Shibboleths (repost from 2011)

– and today in the NYT there is this article which argues that using De Niro’s words will win the Midterms for Republicans – while there is this theory -(by me – MOI!) – that if we ever would have used Trumps ”politics”-(or whatever y’all want to call it?) on – Von Clownstick himself – he never ever would have been ”erected”.

Just think –
”the birther” comes out AND every US newspaper shows –
”F – YOU” – as their headline.
-(perhaps with a very ”cognent” explanation why these very nasty words were used)

And sooo – WE never ever should have accepted any discussion of Von Clownstick in any ”cogent” – ”philosophical” or – worst ”socio-political” form – as ”basic a-holes” just don’t get that type of (honorable) treatment.
AS there is only one response – ”What De Niro Said –
and –

THE END

He has never really had to deal with reality

Trump has made it to 70. He’s rich and famous, parties with elites like Clinton. Romanced attractive women. He’s freaking President, and Kasich isn’t.

The problem Trump presents to us is that we are watching a successful strategy that wildly contradicts our moral norms and expectations of efficacy. We are the ones in cognitive dissonance, not Trump or Republicans, and it is our models of politics and the social that are put into question.

mcmanus, most thinking Americans are familiar with the low-bred huckster with flashy tastes and delusions of petty despot and middle-American, lower-middlebrow rag cover stories. It’s an archetype of 20th century AmLit. If you think Trump isn’t fulfilling the American moral norm, you’re fooling yourself. We just don’t like mirrors held up to our id, is the problem. Nothing’s being flouted, just at long last fulfilled.

“Efficacy,” on the other foot, is a bit mysterious. What game do you think he’s so good at playing? If it’s being rich in money and sex, there are easier ways to get a lot more than he’s ever enjoyed. He’s Potemkin Nouveau Riche Moneybags. Not even self-made. It’s a nice gag, but it’s vaudeville and the pancake make-up is running. Jus Jellus is a pretty tepid take for you.

@4
”The problem Trump presents to us is that we are watching a successful strategy that wildly contradicts our moral norms and expectations of efficacy”.

Not really – as in the the so called ”Wild Wild West” shooting faster than anybody else – supposedly was a ”successful strategy that wildly contradicts our moral norms and expectations of efficacy” – until you met somebody who was ”faster” – and the ”accident” that Trump hasn’t met ”that one” – yet – is just an accident –
As much of an accident that a lot of very confused American voted for him – who thought he was ”a Swedish-German Count who would bring them ”affieceancy” -(or however this word is written) – and as much as an accident that he wasn’t already shot – 40 years ago – at Studio 54 – when he tried to pick up ”some Texans girlfriend”!
-(who would have showed him ”the American way”!)

Adam Kotsko had some potentially insightful thoughts on this theme a year or two back:

I would also advance a potentially more controversial point: like Daily Show-style fake news, contemporary fake news isn’t meant to be taken literally and it probably mostly isn’t. As a point of evidence, I note that only one idiot showed up at the pizza parlor looking for child molestors. Given the thousands of people who read and shared the story, you would expect the place to be inundated with concerned citizens if people were taking it literally. I assume that the conservatives themselves regard the “self-investigator” as a naive idiot. They know these stories are bullshit, but they don’t care because there is a deeper truth at work. “Democrats want to corrupt our children” — that part is true whether or not Hillary Clinton literally rapes children, and the important thing is that that basic message gets across.

If you’re having trouble believing this, think about your own attitude toward the meme that Trump is having sex with Ivanka. Do you literally believe this? Do you ever have a strong opinion one way or the other? Or are you happy to help the meme circulate because it fits with the message that Trump is gross and beyond the pale? I don’t want to draw a false equivalency here or shame people for joking about that — though there is something pretty ugly about such joking, which would probably be hard to maintain if we really thought about it literally as something that had happened, and was maybe even still happening, in real life — but just to give you a sense of the attitudes at work and suggest that conservatives, as fellow human beings, are capable of holding similar attitudes toward questionable stories that reinforce a narrative they want to promote.

In keeping with this and with Philip Mirowski’s take on neoliberal agnotology, the basic “respectable conservative” stance toward memes like birtherism has nothing to do with whether they personally believe the contents of those memes to be true — all they need to know in order to justify promoting birtherism (or climate denial, Pizzagate, creationism, etc.) is that a world with those memes in it would be more amenable to their broader political agenda than a world without them.

I don’t know.

The big difference between Palin in 2011 and Trump now is that in 2016, enough of the swing voters went R to give them the win. The peasants held firm in 2012, to put this in Brothers K terms. In 2016, those peasants in the Midwest did not hold firm. Enough of them who voted for Obama in 2012, switched to Trump in 2016 to put us where we are today.

It wasn’t tribalistic identification as Rs that got us where we are today, it’s that something in Trump’s schtick appealed to swing voters, at least enough of them. If Trump brought a tribe together, it doesn’t seem obvious that it’s the tribe of the Rs. Even people who always vote R or D tend to eschew the label. In fact, the most loyal voters in both camps tend to identify the least with the party. They’re not Rs, they’re anti-Ds. I myself have little to no tribal ID with the Ds. What the hell is there to identify with? What do they stand for? But every election, without fail, there’s some people on the ballot with Rs behind their names that get me to the polls to pull the lever to keep those dangerous idiots out of office.

One solution to this difficulty is to migrate to the idea that the tribe in question isn’t the Rs, it’s really something else, some underlying tribe that Trump and Palin and these other pseudo-populists have finally brought together. The usual and almost inevitable identification of this tribe is as the tribe of the racists. I’m not too sure that this makes a lot of sense. After all, it was working class whites who had voted for freaking Obama defecting to Trump who gave him the win. These guys didn’t notice Obama wasn’t white when they voted for him in 2008 and 2012?

But even if this does make sense, boy, is it ever a counsel of despair. The US is really, when you strip away the niceties and pretensions, majority racist. Shed more light, bring more truth and clarity into political discourse, and you cement the dominance of the racists. Yikes! Let’s all slit our wrists now and be done with. Which doesn’t mean this idea isn’t true. Maybe we should all slit our wrists. That possibility can’t be excluded a priori.

Let’s consider another possibility. The majority in 2016, a majority that has not clearly been dispersed or demoralized or considers itself refuted by Trump’s performance in office, voted against conventional politicians, not against black or brown people. That’s their animus, messaging and the politicians who practice it.

Maybe Trump did well because, in a sea of relentless striver BSers, he seems to people who aren’t paying much attention to public policy content, to be the lone truth-teller. He just says whatever he thinks, he gaffes six times a day. Unless you know the underlying public policy pretty well, it’s easier to recognize as lies the artful avoidance of reality, the messaging of the conventional politicians, than the artless disconnection from reality of the demented Trump.

Look at it this way. The idea that a majority of the US electorate suffers from the metaphorical dementia of racism, that they therefore cannot be trusted to use the franchise responsibly, is becoming the majority view on our side. But the idea that Trump is demented, which explains what happened in 2016 at least as well as the idea that the US electorate is demented, isn’t really given much attention or weight.

Lord knows, both can be true, racist majority and demented leader of said majority. But it seems to me that Trump’s dementia is pretty undeniable (Is there an explanation of the Comey firing, or the inauguration crowd size thing, that doesn’t require Trump to be really disconnected from reality? Not BSing for some effect, but really disconnected from reality?), while the idea that most Americans are racists is pretty much a judgement call, maybe right but hardly established.

@7 Thanks for the link to the Pew report – it’s fascinating stuff. On the not crazy assumption that asking people to put their money where their mouth is tells you what they really believe, it suggests that many attempts to think about polarisation in epistemic terms are mid-guided. What may seem to be beliefs – Obama was not born in America – look more like cases of ‘as if’ belief (what philosophers sometimes call ‘acceptance’) driven by pragmatic reasons, linked to feelings of belonging. It’s a bit like if I moved to a deeply religious area and wanted to make friends: I can easily imagine myself ending up in a church mouthing the credo, and that being more than a pretence, but less than a belief (what can I say? I’m easily swayed). If so, the tired game of suggesting Republicans are all stupid is a bit of a mistake – we were never in the realm of epistemic reasons anyway.

I have no interest in actually doing any work to answer this question, but I find myself wondering how Haidt evaluates Trump conservatives in the context of “Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity.”

Maybe he and Corey can collaborate on a book called, “Authority, Authority and Authority.”

= = = One solution to this difficulty is to migrate to the idea that the tribe in question isn’t the Rs, it’s really something else, some underlying tribe that Trump and Palin and these other pseudo-populists have finally brought together. The usual and almost inevitable identification of this tribe is as the tribe of the racists. I’m not too sure that this makes a lot of sense. After all, it was working class whites who had voted for freaking Obama defecting to Trump who gave him the win. These guys didn’t notice Obama wasn’t white when they voted for him in 2008 and 2012? = = =

I’m not a sociologist, just an itinerant project engineer in the central Midwest, so my observations are inherently anecdotal. For what it is worth my observation is that while the hardcore members of Trumpistan are deeply racist at their core, and would disinherit and shun their daughter for marrying an African-American [1], they don’t have a problem with a cool capable black dude who appears to be getting the job done. A star baseball player (Ozzie Smith was and still is very popular in the most white and racist areas of St. Louis), a trauma surgeon, Lucoius Lyon from the “Empire” TV series. Obama looked that way to them in 2008. Unfortunately while Obama was a pretty decent President he didn’t deliver what his 2008 campaign promised (and it is hard to tell which of those promises the candidate himself agreed with and which were just campaign marketing) and he didn’t directly address many of the problems that face the semi-rural areas.

Yes, I know (I read LGM too): the ACA helped those areas, the GM bailout helped those areas, Mitch McConnell shafted those areas by shafting Obama, yada yada. After almost 40 years in industry and business I’m almost convinced that the Buffalo Commons idea is correct. But that’s not how the people who live there see it, and they didn’t see anything from the Democrats in 2008-2012 that looked to be helping them. Anger was building by 2012 but the campaign did a great job and held on (Palin helped Obama far more than she helped McCain too). By 2016 that demographic was ready to follow their idol Rush and do whatever it took to put a stick in the eye of the libruls who done them wrong.

[1] since I’ve seen it happen more than once, and heard it threatened in my own extended family

“The eagerness with which virtually all Republicans (including Republican-voting ‘independents’) have embraced Trump”

OK, let’s look at the actual numbers, rounding a bit throughout.

Trump got 63 million votes in 2016.

The total adult population of the US was 249 million in 2016.

Polling found that 44% of Trump voters were voting for Trump rather than against Clinton.

So, roughly, 11% of the adult US population “embraced” Trump in 2016.

As ever, the problem is obvious but rarely addressed: enormous numbers of adults are permanently alienated from the political process. If this problem was recognized and addressed consistently and systematically we would have a much different political landscape in the U.S., but it’s not because centrist and liberal Democrats are as deathly afraid to confront it as conservatives and Republicans are. Until this fact is faced and addressed all this puling about how stupid conservatives and Republicans are is pointless.

@JQ – 24

on the specifics of Brexit, we will wait and see. The key aims of Brexit were to get control back over the key elements of government of the UK. It is understood that working with other nations means negotiations which result in compromises, and the EEA may be one such thing.

Solutions such as EEA agreement, Customs Unions, raise almost as many problems as they solve. If those solutions result in the UK being rule takers without say, and those rules are implemented in a way which disadvantages the UK, then the whole sovereignty issue will surely come round again and quite quickly. If on the other hand politicians can show these solutions can work, then there is no reason why they cannot have some persistence.

As for the other side not succeeding, ultimately all political careers end in failure, it is just a question of when. So far Trump seems to be winning and I would bet that if he is still president when the next election comes round he will win.

There are many Americans who voted for Obama and then Trump. If the Democrats want to win again it would seem to be logical to see how those voters can be won back. A strategy of calling them all racists doesn’t seem likely to succeed, so why is this the strategy being pursued? What objective do those people pursuing this strategy have in mind, given that it is unlikely to succeed in winning elections?

@ J-D that’s a bit of a rubbishy nit-picking reply, so I won’t be responding.

@dipper –
”You guys are losing everywhere. USA. UK. Italy”.

Well -it kind of… ”depends”?

If you are talking about ”the dough” – and for sure you must be talking about ”the dough” -it seems to be for US guys ”winning” ALL the way – or as Von Clownstick would say:
IT only goes ”UP” –
but that’s the thing – as all this ”winning” sometimes get a bit tiresome – and as I’m again in London I sometimes get this impression that I -(and my guys) actually don’t deserve so much ”silly winnings” – especially if we owe the winnings to a bunch of idiots – as my very conservative American grandfather taught me:
Life should NOT be the life of a ”Trump”!
-(you know ”the trust-fundbaby-crap”!)

You at least should try – NOT to be an a-hole?!

I’d be a little cautious putting too much stock in the “own party approval ratings”. Under Reagan 33-36% of Americans identified as Republican while now only around 25% of people in the US do.

My take is that both Trump and Brexit are deeply tied to globalism. For thirty or more years in the UK and the US, voters have been choosing between a party that embraces global trade for plutocrats, and a party that mouths worrying about its effects on the rest of us while embracing global trade for plutocrats. Throughout all those years there have been promises that such policies ‘help the nation as a whole’ and that even those who lose out initially will get better stuff as it all sorts out. But there isn’t even a party that says, let’s do a bit of the ‘sort that out’ before doing more globalism.

This also ties directly into the worry about why experts aren’t trusted anymore. From the point of view of people who see themselves damaged by globalism, experts have been lying about how it would be good for the whole country for 30 years. Even the relatively interested Krugman types didn’t wake up to it until the recent crash.

So with both Trump and Brexit, for the first time in 30 years they got a chance to vote against something kind of related to the stuff that has been grinding them down. They took that chance.

@18 – worth remembering, yes, but offering only limited comfort. It would certainly make a big difference if HRC’s 48.5% of the voters, redistributed (or with the electoral college magicked away) had taken the presidency. But that 46.4% embraced, stood with, or didn’t break with Trump taught me something I can’t unlearn — and suggests, at the very least, that HRC would have been even more constrained than Obama was.

Glen Tompkins @12:

Your analysis of the US electorate is flawed: the majority did not vote for the demented racist. Many factors contributed to his electoral college victory, but majority electoral support was not one of them.

OC@23:
It was payoff for the longterm investment in the planting of anti-Hillary meme’s over a period of more than two decades. Before the election Democrats disagreed with me, stating the Hillary was super-tough. But, being tough internally, does not translate into the subconscious emotional response of the average swing voter.

It was worse than this; I heard numerous DNC stalwarts arguing that the decades of very virulent, very public, very widespread Clinton-hate wasn’t merely harmless, but was a positive good because it proved that she was invulnerable to attacks and criticisms. That demonstrated either a frightening level of dishonesty or a dangerous incapacity to understand how real, live people think on the part of far too many people who really should have know better.

21 – ‘no he was always playing you’

He plays a lot of people who claim to dislike him then shower him with praise and attack his critics. Those people are such suckers.

26 – ‘A strategy of calling them all racists doesn’t seem likely to succeed, so why is this the strategy being pursued?’

This is certainly the Democratic strategy as it would be described by a Trump supporter, one who would only have praise and adulation for the Republican strategy of ‘fuck your feelings.’

“Double-think is very difficult”
Double-think comes very naturally to those of us who have worked in a corporate environment. You’ve got to think one way to get the job done; another way to communicate it to the powers that be. What’s difficult, after awhile, is remaining aware of this.

@33
“*if* non-voters voted it would benefit Democrats ”

More importantly, if non-voters were engaged the right-wing party would still win elections but wouldn’t be nearly so right-wing.

I liked that comment on globalism and suspicion of experts, which can be extended particularly to economists

Even the relatively interested Krugman types didn’t wake up to it until the recent crash.

Oh, tentatively, cautiously I look back to the Wilson shift from tariffs to income tax and wonder if those who protested didn’t know something, understand something that many current economists ignore. Maybe 150 years of practice had some justification.

And I use a higher level of abstraction than the protection of domestic industries and workers. What can high tariffs do?

1) They inhibit the movement of capital and direct investment toward domestic opportunities; force efficiencies

2) They make the financing of government dependent on trade (and/or primitive accumulation, as in acquiring land and resources, increasing population)

3) They make government and capital more dependent on domestic demand and worker consumption. The little I know, say about post-war Japan, is that developing economies, so-called export economies, grow on the back of domestic demand rather than exports.

This could be all wrong, but I think maybe useful approach to understand what that rabid racist and anti-communist Wilson had in mind with the income tax and Federal Reserve. Not labour’s friend.

I obviously know so little about development economics that I shouldn’t comment. Got Toporowski’s 2nd volume on Kalecki lined up. I simply don’t trust mainstream economists at all anymore. They serve capital without even thinking about it.

Omega Centauri, #23

“Tons and tons of attacks and insinuations and false rumors, has an effect on the subconscious brain.”

Well then, how is it that you and I, who probably have had more exposure to the public discourse that contains all these insinuations and false rumors than the average Trump voter, somehow resisted the mind control? You are basically saying that the vulgar dross of voters are just too stupid to keep from robotic responses to the public discourse environment. Unlike you and I, who are guided by intelligence and discernment, they basically follow tropisms, like moths to a flame.

The basic idea you are espousing is hardly unusual. If spamming the public discourse with drivel that lacks coherence or connection to reality were not widely thought to be effective, we would not see political campaigns raise billions to buy TV ads. But there is this Socratic hole in this conventional wisdom that the best way to do mass persuasion is to put out loads of garbage, that no one who believes with the faith of the faithful that this works on the masses, ever admits that such toothless drivel could possibly work on them.

Now, you certainly can win with a message that brands big chunks of the voters, even a majority of them, as idiots. This is, in fact, what genuine populists have to do, convince the oppressed majority that they have been duped all these years supporting the ancien regime, so they should stop being idiots and vote for the genuine populist program, that includes x, y, and z public policy changes that will improve their lives. But it’s obviously tricky to attract flies with the vinegar of the insight that they have been idiots. You better have plenty of honey in the mix in the form of convincing proposals to make their lives better.

But most importantly, if your basic message involves telling people that they’re idiots, you absolutely have to be very up front about calling them idiots. Any indirection, any talk, even if it’s only amongst ourselves and not intended for public consumption, about their being gulled by dog whistles, or the weight of TV ad drivel, or the conservative alternate reality factory, is going to be recognized by the masses as writing them off as idiots — which it is — so it’s no use not being open about what we think of their cognitive capacity. You’re not really demeaning someone by telling them that they are mistaken, and here’s the reasons they should change their minds. But you are being demeaning and contemptuous if you avoid a confrontation and write them off as hopelessly wrong, as uneducable.

We all have private lives that demand most of our attention. Not many of us have the luxury of being able to pay the attention to even one field of public policy — all of whose fields are inherently complex — sufficient to spot reliably that we are being lied to about content. None of us can possibly know enough about all of these fields. Take Holbo’s recent item about Trump’s take on US-Canada dairy trade policy. Jeez, maybe the US has gotten a raw deal. How should I know? Sure, if the current trade arrangements over dairy products are unfair to anybody in the US, the idea that this came about because Trudeau in particular and Canadians in general are master criminals is ridiculous. I recognize that Trump is FOS on this because of the obvious nativist angle he’s playing in the manner in which he frames the issue, but not at all because I know the public policy content well enough.

My thought is that a lot of the voters who went for Trump did so because talk of dog whistles, and epistemic entrapment, and every other theory that sophisticated people such as you and I tend to express about why anybody but the 1% vote R, writes them off as idiots that we shouldn’t even bother trying to win over with sense and reason. More broadly than just talking up such theories, the very act of relying on contentless messaging such as TV ads and careful spin doctoring tells the voters that we despise them.

Trump may tell them things right and left that are at variance with reality, but he doesn’t know that because he’s demented, and they don’t know that because they aren’t paying enough attention to public policy. But they do know that Trump just says whatever is on his mind. He gaffes five times a day. He doesn’t message, he doesn’t micro-target or micromanage what he says to manipulate the public. Such strategy-driven behavior is beyond him. He actually is driven by tropisms. His performance sells because he experiences no cognitive dissonance saying whatever the tropism that’s working him at the moment dictates, no matter how much that would confound a person who remembered what he said five minutes ago, or whom pesky logic and vulgar consistency still had power to bother.

Dipper @ 11

It’s not a matter of giving up controversial positions to gain votes. No bloc of voters will show up to vote for a party former pro-gay neoliberals who now espouse neither those things nor any other thing.

Rather, it’s a matter of credibly defending policies one would want to vote for: Giving up being pro-war gains little compared to being actively anti-war. Giving up gun control gains little or nothing compared to credibly and consistently espousing gun control. Giving up same-sex marriage gains nothing but defending rights of common-law wives might mean something.

Showing apparent personal integrity is also very helpful. A scoundrel who learns to act polite and very principled the way Mike Pence does can gain some credibility in the eyes of those who only know he’s “super-religious” and don’t watch him long enough to see the mask drop.

Dipper

I haven’t kept tabs on elections in all parts of the world, but in the context of the post about Trump, the obvious election is the election of Trump, which is close in time to the Brexit referendum, and a number of elections in Europe which have seen social democratic parties collapse in support to be replaced by populist parties of one sort or another, and I’d include Corbyn’s labour in that list.

How many is ‘a number’? One is a number, and so are two and three. Since Trump was inaugurated as President, there have been at least twenty-eight national elections in European countries (without counting referenda and elections of non-executive Presidents). How many of those have you taken into account? I guessed no more than half a dozen; that’s not enough for drawing general conclusions.

@ John Quiggin – 49. Well hang on a bit. ” among those who switched from Obama to Trump, a substantial proportion were swinging voters who had previously supported Bush or other globalist Repubs. The thing they have in common is an identity politics based on affirmation of a dominant “real American” identity. That’s racist, …”

So even though they voted for Obama, they are actually racist? The Obama vote was a false vote but the vote for Trump was the real vote?

And if identity politics around race is racist when white people do it, isn’t it also racist when non-white people do it? Or are some races allowed race-based identities but other races not allowed race-based identities? And if a person’s claim to rights is through their race, but your race is ruled an invalid race and you have no other source of power (i.e. money), doesn’t that leave you with no rights?

As has been said in other forums, 21st century socialism is about social domination through identity politics. It requires people to be oppressed due to their identities, but that also means others are doing the oppressing due to their identities. Hence the major force for racism in the UK now being the Labour Party, which in its hunt for identities that oppress other identities is now profoundly and structurally anti-semitic.

And to go off-topic, we are seeing through the trans debate what happens to women when they lose control of their identities to men and cease to exist as a coherent political identity. I await with interest some posts on CT about the trans debate and women’s rights.

John Quiggin #53: “racism isn’t a dealbreaker”

I think this is it. There exists a sort of intellectual attention span disorder, a fractured intellectual discontinuity that gets slathered over with frustration and emotion to fill the cracks in the facts. Sexual assault, insults, lying, bragging aren’t dealbreakers for these voters either, even though (just like the racism) they poison the young and coarsen the discourse of the “moral” society which the Right presumes itself to support. And this is in pursuit of a short-sighted political-economic solution which incorporates the avoidance of reasoning with others. Methodological individualism becomes another historicist nightmare.

‘Hence the major force for racism in the UK now being the Labour Party, which in its hunt for identities that oppress other identities is now profoundly and structurally anti-semitic.’

You are Benjamin Netanyahu and I claim my five pounds.

I don’t know if Quiggin is letting my stuff through. I do consider what am talking about to be connected to the OP, but I maybe overconnect cause “totality” From the Hudson intro to American Protectionist Takeoff”

“Productivity gains tend to exceed wage gains, enabling high-wage labor to undersell “pauper labor.” Hence, profits and wages may rise together. Higher income slows the growth of population pushing wages up all the more. Also, higher wages spur capital substitution, increasing labor productivity. Finally, higher population density [urbanization] increases productivity, and therefore increases wage levels.”

The connection to the OP, racism and imperialism, is in “pauper labor.” “undersell” here is in terms of costs per unit of output. “Higher wages” are not distributed evenly, and in fact “pauper labor” is likely to see a wage decrease. So pauper labor has to be deliberately socially politically excluded and their lower wages justified.

So what does that mean in the context of 1875-1914?

Scientific racism and imperialism.

I forgot, 1875-1914 also was the era in America of Jim Crow, the institutionalization of a permanent “pauper labor” class identifiable by skin color (also in that era elsewhere with somewhat different rhetoric, Koreans Taiwanese etc)

That’s me, or my reading not Hudson, who as far as I can remember or noticed so far, avoids race and gender issues.

Maybe too much from me. Essentialist and psychological anti-racism is much more fun and profitable. I don’t expect to get paid any attention.

Why do I read? To escape the social demands of ideology. Back to my cave.

59: Glen Tomkins

I am continually humbled by other commenters better work, and grateful that my too often orthogonal and tangential impulsive inarticulate self-indulgences, indulged, do not distract. Thank you.

P.s. there were exceptions, as in Bismarck’s tariffs to solidify ‘the marriage of iron and rye’. But I doubt that 1875-1914 can do the lifting mcmanus seems to want.

I don’t know if it gets us anywhere, but here’s one take on Trump to Obama voters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/upshot/the-obama-trump-voters-are-real-heres-what-they-think.html

Here’s the money quote:

“Using this and other data, political scientists have argued that racial resentment is the strongest predictor of whether voters flipped from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump, and the biggest driver of Trump support among these voters.

Yes, racial resentment is the strongest predictor of the Obama-Trump vote in this survey data. White, working-class Obama voters with racially conservative views were very likely to flip to the Republicans. For example, Mrs. Clinton won just 47 percent of white Obama voters without a college degree who disagreed with the idea that “white people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.” In contrast, she retained 88 percent of white Obama voters without a college degree who agreed that white people have certain advantages.”

Weird, huh?

Glen @46, I think your brush is too wide.
Sure, there probably is no one who is impervious to a well designed persistent emotional advertising campaign. One of the reasons, I know that is I, who have always been a middle-of-the roader had been persuaded by all the denigration of Jerry Brown, that he really was a looneybin. Since then I had to move to California, and now consider him to be a first class pragmatic politician of a type I would be delighted to see as president. So its quite clear to me, that someone who doesn’t live and breath policy, can be led astray by such efforts without realizing it. And the change of the prevailing public attitude often doesn’t have to be very much to change the political balance of power. Just as a drug that only cure 15% of the suffers of a given malady can be a success (and an improvement on the current state of things), an emotional advertising campaign can be a great success even if it far less than 100% effective.

Now those on this blog at the very least consider epistemology to be important, so they do have an advantage that Joe average does. And we would be glad to improve the general level of epistemology too. If anything we probably have too much confidence in the efficacy of such an effort.

Dipper

As has been said in other forums, 21st century socialism is about social domination through identity politics. It requires people to be oppressed due to their identities, but that also means others are doing the oppressing due to their identities.

You haven’t made clear what your position is: that nobody is in fact oppressed? or that some people are oppressed, but not because of their identities? or what?

Sebastian and others re: Obama to Trump voters

1. so the pie was cut slightly differently down the middle in 08/12/16. Don’t overlook the persistent continuities among the three electorates, and don’t overlook the persistence of Politics-as-marketing-and-entertainment in US culture.
2. Institutionalized class privilege (and secondarily racial and sexual privilege) are first generated or enabled through actual politics (making policy) and then pervade the production, marketing, and consumption of Politics (“Democracy”) and mass culture . We tend to passively internalize beliefs that normalize status-relations.
3. there’s plenty of chaos, randomness, and affluenzic ephemerality baked into politics like always and everywhere.
4. In the context of 1-3, seeing a sliver of the electorate go from voting for Obama and then voting for Trump was indicative of nothing substantial about the electorate itself. The electorate is only expressing passive choices on matters of vague import.

I’ll say it again, we have no evidence that a sliver of the electorate switched to Trump. In an electoral with low turnout, and variable turnout, you can’t say that a 48-52 split to one party that shifts to 52-48 in the following election is due to 4% of the electorate changing sides. A perfectly plausible alternative is that Trump energised some racists and the intense attacks on Clinton discouraged some marginal dem voters.

Please don’t fall for the economists’ mistake of assuming that the distribution of votes represents the population. It’s a random sample of the population, and all analyses change when you analyse that random sample in aggregate, not knowing individual decisions.

@ burner. The Tories should clearly not tolerate any racism in their party, but neither should the Labour Party, and on a discussion in which racism plays a large part, there is no party in the UK which is clearly on the right side of this.

@ J-D – worth reading the Lammy Report. He tackles unfairness and discrimination in the justice system through identities and numbers for identities. Hence numbers are set against averages for the “white” population, as though there is such a thing in a statistically significant way. To be fair, he does address the issue of identities and the ability to identify issues through statistics round identities with regards to Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, but nevertheless if we take any individual the question of whether that person has suffered discrimination would seem to depend on what category they are placed into and what others in that category have experienced. So, lose control of your identity, lose control over your ability to get justice and proper political representation.

And back to the OP and Trump/Obama – the question remains about how big are you prepared to make your tent to get power. How much do you want you voice to be diluted in order to have any say in government? Who would you make alliances with, and compromise with?

Faustusnotes–“This isn’t quite the story of rejecting globalist parties for a populist that you think it is. ”

That isn’t my hypothesis, so I’m sorry for not making that clear. My hypothesis is that under the general economic order since about the 1980s, but certainly since the 1990s, globalist parties are pretty much the whole game. Sure in some cases you can vote for a completely fringe anti-globalist party, but the number of cases where voting for completely fringe parties gives you any chance of moving what you want forward is pretty small. My suggestion is that even cautious-about-globalism parties just aren’t on offer at all, so voters have essentially no chance to ‘reject them’ (except maybe my not voting at all…)

In that understanding, a semi-rational voter realizes that their thoughts/feelings on globalism are completely irrelevant, so they might as well vote based on other issues. So they vote on other issues. An additional wrinkle is that most of these voters probably aren’t ANTI-globalist, so much as ‘worried that globalism isn’t working in our benefit and we should try to be careful about its implementation’. Some of the globalist parties mouthed concerns along those lines for the first few decades (though by the pre-crash 2000s that had been mostly abandoned). So for a while, mouthing the concerns while doing nothing about it was good enough. “Our experts are on that problem, don’t you worry”. But after 30 or so years of “on that” not actually doing anything, a bunch of people began to suspect that was a lie. (I’m not saying it was a lie. I’m saying that from a political perspective, eventually those voters are going to feel lied to. What really was happening is their concerns being subordinated to further globalism every major time the issues came into conflict).

“Secondly the claim that globalism hasn’t benefited western voters is presented without evidence and it needs to be.”

You’re shortening the claim. It should be “that globalism hasn’t benefited western voters MORE THAN IT HAS HURT THEM”. And that is where the expert opinion as presented before the crash differs quite a bit from the afterwards analysis. The old case was something like “globalism greatly increases GDP” with basic mutterings about “our models based in the 1950s and 60s suggest that is shared enough across the different demographics of the country to make up for the pain in the medium run”. The current understanding is “globalism greatly increases country level GDP” with lots of caveats about how that gets concentrated with the most wealthy and slow acceptance about the fact that lots of the people who get edged out, never recover.

But those people already knew that they never recovered. They knew that by the mid 1990s. The fact that most policy-influential experts didn’t figure that out until now is precisely the problem.

“But they haven’t in general abandoned the major parties for populism. Why not? What is the special sauce that makes the US so prone to this?”

You’re omitting some major signs in Europe. The National Front making it to the 2nd round in France while the Socialists did not. The rise of the AfD in Germany along with the difficulties of Merkel’s coalition members. The increasingly powerful 5 Star Movement in Italy also points that direction. So while I agree that the US is prone to this, my hypothesis (that the downside effects of globalism have been largely ignored, and this is bearing nasty fruit politically) looks pretty good in a lot of the West. I fell I really don’t follow Australia enough to say anything useful. However I do feel like talking about New Zealand is like talking about Singapore. There are useful lessons available, but we need to be cautious about wide applicability.

“Also it’s worth noting that US voters didn’t abandon the major parties for populism – a populist took over a major party. That is an important difference. It means that people who are uncomfortable with populism have nowhere to run except their opposition, and it only takes a little bit of “it-won’t-be-so-bad” rhetoric to mollify those people and keep them in the party. ”

Yes, but this looks like a confirming point to me. The structure of the electoral system in the US is such that you almost can’t abandon the major parties ‘for populism’. If you want to make skepticism of globalism an effective political force you would do WAY better to take over one of the major parties. My hypothesis is that the problematic side of globalism has been mostly ignored (which is to say ‘politically made an extremely low priority’ not ‘never talked about’) by both parties, so even while it became a major political irritant, there was not much to vote on. THEN, finally when the voters who have been hurt by this for more than a generation get a chance to make a vote where globalism is at least kind of an issue, they seize it. That’s why I find it confusing that anyone wants to raise Romney as a counterpoint. His opponent was Obama. They were both globalists. If being hurt by globalism is your issue, you can vote for either of them because neither is going to address it. You might as well vote on some other basis.

Dr Hilarius

Racism isn’t vanishing by 2020 so if the Democrats/liberals/progressives/leftists don’t want a second term of Trump (or Pence) they better figure out a strategy for winning elections.

Out of the last seven Presidential elections, the Democrats won four. In another two, they won more votes than the Republicans but were narrowly beaten in the electoral college. In 2004, more people voted Republican than Democrat, but the margin was, by historical standards, not large.

Given these facts of the historical record, which of the following two is more likely to be correct?
A. The best chance for a Democrat to win the next Presidential election is to tear up all the old playbooks and follow a strategy that is radically different from what Democrats have been doing in the recent past.
B. The best chance for a Democrat to win the next Presidential election is to make a careful study of recent electoral failures and successes, to make significant strategic adjustments, to consider some new approaches, but to continue with a strategy that maintains important basic features from recent elections.

If the Democrats had just taken the sort of beating they took in 1984, or in 1972, or in 1952, it might make sense to say, ‘Let’s not try that sort of thing again, let’s do something radically different.’ But that’s not what has happened.

There’s an indefinitely large number of possibilities for radically new approaches, and out of all of them the chances are there are some of them that would be big winners if tried. But the statistical odds of reaching into that grab-bag and pulling out one of the good ones don’t make an attractive prospect.

Dipper

@ J-D – worth reading the Lammy Report.

Maybe it is worth reading, but obviously it’s not going to answer the question I asked you, which makes it seem you’re evading that question, which I repeat to save you the trouble of scrolling up.

What is your position? that nobody is oppressed? or that people are oppressed, but not because of their identities? or what?

I don’t know whether reading the Lammy report would tell me Lammy’s position on that point, but it’s clearly not going to tell me yours.

Faustusnotes “Next you say that these two countries are under the sway of populist parties but this is simply not true and you need to address this. The populist parties in the UK are dead, and the country is being ruled – barely – by the tories.”

I sort of feel like you aren’t reading more than like a sentence or two of what I’m saying.

At no point did I say that they were under the sway of populist parties. I’ve explicitly said that both the US and UK have major parties that are globalist and that neither party is particularly interested in dealing with the problems caused to the losers under globalism.

I said that when finally given an opportunity to make a vote that was vaguely against globalism, they seized it. The only major votes that they have been given that were even close to voting against increased globalism were voting for Trump and voting for Brexit (note AGAIN I do not say voting for the Tories. )

“Next America, where there are no populist parties and the current leadership lost the popular vote. How then can you say they’re in the sway of populism ?”

Huh? Did I say that somewhere? I think you’ve translated my argument into “being concerned about the negative effects of globalism=populism” and then gone off the rails arguing about populism.

I haven’t made any sort of generic populism argument. I may be totally wrong, but not because of ‘populism’ arguments I’m not making.

Okay Sebastian, I’ll try again. You argued this up above:

THEN, finally when the voters who have been hurt by this for more than a generation get a chance to make a vote where globalism is at least kind of an issue, they seize it.

And it doesn’t really change anything because:
a) Germany is benefiting from globalism so why the rise of AfD?
b) the Brexit vote was explicitly globalist – they voted to leave the EU so that they could have better trade deals elsewhere and this was explicitly part of the leave campaign’s rhetoric
c) Trump didn’t win the popular vote, by a large margin, and is doing really badly in special elections since he won
d) the party that brought the electorate Brexit is now struggling really badly, so why is it that the electors who took the chance to vote against globalization are now abandoning the party that gave them that chance? Especially when the major beneficiary of that abandonment was an explicitly pro-EU party, the Lib Dems?
e) what about all the countries that are more vulnerable to globalisation than the UK/US and don’t vote for populism when given the chance? e.g. in Australia we have Pauline Hanson but she has had very little success in most elections and remains a sideshow fluke; in NZ they have NZ First but that party can only rule in coalition with the explicitly pro-globalization labour party; in Japan, France etc. there is no interest in the populist parties.

Your argument has huge holes in it. This is not about globalization. If it was, the UK would have stuck with the Tories in 1997, Hanson would have more power in Australia, Trudeau would never have won in Canada, and Brexit would not have happened because people would be scared to vote to leave the EU and then get entangled in aggressive trade deals with the USA. But all these things make sense if they’re instead about racism combined with Russian ratfucking.

Orange Watch, how is “intense attacks on Clinton discouraged some marginal voters” erasing the “agency” of left-leaning voters? Is a choice not to vote a sign of a lack of agency?

@81

“Bojo, no doubt one of your brexit heroes, even made a tasteless joke about how Germany was using the EU to achieve economically what it couldn’t do by occupation.”

As we all know, it was George Steiner who had a French bureaucrat in “The Portage To San Cristobal Of AH” musing that the EC project was realising the dream of Drieux La Rochelle et al. The final chapter of that novel is pretty much the stuff that Ken Livingstone fell from grace for repeating.

You don’t have to be a saloon bar racist to come out with that stuff. You can be one of the most celebrated humanist intellectuals of the past 40 years giving it an airing – in a fictional wrapper.

Sebastian H #84: “neither party is particularly interested in dealing with the problems caused to the losers under globalism”

I think that this is not true in the US, where the Democratic Party has two big and very different problems. Neither the party nor its voters are able to think outside of received economic theory, and are unable to formulate a well-reasoned and comprehensive path forward. And also they are working against rather effective obstruction particularly at the federal level.

@ J-D “What is your position? that nobody is oppressed? or that people are oppressed, but not because of their identities? or what?”

If we use a standard definition of oppression: “a situation in which people are governed in an unfair and cruel way and prevented from having opportunities and freedom:” then yes lots of people are oppressed, and for lots of different reasons. No doubt some are oppressed because of their sex, sexuality, or race, but lots of people are oppressed for all sorts of individual reasons.

To make a statement such as “all BAME people are oppressed in western society” is clearly nuts. in the UK, lots of people of all races are succeeding in all parts of society. So you have to question the motives of people making that statement. To give an example, the England squad for the world cup is about half black or mixed race. that number is far in excess of a proportionate number. Does the football system discriminate against white players? I’ve had a taxi driver tell me that – that scouts are only interested in big black players – but I suspect he’s just exercising his prejudices. Consider Jamie Vardy. Famously released by Sheffield Wednesday, played non-league football before breaking into professional football and now in the England team. Was he a victim of oppression? Or were setbacks the making of the player? Whatever, demanding special rights on the basis of crude statistics just looks like special pleading for a larger slice of the cake at the expense of others, not any attempt at justice.

@ floopmeister – I have no idea what you are on about. Did you press enter before you had finished?

@52:

Racism isn’t like one of those old logic puzzles with the liars and truth tellers. Just because someone is racist doesn’t mean you can count on them to take the maximally racist action at every possible decision point.

My definitely of racist includes people who are convinced that overzealous social justice Harris are a bigger and more important societal problem than racism. People like my otherwise wonderful white nephew who literally said that he was worried when driving Lyft and had a passed out stripper in his car because being white made him more likely to get pulled over.

Because Obama was scrupulous about *never* tipping over into even mildly overzealous SJ rhetoric and both was and appeared massively competent, some such folks were willing to vote for him over an obviously out of touch rich dude in 2012. That doesn’t make them not racist.

Hell, there are plenty of racist liberals, presumably most of them didn’t vote for Trump, but I definitely have read plenty who argued until recently or even still that Trump wasnt actually much worse than HRC.

@ floopmeister – I have no idea what you are on about.

I’m shocked to hear that.

Again:

And if identity politics around race is racist when white people do it, isn’t it also racist when non-white people do it? Or are some races allowed race-based identities but other races not allowed race-based identities? And if a person’s claim to rights is through their race, but your race is ruled an invalid race and you have no other source of power (i.e. money), doesn’t that leave you with no rights?

IE: The universalism of victimhood.

If your identity is historically recognised as oppressed, then dammit, my identity is too. A race to the bottom – the logic of the incels and white racial resentment.

Was not making any comment on whether you agree with this view or not.

I see a few people still banging on about how these “populist” (i.e. racist) parties have risen up because of public concerns about inequality and the benefits of globalisation not being shared, so let’s examine a few examples.

Germany: major beneficiaries of the EU, with a strong social welfare system and higher employment than much of Europe, seeing a growing economy, with relatively low inequality: saw the growth of a racist party, the AfD.

France: A right-wing horror story about how business and economic growth is suppressed by a terrible obssession with equality and ensuring worker’s rights. Paraded by the Brexiteers as an example of how the EU’s agricultural policy unfairly benefits some countries and not others. Famously protectionist in the right wing hive mind. Some people voted for a racist party, the FN.

Italy: A genuinely difficult economic situation, so motivated by concern about the unequal distribution of benefits from global trade, the Italian people voted for a party (the Northern League) that famously started in opposition to, and continues to oppose, any redistribution of wealth from the rich north to the poor (and “lazy”) south. This party also happens to be, you guessed it, racist.

The UK: Pissed off with the unequal distribution of the benefits of global trade, despite lacking any historical interest in inequality, the British people voted to leave a free trade area so that they can form larger free trade agreements with a wider number of more predatory countries. The leave project was supported by an explicitly racist party and a newspaper that backed Hitler.

Greece: Actually genuinely shafted by the EU in a way that caused a major economic crisis, the Greeks voted for a leftist non-racist party and opted to stay in the EU.

All of these countries faced their own migrant problems at about the time that their racist parties began to surge. Only one of them faced an actual genuine economic crisis – and that was the country that voted left.

This “populism” is not about rejecting intellectuals or experts or globalisation, it’s about racism.

I bet if Dipper lived in Japan it would take him or her about 5 seconds to come to the realization that discrimination is a real thing and policy should be enacted to protect him or her from it.

The UK: Pissed off with the unequal distribution of the benefits of global trade

More along the lines of all our jobs have been given to sweatshops in the third world – but yeah it’s been a factor in the UK since at least the 90s.

despite lacking any historical interest in inequality

Bizarre statement displaying significant ignorance of UK history and politics. Currently this is a significant issue in UK politics, but hey whatever.

the British people voted to leave a free trade area so that they can form larger free trade agreements with a wider number of more predatory countries.

Peculiar interpretation of the vote shared by almost noone in the UK (pro or anti).

The leave project was supported by an explicitly racist party and a newspaper that backed Hitler.

I’m guessing that you mean UKIP, who aren’t ‘explicit’ in their racism as a party (the Tories didn’t officially support leave and were split on the issue. In fact the vote came about because the Tories _were_ split on the issue). The leave project was also backed by a number of other papers who did not historically support Hitler, and who have been attacking the EU for most of my life, mostly for things that have nothing to do with race (banana shapes, the human rights court, fishing, etc, etc).

France: A right-wing horror story about how business and economic growth is suppressed by a terrible obssession with equality and ensuring worker’s rights. Paraded by the Brexiteers as an example of how the EU’s agricultural policy unfairly benefits some countries and not others. Famously protectionist in the right wing hive mind. Some people voted for a racist party, the FN.

A lot of companies, particularly in industrial areas, have moved factories and jobs abroad where workers are cheaper. French politicians have been pushing neoliberal policies on the French population for about 15 years. The French working class (particularly the poorer part) have been hit very hard by a number of changes and are struggling (health care is not very accessible if you’re poor, for example). There have been numerous attacks on unions and worker rights by parties on both the right and the nominal left (which is why the Socialist party collapsed). One reason that the FN were doing well was because as the Socialist party moved further right they were able to speak to the concerns of their former voters. And yes in France, like many places, globalization has been used as an excuse for cutting worker pay and rights.

FN@86, 98:
how is “intense attacks on Clinton discouraged some marginal voters” erasing the “agency” of left-leaning voters?

It’s a recurrent narrative about how left-leaning voters (not counting loyal DNC apparatchiks or the irredeemable DFHs, ofc) are passive vessels for advertising and media messaging; they don’t make decisions for themselves or have convictions that drive them; they instead are pushed to and fro by ads. It’s the foundation of e.g. the DNC’s “fundraising trumps everything” and “don’t risk offending big donors” postures.

This “populism” is not about rejecting intellectuals or experts or globalisation, it’s about racism.

That’s a lovely, simplistic, exculpatory explanation, but it ignores the long-standing, well-established hobbyhorses and cultural bugbears which drive a whole lot of populism. Don’t get me wrong, racism is a major factor, but insisting anti-intellectualism or anti-globalization aren’t significantly in play is at best blinkered, if not outright deluded.

Cian, have you tried googling “breaking point poster UKIP” or anything similar?

Here is the Leave.EU homepage’s statement on trade policy. Notice the first sentence of their “analysis”:

Leaving the European Union is a unique opportunity for Britain to play to its strengths in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world

And here is BoJo asserting that the UK needs to fully leave the EU to become a “global trading nation.”

Now you and I both agree that most British people didn’t vote for this, but the fact remains that they voted for a globalization project that was sold to them on false pretenses. And what were the false grounds on which they were sold it? I direct you back to the breaking point poster.

To clean up a few other things:
a) if Germany has seen low wage growth for 30 years why the growth in the AfD vote in just the period since the migrant crisis? What independent factor could possibly explain that?
b) Anyone who says that the UK is interested in fighting inequality shouldn’t accuse others of being ignorant of UK history and politics. The UK has historically high inequality, and even your labour party are “intensely comfortable” with people being extremely rich.
c) UKIP are explicit in their racism – do you recall Farage saying that ordinary British people would feel uncomfortable if a Hungarian moved next door? Or perhaps you could google “UKIP churchill poster” and dispel the foolish notion that UKIP aren’t racist.
d) Australia has extremely pro-immigration policies, and accepts about 200,000 per year – that’s about the same as the UK accepting half a million per year without any assumption they’ll go back to Europe. Australia has vicious anti-refugee policies, and specifically policies targeting people coming by boat. Those anti-refugee policies, incidentally, have been getting worse primarily under the conservative leadership, which has been in power for much of the last 20 years, and in particular under Howard, even as Australia gets more global. It’s as if throwing right wing people racist bones to chew on stops them worrying about economic insecurity, isn’t it?

Which is exactly what UKIP did in the UK, what Trump is doing in the USA, and what Le Pen is doing in France. Rather than being a reaction to the damage done by globalization, this upsurge of “populism” is a distraction thrown by people who aim to keep globalizing, and want to make sure their base don’t notice as they pick their pockets. Far from being mobilized against globalization, the people you think voted against experts and elites didn’t even notice that shit, and voted against the one thing they hate most – foreigners.

Dr. Hilarius

JD at 80: I think you’re arguing against an argument I did not make. But to take on the issue, I’m not advocating that the Democrats tear up old playbooks, I think they should return to older ones.

Surely whether that’s a good idea depends on which older playbooks you’re advocating for? It would be unwise for the Democrats to imagine they can win by repeating the strategies that worked for them in 1964, or 1936, or 1916, or 1844, just as it would be unwise for the Republicans to imagine they can win by repeating the strategies that worked for them in 1984, or 1972, or 1920, or 1860.

As of last year the party held 15 of 50 governorships and only 31 of 99 state legislative bodies. Not healthy for a party whose policies favor far more citizens than those of the Republican. The loss of state level control has facilitated the spread of “right to work” laws and gerrymandering. State courts have become increasingly politicized.

It’s not clear, though, how any of this affects future Presidential election prospects; and it’s not clear what you’re suggesting the Democrats’ response should be.

Pissing and moaning about the unfairness of the Electoral College is pointless. It’s there, it’s not a surprise.

Now you seem to be arguing against an argument I didn’t make. It’s a fact that in the last seven Presidential elections the Democrats won four in the electoral college, as it is now, and in the other three they only lost narrowly in the electoral college, as it is now.

So why did the national party and Ms. Clinton spend so much time and money in California but so little in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

I have no idea. Indeed, I have no idea how much time and money they did spend in California. But what’s your point? Surely you’re not suggesting that the solution to the problem of winning more Presidential elections is as simple as ‘devote more time and money to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania’?

A lot of money has been spent on media and consultants but less and less on building community networks to doorbell voters.

Again, I have no idea what the figures are. But how big is the difference between the figures for 2016 (when the Democratic candidate lost) and the figures for 2012 (when the Democratic candidate won)?

I’ll be at my congressional district meeting on the 20th

I went to regular party meetings for years and years, and I’m slightly embarrassed now at how long it took me to realise they were a complete waste of time. I wish you better luck! Let me know how it turned out.

It’s good that Z raises the example of the Eastern European Trumpists such as PiS etc., because it’s very unclear to me that the Eastern European states in question are suffering from globalisation, at least in the standard model put forward by people like Cian and Oragne Watch. In that model the “neo-liberal” EU has enabled French, German and British companies to move their factories East to the states ruled by these Trumpist parties, whose young people also benefit from being able to move West and earn higher wages (especially in pounds). Yet despite this apparent benefit from globalization, these nations that have been “winning” under the standard model from the “stupid” trade deals that the western European and Anglophone countries made … also have strongman Trumpist parties in power or gaining in popularity.

Of course some of these countries (e.g. Hungary) also have a large migrant problem spilling over from Syria or are trying to defend themselves from it; but no doubt the usual suspects will try to claim that they, also, are victims of the neo-liberal EU order, and that their politics has nothing to do with that. It’s not that Trumpism is the inevitable endpoint of conservatism, and it appeals to conservative old people – it’s that they have “genuine concerns”…

Z

Accepting your characterisation, how do such “Trumpist” parties differ from classic fascism* (as practiced in Italy, Spain, Vichy France, Degrelle’s Belgium, Slovakia, Horthy’s Hungary)?

* Note that I would follow Ze’ev Sternhell in differentiating fascism from its deranged cousin, Nazism.

Hidari

This was undoubtedly not the intention, but the more I read the imperturbable centrist blah from The Usual Suspects on this thread, with their core presupposition that the Clinton campaign was beyond criticism, and that anyone who thinks different is ‘racist’ (a word that has, shall we say, a highly technical definition in the centrist lexicon) , or stupid, or in the pay of Teh Evil Russians, the more convinced I become that Trump will be a two term president.

I can’t find one comment in this thread saying any of those things. Indeed, this thread contains very little comment of any kind, favourable or unfavourable, on the Clinton campaign (there is some; but not much).

Peter T Accepting your characterisation, how do such “Trumpist” parties differ from classic fascism?

I tend to be quite sensitive to core social contexts, so to me the fact that the historical fascists parties you mention were in power in a time where the demographic make-up of the society, its educational achievements and the corresponding organizing social structures were vastly different from what they are today is highly significant. Said in a slightly different way, the ideological similarities are arguably strong, and the direct historical filiation is often clear (for the Lega, FN/RN and FPÖ for instance), but the people supporting Trumpist movements today are vastly different from the people who supported fascism 80 years ago. .

J-D Nox5

Either you live in a parallel universe in which all these parties are not represented in the national parliament and/or active participants in the governing coalition, if not the dominant player of the governing coalition (as they are in mine) as the result of – you know – elections, or you believe that there is just one election in a given country (so e.g the fact that Le Pen did not win the French presidential election ipso facto means she also somehow lost the 11th district of Pas-de-Calais), or you have an understanding of winning that has no overlapping with mine. Whatever the correct explanation, discussion appears to be pointless, and I admit I wonder why you initiated one with me.

Faustusnotes is quite correct, the hypothesis that the rise of “populism” (a term in need of careful qualification but I won’t go into that here) is a response to economic globalization and rising inequality is empirically wrong. There has been opposition to economic globalization for years and it was, and still is, a domain of the left (minus the center left). These movements (e. g. ATTAC, anti-WTO, anti-WEF, anti-TTIP etc.) and parties (Die Linke in Germany and similar) have been vocal and somewhat radical and at times drew large crowds and lots of attention (remember Seattle? btw have you ever been to any of these rallies? I have and I never ever saw anybody remotely rightwing there) but this brand of anti-globalization (or altermondialisme in French) never managed to really threaten the status quo, never became a mass movement capable of altering the political agenda. It’s simply not true, at least not in general, that people didn’t have the chance to vote against globalization and neoliberalism. What is true is that from the 1990s, traditional social democratic parties moved right towards what became entrenched as the neoliberal “consensus” of that period. They did so not because they are rotten traitors but because they had been handed so many electoral defeats by rightwing neoliberals (four in Germany and the UK, three in the US, …) that they were forced to change their strategy – and voters, far from punishing their neoliberal turn, rewarded them by electing Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder.

Trump’s anti-free trade position (the only way in which he does deviate from established right-wing neoliberalism) is a curious case study. Some commenters have claimed that it is this position, rather than his racism, that caused his unexpected rise. But the chronology doesn’t support this thesis. If it were true, you’d think that there had to be widespread opposition to free trade that Trump was able to tap into because other candidates didn’t. But in fact, polls show that until 2015, Republican voters were solidly pro free trade. Their expressed views changed dramatically due to Trump’s campaign (http://www.people-press.org/2016/08/18/5-issues-and-the-2016-campaign/), not the other way round. How would you explain that?

Faustusnotes: I’m British. The reason that I have a pretty good idea of why various people voted for Brexit BECAUSE THEY WON’T SHUT UP ABOUT IT. Turn on the TV, go on a forum or bloody Facebook and you will find out. And this isn’t a new thing, it’s been true most of my life. Brexit has been a livewire in British politics for at least 40 years, which was why it was such a stupid thing for Cameron to do. It’s about sovereignty, not trade deals. Oh and nobody takes Boris Johnson’s ideas seriously. Even those who like him. His popularity is due to his oafish and clownish behavior, appearances on ‘Have I Got News for You’, etc.

To the degree that there were swing voters in the referrendum, these were people who were voting against something. The establishment largely backed staying in the EU, and so a lot of people who were disenchanted with the status quo (and had been for a long time) voted against the establishment. It was a protest vote.

Now you and I both agree that most British people didn’t vote for this, but the fact remains that they voted for a globalization project that was sold to them on false pretenses.

No they didn’t. People who voted for Brexit would accept economic pain if it meant ‘taking back control’. Hell some of them are also people who probably think that economic autarky is possible and desirable.

To be honest most people who voted against Brexit probably weren’t doing so with trade deals in mind – but rather out of some vague ideal of internationalism, access to Europe and a vague belief that Europe is more progressive than the UK (e.g. European Court of Human Rights).

a) if Germany has seen low wage growth for 30 years why the growth in the AfD vote in just the period since the migrant crisis? What independent factor could possibly explain that?

I was pushing back against your suggestion that German workers have benefitted from globalization. They haven’t particularly. It’s a common misconception. Low wage growthy in Germany was one reason why there was so little sympathy for the Greeks (who had experienced better growth prior to the Euro crisis).

b) Anyone who says that the UK is interested in fighting inequality shouldn’t accuse others of being ignorant of UK history and politics. The UK has historically high inequality, and even your labour party are “intensely comfortable” with people being extremely rich.

Britain in the period between 1945 and 1980 (Thatcher) had extremely high taxes, spent heavily on social services and education that benefitted the poor. The upper classes were crushed. During that time inequality fell enormously, and working class (and for that matter middle class) access to housing, education and health expanded enormously. So historically I’m right (you’re welcome). Thatcher deliberately increased inequality, but it would be false to say (as you are) that everyone in the UK was okay with that. It was (and still is) highly controversial. Meanwhile one of the major criticisms made against the Blair administration was that inequality rose under them (and they spent quite a bit of time trying to explain why it didn’t matter – not an argument they’d have made if nobody cared). Post 2007 it has become a very significant issue in UK politics. A significant part of Corbyn’s appeal comes from the fact that he’s transformed Labour into a party that takes inequality seriously

c) UKIP are explicit in their racism – do you recall Farage saying that ordinary British people would feel uncomfortable if a Hungarian moved next door?

No, their racism is implicit. Which is why in some areas they got support from conservative Hindus and Sikhs. They were able to exploit (real) social and economic stresses that exist during a period that had high levels of immigration (the UK is a dense country). As an explicitly racist party they would have failed to have made significant impact.

Or perhaps you could google “UKIP churchill poster” and dispel the foolish notion that UKIP aren’t racist.

That poster’s not racist. I mean it’s dumb, and I hate the whole little Englander thing, but it’s not racist.

The lack of a street fighting force of note is why Trump won’t be an effective fascist. Also his fecklessness. Every time he tries a genuinely proto fascist move and gets a bit of kickback he gives up. He couldn’t even play the strongman on the world stage because he was too scared of Merkel, had to wait till he was on air force One to pull out of the agreement. Which shows the importance of demonstration and resistance, even when the victories are only partial. It would be very different if he had a street fighting force to intimidate journalists and break up demos.

FN@107:

Okay, let’s try one more time:

A perfectly plausible alternative is that Trump energised some racists and the intense attacks on Clinton discouraged some marginal dem voters.

Trump voters are presented as having values separate from the party and the candidate, albeit evil ones. They are capable of looking at the candidate and deciding that voting for them would advance their agenda and serve their (again, evil) interests. This is a typical portrayal from your quarter.

Would-be Clinton voters have no identity outside their presumed loyalty to whatever the party gives them to swallow. They have no agenda and no deep-set beliefs; they are are merely turned on by sufficient Dem ad buys and soundbites, or turned off by too much GOP propaganda. They do not consider the issues and seek to serve their interests; they instead simply respond to infusions of cash to media corps. This is a lot to read out of a very small sentence, but at this point it’s very, very typical of the rhetoric of both established centerist pols and pundits, and individual advocates of technocratic centerism like you.

It’s an invoked narrative, it’s a painfully common one, and it’s one that erases the agency of the bulk of party members; it reduces them to vote blocks that the elite leadership wields as a bludgeon “for their own good”.

@117, bob mcmanus
IIRC Michael Mann also saw a paramilitary wing as a necessary part of a fascist movement.
You can have an extremely violent reactionary regime with the fascist movement as just a junior partner in the ruling coalition (Franco, Horthy) or even crushed for getting out of hand (Antonescu). Once you control the state, you don’t need a bunch of undisciplined amateurs, you use the regular police and the military.

‘Does Donald Trump happen if George W. Bush doesn’t invade Iraq, if the housing bubble doesn’t happen, if Obama/Democrats are able to mount a more effective response to the 2008 recession, or if the Democrats don’t nominate someone connected to all of those things? I would say probably not.’

Almost certainly not. As has been pointed out, H. Clinton was the right candidate: it was just the wrong election. Had she run against George Bush, (first election) she might well have won, and of course, her husband (whose political position was essentially identical to hers) did in fact win in the 1990s against a far more hostile press (the idea that the press was ‘biased’ against Clinton is of course science fictional, as is the idea that she face more lies than her husband did. Remember Bill Clinton was routinely accused of being a murderer in the 1990s. He was not wrong when he claimed there was a ‘vast right wing conspiracy’ against him. But he still won. Twice). Buchanan and Perot fought just as hard and dirty as Trump, but they couldn’t break through (why? It’s the economy, stupid).

But 2008 changed everything and as we can now see, it has changed everything permanently. A lot of hopeful voices on this thread are pining aimlessly for the ’90s and persuading themselves that when that beastly Mr Trump is gone we can return to the wonderful lost world of ‘civility’.* ‘Tain’t so.

(*Strangely, most of the same kind of people are saying precisely the same thing in the UK, but about Corbyn not Trump. It’s almost as if they are centre-right liberals with a vast sense of entitlement who can’t get over the fact that they don’t have the keys to the castle anymore).

TM @118 the hypothesis that the rise of “populism” […] is a response to economic globalization and rising inequality is empirically wrong

Just for the record, I don’t subscribe to that hypothesis, and reading Sebastian H, I would tend to conclude that he doesn’t either (his model appears to me to be quite subtler, in particular in its experts/lay people dynamic).

To be precise, I don’t believe that Trumpism is a response to economic globalization and rising inequality, I believe that rising inequalities and Trumpism (and other new forms of political expression, like Macronism) are all consequences of social changes that run deeper.

As they are both positively correlated to common underlying variables, the epiphenomena of Trumpism and rising economic inequality generally tend to be positively correlated, but we all know a variable X can be positively correlated to Y which in turn is positively correlated to Z and yet X and Z are independent or negatively correlated. In particular, an analysis of correlations between the variable X and Z (here rise of Trumpism and economic inequalities), even if done accurately, would shed little empirical light on what my actual analysis is.

(On the other hand, I am happy to affirm that an empirical demonstration that the electorates of the movements satisfying the provisional definition of my 109 – minus of course the characteristic to be tested – are more educated than the general public, or even that higher education has no correlation with voting for these movements, would utterly destroy my analysis, and would prove that I have been thoroughly wrong about the topic these last 20 years.)

@126

“Once you control the state, you don’t need a bunch of undisciplined amateurs, you use the regular police and the military.”

Might be handy to keep the private army in case the other 2 can’t be trusted under extreme circumstances. Though it might not be the *same* private army that got you in to power. The SS was a different business from the SA.

In the case of Horthy, when he tried to get off the bus he was sacked by his foreign dominator and they put the local fascists in charge in place of him (the Arrow Cross).

Could also mention that Salazar suppressed the rival fascist movement.

mcmanus 127: As in all his comments, mcmanus could just strike the “class”. He uses class rhetoric as a cheap veneer to cover reactionary ideology, a trick that’s at least as old as fascism (as leftists would know if they weren’t often so historically illiterate).

Yes mcmanus is a bigot and he does take pride in it.

Z 130: I don’t think it’s a novel phenomenon that older, more rural and less educated voters are more likely to support right wing parties so it’s not clear to me what you think is proved by that observation. I do observe that traditional class / income variables have become almost meaningless as predictors of voting behavior, and that seems puzzling given that inequality is increasing.

This thread has me wondering if being a Eurosceptic, in the UK, was/is a marker of affiliation, rather than a well-considered opinion.

Being for or again Irish reunification in Northern Ireland pretty clearly divides along sectarian lines.

The argument for exiting the EU has been running for decades, and its going to be pretty hsrd to get peeople to back down if (a) they’ve been campaigning fot it their entire lives (b) it’s part of their identity (c) they got the referendum they’d been campaigning for and it passed,

It’s not quite as strong as if there had been a referendum on Irish reunification which had passed, and then the Westminster government had said “nope, not going to honour that” … but maybe has some of the same quality to it.

TM I don’t think it’s a novel phenomenon that older, more rural and less educated voters are more likely to support right wing parties so it’s not clear to me what you think is proved by that observation

I don’t know where to start. You wrote at your 118 that the statement “the rise of “populism” […] is a response to economic globalization and rising inequality” was “empirically wrong”. Seeing that I mentioned inequalities previously in the thread, I (perhaps mistakenly) though this could refer to my position, so I clarified that this was actually not my position. My position is that deep and decade-long social changes in the educative structure of (most but not strictly all) western democracies electorate have been reflected 1) in increasing inequalities 2) in changes in electoral patterns, with novel grouping of voters that were previously in opposing camps (for instance highly educated professionals in dynamic areas which were 30 or 40 years ago more or less evenly split in center-left and center-right and who by now almost unanimously behind candidates like Clinton, Macron or Renzi) and 3) in novel forms of social polarization, upon which Trumpist movements build their electoral appeal.

I don’t intend to prove anything, just to make clear my position – including the empirical conditions that would falsify it -, if only so that you can argue against it, if you wish to.

I do observe that traditional class / income variables have become almost meaningless as predictors of voting behavior, and that seems puzzling given that inequality is increasing.

Well typically, seen under my perspective, it is not that puzzling: since I believe the dominant variable (the one which is causally correlated to all the other) is educative, I am not especially surprised that the other ones are weakly or even negatively correlated between each other. If on the other hand your are looking for a positive prediction of the model, here is one: the more credentialist a society (for instance measured by an aggregate variable which takes into account the ratio of employment rate between people with a higher-education diploma compared to those with secondary education only and the ratio of average income between the same categories), the stronger the Trumpist camp. All required data are in the OECD website but if you don’t want to test the prediction by yourself, you can check page 161 of Les sociétés et leur école by Dubet and Duru-Bellat and see the list of countries with the first variable above 4 – these are (in decreasing order) Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech republic, Poland, the US, Portugal, Italy and Austria. Perhaps this list reminds you of something, in terms of electoral patterns.

J-D There’s some hard evidence there, which is worth considering, but given that it covers only a few cases, it seems to me to be more suggesting a promising line of inquiry than firmly establishing any conclusion

Well, sure.

is there evidence that this is a novel pattern?

What I believe is novel is the existence of a group of not insignificant size of highly educated people with highly educated parents and whose children will be highly educated and yet at the same time higher education is not universal within society*. That appears to be genuinely new, in the sense that societies with a group of not insignificant size with three generations of primarily educated people were also universally alphabetized and societies in which three generations of people reached secondary education were also essentially universally educated at the secondary level. If this true, this is a new group, and a new make-up of the society, and to be crystal clear (and pessimistic) this means that for the first time in modern history (conventionally understood as starting with the Protestant Reform), there is a group not insignificant in size which is genuinely dominant in the educative dimension. It is then perhaps not so surprising that new or at least distinct voting patterns emerge. Also, this group has wielded a disproportionate share of social power these last three decades (for reasons easy to understand) so it is perhaps not surprising that other groups adopt new political and social behaviors to react to them. Of course, some of these patterns will borrow consciously or not from previous political and social traditions, so some of it will look like fascism, some of it will look like socialism as it was understood in the 20th century etc. But I think there is a genuine core of novelty underlying all this.

*As I discussed recently with John Quiggin, Australia is rather exceptional in that respect, so perhaps this new group does not belong to your personal experience of the social world.

@faustusnotes 06.22.18 at 2:46 am
>Since the election we’ve discovered that Assange spent his days cozying up to Russian oligarchs and spies … we should look the other way when we find out that Assange is hamming it up with rich Russians.

Since the election the ‘liberal’ Establishment McCarthyist smear campaign against the enemies of the US empire has intensified. Assange met seven times with a lobbyist who has represented a number of people such as Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, and, yes, Oleg Deripaska, as he tried to use said lobbyist as a middleman in an ultimately failed negotiation with the US authorities. The same lobbyist was simultaneously mediating between Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and the US authorities – perhaps we should conclude that Steele is a Russian agent, too, and the Trump dossier was produced by Putin in order to help Clinton? Assange is essentially a prisoner persecuted for counteracting American imperial policies since 2007 (originally presided over by your beloved Bush during your beloved Iraq and Afghanistan wars, long before all the Russia nonsense, then faithfully continued by Obama and Clinton). The UN has confirmed that he is de facto arbitrarily detained, the dubious Swedish charges against him have been dropped, it is even more obvious than ever before that the real objective and motivation of what the US and the UK have been doing, and of what Sweden did, is precisely what Assange has maintained all along, he is scandalously and illegally deprived even of his freedom of speech by the new Ecuadoran government under US pressure, he is suffering from the physical and mental consequences of eight years spent in the same restricted space and now even further isolation, and this is callously compared to the Clintons, Obama, Trump, Bush and various billionaires partying together. This is a bit impressive even when one is familair with your … style.

>and also that the people who gave the emails to wikileaks doctored them with fake information to make them juicier.

Not that I know of.

>This is how people make stupid mistakes – by believing everything they read that confirms their pre-existing prejudices, and refusing to believe anything else.

Yes, that would be the charitable interpretation of your take on Assange and on US FP in general. Far too charitable from my point of view, I’m afraid.

Z

I’m not entirely clear on what you mean by universal secondary education. I can find on Wikipedia a page showing a ‘List of countries by secondary education attainment’. Now, before I even start looking at it I’m sure there are issues of data availability and also definitional issues. Still, for what it’s worth, it seems to show recent levels of secondary education completion at only three-fifths for Portugal, around two-thirds for Norway and Spain, and less than three-quarters for Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. So it seems to me there’s a need for clarification there.

It’s also not clear to me in what way you think Australia is an exception from the pattern of higher education you’re describing. I don’t think attainment of a university degree is anywhere close to universal in Australia, if that’s what you mean. On the other hand, if you mean that Australia is different from otherwise similar countries in that it doesn’t have a large group of people who have university degrees, whose parents also had university degrees, and whose children can also be expected to obtain university degrees, then I’m also dubious on that point. Did you perhaps intend something different which I’ve missed?

Also, this is interesting, but …

Well typically, seen under my perspective, it is not that puzzling: since I believe the dominant variable (the one which is causally correlated to all the other) is educative, I am not especially surprised that the other ones are weakly or even negatively correlated between each other. If on the other hand your are looking for a positive prediction of the model, here is one: the more credentialist a society (for instance measured by an aggregate variable which takes into account the ratio of employment rate between people with a higher-education diploma compared to those with secondary education only and the ratio of average income between the same categories), the stronger the Trumpist camp. All required data are in the OECD website but if you don’t want to test the prediction by yourself, you can check page 161 of Les sociétés et leur école by Dubet and Duru-Bellat and see the list of countries with the first variable above 4 – these are (in decreasing order) Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech republic, Poland, the US, Portugal, Italy and Austria. Perhaps this list reminds you of something, in terms of electoral patterns.

… well, no, not so much. For the sake of argument, I compare it with the list of examples you gave earlier of parties which you consider Trumpist, and those parties come from Italy, France, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the USA. So, yes, some overlap between the two lists, but not a strikingly close match-up.

Ah….conspiracy theories.

It’s so obvious that they don’t exist.

‘ Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s comments to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs
Select Committee in 2005. When asked about UK involvement in torture during
the ‘War on Terror’, Straw said:

‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials
are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret
state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and
also let me say, we believe that [U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice] is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United
Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.’

(Fade out, fade in).

‘ The UK Government has now apologised to Abdu Hakim Belhaj for his being handed over to be tortured by the Libyan government during the brief rapprochement between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi.’

(And Straw was, indeed, lying about rendition, as MI6 documents although Straw continued to lie about this until documentary evidence was provided).

And so…

‘UK authorities have acted in good faith’.

Imagine being over the age of 6 years old and thinking this was plausible, especially when the Americans are involved (literally no one has mentioned this on this thread, but the current UK government openly fawn over Trump are the current Tory government are now a ‘populist’ extreme right wing government in all but name. This is presumably because this face doesn’t square with liberal hopes that the ‘glory days’ of the 1990s can somehow be restored).

UK authorities ‘acting in good faith’. I mean, really.

As for conspiracy theories, I will accept critiques about conspiracy theories from those who don’t have a penchant for believing ‘Putin hid my car keys’ type stories, much beloved by the New York Times and some on this thread.

J-D thanks for your constructive (yet critical, in the best sense of the term) engagement.

I think we are now touching at the limit of what can be achieved both theoretically and and empirically within the limits of a blog comment. On the theoretical point, let me just say that under a perspective of differential educative attainment implying social fragmentation, the most important indicator is not the proportion of people attaining level X, it is the derivative of this value, or if you want the shape of the curve: as long as the curve is significantly increasing, no social fragmentation ensues (because people without level X see their family members reaching X and conversely, people with X are connected with people without X). Once a plateau is reached, and especially if it remains for more than a biological generation, you get a fragmented society. On the empirical point, one should and can do much better than Wikipedia (for instance Pisa has normalized, universal testing and paint a much more precise picture, but that’s just a start). Finally, about the correspondence between Trumpism and credentialism, you should take it more as an indication of what can be done than as of a definite statement. So credentialism is an important variable, but “educative social mobility” is another etc.

If I were to do this seriously, I would create a synthetic indicator of “educative domination” combining (at least) the derivative of the proportion of higher education achievement (with respect to time), credentialism, educative social mobility and educative geographic segregation (because a dominant group can only separate itself from the rest of the society if it, well, separates itself from the rest of the society). What would the list of developed countries with a high such indicator look like, and what would this list tell us in terms of Trumpism, the rise of economic and health inequalities etc… ? I don’t know. I havent done it and I won’t, at some point this kind of silliness is taking too much of my free time. As far as I know, nobody did it in precisely this way, if only because that is a lot of work. But that’s definitely where I would look, and I do expect to find valuable information there. Or to speak relatively, I certainly expect to find much more valuable information pursuing this line of inquiry than the more obvious alternatives that comes to my mind.

For example global warming denialism is strong in older people, who often lack the education to understand it. Lacking the education to make sense of modern issues they fall back on the sentiments of their youth – protectionism, coal, and xenophobia.

It’s also strong among doctors and engineers, suggesting that there may be more to this.

Most educated people don’t really have much understanding of what global warming is, or why they should believe it is true. Belief is more of a cultural thing (trust in scientists rather than pastors, or whatever), than an educated thing (*). Or rather it is an ‘education’ thing, but more in the sense that college education tends to inculcate people with a set of shared values and class beliefs that make them more likely to self-identify with the tribe of people who trust scientists.

(*) For the incurably dim I’m not suggesting that global warming isn’t real, merely that most people are not in a position to scientifically judge its validity.

SusanC: This thread has me wondering if being a Eurosceptic, in the UK, was/is a marker of affiliation, rather than a well-considered opinion.

Exactly this. The same is largely true of Europhiles as well.

FN@125:
perhaps you can explain to me why you believed lies about Clinton, why you spread them, and what influence you thought it would have?

Citation please.

This isn’t saying that they have no agency, it’s saying that they’re idiots.
[…]
I’m sure you think you have agency, so perhaps you can explain to me why you believed lies about Clinton, why you spread them, and what influence you thought it would have?
[…]
His inability to process information about Japan isn’t a sign he lacks agency, it’s just a sign that he’s wrong, consistently.

I’m sorry that you don’t understand what agency is.

…and here you tip your hand with zero self-awareness and present an article of centerist technocrat faith. You ARE denying them agency, because you decree that they lack the intelligence to act as independent, proactive conscious beings rather than reactive vessels of propaganda. YOU thoughtfully reason about facts, THEY uncritically accept whatever they’re told. YOU act, THEY react. Etc. You very obviously deny them agency. I don’t know if you’re claiming you don’t because you don’t understand that declaring your opponents mental midgets incapable of critical thinking who instead swallow and regurgitate propaganda necessarily makes them less human than you, because you’re incapable of publicly admitting mistakes, or both.

Bob McManus is also almost universally wrong about Japan every time he writes about the country, but that doesn’t stop him from thinking he’s an expert. His inability to process information about Japan isn’t a sign he lacks agency, it’s just a sign that he’s wrong, consistently.
[…]
Once you get past such knee-jerk reactions to being told you were wrong, perhaps you can start to think about why you were wrong, and what you should do to make amends.

That you wrote this almost immediately after several natives of countries you don’t inhabit dismembered your shallow, blithe, self-serving “analysis” of their recent and not-so-recent political history is telling, though not as telling as your choice to respond to me – at length – instead of defending your wrong-headed assertions or following your own advice regarding admitting and correcting errors.

Cian, a few responses, in no particular order …

Japan is not an extremely right wing government by any functional measure: it has national maternity leave, a government pension scheme, strong labour laws, a well funded and respected public education system, universal health coverage, large public sector funding for public goods, a large and progressive international development budget, very strong respect for international institutions, a constitution that bans any form of aggressive war, and strong support for government and international action on climate change. The kinds of fringe racism that animated major political figures in the us and the UK remains on the fringe here.

Climate change denialism ongst doctors and engineers is really only a thing in America. I was thinking of the rest of the high income countries when I made that comment. But outside of climate change there are a lot of other collective action issues that the boomers aren’t educated to a level sufficient to understand properly (eg trade, disarmament). I think they would be less reactionary on these issues if they had a better education (though they’d still be conservative because old).

The John Podesta doctored email issue is easy to google. You should have done it before you believed them – it’s a little late now.

Saying people are wrong after they failed to check bullshit isn’t denying them agency. I’m not saying they react and I carefully analyze. I’m saying they carefully analysed and got it wrong. Your idea leads to the rather silly idea that propaganda doesn’t work so we shouldn’t fight it, and that there is no point in pushing your own viewpoint because people have agency and they don’t respond to the information we give them. But you’re a case in point: you believed the Podesta mails were a genuine leak and not a hit job, and still can’t believe you were conned. Do you lack agency or were you just wrong? The whole idea of a lie is that people with agency will believe it. If that weren’t the case then noone would ever tell lies. But the Trump campaign was supported by a clever network of lies precisely because people with agency will believe them and act on them.

You’re bending reality out of shape to excuse the mistakes you made in 2016. My god you still even believe that Clinton foundation bullshit. It’s not lack of agency, if you lacked agency you and the other Trump fluffers wouldn’t have spent 2016 spreading Russian lies. It’s ignorance and naivete in the service of a dumb left wing ideology that has been carefully curated by 20 years of right wing lies and misinformation. You’ve been conned,and you need to stop defending the liars like Greenwald and Assange who did it, and have a little less faith in their useful idiots in the press.