And why it cannot do it. You would imagine that getting its clock cleaned in the mid-term Congressional elections would have the GOP moving fast to dump Dumb Don. And to begin the complex business of repositioning itself as the engine of American business, firing up growth and high-value jobs for decades to come.
As Publius showed in The Growth and Development Party (GDP) fifteen months ago, the basic proposition is simple.
The GOP must restate liberalism for our Information Age. And act on its restatement. Now.
It must start with the bedrock of liberalism: The job of the state is to ensure that markets are open and transparent enough to give every citizen a shot at wealth creation, whether it’s buying a house or building a giga corp.
To understand how liberalism works in the Information Age, Publius took the great 1964 work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, and applied it to David Ricardo’s timeless Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. This produced the next step in liberalism: how open and transparent markets must work when information velocities are going through the roof and information costs are going through the floor.
Publius then created a McLuhan-inspired Information Cost-Velocity Curve (ICVC) along which all nations must shift if they are to gain, and keep, Ricardian comparative advantages.
The ICVC has dominated all human organizations for all of history. Everything that fell off the Curve, from the Roman Empire to Pan Am, vanished. Nothing in their forms or structures can be recreated. Except in a museum. The new GOP must ensure that we are not in that museum.
Keeping America ahead of the ICVC means, as Publius wrote two and a half years ago in American Business Needs Four Guarantees, that the liberal state must guarantee us four things:
First, that we can move our goods more efficiently than any nation on earth.
Second, that we can move our information more efficiently than any nation on earth.
Third, that our labor force is the healthiest in the world.
Fourth, that our labor force is the best educated in the world.
Failure in any one of the Four Guarantees is crippling. But it is evident to anyone with a brain that the United States today is failing in all four. Reversing these failures in parallel is the goal of Publius’ Growth and Development Party. To give America a way forward, the GOP must adapt the GDP's liberal principles and do it quickly. If this means dumping Dumb Don, so be it.
Critically, we in business don’t very much care how the Four Guarantees are met. This gives the GOP lots of latitude in its strategy. Charter schools? Vouchers? Public schools? Who cares? Just bring us the results when we hire people. The same thing with healthcare. We want results! Obamacare, Trumpcare, who cares? Just bring us the price-performance that Canadians get. We will use our monster savings to improve our standard of living. (See Publius on What Don’t The Trumpistas Get About Canada?)
There are certain GDP guidelines to which the reformed, liberal GOP must adhere if it is to be successful. The Four Guarantees must have:
The least possible cost.
The least possible government involvement to minimize taxpayer load.
The simplest possible execution.
The maximum employment potential.
The biggest impact on Gross Domestic Product.
What matters is that if the Four Guarantees don’t happen, or happen only piecemeal, we lose market share. We lose jobs and stand aside as our economy unwinds. Wealth creation? Forget about it.
As Walmart and Apple show us every day, putting goods and services together with ever-cheaper, ever-faster information on the ICVC allows us to optimize supply chains in ways that were unthinkable only a few decades ago. The combination means that Ricardian comparative advantage today comes from a powerful and cost-effective information infrastructure. Dumb Don's import taxes are not optimized for the ICVC and they attack this information-optimized process that is the core of our national strength. (See Publius on Dumb Don and Walmart and Pay More! Live Worse!) Only someone who knows absolutely nothing about business would even think of them.
Making a GDP-compliant GOP should be doable in just a few weeks of hard thinking. Plenty of time to roll out the new platform for the 2020 election and retake the country by storm. Indeed, Publius’ Smart Policies show how easy it is to do this.
But, there is no way the GOP can make the cut. As Publius observed in Our Constitutional Crisis nearly three years ago, the GOP began to fall apart when the Tea Party was founded in 2002 and started highjacking GOP ballot lines. The emergence of the Freedom Caucus in 2016 created the highly unstable three-party GOP coalition that we have now. And which has killed off two GOP House Speakers in a row (see Publius on Exeunt Omnes).
The result was policy incoherence on an epic scale. Today, the GOP's platform is just a mish-mash of discontinuities that no one in the GOP can explain. As Publius predicted Don Trump would in February 2016, our fountain of gibberish grabbed the opportunity that this instability offered and ran with it.
But, Trump came away the loser.
Swirling in a vortex of Trump's confusion, misdirection and intellectual incontinence, the GOP coalition lost six House seats in 2016 and another forty in 2018, a staggering setback in the chamber that initiates and approves all money bills. Trump’s GOP lost two Senate seats in 2016 and regained them in 2018, for a net zero.
Trump’s list of accomplishments are all negative (see Publius on President Zero).
He was thrown hard by Canada’s Justin Trudeau who, not for nothing, is a judoka. To get Don to agree to the NAFTA rewrite, Trudeau offered Dumb Don the same concession on dairy products that Canada gave to all members of the Trans Pacific Pact which Trump had rejected only twenty-one months earlier. Don went down. Huh?
Don’s Iran policy collapsed when Russia and The Center of Everything (China in Chinese) used it as a tool for increasing their influence there. Iran, Roosevelt would have told the Great Dumb One, must be the fulcrum of U.S. policy in the Middle East for reasons that the Greeks have understood since Marathon (See Publius on We Need Iran and Does the Middle East Have a Future). Alexander got it. All the Roman Emperors got it. The Ottomans got it. The British got it. Obama got it. What did Don not get?
For Vladimir Putin, Don’s self-inflicted setback in Iran was especially important because Putin foolishly reduced Syria to rubble and stuck Russia’s tiny economy with the staggering cost of rebuilding the place. (See Publius on Putin the Small Stumbles in Syria.)
Our Dumb Dude further supported Putin in Europe by undermining NATO (see Publius on Can the EU Survive?) and forcing the Euros to consider creating their own army while managing the destabilizing forces of Brexit, southern Europe's fiscal collapse and Eastern Europe's turn to Putin.
Don got badly outplayed by Kim Jong-Un because the Dumb Guy didn’t understand the first thing about North Korea (see Publius on What North Korea is REALLY Worried About) and allowed himself to be made to look a fool.
Most recently Dumb Don has been slammed to the ground by Saudi Arabia’s top boss, Mohammed bin Salman (see Publius on We CAN be Bought).
Our international reputation is in the trash heap. As are all the sacrifices made by so many Americans since the Zimmerman Telegram to create a peaceful and prosperous world order.
Dumb Don loves to call his tax policy a success. But, what is it that voters should like about being told, “Hold onto your cash. I’m putting your taxes on your credit card. I know you’ll love to pay the interest”?
For the GOP leadership, there is an added problem with this. The guy telling voters that, like it or not, they will pay their taxes at interest for decades to come has been forcing Americans to pay his federal taxes for him all of his adult life. Don doesn’t pay federal taxes so your interest payments will not be his problem.
Also, for reasons known only to itself, the GOP Coalition allowed a man unable to read, write or count to take its 2016 nomination. Indeed, the GOP leadership knew full well, as Publius demonstrated that it did before the 2016 election (see Publius on Dumb Don and Learning to Count with Don Trump), that Don has problems thinking. He sets policy in incoherent, syntax-free Tweets which are the Planck Length of intellection. He is capable of nothing more.
The result is the endless series of Executive Office management farces predicted by Publius in The Trump Management Protocol (TruMP).
For the GOP Coalition to drain and cure this abscess and build a winning, GDP-compliant policy in time for the next election is an impossibility.
The GOP must face the fact that it is the Whig Party of our time: doomed to obsolescence.
While the path forward is there and easy to see, the party of Dumb Don is, well, dumb.
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