Tag: Jimmy Carter

Forty Years of The Firm: Trump and the Coasian Grotesque

In his classic article “The Nature of the Firm“—which I wish would be put on the list of required reading for political theorists; it really should be in our canon—the economist R.H. Coase divides the economic world into two modes of action: deal-making, which happens between firms, and giving orders, which happens within firms. Coase doesn’t say this, but it’s a plausible extrapolation that making deals and giving orders are, basically, the two things businessmen know how to do. In the last year, it’s occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that Trump is a Coasian grotesque. Making deals and giving orders: that’s all he knows how to do. Except that he doesn’t. As we’re seeing, he’s really bad […]

Donald Trump: His Mother’s Son

1. I pride myself on being that guy on the left who can make meaning out of even the most mindless right-wing text. With The Art of the Deal, I fear I may have met my match. About halfway through the book—chapter upon stultifying chapter about the time he flipped a housing complex in Cincinnati, the time he bought the Commodore Hotel, the time he negotiated with Bonwit Teller, the convention center he wanted to build in the West 30s—it hits me: the book reads like the memoir J. Peterman intended to write, based entirely on stories he bought from Kramer. 2. Thomas Friedman and Trump ought to get on like a house on fire: I do my own surveys and draw my […]

Where did I go wrong? Or, why Trump may be like Jimmy Carter

As readers of this blog well know, I predicted that Clinton would defeat Trump in November. I was wrong. Big time. Since the election, I’ve thought a lot about what I got wrong and why I got it wrong. Part of my failure, of course, was that I didn’t read the polls carefully enough. A lot of the polls, as my more attentive readers pointed out, showed Clinton’s margin over Trump, particularly in key states, to be well within the margin of error. That should have been a warning. But to be honest, I wasn’t so much influenced by the polls as I was by two other things: first, my understanding of conservatism as a reactionary movement of the right; second, […]

My First Seven Jobs

There’s a meme going around on Facebook: list your first seven jobs. Here are mine. With some commentary. First seven jobs: Not exactly a job, but my sisters and I sold coffee and doughnuts to customers waiting to buy gas on one of those epic lines of the Carter era (ca. 1978?) The line stretched from the gas station at the corner of King Street and Bedford Road, all the way down Elm Street, and up and around Ridgewood Terrace, to the corner of Ridgewood Terrace and King Street, caddy corner from our driveway. Newspaper route. Colossal failure. Lasted only a few days. Too active. A scary dog named Caesar, which my sisters and I always heard as “Seize her.” Babysitting. […]

Historically, liberals and the Left have underestimated the Right. Today, they overestimate it.

I’m going to float a series of vast and quick historical generalizations in order to try and get at something that is distinctive about the present moment in US politics. Beginning in Europe in the 19th century, liberalism has been engaged in an on-again, off-again, two-front war: against the right and against the left. Against the right’s revanchism and the left’s radicalism, liberalism has held itself up as the original Third Way. It is the reasonable and moderate alternative to the extremes, offering men and women the promises and profits of a capitalist, vaguely democratic, modernity but without its revolutionary perils and reactionary mystique. Though it has on occasion entered into a more productive, albeit tension-filled, front with the left, liberalism has always been […]