Now that Trump has crushed yet another primary, there's lots of concern trolling going around about how he still can't win with "only" 35% of the vote. And there's even wimpy depressive supporters (probably from out West) who are falling for it. Do not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The trouble for this scare story is that the nomination does not go to whoever gets a majority of the popular vote. It is who gets the majority of delegates to the national convention, and these delegates are sent from each state. These delegates are what is up for grabs in the state's primary or caucus.
Some states have proportional representation, and other states have winner-take-all. Some delegates are won through the vote at the statewide level, and others through the vote at the level of each Congressional district. See this table for how many delegates each state has (total, statewide, district), and what the rules are for securing them.
On Super Tuesday, there are a bunch of proportional contests, where Trump will clean up, although not as totally as he did in South Carolina, where there were winner-take-all rules for both the statewide and district delegates. While not winning over 50%, Trump still won every Congressional district and the state overall, so he got 100% of the delegates at stake.
After Super Tuesday, more of these winner-take-all states come into play, including ones with a yuge chunk of delegates up for grabs, like Florida and California, although most of their delegates are at the district level. Still, when you add up all the smaller and medium states with winner-take-all delegates, it looks very favorable to Trump, even if he does have a ceiling below 50% of the popular vote.
Let's just check the difference between how much of the popular vote a candidate has won, and how much of the delegate pool that has translated into:
Popular %, delegates %
Trump___: 34, 70
Cruz____: 22, 11
Rubio___: 21, 10
Kasich___: 09, 05
Trump has twice as large of a share of the delegate pool as his share of the popular vote would have gotten him under a purely proportional system. Each of the cucks has only half of the number of delegates that their popular vote numbers would have gotten them.
Sure, as we get into states west of the Mississippi yet inland from the Pacific, the apocalyptic cult guru will pick up a larger share of delegates than he currently has. And there will be Establishment bastions on the West Coast and throughout the Northeast that will go for the foam party robot.
But Trump is already at 70% of the delegate pool, and there simply aren't enough delegates up for grabs for the other two -- the frontier preppers only show up in decent numbers in Texas (which is not winner-take-all, so they can't leverage a narrow plurality into a total sweep), and the country club yuppies are only dotted around the major cities. Reminder: foam party robot won the two Establishment stronghold cities in South Carolina (Columbia and Charleston) but still lost the districts that they belong to.
The cucks are also in for a rude awakening about how non-Establishment the Republicans are in the Great Lakes, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic. Today's Establishment hails from the Sun Belt and reflects its laissez-faire, anti-government norms. Trump's highest level of dominance over the other candidates is found in the Rust Belt and New England, where the cucks are naively assuming that just because they're blue states, they'll mostly go for Rubio. Fat chance. With such overwhelming support in the Northeast, even in the proportional states it's possible for Trump to clear 50% and take all the delegates.
Who knows, perhaps Trump's delegate share will decline -- but by 20 percentage points? Doesn't seem too likely, especially with each victory making wishy-washy voters less anxious about voting for someone "who can't win".
That said, we shouldn't rest on our laurels, since winning by the largest margin will provide the most compelling mandate -- ditto for the general election. We need to leave no doubt in the Establishment's minds that the elitist and globalist ways are over with, and now it's all about populism and nationalism.
February 21, 2016
February 19, 2016
Ossified habits of mock-elections prevent Establishment from consolidating in new environment of real-election
An earlier post took a look at how the current climate of hyper-competitiveness is keeping the individual Establishment candidates from coalescing around just one of them, while the others fall on their swords for the greater good of their Establishment team.
"Why do I have to fall on my sword? You do it!" "No, you!" "No, you first!" "No, you first!"
"I'm the obvious choice for taking on Trump, my polls are better than your guyses." "Oh, those polls mean nothing this early. I've got the most endorsements!" "You two losers can't raise as much money as I can!" "C'mon folks, we're trying to stay relevant in 2016 and none of yinz guys has ever been to a gay wedding n'at? Jeez-o-man..."
Etc etc etc, while Trump sails on unchallenged.
There's something else going on, though, where the candidates have become so accustomed to the phony campaigns of the past several decades, that they can't adjust to today's environment where there's a genuine candidate running.
According to business as usual, the Establishment favors a variety of initial cucks, they duke it out in a rehearsed and ritualistic way for the Party's nomination, where nothing is really at stake because whoever wins, the Establishment wins. The only open question is which cuck will prove most popular -- or least unpopular -- with voters, since after all they do want to win the election. The empty mock-combat during the primary is only carried out to winnow the field down to the team's best chance of winning the general election.
Trump has mentioned several times how bizarre it is after the debates, where the other candidates, who have been taking shots at each other for two hours, immediately get all chummy with each other when the debate is over. It's clearly a mock-debate, and there's a sense of sportsmanship among teammates -- may the best cuck win.
Because Trump is not part of the club, does not know its ways, and does not participate in its rituals, the Establishment candidates all ignore him. It's no different than a bunch of guys playing baseball, and excluding the guy who, for some unknown reason, acts as though the game is football. In their minds, he's a wannabe and therefore not worth their attention, not worth their mock-attacks. True, he keeps interjecting his football plays into their baseball game, but that only deserves a dismissive "get off the field" response -- not an actual counter-attack. "Refs, seriously? Remove this confused wannabe player, so we can get back to our regularly scheduled game."
That was very evident during the debate that Trump skipped in order to bring Fox News to heel, and to raise money for veterans' groups at his own rally. By all accounts (too boring; didn't watch myself) it was what should have been taking place all along. With the real candidate gone, they could at long last get around to their ritualistic mock-debate.
This mindset and behavioral style has extended to their campaign trail strategies as well. Because Trump is just a wannabe who doesn't know how the game is played and isn't willing to learn, they all ignore his rallies, interviews, and so on, as though it were a mere shadow campaign by the kid who didn't get allowed into the stadium where the actual game is being played by the actual politicians.
With Trump being out of sight and out of mind, they spend most of their time, money, and effort taking shots at one another. They don't see it as friendly fire because, in their minds, there is no common enemy that puts them all onto the same team. Oh sure, there's that pseudo-candidate who hates all of us, but it's all make-believe, so we don't have to "consolidate" around a single hashtag Establishment candidate.
You see this every time they're forced to remark about Trump's campaign during their rallies, interviews, and so on. They're so irritated at having to take a time-out to deal with a streaker who's burst onto the field. It's like, "Why do they keep asking us about that pretend-campaign going on? Sigh, OK, I'll respond: he's a blustering carnival barker with no specifics who cannot insult his way to the Presidency. There -- is five seconds enough of a response? And now back to my regularly scheduled attacks on a fellow cuck."
But isn't that friendly fire? "C'mon folks, let's get POZ-ITIVE. No matter which one of us cucks wins, the Party wins."
Having been trained as puppets who engage in only sparring-campaigns for their whole careers, insulated from real challengers who hit for real, they cannot help but go through the same old motions. These choreographed wrastlers now find themselves face-to-face with a genuine tough guy in a no-holds-barred street fight, and with no experience to guide them, they fall back on their routine of dancing around with each other, while he advances and puts one after another of them in the hospital.
I think this is what got the Establishment into such deep trouble in the first place. My earlier story about their hyper-competitiveness is more relevant to what has happened after the alarms had been publicly sounded by everyone in the Establishment -- other politicians, the donors, the pundits, everyone -- and they were ordered to perform better as a team by consolidating around just one of them. Then, their overweening ambition has gotten the better of them.
And the rest is history: the unified will destroy the fragmented.
"Why do I have to fall on my sword? You do it!" "No, you!" "No, you first!" "No, you first!"
"I'm the obvious choice for taking on Trump, my polls are better than your guyses." "Oh, those polls mean nothing this early. I've got the most endorsements!" "You two losers can't raise as much money as I can!" "C'mon folks, we're trying to stay relevant in 2016 and none of yinz guys has ever been to a gay wedding n'at? Jeez-o-man..."
Etc etc etc, while Trump sails on unchallenged.
There's something else going on, though, where the candidates have become so accustomed to the phony campaigns of the past several decades, that they can't adjust to today's environment where there's a genuine candidate running.
According to business as usual, the Establishment favors a variety of initial cucks, they duke it out in a rehearsed and ritualistic way for the Party's nomination, where nothing is really at stake because whoever wins, the Establishment wins. The only open question is which cuck will prove most popular -- or least unpopular -- with voters, since after all they do want to win the election. The empty mock-combat during the primary is only carried out to winnow the field down to the team's best chance of winning the general election.
Trump has mentioned several times how bizarre it is after the debates, where the other candidates, who have been taking shots at each other for two hours, immediately get all chummy with each other when the debate is over. It's clearly a mock-debate, and there's a sense of sportsmanship among teammates -- may the best cuck win.
Because Trump is not part of the club, does not know its ways, and does not participate in its rituals, the Establishment candidates all ignore him. It's no different than a bunch of guys playing baseball, and excluding the guy who, for some unknown reason, acts as though the game is football. In their minds, he's a wannabe and therefore not worth their attention, not worth their mock-attacks. True, he keeps interjecting his football plays into their baseball game, but that only deserves a dismissive "get off the field" response -- not an actual counter-attack. "Refs, seriously? Remove this confused wannabe player, so we can get back to our regularly scheduled game."
That was very evident during the debate that Trump skipped in order to bring Fox News to heel, and to raise money for veterans' groups at his own rally. By all accounts (too boring; didn't watch myself) it was what should have been taking place all along. With the real candidate gone, they could at long last get around to their ritualistic mock-debate.
This mindset and behavioral style has extended to their campaign trail strategies as well. Because Trump is just a wannabe who doesn't know how the game is played and isn't willing to learn, they all ignore his rallies, interviews, and so on, as though it were a mere shadow campaign by the kid who didn't get allowed into the stadium where the actual game is being played by the actual politicians.
With Trump being out of sight and out of mind, they spend most of their time, money, and effort taking shots at one another. They don't see it as friendly fire because, in their minds, there is no common enemy that puts them all onto the same team. Oh sure, there's that pseudo-candidate who hates all of us, but it's all make-believe, so we don't have to "consolidate" around a single hashtag Establishment candidate.
You see this every time they're forced to remark about Trump's campaign during their rallies, interviews, and so on. They're so irritated at having to take a time-out to deal with a streaker who's burst onto the field. It's like, "Why do they keep asking us about that pretend-campaign going on? Sigh, OK, I'll respond: he's a blustering carnival barker with no specifics who cannot insult his way to the Presidency. There -- is five seconds enough of a response? And now back to my regularly scheduled attacks on a fellow cuck."
But isn't that friendly fire? "C'mon folks, let's get POZ-ITIVE. No matter which one of us cucks wins, the Party wins."
Having been trained as puppets who engage in only sparring-campaigns for their whole careers, insulated from real challengers who hit for real, they cannot help but go through the same old motions. These choreographed wrastlers now find themselves face-to-face with a genuine tough guy in a no-holds-barred street fight, and with no experience to guide them, they fall back on their routine of dancing around with each other, while he advances and puts one after another of them in the hospital.
I think this is what got the Establishment into such deep trouble in the first place. My earlier story about their hyper-competitiveness is more relevant to what has happened after the alarms had been publicly sounded by everyone in the Establishment -- other politicians, the donors, the pundits, everyone -- and they were ordered to perform better as a team by consolidating around just one of them. Then, their overweening ambition has gotten the better of them.
And the rest is history: the unified will destroy the fragmented.
February 18, 2016
Court schmourt: Men with guns enforcing deportation of immigrants (Operation Wetback)
The initial hysteria about replacing Scalia on the Supreme Court seems to have already subsided. Still, let's remember who really enforces policy -- not the courts but the executive branch. One of the major cases lined up for the highest court in the land has to do with Obama's executive orders for the Border Patrol to more or less stand down and let the whole third world flood over our borders.
First, notice where the weakness is coming from -- the executive branch, whose chief officer is not only refusing to enforce our borders, but is actively ordering them to step aside. It's not as though we had a resolute executive and legislative branch struggling to defend our borders against invaders, but that dang unelected court just insists on usurping Presidential and Congressional authority. Already we see how irrelevant the judiciary has been in getting us to where we are.
More than that, though, is how things will change back toward strong borders -- a determined President Trump will send out teams of men with guns to round up whoever has to go, and will escort them over the border. Other men with guns will be stationed along the border to make sure no one comes back in. Along with the soaring Trump Wall that will also be built through executive action, not through judicial opinion.
In the earlier post on the impotence / irrelevance of the judiciary's opinions, we learned about Governors of several Southern states sending in their state militia (National Guard) in order to block the desegregation of their public schools, which the Supreme Court had already found to be unconstitutional in 1954. We saw pictures of how that was countered -- by the President sending in the Army. There were no protracted court battles: the federal men with guns had more power than the state-level men with guns, so the federal level got its way, and desegregation went through in the South.
In that vein, here are some pictures of the deportation of Mexican immigrants during the 1950s. These immigrants were not responding to a judicial decision, but to men with guns who rounded them up, put them on trains, and pointed guns on them if they tried to flee or sneak back across the border. This was part of Operation Wetback, which was ordered by the head of the INS and carried out by armed officers of the Border Patrol. Both the INS and Border Patrol belonged to a federal executive department (Justice) -- no role for the legislature or the courts.
This gives us hope even in the worst-case scenario for the Supreme Court's decision about immigration. Just suppose that Obama nominates a hardcore open-borders Justice, who is then confirmed by the Senate, and the new Court delivers an open-borders opinion. We will still win against them if we elect Trump as President. He will control the men with guns who actually enforce the borders -- both at the border, and rounding up illegals already within our borders. Let the Justices opine all they want: when it comes to enforcing the laws, it is still, as always, the President who holds ultimate authority.
First, notice where the weakness is coming from -- the executive branch, whose chief officer is not only refusing to enforce our borders, but is actively ordering them to step aside. It's not as though we had a resolute executive and legislative branch struggling to defend our borders against invaders, but that dang unelected court just insists on usurping Presidential and Congressional authority. Already we see how irrelevant the judiciary has been in getting us to where we are.
More than that, though, is how things will change back toward strong borders -- a determined President Trump will send out teams of men with guns to round up whoever has to go, and will escort them over the border. Other men with guns will be stationed along the border to make sure no one comes back in. Along with the soaring Trump Wall that will also be built through executive action, not through judicial opinion.
In the earlier post on the impotence / irrelevance of the judiciary's opinions, we learned about Governors of several Southern states sending in their state militia (National Guard) in order to block the desegregation of their public schools, which the Supreme Court had already found to be unconstitutional in 1954. We saw pictures of how that was countered -- by the President sending in the Army. There were no protracted court battles: the federal men with guns had more power than the state-level men with guns, so the federal level got its way, and desegregation went through in the South.
In that vein, here are some pictures of the deportation of Mexican immigrants during the 1950s. These immigrants were not responding to a judicial decision, but to men with guns who rounded them up, put them on trains, and pointed guns on them if they tried to flee or sneak back across the border. This was part of Operation Wetback, which was ordered by the head of the INS and carried out by armed officers of the Border Patrol. Both the INS and Border Patrol belonged to a federal executive department (Justice) -- no role for the legislature or the courts.
This gives us hope even in the worst-case scenario for the Supreme Court's decision about immigration. Just suppose that Obama nominates a hardcore open-borders Justice, who is then confirmed by the Senate, and the new Court delivers an open-borders opinion. We will still win against them if we elect Trump as President. He will control the men with guns who actually enforce the borders -- both at the border, and rounding up illegals already within our borders. Let the Justices opine all they want: when it comes to enforcing the laws, it is still, as always, the President who holds ultimate authority.
February 16, 2016
Switch to class politics succeeds most where identity politics is about freely chosen groups (achieved vs. ascribed status)
As voters begin to shift out of the identity politics / culture war paradigm of the last generation or so, and back into one about political economy, anti-Establishment candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are exceeding everyone's expectations.
In contrast to the Democrats' side, the rise of populism has been unlimited among the Republican side, because their form of identity politics -- evangelical Christianity -- is a form of achieved status rather than ascribed status. That is, they aren't born into their identity group, or otherwise drafted into it involuntarily. They deliberately choose to join it, usually with that choice being front and center -- they had a "born-again" experience during their own lifetimes, not that they're just going along with whatever their parents went along with.
With ascribed status, the person's membership is beyond their control, such as racial or ethnic group, sex, homosexuality, and so on. These kinds of identity groups make up the identity politics crowd among Democrats.
Because membership in the evangelical identity group stems from a deliberate personal choice, it is hard for them to argue that they are being treated unfairly as a group, and therefore harder for them to nurse a grudge and form an identity politics agenda. In the public's mind, evangelicals bear the consequences of their actions, namely choosing to belong to a group with less-than-popular beliefs about how society ought to be. If, on the other hand, someone is treated on account of belonging to a group that's beyond their control, it's more likely to strike the mind as unfair.
So, the average person is OK with excluding evangelicals from influencing school policy, because they could choose to change their beliefs to align with the mainstream, but are sticking to their guns. For the same reason, and on the other side of the political spectrum, the average person would be OK with excluding Communists or anarchists. It is not so much the people, or the identity, that is being targeted for exclusion, but the beliefs that its members choose to base their identity on.
It's the other way around with ascribed status. The average person would not be OK with excluding blacks or women from influencing school policy, because they can't change being black or being a woman, in order to satisfy the gatekeepers and wind up on the school board after all. Here, it would seem to be the person or identity themselves that were being targeted, and not just a set of views.
Therefore, blacks, women, and gays will be more likely to play identity politics motivated by the belief that they're being treated unfairly because of belonging to a group that they can't change. Evangelicals may think they're being treated unfairly, but they don't get as fiery about the unfairness aspect because they realize that they're not being discriminated against for something beyond their control. Fundamentally, they are just another ideological group. They may be angry that their ideology is being excluded in favor of a different, opposed ideology -- but not because of something they can't help.
In short, when identity is innate, it fires up identity politics to a much more fierce and stubborn game of chicken. We can't change that part of our identity, so either the other side goes or we do.
With a far weaker form of identity politics, the Republican side can leave behind the culture war much more easily -- worst comes to worst, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's". (That was Jerry Falwell Jr.'s appeal to evangelicals who may worry about Trump's personal life or faith.) There still has to be a powerful enough economic motivator, but when the economy is doing as awful as it has been for lower and middle-class people, the shift out of identity politics and toward class is all but inevitable.
On the Democrats' side, there's a similar shift but it's softer and halting. On basic economic matters, blacks have done horribly, so they ought to be rallying around Sanders. But he's not peddling that much in the way of feel-good identity politics, and has largely side-stepped the culture war. And their identity as blacks is innate, unlike being an evangelical Christian, so the lure of identity politics is more salient and tempting.
Ditto for women -- if they're young and saddled with student loan debts, they want to vote for Sanders, but then again the appeal of Hillary to their innate identity gives them some pause and some of them will blink. Generally, though, women do not form an organized political bloc because men and women have to help each other out, whatever the political goal is. So even though sex is every bit as innate as race, it's not as natural of a political fault-line (unlike race, which is more obviously tribal), and class-minded women are finding an easier time writing off Hillary than are class-minded blacks, Hispanics, etc.
This also explains why the gays are so all-in for Hillary -- there is no class angle to sodomy. There are any number of "intersectional" topics about blacks unemployment, black imprisonment, black housing, and so on and so forth. Likewise for women having maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, promotion rates, etc. Having one foot in a class topic allows members of an identity group to put aside the culture war for a moment and focus on getting a decent material standard of living.
There is no such thing on the political battlefield as gay employment, gay imprisonment, gay housing, gay income, gay debts, etc. Oh sure, they can try to make stuff up -- "gay discrimination in ads for housemates," AKA "I don't want some creepy fag spying on me in the shower". But everyone recognizes it as bullshit and does not treat it as the Next Big Moral Panic in "intersectional" identity politics. It's simply much more difficult for gays to face any kind of discrimination because they're harder for the average person to spot and to target, compared to blacks, Mexicans, women, etc.
The closest it gets is their anxiety about indulging in so much filthy deviance and having the public foot the bill for the doctors to clean up after their hedonistic mess. But that's minor in the overall scheme of the political economy.
With only born-this-way identity politics on their minds, the gays are rallying 100% around the culture war candidate, Hillary Clinton. They could not be more flabbergasted by the appeal of the class candidate, Bernie Sanders, for the young college crowd. It turns out that all those homo-enablers in the undergraduate student body will cut the culture war loose and vote for the class-oriented candidate when they have more important things to worry about, like crushing college loan debts.
I'll take that as the silver lining of the student loan bubble -- at least it's getting airheaded young people to vote on class rather than affiliation with fudgepackers and AIDS mummies.
In contrast to the Democrats' side, the rise of populism has been unlimited among the Republican side, because their form of identity politics -- evangelical Christianity -- is a form of achieved status rather than ascribed status. That is, they aren't born into their identity group, or otherwise drafted into it involuntarily. They deliberately choose to join it, usually with that choice being front and center -- they had a "born-again" experience during their own lifetimes, not that they're just going along with whatever their parents went along with.
With ascribed status, the person's membership is beyond their control, such as racial or ethnic group, sex, homosexuality, and so on. These kinds of identity groups make up the identity politics crowd among Democrats.
Because membership in the evangelical identity group stems from a deliberate personal choice, it is hard for them to argue that they are being treated unfairly as a group, and therefore harder for them to nurse a grudge and form an identity politics agenda. In the public's mind, evangelicals bear the consequences of their actions, namely choosing to belong to a group with less-than-popular beliefs about how society ought to be. If, on the other hand, someone is treated on account of belonging to a group that's beyond their control, it's more likely to strike the mind as unfair.
So, the average person is OK with excluding evangelicals from influencing school policy, because they could choose to change their beliefs to align with the mainstream, but are sticking to their guns. For the same reason, and on the other side of the political spectrum, the average person would be OK with excluding Communists or anarchists. It is not so much the people, or the identity, that is being targeted for exclusion, but the beliefs that its members choose to base their identity on.
It's the other way around with ascribed status. The average person would not be OK with excluding blacks or women from influencing school policy, because they can't change being black or being a woman, in order to satisfy the gatekeepers and wind up on the school board after all. Here, it would seem to be the person or identity themselves that were being targeted, and not just a set of views.
Therefore, blacks, women, and gays will be more likely to play identity politics motivated by the belief that they're being treated unfairly because of belonging to a group that they can't change. Evangelicals may think they're being treated unfairly, but they don't get as fiery about the unfairness aspect because they realize that they're not being discriminated against for something beyond their control. Fundamentally, they are just another ideological group. They may be angry that their ideology is being excluded in favor of a different, opposed ideology -- but not because of something they can't help.
In short, when identity is innate, it fires up identity politics to a much more fierce and stubborn game of chicken. We can't change that part of our identity, so either the other side goes or we do.
With a far weaker form of identity politics, the Republican side can leave behind the culture war much more easily -- worst comes to worst, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's". (That was Jerry Falwell Jr.'s appeal to evangelicals who may worry about Trump's personal life or faith.) There still has to be a powerful enough economic motivator, but when the economy is doing as awful as it has been for lower and middle-class people, the shift out of identity politics and toward class is all but inevitable.
On the Democrats' side, there's a similar shift but it's softer and halting. On basic economic matters, blacks have done horribly, so they ought to be rallying around Sanders. But he's not peddling that much in the way of feel-good identity politics, and has largely side-stepped the culture war. And their identity as blacks is innate, unlike being an evangelical Christian, so the lure of identity politics is more salient and tempting.
Ditto for women -- if they're young and saddled with student loan debts, they want to vote for Sanders, but then again the appeal of Hillary to their innate identity gives them some pause and some of them will blink. Generally, though, women do not form an organized political bloc because men and women have to help each other out, whatever the political goal is. So even though sex is every bit as innate as race, it's not as natural of a political fault-line (unlike race, which is more obviously tribal), and class-minded women are finding an easier time writing off Hillary than are class-minded blacks, Hispanics, etc.
This also explains why the gays are so all-in for Hillary -- there is no class angle to sodomy. There are any number of "intersectional" topics about blacks unemployment, black imprisonment, black housing, and so on and so forth. Likewise for women having maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, promotion rates, etc. Having one foot in a class topic allows members of an identity group to put aside the culture war for a moment and focus on getting a decent material standard of living.
There is no such thing on the political battlefield as gay employment, gay imprisonment, gay housing, gay income, gay debts, etc. Oh sure, they can try to make stuff up -- "gay discrimination in ads for housemates," AKA "I don't want some creepy fag spying on me in the shower". But everyone recognizes it as bullshit and does not treat it as the Next Big Moral Panic in "intersectional" identity politics. It's simply much more difficult for gays to face any kind of discrimination because they're harder for the average person to spot and to target, compared to blacks, Mexicans, women, etc.
The closest it gets is their anxiety about indulging in so much filthy deviance and having the public foot the bill for the doctors to clean up after their hedonistic mess. But that's minor in the overall scheme of the political economy.
With only born-this-way identity politics on their minds, the gays are rallying 100% around the culture war candidate, Hillary Clinton. They could not be more flabbergasted by the appeal of the class candidate, Bernie Sanders, for the young college crowd. It turns out that all those homo-enablers in the undergraduate student body will cut the culture war loose and vote for the class-oriented candidate when they have more important things to worry about, like crushing college loan debts.
I'll take that as the silver lining of the student loan bubble -- at least it's getting airheaded young people to vote on class rather than affiliation with fudgepackers and AIDS mummies.
February 14, 2016
Supreme Court is distraction issue during death of culture wars
Because we're in a period of profound political realignment, we probably ought to be suspicious of the usual suspects having the usual hysterical reactions to the death of a Supreme Court Justice and the vacancy that will be filled. That goes for both conservative and liberal sides.
Having these hysterical reactions, and blindly rallying around the political figureheads, has achieved nothing so far during the culture wars, so why continue with their impotence and irrelevance? The culture wars are finally fading out, so the hysteria will resonate even less broadly and persuade fewer people than before.
Indeed, one crucial aspect of the culture wars has been the over-emphasis on the judiciary branch of the government, as though it issued the ultimate reckoning on any matter. Reminder: in a democracy, the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and that is ultimately what decides which way the nation goes. No men with guns to back up a policy? Then there might as well not be a policy.
Consider one of the most vivid examples of the government changing the way the country works -- desegregation during the 1950s. In school we all learned about the Supreme Court's 1954 decision to overturn legal segregation, but given how hostile people were to the change in the segregated parts of the country, what were the nine gray-haired Justices going to do about it? Nothing -- nothing whatsoever. All they do is render a verdict, an opinion.
What actually desegregated the South was the sending of men with guns to move aside hostile white citizens, and escort the black students into the school building. In 1957 at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the governor had called out the National Guard to prevent desegregation. He did not bother having state-level judges issue contrary opinions to the Supreme Court -- he called out the state militia. Men with guns have a more persuasive effect on getting what you want.
Did President Eisenhower respond by fighting a legal battle over whether the Arkansas state militia was allowed to forcibly prevent desegregation? He wasn't an idiot, so no -- he escalated by sending in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. National military vs. state militia -- checkmate. Desegregation followed. A few stark images say more about how things truly changed than reading about the Supreme Court's reasoning:
When President Kennedy faced similar problems, he simply nationalized the state militia and told them to beat it. Sometimes local police served as escorts for the black students, but at any rate it was always men with guns.
Perhaps an even more dramatic example of government-driven societal change was the ending of slavery. Nobody paid any attention to what the Supreme Court thought, one way or another. Armies on one side and the other side lined up, killed each other, and ultimately the side with the stronger military got its way. During the era of Reconstruction afterward, the Northern / Republican policies of enfranchising the freed slaves and giving them jobs was dependent on the presence of the U.S. Army. They could only push through such policies after the Army took control over the Southern states, and when the Army was withdrawn in 1877, those policies fizzled out.
None of that has changed. The local police, state militia, and federal military are still under control of the executive branch of the government. If there is going to be a major showdown over some hot-button political topic, it will be decided when the men with guns are called in to favor one side or the other -- or, what amounts to the same thing, if they are not called in, giving an implicit pass to the situation unfolding as it already was.
Consider abortion, the most popular culture war distraction issue. The Supreme Court has little chance of overturning Roe v. Wade anytime soon. But even assuming they did, you can bet that the abortion clinics would continue to operate, albeit with more caution and security measures taken for both the staff and the patients. If you think the whole abortion sector of the hospital industry is just going to roll over because the Supreme Court said so, you're hopelessly naive.
Rather, it would take the executive branch to send men with guns to apprehend abortion doctors, to block abortion-seeking patients, and so on. Once it escalated to the President sending in the Army, there would be no more discussion or protest.
The same goes for gay marriage. Whether an individual wants to preside over or prevent two homos from getting married, ultimately they will go along with whatever policy that the men with guns have been sent in to enforce.
Ditto for immigration and border security. If the local border patrols want to defy Obama and check immigrants as usual, perhaps the Army would be sent in to hold back the border patrol officers. Then again, perhaps the Army would decide that was crazy and mutiny against the President. On the other hand, if the President (like Trump) wanted to really beef up border patrol, he could send in the Army and not leave it to local officers who might be threatened by local politicians, employers, and the like.
I think conservatives have the most realistic picture about who really makes changes when it comes to the 2nd Amendment. They aren't so afraid of the Supreme Court issuing an opinion that is at odds with owning firearms. What really disturbs them is the prospect of men with guns showing up at their door to forcibly remove whatever firearms they've been sent in to remove, where the individual would either go along with the removal or show down against the police / state militia / U.S. Army and get martyred.
Whether those policies originated as laws passed by Congress, or as executive orders signed by the President, would make no difference. It would still be the executive branch that held ultimate power over the men with guns -- the most central aspect of a democratic form of government. Without that, allowing citizens to vote wouldn't matter, since local strongmen could make things turn out however they wanted.
In moving out of the culture war period, we ought to worry a lot less about what opinions the Supreme Court may or may not deliver. Ultimate authority rests with the President, so we need only worry about getting Trump elected, and not be distracted by who he would or would not consider for the Supreme Court. Cruz already tried to play that hand last night at the debate, warning that Trump would nominate liberal Justices -- a lie, but also irrelevant. Thankfully that appeal to culture war fervor has failed just as pathetically as his attempted attack about "New York values".
Now that the culture war is evaporating, we can all wake up from our collective delusion that the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice is akin to the birth of a god who will divinely intervene in all aspects of society for the rest of their godly existence.
Having these hysterical reactions, and blindly rallying around the political figureheads, has achieved nothing so far during the culture wars, so why continue with their impotence and irrelevance? The culture wars are finally fading out, so the hysteria will resonate even less broadly and persuade fewer people than before.
Indeed, one crucial aspect of the culture wars has been the over-emphasis on the judiciary branch of the government, as though it issued the ultimate reckoning on any matter. Reminder: in a democracy, the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and that is ultimately what decides which way the nation goes. No men with guns to back up a policy? Then there might as well not be a policy.
Consider one of the most vivid examples of the government changing the way the country works -- desegregation during the 1950s. In school we all learned about the Supreme Court's 1954 decision to overturn legal segregation, but given how hostile people were to the change in the segregated parts of the country, what were the nine gray-haired Justices going to do about it? Nothing -- nothing whatsoever. All they do is render a verdict, an opinion.
What actually desegregated the South was the sending of men with guns to move aside hostile white citizens, and escort the black students into the school building. In 1957 at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the governor had called out the National Guard to prevent desegregation. He did not bother having state-level judges issue contrary opinions to the Supreme Court -- he called out the state militia. Men with guns have a more persuasive effect on getting what you want.
Did President Eisenhower respond by fighting a legal battle over whether the Arkansas state militia was allowed to forcibly prevent desegregation? He wasn't an idiot, so no -- he escalated by sending in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. National military vs. state militia -- checkmate. Desegregation followed. A few stark images say more about how things truly changed than reading about the Supreme Court's reasoning:
When President Kennedy faced similar problems, he simply nationalized the state militia and told them to beat it. Sometimes local police served as escorts for the black students, but at any rate it was always men with guns.
Perhaps an even more dramatic example of government-driven societal change was the ending of slavery. Nobody paid any attention to what the Supreme Court thought, one way or another. Armies on one side and the other side lined up, killed each other, and ultimately the side with the stronger military got its way. During the era of Reconstruction afterward, the Northern / Republican policies of enfranchising the freed slaves and giving them jobs was dependent on the presence of the U.S. Army. They could only push through such policies after the Army took control over the Southern states, and when the Army was withdrawn in 1877, those policies fizzled out.
None of that has changed. The local police, state militia, and federal military are still under control of the executive branch of the government. If there is going to be a major showdown over some hot-button political topic, it will be decided when the men with guns are called in to favor one side or the other -- or, what amounts to the same thing, if they are not called in, giving an implicit pass to the situation unfolding as it already was.
Consider abortion, the most popular culture war distraction issue. The Supreme Court has little chance of overturning Roe v. Wade anytime soon. But even assuming they did, you can bet that the abortion clinics would continue to operate, albeit with more caution and security measures taken for both the staff and the patients. If you think the whole abortion sector of the hospital industry is just going to roll over because the Supreme Court said so, you're hopelessly naive.
Rather, it would take the executive branch to send men with guns to apprehend abortion doctors, to block abortion-seeking patients, and so on. Once it escalated to the President sending in the Army, there would be no more discussion or protest.
The same goes for gay marriage. Whether an individual wants to preside over or prevent two homos from getting married, ultimately they will go along with whatever policy that the men with guns have been sent in to enforce.
Ditto for immigration and border security. If the local border patrols want to defy Obama and check immigrants as usual, perhaps the Army would be sent in to hold back the border patrol officers. Then again, perhaps the Army would decide that was crazy and mutiny against the President. On the other hand, if the President (like Trump) wanted to really beef up border patrol, he could send in the Army and not leave it to local officers who might be threatened by local politicians, employers, and the like.
I think conservatives have the most realistic picture about who really makes changes when it comes to the 2nd Amendment. They aren't so afraid of the Supreme Court issuing an opinion that is at odds with owning firearms. What really disturbs them is the prospect of men with guns showing up at their door to forcibly remove whatever firearms they've been sent in to remove, where the individual would either go along with the removal or show down against the police / state militia / U.S. Army and get martyred.
Whether those policies originated as laws passed by Congress, or as executive orders signed by the President, would make no difference. It would still be the executive branch that held ultimate power over the men with guns -- the most central aspect of a democratic form of government. Without that, allowing citizens to vote wouldn't matter, since local strongmen could make things turn out however they wanted.
In moving out of the culture war period, we ought to worry a lot less about what opinions the Supreme Court may or may not deliver. Ultimate authority rests with the President, so we need only worry about getting Trump elected, and not be distracted by who he would or would not consider for the Supreme Court. Cruz already tried to play that hand last night at the debate, warning that Trump would nominate liberal Justices -- a lie, but also irrelevant. Thankfully that appeal to culture war fervor has failed just as pathetically as his attempted attack about "New York values".
Now that the culture war is evaporating, we can all wake up from our collective delusion that the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice is akin to the birth of a god who will divinely intervene in all aspects of society for the rest of their godly existence.
February 13, 2016
"Cuckin' for the 'Witz" (parody of Conservatism Inc.)
In the spirit of parody songs for the era of Trump, here's one about the failure of Conservatism Inc., sung to the tune of "Puttin' on the Ritz".
"Cuckin' for the 'Witz"
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Politics, where bed-a-fellas
Con the hicks. "Enjoy favelas!" --
Hypocrites. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Have you seen the bow tie crew, acting like their blood is blue?
Talking heads for laissez-faire, with their la-di-da eyewear
Sly stats from lightweight scholars, trite brats and blogpost scrawlers
Pardoning GOP slime, "Homo sex is no crime!"
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Politics, where bed-a-fellas
Con the hicks. "Enjoy favelas!" --
Hypocrites. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Cuckin' for the 'Witz, cuckin' for the 'Witz
Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Gotta prance!
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
"Cuckin' for the 'Witz"
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Politics, where bed-a-fellas
Con the hicks. "Enjoy favelas!" --
Hypocrites. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Have you seen the bow tie crew, acting like their blood is blue?
Talking heads for laissez-faire, with their la-di-da eyewear
Sly stats from lightweight scholars, trite brats and blogpost scrawlers
Pardoning GOP slime, "Homo sex is no crime!"
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Politics, where bed-a-fellas
Con the hicks. "Enjoy favelas!" --
Hypocrites. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Jeb is mute on million-job off-shoring
Greeted by a five-person outpouring
Snoring, boring!
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Cuckin' for the 'Witz, cuckin' for the 'Witz
Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Gotta prance!
Glenn Beck's through, and blew his show,
Now must blow Jews -- why don't you blow
Now, call it quits? Cuckin' for the 'Witz
Old-guard hype that values gay
Views, George Will tripe, and throwaway
Views of misfits. Cuckin' for the 'Witz
February 12, 2016
Sanders may hurt in the South, but could clean up in the Rust Belt
Since Trump's victory in South Carolina and elsewhere in the South seems fairly secure, let's continue checking in on the Other Side of the 2016 realignment.
The story all over right now is that in the deeply red states of the South, the handful of Democrats are mostly black, giving them more influence over the nomination down there.
First, they could be in for an upset with Gen X and Millennial blacks, if this report from NPR is at all accurate. Maybe Hillary will still win, but perhaps not by the presumed landslide. That matches what I've seen from the talking heads -- all the black Hillary supporters are Boomers and Silents, still stuck in the identity politics framework, while the Gen X and Millennial blacks are more likely to be either ambivalent or Sanders supporters, interested more in jobs, student loan debts, etc., and less in culture war topics.
Even if Hillary sweeps the South, though, the populist candidate may have better luck in the Rust Belt.
With all the superdelegate shenanigans going on, I looked up a table of how many delegates each state has who are chosen by voters vs. superdelegates chosen by the Establishment for Hillary. It's actually not as bad as I'd thought -- "only" about 15% of all delegates are superdelegates, who will go for Hillary. I thought they were even more corrupt, with a majority of delegates being out of the voters' hands.
To see where he would face the least amount of entrenched corruption, I looked to see where Hillary has less than half of the state's superdelegates already in her pocket. I also restricted it to states with at least 50 regular delegates. He could pick up smaller states, but let's just focus on the bigger ones he could win.
Most of these states are in the Rust Belt -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky (in decreasing order of delegates). These have been either blue states or swing states, not solid-red states. So, the Democrat electorate there will not be a small handful of blacks, as in the South, and pandering to racial topics (whether from a cultural or economic standpoint) will not play much of a role in the outcome.
This region is largely Trump country, so if Sanders keeps hammering away at how our trade deals have sucked so many jobs and entire sectors of the economy overseas, and how important it is to bring good jobs back to America, he could swing a good size of the voters. Identity politics does not resonate here, which is the main reason why it went mostly for Hillary in 2008 -- compared to the down-low half-black from the far West, she was the relatively lesser identity politics candidate (woman, semi-crypto-dyke).
Of course there are legions of college students with dim economic prospects, as everywhere else, and they'll go all-in for Sanders.
There are 686 delegates up for grabs in these six states, compared to 513 in the Black Belt states of the Southeast (east of the Mississippi). Worse, North Carolina should be taken out since fewer than half of their superdelegates are in for Hillary. Even adding in Florida, the Southeast is still 620 delegates -- about the same as in the six Midwestern states above.
I'm not sure that Sanders can do as well in Michigan, etc., as in New England, but it's worth remembering that even if he gets clobbered by the black vote in the South, he can still rebound with the white working class vote in the Rust Belt -- assuming he's willing to go to the mat with Hillary about NAFTA, TPP, free trade uber alles, and the rest of it. He's been incredibly wimpy so far, but perhaps the voters will go with the guy who stands at least some chance of doing something about off-shored jobs.
Outside of the Midwest, where else are there large-ish states with less than half the superdelegates already in Hillary's pocket? North Carolina has already been mentioned. It's more of a blue / swing state nowadays, what with all the East Coast carpet-baggers pushing the Bos-Wash Corridor further southward, in hopes of cheaper housing and living expenses but still with good white-collar jobs (Research Triangle). Even the Appalachian part of North Carolina is home to Bernie-friendly college towns like Asheville. So the Democrat electorate won't be so heavily drawn from blacks.
Then there's Texas and Louisiana. Heavily red states, the Democrats will be more heavily minorities, although as with South Carolina blacks, there could be an upset among the under-50 minorities if Sanders emphasizes jobs over culture.
Arizona is more or less the same story, only now with Democrats drawn more heavily from Mexicans specifically, not blacks. Not much luck.
His one final hope of an easy win outside the Rust Belt is Oregon, a deep blue state where there are no minorities, and where SWPL capital Portland is home to legions of underemployed and debt-saddled college students and grads.
These are only the states that have at least 50 delegates; he could pick up smaller states too. And there are other states who have already given at least half of their superdelegates to Hillary -- that suggests local corruption that will be hard to overcome, but not impossible. Even if he loses a big state, he still may get a good-enough share of the delegates (I'm not looking up which states are proportional or winner-take-all for the Democrats, since Wikipedia doesn't say).
My hunch is that his best chances at overcoming the stacked deck of superdelegates are in the upper Plains and Mountain states, where Obama did well (and not by pandering to blacks), and where the Clintons are not so firmly entrenched. These places are also full of transplant strivers loaded up with student loan debt, and to the extent that identity politics matters to them at all, it's tilted toward the SWPL crowd that Bernie represents, and not blacks / Mexicans / feminists / Sodomites.
Sanders is certainly going to have an up-hill battle, though don't count him out just because he might not do so well among blacks in the South or Mexicans in Nevada.
Trump will be President, but we need Sanders to dethrone Hillary on the Other Side so that the Establishment gets the loudest possible signal that we're done with the era of laissez-faire economics and politics, and done with distracting culture war bullshit.
The story all over right now is that in the deeply red states of the South, the handful of Democrats are mostly black, giving them more influence over the nomination down there.
First, they could be in for an upset with Gen X and Millennial blacks, if this report from NPR is at all accurate. Maybe Hillary will still win, but perhaps not by the presumed landslide. That matches what I've seen from the talking heads -- all the black Hillary supporters are Boomers and Silents, still stuck in the identity politics framework, while the Gen X and Millennial blacks are more likely to be either ambivalent or Sanders supporters, interested more in jobs, student loan debts, etc., and less in culture war topics.
Even if Hillary sweeps the South, though, the populist candidate may have better luck in the Rust Belt.
With all the superdelegate shenanigans going on, I looked up a table of how many delegates each state has who are chosen by voters vs. superdelegates chosen by the Establishment for Hillary. It's actually not as bad as I'd thought -- "only" about 15% of all delegates are superdelegates, who will go for Hillary. I thought they were even more corrupt, with a majority of delegates being out of the voters' hands.
To see where he would face the least amount of entrenched corruption, I looked to see where Hillary has less than half of the state's superdelegates already in her pocket. I also restricted it to states with at least 50 regular delegates. He could pick up smaller states, but let's just focus on the bigger ones he could win.
Most of these states are in the Rust Belt -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky (in decreasing order of delegates). These have been either blue states or swing states, not solid-red states. So, the Democrat electorate there will not be a small handful of blacks, as in the South, and pandering to racial topics (whether from a cultural or economic standpoint) will not play much of a role in the outcome.
This region is largely Trump country, so if Sanders keeps hammering away at how our trade deals have sucked so many jobs and entire sectors of the economy overseas, and how important it is to bring good jobs back to America, he could swing a good size of the voters. Identity politics does not resonate here, which is the main reason why it went mostly for Hillary in 2008 -- compared to the down-low half-black from the far West, she was the relatively lesser identity politics candidate (woman, semi-crypto-dyke).
Of course there are legions of college students with dim economic prospects, as everywhere else, and they'll go all-in for Sanders.
There are 686 delegates up for grabs in these six states, compared to 513 in the Black Belt states of the Southeast (east of the Mississippi). Worse, North Carolina should be taken out since fewer than half of their superdelegates are in for Hillary. Even adding in Florida, the Southeast is still 620 delegates -- about the same as in the six Midwestern states above.
I'm not sure that Sanders can do as well in Michigan, etc., as in New England, but it's worth remembering that even if he gets clobbered by the black vote in the South, he can still rebound with the white working class vote in the Rust Belt -- assuming he's willing to go to the mat with Hillary about NAFTA, TPP, free trade uber alles, and the rest of it. He's been incredibly wimpy so far, but perhaps the voters will go with the guy who stands at least some chance of doing something about off-shored jobs.
Outside of the Midwest, where else are there large-ish states with less than half the superdelegates already in Hillary's pocket? North Carolina has already been mentioned. It's more of a blue / swing state nowadays, what with all the East Coast carpet-baggers pushing the Bos-Wash Corridor further southward, in hopes of cheaper housing and living expenses but still with good white-collar jobs (Research Triangle). Even the Appalachian part of North Carolina is home to Bernie-friendly college towns like Asheville. So the Democrat electorate won't be so heavily drawn from blacks.
Then there's Texas and Louisiana. Heavily red states, the Democrats will be more heavily minorities, although as with South Carolina blacks, there could be an upset among the under-50 minorities if Sanders emphasizes jobs over culture.
Arizona is more or less the same story, only now with Democrats drawn more heavily from Mexicans specifically, not blacks. Not much luck.
His one final hope of an easy win outside the Rust Belt is Oregon, a deep blue state where there are no minorities, and where SWPL capital Portland is home to legions of underemployed and debt-saddled college students and grads.
These are only the states that have at least 50 delegates; he could pick up smaller states too. And there are other states who have already given at least half of their superdelegates to Hillary -- that suggests local corruption that will be hard to overcome, but not impossible. Even if he loses a big state, he still may get a good-enough share of the delegates (I'm not looking up which states are proportional or winner-take-all for the Democrats, since Wikipedia doesn't say).
My hunch is that his best chances at overcoming the stacked deck of superdelegates are in the upper Plains and Mountain states, where Obama did well (and not by pandering to blacks), and where the Clintons are not so firmly entrenched. These places are also full of transplant strivers loaded up with student loan debt, and to the extent that identity politics matters to them at all, it's tilted toward the SWPL crowd that Bernie represents, and not blacks / Mexicans / feminists / Sodomites.
Sanders is certainly going to have an up-hill battle, though don't count him out just because he might not do so well among blacks in the South or Mexicans in Nevada.
Trump will be President, but we need Sanders to dethrone Hillary on the Other Side so that the Establishment gets the loudest possible signal that we're done with the era of laissez-faire economics and politics, and done with distracting culture war bullshit.
February 11, 2016
Sanders supporters, the new populism, and the higher ed bubble
One of the defining features of this election season is the decline of the culture wars. If this were eight years ago, the Democrats were still solidly a party based on identity politics. The only question was which identity group would prevail -- a black man on the down-low, or a white woman on the down-low? This time around, though, the Sanders supporters are trying to bring the party back to focusing on class, economics, and the nature of government.
I've mentioned before that it's a mistake to think of the Sanders movement as one of the working class, since it is primarily young people who have gone to college, racked up student loan debts that they won't be able to pay off, and want some kind of government relief. It is a movement of failed middle-class strivers, who couldn't care less about bringing well-paying blue-collar jobs back to America from all the places where we've off-shored our once mighty manufacturing sector.
It is the Trump movement that is the clear working-class party -- he does the best with low-income voters, and declines in popularity up the class pyramid, and ditto for his support by level of education.
Still, Sanders is the clear populist candidate on the Democrat side. He's no different in this way from the original populist firebrand, William Jennings Bryan, who oddly enough ran against (and lost to) William McKinley, who is Trump's clearest earlier incarnation, including being the champion of the working class and domestic manufacturers alike, against the laissez-faire anarchy of the Gilded Age. The 2016 election is a major realignment, most closely repeating the 1896 realignment election, as the nation left behind the Gilded Age and moved into the Progressive Era (to be dominated by Republicans; it was the later New Deal era that was dominated by Democrats).
Bryan's main bloc of supporters was not the working class either. Rather, they were the frontier strivers who took out huge loans from banks to start up a farming enterprise or mining operation out West, but who made nothing back because the niche had become overcrowded. Wave after wave of new transplant strivers had visions of getting rich quick by colonizing open farmland or hitting the mother lode, hopefully with no competitors around. They wanted to get bailed out of their debts by having the government accept silver as a form of legal currency (bimetallism), and in particular at twice its going market value. Cut your business debts in half overnight -- not a bad way to become solvent.
Sanders' main bloc of failed strivers are not so easily blamed for the explosion of their get-rich-quick scheme -- "going to college". They're only kids -- technically in their 20s, but they're Millennials, so cognitively and emotionally around 10 or 11. They were lied to by their parents about the value of "going to college," as well as by their teachers, college brochures, the media, the government, and any other supposedly responsible and knowledgeable adult. They only found out too late that it was a con job designed to inflate the higher ed bubble, and that they wouldn't be getting anything valuable out the other side of graduation, while being saddled with unpayable debts.
If they were adult speculators in farming, mining, or real estate, then sure, tell them tough luck that their gamble didn't pay off. But these were naive, immature kids whose brains haven't fully developed. And going to college isn't one of those natural parts of life anyway, so it's not as though given enough time they'd learn that going to college was just a con job.
Part of being raised from childhood into adulthood is being taught about the ways of the world, how you get by and earn a living. In a hunter-gatherer society, the father teaches his son that they get food by tracking prey, killing it, and cooking it over a fire. Then he begins teaching him how to read animal tracks, how to prepare his bow and arrow, how to aim, how to follow a wounded animal, and so on and so forth. After adolescence is over, the son is ready to be a real hunter himself, earning his own living rather than only being provided for by his father or other adults.
Today, children still come into the world not knowing how adults earn a living, and what training and preparation they'll have to go through to earn a living of their own. However, today we live in a great big bubble -- the higher ed bubble, which began inflating with the Me Generation of the 1970s -- a phenomenon that does not exist in a primitive society. What the hunter father does, so will the son.
In a bubble, only the early entrants will be able to earn a living -- whatever they acquire from the bubble activity will be in short supply (they're the first to get it), and it will probably be of good quality (the highest-quality stuff gets picked first). Parents and grown-ups in general who teach the young generation that "the way you get ahead in life" is by participating in the bubble, are unwittingly dooming them to failure. They're foolishly assuming that the late-comers to the bandwagon will do just as well as the first arrivers.
So, when a high schooler is planning out life after 12th grade, they take the adults' advice to heart -- why would everyone be lying or at least mistaken, especially your own parents? Off to college they go. Yet, after 40 years of the inflating higher ed bubble, what they get out of it is no longer in short supply, since nearly everyone their age will have a college degree of some kind, and it will no longer be of high quality because all these new-comers are not "college material" and will be accommodated only by low-quality "universities" who ask nothing of the students other than tuition dollars and give nothing other than the piece of paper itself.
Now, some of these Sanders supporters are contemptible, thinking that just because they majored in business or communications at some school no employer has ever heard of, they ought to be able to leap-frog everyone already in some industry and get a good job straight out of college. But most of them were just doing what they were told by literally every responsible-seeming adult during their entire high school career. How were they supposed to know any better? It's as though the primitive father had taught his son the value of hunting prey, and then when it's his turn to earn a living, it turns out there's no prey left to hunt, and he has to learn how to plant and harvest crops instead -- while trying to pay off an impossible loan.
How will we get out of this great big mess?
Back in 1896, the Democrat populist lost (and again in 1900, also to McKinley). The United States did not adopt silver as legal currency (McKinley put us on the gold standard), let alone make it worth twice its actual market value. The get-rich-quick schemes out West quickly evaporated, but with tariffs and other protections in place, there were good honest jobs to go around.
I think we'll see a similar path forward for us too. Trump would win over Sanders, and he's not going to just let people pay down their student loan debts at 50% of what they owe. By curbing immigration and threatening tariffs if jobs go overseas, there will be plenty of good honest jobs here, so that kids won't need to go to college to earn a decent living, and the ones with massive debts will be able to pay it off. But the higher ed bubble will finally blow up, and won't be inflated again.
The only major difference this time around is that the bubble is more the result of con artists perpetrating a fraud on mostly naive and innocent children, and clueless other adults reaffirming what the con men are selling. Given how appalling the greed and bad faith has been by the higher ed sector, I wouldn't be surprised if we do see some kind of yuge forgiveness. Maybe not an outright jubilee, but Trump re-negotiating the terms of those federal loans so that only those made in clear good faith will be kept as they were -- a small size loan going to a kid admitted to the Ivy League, not a gigantic loan going to a kid who scored under 1000 on the SAT and attending a degree mill.
I've mentioned before that it's a mistake to think of the Sanders movement as one of the working class, since it is primarily young people who have gone to college, racked up student loan debts that they won't be able to pay off, and want some kind of government relief. It is a movement of failed middle-class strivers, who couldn't care less about bringing well-paying blue-collar jobs back to America from all the places where we've off-shored our once mighty manufacturing sector.
It is the Trump movement that is the clear working-class party -- he does the best with low-income voters, and declines in popularity up the class pyramid, and ditto for his support by level of education.
Still, Sanders is the clear populist candidate on the Democrat side. He's no different in this way from the original populist firebrand, William Jennings Bryan, who oddly enough ran against (and lost to) William McKinley, who is Trump's clearest earlier incarnation, including being the champion of the working class and domestic manufacturers alike, against the laissez-faire anarchy of the Gilded Age. The 2016 election is a major realignment, most closely repeating the 1896 realignment election, as the nation left behind the Gilded Age and moved into the Progressive Era (to be dominated by Republicans; it was the later New Deal era that was dominated by Democrats).
Bryan's main bloc of supporters was not the working class either. Rather, they were the frontier strivers who took out huge loans from banks to start up a farming enterprise or mining operation out West, but who made nothing back because the niche had become overcrowded. Wave after wave of new transplant strivers had visions of getting rich quick by colonizing open farmland or hitting the mother lode, hopefully with no competitors around. They wanted to get bailed out of their debts by having the government accept silver as a form of legal currency (bimetallism), and in particular at twice its going market value. Cut your business debts in half overnight -- not a bad way to become solvent.
Sanders' main bloc of failed strivers are not so easily blamed for the explosion of their get-rich-quick scheme -- "going to college". They're only kids -- technically in their 20s, but they're Millennials, so cognitively and emotionally around 10 or 11. They were lied to by their parents about the value of "going to college," as well as by their teachers, college brochures, the media, the government, and any other supposedly responsible and knowledgeable adult. They only found out too late that it was a con job designed to inflate the higher ed bubble, and that they wouldn't be getting anything valuable out the other side of graduation, while being saddled with unpayable debts.
If they were adult speculators in farming, mining, or real estate, then sure, tell them tough luck that their gamble didn't pay off. But these were naive, immature kids whose brains haven't fully developed. And going to college isn't one of those natural parts of life anyway, so it's not as though given enough time they'd learn that going to college was just a con job.
Part of being raised from childhood into adulthood is being taught about the ways of the world, how you get by and earn a living. In a hunter-gatherer society, the father teaches his son that they get food by tracking prey, killing it, and cooking it over a fire. Then he begins teaching him how to read animal tracks, how to prepare his bow and arrow, how to aim, how to follow a wounded animal, and so on and so forth. After adolescence is over, the son is ready to be a real hunter himself, earning his own living rather than only being provided for by his father or other adults.
Today, children still come into the world not knowing how adults earn a living, and what training and preparation they'll have to go through to earn a living of their own. However, today we live in a great big bubble -- the higher ed bubble, which began inflating with the Me Generation of the 1970s -- a phenomenon that does not exist in a primitive society. What the hunter father does, so will the son.
In a bubble, only the early entrants will be able to earn a living -- whatever they acquire from the bubble activity will be in short supply (they're the first to get it), and it will probably be of good quality (the highest-quality stuff gets picked first). Parents and grown-ups in general who teach the young generation that "the way you get ahead in life" is by participating in the bubble, are unwittingly dooming them to failure. They're foolishly assuming that the late-comers to the bandwagon will do just as well as the first arrivers.
So, when a high schooler is planning out life after 12th grade, they take the adults' advice to heart -- why would everyone be lying or at least mistaken, especially your own parents? Off to college they go. Yet, after 40 years of the inflating higher ed bubble, what they get out of it is no longer in short supply, since nearly everyone their age will have a college degree of some kind, and it will no longer be of high quality because all these new-comers are not "college material" and will be accommodated only by low-quality "universities" who ask nothing of the students other than tuition dollars and give nothing other than the piece of paper itself.
Now, some of these Sanders supporters are contemptible, thinking that just because they majored in business or communications at some school no employer has ever heard of, they ought to be able to leap-frog everyone already in some industry and get a good job straight out of college. But most of them were just doing what they were told by literally every responsible-seeming adult during their entire high school career. How were they supposed to know any better? It's as though the primitive father had taught his son the value of hunting prey, and then when it's his turn to earn a living, it turns out there's no prey left to hunt, and he has to learn how to plant and harvest crops instead -- while trying to pay off an impossible loan.
How will we get out of this great big mess?
Back in 1896, the Democrat populist lost (and again in 1900, also to McKinley). The United States did not adopt silver as legal currency (McKinley put us on the gold standard), let alone make it worth twice its actual market value. The get-rich-quick schemes out West quickly evaporated, but with tariffs and other protections in place, there were good honest jobs to go around.
I think we'll see a similar path forward for us too. Trump would win over Sanders, and he's not going to just let people pay down their student loan debts at 50% of what they owe. By curbing immigration and threatening tariffs if jobs go overseas, there will be plenty of good honest jobs here, so that kids won't need to go to college to earn a decent living, and the ones with massive debts will be able to pay it off. But the higher ed bubble will finally blow up, and won't be inflated again.
The only major difference this time around is that the bubble is more the result of con artists perpetrating a fraud on mostly naive and innocent children, and clueless other adults reaffirming what the con men are selling. Given how appalling the greed and bad faith has been by the higher ed sector, I wouldn't be surprised if we do see some kind of yuge forgiveness. Maybe not an outright jubilee, but Trump re-negotiating the terms of those federal loans so that only those made in clear good faith will be kept as they were -- a small size loan going to a kid admitted to the Ivy League, not a gigantic loan going to a kid who scored under 1000 on the SAT and attending a degree mill.
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