On Snow Emergencies, Democractic Norms, and Donald Trump

Recently we had a big blizzard here in Minneapolis. Well it wasn't that big, not like the Halloween Blizzard of my youth, or any number of other pretty big ones you could look up. But we did have about five inches over night on a Thursday/Friday, a clear up during Friday, followed by another eight or more inches overnight on Friday/Saturday.

When these sorts of things happen in Minneapolis the city generally declares a "Snow Emergency". Snow Emergencies are a big deal in The City Of Lakes and differ a bit from what you might be familiar with, like in Boston, where they just plow the middle of the streets, or Washington DC where basically everyone panics, abandons their cars in the middle of the street, and run home to hide for three weeks or so. In Minneapolis Snow Emergencies are a highly complicated affair. (Please note suburban cities in the Twin Cities have their own rules, some simply ban on street parking after large snowfalls until every thing is plowed or even parking in general in the winter, but for this blog post I am talking about the City of Minneapolis.)

So how do Snow Emergencies in Minneapolis work? Well feel free to check out the official rules, but gist of it is this:

• The city can declare a Snow Emergency any day before 6:00 pm. Once declared it's illegal to park on "snow emergency routes" (main thoroughfares) in the  city from 8:00 pm to the following 8:00 am.
• Starting the following 8:00 am it is illegal to park on the even side of the street until 8:00 pm or until the street is "fully plowed".
• Starting the next 8:00 am its illegal to park on the odd side of the street until 8:00 pm or until the street is fully plowed.
• Cars that aren't moved are subjected to getting a ticket and possibly towed.

The upshot of this is a series of negative incentives that traditionally have made sure most people pay attention after big snowfalls to see if a Snow Emergency has been declared and move their cars accordingly. Meaning the gargantuan task of plowing a city with well over 1000 miles of streets and parkways that many people park their cars on can be accomplished in just 72 hours. More over in a city where most, but not all, neighborhoods have enough on street parking for everyone to park on one side of the street the "Snow Emergency Shuffle" is quite doable, if also something of a pain in the neck. And in my experience it really can work! Streets can be cleared and everyone can go back to parking wherever without the giant built up of snow mounds that can make streets impassible for emergency vehicles and everyone else.

But here's the thing to remember, this system, while backed up by the power of the city in a very real legal way (you can get a ticket, someone can come and tow your car to the impound lot, if you try to stop them by force you'll get arrested and be prosecuted), but at the same time it is dependent on people complying both due to incentives, and also out of learned habits as well. In fact, getting your car towed during one is a right of passage for many people from Greater Minnesota or the suburbs who "move to the big city" which is part of how the norm gets established for new comers. Moreover these norms aren't all just about avoiding punishment. Moving your car in compliance with the rules can be seen as a good thing, as in "If we do this then the street can be plowed and better for everyone! You idiots who didn't follow the rules are making it worse for the rest of us!" 

In other words, it's a system that is dependent on social norms as much as big trucks or logistical experts in Public Works planning on how to deploy said trucks over three days.

So what does this have to do with Trump and democracy? Well here's what happened to me during the snowy weekend. A Snow Emergency was declared on Friday meaning that plowing of the street where I park my car would start on the even side at 8:00 am Saturday. Easy enough for me, I parked on the odd side Friday night and was fine. Then on Saturday night around 5:00 pm I went to move my car to the even side of the street (as they would be plowing the odd side starting on Sunday 8 am) and to my horror (well okay annoyance) I discovered lots of people hadn't moved their cars, there was no ticketing or towing, and the city hadn't even plowed the even side of many streets.

In other words, the norms of the system had broken down and thus the institutional aspect of it had as well, and vice versa. After all ticketing and towing cars works as an incentive if only a few people break the rule, if lots of people don't do it there's just no way to possibly to punish everyone. Likewise if everyone starts ignoring the rule, you can't plow close to the curb as there are cars in the way, and so what once was a solvable problem becomes giant unmovable ice mounds that cause people to park closer together and close off the street.

What struck me that night as I pondered whether to move my car to the semi-plowed even street and risk a ticket, wait until 8 pm to do it and be sure it would be okay, or just wake up early and on Monday was that this was a good metaphor for an underappreciated problem with politics in The Trump Era.

Any political scientist could tell you that democracies are not just based on written rules and systems but also upon informal agreed upon norms that are there to make sure the system works. In other words the city can't force everyone to comply with snow emergency rules, people have to agree to follow them to some degree. Moreover once those norms breakdown, ie people start not caring about Snow Emergency announcements because it's not clear anyone else does, it's really hard to get them back.

And that's a big part of what the problem Trump poses to our democracy as he's breaking down democratic norms every chance he gets. To cite a few examples:

• He refuses to do the "Head of State" part of the job.
• He lies a lot (all presidents "spin", but Trump's lies are normatively different).
• He threatens to jail his political opponents.
• He says all sorts of crazy shit on Twitter.
• He engages in flagrant nepotism, self-dealing, and tolerates flagrant self-dealing from people he's put in positions of power in a nepotist manner.

A list like this could go on for pages.

I think the poses a huge problem for liberals who are starting to think about what a post-Trump political era might look like. Liberals generally like "good government" reforms and so there's a lot talk about that, see Michelle Goldberg for a typical reformist agenda in a recent column that calls for things like tougher ethics rules. But at the end of her column she quotes political scientist Steven Levitsky who points out that simply changing the rules, without norms to back them up, is ultimately unlikely to work (he's written a book about this whole point).

You can see this in my Snow Emergency anecdote. What sort of "reform" would fix this this problem? Higher fines might discourage some, but then again if there's no way to fine everyone and so lots of people will still ignore it, and it's hardly fair or an effective deterrent if infrequently applied (see this classic example here). More and better equipment could plows the streets quicker, except if people don't move their cars in which case it becomes basically impossible. Better outreach might get the word out more broadly (there is already an app, a Twitter account, a email and text alert service, however) but if people just ignore it that won't work.

In other words, the norms are an important part of Snow Emergencies (and democracy) that more rules and technocratic reforms can't really make up for.

The good news is the City just declared another Snow Emergency on Sunday and people seemed to take it more seriously so the streets are much better. Plus its warming up so maybe climate change will save us all. But it's also quite possible the first botched one will cause real damage in the future, much like even a single failed Trump term could cause real lasting damage to the social norms of our collective City On A Hill for a long time.

Survey Thing

Not a real post, but I wanted to let everyone who reads this know that a team of researchers from Stony Brook University have asked me to help them study the role that emotion plays in politics. I have completed the survey myself, and it only took me a few minutes to finish. The survey is completely anonymous. 

Click the link below to begin the survey:

https://stonybrookuniversity.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bDvaFRlp0rmqYBf

Trump One Year In

While I missed the official one year anniversary, I would like to submit my views on where we are after one year of President Game Show Host. Of course trying to predict Trump and what our politics will look like in January of 2021 is going to be pretty hard. Especially for someone like me who really didn't think he'd win the GOP nomination. But at the same time we're over 25% through the first (and hopefully only) term and I think some pretty major trends have already emerged.

A little over a year ago when we were looking down the barrel of a Trump Administration economist and old school blogger Brad DeLong wrote a nice post predicting what might happen that's really stuck with me. DeLong suggest four possible outcomes for the Trump Era. He opens with Trump as Reagan, that is a president presiding over a bunch of different factions, who believed a bunch of contradictory things, and who did a bunch of contradictory things (some good, some bad) and it will not be clear what was important for a while:

People with Trump's baton will try to implement everything he said on the campaign trail. Some will succeed. Most will fail. Policy will be random. Which random part? We don't know. Will he protect and expand Social Security and Medicare? Is he going to deport 5 million people in the next two years and build a wall? Is he going to make Mexico pay for it? Is he going to somehow "renegotiate" NAFTA? Is he going to somehow reach into the WTO and try to kick China out of it? Is he going to impose tariffs? Is he going to promote a substantial fiscal stimulus? Is he going to make America great again?

I think it's fair to say that one year in, Trump is no Reagan, so we can discard that one.

Delong then offers three other possibilities:

...Trump will be like Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor of California--an office he won in a "discontent with normal politics" election. Arnold had substantial personality similarities with Trump: the word in Sacramento was that no woman should ever get into an elevator alone with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As California governor he tried to make Hollywood-style deals and failed comprehensively. The state government went on autopilot. He hung out in his smoking tent with his cigars. It was eight years of missed opportunities to address the challenges facing California.

The third possibility is Berlusconi. An awful lot of public money going astray and into the pockets of the kleptocrat and his friends. An awful lot of random policy decisions, with occasional bursts of technocracy as something leads the leader of the bunga-bunga movement to think that this is an issue area where, you know, somebody with real expertise should be handling the situation. This kind of bunga-bunga governance is definitely a possibility. Italy lost a decade of economic growth, I think, because of Berlusconi.
...
The fourth possibility is one that I do not want to put on the table but that I have to put on the table: Mussolini. 

These three possibilities are what I want to talk about because as I see it we are probably some where between "The Governator" and Berlusconi.

Personally I think the "Mussolini Possibility", while might have made sense as a tail risk back a year ago is obviously now wrong. Trump isn't a powerful president who might be able to storm into Congress and have everyone arrested Charles I style. After all he had trouble getting the military to follow through with his stupid "Transgender Ban" which is now tied up in the Federal Courts.

Even the strongest case that he is an authoritarian posed to seize power, one rooted in the whole Russia-Mueller thing is pretty weak evidence. The timeline here is important: basically Trump got worried the FBI director was asking too many questions so fired him, this resulted in a political crisis where his own Attorney General recused himself from decision making, and the number two man at the DOJ appointed a respected special prosecutor to investigate things. This prosecutor, Robert Mueller, is already indicting close Trump allies for serious federal crimes and God know what else he and his team have discovered.

This isn't a nascent dictator, it's a desperate president in a weak position.

And that in my opinion is the key to understand the Trump Era one year in. Political scientist Matt Glassman wrote the full "Trump as weak president" argument up in an excellent long form piece for Vox this year and I think he's spot on. Glassman is basing his argument on the works of political scientist Richard Neustadt's classic studies of the presidency that argue it's statutory a pretty weak office (it is compared to say Britain's Prime Minister) and thus presidents who want to be effective have to find ways to "bargain" with say Congress or bureaucracies or whoever through the careful use of political skill.

Trump is not good at these sorts of thing, thus he hasn't had a good first year.

Or as Glassman puts it:

Trump has had a disastrous first year. His professional reputation is awful. Major figures from his own party routinely criticize his impulsive rhetoric and chaotic management, belittle his intelligence, mock his political ideas, and bemoan his lack of policy knowledge. The White House issues talking points, and high-ranking Republicans simply ignore them. Multiple Republican-led congressional committees are investigating his administration on topics ranging from ethics violations to foreign electoral collusion.

Similarly, the president’s public prestige, measured by approval ratings, is among the worst in the polling age. He entered office with record-low approval, 45 percent, and it has steadily declined into the 30s. No other president has had an approval lower than 49 percent in December of his first year; the average is 63 percent. Such numbers sap Trump’s power to leverage popularity into persuasion. They also depress party loyalists concerned about 2018 and embolden potential primary challengers for 2020.

I think this is exactly right.

In other words the Trump's first term represents an already profound missed opportunity, it usually is the most productive year an administration in terms of legislation after all. Trump has succeeded in rolling back environmental, labor, and consumer protections yes. As well a nominate a lot of conservative judges to the federal bench that have been confirmed by the Senate. But that's normal for Republican presidents. Meanwhile many of his top White House staff, Cabinet Members, and agency heads are have had to resign and/or were fired due to scandals, White House failures, or losing Game Of Thrones style power struggles.

To put it bluntly this is a failing, unpopular, weak presidency, which makes it look something like options two or three above, and that's the key part.

To be sure Democrats or other anti-Trump folks shouldn't be gleeful about this, because there are real dangers here. Glassman pointed out these dangers in the end of his piece this way, "A president unable to effectively govern the bureaucracy or lead American foreign policy poses a distinctly nonpartisan problem for the nation." In other words Trump might try to do even stupider stuff than he's tried so far to compensate for his weakness. Like starting a trade war that will damage the economy or creating a crisis with North Korea that could result in nuclear war. These are risks that seem very real with Trump, although who knows if they will happen. 

Which isn't to say he's having no impact. I think he is changing American politics, but will leave writing about that for another day.

But one year in what I see is a weak president, exhausted by the job, and becoming reactive to events, even if he does this by screaming on Twitter. This is bad, and while it's not clear what the next three years hold, this is where I think we are at.