What’s Wrong with the World

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Extended Ramblings, Post-Election Edition

It would take conscious effort to be more spectacularly wrong than I have been about the likelihood of Donald Trump’s ever becoming president. After many months of arguing, with no small degree of vehemence, that this year’s general election result was more or less impossible, it turns out that my reading of this year’s political scene was badly askew. It is of course true that I have a lot of company, and not only among partisans of the Never Trump persuasion, but this does nothing to obviate the simple fact: I was as wrong as it is possible to be, not once, but many times over the course of this interminable election season.

The Trumpists have responded to their great victory at the polls, and to the prospect of a refashioned Republican Party under President-elect Trump’s leadership, with their characteristic good grace and charm. The same could be said of those on the left who in many cases had already begun gloating over their inevitable triumph from the moment Trump secured the Republican nomination. This is to be expected, and hardly counts among the more dire consequences likely to follow his ascendancy to the nation’s highest office. That the administration of so great a country will fall to the likes of Steven Bannon and Corey Lewandowski is the greater occasion for mourning than the bleating of emotionally immature Trump enthusiasts, or the unseemly histrionics of the left.

My own period of mourning took place some months ago, which has freed me to react with some detachment from the unfolding scene. Like a lot of conservatives who bitterly opposed Trump’s candidacy, I find myself able to indulge a considerable dose of schadenfreude at Team Clinton’s expense. That such a grasping, malevolent old crone would become the most outstanding victim of her own hubris and insatiability is cause for some celebration. In her uttermost famine, she devoured herself at last. The fall of House Clinton and her final repudiation by an American public which has, to its credit, never shown much sympathy for her transparent brand of self-seeking and deceit, has given me deep satisfaction, and for that I am grateful.

I will leave it to others to dissect the polling data. The efficacy of such data is perhaps at its lowest-ever esteem, maybe with good reason (though I would caution future presidential hopefuls against the idea that Trump’s improbable victory could be replicated by someone without his peculiar personal qualities—no cult of celebrity without the celebrity). The only thing I will add to the torrent of commentary on “How It All Happened” is that the conventional wisdom on the prevailing dynamics of the contest still seems to me to be basically right: In a race between two deeply disliked and distrusted candidates, each with his own obviously disqualifying flaws, the candidate with the greatest advantage is the one best able to direct each news cycle into a story about the other candidate.

It was, in fact, Mrs. Clinton’s strategy from the outset to remain as closeted and distant as possible from the daily headlines, and in Donald Trump, whose neurotic craving for attention is perhaps his defining characteristic, she had the ideal opponent. Not only was he incapable of allowing a moment to pass in which he was not the central topic of discussion, but he was bound to make that discussion as unflattering as it possibly could be. This was, at least to most observers, the basic electioneering dynamic of the whole campaign, one which militated powerfully against Trump’s ever winning the presidency. Again, I still think this was basically right.

There was something else, though, something that stood a chance of making the 2016 campaign into a black swan event, though I had dismissed it with scorn from the very start: the craving for attention on the part of Trump’s voters (and, decisively, his potential voters). That craving found indirect reflection in the unbalanced, narcissistic personality of the Republican candidate. Moreover, their acute sense of victimhood made them amenable to any appeal that seemed to be directed at them. It was an appeal that Team Clinton consciously decided it had no need to make, bound as they were by their stubborn conviction that the Obama coalition could be mobilized without Obama’s name on the ballot (something for which none of the last five election cycles has provided any evidence).

Call it the Mister Rogers effect, if you will. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was as successful and beloved as it was because the children watching it felt sure that Mister Rogers was speaking directly to them through the lens of the camera. Something similar was true of Ronald Reagan and, in an altogether different technological era, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was almost too simple to attract the notice of the experts or, in my case, the amateurs.

Why these voters, especially the much-talked-about “white working class” of rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, were so susceptible admits of various explanations, some derogatory and others less so, depending on your point of view. I would suggest that the most underappreciated factor in it all was a tyrannical Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Roberts, which had audaciously and repeatedly handed down to them massive political defeats, on such divisive and personally-felt subjects as health care and the meaning of marriage. A Supreme Court ruling is a horrible mechanism for the establishment of political consensus, as the ongoing thermonuclear war over Roe v. Wade ought to have shown.

When those rulings are handed down on the basis of pure ideological will, and in direct contravention of repeatedly-expressed public desires, it has the effect of demolishing any respect for the forms of Constitutional government. A candidate who presents adherence to such forms as a sucker’s game will find receptive ears in such a setting. One could add the profligacy of the Obama administration’s own rule-breaking and law-making, for example as regards the various statutory and regulatory constraints on insurance coverage that he unilaterally waived in the heat of his own re-election campaign, but as appalling as those things might have been to conservative political junkies, they lacked the visceral quality and sense of finality that a Supreme Court ruling over a highly contentious issue might have.

What comes next? A lot of chin-stroking about What Comes Next, I’d wager. Fresh off of the most in-your-face demonstration of the limits of my own powers of prediction, I will nonetheless double down on my contention that the Trump presidency will be a disaster for conservatism and that his supporters will find themselves betrayed without remorse by Donald Trump, as have so many others who have been receptive to his “Art of the Deal,” an art that amounts to saying pretty much anything necessary to close the deal, the details to be re-negotiated later, mostly through litigation. That such a habitual swindler and transparently self-concerned demagogue might prove to be a reliable political ally seems to me to be quite ludicrous.

The alt-right and the generally pro-Trump response is something like this, which is appearing in a thousand memes as I type:

“You said Trump would never cross 30%. Then you said he would never cross 50%. Then you said he would never get the nomination. Then you said he would never win Pennsylvania. Then you said he would never be president. NOW you say he will never build a wall, that he will never undo Obama’s regulatory effrontery, etc. Why should you be believed or listened to at this stage?”

It’s a fair enough question, but it overlooks something crucial. All of the previous predictions about Trump’s odds were really predictions, not about what Trump would do—he did pretty much everything we expected he would—but about what the American electorate would do. Nothing has happened to date that has changed my estimation of Trump the man, who already is beginning the process of walking back his many extravagant promises. To argue that he will govern as a conservative or that he will acquire a gravitas and intellectual curiosity to which he has never been even mildly susceptible, on the basis of his having won an election, is quixotic. It seems probable that on the issue of the courts he will be willing to take some direction from his betters, because it is an issue about which he cares nothing. But because practically everything that matters to conservatives falls under the same heading, it is vain to hope that he will risk any damage to his own prestige by taking positive action on behalf of conservative policy goals. This is particularly true of "social" concerns like abortion or religious freedom, to say nothing of such arcane preoccupations as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rules promulgated by the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If a multi-level marketing salesman comes knocking at my family’s door, I may have some misplaced confidence that they will send him packing. If they don’t, it would be very foolish to change my assessment of his product or the likelihood of his making good on his promises. It is hard to imagine a figure less likely to become a scourge of the left on actual policy grounds than Donald J. Trump. All that any of us has is hope, and in the exhilaration of the post-election moment, I’ve seen an unreasonable amount of it from the right-wing commentariat.

(A quick aside: All this makes the puerile hysteria of politically-attuned homosexuals all the more insufferable--it is explainable not by anything Trump has ever said against them, but only by the fact that they 1) skew young and have little experience of political defeat, and 2) have exercised such merciless retribution and denunciation against their political foes that they can only assume that that is how things are done in Zero-Sum America.)

Time will tell, as always. What remains to philosophically committed conservatives is to engage with great energy the opportunity, suspect though it might be, to gain some ground in those areas where a Congressional majority may be efficacious, in the hopes that the insouciance of the next president can be turned to some advantage. That this counsel turns on the doubtful reliability of such men as the senior senator from Kentucky should not dissuade us from the task.

Comments (56)

Excellent, Sage. I love your humility off the top. Pray God endues the President-elect with the same quality.

I await Al showing up, to accuse a bunch of people who refused to vote for Trump of being responsible for him.

What we see here is that if any good comes out of the Trump presidency in terms of either policy or appointments, it will be as it were by accident, and by the canny work of some counselor or other, not because of anything positively good about Trump.

Take legislation, for example. *Maybe*, if we're lucky, Congress will get past a filibuster and succeed in passing some decent piece of legislation or other--say, defunding Planned Parenthood. At that point, whether or not Trump signs it depends on whether he finds that the path of least resistance or whether (on the other hand) he has some bizarre, personal reason for not doing so. Since it's already become clear that he has an "enemies list," such a reason might be seeing Lindsay Graham's name on the list of co-sponsors. We can have some hope that he would just lazily sign the legislation, not because of any personal commitment to anything, but because he didn't think he had any reason not to. That's where our hope lies now.

Similarly, in the recent 60 minutes interview (just this weekend) he made comments about SCOTUS that betrayed his utter ignorance on matters of jurisprudence and justices. He said he would appoint "pro-life" justices but at the same time said that he considers Obergefell "settled." Putting these together, one might think that he'd look for a SCOTUS justice with a completely incoherent jurisprudential philosophy according to which Roe should be overturned and the issue returned to the states but Obergefell, which was if possible an even wilder instance of activist jurisprudence, and is far more recent to boot, would be "settled law." I am willing to bet that no such candidate can be found.

So our hope is that Trump is so ignorant and lazy that he won't really _care_ that a "good justice" (such as he's promised to appoint) would _disagree_ with his stance that Obergefell is "settled."

And maybe then he'll appoint someone who thinks as a constitutionalist, and maybe such a person will get past the Senate filibuster.

A lot of maybes, and a very pathetic position for conservatives to be in, when our hope rests upon the ignorance and laziness of a Republican President.

Our situation now is like that of a people who have a nasty, ignorant, vindictive, selfish, and highly impulsive child-king and whose regents may or may not be able to control him. The child-king has some decent and thoughtful advisers and some not-so-decent advisers. He responds chiefly to flattery and personal indulgence. And he can, if he wants, ignore all of his advisers and do as he pleases. What will happen next, therefore, is quite unpredictable. Some good policies may actually be enacted, but if they are, it will be in spite of and not because of the character of the child-king.

A Trump presidency may very well be a disaster for "conservatism" as defined by effete never-Trumpers, but it will be a roaring success for an America ravaged by porous borders, illegal immigration, black crime and rioting, poorly-negotiated trade deals, and political correctness.

What we see here is that if any good comes out of the Trump presidency in terms of either policy or appointments, it will be as it were by accident, and by the canny work of some counselor or other, not because of anything positively good about Trump.

Right, "heads I win, tails you lose." Anything he does that you support will be because of his cabinet and anything he does that you don't like will be further proof of his horribleness. Now that you've admitted as much, why should conservatives (whether Trump supporters or not) listen to what you have to say?

Because we have independent evidence concerning his lack of character and lack of knowledge, that's why. Which anyone who isn't a complete fool can see with his own eyes. Indeed, we've gotten more of such evidence just since the election. The incoherence concerning judges in the 60 minutes interview, for example.

Because we have independent evidence concerning his lack of character and lack of knowledge, that's why. Which anyone who isn't a complete fool can see with his own eyes.

Well, at least you've finally admitted that you believe roughly half the country or so to be made up of complete fools.

And GW is right. That Trump had bad character and possibly made an error when speaking about a judge now immediately disqualifies him from being responsible for *any good that comes from his presidency*.

You seriously don't see your error there? We have no independent evidence that all the good that comes will have nothing to do with him for the very simple reason that nothing has happened yet.

Trump doesn't fall for 60 Minutes' gotcha question regarding a recent SC decision and suddenly he's betrayed conservative principles. Of course once he nominates William Pryor or Don Willett to fill Scalia's seat it won't count for him but will be evidence someone else is making his decisions. This is laughable. Has it occurred to you that the reason he's punting on recent SC cases is that he wants his own nominees to be given the same authority previous courts have received?

All that Trump would have to do, all he need ever have done, to earn the trust and presumption of good faith on the part of conservatives like Lydia and me, is to speak and act in a way consistent with a man of conservative conviction. That he is incapable of doing so and repeatedly evinces ignorance of, and even hostility to, any kind of meaningful conservatism, is an observable fact. He doesn't deserve our trust unless and until he can give a remotely plausible accounting of his own ideas.

Bill Clinton, constrained by the political demands and expediencies of the moment, signed welfare reform into law and managed to negotiate a balanced budget. It isn't because of any imperviousness to contrary evidence on my part that I acknowledge that he was only acting within the constraints imposed on him by a Republican congress. He did not wake up a budget hawk one day, and was not naturally disposed to making work requirements more stringent.

GW, you obviously have a very different view of Trump's inner convictions, and in a certain sense it doesn't matter which of us is right. In another sense, it matters very much, because it will condition the way in which approach a Trump administration as activists and as parties to the various political conflicts to come. Your view is that Trump can be trusted to make sound conservative policy, and to take great political risks and endure great criticism in order to do so. My view is that he cannot be trusted in this way. So to the extent that people like me try to hold him to his wild assurances (e.g., "All the bad things happening in America are going to end!"), we'll be doing work on your behalf.

Still, something tells me that for all your finger-pointing about epistemic closure, you'll be the one playing games with the word "conservative" when the time comes. You're already doing it, in fact, as Trump's partisans have done from the beginning. (As when one tries to answer the Trumpist claim that no conservative policy success has ever happened in the last thirty years; if one is produced, it is defined as "not really" a success or "not really" a conservative policy). No matter what he does, I can rest quite assured that opposition to it by any conservative will be called "effete," and worse epithets besides.

Well, at least you've finally admitted that you believe roughly half the country or so to be made up of complete fools.

Nope. That's a ridiculous non-sequitir, and I think you know it.

There are millions and millions of people who are not fools, who voted for Trump in the full knowledge that he lacks both character and knowledge (are you really prepared to argue in his favor on either score?). I know many such people, close friends and family included, and their reasons for voting the way they did is something I can respect, though I wouldn't do so myself.

You are projecting your own uncompromising view onto Lydia. She would be the first to tell you that voting for a man does not amount to endorsing his character or his state of actual knowledge. If you are willing to lie to yourself on those counts and insist that you have voted for a brilliant and virtuous man, because no other possibility exists in your mind, then the fault lies with you.

Both you and Lydia have gone out of your way to declare Trump voters something very close to idiots. As you yourself said:

There was something else, though, something that stood a chance of making the 2016 campaign into a black swan event, though I had dismissed it with scorn from the very start: the craving for attention on the part of Trump’s voters (and, decisively, his potential voters). That craving found indirect reflection in the unbalanced, narcissistic personality of the Republican candidate. Moreover, their acute sense of victimhood made them amenable to any appeal that seemed to be directed at them.

So no, you and Lydia don't get out of this that easily.

No mention of immigration, political correctness, trade, crime, whatever. They voted for Trump because of attention whoring!

That's a silly and selective reading of what I wrote.

There's nothing in any of it that comes remotely close to the claim that "half the country are idiots," which is the view that you impute to her and to me. What that remark is instead is a restatement of the entirely uncontroversial claim--one often made by Trumpists themselves--that a vote for Trump amounted to a demand to be heard, often (though not exclusively) by people who feel put upon. The remainder of my remarks on the subject (including my comments on the Supreme Court and its disregard for so many voters' expressed will) support a more charitable interpretation than you're willing to give. So no, I don't think I have anything to apologize for, even if I don't offer my analysis in as flattering terms as you'd no doubt insist upon.

But I'll note that the constant taking umbrage and insisting, like Harvey Keitel's honor-obsessed duelist Gabriel Feraud, that "You have insulted me!" is a most tiresome argumentative tactic of the pro-Trump combox guy, one to which I've been subjected countless times no matter how gently or dispassionately I've offered my view of Trump. I must say, it's hardly a convincing way of demonstrating that Trump enthusiasts do not have "an acute sense of victimhood."

It is possible to despise Trump and to be repelled at his political ascendancy, without despising Trump voters as a whole. I know that, even if you don't.

I think there were plenty of people who did vote for Trump while not believing that he had good character. Many of them told me so directly, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. If one views one's voting in a purely strategic way (which I myself do not), it was a distinction one could make, or attempt to make. I do think it is great foolishness to believe that he has good character or that he is knowledgeable about the majority of the areas relevant to the presidency. He has demonstrated the opposite in both of these areas so many times that the evidence would be tedious to relate, and of course that evidence does not disappear the moment he wins the presidency in an election. There is no reason why it should.

If it turned out that half the country *did* ignore this evidence, then I would refuse to be brow-beaten by a straightforward bandwagon fallacy. Indignant cries of "You're saying a lot of people are fools" really cut no ice with me. I go with the evidence. The bandwagon fallacy doesn't have some kind of exception clause for the realm of political discourse or the evaluation of political candidates' character and knowledge.

However, as it happens, I do not believe that all of those who voted for him had this particular brand of foolishness--that is, believing that he actually has good character and is relevantly knowledgeable.

Putting these together, one might think that he'd look for a SCOTUS justice with a completely incoherent jurisprudential philosophy according to which Roe should be overturned and the issue returned to the states but Obergefell, which was if possible an even wilder instance of activist jurisprudence, and is far more recent to boot, would be "settled law." I am willing to bet that no such candidate can be found.

There may well be some justice who can credibly pretend, for the time period of Trump's attention span, to be both. I can't even decide whether this would be a good thing or not, since it is effectively impossible for such an appearance to be what they really are. I imagine that if they are anything like a real strict constructionist, they will be capable of finding that Obergefell is a violation of the Constitution, and finding against it. Using Roberts dissent as a springboard:

The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.
Well, at least you've finally admitted that you believe roughly half the country or so to be made up of complete fools.

Heh, since approximately 47% voted for Hillary and another 3+ % voted Libertarian and Green, I would say that it is confirmed that slightly more than half the country are fools. Since it can reasonably be predicted (this is true of almost every national election) that of the 47% who voted for Trump, at least 10% did so for reasons that any rational person would consider irrational, we have a very substantial majority who are fools - though perhaps not complete fools. There is no hindrance to fools voting for Trump, just because it takes a fool to vote for Hillary.

The real question, of course, is whether most or all of those who voted for Trump are fools. I for one would not say so on the mere fact of their voting for him in November.

What we see here is that if any good comes out of the Trump presidency in terms of either policy or appointments, it will be as it were by accident, and by the canny work of some counselor or other, not because of anything positively good about Trump.

I don't entirely agree with that. Trump is likely to push for SOME legislation that would be good, such as restricting immigration. He never denied all along that he would have to rely on others for the details of getting it actually through Congress, so the fact that he would indeed have to rely on others is not COMPLETELY "by accident". I do think that the fact that he never got down into the nitty gritty of what some of these policies would look like is interesting: on the one hand, ANY specific line item is on its face likely to have plusses and minuses, so saying "we're going to do it by pathway X, Y, and Z" would naturally build up a lot of skepicism. On the other, NOT giving the details opened him up to accusations of being all hot air an no substance. Reagan was - at least sometimes - short on substance in his campaign ideas. He was a big-picture guy, and everyone knew it. Remember his daily "naps"? He relied on others for the details. But he was very effective in handing off (delegating) parts of the puzzle to some, while making the whole gel. What I see likely in Trump is that other than trade and immigration, he is unlikely to pay attention long enough to be effective in making sure the whole gels. I doubt that this would extend even to trade and immigration. But even if all he successfully gets through is immigration change, that's better than nothing. (Depending on what else he fiddles with and fails to do.)

Take legislation, for example.

Because Obama relied on using executive orders so much (sometimes rather beyond the writ of law), Trump can reverse a lot of what Obama did with a stroke of the pen. If he wants to. If it is important enough. We will see, in the first 20 days of his presidency, if he really wants them. Such as :

- Immediate reversal of the current administration’s stance on the contraceptive mandate.

- Killing the trade fast track for the TPP agreement.

- Probable finding that China is a currency-manipulating nation.

- Reverse the idiotic executive mandate that public schools accept transgender nonsense.

- Stop using "foreign aid" as a vehicle to push abortion and contraception.

(The last isn't an executive order, but I believe that by and large the president can nix actually SPENDING any foreign aid line item he pleases.)

That the administration of so great a country will fall to the likes of Steven Bannon and Corey Lewandowski is the greater occasion for mourning than the bleating of emotionally immature Trump enthusiasts, or the unseemly histrionics of the left.

It is my understanding, from news and from personal contacts, that much of the transition is in the hands of people from the Heritage Foundation. CNN reports John Yoo saying:

"I'm surprised there are so many people here because I thought everyone at Heritage was working over at transition headquarters," Yoo said on the panel about Trump's win. "I asked the taxi cab driver to take me to Trump transition headquarters and he dropped me off here, instead."

While Heritage isn't perfect, they are hardly the enemy full stop. Some good will come from them, more than likely. And some not-so-good. If they can get a head of State that is decent, and head of Justice that wants to roll back many Obaminations, and a head of Education who would rather put himself out of a job, these would be great things. If they cannot help but select a bunch of RINOs who actually WANT to keep abortion full-bore, to keep gay rights and expand them, to keep on importing future Dem voters, then this would be very bad, but it seems unlike Heritage to do so. I don't assume anything, but I am cautiously optimistic that at least some of the appointments will be good.

If Trump REALLY wants to make a change in Washington, he will have to pay attention not only to his cabinet and political appointments, but also to another layer: the Senior Executive Service. These are the civil servants who carry out the executive orders, and they roll over from one administration to the next. While they are ostensibly a-political, the reality is that 95% of them have degrees and graduate degrees from top name universities. And this means that they have spent years and years being formed by the produce-a-liberal regime that constitutes a university. Whether they pretend to neutrality or not, they are actually liberal, and a great many of them went hog-wild with Obama's executive orders and general policies. If Trump wants to really right this ship-leaning weight, he will have to formulate methods of driving them away from government. It can be done without firings (they are civil servants so cannot be fired at will, unlike political appointees) but it can be done by making life unpleasant for them.

The problem, of course, is that Trump - while he hates the PC nonsense they spout - is in significant share a liberal himself. Does he really want to unravel the pressure towards requiring gay-affirmation in the civil service? He has indicated it's not a big issue with him.

Does he really want to unravel the pressure towards requiring gay-affirmation in the civil service? He has indicated it's not a big issue with him.

If after four years of a Trump Presidency, the military is any less of an enthusiastic booster of homosexuality and transgenderism, I'll admit I was wrong about him all along. Gay Pride is a huge, one could say YUGE, administrative obsession in the US Armed Forces and within the various intelligence agencies. A rock-ribbed conservative of the foundation-shaking type that Trump is supposed to be might actually do something about that. But he isn't, so he won't. You can take to the bank.

It is hard to imagine a figure less likely to become a scourge of the left on actual policy grounds than Donald J. Trump.

I'm not convinced. There are many liberals who have studied autocratic and neo-fascist movements, and they are all sounding alarm bells about Trump. Not only because of his personal demons but because there has been and will be so little institutional resistance to those demons. Which is why when somebody over at Zippy's was telling me Trump was just bluffing and didn't mean any of it, I was thinking "I have no basis to know if that is true which is very disturbing." Look at his most fervent alt-right fanboys, not only with their fondness for swastikas and such but how they refer to Trump in such blatantly personality cult terms as God-Emperor, or Coulter's book title "In Trump We Trust". Somebody over at Feser's blog demanded that it was everyone's Christian duty not simply to vote for Trump but to also advocate for him, at least until Feser appropriately deleted his comments. The obsequiousness they have been displaying is creepy.

I await Al showing up, to accuse a bunch of people who refused to vote for Trump of being responsible for him.

Only if he wants me to shame him for being a complete idiot.

Tomorrow I will provide some election analysis on what I think went wrong, both systemically and with each candidate.

Step2, you are right that that sentence badly overstates the case, but for some reason I let it get through the final pass. I should have said that left to his own devices, Trump has no special beef with the left on either ideological or policy grounds, and that if he could have gotten a bigger applause line out of being pro-Mexican-immigration, he'd have done that instead.

The "most fervent" adorers of Obama in the immediate aftermath of his victory were not only very creepy, but were ubiquitous, and could be found in schools and churches and every place in between. His early appointments of such people as Van Jones and Anita Dunn conformed to the worst expectations of the right, and had he not ultimately been restrained by the united opposition of Republicans (and the intransigence of some few vulnerable Democratic Senators), there's no telling how far he may have been willing to go.

That's not to engage in a tu quoque, because on the substance I agree with you and always have regarded with horror the Trump-as-Roman-Centurion and other echoes of fascistic imagery, the knowing embrace of threats and intimidation, and all the rest of it. My point is that we tend to underestimate the enduring strength of our multilayered system of government to restrain the worst impulses of a single man, and how practical politics in such a large and politically divided country will often bring the fantasies of his most devoted followers crashing to earth. Maybe the strength of Republican gains down-ballot and at the state level will leave Trump in a stronger position, and for a longer time, than Obama (who lost his Congressional supermajority with a quickness once it was clear to voters that the country had massively overcorrected).

But I do believe that over the long run, liberals have little to fear from a Trump administration that they could not undo in relatively short order, because when it comes to policy, unlike the Obama Democrats, his heart really isn't in this.

Still, something tells me that for all your finger-pointing about epistemic closure, you'll be the one playing games with the word "conservative" when the time comes. You're already doing it, in fact, as Trump's partisans have done from the beginning.

No one is playing games here, as what defines "conservative" is the central point. Is a person holding "conservative conviction" someone with strong albeit broad sentiments towards order, tradition, sovereignty, nationalism, and hierarchy; or is it holding a very specific and ever-narrowing ideology? I would say that Trump is very close to the former and distant to the latter. But I fail to see how a rigid doctrine regarding free-trade and corporate tax rates qualifies as more "conservative" than someone motivated to protect American sovereignty and political hegemony for Americans.

Nice way of side-stepping the fact that he just said he not only considers Obergefell settled law but that he is *fine* with that. Very conservative. And that he obviously has no knowledge of originalist judicial philosophy. Or that he waved the gay flag about a week before the election. Or that he thinks people should be able to "use whatever bathroom they want to." Or that he brought in Peter Thiel to the convention to tell us all that the gay issues are a "fake culture war." Or, or, or.

In other words, social conservatives are outta luck as far as whether or not their issues are part of what it means to be conservative. This despite umpteen decades of faithful service on their part. And despite the fact that for the most part (with a few Never Trump holdouts like me who took endless flak from our social conservative brethren) they voted for Trump in their millions, hoping that he really had some concern for their issues.

But he doesn't.

I fail to see how a rigid doctrine regarding free-trade and corporate tax rates qualifies as more "conservative" than someone motivated to protect American sovereignty and political hegemony for Americans.

You don't have to be an ideologue with respect to free trade or corporate tax rates to rate as a conservative in my book, and I've never criticized Trump for his deviations on those subjects. I do not say that Pat Buchanan is not a conservative on the grounds that he disagrees with Cato on such matters, and in fact you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who has done so, though lots of conservatives have disagreed with him on the subject.

As it happens, Trump is probably closer to mainstream conservative ideas on corporate tax rates than he is mainstream liberal ideas. International trade is his real point of disagreement with most of the "respectable" right, and his faith in a kind of economic nationalism goes back a long way, so it's not liable to change any time soon. That's one area where I think we can say he has some real core convictions.

Anyway, the idea that he's a respecter of order, hierarchy, and tradition in the ordinary sense meant by conservatives of every stripe is pretty unsupportable. Only by expanding beyond recognition the limits of what it is to be conservative can we arrive at a place where Donald Trump is an exemplary (or even an ordinary) defender of those things. He's said himself that they mean nothing to him.

But at this late stage, I feel sure that any ongoing argument over whether Trump is identifiably conservative are fruitless to all concerned. Any lurker will have encountered such arguments before, and it was hardly the point of my original post anyway.

Because Obama relied on using executive orders so much (sometimes rather beyond the writ of law), Trump can reverse a lot of what Obama did with a stroke of the pen. If he wants to. If it is important enough. We will see, in the first 20 days of his presidency, if he really wants them.

Tony, I didn't mention those, because IMO those are in a *worse* position than legislation that originates in Congress, as far as what Trump will do. To sign legislation presented to him by a Republican Congress is relatively easy. It makes him look good (to conservatives or Republicans) without requiring him to take the initiative. So maybe we can hope he will do it, if his personal likes and dislikes don't get in the way.

With the things you are listing, they require both information and initiative. I won't say that I will drop dead of astonishment if he does any of the things you list, and all the less so because you included two that have to do with trade and/or China, and as Sage says those may be policy areas where he actually has some kind of personal policy ideas. But for the others, I'll be somewhat surprised if he does any of them and very surprised if he does all three.

I'm not convinced. There are many liberals who have studied autocratic and neo-fascist movements, and they are all sounding alarm bells about Trump.

I have to add that this strikes me as less than compelling. Of all the data points that might lead us to the conclusion that Trump is a crypto-fascist, the fact that liberal scholars have accused him of it rates very low on the list. They sound those "alarm bells" by rote every four years. (Remember how George W. Bush was a Nazi on his father's side, or something? I could multiply more serious examples until my eyes bled, if I was so inclined.)

Stopped clocks and all that.

Tony, I didn't mention those, because IMO those are in a *worse* position than legislation that originates in Congress, as far as what Trump will do. To sign legislation presented to him by a Republican Congress is relatively easy. It makes him look good (to conservatives or Republicans) without requiring him to take the initiative.

Lydia, my estimate is a little different. In order for the Republicans to pass any substantive laws that are not full-of-junk compromises, someone is going to have to do something about the idiotic Senate filibuster rule. The Republicans in the Senate aren't going to have the guts for it, if Trump doesn't get behind them and shove. I.e. he is going to have to expend political capital to get bills before him that HE wants on trade and immigration. Otherwise the only things that can get passed will be watered down and useless.

With the things you are listing, they require both information and initiative. I won't say that I will drop dead of astonishment if he does any of the things you list, and all the less so because you included two that have to do with trade and/or China, and as Sage says those may be policy areas where he actually has some kind of personal policy ideas. But for the others, I'll be somewhat surprised if he does any of them and very surprised if he does all three.

Well, I will be a bit surprised if he does all of them, but I suspect that someone in his administration will be smart enough to figure he can make social conservatives happy with the first (erasing the Obamacare contraception mandate) with VERY little political cost, because the SC decision effectively gutted the mandate anyway. All he would be doing, really, would be accelerating and simplifying what HHS has to do anyway to comply with the court. And if he just SAYS "I am doing this after HHS dragged its feet doing it..." he will basically insulate himself from all but fringe leftist complaint.

As for the others, I don't know. I think his views on foreign aid are pretty negative in general, and it would FIT with his overall intention to re-align foreign policy according to what makes for good trade, to say "attaching contraceptives to deals is stupid, and we don't have to spend that money." Moral considerations aside. I would rate that better than 30% likelihood, but not in the first few weeks. It's not a point that he is going to be eager for, but when it comes up he will have little incentive OTHER than to say "forget it".

I'm not convinced. There are many liberals who have studied autocratic and neo-fascist movements, and they are all sounding alarm bells about Trump.

As Sage says, the media liberals would be saying this about almost any Republican, so it's not very informative that they are saying it about Trump. I think that it is more concerning that it isn't necessarily Trump, but some of his supporters, and some of his advisers, who sound fascist, if Trump is going to be handing influence to these people. But again, what the liberal media considers "fascist" is a lot like what moderates in 1965 thought was "normal" , not "Nazi Germany". Me, I don't want a return to Jim Crow laws, but I sure don't mind a reversal of pure the pure idiocy of the transgender movement. I am pretty sure that a trans person who has bought the transgender lie thinks that ANY claw-back to even 2 years ago, much less 20 years ago is "fascism". We don't have to buy that.

It's not a point that he is going to be eager for, but when it comes up he will have little incentive OTHER than to say "forget it".


Ah, but those things don't have to come up. He can just leave the status quo in place. In fact, this used to happen with older Republican Presidents. They would put back into place the Mexico City Policy on their first or second day in office with much fanfare as a sign of good will to the social conservatives. But if a President just happened not to do it, it just wouldn't get done. And if he was asked to sign some ginormous bill that continued an unholy alliance between foreign aid and contraception, he could just sign it and say it had other good things in it. Unless someone holds his feet to the fire, there's no real reason for it to come up in a natural way.

I think that it is more concerning that it isn't necessarily Trump, but some of his supporters, and some of his advisers, who sound fascist, if Trump is going to be handing influence to these people.

Bannon...

"I await Al showing up, to accuse a bunch of people who refused to vote for Trump of being responsible for him."

First I have to note that last Tuesday was 18 Brumaire. Inauspicious but fitting.

Step2 - On the one hand I don't accept a consumerist voting model so anyone able to vote in a state that Trump carried and who voted for any candidate not likely to defeat Trump constructively aided Trump.

On the other hand, blaming a handful of true believers would be sort of pointless. This is a massive system fail and may well reflect an acceleration of the Constitutional crisis that began in 1994. Sage's post and Paul's comment illustrate the central truth of human existence: If you don't know who the mark is, you're the mark.

What is important is the how and why: A man who inherited his wealth, who engages in all sorts of sketchy businesses and business practices, and is possessed of at least a couple of serious mental and moral issues hires a crowd from a casting agency to applaud him as he descends an escalator and announces he is running for president. Less then eighteen months later and to his own wonder he wins as the champion of the common man. There is a story here and we have yet to hear it.

This was first and foremost an artifact of our ancient and failing Constitution. The very folks from whom the EC was supposed to protect us are the ones who were decisive. The the EC was designed to protect Slave Power and it has given us a man elected as a right wing populist.

Given the power now vested in the national security state under Bush and Obama I find it some what chilling that the head of a part of that security apparatus as well as a small cabal of agents acted to effect the election of a candidate whose finances are unknown and whose closest advisors are fans of the now widespread advance of illiberal democracy. Parallel (I hope) to this the FSB also employed its talents to the benefit of the winning candidate.

This is likely the second "soft" coup of this century and coupled with the de facto evolution to a one party state currently in process and the extensive security apparatus portends an ominous future.

"Similarly, in the recent 60 minutes interview (just this weekend) he made comments about SCOTUS that betrayed his utter ignorance on matters of jurisprudence and justices."

Lydia, viewing these matters in terms of activist, originalist, living, etc., is a dead end (the terms themselves are meaningless) and has nothing to do with the actual process. Abortion involves a one time act which, having happened, is done. Marriage is an ongoing contractual matter that involves property, children, and medical/other life decisions. For a number of folks Full Faith and Credit would be at issue if SSM is left up to the states.

Also, and as I have pointed out previously, while restrictions on abortion are for the little people and don't affect folks at the top, restrictions on marriage affect everyone. Even plutocrats love their children, cherish their friends, and value their associates. This affection trumps mere theology.

I am guessing Bannon and Trump will look for a Justice who has the right view as to the Unitary Executive - perhaps a Yoo clone. In the instant situation Roe is small potatoes. Win Roe, lose the country - guess it depends on ones values.

"I would suggest that the most underappreciated factor in it all was a tyrannical Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Roberts, which had audaciously and repeatedly handed down to them massive political defeats, on such divisive and personally-felt subjects as health care and the meaning of marriage."

Which returns us to the "mark" issue. Robert's vote was designed to protect the SC while sabotaging the ACA . The goal is a one party state and a Unitary Republican Executive (I don't think Trump was what they had in mind) - Roberts and McConnell get that - you don't. In one sweep Roberts got to undermine the Commerce Clause and screw over the poor fools in red states who continue to vote Republican anyway. Call that a win/win.

Anyway Sage, what we are likely to get is the ACA tweaked and renamed Trumpcare.

We are in uncharted territory here. If you are concerned about "conservative principles" you simply don't get it - conservatism is over. The Australian economist John Quiggin describes the last 30 - 40 years as hard vs. soft neo-liberalism. Either way the neo-liberal (so called conservatism was never going to happen - see Kansas) project has failed. If Bannon/Trump get that we will have a new regime and the world will be a very different place. If he lets Ryan do his Rand thing they (and the rest of us) are screwed. Still the climate remains the ultimate wild card.

"Moreover, their acute sense of victimhood made them amenable to any appeal that seemed to be directed at them."

Polling seems to support this.


There was a time when Donald Trump courted great criticism by taking a pro-life stance. Presumably (since he isn't stupid) that was intended to be in exchange for conservative votes. But since even mainstream 'pro-life' organisations strongly condemned him for his stance, I think it's safe to say that he's not going to care all that much about repealing Roe v. Wade or other pro-life concerns.

If you are concerned about "conservative principles" you simply don't get it - conservatism is over. The Australian economist John Quiggin describes the last 30 - 40 years as hard vs. soft neo-liberalism. Either way the neo-liberal (so called conservatism was never going to happen - see Kansas) project has failed.

If you imagine that the conservatives here thought the last 30 years constituted visible battles for the presidency and its power between Republican conservatives nominees and Democrat liberals nominees, you REALLY don't have a clue what we are about. Neither Bush I, nor Dole, nor Bush II, nor McCain, nor Romney were conservatives. We know that.

Conservative principles can't be "over" any more than political truth can be "over". It can suffer a defeat of a sort - truth can be obscured for many a year. It is metaphysically impossible that truth can "defeated" so as to be no longer true.

The the EC was designed to protect Slave Power and it has given us a man elected as a right wing populist.

Very true. Except for 2 small points: the Electoral College was designed to protect the small states from the large (NH, RI, CT, DE, NJ). And the man elected is a not from the right wing. He is, more properly (to the extent these mean anything in this discussion), a LEFT wing fellow. Other than that, you hit the nail on the head.

The lesson to be learned from this election is: if you do not want a man of low moral character to win power through a populist campaign do not create the outrage for such a man to exploit.

Peter Hitchens explained that lesson to the liberal left in his "Mail on Sunday" column this week.

It is a lesson the traditionalist, Christian right needs to learn as well. Perhaps even more so than the liberal left.

It does absolutely no good to tell the rural middle and working class white people who have been scapegoated by the left for decades, who have seen their jobs exported and their replacements imported, and who have had their objections consistently dismissed and denounced as racism, that the candidate offering them hope for the first and possibly last time will betray them when none of the candidates you preferred had their interests at heart and frankly, were as bad as the liberal left candidates.

Nor does it do any good to point to the moral failings of the candidate. Twice in 1992 and in 1996, the Republican Party had the chance to nominate a man of high moral caliber and Christian faith who stood on the same platform that elected Donald Trump, articulating the arguments against immigration, free trade, and military adventurism abroad in an intelligent, eloquent, manner. In 2000 the United States had the opportunity to vote for the same man when he ran as a third party candidate. If you will not have a Patrick Buchanan, you will end up with a Donald Trump.

It also does not do any good to complain about the nasty and vulgar tone of those supporting the populist candidate. Over the course of the last year or so, the alt-right coined and effectively used a term to heap contempt upon mainstream conservatives who are pro-free trade, pro-immigration, and basically as hostile to the interests of working and middle class white Americans as the liberal-left itself. The response of some here was to observe that the meaning of one of the roots from which this term was derived is a new meaning attached to it in the context of internet pornography. That may very well be accurate but to harp on it is like telling someone who has just made a powerful case against your position that you do not have to answer his arguments because his grammar was bad, his punctuation was wrong, and he misspelled a few words. Perhaps the origins of the term in question are disgusting. What is even more disgusting is the way that mainstream religious conservatives have adopted a slightly more moderate version of the pro-free trade, pro-immigration position of liberalism and imitated their tactics of crying racist every time a white person has an objection.

Populism does create a threat of fascism, although I think the dangers of that with this president have been greatly exaggerated. Tyranny springs from democracy, as Plato argued in the eighth book of his Politeia. If you fear the danger of populism begetting fascism or some other form of tyranny, however, the solution is for responsible, non-populist, statesmen to address the concerns that give rise to populism. Enoch Powell was condemned as a fascist rabble rouser by the liberal media after he pointed out the problems that mass immigration and the Race Relations Bill would produce in the United Kingdom. He was nothing of the sort. He was a learned, civilized, High Tory statesman, a supporter of the British institutions of government and the established church, with libertarian inclinations on most matters of public policy. If the Conservative leadership had listened to him on both immigration and entry into the Common Market then parties like the BNP and UKIP would not have gained the strength they later did and there would have been no need for a Brexit.

I hope that the Conservative Party in my own country will learn this lesson, although I very much doubt they will. To that end I have offered them a suggestion as to who they ought to choose for their next leader: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2016/11/canadas-donald.html I hope they listen. ;)

Tony, the number of electors for a state is the number of representatives plus the two senators. The 3/5 compromise advantaged the slave states in the House over the others regardless of size. Any body whose membership was determined in whole or in part by its membership in the House is going to be advantage Slave Power.

Bannon and Bernie sitting in a tree? I think not. By his associates ye shall know him. From a lefty standpoint the BOD gets fuller every day. Also, that right-wing county just south of here - San Francisco we call it - gave Trump all of 10%. You might have a point if he offers Senator Warren Treasury and Bernie HHS. Get back to me when that happens.

But since even mainstream 'pro-life' organisations strongly condemned him for his stance,

Right, because disagreeing with one thing the candidate said while enthusiastically supporting and explicitly endorsing him with your PACs, putting him on all your voter guides, etc., is "condemning" him and loses you any concern of his once he's elected. Well, at least now we know what the Trumpite narrative will be if he betrays the pro-lifers: Those mean pro-lifers condemned one thing that he said that they disagreed with during his campaign, so they don't deserve for him to do anything for them in office, even though they voted for him in their thousands if not millions and browbeat all their friends to VOTE LIFE by voting for him. Got it. There always has to be an excuse for the Savior.


That may very well be accurate but to harp on it is like telling someone who has just made a powerful case against your position that you do not have to answer his arguments because his grammar was bad, his punctuation was wrong, and he misspelled a few words.

Gerry Neal, get real. So condemning disgusting behavior which has zero content is now analogous to ignoring a good argument? Give me an ever-lovin' break. And if anything, it's more important now than ever to oppose the alt-right.


What is even more disgusting is the way that mainstream religious conservatives have adopted a slightly more moderate version of the pro-free trade, pro-immigration position of liberalism and imitated their tactics of crying racist every time a white person has an objection.

Oh, of course! Being in favor of free trade is definitely more disgusting than the harassment that has been heaped on David French./sarc

By the way, I'm yes on free trade, no on pro-immigration, and I don't "cry racist" every time someone disagrees with me on either of those. Policy disagreements are things grownups should be able to have, on both sides. If you're anti-free-trade you should be able to argue your case without whining about how those who disagree with you are mean and don't care about whites or some other unmanly victim narrative. But I do cry racism when, y'know, there's real racism. And I'm disgusted by the attempt to shut that up by changing the subject and developing a theory that one should never say it, even when it's undeniably true.

We are in uncharted territory here.

That was about the only intelligent thing you wrote in that rambling screed. Thanks al, we’ve got about two months before a con artist with a volatile temperament and vindictive nature takes control of a global superpower and you want to waste that time blaming the soon-to-be-victims. If the only damage Trump does is to act like a traditional Republican while also pillaging the US Treasury for billions of dollars in graft I will be thankful that we dodged a bullet.

They sound those "alarm bells" by rote every four years.

With all due respect I’ve been following politics since the time of Bush Sr., although much more closely since the 2004 election, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Sure, you’ll always get some fringe type theory making an obscure or indirect connection; but there was very little crypto- about his campaign, it was direct use of classical fascist style and rhetoric and it has a lot of people rattled. It wasn’t an accident that even the writers at National Review took note of his strongman tendencies. I know I sound alarmist, and I hope you are right about him having more restraints than I imagine, but how many of the norms of politics has he already broken through?

The lesson to be learned from this election is: if you do not want a man of low moral character to win power through a populist campaign do not create the outrage for such a man to exploit.

True, and while I place a larger portion of the blame for that outrage on the Republicans and the manipulative right wing media, the Democrats deserve serious and significant blame as well. The attempts to curtail free speech through the back door of discrimination law, the fanatical extremism of trying to eliminate the Hyde Amendment and unqualified support for Roe v Wade even after the morally repellent revelations of the Planned Parenthood videos, an inability to accept a more limited, gradual approach to integration of new groups and social arrangements, wild overuse of accusations of bigotry, supporting free trade while doing little to control illegal immigration, the list goes on. In some ways liberals are more blind to our own bubbles than conservatives, but that varies greatly by particular issues.

So what went wrong? Just about everything, obviously. The Democrats had a much smaller field to choose from and it went with the establishment candidate in a season when anti-establishment fervor was high. Clinton was a mediocre candidate; about the only bright spot of her entire campaign was the first debate. She had to carry not only her own personal baggage, which was heavy in its own right, but also that of her husband.

The Republicans had far too many candidates to choose from and it went with the sleazy used car salesman who claimed to be the ultimate outsider. People who should have realized early that their chances were nonexistent like Jeb stayed in too late and let Trump's momentum build. Only halfway through the primaries was there actual opposition research done against Trump, it was assumed his supporters would naturally drift to someone else when he finally did something too outrageous (which turned out to be never). From a technical standpoint his campaign was a financial and organizational disaster, and rhetorically it was based almost entirely on braggadocio, whining and slander.

The mainstream media was truly awful, broadcast and cable news giving over $3 billion dollars in free airtime to the con artist to sell his snake oil. Furthermore, by categorizing a bunch of different but tangentially related issues under the singular title of “Clintons’ emails” they helped create the Achilles’ heel by which rogue FBI agents essentially killed her campaign. While the Clinton emails were a legitimate story and her actions deserving of severe criticism, by never fully explaining except in print media the timeline of events or the legal standards by which she could be reasonably charged for criminal behavior, the MSM created the fog in which suspicion and speculation ran out of control. Furthermore, neither candidate was covered particularly well on policy issues which ended up hurting Clinton because she actually did have a coherent policy; many of Trump’s policy positions seemed to change daily and sometimes hourly. Somewhere I read an estimate that the amount of media time devoted to Clinton’s emails more than tripled the amount of time devoted to her policy. It is reasonable to assume the same media differential happened to Trump but because his scandals were so varied it didn’t have the same cognitive effect on voters.

Finally, we have the problem of a two party political system that rewards polarization and discourages compromise. The preferable solution is to have more political parties but that will only be truly effective if those are built from the grassroots up. In the meantime the lack of strategic voting is helping to lock third party candidates out of the debates in presidential elections. There really does need to be a concerted effort to vote third party if you don’t live in a battleground state (~10% difference or more), especially when on the losing end of that difference but always applicable if you consider your party’s candidate unfit for office.

There's nothing in any of it that comes remotely close to the claim that "half the country are idiots,"

You're right. You did not say they are idiots, just immature attention seekers ("craving for attention on the part of Trump’s voters (and, decisively, his potential voters)"

And, perhaps indirectly, unbalanced narcissists ("that craving found indirect reflection in the unbalanced, narcissistic personality of the Republican candidate."). So, not idiots, but rather immature attention seeking unbalanced narcissists. Thank you Pope Francis.

Did it perhaps occur to you that a large swath of Trump voters looked at Hillary, looked at Trump, and decided they would rather take a chance on Trump than be slaughtered (politically only, hopefully) by the Hildebeast? Or simply that they have had it with political correctness, insufferable celebrities, and a slimy MSM that keeps telling them what to say, for whom to vote, and how often they can go to the bathroom? Or simply that Hildebeast was just that bad? No, in your words, they are "attention seeking unbalanced narcissists" says the guy who blogs his thoughts for the world to see and at which to marvel. If that is what you take from this non-apology "apology" of yours, no wonder you got so much so wrong.

C matt is somehow still missing the distinction between Trump voters and Trump enthusiasts.

It seems pretty clear to me that the writers of this blog are directing their, ahem, "unflattering" language at Trump enthusiasts, not Trump voters generally. And it is rather worse than "unflattering" isn't it?

For my part, I don't think even Trump enthusiasts deserve the nastiness ... Is "nasty" that too strong a word? What's in between "nasty" and "unflattering?"

"Craving attention" I find to be a particularly strange bit of psychologizing. White identity politics in this election was a defensive reaction. It was the cultural elites who have been making everything about race and identity politics in the current year, with whites always in the role of villain. And of course it isn't wealthy whites who really suffer from that. The white working class does indeed feel a sense of victimhood, legitimately so, and one need not go further and posit any immaturity in them for doing, what? -- not throwing a tantrum by rioting in the streets, but going to the voting booth and, like responsible adults, casting their vote for someone who gives the appearance of wanting to defend their interests. There's nothing narcissistic with wanting not to be persecuted. Trump is not the man to restore justice, I don't think; but I don't blame folks for lacking the prudence to see that. Most people don't have that much prudence, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to.

"Craving attention" I find to be a particularly strange bit of psychologizing.

Christopher, I had the same reaction to that. Trump, surely, craves attention. Voters who voted for him? In GENERAL, no more so than that they want their choice noted and successful.

Furthermore, neither candidate was covered particularly well on policy issues which ended up hurting Clinton because she actually did have a coherent policy; many of Trump’s policy positions seemed to change daily and sometimes hourly. Somewhere I read an estimate that the amount of media time devoted to Clinton’s emails more than tripled the amount of time devoted to her policy. It is reasonable to assume the same media differential happened to Trump but because his scandals were so varied it didn’t have the same cognitive effect on voters.

Step2, this is true. I find this one of the most ironic things about the whole cycle. MSM managed to be its own worst enemy: having long ago created an environment in which optics over substance completely controls the media, they could not locate the will to push policy, on which the Hillary was hands down more coherent. The reason they could not buckle down to tell the real truth about the email problem (including the complex issues of what is prosecutable) is that they have made it so much a matter of habit that "bad things are to be glossed over, good things are to be made pretty, at all costs avoid engaging the intellect". Reporters and editors are caught up by the same habits, even when they KNOW what they are foisting off on the public is just the superficial.

Finally, we have the problem of a two party political system that rewards polarization and discourages compromise.

Partly true. Except for this funny thing: the "polarization" is, in significant ways, more on the outside than the inside. The number of RINOs who are pro-immigration, pro-medium-big government, pro-big-business and government working to feed each other's desires, is high enough that for the last 25 years (at least) most action in Washington has been favorable to the inside 1/2 of BOTH parties. Republicans have been unable to locate a standard bearer who can lead the party without substantially giving way to the left-leaning half of the party on a LOT of fronts. Bush W's "No Child Left Alone", for example, was a big-government liberal concept (an update on a LBJ "great society" move), gussied up to attract some of the right-leaning crowd with accountability. If you are going to have big government intrusion into life anyway, I suppose that it makes sense for it to be accountable, but that doesn't change it into a conservative idea.

The preferable solution is to have more political parties but that will only be truly effective if those are built from the grassroots up. In the meantime the lack of strategic voting is helping to lock third party candidates out of the debates in presidential elections. There really does need to be a concerted effort to vote third party if you don’t live in a battleground state (~10% difference or more), especially when on the losing end of that difference but always applicable if you consider your party’s candidate unfit for office.

heh, that's what I said. I have objected for year to the mentality (in both parties) that leads members of one party to reject voting for a bill that they think is a good bill, merely because it was proposed by the other party and a win will give the other party a boost in good PR. But that's the kind of thinking you get with the two-party system, there aren't any coalitions of interests in different projects and policies.

AT LEAST for the uncompetitive states, like New York for example, people who were fed up with both candidates but voted for the person who was obviously going to be the loser could have voted for a third party, and made a much louder statement.

Trump is not the man to restore justice, I don't think; but I don't blame folks for lacking the prudence to see that. Most people don't have that much prudence, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to.

There I disagree with you, Christopher. I do think it was a fault to be even remotely taken in by this guy. He's such a transparent phony and huckster. The "baby Christian" stunt was particularly pathetic, almost nauseatingly so, and I do hold someone like Jim Dobson responsible for not being smarter. And Wayne Grudem jumping back and forth and back and forth and (as it were) live-blogging all his twists and turns. I just wanted the religious right to shut the hell up about the election. It was a "go home, evangelical leaders, you're drunk" election, and these were people who did have a responsibility to know better and do better. As for the folks in the pew, I was told on Facebook by someone that she actually knew people in her church who were calling Trump "a godly man." Now, seriously? It's not unrealistic to expect people to be more prudent and able to know a salesman when they see one. They would presumably be more prudent than that in buying a used car, much less voting for the President of the United States.

In contrast, theologian Michael Brown, though I disagreed with him at times, was always trying extremely hard to be clear-eyed about Trump's character and sincerity, and for the most part doing a good job. More people should have been capable of being like Michael Brown rather than James Dobson, even though I'm pretty sure Brown voted for Trump in the end. (AFAIK, he made a point of not telling everybody what he was going to do.)

You're right. You did not say they are idiots, just immature attention seekers ("craving for attention on the part of Trump’s voters (and, decisively, his potential voters)"

And, perhaps indirectly, unbalanced narcissists ("that craving found indirect reflection in the unbalanced, narcissistic personality of the Republican candidate."). So, not idiots, but rather immature attention seeking unbalanced narcissists. Thank you Pope Francis.

The connection I'm drawing between certain of Trump's supporters (the ones for whom a vote for Trump served as a sort of demand to be heard) and Trump's own demand to be the center of attention is much more indirect and attenuated than you are willing to allow. In the space of a couple lines, you collapse a relatively nuanced assessment of the dynamic between Trump the candidate and those voters into a simple bout of name-calling. Once more, we see that no discussion of Trump's voters can be comingled with any criticism of Trump himself, lest one of his partisans pick up his sabre and shout, "Draw!"

Again, this is wearyingly familiar ground, so I won't linger on it a lot longer, except to say that it's a manifestation of the blighted political culture in which we now live. That's mostly due to progressives and supine conservative public figures, who have cooperated in creating a situation where political virtue is established through a contest of who can most convincingly make a show of having been aggrieved.

So once more, for the record, I don't take a dim view of Pennsylvania Trump Guy's reasons for voting Trump, which is why I explicated a bit further on why I think his frustrations are reasonable--seeing as they coincide more or less with my own, as should have been obvious by a fuller reading of the post. I think even Pennsylvania Trump Guy would tell you that it was an unusual thing for him to have done, something like an act of political desperation. I do regard his vote for Trump as an electoral primal scream, so to speak, but if I take his remarks in my Facebook feed to be sincere, it's plain that he basically agrees with me on that. (How many times does it have to be driven home to me that "I don't care about any of that stuff he said, let's just break some s***!" before I'm allowed to take that sentiment at face value?)

If the exact same message were to come from a more pro-Trump messenger than me, Trumpists would largely agree with it. But as it is, the darkest possible construal of my remarks is bound to show up in the comments, whatever else I may say. The reason is that I detest Trump and am willing to say so, and I'm also willing to explain a vote for Trump by reference to some of his more unsavory personality traits. Oh well. That's how it I see it, so while it's not true that I intend offense, I'm also not willing to spend a lot of fruitless energy trying not to give it, for the same reason I no longer worry about whether my criticism of liberalism will have me denounced as "racist."

I'm largely in agreement with Step2's comment from yesterday morning.

Shorter Al: "We're in uncharted territory; everybody listen very carefully: First, we need to get rid of the Constitution."

I see that the President-elect is fulminating on Twitter right now about The New York Times. I'm cannot properly convey my gratitude for the First Amendment right now, even if, in context, we're talking about its protection of the independence of Carlos Slim's left-wing rag.

The effort by the Left to forbid dissent and prevent men from speaking their minds will assuredly continue. I do not rate the chances that Trump will arrest it very high at all. In fact, I suspect he'll take a view of the Constitution right in line with Al's: an antique inconvenience.

Which returns us to the "mark" issue. Robert's vote was designed to protect the SC while sabotaging the ACA . The goal is a one party state and a Unitary Republican Executive (I don't think Trump was what they had in mind) - Roberts and McConnell get that - you don't. In one sweep Roberts got to undermine the Commerce Clause and screw over the poor fools in red states who continue to vote Republican anyway. Call that a win/win.

Anyway Sage, what we are likely to get is the ACA tweaked and renamed Trumpcare.

We are in uncharted territory here. If you are concerned about "conservative principles" you simply don't get it - conservatism is over. The Australian economist John Quiggin describes the last 30 - 40 years as hard vs. soft neo-liberalism. Either way the neo-liberal (so called conservatism was never going to happen - see Kansas) project has failed. If Bannon/Trump get that we will have a new regime and the world will be a very different place. If he lets Ryan do his Rand thing they (and the rest of us) are screwed. Still the climate remains the ultimate wild card.

Al's descent into conspiracy theory is so funny it's hard to know what to laugh at most. Even if you want to grant the premises, that is. That the "powers" behind what's really happening could control things like they have but failed to keep a Trump out of their way? Or, that Roberts' "control" of the SC is designed to sabotage Obamacare? That neo-liberalism has failed because Trump - TRUMP!! mind you - won the election? Trump the liberal in everything but wanting money, fame, and power? (Because that sets him apart from the Hillary, right?) That Trump? This was more a win than a loss for neo-liberalism. What Al fails to recognize is that the liberalism that has been "in control" for 30 years is no adversary to the very sorts of things he is afraid Trump is going to do in terms of accruing power to the White House, in terms of using power to squelch speech he doesn't like. The ONLY difference is this: the older power-mongers in liberal-land have (knowingly and with malice aforethought) used "black" and "women" and BLT-GXQNVS "rights" as politically motivated tools to undermine opposition to their power-grabs and to squelch adversarial speech, whereas Trump is willing ignore those tools and use instead "Us vs them" and "jobs" as the tools. The objective is the same. Pretending that the damage to constitutionally (and humanly, and justly) ordered society he expects to come in Trump's train is of a different kind than that of the last 30 years of liberalism is just silly - they are the very same species of animals, just different spots.

As a conservative who voted Trump, I’m under no illusion that he’s going to turn back the cultural and economic decline: it’s already baked in the demographic cake.

There’s only one thing I do expect: that Trump fill the Scalia seat with someone from his pre-designated list. If he doesn’t do that, then I would blame the GOP Senate just as much as Trump. If Trump strays from the list, the Senate should just say no: pick from the list!! The Senate had a harder hill to climb when they rejected Harriet Miers – Bush had no pre-published list and the GOP was just expected to trust his judgment. We saw how that worked out. (Actually, it worked out rather well because we ended up with Alito, but that was certainly not Bush’s original plan.)

This is a singular but very consequential act and it was the one issue that turned me from a never-Trumper to a Trump voter. Other than this, I don’t expect much. If the nominee fails, we’ll have to blame the GOP as much if not more so than Trump.

If he doesn’t do that, then I would blame the GOP Senate just as much as Trump. If Trump strays from the list, the Senate should just say no: pick from the list!! The Senate had a harder hill to climb when they rejected Harriet Miers – Bush had no pre-published list and the GOP was just expected to trust his judgment.

It's generous of you (generous to the President) to treat this as some kind of game between the President and the Senate, but I *do* hold the President more responsible for his picks than the Senate. And, yes, that applies to Presidents I have liked and admired as much as those I dislike and distrust. The President shouldn't be like someone trying to get away with doing something bad for the country and contrary to the legitimate expectations of his constituency while it's "up to" the members of his own party in the Senate to stop him. They *should* be able to trust his judgement. Of course, in the case of Trump, we know he has no knowledge of constitutional government or constitutional law and no judgement to trust. I certainly agree with you that the Senate Republicans should hold his feet to the fire. I just disagree with the "just as much" language, as though a President gets a free pass for appointing bad justices.

Gerry Neal, get real. So condemning disgusting behavior which has zero content is now analogous to ignoring a good argument? Give me an ever-lovin' break.

If you don't like the signifier do something about that which it signifies. See below.


And if anything, it's more important now than ever to oppose the alt-right.

If that is the case, Lydia, there is a right and a wrong way of doing it. The right way is what traditionalist, Christian and other religious conservatives, ought to have been doing for decades. They should have made the issues that the alt-right is exploiting their own - as William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Frank S. Meyer, etc., for a brief time had the sense to do in the 1950s and 1960s. If responsible people, who believe in God, a transcendent order, the family, constitutional law and order, and civility had been the champions of working and middle class white men and women instead of jumping on board the left-liberalism's anti-racist, i.e., anti-white, bandwagon, there would have been no need for pagan, populist-nationalists, who couldn't give a hoot about civility to do the job that traditionalists were unwilling to do.

Perhaps it is arrogant to say so, but my conscience at least is clear on this matter. I have all my life been a traditional, Canadian Tory and have written extensively in support of our Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy, our Common Law heritage with its long prescriptive tradition of protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual, our tradition of civility, and even our cultural pluralism of English Protestants, French Catholics, and native Canadians under the unity of the Crown. I have been a Christian believer since I was fifteen, at first an evangelical and later an orthodox Anglican. In all that time I have never been a populist-nationalist. I have written at least five essays condemning the dangers of democratic populism and as many warning that nationalism is a deadly alternative to true patriotism. The problems that the alt-right has been tackling have become much worse in my country than they have in yours, however, and I knew that if people like me did not speak out, eventually a darker populist right would. I began speaking out against our "hate speech" laws when I was in seminary, a decade before Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant brought the issue to the general attention of the public. When Steyn and Levant were charged with hate speech it was over things they had said about Islam - in Levant's case he had republished the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons. A decade earlier, it was generally only people who said things offensive to the Jews, like Holocaust revisionists who were charged. I spoke out anyway, knowing that what was being used against people like Ernst Zundel in the late 1990s would eventually be used against Christians - and in Levant's case Jews. I got myself a rebuke from the dean for my efforts. Since starting "Throne, Altar, Liberty" I have written many times against the way liberal governments in my country, yours, the UK, and Europe have been trying to, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, "dissolve the old people and elect a new one." I have condemned anti-racism for what it is - anti-white racism. If other traditional Canadian Tories, preferably with larger audiences than mine, had the courage to do the same, Canada would not be in the mess she is in now and the Toronto liberal elites would not be wringing their hands about "alt-right" posters that have been appearing. If the Old Right had done its job right there would never have been an alt-right.

Why these voters, especially the much-talked-about "white working class" of rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, were so susceptible admits of various explanations, some derogatory and others less so, depending on your point of view. I would suggest that the most underappreciated factor in it all was a tyrannical Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Roberts, which had audaciously and repeatedly handed down to them massive political defeats, on such divisive and personally-felt subjects as health care and the meaning of marriage. A Supreme Court ruling is a horrible mechanism for the establishment of political consensus, as the ongoing thermonuclear war over Roe v. Wade ought to have shown.

Maybe, but that's a huge leap to assume "the much talked about white working class were so susceptible..."(emphasis mine). The use of the word susceptible is interesting to me especially since the other candidate was just if not even more flawed. Never-the-less, I would suggest to you that as a Hispanic middle class individual who works in the human services field, immigration is a huge issue to me.

rOnIn, I have a few questions for you. Are you a citizen, and did you vote? What is your feeling about immigrants who are not citizens who bypass the voter registration laws and vote?

Gerry Neal, I'm going to be pretty blunt with you:

I'm spending more time than I probably should dialoguing with people about every topic under the sun on Facebook, and so I don't have a lot of time to spend figuring out precisely what you mean by your words and to what extent we disagree.

For example, I'm completely against Canadian and British and Euro "hate speech" laws. I'm also against the banning of Holocaust denial *by the government*, though I'm fine with bloggers banning it from their threads, etc. But government banning of craziness of that kind only makes martyrs out of its advocates.

On the other hand, I would say that I am a "champion of working and middle class white men and women" only in the sense that I'm a champion of working and middle class people generally who are law-abiding, hard-working citizens, etc., etc. If most of those happen to be white, fine, but if they aren't, that's fine, too. I have no special desire to champion good white American citizens more than to champion good black American citizens.

I'm also anti-racist in the sense that I think there is such a thing as racism and that it's bad and should be called out, condemned, etc. Yes, non-whites can be extremely racist against whites, and also vice versa. Both happen. Both exist. That doesn't mean that I endorse the silliness of sensitivity training, the diversity racket, or any of the other leftist nonsense. But neither to I endorse being anti-anti-racist or telling people, "You should never accuse anybody of being racist, no matter what, because that's what the SJWs say" or any of *that* nonsense that we are hearing nowadays from some on the so-called "right."

If all of those statements mean that my preferred kind of conservative wouldn't be doing, from your perspective, "enough" to address some kind of "legitimate concerns" of those who have ultimately joined the alt-right, that gets a great, big, ginormous shrug from me.

At the same time, I'm willing to say all kinds of things about the dysfunctionality of inner-city black culture. I'm a meanie of the "pull your socks up and stop making excuses for your drug habit" variety both towards poor blacks *and* poor whites. (So bleeding hearts on both sides dislike me for that.) I can't stand the adulation of Martin Luther King. And I get angry when evangelicals make excuses for black rioting on the grounds of the "legacy of racism." Indeed, black communities are the most hurt by that sort of bigotry of low expectations.

Oh, and I was in favor of banning Muslim immigration long before it was "cool" on the right.

Again, I don't owe you a defense of my "political incorrectness" bona fides. But there is, in my opinion, no excuse for the alt-right. None. People can and should recognize and reject vileness and poison. I'm not going to excuse developing an alt-right habit and a taste for their abusiveness and garbage, because one doesn't feel that one's "issues have been adequately addressed," any more than I would excuse developing a drug habit or rioting on the same grounds.

Tony,

You seemed to be confused. Please re-read my post, since it was a reply to the OP. Anyways, here are my answers:

1.) Yes, I am a citizen.
2.) Yes, I voted.
3.) I don't have a "feeling" about illegal immigrants I have moral duty to all citizens of the USA; in other words, I find it aberrant that illegal immigrants are at times treated better than citizens of this country; hence my reply to the OP, and why I voted Trump.


"Thanks al, we’ve got about two months before a con artist with a volatile temperament and vindictive nature takes control of a global superpower and you want to waste that time blaming the soon-to-be-victims."

As opposed to ??? - Aux armes, perhaps???

The cake is baked, Step2, allow an old man a little kvetching and the title is an invitation to ramble; as cynical as I am I never thought stupid/ignorant/evil would go this far. Here's a video of me at a Trump rally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co

N.B. the comment at the very end.

" Furthermore, by categorizing a bunch of different but tangentially related issues under the singular title of “Clintons’ emails” they helped create the Achilles’ heel by which rogue FBI agents essentially killed her campaign."

I hope you understand that what you describe here is a coup and it was rogue agents, members of Congress, and the FBI director. As I also pointed out this is the second in less then 20 years - that puts us in banana republic territory.

"Shorter Al: "We're in uncharted territory; everybody listen very carefully: First, we need to get rid of the Constitution.""

Reading comprehension anyone?

1. Norms not constitutions are what count in the end.

2. All I did was point out two constitutional FAILURES in sixteen years.

" Or, that Roberts' "control" of the SC is designed to sabotage Obamacare?"

Sigh! Roberts has one vote. Reading the slip opinion it seems he changed it at the last minute, outraging conservatives on and off the court. From an institutional standpoint it seems reasonable to assume he preferred the SC not get the blame for taking away folks' healthcare. He was playing a long game here. He was able to kick the can down the road (and away from the SC) while weakening the Commerce Clause (as well as weakening the ACA) and further asserting his ridiculous and Taneyesque theory of state sovereignty.

" That neo-liberalism has failed because Trump - TRUMP!! mind you - won the election?"

??? Tony, Paul - this is a blog comment. I give you all credit for actually knowing things and therefore compress - too much I guess.

I'll try again but I'm not going to write a book - do your homework. Neo-liberalism has been ascendant since Carter and defined Reagan, Thacher, Bush, Clinton, Blair, etc. It failed as it was destined to and created an opening for the populist - right movements ascendant currently. The Occupy and Bernie movements are also a reaction to the failures of neo-liberalism.

Now Tony, if you actually read with comprehension you will see that I am seeing Trump/Brexit/Bernie/Le Pen/etc. as the result of - not the cause of - the inevitable failure of neo-liberalism.

Likewise, Roberts controlled one vote which happened to be decisive and pointing out problems and failures is somewhat different then "ridding".

That you will likely never understand the actual conditions under which we live is clearly demonstrated by the third party nonsense you all seem to be warming to.

Presidential systems with first past the post voting will resolve to two parties assuming certain norms are observed. Now listen closely. All that is necessary to go from a two party liberal democracy to an illiberal democracy that is de facto one party is for one party to see itself as a Leninist vanguard free to disregard norms, those stinking norms and the other party to be clueless until it is too late.

Now, in a Leninist environment, the Stalins will always rise to the top. As Krupskaya said, “if Lenin was alive, he would be in one of Stalin's prisons.”

With the Trumps we now have the happy and auspicious combination a New York Mafia mentality in league with Alt Right and Republicans, both of a Leninist persuasion.

The cultural stuff is meaningless. The slow recovery led to an opportunity that Bannon (I'm guessing) saw and persuaded Trump to roll the dice.

Sage, Obama only had a somewhat workable Senate majority for a few months. Kennedy was dying, Byrd was ailing, Franken wasn't seated until July, Nelson was a conservative, Lieberman was an Independent who usually made things worse, and Lincoln and Landrieu were from deep red states.

The three possibilities here were:

1. This goes nowhere. That would happen quickly so a small loss.

2. Trump catches fire but loses at some point leaving them with a huge new media potential and scores to settle.

3. Trump wins.

The Republicans in the House are mostly Leninists and dummies; Ryan is a con-man and a stooge. The only hope is that a Senator or two are old school.


The measure of Al's commentary:

hope you understand that what you describe here is a coup and it was rogue agents, members of Congress, and the FBI director. As I also pointed out this is the second in less then 20 years - that puts us in banana republic territory. ... 2. All I did was point out two constitutional FAILURES in sixteen years.

Back to the facts: Whatever was deficient and untoward w/r/t the 2000 election, it wasn't the short-circuiting of the Constitution that got Bush into the White House. There were frauds and misbehaviors, of course, but even in spite of that all the fraud didn't end up keeping Bush out. There were bad court decisions, surely, but they were negated by other court decisions, so THEY didn't keep Bush out. If the Supremes had not decided anything, and let the Florida court have its recount way, Bush would have been declared the winner. If there had been no court cases at all because every undercount vote was counted as best it could be, hanging and dimpled chads and all, Bush still would have had the most counted votes. As every reputable news agency that spent money to figure it out has reported. It is only the goofy die-hard liberals who still maintain that goofy canard "Not a natural born American "... oops, I mean "we was robbed". Talk about disconnect with reality!

All that is necessary to go from a two party liberal democracy to an illiberal democracy that is de facto one party is for one party to see itself as a Leninist vanguard free to disregard norms, those stinking norms and the other party to be clueless until it is too late.

Talking about the evil party and the stupid party, right?

If by Leninist you mean a system in the control of thugs, with a thin veneer of pretend obeisance to law, some argue that this is what we have had here since FDR, or possibly Truman, but _certainly_ by LBJ, more or less: we haven't had a true "liberal democracy" in its proper sense, where rule of law reigns supreme, since the Supreme Court took control of the nation by ignoring law and inserting their leftist wills - say, by the time of the Everson ruling in 1947 if not earlier. It just showed up in different parts of the government more clearly at different times. Certainly LBJ recognized the opportunities for illiberalism in the state of affairs in the 60s. It didn't _start_ after Carter. The left has been doing it for many decades.

Lenin was a great murderer just like Stalin, only Stalin remembered the golden rule of thugs in charge: do unto others before they do unto you. Leninism didn't fail when Stalin took over, only Lenin failed. His legacy went on.

The only thing "neo-liberalism" can claim for itself for the last 60 years is that it requested of its adherents an ever thinning attention to the more and more threadbare pretense of the "rule of law", finally obliterated beyond repair with Obama, and Obergefell which was not an act of judgment but of will. This sort of neo-liberalism didn't "fail" over the last 60 years, it merely outgrew its need to pretend not to be what it always was from the beginning: a regime of thugs. If anything, the programme of the left in this country for most of the last 60+ years has been a repudiation of what was reasonable in liberal democracy (understanding by "liberal" a much, much older meaning than that of the late American left).

Lydia,

I do hold someone like Jim Dobson responsible for not being smarter. And Wayne Grudem jumping back and forth ...
Oh, yes. Evangelical leaders ought to know better. I was thinking of the ordinary folks.

I will agree that any Christian who says Trump is a godly man is if not unusually ill-informed then self-deceived. But I've more often heard the line, "We're not electing a pastor." Which is still not a satisfactory answer, but less blatantly foolish (a Christian can support someone like George Patton as a good choice to lead troops into battle, and the disanalogy between a general and a president can be missed without us having to assume dishonesty in the person who misses it).

Chris, yeah, we'd have to parse various versions of coming to believe that Trump is "the main to restore justice." I guess I tend to think that it was so hard for people really to stick to voting solely strategically on a man of known bad character (the Michael Brown approach) that they were constantly "upgrading" their view of him to rationalize it. I would say that this is because of the intrinsic semantic nature of voting, but even if one doesn't press that reason, the phenomenon was observable--various degrees of actually *being taken in by* Trump, believing that he had some type of good character. Here is one of the weirdest I just witnessed after the election: I was talking on Facebook with a FB friend who is both very smart and very cynical. I don't know if he voted for Trump but suspect he did. This would have been one of the last people I would have predicted would attribute actual good character to Trump or to be taken in by him in any way, even if he voted for him strategically. I was therefore quite surprised when he gave the following opinion, based (by his own account) upon having watched Trump's reality TV show for years: Loyalty is very important to Trump. Trump is very loyal to his friends. Trump would rather "crawl over glass" (exact words) than be viewed as having not come through for the people who supported him and have continued to support him. Therefore, we can expect him to carry out his campaign promises.

This left me gasping, especially considering Trump's manifest _contempt_ for religious social conservatives throughout the campaign, his obvious taking them for granted. And they were the group we were discussing (SCOTUS appointments, etc.). The idea that a godfather-like phrase like "loyalty is very important to me" (which of course chiefly means _other people's_ loyalty to the godfather figure) means that Trump really is _personally loyal_ to his voting base and will "crawl over glass" to carry out his promises to them...I could hardly believe it.

So that's what I would call being taken in by Trump. And I can't help regarding it as in some sense blameworthy. It's a kind of willful making a virtue out of what the person perceives as a necessity (voting for Trump).

yeah, we'd have to parse various versions of coming to believe that Trump is "the main to restore justice." I guess I tend to think that it was so hard for people really to stick to voting solely strategically on a man of known bad character (the Michael Brown approach) that they were constantly "upgrading" their view of him to rationalize it.

Yes, Trump does appear to have a bad character to him, and I won't defend the actions which I deem as "bad." What I find interesting is that there were two choices to choose from with regards to who would actually run the country. People can "rationalize" or even gloss over the fact the other candidate (which would be the other option other than not voting) had also shown "bad character." So, what would have been the "Christian things to do?" No doubt Trump will stumble (hopefully it won't be something in the realm of what Bush did with Iraq or worse), but I do hope people keep underestimating him.

The idea that a godfather-like phrase like "loyalty is very important to me" (which of course chiefly means _other people's_ loyalty to the godfather figure) means that Trump really is _personally loyal_ to his voting base and will "crawl over glass" to carry out his promises to them...I could hardly believe it.

In retrospect Trump's statement that he could "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose any voters was not meant to be taken in jest, as he later claimed, but was in fact an ominous test, to see how depraved and sociopathic he could be and still maintain loyalty from his followers. I know there was some condemnation over that comment but I wonder if there was any condemnation at all from the alt-right or if they really are blind to their own slavish obedience.

...that puts us in banana republic territory.

Promising to imprison your political opponents, scapegoating and threatening the press, and trying to place your children in roles where they can exploit security secrets for profit is banana republic territory. Calling on foreign governments to actively interfere in American elections is to admit a lack of concern for American interests.

Lydia,

Agreed. It is blameworthy. The temptation to put one's trust in princes is ever to be resisted. I don't blame the generality of Trump enthusiasts, but plenty of people who fall into that category are blameworthy for this or that reason. And the one you describe is a common one.

"having watched Trump's reality TV show for years" ... that was his fist mistake, and perhaps the hidden source of his latter folly. Let it be a warning to smart cynical people everywhere.

having watched Trump's reality TV show for years

I don't know how anyone can watch reality shows for years. The very genre is revolting. But watching TRUMP for years? How could you? Watching the man put an ego trip week after week for years? You're darn right this was a mistake. A big one.

In retrospect Trump's statement that he could "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose any voters was not meant to be taken in jest, as he later claimed, but was in fact an ominous test, to see how depraved and sociopathic he could be and still maintain loyalty from his followers.

To me, it is hard to believe that Trump has enough internal discipline and foresight to perform such a test with pre-meditation. Just consider his debate behavior. It would seem at least as likely that it was never a joke so much as (a) the first thing that came to his mind to express a moment of his enormous self-importance; (b) a not-exact representation of the kind of things both he and the Hillary have in fact gotten away with, and so an almost-truth; with (c) exaggeration for effect (because he exaggerates everything); as well as (d) pumping up the fanatic part of his support by the kind of inflammatory behavior they love to see (not much need to TEST THEM, but to feed them). All done at a moment's notice by intuition and instinct, not by plan.

To me, it is hard to believe that Trump has enough internal discipline and foresight to perform such a test with pre-meditation.

Agreed on his internal discipline but I must strongly disagree on foresight. As chaotic as his campaign was he had a deliberate media strategy. About six weeks before he declared his candidacy I started seeing a whole bunch of puff pieces in the National Enquirer and other tabloids virtually begging him to run, so he was smart about setting the stage for certain low-information voters to accept a gaudy chamillionaire as a populist working class hero. Then there were his rallies which were brilliant at drumming up emotions to a fever pitch.
http://qz.com/645345/inside-the-trump-machine-the-bizarre-psychology-of-americas-newest-political-movement/

Just saw this stupid piece by Archbishop Chaput

http://catholicphilly.com/2016/11/think-tank/archbishop-chaput-column/the-right-place-to-start/

This quote pretty much says everything you need to know:

Ensuring public safety, the solvency of our public institutions and the nation’s border security in an age of narco-syndicates and terrorism — Mr. Trump has voiced all these concerns, and they’re all legitimate goals. But the vast majority of undocumented persons in the United States are decent people. They pose no threat to anyone. They want a fruitful life, they work for a living, they raise families, and their children born here are American citizens.


In other words, they’re a vital resource for the future of our country, not a tumor to be cut out of the body.

I don't know how it is that someone as smart as Archbishop Chaput can recognize the fact that this election is a bit of a game-changer, and NOT seek to understand why that is. "Decent" people don't break the laws of a country to get a job, and continue breaking the laws (by not paying income taxes, for example) and it is especially true that decent people don't vote illegally in defiance of the laws of their (unwilling) host country. Their being here in defiance of our laws is harming us. The illegal aliens being here in defiance of our CUSTOMS - in which we undertake to morph strangers into friends and neighbors (gradually, over time, with education and the immigrant's desiring to become just like us in terms of inculturation into the American mind-set) - implies damage to our culture.

I know people who think Chaput is a conservative. But I can't see it, certainly not in this. I think he has drunk the liberal kool-aid at least on this issue, and possibly on multi-culturalism and diversity being more important than our own culture.

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