The Death Of Politics

Peter Wehner, “The Death of Politics. How to Heal our Frayed Republic After Trump,” 2019, Harper One, PP. 239

My Notes:

Peter Wehner, the author, has worked as a college intern in the Washington State legislature, as a senior advisor in the White House, and in the previous three Republican administrations: the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations as well as seven years in the George W. Bush White House as the deputy director of speechwriting before becoming the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives.  Today he is a New York Times contributing opinion writer for The Atlantic, and frequent commentator on political talk shows.  He is a long-time Republican and his recent focus is on the general calamity caused by President Trump.  He warned during the election that even though Hillary could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it.  Trump, if he were to win, could redefine it from a conservative party to an angry, bigoted, populist one.  And, so it goes.

We are at a low ebb in the history of modern American politics—a period when large challenges are being either ignored or made worse, and when politics is an arena to appeal to the most radical factions of party—those that control the gerrymandered primaries. The political leadership in both parties ranges from mediocre to dismal.  Republicans and Democrats have contempt for each other and, many times for each other.  They can’t work together to solve our common problems.  And “the most important and powerful political office in the world is occupied by a man who is intellectually, temperamentally, and morally unfit to be mayor of a small city, let alone president of the US”.

My Notes:

Pg. 14:  How did we get here where public trust in the government is near historic lows?  Three-quarters of Americans believe it is a serious problem that the political system in Washington is not working well enough to produce solutions to the nation’s problems.  The author proposes that the answer is complicated, and as with any broad trend there are many contributing and converging factors.  But four are worth emphasizing because they go a long way toward helping us understand where we are: (1) massive demographic and cultural changes, which many see as redefining what it means to be American; (2) long-term income stagnation for most workers, which provokes middle-class economic anxieties; (3) the ongoing polarization of our political parties at the cost of not solving America’s problems; and (4) the resulting loss of trust in the political class.  Today, 2019, we are at the confluence of these four streams (p. 26)

Pg. 16: Beginning in the decade of the 2000s and for the first time in American history, people who say they are ‘white’ and ‘Christian’ constituted less than 50 percent of the population in America.  Students of color now make up a majority of public school pupils.  Almost 40 percent of the population is nonwhite, double what it was in 1980.  Only half of adults are married today, compared to 72 percent in 1960.  Two-parent households have declined from 88 percent in 1960 to 69 percent today, and 40 percent of all births are to unwed mothers.  Gay marriage is now settled in the minds of most Americans; the next boundary has to do with transgender rights. 

Pg. 19:  The growing economy’s blessing has been asymmetrical, with real-wage growth (excluding benefits, largely health benefits) being zero or negative for the bottom 80 percent of the population since 2008, while about 85 percent of the stock market gains have flowed to the to 10 percent of the population.  (This statistic needs to be revised to a ‘net benefit,’  that is, benefits such as disability payments, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc.).

Pg. 28:  There have been other periods of turbulence, including the late 1960s, which was marked by widespread race riots and the Vietnam War, by Kent State and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial of the Chicago Seven, by the counterculture revolution and the sexual revolution.  The US experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just eighteen months in 1971 and 1972, almost five a day*.  And Watergate in 1974 brought down a president and in the process deeply divided the nation.  (I’m not sure the nation was so deeply divided by Nixon’s downfall—everyone I knew was OK with it.)

*http://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/

The creating and interpreting of the American Constitution was strongly influenced by Aristotle, John Locke, and later, Lincoln.  All three, though living in different centuries, had a conviction that politics is a prerequisite for human thriving; that the failure of politics expresses itself in moral, economic, and social ruin; that politics needs to be rooted in a realistic conception of the human person and a correct reading of human nature; and that the qualities to prize in statesmen are prudence, wise judgment, and discernment.  They all worried about the passions, zealotry, and mob rule and they knew that politics, when done correctly, allows humans to flourish in areas beyond politics. (P. 58).

Pg. 42:  Key principles America learned from Aristotle:

·         Politics is an essential moral enterprise structuring our public life to encourage virtue and moral excellence.

·         Being part of a political community is necessary to achieve the good life.

·         The state exists for the purpose of helping people acquire virtue and moral excellence.

·         Rulers are not above the law and need to be held accountable.

·         Politics negotiates the ongoing tension between the needs of the group and the liberty of individuals.

Pg. 44:  John Locke and classical liberalism concluded that:

·         Human beings are born free and equal, and these qualities are inherent and therefore do not derive from the state.

·         The power of government rests on the consent of the governed; as a result, restraints on government are required to maintain its proper functioning.

·         Government is measured by how it protects the individual and her rights—and because arbitrary and unrestrained state power is a threat to the individual, government should be limited in its power. - -

·         The state should not be engaged in the business of shaping souls.  There exists an ongoing tension, and hence a political debate, in assessing when the proper limits on the power of government are transgressed.

·         Regarding the last principle, this question was never simply settled. And the place of moral questions—and of matters of character and virtue—in politics remained a source of tension and dispute in the practical political life of every free society, very much including ours.

Pg. 52:  Lincoln insisted on interpreting the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration of Independence.  (Note: I keep running into this insistence by Conservatives that the Declaration of Independence is a lens through which the Constitution is to be interpreted.  This insistence is puzzling to me as the Declaration was written ten years before the Constitution and it first yielded the Articles of Confederation as our government.  I also ran into this approach when reviewing a course on the Constitution from Hillsdale College. As desirable as this lens may be, I’ve never found a traceable justification for it in the Constitution, no matter how reasonable it seems.).

Lincoln’s contribution to American politics include the following:

·         The US Constitution and our laws and traditions are built on the foundation of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  (See: here we go again with the Declaration; just saying it doesn’t make it so).

• The heart of the Declaration of Independence is expressed in its second sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
• Fundamental human rights should never be decided by majority rule.
• Passionately fighting for a just cause and treating enemies of that just cause with dignity and forbearance are not incompatible.

Pg. 62:  The evangelical world has rallied around Trump, supporting him for president in even greater numbers than it did George W. Bush.  As a result, white evangelicals got a seat at the table of power.  But this ascent to power has come at a devastating cost to evangelicalism’s moral integrity and credibility, damage that might take generations to heal, if it ever does.

Pg. 76:  What is most troubling about Evangelical support for Trump is that so many of them supported him in the Republican primaries, when there were more than a dozen candidates who were, by any reasonable standard that ought to matter to evangelicals, light-years better than Trump. 

Pg. 114f:   After 773 days in office, Trump made more than 9,000 false or misleading claims, which averages out to more than 11 per day.  The sheer scope, breadth, and shamelessness of the Trump lies are impressive in their own corrupt way: claiming voter fraud cost him the popular vote; Russian intervention in our election was a hoax; Obama bugging Trump Tower; that tax reform is costing him a fortune; Charlottesville, ‘good people on both sides’; migrant children being separated from parents was forced on him by Democrats…etc.

Pg. 124:  A combination of factors—social media and new technology platforms; micro-targeting and psychometric methods in political campaigns; unprecedented polarization and hyper-partisanship, the fragmentation of traditional media sources and the advent of information silos; and the intervention in our elections by hostile powers using ‘fake news,’ misinformation, and disinformation—has reshaped American politics.  The capacity to inject poison into our political bloodstream—in the form of lies and falsehoods, crazed conspiracy theories, smears, and dehumanizing attacks—is unprecedented.

 Pg. 159:  The Great Compromise:  was an agreement that large and small states reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that in part defined the legislative structure and representation that each state would have under the United States Constitution. The compromise retained the bicameral federal legislature, along with proportional representation of the states in the House, but required the Senate to be weighted equally among the states. Each state would have two representatives in the Senate.  Additionally, the Electoral College was the result of compromise as well as determining how Supreme Court justices were picked and the length of time a president could serve.  And then there was slavery compromise which considered each slave three-fifths of a person for representation purposes.  The southern delegates would never have supported the Constitution if it meant the abolition of slavery.

Pg. 172f:  Most of us assume that people see issues—abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism, gun control, tax policy, and income inequality, entitlement reform, illegal immigration, welfare payments, climate change, Black Lives Matter, and countless others—through essentially the same prism we do.  But it’s more complicated than that.  Our interpretative frame and intellectual moral tendencies are the product of many factors.  For example, if one views abortion entirely through the lens of a woman’s right to choose, then restricting abortion is a gratuitous offense.  If one views abortion through the prism of the rights and well-being of an unborn child, then subsidizing abortion is a grave transgression, and so on through the other issues.

Pg. 176:  According to a December 2018 report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Russia’s IRA (Internet Research Agency) activities were designed to polarize the US public and interfere in elections by

·         Campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to distrust US institutions,

·         .encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and

·         Spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum.

Pg. 179:   An encouraging sign on the horizon are groups like the Civics Renewal Network, a consortium of nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations committed to strengthening civic life in the US.  One of those organizations is iCivics.org, founded in 2009 by Sandra Day O’Connor.  It teaches students about government through online, interactive games and supporting classroom resources, and the result is more active and informed citizens.      

Pg. 189ff:  In 1993 the author helped prepare a report, “The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators”, which quantified and analyzed social trends over a thirty-year period from 1960 to 1990.  Over this period of time there had been a 500 percent increase in violent crime, a more than 400 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births, almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rage, a doubling of the divorce rate, and a decline of more than seventy points in SAT scores.

But something happened along the road to Gomorrah and the collapse of our culture.  Most things started to get better.  A 2007 report documented significant progress in the areas of crime and violent crime, drug use, welfare dependency, the rate and total number of abortions, teen sexual activity and births, smoking and binge drinking, and education scores.  Many, including the author, had underestimated the ability of good governance and the will of the American people to reverse these trends. 

For instance, the 1996 welfare law (championed by conservatives and signed into law by President Clinton) reversed sixty years of federal policy by ending welfare as an entitlement program.  It imposed a five-year time limit on the receipt of benefits, require a large percentage of recipients to seek and obtain work, and enhanced enforcement of child support.  Within five years the national welfare caseload declined by almost 60 percent while employment figures for single mothers rose and overall poverty, child poverty and child hunger decreased. (Pg. 205). 

It is the same story with crime.  The violent crime rate has been cut roughly in half since 1993, with the homicide and robbery rates each having fallen by more than 50 percent.  Unlike welfare, where the federal government instituted reforms, in the case of crime most of the reforms were undertaken by state and local governments. (Pg. 206.)

A third major policy success is the earned-income tax credit created during the Ford Presidency and expanded by Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.  Although costing more than $60 billion per year, no other tax or transfer program prevents more children from living a life of poverty; only Social Security keeps more people above poverty. (Pg. 206).

Pg. 198: There are numerous reasons for the rise of populism.  They include uneven prosperity and widening income inequality, the erosion of the manufacturing sector and the ‘urbanization of opportunity,’ and the fallout from the 2008 Great Recession.  These economic factors were combined with the inability of many Western governments to deal with waves of immigration in ways that commanded public support, and with widening cultural divisions between those with college degrees and those without them.  The result is a backlash that has disrupted the post-WWII bargain between elites and citizens.