Staying True

The Oval Office emptied for cleaning

Donald Trump is not President of the United States.  Legally and technically he is, of course.  And O. J. Simpson is legally and technically innocent of murder.  What’s legal and what’s true are not always the same thing.  And it’s not just because Trump failed to win the popular vote.  As ridiculous as the Electoral College is, it is our accepted mechanism for choosing the president, and it did so in keeping with law and tradition. But even though he lacks the democratic legitimacy we demand of every other elected official – even dog-catcher and county judge – that’s only the beginning of what’s missing in our present presidential vacancy.  Things have felt very strange since Inauguration Day, and it’s a feeling of something disordered, something uneasy, and – most strikingly – something lost.  America no longer has a leader. 

American presidents nurture and protect the institutions of American democracy. This one attacks anyone or anything who dares hold him accountable or constrain his power. He calls the media the “enemy of the American people”; he pressures CNN to remove some of its anti-Trump commentators; he accuses the intelligence agencies of acting like those in “Nazi Germany”; he attempts to delegitimize a federal judge (appointed by George W. Bush) by calling him a “so-called judge”, and blames in advance the entire federal judiciary for any terrorist attacks yet to come.  When Congressman John Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther King and was brutalized by racist policemen, criticized Trump, Trump characterized him as “all talk”.   There seems to be no democratic or moral authority he respects.

American presidents make informed decisions, consult with experts and vet policies through appropriate agencies. This one signs amateurish executive orders composed without legal expertise, with no outside consultation of Congress or federal departments, and implements them carelessly, with predictably confusing and chaotic results. He rarely attends national security intelligence briefings, and may not be paying attention even when he does!  He doesn’t read and requires information be brought to him in small, easily digestible bits, with lots of charts and maps.  He believes everything he sees on pro-Trump conservative media like Fox News, or right-wing propaganda sites like Breitbart; and he irresponsibly passes on their stories, including those unsupported by evidence or reason.

American presidents take clear policy positions and stand behind them.  This one changes his positions weekly, daily, hourly. He’s even been all over the map on his signature issue: controlling immigration.  On healthcare, he ran on the promise of repealing Obamacare and replacing it with “something terrific” that would cover more people and cost less. But at one point during the campaign he expressed support for the Obamacare individual mandate, as well as other provisions of the law, such as coverage for those with existing conditions. But once elected he called for abolishing the individual mandate, while inconsistently promising “insurance for everybody”.  And now he has finally spelled out principles constituting the vague outlines of an alternative plan, though hardly a terrific one, since it would cover fewer people at higher cost.  At the same time the White House is failing to endorse a Congressional Republican replacement plan based upon exactly those principles!  And only now, nearing the end of this very long process, has he suddenly discovered what every remotely informed person has known for years: that health care policy is “very complicated”. Was he aware of any aspect of healthcare policy before this earth-shattering insight?  Is he aware now?

American presidents are confident and articulate, able to communicate and persuade. This one spews word salad, and whines about negative coverage.  He exposes his staggering, pathetic need for approval in front of the Washington press corps and the entire world, as in his embarrassing meltdown of a press conference on February 16, humiliating himself in what one commentator called a “seventy-seven-minute emotional striptease”.

American presidents disclose their business dealings by, for instance, publicly releasing their tax returns. This one, during the campaign, claimed his taxes were being audited by the IRS and he could not release them until the audit concluded, though the IRS denied there was any legal constraint on releasing them. He promised that he would make his taxes public after the audit finished, but after the election he (through an aide) simply denied he had any obligation to do so, and, of course, he hasn’t.  He’s denied he has any business connections in Russia, for instance, but such connections are well documented. It’s reasonable to wonder if he doesn’t release his taxes because either they would reveal the depth of his financial entanglements with the corrupt Russian oligarchy, or they would reveal he pays little or no taxes.

Receiving delicate national security information in public

American presidents don’t use their power and connections to profit themselves financially. This one uses the presidency to expand his hotel empire in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia.  He pressures department stores to stock his daughter’s clothing merchandise.  He frequently stays at Mar-a-Lago, his own private club in Florida, which is now charging higher prices for customers hoping to buy access.  American presidents put their business interests in a blind trust, so their positions and policies won’t be influenced by the desire for profit. This one put has put his interests in a trust administered by his own immediate family, doing nothing to eliminate conflict of interest, and probably violating the Constitution’s Emoluments clause.

American presidents protect the democratic process from interference by hostile foreign governments.  This one has done nothing in response to Russian disruption of last year’s election.  His campaign was awash in connections to Russia and its unscrupulous leader Vladimir Putin, and his administration is as well. But multiple American intelligence agencies have concluded that during last year’s election technical experts with Russian intelligence hacked Democratic Party computers, found information there embarrassing to the Democrats, and released it through willing accomplices in Wikileaks, and certain sections of the FBI, with the intent of helping Trump win.  And all that occurred while his advisors kept ongoing communications with Russian intelligence, and while the candidate himself publicly called on the Putin government to release additional damning information they had on his political opponent. He has eased some of the punitive sanctions his predecessor recently applied to Russia in response to their election interference, and may ease other sanctions against them.  Reasonable people can be forgiven for wondering if there was any direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though such collusion would be tantamount to treason.  But these worries aren’t exactly allayed by Trump’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that Russia hacked the election, or to voice even the slightest criticism of Putin or his government (though that may be changing), or to call for an investigation of this mess.

American presidents have a mature understanding of how the world works. This one indulges in the most baseless and laughable conspiracy theories. For years he indulged fever dreams about Obama’s place of birth.  In office, he has claimed that Obama is behind his administration’s constant leaking; that as president Obama personally ordered wiretapping of Trump Tower; that he only lost the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted against him; that anti-Trump protestors are paid Democratic operatives.

American presidents sometimes lie; sadly, it’s a job requirement. But this one lies all the time!  He lies about pathetic things, like the size of the crowds at his inauguration, the size of his Electoral College victory, or how many times he’s been on the cover of Time magazine. And he lies about important things, like how many non-citizens were detained under his travel ban, whether rescinding the ban would allow refugees easy access into the country, whether he offered to send American troops into Mexico or yelled at the Australian Prime Minister.  He’s lied about crime statistics, New York Times subscription rates, cutting spending on military aircraft, Obamacare coverage numbers, etc., etc., etc. Et freakin cetera!

The dishonesty deserves particular consideration, because the dishonesty is at the heart of the Trumpian madness. It’s not just that Trump and his underlings lie promiscuously and indiscriminately. It’s not even that they lie without the slightest compunction or accountability, though that is deplorable.  It’s they have no respect for even the notion of truth; to them, the truth is whatever they want it to be. They just say whatever will help them win. And ultimately it isn’t even winning that matters to them, it’s appearing to win. All the other pathologies flow from this essential dismissal of reality for the sake of appearances.  The disregard for democracy, competence, dependability, consistency, transparency, public-mindedness, patriotism, maturity, the truth – it all comes from one simple position: that no principle can distract from the overwhelming, unquenchable need to appear to be always winning.

But the American president should care about democracy, competence, dependability, consistency, transparency, public-mindedness, patriotism, maturity, and the truth.  Obviously many presidents have failed to sufficiently defend these principles. But most cared deeply about them.  And the ones who didn’t still made great pains to pretend they did. That is, they understood that we, the American people, care deeply about them.  It’s the widespread popular commitment to those principles that has made American democracy work for so long.  And we shouldn’t accept as president a strutting ego-on-stilts who flagrantly flouts and mocks them, who clearly doesn’t give a damn about them.  It’s not clear if he even understands them!  In its open contempt of those values, the Trump presidency represents a clean break from our past. And even if we never have another president like him, he very well may do them permanent damage. 

And that’s why it matters that Trump is incapable of “being presidential”.  When he steps up to the microphone and lies, and whines, and accuses, and equivocates, and rants, and brays like a jackass, he’s betraying what’s best in America. It may seem that his demeanor isn’t important, but it reveals who he is and what’s missing in him. Being presidential doesn’t just mean conforming to outdated notions of propriety or formality. Approaching the job with sobriety and circumspection shows that the president takes seriously the grave responsibility of leading America, of protecting and shepherding our republic through our very real troubles. The president has the power to build and the power to destroy, and the nation and the world are right to expect that power to be in the hands of someone of maturity and responsibility.  That this needs to be said at all reveals the depth of our crisis. 

It has fallen to us, the honest citizenry, to hold our democratic values tight. We take our lives and our children’s lives and our country’s future very seriously, even if Trump’s every utterance proves he does not.  We need to keep our standards high, we need to keep loudly criticizing Trump when he violates those standards, and we need to keep reminding those of our fellow citizens who have momentarily forgotten, just how vital those standards are. That’s how we stay who we are.  A rather strange set of circumstances has landed Trump in his current job, but he is simply not worthy of it, nor worthy of us, and all the Electoral Votes in the world cannot make him so.  And our duty as honest Americans for the next four years is to keep that firmly in mind.

The Devouring

I am ego, hear me roar!

Donald Trump is actually quite a simple person.  All he cares about is his ego.  He knows he’s just so amazingly awesome!  And he has the garish wealth and the hot babes to prove it.  Is there another way to measure a person’s value?  To him the world is only raw material waiting to be consumed, just a collection of objects to be possessed and people to be dominated.  And anyone who declines is an enemy to be crushed, a small person who can only be motivated by petty spite and envy, a loser.  This simplicity is sometimes lost in the blizzard of his abusive and blustering speech, but it’s always his essential motivation, his bottom line.  Everyone must worship him as he worships himself.

And that leads to his defining feature as a public figure: his utter disregard for anything else.  The demands of his ravenous monster-ego are so overwhelming that he literally can’t stop to consider any other principle, including civility, or reason, or truth.  And this gives him a kind of grotesque transparency.  He seems to have no ability to censor himself, to control his impulses, to consider the consequences of his actions.  All that matters is that his ego be sated, which, of course, it never can be.  But his comprehensive irresponsibility also gives him an advantage in any confrontation with critics, since words utterly unconstrained by meaning or consequence are tough weapons to fight against.  It’s hard to argue with someone who doesn’t care about anything but winning.

Let’s consider some of the things he doesn’t he care about.  He quite obviously feels no responsibility to civility.  He crudely denigrates Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, etc.  He brags about how beautiful women are toys created for his pleasure, and how less attractive ones rightly earn his scorn.  Their feelings, their hardships, their dignity – those matter nothing.  Trump has even encouraged violence among his followers.  He doesn’t understand that civility matters because society cannot function if we don’t respect each other, even when we vigorously disagree.  That’s ridiculously obvious, yes.  Well, to you it is.

He feels no responsibility to the Republican Party.  When that tape appeared in which he makes dehumanizing comments about women and brags about sexually assaulting them, party leaders urged him to do everything he could to control the damage.  They begged him – in his own interests and those of down-ballot candidates – to fully apologize, to drop the issue, and to not dredge up similar actions by Bill Clinton.  Instead he doubled down, holding a press conference with Bill’s accusers from the 90’s and before, even giving them seats in the audience at the second debate.  In response, many of those party leaders, notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, have publicly distanced themselves, out of varying degrees of self-interest and moral revulsion.  But Trump’s responses throughout were never in doubt: he went on the crude offensive, first against Bill Clinton, then against those unhappy party bosses, attacking them as weak, pathetic, disloyal non-leaders.  This is an egotism so overwhelming that it can’t even get out of its own way!  A shrewder nominee would have conceded some small amount of stature by being conciliatory with his fellow party members.  But Trump can’t do that, even though it would help him win the presidency.  His narcissism is so short-sighted that it even subverts itself!

And that’s a recurring theme. There was, for instance, absolutely no electoral advantage in deliberately and repeatedly denigrating the Hispanic judge in his fraud trial, or an overweight Hispanic beauty queen from the 1990’s, or the father of a slain Muslim American soldier.  Indeed, in each of these three feuds he came off as bullying a sympathetic figure, and in each case he persisted in his attacks, thereby keeping the story alive in the public mind long after it would otherwise have died.  In each case he was incapable of doing the smart thing: ignoring the criticism and moving on.  And that almost certainly lost him votes with minorities, and probably with moderate whites as well.  But that just wasn’t as important as protecting his vanity.  His ego simply would not let him back down or let it go.

And there’s another recurring theme, his inability to apologize, to consider that he’s done anything wrong.  That is, he feels no responsibility to morality.   Right and wrong are for suckers, they are only distractions from winning.  Consider his leading part in the birther conspiracy.  For years he spread vicious rumors based on flimsy non-evidence that Barack Obama was not born in America, and was therefore unqualified to be president.  He continued to do so long after Obama released his long-form birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii.  And when in this election year the pressure to recant grew too great, he made a mealy-mouthed non-apology in which he falsely blamed the 2008 Hillary campaign for starting the rumors and took credit for finally laying them to rest.  He took no responsibility for the damage he had done to race relations and to our political discourse more broadly.  He just blithely acted as if none of that had ever happened.

And this may be the worst of all: he feels no responsibility to the truth.  To Trump words need not correspond to reality; they’re only tools for achieving whatever his goal is at that moment (and it’s ultimately always the one goal).  Consider his remarks last August in which he called Obama and Hillary “founders” of ISIS.  When interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who understood it made no sense to take Trump’s bizarre locution at face value, tried to prompt him to be a little more circumspect in his word choice:

Hewitt: Last night, you said the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.

Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.

Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. The way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, okay?

He doesn’t care.  And why should he care about trivialities like meaning? He casually contradicts what he said last month, or yesterday, or five minutes ago, or even earlier in the same sentence.  He contains multitudes!  He emits his unacquainted-with-reality verbiage and smirks at the camera defiantly, as if sneering at the truth, “You can’t make me care.”

We could go on like this all day and all night and all day and all night tomorrow.  Consider: By telling Hillary he will put her in jail if he’s elected, and by inviting an unfriendly foreign despot to interfere in the election, he shows he doesn’t care about democracy. By repeatedly promoting false crime statistics that wildly overstate black-on-white violence he shows he doesn’t care about racial harmony.  By celebrating waterboarding for its punitive value, and advocating the summary killing of the innocent wives and children of terrorists, he shows he doesn’t care about humanitarianism or justice.  By pre-emptively warning that he can only lose if the Democrats cheat, he shows he doesn’t care about public trust.  By refusing to prepare for the debates, and by stubbornly maintaining ignorance on even the most basic subjects, he shows he doesn’t care about expertise or competence.  Everything he says and does shows he feels no respect or responsibility for anything.

Except maybe the forgotten white working class, and their understanding of America. Trump at times seems to genuinely care about these people and the way conservative economic dogma and liberal cultural disdain have wounded them.  He sees them the way they see themselves, as hard-working people fighting a system that’s working against them, and in his dismissal of all the normal considerations of politics he is their defiance, and their denial.  His supporters are mostly good people wronged by their own elites, and in those moments when he champions them he rises a little above his own squalid vanity.  He comforts them with the same fairy tale he tells himself, that his amazing awesomeness will conquer all.  He extends to them his own irresponsibility, licensing their bitter refusal to face up to the realities of modern America, and to their part in our continuing racial discord.  His ego devours them, too!  And when push comes to shove and his concern for them conflicts with the demands of that implacable ego, he casually hurts their cause by undermining his own electoral chances.  Ultimately he doesn’t really care about them, at least not enough to deserve their support.

And in the end he doesn’t even really care about being president.  Does anyone actually believe he’d like to hold all that responsibility?  He would love the power and adulation, of course.  But he would be incapable of evaluating heavy decisions, or making concessions to unfriendly realities, or controlling his impulses when his buttons are pushed.  That is, he can’t really be the President, and he knows it.  He seems to have decided to run for president partly to avenge Obama’s insults against him over his birther-ism, maybe even on a dare.  If his ego trumps even his own self-interest, is there any reason to think it won’t trump American interests as well?  This is not someone who should be let within a hundred miles of the presidency.

Obviously, anyone whose policy preferences run conservative would find it hard or impossible to vote for Hillary, even in the grim face of Trump’s blithering unfitness.  On policy, Hillary is a fairly standard professional-class liberal, with all the knee-jerk cosmopolitanism, acquiescence to inequality, and condescension toward working whites that that implies.  She’s more slippery than the average politician, but that makes her less so than a constant dissembler like Trump, just as being more corrupt than the typical politician makes her less corrupt than a dirty Manhattan real-estate developer.  And she is capable of controlling herself, of considering the consequences of her actions, of understanding her own motivations, of learning and growing, of weighing multiple considerations, of compromise, of conciliation, and of responsibility.  She is an adult; he is a screaming baby.  The choice for an honest conservative must be hard, and that conservative can only choose Trump over Hillary if he believes her policies will be so harmful to the country that they out-weigh Trump’s monumental and destructive foolishness, immaturity and irresponsibility.  And that’s a hard argument to make.

It’s not clear how Trump became the genuinely toxic character he is.  It seems likely he was born with narcissist tendencies and 70 years of yes-man sycophancy and moneyed unaccountability have drilled that narcissism deep down into the bedrock of his psyche.  But he is, in a strange way, to be pitied, like a compulsive psychopath, or a Kardashian.  He’s the bellhop of the world’s most superficial and tyrannical ego.  He’s a lost little boy at the mercy of a reality-devouring monster, and whatever was once human or touching about him is long, long gone.  There is no hope for the little Donald, his ruthless ego enslaves him and ruins him.  But it’s quite easy to keep it from ruining us.  Don’t vote for it.

Stupidity, Dishonesty and Cowardice

"I cannot tell a lie"

Another video has surfaced of Jonathan Gruber saying cringe-worthy things about Obamacare.  Gruber is an MIT economist and health care expert who worked as a number cruncher for the White House during the push to enact Obamacare.  Here’s what he said last year regarding the way political pressures distorted the legislative process:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.

In terms of risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay, lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get anything to pass.

Conservatives are up in arms, particularly over the “stupidity” part, convinced that Gruber’s comments expose the dirty truth of modern liberalism:  It’s a conspiracy of snooty technocrats confident their superior brains and sociological analyses authorize them to control the everyday lives of the smelly masses, the rednecks and rubes too foolish to make the right choices, too stupid to know what’s good for them.

But let’s ignore that ridiculous argument and consider what Gruber was actually saying: that for any legislation to pass it must be politically presentable, it must not afford its opponents an easy target. And that applies to Obamacare in two ways.  First, Democrats could not allow the individual mandate to be seen – by the CBO or the public – as a tax.  Second, the essence of Obamacare is a transfer of health insurance dollars from the young, rich and healthy to the old, poor and sick; the public would never have allowed such governmental redistribution, so it had to be disguised.  And Gruber was also saying that it was easy to slip those two deceptions past an American public that doesn’t closely follow healthcare policy debates.  Charles Krauthammer charges that, “in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive.”  Is he wrong?

It’s true, as Brian Beutler protests, that Obamacare’s legislative process was more transparent than most (compared to say Bush’s 2003 Medicare expansion or the run up to the Iraq War).  And it’s true, as Neil Irwin concedes, that certain aspects of the law itself (not the process) were deliberately obscured; and that is a “commonplace” tactic that's been employed by both parties on many occasions.  So who’s responsible for the fact that the American public does not really understand Obamacare?  Andrew Sullivan blames liberals and the administration for not making a better and clearer case for the law.  But many pundits, such as Paul Krugman, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait, have been explaining it clearly for years.  Gruber himself even wrote a comic book to make it easily understandable!  And conservatives, of course, have invested an enormous about of time and energy lying about the very law they now accuse of deceit and deception.  The national press did a bad job of covering all this, as they always do, by focusing on optics and neglecting substance.  But if any individual wanted to know more about the law, they could have quickly and easily done so – as long as they turned off Fox News.  The one actual, explicit lie used to sell Obamacare was the president’s promise that, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  He knew it was a lie when he said it, but he also knew that admitting that 7 or 8 million people would have their policies regulated away – even though they’d be replaced with better ones – might have put the whole law in jeopardy.  The entire structure of American political discourse worked against an honest assessment of the law.

But let’s make the real confession.  There is one fundamental lie liberals have made and continue to make about Obamacare, and it’s a lie of omission.  The components, the details, the numbers have been endlessly examined, analyzed and debated.  But the real meaning of the law has, for the most part, not been adequately addressed.  What is its deeper significance?  What is it really about?  Redistribution.  Both Gruber’s confession and conservative complaints really boil down to this one point: Obamacare severs the connection between income and healthcare coverage; it indirectly redistributes money from the rich, young and healthy to the poor, old and sick.  The “indirectly” in that last sentence is what the current controversy is really about.  Gruber both regrets the necessity of that indirection and gloats over its devious utility.  And that gloating gives conservatives cover to deplore its dishonesty, though in reality they only lament its effectiveness.

But should we deplore its dishonesty?  Only if we care about American democracy.  Only if we wish it to be more rational and effective.  Sullivan puts it nicely:

If someone were willing to explain the ACA in simple, clear and honest terms, I think most Americans would back it . . . I refuse to believe that a democracy has to operate this way for change to occur. Gruber’s arrogance and condescension are just meta-phenomena of this deeper dysfunction. Someone needs to treat Americans as adults again before this democracy can regain the credibility it so desperately needs to endure.

But is Sullivan right that Obamacare could have withstood a thoroughly candid presentation?  Would a majority of Americans have supported it, even knowing the governmental redistribution that lay at its heart?  The answer is not clear, but I think probably not.  The idea of redistribution, explicitly promoted, would probably have been too unnerving.

We see that the distrust of Obamacare is primarily ideological.  American instincts are generally conservative: they fear centralized authority, they mistrust regulation, they insist that each person is the master of his own fate.  But American instincts constantly conflict with American interests.  Modern society would not be livable without the welfare and regulatory state that liberals have created and conservatives threaten, and Americans affirm that every time they deposit their social security checks and present their Medicare cards.  American conservatism evaporates at the door of the unemployment office.  Put more prosaically, the American people are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal, as has been noted many times.

That’s the real reason public policy is often deceptive.  Social Security pretends to give you back the money you paid in, but it actually pays more, relative to income, to those who made less.  So liberal laws must be dressed up in conservative clothing.  Many liberals, possibly including Obama himself, would have preferred single payer healthcare but considered it politically unpalatable, so they offered a market-friendly program cooked up in a right-wing think tank and instituted by a Republican governor.  Many Americans dislike Obamacare (some hate it for the evil Satanic, Islamic, Communist conspiracy it is!) while they like most Obamacare provisions.  Kentuckians, for example, hate Obamacare but love Kynect, their state’s implementation of the Obamacare exchange; but they returned to the Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, who has explicitly vowed to repeal Obamacare yet who refused to condemn Kynect when cornered in front of a Kentucky audience!  In the last election people all over the country voted for liberal policies like marijuana liberalization and minimum wage increases while voting into office conservatives staunchly opposed to those very policies.  Huh?

In effect, Americans want to be lied to.  They want it both ways: to enjoy their liberal dessert while believing it’s sturdy conservative fare.  This is the real deception at the core of this debate: the American people are kidding themselves.  They’re not stupid, as Gruber and some liberals believe, nor are they solid conservatives.  They’re inconsistent, and unaware of it.  And that encourages politicians and pundits to see what they want to see.  Conservative operatives dream of an America utterly given over to its deepest conservative instincts, but they’re woken from the dream by picketers angrily cursing any cuts to Medicare.  And liberals can never understand why Americans don’t follow them out of the laissez-faire wilderness into the social democratic Promised Land.  A consummate seduction of the American public eludes them both, though conservatives whisper sweet poetry and liberals offer alluring gifts.

But you don’t practice politics with the public you wish you had.  Ultimately, Americans want to be told the truth.  And they deserve the truth.  Liberals need to come clean.  The Democratic Party is the party of redistribution, and it should damn well act like it!  That’s not socialism or authoritarianism – conservative paranoia to the contrary – it’s the pragmatic amelioration of the worst inequities of modern society.  An economy that provides more and more to those at the top but demands more and more from everyone else does not satisfy the demands of democracy and justice.  Unfair economics is as destructive to democracy as dishonest politics.  If liberalism is not about justice for working people then it becomes little more than a loose confederation of identity groups, fighting over the scraps of a long gone shared prosperity.  It abdicates its claim to universalism, it loses its fire and its soul.  And so it has.

Gruber thought he bravely spoke the truth of American politics, that the people are so stupid that good policy must be deceitful policy.  But Gruber’s story is really one of liberal cowardice.  And there’s so much of our current misfortune that would be greatly improved with just a little more liberal courage.  Human nature being what it is, game-playing cannot be removed from politics.  But why can’t liberals successfully balance cunning and conviction?  And can they do the ceaseless, thankless work of educating the public about what they stand for and why?  And most importantly, can they learn to trust the people again?  The people are not stupid, they have as many practical instincts as conservative ones; they are amenable to prudential, fair, liberal policy that would benefit them and strengthen the country.  They’re merely waiting for leadership that both works for them and respects them.  Conservatism, in its modern incarnation as plutocratic propaganda factory, does neither.  Timid liberalism can only do the former.  Only confident and candid liberalism can do both.