The economy doesn’t — and shouldn’t — define us.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/FrankBruni »

If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can read it here.

Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Mary Cybulski/Paramount Pictures

Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump’s election was in many ways born of disbelief.

For a while the media didn’t believe that his 2016 candidacy would go anywhere, and he made enormous headway by the time the necessary investigations and takedowns of him came.

Republican leaders and his rivals for the party’s nomination didn’t believe that he’d stick — and were sure that he’d self-destruct — so they dallied in registering the threat of his presidential bid, heeding the lessons of it and responding effectively.

Hillary Clinton and her advisers didn’t believe that he could beat her. In early 2016 some of those advisers told me that it was John Kasich, among the Republican contenders, whom they feared. Trump? He was a gimme. He was a gift. They wanted the Republican Party to nominate him in an act of what they considered suicide. By not appraising him accurately, they couldn’t plot correctly.

And the American voters who couldn’t imagine him in the presidency or stomach the thought didn’t believe that he’d get there. How could he, with all the scandals, all the stink bombs, all the lying, all the bragging? I have long contended that one of the underrated factors in his victory is how many Americans underestimated him and didn’t bother to cast ballots or threw away their votes because they were certain there wouldn’t be any price.

Well, there was. There is. We’re paying it. And we’ll pay it again if we make the same mistake: if we look at an incident like that chilling rally in North Carolina, where he indulged and encouraged those “send her back” chants about Representative Ilhan Omar, and decide that he’s finally overplayed his hand, that he’s nullified himself and that any Democratic nominee will triumph over him.

To defeat Trump in 2020 requires brutal realism — about what can work in American politics, about what can be stirred in American people and about what tricks and assets Trump possesses. In my column last weekend I talked about how important it was for Democrats not to indulge their every policy fantasy, not to see the electorate they want but the one that’s actually there, and not to think that calling Trump names and calling out his ugliness are strategy enough. I skipped over the most important “not.” I neglected to point out that Trump will win if people mistakenly decide that that’s outside the realm of what this country will accept.

It’s not. He won once already. And all the awful behavior we’ve seen since was on display before. So what must change is our response to it. That’s the focus of my column, and that should be something we’re all mulling as we evaluate the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Who’s talking most persuasively about topics other than Trump? Who’s as compelling about the America that he or she wants to create as about the America that Trump is destroying? Who counters the vicious storm of him with something calmer and better and truer?

I don't have the answer, but those are the questions, and I’ll carry them into next week’s Democratic debates, which, I trust, we’ll all watch with great interest — and with great hope.

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Our Bank Accounts and Our Souls

A few times over the last year, I’ve written the exact words or the idea that we can’t “afford” another four years of Trump. Each time, I’ve received emails from supporters of his who say that what we can’t “afford” is any of these Democrats, with their grand spending plans, promises of higher taxes and determination to reinstitute some regulations that Trump erased. These particular Trump supporters seem to have one yardstick for a president and presidency: the economy, as judged by such obvious and imperfect criteria as the stock market and the unemployment numbers.

If the economy is ascendant, the president is O.K.

Let’s leave aside whether Trump deserves credit for the current boom. Let’s leave aside whether that boom is doing enough to address the staggering and (in the long run, I guarantee) destabilizing income inequality in the country. Let’s leave aside whether some Democratic prescriptions would be so economically harmful.

Do we really want a country that’s rich in dollars and robust in spending power but poor in the way its citizens regard one another and weak in its attention to people who need help? I’m not a Kumbaya type, and I think that some Democratic presidential candidates are proposing big-hearted changes to immigration laws that are politically unwise, substantively unworkable and primarily reactions to Trump’s cruelty. They’re not sound policy.

But I care that our laws reflect our values, or at least what our values should be. I care that they honor the diverse nature of a country made great by people who came from elsewhere in search of something better. I care that our president speaks to our better angels, not our darkest impulses.

I care that he or she doesn’t sing the praises of autocrats, dictators and tyrants. I care that we stand with allies whose systems of government and conduct on the world stage match what we have always held dear (or have purported to). I care about all of that, in a profound, heartfelt way.

When we stray too far from that, we lose more than money. We lose the whole story and glory of America. And, yes, we can’t afford that, in the most meaningful sense of the verb, which applies not just to our bank accounts but also to our souls.

On the Subject of Spending

Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times

I was tickled to see this recent article by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic, about how much many Americans fork over for fancy coffee drinks, because that subject has intrigued — no, obsessed — me for many years. The article, titled “The Rise of Coffee Shaming,” takes stock of how many “personal-finance gurus really hate coffee” in the sense that they see the daily or twice-daily consumption of fancy $5 lattes as a ridiculous waste of money for young professionals who could instead be saving it for future purchases of homes, cars and the like. The gurus have a great point, and their complaint and the coffee lovers’ retort say a lot about generational perspectives and tensions in America today.

But what interests me is the bevy of products and services — coffee drinks among them — that were almost nonexistent in America just one, two, three or four decades ago but that seem indispensable to affluent or relatively affluent Americans now. And I don’t mean the stuff that’s only recently been invented: smartphones and other technological gadgets.

I mean gym memberships and, even more so, personal trainers, which I wrote about in a column in 2013. As I observed then: “They’re ludicrously apt emblems of, and metaphors for, this particular juncture in America, where people of means seem to believe that there’s no problem — from a child’s grades to a belly’s sprawl — that can’t be fixed by throwing money and a putative expert at it. Anything can be delegated. Everything can be outsourced, even perspiration.”

We used to manage perspiration on our own, or maybe, if we splurged, we got an aerobics video or took an aerobics class. But then we used to manage studying on our own, too. My parents were well off enough to send me and my three siblings to a private high school, and my mom probably qualified as a tiger mother in the context of the 1970s and early 1980s. But there was no private math tutor, no private S.A.T. coach, no college consultant paid to maximize my essays and burnish my appeal. My peers didn’t have that stuff either. Their contemporary counterparts do. Some of them, in their teens, have personal trainers to boot. Mustn’t let your grades or your abs pale beside your classmates’.

Part of the perverse genius of capitalism — and I’m using “genius” in something other than a reverential vein — is creating need, or the feeling of it, where it never existed before. And that feeling spreads across so many areas of life. A friend and I were talking the other day about how often our dogs wind up at the vet and how much is required to keep them healthy. I grew up with dogs who rarely visited the vet and received significantly less fussing. They didn’t seem to suffer for it.

The questionable expenditures that I’m referring to are, of course, the privileges of a minority of Americans, and that’s one reason I mention them. They’re plenty visible to the majority who can’t even entertain them or who plunge into debt to experience just a smidgen of what wealthier people take for granted. And they trace the fault lines of an economic inequality that has metastasized beyond what’s healthy for a society, beyond what’s sustainable and beyond what’s ethical.

On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note

My dog, Regan.

There she is, my beloved pooch, splendid on the grass, regal in the sunshine. So happy, right? So serene?

Hah!

That’s how deceiving pictures can be. Seconds earlier poor Regan was completely out of sorts, or at least as out of sorts as she ever permits herself to be. A picture from then would have shown her running in a circle, barking at me or such. It would have suggested confusion, agitation, ire. She was in the New York City suburbs, at my dad’s house, and 90 minutes before that she’d been in southern New Jersey, at my sister’s house, where I’d picked her up after a trip that kept me away from her for six days.

It was a lot of upheaval, reflecting the demands of my job, my father’s poor health and my need to zoom in this direction for an assignment, in that direction for a sudden hospital visit.

By the logic of my schedule, I should never have adopted Regan, because there’s just not that much room.

By the logic of my heart, I could do nothing other than adopt Regan, because there’s room to spare.

Taking proper care of her and doing right by her are a challenge, and I think — I hope — I’ve risen to it. There are imperfect periods, like the one I just described.

But there are also days that proceed blissfully, beautifully, with long walks in the morning, with long walks in the evening, with her stretched at my feet as I work on the computer, with friends dropping by to scratch her belly, with me cracking the code of her finicky appetite.

I adjust, she adjusts and together we make it work, partly because our devotion to each other is never in question. I swoon over what a beauty she is. She sees and senses that, and she knows — I can tell that she does — that no matter the occasional hubbub, she’ll always be safe, and she’ll always be loved.

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