OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2016
The coming political realignment
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
Founded in 1873
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
AP Photo/Ben Curtis
Then-U.S. envoy Chris Stevens attends meetings at the Tibesti Hotel in
Benghazi, Libya, in April 2011.
Chinook ancestors
would be proud
Chris Stevens’ family is tired of
the Benghazi witch hunt
t isn’t often that a remote Paciic Northwest coast newspa-
per igures in national affairs in even the smallest way, but
Washington, D.C.’s attention briely lickered toward Paciic
County, Washington, in the aftermath of U.S. Ambassador
Chris Stevens’ 2012 murder by thugs in Benghazi, Libya.
Not only did the U.S. State
Department reach out to pro-
vide a statement of condo-
lence to the Chinook Indian
Nation via the Chinook
Observer, but CBS News
came nosing around to
see whether there was any
Wikipedia/By Kode3
vaguely interesting local Ambassador Via Chris
Stevens’
information to report about gravestone in Grass Valley, Calif.
the ambassador, a member of
the tribe.
of The New Yorker: tinyurl.
The State Department’s com/Stevens-Interview.
outreach was an unantici-
Some high points:
pated but thoughtful gesture,
• The Benghazi com-
while national media inter- pound wasn’t well enough
est was the sort of due-dil- protected, but Congress
igence one would hope for itself underfunded State
from Edward R. Murrow’s Department security.
organization. Unexpected
• The latest investigation
and unwelcome were efforts turned up nothing new. It and
by some in Congress to earlier efforts were blatantly
use Chris Stevens’ tragic political.
death as a weapon to under-
• Clinton took full respon-
mine the political career sibility and established a
of then-Secretary of State better security program.
Hillary Clinton.
However, danger is an inher-
The Stevens family has ent part of being a diplomat
shown remarkable patience in a tumultuous region. Chris
and restraint as one investi- Stevens and his family knew
gation after another tried to the risks and were willing to
pin blame on Clinton and/ accept them.
or the Obama administration
• “It would be much more
in general. Most recently, useful for Congress to focus
late last month Republicans on providing resources
who lead the House Select for security for all State
Committee on Benghazi Department facilities around
issued an 800-page, $7 mil- the world — for increasing
lion report. It lambasted personnel, language capabil-
the State Department, the ities, for increasing staff to
Pentagon and the CIA for fail- build relationships, particu-
ing to adequately protect the larly in North Africa and the
slain diplomats and respond Middle East.”
once the attack on them was
Perhaps best of all in his
underway. Democrats on the sister’s remarks, it is refresh-
committee labeled the entire ing to be reminded of how
enterprise a witch hunt.
bright and outward-looking
Anne Stevens, sister of Chris Stevens was. His open-
Ambassador Stevens and ness to the world, his cour-
chief of pediatric rheuma- age, intelligence and sense
tology at Seattle Children’s of adventure all were exem-
Hospital, cuts through all plary. His Chinook ances-
the political gibberish in an tors would be exceptionally
interview in the June 28 issue proud.
I
onald Trump has done
something politically smart
and substantively revolutionary.
D
He is a Republican presidential
candidate running against free trade
and, effectively, free markets.
By putting trade at the top of the
conversation he elevates the issue
on which Hillary Clinton is the most
squirrelly, where her position rein-
forces the message that she will say
anything to get power.
But mostly it’s politically smart
because Donald Trump’s only shot
of winning the presidency is to
smash and replace the entire struc-
ture of the American political debate.
For the past 80 years that debate has
been about the size of government —
Republicans for less government and
more market and Democrats for more
government and less market.
If that debate structures this elec-
tion, Trump will get somewhere
between 38 and 44 percent of the
votes — where he’s been polling all
year.
Trump’s only hope is to change
the debate from size of government
to open/closed. His only hope is to
cast his opponents as the right-left
establishment that supports open bor-
ders, free trade, cosmopolitan culture
and global intervention. He would
stand as a right-left populist who sup-
ports closed borders, trade barriers,
local and nationalistic culture and an
America First foreign policy.
In an age of anxiety, that closed
posture might have a shot at winning.
On trade, for example, 60 percent
of Republicans, 49 percent of Dem-
ocrats and 50 percent of indepen-
dents believe that trade agreements
are mostly harmful, according to a
Brookings Institution/Public Religion
Research Institute study.
I personally doubt that Trump will
be able to pull off a right-left popu-
list coalition. His views on women
and minorities are unacceptable to
nearly everybody on the left. There’s
no evidence that he’s winning over
many Sanders voters or downscale
progressives.
But where Trump fails, somebody
else will succeed. And that’s where
he’s substantively revolutionary. The
old size-of-government question
was growing increasingly archaic
and obsolete. In country after coun-
try the main battle lines of debate
are evolving toward the open/closed
framework.
If you don’t like our current polit-
ical polarization, wait 10 years. One
way or another it will go away. When
the frame of debate shifts to open/
closed, sometime soon, the old coa-
litions will smash apart and new ones
AP Photo/Keith Srakocic
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a cam-
paign stop at Alumisource, a metals recycling facility in Monessen, Pa.,
on June 28. Donald Trump’s break with decades of conservative econom-
ic thinking on the value of free trade comes as the Republican Party is
increasingly relying on older, downscale white voters who are the most
skeptical of trade deals and have lost out during an age of globalization.
will form. Politics will be
Instead one Carnegie-Mel-
unrecognizable.
lon type layer of prosperity
It’s signiicant that
and innovation had grown
Trump gave his big anti-
on top of the old work-
trade speech in the Pitts-
ing-class layer, which was
burgh area. That part of
still there and in bad shape.
Western
Pennsylvania
When you’re in the
illustrates in a very con-
top layer you see why
crete way how the open/
free trade is so good. Liv-
closed debate will play out.
ing standards are rising.
Pittsburgh is a great
A study by the Peterson
David
renaissance
story.
I
Institute found that past
Brooks
recently got a tour
trade liberalization
of it from the mayor,
laws added between
Bill Peduto. We vis- If you don’t $7,100 to 12,900 in
ited a beautiful, tight
additional income to
like our
Italian community
the average house-
with family-owned
hold. A study by Peter
current
businesses stretch-
Petri and Michael
political
ing back generations.
Plummer estimates
We visited a resurg-
the Trans-Paciic
polarization, that
ing African-American
Partnership, which
community
where
Trump
opposes
wait 10
local activists were
and Clinton sort of
years.
building a cultural
opposes, would boost
center in the home of
American incomes by
the great playwright August Wilson. $131 billion.
Mostly we just saw acres and acres of
You also see how an eficient
new development: new restaurants, manufacturing sector makes it possi-
new museums, new loft-style ofice ble to divert resources into things that
spaces and several gleaming new improve the quality of life. As Neil
hospitals.
Irwin pointed out in The Times, Pitts-
Pittsburgh has come so far from burgh has lost 5,100 steel jobs since
the deindustrialization days of the 1990. But it has also gained 66,000
1970s and 1980s.
health care jobs over the same time.
But then I drove through the steel
The problem is getting people
mill towns along the Monongahela from the bottom layer to the top layer
and other rivers. The storefronts and — a 30-minute drive, but a universe
banks were boarded up, the down- away.
towns deserted. The mills are still
The prophets of closedness will
operating, but they are so eficient argue that the problem is trade. The
they’re eerily empty of human pres- prophets of openness will argue that
ence. The towns still have residents, we need the dynamism that free
but not much is going on. I drove for trade brings. We just need to be more
miles, unable to ind even a diner for aggressive in equipping people to
lunch.
thrive in that dynamic landscape. If
It occurred to me the Pittsburgh facts still matter in this debate — and
renaissance didn’t really grow up I’m not sure they do — the propo-
out of the metro Pittsburgh of old. nents of openness are massively right.
Sovereign Kingdom or little England?
By CHARLES
KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post Writers Group
ASHINGTON — Given
their arrogance, pomposity
and habitual absurdities, it is hard
not to feel a certain satisfaction
with the comeuppance that Brexit
has delivered to the unaccount-
able European Union bureaucrats
in Brussels.
W
Nonetheless, we would do well to
refrain from smug condescension.
Unity is not easy. What began in
1951 as a six-member European Coal
and Steel Community was grounded in
a larger conception of a united Europe
born from the ashes of World War II.
Seven decades into the postwar era,
Britain wants out and the EU is facing
an existential crisis.
Yet where were we Americans seven
decades into our great experiment in
continental confederation, our “more
perfect union” contracted under the Con-
stitution of 1787? At Fort Sumter.
The failure of our federal idea gave
us civil war and 600,000 dead. And we
had the advantage of a common lan-
guage, common heritage and common
memory of heroic revolutionary strug-
gle against a common (British) foe.
Europe had none of this. The European
project tries to forge the union of doz-
ens of disparate peoples, ethnicities,
languages and cultures, amid the sear-
ing memories of the two most destruc-
tive wars in history fought among and
against each other.
The result is the EU, a great idea
badly executed. The founding motive
was obvious and noble: to reconcile
the combatants of World War II, most
especially France and Germany, and
create conditions that would ensure
there could be no repetition. Onto that
was appended the more utopian vision
of a continental superstate that would
once and for all transcend parochial
nationalism.
That vision blew up
more comfortable with its
with Brexit on June 23.
cosmopolitanism and have
But we mustn’t underesti-
come to expect open bor-
mate the signiicance, and
ders, open commerce and
improbability, of the proj-
open movement of people.
ect’s more narrow, but still
They voted overwhelm-
singular, achievement —
ingly — by 3 to 1 — to
peace. It has given Europe
Remain. Leave was mainly
the most extended period
the position of an older gen-
of internal tranquility
eration no longer willing to
since the Roman Empire.
tolerate European assaults
Charles
(In conjunction, of course,
on British autonomy and
Krauthammer
with NATO, which pro-
sovereignty.
vided Europe with its
Understandably so.
Talk
American
umbrella
Here is Britain, inven-
against external threat.)
tor of the liberal idea
about
Not only is there no
and home to the mother
armed conlict among
parliaments, being
a great of instructed
European states. The
by a bunch of
very idea is inconceiv-
pastry-eating Brussels
idea
able. (Fighting between
bureaucrats on every-
the various nations has executed thing from the proper
been subcontracted to
size of pomegranates
badly.
soccer hooligans.) This
to the human rights of
on a continent where war
terrorists.
had been the norm for a millennium.
Widely mentioned, and resented,
Give the EU its due. Despite its was the immigration directive to
comical faux-national paraphernalia of admit other EU citizens near auto-
lag, anthem and useless parliament, it matically. But what pushed the Leave
has championed and advanced a trans- side over the top was less policy than
national idea that has helped curb the primacy. Who runs Britain? Amaz-
nationalist excesses that culminated in ingly, about half of the laws and reg-
two world wars.
ulations that govern British life today
Advanced not quite enough, how- come not from Westminster but from
ever. Certainly not enough to support Brussels.
its disdainful, often dismissive, treat-
Brexit was an assertion of national
ment of residual nationalisms and sovereignty and an attempt, in one fell
their democratic expressions. Despite swoop, to recover it.
numerous objections by referendum
There is much to admire in that
and parliament, which it routinely impulse. But at what cost? Among its
either ignored or circumvented, the casualties may be not just the Euro-
EU continued its relentless drive for pean project (other exit referendums
more centralization, more regulation are already being proposed) but pos-
and thus more power for its unelected sibly the United Kingdom itself. The
self.
Scots are already talking about another
Such high-handed overriding of vote for independence. And Northern
popular sentiment could go on only Ireland, which voted to remain in the
so long. Until June 23, 2016, to be EU, might well seek to unite with the
precise.
Republic.
To be sure, popular sentiment was
Talk about a great idea executed
rather narrowly divided. The most badly. In seeking a newly sovereign
prominent disparity in the British vote United Kingdom, the Brits might well
was generational. The young, hav- ind themselves having produced a lit-
ing grown up in the new Europe, are tle England.