Category Archives: Popular Culture

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Trump And The Economy

12 Comments

His policies would crush the winners:

Like Google and Facebook, Amazon is under attack by European antitrust regulators. If Trump were really the economic nationalist he plays on TV, he would be defending these U.S. stars. But in his picture of the economy, these companies simply don’t count, perhaps because they weren’t around during his 1980s business heyday. Trump is neither pro-market nor pro-business, the usual Republican choices. He’s just pro-Trump.

He’s oblivious to most U.S. success stories. On just about any list of excellence — the most admired companies, the most valuable brands, the world’s supply-chain leaders — U.S. enterprises dominate. Nike has even surpassed long-time champion Louis Vuitton as the world’s most valuable apparel brand, a triumph for American culture as well as a U.S. business. The chemists coming up with new products at 3M or Procter & Gamble are no more important to Trump than the FedEx and UPS drivers delivering packages, the longshoremen offloading cargo at the ports of Long Beach and Charleston, the animators creating new films for Pixar, or the buyers finding bargains for T.J. Maxx. Whether you work for a U.S. company or a foreign company with U.S. operations, if you’re a successful player in a global supply chain, you simply don’t exist to him.

This is a candidate who promised to bring big steel back to Pittsburgh without considering why it disappeared. In Trump’s version of the economy, the only threat to established industries comes from diabolical foreigners and stupid U.S. trade negotiators. (Never mind that Chinese steelmakers already face nearly 500 percent punitive tariffs for corrosion-resistant products, with more tariffs for other types of steel potentially on the way.) He can’t imagine disruption that comes from changing demand or better ideas.

He’s an economic ignoramus, or a demagogue, or both.

But one possible good outcome; could he cause “progressives” to rethink big government?

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power? Have progressives joined conservatives in worrying aloud about the wholesale abuse of power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

Furthermore, I’d like to know if the everything-is-better-in-Europe brigade is still yearning for a parliamentary system that would allow the elected leader to push through his agenda pretty much unchecked; if “gridlock” is still seen as a devastating flaw in the system; if the Senate is still such an irritant; and if the considerable power that the states retain is still resented as before. Certainly, there are many on the left who are mistrustful of government and many on the right who are happy to indulge its metastasis. But as a rule, progressives favor harsher intrusion into our civil society than do their political opposites. Are they still as sure that this is shrewd?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure they’re really capable of thinking those sorts of things through.

[Update a while later]

“Even within the private sector, Trump’s background does not extend to the sorts of decision-making situations that would confront, say, the chief executive officer of a large, well-established corporation. Instead, Trump’s career, apart from his flings at presidential campaigning, has almost exclusively been about deal-making aimed at personal enrichment and enhancing recognition of the Trump brand name. Against the backdrop of U.S. history and past U.S. presidents, Trump’s personal qualifications are breathtakingly narrow and shallow, and his endeavors inwardly oriented.”

You don’t say.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Trump Phenomenon

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Thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

I don’t think the system is quite as corrupt as some Trump supporters believe or, perhaps more accurately, I lack their confidence that burning down the old house is the best way to build something new. But it would be equally wrong and perhaps more dangerous to take the view that there is nothing more fueling his rise than ignorance, racism and hate. The failure of the center-Left to transform its institutional and intellectual dominance into policy achievements that actually stabilize middle class life, and the failure of the center-Right to articulate a workable alternative have left a giant intellectual and political vacuum in the heart of American life. The Trump movement is not an answer to our problems, but the social instinct of revolt and rejection that powers it is a sign of social health. The tailors are frauds and the emperor is not in fact wearing any clothes: it is a good sign and not a bad sign that so many Americans are willing to say so out loud.

Those of us who care about policy, propriety and the other bourgeois values without which no democratic society can long thrive need to spend less time wringing our hands about the shortcomings of candidate Trump and the movement that has brought him this far, and more time both analyzing the establishment failures that have brought the country to this pass, and developing a new vision for the American future.

Yes, as I’ve been saying for months, I get that people are angry, and I get why; the current political class is the worst in memory, and I’m angry too. I just can’t see a willful ignoramus and reality-show con artist who doesn’t even know what liquified natural gas is as the solution.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Facebook And Conservatives

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Some interesting (and surprising) observations from Glenn Beck:

It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.

I sat there, looking around the room at ‘our side’ wondering, ‘Who are we?’ Who am I? I want to be very clear — I am not referring to every person in the room. There were probably 25–30 people and a number of them, I believe, felt like I did. But the overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us.’

What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?

Good questions. I agree that Facebook should do whatever it wants to do, but that it should be transparent.

[Update a while later]

The real built-in bias at Facebook.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump’s Wealth

22 Comments

I’m sure that you’ll be as shocked as I was to learn that he probably greatly exaggerates it. This is a great end quote:

“A fellow asked me that once and I said, ‘I don’t know,” Nelson Bunker Hunt once told a congressional panel grilling him about his net worth. “But I do know people who know how much they are worth generally aren’t worth much.”

Similarly, people who are always bragging about how smart they are generally aren’t that bright.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump 42, Clinton 37

17 Comments

Those are the latest numbers from Rasmussen. I’ve never been one to say that Trump can’t beat Hillary; I just think that would be almost as terrible an outcome as him not beating Hillary.

But what I find interesting is not who gets a higher plurality, but how many people share my desire for another candidate (at one in five, by that poll). And that doesn’t count the number who would switch from Trump or Hillary if someone else were in the race. There has never been a more promising year for a good independent candidate than this one.

[Update a while later]

Get ready for a Bernie third-party run.

It would be interesting to see a four-way race, if there were an actual conservative running. I think he or she would have a good chance.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Pop the corn, “liberal” pundits eating their own.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Trump Versus Clinton

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Tim Carney: You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils:

As a conservative, I weigh the candidates against each other by considering the worst-case scenarios. On that score, there’s an irony: Hillary’s time as secretary of state — especially her disastrous and illegal war in Libya — doesn’t suggest supreme competence; Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile makes many people think of fascism. But the “fascism” threat (an overblown word, of course) is probably greater with Hillary, and the incompetence threat is far greater with Trump.

They’re both incompetent fascist wannabes.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Trump’s Tax Returns

34 Comments

Yes, this is an amazing story in an already amazing election season:

A friend of Donald Trump’s recently approached him to suggest that he will eventually have to release his tax returns, as every presidential nominee has for decades. The friend told Trump that he should do it before the GOP convention to ensure everyone can process what’s in the returns and help make any revelations “old news” by November. If Trump didn’t do that, he was warned, the odds of politicized leaks from his returns were high, citing several examples from the Obama era, including the illegal leaking of some of Romney’s tax information by the IRS in 2012.

“What will you do if the returns come out as part of an October surprise?” Trump was asked. Trump pondered the question and replied, “I’ll say they aren’t mine.” That stunning answer is the essence of Donald Trump. “It’s exactly what I’d expect him to say,” Fox Business’s Charlie Gasparino, who has known Trump for decades, told me. But while Donald Trump has made a life out of bluffing his way past problems and cavalier comments, it’s harder to succeed doing that at the presidential level.

Trump may be inching up in polls now, but one sharp wrong turn could send him spinning off the road. A political party that nominates Trump without seeing his tax returns could be committing political suicide and endangering dozens of down-ballot GOP candidates. Even Superman met his match with kryptonite.

People keep saying that, but…