What Will Follow the Trauma of Trump?

The last week or two I've been haunted by the following metaphorical scenario.  A cancer patient has learned that the disease has metastasized.  There is a particularly large tumor which is causing a lot of pain.  The doctor recommends excision of this particular tumor, as doing that will so lessen the patient's discomfort.  But otherwise, the doctor suggests letting the disease run its course. There is an experimental treatment that might cure the disease entirely, but the success rate is only about 1% of the time.  The treatment itself is painful and disorienting for the patient.  So, the likely outcome with the treatment is no gain yet with lots more pain. Under the circumstances, facing facts but otherwise doing nothing seems the most sensible course of action.

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I hope it's obvious how to translate the above into our current national politics.  A Harris-Walz victory on Election Day can be seen as excising a very large tumor.  If that happens and if there is no return of Stop the Steal, or even if there is such a return but the initial effort in that direction peters out quickly, then the majority of voters will breathe a big sigh of relief.  What then?   Owing to emotional exhaustion from all the national politics, most voters will likely want to turn their attention elsewhere, to relax and enjoy life.  Nobody would blame them in that event.  It would be completely understandable.  In that case, the system will operate much as before, and we'll muddle through. Then, President Harris may go through a honeymoon period, where substantive things do get accomplished.  But the underlying cancer will have remained in the system.  Gridlock in Congress is then very likely to return, just as it did under President Obama.  

Having read this far, you might very well guess that the rest of this post is about considering that experimental solution, the one which could cure the disease entirely, even if the likelihood of doing so is extremely low.  I will discuss my version of such a solution in two parts.  Part one will offer my diagnosis of the disease.  Part two will offer my version of the cure.  Then, in the the conclusion, I will encourage readers to either make modifications to what I suggest, bringing the result more in accord with their own thinking, or have them offer entirely different alternatives yet with the the same goal - to provide a cure for what ails the system.  

Let me also note here that as a sports fan I do believe in "the jinx" and, consequently, I've been wondering myself whether this post should not be published till after election, if at all. The reason for doing otherwise is that some of the ideas offered here will be hard for readers to digest, not conceptually but as to their plausibility.  These ideas might then be entirely discounted and matter for naught.  So I will make a concerted effort to keep up a flow of posts that promote the ideas and hope that with such persistence readers will be more willing to entertain the thinking.  Going from that to putting the ideas into implementation is another matter.  That will require others who want to go "all in" with these suggestions.  My hope is that my posts might serve as a call to action.

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The Diagnosis

I will list several particulars, each with its own annotation.  The particulars are meant to be interconnected.  The first three are at the level of national politics.  The next three are at the level of the general population. 

• Trump drew all the attention, and then some.  Consequently, the Republicans in Congress were set free to act as they would, without concern for consequence, except from Trump himself.
  
  
  • The most obvious of this sort of action was the trial that followed the Second Impeachment of Trump, which was about him inciting the events of January 6.  Two thirds of the Senators would need to have voted guilty for a guilty verdict to obtain.  A majority of the Senators did vote guilty, but that majority wasn't large enough.  Each of those who voted not guilty was a Republican.  There were 43 Senators in that category.  The reader needs to ask, did those Senators vote their conscience or did they turn a blind eye to the evidence, either out of the quid pro quo with Trump or out of fear of retaliation from him?  If the latter, they violated their oath of office.
  
  
  • The only possible threat these Republicans faced for voting to acquit Trump was not getting reelected.  Evidently, for most of them that threat wasn't credible.
    
    
    • In this particular case, the next election was almost two years off and voters typically have a focus only on what is of concern at present.  By the time of the 2022 election, this vote would have been largely forgotten.  Further, the point is amplified as Senate elections are every 6 years and those elections are staggered, so that only one third of the Senate seats are up for contest in any election year.
  
  
• The quid pro quo amounted to this: Republicans in Congress would ignore Trump's various "indiscretions" if in return Trump would do as they favored, particularly with regard to nominations for judicial appointments.
  
  
  • Trump kept his end of the bargain this way.  And Democrats in the Senate got played earlier, by weakening the rules for approval of appointments, as under Obama so many of his nominations (for all sorts of positions, not just judicial nominations) were blocked under the Filibuster.  Obama was upset by this and asked then Majority Leader Harry Reid to do something so that his nominations would go through.  Reid, in turn, had the rules for approval of non-judicial appointments weakened.  Later, then Majority Leader McConnell extended this to include judicial appointments. Subsequently, even with only a narrow majority in the Senate, Republicans were able to get Trump's nominations through.  Indeed, Judge Kavanaugh received only 50 votes for confirmation, yet that was sufficient for him to become a Supreme Court Justice.
  
  
• That majorities in each House of Congress have been so slim gave more power to the Plutocrats, who didn't face sufficient oversight and who kept many of those in Congress in their pockets, as a consequence of their donations to their campaigns and other forms of "generosity." 
  
  
  • The Citizens United case was decided in 2010, during President Obama's first term.  In the process of doing background reading about the case, I stumbled onto an essay about Sandra Day O'Connor that clarified things for me although it was not directly related to the Citizen's United Case.  Rather, it dealt with an abortion case from 1989 dealing with a Missouri law, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.  Justice O'Connor was against Roe and she was the swing vote in the case.  In spite of her prior disposition, she felt it inappropriate to use the case to overturn Roe out of judicial restraint.  In practical terms, this meant deciding the case narrowly.  Further, she argued that judicial restraint is the approach that conservative justices should take, though apparently she was the only one of the conservative justices to hold that position. 
    
    The issue of judicial restraint also played a large role in Citizens United v. FEC, which originally came to the Supreme Court in March 2009.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the initial opinion, in which the case was decided narrowly.  Justice Kennedy wrote a concurrent opinion, which argued that the case should be decided broadly and, in particular, that restrictions in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act violated the right to free speech.  Ultimately, this view became law and those restrictions were shut down.  Justice Souter, who retired from the Court later in 2009, wrote the original dissenting opinion.  It gave a scathing critique of the Chief Justice, who was accused of manipulations that would make him seem moderate while bringing about this broad reduction in the BCRA. 

• Extreme income inequality has become a feature of the economy; where we truly were a "middle class society" when I was kid, we no longer are.  To illustrate this, consider the simple statistic: Median Family Income/Mean Family Income, which has experienced a downward trend since the mid 1950s.  (I describe why I looked at this statistic in this post from May.)  If families with income at or near the median are living comfortably, then income inequality per se is not a problem.  But if such families are struggling to make ends meet then income inequality is a big deal.  (Also note that there are non-family households, which typically have lower income than family households.)
  
  
  • How Inequality Threatens Civil Society, an essay from eight years ago by Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton, is well worth the read.  It gives an explanation for why the inequality has emerged - lack of productivity growth leads many entrepreneurs to engage in "rent seeking" rather than in finding the "new new thing." This motivates the uber-rich at one end of the income distribution and leaves less to go around for everyone else.  Further, certain sectors of the economy suffer from extreme bloat. Deaton mentions healthcare and finance.  Elite higher education may be another of those.  With this as explanation, the piece talks about the social ills caused when too many people can't earn a decent living.
    

• There is a severe mental health crisis in the U.S. as documented here.  The piece points out that the crisis began before COVID-19, but was surely exacerbated by it. 
  
  
  • In fall 2019 I wrote about witnessing this in the course I was then teaching.  The post is called Dire Education.  This paragraph from my post describes the futility that seems at the heart of the mental health issues for college students. 
    
    The thing is, this student is by no means the only student in my class who is struggling emotionally.  Indeed, such struggles may be the new normal. There is discord between (a) very high tuition, (b) pressure to get a good job after graduation, and (c) the students don't know what they want for themselves.   To this I'd add the following.  Many of the students I see in my course don't appear competent at a cognitive level in the course prerequisites.  They've had years and years of school as credentialing, without it producing a foundation for further learning later in life.
    
    
  •  I have no direct experience with the world of work outside higher education, but I suspect that my explanation in the previous bullet, suitably translated to the world-of-work setting, would hold up reasonably well there.  Surely when on the job the fear of being fired or getting laid off has to be very stressful as would being unemployed and then performing a job search that turns up only poor offers.
    

• There is extreme enmity between some conservative Republicans and some liberal Democrats.  The conservative Republicans despise the liberals for their elitism - looking down their noses.  The liberal Democrats despise the conservatives for their selfishness and insularity.  The media reinforces these prejudices.  Indeed, for some TV News networks making the viewers angry is part of the business model, as angry viewers tend to be "repeat customers."
  
  
  • Some of this may be inevitable.  When I was a teenager (late 1960s and early 1970s) the divisive issue was the Vietnam War and it was sometimes characterized as the Hardhats versus the Hippies.  But the then over-the-air TV news didn't exacerbate the tensions much, though there was criticism of liberal bias in the news.  Comparing now to then in this regard gives a dystopian view of technology that enables different news programming depending on political preference.
    
    
  • Political Polarization has many causes.  One of these that the linked piece mentions is the increased reliance on gerrymandering.  Another, I think this still matters but it is not commented upon nearly as much, is that before LBJ and his Great Society programs there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and there were moderates in each party.  This right-left overlap between the parties served as a calming influence.  Subsequently, there was party realignment.  Many of the conservative Democrats became Republicans.  The center within each party moved to the extremes.  At first this was just a consequence of realignment rather than that individuals became more extreme.  The latter did happen, but that was later.
    

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The Cure

Unlike in the previous section, let me provide an overview instead of a list of particulars.  The spoils from the political arrangement between Trump and Congressional Republicans need to be undone.  Vice President Harris has talked about signing a bill into law that restores Roe.  But, given the current composition of the Supreme Court, won't such a bill be deemed unconstitutional not too long after then President Harris has signed it?  If that is anticipated, the undoing of the spoils becomes a necessary part to restoring Roe. There is also a longer term concern, which to my knowledge no one else has talked about yet.  If these spoils remain it will provide a terrible precedent.  Sometime in the future, we could possibly see a replay with a charismatic yet tyrannical President coupled with a wish list from those in Congress in the President's party that can only be implemented by violating the Constitution.  And the next time, it could be the Democrats who are set to do this.  

Let me leave for the moment how this undoing might happen and instead turn to the need for a program that lessens income inequality in a real and substantial way and does so over an extended period of time.  Further, such a program must help not just those who are working or are actively seeking employment, but others as well, particularly those with mental health issues sufficiently severe that them working at present would be in nobody's interest.  This might challenge readers, who hold the belief that work is essential.  I encourage such readers, and everyone else as well, to have a go at this essay by Bertrand Russell published in 1932, In Praise of Idleness.  It's another idea that will require a lot of chewing over.  And, of course, this is not to say that incomes should be fully equalized whether the person works or not.  Unemployment insurance as a notion might convey some of what the solution should be like, but the term of the insurance, the factors that might extend the term further, and the amount paid all need to be taken into consideration.

Regarding programs that might aid those who are suffering from severe mental health problems, treat drug addiction and alcoholism, and encourage those who participate in such programs to see it through to where there is substantial improvement in their own mental health so that they are ready to return to living normal lives, I am out of my element here.  I do want to note that while I was still teaching in retirement (that ended in fall 2019) there was a well publicized need for more mental health professionals on campus (this need was national in scope, not just at Illinois).  But I also felt that our ordinary approach to educating students was far too dehumanizing.  How we can make both school and work more humane is not something we ask very often.  We should be doing that.  And if we come up with good answers, we should implement them.  Beyond that, I shouldn't be prescriptive here.  Let someone else who understands these issues far better than I do be the one to make recommendations.

Casting this into a political setting, I am currently in the midst of reading Keynes' essay, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written soon after the close of World War I, where he argues that the reparations being asked of Germany were far too severe, would hamper their recovery from the war, and cause much resentment.  Though Keynes is often associated with the Great Depression, he didn't predict that in this essay.  Here we can consider the Great Depression as adding fuel to the fire that Keynes had already predicted in this earlier essay.  Weimar Germany was not stable.  We all know what ensued after that.  The Marshall Plan, which came a few years after World War II ended, provided economic recovery in Europe, for friends and former foes alike.   It was quite a contrast to the reparations demanded of Germany after World War I.  In that sense, the economic proposals I have briefly sketched here give an overview of an economic recovery plan for America.  My recent post, Male Fail, offers some ideas programmatically about how this might be done.

Assuming the economic plan was implemented and proved effective, one might expect anger to tone down and tolerance for others unlike ourselves to increase.  If so, one might imagine this to be the favor returned as part of the quid pro quo for receiving economic assistance.  It very well could require facilitating organizations such as unions, churches, or community groups to get the recipients of the economic assistance to understand this quid pro quo.  But it would be the effectiveness of the program that would get those recipients to accept their obligation under the quid pro quo.

The last point to make on the economic program part of the plan is that it needs to endure for quite a while, though on plan specifics those might evolve over time to better fit the then current situation.  How long is quite a while?  I don't know, but certainly long enough to get the political objectives accomplished.  Just throwing out a number here, I would say about a decade.  That is certainly long enough for the economic program to become an expectation for everyone in society.

Now let's take up how the undoing will happen.  The key thought is that a super-majority of the voters must form that supports a specific agenda - the undoing coupled with the economic program.  These voters will come from both parties and include Independents as well.  Voters in this super-majority will vote for Congressional candidates who endorse the full agenda.  Over time, because of the massive number of such voters, Congress itself will move toward having more than two thirds of their members, in each of the two houses, endorse this same agenda.  Once that has happened, an Impeachment Trial aimed at one of the Supreme Court Justices nominated by Trump (or for that matter a similar such trial aimed at a lower court judge nominated by Trump) will obtain a guilty verdict.  Anticipating that, some of the Justices (and judges) may spare themselves the indignity of that experience and retire before it happens.  That would be okay.

To facilitate this happening, a separate non-party organization would need to form, to advance the agenda, get voters who support the agenda to become members of the organization, track candidates as to where they stand on the agenda, and perform these functions in an ongoing manner.  I don't believe this can happen within one of the parties now because voters from the other party will be reluctant to switch parties.  We need to make it easier on the voters to support the agenda.  If they can identify candidates from their own party who do this, bully for them. And, once this gets well along, one might imagine that this non-party organization encourages its members to, on occasion, cross party lines in their voting.  This might matter, particularly, during the primaries. 

Further, the non-party organization needs to remain strictly neutral on political issues that lie outside the agenda.  (In what I've articulated so far, foreign affairs would not have any place in the agenda.)  Now, let me complicate things a bit.  The narrower the agenda, the more likely it is to get people with otherwise diverse points of view to endorse it.  But the narrower the agenda, the less likely it is to cure the disease.  So setting the agenda scope is a non-trivial matter.  Beyond that, it also will matter how individual items are framed.  Indeed, that is critical.

I've had the idea to create a super-majority of voters for a while.  Back in fall 2022, I wrote a novelette that considers just the political component, the undoing, and only reaches that point in the last third of the book, where until then the goal was simply to restore Roe.  I wrote that as fiction, rather than as an essay as I'm doing here, because I didn't know how to get around the low probability of success while keeping the reader's interest.  (This is explained in the Notes to Chapter 01.)  But when I wrote the draft for that book, the upcoming Presidential election was quite a way off.  Now that it is pending, maybe some readers will be interested in what I'm saying here.  There are quite a few arguments brought forward in the novelette about how the political agenda is justified, how the super-majority would form, and the role played by the facilitating organization.  But I also tried to write the book in a way to talk about obstacles in achieving these goals.  I don't mean to imply that any of this will be a walk in the park.

I didn't have the economic piece in the novelette because at the time I didn't know how to fit it together with the political piece.  My blog is full of posts on economic matters, but until now I didn't see them fitting holistically with the political piece.  I believe that considering the economic piece as the analog to an economic recovery plan delivered after a devastating war is useful for the framing.  Further, while our national politics tends to treat economic assistance on an item by item basis, at present the focus has been on affordable housing, in the past it was on raising the minimum wage, actually the whole picture needs to be considered, even if it will take time to implement a full economic plan.

Let me close this section by imagining hypothetical conversations with Republican-leaning friends (I typically vote for Democratic candidates, though not always) on the ideas I've sketched here, provided in advance I know they are not going to vote for Trump and they too would like to see Roe restored.  What would their reactions be to what I've said?  I'm guessing they'd be pretty noncommittal.  They would need to reflect afterwards about matters.  The test is whether they'd want a follow up conversation, one where they could pose the questions and I'd try to address those.   Maybe that would lead to still a third conversation.  If a reasonable synthesis could emerge, I would be quite okay with that.

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While I'm comfortable with my own abstract thinking, I will confess it leaves a lot of holes that need to be filled, in particular, my not understanding the minds of many voters.  In 2016, for example, I didn't understand why so many Republican women voted for Trump, in spite of his evident misogyny.  Nowadays, I don't understand why so many MAGA Republicans seemingly vote against their own economic interests, nor do I comprehend why the race for President still seems to be so close.  I also don't know how my own high school classmates would react to this blog post.  My guess is that they'd say, it's interesting but there is way too much wishful thinking in it, Lanny.  They'd also say the post is much too long.

If that's on the mark, then I'd want to know whether they have some suggested changes/improvements that might still get us past merely muddling along in our politics.  I want other readers of this post to likewise feel empowered to offer changes/improvements in the argument.  If you do this as a comment on this post, I will greatly appreciate it and respond in kind.  If you'd prefer to send me an email, note that my contact information is given in the right sidebar.  Your message may very well influence subsequent posts I write on this topic.  And if you publish your suggestion on your own Website, please let me know.  In the old days when this blog was totally about ed tech, I could track those things.  I no longer can.   Thanks in advance for doing so.