These are hard times. I can handle people who disagree with me about policy. I can handle if you think taxes should be lower and I think taxes should be higher. I can handle if you want a private sector solution and I want the government to do more. I can handle if you think that we haven’t found the right balance of how to help those in need. I can even handle if you think we should use our military more or less than I do. But I still can’t handle if you don’t seem the least bit bothered that a president you love is also loved by nazis. After the election, I hit a low. I wrote about it here. I bounced back from it a bit since, but I’m back to where I started again.
Month: August 2017
Lady Liberty
This is a wonderful work. Posting here to watch from time to time.
Are we at a turning point in history?
None of us has the ability to perfectly predict what current event will be meaningful one hundred years from now. Some things are easy (the attacks on 9/11 for instance), but others are much harder to predict. It’s starting to feel possible, maybe not yet likely though, that we’re witnessing a real split in the republican party. In a simplified version of reality, the party has two groups. It has the classic republicans who feel strongly about free-markets, deregulation, private solutions over government involvement, individual responsibility, low taxes, and those kinds of things. These are the fiscal conservatives who are more likely to be socially liberal, or at least agnostic on social issues. The party also has the social conservatives. This group is where the white nationalists thrive. This is the group that is anti-immigration, feels the “fabric of America” is slipping away (which I can’t explain other than America becoming a more diverse pool of ethnicities), they have, or at least had, strong opinions about morality and decency, and this helps fuel their dislike of “gay culture” that they see as flamboyant, gratuitous, and indecent. At the same time, they balked at the way the government made them be fair to minorities. They way the government had anything to say about the way of life (that was great for them, even if less so for others). People who felt that we were once the base of the democratic party, but found themselves without a satisfying political home when the democrats became the party of civil rights, and stopped being the party of the KKK. That’s when the adoption of the southern strategy and the inclusion of the Reagan Democrats paid off, and brought a big win for Reagan. His characterization of government as something to be feared hit home, and his attacks on the welfare queen driving a Cadillac fit well with their feeling that they were being pushed out of the society they once dominated. And the party has balanced these two groups ever since, and somehow managed them well. The fiscal conservatives seemed to become more socially conservative and the social conservatives became more fiscally conservative. They had a comfortable balance. Trump is disrupting that.
The impervious president
We’re in very strange waters, and this makes it so difficult to predict the future. The President has survived things that would have decimated politicians in the past. He insulted John McCain, and specifically attacked his experience as a war hero, yet supporters, even those in the military, stood by him. He bragged about sexual assault in a more vulgar way that we’ve heard from most politicians. He threatened to use the justice department to jail his political opponent if elected. He blamed President Bush for 9/11. And all of that was before he got elected. Any one of those would have destroyed the candidacy of any normal candidate, but Trump wasn’t a normal candidate. Likewise, there have been so many things that would have crushed a sitting president, and it doesn’t seem to be doing too much harm to him.
Ups and downs
The past day (or so) has been hard for me. The events in Charlottesville have taken an emotional toll, and it’s been almost nonstop fighting on FaceBook since then. I’m so saddened that anybody would turn a blind eye to the President’s reluctance to take sides against Nazis, but my FaceBook threads, and those of others, are full of horrible defenses of what President Trump said and failed to say in response to the events. The last post came before the President’s first statement, and that was when my disgust really started.
Racists in Charlottesville
There is a lot happening in Charlottesville today and yesterday. A group of white nationalists has come to town to protest. I hope it’s obvious to anybody who knows me that this upsets me. But I’m missing some key data. These are things that might be known to somebody, but not me. Forgive the stream of consciousness, but here goes nothing.
More lies from FoxNews
FoxNews.com has a headline story about Trump’s jump in approval. And here is another in the series (see here, and here, and here) about why you should be angry if you get your news from FoxNews: They wrote a headline based on a single poll, from a polling organization that is known to be republican leaning, and there is NOT A JUMP in his numbers when you compare the most recent Rasmussen data with the last poll they reported. In fact, the President’s approval rating is EXACTLY the same as it was in the last Rasmussen poll. Other polls, including one from Gallup that’s as recent as the Rasmussen poll, have his approval where it was before, in the mid-high 30s.
Trust (and some polling analysis)
There’s a new poll out that brought things around to a recurring theme: trust. I wrote a little about this before, but not as much as I think about it. Whether we trust or don’t trust a politician, a candidate, a boss, seems to have so much influence on how nearly everything that person does is colored. Today we’re seeing trust have an enormous impact on how we view President Trump. His approval ratings continue to dip into the 30s, but perhaps more important, a CNN poll found that only 24% of Americans say that they trust “all or most of what they hear in official communications from the White House.”
A crack in the dam
If I had to place a bet on the next election (and the ability of Trump to survive his first term), I’d bet that Trump not only survives his first term, but also gets elected to a second term. I’ve been wrong lots of times before, and I hope I’m wrong about this — maybe just about the second term part, but more on that later. The only chance I see of any kind of impeachment or removal from office would be after a full democratic sweep of Congress, and I don’t see that happening. The seats up for election in the Senate grossly favor republicans, and the House districts have been so cleanly carved up that I think it will be hard, if not impossible, to win back the House in 2018. But it looks like there’s some division growing in GOP land. We’ve seen this from pundits and strategists, but we’ve seen far less of it from elected officials, until now.
Hitting Bregma 