100 Days with Donald

It is a completely arbitrary, pointless, and probably harmful deadline. But since the legendary beginning of Fraklin Roosevelt's administration, political media have been attracted to the first 100 days as a measure of the direction of a presidency and how successful it is likely to be. We've arrived at that point in the Trump presidency, and while the number itself is meaningless it's still useful to take advantage of an opportunity to step back and evaluate what has been happening.

The word I would use to describe the state of the government in the last 100 days is erosion. There has been a slow but consistent undermining of political norms across the board. Trump has not remotely removed himself from financial interests in his companies, and his children still run those companies. He regularly conducts state business at the exclusive club he owns, in the presence of people whose membership fees have risen sharply since he won the election. He has insulted closely allied nations with words and actions and his diplomatic incompetence has already sparked a war scare with North Korea. 

He has made decisions about legislative strategy and even content without consulting his party's leadership. He and his inner circle have purposefully excluded the regular bureaucracy from the policymaking process, which has created open distrust and conflict between the chief executive and a significant portion of the executive branch. He insists that the news media are attempting to oppress the people of the country with lies when they point out the extensive falsehoods he himself has inflicted upon us. He has directly insulted the courts and has threatened to break up a circuit court that has delivered rulings he doesn't like.

And that is only a partial list.

All of those things are a break with precedent, both in theory and practice. The president is supposed to conduct foreign policy with respect for allies and at least follow rules of seasoned diplomacy with respect to potential adversaries. The president is supposed to lead the party with respect for the legislature as a coequal branch of government. The president is supposed to respect the courts even in disagreement. The president is supposed to understand that for all their faults, the news media are the ultimate guardians of democracy. The president is supposed to administer the executive branch in good faith.

There is a reason those norms exist. Because executive power is the most direct and easily abused form of power, those norms serve to put the inidividual at some distance from the office itself. The things that the president is simply expected to do regardless of party or ideology keep the most powerful office in the world from becoming a personalized form of power, because personalized power is prone to arbitrary application and outright abuse.

It has not dominated the news, but the longest-term consequences of these first 100 days will come from the erosion of the barriers between the person and the presidency. The separation of powers and the expected respect for institutions in government by the individuals in power have both been weakened. The precendents have been set, and will be there still when Trump is no longer president. While its worst consequences may never come to fruition, it must be acknowledged that we have taken a few steps down a dangerous path. A sustained commitment not only to defeating Trump politically but to restoring the institutions themselves will be required to reverse those steps. 

Where is the War on Terror Going?

Shortly after 9/11, as the War on Terror was being constructed and advertised to the public, we were told repeatedly that it would be a very different type of conflict from the large-scale ground wars of the last century. I don't think anyone imagined at the time exactly how different it would be. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq occurred within two years. Both of them lead to long-term insugencies; in Afghanistan because of the difficulties of constructing the strong central government the US clearly needed there, in Iraq because the astonishingly fast transition from authoritarian state to near-anarchy gave tensions that had been simmering for decades all the oxygen they needed to burst quite literally into flames.

President Obama came into office in significant part because of his rejection of that heavy-handed approach to anti-terrorism policies. He saw Afghanistan as an unpleasant but necessary conflict, and Iraq as a catastrophic error. His goal was to end Iraq as quickly as was feasible and do enough to stabilize Afghanistan before getting out of there too. He had, to put it mildly, mixed success pursuing those goals. He succeeded in drawing down US combat troops from Iraq, which scarcely two years later was afflicted by the meteoric rise of ISIS. After he increased the US presence in Afghanistan, the military situation ground to an eight-year stalemate that has still not been broken.

Yet, while he disdained and to my knowledge never used the phrase "War on Terror" while in office, Obama was nonetheless very committed to fighting it. That being said, he fundamentally changed the way it was fought. His aversion to the use of conventional military force has been well-documented, and his response was to rely increasingly on drone actions while also enlarging the area in which they were free to operate to countries like Yemen and Somalia. He had in a sense only halfway removed himself from President Bush's policy. Averse to a course that could lead to ground wars at any time, he committed to one that would guarantee a lesser but very real form of war all the time. This form of war has been used increasingly by President Trump, who by all accounts has none of Obama's qualms about the use of force abroad.

The point I am attempting to make is one that has been made many times already, but it is importat to keep sight of it. The United States has now been at war in the Middle East for approacing 16 years without interruption. It is true that every al Qaeda or ISIS leader who is killed decreases the likelihood of American deaths to terrorism. That is a fact. But is it also a fact that every civilian casualty, every airstrike that bends rules of national sovereignty beyond recognition, and every time we don't take world opinion into account as we act, only serves to gift propaganda victories to anti-American and anti-Western groups. Those things also do real damage to local communities in the Middle East, encouraging still more anti-American sentiment.

There comes a point where we have to question the utility of a policy that manages to create more radicals every time it eliminates one. We cannot crush radicalism from the air. We cannot crush radicalism even from the ground. Political problems - and make no mistake terrorism is very much a political problem - do not in general have military solutions. In 16 years, has the Middle East become more stable, or has terrorism become any less of a global issue? Do people feel safer in their beds? Are we more optimistic about the future?

I think the level of ineffectiveness we have seen in countering rising tides of radicalism worldwide, in stark contrast to our very keen and clinical responses to inidivudal potential attacks, is damning for our strategy do date. The question "how will we know when we've won?" is unanswerable for the War on Terror, which as a result demands that it be either abandoned, refined, or continued into the indefinite future. Even beyond that, perpertual war can only serve to make us more of a security state than we have become in the last 16 years. If we don't seriously reevaluate how we're attacking this problem, in another 16 years we'll be having the same discussion.

An Offer They Can't Refuse?

This week, buried under the stories about Syria, Russia, Afghanistan, and a gentleman being brutally removed from an airplane, something quietly extraordinary happened. While interviewing with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump discussed the future of the Affordable Care Act in the wake of his party's stunning failure to repeal it last month. He suggested, almost casually, that he might order the payments to help those unable to afford insurance mandated by the law to be stopped as leverage to force Democrats to "negotiate" on repeal efforts.

Whether such an effort would pass muster for the inevitable court challenges is doubtful, so the practical effect of the policy is going to play second fiddle in this analysis. It should be noted, however, that under portions of the law that would remain in place should Trump make that call, individuals would still be required to purhase insurance or pay a fine. The subsidies are what made this policy reasonable with regard to lower-income consumers who still did not qualify for Medicaid. Simply not paying the subsidies would force those consumers out of the insurance market, eliminating their access to most basic care, and fine them every tax season for their trouble. It is a very direct slap to the face of the lower-middle class.

What I would like to focus on, though, is the simple fact that Trump was willing to make the threat. The ACA repeal effort ultimately failed because a number of Republicans were unwilling to leave the people in their districts who need the subsidies to maintain insurance without any way to afford their coverage. It is not a small thing to take the ability to afford health insurance away from someone. That simple fact was enough to derail what had been the Republican Party's premier policy goal for seven years, even though they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Yet, the President of the United States is so very detached from the day to day concerns of actual people in this country that he is willing to discuss leaving several million people without the ability to afford health care as a pawn to get leverage over his political opposition.

It is said that politics is a game where anything goes. But that isn't entirely true. In a stable society, conventions and respect for how things are done restrain the lengths to which politicians are willing to go for success, as well as the lengths to which the people will tolerate them going. Our political system was set up with the express intent of limiting personal authority and the ability-to-get-ones-own-way as the driving force behind policy. Trump, it seems, has absoluely no personal problem with holding several million people hostage to force the opposition to do as he pleases. That is a problem.

It will be remembered that Trump acceded to the presidency on the back of his claims to work for "the people" and to buck the entire political establishment. The efficacy of that rhetoric is undeniable. What his threat shows vividly is that concern for those people is at most residual for Trump. Even someone who is vehemently opposed to the form of the ACA would recognize that it is immoral to purposefully keep funds from people who need them to afford insurance when they are still mandated to buy it. For the president that concern is overruled by the prospect of acquiring a personal advantage over those who don't like him.

I have said before in this forum, and I truly believe, that what really matters to Trump is Trump. At no point in his presidency to date has that been more apparent. His first major legislative push was an abject failure. Instead of moving on to the next priority, or even considering a different approach to break the stalemate on his signature issue, this is the path he chose to propose; a spiteful suggestion to directly hurt people in an attempt to get his opponents to cave.

His actual words were "I don't want people to get hurt." It would seem that if he didn't want people to get hurt the obvious thing to do would be not to hurt them. But what he said isn't precisely what he meant. He meant his words in the same way a mafia boss would mean them. He isn't saying that he doesn't want bad things to happen to anyone, he's saying that he will make them happen if he doesn't get his way. Maybe in this case he won't follow through on the threat. Maybe he never will. But the unavoidable fact remains that we have a president who thinks in that way. The problems of individual people are just a bargaining chip in his plan to get what he wants.

That makes him different in a fundamental way from even the morally worst individuals who nonetheless feel constrained in public to abide by the rules of decency. We should not be surprised if this approach appears again, on some other issue on some other day, to blackmail his opposition. He may have been legally elected, and he may not yet have committed a technically impeachable offense, but behavior like this makes it more clear every day that Donald Trump is personally unworthy of the office he holds.

Syria

A week ago, the Syrian military used sarin gas to attack Syrians. It is already named among the premier atrocities in a seven-years-and-counting long civil war that has regularly shocked the world with its brutality. Four days ago, President Trump elected to respond by firing 50 tomahawk missiles at the Syrian base where the attack originated. That attack represented a very substantial escalation of American military involvement in Syria, which has not directly engaged with the Assad regime before now. Russia, Iran, and Syria have since released a strongly worded statement promising relatiation for any future strikes. It is unclear whether Trump intends any additional action.

The situation in Syria is impossibly complex. Assad, with Russian backing, ISIS, a competing extremist group called the al-Nusra Front, Kurdish militias, and a number of other disparate groups in rebellion against Assad all control territory in various parts of the country. Finding an appropraite balance of power between even the non-extremist groups in the event that Assad were to fall would be an exceptionally difficult task, as the experience of post-Qaddafi Libya has shown. But many Democrats have joined Republicans in praising the intervention, small and relatively inert thought it was. Why?

The central and by far the most convincing argument for intervention is a moral one. Assad is an autocrat whose people rose against him en masse and who has spent the last seven years using every piece of military technology he posesses to force them into subservience, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. His brutal civil war, aside from facilitating the rise of ISIS, has created an international refugee crisis. The United States, as the primary superpower and world leader with - in principle if not always in practice - a commitment to human rights, therefore ought to have every reason to rally the world in an intervention on behalf of a people being murdered in large numbers and in grotesque ways by their government.

The argument against intervention is far more practical, and in that sense I think it is decisive. There is simply not much good that the United States can accomplish militarily in Syria, except with respect to continuing strikes against ISIS. Nothing short of a ground invasion at this point would serve to dislodge Assad, and doing so would bring us directly into conflict with the Russian military. We can continue to support rebel military groups, but these are so disjointed that victory for them over Assad and his Russian backing is a pipe dream. There was a time, before the situation was so chaotic and before the Russian military was so deeply involved, when a less dramatic form of intervention might have served to oust him. That window of opportunity closed years ago.

In addition, effective intervention in a case like this requires the support and cooperation of regional powers. In the Libya campaign, for example, the Arab League and America's European allies pitched in to a very general effort. Even with that broad support base, the result remains uncertain as rival governments continue to attempt reconciliation with international help. While not as chaotic as it was portrayed during the election campaign, Libya is still in a state of civil war until appropriate compromises can be reached among the two main parties. There is hope, but no guarantee of that happening.

Syria is a much more complicated battleground than Libya is or was. There is nothing approaching regional consensus on the preferred outcome in the way there was for Libya. Egypt is still grappling with the consequences of its own revolution and subsequent coup. Turkey is warily eyeing its restive Kurdish minority and therefore will do nothing that strengthens Kurdish troops, even if those troops are fighting Assad. One of the worst kept secrets in the Middle East is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have financially supported Sunni extremist groups in the region and in Syria as a counterweight to Iran. Israel is in no way upset that several of its historical enemies are now openly fighting each other. It is this bewildering array of competing interests that has paralyzed the capacity of regional powers to respond.

I think, though I might well come to regret holding or expressing this opinion in the future, that Assad's dominance in Syria is a fait accompli. Once ISIS is properly defeated there is no way to keep him from holding power in Syria short of a ground invasion, which would probably mean war with Russia. I am not against intervention in the abstract for a humanitatian cause and with a reasonable probability of success, but there is no such probability here. Unless we are willing to risk a general war to oust Assad, getting him out of Syria is a lost cause for the foreseeable future.

Our focus then, if our concerns are humanitarian, ought to be seeing to the well being of the Syrian people, and in particular its refugees. President Trump's citation of the pitiful child victims of the recent gas attack to justify his response, in the context of his refugee bans and wolf-in-sheep's-clothing campaign rhetoric denigrating those fleeing the war, is an act of staggering hypocrisy and callousness. The missile attack is at bottom nothing more than geopolitical posturing. What's more, it is posturing that is recognized by everyone for what it is, and has actually accomplished nothing of value to anyone.

Representation

Today's post will be a little different. It isn't motivated by a specific policy issue or current event. Instead I would like to examine a piece of common political rhetoric. Even more than in most election years, 2016 was overflowing with rhetoic about "the people," their "will," and "the national interest." Returning power to the people from the shadowy elite was a running campaign theme on both sides. Implicit in that theme is that the government is no longer representative, in some sense, of the governed. But what do we really mean when we say that?

The immediately obvious way to answer that is to say that the government is not making policy in the national interest or according to the will of the public (these are not necessarily equivalent, but nevermind that for now). But how can we measure or understand what those admirable phrases mean? Is the general interest simply the sum of individual interests, or does it have a unique character? How are we to decide between policies that directly hurt some people and benefit others, as essentially every policy must? How do we know what public opinion is about a specific policy, when branding and question formulation can change poll results so reliably?

I could, and many have, dispose of reams of paper and decades of effort trying determine a method of defining the general interest. Personally, I have concluded that there can be no such measure that does not obscure more than it illuminates. The "general interest," unless it is accompanied by a very specific ethical system to decide among competing interests - and which like all ethical systems is subject to vigorous debate - is meaningless. I think it is both simpler and more accurate to say that there are competing interests in society and leave it at that.

That answer, though, doesn't seem to be much of an answer at all. A more interesting way of stating it is that evaluating how "representative" a government is through the policy it creates is not possible. There are simply too many uncertainties in measurement, too many logical problems, and too many conceptual ambiguities.

I would suggest instead that the best way to "measure" representation is to focus less on policy and more on how representatives are chosen. As more people are permitted to vote, as casting that vote becomes easier, as leisure time for voters increases, as the difficulty of mounting a successful challenge for elected office decreases, or as the number of people a given representative must represent is smaller, the odds of the person chosen as a representative being more "like" the people of the district in habit, temperament, and worldview increase.* There is no need to evaluate any specific policy position with polling in this case, because on average the sort of decision such a representative makes will be the sort of decision their consitutents would make, given the chance.

In short, true representation is accomplished procedurally. The remedy for lack of confidence in government and disdain for the political establishment - to the extent that they are not due to external shocks or circumstances - ought then to be sought by making representatives "closer" to the people represented in one or several of the above senses. Representation is not achieved by listening to this or that group of particularly vocal citizens, but by involving people in general much more intimately in the process of selecting representatives.

The reason there is so much discontent with our politics, in my view, is because as the population has changed, our representatives haven't. They are all much wealthier, much whiter, much more protestant (and religious in general), than the populations they represent. That combination has sufficed to alienate nearly everyone. Certainly bad policy decisions have been taken, but calling that the problem is to mistake the symptom for the disease. Across the country, voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and the obscene expense of running for office have taken representatives farther from, not closer to, their people in recent years. If we want to have a truly representative goverment and one worthy of the trust of its people, those trends will have to be reversed.

*I am sure that this list is not exhaustive, but it serves to demonstrate the point.