Brief Comment

I have no doubt that Trump will give me plenty more to post about on a regular basis.  But for now I have (finally) completed the specific posts I planned to do after learning that he had won.  I now plan to move on to a more general and philosophical account.  This will start with two more general and philosophical posts I had planned to do after his defeat, and then some broader posts on the overall phenomenon we are seeing these days.

And I really do hope to be able to go back to posting on other subjects before too long, although Trump will undoubtedly give me plenty more to write about.  But by now the backlog is almost done and I should be able to return to normal society.

Trump, Republicans, and the Russians

I may have been wrong.  I recently posted that the Republican establishment would let Donald Trump get away with almost anything, with two exceptions.  Shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and the Republican establishment would dismiss it as a mere private indiscretion and not something that would effect Trump's public duties.   But the two things they would give battle on were infringing on the financial freedom of the Republican donor class, and being a Russian agent.  I got a comment expressing skepticism.  Republicans would be perfectly willing to accept Trump's crony capitalism so long as they got to be cronies.  And now Republicans appear to be more tolerant of Russians being in the tank for Trump than I would ever have expected.  (Whether they would tolerate Trump being in the tank for the Russians is another matter).

The CIA's revelation that Russia's hacks were not just attempts to undermine Americans' confidence in our system, but actual attempts to get Trump elected belongs in the Department of Duh.  But two things in the account are new.  One is that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee  as well as the Democrats but did not publish their findings.  The other is that President Obama assembled twelve relevant members of Congress -- the ranking members of the two houses, and the chairs and ranking minority members of the intelligence and homeland security committees of the two houses -- to inform them of the hacks and suggest a course of action.  The story reports that Obama proposed a strong bipartisan statement against Russian interference, but that two Republicans, refused, saying they were unconvinced the Russians were behind the hack.  One of the Republicans to dissent was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  The other is not named in the story, but it does quote House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes as expressing similar skepticism, and also as serving in the Trump transition team.  The inference is obvious.

This lays Congressional Republicans in general, and McConnell and Nunes in particular, open to charges of placing partisan loyalty ahead of national security, or at least being too intimidated by the Republican base to stand up for the integrity of our election system.  But another thought has occurred to me as well.

The Russians hacked Democratic e-mails and passed them along to Wikileaks.  There was nothing very damning in the e-mails, just politics as usual, but private communications do tend to look ugly if posted in public.  And I wondered if the Russians actually succeeded in getting Trump elected, how they would keep him in line once he was in office.  And the answer was a little too painfully obvious. Having seen how successful the technique could be, they would threaten to hack his e-mails and publish the results on Wikileaks.  Can anyone doubt that Trump e-mails would contain stuff a whole lot more damning than anything the Russians found on Clinton or Podesta?  (The pussy tapes make clear enough how Trump talks in private).

And I have to wonder if that, too, plays a role in the Republicans' reluctance to make any public accusations against the Russians.  The Russians have their e-mails, but haven't published them yet. There is no reason to believe that they contain anything scandalous, just politics as usual, including using the party apparatus to prevent a Trump nomination.  (Just as the Democrats used their party apparatus to prevent a Sanders nomination).  But they saw the damage that publication did to the Democrats.  And so they have to be wondering what would happen if their e-mails ended up on Wikileaks. . .

So, Now What?

Matthew Yglesias has a post up saying that the only way to fight Trump is to treat him like any other politician.  Forget character, forget corruption, he says.  Forget about character.  Focusing on his antics with just strengthen the impression that he is being persecuted by the Establishment.  Forget about corruption.  His followers are utterly cynical about corruption and will simply shrug and say that at least he is deploying it in favor of Us and against Them.  No, says Yglesias, the best way to defeat Trump is to focus on the issues, specifically that Trump is lining up behind the plutocratic priorities of the Republican establishment, priorities that find very little support among the public at large.  The Republican establishment shows all signs of doing its utmost to help.

I suppose I am somewhat ambivalent about this.  Yglesias cites polls that show one the one hand, that most Americans think Trump is a dubious character, but that they are prepared to give him a chance because they believe he will boost the economy, while on the other that the Republican agenda of tax cuts geared to the top, massive reduction in financial and environmental regulations, and banning abortion are not popular.  But here is the thing.  While none of those things may be all that popular, my guess is that, like Trump's personality, it is the sort of thing most people are willing to give a chance if it will boost the economy.  So while I don't see any huge public clamor to lower tax rates at the top or repeal financial and environmental regulations, I don't see a real groundswell of opposition to them either.  I think most people are willing to say that if our companies are being strangled to death by confiscatory taxes and oppressive regulations, if rolling back both will bring back those good paying jobs of yesteryear, then by all means, let's at least give it a chance to see if it will work.

But keep in mind what regulations Trump has not focused on rolling back.  His (and Congressional Republicans') talk of rolling back regulations focuses entirely on environmental and financial regulations.  You don't hear much talk about rolling back labor and consumer protective regulations. Partly no doubt that is because the main expansion in regulations under Obama fit in those categories and Republicans want to tear out everything Obama did by the roots.  But it may also be because most Americans aren't all that vested in financial and environmental regulations, which don't have much immediate effect on them.  Now, a proposal to roll back protections for workers or consumers might look more like the work of a heartless plutocrat and meet with more resistance.*

No, the place Republicans seem really determined to blow themselves up is in healthcare, which is unfortunate, because the potential for collateral damage is immense.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear that Congressional Republicans will go after Obamacare on Day One (January 3, 2017), although whether this means actually passing repeal legislation on the first day, or merely introducing it is somewhat unclear.  But the goal in either case is the same -- to create an artificial, completely unnecessary crisis in which some 20 million people lose their health insurance. Indeed, many fear that repeal could disrupt the individual market outside the exchanges and cost as many as 30 million people their health insurance.  Republicans count on this artificial crisis as having two effects -- it will force them to come up with some sort of alternative to avoid such a crisis, and it will make whatever they come up with -- no matter how many fewer people it insures, how much skimpier the coverage, or how much higher the deductibles -- look good compared to the alternative. The only disagreement appears to be whether to postpone the crisis for two years or three.  But that appears to have been resolved in favor of two, because the House Freedom Caucus will not vote for the measure otherwise.  The Freedom Caucus may very well fear that Republicans will do themselves enough damage over the next two years to hand Congress over the the Democrats at the midterm elections, and Democrats might replace Obamacare with something very similar, but more generous.

So, granted that none of this will be very popular, will Republicans be able to avoid blame for it.  I have seen opinions ranging from the optimistic view that fear of unpopular consequences will ultimately thwart the Republicans to the pessimistic view that Republicans will strip millions of their health insurance and blame Obama.  My guess is the truth will lie somewhere in between.  Democrats need to scream at the tops of their voices, "Republicans want to take your health insurance!"  They need to deploy other people to scream the same thing.  Insurance companies and the health industry will join in the outcry.  The basic message, I think will get across.  But the damage to people's insurance will be very real.  Besides, to suggest that Democrats will be blamed is to forget another lesson of the passage of Obamacare.  As the saying goes, two things you never want to see made are laws and sausages.  When Obamacare passed, the American people got a good look at the sausage making process and didn't like it one bit.  Well, given that Republicans right now have no idea how they will replace Obamacare and have a lot of mutually exclusive competing provisions, expect to see a lot of sausage making going on, and don't expect the American people to like what they see.

And Republicans don't seem inclined to stop at that.  At a bare minimum Paul Ryan wants to turn Medicaid into a block grant, i.e., turn complete authority over to the states, and gradually lower its funding.  Since this will squeeze people out of their health insurance gradually over time instead of in a single catastrophe, it will probably pass, and Republicans won't pay too high a price for it.  Besides, it will target poor people, which is always popular with the general public and especially with the Republican base.  Since nearly half of Medicaid these days is geared to long-term care, i.e., people in nursing homes who are "poor" only because their assets have been used up paying for the nursing home, that may strike a cord.  Democrats and the long-term care industry should shriek, "Republicans want to throw granny out in the street!"  But my guess is that this will pass and won't carry too much political cost.

But there are three other measures being tossed around that have such potential to damage Republicans that I do not expect them to come to a vote, let along pass.  Tom Price (Trump's incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services) and Paul Ryan want to limit employers' tax deduction for providing health insurance.  The point here is to encourage employers to offer cheaper coverage with a higher deductible.  Hot news flash -- this won't be popular.  Especially if it is spun (as Democrats presumably will) to undermine employer-based health insurance and force people out into the individual market.  Which Republicans are going out of their way to destroy.  Whatever "replace" consists of, I expect this to be taken out.

And that isn't all.  Ryan and Price are also proposing to replace Medicare with a voucher system.  In other words, something like Obamacare, which they are going out of their way to blow up.  I do not expect this to get very far.  Probably not even to a floor vote, let alone to pass.  It is suicidal, and the Republicans have to know it.  Rumor has it that Senate Republicans are not eager to put an end to the filibuster.  This is probably one reason why.  It will allow Senate Democrats to protect them from those crazies in the House without actually requiring Republicans to break party discipline.  But it it does come to a vote, the 30-second ads are writing themselves.  Furthermore, it is hard to see what Republicans hope to accomplish this way.  They have, after all, given Democrats the script on how to fight it.  All proposals to voucherize Medicare contain a time lag so as not to affect current or near-term beneficiaries.  Just as Republicans attempted to block Obamacare before it took effect, Democrats will have plenty of time to win a wave election and stop this from going into effect.  And if ever there was an issue to hand Democrats a wave election, this is it.

And even that isn't all.  Now the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is proposing major cuts to Social Security, without even a long delay.  Given that this is both (a) political suicide and (b) something Donald Trump ran on a campaign specifically promising not to do, I doubt very much it will ever be voted on.  But if it is -- well, I can't help it if Republicans want to make Matt Yglesias' point.

Keep in mind that whichever of these measures Republicans do or do not actually seek to implement, they will be accompanied by huge tax cuts geared to the upper income brackets.  In 2012, the Republican platform ran on many of these measures.  Democrats raised this in focus groups and found that they couldn't get any traction warning that Republicans planned to destroy Medicaid and phase out Medicare in order to make way for large tax breaks for their rich friends.  It all seemed so outrageously unpopular that no one believed that any political party would commit suicide by doing such a thing.  During the Obama Presidency, Republicans repeatedly held the debt ceiling hostage in order to force over measures like these.  They hoped to pass them under a Democratic President so that he would be blamed.  But Obama was always able to convince the American people that the Republicans were holding the economy hostage and must be stopped.  The unpopularity of the measures Republicans wanted to force over no doubt did a great deal to reinforce the message.

And if these legislative battles take place, it should finally bring to light any number of political facts that should have been obvious for a long time.  Republican populism is a big lie.  There is, indeed, a liberal elite, and it does, indeed, live in a bubble.  But there is also a conservative elite, and it lives in a bubble as well.  The liberal elite may have greater visibility and greater influence of popular culture, but the conservative elite  has lots of money, lots of influence in policy-making circles, and the ability to harm people in ways that the liberal elite never thought of.**  And it should lay to rest the illusion that the Republican elite are the reasonable ones and the Republican base are the crazies.

Notice here that I keep talking about Republicans, rather than Trump.  But, as Yglesias says, the whole strategy here is to blame any unpopular measures in Congress on you-know-who.  As the Republicans proved throughout the Obama Administration, when Congress is a mess, people tend to blame it on the President.


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*And incidentally, it also shows why Trump's hostile tweet toward Chuck Jones, the union leader at the Carrier plant where Trump bragged about saving 1,000 jobs was a mistake.  Jones accused Trump of "lying his ass off" about the number of jobs saved and the ones that would still be sent overseas. The sensible response would have been to ignore the comment.  The story would have been about the Carrier plant staying and the jobs saved, with a caveat somewhere in the fine print that the full story might be exaggerated.  Jones might even be quoted.  But the President (elect) of the US has a bigger megaphone than a local union leader, so guess who would get more attention.  Successive tweets, "Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!" and "If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues," do Trump no good, for several reasons.  First, they blame unions (rather than government) for companies sending jobs overseas, which raises the awkward possibility Trump wants to avoid that maybe companies aren't sending plants overseas because they are being strangled by taxes and regulations, but because overseas wages are lower.  Second, picking a fight with a union leader might give offense to the white, blue-collar constituency Trump wants to appeal to -- at least in the Rust Belt, where unions have been historically strong and respected, and where Trump's appeal to the white working class was most decisive in swaying the election.  Third, it draws attention to Jones' claims that the success in saving jobs wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  Now what was once an asterisk to the overall story gets attention for at least several days and causes the account of how the jobs saved were less than they appeared to be as much a center of attention as the original story.  And finally, it encourages the Twitter mob to send threatening tweets, texts, and phone calls.  Whether this was intended is anyone's guess.  But it was foreseeable and, again, draws further attention to a story that Trump would prefer to see forgotten.  It has been suggested that Trump is deliberately unleashing the Twitter mob to intimidate, but most union leaders are tough and don't intimidate so easy.  As for the question of whether Trump's tweets show he is out of control or whether they are a calculated provocation -- I am inclined to see them as both.  On the one hand, yeah, a lot of them are undoubtedly just attempts to grab headlines, especially if something more harmful might grab the headlines otherwise.  On the other hand, well, Trump shows a distinct tendency to be bated into exchanges that bring him nothing but trouble.  So let's recognize his brilliance in trolling without attributing to him any superhuman powers or anything.
**Neocons are illustrative.  As a voting bloc, neocons are negligible.  But their influence in foreign policy circles is extraordinary.

Why Hillary Lost

If you want to know why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton as President, this story by Gallup, though written in mid-September, tells it all.  Here is Donald Trump's word cloud, based on the leading stories about him, week after week:

The word cloud does not have a single theme, but the main words, speech, immigration, convention, President, make, people and Mexico are presidential words, policy words, words you would expect to hear about a normal candidate doing presidential things and setting forth is views on the important issues facing this country. Week by week, the top words were "President," "convention," "Russia," "Obama," "family," "campaign," "immigration," "Mexico," "Mexico," and "Obama."  Other important words included "speech" and "immigration."  Certainly there is nothing here to suggest that Trump was anything other than a normal candidate, nothing to suggest his unprecedented lack of experience, his extraordinary conflicts of interest, his nature as a crook or a bully, his association with the semi-fascist Alt Right, his fondness for conspiracy theories verging on the paranoid, or any  of the countless reasons why he was not a normal candidate.






Now look at Clinton's word cloud:

What more is there to say?  With the exception of the week of the convention and the week when she collapsed with pneumonia, the leading story about Hillary Clinton every single week for two months was about her e-mails.  And after e-mails, the usual words were lie, scandal, foundation, health and pneumonia.

And let us give credit where it is due.  Trump, erratic is he may have been in some ways, maintained superb message discipline.  He hit on the e-mails over and over again, making clear that sending State Department e-mails on a private server was the most heinous offense any candidate for office had ever committed in the history of the Republic, that her missing e-mails showed she was hiding something worse, that only her status as candidate for President was keeping her out of jail, and that, if elected, he would remedy that.  In this, Trump got a lot of help for a cooperative press that breathlessly looked through every new revelation to see if there was any appearance of impropriety.  And sure enough, it turned out that as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton sometimes spoke to people who had made large donations to her foundation, and that some of them wanted special access as a result, although none seemed to have gotten any.  Trump also got an assist from the Russians hacking and Wikileaks printing DNC and campaign e-mails that had nothing to do with the State Department or national security, but by then the voters had heard the terms "Clinton," "e-mails" and "scandal" together so many times that the details scarcely even mattered.  And, of course, there was the FBI's surprise announcement eleven days before the election that they were reopening the investigation.

Things eventually reached the point where you could expect something like this:

CLINTON E-MAILS REVEAL POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST 

The latest e-mail revelations for Hillary Clinton reveal further potential conflicts of interest as growing numbers of large-scale donors to the Clinton Foundations appear to have met with her as Secretary of State.  While no evidence of any improper influence was found, and scheduling appears to been done by persons independent of the ones soliciting donations, the fact that donations did not come with a clear disclosure that making a donation meant that Clinton would never speak to the donor again raise troubling ethical issues. 

In further news today, Donald Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Of course, Trump had plenty of scandals, too.  The problems was not the lack of scandals, but that there were too many.  Confronted with such an embarrassment of riches, important publications like the Washington Post, USA Today and Newsweek published a new scandal a week, but none of them stuck around long enough to achieve any traction.  It would appear that leading an exemplary life with one slip is worse for a candidate than being a walking scandal because walking scandals don't allow for much focus.

The only Trump scandal that achieved any traction was the "pussy" tape.  Imagine, then, if the tape had been released in July.  Imagine if Trump promptly denied having done any of the things he bragged about on tape, and for the next two months the leading Trump story each week was a new woman coming forward to say that he had groped her.  Imagine if every interview with Trump had focused on the latest groping allegations.  Imagine if, just as things seemed to have settled down and the tapes seemed to be behind us, the mysterious woman who claims that Trump raped her when she was 13 years old came forward with her story.  And hell, suppose that two days before the election the word came out that her story had been found to be unsubstantiated.  Would it have made a difference.  Suppose that the leading words in Trump's cloud had been "pussy," "grab," "grope," "assault," and "tape."  It seems plausible that the election would have gone the other way.

Trump's response to the women who accused him of groping them was to say that they were all liars and paid shills of the corrupt Clinton machine.  That was a flagrant, shameless lie.  But it does seem reasonable to assume that if a new accuser had come forward each week for two months (or more) on end and accounts investigating hers story, in salacious detail, had dominated the news week after week, it would start to look as is there was a coordinated element to it.  But honestly, so what?  There is ample evidence that the Clinton e-mail revelations were also released in a calculated manner, to do most damage, by Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, the FBI, the Russians, and Wikileaks.*

For that matter, it wouldn't have to be the "pussy" tape.  Suppose litigation had been more intense on Trump University and week after week a new and embarrassing pleading was filed in court (public documents).  Or, on weeks when one wasn't filed, reporters started digging in the old pleadings in the case and revealing more and more about the Trump University had been up to.  And only after the public had been softened up by weeks and months of stories about Trump University did the story  break about the Trump Foundations illegal donation to a Florida Attorney General who was considering an investigation.  Trump's word cloud would have been more like "fraud," "lawsuit," "deception," and "bribe."  Of course, Trump could have spiked that simply by settling.  Or suppose reporters had become obsessed with his bankruptcy and how he looted the company and left shareholders holding the bag.  Or possible conflicts of interest in international relations (there are A LOT!), with a new one breaking week after week. (Instead of only noticing after he was elected). Any grand unifying theme would have been sufficient.**

The real question has to be, why did the media all play along with this?  Trump accused the media of being biased against him, as evidenced by so many leading media personalities being so dismayed when he won, and I think he is right.  Yet if the media were so biased against him, why did they focus so obsessively on Clinton's e-mails and conflicts of interest and fail to show Trump up for what he really was?  I think the only answer can be in a strange sort of way that they focused so harshly on Clinton precisely because they were biased against Trump.  One person commented that they considered Trump being a crook to be a "dog bites man" story.  But more to the point, I think they never bothered to fully expose him because it never occurred to them that he could actually win. They came down so hard on Clinton precisely because they expected her to be the next President and assumed that they should hold the next President's feet to the fire.

And look where it got us.
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*Although, to be clear, there is no evidence that any of these organizations except the Russians and Wikileaks coordinated with each other, and none whatever that they coordinated with Trump.  It is pointless to complain about Congressional Republicans.  They were simply playing politics as usual, using their powers of investigation to hurt the opposing party.  The FBI, on the other hand, is not supposed to meddle in elections, and they clearly behaved improperly in doing so.  And as for the Russians and Wikileaks -- well, I suppose they were doing what intelligence services do, but that it succeeded is troubling in the extreme.
**Though probably not Trump stiffing his contractors.  That did get a good deal of play but never bothered his supporters.  I assume the reason was that, although they did not condone his ripping off contractors, they appreciated that he knew how to drive a hard bargain and couldn't wait to see him do that to all the people ripping us off.

Further Thoughts on "Systematic Corruption"

Matt Yglesias got his ideas of "systemic corruption" from this paper, which was written in 2006, well before even Trump's first candidacy in 2012 and treats the idea of "systematic corruption" as a historical relic rather than a present-day concern.  So clearly it was not written to serve any partisan agenda.

The author defines his terms as follows:

What I define as systematic corruption is both a concrete form of political behavior and an idea. In polities plagued with systematic corruption, a group of politicians deliberately create rents by limiting entry into valuable economic activities, through grants of monopoly, restrictive corporate charters, tariffs, quotas, regulations, and the like. These rents bind the interests of the recipients to the politicians who create them. The purpose is to build a coalition that can dominate the government. Manipulating the economy for political ends is systematic corruption. Systematic corruption occurs when politics corrupts economics.  

In contrast, venal corruption denotes the pursuit of private economic interests through the political process. Venal corruption occurs when economics corrupts politics.

The author goes on to say that venal corruption is simply the result of human failing.  No structure can prevent it; the only remedy is to prosecute the offenders.  Systematic corruption, by contrast, is a form of structural corruption and can be prevented with appropriate structures and institutions.  He also argues that systematic corruption will ruin an economy in a way that venal corruption cannot.

At the time this country was founded, the author argues, one of the leading sources of systematic corruption was in corporations, which were deeply suspect.  A corporation back then did not mean what it does now.  A corporation was a quasi-governmental body, created by special act of the legislature, given a licensed monopoly and a variety of privileges that differed depending on the charter.  And how did corporations persuade the legislature to charter them?  Usually by paying for the privilege.

Most notorious of the corporations of the day was the East India Company, which was run on a for-profit basis, but exercised many governmental functions (such as fielding armies) and ended up becoming the de facto government of much of India.  The Boston Tea Party was undertaken in response to the British government granting a monopoly on tea imports to the colonies to the East India Company.  Many of the American colonies started out as for-profit corporations.*  We would presumably agree that for a for-profit corporation be be running a de facto government, or a government to be operated as a for-profit corporation, is a dangerous mixing of separate functions that cannot end well.

All of this meant that at the time this country was founded, corporations were viewed with deep suspicion as repositories of legal privilege and economic distortion.  Yet there was a vast, undeveloped country and a great clamor for infrastructural development.  How was this to be done without the resort to corporations?  Ultimately, in the 1840's, states came up with an American invention to resolve the problem -- create a single incorporation act and allow anyone who wanted to incorporate to do so administratively.  At the same time, they forbade governments from investing in private corporations.  Governments wishing to build infrastructure directly must finance it with taxes, or with bonds that would ultimately be paid by taxes, approved by the voters.

This, in the authors view, resolved the problem of systematic corruption so well that Americans forgot all about it.  Certainly, venal corruption remained.  In fact, throughout the Gilded Age it became so rampant that it gave rise to the Progressive movement founded largely to fight such corruption.  The Progressives allowed both governments and corporations greater freedom in how they wished to be structured.  For local governments, this took the form of home rule and allowed the people to vary from the general form of chartered government.  For corporations, this meant moving away from a one-size-fits all administrative charter and allowing corporations to organize as they saw fit.  One such change was allowing corporations to buy stock in other corporations.  This lead to a great wave of mergers, and turned corporations into vast accumulations of private wealth that threatened to subvert democratic government.

Progressives sought to tame these monstrosities by governmental regulation.  The author points out that this would have been viewed with alarm by past generations as opening the door to systematic corruption:

In classic commonwealth political theory, increasing government regulation raised as many red flags as did special corporate charters. Regulation created the opportunity for creating rents, and rent creation created the possibility for political manipulation of the economy. One could see James I or Charles II supporting Progressive policies, not Whig commonwealthmen. If, on the other hand, political and economic competition limit rent creation and dissipation, they also make it safer for the government to regulate in positive and negative ways. Competition and entry create their own balanced equilibrium. This could only have happened if Americans came to trust their government more than they ever had in the colonial, revolutionary, or early national periods. . . . Giving the national government control over food and drugs would have seemed insane to the founding fathers, Federalist and Republican. Such regulation opened up vistas of rent creation beyond the imagination of James I or Charles II.

In the clear light of hindsight, that is a remarkable statement -- certainly a remarkable one to make as late as 2006.  Americans these days do not trust their government.  A large libertarian movement has arisen that absolutely sees the Progressive Era as a national fall from grace (and, by implication, the Gilded Age as our golden age).  And libertarians, it seems safe to say, would fully agree in the dangers of governmental regulation, and the risk that it would lead to "systematic corruption," Indeed, some would probably give such fears as a major reason for opposing any sort of economic regulation.  A common argument by libertarians is that the effect of Progressive Era health and safety regulations was to increase concentration and squeeze out the little guy because large companies could afford to comply and small companies could not.

Are they right?  Should be refrain from any sort of economic regulation because it can be used to limit entry and make economic success contingent on political connections?  I suppose I would answer that it is remarkable how many libertarians, or at least pseudo-libertarians, fear government only in its mommy functions and never give a thought to the dangers of its daddy functions, even though these are by far the more dangerous.  After all, armies can stage coups.  They have, indeed, done so on many occasions.  Should we therefore disband our army out of fear that it will stage a coup?  Somehow we and other advanced democracies have managed to have armies and never have a coup or anything close to one.  How is that possible?  The answer lies in what, for the lack of a better term, I would call the general culture.  Our army has never been tempted to stage a coup because such a thing is simply unthinkable.  Our military are trained from the very start in the importance of respecting civilian control.  Without knowing much about our military structure, it seems a reasonable assumption that it has institutional safeguards in place to detect and root out any such sign of disloyalty.  But in the end, these succeed because the general culture of our military does not allow a coup.

Every President from FDR to Nixon abused the U.S. surveillance system to spy on political rivals. Does that mean we shouldn't have a surveillance apparatus?  Here, too, reforms to set regular rules as to how it was used (mostly) put an end to such abuses.  Under Bush II and Obama our surveillance state has certainly grossly overreached and desperately needs paring back.  But it has not been abused against individual enemies the way it was from the 1930's to the 1970's.

So if we can keep the military and the intelligence agencies from being used corruptly to further partisan goals, why not the regulatory bureaucracy?

An important reason our bureaucracy is able to resist the lure of systematic corruption is something that began before the Progressive Era at the federal level and continued throughout it on the state and local level -- civil service reform.  By protecting government employees from arbitrary dismissal, the civil service was able to keep them from using the regulatory apparatus for narrowly partisan purposes.  We also have rules on procurement and bidding for private contractors, again to discourage the use of government contracts in a systematically corrupt fashion.  If libertarians and the Republican establishment care about systematic corruption (and they should), maybe they should think twice about proposals to make government employees easier to fire.  What happens the first time a government employee is fired for refusing to enforce regulations in a politicized manner? What happens when you remove an important barrier against crony capitalism?

I would further ask whether we have eliminated systematic corruption as far as the author claims.  For instance, government has at least one avenue for making economic success hinge on political connections -- procurement.  That is why there are strict rules about competitive bidding and process of selection, to ensure that the choice is not made corruptly.  At the same time government regulations -- mostly written by Democrats -- often impose labor standards on all government contractors above and beyond what general regulations require.  Is this the beginning of systematic corruption?  Yet that is only a matter of policy, not politics.  And in this case, Republicans are the worst offenders.  Under Ronald Reagan, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) became a patronage network,  with contracts going to the politically connected.  Something similar happened under Bush II.**  And now it is set to recap once again under Ben Carson.  Of course, HUD contracts make up an infinitesimal share of the US economy.  How many other contracts are vulnerable to that sort of political favoritism.  And then there was the Trump tweet about cancelling Boeing's contract to build Airforce One and suspicion that the threat may be retaliation against Boeing for criticizing Trump's policies.  Rush Limbaugh has suggested that the tweet was retaliation against Boeing for supporting the Clintons.  To supporters, this was to be applauded as a crack down on the old crony-ism.  But how hard is the subtext to read?  If that is so, then it is also a warning not to companies not to donate to my political opponents if you want to preserve your government contracts.  Systematic corruption, here we come. (Unless, of course, he was just being impulsive).

And finally, is the distinction between venal corruption and systematic corruption and clear-cut as the author claims?  Consider this article about the problems that occur when governments start to outsource what were once core functions.  Public goods are run on a for-profit basis.  For-profit garbage collection companies insist that cities create a certain quota of garbage and demand penalties for recycling programs.  Companies running toll roads impose penalties for car pooling, improvement to public road, or when governments suspend tolls for evacuation during natural disasters.  And contracts are often locked in place for decades, preventing technological innovations that would serve the public well.  In short, when government outsources core functions, it is effectively licensing monopolies that usurp governmental functions on a for-profit basis, and we are back to the East India Company.  Yet nothing in the article suggests that such contracts are given on the basis of political favoritism.  Under the article's taxonomy, this would not be systematic corruption, just really bad venal corruption.  Venal corruption on a Gilded Age scale.  And evidence, perhaps, that venal corruption, on a large enough scale, may be more dangerous than the author thinks.

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*At the same time, the author emphasizes the importance put on balanced government, with the proper harmony among the many, the few and the one.  This balance was seen as precarious, and the slightest upset in the balance might lead to corruption and ultimately the loss of liberty altogether.  Although he does not elaborate on it, this would seem to imply that there is only one right way to form a government or else it will go out of balance and be corrupted.  How this was compatible with the difference in government between England and the U.S. or between different U.S. states he does not address.
**But emphatically not under Bush I, who appointed the squeaky clean and committed Jack Kemp.

Trump Should Scare the Hell Out of Generic Republicans: "Systematic Corruption"

Not quite sure what I think of this, but I saw an interesting article by Matthew Yglesias on what he saw as the greatest danger from Donald Trump (assuming he doesn't start a disastrous war).  Yglesias' argument is not just that Trump is corrupt to an unprecedented degree, but that he brings an unprecedented kind of corruption to the White House.  This is not the distinction I have made, that Trump's corruption is uniquely narrow, or that he is our first President who does not seem to distinguish between the public interest and his private interest.  Rather, Yglesias relies an an article predating any Trump candidacy, that draws a distinction between what it calls "venal corruption" and "systemic" or "systematic" corruption.

I should probably start here with a definition of "corruption."  Most people tend to see corruption rather narrowly, as bribery or some other sort of illicit financial gain.  But treating corruption solely as financial is too narrow.  I would define "corruption" to mean "subversion or cooption to an improper purpose."  Most people these days think of corruption specifically as meaning powerful private actors coopting government for their own purposes instead of the public good.  Yglesias and John Wallis, the author of the pamphlet, refer to this as "venal corruption."  So far as I understand it, systemic/systematic corruption is the opposite kind -- government subverting private actors to an improper purpose.  Yglesias explains:

We are used to corruption in which the rich buy political favor. What we need to learn to fear is corruption in which political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success. . . .  To be a successful businessman in a systemically corrupt regime and to be a close supporter of the regime are one and the same thing. 

Those who support the regime will receive favorable treatment from regulators, and those who oppose it will not. Because businesses do business with each other, the network becomes self-reinforcing. Regime-friendly banks receive a light regulatory touch while their rivals are crushed. In exchange, they offer friendly lending terms to regime-friendly businesses while choking capital to rivals.

As specific examples, Yglesias suggests the use of anti-trust legislation to break up media conglomerates that criticize Trump, or a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) whose position on unions and labor disputes depends on the political leanings of the parties.  

Yglesias has discussed this sort of thing before.  His comments on the auto bailouts under Obama are revealing:

Opposition to the bailout was driven, in part, by the recognition that nationalization of an industrial enterprise is an open invitation to mismanagement and bad public policy. You could easily imagine a scenario in which the Obama administration made its partisan political objectives a key management priority at Government Motors. Alternatively, you could easily imagine a scenario in which Obama administration trade policy became dominated by the narrow interests of Government Motors rather than the broad interests of the American public. There's a good reason why sensible people don't normally recommend that the government own manufacturing companies. . . . . I think it's very understandable that Obama's political foes were not prepared at the time to simply assume that the administration was handle a post-nationalization auto industry in a responsible way. But the fact of the matter is that they did handle it in a responsible way and the skeptics were largely mistaken.

That sound very much like what he is describing as the danger from Trump, except that presumably in the case of Trump he would also own stock in GM and insist that it name its top model car after him.

But here is the thing about that type of corruption.  It is something I would expect the Republican donor class to care about.  It is the sort of government abuse I would expect them to fear the most because in this case they would be the targets.  In fact, I think it fair to say that at least one reason libertarian-esque people are so strongly opposed to economic regulation is the fear that it will be used in exactly this sort of way.   It is probably  not too much of a stretch to suspect that a lot of members of the Republican donor class would prefer a Democrat imposing what they would see as excessive and heavy-handed regulation, but doing so in an objective manner that a Trump Administration applying its regulatory powers based on political support and personal enrichment.

In short, this is something I would expect to meet with immense resistance, from extremely powerful actors in the Republican Party, including many who supported Trump in hopes that he would be their puppet.  They will let Trump get away with a great deal -- immigration, foreign trade, crazies in the Cabinet, conflicts of interest, racist appeals, sexual assault, erratic rantings, loopy foreign policy, and, for all I know, maybe even shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue -- but there are two things I do not think the Republican donor class will let Trump get away with.  One is being a Russian agent (as opposed to a mere useful idiot).  If any solid evidence were to emerge of a quid pro quo in which Trump actively sought out the support of the Russian government in the election in exchange for a pro-Russian foreign policy, then I have no doubt that he would be impeached for it.  (And just for the record, I do not believe that any such evidence exists).  The other is any attempt to use the powers of the federal government to infringe on the freedom of the Republican donor class.

Already in the case of the Carrier Air Conditioning deal, we are starting to see push-back. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns, "[T]his is all terrible for a nation's economic vitality if businesses make decisions to please politicians rather than customers and shareholders. . . . Imagine business after business, year after year, making decisions based partly on pleasing the Trump White House."  Reason Magazine (a libertarian publication) warns against, "a system in which corporations succeed and fail not based on their value in the marketplace, but based on their facility at making friends in the government, and friendly deals with the political class."  Even Sarah Palin,  the very embodiment of the Republican base politician who scorns its elite, has warned that the deal smacks of "crony capitalism."

Granted, we don't know whether this is a mere speed bump or the beginning of a big fight, but my own guess is that we should be looking for a big split here.

Trump is Not a Generic Republican: Corruption

I intend to post on this subject a lot, so it is fair to ask, do I consider corruption to be Donald Trump's capital flaw?  And in the end, the answer has to be that Trump doesn't have a capital flaw.  He has so many of them and they are so severe that naming any one of them as the capital flaw is pointless.

At the same time, it is one that I intend to emphasize a lot because it formed so large a part of Trump's appeal.  He was the heroic outsider fighting corruption in Washington, as represented by Hillary Clinton, who sent classified e-mails on a private server and went unpunished, engaged in foundation activities that created at least the appearance of impropriety, and deleted e-mails to conceal her nefarious activities.  He bragged that he was immune to corruption because he was rich enough to fund his own campaign and wasn't dependent on donors.  Even now, he insists that he is going to drain the swamp.

So it is important to emphasize that Trump is corrupt in a narrower and more pernicious way than any other President in our history, indeed, than ever seemed possible before.  Trump gives no evidence of having any concept of the public good apart from his private interests.

Consider:  When asked how as a businessman with so many holdings he would avoid conflict of interest, Trump said he would turn his business empire over to his children to manage.  Plenty of people have pointed out why that is far from adequate.  And that was before he invited his children to serve on his transition team.  Even assuming they take over the business and tell him nothing about its doings, they will give their father advice.  Could their business interest shape that advice even if they don't tell their father about it?

Furthermore, while nepotism rules forbid Trump from allowing any of his children to hold formal posts in his Administration, Trump apparently intends to give his son-in-law,  Jared Kushner, some sort of role in the White House.  Does anyone seriously believe that Kushner can work in the White House while his wife manages Trump Enterprises and that he will never once know what his wife is doing on the business side?

And for anyone else wanting further evidence that Trump has no concept of the public good apart from his own business advancement, consider the following before he has even been sworn in:

Advertised his properties on his transition website.

Asked his appointees to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Seen foreign diplomats flock to his hotels, and handed out brochures about his other properties.

Invited his daughter, who will be running his business empire, to a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister.

Met with his business partners from India.

Saw bureaucratic obstacles to his building permit in Argentina disappear three days after he spoke to the Argentine President. (Both men deny that the subject was ever raised, but some things can go without saying).

For more about potential conflicts of interest, see here and here.

When asked about the possibility of conflicts of interest, Trump simply said that there were no laws on the President and conflicts of interest, so anything goes.

Oh, well, Trump might say, the real problem with Hillary Clinton was not that she was corrupt, but that her sending State Department e-mails on a private server endangered national security.  Hillary was, in the most charitable reading, "extremely careless."  For anyone relieved at the thought of our national security depending on Donald Trump's carefulness, keep in mind that before even being sworn in he has talked to foreign leaders on an unsecured line, chosen a National Security Adviser who installed an unauthorized internet connection and disclosed classified information without authorization, and is considering a new Secretary of State on probation for sharing classified information.  I never thought that entrusting our national security to Donald Trump's carefulness was a good idea.

And so on and so forth.  But don't worry.  There will be plenty more to say about Trump and corruption.