Random Blogging – Page 145

Thank Heavens For Ineptitude

I have mentioned before my fondness for Juanita Jean, The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Shop. It’s the blog Molly Ivins would have authored had she lived into the blog era.

I want to share a recent post in its entirety. It’s amusing–but like most of Juanita Jean’s observations, it’s also pretty profound.

Remember back last summer when Trump took away John Brennan’s security clearance? Brennan says he hasn’t heard from anybody about anything officially notifying him that his pass had been revoked, so maybe …

Yep. Trump never did it. Brenna still has a full clearance because …

But the White House never followed through with the complex bureaucratic work it would have taken to strip the clearance, according to a person familiar with the process.

Okay, you get to pick: lazy or stupid.

I’m going with the hybrid – too dumb to find out how but also too lazy to follow through even if they did find out how.

Trump doesn’t care about accomplishing anything. He just wants headlines.

Anyone who has followed this administration can attest to the accuracy of this observation. For most of us, the first impulse is to bemoan the fact that we have a President with a very limited intellect who clearly knows nothing about the job he was accidentally elected to do.

I have a different reaction: relief.

I’ve noted before that when Trump is sued for doing something that violates the law, or is otherwise stupid or damaging, he almost always loses. This is because he–and the Keystone Kops with whom he has surrounded himself–rarely know what the hell they are doing, and even more rarely follow the rules that govern policy change.

Think about this: Virtually everything the Trump Administration tries to do is wrong, damaging, corrupt, unAmerican and (often) incredibly stupid.

Can you imagine how bad it would be if this crew was competent? (Think of the incredible damage Mitch McConnell has done to American democracy, because he’s both evil and good at what he does.)

Thank God they are–to repeat Juanita Jean’s accurate observation-too dumb to learn and too lazy to follow through even if they did.

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Psychology And Trump Support

I have had real trouble getting my head around the fact that somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of Americans actually support Donald Trump. Here is a man who demonstrates hourly that he is boorish and crude, none-too-bright, embarrassingly and painfully ignorant, and bereft of anything resembling a coherent policy agenda (or, for that matter, a coherent anything).He routinely embarrasses us on the world stage, his cabinet is a cesspool, and his crazy tariffs are threatening the economy. And that’s just for starters.

What accounts for the support?

I’m clearly not the only person who struggles with this question. What do his rabid supporters in the GOP see in this man who repulses rational, thoughtful people around the world?

Psychology Today had an article attempting to answer that question; it rounded up all of the psychological theories about Trump’s appeal.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paper published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016, by me, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump’s intransigent support. As the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

So what were the theories? The “benign” ones ranged from rich people being willing to support him because they’re making money, to the theory that “showmanship and simple language” engage the brains of some people, to America’s addiction to celebrity.

These are “benign”?

The list also referenced research showing conservatives more responsive to threat: fear, in this theory, keeps his followers energized. And it included the the Dunning-Kruger Effect (Trump followers aren’t simply misinformed; they’re completely unaware that they are misinformed.) Authoritarian personality disorder was another.

And of course, a significant number of recent studies have correlated support for Trump with “racial anxiety,” a polite word for racism. (This one has been my “go to” explanation; they support Trump because he hates the same people they do.)

I’m no psychologist, and I don’t play one on TV, so I can’t evaluate the relative merits of these theories. But I want to add one. Bear with me…

Recently, I was listening to “Fiddler on the Roof.” Tevya was singing “If I were a rich man,” and I was struck by the passage where he sings that, if he were rich, all the men in town would come ask him difficult questions. “And it wouldn’t matter if I answered right or wrong; when you’re rich, they think you really know.”

It was an “aha” moment. The line made me think of a Guardian report quoting Steve Bannon.

According to an upcoming book obtained by The Guardian, Bannon predicts Trump will be abandoned by his base following various investigations into his family’s secretive finances.

“This is where it isn’t a witch hunt — even for the hard core, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth $50 [million] instead of $10 [billion]. Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag,” Bannon tells Michael Wolff in Siege: Trump Under Fire, according to an advance copy seen by The Guardian.

Is a significant portion of the American public really that superficial?

Maybe I should ask a Kardashian….

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What Does “Conservative” Mean Now?

This is a test. Who said this?

We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost … And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door. It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed, and often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world. The last, best hope of man on Earth.

The answer, it may surprise you to learn, is Ronald Reagan. It was from his final speech as President.

I didn’t know that, but it was only one revelation among many in a paper delivered at a conference I attended on American Political History–a paper by Marcus Witcher that traced the “conservatism” of Donald Trump back to that of Pat Buchanan, and drew a strong distinction between what he dubbed Buchanan’s “paleoconservatism” and the more optimistic and libertarian approach of Reagan.

Trump, it appears, did not come out of nowhere, much as we might wish to believe that. There has long been a “Trumpian” faction in the GOP.

As I read the paper, which the author was kind enough to share, I was struck by the numerous parallels between Buchanan and Trump: the culture war rhetoric; the need to “save” America from “barbarians”–feminists, homosexuals, immigrants and foreigners; opposition to free trade and NAFTA; opposition to immigration, both legal and illegal.

And of course, the appeal to bigotry.

Some of us remember the very different speeches made by Buchanan and Reagan at the 1992 GOP convention. Buchanan’s speech (which Molly Ivins memorably quipped “sounded better in the original German”) was all about culture war and protecting the “Judeo-Christian heritage” of America; Reagan’s was about “working together for a brighter tomorrow.” Reagan concluded his speech by saying that, whatever history ultimately concluded about him and his Presidency, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.”

Not a Trumpian sentiment.

We can agree or disagree with Reagan’s policies, but there is no disputing the vast difference between his version of conservatism and the much darker version peddled by Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan eventually left the GOP for the Reform Party, and he defeated Donald Trump for that party’s nomination in 2000. (If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten it.) Trump left the Reform party after that defeat, but as the paper pointed out, the 2016 messaging that won Trump the GOP nomination is an eerie, virtually identical replica of Buchanan’s Reform Party message in 2000. Even the slogan “America First” was Buchanan’s. Politico later concluded that Buchanan’s legacy “was being Trump before Trump was Trump.”

For good or ill, the GOP is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. (Nor is it the party of Barry Goldwater, or Nelson Rockerfeller, or Dwight Eisenhower, or ….) Reagan’s children have been vocal about the differences between the Gipper and Trump; they insist their father would be horrified by Trump and by what the current GOP has become.

Unfortunately, with its full-throated endorsement of Trump and Trumpism, the GOP is now the party of Pat Buchanan–bitter, hateful and backward.

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A Cornfield Conference

According to Indiana Public Media, 1938 saw the Republican Party in disarray, both nationally and in Indiana. FDR and the Democrats had won massive victories in the 1936 elections, and the New Deal was rapidly concentrating federal power in the Democratic Party.

It was so bad that the editors of Fortune suggested that the national GOP go out of existence. In Indiana, Democrat Paul V. McNutt had been governor since 1933, and Republicans in the state were apathetic.

In February 1938, Homer Capehart went to Arch Bobbitt, then state chair of the Republican Party, with a proposal to hold a “mid-term Republican conference” in August –a “cornfield rally.” Twenty thousand precinct committeemen, county chairmen, their families, and dignitaries from out of state attended, and it worked: the Hoosier GOP rebounded.

I was totally unaware of this history, but evidently Democrats in Northwest Indiana weren’t. They’re modeling an upcoming event on that bit of Hoosier history.

According to the press release, a Tri-State Cornfield Conference on June 29th will be hosted
by Democratic Party organizations in Noble, Dekalb, Lagrange, Kosciusko, and Whitley Counties.

The main conference will occur on Saturday, June 29th in Kendallville, Indiana at the Noble County Fairgrounds. Special guests will include State Representative Karlee Macer and State Senator Eddie Melton. The conference will start at noon.
An extensive digital activist training seminar will occur over 3 days at the fairgrounds, June 28-30th, by Becker Digital Strategies, which has been featured at Net Roots Nation.

Carmen Darland, the organizer of the event, and Vice Chair of the Noble County Democrats, explains that it is time for a similar revival of Indiana’s Democratic Party (and not so incidentally, time for a restoration of checks and balances), both at Indiana’s Statehouse and in Washington.

The obvious purpose of the event is to get Hoosier Democrats fired up for 2020, and an extensive speakers’ list promises to focus on the importance of the upcoming election, not just for Democrats, but for the country and the planet.

Tickets for the entire three days of the conference (including training sessions) are $10 per person, and are available on Act Blue or by calling (260) 237-1199. Additional information can be found on Facebook @2019CornfieldConference, or by contacting Carmen Darland via email: carmendarland@gmail.com.

I found this planned event very encouraging.

Thanks to gerrymandering, (and unlike the situation in 1938) Democrats in Indiana face a very uphill battle. But uphill is not the same thing as impossible. The key–as anyone with even the most modest amount of political smarts will attest–is turnout. Even most of our so-called “safe districts”–in Indiana, those gerrymandered by Republicans for Republicans–are not so safe when enough citizens who haven’t previously voted get off their couches and go to the polls.

Gerrymandering (and yes, Democrats are equally guilty of choosing their voters in states that they control) creates apathetic citizens. Residents of districts drawn to be “safe” for the party drawing the lines figure their votes don’t count, so they don’t vote. Increased turnout, however, can make those votes count, and that is one of the messages that must be repeatedly emphasized at the upcoming Cornfield Conference.

The stakes have never been higher. Here’s hoping that Mark Twain was right when he said that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.

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Whom Should We Fear?

Among the piles of literature I get, both via snail-mail and online (one of the perks–or perhaps the banes–of being an academic) are the periodic Policy Analysis publications issued by the Cato Institute. Cato, as most of you know, is a libertarian think-tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.

I have my disagreements with their economic policy perspective, but they tend to be very good on civil liberties and their scholars, by and large, are intellectually honest.

The most recent issue I received was fascinating. Titled “Terrorists by Immigration Status and Nationality: A Risk Analysis, 1975-2017, it was a thorough compendium showing which terrorists did what and why during those years. (It appears that people who enter on different visa categories pose different risks, which was something I wouldn’t have guessed.)

Terrorism, for purposes of the study, was defined as “the threatened use or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.”

Here are some illuminating calculations from the Executive Summary:

Including those murdered on 9/11, the chances of perishing in a terrorist attack committed by a foreigner on American soil is 1 in 3.8 million per year.
The chance of an American being murdered by a refugee is 1 in 3.86 billion.
Despite the rantings of our bigot-in-chief, the chance of an American being murdered by a terrorist who is an illegal immigrant is zero. You read that right: zero.
But watch out for tourists on B visas (the most common tourist visa). The odds of being killed by one of those guys is 1 in 4.1 million per year.
The chance of being murdered by one of our very own, home-grown wackos is 1 in 28 million.

No matter what the category, we really don’t have to fear that terrorists are lurking around every corner. We’re far more likely to be killed by a texting driver or even falling furniture.

Per the Executive Summary:

There were 192 foreign-born terrorists who planned, attempted or carried out attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2017. Of those, 65 percent were Islamists, 18 percent were foreign nationalists, 6 percent were non-Islamic religious terrorists, 3 percent were left-wingers and the rest were separatists or adherents of other or unknown ideologies. By comparison, there were 788 native-born terrorists who planned, attempted or carried out attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2017. Of those, 24 percent were right-wingers, 22 percent were white supremacists, 16 percent were left-wingers, 14 percent were Islamists, 11 percent were anti-abortion, and 6 percent were other.

What really impressed me about the analysis–which contained much more information than I have shared here–were the appendices: Table 12, which listed foreign-born terrorists, fatalities and injuries by the nation of origin, and Appendix 1, which listed every person–foreign or native born– who attempted or committed terrorism on U.S. soil between 1975-2017, and their ideologies.

A scan of those ideologies strongly supports Cato’s conclusion that religion, white supremacy and nationalism drive a hugely disproportionate number of these attacks.

Color me unsurprised.

And watch out for falling furniture.

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