The opening quotes of the Weekly Sifts of 2016 are collected in "Sift Quotes of 2016"
One
of the things I like best about writing the Sift is that it keeps me
focused in the present, with an eye to the future. But once a year I try
to take a broader perspective on where we've been.
2016 was the
most dismal year I've had to look back on since this blog started --
leading, as it did, to the present moment, in which President-elect
Trump is assembling his henchmen and deciding which aspects of the world
order to screw up first. Not only was I very consistently wrong about
what would happen next in 2016, but looking back at the plausible
arguments and scenarios I laid out only emphasizes how many times and in
how many ways events could have taken a turn for the better, but didn't
-- right up to election night, when shifting a handful of votes from
one state to another would have changed the outcome.
But
prognostication has never been the primary purpose of the Weekly Sift.
(In fact, one of my major criticisms of mainstream media is that it
spends too much time on speculation, rather than telling us what is
happening and why.) Primarily, I'm trying to cut through the hype and
propaganda to focus my readers' attention on what is real and give them
tools to think about it effectively. But that doesn't mean you're going
to know what will happen next, because I certainly don't.
The themes
I've broken the primary theme out into its own article "The Year of This-can't-be-happening".
It covers my repeated attempts -- from the beginning of the year to the
end -- to understand how anyone could support Donald Trump and what
could be done to persuade them not to.
And
finally, there were a number of posts about the Bernie/Hillary split in
the Democratic Party. Early in the year, I had to decide who to vote
for in the New Hampshire primary. Bernie better expressed my ideals, but
I had more faith in Hillary as a candidate. (I still think Bernie's
supporters underestimate how vulnerable he would have been if
Republicans had ever taken him seriously, a position I laid out in "Smearing Bernie: a preview" and "Do we still have to worry about the McGovern problem?") My decision process -- ultimately resulting in a Bernie vote -- played out in "Undecided with 8 days to go" and "Imperfections".
In
general, I never saw the Bernie/Hillary argument as being about goals.
Rather, it seemed to me to revolve around methods and tactics: Is it
better to push for big, revolutionary changes or to head in the same
direction in incremental steps? And I was skeptical that electing a
progressive president could actually bring about that revolution without
a more fundamental re-education of the electorate, as I spelled out in "Say -- You Want a Revolution?"
That's
an argument that continues into the future, even if neither Hillary nor
Bernie runs again. I'm not sure why it has been so hard for candidates
to straddle the difference: This is where we want to go ultimately, and
this is the next step we want to take to get there. Preserving and
patching up ObamaCare is not an end in itself, but we're also not going
to pass single-payer any time soon.
A theme I announced after the
election, which I hope to continue into 2017, is that liberals have to
begin re-arguing issues we used to think were long decided, but which
the Trump victory proves are still open. The first of those posts was "Should I Have White Pride?".
The numbers
The
blog's traffic statistics tell two contrasting stories. On the one
hand, this year the Sift had no breakout viral posts, or posts from
previous years that went on a viral second run. As a result, the overall
page view numbers are down: from 782,000 in 2015 and even 415K in 2014
to somewhere around 350K this year (with a few days to go).
On the
other hand, all the signs of regular readership are up. The number of
people following the blog (according to WordPress; I have no idea
exactly what they're counting, but I assume it's comparable from year to
year) rose from 3820 to 4269. Hits on the home page, weeklysift.com,
held the gains of 2015: from 44K in 2014 to 100K in 2015 to 101K this
year. (I interpret that as views from people who are not looking for any
particular post, but have the site bookmarked and want to see what's
new.)
Two years ago, a 1000-view post seemed like a big deal;
sometimes I'd go a whole month without one. This year, the featured post
each week almost always topped 1000.
Most encouragingly, the number of comments continued its upward trend: from 879 in 2014 to 1432 in 2015 to 1751 so far in 2016.
Viral
posts, as I point out every year, are unpredictable. Some years they
happen, some years they don't. Hall of Fame baseball player George Brett
used to claim that most of his home runs were mistakes: He was trying
to hit line drives, but sometimes he swung just slightly under a pitch
and it went up and out of the park. If he tried to do that, he knew, he
might hit a few more home runs, but he'd also wind up with a lot more
pop-ups and strikeouts.
That's how I feel about viral posts. Every
week, I'm trying to serve the needs of my regular readers. If once in a
while that intention produces something that gets the attention of a
larger public, that's great. But if I tried to swing for those home
runs, I think the overall quality of the blog would decline.
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
- Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and former world chess champion
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
It's no mystery why Putin would favor Trump. I was describing that motive already back in August. Steve Benen gives the story a broader perspective by reviewing Trump and Putin's comments about each other over the past year. Basically, Trump has surrounded himself with pro-Russian advisers (including people like Paul Manafort who took large sums of money from the now-overthrown pro-Russian government of Ukraine), and has consistently spoken highly of Putin and defended Russia's point of view whenever it became an issue.
The Russian interference ought to horrify any American, independent of party, but of course Democrats seem much more concerned about it than Republicans. But several Republican senators have a long history of hostility to Russia and Putin -- McCain and Graham, most obviously -- and they don't seem inclined to reverse themselves that easily. So some kind of hearings will be held, and we'll see what comes out.
Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books has an insightful article about the stylistic similarities between Trump and Putin. For example:
Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.
In an interview with RT, a Russian state-funded news source, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange claimed the leaked Democratic emails did not come from the Russian government. Given the partisan role WikiLeaks played in the election -- they didn't just dump the Clinton emails on the public, they attempted to raise as much anti-Clinton buzz as possible in the way they released and tweeted about them -- I have doubts about Assange's objectivity.
and the Electoral College
It votes today. Theoretically, the electors could defect from Trump and throw the election into the House, where he might win anyway. But probably they'll just elect him.
and the near-completion of Trump's cabinet
CNN and the NYT are both keeping a running lists of who has been nominated. A few trends:
lots of white guys. Nominees for all the top positions -- State, Defense, Treasury, Attorney General, and Homeland Security -- are white men. Carson, Chao, and Haley are the only appointees of non-European ethnicity. Chao, Haley, DeVos, and McMahon are the only women.
lots of rich people. Republican cabinet choices (and some Democrats as well) are usually fairly well-to-do, but the Trump cabinet is off the scale. Betsy DeVos' family is worth over $5 billion. Wilbur Ross has $2.5 billion. Rex Tillerson made $27 million as CEO of Exxon Mobil in 2015, and Andrew Puzder has made as much as $10 million in a year from CKE Restaurants.
lots of generals. Mattis at Defense, Kelly at Homeland Security, and Flynn as National Security Adviser.
not a lot of relevant education or experience. The poster boy for this is Rick Perry at the Department of Energy. DoE's primary mission is overseeing everything nuclear, from power plants to nuclear weapon stockpiles to radioactive waste disposal. Obama's energy secretaries were two distinguished Ph.D. physicists: Nobel-prize winner Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz. Perry majored in Animal Science and generally got bad grades. Similarly, Education Secretary DeVos has never studied education or worked in a school, Secretary of State Tillerson has no foreign policy experience, and neither does U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Ben Carson is educated -- he's a doctor -- but it's not clear he knows anything about Housing and Urban Development.
no draining the swamp. Tillerson at State is from Exxon Mobil and Mnuchin at Treasury is from Goldman Sachs. DeVos, Ross, Puzder, and McMahon at SBA were all big donors to the Trump campaign.
We also know Trump's choice for ambassador to Israel: David Friedman, who would be considered a right-winger among Israelis. He has described the two-state solution as "a con" and wrote in 2015:
Judea and Samaria historically have deep Jewish roots and were validly captured 48 years ago in a defensive war – far more legitimately than through the atrocious acts that today dictate the borders of most countries. ... As a general rule, we should expand a community in Judea and Samaria where the land is legally available and a residential or commercial need is present – just like in any other neighborhood anywhere in the world. Until that becomes the primary consideration for development, how can we expect to be taken seriously that this is our land?
In general, I worry about any ambassador who uses "we" and "our" when talking about the country he will be posted to.
and Trump's conflicts of interest
Trump cancelled a press conference in which he was going to announce his plans for handling his businesses while in office. Originally scheduled for last Thursday, it's been put off until some unspecified date in January. (NPR lists seven questions it would have liked to ask.) Many are speculating that it will never happen; at some point we'll just get a statement about what the arrangements are, and he will never answer questions about them.
During the campaign, Trump proposed turning management of his businesses over to his children, who presumably would not be part of the government. Now, even that separation is becoming tenuous. Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner apparently will have roles in the Trump administration. Eric and Donald Jr. might be slated to take over the business, but they also have been involved in the transition, including the selection of the Interior Secretary. So even if there is to be some kind of line between the Trump administration and the Trump Organization, everybody seems to already be on both sides of that line.
The issue that is likely to arise first concerns the new Trump International Hotel located in D.C.'s Old Post Office building, which is owned by the U.S. government and leased to the Trump Organization. The lease explicitly prohibits "any elected official of the Government of the United States" from "any benefit that may arise" from the lease.
The Brookings Institution published a scholarly assessment of the various ways President Trump "would arrive in office as a walking, talking violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution", which prohibits officials of the U.S. government from accepting gifts from foreign governments or making other profitable arrangements with them. The document is a clear exposition of the history motivating the Clause and how it has been interpreted. The authors (Norman Eisen, Richard Painter, and Lawrence Tribe) conclude that no solution proposed or hinted at by Trump or his campaign comes close to eliminating the conflicts of interest the Clause prohibits. Unfortunately, the only recourses they propose involve action by either the Electoral College (today) or the Republican-controlled Congress.
One silly way that Trump's conflict-of-interests surface is how personally he takes any attack on his businesses. Recently, Vanity Fair published a damning review of Trump Grill, the steakhouse in the lobby of Trump Tower. Our President-Elect then felt compelled to tweet back an attack on how badly the magazine is doing under its current editor. And that naturally made headlines and resulted in a huge jump in Vanity Fair subscriptions. Thanks, Donald! Could you go after The New Yorker next?
Time proclaimed Trump "Person of the Year". That really isn't an honor, it's an answer to the question: "Who was most central to the news this year?" They couldn't have chosen anybody else. Trump's story drove the campaign, which dominated the year. If you could go back in time and tell yourself who you should keep your eye on in 2016, how could it be anybody but Trump?
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To no one's great surprise, Dylann Roof was found guilty of killing nine members of Charleston's Mother Emanuel Church. The death penalty is still a possibility. Most coverage of the story still makes him sound like a disturbed individual, rather than a terrorist radicalized by the white-supremacist movement. This is typical; I've been writing about the same phenomenon for more than four years.
I could do a long rant on the importance of norms to democracy, but I've already done it. Paul Waldman points out how the illegitimacy cascades:
In this closely divided swing state, Republicans enjoy supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature because of aggressively gerrymandered legislative districts that pack African-Americans together in order to dilute their power. The districts were declared unconstitutional by a federal court earlier this year, and the state has been ordered to redraw them and hold special elections next year.
So while they still have that ill-gotten supermajority, they're using it to change the rules further in their favor.
Josh Marshall acknowledges that you can blame Hillary Clinton's loss on Clinton herself, or that you can blame it on external factors like Russia or the FBI or the Electoral College. (Any close election has many difference-making factors.) But since neither Clinton nor Bernie Sanders is likely to run again in 2020, we could probably find a better use of our time than trying to refight the primary battle.
There was a sort-of-happy ending to an otherwise disturbing story out of the University of Minnesota: The football team backed off of its threat not to play the Holiday Bowl in San Diego on December 27. They were defending 10 of their teammates suspended after an alleged sexual assault on September 2.
Police had decided not to charge the players with a crime, but the University's internal process has a lower standard of proof (preponderance-of-evidence rather than beyond-reasonable-doubt). The University's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action has recommended expulsion for five of the players, and either suspension from the University or probation for the other five. A hearing on that report is scheduled for January. In the meantime, the Athletic Director has suspended all ten from the football team.
Thursday, the team assembled as a group in uniform and read a statement demanding that the players be reinstated. They wanted a private meeting with the regents (i.e., without either the athletic director or the University president) about "how to make our program great again". (It's hard not to interpret that as a political statement: Trump has been elected, so the country is done with all this political correctness about sexual assault.)
The players' case is that the sex was consensual, and a 90-second video of part of the 90-minute encounter has been offered as proof. (Think about that: The players' defense is that they were involved in a group sex act where people videoed each other, but that it was all consensual. That may be a fine legal defense, but does the University want these guys representing the school?) The team's coaches seemed to be supporting them rather than the administration.
Big money was at stake for the University. Last year's Holiday Bowl paid $2.83 million to the participating schools, and additional advertising and ticketing revenue is at risk, not to mention the fund-raising bump a school gets when it's alumni watch its team on national TV.
Fortunately, the administration didn't back down. The team got its meeting with the regents and the president and athletic director, during which "it became clear that our original request of having the 10 suspensions overturned was not going to happen." If it had, how could anyone justify sending a daughter to the University of Minnesota?
Merry Christmas, which you can say again because Donald Trump is now the president. You can say it again! It’s okay to say—it’s not a pejorative word anymore.
If Trump wants to declare an imaginary victory in an imaginary war, how can you argue with him?
Wisconsin conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes is retiring. A never-Trump Republican to the end, Sykes' farewell message is blistering:
We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.
This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.
I've been resisting covering speculation about what the Trump administration might do, because there's just too much of it and I think reality already gives us enough to worry about. But the alternatives for repealing ObamaCare are starting to sound fairly solid, so let's talk about them.
The way around the filibuster is a process called "reconciliation", which is complicated, but basically requires a bill to be entirely fiscal. However, there are also non-fiscal aspects to ObamaCare, and leaving them in place while repealing the taxes and subsidies would make a huge mess:
What the health care policy experts consulting with GOP staff have been arguing is that repealing Obamacare's subsidies and individual mandate – but leaving market regulations that require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions (which the 2015 reconciliation model would do) – would have catastrophic effects for the insurance market.
Exactly what is and isn't fiscal is outlined here.
The alternative would be to repeal the whole thing through reconciliation, but that requires a way to work around the Senate parliamentarian, who is likely to rule against such a move. In other words, it requires tossing aside another democratic norm: We're the majority, so we get to say what the rules mean, even if a good-faith interpretation says they mean something else.
The one thing still missing from either approach -- nearly seven years after ObamaCare became law -- is the "replace" part of repeal-and-replace. There is still no official Trump administration or congressional Republican plan for replacement. Repeal-without-replace takes healthcare coverage away from about 20 million people.
and let's close with something that goes all the way
No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear December 19.
If the president of the United States declares war on journalism, journalists are not obliged to just record his words and publish them. They are obliged to take a side – the side of freedom.
I'm cancelling the December 12 Sift because I'm traveling this week. If you're anywhere near Palo Alto this Sunday, I'll be speaking at the UU church there at 9:30 and 11 on the topic "Season of Darkness, Season of Hope". It's about how the symbolism of the Winter Solstice might apply to our dark political times.
This week everybody was talking about China
One of the scary things about Donald Trump as president is that when he causes an international incident, everybody's first thought is "Did he mean to do that?" Because it's entirely plausible that he just didn't think about it; he so often appears not to think about the consequences of what he does.
Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn't tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so!
One of the interesting things to watch in the early days of the Trump administration will be which conservatives stick to their previous principles, and which ones think it's fine for Trump to do things they would have condemned Obama for.
During the campaign, Trump specifically called out Carrier's plan to close a plant in Indianapolis and open one in Mexico. He made it sound like he would get tough with businesses like that, threatening them with tariffs until they knuckled under. Well, that's not at all what happened. Carrier got at least $7 million in Indiana tax breaks. (Pence is still governor, remember?) Plus, who knows what else its parent company, United Technologies, was promised in terms of its defense businesses? In exchange, they agreed not to move as many jobs as they had planned, at least not right away.
Bernie Sanders wrote that the people whose jobs were saved should be happy, but "the rest of our nation’s workers should be very nervous." In essence, the deal establishes that corporations can extort goodies from Trump by threatening to move.
Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren’t thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be reevaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America.
OK, you didn't really expect Bernie to side with Trump. But a number of conservatives also raised their voices against the deal, for a different reason: It's exactly the kind of "industrial policy" they hate when Democrats try it. Sarah Palin called it "crony capitalism". National Review called it "a rejection of economic reality".
and the PizzaGate shooting
I had the bad timing to write a somewhat whimsical piece about fake news at the same time that fake news was having a serious consequence: A guy armed with an assault rifle walked into a D.C. pizza place and started shooting, because he was "investigating" a fake-news story that "Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s backrooms". Because that's so incredibly plausible, I guess.
A sidebar on that story: So a guy believes a ridiculous piece of fake news, takes an assault rifle into a crowded restaurant and fires. Police take him into custody without finding it necessary to kill him first.
More announcements from the High Castle (a.k.a. Trump Tower).
Mattis at Defense. I can't decide whether to be glass-half-empty or glass-half-full about General James Mattis for Secretary of Defense. On the downside, it's never good to have a SecDef whose nickname is "Mad Dog". That Trump compares him to General Patton (from World War II, or maybe from the George C. Scott movie) also makes me uneasy: Patton was a tactical genius who was also a political and interpersonal loose cannon. He did well for us in World War II largely because wise, unflappable men like Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall stood between him and the president, who was the masterful Franklin Roosevelt. Show me anybody in the Trump administration like those guys, and I'll feel a lot better about having another Patton.
On the upside, he is a real general who actually knows something about military affairs. He didn't just play a general on TV or give a bunch of defense-related speeches or something. People who know their fields are rarities in the Trump cabinet, so I don't want to complain too much. Also, he apparently told Trump that torture doesn't work very well, and he wants to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, so he gets credit for that.
On the downside, he pairs with National Security Advisor (and former General) Michael Flynn to virtually eliminate civilian oversight of the military. (A third general is rumored to be Trump's choice to head Homeland Security.) By law, a general has be out of the military for seven years before taking the SecDef job, a provision that Congress would have to waive for Mattis. That opens his nomination to filibuster.
The Army announced that it won't allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to go under a dammed section of the Missouri River. Alternate routes are being explored.
and the ongoing corruption issue
The NYT illustrates the problems in a series of circular diagrams that include both government agencies and Trump business interests. The gist is that Trump will frequently be in the position of deciding as president whether he should make more or less money.
Trump's business empire, and its dealings in foreign countries and with foreign governments, seems to set up clear violations of the Emoluments Clause, a part of the Constitution that you never hear about because no president previously thought he could get away with violating it:
So, for example, any loan the Trump Organization gets from the Bank of China would need to be examined to make sure its terms aren't more favorable than it might have gotten if Donald Trump weren't president. Otherwise the deal might include a gift, which the Clause bans. Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, elaborates:
Even absent a quid pro quo, the Emoluments Clause bans payments to an American public official from foreign governments. Yet they will arise whenever foreign diplomats stay in Trump hotels at their governments’ expense; whenever parties are organized by foreign governments in Trump hotels (Bahrain just announced such a party in a Trump hotel this week); whenever loans are made to the company by the Bank of China or any other foreign-government-owned bank; whenever rent is paid by companies controlled by foreign governments with offices in Trump buildings; and whenever there is any other arrangement whereby foreign government money goes into the president’s businesses.
However, think about how to enforce this, if Congress decides to let it slide. Conceivably a court could step in, but courts can't just take something up because it sounds wrong. Someone has to come to court claiming to have suffered an injury that the court has the power to correct. (That's what's meant by the legal term standing. You have to have standing before you can sue.)
Who could do that? Maybe a competing business that suffers from foreign-government favoritism towards the Trump Organization? Law professor Jonathan H. Adler doesn't even offer that possibility:
the underlying controversy is almost certainly non-justiciable. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which someone would have standing to challenge Trump’s arrangements, and even harder to think what sort of remedy could be ordered by a court.
And Painter agrees:
The only remedy for a serious violation of the Emoluments Clause is impeachment.
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As absentee and provisional ballots get counted in various states, Hillary Clinton's lead in the national popular vote continues to grow: currently more than 2.6 million votes, or 2%.
One thing this means is that the polls were not actually that far off. Going into election day, most pollsters were called for a 3-4% margin. She also did not run much behind Obama's 2012 pace, when he won by 3.9%.
Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin are putting together a bipartisan effort to protect the DREAMers from deportation. We'll see if Graham is by himself on this, or if a few other Republicans (Flake? McCain?) are willing to join. I have a hard time picturing the House backing this, but that's a battle I really want the public to see. The DREAMers are the most sympathetic of the undocumented immigrants, because they broke no laws and most of them know no other country than the United States. If we can't find a place for them, America really has become a hard-hearted country.
Not sure why Trump tweeted about flag-burning. I haven't heard of anybody doing it lately; maybe he's just anticipating that somebody will. Anyway, it's a pretty clear First Amendment issue: The reason people object to it is that burning a flag expresses an opinion they don't like. Nobody objects if you burn a flag that is worn out; that's actually the preferred method of disposal. Nobody cares if you have flags on your 4th of July napkins and then throw them in the campfire. The only time people object to burning a flag is if you're doing it to make a point.
In religious terms, laws to protect the flag from burning constitute idolatry: The symbol has been elevated above the thing it's supposed to symbolize. The flag symbolizes our American freedom, but idolators want to protect the flag at the expense of our freedom.
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