Worst. Referendum. Ever.

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 87 Comments

Who wouldn’t trust that smile?

Ohio voters will decide today whether to approve Issue 3, an amendment to their state constitution, via referendum, which would legalize marijuana in the state. Sounds great right?

Get ready to vomit on your keyboard.

Along with legalization, Issue 3 would create a marijuana monopoly owned by the investment consortium that sponsored and funded the effort. That’s right kids; a company was formed for the sole purpose of changing Ohio law in a way that would net the company millions of dollars through a legislative monopoly. And they even have their own adorable mascot, Buddie.

Here’s how democracy works now. A political consultant with experience on referendums hatched a brilliant money-making venture. He formed a consortium. Members could buy in for $2m. They raised about $40m. The money would fund a political campaign to legalize marijuana in Ohio and create a monopoly on its cultivation and distribution. The investors in the consortium would own the resulting monopoly.

Capitalism meets Democracy in a bar and slips her a roofie. He bans her from getting an abortion, and out comes something magical. It’s the School House Rock Episode rejected by censors.

A ludicrously simple step could have prevented this hostage taking exercise. Federal authorities could recognize the ridiculousness of our long, bloody campaign to crack down on cultural subversion by jazz musicians, hippies, and snow boarders. With one move by Congress, we could move marijuana out of the FDA’s Schedule 1, a position it shares at the highest level of danger with heroin. It could continue to be regulated at some level, perhaps available only through pharmacies, but we could stop treating it like nuclear waste.

Or we could wait for political opportunists to make the most possible money off the situation, before eventually succumbing to the inevitable. Looks like we are leaning toward the latter.

Tagged with: issue 3, legalization, marijuana, ohio
Posted in Drug War

The American Prime Minister

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 111 Comments

The Politics of Crazy

One of Newt Gingrich’s first moves after gaining control of the House in 1994 was to cut off funding for Congressional caucuses or “Legislative Service Organizations” (LSO’s). News reports at the time focused on the impact this would have on Democratic groups like the Congressional Black Caucus and the Womens’ Caucus, but hindsight reveals a different angle. Of far more concern to Gingrich was the Republican Study Group, the powerful sub-partisan institution which had helped hand him the speaker’s gavel. After the revolution, an ally might become a rival.

Two decades later the unintended consequences of that and many other moves by the Gingrich Congress shaped the rise of Rep. Paul Ryan to House Speaker. Last week, America was introduced to its first European-style Prime Minister. For the first time, a major US political party was forced to enter into coalition with a junior partner. Gingrich’s great fear was realized when an offspring of the RSC ousted and replaced a sitting House Speaker.

A passage in The Politics of Crazy describes the devolutionary forces that are weakening our central political institutions. As those forces grow more and more potent, we can expect to see smaller, sub-partisan organizations assert themselves inside each party in a development that mimics European parliamentary politics.

What makes the rise of Paul Ryan unique is the way a sub-partisan group, in this case the Freedom Caucus, acted independently of the political party under which its members are elected. Southern conservatives once exercised a similar kind of power in Democratic Congressional politics, but they generally only acted as a bloc on racial matters. They were identifiable only on geographic terms, did not embrace an independent institution of their own, and only united on a narrow template of issues.

The Freedom Caucus is distinct from other Congressional subgroups in its willingness to openly defy party discipline not only on a single issue, but on a question of party authority. And not merely in a personal conflict between or among members, but in open rivalry between a political party and a named, organized sub-entity with its own funding and membership. Negotiations like this are common in European Parliaments, where leadership questions are settled by agreements among parties. It is hard to find any precedent for this scenario in the US Congress.

There is reason to hope that the rise of Paul Ryan will open the door to a more parliamentary system. AEI scholars Norm Ornstein and and Thomas Mann urged similar adaptions in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. Though the structure of our political system, with single-member districts and winner-take-all elections blocks the emergence of multiple parties, nothing prevents candidates from aligning themselves under sub-headings. The Tea Party was the first major step in this direction, with members openly challenging and even defeating non-Tea Party candidate of the same political party in primaries. This development might encourage these subgroups to operate more openly all over the spectrum.

Whether this development will make Congress more or less representative of public opinion remains to be seen. It is possible that these new groups, by weakening the two parties, may actually increase the influence of private money and weaken democratic engagement. What makes this evolution difficult is the structure of our Constitution.

Authors of our Constitution were limited in their high-minded ambitions by one frustrating reality. Their project could not hope to survive and take root unless it could preserve, at least for a time, an awkward and untenable alliance. Northern states dedicated to a proto-capitalist merchant economy must somehow exist under a common legal framework with a violently regressive collection of plantation settlements committed to an older form of war capitalism.

Those demands led to the creation of a permanently weak central government, gridlocked by design. As described at some length by Francis Fukuyama in Political Order and Political Decay, it takes far more than popular will to affect policy changes in the US. Our structure created what he calls a state of “courts and parties,” in which veto power is wielded by innumerable official and unofficial actors. This leads to an under-developed executive power, permanently subordinate to interest groups and incapable of carrying out the public will.

Thanks to this compromise the US has always suffered from an ineffective, needlessly expensive political environment, maimed by its creators. A Constitution engineered to make adaptation extremely difficult meant Americans built a modern democracy on the back of a relatively poor, unusually corrupt government compared to its peers that emerged in Europe. Race and slavery shaped our destiny right from the beginning. These origins explain why no one in America displays a more fanatical, quasi-religious reverence toward our Constitution than Southern conservatives.

About 150 years behind our European colleagues, evolutionary demands are finally pushing us toward a more parliamentary arrangement, one that could incorporate a broader range of public sentiment farther up the political hierarchy. Our Constitution makes this very difficult, but the demands of adaptation eventually either break their obstacles, or kill off a species.

Unfortunately, these parliamentary coalitions are, at their birth, taking on some of the darkest traits of our existing system. Those traits can be seen in the strange consequences of Gingrich’s 1994 purge of the LSO’s.

What Gingrich and others hated about the LSO’s was the way they used public money to empower dissident voices inside Congress. Rep. Dick Armey’s statement dismissing the LSO’s foreshadowed an ugly trend to come: “If you want money for your hobby, get it from someplace else.” That’s just what they did

The Republican Study Group bounced back immediately, now with new funding sources outside of Congress. Other LSO’s with less financial appeal did not fare so well. As matters played out, Gingrich’s move failed to stifle dissident voices; it merely introduced them to market forces. In a dynamic described on a larger scale in The Politics of Crazy, capitalization of government meant groups popular with wealthy donors continued to grow and thrive, even more than before. Those that offered little financial appeal were not so successful.

Money is more influential in Congressional caucuses now than it was before Gingrich’s move. Dependent on outside money for their operation, they are also more closely aligned with interests outside Congress and the electoral process. Look closely at the priorities of the Freedom Caucus, our first proto-parliamentary organization and of the Tea Party from which they emerged, and this challenge becomes clear.

You can’t un-ring a bell. For the first time ever a collection of Congressional back-benchers has deposed a Speaker of the House by building a discrete, sub-partisan coalition. The sense of authority that once hung over the Speaker’s office has blown away. We have met our first Prime Minister. There is no way to stop this dynamic from expanding.

As our political parties continue to decline the power and sophistication of these sub-partisan groups will grow. Gingrich’s move twenty years ago to cut off caucus funding means that their growth will be fueled entirely by big-money private donations. Will a more Parliamentary style of government in Congress make the body more representative of popular will, or will it merely introduce new avenues of special interest obstruction? A close look at our first sub-partisan venture suggests a difficult path ahead toward parliamentary democracy in America.

Tagged with: congress, constitution, francis fukuyama, freedom caucus, norm ornstein, paul ryan, politics of crazy, prime minister, speaker of the house, thomas mann
Posted in congress, Politics of Crazy

A Portrait of Modern Racism

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 103 Comments

Huddled in the store’s back office, the employees tried to avoid being seen by the men who loomed outside. They were ready for this situation. A suspicious call earlier in the day inquiring about the store’s opening hours set the jewelry store workers on edge. Having alerted the police, they waited for help to arrive.

When police arrived on the scene they confronted the thugs and uncovered the plot. John Henson, a star forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, had arrived with three friends for what he saw as a major event in his life. Having just completed a $40m contract, Henson was planning to purchase a Rolex watch. He had been perplexed to find the store closed yet again, despite having called ahead to check its hours.

In America, you may get rich, but you’ll always be a…

There’s no denying that white America has come a long way over the past fifty years, shedding many of the most overt and violent elements of our deeply embedded race culture. Glossed over in that dramatic process are hardened relics of hostility and fear with origins so old that their rationale is lost to history. They remain cemented into our foundations, inspiring a bizarre white psychosis that still emerges to shape the life experiences of those subjected to it.

John Henson’s experience two weeks ago encapsulates what those achievements mean and what challenges still remain. If you want to know what American racism looks like in the 21^st century, this may be the best place to start.

What makes this story so accessible is its banality. No guns, no screeching tires, no chase. There’s none of the lurid violence of a recorded beating. And it didn’t happen in the South. Henson’s experience at a jewelry store in suburban Milwaukee is important because it is so ordinary. This is how the machinery of white cultural supremacy operates on a routine basis.

A shop worker got a phone call from a black man who planned to come to the store. That shop worker reached the unremarkable racist conclusion that a black man (she could tell from the voice) would only visit her store for one reason. Repeat after me, “you know how those people are…”

She took the precaution of warning the police. Then when the frightening figures arrived, she did what her racial programming demanded – she hid and waited for law enforcement to restrain the deadly impulses of ‘those people.’

Here’s what she said to the 911 operator:

I don’t want them to see me out there. We’re pretending like we’re closed. They’re looking in the window. They’re just kind of pacing back and forth. I don’t feel comfortable letting them in. I just really don’t at all.

Sometimes this cycle ends with a dead black man. More often it leads to humiliation or threats. On the aggregate it feeds a kind of organized extortion as African-Americans are forced by a shadow hand out of common channels of commerce into markets that are little regulated, built for exploitation.

The same silent unacknowledged dynamics that might insert a police officer between a black millionaire and a Rolex shunt black borrowers into riskier, more exploitative lending environments, sort black-sounding names to the bottom of the resume stack, and block black entrepreneurs from access to lucrative capital markets. African-Americans can never assume that they are not inspiring fear or hostility (the same thing, really) in the people around them.

Most important of all in this scenario is the “innocence” of the store clerk. In the truest possible sense, that store clerk intended no one any harm. As she huddled, frightened, in the store office, she was possessed by a genuine fear of danger. Ask her and she would probably explain that she has “lots of black friends” and an absence of any racist bones anywhere in her wholesome frame. White fear is a blanket of absolution.

Her nasty racist assumptions could have gotten someone killed, as happened to John Crawford III and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and countless others. Yet no one is to blame. There are no racists in America. When these confrontations with racism turn deadly and are captured on camera, we are treated to a cascade of trolling concern over “black on black” crime. That term becomes our code, used to evoke the eternal absolution for racism, “you know how those people are.”

No matter how absurd, how ignorant, how malicious, White Fear is always a legitimate ground for violence against blacks. Young black men carry an implied burden of proof that they are not dangerous. Their window of proof sometimes opens only for a few seconds before closing forever.

On a more mundane level across endless small interactions like the Milwaukee incident, the same racist assumptions push their targets toward a galaxy of negative outcomes, big and small. Like a million invisible hands on a tug-of-war rope, the programming that clerk followed drags black Americans toward otherwise unexplainable outcomes.

And she is blameless. And we are blameless. This is how racism continues to impoverish whole communities, destroy lives, and kill in an America without any racists. This is why your aging parents passionately hate President Obama without being able to describe any justifications grounded on facts. Racism is the most universally potent cultural force in American life that allegedly doesn’t exist. As is doesn’t exist, it is beyond accountability.

Progress is real, and it is present in this story. Before 1950 black players were not allowed in pro-basketball. Henson not only plays, but he has become wealthy doing it. Without that progress this story would not have happened, at least not in this way.

For those who want to see a wealthier, freer America, Henson’s trip to the jewelry story is a capsule of our hopes and frustrations. What lies ahead for us may actually be more difficult than the long challenge of dismantling Jim Crow.

There may be no legislation or army that can perform this duty for us. The largest obstacles to progress in the black community are hidden deep in the souls of the white folks who surround and outnumber them. They are relics left behind that distort our vision and pervert our intentions. As the British still wrestle with ghosts of class we remain blinded by race.

Only self-reflection can correct our distorted vision, but that is painful. Time may bring us some relief, as each new generation seems to have incrementally less racist programming than the last. However, the time that white Americans demand to work out their issues is little comfort for those who must stand outside a locked door waiting.

Eddie Murphy discovers what life is like as a white man.

Tagged with: john henson, milwaukee, milwaukee bucks, racism, rolex
Posted in Civil Rights, Race

GOP AWOL in Presidential ground game

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 148 Comments

Perhaps at some point during the early stages of this campaign for the GOP Presidential nomination you found yourself wondering whether any of these yahoos are actually serious. Are they just selling a book or supporting their TV show?

A previous post outlined a unique problem for this field – none of the candidates has sought the nomination before and, as a consequence, none of them has built an organization capable of supporting a national campaign. This is a particularly pressing problem if Donald Trump manages to lead in the primaries, since he will likely be unable to secure the pool of convention delegates that a potential victory would ordinarily yield.

Now we can start to see the outline of this problem on the ground. With about eight weeks left to secure signatures to land on the Illinois GOP primary ballot, only three Presidential campaigns have even started. Bush, Kasich and Rubio each have committed delegates in the process of collecting signatures, though Rubio still lacks a complete slate.

Remember, the primaries are merely a gateway to the nomination. The party’s nominee is not selected in a primary. They are selected at the national convention. Candidates who fail to recruit delegates face a very difficult road to the nomination, regardless of how well they poll in the primaries.

Interesting times.

Tagged with: election 2016
Posted in Election 2016

A 4th Era of Capitalism

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 109 Comments

A century ago in 1916, after decades of deadly protests, union railroad workers won the right to an eight-hour a day, six-day work week. Other workers would not earn the same rights until 1933.

The latest trend in corporate management today is unlimited vacation time. Employees at Netflix, where the concept was made famous, take on average almost five weeks a year. The world is changing.

Capitalism evolves. That evolution is beginning to take us in some strange directions. A vastly freer, wealthier, and better informed world is putting new pressures on governments and businesses. As governments struggle to adapt, corporations are taking on a social role that few would have imagined for them in the past.

A new era of capitalism may see businesses behaving less like rapacious machines and more like other social institutions. Our continuing devolution of power away from traditional institutions is creating an odd and awkward market pressure on businesses to operate under a broader, smarter balance sheet. We may be entering an era of social capitalism, in which ruthless, narrow-minded profit-optimization simply fails to compete successfully in the marketplace.

Defining the characteristics of an era is an imprecise business, like trying to attach a personality to a generation. Looking back at the interactions between business and politics over time, it is possible to see an outline of changing interests. Those changes are often punctuated by wider historical forces, making it possible to describe fairly discreet periods in which one set of traits were particularly dominant. Using this approach we can roughly describe three historical eras of capitalism and perhaps perceive the emergence today of a fourth.

War Capitalism

War capitalism was an economic order built on the violent expropriation of land and labor to secure newly valuable commodities. This economic order fed the development of the next by tearing down the pillars of feudalism and creating conditions in which mechanical production methods could begin to emerge. By disrupting a long-established political and economic order that had squashed previous efforts at technological development, war capitalism opened a door to the industrial age.

Industrial Capitalism

Out of the new commodity surpluses and political upheaval rendered by war capitalism emerged industrial capitalism. This is the form of capitalism we most associate with the term “capitalism” itself, as industrial capitalism produced Karl Marx and the academic field of Economics.

Industrial capitalism is defined by the use of machines on a mass scale to convert raw materials into products. Where the most valuable output under war capitalism was still commodities, the most valuable capital was still land, and the labor force was mostly enslaved, industrial capitalism changed the equation in ways that had serious political impact.

Under industrial capitalism the most valuable outputs were consumer goods and, eventually, other machines. The most valuable capital was machinery. Labor was not bound to any particular producer, and we began to see the emergence not only of skilled labor, but of a very small tier of engineering labor with the rare potential to become capital owners in their own right.

For our purposes the most important factor distinguishing the industrial age from the brutality of war capitalism is the demand for a relatively more skilled, disciplined work force, and the need to divorce capital owners from a requirement to permanently support and maintain that labor force. Our memories of that era are marked by reference to cruel working conditions, but that only becomes apparent with a backward-looking view. Compared to war capitalism, common laborers experienced a degree a power that had never before been seen.

Industrial demands fed the growth of the activist nation-state. Trade protections, education, transportation infrastructure and other demands necessary for the growth of large business enterprises could only be delivered by a strong state. That demand fed the central conflict of the industrial age, a power struggle between laborers and capital owners over control of that state.

Building a political entity with the requisite size and power to meet industrial demands strained the legitimacy of hereditary states. Delivering the broader legitimacy needed to maintain the strong state that capital owners wanted, simultaneously eroded the political power of capital owners. This cycle set up near-constant internal conflict between an increasingly powerful labor pool and capital owners.

Most of US history, and in fact the US Constitution itself, is shaped by the need to maintain both of the earliest forms of capitalism inside the same political union. By the end of the 18^th century Northern states had already begun their industrial development while the South remained committed to war capitalism. Political distortions that rose from that complex collection of tensions have never been fully reconciled.

Knowledge Capitalism

Rising demand for skilled labor, and especially skilled engineers led capital owners to sponsor the development of mass education and technological advance. By the second half of the 20^th century in the US an entirely new category of capital enterprise had emerged in which the firm’s most valuable capital was information.

Perhaps the earliest example, born deep in the Industrial Age, was General Electric. By the 1950’s companies like IBM, HP, Walt Disney, Texas Instruments and Hughes Aviation had upended the older labor/capital relationship. These new firms enjoyed massive profit margins by leveraging creative capital.

Sometimes their products were tangible, but their capital pool was based largely on human talent. Labor working in these firms enjoyed material rewards beyond anything workers had earned before. With that wealth and importance came mass political power, exercised with a quality and information level that had never before been achieved. Though democracies had existed in the past, real political power had never been so broadly distributed in previous civilizations.

More importantly, these new firms would finally sever the ancient relationship between wealth and land. By doing so, firms engaged in knowledge capitalism became uniquely global in a way that had been impossible before. Where capital had helped to build the nation state in previous eras, now it was beginning to dismantle state power. With a new working class more powerful and wealthy than any that had previously existed, the mass demand for powerful nation-states began to weaken.

The regulatory state, set up to satisfy the needs of an industrial labor force, is at constant tension with the disruptive tendencies of capitalism, accelerated to a blur by the growth of technology. Those with sunken investments in old, antiquated capital often leverage the regulatory state which they once so loathed to protect their ability to collect rents from capital whose value would otherwise be depleted by competition with technology. In knowledge capitalism a large portion of the former working class is now fiercely at odds with the big government infrastructure their parents and grandparents helped to create.

While knowledge capitalism, which continues to dominate life in the US today, introduces better working conditions than industrial laborers dared imagine, it suffers from a disturbing flaw. A global trade in creative capital has a bent toward fantastically unequal outcomes. While rhetoric has focused on the 1%, the real disruption in knowledge capitalism is the way it has sheared away the old middle class political consensus achieved in the industrial era.

There’s nothing new about a few hundred families achieving extraordinary wealth. The political problem undermining knowledge capitalism is the way it has massively enriched the top quarter or so of the former middle class, aligning their lifestyles and interests much more closely with the traditional rich rather than the remaining working class. It was a middle class ideology that brought stability to industrial capitalism. That ideology no longer makes sense under knowledge capitalism, but it has not been replaced. Tensions rising from an anachronistic understanding of the role of the state are perhaps giving rise to a new era of capitalism.

Social Capitalism?

We may be experiencing a new era in business and capital development. Over the past thirty years, how many of the most pressing social problems in our world have been solved by political action? How many have been solved by corporations?

What has been the role of corporations in responding to climate change, AIDS, racial injustice, women’s rights, mass education, access to water, food, housing or health care? America’s largest ever reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was achieved thanks to the fracking boom of the past decade. Our next great step in carbon reduction is coming from solar technology and electric vehicles developed by Silicon Valley firms.

An older stereotype of the corporate bully seemed to be confirmed recently when a wealthy hedge fund manager bought the rights to a critical AIDS drugs and hiked its price. Within a week a competitor emerged charging $1 per dose.

Social capitalism is an economic order in which social and political forces come together to cause market transactions to more competently incorporate formerly “external” costs. Industrial capitalists paid no price for polluting a river or destroying a forest. Under social capitalism, an increasingly equal distribution of power across a society provides methods to force those costs to be factored into market mechanisms. Under social capitalism, the division between labor and capital blurs to near-irrelevance. Meanwhile, an expanded commercialization of nearly every valuable resource leads to a sort of “commodification of everything.”

A strange thing happened earlier this year when the State of Indiana tried to legitimize anti-gay discrimination in the marketplace. One big tech company, Salesforce.com, immediately stood up against the move, triggering a cascade of similar actions from other tech companies. Indiana’s political leadership was so blindsided by this unprecedented move that it reversed course within weeks. Understanding why a tech company would do this while industrial companies were mostly silent helps explain the meaning and importance of social capitalism.

Salesforce had nothing to gain from this move in terms of its appeal to customers, access to capital, or direct profit impact. Here’s what Salesforce’s CEO said about the move:

Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination.

That statement identifies the hinge on which social capitalism turns – the power of employees. Understanding what drives the relatively more humane and responsible behavior of corporations under social capitalism means recognizing the massive devolution of power from capital owners to employees.

Salesforce took that move because it could not tolerate a situation in which its employees might be mistreated on the job. They could not tolerate that situation, because they cannot afford to lose an employee. Under war capitalism, labor was performed by slaves. Under industrial capitalism labor was performed by barely skilled, poorly paid, largely interchangeable individuals who could be disposed of and replaced by a broken cog. Under knowledge capitalism employees began to emerge as a resource in their own right, with their contributions converted into capital which they might accumulate on their own. Under social capitalism that increased economic heft is converted into political influence. That political influence finally begins to reshape the economic climate so that formerly external costs in form of pollution, violence, discrimination, and resource destruction finally find their way onto the corporate balance sheet, making businesses begin to function like political partners rather than rivals of labor.

What will be the greatest weakness of social capitalism? A relentless libertarian ethic may demolish critical social institutions. Social capitalism places a remarkable new premium on creativity, but it dangerously devalues every other value from family to religion to public service. It is early, but it appears that by splitting up the middle class more or less finally, it threatens to create a dangerous social disruption.

Social capitalism is in some ways fairer than previous forms of capitalism. However, in driving inequality much deeper into our society, it is tearing away many of the older social bonds we once relied on to soften economic outcomes. Not everyone gets to participate in social capitalism. Its benefits flow disproportionately toward those who actually work for information-driven firms. That’s a large minority, but still a minority. As technology breeds advanced automation, that minority is likely to shrink.

The destruction of older forms of social capital is weakening communities and ultimately shaking the foundations of the democratic nation-state. The ultimately question seems to be this: will the emergence of the social capital business model alleviate enough of the previous order’s injustices to justify its own flaw. Alternatively, will the political systems of the old Western democracies adapt fast enough to recognize and minimize the destruction brought by this exciting new development?

Evolution is relentless. Each new development is paired with new demands. There is no Nirvana, no Utopia. Happy outcomes depend on aggressive, intelligent adaptation. Are we ready to adapt to a new age of capitalism? Someone will. Some won’t.

Tagged with: economics
Posted in Economics

How a Trump primary “win” could go sour

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 171 Comments

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

It has been apparent for some time that the GOP is on a path to national irrelevance. No less a source than the party’s own post-2012 assessment trumpeted this conclusion and urged a change of course. No course correction has occurred. Now, in the shape of Donald Trump, we can start to see the outline of how the party might crack apart and realign itself.

Trump’s apparent popularity among Republican voters, sustained over several months, suggests he might actually be successful in the primaries. That success would set up an irreconcilable conflict with the party infrastructure. Our nominating process evolved with the expectation that a presumed nominee would be apparent before anyone casts a vote in a primary. Success by Trump in the primaries will not necessarily secure either the nomination or the support of the party.

If Trump makes a credible run at the nomination it will almost certainly lead to a formal division of the GOP. Here are the factors that might contribute to a division and a few examples of how the process could play out.

For starters, we have to understand the disconnect between winning a primary and securing convention delegates. The first thing does not necessarily lead to the second thing. With many state-level deadlines running out soon, Trump still has none of the ground presence required to win at the convention.

Contributing to this uncertain climate is yet another factor. Though Trump is farther behind than some others, none of the candidates has the kind of broad local presence it takes to definitively secure the nomination. This has never happened in the modern era.

There are a lot of very good reasons why Republicans always nominate the guy who finished second last time or was anointed by party insiders. Our process is structured to favor this outcome. Winning the nomination demands a national presence with a strong local ground game in every corner of the country. It is nearly impossible to accomplish this on a first national run.

Illinois presents a fine example of how this challenge plays out. When voters go to the polls here in the Republican primary in March they will not be selecting their favorite candidate. They will have the opportunity to vote on a slate of “electors” nominally committed to a certain candidate.

In order to have a presence on the ballot, each candidate must recruit electors in each of the state’s 18 Congressional districts. Those electors must then obtain enough signatures to appear on the ballot in that district. A candidate who fails to recruit qualified electors will not appear in the primary.

The collection period has already started here and the Trump campaign apparently has no declared electors working to get on the ballot. Trump is not the only candidate with this problem.

Lining up electors is still only part of the process. Only 54 of Illinois’ 69 Republican delegates are selected in the primary. The rest come from sitting officials and at-large selections made at the state convention. Those other 15 delegates carry no formal commitment to any candidate. What are the odds that they would support Trump at the convention under any circumstances?

Illinois’ process for selecting a nominee may be unique in its particulars, but it is typical of the broader pattern. In some states, like Minnesota, Iowa and Nevada, the caucus is merely suggestive of the final delegate count. Getting delegates to the national convention means winning support at county and state conventions. In most cases, that means developing a base of support in the years leading up to the campaign.

As another example, Texas’ 155 RNC delegates are selected at the state convention. Texas follows a process similar to Illinois in which 2/3 of the delegates are assigned via a complex schedule on a per-Congressional District basis. The remaining 1/3 of the delegates are at-large, selected from a pool of applicants. Primary results are supposed to influence the assignment of delegates. However, a candidate with little grassroots support and poor state level organization could find himself nominally represented by delegates who are deeply committed to another candidate.

With a presumed nominee none of this really matters. State level politicos who might not be tremendously supportive will still go along with the tide. In the absence of a presumed nominee, and with a candidate like Trump emerging from the primaries as the leader, delegates’ behavior at the convention becomes very difficult to predict.

We face a series of potential nightmare scenarios. All of these scenarios are plausible. Odds favor the possibility that one of them, or something along these lines, plays out.

Scenario 1 – Trump wins with a majority in the primaries, yet fails to secure a majority of the convention delegates. Delegates select another candidate, perhaps even someone who did not participate in the primaries. Trump graciously concedes…just kidding. He throws a fit and threatens an independent run.

Scenario 2 – No one wins a clear majority in the primaries. The top finisher goes into the convention with the largest number of delegates, but not enough to secure the nomination without brokering a deal. Trumps graciously concedes when the party rejects him…

Scenario 3 – Trump pulls off a narrow majority in the primaries and a slim majority of the delegates, enough that the convention selects him as the nominee. Do Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and others mount the podium in Cleveland to endorse Donald Trump? Really? Really really?

A brokered convention might be incapable of selecting a consensus nominee, with two or more candidates emerging from the wreckage promising a continued campaign for the White House. A Trump win at the convention is likely to result in a large number of prominent national Republicans either leaving the party outright or declaring support for Clinton. This is how political parties crumble and realign. Alliances and relationships formed on a divided convention floor become the raw materials of new partisan coalitions.

It is early yet. If Trump somehow implodes by February none of this might happen – this time. However, without some major realignment, the 2020 campaign will be even worse. If we somehow get a reprieve from chaos next summer, hopefully the party will use that window of opportunity to learn the neglected lessons of 2012. We could use the first years of the second Clinton Administration to build a sane, inclusive party ready to face the future. What are the odds?

Tagged with: delegates, divided convention, donald trump, election 2016, jeb bush, republican convention
Posted in Election 2016

Link roundup, 10/19/15

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 150 Comments

A look at Homan Square, the Abu Ghraib of Chiraq.

Graduating from High School in the Deep South.

GOP primary candidates show up to church.

Why Uber is investing in self-driving cars.

A quick video explains the science and impact of quantum computing.

Posted in Uncategorized

Link roundup, 10/15/15

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 138 Comments

Ron Paul is selling a home-school curriculum. No seriously, I’m not making this up.

Ben Carson has been pitching nutritional supplements to cure cancer, marketed through a pyramid model.

Today’s GOPLifer throwback from 2011: The Biggest Loser

Guns don’t kill people. Toddlers kill people – at a rate of about once a week.

The new Tesla introduces an “auto-pilot” mode, a precursor to the self-driving car.

Just in time for Halloween, a list of issues Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick wants to Legislators to prepare to take up in next session.

Donald Trump is threatening not to perform his shtick at the next GOP debate if his demands aren’t met.

Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is planning to enter a plea on banking law violations. Those crimes are related to a years-long effort to cover up accusations that he molested boys on the wrestling team he coached.

Just for reference, here’s the speech Hastert made urging the impeachment of Bill Clinton while he was paying hush money to the boys’ families.

For those keeping track, each of the last three Republican Speakers prior to Boehner were either convicted of a crime or of House ethics violations.

Posted in Uncategorized

David Brooks finally looks out his window

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 136 Comments

Yesterday the New York Times played host to a strange event. In a piece communicated as a sort of public service message, commentator David Brooks declared that the Republican Party has become “naïve,” “cynical,” “bumbling,” and most of all, “incompetent.” From his piece:

Politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions. It involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.

But this new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal.

There is nothing in his typically literate and insightful assessment that I disagree with. What makes this column, like the rest of his work, so frustrating is this burning question: “Where the f%$# have you been for the past decade?”

Through an endless string of Mission Accomplished’s and Terry Schaivos and Rev. Wrights and Sarah Palins, through climate denial, and mortgage crisis denial and deflation denial and apology tours, past gold-buggery, the Amero, FEMA camps, and Jade Helm, through hearings on Fast and Furious, the IRS, Benghazi, and Planned Parenthood; all of a sudden NOW the GOP is nuts.

There is a strange detachment experienced by established Republican figures in DC and New York circles. Out in the provinces the pace of events has been dizzying. These folks seem largely unaware that they are no longer driving the bus.

Every political organization has its share of weirdos and extremists. Conventional wisdom dictates that engaging those characters directly is fruitless. A healthy organization can overwhelm the will of a few oddballs merely by remaining on task.

There are exceptions to that rule. Sometimes, as in a patient with a compromised immune system, otherwise ordinary pathogens turn lethal. Out in flyover country this dangerous condition has been apparent for a long time while our “thought leaders” on the East Coast twiddled away, dismissing concerns. If David Brooks is finally noticing that there’s a problem, then it is probably too late to reach the lifeboats.

To his credit, Brooks has a least taken a different path from his ideological predecessor, George Will. In fairness to Will though, the difference may be marked more by a generational divide than any particular personal insight. As the GOP has raced over a cliff Will has dutifully followed, becoming that obnoxious bigoted uncle at the Thanksgiving table. Brooks is still clinging to the ledge, trying not to become a cartoon while the party leaves him and others like him unrepresented and despised from all sides.

I wish him luck. We all need it. These are difficult times for sane conservatives. Even if the party were in a healthier state, the accelerating pace of technological and social change would make credible conservatism uniquely challenging – and more valuable than ever.

Tagged with: david brooks, republican party
Posted in Republican Party

Understanding Democratic Racism

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 86 Comments

Jeb Bush was recently pilloried for his characterization of the relationship between African-Americans and the Democratic Party. As insulting as his statement was, what’s worse is the lost opportunity it represents.

“Our message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn’t one of division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff. Our message is one that is uplifting — that says you can achieve earned success.”

His explanation of black politics echoes the age-old racist trope that black voters are looking for “handouts.” Democrats, by that reasoning, are buying votes with welfare while Republicans are appealing to good, honest people who want to stand on their own two feet.

This is yet another example of an opportunity lost by ignorance and racism. Bush lurched past a prime opportunity to set fire to the Democratic coalition. Democrats do in fact use welfare and other critical social safety net programs as leverage to manipulate black voters. It just doesn’t work the way white racists imagine.

A history of systemic looting, which hasn’t entirely ended, has left many black communities with almost none of the financial or political capital required to begin a climb. For many of the worst affected communities, access to social welfare services are the starting point for survival, the first critical step before anyone can begin to consider advancement. Democrats did not create that circumstance with social welfare programs, but they exploit it for political advantage. That reality is critical to understanding what is really happening in America’s Democratic-controlled cities.

People want to get welfare like they want to get chemotherapy or an abortion or a good lawyer. Republicans’ ignorance and occasional racism leaves us completely blind to the way Democrats exploit this situation. We are unable to connect to the very real frustrations of black voters trapped in the gears of the Democratic urban machine. That frustration is on full display in Chicago, but few if any Republicans have noticed.

Deep behind the Blue Wall, Democrats who hold a super-majority in the Illinois State Assembly were recently handed a shock. A Republican Governor had been elected in Illinois on his promise to clean up the state’s quagmire of union-driven public corruption. He vetoed a bill designed to further insulate public sector unions from any pressure to moderate their salary and pension demands. Democrats’ effort to override the Governor’s veto failed when three Democrats refused to support it.

One of those Democrats was Ken Dunkin, a black legislator from the South Side of Chicago. In order to pressure Dunkin to cooperate on the veto override, House leadership tied the bill to a vote on state funded child care services. Details are complex, but in essence Democrats in the Legislature used the state’s day care program for low-income families as a hostage to ensure black legislators’ support for the union bill. Dunkin resisted the pressure and low income residents in his community are suffering the consequences imposed by the Democratic leadership.

Think back for a moment to Jeb Bush’s comments on “free stuff.” Imagine how powerful his statement might have been if he understood the pressures Rep. Dunkin faced. That day care program is not “free stuff.” For black parents struggling to find their first rung on the economic ladder, access to child care is a crucial component in their rise. People who aren’t working or going to school do not have a pressing need for child care. This is just one example of that ways that black advancement is sacrificed by Democrats to protect interests they truly respect.

For those who still buy the 19^th century rhetoric on the role of unions, this conflict might sound confusing. After all, strong unions are supposed to be a force for economic progress for the underprivileged. They may have served that role once, but that’s not what’s happening today.

Dunkin’s resistance to the union bill reflects certain realities of life inside the Democratic coalition that few Republicans understand. There is probably no major public institution in American life more stubbornly, unapologetically racist than trade unions. And although public employee unions have, by contrast, been fairly helpful to their many African-American members, those same unions treat the black communities they disproportionately serve as an occupied territory to be exploited. Most of the power Democrats reap from a loyal black constituency is used in ways that undermine black political and economic interests. Republicans for the most part neither see nor care.

Much progress was made in desegregating trade unions in the sixties and seventies. However, as blacks became increasingly trapped by the Democratic machine, their leverage to drive reforms in the party’s most powerful institutions declined. Big city trade unions are the Dixie of the North and they dictate Democratic politics.

An example from Philadelphia tells a familiar story. In 2011 Philadelphia’s black Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter challenged trade unions there to begin hiring black workers. Unions doing work in the majority-minority city were almost universally white. For decades they have successfully resisted desegregation by quietly defeating the efforts of young black apprentices to move up through the ranks. As public money pours into their coffers for job programs and new projects, black residents are systematically excluded from any benefit.

Nutter insisted that he would block new contracts with the unions until hiring changes were implemented. The mayor was forced to back down under the cover of a negotiated settlement. In fact, almost everything Nutter managed to achieve for the public in his term as mayor of Philadelphia had to be clawed from the hands of union bosses.

A similar scenario is playing out in Chicago, shedding light on the more complex relationship between black communities and unions representing government workers. Public employee unions have been more open than trade unions to black participation. In fact, government jobs have been a key force in moving black workers into the middle class.

Unfortunately, the same forces that fostered job security have also undermined black access to effective public services. The extraordinary power of public employee unions has left their members immune from accountability. Those unions employ a lot of black members, but they also wield enormous political power over black communities.

Thanks to those unions, it is next-to-impossible to remove poorly performing teachers, abusive cops, or corrupt bureaucrats. Mayor Emanuel has been engaged in a low-grade war with unions to open up more black employment and improve public schools. Those unions exist to serve their members, not the public. For minority communities struggling to advance economically and politically, public employee unions take away with the left hand what they give with the right. In the Democratic Party, the fruits of black political activism belong to labor unions. African-American communities get whatever is left over.

It is no accident that the most visible and egregious examples of police brutality in recent years have emerged from Democratic strongholds like Baltimore, New York, Chicago and even Ferguson, Missouri. It is no accident that school districts in Democratic-dominated areas are burdened with needless expenses and poor teachers who cannot be fired. Black Lives Matter, but in the Democratic Party the union always wins.

A Republican could throw a devastating wrench into this machine by asking one simple question: “Why are Democrats allowing trade unions to engage in systematic racial discrimination?” We have been unable to present Democrats with this dilemma for a couple of frustrating reasons.

First, Republicans have no idea that any of this nonsense is occurring. We are so utterly disengaged from urban and minority constituencies that we lack the most basic awareness of the issues that shape their lives. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only problem.

Thanks to the Dixiefication of the Republican Party, we operate under a tacit agreement that we will never acknowledge the existence of racism under any circumstances. Calling out the Democrats on the racism that drives their union politics means admitting that racism exists. If racism exists, then we might have to answer some awkward questions about Voter ID, police brutality, the Voting Rights Act, gun regulation, affirmative action, and a whole range of other subjects that many Republicans would prefer to ignore.

The “free stuff” or “plantation” talking points so common among Republicans are insulting perversions of a very dark reality. Democrats do in fact exploit the economic vulnerabilities of minority communities, leveraging their political support to better serve the interests of the party’s white voters. With a modicum of humility and willingness to wrestle honestly with our own racial liabilities, Republicans could offer black voters a potent alternative. If we ever develop a genuine interest in minority concerns, we will find doors open to us that we never imagined.

Tagged with: dunkin, illinois, madigan, unions
Posted in Illinois