The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Donald Trump

Trump Is Doing What Matters Most for Winning the Election

Melania Trump’s Plagiarism is not important. Look, if you’re a college-educated intellectual like myself, or a college-educated journalist, you think plagiarism is a bad thing.

Most ordinary people do not care very much. It’s just not very important.

So. Is it more important if Melania plagiarized a paragraph from Michelle Obama, or is it more important if Trump can handle the economy better than Clinton?

The argument seems to be that it creates a narrative of incompetence. My guess is that people who would vote Trump will shrug it off as “not important.”

I note, further, that Trump continues to suck the air out of the room. Yes, it’s the convention, but even so, the coverage drum beat, day-by-day, is Trump, Trump, Trump. Good publicity, bad publicity, it’s all publicity.

Recent polling has had Trump winning key swing states, though Clinton is still ahead in more polls.

Trump is far from out of it, and can still easily win.


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Is Hypocrisy Preferrable to Honesty?

Ok, this.

Right. Now, Bill Clinton, whom some call the “first Black President” signed a crime bill based on the myth of teen (black) superpredators, which included three strikes laws and a huge amount of money for local policing and prisons.

That crime bill was emulated and led directly and indirectly to huge incarceration of blacks, massive-over policing of black communities, and the destruction of black families.

What Bill Clinton DID, which Hillary Clinton supported, was terrible for African Americans. Absolutely devastating.

Now, no question, Donald Trump is saying shit important people aren’t supposed to say. I despise racism, and Donald is saying a lot of racist shit.

But the Clintons did stuff that terribly hurt poor black communities. Now, maybe Bill loved blacks but just happened to accidentally fuck them sideways. That’s certainly possible. I don’t know the man’s soul. But his actions towards blacks were terrible.

I don’t know if honest racism is better, in the sense that it makes racism more socially acceptable. But it does have the simple virtue of being honest and getting it out. American politics has been driven by racism since, well, forever. But there is a hypocritical stream of racist action and rhetoric from Nixon that has never ended.

It was all dog-whistle. Say “welfare moms” and wink, and voters knew you were saying blacks. Welfare Reform was also about punishing blacks (poor whites just got caught in the crossfire).

America’s economic history since the end of the post-war era can be read in racial terms. Blacks came to the city, whites fled to the suburbs, and enough of them switched votes to Republicans (the Reagan Democrats) to elect Reagan, in order to keep their suburban home prices up.

This is all of a piece.

Racism is stupid. It is contemptible. But few politicians have done more harm to blacks than Clinton or Mario Cuomo, the great Liberal governor with his three strikes law.

So I’m not going to get super-worked up that Trump is honestly saying what many think, and the attitudes which “liberal” politicians acted upon.


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Trump Wins in Nevada

Donald TrumpNot precisely a surprise, or anything. Barring an airplane accident, or some such, he’s the nominee.

Most polls show him winning against Clinton (and losing against Sanders).

Get used to the idea of President Trump, it is your very possible future. If he improves the economy (quite possible, politicians and central bankers have refused to do all the obvious things to improve it), he could be your President for quite some time.


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Clinton and Trump Win

Donald TrumpMargin is about 4 percent for Hillary. Trump’s victory is crushing.

Sanders won the majority of Hispanics, but African Americans broke hard for Clinton.

It seems unlikely that Sanders will win South Carolina, given the make-up of its primary voters.

Much of this depends upon whether Bernie’s momentum in the polls continues. African Americans are an important constituency, but if he can extend his numbers with Hispanics and women, he’ll be in good shape.


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As for Trump, I don’t see a scenario that doesn’t involve his health, where he isn’t the Republican presidential candidate.

If he runs against Clinton, a lot of Sanders working class voters are going to vote for him, not Clinton, but his bashing of minorities may cost him the election. Unlike mainstream pundits, I am not 100 percent certain of that: After all, mainstream pundits also said there was no way Trump could win a primary.

(Update: I wasn’t going to comment on Jeb dropping out since he’s been such a non-factor, but I think it’s worth noting that he did speak out against Trump’s demonization of Hispanics and his anti-Muslim ban. That said, the fact that Trump said George Bush Jr. lied the US into Iraq and still won this primary is revealing.)

Sanders and Trump Win in New Hampshire

Donald TrumpNo surprise, the polls were leaning strongly to both of them.

Things get interesting from here for Sanders, but Trump will be moving to strength. New Hampshire is prosperous and has done well since the financial crisis; that’s not true in most of the upcoming states.


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I think Trump will be the Republican nominee. On the Democratic side, the Clinton campaign is beginning to panic and lash out. Bernie’s national numbers keep trending up. The question is mostly whether they’re trending up fast enough to allow him to win.

Trump’s nasty endorsement of torture puts him even further beyond the pale than he was before, but he continues to be to the left of Clinton on most domestic policy.

Update: Exit polls show Bernie taking 49 percent of non-white voters. 85 percent of voters under 30. 55 percent of women. I suspect he’s the next Democratic nominee.

Trump Is Viable in a General Election and Has Left-flanked Hilary

Donald TrumpHe’s a nativist populist.

Yesterday, during the debate he said that he wanted something even better than the single payer that Sanders is offering. Then he said that people are dying on the street (from poverty) and that he’d make that stop.

If Trump is the general election candidate, he left-flanks Hilary on economics. It is not even close. He wants bilateral trade deals (if you are anti-“free trade,” you want this too.) He does not want to diminish Medicare and SS. He wants universal health care.

His policy platform is pitched to appeal to the working class. They don’t like immigrants, and under the current economic regime, that makes sense: They are competing for the same jobs, and there aren’t enough jobs. I favor immigration, but you have to have an economy set up to deal with it.  Right now the US does not.

Trump’s got a minority problem. They aren’t going to vote for him.

But he has the ability to mobilize huge swathes of the white working, lower and middle classes.

He’s also less of a hawk than Clinton on foreign affairs.

A lot of people think he can’t win the primary, and he can’t win the general. I’m really not sure. He has the potential to be a real phenomenon. He parses as an outsider. He feels like a “conservative,” but his actual economic policies are left-wing and populist.


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He gets past, then, as many Americans desire to vote for the conservative. He will peel off a chunk of people who would usually vote Democratic for economic policy reasons. He is more credible on SS and Medicare than Clinton, which will appeal to the olds.

Steal Bernie’s free college plank (or offer something close to it), and he could clean up amongst youngsters as well.

Nothing’s guaranteed, but…

And, for the record, I think he’s more palatable than Cruz, the other front-runner. It isn’t like either of them are good candidates from my point-of-view, but Cruz is saying even crazier things than Trump, without any of the good stuff, and appears far, far more severe.

Both, are, of course, scum. Trump fell over himself to talk about how he’d torture yesterday, and I’ll have no truck with such.

But amongst evils, he’s not the worst, and that’s what American elections are about.

Pick yer poison.


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The Political Consequences of Mental Models

Sense is sense, no matter who says it:

Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd if the Middle East would be more stable with Gaddafi and Saddam in power, Trump replied, “Of course it would be.”’

There comes a point where one must ask—ok, well, this point has come again and again, but really: Are the West’s leaders destabilizing the Middle East deliberately?

Q. “Stupid or evil?”

A. “Both.”

I know someone who worked with Cheney and believes that Cheney honestly thought that removing Saddam would make the world a better place. Also (and the person I know is a smart, capable person) that Cheney was very smart.

But smart in IQ terms (which Cheney probably was) isn’t the same as having a sane mental map of the world. Being brilliant means being able to be brilliantly wrong and holding to it no matter what. Genius can rationalize anything.

Human thought is mostly an unconscious and uncontrolled process. What comes up is what went in, filtered through conditioning. We are so conditioned and the inputs are so out of our control during most of our lives (and certainly during our childhood) that our actual, operational margin of free will is far smaller than most believe.

We interpret what we know through the mental (and emotional) models we already have. Thoughts are weighted with emotion, recognized and unrecognized, connotations far more than denotations.

Machiavelli made the observation that people don’t change, they instead react to situations with the same character and tone of action even when a different action would work better.

This doesn’t mean one cannot undergo ideological changes, it means character changes only very slowly, and that we have virtually no conscious ability to change our thinking, actions, or characters on the fly.

This is true for both the brilliant and the stupid, though the tenor of challenges for both is different.

You see much of this in Hilary Clinton’s vast hatred and enmity towards Russia. She is a child of the Cold War.

You see it in the repeated use of force in situations where force has failed to work over and over again.

You see it in the inability to tolerate democratic governments of opposing ideologies despite the fact that destroying them, after a period of autocracy, generally leads to worse outcomes than simply working with them. (See Iran for a textbook case.)

And you see it in the belief that the US needs to run the world in tedious detail, that regular coups, invasions, garrisons, and so on are necessary—along with the endless, sovereignty-reducing treaties described in “free trade deals.”

These policies are insane, if one assumes a minimum of public spiritedness. They have not worked. They will not work.

But they do work in the social sense: They create successful lives for the people who devise and implement them. They are rewarded with money and social approval, they receive feedback which screams, “Continue!”

Over fifteen years ago Stirling Newberry told me, “Insiders understand possibility, outsiders understand consequences”.

Insiders are rewarded for acting in accordance with elite consensus, and very little else.

Outsiders, not being part of that personal risk/reward cycle are able to say, “Yeah, that’s not going to work”.

They are both right and wrong.

The science of conditioning, which was strong from the late 19th century through to the 60s, has faded out of the intellectual limelight. But viewed through the lens of conditioning, much that makes no sense makes perfect sense.

We are ruled by people who are what they have been conditioned to be, and we are what we have been conditioned to be: We are passive consumers who shut up and do what they are told by their teachers or bosses.

Conditioning extends well beyond observable behavior and into thought, and the structure of knowledge. Intellectual structures are felt, and each node and connection has emotional freight. This is true even in the purer sciences, and it is frighteningly true in anything related to how we interact with other humans and what our self-image is.

It is in this sense that the disinterested, the outsider, those who receive few rewards for acquiescence, are virtually always superior in understanding to those within the system. Outsiders may not understand what it “feels” like, but the outsider understands what the consequences are.

This is true far beyond politics, but it is in politics where the unexamined life, the unexamined belief structure, and the unexamined conditioning, are amplified by long levers to brutalize the world.

 

Why Trump, Corbyn and Sanders Are Doing Well

Let’s state the obvious about Trump.

No, not that he’s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.

Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren’t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren’t as stupid as the media pretends.

  • He doesn’t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does. Obama has talked this up.
  • He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he’s badmouthing it from a position of, “Give them the real thing.”
  • His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they’ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages. This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism’s history. Disagree if you like, but it’s not crazy.
  • His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don’t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one. Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.

I’m not a fan of Trump, there are plenty of reasons why he’s problematic, but he’s actually an economic populist on many issues. People shouldn’t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism, but I’m tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together.

Populist, nativist, runs off at this mouth.

And folks, he told the truth about buying politicians.

Trump is doing well because he is telling some truths other politicians won’t, and because his actual policies sound good to right-wing populists. Populists have been divided into right and left for a long time, but it’s feelings that matter to right-wing populists. Trump comes across as a straight shooter and that’s why they’ll vote for him. (It is also why many of them will cross the lines to vote for Sanders if he’s the Democratic nominee and Trump isn’t the Republican one.)

Anyone who feels like a “run-of-the-mill” politician loses big points in the current environment, because people feel like normal politicians are why we’re here, in this shithole economy, with no end in sight and plenty of reason to believe it could get a lot worse.

Sanders, Trump, and Corbyn in England (whom I’ll write about in a bit) are all doing well because of this dynamic. People are sick of the status quo and they will take a chance with anyone who is willing to actually bloody well try something different than the usual. And because most people don’t parse just on policy positions (nor should they, since politicians lie), what they are looking for are candidates who don’t act like the normal candidates and who therefore might actually do something different.


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