Category Archives: Politics

The authoritarian moment

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David Brooks writes,

progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses. Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed. The boundaries are being redrawn across society.

There seems to be a bit of a trend. Putin is getting more authoritarian. Erdogan is getting more authoritarian. Xi Xinping is getting more authoritarian.

I know I’m not saying anything original here. But I wonder what it will take to turn things around.

Off Topic: Cultural Appropriation and Dance

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Ira Stoll is angry about a NYT interview with an Israeli modern dance choreographer.

Israelis stole folk dancing from the Palestinian Arabs in an act of “cultural appropriation,” The New York Times claims.

I think that he is over-reacting. In response (without referring to his piece), I wrote,

it was the most liberal-minded Jews who enjoyed Israeli dances that incorporated steps modeled on Arab debkas. Some of the choreographers had come from Arab countries and were proud of their heritage. Others wanted to promote their idealistic vision, which was for an ethnically and culturally integrated state, with Arabs blended seamlessly into the economy and life of Israel. In hindsight, this vision may seem naive , but it was well intended.

Colin Woodard on the 2016 election

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He writes,

Much of the action, as history would predict, was in the Midlands, the great swing region of U.S. politics and the only one that was the least bit competitive in 2016. This region—communitarian-minded but wary of top-down government action—voted for the Democratic candidate for the third election in a row, but by a greatly reduced margin that proved catastrophic for Clinton. Whereas Obama’s margin of victory in the Midlands was 11 points in 2008 and six in 2012, Clinton won by just 0.4 percent — in effect a tie, and a doomsday result in three traditional Electoral College swing states…

Trump significantly improved on Romney and McCain’s results in Yankeedom, losing by eight points rather than 16 or 19, respectively, a swing equal to that in the Midlands. Significantly, this shift was overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas that traditionally vote for the more community-minded candidate.

…Overall, rural Yankee counties went for Trump by more than 18 points, after having voted for Obama in 2008.

Recall my previous post on Woodard. I wrote,

Woodard sees a centuries-long struggle for power between the nation he calls Yankeedom (New England) and the two nations that he calls Tidewater and Deep South. His antipathy toward the latter shows through, especially in the final chapters of the book.

He is no fan of President Trump, either. Note that Yankeedom actually includes the northern parts of several Midwestern states, and that is where Mr. Trump’s gains in Yankeedom helped swing states into his column.

You should read Woodard’s post to look at the maps and his tables.

When I compare Woodard to David Hackett-Fischer’s classic, Albion’s Seed, Woodard makes several modifications. Woodard’s Far West, Left Coast, El Norte, and New Nederland were not part of the English migration of the 1600s and 1700s. Woodard splits Tidewater from Deep South, where Hackett-Fischer did not. Woodland sees the Midlands as incorporating a number of non-English ethnic groups, mainly from Germany and other parts of Northern Europe, who had values similar to the Quakers that Hackett-Fischer placed at the heart of the original region.

Woodard predicts that rural Yankeedom and the Midlands will come back to the Democratic fold in the mid-term House election.

Morris Fiorina’s book

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It is called Unstable Majorities. He claims that the public is not as polarized as political elites. When one party wins in an electoral cycle, it tends to over-reach, leading to backlash from the public. Hence the unstable majorities.

The odd thing about the current situation is that I think it is the losers of the election who are over-reaching. Instead of positioning themselves as providing a centrist balance, the Democrats are positioning themselves as the #Resistance, denying the legitimacy of the last election and not moderating their views in any way. We’ll see how that works out for them.

Moderate voters?

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James Taranto (WSJ) writes,

Those old enough to remember the decades before the ’90s, then, may tend to see permanent majorities around the corner because they expect a return to normalcy. Mr. Fiorina, by contrast, argues that frequent shifts in political control are now the norm because of the way the parties have changed. He rejects the common view that American voters are “polarized.” Instead, he says, the parties have become polarized, in a process he calls the “sorting” of the electorate.

So we have parties captured by extremists, and voters trying to find the moderates. Possibly related: Nassim Taleb’s forthcoming book.

Martin Gurri on the Trump Administration

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He writes,

It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices – and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more conventional Republicans and conservatives.

Read the whole thing.

Quotation of the Day

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Politics also reflects the new division. In the United States suspicion or resentment is no longer directed to the capitalists or the merely rich. It is the intellectuals–the effete snobs–who are eyed with misgiving and alarm. This should surprise no one. Nor should it be a matter for surprise when semiliterate millionaires turn up leading or financing the ignorant in struggle against the intellectually privileged and content. This reflects the relevant class distinction in our time.

This is from the 1971 edition of The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith. He gets many things spectacularly wrong, of course. But offers insights into the role of technical expertise and Weberian organization within a large firm that are too little appreciated by today’s economists. He deserves to be re-read.