Find the autocrat: Part 2

The mainstream media have a new favorite word: autocrat (used maybe even more frequently than their other new favorite term: alt-right).

This morning Bloomberg ran as the lead article on its website a piece entitled Modern Democracy Has Plenty of Trump Precedents by one Joshua Kurlantzick. The article argues that Donald Trump is an autocrat (this judgment seems a tad premature since he was elected less than a month ago and has not yet taken office) and compares him to other well-known autocrats around the world.

Mr Kurlantzick starts out:

According to the monitoring group Freedom House, democracy has been on the decline worldwide since the late 2000s, with the rise of elected autocrats — legitimately elected leaders who then undermine democratic institutions and culture — a major reason for freedom’s ebb. ... [These autocrats are] indeed deeply devoted to themselves and their images, making their administrations reliant on their own personal influence. And in office, they usually conform less to policy orthodoxies than politicians with traditional backgrounds.

I cannot think of a better example of someone who undermined democratic institutions, made his administration reliant on his own personal influence, and did not conform to policy orthodoxies than President Obama, who in the last 4 years has attempted to rule unilaterally, through "the pen and the phone," using executive orders and international agreements not submitted to the Senate for ratification, and encouraging his party to employ such unorthodox and undemocratic maneuvers as the reconciliation process and the nuclear option to ram through his legislative agenda and judicial nominees.

Mr Kurlantzick then proceeds to critique the way autocrats use the media:

What else do the elected autocrats have in common? They usually win elections in part by dominating the media, sometimes by buying media outlets or having allies who do so.

Mr Kurlantzick must have in mind the way Hillary Clinton's campaign sought to win the recent election by manipulating the media, for example, by having her plant in CNN, Donna Brazile, supply her with questions that CNN moderators were going to ask during a subsequent debate.

Then, Mr Kurlantzick discusses how autocrats corrupt the civil service:

In office, elected autocrats try to slowly suffocate the civil service, military bureaucracy, and other government networks that are supposed to be apolitical and which normally provide continuity across presidential administrations. They substitute clientelism for professionalism.

Here, Mr Kurlantzick must have in mind the kind of transformation that takes place when an apolitical civil service agency like the IRS is turned into a weapon to target conservative groups.

Mr Kurlantzick concludes with some fantasies from his own imagination:

It’s not hard to imagine that, as president, Trump would vocally attack judges who decided against his administration or try to stack the U.S. Department of Justice with allies whose primary qualification is loyalty.

(In other words, Bloomberg treats as news things that this guy "imagines." How embarrassing.)

Mr Kurlantzick, when you talk about attacking judges, do you have in mind the kind of attack that President Obama made on the Supreme Court when he criticized the Citizens United decision during his State of the Union address (causing Justice Alito to shake his head and mutter "Not true!")? And, when it comes to stacking the Justice Department "with allies whose primary qualification is loyalty," have you ever heard of Eric Holder, Mr Kurlantzick?

In other words, Mr Kurlantzick, if you are looking for autocrats who undermine democracy and do not abide by the rule of law, maybe a better place to start is with the Democrat Party, and President Obama and Mrs Clinton, than with Donald Trump.

The two best articles I've read on the recent campaign

The two best articles I've read on the operational and high-tech aspects of Trump's recent campaign are:

Joshua Green's profile of Steve Bannon in Bloomberg.

Steven Bertoni's profile of Jared Kushner in Forbes.

Both articles make my analysis in earlier blog posts sound like child's play. Very good reporting, Steven and Joshua.

Thiel's opinion of Obergefell

One reason why Donald Trump might be willing to consider Obergefell "settled" is because he may have been persuaded to think that way by Peter Thiel, a gay man and Trump's biggest supporter in Silicon Valley.

Peter, I would like to know what you think of the substantive due process legal reasoning of the majority opinion of Obergefell. My guess is that you agree with Scalia and Thomas and think that it is "pure applesauce." Which says nothing about your support for gay marriage.

Creative destruction in the most recent campaign

It was considered a given throughout the entire course of the recent presidential campaign that the Democrats had an enormous edge in technology over the Republicans in the areas of data science, analytics, and the set of technologies required to sway voters through social media. For example, Bloomberg reported in 2013:

During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an under-appreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. ... Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. ... Wagner’s team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook, e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength.

The Democrats' edge in these disciplines turns out to have been much less important in 2016. Much more significant was the Trump campaign's ability to produce and disseminate information and narratives across the internet, an expertise in no small degree due to the presence in the Trump campaign of Steve Bannon.

Bannon, a Hollywood media mogul, had become an expert over the years in the art of creating and promoting memes and narratives through the packaging and releasing of films and books across a wide variety of media channels, including through Breitbart news and even the New York Times. This was yet another change in the landscape that the Democrats turned out to be completely blind to. They smugly assumed they had the technology advantage. The election last week was a rude awakening. They must now acknowledge that they have suddenly been completely outflanked/leapfrogged by a revolutionary new approach.

This sudden outflanking/leapfrogging of an old technology by a new technology is precisely what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was trying to capture when he coined the term "creative destruction" (schöpferische Zerstörung). As Wikipedia informs us::

According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".

In other words, the Democrats' big data operation is just another example of a high-tech company grown lazy and complacent. Its incumbent technology is suddenly obsoleted by the arrival on the scene of a brash new startup. The old darling was Google's Eric Schmidt; this year's new darlings are Bannon and right-wing Peter Thiel, who, as with so many of his VC bets, made a high-risk (though calculated) wager on a revolutionary new approach and, to the dismay of all the ultra-liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to keep pace, won big yet again.

Expect the technology war between the two parties to continue and escalate.

Find the autocrat

David Remnick begins his latest interminable bloviation in the high-brow New Yorker with the following paragraph:

The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door.

The definition of autocracy is "a system of government by one person with absolute power." Considering that in the last 4 years, Obama has attempted to rule with "the pen and the phone" through unilateral executive orders and international agreements not submitted to the Senate for approval as treaties, I think the term "autocrat" is much better applied to him, than to Donald Trump.

Trump and Obergefell

During one of the debates, Mr Trump stated that he was "looking to appoint judges very much in the mold of [the late] Justice [Antonin] Scalia." Separately, in an interview with Chris Wallace, Mr Trump said that he would consider appointing judges who would overturn the recent Obergefell decision:

WALLACE: But — but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?

TRUMP: I would strongly consider that, yes.

Now Politico reports:

Donald Trump said he is “fine with” same-sex marriage ... “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And I’m — I’m fine with that,” he said.

As I have noted several times in this blog (for example, here), Scalia strongly dissented from the Obergefell decision, not because he was opposed to gay marriage per se, but because he considered the majority's use of substantive due process to be a judicial Putsch:

I write to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy. ... [I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. ... But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. ... This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776; the freedom to govern themselves. ... This is a naked judicial claim to legislative -- indeed, super-legislative -- power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional provision agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices' "reasoned judgment." A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Justice Thomas in a separate dissent adds:

I have elsewhere explained the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause as a font of substantive rights. ... . It distorts the constitutional text, which guarantees only whatever “process” is “due” before a person is deprived of life, liberty, and property. ... Worse, it invites judges to do exactly what the majority has done here — “‘roa[m] at large in the constitutional field’ guided only by their personal views” as to the “‘fundamental rights’” protected by that document. ... . By straying from the text of the Constitution, substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority. ... That a “bare majority” of this Court ... is able to grant [the] wish of the petitioners, wiping out with a stroke of the keyboard the results of the political process in over 30 States, based on a provision that guarantees only “due process” is but further evidence of the danger of substantive due process.

An appropriate, intellectually consistent position for Mr Trump would have been:

Whether same-sex marriage should be legal is a matter that should be decided by the people and their legislatures. Although I personally support gay-marriage [if, in fact, that is his position, which would probably surprise many of his religious supporters], I disagree with the legal reasoning of the recent Obergefell majority opinion, which used a substantive due process argument to discover a non-existent right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment. Therefore, I would support the appointment of judges who would overturn Obergefell and remand consideration of that issue to its rightful place in the Congress and the state legislatures, where gay marriage would likely be kept legal, given the current tenor of public opinion.

But that is not what Mr Trump said. That he cannot see the contradiction between a.) his promises to appoint judges who are in the mold of Scalia and therefore might consider overturning Obergefell and b.) his statement that the question of gay marriage has been settled by the Obergefell decision is disturbing and does not bode well for his ability to appoint judges in the Scalia mold.

I must admit that another intellectually defensible position for Mr Trump would be to say that, although he disagrees with the reasoning of the Obergefell decision, he would be willing to see the decision upheld out of consideration for the principle of stare decisis, the legal principle that subsequent courts should accept a rule established by a prior decision for the sake of consistency, even if the later court finds the legal arguments underpinning that rule faulty. Of course, Mr Trump was elected on the promise that he would overturn (and not preserve) many of the enactments of the Democratic Party and the judges that party appointed, so it is unknown how such a position would be received. It is unknown whether Justice Scalia would have been willing to apply stare decisis to let Obergefell stand. In its article on stare decisis, Wikipedia observes:

Justice Antonin Scalia explained the conservative view of stare decisis in a concurring and dissenting opinion joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas in 2007:

"Stare decisis is not an inexorable command" or "a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision." It is instead "a principle of policy," and this Court has a "considered practice" not to apply that principle of policy "as rigidly in constitutional as in nonconstitutional cases." This Court has not hesitated to overrule decisions offensive to the First Amendment, a "fixed star in our constitutional constellation," if there is one, -- and to do so promptly where fundamental error was apparent. Just three years after our erroneous decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis , the Court corrected the error in Barnette. Overruling a constitutional case decided just a few years earlier is far from unprecedented.

Justice Scalia then set forth in a footnote to the above paragraph a remarkable list of roughly 20 significant examples where the U.S. Supreme Court has discarded stare decisis in favor of correcting a mistake.

I hope in a later blog post to have more to say on Trump and the principle of stare decisis as it applies outside the decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Democrats' coup d'état through faits accomplis and judicial Putsch has failed

President Obama governed domestically by executive order and internationally by agreements that do not have the force of treaty. The most notable examples of domestic executive orders were:

• the Clean Power Plan in the area of climate change,
• the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) in the area of immigration,
• the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) again in the area of immigration.

The most notable examples of international agreements that do not have the force of treaty were:

• the Paris Agreement again in the area of climate change,
• the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement, which attempts to slow down Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons (although it may only simply serve to guarantee that Iran eventually acquires such weapons).

All of these executive orders and international agreements do not have any legislative sanction and can be reversed by a future president "at the stroke of a pen," a phrase we have heard repeatedly this week.

Obama's strategy was to use executive power to change conditions on the ground. Interested parties (for example, power plants or immigration authorities) would be forced to comply with and adapt to the new executive directives. Until last Tuesday night, it was anticipated that President Obama would then hand off the presidency to Hillary Clinton, who would reaffirm Obama's executive orders and international agreements. By the time a Republican president took office in the distant future, the Democrats hoped, the changes would have taken root so deeply that reversing them would, practically speaking, be impossible. They would be a fait accompli.

Legal actions prevented Obama from enforcing some of these executive actions. For example, 27 states took legal action to stop the Clean Power Plan and the United States Supreme Court has ordered the EPA to halt enforcement of the plan until a lower court rules in the lawsuit against the plan. Likewise, 26 states took legal action to enjoin implementation of both DAPA and DACA expansion and Judge Andrew S. Hanen has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the program from going into effect while that legal action proceeds. These lawsuits certainly were obstacles. Nevertheless, if Obama could pack the courts with judicial appointees who would defer to the executive branch and affirm the legal force of his executive actions and international agreements, he could overcome these legal challenges.

The most important judicial appointment the Democrats hoped to make was the replacement of Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. It was envisioned that Hillary would be elected and the Democrats would retake the Senate. Then, Hillary would submit a new nominee and the Democratic Senate, not having a filibuster-proof majority, would use the nuclear option to confirm that nominee, thereby replacing the most conservative justice on the court with a compliant liberal and changing the balance on the court for decades. For example, the Supreme Court's order to the EPA to halt enforcement of the Clean Power Plan resulted from a 5-4 decision, with Scalia voting to halt enforcement; a Hillary-appointed justice presumably would vote the other way, flipping the decision. What's more, it had been the ferocious Italian badger Scalia, who over the years had so clearly identified the dangers posed to the American constitutional order by such pernicious legal doctrines as substantive due process. For example, in his dissent from the recent Obergefell decision, wherein the Court invented a right to same-sex marriage, basing its opinion on a substantive due process interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Scalia wrote:

I write to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy. ... [I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. ... But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. ... This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776; the freedom to govern themselves. ... This is a naked judicial claim to legislative -- indeed, super-legislative -- power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional provision agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices' "reasoned judgment." A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. (emphasis added)

Note: For a full discussion of the Obergefell decision and substantive due process in general, see my blog post here.

If the Democrats could somehow manage to forge a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and that liberal majority (a majority of an unelected committee of nine) could then wield such malleable legal principles as the substantive due process argument to obtain the results they wanted, the Democrats could manage to create a form of government whereby the American people would be tyrannized over by a thin elite of Democratic politicians and jurists, enforcing their will through the Presidency, the highest court in the land, and the enormous Federal bureaucracy. The Democrats could take an enormous step in this direction by replacing Scalia with a more liberal voice.

Obama also used strict party line votes and abused the legislative reconciliation process to ram through Obamacare without bipartisan consensus. Thus, although Obamacare did technically have legislative sanction, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, it was passed with no support from Republican senators and congressmen. Thus, a Republican Congress and a new Republican president would feel no compunction about repealing it. Once again the Democrats' hope was that, by the time a Republican Congress and President got the opportunity to repeal or substantially modify the legislation, Obamacare would be so thoroughly entrenched that changing its provisions would be too difficult. Obamacare, too, would then have become a fait accompli.

The Republicans must make a concerted effort to make clear to the American people that any chaos that results from the overturning of all these executive orders, international agreements without the force of treaties, Supreme Court decisions based on faulty legal arguments, and legislation passed without bipartisan support is not the responsibility of the incoming Republicans, but of Obama and the Democrats, who, for the last 8 years, have attempted to govern by circumventing the legislative branch of government and the rights of the states, an extraordinary abuse of power never imagined by our constitutional system. In fact, the election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress has narrowly averted the consummation of a silent revolution that was underway. Democrats could not get the cooperation of the Republican Congress or Republican state governments, so, instead of seeking consensus, as our constitutional system of checks and balances requires, they hoped to bypass the legislative branch and the states entirely by permanently occupying the presidency and packing the courts with judges who would defer to the executive. Then, they would use the crushing force of the Federal bureaucracy to enforce their vision. When one considers the revolutionary nature of the changes they were attempting, all the pleas this week from Obama and Clinton that Mr Trump abide by the "rule of law" are the height of hypocrisy.

Consider, for example, the lawlessness of Obama's executive orders in the area of immigration. Courts have found that the DAPA executive order violates the rulemaking requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and that the Immigration and Nationality Act "flatly does not permit" deferred action.

Or consider the lawlessness of Obama's Clean Power Plan executive order. Of this plan, Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama's professor of constitutional law at Yale and a man who has been mentioned frequently as a potential Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court, wrote:

I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means. ... After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority. ... [T]he EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not. (emphasis added)

JV DeLong in an article in Forbes describes the lawless Democratic strategy:

EPA also practices government by fait accompli. In their petition for a stay of the CPP [Clean Power Plan] rule, the utilities described the aftermath of a Supreme Court victory they won last year:

The day after [the Supreme] Court ruled ... that EPA had violated the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) in enacting its rule regulating fossil fuel-fired plants . . . EPA boasted in an official blog post that the Court’s decision was effectively a nullity. Because the rule had not been stayed during the years of litigation, EPA assured its supporters that ‘the majority of power plants are already in compliance or well on their way to compliance.’ Then, in reliance on EPA’s representation that most power plants had already fully complied, the D.C. Circuit responded to this Court’s remand by declining to vacate the rule that this Court had declared unlawful. . . . In short, EPA extracted ‘nearly $10 billion a year’ in compliance from power plants before this Court could even review the rule, ... and then successfully used that unlawfully-mandated-compliance to keep the rule in place even after this Court declared that the agency had violated the law.

In the CPP litigation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that EPA had the same game plan in mind – force expensive compliance during the leisurely course of appeal, and then contend that things have become so convoluted that there is no going back. It is the strategy of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, not just of EPA.

Finally, consider how Obama, instead of seeking ratification of significant, formal international agreements as treaties in the United States Senate, as he is constitutionally required to do, sought to bypass the Senate entirely because he knew his agreements would not garner the 2/3 of the votes required for treaty ratification. For his agreement with the Iranians Obama instead sought validation from the United Nations, an international body that has no sovereign power in the United States. This is a simply extraordinary example of an attempt to circumvent the rules of government laid out by the American Constitution and to substitute for the prerogatives of the Senate the authority of a super-national body! Of Obama's actions, Fred Fleitz writes in the National Review:

Knowing that a bipartisan majority of Congress opposed the nuclear deal and that the U.S. Senate would never ratify it as a treaty, the Obama administration arranged to go around the Senate by negotiating the deal as an executive agreement endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. Because Security Council resolutions are binding on all U.N. members, it could therefore be argued that the nuclear deal was binding on the United States even though it had not been ratified by the Senate. But that is not how our constitutional order works. American presidents historically have decided which international agreements are to be treated as treaties, but the Iran deal specified that it be ratified by the Iranian parliament. If President Obama wanted to make a long-term international agreement binding on the United States, he needs consent from Congress. Anything else is a serious affront to the Constitution, and no U.N. endorsement changes that.

Of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation writes:

While Presidents should have a certain amount of discretion to choose the legal form of international agreements they are negotiating, President Obama has placed his desire to achieve an international environmental win above governmental comity and historical U.S. treaty practice. Major environmental treaties that have significant domestic impacts should not be developed and approved by the executive alone. An agreement with far-reaching domestic consequences like the Paris Protocol will lack democratic legitimacy unless the Senate or Congress as a whole, representing the will of the American people, gives its approval.

Thus, it is not the lawlessness of Trump we need to worry about. It is not Trump who over the last 8 years has been governing unconstitutionally, but rather Obama and the Democrats! Say what you will about the loutishness and lack of qualifications of Donald Trump, a man for whom I did not vote myself. His election has prevented a thin layer of lawless (and, apparently, thoroughly corrupt) Democratic elites, who were packing the courts, manipulating the vast and crushing power of Federal bureaucracies like the EPA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and disregarding the constitutionally guaranteed prerogatives of the Senate, and who were also enabled by a compliant and naive left-wing press, from perpetrating a silent coup d'état on the American people. In trying to work their mischief, these Democrats have honed powerful new tools like executive orders, international agreements without the force of treaties, the nuclear option (which ends the filibuster and undermines bipartisan comity in the Senate), the reconciliation process, and substantive due process. The Democrats may now argue that the Republicans should refrain from using these tools (and they may be right). But, it must always be remembered that it was ruthless Democrats who first perfected their use. What incentive do Republicans now have to refrain from using these tools when they know that Democrats like the absolutely shameless Harry Reid, if they return to power, will not hesitate to take these tools up again?

So, now, hopefully, the first thing Mr Trump will do is replace Justice Scalia with a justice in the Scalia tradition, thereby shoring up the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court.

Aside: All I can say is that the Democrats had better pray for the extended good health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice whom smug liberals have named The Notorious RBG. Their haughty gloating may have been premature. If she should pass away or become mentally incompetent to serve on the Supreme Court -- and her recent "ill-advised" comments about Mr Trump have given signs that her mind is beginning to go -- Mr Trump will get to use the nuclear option to replace her with yet another justice in the Scalia mold, thereby tipping the balance of the Court back in favor of jurists who do not believe in the Democrats' tyrannical circumvention of the legislative branch. How ironic it would be if her last thought, as she passed into the darkness, were the insults she, confident of a Hillary victory, had flung so stupidly against the man who will appoint her replacement.

Subsequent to this Supreme Court appointment, I hope that Mr Trump will rapidly proceed to the dismantling of Obama's unilateral executive orders and international agreements, emphasizing to the American people that any chaos that ensues from this dismantling must be laid squarely at the feet of Obama, who for 8 years has ruled as a lawless tyrant.

Inclusiveness for all! (except for the almost 50% of the population who voted for Trump)

A FoxNews article reports that Matt Maloney, founder of GrubHub, sent out a letter to his employees bemoaning the election of The Donald. Here are some excerpts:

While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants, and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior and these views have no place at GrubHub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination. We have worked for years cultivating a culture of support and inclusiveness. ... I firmly believe that we must bring together different perspectives to continue innovating -- including all genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual, cultural or ideological preferences. ... We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

When Mr Maloney talks about inclusiveness, what he really means is inclusiveness for everyone except for those in Hillary's basket of deplorables. For example, his inclusiveness presumably would not extend to those who, like Brendan Eich (see here and here and here), donated to the campaign in favor of Proposition 8, because, perhaps on religious grounds, they believed that gay marriage should be banned in California. Until quite recently, holding the belief that marriage was an institution between a man and a woman was unremarkable in California. Now, apparently, holding such beliefs in good faith in a workplace like GrubHub means that one needs to fear, like Brendan Eich, for his/her job.

Mr Maloney talks about the need to include all ideological perspectives. But, when confronted with a truly different ideological perspective, Trumpism, for example, Mr Maloney stomps his foot like a spoiled child, and insists that it be removed from his presence. He will not tolerate it, he avers, in the very same letter in which he urges tolerance for all ideological preferences. The utterly illogical nature of his statement does not seem to occur to him, so blinded is he by his rage that the election did not turn out the way he and all his liberal San Francisco friends imagined it would (it should, it had to).

But maybe the reason it turned out so differently than you imagined, Mr Maloney, is because your own intolerant attitudes have caused so many people in your employ to conceal their true ideological preferences out of abject fear that you would react to them in precisely the manner you have. You have no clue how undemocratic and even totalitarian the tone of your letter is. This is the kind of talk one would have expected during the lowest days of the Terror during the French Revolution. An employee doesn't believe in gay marriage? Well then, to the guillotine with him!

Imagine the chilling effect that your email had on all those employees of yours who actually did vote for Donald Trump. And yes, Mr Maloney, even in San Francisco, that group likely amounted to as many as 20 percent of your employees. According to the Fox News article, you felt vindicated in having written your letter because many of your employees personally thanked you for the note. But, given the threatening and intolerant tone of your email, do you really think that the fraction of your employees who actually voted for Trump would dare to express any objection to it?

Finally, to all stockholders in GrubHub, I give this piece of advice: sell your shares now. If there is one hard and fast rule that every CEO should abide by it is: KEEP POLITICS OUT OF THE WORKPLACE! That Mr Maloney was unable to control his personal rage and allowed it to cause him to violate this fundamental rule calls into question his ability to exercise calm judgment while conducting GrubHub's business in the heat of battle. This does not bode well for the long-term success of the company.

It's probably best to just end it all right now

David Remnick in the New Yorker:

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

Mr Remnick, it's probably best to just end it all right now.

Oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments

Oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that is taking place on the floors of software companies across Silicon Valley this morning! (Except maybe at Peter Thiel's office.)

Barrons reported that donations to Hillary from employees at so-called millennial firms (the Barrons Next 50 index) outpaced donations to The Donald from those same firms by a factor of 50-1. How can all these advanced thinkers possibly continue to live in a country that elected The Donald?!?

I work with two people, D and T, both very intelligent software engineers. T is one of those very skilled high-tech workers who have immigrated legally from China.

D says to T: "After last night's election, I think I am going to have to move to China."

I comment: "T is probably thinking: Be my guest."

T, who struggles sometimes with English, simply smiles and nods her head in agreement.

Congratulations Ro!

Congratulations to Ro Khanna on his landslide victory in the 17th Congressional District, my district. Silicon Valley is finally free of that old Democratic millstone Mike Honda!

Potential Trump cabinet appointees?

Maybe Victor Hanson for Secretary of Defense or State and Peter Thiel at Treasury?

Democratic hypocrisies coming soon to a theater near you

The Democrats will insist that elections do not necessarily have consequences. For weeks, Democrats have been insisting that The Donald should accept the will of the people as expressed through the outcome of the presidential election; now, like Peter Beinart this morning, they will insist that some things "are too precious to be put to a popular vote."

The Democrats will begin to appreciate the virtues of obstructionism. Alternatively, they will praise the virtues of bipartisanship.

After having pushed through Obamacare by a strict party line vote, the Democrats will bewail legislation passed along strict party line votes.

The Democrats will defend the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees. For close to a year now, the Democrats have threatened to use the nuclear option to fill Antonin Scalia's seat on the SCOTUS as soon as Hillary was elected and they retook control of the Senate; now, Democrats will be outraged and cry foul when The Donald nominates a conservative and the Republicans use the nuclear option to fill Antonin Scalia's seat on the SCOTUS.

After 4 years of Obama using the phone and the pen to govern by executive order, the Democrats will bemoan presidential government by executive order.

After allowing President Obama to foist on the United States international deals on climate change and Iran's nuclear weapons without Senate ratification, the Democrats will now insist that all international deals be ratified as treaties by the Senate.

After having insisted for quite some time now that only Black Lives Matter, Democrats will suddenly realize that they need to pay attention to the plight of white, middle class voters, too (just so long as those deplorable troglodytes don't adopt extreme positions, like opposing gay marriage, or objecting to abortion on demand, or something equally benighted).

After Hillary and her PACs spent twice as much as Donald, the Democrats will insist once again that we must pass campaign finance reform.

After having been the beneficiary of nonstop, blatantly partisan, pro-Hillary media coverage during the campaign, the Democrats will once again denounce the biased political coverage of FoxNews.

After defending the rapist Bill Clinton for decades, the Democrats will find unfit for office a president who is guilty of serious sexual offenses against women.

And last, but not least: After not uttering a word of criticism during 8 years of Obama megadeficits, Paul Krugman will become a fanatical deficit hawk.

Full disclosure: I voted for neither Crooked Hillary nor for The Donald.

I can't believe how stupid Trump and Hillary are

Where was Peter Thiel when Trump needed him? SFGate has published a tweet from Edward Snowden refuting Donald Trump's desperate claim that the FBI could not have reviewed the emails on Huma's server so quickly. Every second year CS student knows that comparing hashes was the obvious way to eliminate all duplicate emails. Interestingly, SFGate seems to think Snowden's remarks are the brilliant insight of some great genius.

Of course, Trump's ignorance is matched by Hillary's, who (along with her lawyers, ferchrissakes?) thought that her server was secure because it was "on property guarded by the Secret Service."

And we are going to elect one of these two buffoons to be leader of the free world.

New pieces of shit

One day back in my hippy days, I got into a heated philosophical discussion with my parents. I told them that they were "overly materialistic." Gesticulating around the room, I shouted "Look around you at all these possessions that you have accumulated. They are just pieces of shit." Presumably, my point was that I was morally superior to them because I cared nothing for the base, physical things in life, but instead had my mind's eye firmly set on objects in the higher spiritual plane.

So, for the rest of her life, whenever I acquired any new possession -- a new car, or a new piece of furniture, or expensive new fishing gear -- my mother would say to me: "Oh, so you've acquired some new pieces of shit, huh?"

My mother has been dead for several years, rest her soul. But, this morning, as I stood in our backyard admiring the new teak patio furniture that had just been delivered to our house, she called out from the grave "Ah, I see you've acquired some new pieces of shit." Touché, Mom.