Columnist.
Vladimir Putin's serial humiliations of America's bewildered secretary of state regarding Syria indicate Putin's determination to destabilize the world. Here is an even more ominous indication of events moving his way: On just one day last week, Italian ships plucked 6,055 migrants from the Mediterranean. What has this to do with Putin? It portends fulfillment of his aspiration for Europe's political, social and moral disorientation. The Financial Times reports that of the 138,000 migrants who have come by sea to Italy this year, few are from Syria. The "vast majority" are from Africa, with the largest number from Nigeria. The U.N.'s World Population Prospects says that only 10 percent of global population is in Europe, which is projected to have fewer people in 2050 than today.
"The 'quiet catastrophe' is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet."
The "quiet catastrophe" is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs. The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This "work deficit" of "Great Depression-scale underutilization" of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt's new monograph "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis," which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this:
The good news, a commodity in short supply, is that Americans are about to get a respite from the inundating Niagara of candidates' blather. The bad news is that the respite will be a tsunami of Cubs Gush, which will slosh from sea to shining sea. So, brace yourself for a surfeit of dubious sociology and worse metaphysics. There is something about baseball, and especially about the Chicago National League Ball Club, that triggers — consider this column a trigger warning — incontinent rhapsodizing and nonsensical theorizing by otherwise sensible citizens.
Looking on the bright side, perhaps this election can teach conservatives to look on the dark side. They need a talent for pessimism, recognizing the signs that whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunize this nation from decay, to which all regimes are susceptible. The world's oldest political party is an exhausted volcano, the intellectual staleness of its recycled candidate unchallenged because a generation of younger Democratic leaders barely exists. The Republican Party's candidate evidently disdains his credulous supporters who continue to swallow his mendacities. About 90 percent of presidential votes will be cast for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, refuting the theory that this is a center-right country. At the risk of taking Trump's words more seriously than he does, on some matters he is to Clinton's left regarding big government powered by an unbridled presidency.
Here on the High Plains, where the deer and the antelope once played, Denver's suburbs roam toward the Rockies' front range and the nature of today's polyglot politics is written in the local congressman's campaign schedule. One day last week, Republican Mike Coffman went from a Hispanic charter school in a strip mall, to another strip mall for lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant with leaders of the Ethiopian-American community, then to a meeting with the editor of the largest of two Korean-language newspapers serving more than 3,000 Korean-Americans in the metropolitan area.
Technology has put powerful computers in billions of pockets, but an invention much more mundane than the smartphone — the shipping container: a rectangular steel box — also has changed the world. Because of it, two of today's preoccupations — infrastructure and globalization — are connected by a chain of events that began more than 60 years ago and today runs through Congress and to the wharves of Charleston's booming port. In 1934, Malcolm McLean, a North Carolina high school graduate struggling in the Depression, spent $120 earned pumping gas to buy a used truck. In 1955, running what would become the nation's fifth largest trucking company, McLean had an idea: The process of loading ships — swarms of stevedores stowing (and often pilfering) cargo packed into ships' holds in different sizes of wooden crates — was so slow that ships often spent more time in ports than at sea. Cargo brought to docks on trucks or rail cars and sealed in standardized containers could be loaded 20 times faster per ton, and for one-20th the cost.
From Erie in the west to Scranton in the east, Pennsylvania is flecked with casualties the stubborn economic sluggishness and relentless globalization have inflicted on industrial communities. But in this middle-class Philadelphia suburb, Tom Danzi knows that the economy is denting even his business repairing damaged cars. His Suburban Collision Specialists once had 27 employees kept busy by drivers stimulating the economy by producing fender benders. Now he has only 17. Many cash-strapped motorists keep driving cars with unrepaired scars. So, U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican seeking a second term, recently came here to commiserate and to warn that if his Democratic opponent wins she will make matters worse.
Documents inconvenient to the regime went into the Ministry of Truth's slits and down to "enormous furnaces." Modern tyrannies depend on state control of national memories — retroactive truths established by government fiat. Which is why Russia's Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a blogger for violating Article 354.1 of Russia's criminal code. This May 2014 provision criminalizes the "Rehabilitation of Nazism." The blogger's crime was to write: "The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War." The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have gone down one of Vladimir Putin's memory holes.
Republican congressional leaders ardently want conservative members of the House to not force a vote on impeaching the IRS commissioner. The public does not care about John Koskinen's many misdeeds. And impeachment will distract attention from issues that interest the public. And because Democrats are not ingrates, the required two-thirds of the Senate will never vote to convict Koskinen, whose behavior continues the pattern of doing what Democrats desire with the most intrusive and potentially punitive government agency. These Republican leaders' reasons are cumulatively unpersuasive. Resuscitating the impeachment power would contribute to revitalizing Congress' Article I powers. Impeachments are rare — no appointed official of the executive branch has been impeached in 140 years. But what James Madison called the "indispensable" power to impeach should not be allowed to atrophy, as has Congress' power to declare war.
Sen. Rob Portman probably will win a second term, despite the fact that he deserves to. The swarm of young people who gathered on a Saturday morning in this Cincinnati suburb to feast on doughnuts and his gratitude are among the 5,000 volunteer interns, including students from 35 campuses, who have made 3.5 million voter contacts. Portman's supporters are a forgiving sort, undeterred by his many accomplishments and qualifications that could be disqualifying in this season of populist antagonism toward people who have actually governed. A graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Michigan Law School, Portman was one of President George H.W. Bush's counselors. After six terms in Congress, Portman became President George W. Bush's trade representative and, a year later, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
For 67 years, the son of Vincent and Bridget Scully, immigrants who came to New York City from County Cavan, Ireland, has been plying his trade. For eight years on the East Coast and 59 on the West Coast, on radio and television, he has strolled with Brooklyn Dodgers fans and then Los Angeles Dodgers fans down the long, winding road of baseball's seasons. In an era with a surfeit of shoddiness, two things are well-made — major league baseball and Vin Scully's broadcasts of it. Although he uses language fluently and precisely, he is not a poet. He is something equally dignified and exemplary but less celebrated: He is a craftsman. Scully, the most famous and beloved person in Southern California, is not a movie star, but has the at-ease, old-shoe persona of Jimmy Stewart. With his shock of red hair and maple syrup voice, Scully seems half his 88 years.
Because truth in labeling laws are among the laws from which Washington feels exempt, the titles of congressional legislation often take liberties with the facts (e.g., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act, however, precisely names the ailment for which it is the remedy. The Justice Department has negotiated "bank settlement agreements" whereby banks make restitution to the government for the damage they allegedly did in connection with the creation and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities in the subprime mortgage crisis. Our subject here is not, however, whether the sums extracted from the banks (e.g., Citigroup $7 billion, Bank of America $16.65 billion, JPMorgan $13 billion) are proportionate to their alleged culpabilities. Rather, our subject is what Justice does with millions of these dollars.
Nevada, which calls itself the "Battle Born State," actually was born prematurely because of Republicans' anxiety. Now, 152 years later, it again is a subject of their anxiety. Entering 1864, Abraham Lincoln and his party were intensely, and reasonably, in doubt about his re-election. So, scrambling for every electorate vote, Republicans decided to conjure three from thin air — thin desert air. They began the process of admitting Nevada to the union, even though the 1860 census said its population was 6,857, far short of the 60,000 ostensibly required for statehood. Nine days before the election, the Republican-controlled Congress made Nevada a state (although Gen. Sherman's Sept. 2 capture of Atlanta probably guaranteed Lincoln's victory).
Seated in his office here, wearing neither a necktie nor a frown, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is remarkably relaxed for someone at the epicenter of a crisis now in its second year and with no end in sight. But, then, stress is pointless when the situation is hopeless. Besides, if you can ignore the fact that self-government is failing in the nation's fifth-most populous state, you can see real artistry in the self-dealing by the Democrats who, with veto-proof majorities in the state Legislature, have reduced this state they control to insolvency. Illinois' government, says Rauner, "is run for the benefit of its employees." Increasingly, it is run for their benefit when they retire. Pension promises, though unfunded by at least $113 billion, are one reason some government departments are not digitized at all.
Like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a floating mast, many Republicans rationalize supporting Donald Trump because of "the court." This two-word incantation means: Because we care so much for the Constitution, it is supremely important to entrust to Trump the making of Supreme Court nominations. Well. In a Republican candidates debate, Trump complained that Ted Cruz had criticized Trump's sister, a federal judge. Trump said: "He's been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill." Trump, the supposed savior of the Supreme Court, thinks federal judges sign bills. The mast-clingers say: Well, sure, he knows nothing about American government, including the Constitution, which he vows to defend all the way to "Article XII." He will, however, choose wise advisers and humbly defer to them.
In the 1870s, when Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall controlled New York City, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when Chicago's Democratic machine was especially rampant, there was a phenomenon that can be called immunity through profusion: Fresh scandals arrived with metronomic regularity, so there was no time to concentrate on any of them. The public, bewildered by blitzkriegs of bad behavior, was enervated. What Winston Churchill said about an adversary — "He spoke without a note and almost without a point" — can be said of Donald Trump, but this might be unfair to him. His speeches are, of course, syntactical train wrecks, but there might be method to his madness. He rarely finishes a sentence ("Believe me!" does not count), but perhaps he is not the scatterbrain he has so successfully contrived to appear. Maybe he actually is a sly rascal, cunningly in pursuit of immunity through profusion.
To gauge the opportunism and hypocrisy that define Donald Trump's Republican Party, consider this: Imagine the scalding rhetoric that would have boiled from the likes of Newt Gingrich, that Metternich of many green rooms, if Hillary Clinton had offhandedly undermined the collective security architecture of U.S. foreign policy since NATO was created in 1949. Vladimir Putin's regime is saturating Europe with anti-Americanism, buying print and broadcast media, pliable journalists and other opinion leaders, and funding fringe political parties, think tanks and cultural institutions. (Putin is again following Hitler's playbook; read Alan Furst's historical novel "Mission to Paris," set in pre-war France.) Putin is etching with acid a picture of America as ignorant, narcissistic and, especially, unreliable. Trump validates every component of this indictment, even saying that the U.S. commitment to NATO's foundational principle — an attack on one member is an attack on all — is not categorical.
En route to fight one of his many duels, French politician Georges Clemenceau bought a one-way train ticket. Was he pessimistic? "Not at all. I always use my opponent's return ticket for the trip back." Some Hillary Clinton advisers, although not that serene, think her victory is probable and can be assured. Her challenge is analogous to Ronald Reagan's in 1980, when voters were even more intensely dissatisfied than they now are. There were hostages in Iran and stagflation's "misery index" (the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates) was 21.98. By August 1979, 84 percent of Americans said the country was on the wrong track. A substantial majority did not *want* to re-elect Jimmy Carter but a majority might do so unless convinced that Reagan would be a safe choice. Reagan's campaign responded by buying time for several half-hour televised speeches and other ads stressing his humdrum competence.
Crucial political decisions often concern which bridges to cross and which to burn. Donald Trump's dilemma is that he burns some bridges by the way he crosses others. His campaign depends on a low-probability event, and on his ability to cause this event without provoking a more-than-equal and opposite reaction. Extrapolating from recent elections, the turnout of non-college educated whites this November would be expected to be 3 percent smaller as a portion of the total turnout than in 2012, and college educated whites a 1 percent larger portion. The core of Trump's support consists of non-college educated whites, a cohort whose 2012 turnout was 60.4 percent. There is a low probability that Trump can motivate recent non-voters in this cohort to increase the turnout to 67 percent. There is, however, a high probability that the way he stimulates such people — still more insult oratory and fact-free "policy" expostulations — will cause other groups to recoil.
