Bloomberg View (Opinion)
By Megan McArdle
August 17, 2015
I
spent this morning struggling to come up with an elegant description of
Donald Trump's first official policy paper, a six-page document on
immigration. After more than
a decade of writing about politics and public policy, this should have
been easy. That experience did finally lead me to the right terminology:
"bag o' crazy."
Here is Donald Trump's statement of principle about American immigration:
A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.
A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.
A
nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any
immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all
Americans.
I'm
not sure what to make of the first. Will we cease to be a nation if we
do not build a wall? For that matter, what have we been doing for the
last 239 years? The latter
two are blandly populist boilerplate that any candidate might endorse,
while taking any number of different policy positions.
To
be fair, he does have some practical positions. Some of them will be
controversial, like criminal penalties for people who overstay temporary
visas. Some of them are
theoretically feasible, but wildly expensive, such as tripling the size
of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff, and stepping up
detentions and deportations.
Then there are the less practical ideas, which are -- well, there's a reason I got stuck on "bag o' crazy."
Most
notably, Trump is promising to end birthright citizenship and get
Mexico to pay for building a giant wall across our nearly 2,000-mile
border. He also adds bizarre
promises like a temporary halt on issuing any green cards at all until
the domestic labor market recovers and a "refugee program for American
children" aimed at getting foster kids into better homes.
This
is not a serious policy document. Ending birthright citizenship would
require a Constitutional amendment, which would never pass Congress,
much less the three-quarters
of the state legislatures required to ratify it. The difficulty of this
task is exceeded only in the difficulty of getting Mexico to pay for a
2,000-mile wall that Mexicans have no interest in.
But
critiquing Trump on the basis of his policy fantasies sort of misses
the point. The precise reason that people like him is that his campaign
is completely unmoored
from underlying realities.
Every
election season, candidates release white papers outlining what they
will do when they take office. Those policy papers inevitably have a
bunch of magic asterisks
where the candidate has substituted heroic assumption for plausible
numbers. These heroic assumptions do the bold and necessary work of
hiding the costs of their rosy promises from voters. For example,
Obama's promise that his health care plan would save the
average family a bunch of money, and also, never include a legal
mandate forcing them to buy health insurance.
While
those policy documents always have a certain … let's call it a
"muscular optimism" -- they're ultimately at least weakly tethered to
the plausible. Viable Republican
presidential candidates do not promise that on their first day in
office, they will repeal Roe v. Wade. Democrats do not claim that they
will provide universal preschool education for a net cost of $5. That's
just unrealistic.
But
a broad swath of American voters are hungry for those sweet little
lies. Or big lies. These voters don't want some guy who crafts a policy
agenda that could actually
be enacted, some triangulated plan that could get past the American
system's checks and balances. In Dave Weigel's terrific piece on a Trump
rally in Flint, Michigan, two quotes, from two different people, stand
out:
"Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don't think he'd go to Congress and ask. I think he'd just do it."
And:
"I compare Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. He lets people know what he's going to do, not what to ask for."
This
is, of course, a completely inaccurate picture of how government works.
But they're sick of how the government works. The government, working,
has left them stranded
in Flint, Michigan, or some equally troubled place, without much of a
future. They want someone who will cut through all those procedural
safeguards and do something.
Or
as Timothy Burke put it, in distinctly un-Trumply terms: "Not only are
publics in most liberal democracies dismayed by the incapacity of their
elected officials to
do much with the sprawling, recumbent states that they theoretically
command, not only are they restive about the downward spiral of their
economic and social lives and the predation of the global plutocracy,
they're also tired of the screaming inauthenticity
of the entire wretched system."
Politically,
Trump is, of course, at least as inauthentic and dissembling as the
rest of them, from his opinions, which drift upon the prevailing
populist winds, to his
wild lies about what he will be able to do if people actually elect
him. But he appears to be a most genuine jerk, which is one more symptom
of sincerity than most candidates are able to muster.
The
anger he has tapped into is genuine as well. His supporters want to
hear how the government is going to fight back against the forces that
have upended their lives.
Of
course, all politicians greatly exaggerate the ability of their
programs to fix all manner of intractable ills. But these are tepid,
weak lies compared to simply declaring
that you'll make it stop through sheer force of will. Which is crazy,
of course. But I have to concede this: Trump's popularity may reflect
the scale of the problems that many American communities face, based on
the commensurate towering, magnificent whoppers
he's selling.
Trump,
like many people, seems to believe that the limitation on getting
foster kids into homes is money. It isn't. The limitation is that foster
kids tend to have a lot
of problems, and the supply of foster parents who are willing and able
to raise children with special needs and circumstances is pretty
limited.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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