Columnist.
The scholar Francis Fukuyama has been widely ridiculed for the title of his 1992 book, "The End of History." Critics point out that we've had — suffered — a lot of history since then: the 9/11 attacks, prolonged wars in the Middle East, a worldwide financial crisis and deep recession. But Fukuyama's point wasn't that all conflict would cease. His argument was that the Western model of democratic governance and market-based capitalism had emerged as the only intellectually serious model of a good society. Other models have persisted — China's centralized control, Russia's petrostate, Islamic jihad — but don't have appeal beyond the places where they are imposed by force.
Opportunity cost. That's an economist's term for what you lose out on when you divert your investments and attention to something less profitable. It's also a good term for the losses Donald Trump has incurred in the last six days — more than 6 percent of the 94 days between the close of the Democratic National Convention and the election in November. Trump has spent much of that time attacking the father and mother of a Muslim U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq. He has made a point of refusing to support Paul Ryan or John McCain in their upcoming primaries. He accepted someone else's purple heart and said that his business investments amounted to "sacrifices."
What is the campaign strategy for the two political parties? Clues can be had from the responses to a question I asked about a dozen dignitaries of each party at their conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. What's your best guess, I asked, emphasizing guess, of your nominee's percentage of the popular vote in November 2016? I understood the responses, being on the record, were not entirely frank. Only two Republicans guessed Donald Trump would lose; only one Democrat said he was uncertain about the result. It would be churlish to hurl the responses of those who turned out to be less than prescient back at them in scorn. One thing the responses had in common is that they reflected pre-convention polling, which showed Clinton 3 to 5 points ahead. Democrats did not seem to be taking into account post-Republican Convention polling that showed the race essentially even.
It was a variant on a traditional convention for a party seeking a third straight term in the White House, attempting to overcome an apparent post-convention bounce for the opposition's candidate: shades of 1988 or 2000 or 2008. Usually it starts with a valedictory speech by the incumbent president, followed by celebration of the new nominee and ending with a rousing acceptance speech. This year's Democratic convention in Philadelphia was different, because circumstances were different. Monday was about unifying the party, Tuesday about humanizing the nominee, Wednesday about disqualifying the opponent, and Thursday had sure-to-be-overlooked minor events leading to Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech.
"Make America One Again." That was the stated theme of the last night of the Republican National Convention. In the welter of analysis of Donald Trump's acceptance speech, few have commented on it, but it's worth taking it seriously. Liberal commentators have dwelled repeatedly on Trump's "dark" and "dystopian" view of America. Apparently, you're not supposed to think badly of our nation when we have a black Democratic president. This is mostly just partisan spin. The candidate of the out party invariably takes a dim view of the way things are going. Yes, they usually add more uplift than Trump provided.
Disruptive. That's a good word to describe Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, and to describe the sometimes-ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland this past week. Apple disrupted the music industry; Uber disrupted the taxi cartels; Amazon disrupted the mega-bookstores. Global competition has been disrupting American manufacturing for decades. The inundation of low-skill immigrants unintentionally produced by the 1965 immigration act has disrupted many communities and big metro areas.
Donald Trump postponed the announcement of his vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence, because of the terrorist attack in Nice, which was in line with the modus operandi of his campaign. He didn't want to preempt news media coverage of another radical Islamist terrorist attack. Disarray and disorder work against the party in power, especially if the president and his presidential candidate refuse to identify radical Islamists as the threat facing civilized societies. The rollout of the mild-mannered Pence could wait until a slow-news Saturday. The Trump campaign, pundits tell us, is violating all the old rules. The candidate has mostly eschewed "paid media" — television and radio advertising — in favor of low-cost tweets and the inevitable intensive free media coverage generated by a celebrity candidate.
"Events, dear boy, events," the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied when asked what he most feared. And events can certainly make a difference, as was apparent this week: Prime Minister David Cameron moved out of No. 10 Downing Street and Theresa May moved in. This came after British voters, against Cameron's advice and contrary to widespread expectations, voted to leave the European Union June 23. But the extraordinary machinations in London are not capturing American voters' attentions as much as things happening over here. At the midpoint of a tumultuous and often surprising presidential campaign, with the nominees seemingly chosen (though some Republicans still hope to stop Donald Trump in Cleveland), two major events have roiled the American political landscape over the last week.
When the Republican and Democratic national conventions gather in successive weeks in Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively, one item on their plates will be reconsideration of their parties' nominating rules. Just about everyone agrees that they are unsatisfactory in some way or another, and many itch to do something about it. But what? Perhaps I can give some advice as one who was present at the creation. I was in Chicago's International Amphitheatre at the 1968 Democratic National Convention on the one roll call when the delegates voted down the convention managers. It was a resolution, sponsored by Geoffrey Cowan, now head of the Annenberg Foundation Trust, requiring creation of a commission to recommend changes in the delegate selection process.
Unindicted co-conspirator: Technically, the term, made familiar in the Watergate scandals, does not apply to Hillary Clinton, since no one has been or apparently will be indicted in the emails case. But if you read the bulk of FBI Director James Comey's statement, it's plain that Hillary Clinton and her top aides conspired to do things that violated the law. And yet Comey made it clear she would not be indicted. Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would indict her, even though the facts he set out show that she violated section 793(f) of the criminal code. That section does not require criminal intent but imposes liability in cases of "gross negligence." It's hard to distinguish that from Comey's description of the conduct of Clinton and her aides as "extremely careless."
"Affirmative action" will continue to be the routine course of business of college and university admissions for the foreseeable future. That's the bottom line from the Supreme Court's June decision in Fisher v. University of Texas. By a 4-3 vote, the Court essentially approved the University of Texas' "holistic" admissions as not violating the civil rights of white plaintiff Abigail Fisher. Justice Anthony Kennedy, as a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, "overturned himself." That leaves five votes for racial quotas (counting Justice Elena Kagan, a lockstep liberal on this issue, who recused herself from this case) regardless of who eventually takes Justice Antonin Scalia's seat.
Bigotry! Nativism! Racism! That's what elites in Britain, Europe and here have been howling, explanations for why 52 percent of a higher-than-general-election turnout of British voters voted for their nation to leave the European Union. But there is plenty of bigotry, condescension and snobbery in the accusations and the people making them. And it's incoherent to claim, as some do, that it's undemocratic for voters to decide. That amounts to saying that ordinary people should be content to be ruled by their betters.
Earthquakes seldom hit the British Isles. But one did late Thursday night and early Friday morning, as the constituency returns started pouring in on the referendum to decide whether the United Kingdom would remain in or leave the European Union. Most polls had shown a small margin for remain, and betting markets made it an odds-on favorite. Hedge funds went long on the assumption "Remain" would win. It had the support, after all, of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, the leftist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bank of England President Mark Carney and the financial leaders of the City of London.
Donald Trump is the latest proof that the campaign always reflects the candidate and that the candidate is a product of his experience over the years. So, as Trump, after clinching the Republican nomination, reshuffles and rejiggers a campaign that has fallen behind Hillary Clinton, it's instructive to look at his political ground zero. That would be New York and its tabloid politics. I first encountered this in summer 1961, on a family vacation to New York City. As a teenager I was allowed to travel on the subway (15 cent fare, a dollar gets you six tokens and a dime change) and arrange my own meals (a pizza slice — exotic food back home — for a quarter).
Why has the American economy had such sluggish job creation and economic growth? That's a pretty fundamental question, and one for which most conventional economists have had unsatisfying answers. Clues can be found, I think, in the new book by the unconventional economist and blogger Arnold Kling. "Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction to Economics" is, among other things, a polemic against macroeconomists who treat the economy as what Kling calls a "GDP factory" and who think policymakers can get it producing more by just stepping a little harder on the gas pedal, with federal stimulus spending or low interest rates.
Brexit is a choice for the British people.
"Market Angst as U.K. Edges to Exit," proclaims the headline on The Wall Street Journal's lead story. The exit referred to is Britain's departure from the European Union, a move that will be mandated if a majority votes "leave" rather than "remain" in the national referendum next Thursday.
Are the exit polls, on which just about every elections analyst has relied, wrong? That's a question raised by New York Times Upshot writer Nate Cohn — a question whose answers have serious implications for how you look at the 2016 general election.
Bernie Sanders is not going gently into that good night, at least not yet. After hearing Monday from the Associated Press that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, after absorbing Tuesday night a solid defeat in the California primary and losses in three other states, Sanders was still pledging to go on campaigning for the District of Columbia's 20 delegates in its primary next Tuesday and to fight on until the Democratic National Convention opens in Philadelphia July 25.
No contemporary political issue has been more controversial, or has been subject to more dubious analyses, than immigration. Take Donald Trump's endlessly repeated promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. As I've pointed out, that is attacking a problem that no longer exists or that has diminished greatly. Net migration from Mexico to the U.S. was around zero between 2007 and 2014. But Trump's critics also miss something. Walls can actually work. The wall along the border near San Diego worked well enough a dozen years ago that many migrants crossed into the Arizona desert instead. It may not be feasible to build a wall along the Rio Grande in Texas, but the border there can be patrolled more effectively than it is now.
