BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Hah, yes, once again my errant prediction from page 1 of this thread has been taunted. Indeed, I was tragically wrong.

In my defense, I plead that my error was not underestimating Trump. So far he is almost exactly the president I thought he could be. My error was overestimating R voters. I thought that not enough of them could possibly be fooled by such an obvious charlatan. That was quite wrong .. and here we are.

So here's the white elephant in the room...what are we going to do with the working class and working poor white voters who historically vote Republican regardless of the appropriateness or legitimacy of the candidate involved?

In general, they are party faithfuls so they voted for Trump EVEN IF he was a D.C. laughing stock and a crafty snake oil salesman. Trump is a branding and marketing guru who rode the media like a cowboy on a bronco at a rodeo show.

It sounds like you expected this voting block to do the due diligence, see through Trump's smoke and mirrors and his dubious answers to crucial policy questions, and not vote for him. However, they remained loyal to the Republican brand. I believe they were tired of being duped by politicians who were RINO at the congressional level. They wanted something--anything different...and they most definitely voted for and elected that.

Part of the problem is that the D party hierarchy stubbornly hitched their wagon to a bad candidate. This created a no-win situation for many voters on both sides, myself included. The Ds had candidates that could have beaten Trump (or so I believe). But instead of trying to win the election or best represent their voters, the DNC had become merely a vehicle of Clinton's ambition.

Also, I wouldn't say that trump "rode the media like a cowboy". He capitalized on free publicity from media eager to portray stupidity in the R primary field, when they should have simply ignored him. But that's about it.

Here are some truly concerning polling results. (emphasis added)

Quote

The big picture question to me is this: can a democracy survive facing an organized propaganda war against its own citizens? And how is it possible to degrade their message and render it harmless?

We’re living in an age of anxiety. The country is being transformed by complex forces like changing demographics and technological disruption. Many people live within a bewildering freedom, without institutions to trust, unattached to compelling religions and sources of meaning, uncertain about their own lives. Anxiety is not so much a fear of a specific thing but a fear of everything, an unnamable dread about the future. People will do anything to escape it.

Donald Trump is the perfect snake oil salesman for this moment. He lacks inwardness and therefore is terrified by the possibility of anxiety. He has been escaping self-scrutiny his whole life and has become a genius at the self-exculpating rationalization. He took a nation beset by uncertainty and he gave it a series of “explanations” that were simple, crude, affirming and wrong.

Trump gave people a quick pass out of anxiety. Everything could be blamed on foreigners, the idiotic elites. The problems are clear, and the answers are easy. He has loosed a certain style of thinking. The true link between the Trump administration and those pathetic loons in Charlottesville is not just bigotry, but also conspiracy mongering.

In the White House you have pseudo-intellectuals like Steve Bannon who think the world is secretly controlled by the “deep state.” You have memos like the one written by the recently fired Rich Higgins, positing a massive worldwide conspiracy involving the A.C.L.U., the Muslim Brotherhood, the United Nations and global Marxism. The alt-right, which has emerged in support of the Trump administration, is marked by the same conspiratorial epistemology. It provides explanations for complex events that allow its followers to avoid anxiety. The leaders of the alt-right claim to possess superior understanding that pierces through the myths that blind common mortals.

From here it’s a short leap to those losers in Charlottesville. If the alt-right thinks the globalists secretly and malevolently control society, the neo-Nazis go back to the original version and believe that a conspiracy of Jewish bankers does. For them, tribalism is not only a way to feel some vestige of pride in their own lonely selves, it’s also an explanatory tool. The world can be a bewildering place, but not if you see it as a righteous war between whites and blacks, between straights and gays. The neo-Nazis are not the first group to discover that war is a force that can give an empty life meaning, even a race war.

The age of anxiety inevitably leads to an age of fanaticism, as people seek crude palliatives for the dizziness of freedom. I’m beginning to think the whole depressing spectacle of this moment — the Trump presidency and beyond — is caused by a breakdown of intellectual virtue, a breakdown in America’s ability to face evidence objectively, to pay due respect to reality, to deal with complex and unpleasant truths. The intellectual virtues may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else falls apart.

The temptation is simply to blast the neo-Nazis, the alt-right, the Trumpkins and the rest for being bigoted, vicious and hate-filled. And some of that is necessary. The boundaries of common decency have to be defined.

But throughout history the wiser minds have understood that anger and moral posturing are not a good antidote to rage and fanaticism. Competing vitriols only build on each other.

In fact, the most powerful answer to fanaticism is modesty. Modesty is an epistemology directly opposed to the conspiracy mongering mind-set. It means having the courage to understand that the world is too complicated to fit into one political belief system. It means understanding there are no easy answers or malevolent conspiracies that can explain the big political questions or the existential problems. Progress is not made by crushing some swarm of malevolent foes; it’s made by finding balance between competing truths — between freedom and security, diversity and solidarity. There’s always going to be counter-evidence and mystery. There is no final arrangement that will end conflict, just endless searching and adjustment.

Modesty means having the courage to rest in anxiety and not try to quickly escape it. Modesty means being tough enough to endure the pain of uncertainty and coming to appreciate that pain. Uncertainty and anxiety throw you off the smug island of certainty and force you into the free waters of creativity and learning. As Kierkegaard put it, “The more original a human being is, the deeper is his anxiety.”

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.

Here's David Brooks echoing winstonm's observation about our age of anxiety and kenberg's modest prescription (by example -- the dude does not prescribe) for finding a balance between competing truths:

Good article. However, we are in an age of anxiety because the majority of the populace couldn't adequately articulate or identify their own core values and belief system if their life depended on it (and it does). The majority of citizens are drowning in a sea of mis-information and dis-information and can't find safe ground because they don't have a strong foundation of self and don't know what information they should accept and what information they should reject. Too many voters are looking for identity and information in ALL of the wrong places and spaces.

If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.

Anxiety occurs when you are uneasy or uncertain about a future event. Nothing is guaranteed so our ability to "control" a future event is very limited. However when you are strong in your personhood and know what you stand for and will tolerate, you can manage your anxiety better.

Also, this article hits on a very important point. As we have entered this Mis-information Age and have become slaves to our electronic devices, we are not demonstrating the intellectual curiosity to successfully navigate this tidal wave of propaganda on the Information Superhighway.

We do not ride on the Information Superhighway, it rides upon us. There is no justification for our misinformation when so many of us have the data equivalent of libraries at our fingertips--if only we leverage the 150 times we check our smartphone or tablet EACH DAY!

Knowledge is power only when we search for it and make a conscious effort to interpret, understand,and apply it. We also have to be smart about our technology and minds. When we get a newspaper, we need to commit ourselves to reviewing the Politics section as we would the Sports section. There's nothing wrong with checking up on your favorite sports team or quarterback, but you haven't signed a multi-million dollar sports franchise contract, so boning up on Politics might pay more handsome dividends. We need to be vigilant about staying current on political news and information before the next propagandist takes advantage of our naïveté.

From When Do Democracies Die? by Max Fisher and Amanda Raub
There’s a question gripping political scientists that we’re exploring ourselves: How and why do democracies die?

The study of democratic backsliding, though around for years, is becoming increasingly urgent. In the mid-2000s, the global spread of democracy, after 200 years of expansion, stalled. But the real change came just in the past year, with the rise of populist movements in the part of the world considered the most solidly democratic: the West.

The new Western populism bears more than a passing resemblance to, say, Latin American populist waves that turned quickly authoritarian, as we discussed in a recent column on Venezuela. The warning signs for Western democracy, Amanda has written, are flashing red.

Over the next few months, we’ll be looking more at the health of Western democracy, but we also want to understand broadly how democracies die. So we wanted to show you a fascinating chart from Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who specializes in forecasting, illustrating the age at which democracies die:



The chart shows democracies that collapsed into authoritarianism between 1955 and 2010, arranged by their age at the time of collapse. For example, Zimbabwe had been a democracy for seven years when, in 1987, it reverted to one-party rule.

You can see one lesson right away: Democracies tend to decline when they’re young. The median age is six. A lot of these cases are countries emerging from colonialism, which tends to leave them with weak institutions and small groups of powerful elites.

This gets to an interesting thread of the debate over Western democracies: They tend to be pretty old. And old democracies, as this chart shows, rarely collapse.

But we don’t know whether this is because there’s something special about older democracies or it just looks that way because we’re working from such a small data set. There aren’t that many older democracies in the world — only nine have been around since 1940, according to data from a data set called Polity IV. Nine! What conclusions can we really draw based on just nine cases?

It does happen. That one case on the far right of Mr. Ulfelder’s chart is Venezuela, whose democracy lasted 46 years before Hugo Chávez ended that run in 2005.

Mr. Ulfelder has published the full dataset here. You can read his analysis in this 2010 research paper and in his book, which looks fascinating. We also enjoyed this 2011 paper on the relationship between economic growth and political stability.

When Donald Trump first announced his presidential campaign, I, like most people, thought it would be a short-lived publicity stunt. A month later, though, I happened to catch one of his political rallies on C-Span. I was riveted.

I supported the Republican in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances, even as conservative friends and colleagues said I had to be kidding. As early as September 2015, I wrote that Mr. Trump was “the most serious candidate in the race.” Critics of the pro-Trump blog and then the nonprofit journal that I founded accused us of attempting to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.” I hoped that was the case. I saw the decline in this country — its weak economy and frayed social fabric — and I thought Mr. Trump’s willingness to move past partisan stalemates could begin a process of renewal.

It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.

Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardizing any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life.

***

What, you may wonder, especially in the wake of Charlottesville, Va., did I possibly see in this candidate?

Although crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign, Mr. Trump eschewed strict ideologies and directly addressed themes that the more conventional candidates of both parties preferred to ignore. Rather than recite paeans to American enterprise, he acknowledged that our “information economy” has delivered little wage or productivity growth. He was willing to criticize the bipartisan consensus on trade and pointed out the devastating effects of deindustrialization felt in many communities. He forthrightly addressed the foreign policy failures of both parties, such as the debacles in Iraq and Libya, and rejected the utopian rhetoric of “democracy promotion.” He talked about the issue of widening income inequality — almost unheard of for a Republican candidate — and didn’t pretend that simply cutting taxes or shrinking government would solve the problem.

He criticized corporations for offshoring jobs, attacked financial-industry executives for avoiding taxes and bemoaned America’s reliance on economic bubbles over the last few decades. He blasted the Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz campaigns for insincerely mouthing focus-grouped platitudes while catering to their largest donors — and he was right. Voters loved that he was willing to buck conventional wisdom and the establishment.

He flouted GOP orthodoxy on entitlements, infrastructure spending and, at times, even health care and “culture war” issues like funding Planned Parenthood. His statements on immigration were often needlessly inflammatory, but he correctly diagnosed that our current system makes little sense for most Americans, as well as many immigrants, and seems designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of working people.

Yes, Mr. Trump’s policy positions were poorly defined, but these days, most candidates’ positions are. And yes, he had little support from the Republican Party leadership. But many of us thought even this might be a positive if it forced him to focus on “making deals” rather than on Washington’s usual ideological posturing. He was never going to fulfill all of his over-the-top promises, but we believed that his administration might achieve some meaningful successes.

In my writing, I tried to steer this administration in the right direction. During the presidential primaries, the blog I helped organize, called the Journal of American Greatness, was one of the leading voices supporting certain themes of Trump’s campaign. (Michael Anton, now a National Security Council adviser, was our most prolific writer.) Then, after the election, I founded a quarterly journal, American Affairs, largely to question elements of what is often called the neoliberal policy consensus — totally open borders for capital and labor; transferring power from national governments to transnational technocracies; unfettered markets; and democracy promotion as the sole premise of foreign policy. In other words, the disappointing legacy we inherited from the Bushes and the Clintons that helped pave the way to Mr. Trump’s election.

In this role, as one of the few people in the media who has been somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Trump, I am often asked to comment on his surprise victory, or more recently on his statements, policies and the gusher of news pouring out of this White House. For months, despite increasing chaos and incoherence, I have given Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt: “No, I don’t really think he is a racist,” I have told skeptical audiences. “Yes, he says some stupid things, but none of it really matters; he’s not really that incompetent.” Or: “They’ve made some mistakes, but it’s still early.”

It’s no longer early. Not only has the president failed to make the course corrections necessary to save his administration, but his increasingly appalling conduct will continue to repel anyone who might once have been inclined to work with him.

From the very start of his run, one of the most serious charges against Mr. Trump was that he panders to racists. Many of his supporters, myself included, managed to convince ourselves that his more outrageous comments — such as the Judge Gonzalo Curiel controversy or his initial hesitance to disavow David Duke’s endorsement — were merely Bidenesque gaffes committed during the heat of a campaign.

It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves. Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes. Either way, he continues to prove his harshest critics right.

Mr. Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone in the street and not lose voters. Well, someone was just killed in the street by a white supremacist in Charlottesville. His refusal this weekend to specifically and immediately denounce the groups responsible for this intolerable violence was both morally disgusting and monumentally stupid. In this, Mr. Trump failed perhaps the easiest imaginable test of presidential leadership. Rather than advance a vision of national unity that he claims to represent, his indefensible equivocation can only inflame the most vicious forces of division within our country.

If Mr. Trump had been speaking about the overall political climate, he might have been right to say that “many sides” are responsible for exacerbating social tensions. Yet during the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, only one side — a deranged white nationalist — was responsible for killing anyone. To equivocate about this fact is the height of irresponsibility. Even those concerned about the overzealous enforcement of political correctness can hardly think that apologizing for neo-Nazis is a sensible alternative.

Those of us who supported Mr. Trump were never so naïve as to expect that he would transform himself into a model of presidential decorum upon taking office. But our calculation was that a few cringe-inducing tweets were an acceptable trade-off for a successful governing agenda.

Yet after more than 200 days in office, Mr. Trump’s behavior grows only more reprehensible. Meanwhile, his administration has no significant legislative accomplishments — and no apparent plan to deliver any. Wilbur Ross’s Commerce Department has advanced some sensible and appropriately incremental changes to trade policy, but no long-term agenda has been articulated. Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue’s recently proposed legislation offers a sound basis for reforming immigration policy, but seems to have no prospects and has received comparatively little attention. The administration inexplicably downgraded infrastructure and corporate tax reform — issues with potentially broad-based support — to pursue a warmed-over version of Paul Ryan’s Obamacare repeal, which ended, predictably, in a humiliating failure.

Nothing disastrous has occurred on the foreign policy front — yet — but the never-ending chaos within the administration hardly inspires confidence. Many senior-level appointees are still not in place, including the assistant secretaries of state, for example. And too many of those who are in office appear to be petty, clueless, and rather repulsive ideologues, like Steve Bannon, who seem to spend most of their time accusing one another of being “swamp creatures.” It’s pathetic. No wonder an increasing number of officials are simply ignoring the president, an alarming but understandable development.

Effectively a third-party president without a party, Mr. Trump has faced extraordinary resistance from the media, the bureaucracy and even within the Republican Party. But the administration has committed too many unforced errors and deserves most of the blame for its failures. Far from making the transformative “deals” he promised voters, his only talent appears to be creating grotesque media frenzies — just as all his critics said.

Those who found some admirable things in the hazy outlines of Mr. Trump’s campaign — a trade policy focused on national industrial development; a less quixotic foreign policy; less ideological approaches to infrastructure, health care and entitlements — will have to salvage that agenda from the wreckage of his presidency. On that, I’m not ready to give up. -- Julius Krein, founder and editor of American Affairs

From the it's never too late to do the right thing files:


What did JK see in this candidate? What does see even mean?

He saw what everyone else saw. A man, and I use the term very loosely, who was willing to break through the 4th wall of our political play and talk about SO MANY WHITE ELEPHANTS that several political cowards wouldn't broach.

While Trump sucked up all of the media oxygen, he did inject a healthy level of "Keeping it real (interesting)" that our double-talking politics needed.

This trait doesn't mean he would make a great president, but it gave us hope since he was trying something clearly unorthodox and speaking to (and playing upon) people's fears.

Name your "White Elephants".

With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy. Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This offshoring has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.

In the United States, blue collar and service occupations generally refer to jobs in precision production, craft, and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers.

In the United States, the Rust Belt has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly. With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Erie, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio, Rochester, New York, and Saint Louis, Missouri, have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases. Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty, and urban blight.

btw I believe the coal industry is up, dramatically up in places. Technology/robots continues to chip away at jobs even in this industry

The North American coal industry remains negatively positioned for 2016 with thermal coal facing a slow, long-term decline and metallurgical coal prices unlikely to recover within the next 12 months, a Moody's Investors Service note said Wednesday. . ."Environmental regulations will pressure domestic coal consumption for the foreseeable future as new capacity investment is directed toward natural gas and renewables," the New York City-based firm said.

The biggest white elephant that Trump spoke to was creating a populist platform that spoke to chronic decline in Rust Belt America.


http://www.cnn.com/2...ders/index.html

The Rust Belt is a term for the region straddling the upper North-Eastern United States, the Great Lakes, and the Midwest States, referring to economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector (steel, automobile, and coal manufacturers). The term gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s.

Quite frankly, the decline of the coal industry happened on Obama's watch between 2008-2016 and under a carbon cap-and-trade emissions scheme that would undermine the economics and business model of "dirty coal". Even Time magazine labeled Obama's approach to the coal industry as the "War on Coal" which is effectively a war on the Rust Belt. Arch Coal and Peabody Energy, the top two coal producing companies in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy in early 2016 and showed just how this war on coal was going to play out for the Rust Belt before the federal election.

http://time.com/2806...pa-coal-carbon/
http://dailycaller.c...l-in-one-chart/

As such, Trump was speaking to the vulnerable blue-collar white males who were losing jobs left and right in this emerging global economy.

Source: https://en.m.wikiped...e-collar_worker

Enter Trump stage right to speak to and capitalize on the attendant fears created by dubious trade agreements and carbon emissions schemes that decimated the industries of the Rust Belt.

While the de-industrialization in the Rust Belt occurred during Blue and Red Presidencies, it appears Washington took the Rust Belt for granted and did very little to rehabilitate these forgotten decaying urban areas and economies.

Trump spoke to the Rust Belt voters and said, "Hey I know what's going on here and I acknowledge your economic and political reality. I won't treat your region like the forgotten step child in this seemingly unstoppable march towards an unforgiving global economy. I will root out corruption, get rid of (or renegotiate) these non-transparent international trade agreements that destroy blue-collar jobs, and bring manufacturing jobs back to the forgotten Rust Belt and make America great again."

He catered his platform to directly address the white elephant of the declining White blue collar males in the Rust Belt which could have been a political landmine for other establishment candidates.

This political ad was very telling. . . https://m.youtube.co...eature=youtu.be

Coal has been in decline much longer than 8 years. It is being replaced by cheaper, cleaner fuels like natural gas. Obama didn't do it.
Lower-end manufacturing jobs have been outsourced since the 1990s. Again, Obama didn't do it.

Trump tapped into anger and anxiety, all right. But it is misguided anger. Bill Clinton and other neoliberals (including Republicans) are to blame for not addressing the affect on the workers of policies of globalizing the economy.

Obama's greatest failing (IMO) was in failing to communicate directly to the American people on t.v.