The Parochial and the Cosmic

  • Our mistake was thinking we lived in a better country than we do;
  • The US has lost faith in the American dream;
  • Connie Willis’s detailed daily political summaries are now at CW Daily on Facebook;
  • With today a dozen or more reason why fascism may not succeed in the US;
  • Switching gears: an essay by cosmologist Paul M. Sutter on how the emptiness of the universe gives our lives meaning.

A few more comments on the current situation.

The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit, 7 Nov 2004: Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do, subtitled “Americans will be stuck cleaning up after Maga’s destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves”

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

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How to abandon ideals and appeal to base human nature. It works. It’s worked.

The Guardian, Andrew Gumbel, 9 Nov 2024: The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it?

A dozen years ago – an eternity in American politics – the Republican party was reeling from its fourth presidential election loss in six tries and decided that it needed to be a lot kinder to the people whose votes it was courting.

No more demonising of migrants, the party resolved – it was time for comprehensive immigration reform. No more demeaning language that turned off women and minorities – it needed more of them to run for office.

“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them too,” the party asserted in a famously self-flagellating autopsy after Barack Obama’s re-election as president in 2012.

Even Dick Armey, a veteran Texas conservative, told the authors of the report: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.”

Just one voice on the right begged to differ: Donald Trump. “Does the @RNC [Republican National Committee] have a death wish?” he asked in a tweet.

His objection received little attention at the time, but it wasn’t long before he was offering himself as flesh-and-blood proof of how wrong the autopsy was. In announcing his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals.

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There is now a CW Daily group on Facebook where Connie Willis’ exhaustively detailed daily summaries of political events, which until now have been reposted (from where? I never could figure that out) by Lou Anders.

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Here is Lou’s post for today, who shares Connie’s latest post and advises us of CW Daily.

The post is divided into “good new from blue-state governors,” “They’re Already at Each Others’ Throats” news, and “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” news. Plus this, which I’ll quote (the CW Daily post is public).

And here are a Dozen More Reasons Fascism May Not Succeed in the U.S., at Least Without a Struggle (from Daily Kos, with additions by me and others):
–1. We have a large, well-organized, and well-informed opposition. We did many, many things well this cycle and have many resources at our disposal. (Including those zoom calls, which people are still organizing.)
–2. We’re not the only ones who are upset. People with a lot more power than us–military officers, government officials, Senators, Representatives, governors (see above), etc.–are just as horrified as we are, and they’re in a position to actually do stuff. (In regard to that, a commenter on Daily Kos said that a Democratic Senator said that high-powered DC types have been planning for the last five years for the possibility of a Trump administration and are trying to defend us in various ways.)
–3. Many major and popular celebrities oppose Trump and jailing or murdering them would be politically untenable. (Which is putting it mildly. Think Taylor Swift. And Harrison Ford. And the same goes for the Obamas and journalists like Rachel Maddow and Nicole Wallace.)
–4. Even though the media has largely failed to rise to the occasion (so far), there are many serious and dedicated journalists in this country, like David Folkenflick, who has already quit the Washington Post because of its yanking of Kamala Harris’s endorsement, and who was relentless in exposing Trump’s dishonesty when he was President and afterwards.
–5. Modern technology makes it easier to capture and share abuses of power, to communicate and organize in ways that weren’t possible in the 1930s. (That’s even with the complicit mainstream media caving. In the 1930s that was all there was. It’s not the case any more. (In the old days nobody would ever have known about Tianamen Square or the Arab Spring. And I know tech also makes it easier to spy on the population and identify protesters, but it still works both ways.)
–7. The U.S. is less white and less religious and Trump’s whole plan ignores these realities and a lot of others, like global warming and how the economy works. And reality is–well, reality, no matter how much you talk about “alternative facts.” (See Galileo. When he was tried for heresy for his astronomical work, which went against the Church’s belief that the Heavens were the Realm of God and therefore perfect and unchanging, he said, “Nevertheless, it moves.”)
–8. The right really doesn’t have an ideology or a shared belief system other than “owning the libs.” Which many of them said was the reason they voted for Trump. Well, they’ve owned us. Now what?
–9. We have experience with Trump and with the authoritarian playbook. We know their plans in advance, since they so kindly laid them out for us in Project 2025 and other documents) and can prepare. This isn’t like they pretend to be one thing to get elected and then spring their real plan on us once they’re safely in power.
–10. Trump is old, stupid, and in severe cognitive decline, and it will only get worse. Plus, he has no ambitions beyond himself. He’s also unfocused and easily distracted. True, the people around him are neither old nor stupid and are really dangerous, but they are also wildly ambitious and will be vying for control. In fact, they already are. DeSantis thought he would be Chief of Staff, and Trump gave the job to Susie Wiles, and there are already signs that RFK, Jr. is being sidelined into some sort of “health-czar-think-tank” job instead of really letting him be in charge of the CDC and the NIH. (The early days of the Russian Revolution were all about different factions killing each other off, and let us not forget Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he had almost everyone who helped him come to power murdered.)
–11. Dictators never name successors because those successors might try to dethrone them. So if Trump dies or is incapacitated, his successor is unlikely to have the same following and party support. Considerable energy will be consumed by those trying to seize the mantle of his authority.
–12. It’s a cult. It always has been. They love Trump–they’re willing to wear diapers and bandaids on their ears for him and they buy paintings of him as Jesus and George Washington. And cults never survive the death of their leader–or his supplanting. The same arguments and “policies” and language just don’t work for other people, as witness Ron DeSantis and Mark Robinson and Kari Lake. They may think they can switch in J.D. Vance (I saw a post where they were already talking about running Vance and Don, Jr.) but it won’t be that simple.

Let me trot out this observation, which I’m not certain is true. We understand them far better than they understand us.

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Now let’s start to switch gears. It’s unproductive for me to spend so much time commenting on the political news — though I do so in consideration my reading and subsequent theories about human nature, in the context of long-termism.

There is a real universe out there. This piece was posted a week ago, and appears in today’s paper.

NY Times, Paul M. Sutter, 3 Nov 2024: The Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning

Another take on this theme. Again, there’s a real universe out there, far vaster than most humans imagine, and considering it dwarfs most of the petty conflicts among human beings. But not all of them. Yet again it’s about short-term thinking, living in the human bubble of immediate survival, and having the luxury of assured survivial in our modern global world to contemplate the nature of the universe, with an understand built up over millennia that surpasses the naive notions of our ancient ancestors, who wrote our ancient holy books.

Sutter has a particular issue in mind here — the voids that fill the universe, i.e. the irregular distribution of matter throughout the observable universe, not to mention Earth’s own particular place in it.

I’m a cosmologist, the kind of scientist who studies the origin, history and evolution of the universe. I have spent my career researching one special part of the universe called cosmic voids: the vast expanses of nothing that stretch between the galaxies. Most of our universe is void — somewhere around 80 percent of the volume of the cosmos is made of nothing at all.

By strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero. Insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night, a tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. The great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present-day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars; at these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light.

There is a temptation, when faced with the true scale of the empty cosmos, to look at our tiny world with nihilism. To feel that our great achievements amount to nothing. That our history fails to leave a mark. That our concerns and anxieties are rendered meaningless. That our very humanity is reduced to irrelevancy.

It’s a matter of perspective, of course, which the cosmologists perhaps appreciate best of all.

It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor long-lived. But that is only one way of measuring significance. Compared with the voids, there is something special happening on our planet. Despite decades of searching, Earth is still the only known place in the entire universe where conscious beings raise their curious eyes to the sky and wonder.

Earth is the only known place where humanity exists — where humanity can exist. It is the only known place where laughter, love, anger and joy exist. The only known place where we can find dance, music, art, politics and cosmology.

Our disagreements and jealousies and all the beautiful complexities that make us human aren’t meaningless. The presence and dominance of the cosmic voids guarantee the opposite — the stories and experiences we fill our lives with are special precisely because they will never happen in the empty expanse of most of the universe.

Voids sharpen and define. He concludes:

Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.

Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.

Posted in Astronomy, conservatives, Cosmology, Politics | Comments Off on The Parochial and the Cosmic

Do Trump’s Voters Know What They’ve Done?

  • Jamelle Bouie asks if Trump Voters know what he has planned for them;
  • Heather Cox Richardson observes how on social media Trump voters are alarmed by the implications of Trump’s polices, which somehow they hadn’t noticed before;
  • Two more lists of reasons why Trump won and Harris lost, from Slate and Salon;
  • How I see the big issue as about how humans react to short-term circumstances and cannot process long-term thinking.

Answer: No.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 9 Nov 2024: What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”

What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

I’m guessing that the billionaire class who support Trump know, and don’t care, because these things won’t affect them. And some of the far-right MAGA folk know, but don’t care, because they’re all for deporting immigrants and banning abortion, and they’re willing to suffer some economic pain to get that done. But not the majority of casual voters who have some vague impression Trump will make the economy great again, because of, well ya know whatever, the price of eggs was lower when Trump was president before. A puddle-thin understanding of big issues.

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Similarly,

Heather Cox Richardson, November 8, 2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.

As well as voters alarmed to realized that their undocumented relatives could be deported. And so on. And how voters prefer Harris’s policies…

[Salon‘s Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

And on and on.

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Another list of the reasons.

Slate, Jim Newell: The Surge, subtitled “Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week”

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which welcomes Mr. Trump to his rightful place on the throne! Ha ha ha, very good, sir! (Disclaimer: Surge Enterprises LLC has large contracts—spaceships and so forth—before the federal government.)

A longish paragraph about each of seven issues: Inflation; Joe Biden; The border; Transgender issues; Right-wing media; Butler, Pennsylvania [the site of the first assassination attempt on Trump]; This too shall pass.

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And another list!

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 9 Nov 2024: Six big lies that won the election: How Donald Trump gaslit America, subtitled “It isn’t just that Trump told lies. He wove a set of interlocking false narratives — and the media helped”

Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump delivered his closing argument at a Madison Square Garden rally that drew comparisons to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in the same arena and characterized by similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press.

Responding to criticism of this self-evident hate-fest, Trump characterized it as “a lovefest.” He wasn’t just lying. That’s too simple an explanation of how Trump behaves in general, and what he’s doing here. Lying is deceiving people about the state of the world, and Trump routinely does that too. But simply tallying up the lies gives no insight into their purpose. Bulls***ting is deceiving people about one’s motives — using true or false claims indiscriminately — and is a more accurate description of his routine behavior. But calling that rally calls a “lovefest,” is doing something more: That’s gaslighting, an effort to undermine people’s entire sense of reality and impose an invented reality in its place

Trump was saying, in effect: The hate you saw was really love, and if you can’t see that, you’re the hateful one. It’s the kind of upside-down logic commonly found in abusive relationships, whenever the abuser is challenged. They may lie all the time, but when the chips are down, they gaslight.

Then:

In this election, Trump relied on five key themes of gaslighting in various different ways, all of them adding up to an overarching sixth theme: Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and Donald Trump is its savior.

(I have to say, editorially, that if an article’s title promises five or six or ten points about something or another, a reader should be able to skim the article and see all five or six or ten. Why make reading your article hard on the reader? This article fails in that way; the sixth is hidden in that comment quoted above.)

So, reading through the article, these are the other five :

  1. The climate crisis.

    Climate is arguably the main reason that Central Americans have replaced Mexicans as the largest population seeking entry to the U.S. since Trump first took office, so gaslighting on climate change was essential to making his “immigrant crime” narrative work. Hurricane Helene presented the perfect opportunity for bringing the climate crisis into the campaign. The damage done was almost 1% of U.S. national GDP, far exceeding annual government spending to combat climate change. It was the moment for a supremely important public policy discussion, but Trump’s gaslighting helped keep it entirely off the agenda.

  2. The great replacement. Citing fantasies of white supremacy, and Tucker Carlson.

    Of course reality is radically different: Immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans, and are a net boon to the economy. It’s pure paranoid fantasy that blocks out the complex reality of a world in which the climate crisis will inevitably increase migration pressures. But it’s a simple story for a conman to tell, and the media’s willingness to normalize it radically shifted political discourse in Trump’s favor.

  3. The voter fraud myth. Around since the 1960s.

    Decades of election data shows that individual voter fraud is extremely rare and organized voter fraud, beyond a single Republican example in North Carolina, is simply nonexistent. But through endless repetition, Carlson and others have made it a right-wing article of faith that Democrats are encouraging undocumented immigration and registering the undocumented to vote in significant numbers.

  4. Roe v. Wade and abortion.

    His claim that “everyone” wanted this all along is, by itself, spectacular gaslighting, as is his claim that women have nothing to worry about. “I will be your protector,” he says, one of the creepiest gaslighting lines that women in abusive relationships often hear. “You will not be thinking about abortion” may have even more sinister undertones. This example of gaslighting was particularly effective, in that state initiatives to protect abortion rights passed almost everywhere, with large numbers of Trump voters voting for them.

  5. The great Trump economy.

    This outrageous fiction builds on decades of GOP puffery and media complicity. Republicans have long been trusted more on the economy, despite generations of evidence that the economy does better under Democrats. Job growth offers a particularly striking example: Nearly all of it since 1989 has occurred with Democrats in office. But Trump takes this gaslighting to new levels, and the media’s abysmal treatment of Joe Biden’s remarkable record offered him a big assist.

Concluding,

There are certainly many other factors to consider in unpacking what happened in the 2024 election, including that it was just one element in a global trend of incumbent losses. But gaslighting is a central factor in the operation of fascism, and the failure of media in liberal democracies even to recognize its existence, much less to fight it, puts the very survival of liberal democracy at risk.

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More tomorrow. This is a big issue, that goes to the core not just of Americans and America’s status in the world, but to how human do or do not understand reality, and how they evaluate short-term issues and ignore long-term threats. And how cultures, or the species, may or may not survive.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Do Trump’s Voters Know What They’ve Done?

Lessons and Narratives

  • Everyone has theories and lessons to be drawn from the election results; Robert Reich rejects several and offers his own;
  • The focus on the current economy is just another example of short-term thinking, at the expense of bigger issues;
  • Disinformation and propaganda were key as well;
  • Items about what the world thinks, American’s dark age, how the consequences will be dire, preparing for the Trump sequel, and weaponizing the First Amendment;
  • And Adam Lee on heading into the dark, but reassuring us it won’t last forever.

It happens after every election, I’m sure, but this time the Monday-morning-quarterbacking (is that the right term?) seems especially extensive. Everyone has their own theory about what the Democrats did wrong, or what Kamala did wrong, or why voters cared about this and not that. The trouble with these is, they’re all ex post facto. If the problems were as obvious as the commentators seem to think, why weren’t they pointed out ahead of time? On the contrary, most Democrats and commentators seemed quite optimistic leading up the election…

So let’s start with Robert Reich’s piece. (In another couple days, maybe, I’ll move to non-political subjects. Maybe even science fiction!)

Robert Reich, 8 Nov 2024: The Lesson, subtitled “The real lesson we should draw from what occurred Tuesday”

To set my broader context: any “lesson” is a kind of story-telling, a narrative imposed on messy reality to try to place at least a small set of facts or observations into some coherent narrative. Depending on which set of facts you choose, you can justify almost any “lesson.” As the commentators are demonstrating.

Reich begins:

A political disaster such as what occurred Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.

This is known as The Lesson of the election.

The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.

And therein lies its power. When The Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom — when most of the politicians, pundits, and politicians come to believe it — it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives, and journalists approach future elections.

There are many reasons for what occurred on Tuesday and for what the outcome should teach America — about where the nation is and about what Democrats should do in the future.

Yet inevitably, one Lesson predominates.

Today, I want to share with you six conventional “lessons” you will hear for Tuesday’s outcome. None is or should be considered The Lesson of the 2024 election.

His six lessons that are not The Lesson:

  1. “It was a total repudiation of the Democratic Party, a major realignment.” Rubbish, says Reich; he points out that “less than 1 percent” vote shift in three battleground states would have changed the outcome.
  2. “If the Dems want to win in the future, they have to move to the right. They should stop talking about “democracy,” forget “multiculturalism,” and end their focus on women’s rights, transgender rights, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, civil rights, and America’s shameful history of racism and genocide. Instead, push to strengthen families, cut taxes, allow school choice and prayer in public schools, reduce immigration, minimize our obligations abroad, and put America and Americans first.” Wrong, says Reich; these are moral ideals at the heart of the Party and at the core of America.
  3. “Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda. They won over young men because of a vicious alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers and podcasts appealing to them. The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built.” Partly true, Reich admits. (As I’ve been thinking.)
  4. “Republicans cheated. Trump, Putin, and election deniers at county and precinct levels engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress votes.” Reich doubts it. No evidence; the system works.
  5. “Harris ran a lousy campaign. She wasn’t a good communicator. She fudged and shifted her positions on issues. She was weighed down by Biden and didn’t sufficiently separate herself from him.” Untrue. In fact I read something a few days ago by some political observer about how Harris had run an almost perfect campaign, with no errors, except possibly for Biden’s gaffe about “garbage.”
  6. “Racism and misogyny. Voters were simply not prepared to elect a Black female president.” Partly true, Reich admits. (And I’ve been thinking this too.)

So what’s the real Lesson? The economy (but not in any simple way).

On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy — and their votes reflected their class and level of education.

While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.

In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90 percent is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

Followed by details… Then:

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.

So if the economy is “rigged,” it’s rigged by the big corporations and the Republican policies that give them free reign.

If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, as seems likely, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America. Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.

The Democratic Party should use this inflection point to shift ground — from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrism” — to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

This is and should be The Lesson of the 2024 election.

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Yet, as I’ve said, this focus on the current economy is just another example of short-term thinking.

Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 8 Nov 2024: Trump’s win is a victory for the “petrostate” and a major loss for climate action, experts say, subtitled “Trump’s anti-science ideology will devastate our ability to stop our planet from cooking us to death”

Now that the Republican nominee has won, scientists are bracing for the worst. Speaking to Salon, these experts reiterated one theme over and over again: This was an election between science and ignorance of science, and the ignorant side — which serves special interest groups like the fossil fuel industry — have prevailed.

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On Reich’s third “partly true” notion.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 7 Nov 2024: The MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America

Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.

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A few more links.

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And then Adam Lee.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 7 Nov 2024: Heading into the dark, subtitled “This too shall pass.”

Like most of you, I hoped for a different outcome this Tuesday.

This election was a litmus test of our morals, our values, and who we are as a people. And we failed it.

I don’t want to believe in a world of cruelty and arrogance, where might makes right. I don’t want to believe in a world where the powerful have impunity, where tyrants crush free nations beneath their tank treads, where the innocent suffer, children go hungry, the poor die on the streets, and justice is nowhere to be found.

But what I believe has nothing to do with it. The world is what it is, and it doesn’t bend itself to our desires. Any belief other than that is foolish. We can’t control reality by wishing or by wanting, only by working.

At the very least, I wanted to believe that people would be motivated by their own self-interest: the poor, who face the loss of their safety net; union members, who face the end of their hard-won rights; minorities, who are menaced by white supremacists on the ascendant; immigrants of all backgrounds, who face mass arrests and deportation; women, who’ve already felt the oppressive hand of the state weighing on their bodies; and people who value democracy in general, facing a wannabe dictator who’s promised to dismantle it.

But it appears not. People were eager to believe the lies of a demagogue. Even when his evasions were obvious and his promises transparently false, we long to be fooled. We saw decency and turned away from it.

They voted for their own self-interest, but only for the very short-term.

And remember: This won’t last forever. As hard as it may be to imagine from the standpoint of this moment, there will be better days.

If the study of the past has anything to teach us, it’s that history goes in cycles. We alternate between eras of tolerance and expansiveness, and eras of regression and prejudice. When the world is changing rapidly and our accustomed ways of life are under stress, people shrink into themselves; they become insecure, fearful, easily manipulated into hate.

But the wheel will turn, and views that are ascendant one day will lose favor the next. As the Persian poet said, “This too shall pass.”

No ideology or political platform is dominant forever. Churches, states, kingdoms and empires that all claimed to be invincible and eternal in their heyday have crumbled into shadows and mist. Rights have been won and lost and won again. The only thing that ensures defeat is giving up.

In the midst of darkness, it can be almost impossible to imagine light. But as far-off as it may seem, don’t let that vision go. Keep it alive, even if it’s just an ember of dreams smoldering in the ashes. A day will come when the world needs and wants it again.

And that is the big picture.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Economics, Politics, progress | Comments Off on Lessons and Narratives

More Aftermath

  • Heather Cox Richardson summarizes;
  • Frank Bruni on the running theme that most voters don’t pay attention to the big picture;
  • RFK Jr and the role of disinformation, perhaps the worst plague of the 21st century;
  • More about who we are and the illiberal trend around the world;
  • And how Trump believers feel validated: God is on their side! Keep smart people out of Daddy’s cabinet! Impose “rough justice” on anchors and outlets that criticized Trump; how prosecutors deserve execution; how women are property; how Jack Smith should be imprisoned.

To cut through the opinionated commentaries about what happened in this week’s election, here’s historian Heather Cox Richard’s very matter-of-fact account.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, 6 Nov 2024: November 6, 2024

Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.

Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.

These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.

Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.

But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.

With background about Hungary, Biden, the current economy, Fox News, Project 2025…

For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

That is what voters chose.

Of course, a running theme in my commentary and commentary from others is that voters didn’t *consciously* choose all those things. Most voters don’t pay close attention. They have selective memories. They dimly recall that somehow things were better under Trump — things were always better in the past, remember — and so voted to bring him back.

Then about sexism and racism, disinformation…

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

And this is telling.

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.

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The running theme:

NY Times, Frank Bruni, 7 Nov 2024: Democrats, Let’s Get Real About Why Harris Lost [gift link]

Many expected that “there was a limit to the cruelness and craziness” of Trump, and so that Harris would win.

That judgment, of course, was terribly wrong. And I want to name and dwell on a few of the reasons for its wrongness, because they’re stubborn misapprehensions, enduring blind spots. They’re costing Democrats — no, they’re costing America — dearly.

For starters, many voters don’t know about or didn’t really pay attention to all of Trump’s florid ugliness in the final hours. Many voters aren’t plugged in like that. Politics, even presidential campaigns, aren’t in the center of their vision but in its periphery — and irregularly, at that. Those of us who get hourly updates, have nightly freak-outs and can hold forth on Trump and the shark, Trump and Hannibal Lecter, Trump and windmills aren’t normal, but we’re arrogant: We assume our experience is everyone’s and our knowledge ambient.

No. People are busy. People are distracted. People are cynical. They tune out much if not most of this political drama because they regard it, indeed, as theater, as performance, whether it’s Trump’s conniptions or Harris’s “Kumbaya.”

So what, then, forms their impressions and drives their decisions? They’re responding in significant measure to the state of the world around them, whether it’s to their liking and whom they hold responsible for it. That was Harris’s affliction — the price of food, the elusiveness of homeownership and the fact that she’d been the No. 2 figure in the administration in charge of the country for the past four years. The obvious, boring nature of the diagnosis didn’t make it any less fatal.

And this is a permanent blind spot in human nature — our inability to see long-term consequences and focus only on the immediate, even at the expense of the long-term. Thus, “drill, baby, drill!” This will likely never go away.

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It’s also about making things up. Disinformation. The worst plague of the 21st century, arguably. That depends on the gullibility of most people, which won’t go away either.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 7 Nov 2024: The True Danger of RFK Jr.’s Role in the Next Trump Administration Is Already Clear, subtitled “It’s not about the fluoride in the water—or even, really, vaccines.”

Kellyanne Conway pushed the idea of “alternative facts” in an interview almost eight years ago as then-President Trump’s senior counselor. Since then, the nation’s sense of a shared reality has only degraded further. Certain Trump lies stick out for their absurdity (the Sharpie-drawn addition to a hurricane map in 2019) or vilification (“eating the dogs”). Others, like the lies he told to try to overturn the 2020 election, stick out for how they were used for a brazen assault on American democracy. But, arguably, the single most destructive set of falsehoods perpetuated by Donald Trump, in terms of the toll on American citizens, had to do with the COVID pandemic.

It’s impossible to calculate the damage that Trump’s pandemic lies did. They unquestionably led to greater numbers of American deaths. They seeded suspicion and harebrained ideas of alternative cures, some toxic. One study out of Cornell that analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media found that Trump was, in fact, the single biggest driver of COVID misinformation, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods. Fortunately, we still had people operating within the federal health agencies who relied on good science and public health measures. The dispassionate expertise from the medical community provided some kind of solid ground in a frightening time, despite Trump’s politicization of the disaster—even as the figureheads were assaulted by misinformation powerful enough that Anthony Fauci, years later, would still face heated conspiracy theory–based accusations from members of Congress.

Now we may have RFK Jr imposing his non-scientific, non-medically-based, superstitions on the American population. Details in the article. Concluding:

Established medical science should be one of the easiest places for Americans to find, if perhaps not complete agreement, anchors for a shared reality. Where medical experts find mountains of studies and years of data to be conclusive, Kennedy goes zooming against the grain, for little apparent reason. Trump’s decision to give a man so committed to dashing that shared reality a place of prominence is a warning. The threats of a second Trump administration may not always come in the form of practical policy changes: They can come, just as potently, in casting doubt and sowing confusion.

It’s like promoters of fake conspiracy theories on the internet: some people just get their jollies by being contrarians, and doing anything to getting attention. It gives them some kind of power, or validation. What’s real or true is of no interest to them.

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Another running theme: is this who we are? I would say no: it’s about how a large part of the population is, and the few percent in the middle who voted from Trump instead of Harris waffled, didn’t think things through, and swung the election. It’s about who *they* are.

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 6 Nov 2024: This Is Who We Are Now

As with problems like inflation, which many voters blamed Biden/Harris for, this illiberal trend is happening all over the world.

In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right. Trump, after all, is a particularly ghastly manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics all over the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and powering the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. You can blame Kamala Harris for spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or for the vagueness of her “opportunity economy” rhetoric. But few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.

And Goldberg echoes Tom Nichols, quoted yesterday. And his promises will come home to roost.

Ultimately, Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it.

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And then we come to the folks who feel vindicated, and empowered, by Trump’s win, in the worst possible way.

NY Times, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, 7 Nov 2024: Trump’s Believers See a Presidency With God on Their Side, subtitled “Many Christian conservatives saw the battle for the White House as a holy war. Now, with Donald Trump’s victory, their vision goes beyond politics.”

My initial take: Never, ever, give any intellectual credit to someone who thinks God is on their side. This is self-serving motivated reasoning at its most pure. Everyone, on both sides of every religious conflict throughout history, has thought God was on their side. My second take: it astonishes me that Christians claim the most despicable person on the planet as evidence for their divine favor. That’s the best they can do? Spare me the Biblical analogies to ancient kings; I don’t give any intellectual credit to anyone who relies on ancient texts written thousands of years ago, before most people knew much of anything at all about the reality or history of the world.

Eight years ago, conservative Christians wondered if Donald J. Trump, who had just been elected president, would truly be their champion. They were weary, and angry, after wandering in the wilderness of the Obama years when liberal values seemed ascendant and they felt powerless.

Mr. Trump delivered. A promise to “my beautiful Christians” came true even after he left office, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion.

Now, as Mr. Trump’s sweeping re-election victory brings them to new heights of power, they believe his return is more than an electoral mandate: they believe it is a divine one.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly invoked a religious anointing since he survived an assassination attempt in July. And when he claimed victory on Tuesday night, he did so again.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Mr. Trump told supporters. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”

It is a remarkable claim for a president who claimed to be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.

And ending:

On the eve of the election, Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Southern California, described Mr. Trump’s opponents as the “enemy” who “attempted so many divisive and evil deeds.”

“Lord, please do a great and mighty thing we know not of,” he prayed.

And when the results came in, Mr. Trump’s followers believe God did.

OK, Christians, if God did it this time, why didn’t he do it last time? Why did God let Biden win? I realize these are intemperate questions, but that’s only because the religious take offense at anyone pointing how their logic and rationalizations are vacuous. Thus dim. (The intelligentsia of the world simply ignore the religious, and work in a world based on reality from evidence.)

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Perhaps we can start an “I told you so” or “We predicted this” segment of this blog. Without becoming too obsessed by it. Here are several items from my favorite aggregate site, all today.

This is 21st-century civilized behavior? Oh, but Trump and his tribalist supporters are… sort of the opposite of civilized.

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This Is Who Some of Us Are

Astonishingly, Trump won the presidency again. Despite everything.

  • Slate: Americans just voted to burn it all to the ground;
  • Trump supporters are calling for executions; and how they laugh at Trump rallies;
  • Zack Beauchamp on Trump’s existential threat, and some hope for optimism;
  • Robert Reich on the Resistance;
  • Tom Nichols suggests that the danger of a Trump administration might be undercut by his incompetence;
  • Personal comments about sexism and racism; how Democrats are not denouncing the results as evidence of cheating; how it will be interesting to track Trump’s promises/threats against results; and how I find this result more shocking than the one in 2016.

Or to the rest of the world, this is what Americans are. This too shall pass.

Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 6 Nov 2024: Americans Just Voted to Burn It All to the Ground, subtitled “This is an even more decisive turning point than 2016.”

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An Election About Elections

We won’t know today.

  • David A. Graham at The Atlantic about how this election is a test;
  • Evidence about how European nations would vote in today’s US presidential election;
  • More about the Republican backlash to the idea that women can think for themselves;
  • Short items about educated women, submission to Christ, how Democrats are demonic, how RFK would remove fluoride, and how today Trump uttered 15 falsehoods in 15 minutes.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 5 Nov 2024: This Is a Test, subtitled “Can the country pass?”

This is an election about elections.

One of the two leading candidates in the race, Donald Trump, has not only demonstrated a long-running skepticism of rule of law; he is also the only president in American history to attempt to remain in office after losing an election. This election is a test: Can the American public resoundingly reject a man who has not merely been a chaotic extremist but has also attacked the American system of republican government itself?

No, because to many Americans, Trump represents something more important than the “American system of government,” despite how much they claim to venerate the Constitution. Graham concludes,

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Of Course This Won’t Be All Over Tomorrow

  • Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds;
  • Trump says rallies are full while a cameraman pans over an empty arena;
  • CNN fact-checks Trump’s final day of his campaign;
  • When called out, Trump says never mind, I was kidding;
  • Robert Reich offers some reassurance;
  • WaPo asks whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago, and the answer, for most people, is yes;
  • David A. Graham at The Atlantic asks yet again, how is the election this close?
  • Quick takes on voting like atheists, and Tucker Carlson stating that hurricanes are because abortions.

Again and again, why do so many people support a man who lies constantly? You can’t believe anything he says! That means you can’t *count* on anything he says, no matter what he promises. He’s a con man. Why do his fans believe him??

NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 3 Nov 2024: Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds, subtitled “Throughout his life, Donald J. Trump has bent the truth to serve his needs, never more so than on the campaign trail to win back the White House.”

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César Hidalgo, WHY INFORMATION GROWS

Subtitled “The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies”
(Basic Books, 2015, xxi + 232 pp, including 51pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index)

A few weeks ago I sat down to read the new Yuval Noah Harari book, NEXUS, and just a few pages in noticed a footnote crediting much of his understanding of the concept of “information” to César Hildago’s WHY INFORMATION GROWS. And I realized, I have that book! It’s that green one! So I got it off the shelf and browsed a bit. His thesis based on that browsing seemed very similar, at least analogous if not identical, to a key idea in the Brian Greene book I read recently, UNTIL THE END OF TIME (review here) — the idea that order can build up, despite the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but only *temporarily*, even if temporary means billions of years, because of the course of the life of the *entire* universe, that order (or information) will dissolve back into entropy. (Greene calls this “the entropic two-step”.) How interesting! That meant the little green Hidalgo book has ties to two other big books. So I set Harari aside, to get Hidalgo’s ideas from the source. And here we are. How does this idea relate to “information”? How exactly does he define “information”? That’s what Harari deals with too.

(More broadly, the idea of that evolution can happen despite the 2nd law of thermodynamics, an idea disputed by naive, ill-educated people who desperately want evolution to be untrue so that can think their Bible is true, relates to a broad range of topics. And another 2015 book I haven’t read, Matt Ridley’s THE EVOLUTION OF EVERYTHING.)

So: the universe is made of energy, matter, and information, and it’s the last that makes it interesting. It hides in pockets at the universe succumbs to entropy. Nevertheless, information grows. Without summarizing the entire book, here are some key points:

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How Much Is There Left to Say?

  • David French: There will always be a Trump;
  • David Frum: No one has an alibi;
  • Facts, if anyone cares, about the economy under Biden and Trump (On 17 points: Biden advantage 11, Trump advantage 5, and 1 unclear);
  • How Musk’s mother claims she can vote multiple times; How a Project 2025 leader suggests Christians will be forbidden to worship; How maps show that Trump and his fans actually despise most Americans; Zach Beauchamp compares Trump to Orbán; Gingrich is infuriated over the idea that wives might vote differently than their husbands; Vance suggests testosterone aligns with conservative politics; and how Trump has lured evangelicals to follow Satan.
– – –

NY Times, David French, 3 Nov 2024: There Will Always Be a Trump. That’s Only Part of the Problem.

This echoes a key theme of my blog; as I said in my summary of the Prothero book yesterday, “there will always be gays and bigots.” Base human nature will never go away. But it’s despite that that humanity has made progress.

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Ramping Up

It’s happening right before our eyes.

  • How Trump’s 2020 Playbook is being put into action;
  • Trump simulates oral sex in public;
  • Jonathan M. Katz on what Trump’s team will do following the election;
  • Robert Reich reminds us of 101 terrible things Trump has done;
– – –

NY Times, Jim Rutenberg and Alan Feuer, 2 Nov 2024: Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action, subtitled “Step by step, Donald J. Trump and his allies are following the strategies that caused chaos four years ago. Election officials say they are ready this time.” [gift link]

Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are rolling out a late-stage campaign strategy that borrows heavily from the subversive playbook he used to challenge his loss four years ago.

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