One way to launch a project is the Tina Brown Way: Have a big party, invite stars, spend tons of money to try to get as much attention as possible. Also maximize the embarrassment when your project fails. The other way is the Mike Kinsley approach: xerox the first issue and send it to your mother. I’m with Kinsley. If you’re getting this via email you’re either a very close friend or you are me.
Those who have read my Twitter feed ( @kausmickey) already have some idea what this will be like—but in theory it will be a bit more (not much more!) fleshed out, with more links. better-baked half-baked ideas, and less fear of suppression-by-algorithm. More important, it will evolve in ways I can’t predict now.
Enough intro. This is the web. “Nobody wants to read your back-in lede.”
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1. The UAW has failed again in its latest attempt to organize a foreign-owned auto assembly plant. Workers at VWs Chattanooga factory (they make Passats and the Atlas SUV) voted down the union 833-776. Pretty close! But why does the UAW keep losing? It can’t have escaped the notice of Chattanooga workers that all the UAW-organized companies (GM, Chrysler and Ford) have been in decline for decades. Two of the three have actually gone bankrupt, and Ford isn’t in such good shape. Meanwhile most foreign-owned plants (e.g. Honda, Toyota, BMW) are doing fine and paying relatively high wages.
I’m all for trying to boost the wages of unskilled workers — via minimum wage laws, regulation of trade, regulation of immigration to keep the labor market tight. This may be the fundamental economic challenge for our politics, given the way unskilled work has been devalued for at least 50 years. But our legalistic form of unionism, as enshrined in the Wagner Act, seems particularly toxic to productivity. (Short version: At GM they made job classifications; at Honda they made cars). Back in the Glorious Neoliberal Era of my youth, Democrats boasted they’d pioneer a different, less adversarial form of worker organization—in 1993, Robert Reich said “The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace.” Well, the jury’s come back. Yet it’s almost inconceivable Reich would say the same thing today, because, while casting neolib centrists aside, the Democratic party has nevertheless reverted to ossified pre-Clinton legal liberalism … sorry, I mean they’ve embraced a sweeping vision of change.
Mo’: Basic case against Wagner Act unionism is here, if you want to pay Harper’s $23.99.
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2, Have people noticed … that early Trump supporters like Ann Coulter and Ryan Girdusky are so hostile to Middle East wars that their position is often virtually indistinguishable from the left (eg Coulter recently retweeted this from Matt Yglesias) … P.S. They also seem to have turned on Trump aide Stephen Miller, not because they disagree with him on immigration but because he hasn’t hired enough like minded people to get the job done (i.e. people like Kris Kobach). The suspicion is he doesn’t want any competition as the Trump Administration’s top hard liner. … I’m staying out of that one. … But Miller and Trump have manifestly not yet gotten the job done given the stunning surge of apprehensions at the Southern border. Here’s a recent quote from a coyote named Daniel:
They said Donald Trump was not going to let the migrants pass, and was going to deport everyone there, but it was completely the opposite, ... Donald Trump gave an opportunity for the entire world to get into the U.S.
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3. Just Between Us …: Breitbart’s estimable Brandon Darby tangentially raises an uncomfortable question for border-controllishTrump supporters: Would Trump have accomplished more if his rhetoric (and the rhetoric of the supporters) had been less strident and loaded (“mean” is the approved word )? Since Trump’s clearly failing in his basic immigration-control efforts—he hasn’t gotten much wall built, and we’re back to a million-a-year unauthorized migrants, see #2 above—you have to wonder: ...
What if Trump had sung the praises of immigrants and Latinos, sympathized with economic migrants, talked less about criminals and MS-13, emphasized that his wall (when he mentioned it at all) was an alternative to wrenching deportations, gritted his teeth and intoned the boilerplate platitudes the CW wanted him to say after Charlottesville (and then shut up)? No epidemiological metaphors (“infest”). No zoological metaphors. No military metaphors (“invasion”).
I dunno. Clearly the courts would have let a President Hillary Clinton get away with more at the border— in part because a lot of what judges are doing now is just stopping Trump by any means necessary, including ruling that otherwise lawful actions can’t be taken by Trump because, well, they think he’s a racist.
Obama could have gotten away with even more. (I mean, if an obviously non-racist fellow like Barack Obama wants migrants to remain in Mexico pending their hearings … who are we judges to second guess him?) As for Congress—well, Democrats in Congress voted for border barrier money before Trump came along (Hillary and Chuck Schumer included). Now they’ve got their backs up because Trump’s made such a big deal about it. What if he hadn’t made a big deal about it—but just quietly insisted on a slow, steady increment of funding in each succeeding budget, while getting headlines for, say, his contrarian embrace of a higher minimum wage? Would the Democrats still have been committed to totally blocking new border barriers?
(More Alt-History: With Hillary in the White House trying to control a surge of asylum-seekers, would her party have radicalized itself on the subject, so that it now basically argues that all would-be asylees should be released into the country pending hearings, and those who lose at hearings should get to stay anyway? If you’re in, you’re in! And everyone gets in. [But note: during the campaign Hillary herself came out against all deportations of non-criminals.])
Maybe a Nice Trump could have gotten away with more than real, existing Trump. But it would have been hard for even Nice Trump to completely decathect the immigration issue, especially with the press ready to jump on any unpleasant nuance (even, if necessary, by making them up—see “animals”). And Trump was elected on “Build The Wall,” so it woud be hard to downplay.
It would be even harder for Trump to not be simply the Man who Beat Hillary. Trump could undergo the political equivalent of a chemical castration and the humiliation of 2016 for Democrats and the media would still be difficult to dispel (maybe Trump could have offered some other outlet—like directing Dem anger at Paul Ryan, Wall Street, or neocon interventionists). Coastal liberals, at least—and, in general, the people who give money to Dems in off years—weren’t about to support politicians who cooperated with their new president. That’s even in the absence all the available ways to refight that humiliating election and portray it as stolen. Will MSNBC viewers ever be ready to ever give Trump (on immigration, or trade, or avoiding military entanglements) the grudging respect a Reagan eventually got (on the Cold War).
Still, niceness might have been worth a try …
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4. Kinbote nods: ‘A’s Beat Rays 5-4 On Chapman's Homer’
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5. Mexico’s Southern border is shorter than ours, but that doesn’t make it easy to seal. Good ‘situationer’ from a restrictionist …
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6. In New York, non-citizens have to opt out of being automatically registered to vote. Hello?
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7. Is there some secret reason black voters don't like Kamala Harris?
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8. Warren in the best position for the Dem nomination, with the media as the Great Winnower, by the estimable John Ellis. [More on this winnowing business in the next newsletter]
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The website for this newsletter is here: https://kaus.substack.com/
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Stay paranoid
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