Between Performative Politics and “Partisan Terrorism”
As I heard surprisingly positive remarks about Biden's SOTU speech, I gave it a listen and must say that given the circumstances in which he now has to legislate in accompaniment of a crucially divided Congress, it was a solid speech and some solid proposals, although I agree with the Libertarians who are concerned about the protectionist measurements for foreign policy and trade policies¹. What one needs to understand, of course, are two things:
(1) As a President, Biden is obliged to secure as many jobs as possible in order to employ as many US-Americans as possible. Some would suggest that retracting bureaucracy could attract employers to retrieve some outsourced jobs, but this is often just a general pattern reissued whenever the topic is en vogue. One needed to be more precise in terms of which regulations should be retracted; otherwise, we won't make progress and the suggestion will be swiped off the table. In the end, most people would therefore just suggest to abolish the minimum wage, and while this would bring back jobs, those wouldn't be jobs that made sense in establishing: Those would be pittances that would erect the façade of a job but only hid impoverishment in more visually appealing garments. We need solutions, not loopholes that insists on solving problems but actually just skips ahead on clay feet.
(2) This is not only about bringing back jobs for employment's sake, but also in order to become more independent from suppliers abroad. The formula crisis on the one hand² and the Covid-19 crisis on the other hand, have shown us that outsourcing production and pecuniary labour may be attractive for companies to swiftly cut down costs, but will convey problems long-term. In many ways, Biden is spellbound by his mandates. What Libertarians enquire were only imaginable through the dissolution of his office, something that would neither be in his office's favour, nor in the people's greater majority, as much as I would be interested in such instances too.
So, protectionism is still a fallacious concept³, but popular as it could answer some of our most pressing questions, especially that of autonomy in production. The middle way is of course twofold: A core share of production to not fall into crises whenever a country's businesses are currently/temporarily unable to produce as much as they could beforehand, and a good share of production abroad to keep costs as low as possible in order to not put less strong families on the dole. Whether the core share should be equal to providing to everyone at reasonable prices is disputed as this may be more than could be produced economically in one's country without scaping the workers that have to provide this product in demand. But we couldn't brush over all market segments in general as there are various factors to be considered for that⁴. Libertarians grudge over such subsidy programmes, apparently, but there'd be nothing wrong with making vital products available to the needy as long as they still gave back to society in offering their workforce once it's possible again. Humans still organise in societies in order to amortise their individual shortcomings, just as the blind carries the lame so that both survive. Just as is the case with bureaucracy and all other issues at once, we need to find a reasonable middle way between the extremes--this accounts for subsidy programmes too⁵.
Now it was not my plan to write about Biden's protectionist policy proposals, or about the goodness of his planned subsidies for Medicaid et al. My point of interest was the rebuke presented by the GOP, via Sarah Huckabee Sanders, herself one of POTUS Donald J. Trump's former press secretaries and currently Governor of Arkansas (https://governor.arkansas.gov/about/governor-sanders/). I tried to watch it, but after a couple of minutes in, I had to stop because it was unbearably humiliating not only for herself but also for her party. Besides briefly addressing the fentanyl crisis, she immediately returned to her rant that barely addressed any of the major issues POTUS Biden spoke about; instead, it sounded as if she hadn't followed his SOTU speech and instead watched the prime-time programme of Fox News, particularly the soliloquy of anchorman Tucker Carlson. It ticked off a list of right-winged talking points and buzzwords, claiming that Joe Biden was a puppet of the 'woke mob', implementing a 'Socialist agenda', and so on and so forth. It was a deranged gobbledygook unfounded in reality, trying to nourish a rank following comparable to that of fringe right activist Nick Fuentes or 'editor-at-large' of Breitbart, Stephen "Steve" Bannon.
While this was nothing surprising, given the current state of the Repulican Party⁶, it also shows how much it lacked the endeavour of actual Conservatism, whether we chose the British model or the early US-American one. Netiher would be a proper representation of what is now dominant in the formerly Grand Old Party. Instead of choosing to do the right thing, it instead bows towards fringe concepts disbarring the principles of free speech, of liberty and individualism, and of as little state intervention as possible; Roe v. Wade, to me, was an outstanding example of how the Republican party now chose 'Squatter Sovereignty' over prudent governance from the Beltway while guaranteeing the federalist concept as outlined by the founding fathers⁷. A more recent example thereof could be that many Republican Representatives and Senators put the US' support of Ukraine in the war initiated by Russia because of the costs it bore. The household plan that included that was decried by many Republicans who, under POTUS Donald J. Trump, approved of a household plan that even exceeded that proposed by the 118th Congress⁸.
Hypocrisy on behalf of Republicans is nothing new, so it would be pointless to now complain about it. It compared to crying about the cold during winter or the heat during summer. But it becomes evermore clearer that Republicans are no longer Conservative but rather a blend of Nationalism and fringe right Populism⁹. It would be high time to consider placing the Republican party on a list of domestic threats, regarding policies such as banning books (particularly visible in states like Florida¹⁰), attacks on legislators across the US¹¹, election denialism¹², a tendentious hostility towards immigration especially from Latin America, dominantly perceived with Southern Republicans¹³, etc.
To some, even from the moderate branch, this may seem too much, exaggerated even, and sidelining plenty of voters. But in the end, something needs to be done as vast parts of the United States' population not only feel alienated by Republican legislators to whom they seem to constitute a burden and even a threat rather than a voter base interesting to attract in order to win elections--gerrymandering represents that tendency best: Instead of convincing voters of a different party in order to win districts fair and square, they redraw them in order to alienate the other party's voters and draw districts that are distinctly in their party's favour, thus killing "persuasive politics"¹⁴. Of course this is just another symptom of partisan politics, of treating the representation of people and the victory of the more attractive party and personnel in a Democratic election as a game warfare with rhetoric and mudfights as the means to partake therein. But what the Republican party is doing goes even beyond that. In a post on Facebook that implicitly referred to the book bans taking place in Florida at the moment, too implictly at Governor Ron De Santis' behest, I wrote that this sounds as what we have perceived in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451"¹⁵.
 |
| A political caricature attributed to James Turner, depicting a snake cut into pieces, with the single pieces bearing the abbreviations of the states of South Carolina (S.C.), North Carolina (N.C.), Virginia (V.), Maryland (M.), Penn-sylvania (P.), New Jersey (N.J.), New York (N.Y.) and New England (N.E). The version seen here was reissued in the Pennsylvania Gazetta in 1754. The states were implicitly recommended to join the Union to be prepared better for any wars against the British Crown in battles for independence. The theme that unionism was superior to absolute federalism in which each state was supposed to handle its affairs without a central government, may it be in Phila-delphia or in Washington D.C., was also reasonant in Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech as well as during the debates against Stephen Douglas during the Illinois Senate race. |
To cut this text abruptly short, it becomes clear that the Republican party has ultimately fallen from any stance of reason, sanity or repairability, to eventually return to its core principles of Federalism and Patriotism, but also the search for Unity within the country beyond party lines and ideological leanings. (All upper-case initials on purpose, although perceptibly arbitrary) George Washington, the first POTUS after the establishment of an independent US (thus after the presidents under the Continental Congress), already perceived the treats of such parliamentary partisanship and the threats it bore consequentially¹⁶. His worst fears may have finally come true, partisanship overtook the very interests of the American people, but the latter may not even be aware about their self-threatening behaviour because of their ignorance. But the only remedy against ignorance is education, curiosity and the ability to negotiate compromises and the introspection required to recognise and confess to own shortcomings and failures. As Seneca famously wrote, and I frequently cite: „Errare (Errasse) humanum est, sed in errare (errore) perseverare diabolicum.“¹⁷ And as bathetic this quote has become over the years, as necessary it has become to reiterate it in order to show the people how much we have devolved in our own sense of civilisation and humanity, that we even perceive it as a threat to admit to one's own human imperfection, that we perceive ubiquitous interactions and discussions as battles of life and death, that we won't discuss any politics anymore below the question of our civilisation's, our nation's very existence, perseverance and survival. Republicans play that game fairly well, no less because they have set the rules for this very game; needless to say that they have also created their own army of strawmen against which they fight, giving them names like "woke agenda" and "Socialist indoctrination", inter alia. Which also brings me back to my critique of Governor Sanders' rebuke against POTUS Biden's SOTU speech: She has not addressed his proposed policies but instead ran upon a platform of Republican talking points, thus mooting the purpose of her very speech.
It would of course have been too much to ask for when saying that she had to respond to his speech which he just held, but then again, we could remind ourselves of the Lincoln--Douglas debates during the Senate race in Illinois. The speeches were supposed to include one prepared and the other being in response thereto, spontaneously. It worked well, both speakers were able to follow this model, thus bringing us perhaps the most famous campaign trail in US history. It is thus not impossible, if perhaps a little bit difficult, but the issues at hand were far from unbeknownst to anyone. It was a choice by Gov. Sanders to run upon hollow issues of no interest to the average American, but then again, she was not an outlier, but the rule. The Republican party has become a parcel of performative troupes who have got no answers to the pressing questions of the average Joe anymore, because they know that whatever was advantageous would run against their personal platform, and so they resort to ultimate zilch.
The Republican party is at best deconstructed by Partisanship, Populism and (Ethno)Nationalism. And at worst they have become a threat to the American people, particularly those of ethnic backgrounds or who identify not as cis-heterosexuals or generally as LGBTQ+ people. People with mental illnesses, who, for example, are on the Autistic spectrum, may fall down when confronted with Republican policies, but this is not for me to evaluate properly at the moment as I like information thereupon. But given their current trends, this is most likely to be the case.
What the US needs is a Conservative party. Conservatives are underserved at the moment, while Populists, Nationalists and other fringe-right figures have conquered the platform of the GOP.
¹ Although some Conservatives emphasised that too. As a Democrat is now POTUS, the NRO remembered that it was originally Conservative, so they changed their tone again: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/unity-at-last/ . As I cannot find a current article about this issue, although I know that Reason has published one, I will just leave a longer piece by CATO on that issue, published one year ago:
Lemieux, P. (2022). Biden's Protectionism: Trumpism with a Human Face: The President's "Worker-Centric" Trade Policy Amounts to Special-Interest Favoritism. Regulation, 45, 10. Link: https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2022/bidens-protectionism-trumpism-human-face
² As testimonies in Congress showed later, the formula crisis was also the result of immobile, incompetent bureaucracy: https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/formula-crisis
But bureaucracy was not a monolithic perpetrator, as there seldom is a single perpetrator with regards to an issue, there also isn't one single responsible either. As extreme suggestions are about as short-sighted and counterproductive when long-term solutions need to be found, the middle way is hard to trace, a bromide that also matches the question of optimal outsourcing. As is argued in this paper:
Outsourcing is an interesting opportunity for digital products as well as for producers in countries that are close to countries like Mainland China, where production is cheap due to lower standards in employee protection and minimum wages. And while this bears ethical problems due to human-rights standards, it is not strictly prosecuted or sanctioned. More on this can be read in this paper:
³ Kutlina-Dimitrova, Zornitsa and Lakatos, Csilla, The Global Costs of Protectionism (December 14, 2017). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 8277, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3088320
⁴ Speaking of baby formula, state subsidies were an option, when negotiated prudently so that producers could not reap additional revenue from the subsidies. The US DA has got such a programme to support families: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/46787/15976_fanrr39-1_1_.pdf?v=0 .
⁵ In the end, social welfare needs to function like a credit received from the bank: It needs to be paid back someday, unless there are factors that make it impossible, such as phsyical or mental disability. Those are demogrpahically exceptional factors that should at best be borne by society not as a sign of outstanding bonhomie but of reasonable empathy. That's where we could argue that Libertarians are presumably psychopathic individuals incapable of conveying empathy. Concerning the credit-like social welfare:
⁷ As it was already forecasted in 2018, we could also add fiscal responsibility, but this is a cliché brought up whenever the POTUS is a Democrat: It is then that the GOP remembers that not regularly raising the debt ceiling is important in order to avoid irresponsible spending of taxpayers' money: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/republican-party-conservative/571747/
⁸ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/07/debt-republicans-democrats-trump-biden/
⁹ https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-gops-faustian-bargain-with-far-right-extremism-with-david-corn/
¹⁰ https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/why-some-florida-schools-are-removing-books-from-their-libraries
¹¹ Most recently against Angie Craig: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/politics/rep-angie-craig-assaulted-in-her-washington-apartment-building/3275989/ ; before that, such attacks targeted county commissioners in New Mexico: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-told-gunmen-aim-lower-attacks-new-mexico-democrats-2023-01-17/ ; most famously, husband to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, was attacked at home while his wife was absent, so that he remained the only possible victim to a MAGA-inspired burglar: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/us/politics/pelosi-attacker-interview.html ; for completeness' sake, we will also include the Capitol Hill Insurrection of January 06, 2022: https://www.britannica.com/event/January-6-U-S-Capitol-attack
¹² Although some journalists already say that the party may be underway to finally abandon that forlorn concept, with few outcasts who stick with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/22/wisconsin-election-denial-activist/
¹³ https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/why-immigration-and-border-security-endure-central-axis-texas-republican-politics
¹⁴ Gianni Sarra (2022) Fighting fire with fire: the ethics of retaliatory gerrymandering, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2056354
¹⁵ " [...] So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.'" (Bradbury, Ray (1979). Fahrenheit 451. New York City, Toronto: Ballantine Books. Page 58-59.)
The comparison may be rather extreme, compared to the fact that those bans were so far limited to public schools and their adjacent libraries, but it therefore targets the youngest and most vulnerable in a society, those with the greatest craving and the greatest need for accessible information, especially about their selfs. Thus, to take away information about sexuality, about self-identification and -awareness because information like this could be harmful for them is also fallacious as those books, prior to ending up in libraries, have undergone editing in multiple sequences, and were never deemed inappropriate or even harmful by paediatrists, schoolteachers or pedagogues. To claim that all of those professions were uuniversally occupied by "woke leftists" who were solely interested in "indoctrinating our children with their destructive agenda" were a crass assumption that needed to be proven first. A fistful of TikTok videos wouldn't suffice to argue that point, and so, policies like De Santis' are more harmful than any book featuring non-binary or transsexual protagonists could ever be. And this doesn't even include legislation that permitted minors to carry assault rifles with sharp ammunition, as Republicans deem appropriate in Missouri: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/09/missouri-gop-children-guns-open-carry/
¹⁶ Phelps, G. A. (1989). George Washington and the Paradox of Party. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 19(4), 733–745. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27550570
¹⁷ Hieronymus; Seneca, Epistulae morales VI,57,12; Cicero, Orationes Philippicae 12,2
But bureaucracy was not a monolithic perpetrator, as there seldom is a single perpetrator with regards to an issue, there also isn't one single responsible either. As extreme suggestions are about as short-sighted and counterproductive when long-term solutions need to be found, the middle way is hard to trace, a bromide that also matches the question of optimal outsourcing. As is argued in this paper:
Kulembayeva, F., Seitkaziyeva, A. & Yelshibayev, R. Economic Efficiency of Outsourcing Business Models: A Comparative Assessment. Glob J Flex Syst Manag 23, 75–88 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40171-021-00290-wA company should evaluate whether outsourcing was a sustainable model to run a business on. Given the factors to be considered according to the authors, would outsourcing production of formula to be sold in the US make sense? Technically, no. But then again, the examples chosen are not necessarily appropriate for the niche in which formula is settled in, namely infant nutrition, as opposed to two software companies which are subjected in this paper. As a key factor for infant nutrition, and derived from our experience as of now, we could consider permanent availability and safety from sudden supply-chain eruptions as threatened through factory closures due to viral outbreaks (as we have seen in Foxconn factories in Mainland China: https://www.dw.com/en/china-foxconn-workers-take-big-risks-to-flee-covid-lockdown/a-63614470 ) or gradual price increases that would disrupt availability to consumers; we have seen such effects in all kinds of market segments due to inflation and supply-chain crises.
Outsourcing is an interesting opportunity for digital products as well as for producers in countries that are close to countries like Mainland China, where production is cheap due to lower standards in employee protection and minimum wages. And while this bears ethical problems due to human-rights standards, it is not strictly prosecuted or sanctioned. More on this can be read in this paper:
Kriebitz, A., Max, R. The Xinjiang Case and Its Implications from a Business Ethics Perspective. Hum Rights Rev 21, 243–265 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-020-00591-0Sanctions may help, but needed to be conducted comprehensively, in unison and for a durable period of time. Businesses would certainly seek loopholes to undermine them as there are enough rogue nations that wouldn't ratify such sanctions and instead continue their relationship with Mainland China, just hink about Russia and India. This would place additional burden upon the businesses that had to compete against one another, some of which would possibly budge their own human-rights stance and seek joint ventures in rogue nations in order to transfer some of the production to subordinates, just to lower their costs. The only functioning solution to close the faucet on such undermining of the nations' authority would be to nationalise them. But we can all imagine how that would play out in long term.
³ Kutlina-Dimitrova, Zornitsa and Lakatos, Csilla, The Global Costs of Protectionism (December 14, 2017). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 8277, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3088320
⁴ Speaking of baby formula, state subsidies were an option, when negotiated prudently so that producers could not reap additional revenue from the subsidies. The US DA has got such a programme to support families: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/46787/15976_fanrr39-1_1_.pdf?v=0 .
⁵ In the end, social welfare needs to function like a credit received from the bank: It needs to be paid back someday, unless there are factors that make it impossible, such as phsyical or mental disability. Those are demogrpahically exceptional factors that should at best be borne by society not as a sign of outstanding bonhomie but of reasonable empathy. That's where we could argue that Libertarians are presumably psychopathic individuals incapable of conveying empathy. Concerning the credit-like social welfare:
Bolt, W. & Tieman, A. (2006). Social Welfare and Cost Recovery in Two-Sided Markets. Review of Network Economics, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.2202/1446-9022.1091And as laughable as it may seem, there has been a paper that argued that Libertarians were disproportionately represented as psychopaths on their own:
Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366⁶ The nicest thing that could still be said about that party was that it no longer matched the party once represented by POTUS Abraham Lincoln: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/16/republican-party-now-has-more-common-with-southern-minority-1860/
⁷ As it was already forecasted in 2018, we could also add fiscal responsibility, but this is a cliché brought up whenever the POTUS is a Democrat: It is then that the GOP remembers that not regularly raising the debt ceiling is important in order to avoid irresponsible spending of taxpayers' money: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/republican-party-conservative/571747/
⁸ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/07/debt-republicans-democrats-trump-biden/
⁹ https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-gops-faustian-bargain-with-far-right-extremism-with-david-corn/
¹⁰ https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/why-some-florida-schools-are-removing-books-from-their-libraries
¹¹ Most recently against Angie Craig: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/politics/rep-angie-craig-assaulted-in-her-washington-apartment-building/3275989/ ; before that, such attacks targeted county commissioners in New Mexico: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-told-gunmen-aim-lower-attacks-new-mexico-democrats-2023-01-17/ ; most famously, husband to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, was attacked at home while his wife was absent, so that he remained the only possible victim to a MAGA-inspired burglar: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/us/politics/pelosi-attacker-interview.html ; for completeness' sake, we will also include the Capitol Hill Insurrection of January 06, 2022: https://www.britannica.com/event/January-6-U-S-Capitol-attack
¹² Although some journalists already say that the party may be underway to finally abandon that forlorn concept, with few outcasts who stick with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/22/wisconsin-election-denial-activist/
¹³ https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/why-immigration-and-border-security-endure-central-axis-texas-republican-politics
¹⁴ Gianni Sarra (2022) Fighting fire with fire: the ethics of retaliatory gerrymandering, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2056354
¹⁵ " [...] So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.'" (Bradbury, Ray (1979). Fahrenheit 451. New York City, Toronto: Ballantine Books. Page 58-59.)
The comparison may be rather extreme, compared to the fact that those bans were so far limited to public schools and their adjacent libraries, but it therefore targets the youngest and most vulnerable in a society, those with the greatest craving and the greatest need for accessible information, especially about their selfs. Thus, to take away information about sexuality, about self-identification and -awareness because information like this could be harmful for them is also fallacious as those books, prior to ending up in libraries, have undergone editing in multiple sequences, and were never deemed inappropriate or even harmful by paediatrists, schoolteachers or pedagogues. To claim that all of those professions were uuniversally occupied by "woke leftists" who were solely interested in "indoctrinating our children with their destructive agenda" were a crass assumption that needed to be proven first. A fistful of TikTok videos wouldn't suffice to argue that point, and so, policies like De Santis' are more harmful than any book featuring non-binary or transsexual protagonists could ever be. And this doesn't even include legislation that permitted minors to carry assault rifles with sharp ammunition, as Republicans deem appropriate in Missouri: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/09/missouri-gop-children-guns-open-carry/
¹⁶ Phelps, G. A. (1989). George Washington and the Paradox of Party. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 19(4), 733–745. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27550570
¹⁷ Hieronymus; Seneca, Epistulae morales VI,57,12; Cicero, Orationes Philippicae 12,2
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