In the past few weeks, things have not gone well for political philosophies based in traditional formulations. Right or Left (but more so on the self-identified Right) there is a kind of flailing, a death throe undulation that looks like grasping for anchors in something that feels historically relevant but in fact turns out to be sunk in air or sand and simply gets torn loose the moment any real strain is put on it. At its most discernable, there are a lot “I know what you mean” moments, but even these are more “I think I know what you mean, maybe” moments that later turn out to be coincidental brushes with familiar syntax and not much in the way of substantive connection.…
Tag: Freedom
Great Bear Politics
In all the chatter about Russian interference in the last election, one question keeps coming up. It’s never fully answered and because of that, the question as to whether or not such interference occurred remains in play. At this point, it’s like climate change—everyone knows it happened, but how, in what form, and to what end are details the absence of which seem to insulate the president for the time being. That seems about to change with Comey’s testimony.
But that question—why, what does Putin hope to gain, what’s the pay-off?—bedevils people. Especially people raised on spy thrillers and James Bond and post-Cold War conspiracy porn.…
Reality Check
The question came up in a recent discussion, “Why are you so sure if more people had voted they would have voted for Hillary?” Well, I’m not. I am fairly certain most of them would not have voted for Trump. I base that on a very simple number: Trump pulled the base that always votes that way and in fact received fewer votes than Mitt Romney. You can try to spin that any way you like, but to my mind that says something very significant. Namely that the GOP in its current manifestation is utterly dependent on two things to stay in office—that base and keeping the rest of the country disaffected from the political process.…
So What Do We Do Now?
It has been clear for all of the campaign season and is now becoming clearer that Donald Trump should not be president. He is temperamentally unsuited to the position, he does not have the working knowledge of how things work in a government, and he is wildly unpredictable. He is also as thin-skinned as they come.
But so what? He has been elected. For better or worse, unless something remarkable happens, he will be president for the next four years.
By remarkable I mean any of several possible legal scenarios.
There is a petition circulating to request the Electors of the Electoral College change their vote.…
47
The number will make sense presently.
It’s Friday. I’ve spent the last few days trying to process what happened Tuesday. It is not going well. I’m angry, frightened, and more than a little disgusted by the fact that we allowed Donald Trump to be elected president. I’m a cynic most days, an optimist forced by reality to concede that the world is perhaps more malign than not. But I’m also, marginally, an intellectual. By that I mean someone who deals with that reality by trying to understand it and make it cogent. By looking at things through the lens of causality, knowing that events are products, usually of combinations of factors no one person can see.…
Endorsement
With only a couple weeks now till the election, I’ve decided to make it plain (if i I haven’t already) that I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton.
I have a number of reasons for doing so, some of which are not quantifiable, but if I may I’d like to state a few of them.
First off, she is opposed, disrespected, and outright hated by all the right people. Her list of detractors is a grocery list of those I would like to see ousted from their own positions in government. This includes people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, Representative Issa, and just about every firebreathing Tea Party moron who has been miring the workings of my government in the muck of intransigence like a child refusing to eat their vegetables for far too long. …
Trump Card
Just a couple of thoughts. We’ve been hearing for months, here and there, how Donald Trump might be a trojan horse placed by the Democrats to discredit the Republican Party. That, presumably, a deal was done between The Donald and Hillary to run the most absurd campaign and make her look like the only viable choice. Not a bad idea for a potboiler political thriller. And the closer to the election we get, some variation of that idea is making more sense.
However. Despite what pessimists might say, the American electoral landscape is not really that controllable. And any such actual plan would long since have been discovered and revealed. …
A Couple Of Observations About The Culture
I’ve been working my way through Mario Vargas Llosa’s intriguing little book Notes On The Death Of Culture, which intends to be a general critique on the state of high culture and the impact its enervation has had on the world at large. Reading that and watching the election campaigns is a strange thing.
One of Llosa’s main themes here is that we have demoted “high” culture through a process of democratization of self-brutalization via social media and a mistaken acceptance of the idea that everyone’s opinion carries equal weight. That we no longer value wisdom, quality, or know how to appreciate it as distinct from middle or lowbrow culture, so-called “popular” culture.…
Unqualified
The clown car rolled into the station, the occupants decamped, and the frollicks began in earnest. Lots of shouting, foot-stamping, and low-grade denunciations from the podium of this or that.
Trump is almost universally seen by all but the most ardent supporters as unqualified for the office of the president. We keep hearing that, squeezed in between all the other verbiage being spewed about him. That in fact the only reason for some to vote for Hillary is because Trump is so thoroughly unqualified.
And yet, it would seem that most people who support him have a “Yeah? So?” reaction.
Consider: that very accusation, leveled by people despised by Trump supporters, makes him all the more appealing. …
Embracing Stupid
I’m hearing from some folks about Brexit and by and large what I’m hearing says this is a calamity. The idiots “broke the U.K.”
There were plenty of people explaining what would likely happen if they did this, but hey, what do experts know?
Well, quite a lot, actually, but that fact alone makes them unpalatable to the voters who actually cast a Leave vote. We see precisely that kind of—what would we call it?—“learning fatigue” here. Who do you think supports Trump? People who know little or all the most useless things when it comes to politics and economics and quite adamantly do not want to know, because knowing would contradict the fantasy world in which they stand forth at weekend keggers loudly proclaiming positions that might hold some value in a Game of Thrones episode, but since the folks they’re holding forth to know just as little or less, no one challenges them and they feel justified in clinging to their ignorance.…