05-16-2019, 01:26 AM
(05-15-2019, 04:42 PM)David Horn Wrote: This piece by Thomas Edsall in today's NY Times fits in well with our discussions, but not with any posted thread I could find. It also references an alternative 4 phase system -- different from TFT, but not incompatible.
The Fight Over How Trump Fits in With the Other 44 Presidents
It didn’t take long after President Trump took office for conflicting views about the strength and duration of his legacy to surface.
A “regime” theory of the presidency — developed in “The Politics Presidents Make” by Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale — provides the theoretical basis for the view that despite his victory in 2016, Trump represents the final collapse of Reagan-era conservatism. Skowronek described his overall project as a “study of presidents as agents of political change” that produced a framework of “four types of political leadership,” each of which I will explore in more detail below, with and without reference to the seeming anomaly of Trump.
Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, adapting Skowronek’s model, argues that Trump epitomizes the fourth type of political leadership Skowronek identifies because Trump is “in the same structural position as Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter,” caught in an uphill, presumptively doomed, struggle “to hold together the fraying coalition of an exhausted regime.”
… more at the link above.
As applied to Hoover and Carter, disjunctive seems to describe someone who fails to meet some critical issue. Neither failed due to some character flaw, and neither was at all despotic or dictatorial. Hoover simply held tight to orthodoxies that no longer worked as the economy worsened; Carter promised to end stagflation but could not succeed at getting people to lower their expectations in life.
Trump is disjunctive, all right -- but he is far more ruthless than either Hoover or Carter.
Exhausted regime? It has the moneyed elites behind it, and moneyed elites have been successful at times in preserving their political dominance after their support has dwindled, typically through a dictatorship. Such is the danger!
We may be approaching the end of the Reagan 'patch' that ended stagflation by immiserating young adults so that people had to work cheaper, concentrating more wealth and economic power (of course income is included) in fewer hands so that profits increase while real wages fall. The Reagan 'patch' depended upon the expansion of low-paying retail and food-service jobs while manufacturers became importers. So the shopping malls and fast-food places started getting people with college degrees or retaining them after graduation instead of losing them to better-paying employers. We had the best salesclerks and counter-workers ever, which was good for efficiency in such places. The problem is that the people who can't give that wonderful "Happy to serve you!" smile lost their jobs in manufacturing.
The retail apocalypse has made that paradigm unsustainable. But what happened to the manufacturing jobs?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.