Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Zack Beauchamp: The Virtue of Nationalism and Whiteshift: Books that Explain Trump: "The new reactionaries: Two new books reveal the coalition of far-right nationalists and anti-PC warriors who define the modern political right: Why has President Trump gone to such extraordinary lengths to build a wall on the Mexican border?... Ethnonationalism is behind the wall and Trump’s overall immigration policy, as well as his approach to racialized issues like civil rights and police violence. It explains his affinity with a host of powerful far-right European parties.... Few scholars are interested in turning the scattered political proposals of Trump and the European far right into a coherent political program. But recently, two new books shed light on what that could look like: Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism and University of London professor Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift. One is a work of political philosophy, and the other a quantitative look at the demography and views of far-right supporters. One is written by an avowed conservative, the other by a self-described liberal. One is poorly reasoned (at best), the other tightly argued. What the two books have in common is that they go beyond articulating part of the ethnonationalist worldview to actively defending core parts of it...

2. Financial Times: Republicans Are Craven in Their Loyalty to Trump: "A bigot, a cheat and a con artist who never expected to sell Americans on his ultimate scam: to become their president. In his portrait of Donald Trump this week, Michael Cohen went after what reputation his former client still enjoys.... How depressing... that Congressional Republicans did not do much more than impugn Mr Cohen. None mustered a substantive rebuttal of the allegations.... Not for the first time, the party finds itself in craven homage to a leader it does not even pretend is sound of character or judgment....Indeed, the party’s behaviour is consistently much more striking than Mr Trump’s.... The president is not an enigma at all. Any observant person had a sense of his temperament and ethics before (apparently to his own surprise) he was elected. Nothing his former fixer said about the president this week would have seemed implausible in 2016. It is the quickness of a great party to abase itself in his cause that continues to astonish...

3. Yevgeny Simkin: You’re Not the Asshole Twitter Makes You Out To Be: "Twitter is the functional equivalent of shoving tens of millions of people into a closet, wrapping them in barbed wire, and pumping them full of PCP. It’s a miracle that anyone makes it out alive. The very fact that we volunteer to go in there is a testament to how badly we want to connect, and be heard, and maybe even understood because we feel like we’re standing here, all alone, shouting from the wilderness. So don’t fall for the narrative that humans are all a bunch of ill-tempered, arrogant, imbeciles filled with rage. Definitely don’t fall for that narrative if the evidence for it is Twitter. We’re not. Under the right circumstances these qualities, which exist to some small degree in everyone, can be illuminated and brought to the fore. Twitter is practically engineered to bring the worst out in people. But the real you is the one in the grocery store, not the one being cut off on the 405...

4. Los Angeles Times: Today: A Trade and Truth Deficit: "Trump hasn’t been living up to a number of his biggest campaign promises, including reducing the trade deficit, but that hasn’t stopped him from boasting about them.... President Trump has long talked about reducing the trade deficit.... The gap in imported and exported goods soared to an all-time high last year, largely because of Trump’s policies. And it’s just one area where Trump is falling short of his own goals.... Facts haven’t stopped Trump from boasting about his record over and over again with exaggerations and outright untruths. But will he pay a political price among his supporters? Probably not. As Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, put it: 'Maybe 50% of Americans look at Donald Trump as struggling to accomplish things, but the other 50% looks at him as willing to take on challenges other presidents weren’t'...

5. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History: "Beginning 10,000 years ago, limited-access social orders developed that were able to control violence, provide order, and allow greater production through specialization and exchange... using the political system to limit economic entry to create rents, and then using the rents to stabilize the political system and limit violence.... This type of political economy arrangement... appears to be the natural way that human societies are organized.... In contrast, a handful of developed societies have developed open-access social orders. In these societies, open access and entry into economic and political organizations sustains economic and political competition. Social order is sustained by competition rather than rent-creation. The key to understanding modern social development is understanding the transition from limited- to open-access social orders, which only a handful of countries have managed since WWII...

6. Mike Konczal: The Failures of Neoliberalism Are Bigger Than Politics: "Here are two statement... I associate with left neoliberalism.... The first is that neoliberal policies would create more growth. Sure, inequality might increase, but so would wages; and even if not wages, mobility up and down the income ladder.... The second is that if we get government out of corporations’ way, the market would become more dynamic, competitive and innovative. Sure, there might be some level of profits and questionable behavior in the short term, but the market itself would fix it, such that in the long term the corporate sector looked much healthier in terms of profits and dynamism. I want to ground it this way, in two intellectual statements about the tradeoffs of a policy regime, to help understand why the confidence that left neoliberalism once held over the baseline assumption of economics has collapsed.... This is a matter of ideas: ideas having failed, and us needing new ones...

7. Victor Davis Hanson has decided that he is an evil person who does evil by telling lies in support of other evil people. He has stopped resisting. He has recognized that this is his nature: to be a one-man definitive refutation to Sokrates's doctrine that nobody does evil knowingly: Gabriel Schofield: Sophistry in the Service of Evil : "Mounting a persuasive case for the presidency of Donald Trump turns out to be a problematic enterprise.... Throughout Trump’s career, blatant racial prejudice has been a continuous thread.... Hanson... acknowledges that Trump was 'likely wrong' in holding the view that Judge Curiel harbored some innate bias.  But Trump, he continues, was merely 'clumsy in his phraseology' and, moreover, his identification of the American-born judge as Mexican was actually 'correct', explaining that there is never a 'commensurate outcry about identifying Swedish Americans as "Swedes" or using "the Irish" for Irish Americans'. From beginning to end, Hanson’s treatment of this episode is an exercise in sophistry. Was Trump wrong or was he just “likely” wrong—Hanson’s equivocating interpolation—about Judge Curiel’s innate bias as a “Mexican”? Racism is America’s original sin, a sin that we as a nation have struggled long and hard to expiate. Yet with a drumbeat of racially charged remarks emanating from the White House, Trump has been setting the nation back to a darker time. Hanson’s casuistry about the Swedes and the Irish, and the gaping hole that is his treatment of Trump’s odious life-long record in matters of race, are worse than sophistry; they are sophistry in the service of a genuine evil. Hanson has also drunk deeply from the gourd of conspiratorial thinking. He goes on for pages about the nefarious 'deep state', which he claims has 'the unlimited resources of government at its call', and whose 'operating premises have embraced multiculturalism, feminism, and identity politics'.... It was not Trump’s but Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was tacitly colluding with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election. Trump, he insists, was actually 'a victim of Russian collusion at the very time he was being accused of it'...

8. New York Fed Nowcasts: 1.4% for 2019Q1, 1.5% for 2019Q2: FRBNY: Mar 08, 2019: New York Fed Staff Nowcast. The Atlanta Fed Nowcast stands at 0.5% for 2019Q1: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/cqer/researchcq/gdpnow/RealGDPTrackingSlides.pdf

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