I believe the election of Donald Trump as president could undermine the traditions and values that have ensured our peace and prosperity through the years. I know others feel differently based on their beliefs, backgrounds and values. I come to my view based on my career as a military man and as an international economist.
Yes, I have deep faith in our country and our people. Yes, U.S. democratic institutions are, as I argued a few weeks ago, broad-based and deeply-rooted. Yes, this country can survive a lot. Yes, our nation’s economy is resilient and multifaceted. But I am worried and I think it necessary to explain why the prospect of a Trump administration causes me such concern.
I admire and yet am frustrated by the work of Milton Friedman. The Nobel laureate had some of the deepest insights of any 20th century economist. And he could also be remarkably obtuse about human behavior. Friedman strongly argued that economists were scientists who should be able to separate how they did economic scholarship from their personal experiences and values. That struck me as bunk decades ago and still does. It isn’t true for me and I don’t think it true for any other economist anytime — including Friedman. If one’s experiences and values affect how one frames economic questions, then perhaps I should be explicit about where I, myself, am coming from.
I have never claimed to be “fair and balanced.” But, over 17 years now, I have written from the belief that there are multiple sides to all public policy issues and that both the political left and right have blind spots and make mistakes. My goal in this column has been to improve the level of public debate about issues rather than win people to my particular point of view. I seldom waste words explaining why I come from any particular starting point on some issue. But my disagreement with Trump’s agenda, at least as voiced during his campaign, is such that I must devote a column to backdrop. Here is why he bothers me.
I am an “internationalist” and proud of it. My mother was interested in current affairs and encouraged us to read her Time magazine. When I was 12, I won the “original orations” category of a speech contest for students of our four tiny Christian elementary schools in southwest Minnesota. My argument was that the new European Economic Community was, on the whole, a good development. I think that is still true and that point of view has only grown.
My mother, who was a Democrat largely in response to her own mother having been a Republican, did not have international experience. But she communicated a sense that international affairs were important just as she did that the treatment of African-Americans in the 1950s was a national shame.
I enlisted in the Army two weeks after my 17th birthday and, in one way or another, served as a soldier for the next 35 years. At 18, I was sorting mail at Army Post Office 09676, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a heady time to be in that country, at the height of a repressive military government but also in a historic economic breakthrough and a cultural explosion. I fell in love with another country, another culture, and still am in love 48 years later.
In the reserve phase of my military career, I was commissioned and returned to the infantry where I had started. My units that trained with other NATO soldiers from Norway, Denmark and Germany. I never participated in one of the enormous “Reforger” multinational military training exercises predicated on stopping a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, but friends did. That scenario was the subject of exercises in my officer basic and advanced courses, the Combined Armed and Services Staff School and then the Command and General Staff course. NATO was the very core of national defense for an officer of my generation.
Politically liberal friends laughed at me as a “Scoop Jackson Democrat” and said I had been brainwashed as an adolescent by reading John Noble’s memoirs of life in Stalin’s gulag, or Solzhenitzin’s “Ivan Denisovich” or Thomas Dooley’s little books about his medical work in Vietnam and Laos. Some joked about me going off to “play soldier” on weekends. But while I understood that western democracies had many faults, they were morally and economically superior to Soviet totalitarianism and that it was important for democracies to work jointly for security and prosperity.
I had been a history major before moving to economics in grad school, and the importance of trade was clear to me well before I knew how Adam Smith or David Ricardo had laid out a theory of why.
I was working on an agricultural development project in Peru just as that beautiful and tragic nation emerged from 12 years of nationalistic military dictatorship only to slip into the horrors of the Sendero Luminoso insurgency. Some of my students lived in palaces; others clung to the outside of buses to make their way from the squatter settlements where they lived to classes on a squalid public university campus.
In Brazil, where I had gone back for a semester in 1972, and in Peru in 1980-1982, I watched as bad monetary policy stoked inflations that ended in economic crisis. And as a regional economist at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve for seven years, I observed the unintended and unacknowledged genius in the institutions of monetary policy in our own country.
All the while, I have taught economics, usually part time, but sometimes full time. Of the 4,300 or so students I have had over the last 35 years, perhaps 150 or so were Muslim. So was my good Indonesian friend in grad school and my Moroccan neighbor in university housing. So was the colleague who headed the econ department at Hamline University in St. Paul before returning to her native Bangladesh and so was the Iranian colleague at St. Kate’s whose students so cherished her. So was the smart Albanian woman in the MBA class at Thrivent. Ditto for a Turkish student at Metro State who looked like he was going to faint during an exam because it was Ramadan and he had not eaten in 24 hours.
So was the brilliant young Somali woman at Augsburg who wore a full hijab and had been married at age 18 and who took pains in her first-day self-introduction to explain to her classmates that neither her dress nor marital status meant she was oppressed and that she did not need their help in being liberated, thank you! So was the quiet ethnic-Turkish feed mill manager in my “privatization” course in Bulgaria who tiptoed around the loud-mouth malt buyer who frequently opined during breaktime conversations that things would improve “once we shoot all the Jews and communists.”
So to sum up, all of my experience over decades convinces me that economic and diplomatic isolation is harmful, that the benefits of trade and commerce generally outweigh the harms, that no culture is evil. Totalitarian regimes are bad. Demagogic populism often leads people into great self-harm. Economic autocracy, or absolute self-rule, is a dangerous pipe dream.
I know that there are others with military backgrounds who cheered Hillary Clinton’s loss. I know that while virtually all economists disagree with Trump’s rhetoric, some may have chosen him as the lesser of two evils. I know how I myself think both candidates had deep character flaws and that neither was particularly strong on economics.
The bottom line is that I recoil at someone who says he would toss aside the collective security of relationships that we as a country worked to develop over 70 years and the international trade regime that we developed from lessons we learned from the Great Depression. Having experienced how we got close to fiscal sustainability in the late 1990s, only to throw it all away in 2001-2003, I detest promises to enact “the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan.”
I could go on and on.
I understand that people may disagree and distill different lessons from life experiences. I was raised a Calvinist, not a Lutheran. But readers will understand why Martin Luther’s famous statement, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” aptly describes where I am today.