Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S. New York Times
Not really a big surprise, still a big shock. It’s very likely not as bleak as it looks this morning.
It’s probably going to be a little worse if you are Jewish, or Muslim, or undocumented, or a woman, or anything but white European male, for that matter. The white male hierarchy – and it must be larger than I imagined from the viewpoint deep in my little bubble – will have more legitimacy.
The very rich will do better, NATO and Ukraine worse, but in our day-to-day lives, we (Michele and myself and most people we know) probably won’t notice much change .
The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,as quoted by Yuval Noel Harari in Nexus.
The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built; essentially, they both see the area as their territory and are protecting it, even if the dog doesn’t fully understand the concept of ownership like the human does. Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. Joan Didion in The White Album (1979)
Michele and I watched the VP debate last Wednesday. I know the debate was on Tuesday, but we had long-standing plans to see Yuval Noel Harari. I’m a big fan of Harari, though, to be accurate, I should really say that I am a big fan of Sapiens, Harari’s first book (I did not get through his second book).
Harari has a new book out, as do many of the other speakers in the same series of talks, and I think that is largely the reason for his being on the speaker tour. The book is Nexus, subtitled A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, and, from his talk, the book sounds interesting, if not very optimistic. One thing that Harari said that was both interesting and frightening is that Israel is using AI to pick targets in their wholesale killing of the indigenous Palestinians (I keep reading that it is called the Israeli-Palestinian War, but with the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli weapons, and an estimated death toll of about 1,706 Israelis to 41,431 Palestinians this fight can not be called a war). Harari pointed out that humans still pull the trigger, but only after AI tells them where to shoot. He did not say it like it was a good thing.
Watching the debate the next day, after reading the reviews, so to speak, was more like doing homework than “Oh boy! Let’s watch the debate”. Vance was very polished and has the ability to make some of his and Trump’s crazy ideas seem almost normal. It seems obvious to me that Vance has done a lot of debating. I kept thinking, Hum, I guess the elite schools are better; Yale, Vance’s alma mater, is better, at least in preparing people for debates, than Chadron State College, Walz’s alma mater.
The first question was something like, “Governor Walz, if it was up to you, would you support or discourage an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran?” Walz didn’t answer the question, saying instead that Hamas attacked first and that Israel has the right to defend itself, and Vice President Harris will provide steady leadership. I understand the Harris/Walz Campaign’s problem here; the Jewish population is a big demographic and a bigger donor pool. On the other side, Michigan and Minnesota, which are both swing states and could go either way, have a lot of Muslim voters, which the party does not want to lose.
Next, one of the moderators asked Vance the same question. The Republicans have a different problem; they lost most of the Muslim vote after President George W. Bush senselessly attacked Iraq (before Bush’s attack, a plurality of Muslims, who are pretty socially conservative, voted Republican). Vance, who is new to the national scene but already disliked for some of his past comments like, “Cat ladies are unhappy and trying to make everybody else miserable.”, said, “I want to answer your question, but, first, let me tell you about myself.” He came across as a nice, reasonable guy. At the very end, he said something to the effect that Israel can do whatever they want. I started to worry that this would be a bad day for the Democrats. Still, as the debate went on, Vance seemed to misrepresent various Republican and Democratic positions and, in the end, refused even to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, leaving me feeling better.
In the background, the threat of war in the Middle East is ramping up, and Israel is increasingly seen as the bad guy, which, in my opinion, it is. That’s not good. Not good for Israel or for Jewish people around the world who are mistakenly tarred with the same brush as Israelis. I say mistakenly because Jewish people who were born and live outside Israel and Israelis are not interchangeable, and many Jewish people, especially younger Jewish people who consider Israel the dominant power in the region, think the Israeli government is in the wrong.
I’ve been interested in human evolution for a long time, probably since 1966, when I first read The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey. Robert Ardrey was not a scientist; he was a playwright and a screenwriter who was also interested in human evolution and became a science writer. He was a very controversial science writer in 1966, but most of what was then controversial, like humans evolved in Africa and not Asia, is now considered obvious. Ardrey also wrote that we evolved from animals and were still, in large part, run by our animal roots when the prevailing wisdom was that animals acted out of instinct, and we were different because we acted through our power of reasoning (which, of course, animals didn’t have).
Ardrey postulated that one of the instincts that we are controlled by is our animal instinct to acquire land and defend territory. He further postulated that the Nazis were able to round up and slaughter the Jews because they did not have any territory to defend, and if they did own territory, they would have fought back.
Now, both Israelis and Palestinians think that the land between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean is theirs, exclusively theirs, and both are willing to fight to the death to keep it. I think that it is a problem without a solution. One of my many doctors is an Israeli who moved here from Israel because she did not want to raise her children in a country that treated the Palestinians so cruelly. Off and on, when I have an appointment with her, we end up talking about Israel and Palestine, although neither one of us has a solution.
On one of those visits, I suggested that the only solution was for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people to learn to live together in a single state. She snapped back, “No way, we would never let that happen.” It was the most animated I’ve ever seen her. Much more animated than either Vance or Walz in the aforementioned Vice Presidential Debate.
That debate was, for the most part, a civil, lowkey affair. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It would be a compliment if Senator Vance or Governor Walz actually debated their different takes on the issues, but they didn’t. Both debaters were excellent at not answering the questions, although Walz did it better. I think Vance hurt himself when he started, several times, with, “I don’t want to talk about the past, I want to talk about the future.” Maybe, in the end, that is the good thing about AI. I read that different AI programs make up answers – called hallucinating in the trade – but they haven’t yet learned to equivocate.
Neoteny is the retention of the juvenile features in an adult animal. Genetic factors influence the degree of neoteny in individuals. Neoteny is manifested both behaviorally and physically. Temple Grandin, Mark J. Deesing, in Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals.
On the one hand, I am convinced that man owes the life-long persistence of his constitutive curiosity and explorative playfulness to partial neoteny that is indubitably a consequence of domestication. … On the other hand, domestication is apt to cause an equally alarming disintegration of valuable behavioral traits and an equally alarming exaggeration of less desirable ones. Conrad Lorenz in the forward to The Wild Canids.
Debating is all about dominance, and Vice President Kamala Harris dominated former President Donald Trump in last Tuesday’s debate. She doesn’t want to come across as an Angry Black Woman, but she can’t look weak; that’s a pretty narrow path to follow, and, after a shaky start, she pulled it off. Somebody with a much better political memory than I have said it was the first time anybody beat Trump in a debate.
When I repeated that to some friends on a Zoom call, they all said I was wrong, insisting Hillary won in 2016 and Biden won in 2020. That’s not how I remember it, so I listened to the second of three debates between Trump and Clinton. Ok, I didn’t listen to the entire debate – I’m not that much of a masochist – but I did listen to the first third. What I came away with was not so much about who the clear winner was but the impression that Donald Trump was way more coherent eight years ago. He was a much more formidable candidate then.
What I thought this blog was going to be about was neoteny and how it fits into Donald Trump’s persona, but I believe now that the most noticeable thing about Trump is his deterioration. Sure, he is an adult who acts like a three-year-old – a bad-mannered three-year-old who acts in a way most people would not want their three-year-old child to act like – but that is not as noticeable as the deterioration happening in front of us.
We are born, we grow up, and we – eventually – die. However, it is not a linear process. The change a human goes through in their first fifteen or twenty years is dramatic, and I believe the same sort of dramatic change takes place during the last fifteen or twenty years of our lives. We are comparatively stable during what I would call our middle years. Comparatively, the change that occurs in us at thirty to forty-five – or even forty-five to sixty – is pretty minor. But Trump is past those relatively stable years – stable not being a descriptor I would not normally use to describe Trump – and rapidly falling apart on live TV. If he were to win, I imagine that decline would on accelerate. That’s pretty scary.
Mr. Trump now leads Mr. Biden 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from just a week earlier, before the debate. Nate Cohen in the New York Times.
Democrats have had the tendency to think, ‘Well, we owe it to the person. They’ve been good to the party, they’ve fought for the right causes over the years.Therefore, it’s kind of up to them to decide when to step aside.” Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
Michele and I didn’t see The Great Debate Disaster – we were driving to her family cabin in what is now known as Olympic Valley – although we did listen to the debate on the car radio. Well, we listened to parts of the debate anyway. After Biden or Trump would say something, I would turn the radio off, saying, “I can’t listen to this.” Thirty seconds later, in a FOMO frenzy of thinking Biden had to improve, we would turn it back on, listen for ten or fifteen minutes, and then repeat the cycle. It was painful.
I thought Maybe Biden did better on TV, where people could see how much better and more Presidential he looked. However, by every account I’ve read, Biden looked even worse on TV. Part of the problem is that Biden is not a very good campaigner. According to President Biden’s campaign team, part of the problem was that Biden had jet lag from going to Normandy to celebrate D-Day, and part of it was that he had a cold. It’s safe to say that whoever made the deal with former president Trump’s campaign team wasn’t thinking it out. And Biden surely signed off on the debate date which doesn’t speak very well for him.
Actually, President Biden running for a second term does not speak well for him. I say that even though I believe that President Biden had a great first term with a long list of accomplishments like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – which, somehow, was a bill that everybody wanted but nobody could get passed – $280B to bring very high tech chip manufacturing back to the United States, and he got the Respect for Marriage Act through Congress which codified marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. For me, most importantly, he actually acknowledged that Climate Change was real and started doing something about it with the infrastructure law and the Build Back Better Act. However, all these bills were passed in the first half of Biden’s term, while the second two years were much less impressive.
I think Biden should withdraw from running for president because he is too old to effectively run for office or effectively run the office – as far as that goes, and he is getting worse. I also believe he is unlikely to stop running. That’s too bad for everyone concerned: President Biden, the Democrats, and, especially, the people of the United States.
Now that I’ve said that, I want to reference a couple of similar situations that suggest I’m wrong. Running for his second term, President Ronald Reagan lost the first debate to former Vice-president Walter Mondale and went on to win the second debate and the presidency. President Johnson had a great first term – a great 1.5 terms? – and then withdrew from running after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey won the nomination at the 1968 Convention in Chicago and went on to lose the election.
I do want to point out that six years after leaving office, Ronald Reagan made public that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. What he did not say was that he probably had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s during his second term in office, and it probably contributed to his second term being non-productive. I also want to point out that the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was chaotic, and Johnson would have surely lost if he had run.
I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States. Barack Obama
I don’t know if everyone has a favorite President, but I do. Two, actually; Harry S. Truman and Ulysis S. Grant. That doesn’t mean that I think that they are the two greatest presidents, I don’t. They are my faves because their stories resonate with me. In both cases, they are regular guys who had the presidency thrust on them and, under rough circumstances, they did a very good job.
In my opinion, President George Washington was our greatest president. What makes Washington so great is that, after two terms in office, he walked away. That is a big deal, a huge deal. He led an army to victory, became president for two terms, and then left. Nobody had ever done that before. Not Alexander the Great, not Julius Caesar, not Napoleon, not anyone. That, in my book, is an excellent reason to say he is number one.
Presidents Day is a strange little holiday, tucked between what used to be President’s Lincoln and President Washington’s birthdays. On this Presidents Day, Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin S. Vaughn took a survey of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association…as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. In other words, a poll of people who care, and are knowledgeable, about who is, or was, a good president.
In the 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, along with Washinton are the top three presidents(in that order). Both Lincoln and Roosevelt held the country together when it seemed an impossible task and they seem like obvious picks. Truman is 6th, right after Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. When Truman lost the election in 1952 to President Dwight Eisenhower, he was already unpopular. Eisenhower said it was because of: “Korea, Communism, and Corruption”, while that may be true, or, at least partially true, Truman also desegregated the military which was very unpopular in the Democratic South. While Truman was persona non grata to the general public, scholars regarded him highly and he has always been considered one of the top ten presidents.
In this 2024 poll, Grant is rated the 17th-best president. Interestingly, in the early part of the 20th Century, Grant was in the bottom ten in most presidential polls and was also considered more of a “drunken butcher” than a good general. Now he is generally considered the US’s best general and, with the rise of African American Civil Rights and the South’s phony Lost Cause Theory going out of style, his presidency, especially his Civil Rights record, has been looked at more carefully, and he has been slowly climbing in the polls.
On this poll, BTW, President Joe Biden is ranked 14th and President Donald Trump is dead last. I think that Biden is too old to run for president again and I have been pissed at the way he has dealt with both the Israeli/Palestinian disaster and our Southern border crisis, but there is no question he has been a very active, good- even excellent -president. Our inflation is lower and our economy is doing better than Europe, Canada, and, surprisingly, even Japan and China. He brought a diverse -from AOC and Ilhan Omar to Joe Manchin – Democratic Party together – and passed the $1.9T American Rescue Plan designed to counteract the economic damage caused by COVID which has, more or less, been successful. Biden has also passed a much-needed, $1.0T trillion infrastructure bill known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 at $53B among other things.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I don’t think that Trump is our worst president. He probably was our worst-mannered president, even the most erratic and incompetent, but Bush the Younger did the most damage. Under his watch, we killed way over 100,000 in Iraq on a premise he should have known was false. It is worth noting that the people who knew him well, his fellow baseball team owners, wouldn’t even elect him to be Baseball Commissioner.
The name, Presidents Day, implies that we should honor all our presidents equally but that is pretty hard to do, so, if you do have a favorite like I do, it is perfectly alright to just take a moment to honor them. Happy Presidents Day.
