US Politics: Paradise Lost

[Kalbear]

10 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Trump does have the habit of turning on even his closest allies.  Comey and Sessions were once favorites of his.

Trump turns on them when they don't do what he wants them to. I don't see Kavanaugh ever doing that.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

16 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I don't think Gorsuch is a 'Trump judge', but I absolutelu think Kavanaugh is.  I think there was a line crossed here - we had a SC nominee with a very political background who when questioned by the Senate, explained that he considered himself to be the victim of a Democrat plot to keep him off the court.  

Beyond that, and the dubious qualifications of many of Trump's appointees to lower courts, I completely agree [with your point]

The one nice thing about lifetime appointments is that once on a court a Judge or Justice really does have the freedom to be independent of the President who nominated them, if they choose to.

[Jace, Extat]

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Anybody catch GRRM on Colbert last night?

Nah, I've been camped out in line for Winds of Winter since 2013.

[felice]

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The one nice thing about lifetime appointments is that once on a court a Judge or Justice really does have the freedom to be independent of the President who nominated them, if they choose to.

Assuming they weren't nominated because the President has kompromat on them. And you don't need lifetime appointments for that sort of independence; eight year terms would suffice.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, felice said:

Assuming they weren't nominated because the President has kompromat on them. And you don't need lifetime appointments for that sort of independence; eight year terms would suffice.

If they are limited to one term perhaps, but that may reduce the appeal of such an appointment.

[ThinkerX]

6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Trump turns on them when they don't do what he wants them to. I don't see Kavanaugh ever doing that.

They don't have to disagree with Trump in order for Trump to condemn them.  They just have to meet one of two criteria:

1 - they fail

2 - they make a good scapegoat - Trump gets to blame them for issues his policies cause instead of accepting responsibility himself.

That said, Kavanaugh comes across as especially unstable.  I find myself wondering if he might not quit or otherwise be forced out either during Trump's tenure or shortly thereafter.  (Could a sitting supreme court  justice be charged and prosecuted for a criminal felony?)

[Rippounet]

Interesting article by Walter Russell Mead on Jacksonian America in Foreign Affairs. I don't know much about Andrew Jackson myself, so it's interesting to read about "Jacksonianism", though I wonder if Mead doesn't twist the truth a little.

Edit: btw that's an old article, for some reason FA is advertising it now.

The article is behind a paywall, but here are some of the best titbits:

Quote

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-01-20/jacksonian-revolt

For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong, by their lights. Many Americans with cosmopolitan sympathies see their main ethical imperative as working for the betterment of humanity in general. Jacksonians locate their moral community closer to home, in fellow citizens who share a common national bond. If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic, Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous—people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.

[...]

The right to bear arms plays a unique and hallowed role in Jacksonian political culture, and many Jacksonians consider the Second Amendment to be the most important in the Constitution. These Americans see the right of revolution, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, as the last resort of a free people to defend themselves against tyranny—and see that right as unenforceable without the possibility of bearing arms. They regard a family’s right to protect itself without reliance on the state, meanwhile, as not just a hypothetical ideal but a potential practical necessity—and something that elites don’t care about or even actively oppose. (Jacksonians have become increasingly concerned that Democrats and centrist Republicans will try to disarm them, which is one reason why mass shootings and subsequent calls for gun control spur spikes in gun sales, even as crime more generally has fallen.)

As for immigration, here, too, most non-Jacksonians misread the source and nature of Jacksonian concern. There has been much discussion about the impact of immigration on the wages of low-skilled workers and some talk about xenophobia and Islamophobia. But Jacksonians in 2016 saw immigration as part of a deliberate and conscious attempt to marginalize them in their own country. Hopeful talk among Democrats about an “emerging Democratic majority” based on a secular decline in the percentage of the voting population that is white was heard in Jacksonian America as support for a deliberate transformation of American demographics. When Jacksonians hear elites’ strong support for high levels of immigration and their seeming lack of concern about illegal immigration, they do not immediately think of their pocketbooks. They see an elite out to banish them from power—politically, culturally, demographically. The recent spate of dramatic random terrorist attacks, finally, fused the immigration and personal security issues into a single toxic whole.

 

Some of this makes a lot of sense. I'm far less convinced by the paragraph on immigration though. Mead seems to dismiss xenophobia or racism as possible explanations a bit too quickly. There is a case to be made that Jacksonians are at the very least xenophobic, period.
Also, it seems to me that similar articles have been written using "Trumpist" instead of "Jacksonian." I don't think Mead does a good job of explaining what exactly was inherited from Jackson himself, or his 19th century supporters. In a nutshell, he describes Trumpism well, but doesn't exactly explain it as well. Still food for thought though...

[Martell Spy]

Fiery West Wing meeting led to more power for military at U.S.-Mexico border
Aides squared off against administration immigration hawks over an order they said was beyond the president's constitutional powers.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/22/kelly-nielsen-debate-border-troops-1012547

Quote

 

President Donald Trump this week presided over an explosive meeting on a new Cabinet order granting the troops deployed at the southern border the right to use lethal force to defend border patrol agents.

Several White House aides and external advisers who have supported the president’s hawkish immigration agenda attended the Monday meeting, which devolved into a melee pitting two of Trump’s embattled aides, White House chief of staff John Kelly and Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, against other attendees, according to three people briefed on the exchange.

Kelly and Nielsen initially argued against signing the declaration, which granted the military broad authority at the border, telling the president that the move was beyond his constitutional powers. They were vocally opposed by, among others, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller; Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council; and Brandon Judd, president of the border patrol union. Also present was Vice President Mike Pence, who did not take a stand on the issue, according to one of the people briefed on the debate.

Kelly and Nielsen eventually came around to the president’s position, and the bitter dispute ended Tuesday evening when Kelly, on Trump’s orders, signed a Cabinet declaration granting the military the disputed authority. The move ran afoul of the guidance offered by the White House counsel, Emmet Flood, who cautioned that it was likely to run into constitutional roadblocks, according to a second source familiar with the conversations.

 

 

[Rippounet]

Ha, I'm stumbling into this bunch of old articles, but here's one that supports one of my pet theories, that Trumpism is before anything else a triumph of stupidity:

Quote

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise

I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none. By the death of expertise, I do not mean the death of actual expert abilities, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors and lawyers and engineers and other specialists. And most sane people go straight to them if they break a bone or get arrested or need to build a bridge. But that represents a kind of reliance on experts as technicians, the use of established knowledge as an off-the-shelf convenience as desired. “Stitch this cut in my leg, but don’t lecture me about my diet.” (More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight.) “Help me beat this tax problem, but don’t remind me that I should have a will.” (Roughly half of Americans with children haven’t written one.) “Keep my country safe, but don’t confuse me with details about national security tradeoffs.” (Most U.S. citizens have no clue what the government spends on the military or what its policies are on most security matters.)  

[...]

Over a half century ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that “the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself.”  

In the original American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government. Today he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of vital and intricate issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them.  

Hofstadter argued that this overwhelming complexity produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself to be increasingly at the mercy of more sophisticated elites. “What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert,” he noted. “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”  

[...]

Part of the problem is that some people think they’re experts when in fact they’re not. We’ve all been trapped at a party where one of the least informed people in the room holds court, confidently lecturing the other guests with a cascade of banalities and misinformation. This sort of experience isn’t just in your imagination. It’s real, and it’s called “the Dunning-Kruger effect,” after the research psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The essence of the effect is that the less skilled or competent you are, the more confident you are that you’re actually very good at what you do. The psychologists’ central finding: “Not only do [such people] reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” 

[...]

Too few citizens today understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality in which all get the franchise and are equal in the eyes of the law. Rather, they think of it as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other, regardless of the logic or evidentiary base behind it. But that is not how a republic is meant to work, and the sooner American society establishes new ground rules for productive engagement between educated elites and the society around them, the better.  

Experts need to remember, always, that they are the servants of a democratic society and a republican government. Their citizen masters, however, must equip themselves not just with education but also with the kind of civic virtue that keeps them involved in the running of their own country. Laypeople cannot do without experts, and they must accept this reality without rancor. Experts, likewise, must accept that they get a hearing, not a veto, and that their advice will not always be taken. At this point, the bonds tying the system together are dangerously frayed. Unless some sort of trust and mutual respect can be restored, public discourse will be polluted by unearned respect for unfounded opinions. And in such an environment, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy and republican government itself.

 

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Ha, I'm stumbling into this bunch of old articles, but here's one that supports one of my pet theories, that Trumpism is before anything else a triumph of stupidity:

I think we discussed this one back when it first came out and I would not call this phenomenon a triumph of stupidity -- it's much more a failure of expertise than anything else. The social contract between experts and the rest of society is that the experts are allowed to put significant resources to uses which, to almost everyone else, may as well be a black box... but the visible output of this black box must be both what the experts predict and overwhelmingly positive for the vast majority of the population. When this is the case, the experts are mostly respected. For example, there aren't too many people who argue that they know more about building microprocessors than the big chip companies (they exist and are truly weird, but there are very few of them and they have practically no influence).

On the other hand, when the experts insist that a bailout is necessary for people who were directly responsible for an economic collapse and these people recover much faster than everyone else... well, don't expect a high opinion of this type of expert among the general population from that point on.

[DMC]

On 11/21/2018 at 8:18 AM, DanteGabriel said:

I apologize for misreading your intent and for my own unkind words.

No worries.

[ThinkerX]

Not sure if Clinton lost her mind here or not.  Looks like a win for fascists to me....

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hillary-clinton-europe-must-curb-immigration-to-stop-rightwing-populists/ar-BBPZVPC?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msnclassic

 

Europe must get a handle on immigration to combat a growing threat from rightwing populists, Hillary Clinton has said, calling on the continent’s leaders to send out a stronger signal showing they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support”.

 

Related: Clinton, Blair, Renzi: why we lost, and how to fight back

In an interview with the Guardian, the former Democratic presidential candidate praised the generosity shown by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, but suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

[Fragile Bird]

13 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Not sure if Clinton lost her mind here or not.  Looks like a win for fascists to me....

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hillary-clinton-europe-must-curb-immigration-to-stop-rightwing-populists/ar-BBPZVPC?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msnclassic

 

 

 

Do you think she was wrong? Didn’t Trump come down that escalator in the Trump Tower and launch into his attack on Mexican rapists from the very start of his campaign? And didn’t that resonate with his base?

The US went hysterical over the thought of 10,000 Syrian refugees coming in, Merkel let in a million refugees in a year. ‘Curbing’ may have very different definitions in this context.

And hell, the British went nuts over Polish workers who came in under EU rules, and they’re pretty well 100% white and Christian.

[DMC]

22 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Anybody catch GRRM on Colbert last night?

Yeah I randomly caught it, which was kind of serendipitous - actually old school channel surfing.  I don't watch Colbert since he went to CBS but I was an early and one of his most virulent fans.  The segment was a let down though, all Colbert wanted to do was geek it up about Tolkein.  Love how Martin mentioned A Caution for Young Girls though, which I just read about yesterday.

[Horza]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

The US went hysterical over the thought of 10,000 Syrian refugees coming in... And hell, the British went nuts over Polish workers who came in under EU rules, and they’re pretty well 100% white and Christian.

What is it about the above two examples that makes you think this anti-immigrant upsurge is related to immigration levels, or that centre-left parties moving to heavily restrict nonwhite immigration is going to be effective at undermining this movement?

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Do you think she was wrong? Didn’t Trump come down that escalator in the Trump Tower and launch into his attack on Mexican rapists from the very start of his campaign? And didn’t that resonate with his base?

The US went hysterical over the thought of 10,000 Syrian refugees coming in, Merkel let in a million refugees in a year. ‘Curbing’ may have very different definitions in this context.

And hell, the British went nuts over Polish workers who came in under EU rules, and they’re pretty well 100% white and Christian.

To me, it gives the *appearance* of Clinton copying Trump, and therefor giving apparent legitimacy to policies of exclusion tinged with racism.  Note my use of the word *appearance*.   Clinton came across during the campaign as a trying to be 'all things to all people' - a strategy, which going from my readings of political commentary - worked against her.  I don't know if this is more of the same or not.

 

What with climate change, migrations from devastated areas to less devastated ones are likely to increase - something people already in the less devastated regions are likely to take exception too.  Quite possibly, Trump may be hailed as a sort of 'populist prophet' with his 'build the wall' malarkey - somebody who attempted to preserve civilization by keeping the barbaric third world peoples safely locked out. 

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 hours ago, Altherion said:

I think we discussed this one back when it first came out and I would not call this phenomenon a triumph of stupidity -- it's much more a failure of expertise than anything else. The social contract between experts and the rest of society is that the experts are allowed to put significant resources to uses which, to almost everyone else, may as well be a black box... but the visible output of this black box must be both what the experts predict and overwhelmingly positive for the vast majority of the population. When this is the case, the experts are mostly respected. For example, there aren't too many people who argue that they know more about building microprocessors than the big chip companies (they exist and are truly weird, but there are very few of them and they have practically no influence).

On the other hand, when the experts insist that a bailout is necessary for people who were directly responsible for an economic collapse and these people recover much faster than everyone else... well, don't expect a high opinion of this type of expert among the general population from that point on.

Altherion,

Given that you work on one of the biggest and most expensive pieces of technology ever created for “pure research” this rejection of “expertise” should make you and everyone else that works on the LHC very uncomfortable.

[Paladin of Ice]

7 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Not sure if Clinton lost her mind here or not.  Looks like a win for fascists to me....

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hillary-clinton-europe-must-curb-immigration-to-stop-rightwing-populists/ar-BBPZVPC?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msnclassic

Classic Clinton triangulation.

[Larry of the Lawn]

6 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Do you think she was wrong? Didn’t Trump come down that escalator in the Trump Tower and launch into his attack on Mexican rapists from the very start of his campaign? And didn’t that resonate with his base?

The US went hysterical over the thought of 10,000 Syrian refugees coming in, Merkel let in a million refugees in a year. ‘Curbing’ may have very different definitions in this context.

And hell, the British went nuts over Polish workers who came in under EU rules, and they’re pretty well 100% white and Christian.

So just capitulate to the fears and hatred of the mob?   Brilliant.  

In the US undocumented immigration is DOWN from what we saw from 2000-2014.  

I really wish HRC would just stay out of the press if she's just going to suggest ways to abandon ideals for political expediency.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

So just capitulate to the fears and hatred of the mob?   Brilliant.  

In the US undocumented immigration is DOWN from what we saw from 2000-2014.  

I really wish HRC would just stay out of the press if she's just going to suggest ways to abandon ideals for political expediency.

Bah, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say anything about capitulating to those who want to clamp down on immigration. I’m saying Clinton is right, immigration is feeding the far right. And I stand by my examples. The US is paralyzed on the topic of immigration, totally unable to put together a policy on what to do about the 11M people living illegally in the country. This gave a person like Trump a hole big enough to drive a Mac truck through, with his ranting and raving about rapists and terrorists. 

Americans don’t care about percentages or whether or not the percentage is down .3 or .5 or whatever, Trump screams millions and millions and millions, and many of them BAD people. It’s a message of fear and pretty darn effective one. Look at the incredible cruelties being inflicted on people, ICE agents don’t even blink at ripping away babies out of the arms of parents or deporting spouses who’ve lived in the US for 20 years, leaving behind partners and children, jobs and mortgages and gutting communities.