(Turning Points Appear To Be Reversible, But They Aren’t)

Part A

As the news cycle heats up, hysterical pronouncements abound, and people try and make sense of how Donald Trump could have won the election, it is becoming clear that the U.S. may be experiencing a historical turning point.

While this might seem obvious to some, others seem to think that if we can just dispose of Donald Trump somehow, things will return to the way things were before. A true historical turning point though isn’t just that things change or that a historical event has happened, it is something (or a series of somethings) that occur that completely change a country, a region (or the world) to such an extent that what things were like before is totally different from what things are like after. True historical turning points are not one-off events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. While those might change a way thinking that eventually lead to different policies than would otherwise be the case, they don’t fundamentally change everything.

An example of a true historical turning point would be the start of WWI. Yes, it was started by an assassination, but the magnitude of the change that this would lead to was not understood at the time. When WWI started, people assumed that it would be a relatively short, quick affair that would be over, and then things would largely return to how they had been before. But after 4 years, the entire map of Europe was different and many countries had entirely different governing structures than what they had only a few years earlier. Roughly 75 years after the start of WWI, Eastern Europe would again experience a historical turning point with the collapse of Communism. The governing AND economic systems that existed in these countries during and after the communist period so totally different as to be unrecognizable from each other. People were truly living in a completely different country from what they had been just a few years earlier.

An for the U.S., of an historical turning point would be the Great Depression + WWII. With the expansion of government and a Supreme Court that allowed the government to enter into areas of American life that it had not been before, the country was, over time, fundamentally changed in a way that what went before was completely different from what went after.

The thing about historical turning points is that they seem, initially at the time, to be temporary and/or reversible changes when in fact they are not. The WWI generation thought that the war would be temporary and that things would return to their ‘normal’ path. They had no idea that an aristocratic system that had held sway in many countries, in some cases for hundreds of years, was to be swept away forever. It was just viewed as “let’s just get through this insanity as quickly as possible, and then return to our lives”.

In the case of the changes to American governing assumption wrought by the New Deal and WWII, Republicans in the 1930’s thought that they would be able to overturn them when their turn in power came. The problem was that never really came for 40 years, at which time the changes were an indelible part of the American government structure, rendering talk of “small government” laughable. So ingrained were they that the first non-war hero Republican President (Richard Nixon) actually expanded upon them. In other words, Republicans had accepted to a large extent the governing assumptions of their opponents.

In 1990, some hardliners in the Soviet Union thought that they could launch a coup, replace the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and restore the Soviet Union to what it had been. Their plan, it seemed, was to grab control of the government, close the borders, and basically reverse with the stroke of a pen what Gorbachev had done over the prior 5 years. It seemed so simple, but it wasn’t. The Soviet people were no longer cowed by their government, and the troops were no longer willing to take directives from a few jokers who nobody had ever heard of. People and troops went out into the streets and brought the coup to an end. Basically, the historical turning point had been reached passed, but some had not yet recognized this fact.

The reason that these changes seem to be reversible is that those trying to reverse things back to some earlier point don’t seem to appreciate the deeper social forces that are creating the visible change that they are trying to reverse. In the case of the Great Depression, small government conservatives didn’t seem to understand that the economy wasn’t working for a lot people and that people, in some cases, were starving. Talking about Constitutional restrictions on the power of the federal government don’t mean much to people who are feeling economic anxiety regarding where their next meal is coming from. All they see is that one group of people is attempting to help them and another group is attempting to stop the first group. Furthermore, when the second group’s President (Herbert Hoover, a Republican) appears to be the one that caused the mess, it is hardly surprising that Democrats had a lock on the White House (with the exception of a singular, centrist war hero in Dwight Eisenhower) for nearly 40 years. By the time Republicans were electable nationally again, they were comfortable adding to the size of government and the historical transformation was complete.

Another example of this is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Communist governments in Eastern Europe simply weren’t working for large swaths of the population. Because of the tight media control that those regimes had, the West (and the rulers themselves) didn’t really understand how bad things were for ordinary people. On the outside, the regimes looked stable and strong enough to last 100 years. Then, suddenly it seemed, people lost their fear of the government and began to go and protest in the street. And within a very short time, regimes that looked to be set for the ages were gone. While this process was going on, some people thought that they could stop or reverse it, but they couldn’t. The factors driving the process was irreversible.

(In the next installment, we will look more specifically at the historical turning point that we are now living through).

(Whenever the solution is always the same, you have stopped thinking)

For those looking for answers as to why the U.S. has arrived at the political polarization point that it has, one could do worse than look at intellectual bankruptcy as a leading cause. There can little doubt that since at least the end of the 1980’s, the U.S. has been seriously misgoverned. Policy has been unimaginative. Failure and mediocrity have become entrenched (think education), the Federal Reserve has inflated two financial bubbles (the jury is still out on whether we are in a 3^rd one), bad actors who caused the financial crisis have been bailed out while the middle-class taxpayer has been left holding the bag, a botched health reform bill, bureaucratic abuse has run rampant and often nobody is even indicted, let alone convicted. All of this has culminated in the election of Donald Trump, an act that has left the same people who brought us the mess above scratching their heads as to why anyone would choose that guy.

Usually mis-government has intellectual bankruptcy as one of its culprits, and this case is no exception. The world has changed radically over the last 30 years. You can’t go to work without computer skills. The internet has allowed us to have constant entertainment, personalized to each individual. We can watch news events happen nearly live on T.V., our phone, our computer, etc.; something unimaginable in 1987. The world moves faster. Changes that might have taken 50 years in an earlier time period now takes 5 years. And yet, our thinking about problems has remained the same as it was 40 years ago.

On the right, economic policy can be boiled to two concepts: Fewer regulations & tax cuts. The right as it currently exists (or at least as it existed up until Donald Trump) simply kept touting Ronald Reagan’s policies that tax cuts would cure all economic woes (and add revenue to the government coffers to boot). While this is not as insane as it sounds, Reagan’s tax cuts did spur some economic growth and increased tax revenues, Reagan was operating under unique political-economic conditions which allowed for that state of affairs. That won’t happen under all economic conditions, and yet the right has been happy to parrot that for the last generation as some sort of cure all.

On the left, getting the government involved is the solution to every problem. In this view, problems can just be legislated (or regulated) away by decree. Over the last 80 years, the left has essentially been touting an expansion of FDR’s policies. Whatever the problem is, government is the solution. Missing in this worldview is any appreciation for the inertia and inefficiency inherent in all large organizations. A large organization is often not an efficient or effective organization. While government has produced some good, where it is most effective is where there is a blindingly obvious need that people can see with their own eyes, and there simply isn’t another organization capable of intervening. Under most other conditions, government is often slow and ineffective. But just as the right views less regulation & tax cuts as some sort of cure all, the left views government spending and regulation as the same thing.

The result of this simplistic thinking is that the two sides have learned to stop thinking and start hate each other. The left views the right’s attempts (more in rhetoric than in practice) of cutting government spending and regulations as a heartless attempt to hurt people or leave them twisting in the wind, and the right views the left’s love of government command and control solutions as a secretly harbored totalitarian desire to rule over people. These hardened perceptions aren’t helped by media (including august outlets like the New York Times (last endorsed a Republican for President in 1956) and the Washington Post (has never endorsed a Republican for President since its founding in 1877)) who act as if one political party has all of the answers on everything and the other party is wrong about nearly everything.

Consequently, our political class has provided us pre-packaged solutions to everything. Whatever problem pops up, the solutions proposed are largely the same (with some modifications for the unique circumstances under which the reform is being proposed).

Contrast this with real life. We make decisions everyday at home or at work in which a solution is accompanied by a problem in the manner of trade-off. Sometime we may need to spend more on X. Sometimes we need to spend less on X, and more on Y. As our situation changes, we change. Sometimes, we even do the opposite of what we did before. We don’t blindly continue on doing the same thing when our situation has changed to where the previous practice is no longer appropriate. That is how life works. But the political class (and the media outlets) would have you believe that the solution is simple with no-tradeoffs, ever. And also that once you start spending on something, you can never reduce it even though it is no longer relevant to the current situation.

A final sign of intellectual bankruptcy is the following. In 2028, if the United State survives that long, there will be an election for President.

1.)    We don’t know who the candidates will be.

2.)    We don’t know how the world will look geo-politically at that time.

3.)    We don’t know the economic challenges that we will be facing.

4.)    We don’t know what the big issues of the day will be that will have captured everyone’s attention.

5.)    But we do know that the Washington Post and The New York Times will be endorsing the Democrat for President.

6.)    And we know that Rush Limbaugh (if he is still around) will be endorsing the Republican candidate.

This is NOT the characteristic of an intellectually vibrant society. It IS the characteristic of a politically polarized society. Which is what we have today.

With the election of Donald Trump, the election in France which brought an independent to power, Brexit, and other movements, it is becoming increasingly clear that something in the West has shifted. While I suspect that it will take decades to fully understand the epoch that we are currently living through, some of the political fights indicate that at least part of the problem may be that a segment of the Western political class has forgotten the purpose of government. This matters, because government, by setting the conditions under which an economy and a society conducts itself, is key to whether a country is ultimately stable (without which broad economic prosperity among the population cannot be achieved). Although the political-economic fights of the last 70 years or so have focused on policy minutia (this tax rate vs that one, more/less social welfare spending, more/less environmental regulation, more/less defense spending, more/less education spending), the rising dissatisfaction with the political class seems to be generated in part by a lack of fundamental understanding of government’s purpose.

Although governments have grown more sophisticated over thousands of years, the real purpose of a government has not changed since that time when three groups of cavemen from different caves came together and formed a crude governing unit. Specifically, these individuals concluded that they would be better able to fend off attacks from other groups of cavemen (and the occasional saber-toothed tiger) if they came together as one. They agreed to cede some of their sovereignty in exchange for a promise of help from the other groups in the event that they were attacked (either by outside groups, or by a member of their own group). In exchange for this promise of help, the governing unit was promised loyalty from all of the individuals. Although governments have become more and more sophisticated and societies have become more and more complex, this promise of protection is still the bedrock upon which the states’ claim on the loyalty of its citizens rests. This “Protection In Exchange For Loyalty” deal exists whether the government is monarchical, oligarchical, tribal, feudal, fascist, communist, socialist, democratic or republican (or anything else).

Today in the West, many in government appear to have forgotten this simple fact. While those that argue for border security, travel pauses (known to some as travel bans), deportations, and other restrictions are depicted as morally reprehensible, these people are doing nothing more than demand that their government stand up for them against people who are not citizens. Immigration, legal or otherwise, imposes costs (and benefits) on a society. While a government may decide that a certain immigration policy is best for the country as a whole (for a whole variety of political-economic reasons), changing situations over time will dictate that an immigration policy be loosened or tightened.

Today, many in the elite appear to be taking the position that keeping foreign immigrants out is an immoral act and should be condemned. There is no doubt that the importation of Muslim immigrants into Western societies has created a method by which terrorism has been imported, even if not all Muslims are supporters of the terrorists. And yet, the response to this terror by Western governments has been to mouth platitudes about not giving into hate, condemning those calling for a more robust response (including halting immigration from certain areas) and deportations, and then ignoring things until the next attack. The assertion that the West is just going to have to learn to live with terrorism is an admission that the political class, as it currently exists, has no real intention of seriously performing its duty.

Which is to say, the governments in the West, and the governing class as a whole, are losing legitimacy. The underlying social contract of all governments (protection for loyalty) is being violated by certain parts of the political establishment and the political class. Unless they rediscover the loyalty that they owe as the governing class to their own citizens (and I fear that time may be growing short on this), politics in the West will become more and more unstable, and will eventually become revolutionary as citizens shift their loyalty to a movement or governing structure that will stand up for them.

Revolutions, by their nature, are unstable. And this is not good for safety, or economic prosperity.