What If The Republicans Win?

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Rand Paul's latest (via NYTimes) . . .

Rand Paul Seeks Middle (Sorry, Dad)

By JEREMY W. PETERSFEB. 8, 2015


DES MOINES — When Ron Paul ran for president in 2008 and 2012, his rallies were decidedly unpretentious affairs, appropriately suited to the scrappy outsider nature of his campaign.

His son is trying things a little differently.

Senator Rand Paul, eager to shake off a bruising week, came to Iowa over the weekend for a test run of his increasingly likely bid for the Republican nomination in 2016. First, he met privately with the chairman of the state Republican Party. Then he headlined an “Audit the Fed” event at a stylish wine bar and vineyard just outside downtown.

“I didn’t know Iowa had a winery,” Mr. Paul, of Kentucky, would later say.

The crowd of about 150, many of them young professionals still in jackets and ties from work, snacked on minicupcakes and drank craft India pale ale and seyval blanc that was aged in barrels on the premises.

As he works to build a broad national following, Mr. Paul is trying to stitch together very disparate worlds. There are those who are young, more affluent and likely to vote Democratic. There are the establishment, center-right elements of the Republican Party. And there are his most ardent libertarian fans who are no doubt more comfortable with the Busch-Light-and-blue-jeans sensibilities of the Ron Paul movement.

After a bumpy few days that began with Mr. Paul, a physician turned politician, appearing to question the safety of vaccines and then snapping at a television interviewer who pushed him to clarify, one of his biggest liabilities was suddenly impossible to ignore: Does someone who can be so impetuous and unapologetic have the finesse and discipline to win over people who are more naturally inclined to vote for someone else?

In a series of interviews over the last several weeks, including one in whichhe invited a New York Times reporter to watch him get a Hepatitis A booster shot to dispel the notion that he was anti-vaccine, Mr. Paul displayed little interest in embracing the please-all-people approach to politics.

“Everybody is going to be a critic about something,” he said. “I don’t wear the right clothes; my hair’s not great. You are who you are.”
“You can spend your whole life worrying about too many little middling things,” he went on.

Questions about his style and temperament are not incidental to doubts about whether he can build the diverse political coalition he seeks. He has constantly fought to ease concerns from old-guard Republicans that he will work against the party, much as his father’s supporters did when they seized control of many state Republican organizations in recent years.

“I’m impressed with the guy,” said Richard Hohlt, a prominent Republican donor. “But the problem is, can he be like Reagan and say to the Libertarian Party: ‘Cool it. I’m going to run to win, and then I’ll come back to you and we’ll work together. Don’t trash me in the process because you know where I stand, and I’m the one guy you can trust.’ ”

Unpredictability in candidates tends to scare off big donors like Mr. Hohlt, who is now helping out Jeb Bush but remains uncommitted to any one candidate.

Over the past few months, Mr. Paul has been seeking to convince mainstream Republicans that he is a team player. In states like Iowa that will hold the crucial early nominating contests, he has been bringing into the fold veteran party strategists who are laying new groundwork where his father’s operation wreaked havoc when they seized control of state parties and created a bitter rift.

Before the November elections, party leaders approached Mr. Paul to ask if he would help work against libertarian candidates who were drawing support away from Republicans in Senate races where a few thousand votes could make the difference.

Mr. Paul agreed without much reluctance, top Republicans said. He filmed several ads for the United States Chamber of Commerce on behalf of Republican candidates in Iowa, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Republicans ended up taking two of those three seats away from Democrats.

Mr. Paul’s political action committee also spent $100,000 to help save the distressed campaign of Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, a target of Tea Party activists.

Harnessing the intense grass-roots energy that Ron Paul followers bring is something the Rand Paul campaign acknowledges it has to manage delicately. Jesse Benton, an adviser who has worked for both Pauls, said the expectations of the base could always be better managed.


“Their energy is so crucial, and you legitimately love and respect them so much for their dedication,” he said. “But because they care so much and they’re so passionate, they require a lot of attention and a lot of tending that does suck up campaign energy that could be used for other purposes.” (Some strategists said they sometimes have to warn overeager volunteers not to do anything too aggressive, such as covering an entire neighborhood in campaign signs and leaflets.)


Ron Paul, or “the Old Man,” as some of the son’s advisers playfully call him, will not have any formal role in the campaign.

“I think I need to present my message, and it needs to be my message,” Mr. Paul said. “I doubt Jeb Bush is going to be using his dad,” he added. “I don’t think you’ll see George W. Bush out on the trail for Jeb Bush because Jeb Bush needs to be his own candidate.”

Iowa is a case study of how the two Paul worlds are trying to coexist. Mr. Paul’s top strategist here is Steve Grubbs, a former chairman of the state party who has worked for Bob Dole and Steve Forbes. But as Mr. Paul worked his way from Des Moines to Ames, home of Iowa State University, he was repeatedly asked whether he was rethinking the hiring of another local strategist, A. J. Spiker, a Ron Paul loyalist who ran the state party until a group of more establishment-friendly Republicans led by Gov. Terry E. Branstad ousted him. Mr. Paul said that the divisions were exaggerated.

On a trip last month to Nevada, another state where Ron Paul supporters angered many Republicans by leading a coup that drove many local party leaders out of office, the younger Paul was making amends. Many of his father’s allies have since been run out of office, and Mr. Paul was there to show he harbored no hard feelings.

As he made his way around the dining room of the Peppermill on the Las Vegas Strip, Mr. Paul was accompanied by the chairman of the state Republican Party, Michael J. McDonald. Later that night Mr. Paul would be the guest of honor at a state party dinner.

Its invitation, which listed a $250 per person ticket price, boasted of “a very special appearance” by the person Time magazine called “the most interesting man in American politics.”

In Texas, where he grew up, Mr. Paul’s efforts to court the Republican establishment could not have better symbolism: He just hired the state party chairman as a senior adviser.

Some of his moves have angered libertarians who say he is getting too cozy with Republican leadership. His advisers, like their boss, make no apologies. “Rand is a Republican — a capital ‘R’ Republican,” said his senior strategist, Doug Stafford.

As he sat at a small table in his Washington office last week, Mr. Paul contemplated the issue of temperament and said he believes it is a crucial factor in selecting a president.

“You have this enormous responsibility of being not rash, not overly emotional, not quick to anger,” he said.

But Mr. Paul was not talking about himself. Changing the subject to the other possible presidential contenders and whether he would want any of them as commander in chief, the senator said, “I think that’s really what disqualifies some of the people out there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/us...=top-news&_r=0

[dcarrigg]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Since it's this thread, and old Rand's now the topic, I'd like to point out what I heard when he said "parents own their children," the other day...

When you view the whole universe in terms of property rights and domination, things can get sticky...

From New Republic:

Libertarians Have a History of Horrifying Views on Parenting


By Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig @ebruenig

I

In a recent CNBC interview, Senator Rand Paul tempered some of his recent remarks about the alleged horrors of vaccination by claiming that he only opposes vaccine mandates because they infringe upon parents’ freedom. When confronted with the question of whether or not discouraging vaccination is a threat to children’s health, Paul launched into a meandering consideration of public health and liberty that concluded with the assertion that “the state doesn’t own your children, parents own the children.”

Paul’s bizarre rendering of the parent-child relationship as unilateral ownership is not the most unhinged thing a well-regarded libertarian has ever said about children. In fact, libertarians exhibit a historical inability to adequately explain how parents should relate to their children, why parents are obligated (if at all) to care for their children, and whether or not moral nations should require that parents feed, clothe, and shelter their children within a libertarian frame.

Consider Lew Rockwell, former congressional chief of staff for Rand’s father, Ron. Rockwell, who may or may not have had a hand in composing the now infamously racist and homophobic slew of newsletters sent out to Ron Paul fans between the late '70s and early '90s, is a professed fan of child labor. Complaining of laws that prevent, among other things, second-graders from operating forklifts, Rockwell opines that “we are still saddled with anti-work laws that stunt young people’s lives.” Like Rand Paul on vaccine mandates, Rockwell sees child labor laws as government overreach. “In a free and decent society, decisions about these matters are for parents, not bureaucrats,” Rockwell writes, referring to whether or not schoolchildren should be breadwinners. The type of society Rockwell envisions here hardly seems "decent," but it would certainly be "free" in the way Paul imagines, and in that sense it is perfectly libertarian.

Rockwell’s mentor, Murray Rothbard, one of the twentieth century’s more famous libertarians, was similarly fond of kids in the workplace. Rothbard imagined that laws against child labor were passed in order to artificially inflate the wages of adults, who viewed children as competition capable of underbidding them. “Supposedly ‘humanitarian’ child labor laws,” Rothbard remarks in his book The Ethics of Liberty, “have systematically forcibly prevented children from entering the labor force, thereby privileging their adult competitors.” While the real impetus behind child labor laws was child welfare, it is telling that Rothbard tended to look upon kids with a suspicious eye, and his ethics bear out this cold approach. Later in The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, in keeping with the libertarian exaltation of personal freedom, argues that “no man can therefore have a ‘right’ to compel someone to do a positive act”—that is, because all people are free, by his account, your rights cannot impose positive actions on others. This means, Rothbard goes on, that a parent “may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.” He concludes that “the law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.” To do so, for Rothbard, would be pure government overreach.

Such dark fantasies are not restricted to the weird world of libertarian academia. Williamson “Bill” Evers, formerly a libertarian candidate for congress and advisor to the McCain 2008 campaign, also argues that there should be no laws preventing a parent from, say, starving an infant to death. In an article published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Evers concludes, “We have considered the hypothesis that there should be an enforced legal duty of parents to support their minor children. Having found the various reasons advanced in support of this duty inadequate, we can only conclude that no such duty exists … one has to regard the notion of a legal duty of parents to support their children as without merit.” Evers allows that parents might be morally obligated to do something for their children, but also that morals should not be legally enforced. Therefore, vaccination, labor, and finally whether or not to give one’s children the necessities of life ultimately comes down, for these classic libertarian thinkers, to the free will of the parents.

Libertarianism rests on the whimsical notion that all people are isolated, entirely free agents with no claims on others except those that they can negotiate through consensual contracts. The very existence of children flatly disproves this; any moral intuition indicates that children come into the world with claims on their parents at the very least, and their entire societies considered broadly. To avoid a hellish death spiral of infectious disease and neglect, we would all do well to reject Paul and his cohort on the subject of child rearing.

[vt]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Evidently Wall Street has a no lose view if it's Hillary vs. Jeb or Chris:

http://nypost.com/2015/02/08/wall-st...-view-of-2016/

It's certainly a loss for the working man and woman.

Meanwhile FIREstarter Greenspan is trying to get his latest point, whatever it is, out in the media. He must be writing a new book

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02jmyh5

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

a real beauty - reminds me of a dog that's walked where I walk our guy. His name is Larry. There were 3 dogs . . . you can guess the other names. (wonder how Moe's doing?)

below is an interesting analysis on the Republican electoral guise.

Boehner has had to make hazardous deals in order to retain his enormous gavel. Thus, he chose the heretofore obscure Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, as House whip in order to pull into the leadership someone with close ties to members on the far right. The revelation that in 2002 Scalise had addressed a group headed by Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke set off the kind of kerfuffle Washington specializes in (lots of noise and coverage, usually but not always fleeting), until Boehner decided that it would be less dangerous to ride out the Scalise crisis than to dump him, gambling that there’d be no more revelations of indefensible behavior. The episode was an uncomfortable reminder to the Republicans of the risks they’ve taken by playing to anti-black and anti-minority sentiment in order to maintain their electoral strength.

The Republican Party hasn’t always been so entangled in the race issue; but in modern times it became dependent on winning the anti-black vote in order to win the Electoral College. This was carried out through some overt actions and policies and also ones couched in winks and nods and “dog whistles.” Part of the code was to be against “big government”: this can of course be a sincerely held philosophy, but it also overlaps with opposing programs that are aimed at helping blacks, or are seen that way, e.g., food stamps. Who can forget Rick Santorum’s line in Iowa in 2012: “I don’t want to make blaaaah people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

Following the New Deal, the once solidly Democratic South was ready for the Republican Party. Southerners had already begun to vote Republican during the New Deal; later, there formed in Congress the “conservative coalition” of conservative midwestern and western Republicans and southern Democrats that had to be overcome to win passage of civil rights and Great Society legislation.

In 1964 Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president took this new arrangement a step further by cultivating southern Democrats. Notably, Goldwater, an economic conservative in the tradition of his party but also a libertarian, voted against Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Previously he had supported lesser civil rights measures.) He also advocated protecting states’ rights and spoke out against Brown v. Board of Education. Of the six states Goldwater carried, five were in the Deep South and the sixth was his home state of Arizona.

As Lyndon Johnson foresaw, his push for civil rights legislation drove southern Democrats into the Republican Party in large enough numbers to change the Electoral College map. But it took Richard Nixon to see and seize the opportunity to institutionalize an appeal to racial prejudice in the South and elsewhere, through the “Southern Strategy,” by among other things slowing down integration of schools. The strategy also appealed to blue-collar workers in the Northeast and Northwest who were opposed to “forced bussing.” This was expressed in code as favoring “law and order” and opposing “crime in the streets.”

Ronald Reagan continued the tradition of Republican nominees sending signals to the South when he opened his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba, Mississippi, close by the town of Philadelphia, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, with the theme of “states’ rights.”

The Republican strategist Vin Weber, a former member of Congress and now a prominent lobbyist respected by people in both parties, pointed out to me that the transformation of the Republican Party could be seen in the fact that in 1960 Nixon chose as his vice-presidential running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, a Boston uber-Brahmin, while in 1968 he selected Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, who to the extent that he was known at all was most famous for confronting civil rights protesters.

When Nixon’s chosen successor, Gerald Ford, ran for the presidency in 1976, he was forced to dump his vice-president, Nelson Rockefeller, only two years after he’d chosen him. Ford hadn’t realized how much the party had changed. Weber says, “The combination of southern conservatives who gravitated toward the Republican Party over the racial issue and traditional northern conservatives left the moderate and liberal Republicans overwhelmed.”

In 1975, Paul Weyrich, a leader of what was then termed the “new right,” told his colleagues that he was going to travel to Lynchburg, Virginia, to meet with a Baptist minister whom he thought he could entice into politics. In 1980 Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority appeared as if out of nowhere at the Republican convention to back Reagan, who had nearly defeated Ford for the nomination in 1976. The Republican Party hasn’t been the same since. The Christian right has exerted tremendous influence on the party’s politics, particularly in its primaries, especially on social issues. This has bedeviled the Republicans’ presidential nominating system because the Christian right is particularly strong in the early contests in Iowa and South Carolina, creating problems for the nominee in the general election

Gradually the congressional Republican Party, while lagging behind the presidential party, also continued to move to the right. The “Gingrich revolution” of 1994 wasn’t just a stunning triumph over the Democrats, but also an assault on mainstream Republicans. The Senate, taken over that year by the Republicans, was led by the more centrist Bob Dole. When he resigned in 1996 to run for the presidency Dole was succeeded as majority leader by Trent Lott of Mississippi—who was ultimately ousted for lavishing excessive praise on the former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond and his segregationist platform.

The Tea Party’s guiding passion was limited government, but it also continued the political purge of establishment Republicans. As far as these economic populists were concerned, the traditional wing of the Republican Party was not to be trusted. Tea Party members are primarily white, male, better off, and more highly educated than the general populace. The Tea Party was set off by a vehement reaction to TARP, the proposal by the Bush administration with bipartisan support to bail out banks whose practices had instigated the deep recession. (Many Tea Party people were upset with Bush for presiding over a steep increase in government spending, including two wars that weren’t paid for.)

The Tea Party’s anger at TARP carried over into the Obama administration and was aimed also at the stimulus bill and then health care reform, which the Tea Party portrayed as a “government takeover” of people’s health care. The large number of Tea Party members elected to Congress in 2010 both strengthened the congressional Republican Party—allowing it to reclaim the House—and bedeviled it.

Though it was less successful electorally in 2014, the Tea Party is still in a position to cause big problems for the pragmatic congressional leaders, particularly in the House, not least because of its perfervid opposition to liberalization of immigration, combined with antipathy toward and fear of the growing numbers of minorities in this country. Not only racism but nativism is alive.

In its mistrust of the Republican Party, the Tea Party took to challenging the renomination of such seemingly secure senators as Bob Bennett of Utah (successful), Richard Lugar of Indiana (successful), and Thad Cochran of Mississippi (almost). The complaint against these men wasn’t that they were too liberal but that, as committee chairmen and leaders, they were part of the Washington establishment. In 2014 numerous Republicans up for reelection moved to the right to stave off a Tea Party challenge. Weber says, “It’s definitely a more conservative party since 2010.”

Fortunately for the party, most of its incumbents up for reelection in 2014 were from the South and West and could safely move to the right in the primaries without jeopardizing their position in the general election; but this strategy could prove more difficult for several Republicans who are up for reelection in 2016 in states in the Midwest and East. In any event, the Tea Party can continue to make candidates tread very carefully in their voting in Congress and in their nomination contests, hewing to a narrow range of safe subjects

To offset the power of the Tea Party in the nominating process, in 2014 a countermovement began on the part of national Republican leaders, with major participation by the US Chamber of Commerce. This was largely an effort to keep the party from nominating oddballs doomed to defeat, who had cost the party six seats in 2010 and 2012, but it was also aimed at protecting establishment figures. But the Chamber’s involvement wasn’t an unmixed blessing, since it’s seen as representing big business—the dread establishment—and its support of Eric Cantor was a factor in his surprise primary defeat in 2014. The effort to ward off screwball candidates largely succeeded (which is not to say that the process produced members entirely in the mainstream). The national party and the Chamber, as well as other establishment forces, rescued Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, as well as Thad Cochran, from strong challenges from their right.

As has almost always been the case, in the end, the presidential candidate will define the party in 2016—and for all the speculation that will go on from now until then, who will be nominated, much less elected president, is unknowable. We waste an amazing amount of time on speculation that’s futile, since a candidate may or may not wear well, or might screw up in a way that affects the outcome. Moreover, the polls were off in 2012 and to a greater extent in 2014. Events can upset calculations.

At least fifteen people have indicated that they will or might run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Not all of them are likely to, but there’s no harm in getting one’s name out there, which among other things can prove quite lucrative. Candidates will have to figure out how to win the early contests dominated by the Christian right and still be able to win in November. Jeb Bush has publicly expressed his concern about this. When he let it be known early in January that he was serious about running for the nomination, this seemed to many to settle matters: he would be formidable in gathering the necessary money and network of skilled operatives. Not everyone, including Mitt Romney, agrees that the familiarity of the Bush family name is an unalloyed advantage.

A sign of what’s happened to the Republican Party is that while Bush is considered a mainstream candidate, according to Republican pragmatists who favor him—he is not only more conservative than either his father or his brother, but more conservative within the spectrum of the current Republican Party than Ronald Reagan was within the party of his time. In fact, Scott Reed, a longtime Republican operative who was involved in Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, says, “I’m not sure that Ronald Reagan could be nominated today.”

At the same time that the possible establishment candidates—Bush and Romney—and perhaps some governors are circling one another and potentially dividing the donors and the mainstream vote, several candidates on the Christian right will also be battling it out, possibly dividing the votes of their wing of the party. Rand Paul will be weaving his own iconoclastic, peculiar blend of conservatism, libertarianism, and antipathy to foreign involvements (and trying to shake some past flirtations with racism). Paul is clever and supple; much of the political press admires him for being “interesting”; but that’s not the same as having depth and steadiness.

At this point handicapping the race for the Republican nomination may be an interesting exercise, but it’s useless. Also unknowable is just how the congressional Republicans will handle themselves in the next few years

from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/19/republicans-divided-scary/?pagination=false&printpage=true

[dcarrigg]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

a real beauty - reminds me of a dog that's walked where I walk our guy. His name is Larry. There were 3 dogs . . . you can guess the other names. (wonder how Moe's doing?)

below is an interesting analysis on the Republican electoral guise.

Thanks Don! He's definitely a bit of a stooge.

In a lot of ways, I see the emerging cleavage in the Republican and Democratic parties to be the same one. And the same thing seems to be happening all over the first world too. Populism of one flavor or another will continue to bubble up. It's the natural reaction to accelerating inequality in a low-growth environment.

In the Republican Party Leadership, I think there's a fundamental tension. The marriage - officiated by Buckley - of traditionalists rooted in the past and utopian libertarians imagining technocratic futures is fundamentally volatile. As market orthodoxy advances, traditional social structures die. In order for the libertarian dream to occur, everything gets mediated by the market and payments. Families, social clubs, even firms - the entire old order - must be demolished and replaced with floating rate, transferable, market mechanisms. It's the natural outcome of privatizing and trading everything. At the same rate, traditionalists are trying to save these institutions. You can't push towards a theoretical free-market utopia and retain the social structures of the past simultaneously. But they do share a strong distrust for federal government, and hitherto, that has been enough to keep the marriage alive. The traditionalists are losing. The libertarians are winning. We'll see how long the marriage can last.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party Leadership, you also have two groups. The Technocrati and the Progressives. The technocrati are pretty firmly convinced that all problems can be solved within the framework of the status quo by making everything measurable, issuing studies, and making minor incremental changes. The Progressives are a hodge podge of everything from bread and butter workers to social justice crusaders to other small identity groups that feel isolated from the majority. But they have their own distrust of concentrated power, just not with the same laser like focus exclusively on the public sector. But how long can this marriage last when one side wants fundamental change and the other side wants incremental change? One side wants debts cancelled and benefits expanded, the other side wants to cut Social Security and roll back financial regulation. They're fundamentally at odds. The Technocrati are winning. We'll see how long the marriage can last.

It's the Neoliberal consensus. There's a lot of money fueling it's continuation. But people are increasingly fed up. In Europe it has led to the collapse of left parties. The SPD in Germany is dead. Fractured with The Left party and The Greens and forming coalitions with the CDU. What do the social democrats even stand for anymore when the last major thing they did was to pare back the safety net with Hartz IV? What are voters supposed to make of it all? PASOK is dead in Greece. There is no way back. When "social democrats" are advocating financial solutions through market incentives, what differentiates them at all from Conservatives and Liberals? Essentially nothing. So the parties collapse. The only thing giving Labor a shot in hell in the 2015 UK election is the rather spectacular rise of the far right UKIP taking steam out of the Conservative voting bloc. Far right parties pop up in Europe and abound. But they all share a bit of populism and resistance to neo-liberalism. Le Pen's National Front might actually start taking real power.

The neoliberal consensus is fraying everywhere. It promised to create spectacular growth that never materialized. And its proponents refuse to change or to own up to their failures. A decade of some of the slowest growth in American/European history was not supposed to be the outcome of massive financial deregulation, relaxed borders, and trade liberalization. The free trade deals were supposed to be boons for everybody. But they don't give a good answer to why growth is so slow. We're doing almost everything they want, other than doing what they say a bit faster and harder than we're already doing it.

When we've been following the program they prescribe for decades, and things aren't getting better, the question becomes, "Why should we believe you?" So people look for other answers. In parliamentary systems, that means third parties might start getting real as major parties implode - Syriza, National Front, etc. In a first-past-the-post presidential system, that means building pressure and stalemate until a realignment, which eventually happens by hook or by crook.

You can't keep putting forth these results year after year with no new ideasforever. Eventually someone starts asking questions. The downtrend will catch up eventually. The US is a bit more insulated and stable. We could stay on this merry go round for another decade and drop to 1.5% growth.



Europe has already gone negative. So things are a bit more serious.





But you get the point. We all swallowed the neoliberal pill on the promise that it would create growth, even if it had harsh side effects. But the growth hasn't been at all impressive. So how can we keep buying the pill forever? Even by their own measures, the mainstream consensus crew are failing.

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Thanks Don! He's definitely a bit of a stooge.

In a lot of ways, I see the emerging cleavage in the Republican and Democratic parties to be the same one. And the same thing seems to be happening all over the first world too. Populism of one flavor or another will continue to bubble up. It's the natural reaction to accelerating inequality in a low-growth environment.

In the Republican Party Leadership, I think there's a fundamental tension. The marriage - officiated by Buckley - of traditionalists rooted in the past and utopian libertarians imagining technocratic futures is fundamentally volatile. As market orthodoxy advances, traditional social structures die. In order for the libertarian dream to occur, everything gets mediated by the market and payments. Families, social clubs, even firms - the entire old order - must be demolished and replaced with floating rate, transferable, market mechanisms. It's the natural outcome of privatizing and trading everything. At the same rate, traditionalists are trying to save these institutions. You can't push towards a theoretical free-market utopia and retain the social structures of the past simultaneously. But they do share a strong distrust for federal government, and hitherto, that has been enough to keep the marriage alive. The traditionalists are losing. The libertarians are winning. We'll see how long the marriage can last.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party Leadership, you also have two groups. The Technocrati and the Progressives. The technocrati are pretty firmly convinced that all problems can be solved within the framework of the status quo by making everything measurable, issuing studies, and making minor incremental changes. The Progressives are a hodge podge of everything from bread and butter workers to social justice crusaders to other small identity groups that feel isolated from the majority. But they have their own distrust of concentrated power, just not with the same laser like focus exclusively on the public sector. But how long can this marriage last when one side wants fundamental change and the other side wants incremental change? One side wants debts cancelled and benefits expanded, the other side wants to cut Social Security and roll back financial regulation. They're fundamentally at odds. The Technocrati are winning. We'll see how long the marriage can last.

It's the Neoliberal consensus. There's a lot of money fueling it's continuation. But people are increasingly fed up. In Europe it has led to the collapse of left parties. The SPD in Germany is dead. Fractured with The Left party and The Greens and forming coalitions with the CDU. What do the social democrats even stand for anymore when the last major thing they did was to pare back the safety net with Hartz IV? What are voters supposed to make of it all? PASOK is dead in Greece. There is no way back. When "social democrats" are advocating financial solutions through market incentives, what differentiates them at all from Conservatives and Liberals? Essentially nothing. So the parties collapse. The only thing giving Labor a shot in hell in the 2015 UK election is the rather spectacular rise of the far right UKIP taking steam out of the Conservative voting bloc. Far right parties pop up in Europe and abound. But they all share a bit of populism and resistance to neo-liberalism. Le Pen's National Front might actually start taking real power.

The neoliberal consensus is fraying everywhere. It promised to create spectacular growth that never materialized. And its proponents refuse to change or to own up to their failures. A decade of some of the slowest growth in American/European history was not supposed to be the outcome of massive financial deregulation, relaxed borders, and trade liberalization. The free trade deals were supposed to be boons for everybody. But they don't give a good answer to why growth is so slow. We're doing almost everything they want, other than doing what they say a bit faster and harder than we're already doing it.

When we've been following the program they prescribe for decades, and things aren't getting better, the question becomes, "Why should we believe you?" So people look for other answers. In parliamentary systems, that means third parties might start getting real as major parties implode - Syriza, National Front, etc. In a first-past-the-post presidential system, that means building pressure and stalemate until a realignment, which eventually happens by hook or by crook.

You can't keep putting forth these results year after year with no new ideasforever. Eventually someone starts asking questions. The downtrend will catch up eventually. The US is a bit more insulated and stable. We could stay on this merry go round for another decade and drop to 1.5% growth.



Europe has already gone negative. So things are a bit more serious.





But you get the point. We all swallowed the neoliberal pill on the promise that it would create growth, even if it had harsh side effects. But the growth hasn't been at all impressive. So how can we keep buying the pill forever? Even by their own measures, the mainstream consensus crew are failing.

dcarrigg, I always enjoy reading your carefully thought out comments. Your take on the neoliberal "promise" has me a bit mystified. My take on neoliberalism is it's the successor to neocolonialism, using debt as the pry bar, with privatization of the goodies to follow, putting the productive economy rather distant in the eco-pecking order. Wither the promise for create growth?

[lektrode]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

dcarrigg, I always enjoy reading your carefully thought out comments. Your take on the neoliberal "promise" has me a bit mystified. .....
...
Wither the promise for create growth?

+1
and that IS the question...

[dcarrigg]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

dcarrigg, I always enjoy reading your carefully thought out comments. Your take on the neoliberal "promise" has me a bit mystified. My take on neoliberalism is it's the successor to neocolonialism, using debt as the pry bar, with privatization of the goodies to follow, putting the productive economy rather distant in the eco-pecking order. Wither the promise for create growth?

Don, I had typed out a long, thought-out response to this. But the wordpress error killed it.

So here's the reader's digest version:

1) You're right. But you're looking at it from a 3rd world perspective.
2) The same policies of sign free trade deals, privatize, deregulate finance etc., cut were sold to the first world as well as the third.
3) Voters in the first world were sold this bill of goods on the promise of creating growth.

It's all a matter of perspective. Suffice it to say, the world was told, kill tariffs, privatize, open up to MNCs, growth will follow. Wallerstein sees that and says it's the core drawing off the periphery - neocolonialism. I see a dying first world middle class and think they're not benefitting from this neocolonial period. So maybe look at Davos and see that neofeudalism's a more apt analogy. Even growth in the core suffers. The result is, 1) lower tariffs everywhere, 2) slower growth in gross world product, and 3) higher world GINI coefficients.

But the theories in the econ text books will tell you quite plainly that tariff liberalization should lead to accelerated growth. Yet in the real world, it hasn't born out. I guess the point is, we were all, third world and first world alike, sold a bill of goods here. Sign on to the GATT and the WTO and get with the IMF and World Bank in the third world and growth will speed up. The result has been slower growth, though.

I guess this is the simple way to say it:

Econ textbook sez: "Sign free trade deals, kill deadweight loss, pie grows faster, might be unequal, but growth makes up for it.
But reality sez: "Sign free trade deals, pie grows slower, slices get less equal, growth suffers, only a few capture what growth there is."

The most damning evidence of all is that the countries with the fastest growth in this period have been export-oriented, production economy, neo-mercantalist Asian countries.

But mercantilism is "not supposed to work," and "outdated," replaced by "free trade."

So here we are. Being sold two more free trade deals. TPP and TTIP. Promised millions of new jobs and billions of new investment. But history shows the real question is, "Where's the next Detroit?"

[vt]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Trade liberation can't overcome FIRE being given even more goodies by liberals and conservatives, who trade political power to serve almighty FIRE elites. Toss in aging populations in the West with governments taking on more debt with ever diminishing returns, and you have the recipe for the current economic malaise.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...ilout-20130104

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/30/5949581...charts-explain

My simple proposal to have only publicly funded campaigns corrects most of this.

[dcarrigg]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

My simple proposal to have only publicly funded campaigns corrects most of this.

If there's one area we agree 110% vt, this is it.

You get news stories today like this one, talking about gaffes made by Republican presidential hopefuls campaigning in London.

I haven't seen one news story stop and ask, "What in the sam hell is any presidential hopeful from any party doing raising campaign funds in a foreign city on the wrong side of the Atlantic?"

[vt]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

DC,

Both Republicans and Democrats raise foreign funds:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/wo...nton.html?_r=0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...ies/china1.htm

[dcarrigg]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

No doubt. Doesn't make it right.

[vt]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Of course not.

Two issues here.

1) How to get growth: a) reduce FIRE and increase TECI, which is EJ's thesis

b) Demographics will gradually improve in the U.S. over the next few years but worsen in Europe. Asia and the U.S. will save global growth.

2) Get money out if politics by publicly funding elections.

These are the issues.

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Thanks, dcarrig, for taking the time to reply.

My 2-cent take, in part:

Financialization is a symptom, not a cause, of

Over-production, which rose its ugly head with a rebuilt Europe and Japan, in the late 60s-early 70s.

With the collapse of the SU and its satellites, global labor 'arbitrage' exploded.

Out-sourcing of production blossomed,

with rapid digital communication further goosing this phenomenon.

As real-value, from production, waned in the core,

the neoliberal debt model became a new norm.

Of course every epoch has its geo-political characteristics. The ongoing energy wars, containment of Russia and China, re-configuring global dominance - all color the above today.

[shiny!]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Of course not.

Two issues here.

1) How to get growth: a) reduce FIRE and increase TECI, which is EJ's thesis

b) Demographics will gradually improve in the U.S. over the next few years but worsen in Europe. Asia and the U.S. will save global growth.

2) Get money out if politics by publicly funding elections.

These are the issues.

You're right, but it isn't going to happen without some kind of revolution, and I don't see that in the cards. Under the current system, it would require Congress to write and vote for legislation that shoots them right in the pocketbook, and that will never, ever happen. The foxes will not voluntarily stop raiding the henhouse. And the majority of citizens, oops, I mean "consumers" are too medicated with anti-depressants, too distracted with TV and social media, to care.