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Healthy skepticism

Recently Rod Dreher posted about his concerns for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health. I commented as follows:

I join other commenters in wishing HRC a speedy recovery, and in being willing to believe the official story.

As for the issue, if (God forbid!) a president dies in office, the vice president takes over. Provided the vice president is competent and broadly in sympathy with the policies of the administration, that is not in fact a major national crisis, however much talk it may inspire, however much angling for jobs among Washington types it may inspire. Likewise, if a president becomes disabled and signs over the powers of the office to the vice president under the 25th amendment, that is no crisis. It just means that the vice president is earning his salary for a change.

What is a crisis is what happened in the White House in 1883-1884, 1919-1920, and 1944-1945, when the president did become incapable of carrying out the duties of the office and the palace guard closed ranks, denied there was a problem, and created a situation where it was not clear to anyone who was making decisions there. The same thing happened in Britain in 1953, when Churchill had a stroke and deputy prime minister Anthony Eden was also ill, and does happen with some regularity around the world. (Remember Leonid Brezhnev’s colds?) That’s why the real issue is the refusal of either major party candidate to release their health records, and their retainers’ increasingly absurd insistence that neither of them has any health problems at all. It is so clear that each of them is surrounded by people who are prepared to do exactly the wrong thing if they should fall seriously ill while serving as president. Especially clear about HRC, of course, but who can doubt that the people around Don-John of Astoria would behave in exactly the same manner?

Mr Dreher is far more interested in the state of HRC’s health than I am. The post linked above is the second of three he has put up about it in the last 24 hours. (I also commented on the first, in that case cautioning against over-interpreting the particular directions in which HRC wobbled when she was having her episode yesterday. Mr Dreher expressed suspicion at my note of caution, requiring me to add a further comment.)  Mr Dreher’s third post links to pieces by Damon Linker, David Goldman, and Peter Hitchens’ late (but still less interesting) brother.

Mr Dreher explains why he is so exercised about the particulars of this story in these paragraphs:

The Clintons lie. That’s what they do. Their pattern is:

1. It didn’t happen.
2. OK, it happened, but it wasn’t a big deal, and we’ve got to get back to work doing the business of the American people.
3. Only haters say it’s a big deal.

We saw the same pattern emerge from the Clinton camp over the course of Sunday afternoon, regarding Hillary’s serious health episode. Presumably we are now not supposed to be concerned about whether or not she is leveling with the American people about her health situation because if you start asking those questions, Trump will win. Therefore, we must not ask those questions, and demonize anyone who does. You see the same thing in institutions with serious wrongdoing to hide, for example:

1. Priests did not molest those children.
2. OK, priests did molest those children, but it was only a few, and it shouldn’t distract from all the good work of the Church going on right now.
3. Only anti-Catholic bigots say it’s a big deal.

Apply this pattern to any similar situation involving a public figure or an institution, and you’ll see the same thing.

Mr Dreher covered religion for the Dallas Morning News in the mid-2000s; he was Roman Catholic when he started working that beat, and became Russian Orthodox after writing his umpteenth story about Roman Catholic bishops covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests.  So I understand his sensitivity to coverups, and the urgent need he feels to uncover whatever has been covered up. In this case, however, I think he is getting ahead of himself.

 

by acilius on September 12, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by acilius on September 12, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/09/12/healthy-skepticism/

The Old Right’s New World

This Labor Day weekend, I made an attempt to catch up on the magazines that have been accumulating around here for the last couple of years. I did come upon some things I wanted to note.

For example, in both a column about his personal evolution on questions of immigration policy the July 2016 issue of Chronicles and an article about the electoral prospects of the Libertarian Party in the July/ August 2016 issue of The American Conservative writer Justin Raimondo presents the same quote from Murray Rothbard’s speech to the 1992 meeting of the John Randolph Club:

The proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

I don’t fault Mr Raimondo for presenting this excerpt twice, not only because the pieces are quite different from each other, but also because it is so uncannily like what he and other admirers of Mr Don-John Trump seem to see in their presidential candidate. I am an undisguised social democrat, and do not see much evidence that a tacit commitment to social democracy characterizes the policy-making of either the Democratic or Republican Parties in the USA.

Nor do I think that Mr Trump’s campaign represents a particularly strong challenge to the elites where they are in consensus; on immigration, the one issue where Mr Trump’s position has been fairly consistent and sharply at odds with the leadership of the Republican Party, I tend to agree with those observers, ranging from Slate magazine on the ultra-relaxationist left to John Derbyshire on the ultra-restrictionist right who say that the likeliest outcome of a Trump campaign is an electoral defeat that will push restrictionism to the margins for years to come. I grant it is possible, indeed rather likely, that Hillary Clinton will be such a shockingly bad president, leading the USA into pointless wars and so on, that the Republicans will win a huge landslide in 2020. That would give the Trumpians just enough time to establish themselves as a major part of the Republican Party, and not enough time for the entrenched elites to push them back out.  In that case, the president who follows the Clinton Restoration may have little choice but to throw a sop to the restrictionists every now and then. However, that’s a long way from the kind of epochal change Rothbard prophesied and for which Mr Raimondo hopes.

There are some other interesting bits in recent issues of my favorite “Old Right” reads. In the May 2016 issue of Chronicles, Srdja Trifkovic reviews Dario Fernandez-Morera’s The Myth of The Andulusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (2016,) which along with Sylvain Gouguenheim’s Aristote au Mont Saint Michel (2008) and Raphael Israeli’s Islamic Challenge in Europe (2008) represents a powerful scholarly riposte to happy-talk about Islam. Professor Trifkovic himself is rather fonder of unhappy-talk about Islam than may seem strictly necessary, but even at his angriest he is less obnoxious than are aggressively ignorant Washington figures such as Madeleine Albright and George W. Bush who have spent the last couple of decades setting themselves up as the authorities on what constitutes “true Islam.” No matter how hostile he may be to Islam, at least Professor Trifkovic doesn’t purport to speak as the arbiter of its orthodoxies.

In the June issue of Chronicles, Gerald Russello reviews Barry Alan Shain’s The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context, which builds on the thesis of Professor Shain’s 1996 book The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. Professor Shain argued in that book that the principal influence on American political thinking in the late eighteenth century was Calvinism, and in his new work collects documents that illustrate the extent to which the Declaration of Independence is a Calvinist tract. That thesis may sound familiar to readers of this blog, though I have so far been only vaguely aware of Professor Shain’s work. That looks like a gap in my erudition that I will need to fill post haste!

The August issue of Chronicles included a remarkably charming bit of light literary writing by Derek Turner, of all people. Mr Turner discusses Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s famous tour of the islands and Highlands of Scotland, comparing their experiences with some recent observations of his own as he visited the same areas.

The September issue of Chronicles features Aaron D. Wolf’s discussion of Don-John of Astoria. Mr Wolf theme is that the word “conservatism,” as used by Republican luminaries who attack Mr Trump for his lack of ideological formation, is an empty one; Mr Wolf appeals to the late M. E. Bradford’s critique of all ideologies, branding every attempt to discover a totalizing set of political values as a reversal of history, an imposition of the present on the past in order to justify whatever one’s favorite political movement happens to be doing at the moment. Like Bradford, Mr Wolf values an attitude of respect for the particular, for particular places, particular times, particular customs, particular people, as an antidote to the brutality that so regularly finds a cloak for itself in the abstract and general language of ideology. Bradford could describe himself as “conservative” because that attitude of respect led him to want to conserve things, not because the word named a program that he was committed to carrying out though the heavens fall.

Don-John of Astoria is no more a conservative in the Bradfordian sense than he is in any of the ideological senses that the recent leaders of the Republican Party have tried to attach to the term, and Mr Wolf does not try to claim that he is. But he does close his column by finding a redeeming quality in the rise of Mr Trump:

Trump’s statement [that “if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country”] resonated with a great many of the American people, whose impulse is conservative (regardless of party and ideological affiliation,) and who had to be convinced by ideologues of both political parties that their impulse is immoral and contrary to “conservative” values.

Given that milieu, it’s no wonder that the only candidate who could break through with an argument for immigration sanity was a man of Trump’s character, whose narcissism makes him immune to their ideological attacks.

So it is precisely in the characteristic that would most have horrified Don John of Austria that Don-John of Astoria makes his contribution to the latter-day Battle of Lepanto to which the anti-Islamic writers of Chronicles imagine the West to be heading, rallying the forces of Christendom by throwing a series of self-aggrandizing tantrums.

The July/ August issue of The American Conservative includes not only the Justin Raimondo piece mentioned above,  but also an essay by David Cowan about economist Frank Knight, a pioneer in the study of uncertainty as the precondition for innovation and growth. Along with that is an excerpt from Knight’s work.

The September/ October issue of The American Conservative features Samuel Goldman’s review of Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, by George Hawley. Professor Goldman’s review is full of gems; I’ll quote these four short paragraphs from the middle of the piece, since they seem to form the heart of his case:

Hawley begins with the observation that the historic pillars of the American conservative movement—limited government, an assertively anti-communist foreign policy, and quasi-Christian moralism—have no necessary connection. Beginning in the early ’50s, these elements were packaged together by a group of intellectuals and activists led by William F. Buckley. The story is often told as a process of addition, in which disparate constituencies were brought into a grand coalition. Hawley emphasizes that it was also a process of exclusion, as unsuitable ideas and characters were driven out.

All students of the conservative movement know about the marginalization of Robert Welch and other leaders of the John Birch Society. Hawley reminds readers that the purges did not begin there. National Review was established partly to distance conservatism from the anti-Semitism that bedeviled the Old Right. Its founding manifesto was also a statement of protest against so-called New Conservatives of the 1950s who accepted the New Deal. Secular-minded anticommunists like Max Eastman were theoretically welcome in conservative circles but found their ostentatiously pious tone intolerable. In its first decade, the conservative movement was defined as much by who was out as who was in.

This process of self-definition did not end with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the first movement conservative to seek the presidency. Since then, Southern nostalgists, critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance, opponents of the Iraq War, and offenders against the movement’s code of racial etiquette have all been treated to quasi-official denunciations. Skeptics of supply-side economics have also been encouraged to make their homes elsewhere. This magazine has its origin in some of those disputes.

One result of this boundary-policing is a “true” conservatism of striking narrowness and rigidity. Its less recognized corollary is the development of a diverse ecology of ideas outside the movement’s ever shrinking tent. Some of these uncultivated growths are bitter and even poisonous. Others might contain the tonic that the right needs to recover its relevance.

“Some of these uncultivated growths are bitter and even poisonous. Others might contain the tonic that the right needs to recover its relevance.” Indeed, many of those the bitter and even poisonous growths flourish in and around Chronicles magazine, and the attention I’ve paid to that magazine so far in this post should suffice to show that I believe that healing tonics may sometimes be distilled from bitter and even poisonous growths.

In the May/June issue of The American Conservative, Alan Mendenhall reviews Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: The Career of a Concept, in which Professor Gottfried neither neglects fascism’s connections to the political left nor denies that it was, after all, a creature of the far right.  That may not sound like much, but lesser writers do often resort to sleight of hand to disassociate labels they accept (and Professor Gottfried does accept the label “rightist”) from odious labels (and no label is more odious than “fascism.”)

The March/April issue of The American Conservative includes Richard Gamble’s review of John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea.  Evidently Professor Wilsey argues that the USA should let go of religious ideas that incline it to militaristic enterprises around the globe, but adopt religious ideas that will incline it to humanitarian enterprises around the globe. As a student of the thought of Irving Babbitt, Professor Gamble recognizes in this proposal an exchange of one indulgence of the expansive temperament for another, and sees in the apparently benevolent expansive humanitarianism the barely-concealed potential for warfare. He calls instead for what Babbitt endorsed, a truly humble policy that is founded in self-restraint and self-denial.

 

by acilius on September 6, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016, Chronicles, The American Conservative
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Posted by acilius on September 6, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/09/06/the-old-rights-new-world/

There are two types of multinational federations: Those that end peacefully, and those that end violently

In a few days, the United Kingdom will hold a non-binding referendum, advising members of parliament either that the majority of voters would like to remain in the European Union, or that a majority would like to withdraw from it. Every party with more than one MP has a leader who is committed to remaining in the EU, and the classes to which MPs belong are dominated by economic interests which benefit from British membership in the EU. Therefore, unless Leave wins by a vast majority, as there is almost no chance it will do, the results are unlikely to precipitate British withdrawal from the EU. A win for Remain will lead to self-congratulation by advocates of British membership, to vows of continued resistance by opponents, and to no significant change. A win for Leave will probably trigger a leadership contest in the Conservative Party, the winner of which will be a prime minister who makes a great show of going to Brussels and presenting various demands for the European Union to reform its institutions. When those demands are either granted or politely taken under consideration, that prime minister will declare victory, claim to be a reincarnation of Alfred the Great (or more likely Winston Churchill, since historical literacy in the UK isn’t what it once was,) and go on with business as usual.

None of this is directly my business, as I do not live in the UK and am an American citizen. However, it does strike me that, throughout the history of the world, there have been many multinational federations. Some of these have labeled themselves as empires, famously including the Holy Roman Empire and the Dual Monarchy of the Hapsburgs; others as movements embodying a nationalism transcending borders that were dismissed as historical accidents, like the United Arab Republic under Nasser or Yugoslavia under Tito; some as the vanguard of global revolution, like the Soviet Union; etc. What they have in common is that their formal bureaucratic and legal structures were tolerable to the people of their member states as long as the underlying realities of economics and Realpolitik supported them. When economic circumstances and the power relations among the federation’s constituent parts shifted, those formal structures broke down and the federation itself ended. Since economic circumstances and power relations continually change, it is safe to assume that all multinational federations will sooner or later collapse, and that the primary distinction among them is between those that dissolve peacefully, like the Soviet Union or the United Arab Republic, and those that dissolve violently.

Among federations that dissolve violently, there is a second distinction to be drawn. Some dissolve as a consequence of wars they have fought and lost against outside states; others dissolve as a consequence of wars among nations within the federation. Outside states usually involve themselves in these internal wars as sponsors of the various sides.

If the current goings-on in the UK are any indication, it seems unlikely that the European Union will dissolve peacefully. How might a violent dissolution of the EU play out? The principal geopolitical division in Europe is between the Western section, naturally dominated by Germany, and the Eastern section, naturally dominated by Russia. When the European Economic Community and NATO were formed, Germany was divided, defeated, and occupied, as weak as it could be, while Russia was the nucleus of the USSR, an empire of nearly unlimited reach. These institutions then served to sustain a balance of power between the two halves of Europe. Now, Germany is the undisputed mistress of western Europe, while Russia is still isolated and relatively impoverished. Under these conditions, a set of institutions that commit the United States of America and the members of the EU to a perpetual alliance with Germany against Russia can serve only to unbalance the European system and make general war more likely. Every time in history when Germany has been strong and Russia is weak, the Germans have grown reckless pressing their claims in the East, ultimately provoking the Russians to war. There is little reason to suppose that matters will play out any differently this time.

If Russia undergoes an economic and political resurgence soon enough, then perhaps Russia will be able to contain Germany’s ambitions before they take the situation to its usual cataclysmic outcome.  If that resurgence continues long enough, and is accompanied by a relative decline in Germany’s fortunes, perhaps the European Union will end as Yugoslavia ended. As Germany sponsored Croatia and other states in their anti-Serbian efforts leading to the destruction of Yugoslavia while the powerless Russia of the 1990s looked on, so in the future Russia might sponsor anti-German efforts on the part of various EU member states, leading to the destruction of the EU while a weakened USA looks on from across the ocean.  This scenario would be as likely as an outright war between Germany and Russia to involve a large-scale thermonuclear exchange and therefore the destruction of civilization.

Of course, simply because the UK is going through rather an unfortunate bit of political theater right now does not mean that it will not be possible, at some future date, for the members of the European Union to escape peacefully. It might be more difficult than one supposes, however. A German government unrestrained by the need to maintain a coalition that includes the Social Democrats might very well charge hard enough into the former Soviet republics, pressing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia for example, that there might not be time for a peaceful breakup. If the USA is led by so hawkish an administration as that which Hillary Clinton has promised to conduct, then such a danger would be very close by.

If that danger is avoided, there would likely be some warning before EU member states erupt in civil war. One would like to suppose that member states would withdraw peacefully rather than fight civil wars to postpone departure. What might prevent peaceful dissolution would be a sharp cleavage in economic interests between social classes in the member states. Should a time come when it is clearly not in the interest of most people in certain EU member states to continue in the federation, while it was as clearly in the interest of the elites in those states to continue, then civil wars on the Yugoslav model would be very close at hand.

by acilius on June 20, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Politics

Posted by acilius on June 20, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/06/20/there-are-two-types-of-multinational-federations-those-that-end-peacefully-and-those-that-end-violently/

A links post, like in the olden days

Biswapriya Purkayastha, alias “Bill the Butcher,” creator of Raghead the Fiendly Neighborhood Terrorist, posted this ravishingly beautiful prose poem on his blog last week. Maybe the opening will hook you into following the link and reading the whole thing:

I was lost in the forest at night, alone, and I called to my ghost; and at last, my ghost came to me.

I asked my ghost, “Why, when I was lost and I was calling, did you take so long to come? I have been wandering alone and blind through the dark, and I could have harmed this body beyond repair.”

And my ghost settled before me like mist on the ground, and reached out to touch me.

“I was gone far,” it said, “looking along the paths of the forest, and the things that dwell therein.”

“And what did you see?” I asked my ghost, and saw that it still hung away from me, as though reluctant to come home to my body.

“I saw pain and hunger,” the ghost said. “I felt death and the terror of many small scuttling things. And I saw on the fringes of the forest, villages; but the villages lay empty, burned by fire and disease until the living fled and the ghosts of the dead, unable to bear the loneliness, fled after them.”

“What else?” I asked, for I knew the ghost had more to tell; it was my ghost, and it had dwelt within me since the moment I was born.

“And I saw on this path, before us, five images in the shape of women; but women they were not.” The ghost paused, and I could feel it look away into the jungle with its eyeless eyes. “They had skulls for faces, and were clad in robes made of the night. And the first of them had a flame in her hand, for she was the spirit of passion and the heat of vengeance, and she would burn you to ashes if she found you; not because she would want to, but because it is her nature.”

“And the second?” asked I.

It just gets better from there, it really is a gorgeous bit of writing.

It’s certainly at the opposite extreme from the sort of thing I encounter that sometimes makes my daily habit of looking at things on the internet feel like this:

2016-04-04-PLTM300

I am very fond of this installment of The Periodic Table of Videos. My favorite moment comes when the Prof says, “I’ve no idea how this sample got to London. It was brought to me in London, in Max’s bag.”

At The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs worries about the extent to which Americans have taken up, as a favored hobby, hatred for those whose political views differ from theirs.  He recommends pieces in this topic by blogger Scott Alexander (an essay that made its way into the DNA of Weird Sun Twitter,) journalist Lynn Vavreck, and scholars Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood.

The “Archdruid,” alias John Michael Greer, is occasionally brilliant; this essay about “The End of Ordinary Politics” builds on his theory that the distinction between hourly wages and salaried employment marks a class division that explains much of American social life, and that the US political elite has little comprehension of or curiosity about the economic interests of wage laborers. The Archdruid holds that the kind of partisan hostility that Alan Jacobs, Scott Alexander, and others lament is largely explicable as the result of tactics representatives of the salaried classes deploy to keep wage laborers off the political radar:

I’m thinking here, among many other examples along the same lines, of a revealing article earlier this year from a reporter who attended a feminist conference on sexism in the workplace. All the talk there was about how women in the salary class could improve their own prospects for promotion and the like. It so happened that the reporter’s sister works in a wage-class job, and she quite sensibly inquired whether the conference might spare a little time to discuss ways to improve prospects for women who don’t happen to belong to the salary class. Those of my readers who have seen discussions of this kind know exactly what happened next: a bit of visible discomfort, a few vaguely approving comments, and then a resumption of the previous subjects as though no one had made so embarrassing a suggestion.

It’s typical of the taboo that surrounds class prejudice in today’s industrial nations that not even the reporter mentioned the two most obvious points about this interchange. The first, of course, is that the line the feminists at the event drew between those women whose troubles with sexism were of interest to them, and those whose problems didn’t concern them in the least, was a class line. The second is that the women at the event had perfectly valid, if perfectly selfish, reasons for drawing that line. In order to improve the conditions of workers in those wage class industries that employ large numbers of women, after all, the women at the conference would themselves have had to pay more each month for daycare, hairstyling, fashionable clothing, and the like. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the slogans of an earlier era liked to claim, but it’s clearly not powerful enough to convince women in the salary class to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of women who don’t happen to share their privileged status.

To give the women at the conference credit, though, at least they didn’t start shouting about some other hot-button issue in the hope of distracting attention from an awkward question. That was the second thing relevant to my post that started happening the week after it went up. All at once, much of the American left responded to the rise of Donald Trump by insisting at the top of their lungs that the only reason, the only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters.

The Archdruid isn’t a Trump supporter and does not deny that Mr Trump’s appeal is at least partly racial, but he focuses on the questions of economic status that have drawn so many white wage-earners to that particular loudmouthed landlord when they might have chosen to throw their lot in with any of a number of other race-baiting demagogues.

Speaking of Scott Alexander, here’s a bit of speculation from him about where religions come from. These paragraphs are from the middle of it:

If we were to ask the same New Guinea tribe to follow Jewish food taboos one week and American food taboos the next, I’m not sure they’d be able to identify one code as any stricter or weirder than the other. They might have some questions about the meat/milk thing, but maybe they’d also wonder why cheeseburgers are great for dinner but ridiculous for breakfast.

People get worked up over all of the weird purity laws and dress codes in Leviticus, but it’s important to realize how strict our own purity laws are. The ancient Jews would have found it ridiculous that men have to shave and bathe every day if they want to be considered for the best jobs. One must not piss anywhere other than a toilet; this is an abomination (but you would be shocked how many of the supposedly strait-laced Japanese will go in an alley if there’s no restroom nearby). I have been yelled at for going to work without a tie and for tying my tie in the wrong pattern; wearing sweatpants to work is right out. And once again, this gets even longer if you you let the more modern/rational rules onto the list – Leviticus has a lot to say about dwellings with fungus in them, but I recently learned to my distress that landlord/tenant law has a lot more.

Once again, if we made our poor New Guinea tribe follow Jewish purity laws one week and American purity laws the next, they would probably end up equally confused and angry both times.

So when we think of America as a perfectly natural secular culture, and Jews as following some kind of superstitious draconian law code, we’re just saying that our laws feel natural and obvious, but their laws feel like an outside imposition. And I think if a time-traveling King Solomon showed up at our doorstep, he would recognize American civil religion as a religion much quicker than he would recognize Christianity as one. Christianity would look like a barbaric mystery cult that had gotten too big for its britches; American civil religion would look like home.

Insofar as this isn’t obvious to schoolchildren learning about ancient religion, it’s because the only thing one ever hears about ancient religion is the crazy mythologies. But I think American culture shows lots of signs of trying to form a crazy mythology, only to be stymied by modernity-specific factors. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many historians around to tell us exactly how things really happened. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many scientists around to tell us where the rain and the lightning really come from. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we’re only two hundred-odd years old and these things take time. And most of all, we can’t have crazy mythologies because Christianity is already sitting around occupying that spot.

I have a weakness for maps that purport to describe what people are like in various locales, such as this one, which I saw here and which comes from this article:

 

by acilius on April 14, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, Demography, Politics, Quick Links, Science
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on April 14, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/04/14/a-links-post-like-in-the-olden-days/

Minority voting

Writing for The Atlantic, Matthew Delmont considers “What African Americans lost by aligning with the Democratic Party.” It’s a brief piece, but makes important points about the limits of the Democratic Party’s collective vision of race relations in the USA, and the ways in which those limits have exacerbated regional and class divisions among African Americans.

I would just like to add one point. It would be illogical for African Americans to vote otherwise than as a bloc supporting one party with 90% or more of their votes. Illogical, because in each of the fifty states and in most other jurisdictions around the USA, African Americans are a numerical minority. Say African Americans constitute 10% of the vote in a given state, and that there is no ethnic bloc voting in that state. If African Americans give one candidate 5.1% of the vote and the other 4.9%, that .2% difference will matter only in the most closely divided election. It will hardly be worth any candidate’s while to address issues of special concern to the African American community in pursuit of so small a reward, especially since white voters tend to be quick to see any effort to appeal to African Americans as a sign that politicians are neglecting their interests. Even an African American vote that divides 6% to 4% will give politicians little incentive to risk alienating the touchier segments of the white vote by focusing on specifically African American issues, since many or most undecided African American voters would be concerned chiefly with issues that are as important to whites as they are to African Americans.

By voting solidly for the Democrats, African Americans do lose the interest of the Republicans, and do wind up tied to some unattractive politicians. But they also constitute the single most powerful voting bloc within the party. In the Deep South, where whites vote almost as solidly Republican as African Americans vote Democratic, the institutional Democratic Party is a space where African Americans can influence events on a national and international scale. This in turn gives African Americans in those states an incentive to value loyalty to the institutional Democratic Party. We saw the results of this several weeks ago, when Bernie Sanders, who joined the Democratic Party only last year after decades in politics as an independent, lost every southern primary by enormous margins to Hillary Clinton, who, having been Secretary of State under the current Democratic president and wife to the Democratic president before him, is as much a symbol of the institutional Democratic Party as is any red, white, and blue cartoon donkey.

Ethnic bloc voting is not peculiar to African Americans and to whites in the Deep South, of course. It is the norm wherever the largest ethnic group does not form so large a supermajority of the voting population that it can be confident it will dominate whatever government emerges from an election. In the northern states of the USA, a significant percentage of whites vote for the Democrats, knowing that while African Americans might have more influence and more representation in Democratic state governments than in Republican ones, most of the leadership will still be white, and whether the leaders are white or not, they can hardly hope to stay in office long if they alienate a significant percentage of the otherwise-available white vote. In southern states, where African Americans are a much larger percentage of the population, if a quarter or less of whites voted Democratic, that might be enough to install a Democratic state government. Most of that government’s support would come from African American voters, and so its first order of business if it were to survive would be to address itself primarily to the concerns of African Americans.

I remember public discussion in the USA leading up to and away from the Iraqi elections of January 2005. Before the elections many experts warned that elections in Iraq at that time would, in effect, be an ethnic census, in that Shia Arabs would vote for the Shia coalition, Sunnis would vote for the Sunni coalition, and Kurds would vote for the Kurdish coalition. After the election, observers pointed out that precisely this had happened. Much of that commentary hinged on the phrase “at this time.” An election held “at this time” would be little more than an ethnic census. I wondered what time might come when it would not be so. The hated Steve Sailer likes to quote an August 2005 interview in which Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew said that “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” I first saw him quote that in August 2005, when that Iraqi election was still fresh in my mind, which is one of the reasons why that line made an impression on me (and why I am still in the habit of reading Mr Sailer’s blog.)

If African Americans ever do break away from the Democrats, it’s hard to see where they will go. Wherever they do go, it will probably be in their best interests to go there as a bloc, since demographic trends don’t suggest that African Americans will be a supermajority of the USA’s population any time soon. Indeed, all current trends suggest that the African American share of the population will continue to decline throughout the remainder of this century.

by acilius on April 1, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Politics, The Atlantic Monthly
Tagged

Posted by acilius on April 1, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/04/01/minority-voting/

Trump voters want to live in predominantly white neighborhoods

The other day, Texas Senator Ted Cruz won a very wide victory in the Republican caucuses in the state of Utah, dealing a heavy defeat to loudmouth landlord Donald Trump. Most Utahns, including the vast majority of the state’s Republicans, are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons. Many commentators have tried to find in this result some aspect of Mormonism that makes Mr Trump’s anti-immigration message unappealing, speculating that the LDS movement’s nineteenth century experience as an unpopular religious minority has sensitized its members to Mr Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Some observers have placed a very different interpretation on the Utah results. So, Rod Dreher quotes at length from a correspondent who argues that Mr Trump attracts votes from people who either live in predominantly white neighborhoods and are worried that their lives will become less pleasant if those neighborhoods become largely nonwhite, or who live in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods and believe that their lives would be more pleasant if they lived in predominantly white neighborhoods. Since Utah is more than 90% white, predominantly white neighborhoods are not particularly scarce in the state, and so these concerns are not the powerful vote drivers they are among downwardly mobile whites in the South and in urban areas.

by acilius on March 25, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016
Tagged

Posted by acilius on March 25, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/03/25/trump-voters-want-to-live-in-predominantly-white-neighborhoods/

Who will pick up the pieces of the Republican Party after Trump’s defeat?

It seems pretty obvious to me, at this point, that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican presidential nominee and that each of the other candidates is trying to position himself to be the man who leads the Republican Party out of the wilderness that will follow the defeat Mr Trump will suffer at the hands of Hillary Clinton.

I’ve been tweeting at various people about this.  For example:

and:

and:

and:

Ted Cruz hasn’t done significantly better so far than did Rick Santorum in 2012 or any better than Mike Huckabee in 2008, neither of whom emerged as the heir apparent for the next cycle. So his continued presence represents a hope that Republican voters will be slower to coalesce around Mr Trump than they were to coalesce around Mitt Romney in 2012, John McCain in 2008, George W Bush in 2000, Bob Dole in 1996, or George H. W. Bush in 1988, and that he will be able to win some of the states that won’t vote for him. That seems a forlorn hope, since Mr Cruz has drawn almost all of his support from evangelicals, and in no remaining state are there enough of them to put him over the top. His current standing would not seem likely to entrench Mr Cruz even as leader of the far-right counter-establishment, let alone as nominee-in-waiting for the 2020 election.

John Kasich also has to hope that states keep voting against Mr Trump, and if they do he can plausibly hope to be the beneficiary of that opposition. But, there is really no reason to suppose that Mr Trump’s support on the remaining primaries and caucuses will spike any less dramatically than did Mr Romney’s in 2012. If Mr Kasich’s bid ends with him having lost every state but the one where he is governor, he’ll be a punchline, then a trivia question, then a lecturer at the Kennedy School.

Many diehard anti-Trump Republicans have been touting House speaker Paul Ryan as a potential nominee if the Republican convention does not produce a first-ballot winner. Unlikely as that scenario is, a couple of weeks of discussion of it may be enough to qualify Mr Ryan as this cycle’s runner-up, and therefore as the de facto leader of the opposition to the Hillary Clinton administration.

by acilius on March 18, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016

Posted by acilius on March 18, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/03/18/who-will-pick-up-the-pieces-of-the-republicab-party-after-trumps-defeat/

How party loyalty undermines the power of party elites

I think this piece on Politico about the failure of the John E. Bush presidential campaign and the challenges facing the Hillary R. Clinton presidential campaign is pretty good, but it misses one key point.

In the USA, people by and large are much more likely today than they were in the past to consider their allegiance to the Democratic or Republican Party an important feature of their social identity. US presidents symbolize their parties. Therefore, when pollsters ask prospective voters their opinion of the person their party most recently elected as US president, the first reflex for many of them will be to express a very high opinion of that person.

It should be no surprise, then, that in 2013 and 2014 polls indicated that most supporters of the Republican Party expressed a high opinion of the Bush-Cheney administration. Leading figures in and around that party decided at that time to coalesce around John E. Bush as the party’s next presidential candidate.  If Republican voters liked George W. Bush so much, why not give them his brother as their next standard-bearer? When the party’s rank-and-file greeted John Bush’s entry into the race with an uncomfortable shifting in the seats and the sound of crickets was heard, party elites cast about for another candidate who could address the putative demand for a return to the Bush-Cheney years. Eventually they settled on Florida senator Marco Rubio, whose policy positions are identical to those of the Bush-Cheney administration. Four states in to the nomination contest, Mr Rubio has yet to win anywhere, and polls indicate that the states where he once seemed to have a chance are now moving out of his reach. His campaign and indeed his political career, will likely end with a humiliating defeat in his home state on 15 March.

What the elites who rallied first around John Bush and then around Mr Rubio missed is that the reflex which leads partisans to tell pollsters that they have a high opinion of the person whom they still see as their party’s leader is largely about those partisans’ reaction to a stranger asking them whether they are loyal members of their party. That reaction doesn’t necessarily predict much about the process of selecting a new leader. So when loudmouth landlord Don-John Trump rejects George W. Bush’s relaxationist stand on immigration and says that George W. Bush lied in making the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, party elites are genuinely surprised that Mr Trump’s support among Republican primary voters seems to go up afterward. Why wouldn’t they be surprised, those voters are the very people who for years told pollsters that George W. Bush had been a good president.

Except among party elites and ideological purists, support for Mr Trump is not likely to mark anyone as a disloyal Republican. Mr Trump’s image as a not-particularly-ethical businessperson who is wont to make racist and sexist remarks fits a stereotype of Republicans; that’s why he is so unpopular outside the Republican Party, but it’s also why his deviations from the party’s familiar line are so acceptable to its traditional supporters. He gives them a way to acknowledge that their party’s leaders have betrayed their interests and ill-served their country without surrendering to Democrats or radicals or foreigners or anyone else outside their ranks.

On the Democratic side, we have a two person race in which one candidate has the support of every major donor, every major media organization, and virtually every elected official, while the other is an elderly Jewish socialist who joined the Democratic Party for the first time last summer. In the first four contests, the elderly Jewish socialist first fought the establishment favorite to a tie, then won by a handy margin, and finally came within four points of winning a second victory before heading into territory where he had not had time to build a campaign.

Coupled with the fact that the same establishment favorite actually lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, Mr Sanders’ early success confirms that the Democrats are going through something similar to what the Republicans have experienced with the failures of the party elite to sell either John Bush or Marco Rubio to their party’s rank-and-file. Going in to the 2008 election cycle, Democrats were telling pollsters of their deep and abiding love for former president William J. “Bill” Clinton. As their Republican counterparts would, eight years later, offer George W. Bush’s brother to their party, so Democratic Party elites in that cycle offered Bill Clinton’s wife as a presidential candidate.

Hillary Clinton’s backing for the Iraq War out her at odds with the Democratic Party’s base, dooming her candidacy in 2008 as John Bush’s for a relaxationist immigration policy doomed him among Republicans in 2016. As in 2016 Mr Trump’s fit with stereotyped images of Republicans enables him to hold onto the support of the party faithful while denouncing Republican leaders, so in 2008 voting for the first black US president was so much a thing one would expect Democrats to do that Ms Clinton could not make headway by casting doubt on the status of Barack Obama’s supporters as true Democrats.

That Hillary Clinton has come back is a sign, in part of the declining salience of war and peace as an issue in a Democratic Party led by a president who is currently bombing half-a-dozen countries or more, and in part of the party’s failure to replace Bill Clinton’s Finance First strategies. By Finance First, I refer not only to Bill Clinton’s campaign strategy of lining up finance before formulating policy proposals or doing anything else, but also to the economic policy that was a corollary to that, in which his administration addressed the demands of the finance sector before attending to any other concerns.

Finance First is not an approach that comes naturally to the sorts of people who tend to vote for Democrats, and is in fact anathema to most of them. In view of the distribution of wealth in today’s USA, however, and considering that neither organized labor or ethnically or religiously based political groups can any longer turn out enough volunteers to counteract the power of the money-men, it is not obvious that any approach other than Finance First can elect a president or sustain one in office. The Democratic Party’s elites, therefore, see the presidential nominee’s job as persuading the base to accept Finance First.

Though Finance First has enabled the Democrats to win five of the last six presidential elections (falling within the margin of error in 2000, when the party nominated an exceptionally maladroit candidate,*) it has not served them well overall. When Bill Clinton was first nominated in 1992, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, most state legislative chambers, most governorships, most elected county and municipal offices, and had for decades. A quarter century into the dominance of Finance First, the Republicans hold 70% of all elected offices in the USA. Even if Hillary Clinton defeats Don-John Trump in a landslide come November, that isn’t going to change. Indeed, since the party in the White House usually takes a drubbing in the midterm elections, by the end of the first term of the Hillary Clinton administration the Democrats will probably be in a much weaker position even than they are now.

For Mr Trump to challenge the Bush-Cheney relaxationist line on immigration is not a radical departure for his party. Restrictionists do tend to cluster in the Republican Party, and the party elite can retain its commitment to a low-wage economy even without significant relaxation of border controls. Likewise for the Democrats and an issue like the Iraq War; while militarism is a central feature of the American economic system and a challenge to it would represent a profound revolt against both major parties, one can always express reservations about a particular war without standing for a demilitarization of the US economy and society. Barack Obama’s emphasis on his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq in his 2008 campaign was, therefore, within the bounds of what the Democratic Party is capable of handling.

What Mr Sanders is doing, however, is a head-on challenge to the whole Finance First model.  Even if he had worked out a viable alternative, that would be a breathtakingly audacious undertaking. If he ends up with something like 40% of the popular vote at the end of the primary season, I think we may see a great deal of effort put into developing such an alternative between now and the next open Democratic nomination. If a hardy campaign on behalf of Mr Sanders in the primary is followed by a significant vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the general election, I am confident that such an effort will have a noticeable effect on the Democratic Party’s overall direction.

*Then-US Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Junior.  Mr Gore likes to be called “Al.”  I call him “The Tennessee Turd.”

by acilius on February 28, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016

Posted by acilius on February 28, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/02/28/how-party-loyalty-undermines-the-power-of-party-elites/

More guesses about how the 2016 US presidential race will turn out

img_1959202

Out of the starting gate

Since I’ve been so brilliantly successful at forecasting the progress of the US presidential campaign so far, I’ve decided to share more predictions.

At Five Thirty Eight, Nate Silver sees “Four Roads Out of Iowa for the Republicans.”  I also see four sets of outcomes for tomorrow’s Iowa caucuses, but not quite the same four Mr Silver sees.

I see four possible winners. Loudmouth landlord Don-John Trump is leading the polls among Republican voters in Iowa and most other states.  If he wins the first contest, (let’s say he has a 35% chance of doing that,) his odds of winning everywhere else likely increase.  However, it has several times happened that the winner of the Iowa caucuses has gone on to receive a smaller percentage of the vote in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary, than the New Hampshire polls had suggested before that Iowa win. George H. W. Bush in 1980, George W. Bush in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 can all be cited as examples of that sort of anti-momentum. A highly unconventional candidate like Mr Trump might be especially vulnerable to anti-momentum.  New Hampshire voters might be leery of giving him wins in both of the first two contests, thereby putting him in a commanding position in the rest of the primary season.  If they do desert him, the likeliest candidate to benefit would be Ohio governor John Kasich. Mr Kasich is rising in the New Hampshire polls, drawing big crowds at events in the state, and dominating the airwaves there. So if Iowa goes to Mr Trump, I would put the chances of New Hampshire also voting for him at about 70%, and of it turning to Mr Kasich at about 20%.

Texas senator Ted Cruz is also strong in the Iowa polls, and his voters do seem likelier to turn out for the caucuses. So I’d give him a 50% chance of winning Iowa. If he beats Mr Trump by a narrow margin, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone; Mr Trump’s chances of winning New Hampshire would probably be at least 70% in that case. On the other hand, if Mr Cruz wins by a wider than expected margin, that would put Mr Trump on the defensive, and again Mr Kasich comes into the picture as a possible winner in New Hampshire. Maybe his chances would rise as high as 40% in that case, with a 50% likelihood Mr Trump would win New Hampshire.

Florida senator Marco Rubio has consistently stood in third place in the Iowa polls, and is the only conventional Republican candidate making a stand there.  Mr Cruz and Mr Trump have been feuding with each other in recent weeks; Iowa caucus-goers don’t like that sort of fighting, as witness the Democratic race in 2004, when frontrunners Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt spent weeks filling Iowa television and radio with attacks on each other, then neither finished in the top two on the night.  It’s possible Mr Rubio could pull the kind of upset this year that John Kerry pulled on the Democratic side in 2004.  If that happens, Mr Rubio will eclipse Mr Kasich, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Florida governor John Ellis Bush, and onetime tech CEO Carly Fiorina to become the default candidate of those looking for a conventional Republican candidate. That will likely guarantee him a win in New Hampshire, and probably make him unbeatable down the road to the nomination. If he doesn’t win Iowa, Mr Rubio won’t win anywhere; he’s been static in the polls, fundraising, and organization for months and months, and simply is not very good at connecting with Republican voters.  If he does win in Iowa, though, he’s the nominee.  (Unless something embarrassing bubbles up from his past, or something else unforeseeable happens.)  On the other hand, that Iowa win, is pretty unlikely, I’d say about a 5% chance. So let’s say that translates to a 4% chance of a Rubio nomination.

Retired brain surgeon Ben Carson, briefly a frontrunner in the polls last year, is now polling at about 10% in Iowa.  However, the final polls before the 2012 Republican Iowa caucuses showed former Pennsylvania senator Richard Santorum with about that same level of support, and he won. Mr Santorum’s people were the hardcore religious conservatives, the group that is far likelier than any other to show up and take an active part in the Republican caucus meetings. Dr Carson draws his support from the same bloc, and he has been a familiar figure among them for decades. While Mr Cruz may have made sufficient inroads with the religious right that Dr Carson is unlikely to emerge tomorrow night as the big winner, it would be foolish to discount his chances altogether.  I would guess that he has about a 10% chance of winning Iowa. If he manages that, Mr Trump and Mr Cruz will both be seriously damaged, and Mr Kasich is virtually certain to win New Hampshire.

If Mr Trump comes out of Iowa and New Hampshire looking like winner, he’ll have to knock all of his opponents out of the race quickly, lest his poverty choke his campaign before he can clinch the nomination. If he wins Iowa, Dr Carson will probably back out of the race; if he wins it by a wide margin, Mr Cruz may see his candidacy collapse.  If he wins New Hampshire, he’ll knock Mr Kasich, Mr Christie, Mr Rubio, Ms Fiorina, and Kentucky senator Randall “Rand” Paul out of the race.  Mr Bush has enough money in the bank and enough institutional support that he can continue his campaign indefinitely.  He will likely spend many millions of dollars trying to win the primary in South Carolina regardless of the results of the first two contests. If Mr Cruz is still in contention at that point, as it seems virtually certain he will be, then the outcome of the South Carolina primary will be quite unpredictable.

If Mr Kasich wins the New Hampshire primary, he may slip through the Trump/ Cruz/ Bush scrum to win South Carolina as well.  Even if he doesn’t manage that feat, a win in New Hampshire would give him the mainstream default candidate status Mr Rubio could gain by winning Iowa.  That in turn would take him to March 15, when the first states hold primaries in which the winner takes all of that state’s convention delegates, instead of giving each candidate a share of delegates proportional to his or her percentage of the vote. The two biggest of these states are Ohio, which Mr Kasich will certainly win if he is a viable candidate, and Florida, which is also likely to favor a candidate more conventional than Mr Trump or Mr Cruz. If he wins those two states, Mr Kasich will be all but unbeatable in the later stages of the nomination contest.  But he has to win New Hampshire; he stands so low in the polls nationally and has so little organization or institutional support that anything less than a first-place finish there will force him out of the race.

Of all the Republican candidates, Mr Kasich sounds the most like a president; no less an an observer than the late Richard M. Nixon has declared that he is his party’s most, and indeed only, electable candidate.  I would rather not see a Republican elected president, so I suppose I should hope they nominate Dr Carson or Mr Bush or Mr Cruz, each of whom, for his own particular reasons, would probably drive well over 50% of the electorate to oppose him unalterably.

 

by acilius on January 31, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016
Tagged , , ,

Posted by acilius on January 31, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/01/31/more-guesses-about-how-the-2016-us-presidential-race-will-turn-out/

I say something about politics and something about religion. No sex or money, though.

I’ve recently been participating in two discussion threads at The American Conservative. In a thread on Noah Millman’s blog, I’ve been laying out a theory that Florida Senator Marco Rubio will either win virtually every state in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating contest, or he won’t win any states at all. It all hinges on whether he can pull an upset win in the Iowa caucuses. My comments are here, here, and here.

In a thread on Rod Dreher’s blog, I’ve been talking about how the request by the “Primates” of the Anglican Communion that the leaders of the Episcopal Church scale back their participation in the Anglican Communion’s policy-making structures raises questions about how we can tell whether formal organizational bonds are helping or harming efforts to unify Christians, and if we decide that a particular structure is doing more harm than good, how we can dissolve it without making matters even worse.  My comments are here and here.

I’m not going to vote for a Republican for president in any case, and I think Mr Rubio would do an especially bad job in the White House.  The fact that I have worked up a theory about his prospects, therefore, just goes to show what a political junkie I am.  The other topic is of more direct personal interest to me, since I am a member of the Episcopal Church, and I find some value in the “Anglican” label.  Still, I discuss that topic also in terms of political strategy.

by acilius on January 23, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Campaign 2016, religion, The American Conservative, Thunderlads at Large
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on January 23, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/01/23/i-say-something-about-politics-and-something-about-religion-no-sex-or-money-though/

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