Democrats Are About to Give Big Pharma the Big Tobacco Treatment by David Dayen for The New Republic

Democrats Are About to Give Big Pharma the Big Tobacco Treatment
The House of Representatives' first oversight hearing of 2019 wasn't about Trump. It was about skyrocketing drug prices.
By DAVID DAYEN
January 31, 2019
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Since flipping the House of Representatives in last year’s midterms, Democrats have been waiting to see real oversight return to the halls of Congress. That arrived on Tuesday, with the Committee on Oversight and Reform’s first hearing of 2019. But the subject at hand may have disappointed those who were hoping for a dramatic broadside against the Trump administration.


“Our first witness today is not President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen,” said chairman Elijah Cummings. “It’s not someone from the White House or even the Trump administration... The first witness is Antoinette Worsham.”

Worsham, a working mother from Cincinnati wearing a T-shirt reading “Patients Over Profits,” told the committee about her two daughters, both of whom were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. When the oldest, Antavia, turned 21, she was kicked off the Bureau for Children of Medical Handicaps, a state program that helped pay for her insulin. Unable to afford the medication, Antavia began to ration it. Eventually, she died. Worsham’s second child, Antanique, a freshman at the University of Toledo, fears the same fate.

“In two years my daughter will be 21,” Worsham told the committee, her voice cracking. “I am crying out and asking for you to review the pharmaceutical drug gouging and make healthcare affordable for all.”

Cummings has been working on the issue of high drug prices for a decade. Tuesday’s hearing was the first of what looks to be his signature investigation, an analogue to Henry Waxman’s investigation of the tobacco industry when he ran the Oversight Committee in the 1990s. It’s a reminder to Democrats of the importance of overseeing more than just the Trump administration—of the power of Congress not just to check the president, but make a difference in people’s lives.

Health care was the top issue in the midterm elections, making drug company price-gouging a natural subject of inquiry. Prescription drug prices are expected to go up to $610 billion by 2021, and for every price that gets cut, another 96 increase. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects prescription drug spending as a primary driver of overall health care inflation.


Innovation, in the form of new advances in medicine, is not the cause of this steady price rise. It mostly comes from existing medications. Insulin, for instance, is a 100-year-old drug that companies have “evergreened” through incremental changes to the makeup of the drug, which resets the 20-year patent clock. Insulin costs per patient doubled from 2012 to 2016, and at the beginning of the year, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk raised their insulin prices again.

Cummings’s Oversight Committee is taking on the industry in a systematic fashion. Two weeks ago, he sent letters to twelve major drug companies, asking for internal communications about price increases and preserving market share, as well as estimates of investment in research and development. Repeatedly in the hearing, Democrats made the point that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than researching new drugs.

The hearing featured several researchers and experts on the drug supply chain, as well as Worsham. Future ones will undoubtedly include CEOs of the leading drug companies, contrasting the personal stories of dying patients with the cold financial calculus of Big Pharma executives. Maybe Cummings will end up with a picture as famous as the shot of the tobacco CEOs with their hands raised, testifying under oath that they had no idea their product was addictive.

There’s no shortage of legislative ideas to prevent skyrocketing prices. Prescription drugs are currently organized through patent monopolies that give 20 years’ exclusivity to treatments. Congressman Ro Khanna and Senator Bernie Sanders would break those monopoly contracts and license medications for generic competition if the prices exceeded an international benchmark. Senator Elizabeth Warren would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing to manufacture generic versions of excessively priced or inaccessible drugs. And that’s on top of more common proposals, like having Medicare directly negotiate with drug companies over prices or importing lower-price drugs from overseas.

Most consumers know that drug prices are high and getting higher. But a congressional investigation that yields real information from inside the executive suites of pharmaceutical companies can build momentum. It can spur legal action, as it did in the tobacco case. It can set a roadmap for legislation, like the series of reports from former Senator Carl Levin’s subcommittee on shady financial practices that informed what became the Dodd-Frank Act.

It can even lead to bipartisan support. At yesterday’s hearing, Mark Meadows, the head of the Freedom Caucus who is seen as a close confidant of Donald Trump, said that he was “conveying a message from the President… he is serious in working in a bipartisan way to lower the cost of prescription drugs.” Trump’s actions thus far on drug prices have been limited and fairly ineffective, but even he has proposed some solid ideas, like eliminating rebates that push up list prices and forcing certain drugs to conform prices to international benchmarks. Good oversight makes it impossible to ignore pressing problems and can cut through the partisan fog.

Congress has lost a lot of institutional memory over the years, and perhaps the greatest deficiency has been in the area of oversight. Congress’ role should not be limited to overseeing the executive branch, although that’s certainly important. Committees can use oversight as a kind of field study for the challenges facing Americans outside of Washington, to identify and inform priorities. And in doing so, Congress can get closer to the people by showing its interest in the people’s business. As Cummings raged at the end of the hearing, “The cost of doing nothing is never nothing. I am going to paint Ms. Worsham’s face in the DNA of every cell of my brain to try and make sure that her other daughter, who’s facing the same thing, does not die.”

David Dayen is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud.
@ddayen

Universe of Memory 05: The cost of wasted time + testimonies

Vocabulary Labs can save you all this time, pain and frustration. If I didn't manage to convince you until now, that's ok. I still hope that you managed to learn a lot from these e-mails. If you're still hesitating, keep in mind that Vocabulary Labs comes with a 60-day guarantee. If you don't find it to be helpful, simply e-mail me, and you will get your money back without jumping through hoops. Take a chance on me, and I will take a chance on you. As many Vocabulary Labs students say - it might be the best language investment of your life. P.S. The course closes on Sunday at 9 am (GMT+2), or Saturday 11:59 (PT). It won't be back up for at least a couple of months. My students have my full support and that requires time. There are only so many people I can help at the same time. Here is how to join. Best, Bartosz

One of the aspects of language learning which not many people are willing to discuss is time. Mastering it fluently, or even at a conversational level, is one of the most time-consuming activities you might take up. If you use your typical learning approach, it will cost you anywhere between 600-1500 hours to start having a conversation in your target language. And even though people care about their time, and they hate to waste it, somehow they are fine with using ineffective methods for years on end. They buy dumbed-down advice of "you have to have fun." Sure, it will cost you extra 500 hours of your life to get to the same level, if you get there at all, but you will have fun. And I die a little bit every time when I get an e-mail saying "But this or that polyglot learned a language just by listening!" My answer is always the same - it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how fast I, or any other polyglot, can learn. Any person who knows many languages can learn much faster than the average. But can YOU, as a non-polyglot, learn fast without this advantage if you just use the right methods? The answer is, yes, you can. However, when you take a look at your typical testimonies from almost any language course, you might doubt it. They look lifeless and unenthusiastic. "I enjoyed the course.", "I learned so much.". Ugh. Here are just a couple of testimonies from Vocabulary Labs. Pay attention to the language my students use and to their results. "Although at present I devote about 20 minutes a day to study, I see that I have learned more than in the last month, going to ordinary language classes" - Anna K. "(...) I didn't believe at first that a B1 (in Finnish) in 4 months is achievable, but now I think it is pretty possible if I just keep doing it at the same pace (which is not highly demanding, by the way)." - Katrina Y. "One of the greatest investment I did for my education." - Marcelo A. (6 weeks after finishing the course) "Today I managed to read a Japanese newspaper article online and I would estimate I understood about 80 - 85% of it. Certainly, I understood everything the article was trying to express. Little victories keep my motivation high!" - Leon Mc. "I acquire 1000+ new vocabulary per month by putting in just 1-2 hours per day." - Jatupol P. "Your course is the first language course that I have ever owned where I actually looked forward to reading the next units and modules. Other language courses simply reminded me of boring and ineffective school work." - Ashley B. You can read more testimonies here. We are not talking about slight improvements in their learning pace. We're talking about complete transformations. Keep in mind that they are not exceptions. These results are pretty ordinary. I am not sure if there are many language experts out there who can boast the same results. And hence my question to you - how much is your time worth? The way I see it, even for a person who earns 5$ per hour, using the right methods might cut your learning time by hundreds of hours. That's a big chunk of your life which is potentially worth thousands of dollars. And I am talking about just one language here. What if you want to learn more of them? Are you prepared to kiss all that time goodbye? I am sure you all know at least a couple of people who learned a language and then they forgot it. They spent all that time to learn a language and then they wasted it. Why? They just didn't know how to learn properly, and how to maintain languages.

Universe of Memory 04: How to deal with overwhelmedness

Hi,

The number of options for any daredevil who wants to learn a foreign language is truly dizzying: Duolingo, Memrise, paper flashcards, textbooks, 1 million apps, and so on. Each one of them screams 'I am the one you need, babe. Pick me! I will show you what the good time means!'

But is the variety really that good for you (hint: it's not)?

Imagine the following:
You finish your work, get home and sit all worn-out in your comfy armchair. Suddenly, you start feeling this intrusive urge. The urge to LEARN.

So you think to yourself, "What should I start with? A book? An app? Or maybe an option no. 43?" After all, there are so many choices!

The clock keeps ticking, and you can't seem to make up your mind. Then you say with your best British accent "perhaps tomorrow."

Let's analyze what happened between your initial thought to learn and the moment when you gave up.

One thing which becomes instantly clear is that it isn't your ordinary quiz show, where you get to choose from a couple of available options. The potential answers are A, B, C all the way to Z. Heck, a single piece of paper, with 10 words on it, is treated as yet another learning material.

The growing confusion in your head immediately awakens your biggest opponent - your brain. It jumps in on the action, gently whispering to your ear. "You are not taking my glucose away."

This is the exact moment when you start feeling a knot of resistance in your stomach. As a result, you come up with ridiculous excuses as to why you shouldn't learn right now, and finally, you give up.

What's the simplest way to avoid this cognitive trap?

Limit the number of learning resources to the minimum. Don't hamster them. Just use what's necessary for your current level.



Dealing with overwhelmedness is just one of many language learning strategies I have created throughout the years to help me and my students learn languages in record time. You can find all those strategies in my course Vocabulary Labs.

Vocabulary Labs contains 15 modules and over 160 units which will explain you step-by-step how to rapidly acquire vocabulary and grammar, and first of all - how to become a truly independent and effective language learner.

Here are some of the things you will in Vocabulary Labs:

• what kind of mistakes hinder your learning and how to avoid them

• the EVA method which will guarantee you 100% recall (that's a big promise but I definitely deliver)

• how to optimize your reading. Learn new vocab from texts without spending too much time.

• my system for mastering grammar of any language (over 15 strategies which can be used in conjunction with each other so you can control your own grammatical correctness without any extra help)

• how to become fluent by speaking with yourself (including methods for double-checking that what you're saying is correct

•  how to find language partners so you don't have to pay for teachers/conversations

• how to surround yourself with a language so you maximize your total learning time and language gains.

• how to combine passive and active learning to get the best benefits

• how to use logic in learning to avoid unnecessary memorization

• how to improve your listening comprehension so you can understand asap

• how to use music in language learning. Learn and have fun! The module includes lots of different apps to automatically find interesting artists and lyrics.

• general learning strategies and strategies for specific language levels (A1-A2, B1-B2, etc.)

• Vocabulary Labs Cookbook - includes a lot of language specific resources so you don't waste time looking for them (currently available for German; Finnish, Swedish, Polish and Spanish are coming up soon).

• and many more

- Vocabulary Labs comes with a 60-day guarantee. If you don't find it to be helpful, simply e-mail me, and you will get your money back without jumping through hoops.

- What's more, you will have my full support so you can rest assured that you will be able to get the most out of it. It's not one of the courses where you are left to your own devices.

- Oh, and you get lifetime access to it as well. You can use it at the pace which you find convenient. That also means that you get a lot of cool updates per year to make your learning even more effective.

- Also, I will be checking on you via e-mails for 12 months after you complete the course (aka a naggin' mamma package).

P.S. The course closes on Sunday at 9 am (GMT+2), or Saturday 11:59 (PT) and it won't be back up for some time. My students have my full support and that requires time - there are only so many people I can help at the same time. Here is how to join.

P.P.S. Here are previous e-mails in case you missed them.

• Why so many people fail at language learning

• Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress

• The universal guidelines to structure your language learning

Talk to you soon,

Bartosz

Universe of Memory 03: The universal guidelines to structure your language learning

Hi!

Just like in nature, there is a specific order to things in learning languages. Those who violate it are doomed to pay the terrible price - they will inevitably flounder about and usually give up.

Here is how you can tell that it's happening to you:

• 1. Your current language routine is very haphazard.   

• 2. You keep starting and stopping because you really don’t know what you are doing.   

• 3. You really struggle to come up with a daily learning schedule, especially one that is intense.     

• 4. You have difficulty allocating your time.

Is there any way out of this madness? Yes. But as always, it's very different from what you usually hear.

Probably you've seen recommendations of this kind - read 10 minutes, then talk to somebody for 15 minutes, then do your flashcards, and watch TV series for 20 minutes.

That's crazy to expect from anyone to follow this kind of a learning plan. One sensible look at it should tell you that the cognitive load for any learner, in this case, will be through the roof!

There are way better solutions. Here are some strategies which I suggest to my Vocabulary Labs students:

• 1) At any given level, always prioritize vocabulary acquisition. Your vocabulary size is the single best predictor of how fast you will improve all the other language competences.

• 2) Always concentrate on learning actively. Once you feel frazzled, move on to passive learning.

• 3) If your goal is to communicate, ignore reading at A1-B1 levels. You can't talk to someone unless you understand them.

• 4) Once you achieve your basic fluency (usually around a B2 level), talking to others stops being a good learning strategy. Words used in conversations tend to be very repetitive and thus such an approach won't get you much further.

Of course, there are many other guidelines which, if implemented, will significantly optimize your learning and give it a nice structure. The feeling of knowing what to do every day is definitely very liberating and will help you restore your sanity.

Tomorrow I will show you some ways in which you can deal with overwhelmedness.

P.S. The Enrollment to my course Vocabulary Labs is open. This is the only course on the market which will give you deep insight into all the aspects of learning a language, especially learning vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary Labs will both simplify and accelerate your learning.

The course is based on the immutable principles of memory and will optimize your learning in every possible way. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you want to learn. Vocabulary Labs  gives you all the tools to pursue your goals with maximal efficiency. So far it has been used successfully by participants from over 20 countries to learn over 40 different languages (e.g. German, Tibetan, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Burmese, etc.).

Contrary to the most solutions on the market which offer you a chaotic bunch of methods, Vocabulary Labs guides you through all the complexities of the language-learning process in a step-by-step manner.

P.S. 2 - Here are two previous e-mails in case you've missed them.

• Why so many people fail at language learning

• Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress

Talk to you soon,

Bartosz

Bartosz 05 (Jan. 22): Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress

Hi!

If you have ever struggled to remember vocabulary, know that you're not alone. Many people feel that they need to work on their memory or get some good strategies for learning their target language.

No wonder. The whole learning process sometimes seems like the seventh circle of hell. Every time you learn a new language, you forget the ones you've learned previously.

Or you learn a language and feel quite confident. That is until you realize that you are forgetting the words you already know. So you make a smooth transition into the eight circle of hell, and you start experimenting. Duolingo, Memrise, shadowing, etc. You try out all these wonderful apps and methods, but you still feel that you're spinning your wheels.

Here are a couple of strategies which will help you get unstuck.



1) Limit your passive learning.

I get it. 98% of online "experts" tell you that it's the best way to progress. It's not. Very far from it. Let's talk about facts, not opinions, for a second.

Is reading that effective? Think again.

"Horst, Cobb, and Meara (1998) specifically looked at the number of words acquired from a simplified version of a novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which had 21000 running words. The novel was read in class during six class periods. It was found that the average vocabulary pick-up was five words."

"Lahav (1996) carried out a study of vocabulary learning from simplified readers. She tested students who read 4 readers, each one of about 20 000 words, and found an average learning rate of 3–4 words per book"

Both reading and listening have a very important place in the learning process but not when you just start to learn.

You will always learn the fastest if you:

• a) first learn actively until you get exhausted

• b) and then learn passively as much as you want to.

2) 'Train how you fight, fight how you train.'

Marines' motto is one of the best tips which will guide you towards the success in your learning. If you want to learn fast, your learning method should be as similar to the real application of languages as it's only possible.

Let's assume that you want to learn your target language to communicate. Communication means that you need to learn a word and build a sentence with it using the appropriate grammar rules. Your default learning method(s) should include all those elements.

Now, a couple of quick questions for you:

Does Memrise, or any spaced repetition software or app, meet these criteria or are you just mindlessly reviewing flashcards? Mostly without any context.

What about your typical flashcards, mnemonics, favorite websites, etc.? Not really, right?

What if you use pre-made decks or other lazy solutions? That's another hard no.

If you don't train how you fight, you're wasting unnecessarily tons of hours each year. Or you don't make any progress at all.

3) Stop exceeding the capacity of your short-term memory (aka memory span).


Your short-term memory is the bottleneck of the learning process. If you strain it too much, you will suffer some nasty consequences. Migraines, general disgust towards studying are among the most popular ones. And let's not forget about rationalizations.

If you have ever felt the sudden urge to plaster your walls rather than to buckle up and start learning, then you know what I am talking about.

How to deal with it?

The simplest solution is to always divide vocabulary you want to learn into smaller chunks. You want to learn a word only in the minimum viable context. It's the kind of context which contains only the necessary information needed to boost your chances to memorize the said word.

If you want to learn the German word 'der Stuhl (chair);, don't try to memorize it in the following phrase: 'Ich habe einen sehr schönen und teuren Stuhl gekauft.' Rather go with 'Ich habe einen Stuhl gekauft'.

Just these three strategies should help you learn much faster and save you countless hours.

Tomorrow, I will show you how structuring your language studies in the right way can further increase your learning pace.

----

P.S. My course Vocabulary Labs has just opened. It's a comprehensive learning system that teaches you step-by-step everything about learning vocabulary, learning strategies for different levels, mastering grammar, improving your listening comprehension and much more.

All with a humble (and extensive) support of yours truly and a 60-day guarantee. If you're stuck or simply want to learn fast(er) then you simply won't find anything better in the language learning world. Here is how you can join.

----

P.P.S. Here is my yesterday's e-mail in case you missed it.

• Why so many people fail at language learning.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Bartosz

The Party Declines / The Niskanen Center / Jacob Levy

January 18, 2017
The Party Declines
by Jacob T. Levy

For just over forty years, the Republican Party had a famously orderly succession to its leadership. From 1968 until 2012, every non-incumbent presidential nominee was, in one sense or another, the next in line, as either

•     the most recent Republican vice-president,

•     the runner-up in a previous contested Republican primary, or

•     the namesake son of the previous Republican president.

This lent even raucous Republican presidential nomination races an aura of seriousness and stability. The nomination sometimes went to someone who was once a rebel within the party (such as Ronald Reagan or John McCain), but only after he had put in some time in the organization, been given a thorough second look by the electorate, and developed into something more like a respected elder statesman.

Well, things continue until they don’t.

The 2016 election exposed grave vulnerability and fragility in the American party system. One major party was successfully hijacked by an extremist outsider in the face of initial opposition from a huge portion of the party’s elites and elected leaders. The other party came surprisingly close (if still not objectively very close) to meeting the same fate—and if Bernie Sanders had the advantage over Donald Trump of long experience in the Senate, his relationship to the Democratic Party was even more attenuated than Trump’s relationship to the Republican Party. (Sanders formally became a Democrat for the first time only in order to run in the primaries, and in the Senate he still identifies as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.)

It is little appreciated how much liberal democracy depends on strong parties, and a revitalized, re-understood liberalism adequate to the moment will have to overcome a traditional distaste for partisan politics.

Seventy-five years ago the political scientist E.E. Schattscheider wrote that political parties are “the orphans of political philosophy.” For more than a decade, a handful of political theorists led by Harvard’s Nancy Rosenblum (full disclosure: my undergraduate advisor) have been working to integrate an appreciation for parties and partisanship into our understanding of what healthy democratic government is like. The election of 2016 showed how urgent that task is; as political scientist Julia Azari has been arguing for months, “the defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.” 

I suggested in my previous essay that “voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.” That normality was the strong partisanship mentioned by Azari. 89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, 90% of Republicans for Trump. Those figures are down a touch from 2012—both major parties lost more voters to third parties than in 2012—but considering the year of headlines about how unpopular both candidates were, the result is stark.

For a while in the Fall it seemed that Trump would alienate enough Republicans to suffer a sizeable loss to Clinton. But those alienated Republicans had mostly shifted their voting intentions to third parties, not to Clinton, and most of them came home again by election day. Which is to say, we should start by understanding that partisans are very, very likely to vote for their own parties’ candidates, regardless of those candidates’ personal merits or indeed the substance of their views. Republicans will even vote for an opponent of free trade and of the postwar western alliance who grossly offends against conservative Christian sexual mores, if that’s who is at the top of their ticket.

The most important political science book of 2016, Christopher Achen’s and Larry Bartel’s Democracy for Realists, shows that we should expect this. Systematic political beliefs, ideas about policies, and views about the state of the world don’t drive decisions about what party to support among most voters most of the time. It’s the other way around: the initial judgment call about which side I’m on (a judgment call that is often shaped by intergenerational habits or membership in identity groups: which party is the party for people like me?) then leads me to bring my beliefs, ideas, and views into line with those that prevail on my side.

This is in part a matter of economizing on information, which we all do, because we have to. No mind could contain the information needed for sufficiently-informed decisionmaking about the countless policies decided by a modern government, and no life contains enough hours to study it, even if the mind could contain it. But it’s not just a matter of low-information voters using parties as a substitute for judgment.

Achen and Bartels show that the adjustment of beliefs (even about factual questions) to match the party’s often increases with greater information and education; it takes some sophistication to correctly understand which side of an issue one’s party is on, after all.

All of which is to say: once Donald Trump got the nomination, there was a real chance of his being elected. (Note that this means no one should ever wish for, and they certainly shouldn’t engage in, strategic cross-party voting to help a major party to nominate a truly disastrous candidate. The other party’s candidate starts with a very large part of the electorate that’s almost sure to vote for them; and that could well put them close enough to a plurality that they’re a stock market crash, a terrorist attack, or an FBI letter away from winning. Although there is now some debate about this finding, Achen and Bartels argue that there’s strong evidence that weather or even shark attacks can jiggle the needle.) In the face of strong partisanship among voters, a lot depends on the strength and quality of the parties as institutions in shaping nomination outcomes.

The question, then, is how did Trump win the nomination?

The immediate answer involves a lot of nervous, feckless, or opportunistic Republican elites waiting for other Republican elites to do the risky work of seriously opposing him, or just taking for granted that he’d implode of his own accord like previous vanity and novelty candidates like Herman Cain had done. In the fall of 2015 Trump flirted with the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if he didn’t like how the Republican establishment treated him; and any of his rivals who took direct aim at him became the target of his mud-wrestling style of politics. (Ted Cruz stood out for the shamelessness of his strategy: hug Trump close and actively praise him, the better to be able to sweep up his support once, presumably, other Republicans had done the work of taking him down.)

Democratic elites, in their capacity as superdelegates, at least faced some pressure to get off the fence and declare for a candidate, allowing Clinton an early show of strength. The Republican Party doesn’t have superdelegates to defend the party’s organizational interests, and Republican officeholders were extremely slow to endorse or rally around any candidate. The RNC seemed so unnerved by the third party threat that its leadership sat on their hands.

Enumerating these bad decisions is just the detailed way of saying: it turned out that the party establishment didn’t have enough organizational strength to be able to repel the invader. An RNC more confident in the party’s strength would have made different choices. Republican officeholders and donors with a clearer sense of partisan coherence might have rallied around one alternative and pressured others out of the race soon enough to matter.

In other words, while we can easily imagine smarter, earlier, and braver action by party elites that would have changed the outcome, suggesting that the party might not have been organizationally impotent, the party elites managed things so haplessly in part because they were organizationally weak and didn’t have tools they were confident in.

In an important new paper, NYU law professor Samuel Isaacharoff argues that the ability of American parties to effectively coordinate political action has been undermined by reforms and legal restrictions including the decline in patronage, the increasing reliance on primary elections (I would add, especially “open” primaries), and campaign finance reform that disproportionately targets highly-visible fund-raising by the parties themselves. The result is “hollowed out” institutions that are vulnerable to “hostile takeover.” Presidential campaigns end up standing substantially on their own in organizational terms, and remake the party afterwards if they win. Trump had notoriously little organizational contact or useful coordination with the RNC in the summer and fall; it turned out not to matter as much as nearly all pundits expected.

Why should we care?

The expectations of the founders notwithstanding, parties aren’t a pathology. There is no case of anything resembling democratic politics in a large modern nation-state that doesn’t involve party competition. Parties aggregate ideas, interests, and ideologies into medium-to-large coalitions, offering information to voters that is even approximately manageable. (Imagine if responsible voting involved not only a mastery of millions of pieces of information about thousands of policies, but also finding out about where the dozens of candidates who appear on a typical ballot—from president to dogcatcher—stood on each of them.) Parties encourage tradeoffs and turn-taking among the groups that make up those coalitions, providing rewards for moderation and patience. And they monitor both their own politicians and the other side’s politicians for gross malfeasance or misgovernment.

A party has a longer time horizon than does an individual politician, and doesn’t want to be tarred with an individual politician’s sins. The individual politician may have an interest in short-term corruption, demagogic popularity, and personal power, but their own party has an interest in keeping them in check. And if their own party forgets about that interest, the opposition is there to remind them.

The elites in the Republican Party spent late 2015 and 2016 showing every sign of knowing that Trump was bad for their party. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do enough about it. As voters and as people we should hold them responsible for their failure, but as citizens trying to understand the current state of affairs and looking for routes toward improvement, we should worry about the institutional weakness their failure revealed.

Democratic government needs parties; parties do not need democracy. As a method of integrating large numbers of people into organized mass politics, the party has also been a tool of authoritarianism and totalitarianism—indeed, party organization is one of the key ways in which modern totalitarianism differs from pre-modern tyranny.

In other words, the fact that we need parties as such is the beginning, not the end, of responsible analysis here. We need healthy and competing parties with reasonably responsible elites operating under rules and institutions that encourage ongoing responsibility. The breakdown of parties like that is an easily-overlooked piece of the fragility of free societies—for example, when they become vehicles for the organization of mass support for one strongman, instead of coalitions of cooperating groups brought together by groups of intermediating elites. Parties are only semi-formally a part of the state, and at first glance don’t seem like a part of its constitutional machinery, but their weakness or breakdown becomes weakness and breakdown in the system as a whole.

Isaacharoff’s paper analyzes parties through the model of the corporate business firm. This is useful and illuminating. As Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have argued, there’s something important in the early-19th-century conjunction of the rise of mass-membership partisan democratic politics and the transformation of the corporation from a monopolistic tool of mercantilist power into an organizational form open for anyone to access in a competitive market. That is, modern competitive democracy and modern competitive commercial capitalism are both part of what they call the “open access order” in which access to organizational tools that solve collective action problems is widely available.

In classical liberal or libertarian social thought, the commercial corporate firm is an object of constant analysis; but when it comes to firms’ political counterpart, that body of thought looks more like political philosophy than like political science, and parties are nowhere to be found. (A thinker like F.A. Hayek might mention that he identifies as an Old Whig to signal what his commitments are, but the sense of the Whigs as a political party doesn’t play any part in that.) I would argue that this is of a piece with classical liberal social theory’s neglect of democratic political processes and indeed of political science as a whole. Classical liberals rightly don’t believe that politics is the most morally valuable thing in the world, but the liberal order that encompasses such values as freedom of religion and speech, due process of law, and open commerce is structured and protected by its political environment. That order  is acutely vulnerable when those political structures fail. Our colleagues in economics (and in law-and-economics) do constant valuable work analyzing which legal rules and institutional forms best allow the commercial corporate firm to fulfill desirable economic functions—and which are most likely to become perverse institutional failures. Liberal political thought desperately needs to pay as much attention to the firm’s political counterpart.

I haven’t offered solutions here. I hope to develop ideas about solutions in this space over the next year. But treatment comes after diagnosis. We have to start by understanding that the dangers faced by the political and constitutional order have a lot to do with the weakness of the parties that we rely on to to make that order function.

—
Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Adjunct Fellow and Advisory Board Member.

Trump’s Cruel Proposal to End the Shutdown The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Trump’s Cruel Proposal to End the Shutdown
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 56min
Senate Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday announced the first hint of progress in negotiations over the government shutdown. The chamber has scheduled procedural votes on two separate bills for Thursday: one that would fund the government through February 8, and one that represents President Donald Trump’s opening bid for ending the standoff. Some experienced Capitol Hill observers are underwhelmed by the news:

Senate reaches critical deal to take failed cloture votes

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) January 22, 2019
I know this is an agreement to take two failed votes, but am I missing something?

Isn’t it tougher on Senate Republicans to vote against a clean CR to reopen government than it is for Senate Dems to vote against wall money + immigration changes + government funding?

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) January 22, 2019
A breakthrough, then, this is not. That would require a good-faith proposal from the president. Instead, he has put forth a lopsided deal that was reportedly crafted in negotiations between Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—hardly a stirring example of bipartisanship. Democrats rightly will reject it on Thursday, just as Republicans likely will reject the proposal to reopen the government while negotiations over the wall continue.

As expected, the proposal includes $5.7 billion in funding for Trump’s proposed wall along the southern border. In return, it would grant a three-year extension to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields roughly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. It also offers to extend the Temporary Protected Status program, which protects thousands of immigrants who have fled natural disasters or civil wars in their home countries.

It was Trump himself who, over the last two years, ordered an end to DACA and placed TPS recipients at risk for deportation, so his shutdown offer amounts to a hostage-taking. Since the extensions would be temporary, he wouldn’t even be releasing the hostages. But Trump still pitched his proposal as a moderate, sensible solution to the deadlock. “Border security, DACA, TPS, and many other things—straightforward, fair, reasonable, and common sense, with lots of compromise,” he told the country in an address from the White House on Saturday.

When Senate Republicans published the full legislative text of the proposal on Monday night, it soon became clear that their bargain had no hope of becoming law. Immigration lawyers and experts quickly discovered that the proposal would rewrite the DACA and the TPS programs to water down both their scope and their protections. The bill would also impose onerous new restrictions on some asylum applications that, if enacted, may violate U.S. humanitarian treaty commitments. The bill doesn’t show a way out of the shutdown standoff through compromise and conciliation. If anything, it makes compromise even less likely than before.

Trump’s proposal would create a new form of legal status called “provisional protected status” for DACA and TPS recipients. The bill would only apply to TPS recipients from four countries: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Pending expirations for recipients from Nepal and Sudan are still set to lapse without congressional action, while protections for recipients from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that expired in 2017 won’t be renewed. (Sudan’s status was scheduled to expire last November, but a federal judge ordered that it be kept in effect last October.)

Rather than simply extend the current legal status for DACA and TPS recipients, Trump’s proposal would essentially require them to reapply for it—this time, under legal thresholds normally used for immigrants suspected of marriage fraud. Other parts of the bill appeared to be aimed at dissuading asylum applications in the first place. One unusual provision, for example, would also require TPS recipients to reimburse the federal government for any tax credits they benefited from while living in the United States. Since some TPS recipients have lived in the country for more than a decade, those costs could be a crushing financial burden. David J. Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter that the provision was “totally unprecedented in the history of immigration law.”

Most of the changes to asylum law focus on Central American minors, a group of applicants whose requests for asylum have drawn the most coverage in recent years. Under current law, anyone seeking asylum can apply regardless of whether or not they entered the country with legal authorization. Trump, hoping to keep asylum-seekers from first entering the U.S., issued an executive order barring applications from those who didn’t present themselves at a port of entry. But a federal judge in California blocked the order from going into effect in November, and the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to overturn that injunction in December.

Trump’s proposal essentially asks Congress to let it do what the courts won’t allow. A key provision would require Central American minors to submit applications for asylum at U.S. processing centers in their home countries or neighboring ones, thereby undermining the entire premise of the legal right. “Asylum is a form of relief for people who are being persecuted in their home countries and the authorities there are unable or unwilling to protect them (or are the source of the persecution),” Gabriel Malor, a contributor to The Federalist, wrote on Twitter. “You can’t condition asylum on people remaining in the place where they are persecuted.”

Under the bill, only 50,000 Central American minors would be allowed to apply for asylum each year, and only 15,000 of those applications would be accepted. Determining which applicants would be granted asylum wouldn’t be left to immigration courts, but Department of Homeland Security officials. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer and analyst for the American Immigration Council, noted on Twitter that the bill explicitly shields those officials’ conclusions from judicial review by the federal courts.

The draconian terms make the proposal a non-starter for Democrats. So why make it at all? Trump, a reality-TV maven at heart, has never shied away from placing theatricality ahead of reality. By proposing an end to the shutdown, no matter how far-fetched it may be, he is hoping to shift public pressure onto the Democrats by casting them as the obstructive ones. (Polls show that Americans largely blame Trump and his party for the shutdown and its worsening effects.)

It’s not unusual for dealmakers to make an aggressive opening offer that can be pared back during negotiations. What’s striking about Trump’s proposal isn’t its boldness, but its underlying malice. The North Star of the president’s immigration policy has always been cruelty towards those who pass through the system. By pitching such an extreme proposal, Trump is essentially asking Democrats and the American public to participate in that cruelty to a degree of their own choosing. The only moral choice is to not participate at all.

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The huge problem with Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe that no one talks about | Will Bunch

The huge problem with Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe that no one talks about | Will Bunch
Updated: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
by Will Bunch

If you watched even a few minutes of cable TV news on Friday, you could almost catch a whiff of gunpowder emanating from your flat screen -- and you heard the word “bombshell” more often than a night of Dick Cheney “shock and awe” over Baghdad. A “game-changer” was the other phrase that got tossed around frequently as TV’s talking heads struggled to dissect a report from Buzzfeed News alleging that federal prosecutors had evidence that President Trump had “directed” his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations for a Trump Tower Moscow during the heat of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Indeed, if anything else happened Friday -- killer floods, a new “murder of the century” -- the nation would not have heard about it. The implication was that Buzzfeed’s report was the “smoking gun,” the one thing that would end Trump’s presidency, even if some viewers couldn’t help but wonder why that line wasn’t crossed with Trump’s firing of FBI chief Jim Comey or the revelation of the June 2016 Team Trump-Russia confab at Trump Tower NY or Cohen pleading that Trump “directed” a felony campaign-finance violation. Then, at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, the real chaos erupted.
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The special counsel’s office led by Robert Mueller -- with a penchant for speaking in public somewhere between Greta Garbo and Marcel Marceau -- shocked journalists with a statement that said elements of the Buzzfeed article are “not accurate,” although it wasn’t clear if that meant the sourcing of the information or the entire premise. (Buzzfeed News is defiantly standing behind the article.) After that, the Buzzfeed affair devolved into a Rorschach test for how one perceives Trump, the Russia scandal, and the media. The Team Mueller statement was certainly a chance for the president and his allies to crow about “fake news.” The Trump Resistance take was a) the oddly worded Mueller denial didn’t necessarily mean the essence was wrong and b) to recall a famous 1972 Watergate incident in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were also attacked as “fake news” for a mistake in an article that would soon be swamped by the proof of Richard Nixon’s massive corruption.

In other words, there was probably some wishful thinking on all sides. The only thing most Americans can say with certainty as the Buzzfeed incident still reverberates is that citizens don’t really know any more now than we did last Thursday on the question that increasingly consumes the nation: Is our president a crook? It’s a good time to take a step back and talk about some deeper issues around the American moment we’re living through -- and the outsized role that we’ve given to Mueller and his investigation.

I believe the Buzzfeed article generated such a media frenzy not only because of the explosive nature of the allegations but because The Establishment -- Beltway insiders in the media and on Capitol Hill, even a growing number of Republicans -- is coming to realize what more than half of everyday citizens have known for exactly two years, that Donald Trump is not fit to serve one additional day as our president, and that the risk accelerates with each day he remains in the Oval Office. It’s an existential crisis for the American Experiment that runs much deeper than Trump and Russia (or “Rusher,” as Trump might say) and that many in the D.C. crowd are, in fact, complicit in. And yet no one knows how to get out of this mess. The idea of Trump caught red-handed committing a “high crime” was their easy way out, and Mueller is their deus ex machina.

Let’s stipulate right now that America is in the midst of overlapping crises that are worse, arguably, than anything we’ve seen since 1861, and that the question of Trump’s criminality -- while a vitally important one -- is only one piece of the puzzle.

America is facing a political crisis -- with major chunks of the federal government now shut down for a month with no end in sight, with 800,000 workers struggling to get by, with many of them working for no pay in a nation that supposedly abolished slavery 154 years ago, and with Trump not able to end the crisis as long as he’s in thrall to right-wing talk radio hosts.

America is facing a moral crisis -- as shown by families seeking the legal right of asylum instead getting ripped apart at the U.S. southern border, with thousands of children held in inhumane tent cities or even cages, or by the growing number of hate crimes from coast to coast, like this week’s “Make America Great Again” harassment at the Lincoln Memorial of a proud Native American hero, in a nation where simply chanting the president’s name (“Trump! Trump! Trump!”) is now a symbol of white supremacy.

America is facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence -- thanks to the growing, impossible-to-ignore evidence that a president who was elected with an assist from an often-adversarial in Russia may in fact be an agent, consciously or unconsciously, of that foreign power who is consistently advocating policies that aren’t in the best interest of the United States yet somehow benefit Vladimir Putin.

America has faced down a lot of big crises in its history. Over just the last 100 years, think about moments like the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, or Watergate. We survived those crises through both the strength of our institutions (New Deal legislation, civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court ruling on Nixon’s tape) and the moral courage of everyday citizens who marched in places like Selma. But with the monumental crisis of the most dangerously unqualified president in American history, the institutions that solved the problems of yesteryear have instead helped get us here -- a corrupt, complicit and cowardly Congress, a politically warped judiciary and an numbed electorate that’s been “entertained to death.”

And so our nation has turned its lonely eyes toward Robert Mueller, who plays right into every all-American Gary Cooper myth that a tall, silently stoic cowboy can ride into a lawless town and mete out frontier justice. The Mueller myth has only grown over the 20-months-and-counting of his slow, methodical, secretive investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, Team Trump’s collusion with Russia, a possible White House cover-up, and related matters. Congress and other key players have used the existence of the Mueller probe as an excuse for inaction on the dangers posed by Trump. But Friday’s chaos should have been a wake-up call for the nation. America cannot Mueller its way out of its problems.

Mueller worship has blinded the majority of Americans who oppose Trumpism to some fundamental truths. Among those is the reality that Mueller and his team aren’t perfect and occasionally reek of arrogance. Whatever emerges about Buzzfeed’s original reporting on Michael Cohen, Mueller’s aides could have acted better both when contacted prepublication and in their vague statement Friday night. (And Big Media is showing its embarrassing tendency to defer to authority by giving all the weight to Mueller’s statement even as Buzzfeed aggressively stands by its reporting.) More importantly, Team Mueller is -- nearly two years into this -- excessively secretive, as we’ve seen from pages after pages of thick black redactions. No one truly knows when Mueller might issue his final report, or whether the public will even see it.

Journalism is under fire today, but the foundational premise of investigative reporting is that it abhors a vacuum -- whether that vacuum is a small town city hall that’s serving real-estate developers instead of the public, or the American political system punting on evidence that the president of the United States may have committed high crimes. Journalists from Buzzfeed News, McClatchy, or other newsrooms are aggressively trying not just to get inside the Mueller probe but the underlying evidence because the public is demanding answers that we’re not getting answers from anywhere else in the system.

I understand what the growing network of legal beagles who’ve become TV and internet stars say about this -- that Mueller is playing it by the book, and that releasing any information before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed might not only jeopardize future convictions but risk undermining the authority that Mueller’s final report would need in order to convince such a politically polarized nation. But the legal-industrial complex that takes over TV every night consists of carpenters looking at every Trump problem as a nail to be hammered by the criminal-justice system. Meanwhile, the public is starting to feel the tension between Mueller’s tortoise-like probe and the crisis at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that is rapidly spiraling out of control.

Think about Watergate. Yes, there were robust criminal investigations by special prosecutors Archibald Cox -- fired in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” -- and Leon Jaworski that convicted more than 40 people, including an attorney general and the White House chief of staff, but that wasn’t what took down Richard Nixon or helped America get beyond the scandal. Instead, it was a combination of nationally televised public hearings where citizens saw the key players -- especially White House counsel-turned-whistleblower John Dean -- for themselves, and then a thorough (and also public) impeachment process where Nixon’s sins were debated by Democrats and Republicans. Yes, it was a different time. There was more trust in the media, less partisan trench warfare among the public, and a lot more courage, especially from Republicans willing to break from their party.

But it’s time to acknowledge the problem with the Mueller probe -- that it’s not going to get America out of this mess. The only thing that can do that is an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, a process that will be not secretive but transparent, not legalistic but democratic in its nature.

This week, the Atlantic published a remarkable piece by historian Yoni Applebaum that lays out the case for the impeachment process to begin. He argues that some mythology about the way that the major impeachment inquiries of the past -- Nixon, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson -- played out has blinded us to the essential role that an impeachment process can play in airing a crisis like the current mess, even if the ultimate outcome is not Trump’s removal from office.

The crux of Applebaum’s argument is this powerful paragraph. “It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits -- to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system -- accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.”

Until this month, Republican control of the House -- and their fealty to the Trump-Fox talk radio axis -- made that a mathematical impossibility. Now that Democrats control the lower chamber, it is imperative that they conquer their decades of political timidity and exercise their Constitutional duty -- to investigate the president’s fitness to complete his term. And these investigations should be conducted largely in public, in the same manner as the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings. News that Cohen will testify in public in early February is only a start. The American people demand -- and deserve -- much, much more.

Let’s stop waiting for Bob Mueller to come down from the mountaintop. It’s time for the American people, our leaders, and our battered system to relearn how to climb that mountain ourselves.
by Will Bunch
Posted: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
Will Bunch | @will_bunch | bunchw@phillynews.com

A coal baron's takeover of the EPA is nearly complete, by Emily Atkin (TNR)

 newrepublic.com
A Coal Baron’s Takeover of the EPA Is Nearly Complete
By Emily Atkin
5-6 minutes

A few weeks after President Donald Trump moved into the White House, he received a memo from one of his biggest campaign donors: Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, America’s largest private coal company. Emblazoned with the words “Action Plan,” it was essentially a wish list of all the environmental regulations Murray wanted Trump to get rid of.

Nearly two years later, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is on track to fulfill almost all of Murray’s requests. And the Senate is on the cusp of allowing one of Murray’s most trusted former lobbyists to lead the effort.

On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler has been effectively running the agency as acting administrator since July, when Scott Pruitt resigned amid a deluge of ethical scandals. But Trump only formally nominated Wheeler to lead the EPA last week, triggering a confirmation process that Democrats are using to shine light on an unsavory fact: As a lobbyist for Faegre Baker Daniels, Wheeler earned more than $700,000 working for an industry he’s in charge of regulating.

The Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to care about this potential conflict of interest, because they’ve confirmed Wheeler before; his ascent to EPA acting administrator was an automatic promotion from his Senate-confirmed role as deputy administrator. But Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse used Wednesday’s hearing to argue that Wheeler had hidden information from the Senate about his relationship with the coal company.

During his confirmation hearing in November 2017, Wheeler said he “did not work on” Murray’s “Action Plan” for Trump, did “not have a copy” of it, and that he only saw the plan “briefly at the beginning of the year.” These comments were featured Wednesday on a large poster board held by a Whitehouse staffer.

epw.senate.gov

As The Washington Post later revealed, Wheeler attended a meeting in March 2017 with his then-client, Murray, and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “The action plan was right there in the room,” Whitehouse said while his staffer displayed the photographic evidence.

epw.senate.gov

Whitehouse then showed a photo of Perry and Murray at the end of the meeting, embracing in a “bear hug.”

“That’s not me, though,” Wheeler said.

“No, that’s your client, Mr. Murray,” Whitehouse replied.

epw.senate.gov

Good government advocates say it’s not inherently unethical for a former industry lobbyist like Wheeler to lead the EPA. What’s unethical, they say, is if the former lobbyist continues to work for the benefit of their former client instead of the public.

Murray seems to believe Wheeler will continue to do what he wants. “He worked for me for 20 years,” he told Politico last year. “Didn’t want to lose him. But the country has him.” And so far, he’s right. As Mother Jones reported on Wednesday, “The last major action Wheeler took before his agency shut down late last month was remove the legal justification for the EPA’s regulation for mercury, arsenic and air toxics, a move that weakens the EPA’s position in a court case pursued by, yes, Bob Murray.”

The key question for the Senate is whether Wheeler, as the head of the EPA, would willfully ignore the public interest in order to please his former client. Senate Democrats certainly think he would, which is why they spent much of their time Wednesday grilling Wheeler on climate change and criticizing him for weakening several Obama-era rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Wheeler has proven to be a quieter, less controversial figure than Pruitt—and potentially a more effective one. Under Wheeler’s rule, the EPA has proposed weakening methane pollution limits for oil and gas producers and air pollution limits for cars. The agency has also proposed new greenhouse gas regulations to replace the ones implemented by Obama’s EPA, which could be worse for the climate than having no climate rules at all.

Pruitt was planning on doing all those things, too. But many have argued that Wheeler understands the administrative and legal processes better than Pruitt, and thus can implement deregulatory rules that more effectively benefit industry and withstand court challenges. And unlike Pruitt, Wheeler hasn’t been making daily headlines for booking expensive first-class travel, keeping secret calendars, or installing $43,000 soundproof booths.

Wednesday’s hearing didn’t alter that impression. Wheeler proved that he’s deeply knowledgeable about the energy industry and EPA regulations, and that he’s more politically adept than his predecessor. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked him about climate change, he did not deny its reality. “I would not call it the greatest crisis, no sir,” Wheeler said. “I would call it a huge issue that has to be addressed globally.” It was an innocuous response that lent itself neither to outraged headlines nor furious tweets from his soon-to-be-boss.

The real reason Donald Trump lies. By Stephen Grosz for The Financial Times

The real reason Donald Trump lies
The president’s greatest ambitions are neither financial nor political — they’re psychological, writes Stephen Grosz

The Financial Times. January 9.



We all lie, but we don’t lie like President Trump. He is the most extravagant, reckless, inexhaustible fibber of our era — the panjandrum of porky pies.

Because we all lie, we may be tempted to think we understand why Donald Trump does, or even that he lies for the same reasons we do.

He doesn’t.

Last April, a 34-year-old woman I’ve been working with for several years told me that she hadn’t been honest with me. “Not big lies,” Ms A said, “I just couldn’t tell you certain things.” It took us some time to understand why she brought herself to her psychoanalysis in this particular way.

When she was a child, Ms A’s parents saw her as an extension of themselves — they experienced her successes and failures as theirs. Ms A could not, for example, be sad or cry without making her much-loved mother unhappy and unsure of herself. She had to be sunny. As a child, Ms A discovered that lying to her parents allowed her to feel separate from them, self-contained, a bit free. Her deceits felt more hers than the real world. Lying allowed her a private self. She lied to feel independent.

Most of us lie to avoid causing painful feelings in others, and ourselves. Sometimes, like Ms A, we lie to protect some sense of self.

Trump’s lying is different. It’s not just a departure from the norms of the presidency — it’s a departure from the norm.

There are so many examples — The Washington Post’s Fact Checker estimates that during the two years of his presidency, Trump has told some 7,600 lies — but let this one suffice. On Boxing Day last year, during an unannounced visit to Iraq, Trump spoke to US troops about a pay rise. “I got you a big one. I got you a big one.” He continued, “They said: ‘You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 per cent. We could make it 2 per cent. We could make it 4 per cent.’ I said: ‘No. Make it 10 per cent. Make it more than 10 per cent’.” The future pay rise is 2.6 per cent.

Think about what is happening here: a lie — easily discredited — is being made, with complete shamelessness, to people most of us would regard as heroes. When he told the troops about the pay rise, they must have gone wild. For the briefest moment, Trump will have been applauded, celebrated — but then what? How can someone be so oblivious to the consequences of deceit?

Born to parents who, by some accounts, left him feeling deserted and bereft, Trump has been a loner most of his life. At school and university, he seems to have made no friends he kept. While he does collect celebrities, for the most part his friendships seem to be perfunctory, fleeting. Averse to shaking people’s hands, phobic of germs — whatever the origins of his behaviour, many psychoanalysts would describe Trump’s way of relating as “avoidant”. “One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.”

Given this apparent lack — and the effect his lying has on us — my view is that Trump may abuse the truth so we take notice of him, think about him, become emotionally involved with him. Because he’s in no one’s heart, he wants to be in all our minds. More and more, I’m convinced that his greatest ambitions are neither financial nor political — they’re psychological. He wants us never to take our eyes off him. A psychic imperialist, he aims to colonise our minds. He wants to dominate the external and internal landscape.

The word famous has its roots in the Latin fama — rumour, reputation, or renown. Initially, fame was linked to deeds, actions. Over the past hundred years, that link has been broken. Nowadays, if you’re discussed, you’re famous. Much of what presidents do isn’t very interesting — so Trump doesn’t bother. He does things to get people talking about him. Threats and rows get him attention. Shocking, melodramatic, confounding lies work too — he’d rather be infamous than forgotten.

Between 1980 and 1990 Trump spoke to some reporters pretending to be a “John Barron — spokesman for Donald Trump”. During these conversations, Barron would praise Trump — inflating his wealth and business success, describing how beautiful women were sexually attracted to Trump, and so forth. Whatever its beginnings, “John Barron” gives us a sense of the vehemence of Trump’s self-doubt, his craving to be famous.

“John Barron” is a fiction that Trump created because, I presume, he thought no one else would come to his defence or applaud him. This creation may well be the result of child-Trump being disregarded, neglected, unloved. In 2006 Trump and Melania named their only child Barron. I find this poignant — it suggests to me that Trump wanted to bring his imaginary friend to life. In giving his son the name Barron, he may have been trying to make his fiction real.

Does Trump’s invention feel to you — like it feels to me — a male thing? Let me pose a connection between Trump’s lying and masculinity.

Masculinity is complex. For the most part, all of us, male and female, start life loving our mothers. But love is not simple. When a boy loves his mother, he will empathise with her thoughts, feelings and desires. He identifies with her. At times, he will even wish to be her.

One classic study asked three-to-eight-year-old boys and girls whether they wanted to be fathers or mothers when they grew up. Unsurprisingly, boys four or older wanted to become fathers, and girls four or older wanted to become mothers. Three-year-old boys and girls were different. As expected, most of the girls wanted to become mothers. But, unexpectedly — so did the majority of the boys.

In other words, for a period of his childhood, a boy will want to be a woman. And it is upon this foundation — the desire to be a woman — that masculinity is built.

In our “girls like pink, boys like blue” world, a boy quickly learns that he is expected to feel whole and confident of his masculinity. His feelings may be conflicted, shifting, but he is expected to conceal this internal struggle from others as well as himself. A “sissy”, “mama’s boy” or “wimp” will be shamed and humiliated, sometimes assaulted. To have a masculine identity, a boy must reject what he once loved.

The upshot of all this is that a boy’s development leaves him with the fear that there is something feminine in him, that he’s not a real man — at any moment, he can be exposed as a fake.

Trump makes heavy use of this fear. To show you how, let me take you on what may seem like a digression — Trump’s love of professional wrestling.

Before throwing his hat into the political ring, Trump threw it into the wrestling arena. Between 1988 and 2013, he ran wrestling events, appeared ringside (notably in the Battle of the Billionaires), and was even inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. Despite being presented as a competitive sport, professional wrestling is scripted. The competitors, results, pre-match and post-match interviews — all of it is make-believe. The broadcasters give their audience all the things you’d expect in a work of fiction: backstory, suspense, symbolism and so forth.

In wrestling, as in literature, names are never neutral. Naming a character is an essential part of creating them. There’s always a “face” (short for babyface, or hero) and a “heel” (villain). Hulk Hogan and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are faces. Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Rick Rude are heels. Wrestling pits good against bad, a genuine he-man against a phoney rascal.

To emasculate his opponents, Trump uses this trope: “Low Energy Jeb”, “Mr Magoo” (Jeff Sessions) “Lyin’ James” (Comey), “Rat” (Michael Cohen), “Highly Conflicted Bob Mueller”. As part of his two-fisted swagger, Trump tweets in wrestling-speak: “Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is, he is a choker, and once a choker, always a choker! Mr. Meltdown.” It’s not just men — Trump labels groups of people as double-dealing wimps: “fake CNN”, “Fake news”, “Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation”.

“It’s like a manhood thing — as if manhood can be associated with him — this wall thing,” leader of the House Nancy Pelosi said in December. The next day, publicly clarifying her private remark, she said, “there is no justification for this wall. It is not the way to protect our border . . . in terms of factual data.”

For Trump and many others — precisely because it is a manhood thing — the “factual data” doesn’t matter.

In professional wrestling, fact and fiction are worked together to create storylines that connect with the audience’s feelings. Wrestling’s good v bad, real v fake storylines provide clarity. What’s vital is this — fictional storylines can unleash genuine emotion. For the wrestling fan, as long as it feels true, it doesn’t matter that it’s fiction. Facts are beside the point. Feeling true is more important than being true.

Many of Trump’s big political lies work this logic. President Obama’s birth certificate, or, more recently, the invading caravan of “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” — these storylines have been fact-checked and discredited. There may be data proving the wall isn’t the best way to secure the border, but for many Trump supporters, those facts are irrelevant. For his enthusiasts — especially those who share his anxieties — Trump’s lies feel truer than the truth.

Outrage at Trump’s duplicitousness is a dangerous pleasure, in a Trump-like way, self-satisfying — what Philip Roth called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. While it is comforting that journalists are fact-checking Trump, this exercise too may be worse than pointless. If my analysis is correct, outrage and fact-checking will certainly not stop his dishonesty. These acts may even help Trump to have what he wants — forever, to be in our minds.

Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst and author of ‘The Examined Life’.

Some details have been changed in the interest of confidentiality

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Jair Bolsonaro is not the new Trump. He's worse. The New Republic

Jair Bolsonaro Is Not the New Trump. He’s Worse.
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
7-8 minutes



The New Republic

Scarcely a week into Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as president of Brazil, protections for the environment and indigenous and LGBTQ populations have been removed, and both the neoliberal economic policies closely associated in Latin America with the thirteen-year Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the language of Brazil’s military junta, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, have resurfaced. “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism, and political correctness,” Bolsonaro told his inaugural crowd, pleasing Brazil’s elites and the stock market. His call for surgical violence—Brazil’s “whole body needs amputating” was the memorable phrase—left others fearful of a return to “disappeared” bodies and torture cells.

Threat is a fundamental tool of the 21st-century authoritarians on the rise: Dominating is much easier if you’ve prepared people to be afraid of you when you take office. Bolsonaro used it to sell himself as the only candidate capable of tackling Brazil’s soaring violence problem, which included a record murder rate in 2017. “A good criminal is a dead criminal,” he said last fall, earning comparisons to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who has made good on his own campaign promises to carry out extrajudicial killings of those involved in his country’s drug trade.

Yet Bolsonaro has also preventively criminalized all leftists and other political opponents, promising to send such “red outlaws” to prison or into exile. “It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history,” he said in October, raising the possibility that he might aspire to be even harsher than the former junta, which he believes didn’t kill enough people. Years of documented Bolsonaro hate speech against gays and blacks suggest other potential targets, although even if he gets a ruling majority in parliament, “cleansing” an enormous country with a multiracial and ethnically complex population would be a Herculean task.

The slew of executive order legislation following Bolsonaro’s inauguration has hewed closely to the authoritarian playbook, designed to further intimidate the population, cement Bolsonaro’s profile as a “get things done” disrupter from outside the political establishment, and, most importantly, reassure the conservative elites who have always backed such leaders that they will profit handsomely with him in office. The summary removal of indigenous peoples from protection by the Human Rights Ministry (which may go the way of the newly suppressed Labor Ministry) supplements the planned merger of the Environmental and Agricultural Ministries, which will put indigenous lands up for grabs by logging and other agribusiness interests, helped by the highway Bolsonaro envisions building through the Amazon rainforest.

During the Pinochet regime, University of Chicago and Harvard-educated neoliberal economists propping up the dictatorship through spending cuts and  privatization were known as “Chicago Boys.” The day following the inauguration, Bolsonaro had his very own Chicago Boy sworn in as Economy Minister: Paulo Guedes, a Milton Friedman-influenced neoliberal who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era. Joaquim Levy, the new head of the Brazilian Development Bank, and Roberto Castello Branco, the new chief executive of the oil and natural gas company Petrobras, are also Chicago economics alumni. The Brazilian economy, long stagnant, definitely needs reforms. But, as of yet, Bolsonarans seem untroubled by the fact that neoliberal successes in Chile capitalized on the “advantages” of authoritarian oppression—bans on unions and strikes and the absence of a political opposition.

Bolsonaro’s savvy appointment of popular corruption fighter Sergio Moro to lead an expanded Ministry of Justice continues an election persona that for many voters seemed to promise “a deep change in the political establishment,” as Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with Brazilian daily Correio Braziliense, wrote to me by email. Yet Bolsonaro would be the unusual authoritarian if he eradicated corruption; he’ll more likely use the moral high ground of anti-corruption to neutralize his political enemies and purge the bureaucracy, the better to populate it with loyalists. Certainly, Bolsonaro has benefited from the corruption scandals that have rocked the traditional political class—widely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who might have defeated Bolsonaro had he not been barred from seeking election in 2018 is now serving a twelve-year jail sentence, while his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016.  Moro, the ex-judge who jailed da Silva, and who is crucial for this first phase, may find himself cast aside later.

Bolsonaro, a career politician, used his military background as a paratrooper to separate himself from the corrupt reputations of other career politicians, playing on the idea that the military is nonpartisan, since serving officers are forbidden from making political statements. One-third of his cabinet positions have gone to military officers; a retired general, Hamilton Mourão, is his vice president. It seems the post-dictatorship wariness of having the military play an active role in politics has waned—an increasing number of Brazilians want “law and order” government regardless of the consequences.

“Bolsonaro is as much an apparition from Brazil’s past as a harbinger of its future,” historian Kenneth Serbin wrote at Foreign Affairs the day of the inauguration: Only a “politics of forgetting” about the violence of the military dictatorship has made his ascent possible. I’d go further: Bolsonaro advances a new phase of remembrance that rehabilitates the people and causes of that terrible time. During the 2016 congressional proceedings leading to Rousseff’s impeachment, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote against her to her torturer—Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, de facto chief of army intelligence services, which ordered Rousseff, then a leftist guerrilla, tortured for three weeks in 1970 (she was then a political prisoner for two years). Sympathizers like Bolsonaro publicly honor those who subjected Brazilians to torture methods such as “the barbecue,” where victims were tied to a metal rack and given electric shocks on and inside their bodies.

Bolsonaro may be called the “Trump of the Tropics” for his impolitic and often incoherent remarks, his skill with social media, and hodge-podge coalition of Evangelical Christians, military toughs, and business elites. But the precedent of military rule in Brazil makes him more dangerous than his United States counterpart. In 1999, Bolsonaro declared that if he ever became president he’d immediately launch a coup and declare himself dictator. Twenty years later, he’s in power. Time will tell what kind of strongman he will be.