Some Links
Megan McArdle observes that “the ‘emerging Democratic majority’ is no longer emerging.” A slice:
As with so much modern activism, it became the social justice version of what critics used to call Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics”: Elites would spend a lot of time searching our souls and policing our language, and create new opportunities for college graduates who belonged to underrepresented minorities. Somehow, by osmosis, those changes would eventually work their way down to the majority of people in those groups who didn’t have a college diploma, or any shot at working in Hollywood or at the New York Times.
Call it trickle-down social justice.
Garry Kasparov blames today’s Democratic party for Donald Trump’s political success. Two slices:
I am deeply concerned about what Donald Trump’s re-election means for the future of American and global democracy. Not only because Mr. Trump is a dangerous one-man show, but because of the feebleness of the opposition mustered against him.
Voters rejected the woke progressive agenda that Democrats made their centerpiece. Instead, they went with the candidate they believed would act in their interests decisively. Just before the election, I endorsed Kamala Harris. I would have supported almost any Republican other than Mr. Trump over Ms. Harris.
She should never have been the presidential nominee. An earlier withdrawal from the race by Joe Biden, as I urged in these pages in 2023, would have benefited everyone. It would have pushed the Democrats to field a stronger candidate—and the Republicans too. Ms. Harris has never been a skilled political animal—not in 2016, 2020 or 2024. But she was the candidate, and the race was winnable. Mr. Trump was more vulnerable than ever, with piles of legal baggage and signs of cognitive decline—not to mention a personality repellent to many voters.
…..
More than Democratic success in the 2026 midterms will be needed to protect checks and balances. That party must undergo a soul-searching operation—the same test the GOP failed by nominating Mr. Trump three times in a row. Far-left overreach always enables far-right successes. If the left puts forward more Bernie Sanderses and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes and continues to pursue identity politics over majority concerns, Mr. Trump’s strongman appeal will increase. What is needed are parties that compete to reflect the dreams of the majority of the American people instead of the extremes.
Jeff Jacoby is correct: “Trump didn’t earn an ‘unprecedented and powerful’ mandate.” A slice:
For nearly two centuries, presidents have been claiming that their election confers on them the political right and moral authority to do what they campaigned on. The claim dates back to Andrew Jackson, who insisted that as the only official elected to represent the whole nation, a president is entitled to carry out his platform with “as few impediments as possible.” That isn’t what the Constitution says and it isn’t how our system works, but that never stops presidents and presidential loyalists from invoking the M-word.
“The myth of the mandate is now a standard weapon in the arsenal of persuasive symbols all presidents exploit,” Robert Dahl, a professor of political science at Yale, wrote in 1990. At times presidents have deployed that weapon with almost comical audacity. In 1973, as the Watergate storm clouds were gathering, Richard Nixon went on television to insist that the scandal must not be allowed to interfere with the “mandate” bestowed by his reelection the previous November. “If you want the mandate you gave this administration to be carried out,” Nixon told the nation, then “those who would exploit Watergate” must not be allowed to succeed.
It was a wholly self-serving claim, of course. But Nixon’s “mandate” claim had at least one thing in its favor: He had won the 1972 election by one of the greatest landslides in presidential history, carrying 49 states and pulling nearly 61 percent of the popular vote. As an objective legal matter, a president’s margin of victory is irrelevant to his constitutional authority. In terms of practical politics, however, a candidate who surges into office with support from a sweeping majority of the electorate is likely to be seen as having earned more leeway to pursue his priorities than a candidate who barely edged out his opponent.
Trump is in the “barely edged” category. He won the election with 49.9 percent of the popular vote to Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent — a margin of just 1.6 percentage points, one of the tiniest in history.
Mike Munger warns that reforming bureaucracy cannot be done simply by changing bureaucrats.
Joe Zielinski’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:
In the likely event that Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux’s fact-filled op-ed “Trump’s Tariffs Would Smother His Economic Successes” (Nov. 14) is lost on the president-elect and his frighteningly obsequious incoming administration, I would like to refer them to what might be a more comprehensible explanation: the classroom scene of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Ben Stein, playing an emotionless high-school economics teacher, lectures his catatonic class: “In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the . . . Anyone? Anyone? . . . the Great Depression, passed the . . . Anyone? Anyone? . . . the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which . . . Anyone? Raised or lowered? . . . raised tariffs. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? . . . It did not work and the U.S. sank deeper into the Great Depression.
Let us all hope that, somehow, President Trump’s international-trade blinders come off soon. Otherwise, history is doomed to . . . Anyone? Anyone? . . . repeat itself and sink us into . . . Anyone? . . . another Great Depression.
[DBx: To be clear, while Smoot-Hawley worsened the economy in the 1930s, it didn’t cause the Great Depression. And I don’t believe that Trump’s proposed massive tariffs, as obnoxious as they are, would by themselves bring on another Great Depression. But Trump’s proposed tariffs would, without doubt, cause much economic turmoil and damage.]
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein argues that Javier Milei is both a populist and a classical liberal.
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