LONDON - I've actually been watching the early Trump presidency from London. (I would have gone to the moon, but I couldn't get a ride.) Even from here I have vertigo.
My head is swirling from "alternative facts," trade deals canceled, pipelines initiated, Obamacare in the Twilight Zone and utterly bizarre rants about attendance on Inauguration Day and fake voters on Election Day. Whatever this cost Vladimir Putin, he's already gotten his money's worth - a chaos president. Pass the vodka.
But moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats who opposed Donald Trump need to beware. He can make you so nuts - he can so vacuum your brains out - that you can't think clearly about the most important questions today: What things are true even if Trump believes them, and therefore merit support? And where can Democrats offer smarter approaches on issues, like jobs, for instance - approaches that can connect to the guts of working-class voters as Trump did, but provide a smarter path forward?
Where Trump's instinct is not wrong is on the need to strike a better long-term trading arrangement with China. But I worry about his pugnacious tactics. I would be negotiating with Beijing in total secret. Let everybody save face. If he smacks China with "America First," China will smack him with "China First," and soon we'll have a good ol' trade war.
Where I think Democrats should focus their critique, and fresh thinking, is how we actually bring back more middle-class jobs.
If Trump's bullying can save good jobs, God bless him. But what Trump doesn't see is that while this may get him some short-term jobs headlines, in the long-run CEOs may prefer not to build their next factory in America, precisely because it will be hostage to Trump's Twitter lashings. They also may quietly replace more workers with robots faster, because Trump can't see or complain about that.
You need to protect workers, not jobs. Every worker today will most likely have to transition multiple times to multiple jobs as the pace of change accelerates. So the best way you help workers is by ensuring that they are flexible - that they have the skills, safety nets, health care and lifelong learning opportunities to make those leaps and that they live in cities open to innovation, entrepreneurship and high-IQ risk-takers.
The societal units protecting workers best are our healthy communities - where local businesses, philanthropies, the public school system and universities, and local government come together to support a permanent education-to-work-to-life-long-skill-building pipeline.
Businesses signal to schools and colleges, in real time, the skills they need to thrive in the global economy, and philanthropies fund innovative programs for supplemental education and training. Schools also serve as adult learning and social service centers - and local and state governments support them all.
Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, calls this the "new progressive localism." For too long, he argues, "progressives have been so focused on Washington, they've missed the fact that most of the progress on the issues they care about - environment, education, economic opportunity and workforce skills - has happened at the local level. Because that is where trust lives." Trust is what enables you to adapt quickly and experiment often, i.e., to be flexible. And there is so much more trust on the local level than the national level in America today.
Another of Trump's jobs fallacies is that regulation always holds companies back. In some cases it does, and thoughtful deregulation can help. But Trump's argument that we must ignore climate science because steadily upgrading clean energy standards for our power, auto and construction companies kills jobs is pure nonsense.
Fact: California has some of the highest clean energy standards for cars, buildings and electric utilities in America. And those standards have kept California one of the world's leaders in clean-tech companies and startups, and its jobs and overall economy have grown steadily since 2010.
In sum, Democrats should and can take the language of "strength" away from Trump and own it themselves. They should be for strong workers, not strong walls; for building strong communities, not relying on a strongman to strong-arm employers; and for strong standards to create strong companies. Those would be my fightin' words.
The New York Times