It’s not so easy: evaluating political consequences and voting accordingly

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “F” writes:

The thing about identity politics that always confuses me is why Democrats are able to benefit from it. They have the black vote in Chicago, for example, but are black Chicagoans better off after having voted D for decades? It would not appear that way. And we have all heard what the minority unemployment figures are under Trump — better than they’ve ever been, in some cases. But the Democrats still took the House. I just don’t get it.

Good point. And then F answers his/her own question, at least partially:

Saying you care is worth more votes than showing through policies that you care.

So I’ll just expand a bit more on the reasons I think this happens.

The conservative message is rather like a “tough-love” one. It doesn’t sell all that well, because it asks people to forego easy, quick solutions for longer-term ones that might require some sacrifice. Human nature is such that this isn’t necessarily convincing.

But it’s especially unconvincing because of the modern tendency towards imagology, something I’ve discussed several times before. To refresh your memory, here’s a quote from the Czech author Milan Kundera describing the phenomenon:

…[I]magology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed.

Imagology has become especially strong, and cause-and-effect in politics is difficult to discern in terms of evaluating the policies of a given party. We all know how much arguing goes on, for example, about whether a certain president (pick a president, any president) is responsible for either a good or bad economy during his administration. It’s neither easy nor simple to figure out, although we try to simplify it, and statistics can usually be used to bolster either side of the argument.

Of course, a lot of people neither read the statistics nor understand them. But even for those who do, the situation is often murky. That leaves a lot of room—a lot of room—for propaganda and for confirmation bias.

Then we have political habit and tradition. If a person is surrounded by friends and family and newspapers that espouse one particular view, and has been since birth—for example, in many urban areas that means the liberal point of view—it takes an awful lot to strike out on one’s own and disagree, changing points of view and party. I’ve dedicated a lot of verbiage to that very topic (see this as well as this). And it’s not gotten easier over time to leave the circle, now that political polarization has reached a fever pitch.

The changing way to buy groceries

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was a child my mother didn’t have to go out all that much to shop for food. For the most part, the food came to her.

There was bread delivery, milk delivery, fruit and vegetable delivery, and meat and fish delivery, and it was regular—some of it on weekly order and some by phone. I’m not sure how she paid; I’m assuming they sent bills that she paid with cash or check. The supermarket—there was only one anywhere near us, and I remember when it was built—was for a few items now and then, such as cereal and canned goods. We even had paper products and soda delivered, although I’m not sure that was commonplace among our neighbors.

By the time I was doing my own shopping, trips to the supermarket were frequent and I can’t remember any deliveries at all. I paid with cash or check, and when I gave the clerk a check there was a long process of looking at my ID and writing things down, and it had to be a local check and a local ID.

Then came credit cards, which initially were phoned in, with a wait that could be quite long. I’m not even sure whether at that point credit cards were used in supermarkets or were confined to other retail establishments unlikely to have such long lines. Remember those little machines that the clerk operated, that made an imprint of the raised figures on the card?

And of course you had to sign the credit slip, no matter what the amount.

Then the sliding of the card on the side of a small machine fixed so that the customer had easy access, and now we have chips. Unless the amount is high, no signing. And the computers of the world know your buying history from way way back.

Apparently there’s delivery again, too. I prefer to walk the aisles and look at things and people, but you can also have all sorts of services that deliver prepared meals that cater to your food preferences and diet needs.

What might be next?

When it’s Democrats talking trash, they’re just “passionate”

The New Neo Posted on by

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

One of our newly-sworn-in members of Congress has covered herself with glory:

New Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) started her term with a bang as she cursed out President Donald Trump in a speech to supporters. From Fox News:

Speaking to a crowd of supporters Thursday night, the Michigan Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress said of Trump: “People love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the mother***er.’”

…

Not to mention the fact that Tlaib had anti-Semitic racist Linda Sarsour with her at her swearing-in. You know, the woman who loves Louis Farrakhan and terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

Tlaib is in a safe Democratic district, and she has the honor of being one of the first “two Muslim women elected to Congress…and the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.”

Tlaib is the eldest of fourteen children of Palestinian immigrants to this country. She was born and raised in Detroit.

Tlaib’s statement has not met with condemnation by the Democrats in power, which should come as no surprise. It has been labeled (“reframed,” as they say in the family therapy biz) as “passionate.”

[NOTE: I will point out that although Tlaib ran as a Democrat, she is a “Democratic Socialist,” which is in itself a reframe of “socialist.”]

White people and the Democratic Party

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Concept Junkie” makes this interesting point about identity politics and today’s Democratic Party:

I think the Democrats have put themselves in a box in that they’d look like hypocrites nominating a white male. This limits their list of qualified candidates significantly. Oh, wait, “qualified” is rarely a consideration. Regardless, by becoming the anti-white and anti-male party, they are hurting themselves.

That got me to wondering whether it’s true.

Actually, I believe that the Democrats would have no trouble nominating a white male if they chose to do so—although I also doubt they’ll choose to do so. But if they did, they’d just re-label him a non-white male, as they’ve somehow been doing with Beto O’Rourke. Alternatively, they’ll just point out how he’s a “woke” white male who has renounced and/or confessed to his white male privilege and is atoning for it by running on a platform of championing diversity and undoing that privilege by which he’s benefited.

It’s not that difficult, really—and, as I pointed out in this post, Democratic voters don’t have much trouble with hypocrites: the left is all about holding power and getting “progressive” things done and saying what is necessary to do so.

What about Concept Junkie’s second point, that the Democrats have hurt themselves by positioning themselves as anti-white and anti-male? I wonder; I’m just not sure.

Even prior to their overt embrace of anti-white-male rhetoric, Democrats had a lock on the black vote and to a great extent the Hispanic vote. I doubt that their stance on white males would impact that negatively. Nor has it seemed to have had much (or any) negative effect on the Jewish vote—the Democratic segment of which is about 2/3 of the total Jewish vote and consists to a large extent of secular Jews (although Jews are such a small group they hardly matter in terms of numbers, but they do form a disproportionate percentage of donors to the Democratic Party).

There are a bunch of charts at this link illustrating the changes in voter patterns from the 80s till now based on demographics. It’s quite informative. In general, the leftward/Democratic trend in most groups has been pretty strong in all groups, although men in each group are consistently less left than women, even among fairly monolithically Democratic groups such as black voters. The only group solidly to the right (men and women, although men more so) are whites. And whites are a smaller and smaller percentage of voters as time goes on.

Whites also—unlike many other ethnic groups—do not vote as a solid bloc. There are many liberal whites males, for example, who support the anti-white anti-male stance of the current Democratic Party. What’s more, young people have in recent decades been steeped in anti-white anti-male rhetoric through a host of influences, starting with education and continuing in popular culture and the press. An enormous number of young white people are on board with this. So far I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of youth voting patterns by race, so I don’t know how white voters under 30 have been voting, but the preference for Democrats among voters under 30 is so huge and pronounced that I’d be surprised if white males under 30 weren’t part of it (and note, if you read that link, that voters under 30 accounted in large part for the Democratic victory in the House in 2018).

Democrats long ago decided to case their lot with identity politics. That certainly paid off during the Obama years in terms of political power in the federal government. I’m not sure that the Republican victory in 2016 on the national level (presidency and legislature) represents a long-lasting reversal for the Democrats, as the 2018 midterms showed. If Republicans hold their own in 2020 I think the argument that Democrats have hurt themselves will be stronger, however.

I do think that on the more local (state) level, there definitely has been a general trend toward the right. Whether that has anything to do with a reaction to the anti-male anti-white stance of the Democratic Party I don’t know, but it’s certainly possible.

I’m also not sure the Democrats have a coherent message except for racial and gender identity politics: we are the nice people, the ones who care, and the GOP are the bigots. There don’t seem to be any winning alternatives, so they may as well stick with it.

Drudge

The New Neo Posted on by

I find Drudge very depressing today. It’s probably due to the prominent place given to the Democrats being sworn into power in the House, and the sense of deja vu combined with a sinking feeling that I’ve often had in the last decade or two, of things slipping away and time running out.

But I happened to notice something on the page I’d never seen before. I’m not a daily Drudge devotee, but I go there now and then just to see what people are talking about. Today I noticed a little line in the lower right of the page that says this:

VISITS TO DRUDGE 1/3/2019

029,718,569 PAST 24 HOURS

I knew Drudge was influential and had enormous traffic, but 30 million a day?

Anyone able to tell me why? There are plenty of other news aggregates, but what’s his secret?

I know the page started as a gossip column (back in 1995) and in some ways retains aspects of that. I recall that Andrew Breitbart was part of its early growth. I know that Drudge was instrumental in breaking the Lewinsky story.

But why is it still so popular? It’s got an archaic design—hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Is it mostly habit that accounts for the huge amount of traffic, or is there something else I’m missing?

That Drudge Wiki entry describes the site as conservative. I think that used to be more true than it is now. It also says the site has 3 million visitors a day, which seems more in line with reality; probably the disparity in figures represents the difference between visits and visitors. Perhaps a lot of people check the site over and over and over, compulsively, during a single day.

Oh, and about that foreign-influences-on-the-elections thing

The New Neo Posted on by

We have ballot harvesting by DREAMERS in California:

Voting up until now has been a practice reserved for citizens. Today, non-citizens vote – by getting hold of indifferent Americans and in a perfectly legal setup in California, filling in the ballots by proxy, with no fingerprints visible. Who knows what kind of coercion may be employed by some of them?

And even more disturbingly, if DREAMers can do that to promote their own political agenda, what’s to stop other foreigners, with far more malign agendas, from doing it?

The growth of political anger and the idea of political illegitimacy

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Phoenix” wrote:

I believe that Scott Adams is correct in saying that we are watching two movies – The one where the Orange Man is Bad, and the one where Our President Trump takes on the evil Powers that be. And in my personal opinion that split occurred during the aftermath of the 2000 election when Al Gore refused to concede to George W. There are still democrats who, to this very day, believe that the election was stolen from them.

And Mike K adds:

I agree that the anger and hate by Democrats began in 2001 when Bush was elected.

I wouldn’t date the beginning of that polarization to the Bush-Gore election.

Just in my own lifetime, Nixon was very hated and actually considered evil by a great many Democrats. As knowledge of the events of Watergate unfolded it was considered merely confirmation of what they already believed of him, which was that he was downright vile and dangerous. Then Reagan—a very different personality—received an enormous amount of hatred on a very personal level as well. In addition, the Bork nomination featured a lot of hatred on Democrats’ part and was a very vicious undertaking.

Then when Clinton was impeached the Democrats were exceedingly angry in response, feeling it was an unfair frame-up and perhaps even payback for what had happened to Nixon. The impeachment of Clinton wasn’t exactly a lovefest on the part of Republicans, either.

But the Bush presidency was probably the beginning of the widespread idea that the Republican president wasn’t validly elected. However, it’s a bit understandable, if you look at the way the voting went in 2000—the extreme closeness of the vote made it almost impossible for quite some time to know who actually had been elected, and I believe that whichever party had lost would have felt a great deal of ire and might have decided that the winner had gained the office through unfair means and should not be president.

The birther movement during the Obama years was a continuation of this idea of fighting a president one doesn’t like by insisting that his presidency itself is illegitimate, although the argument and methods were different. That is what I believe is the newer element that was introduced as a result of the 2000 election: the notion of almost automatic illegitimacy for whatever reason. And this idea of an illegitimate Republican president has followed big time in connection with Trump’s election, and taken on new dimensions of hatred, bile, and accusation as well as nearly endless legal machinations in an attempt to prove his illegitimacy or at least punish and/or frighten those who have associated with him.

So I separate out the two phenomena that sometimes go together and both of which reflect political polarization and distrust: (a) hatred towards a president, and (b) the idea that a president is illegitimate. The first is more common and of greater antiquity, whereas the second is a more recent trend, probably beginning in 2000 and affecting every president since. Another change is that I believe (without having any statistics) that the Trump presidency is the first time a majority of the opposing party ascribes to the notion of the president’s illegitimacy.

[ADDENDUM: I did find a poll of the 18-to-30 age group back in 2017 that says that group considered Trump an illegitimate president by a 57-42 margin. The numbers thinking he’s illegitimate were much higher among certain ethnic groups in that age range: 74/25 among young black Americans and 71/28 among young Hispanics, for example. I have no idea what the figures would be now. And that’s not just Democrats, although of course Democrats predominate in that age group and very much dominate in those ethnic groups whatever the age.]

The Democrats…

The New Neo Posted on by

…take over the House today, and Pelosi will become Speaker.

The House alone won’t actually be able to implement all that much without the Senate, and yet they can do quite a bit. For one thing, they can impeach Trump with a simple majority, although without enough Republican allies in the Senate—and a great many would be needed—that will go nowhere except to stir up the Democratic troops in their anger and provide them with entertainment, as well as take up resources and time that could be spent in more productive ways. I actually doubt that the House Democrats will bother, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if they did.

What else can they do? They certainly can keep Republican causes from being approved. Bipartisanship is dead except on certain issues that happen to appeal to both parties, but those issues don’t involve the big hot-button items such as the wall (which they are determined to stop not only to please their base but most particularly to thwart Trump’s chances of re-election). Democrats have very good political discipline, too, and Pelosi is extremely experienced at keeping in line those who might be even thinking of straying.

Many House members who are on the more extreme political left, such as Ocasio-Cortez, will also be basking in the limelight, issuing inflammatory rhetoric to keep themselves in the news. And the MSM will fawn over them.

Former NY Times editor Jill Abramson bashes the paper…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for anti-Trump bias:

Former ‘New York Times’ executive editor Jill Abramson rips her former publication, slams the media as “anti-Trump,” and complains that younger employees throw out standards in her new book, ‘Merchants of Truth.’

“The more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased,”…

Well, duuh.

Only thing is, this probably reflects an old feud between Abramson and the current head Dean Baquet, who basically was responsible for her precipitous firing. No love lost there. I covered the story at length, and here’s a post of mine to refresh your memory.

What’s more, are we to believe that Abramson would have done any differently? I tend to doubt it, considering that last March she admitted to the following:

Jill Abramson, 63, the former executive editor for The New York Times from 2011 to 2014, claimed she keeps a therapy doll of the 44th president to get her through the Trump Administration, she wrote in The Guardian Mar. 7th. The Harvard educated journalist previously wrote a book about the Obama administration, “Obama: The Historic Journey,” published in 2009.

Abramson discussed a so-called “Trump rebellion,” alleging there is a solid chance Democrats will win the Senate, House and possibly the White House in 2020. The Ivy League educated journalist is carrying the “little plastic Obama doll” until the possible Democratic victory.

“It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington, D.C., and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America,” Abramson wrote.

I call Abramson on hypocrisy in her recent criticism of her former paper, and I doubt very much she’d be running it any differently if she’d been the one in charge during the Trump years.

And in this corner, there’s Romney

The New Neo Posted on by

The incoming freshman senator from Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed critical of President Trump that appeared in the WaPo today. Trump’s retort was basically “I’m president, and you’re not.”

Actually, that’s a relatively restrained retort from Trump, who is basically saying “Get on board.” But what was Romney saying? He started by criticizing some of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves (a la Syria, for example) which appear to have alarmed him. But mostly Romney’s op-ed is about what he calls “character” but is more about what I’d call “tone,” although character is related to it:

After [Trump] became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

Compared to the usual NeverTrumper rhetoric, or the typical Two Minutes Hate of the typical Democratic critic of Trump, that’s tepid fare. Romey’s not a NeverTrumper, but why would he do this at the outset of taking office? Well, perhaps he’s positioning himself to primary Trump in 2020. But I don’t that’s what’s going on, although he certainly might end up supporting someone who does (depending on the person). I think Romney is just showing exactly what he doesn’t like about Trump and what he hopes will change. In the process, he’s also showing us what he thinks that he, Mitt Romney, would have offered America had he been elected in 2012: a gentleman president.

He’s right and he’s wrong. Yes, Romney would have been a gentleman president (had he won, which he did not, in part because he was such a gentleman), and Trump is most decidedly not a gentleman in the conventional sense. And I think that all the nostalgia demonstrated at George H. W. Bush’s recent funeral indicates a poignant yearning for a time when presidents were gentlemen, or at least appeared to be gentlemen.

But in much of Romney’s op-ed he reminds me of Horton the Elephant of Dr. Seuss fame:

And it should be,
it should be, it SHOULD be
like that!
Because Horton was faithful!
He sat and he sat!

Here’s Romney in the op-ed:

A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.

To quote the last line of another great literary work—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—Isn’t it pretty to think so?

I think there’s something far more broken than that in the US today. I’m not even going to try to pinpoint exactly when it began—there have been many points of increase along the way—but I know that it’s been building and building and building for much of my lifetime, and I don’t believe that any Republican could set a tone that would actually unify or inspire us, because (as the attacks on Gentleman Romney himself during his candidacy demonstrated) anything and everything will be used against such a candidate, who will be perceived as weak. Whether a Democrat—with the help of the press behind him or her—could do some uniting is questionable, if only because such people are now dinosaurs who’ve been drummed out of the party a la Joe Lieberman.

So those days are gone, and Romney is dreaming. It’s a cliché to say it, but Trump is the symptom rather than the cause.

And right on cue, the WaPo itself demonstrates this, albeit in a somewhat subtle way. On the very day of Romney’s op-ed—which must have had them chortling with glee—they have also published this piece by their very own correspondent Philip Bump entitled “Timeline: Romney’s criticisms of Trump have always been moderated by his own ambitions.” It’s long and detailed, and must have taken some time to research; probably Bump was given the assignment as soon as Romney’s op-ed was received and the decision made to print it.

Bump’s piece attempts to show Romney as a craven opportunist whose stated opinion of Trump waxes and wanes depending on whether he needs him or not. In this, of course, Romney shows himself to be what he is: a politician. And the WaPo shows how it repays Republican gentlemen such as Romney.