Democrats and the American Identity Crisis

Democrats need an immigration policy.

Trump had one.   He said immigrants from Mexico were criminals and rapists, but a few were probably ok and those took your jobs.   He said immigrants who were Muslim were frightening and some were terrorists and you can't really tell the good ones from the bad ones.

Democrats had no real policy other than to say that immigration was in our heritage, that people here illegally were a fait accompli, that that the fears were overblown and a sign of xenophobia and racism.   This argument failed to connect with people.  In fact, a great many people are worried about terrorism by Muslims and they didn't want to be scolded for feeling that way.

Click: A Nativist reaction to immigration from Catholic Ireland

The reality is that the USA is in a period of high immigration.  Some 13% of the people in the US are foreign born and some 25% are either foreign born or the children of foreign born.   The vast majority of the new residents are from Latin America and Asia so they generally have darker skin color and somewhat greater assimilation adjustment than would be the case of immigrants from western Europe.   Historically, in periods of high immigrant populations (Irish potato famine of the 1840s) and the Ellis Island era at the beginning of the 20th Century the higher populations brought backlash, restrictive laws (Chinese exclusion act of 1882), and nativist parties.  

KKK, re-emerged in early 20th Century

Since Republicans under Trump have seized the anti-immigrant political ground Democrats cannot and should not be a "me, too" party.  The Democratic Party is the party of government intervention to fix problems, and rather than say that ethnic frictions are a moral problem, a sign of deplorable racism, Democrats should have--and can now--acknowledge the inevitability of frictions and make their case that immigration needs control and affirmative government to keep immigration from turning bad.   

Democrats could voice this as a commitment to help immigrants become "good Americans."  This would justify careful border control, expressed not as a way to keep out vermin but as a way to assure every newcomer has a chance to become a good American, welcomed by his neighbor, happy in his new home.  It means language immersion programs for kids, voiced as pride in our language with the goal of becoming good Americans.  It means embracing employment laws as a positive good toward the happy integration of immigrants, saying that we need to enforce these rules so that immigrants won't be resented.

Democrats 2016 were afraid of validating entry restrictions, of praising English, of enforcing employment laws because it had been conflated with racism, and a big part of that conflation was made by Democrats.  Trump did not need to racialize the election; Hillary did it for him.   It failed as a policy and it failed politically.  As Guyer notes below, a third of Hispanics voted for Trump.  Democrats can embrace immigration laws and government steps to teach English and teach civics and do it saying it is for the purpose of embracing immigrants and sharing patriotic pride in our country.  They say we have these controls so that we can continue the American tradition of welcoming immigrants and making them into good Americans.  

It is not racist or xenophobic to be afraid of criminals, rapists, and terrorists and so Democrats should not mumble or excuse or minimize or work hard to contextualize criminality, rape, and terror when it is done by black, brown, foreign, Hispanic, Muslim, or other people of color.   It is politically safe--indeed it is politically essential--for Democrats to say that they condemn criminality.   

It is politically safe--and again essential-- for Democrats to oppose the assassination of police officers, even when it is done by people of color.   Remember the message:  Democrats welcome good Americans.  Criminality is bad, and criminality makes it harder for Americans to continue the tradition of welcoming newcomers.

Democrats can talk about this.

Democrats have a positive message of identity, but they need to get their heads around the notion that Democrats believe in good citizenship.   Democrats need not minimize criminality or hesitate to encourage wholesome assimilation out of fear of accusations of racism or dislike for diversity.  Democrats can say it: immigration has to be done right. It is not anti-immigrant or anti diversity.  It is pro-American and pro-immigrant.

Thad Guyer observes that it is probably too late for the west to get immigration right and we are well past the tipping point.   The battle lines have been drawn around race, and mass immigration from Muslim Africa and Turkey have exhausted European patience and tolerance.  The Euro zone experiment is fracturing.

Guyer

Guest Comment by Thad Guyer:  "The Decline of the Left."

Our democratic elitism in my view is clearly on its way out at the presidential and Supreme Court levels. Whether the USA, UK or France, no political regime can survive that has become so out of touch with its native base that it thinks it can throw open the borders with almost no input from the governed. Immigration and globalism is not an issue-- it is the defining issue and blue state democrats will remain on the losing side of the wall if they can't adjust to this new political reality. I'm confident democrats will transition to it in 4 or 8 years just as we did with the 2nd Amendment. Both democrats in the Kansas and Georgia special elections campaigned on "following the rules" in immigration. Hillary was a border protector until she got scared of losing the Hispanic vote, but that illusory path to victory vanished with Trump getting a third of those voters.

An NYT podcast at its best last week interviewed Paris and Moscow correspondents about the fall of the European left. It contains no hype, spin or Trump trash talk-- just a sobering analysis of how unpopular immigration policies, fear of cultural eclipse, and blue collar job loss have put Western liberal democracies in decline.
https://t.co/8dd3Fe8XeB. 

David Brooks says there is surprisingly little defense against this decline. See NYT, "The Crisis of Western Civilzation",
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/opinion/the-crisis-of-western-civ.amp.html. 

He cites our self-inflicted wounds, as Upclose puts it, with our failure to condemn leftist campus fascism, asking what's up at Berkeley? He cites a powerful Atlantic article decrying the movement "to scrub campuses of words, ideas, or subjects that cause discomfort or offense".
https://t.co/AAGXfTBBWa. 

The clear loser issue of sanctuary cities is yet another obstacle to a Democratic comeback.

If we want to have Obamacare (or better), climate protection, clear air, feminist
economics, Planned Parenthood, a humane Supreme Court, and most of the rest of our agenda, then we have to win, and that won't happen without the right rhetoric on border control, H1 visas and blue collar job protection. The country is going to have those with or without us. 

Republican Trudge toward Suicide

Republicans damned if they do.  Damned if they don't.

Solution:  Do as little as possible and put the blame on someone else.  

Health care in America is simple.  The politics of health care is not.   If America had Medicare for everyone, and added a 5% surcharge to all incomes from every source, we could have Medicare for all.   It would be pretty simple, universal, good, and it would be less expensive than what we have now.  It would largely remove the insurance industry cut from the health care cost structure, which would save money.

There would be complications.  Medicare insurance reimbursements aren't enough in some areas (like Oregon) but they are higher in other areas for the same procedures (like NY and Florida) so there needs to be some adjustments.   It would lower cost for employers since health care would quit being an "employer" expense and it would become a citizen expense paid in higher taxes.  Again, there would need to be adjustments and presumably people would be paid more in wages (to cover the tax) to replace the health care cost currently buried in the personnel cost under contained under "benefits."    There would be transition hassles, and some people would be hurt, including health insurers, who would scream.

Why not do it?  It would be a form of wealth distribution because rich people would pay in taxes more than the costs of their own care and poor people would get the extra help because their healthcare is more expensive than the taxes they pay.   The rich don't want to subsidize the poor.   Even middle class people who feel they personally "have a good deal", either because they are on Medicare or because they have a secure job with benefits do not want to pay for the health care of others less fortunate.   Even though the current system is inefficient and incomplete and wasteful, there are relative "winners" and those winners don't want equality.  They want to hang onto a sweet deal.  The many winners in the current system are politically powerful--seniors who vote, people with good jobs, the wealthy who write campaign donation checks.

Bashing the ACA was great politics.

The ACA--Obamacare--put bandaids onto a flawed system and made it somewhat more universal.  Republicans prospered by complaining about what it cost and what it did not do.  They promised "repeal" and voted some 50 times in the House to show their resolve.  

They won the House, Senate, and White House in large part by bashing the ACA.  That is the problem.  Now they have no excuse for being the party of mere critics rather than the party that solves problems.

Some Republican congressmen--especially those in the Freedom Caucus--oppose the subsidies for insurance and expanded Medicaid, so they oppose the ACA on the issue of thrift and morality: let the uninsured poor make better life choices so they would have the money they need for cancer surgery.  Some Democratic activists think this is terrible politics for Republicans--the working poor being thrown off a lifeboat--but for many it is not.  Remember, there are more winners than losers in the current inefficient and spotty system.  The winners consider their place in the system well deserved and just and the current losers to be improvident.  "Why pay to support lazy people and welfare cheats?" There is a big caucus of Republicans who want less--the thrift caucus, and there are voters who like hearing them stand tall for the taxpayer.

There is another group of Republicans who want to continue health insurance for the working poor.  Those blue collar and working poor people vote Republican.  They were the group that voted for Trump.  They are a big part of the margin for red-state/red-district Senators and Congressmen.  (There are lots of them in my red-district Congressional district, almost 1/3 of the voters.)

Republican officeholders are stuck with their promise:  end Obamacare.  They look like failures when they did nothing on healthcare repeal, so they are going back to try again. (I personally think the smartest political strategy for Republicans is to accept failure because doing nothing keeps the attention of the problems with the ACA, but I apparently underestimated Trump's competitive drive and to be able to show a "win", even if the "win" on health care will transfer the albatross from Obama to the GOP.)   The GOP is moving forward. This time the new Republican bill will be more stingy.  It will be cheaper.  It might pass the House.

Its real purpose is to pass the buck.   A new House bill will pass the buck to the states.  States will get permission to use federal Medicaid money how they want, being told if they want to expand Medicaid to help more of the working poor they can pay for it.  A House member can defend it as "giving states the power" when it is actually saying, let the states take the blame for people not having affordable health care because, of course, there is little or no state money for this.   It also passes the buck to the Senate.   Senate districts are statewide and therefore almost alway include a broader mix of people than do House districts, especially carefully gerrymandered ones.   The Senate will not pass a stingy ACA replacement because there are too many people who would lose access to coverage, including people that Republican officeholders identify as sympathetic victims: older people and small business people and lifelong Republicans who have pre-existing conditions that mean that no insurance company would willingly cover them without a subsidy.   Any provision that allows coverage for pre-existing conditions dooms any new plan to complexity and compulsion.   (Otherwise it wouldn't be insurance.  People would simply wait until they have a problem, get "insurance" and someone else would help pay.)


The Republican suicide is their twin burdens, being forced to do what will hurt them when they do it.  If they do nothing on health care they are revealed as dishonest in the promise to repeal and unable to govern.   If they do something on health care the House will appear to be able to govern but they will push forward a bill that the Senate cannot pass.  House members can extoll the vague virtues of their bill safe in the knowledge that it will not pass so no one can look closely at its problems.   Senators get national attention.  They grandstand.  Republicans House members can blame ideological Senators and their ambitions.

House Republicans may be safe, but they would still injure the GOP brand.   The divisions in the Republican caucus would be visible: what pleases Susan Collins is hated by Rand Paul.

What if something actually passes the Senate?  Full disaster for Republicans.   

Trump would sign a law that will have critics and sympathetic victims from day one.   Millions of people would be pushed off the Medicaid expansion.  Fifty states would complain. Insurance subsidies would be reduced.  There would be millions of sympathetic victims clear that Trump and the GOP got their vote then stabbed them in the back.

The group of people hurt--the blue collar, working poor, red-state/red-district non-college voters who helped Trump win the electoral college are exactly the people who would be most hurt by a thrifty-GOP plan.   Democrats would have a huge messaging bonanza.  Their current problem is explaining that the ACA has problems because Republicans are intentionally starving it and disallowing the "insurance corridors" that would have allowed it to work as intended.  If there is Trumpcare then the branding is easy.

Healthcare in America--now and if there is a GOP Trumpcare--will not be universal, simple, inexpensive and good.   It will be spotty, complicated, expensive, and bad. 

Democrats will know whom to blame.  Republicans broke it and Republicans replaced it with a monster.

Avoiding Democratic Suicide in Red States

This did not "just happen."  .

Democrats don't have an insurmountable political problem.  They have an attitude and style problem.   It is fixable.

Democrats need to stop signaling they are primarily the party of the coastal elites.   This map happened because too many Democrats are snobs.  

Democrats did well in major coastal cities and poorly everywhere else.   Happily for Democrats such a voter base is almost enough to win a presidential election.  But not quite.

I have described a Democratic party policy and style that makes perfect sense for Cambridge, Massachusetts and Manhattan and San Francisco, but which are simply wrong for rural and manufacturing areas.    I have described the archetypal Democratic voter as a single, professional, highly educated, non-churchgoing woman who lives in a large city on the east or west coast (or in a college town if mid-continent) and who works at a desk doing emails, making phone calls, and handling data of some kind, e.g. as a lawyer or accountant or financial manager. 

Of course, this is a stereotype.  It is over-simple.  It leaves out multitudes.  And, yes, there are some women who meet all those criteria who still voted for Trump.

It is a stereotype and indeed polls showed that such people were overwhelmingly for Hillary instead of Trump.  It is a person who lives such a life can have attitudes that create resentment by people who live other lives.

Such a person is more likely to be comfortable with diversity, seeing more of it in their workplace and neighborhood.

Such a person receives agricultural, manufactured, and resource-based products but is removed from their sources.  The person sees clean, washed, packaged produce, not truck farms.  The person sees a gasoline station, not a drill site.

They are accustomed to sharing things--public transportation, elevators, sewerages--and they have quick access to police and fire services.  

Such an educated, urban person can experience and project the values of urbanity.   I do not consider "urbanity", with its connotation of sophistication and worldliness, as bad.  But I recognize that people who aren't urbane resent enormously what they perceive as the sneering condescension of those who are.

 Frequent guest poster Thad Guyer described it in a recent comment:

There's a name for the Democratic orientation you describe- coastal elitism. Elite education, elite social values, elite economics, elite environmentalism, elite music and elite cuisine. The non-elites can't afford to be part of our hyper bourgeois life and values. Non elite Dems are told to accept our brand of trickledown-- job retraining, higher minimum wage, indentured pathway to non-deportation, and foodstamps.  

Trump's message aligned with Sanders'-- fight the sons of bitches trying to steal your life whether they're wearing red or blue. That message can't be countered with "resist Trump and his bigotry". 

Click here. Castrate hogs; respect for parental authority

A premise of this blog is that most political communication is simple and non-verbal.  The verbal content is only important as a signal of what side a person is on.  People profile others.  They "peg" them.  Especially for offices below that of the presidency people vote on the basis of scant impressions.   Political party, gender, age, looks, dress, tone.   What most people know about Joni Ernst, the new senator from Iowa is that she is a Republican, a woman, and she said with a bright confident face that she castrated pigs so she knew she could handle the politicians in Washington.  Pow!  Memorable.  Shocking.  It validated her as an opponent of the politically correct urban elites.

Some elements of urbanity are not problems.  Going to an Ivy League college or law school is not a problem.  Republican senators Cruz, Cotton, Sasse are all rising stars from red states and they attended Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.  It is OK to read the New York Times.  It is OK to get the jokes in The New Yorker.   Being educated and sophisticated is not the problem and even being urbane is not the problem. 

Duty and Sacrifice

 The problem is when a Democrat projects what Guyer called those "hyper bourgeois life and values."  Patriotism is a conservative moral value.  A Democrat who is electable needs to be fully comfortable with patriotism and the best way to project it is to have served in the military in a dangerous place.   Patriotic sacrifice demonstrates genuine patriotism.

A Democrat needs to show respect for authority.  Respect for authority is a conservative moral value.  A Democrat in a uniform of police, fire, or military demonstrates that.  Forthright and sacrificial actions on behalf of traditional authority signals respect.  A son who returns to a family farm to help a parent "save the farm" would be an example of this. 

People signal their values.  For example, a person who "follows my dream and passion to operate a farm" is projecting the opposite of the respect for authority.  This is an expression of  self actualization.  Note I am not against self-actualization but it is a value of personal fulfillment and self regard and the opposite of the value of respect and duty.   If a person's own biography and attitude is one of "follow your passion" then there is not shame in this but that person should move to a college town or coastal city and run for office there, where that value is more highly appreciated.  Duty and sacrifice are values more highly valued in rural areas.

Actually, what matters is the snobbery.

A Democrat needs to show respect for the life style of rural and suburban life, which include resource extraction, popular culture, popular food.    Coastal elites mocked Bill Clinton for being chubby and for eating McDonalds.  That did not hurt him; it helped him.  A great many people are chubby and a great many people eat at McDonalds.  That that was a brighter signal than was the fact that he was a Georgetown graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and a Yale Law School graduate.  He was not fashionably and fastidiously thin.  He ate fast food and loved it, too much, like a great many of us.

Liberal elites do not understand how much they hurt themselves by mocking Trump for ordering his steaks well done, with ketchup.  People of all demographics hate the notion that snobs criticize their food choices.  Not only do a great many people like ketchup on things the important point is that people pick up on the snobbery and disdain.  Trump's election was a rejection of people who pushed urbane values onto them.

Must not fake this.

Note that I use the word "signal."  Political messaging is by big, bold actions.  A successful Democratic candidate can in fact come from a college town and can have progressive politics, but he or she cannot have those and simultaneously project urbane tastes and attitudes win election.   The candidate needs to signal they share the values of the people of their district which is not done with policies.  It is done with actions that are undeniable and un-falsifiable.   John Kerry in a duck hunting vest looks like what it is:  false messaging.   A person who served in Iraq carrying a gun is sticky messaging.  Saying you castrated hogs is sticky messaging.  

This cannot be easily faked because voters are alert to fakery.   A three day crash course in country music will not suffice.   It will look fake because it would be fake.  A Democrat needs to signal who they are, not who they are not.

Field Report on Retail Politics:

What Really Happens:  A Field Report on a staple of politics in America.

Governor Kate Brown comes to speak at a Rotary meeting in a small city.

I introduced Gov. Brown

Oregon Governor Kate Brown spoke at a Rotary meeting in Medford, Oregon yesterday.  This is a bedrock element of political life in America.   I have been to well over a hundred of such events, but every one is a little different and not every politician handles them the same way.   Here is what happened at this one.

Gov. Brown stepped right up for photos.

Arrangements:   Rotary is an international organization set up as a collection of local clubs.  The Medford Rogue Rotary Club has about 200 active members, of which about 90 attend a typical weekly meeting, set for noon on Wednesday.  The meetings start at 12:10 and end promptly at 1:15--an hour and five minutes.   The club consists of business and professional people who are "civic minded".  It provides an opportunity for service projects (help nonprofit groups, improve playgrounds, clean up drinking water in Central America, eradicate polio).  It provides fellowship for its members.  It is a kind of secular church congregation.

Kate Brown's office arranged a speaking date because she was in town on other matters.  Because she had a flight to catch she needed to leave the meeting at 12:55 so the club accommodated that schedule by having her speech be early on the agenda as opposed to the normal meeting format.  

Warm, good eye contact.  Lots of these photos.

There was a packed house.   I counted 210 people in attendance.  Rotary members are aware of the upcoming program speaker.  Governor Brown drew a crowd.
Cameras from three local television stations were there to film the event, for use on their evening news shows.

Greetings and photos:   Governor Brown was gracious and friendly.   This is common but not universal among politicians.  (Hillary Clinton, for example, is friendly and appropriate, but not noticeably warm.   Rand Paul is decidedly cool.  Bill Clinton is deeply and penetratingly engaging, even in a ten second encounter.)   Kate Brown made close eye contact.  She smiled warmly.  She wasn't just happy to and willing to be in photographs, she leaned into it and appears to love it.

The Governor and Michelle Blum Atkinson 

She was introduced briefly by a Rotarian:   I introduced her.  (The club president called to ask me if I would do it.  He knew that I knew Kate Brown and would enjoy the opportunity.)  

The Governor and Kevin Stine

He forwarded to me a suggested introduction, sent to him by Brown's staff.  The introduction would have been embarrassing to the Governor had I read it verbatim because it read like campaign grandstanding.  It began,  "Kate Brown, Oregon's 38th Governor, has over 25 years of experience in standing up for working families and making government more accountable.  As Governor, she's signed legislation improving the state's education system. . . ."     I ignored the recommended speech and listed her previous jobs: State Senator, Senate President, Secretary of State, now Governor, noted humorously that she had graduated from a PAC 12 rival, the U of Colorado, that she lived in public housing (the Governor's mansion) and that I had tossed her staff's recommended speech.


She spoke for 20 minutes, listing policy achievements.  Her speech began with an example of her taking some personal initiative that allowed a state regulation to be met which allowed a disrupted family in foster care to stay together.  

The Dias setup:    A head table with six people.  A lectern set on the table.  Screens for power point on either side.  The head table is elevated about 24 inches.  The crowd is seated at round tables of ten.  There are Rotary flags and insignia behind the head table.   There are no surprises here if one is familiar with a Rotary or Kiwanis type event.  This is the standard setup world-wide.

Surprise Event:   As people stood to applaud at the end of her speech a group of a dozen people holding signs quietly entered the room.   These were activists opposing a proposed natural gas pipeline which would connect a major north-south natural gas line located about 75 miles east to the Oregon coast port of Coos Bay.  It would run through Jackson County.   I used this group as an example of the activist and uncompromising environmentalist who are an important--possibly essential--part of the Democratic activist base.  
I wrote yesterday that these activists are both a benefit and a challenge because their ethic is to "hold their feet to the fire" to make certain Democrats meet their wishes.   Their tactics are to be visible and mildly disruptive.  After entering the room silently one of their members began shouting out to the Governor: "We want a meeting!   We want to meet with you.  We are citizens and we want to discuss the pipeline with you."    Brown said, "Of course, I am happy to meet with you."  The protester said, "We want a meeting." There was a moment of growing tension.   The club president called out that this was a private meeting and that they were not invited, that we had a meeting in progress.

Protesters on the side entered as her speech ended

TV cameras focused on them. 

One of their members called out to the crowd, "All of you, please stand if you oppose the Jordon Cove pipeline!"   One or two people in the audience near them stood.  The rest remained seated.  

They began filing out.  They were there about 3 minutes.

They were a surprise, their entry into the meeting was disruptive, but only briefly so. They stayed on the side of the large room.  It could have been worse.  They could have brought drums or other noise makers and fully disrupted the meeting.  They could have started loud chants.  They did not.   But their appearance, with the brief disruption and their signs, would dominate the local TV news because people moving with signs are visually more interesting than a speaker behind a lectern.   The local newspaper story mentioned the disruption, but it was low in the story.  

Signs

This kind of visible disruption has become a pattern for moving their agenda.

Anti-pipeline strategy:  push vulnerable Democrats.  There were sign-carrying people at the Town Halls of Senator Wyden and Congressman Walden.  Demonstrators with anti-pipeline signs picketed in the street in front of a fundraiser for Brown that I hosted at a winery during her campaign last summer.  A smaller group, but with a giant sign, picketed my house last summer when I hosted a fundraiser for Senator Jeff Merkley, who opposes the pipeline.  Their pickets said that Merkley was friends with a Colorado Senator who supported fracking.  Kate Brown's Republican opponent was an outspoken supporter of the pipeline, while Brown, like fellow Democrat Wyden, is staying neutral.)  The anti-pipeline strategy is clear:  disrupt events for Democrats to try to push them into open, enthusiastic total opposition to the pipeline.  Republicans are a lost cause, but Democrats are vulnerable to losing environmentalist support if they are not sufficiently on board, so Democrats are susceptible to political pressure.

Outside my home.  Protests at your friends, too.

Summary:  A good day for Kate Brown.  She communicated that she was confident, a strong speaker, that she was willing to meet warmly her constituents, and that she could draw a crowd.  There were widespread comments after the meeting that the group had a full house, that it was great to see every table filled, etc.  

The fact that she drew and held the attention of the crowd will strengthen her reputation.

The Big Democratic Opportunity and Challenge

Making America the Land of Opportunity.

The Democratic Platform for jobs

This week is the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's getting onto a rail car in Zurich to go to Russia to foment revolution.   It was the idea of Arthur Zimmermann, the foreign minister of Germany, that it might be a way to take Russia out of the war.   This idea worked. 

Russia was ripe for revolution.  The Russian Revolution was a way to deal with the frustrations of people locked in the Czarist class and economic system that gave them no realistic path to opportunity  Lenin and a classless dictatorship of the proletariat was a proposal for a way out: everyone would be equal, their will expressed and embodied in an all powerful party and its leadership.

The new order replaced the old order.   It was still tyranny, but it was a new tyranny.

Meanwhile, in the USA.    The economic system of the industrial West has created extraordinary wealth and opportunity and it has created enormous pressure on the the evolving social order.  Most of the great political battles of the past 200 years can be understood as attempts to adjust the social order to the changing economic order.   People with something to lose don't want to lose it.   The civil war was a fight over the status of labor--free or enslaved--with an old guard trying to hang onto a social order and its traditions. The battles over wages and hours, over child labor, over public education, over Social Security and Medicare, over progressive taxation, over the estate tax, over the various tax rates on wages versus dividends, can all be understood as--at least in part--the struggle to accommodate new economic realities in the context of the interests of people with a stake in the status quo.

Democrats under Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, and candidate Hillary Clinton generally accepted the bi-partisan globalist solution: free trade between highly educated work forces in advanced economies like ours with manufacturing done in low wage countries.  We would exchange mass commodity agricultural crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans with vegetables grown by Mexican farmers in Mexico and Mexican farm workers in the US.  America would specialize in high wage sectors like technology and finance and we would trade with low wage countries that specialized in assembly.   

This blog has summarized that prescription to America on how to achieve prosperity as the "go to graduate school" plan.  Become a highly skilled worker.

Florida Trump rally:  immigrants are the problem, he said.

Donald Trump had a simpler plan for opportunity: blame our foreign competitors for taking the manufacturing jobs that we want back, or that we want to keep.  He targeted foreigners abroad with their factories and foreigners, legal and illegal, who came here to take "our" jobs.  He appealed to a patriotic and ethnic definition of "our", assisted by Hillary Clinton's campaign appeal to a coalition of the oppressed.  Trump adeptly seized the backlash and the larger half of the ethnic divide.   White Americans closed ranks in response to Muslim terror incidents and Hillary's campaign against the deplorables.  White women voted their race, not their gender.

Donald Trump still has a plan:  reduce immigration, deport criminal illegal immigrants, build a wall, conspicuously fight to preserve American manufacturing, nominate Supreme Court justices who will defend traditional social customs, increase use of American fossil fuels including coal, publicly celebrate traditional observances like Easter Egg hunts, and change the tax code to push taxes toward newly earned money (wages) and away from divided, interest, rents, and estates (capital) justified as being good for job creation.  The net result, as Trump describes it: America is great again and working people will reclaim the jobs lost to foreigners.  America becomes once again the land of opportunity.

Democrats need a plan.   Hillary Clinton never articulated one anyone can remember, other than urging white racists and xenophobes to end their prejudices and for "middle class tax cuts."   The problem for industrial workers is not taxes on the middle class; it is getting into the middle class.   Bernie Sanders had a plan: tax billionaires and a $15/hour minimum wage, thus bringing workers out of poverty.  He wanted to tax billionaires at a higher rate and use the money to make public colleges tuition free.  In some respects the Sanders plan was an affirmation of the Democratic plan: "go to graduate school."    The Democratic Platform list for jobs was long, utterly immemorable, and it never had credibility or political traction.  Readers today would have a hard time listing any of it.  (Hint.  Lots of job training and lots of concern for discrimination against black, immigrant, LGBTQ employees.)  Click on the link below the "Platform "graphic at the top of the page to read the whole 73 pages.  My expectation is that no one will because not one has.

Democrats lack a larger, more comprehensive story, one that integrates what voters feel about the multiple social and economic problems we face.  This is a period of high immigration with high numbers of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, approximately 25% of the population.   Democrats need to address that situation.  If they consider it a very good thing (in contrast to the Republican position) then they need to affirm them and simultaneously advance plans to make certain those people are integrated into the American culture and economy.  Un-assimilated groups, combined with declining industrial job opportunities, equal unhappy voters.   Democrats need an immigration policy that reduces the friction between immigrant and native born populations.

Democrats need an industrial policy and they need to recognize that not everyone can go to graduate school to become a computer or medical technician.  If Democrats' only real solution is for every worker to become a highly skilled, high wage employee then Democrats are doomed as a political party.   A great many people struggle in school.  A great many people who do well in school have children who struggle in school. Democrats had been the party of industrial workers and the "average guy."  The New Deal and the Fair Deal addressed their interests.   Modern Democrats do not.

A Democratic policy that focuses on entitlements to solve the problem is doomed to fail.  It divides the voters.  Even people who enjoy rich benefits (Social Security, Medicare, public pensions) resent the notion that others--presumedly less deserving--get benefits, especially needs based ones.   A Democratic policy needs to emphasize work, not entitlements.  Bill Clinton's formulation that he was fighting for people who "worked hard and played by the rules" is a frame that works.  It unifies.  Jesse Jackson, in his presidential campaign, spoke with respect and admiration for people who work hard, "they take the early bus", he said, to be on the job.   If Democrats give up on there being meaningful work for non-college adults then those non-college adults will give up on Democrats.  We saw it happen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina: states won by Obama and lost by Hillary Clinton. 

Recommendation for Democrats:  Have an industrial policy that provides a way into the middle class for people who barely graduated from high school.  (If they don't find hope with Democrats, do not worry.  They will find hope with Republicans, who in fact have a plan: blame foreigners and foreigner-loving Democrats and abolish the EPA.)  

Great activist base, but a demanding one

What would work for Democrats?  Recognition that industrial jobs using natural resources, are here in America, and they tend to employ the least employable people in our society: non-college men.   This involves lumber, mining, energy extraction, agriculture, and construction.  These are jobs that happen in rural areas, areas currently bright red and bright red for a reason.

(Areas like my own Oregon 2nd Congressional District, a bright red rural area.)

  Environmentalist Democrats will be uncomfortable with this. They personally actually use wood, materials, energy, food and infrastructure but they are uncomfortable with the production of them.  A Democrat who can win will insist on two things: that the use of wood fiber, energy, etc are good rather than suspect, and that they can be extracted responsibly.  There is an old phrase now in dis-use:  "wise use."    Democrats can and should renew its idea and its vocabulary.   

Must a Democrat abandon environmentalism?   Not at all.  But his or her focus needs to be on redefining environmentalism as a policy of care rather than a policy of resistance, to extraction and use of natural resources.  The issues are controversial and Democrats are blessed--and troubled--because the most active and loyal Democrats are motivated in significant part by environmental concerns.  Some environmentalists will object and want to "hold their feet to the fire" and the result will be Democrats with burned feet and a public position that sends the message to a great many workers that Democrats oppose any realistic opportunity for them to find good paying work.  Democrats run a risk here.  A Democratic candidate who appears "soft" is considered a traitor and some environmentalist voters will support a Green party candidate.  The Ralph Nader/Jill Stein alternative dooms Democrats, but a true believing environmentalist believes that the earth is in the balance and compromise demonstrates bad faith. 

A policy of environmental care may provide a pathway for a Democrat, but it is a delicate one.  Environmentalists are demanding and "pretty good" is often no where near good enough.  It is bad, a sell out, a traitor.  A successful Democrat will need to sell an idea that no one on the national stage is selling, that he or she is in favor of extraction and use of natural resources and that it can be done well. 

It may not be good enough for the Democratic environmental wing of the party, in which case Greg Walden will have an easy path to victory in Congress and Donald Trump will be re-elected as rural blue collar voters get the clear message, that Democrats would rather they subsist on food stamps than allow them to do good, hard, well-paying work.

The Big, Big Catastrophe is Unthinkable.

Humans could really mess things up, big time.

The problem with climate change isn't that the problem is too small.  It is that the problem is too big.  It is unthinkable.

Let's not worry about a big astroid.  If it blows us to smithereens it won't be our fault.   If the rotating iron core inside the middle of the earth makes some kind of polarity switch and we all get zapped by cosmic rays, well, that won't be our fault either.  


Lets contemplate for a moment nuclear war and ice ages, as a way to take our mind off of the frightening aspects of politics and messaging.  Humans tend not to prepare for unthinkable disasters.   They are too terrible to contemplate and they are expensive and inconvenient.  The chance of a full out nuclear exchange is not zero.   The chance that North Korea will prove its powerful self defense by striking out with a pre-emptive strike is much more than zero.    

Just threatened "All-out nuclear war."

     They have announced that North Korea is under imminent threat from the US and that they will do a pre-emptive defensive strike.

     They have enough nuclear weapons to destroy a few cities, while announcing that they have several more in reserve, doing to the US essentially what we did to Japan in 1945.  They would do what kidnappers do with hostages: show their ability and intent, then threaten to do more if their demands are not met.

     They have prepared to survive an attack.   They have super-deep subways and a civil defense program.   In messaging to their own people--also known as propaganda--they describe themselves as a spiked porcupine, able to protect itself from aggression.

     They have submarines, but they don't need them.  They have fishing boats and the ability to sneak a nuclear bomb onto freighter ship heading to any American container port.  Justified as self defense, a pre-emptive strike for their own protection, North Korea can kill 30 million South Koreans and 30 million Americans, and tell the US if we respond they will kill 50 million more Americans, our choice.

My point is not that horror of that scale is possible, because of course it is.  My point is that there are very, very few Americans who take action as if that can happen.   People buy liability insurance--and then umbrella coverages on top of that--against potential incidents that are very, very remote but we tend not to prepare for a much more plausible event because the event--a nuclear blast--is so unthinkable.

   Do readers of this blog have a supply of iodine tablets?  (They would be very useful in a period of nuclear radiation because our thyroid glands prefer uranium to iodine.  Give your thyroid a full-up supply of iodine so it doesn't go looking for uranium.)

  Do readers of this blog have a bomb shelter, a place where one's family can shelter underground for weeks or months, with food, water, a method for dealing with waste?

  Have readers protected their investment assets from the potential that one of those freighter ships with a nuclear bomb inside have been sent to the port of New York and New Jersey, and that the example-city demonstration blast will be at Wall Street?

My guess is no.  American policy has been to consider nuclear war as "unthinkable".  It has not been to think of nuclear war as a civil defense issue.  (In North Korea, it is a civil defense issue.  It isn't unthinkable to them, which means it isn't unthinkable.)

This gets us to the climate change debate.   Greenhouse gas levels are rising from levels of 100 years ago.  It is almost certainly important, although what changes it will make are uncertain because everything is connected.  Maybe warmer means more clouds, which means less sunlight which means cooler and it all balances out.  Or not.  Ice at the north pole seems to be melting.  That is not speculation.  It is measurable and obvious.  Will it mean net higher sea levels?  That would be expensive for the US, miserable for Florida, and catastrophic to Bangladesh.  Unfortunately for the Bangladeshi, Americans are not very concerned about them.  Presumably they will move to higher ground, their neighbors will not like it, there will be strife in Asia, but there is always strife of some kind in Asia, and Americans ignore it.

El Nino

But what if the effects are really big, and they effect us.   Again, there is a non-zero potential for this. Humans ignore this potential.  It is too terrible to contemplate.  We dismiss it as "scare talk." 

World climate is a delicate, interconnected thing.   Water temperature changes of two degrees in the western Pacific determine whether it is El Nino or La Nina.  The Southern Oscillation affects whether California is in drought or flood.

But there is something much bigger than that.  Reminder:  the earth is currently in an interglacial period, those rare 20-thousand year warm periods between Ice Ages.  Ice Ages last 200-thousand years, then for some reason things warm up, like now.  Civilization!  Then the Ice Age returns.   

This is not prediction.  This is history.

The warm half: the Gulf Stream

Isn't it good, then, that things are warming up?  It may stop a new ice age, right?  No.  Not necessarily.

(I realize some people dispute temperatures are actually changing more than normal.  What is not in dispute is that CO2 levels are higher, although some people dispute whether this is a problem.   What is not in dispute is that arctic sea ice is diminished from earlier centuries, but again whether this is abnormal or a problem is disputed.)    

The North Atlantic thermo-haline circulation.  Something very, very big and important happens in the North Atlantic.  Warm water from the tropics moves north, making moderating the climate of Western Europe, and the Northern Hemisphere generally.  During Ice Ages what is now called Canada and the northern USA and nearly all of Europe is covered in a mile deep pile of ice.  It looked like Greenland looks now.   The ice sheets came down to about the 42nd degree of latitude in the US--about to Boston, about to Chicago, about to somewhere south of Portland, Oregon.  It would change everything.    If global warming melts the Greenland ice cap too quickly it presumably would change the saltiness of the North Atlantic, thus--perhaps--turning off the thermo-haline circulation that keeps the Northern Hemisphere out of an ice age.  The land that is now France and Ohio looked like Greenland looks now--buried in ice--25,000 years ago and it could look that way again. Indeed, history says that it will.

The tiny difference in saltiness between the surrounding sea water in the North Atlantic and the saltier sea water from the Gulf Stream (saltier because evaporation from the warmer water caused its salt level to be greater, therefore be heavier, and therefore sink to the sea bottom and flow south, causing the Canary Current) makes the whole system work.  Fresh water runoff from Greenland could mess that up.  

Sailors noted this circle and used it

 Global warming isn't just the date when tulips bloom in our front yard; it can effect the future of civilization.  It can mess up an ocean current that is essential to maintaining life in the West.

Will CO2 and greenhouse gases cause global warming then trigger an Ice Age?  We don't know.   But we do know that Greenland's ice is melting rapidly and we do know that there is a great circle of circulation of warm and cool in the North Atlantic, and we do know that most of North America and nearly all of Europe is north of the 42nd degree of latitude.

Is the potential for triggering catastrophic climate change speculation?   Yes.  Do we know there will be a nuclear attack by North Korea?  No.  

But the consequences are terrible if they happen.  On matters that are thinkable--winning the Megabucks lottery or being sued for causing a fatal car accident--people take action.  They buy tickets and they buy umbrella liability insurance.   On things that are unthinkable, we do not.

And that is one reason why climate change is both a huge issue but not a good political issue for motivating generally uninterested and un-engaged people, even though the consequences are huge.  On the really, really important risks, people just don't want to think about it.