Category Archives: Politics

Clinton, Trump, and Trust

Posted on by

I am disturbed by Mr. Trump’s personality, as many people are. However, I am also disturbed by Mrs. Clintons’ personality, for pretty much the same reason. In both cases, I see a closed circle of trust, as opposed to an open circle of trust.

Let me try to explain. Obviously, I am playing amateur psychiatrist here.

1. Someone with an open circle trust sees a world filled with potential partners. At some point, anybody out there could be able to offer some goods, services, information, or connections in a mutually beneficial exchange.

2. Someone with a closed circle of trust relies on loyal followers who have no important outside relationships. People outside the circle do not enjoy trust. Particularly if they have talent and ambition, they are at best threats and at worst enemies.

3. A President with a closed circle of trust poses a threat to the rule of law by choosing assistants who would follow their leader as opposed to following their consciences. In my lifetime, Richard Nixon comes to mind as the President who fit this pattern most closely. Next might be Lyndon Johnson, although he was aware that he had this trait, and the more aware you are of a trait the less likely it is to overwhelm you.

4. My instinct that Mr. Trump has a closed circle of trust comes in part from the way that he is treating the Republican establishment. He seems to me to be telling other Republicans that he wants their support and their money but not their input.

5. My instinct that Mrs. Clinton has a closed circle of trust comes from a variety of evidence, some of which I am likely to have forgotten. Consider the peculiar way that she and Ira Magaziner went about designing her health care reform. Consider her use of the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Finally, consider her email server. Any normal individual would have trusted the IT professionals at the State Department to provide email that met their needs. But for Mrs. Clinton, those professionals, with their loyalty to the institution of the State Department, were outside the circle of trust. It was inconceivable that they would be allowed to handle her email account.

On Sunday, the WaPo ran a banner headline story about people who fear/loathe one or both candidates. I went to the story on line, hit control-F “Johnson”, and got nothing.

The coalition of people who rightly fear/loathe Mr. Trump and/or Mrs. Clinton is really large. If Gary Johnson had access to that coalition through the media, I think he could win. But, so far, crickets.

UPDATE: Well, you schedule a post a couple days in advance, and events intervene. In this case, the Orlando terrorist massacre. One side says “Blame gun culture! Blame homophobia!” The other side says “Blame the failure to face up to Islamic radicalism!” Gary Johnson doesn’t take either side. Perfectly reasonable, but reasonable is not how you get attention.

Orlando and Paris: Invitation to Comment (Limited)

Posted on by

First, let me express solidarity with gays. When people are targeted for murder as gays, it’s time for the rest of us to say We Are All Gay.

But that is not my point. My point can be expressed in terms of multiple choice: The common element between the attacks in Paris and the attacks in Orlando was:

a) Radical Islam

b) Hatred of gays

c) American gun culture

d) No common element. These were idiosyncratic attacks, carried out by different people, each with their own motivations.

Instructions for comments: I do not want to hear from people who, like me, would answer (a). Do not use this post to justify such a belief or to criticize other beliefs or to try to guess what other people are thinking. Instead, I want to hear from people who sincerely would make one of the other choices. I would like to understand your point of view. To put it another way, I would be interested in a comment from President Obama, not from Donald Trump.
[UPDATED INSTRUCTIONS: Note that the question does not ask “which of these were factors in the Orlando attack?” It asks “which of these is a *common element* between Paris and Orlando. Already, the first comments are in response to the question that I did not ask]

Just to be clear: I still plan to vote for Gary Johnson, based on his character and demeanor.

When the Political Going Gets Weird. . .

Posted on by

Alberto Mingardi writes,

So, the nationalists are going to be more socialist, because they want to vindicate the power of the nation state in taking control of the national economy, and the socialists are going to be more nationalist, because strengthening regulation and advancing redistribution is all the more difficult in supranational arrangements, where a cooperative understanding is seldom reached.

I think the diagnosis is fair; I couldn’t make a prognosis. But I fear there is a symmetric problem for libertarians. If we take Applebaum’s points seriously, as we should, we are put in a very awkward position: which is defending the status quo, made of relatively free international trade plus relatively weak supranational institutions, as the least bad of all possible worlds. And yet libertarians are highly critical of the status quo and won’t feel well in the company of the current global elites.

Interestingly, this year the Libertarian Party, rather than nominating two bomb-throwers, is putting up a ticket of two former moderate governors. And one can make a case that an upset victory by the Libertarian ticket would be more likely to avoid four years of political strife and antagonism than a victory by either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump.

Current Thoughts on Neo-reaction

Posted on by

As a characterization of neo-reaction (not as his own point of view), Tyler Cowen writes,

If you are analyzing political discourse, ask the simple question: is this person puking on the West, the history of the West, and those groups — productive white males — who did so much to make the West successful?

My thoughts.

1. Various sources credit me with popularizing the term “neo-reactionary.” However, the links go back to this post from 2010, which today strikes me as quite confused. I wrote,

Other writing in this vein ranges from the best-selling (Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism) to the obscure (Mencius Moldbug’s old blog posts) to somewhere in between (Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, which I still have not read.)

To which, the current me says “Hunh?” I do not know what I meant, and reading the rest of the post does not help.

2. Let us follow Tyler and say that a major role of political ideology is to attempt to adjust the relative status of various groups. The extreme ideological combatants are the post-modernists and the neo-reactionaries.

The post-modernists seek to elevate the status of women, minorities, and nationalities they view as oppressed. They want to knock down the status of American white males. Neo-reaction can be thought of as expressing the feeling that the status re-alignment has gone too far and needs to be rolled back. A middle ground might be that the status re-alignment to date is fine but that further denigration of white males would be going too far.

3. I would like to elevate the status of people who work in the for-profit sector and reduce the status of people who work in the non-profit sector. Instead, we seem to be intent on reversing the status-change that Deirdre McCloskey says helped produce the Great Enrichment.

4. Consider the principle of “welcoming and assimilating outsiders,” which I think of as central to American success. I believe that we are seeing dangerous extremism against that principle. The neo-reactionary does not want to welcome outsiders. The post-modernist does not want to assimilate them.

5. Of course, every adherent to an ideology seeks to elevate the status of those who share that ideology and to downgrade the status of those with different ideologies. That is why it matters that journalists and academics are overwhelmingly on the left. This means that the institutions of the mass media and higher education are inevitably and relentlessly going to seek to lower the status of conservatives.

Double Standards on Presidential Power

Posted on by

Michael Beschloss writes,

[Sean] Wilentz argues that, after achieving “historic health care reform” and an economic stimulus, it was only in 2015, after withstanding four years of an opposition Congress and failing to make a “grand bargain” with the other side, that Obama shed his “postpartisan illusion” to circumvent the House and Senate by vigorous use of executive orders.

In the same issue of the WaPo, there are many opinion pieces fretting over Donald Trump’s potential abuse of power. Although I disagree with Trump on many substantive issues, I am not going to get on the bandwagon of attacking his authoritarian personality.

I do not doubt that Trump has authoritarian tendencies. Or that he is a narcissist. Or that he is overconfident in his own views. But all of those qualities are present in Barack Obama. And yet when he acts on these authoritarian tendencies, the narrative becomes “vigorous use of executive orders.”

I have not changed my views from a few weeks ago. I will vote for Gary Johnson. But if the media continue to ignore the most respectable ticket on the ballot, then I hope Trump wins. Again, this is not because I agree with him on substance. It is because I believe that as long as we are going to have an arrogant, over-confident, self-centered President, I would rather have the institutional forces of the left arrayed against executive power than in support of it.

Martin Gurri on Elites vs. Democracy

Posted on by

He writes,

The elites’ loss of faith in democracy is directly proportional to their heightened loathing of the public. According to Cohen, the public is susceptible to “greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear.” It worships political thugs like Donald Trump in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. It erupts into Tea Parties and Occupations that upset the steady progress of history. The elites, in brief, have come to doubt that their pet projects can be implemented democratically. They are shopping for alternatives.

Gurri ends up suggesting that Estonia and Iceland’s Pirate Party might offer workable models for the future. I think that it is fair to say that you won’t find that view widely expressed.

Will the Media Notice the Libertarian Party?

Posted on by

David Boaz writes,

Lots of Republicans are looking for a sane alternative to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and it looks like the Libertarian Party has just given it to them, now that former Massachusetts governor William Weld has joined former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson’s ticket.

If someone had told two years ago that one party was going to run a ticket with two ex-governors who were regarded as competent and scandal-free while another party was going to run Trump, which would you have guessed would be the mainstream party and which would you have guessed would be the wacko third party?

Between now and November, could the mainstream media take notice of this? How would it affect the race if the media started to take the Libertarian ticket seriously?

It seems to me that any enthusiasm for Clinton is based on the fact that many people fear and loathe Trump. If it started to look as though Trump represented a small splinter party and Johnson-Weld represent a major party, then the “stop-Trump” rationale that bolsters Clinton’s candidacy disappears, and she is left with whatever support comes from people who genuinely think she is wonderful. Or, to put it another way, I think that there are enough voters who are negative about Trump and Clinton to make it possible for Johnson and Weld to get more votes than either one of them, provided that the media give the Libertarian ticket as much attention as the other two.

What the Deuce is Going On?

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen writes,

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males. The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them? Brutes?

His point seems to be that we are becoming a more feminized society, and some of what we observe is (futile) pushback against that. My thoughts:

1. When one speaks of feminized culture (or at least when I speak of it), it is not to suggest that all women have traits that differ from all men. Rather, think of tendencies that are higher in one gender or another.

2. I am less positive than Tyler about the traits of feminized culture. While the favorable characteristics are there, I also associate with feminized culture: consensus-driven to the point of repressing unpopular ideas; elevation of feelings relative to reason; too much tolerance for roles with authority without accountability and for roles with accountability without authority, rather than constructing a hierarchy that keeps authority and accountability aligned (“the buck stops here”).

My impressions are based on experiences working in organizations as well as observations about society at large. I used to say that I felt uncomfortable at business meetings that were male-dominated or female-dominated. I felt most comfortable with close to a 50-50 mix.

3. I am considering reading another Peter Turchin book, from ten years ago, called War and Peace and War. He apparently offers a grand theory of the integration and disintegration of empires, and I wonder how well 21st-century developments fit the “disintegration” model.

I Was Wrong

Posted on by

I recall writing that I thought that Bernie Sanders had a better chance of getting his party’s nomination than Donald Trump did of getting his party’s nomination. So, chalk up another in a series of bad prognostications.

However, I am curious about one thing. Of all the votes cast in primaries (forget caucuses for the moment), how does Sanders’ percent of Democrats compare with Trump’s percent of Republicans? If I read this correctly, then as of March 19 Sanders had roughly 40 percent of Democratic votes and Trump had 37.5 percent of Republican votes. My guess is that both of their shares have gone up since then. Perhaps the answer to my question is here and here.

I think Sanders has out-performed Trump by this measure, although I may be wrong again.

Venezuela

Posted on by

I can imagine that this might be a front-page story every day if it were happening in a different country, say, Egypt or Poland.

I find it easy to come up with explanations that are not chartitable toward the news media. Let us stay away from those. Think of charitable interpretations, such as American readers feel little or no connection to Venezuela. Or that this is one of many important stories that Donald Trump has driven off the front page.

What is the best, most charitable reason for the news media not to give more coverage to Venezuela? Serious, nonsarcastic answers only, please.