The Reality Show Presidency

Say what you like about Trump but the fact is that he's transformed government.  No longer is it a dry, boring affair where serious policies are crucial and conflict of interest can ruin you.  Now, you can be as smart, as honest, as empathetic, as telegenic as you like.  If you're not entertaining, you're out.

You can be perplexed and offended by this.  You can point out that millions of lives are deeply affected by what the government does.  You can insist that governing is a serious business and needs to be done by serious people - people with expertise, compassion, experience and vision.  I agree with you but that clearly isn't what people expect anymore.  This is an era of memes, pet videos, bizarre pictures and emoji.  If the government isn't entertaining, people's attention will shift in an instant.  It isn't just young people, either.  Plenty of Xers and boomers now have the attention span of gnats as the digital age drowns us all.

Twenty years ago, Trump would have single digit approval and would have been dumped by his own party.  Twenty years ago, Trump would never have won the nomination.  Twenty years ago, he could have been the Ross Perot of his day, a crank; a joke.  He is a joke but the joke is now on Americans and on the world.  Make no mistake.  What's happening is deadly serious.  Nationalism and its ugly twin racism are engulfing the US.  The myriad of links from Trump and GOP to Russian money are not, as Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard might have you believe, baseless conspiracy theories. Authoritarian regime expert Sarah Kendzior's warnings that Trump and his minions are using well-understood tactics to move America closer to authoritarianism are not completely ridiculous notions.  It's time for people to pay attention.

Unfortunately, most of the people who are paying closest attention seem to come from the old era of boring government.  They aren't learning.  Consider this tweet posted yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald:

1. Messages from@RadioFreeTom,@JRubinBlogger,@WalshFreedom and others are the key to the survival of America. If we have learned anything from the Trump era, it is that we MUST end the personal invective of politics. Politics is about governing, and governing is about policy..

Trump has been running circles around these folks by the last three years by doing the exact opposite of what he proposes.  Does anyone think that the ~120 million Americans that, judging from the polls, still support Trump and have no intention of abandoning him, are going to have their minds changed by that?

So, what to do?

1. Stop chasing Trump's every crazy tweet.  The one yesterday about buying Greenland is a great example.  It's not going to happen so ignore it.  If the press and progressives do this and leave Trump's base to talk about it among themselves, he will look as weak and foolish as he is.
2. Focus on issues that matter to Trump's base like conflict of interest, his Russian connections, lack of wage growth and the way tax cuts have benefited the wealthy.  Use House investigations to dig up dirt.
3. Impeach.  Maybe Nancy Pelosi is a genius who is dragging her feet to make sure impeachment hearings can become an election issue.  Maybe she's timid. Maybe she's compromised. Maybe she's a genius and I just don't understand. But if Trump isn't impeached, this will be a message to future presidents. There will be no consequences for anything you do as long as your base doesn't abandon you.
4. Learn from the last election.  The Democrats need a populist, someone who can draw a crowd and make people care enough to show up and vote.  Someone like Bernie.
5. The Democrats need to firmly address the elephant in the room - the spiraling gap between the poor and the rich.  For decades, they've been promising to help the poor but pursuing policies that make the wealthy wealthier. Universal health care is a good start but it's not enough.  Bernie or or Elizabeth.  Not Joe. 

The game has changed.  If the Democrats and progressives don't change with it, they will always lose.

Socialism? wtf is that?

In the past few years, I have seen a noticeable uptick in anti-capitalist sentiment on social media.  In a remarkable turnaround from the 90s when being called a "liberal" in the US could end your political ambitions, many people are openly labeling themselves as socialists.  I always wonder what they mean by that.

While socialism actually means one of a variety of forms of collective or public ownership of the economy, the word socialist is still widely used by people on the economic right to mean almost any policy they don't like.  Even on the political left, many call social programs like welfare or socialized medicine as socialism.  Nordic countries are often described as socialism when they clearly social democracies with capitalist economies.  Bernie Sanders has, at times, called himself a socialist; something he is definitely not. 

I find that much of conventional socialist thought is still modeled after Marxist thought - exploited workers and cooperative ownership of organizations.  I find this curious in 2019 as we move towards a future where a manufacturing facility might consist of a building full of robots.  Although I support unionization of workers who truly are exploited, I also see the limitations of this from three perspectives.  First, unionization raises wages which causes companies to  invest more in labour saving technology, which in turn reduces employment.  This isn't inherently a bad thing, providing we have societies that look after unemployed people (which we currently don't).  Second, technology acts as a multiplier that allows individuals to become wealthy to an extent that wouldn't have been possible in Marx's time.  Finally, I regularly see unions on the wrong side of environmental issues as they support expansion of dirty industries for the benefit of their workers.

I think socialist thought requires an update.

First, instead of focused on workers, it needs to be people-centric.  Over the next few decades, we may find ourselves increasingly in a position where workers aren't needed for production of necessary goods and services. People still need to be free, cared for and provided opportunities to challenge themselves and grow.

Second, the resources of the world need to be equitably distributed to the people of the world.  Also, consumption needs to be capped to within and amount that is sustainable across the planet.  This means that sooner or later, there needs to be some form of democratic world government.  No, not the UN.

Third, there needs to be limits on the amount of wealth inequality allowed.  I don't care how good of a singer you are or how talented at curating cat videos, you are not entitled to enormous wealth because that wealth allows you to consume disproportionate resources.  Inequality is corrosive to social cohesion.

Finally, we need to abandon nationalism in favor of localism.  Nation-states should be weakened, with more control given to local governments, under an overall global administration.

I know this all sounds so utopian but it's all possible.  The key element is for people to wake up and understand that giant corporations and the billionaires that own them are pan-national.  When trade deals are negotiated and pundits claim that this or that country won the negotiations, what isn't mentioned is that the corporations win no matter what.  They operate in both countries and simply adjust their operations to maximize their profits.  While ordinary people are played into acting against their own interests in pursuit of the "national interest", billionaires win either way.   When people understand that their interests are more aligned with people in other countries than the billionaires in their own country, then things become much clearer.

Good luck to us all.