escape its power. One of the virtues of the original decentralized American republic and its federalism was that if you didn’t like the laws and rulers where you lived, you could go elsewhere.

“Foot voting is still underrated as a tool for enhancing political freedom: the ability of the people to choose the political regime under which they wish to live,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote in a 2012 paper since expanded into a book. “When people are able to choose their governments, political leaders have stronger incentives to adopt policies that benefit the people, or at least avoid harming them. And the people themselves are able to select the policies they prefer.”

The “people” Somin references aren’t the amorphous masses discussed in Social Studies classes as marching to the polls to jam the alleged will of the winners down the throats of the losers. He means individuals turning their backs on governing systems they dislike and picking those that better suit them.

But, as Chapman University law professor Tom Bell—another advocate of political choice—points out in his 2018 book Your Next Government?, “the United States has in recent decades failed to take states’ rights seriously, making federal law supreme even in minutely local matters.”

Moving does little good when the laws and “vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed” (as Cochrane put it) follow you.

Even reviving federalism would accomplish little when many states have larger populations than the whole country did at its founding and the major political divides run not between states or regions, but between urban and rural areas. Within localities are many people who feel trapped by circumstances in “enemy territory,” subject to hostile rulers and laws they despise.

How do we make more palatable a political system that functions as a death match between mutually loathing factions who believe themselves—with reason—to be in peril when their enemies win control?

“If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support,” Herbert Spencer famously argued in 1851. Fundamentally, Spencer wanted the right to exit that Somin favors, but without the physical migration of foot voting, as a means of making political arrangements more widely acceptable and considerate of liberty.

But Somin not only favors radical decentralization to minimize the costs of migration, he also discusses arrangements whereby “individual citizens can change government service-providers without a physical move.” Bell, too, believes that “for the same reason that nation states should and generally do allow the unhappy residents to emigrate, more consent-rich governing services would doubtless guarantee the freedom of citizen-customers to exit to other legal systems” without moving their locations.

In 2001, Swiss economist Bruno Frey proposed what he called functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions—basically, governments that people choose among as if picking club memberships.

Frey echoed Belgian economist Paul Emile de Puydt who, in the 1860 article “Panarchy,” advocated a system of non-territorial federalism under which people could freely register their support for, or withdrawal from, any political associations that gain sufficient support. “I hope we can all go on living together wherever we are, or elsewhere, if one likes, but without discord, like brothers, each freely holding his opinions and submitting only to a power personally chosen and accepted,” de Puydt wrote.

These proposals expand on Spencer’s “right to ignore the state” in empowering people to join with the like-minded not just to reject officials and laws that don’t suit them, but to construct systems that do.

Their advocates emphasize existing precedents for choice in government. “People choose between governments every time they choose to live in a new city, state, or country,” writes Bell. “Businesses and others are often able to choose for themselves which state’s law will govern their dealings with each other, even if they do not actually reside in the state in question,” points out Somin.

What if Americans could choose governing systems rather than having them jammed down their throats? They could embrace rules as limited or restrictive as they please, programs and policies that suit their tastes, and officials who resist treating election to office as opportunities to punish enemies. If dissatisfied, they could exit one system and choose another—just as they can now, but without having to shoulder the hassle and expense of loading a rental truck and driving across a border. Tensions might ease and violence become less likely if people who hold each other’s values and lifestyles in contempt didn’t have to fear government as a bludgeon in the hands of their enemies.

True, American politics has been moving away from allowing exit in recent years, centralizing power so that people can’t escape and even attempting to continue taxing those who flee, as California lawmakers propose. But the result has been battles between rebellious localities and higher authorities. And now troops patrol the streets of the nation’s capital because nobody is willing to lose elections.

We can have a future of increasing conflict between Americans who hate each other. Or we can make it easier for people to peacefully escape each other’s control.

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via IFTTT

To Avoid More Political Violence, Allow Americans to Escape Each Other’s Control

zumaamericastwentynine066934

Thousands of National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital as I write, hoping to ensure that the scheduled transition of power from one president to the next comes off without renewed violence. That sight—unusual for the United States—underlines the fact that millions of Americans no longer support the political system or believe it derives its powers “from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence puts it). It also strongly suggests that it’s time to try something new if the government under which we live is to be anything better than a resented force at war with much of the population it rules.

The militarization of Washington, D.C., comes after the January 6 storming of the Capitol —a shocking event with as-yet to be determined repercussions that was actually supported by a fifth of voters and 45 percent of Republicans, according to post-riot polling. Perhaps that’s not as surprising as it should be; well before the ginned-up controversy over the presidential election results, only 24 percent of voters believed the government had the consent of the governed (53 percent disagreed), as reported by a 2018 survey. Maybe the real marvel is that we avoided a January 6-style event for so long.

We’ve built toward this point for years. While the Trumpists’ storming of the Capitol was an unprecedented rejection of the established procedures for transferring power, it built on trends. From the contested, but peaceful, 2000 election, to the boycotting of Trump’s 2016 victory by dozens of Democratic members of Congress as other opponents rioted blocks away, Americans have moved toward belief in the legitimacy of elections only if their side wins. At some point, we were going to see an outright refusal to accept a loss, which is what occurred on January 6.

And there’s no reason to expect that people will lose their distaste for political defeat in future political contests.

How could Americans be accepting of electoral losses when many view their opponents as immoral and unpatriotic and see them as enemies of the country—to the point that the major factions are defined by their hatreds? “Democrats and Republicans … have grown more contemptuous of opposing partisans for decades, and at similar rates,” notes a November 2020 paper on political sectarianism. “Only recently, however, has this aversion exceeded their affection for copartisans.”

To a large extent this is because politics has become combat, with election victors using their control of government agencies to torment losers.

“It is more and more dangerous to lose an election,” economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. “The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide.”

No sane people would consent to a political system that works as a weapon against them; they would try to escape its power. One of the virtues of the original decentralized American republic and its federalism was that if you didn’t like the laws and rulers where you lived, you could go elsewhere.

“Foot voting is still underrated as a tool for enhancing political freedom: the ability of the people to choose the political regime under which they wish to live,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote in a 2012 paper since expanded into a book. “When people are able to choose their governments, political leaders have stronger incentives to adopt policies that benefit the people, or at least avoid harming them. And the people themselves are able to select the policies they prefer.”

The “people” Somin references aren’t the amorphous masses discussed in Social Studies classes as marching to the polls to jam the alleged will of the winners down the throats of the losers. He means individuals turning their backs on governing systems they dislike and picking those that better suit them.

But, as Chapman University law professor Tom Bell—another advocate of political choice—points out in his 2018 book Your Next Government?, “the United States has in recent decades failed to take states’ rights seriously, making federal law supreme even in minutely local matters.”

Moving does little good when the laws and “vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed” (as Cochrane put it) follow you.

Even reviving federalism would accomplish little when many states have larger populations than the whole country did at its founding and the major political divides run not between states or regions, but between urban and rural areas. Within localities are many people who feel trapped by circumstances in “enemy territory,” subject to hostile rulers and laws they despise.

How do we make more palatable a political system that functions as a death match between mutually loathing factions who believe themselves—with reason—to be in peril when their enemies win control?

“If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support,” Herbert Spencer famously argued in 1851. Fundamentally, Spencer wanted the right to exit that Somin favors, but without the physical migration of foot voting, as a means of making political arrangements more widely acceptable and considerate of liberty.

But Somin not only favors radical decentralization to minimize the costs of migration, he also discusses arrangements whereby “individual citizens can change government service-providers without a physical move.” Bell, too, believes that “for the same reason that nation states should and generally do allow the unhappy residents to emigrate, more consent-rich governing services would doubtless guarantee the freedom of citizen-customers to exit to other legal systems” without moving their locations.

In 2001, Swiss economist Bruno Frey proposed what he called functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions—basically, governments that people choose among as if picking club memberships.

Frey echoed Belgian economist Paul Emile de Puydt who, in the 1860 article “Panarchy,” advocated a system of non-territorial federalism under which people could freely register their support for, or withdrawal from, any political associations that gain sufficient support. “I hope we can all go on living together wherever we are, or elsewhere, if one likes, but without discord, like brothers, each freely holding his opinions and submitting only to a power personally chosen and accepted,” de Puydt wrote.

These proposals expand on Spencer’s “right to ignore the state” in empowering people to join with the like-minded not just to reject officials and laws that don’t suit them, but to construct systems that do.

Their advocates emphasize existing precedents for choice in government. “People choose between governments every time they choose to live in a new city, state, or country,” writes Bell. “Businesses and others are often able to choose for themselves which state’s law will govern their dealings with each other, even if they do not actually reside in the state in question,” points out Somin.

What if Americans could choose governing systems rather than having them jammed down their throats? They could embrace rules as limited or restrictive as they please, programs and policies that suit their tastes, and officials who resist treating election to office as opportunities to punish enemies. If dissatisfied, they could exit one system and choose another—just as they can now, but without having to shoulder the hassle and expense of loading a rental truck and driving across a border. Tensions might ease and violence become less likely if people who hold each other’s values and lifestyles in contempt didn’t have to fear government as a bludgeon in the hands of their enemies.

True, American politics has been moving away from allowing exit in recent years, centralizing power so that people can’t escape and even attempting to continue taxing those who flee, as California lawmakers propose. But the result has been battles between rebellious localities and higher authorities. And now troops patrol the streets of the nation’s capital because nobody is willing to lose elections.

We can have a future of increasing conflict between Americans who hate each other. Or we can make it easier for people to peacefully escape each other’s control.

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via IFTTT