Category Archives: Politics

Wake the #$%& up. Please.

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Jeb Lund gets it.  If his observations aren’t already obvious to you then please wake the fuck up take note.  (Hat tip to driftglass for linking to Lund’s post.)  Stop Waiting for Trump to Start Making Sense:

Let’s say you were suddenly whisked back to the sixth grade, and you found yourself face-to-face with a bully threatening to kill your Tamagotchi. Now let’s say you countered that surely his actions would exhibit a break from norms and that he would feel hypocritical because he’d probably once been victimized by someone. You would, in all likelihood, get your ass beat.

Anyone who went to an average middle school understands how this plays out. Which is why it’s all the more bewildering that leftists, centrists, and guardians of the genteel status quo seem to think this approach will work with Trump after it failed to work with the Republican Party for at least a generation.  This has not, and will never, work. The president-elect’s team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail. They have no sympathy.

Like a lot of bad ideas, this all started with a misunderstanding. It is an article of faith among the left that people vote against their own self-interests and tolerate political chicanery because they don’t understand economics or history or good governance or what popular conservative demagogues said once six years ago….

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Rebecca Solnit, The Ideology of Isolation

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Noted few months ago.  Worth reading again.  Rebecca Solnit, The Ideology of Isolation:

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.

This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted:

There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

Throughout that interview with Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher walked the line between old-school conservatism — we are all connected in a delicate tapestry that too much government meddling might tear — and the newer version: “Too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’ ” At some point in the decades since, the balance tipped definitively from “government aid should not replace social connections” to “to hell with others and their problems.” Or as the cowboy sings to the calf, “It’s your misfortune / And none of my own.”

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Years of Magical Thinking

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Andrew Bacevich, How the US Blew the Post-Cold-War Era:

The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments? Answering that question is essential to understanding how Donald Trump became president and where his ascendency leaves us.

Hardly had this period commenced before observers fell into the habit of referring to it as the “post-Cold War” era. Now that it’s over, a more descriptive name might be in order.  My suggestion: America’s Age of Great Expectations…

Anne Tagonist, 2016: the year Magic broke into Politics

The mythopoesis of a pre-Romantic Scots witch story is straightforward: a witch or sorcerer has foresworn the church and enjoys great power in the world. Her land is green. Her enemies fear her. She should be happy, but in fact she is beholden to the devil to torment her neighbours so that they, too, will foreswear the church. The hero, brought to agony by the loss of family, land, or freedom, is tempted in a moment of wild rage to call on the devil, but does not. This forebearance kills the witch malefactor, though since this is Scotland nothing improves the lot of the broken hero, whose only consolation is the firm possession of his or her soul. The Romantics prettied it up with ancient ruins and mysterious rituals, but the underlying narrative remains ugly and revolting. Magic, in these tales, is a contagious evil narrowly avoided at the final minute.

But then, history is written by the victors.

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“The wise restraints that make men free.”

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Limits are the very stuff of a real democracy — a representative, constitutional republican democracy. Even in the structure of a democratic government there must be checks and balances among its three main limbs: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

No one among them can usurp the exclusive powers of any of the others. On the day the executive assumes the power to make laws or to interpret them, on that day democracy dies. Indonesia itself witnessed this not many years ago. Democracy is not a happy-go-lucky breaking of handcuffs. It is neither party nor picnic nor feast. It is serious business. It is about obligations to others. It is about authority and its limits. It is about rights and freedoms and their limits.

And vox populi is not vox dei. Democracy is not people power. Democracy is the social discipline that makes freedom meaningful and a true blessing: “the wise restraints that make men free.”

– Wim Tangkilisan

 

Voting trends in selected states: What does the raw data tell you?

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There’s been much speculation about the root cause of Clinton’s loss, e.g., white working class turnout for Trump?  Clinton unable turn out the “Obama coalition”?   For example, Nate Cohn offers an analysis in the NYT, “How the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an Opening for Trump“.  There’s a section in his post, “It Wasn’t Turnout” (that caused Clinton to lose).   With respect to WI, MI, and PA, the three Clinton “firewall” states which went for Trump and essentially won him the election, that’s BS.  Just look at the number for votes for the Democratic and Republican candidates over the last five elections.

Wisconsin:

Republican up 147k votes from 2008;  Democrat down 295k.

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Noted – December 20, 2016

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Hal Niedzviecki, “Donald Trump ushers in the Anti-Future Age“:

It’s not like [Trump] was out garnering votes in small-town Ohio by telling the unemployed that that the virtual Eden perpetually promised by the demi-gods of future is a dangerous chimera that needs to replaced by pragmatic action to replace consumption with community… Trump’s election, like his anti-future campaign, is a rebuttal, but not an answer.

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