Two weeks ago, Thomas Friedman wrote, Web People vs Wall People. “Web people” are the Good Guys who accept what Friedman believes: that the more interconnected the world is, the better. The “Wall People” are, of course, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders followers who don’t think much of this whole globalization thing. Leave aside that Trump supporters are mostly xenophobes who are well to do and don’t really care about economics. You get the idea of his argument.

But I was really struck with something that he said, that sound suspiciously like what Bill Clinton was pushing in 1992. He said that Hillary Clinton was “refraining from telling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.” That’s interesting, I think.

Lawrence Mishel Is a Livelong Learner

It reminded me of something that Lawrence Mishel wrote last year, Failed Theory Posed by Wall Street Dems Puts Hillary Clinton in a Bind. It it, he noted, “There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems.” But since then, we’ve learned a lot. Friedman famously said, “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” Two words and he’s for CAFTA! Mishel is a brilliant economist who looks at actual data — and learns.

So here is Mishel, roughly the same age as Friedman, continuing to learn. But Friedman, the man stealing ideas from a politician 25 years ago hasn’t learned a thing since at least 2005 when he published The World Is Flat. I guess it’s just the poor who need lifelong learning and not overpaid columnists who write constantly about economics without actually knowing anything about it.

Thomas Friedman Married Well

And Thomas Friedman isn’t just wealthy. I read this from the great Norman Solomon:

That was in 2011, when Thomas Friedman and his wife were building a $10 million house. I don’t care. As Solomon noted in the article, this doesn’t make Thomas Friedman’s arguments invalid. But it does make you wonder. There is no doubt that globalization is a great thing when you are part of one of the hundred richest families in America. And everyone has a frame. Friedman’s not too open about his frame.

Thomas Friedman Stop Learning Long Ago

But it’s amazing to think. We went through NAFTA and it didn’t work as promised. (Since then, various different justifications have been offered.) We’ve been through the Dot-Com bust. We’ve been through the Great Recession. We have seen worker salaries stagnate — including those of the college educated. And what did Thomas Friedman learn from all this? Zip! Nada! Not a damned thing!

Yet there he is: a columnist at The New York Times! And it’s not just that. Those in power listen to him (or he’s just an apologist for them). And he’s here to tell us that all we have to do is open ourselves up to education. I have a better education than Thomas Friedman — in a supposedly valuable STEM discipline! And as a professional freelance writer, I am by definition a lifelong learner. But it hasn’t helped me that much. It certainly hasn’t helped me the way marrying into the General Growth Properties family did Thomas Friedman.

Lifelong learning is for the prols! It’s for the people who didn’t marry well. It isn’t for Thomas Friedman!

On this week’s Real Time, Bill Maher made the argument that Donald Trump is such an existential threat to the country that we must all put our pet issues aside and just get Hillary Clinton elected. His focus was on transgender rights. He noted that in 2008, Obama was not publicly in favor of same sex marriage. Obviously, he was privately. Maher’s point was that Obama was being strategic. He didn’t want to torpedo his campaign for the sake of an issue that would bring out the crazy conservatives to vote against him.

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Shakezula was not pleased. He[1] particularly didn’t like the notion of transgender rights being a “pet issue.” I understand and sympathize. But I do think he grabbed onto that one statement rather harder than is reasonable. For one thing, Maher was talking about bathroom choice for transgender people. As with same sex marriage, I don’t think it is a particularly big issue. When LGBT people are still commonly beaten up and even murdered, these other worthy causes strike me rather more as easy and non-threatening things that the straight community can do until the descriptor LGBT itself because pointless.

But Is Trump an Existential Threat?

None of this means that I agree with Maher. The truth is that each presidential election is framed as an existential threat to our republic. Both parties do it, although clearly there is the stink of demagoguery in the Republican arguments that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were extremists. But there is a lesser bit of nonsense that comes from us Democrats. Certainly Trump would be a far worse president than George W Bush was. But then, Bush was a far worse president than his father. If Donald Trump becomes president, I guarantee you that the Republicans will offer up an even worse candidate than he.

None of this should come as a surprise. Richard Nixon is now seen as quite the reasonable politician except for that little paranoia problem. But he was responsible (with the aid of his inside man, war criminal Henry Kissinger) of extending the Vietnam War for at least four more years, leading to the deaths of at least 21,000 American troops. People now talk about Reagan’s willingness to raise taxes as some super-ability, as though the “no new taxes ever” philosophy of the Republican Party is normal in any functioning democracy.

Trump Would Be a Catastrophe — Like All Republicans

Do I think that Donald Trump would be a total catastrophe for our nation? Yes! Although like with George W Bush, I don’t think we would get a Trump presidency. For six years of the Bush administration, it was Dick Cheney running the executive branch. I have no idea who would be running the country under Trump, but I know it wouldn’t be Trump himself, because he has no interest in it. But the biggest problem with a Trump presidency would be that he would likely get to appoint two Supreme Court Justices — just like Bush. And good luck with transgender rights under those circumstances.

But that’s going to happen even if Trump dies on 9 November 2016 and we get “reasonable” Mike Pence as president. Or, for that matter, any nationally known Republican. The truth is that the Republican Party is simply terrible. Trump may be stupid, ignorant, and gauche, but he isn’t especially different from other Republicans. He’s the symptom, not the cause of Republican dysfunction.

Liberals Need to Be Liberals

So as liberals, now is not the time to panic. There is no more existential threat than usual. It is not the time to pretend that we aren’t liberals — to back off on transgender bathroom rights or anything else. If this election is an existential threat to our nation, then they all are. And that means that liberals should always be abandoning their beliefs to win this one election. And we’ve seen what this has brought us: a Democratic Party that is in the mushy middle and is too often unable to beat a party made up primarily of mad men.

[1] I assume that Shakezula is a man, given that posts at his personal blog are posted by “Jules.” If anyone has contrary information, let me know.

I’ve gotten to the point that I think Paul Krugman is irrelevant. He hardly blogs. And he has very little to say. Perhaps my thinking about him is tainted by the fact that I read a lot of economists. I’m an Economist’s View addict, so I read a lot of other economists’ blogs. I even read a fair number of academic papers. (Being able to understand economics papers is probably the biggest benefit of my physics PhD.) But last night it occurred to me that Krugman must still write his column. And given that the primary is over, it wouldn’t be yet another article about how horrible Bernie Sanders is. But instead of his newest column, I was brought to an article by Karol Markowicz, How Paul Krugman Made Donald Trump Possible.

I didn’t have to read the article. I knew what was in it. If I hadn’t decided to write this article, I wouldn’t have read Karol Markowicz’s trite “blame the other side” rant. It’s not that she’s a bad writer. But her Twitter account has pinned to the top of it a February tweet, “I’ve never voted for a Democrat and I’m not starting with Donald Trump.” She seems to be big in the “Don’t vote for Trump because he’s a liberal” camp. Anyone thinking that can’t be too deep a political thinker. But she was born in the USSR. As I’ve noted often before, people from old communist countries are often easy marks for the Republican Party. They are fooled by its ostentatious rhetoric of “freedom” combined with the authoritarianism that they find comforting (even if they don’t realize it).

Karol Markowicz’s Argument

The argument Karol Markowicz makes is that Krugman and other liberals made Trump possible because they said mean things about “reasonable” Republicans. For example, people called Mitt Romney “dangerous.” She spends quite a lot of time setting up her argument quoting that great political commentator Ellen DeGeneres. But fair enough: liberals attacked conservatives in the past. Is it not acceptable to call Romney “dangerous” without seeing Donald Trump as categorically different — and worse? Is it really the case that Republicans told themselves, “Well, liberals are going to call us terrible things regardless, so let’s nominate someone even worse!”?

If that’s the case, why haven’t the Democrats done the same thing? After all, for all of my adult life, Republicans have called every Democratic president a socialist. I remember this was especially true of Bill Clinton. Yet today, Bill Clinton is held up as almost a Republican hero. If they could get away with claiming him their own, they would.

This has reached the level where Bernie Sanders wasn’t laughed out of public life because he calls himself a socialist. Because here’s the truth: Bernie Sanders is no socialist; he’s just an old fashioned New Deal Democrat. So the effect of calling every Democrat a socialist — and in many cases a communist — has not caused the Democrats to nominate a socialist. I wonder why?

Krugman Normalized Trump!

Karol Markowicz wrote:

Not really. Since the early days of the Bush administration, Krugman’s complaint hasn’t been that this or that Republican has been an outlier but that being a con artists was basically what defined the party. And he made actual arguments. The truth was that Romney, who Karol Markowicz calls a “good man,” was a con artist. His economic plan was thoroughly analyzed and shown to be a fraud. And there is no way Romney could not have known that given that the only people he could get to go along with his plan were his friends.

How Trump Is Different

There is no categorical difference between Romney’s tax plan and Donald Trump’s. And I don’t recall Krugman or anyone else saying there is. Donald Trump is categorically different in his explicit racism and that’s what people have focused on. As I (and countless other liberals) have noted, outside of his explicit racism (the Republican Party has long been simply implicitly racist) and his bizarre foreign policy (which is closely tied to his racism), he’s a standard issue Republican.

I blasted Avik Roy the other day. But at least he understands that the basis of the Republican Party’s power is racial resentment. Karol Markowicz is unwilling to admit that truth. “It’s the fault of we liberals! If only we had said that Romney was a perfectly acceptable candidate for president, the Republican base would never have voted for Trump!”? Give me a break! The same Republicans who proudly voted for Trump this year were complaining that they lost in 2008 and 2012 because McCain and Romney weren’t conservative enough.

And this “liberals created Trump” theory comes from Karol Markowicz, who appears to think that Trump isn’t conservative enough herself. Unbelievable.

I understand that the feeling of outrage is delicious. We all need to get our anger out and there’s nothing so great as righteous outrage. But like anything, a little of something can be good where a lot can be bad. Think: water. It is because of this push towards outrage that I often find myself on the receiving end of stories like, “Did you know that Target forbids their employees from saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to their customers?!”

Statements like these would have set me off… when I was 13 years old. But over the past 40 years I’ve learned a few things. One is that these stories are often not true. For example, Target never told its employees to stop using the word “Christmas.” So when I hear something along these lines, I usually sigh and assume it isn’t true. But another thing I’ve learned is that when the story is true, it is almost always way more complicated and nuanced than claimed.

No Greased Pig Chases!

This brings me to Wednesday. My father has a regular lunch date with his friends on Tuesday. And so my father told me something he learned from his friends: the Sonoma County Fair had canceled the greased pig chase. This is where a pig is smeared with grease and children run around and try to catch it. According to the experts at the luncheon, it was canceled because someone thought it was cruel to the pig.

Sigh.

Learning this put me in a difficult position. First, I was pretty sure the story wasn’t true. Second, I do think it’s cruel to the little pig. I know I wouldn’t want a bunch of five year old kids running around trying to catch me. But given other things we do to pigs, a greased pig chase isn’t high on the list of cruelty. For example: burning pigs (don’t watch it). So I found it hard to believe that suddenly people were freaking out about greased pig chases.

Political Correctness — in 1971

But it is true that people do care about the issue. Greased pig chases (and related activities) are illegal in Minnesota. But this isn’t the result of our political correct culture that has gotten such a boost from Donald Trump. That law was passed in 1971. Is that the case in California? No.

I went online and found Free Family Fun at the Sonoma County Fair. And there on the 24th of July was, “Catch a greased pig on Farmers Day.” Maybe if a single man at the luncheon actually cared about greased pig chases, they would have known this. But I doubt anyone at the luncheon had ever participated in such an event — or even seen one outside a movie.

Growing Old Sucks; Grow Up!

But they were all only too happy to grouse about the fact that the America they knew is being destroyed. Of course, it isn’t an America that they ever knew. It’s just an excuse to bitch: kids today don’t get the joy of doing what the vast majority of children never did in the past. But as I noted: it’s understandable.

I can see as one grows older, one naturally feels that their culture is dying. That’s because it is. But it isn’t because liberals like me are murdering it; it’s just the way the world works. Poor children learn that rich children get more ice cream. The universe isn’t fair. Why can’t old people learn that the culture leaves them behind?

But barring that, they could at least find real things to complain about.