Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the Virginia governor’s race, suggestions by Donna Brazile that the Democratic primary race was rigged for Hillary Clinton, the GOP tax overhaul plan and the Russia probe indictments.Obama doesn’t like politics and left the Democratic Party in ~24 million of debt, which left it vulnerable to influence by Clinton big donors, against the bylaws.
Upswingers and Downswingers
The popular gloom notwithstanding, we’re actually living in an era of astounding progress. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in history. As Steven Pinker has documented, we’ve seen a steady decline in wars and armed conflict. The U.S. economy is the best performing major economy in the developed world.
n 1980 the U.S. had a slight edge in G.D.P. per capita over Germany, Japan, France and the U.K. But the U.S. has grown much faster than the other major economies over the past 37 years, so that now it produces about $54,000 of output per capita compared with about $39,000 for Japan and France.
.. During the mid-20th century the West developed a group-oriented culture to deal with the Great Depression and the World Wars. Its motto could have been
- “We’re in this together.” That became too conformist and stultifying.
A new individualistic culture emerged (pivot) whose motto could have been
- “I’m free to be myself.”
That was great for a time, but excessive individualism has left society
- too fragmented, isolated and divided (hatchet). Something new is needed.
.. Politics during the hatchet phase gets nasty. It tends to devolve into a fight between upswingers and downswingers.
- Upswingers believe in progress and feel that society is still fitfully moving upward.
- Downswingers have lost faith in progress and feel everything is broken.
.. Among Republicans the
- upswingers embrace capitalist dynamism, global engagement and the open movement of people and ideas. The
- downswingers embrace ethnic and national cohesion and closed borders.
On the left it’s between those who believe
- the only realistic path is to reform existing structures and
- those who think they are so broken we need to
.. Because of the loss of faith in progress downswingers have a baseline mood of pessimism, protest and anger. They are marked by a deep social distrust and a bent toward conspiracy thinking. They disrespect codes of etiquette that traditionally regulate public life and crack down on opposing speech.
.. downswingers have a tropism toward ethnic and identity politics. If you’ve lost faith in universal progress, if you think everything is a zero-sum scramble for slices of a stagnant or shrinking pie, then of course you are going to see your ethnic identity marker as essential and all defining.
.. You are going to embrace a sense of victimhood
Shields and Brooks on Trump dismantling Obama’s achievements, Puerto Rico in need
Trump is more aggressive than just about anyone in the administration. They are trying to restrain him.
Bannon is thinking on another time frame. .. He’s thinking 50 years ahead.
Bannon is thinking a long game, picking off a few Republicans.
Congress is fearful of the Trump base in the primary. The more Roy Moores the are the more fear, and more party discipline.
What David Brooks (Still) Doesn’t Understand About America
The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity”?
.. America was in fact a tribal enterprise.
.. Brooks would have us believe that the United States began as a pristine crusader state on behalf of global democracy and internationalism, a “universal nation” devoted to “diverse hopefulness” as opposed to “fear-driven homogeneity.” No, the people who ventured onto these shores and then pushed westward inexorably were highly conscious not only of their religious provenance but also of their cultural and ethnic heritage. They brutally pushed aside the aboriginal peoples, declined to mix with them, and created societies that mirrored those of the Old Country, even naming their towns and cities after those inhabited by their overseas ancestors.
.. No one expressed more forcefully than Theodore Roosevelt this sentiment that newcomers must assimilate into prevailing American culture, for that culture had no intention of adjusting to the newcomers. “We freely extend the hand of welcome and good fellowship to every man,” wrote Roosevelt, “no matter what his creed and birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us; but we have a right, and it is our duty, to demand that he shall indeed become so, and shall not confuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old-World quarrels and prejudices.”
.. Brooks is not wrong when he says that much of the Trump constituency is driven by tribal impulses. But he is wrong to say that these sensibilities are un-American and the result of bigotry. Tribalism is a part of the American story
.. Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division—between rich and poor, white and black, educated and less educated, right and left.
.. Trumpist populists want to widen the divisions and rearrange the fences. They want to turn us into an old, settled and fearful nation.
.. The divisions Brooks laments with such invidious intent won’t vanish until the fears and concerns of Trump voters are addressed in ways that can alleviate, at least to some extent, those grievances.