Telluride celebrates Telluride

   It's true that Telluriders almost always believe that the ideal Telluride would look an awful lot like the town they saw when they first came here. For me, that magic year would be 1988. The town seemed much more free and easy back then, layed back but ready to party or play like mad at the drop of a hackysack.. Hippies danced in the park with abandon and life was full of enchantment and wonder. In other words ,I was much younger then, and whatever I was learning and experiencing at the time was easily projected in my mind out to the world surrounding me. It would not just be difficult to recreate my original Telluride, it would be impossible. You could tear down every building built since then and restore what's left to there exact 1988 glory and purpose, but there's no getting me ,or anyone else, back into our lovely well chiseled 1988 bodies and faces, let alone back into our eighties frame of mind. What's past is past, the rest is nostalgia.
   This reminds me of the Telluride Art and Architecture weekend.  I hope you made it. Maybe you'll consider coming out to a future A &A . To some extent, all the festivals on our busy calendar highlight the uniqueness and beauty of this valley and the little town that adorns it, but this one in particular celebrates Telluride for all it is and once was. To Kate Jones ,who envisioned this magic festival and with her dedicated staff, Britt Markey, and Molly Perrault ,make it happen, and to all the many talented participants, my profound gratitude.
     I could go one of two ways at this point in the column. I could use the Art and Architecture weekend to segue my thoughts on the spate of construction and destruction going on around town this summer. The problem with that train of thought is that I don't know where it's going. I suppose I could always just start in with it and see where it takes me. That could be fun. The problem is there are more serious thoughts on my mind. There are more serious issues out there . Yes ,there are worse things happening  than the noise and inconvenience caused by the construction crew down the street. There are worse things happening even then the empty lot next door that's being turned into yet another Telluride maximum square footage, three story box. In short ,there's the news from Baton Rouge, from Nice, and from Cleveland.
    As human beings we are uncomfortable with taking full blame for our actions ,or lack of action, in my case . I've never met a three year old, however adorable, that wouldn't do just about anything to avoid accountability when something gets broken ,lost, or spoiled, and there's no doubt who the culprit may be. No honey, I don't think the dog did it this time. We grow up. We grow in lots of ways, but this infantile trait tends to stay with us more tenaciously than most. We just get better at masking our need to avoid the pain that comes from blame. We can even fool ourselves, and we do.
      Whole textbooks and treatise have been written about our avoidance strategies. We transfer the blame. We project it on others. We wallow in victimhood. The greater our failings, or perceived failings, the greater our shame and quilt and the greater our urgency to pass it on. We identify a likely scapegoat, or obsess on the power and evil intentions of the perceived oppressor. The worse our enemies, the better we come off. Are you responsible for your rotten life? "Hell no" is more and more the answer as we discover that the system is surely rigged against people like me. It can't be me, it's got to be  "them".
       This sounds to me like Trumpism. It sounds a little like what all the other snake oil salesmen out there are selling too. How do you spot a successful politician? They're the ones who relieve their constituents of any necessity to find fault with themselves and move it adroitly to someone else .Wall street bankers caused the great recession. Mexicans took our jobs. Infidels corrupt our youth with their cigarettes, alcohol, short skirts, internet pornography and Coca-Cola. The cops are racist. The prison system exists to keep the black man down and enrich others. It's all claptrap! It's all cleverly designed to entrap willing minds. We'd rather believe anything but the truth. We'd rather point fingers than admit that we are all free to act for ourselves. Tell the public that they make their own beds and see how many votes you get. 
      So there you go, Cleveland, Baton Rouge, and Nice, all tied up in one pretty little bow.

Trumps creative destruction

      As a Republican I'm embarrassed and a little worried by the Trump candidacy. As an American I'm worried over the Clinton candidacy. Vote for Hillary, and ill be relieved of my embarrassment. Of course, there's still that worry factor.
      My friends on the left are not enamored with Mrs. Clinton either. I suppose, when it comes right down to it most will vote for her rather than risk four years (or more) of Donald Trump, whatever their feelings about her personally. They rightly see her as representing the unholy alliance between big business and big money, and political power brokers. Crony-Capitalism has been around longer than we've had a name for it. Madison sought to keep it in check by distributing power widely throughout government, and encouraging competition between power interests. Jefferson imagined a nation of small farmers happily handing over decision making power to larger farmers ,who would choose from amongst themselves the wisest and most virtuous to lead and govern forever more. It turns out that nothing they could do or say or pass through Congress could prevent us from going our way. Our way is to throw money at the powerful, and power to those who can spend it freely.
     Two hundred and thirty or so years later we still honor Madison's Constitution ,study it, swear our allegiance to it on occasion, but are always ready to put it aside whenever it gets in the way. 
      During the Nixon administration Arthur Schlesinger Jr. referred to the " imperial presidency" . He was concerned over Nixon's overreach, and the implications of the trend if it would continue through future administrations. He was right, of , but it's interesting that it took the presidency of this Republican, long detested by the left ,to awaken in this old New Dealer a healthy fear of supraconstitutional authority run amuck. As far as overreach goes, Nixon was not particularly unique among modern presidents. As far as Republicans go he was not particularly conservative. Nixon brought us the EPA, affirmative action, and much else that conservatives often rant about. It's worth noting that presidents are rarely the game changers we hope them to be. They must be pragmatists. They have to deal with Congress ,which controls the budget. Some trends are bigger than the office.
       This is what keeps me up at night. All the trends are against us. The arc of history is taking us in the exact wrong direction. We could benefit greatly from smarter ,smaller government but there is no indication that we are headed that way anytime soon. Our national dept is about to reach twenty trillion unaffordable dollars . The Federal reserve is unable to increase interest rates yet again because economic growth refuses to budge from its virtual nonexistence. Millions of Americans are unemployed. Millions more are underemployed. The number of food stamp enrollees has doubled since the Great recession. Meanwhile, Congress continues to hand off its law making responsibility to the agencies it has created and funds, the same agencies that add annually millions of pages of new regulations to justify their own existence while effectively stifling business growth and limiting competition.
        What will Hillary Clinton do about these trends? What would Donald Trump do? Neither appear willing to turn back power to the States, or to Congress, or dismantling the undemocratic regulatory state. Trump sees no limit to presidential power, at least not if he's the guy running things. In a strange way that is my only small ray of hope in this election. If America elects Trump it's true I will feel embarrassed, but my consolation is that he will be  true to his own personality and reach too far ,step on too many toes, fall head first into a big steaming pile of his own hubris, and promptly find himself turned out of office. I realize all that drama could get messy furthering my already considerable embarrassment, but consider the upside. At long last Republicans and Democrats will come togeather, first to get rid of the Donald, then to reach lasting reforms to prevent future presidents from exercising more authority than the Republic can handle. This would set back an eighty odd year trajectory of centralizing and consolidating executive power.
        Who knows what could come next? With reform all the rage in Washington we may even do something about that national debt. We may get serious about downsizing government, reducing wasteful regulations, eliminating wasteful programs, and allowing for real economic growth again. A really awful Trump presidency may be providentialy short . It may lead to the reversal of destructive trends. A really awful Hillary presidency will look a lot like the last eighty years and will only get us in all the deeper. So I'm hoping for Trump to win. I'm hoping he's just as bad as he looks. What is it they call this in economic theory, creative destruction? That's where I see hope. Kind of sad, isn't it?

Fractured fairytales

    Someone told me that this presidential election is God's judgment on us. The speaker wasn't even waiting for the result to be announced in November. God, they figure, is ticked off at us, and the fact we have two such flawed candidates is already all the  proof you need.
    Maybe God isn't angry at all. Maybe this is another example of the sense of humor He is sometimes credited with . I like the idea of a capricious God, like the ones in Greek mythology. It's possible he likes throwing a spanner into the works now and then just to watch us jump, something like the picture we get of Him in the Book of Job. It could be worse than this choice between Hillary and Trump, we could find ourselves covered in painful boils, like Job.
     It's been amusing to watch the  political parties that have dominated  public life over the last century and a half  tearing themselves apart over this election season. It's been amusing except when its been too painful to watch, which is about half the time. Half laugh fest, and half tearful agony, that's about the right proportion. A normal election would come with less tears, but less laughs too.
      This election didn't come out of the blue. If God is intervening then he began constructing the setup for this elaborate prank long ago. It comes  out of a backdrop of the extreme polarization that has been the dominant feature of American politics  for the last fifty years. In "the Fractured Republic" by Yuval Levin, which was published this year, this path to political tribalism over the last half century is examined and explained.                                              Yuval's premise is that Democrats and Republicans are alike in their sense of  nostalgia for the middle years of the twentieth century but mostly for much different reasons. For liberals, that was a time when government really worked, people were more accepting of its many intrusions into their lives, into business too. Business, labor, and government worked togeather to provide unprecedented economic growth that reached every tier of society, the rewards falling equally among them. For conservatives, the post war years represent an expanding economy, but also a time of social stability, an era of broadly shared values, hard work, education, thrift, and family. Conservatives are often equally nostalgic for the eighties, the Reagan years. It's considered a time of reassessment, of tax cutting and regulatory reform that and unleashing an economy that had too long been restrained by both. He also brought optimism and purpose to a nation shaken by recent social upheaval, civil strife, high inflation and stagnant wages. 
     The sad news Levin has for conservatives is that those "city on a hill" Reagan years won't be coming back anytime soon.  That moment has passed. Clearing up today's problems will require twenty-first century solutions. Liberals need to get with the program as well. The fifties and sixties are even less likely to return , and anyhow nostalgia for the Buddy Holly years is seriously misplaced . The economy was on fire at that time, and wages saw real growth, but a recent world war had devastated the other major economies. America found itself producing half the world's manufactured goods. There was room to grow and prosper because we were what was left when the fighting was over. It's popular to write that during these peak years of union power, wages, relative to inflation, were also at there peak, and the middle class reached a sort of nadir. From that day till this ,middle class Americans would see their purchasing power steadily decrease. That's not even close to being true. The middle-class may have shrunk, but most of the former middle class have moved upward rather than descending the other direction. The purchasing power of today's American is far in advance of our parents and grandparents, something like comparing an old fashioned rotary phone to the miraculous computers we talk into, and do a hundred other things with today.
      Levin contends that a romanticized and fallacies picture of the past cripples both sides of the political divide , preventing them from carefully accessing current challenges and reaching solutions to meet them. It also hampers the parties from appreciating the strengths of the other, and cooperating despite their differences.
    Most of all Levin regrets that over the course of the last century the United States has inexorably moved power toward the center, toward federal bureaucrats, toward the Whitehouse (did I mention that Levin is libertarian?).  He calls instead for a recommitment to subsidiarity, which is placing power ever closer to the people. Top down solutions that may have worked well for earlier generations are clearly not working today. Or we could join old Job and learn to live with boils.