You Keep Using That Word

G Othic @1
what the American media establishment will do seeing as this election is basically going to come down [to] either: a socialist (self-declared) vs. a lunatic, or a woman (and a Clinton) vs. a lunatic.

This assumes Trump will get the Republican nomination. He may or may not. Since the first votes of the primary season haven’t been cast yet, assuming he will get the nomination seems a mite premature/unwarranted.

…but given that this clause, “at least according to conventional wisdom”, means that you are not talking about impossibilities, but merely things that run counter to conventional wisdom, doesn’t this just boil down to, “how often is the conventional wisdom wrong”?

Your headline shows that you know you’re engaged in a massive abuse of language. But you seem still to want to engage in a massive abuse of language (“the number of impossible things that actually happen”).

Why? People don’t misuse modal discourse enough already? What did modal discourse ever do to you?

“Life is what happens while you’re making plans.” A good aphorism & one that’s more than a little telling in a world that’s increasingly “intellectualized.” Too much thought, at least too much forethought, has always been the scourge of the politicized branch of the brainiac class.
Little wonder that everything is “foreordained” and yet so little comes of all the scribbling and verbal posturing. You’da thunk we might have learned our lessons after all the prep and posturing that went into our recent excursions into: Affie, Iraq, Libya, Syria & other triumphs of the neocons I may have forgotten.

Humor me here. I am old, but hilarious. I still think that Trump is impossible.

But, Big Big Surprise… if Trump gets the Republican nomination and Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, that makes SANDERS possible.

I didn’t see THAT coming. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bernie. But, most of the other GOP candidates could beat him. Not Trump. Sanders out-trumps Trump. Bernie could stomp all over The Donald with an emotional truth that Hillary does not tap into.

However, John Holbo writes of Trump, “No one – I mean: no one – thought he would make it this far.”

Harrumph!! At the end of September (Sept. 24) in a comment under a John Quiggin post here, I predicted that in three months, Trump would hit a ceiling at about 25-30% of the GOP primary voters, due to the predictable emotional fatigue of much of the electorate + his lack of policy specifics + the other contenders would nail him.

Magically, the aggregate poll shows that three months later, around Dec. 24, he leveled-off at 35% of GOP voters:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html

I do not claim vindication. But I still have plenty of evidence to support my basic predictive theses of:

1. The GOP’s Epochal, Historical Cul de Sac.
2. The Three-Month Emotional Fatigue in Politics.
3. The Sudden, Permanent Disappearance of the 100-year Mass-Media Narrative.
4. The Donald’s Fatal Flaw.

Four independent factors! …Thus, I get almost as much wriggling-room, as any social scientist or economist. You can’t touch me!

What screwed-up my September prediction, what I really didn’t see coming, was that the other GOP candidates couldn’t neutralize Trump. That was a big part of my reasoning that Trump was toast: that they would easily put him to bed.

Wow. It should have been very easy. Yes, it is a hypothetical “prior” that they are descended from various species of political knucklehead. But they wouldn’t NEED real, true, scientific facts at their command; even if they knew a’ one! Far from it!

I just didn’t realize that they would be so politically unskillfuI. Their varying lacks of stage-moxie were the true shocker, to me… This is a big story, here: If there is one single reason why NONE of them should EVER be Commander-in-Chief, it’s that they couldn’t stop Donald Trump on the political stage.

And I should have predicted this! Upon my own personal egotistical reflection and self-reinforcement, and also as a good scientist!, I now believe that their incompetence might have been derived from my thesis #1: The Reaganomics disaster that has riven the heart of the GOP — an epochal disaster — has rendered them psychologically rattled, befuddled, politically incompetent.

So don’t even let them take out your trash, they couldn’t separate the bottles from the cans. One of the corollaries of #1 is that we are witnessing a first-rate socio-psychological disaster. It’s sad, but pass the popcorn!

“Why? People don’t misuse modal discourse enough already? What did modal discourse ever do to you?”

There is a possible world in which modal discourse killed my parents and left me an orphan. That both justifies misusing it in the actual world, and it’s a premise in the ontological argument for the existence of Batman.

Lunatic is a slippery word (and I see a lot of people with mental health problems who don’t like seeing it used), but I think narcissist would be entirely appropriate.

Narcissism is helpful in some fields, like show business; and you know what they say: ‘Politics is show business for ugly people.’

Anarcissie: “I think you all are making a serious misjudgement of Trump. Scary, yes; lunatic, no.”

I don’t think Trump is scary or a lunatic.

His fatal flaw derives from being a short-sighted egotist + thinking that a political campaign works like a business deal.

It has driven him too far: To win the GOP primary, he has said things which damage the foreign policy of the United States. And he has taken positions which he cannot retract, although he must, to win the general election.

The Temporary Name: “It turns out that everyone in the Establishment hates the guy.”

Cruz is a George W. Bush Republican who is POSING as an anti-establishment firebrand. The others don’t mind that part: It’s okay to lie to the electorate. But to oppose your own party’s legislation on the floor of the Senate, and slander McConnell’s leadership, for your own personal campaign purposes? That is unforgivable. Even Lindsey Graham has called him an “opportunist”.

LFC: “…would probably be a worse (more dangerous etc) President than Trump…”

Want more war? A quick Google search shows that Cruz’s foreign policy team are neocons, including John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, and other Iraq War hawks.

Want more Constitution-bending? According to Wikipedia, “Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser… Cruz assisted in assembling the Bush legal team, devising strategy, and drafting pleadings for filing with the Supreme Court of Florida and U.S. Supreme Court, in the case Bush v. Gore, during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts, leading to two wins for the Bush team. Cruz recruited future Chief Justice John Roberts… to the Bush legal team.”

I’m a dork and can’t help thinking about impossibility claims in politics in the pretentious way that philosophers do. What are the “truth conditions” of a claim that it’s impossible for x to be elected? Other than, of course, x failing to be elected, which proves nothing about whether it was possible?

Actually, I have this problem with all predictive political claims. What are the truth conditions of, e.g., Lee A. Arnold @10’s “But, most of the other GOP candidates could beat [Bernie]”? What kind of evidence could possibly verify or refute it? Or for that matter, what could verify the opposing claim that Bernie could beat the other GOP candidates?

As for “Sanders out-trumps Trump,” I think this common analogy is mistaken, if not entirely off track. In Freudian language, I’d say Trump is the Id, Clinton the Superego, and Sanders the Ideal Ego. The important point is that while the ideal ego is easily mistaken for the id, it’s the superego, on the contrary, that despite its self-image as the voice of reason and maturity, is most closely tied to the id.

Anon: “What are the truth conditions of, e.g., Lee A. Arnold @10’s ‘But, most of the other GOP candidates could beat [Bernie]’? What kind of evidence could possibly verify or refute it?”

None.

Anon” “Trump is the Id, Clinton the Superego, and Sanders the Ideal Ego.”

Well I won’t ask you for the truth condition of that one! But it brings me as political junkie to two interesting parallels in this campaign so far, although perhaps trivial:

1. Trump and Cruz are parallels. Both are amazing opportunists; both are stepping into the GOP’s “Tea Party vs. Country Club” breach with anti-establishment rhetoric for the primary; and neither one is saying what he truly believes. The difference is that Trump’s got enough money of his own to come in posing as an outsider, while Cruz had to try to get anti-establishment street-cred using the strategy of noisy obstruction on the floor of the Senate.

2. “Trump vs. Jeb” and “Bernie vs. Hillary” are parallels. “Upstart, up-ending emotional success” vs. “Judicious establishment reasonableness”.

“But seriously. Barack Obama was impossible. Clinton was impossible. Reagan was impossible. Carter? A long-shot, for sure. Watergate was impossible, ergo Ford. Nixon was impossible, insofar as he was a has-been.”

I’d disagree with many of these characterizations.

Obama – was a long-shot early on but by this stage of 2008 he was solidly in the top three and it was a near 100% certainty that the D nominee would be president given the economy and Ws ‘accomplishments.’ The fact anyone was even discussing the possibility of McCain was that he was a likeable enough war hero, but he never had much real chance

Reagan – same as Obama. He was consistently a top three candidate and it was all but certain Carter wouldn’t be re-elected.

Nixon ’68 was far from impossible…maybe not 1st choice probable, but to suggest a candidate that got 50% of the vote in ’60 was “impossible” eight years later seems a real stretch. Additionally, I wouldn’t count Ford as that had nothing whatsoever to do with voters and voting and all to do with politics and dealmaking.

Carter and Clinton probably legitimately could be viewed as longshots, although even Carter in the context of his time was a far more plausible and estabilishment Southern Democrat (therefore electable) than either Bernie or Trump are today.

That said, I’d still agree with the main point – unless by some magic we wind up with Clinton-Bush or Clinton-Rubio (which were early favorite outcomes) 2016 may go down as one of the more unlikely races in ages.

Perhaps more interesting is the “WHY” behind voters interest in non-main stream candidates. Perhaps the better part of 16 years of on the whole poor leadership has finally entered the psyche.

The Republican establishment went to so much effort to get Trump to commit not to run as an independent candidate. Now that’s an option they might need themselves. John Anderson 1980 looked impossible except for a couple of things that could have gone a bit differently and propelled a moderate Republican (terms used advisedly) running as an independent to the Presidency.

Bloix @30: “Trump is inconceivable in the literal meaning of the word.”

In the literal meaning, sadly, no.

Now I can’t stop fantasizing about an ontological theological-style argument against the existence of Trump: an asshole than which no greater asshole can be conceived could exist only in the mind alone.

@33 – did you read DeLong? No, you did not. Read DeLong and try to understand it.

anon/portly: You are misreading DeLong. An event is “zero-probability” as determined by an observer’s model. “Inconceivable” is a mental state, not an objective reality. And if an observer sees an event that according to his or her model is “zero-probability” – an event that is inconceivable – it means that the model no longer works.

Digby today:
“If the GOP accepts Donald Trump’s openly xenophobic, white supremacist, nationalist agenda as the Republican platform, whatever was left of sanity in the GOP is gone. They are setting their party on fire and risking immolating the whole country in the process.”
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/21/the_gops_terrifying_trump_plan_why_the_partys_establishment_thinks_it_can_control_the_donald_and_why_its_wrong/

I believe that the Republican Party, starting with Gingrich and Army, has been moving toward genuine fascism for many years, and that Bush/Cheney was a failed attempt to institute permanent one-party rule. But until now I have never considered the possibility that the Republican Party is controlled by insane fools. Ignorant, arrogant, greedy criminals, yes. But not self-destructive maniacs.

This is not like Obama or Ford or Nixon or Carter or Truman. It’s not enough to say, “I was wrong about the candidate.” It’s beginning to look like we will have to say, “I was wrong about American society.” We may be moving from the world of Tiberius to the world of Caligula, where rules will be different.

Lunatic is a slippery word (and I see a lot of people with mental health problems who don’t like seeing it used), but I think narcissist would be entirely appropriate.

Are there any republican candidates who do not have severe and obvious mental/cognitive issues involving empathy disturbances?

@Collin Street
heartlessness and lack of empathy are not, in this context, “mental/cognitive issues,” they are bad political stances. Your continued insistence that people with whom you (and most CT readers, incl. me) disagree are mentally disturbed ignores a large number of things, such as the history of the last, say, three or four thousand years, for one.

Anon/portly #34: “…today’s Nate Silver piece suggests that one thing helping Trump a lot is that the GOP is more worried about Cruz! That’s pretty funny. Also contra Lee Arnold’s point (#27 as of now) that *Cruz* (not just TD) doesn’t believe his own rhetoric.”

Silver’s analysis neglects to consider that the GOP Establishment doesn’t want either one of them, but has to knock them off, one at a time.

As Lindsey Graham and Bob Dole said today (and Graham said it, not for the first time), either one of them loses to Hillary.
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/21/lindsey-graham-says-electing-donald-trump-or-ted-cruz-would-be-death-of-the-party/?_r=0

There is a big fight going on inside the GOP over which one is the greater poison. The ones who want to get rid of Cruz cite a widespread personal contempt. Therefore, I guessed that something doesn’t comport between what he says in public and how he acts in private:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/donald-trump-ted-cruz-republican-establishment.html

Silver also notes the current little Kasich surge in NH, funny because he was my old pick for toughest to defeat.

anon @42–

no, no–no jab intended, no offense taken. I liked your proposal to run an ontological argument on a-holes, but it caused me to remember the Editor’s “enormous, mendacious, disembodied anus.”

TNC @48

Do you really want to ask Ze K that? Do you think it would lead to a productive conversation? He wants someone to take the bait.

The GOP knows that the Trump phenomenon reflects a loud quasi-populist double-digit percentage of the party, but cannot be converted into numbers that will win the general election (same for Cruz on other grounds; I for one find his physical appearance so much like underdone dough that I cannot stand to look at him–mea culpa for shallowness). The difficulty for them is finding a torpedo strategy for Trump that also blows the ballast for a Rubio or Jeb! to allow them to surface in forthcoming primaries. An unknown factor is how many of the Trumpsters will turn out to vote–loud approval doesn’t always translate into an effective ground game.

BTW I’ve appreciated the Forbidden Planet refs. Monsters from the Id indeed.

If Sanders takes out Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well he might, then Biden will be drafted faster than you can say Establishment.

All rules about filing deadlines and other trivia will be set aside.

The trouble with a Biden-in-the-emergency scenario is that Biden’s potential as a candidate or a President has been repeatedly proven to exist exclusively in Biden’s own fevered imagination. That Obama, the most astute political observer among American politicians, chose Biden as his life insurance policy ought to tell you something.

You are never supposed to even point to any of the organs of actual power in American politics, because “conspiracy” and certainly never speak of actual methods, but it does seem to me that Sanders, at age 75 (on election day) is his own exit plan.

Seeing is believing! https://web.archive.org/web/20160112011754/http://timecube.com/

@Peter T: If S. Wang is right and Trump gets the nomination, that’s good news for whoever the Dem. nominee is, I would think. I don’t want to entertain the possibility that Trump might actually become Pres.

I’m as old as most here, and my main research topic is exactly that of the OP: the relationship between unconsidered possibilities, zero-probability events and decisions under uncertainty. So, I don’t think there’s anything about the OP that’s unacceptable to the old.

But I have observed that old people (more particularly old, high-status men) tend to get dogmatic and cranky (in all senses of the term). In academic circles it’s called emeritus disease. Participation in blog discussions can help cure the disease, or bring it to the crisis point of complete meltdown.

Based on a reasonably close viewing of the 2012 campaign, I don’t think there was anything inconceivable about the way the current Republican primary has played out. The 2012 candidate most similar to Trump was Herman Cain, and he looked very strong until he was felled by a string of sex scandals (he and his supporters toughed out the first couple). Michelle Bachmann also looked strong, and was disqualified by anti-vax comments, which were then unacceptable but are now in the Repub mainstream. Gingrich did well enough to show that a similar candidate with a few less negatives could have one. On the other side of the fence, the establishment was unified behind a single candidate without any obviously disastrous negatives.

So, all you need to flip this is a campaign in which the obvious establishment candidate (Bush) flops for some reason, but doesn’t withdraw, and where the bar for disqualification on outsider candidates is raised a bit, as the Repub base withdraws more and more into its alternate universe. With those conditions in place, one or other of the outsiders is highly likely to win. If Trump and Cruz had been too problematic for the base, we would probably be talking about Carson and Fiorina right now.

DeLong’s phrase “visualization of the Cosmic All” I think is another SF reference, not to Forbidden Planet but to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series.

If you don’t know, don’t ask.

On age effects: the naturalist Richard Lydekker wrote, “The male primate grows morose and savage with age.”

To which I reply, yeah, but there’s a lot to be morose and savage about.

BW @59
Obama is conservative in the mode we used to be call a liberal Republican, a species that went extinct in the 1970s. Back in the day, much of what used to be identified as the Republican establishment was fine with the liberal Republicans, when that persona was necessary to get votes from Democrats. I guess it is still necessary, and they still like it for that reason.

I find this wrong. A liberal Republican like, say, John Lindsay was not conservative, therefore to say Obama is “conservative in the mode of a liberal Republican” is rather pointless. As for the rest, I started to write a long comment, but I’ve decided I don’t have the time or energy right now. Anyway, no minds are going to be changed about anything.

Actually, since money laundering is a criminal offense, accusing them of money-laundering via their foundation is probably libel, assuming the accusation meets the NYT v. Sullivan ‘reckless disregard’ test. But since this is a blog comment thread, I guess it’s a libel-free zone, or something like that.

My last comment was directed at SomethingSomethingNYC, sort of adding to LFC (tho maybe not much of value).

A number of people seem to be misreading DeLong’s comment. His whole point is that is a zero probability event seems to be happening, that means your understanding of the underlying situation is faulty. He is suggesting that because Trump has in fact made it this far, despite the ‘impossibility’ of Trump getting this far, means that we don’t understand the underlying dynamics going on with the US electorate as well as we thought.

The same is true of Sanders. On many levels he is appealing to the same underlying anxiety as Trump–that the middle class is failing to thrive. Trump says it is immigrants, Sanders says it is banks, but they are both seriously talking about something that the professionals have been giving only lip service to for the last 20 years.

The scary thing about Trump *should be* that the fact that he has made it this far means that nearly all of the professional political world has mis-diagnosed the underlying political landscape. Clinton is absolutely a creature of the professional political world, so if she goes up against Trump, we can’t be sure she will win because she doesn’t understand the landscape.

The proof that she doesn’t understand the landscape is in the fact that she hasn’t already dispatched Sanders. She hasn’t done so because he is dealing with the actual landscape in a way that she is not.

That doesn’t mean that she can’t win. She has enormous institutional advantages. But in some way that is ultimately part of the underlying problem. The institutions are losing touch with the political reality. That opens the door for people like Trump.

js. @ 64

I started to write one of my interminably long comments, but discarded it finally. There’s no hope that anything I wrote would be understood. LFC @ 69 is a case in point. And, as you say, “weird personal judgments and feelings”.

There’s no easy way to distinguish a President from his times, his choices from his compromises, from his friends or from his enemies, or ultimately from fatuous insistence on the historic inevitability of it all.

@53,

Under the incomprehensibly decentralized election system in the US, states control filing deadlines and all sorts of other critical components of even federal elections. Both major parties have cooperated to put in place election procedures that make third party runs very difficult, and especially third party runs by people who contested for the nomination of one of the two bigs.

That said, it’s not unimaginable, inconceivable, or impossible that states with D Secretaries of State, and D judges, might be able to bend their own rules. But too many states are controlled by Republicans to imagine that enough states would bend the rules to allows the Ds to get an establishment alternative like Biden on the ballot in enough states to have any chance to win. Any D candidate would have to win many states whose govt is in the hands of Rs. Most Rs, foolishly or otherwise, want Sanders to be the D nominee.

Re: the OP, Bill Scher and Matt Lewis muse: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/38721

Bill cites Rush on conservatism today and how and why Trump the candidate has emerged. Hint, there is no single ‘there’ there in American conservatism. The elite political, pundit, and intellectual class (to the degree the latter exist) have in fact over estimated the conservatism of the base, many of whom don’t seem to be so conservative after all. I think this is right and it’s certainly the first time I’ve this analysis of the Trump candidacy.

There is a possible world in which modal discourse killed my parents and left me an orphan. That both justifies misusing it in the actual world, and it’s a premise in the ontological argument for the existence of Batman.

Oh my god. Flashbacks to listening to philosophy grad students talking. I still feel disbelief that they give out PhDs to these people.

“A number of people seem to be misreading DeLong’s comment. His whole point is that is a zero probability event seems to be happening, that means your understanding of the underlying situation is faulty. He is suggesting that because Trump has in fact made it this far, despite the ‘impossibility’ of Trump getting this far, means that we don’t understand the underlying dynamics going on with the US electorate as well as we thought.”

Well yes, if something is happening, then it’s not zero probability. But who is this we? I never thought Trump zero probability, and a lot of other people did as well, because I and they know what zero probability means. Anyone who had a model with Trump really as zero probability is not likely to be a good authority on anything – and that I presume means De Long.

Also.
https://www.google.com/#q=%22bomb+the+shit+out+of%22

Why Trump gets the evangelical vote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg3f29kEOg4

More news from outside the bubble, Fallwell jr. all but endorses Trump and provides a cogent persuasive explanation of why the religious right needs to vote for the right leader, not a Sunday school teacher, or professional politician.

Zero-probability that an aggressive racial demagogue whipping up exterminationist hatred could get far in American politics? Oh, no, not in America! Is this some kind of puzzle that needs to be solved?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/jan/06/dont-let-trump-fool-you-rightwing-populism-is-the-new-normal-video

@92 – when something has never happened before, the argument “it was ever thus” is singularly unpersuasive.

So am I to get this right: professional observers and the CT intellectuals were convinced that once Trump painted racist caricatures of Mexicans and issued calls for the internment of Muslims after suggesting that they were in their hearts enemies of the state he would quickly lose favor with much of the Republican electorate? All this is very surprising, a zero probability event? That is what you are saying?

The charge of racism is so loud and automatic that it hard to know sometimes whether people are actually all that racist or are simply rebelling against the lectures, in a good tribalist fashion.

The white middle-class — especially males — are in economic trouble and they see a political system that responds to no one but the rich, except when the charge is racism or sexism. The Democrats have been dependent for popular support on women and minority groups, whose grievances are symbolically privileged, even as substantive policy is driven by corrupt service to the plutocracy.

Trump’s persona talks like a 3rd grader. That is worrisome. Also, people are regularly told that everyone is lying to them. Also worrisome.

Trump as racist demagogue just seems like a manipulation, the setup for why everyone good has to vote for the lesser evil.

I do not know why someone at the RNC decided a reality teevee show debate series months in advance of the electoral campaign would be a good idea. That Trump, a reality teevee veteran did well is not surprising. I do not know who has actual ambitions for office or an actual campaign apparatus and the ability to mobilise voters on the Republican side.

The legitimacy of both Parties is under erosion. I know that.

Bruce: “The white middle-class — especially males — are in economic trouble and they see a political system that responds to no one but the rich, except when the charge is racism or sexism.” That’s what they see–that the system is responding to poor blacks and Latinos and women as a whole? And then you are questioning whether prejudice is really real?

= = =The Democrats have been dependent for popular support on women and minority groups, whose grievances are symbolically privileged, even as substantive policy is driven by corrupt service to the plutocracy.= = =

Ah, the old David Broder formulation. Because of course women and minorities aren’t real citizens compared to white males, so their votes don’t count as much as those of the latter (zero for women and 3/5ths for minorities probably). And therefore an election won 55%-45%, say, isn’t legitimate if a good portion of the 55% is comprised of the inferior types.

p.s. correction — I think Kemp’s run, at least the first, was in ’88.

Clinton, not Clintion. (typos. whatever.)

I am saying that I have not been surprised that Trump has done well on the basis of racist and xenophobic comments. It is exactly what I expected once he started making them. Why should have anyone expected otherwise?

The expectation was not that they wouldn’t have been made, but that they would be sufficiently clouded for the purpose of actually running for president. There are national negatives to running ugly (though those are not negatives to motivated primary voters). Trump really is shocking. Even when you invite all the toddlers to the birthday party the one who faceplants in the cake is still surprising.

One way this might not have been surprising, though, is that running a campaign can be a scam, simply a way to be famous and keep making money, so ANY antics could be expected I suppose. Carrot Top for President!

Cranky Observer @ 104

Tribalism and goofy narrative formulas, like Mommy party and Daddy party, have been used to herd people into partisan identifications and voting behavior. Feeling affiliated in one’s personal identity with one of the Parties and alienated from the other Party is the formula. To a large extent, these divisions have been created less by particular candidates and more by the political pros, the operatives who make money from fund-raising and television ad buys, and cynically use propaganda techniques to get out the vote in closely calculated fashion. Political programs and ideologies are crafted to produce the electoral behavior, while leaving policy to the lobbyists. A lot of resentment and fear is stirred up. I don’t think it is surprising that authoritarian attitudes come to the fore, or are echoed by characters like Trump.

@ Lee A. Arnold #91 re: “1. The Sudden, Permanent Disappearance of the 100-year Mass Media Narrative.”

What I perceive in the Trump phenomenon is actually not an end of MM dominance in US politics, but its apotheosis. In a Democracy, where the People are Sovereign, one could at least imagine a political infrastructure that allowed for electoral legitimacy to flow upwards from popular mandate. What we have instead is electoral legitimacy flowing downwards from elite mandate, and represented via MM as popular mandate. [this is civics 101 for the left, no?]

So the MM becomes the key institution in such a sham democracy. Because actual governance is taking place behind “closed doors” (a balancing of elite interests rather than popular ones), the MM has the function of performing our “democracy” for us. Mass politics, arising in the context of profoundly anti-democratic economic and cultural institutions, discovered mass communications…and that was that.

Neither Trump (nor the lot of ’em) exists without a microphone and a camera. Yes, now there are many microphones and lots of cameras, but that’s not a substantive difference. All but the radical few have become habituated to American Democracy as it has been performed by its various “producers” and “directors” for generations. Today, everyone in the MM in its metastasized form knows what “Democratic Elections” look like, so they go along with the show without much sophistication regarding its fabricated, illegitimate nature.

Trump (again, like the lot of ’em) is exploiting and thus exposing the system. You mean, all you have to do is be a celebrity and give some speeches, and the directors and producers of “Election ’16” will put your poster on every street corner in town? You’ll get plugged into the pre-scripted discourse of US politics and become a legitimate canditate? Yes, Mr. Trump, that’s exactly right.

When political legitimacy is an act, anyone with a backstage pass can put on the mask and take the stage.

Lee A Arnold @ 91
Trump is running people out of the Republican Party (women, Latinos, foreign policy realists, non-haters of all stripes).

That’s a fascinating assertion – is there evidence of it? (Not trying to be rude, just interested). Could it be possible (ie not ‘impossible’) that he gets the nomination (at least in part) by driving people who might vote for a more moderate Republican candidate away from the party altogether? I don’t understand your presidential nomination process well enough to know if that’s any sort of possibility.

There’s no easy way to distinguish a President from his times

I very much agree with this. Which makes it difficult for me to understand a lot of what you have to say about Obama. (Tho maybe what you mean is different from what I imagine.)

@ 87 is welcome and should be internalized. Trump did not oppose the Iraq invasion. Like many, he used the 20/20 vision of hindsight to criticize both the concept and the execution. For those interested in a more detailed critique, this very useful Gallup survey of opinion on Iraq http://www.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx confirms that the summer of 2004, specifically June 21st to July 21 saw a huge spike among Americans who judged the war a mistake – jumping from 41% to 54%. I read the Esquire article and Donald is riffing on Iraq in a series of boasts – ‘I woulda, I wouda…’ Privately, he may well have felt the war was a bad idea before 2003. But he’s got no business pretending public foresight and opposition. Trump was following ,not leading, a trend.

@91, 100, 111. Partly, yes, and yes. There is nothing new at all about using xenophobia and tribal hostilities to gin up political support and make money, whether we’re talking about the ‘The Teares of Ireland..’ or a modern manifestation in America, or abroad.

Re, the GOP. As I’m probably the only one here who reads the right more often than I do the left, I can assure you that ‘establishment’ is regarded as a smear. The Instapundit stable of pundits (yes, it’s not just Reynolds now) are uniformly denouncing Trump as an opportunist, which I continue to regard as an asset rather than a liability, insufficiently principled to become Supreme Leader of the American church. Makes for great comic reading, especially when we recall that Cruz is both a lawyer and a politician.

@ 116 raises an excellent question. Case in point: the National Black Republican Association just now endorsed Trump. Nate Silver pointed out that something like 20% of Dem voters might cross to Trump. Trump will absolutely spend big to bring black voters over and his daughter Ivanka is no slouch on the political trail. Trump’s liberal positions are going to get a great deal of attention in the near future as the NRO and Cruz purists publicize Trump’s long support for the New York values social conservatives hate. Trump will use a four-letter word to bring in minorities: J-O-B-S. Trump, I suspect, is serious about his protectionism.

Trump is building an impressive group of supporters that crosses political boundaries – Rush is right, the conservative elite has over-estimated the net conservatism of the base. If you want to know how Trump is actually winning the evangelical vote – watch the Fallwell Jr. intro – it’s about 15 minutes. Junior, btw, easy on the ear and nothing at all like his old man, or Trump for that matter.

Right now, I don’t see anybody stopping Trump. He, Bernie, Ted, and Hillary are the leaders of our time, like it or not.

Kidneystones #120: “As I’m probably the only one here who reads the right more often than I do the left…”

No.

I don’t really want to pollute this otherwise very reasonable discussion with ramblings from the other side of the internet, but Scott Adams (cartoonist, known mostly for Dilbert and a sort of neo-realist-sexism, a term I just made up because I don’t know what the right word for it is) has a reasonable claim to have called the Trump phenomenon before it happened, or at least before most people noticed that it had happened.

To be fair, he only started calling this publicly back in August, by which point it was obvious that Trump was polling well, but it was also widely expected that Trump would falter, perhaps by eliminating himself through some beyond-the-Pale gaffe, or as a result of the public getting bored of his shtick, or the Republican establishment rallying support to a more ‘credible’ candidate. I think it’s fair to say that expecting Trump to be where he is now was a minority position at the time.

Adams’ view is that Trump has particular skills of presentation and negotiation that make him well-suited to modern campaigning. In a fragmented media environment, you need to create a spectacle in order to make yourself the focus of attention; we can no longer rely on the large media outlets to decide amongst themselves who is the most credible candidate and direct attention towards them. Trump uses particular techniques like ‘anchoring’ – saying his personal wealth is $10bn when it’s probably $4.3bn or $2.5bn or what-have-you means that many people will still remember the high figure, and the main thing we come away with is that Trump is very wealthy. His overreaching policy proposals can be considered similarly, as ‘big asks’ that Trump can use as bargaining chips later, chips that he earned simply by asking for them. His 3rd grade reading level speeches do have a repetitive, hypnotic quality to them which Adams argues is a technique that Trump uses because it works; Adams specifically claims that Trump employs techniques of hypnosis on the basis of his own training in the same.

Now, all of this would be so much BS if it didn’t appear to have so much predictive power. Most of the things that people like us think of as being Trump’s weaknesses really have not turned out that way. He has the good fortune of incredibly weak opponents, but he has dispatched them with particular ruthlessness and has made it look easy. I find Scott Adams pretty disagreeable, in a creepy uncle kind of way, but he would appear to be on to something.

Of course, in an age of thousands of mid-list bloggers, simple probability theory tells us that someone is going to have an amazing predictive streak. Maybe Scott Adams is just lucky, and the apparent predictive value of his ‘master persuader’ theory of Trump is an after-the-fact explanation rather than a true prediction. Adams has made a particular point of predicting key events – that Trump will use ‘linguistic kill shots’ (such as the branding of Jeb as ‘low energy’) on his opponents, and several of Trump’s later utterances have been claimed as examples. Does that mean Adams was right about Trump’s modus operandi, or could we claim almost anything as a ‘kill shot’ if Trump said it and the person he said it about subsequently declined in the polls?

What strikes me here is that we don’t have an accessible store of knowledge about this kind of verbal and presentational manipulation that isn’t pop-culture self-help/hypnosis/airport business paperback material. There are practical books about how to fight political campaigns (I’ve read a few from eco-campaign backgrounds, which don’t cover electoral politics), but we mostly tend to ignore the influence of personal characteristics on political outcomes, perhaps because there are very few Western elections in recent memory where the personal characteristics of a leader can truly be said to have been decisive. Does that mean that they’re not decisive, and any apparent effect is just an illusion? (Labour would have won in the UK in 1997 even without Blair, for example, but he gained enormous prestige from being the first Labour PM in 18 years).