Ideological blindness

One of the most remarkable things about this presidential election is the amazing degree to which ideology has blinded the Democrats. They lost the election for a number of fairly obvious reasons – a weak, scandal-ridden candidate, the historical tendency of American voters to vote to change parties after a two-term president, and their failure to pay attention to the economic plight of their largest and most important base, the working class. A pragmatist would simply say “Oops, I goofed” and get on with repairing the errors and getting ready for the next election. But not the ideologues in the Democratic party.

Hillary’s team has joined Jill Stein’s expensive but meaningless effort to get votes recounted in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, even though (a) there is no evidence of any significant voter irregularities in any of these states, (b) no past recount has ever found enough change to overcome the Trump lead in any of these three states, and (c) a recount would have to change the result in all three of these states for Trump to lose the Electoral College vote. Stein’s motive may have been as a scam to raise money from gullible liberals for one of her future campaigns, but what is Hillary’s motive?

The mainstream liberal press is rushing around trying to find – or create - dirt on anyone Trump looks likely to pick as a cabinet member. Did she 20 years ago make a sarcastic remark that can be stretched to imply racism? Did he once own some stock in a coal company that was fined by the EPA?  Did a neo-Nazi nut once say in public that he liked her? Does he have a third cousin twice removed who was once arrested on a DWI?  The liberal press is so desperate to keep up the hysteria that they are ignoring the question of whether these people are competent (most are) in favor of trying to paint them as evil as possible. Of course all of this is satisfying to the liberal base, because it feeds what they want to believe, but it keeps them blinded to the hard truths they need to face if they are to regain power.

And of course the liberals keep harping on the fact that Hillary won the popular vote. She did, but only because she won so many votes in New York City and Los Angeles. Remove those two cities, and she lost the popular vote across the rest of the nation by almost 2 million votes. But more to the point, for very good reasons we elect presidents vie Electoral College votes, not popular vote. That’s the system. If it makes liberals feel better that she won the popular vote, so be it, but in fact it is irrelevant and distracts liberals from the hard self-examination they need to recover their fortunes.

Then there is this insane movement to try to get the Electoral College delegates to vote against their pledges. If you think this election was a popular revolt, imagine what sort of revolt would occur if 60+ million Americans, many of them armed and all of them furious, suddenly found that their vote didn’t count because someone tampered with the system. We would likely have civil war in the streets, and I wouldn’t blame them.

And finally there is the re-election of the Democratic Party leadership, which looks like it will put back in place the very same people whose flawed far-left ideology and stale message has resulted in the decimation of the Democratic Party locally and nationally over the past decade.

There are many progressive causes that make sense and are worth supporting, but they will not be represented effectively by people as ideologically blinded as the current crop of liberal politicians and journalists.  

Can Democrats learn?

I see that Democrats are still trying to blame everyone but themselves for Trump’s election. And they are still apparently unable to connect Clinton’s loss this fall with the party’s disastrous performance nationally over the Obama administration’s years. Over Obama’s almost 8 years, Democrats have lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats, and 12 state governorships, losing control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Anyone not blinded by ideology would see that whatever message Democrats have been trying to sell over the past decade just isn’t selling – nationally or locally. So far the noisiest of the talking heads in the press and among the Democratic elite are still sticking to their identity politics approach, even though the post-election statistics are showing that it didn’t work.

A few of the Midwest Democratic operatives have been pointing out that they warned the Clinton campaign team way back in early summer that they needed to pay more attention to the economic plight of the traditionally Democratic working class, but the East Coast Democratic elites in their arrogance thought they knew better, and  ignored these warnings. The success of the Sander’s campaign might have alerted them if they had been paying attention, but it didn’t. Even Bill Clinton himself couldn’t get his warning through Hillary’s inner circle.

But the Democrat’s problems run far deeper than Hillary’s flawed candidacy, or than the Clinton machine’s ability to hijack the Democrat’s nomination process so thoroughly. It is rooted in the fundamental fact that they have lost contact with much of their traditional base – they have gotten so focused on the social concerns of the urban privileged classes that they have forgotten about the middle class workers they used to represent.  As someone pointed out in a post today, the fact that a billionaire with gold-plated toilets would appeal to them more than the Democratic candidate is an indictment of how far out of touch they have gotten.  .

So it will be interesting to see if the Democrats can learn from this election loss.  The message is clear, and unchanged from when Bill Clinton first enunciated it in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid!”. 

Of course the Republicans, having won, will learn nothing. And they too have lost their way in recent decades. So their chickens will come home to roost in a while too.

Recommended: The Crisis for Liberalism

Ross Douthat has a fascinating article in today's New York Times, The Crisis for Liberalism. This is about more than the issue of whether the Democrats should go further left or back toward the center to win more elections. He is discussing a more fundamental issue, the issue of identity politics in America. This isn't the easiest article to read - I had to reread it several times before I grasped the full import of what he was trying to say.  But I think it is important.

Recommended: The Media's Hysteria Over Trump Is a Real Problem

Kyle Smith at the New York Post has a good article today, The Media's Hysteria Over Trump Is a Real Problem. Like Smith, I am dismayed and disgusted at the continual heavily biased and at times completely untrue attacks from the media against our new president-elect. No, I didn't vote for him, but 60+ million Americans did, and he won the Electoral College votes needed  to win the presidency. In this country we hold democratic elections, and then accept the results. But apparently not the mainstream media, not this time.

Let's be absolutely clear about this, there are lots of things not to like about Trump, but

a) There is absolutely no evidence in either his actions or his speeches that he is a white supremacist, despite the repeated attacks by the press.  If you don't believe this go read the full transcripts of his speeches, not the cleverly edited excerpts from the press or the blogosphere, but what he actually said, all of it. Did you know, for example, that when he considered running for president in 1999 he wanted Oprah Winfrey as his running mate? Does that sound like a white supremacist?

b) There is absolutely no evidence in either his actions or his speeches that he is anti-Semitic, despite the attacks by some liberal journalists. Again, if you don't believe this, do some serious research, something more than reading Op Ed opinions by anti-Trump journalists. Or just consider that Israel thinks he is one of their strongest supporters, or that his daughter Ivanka is Jewish.  

c) There is absolutely no evidence in either his actions or his speeches that he discriminates against the LGBTQ community, despite the hysterical claims made by some journalists. Again, if you don't believe this, do some serious research. For example, on the NBC "Today" show in April he said that transgender people should be allowed to use whatever bathroom they feel most comfortable with — including at Trump Tower in New York.

d) There is absolutely no evidence in either his actions or his speeches that he is anti-Muslim, despite the hysterical attacks by the media. He certainly is against Islamic jihad terrorists (who isn't?), and he certainly wants tighter vetting for people coming from countries where such terrorists are highly active (not unreasonable), but that does not mean he is biased against all Muslims.

e)  There is absolutely no evidence in either his actions or his speeches that he is anti-immigrant.  He certainly is against illegal immigrants, and in that respect he is exactly like Obama (who has already deported about 2.5 million of them), Bush and Clinton.

Again, there are lots of things to dislike about Trump, but let's get off these malicious attacks, motivated more by sore losing among liberals than by any real facts.  

I am appalled!

I am appalled at the liberal response to this election. It is bad enough that the news media is doing everything they can to de-legitimize the new administration even before it has taken office.

On Friday night vice-president elect Mike Pence attended a performance of Hamilton on Broadway. At the end of the performance one of the actors singled him out and read a prepared statement - a political statement - from the stage to him. It was at least a fairly respectful statement, but it was unbelievably rude to do that to anyone, whether you agree with them or not.

If that actor had gone to a restaurant and at the end of the meal the chef had come out and singled him out among the customers and read a prepared political statement to him in front of everyone in the restaurant he would have been outraged - and correctly so. Why does anyone think it is OK for an actor to do this from the stage in a public performance?

Have common decency and manners completely disappeared in our society?

Highly recommended: You Are Still Crying Wolf

In the face of the continuing hyperventilating among mainstream journalists about Donald Trump's election, I highly recommend Scott Alexander's article today You Are Still Crying Wolf . Scott Adams is also recommending it, I see.

Alexander puts some hard facts and real quotes against some of the more outlandish claims about Trump circulating these days in the press and blogosphere.  He isn't particularly a Trump supporter, and is well aware of Trump's failings, but he simply thinks there are too many completely false claims running around.  His worry is that if a real Hitler came along, the liberal press has cried "Wolf" so many times before (with Reagan, with McCain, with Romney, with Bush, now with Trump) that no one would listen.

I haven't trusted the press in years, and never trusted the blogosphere, but the blatant bias in this election against an anti-establishment candidate has made me largely tune the press out, and apparently many others have had the same reaction.

Seven things to learn from this election

1.      It’s still the economy, stupid. It was true when Bill Clinton first said it. It’s still true. Liberals may think immigration policy or women’s rights are more important to the voters. Conservatives may think Christian values or gun rights are more important to the voters. Both are wrong. In the end, if people can’t find jobs or can’t find a way to pay their bills, THAT is what is most important to them. Trump understood that, Hillary didn’t, even though Bill Clinton tried his best to tell her that. The Obama administration tried its best to convince people the economy was good - and it is great for the top 10%, the CEOs and top executives of corporations, Wall Street investors, and all the lobbyists and experts who feed off of Washington,  but it has been disastrous for many others.

 2.      Don’t trust the mainstream press for accurate information. The press and the network talking heads and the Op Ed writers have gotten this election wrong right from the beginning. They saw what they wanted to see, not what was actually happening.  Trump didn’t fade from the primaries, despite their confident predictions. Trump won the Republican primary, despite their confident predictions otherwise. Trump won the general election, despite their confident predations that he would lose. The stock market didn’t crash the next day, despite their confident predictions – in fact it hit new highs. (They predicted Brexit wrong too) The mainstream press is establishment, and portrays the establishment views, largely liberal. It doesn’t portray reality. It is not unbiased. The coverage was not in the least balanced in this election – Trump’s outrageous comments made better headlines, so they often ignored bad news about Hillary’s scandal of the day. (And Trump wisely used that very flaw to con the press out of billions in free political advertising).

Remember two things about the mainstream press. First, it exists primarily to sell advertising, which means sensational news that will draw readers is more important than accurate news. Second, all mainstream press has a reader base, so the news it distributes will be slanted to what the reader base wants to believe. Liberal press will be slanted to liberal readers, conservative press to conservative readers.  It is hard, but not impossible, to find fairly balanced sources (The Economist is pretty good, for example.)

3.      Don’t trust the web for accurate information. Facebook and Twitter and the various websites like The Huffington Post (liberal) or the Drudge Report (conservative) were full of misinformation, fake stories, doctored facts and videos, etc. etc.  Mainstream reporters, biased as they may be, have to have at least some basis for a story, even if they have to work hard to spin it the way they want it. Website stories and Twitter and Facebook posts can be (and often are) complete fabrications.

4.      Identity politics doesn’t work reliably.  Hillary just proved that.  Political strategists may see all women as a voting block, all African-Americans as a voting block, all Evangelicals as a voting block, all Hispanics as a voting block, all gun owners as a voting block, etc, but many, perhaps most of them, don’t see themselves that way. They self-identify in many other ways.

5.      Extremes don’t win elections – the majority in this country is moderate. Obama went too far left for the country, and Hillary, pushed by Sanders, did too in this last election. Republicans, driven by evangelicals and social conservatives, have gone too far right.  If Cruz had won the Republican nomination I think he would have done poorly because of that.

6.      In this election a third party finally won. Yes, Trump ran as a Republican, but he is no more a Republican than he is a Democrat (and in fact he has registered as both at various times in the past).  Trump’s positions in the campaign were neither traditional Republican nor traditional Democratic positions.  And he probably won because a lot of people are unhappy with the policies and the actions (or inactions) of both parties.

7.      Emotions matter more than facts in a campaign. Trump won because he engaged the emotions of a large segment of the population who felt left behind. In fact it is not clear he (or anyone else, for that matter) knows how to solve their problem, but he at least paid attention to them and acknowledged their pain. When Obama won his first term, it was because he stirred hope in many people, even though there was no evidence that he could deliver on that hope, or that he had any background that equipped him to deliver on that hope (and in the end, he didn’t deliver, of course).  

In defense of “the deplorables”

It is ironic that the progressives in the nation who are so focused on “multiculturalism”, on being sensitive to and inclusive of and understanding and accommodating to the cultural differences of African-American communities, of Hispanic communities, of LGTBQ communities, and of Muslim communities, seem to be incapable of doing the same for their own blue-collar working class fellow Americans in the Industrial Midwest and South. Derision and stereotyping and labeling that would be anathema – completely politically incorrect, and in bad taste as well– if applied to, say Muslims, is apparently perfectly acceptable to progressives if applied to religious working class people in Cleveland Ohio or South Bend Indiana or Montgomery Alabama.

President Obama displayed this double standard with his famous 2008 snide “clinging to guns and religion” comment . Hillary did it more recently with her bitter “basket of deplorables” comment.  Some of the more clueless liberal journalists are still doing it today in their condescending analysis of the election results.

Yes, they drink Pabst Blue Ribbon beer instead of Single Malt Scotch. Yes, they drive Ford F-150 trucks instead of BMWs or Toyota Prius’. Yes, they go to church on Sunday instead of the golf course. Yes, they like to hunt rather than ski at Vail. Yes, they work with their hands, often at hard, dirty jobs rather than sit in an air conditioned office and push paper. Yes, they are different.  They are a different culture, and their culture deserves exactly the same respect as all the other cultures that the progressive multiculturalists are so proud of accepting and learning to understand.

Yes, they have prejudices.  Do you think Muslims don’t have prejudices (ever hear of the Sunni-Shia divide)?  Do you think African-Americans don’t have prejudices?  Do you think Hispanics don’t have prejudices?  More to the point, if you are a progressive: are you really so arrogant as to think you yourself don’t have prejudices? In fact, your disdain for all the Trump voters is the most blatant kind of prejudice.

If you are a well-off, well-educated progressive with a nice, safe white collar job, just remember that your expensive car runs off of ethanol and gasoline produced by these people you despise.  Your upscale supermarket shelves are stocked, late at night, by people like this. Your fresh arugula is delivered by hard working truckers like this. Your fancy office was constructed by these very people you are disparaging. In the back rooms of your favorite trendy restaurant these sort of people are working 12 hours a day or more washing your dirty dishes and cutting up the vegetables for your dinner. That nice highway you travel on your vacation was built and is maintained by these sort of people. If people like you stopped doing your daily job the world might be inconvenienced a bit.  It these “deplorables” stopped doing their jobs we would all starve to death in a couple of weeks, if we didn’t die of thirst first.

Progressive journalist are lamenting the fact that this election surfaced so much hate and prejudice, and it is indeed lamentable.  But they seem to be ignorant of the fact that they themselves are displaying exactly the same sort of lamentable hate and prejudice against fellow Americans who happen, for perfectly understandable reasons, to see the world differently than they do.

At the risk of offending secular progressives, let me recommend an apt Bible quotation: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye (Matthew 7:5)

Let's get real here

Donald Trump’s election was clearly a rude shock for the ruling elites of the country, and I can understand the disbelief and dismay the next day. But he did win, and not even by a close margin (290 to 228 electoral votes).  Yes, the popular vote counted may be slightly in Hillary’s favor, though in many states absentee ballots are not counted unless the election is close, and historically absentee ballots tend to go 2-1 for Republicans, so the real popular vote is probably closer, and may even be in Trump’s favor. But in any case it doesn’t matter – our system runs with the Electoral College vote, for good reason (see my earlier post on that).

But we are past the first day. As President Obama said to the Republicans when he was elected “I won. Deal with it”  (his version was wordier, but essentially the same message).

So why, four days after the election, are there still anti-Trump demonstrators in the streets?  This isn’t a banana republic (I hope) where crowds refuse to recognize election results.

So why is there a movement, led largely by elites and media stars, to subvert the Electoral College by convincing electors to abandon their pledges? Over 60 million people voted for Trump.  Do you think the heartland of the nation would really stand for such a tactic?  If it succeeded there really would be armed rebellion in the streets.

When Obama was elected President lots of conservatives and Republicans were unhappy, but they didn’t march in the streets or propose to undo the election result. So why are liberal followers acting like petulant children? Parties lose elections.  Then they pull up their socks, figure out what they did wrong, and go to work to win the next election. They don’t sulk.

But what I see tonight on the web, in the press, on TV (all largely dominated by liberals) is a constant drumbeat trying to delegitimize our duly-elected next president. Yes, they may not agree with him (that’s reality in politics – sometimes people who think differently then you win), but he is the next president of our nation, and deserves our backing and goodwill at least at the start of his term. If he screws up, then it’s fair to attack him.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Hillary and her team did everything they could to demonize him, and they were pretty good at it.  And the media, hardly unbiased, helped, by being a bit selective in quoting him and editing the clips of him. And it is still going on. I see an article tonight from People Magazine which distorts what he said in his 60 minutes interview. (they report that he intends to prosecute Hillary. He actually said he not only hadn’t decided about that, but that he didn’t want to hurt her, and anyway he had far more urgent priorities).

I’m not happy with some of Trump’s positions, nor some of his language. And I didn’t vote for him (or Hillary either).  But he is our duly-elected next president. Let’s get real and move on.

The Supreme Court

The Trump victory is bringing a lot of hyperventilating on the web about the Supreme Court nominations he might make. Some people are sure he will pick religious bigots who will overturn Roe vs Wade and do other illiberal things. That seems unlikely to me, though there are no doubt a few of the more religious-right Republican Congressmen who hope for that.

But there is an important division in jurists that is worth considering.  This division, in somewhat simplified form, is between:

1)      Judges who think that it is the function of the court to see the Constitution as a living document, and interpret it – or re-interpret it – in the light of changing circumstances and changing social values.  These are sometimes called “activist” judges, and in recent years liberals have depended on them to push through views that they can’t get through Congress.

2)      Judges who think it is the function of the court to interpret the law and the Constitution as it is written, and no more – not to “expend” or “reinterpret” what is written.  These judges feel it is the job of Congress (and the states in the case of Constitutional amendments) to create new law, and that it is inappropriate for the court to, in effect, “create new law”. These are sometimes called “strict constructionists”.

There are valid arguments for both positions. The framers of the Constitution did intend for new law to come only from Congress, ratified by the President.  This is because these are elected officials, held accountable at each election to the people, while the judges are appointed positions, not directly accountable to the voters.

On the other hand, some important social advances have come from the Supreme Court when the state and federal legislatures simply couldn’t muster the majority needed to get it though.  Roe vs Wade (abortion) and Brown vs Board of Education (desegregating schools) are two recent examples. So there are reasonable arguments for an activist court as well.

What is probably true is that a Trump administration will favor strict constructionists in its nominations. Liberals will label them “conservative”, but that really isn’t accurate because it doesn’t really mean they will necessarily be ideologically biased toward conservative causes – just that they will interpret the existing law and Constitution as it is written, and not try to “expand” it with creative interpretations, as liberals sometimes hope.

In fact, if one looks at voting records, it would appear it is the four more liberal Supreme Court justices who are perhaps the more ideological, because they more often vote as a block, while the four more conservative justices disagree with one another more often.

I guess on balance I favor appointing strict constructionists.  I really do think new law should come exclusively through elected legislators, and if a law can’t get a majority of support from the legislatures (and in the case of changes to the Constitution, from the states) then it probably shouldn’t be implemented “through the back door” instead by 9 unelected judges.

Why the Democrats lost

I see Democrats are now in the morning-after round-robin firing squad mode, blaming everyone but themselves for Clinton’s loss. It was the FBI. It was Wikileaks. It was the Russians. It was the dumb, deluded voters. It was the campaign managers. It was the Electoral College system. It was sexism and misogyny – the glass ceiling. ……….

No, it was none of those things. It was simply:

a)      A lousy candidate

b)      A lousy economy after eight years of a Democratic presidency

c)      A lousy out-of-date message that didn’t sell

Once the party gets out of its sulk and faces up to reality, these are fixable problems. Get a better candidate. Get a coherent, up-to-date message that sells in today’s world. And hope that Trump gives you a better economy for the next presidential election year.

The liberal “deplorables”

Since Donald Trump’s election, his twitter account has been swamped by death threats (which the posters will soon regret, since death threats to a president-elect are investigated by the FBI and Secret Service, who take them seriously), there have been riots in several cities, and several videos of Hillary supporters beating up Trump voters have gone viral.  All of which shows that there are a healthy number of “deplorables” among the liberals as well, so the liberals ought not to be so smug.

And the Clinton team and its press surrogates own responsibility for some of this, because they were the ones who demonized Trump so much, and did so much fear-mongering about what his presidency might be like.

In fact

a)      Trump is clearly smart, smarter apparently than the whole Washington establishment, Republican and Democrat alike, whom he soundly outsmarted in both the primaries and the general election, even though they did their level best to kill his campaign.

b)      In retrospect it is pretty hard to say he is anti-woman, as Hillary kept claiming, since his main campaign manager, whom he picked to manage the brilliant final phase of the campaign, is Kellyanne Conway, a woman. Not really surprising, since he has a number of bright, competent women among the top executives of his various businesses. My impression is that he is gender-neutral, picking the most competent irrespective of gender.

c)      He appears to be putting together a competent team. Liberals won’t like some of them, because (of course) they aren’t liberal and don’t support liberal points of view.  But realistically he is looking at a lot of pretty competent people, many of them outside the incestuous Washington “revolving door” insider group, which is healthy.

d)     Like all presidential candidates (like Obama did and and like Hillary would have done), he is already backing away from some of his more extreme election promises. For example, when Obamacare dies (either of its own accord or because the Republicans kill it), he apparently intends to keep the coverage of children up to age 26 on their parent’s policies, and the requirement to sell insurance to anyone, regardless of prior medical condition. I suspect that some of his other pledges, like improving immigration screening, will turn out in the end to be quite reasonable as implemented.

Once the hyperventilating on the web dies down and the crazies get off the streets, I expect this will begin to look like a perfectly normal presidential transition. Liberals will continue to kvetch, no doubt, but there is a fairly good chance that a Trump presidency will be no worse that the Obama presidency and even a reasonable chance that it will be better.

Doctoring Trump speeches

I have seen repeated claims that media outlets edited Trump's speeches to make him look bad.  I saw the media do that to Goldwater in the 1964 election (I actually attended a speech and then saw what the TV and news media did to it afterward to distort it), so I could believe it might happen.

River Entertainment posted a video on Facebook, just after the Orlando shooting, showing how Trump's comments had been cleverly edited by the media to make him look insensitive.  And then, guess what, Facebook took down the posting - guess they didn't like exposing the measures that were favoring their chosen candidate (so much for Facebook impartiality).

HOWEVER, you can still find the transcripts, and the videos, at the Daily Caller, in the article Watch How NowThis Doctors Video of Trump to Distort His Message.

It is an education, and will make you distrust the media from now on, if you don't do so already.

In retrospect

In retrospect I’m astounded by the hypocrisy of the Democrats in this last election.  It didn’t really come home to me until I began thinking about Trump’s win and Clinton’s loss. But the more I think about it the more obvious it becomes.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for fear mongering, even while she and her surrogates in the press did everything they could think of to paint a Trump presidency as fearful and Trump as a nut who would be dangerous around the nuclear codes.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for his “stupid” idea of building a wall across the US-Mexican border, conveniently forgetting to mention that the Obama administration has already built about 670 miles of it themselves. 

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for his proposal to deport illegal immigrants, conveniently omitting to mention that the Obama administration had already deported 2.5 million illegal immigrants, more than the combined total of all previous presidents.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for derogatory labeling of groups, even while she and her surrogates in the media were labeling Trump voters as ignorant, sexist, racist, “deplorables”.

Funny how the (mostly #ImWithHer) press failed to notice this hypocrisy.

What goes around comes around

The Senate used to have a rule that it required a supermajority of 60 votes (out of 100 Senators) to end a filibuster and bring nomination to a vote, and 67 votes to make a change in the Senate rules. The principle behind this is that nominations, and Senate rules, are so important that they ought to require concurrence from most Senators.

The so-called “nuclear option” was proposed back in 2005, when the Republicans had a majority in the Senate. It involved changing the Senate rules so a simple majority could pass a nomination and change Senate rules. John McCain saw that this was a dangerous route, because while it would help the Republicans at that moment, it would set a precedent that could be used against them in the future. He organized a bipartisan “gang of 14” that killed this idea.

Fast forward to 2013 and Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, faced with filibusters of judicial nominations from the Republicans , actually went ahead and exercised the “nuclear option” against the advice of many of his colleagues. It let the Democrats get a few nominations through over Republican objections. And just before election night, Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine was boasting that when Hillary won they could use it again to get her Supreme Court nominations through.

Guess what? Hillary didn’t win, and now the Democrats are about to reap the whirlwind which they unwisely sowed, because they have set the precedent. As it stands now it does still take 60 votes to approve a Supreme Court nomination, but the Republicans can, if they wish, reduce it to a simple majority.  The Democrats will of course “be outraged” and make all sorts of hypocritical statements about such a move – but in fact they were the ones who did it first, set the precedent, and made it possible.    Dumb. Dumb. Dumb!

Recommended: The unbearable smugness of the press

Will Rahn of CBS News has a good piece today: The unbearable smugness of the press. The press was certainly not unbiased in this election, as some of the hacked emails posted on Wikileaks showed clearly. But it goes deeper than that.  The mainstream press has ceased to be an objective observer of the world (if it ever was) and become a propaganda corps for various causes, mostly but not entirely liberal. The problem is that they have been drinking their own Coolaid and believing their own propaganda, which is why they got it so wrong all through this election, right from the first primaries.

Rahn's assessment is right on the money. We will see if the press has learned anything from this, or if they simply can't overcome their smugness.

The Republican’s problem

One of the repeated cycles throughout history is the reaction to victory and defeat.  The victor generally fights the next war the way they fought the last (after all, it won last time), while the loser generally changes (after all, what they tried last time didn’t work).  After World War I the French, having won, prepared to fight another trench war with the Maginot Line, while the Germans, having lost, went back to the drawing board, rethought their approach and invented Blitzkrieg, and conquered France in 6 weeks in the next war.

This is the Republican’s problem now. The Democrats failed miserably in this election (as they should have, considering the candidate they picked), and are forced to go back to the drawing board and figure out what they did wrong. The Republicans, on the other hand, won, and are now busy figuring out what to do now that they have free run of the candy store. But in fact the Republican Party is every bit as dysfunctional, as out of touch, as in need of a thorough house cleaning as the Democratic Party – perhaps even more so. But having won, they have no incentive to do the rethinking, the house cleaning.

This is the danger lurking for the Republicans. Hillary was a very weak candidate, and her team in their arrogance made some serious mistakes. Even a candidate as problematic as Trump could beat that. But the next election Republicans probably won’t get such an easy opponent, and they won’t be ready for that.

The liberal’s worst nightmare

Hillary supporters thought their worst nightmare had come true on election night when Donald Trump won. But that might not turn out to be their worst nightmare.  Their worst nightmare might be a Trump presidency that is more successful than the eight Obama years, showing just how inept the Washington liberals have been since Obama came into power.

Impossible? Well, realistically it isn’t a very high bar. Trump doesn’t really have to do too much to be better than Obama.

He doesn’t have to completely solve the structural problems in the workplace that have put so many Rust Belt workers on unemployment – he just has to pay attention to their plight and do SOMETHING, ANYTHING, to help them rather than ignore them as part of the uninteresting “flyover country”.

He doesn’t have to perform an economic miracle with the economy – he just has to get growth going again instead of deciding, as the liberals did, that 2% growth is the “new normal” and we will be satisfied with it.

He doesn’t have to solve the Middle East mess – he just has to get us out of it and stop hemorrhaging American lives and money in a lost cause. (We have invested about $4 TRILLION and about 8000 American lives in these wars – the longest in America history -  and things are far, far worse throughout the entire Middle East than when we first went in to invade Iraq)

He doesn’t have to solve the problem of rising medical costs – he just has to put something workable in place to pick up the pieces as Obamacare fails.  He doesn’t even have to repeal Obamcare to get rid of it (though he may anyway) – it is failing of its own accord because it never was fiscally sustainable.

He doesn’t have to make Congress work well – he just has to make it work at all, to actually pass a budget on time, to actually get some legislature through.

My guess is that he may well achieve at least this much (and we all, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat alike, had better hope so!!), because this isn’t really a very high bar.  And if he does, he will look a lot better than the last eight years!

And that will be the liberal’s real nightmare.

The Electoral College

Occasionally presidents win the electoral vote but not the popular vote. It has happened four times before (1876, 1888, 1824, and 2000 with Bush-Gore) and looks likely to happen again in this election. That will no doubt bring up again calls to abolish the Electoral College by journalists who have a less than complete understanding of American history. (PS - I’ve just seen the first such article pop up)

When the founders of the nation were putting together the Constitution, one of the major issues they faced was the worry of the smaller states, like Delaware, that they would always be overpowered and outvoted by the larger states, like Virginia. The solution, or compromise, was to create two chambers in Congress, the House with representation (roughly) proportional to the population of each state, and the Senate where each state got exactly two representatives, irrespective of size or population.

In essence the Electoral College addresses that same issue. States with smaller populations get slightly proportionally more electoral votes than larger, more populous states. That means that elections aren’t always just decided by California and New York, with the largest populations and the largest cities. The smaller, less populated portions of the nation get a say as well, as they should in a democracy.

Liberal urban voters (like the journalists who will push to eliminate the Electoral College) would not be happy if their elections were always settled by conservative rural voters, so they need to understand that those conservative rural voters would be equally unhappy (for equally valid reasons) if elections were always settled by a few big states and big cities.

The essential problem with democracy is to ensure that it doesn’t just become mob rule by the majority, and that the rights and views of the minorities are also heard and respected. Direct election by the majority of the popular vote sounds like a good idea, but it would tend to destroy one of the essential features of America – the recognition and protection of a wide diversity of views and needs across many states. It would become the tyranny of the majority – mostly urban dwellers in a few big cities in a few large states.

Recommended: Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump

For a little humor (but with some sound advice underneath) see the New York Times article Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump. Very good.

Recommended: The Democratic Party Deserved To Die

The Huntington Post (very liberal) has a very good piece today by contributor Krystal Ball (very liberal) entitled: The Democratic Party Deserved To Die.  I highly recommend it.  Ball tells it like it is - not only how unsuitable Hillary was, but how the whole Democratic Party has sold out its core values and ignored the desperate plight of middle America, and deserved to lose the election because of it.  One hopes this is the opening bell of a top-to-bottom rethinking of the party, long overdue.

I'm looking for the same sort of insightful piece about the Republican party, which needs an overhaul even more than the Democrats do.

The morning after

I have friends and even family who are in despair after this election – sure that Donald Trump will ruin the country. On the one hand the despair it is understandable – Trump certainly has some unpleasant and undesirable traits. On the other hand, the despair is also a form of unwarranted intellectual arrogance.  Almost exactly half the voters thought that Donald Trump, despite his flaws, was a better choice than Hillary Clinton and her flaws.

Are we really willing to say out loud that we think half of our American friends and neighbors are deluded, sexist, racist, politically incorrect, Islamophobic, “deplorables”, who were dumb enough to be taken in by Trump’s promises?  Because, at root, that is what we would be saying if we dismiss the fact that they all voted for Trump. Oh, we wouldn’t admit to ourselves that we thought that way – it would be politically incorrect – but that is in effect exactly what we would be thinking.

If we are a well-off, well-educated urban liberal with a nice safe white-collar job and a comfortable office, we certainly might have preferred Hillary.  But put yourselves in the shoes of a 50-year old worker in a Rust Belt mill or factory or a West Virginia coal mine, with a wife, three kids and a mortgage, who faces losing his job and having his town (and his equity in his house) disappear when the factory or mill moves overseas or automates or the mine closes, and the picture looks a lot different. Hillary is all about helping African-Americans, Hispanics, the inner city poor, (and her wealthy corporate sponsors) etc, etc.  But what is she offering to do for this desperate 50 year old, who sees his lifetime of building his skills become irrelevant, and his savings and home disappear – with no effective help at all from Hillary’s “trade agreements” government?   I didn’t vote for Trump, but I certainly understand why this 50 year old would have! And I respect that.

American democracy is about the free and open competition of ideas. We each of us certainly have our preferred views on these ideas, but none of us has the Godlike wisdom to know which of these ideas is really best, or which will be best suited to the unknown problems that will arise in the future, so when our particular views happen to lose for the moment it is childish petulance to despair. A adult response would be to wonder why others preferred another view, and to think with an open mind about why they preferred that view.  We might learn something.  We might grow in understanding. We might even (gasp) begin to see their point of view.

Trump’s Victory

Well, Donald Trump again exceeded expectations and won the presidency, and by a decisive margin, despite the predictions of the (mostly liberal) media and most of the pollsters (and note that in the end Scott Adams was right again!). And he clearly outsmarted and outmaneuvered the entire Washington establishment, both Republican and Democratic – that is an amazing performance which I didn’t really expect. I’m sure the numbers will be dissected in detail ad nauseam over the coming months, but here are my immediate take-aways from this result:

1)      The shopworn old Republican promises – never kept – of less government, lower taxes, less regulation, “family values”, etc, etc simply aren’t selling anymore. And Republicans need appealing new ideas, not just opposition to Democratic ideas. This has been clear ever since Trump buried all the establishment candidates in the primaries.

2)      Hillary’s big mistake was not to learn from Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly good performance in the primaries that part of the traditional Democratic base – the blue collar workers – were not on board. Instead, once she had dispatched Bernie, she simply ignored him and his proposals and steamrollered her way to the nomination.

3)      The Democrat’s’ big mistake in the first place was to field a candidate as unpopular and scandal-tainted as Hillary. Or perhaps their mistake was to allow the Clinton “machine” to so thoroughly dominate and control the nomination process.

4)      The liberal’s “identity politics” didn’t work very well for them in this election. Latinos didn’t vote for Hillary in a block. Women didn’t vote for Hillary in a block. African-Americans didn’t vote for Hillary in a block. In fact all of these groups voted pretty much as they normally do.

5)      The establishment politicians of both parties have clearly gotten out of touch with their bases. In particular, the liberal elite have not succeeded (nor even really tried) to sell their view of a globalized world with open boarders to the average American.  Instead they have arrogantly assumed that any "right thinking" person would agree with them, and that everyone else is a racist, Islamophobic or sexist "deplorable".  This is not a way to win a democratic election.

I expect major civil wars within both parties over the coming year or two, as they try to figure out how to respond to these events.  It will be interesting to see how they reshape themselves.

About Immigration

Most of us have homes, owned or rented, and we have set up our homes to suit our lifestyles, values, and preferences.  We certainly welcome strangers into our homes as visitors, but we don’t expect strangers to move in with us and change the furniture and décor to suit themselves. And we certainly don’t expect to keep our door open all the time for just anybody to come in off the street if they feel like it.

The same is true with countries. America has a certain more-or-less uniform set of American values. We expect people to respect the law, unlike some lawless areas of the world. We expect people to be tolerant of other religions, unlike some Muslim countries, and other political views, unlike some dictatorships. Our culture doesn’t condone tax avoidance like the Italians or Greeks. We don’t tolerate “honor killings” or allow village elders to order punitive rapes, unlike Pakistan. We believe in a democratic system of government (messy as it sometimes is), unlike Russia. We value individuality, unlike China or Japan.

We are a nation of immigrants, but what is more-or-less common among all our immigrant ancestors  is that they came to America and became “Americans” – learned the common language, learned and respected the universal values and customs, supported the democratic process (and sometimes got pretty good at using it).  They certainly brought with them and added to the America culture many valuable things:  their music, their cuisine, their art, their holiday customs, and their own unique religions.  But they didn’t expect to come here and change America back into their home country – in fact many if not most left their home countries precisely because they didn’t like something about it – the lack of economic opportunity, the lack of religious freedom, political persecution, etc, etc.

The liberal dream of worldwide open borders is roughly equivalent to having everyone in town open their homes to any stranger coming by at any time of the day or night.  It just doesn’t make sense, and it certainly isn’t a popular view with the majority of Americans – perhaps just with wealthy liberals living in gated communities, who are happy to have low-wage immigrants mow their lawns, but certainly don’t want them moving in next door and lowering the neighborhood property values.

We should accept immigrants, (a) in reasonable numbers that don’t swamp the culture, (b) that want to become Americans and adopt American ways and learn the American language rather than just set up an enclave of their own country within America, and (c) that appear able to support themselves in our economy and not become a welfare burden on the taxpayers.

And we ought to do a lot more than we now do to help new immigrants settle in.  Some nations have “sponsor” programs where new immigrants each have a sponsor family who help them adjust for the first year or so, get jobs, learn their way around, and integrate into the American culture.  We would be smart to do the same.  And we certainly ought to make it easier for bright, well-educated (often in American universities), ambitious people to immigrate and strengthen our nation. Indeed, we already do a fairly stupid thing with foreign students who come here for a graduate education – we force them to leave after they get their degree, instead of encouraging them to stay and help the economy grow.

This liberal dream of "worldwide open boarders" is a recipe for disaster, as the EU is already finding out. On the other hand the knee-jerk right-wing opposition to immigration is also a disaster, and shows an appalling ignorance about our American history.