Sunday 19 March 2017

Some Weekend Reading

(... as a distraction from the subdued performance by England in Dublin yesterday.)  This interesting essay from the LRB is broadly about the Trumpy thing, in wide-ranging aspects.  Some extracts:
"In Leviathan Hobbes said that what we call the ‘deliberation’ of the will is nothing but ‘the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to’ an action. Whatever the general truth of the analysis, Trump’s process of thought works like that. If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed. And if along the way he speaks false words? Well, words are of limited consequence. What people want is a spectacle; they will attend to what you do, not what you say; and to the extent that words themselves are a spectacle, they add to the show. The great thing about words, Trump believes, is that they are disposable...
"Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI ... A more popular and reliable target was Vladimir Putin ... It is possible that Trump’s defiance of this multifarious establishment actually helped his popularity with non-political voters. Damage more telling than any emanation from the FBI or Russia probably came from Hillary Clinton’s remark that half of Trump’s supporters were ‘a basket of deplorables’ – an unforced error that was rightly read as an expression of contempt.
"The national security state that Obama inherited and broadened, and has now passed on to Trump, is so thoroughly protected by secrecy that on most occasions concealment will be an available alternative to lying. Components of the Obama legacy that Trump will draw on include the curtailment of the habeas corpus rights of prisoners in the War on Terror; the creation of a legal category of permanent detainees who are judged at once impossible to put on trial and too dangerous to release; the expanded use of the state secrets privilege to deny legal process to abused prisoners; the denial of legal standing to American citizens who contest warrantless searches and seizures; the allocation of billions of dollars by the Department of Homeland Security to supply state and local police with helicopters, heavy artillery, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and armoured vehicles; precedent for the violent overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress; precedent for the subsidy, training and provision of arms to foreign rebel forces to procure the overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress; the prosecution of domestic whistleblowers as enemy agents under the Foreign Espionage Act of 1917; the use of executive authority to order the assassination of persons – including US citizens – who by secret process have been determined to pose an imminent threat to American interests at home or abroad; the executive approval given to a nuclear modernisation programme, at an estimated cost of $1 trillion, to streamline, adapt and miniaturise nuclear weapons for up to date practical use; the increased availability – when requested of the NSA by any of the other 16 US intelligence agencies – of private internet and phone data on foreign persons or US citizens under suspicion... Obama’s awareness of this frightening legacy accounts for the unpredictable urgency with which he campaigned for Hillary Clinton – an almost unseemly display of partisan energy by a sitting president.
"How did America pass so quickly from Obama to Trump?  The glib left-wing answer, that the country is deeply racist, is half-true but explains too much and too little. This racist country voted for Obama twice. A fairer explanation might go back to the financial collapse of 2008 when Americans had a general fear and were shocked by what the banks and financial firms had done to us. ‘In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash’, as John Judis wrote, Obama ‘allowed the right to define the terms’. The revolt of 2008-9 was against the financial community and anyone in cahoots with them, but the new president declined to name a villain: when he invited 13 CEOs to the White House in April 2009, he began by saying he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks, and ended by reassuring them that they would all work together. No culprit would be named and no sacrifice called for. Trump emerged early as an impresario of the anger, a plutocrat leading the people’s revolt against plutocracy.

ND

20 comments:

  1. "Trump emerged early as an impresario of the anger, a plutocrat leading the people’s revolt against plutocracy."

    Is my understanding of things.

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  2. Anonymous2:02 pm

    It is worth remembering that Trump's majority was very small.

    Don Cox

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  3. Anonymous2:03 pm

    "In Leviathan Hobbes said that what we call the ‘deliberation’ of the will is nothing but ‘the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to’ an action.

    A bit heavy for Sunday morning?

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  4. Y Ddraig Goch6:50 pm


    "It is worth remembering that Trump's majority was very small."

    He won the electoral college vote 56-44, a comfortable margin, better than either Carter or Kennedy, and only marginally worse than Truman. He lost the popular vote. In neither case was his majority "small".

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  5. Don - he only needed to win in the EC (see YDG's comment) - and if he'd needed to win the 'popular vote', who knows what his strategy would have been, or whether successful?

    anon @ 2:03 - indeed (and I nearly put a 'philosophy' tag on it). I wasn't previously aware of this dictum of Hobbes, which puts him squarely as a fore-runner of the C19th greats (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud in that order) who opined that what we believe / claim about what is going on in our heads should be viewed with circumspection if not outright dismissal

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  6. Anonymous7:37 pm

    I am sure that if Trump had needed to win the popular vote, he would have campaigned differently, and still won. Hillary ran a poor campaign.

    My point is that it was not a 60:40 majority, or anything near it. There wasn't a massive surge to the right. (Or to the well-known TV personality.)

    People should not talk as though there has been a revolution.

    Don Cox

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  7. It depends on your vocabulary
    Some may call it a revolution. I would call it a phase change.

    IMO
    The US (and UK and world) public has had some decades of pols

    not answering questions
    answering the question they wish they were asked
    following a 'well, you should have read the small print' line
    not telling the whole truth
    trying to hide their embarrassments, but v. keen on 'if you have nothing to hide'
    manipulating statistics
    stretching facts out of shape

    etc

    The apparent public response is

    'if you dont really care about truth,
    it must be ok to elect people who really dont care about truth'

    (Trump, Maduro, BJ, Farage etc etc)

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  8. Anonymous8:45 pm

    It's impressive what Obama was able to get away with - assassination by executive fiat of American citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki being the most startling. He's certainly left a lot of precedent for Trump to follow. You wouldn't exactly say the press was on his back holding him to account, would you?

    I remember that 2008 Obama was against gay marriage, and the thought that he'd one day order schools to allow boys to use the girls toilets seemed far-fetched.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_policy_of_the_Barack_Obama_administration#Same-sex_marriage

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  9. I don't think it's a revolt against the plutocracy - I think it's a revolt against Political Correctness and the Politically Correct.



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  10. @ Don Cox

    "The Presidential election of 1960 was one of the closest in American history. John F. Kennedy won the popular vote by a slim margin of approximately 100,000 votes. Richard Nixon won more individual states than Kennedy, but it was Kennedy who prevailed by winning key states with many electoral votes."

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  11. We did the number crunching the day after trump's win.
    Although he took both houses and a comfortable EC seat share, his winning margins in the winning key states were very thin.
    Not to suggest his win was in any way a fake win. Or undemocratic or any other sore loser meme. He won by the system as intended by the founding fathers. And won convincingly against "the establishment " candidate.

    But it was very close. He could just as easily have lost by the same margin he won. That's not something the Obama results ever showed.

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  12. True BQ but for Buck ofama you have to add the voter fraud and massive media loading which worked for him and in the latest election against Trump. If trump can neutralise some of the media and reduce fraud who knows where 2020 will take us.

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  13. BQ - The thing is *populist* Trump should not even have come close to the Whitehouse - let alone WIN it !

    He pricked a festering boil of resentment in the US. One which was being ignored. Ditto Brexit.

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  14. Anonymous8:44 am

    " The thing is *populist* Trump should not even have come close to the White House - let alone WIN it !"

    Nor should Hillary Clinton. Both were poor candidates.

    The interesting question is why out of 300 million people, nobody better could be found. Has the job become very unattractive ?

    Don Cox

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  15. Don - There was better than Hillary. Except A) It was supposed to have been Hillary's *turn* B) It was supposed to have been time for the first lady President

    So Bernie Saunders was ignored. (He would have beaten Trump.)

    Trump rode in on for his party a similar horse to Farage - the refusal of Conservatives to actually be Conservative and for allowing politics to exist and operate in the Leftists' Politically Correct paradigm.

    To many Trump is a breath of fresh air and a liberator from stifling Political Correctness.



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  16. dearieme10:13 am

    Trump was only absurd; Hellary was appalling. So by handling himself cleverly, Trump won.

    P.S. Almost nobody seems to have said it explicitly so I will; I suspect that Trump is more intelligent than Hellary.

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  17. To clarify my previous:

    Don - There was better than Hillary except A) it was assumed to have been Hillary's *turn* B) it was assumed to have been time for the first lady President

    So the better candidate, Bernie Saunders, was ignored. (He would have beaten Trump.)

    Trump rode in for his party on a horse from the same stable as Farage's - people no longer accepted the refusal of Conservatives to actually be Conservative and for allowing politics to exist and operate in the Leftists' Politically Correct paradigm.

    Popular oversteer resulting from the excessive force needed to break the political straight jacket.

    To many Trump is a breath of fresh air and a liberator from stifling Political Correctness.

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  18. Anonymous1:31 pm

    In case you haven't seen it, take a look at the video at the below page:

    https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html

    Some academic types at NYU thought they'd recreate some of the presidential debates but by swapping the genders, hoping to prove how men and women a treated differently.

    They didn't get the results they expected....

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  19. Anonymous11:28 pm

    "Hillary won the popular vote." Indeed, it is amazing how many dead people and other absent friends get to vote Democrat in New York and Illinois. And how many "undocumented" Latinos, supplied only with a driving licence, can do the same in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

    As for Political Correctness, the phrase means correct by the standards of leftists and feminists. Quite how those types have managed to impose their attitudes on the rest of the population is a question for later historians to discuss.

    "Populism" means the rest of the population is fighting back at last.

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  20. @Don - the job may not exactly be unattractive, however the mechanisms that exist to get there constrain any real choice, i.e. Campaign Finance.

    Trump was wildcard who could cmapaign agianst both the Republican and Democrat party machines, he has rowed back since. But for both he was an insurgent.

    To my eye his eleection is a a kick against many things, political correctness, globalist corporatism nd anon repsonsive political system which is unidirectional depsite what it says.

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