Freedom ain’t free

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.

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.

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.”

On the occasion of May Day, we are worrying about rising authoritarianism in the United States.

One of your Editor’s sterling attributes is that we have no impulse to tell people — other than perhaps our long-suffering offspring — how to run their lives or that they need to improve in some way. This automatically means that we have no empathy for social conservatives and “progressives,” both of which clubs are very much about enlisting government to “improve” me, you, and everybody else, regardless of the cost to human dignity, the purpose of life, and other such abstract concerns that make civilization better than its absence.

Both sides of course deny that coercion is their game, but each does such a great job in documenting the perfidies of the other that it is best simply to let their arguments stand. The hope of my lifetime, that the authoritarians of the left and right would discredit each other, was looking good in the 1990s but has since gone on life support, no more profoundly than in the current presidential election. The top four vote-getters are all authoritarians in direct proportion to their populism, are all very keen to lean on the state to improve people, or to persecute one group to benefit another (which is in fact how even most benign social improvement methods actually work out), supposedly because justice.

Here in Austin, or in at least my midnight blue neighborhood, the joy is all for Bernie Sanders, who promises to use the power of government to coerce an entirely different group of people than his predecessors. People love him for this. One teeny-weeny link to illustrate the default impulse:

Bernie Sanders supporters have hounded federal regulators with allegations about bias in the media, according to records obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A review of about 850 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about the three major cable news networks throughout the campaign season found that one of the most popular objections came against CNN in the days after the first Democratic debate last October.

In what looked to be a coordinated effort, more than 160 complaints alleging CNN bias in favor of Hillary Clinton were filed. The complaints pushed a now-debunked story claiming the cable news network deleted favorable polling that showed Bernie Sanders won the debate.

Now, you might say that trying to get the government to dictate speech — and make no mistake, that is what these complaints are trying to do — is all about expanding freedom, because “corporations” or some such incoherence. Yeah, that argument is so old it is one of the chapters in the “Ye Olde Authoritarian’s Book of Power.”

Obviously, this is but one moment. But it is in fact an ancient tactic of the authoritarians, and we are seeing its rise on college campuses, the beating heart of the Feel-the-Bern movement. The latest rage — and we pun advisedly — among undergraduates and their fellow travelers on the faculty is to ban speech that offends their sense of justice. See the long list of cases at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the notorious campus speech moments from last year. The Yale case is typical. After having taken offense to a measured email written by a professor (who had objected to a puritanical policy regarding Halloween costumes, itself a regulation of expression), students demanded that Yale fire the professor instead of merely responding to her argument or objecting to it. Their first impulse, or perhaps their calculated tactic, was to appeal to authority to silence the professor, or teach the professor a sorely needed lesson, or something.

There are, of course, countless recent examples of this on both left and right. Authoritarianism is ascendant, and our great fear is that we will not see it discredited until something really bad has happened. In the meantime, people who promote the power of the state as a solution to other people’s problems would do well to consider this meme, which circulated in libertarian circles, from the Occupy Wall Street movement a few years back: