SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2024
Plus, the 700 pages: Why did Candidate Harris (narrowly) lose this year's election after her (remarkably truncated) three-month campaign?
Given the way we humans are built, a large number of Blue American pundits have been offering simple, one-part explanations. With respect to any such effort, we'd offer two suggestions:
First, try to avoid explanations which don't even seem to make sense.
Also, try to get your pronouns in line. More specifically, try to avoid referring to us as them.
Last night, Jonathan Capehart sat in for Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word. At one point, this exchange occurred:
CAPEHART (11/22/24): You know, Speaker McClinton, there is this notion that Democrats lost because they leaned too far into identity politics, and that a stronger populist economic message was needed.
Do you agree with that assessment?
SPEAKER MCCLINTON: Absolutely not. We need to be honest. This nation does not want a woman in charge. That is what we need to agree upon.
We need to agree upon the fact that people understood everything our former president stood for, all of the promises he made on that campaign trail abut dismantling our democracy. The deadly insurrection that he provoked on the sixth of January in 2021.
Nevertheless, all of the things that occurred, they decided they didn't want what will probably be one of the most accomplished women to ever run to be the president—a former prosecutor both locally and at the state level, a member of the United States Senate, the first woman vice president.
That is what we need to acknowledge. This nation decided they [sic] didn't want that.
CAPEHART: How are you going to make sure they hear that?
And so on from there.
Who the heck is Speaker McClinton? To watch the full six-minute segment, you can just click this. To see the exchange in question, you should move ahead to the 2:40 mark.
According to Speaker McClinton, everyone who voted for Candidate Trump understood everything he ever said. And not only that—the 76.8 million people in question all understood the things he said in the same way she did!
Beyond that, we'll cite two historical facts:
In 2016, a preponderance of "this nation" did in fact vote to put "a woman in charge!" And in this year's election, the accomplished woman who was forced to conduct that shortened campaign came within a point and a half of winning the nationwide popular vote again.
Beyond that, we'll restate the point we made in the face of a recent statement by Bill Maher:
Blue Americans, when we refer to "America" or to "this nation," it probably helps to get our pronouns right. On an obvious political basis, it's better to refer to "this nation" as us—not to describe it as "them."
If you want to know who Speaker McClinton is, you can click right here. But so it frequently goes when those of us in Blue America continue laying the groundwork for additional future defeats/
We Blues! We tend to seek the one explanation for this year's (narrow) defeat. There can only be one such reason, and that reason doesn't have to make any obvious sense.
Also, the blame must all be laid directly on The Others—on the eternal Them. By the time we get through emitting our jumble, "this nation" won't even include the 74.4 million of Us!
Are we built for this line of work—for conducting a sensible discourse? For some time, we've been suggesting that the answer is no.
As further evidence from a different sphere, consider this wonderfully comical passage from Stephen Budiansky's book about the greatest logician since Aristotle. For background, see yesterday afternoon's post.
We focus here on a sidelight concerning Bertrand Russell. In the highlighted passage from page 108, Budiansky almost seems to be chuckling a bit at Lord Russell's expense:
Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
[...]
SHAKY FOUNDATIONS
In deciding to take on the fourth of the challenges Hilbert had put forth at the Congress of Mathematicians in 1928, Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica. Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."
Say what? Russell and Whitehead spent more than seven hundred pages proving the fact that 1 + 1 = 2?
Budiansky seems to be chuckling a bit at this point. On the next page, he describes the way Russell wrestled with the discovery which came to be known as "Russell's Paradox."
This new paradox brought Russell up short. It seems to us that Budiansky may be chuckling again:
"Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is the Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence, "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.
"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first, I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradictions quite easily, and that there was some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored.
Alas! Russell decided the contradictions couldn't be overcome, which led to the 700 pages and to the remarkable weight of the eventual text. According to Budiansky, Russell and Whiehead's "massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of the Cambridge University Press when it was finally done."
Did any of this activity actually make any sense? We're speaking here of received intellectual giants, but Budiansky seems to be chuckling a bit, and we can't say the answer to our question is obvious.
At any rate, before Hitchcock filmed the 39 Steps; Russell had produced the 700 pages. Those pages were built upon an apparent conundrum which lurked within an ancient paradox which, to be perfectly honest, was and is the embarrassing equivalent of a silly parlor trick.
That said, we humans have always tended to reason in such ways, from our greatest scholars on down to our current political tribunes. It isn't clear, in any way, that we were built for this type of work.
Why did people vote for Trump? Given the tens of millions of people involved, there may be more than one answer to that question.
Last night, one tribune offered a remarkably simple story, much like Thom Hartmann before her. In our view, her story didn't even seem to make sense.