A common theme among populists is to empower a leader who can cut through procedures, rules, checks and balances, and protected rights, privileges, and immunities and “just get things done.”
In other words, Donald Trump is Dirty Harry. In the American collective unconscious (I have instantly become a Jungian, after watching a semester’s worth of Jordan Peterson lectures last week), there is a generic movie about a rogue cop. The bureaucrats try to use rules to hem him in, but he breaks the rules in order to stop the bad guy. Of course, there were precursors of Dirty Harry long before 1971, when the movie appeared. The hero who has to break a few dishes because the system is to corrupt to do its job is an ancient story.
Think of the election in 2016 in those terms. Think of Mr. Trump as the rogue cop, and think of the public as the audience. The press and other elites are the soft-headed folks trying to get him to play by the rules. But the more obstacles they put in his way, and the more defiant he is, the more the audience roots for him.
Consider another movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Again, the audience roots for the rogue, Randle McMurphy, against the representative of order, Nurse Ratched. Try that one on.
I seem to be taking in a lot of input these days from very erudite individuals whose outlook I might describe as seeing evil welling up in the collective unconscious–on the left as well as on the right. If you don’t like that phrase, I could say it in more words, as Tom Palmer does (read the whole thing). Or you could look at some data on authoritarianism among millenials (pointer from Tyler Cowen). Or you could look at Peter Turchin’s new book, Ages of Discord.
Obama deemed CO2 a pollutant and arbitrarily (de facto) banned coal plants. My question is why the left thinks Trump is new.
And they loved the immigration unconstitutionalites and dreams of billion dollar coins danced on their heads. So, I see nothing falsifying my “presidents always get worse” theory. I just see a new data point.
I have a lot of questions about the “populist getter doner” narrative. Are sanctuary cities the rule of law? I don’t know. But I think a perfectly fine competing theory is that democrats were doing things by fiat and conveniently not enforcing the law and being disingenuous (claiming that having a border is racist), too.
The two best theories going are that voters are tired of democrats (and their overextended, disingenuous, cynical and politically motivated political correctness) and Trump fit the bill as being ruder to the establishment than the other Republicans were willing to be.
If you want to say there were 3 groups that correctly predicted Trump victory they were the naive academics who based it on simple 2 party pendulum swings, the anti-establishment critics, and Scott Adams who claims Trump is a master persuader.
You don’t need secular trend theories, even if they are broadly correct.
I can imagine quite an outcry if one equates Dirty Harry, Rambo, Robin Hood, MLK, and Gandhi.
The basic question: When is it the right thing to do to break rules?
I would go with the original Dirty Harry movie as Eastwood was the anti-hero who got the criminal by breaking the rules.
Sure feels like pushing through the Iraq war and bailing out the banks was “getting something done.” Maybe the population wants a Dirty Harry that has their back.
We areall “taking in a lot of input” these days from bright clever folk who employ their intellects to determine whom they ought to like and dislike and why, and what particular policies governments and social institutions should employ to benefit particular groups. Ideologues, in other words, from right and left and the militant center, who are accustomed to think of all of humanity as striving to be as rational and analytic and foresighted as they …
… who are now discovering that half the planet is made up of people, many of them individually wise and generous and capable and decent, who are perfectly content to base their actions and opinions on “gut feelings” and intuitions and traditions and spur-of-the-moment impulses.
In what’s left of the century, we analytical types will have to rethink a whole lot of psychology and political theory and maybe even some economics.
Palmer is misrepresenting this particular ‘populist’ sentiment. Though I could name dozens of elite lawyers who feel the same way.
The feeling is not some combination of reckless impatience for action and indifference (or even hostility) to important rights and protections. That frames it as bad people with bad desires and bad values who must be opposed by us good people with good values.
Instead, the idea is that, hiding behind values almost everyone shares and using them as cover, agents in the system have abused their various forms of authority and power to avoid responsibility and introduce inordinate delays and unjustifiable requirements to frustrate the implementation of the law, and the ability to achieve core public purposes or simple private projects, with reasonable effectiveness, timeliness, and efficiency.
That is, the ‘red tape’ and the hoop jumping procedures are fully illegitimate excesses, not ordinary annoyances. Less and worse than even than ‘mere technicalities’ that can’t withstand the scrutiny of a cost benefit analysis. But nearly a conspiracy to set up a systemic and institutional framework of bureaucratic passive – and occasionally active – resistance by unelected officials to the achievement of legitimate objectives, and in a way that voters can’t seem to reverse in any other way than by electing Dirty Harry.
Ironically, progressives are plenty able to recognize and criticize this kind of resistance when it’s frustrating one of their fashionable pet causes. When Ted Kennedy slows down the installation of off-shore wind turbines, few were mislead as to what was really going on.
Whoops, tapped ‘Post Comment’ by accident too early. Damn these touch screens. God’s way of saying ‘wrap it up already’.
Anyway, the point is that any institution invested with authority can either use or abuse that power by deviating from their duty to act fairly and with neutral disinterest regarding the results of their actions.
When the perception of that unjustifiable or corrupt abuse becomes widespread, then the institution loses its legitimacy, no matter how important it and the values it was charged to further may be. The risk should always be lurking in the back of the mind of any officials tempted to act ultra vires to achieve some particular goal, no matter how laudable. They risk breaking the whole warehouse of eggs in order to make one omelet.
Lincoln made the point regarding the Court in his first inaugural address.
More recently, Scalia made a similar warning in his dissent to Obergefell:
“Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. […] With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.”
It is not a happy vision to imagine Presidents blowing off the judiciary or bureaucracy and with large portions of the population shrugging their shoulders or even applauding. But that’s eventually what happens when institutional authorities are abused.
Too many lies. Too much hypocrisy. Too many breakdowns. Too much laugh. It was supposed to be a Great American Movie, but now Big Brother is telling us that it’s a Russian Show. Anyway let us thank all the fake clowns that never expected we could enjoy their show so much. And on January 20, 2017, let us celebrate the final act, the end of the Obama era.
I see Trump as more of a William Wallace figure, minus the two-handed sword: leading a peasant revolt, contending with a corrupt, cowardly, ineffectual elite that is supposedly on his side (Scottish nobles/Establishment Republicans) but won’t stand up to the real enemy (the English/Democrats), finding out that the opposition isn’t is tough as people supposed (Longshank’s gay son/Hillary Clinton’s candidacy), and achieving unexpected victories before (probably) eventually being crushed.
The cabinet Trump is putting together does not look like the 21st century equivalent of a peasant revolt. It looks a lot like the kind of cabinet that might have been appointed by Haley Barbour. Other than Sessions, of course.
Trump may turn out to be the GOP establishment with poufy hair. If this is what happens, whether his hard-core fans will notice is doubtful.
The funny thing is people don’t listen to what Trump really says. He wants America to win. That’s all. That is why he still really wants to pick Mitt Romney.
(And also why he won’t pick Romney after allowing Kelly Ann Conway to float the resistance/pushback to him and it getting decent traction)
What does it mean for America to “win”? Obama would also say that his policies have been making America a “winner.” Based on Obama’s definition of winning, he would be right. “Winning” means whatever you want it to mean.
Trump seems to define “winning” as brining back all the manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the last 50 years, and having a large trade surplus. Defined that way, we can’t win, Trump or no Trump.
No, that is completely false. Obama and democrats have been poor-mouthing America for a long time.
And even when they say things like “America is the richest country in history” it is always followed by “so we should be willing to give away or lose again here.”
I have a strong suspicion that this is what motivates Trump. I think he wants to change the “Animal Spirits,” if you will, of America from apologizing to unapologetically striving and hustling and at least faking it until we make it.
Again, when it comes to the margins of capital and trade, why weren’t the Carrier jobs off-shored long ago? They were still here to “save” (as real or as fake as that was) because the margin is closer than you have been told to believe. And I’m willing to let Trump try to change it even if all he has is attitude.
Obama believes that he’s making America a “winner” when he apologizes to some third-world despot for America’s imagined past sins and removes sanctions on the third-world despot’s country. His definition of “winning” is having America do whatever would be applauded by Noam Chomsky and post-colonial studies academics around the world. This he calls “smart power.” Unfortunately, this seems to be Democratic Party orthodoxy now. No more Pat Moynihans or Bob Kerreys.
Look, I reluctantly voted for Trump, given who the alternative was, but I don’t see how he’s going to change what’s gone wrong in the lives of the people who turn up at his rallies and buy his silly hats. It would be nice if he would at least keep his promise to stop the government from continuing to make their problems worse by allowing (and promoting) excessive immigration, which is something he actually could do. But I have my doubts.
What you are saying is that if you define losing by a field goal then you won. I mean winning means winning.
I’m not saying Trump’s conception of winning is correct or that we can win in the way he thinks we can. I’m saying as long as we stop saying losing by a touchdown is winning then I’m willing to go along with Trump…as if we have a choice.
I should also say I like the William Wallace analogy, except that The Republicans thought they were fighting the Democrats and both sides thought they had the correct enemy. One almost unequivocally positive aspect of Trump is that he is shaking the 2-party system out of the gridlock. He has already reformed the Republican party on their LGBT stagnation. He basically fixed the immigration gridlock already (one reason I keep predicting he won’t build what people think of as a wall), he ixnayed waterboarding with one sentence, he made nice with the Clintons (again, in one sentence), etc. The real political enemy was the gridlock that Bush and Obama created.
Haha, I would never actually vote for Trump.
And immigration is not really a problem. It is a symbolic problem the likes of which I’m talking about. You simply can’t tell us indefinitely that we can’t have a border or enforce the law of the land. That is what I’m talking about.
People should know that the immigration flux has reversed and basically halted. But you can’t keep telling people we can’t possibly get it under control and make sure Canadian engineers are treated at least equally as Mexican transient farmworkers.
What Trump is going to do is basically amnesty the people here except for criminals and then get the enforcement under control.
And the outlandish part of this prediction is that it is going to be plenty good enough for the vast majority of his supporters.
As an aside, Scott Adams says we can’t perceive reality and we are all just interpreting our own movies in our heads. I’m just trying to convince people my movie is more realistic than theirs.
If you think we’re heading into a political era of good feeling under Trump, I think you’re wrong. Look at the hissy fit the Dems and their operatives in the media and the intelligence [sic] community are having over the election now. Apparently, they want us to believe that leaked emails revealing that – surprise, surprise – Bernie never had a chance, and John Podesta & Co. are a gang of smug, callous bigots, swung the election, and therefore Trump is illegitimate. Trump’s making nice with the Clintons has not bought him anything.
I hope I’m wrong, but my pessimistic expectation is that Trump will break “gridlock” over immigration by reviving Gang of 8 under a different name, while deporting illegal aliens who commit felonies and restoring border enforcement to what it was in Obama’s first term. In other words, a 98% surrender to the open borders crowd. I suppose that will make libertarians happy. We’ll find out how many Central American peasants are really “natural conservatives.” Oh joy.
Google “Donald Trump” and click on News. The only significant one is about Kanye West visiting Trump Tower. Nobody gets it. Everybody thinks it’s a joke. They are incapable of understanding what is really happening. They don’t have the vocabulary for it. Kanye gets it. Because he has the vocabulary of a promoter.
This is the most amazing political story possibly ever and nobody understands what is happening, and in fact people are expending energy to not understand it.
Now I can sense Arnold’s disapproval, so I’m done.
We don’t have anything like open borders. We have progressive/corporatist-enforced perverse immigration where high human capital workers are kept out and harassed because they have something to lose.
And if I had eternity and a hundred Chimpanzees I could convince you that if low wages are the problem, then lower wages here are the solution. Again, the margins are closer than you have been told and apparently believe.
By analogy, I’m not happy with what we have decided is “gay marriage” either. In large part because I don’t consider passing laws by one vote in the Supreme Court to be “progress.”
Anti-democracy != Pro-authoritarian
They’re different dimensions of political beliefs.