‘king of TikTok’ – ABC News
Like TRUMP: The President Who Did Everything Right and Got No Thanks!
Opinion by David Frum
Which would you prefer? An elderly TikTok star who compares himself to Donald Trump? Or a former Marxist guerrilla who attended the funeral of Hugo Chávez?
A candidate notorious for his radical flip-flops on public policy?
Or a candidate notorious for his intolerance of any kind of disagreement or dissent?
One who explained his praise for the Hitler dictatorship by claiming he had confused Adolf Hitler with Albert Einstein? Or one whose attempt to renationalize garbage collection in his city left mountains of trash piled in the streets?
Welcome to the Colombian presidential election of 2022. The second round of voting last night yielded a victory for candidate No. 2, the former guerrilla Gustavo Petro, over No. 1, Rodolfo Hernández. Obviously, either choice would have inscribed huge question marks over the future of one of the more successful democracies in Latin America.
But there’s another question mark, a retrospective one: How in the world did Colombia arrive at such a bizarre dilemma?
Colombia’s outgoing president, the moderate conservative Iván Duque Márquez, was barred from running again by the country’s strict single-term limit. In those four years, he oversaw a record of policy success unmatched in recent South American history. In return, he is leaving office with an approval rating in the low 20s, the worst any president has had in Colombian polling history. The party he belonged to has been wrecked and discredited.
I interviewed Duque on June 2, during a visit he made to Washington, D.C., and found him as baffled as anybody else by Colombia’s turn to extremism.
When Duque took office in 2018, he was only 42. Yet he seems as vexed by the impact of social media as politicians’ decades his elder. “The world has become very polarized,” he said. “Sound debates about policy issues don’t seem to be applauded today. It makes more applause if you decide to take a strong stand, even based on not-sound facts or on lies—but you get a lot of likes. That sometimes seems the temptation we have in modern politics.”
[Read: This country is setting the bar for handling migrants]
President Duque faced two big challenges in his four years in office: the COVID-19 crisis and the social collapse of neighboring Venezuela. He met both challenges in a careful, balanced, well-informed way.
On COVID, he rejected the dismissal and denial espoused by populists like Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Duque did not pursue dubious Chinese vaccines to win points from anti-American voters, as Peru’s leftist president, Pedro Castillo, did. Instead, Duque used the strong relationship with the United States built by Colombia’s moderate conservative leadership. Colombia qualified for the first exports of the Pfizer vaccine from the United States and began a national vaccination program early in 2021.
As of mid-June, at least 70 percent of Colombia’s population has been fully vaccinated with safe and effective vaccines developed by Western democracies.
On Venezuela, Duque agreed with his country’s right that the Chávez-Maduro dictatorship was repugnant, no model for anyone to follow. He took a hard line against Venezuelan subversion and threats to export revolution to Colombia.
At the same time, Duque extended refuge to Venezuelans fleeing the disaster in their country. He granted some 1.7 million Venezuelans the right to remain and work in Colombia for 10 years, the largest such temporary-protected-status program in the
history of the Western hemisphere.
As he coped with these emergencies, Duque upheld Colombia’s trading relationship with the United States, ratified by the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement that entered into force in 2012. Thanks to this agreement, Colombia has enhanced its traditional exports of oil and coffee. The country now supplies three-quarters of all the cut flowers sold in the United States. Colombia has also emerged as the world’s No. 3 avocado producer.
Colombia is surging out of the pandemic with one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. In the first quarter of 2022, Colombia’s output expanded at an annual rate of 7.5 percent. Duque used some of this wealth to bolster the nation’s shaky social-insurance system. He abolished tuition for virtually all students in Colombia’s public colleges and universities.
At every turn, he faced attacks either for doing dangerously too much, according to the hard right, or for doing offensively too little, according to the radical left.
[Read: The slow death of Colombia’s peace movement]
Colombian society remains cleaved by the aftermath of the left-wing insurgency of the 1970s and ’80s, as well as by the opportunistic alliance those guerrillas formed with drug-trafficking cartels like the one once run by the notorious Pablo Escobar. A lengthy peace process produced an agreement signed in 2016 that provided amnesty for former guerrillas. But the settlement was intensely resented by the many Colombians whose family and friends had been kidnapped or murdered by the insurgents. That resentment became the basis for a more militant Colombian far right—a resentment then reinforced by anti-immigrant sentiment, with the influx of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans asylum seekers into Colombia.
Colombia’s new president will inherit all of these challenges, plus soaring inflation and a possible recession in the United States, by far Colombia’s most important trading partner. That record made it no wonder that President Duque received such a fond goodbye from President Joe Biden on Duque’s farewell tour of the United States. In sharp contrast, President-elect Petro has made his career by exploiting his country’s social divisions, not healing them.
Americans may have come to take for granted Colombia’s very recent, hard-won, and fragile achievement of social peace. The democratic world will sadly miss President Duque, perhaps more than it yet knows.
Biden’s China tariff policy could irritate union allies
Morgan Chalfant
President Biden is facing a tough decision on whether to lift some Trump-era tariffs on China, a move that economists say will help inflation but promises to anger labor unions.
Biden said over the weekend that he was still weighing such a move, and officials have not offered a timeline on when he would make a decision.
Some economists see a clear benefit to lifting some tariffs, which former President Trump imposed as part of a tit-for-tat trade war with China.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that some of the tariffs inherited by the Biden administration serve “no strategic purpose.”
But the decision won’t come easily for Biden given the blowback he is risking from unions, which have publicly expressed their opposition to lifting tariffs.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, who Biden shared a stage with last week when he addressed the group’s convention in Philadelphia, told CNN on Wednesday that
“it’s the wrong time to relax tariffs on China.”
“We think it would have a marginal impact, at best, on inflation,” she added.
Biden has been ramping up his engagements with organized labor as Democrats worry about losing ground with blue-collar workers in the midterm elections. Democrats lost union workers in 2020 in states like Ohio to Trump, whose anti-free trade message resonated with the labor vote. Biden routinely praises Big Labor, saying that unions “brung me to the dance” in expressing his gratitude for union support during his political career. And, for the most part, labor’s bosses are largely in his corner, which is on display when they praise the president during his visits to their events.
But labor unions would clash with Biden if he decided to lift tariffs on China amid efforts to lean into their support. Labor unions filed an official comment to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative earlier this month to push for tariffs to remain in place.
United Steelworkers President Thomas Conway, on behalf of the Labor Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy, wrote in a letter that “members of the LAC are united in the view that the overall level and the individually identified tariffs imposed on China pursuant to the 301 actions should be extended.”
Trump imposed a raft of tariffs on China to punish Beijing for unfair trade practices that affected a wide variety of imports totaling about $350 billion.
The Biden administration has broadly maintained Trump-era tariffs and last fall launched negotiations with China aimed at enforcing the “phase one” trade agreement between Washington and Beijing brokered by the Trump administration. China fell short on its purchasing commitments under that deal. At the same time, Biden administration officials have described the previous administration’s approach to trade with China as flawed and signaled the possibility for change.
Experts say that lifting some Trump-era tariffs would help lower the cost of goods at a time when Americans are grappling with sky-high inflation, but that depends on companies passing on savings to consumers.
Biden has limited tools with which to fight inflation, and lifting tariffs on goods from China is among a few actions under consideration at the White House as it looks to ease the burden of costs on families.
“We’re looking closely at it, and I anticipate the president will have more to say on that issue in the coming weeks,” White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is slated to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to testify on the fiscal 2023 funding request and could field questions about the policy decision process.
“My recommendation would be to remove the maximum amount of tariffs possible on China,” said Jason Furman, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Obama.
Furman estimated that consumers would feel the relief “probably within a few months,” depending how quickly retailers adjust prices after receiving relief from tariffs. He also argued that the Biden administration should be reviewing other tariffs, not just those on Chinese imports.
“They should be pulling every lever they have,” Furman said.
Larry Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under the Clinton administration, endorsed the idea during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend. Biden subsequently said that he spoke to Summers on Monday morning. “Look, I think cutting the tariffs is clearly a good idea. It will hold down prices. It will enable us to take
a more strategic approach to dealing with China,” Summers said Sunday, predicting that
it could cut 1 percentage point or more from the consumer price index — a key inflation gauge — over time.
An analysis produced by the Peterson Institute for International Economics earlier this year estimated that a package of tariff reductions including those targeting Chinese goods would amount to a reduction in the consumer price index of 1.3 percentage points and would save each household $797. Lifting the tariffs would also ease tensions with business groups, which have been lobbying the administration to repeal tariffs on goods from China.
An end to the tariffs would boost the bottom line for some major retailers, manufacturers and tech giants that pay tariffs of up to 25 percent to import some Chinese goods. The National Retail Federation, which represents major retailers like Walmart and Target, launched an ad campaign this month to push for an end to the tariffs, arguing the tariffs have cost the average American family more than $1,200 a year since they were implemented in 2018.
“While the Federal Reserve continues with its long-term strategy to stem inflation, we need the administration and Congress to move forward on steps to lower prices that can be taken immediately,” National Retail Federation CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement. “Repealing tariffs is one of those steps and one of the most effective and meaningful.”
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Why are Americans gripped by nostalgia?
Nostalgia is our national mode. We salvage artifacts of the past for entertainment, to calm present anxieties. We discuss the present in terms of the past, and we judge the present by the standards of long ago. One party seeks to recapture the economic conditions of the 1960s; the other would restore the family structure of the 1950s; our films and television cannot escape the Reagan era. Our cultural dialogue is a series of ironic or earnest references to earlier works. Discussions of movies, television and music tend to begin with the question, “Remember when?” Those words summon happy thoughts. So acute has the condition become that the great satirists of our age, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, parodied it last year in an episode of South Park. Residents of the town became addicted to “Member Berries.”
Ross Douthat says it’s a symptom of decadence.
“Not the decadence of orgies and debauchery, but the decadence of drift, stagnation, and repetition.” He quotes Jacques Barzun, who wrote that in periods of decadence “the forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through.” Yuval Levin, on the other hand, ascribes our “blinding nostalgia” to the dizzying changes of the early 21st century. “In our economy, our culture, our politics, and throughout our society, longstanding norms seem to be breaking down.” Writing in the neo-Marxist Jacobin, Samuel Earle points his finger at “global, neoliberal capitalism,” which, “by subjecting everything in the world to the logic of the market,” generates “enormous change in local communities with little to no regard for social cohesion.” Douthat and Barzun suggest that there isn’t enough novelty in the world; Levin and Earle, that there is too much.
Perhaps instability in the economic and social spheres moves us to stabilize the cultural and political ones, by clinging to franchises of yore, and by recalling national glories of old. Or perhaps we return to the past because we are experts in it. In his new collection of essays, X, Chuck Klosterman asks, “What if the feeling we like to call ‘nostalgia’ is simply the byproduct of accidental repetition?” He has listened to Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon “more than all the other Ozzy solo albums combined,” he says, for the sole reason that “I had only six cassettes” as a teenager. Nostalgia for Klosterman has little to do with memory. He feels nostalgic for Bark at the Moon “because the middle ’80s were a time when I might lie on my bed and listen to a random Ozzy song 365 times over the course of 12 months. It’s not an emotional experience. It’s a mechanical experience.” Stranger Things, by this logic, satisfies our nostalgia craving because it’s an excuse to share our knowledge of all the Stephen King books we have read, all the Spielberg and Carpenter movies we have watched. “What seems like ‘nostalgia’ might be a form of low-grade expertise that amplifies the value of the listening event.”
I see what he means. How often did I watch Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as a kid, until I knew basically every line of dialogue, every fanfare and swell in the score, could mimic every sound effect? Do I feel nostalgia for Star Trek: The Next Generation because of what was going on in my life during middle school — not much — or because I have watched each episode of the series too many times to count, with the exception of “Conspiracy,” the existence of which I do not recognize? I feel no nostalgia for the rented townhouse where I first listened to Vs., but could describe to you in detail its layout, its fading tan wallpaper and thick brown carpet, because the memory of my surroundings is connected to “the listening event.” The fascination with early video games that manifests itself in the popularity of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One — the film adaptation by Spielberg is forthcoming — is less a longing for the innocence of childhood than evidence of all the hours I wasted on Atari and NES.
Klosterman’s thesis is a clever explanation for certain forms of nostalgia, but not of others. It might tell me why I return to the first three Indiana Jones movies, but it doesn’t explain why Spielberg and George Lucas insist on making more of them. (I don’t need Jacobin to tell me the reason is money.) Nor does Klosterman’s mechanical basis for nostalgia apply to politics. We experience history only once, and Golden Ages are few and far between, and difficult to reproduce.
Why are Americans gripped by nostalgia?
“Nostalgia,” wrote Robert Nisbet, “breaks the telescopic relation of past and present that is the essence of ritual. It makes the past a cornucopia of anodynes and fancies to draw from at will. It seizes upon some period, decade, or century and bathes it in solutions of sentimentality. The past, so necessary to replenish the present when properly understood, takes the form of memorabilia, golden-oldies such as records, books, and movies which should not be wrenched from their ages.”
For Nisbet, nostalgia waxes as the traditional understanding of time wanes.
Human beings are temporal creatures. We need ways to understand and to order the past, the present, and the future. Normally we do this through religion, its holidays and life-cycle events. “The greatest barrier to nostalgia,” he writes, “in contrast to simple respect for the past, is a social structure in which the forces of stable growth outweigh those of instability and perceived formlessness. Ritual — religious, political, and other — is a strong force against nostalgia.” It may be that religion, by keeping us focused on a life to come, and by emphasizing righteous acts in the present, prevents us from becoming lost in memories and trinkets of the past. Then again there are plenty of religious people who are nostalgic about some earlier incarnation of their church or their country or their culture.
Do they lack ritual?
What would be useful is a grand unified theory of nostalgia, a way to tie together Star Trek: Into Darkness and MAGA hats, Back to the Future Day and Marine Le Pen. Sorry to say, no such theory exists. Maybe none is possible. Nostalgia in politics, in the marketplace, and in our psychology may be separate phenomena, may operate on different axes. I’m inclined to believe that the flight to the past is a consequence of our anxiety over the future: our fear of mortality, the precarious state of our country, the feeling that no one is entirely in control of his government, his destiny. Grim thoughts to ponder on my way home from work, as Dave Matthews Band plays on the radio, and I prepare for an after-dinner viewing of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It was just on TCM.
More from MATTHEW CONTINETTI:
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— Matthew Continetti is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon,
where this column first appeared. © 2017 All rights reserved
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