FAREED ZAKARIA
• Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s flagship foreign affairs show, a Washington Post columnist, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a New York Times bestselling author.
• Esquire Magazine called him “the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation.”
ED: If I were teaching, I would require my students to read Fareed Zakaria’s editorials as truth has no finer teller.
AUGUST 4, 2016
A few days ago, I was asked on CNN to make sense of one more case in which Donald Trump had said something demonstrably false and then explained it away with a caustic tweet and an indignant interview. I replied that there was a pattern here and a term for a person who did this kind of thing: a “Bullshit Artist.”
I got cheers and boos for the comment from partisans on both sides, but I was not using that label casually. Trump is many things, some of them dark and dangerous, but at his core, he is a B.S. artist.
Harry Frankfurt, an eminent moral philosopher and former professor at Princeton, wrote a brilliant essay in 1986 called “On Bullshit.” (Frankfurt himself wrote about Trump in this vein, as have Jeet Heer and Eldar Sarajlic.) In the essay, Frankfurt distinguishes crucially between lies and B.S.: “Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point. . . . In order to invent a lie at all, [the teller of a lie] must think he knows what is true.”
But someone engaging in B.S., Frankfurt says, “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all . . . except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.” Frankfurt writes that the B.S.-er’s “focus is panoramic rather than particular” and that he has “more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ‘bullshit artist.’ ”
This has been Trump’s mode all his life. He boasts — and boasts and boasts — about his business, his buildings, his books, his wives. Much of it is a concoction of hyperbole and falsehoods. And when he’s found out, he’s like that guy we have all met at a bar who makes wild claims but when confronted with the truth, quickly responds, “I knew that!”
Take, for instance, the most extraordinary example, his non-relationship with Vladimir Putin. In May 2014, addressing the National Press Club, Trump said, “I was in Russia, I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.” In November 2015, at a Fox Business debate, he said of Putin, “I got to know him very well because we were both on ‘60 Minutes.’ ”
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has made quite a few false statements during his rise to the top of the Republican field. The Post's Fact Checker took a look at Trump's five biggest whoppers.
Did Trump really believe that you could say something like that on live TV and no one would check? Did he think that no one would notice that the “60 Minutes” show consisted of two separate prerecorded interviews, with Putin in Moscow and Trump in New York?
In fact, Trump was bullshitting. He sees himself as important, a global celebrity, the kind of man who should or could have met Putin. Why does it matter that they did not actually meet?
Or look at the issue that fueled his political rise, birtherism. Trump said in 2011 that he had sent investigators to Hawaii and that “they cannot believe what they’re finding.” For weeks, he continued to imply that there were huge findings to be released. He hinted to George Stephanopoulos, “We’re going to see what happens.” That was five years ago, in April 2011. Nothing happened.
In fact, it appears highly unlikely that Trump ever sent any investigators to Hawaii. In 2011, Salon asked Trump attorney Michael Cohen for details about the investigators. Cohen said that it was all very secret, naturally. Trump has said the same about his plan to defeat the Islamic State, which he can’t reveal.
He has boasted that he has a strategy to win solidly Democratic states this fall, but he won’t reveal which ones. (Even by Trump’s standards, this one is a head-scratcher. Won’t we notice when he campaigns in these places? Or will it be so secret that even the voters won’t know?) Of course, these are not secret strategies. It’s just B.S.
Harry Frankfurt concludes that liars and truth-tellers are both acutely aware of facts and truths. They are just choosing to play on opposite sides of the same game to serve their own ends. The B.S. artist, however, has lost all connection with reality. He pays no attention to the truth. “By virtue of this,” Frankfurt writes, “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
We see the consequences. As the crazy talk continues, standard rules of fact, truth and reality have disappeared in this campaign. Donald Trump has piled such vast quantities of his trademark product into the political arena that the stench is now overwhelming and unbearable.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
In recent days, I have had a dream: that America has a real Republican Party, a party offering a serious right-of-center alternative to the Democrats. Such a contest of ideas would improve the public debate and offer Americans a real choice, not the cartoon campaign we have today.
Donald Trump had the opportunity to reset his campaign this week and managed to derail it. But forget the detour for a moment. Trump’s much-heralded speech laying out his economic policies was a mishmash of populism, hypocrisy and pandering. It promised protectionism, trade wars and tax cuts for the rich and proposed no changes to the United States’ fast-growing entitlement programs. It was ideologically incoherent and fiscally irresponsible.
When did this Republican intellectual decay begin? According to conservative writer David Frum in his brilliant book “Dead Right,” it started in the Ronald Reagan years. Historically, the Republican Party was all about fiscal discipline. Reagan had viciously attacked Jimmy Carter for racking up deficits and debt. In fact, by the end of Reagan’s two terms, the national debt had tripled.
Republicans came to recognize that, whatever it might say, the public in fact didn’t want cuts in government programs. The country was, in George F. Will’s phrase, “ideologically conservative but operationally liberal.” This was the Republicans’ moment of truth, Frum argued, and they blinked.
Since then, most Republican presidential candidates have promised the public huge tax cuts without any real spending restraint to pay for them. The result, of course, has been massive deficits. The only Republican who tried to adhere to some notion of fiscal conservatism, George H.W. Bush, was attacked and destroyed for this sin by conservatives led by Newt Gingrich.
Republican economic plans nowadays are simply not serious. In the primaries, the three main candidates of “the party of fiscal discipline” — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump — presented plans that added $8 trillion, $10 trillion or $11 trillion in debt over the next decade (according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center). Even the much-respected Paul Ryan proposed a plan with a $2.4 trillion hole in it. These vast gaps are papered over with magical assumptions of higher growth and the usual vague calls to end waste, fraud and abuse. (Whether you like or dislike Hillary Clinton’s economic plan, its numbers add up.)
Trump’s plans are a replay of these dishonest techniques. He proposes large tax cuts but of course doesn’t pay for them, assuming the usual bogus growth numbers to make them look better on paper. He promises to cut regulations, saying at a rally this week that he might reduce them by 70 or 75 percent, which is so absurd that I don’t think even he believes it. His added twist is protectionism, but even here the technique is the same. He makes wild promises that he would never be able to fulfill.
Imagine, instead of all this, a Republican Party that believed firmly in limited government — and proposed policies that were true to these beliefs. It could present a serious plan that rationalized America’s unwieldy and corrupt tax code, simplifying the structure, even cutting rates — but only to the extent these were actually paid for by increased revenues from closing loopholes, deductions and credits.
Imagine a Republican Party that focused less on tax cuts for the rich and more on improved access to the market for the poor and middle class. For example, a party that proposed not to eliminate Obamacare but to reform it using stronger market mechanisms, allowing greater competition and transparency in prices and services.
Imagine a party that presented specific plans to cut regulations that hamper the formation and growth of small businesses and encouraged large companies to hire more workers and make new investments (rather than engaging in financial engineering and stock buybacks). A party that encouraged states to get rid of the ever-expanding licensing requirements put into place to keep out the competition. (In the 1950s, less than 5 percent of jobs required a license to do the work. Today 29 percent do, at a cost of nearly 3 million jobs, according to University of Minnesota professor Morris Kleiner, who has studied the topic extensively.) As the Kauffman Foundation has discovered in surveying small businesses, they care far more about too many regulations than they do about their tax rates.
Political systems need debate and choices. But for these to be useful, both sides have to accept certain informal rules — that their proposals will be serious and coherent and that their numbers will add up. The United States would benefit greatly if the Republican Party were to focus on its core ideas, and be a substantive, market oriented, right-of-center party.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
While we are consumed with the ups and downs of the bizarre U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama will make his last trip to Asia as president. The direct purpose of his trip to China is to attend a meeting of the Group of 20, but perhaps more importantly, the visit is intended to breathe life into one of his big ideas: the pivot to Asia. It is a genuinely important policy, but Obama is now the last man standing willing to push for it.
Foreign policy is consumed with momentary crises — often created by failing states and violent groups. But in the long run, the future is shaped by winners, not noisy losers. And when the flash points of today have passed, the rise of Asia will remain the dominant trend of our time.
The Pacific will be the arena that defines the 21st century. According to the World Bank, in just 10 years, four of the five largest economies in the world will be in the Asia-Pacific region. The United States will be able to shape the 21st century only if it remains a vital Pacific power.
How should Washington approach this region? One central task is obviously to prevent China from dominating it. That job has been made somewhat easier by Beijing’s recent expansionist moves, especially in the South China Sea. These actions illustrate the challenge China faces — it is not rising in a vacuum. Asia is a crowded continent, and every aggressive move by Beijing produces an angry reaction from neighbors such as Vietnam and the Philippines. India, which has resisted any moves that would suggest it is ganging up with the United States against China, has nonetheless moved in that direction in recent weeks. The Obama administration has also enhanced security cooperation with a range of traditional allies such as Japan, Australia and Singapore.
But Washington’s policy is not containment. It can’t be. China is not the Soviet Union but rather the most important trading partner for every country in Asia. The larger project, writes Kurt Campbell, who was until 2013 the State Department’s top Asia hand, in his smart book “The Pivot,” is “to strengthen Asia’s operating system — that is, the complex legal, security and practical arrangements that have underscored four decades of Asian prosperity and security.” That means bolstering freedom of navigation, free trade, multilateral groups and institutions, transparency and accountability, and such diplomatic practices as peaceful resolution of disputes.
The most vital of these right now, Campbell notes, is trade. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the sine qua non of Washington’s pivot to Asia because it works at many levels simultaneously — economic, political and strategic. It boosts growth, shores up U.S. alliances, sends a powerful signal to China and, most importantly, writes the rules of the 21st century in ways that are fundamentally American. Without it, expect China to begin drafting those rules in ways that will be very different.
And yet the TPP is under assault from every quarter in the United States. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Donald Trump flatly oppose it. Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have said that it doesn’t meet their standards anymore. What these standards are, they haven’t specified. Harvard’s Robert Lawrence has noted that for workers, the TPP’s gains far outweigh its losses.
The notion, often peddled by Trump, that the United States comes out badly in trade deals can be asserted only by someone who knows nothing about the topic. The simple reality is that the United States is the country with the largest market. As a result, it has the most leverage and — as foreign officials have often complained to me — it uses it, asking for exemptions and exceptions that few other countries get. The TPP is no different. Asian countries have made most of the concessions. And because their markets are more closed than the United States’, the deal’s net result will be to open them more.
One could argue that Sanders is speaking out of conviction, though it is strange to hear the idealistic socialist viciously denounce trade policies that have lifted hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people out of poverty. With Trump, who knows what he actually believes? The others — most importantly Clinton and Ryan — are shamelessly adopting positions that they must know are wrong. The Republican Party has now reversed itself entirely on two of its core beliefs, immigration and trade, going from a party of openness to one that wants walls and tariffs.
With the Asia pivot, Obama is pursuing the deepest, most enduring interests of the United States. But in doing so, he is now alone in a Washington that is increasingly awash in populism, protectionism and isolationism.
Thursday, September 8, 2016
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was driving on the Long Island Expressway, heading out to a friend’s house to spend a few weeks working on a book. An hour into my drive, I switched from music to news and listened with horror to reports that two large passenger planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned around instantly, realizing that my sabbatical was over. So was America’s.
It’s difficult now to recall the mood of the 1990s. The Cold War had ended, overwhelmingly on American terms. A world that had been divided into two camps, politically and economically, was now one. Dozens of countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia that were once staunchly socialist were moving toward capitalism and democracy, embracing a global order they once decried as unjust and imperial.
America in the 1990s was consumed by talk of economics and technology. The information revolution was just taking off. I try to explain to my children that only two decades ago, much of the world that seems indispensable today — the Internet, cellphones — did not exist for most people. In the early 1990s, AOL and Netscape gave everyday Americans the chance to browse the Internet. Until then, the revolutionary technology that had broken down government censorship and opened access to information in the communist bloc was — the fax machine. Explaining its effects, the strategist Albert Wohlstetter had written an essay for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Fax Will Make You Free.”
What few of us recognized at the time was that one part of the world was not being reshaped by these winds of change — the Middle East. As communism crumbled, Latin American juntas yielded, apartheid cracked and Asian strongmen gave way to elected leaders, the Middle East remained stagnant. Almost every regime in the region, from Libya to Egypt to Syria, was run by the same authoritarian system that had been in place for decades. The rulers were mostly secular, autocratic and deeply repressive. They had maintained political control but produced economic despair and social paralysis. For a young man in the Middle East — and there was a surfeit of young men — the world was moving forward everywhere except at home.
Into this void entered political Islam. There had always been preachers and thinkers who believed that Islam was not just a religion but a complete system of politics, economics and law. As the Arab world’s secular dictatorships produced misery, more and more people listened to ideologues who had a simple slogan — Islam is the answer — by which they meant a radical, literalist Islam. The seductiveness of that slogan is really at the heart of the problem we still face today. It is what drives some young, alienated Muslim men (and even a few women) not just to kill but — far more difficult to understand — to die.
Where do things stand now? Since that day in September 2001, the United States has waged two major wars, embarked on dozens of smaller military missions, built a vast bureaucracy of homeland security and established rules and processes all meant to protect the United States and its allies from the dangers of Islamist terrorism.
Some of these actions have protected the United States and its allies. But the striking change that has taken place across the Middle East is that stability has been replaced by instability. The United States’ intervention in Iraq might have been the spark, but the kindling had been piling up high. The Arab Spring, for example, was the result of powerful demographic, economic and social pressures pushing up against regimes that had lost the ability to respond or adapt. Growing sectarianism — Shiite vs. Sunni, Arab vs. Kurd — had reshaped the politics of countries such as Iraq and Syria. When the repressive ruler was toppled — Hussein, Saleh, Gaddafi — the entire political order unraveled and the nation (a recent creation in the Arab world) itself fell apart.
The challenge in defeating the Islamic State is not really about vanquishing it on the battlefield. The United States has won battles like that for 15 years in Afghanistan and Iraq only to discover that once U.S. forces leave, the Taliban or the Islamic State or some other radical group returns. The way to have these groups stay defeated is to help Muslim countries find some form of politics that addresses the basic aspirations of their people — all their people. The goal is simple to express: to stop waves of disaffected young men from falling into despair at their conditions, surfing the Web and finding within it the same old slogan — Islam is the answer. When those young men stop clicking on that link, that is when the war on terrorism will be won.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Whether you put them in a basket or not, the question of this election is: Who are Donald Trump’s supporters? One way to answer that question is to widen its scope beyond the United States. Trump is part of a broad populist trend running across the Western world. Over the past few decades, we have seen the rise of populism — both left- and right-wing — from Sweden to Greece, Denmark to Hungary. In each place, the discussion tends to focus on forces that are particular to each country and its political landscape. But it’s happening in so many countries with so many different political systems, cultures and histories that there must be some common causes.
While populism is widespread in the West, it is largely absent in Asia, even in the advanced economies of Japan and South Korea. It is actually in retreat in Latin America, where left-wing populists in Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia ran their countries into the ground over the past decade. But in Europe, we have seen a steady and strong rise in populism almost everywhere. In an important research paper for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris calculate that European populist parties of the right and left have gone from 6.7 percent and 2.4 percent of the vote in the 1960s, respectively, to 13.4 percent and 12.7 percent in the 2010s.
The most striking finding of the paper, which points to a fundamental cause of this rise of populism, is the decline of economics as the pivot of politics. The way we think about politics today is still shaped by the basic 20th-century left-right divide. Left-wing parties advocated increased government spending, a larger welfare state and regulations on business. Right-wing parties wanted limited government, fewer safety nets and more laissez-faire policies. Voting patterns reinforced this ideological divide, with the working class voting for the left and the middle and upper classes for the right.
Inglehart and Norris note that the old voting patterns have been waning for decades. “By the 1980s,” they write, “class voting had fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded in Britain, France, Sweden, and West Germany. . . . In the U.S., it had fallen so low [by the 1990s] that there was virtually no room for further decline.” Today, an American’s economic status is a far worse predictor of voting preferences than, say, his or her views on same-sex marriage. The authors also analyzed party platforms in recent decades and found that, since the 1980s, economic issues have become less important. Non-economic issues — social, environmental — have greatly increased in importance.
I wonder whether this is partly because left and right have converged more than ever on economic policy. In the 1960s, the difference between the two sides was vast. The left wanted to nationalize industries; the right wanted to privatize pensions and health care. While politicians on the right continue to make the laissez-faire case, it is largely theoretical. In power, conservatives have accommodated themselves to the mixed economy as liberals have to market forces. The difference between Tony Blair’s policies and David Cameron’s was real but historically marginal.
This period, from the 1970s to today, also coincided with a slowdown in economic growth across the Western world. And in the past two decades, there has been an increasing sense that economic policy cannot do much to fundamentally reverse this slowdown. Voters have noticed that, whether it’s tax cuts, reforms or stimulus plans, public policy seems less powerful in the face of larger forces. As economics declined as the central force defining politics, its place was taken by a grab bag of issues that could be described as “culture.” It began, as Inglehart and Norris note, with young people in the 1960s embracing a post-materialist politics — self-expression, gender, race, environmentalism. This trend then generated a backlash from older voters, particularly men, seeking to reaffirm the values they grew up with. The key to Trump’s success in the Republican primaries was to realize that while the conservative establishment preached the gospel of free trade, low taxes, deregulation and entitlement reform, conservative voters were moved by very different appeals — on immigration, security and identity.
This is the new landscape of politics, and it explains why partisanship is so high, rhetoric so shrill and compromise seemingly impossible. You could split the difference on economics — money, after all, can always be divided. But how do you compromise on the core issue of identity? Each side today holds deeply to a vision of America and believes genuinely that what its opponents want is not just misguided but, well, deplorable.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
It’s the annual gathering of world leaders in New York this week, and for most of them, it’s time for group therapy. Around the globe, leaders of all stripes seem afflicted with the same malady: low approval ratings. Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has pointed out that the median approval rating for the leaders of the top 20 emerging and developing economies has dropped by 17 points over the past decade. What is going on?
Sharma argues that the cause is economic. Global growth has slowed from a post-World War II average of 3.5 percent to 2 percent since 2008. There is no region of the world that is growing faster today than it was before the global financial crisis. And yet, the very rich continue to prosper. Sharma notes that the number of billionaires globally has doubled, to more than 1,800. Seventy of them live in one city, London.
But, in fact, the problem is deeper than simply a slowdown. There is a wider sense of political paralysis, which leads to public frustration. The underlying causes for this anger are even more fundamental in many Western countries. Growth in the West has been falling since the 1970s, including in the United States. Productivity growth has never returned to postwar levels, except for a brief period in the 1990s.
As I argue in a forthcoming Foreign Affairs essay, Western countries face four structural challenges — demography, globalization, automation and increasing debt burdens. The demographic challenge might be the most fundamental. In almost every advanced economy, fertility has dropped sharply, from Japan to South Korea, Germany to Italy. The number of centenarians in Japan is more than twice what it was a decade ago, with 32,000 people in the country expected to turn 100 just this year.
Globalization and the information revolution boost growth overall, but they concentrate the costs on skilled and semiskilled workers, particularly in basic manufacturing industries that once provided large numbers of stable, high-paying jobs.
As a response to the global financial crisis, governments have taken on huge debts. In addition, the aging population means that spending on the elderly is crowding out the investment needed for growth — in infrastructure, education, science and technology.
Facing these forces, leaders have no easy path to restore growth and revive their countries. Deep, radical reforms are unpopular and in this climate do not seem to lead to roaring growth. Ireland, Portugal and Mexico have all enacted broad market reforms, and yet, growth has not come booming back. Japan has spent hundreds of billions on stimulus plans and yet it is just muddling along. Thus, even the leaders who come to office with strong public approval and much promise find themselves trapped by the same forces. Very quickly their approval ratings begin to drop and new populist anger grows. Italy’s reformist prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has seen his numbers fall below 30 percent. The populist Greek leader, Alexis Tsipras, is down to 19 percent.
President Obama outlined many solutions to the problems of growth and inequality in his speech Tuesday to the United Nations. He explained how the United States has focused its reform and recovery efforts on helping the middle class gain better access to jobs, health care, training and housing. He argued that furthering these efforts — with new investments in child care, infrastructure and basic research — would keep this momentum going. He pointed out that immigration and assimilation can work for all of society.
But the policy solutions he put forth and the ones that other countries are adopting are all small-bore, specific and incremental. They are wonky efforts to nudge the market, government and people in ways that will work gradually. Meanwhile, the populists promise dramatic, bold solutions that sound much more satisfying. Donald Trump tells Americans that their lives are hard and there is a simple reason for it: foreigners. They steal American jobs, burden the United States’ welfare state and make Americans less safe. His solution is to get tough on them. That will make the country great again, he promises.
It’s not hard to understand the appeal of simplicity in a complex world. There is little drama in plans to expand early-childhood education — and yet they work. The persistent and energetic efforts at reform do pay off. Sensible, fact-based, market-friendly government policy makes a difference. A recent Census Bureau report, showing the biggest one-year drop in poverty in the United States in almost 50 years, highlights that these efforts are working. To the United States’ north, Canada is handling a slowdown in growth, welcoming thousands of refugees and celebrating diversity. And the two major leaders in the Western world with the highest approval ratings today are Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau. The center can hold.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Donald Trump is a strange standard-bearer for Republicans. He espouses few of the party’s traditional positions and disavows most of its icons. Almost every important conservative publication — National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary — opposes him, as do most leading conservative pundits, from George Will to David Brooks to Bret Stephens. Of the five previous Republican nominees for president, three will not publicly affirm that they would vote for Trump and I would bet that a fourth (John McCain) will not in the privacy of the voting booth. And yet, amazingly, in polls, Trump has received around the same level of support from Republicans as previous GOP nominees — so far. The election might well hinge on one simple issue — whether Republicans prove to be rational or tribal.
The last time so many Republican leaders defected was in 1964, and Barry Goldwater was wiped out in a landslide. But polarization is so intense in the United States today that a cardboard cutout with an “R” on it would get about 43 percent of the vote, and one with a “D” would get about the same.
For months now, many conservative intellectuals have hoped that the campaign would reveal that Trump was neither Republican nor qualified. It has, on several occasions, most recently at Monday’s debate. Public opinion polls showed that Hillary Clinton won by a huge margin. But when Republican and Republican-leaning likely voters were asked in an NBC News poll whether the debate had improved their opinion of Clinton, only 4 percent said yes. When the same group was asked whether it had worsened their impression of Trump, just 6 percent agreed. (Those numbers were 50 percent and 46 percent, respectively, among Democrats and Democratic-leaners.) Watching the same lopsided debate, people on both sides simply reaffirmed their pre-debate perspectives on the candidates.
These dynamics have reminded me of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal book, “The Righteous Mind.” Haidt, a social psychologist, used exhaustive evidence to explain that our political preferences are not the product of careful analytic reasoning. Instead, they spring from a combination of moral intuition (instinct) and a tribal affiliation with people who we believe share these instincts. We use reason, facts and analysis to affirm our gut decisions.
If you think this is true of other people and not you, consider the example of Peter Thiel, a billionaire technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and funded Facebook. He is an extremely intelligent and well-read person, with mostly libertarian views. He strongly supports Trump, for a truly bizarre reason. He asserts that Trump’s most significant statement during this campaign, revealing his worldview, was “to declare that government health care can work.” He quoted Trump praising the Scottish and Canadian systems — one a nationalized system, the other a single-payer network — as proof of his remarkable willingness to think heretically and challenge Republican dogmas about government.
Now, another interpretation of Trump’s remark would be that it was a stray comment, thrown off the top of his head, signifying almost nothing. Remember that Trump took five different positions on abortion in three days. NBC News calculates that he has changed his position 124 times on 20 major issues since the campaign began. In Monday’s debate, he took two contradictory positions on the “no first use” policy of nuclear weapons in 30 seconds. And most important, after that offhand reference, Trump backed down from his support for government health care, instead only reciting Republican orthodoxy about the evils of Obamacare.
So an intelligent libertarian has chosen to support a man whose main — and utterly consistent — public policy positions are anti-free trade and anti-immigration and who has promised to appoint socially conservative judges to the Supreme Court because he is convinced that Trump is actually a closet admirer of Britain’s nationalized health-care system. I cannot think of a better example of Haidt’s thesis that we come to a decision first and reason our way to it afterward.
Paul Ryan has managed similar acrobatics. Ryan is opposed to all of Trump’s major policy proposals — the wall, mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, unilateral tariffs against China, renegotiating NAFTA, total opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, rapprochement with Vladimir Putin — and has even publicly condemned many of them. And yet, the speaker of the House says that Trump is his man.
The signs to look for in the next few weeks are whether Trump is losing any support among Republicans. That would indicate that politics is about more than tribal loyalty to a team. It would be heartening on many levels. After all, democracy depends on the ability to look at evidence and argument, to use reason and judgment, and to take seriously our roles as citizens of a great republic.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Donald Trump has done America a great public service. By taking advantage of the country’s tax laws in such spectacular fashion, he has shone a spotlight on the corruption that is at the heart of American politics — the tax code.
When most people discuss taxes, they tend to talk about them in left-right terms. The right says that taxes are too high for everyone. The left worries that the rich don’t pay their fair share. But the facts don’t support either position. The simplest comprehensive way to judge a country’s tax burden is to look at its tax revenue from all levels of government as a percentage of gross domestic product. The United States has the fourth-lowest burden in the industrialized world, ranking 31st out of 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States’ percentage is actually lower today than it was in 2000, while the OECD average is about the same.
Nor is it true that the rich don’t pay much in America. Obviously some people manage to arrange their affairs so that they don’t pay many — or, possibly in Trump’s case, any — taxes. But the federal government derives most of its revenue from the income tax, and 70 percent of the federal income tax is paid by the top 10 percent of Americans. Most other countries rely on value-added taxes — a sales tax, often as high as 25 percent — that hit everyone equally. Summarizing the academic research for The Post, Dylan Matthews noted: “The United States has by far the most progressive income, payroll, wealth and property taxes of any developed country.”
The problem with American taxes is something different: their complexity. The United States has the world’s longest tax code. The scholar Sean Ehrlich tabulated its word count at 3,866,392. Germany and France have codes that are less than 10 percent as long. And size makes for burdens. In most international comparisons, the United States scores very poorly on this measure. The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index ranks the United States 53rd for its tax system. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report polls executives on the five biggest burdens of doing business in a country. For the United States, Nos. 1 and 2 are tax rates and tax regulations.
Even though America is generally more competitive than other rich countries, its taxation is much more complicated and inefficient. Why this anomaly? The answer is that it is intentional — a feature, not a bug, in the system. The complexity of the tax code exists by design, because it allows for the distinctive feature of the American political system: fundraising.
America is unique among democracies in requiring, at all levels of politics, that vast amounts of cash be raised from the private sector. In order to get this money, senators and members of Congress need something to offer in return, and what they sell are amendments to the tax code. When you pay $5,000 to have a stale breakfast with a congressman, you are not paying for his insights or personality. You and others like you are buying a line of the code, which is why it is thousands of pages long. This is the world’s ultimate “pay for play” setup.
All these small additions and exemptions to the tax code are terrible economics. They divert business activity into areas that might not make economic sense but provide tax benefits. They are expensive and reward people and businesses for activities that they might have done anyway. And most damaging of all, they are hidden and often eternal, not requiring reauthorization. If Congress wants to fund something, it could do so openly by giving a grant. By providing a complicated tax credit, it ensures that no one realizes that it is giving cash to a company or industry.
There are only two ways to fix this problem. One would be to stop people from paying politicians. But the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 that money is speech and thus constitutionally protected. (As far as I know, this is a view shared by no other Western democracy.) That leaves another path — take away what Congress sells. If the tax code were to be made short and simple, with a handful of deductions, politicians would have little to offer people as a quid pro quo. You could still pay them, for their ideas and personality, but I suspect that the flow of money would slow to a trickle. It is the simple, single solution to the cancer in American politics. And we could thank Donald Trump for highlighting it.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Politics is an enduring feature of human life, but political parties are mortal. This week we watched the beginning of the end of one of the United States’ great, illustrious parties. The Republican Party, as we knew it, is dying.
The death of a party is not so unusual. Scholars divide U.S. history according to six distinct party systems, each responding to a particular political era. Sometimes parties retain their name but morph ideologically, like the Democratic Party, which went from being Southern, pro-slavery and pro-Jim Crow to the opposite. On other occasions, parties collapse entirely, as did the Whig Party in the mid-19th century, torn apart by divisions over slavery. (In fact, in an interesting parallel, the fall of the Whigs was hastened by the rise of a party called the Know-Nothing, dedicated to stopping what was then seen as uncontrolled immigration.) Whatever the form of the Republican Party’s collapse, it will be messy.
Sunday’s debate may have been the watershed moment. As many commentators and some of his own strategists noted, it was pretty obvious what Donald Trump needed to do — apologize, be contrite, and then strike broad themes of change, bringing back jobs and putting the nation first. Ideally, he would have reached out to women — the group of voters he desperately needs to win the election.
Instead, Trump did the opposite. He minimized his behavior as “locker-room banter,” accused Bill Clinton of much worse and paraded the former president’s accusers at a news conference. Since then, things have spiraled downward. Trump’s strange, self-defeating strategy has led to speculation that his real ambitions lie beyond the election, when he may set up a conservative media network to rival Fox News.
It’s quite possible. But in any event, what it means for the Republican Party is simple: Donald Trump is not going away. Many Republicans have nurtured a fantasy that their party has been briefly taken over by a strange historical aberration who will lose the election, and then somehow things will go back to normal. Trump has now made it clear that he will not go gently into the night.
In fact, he has declared war on the GOP establishment. His goal is surely to take over the Republican Party and remake it into a populist, protectionist, nationalist party, the kind that his Breitbart-oriented advisers have been dreaming about for years.
There will be a fight for the soul of what’s left of the Republican Party. We can see the battle lines. People such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.), backed by most serious conservative intellectuals, will try to restore the party to its Reaganesque ideology — with free markets, limited government, entitlement reform and an assertive foreign policy. Others, such as Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, backed by Christian conservatives, will try to bridge divides and keep everyone in a big tent. But then there is Trump, who has — for now, at least — the crowds, the energy and a powerful message. Political scientist Justin Gest recently surveyed white Americans on whether they would support a party committed to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam.” Sixty-five percent said yes.
The Republican establishment could have stopped Trump but instead surrendered to him months, perhaps years, ago. When they want to criticize opponents for being weak-kneed, Republicans often recall Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler. And yet that is exactly the approach that the party’s senior leaders took with Trump — appeasing him in the hope that doing so would satisfy his appetites. They tolerated, excused and covered up for Trump as he began his political career with birther racism, launched his presidential campaign with anti-Mexican slurs and heightened it with anti-Muslim bigotry, and thrilled crowds with policies that would be unconstitutional or amount to war crimes — all while demeaning and objectifying women. Winston Churchill said of appeasers: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”
Trump will lose the election. Forget his dismal polls last week. He has almost never been ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls for a single week since they were both nominated. The major models predicting the election have only once or twice put his chances over 40 percent.
But Trump will not sit in loyal opposition to Clinton. He tells his legions that the election will be rigged. He says that the media are lying and that reporting cannot be believed. He warns that the country will be utterly destroyed if Clinton wins. He is fueling a toxic movement of protest and insurgency.
Trump will lose. And he will destroy the Republican Party. The frightening question is what he will do to the country in the process.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
The battle for Mosul will soon demonstrate that the key to success against the Islamic State is not that Washington should have surprised it or “bombed the hell” out of it. About 100,000 coalition forces are involved in helping to liberate the city, backed by formidable U.S. air power. They will face at most 5,000 Islamic State fighters. The struggle might be bloody, but the coalition will win. The problem: A battlefield victory could be irrelevant.
When Donald Trump rails against the Obama administration for having signaled its intention to retake Mosul, he is, as usual, ill-informed. Perhaps he has in mind a few vivid examples of surprise attacks, such as the D-Day invasion at Normandy in 1944. But those are unusual cases. Nazi Germany knew that the allies were going to invade at some point, but since it occupied almost all of Europe, it couldn’t know where the invasion would take place. Britain and the United States worked hard to make the Nazis think they would land in Calais or even enter from the Balkans.
The Islamic State, on the other hand, controls only a handful of towns and one large city in Iraq. From the day it took Mosul, it knew that the Iraqi army would try to take it back. Given the desert topography, there are only a few open paths by which to approach the city. This lack of surprise is the norm in warfare. (Think of Operation Desert Storm, when the United States slowly massed half a million troops over months to fight Iraq.) Most of the truly successful examples of surprise involve an unexpected invasion of a country — such as the Nazi blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939.
The real challenge for the coalition is to ensure that in retaking Mosul, it does not set off the same sectarian dynamics that led to the city’s fall in the first place. Remember, Mosul is majority-Sunni. The reason it fell so easily in 2014 was that its residents had been misruled and abused by Iraq’s Shiite government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. As a result, when confronting a choice between Shiite militias and the Islamic State, they either sided with the jihadists or remained passive.
Over the past two years, Iraqi forces — often Shiite militias — have “liberated” some Sunni towns, such as Fallujah, and then embarked on a new round of bloodletting. From the perspective of the Shiites, they are engaging in “extreme vetting” to ensure that Islamic State sympathizers are weeded out. But Sunni residents feel that they are being rounded up, presumed guilty, and denied entry back into their homes and neighborhoods.
The root cause for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is political — the discontent of Sunnis in the region, who see themselves as ruled by two anti-Sunni regimes in Baghdad and Damascus. Some of this is the resentment of a population that believes it should be in power, and some is a response to genuine persecution. In any event, without addressing the discontent, the Islamic State will never stay defeated.
When Mosul fell, many experts, including within the Obama administration, wanted Washington to rush to the aid of the Iraq government. But President Obama resisted these calls because he understood that the underlying problem was sectarian. He insisted that the Iraqi government fundamentally change its attitude toward the Sunnis — in effect, demanding that Maliki resign. Only when that happened and a new, more conciliatory leader emerged did the United States agree to militarily support the Baghdad government.
Every country wants a free ride. Most governments would be happy if the United States would fight their battles for them with no strings attached. In the Arab world in particular, this disease is widespread. Coalitions signed on to fight in Syria but — with a few exceptions — very quickly became inactive, leaving all the heavy lifting to the United States. Some argue that the answer is to publicly shame and harangue allies. That hasn’t worked in the past and is unlikely to in the future. The only strategy that seems effective is for Washington to signal that it will not pick up the slack — and mean it. It was only when it became clear that the Obama administration really would not help Iraq unless the government changed course that Maliki resigned.
This strategy of forcing others to take action was once described by an Obama official as “leading from behind,” and, although the phrase is unfortunate, the idea is exactly right. In this case, it is only the Arabs who can address the sectarian dynamic by engaging in genuine reconciliation and power-sharing. The United States can help in this process, but only if these countries and their leaders actually want to help themselves.