What we Fear is Us

February 28, 2017

When negotiating a traffic circle, the idea is not to bisect the circle at high speed. Rather, these circles enable vehicular traffic to flow efficiently and harmoniously, where drivers enter in turns and navigate the lanes using mirrors, signals, and a dose of civility. For my friends in DC who travel Chevy Chase Circle, we understand too well that this latter description can fail utterly.

And that’s really an apt metaphor for today’s United States, isn’t it? We’re no longer working in concert with others; no, by contrast we’re charging angrily into the circle, cutting through the lanes, sowing risk and spreading destruction in our wake. Everyone else be damned. So, for all those well-meaning and nostalgic individuals who say, “this isn’t America” … let’s labor no more under such delusions: this is who we are as a country. This is us. We’re going to try being the bullies on the block for a while, and see what that feels like. Are you ready?

As an historian recently (and wrongfully) detained at an airport so aptly put it, “We must now face arbitrariness and incompetence at every level.” Ever looked down your nose at those banana republics and their graft-ridden low-level apparatchiks? Well take a look in the mirror. Do you enjoy the freedom to say what you want, and be what you want, without the fear and reprisals with which other populations must contend? Better start watching your back. You should also get used to violence and intimidation against religious minorities; we see more of it with each passing day. Get used to people who are in this country legally now fleeing across the northern border (illegally) just to escape you. YOU. Get used to well-educated and economically additive immigrants choosing to leave the United States, or instead to never come here at all but to go elsewhere, and make those countries wealthier and more powerful – not us. For those of you that took the course, we’re going to try tossing macroeconomics out the window, and see how that goes. Let’s all slam the doors and throw up tariffs and walls and all of those things we’d once consigned to the trash heap of fiscal experimentation. Can we fix it? Perhaps, if it isn’t already too late, but that will take a lot more effort than we’ve shown ourselves willing to give.

So together we have a front seat view now of just how little is required to dramatically alter a nation’s climate to one of fear and intimidation, and to let loose the less savory and more violent instincts of what psychologists will tell you is a larger part of the population than you probably wish to imagine. How much fun that will be, for all of us. Oh, what a small number of words from a powerful set of lips can unleash, like a few crooked stones in the Oroville spillway. Before us now is a farcical tyranny of the masses, tossing gasoline on a fire in a desperate last act of irrationality and recklessness.

But the thing about burning down the house is, my friends – you’ve got to be prepared to stand in a pile of ashes. Ever sneered at those other countries which lacked our social, political, and economic stability, or maintained our professional and civil standards? Our long-standing religious rights and protections? You’ve got to be prepared to lose those rights, privileges, services, predictabilities, and opportunities you’ve come to expect (and perhaps never even really considered), as they were built on the very foundations you just torched. Have you enjoyed the comfort and peace of mind that comes with being the adult among nations? Say goodbye to the prestige you once carried, the doors held open, the elevated pathways afforded you.

Welcome to your Brave New World, America.

Our Intellectual Crisis

February 11, 2017

Many of you have expressed exasperation with political posts. OK – you’re not alone. This morning, I poured my coffee and turned to MSNBC. Reporting from Tehran indicated that while the demonstrations included some typical anti-U.S. rhetoric, there was a notable reduction this year in the number of burning American flags, and many demonstrators expressed solidarity with protesters of the current administration. There were pictures, of course, and this all seemed believable. I turned to FOX. The story line was of a belligerent display, that there were shouts everywhere of “death to America”, and presented to the viewer a picture of a U.S. flag aflame. Clearly this was also quite believable, as it’s the Tehran we've come to know and follows years of the same. So, what do we take away? Who is correct… and is there even a single “correct” here?

What did I take away from this morning’s news? Well, yes, our old adversaries in Iran are still there and must be managed, and they’re still aiming both invective and policy our way. But also that the populace itself may actually hold a more nuanced and shifting view of our country and its inhabitants, and that this divergence might present some kind of opening in the future if properly exploited and leveraged.

The larger point, perhaps, is this: if we are to return to civility in discourse, to thoughtful discussion, we must recognize the difference between opinion and fact. Between feeling and spin, and objective reality. You’re entitled to your feelings and opinions. They’re of course more compelling when fact and evidence-based. You are not entitled to your own versions of facts; these are simply obstructionist opinion. That a thing may fit a chosen narrative does not in itself bestow merit. And while that’s sometimes discomforting, the truly strong, substantive personality and mind is equipped to understand it and to adapt. If we were on the ground, there amongst the demonstrators, that would be rather direct evidence and basis for a fairly concrete stance. Were we, however, to have established a perspective based upon viewing only one of these news outlets, we’d have limited our impression of today’s events. Perhaps we'd now hold a less-informed perspective. Having not been there, of course, we must consult multiple sources to build a more circumspect opinion. And even then… it being indirect evidence… we must concede to not being primary sources and thus should be open to listening, to consulting other sources of information, and to conducting objective discussion – especially with those (should we be so fortunate) who are direct sources, and have studied or participated in the topic at hand.

Our country is in the grips of an intellectual crisis long in the making. I cannot possibly enumerate all of the causes and contributors here in this post. But unless and until we recognize the difference between what we wish or assume to be true, based upon narrow and indirect sources, versus demonstrable fact through direct evidence or at the very least based upon a broad survey of credible indirect sources, we will continue to follow an unsustainable path of division and discord of our own creation.

Oh, and these are Mr. Jefferson’s Books, Library of Congress.

How Big is Your Bubble?

December 15, 2016

It's incumbent upon all of us not to dismiss out of hand information that conflicts with our established views. If you bristle when people unfairly cry "racist" every time they hear the word Republican, just imagine what it's like for Democrats to hear "America-hating communist" every time they’re mentioned. That's pretty much what I've witnessed for years now. We’re better than that, aren’t we? Hatred and animosity are amplified in echo chambers; it’s easy to dismiss (and even to hate) people and things with which you don’t often interact. Especially when others around you are constantly shouting that they’re the problem…. and that is neither a totally red nor blue statement. This chart should give all of us pause. (and please do not dismiss it because it’s from MIT...)

Winter has Come

November 19, 2016

Winter has come for the greater generations; we've only these monuments to our better angels now. They elevated knowledge, while we suborn it to emotion. They remained calm under fire, while we burn with hair-trigger outrage. Their humility and quiet actions spoke of their character; our hollow and sanctimonious bellicosity belies our own. We're no longer the people we once were, nor those we so loudly profess to be. But while these stone memorials to discarded ideals remain, I will enjoy them and share them with you on this beautiful fall day, in rapidly fading hopes for our return to worthiness of their provenance. 

Election Year Stockholm Syndrome

There are certain truths that escape understanding even in plain view; for instance, if one digs a hole deep enough, climbing out may be difficult.  Certainly, it will be much more difficult, and a longer process still, than climbing out of a shallower hole.  Makes sense, right?

So let’s apply that to our economic situation.  In past recessions, say since the 1930s, we've been climbing out of holes somewhat shallower than that of the Great Recession from which we are currently struggling to extract ourselves.  Other recoveries (to which this one is unfavorably compared) have been much more robust and far shorter in duration.  Does this surprise anyone?  Apparently, it does.

When there is no public money left, when we are deeply in debt, when interest rates are already at historic lows, when credit markets are inaccessible, when public payrolls are bloated, and when most Americans (who decry the government’s poor management of its finances) have little to no savings of their own, even after the good times when they should have been socking it away, and finally, when they bought homes for which they paid far too much that are now worth considerably less… well, one can easily see the challenges involved in engineering a traditionally robust recovery.  It’s got a snowball's chance of making it across the river Styx.

This was the Frankenstorm of recessions, the Sandy of slowdowns.  We can at least agree on that.

Of all the myths perpetuated this election cycle (and there are many, even on the blue side), this idea that we should have snapped our fingers and been out of the woods in a year or two is just the stupidest farce we've witnessed here.   And yes, the president set an unrealistic expectation four years ago.  Thinking people knew it was optimistic.  But what is most dispiriting is that at least 47% of Americans seem to have bought the idea and are genuinely upset about it.  They should look in the mirror.  Even George W. Bush didn't create this mess alone.  Let’s stop blaming Obama for the hole we dug together.  And let’s be smart enough to recognize that we've got a painful climb out of our collective mess, regardless of who occupies the White House in January.

What this really comes down to is the Congress; if they don’t mend their fences, enact a Simpson-Bowles-esque solution, and get control of healthcare entitlements, all of the campaign trail rhetoric in the world won’t pull us out of the downward spiral.  Don’t count on a GOP-led congress to make the tough choices: as the numbers show, red states are net beneficiaries of the federal dollars they lambaste.  It’s the blue states, in grim irony, that fund the red ones, and are net contributors to the budget.  How exasperating that they are under withering fire from the very populace they feed.  Do we honestly believe congressional representatives will willingly cut funding from their own states?  And as I've written before, I’m less concerned about a Romney presidency than with the right-wing congressional fringe and corporate profit centers to whom they’ll be inextricably beholden.  I fear we won’t get Governor Romney, but President Koch. 

Our voting this time around is regrettably for who will do the least damage, and to give congress a chance to come up with some compromise solution.  There is a part of me that actually suspects that if Romney wins, these GOP tea-soaked obstructionists will suddenly find it in their hearts to cross the aisle and back off of some of their brinkmanship, as they have so many times stated that the party’s number one goal is to defeat Obama.  If they are to be believed, then perhaps we have some hope should Tuesday break that direction.  But we should all recognize however that this is like paying the ransom, and trusting your hostage will be delivered alive and unharmed.  It’s sympathy for our captors.  Our national embrace of the very congressional elements complicit in our current economic quicksand is a massive and bizarre case of Stockholm syndrome.

Happy voting tomorrow.

JB's Top 10 Reasons It's No Fun To Be A Moderate

I'm a moderate Republican, a member of an orphaned cadre which no longer has a voice in American politics.  The GOP and my more conservative friends label me a turncoat liberal.  Yet the Democratic party's chronic largess makes me uncertain of its ability to make real progress fast enough; they are, however, giving it a shot, tackling out-of-control programs such that we may at least have a mechanism to contain the mess.  Conversely, the Republican party's engineering of the last decade's deficits and excesses (which they now suddenly decry) doesn't inspire me to place much faith in them, either.  

Four years ago I could not fathom voting for any ticket containing Governor Sarah Palin, and for the below reasons, I'll likely vote Democratic once again.  I don't relish it.  In short, the GOP of today has managed to convince the American people that what they see... isn't really what they see... and I can't get past it.  They've succeeded remarkably well in:

1) Painting a president who bailed out and saved the American auto and banking industries as anti-business, while openly pillorying him for doing it.

2) Dismissing 47% of Americans as lazy and non-taxpaying when a sizable chunk of that very group actually comprises the conservative base and will, bewilderingly, be voting GOP this fall.

3) Professing to be deficit and spending hawks while having directly helped to create most of the deficits we now face through two wars, tax cuts, and healthcare spending.  All unfunded, however justified.

4) Persuading people they're actually worse off now than when the economy was in unrestrained free-fall, credit markets were completely frozen, stocks were half their current value heading downward, home values were collapsing, and we were shedding millions of jobs each month.  Few of us seem to remember these events.  

5) Establishing the conventional wisdom that while we've been relentlessly cutting taxes, reducing personal and public savings, and deregulating for the past 30 years, that if we just double down on those same policies, a complete turnaround of our economic situation will suddenly spring into being, and the debt to be paid for the excesses of those decades will simply vanish in the span of an election cycle.

6) Construing the GOP as the party of the family, while continually fighting the rights of a minority of loving couples to establish community-building, tax-paying households and families. 

7) Presenting the right as champion of children, education, and technological progress, while proclaiming evolution a theory "from the fiery pits of hell", and telling Americans it's "snobbish" for the president to want everyone to have a chance to go to college... and (ironically) accusing the Democrats of class warfare.

8) Convincing Americans that the president is a Kenyan Marxist Muslim Fascist (still trying to wrap my head around this one) who secretly hates America, and that we are only an hour away from jack-booted federally-imposed marshal law.  Seriously.  There's enough of this travelling around the internet with the help of otherwise level-headed people I know, love, and respect as to beggar belief.  I'm not seeing this same level of vitriol from my friends over on the left.

9) Successfully substituting faith & emotions for details and policies.  The very campaign slogan of "Believe in America", among too many other statements, slogans, Fox News pieces, and emailed stories and pictures to count, perpetuates the notion that if you don't vote GOP, then you don't believe in America, you hate Jesus, eschew apple pie, and would just as soon sit on your ass and take a government handout.  No matter how I choose to vote, I find that patently false, mean-spirited, short-sighted, and divisive.

10) Obscuring the fact that unfunded liabilities - healthcare spending to be precise - is our number one issue and driver of public debt.  All of the discussions of Big Bird and eliminating cabinet agencies are minuscule rounding errors on our budget and hardly merit discussion given the enormity and immediacy of this real Medicaid problem.  Bringing healthcare under control must be our number one priority - we cannot simply ignore it.  As Governor Romney rightly said, "We don't just let people sit in their apartment and have a heart attack and die; we send an ambulance and bring them to the emergency room and give them care regardless of their ability to pay."  So, we do in fact have socialized medicine, whether we want to call it that or not, and as long as healthcare spending remains on its present course without management, allowing patients to spiral downward outside the system (creating uncontrolled risk), we will plunge further into debt.

I recognize that this list above is focused on complaints, not solutions - but that's another topic deserving its own space.  To be clear, I am far less concerned about Governor Romney becoming president than I am about the shrill extremists that will unfortunately and invariably follow with him.  He's an intelligent, good man who would very likely seek to lead us on a prudent course.  The GOP as a party, however, has over the last 20 years or so become increasingly beset by fundamentalist, right-wing fringe elements with whom neither reason nor compromise can be achieved, and they wear their obstructionist badge proudly.  How can a government run by such people function effectively?  All one need do is look at the U.S. House of Representatives today; it is not operating as our founders envisioned, nor is it what created the American prosperity of the twentieth century.  By contrast, the real Romney (his record tells us) is much more moderate and pragmatic than he and his campaign staff would have us believe... just as Obama's centrist policies and actions have shown him to be as well, seemingly against all popular recognition.  My faith in the American people's ability to grasp a necessary degree of nuance or complexity of issue and argument - both of which color and shape the real world - is greatly shaken by this race.

America Discovers its Youthful Fervor. And that’s Not a Good Thing

I believe the consistent quality that marks members of older generations is a wizened pragmatism. With years, our elders seem to become more patient, harder to ruffle, better judges of people, and surprisingly more tolerant. So it’s striking to me how extreme our politics has become as America’s irrational exuberance has turned from stocks to statesmen.

Young people are remarkably more dramatic in their everyday lives than their elders. For instance, the passion displayed by my five year old daughter knows no bounds when it comes to Barbie’s hairstyle or the seasoning on her vegetables. In their later years, our youth have a history of taking ideas and ideals to extremes, as they did during the turbulent 1960’s when the country cried out for social change. Fast forward, and the last twenty years have seen the rise of the religious right as a truly young and potent force in national policy debate. Likewise, politically immature countries also tend toward extremes (these may be newly formed, or simply have undergone dramatic socio-economic shift). Politically maturing countries exhibit wild uncertainty in policy direction and cultural norms, such as the myriad Middle Eastern nations which abruptly reversed their trends toward westernization during the 1970’s, installing religious leaders as heads of state, and whose populations now live under the tight thumb of thought police and economic oppression.

Here at home, recent election results from the nation’s capital and Delaware, in particular, expose an ominous immaturity and irrationality. The unseating of a moderate conservative in Mike Castle (R – DE) by a novice candidate with vague slogans and questionable personal dealings, and the ousting of a mayor widely acknowledged as effective in a city clamoring for progress demonstrates a profound eschewing of realism among voters. It’s difficult to understand the mindset of the two-thirds of Democratic constituents who agree that Mayor Adrian Fenty “brought needed change to the District”, and who thought he’d improved schools by 2:1 (Washington Post poll), yet booted him from office for a councilman of the Barry era whose campaign platform was basically that he’s a nicer guy than the mayor. It’s difficult unless you consider that many constituents are teachers who bristle at the possibility they could ever be fired from a job (like the rest of us) or taxi drivers who decry the honest fares they must now charge using regulated meters. Anyone who’s ever been driven through three zones in four blocks knows what I mean. We like to talk about turning Washington around, but it turns out that it’s just too painful once someone actually does it.

While we might expect otherwise questionable choices from the city that once elected a mayor straight out of prison, the conservative voting block of Delaware has possibly bested Washingtonians by nominating a youthful candidate with no discernible job, no sources of personal income, no home, no short history of litigation, and finally no real policy specifics on which to run. Mike Castle was known to be honest, moderate, and more concerned with getting legislation right than keeping his day job. With last week’s primary, that became clear. Voters wanted rhetoric, not realism. They allowed themselves to be whipped into a populist fervor, tossing out incumbents who were actually doing a good job, simply because they were… incumbents.

The youth can be light on details, but heavy on gut and emotion, and it is displayed at these “Tea Party” rallies everywhere; the detail and fact that gets lost at them is astonishing. From the “birthers”, to the hammer-and-sickle emblazoned signs that disparage the socialist Obama’s bailout of big business (do I need to even explain this one?), we seem to be awash in vitriolic assertions that don’t make any sense. How did it get so easy to overcome reality? Isn’t anyone aware that the bailout began under a Republican administration? One literally staffed by many of the same officials retained by the current administration? Are any of these people aware that they may have the jobs they have now in part because an auto parts factory or coatings plant did not close? How would the shut down and liquidation of more car companies and banks have reduced the current unemployment rate? And finally, if you believe at all that Keynes had a point or two, how does one propose to stimulate without direct spending? The banks and large corporations, left on their own, have demonstrated that they will not do it by themselves as they aggressively hoard cash to rebuild their balance sheets.

The United States must, and must soon, open itself up to the idea that it is not being taken over by Kenyan anti-colonial big business socialists, that family values means policies that support people that want to be families, that the private sector which brought us the financial crisis, left completely to its own devices, will not fix health care, and finally that while excessive public debt is indeed a bad thing, it cannot simply be wished away or absolved by politicians who cry that it can be erased without either a decrease in expectations of public services or an increase in tax revenues. These people are not telling us the truth, and in at least one case, they are shown to be in serious need of a job.