Posts Tagged ‘Nixon’
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic”*…
Jennifer Pahlka— the founder and long-time leader of Code for America, the former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, the author of Recoding America, and the cofounder and board chair of the Recoding America Fund— has dedicated her life to improving governance and government services. Here, she reflects on a core lesson that she has learned…
I got into government reform sixteen years ago, though I didn’t think of it as reform at the time. I thought of it as just trying to make a few specific things work better. Since then I’ve worked at the local, state, and federal levels, on benefit delivery, on national defense, on a handful of things in between. I’ve worked alongside a lot of people whose own paths in this work have run the gamut. Collectively we’ve seen a lot. I think we’ve learned a lot about what we often call the operating model of government.
But the government we have — the operating model it runs on, the rules and structures and assumptions that shape how it hires, procures, and delivers — was built for a world that no longer exists, and the distance between that world and this one is growing. We are approaching the kind of moment when that gap stops being a management problem and becomes a true legitimacy crisis. (Many will say that moment has already come.) It’s time to start asking whether the theory of change most of us have been operating under — incremental improvements off a pretty poor baseline — was ever going to get us to a government capable of meeting fast-changing needs. It hasn’t yet, and if we don’t do something differently, it won’t.
Kelly Born at the Packard Foundation recently shared with me a framework called the Three Horizons, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson and adapted widely in systems-change work. In it, Horizon 1 is the currently dominant system. It’s functional enough to persist but failing in critical ways, especially for people with less power. Horizon 3 is the future system you’re working toward, already visible in patches of practice that embody different values and different ways of working, but far from the norm. Horizon 2 is the turbulent middle where change agents work.
But the key insight is that not all Horizon 2 work is the same. Some H2 innovations genuinely create the conditions for the new system to emerge. Call those transforming H2, or H2+. Others, however inadvertently, extend the lifespan of the failing system by relieving the pressure that might otherwise force structural change. Call those sustaining H2, or H2-. Both feel like reform, but they have very different long-term implications.
H2- work is attractive because it usually produces real value in the short run. H2+ work can take a long time to pay off, and the path is rarely clear. In a stable environment, you can get away with a lot of H2-. In an environment where the underlying system has become truly untenable, the difference between the two starts to matter a great deal. I think that’s where we are now…
[Jen describes a few projects that illustrate patterns that play out over and over in the category of H2-, the work that sustains the status quo…]
… The H2- work I’m describing has been done in good faith by people. I am one of those people. Code for America, which I founded and where I spent more than a decade, is in important respects capacity substitution. USDR, which I also helped start, is as well. The healthcare.gov rescue (which I didn’t actually work on but tried to provide moral support for) was the rescue-and-rebuild cycle. For much of the past fifteen years, the H2- path was arguably the right call. When there was no political space for structural change, demonstrations were a good way to build the evidence base and develop the field.
I think we are in a different moment now. This moment is defined by disruption. I count three kinds.
Contingent disruption — pandemics, climate events, geopolitical shocks, financial crises — is unpredictable in its specifics but very predictable in its category: large, fast-moving, high-stakes demands that fall disproportionately on government. COVID was not an anomaly. The next version won’t look the same.
The most recent disruption to federal government, however, was political. Whatever the cost of its methods, DOGE made the brittleness of the current operating model impossible to ignore and created political openings for structural arguments that previously had no traction. The reform field did not create this moment. But it can shape what comes out of it.
AI brings structural disruption. This is a transformation already underway in the material conditions of work, economy, and administration. AI creates dramatic change in both the needs and conditions government must respond to and the ways in which it can respond at the same time. Yes, I certainly mean a social safety net not nearly fit to handle the levels of unemployment that are likely coming our way, and yes, I mean possible upsets in the balance of power between agencies and the vendors they rely on, but that’s barely scratching the surface.
AI is not only an exogenous shock that government will have to absorb. It is also moving the bar on what counts as acceptable service in the first place. People are already using AI to understand their medical bills, navigate insurance denials, and draft appeals for benefits they were wrongly denied. Soon they will expect to apply for SNAP or file their taxes by uploading a paystub and answering a few plain-language questions, not by filling out even the best-designed web form. The forty-page PDF used to feel intolerable. The well-designed web form will start to feel that way too, and faster than the last transition did.
And service delivery is only the most visible piece. The same expectation shift is going to hit regulation, permitting, enforcement, how quickly an agency can respond to a new problem, how a legislature decides whether a law is working. If a small team with the right tools can map a regulatory regime in a week, the timelines we have now, in which rulemaking takes several years–or even multiple presidential terms–become indefensible. If an advocate can stress-test a policy against thousands of edge cases before it gets enacted, the standard for what counts as due diligence in lawmaking starts to move. The bar is rising on the whole surface of what government does, not just on the forms people fill out.
Not everyone wants this shift to happen. Public sector unions have secured laws in several states forbidding the use of AI in service delivery, won contracts requiring union consent before autonomous vehicles can operate, and pushed legislation mandating staffing levels that the work no longer requires — as my colleagues Robert Gordon and Nick Bagley have documented. The concern for workers caught in this transition is legitimate. But blocking government’s transformation while the world around it moves on is not a strategy for protecting those workers. It exacerbates public frustration with government, weakens the case for investing in it, and leaves the people who most depend on public services with a system increasingly unfit to serve them.
So the gap we have been measuring, between what government delivers and what the public considers a basic level of competence, is widening from both ends at once. The system is straining to clear the old bar at the same moment the bar is rising.
In this environment, the benefits systems that struggled to scale during COVID will be asked to scale again. The regulatory processes that can’t move quickly will be asked to respond to developments they weren’t designed to anticipate. The civil service system that can’t attract the people it needs now will need to attract people with skills that didn’t exist a decade ago.
If I had to pick, it’s AI that drives this disruptive moment. But I don’t have to pick. You could just as easily imagine climate shocks, or the next pandemic, or an escalation of the current war. Truly, some combination of all the above is not that unlikely. Reasonable people may disagree about the size and shape of the disruption AI will bring, but betting against disruption generally seems deeply unwise at the moment.
If you buy that argument, then we must acknowledge that a reform field largely dedicated to H2- work is not what the moment calls for. In a stable environment, H2- work that buys time for a failing system might be much-needed, and might be a missed opportunity for transformation. In an environment where disruptions of all kinds are accelerating, it becomes a compounding liability. Extending the lifespan of a brittle system just means the system eventually fails more spectacularly. More people get hurt. More people look for alternatives to democracy.
That doesn’t mean we need to throw everything out and start over. For the reform ecosystem, it means existing actors need incentives to align their work toward structural transformation, new actors with adjacent expertise need to be welcomed into the fold (especially advocates and lobbyists, given how little influence muscle the field has today), and connections need to be made both upstream and downstream of where we’ve been focused. It means articulating competing H3 visions from a wide range of ideological and practical perspectives and debating them among, including the project that sparked this line of thinking, which Kelly funded and FAI and New America are currently working on. It means designing funding and partnership structures that reward structural ambition while staying grounded in meaningful near-term progress. Funders and grantees share responsibility for creating the conditions under which a diverse set of actors can aim higher by working together, and connecting the dots upstream.
For this to work, it can’t be a zero sum game. Government capacity is wildly neglected in philanthropy despite its high leverage. (Good luck naming an issue philanthropists care about that doesn’t benefit from increased government capacity.) Could the field stop doing some H2- work? Sure. That would free up some existing resources for more H2+ work, which has been too little of the field’s mindshare and resources to date. But that is not the path forward — it wouldn’t get us where we need to be. We need more resources, full stop. We need to make the case to philanthropy for greater investment in the entire field (that’s part of what Recoding America Fund is trying to do) and make the case to government leaders, including electeds, to invest in better plumbing, so that the investment in H2+ work isn’t coming at the expense of the essential life support…
[Jen outlines some of the key principles that animate H2+ efforts, then ponders “doing different things differently”…]
… I realized early last year that while I’d spent the bulk of my career trying to drag government into the Internet Era, that work has to change now. We are entering a new era, and if those of us who fought the last fight don’t adapt to the conditions and expectations of this one, we’ll make exactly the mistake the people who resisted internet-era ways of working made. We’ll become the blockers — the ones holding on to old ways of working because that is what we are used to and that is what we are good at.
None of which means rescue work should stop, or that demonstrations are worthless, or that capacity substitution isn’t helpful and needed. Some H2- work, done deliberately and named honestly, is best understood as experimentation: we’re running it inside the failing system precisely because that’s where we’ll learn what a new operating model has to do. That’s a different kind of work from rescue that produces learning incidentally, but both can be valuable.
But the field needs a shared frame clear-eyed enough to ask, with each investment: does this move the system toward H3, or does it prolong H1? That question should be driving how resources, talent, and attention get allocated now, not because the prior work was mistaken but because the moment is different and the cost of extending the status quo is too high. There will have to be work that sustains the status quo, but what tradeoffs are we willing to make?
But insisting we ask the question does not mean that answering it is easy: there is no objective set of criteria that distinguishes one from the other. What may look like H2+ to some may seem like H2- to others, and part of that depends on your particular vision of that third horizon (more on that in the coming weeks.) Some may see work as contributing to a transformation, and therefore H2+, but towards an undesired H3 state. Grappling with how to answer this question is work we all need to be doing…
… Some things haven’t changed. The community is still full of good, smart people with enormous insight into a very difficult problem. We’ve just run out of time to do it the way we’ve been doing it. A brittle system that gets propped up through manageable shocks will eventually meet a shock it can’t survive, and we are moving into a period where the shocks are neither manageable nor hypothetical. Every H2- intervention that returns the system to “good enough” is now a bet that good enough will hold. It’s a bet I no longer think we can afford to make.
The window for H2+ work has not been open like this before. It will not stay open indefinitely.
Eminently worth reading in full.
What DOGE coulda, shoulda been: “A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform,” from @pahlkadot.bsky.social.
* Peter Drucker
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As we face forward, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that President Richard Nixon formally authorized the commitment of U.S. combat troops, in cooperation with South Vietnamese units, against North Vietnamese troop sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who had continually argued for a downsizing of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, were excluded from the decision to use U.S. troops in Cambodia. Gen. Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabled Gen. Creighton Abrams, senior U.S. commander in Saigon, informing him of the decision that a “higher authority has authorized certain military actions to protect U.S. forces operating in South Vietnam.” Nixon believed that the operation was necessary as a pre-emptive strike to forestall North Vietnamese attacks from Cambodia into South Vietnam as the U.S. forces withdrew and the South Vietnamese assumed more responsibility for the fighting. Nevertheless, three National Security Council staff members and key aides to presidential assistant Henry Kissinger resigned in protest over what amounted to an invasion of Cambodia.
When Nixon publicly announced the Cambodian incursion on April 30, it set off a wave of antiwar demonstrations. A May 4, protest at Kent State University resulted in the killing of four students by Army National Guard troops. Another student rally at Jackson State College in Mississippi resulted in the death of two students and 12 wounded when police opened fire on a women’s dormitory. The incursion angered many in Congress, who felt that Nixon was illegally widening the war; this resulted in a series of congressional resolutions and legislative initiatives that would severely limit the executive power of the president.
– source
“By gold all good faith has been banished; by gold our rights are abused; the law itself is influenced by gold, and soon there will be an end of every modest restraint.”*…
Timely etymology from Dan Lewis…
If you follow politics (or, more likely, a politics-themed TV sitcom or drama) you’ve probably heard the term “slush fund” — and usually, it’s tied to something shady. A slush fund is money set aside for unofficial, often unethical, and sometimes illegal uses. It’s the kind of fund that no one really wants to talk about, and if they do, they don’t want to explain too much about it. If someone has a slush fund, you could say that there’s something fishy going on.
And you’d be right — literally speaking.
The word “slush” dates back to at least the mid-1600s, referring to the cold, wet muck that is formed when snow begins to melt. It’s unpleasant texture must have made an impression of the people of the day because a century or two later, “slush” took on a new, second meaning — at least, if you were on a boat.
Salt pork — salted (for preservative reasons) pieces of pork belly — was a staple on fishing and whaling ships of the early-to-mid 1800s. Crews aboard those ships spent a lot of a time at sea, and salt pork was a good, long-lasting protein source in an era before refrigeration. Salt pork was typically fried, and as the ship’s voyage continued onward, fat, grease, and other waste products would build up in the cooking vats. This residue became known as “slush,” likely because of its similarities to the melted snow seen back on land.
But this pig-created slush wasn’t just thrown overboard as waste — it turned out to be useful; as One Word a Day notes, “sailors used it as a lubricant and to waterproof the rigging and sails on their ships.” So they kept it around, and when their whaling or fishing expeditions ended, they typically still had a large amount of slush left over. And it turned out, there was a market for the stuff. Other ships could also use it to help their sailing efforts (before they started cooking up their own salt pork). As The Straight Dope notes, it could also be used by candle and soap makers. Once back on land, there were plenty of people who would gladly buy the slush off the ship’s cooks or other sailors.
That turned out to be a boon for the crew. Because the slush was a byproduct of the efforts to feed the crew, ship owners rarely, if ever, cared about the value of the slush itself — to them, it was waste created by the cost of doing business, not an asset. So when the sailors sold off the slush, they kept the money for themselves and their crewmates. Per Merriam-Webster, “The money from the sale of slush was reserved for the crew of the ship, and would be used to purchase items, such as musical instruments or books, which were not considered necessary enough that a country’s navy, or a ship’s owner, had to provide them for a crew.”
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, as a result of this usage, the phrase “slush fund” first appeared in our collective lexicon in 1839. It would take a generation or two before it gained its current, negative connotation often implying bribery. And with that came another term for financial shenanigans, which also comes from the use of salt pork byproducts to fund sailors whims: “greasing,” meaning “bribing.” The Etymology Dictionary explains “The extended meaning ‘money collected for bribes and to buy influence’ is first recorded 1874, no doubt with suggestions of ‘greasing’ palms.”
The term “slush fund” didn’t originally imply anything untoward — the association with bribery came later, as noted above. And the same is likely true for the word “bribe” itself. Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, “bribe” comes from the Old French term of the 14th century of the same spelling meaning “a gift,” and specifically, “bit, piece, hunk; morsel of bread given to beggars.” It took 200 or so years before the modern, sketchy meaning developed, and it’s unclear why…
“The Original Slush Fund” It was greasy. Literally. @nowiknow.com
(Image above: source)
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As we lament lawlessness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18-1/2-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
Still, the tapes were damming. The White House released the subpoenaed tapes on August 5. One tape, later known as the “Smoking Gun” tape, documented the initial stages of the Watergate coverup. On it, Nixon and Haldeman are heard formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved.
It’s a measure of how different those times were from ours that, once the “Smoking Gun” transcript was made public, Nixon’s political support practically vanished: the ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor.
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing”*…
I don’t normally deal with current politics, and certainly not two days on a row. But these are tumultuous times. As we look forward, we’d be wise to heed Marilynne Robinson…
… I have devoted a good part of my life to studying American history and literature. And I have regretted the habit of self-disparagement that has caused things of great worth to be undervalued, including the habits of respect that make debate possible. I mention this because there is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands. A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America. In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism…
… my subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.
It is taken to be true that the Trump phenomenon reflects the feeling in a large part of the population that they are “left behind.” This view is obviously too smug to deserve the acceptance it enjoys. Why does this movement have no vision of a future, beyond the incarceration of whomever Trump chooses to vilify? Why have its members proposed no reforms to narrow the economic divide? Why is there no response to the ambitious investments President Biden has made, designed to stimulate the economies of struggling areas? A “populism” whose lieutenants have an impressive number of Yale Law degrees and whose idol is a Manhattan moneyman is not to be understood as a flaring up of aggrieved self-interest. Nothing we normally think of as profit will accrue to these foot soldiers.
An anger that is too intense and immediate to pause over possible consequences, whether desirable or not, seems to make a better account of this movement. Having no vision, it would certainly have a future. Trump is an old man, and he will soon go the way of his ancestors. But the very arbitrariness of his being chosen as the hero of the disaffected means that when he goes he is likely to be replaced in their angry adoration by someone equally improbable, perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is truer because Trump has proved that law can be scorned without consequence. He has shown us that there is a kind of loyalty that neuters outrage, and he has established a breadth of latitude for scurrilous and threatening speech that can only be of profound use to every scoundrel who succeeds him.
This anger is entangled with resentments and revanchism and varieties of opportunism, including Trump’s, that are readily seen as discrediting the entire phenomenon of unrest. But this is the kind of mistake that comes with the idea that the old symmetry of opposed parties is in play here. The MAGA side really has no politics. Its broad appeal lies in its galvanizing resentment, which is what anger becomes when its legitimacy is not acknowledged. Trump can reverse himself on any point, and his followers will simply realign themselves as necessary. If he were dealing with his followers in good faith, Trump would be offering them policies addressed to the relief of their grievances. Instead, he recites his own.
I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great many Americans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use…
…
… All the flags and chants give the Trump rallies the look of traditional nationalism. Trumpism is in fact very singular, however, in its insistence that America is a failed country, a scene of hideous crime, invaded by depraved aliens and betrayed by depraved liberals, all of whom should be jailed or worse. Trump’s America is a thing of sham institutions and fake information—this should be a joke, considering, for example, Trump University and the fakery of the National Enquirer—and is altogether so fallen that it must defer to the wisdom of Vladimir Putin and autocrats in general. All this seems less like love than loathing. By every measure I know of, the country is doing well. Comparisons are always difficult. We know from the reportage of Tucker Carlson that Moscow has one highly polished grocery store. How appropriate it is to generalize from this fact we cannot tell. And, of course, what should it matter to anyone who prefers a little democratic clutter to an (apparently) immaculate authoritarianism? This choice has presented itself before.
In any case, this “nationalism” departs from tradition in that its foreign enemies are the desperate immigrants trying to cross the southern border—for all the excitement, an appropriate adversary for a bully only. Trump’s militaristic fantasies involve calling up the army to crush resistance on the part of Americans. I cannot account for these passions he seems to channel for his crowds except as a fusion of disillusionments, a sort of plasma not accessible to conventional political or economic analysis. I am far from dismissing it on these grounds. With the proviso that the part of the population that might show up at Trump rallies is small, and that many might be attracted by the febrile showmanship, even by the certainty that their own primal screams would startle no one in all that noise, opinion makers assume that these people do tell us what our future might be, beginning as soon as November.
If my analysis has any merit, one side in this opposition has a far richer and more nuanced geopolitical insight. A population more likely to provide troops for the military would have a livelier awareness of the fact that they are deployed all over the world, in places that are or at any time might become very dangerous. This might yield a different definition of globalism. On the other side, that regrettable gift for forgetting is a factor, forgetfulness of the weight of this burden. Trump’s utter lack of foreign policy beyond a resentment of Europe, his hinted readiness to capitulate in the face of what he constantly represents as superior strength and “genius,” seems never to thin his crowds. His antagonism toward NATO is expressed in mercenary terms, though the economic consequences of the fraying of the West would be unimaginably great. An era of smash-and-grab would benefit those inclined that way and well positioned for it. Trump never describes a future, which is sensible, since no policy he suggests would be less than disastrous.
All this is beside the point in the minds of his followers. Perhaps their zeal is driven by the thought of shaking the foundations of the existing order, which they passionately insist is not the legitimate order that would be restored by institutions and elections they accepted as having integrity. The problem is that they will never be satisfied as long as their resentments are channeled without definition, and without hope or purpose, into a political system that was designed and has functioned to produce a government. If their grievances could be made political, could be spoken of in terms of policy, in terms of justice and reform, of democracy, then Trump could concentrate on selling sneakers and Bibles. And the press and public should stop seeing his hectic road show performances as proof of health and vigor.
I have done the thing I deplore. I sat down to write about Joseph Biden and ended up writing about Donald Trump. President Biden is looking back on a long life, imagining a future that will return the country to its true work, of achieving fairness and mutual respect as norms of American life. The personal tragedies he has suffered are well known. It should be noted here that he lost a son to illness apparently related to military service.
Why does President Biden not receive credit for his remarkable legislative achievements? Whenever he announces a policy that is designed to benefit a particular region, this is interpreted in the press as a lure meant to attract swing state voters, which if true would only mean that the policy is welcome and likely to produce good results. Cynicism is an excuse for the failure to actually look at the substance of a presidency, and can only be a major contributor to the general sense that the country is adrift. Add to this the erasure of differences between parties and candidates that comes with cynicism, and the idea that voting is an empty exercise is reinforced. All this tends to delegitimize government, making it a thing of ploys and impositions no matter how wise and well-intentioned it may in fact be.
There is a tone of implied dissatisfaction among the commentators, in the absence of specifics, that functions in the public discourse as if it were weighty and considered objection. It is an attitude, not a reaction to actual circumstance, so there is no possibility of rebuttal. Jimmy Carter, now revered, his brilliance acknowledged, fell victim to this same hectoring. It is fair to wonder what the state of the environment might be if the press then were not so distracted by his cardigans and his southernisms. President Biden is old, and there is concern that his health might decline, leading to some disruption. But this consideration should be weighed against the fact that Trump promises only disruption. That he might pursue bad policies with enormous vigor should reassure no one.
The twentieth century left the world in a parlous state. Our foreign entanglements have passed through permutations that have made them truly baffling. We have always supported Israel. Now our strength is shackled to its weakness. The consequences of our even seeming to be about to abandon Israel could be cataclysmic, for it and for that region, at very least. So Netanyahu has a free hand, to the world’s grief and, it must be feared, ultimately to Israel’s. This state of things has been developing over many years. There is no simple, obvious solution available to an American president.
Americans have special obligations to reality. It is true and manifest that we will have an outsize part in determining the fate of the planet. If it should be that big problems cannot be solved and that we are left with the tedious business of managing them, we should discipline ourselves to patience and deliberation, the old courtesies that have made democracy possible. We have at hand the best resources that can be had to deal with our situation, if we can agree to respect them…
Eminently worth reading in full. We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters: “Agreeing to Our Harm,” in @nybooks. (With apologies to The New York Review of Books, to which I subscribe, I have broken my usual habit of sharing direct links, even when the source is behind a pay wall. Because I hope that everyone will click through and read the entire essay, I have linked to an archived copy, freely available to all.)
See also: Richard Slotkin‘s “The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies” from @yalereview.
* Allen Ginsberg, “America”
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As we take stock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the Supreme Court– a very different Supreme Court than today’s– unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and ordered him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
“When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers”*…
… So, the estimable Rana Foroohar suggests, American business leaders should be careful what they wish for…
For months now, I’ve been watching with alarm how many top business leaders in the US are buying the line that Donald Trump II would somehow be just like the last time around — loud, but laissez-faire. It was so depressing to see some of America’s top CEOs giggling as the former president joked at his recent Business Roundtable event in Washington. Trump said that he’d polled waitresses and caddies (presumably at Mar-a-Lago) about removing taxes on tips and they were in favour. Sure, there were reports of some grumbling about hardline tariff talk, Trump’s inability to stay on point and his general blow-hardness. But for the most part, tax cuts, deregulation and an utter lack of imagination about political risk seems to be driving business sentiment around him.
It’s not just American business that has the blinders on. I did a Lunch with the FT [gift link] with Lloyd’s of London chief executive John Neal, and I was amazed that when I asked him to think about his top US political risks, he spoke first about Joe Biden’s money printing — rather than the risk to, say, the rule of law under Trump. When I pressed him on the Trump risk, his biggest worry seemed to be the differing policies of the two candidates around things like electric vehicle production, and the decision risk that this might introduce for companies.
Really folks? Let’s have a refresher course on Trumpian economics.
In 2016, Trump talked tough about Made in America and helping working people, but most of his economic policies (aside from tariffs on China) were basically business as usual. He rolled back regulation and lowered taxes on big corporations. Much of the money went to stock buybacks, not Main Street investment. That buoyed short-term stock prices, which were also helped along by low interest rates.
But, it’s VERY unlikely we would see the same phenomenon in a second Trump administration. His tenure marked the apex of financialised growth, which is now largely tapped out. As the Federal Reserve’s End of an Era paper from June 2023 laid out, more than 40 per cent of real corporate profit growth between 1989 and 2019 came from the secular fall in interest rates, and corporate tax rates being cut. That’s what has propelled so much growth in equities in recent years.
Today, the S&P is by some measures more overvalued than it was when the housing bubble burst. In this environment, it’s difficult to see equities rising even if the Fed were to begin cutting rates in the face of a recession. It’s much more likely they’d fall, despite any new Trump tax cuts. And that is the more benign scenario. A more likely possibility is that we’d get a harder-edged, even more insular, xenophobic and paranoid version of Trump this time around.
For starters, few of the more moderate business types that served with him the first time would be willing to come into a second administration given the January 6 2021 Capitol riots and Trump’s ongoing election-loss denial. Some smart people in the business community have concerns about his propensity for fiscal profligacy at a time when rising US deficit levels are worrying investors. It’s fascinating to me that people think about Biden when they think about debt, rather than Trump. Biden’s White House has made record fiscal investment, sure, but it is investing in the real economy, while Trump’s legacy was a classic Republican formula of boosting asset markets with financialisation.
Add to that the prospects of a 10 per cent tariff on imports across the board, and 60 per cent levy on China. This goes to what has been one of the biggest problems with Trump’s trade and economic strategies from the beginning — a tendency to blame China and employ tariffs as a standalone solution to the big, complex problem of slower secular growth and growing inequality in the US. Not that Trump seems to think in such nuanced terms. The fact is that America’s economic and political problems are only partly about the failings of globalisation and the neoliberal trading system in particular. They are also about a lack of investment at home, in basic infrastructure, skills and education, as well as core research and development.
I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me think that Trump or anyone in his orbit has a plan for a multipolar world, or any sense of how to manage complex supply chain de-risking or the politics of friendshoring. And yet, 10 or 60 per cent tariffs depending on the locale would require some kind of reshoring approach. None of that will square with an asset boom, but rather quite the opposite…
A warning to business leaders supporting Trump, from @RanaForoohar @FT.
(Image above: source)
* Oscar Wilde
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As we study self-interest, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18-1/2-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
Still, the tapes were damming. The White House released the subpoenaed tapes on August 5. One tape, later known as the “Smoking Gun” tape, documented the initial stages of the Watergate coverup. On it, Nixon and Haldeman are heard formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved.
It’s a measure of how different those times were from ours that, once the “Smoking Gun” transcript was made public, Nixon’s political support practically vanished: the ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor.
“If all else fails, there’s always print or web zines”*…
Gabriela Riccardi, with a history of– and an homage to– the zine…
After Martin Luther furiously (supposedly) hammered his 95 Theses to a local church door in the 16th century, chroniclers of history saw his act as plenty of things: a righteous rally against Catholic excess, a call to arms for renewed values, a firing shot for one ripper of a Reformation.
Others, though, saw it as the world’s first zine.
The zine — that unruly riff on the glossy magazine, often handmade and always self-published — has long been associated with revolution. DIY dabblers and political thought guerrillas, superfan scenesters and couriers of counterculture have all found a home in the humble zine.
Maybe that’s because a zine’s proposition — permission self-granted, gates unkept — is a boon companion to those who operate outside of the mainstream. Or maybe it’s just because they’re a lot of fun to make.
In any case, these exuberant little publications have something big to say: Small presses, indeed, can turn over heavy pages of history….
An appreciation of handcrafted publishing: “Zines: Scan and release,” from @griccardi_ in @qz.
See also: “Zines, the Punks of Print Media: A Creative Rebellion in Branding and Design” (source of the image above)
* Rudy Rucker
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As we do it ourselves, we might recall that this date in 1972 was a milestone in (a different kind of) guerilla publishing: the New York Times begin publishing the “Pentagon Papers”…
… the 47-volume Pentagon analysis of how the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia grew over a period of three decades. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had become an antiwar activist, had stolen the documents. After unsuccessfully offering the documents to prominent opponents of the war in the U.S. Senate, Ellsberg gave them to the Times.
Officially called The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam, the “Pentagon Papers” disclosed closely guarded communiques, recommendations, and decisions concerning the U.S. military role in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, along with the diplomatic phase in the Eisenhower years. The publication of the papers created a nationwide furor, with congressional and diplomatic reverberations as all branches of the government debated over what constituted “classified” material and how much should be made public.
The publication of the documents precipitated a crucial legal battle over “the people’s right to know,” and led to an extraordinary session of the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the issue. Although the documents were from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, President Richard Nixon opposed their publication, both to protect the sources in highly classified appendices, and to prevent further erosion of public support for the war. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had the right to publish the material.
The publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” along with previous suspected disclosures of classified information to the press, led to the creation of a White House unit to plug information leaks to journalists. The illegal activities of the unit, known as the “Plumbers,” and their subsequent cover-up, became known collectively as the Watergate scandal, which resulted in President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974…
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