Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

From It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Gilded Age by Justin Fox at Bloomberg:

 

In an impromptu speech to a crowd that gathered outside the White House on George Washington's birthday in 1866, President Andrew Johnson rambled on for more than an hour, referred to himself 210 times (a rate of about three times per minute), and said Republican lawmakers Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were at least as treasonous as the leaders of the just-defeated Confederacy.

 

A few days earlier, when a delegation of black leaders led by Frederick Douglass came to visit, Johnson had told them that poor whites, not blacks, had been the real victims of slavery in the South. After Douglass left, Johnson launched into an off-color, racist tirade about him to an aide.

 

Does any of this sound at least an eensy-weensy bit reminiscent of some recent presidential statements?

 

The political turmoil of the past couple of years has sent people grasping for all sorts of historical parallels. I've seen references to 1930s Germany, 1960s China, 2000s Russia -- and of course, as always, ancient Rome. But if historical analogies are your thing, you can't do better right now than to spend some time learning about the U.S. from the end of the Civil War to the late 1890s.

 

Johnson's Donald Trump-like logorrhea was the least of it, really. The era that followed Johnson's departure from office in 1869, widely known as the Gilded Age, was a time of exploding economic inequality, stagnant living standards, growing concern about monopolies, devastating financial crises, multiple "wave" elections in which control of Congress suddenly shifted, two presidential elections in which the popular-vote winner came up short in the Electoral College, brazen political corruption, frequent pronouncements that the American republic was doomed, and seemingly unending turmoil over race and national identity.

 

That all sounds familiar! And even if you think it can be silly to fixate on historical parallels, the late 1800s seem worth knowing more about simply because so many of the great conflicts from then live on in altered but recognizable form today.

 

So it's pretty great timing that, along with that No. 1 bestselling Ron Chernow biography of Ulysses S. Grant, whose presidency ushered in the Gilded Age, there's also a gigantic new history of the entire era, "The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896," by Richard White. It's where the above anecdotes about Andrew Johnson come from, along with another 871 pages of richly detailed history.

 

The book, which came out in September, is the latest installment in the Oxford History of the United States, now more than half a century in the making. The most famous book in the series, James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," had the advantage of a ready-made narrative trajectory. Authors of the volumes that aren't dominated by such an epochal event face a tougher challenge, which they're not allowed to get around by adopting a thematic focus. Charles Sellers of the University of California at Berkeley tried that for his history of the period from 1815 to 1846 and had his book rejected for the series. Oxford University Press still published it as "The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846," but Daniel Walker Howe of the University of California at Los Angeles was commissioned to write a do-over, "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848," which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2008.

 

White, a Stanford University historian who has previously written about the settling of the West and the transcontinental railroads, plays by the rules in "The Republic for Which It Stands," and at times that can be tough going. But he is such a wise, entertaining and often flat-out funny guide that a reader is rewarded again and again and again for sticking with him.

 

My single favorite moment in the book comes courtesy of William Dean Howells, the 19th-century novelist and Atlantic Monthly editor of whose letters White makes frequent and excellent use. The scene is the Hiram, Ohio, home of U.S. Representative and future President James A. Garfield, in 1870 or thereabouts:

 

It was evening, and Howells started telling Garfield a story about the New England poets -- then already elderly -- whom he published in the Atlantic. Garfield stopped him, ran out into his yard, and hallooed the neighbors sitting on their porches: “He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier.” The neighbors came and listened to Howells while the whippoorwills flew and sang in the evening air.

That lovely image of a calmer, gentler, more erudite time isn't allowed to linger for long, though. The Gilded Age -- the name comes from a not-very-good 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner -- was an era of great ugliness and wrenching change. In recent decades, it has been celebrated for its technological breakthroughs and business triumphs, which eventually did lead to great economic progress, but as White shows, it often didn't feel like progress to the people living through it.

[kenberg]

From It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Gilded Age by Justin Fox at Bloomberg:

 

 

 

As it happens, last night I saw the last part of the PBS production The Gilded Age. It will be repeated and I am looking forward to seeing it all. My knowledge of history is embarrassingly bad but time and again I find that at least some others know even less. Based on what I saw, I recommend this two hour program for those like me who know a little but not much. I was vaguely aware of J. P. Morgan's role in the financial crisis of the 1890s, I learned a little more, no doubt there is more to learn. Apparently Grover Cleveland and the Congress were pretty much stymied, Morgan took the train down to D.C., Cleveland refused to see him, Morgan waited until Cleveland would see him, Morgan convinced Cleveland that the economy was facing complete collapse and he and other very wealthy people were the only ones who could prevent this. I got the impression that modern historians agree with Morgan's assessment.

 

The inequality in wealth was enormous, economic growth following the success of Morgan's intervention was enormous. You cannot watch this without seeing comparisons with today. But don'r overdo it. History is relevant, but every time and case is different and just because we survived that era, and later prospered, does not mean we will again. We have to look at what we can see and make our best bets.

 

Analogies: I watched the Super Bowl. Everyone involved deserves great credit. But clearly a few inches here and there would have changed the result. On a less dramatic stage, I was in 6D the other day with a 4-4 diamond fit and a 6-2 spade fit. 6S was hopeless since I had Ax opposite Kxxxxx and we were missing the diamond A. Otoh, 6D is cold as long as spades and diamonds are both 3-2. They were, but I don't really recommend playing that hand in 6D. (The probability that both suits split 3-2 is 0.47 or so.)

 

Anyway, history is relevant, especially if we approach it with an open mind. We have to look closely at whether we were brilliant or lucky.

 

I liked my history classes in school, but that was a while back and a lot of it was focused on demonstrating how great we are. We were told to skip the chapter in the book that explained how we grabbed Texas from Mexico. Note to teachers: Telling a 15 year old not to read something is a really good way to get him to read every word.

[barmar]

The inequality in wealth was enormous, economic growth following the success of Morgan's intervention was enormous. You cannot watch this without seeing comparisons with today. But don'r overdo it. History is relevant, but every time and case is different and just because we survived that era, and later prospered, does not mean we will again. We have to look at what we can see and make our best bets.

I haven't seen this show, but I've seen and read others comparing then and now.

 

Yes, we've had robber barons for many years, and the wealth gap between the Morgans/Fords and their workers was enormous. But the difference was that as their companies were growing, the workers were sharing in it. Henry Ford knew that he made more money when more people could afford to buy his cars, so he made sure that he paid wages enough that they could live well and buy his products (and those of others like him). Reducing poverty is good for business. And recognizing the value of workers also led to innovations like company-provided health insurance.

 

What's happened more recently is that businessmen discovered that another way to make lots of money is to sell the same number of products but reduce costs. Automation has made this feasible: replace workers with robots. Now only the people at the top are sharing in the growth, the little guys are getting squeezed out.

 

There are a few billionaires who still get it, like Warren Buffett. But he's pretty old, I wonder how much longer he'll be around.

[Al_U_Card]

Posted without comment:

And here I thought that when the market went down, it was all those rich folk selling "high", taking their profits and making out like bandits (bankdits? ;) ) ? That would be the great "good" news I suppose...

[ldrews]

Approval ratings:

 

https://www.sgtreport.com/articles/2018/2/8/amazing-president-trumps-approval-rating-tops-barack-obama-by-4-points-at-same-time-of-his-presidency

[y66]

From the cover story at The Economist this week:

 

VOLATILITY is back. A long spell of calm, in which America’s stockmarket rose steadily without a big sell-off, ended abruptly this week. The catalyst was a report released on February 2nd showing that wage growth in America had accelerated. The S&P 500 fell by a bit that day, and by a lot on the next trading day. The Vix, an index that reflects how changeable investors expect equity markets to be, spiked from a sleepy 14 at the start of the month to an alarmed 37. In other parts of the world nerves frayed.

 

Markets later regained some of their composure (see article). But more adrenalin-fuelled sessions lie ahead. That is because a transition is under way in which buoyant global growth causes inflation to replace stagnation as investors’ biggest fear. And that long-awaited shift is being complicated by an extraordinary gamble in the world’s biggest economy. Thanks to the recently enacted tax cuts, America is adding a hefty fiscal boost to juice up an expansion that is already mature. Public borrowing is set to double to $1 trillion, or 5% of GDP, in the next fiscal year. What is more, the team that is steering this experiment, both in the White House and the Federal Reserve, is the most inexperienced in recent memory. Whether the outcome is boom or bust, it is going to be a wild ride.

Volatility is back feels like the biggest understatement on this thread. Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, many investors in the world’s biggest bond market are smiling and sending this message ‘We want to own Treasuries, and we’re not afraid.’

[jjbrr]

Approval ratings:

 

https://www.sgtreport.com/articles/2018/2/8/amazing-president-trumps-approval-rating-tops-barack-obama-by-4-points-at-same-time-of-his-presidency

 

But obviously it's much worse when you take a composite of polls and not just a single one.

[ldrews]

But obviously it's much worse when you take a composite of polls and not just a single one.

 

But starting to climb as the public experiences more jobs, higher wages, reduced taxes, higher optimism/confidence.

[Winstonm]

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

 

Can you believe this?

 

CBS News reported Thursday that Nunes’ latest project appears to be the construction of a literal wall to separate Republican and Democratic staff members within the committee’s designated secure areas. The wall, which is expected to be built this spring, would be a physical manifestation of the increasingly partisan fights within the committee. Other Republicans seem to be flat-out mortified by Nunes’ shovel-ready infrastructure plan

 

I wonder if McFredo can get Mexico to pay for it?

[jjbrr]

But starting to climb as the public experiences more jobs, higher wages, reduced taxes, higher optimism/confidence.

 

ok lil buddy. that's cute. run along now.

[kenberg]

When the stock market is surging nobody wants to listen to a wet blanket.

 

My day to day life does not depend on the djia. I usually don't know its level within 1000 points, or whether it has gone up or down in the previous week. Some swings get my attention.

 

I would like to see good decisions fostering long term economic health.

 

Let's face facts. The guy in the WH made a lot of money screwing suckers. Get in, say anything, make a buck, get out. He has now taken his act to the presidency. Long term, this is not good.

 

I get along with conservatives. I am more conservative than many who post here. But I don't like having a scam artist as president. Basically, that's the whole story with me.

 

Economists worry, but the guy in the street thinks "The market is going up, who cares what the eggheads say?". Now might be a time to think a bit about that.

 

Nobody has to totally surrender all of their social views, I am simply suggesting they give some thought to the character of the person who has been elected.

[ldrews]

ok lil buddy. that's cute. run along now.

 

Thanks I will. I have to go celebrate "winning" some more, and get ready for 7 more years of the same. I hope you are enjoying your day too.

[ldrews]

When the stock market is surging nobody wants to listen to a wet blanket.

 

My day to day life does not depend on the djia. I usually don't know its level within 1000 points, or whether it has gone up or down in the previous week. Some swings get my attention.

 

I would like to see good decisions fostering long term economic health.

 

Let's face facts. The guy in the WH made a lot of money screwing suckers. Get in, say anything, make a buck, get out. He has now taken his act to the presidency. Long term, this is not good.

 

I get along with conservatives. I am more conservative than many who post here. But I don't like having a scam artist as president. Basically, that's the whole story with me.

 

Economists worry, but the guy in the street thinks "The market is going up, who cares what the eggheads say?". Now might be a time to think a bit about that.

 

Nobody has to totally surrender all of their social views, I am simply suggesting they give some thought to the character of the person who has been elected.

 

Do you mean his character or his personality? Based on his presidential actions so far his character seems pretty good. His personality, on the other hand, is a bit abrasive to the establishment and the media. I understand that on a person to person basis he is somewhat charming. His family and ex-wives speak highly of him for what that is worth. I wonder, would our family and ex-wives speak highly of us?

[kenberg]

On second thought, I think I will let what I said speak for itself

[ldrews]

On second thought, I think I will let what I said speak for itself

 

Ah, OK, you don't want to distinguish between character and personality. I would have liked a conversation on the nuances, but so be it.

[y66]

From Has Anyone Seen the President? by Michael Lewis:

 

Bannon thinks the U.S. is in decline and the people perched on top don’t particularly care. “The elites of both parties are comfortable with America being in decline,” he says. “They manage on the way down, and they make even more wealth.” He sees his job as finding ways to organize the masses against the elites. Trump was never an end in himself but the means to it -- and Bannon clearly finds some of what Trump has done since taking office, like the tax cuts, as, at best, beside the point. He also finds distasteful some of the people Trump brought into his inner circle -- some of the generals who have, in Bannon’s view, wasted trillions of dollars and American lives; plus the financiers. Bannon thinks Goldman Sachs’s shareholders should have been wiped out in 2008, and that its president, Gary Cohn, should have lost his job. Instead Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has survived, and Cohn, who paid himself hundreds of millions of dollars, now gets to swan around as Trump’s economic adviser.

 

Bannon has a favorite line: If I had to choose who will run the country, 100 Goldman Sachs partners or the first 100 people who walk into a Trump rally, I’d choose the people at the Trump rally. I have my own version of this line: If I had to choose a president, Donald Trump or anyone else I’ve ever known, I’d choose anyone else I’ve ever known. Among the revelations of Wolff’s book was just how many of the people in and around Trump’s White House feel more or less as I do. “Insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence was both the thing you could not do and the thing that everybody was guilty of,” Wolff writes. “Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, and did not particularly care.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump “a ***** moron.” Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus preferred to describe Trump as “an idiot.” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope.” Cohn called Trump “dumb as *****.”

 

Bannon had done something even less forgivable, in Trump World, than question Trump’s intelligence. He’d allowed himself to be given credit for the one thing that Trump could point to as a sign of his genius: winning the election. Time magazine ran a cover with Bannon’s face on it with the headline “The Great Manipulator.” It sits in a frame on his floor right now.

 

But the more we learn about Trump, the more stupendous Bannon’s achievement appears. It’s as if he took the Cleveland Browns to the Super Bowl and then, in the off-season, turned the football players into Olympic athletes, and won gold in curling.

 

“I want you to do an exercise with me,” I say, inching close to the reason I’ve come.

 

He eyes me, but not with hostility.

 

“If you can get Trump elected president, you can get anyone elected president. And so I want you to tell me the steps I’d need to take to get elected. What do we need to do?”

 

He shakes his head quickly. The question doesn’t offend him. He just thinks I’m missing the point. “What was needed was a blunt force instrument, and Trump was a blunt force instrument,” he says. Trump may be a barbarian. He may be in many senses stupid. But in Bannon’s view, Trump has several truly peculiar strengths. The first is his stamina. “I give a talk to a room with 50 people and I’m drained afterward,” Bannon says. “This guy got up five and six times a day in front of 10,000 people, day in and day out. He’s 70! Hillary Clinton couldn’t do that. She could do one.” The public events were not trivial occasions, in Bannon’s view. They whipped up the emotion that got Trump elected: anger. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” he says. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”

 

The ability to tap anger in others was another of Trump’s gifts, and made him, uniquely in the field of Republican candidates, suited to what Bannon saw as the task at hand: Trump was himself angry. The deepest parts of him are angry and dark, Bannon told Wolff. Exactly what Trump has to be angry about was unclear. He’s had all of life’s advantages. Yet he acts like a man who has been cheated once too often, and is justifiably outraged. What Bannon loved was the way Trump sounded when he was angry. He’d gone to the best schools, but he had somehow emerged from them with the grammar and diction of an uneducated person. “The vernacular,” Bannon called Trump’s odd way of putting things. Other angry people, some of whom actually had been cheated by life, thrilled to its sound.

Steve Bannon reminded me of someone, but it’s not until I’m back in my hotel room that I realize who. He was a character from “The Big Short.” He saw the world differently from virtually everyone in his profession, and it led a lot of people to think that he was insane. But he was right and they were wrong, and the rest of the world has yet to come to terms with why.

Steve Bannon reminds Lewis of Michael Burry, the guy who made north of $2.5 billion by betting against mortgage-backed securities in 2008? Ha! Bannon is a smart guy, a non-conformist and masterful when it comes to tapping into and ramping up hate but he has no idea what to do with it, he has let it infect his own judgment and the monster he helped put in the White House is hurting the people he says he wants to help most whereas Burry comes across as Spock-like emotion-wise in The Big Short and as someone who knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish on behalf of his constituents -- his investors -- and did.

[hrothgar]

Back when Comey was fired,

 

then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had “lost confidence in Director Comey” and that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” She stated that the president had “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision” and that the president believed “Director Comey was not up to the task...that he wasn’t the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI.”

 

Lawfare using the Freedom of Information Act to get access to the FBI emails that circulated after Comey was fired...

 

Turned out that this was - yet another - example where Saunders and Trump directly lied to the public.

 

https://www.lawfareblog.com/i-hope-instance-fake-news-fbi-messages-show-bureaus-real-reaction-trump-firing-james-comey

[kenberg]

From Has Anyone Seen the President? by Michael Lewis:

 

 

An interesting piece. I recommend it. Lewis and Bannon watching the State of the Union speech is fascinating.

 

I think my favorite part of the section you quote is

 

What Bannon loved was the way Trump sounded when he was angry. He’d gone to the best schools, but he had somehow emerged from them with the grammar and diction of an uneducated person. “The vernacular,” Bannon called Trump’s odd way of putting things. Other angry people, some of whom actually had been cheated by life, thrilled to its sound.

 

When we think of people disguising their origins maybe Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's comes to mind. Or Felony Melanie from Sweet Home Alabama. But Trump pulls it off in reverse. It has never seemed authentic to me, but then I don't feel cheated. I have always thought that the things that have gone wrong in my life are, as Jimmy Buffet says, my own damn fault. And there hasn't been all that much to complain about.

 

Harry Truman sounded like someone who grew up with not much, and I understand the connection he had. Kennedy sounded like he came from wealth, and from Boston, but he didn't pretend otherwise and he could connect. With Trump I just don't get it. To just mention one current topic, Truman and Kennedy as well as the first Bush and others, served in the military. I can't recall that any of them had a great fondness for rolling some tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue so we can all salute. Well yes, after VE Day and VJ Day, but that's different, a truly awful conflict had come to a close. I really don't get Trump's appeal.

[Winstonm]

GAO: The tax cut will cost us $1.5 Trillion.

McFredo: I've got an idea. Let's put on a parade!

[barmar]

Do you mean his character or his personality? Based on his presidential actions so far his character seems pretty good. His personality, on the other hand, is a bit abrasive to the establishment and the media. I understand that on a person to person basis he is somewhat charming. His family and ex-wives speak highly of him for what that is worth. I wonder, would our family and ex-wives speak highly of us?

You really think someone who reneged on contracts in his businesses has "good character"? And what about his clear racism, that's character, not personality.

 

I saw an interview with Ivana a few months ago, I don't think she spoke so highly of him.

[jjbrr]

Back when Comey was fired,

 

 

 

Lawfare using the Freedom of Information Act to get access to the FBI emails that circulated after Comey was fired...

 

Turned out that this was - yet another - example where Saunders and Trump directly lied to the public.

 

https://www.lawfareblog.com/i-hope-instance-fake-news-fbi-messages-show-bureaus-real-reaction-trump-firing-james-comey

 

The key takeaway here is that they actually honored a FOIA request. Incredible.

[hrothgar]

And, it looks like Trump is going to need a new Chief of Staff...

 

https://www.axios.com/the-john-kelly-crisis-white-house-rob-porter-b7924ce5-e4d4-40e1-bc50-e901a6471fa2.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

"Only the best people"

[Winstonm]

And, it looks like Trump is going to need a new Chief of Staff...

 

https://www.axios.com/the-john-kelly-crisis-white-house-rob-porter-b7924ce5-e4d4-40e1-bc50-e901a6471fa2.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

"Only the best people"

 

General Petraeus, now Kelly: have we become so enamored of our military generals that we allow them good reputations, regardless?

[Winstonm]

You really think someone who reneged on contracts in his businesses has "good character"? And what about his clear racism, that's character, not personality.

 

I saw an interview with Ivana a few months ago, I don't think she spoke so highly of him.

 

Personality trait #1: paid a $25 million settlement for defrauding students. B-) :D :P

Personality trait #2: associate of and did business with organized crime figures (See Felix Sater, among others). B-) :D :P

Personality trait #3: owned a casino that had to pay fines for money laundering. B-) :D :P

 

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in? - Alexis de Tocqueville

[hrothgar]

When Trump talks about how much he would like to f*ck his own daughter, is that "character" or "personality"?