Go Team

The problem that I tend to have with partisan rhetoric is, well, it's partisan nature; in the sense that it's by partisans, for partisans, and it doesn't need to make sense to anyone else.

Take Trump Administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's comments to Meet the Press last week. In defending President Trump's imposition of tariffs, he said that "American products will get cheaper." His stated logic was that American farmers, ranchers and fishermen would be "unleashed" and when they "explode in value," food prices will decrease. That may as well have been in Burmese for all the sense it makes to me. What's the relationship between this "unleashing" and the costs of farm inputs? How is "exploding in value" going to raise the volume of food produced? What's going to drive farmers to produce more food than demand levels warrant? These are the sorts of questions that I, as someone who isn't a Republican partisan, would like answers to. But I understand that I'm not going to get them, because I'm not in the target audience for Secretary Lutnick's comments, which is, well, Republican partisans.

Partisan cheerleading, whether it's comprehensible to non-partisans or not, is par for the course in partisan environments because people think that it delivers results. If, as I suspect, Secretary Lutnick is attempting to head off, or at least blunt, a looming recession by keeping consumer sentiment high (at least among Republicans), he could just as easily chanted "Brick-a-bracka, firecracka! Siss, boom, bah! More tariffs, more tariffs! Rah, rah, rah!" because what matters isn't the words used, but whether or not the home crowd cheers. In that sense, it's irrelevant what the ground reality is, or appears to be, for other people; what's important is that the right people buy into the message of "It will be great; you'll see!"

But the public at large is made up of more than just "the right people." There are skeptics, critics and the simply neutral in the audience, and their behavior plays a role, too. If the actions of committed partisans were enough to drive specific outcomes, one would think that the United States (and a lot of other places, for that matter) simply wouldn't ever have economic downturns. Surely, George W. Bush, for example, could have mobilized enough committed Republicans to avert the Great Recession if they could have prevented it by themselves.

Partisan rhetoric is an invocation of mind over matter in the sense that "those who mind, don't matter." Secretary Lutnick, and the Trump Administration as a whole, appears to believe that only the people who cheer when they speak matter, despite the fact that this strategy (or non-strategy) hasn't worked out well for people in the past. I'm inclined to chalk a good part of this up to the idea that presidential Administrations tend to see themselves as unique and special; and there's no reason why the Trump Administration would avoid that particular mindset. But I wonder how much of it is a willingness, if not a desire, to believe one's own rhetoric. It's tempting to think that Secretary Lutnick himself believes his comments to "Meet the Press" to be simply so much rambling nonsense, but I don't think I'd be surprised to learn that he's actually convinced himself that an adversarial approach to international trade should be taught in Economics 101 courses as a sure-fire means to rapid economic growth, and the fact that it doesn't make intuitive sense to me is simply proof that I'm a hater.