My guess is that if you asked voters analogous questions a generation ago, there wouldn’t have been much, if any, correlation but this is the world we live in now.
Reading Material – November 6, 2024
Nicholas Grossman, America Chose This:
I was wrong about the election, and wrong about America… I do not regret being optimistic, writing an article that made readers feel hopeful heading into Election Day, even though that hope quickly curdled. This was going to feel terrible regardless.
I was wrong on the intangibles — the “I believe in America” stuff — and right on the rest. This election really was a national referendum on Constitutional democracy, the U.S.-led international order, and the importance of acknowledging factual reality. It’s just that the American people voted against.
America chose this, and there’s nothing ambiguous about it. It isn’t like 2016, when Trump was an outsider businessman, or 2020 when he was the sitting president. This time it’s after a coup attempt, criminal prosecutions, prominent officials from his first administration warning he’s a fascist, and a presidential campaign that lived down to that label.
Ken White, And Yet It Moves: Continue reading
Grow the @#$% Up
Trump did wreak a lot of carnage, both before and during the pandemic. His trade policies triggered an industrial recession in 2019, and his refusal to acknowledge the coronavirus made a bad situation far worse during the pandemic. Trump was a bad president who left the executive branch in a parlous state, but many Americans have nostalgia for a pre-pandemic life…
[On Nov. 5] we will learn about the maturity of the median American voter. All I can say is that for those readers who know friends and relatives that are thinking about voting for Trump, tell them to grow up and act their age.
Thought for the Day – October 31, 2024
A two-parter:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
– Frédéric Bastiat
Thought for the Day – October 26, 2024
1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
2024: “It’s the revanchism, stupid.”
(I think decent odds Harris wins, but still.)
Thought for the Day – October 25, 2024
There are few options open to the rump core of an empire after resource extraction is no longer effectively free. Intentionally becoming more isolated, stagnant, and falling behind neighbouring nations, while also experiencing reveries about a halcyon past is, I think, an unresolved contradiction.
A pragmatic, self-interested approach to keeping the lights on in a country with an ageing population and no longer any manufacturing capabilities would surely attempt to appeal to international workers in a form of ‘trade’, i.e. an exchange of labour for goods and services, benefits, citizenship.
It would be tantamount to self-sabotage, given the available options, to spend so many remaining resources on making immigration to the rump core of the empire as difficult and undesirable as possible.
-Nate O.
Music for Sunday Night
X was a favorite band forty years ago. They’re on a farewell tour. (Their guitarist is 76. Good lord!) Stacy and I went to their Boston show a few weeks ago. They were really good.
Wild Gift is a great album. I’d forgotten how good it is. Give it a listen when you have a chance.
Reading Material: “Re-sourcing the Mind”
I first heard Michael Sacasas on a podcast several years ago. I was very taken with his observations on how technology can work as a “convivial tool” or against conviviality. Yesterday he posted an essay on the “labor of articulation”, Re-sourcing the mind. I’d never heard the term before and it is spot on. Articulating your thoughts is hard work! Here’s an excerpt:
Consider what is entailed in the labor of articulation… It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.9 To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in relationship with others.
I agree. I also think there’s much truth to this:
My contention… is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.
Read the whole piece here. It’s very good.
Music for a Long Week
Thought for the Day: June 8, 2024
That and Friedman has been written some pretty respectable columns over the same period.