I use that moniker in honor of a survey done by that silly magazine, which is not Papa, on the history of pop music. Yes, I'm going to write about pop music today. For real.
A little over a decade ago, not-Papa asked a group of musicians to come up with their lists of the greatest songs of the last ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!! Not joking. You can guess what happened. Most musicians, or at least, most of those asked by not-Papa, didn't really know much about the history of music going beyond the previous few years. They knew the previous decade or so of popular music relatively well, but even then, their knowledge was limited by genre, and almost nobody knew anything before the 1950s or 1960s. A thousand years? Yeah, right.
But... they also asked some dude named Richard Thompson. Maybe you know that he is a hero of mine. He is a scholarly sort of fellow, in addition to being one of the greatest guitarists you are likely to hear, a brilliant songwriter, a great singer, and... basically an all-around genius. On any given day, if you asked me my favorite musician, I'd struggle to give an answer, but there is a non-zero probability that, if forced to answer, the name you'd get is Richard Thompson.
Thompson took not-Papa's survey question literally, and wrote a list that included songs going back... 1000 years from historical records, and yes, we have some historical records of songs that old. They just aren't written on sheet music in the same standardized format as classical conventions that developed later.
Anyway, that silly, little magazine... didn't print Richard's list. So, he recorded an album around it, then did a tour for it, and released a live album for that, along with a concert DVD. All highly-recommended by yours truly.
My point here is that you should all listen to Richard Thompson, and I was listening to 1000 Years of Popular Music recently.
No, that wasn't it. Tangent. Sorry. My point, um... was about historical myopia and peoples' tendency to focus on the recent, even when presented with a question about the best, or worst, of all time.
Whenever posed with a question about presidents in historical context, we need to remember just how bad James Buchanan was. Not to belabor the point, but most countries around the world resolved slavery without a civil war. Why did we have one? A strong case can be made that the answer is some really horrible President named "James Buchanan." I'll let historians explain it, but the short version is that he all but told the south to secede, while simultaneously saying that they couldn't.
In the scheme of things, bad events in American history... the Civil War was pretty bad. In order for anyone to claim the title of "Worst President Ever," they have to make a case for doing more damage to the country than James Buchanan.
And that's a different question from just being a bad person, incompetent, etc. So, let's return to yesterday's Captain Hazelwood reference. Was Joseph Hazelwood the worst oil tanker captain ever? A case can be made, based on consequences of his horribleness.
That doesn't mean that there haven't been less intelligent, less competent... less sober captains, or more unfit captains throughout history! It just means that if someone else is vying for the title, Hazelwood set the bar with the Valdez, and battle must be joined.
Donald Trump. I don't think there can be any question that he is the least intelligent president in American history. That's not even close. I don't think there can be any question that he is the least informed, the least sane, the least tethered to reality, the most sociopathic, the most corrupt... take your pick of measures of fitness. "Valence" characteristics, as I often discuss here. None of this is even a close question. If Ginsburg kicks the bucket, my money's on Incitatus for her replacement. (Richard Thompson would get that...)
But... the Civil War. For all of the bad things Trump has done, he hasn't topped Buchanan for feats of wretchedness, and in the modern context, we need to remember that.
Part of that is context. Slavery was already shredding American politics and society when Buchanan came into office. Had Lincoln been elected in 1856 instead of 1860, would that have prevented the Civil War? What would have happened? That's hard to say. Lincoln certainly would have handled things better than Buchanan, but his election was also a response to Buchanan so... History is hard. That's why I'm a political scientist.
Had Trump been president back then, would he have been better, the same, or worse than Buchanan? Worse, obviously. But Trump had the tremendous luck that he has always had to come into the White House with-- despite his constant lying-- a healthy, growing economy, a low crime rate, a basically stable situation throughout the globe, and he has just tried his hardest to screw it up in a system designed to prevent that.
Capitalism. Capitalism means that the president is not sitting at the control center of a centrally-planned economy pushing buttons and pulling levers to make the economy work. Capitalism is the opposite of central planning, as removed as possible from the executive of the political system "hereby ordering" economic decision-making because when the government does that, the economy collapses.
See: Union, Soviet.
Yes, I just called Trump a "communist," for all practical purposes. Not really, because Marx's goal was redistribution, and blah, blah, blah, but that wasn't actually what Stalin or the rest of the post-Lenin Soviets were all about anyway. Trump wants to be a central planner. So, let's call him a communist. Doesn't that kind of work for other reasons anyway? I kind of get a kick out of this. Trump's a commie! Trump's a commie!
Anyway, now that that's (not really) out of my system, given the challenge of coming into office when everything was fine, what could Trump do to try to take the title from Buchanan?
You see, right now, he is sort of hovering at the second-place title. Just above Buchanan, there had been Herbert Hoover, and Warren Harding, with the challenge being how you distinguish between the guy who turned a crash into the Great Depression through incompetence (Hoover), and the previous record-holder for corruption in a presidential administration (Harding, even though it was his people rather than Warren himself).
As far as corruption goes, Trump is so far beyond Harding that it's like comparing Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix. Yeah, Johnny B. Goode was cool when it came out, but after you've heard Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)…, no, send Chuck back to prison, we're done with him.
So how do we compare Trump to Hoover? Hoover turned a crash into the Great Depression. But... Keynesian economics actually came from knowledge gleaned from his mistakes, in part! That means we sort of have to give Hoover a little bit of a break because what we know about economics wasn't as formalized back then. However, crashing an economy with tariffs?
No excuses anymore. And when you're whining about the economy while imposing tariffs against Congress's intent? That's where you start bumping up against Hoover.
We aren't, though, at a recession yet. The recession does look likely, eventually, though. The question is timing. Will it happen before or after 2020? No clue. However, the stupidity of escalating a trade war with China like this, while then complaining about the economy... that's how you take the spot from Hoover.
The question is the Trump/Buchanan comparison. What could Trump do to take the title from Buchanan? I won't rule that out. There are plenty of military options that we need to keep in mind, especially if the 2020 election starts looking bad for him. Even if he doesn't do that though, destabilizing the global financial system through a fully-escalated trade war with China could have such wide-ranging economic consequences that we wind up with a real question of Trump versus Buchanan.
How does that work? Basically, it was possible for the Civil War to end. Sort of.
It is, however, possible for Trump to shove Humpty Dumpty off of the wall, breaking him to the point that he can't be put back together again. The basic problem is as follows. Remember that matter of distinguishing between Trump, personally, and the US? It is important to do, but with respect to other countries, one of the problems is that Trump's reckless stupidity, dishonesty, and refusal to adhere to international agreements really isn't just Trump personally. The fact that Trump does what he does means, logically, that the United States cannot be trusted. Even if Trump were gone, we could be stupid enough to elect another person as horrible as Trump. The damage is done, just by having Trump break every international norm. There's no going back from that. And the further he goes, the more permanent damage he does to the global financial system by making the US an untrustworthy nation. We can't get that back, no matter whom we elect, because we are always potentially one election away from electing the most horrible person on the planet, who will then break every agreement we just made.
Trump isn't the problem. It's the voters who put him there. And every other country in the world knows that. There is an international caricature of Americans, which you may encounter when you travel abroad, of us as brash, stupid, arrogant, and so forth. The fact that Trump can be seen as the caricature of an American, taken to surrealist extremes means that he cannot be written off internationally as an anomaly. He is a reflection of us. That's the problem.
So, the further he goes with his trade war, the more damage he does to the global financial system.
Right now, he is making noises about "hereby ordering" companies out of China. What can he do? Well, there is a distressing likelihood that he will declare another phony "national emergency" to give himself more of a claim to extraordinary and... basically, dictatorial powers, because once he does that, the spine of every Republican politician in the country returns to its natural, gelatinous state, the Trump-stacked courts stand by their man, and craziness ensues. Businesses are unlikely to leave China, and I have no clue what, specifically, happens, except chaos. Even if that's not what happens, Trump and China are going to keep incrementally raising tariffs because Trump is too stupid and arrogant to see that this is not a fight he can win, and China absolutely cannot give in, and absolutely can wait him out given their political structure. I cannot see how this gets resolved with Trump in office. And that means things get bad.
Possibly bad enough for Trump to take the title from Buchanan, because there is no undoing the damage that Trump is in the process of doing. Like it or not, everything Trump does reflects on us, and that means Americans are responsible for everything he does. We joke about him being an idiot child because he may as well be a child. He has the emotional maturity and intellectual development of an adolescent, and someone like Trump should not, ideally, be allowed to operate without adult supervision. Politically, those adults are us, and just as parents can face legal liabilities for what their children do in certain circumstances, other nations around the world will hold us responsible for all of the stupid, vile things Trump is doing. They must, because they cannot trust us not to elect another Trump in the future.
That is why the damage he is in the process of doing may surpass Buchanan. May.
My point? This trade war is likely to get very bad, unless one of Trump's advisors figures out a way to have him declare a phony victory. The problem with that is that the whole point for China is that they can't let him do that.
Look out, Jimmy. You can't stay the fastest draw forever. Yeee-HAW!