The U.S. leads the free world in its helplessness
before the dissolution of its most cherished values.Walter Lippmann worried that the promise of private wealth-creation was a weak moral basis for a national community.
For many midcentury thinkers, nihilism, a catastrophic breakdown of faith in national ideology and institutions that had occurred in Europe, was also a possibility in America.
.. The 1960s and 1970s did turn out to reveal a country sharply divided along generational, racial, religious, gender and political lines. White and black, gay and straight, men and women, religious and secular, antiwar protesters and hard-hatted patriots all faced off. For a time, the founding principles of American society — the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — seemed like they would be unable to adjudicate between the competing, often clashing, interests.
.. It has been too easily forgotten that the calamitous failure of these “market Bolsheviks,” as the economist Joseph Stiglitz called them, helped spawn the first major demagogue of our time: Vladimir V. Putin.
.. In another self-protective move, these intellectuals have taken to blaming identity politics for Mr. Trump’s support among white male voters.
.. It could be argued that this frequently asserted and widely believed American creed of continuous and irreversible progress is what saved a diverse society not only from tragic social conflicts, but also from the mass manipulators who have periodically ruined other countries with their quack solutions. Today, however, more people seem to have seen through the constructed nature of this quasi-religious faith: It’s credible only if you believe in it.
.. They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be in possession of the truth and offered a series of propositions that turned out to be misleading or wrong:
- the rising tide of globalization will lift all boats,
- the market is free and fair, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia,
- shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq.
Many of the aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans.
.. America has accelerated its most insidious tendency: nihilism.
The Rise of ‘Welfare Chauvinism’
The United States and Europe reveal the contrasting ways in which political systems in advanced democracies cope with factors as diverse as globalization, depressed wages, cultural tension, welfare policy, immigration and nontraditional family structures, along with racial, ethnic and religious division.
In the United States, the besieged two-party system has remained intact, protected by a 200-year-old tradition and an electoral system that cuts short any bid to create a viable third party.
There are two major costs to this stability: recurrent gridlock, which constricts legislative action, and a failure to provide full representation to the most aggrieved constituencies.
.. These parties have adopted a strategy that might seem strange on its face but actually makes sense, according to the logic of their grievances: exclusionary nationalism combined with generous support for safety-net programs available only to legal residents.
.. The traditional European social democratic left and the Democratic Party are both struggling to address the often conflicting interests of a socially liberal elite and an economically pressed lower class.
.. New actors on the far left and far right, as well as astutely positioned conservative and Christian democratic parties, will not hesitate to capitalize on the struggle to craft a clear narrative – however myopic and divisive.
.. These changes, Ford and Goodwin write, “have pushed to the margins a class of voters who we describe as the ‘left behind’: older, working-class white voters with few educational qualifications.”
.. These value shifts have also left older white working-class voters behind, as a worldview which was once seen as mainstream has become regarded as parochial and intolerant by the younger, university-educated, more socially liberal elites who define the political consensus of twenty-first-century Britain.
.. supporters of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Front are, in comparison to supporters of other parties, less well educated, employed in manual and blue-collar jobs and live in rural areas.
.. “The Class Basis of Switzerland’s Cleavage Between the New Left and the Populist Right.”
.. small-business owners and workers prefer cultural demarcation and defend national traditions, salaried professionals strongly favor international integration and multi-culturalism.
.. “the more robust the multiparty system, the less likely the main left party will be able to dominate” among liberal-leaning constituencies.
.. the emergence of “a more profound, if nuanced, politics of identify” is fracturing the European left from two directions.
.. On one side, “middle-class progressive-values voters and the younger generation place an ever-increasing importance on a tolerant society and support equality for gays, promote multiculturalism, and express concern for the environment.”
.. the new politics of identity traps progressives on both sides. Whatever political position they adopt is bound to alienate either their working-class voters, who tend to be more conservative with regards to values, or progressive-values voters and the millennial generation, who are turned off by the more nationalistic rhetoric that appeals to the traditional or core voter base.
.. Populist parties on the right are moving beyond their adamant opposition to immigration, the European Union and the welfare state to become proponents of a more lavish, but also more restrictive, domestic social spending regime under a policy European scholars describe as “welfare chauvinism.”
.. parties of the right support health care, housing programs and other benefits with the explicit proviso that only legal residents qualify and that public spending on behalf of illegal immigrants be eliminated.
.. We will ensure that visitors to the U.K., and migrants until they have paid N.I. for five years, have N.H.S.-approved private health insurance as a condition of entry to the U.K.
.. the American two-party system, when it works, forces politicians and the public to submit to a multi-step process requiring competing interests to compromise. The first stage is the building of Democratic and Republican coalitions with the aim of winning elections
A Quiet Giant of Investing Weighs In on Trump
While Mr. Klarman has long kept a low public profile, he is considered a giant within investment circles. He is often compared to Warren Buffett, and The Economist magazine once described him as “The Oracle of Boston,” where Baupost is based. For good measure, he is one of the very few hedge managers Mr. Buffett has publicly praised.
.. “Exuberant investors have focused on the potential benefits of stimulative tax cuts, while mostly ignoring the risks from America-first protectionism and the erection of new trade barriers,” he wrote.
.. “President Trump may be able to temporarily hold off the sweep of automation and globalization by cajoling companies to keep jobs at home, but bolstering inefficient and uncompetitive enterprises is likely to only temporarily stave off market forces,” he continued. “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”
.. “The Trump tax cuts could drive government deficits considerably higher,” Mr. Klarman wrote. “The large 2001 Bush tax cuts, for example, fueled income inequality while triggering huge federal budget deficits. Rising interest rates alone would balloon the federal deficit, because interest payments on the massive outstanding government debt would skyrocket from today’s artificially low levels.”
.. “The erratic tendencies and overconfidence in his own wisdom and judgment that Donald Trump has demonstrated to date are inconsistent with strong leadership and sound decision-making.”
.. Trump is high volatility, and investors generally abhor volatility and shun uncertainty,” he wrote. “Not only is Trump shockingly unpredictable, he’s apparently deliberately so; he says it’s part of his plan.”
.. hedge funds had returned only 23 percent from 2010 to 2015, compared with 108 percent for the Standard & Poor’s index — he blamed the influx of money into the industry.
.. “When money flows into an index fund or index-related E.T.F., the manager generally buys into the securities in an index in proportion to their current market capitalization (often to the capitalization of only their public float, which interestingly adds a layer of distortion, disfavoring companies with large insider, strategic, or state ownership),”
.. To Mr. Klarman, “stocks outside the indices may be cast adrift, no longer attached to the valuation grid but increasingly off of it.”
“This should give long-term value investors a distinct advantage,” he wrote. “The inherent irony of the efficient market theory is that the more people believe in it and correspondingly shun active management, the more inefficient the market is likely to become.”
Theresa May’s ‘Global Britain’ Is Baloney
May at the Conservative Party Conference last October saying this: “But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
So much for May and her global baloney: She doesn’t like people who move from country to country, who may feel allegiance to more than one, and who have concluded that the most useful form of citizenship these days is one dedicated not only to the well-being of a Berkshire parish, say, but to the planet.
Global Britain without global citizens, please!
.. President Vladimir Putin says that Trump would never run after Russian “girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”
.. May seems to see Trump as her global ace in the hole, her counterweight to the European Union.
.. As Orwell is said to have observed, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”