The "Orthodox and Liberal" Post I've been meaning to write

The Israeli TV series "Serugim" about single religious people in Jerusalem will always have a special place in my heart. For one thing, watching episodes online from an apartment in San Antonio, Texas helped me make up my mind to try living in Israel. But more importantly, it was one of a very few artistic self-representations by modern Orthodox people, and in a lot of ways for me it hit the nail on the head. It told the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, and one of the most meaningful presentations came in the first episode.

In the last part of the episode, a lead character goes from a warm and full synagogue to an intimate Shabbat dinner with friends, and ends the night at home in his apartment alone, taking a magazine to sit on the floor in the dark hallway so he can read by the only light that's on - in the bathroom. This scene has stuck out in my mind for years because first of all, it's incredibly accurate and the kind of thing that only happens to Sabbath-observant people. But I think one reason it has stayed with me is because it speaks to something deeper. (Long lead-in for what's supposed to be a political blog post, no?)

Sitting in a dark hallway to read by the light of the bathroom because you won't turn on the lights is a distinct and profound portrayal of something significant that can be pretty hard to represent. The character in that show does something difficult as a matter of principal and commitment. I want to hold up that example as the right frame of reference when talking about Orthodox Judaism and liberal politics.

The reason I think it's so important to set the stage in this way is because there's something that really tears at me about most attempts to address the relationship between religious Jews and American politics (this article for example). Too often the subtext or message of discussions of "the problem" of being observant and liberal (or liberal people being observant) ((or observant people being liberal)) is that the author sort of anchors on there being a right answer, or focuses on the "complaint" part of the struggle these people experience. That posture of conflict seems like the natural one, because if that tension weren't there, you wouldn't be reading an article about it. But the problem is starting from the tension or conflict as if it were resolvable or as if writing about it were part of the resolution does particular violence to part of the very nature of the thing it talks about. For many of us, being religious is about commitment and principle, and so focusing on "the tension" or "the conflict" among more than one set of commitments rather than the commonality or strength of those commitments sort of undermines the point of the whole thing!

God created the Universe and wrote the Torah and gave it to the Jewish people. And sometimes what that means for us is joining together with a hundred people at warm and uplifting kabbalat Shabbat, and sometimes that means sitting on the floor in the hallway in your own apartment reading by the light of the bathroom.

Learning from the life of John Sidney McCain

One remarkable feature of the life of Senator McCain that stands out from among thousands and thousands of heros and statesmen whose lives I've studied at one point or another is the tremendous ability to overcome or improve on previous shortcomings. Three examples come to mind.

As a young person, he was somewhat reckless and rebellious and it seems clear that if his father and grandfather had not been high-ranking officers, he would not have had the opportunity to go to Annapolis or become a pilot. In the course of events, he became a prisoner of war and underwent severe torture when the opportunity to use the ties of privilege could have saved him. Senator McCain wrote about this period quite a bit and I haven't read those books, but it is easy to imagine that being presented with real adversity actually changed him from playboy to the scion of a great tradition of service and sacrifice.

In the years after he came back from captivity, he had a wife and young children and it is well-known that they had significant marital difficulties and divorced. Now overcoming this kind of trauma would be understandably hard on any couple, but his first wife has described that time saying, "John was 40 but he wanted to act like he was 25 again." Normally I wouldn't want to go around talking about anyone else's personal lives, but the reason I bring all this up is to observe that not only did McCain remarry and raise a second family, the children from his first marriage seem to have a good relationship with him, his second wife and their children, and he and his wife adopted a Bangladeshi orphan with a cleft palate in 1991, which is just about the most loving thing that I think a person can do. His second wife and their children also had a husband and father who suffered great trauma, but what was different? One has to imagine that he found a way to change.

As a young senator, McCain was involved in a scandal about helping a wealthy donor in which he was cleared of wrongdoing, but it gave rise to the appearance of impropriety. He could have stuck by the line that he was cleared and been done with it, but instead he spent the next fifteen years with anyone and everyone to advance the cause of campaign finance reform. His collaborator Sen. Russ Feingold wrote a very fine remembrance of their work together, which I recommend reading.

"The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar."

Don't take what I'm writing here to be a support for or indictment of any position or person in common discussion. I'm aiming for something deeper. The things that matter most for the next 30 or 40 years are being born today, but are not apparent to any more than a few, so what really matters is not how we respond to what's in front of us today but how we prepare for what we can't really anticipate. This capacity to grow, to overcome and to change would be one thing we can all find to emulate in the life of Senator McCain.

The next President of the United States

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a pretty substantial majority, but lost the electoral college. Trump is doing a remarkable job of making himself into the least popular president of all time, so it seems like the next election would be for the Democrats to lose. If that's the case, then the important question is "How do we not screw this up?" A Democratic candidate could hold on to the firm majorities that already support the party and gain the support of disaffected former Republicans to carry states Clinton lost such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

To hold Democratic gains while earning the support of reasonable former Republican voters, a Democrat would have to remind people outside the party of what they like about Democrats.  At the same time, the person needs enough "bona fides" in liberal circles to prevent another Ralph Nader fiasco. (A digression: No matter who the leading Democratic candidate is, there will be a significant challenger who hangs in and gets certain people excited about the election. That's almost a necessary product of the party structure and nominating process. Its very presence creates this vacuum for at least one other candidate. This person and her movement will not mean anything - during or after the election. Not Bill Bradley, not Howard Dean, not Bernie Sanders. They all don't mean anything, didn't show anything, and won't change anything. They're all by-product.)

So where do we find a candidate with a real track record, who is known as a moderate to those outside the party but has enough of a liberal reputation within the party? It would help if it were someone with business experience, and it would help even more if it were someone whose experience was in the kind of business people look up to.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present a long-term member of the board of directors of one of America's two most admired companies, a successful media and investment entrepreneur, perhaps the best known environmental campaigner on the planet and someone whose career and reputation are closely tied to the successes of the Clinton years but removed from their scandals.

Your next President of the United States: Al Gore.

The Max Bialystock Administration

In the Mel Brooks classic "The Producers," protagonist Max Bialystock is a promoter of Broadway musicals who sustains his lifestyle by showering affection on wealthy little old ladies in order to recruit them as "investors" in his plays which never seem to quite make it.  One day his accountant suggests that he could make more money producing a flop than a hit because the money comes in but never has to go out. To ensure the success of his flop, Bialystock recruits a basket of deplorable actors, writers and production staff to stage a play named "Springtime for Hitler."

My favorite line in the money is one that provides some real insight in to the world of Max Bialystock, and I believe it will be a guide to the next four years:

Max Bialystock: The two cardinal rules of producing. One: Never put your own money in the show.
Leo Bloom: And two?
Max Bialystock: [yelling] Never put your own money in the show!

The way Max's world works is by putting himself in situations where he can take advantage of the upside from a play's success without exposing himself to the downside of risking his own money on a failure.  That basically sums up the almost 50-year history of Donald Trump.  There's no other way to evaluate his career and personal life but as a series of situations where he takes advantage of the bankers, contractors, condo depositors, real estate seminar students, wives and all others who are foolish enough to transact with him.

So what does that mean for the policies and actions of a Trump administration?  First and foremost, the people who put him in office will find themselves holding the short end of the stick. He got what he wanted, he doesn't need them for anything, and it's over, so they will only get the barest amount of attention from him required to keep the operation going.  This is a testable prediction. You've already seen that his acceptance speech was conciliatory in ways we didn't think possible.  Now that he needs the attention and acquiescence of different groups of people, he will begin appealing to those groups instead.  You will find yourself saying, "Where was this guy on the campaign trail? It's like a whole different person!"

The second thing it means is that you will never see Donald Trump "put his own money in the show" by advancing a policy or course of action that could fail.  He has campaigned on anti-immigrant, anti-Obamacare and anti-Trade views among other things.  I don't think that any of these are particularly well-designed systems, but they all have some role to play in the real world as it is and changing any one of these pieces of the economy will be extremely disruptive. Trump won't touch any of them with a ten-foot pole.  He may let someone else advance a proposal in Congress, but there will be enough plausible deniability for him to claim that it's someone else's fault if the new system doesn't work.

Third, he will address problems (I don't want to call it "making decisions") by abdication. There will be a class of other people really running things.  Two kinds of people will take these jobs. The first will be real incompetents. They will be nominally qualified for whatever job they have, but totally incapable of really doing it.  The result will be that they will "put new coversheets on all TPS reports before they go out" (in the language of the classic Office Space), but they will not govern anything. The second will be well-meaning, experienced individuals who don't really want to be there but feel a deep sense of responsibility to the country.  Think of Robert Gates serving as Secretary of Defense for President Obama.

This implies a few things.  First of all, even though he obtained the Republican nomination by appealing to racist and authoritarian instincts, he will back off from or abandon them now that he actually has the White House. The reason is because he just doesn't care.  If he gets what he wants by being a racist, he'll do it.  If he gets what he wants by opposing racism, he'll do that too.  The second is four years of (hopefully) benign neglect of all major issues. There will be no problem of consequence addressed from the top down. The third is a disproportionately large amount of attention paid to small issues that have out-sized symbolic importance.

I'll try to develop some of these thoughts a little later, including what I think they mean for other Republicans and those other guys.... what were their names again?  We used to have a political party at some point...?

Along the way, I also hope to share some thoughts on investing going forward (spoiler alert - do whatever you were going to do before).

PS - I wanted to call this post "Springtime for Hitler," which would have been funny, but inflammatory.