Realignment

There are many reasons for a conservative not to like Donald Trump.  He is brash and impulsive, given to hyperbole.  He has attacked some of the pillars of American stability—NATO, the Federal Reserve Board, free trade.  He has proposed overly broad solutions to both Mexican and Muslim immigration. He is undisciplined and gets unnecessarily distracted by personal slights against him.  His odd admiration for Vladimir Putin is disquieting.  His recently revealed vulgar tape was disgusting.  Ross Douthat has written excellent back to back columns on the dangers of a Clinton presidency and of a Trump presidency, and I largely agree with his assessments.    The harsh fact is that in this time of economic stagnation and a myriad of real dangers abroad, lovers of capitalism and the Constitution have no good choices.

But despite these risks---and they are legion--Trump has said and done some things that resounded with me that no other Republican candidate has had the courage to do.  The Trump phenomena  has led me to believe that the Republican and Democrat alignment may be an obsolete construct.  Insider and Outsider is a more accurate way to think about our politics now with Insiders fiercely trying to pull power and resources away from individuals and the states and concentrate them in Washington.   I’m not entirely convinced that Trump is the best person to push against the Insiders but it’s clear that the Insiders are trying hard (mainly the Deplorables and Bitter Clingers) to heel.   

Trump has uttered two sentences that caught my attention.

The first was said at the Republican convention, “I am your voice.”  The expansion of presidential power and the relentless push of progressives to sculpt a society to their liking through the courts and regulatory bodies have left us nearly voiceless.   Material changes in our society are being jammed down our throats without any say by the body politic whatsoever, whether it is through nonenforcement of immigration laws, gay marriage, putting women in combat roles, forcing local changes in zoning through H.U.D., changing overtime laws, Big Government has been busy reshaping our lives in material ways without our input.  You know it’s bad when even the liberal New York Times is beginning to run articles sounding alarm bells over Obama’s propensity to govern by pen and phone.  

Perhaps the most egregious example has been in the area of the LGBT agenda. Marriage equality and how to deal with transgendered people in certain circumstances (the military, public restrooms) are major social changes that should be argued and decided upon by We the People.  Instead, the democratic process was rejected in the case of marriage equality and by administrative fiat in the case of transgender issues.  In neither case did We the People get heard.  We may have come out in the same place,  but the people needed to be heard and had their views taken into account.  One of the principal reasons that there is so much stress in our country right now is that major decisions are being dictated with the pen and phone, through the courts, or through regulatory agencies without any of us having any say in the matter.  That is dangerous in an open and free society.  So when Trump says, "I am your voice," many citizens know and understand that they have been completely shut out of the decision making process in our country.

The second assertion that Trump made was directed at African Americans.  His direct challenge to the black community was, “What do you have to lose?” [by voting for Trump] later to be followed up by a “new deal  for black Americans.”  Despite the charge from the Left that he is a racist and a bigot, Donald Trump is the first Republican to have the courage to address the black community directly.  Of course, his efforts were summarily dismissed and slapped back as inadequate and vague.  But that doesn’t matter.  There was nothing   he could say or do to make the black community embrace him with open arms.  But what matters is that he reached out.  And Republicans need to keep doing this and making the case for smaller government.   By almost every measure, black America has lost ground under the Obama administration.    Trump is the only Republican in memory to take his case directly to black America. 

Trump is not an ordinary Republican.  But the Republican/Democratic demarcation may no longer be as relevant.  Despite his liabilities, he is saying and doing many things that need to be said and done, even if the things said aren't said in the refined language of the Insiders.  

Catastrophe

Last weekend, I skipped both the N.F.L. games and the presidential debates.  Instead, I opted for two other forms of disaster for my weekend entertainment.   I attended opening night of the film, “Command and Control” at the Siskel Film Center and saw the film “Deepwater Horizon” as well.  It was fascinating to see these two films back to back.

Command and Control is a documentary by Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.)  and recounts the tale of an accident in a 1980 at the height of the Cold War.  The powerful Titan II was the mainstay of the U.S. fleet during the height of the Cold War.  Standing almost nine stories  high, the Titan II packed a wallop and could deliver an explosion greater than all the bombs unleashed in WWII and deliver it in minutes.  The missile experienced what appeared to be a minor malfunction and when repair crews were sent to fix the problem, one of the workers accidentally dropped a ratchet wrench (which was the wrong wrench and picked up accidentally) down the silo, banging into the side and causing a plume of fuel to start filling the silo.  The team failed to control the problem, and the silo ignited, killing 1 crew member, injuring others, and expelling the warhead.  Had the warhead detonated, the results would have been devastating.  The film makes the point that if a warhead ever detonated on U.S. soil, we expected it to be a Soviet one.  Command and Control is a riveting film, showing that we were a hairsbreadth away from massive loss of life arising from this accident.  Of course, someone was blamed for this particular accident for bringing the wrong wrench, but the frequency of these near misses gives one pause.

The second film I saw last weekend was Deepwater Horizon, a Peter Berg film about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2012 on the oil platform that was the biggest ecological disaster in history.   Berg has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He won several awards with his cable series “Friday Night Lights” and is known for his innovative filming techniques and close ups that capture human emotion so well.   He delivered with this film as well.  In a film that echoes of “Titanic,” Deepwater Horizon shows up once again the potential consequences of pushing technology past its limits.   Like Titanic, Deepwater Horizon also has a villain—the BP supervisor (masterfully played by John Malkovich) that eggs the platform crew on, downplaying warning signs that something may be amiss.  The result is a backup of oil and explosion on the platform and a gripping struggle to survive by the crew and staff.  Mark Wahlberg turns in one of his best performances in Deepwater Horizon as does Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson.  The world was focused on the ecological damage cause by the accident, but 11 people died and several others were injured in a horrific catastrophe at sea.

In both instances, investigators tried to finger a human cause.   It is human nature to try to find a person to blame.  But I have just started to get acquainted with the work of Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents) and have started to look at alternative explanations for these events.  Perrow focuses on system failure, particularly with respect to high technology systems.  Perrow contends that complex systems have parts that interact in unexpected ways, and those systems are most vulnerable where there is “tight coupling,” i.e. where sub-components interact.   Clearly, an offshore oil rig and a missile silo are both complex technology dependent systems and Perrow would say that we would expect failure in a certain number of instances.  In fact, one of the points of Command and Control is that it is almost a miracle that we haven’t had a catastrophic,  mass casualty  failure especially given that we had some 50,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War.

Both of these films were riveting depictions of failure of technology (as was the Titanic), and the Arkansas incident very well could have been a mass casualty event.  Charles Perrow has started to get me to think about risk and technology in a different way.  Perrow would not be surprised by these events; rather, he would suggest that they are evidence to support his thinking.

Much has also been written about our power grid and it certainly gives one pause to consider the interaction between the internet and our financial system or our power grid.  Seeing these films together at the same time that I have begun to explore Perrow’s work has opened my mind to a new way of thinking about risk.

Eclectic Week

 It’s been quite a week of events, and I am grappling with a way to tie them all together.  Perhaps it is nothing more than a desire to divert my attention from this hideous election season and cage fights that call themselves debates—in which neither candidate made a case for free markets.   Within the span of one week, I attended a presentation by a transgendered economist (Deirdre McCloskey) , a world  renown theologian and journalist (Martin Marty and Kenneth Woodward) , and an aging rock star (Alice Cooper).  Together, they were a welcome distraction from an economy stuck in neutral, a world in flames, and a country divided and faced with two distasteful choices and a third (Gary Johnson) that gets lost on the way to the men’s room.

Woodward’s and Marty’s presentation was put on by the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago.  Woodward’s book, Getting Religion:  Faith, Culture & Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama spans the role and evolution of religion in American life over Woodward’s lifespan.  He puts it forward as a first hand, ringside view of religiosity over the post war period.  And while the role religion has diminished somewhat in America, a large proportion of Americans still count themselves as believers and religion remains an important part of our culture.  Woodward’s book is a “lived history” and covers growth of religion (more churches built in the 1950’s than any other time and in 1960 60% of children were in parochial schools) to the Billy Graham era to the present.   Best line of the evening was Martin Marty, “Methodists take responsibility for all of society because they know what’s good for you.”  Second best line of the evening, “If you don’t believe in God, you believe in everything.”

A few days earlier, I attended a lecture by Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Don), who discussed her new book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions Made Us Rich.  McCloskey is a University of Chicago trained economic historian who was THE professor to take as an undergrad at Chicago. She is a most out-of-the mainstream advocate for the free market—a transgendered woman that suffers from occasional stuttering, “I began as a Joan Baez Marxist,” she proclaimed.   I was too insecure about my math background to do so and now regret it.  She is witty, sharp, charming and insightful with a wonderful sense of humor that is simultaneously self- promoting and self-deprecating. Her thesis is that the notion that capital accumulation and natural resources lead to wealth is wrong.  “If it were natural resources, Russia and the Congo would be rich.”  McCloskey believes that it is equality under the law that makes a wealthy society, “We are rich because we are free.  The essence of society is new ideas.  Equality under the law permits ordinary people to become creative.”  McCloskey was captivating, persuasive, and inspiring.  She is a most respected economic scholar, writer and lecturer, despite having to overcome her stuttering and gender identity issues.

Finally, I attended an Alice Cooper concert.  Alice Cooper is nearing 70 and was known in the early 70’s as an outrageous performer (although relatively tame by today’s standards) and boundary stretcher.  played the usual fare—“No More Mister Nice Guy,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” and his signature hit, “School’s Out,” which has been an anthem for school kids in June for two generations.  Alice Cooper has always intrigued me because in addition to his musical and showman talents, he is a scratch golfer and is still touring and playing golf at a high level at an age when many are retired.  Still, crowd was largely geriatric and I am guessing that many tickets were paid for with social security checks.  I actually saw people with walkers and canes and I assumed that any pot smokers had a medical exemption.   The music was a bit loud but most likely that was to accommodate concert goers that had forgotten their hearing aids.

It certainly was an eclectic week, with out-of-the-mainstream but superb talents in three different areas-musical, economic and spiritual, and all three still productive in their later years.  Marvelous.