Thursday, July 21, 2016
Trump happened because conservatism failed
Noah Smith
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-happened-because-conservatism.html
Tyler Cowen (now a Bloomberg View colleague of mine) took a crack at this question back in February, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Here's my unified theory of why a guy like Trump managed to take over the Republican party this year, when nothing similar had ever happened before in living memory.
First of all, a note about causality. Most events are the result of a chain of causes - if one link in the chain falls apart, the event doesn't happen. ...
But that's just one link in the chain - one precondition for the Trump Takeover. I think there are two other main links here: 1. The dramatic weakness of the Republican establishment, and 2. The existence of a Trump-friendly voter bloc in the first place.
In the past, the Republican presidential candidate was usually a gray, bland figure, a stalwart conservative but not a fire-breathing one, a man who had worked his way up the ranks. Romney, McCain, Bush II, Dole, and Bush I all fit this description - Reagan was the only possible exception within my lifetime, and even he didn't deviate too far from this model. As a conservative, the Republican nominee would support tax cuts, a business-friendly attitude, a tough-guy attitude toward America's enemies and rivals, and traditional family values based on Christianity. That's what conservatism was.
But in the past fifteen years, the three pillars of conservatism - economic, foreign-policy, and social conservatism - have all had huge, dramatic failures.
Economic conservatism had two big failures. The first failure was when the Bush tax cuts failed to reverse income stagnation:
...
The second failure was when a lax regulatory climate appeared to give rise to a financial crisis that devastated the job market. That second shock was so huge that it has all kinds of people questioning neoliberalism itself - big, comprehensive alternative policy paradigms like protectionism, socialism, and industrialism are now being openly considered. ...
Simple truth: Economic conservatism failed in the 2000s and 2010s.
Next, foreign policy conservatism. This failed during the George W. Bush administration, when Bush turned bellicose rhetoric into bellicose reality with the disastrous Iraq War. The Iraq War was a disaster because despite winning the war pretty handily and taking low casualties, we received no gains. We spent massive amounts of money and thousands of lives, and temporarily wrecked our international prestige, only to turn Iraq from an unthreatening petty dictatorship into a failed state and a breeding ground for ISIS. It was a failure of the modern conservative approach to war itself.
A more minor failure was the seeming emptiness of Bush's bellicose rhetoric when it came to actual threats. ...
(thought provoking article check it out.)
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Trump happened because conservatism failed
Noah Smith
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-happened-because-conservatism.html
Tyler Cowen (now a Bloomberg View colleague of mine) took a crack at this question back in February, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Here's my unified theory of why a guy like Trump managed to take over the Republican party this year, when nothing similar had ever happened before in living memory.
First of all, a note about causality. Most events are the result of a chain of causes - if one link in the chain falls apart, the event doesn't happen. ...
But that's just one link in the chain - one precondition for the Trump Takeover. I think there are two other main links here: 1. The dramatic weakness of the Republican establishment, and 2. The existence of a Trump-friendly voter bloc in the first place.
In the past, the Republican presidential candidate was usually a gray, bland figure, a stalwart conservative but not a fire-breathing one, a man who had worked his way up the ranks. Romney, McCain, Bush II, Dole, and Bush I all fit this description - Reagan was the only possible exception within my lifetime, and even he didn't deviate too far from this model. As a conservative, the Republican nominee would support tax cuts, a business-friendly attitude, a tough-guy attitude toward America's enemies and rivals, and traditional family values based on Christianity. That's what conservatism was.
But in the past fifteen years, the three pillars of conservatism - economic, foreign-policy, and social conservatism - have all had huge, dramatic failures.
Economic conservatism had two big failures. The first failure was when the Bush tax cuts failed to reverse income stagnation:
...
The second failure was when a lax regulatory climate appeared to give rise to a financial crisis that devastated the job market. That second shock was so huge that it has all kinds of people questioning neoliberalism itself - big, comprehensive alternative policy paradigms like protectionism, socialism, and industrialism are now being openly considered. ...
Simple truth: Economic conservatism failed in the 2000s and 2010s.
Next, foreign policy conservatism. This failed during the George W. Bush administration, when Bush turned bellicose rhetoric into bellicose reality with the disastrous Iraq War. The Iraq War was a disaster because despite winning the war pretty handily and taking low casualties, we received no gains. We spent massive amounts of money and thousands of lives, and temporarily wrecked our international prestige, only to turn Iraq from an unthreatening petty dictatorship into a failed state and a breeding ground for ISIS. It was a failure of the modern conservative approach to war itself.
A more minor failure was the seeming emptiness of Bush's bellicose rhetoric when it came to actual threats. ...
(thought provoking article check it out.)
* It was a great money making opportunity for certain powerful interests.
* It was junior avenging slights real and imagined against papa Bush.
* It definitely had nothing to do with democracy, our own or theirs.
* It was a Shock'n Awe campaign that was absolutely guaranteed to exponentially increase committed terrorist with passionate revenge-lust against the USA.
* It was a great money making opportunity for certain powerful interests.
* It was junior avenging slights real and imagined against papa Bush.
* It definitely had nothing to do with democracy, our own or theirs.
* It was a Shock'n Awe campaign that was absolutely guaranteed to exponentially increase committed terrorist with passionate revenge-lust against the USA.
It's getting hard to remember an Iraq with Saddam. The Mideast was still a mess, but compared to today, it was almost stable. But we didn't have was a military presence, we didn't have bases, we couldn't even fly over large areas. In over simplified terms, I think that passed off a lot of US military people off. We wanted more access to those resources, so we picked the guy who seemed to be the least popular and went and beat the crap out of him. The fact that he invaded Kuwait was just a convenient excuse.
* It was a great money making opportunity for certain powerful interests.
* It was junior avenging slights real and imagined against papa Bush.
* It definitely had nothing to do with democracy, our own or theirs.
* It was a Shock'n Awe campaign that was absolutely guaranteed to exponentially increase committed terrorist with passionate revenge-lust against the USA.
It's getting hard to remember an Iraq with Saddam. The Mideast was still a mess, but compared to today, it was almost stable. But we didn't have was a military presence, we didn't have bases, we couldn't even fly over large areas. In over simplified terms, I think that passed off a lot of US military people off. We wanted more access to those resources, so we picked the guy who seemed to be the least popular and went and beat the crap out of him. The fact that he invaded Kuwait was just a convenient excuse.
Somehow I thought it had ro do with 9/11. You know, the WTC bombers were Saudis, so why not attack Iraq in retaliation. Bush logic.
Lois
It's getting hard to remember an Iraq with Saddam. The Mideast was still a mess, but compared to today, it was almost stable. But we didn't have was a military presence, we didn't have bases, we couldn't even fly over large areas. In over simplified terms, I think that passed off a lot of US military people off. We wanted more access to those resources, so we picked the guy who seemed to be the least popular and went and beat the crap out of him. The fact that he invaded Kuwait was just a convenient excuse.
This touches on the fundamental insanity of that war that I could never figure out.
That oil was not going anywhere.
What were we supposedly securing it for?
At best because we felt we needed to build our own fences around it and militarize the area.
What has that achieved for mankind.
Oil producers want to sell their oil - we are the gorilla and we had plenty of money and plenty of muscle no one was going to stop selling it to us.
So what the hell was the need to militarize the country and destroy all those live and create that living nightmare that those people are living these days?
If someone could explain that I'd surely appreciate the edification.
Somehow I thought it had ro do with 9/11. You know, the WRC bombers were Saudis, so why not attack Iraq in retaliation. Bush logic.
Lois
If ever there was a nation that deserved a ruthless smack down Saudi Arabia was it.
But Bush/Cheney gave them aid and comfort and speedy exits from our country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/washington/world/the-reach-of-war-arranged-departures-new-details-on-fbi.html?_r=0
The full story will never be known
Oh and from where was the intellectual foundation of extremism incubated and nurtured to full throttled global insanity.
With allies like Saudi Arabia who needs enemies.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/06/saudi_arabia_funds_and_exports_islamic_extremism_the_truth_behind_the_toxic_u_s_relationship_with_the_theocratic_nation/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/wahhabism.htmlhttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/Saudi-Arabias-harsh-vision-of-Islam-blamed-for-rising-extremism/articleshow/53871496.cms