[Peace-discuss] "Trump and the Re-emergence of the Jacksonians" - Michael Pettis, via nakedcapitalism
Stuart Levy
stuartnlevy at gmail.com
Sat Mar 26 10:36:03 EDT 2016
(I've been avoiding much of the writing around the electoral circus, but
thought this one worth reading. -SL)
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html
Yves here. Even though readers may disagree with Pettis’ dismissiveness
about Trump’s prospects for suceess in November, trust me, this is a
terrific post.
/*By Michael Pettis, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s
Guanghua School of Management. Cross posted from China Financial Markets
<http://blog.mpettis.com/2016/03/the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians/>*/
We’ve pelted Donald Trump with all the withering humor we can muster,
and even though it is hard to imagine an easier target for elitist
humor, with his blustering narcissism, his intellectual inconsistency,
his questionable business record, and his truly stupid television show,
above all of which rages his ferocious hair, it’s been so frustrating.
Although we have shown again and again that he is dishonest, unfit for
the presidency, and incapable of office, not only has he been able to
survive, but he actually seems to thrive on the relentless series of
what for any other candidate would have been knockout blows. Donald
Trump’s supporters are indifferent to our wit and to our arguments, and
we’ve convinced ourselves that this only proves what probably didn’t
need much proving, that his supporters are racist nitwits and that they
support Donald Trump for reasons that are too trivial to matter. This
frightens us because collectively they seem to be bringing something new
to American politics.
But we are wrong on all counts. Most of Trump’s supporters are not
racist nitwits, and not only do they have legitimate reasons behind
their support of Donald Trump, in fact they are very important ones. We
are finally starting to see this. We are wrong, however, to see recent
events as some kind of turning point in American history. The outrage
which the American political establishment is being rejected certainly
brings dangers and risks, but much fewer than we think because in fact
we’ve been here many times before, and by remembering our history we can
make some pretty good guesses as to how this all of will evolve.
Trump’s supporters belong to what we sometimes call the Jacksonian
tradition in American history, and their history, which of course
pre-dates the presidency of the man who gave them their name, combines
the impressive with the shameful. Like Andrew Jackson himself they have
been the strongest defenders of some of our most fundamental American
values while undermining others. While their social peers in Europe have
largely accepted their limited role in politics, except from time to
time when they rise up in sans-culottes rage, the Jacksonians always
demand to be heard when they feel their rights are threatened.
But while he may count on the support of the Jacksonians, Donald Trump
is no Andrew Jackson and soon enough, like most of his predecessors, he
will abandon his followers or be abandoned by them. Because Jacksonians
lack sophistication, and tend to be largely uneducated, at times when
the small victories they have worked for are threatened to the point of
creating deep-seated anxiety it has always been easy for scoundrels to
exploit them, but as one of the greatest of their heroes reminded us,
you can’t fool all the people all of the time. The Jacksonians have been
the defenders of American democracy even when their history has been
marred by misjudgment, and although Donald Trump’s time will be limited,
the effect of Trump’s supporters will be far-reaching, and probably
positive for the US in the longer term even if it risks foolishness in
the short.
I won’t pretend I’ve ever been a Jacksonian. In the early 1980s, when I
was getting my Ivy League education, my brother and I lived in
Manhattan’s notorious Alphabet City and ran a music space on Avenue C
and 3rd Street. One of the friends we made in that heavily Dominican
neighborhood was Dani, a bright, uncontrollable but ferociously charming
15-year-old, who at some point within a few months of our meeting him
suddenly seemed to have constructed us into his family. As we got to
know Dani, we quickly learned about a life very alien to ours but which
he took for granted. Dani’s daily life combined what to us was the
romance of New York street hustling and the sheer awfulness of life for
a kid living in one of the worst neighborhoods of the city. It consisted
mostly of petty crime and street hustle, avoiding trouble with local
gangs and only picking fights you knew you could win.
He didn’t stay often with his Dominican mother but, until my brother and
I managed to get him a tiny apartment in the basement of our building,
Dani usually slept in Lower East Side squats, friend’s apartments, and
even sometimes in a wooden box tucked away on a side street. He went to
school occasionally, and until we put him on an allowance he depended
mostly on hustling, shoplifting and small burglaries to earn spending
money (in fact we met him when he tried to charm my brother and me into
not noticing as a friend of his made off with a crate of beer from our
bar). When he was 16 he got caught up in the crack epidemic sweeping New
York and it took us more than a year, and a tough year at that, to get
him to stop.
Dani never knew his father but had been told that his father was half
African-American and half Dominican, although if Dani wanted to seem
white he easily could. Over time we met his two younger sisters, who
both eventually became prostitutes and junkies, and both eventually died
of AIDS before Dani turned 25. His older brother, with the very
inappropriate nickname of Hippie, was a fairly scary guy, heavily
scarred and stocky, who had been in and out of jail several times. He
too died early, in his mid 30s, halfway through a 12-year sentence.
Hippie had been convicted of a series of armed robberies at local ATMs,
and because he had forced Dani to join him as lookout – and Dani, like
most of us, was far too frightened of Hippie not to do whatever he
demanded – Dani was himself sentenced to four years in jail.
I was glad to see Hippie in jail because of the way he had dragged Dani
into dangerous crime, but my brother, both tougher and less judgmental
than I was, would send him care packages six or seven times a year.
After Hippie died my brother’s girlfriend showed me some of the letters
Hippie had sent my brother from jail: badly written, misspelled, with
the most hackneyed expressions of emotion, which conveyed nonetheless an
almost heartrending gratitude for packages that were the only evidence
Hippie had during his final years that anyone on the outside cared or
ever thought about him.
With that kind of background it was easy to assume away any useful
future for Dani, but he had always been bright and ambitious. I think I
may have been the first person ever to tell him how smart he was, some
time when he was still 15, because when I did, and then had to insist
that I wasn’t just making fun of him, his mouth fell open with surprise
and he began beaming cockily when he realized that I was probably right.
He certainly was bright, and while in jail, Dani decided he would
complete his high school education. We spoke by telephone nearly every
week so that he could brag about his progress, and about the facility
for computers he discovered he had.
*How to Succeed*
Over the next few difficult years after his release Dani made an amazing
recovery. He got a job working in some computer capacity, and then
another job driving a truck. After a lot of oats were sowed, mostly with
the arty white girls who had begun moving into the neighborhood in the
mid-1980s, he suddenly fell in love with a working class girl of Irish
descent, and decided he had to marry her. He did, and they are still
married nearly three decades later.
A few weeks after the events of 9/11, an event that shocked him
terribly, I happened to meet Dani for beers when he told me, very
casually and without the least sense of having done anything
praiseworthy, that beginning two or three days after the Trade Center
disaster, every morning he had joined the hundreds of volunteers working
downtown to dig up bodies and clean up the rubble of the devastated Twin
Towers. I didn’t know what to say when I heard that except that I felt
very proud of him, which surprised him. After a moment of confusion, he
suddenly figured out why his volunteer work was indeed sort of an
impressive thing, and he beamed, realizing that he had just hustled some
big points with me.
Around that time I left New York to live in Beijing, but from there I
learned that Dani’s knack for computers paid off. A few years after 9/11
he wrote to me to say that he had started a small computer consulting
business and had moved to the Midwest. He had three daughters, of whom
he was inordinately proud, and joked about the dictatorship his wife
exercised within the family. He was now a member of the middle class,
and although he was much closer to the bottom of the middle class than
to the top, he had achieved a social standing almost unimaginable for
anyone in his family. He was very clear that his adored daughters were
never going to be given the chance to return to the place from which he
came.
Over the years during trips back to the US I saw him from time to time,
although rarely, but I got emails and later was able regularly to check
his Facebook page. His page consisted of the expected combination of
family pictures, silly animal videos, and the corny jokes he had always
been famous for, along with dutiful messages about the various volunteer
work he and his wife (and the kids) were doing as community members and
as a family. He had determined to become “normal”, as he saw it, but of
course far from being normal what he had become was the result of
extraordinary effort and determination.
Late last year I noticed for the first time on his Facebook page that he
had taken an interest in politics, and this year I could see that the
candidate of whom he seemed most to approve was Donald Trump. I sent him
a joking Facebook message about his new-found interest in politics and
asked him if he really was a Trump supporter. He wrote back, a little
sheepishly, knowing that I was unlikely to be impressed, saying that
yes, he was going to vote for Trump if he got around to voting.
After a few more kidding messages back and forth, as I expected, I could
see that Dani didn’t know much about Trump’s policies and his
background, even though many of his friends also supported Trump, and he
didn’t mind that he knew so little. To the extent that he and his
friends even noticed it they dismissed the controversy around Trump as
noise, and probably to be expected by anyone who had decided to take on
the establishment, which he believed Trump to be doing. He had never
paid attention to politics before because he had never thought any of it
mattered, but he had some idea that Trump was a successful businessman
determined to toss out a political establishment for whom Dani had
always seemed irrelevant.
Few people who follow the Trump saga will be surprised to learn that
Dani never really was able to explain to me very clearly why he
supported Trump, except to the extent that he felt a vote for Trump was
a vote against everyone else, and that rather than be swayed by the
howls of liberal or conservative anti-Trump rage, which he barely
followed, he thought that every time some over-educated pundit attacked
Trump it only reinforced his sense that Trump was probably taking on the
Washington establishment. Democrat or Republican, Dani wasn’t able to
distinguish among the Trump critics, and we shouldn’t be too quick to
take that as evidence of how hopelessly naive Dani is when it comes to
politics. As far as he and his family were concerned there really was
little to distinguish the two.
Dani’s success in life was tenuous enough that he was unwilling to admit
that his middle-class life was threatened in any way by financial
difficulties, but from the way he talked about how the government had
mismanaged the economy, and his concern about illegal immigrants taking
jobs, I suspect that things weren’t always easy financially, and the
educational needs of his daughters would certainly be creating pressure
for him. The things that worried him seemed to be the things that were
weakening his grasp on the edges of the middle class.
*Trump and the Dummies*
Dani clear doesn’t seem to most of us to be an obvious Trump supporter.
Given his background he is clearly a tough guy who can handle himself in
a fight, but I know him well enough to know that if he ever actually
attended a Trump rally, which I doubt, there is no way he would be one
of the trouble-makers that joined the mobs looking to beat up
protesters. He probably wouldn’t have any sympathy for the protesters,
but in Dani’s world you mind your own business.
So how does Dani fit in? Clearly he isn’t a racist, and just as clearly
he isn’t one of those losers who flock to Trump campaign events to get
reassurance that their failures are caused by someone else. He is a
successful, middle-aged, middle-class family man, not terribly educated
but smart, of black and Latino descent, who participates and volunteers
in community events (grumbling just enough to be good-natured about it),
and who cannot hide the sense of joy and even surprise whenever he looks
at his daughters.
And yet he supports Donald Trump, a man who probably isn’t especially
racist himself but is distressingly reluctant to reject racism, and who
is so intensely narcissistic that the idea of his volunteering to help
some abstract community, and for no reward, wouldn’t even register with
most of us. It is almost impossible, for example, to imagine Donald
Trump working shoulder to shoulder with Dani, digging through the fetid
ruins of the World Trade Center to pull out bodies, simply because, as
Dani tried to tell me that night over beers, he felt there was an
obligation to show respect to the bodies of the people who had died
there, especially the cops and firemen.
It is also hard to imagine that Dani could have much sympathy for
someone who inherited a fortune. He came from a wholly dysfunctional
family, and shortly after he turned 18 he was in jail for violent crime,
had almost no education, and a history of crack addiction, and yet he
was able to turn himself around through hard work and a total lack of
self-pity. Even Donald Trump might agree – or perhaps he is narcissistic
enough not to – that Dani’s pitiful success is heroic in a way that
Trump’s magnificent success isn’t.
But in fact Dani’s support for Donald Trump isn’t any more surprising
then the fact that Dani is almost completely ignorant of anything Trump
has done or said. His support for Trump simply reflects a recurring and
predictable feature of American history. There are so many historical
precedents for anyone willing to read American history in light of the
Trump campaign that it should have been obvious from the surge in recent
years in immigration and, even more so, the surge in income inequality,
that sooner or later someone like Trump was going to emerge and someone
like Dani was going to support him.
In fact what is important about Dani’s support of Donald Trump is what
it says about the bulk of Trump’s supporters and what it says about the
ignorance of the opposition to Trump. The political establishment in the
US, the press, and much of the huge anti-Trump constituency loves the
excitement of the Trump campaign because Trump has given America and
much of the world a wonderful gift whose value we are too embarrassed to
acknowledge. He allows us to feel the thing that we most eagerly want to
feel: unified and justified outrage.
Nothing seems to make us happier than when we are able to join hands to
recoil together in outrage at some thing that is unambiguously
detestable. We count with delight the racists who flock to Trump’s
campaign speeches as fodder for our outrage, we quiver with an almost
delicious anger as we note the redneck shit-kickers who show up hoping
that some raghead will allow them to unleash their hatred of Muslims, we
recoil when Trump measures his penis, we are enraged when Trump has the
effrontery to contradict today what he said only yesterday, and then we
damn the sheer stupidity of anyone who is unable to see the
contradiction. We are certain that Trump’s supporters consist of the
worst people in America, and there are enough of them to make him president.
But Trump’s supporters are not the worst people in America, and they
will never make him president. Of course it is true that many of the
worst people in America do support Trump. Why wouldn’t they? There is no
doubt that if you think black people have slyly and unfairly, and no
doubt at the connivance of the Jews, gained the upper hand in America
and deserve to be knocked down a notch or two, or that the only
important decision that must be made by the mob of which you are a part
is whether to beat up the Mexican first or the Arab, or if you loathe
foreigners but aren’t really sure where you stand on people from Oregon
because you can’t remember whether or not Oregon is a foreign country,
then of course you are going to attend a Trump rally – which gives you
the comfort that a homogenous crowd grants itself – and roar with
approval every time Trump says something outrageous.
But who cares about whether or not these people attend Trump rallies,
except for those who are eager for the excitement and danger of showing
up to protest? We must remember two things. First, these people, the
dumb ones, are not the ones who are going to win Trump the presidency,
or even the Republican nomination, because these people don’t vote. They
aren’t smart enough to vote. They find voting to be too complicated and
confusing.
Second, the dumb ones and the thrill seekers who attend the rallies only
because they are cheap entertainment have locked Donald Trump into an
unwinnable position. If he wants to keep them roaring their approval at
ever-larger rallies, and his narcissism makes him want it desperately,
Donald Trump must be outrageous every day. But our standards of the
outrageous adapt so quickly that this only means that every day Trump
must do or say something more outrageous than he did yesterday, or he
risks losing his momentum. The whole penis incident only makes sense
when you recognize the pressure under which Trump has placed himself to
remain outrageous.
*Stratospheric Outrage*
But if you have to be more outrageous every day than you were yesterday,
and the election is months away, it is certain that at some point you
will become stratospherically outrageous, and you will have gone way too
far. This is when Trump’s real supporters will begin to get over their
intoxication, as they eventually almost always do, and this is why it is
probably only a matter of weeks before the whole Trump phenomenon begins
to collapse. You cannot easily maintain a geometric progression when it
comes to outrageousness.
Because while the dummies of America may indeed flock to Trump’s
campaign speeches in order to enjoy the spectacle, it is unfair to
dismiss Trump’s supporters as if they are all the same. Many people who
support Donald Trump, and Dani is an obvious case, are good people,
honest, hard-working, perhaps not especially well-educated, but they are
often the backbones of their communities and their country.
And they are not as stupid as we want to believe. Does immigration hurt
them? Yes it does, and while I believe that immigration has always been
one of the greatest and most powerful sources of American success, and
will continue to be for decades, if not centuries, I also fully
understand that only someone who treats trade as a matter purely of
ideology can deny that there are short-term costs. But Dani and millions
of Americans do risk paying these costs, and it is unnecessary and even
stupid to point out the irony of Dani’s own immigrant background as if
this conclusively proved anything because it is wholly besides the
point. When Dani worries about immigration it is because he is worried
about his daughters’ education, and not because he has forgotten that
his mother is Dominican. Trump’s supporters know that some of them may
end up paying the short-term cost for what many of them even know is
America’s long-term benefit, and they know that they do not have enough
slack in their incomes and savings to afford it.
And what about their fury at what they believe to be unfair
international trade? While there may well be global benefits to free
trade, and almost certainly are, it isn’t so incredibly hard to
recognize that the global trading environment is systematically gamed by
many countries – and yes, sometimes by the US too – and that they do so
because there are gains to be had at the expense of other countries. The
global trade regime has undoubtedly benefitted certain constituencies in
the US, but it has also created significant costs for the US and, more
importantly, has resulted in a redistribution of income, and while the
hard-working if uneducated millions who support Trump may not be able to
explain the costs to them as glibly and as self-confidently as they are
denied by bankers and other winners from free trade, they are right to
complain. Trade is undoubtedly a complex issue, but there is a real case
against the current system of free trade that must be addressed in a way
that makes sense to Trump’s supporters.
And finally Trump’s supporters are enraged by the inexorable rise of
income inequality. The only response they have been offered is that this
rise in income inequality is natural, probably the result of technology,
and cannot in any way be reversed, so we might as well get used to it.
This response is so profoundly untrue that it can only be seriously
proposed by someone for whom American history is a total mystery. We
have had periods of rising income inequality before, and they have
always been reversed once there was a political determination to do so.
Dani, and the millions like him, have every right to be enraged by the
past three decades of rising income inequality, and if they dismiss
every anti-Trump witticism as completely irrelevant until it addresses
income inequality, they are right to do so.
Trump’s followers may not articulate it very well, and they may too
easily allow their anxiety about immigration and trade to spill over
into nativism and hatred of foreigners, but they do have a strong case
that makes them in fact part of a venerable history. Trump is almost
certainly not going to resolve any of these issues for them – the
historical precedents are pretty clear on that point – but it isn’t
stupidity that drives them anyway to Trump. It is the recognition that
because anyone that belongs within the political establishment has
clearly proven himself unwilling or unable to resolve any of these
issues, then gambling on someone “outrageous”, who they identify as
outside the political establishment, is perfectly reasonable because it
has no possible downside. Their logic is the logic of successful hedge
funds: when there is no cost to being wrong, then you must gamble, no
matter how small the chance of being right.
*The Jacksonians Ride Again*
The Jacksonian tendency in American politics has existed throughout
American history. Their first flag bore the motto “Don’t tread on me”,
and all of their subsequent flags have retained that message in one form
or another ever since. Their often-admirable self-reliance, however,
comes with other qualities.
They are often ferociously nativist, i.e. anti-immigrant, and while we
think they are always foolishly unaware of the irony of their
provenance, in fact they understand that irony to be irrelevant. They
know that the filthy immigrants that thirty years ago threatened to
corrupt the American ideal are today the nativists that are determined
to protect American purity, but the fact remains that they often have
too little slack in their daily lives, and those of their families, to
afford any financial interruption. Perhaps that is why they seem so
unimpressed with irony and it is probably only arrogance on our part
that assures us that they are too stupid to see it. Dani and I have
spoken about his family background many times, and he knows full well
that his American genealogy is shallow, but he grew up in the streets of
New York and he is convinced that he is as full-blooded an American as
any one else, and of course he is.
Jacksonians can shift their views haphazardly. In modern times, for
example, they usually support states’ rights, although during the 19th
century, during Andrew Jackson’s campaign, they demanded a much stronger
presidency. But there are also rock-hard consistencies. Jacksonians
romanticize the common man, whether he happens to be at the time the
frontier settler, the homesteading farmer, or an employee of the Ford
Motor Company in the 1920s, in the same way that Dani spoke feelingly
about the police and the firemen whose bodies he felt obliged to dig up
after the tragedy of 9/11. They have always fulminated against anything
resembling a hereditary aristocracy, and instead admired or even
worshiped, sometimes with astonishing foolishness, the nouveau riche
that displaced them because these men made their own way. Trump has
convinced them, in spite of the truth, that he is one of these self-made
men, and as long as they believe him they will forgive his clownishness
and his self-importance.
This is because Trump has positioned himself well, if dishonestly, among
people who have a long history of loathing monopolists and big city
bankers. Jacksonians have always despised New York and Washington (and
now Los Angeles too) as the homes and headquarters of all that is wrong
with the Republic. They value fair play and a level playing field as the
highest aims of government, and oppose on principle government actions
that attempt to redress social wrongs by favoring any group – and while
this hatred of government redress can very easily slide into racism, it
is unfair to dismiss it as only racism, especially when many
conservative and religious but often silenced African-American and
Latino families scattered around in cities, small-towns and farms across
the country share the same feeling. In fact if someone were ever able
credibly to overcome their fear that nativism leads automatically to
racism, many of these blacks and Latinos would quickly join the Jacksonians.
Jacksonians include the original tea-partiers and the Sons of Liberty,
who despite their subsequent glorification included hooligans and
sometimes-vicious mobs who were often revolutionaries less for love of
liberty than for hatred of the rich. They included the Know-Nothings of
the 1850s, nativists who rose up in anger to purify an America that was
likely to be overrun by filthy Irish Catholics, along with the Locofocos
of the 1830s, who rose up in anger to protect workers from the
depredations of rich monopolists. William Jennings Bryan counted on them
in his crusade against gold, and even more against the New York City
bankers who backed the gold standard. His followers were known as the
progressives, and their racism and nativism was largely romanticized out
of history, but they were no less Jacksonian than those who say they
support Trump today, something Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has
already pointed out.
The Jacksonian fury with the changes brought about by rapid
industrialization and the monstrous Second Bank of the United States,
around which the new country suddenly saw individuals of
once-unimaginable wealth emerge, put Andrew Jackson in the presidency,
and it is unfortunate that the real concerns many Americans had in the
1830s have been subsumed by the racism of Andrew Jackson and his
followers – both against black slaves and against native Americans – but
we do no favor to our understanding of American history if we allow
racism to be the whole story of Jackson’s presidency, any more than if
we forget that people like Dani, who is not a racist, comprise a larger
share of Trump’s supporters than the racist fools we love to mock.
*Dirty Rotten Scoundrels*
The strength of the Jacksonian tendency has waxed and waned depending on
American conditions. It is during periods of especially heavy
immigration, and during periods in which income inequality is especially
deep, that they have come out in force, so much so sometimes that they
rock the political establishment to its very bones, and usually none too
soon. But with very few exceptions the Jacksonians have almost always
chosen as their leaders the worst and most hypocritical of scoundrels,
scoundrels who nearly always betray them once they’ve pocketed the
millions they’ve obtained from thrashing the old elite.
When we tremble at the idea of Trump as president, we should remember
their weak track record in putting presidents into office (even William
Jennings Bryan for all his oratorical brilliance got trounced). Perhaps
their only triumph was Andrew Jackson himself, but his success in no way
suggests that Trump can do the same. Andrew Jackson, for all his
barbaric treachery towards native Americans, was no hypocrite and no
opportunist, and his accomplishments, especially as a soldier, put in
him in a category that is wholly out of Trump’s reach, so much so that
to compare the two is meaningless.
But while they have nearly always been unlucky or foolish in who they
end up choosing as their leaders, the Jacksonians have still managed to
disrupt the political establishment in ways that proved pretty
permanent, and they are doing so again. As absurd as Trump may be, he
channels their sans-culottes hatred of the elite in ways that might
actually strengthen democratic institutions. Trump’s supporters might be
why the US has never developed a European-style permanent aristocracy or
its institutionalization of power. And perhaps it is not just
coincidence that any period in which there has been a significant
downward redistribution of wealth seems to have been preceded by a
period in which the Jacksonians have done well. For better or for worse,
Trump is not exceptional in American history and the good news is that
even though he will never win the presidency, he has made it clear that
future presidential candidates have no choice but to address income
inequality and the anxieties of the Jacksonians if they want to keep the
likes of Trump out of office.
Even if Trump does get the Republican nomination, the only effect might
be to destroy Abraham Lincoln’s party forever, and the Democratic
candidate, almost whoever it is, will win by an historic landslide. And
for those who need the bogeyman of a possible Trump presidency in order
to maintain that delicious feeling of justified outrage, so what if
Trump becomes president? That is not the end of the world, or even close
to it. The first thing every American president learns is how little he
is able to do, and President Trump will be in office for four years,
with a Congress in which both parties despise him, and he will
accomplish nothing, after which he will exit office with among the
lowest popularity ratings ever recorded.
And about that wall, how many times have we heard our liberal friends
threaten that if Trump becomes president they will give up their US
citizenship and move to Canada? What idiots. In the incredibly unlikely
circumstance that Trump becomes president, the very first decision he
will make, because he has no choice but to make it, and probably the
last he will ever implement, is to build the wall between Mexico and the
United States that he has promised. But anyone whose has followed
Trump’s business career knows damn well what will happen. He will indeed
build the wall, but inevitably he’ll build it on the wrong side of the
country – perhaps out of incompetency or perhaps because there is a lot
more money to be made with a longer wall. Those liberal idiots can talk
all they want about going to Canada, but they won’t be able to get
there. There’ll be Trump’s wall in the way.
P.S. I don’t really write about political events on my blog, but after a
discussion about Trump with an English friend during one of my business
trips, I wrote this on the flight home with some vague idea of perhaps
submitting it to some publication. However I didn’t want to spend too
much time on this as I am swamped with other commitments and so have
decided to publish it here. By the way I wrote this just before the
horrible events Tuesday in Belgium, which reminded me that while I
dismiss the chances of Trump ever making president, or even of lasting
much longer as a candidate, there is a fly in the ointment that will
give him a few more weeks purchase. Terrorist organizations seem to know
that we are in a period of elections in the US and Europe, and that to
the extent that they can affect the election process in the West – and
clearly they can – they must do what they can to ensure that the extreme
parties of the right perform well. The two are in a self-reinforcing
loop. The awful events in Brussels will not only strengthen Donald
Trump, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and a host of others, but their
increased strength will raise the number of domestic recruits for
terrorist organizations. It is a maddening process.
105 comments
1.
*Disturbed Voter* March 24, 2016 at 7:03 am
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569419>
Why has it been automatically assumed, since the League of Nations,
that nationalism is obsolete? Who would such a policy serve?
Nationalism has obvious drawbacks, but most of us aren’t ready to
live in a global village, ruled by iron fisted bureaucrats … for our
own good. Smells of snake oil.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569419>
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1.
*Moneta* March 24, 2016 at 8:25 am
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569444>
The right wants globalization and the left world peace with one
big happy global family.
Maybe one day we’ll be able to properly mesh the micro with the
macro… and understand that healthy sustainable communities needs
some level of self-sufficiency and industry diversification.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569444>
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2.
*Minnie Mouse* March 24, 2016 at 8:55 am
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569456>
What can be said for the nation state is that it functions as a
defacto safety firewall against screwing up everything all at
once. That alone justifies nationalism. Any mono culture can get
wiped out by a single infection.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569456>
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*scraping_by* March 24, 2016 at 2:03 pm
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569664>
There’s a small but growing line of thought that nationalism
has worth because it values people on a basis other than
economic utility. It may be sentimental, subjective, and
conventional, but it is a recognition that a human being is
more than a cost input in a profit machine. With the last
humane impulses being beaten out of religion and
professional psychology mired in identity politics, history
weaponized and literature divided into silos, it may be one
of the few paths to human recognition we’ve got left.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569664>
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*Minnie Mouse* March 24, 2016 at 4:11 pm
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569756>
National self sufficiency tends to diversify the overall
global supply chain simply because everybody must
produce at least some of everything to be self
sufficient, hence “biodiversity” is a hedge against
global catastrophic failure. Concentration of anything
is a single point failure vulnerability. Nationalism is
more than sentimental, subjective, and conventional but
mitigates global systemic risk.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569756>
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2.
*Andrew Anderson* March 24, 2016 at 7:05 am
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569420>
Andrew Jackson took on the banks, not very intelligently because it
caused a depression (of 1837 iirc).
Today we know better and can deprivilege the banks safely but we’d
best start planning carefully how to do so.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569420>
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*SufferinSuccotash* March 24, 2016 at 8:39 am
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569449>
He actually took on only one bank, the Second Bank of the United
States. But the results were pretty definitive.
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569449>
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*barefoot charley* March 24, 2016 at 1:32 pm
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569649>
Driving a stake through the heart of the ever-never-dead
central bank was a great left-wing issue throughout the 19th
century, second only to slavery. Leftists cannot and will
not be serious until they get off the banksters’ bus. Good
essay. Jackson embodied the strengths and contradictions
that Trump lampoons like a reality tv show: he’s the
authoritarian father-figure who knows what’s good for you;
the daddy who loves and hates for you; the rabble-rousing
honest broker who’s not above an occasional shooting or
clubbing, usually well deserved; above all he’s a man, not a
worm like the bankster buddies and biddies Trump’s running
against. (Forgive me for not mentioning Bernie, perhaps the
last ghost of Lower East Sides past. In a better America
after WWII, his views got trampled like Jackson trampled
Indians.) If we could fuse the nativist/populist and elite
Progressive strains of our country, we could recognize the
deep overlaps of Trump and Sanders. It’s culture, not policy
that most divides them. Note that Marine le Pen and Nigel
Farange also have vastly more progressive social policies on
banksters and centralization than leftists, who are as
captive as government regulators. Trump/Sanders 2016!
Reply
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569649>
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