#AmazonSmart

During the presidential debate of September 26th, 2016, the following exchange took place:

Hillary Clinton: Maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.

Donald Trump: That makes me smart.

On  June 28th, 2017, now-President Donald tweeted the following:

The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!

So I guess that makes Amazon's leadership smart.


Most of the discussion around this has focused on the idea that President Trump is a hypocrite who is attempting to have it both ways, a thin-skinned whiner who calls any media he doesn't like "fake news" or an idiot who either doesn't realize that there are no "internet taxes" in the United States or somehow missed the fact that Amazon.com does collect and remit state and local sales taxes. (Although given that many Americans see no differences between a price discount and tax evasion, and thus will make buying decisions based on not having pay the tax, I doubt they're very pleased about it.)

But this tweet, like a lot of others, can be boiled down to four words: Us good, Them bad. When Mr. Trump embraced tax dodging as a marker of intelligence during the campaign, he was holding himself up as someone who understood the system well enough to make it work for him - and therefore someone who understood it well enough to make it work for the people who supported him. And for many of those people, one of their primary grievances with (big) government wasn't its size, reach or spending habits; it was the fact that they perceived it as acting to benefit "Them" at the direct expense of "Us." And it's a common refrain. In the 1990's a politician from downstate Illinois was fact-checked after saying that rural Illinoisans were paying their tax dollars to support Chicago and the suburbs. Which locations, it turned out, paid some 60% of state tax revenues, while only receiving 15% in state spending, leaving rural downstate residents to have their wallets sucked dry to the tune of less than 50¢ in taxes for every dollar the state spent on them.

The mythical "internet taxes" that President Trump feels that Amazon should be paying are perhaps better viewed as a "Liberal tax;" money that wealthy liberals should be paying to make life better for the hardworking Conservative voters who elected him into office. And their failure to do so is portrayed as simply another way in which Liberal America is disloyal to the people who really matter. And likewise, their unflattering coverage (or covfefe) of President Trump isn't due to the fact that the President has done things that ideological opponents may disagree with, or even different views of the same events. It's cynical, and knowingly dishonest, payback for the President siding with his voter base, rather than the wealthy "élites" who think they should run everything.

It's a simple political strategy, and the President goes to that well over and over, because he can still draw water from it. It's unlikely to run dry anytime soon.

Air Orca

Keeping Up Appearances

I was on LinkedIn, and someone had posted an "article" that was little more than a cropped photograph of some legislators sitting down, while other stood with their hands over their hearts. It was titled: "Our disrespectful congress members," and called for members of Congress who refused "to stand for our country" to be voted out of office.

The first thing that crossed my mind was "Do you want empty ritualism? Because this is how you get empty ritualism."

I'm one of those people for whom The United States of America, Pledge of Allegiance and the flag of the United States are separate and distinct things from one another. Accordingly, I can come up with ways in which Congress has been much more "disrespectful" to the United States and its population than simply refusing to be bothered to stand every time there is a recitation of the Pledge, the National Anthem or whatever other patriotism litmus test someone came up with this week.

There isn't a high enough correlation between love of country and certain specific words or actions to be able to equate the two. Sure, there are people who use their public refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance or to salute the flag as a means of protesting what they understand to be wrong with the nation. It does not follow from this, that everyone who, for whatever reason, doesn't recite the pledge or stand when expected to is protesting something. (Nor does it follow, for that matter, that protest is a form of expressing disrespect.) One can do "all the right things" and still have no love or respect for the United States. Feeling that the nation does not deserve positive regard does not render one incapable of saying the words.

Choosing to sir during the national anthem or to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with gusto are matters of style and not substance. Conflating the two has never been useful.

A Broader Shade of Blue

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America and the current Republican majorities in the House of Representatives, Senate, Governorships and many state legislatures (not all of them Red States) has placed the Democratic Party in a position somewhat similar to the one that the Republican Party was in after the 2012 election cycle - out in the political wilderness, wondering how they got there, at a loss for a concrete plan to find their way back and looking for one of their own to take the fall for it.

Enter the Dean-Moulton Line of Demarcation. It's a term that NPR's Domenico Montanaro pretty much made up on the spot, but it's a useful one, so let's run with it a bit. The central debate of Dean-Moulton is this: in order to get more votes especially in redder areas than their normal stomping grounds, Democrats have to shift their party platform. So, do they shift towards a more Progressive platform, to put more daylight between themselves and the Republicans - the Jim Dean position? Or, do they prepare themselves to run to the center when required - the Congressman Seth Moulton position?

The answer, I suspect, lies in what one thinks of how the electorate works, and what it wants. The Dean position says, in effect, that there are more votes to be had by running harder to the Left. From my layman's perch, this says a couple of things to me, both of which I've heard from people who would strike me as being in the Dean camp. 1) That there is a relatively large number of disaffected voters to be picked up, who are currently to the Left of the Democratic Party as a whole. These are people who are highly unlikely to ever vote for Republican candidates, and the reason that they don't turn out for Democrats is, when it comes down to it, from that far to the Left, the center and the Right are pretty much indistinguishable, to the degree that many "moderates" are, as far as they're concerned, simply Republicans who may or may not have actively pledged allegiance. 2) That most reliably Democratic voters are reliable to the point of being givens. Their brand loyalty means that wherever the party platform goes, left, right or awkward, they'll still be reliable votes. To be pejorative about it, they're sheeple, unthinking drones who'd vote for Satan or a ham sandwich, as long at they ran on a Democratic ticket. So those votes don't need to be contested for. So moving to the left to pick up the disaffected progressives has little, if any downside.

The Moulton position says that a move Right towards the center, or at least the flexibility to do so, is a more likely winning strategy. Again, my layperson's analysis of the calculus involved tells me that the thinking is that most of the votes that have been left on the table are in the space between the Republicans and the Democrats, and that many people who don't vote, and thus are available to be wooed, feel that both parties have moved too far away from their positions to be worth chasing down. I suspect that it also postulates that people do make the switch from one party to another, depending on which is closer to their own interests. Generally speaking, to be politically active without it being more or less a waste of time requires that one line up with one of the Big Two political parties. Smaller groups, like the Libertarians and the Greens, are seen as something between protest votes and markers of mental illness, and so aren't taken at all seriously in the political scheme of things. The centrist position strikes me as less self-assured than the alternative; their pitch to those on the leftmost edge of the spectrum is less "Who else are you going to vote for?" than "Half a loaf is better then none, and while we won't go as far as you'd like, it's certainly farther than you'd get otherwise." I'm not sure that I see the wisdom in appealing to the pragmatism of the edges, but then again, I'm not in politics, either.

Whether or not the Dean-Moulton Line of Demarcation takes into account the current ground truth is, for me, an unknown. My own analysis of the election in November tells me that there simply wasn't enough enthusiasm for the Obama years left to carry a Democrat into the White House and give the party control of Congress, regardless of whether that was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. And so, like the recriminations of the Republicans before it, the issue may simply be solved when the population tires of the brand of government that President Trump and the Republican Congress have brought with them. For those people who felt that the Obama Administration had adopted a policy that lay somewhere between ignoring them and throwing them under the bus, I'm uncertain of either Mrs. Clinton or Senator Sanders represented enough of a change to gain their votes. But when the nation sours on the Republicans, it's also unlikely to matter whether or not Dean or Moulton have won the argument. Bigger events will likely have been the deciding factor.

Way With Words

After last Wednesday's shooting at Republican practice for the annual Congressional charity baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the targets for blame was "overheated political rhetoric." And one of the phrases that came back into the public consciousness was "words have consequences."

One of the interesting things about public anger at politics and with politicians is that people tend to see it as genuine emotion when it comes from people the agree with, and the result of cynical emotional manipulation when it doesn't.

Three guesses which side of the political spectrum "NewsBlaze" comes down on...

There seems to be an understanding that co-partisans can be legitimately upset with policies enacted by the other side, to the point of anger or even literal outrage. But people on the other side are often seen as passively accepting of the world around them, unless someone takes action, either deliberate or careless, to "rile them up." Part of it is simple political blind spots. It's easy to understand how policy choices that one doesn't like, either because of the policies themselves or the people who enacted them, are simply bad. And it makes sense that people would be angry at wrongheaded, perverse or treacherous policy choices. It seems to be more difficult for Americans to understand that the policy choices they support might create losers, or people who honestly perceive themselves as possible losers, and that those people would have a genuine (if perhaps premature or misplaced) grievance with those policies and their supporters.

And once you've convinced yourself that the only reason why someone could be roused to violence over what is obviously sound policy is that they are weak-willed, ignorant and easily- mislead, it's only a short step to pointing out the strongest voices that one disagrees with as engaging in incitement. Which is not to say that incitement doesn't happen - but it rarely, if ever, directly comes from the highest halls of power. Open calls for violence tend to erode the support that politicians depend on. It's the rare office holder who could, as then-candidate Donald Trump bragged, shoot a man in the street and not lose any support. And so people hear dog whistles everyone (despite the fact that the whole point behind a dog whistle is that it's not universally audible).

While far from the worst place in the world for political violence, the United States is always going to have an undercurrent of it because we tend to view violence as a way of solving problems. Even when the problem is politics.