A moment on Town Lake.
Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House, has “pulled a Paul Ryan,” and refused to say that he will support Donald Trump. Good for Straus. His motives may be a tad impure, but that impurity implies a respect for the voters of Texas that one rarely sees on the pages of coastal newspapers. His instincts are right: Thoughtful people ought not vote for Donald Trump for president of the United States.
If by now it isn’t obvious, your Editor is a national greatness libertarian, and has historically voted Republican far more often than not. Notwithstanding the “national greatness” and “historically voted” parts, we will not be voting for Donald Trump for president of the United States in this November’s general election. Painful as it would be to do, if you were to put a gun to the puppy’s head and insist that we vote for one of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we would vomit up a vote for Hillary.
Recent readers, and those who do not know our secret identity, may not appreciate how difficult this would be for us. There is almost no reason to like Hillary Clinton. She is as authoritarian as Americans get, has a constant wish to involve the state in “improving” our fellow citizens, and will say or do anything to achieve her political objectives. In this regard, she is not very different from Donald Trump, who at least talks in authoritarian words and in the style of a “great” leader, has a constant wish to involve the state in “making America great again,” and will at least say anything to achieve his political objectives.
If the United States were the only country in the world and had no foreign policy, we would not be so firm in our conviction. Part of us wants to see what Trump will do to the established order, which is obviously FUBAR to some huge exponent. And then there is the entertainment in any demolition derby.
Sadly for Trump, the first and by far most important requirement of any president is apparent competence in national security matters. We say “apparent” because it is almost impossible to know in advance whether a candidate will in actual fact be competent. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush might have been exceptions, but we had no way of knowing in advance whether (for example) JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Dubya, or Barack Obama would have Clue One. Some would say, in each case, that they did not. But in all those cases reasonable people could conclude that they would respond to a security crisis soberly, with deliberation, and due respect for the seriousness of the moment. That is, with apparent competence.
The same can be said of Hillary Clinton. While we can be certain that she will lie about what she did and conjure no end of tall tales to obfuscate her role in any crisis that goes pear-shaped (not sure why that metaphor occurred to us, but there you have it), there is no question that she will react to a crisis seriously and with deliberation.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has given us no reason to believe that he would react soberly in a national security crisis. Indeed, his impulsiveness and capacity for chin-thrusting offense is so manifest that we worry he would actually catalyze a crisis that would not have occurred otherwise. Since he fails the basic requirement of a candidate for president, if forced to choose between Trump and Hillary we will have no choice but to go all in for the harridan.
All of this reminds us of a great passage from one of H.L. Mencken’s columns in the run-up to the sorry election of 1920, pertinent part below:
The precious boon of the suffrage, indeed.
Over our fondest wishes and most eloquent argument, the voters of Austin have voted to defeat Proposition 1, which would have overturned an Austin ordinance that regulates the ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft. These regulations are so onerous that Uber and Lyft threatened to leave Austin if Proposition 1 did not pass. Both firms have now announced that they will in fact stop doing business inside the Austin city limits starting tomorrow morning. (This is personally annoying in a very specific way, insofar as your Editor’s travel plans for the coming week, involving complex logistics with his daughter, depended on Uber. Sad!)
The opponents of Proposition 1, which included the flower and chivalry of the city’s Democratic establishment – the politicians, media, liberal activist groups, and so forth – made the election about “corporate greed,” and if you did not believe that they argued it was about safety, and finally they claimed that Uber and Lyft would not leave town anyway. Regarding the last point, the same Luddites made much of Uber and Lyft spending more than $8 million campaigning for the referendum, which to your Editor and other economic thinkers amounted to virtual proof that Uber and Lyft indeed considered the city regulations to be an existential threat to their business model. Why would two money-losing companies waste that much coin on a lark?
In fact, the fight was really over political power. The city’s politicians by and large believe that one must not disrupt local monopolies, however poorly they perform, without seeking permission. Uber and Lyft offended this sensibility by taking the point of view, after reading the existing taxi law, that they did not need permission. We know this to be true, because “senior city officials” — household names in this town — told us as much in private conversations.
All of that being the case, why did the town’s Democratic establishment come out so strongly against Uber and Lyft (and why are they trying to push out Airbnb and HomeAway)? Because progressives hate the “share economy.” For more than 50 years progressives have been using employers as leverage to push social change, whether in opportunity, health care, or political speech, and they do not want to lose that lever. The share economy, which turns workers into capitalists — their cars and houses become working capital in the truest sense of the term — is anathema for progressives who believe that the purpose of government is to change the way people behave. Austin’s new city council is surprisingly extreme in this view, considering that the new economy has produced the tax base that enables Austin’s municipal profligacy, but cause and effect has never been very important to politicians of any party, at any time.
The battle is not over, either in Austin or in general. We suspect that the thousands of people who will come to Austin for next year’s session of the Texas legislature will be universally irritated that they cannot use Uber to get around. We would wager more than a plug nickel that the “lege” will extend the logic of last year’s ban on local fracking ordinances to ridesharing and perhaps to other local regulation of disruptive businesses.
More generally, ridesharing is here to stay, because its underlying logic is too powerful. Uber, which reduces traffic and the demands on scarce parking, enables carpooling among strangers, reduces drunk driving, and allows the livery business to respond quickly to hour-by-hour changes in demand, is such a quantum improvement over taxis that it will win eventually. After all, if Uber and Lyft had existed first, would anybody have said “let’s establish a fleet of yellow cars, give them a local monopoly, and impose fixed fares so there are chronic shortages when people need them most”?
Not in Bernie Sanders’ wildest dreams.
Whether you regard this as a feature or a benefit, there is no question that this is true for many of the ingenuous and all of the disingenuous voters who have pulled the lever for Donald Trump:
Our top 10 comments of the week https://t.co/nlQEeoo9GD pic.twitter.com/9A13YVSfXF
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 7, 2016
And, yes, we know that “ingenuous” and “disingenuous” are not precise antonyms. We meant to do that.
Regardless, the original Grand Old Party was the coalition of anti-immigrant, anti-alcohol, anti-slavery, pro-Union and, within a few years, anti-inflation and pro-business forces. In today’s terms, the first two groups follow Trump and social cons, respectively. The middle two groups are a dead letter — although we suspect the current election season will see some resurgence in fringe secessionists — and the last two groups most reflect the now vilified “establishment.” The question is, where do the all the pieces go?
In any case, we do predict this: the fragmentation of the GOP will have some very surprising effects on the Democratic Party, and will accelerate its own radical transformation. Why? Because once the first major party shatters, the first time it will have happened since before the Civil War, the example will have been made.
An unscientific online poll on Austin’s Proposition 1, through the tweet below. As of this writing, “for” Prop 1, which is a vote for freedom and for the customers and drivers of the big ridesharing companies, is way ahead of “against.” But we’re going to go out on a limb and say that the local liberals who think of this as a fight with “corporations” are not big followers of the Austin Business Journal.
Ride-hailing's future in Austin will be decided tomorrow — tell us, how will you vote? https://t.co/pL7NtxIM2y pic.twitter.com/o0aHC06Czg
— AustinBizJournal (@MyABJ) May 6, 2016
Politically engaged Americans with more than the usual education — you know, readers — are in despair, for Republicans of that group who will admit to supporting Donald Trump are rare, and only a few more Democrats genuinely respect Hillary Clinton’s character, even if in each case at least some of them will support their partisan as the least bad alternative. Americans dislike the presumptive nominees of both parties by record margins.
And yet, they, or somebody, voted for them, in each case over candidates who were far more ideologically appealing to the alleged “base.”
The chattering classes propose various explanations for this. The thoughtful right most often attributes Trump’s success to the complicit media, which has covered him almost without limit. Other explanations include the supposed perfidy of the GOP “establishment,” which could not unite behind a single non-Trump candidate early on, and secretly and not so secretly preferred Trump to Ted Cruz when the latter emerged as the only credible alternative. And then there are those “too democratic” Republican primary rules.
On the left, bitter Sandersnistas blame Clinton trickiness and her lock on the Democratic “super delegates,” which are designed to make the Democratic Party’s nominating process less democratic.
No doubt these and other nastier explanations — from lefty partisans that the GOP base is irredeemably racist, and from righty partisans that Sanders voters are the beating heart of the freeloader class — are all to some degree true. Nothing in American politics is ever cut and dried, no matter how much meme-producers and other such addled thinkers prefer tweetable explanations, which are so much more useful for demonizing the opposition.
There is another explanation. In both parties, voters overwhelmingly preferred transactional candidates over ideologues. Trump is overtly non-ideological, selling a vision of the presidency that is centered around “winning” negotiations. Astonishingly, he has escaped the need for any consistency, repositioning each flip-flop as pragmatism. Clinton feigns ideology when the circumstances appear to require her to do, but only a child’s mind can believe that she is anything other than transactional. And she has “evolved” the preferred euphemism on the left for “flip-flopped” — during her 30 years in public life at least as much as Trump has done in, well, the last five years.
So Americans of both parties are about to nominate extremely practical candidates they despise over far more ideological — and manifestly more sincere — candidates that in theory were more attractive to the activist “base.”
Maybe we meant to do that. Maybe the voters have chosen candidates that they do not like on purpose.
Stay with me here.
There is a national agreement that our governments do not perform basic services effectively any more, especially the federal government. Yes, there are profoundly different explanations for the dysfunction, but very little disagreement that the effectiveness of government has declined tremendously since its heyday between the 1940s to the 1970s.
At the same time, the public has rather famously become more ideological, and the ideological divisions have become more partisan. There are no longer very many liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and the few the remain keep a very low profile. (The Big Sort, by a couple of Austinites, is the book to beat on this subject.)
In other words, we prefer ideological consistency, but we quite dislike the government that ideological partisanship produces.
Maybe the voters understand that paradox better than the chattering classes. Maybe the frustrated primary voters of both parties knowingly chose the most transactional candidates even though they don’t like them very much, because they have seen what ideological purity hath wrought.
Of course, this explanation will not be popular among the ideologues, who by their nature put a high value on consistency. But do we not hear it reverberating in the focus groups of frustrated Trump voters who acknowledge his plasticity but revert to “nothing works any more”? Do you not know Democrats who want to feel the Bern, but who do not believe all his sincerity and consistency can actually change a damned thing?
Trump and Clinton are the candidates for people who want government to function again regardless of ideology, the true silent majority in our politics today. But that does not mean Americans don’t feel icky about voting for such people. That sound you hear, perhaps, is the sigh national resignation.
A beautiful moment in the Twitterverse, one among many in this crazy-ass election year:
Start with this…
Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016
Enjoy this Austin perspective…
@EricaGrieder I mean, come on, what kind of person even orders a taco bowl?
— John (@vajohna) May 5, 2016
And then look at this:
A floridly aging moron from New York who is a Mexico expert bc he once saw a Speedy Gonzales cartoon in the 1980s? https://t.co/twnRajQyuA
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) May 5, 2016
And then, our own modest contribution.
#AfloridlyagingmoronfromNewYork really ought to be a thing. Or at least a hashtag. @EricaGrieder https://t.co/y6voCAt1Ib
— Blueberry Town (@Blueberrytown83) May 5, 2016
Longer Grieder here. We at Blueberry Town are not yet in such despair that we are all in for Hillary, but we do agree with this important point:
There are, of course, plenty of postmortems on Cruz’s campaign making the rounds today. I’d recommend the one by Katie Glueck and Shane Goldmacher, at Politico. And, for my own part, I’d just add that for all Cruz’s flaws, and even taking a maximalist view of his missteps this year, none of the many Republicans who ran for the nomination this year did more to stop Trump from taking over this failed party than Cruz did, so the schadenfreude being directed at him by certain corners of the establishment strikes me as entirely misplaced. Is Cruz likeable enough to be president? Apparently not; even so I’d say he’s considerably more likeable than Trump, in addition to being more sane, intelligent, dignified, and decent, among other things.
Indeed. Cruz was not our first choice in the original Republican field, but he was far from our last and he did the most to slow the Florid One’s populist romp on the right. Cruz was, in fact, the “sane, intelligent, dignified, and decent” — even if sometimes dickish and more often intransigent — alternative to the carnival barker who thinks tacos even can be served in a bowl.
Sheesh. Trump probably even thinks Cinco de Mayo is “Mexican independence day.”
From the phone camera archives, during SXSW.
After last night’s proceedings, this seems like the apropos tweet of the day:
A complete list of states with their dignity intact: Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Maine, Idaho, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio*
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) May 4, 2016
Your Editor grew up in Iowa, and now (obviously) lives in Texas, so the alignment of our personal and state dignity gives us the quiet satisfaction that, sadly, is our last refuge in this benighted election year.