Will American politics return to normalcy in 2021 or 2025? I’m not betting on it.
Deflection as a media strategy has become an art form. Its purpose is to avoid answering a charge by misdirecting it and confusing the issue. It’s often used during crisis.
.. The paparazzi had chased her like jackals, raced after her car in the tunnel, surrounded it, and taken pictures after the crash. Fleet Street hunkered down in confusion, perhaps even some guilt. Then some genius noticed Buckingham Palace wasn’t flying a flag at half-staff. The tabloids rushed to front-page it: The cold Windsors, disrespecting Diana in death as they had in life. They shifted the focus of public ire. Suddenly there was no more talk of grubby hacks. Everyone was mad at the queen.
.. Ms. Lewinsky had gone into virtual hiding in 2008, when Hillary last ran, and didn’t want to do it again. So in 2014, just before the cycle got serious, she rather brilliantly wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in which she announced yes, she’d been a victim in a national scandal and the true culprit was . . . the press, the internet and the “feedback loop of defame and shame.”
In fact she was the Clintons’ victim, but she successfully deflected your gaze. Once Mrs. Clinton’s people understood Monica would be taking shots not at Hillary but at Matt Drudge, Ms. Lewinsky’s problem went away.
.. The best deflection has some truth in it. The Windsors were a chilly lot, and the internet does amplify a personal humiliation.
.. as I watched the Golden Globes. Hollywood has known forever about abuse, harassment and rape within its ranks. All the true powers in the industry—the agencies, the studios—have one way or another been complicit. And so, in the first awards show after the watershed revelations of 2017, they understood they would not be able to dodge the subject. They seized it and redirected it. They boldly declared themselves the heroes of the saga. They were the real leaders in the fight against sexual abuse. They dressed in black to show solidarity, they spoke truth to power.
.. They were upset, as Glenn Reynolds noted on Twitter , that you found out, and thought less of them. Anyway, they painted themselves as heroes of the struggle.
.. Deflection is brilliant, wicked, and tends to work.
.. But could she win? Absolutely.
Oprah is stable. Oprah is smart. Oprah is truly self-made. She has a moving personal story. She has dignity and, more important, sees the dignity in others. She is fully wired into modern media; she helped invent modern media. Reporters and editors are awed by her. People experience her not as radical but moderate. She has been a living-room presence for two generations and is enormously popular. The first poll, published Wednesday, had her leading President Trump 48% to 38%.
.. But it freaks you out, doesn’t it? Not that American presidents now don’t have to have the traditional credentials and governmental experience, but that maybe they can’t be fully accomplished and appropriate because that’s boring. History has been turned on its head. In falling in love with celebrity and personality, we are acting not like a tough and grounded country but a frivolous, shallow one.
.. I had a disagreement with a friend, a brilliant journalist who said when the Trump era is over, we will turn for safety to the old ways. We will return to normalcy.
.. No I said, I see just the opposite. We will not go back for a long time, maybe ever. We are in the age of celebrity and the next one will and can be anything—Nobel laureate, movie star, professional wrestler, talk-show host, charismatic corporate executive.
The political class can bemoan this—the veteran journalists, the senators and governors, the administrators of the federal government. But this is a good time to remind ourselves that it was the failures of the political class that brought our circumstances about.
.. at least half the country no longer trusts its political leaders, when people see the detached, cynical and uncaring refusal to handle such problems as illegal immigration, when those leaders commit a great nation to wars they blithely assume will be quickly won because we’re good and they’re bad and we’re the Jetsons and they’re the Flintstones, and while they were doing that they neglected to notice there was something hinky going on with the financial sector, something to do with mortgages, and then the courts decide to direct the culture, and the IRS abuses its power, and a bunch of nuns have to file a lawsuit because the government orders them to violate their conscience . . .
.. The idea that a lot had to go wrong before we had a President Trump, and the celebrity who follows him, has gotten lost in time, as if someone wanted to bury it.
Sometimes I see a congressman or senator shrug and say, in explanation of something outlandish, “It’s Trump.” And I think: Buddy, you’ve been on the Hill 20 years, and we didn’t get to this pass only because of him. That’s a deflection.
Generation Y Takes Over
But immigration is a subset of a larger global problem. The dominant economic event of our era is the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and ended for the U.S. in 2009. Its status as a “great” economic downturn is attributed to its long aftermath of unemployment and, more important, underemployment.
As the U.S. and European economies failed to achieve pre-recession growth levels, which exacerbated social anxieties, the elites produced an explanation. They called it “the new normal.”
.. The new normal” theory, which in a wink became conventional wisdom among conventional economists and pundits, exists mainly to absolve them—and Barack Obama —of responsibility for weaker growth’s dire effects on national standards of living. What the theory failed to capture is that the new normal creates angry have-nots.
.. Voters everywhere are rebelling against the new normal. They won’t concede its implicit acceptance of flattened opportunities for younger Americans or Europeans still in their prime working years, who don’t have sinecures explaining to everyone else why this is as good as it will ever get. Increasingly, they are voting into office political outliers—from Trump to Macron to Kurz.
.. Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan should be seen as a proxy for what the next Democratic presidential nominee is likely to run on. Influenced by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers’s theories on “secular stagnation,” Mr. Trudeau is making massive outlays on infrastructure repair and modernization to revive demand inside Canada.
.. Donald Trump is an infrastructure guy, too, but his path out of the new normal’s long-term trap runs mainly through regulatory relief and reforming the U.S. tax system.
.. U.S. firms kept 71% of their foreign-earned profits abroad, “benefiting other nations’ workers.” What would be the effect, Mr. Hassett asked, if for the next eight years, those profits were repatriated and reinvested here through a tax regime designed to promote more capital investment in the domestic economy? Incomes would rise.
The Empty Majority
And one lesson of that decade, of every election when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, is that a party that’s terrible at governing can still win elections if the other party is even worse at politics.
Which the Democrats, amazingly, have been. Or to be less judgmental, let’s say that there’s been a strange cycle at work, where Republican incompetence helps liberalism consolidate its hold on highly educated America … but that consolidation, in turn, breeds liberal insularity and overconfidence (in big data and election science, in demographic inevitability, in the wisdom of declaring certain policy debates closed) and helps Republican support persist as a kind of protest vote, an attempt to limit liberalism’s hegemony by keeping legislative power in the other party’s hands.
.. But even the Iraq War and the financial crisis didn’t prevent U.S. politics from reverting to a Republican advantage.
.. So that leaves the Democrats as the only people with the power to put an end to the current spectacle of Republican incompetence and folly.
All they need to do is persuade Americans that they have more to fear from conservative hackwork than from a liberalism in command of politics as well as culture.
A Le Pen-Mélenchon Runoff: Investors’ Nightmare Scenario in France
With the start of the French election just days away, investors are contemplating their nightmare scenario: a choice between far-left and far-right candidates.
In recent days, a surge in opinion polls has placed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing firebrand who promises higher wages and fewer working hours, as a potential candidate to move past this Sunday’s first round of voting. That could set up a second-round vote in May 7 with Marine Le Pen, an economic nationalist who wants to pull France out of the euro.
.. A runoff between Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Mélenchon “would be a disaster for France…[and] a disaster for Europe,” said Patrick Zweifel, chief economist at Pictet Asset Management.
Under that scenario, investors would dump the debt of France and of weaker European economies and send the euro sharply lower, analysts say.
.. the cost of insurance against a sharp fall in the euro, as measured by so-called one-month risk reversals, hit levels seen at the height of the continent’s sovereign-debt crisis in 2011.
.. For months, investors prepared for a runoff that pitted Ms. Le Pen against a candidate from the political mainstream, either François Fillon, a center-right former prime minister, or Emmanuel Macron, a former economy minister.
.. Analysts believe that either would beat Ms. Le Pen in a second round, as voters of different political stripes coalesced around a candidate that wasn’t the National Front leader.
.. The prospect of a victory for Ms. Le Pen, however distant, has long spooked markets. Ms. Le Pen’s desire to pull France out of the eurozone has raised concerns that the entire block could unravel.
.. In a runoff between Mr. Mélenchon and Ms. Le Pen, the sort of trading that hit markets during the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis, including extreme volatility in the euro and a selloff in the bonds of weaker members, would re-emerge, some analysts predict.
.. Mr. Mélenchon favors granting a sixth week of annual vacation; encouraging a four-day, 32-hour workweek; raising the minimum wage; and reducing the retirement age.
.. “It’s all very well having a mandate in the presidential election, but you need support in the national assembly too,”