Overton Thoughts

I think this is right but what it represents is the triumph of PR culture. In my book, Brandishing the First Amendment, I raised a concern about how there are a lot of professionals in the PR/marketing, and now political world, who don’t believe that there is any problem beyond people’s perception of a problem; so they think the problem is not acid rain, it is that people think acid rain is a problem. Change the perception and there is no problem.

Except, of course, there is real stuff in the world. Between the hard edge of empirical facts like gravity, which exists whether the majority “believe in it” or not, and those things that are real precisely because we all believe in them and act like they are a thing, but if we all simultaneously stopped believing in them (money, for example), they would stop being a real thing, there is a world of stuff mushy middle. It seems to me that what is happening in this world of branding and opinion management, is that the line has moved rather dramatically on which stuff we used to think that there was some reality against which you could test representations (vaccines are a good idea) and that which was just “opinion” or a an unverifiable belief “chocolate ice cream is the ‘the best'” or “god exists.” It appears that guys like Frank Luntz have unleashed the powers of perception management, that you really *can* pee on someone’s leg and convince them that it is raining, at least for long enough to do real damage, because the real world feedback loop that would undermine that impression is so slow, so susceptible to interpretation, wishful thinking, denial, motivated reasoning, etc. that it can take a very long time for people to wake up and make the right casual connections for their miseries. It is not like trying to take a walk out of a 3rd story window. Try that ans you will discover pretty quickly that gravity is not just a good idea, it’s a law, a really, real law. But global warming is not that direct. Health care is not that direct. Things can go horribly wrong, STILL, even though Republicans control both houses, the executive and have a majority on the Supreme Court and there are some people who will manage to to believe that their health care problems really are still a problem attributable to Obama, even if the Republicans manage to get rid of the ACA. It is astonishing that this “cut taxes/trickle down” routine still has ANY credibility, with anyone at all. Yet it does. It seems like things will have to get much worse before some of his loyal supporters will blame the right people. And maybe they never will. For example, there is this vague sense that money in politics is a bad thing and many voters are demanding that Democratic candidates show their bona fides by giving up funding, failing to understand that the problem is the law, that until the law changes, any candidate who completely eschewed big donors, all “cooperation” with industry, will never get elected and never accomplish even half-hearted things. The ACA is partly the mess it is because of the need to get the insurance and health care providers on board and “a seat at the table.” Of course, once they are in the room, at the table, they deal themselves in and ordinary voters are out. Voters are asking for the wrong sort of purity tests which is actually likely to make things worse, not better.

The feedback loop may be a whole generation or two, or three. It seems to me that we are being forced to relive the things which those of my generation probably thought were well-settled lessons of the Gilded Age, that laissez-faire, unchecked by any sort of regulation or limit, and unrestrained meddling of capital in politics, gives rise to monumental corruption and lays waste to people’s health and safety. There was a reason our forefathers and mother enacted the Pure Food and Drug laws, truth in labeling, securities rules, workplace safety rules. But we seem to have “forgotten” all that and appear to be hurtling back to the 19th century at full speed ahead. It is truly frightening.

What we are seeing here is just how much reality matters and it appears that sadly the answer is, “not much” or at least not yet. Trump is, as you say, omni-incompetent (his greatest strength is as a marketer and even there he can’t help stepping on his own message with his tweets; if he really was a genius we would be in even more trouble), no matter how many (or how few) think otherwise. Public opinion no more makes him competent than gravity is dependent on public assent. It is just a fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.

But it is scary that he might learn. And it is disheartening how little that incompetence means. I think what we are seeing though is that facts DO matter some of the time, about some things, to some people. And not all the PR people in the world can smooth over some of Trump’s knowledge gap. The burning question though is whether a commitment to knowledge and facts and a shared value system about what the lines are, can be reestablished before he and his cronies and his organized crime family blow us up. If he were to leave office tomorrow he has already done so much damage to the polity by showing others just how much you can get away with in some quarters and still get elected. I very much fear someone will come along who does know more about actual governance, who is smoother, more decorous, but just as unprincipled. I don’t think Pence is that person because I don’t think he has enough initiative. But Paul Ryan? It is scary. And it so shouldn’t be this way. Were it not for the various Constitutional compromises and advantages for majority white, southern, conservative districts, voter suppression this would not have worked. This election really was a sort of slow motion coup d’etat. It remains to be seen whether various democratic institutions like Congress and the press will work, and work fast enough, to right the ship of state before it crashes on the rocks. I sure hope so. I have never been more worried that they aren’t up to the task.

I think you are right. Now, at the state level this is old news. But it seems only now to be part of national politics. And the people who do this know they have crossed a line, know that if decency returns they will be anathema. And so they press on. The next line will be killing, or maybe the horrific withdrawal of health care from millions will be that that line.

Tamara Piety@2: I write fairly often about messaging but it seems to me that what I have written is off John’s topic, so I won’t be reproducing them here. In any event here’s two old articles, writing about it in the context of both parties: 2010 and 2011.

Na, Trump’s election was just a product of a crap electoral system and an opposing candidate who didn’t understand it. The primary system encourages hyper-partisanism, and the electoral college system encourages appeals to some minority interests and ignoring of others, depending on their geographic distribution. I don’t think Trump discovered any new political constituency, and I don’t think any Republican is sanctioned for saying plumb crazy things.

That’s especially so if the plumb craziness is mixed with a handful of obvious truths that for varying reasons Very Serious People will not say (there are always such unspoken truths in any political culture). But they have to be obvious truths so they cannot be characterised as plumb crazy.

I think you’re correct – the right does cluster in the edge of the unsayabke.

There’s leftist opinions that are unsayable, of course. If you advocate armed revolution, people will fear you’re serious and patiently explain to you why (a) this is a terrible idea; (b) you’re an idiot; while having a word out of your earshot to their counterintelligence people that (c) you might be an undercover police agent who is being paid to cause trouble, because nobody says anything that stupid unless they’re being paid to say it. But this isn’t a majority opinion. The curve falls to “hardly anyone believes that” before it reaches “unsayable”‘.

Context matters, possibly. In Blairite Labour, maybe even the Corbyn style of leftism was unsayable, until Corbyn said it.

P.S. I can think of at least one exception on the left: Israel. We’re not going to talk about that, right?

When so many in the Media are engaged in the ridiculous pursuit of Russiagate, it is hard to get a clear view of the man. It seems like a case could be made that he is screwing up royally in the Middle East with Qatar, Syria, and Afghanistan, but how can such a case be made when the established opposition will not deviate from the same idiot support for pointless perpetual war and the Deep State?

It’s possible trumps election was just bad luck – a consequence of a variation in turnout in low turnout states that swing. No message, no lesson …

Israel is an obvious example of a subject many people on the left avoid talking about honestly. I could go on an extended rant, but instead will switch to Yemen. Mainstream liberals in the US were silent about the fact that the Obama Administration ( as well as the British government) was lying about Saudi war crimes, because if the officials were truthful they would be confessing to war crimes themselves. So the storyline was that the Saudis were just incompetent at targeting. Here is John Kirby from last fall earnestly explaining why bombing in Yemen and Aleppo are completely different.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv7p1RBOOXM

There is more honesty about Yemen now, because Trump is taking a bad policy and making it worse.

I think on the further left and also on the libertarian right a clever politician could tap into a desire for some Overton window breaking about our interventionist foreign policy. Unfortunately the Rand Paul types are pretty disgusting on most domestic issues, but they could cause some trouble in their own party. Some of the columnists ( though fortunately not my favorite one Dan Larison) over at the American Conservative thought Trump was serious when he criticized our stupid Mideast interventions. That was delusional, but it showed some desire on the right to talk about things the mainstream in both parties prefer to ignore. I saw claims over there that some of Trump’s appeal to voters was that he sounded like an anti- interventionist ( when he wasn’t calling for the theft of Iraqi oil and more and bigger war crimes.)

Here is liberal icon Rachel Maddow giving a summary of the war in Yemen last fall without mentioning the bombing of civilians by our allies or starving children or the bombing of the funeral that killed over 100 civilians a few days before. That was the point where the Obama people felt pressured to slap the Saudis on the wrist, but Maddow, knowing her audience, scrupulously ignores everything about the war that would make Obama look bad.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/iran-warships-raise-stakes-for-us-near-yemen-785684035597

Dog Whistles and Messaging

The problem with the idea that Trump succeeds by finally just saying outright all the ugly id-stuff that is sweet music to the ears of the nativists and bigots in the electorate, is that he won those swing states that gave him the victory by getting votes from people who had voted for Obama, twice in most cases. It’s not that he got a higher percentage of the wingnuts than a conventional R, or that they turned out in higher numbers. He did better with at least one sizable segment of swing voters.

This success of outright bigotry with swing voters upends conventional US politics. The conventional wisdom is that you have well-known policy positions that keep your side’s base happy, but you say speak in ways designed to not alienate swing voters by not being too forthrightly for or against things that might appeal either way to them.

The Rs have succeeded since Nixon by using the more aggressive, dog whistling, form of this dance. They do something like run the Willie Horton ad, that bigots recognize very clearly as an appeal to racism, but in which the racism is framed as concern that the D candidate isn’t strict enough with criminals to protect innocent people from them. The idea is that you can’t openly appeal to white supremacy sentiment, you have to couch it as being tough on crime, or fiscally austere, or you’ll lose the suburbs. The racists understand you’re referring to the “fact” that blacks are mostly criminals and live off welfare. They can hear those frequencies in your dog whistle. But in the lower frequencies that swing voters can hear, you’re not being racist, you’re concerned about crime and the deficit.

This has succeeded so well that the Ds have responded, for half a century now, with their own, defensive, insincerity. We decry the racism inherent in the Willie Horton ad to keep our base happy. But our side is 110% for being tough on crime, and our legislators vote for every bill that sends more blacks to jail, and keeps them there forever. We decry Hispanophobia, and are careful to always call the people our votes leave in the status of illegal aliens, as the “undocumented”, because we care. But we also 110% for “securing our borders”. Our legislators vote to fund ICE as it persecutes the undocumented, and we never, even when we have the trifecta, vote to decriminalize the 11 million illegal aliens. That would be “amnesty”, and we’re not going to be caught dead being for amnesty.

Aggressive Rs dog whistle to appear less stupid and inhuman than they really are. Ds and moderate Rs message to appear more stupid and inhuman than we really are. Both moves are pretty disgusting, but I have to give the Ds the prize in this particular diving contest.

Now the aggressive Rs have moved on. With Trump they have just thrown away the dog whistle. The reaction that conventional wisdom expected, that Clinton relied on to beat Trump, was that swing voters would abandon the Rs and our side would win handily. That didn’t happen. It’s now clear that the conventional wisdom about the efficacy of dog whistling and messaging was a fable that sophisticated people told themselves to avoid some ugly realities. Unsophisticated voters have always been able to hear all the frequencies of appeals like the Willie Horton ad. Racism simply isn’t radioactive in America. The dog whistle was always something designed to preserve the feelings of the sophisticated, not the vulgar masses.

The unsophisticated also recognize messaging for what it is, BS tap-dancing. We don’t fool any of them. I may shoot the next D politician who mouths the words “secure our borders”. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to not see that if you believe our borders need to be secured against the undocumented, you actually agree with Trump that they’re rapists and murderers. Why not vote for someone willing to say what everyone seems to believe?

Trump is indeed incompetent at doing the job he was elected to do, at public policy. But what we tend to unthinkingly lump in with that actual incompetence — his non-stop gaffathon public statements — is the source of his political strength. This demented person, who has apparently lost the ability to recognize the truth even if it hit him over the head with a lead pipe, and so spouts an unending stream of outrageous untruths, has attained an unparalleled reputation for truth-telling with Rs and swing voters precisely because he avoids messaging. He says whatever is on his id. Ds, “moderate” Rs, even aggressive Rs, all practice messaging, they all calculate what they say to minimize the offense they will give to anybody who votes. Not Trump. He calls ’em like he sees ’em. He’s too demented to have any filter left.

I won’t try to predict how it will end. Maybe some at least half-way competent public policy people will tame Trump to the point that they can use the political appeal provided by his dementia to get away with implementing their policy agenda. Maybe no one will ever be able to control Trump enough to stop the current chaos, and it will become clear to the R base and his swing voters that he is just demented. At that point, either Trump and Trumpism will have had its 15 minutes, he’ll go down the memory hole and we move on the next public spectacle in the usual peaceable fashion, or he refuses to go quietly and we have some adventuristic end to this farce.

I know how I want it to end. The Ds stop messaging. We come out for blanket amnesty for the “undocumented”, for national health insurance, for open class warfare against the owners, for reducing every state that keeps nullifying laws on its books to territorial status. Okay, the whole program may be too much at once. But just come out for any one of these things, or any other one public policy you may think worthy. The important thing is to scrupulously avoid messaging, to avoid softening or trimming in the vain attempt to fool people who are better at spotting BS than we are because they have lived their whole lives eating the dust of sophisticated people like us spouting BS. I have to agree with Trump on this, that it’s just sad to think we can get them to vote for us by the pretense that we don’t actually disagree with whatever vulgar prejudice we project onto them.

That plan, just saying what you think, is, of course, terribly unrealistic. It’s demented of me to even imagine it to be possible. But while Trump and I may be the Last Honest Men in politics because we’re both demented, at least I have dementia without behavioral disturbance. I’ve never run for public office.

I’d interpret Trump differently. There is an enormous mismatch between the priorities of the Republican donor class and those of the median Republican voter. He was able to take advantage of that to secure the nomination, and a combination of intense partisanship and related weaknesses on the Democratic side put him over the top. A politician without his personal flaws could have cruised to a landslide win, and I’d be very worried by that prospect (Trumpism with the edges sanded off, so to speak.)

Something that people haven’t mentioned here is the absolute flood of campaign spending, and how it comes from a very small group of donors. This has distorted politics in all sorts of ways. In the past, candidates who fell behind would drop out because they’d lose the ability to fund their campaign. Now, all you need is one billionaire – and that’s why we saw so many candidates lingering in the GOP presidential primaries well after their overall support cratered. But this comes with a price: all of the candidates being forced to adopt functionally identical platforms appealing to a small group.

The problem is that the things the billionaires like aren’t the priorities of the working class voters who have migrated to the Republican party – they don’t actually care about tax cuts for the rich, for instance, and they like Social Security. The disconnect is particularly big on immigration (big business likes it – keeps costs low.) Trump could tap a large audience, and he could use his celebrity as an advantage too.

In terms of breaking boundaries, if you think of Trump as a reality TV participant his behavior becomes almost normal. There being outrageous is part of the act, so to speak. If people respected politicians and the political process they’d draw a bright line between the two, and undignified things would be the political kiss of death. But they don’t, at all, and Trump was also remarkably cunning about drawing negative reactions that ended up helping him.

I bring this up because there is a pretty important difference between this approach and one that basically treats the opposition as a bad monolith – which is pretty much what’s implied by the claim that a large fraction of the people on the other side are feral.

It seems to me that Trump isn’t secretly a genius, whatever some may say. So I figure others are going to get the hang of the Trump trick.

I agree, but I’d frame this somewhat differently. Our political ecosystem creates people like Trump in the same way that natural selection is a creative process. Everything that was not-Trump got killed off.

Corey Stewart and his ilk were always out there, but the ecology of our political system didn’t used to allow them to prosper and reproduce.

The key evolutionary advantage for folks like Trump is that they have more tools to work with. Trump can say absolutely anything without being held to account by his political party or the media. Traditional politicians are limited by integrity or shame.

Trump is not a sudden apparition, he’s the inevitable product of that bright line (a created thing!!!) that many people have become convinced they must stay on the uphill side of … belonging to a group is MUCH more important than being “right” (whatever that means). It’s what makes us _us_. I guess you could say that T possesses a purity to his non-wonkiness that McConnell can only aspire to. Management consultants know, Craftsmen don’t get to be CEO. I wouldn’t call it a “trick” people could adopt, tho. Having as I do this absurd faith in the future of human nature.

… I don’t think the line has gotten less bright, it’s just that fashion moves on. Complaining about zoot suits is so libtardy.

Traditional politicians are limited by integrity or shame.

rofl

I should add that people on the right commonly say it is the left which is fascist. Here is an example–the comments below the article show the attitude in its purest form.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/29/why-we-want-to-kill-each-other-over-politics/#disqus_thread

Donald: people more towards the centre commonly say that both extreme left and extreme right share very unpleasant qualities that are what the left call fascist.

John, rereading your post, I realize that what you are worried about is that, since Trump is unlikely to be a real(tm) magician, his trick will work for other people. And that given the massive power that that trick unleashes, it is unlikely that nobody will try it successfully.

I think that’s all true, although I think too that you need to be made of a special material to invoke the magic. Not everybody musters the green nadgers needed to pull it off.

Part of what made the line-not-to-be-crossed so fragile was that it was used as a means of excerting power. The definition of what was allowed to be said was used to shape discussion, and thus it lost its legitimacy. And once breached, well, it was breached, and it all felt like a huge liberation to those whose concerns had been redefined as not worthy of discussion for moral reasons.

Consider immigration (link goes to The Atlantic).

I sometimes wonder if there aren’t more fundamental issues of human nature in play, because most of the behavior by Trump that is labelled ‘incompetence’ seems to be mostly about propriety. And that doesn’t work if most of the public finds your standard of propriety asphyxiating and unrealistic (c.f. “she has a beautiful smile”).

If I boldly claimed that HRC would win, I might insert an ‘My predictive powers are suspect on the topic of Trump are suspect at best. I’ve yet to complete any serious forensic inquiry into why I might have decided to believe in unicorns, so I’ve no clear idea whether this was a one-off error, or a predictable consequence of deeply-rooted biases, so take everything I write on the topic of Trump with a dump truck full of salt.’ But mine is, once again, clearly the minority view.

The success of Trump is an historical anomaly – the rich and powerful usually win. That the richest people in America – Bezos, Zuckerberg, the Kochs, et al are funding the ‘resistance’ speaks volumes. The system is not collapsing, predatory capitalism will thrive, and individual rights and privacies will continue to diminish. Protectionists may throw up a roadblock, or two, and may in the end succeed in reclaiming some autonomy for the middle and lower classes. But the forces arrayed against such change are massive, deeply-entrenched, committed, and extremely well-funded.

Very sorry to hear of family troubles, John.

Mario
Peter Beinart writes, in the article you linked to, that people like Peter Beinart are under pressure to refrain from saying or writing the kind of things that Peter Beinart himself writes in that very article. He doesn’t, however, make any reference to himself being under that kind of pressure; nor does he give any explanation of why he should be an exception. So there’s something important missing from the story he’s telling, which makes it hard to evaluate.

and from @34
very, very funny:
‘The success of Trump is an historical anomaly – the rich and powerful usually win.’

– As a rich and powerful won (Von Clownstick) – who pretented -(that is true!) – that he wasn’t rich and powerful…

Doctor Memory

I think that you got it pretty well, ah, Dead Right back in 2003. In fact I think you got it so right then that I’ve been thinking about that article a lot, and forcing some people to re-read it.

Then you probably want to put in a link that works?

Tamara Piety #2,

I share your concerns. It seems like an overwhelming set of conditions:

(a) The end of one-way broadcast media that once provided a national narrative and weeded-out some of the worst falsehoods, for about 100 years — and had made the “information consumers” passive, and quite unready for

(b) the rise of internet and social media, which has leveled the information providers suddenly, but allows extremists to flourish more easily, and returns us to the “yellow journalism” days of the 19th Century.

Then there is the nature of the information, itself:

(c) The complexity of the real world is growing, especially in political & environmental dangers — with two further effects: it is hard to wrap your mind around it all, and therefore, many people search for simplistic, emotional, and monocausal solutions.

(d) The system of capitalism is putting itself out-of-business (as many in the 19th Century foresaw) by being so successful as to provide its goods to satiation, while shedding itself of labor. But people still need the money, under the peculiar system of financing, to buy the goods — and people still maintain the quasi-religious (and quite modern) belief that money and property ownership define self-worth (a.k.a. the “Protestant ethic”), and further, that we must maintain the fear of the lack-of-money, in order to make people productive and creative.

PR practitioners themselves are also subjected to these same conditions, and so we are being further ill-advised and misled.

So now, someone with the skimpiest set of catchphrases wins the Presidency. A snake-oil salesman, a swamp-property seller, who found a slim advantage in the vast political disarray.

If things get bad enough, a Constitutional convention, which some of the plutocratic loonies are striving for, might erase the check-and-balances which are holding this particular guy in stasis.

The plutos really don’t like Trump al(though he may get them some tax cuts), but they may be very happy if the next swamp-drainer can run the whole show. I agree with you, it is worrisome.

– but as it now ALL comes down to a battle between Mika Brzezinski and the US President I had to change from: ”Not being worried”
to –
“I’m really worried.” -(like Mrs. Brzezinski)

So I’m also really ”worried” about our (beloved) ”President”?
Is he really ”not well.”
AND will Mika ”win”?

AND is it true ”that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching ‘Morning Joe’??!
OR ”should he really exclusively watch “Fox & Friends.”

These are the questions my homeland HAS to solve – and perhaps we just have to do one of these ‘Family Interventions’ -(my family did with aunt Assunta in 1982?)

Kidneystones #34: “If I boldly claimed that HRC would win, I might insert an ‘My predictive powers are suspect on the topic of Trump are suspect at best…'”

Speaking for myself, I wrote here probably 4 or 5 times under the assumption that Trump might win, starting back in August 2016, right after the GOP convention. As soon as Trump won the Republican nomination, most political insiders who were writing on the web assumed anything was possible. I am not one of those, but this was a risk-free observation, you don’t need to be prescient: The U.S. electorate is closely 50/50 tribal, the RNC & DNC will always go all out for their candidates, and Presidential contests have usually been tight in the last decades. Jeez, even Hillary said it would be a close election.

Insofar as Trump won because voters sick of messaging and dog whistles were attracted to what they perceive as his anti-messaging plain speaking, it is not going to be easy to reproduce that success. These people haven’t turned on him yet because so far what we perceive as part of his overall incompetence — his intemperate rage tweets, etc. — is exactly why they voted for him. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks, however politically incorrect.

But these people do expect him to produce results. They aren’t attracted to the outrageous things Trump says for the content (many of them voted for Obama, twice), but because they give hope that, finally, we have a politician willing to break out of the paralyzing stasis that US politics has degenerated into. You have to have glasnost before you can have perestroika.

But Trump is going to have to start delivering on the hope that the presumed thinking outside the box that is behind this iconoclastic speech, means that he will soon be delivering dramatic results. The idea is that the US has tied itself in Gordian knots with all this PC speech and PC thinking, and that’s why things aren’t going well. In every field, all that has to happen to make dramatic progress flow, is to cut the knots and start asserting America’s interests, to start getting the US the better deals it deserves and could have gotten if only the conventional politicians had asserted our might. Instead they let themselves be tied up in knots of PC thinking, and conceded too much in bad deals with our competitors and rivals.

This is nonsense of course. There are no dramatic and easy wins to be had, well, short of the program I outlined above at #16, which is exactly the opposite content to any perestroika Trump and his party would want. And even if there were dramatic wins that perhaps a competent person leading Trump’s party might be able to achieve, Trump is not that competent person.

It is perhaps not too late for some competent Mayor of the Palace to emerge in the Trump administration or their Congressional leadership who could get something done. But this person would still not have any dramatic wins he or she could engineer to keep the hope in Trump alive, except perhaps foreign adventures using US military might to create a tributary American Empire, or some such exotica. Such a “Dare to be great, America!” scheme could be made to work, but I can’t say I see anyone busting to make it work.

What seems more likely is that Trump will not prove governable, not by any eminence grise who has a grand scheme to make Trumpism a continuing success by getting some dramatic wins, and not even by such a person or group willing to settle for merely ordinary, modest and incremental achievements in office. He’s got dementia with behavioral disturbance.

Even if the latter possibility comes to pass, and competent handlers get control of Trump and steer his administration down a consensus R path, in the model of the Reagan administration, the people who voted for him in the hope that he would deliver perestroika are going to turn on him. Modest achievements won’t do it, and especially because they will only be gained if Trump very obviously accepts the role of the roi fainéant to this competent Mayor of the Palace.

Trumpism is going to be discredited for a generation or more by the eventual but inevitable failure of Trump to achieve anything but chaos. Okay, inevitable unless he goes full Fourth Reich. But that, even if it works short term, ends in a bigger disaster, and Trumpism is discredited for centuries instead.

Also Glen 16: “But our side is 110% for being tough on crime, and our legislators vote for every bill that sends more blacks to jail, and keeps them there forever.”

This is the leftist version of the old “both sides do it” narrative. I’m tired of it. Fact is that Trump is undoing evey one of Obama’s steps in the right direction, fact is that Trump’s successful law and order rhetoric killed the best chance at justice reform in decades (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/senate-dysfunction-blocks-bipartisan-criminal-justice-overhaul.html).

“we never, even when we have the trifecta, vote to decriminalize the 11 million illegal aliens”

Obama tried to shield millions of undocumented immigrants by executive order and was overturned. And what do you mean “when we have the trifecta”? The US electoral system prevents even the dream of a truly progressive trifecta. Even in the best case scenario, no reform can pass Comgress without support from Senators from conservative states. Ultimately it’s American voters who block the kinds of reforms we’d like to see. That Dem lawmakers are reluctant to appear soft on crime or pro-“amnesty” is because they know they WILL lose the next election if they do. Even the most progressive politician can’t make that fact go away.

soullite,

I agree with you that Obama was a bad president, and the Ds have systematically failed to be better than awful.

But however bad things are, they can always be made worse. And no reasonable person would have imagined, just because Trump was willing to say outrageous out-of-the box things, that meant he was going to be some Huey Long once elected, a politician who was going to right all the wrongs by overturning the conventional political order that serves only the privileged.

It doesn’t take any fancy expertise, just common sense, to see that Trump is demented. Your common man oppressed by technocratic centrists had the responsibility to pay attention and see that Trump belonged in custodial care, not the White House, before voting to make him the most powerful man in the known universe.

We have to work with what we’re given. We have to trust experts outside our field of expertise because we cannot be experts in everything. Yes, experts can be wrong, and yes, they can give advice out of self-interest rather then your interest, so you need to take their advice with a grain of salt. But you really, really need to not let your frustration with the complicated question of what expert advice to take make you turn to panaceas and miracle cures and the quacks who offer them.

Our two parties are like competing schools of medicine back in the days when there really wasn’t much difference between medicine and astrology. I always vote for the Ds, not because I have much respect for their “expertise” at running the world, but because you need a majority to get anything done, and the other school of political medicine is clearly and consistently even worse. There hasn’t been an election I’ve ever voted in where I didn’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils. Trump was clearly, from the point of view of anyone who bothered to pay any attention at all, the greater of two evils, not just for technocrats, but for middle America.

“There hasn’t been an election I’ve ever voted in where I didn’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils.”

Has there ever been any other kind of election? Has any voter in history actually pulled the lever for any candidate while being in total accord both with said candidate’s avowed aspirations and predictable actions?

I do strongly believe, however, that many recognized the transparent dishonesty of HRC and the fact that many voters were looking for something more than ‘My turn, now’ in a candidate. Rather than look at the facts (Trump’s Obama-like ability to beat the field in the primaries), the fearful allowed themselves to be hooked on Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, much as some are now.

As for Trump’s ‘chaotic and ineffective’ performance as POTUS, the same holds true. Trump-haters evidently believe that Republican voters focus on Trump’s tweets, rather than Trump’s already impressive record – such as placing one conservative justice on the Supreme Court with another likely to follow. Scrapping the TPPP, approving Keystone, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord all count among Trump’s victories and go into the win column for Republican voters.

The stock market may well crash, but currently teachers’ pension funds invested in the market have grown at a dramatic rate in the first six months of the administration. I don’t believe Trump will accomplish very much of what he promised but the media and others have set the bar so impossibly low (agent of a foreign power-Putin stooge) that perceptions of success in many key areas are assured among large segments of the public, with concrete material evidence such as an improved stock market to buttress Trump’s 2020 chances.

Given that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric did not disqualify him during the Republican primaries and did not disqualify him during the general election, the oh-so-wise are left to declare that Trump’s tweets will disqualify him from serving as president – with a mountain of recent evidence suggesting the exact opposite is true. Few here understand, predicted, or recognize Trump’s appeal and so transform his supporters into bigots, racists, imbeciles, and fascists. As such, Trump critics are uniquely unqualified to predict what the Trump future holds, at least until they can establish and move past their own confirmation biases. Such a transformation may never occur.

Unless this changes, Trump’s re-election in 2020 looks highly likely.

Well, Trump busted through and loosed the id monster – as many have noted.

Except the critters from the id are like global, showing up all over everwhere.

The key to 2016 showed up in April, when the Internet overwhelming voted to name the new British exploration vessel…Boaty McBoatface. I saw that and thought we are so ficked. Eijanaika, we were in a pre-revolutionary condition. Still comin’ on, with a metallic taste and some speedy effects.

“Boaty McBoatface” needs to be coherently incorporated into our political analysis. Ain’t so racist. Not a cry for economic relief. Not even partisan. Not even goal directed, it is absurdity for its own sake, jouissance of breaking out of subject positions. A mob, not a crowd. It will not be quieted with pablum or policy.

Let this slow motion riot intensify.

@MarioHe’s just not conforming to your standards of propriety in a fairly crass way, and I think many people are unable to see the difference.

Err, no. We can cancel out most of the impact of our interpretations and preferences on our assessment by seeing how effective people are at achieving what they want. “What they want” is obviously our interpretation, but the scientific evidence we have strongly suggests that we can get a fair idea.

And so. We compare-and-contrast “what they want” from “what they get”, eliminating most — not all, but the vast majority — of the impact of our own preferences. And we can evaluate people on their own terms, and when we do this… Trump performs poorly, as do the republican anti-obamacare crowd, as do the Brexit Brigade in the UK, as do the hard-right members of the liberal party in australia.

“Demented” is appropriate. Our judgement of a person’s ability to achieve their ends can be usefully distinguished from our judgement of those ends.

[see also, the application of this to you. You want to persuade us that right-wingers are rational, no? But you do so badly, because you write things that are untrue, casting doubt about the reliability of your knowledge and interpretations.]

53 –
”The fact is that to a lot of people, the man just comes across as refreshingly human in comparison to, say, Hillary Clinton.”

”Unless this changes, Trump’s re-election in 2020 looks highly likely.”
– 56

Well – that would be just another ‘amazing’ outcome of democracy ‘Made in USA’ –
In-it?
and so the American people will get again what they want – ‘refreshingly human’? – and one has to absolutely love them for such a ‘refreshingly human’ expression of ‘democracy’ – where out of the midst of them – the utmost ‘refreshingly human’ get’s… erected.

-(and there might be hope – that in 2020 – there are no comments here anymore about the erection of 2o16 and Hilary Clinton?)

– and about 48 –
”The idea is that the US has tied itself in Gordian knots with all this PC speech and PC thinking, and that’s why things aren’t going well.”

That’s why the US is changing it – and the ‘refreshingly human’ speech and thinking of Trump might become the new ‘Political Correctness’ – and at my last visit to the homeland there already – everywhere were the signs of this ‘transformation’ as more than a few -(mostly older dudes) – told me that they don’t want to have a ‘filter’ NO more’ and/or – how liberating it is to operate without ‘a filter’ – and as I understand this concept very well -(from what I heard from our family intervention – from 1982 – concerning aunt Assunta) –
she afterwards took up knitting again -(and it helped her a lot) –
So perhaps there is also hope for our ‘Dear Leader’ – if he takes on some other hobby than Golfing?

Social enlightenment recedes
before gathering networks
of production and distribution.

The search for political community
is persistent,
ill-defined.

Rancorous.

As we fence ourselves off
in networks of communication,

Forever deciding nothing.

Must we seek those
who will speak our name
when the contracts are written

And then retreat before
a Force we have yet
to see?

“No mainstream liberal has blamed White Men for all of America’s problems, but repeating that gross distortion can provide an another excuse for failing to come to grips with what the people who disagree with you do actually say.”

I disagree with that to some extent. They are to blame. They vote GOP.

P.P.S. I am also sick and tired (not just sick of being tired of ) having to point out these obvious things.

“if any of you left your enclaves and drove across this country (not fly, not take a train, no busses; just drive all the way across it)”?

Have you ever been in a big city? What do you know about poverty, and deep poverty, about the housing market, the state of schools, in say Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Washington DC? Not to mention Detroit or Flint. All these places where people vote 80- 95% Democratic. Do you have any f***ing idea what real life is in those parts of America where Trump isn’t popular? I have lived in Arkansas and Philadelphia. It is true that most people in either place know next to nothing about the other place. What is not true is that the one is privileged and the other neglected. True is that rural and urban America are facing different problems. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that. True is also that urban America has been systematically underinvested in for decades, and that rural America is politically way overrepresented to the point that state legislatures are systematically withholding funds from the big cities on which the state’s economy depend, systematically starving their tranit systems and their schools. My experiencei n Philly has been that the republican reps from rural areas do this out of pure malice, pure hatred for the urban liberals. There is no rational reason since they are really sawing off the branch they are sitting on. Even NYC, though more affluent than most cities, is in that predicament.

I have never heard urban Americans express the kind of hatred for rural America that is routinely expressed towards them (by politicians like Sarah Palin for example).

Regarding “coming across as more human than Clinton ” – in the 1980s jimmy savile was a much loved tv show host. He was also a paedophile and a bully. Watch any interview with him now, if you’re the age that we’re children when he was a much loved children’s show host, and his creepiness and weirdness is inescapable. But to our parents generation he was just great, a fine upstanding guy. Our parents generation is also the generation that overwhelmingly voted for brexit, trump and May.

That generation are fucked up. Sure, every generation has people who love bullies and creeps, but for that generation those kinds of people have somehow been normalized. We just have to wait for that generation to stop voting – or mobilize a much larger proportion of the subsequent generations. Because that generation are going to take us all to hell if they get a chance.

Glen Tomkins

I always vote for the Ds, not because I have much respect for their “expertise” at running the world, but because you need a majority to get anything done, and the other school of political medicine is clearly and consistently even worse. There hasn’t been an election I’ve ever voted in where I didn’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils.

Layman

Has there ever been any other kind of election? Has any voter in history actually pulled the lever for any candidate while being in total accord both with said candidate’s avowed aspirations and predictable actions?

A vote is a chess move, not a love letter. Evil doesn’t come into it, and neither does total accord. Chess players look to select the superior moves and to reject the inferior moves. The inferior moves aren’t evil, just inferior; and the superior moves are only that, not embodiments of deepest identity and aspirations. I’ve never voted for a candidate or a party I considered evil; I’ve never voted against one I considered evil, either. Evil is a strong word, and light use of it obfuscates.

Somewhat OT but I was interested to see this Bloomberg piece yesterday on (sections of) CT’s BAE Emmanuel Macron;
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-29/the-french-president-is-spending-his-summer-fighting-unions

@63
>but to suppose … that non-experts are more likely to be correct than experts is also folly.

Non-experts are more likely to be correct than experts *when it is in the interest of experts to be incorrect* (as recognised, at least, by 52). 52 nevertheless concludes that people should continue to trust experts, just ‘with a grain of salt’, and that one shouldn’t let one’s frustration make one turn to non-experts. Sorry, but this is a ball in the experts’ court. Whether the public will trust the experts will depend on whether the experts earn that trust.

reason
Are you a mainstream liberal?

J-D: “Evil is a strong word, and light use of it obfuscates.”

If trying to fund a massive tax cut for rich people by eliminating health care for poor people – while lying to those poor people about the impact of your scheme – isn’t evil, then what is? Is killing the poor people for money not sufficient? Must one also eat them?

bob mcmanus @58,

All the voters hear from conventional politicians in both major US parties is messaging, BS that no one believes, not even those who mouth the slogans. Our system may not come to as dramatic an end as that of the Soviet Union, because theirs was always more idealistic, and the constant BS was more of an affront from a system that claimed to be based on Marx. Our system is based on the thought of PT Barnum, and it’s not so great a stretch to have con-men in charge, or wasn’t such a stretch in PT Barnum’s time. But ours is a circus that has in recent generations taken on directing the largest military in the world on a permanent wartime footing, and getting health care to millions. It’s not really a show anymore that people can tolerate indefinitely being run like a circus. Maybe for now it’s just cynicism and joking back at a joke system with Boaty McBoatface, but the mood could turn quickly if the clowns in charge clown up health care too much, or get us into an even stupider, bigger war.

A big problem in discussions of this kind is that there are three groups of Trump voters.

(a) Republicans (including R-voting “independents”) who preferred Trump to any other Republican (about 40 per cent of his voters)
(b) Republicans who didn’t prefer Trump but voted for him anyway (about 50 per cent of his voters)
(c) People who didn’t vote for Romney, but switched to Trump (< 10 per cent) The OP, I'd say is mainly about group (a), which turns out to be much larger than expected. A lot of the rebuttals are about group (c). It's also worth mentioning the mirror image of (c), "decent" Republicans who switched to Clinton because they were horrified by Trump. Clinton's whole campaign was pitched at this group, which turned out to be so small as to be negligible.

– and I forgot –
It’s what Continental said @43 – as long as the American people believe a dude – who ‘brags about his wealth, claiming it proved his qualification for the presidency – and vote for him when he ‘relished in bragging how he was so rich and powerful he could game the system, bribe politicians, get away with paying no taxes, and even kill somebody in open daylight with impunity – and his supporters ‘love all of it, just lapped it up’ –
and I’m also –
‘convinced hardly any of them would have voted for him had he not been rich and powerful and his whole candidacy was built on his plutocratic appeal’ –
and still he had them sooo confused -(like kidneystones) – that they believed he is NOT one of the ‘richies’ – not AS ‘rich and powerful as THE Washington Establishment –
BUT – another ‘loser’ – just like any ‘lost worker’ in the rust belt.

Now that was – ‘the problem’.

Weird but possible:

-America’s breakup with itself (experienced after losing the shared experience of network television) has emotionally harmed the body politic suffienctly to allow for Trump as a hedonic protest vote among a crucial “moderate”/apolitical voting segment.

-Trump has for a long time very privately explored ways to get fired that do not become personally embarrassing (from his perspective). He or a confidant has set it up on two fronts (Russia, self-dealing from the executive in business) where he might “honorably” step aside in a way that preserves a veneer of virility: international corruption will do nicely.

-Political attachment theory would become a study based on bio-social microfoundations establishing that settled status (unless your a teen-young adult) and vertically integrated personal relationships with the range of status levels that hold stakes in communal decisions (….exhale) are two strong predictors of human thriving: health indicators, mental especially. The theory would inspire a progressive focus on political-economic localism and experimental communities (as it already has, in some sense) as well as anti-opt-out-solicitation legislation (anti advertising and campaigning, which has been a dirty hippy thing for 40 years?).

JQ 88 makes a good point. A lot of attention has been directed at group c), Obama voters who switched to Trump, but they are a small group. Moreover, counter to JQ, the group of Romney voters who switched to Clinton must have been about the same size as the opposite. I explained this in detail on another thread. Romney lost the popular vote by 5 million votes and Trump by 3 million. The 2 million difference is mostly explained by Obama voters who stayed home (including a significant number of African-Americans, although their turnout still matched or exceeded any pre-Obama turnout) and the third party vote (Green Party + 1 million). There is no way numerically that vote-switching can have made a big difference (except as an artifact of s screwed up electoral system that values some votes more than others). As to the number of vote-switchers, I haven’t seen any plausible evidence for the larger estimates (6-9 million), in particular I have yet to see an analysis that takes into account all flows (non-voter to voter, party X to party Y).

reason 68, 69: I think you are saying that voters have responsibility for the choices they make, and that we should stop insisting that voters are never to blame, only politicians. I totally agree and have been making the same point.

However, the habit of generalizing about whole demographic groups and speaking as if “white men” or “the baby boomer generation” (cf. 74) or “the Midwest” where monolithic entities is pernicious and irrational. One can blame GOP voters for voting GOP, but one can’t rationally blame a demographic group for anything. This style of discourse should be beneath progressives.

The OP is a conversation starter, not a well-sourced analysis. Bruce W. at 91 is largely correct in my view. Re: the magical mirror Republican voters discussion might make more sense if the third party bleed-off is factored in. Republicans disgusted with Trump did, in fact, have somewhere other than Clinton park their votes. The 260, ooo votes for Stein and Johnson are might have been evenly distributed, or might not. The losses by HRC were marginal in all the big states HRC lost to Trump – Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Trump didn’t win this election, Democrats threw it away. The principal problem was the coronation, the corruption, and the candidate. The lack of an effective economic message was almost as important. Obama’s hubris and narcissism didn’t help. His ego-driven decision to cozy up to Castro with no quid pro quo for the Cuban community energized and alienated Cubans ready to stay home or vote Dem in Florida. The notion that African-American voters in Detroit (and Florida, and…) would turn out in numbers to protect his ‘legacy’ and vote for the white woman they hardly knew was always suspect at best.

Not visiting Wisconsin after the convention required a special stupidity and vanity. Underestimating the enthusiasm for Trump in the sticks was fatal. Bruce nails it as far as the masquerade. Plenty of ‘core’ Democratic voters – middle-class educated white folks want more, not less, and Trump looked the better bet. The Democrats stand for nothing other than Trump, Romney, McCain, are evil.

Not sure how much longer that’s going to ‘work.’

There’s a comment above about the Democratic Party betrayal since Clinton’s presidency.
The Democratic Party definitively turned right, in the sense of repudiating the New Deal, under Carter.

All discussion of Trump’s victory that forgets Trump didn’t win is conceptually false, therefore futile.

This country is ruled by a tiny stratum of enormously rich men. Politically they have to work through agents, just as they have managers for their businesses. Because of their incessant rivalry and lack of support their political system has devolved into an elective quasi-monarchy. It doesn’t matter in one sense whether Trump is competent, any more than it mattered whether Reagan was competent, or whether a Nicholas II or Louis XVI were competent. The system requires a head, he’s it.

J-D @83

OK, I’ll refine the wording of my first sentence to ‘non-experts are more likely to be correct than experts when it is in the interest of experts to be incorrect *more than it is in the interest of non-experts to be incorrect*’. Such situations can and do occur. When a group of people is systematically paid to be wrong, they become even more likely to be wrong than any random human or group of humans. Similarly, and indeed consequently, situations can and do occur where an individual or group, e.g. experts, deservedly loses people’s trust so that the level of trust becomes equal to or lower than the average trust in a random unknown human, including a non-expert.

steven t johnson @ 98

I don’t know what it means to assert that Trump was elected but didn’t win the election.

But, yes, the U.S. is effectively a plutocratic oligarchy in practice, though not form. A lot of ill-conceived electoral analysis focuses on the form, while forgetting the reality of practice. I don’t see Trump as some kind of revealed preference for which we should diagnose or blame the character of voters, individually or as dubious statistical clusters; late in a long game, they were presented with a pre-printed menu featuring rotten meat, not a gourmet tasting.

Commenters like me do polemics mostly, but there are good quality academic studies that confirm what ought to be blindingly obvious: the American political system as a whole — including Congress and state legislatures as well as major political Media — has become almost exclusively responsive to the very rich and large business corporations. And, there isn’t much to oppose them from below.* It seems to me that a number of commenters here are unaccountably in denial that this is reality and while most people from self-interest as well as principle ought to be disgusted and alarmed by this state of politics, many are strangely cynical and accepting, or, as I say, in denial of one sort or another. I include the OP.

In terms of political philosophy, I am basically a liberal. I don’t believe in having an “ideal” standard of politics, a guiding notion of utopia; I believe in messy and never finished. It seems to me that the interests of the bosses are against the workers, the few rich against the many poor or merely middle-class. This opposition is naturally perennial, inherent in cooperation in a hierarchically organized political economy (and, no, we are not going to abolish hierarchy any time soon). A healthy democracy balances the numbers of the many against the ease with which a few who already command resources can organize against the many. By creating a complex institutional machinery of government dependent on popular electoral support, organizing a faction or more broadly a socio-economic class, small and homogenous enough to be stable and persistent to dominate all the institutions at once should be nearly impossible, and so contending factions are reduced to more-or-less rational argument and deliberation to coordinate political action to control the state and govern the political economy. That’s the liberal theory: keep the game of political conflict, argument and compromise going, with rational deliberation and controversy as the lubricant that keeps the machinery from seizing up. Even if the governing elite is an elite, keep it a divided elite contending among themselves, and occasionally they have to appeal for mass support, and that may be enough to introduce rational deliberation and the possibility of progressive reform adaptive to circumstances.

So, as far as “incessant rivalry” among giant corporations and the super rich is concerned, I’d say a big problem is that there is so little of it behind the slight buzz of media white noise. The top management of big American corporations, their venture capitalist social clubs and their networked coteries of consultants and lobbyists have become a singularly self-conscious, certainly globalized social and economic class, strangely homogenous ideologically in their embrace of the neoliberal hydra; they make the 19th century French haute bourgeoisie look like populist non-conformists.

A government that solves problems only for a small oligarchy of enormously rich people and the c-suite executives of giant business corporations doesn’t want rational deliberation on policy ends or means. Their politicians are meant to be spokesmodels only, stars in an alternative show business. Public political discourse isn’t about choosing, it is about devising and exercising the means of manipulation. Policy becomes arbitrary and corrupt and after a while its only apology is authoritarian.

That’s what is wrong with Nicholas II or Louis XVI or Donald Trump as Monarch: the government and political system they preside over more than run, deprived of the lubricant of rational deliberation over means and ends, becomes increasingly sclerotic and stupid. Policy can be hijacked or “farmed” by a well-placed lobbyist or crony or just left inert in the face of mounting crisis by the inability to mobilize the political will to overcome vested and reactionary interests, while the legitimacy of the system erodes with every repeated demonstration of its increasing incompetence. No one in power says, “hmm maybe enormously expensive perpetual war is a bad idea”; or, “maybe immunity for banksters in a core sector of economy prone to fraud and predation is not the way to go.” They are in power only as long as they don’t question the parasitic interests behind perpetual war and endemic financial corruption.

That’s where the U.S. is after a long thirty-year journey on this path. Republican Movement Conservatism has its Federalist Society, business corporations have their ALEC, while the Obama-Clinton Democratic establishment evolved into a parasite lacking the functional organs for an independent existence, trying to achieve for its own survival complementary symbiosis with Republicans who regard them as a noxious pest afflicting Hollywood on the Potomac.

Sure, Trump’s Twitter stream is alarming. Almost every Twitter stream is alarming: 143 characters and a picture is not thinking, people! Hillary Clinton’s excuses for electoral failure — not just falling short personally but leaving the whole Party in ruins — are bizarre, too. Rachel Maddow is bizarre also (see @ 14). The Media’s passionate pursuit of the Russiagate nothingburger in violation of every remaining journalistic norm is bizarre. Trump isn’t causing the crisis of legitimacy and it is hardly limited to him. If Clinton had chanced into office, we’d still be having a crisis of legitimacy as Republicans use her notoriously bad judgment to gin up the Daughters of Whitewater and Benghazi and Email and talking the Clinton Foundation instead of the emolument of paying hotel rack rates, because she was horrible and incompetent, too; she’d be trying to find a reason to intervene in Syria or Ukraine (because that’s what the Blob or the Deep State [choose your clever label] unaccountably and inexplicably wants) and offering to waive States wanting to privatize of Medicaid and appointing reactionaries to the Supreme Court allegedly to satisfy a Republican Senate majority she conspicuously did nothing to displace in an election in which she spent over $1 billion.

*What is missing — any credible vehicle for popular dissatisfaction or even rational concern for the general welfare and national interest to register in governance — is critical. The rich we will always have with us in politics; that we don’t have the poor or merely middle-class or a disinterested (or even differently interested) elite faction to voice more than a squeak of ineffectual protest is a problem — the problem in my humble opinion. (And, yes, Sanders was great as proof of concept for some possibility, but also evidence for how limited still is the possibility at this moment, how close to stillborn.) There has to be pushback, and a lot of it from below (the middle even if not the bottom, or the local instead of exclusively the center) to get a politics of balanced judgment and rational adaptation to circumstance, let alone progressive reform. It isn’t just that we no longer have labor unions; we don’t have local newspapers or much in the way of a local chamber of commerce. We don’t have small business to rail against big business. Much of the academic or intellectual left is off doing cultural criticism of language and semiotics, leaving us to the tender mercies of thought leaders like the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman or Nicholas Kristof who can neither write well nor think, and don’t really care because celebrity makes them rich. And don’t get me started on the virtue signalling of Cory Booker.

That was a pretty good rant if i do say so myself; strike a blow for liberty and independency! wherever you are this American holiday.

(i’m off for a few days and probably won’t be able to answer, should i have an incisive critic; sorry. also, i admit i don’t understand anything nastywoman says; can anyone translate? should i care?)

Glen Tomkins
Maybe I have misunderstood, but if you describe voting for the Democrats over the Republicans as ‘voting for the lesser of two evils’, it seems to me that you are saying that the Republicans are evil and that the Democrats are evil.

F. Foundling
If there are people who have an interest in being incorrect, it is reasonable have less confidence in their being correct than in people who have no such interest, but there’s no relationship with expertise. I stand by my earlier assertion that it is folly to suppose that experts are more likely than non-experts to have an interest in being incorrect.

When a group of people is systematically paid to be wrong, they become even more likely to be wrong than any random human or group of humans.

That’s plausible; but experts as a group are not systematically paid to be wrong.

@102
(sorry. also, i admit i don’t understand anything nastywoman says; can anyone translate? should i care?)

You shouldn’t -(care) – as I have a very hard time to understand myself what I’m saying -(not unlike Von Clownstick) – but about the translation – and as you brought up ‘gourmet tasting’ – I see Trump as THE… ‘cook’ – you could blame his voters for making me eat the rotten meat he is serving.

@ bruce wilder

>also, i admit i don’t understand anything nastywoman says; can anyone translate? should i care?

I think I’ve figured out where I’ve encountered the style before:

“Heads, heads – take care of your heads”, cried the loquacious stranger as they came out under the low archway which in those days formed the entrance to the coachyard. “Terrible place – dangerous work – other day – five children – mother – tall lady, eating sandwiches – forgot the arch – crash – knock – children look round – mother’s head off – sandwich in her hand – no mouth to put it in – head of family off – shocking, shocking. Looking at Whitehall Sir, – fine place – little window – somebody else’s head off there, eh, Sir? – he didn’t keep a sharp look-out either – eh, sir, eh?”

One of the privileges some Trump voters would like back would be the right to elect progressive leaders without having our votes hacked or those leaders jailed if we do manage to overwhelm voter suppression strategies with our numbers. Voters in Georgia elected Roy Barnes who was leading the nation in legislating against predatory lending. But Rove hacked our vote and gave us the venal Perdue dynasty instead. In Alabama they ran a kangaroo trial to jail Don Siegelman, a Democratic governor they could not defeat even in rigged elections. Obama never pardoned him either.

I thoroughly agree that Trump is a nightmare, but I can’t agree that he was unforeseen or an inexplicable departure from what has been building up to him.

I also suspect that it will limit anyone’s ability to understand the sources of Trump’s popularity if we are content to suppose that it is only fueled by the resentment of a demographic of Archie Bunkers. That explains some of it, but it leaves out more than it covers. What about the women who voted for Trump? Do they long for a return to the good old days before birth control and equal access to education and good jobs?

“One of the privileges some Trump voters would like back would be the right to elect progressive leaders”

Very interesting news from that parallel universe known at Lefttrumpia. Are your enjoying your Science Fiction cartoons?

[John Holbo is there a reason for keeping my stuff in moderation longer?]

Glen Tompkins #48: “Trump is going to have to start delivering on the hope…”
Continental #49: “The evidence doesn’t support this. Trump is still highly popular among his base…”

I agree with Glen Tompkins here. Some of Trump’s supporters have put him on a very short leash, and if he doesn’t produce soon, he’s toast.

Their hopes could be dashed on the division within the GOP, which has been a long time coming and which Trump is not a part of. He inserted himself into it. The silliness of Trump just illustrates their dilemma more.

This may be a big reason why Trump is still blaming things on the media. He cannot find another excuse. (This is a weak defense, inextensible beyond his most gullible.)

As I wrote here last August, a month after the GOP convention, “I still think the GOP is splitting in half, unless Trump wins, and then maybe the Dems will split up first, while the plutocrats make new in-country deals to avoid much damage to their portfolios during the thrashes of faux-protectionism.”

I would amend this to, “The plutocrats will get their tax cuts and get that money out of the U.S.”

@109
‘I think I’ve figured out where I’ve encountered the style before’

How flattering – but ‘warum in die Ferne -(or into the past) -schweifen wenn das Gute liegt so nah?! as I definitely try to show the style of our great new leader – the beautiful – always winning Donald Trump!

And there is a very important reason for that – as you need to speak ‘Trump’ in order to be understood by ‘Trump’!

And what is this junk?

One of the privileges some Trump voters would like back would be the right to elect progressive leaders without having our votes hacked

Trump lied about every single one of his policies and the Russians literally hacked the voting machines, along with his policy platform. One of the republican candidates physically assaulted a journalist and wasn’t jailed. Yet you want a leader who won’t get hacked or jailed? You have been thoroughly and completely played by the republicans but you blame the democrats. How can anyone be this naive?

J-D,

English is an amazingly flexible language. You can actually say that a given person is “evil” without meaning that that person works for the devil, is Absolute Evil, or any such implication that, yes, is a bad idea to be putting out there. The wonder is, that you can use words that might, at some extreme be taken in very unfortunate ways, and still everybody will take them in the context presented rather than as that unfortunate extreme. Well, everybody except the occasional person who has taken on the thankless task of policing the English language. Even if your efforts at policing the use of the word “evil” were far more successful than they are at all likely to be, I don’t see the point of that enterprise.

It’s possible you don’t actually need the stent, but only the doctor knows for sure.

The doctor does not know. Assuming good faith (and there have been clear cut cases of surgeons running Medicare mills with considerable disregard for patients or medical necessity as it is commonly understood), she is likely to be applying probabilities drawn from the statistical analysis of variance in some combination of studies done by others as controlled trials of “treatments” or population experience surveys. Committees meet, make up conditional rules derived from argued interpretation of some body of such studies, and the internist, surgeon or other doctor or nurse applies her expertise to the task of clinical application of the rules to the case. It is an open question where the greatest information gaps exist: in the pseudo-scientific formality of the research designs, the not-so-subtle distortions imposed to allow the use of simplified linear statistical models as the lens to look at decidedly non-linear, complex biological processes, the attempt at generalization into rules in the emergent social command-and-control of the hierarchy of committee and physician, the severe time constraints placed on doctor-patient interaction, observation and diagnosis, or the reliance on a “battery of tests” which vary greatly in specificity and quality, and subject to dubious interpretive judgment conditional on guesses about the biological processes and conditions that are producing “results”. The actual practice of medicine occurs in a fog.

The actual history of medicine is littered with elaborate theories of disease and practice that were globally wrong and the actual practice is a detailed string of individual error, even within the ambit of current consensus opinion. Idiopathic deaths in hospitals in the U.S. runs into the many tens of thousands every year and those are the ones those making the errors recognize as errors.

And, you are arguing over the appropriateness of social deference.

F Foundling: “What you present is a false dichtomy, since there are many other options besides absolute trust in and reliance on doctors/experts and complete ignoring of doctors/experts…”

Yes, exactly. So, when you wrote:

“…non-experts are more likely to be correct than experts when it is in the interest of experts to be incorrect *more than it is in the interest of non-experts to be incorrect…”

…you were ignoring that there was more than one expert who could be consulted, more options as it were, and instead creating a sort of, I don’t know…a false dichotomy, can we say?…suggesting that there was a generalized group of experts all of whom were corrupt, not distinguishable into discrete individuals who could be consulted independently, and against whom the advice of non-experts was better, as it was guided by their own self-interest, which self-interest is apparently a single monolithic thing, not a collection of competing greater and lesser imperatives, which must be balanced against each other. So we agree, then, that my example was helpful in dispelling that nonsense?

F. Foundling
Yes, often it will be a good idea to consult more than one person with medical expertise (or whatever other expertise is relevant to the issue at hand). But to prefer the opinion of somebody who lacks expertise on the sole ground of lacking expertise — that would be folly. Unfortunately it’s not unheard-of folly. There are indeed cases of calamity following reliance on the opinion of experts on medical questions, but there are also cases of calamity following reliance on the opinion of non-experts — quacks — on medical questions.

And experts often lie about what is in someone else’s best interest (not to mention often being incompetent as well).

Sometimes, yes, but ‘often’? Certainly not more often than non-experts, which is the practical point at issue here.

@119
‘This isn’t the first time that I’ve noticed the resident brocialists getting a different moderation treatment to the rest of us.’

Me too – but I always thought that you were one of the resident ‘brocialists’ – even I completely agreed – that the other resident ‘brocialists’ had a very funny -(and subjective) way of defining ‘Neolib’ – and about putting ‘incomprehensible hyphenated gibberish with multiple quote marks like Emily Dickinson writing a marvel comic’ – on kind of the same level as the excited ‘Trumping’ of kidneystones is really… disturbing?

Which finally could remind US all what this thread is all about –

‘Overton Thoughts’
Check!
‘The state of the Republic.’
Check!
‘Trump’s omni-incompetence’
Check!

And that ME and 119 are trolls and urgently should be relegated forever to moderation!

= = = Sometimes, yes, but ‘often’? Certainly not more often than non-experts, which is the practical point at issue here.= = =

I’m generally in agreement with you J-D but OTOH consider the case of professional economists and the minimum wage: it is well documented that there is a “you’ll never work in this town again” prohibition across the entire profession in the US against honestly discussing empirical results of raising the minimum wage, because those results are positive for ordinary workers and the funding class doesn’t want that known.

to prefer the opinion of somebody who lacks expertise on the sole ground of lacking expertise — that would be folly

Why do we use juries and not judges or senior lawyers to determine guilt?

Cranky Observer
What you describe as well documented may in fact be well documented, although I am unfamiliar with this documentation; but even if conclusively established it would not be sufficient, by itself, even to demonstrate that economists are wrong (about questions within their area of expertise) more often than non- economists, let alone to demonstrate that experts in general are wrong more often than non-experts. (What might be demonstrated, if you’re right, is that economists have been paid to evade the truth about one particular subset of economic questions, which if demonstrated would be an excellent reason to doubt what they say on those particular questions.)

engels

Why do we use juries and not judges or senior lawyers to determine guilt?

It is not true in all cases that we use juries and not judges to determine guilt; but, that aside, your question is a good one, and I’d like to know the answer to it myself; unfortunately, I don’t. In the context of the present discussion, however, it is probably relevant to point out that judges and lawyers are experts on the law, and that this does not seem to be the same thing as being experts on guilt.

Re Faustusnotes @119 and Continental @129: “This isn’t the first time that I’ve noticed the resident brocialists getting a different moderation treatment to the rest of us. Could it be crooked timber has become a sheltered workshop for beardy old dudes who can’t define neoliberalism? If so then I guess it’s a microcosm of the American left! But it used to be more engaging before the threads came to be dominated by a couple of brocialists, their id in the form of kidneystones, and nastywoman.”

Hilarious. Almost every categorisation, generalisation and assertion here is comedy gold – but the best thing is the overall picture, where poor little economic-moderates/centrists-cum-identity-radicals are incredibly oppressed, marginalised, victimised and unrepresented on CT and in the American left in general, whereas Mr Wilder and yours truly rule CT and the left half of the political spectrum of the Land of the Free with an iron fist.

Re nastywoman, you are only saying that she is incomprehensible because she is a woman, you nasty brocialist! You just can’t conceal your hatred of strong women who make good points, can you? She is so far from being incomprehensible that even I’ve got that she is essentially in your camp, just as Collin Street is. It’s not my fault that there are so many of you mainstream liberals that you even manage to quarrel with each other over your different commenting styles.

That’s enough chatting and dominating CT, now it’s back to wielding my totalitarian patriarchal power over America as a whole by swinging my mighty brocialist Marxist-cowboy beard all over the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. Ciao!

F. Foundling

… All along, you have been arguing with a very implausible and abstract strawman of your own construction.

Same strawman. …

I have reviewed the discussion in order to figure out what’s going on here.

My first comment on this subject was in response to a comment from soullite, which you can find above. So it seems to me there are two possibilities:
1. you would defend soullite’s position against my criticisms, possibly by suggesting that my criticisms are misconceived because I have misinterpreted soullite’s position;
2. you agree with me in rejecting soullite’s position.
Or can you find a third possibility?

When your poster boy for the vast brocialist conspiracy that has infiltrated CT is a commenter called ‘nastywoman’ it may be time you took a holiday

I think the OP is great and entirely on-topic. Trump did indeed offer two blatantly contradictory positions on many occasions, misrepresent his past remarks, lie, race-bait, and thumb his nose at nay-sayers, prigs, and pearl-clutchers of all stripes all the way across the finish line. Winning!

And people marvel at his popularity, and call him incompetent? I normally find little reason to remark on nastywoman’s comments and hope I won’t compound any perceived insult by offering a word of support. Like Bruce, I struggle at times to get her gist, but believe she has points to make.

Were I desirous of a place in the choir, I’d start singing from the hymn book. Had lunch with a (lefty) German colleague who identified his favorite teacher in high school as a conservative who loved debate and encouraged his students: left and right to go at hammer and tongs on the issues of the day. What a useless tool, no?

Had there been a fingernail more debate here and elsewhere, the 2016 outcome might have been very different. The local speech police did all they could to enforce right-think and right-speech, but the moderators were enlightened enough to resist demands for ideological purity.

Long may this continue.

Hi John, Hope this passes muster – https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/07/06/best_of_pro-trump_online_grassroots_declares_meme_jihad_on_cnn.html

I know you can take a joke, and I’m pretty sure most other folks can, too. What many here don’t understand is that team Trump is laughing out loud at critics, especially in the media.

What’s the lesson? The Trump troll-monster relies absolutely on media over-reaction to maximize reach and to energize a base that might otherwise be wondering…”Where exactly are all those jobs he kept promising.”

You know my comments well enough to know when I’m being insulting, and I’m certainly not trying to be. In any event, despite taking a three-month absence from January, I never left the minds of at least one observer. I don’t think I’ve gloated (much) in 2017, but I feel no need to apologize for being right, especially after being called every name under the sun for the better part of a year by the noble and magnanimous. I’d be grateful if you allow this final comment for a bit.

Feel free to delete all further for the next 3 months. You won’t need to, of course, cause I got the discipline. Just want to add a huzzah to my communications students who produced a bumper crop of stellar projects that my colleagues deem peerless. One attempted to appropriate the students’ work. True! Best of luck to the family.

engels

If you take a holiday, the brocialists win.

Katsue, there are no “experts” paid by oil companies to be wrong on global warming. Those people aren’t experts, they’re people from other fields who don’t know a single thing about climate science.

Le sigh.

CDT

The meaning of ‘we’ is at least partly indexical. If you pose the question ‘Why do we have juries?’, then ‘Because of the Sixth Amendment and because of the Fourteenth Amendment’ is one of the appropriate answers. But when I pose the question ‘Why do we have juries?’, it is not an applicable answer.

Moreover (and the indexicality helps to point this up), even where ‘Because of the Sixth Amendment’ is an applicable answer, it doesn’t answer the reframed question ‘Why do we [or should I say ‘you’?] have the Sixth Amendment requirement for juries?’

The official theoretical model is, I know, and you correctly point out, that a judge is the trier of law and a jury the trier of fact. This observation naturally complements my own earlier observations: on questions of law, the opinion of a judge, who is supposed to be an expert, is supposed to be preferred to the opinion of a jury,supposed to be non-expert; on questions of fact, where the opinion of a jury is supposed to be preferred to the opinion of a judge, the judge is not supposed to be more expert than the jury. Questinos about the relationship between experience and the official theoretical model remain.