The Republican Convention was a tour de farce of plagiarism, F-list celebrities, lies, and stupidity, capped off by Trump’s “This country is a hellhole, and you’re all going to stay unemployed, lose your jobs and/or die if you don’t elect me” speech. The Democratic Convention was a well-run affair, featuring speeches by actual celebrities and accomplished elected officials, none of whom seemed to be raving lunatics. There was some bad behavior from sour Sanders dead-enders, but they’re now gone and irrelevant.
Hillary Clinton gave an okay speech that accomplished one big thing: it put the Democratic Party on the offensive, seizing the mantle of what it means to be an American in 2016. This is remarkable to me, as the Democratic Party has been on the defensive my entire life when it comes to questions of which party better represents American ideals.
The conventions mark the point in an election cycle when the general American electorate begins to think seriously about the choices for president. For those of us who follow politics on a daily basis, it seems unbelievable that many Americans don’t know anything about the candidates or the parties’ platforms before the conventions, but that is actually the case. The conventions help voters focus by formally deciding on their candidates and providing them and their parties with four days of prime time opportunities to introduce themselves and their policies.
In the wake of last month’s conventions, Clinton quickly took a commanding lead in the polls and has yet to relinquish much if any of it. It turns out that Trump’s candidacy, catering to the grievances and resentments of a faction within one of the major parties, cannot gain much traction with the general electorate in 2016. I always thought/hoped that the election would look like this after the conventions. Trump may have won the votes of 50% or so of the Republican Party’s base by letting the racist freak flag fly, but it didn’t survive first contact with the general electorate. This is why polling trackers give Trump almost no chance of winning the election. FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton an 83.6% chance of winning, likely in an Electoral College landslide. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics finds that Clinton pretty much has a lock on 272 Electoral College votes (270 are needed to win the presidency). That’s even without quadrennial swing states like Florida and Ohio that have leaned Democratic the last few presidential elections.
Trump is now desperate. He can’t abide losing. He’s an idiot. So what’s a desperate idiot who’s losing supposed to do?
It turns out that he’s reneging on his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, flirting with the dread “amnesty” on Fox News Channel with Sean Hannity last night. This must be an effort to stop looking like a racist gleefully intent on mobilizing the forces of the federal government to hunt down 11 million people, deport them, and break up their families. Trump’s too dumb to realize that that horse has left the barn, got hit by a freight train, and then had its hooves salvaged for glue.
The Trump campaign is out of ideas and tricks. It doesn’t know what the point of itself is anymore. Like Fonzie and Happy Days in its fifth season premiere, it has jumped the shark.
When you find yourself flip flopping on the one issue that got you the nomination, it’s time to pack up and go home. Imagine Hillary Clinton securing the nomination, and then saying maybe it’s okay if we don’t have universal pre-K or paid family and medical leave after all. Or Sanders securing the nomination, and then saying big financial banks should remain large and unregulated and hey maybe the rich pay enough in taxes after all. They’d be skewered and rightfully so.
Where does Trump go from here? The election is still two and a half months away and there’s just no point to him anymore. Trump was useful in the sense that it was useful to learn for a certainty that 30 to 40% of the country’s voters are ignorant rubes, just waiting for a Trump to come along and take their dignity and/or their money. But if Trump can’t even keep the one position he’s held clearly and consistently, which enabled him to beat all the other Republican candidates – including John Kasich and Marco Rubio both of whom I think could’ve won the general election – what exactly is he doing?
Before trying to answer that question, I’d like to introduce readers to “Trump’s Razor.” This is a principle coined by John Scalzi to capture what Josh Marshall was getting at in this piece about how Trump immediately regretted and tried to reverse his decision to have Mike Pence run as his candidate for Vice President (remember that happened!?!?). As Marshall wrote in a follow up piece:
According to Trump’s Razor: “ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts” and that answer is likely correct.
Let’s take a look at some of the available facts from recent weeks:
Manafort was replaced by two new people: Steve Bannon, the guy who’s been running Breitbart and turned it into a haven for white nationalists and misogynists; and Kellyanne Conway, presumably hired to help Trump gain ground with women. (Women, it should be noted, generally don’t care for misogynists.)
“Our government has totally failed our African American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period,” Trump said in Akron, Ohio, straying from the prepared remarks the campaign provided to reporters. “The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician — year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats. And I ask you this, I ask you this — crime, all of the problems — to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?”
Trump opined that women who face sexual harassment at work should find new careers.
As mentioned previously, Trump tried to get a do-over on Pence as V.P.
Trump spent days defending his statement that, literally, Obama founded ISIS. Then he backtracked, accusing people of not understanding sarcasm. It wasn’t sarcasm, literally or figuratively.
We could go on. So, what’s the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts? I’m open to other suggestions, but I’d say the stupidest possible scenario is that nobody in the Trump campaign nor Trump himself has any idea what they’re doing. They make it up on a daily basis, constantly changing to meet the demands of Trump’s feel for the audience he’s talking to at that particular moment. Or, as with Trump’s flirting with doing a 180 on his immigration policy after meeting with some Hispanic leaders, constantly changing to meet the demands of whichever person he spoke to last.
I’m on the record as stating that it’s good for a politician to shift their stances on issues in response to the preferences of his or her electorate, but this is ridiculous. What use is a political campaign in a democracy if it’s not pushing anything resembling a consistent agenda? We still have 74 days of this left. How many more people have to realize they’ve been had and are holding a worthless piece of paper from Trump University before this collapses under the weight of its own asininity?
The Trump campaign, like a perpetually drunken cat, just isn’t interesting or helpful anymore.
With my wife out of the country on a business trip, I spent the weekend with my parents on the Jersey shore. Lovely if hot beach day yesterday, capped off with one of my favorite dinners: lobster! My mom found them at the supermarket at $5.99 a pound, so why not? We grilled them, which was easy and we all thought tastier than boiling. Although neither preparation method is likely to get the lobsters’ endorsement. Anyway, to grill them: brush the lobsters with olive oil, place them backs down on grill preheated to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, flip them after six or seven minutes, then grill for another six or seven. Serve with melted butter, and our sides were baked potatoes and grilled corn on the cob. Delicious!
Some links:
Murdering lobsters and then writing about it the next day requires one to provide a link to David Foster Wallace’s great essay about the Maine Lobster Festival: “Consider the Lobster.”
Donald Trump’s suggestion that 2nd Amendment fanatics might be able to do something about President Hillary Clinton’s appointees to the Supreme Court is just the latest in a long line of similar rhetoric from Republican candidates, officials, and their supporters. And that “do something” is assassination. Words have meaning and to argue that’s not what Trump was saying is to be a hack or someone who does not understand the language. Ed Kilgore has a brief history, with examples, of people on the political right suggesting violence is appropriate when they don’t win elections.
On top of poor showings in battleground states, Trump’s candidacy is managing to put Arizona, Georgia, and Utah (!) in play!
Trump is in fourth place nationally with African American voters. That’s right, fourth place. Jill Stein, whom the average American couldn’t pick out of a lineup of two people, is ahead of Trump. Sad!
Nothing to worry about for this slave because maybe he’ll be well-fed and have decent lodgings. By Austa Malinda French (1810-1880) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
You are failing spectacularly at whatever it is you think you are doing if you find yourself qualifying America’s history with slavery by saying that some slaves were “well-fed and had decent lodgings.” In fact, if you’ve lived a life that has led you to not understand that a statement like that adds no value to our public discourse, then you have failed spectacularly at life.
Bill O’Reilly made exactly these claims while fact-checking Michelle Obama’s speech from Monday night. Criticizing O’Reilly for this isn’t being PC, though I’m sure right wingers are defending O’Reilly at this very moment by whining about overzealous “PC police.”
Calling out someone for trying to diminish the horror of slavery is not being PC. It’s being a decent human being. And if people on the right don’t see the difference, I feel sorry for them.
There’s no right way to get back into blogging after a month-long hiatus, so I’ll just dive right in again. There’s a lot coming out at the moment about Donald Trump and some of his advisers’ connections to Russia and Vladimir Putin’s cronies. A taste, from the first article I read about what should become a major issue, if we still have a functioning media:
3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump’s largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that’s not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,
“Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.”
Another suit alleged the project “occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”
Sounds completely legit.
Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.
Altogether, Josh Marshall gathers seven pieces of information that suggest the following: at best, Trump’s business interests have received huge amounts of money from people in Putin’s circle, he’s got several advisers who have made lots of money from and have been very close to Putin’s circle, and Trump has basically promised to give Putin everything he would want from an American president.
Marshall responds to some reasonable skepticism about the whole thing here. Kevin Drum clarifies some of what we now know here, and Daniel Drezner has a good piece here. We’ll see if these unquestioned-so-far connections between Trump and his world and Putin and his world get nearly as much attention as Benghazi-gate and email-gate. They should.
The Democratic Party will run on a “Ponies for Everyone” platform in 2020 if we all wish hard enough. Friedrich von Amerling [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money finds Freddie deBoer making a fascinating argument that if we punish the Democratic Party in 2016 we will all get ponies in 2020. Cool story, bro. Let’s just outsource the proper response to this to Lemieux, here, with the relevant excerpt (but read the whole thing):
He [deBoer] continues, in vain, in this vein:
“I reject the insistence that it’s my responsibility to vote for Hillary Clinton out of support for the “lesser evil” because the lesser evil argument contains no coherent argument for how change occurs. The lesser evil is not good enough; lesser evilists never articulate a remotely compelling vision of how one proceeds from the lesser evil to the greater good. Politics is a form of negotiation. The lesser evil argument compels us to concede to our negotiation partner (the candidate we are meant to support) our only source of leverage (our vote) before receiving any concessions at all. You might try this in any other form of negotiation and see how well that works for you. Promising to vote Democrat no matter what ensures that Democrats have no reason whatsoever to actually improve as a party. And as long as Republicans are in a death spiral, “better than the Republicans” is a designation that simply gets worse and worse over time. Lesser evil thinking is a road that has no ending and inevitably leads to the bottom.”
deBoer attacking other people for lacking a “coherent argument for how change occurs” is…astounding. There’s a reason why this argument operates entirely at an abstract level, with no historical examples. This is because history has continually and decisively refuted deBoer. Voting for Johnson, as we’ve discussed, was a classic “lesser evil” vote in the sense that he means it. So was FDR, given the many compromises the New Deal had to make with the white supremacist faction of the party. So was Lincoln, an incrementalist on an issue of the utmost moral urgency. Major progressive reforms are almost always the result of lesser-evil voting and coalition-building, and are virtually never the result of dramatic flounces out of the coalition, as the same-sex marriage movement shows. Did movement conservatives take over the Republican Party by voting third party if they didn’t win? They did not. They try to get their candidates elected in the primaries, they won some and they lost some, but they kept pushing. It’s not complicated, but it works. As a theory of political change, it’s perfectly coherent. deBoer’s isn’t even a theory; it’s a retrospective justification for his belief that he’s too good to form any political association with people on the left he deems not left enough. Let’s say enough of the left agreed with deBoer to successfully throw the election to Trump. Do you think this would be good for the American left? That it would increase their influence? The whole idea is nuttier than a warehouse full of fruitcakes. It’s a ridiculous idea in theory that has an extensive record of failure in practice.
From his CV I gather that deBoer is about my age, which means he’s old enough to remember the last time leftists made this argument that progressive paradise is right around the corner if we just teach those Democrats a lesson. That was 2000, and the ponies we reaped for sowing Democratic Party candidate Al Gore’s defeat by sitting out the election or voting for Ralph Nader were huge tax cuts for the rich, soaring budget deficits, a recession, and oh yeah, the loveliest pony of them all, the Iraq War.
Hillary Clinton is running on a strong progressive platform. The deBoers of the world go on believing their lying eyes, concocting farcical stories about why they just can’t vote for her. As they continue to trot out such arguments and fail to respond adequately to criticism, one starts to wonder if their true motivation can be found by rearranging the letters in “my soy gin” to make a single word.
Hmm, I don’t know, Trump’s kind of a bully and Clinton is such a nerd. How will I ever decide whom to go to prom with? By Mjt16 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Since Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee and the choices are clear before the American people, it’s important to sharpen our thinking around voting. I’ve written about thisbefore, but it’s worth revisiting now that there are three candidates.
The third candidate whom I’m referring to is Gary Johnson. There has already been some “Johnson is the only true progressive!” nonsense published out there after Bernie Sanders’ hopes were crushed in New Jersey and California last Tuesday. Johnson is many things, but he’s no progressive. To begin with, he doesn’t believe in any of the basic pillars of the New Deal or the Great Society that Sanders and Clinton both are trying to preserve or expand upon. Johnson is as close to being Sanders on the issues as I am to starting at center for the L.A. Lakers next season (I’m 5’4″ and haven’t played a game of basketball in about seven years).
But Clinton and her emails! Her Wall Street speeches! Trump says she had someone murdered! We just can’t trust her!
It should go without saying that if one is going to make a moral case against Clinton, then one cannot vote for Donald Trump, either. That leaves Johnson.
No politician or human being is without moral shortcomings. Clinton, Trump, and Johnson didn’t get to their positions in life without making some mistakes or engaging in outright reprehensible behavior on occasion. There’s even a moral case against Sanders and his oversight as chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. Then there is Sanders’ wife, Jane Sanders, whom stands accused of destroying a small Vermont liberal arts college due to an irresponsible and possibly fraudulent real estate deal she rammed through during her tenure as president. Now, these might be cases made by people with an ax to grind against Sanders, but that brings us back to the larger, more important point.
Everyone at the level these people reach has skeletons in their closets. Johnson is no different. Aside from being a hypocrite like we all are sometimes, he has some truly ugly behavior for which he’d probably rather not have to account. As governor of New Mexico, he loved privatized prisons, and he loved awarding the contracts for their construction to the friends he had made when he was CEO of his own construction firm. When state officials became alarmed by the number of murders and riots happening at these prisons, Johnson refused to allow his own state to study what was going on inside them.
The fact is that all these candidates have their flaws and we can minimize them or blow them out of proportion according to our own biases, so as always, people should figure out which party they’d rather have in power and vote for its candidates. If someone finds Clinton’s emails disqualifying, well, I guess that’s principled. If someone finds the fact that Johnson refused to allow his own state to investigate a dramatic increase in murders and riots in his pet private prisons disqualifying, well, I guess that would be principled, too. See, everyone can play the “my candidate’s purer than your candidate” game. It’s the wrong game to play, especially with the stakes as high as they are in a presidential election.
It’s not terribly inspiring to make the dread relativist argument about why any given candidate, as a moral person, is generally no worse than any other candidate. Personal qualities and behavior matter for sure, and I’d argue that Trump’s disqualify him while Clinton’s and Johnson’s don’t disqualify them. Actually, Trump is that extremely rare candidate for president that is obviously morally unfit for office and is kind of the exception that proves the rule. Although, a good moral argument could’ve been made against George W. Bush in 2004 after we had already learned about his administration’s torture policies. (As an aside, it was Bush’s torture regime that motivated my first foray into political blogging, published by Andrew Sullivan back in 2006.)
It’s very easy for a motivated person to make a moral case against any specific candidate. Do I really think that Clinton’s moral failure with her emails isn’t as bad as Johnson’s moral failure with the private prison industry he was in bed with? Who cares?
My role as a voter is to figure out which party I want to control the government. The parties have very clear and very different platforms. If people want to vote for Trump or Johnson then vote for Trump or Johnson, but they should save us the bullshit about how they would’ve voted for Sanders if he were the Democratic Party’s nominee but they just can’t vote for Clinton. That’s being confused about what they’re doing with their vote at best, and being disingenuous at worst.
This is the last picture I took from the house I’d been staying at here in Dali.
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote here. While laziness explains some of my absence, a somewhat frightening, bizarre, and ultimately tragic episode that took place is mostly responsible. I’ll share it here since it sheds light on a problem that’s looming in China.
For some background, I moved into a new place at the beginning of the year and wrote about it here. I rented the third floor of a nice house near Dali Old Town and paid rent up front for January through June. The house was owned by the family of one of the students in my adult EFL class. Let’s call her “Ann” to protect some privacy, even though using her English name probably wouldn’t lead anyone back to her and everyone here in Dali that might read this already knows who she is and has heard at least part of this story.
About six weeks ago, I was heading out on an off day around 4 p.m. to do some food shopping when Ann’s parents, daughter, and niece arrived at the house to do some yard work and take care of the dog. As I passed by them in the house’s courtyard, Ann’s father muttered something to me that I didn’t quite understand. At that moment, someone started knocking on the door (the house, like many in Dali, has a big courtyard enclosed by two parallel walls extending out from the house, with a third wall connecting those two out in front, with a large gate in it). I turned back and told Ann’s father someone was knocking on the door, but he was acting very strangely, kind of hiding behind the front door to the house itself and continuing to mutter. I asked him to repeat what he was saying, but he muttered again and feeling frustrated, I turned back around to open the gate and leave. When I did, three men were standing out front and let themselves in as I started to walk out. Not liking the vibe, I followed them back into the house. Ann’s daughter and niece were already on the third floor, where I was staying in one of the bedrooms. The three men sat down in the first floor living room and began speaking with Ann’s parents.
After an hour passed, I really started to worry about the situation. I asked Ann’s daughter and niece, both in their early teens, if they knew those men or knew what they wanted. They both said they didn’t know anything about them, and while they didn’t seem particularly interested in what was happening, they also seemed embarrassed by my questions. They both continued to chat, do their homework, and play on their phones. I tried to eavesdrop on the first floor conversation, but couldn’t really catch much. The men seemed to be making some sort of demands, occasionally raising their voices. I wanted to go do my shopping, but I also didn’t want to leave two elderly people and their teenage granddaughters alone with those men.
This went on for four and a half hours. I grew increasingly worried, and had sent text messages to Ann after her daughter and niece proved entirely uninterested and useless in figuring out what was happening. Ann replied that she didn’t know these men and not to worry.
Then men finally left around at 8:30 p.m., just before Ann and her husband arrived. The family quickly left. I didn’t even have a chance to see Ann, who I guess was waiting outside the house. I found this odd because Ann is very friendly and always keen to practice her English. After texting her again about the situation, she replied that I shouldn’t worry, those men were just looking for her brother.
I knew that her brother owned an Audi dealership, and the one time I met him he seemed flamboyantly nouveau-riche. That assessment may be influenced by what has transpired since, but I’m pretty sure I had that sense of him. He was surrounded by some of his staff members, and they were all fairly drunk, rambunctious, and pleased with themselves.
Either the irony of saying both “strange men are looking for my brother” and “don’t worry” was completely lost on Ann, or she was aware of a growing problem and trying not to make me panic. In any case, the whole thing had felt a bit like a hostage situation, and I was not convinced it was finished.
Sure enough, the men returned the next day, this time meeting Ann’s parents as they exited the front gate after finishing the yard work. The timing of that suggested to me that someone had been watching the house. The men came inside the courtyard and then the house with Ann’s parents, and again the men sat them down in the living room. I stayed on the third floor and tried to listen, but again could only catch occasional raised voices and vague references to “demands.” This time the men only stayed an hour and a half. After they left, I asked Ann’s parents if they were okay and they smiled politely but didn’t say anything relevant. They left to return to their family in Xiaguan, the “new city” here in Dali.
The next afternoon, about a minute after I got home from going shopping, someone knocked on the door. I didn’t answer it, and after knocking off and on for ten minutes the person stopped and went away. I texted Ann about it, to which she again replied that I shouldn’t worry, some men were just looking for her brother. She also asked if I could feed the dog for at least a week because her father had “low energy.” Over the next week, I must have been home when someone knocked on the door every other day. I had the distinct sense that I, or at least the house, was being watched.
A few days later, Ann’s husband, with whom I’m friendly, stopped by the house to check on the place and see how things were going. I told him that people had been by a few times to knock on the door, but I hadn’t answered. He told me that men were looking for his brother-in-law but I shouldn’t worry, it wasn’t any business that concerned me, and I shouldn’t open the door for anyone. While he was preparing to leave a man came and knocked on the courtyard door. He went out to answer it and I watched them have a heated argument through the courtyard gate peephole. When Ann’s husband came back inside, he said that it was someone looking for his brother-in-law again, but that hopefully they wouldn’t be coming back.
Fast forward to the Wednesday evening of May 25th. I was reading the news when someone started pounding on the front gate. They pounded for about ten minutes straight with only very short breaks. It started around 8 p.m., so very soon it was dark. Whoever it was could obviously see that the light was on up on the third floor where I’d been sitting at my computer. A man walked back from the front wall to find a spot where he could angle his flashlight beam up into the third floor windows. I ducked behind the curtain, but with the light on they almost certainly assumed, correctly, that someone was in there anyway. I couldn’t tell how many men were out there, but at some point it became clear it was at least three and that they had a car parked outside the front gate. They kept banging on the front gate, and they even tried the gate handle to see if they could simply let themselves in. Someone went around to the back of the house and tried the back door as well, but that was also locked.
By this time, I had gone downstairs to lock the front door to the house and returned to the third floor with a meat cleaver and a knife. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t have the physical stature or any real desire to fight. But while these weapons almost certainly would’ve been ultimately futile, I at least felt like I was doing something to deal with the situation.
About an hour into it, someone got the bright idea to cut off the power to the house. So then it was about 9 or 9:30 p.m., I had no power and therefore no internet access (important because I’d been using WeChat, China’s ubiquitous online chatting/sharing platform, to send some messages to Ann), and it was clear that men were surrounding the house and didn’t really seem anxious to leave. Fortunately, I had just fully charged my phone that afternoon, so I knew I was good on power for at least two days. My phone bill was paid up, so I’d be able to message and call people. For an hour or two more, someone would occasionally pound on the door or call out for me, or whomever they thought it was in the house, to open the door. I sat down in a chair to alternately read SPQR on my Kindle and stress out, all the while updating Ann through text message about what was happening and not feeling at all like she was in any control whatsoever of the situation.
I think I went to bed around 1 a.m. I was pretty sure that some men were sleeping in a car outside of the front gate. I hadn’t seen lights reflecting off the neighboring house’s wall in a while, nor had I seen the car leave, so I figured they were done chain-smoking and playing cards in the car or whatever it was they were doing to pass the time that evening and were then trying to sleep.
I was awake early but didn’t get out of bed until about 8 a.m. I figured the men were still there, though I couldn’t see anyone or catch sight of the car I knew had been out there from the lights turned on the previous night. The dog chained up by the front gate was barking angrily, which meant he could probably sense people just outside the gate. I went downstairs to take a look out the front gate. However, they had covered the peepholes set in the two front gate doors with dirt. Now convinced they were still out there, I went back inside and sent Ann a message saying something like “the men are still here, this is crazy and i’m scared.”
We finally talked on the phone, and I told Ann that if her family couldn’t figure out what was happening soon, I’d have to ask my friends to help me out of the situation, perhaps by calling the police. Ann seemed more confused about why I thought the police would be able to do anything than she seemed worried about me getting the authorities involved, but I finally impressed upon her that whatever was happening, I felt threatened and wanted out of the situation, the sooner the better. She said she was sending her father, whom I hadn’t seen in four weeks, and that he would get there soon.
The men continued to occasionally bang on the door and call for me to open it. As the morning progressed, I started feeling more and more sheepish about the whole thing. I knew intellectually that these men were not there for me. My Chinese is good enough that I could’ve spoken with them the night before when they first showed up to figure out what was happening. But something about them trying to let themselves in and then cutting off the power made me feel threatened, or too annoyed to give in, or some combination of both.
While I was waiting for Ann’s father to arrive, I started calling some friends to tell them about the last 12 hours and solicit advice. For the time being, it was thought best that I stay locked in up on the third floor and wait to see what would happen with Ann’s father. Meanwhile, people would be ready to come to the house and call the police at a moment’s notice.
Ann’s father arrived around 10:30 a.m. and opened up the front gate. Four men filed into the courtyard after him, several of them quite big and all of them wearing tightly fitting shirts and some version of a man purse. This outfit generally conjures up images of the mafia in China, but even now I don’t really understand who these men were or who they were representing if not themselves. Anyway, after discovering the front door to the house locked, they banged on it for a few minutes before realizing I wasn’t going to open that one for them either. I overheard Ann’s father explain that a foreigner lived in the house, which is why some of the men serenaded me with an infuriating “helloooooooo” from time to time. That morning, I had grabbed some sausage, cheese, and crackers from the kitchen, so I had a snack while I contemplated my next move.
Meanwhile, Ann could not get in touch with her father because he’d either set his phone to silent mode or was ignoring the calls. So she still didn’t understand what was happening and advised that I not open the door. She said she would be there after work, which would be around 6 p.m. I told her that wasn’t really an option for me. If nobody could confidently tell me that I could leave the house unharmed soon, I was going to ask my friends to help me get out.
For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I made sure to stay out of the men’s lines of sight. This also meant I couldn’t get close enough to windows to hear what they were saying to Ann’s father, though I did watch a ten-minute session when one of the larger men held a piece of paper in front of Ann’s father’s face and gestured at it emphatically. Ann’s father looked dejected, and I could see that his left hand was almost constantly shaking, something I had never seen before. And I had seen him every day for about two straight months before this whole ordeal started. Anyway, when I then saw nine muscle-shirted men congregate in the courtyard at once, I figured it was time to act.
My friends and colleagues, foreigners and Chinese, were great. We hatched a plan that two of my Chinese friends, both women, would come to the house and try to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, three more friends – all somewhat big or very big foreign men – would wait down the street out of sight. An at then unknown number of other people would be ready to come to the house should anything happen. But our first priority was for me to leave peacefully and be done with the whole thing without the men even knowing we were prepared for worse. I would have a bag with essentials ready to go at 2:30 p.m.
My two Chinese friends arrived at the set time and immediately started talking with some of the men. It was animated but nothing about it appeared dangerous, and sure enough a few minutes into it one friend called me to say I should come out and we could leave. So I did, and some of the men were very apologetic, entreating my Chinese friends to tell me they were sorry about the inconvenience. They also said that I could come back for the rest of my things, but that it’d be better if I found a new place to live. Ann’s father was also very apologetic, and he and I shook hands and we took our leave.
When we met up with our other friends down the street, the two women told us what they had learned. Ann’s brother, the one who had disappeared, had a 10,000,000 RMB loan (about 1.5 million USD) outstanding and the house had been put up as collateral. The men were simply there to take the house as representatives of – or possibly as – the new owners.
Of course, I was never really in danger and felt pretty sheepish about that. But it was nice to learn, though I already knew it, that I have really good friends here. It turns out my friends had at least another 15 people just a ten-minute walk away who were all ready to come help if needed. I met a bunch of them for drinks later and thanked them. Thank you again, any of you who read this!
I know I was comically overcautious, but I justify it in a variety of ways. The simplest is that I leave China for good on June 28th, and now that I’m so ready to return to my wife and to go back to school in the U.S. and it’s so close, I don’t want anything stupid to happen that would prevent that. Getting caught in the middle of some dude whom I don’t even know and the people he owes millions of RMB is precisely the kind of stupid situation I want to avoid.
I’d also argue that my instincts about what was happening in real time were not totally crazy. In the U.S., if a bunch of strangers start violently pounding on your door, try to let themselves in at multiple points of entry, cover your peepholes with dirt, and cut off your power – all this after watching your house for a month – you’d probably think that that’s not going to end well for you.
Of course, I feel really badly for Ann and her family. Ann and her daughter were two of my first students here in Dali, and their family has been nothing but kind to me. I hate to see such terrible things happen to such nice people. I have since been able to go back and get all of my stuff out of that house (a story in itself, with how nice the muscle-shirted, boxing-loving guy watching it has been to me). I now only hope that Ann’s family doesn’t suffer any more harassment, and that the house, tragic as that is, is their only liability here. I really don’t know what to say regarding the brother. We’ve already heard stories of his and his wife’s extravagant lifestyle, that the Audi dealership is lost as well, and that he had borrowed even more money. I don’t wish him ill, but it’s hard to see how this ends well for him.
Everything about this story seems to confirm some of my and my peers’ worst fears about the Chinese economic system. Some of Ann’s comments after this happened – and of course she has every right to be upset and looking for a scapegoat is understandable – suggest that many people here do not understand basic concepts of risk that accompany investment in a market economy. She wondered how the government can let this happen, and that’s not a crazy view when we see repeated instances of the government bailing out poor investments, whether it’s in the stock market or it’s a state owned enterprise or it’s a wink and a nod to banks allowing them to lend money to failed businesses which then use the new loans to service the old loans. The credit flying around here, and the sense that businesses can’t fail, remind some of us of the pre-recession real estate bubble in western countries like the U.S., only this credit bubble seems to be spread among the wider economy as well.
Of course, I should be careful about using this one story of Ann’s brother to confirm such notions. I haven’t done the research necessary to be confident in them. It’s possible that Ann’s brother is actually a case of things working out the way they should when someone runs an unsound business and/or uses the loans to acquire personal possessions, and that people fully understand there are consequences for failure, like losing the property you’ve put up as collateral. Whether this is one data point in a largely healthy economy where risk is generally understood and accepted, or it’s a case that illustrates a significant trend of investments made with credit and limited appreciation for the risks involved…
This story is one anecdote among many similar that have already happened concerning private debt in China, and surely more are to come. It’s a growing problem: please find an eye-opening chart here and a great series of articles about it here. China has some unique circumstances in its favor, and there are reasons to believe China won’t suffer a 2008-style recession or something worse. But this type of situation Ann’s family found itself in, with all sides seeing wealth disappear and one side seeing a family member disappear – if that repeats itself millions or tens of millions of times without organized intervention to stop or mitigate it, well, I’m glad I’ll be gone.
Behold! There is a white knight for anti-Trump Republicans after all. His name is Gary Johnson, Republican Governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, now turned Libertarian and likely to be that party’s nominee for president in 2016. He’s polling at 10% in matchups with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the moment, and really, he could gain some traction this year.
Johnson is the candidate that would have been created in a lab to attract “limited government” Republicans who like everything about Trump’s tax and economic policies but don’t want to vote for a misogynist, mobbed up, white nationalist-inspiring know-nothing. I mean, look at Johnson’sissue positions:
He would shift the tax burden from the rich to the working and middle classes through eliminating all tax on income and establishing a nationwide consumption tax.
He rails against Trumpian immigration policy and supports a two-year grace period for the millions of currently undocumented immigrants residing in the country.
He loves term limits for elected officials.
Johnson believes the federal debt is going to destroy us all, so we’d better slash the welfare state and make sure lazy senior citizens work until they’re at least 72.
He thinks the health insurance market is basically the same as any other market, so it shouldn’t be regulated. If Americans are too lazy to get rich and afford plans that cover anything more than catastrophe after huge deductibles, them’s the breaks.
He’s a harsh critic of our criminal justice system and U.S. drug policy, would like to see marijuana legalized, and loves privatizing prisons.
For that matter, Johnson loves privatizing everything.
On climate change, Johnson thinks the government shouldn’t do anything about it. But hey, at least he thinks it’s probably happening!
He’s pro-choice, but not too pro-choice!
Johnson thinks that people and corporations should be able to contribute as much money as they want to candidates seeking election, but it’s problematic if public sector unions make contributions.
He loves guns and thinks gun control doesn’t work. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, because logic.
Johnson thinks the federal government can’t do anything right, but state governments are great, so put them in complete control of education, Medicaid, making sure black people can use the same bathrooms as white people, etc.
He wooed his current partner by having her read Ayn Rand, which allows me to link to my all-time favorite Rand joke: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
I can’t help but editorialize around some of Johnson’s positions, so it must be clear I won’t be voting for him. But Republicans disaffected by Trump, he’s your man!
Voters registered with the California American Independent Party. By Wilson Bentley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A few hundred thousand California voters are about to find out that they cannot vote for candidates in their preferred major political party in the primary contest being held on June 7th. This will inevitably lead to wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of Bernie Sanders supporters who don’t want to engage with the American political system until they do.
Ed Kilgore explains that many California voters, though not a terribly significant amount in the country’s most populous state, have registered with the American Independent Party (AIP), many apparently under the mistaken belief that it means they are of “no party preference.” Being able to call yourself an “independent” is way sexier than saying you have no party preference, but there’s a problem for these voters.
The AIP was the vehicle by which segregationist George Wallace ran for president in 1968. Today, and largely because of mistaken affiliation, the AIP is California’s third largest party by membership. In recent times, the AIP has been most closely associated with the Constitution Party and the Tea Party reaction against Barack Obama’s presidency. Accordingly, intentional members of the AIP tend to believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation, Social Security and other federal welfare programs are unconstitutional, income taxes should be abolished, undocumented immigrants should be summarily deported, etc. You know, all the stuff Bernie Sanders supports!
I mock, but that’s because I had been the type of person to whom political independence and special snowflake posturing was attractive. I wrote a while ago about why my vote in 2000 for Ralph Nader was stupid and I regret it to this day. Our democratic republic and presidential system tends to converge on two major parties, each consisting of competing factions. Showing up to vote in most primaries as a registered independent or no party preference voter, and finding you do not have a say in one of the two major parties, is like turning up at a soccer match and wondering why you can’t just pick up the ball with your hands, run down the field, and throw it in your opponent’s goal. It shows no understanding of the system in which you want to participate.
I agree with Kilgore that closed primaries ought to make it easier for people to re-register their party affiliation, preferably on the same day as the primary. It should be easier to vote, not harder. For example, New York’s re-registration deadline 193 days before its primary contests was absurd and undemocratic. The good news for California voters is that their deadline is today, a relatively reasonable 15 days before the primary contests.
People are busy, and most don’t spend hours obsessing about this stuff for a hobby like me. Convenience in voting should always be preferred in a country that prides itself as the world’s foremost democracy. However, voters should have minimal understanding of the system in which they live if they want to participate in a meaningful way.
Independent or no party affiliation registration denies voters a voice in major party primary elections, and frankly, that’s fine. Parties are state-by-state organizations and are set up to gauge the preferences of their members. Independents can go on and cast a meaningful vote in the general election, because like party-affiliated voters, they are members of the United States. But in what other walks of life do we allow non-members to have a say in an organization’s affairs? Independent voters aren’t morally wrong to declare themselves untainted by party affiliation, but it’s extremely unreasonable for them to expect parties to welcome their input.
The last few weeks have featured some interesting pieces by prominent reporters and analysts about why they severely underestimated Donald Trump’s chances at the Republican nomination. For my money, the most worthwhile so far is this one by “data journalist” Nate Silver at his website FiveThirtyEight. He and his team put Trump’s chances at 2% last August and raised them to 7% by December. The unprecedented nature of a Trump-type seriously vying for the nomination led the FiveThirtyEight crew to over-rely on the thesis behind The Party Decides, which proposes that a political party’s establishment steers the electorate to its preferred choice in presidential nominating contests. As it turns out, while the 2016 contests haven’t been great for The Party Decides-style analysis, they certainly haven’t refuted the theory altogether. After all, Hillary Clinton is a classic “party decides” candidate, and Trump’s victory is perhaps indicative of what happens when the party DOESN’T decide.
The Republican Party establishment was dead set against Trump from the beginning, but they never managed to rally around a single candidate. Actually, that’s not entirely true; Jeb Bush had huge amounts of money and significant establishment support dating back to early 2015. For a variety of reasons, Bush’s candidacy went nowhere fast. The establishment backed a spectacularly and fatally flawed horse and never recovered. That they thought Bush – brother of one of the two worst presidents since World War II, non-hater of immigrants, and Common Core supporter – could ever establish rapport with the Republican base in this weird political moment we’re now living through goes to show just how unprepared they were to deal with the forces that have brought us Trump.
In his fascinating retrospective on FiveThirtyEight’s thinking, Silver proposes models that could have taken Trump’s chances more seriously. However, under these new models, back in the fall of 2015 Trump still would have only been considered to have had between a 10 and 15% chance at the nomination. It wasn’t until the voting actually began and Trump did very well in February that FiveThirtyEight’s models finally gave him front-runner status.
We’ve seen unlikely and ultimately poor general election candidates win nominations before, such as George McGovern and Barry Goldwater. As more and more indicators revealed Trump’s strong position, the unlikely became likely, and after Indiana, inevitable.
Since a lot of elite political commentators are making hay right now out of getting Trump wrong, why not explain why I got him right? How did I come to call Trump the front-runner last August when most analysts were still laughing at his candidacy? First, I should acknowledge that I waffled a bit on that just a few days later in the post “Can the Republican Establishment Trump Trump?” I was heeding commentators like Nate Silver and Jonathan Chait, and I hedged against what seemed to be a rash take? But even in that post, I laid out the case for Trump being the favorite. Just as important, I explained what had to happen in order for the Republican Party to deny Trump the nomination. They never managed to do any of it.
There were two main reasons, both related to polling, why I thought Trump was in the best position to win the nomination. First, Trump was the plurality leader in nearly every poll taken since he had entered the race. Silver cautioned against reading too much into polls taken months before voting was set to begin, and usually caution is warranted. This time, however, there were indicators suggesting something strange was happening. I noticed that Trump’s leads were consistent except for one brief period of time when Ben Carson inched ahead, but not really at Trump’s expense. The Carson bubble soon burst, and Trump went right back into the lead, never to relinquish it.
Another polling factor I thought important was how “non-establishment” candidates performed in aggregate against “establishment” candidates. Nationally, and often in individual states, the Trump-Carson-Ted Cruz trio combined for more than 50% and sometimes more than 60% support, while the “establishment” candidates were stuck between 20 and 30% altogether.
When Carson collapsed, which was only a matter of time, where was his support going? I never for a second believed it would go to Bush or Marco Rubio. Cruz, who had hoped to be the credible outsider in this campaign, started losing votes to Trump when he blatantly cozied up to Republican elites to earn their support to deny Trump a majority of the delegates. I always thought that at least 50% of the vote would go to non-establishment types, and once Cruz turned his campaign into that of an insider, Trump cleaned up the outsider vote. I doubt it’s a coincidence that Trump started winning majorities around the time Cruz and his campaign started bragging about gaming the delegate system. The geographic region helped, sure, but then Trump went on to a crushing win in Indiana, where Cruz was supposed to be strong.
Why think that non-establishment types would combine for at least 50% of the vote, and that Trump could consolidate that vote when his rivals dropped out or forfeited their outsider status? First, the polls always gave the non-establishment category commanding support, usually well over 50%.
Second, I wrote this back in August 2015 about what animates the Republican Party base and why it might support Trump :
The genuinely fascinating thing about Trump’s candidacy is how he is exposing fault lines between the GOP’s elites and its base. The elites have two economic priorities: keep taxes low and limit government regulation. The base has two economic priorities: keep their jobs and their “earned” benefits, Social Security and Medicare (the “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare” phenomenon).
The GOP elite has always been hostile to welfare programs (yes, Social Security and Medicare are socialist welfare programs) because they require certain tax levels and regulations to keep afloat. So how has the GOP managed for decades, like with Bush in 2004, to elect people who promise to dismantle the programs the base relies upon? One thesis, though it has its flaws, is proposed in the famous book What’s the Matter with Kansas?The basic argument is that GOP elites impose upon the electorate candidates who share elite priorities of low taxes and slashed welfare programs, but are capable of redirecting the base with cultural issues, such as immigrants, abortion, gays, and guns (and yes, race), that the candidates and elites have little appetite for actually pursuing.
The Tea Party backlash against the GOP establishment is an expression of this tension in the party. The base started waking up to the fact that the establishment had no real dog in the culture war fights. The base began electing people who really did want to ban abortions, who really did want to carve out exceptions to equal protection laws to allow people with certain religious beliefs to discriminate against gays, who really did want to severely restrict immigration and forcibly remove those residing in the country illegally.
The problem here is that the GOP base has always preferred Democratic economic policies (link to opinions about Social Security, but could easily link to opinions about taxes, Medicare, etc.). So I find it extremely hard to believe that the GOP base is rallying around Trump simply because he talks more like a Democrat about economic issues…
So what’s going on here? Why would a bloc of voters who have always voted for GOP economic policies all of a sudden be open to Democratic economic policies espoused by someone who sounds like a racist demagogue?
The Republican establishment took it for granted that its base of angry white people would hold their noses and vote for John McCains and Mitt Romneys forever and ever. They assumed the base would be fine in perpetuity with do-nothing Congresses that never deliver on the campaign promises of repealing Obamacare, building walls and deporting millions of immigrants, and putting women, minorities, Muslims and LGBT citizens back in their places. The elite made the mistake of conflating base support for these reactionary positions with support for the elites’ two true goals: low taxes and no regulations. This was the Republican establishment’s key mistake, and you could see back in the summer of 2015 how Trump was deftly exploiting the rift between the elites and the base over economic issues. Nevermind that Trump’s tax policies and many of his economic policies belie his populist rhetoric. The Republican base has always been a bunch of rubes.
What Trump did brilliantly in his campaign was decouple the traditional conservative cultural grievances from elite economic policy. Once a candidate, and especially a gifted demagogue like Trump, figured out that the base just wants its cultural meat and who cares about the tax vegetables, it was over. It might sound simplistic, but that was my assumption this whole time. Polling during this election cycle and recent voting behavior suggested that at least 50% of the Republican base is most concerned with full-throated airings of grievances and couldn’t care less about making sure the rich don’t pay higher taxes. Much of the base, after all, are members of Romney’s infamous 47% who don’t pay income taxes and will never take advantage of tax schemes that favor the rich like the carried interest loophole.
I won’t pretend that this explains the whole election, though I contend it explains much of it. Trump demonstrated almost immediately that he understood this cleavage between the base and the elites and that he could leverage it better than any of his 2012 harbingers or 2016 rivals. That’s why he’s the long shot that actually came in first.
Nonsense Consensus 