Fareed Zakaria very kindly mentions my 1992 book in his argument for national service. But my dirty little secret is that, in the intervening years, I lost enthusiasm for this particular solution to our overarching national problem (that the country is coming apart, in ways that undermine our sense of social equality). Mainly, national service seemed unlikely to happen. In the booming ’90s, kids wanted to get on with their careers, not spend a year fixing up parks or serving in the military. The all-volunteer military force had replaced the draft and the Pentagon was happy with the change (even if it meant diminishing interaction between the people who fight our wars and the rest of society). At the turn of the century it looked far more likely that some kind of Medicare-style national health care system–everybody waiting in the same waiting room, etc.–might do the job of providing a common experience where Americans interact as equals.

But I was wrong, and Zakaria’s right, I think: The case for national service is stronger than ever. Three reasons:

1. Health care is no substitute: Obamacare may have tenuously established the principle that everyone should be able to get coverage, but it also left the health care sector more stratified than ever, with the middle class mainly on employer plans, working class on (often inferior) Obamacare exchange plans, the poor shunted onto Medicaid. (If you have a low income you weren’t permitted to buy a plan on the Obamacare exchanges even if you were willing to pay full price. Talk about a caste system.) Maybe some version of Medicare for All will get everyone in the same waiting room–with only the top 10%, say, paying to get out of the common system. But it looks like it will be a while before that happens. Meanwhile…

2. The centrifugal forces are stronger: It’s not just that the economic and social gap between the affluent and the non-affluent is growing, and that it’s still correlated with invidious differences in “merit” that render it especially toxic. There are other gaps. Zakaria notes the urban rural divide, the nasty Trump vs. anti-Trump tribalism, and the fractiousness of identity politics and the centripetal effect of multiculturalism. Time to get BLM supporters and Magahatters together, somewhere other than the DMV.

3. What else are they going to do? Instead of worrying they might have to delay their careers, young adults are contemplating the possibility they won’t have careers at all — at least not careers in the traditional sense. If you’re looking at a life on the UBI, engaging (at best) in various non-remunerative aesthetic pursuits while robots do all the real work, a year spent in service — or maybe a few months every few years — may seem less of a sacrifice, even a relief. Something non-artisanal for a change

Here’s what’s truly alarming about the apparent success of Nike’s “woke” Kaepernick ad campaign, now emulated by Gillette. It’s not that businesses have discovered they can make money, not by appealing to all customers,  but rather by taking explicit political stands that only some customers love. It’s not even that these political stands, so far, seem to be overwhelmingly “progressive.” It’s that — well, Scott Galloway of ReCode’s “Pivot” hit the sore spot when he said the key motivating factor in this trend is that

“progressives are capturing the majority of the income”

You might expect politicized advertising to split the country in two, along familiar blue/red, lines.  Progressives would have their ads and deplorables would have theirs. But you would be wrong. The two sides in the politicized commerce fight aren’t equal. Trump may have won the Electoral College and come close in the popular vote — but the Resistance seems to be decisively winning the money competition (something anti-Trumpers obnoxiously advertised after the election with boasts about how Hillary voters came from the economically most dynamic parts of America, i.e. the knowledge industries on the coasts).

However undesirable or desirable it might be to have politicized conservative marketing that match the growth in Woke marketing, we’re not going to see it.  No checks and balances here. Woke has the wad. A dystopian world opens up, in which the losers in the global income inequality game — e.g. blue collar workers in ex-industrial states — find that not only has capitalism let them down, but capitalism’s formidable marketing machinery has suddenly been marshalled to drive home the message that, if they’re conservative (as many, perhaps most are) they’re, such second-class losers that American businesses don’t even want their money, whatever pitiful amounts they might have.

Think about the texture of this new society. The old 1950s ideal was that we were all becoming equals as consumers. “The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in 1952, “shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitey.” This was always a bit of a fantasy — even Allen noted that there was still a status hierarchy among consumers. It’s just that everyone more or less agreed what the hierachy was, thanks to “the immense influence of mass circulation magazines, the movies, the radio, and television in imposing upon Americans of all income levels the same patterns of emulation:”

But even if you couldn’t make it up this accepted consumer ladder, you could be confident that the great commercial actors still wanted to sell to you–if only hamburgers, Chevrolets,  Jockey shirts, Converse sneakers,etc. That was a form of respect.. Your money still talked, even if it ordered Budweiser instead of Heineken.

But in the Kaepernicked future we won’t even have status anxiety in common. Will MAGA-hatters in the Midwest even aspire to do what the rich post-grads on the coasts do (spend $400 to hear Bono lecture them about the wall)? Meanwhile, their former suitors in the Fortune 500, the ones who used to try to sell them sneakers, are now telling them to go fuck themselves.

It’s a new species of social inequality , I think.  Progressives who believe in greater income equality have, perhaps inadvertently, succeeded in harnessing the increasing money inequality of the age — which has made them relatively rich– in the service of a profound, innovative form of invidious class scorn. It could get ugly.

Kausfiles Insider! Was Gen. Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff, trying to throw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus on the immigration issue in order to protect his protege, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen? Kf hears this was the subplot of the recent cabinet meeting that (allegedly) caused Nielsen to think about quitting.  In this telling, Kelly set up the meeting to focus on immigration judges so that Sessions would bear the brunt of Trump’s anger (at his administration’s failure to secure the southern border).  But Trump turned on Nielsen instead. .., P.S.: If the immigration-control lobby had to choose, they would pretty clearly prefer Sessions–who’s been trying to crack down–to Nielsen.** See, for example, these comments from Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, and this from Breitbart. …

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**– Nielsen’s not just a former Bush aide but Painter-endorsed!

As part of the ongoing negotiations on what to do with 700,000 illegal immigrants who’ve been protected by Obama’s executive amnesty (“DACA”), the Trump White House is pushing to end so-called “chain migration.”** That’s the ability of legalized immigrants to bring in, not just their immediate families but their brothers and the families of their married children—who then get to bring in their extended families, who then get to start the process all over again, until entire villages have moved here. “[D]o you really want to have policy in place where the entrance of an immigrant provides a path for the entrance of the immigrant’s wife’s sister’s husband’s parents?” Probably not.***

Chain migration has surged since the 1990s. Most of our milion-a-year legal immigrants are now these “family reunification” immigrants who come here almost as a matter of right. In time, 700,000 amnestied DACAns would become several million as their relatives arrive. Maybe there are other, more skilled immigrants we’d prefer to let in? Maybe we’d like to lower the overall immigration influx for a few years to let our labor market tighten and produce a significant wage hike? That’s Trump’s point.

The trouble is, “chain migration” isn’t an easy concept to get across. It’s a metaphor for the long-run after-effect of a complicated law. But it doesn’t, in iteself, tell listeners what’s so bad about it. You got a problem with chains? Frank Luntz would not approve this messaging. ****

There’s an easier, instantly comprehensible way to sell the same essential policy. What if  President Trump said:

I call on Congress to enact an immediate 5-year moratorium on our current mandatory immigration by extended family members--brothers and in laws and uncles and cousins. This pause would not apply to immediate family members–if you are here legally you could stil bring in your wife and your children, of course. But not your whole village!

The pause would allow our labor market to catch up to where it was when wages were rising. Remember that? The American people, not just people from other countries who’ve recently arrived, would regain control over who gets in.

When the five-year pause ends we can easily decide to resume what I call “mandatory clan immigration”– cousin immigration, run-on in-law-immigration — or admit different immigrants in equivalent or lower or greater numbers — if that’s what the people want.

You get the idea. Immigration mavens understand what  “chain migration” means. But everyone understands what a moratorium is.***** That it only applies to one category of immigrants — semi-distant relatives — doesn’t make it less comprehensible. It’s an idea Trump could sell, at least to his base, which may be almost all he needs in the coming DACA negotiations.******

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** — Why would  curbing “chain mig–” …sorry, I mean “mandatory clan immigration” become the favored reform to trade for DACA protection? One answer: it seems to be the immigration-control measure that’s least unpalatable to the existing illegal immigrant lobby, including the DACAns. For example, mandating a computerized system of checking the legality of new hires (“E-Verify”) might take away the magnet for much illegal immigration — it would be a big reform. But it might prevent illegals who are already here from switching jobs. The lobby doesn’t like that. More money for ICE — something else mentioned as a possible trade for a DACA amnesty — means more deportations for current illegals. Ending mandatory clan migration doesn’t threaten that kind of harm to anyone who’s already here. (Trump’s border wall would actually be even less threatening–it only prevents future illegal immigration, doesn’t deport anybody, doesn’t prevent legal immigrants from bringing in their in-laws. But Democrats are too committed to blocking Trump’s wall to recognize the self-interest of even their own lobbies.)

*** — This extended family immigration wasn’t part of our law until 1965, when it was included in a big immigration bill as a misguided sop to conservatives (who wrongly thought it would allow Europeans to bring in other Europeans).

****– Even calling it “migration” works against Trump’s message. “Migration” seems like an inevitable, natural process. Birds migrate. “Immigration” seems less natural — which is more accurate.

***** — Trump proposed a general “pause” on issuing  new green cards as part of his initial immigration plan in August, 2015.  A 10-year moritorium on all immigration is a key prescription of  Ann Coulter’s Adios America!. Even Arianna Huffington once advocated a pause, apparently.

****** — The power of the base lies largely in its ability to pressure GOP House members who are terrified of primary challenges or election-day defections (and who know, from the examples of Eric Cantor and Luther Strange, that they can’t rely on establishment dollars to save them). Also, if Trump’s first immigration bill is an amnesty for 700,000 illegals (with a little window-dressing funding for the border thrown in) there will be a firestorm that might leave the President supportless heading into 2018 and 2020, not to mention possible impeachment proceedings.

Democrat Ralph Northam has beaten GOP nominee Ed Gillespie fairly decisively (54/45) in the Virginia governor’s race. I’d have preferred a different outcome — say,  “‘SANCTUARY CITY’ ISSUE FUELS GILLESPIE UPSET.” Stlll, there are several promising spin possibilities. Let me know (in comments) if you have others to recommend.

1) Virginia’s now just a hopeless swamp state, thanks to the government-dependent Northern suburbs of D.C.

2) Gillespie was always a K St./donorist gotta-have-an-amnesty type. [Fact check: True!]

3) It was Northam’s last-minute flip-floppish opposition to “sanctuary cities” wot done it. [Did he do it because polls showed the issue was hurting him?]

4) Problem was Gillespie’s failure to embrace Trump! [This seems to be Trump’s theory]

5) The election script has flipped: Dems now do well in low-turnout off-year contests, because their passionate distaste for Trump gets them to the polls. Republicans will do better in presidential years — and maybe in even-numbered Congressional years — when there’s more at stake and their passionate distaste for national Democrats drives them to the polls.

Update …

6) Adopting his primary opponent’s Trumpism is only thing that got Gillespie close …

7) Gillespie got 35% of the Latino vote, despite Gillespie’s MS-13/sanctuary cities ads. Or was it because of them? Latino voters more likely to know MS-13’s a real issue. …

Alabama Mad: Before Tuesday’s Alabama Republican senatorial primary, Chamber of Commerce strategist Scott Reed said his organization had gone “all in” for incumbent Luther Strange in order to “remind [populist ex-Trump aide Stephen] Bannon who’s in charge,”

Mission Accomplished! The Chamber’s candidate lost in a 55-45 rout to Bannon’s candidate, Roy Moore, a former judge once regarded as too much of a religious zealot to make it all the way to the U.S. Senate.

Here are 5 reasons why this outcome is significant, not counting the obvious one (GOP primary voters were PO’d at what Reed boasted was the “governing wing of the party”– i.e. the GOP Establishment).

1. Moore won without Trump: Only a few days ago it was fashionable to declare “there is no such thing as Trumpism”–there was only Trump, and his changing positions. Trump’s voters would simply follow whichever way their leader led — even, most controversially, into a deal with Democrats to give formal amnesty to the illegal immigrants known as “Dreamers,” who had been protected by an Obama executive action (DACA). But, in Alabama, Trump said ‘Follow Big Luther’ and his base said, ‘No thanks. We’ve found a Trumpier candidate.’ Turns out there is such a thing as Trumpism without Trump:

2. Moore won without Drudge: This one’s more surprising. Drudge’s website has been a rock of support for both Trump and Trump’s underlying cause of immigration-skepticism. Given the pro-immigration bias of the mainstream press, he’s seemed indispensable. Populists winning an election without him was like…Moby Grape without Bob Mosley [LeBron-ed] the Cleveland Cavaliers winning without LeBron James! But that’s what happpened. In recent months, Drudge has seemed more in tune with Jared & Ivanka than Bannon. The site didn’t feature many articles on the Alabama race as it headed down the stretch–but a few hours before the polls opened there was a beautiful picture of Ivanka, who was on her way to Detroit. In the long run, Drudge is probably still indispensable. But the idea that the king of alt media could be sidelined and scrappy Breitbart would fill the void must terrify the GOP “governing wing.”

3. Bannon won: They mocked when Bannon left the White House and pledged a vague campaign to somehow support Trump while still attacking him as he strayed from his former populist “America First” ideas on immigration, trade, and war.  Here’s A.B. Stoddard of RealClearPolitics:

Bannon’s new self-described role as “wingman” growling from outside instead of inside the White House — where as chief strategist he fought openly against the “globalist” forces he believed included Trump’s family members — isn’t going very well.

5. Immigration Amnesty lost big: Two weeks before the Alabama election, some polls apparently showed a very tight race. About this time, Trump held his infamous dinner with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at which he seemed to cut a Dem-friendly deal to give amnesty to the “Dreamers” — in exchange for a grab-bag of feel-good border security measures that did not include his promised Wall. Candidate Moore denounced the deal. Strange wouldn’t commit. Moore soon opened up a lead that doesn’t seem to have been cut even by Trump’s appearance in Huntsville on Strange’s behalf. I’m not saying there weren’t other big factors in the race, like anger at the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. I’m saying the seemingly impending Trump-endorsed Dreamer cave-in was another big factor. The difference between the two factors is that the mainstream press, which instinctively avoids crediting restrictionist concerns, will tell you about the former but not the latter.

And the Alabama revolt will make a difference in the eventual legislative outcome. Remember  when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat by an anti-amnesty outsider in 2014 sealed the doom of the massive, heavily hyped “Gang of 8” amnesty? The bill had already passed the Senate, but when Cantor went down House Republicans who valued their job security didn’t want to go anywhere near it.

Luther Strange is Cantor II. Which House Republicans want to try out for the role of Cantor III by backing the Pelosi/Trump amnesty? Not many, I suspect. The pundits may tell them the Alabama race was all about vague anti-Establishment anger, or the failure to repeal Obamacare, or about “local dynamics.” Elected Republican legislators, with their careers on the line, know better.

Today’s Crazy Thought: If Trump were really in cahoots with Putin — e.g. high level secret communication, “We’ll drop sanctions if you sabotage Hillary and give us a billion dollars for 666 Fifth Avenue” — he wouldn’t need these amateurish shenanigans. They’re exculpatory! That’s the ticket. … Update 7/16: Remember that Trump had been saying oddly conciliatory things about Putin for many months before that June 9, 2016 meeting between a Russian lawyer and his son. Seems a bit late for an exploratory feeler from Moscow. If the Trump and Russia were open to colluding you’d think they would already have come to some understanding. Trump had also been the GOP front-runner for many months, after all. …

Here’s Trump in Warsaw:

Americans, Poles and nations of Europe value freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.

If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies. [E.A.]

Am I the only who thinks that what Trump’s talking about here — the “forces” he vows to confront — is not just ISIS, or more broadly “radical Islam” — but also globalism?  In this Steve-Milleresque reading, it’s international G-20 style pressure for ever more trade and ever more transnational migration that would, over time, “erase” what makes America America. I’d include in the latter the traditional American sense of social equality, though it’s only flicked at in the speech.**

So how about this for a principle of Trumpism:

Social equality, and universal human dignity (including the right to dignified work), is a core aspect of our national identity. We will not accept greater global movement of goods or people if it comes at the expense of this identity, as it arguably often does (e.g. when trade permanently destroys jobs for the less-schooled, when mass immigration drives down unskilled wages to levels incompatible with social equality).

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** — Trump: “And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are.”  Universal “dignity” is not social equality, nor are universal civil rights. But they seem essential ingredients.

What’s the difference between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia? One’s a powerful country whose ruler has named as Crown Prince — with control over virtually all policy — a member of the next generation in his own family. The other’s just …

Here’s an email I recently got from a currently unemployed American techie (who’s also a longtime kf reader):

I am having difficulty competing with H-1b visaholders.  I thought it would be an easy sell.  I would say, “I am willing to work for as little as them, plus I speak English, and went to graduate school, and made good grades, and have done exactly that job well for decades.”

Employers don’t care.  You see, when they say to Americans, “You must routinely work evenings and weekends and holidays and vacations and all-nighters for free,” the Americans look for another job.  When employers say that to H-1b visaholders, they can add, “Oh, and it’s a crime for you to work in America for anyone except me, and if you get fired you are immediately deported back to Bangladesh, per capita annual income $800.  If you keep working at this awful job, by contrast, your whole family may move here for family reunification.”

And we worry why more Americans aren’t motivated to get STEM degrees? … The H-1B program (at about 100,000 visas a year) may look small, but it seems to have a huge impact on the tech industry (why so many Silicon CEOs care so much about it) ….

A lot of talk about America’s declining “social capital.” Sen. Mike Lee has a big report out:

There is a sense that our social fabric has seen better days. Leading thinkers have issued warnings that we are increasingly ‘bowling alone,’ ‘coming apart,’ and inhabiting a ‘fractured republic.’ At the heart of those warnings is a view that what happens in the middle layers of our society is vital to sustaining a free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country.

Lee’s report focuses on a decline in “associational life” — marriage, church membership, volunteering, etc. — and blames prosperity: “[R]ising affluence has made associational life less necessary for purposes of gaining material benefits …”

True enough. But I’d also blame this chart, which I’ve come to think is the most important chart around when it comes to explaining contemporary politics, including Trump:

It’s not just that wages for many have been stagnant. It’s that their increase or decrease has taken on a vicious meritocratic bias. Well-educated Americans are still doing well. Uneducated Americans are actually doing worse — they’re dropping out of the bottom of the pack.

It’s hard to see how traditional American-style social equality — everyone’s equal, not only in the eyes of God or before the law but in the eyes of each other — can survive many more decades of this chart. It’s one thing if the rich get richer — I’d argue there isn’t a hard, Marxist connection between income tables and a sense of social superiority. (Would you let any of these guys butt in front of you in line?) It’s another if a whole group of Americans — increasingly identifiable by dress, appearance and language — keeps getting tossed into the economic trashcan. *** I’ve had more than one conversation out here in West Los Angeles in which the topic of heartland working-class decline comes up and the explicit response from one of my friends is, “Fuck ’em.” (The only-sometimes-explicit rest of the response is “… if they’re too stupid to move or go to school.”)

Social equality isn’t “community” or “social capital.” You could have a perfectly socially equal society of monads who never talked to each other but merely tipped their hats out of respect when they passed on the street. But in a nation where community institutions — schools, churches, highways, ball games — are built on an egalitarian basis, the introduction of vicious class divisions isn’t going to help. Who wants to associate with a bunch of losers whose children will only drag down your kids’ SAT scores (and push them onto a lower meritocratic track)?

More simply: If, as Robert Putnam suggests, ethnic divisions cause a decline in social trust, the meritocratic split is yet another division that has to be overcome. Maybe a bigger division. It’s probably easier for ethnic Chinese software developers to associate with Caucasian software developers (I see it every day in my neighborhood) than for Caucasian software developers to associate with Caucasian car wash attendants.

True, each educational class might develop its own associational life, the way ethnic groups traditionally developed their own groups (Knights of Columbus, etc.). But it might take a long time. It’s also the stuff of neo-feudal dystopias. (When will the Betas and Zetas revolt?)

Which is another way of saying that community and “social capital” aren’t everything.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru suggests that one reason the wages of “less than high school” are declining in the chart is that there are fewer of them.

It was much more common to be a high-school dropout in 1973 than in 2005. We would expect the later group of high-school dropouts, a more distinctive part of the population, to have a worse relative economic standing …

In other words, “high school dropouts” used to be a mixed bag of people. But now the more able citizens almost always get degrees, while the less able drop out and become … well, a “more distinctive part of the population.” Maybe a part that always could only earn low wages. The more “less than high school” group is composed exclusively of these people, the lower its average wage, even if nobody has actually gone downhill.

Good point. A process like this might indeed be at work. But note this is the very sorting (into classes marked by income and ability) that itself eats away at our sense of equality. You used to be able to look at someone earning low wages and not think that they were someone the system has determined to be a loser. Now you can. The entire income distribution has been given a toxic, divisive cast. The fairer the system, the more toxic.

Even if the chart reflected only this sorting process, rather than a long-term decline of wages at the bottom, it would be bad for social equality (and, I’d argue, for “social capital”). It almost certainly reflects a mix of both phenomena. But it’s bad news either way.

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*** — That’s why I’m obsessed with immigration, which may explain a third of “the recent decline in the relative wages of less-educated native workers.”  [See also.] It’s the easiest lever we have to pull (easier than reversing trade patterns, or halting automation). Controlling competition from cheap imported labor isn’t a full solution, but in itself it could cause a surge in unskilled wages — something that may already be happening.

Have Republicans won any shutdown confrontation since Newt Gingrich lost to Bill Clinton in the winter of 95-6? I can’t think of one.  Certainly the Democrats are gloating over the latest shutdown deal. Yes, they’re playing to their frustrated base, but unless Trump pulled off some impressive Kabuki regarding funding for his wall, it sure looks like they have some justification for claiming to have bested the president.

But is it possible something bigger has also been revealed, namely that Republicans are simply incapable of winning a shutdown fight for the forseeable future — won’t happen, shouldn’t expect it to happen — and that this is a new (and asymmetric) feature in our government’s structure, as much a change as the partial abolition of the filibuster or the potential end of gerrymandering?

At least four factors contribute to this phenomenon: 1) Memory of the Clinton-Gingrich showdown. Gingrich attempted to effect vast budget changes (including raising Medicare premiums) from the House Speakership. But, in what may have been the most successful episode of gaslighting in the century, he was provoked into a tantrum when asked to use the rear door of Air Force One–and partly as a result got blamed for the shutdown. The episode marked the turnaround of Clinton’s presidency, and Democrats aren’t going to give up that precious template soon. 2) The press is on the Democrats’ side. Why? Because it is. Any shutdown impact — park rangers furloughed, etc. — will be played up and subtly twisted against GOPs.  3) You’d think GOPs would have built-in leverage over Democrats, who are the party of government after all. They should most want it to stay open. But that’s not how the PR war has been playing out.  When the state closes its doors — well, isn’t that what the [mean] Republicans want?  Quite apart from press bias, modern ideological Republicans consistently underestimate how much government the voters — including Trump voters —  prefer. Shutdowns tend to highlight this very real gap. Voters decide they’d just as soon keep Leviathan going; 4) Republicans are split between the Freedom Caucusers and the moderates — in a way Dems are not. This may change, but I don’t see the Sandersites actually shutting down the government because a budget funds Obamacare rather than Medicare-for-all, at least not anytime soon.

Note that these factors apply even when Republicans don’t control all the branches of government and therefore might not be expected to shoulder all the blame. **  They managed to lose in 1996 and 2013 despite divided government.

It’s hard to believe now that Republicans actually scheduled this shutdown back in December, thinking it would give them leverage. Who were they kidding? They need to find some other way to pass legislation when they don’t have 60 votes in the Senate. Aren’t there other must-pass bills? If  government-wide funding confrontations are “the single best opportunity to make conservative policy,” conservatives are in trouble.**

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** — You could even see President Minority Leader Schumer routinely use the shutdown threat to effectively repeal victories conservatives win in the ordinary course of legislative business — e.g. ‘You know that mandatory welfare work program you passed? Well we’re shutting down the government unless it gets unfunded.’

[This is derived from the discussion on today’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney.]

President Trump picked a fight by trying to get explicit funding for his border wall in the current shutdown spending-bill negotiations with Congress. Now he’s backed off his demand. There seem to be at least three possible explanations for this behavior:

1) Naivete: In this theory, Trump actually thought he could force Democrats to cough up the money, in part by dangling the prospect of Obamacare subsidies (now hung up in the courts). Maybe Trump wanted a big achievement for his first 100 days. Maybe he was worried his base could bail on him. Why naive: This was a very unfavorable circumstance in which to try to fund The Wall. Democrats are desperate for an issue that can unite them against Trump (while appealing to their base).  Righteously opposing the Wall fits the bill. If they held out (as they have) Republicans would get blamed for any resulting shutdown — as they’ve been every time it’s happened, ever since Bill Clinton bested Newt Gingrich in 1996. The MSM would certainly blame Trump. Policy arguments for the wall would be inevitably mixed up with, and obscured by, extraneous arguments over the shutdown.

2) Mildly cynical: Trump knew he’d have to cave this round, but figured the base would give him an “‘A’ for effort.” Problem: Why pick a fight only to retreat? The base is going to like that? Trump’s supposed to be the strong one. Plus, even if he says he’ll seek funding later, the Trump-hostile press will now instinctively portray it as another defeat — ‘after his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare,’ etc.. You know the drill.

3) Super cynical: Trump knew he’d have to cave but actually wanted to use the defeat to wriggle out of his border wall promise entirely, redefining “wall” down to mean merely “border security” — e.g., drones, sensors better flashlights for the border patrol, whatever. (Anything but a wall!) Certainly the usual-suspect GOP proponents of amnesty and less-restricted immigration –like Senators Tillis and Graham — have  jumped at this opportunity. Here’s Graham:

“I think [the wall] has become symbolic for better border security. So it’s a code word for better border security.”

Nice try.  Problem: Even if Trump intended to redefine “wall,” he publicly abandoned the idea in a tweet this morning:

Don’t let the fake media tell you that I have changed my position on the WALL. It will get built and help stop drugs, human trafficking etc.

Which? I tend to buy #1 — they misread their leverage — maybe with a bit of #3 in the mix from traditionally anti-restrictionist players like Ryan and Priebus.  Troubling! But make your own call.

The crazy part is, Trump doesn’t need explicit funding from Congress now to start his Wall project. He already has plenty of statutory authority and surely could cobble together start-up funds within the Department of Homeland Security. Eventually he needs some Congressional approval, but not right now. The skirmish seems to be a self-inflicted loss. But not one that prevents Trump from building the wall. And, as David Drucker points out, he caved quickly enough to avoid major damage. [Update: Maybe not. The base has noticed. Drucker’s now alluding to longer term consequences. ]

Lawrence Summers, arguing recently against Bill Gates’ proposed tax on robots, makes a point familiar to economists [emphasis added]:

[W]hy tax in ways that reduce the size of the pie rather than ways that assure that the larger pie is well-distributed? Imagine that 50 people can produce robots who will do the work of 100. A sufficiently high tax on robots would prevent them from being produced. Surely it would be better for society to instead enjoy the extra output and establish suitable taxes and transfers to protect displaced workers. It is hard to see why shrinking the pie, rather than enlarging it as much as possible and then redistributing, is the right way forward.

This last point has long been standard in international trade theory. …

None of this is to minimize the problem of job destruction and rising inequality … Rather, it is to suggest that staving off progress is a poor strategy for helping less fortunate workers. … There are many better approaches. Governments will, however, have to concern themselves with problems of structural joblessness. They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been the practice in the United States. Among other things, this will mean major reforms of education and retraining systems, consideration of targeted wage subsidies for groups with particularly severe employment problems, major investments in infrastructure and, possibly, direct public employment programs.

Grow the pie, use part of that growth to compensate the “losers”– this idea, Summers might have added, is central to arguments for more wage-lowering immigration as well as for more trade and more technology. But what if we are terrible at compensating the losers — especially at compensating them without robbing them of dignity and self-respect? What, in our long record of “education and retraining” or “trade adjustment assistance” suggests these policies will ever do enough for the “losers” to make them whole? Just putting them on the dole — sorry, “transfer payments” — is inherently degrading, even when done under cover of “disability.”  Retraining? Not everyone is easily retrained.**  Even if many are, the resulting distribution of income will have a nasty meritocratic bite (smart people up, stupid people down) that those lower on the ladder may not appreciate.***

If there are principles of “Trumpism,” surely recognition of this reality is one good candidate. Maybe it’s not worth growing the pie “as much as possible” — through trade deals, immigration, automation — if that leaves losers who can only be compensated in theory, but not in practice. That doesn’t mean never embracing trade, technology, or international movement of people. It does mean we should make those decisions differently, and less easily, especially when the “losers” are going to be Americans who are already at the bottom.

__________

** — That’s likely to be especially true of people performing physical labor who are now asked to perform mental labor.

*** — Summers goes beyond the orthodox loser-compensation kit when he proposes “direct public employment” — a good idea, and a Trumpish idea. But ultimately even that doesn’t solve the dignity problem.  Once we’ve built all the roads and bridges and dams we need, the trade/tech/immigration “losers” doing makework jobs will know they are losers doing makework jobs. Think the Reconstruction & Reclamation Corps (“Reeks & Wrecks”) in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.

Maybe this is obvious! Here’s my crude, relatively unwonky framework for thinking about the ongoing troubles of Obamacare (specifically, of the Obamacare exchanges): It’s a class problem. The exchanges are attractive to lots of heavily subsidized near-poor Americans, but distinctly less attractive to middle class Americans with incomes above 4-times-poverty, about $48,000 for a single person. (That’s the point at which subsidies disappear and the exchanges become a much-less-good deal).  Most of the middle class doesn’t have to use Obamacare, of course, to their immense relief — they get coverage from their employers. (Some, like freelance writers, have no choice. They have been known to complain.)

Why is this lack of a middle class participants a problem? Not because “programs for the poor are poor programs.” (Some are, some aren’t). Two other reasons:

1) We’re all human beings with the same health problems — but poorer Americans tend to be less healthy, so premiums that cover a poor-heavy risk pool will be higher than the “one true price” that would cover a risk pool made up of everybody. Middle class people thrown into this unhealthy risk pool wind up paying higher prices than they should have to pay. **

2) Different tastes. If you haven’t had health insurance because you can’t afford it, you might rationally be happy with any access to a regular doctor at all. If you’re middle or upper class you probably want access to the best doctors and the best hospitals. Not surprisingly, with a huge near-poor presence and no big middle class presence Obamacare is evolving to serve the former group: Medicaid-like packages with low prices and short lists of maybe-not-quite-as-top-tier docs (sorry, make that “narrow … networks that are especially adapted to the needs of lower income consumers”) have driven higher-end plans off the playing field. In some places, it’s hard to get a plan with top doctors and top hospitals on the exchanges even if you are willing to pay extra for it.  More reasons for the (healthy) middle class to look at Obamacare the way a traveler views a seedy hotel — something to be avoided if possible. ***

It’s not easy to see how this core problem can solved without somehow getting more middle class people off their employer plans and into the Obamacare pool, something they won’t want to do as long as — well, as long as there aren’t more middle class people like them in the Obamacare pool, which won’t happen as long as the plans are too expensive and too Medicaid-like,  which won’t change unless there are more middle class people in the pool ….

— Tinkering with the subsidy structure, a la the just-defeated Ryancare, might improve the mix a bit at the cost of leaving many poor Americans insufficiently subsidized and uncovered.

— Lowering the cost of the policies (by limiting “essential benefits,” for example) would also ease but not eliminate the underlying tension.

— Making the insurance mandate really coercive– with stiff penalties — is likely to be highly unpopular (who wants to be forced to check into a seedy hotel?) while failing to solve the problem, simply because there are too few middle class people to coerce. They’re squirreled away on their employers’ plans, and they ain’t comin’ out if they can help it.

Note that Medicare does not have this problem. Americans of all classes are in the Medicare system and good doctors are still (as of this writing) available. But even extending Medicare down to age 55 (from the current 65) or offering a public option (i.e. to effectively “buy into” Medicare) wouldn’t be a cure for Obamacare’s class problem: Those moves should again make  Obamacare policies much cheaper — in this case by removing the higher risk patients from the pool. That alleviates the symptoms.  But the insurance offered to whatever age group is left on the exchanges will still be overpriced for higher income people.

I suppose with enough money, anything can be fixed: You could slather the exchanges with such rich subsidies that they’d be a good deal for the semi-affluent as well as the semi-poor. That sounds awfully expensive, though. Would it be any cheaper than Bernie Sanders’ famously costly Medicare-for-all?

Or you could figure out some politically palatable way to knock millions of middle class people off their employer plans. Good luck with that.

Any help with this dilemma appreciated. …

__________

** — They do get at least one benefit they may not have had before: Insurance companies can’t kick them off if they get sick. Not enough to make the exchanges appealing apparently.

***-  Alternate analogy: When I was in Cleveland for the GOP convention, I needed some groceries late at night. The only open store was in a nearby, very poor neighborhood. The shelves were filled with highly suspect off brands —  Count Chocula would have been a welcome, healthy choice. The stuff wasn’t even that cheap. A valued local institution, maybe — but I would never voluntarily shop there again if a more Gelson’s-like alternative was available. Let’s say Obamacare is not the Gelson’s of health insurance.

Here’s an idea-so-crazy for a big, Trump-like move on health care of the sort Peggy Noonan seems to call for:  Lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55 (from 65) as part of the deal. Why?

1) This would remove the costliest, highest risk cohort (older people) from the Obamacare risk pool, allowing Obamacare insurerers to lower prices. The near-poor who are served by the program would find it easier to afford. Ditto the healthy young. The unsubsidized middle class would feel less ripped off.

2) The deal could still include many things Republicans want:--e.g.  replacing the individual mandate with some other incentive, offering tax credits instead of subsidies,  paring down the list of “essential benefits” (that anyone who buys an Obamacare policy must purchase–including substance abuse treatment), eliminating the rightly controversial Independent Payment Advisory Board.  Or bolder: Make selling Obamacare insurance a nationwide market (rather than in 50 state markets),

3) Medicare-at-55 wouldn’t just be a halfway house on the way to Bernie-style Medicare-for-everybody.  It’d be a way to give the competitive Romneycare/Obamacare model a chance to work. It’s not working now. We could decide later whether to apply it to Medicare or expand Medicare to absorb it. Let the best model win.

4) It would add to the federal budget. (Medicare isn’t cheap.) Since when has Trump been Dr. Cut-the-Deficit-Now?

5) How would it pass? Straight down the middle. Medicare-at-55 will be very popular with voters, including Trump supporters. That’s a big engine to power any deal through (just as voter hostility to welfare powered the 1996 welfare reform through, in another down-the middle play).  Democrats (and many Republicans) would have a hard time voting against a deal that included Medicare-at-55.  In the 1996 welfare debate,  President Clinton was a passive triangulator, oppposing, but not actively denouncing, the pro-welfare views of his own party in Congress. You’d expect Trump to be far less passive dealing with recalcitrant GOPs who don’t get on board.  Arguably that’s what voters expected when they elected him.

Just a thought!

Policy, the last resort of  … : Ryan Lizza on the allegedly suspiciously-friendly-with-Russians Trump players (Flynn, Manafort, Page):

To some extent, they all share Kislyak’s view that America, through NATO and its eastern expansion, has been needlessly hostile to Russia, that Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty is a nuisance issue, and that the U.S. and Russia could be united by the common threat from ISIS. [E.A.]

Yikes. That is so … um, reasonable. It would be easier to join the press’ near-unanimous scorn for the Trump advisers if it weren’t. …  (I wouldn’t say Ukrainian sovereignty is a “nuisance issue” — just not our cause, and not a cause we should be willing to go to war over.) …

David Frum on Trump and autocracy:

If the story ends without too much harm to the republic, it won’t be because the dangers were imagined, but because citizens resisted.

This is anti-Trumpism as a closed system, no? It leaves no possibility that events can ever convince Frum he was wrong (e.g., that the dangers maybe weren’t imagined but were just never close to materializing). Nice work if you can get it. …

A small complaint about Tuesday’s speech: President Trump seems to think the most appealing way to frame his proposed immigration reform — shifting immigration from low-skilled to higher-skilled — is as “adopting a merit-based system.”

Why use that word? If I were going to crudely describe the roots of the Trump movement, it would be as a rebellion against the idea that people without degrees or high SAT scores or complicated training are the rational and inevitable losers in the global economy.  Trade sends their jobs overseas, unskilled immigrants take their jobs at home, automation may permanently remove their jobs from the face of the Earth. That’s why you got Trump!

Calling this  de-selection of the unskilled “meritocracy” only adds an invidious layer of judgment, as if the winners are superior to the losers — they have the smarts, or some other virtue (but usually smarts) and can justifiably look down their noses at unemployed ex-steelworkers in small Pennsylvania towns. That’s really why you got Trump. 2016 was a revolt for social equality.

It’s especially discordant for Trump to appeal to “merit,” in other words.  Let’s call people with skills people with skills. They may have “merit,” they may not!  In the case of immigrants, we don’t even know how they’ll perform in their new U.S. jobs — so even if you equate career success with “merit,” the judgment is premature.  Yes, there’s an argument for preferring them over the unskilled . As Trump argues, they’ll pay more taxes and consume less in various benefit programs. More important, skilled immigrants will compete with — i.e. lower the wages — of  well-trained Americans rather than unemployed ex-steelworkers.  But they aren’t better, any more than liberal Hollywood movie stars are better than Chris Arnade’s photo subjects.

“We are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans, that is not enough, we must be equal in the eyes of each other.”

Godwin Is Dead: Ron Rosenbaum, one of the great magazine writers of our time, has written a widely-hailed L.A. Review of Books piece that he insists does not argue that “Trump=Hitler.”  He’s explicit on this point!

While Trump’s crusade had at times been malign, as had his vociferous supporters, he and they did not seem bent on genocide. He did not seem bent on anything but hideous, hurtful simplemindedness — a childishly vindictive buffoon trailing racist followers whose existence he had mainstreamed. … [G]enocide is almost by definition beyond comparison with “normal” politics and everyday thuggish behavior, and to compare Trump’s feckless racism and compulsive lying was inevitably to trivialize Hitler’s crime and the victims of genocide.

“I posit similarities and differences, not identity” between Hitler and Trump, Rosenbaum later declared. All very careful and nuanced. And yet, by the end of his piece, Rosenbaum seamlessly deploys the stock 1934ist template when discussing how the media should react to Trump: they should shun “compliance,” condemn “normalization,” emulate the “defiance that was heroic and inspirational” by the anti-Hitler journalists of the Munich Post. Obviously, Rosenbaum thinks the similarities are strong indeed– strong enough, anyway, to justify cranking up the full machinery of the pre-war anti-fascist struggle, strong enough to justify invoking the martyrs of Munich.

How strong, exactly? Rosenbaum says, “Trump and his minions are … attempting to pose as respectable participants in American politics, when their views come out of a playbook written in German.” [Emphasis added]

And they’re not joking. If you’d received the threatening words and pictures I did during the campaign (one Tweet simply read “I gas Jews”), as did so many Jewish reporters and people of color, the sick bloodthirsty lust to terrify is unmistakably sincere. The playbook is Mein Kampf. [E.A.]

Sounds pretty bad. ** And if Trump really is that much like Hitler — Not identical! Not equal — no sirree! But with bloodthirsty views out of Mein Kampf! — then we really don’t want to normalize him the way so many Germans foolishly normalized Hitler. The trouble is, Rosenbaum’s own piece, with its riveting, punctilious descriptions of Hitler’s rise to power, makes a perhaps-unintended but near-overwhelming case that Trump is really not much like Hitler at all.

I’m talking here of any indications that Trump, like Hitler, will , if “normalized,” pursue an evil, autocratic course of action.  It’s not enough if both men are “mountebanks,”*** con men who don’t believe their cons, whose outrageous acts and contradictory statements distract, lull and befuddle opponents, so that

you can’t take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all.

What we need is the evidence, amid all the confusion, that Trump actually is driven to autocracy, as Hitler was — not that he, like Hitler, conned and clowned his way into office, but that he’ll use the office so acquired to further some horrifying, megalomaniacal, perhaps “bloodthirsty” anti-democratic scheme. That’s the key question, isn’t it? The Munich Post journalists knew that underneath it all Hitler was Hitler — and he needed to be fought, not normalized. How does the evidence they had compare with the evidence offered by Rosenbaum regarding Trump?

Here’s my crude catalog of HItler’s Hitleresque sins — as known (often uncovered) by Munich Post journalists — compared with Trump’s:

HITLER

— Had attempted to violently overthrow the government (the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923)

— Had “a death squad (“cell G”) that murdered political opponents”

— Sent his private militia (precursor of the SS) to physically ransack the newsroom of the paper that opposed him

—Planned a “‘final solution’ for Munich’s Jews.”

TRUMP

— Supported by some racist and anti-Semitic tweeters

— Proposed, and then abandoned, a hold on travel to the US by Muslims.

— Allegedly had a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed

— Once ducked an invitation to “unequivocally condemn” David Duke.

You get the idea. The two lists are orders of magnitude apart. Are there things about Trump — seeds, if you will**** — that make reasonable people worry about future developments? Sure, just as there were with a dozen other national politicians (including Nixon and even FDR). But those are seeds, not the tree, and there are seeds of a lot of things in Trump, including many good things.  Hitler, you had more than seeds.

And don’t say (as Rosenbaum did when we argued on Twitter) that “[H]itler was in office 12 years Trump 2 weeks.” The list above is a list of things Hitler did before he took office in 1933 — the equivalent of Trump before January 20 of this year. Was boycotting the Iowa debate Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch?

Maybe Trump will try to acquire autocratic power. But, in Rosenbaum’s piece, that seems to be more an assumption than a conclusion.

This became clearer after the piece was published,  when Rosenbaum vigorously defended it on Twitter — because a funny thing began to happen. In argument, Rosenbaum tried to supply some of the evidence the piece he was defending lacked — evidence that Trump, if “normalized,” really would try to become an autocrat.  Hadn’t Trump aide Steve Bannon told the “press to ‘shut its mouth.'”?  That was “an example of autorratic [autocratic] impulse he shares with many dictators not just AH.”

Rosenbaum’s right: Telling the media to “shut up” [actually, saying it should “be embarrassed” and “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while”] does represent an autocratic impulse.***  It’s an impulse shared by half the politicians in America — but if followed blindly to its ultimate conclusion it would be bad news for the First Amendment. So why didn’t Rosenbaum include it in his piece, which cries out for actual examples of the dictatorial drive that only Munich Postische anti-normalist resistance can block?

Answer: Because it would look pathetic. Hitler sent his militia to physically destroy newsrooms.  Trump has an aide who said a hostile press should put attacks on hold! See the paralllel? We do … and we don’t.

Likewise, Rosenbaum, who mentions the “Muslim ban” in passing in his piece, refers on Twitter to Trump ” banning an entire religion.”   When a Twitter adversary notes Trump’s actual executive order affected only 7 out of  “40 or so Muslim countries,” Rosenbaum responds “the order can be extended w/o to all Muslim nations.”  Why yes, it can! But that would be a transformative change, and Trump has been heading in the opposite direction. Normalization works sometimes.

If comparing Politican X to Hitler makes you spend most of your time explaining that you aren’t equating the two, and mainly succeeds in making your legitimate complaints about X seem small in comparison to Hitler’s monstrousness, maybe it’s not such a useful comparison. Godwin had a point! If Trump’s only a 2% Hitler then maybe the media attitude we need is 2% no-business-as-usual anti-normalization–or, in any case, not 100% heroic***** dedicated resistance. All Rosenbaum’s words spent in stirring description of the Munich Post tend to obscure this point. They become a distraction, much as even Trump’s more righteous tweets are often distractions.

Why strain to make the comparison? Why not find an autocrat who better fits the subject? (Berlusconi seems an obvious choice.) [Because then Trump’s opponents couldn’t cloak themselves in the glory of the German resistance?–ed You said that.]

**************

** — The antecedent of “they” — who are “not joking” — seems to be Trump, or maybe “Trump and his minions.” Not merely the minions.

*** –Rosenbaum notes that historian Alan Bullock, proponent of the “mountebank” theory, “would later change his mind” and acknowledge that Hitler was heavily invested in his anti-Semitism.

**** — Attacking judges represents another potentially troubling impulse, a “seed”– one Rosenbaum doesn’t mention in his piece. So far, Trump has engaged in name calling while he obediently complies with judges’ orders.  The author of the “Mein Kampf playbook” went a little further (at one point setting up an alternative court system until the judges “knuckled under”).

*****– Does it take heroism to oppose Trump? Not that I can see. In most places resistance (like resistance to the Vietnam War, or to Nixon) is more likely to get you laid.  Former N.Y. Judge Robert Smith wrote recently that “Not many federal judges travel in circles where being an enemy of Donald Trump is anything but a badge of honor.” Same for journalists.