Politics As Usual

[Arkady]

We're conditioned to treat "politics as usual" as a negative phrase. And if you think of that phrase in terms of the millenia-old tradition of dishonest politicians using their positions to serve themselves and to shut down promising policy alternatives that might disrupt their status quo, then it is a negative thing. But this election cycle, more than any others in my time, has served as a lesson that there are worse alternatives than politics as usual. We might not yet be at the stage of Central Europe in the 1930s, but we're taking some alarming steps in that direction.

This is not a symmetrical thing, as much as many pundits want to make it into one. It really is about one side of the political divide. What you're seeing on the Democratic side is pretty much "politics as usual," for good and ill. You have two highly experienced and temperamentally unremarkable politicians vying for the presidential nomination in a fight that has about the normal mix of policy and personality disputes. Hillary Clinton is entirely mainstream by modern Democratic standards. And Sanders represents a fairly typical insurgency by the base. Granted, Sanders is farther to the left than the insurgents in recent Democratic nomination fights, but his positions are well within the mainstream for advanced nations generally -- he'd be an unremarkable center-left candidate by the standards of France, Germany, Denmark, Canada, etc. The contest between those candidates has been mostly dignified and substantive, and the contest among their proxies in the media has been commendably informative and thoughtful. Consider, for example:

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/19/pau..._on_bernie_sanders_completely_miss_the_point/

It's on the GOP side of the divide that "politics as usual" has gone out the window this cycle. The two leading candidates for the nomination are a badly under-experienced bomb-throwing Senator who even most of his own party's leaders hate, and a completely inexperienced reality TV star who pretty much all the party's leaders hate. They each are proposing things that are far outside the spectrum of mainstream policies among developed nations. But, more to the point, neither is really running on policy. It's largely a campaign about who hates liberals more and who will do more to put out-groups in their place. It's hard to imagine something like the Salon piece I linked to coming out about the GOP race today, because their nomination fight isn't being waged in terms of intellectual questions. It's not about different approaches to political strategy, much less different economic assumptions and their policy implications. It's about emotion -- about how best to tap the fear and loathing of the right-wing masses. We may not be 1932 Germany yet, but for those who've studied that place and time, the tone is ominously familiar.

 

[Rouge Rover]

I think you're mostly right about the GOP candidates but you're way off on what's motivating GOP voters.

 

[Lukey]

“[T]he reason the joke about facts having a liberal bias rings so true..."

Is because it IS a joke!

 

[Arkady]

I think you're mostly right about the GOP candidates but you're way off on what's motivating GOP voters.

What do you think is motivating them?

 

[as seen on tv]

politics has a negative connotation because the practice is abused.

in it's highest level, politics is the art of compromise. creating a win-win situation for citizens and taxpayers.

however, as practiced by both parties currently, politics consists of

• earmarks and special interest monetary deals which enrich the few
• legislation which is so long, complex and delivered so late that neither congress nor the public can review it before the vote
• legislation intended to generate campaign contributions and a perpetual seat in congress, rather than address public needs.

 

[Rouge Rover]

What do you think is motivating them?

Disgust and anger. Some don't want the perceived "establishment' in office anymore and they're willing to stick a dagger in the GOP to accomplish that. It's not based in fear it's actually a well thought out long view.

 

[Arkady]

“[T]he reason the joke about facts having a liberal bias rings so true..."

Is because it IS a joke!

No. It's because there are measurable real-world truths that have a stubborn habit of coming closer to the liberal talking points than the conservative ones. One you and I have discussed a lot is inflation -- the conservative talking points, starting in 2008, were built around being very afraid that hyperinflation was going to show up any day now because of loose money supply. The liberal talking points, from that time forward, were that inflation wasn't going to be a serious issue until the economy had picked up a lot more, and that job creation should be our primary concern. That was followed by eight years of inflation averaging lower than even the Fed's ultra-conservative target rate, with job creation indeed being enough of a problem that it took that whole time just to get unemployment under 5%, even with the help of Baby Boom retirements. Reality, it turned out, had a liberal bias.

That's just one of countless examples. There was also the almost universal clamoring among conservatives for us to start a war with Iraq, while liberals argued that we should give weapons inspectors more time. Turns out, the liberals were right. Not only was the Iraq invasion an epoch-making catastrophe, but if we'd given weapons inspectors more time, we would have found that Iraq didn't have the massive WMD arsenals and programs the Republicans claimed, and the case for war would have unraveled.

Or consider climate change. Liberals have generally deferred to the expert community of scientists on that one. And so liberals have been unsurprised as new record highs for global temperatures have been set time and again, and each decade has been hotter than the last. But a great many conservatives instead aligned behind the ramblings of non-scientist bloggers like Anthony Watts, who rejected the science behind the predictions of ongoing warming, and thus have been taken by surprise by that ongoing trend.

I'm not going to claim that liberals never find themselves more at odds with the facts than conservatives. Although I think liberals have injected some healthy considerations into the debate about free trade, ultimately I think there's a lot more know-nothingism on the left than the right on that topic, and I'd say the same about GMO crops, and maybe also vaccines. But for the most part, liberals are a lot more likely to look at the evidence and form their opinions around that -- or at least to allow their opinions to be swayed by the evidence. I suspect religion may have something to do with this. There is a lot more religiosity on the right than the left, and if your brain has been trained, from childhood, to treat strong belief in the absence of evidence as a sign of virtue, it's hard to turn that off when you move outside the realm of religion.

 

[Arkady]

politics has a negative connotation because the practice is abused.

in it's highest level, politics is the art of compromise. creating a win-win situation for citizens and taxpayers.

however, as practiced by both parties currently, politics consists of

• earmarks and special interest monetary deals which enrich the few
• legislation which is so long, complex and delivered so late that neither congress nor the public can review it before the vote
• legislation intended to generate campaign contributions and a perpetual seat in congress, rather than address public needs.

I agree with your points. However, I'd argue that politics can work "well enough" even with those things going on. Democracy can bear a certain amount of corruption and self-dealing and yet still gift the people with ongoing improvement. I mean, it's not like the US, in the 20th century, was magically free of politicians using earmarks to serve special interests, and so on. Yet, the government helped to make people a lot better off through the course of that century. "Politics as usual," for all its sausage-making ugliness, tends to work more often than not. What I'm worried about is that we may be moving to a different stage -- something more like Italy and Germany in the early 1930s. We may be getting into a kind of politics that no longer shambles fitfully in a positive direction, and instead into a politics that charges aggressively off the nearest cliff.

 

[Arkady]

Disgust and anger. Some don't want the perceived "establishment' in office anymore and they're willing to stick a dagger in the GOP to accomplish that. It's not based in fear it's actually a well thought out long view.

I'd like to think that were true. And I might think that way, if the voters were embracing an anti-establishment figure who was smart, substantive, and temperamentally suited to the presidency.... even a Bloomberg type. But they're backing a clown and every time he says something hateful or unhinged, his numbers go up.

 

[Lukey]

No. It's because there are measurable real-world truths that have a stubborn habit of coming closer to the liberal talking points than the conservative ones. One you and I have discussed a lot is inflation -- the conservative talking points, starting in 2008, were built around being very afraid that hyperinflation was going to show up any day now because of loose money supply. The liberal talking points, from that time forward, were that inflation wasn't going to be a serious issue until the economy had picked up a lot more, and that job creation should be our primary concern. That was followed by eight years of inflation averaging lower than even the Fed's ultra-conservative target rate, with job creation indeed being enough of a problem that it took that whole time just to get unemployment under 5%, even with the help of Baby Boom retirements. Reality, it turned out, had a liberal bias.

That's just one of countless examples. There was also the almost universal clamoring among conservative for us to start a war with Iraq, while liberals argued that we should give weapons inspectors more time. Turns out, the liberals were right. Not only was the Iraq invasion an epoch-making catastrophe, but if we'd given weapons inspectors more time, we would have found that Iraq didn't have the massive WMD arsenals and programs the Republicans claimed, and the case for war would have unraveled.

Or consider climate change. Liberals have generally deferred to the expert community of scientists on that one. And so liberals have been unsurprising as new record highs for global temperatures have been set time and again, and each decade has been hotter than the last. But a great many conservatives instead aligned behind the ramblings of non-scientist bloggers like Anthony Watts, who rejected the science behind the predictions of ongoing warming, and thus have been taken by surprise by that ongoing trend.

I'm not going to claim that liberals never find themselves more at odds with the facts than conservatives. Although I think liberals have injected some healthy considerations into the debate about free trade, ultimately I think there's a lot more know-nothingism on the left than the right on that topic, and I'd say the same about GMO crops, and maybe also vaccines. But for the most part, liberals are a lot more likely to look at the evidence and form their opinions around that -- or at least to allow their opinions to be swayed by the evidence. I suspect religion may have something to do with this. There is a lot more religiosity on the right than the left, and if your brain has been trained, from childhood, to treat strong believe in the absence of evidence as a sign of virtue, it's hard to turn that off when you move outside the realm of religion.

Does that include the fact that your policies have us on a collision course with a Euro-style social and economic debacle? There is no "logic" in socialism - it fails, always and everywhere (including your vaunted "Nordic Model"):

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ca036e9e-c9a6-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html

 

[Arkady]

Does that include the fact that your policies have us on a collision course with a Euro-style social and economic debacle?

Quite the opposite, as you know. On the left, they looked at the best economic models and concluded that austerity in response to a financial crisis was a really dumb idea. On the right, they came up with fairy tales about austerity boosting confidence and stimulating the economy. None of the major countries went down the Keynesian path of boosting government spending during this era (at least in per capita, inflation-adjusted terms, even the US cut the size of government), but they went down the austerity path to different degrees, with those who went further down it tending to suffer the worst economic debacles. Europe, for the most part, stumbled farther in the direction of austerity than we did, and I'm glad we swerved from that collision course with an economic debacle before suffering their fate to the same extent.

 

[Rouge Rover]

I'd like to think that were true. And I might think that way, if the voters were embracing an anti-establishment figure who was smart, substantive, and temperamentally suited to the presidency.... even a Bloomberg type. But they're backing a clown and every time he says something hateful or unhinged, his numbers go up.

Voters can only go with what's put in front of them, either that or stay home. I'd vote for Cruz but only because I see a vote for Cruz as a vote for gridlock which I'm all for. I don't see Trump as a freak, I think he's a reasonable, realistic guy once you get past his persona and would make a good President. The rest of them are establishment tools and if one of those people gets the nomination I'll be voting third party.

 

[SW48]

We're conditioned to treat "politics as usual" as a negative phrase. And if you think of that phrase in terms of the millenia-old tradition of dishonest politicians using their positions to serve themselves and to shut down promising policy alternatives that might disrupt their status quo, then it is a negative thing. But this election cycle, more than any others in my time, has served as a lesson that there are worse alternatives than politics as usual. We might not yet be at the stage of Central Europe in the 1930s, but we're taking some alarming steps in that direction.

This is not a symmetrical thing, as much as many pundits want to make it into one. It really is about one side of the political divide. What you're seeing on the Democratic side is pretty much "politics as usual," for good and ill. You have two highly experienced and temperamentally unremarkable politicians vying for the presidential nomination in a fight that has about the normal mix of policy and personality disputes. Hillary Clinton is entirely mainstream by modern Democratic standards. And Sanders represents a fairly typical insurgency by the base. Granted, Sanders is farther to the left than the insurgents in recent Democratic nomination fights, but his positions are well within the mainstream for advanced nations generally -- he'd be an unremarkable center-left candidate by the standards of France, Germany, Denmark, Canada, etc. The contest between those candidates has been mostly dignified and substantive, and the contest among their proxies in the media has been commendably informative and thoughtful. Consider, for example:

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/19/pau..._on_bernie_sanders_completely_miss_the_point/

It's on the GOP side of the divide that "politics as usual" has gone out the window this cycle. The two leading candidates for the nomination are a badly under-experienced bomb-throwing Senator who even most of his own party's leaders hate, and a completely inexperienced reality TV star who pretty much all the party's leaders hate. They each are proposing things that are far outside the spectrum of mainstream policies among developed nations. But, more to the point, neither is really running on policy. It's largely a campaign about who hates liberals more and who will do more to put out-groups in their place. It's hard to imagine something like the Salon piece I linked to coming out about the GOP race today, because their nomination fight isn't being waged in terms of intellectual questions. It's not about different approaches to political strategy, much less different economic assumptions and their policy implications. It's about emotion -- about how best to tap the fear and loathing of the right-wing masses. We may not be 1932 Germany yet, but for those who've studied that place and time, the tone is ominously familiar.

A wife of a successful president and a good guy socialist senator who has never gotten any legislation passed are more qualified and "politics as usual"? I just don't see it.

 

[SW48]

Voters can only go with what's put in front of them, either that or stay home. I'd vote for Cruz but only because I see a vote for Cruz as a vote for gridlock which I'm all for. I don't see Trump as a freak, I think he's a reasonable, realistic guy once you get past his persona and would make a good President. The rest of them are establishment tools and if one of those people gets the nomination I'll be voting third party.

I too prefer gridlock but I think to do that it would have to be Hillary. Because Cruz with a Republican congress could do damage. Hillary would only be able to sign executive orders as she says Republicans are her greatest enemy so she has no way to pass anything through Congress.

 

[Lukey]

Quite the opposite, as you know. On the left, they looked at the best economic models and concluded that austerity in response to a financial crisis was a really dumb idea. On the right, they came up with fairy tales about austerity boosting confidence and stimulating the economy. None of the major countries went down the Keynesian path of boosting government spending during this era (at least in per capita, inflation-adjusted terms, even the US cut the size of government), but they went down the austerity path to different degrees, with those who went further down it tending to suffer the worst economic debacles. Europe, for the most part, stumbled farther in the direction of austerity than we did, and I'm glad we swerved from that collision course with an economic debacle before suffering their fate to the same extent.

And as you know I have exposed this crackpot economic "analysis" of yours repeatedly:

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Famous-NY-Times-columnist-got-Ireland-all-wrong.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-s-really-really-worried-abenomics-might-fail

 

[Addy]

It's about emotion -- about how best to tap the fear and loathing of the right-wing masses.

The shame of it all... and this election season could be one for the history books -- just for that reason alone.

And their theme song could be -- I'm exactly what you made me.

 

[Arkady]

A wife of a successful president and a good guy socialist senator who has never gotten any legislation passed are more qualified and "politics as usual"? I just don't see it.

The "wife of a successful president" is a successful politician with her own eight-year senate career and four years as Secretary of State under her belt. As for Sanders, he has a quarter century in Congress and before that was mayor of his state's biggest city. That gives both of them both legislative and executive-branch experience. By comparison, Trump is best known for bellowing catch-phrases as a reality TV star, and has never held any political office. Cruz at least has some relevant experience, but really only has three years in the big leagues, and most of that time was spent on obstructionist grand-standing. So, yes, I'd say both Clinton and Sanders are head-and-shoulders more qualified. And they're certainly more "politics as usual." Their backgrounds would fit right in with most people who become president. Cruz, like Obama before him, would be a bit of an oddball, in being radically under-experienced, and Trump would be unique in modern American history.

 

[Arkady]

I too prefer gridlock but I think to do that it would have to be Hillary. Because Cruz with a Republican congress could do damage. Hillary would only be able to sign executive orders as she says Republicans are her greatest enemy so she has no way to pass anything through Congress.

By all means, provide the link to where Clinton claimed that Republicans are her greatest enemy?

It's amazing how eager people are to swallow these right-wing lies.

 

[marvin martian]

By all means, provide the link to where Clinton claimed that Republicans are her greatest enemy?

It's amazing how eager people are to swallow these right-wing lies.

Not her greatest enemy, just the one of which she is most proud. A difference? Maybe.

Which enemy are you most proud of?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians.

(LAUGHTER)

Probably the Republicans. (LAUGHTER)

By the way, all the Dems were asked that question. Sanders' greatest enemy? Wall Street. Chafee? The coal industry. O'Malley, like Hillary, also confirmed a civil rights organization as his greatest enemy. Webb said it was one of the NVA soldiers he killed in Vietnam. What a bunch of losers...

 

[Mr. Friscus]

The "wife of a successful president" is a successful politician with her own eight-year senate career and four years as Secretary of State under her belt. As for Sanders, he has a quarter century in Congress and before that was mayor of his state's biggest city. That gives both of them both legislative and executive-branch experience. By comparison, Trump is best known for bellowing catch-phrases as a reality TV star, and has never held any political office. Cruz at least has some relevant experience, but really only has three years in the big leagues, and most of that time was spent on obstructionist grand-standing. So, yes, I'd say both Clinton and Sanders are head-and-shoulders more qualified. And they're certainly more "politics as usual." Their backgrounds would fit right in with most people who become president. Cruz, like Obama before him, would be a bit of an oddball, in being radically under-experienced, and Trump would be unique in modern American history.

I think that's why Trump is getting so much support.

People have noticed just where the "presidential mold" has taken us.

I think diversity in the office would be great... different professions, different sectors of the society, etc.