Some Thoughts On The 2016 US Election

Oh well, so much for my prediction 4 years ago that the Republicans would never again win a Presidential election in the foreseeable future.

I was completely blindsided by Trump's victory. I had all but assumed a Clinton presidency post-Nov 8. I guess I was living in a bubble created by the media and left-leaning intellectuals. Of course, there were a few people in my social media circle who were predicting a Trump victory, but since many of them were right-leaning, there's nothing to say they were not engaging in some wish-fulfillment themselves.

There's a lot that has been said by other worthy people, and I will merely link to their words here. There's nothing to be gained by me repeating their points.

Seshadri Kumar has a comprehensive analysis of what happened and why.
Kanishka Sinha offers a fascinating set of parallels between Trump and Narendra Modi.
Raja Visweswaran provides a comforting explanation to his disappointed and apprehensive children.

I will try to make some original points here.

1. Trump's victory was the result of sexism.

This is going to infuriate a lot of people, because I don't mean what many may understand from this.

I'm in fact blaming many older feminists for Trump's victory. Many women who earned their feminist stripes over the last few decades were so taken with the idea of electing the first woman president that they willingly threw a much more deserving candidate under the bus during the Democratic primaries -- Bernie Sanders. Sanders is a progressive who has stood with women on all women's issues, and his track record in the Senate shows that he is a trustworthy ally to the feminist cause. Yet his gender worked against him in the primaries. Many older women voted against him purely on grounds of gender. Madeleine Albright infamously said in support of Clinton, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." To their credit, younger women showed that they had internalised the lessons of a post-feminist world, and they ignored gender by supporting the more worthy candidate, but older women sadly proved that they had failed to overcome their learnt biases.

I have heard women from that cohort defend their preference ("He's impractical, she's pragmatic"), but I see that as post-facto rationalisation. They voted for the woman for sexist reasons, pure and simple.

Well, how did that karma sandwich taste the morning after?

I believe Bernie Sanders could have beaten Trump, for at least three reasons:

1. Sanders criticised the unfairness of the global capitalist system with more credibility than Trump did, and of course with far greater credibility than Clinton could ever hope to muster. He stood up for the people who lost out on account of the New Economy, and has a track record of having done so consistently. He had the moral high ground from which to expose Trump's hypocrisy on imported steel, migrant labour and unpaid contractors. As the "establishment candidate", Clinton never had a chance to call out Trump on his hollow platform.

2. Sanders has a long public record, and it's clean. Clinton's team tried its best to dig up dirt on him during the primaries, and they couldn't manage anything. It's unlikely that Trump could have flung any mud on him that would stick, unlike what he did to Clinton. She was a highly flawed candidate whose flaws stood exposed throughout the campaign. Whether it was policy flip-flops, highly paid speaking engagements paid for by Wall Street, a track record of warmongering, or the infamous email scandal, she was far from being squeaky clean. The Clinton-Trump clash was a choice between two evils. A Sanders-Trump match would have been a clear choice between good and evil.

3. While it's not a matter to be proud of, it's a fact that Clinton lost many votes to Trump because of misogyny amongst the voting populace. Trump wouldn't have had that advantage against Sanders. And conversely, while Trump lost votes to Clinton because of the antipathy of many women, that effect wouldn't have been neutralised if Sanders had stood instead of Clinton. Sanders would have had a net advantage in terms of the gender bias, on top of everything else.

In short, the reason the world is looking at a President Trump today is because many women who call themselves feminist couldn't recognise and fight the sexism in their own minds.

2. There are (thankfully) limits to money power

One silver lining I take away from Trump's victory is that money can't ...ahem... trump the people's will.

Clinton had the inexhaustible war chest, while Trump was reportedly strapped for cash and couldn't afford as many TV ad slots. Fat lot of good that did her. I'm glad to see that democracy isn't for sale. It was a free and fair election, and the outcome was determined according to the rules. One could quibble about the popular vote not being reflected in the electoral college, but those are the rules. All the king's horses and all the king's money couldn't put a Clinton in the White House again.

3. It's now capitalism versus democracy

I have often said this in the past, but it's coming true in recent months, first with Brexit and now with Trump. The runaway march of capitalism can only by stopped by democracy, because the number of votes a person has bears no correlation to their purchasing power. Try as they might, the plutocracy cannot take over. What we've seen recently is the genteel equivalent to the French Revolution. The elites managed to crush the Occupy movement, but it's now clear that the revolution cannot be rolled back. If the elites do not take heed from these recent reverses, we might one day see heads carried on pikes down Wall Street. I will not shed any tears on that day.

As a member of the elite myself, I have attended economics lectures and swallowed without question the idea that free trade is an unmitigated good, and that Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage proves it to be so. Well, that's only true in a macro sense. At the micro level, there are winners and losers from free trade in every country, and it is the responsibility of each country's ruling elites to ensure an equitable distribution of the benefits of free trade to all parties. That has never happened to date in any country. The winners keep all their winnings to themselves, and don't share any of it with their less fortunate compatriots. There are people who have personally lost out on account of it, and yet the elites expect them to keep supporting globalisation, outsourcing, free trade and other aspects of the New Economy because they expect the virtues of these to be self-evident to anyone who isn't a troglodyte. Well, the dispossessed can protest, and they are doing so now.

4. The Republicans have themselves a poisoned chalice

It was widely predicted that the Republicans were going to lose both the White House and the Senate, with only the House of Representatives in their hands, and they were therefore girding themselves for another long round of trench warfare and government shutdowns. Now they have unexpectedly found themselves in control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Soon they will be able to ensure Conservative control of the Supreme Court too. At that point, they will have no more excuses. If they don't deliver in terms of making people's lives better, it will be downhill for them from 2016 onwards. The younger generation (18-25) is the most hostile the GOP has yet encountered, and as the older populace dies out in the years ahead, there will be strong headwinds for the Republicans to face. 2016 could well be their high watermark.

I personally believe that the creeping advance of the "Technology Singularity" is responsible for what is recognised to be a jobless recovery in most advanced countries, and this trend will only exacerbate the pain that ordinary people are going to face. These are structural problems, and they cannot be solved by protectionist band-aid. I believe the only workable long-term solution is a socialistic one - a guaranteed minimum income paid to every household, from taxes levied on businesses that operate without the costs of employing human labour. There will be a painful transition to an ultimately pleasurable "leisure society", but conservatives are fundamentally incapable of conceptualising it or ushering it in. Their repertoire of traditional conservative solutions (small government, low taxes and private enterprise) will fail them dramatically in the New Economy as capitalism clashes ever more dramatically with democracy. Ultimately, the Republicans will lose power altogether unless they jettison economic conservatism.

5. Trump could either start World War III, or usher in a new era of peace

Trump is famously unpredictable, volatile and narcissistic. He has all the makings of a maniacal despot. On the other hand, he has more than once expressed his desire to bring US troops home, and has said he would ask allies to pay for their own defence, which is a more conservative, isolationist stance than that of any US president in recent memory. He is also far more likely than Obama or Hillary Clinton to arrive at an amicable arrangement with Russia's Putin and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East.

There's a lot to fear, but there's also hope. Obama started his term by winning the Nobel Peace Prize. By the end of his term, the US was bombing seven countries, with none of those bombings authorised by Congress (see video below). Trump enters the White House amidst widespread trepidation. It is possible he could belie those fears just as Obama belied hopes.

And those are some of my thoughts after the US poll verdict.

Sarah Palin - Now why would McCain choose her?

I'll be blunt. Sarah Palin has a good reputation as a new broom who swept Alaska clean, but that's not why McCain chose her as his Veep.

Cynical as always, the political machine (and yes, this is a bipartisan trait) has picked the candidate with the best potential to bring in the votes, never mind how.

McCain's campaign calculates that there are millions of seething women out there who are frustrated at their favourite candidate Hillary Clinton's defeat in the Democratic primaries. Not to put too fine a point on it, they're counting on sexism to bring those disaffected voters to the Republican side. They're gambling that millions of women will put aside issues of party affiliation, policies and plans, and vote purely on the issue of gender.

I hope they're proved wrong. It would be terrible if sexism turns out to be a winning strategy.

Barack Obama and "Change" - Does He Really Lack Detail?

There's been a lot of newsprint devoted lately to how Barack Obama lacks detail when talking about the "change" that he will bring about. A lot of that criticism comes from the campaign office of Hillary Clinton, of whom I've written before (Hi, Mom!). Mom, of course, has all the details required to make change happen, right at her fingertips.

But she, and all the analysts, are missing a very important part of why Barack Obama does not need to spell out how he's going to bring about change. Barack Obama is the change. People everywhere see it, and people everywhere will treat him differently, setting aside their own prejudices of what an American president is, giving him a fresh hearing, being willing to listen to what he says and even doing what he requests them to do. That's significant.

I'm approaching this very personally and viscerally, just as with my earlier analysis of Hillary Clinton. I can put Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George Bush (both father and son), and any number of previous US presidents in the same mental box, regardless of party affiliation. But I cannot put Barack Obama in the same box. He doesn't belong! I never realised that ethnicity could play such an important part in perception. Much as I want to be colour-blind, I find I cannot.

Barack Obama is clearly not part of the US political establishment traditionally dominated by middle-aged white men. As any brand consultant will tell you, that positions him differently. The brand equity of the US political establishment is entirely negative (remember Truman's "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog"?) Obama's involuntary positioning benefits him a great deal, not only in the US, but more importantly, in the rest of the world.

I'm aware of my thought processes, and I can't be alone in this:

Barack Obama => not middle-aged white man
Not middle-aged white man => not part of traditional US political establishment
Not part of traditional US political establishment => good guy

Barack Obama is a good guy. Whoever I am, my defenses are down. I am disarmed.

So now if a President Barack Hussein Obama sits down with leaders in the Middle East and puts together a peace treaty, there's likely to be far greater buy-in than if another middle-aged white man in that role does the same thing. His appearance, and his name, promise a far greater chance at peace than the details of the accord.

Another area where I predict he would have immense influence is in India-Pakistan relations. Indian leaders don't trust the US because of its past (and continuing) history as an ally of Pakistan. Paradoxically, Pakistanis don't seem to trust the US either, because it hasn't been a reliable ally (Example: Ignoring India's protests, the US sold F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Then they took payment but refused to deliver the jets because of nuclear concerns. They didn't refund the money either. Some ally. The Indians chuckled but somehow didn't see this as reason to start trusting the US.)

The current US ability to broker a peace deal between India and Pakistan is virtually zero, and it has everything to do with credibility. But enter a president with none of that historical baggage, and everything changes.

The solution to the India-Pakistan logjam is simple and stares everyone in the face, but has no chance of implementation in the current political climate. It's about accepting the status quo in Kashmir and then moving on with development, trade and all-round progress. India will never give up the part of Kashmir that it controls, and neither will Pakistan give up the other. This situation has remained static for decades. For a solution to the impasse, no real exchange of territory need actually take place. All that is required is for each party to admit publicly that they are not going to get "back" any territory from the other.

I will wager that if a certain President Barack Obama drops by in 2009 and gets the leaders of India and Pakistan to sign an accord that recognises this reality, the people of both countries will accept it. I'm not talking about the lunatic or fanatic fringe on either side. They can never be won over. It's the common people who will accept the bona fides and huge perceived moral authority of this different US President and do what he asks.

Once again, the clincher will not be in the details. It will be the person.

Hillary Clinton cannot pull this off. A white woman will not command any more authority than a white man, and in the subcontinent, may even command less, sad to say. No amount of mastery of detail will help when it comes to influencing people.

It's not what you know, it's who you are.

Barack Obama is The Man.

Why Hillary Clinton won't win the Presidency, or even the Democratic Nomination

OK, this post could turn out to be one of those embarrassingly wrong predictions, like "Dewey defeats Truman", but I'll make it anyway.

I think Hillary will fail to win the Democratic party's nomination, and it won't be because of sexism either. (That would be a factor in the Presidential election, and she won't be getting to that level anyway).

No, Clinton is competent, experienced and efficient, and most people see her as such. That's the problem.

Imagining a world where Hillary Clinton is in charge takes one back to one's childhood where one's mother was in charge - "Do your homework!", "Clean up your room!"

Shudder!

Mom knows best. But we're adults now, mom. And we enjoy our adult freedom to keep our surroundings messy and not do our homework once in a while.

Nobody will vote to go back to their childhood - and its powerlessness. Even if mom was around to take care of everything.