Thought for the Day

[broncofan]

He appeals to people because he demonizes the entire educated class, whether they're journalists or scientists or artists. But this tactic would not work if a core of mindless resentment did not already exist among the public.

This sentence of mine sounds a little Hernstein and Murrayish. What I mean is that his supporters seem to loathe anyone bold enough to point to a detail or explain a nuance. There are actual experts in every field a president is expected to consult with. Trump hates experts because they see through him. They can explain to him that it can't be great if it's not constitutional or if it destroys the ozone layer. They can laugh at him and point out his hypocrisy. These are the pencil-pushing pedants Trump and his supporters want to crush. Many of Trump's supporters are more filled with glee at the average liberal's horror than they are with any sort of optimism that Trump can deliver on his promises.

[Stavros]

There may be people who sneer at the 'Expertariat' but take the advice their doctor gives them. What proportion of people now disregard science I do not know, currently economists and opinion poll organizations are being pounded, yet I do think people -even those so-called Trump voters who don't read the Washington Post or the New York Times (or read at all)- can tell when they are being lied to and when it matters. We have barely got through a month of Trump-drama, so it will be interesting to see how the year pans out, given that US business is broadly optimistic that it will be a good one, though the issue of tariffs and taxes has yet to be clarified. And there is only so much drama 'the people' can take, whoever they are.

[trish]

Although jobs (or rather the lack thereof) played a significant role in this last U.S. election, I do not believe Trump won because the Democrats neglected to talk about jobs and the economy. Hillary’s campaign speeches continually harped on about jobs, the economy and new economic opportunities. She was truthful about the decline of coal (and that hurt her), and yet the Obama job numbers were on her side - unemployment was declining. What she lost was the media. Trump completely dominate the media coverage - his daily buffoonery, loud mouth, scandals and gaffs drowning out all discussion of policy. When the media did cover Hillary, Trump managed to keep the focus on (what we now regard as two non-issues) Benghazi and emails.

In my view the election was not about jobs and politics at all: it was about identity politics and showmanship.

By identity politics I don’t mean LGBT issues, or Black Lives Matter or any of that stuff. It was about a different tribe, namely white, Christian American men who are having (or never got over) their mid-life crisis. The familiar fears they suffer (loss of political, domestic and social dominance) were nicely amplified starting with Donald’s announcement that Mexicans were flooding across the borders (they weren’t). The deluge of Mexicans consisted of criminals, rapists and drug-dealer - although Donald was sure some of them were nice people. From there he moved on to ‘Islamic Terrorists’. Dividing us against ourselves, separating out tribe and another against the tribe white Christian males is the strategy that put Donald in the White House along with his ‘white supremacist’ friend, strategist, confidant and now trusted security advisor Steve Bannon.

We are now wasting time and taxpayer money fighting Steve Bannon’s ‘Muslim Ban’ in the courts. Trump says he’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to (after he stacks it, of course). The litigants are arguing the intent of the ban. Was the intent to keep out Muslims or was the intent to keep out possible terrorists until we beef up our vetting process? The problem is that the answer is neither of these. The intent was pure showmanship. Donald’s putting on the reality show of his life. The ban is just a macguffin, or better, a device to gain attention in this opening segment of the show. It has no other purpose than to swell Donald’s ego and impress the viewer. It’s effect is to once again dominate the press, clog up the wheels of an opposing branch of governance and mystify the populace.

This is going to be a very tiresome four years. I hate reality shows. I never watched them. But now I’m in one.

On a separate topic that just arose in this thread: why does the tribe of white, Christian males hate the educated. (Remember Trump once said, “I love the uneducated.”) I think one can trace a thread anti-intellectualism all the way back to the Pilgrims. Science gained prominence when it proved itself in warfare. The invention of the Atomic Bomb, which was based on science laymen could barely understand, was a boon for physics. Federal dollars were necessary to maintain our military dominance throughout the world. Sputnik and the race for space was next. The populace was nearly one-hundred percent behind education and especially education in the sciences. Those heady times have waned. The satellites we’ve put into orbit are showing us depressing things we don’t want to see. Cracks in the Antarctic ice shelves. Diminishing rain forests. Rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Shrinking of the ozone layer. Rise in greenhouse gasses. The fixes are costly. Doing nothing is costlier.

Also, many - if not most- of our scientists, historians, sociologists, economists, english professors, classicists, philosophers etc. find employment in State Universities and are paid with State and Federal dollars (not factoring in the Grants from private corporations). Most taxpayers see these jobs as cushy. Professors are free-loaders who are being paid by ‘ordinary working class people.’

Besides, nobody likes a smarty-pants. Everybody hates having to admit they’re wrong about anything, and most won’t admit it. Experts are fine when they tell you what you want to hear, but otherwise we’re better off without them.

My rant’s too long to proofread, so I apologize ahead of time for the slips and typos.

(Welcome back broncofan, missed you).

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=trish;1748214
By identity politics I don’t mean LGBT issues, or Black Lives Matter or any of that stuff. It was about a different tribe, namely white, Christian American men who are having (or never got over) their mid-life crisis. The familiar fears they suffer (loss of political, domestic and social dominance) were nicely amplified starting with Donald’s announcement that Mexicans were flooding across the borders (they weren’t). The deluge of Mexicans consisted of criminals, rapists and drug-dealer - although Donald was sure some of them were nice people. From there he moved on to ‘Islamic Terrorists’. Dividing us against ourselves, separating out tribe and another against the tribe white Christian males is the strategy that put Donald in the White House along with his ‘white supremacist’ friend, strategist, confidant and now trusted security advisor Steve Bannon.
[/QUOTE]

Identity is not only crucial to Steven Bannon's view of the 'crisis' the Christian world is in, it is his fundamental belief that the USA is a guardian of a 'Judeo-Christian' heritage that is under threat from secularization and Islam. This raises the question: Is the USA a secular state? To which the answer could be No, it is Christian state. I watched the Inauguration and was puzzled when prayers were said not once, but in two phases each with three readings, not to mention the emphatic way in which in his speech Trump argued that everything we are is due to Almighty God. The USA is a Christian country, it was made by Christians, and it belongs to them. I see that as the fundamental belief of the Republican Party, and also of Donald Trump, who is not a Republican. To what extent is it true of the USA? I cannot answer that and don't know how to either.

The link below is to the contribution Steven Bannon made to a conference held at the Vatican in 2014, where Bannon talks about wealth creation to defeat poverty as a free market capitalist enterprise shaped by Christian faith. He argues that when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 the world was at peace, yet within months millions were dead and he sees clearly, that it was due to Atheism as the greatest destroyer of the 20th century and that it is now allied with Islam to threaten the Christian world and the USA in particular. He argues, and he is right, that State Capitalism rather than free market capitalism is the standard model across the world, but doesn't say how free market capitalism will release new energy perhaps because across the world most people are not Christians, and cannot therefore embrace Capitalism like Americans can.

But Bannon is ignorant, the assassination in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1914 followed three wars in the Balkans in the first two decades of the century that slaughtered hundreds of thousand of people for the Serbian national cause; and one wonders where Bannon thinks peace reigned when the British fought a war in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century not to mention the Jews being slaughtered in the Russian Empire in pogrom after pogrom. It is also simply not true that the First World War was connected to Atheism -Caesar William of Germany was not an atheist, Tsar Nicolas II was not an atheist, but ok France was a secular Republic and its leader Georges Clemenceau was anti-Catholic (and married to an American).

This 'Judeo-Christian' heritage is a curious American concoction that argues there is a seamless link between the Old and New Testaments as the foundation of the faith of the USA, which as de Tocqueville described it was Christianity as the living antidote to individualism and atheism, but oh dear, also to materialism. Bannon thus wants to merge his Roman Catholic faith with Capitalism without the exploitation of workers for individual gain, just as the Judeo part of the equation admits nothing in the history of the USA that was ever anti-Jewish, while carefully not pointing out that Christian Zionism in the USA is based fundamentally on support for Israel as long as the Jews admit their religion is wrong and that Jesus was the Messiah they deny.

Make your own mind up, Bannon's contribution, delivered to the Conference by Skype, is here:

[broncofan]

That's a tremendous point Trish. Science is exciting when it's pushing new frontiers but not when it's cautionary. I'm afraid I am going to be posting a bit less often but am still going to read. I am not a big picture person and would only be posting a litany of complaints. I have no clue how the pieces fit together; the narcissism, the tribalism, the nationalism, the anti-intellectualism, the protectionism, the cronyism.

I have also used the phrase identity politics which has become a buzz word for people on the right. Many on the right think any particularized form of civil rights activism is identity politics. For instance, if the ADL focuses on anti-semitism or Black Lives Matter focus on racism against African-Americans, that's identity politics to them. But really what they are attempting is a form of dilution. One can focus on particular manifestations of bigotry without engaging in identity politics. The reason people focus on the particular is because often there aren't universals and because one cannot focus on everything at once. Besides one doesn't have to be Ayn Rand to acknowledge that Muslims have a special interest in anti-Muslim bigotry etc.

When I say identity politics, I think unprincipled tribalism, sometimes ethnic based but often based on other affiliations. So, Castro must be a good man because the West, responsible for awful atrocities dislikes him or because he represented a certain strain of leftist politics even when he violated the tenets on which it was grounded. Or this person has spoken the truth but I don't believe they are well placed to speak that truth.

In that sense, white supremacists are involved in identity politics. A white supremacist can call you a racial slur and in the same sentence swear you're trying to commit white genocide. These are deeply disgusting human beings and like anything they range in the degree of their pathology.

[broncofan]

When I say identity politics, I think unprincipled tribalism, sometimes ethnic based but often based on other affiliations.

Maybe this isn't how other people use the term, but I feel the linchpin is that attention to group affiliation becomes more important than the ideas upon which the group was originally formed. So then, isn't hyper-partisanship identity politics? If you're a Republican but don't care whether the party is militaristic or promotes isolationism, you're engaged in identity politics. But if you're a Republican only insofar as they promote some variant of the values you hold, then the affiliation is secondary.

[filghy2]

I agree that white christian identity politics is the key factor for Trump's base, but I doubt this was critical in the election. The people for whom this is the primary motivator are unlikely to have voted for Obama previously. Elections are not generally determined by the base, but by swinging voters who don't have strong attachments.

Trump's victory hinged on just over 200,000 votes in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If less than 3% of Trump voters in these states had changed their minds the result would have gone the other way, and Trump would be just a curious historical footnote. They key factor for these people was probably the sense that the existing system was not working for them; that they were being left behind economically. Hillary Clinton's talk about jobs did not resonate because she was seen as a supporter of the existing system.

[Stavros]

I think the time has come to put an end to these tedious comparison of Donald Trump to the Nazis. It diverts attention away from real issues, and distorts the argument by attempting to depict the Trump administration as something so bad the only evil regime it can be compared to is the Third Reich.

Trump is not much of an ideologue, he appears to believe in low taxes, small government, free markets and the Christian family, he does not have a theory of 'race', and he doesn't have a policy of 'lebensraum' as the Nazis did, intending to empty the east of its 'untermensch' so that the 'Aryan race' could expand in the living space it needed. Trump has yet to lay claim to Canada and Mexico, I doubt that he will.

If you want the most critical point of comparison, it is the USA itself. In Trump's case, his idol Ronald Reagan, in the case of the Republican Party and the alt-right, the 'golden age' of America, ie the 1950s before the country surrendered to women, queers, blacks and greens.

Reagan had an ideology of sorts -small government, low taxes, free markets, the Christian family and a strong America that could lead the world in a campaign against Communism. But Reagan was also a pragmatist more than he was an ideologue, he spent money the USA didn't have so that when he left the US had the highest deficit in the history of the USA -so much for 'small government'. Tax cuts that were supposed to 'trickle down' had no such effect, while financial and capital liberalization enabled American capital to invest overseas what it might have done at home, and crucially, the concessions to the USSR on arms reduction as a recognition that the Cold War was ending, split the President's men and gave rise to the 'Neo-Cons' who took an even more aggressive attitude to foreign policy than Reagan. I don't think Trump will get a second term, but one wonders on the basis of the Reagan comparison if his team will remain the same, with Steven Bannon and Steven Miller perhaps the most vulnerable.

The critical point of conflict now must surely be with those Republican States where there is no effective opposition and the State government is expanding existing programmes designed to shut down planned parenthood and lay so many limitations on abortion that it is impossible for a woman to receive one. The measures being taken to reject applications from citizens who want to vote, or to place numerous obstacles on registration and voting itself, underlines my point, for in over 20 States in the Union there appears to be a determination to return to a time when, to put it bluntly, Black people were not allowed to vote. Formal segregation may not be revived, but other forms of segregation are in place or being proposed whose sole purpose is to remove Black people from the public sphere, to deny women equal rights in the public spheres of health, and to deny LGBTQIAPN/B individuals rights in a wide variety of public spaces from schools to work to toilets.

Conservatives in the Republican Party, and the alt-right believe the 1960s undermined the America they love, it was the decade of the environment, women, civil rights -indeed rights for any identity group to invent itself and demand them, and through these measures and the growth of welfare, an attack on the Christian family that must now be countered, to return American to the time when the family was the building block of a prosperous and peaceful society and there was a Republican in the White House.

So back off on the Third Reich, and when analysing the USA use the most effective comparison at your fingertips, the USA itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/u...ftly.html?_r=0

[filghy2]

Rather than the Nazis, the more relevant comparators are current leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Erodogan in Turkey, who came to power democratically on strong nationalist agendas and then progressively undermined independent institutions like the judiciary and the media and lilted the playing field against their political opponents. Fortunately, the US has stronger checks and balances (eg, a 60% parliamentary majority in Hungary allows the government to change the constitution). However, these don't just work automatically - they require people to stand up for them at the risk of retaliation.

I doubt that Trump truly believes in free markets in the sense that everyone competes on the same terms and businesses are free to make decisions based on the underlying economics. For starters, he's a protectionist, so no free markets for foreign producers. He also seems to be a believer in crony capitalism, in which well-connected firms receive special favours and in turn support the government's agenda. Much of Trump's business success in real estate was based on special favours from political connections. The model for Trump's economic policy is likely to be the Carrier deal announced last November, in which announcements of factories remaining or reopening in the US are secured through a mixture of bribes and threats. Uncooperative businesses will probably face punishment in various ways.

[sukumvit boy]

Godwin's Law again,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
So ya don't think Trump has plans to annex Saskatchewan ?