U.S. Election, Nov. 2020: How to Vote and Whom to Vote For

I just went looking for a webpage that would guide me to the list of candidates running for office in the autumn 2020 general election, with links to sites that would discuss them. I was surprised: finding this information was not easy or obvious.

I thought that, for once, I would try to learn something about these people before election day. Nice idea but, wow, it’s a mess. Hopefully this page will help others who share my reactions.

Contents

How to Vote
How to Identify Candidates
How to Learn About Candidates
How I Chose My Preferred Candidates
Conclusion

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How to Vote

Don’t assume that you can just show up and vote. There are rules and deadlines on how to register, where and when to vote, etc. Those rules may have changed in your location. For a state-by-state guide, try FiveThirtyEight. That site is considered relatively centrist, neutral, and balanced (i.e., not obviously liberal or conservative) (see e.g., AllSides, Ad Fontes, Reddit) or perhaps slightly left-leaning with high factuality (MediaBias/FactCheck).

The FiveThirtyEight site provides how-to links for each state on voting registration, voting early, in-person voting, requesting and submitting an absentee ballot, and other topics. USA.gov also provides pages on those topics.

USA.gov repeatedly advises that you contact your state’s election office website for the most accurate information. U.S. Vote Foundation also provides links to those state offices. See also Rock the Vote, Vote.gov, and U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

If your state allows voting by mail, I encourage doing so. It is easier, it protects you — not only against the coronavirus, but also against last-minute weirdness (e.g., they might close your local polling place for some reason, good or bad) — and it gives you time to learn something about the candidates.

But I would say, be careful. In my Republican-controlled state, the elections people took a month even to send me the form to request a ballot to vote by mail. I was very cautious about every step of the process, lest they seek to invalidate my ballot for trivial reasons.

There’s a lot of pressure to vote for someone. My personal view, which you may or may not agree with: I suggest not voting unless you know who and what you’re voting for. Don’t cancel out the vote of someone who really cares and who took the time to learn something about that specific contest. That voter may actually be choosing the candidate who will produce better results for you.

There is also the viewpoint expressed in the phrase, “Don’t vote — it only encourages them.” This is not an entirely crazy perspective, in an election where Gallup finds that one in four voters feel that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump would make a good president. The main problem with that viewpoint is that one of the two is going to become president regardless, and voting is how that decision will be made.

How to Identify Candidates

For some voters, it is not necessary to know who the candidates are: all that matters is their political party. Ballotpedia provides a list of political parties in the U.S. (Ballotpedia is considered centrist and unbiased: see AllSides and MediaBias/FactCheck. In the following paragraphs, I provide links to the specific Ballotpedia webpages because some took a bit of effort to find.)

Straight-ticket voting means voting for the candidate of a favored party (a/k/a “ticket”) in every contest. So if you choose to cast a straight-line vote for, say, the Green Party, then you choose the Green Party candidate for president, and the Green Party candidate for the Senate, and so forth. Some states make this easy, by giving you a party-line lever (in a voting machine) or a box to click or check (on paper or computer ballots). Ballotpedia provides more information on straight-ticket voting.

If you don’t plan to choose your candidates based solely on their party — that is, if you want to know something about them — then the first step is to figure out who they are. Learning about candidates in U.S. general elections often starts at the top, with a focus on the U.S. presidency and Congress. There tends to be more public attention to these federal candidates because voters across the country recognize their names and have opinions on their qualifications. For instance, Ballotpedia considers about one-third of U.S. states to be congressional “battleground” states — meaning that elections for the U.S. Congress in those states may be especially close, or important on a national level. As an example of a nationally important congressional election, Ballotpedia says that the contest for Mitch McConnell’s seat (Republican – Kentucky) “will affect the partisan control of the U.S. Senate.” Non-Kentuckians may contribute a great deal of time and money to help re-elect or defeat an incumbent like McConnell in that sort of battleground contest.

To identify the candidates for the U.S. Congress in your state, Ballotpedia offers a map. Clicking on a state on that map leads to a page listing its senators and representatives. Senators represent the entire state in the U.S. Senate, but representatives represent only specific parts of the state in the U.S. House of Representatives.

To figure out which U.S. representative is yours, you have to know which U.S. congressional district you’re in. You may be able to get that with Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot Lookup. Alternately, 270ToWin provides an interactive map that lets you zoom in on your area, with a separate map allowing a search for your location. This map may incidentally acquaint you with the bizarrely gerrymandered shapes of some districts.

On the state level, Ballotpedia provides state-specific information on elections for state executive officials, such as the governor and others further down the ballot (e.g., attorney general, secretary of state, public service commissioner). Ballotpedia also provides pages for the other two branches of government at the state level: legislative and judicial. In addition, Ballotpedia provides pages for state and local ballot measures (e.g., initiatives, like California’s famous Proposition 13 initiative in 1978) as well as mayoral and other elections in big cities, along with school board elections and political recall efforts.

Your state election office website may provide a list of names that will appear on your ballot. Being familiar with them could help you avoid being one of those voters who just chooses the first name appearing on the list. According to NPR, that position in the list has been found to increase a candidate’s votes by up to 20%. To reduce that unfairness, some states rotate the names randomly, from one county to the next.

In my case, the state’s website listed names for five different U.S. congressional districts, three different state senate districts, ten different state representative districts, 13 different judicial districts, three county commissioner precincts, and four county constable precincts. (Note: these districts and precincts are not the same as the U.S. congressional districts.) If I wanted to know who I was voting for — if I wanted to prepare an accurate, marked-up copy of the state’s printout, to take with me to a polling place — it was up to me to try to figure out who these people were. Fortunately, in all cases except the judicial districts, Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot Lookup narrowed down the list to my particular districts and precincts.

How to Learn About Candidates

From the president on down, Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot provides links for each candidate it names. These links lead to Ballotpedia’s own writeups about individual candidates. For instance, using Mitch McConnell again as an example, Ballotpedia’s page summarizes his prior experience, education, and achievements; states his net worth ($22M); and says a bit about this year’s battleground contest for his Senate seat.

If Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot doesn’t work for you, you might be able to find an alternative that does much the same thing. iVoterGuide offered “My Ballot,” like Ballotpedia, but as of September 13 there was nothing on it, and no Voter Guide for the upcoming election. BallotReady had promise, and I did use their site, but they warned: “BallotReady is continuing to work to gather all elected officials nationwide and may not have gathered complete information for your area.” For the few candidates I did examine, BallotReady had obtained little information.

Beyond sites that offer a complete ballot for your location, it becomes a question of finding alternate sources of information that will not mislead you. This may be difficult. For example, Wikipedia provides pages offering varying degrees of detail on the 2020 U.S. elections as a whole, and on the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives elections, with links leading to further information. And yet, in the view of Conservapedia (obviously right-leaning), Wikipedia tends to be leftist, sometimes radically so. As another example, the League of Women Voters (LWV) takes pride in the longstanding nonpartisan stance of its public education division — and yet Wikipedia acknowledges that the LWV’s advocacy division “does support a variety of progressive public policy positions.” InfluenceWatch (rated moderately to strongly right-wing by MediaBias/FactCheck) says LWV “has been widely criticized for pushing left-leaning policies.” On its Vote411 website, the nonpartisan side of LWV offers “personalized voting information” about candidates in your specific location. Unfortunately, in my location, that page provided nothing.

LWV (i.e., SmartVoter and Newton) suggests that candidates’ leadership ability and their stances on the issues are the most important factors in deciding whom to vote for. Some voters care more about a candidate’s stance on issues; others are more concerned with his/her ability to lead, or his/her character or personality, even if they don’t always agree with where s/he leads. While it may be true that many candidates would say anything to win votes, in practice they tend to be at least somewhat limited by what their supporters can stomach, and by what their opponents will make of their words. Of course, nearly every political, economic, religious, cultural, and social group and demographic has its own hot topics and/or preferred beliefs. Many voters are inclined to just go along with dominant opinion in their preferred organization or group. For instance, political writers often talk about “the union vote” or “the evangelical vote.”

Back in January, Gallup (Hrynowski, 2020) (rated as centrist by AllSides) found that Americans felt the key issues (rated as “extremely important” by at least 25% of survey respondents) were, in descending order, healthcare, terrorism and national security, gun policy, education, the economy, immigration, climate change, abortion, and economic inequality, followed (at 23%) by the federal budget deficit, taxes, and race relations. Gallup may update that before the election. In July, Fortune (Goodkind, July 30) (rated as centrist by AllSides) said the top issues were the COVID-19 pandemic and public health, followed by the economy and race relations/racism. Pew Research Center (August 13) (rated as centrist by AllSides, though I have found Pew to be leftist on several issues for which I have examined their research) said that, in a June survey, at least 50% of voters considered the following issues very important, again in declining order: economy, healthcare, Supreme Court appointments, pandemic, violent crime, foreign policy, gun policy, race and ethnic inequality, and immigration, with economic inequality following at 49%.

Many sites provide guidance on specific issues. For instance, Forbes and Classpass claim that IssueVoter provides nonpartisan information on specific issues, though I found it more oriented toward advocacy for pending legislation. AllSides itself offers a list of topics, with links to further reading. Political Galaxy, produced by VoteSmart (rated Centrist by AllSides and MediaBias/FactCheck), provides extensive lists of issues for each candidate in federal elections. Unfortunately, in brief testing, I found that Political Galaxy itself did not have much information, but rather tended to lead back to VoteSmart’s page for the specific candidate (e.g., Mitch McConnell’s page). On that page, I found it most effective to search by the name of the individual candidate. When I searched by address, the page brought up many names that were not candidates in the current election. The webpage for VoteSmart’s Political Courage Test said that it “Measures each candidate’s willingness to answer the voters’ questions.”

Those who are concerned about where candidates get their money may appreciate Greenhouse, which offers a free browser extension that displays “campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative” on any webpage. OpenSecrets (a/k/a Center for Responsive Politics) (rated by AllSides and MediaBias/FactCheck as centrist) provides candidate-specific information on contributions and lobbying for national races.  On the state level, the former Campaign Finance Institute explains that it has become a division of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which Wikipedia describes as a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance data. Ballotpedia seems to indicate that the Institute presents itself, online, as FollowTheMoney (rated as centrist by MediaBias/FactCheck). TransparencyUSA offers “the answers you need about the money in state politics.”

Research into candidates and issues can become a part-time occupation. For instance, I use the free Feedly newsreader to subscribe to RSS feeds from across the political spectrum. Feedly gives me a one-line summary of each article, so I can browse among many articles without much time investment, opening only those that look like they may tell me something I haven’t already heard. Sources to try in Feedly (click the plus sign at the left edge of the Feedly screen) appear in media bias charts by Ad Fontes Media and AllSides. I probably skim 150 to 200 of those one-line summaries per day, and read maybe 10% of them, where “read” means I look through the article in search of things I haven’t already heard. That part goes fairly quickly. But getting into a particular issue can quickly become a quagmire. MediaMatters warns that the media are capable of getting sidetracked into exciting but unimportant issues.

If you do decide to explore any issues in detail, you may find it helpful to check various claims and candidates on political fact-checking sites. A search for the best fact-checking sites leads to multiple sources, many of which have a leftist lean (at e.g., Berkeley, American University, Middlebury). In what I think may be declining order of quality, such sites name FactCheck (which both AllSides and MediaBias/FactCheck consider centrist), Politifact (which AllSides describes as left-leaning but MediaBias/FactCheck considers minimally biased), and Snopes (which both AllSides and MediaBias/FactCheck consider centrist, but which I would have considered left-leaning).

How I Chose My Preferred Candidates

I wanted to cast a vote in every contest offered on Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot. I decided to start at the bottom of the list, for several reasons: I already had some information about people at the top, and felt I would be gathering more as the season went on; I felt the available information would be more limited at the bottom, and easier to get through; I didn’t want to get lazy or worn out, and let myself decide to skip them; and I thought these might help me get warmed up and more prepared to make an informed choice in the higher-level contests.

In several minor races on my sample ballot, the candidate ran unopposed. I did not research these.

State Board of Education. On Ballotpedia (following links from the Sample Ballot), only the Democrat candidate had both a photo and a link to her website. On TeachTheVote, likewise, apparently only the Democrat had submitted responses to the Candidate Survey. On TransparencyUSA, again, nothing from the Libertarian; it looked like the Republican (whose fancy signs I had seen around the neighborhood) had vastly outspent the Democrat. I ran a Google search to find the Republican’s website, but got more out of the iVoterGuide page, whose questions only the Republican had answered. iVoterGuide felt that I was looking at candidates who were Somewhat Liberal vs. (strongly, I felt) Conservative. Some of the iVoterGuide questions did not seem relevant to the school board (e.g., views on abortion). The Republican’s answers to others were informative. Eventually, I found that VoteSmart provided particularly extensive information. That’s where I also realized that Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot should not have put this office at the bottom of the list: it is a state, not local, office, and thus VoteSmart does provide information on its candidates, unlike those for local offices (below). Between their own websites and these materials, I felt I had enough to make a choice.

County Commissioners Court. Neither candidate had any information on Ballotpedia or iVoterGuide. A plain Google search for both of their names turned up a few articles and a video about them. It took maybe 15 minutes to get a sense of where I wanted to go with this. No denying that spending hours or days learning more about both candidates and about the court could change my perspective, but I wasn’t going to invest that time.

District Court. The situation here was much the same: beyond a very skimpy sketch on Ballotpedia, the Google search was my friend. That search turned up an article whose author said this:

Ask any of them: The system stinks. Even the winners don’t like the way they are put on the bench by voters in general elections. Most voters simply have no idea who they are voting for or why. …

Even a well-run campaign is no guarantee voters will learn why one candidate is a better choice than his or her lesser-known opponent. The simple reality of an attractive or familiar last name, or confusion over a candidate’s identity, can swing a race in the wrong direction. It happens all the time.

My question — and it is one of many questions that a lawyer might have about the American legal system: why have law schools, lawyers, and judges not come up with something better, something that would educate and inform voters? Martindale-Hubbell, among others, is capable of rating attorneys in practice; why not judges? Why were the candidates themselves unable or unwilling to post specific performance information, anything beyond a few lines about education and positions held, on Ballotpedia? Why aren’t journalists or others who do know the courts posting any guidance?

In this dearth of information, I had to make grossly uninformed choices in several different races. If I did find that one candidate provided information and the other didn’t, relying perhaps on his/her political party, I made a point of going with the one who provided information. Otherwise, at least my searches turned up reasons to doubt the candidate in one or two cases. Whether those reasons would stand up to careful scrutiny, I could not say for sure.

Court of Appeals. This was higher-profile than the District Court races. The Republican provided some information on Ballotpedia; the Democrat provided none. I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the Republican had been voted out of the judgeship twice before. I wasn’t able to get past a paywall to read an article about the two candidates. I had a very slight sense of which one I preferred, and why.

County Tax Assessor. I found one editorial endorsing the incumbent. There was nothing on Ballotpedia or iVoterGuide.

County Sheriff. This was interesting. I found an article in a seemingly left-leaning municipal newspaper that did not endorse the Democratic incumbent, whose term had apparently seen multiple problems, over a Republican offering an unexpectedly reformist perspective, at a time when changes in policing are under discussion nationwide.

State House of Representatives. On several issues, the Republican’s website conveyed strong views that I did not share. Our disagreement was strong enough to overcome my irritation at a Democratic challenger with a graduate degree and no government experience who could not even get her campaign website to function. It looked like she had lost to the Republican in at least one prior election. And yes, my tone at this point is a little more impatient because, from a voter’s perspective, my initial disbelief or dismay at the absence of good information is giving way to somewhat stronger feelings.

State Court of Criminal Appeals. Several seats were open. In one, the reportedly conservative JudgeVoterGuide (which didn’t seem to cover county races, outside California) gave the Republican a (perhaps predictable) score of 8 out of 10, and gave the Democrat a score of 2 out of 10. There was, again, a paywall preventing me from viewing a Texas Lawyer article on this contest. I liked the Democrat’s answers to the Ballotpedia questionnaire (vs. the Republican, who didn’t submit any answers at all), but they were very brief. I didn’t necessarily agree with everything on the Republican’s webpage, but at least it was accessible, whereas for some reason the Democrat provided a link to a private Facebook page that I couldn’t access. In another contest, iVoterGuide was very helpful.

State Supreme Court. These contests are a distinct step up from the lower court elections. At this level, the candidates have degrees from top law schools and are touting recommendations from the governor and experience clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court. A Google search turns up a number of articles, some of which highlight controversies related to this court’s recent decisions. Unlike the situation in lower courts, VoteSmart offers comparisons at this level. Meanwhile, my preferences have been sharpened somewhat in the process of comparing the lower court candidates; I have been reminded of my priorities in choosing judges. At this level, it’s not just about the candidates; it’s about the politics, about the calls for change in this state. Or maybe it just feels that way because I am less informed on the politics at the lower levels.

U.S. House of Representatives. There is much more information on candidates at the federal than at the state level. From an issues perspective, both Republican and Democratic candidates here were political newcomers, so VoteSmart showed no votes on key issues on the Votes Tab. The Positions tab seemed to say that neither had taken VoteSmart’s 2020 Political Courage Test. The Ratings tab indicated that they were nearly polar opposites in the view of the National Rifle Association, and that the Democrat had far more endorsements, though I was familiar with only a few (e.g., Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, End Citizens United). The Democrat also offered links to ~10 speeches, as distinct from only three for the Republican. The Funding tab indicated that the Democrat had raised about four times as much as the Republican. The Bio tab indicated that the Republican had interesting but narrow and mostly not policy-level experience and less prestigious educational credentials than the Democrat, who did have national-level policy experience. From a character/leadership perspective, neither candidate’s website offered video. I did find a paid advertising video for the Democrat. Not surprisingly, several respectable sources said the race “leans Democratic.”

U.S. Senate. This race pitted an older white male Republican lawyer with 17 years of experience in the Senate, and 16 years of experience as a judge and state attorney general before that, against a younger white female PhD with no prior political experience and, in her 20-year professional career to date, no significant executive, legislative, or legal experience. There was obviously an enormous difference between the two in terms of what VoteSmart showed on its Votes Tab: she had none; he had 37 pages of key votes. He had taken VoteSmart’s Political Courage Test; she had not. Her list of endorsements was actually only about half as long as that of the woman running for the House (above), though the Republican senator didn’t list many more. There was, again, polarization in their ratings. She had only one, from the NRA, while he had many, and those were extreme: most were either 0% of 100%, indicating a very staunch, consistently Republican record. Clicking “Select Issue” on her Ratings tab indicated that no records were available whereas, again, his page produced a list of ratings focused on the selected issue. On the Speeches tab, she provided links to maybe 20 public statements, while he offered 231 pages. The Funding tab indicated that she had raised $6.5M while he had raised $22.2M. My search for videos led to an interview in which she apparently said that her opponent had “grossly underestimated … our ability to detect bullshit.” In that phrasing, and in what I saw on the video, she was not trying to compete on his terms, as a solid professional who chose her words carefully and was capable of standing up to pressure and delivering in a pinch. Overall, my impression was that this Democratic candidate was not, as she might put it, working her ass off to win. It appeared, rather, that this race posed the question of whether voters were ready to choose some random — though certainly intelligent, educated, and chatty — female to replace an old, powerful, experienced white male. Her runoff victory in the primary was a narrow win, suggesting that her support on the left may not be as strong as she might wish. Recent polls suggested that her bio and style had not yet convinced voters: she still seemed to be well behind in the polls.

U.S. President. The presidential election usually commands far more attention than any other. Among the sites offering direct comparisons among presidential candidates, ProCon and ISideWith are especially easy to use. The former gave me a nice list of issues, with the presidential candidates’ stances on each. The latter produced “My 2020 Ballot,” listing my supposed percentages of support for each of the U.S. presidential and congressional races. I should have signed into ISideWith before beginning: I wanted it to save my entries for future races. I wondered whether ISideWith captured my views and priorities more accurately, or less accurately, than I did in my own blog post on the choice between Trump and Biden. The latter was still in development; but when I read through it, I did not feel that I was the voter whom ISideWith had said. Possibly it’s a contrast between what’s best for me personally, which is what ISideWith seems to emphasize, and what I think is best for the country or the world, which may be the focus of my post.

Finally, on a more general level, ChartsMe asked a series of weird questions and reached a conclusion as to whether my brain was Democrat or Republican.

Conclusion

This post traces through the task of learning about and choosing among candidates for political office in the U.S. November 2020 general election. In working through that process, I found that voters are expected to choose candidates for local and even state office with little to no significant information or guidance. At the lower levels, I observed what you’d expect: people just starting out in politics, taking their shot on relatively small amounts of money and with little public awareness or support — and, under such circumstances, being voted in or out on the basis of trivial factors, such as whether their name comes first in the list of candidates. As I moved from local to state, I saw more professionalism and greater public awareness and inquiry. Moving from state to the national level, it seemed that we were transitioning from people who were fundamentally qualified, if not necessarily very experienced, to career politicians who could actually be less qualified and yet politically more successful. At all levels, then, there were grounds to believe that the American form of democracy could be significantly improved, in terms of its ability to attract, support, and choose good leaders.

2020 Presidential Election Scorecard

If the coronavirus doesn’t mind, this fall the U.S. will choose its president for the next four years. This post contains my list of key issues favoring Donald Trump, the incumbent, and Joe Biden, the challenger.

I started this post in mid-May 2020 and will be revising it until the election in November. In effect, each of these items is an argument with myself, an attempt to express how each issue appeared to me, as of the last time I revisited it. So if I say Trump has the advantage on a certain matter, I mean that, to me, this item would be a reason to vote for Trump. The weighting is an attempt to state priorities among these items.

Note also my long-term bet (made in March 2018) that Trump will win and my post on how to vote.

Final Results: The Scorecard

Topic Details

Note: this discussion does not purport to provide an exhaustive analysis. These are largely just my notes, accumulated over the several months prior to election season.

Economy, Poverty, and the Environment (Weight: 50. Points: Trump 10, Biden 40)

The current state of the U.S. economy is awful. It got that way because of the coronavirus, and that is much worse in the U.S. than virtually any other developed nation because Trump handled it incompetently. It does not appear that he has improved as the months pass, nor that he would handle another virus or other catastrophe better.

Part of this is the federal budget. Bill Clinton was the last president who ran a budget surplus. The Republicans (and the Donald) have never seen a tax cut that wouldn’t solve everything. We’re running trillions in the hole, and they still can’t bring themselves to undo the 2017 tax cut that shoveled billions to foreign investors. Even in the middle of the coronavirus recession, they couldn’t help insisting on a bailout law that sent tons of cash to big corporations while mom & pop shops ran dry. Democrats will give everything to illegal immigrants while American citizens go without food and healthcare, but at least that actually helps someone who needs it, and has some potential to stimulate the economy rather than merely improving corporate balance sheets and then getting paid out in bonuses to CEOs. Bailouts aside, millions of people have ongoing needs, and the Republicans (notably including Trump) are the only ones who keep showing signs of gutting Social Security, putting millions on the street, and preventing the U.S. from getting workable healthcare.

The American Conservative (Doran, September 5) argues that the Democrats are no longer the party of the poor — especially, but not only, the rural poor. It is true that the Democrats are most certainly the party of ridiculing people for being hicks, and in that sense favoring the elite. There is a credible argument that billionaires and other members of the elite favor the Democrats, not merely because they are more enlightened in various areas, but because continuing to set the “woke” against poor whites, especially, prevents the poor of all colors from joining forces against those (not only the rich) who exploit and manipulate them.

Not that murky skies and rivers that catch fire were bad. Sometimes they made for more colorful (orange!) sunsets and more spectacular nighttimes. Besides, so far it looked like we were going to be OK without fireflies and honeybees and whatever other bugs the scientists keep going on about. But I would really rather not have to see photos of two-headed salamanders. (Pardon the sarcasm; I am attempting to emulate those who somehow manage to be indifferent to the environment.)

Administrative Competence, Constitutional Government, and Leadership (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 5, Biden 35)

Trump’s government has been a chaos. Every time I turn around, I hear about another administrative vacancy not filled for years after his inauguration, or another administration employee (including many cabinet members and senior White House figures) leaving. It seems to be a government run by caprice and scattershot attention span. Trump has demonstrated that a yahoo, flying by the seat of his pants, can occasionally serve a useful purpose in upsetting applecarts and breaking things. But overall he has demonstrated that good government requires competence. That said, the Democrats nowadays are so hyper-partisan these days that they, too, appear unlikely to give us really decent government.

Given that Biden appears to be tending toward senility, I wonder if the Democrats are hoping to replace him promptly with Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential candidate, and are using this route to get a female president. Aside from my suspicion that Biden is, if anything, less electable than ever, I would be surprised if this back door will impress voters generally. It won’t impress me, even if I believe the woman will make a good president, even if I believed that Americans will not willingly elect a suitable female candidate. The outcome would be desirable, but I can’t approve of Joe Biden — or, perhaps, Joe Biden’s handlers — choosing the next president of the United States.

Nonetheless, Trump is a walking anti-constitution. Firing inspectors general and other governmental watchdogs is very bad. In a time when many people rightly doubt that our flawed form of democracy can rule effectively, Trump is very much the wrong person to be so much as one step closer to dictatorship. And I shudder to think of subjecting young people, for whom this may be the only president they know much about, to four more years of this. As Election Day nears, I am seeing increasing indications that Trump will fight the constitutional transfer of power when his time is up, and that Republicans are trying to wreck the popular vote. Slate (Hannon, October 13) cites the example of efforts in Texas to make voting more difficult, so as to deter the poorer and less-educated people who are less determined about it. I could see an argument that people who aren’t determined to vote shouldn’t be given the opportunity, for fear that they won’t know what they’re voting for; but dirty tricks to disenfranchise them are beyond the pale.

One item in Trump’s favor has to do with having balls. It’s not a question of physiology. Many women have the functional equivalent; many men don’t. Regardless of whether Trump’s nerve is due to psychopathy, the point remains that he has faced down calumny and (in my view, far too often) proceeded with his chosen policies despite the slings and arrows, where someone like Joe Biden would have done fourteen flip-flops and would still be begging the media to love him. To a certain extent, people expect their candidates to know how to act like leaders. Biden has been particularly weak during these months of runup to the election: you rarely hear or see him take a position on anything, presumably because his handlers are trying to avoid broadcasting his dementia. But there is also a larger problem. Hillary’s campaign in 2016 was faulted for its lack of courage — and now we have the same thing all over again. If anything, it’s worse. Hilary was afraid of her own shadow; the handlers aren’t letting Biden out into the sunlight at all. You’ve got to wonder what odd kind of presidency we are about to enter.

International Affairs (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 10, Biden 30)

First, about China. My initial remarks said this:

Obama started the talk with his “pivot to Asia,” but Orange Man has been far and away more active in awakening America to the economic, military, and political espionage, theft, propaganda, exploitation, and otherwise unkind behavior of China toward its own neighbors as well as the U.S. Even now (i.e., May 2020), when the New York Times has belatedly realized that the American viewpoint has shifted, there are still Democratic remarks about how we really just need to go back to buying everything from China and being pleasant while they take over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Biden will be flip-flopping on this within five minutes after taking office. Not to deny that Trump is likewise capable of completely reversing himself on everything at any moment.

I think The Atlantic (Schuman, July 9) makes a persuasive case that, having helped to awaken America to the threat posed by China, Trump has become more harmful than helpful, for purposes of forming the coalition of nations that will be needed to place limits on Chinese imperialism. I think there is also something to the argument in Foreign Policy (Detsch & MacKinnon, July 24) that it’s a put-on — that Trump has actually been pretty easy on China, and is just posing as a tough guy for the election. On the other hand, I like Mike Pompeo’s remarks opposing China’s freedom to bully Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, and I am concerned that there will be no coalition of nations facing China — that media will compel Biden to adopt a pro-China stance. This concern is exemplified by The Atlantic (Beinart, July 26), which strongly endorses America’s continued financial support for China, to the tune of a $400+ billion trade deficit per year. Beinart says, “Surely what’s needed now isn’t for Democrats to “stand up” to China but to cooperate with it to rebuild the economic ties on which so many American exporters depend.” In other words, money for us today; servitude for future generations. Contra Beinart, surely what’s needed now is for America to begin the long, hard task of recalling some of the excessive trust it has placed in China — to insure, among other things, that China is one of the nations to which “American exporters” are able to export. Because in many areas, that has decidedly not been the case so far.

I like the idea that Biden will form a coalition of nations to hang tough against China, and I believe he — or, more accurately, his team — are more capable of doing so; but I am afraid it won’t work that way. One question, for me, is whether Trump has learned anything from his blunders in alienating various allies. It is possible. At the moment, I don’t think he has been doing as much of that as he did in his first few years in office. Bolton’s book (2020) reminds me, though, that Trump was, and may always be, a poor and impetuous negotiator with little grasp of nuance or complexity.

More generally, as America’s spokesman to the world, Trump does have one strength. The world has hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people who would like to come here. For all this country’s problems, it still looks a damn sight better than what they’ve achieved so far in Central America. Trump at least says so. I am afraid the Democrats will allow the progressives to control the microphone and only harp on our failures. Perhaps worse, though, Trump is all about making the U.S. a flaky partner abroad and an object of ridicule around the world; he has profoundly undermined our influence worldwide.

It almost goes without saying — Trump virtually broadcasts — that he doesn’t care about human rights. Yet there are counterexamples. Perhaps the most obtrusive examples in the world at present are, once again, in China. At least the Trump administration’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is still making noises about Tibet. Despite the brevity of its grudging coverage, the New York Times (Jakes, 2020) does acknowledge that Trump has not completely forgotten this place that the media were so passionate about, and then proceeded to implicitly give up on. If an American administration can find excuses to push back against China’s abuses of Tibetans, Uighurs, Africans, and other peoples around the world whose rights and needs do not accord with China’s global ambitions, then that is something. I don’t know whether it is more than the mere talk that Obama presented; I don’t know whether it is more than Biden will actually do. But it is something.

Extremism & Identity Politics (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 30, Biden 10)

I hear about the extreme right, but in daily reading most of the extremism I’m seeing is on the Left. I think it feeds on Trump’s variously erratic, bizarre, incompetent, and corrupt administration. All other things being equal, I would think the solution to that would be, not to perpetuate Trump as a catalyst for more Left nuttiness, but rather to replace him with a centrist who will tend to trigger less radical thought and action on either side. Having a Democrat as president may reduce support on the left for the more extreme behaviors that have flourished due to what conservatives call Trump Derangement Syndrome, which roughly translates as foaming at the mouth whenever someone mentions Trump.

That said, I am concerned at the extent to which extreme progressivism has taken root in American institutions and seems likely to remain, regardless of who is president. Using the New York Times as an example of an institution that I would expect to remain balanced, I am looking for instance at an article (Gladstone, July 22) whose objective is apparently to twist every aspect of a current issue into an argument against Trump. It would be no surprise to see this in many other websites; but it is stunning to see that the Times has descended to this level of irrationality. A few brief illustrations:

• Gladstone says it is “racist” to refer to SARS-CoV-2 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus.” As argued in my separate post, Gladstone’s racist claim is that the Spanish were tough enough to absorb the incorrect 1918 labeling of the “Spanish flu”; somehow the Germans are not offended when we refer to a McDonald’s quasi-sandwich as a “Hamburger”; but China is too delicate to take responsibility for a virus that its dietary practices supposedly originated, and that its government’s handling did help to spread worldwide, in the eventual killing of millions of innocent people.
• Gladstone blames the Trump administration for “setting up potential military confrontations between Chinese and U.S. naval forces” in the South China Sea, without any mention of the fact that — as reported in the “old” New York Times (Perlez, 2016) — “An international tribunal in The Hague [has] delivered a sweeping rebuke … of China’s behavior in the South China Sea.” It is actually China that is setting up that potential military confrontation, by claiming other nations’ waters as its own. Gladstone claims to be sensitive to racism, yet he privileges China over other Asian nations.
• Gladstone says, “The Trump White House has escalated the accusations [of Chinese theft of American intellectual property] further by seeking an international blacklisting of Huawei.” Again, however, an article in the old, rational Times (Sanger & Perlroth, 2014), written during the Obama Administration, says this: “American officials have long considered Huawei … a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company … could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.”

My concern in this regard is that these media outlets are serving as mouthpieces for Chinese propaganda, as if deliberately favoring (and apparently selling advertising to, and in other ways conceivably being funded by) Chinese interests over American ones — and also over the interests of the people of the many nations, from India to Vietnam to Japan, against which China has wielded increasingly aggressive economic and military force in recent years. This pattern of inventing arguments hostile to the Trump administration, across many areas of American social and political life — even when that administration is doing the right thing — does seem to position the Times as an “enemy of the people,” insofar as the people need and deserve honest, factual reporting.

When Trump first made that accusation against the media (i.e., “enemy of the people”), I thought he was crazy. But I have been a Times reader for more than 30 years, and I am really appalled at its current drift. Possibly a second Trump administration would persuade the Times and other such sources that incompetent journalism is counterproductive — that, indeed, someday it may encourage hostility to our present concept of a free press, if and when a would-be American tyrant really does emerge. In other posts, I have discussed other examples of institutional failures at the Times (e.g., harmful distortion of issues pertaining to gender and anti-Semitism). Another example that I have not explored elsewhere: the hypocrisy in media coverage of the #MeToo complaint by Christine Blasey Ford (accusing a Republican male of inappropriate sexual behavior) vs. media coverage of Tara Reade’s comparable complaint (against a Democrat). This demonstrates what I had observed earlier: even liberal and progressive media outlets that formerly seemed to care about truthfulness now display persistent political bias, at the expense of the nation’s best interests. Suppressing a disfavored narrative while promoting a favored one may be journalism, but it is not truthseeking.

Here, again, I am increasingly concerned that Biden and the Democrats will kowtow to the extreme progressives who have attempted to censor everyone who does not say exactly what they want, as illustrated in Matt Taibbi’s (May 29) article on progressive attempts to censor — would you believe — Michael Moore. Trump is a lousy standard-bearer for a free and honest press; but in this presidential election, I fear, he may be the best we will get.

There’s less of the White Man Bad nuttiness than there was in 2016, but I still run into it frequently. White progressives do still have a pathological need to pretend they are the friends of nonwhites. Some are. But too many are just popularity hounds who would say anything, or sell anyone, if it made them look or feel better. There is a reason why supposedly progressive social workers were able to serve Hitler’s Nazi regime with hardly a trace of dissent. On the other hand, a black woman like Kamala Harris, as vice president and eventual president, could make a huge improvement just by standing up there and saying something to the effect of, “We don’t need white people attacking white people on behalf of black people. Alienating white people is not going to help black people.” The problem is that, so far, Harris doesn’t seem inclined in that direction.

One other issue: I have nothing against LGBTQ people, and I sympathize with them against discrimination. I realize that everyone wants to be on the winning side, so everyone is pretending to be something they aren’t — namely, to be just like an LGBTQ person, and thus able to see and understand and share and support. But in terms of what people will do when their money or their real priorities are at risk, I believe the reality is quite different. A person focused on reality may more honestly admit that, for most Americans, it does not make sense to prioritize this cause célèbre while neglecting the grievances of others who are more numerous and/or whose problems are more intense or historically egregious (e.g., rights of people with disabilities or American Indians or the homeless). This has been a very visible issue, and Biden appears better positioned to benefit from it. But when it is overdone, it risks recoiling to Trump’s advantage. There is, for example, widespread concern that kids are free to choose sex reassignment surgery when they are too young to have any idea of who they are or what they are doing, and that medical and counseling professionals are helping them override parental concerns to do so. America has lots of voting parents who may not appreciate this.

Academia, Science, and COVID-19 (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 20, Biden 10)

I sympathize with Trumpistas’ hostility to the wrong kind of expert. But ignorance is no way to run a world. Trump would have been far more effective on this front if he had, ironically, used experts to remove some of the halo from the intelligentsia. There are legitimate controversies out there. Academia’s current tendency toward woke (f/k/a Soviet) homogeneity of opinion and inquiry is not the solution. But Trump was not the man for that job. Biden isn’t either, but at least he’s not a know-nothing. We’ll have to wait until the next election, or at least until Biden’s retirement, for a candidate who can do something constructive on this point. I doubt a Democratic president will do anything not beloved of academia, though.

In the area of COVID-19 specifically, our present circumstances are a consequence of Trump’s cluelessness on both science and administration. I am reading, for example, that The Atlantic (Zhang, July 24) quotes Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, as saying, “We continue to ask CDC these many, many questions. And they don’t know.” Producing a useless CDC at the time of a pandemic seems like a pretty good example of the consequences of blindly politicizing science and wrecking government. I recognize the conservative argument that prominent Democrat leaders (e.g., New York’s Cuomo) were not necessarily favoring more enlightened responses at crucial points, but the buck stops here: the fact remains that the U.S. response has been a mess.

Trump has left the states to figure things out for themselves; and while that has been a circus, perhaps in some regards it has been for the best; perhaps a Trump-created catastrophe in handling COVID-19 has been and will be best addressed by states experimenting with and collaborating on their own solutions. It is not clear that there was a solution in which people in the heartland would get the message about masks and social distancing until enough of them died. And meanwhile, in important regards, the left is destroying what American science and academia are all about.

There is, for one thing, the question of where COVID-19 came from. Although it presently sounds like a matter of mere curiosity, it could be very important for, among other things, world opinion on China, and for protection against future biowarfare. The Democrats don’t merely believe that the evidence favors a purely natural origin, from an animal to a human at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. They — especially leading liberal media — have consistently evinced an unscientific political determination to avoid, indeed to ridicule, the question of whether the virus could have originated in the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. These people will never seek an unbiased investigation of, for instance, the question of whether the Chinese government could have released the virus deliberately. They believe, in effect, that God has already given them the truth: Republicans like Tom Cotton are always wrong.

That’s not science, nor is it the way to learn anything you don’t already believe. Such nonsense is unfortunately too typical of the extremely partisan bent of academia these days. Political hacks masquerading as intellectuals destroyed my own academic career. In their view, the pursuit of knowledge is just one more political angle. I can’t favor that. I don’t see that Trump has any intelligible response to that sort of bias. But at least he offers a piecemeal opposition to it, whereas Biden will surely coddle it.

Courts and Rule of Law (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 0, Biden 30)

The rule of law in America has serious problems, regardless of who wins this election. The main problem with Trump, and with both political parties, is that they seek to corrupt the courts in order to promote their partisan priorities. I am not sure how I would vote on this item in normal times. I am sure that I was offended by how the Republican Senate broke the rules to prevent Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland from joining the Supreme Court, and then turned around and fast-tracked Amy Coney Barrett. This is not a vote on her. This is a vote against the Republican Senate.

Political Parties in the Long Term (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 5, Biden 25)

I don’t like having just two political parties. But that’s where we are. For purposes of making them effective, much needs to be done. I have heard partisan liberals say that Republicans are unified. Then I read, for example, an article in Business Insider (Haltiwanger, August 19) describing how Trump has fractured the party. There is no such illusion about the Democrats: traditional liberalism is increasingly divorced from extremists on the left.

Trump may have pushed the Republican party toward paying more attention to its small fry and less to its millionaires. I’m not sure about that. I feel they have had their four years. Meanwhile, I think it would be healthy to give the Democrats power, so that they can fight among themselves about what their party stands for, instead of being pseudo-united against Trump. Ideally, this would result in a party split, with the radicals leaving the Democratic Party and empowering a party farther to the left (e.g., the Greens). I don’t know whether this would produce a better Democratic party. I am pretty sure it couldn’t produce a worse one.

Regardless of whether that happens, I think an opportunity for the Democrats to fight among themselves may help to reduce the far left’s promotion of civil war against conservatives. I would rather expose and reduce the push toward armed hostility among young people who have not yet persuaded me that they have any idea of what they are doing. This is the principal reason for my allocation of points in this area.

Police and Race Relations (Weight: 20. Points: Trump 10, Biden 10)

The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 led to riots and looting — supposedly in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement — that a majority of voters disapproved of. For people who are concerned about social unrest, the situation was compounded by progressive cluelessness — by, for example, a pair of opinion pieces in which the New York Times conveyed the doubly bad impression that Democrats favor riots because that’s what most black people want.

Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris could be a plus for Democrats on both moral and electoral levels, but not if blacks keep getting associated with ongoing riots and looting. I felt that Trump shot himself in the foot with his poorly executed injection of federal officers into the protest scene in Portland. But after viewing videos of protesters’ violence there, and seeing that the violence has expanded into violence including murders in Portland and Kenosha while mayors and governors do nothing, I am less critical of Trump’s decision.

Even after months of riots and looting that seem to have nothing to do with black lives, and that have drawn criticism from a number of blacks, we do not seem to have responsible coverage in the mainstream media. Thus, I have increasingly been reading The Federalist. Despite purveying more than its share of right-wing nonsense that leaves me rolling my eyes, I find myself agreeing with black writers like Delano Squires, whose Federalist article (July 21, 2020) offers a number of seemingly fact-based arguments in support of his argument that “Too many black leaders continue to proclaim black problems only matter when caused by white people” and that they act as though “white thoughts are more important than black actions” — such as,

In the past five years, about 25 percent of those shot and killed by police were black, and only 2 percent were unarmed. …

[N]early half of the people killed by police in the last five years have been white ….

The truth is that 61 percent of black inmates in state prisons — by far the largest part of the prison system — are there for violent crimes. Drug possession accounts for just 3 percent of the black prison population ….

I would really rather have much less of well-to-do white progressives preaching at me about white privilege (which many of them enjoy to a far greater extent than I do), and much more real conversation with black people who will not beat me up if I express a willingness to learn but also a determination to stick with the facts. Given the surprising number and weight of black leaders choosing Trump (e.g., Vernon Jones), I would like to see people like Squires taken seriously in the New York Times and Slate. Judging from mainstream media’s somewhat improving ability to look askance at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, now that they are not in power, I think it could be beneficial to have a Republican (preferably not Trump, but there you are) in power for another four years.

One of the primary factors pushing me toward Biden on this issue is the thought that police reform is a real possibility at the presidential level under Biden, but apparently not under Trump. I would rather not see that opportunity pass. There is some pressure in that direction now, though much of it has already vanished in the wake of continuing riots and looting; it seems the public has already largely been driven back toward accepting the police as they are.

Vice-Presidential Candidates (Weight: 20. Points: Trump 15, Biden 5).

Since there is a strong likelihood that Biden will be replaced by Kamala Harris no later than 2024, and possibly much sooner, it seems that I would ideally have been considering Harris on most if not all of the other topics addressed in this post. Until I have time and information to support that effort, I will have to settle for this separate entry. At present, I have only two things to add. First, I did not like Harris as a candidate in the Democratic primaries. I felt she was a rank careerist, very much in the mold of Biden and Trump, who would do or say anything to get elected. I did not know a lot about Susan Rice, and was concerned about her limited experience, but based on what I knew, I would have been far more excited about Biden with her on the ticket. She seemed to be a genuine person, perhaps advantaged in that regard by her lack of years of cynical experience as a politician. Second, it seemed that Harris had been abusive, especially toward the poor, in her years as San Francisco District Attorney and California’s Attorney General. Here, again, I am not generally comfortable with The Federalist, but one of that website’s articles (Clark, 2020) draws on several liberal sources to support the impression that Harris is very likely to back the powerful and the privileged against the poor. I don’t have comparable material on Trump’s VP Mike Pence, nor interest in him, because it seems much less likely that he will ever be president.

Morality and Civility (Weight: 15. Points: Trump 5, Biden 10)

Politicians lie. That’s what we want. If we really cared about lying, we wouldn’t vote for people who do it, regardless of whether it comes in the form of Biden’s pandering to voters or Trump’s more bald-faced style. Politicians cheat as well; they care about winning more than they care about the country. This, too, is generally acceptable for American voters; when the only food left is a choice between rotten meat or rotten potatoes, we hold our noses and select one or the other. Within this narrow and distorted scope, voters are likely to conclude that Biden does a much better job of pretending to be what he’s not. It’s not that America is actually going to become a more moral place for political reasons. If its next generation does so, it will probably be, rather, for economic reasons: by becoming less available, money may become less corrupting. It’s just that Americans’ preferred view of themselves entails not being regularly and publicly besmirched by association with a president who open practices and endorses immorality in a variety of forms.

Trump has had his impact. He has sent his message. At this point, his presence — his coarseness, his ignorance, his corruption — seems likely to continue to influence the country negatively. It is time to return to the land of adult leadership. It is unfortunate that the Republican party missed the opportunity, presented by impeachment,  to replace him with a serious candidate, capable of leading all Americans. Not that Pence would have been the ideal candidate for that, and presumably that was part of the impeachment calculation.

On the other hand, Trump’s mentality and behavior are ugly on many levels, but to some extent that has been priced into the current exchange: he’s not shocking anymore. “Shocking” has moved on to the increasing violence (see Law & Order) and aggression (see Extremism) displayed by radical progressives on all levels. If you can make Trump look stable and reassuring, you are definitely doing something wrong.

The Trump administration — explicitly, and by its very existence — has encouraged rethinking of Obama’s years in office. When Trump replaced Obama, you’d have thought Satan was replacing God. There were mass protests absurdly declaring that Trump was “Not My President!” More recently, however, it appears that even some on the Left are less inclined to believe that everything about Obama’s administration was wonderful. I, personally, don’t think Obama’s administration was nearly as corrupt as Trump’s — even though I did wait eight years, in vain, for his Department of Education to render an honest opinion on my appeal of its initial corrupt decision of my case. But, despite efforts, I’ve also gotten nothing from Trump’s DoE.

Immigration (Weight: 10. Points: Trump 10, Biden 0)

I am not fond of the idea of admitting millions of additional immigrants into the U.S. My primary concern is that the U.S. has far too many people, and should be working toward significant population reduction. One reason is that people consume resources and produce waste. The world cannot support its present population without continued catastrophic environmental consequences. Another reason is that it seems to me, pending research, that lower population entails lower stress and more friendliness. On that level, I don’t care where the immigrants come from; they just need to stay there, and add to the pressure to reduce population there. I don’t blame people for wanting to come here. This country is a lot better than a lot of other places. But if the U.S. wants to spend money on making life better for immigrants, it should focus on long-term constructive humanitarian programs (as distinct from short-term fixes that solve nothing) in their home countries. Another concern is that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries contribute to social fragmentation: too many of them persist, understandably, in their cultures of origin, rather than contribute to an America that all residents share. We cannot fix the world’s problems by bringing the world into the U.S.; we can only burden the U.S. with the world’s problems. I don’t know that Trump’s wall is the most brilliant concept — again, I haven’t studied it in any detail, though one brief sketch suggested that it might actually be cost-effective. I don’t think Biden necessarily opposes some form of immigration control; the problem here, as elsewhere, is that he will blow with the wind, whereas at least Trump draws a hard line. If the Democrats have an effective plan for immigration control, as distinct from open borders, it has not been publicized in the largely liberal press that provided most of my reading until this year.

Democrats: You Have Only Yourselves to Blame

I am not a Republican. I don’t think I have ever voted for a Republican. Certainly not for national office.

I have to begin with those words, even though they are irrelevant to this post, because so many Democrats are partisans now. In other words, I am indulging illogic — I am talking about something irrelevant — because the Democratic mindset now requires illogic. And that, unlike my voting record, actually *is* relevant here.

Let’s clarify the terminology. I’m using “partisan” as Dictionary.com defines it: “an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, especially a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance.” Emotions have their place. But they are often unfortunately opposed to logic. Example: your head tells you you’re freezing to death, but your feelings say it is so comfortable, lying here in the snow, and you should just go to sleep.

In politics, partisan thinking is destructive. It says, I want my person elected, even if that person is corrupt, bad for the country, and unfair to the other side. Partisan thinking is not about finding the best solution. It is about winning, even if winning is ultimately harmful. That is, it is an emotional solution — personally satisfying, but often unintelligent.

So when I say my own voting record is irrelevant to this post, that’s because I’m not a partisan. My voting for the Democratic candidate is not due to any misplaced loyalty to a corrupt political party. If I believe the Republican candidate is better, I will vote for him/her. I haven’t had much sympathy with many Republican policies, so I have voted Democrat. But that is always subject to change.

It may seem unfair that I would criticize Democrats for becoming partisans. Haven’t the Republicans done exactly the same? Wasn’t the impeachment of Bill Clinton, more than 20 years ago, an example of partisan politics?

I believe it was. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was not relevant to his qualifications or obligations as President of the United States. He cheated on his wife. In our legal system, that was no longer a crime. Newt Gingrich and the other Republicans tried to leverage moral outrage to remove a president for lying about non-criminal misbehavior. That was wrong. I know of no way in which that impeachment charade was beneficial to this country or to its people.

The Republicans were even worse during the Obama years, responding to his bipartisan gestures with scorched-earth tactics. Part of the problem is that Congress (especially but not only its Republican side — see Roll Call, 2018) has become filled with wealthy people, and wealthy people often become wealthy through their willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and wreck things — whatever it takes to win. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the Republican Party rejected bipartisanship, and the best interests of the country in the big picture, in a rather successful effort to neutralize Obama. That said, his biggest failings were self-inflicted — and the ability to be honest about his failings, despite generally approving of him, is another form of behavior that many partisans find difficult. (It has taken a while, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have finally reached the day when the often partisan New Republic (Pareene, 2019) would frankly criticize some of Obama’s mistakes.)

It is understandable that Democrats would react emotionally to those Republican behaviors. Understandable, that is, but not defensible. If you want a better country, you don’t get it by making the country worse — and that’s exactly what partisanship does. I’m not advocating turning the other cheek. I’m saying that, even if you are preoccupied with winning, there’s a difference between lashing out and keeping your eye on the ball.

More than eight years ago, in September 2011, I wrote a blog post advising President Obama to seek a constitutional convention. There were signs that the Democrats were in a relatively strong position to push for changes to the Constitution. Not to say it would have happened, but at least there could have been an attempt. I said that Obama’s prolonged but weak efforts at bipartisanship had proved to be “the right approach at the wrong time.” As elaborated in another post (“Heads Must Roll,” 2009), Professor Obama did not understand power, and thus failed to respond adequately to the Great Recession and to use its opportunities to seek badly needed reform of our financial system.

I recommended a constitutional convention because the country has gone off the rails on the most fundamental level: our three branches of government have become dysfunctional. First, the executive branch. There are too many educated, experienced, qualified people out there, for us to ever be left with a choice of a crook like Donald Trump (for whom many conservatives saw no alternative but to hold their noses and vote), a buffoon like George W. Bush, or a well-meaning but unsuited man like Jimmy Carter. Likewise, with the other branches: public approval of Congress has been in the toilet for decades (Gallup, 2019), and the Supreme Court has long presided over a profoundly unjust and incompetent legal system.

A constitutional convention would have provided an opportunity to revisit the Electoral College. With an Electoral College revised to fit the nation’s developmental trends, Donald Trump would not have won in 2016. But, again, calling for a constitutional convention would have required Obama to demonstrate some backbone, some courage, and courage is a virtue that liberals have tended to denigrate. Liberals themselves seem confused about this. For instance, the liberal Atlantic (Traub, 2018) perpetuates the belief that Republicans are the party of selfishness — while simultaneously admitting that the Democrats have become the party of elite entitlement. As better grasped by Haidt (2008), liberals have generally encouraged the pursuit of allegedly meritocratic personal advantage, rather than self-sacrifice and other values that have long persuaded conservative blockheads (as they seem to liberals) to sign up for the military, vote against their personal economic interests, and otherwise sacrifice themselves for larger causes.

The Democrats may have had an opportunity to rewrite the Constitution. It is too bad that our political horizons were limited by the party hacks who encouraged Obama’s meekness, starting in 2008, and who gave us the ill-suited Hillary Clinton instead of the (relative) firebrand Bernie Sanders in 2016. Polls said Bernie would have defeated Trump; and, once elected, Bernie would have belatedly delivered some of the change that Obama promised.

Trump’s election obliged us to face what happens when you don’t strike while the iron’s hot. Instead of leading, Democrats became the followers. This, they found, was not at all pleasant. They reacted like the spoiled children they had become — spoiled, that is, by the belief that they were entitled to have the president of their choosing, as distinct from the one designated by the constitutional process. The West Wing TV show of the 2000s nursed the undestandable resentment that a popular and effective president had now been supplanted by a gross loser, and likewise the Democrats in 2016 became proponents of the stupid claim that Trump was Not My President. He most certainly was, and they had only themselves to blame, for failing to insist upon constitutional change when it was needed, and for tolerating Bernie’s suppression. Perversely, the pro-black eagerness to see Obama as a sort of savior reduced pressure on him to actually perform as a savior. The Democratic cause would have been better served by a non-partisan willingness to criticize him in a timely manner, in place of a warm feeling that now our side had won and everything was going to be fine.

I think I did send emails to Obama’s White House, notifying them of my posts. I didn’t think those emails would carry much weight and, plainly, they didn’t. The thing is, I wasn’t the only one saying this stuff. My posts drew upon what published sources were saying. If Obama’s White House didn’t hear and respond, it wasn’t because people weren’t speaking; it was because Obama wasn’t listening.

Sometimes I’m right; sometimes I’m wrong. It seems, unfortunately, that I may have been correct in predicting, in March 2018, that Trump would win re-election in November 2020. As indicated in my updates to that post, Trump has not exactly gone down to flaming ruin in the 21 months since I made that prediction. At this point, we have endured more than three years of constant Democratic fulmination against him; and yet, according to FiveThirtyEight (2019), his approval rating is higher than it has been at any time since the first two months of his presidency.

During these past three years, the Democrats have marched in pussyhat protest; they have chanted Not My President; they have had their eyes glued to the tube as talking heads went on endlessly about the Mueller Investigation; and in the stupidest move of all, they have proudly announced their partisan determination to impeach Trump for any reason, or if necessary for no reason at all. The net effect of all this self-righteous sound and fury is that, as I say, his approval rating has risen.

There is a saying, sometimes rendered as “When you strike a king, strike to kill.” Another saying with a somewhat similar meaning is, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” The latter, for all its untruth, does aptly describe what the Democratic partisans have done with their opportunities to get rid of Trump. They could not control themselves; they could not organize and implement a disciplined project of preparing and delivering a lethal blow. Like children with candy, they found it just too tempting to indulge their daily fascination with the latest micro-gossip, snark, and harebrained conspiracy theory about Trump, his family members, his business dealings, and so on ad nauseum.

Why am I critical of all that? Two reasons: this partisan behavior has been harmful to the country, and it has been counterproductive for the Democrats’ own purposes. By showing their hand so early and so often, they have made clear that they were not seeking truth, justice, or the national interest. They claim to be defending the rule of law, but that’s a crock: as just noted regarding the Electoral College (and as established in my own experience with corruption in Obama’s administration), they are quite ready to dislike and ignore the law — indeed, to endorse illegal violence — when that suits their interests.

What Democratic partisans have made abundantly clear, over the past three years, is that they just have a personal dislike for the man, and they have made the further mistake of spewing that all over everyone. The reaction, as we could predict from childhood experience in the playground, is that even sympathetic observers may feel a certain urge to shy away from the person who cries and screams and demands revenge. People just don’t want to get involved with your personal complaints — and that’s what the Democrats have made of what should have been handled as a principled, nonpartisan defense of the national interest.

Thanks to the Democratic Party, the many, sometimes egregious legal and moral problems of Donald Trump’s presidency have become simply tedious. What could have been a crushing accumulation of damning facts, sufficient at least to lose him the 2020 election if not to be impeached during his first term, has instead been converted into an incessant, tiresome whining. The “death by a thousand cuts” strategy has ignored the sage advice about striking to kill, and now we see the result. The Democrat partisans could not have done a better job of inoculating the public against concern with Trump’s behavior. With their assistance, many of us have had enough. Thus we have all become accessories to Trump’s crowing that he could shoot someone and not be prosecuted: we have participated in the creation of an America in which he can behave impeachably and yet, if anything, could actually benefit from all the attention.

The purpose of a congressional representative is to represent the people of his/her district. Granted, the Republicans have made matters worse, in that regard, with their gerrymandering. But if Republicans don’t firmly believe in good national government, and seem to be doing their best to wreck it, it becomes all the more important for Democrats to make theirs the party of principle — not to join in the partisan corruption by urging representatives to cater only to their own party’s voters. Having failed to seek a constitutional rewrite that would focus citizens’ votes on policies rather than personalities, at least the Democrats might have taken the opportunity to show that, unlike the Republican gang attacking Clinton, they were going to treat the impeachment process with great respect, turning to that extreme measure only after establishing facts that demanded it.

The American public is not presently convinced that the facts demand impeachment. Despite these years of constant calumny, support for Trump’s impeachment or removal from office has remained at a pretty steady level, a bit below 50%, and the percentage favoring impeachment is now back to about where it was nine months ago, before the Mueller Report was made public (FiveThirtyEight, 2019). Going for the incremental percentages — 48%, 49%, 50% — may make sense to millionaires who have benefited, in their own careers, from fighting tooth and nail for every last penny. It makes much less sense to those who observe the big picture, who can see that this whole project is obviously stalemated.

The title of this post says that Democrats have only themselves to blame. That is because, first, as indicated above, they gave Obama a pass, instead of demanding that he deliver the financial and perhaps the electoral change the country needed; second, because Democrats put their faith in a corrupt party that resisted radical change when Bernie was ready to deliver it, so as to prefer the politically correct Hillary Clinton instead; and, third, because Democrats became more extremely partisan and, as such, behaved like children in their endless ranting about Trump, instead of focusing on the good of the country and saving their fire for the next election, when they could have used the accumulated evidence to deliver a crushing blow against his plutocracy. Democrats have essentially bought into Trump’s method — and haven’t used it as well as he does.

That brings us to the current situation. The House of Representatives has just voted to impeach President Trump. This has occurred in a setting where it is entirely clear that the Republican-controlled Senate is not going to vote to remove him — and where, moreover, the matter will have grown stale long before the 2020 election. In contending that this was consummately stupid — that it was a triumph of partisan emotionality over rationality — I have the support of the New York Times (Fandos & Shear, 2019):

Democrats, including the most vulnerable moderates, embraced the articles of impeachment with the full knowledge that doing so could damage them politically, potentially even costing them control of the House.

In effect, the Democratic Party wasted Trump’s first term on bitching and whining about an interminable series of frauds and scandals that could have been used as stepping stones but were instead overused to the point of public counter-reaction. Instead of standing for the country, or for any larger principle, the party handed Trump a golden opportunity to assert, in effect, that Democrats were no better than Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in making impeachment a cheap and ultimately weakened political maneuver.

It is not very surprising that one corrupt political party would behave like another. What is quite surprising is that supposedly intelligent people — people who, moreover, pride themselves on their morality — would encourage such behavior. It took harsh personal experience for me to grasp that, for some decades now, universities have been in decay, in the sense that professors have been increasingly selected and promoted according to their political biases and their willingness to go along with immoral, unwritten university ethics. Such professors imagine themselves to be truthseekers, even as they distort the selection of questions that will and will not be researched; they have contributed greatly to the creation of a Democratic electorate that, in their own image, sees truth not as an end in itself, but rather as a tool to manipulate for preconceived purposes.

Thus we are burdened with a morally bankrupt Democratic Party, vainly attempting to persuade a decisive share of the American public that its cause is more virtuous than that of the morally bankrupt Republican Party. The causes of the bankruptcies may differ, but the outcome is the same: never-ending efforts to manipulate voters to lash out emotionally rather than demand reasonableness or honesty. What we get from the supposedly superior Democratic Party is not visionary leadership, seeking to build upon the good in Americans across the political spectrum, so as to grow a wonderful society of the future. The Democratic Party has made sure we wouldn’t get that. Instead, what we have is an ongoing grind, a perverse memorial to the trench warfare of World War I that, a hundred years ago, cost millions of lives for virtually no gain.

Democrats have tied themselves to a corrupt party that prioritizes winning over principle, and thus makes itself as cheap and crooked as its adversary. I bet, two years ago, that the resulting dearth of inspiration would cost them the presidency again in 2020. It still looks that way. Somehow, against all odds, Democratic partisanship has repeatedly wrecked a winning hand — the Great Recession in 2008, Bernie in 2016, corruption in 2020. For this, Democrats have only themselves to blame.

What Is the Purpose of Government?

I started this post hoping to produce a simple summary of what government is supposed to do, or what purposes it is supposed to serve. I was quickly reminded that such questions are very controversial. Taking a different approach, I decided to review works discussing several related topics, in hopes that these would yield a more informed sense of what one can and should expect of one’s government. The Summary (below) provides a brief recapitulation of what I learned and concluded along the way.

Contents

Origins of Government
Human Propensities and the Political Economy
Forms of Government
Measures of Effective Government
What People Want from Government
Beyond the Question of What People Want
Summary

.

Origins of Government

It appears that humans lived in highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes for their first 200,000 years. Inequality seems to have become a standard feature of society with the emergence of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Agriculture brought population growth, longer hours of work, planning for the future, accumulation of resources, and shortages (e.g., Suzman, 2017; Wikipedia).

According to Turner and Maryanski (2015, pp. 168-171), hunter-gatherers understood plant cultivation (e.g., that plants grow from seeds) at least 40,000 years ago, but simply found it easier to collect food than to go to the trouble of gardening. Pressures leading to abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may have included population growth (i.e., the need to produce more food), resource depletion (e.g., gradual elimination of larger game animals), and barriers to mobility (e.g., growth of neighboring populations).

Over a period of thousands of years, Turner and Maryanski (2015, pp. 172-174) suggest, primitive horticulture evolved into agriculture (defined as farming with non-human sources of power), and then agriculture evolved — at varying rates in different places — into industry. Such developments created pressures favoring regulation (defined as coordination and control) of the population itself, and also of the production and distribution of food and other products. While such developments may push societies to become more sophisticated, progress toward more complex arrangements is not a one-way street: “societies . . . have collapsed [due to e.g., war, soil depletion, climate change] in ways that force populations to adopt simpler technologies, cultural ideas, and political systems in order to survive” (p. 174).

Such observations suggest that the purpose of government depends on what you want or need to regulate, and that that depends in turn on your society’s complexity (measured in terms of e.g., size of, or variation in, population or production). Almost invariably, it seems, in more developed (i.e., agricultural or post-agricultural) societies, the size of government falls somewhere along a spectrum, between “too small to deliver the desired regulation” and “too large to be compatible with societal expectations.” Such expectations may include, for instance, government at a reasonable cost, conducted without excessive interference with reasonable activities.

Human Propensities and the Political Economy

In place of the older (especially 19th-century) belief in linear progress from primitive to modern societies, Johnson and Earle (referred to here as J & E) (2000, p. 5) describe a theory of multilinear evolution. This theory, emerging in the mid-20th century, observed that societies evolve in different ways and at different rates, according to local needs and opportunities. There may still be a tendency to evolve from bands to chiefdoms to states, but the economics and the politics can vary at any such level. For instance, power may be seized by leaders in some communities while being granted to leaders by other communities.

Since Malthus (1798/1998), there has been increased awareness, albeit more at some times than at others (e.g., Ehrlich, 1968), that while technology may lead to improved living conditions, it cannot keep pace with (indeed, may foster) a tendency toward “a population extended beyond the means of supporting it. . . . [whose distress] must fall hardest upon the least fortunate members of society” (p. 15). J & E (2000, pp. 8-9) observe that, by the 1970s, environmental degradation, and the continuation of longer-than-expected working hours, fostered doubts as to the actual degree of social progress being achieved. In any case, the dominant understanding seems to be that growing population is linked with more complex societies, and that population and complexity are ultimately limited by the first essential resource (e.g., water, food) in which shortages spell an end to continued growth.

J & E (2000, pp. 20-21) list topics within evolutionary biology that appear crucial to the formation and functions of government. These include differences in male and female mating behaviors and goals; defense of territories (especially those containing desired resources); loyalty, trust, and altruism, especially toward near relatives; the relationship between speech and complex social interaction; the propensity of some people, mostly male, to seek dominance over others; and predispositions for socially beneficial behavior (e.g., cooperating, identifying untrustworthy and parasitical behavior, imitating approved behaviors). J & E suggest, however, that these tendencies do not control the outcomes observed in various societies, but merely serve as the raw material from which humans adapt solutions fitting their particular situations.

One particularly important characteristic of a complex society is its division into what J & E (2000, p. 22) call its subsistence economy and its political economy. The subsistence economy is the economy of the household, the level at which individuals and families organize themselves to meet their basic needs (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, defense). In the subsistence economy, “the goal is not to maximize production but to minimize the effort expended in meeting household needs” (p. 24). The problem with the subsistence economy is that households clash. For instance, in the classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario (p. 25), when one pulls back to allow others to have their share of a common resource (e.g., a meadow on which all are free to graze their livestock), others exploit the opportunity to take more than their share, until the common resource is depleted, at which point everyone is worse off. The solution is the political economy: a politically governed system of rules and penalties that compels harmony among competing groups and individuals. In effect, the political economy is the aspect of government focused on mediating households’ economic interactions and their use of shared resources.

Needless to say, the political economy does not just happen. There are people involved in creating and expanding it. The tools at their disposal include not only “rules of proper behavior” (e.g., laws) but also “fictive kinship” (presumably including national identity) and “awe (sanctity)” (i.e., religion) (J & E, 2000, p. 25). The people who embody the political economy tend to form an elite, supported by mandatory contributions (evolving eventually into taxes). Their incentive is not to mirror the stability of the household’s focus on basic needs but, rather, to increase production in ways that benefit them. As such, the political economy “is growth-oriented in a highly competitive political domain, and thus inherently unstable” (p. 26).

That, in itself, tends to support the Marxist perception of the political economy as the home of “a power-wielding, self-serving elite” (p. 25). In partial mitigation of that judgment, J & E (2000, pp. 26-28) note that the elite is obliged to produce results, and to reinvest, so that households find continued participation advantageous — enough households, at least, with enough power, so that the rest find it infeasible to break out. The inherent conflict between the interests of households (seeking stable provision) and of the elite (seeking growth) can result in various harms, such as agricultural intensification that, in one example, “degraded the region and brought on a collapse” (p. 27). Thus, “The political economy, whose origin lay in solving problems of the subsistence economy, eventually comes into partial opposition to the well-being of households, raising the specter of domination and exploitation” (p. 29).

Leadership is a key part of that picture. J & E (2000, pp. 29-30) suggest that, as societies become more complex, and move closer to the brink of overpopulation, the need grows for more powerful leaders wielding more extensive control to achieve outcomes beyond the capabilities of individual families. Various developments can enhance that need. For example, strong leadership may be needed to protect against other entities (e.g., tribes, government), or to work out trade or reciprocal resource access deals with them in anticipation of bad harvests, or to drive investments in productive facilities. In place of older schemes distinguishing chronological eras (e.g., Bronze Age, Iron Age) or subsistence types (notably hunter-gatherer and agricultural), J & E (pp. 32-35) divide social units according to their leadership types:

• the family-level group, in areas of low population density, comprised of several families numbering perhaps 25-50 persons altogether, within which leaders step forward at times of need;
• the local group, with more of a village-type arrangement, likely to be headed by a Big Man (i.e., “a strong, charismatic leader” who is nonetheless at risk of seeing his followers abandon him for a competitor), with up to 500 people;
• the chiefdom, comprised of thousands, led by a chief within a more established elite, enjoying more reliable control due to supra-familial investments and systems (e.g., irrigation, external trade) as well as conquest; and
• the state, potentially comprised of millions, covering vast territory, with elite ownership of resources formalized, managed, and enforced through institutions (e.g., courts, military, bureaucracy).

To sum up, this section sketches out concepts and vocabulary contributed by Johnson and Earle (2000) for theorizing how (pre-) governmental expectations and obligations might emerge or become clarified. To the preliminary impressions suggested in the preceding section, this section adds awareness of the role that a ruling elite (including but extending beyond the top leader) might play. The self-serving motives of such elites apparently tend to result in leadership that is larger, more expensive, and more aggressive than in a small-scale subsistence society, driving enterprises capable of yielding greater rewards, at the price of greater expense and instability for individual citizens.

Forms of Government

Generally, the nations of the world have now arrived at the state level of organization identified by Johnson and Earle (above), though the governments of those states vary considerably in their power, their level of popular support, their degree of disorder, and other attributes.

Encyclopedia Britannica (n.d.) indicates that Plato and Aristotle (see e.g., Sidgwick, 1892) identified the forms of government that are most familiar to the average person (e.g., aristocracy, democracy, monarchy), but that more recent scholars have developed a variety of classifications. For example, Wikipedia notes that states have been classified according to power structure, power source, ideology, and other attributes; and the World Factbook produced by the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, n.d.) provides a simple list of 31 different types of government — with the caveat that a single government may qualify for more than one descriptor from that list (e.g., it may be both a republic and a democracy).

Elsewhere, in another list that is not dated but is presumably updated regularly, the World Factbook applies that list of 31 types to 234 states and territories around the world, with special notes summarizing complexities in a few (i.e., Antarctica, Cyprus, and Malaysia). I found some irregularities in that application (e.g., no places fitting some categories, such as “anarchy”; no definition of “semi-presidential” republic; the U.S. not categorized as a democracy; the U.K. listed as being “constitutional” although it does not have an actual constitution).

Irregularities aside, my first conclusion, from a review of the CIA lists, was that many descriptors apply to few if any places. There are few theocracies (or Islamic or ecclesiastical states), few communist (or Marxist, or socialist) states, few confederations, and few states “in transition,” to use the CIA’s term for failing or being in limbo. In some cases, the small numbers may result from CIA counting errors. For example, I did think the world had more than a dozen (or so) states that might be characterized as authoritarian, absolute, totalitarian, or dictatorship. The problem there seemed to be that, at least in some instances, the CIA would label a state as simply presidential, without additional labels, if it had a president, even if that president was essentially a dictator.

It appeared that a few concepts of government predominate around the world. “Republic” was the most common term in the CIA descriptions, followed by “parliamentary” and “presidential,” each applied to roughly a hundred states or more. A second set, applied to between 35 and 50 states each, included (in descending order) “democracy,” “monarchy,” and “constitutional.” Aside from “federal” (22 states) that was pretty much it.

Viewed by Wikipedia’s classifications, it thus seemed that the CIA, at least, was inclined to characterize governments by a few key factors. First, does the country’s rulers treat it as a family matter (i.e., a monarchy) or, rather, as a public matter (i.e., a republic)? Second, what type of republic is it? Among monarchies, key versions are absolute, constitutional, or merely ceremonial monarchy. Among republics, the predominant alternatives are constitutional, democratic, parliamentary, presidential, federal, so-called people’s, and Islamic republics.

The primary question distinguishing such variations, monarchical or republican, seems to be who or what (if anything) controls the government. For the most part, that appears to be a matter of whether voting and/or a legal system determines who wields power, how much power they wield, and how long they can wield it. Thus, for example, when the CIA World Factbook describes Vietnam as simply a “communist state,” that obscures the Factbook‘s own more detailed explanation that Vietnam has a constitution, a president and prime minister, a court system, universal suffrage, and elections. By Western standards, some of those components are inferior — for example, the Factbook states that the Communist Party is the only permitted party. More readable sources (e.g., BBC; Encyclopedia Britannica) indicate more clearly that, while there are elections, and nearly everyone votes, the Communist Party is the real center of power in Vietnam. Time (Lewis, 2016) explains that, in (for example) the 2016 election for members of the National Assembly, the party decided which names would appear on the ballot.

Measures of Effective Government

Among the various forms of government, which works best? To answer that question, one would need some way of measuring and comparing the achievements of various governments. This section looks at two different ways of evaluating government performance, and also at the question of what kind of evidence to use in conducting that evaluation. The discussion here is not very technical but, in any case, the final paragraph of this section offers a summary.

The question of how to measure governmental effectiveness begins with the meaning of the word “effective.” Various sources explain that being “effective” means “doing the right things,” while being “efficient” means “doing things right.” Cambridge Dictionary says that efficiency means working in a quick and organized way, while effectiveness means getting the desired results. In describing leadership styles, the Huffington Post (Peck, 2013) suggests that the efficient manager focuses on getting things done, while the effective manager looks beyond immediate results to consider long-term effects: “‘effective’ means balancing what’s required to get the job done well with [how] those efforts impact the people doing it.” Similarly, Livestrong (Northridge, 2015) argues that, in communication, efficiency favors brevity (i.e., using no more words than necessary to express an idea), while effectiveness typically requires interaction, with “a lot of verification and validation,” to insure that the parties understand each other, and also to give the other person an assurance that s/he has been understood.

The conclusion seems to be that efficiency is not irrelevant — it is often, if not always, advisable to figure out the fastest and simplest way to accomplish something — but a focus on effectiveness may highlight important constraints that efficiency calculations must take into account. For instance, in a business context, production and sales are important, but it is also essential to determine the effects of that production or those sales. It would be important to know that, for instance, the company loses money on each sale, or that the product alienates users, or leads to lawsuits. Similarly, in government, it would be insufficient to observe that hospital stays have been reduced in length, if death rates rise as a result, or that more students are graduating from high school, if their so-called educations actually give them little that they will remember or use.

In the introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance (2017), Bhuta et al. (2017, pp. 6-7) suggest that the attempt to understand what constitutes effective governance has resulted in the production of numerous schemes for evaluating the performance of nations by many different indicators (e.g., democracy, corruption, rule of law, state fragility). Bhuta et al. (pp. 14-15) describe an “indicator culture” in which claims about numbers are quickly met with counterclaims about the meaning of the numbers in question, or about alternative numbers. For instance, Bhuta et al. (pp. 8-9) say that indicators may serve to create truth rather than to find it, insofar as a given indicator may facilitate judgments based on Western standards not necessarily suitable for other settings. An example would arise where surveys may reveal that citizens of one country want different things than citizens of another country, such that it would be wrongheaded to evaluate both countries according to a single standard of effective governance.

Bhuta et al. (2017) find that key debates swirl especially around indicators related to corruption, to governance, and to sustainability. Such debates have resulted in a turn away from the “first generation of global-scale indicators” (p. 16), such as those that aggregate many points of comparison to produce simplistic ratings and rankings of countries. For example, Bhuta et al. point to Beschel (2017), who cites Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (1995-2017) and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI, 1996-2017) as preeminent examples of that first-generation approach. According to Kaufmann et al. (2010, p. 2),

The WGI consist of six composite indicators of broad dimensions of governance covering over 200 countries since 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These indicators are based on several hundred variables obtained from 31 different data sources . . . .

Beschel (2017) concludes that measures like the WGI “provide a rough and cost-effective first approximation that can be used to assess the severity of problems” but that “newer second-generation analytical tools, such as the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments, can provide more nuanced and granular information about specific government functions.” As its name suggests, PEFA (2016) offers more of an accountant’s perspective on national health: in comparison against the WGI, its “seven pillars” appear to include nothing on most of the key points covered by the WGI (e.g., citizen voice, political stability, rule of law). Moreover, for the lay reader, a brief look at downloadable  WGI and PEFA datasets suggested that what Beschel described as “nuanced and granular information” may translate as “getting lost in the weeds.” That is, I appreciated WGI’s aggregate calculations of each nation’s score on its six composite indicators (above) — indicating, for instance, that in 2016, in terms of Voice and Accountability, on a scale of zero to 100, Afghanistan ranked 21.18, while Australia ranked 82.76.

As a different example of second-generation tools for assessment of good governance, Bhuta et al. (2017, p. 19) point to the Government at a Glance (GG) “dashboard” produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2017). Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 209) describe the dashboard approach as one that offers narrowly defined indicators without any WGI-style “super-aggregations . . . aimed at summarizing the performance of activities . . . into a single figure.” Contrary to my hopes, the “dashboard” terminology evidently does not imply the existence of a graphical user interface (as in OECD’s Better Life Index) providing a visual comparison of countries as the user changes the weighting of various components of governance. The “at a glance” phrasing appears to refer, rather, to the availability of targeted datasets.

It is rather paradoxical that Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 209) understand GG as seeking “a wider audience, including opinion leaders, academics, students, public interest groups, and, not least, interested citizens.” For one thing, GG “is not constructed on the basis of an explicit definition of what good governance is,” which is precisely where many interested citizens would like to start. The information made available to end users in GG tends moreover toward the arcane. Consider, for example, this question from GG’s Public Sector Integrity dataset: “In your country, what kinds of mechanisms are used to mainstream integrity policies across line ministries (e.g. health, education etc.)?” Even an “interested” citizen might find it challenging to be very interested in that. In any event, is not clear how interested citizens would be involved in “discussion” focused on “conceptualisation, definitions, and substantive elements of indicator building in close collaboration with government officials” (p. 235).

In short, GG does not appear to be designed for use by interested citizens. Its concerns seem legitimate. But summarizing an entire nation in a manageable set of concepts and/or numbers for use by “opinion leaders, academics, students, [and] public interest groups” will inevitably entail reductionism and, at times, oversimplification. Mistakes will be made. Bhuta et al. (2017, p. 17) euphemize that second-generation tools like GG require “data publics” to be “tolerant of greater complexity in deriving conclusions from indicators.” More frankly, Lafortune et al. (pp. 215-217, 235) admit that such indicators are not media-friendly; acknowledge that “some concepts of government activities are multidimensional and cannot be accurately measured/captured” by such narrow indicators; and agree that “composite indicators can be useful tools” when “constructed rigorously” and used in an informed manner by people aware of the complexities of the underlying data. Summarizing those underlying complexities in a digestibly cautionary form may be about the best that opinion leaders and academics can do, when massaging something like GG into a form useful for non-expert discussion.

As Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 210) acknowledge, officials or experts, responding to the surveys that underlie tools like GG, “may interpret and answer the questions differently and/or they may not answer the questions completely objectively.” Lafortune et al. respond to that problem with a potentially misplaced faith in accompanying literature providing “extensive guidance on how to interpret the questions and fill out the responses.” Less optimistically, Rotberg (2017, p. 45) questions a GG-style use of “a very complicated array of ‘second-generation’ data . . . when much simpler, more direct ways of assessing good governance are easily available.” In Rotberg’s (pp. 35, 40) view, governance is simply “a collection of responsibilities” to produce certain outputs. Thus, Rotberg suggests evaluating government on the basis of its outputs. Although Bhuta et al. (2017, pp. 20-21) contrast the views of Rotberg (2017) against those of Ivanyna and Shah (2017), in my reading the latter primarily suggest that outputs can be measured effectively by surveying citizens. There is, admittedly, the problem that citizen opinion is subject to biases due to governmental intimidation, mass media distortion, and citizen activism (p. 422; see also Ivanya & Shah, 2011, p. 61).

To summarize, this section approaches the topic of effective governance by looking at a few tools that have been used by major players (e.g., World Bank, OECD), over the past two decades, to capture and summarize information about the quality of government in various countries. Such tools differ from one another in their willingness to trade accuracy for usability. The risk on one extreme is that data on divergent topics will be aggregated into an absurdly simplistic composite number most useful for extreme comparisons (e.g., Afghanistan vs. Australia); the risk on the other extreme is that findings will be presented in a fragmented form that leaves would-be users at a loss as to what such data means or how it can be used. To the extent that such tools focus on processes rather than outputs, Rotberg (2017) makes the persuasive point that, as indicated at the start of this section, measurement of governmental effectiveness requires identification and measurement of expected outputs.

What People Want from Government

As the preceding section indicates, the Palgrave volume (Bhuta et al., 2017) presents current expert opinion on tools and methods for measuring governmental effectiveness. Such efforts assume consensus on what government should be effective at. This is perhaps a straightforward matter. Rotberg (2017, pp. 41-42) contends that, since the 17th century, citizens everywhere have tended to seek a rather stable set of outcomes. These universally desired outcomes, he says, include security, safety, fair and predictable legal process, freedom from corruption, self-governance or at least having a voice in governance, prosperity (e.g., more and better food, adequate housing), fair wages, private enterprise (i.e., being “free to use their own skills to better themselves”), and essential public services (e.g., education, healthcare, clean water, environmental protection).

More detailed lists exist. For instance, one might add the blizzard of criteria of good governance covered by the WGI and GG, the dimensions of governance outcomes suggested by Ivanyna and Shah (2017, p. 411), indeed the many expectations spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). All of these sources, and many others, identify ideal outcomes. Yet their lists differ, and governments also differ on the issues they consider most important. Why?

Part of the reason is, of course, that different circumstances call for different responses (see e.g., Andrews, 2008). But another part of the reason is that governments and planners are not always in the driver’s seat — that, contra Rotberg (2017), the supposedly unanimous voice of humanity is in fact conflicted and confused, with considerable inconsistency in actual priorities. For example, Rotberg (pp. 44-45) himself observes that poor little Malawi achieves better governance than the much larger and wealthier Kenya, partly because of Kenya’s ethnic tensions. In effect, Kenyans (like a growing number of Americans, it seems) would rather hold onto their mutual animosities than pull together in pursuit of an improved society. Speaking of Americans, how can it be that such a rich and settled nation would turn in such a lackadaisical performance, relatively speaking, in pursuit of some of Rotberg’s supposedly universally desired outcomes (e.g., fair and predictable legal process, shared prosperity, healthcare)?

In my hours of reading among such sources to this point, I saw plenty of evidence that scholars had identified practical considerations (e.g., security, clean water, human rights) that sensible people would prioritize, if their primary and collective task in this life were simply to control the threats imposed by predatory and destructive forces in nature and in humanity. I also saw recognition of misgovernance and state fragility (e.g., Venger & Miethe, 2017). What I did not see was attention to the possibility that people free to seek ideal outcomes would instead become preoccupied with pursuits that, perhaps making sense from one perspective, or within one timeframe, would appear self-defeating and perhaps even self-destructive on a longer timeframe, or in a larger perspective.

I did not think, for instance, that Americans of the World War II generation, with their social organizations and attitudes, their expectations of self and family, and their optimism about America’s place in the world, would have been happy to know that they were laying the foundation for a nation riven with loneliness and mutual distrust. It seemed to me that the members of that older generation might have done some things differently, if they had realized that they were constructing an economy in which wages would languish while the rich became vastly richer. I believed that the parents of many Baby Boomers would have pursued an alternate vision of the good life if they had foreseen that their children’s consumerism would leave them wondering whether Social Security would survive political machinations, or how the nation would ever repay its enormous indebtedness — especially but not only to China — acquired in exchange for the plasticware filling oversized houses with shrinking lawns on which children, glued to electronic devices in lieu of real face-to-face interaction, never play.

An American of the World War II generation — indeed, a person of any generation, from almost anywhere — might expect that the world’s most powerful nation, and one of its wealthiest as well, would emanate a sense of positivity and happiness. It would have seemed almost absurd to propose that, as it turned out, for the past 40 years, at least one-third (indeed, for most of the past decade, more than two-thirds) of Americans would be dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. (Gallup, 2018). That is, unfortunately, the reality. That cannot be what we or our parents (or their parents) wanted. It is not something that anyone could have forced upon us, if we had been committed to the achievement of a different outcome. It is simply what our priorities led us to, within the shortsighted timeframes that shaped our self-defeating perspectives.

This century has seen enormous disruptions to, and shifts in, this nation’s global position, its priorities, and its capabilities. Relatively unforeseen catastrophes include the Great Recession of 2007, the Iraq invasion of 2003, the rise of China, the opioid addiction epidemic, and (depending on one’s politics) the election of Donald Trump, or the circumstances making Trump’s election the best result in a bad situation. It does seem that researchers focused on logical and practical priorities have failed to adjust for the enormous distortions wrought by the preferences of a confused or unfocused public, and by those who capitalize upon the resulting opportunities.

Beyond the Question of What People Want

The preceding section suggests that traditional human priorities (for e.g., food, shelter, freedom of speech) explain only part of human expectations of government. A more complete explanation would take account of a will to drive oneself and one’s homeland into the ground, though plainly that is not what people think they are doing, nor is it what they say they want to do. Possibly the mechanism at work involves being spoiled, losing touch with human suffering, or otherwise becoming clueless and/or corrupted, such that one takes for granted one’s privileges and advantages, at least until some other person or sequence of events compels, perhaps too late, a corrected recognition of what might have been.

To the extent that government serves only to give the people what they think they want, government in corrupt times becomes an accomplice in the public’s disintegration of its own hopes and possibilities. Certainly government was the mechanism by which America brought about several of its own catastrophes and other forms of deterioration listed above. Government, with its protection of free speech that is patently false and sociopolitically destructive, is likewise the hapless facilitator of opportunists who stir up the mob for personal advantage. It is increasingly plausible that, as some (e.g., Demaggio, 2017; Astore, 2013) have suggested, the U.S. is following the “bread and circuses” path of the Roman Empire, insofar as American leaders increasingly “generate public approval,” not by forging real solutions to problems, but rather by distracting the public’s attention and by meeting its “most immediate or base requirements” (e.g., food, entertainment) (Wikipedia).

Though it may seem obvious that the purpose of government must ultimately be to serve the people, that does not necessarily require giving them what they think they want. It is quite possible that, just as most people may sometimes fail to take action that is highly recommended to avoid bigger problems later, the public as a whole may resist or reject steps that are important but unpleasant. In such a situation, a good government may sometimes have to enforce policies that a majority would vote against. For instance, the “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) mentality has been responsible for blockage of numerous projects that would benefit many at the expense of a few (Wikipedia; Forbes, 2015).

In this light, it appears that the purpose of government is to deliver good government. While that formulation may seem simpleminded, it can be construed as a shift in focus, from an abstract question about “purpose” to a more concrete question about best outcomes. In this context, good government thus means having the power and inclination to make decisions and take actions that are best for the people, even if the people don’t necessarily agree.

The problem with this line of thought is that, when you give one person or entity the power to overrule the public will, you get the bad along with the good. Ideally, the people acquiring this kind of power would always use it wisely and effectively. But even if they do, the time comes when they hand it off to others, or others seize it, and then anything can happen.

To avoid that sort of outcome, it would make sense to avoid reaching a crisis point resulting in an irregular seizure of power by any person or entity not subject to public control. If it starts to appear that the existing government is no longer capable of governing effectively, then it would be wise to have that debate and reach the necessary decisions sooner rather than later. Ideally, one would develop plans for a possible future transition — would amend the Constitution, in the case of the U.S. — so that the switch to a different form of government would continue to be governed by laws and would unfold in a stable manner.

It does seem that a major transition point in American government may be coming somewhat closer. Such a development is not surprising. After many years, car engines may need to be rebuilt, computers may need to have their operating systems reinstalled or upgraded, human hearts and knees may need surgery or replacement. It is possible that day will never come, but wisdom would recommend being prepared for the fair chance that it will. In that case, the purpose of government seems to include planning for ways to insure that good government will anticipate and survive a transition to a different form of government. The American Constitution does not presently include that, but perhaps it should.

Summary

Among the various possibilities discussed in this post, a plausible conclusion is that, for better and for worse, humanity is presently at the state-level stage of political development, where a powerful elite typically governs the public, in a manner that is inevitably parasitical and in some ways destabilizing, but that also contributes, at its best, to happier, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives for those who are governed.

There have been many efforts, some quite sophisticated, to evaluate how well governments perform at the state level. In many if not all regards, it appears this evaluation is best focused on governmental outputs — not on how much government spends on healthcare, for instance, but on whether and how health is improved, as determined by direct observation and/or by surveys of those affected.

It seems that a focus on results must take account, not only of the sensible things that the public claims to want, but also of the counterproductive if not senseless things that the public sometimes pursues. In the U.S. particularly, there is a rather vivid contrast between the sort of nation and government that our ancestors seemed to want and the situation in which we presently find ourselves.

This contrast raises the question of whether the American public would benefit from a temporary or permanent switch to a form of government in which an extraordinarily powerful leadership would compel changes, particularly unpleasant changes, conducive to a better long-term future for America and its people. Of course, such a switch would pose the risk that an extraordinarily powerful leadership would abuse its power or simply fail to govern wisely, forcing changes that would result in more harm than good.

Notwithstanding that concern, in unsettled times there remains the possibility that such a change of government will come, whether one prefers it or not, through deliberate scheming and/or the use of force, or possibly through simple chaos. This sort of thing does happen, after all, sometimes with positive results but often ending in disaster.

Such thoughts suggest that the purpose of government may be, not only to deliver outcomes desired by the public, and perhaps sometimes to administer medicine that the public would prefer to avoid, but also to prepare for its own eventual transition into a different form. That conception of government may recommend that the contingency planning begin sooner rather than later, so as to prepare for a smooth transition into an alternate form of government offering the fewest risks and the greatest payoffs.

A Reason to Vote for Donald Trump

As of this writing on August 22, 2016, the U.S. presidential election is about 2.5 months away; Donald Trump is the Republican candidate opposing the Democrats’ Hillary Clinton; and Clinton is leading by about six to eight percentage points in the polls. Clinton’s lead is not surprising; Trump has distinguished himself with many odd and in some cases disconcerting words and acts. I do not personally think he is suitable for the office of president. There is also speculation that he may drop out of the race.

Nonetheless, as long as Trump remains in the contest, I would like to suggest one reason to vote for the man. I am not sure this reason will persuade me, though perhaps it should.

The reason is simply that Trump has the potential to disrupt politics as usual, in ways that could benefit ordinary citizens and could ultimately enhance the state of the Union.

I say that as a victim of the Obama administration’s corrupt Department of Education, which — for more than seven years, at this point — has declined to render a credible decision on a complaint I filed against Indiana University (IU) in 2009.

The Democratic Party tends to be the party of big government. That is fine with me. I don’t care if government is big or small. I just care that it works. Unfortunately, government is a form of power, and power can be abused. Among other things, having worked in a federal agency, I know that government employment can foster a mindset in which bureaucrats spend inordinate amounts of time feathering their own nest.

To defeat Republican complaints, it seems obvious that Democratic leaders would want to make sure that government functions as advertised. People who have had an experience like mine will tend to believe others’ complaints about incompetent or unethical governmental behavior.

In the past eight years, the demands for change have grown more insistent. Young voters chose Obama in 2008 because of his promise of dramatic change. Sadly, he became very much a president of the established order. The Huffington Post (Uygur, 2010) considered Obama more conservative than Ronald Reagan; Esquire (Maiello, 2014) and Salon (Brinker, 2014) agree.

I am not sorry that this country chose a black president in 2008. What I am sorry about is that we chose a professor rather than, say, Oprah Winfrey. We would have been better served by someone who knew how to function as an executive, to drive her agenda, and simultaneously to connect with the public.

At any rate, voters learned their lesson. Many who had sought change in 2008 refused, in 2016, to believe they would get it from the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders, the Democrat who did respond to that call, is no longer in the race. But Trump is.

So let us suppose that, as some inappropriately contend, Trump has psychiatric issues — specifically, that he is highly narcissistic. As president, such a person could do considerable damage. But what if his election triggers alarm sufficient to rein in the presidency: what if the behavior of President Trump eventually forces a coalition of adversaries who leave him impeached, discredited, and hamstrung?

In other words, suppose the cleverest political minds deliberately advanced Trump as president, in hopes that his behavior as an ineffectual tyrant would trigger reinforcement of constitutional safeguards against any real American tyranny. The election of Donald Trump, a weak and confused proxy for the abuse of power, could inoculate us against the real thing.

Trump is sometimes, inevitably, compared to Hitler. All right; let’s suppose that comparison is apt. If we are to have a Hitler, let us look back to Hitler’s day: let us have him in the 1920s, when his adversaries are still strong enough to expose and counteract his extremism. Let’s not drag things out until the 1930s, by which point the Democratic opposition will have so discredited itself as to leave no coherent political counterforce in his path.

The suggestion here is, in short, that Donald Trump could be the better choice for president. On many small matters and perhaps some fairly large ones, he could be a disaster. But his independence from the established political parties may provide a rare opportunity for reform, in two regards: his best efforts may roll back some of the corruption that has so alienated so many, and his worst efforts may culminate in a crucial antidote to the growth of an imperial presidency.