The View from Right Field

Where Does the Republican Party Go After Donald Trump?

While Donald Trump has only been president for a little over a year and a half (it seems longer, doesn't it?), with the 2020 election starting in January of next year (assuming it hasn't started already), it is perhaps not too early to start looking at the question in the title this post, since it could happen in a little more than two years.¹

In an editorial (“What has become of the Republican Party?”) and a long article (“How the elephant got its Trump”) back in April, The Economist touched on this question.  One of the most interesting points in the article was that Trump supporters came to the Republican Party before President Trump did.  Donald Trump didn’t create the populist wing (or whatever you want to call it) of the Republican Party.  He merely took advantage of it.

Let’s Respect the Flag by Actually Singing the Star Spangled Banner

On Wednesday, the NFL announced a policy providing, as I understand it, that all players on the field when the National Anthem is played must stand and show respect for the flag and anthem.  Players who do not want to stand can stay in the locker room until after the anthem is played.

It has never been a big deal for me whether players stood or didn’t stand during the anthem.  I don’t watch football, and even if I did, I wouldn’t care.  There are more important things to worry about.  Plus the freedom to protest is a good thing.

An Idea for Less Stress About the News

Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics, was asked what somebody should do if they woke up, turned on the TV, and found that the stock market had fallen by three percent.  Dr. Thaler’s advice was simple: “Change channels.  Turn the show off.”¹

Dr. Thaler’s investment advice is pretty simple:

“Whenever anyone asks me for investment advice, I tell them to buy a diversified portfolio heavily tilted toward stocks, especially if they are young, and then scrupulously avoid reading anything in the newspaper aside from the sports section.”²

He said crossword puzzles are also okay, but you need to stay away from the financial section.

Sex Scandals – and Bill Clinton’s Impeachment

With all of the sex scandals, and worse, appearing these days involving politicians, entertainment figures, and business leaders, I want to make one thing perfectly clear with respect to Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and President Clinton’s impeachment.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but the reason I supported President Clinton’s impeachment was not because of what he and Ms. Lewinsky did.¹  It was because President Clinton lied under oath about what he and Ms. Lewinsky did.

TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome

We have previously had ODS and BDS (i.e., Obama Derangement Syndrome and Bush Derangement Syndrome [George W. Bush, that is]).  ODS and BDS can be explained as stressing out over President Obama or President Bush all the time, thinking that everything wrong was their fault, and worrying that the country might never recover.  We had a form of CDS (i.e., Clinton Derangement Syndrome) back in the nineties (particularly during Bill Clinton’s second term), even if it wasn’t called that.¹  There was probably a RRDS (i.e., Ronald Reagan Derangement Syndrome), though it, too, would not have had that name.  There definitely was a NDS (i.e., Nixon Derangement Syndrome), which started not in 1969 or 1973 (with Watergate), but in 1948.²  However, I don’t think any of them, even ODS, was as all-consuming as TDS (except maybe NDS during the last few months of Watergate).

TDS has been going full strength since Donald Trump was inaugurated – if not since he was elected (or before).³   It’s hard to read a newspaper or watch a news show (or check your smartphone, for those who get their news that way) without seeing all kinds of things about Donald Trump: good, bad, crazy, porn, etc.  And we have 33 months to go (at a minimum).

Social Trust

Megan McArdle wrote about trust, and in particular social trust, in a recent article on “The left’s Denmark envy.”  The reason for the left’s “Denmark envy” is fairly obvious: generous welfare benefits, social liberalism, and high taxes.  Plus Denmark doesn’t have the things those on the right predict for a country with generous benefits and high taxes, such as high unemployment, fleeing capital, lower GDP, and benefit cheating.  Why?  According to Ms. McArdle: “Denmark and its Nordic neighbors get away with it because they have an extraordinary high level of social trust.”

Ms. McArdle explains how social trust works and why the United States has less of it:

“‘Social trust’ is, well, what it sounds like: How much do you trust your neighbors?  And in turn, how trustworthy are they?  In a low-trust place such as Greece, people don’t trust their neighbors not to cheat, which in turn makes them more likely to cheat themselves, because why should you stay honest when everyone else is getting away with something?  This affects everything: whether people pay their taxes, whether they take benefits they don’t really need, how easy it is to regulate companies.  And social trust also works as a productivity booster, because [it allows you to] do away with a lot of the cumbersome monitoring that is ubiquitous in modern societies – the supervisors who oversee low-level workers, the store clerks who keep an eye on the customers.  Every worker who is not making sure that people don’t steal or shirk can be re-employed doing something that actually increases output.

The Thomas Jefferson Standard for Judging Leaders

Thomas Jefferson is famous, among so many things, for what he had inscribed on his gravestone.  Mr. Jefferson had been Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Secretary of State, Vice President, and of course President from 1801 to 1809.  Any of these alone would be career achievements for other people.  And yet, Thomas Jefferson did not put any of them on his tombstone.  Rather, he directed that his gravestone read as follows:

“Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom
And Father of the University of Virginia”

What Will Happen in Washington When All the Good People Leave?

Democrats will be happy with Trey Gowdy’s (R, SC) announcement Wednesday that he will not be running for reelection to the House this year.  Representative Gowdy is another in a long line of Republicans retiring from the House this year.  Some of them were members who were reaching their term limits as heads of committees,¹ but that wasn’t Representative Gowdy.  He only took over last year as head of the House Oversight Committee.  Instead, Representative Gowdy explained his retirement this way:

“Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom that in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system.  As I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding.”

That is a considerable indictment of our political system today.  People rightly talk about the Greatest Generation, the men and women who served in World War II and then went on to serve our country in government and elsewhere for decades afterward, all the way to George H. W. Bush and beyond.

Donald Trump As a Dangerous President: The Problem With Crying Wolf

Democrats, and others, have called, and continue to call, Donald Trump the worst prepared president we have ever had with respect to foreign policy.  They see his instincts and lack of knowledge as dangerous. 

While I agree with many of these thoughts, the problem Democrats have in making this complaint is that it sounds so familiar.  It is hard for me to think of a Republican president in my lifetime (which is not a short period of time), who was not, when running for office and, usually, when in office, criticized by Democrats as ill-prepared, impulsive, and/or just dumb.

Dwight Eisenhower, even after he left office, was viewed by Democrats and academicians (assuming there is much of a difference) as a congenial grandfather type who didn’t run things or understand how government ran.  Harry Truman famously said of President Eisenhower, when he was running for president: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this!  Do that!’  And nothing will happen.  Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army.  He’ll find it very frustrating.”  Truman was talking of a man who had successfully gotten Generals Bernard Montgomery, Omar Bradley, and George Patton to cooperate in the invasion of western Europe, and yet Truman, and many others, thought Eisenhower didn’t understand politics or know how to get things done.

Nudges, Sludges, and Who Gets to Decide

Using insights from behavioral economics, Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal about ways to get workers to save more for retirement.¹  The basic idea is to make it easier for people to do the right thing.

For example, instead of making workers choose to join a retirement plan, they suggest putting them in the plan automatically and letting them opt out if they want to.  Also, instead of putting people in at a low contribution rate and letting them decide to contribute more, they say to start people at a higher amount and let them cut back if they want to.  And to get workders to increase the amount they are saving, get them to agree now to automatically increase the amount they save in the future, for example, when raise time comes around.  These things, which the authors call “nudges,” actually do get people to save more.