RUNNING ON TRIBAL: "Tonight's the night that rips our ranks..."

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2021

The Iliad, Our Instincts, Ourselves: Did the headline on the David Brooks column overstate a point?

According to scholars, that's a matter of judgment. Last Friday morning, the headline in question said this:

Here’s the Mind-Set That’s Tearing Us Apart

Brooks' column defined a mindset in which we're inclined to form sweeping, negative generalizations about large groups of people, thus rendering them as Others.

Is some such mindset "tearing us apart" at this point in time? At this site, we'd be inclined to say that it is.  Indeed, we'd be inclined to say that mindset is hastening our society's widely-discussed impending demise! 

But when we read that headline last Friday, our thoughts turned to what may be our favorite scene in literature. We refer, of course, to the scene in Book IX of The Iliad where Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, tells the Achaeans this:

“Tonight's the night that rips our ranks to shreds or pulls us through.”

By now, the Achaeans (the  Argives) had been conducting their assault on the walls of Troy for a full ten years. But the headstrong young warrior, Diomedes, was threatening to break with the Argives' commander, Agamemnon, lord god of men. 

When that happens in the evening's council meeting, a tribal schism seems imminent. As we noted long ago, Nestor scrambles to his feet and offers this good, sound advice:

All the Achaeans shouted their assent,
stirred by the stallion-breaking Diomedes' challenge.
But Nestor the old driver rose and spoke at once.

“Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age
But you don't press on and reach a useful end.
How young you are—why, you could be my son,
my youngest-born at that, though you urge our kings
with cool clear sense: what you've said is right.

But it's my turn now, Diomedes.
I think I can claim to have some years on you.
So I must speak up and drive the matter home.
And no one will heap contempt on what I say,
not even mighty Agamemnon. Lost to the clan,
lost to the hearth, lost to the old ways, that one
who lusts for the horror of war with his own people.”

In Nestor's rendering, the headstrong young warrior was "lust[ing] for the horror of war with his own people.”  More specifically, Diomedes was encouraging a schism within his own vaguely national group. 

Scrambling to his feet, Nestor warned against this dangerous schism. Eventually, he scripted Brooks, telling the council this:

“Tonight's the night that rips our ranks to shreds or pulls us through.”

At present, our floundering nation's unimpressive ranks are being ripped to shreds by the routinely hapless behavior of various warring groups. 

Just as it ever was, each of these groups will point to the others, saying the misconduct is Theirs. According to experts, our human brains are wired to "reason" in this and similar ways.

We thought of Nestor when we read Brooks—Nestor, whose wisdom prevailed. ("He always gave the best advice," we're explicitly told in The Iliad.) This morning, we'll offer a controversial thought concerning the tribal warfare which is currently ripping our national ranks to shreds.

Our controversial claim would be this:

Everything we ever needed to know we learned from reading The Iliad. 

Everything we ever needed to know? What could we mean by that? 

We'll start by getting a bit more specific. Everything we ever needed to know about human behavior we learned from reading The Iliad.

Even as our nation seems to be dissolving, that's the claim we advance today. Can it possibly be accurate? 

We'll start by refreshing ourselves about what The Iliad is. We quote the leading authority on the subject:

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Usually considered to have been written down circa the 8th century BC, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature...

Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states (Achaeans), it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.

Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' imminent death and the fall of Troy, although the narrative ends before these events take place. However, as these events are prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, when it reaches an end the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.

The Iliad is a poem about one of our species' many tribal / national wars.  The war in question is a ten-year war between two warring tribal or quasi-national groups—the Achaeans (Argives) and the Trojans.

Our species is wired for such tribal wars. According to experts, our "lizard brains" have instructed us to conduct such wars since we first crawled out on dry land.

In this case, the Argives were laying siege to the Trojans—to the towering walls of Troy. What lofty motives were producing the various conflicts found within The Iliad? 

More specifically, how did this ten-year war begin? In the shorter term, what was causing the conflicts now roiling the Argive ranks?

Surely, our storied ancestors went to war for only the loftiest reasons! Concerning the various disputes at issue here, the authority offers this synopsis. 

We offer this with our apologies. This is gruesome stuff:

Synopsis

Book I: After an invocation to the Muses, the story launches in medias res towards the end of the Trojan War between the Trojans and the besieging Achaeans. Chryses, a Trojan priest of Apollo, offers the Achaeans wealth for the return of his daughter Chryseis, held captive by Agamemnon, the Achaean leader. Although most of the Achaean army is in favor of the offer, Agamemnon refuses. Chryses prays for Apollo's help, and Apollo causes a plague to afflict the Achaean army.

After nine days of plague, Achilles, the leader of the Myrmidon contingent, calls an assembly to deal with the problem. Under pressure, Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis to her father, but decides to take Achilles' captive, Briseis, as compensation. Achilles furiously declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon and will go home. Odysseus takes a ship and returns Chryseis to her father, whereupon Apollo ends the plague.

In the meantime, Agamemnon's messengers take Briseis away. Achilles becomes very upset, sits by the seashore, and prays to his mother, Thetis. Achilles asks his mother to ask Zeus to bring the Achaeans to the breaking point by the Trojans, so Agamemnon will realize how much the Achaeans need Achilles. Thetis does so, and Zeus agrees.

[...]

Book III: The armies approach each other, but before they meet, Paris offers to end the war by fighting a duel with Menelaus, urged by his brother and head of the Trojan army, Hector. The initial cause of the entire war is alluded to here, when Helen is said to be "embroidering the struggles between Trojans and Achaeans, that Ares had made them fight for her sake." This allusion is then made definitive at the paragraph's close, when Helen is told that Paris and "Menelaus are going to fight about yourself, and you are to be the wife of him who is the victor." Both sides swear a truce and promise to abide by the outcome of the duel. Paris is beaten, but Aphrodite rescues him and leads him to bed with Helen before Menelaus can kill him.

With our apologies, this is horrible stuff:

As the poem begins, Agamemnon has stolen the daughter of a Trojan priest and is refusing to release her. When he finally agrees to let his captive go, he takes a woman stolen by Achilles as his compensation.

Achilles asks his mother to intervene; he then refuses to fight. By Book III, we learn about the larger cause of the actual war:

Paris, brother of the admirable Hector, has absconded with Helen. The Argives have spent ten years on the plains outside Troy attempting to get her back.

A few centuries later, Aristotle came up with one of his many ideas. "Man [sic] is the rational animal," he's widely said to have said.

Today, we know that Aristotle's claim, at least as commonly understood, basically isn't accurate. We know that we humans are in fact the tribal animal. 

According to credentialed experts, we're inclined to form tribal groups and to repeat hostile claims about The Others. We're inclined to repeat those sweeping claims as the prelude to the latest of our endless tribal wars.

In large part, that's what's happening within our failing nation today. You can see this process played out each night on cable TV, by the corporate priests and priestesses whose corporate salaries you aren't allowed to know or inquire about.

In part, these corporate players stir hostile feeling for the purpose of corporate profit. Experts say the larger impulse at play can be described as follows: 

Here’s the Deeply Imbedded Human Instinct That’s Tearing Us Apart

In the way Lincoln once described, each tribe will always be convinced that the fault lies with The Others. Within the walls of our deeply self-impressed Blue Towns, we're deeply convinced of this alleged fact.

Alas! The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we liberals just aren't super-sharp. As Jackson Browne was once running on empty, our tribe is currently running on tribal, in a way which tends to hasten our own defeat.

In the summer of '61, the silly Southern boys longed for war with the Yankees. One hour later, the camera drew back to show us their coffins, filling the streets of their burning Atlanta. 

Each side lost the Trojan War, given the way it turned out. Our own tribe is currently playing the game in the manner described.

Like all tribes within our war-inclined species, ours is routinely very dumb. On balance, our tribe is simply too dumb—is simply too tribal—to be aware of this fact!

Each side lost the Trojan War. That's the nature of the wiring, disconsolate experts insist.

Tomorrow: Readers respond to Brooks

Friday: A very simple bit of advice with respect to Klein and Shor

RUNNING ON TRIBAL: Michael Gerson's likely outcome!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2021

Visions of the deluge: Last Friday morning, David Brooks made a perfectly reasonable point in his New York Times column.

We should avoid making "sweeping generalizations" about large groups of people, Brooks said in his column that day. 

According to Brooks, we should especially avoid such generalizations when they involve "rampant dehumanization," leading to a public discourse in which "people are barraged with crude stereotypes that are increasingly detached from the complexities of reality."

We should avoid sweeping generalizations and rampant dehumanization. It's hard to argue with such suggestions—unless you're a human being!

Brooks made several points in his column with which a sensible person could certainly disagree. For example, is the tendency to see the world in the way Brooks described really "the mind-set that’s tearing us apart," as his headline and his column seemed to say?

(It's our understanding that New York Times columnists compose their own headlines.)

A sensible person might sensibly think that Brooks was overstating that point. In yesterday's report, we cited other aspects of his reasoning which struck us as less than sublime.

That said, we were curious as to how readers of the Times would react to the basically sensible words of advice which lay at the heart of Brooks' column. For better or worse, we weren't surprised by what we found when we clicked to the column's comments.

Let's postpone our review of those comment for another day or two. For today, let's look  at a second opinion column, one which is being widely read.

This second column was written by Michael Gerson. As we type, it's listed as the MOST READ article in the whole of the current Washington Post.

Gerson's column describes the coming deluge. This "nightmare" is likely on the way, Gerson says at the start of his column. Headline included:

GERSON (10/12/21): The Trump nightmare looms again

It is increasingly evident that the nightmare prospect of American politics—unified Republican control of the federal government in the hands of a reelected, empowered Donald Trump in 2025—is also the likely outcome.

Why this is a nightmare should be clear enough. Every new tranche of information released about Trump’s behavior following the 2020 election—most recently an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee—reveals a serious and concerted attempt to overthrow America’s legitimate incoming government.

[...]

Meanwhile, it is clear that this same lawless, reckless man has a perfectly realistic path back to power. The GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious and their enablers, yet the short- and medium-term political currents are in its favor.

Trump is probably on his way back to power, Gerson says at the start of his column. He describes the former and future president as "a lawless, reckless man."

For ourselves, we would start by describing Trump as being "deeply disordered." That said, is Donald J. Trump really on his way back to power? 

It's entirely possible. Meanwhile, his party's return to power next November can seem like a virtual certainty.

In our view, some of the comments to David Brooks' column help explain why that "nightmare prospect" could conceivably come to pass.  For today, though, let's examine Gerson's description of the political failures which may yield a second Trump presidency, which he describes as a "catastrophe" near the end of his column.

As he continues, Gerson refers to a recent New York Times essay which has received a lot of attention. In this essay, Ezra Klein interviews data analyst David Shor about the reasons why Democrats have trouble winning elections.

We think this interview / essay deserves a lot of attention. We also think that Gerson's account misstates the fundamental source of the problem in one basic way:

GERSON: In my woefully condensed version of Klein’s column based on his interviews with the data analyst: American voters are increasingly polarized by education (which is really a proxy for complex issues of class and race). Whites with a college education have lurched Democratic. Whites without a college education have lurched Republican.

This presents Democrats with disadvantages. Significantly more voters lack a college education than have one. And voters with a college education tend to be located in urban areas, which centralizes and thus diminishes their influence. Both the electoral college and the constitutional method of Senate representation reward those who control wide open spaces.

What does this mean in practice? It means Democrats need to significantly outperform Republicans in national matchups to obtain even mediocre results in presidential and Senate races. It means that Democrats, to remain competitive, need to win in places they don’t currently win, draw from groups they don’t currently draw [from] and speak in cultural dialects they don’t currently speak.

[...]

Klein’s main complaint, however, is that few Democratic lawmakers at the national level—who mostly live among like-minded, college-educated, liberal peers—are paying attention to the urgency of the task. This type of shift in electoral focus would likely involve major ideological and strategic adjustments. But who in the national debate among Democrats over budget priorities has demonstrated the slightest interest in these matters?

In this rendering, Democrats are losing votes they will need in order to win future elections. They're losing those votes because of their failure to master certain "cultural dialects"—because of their inability to speak to, or understand, the politics of "whites without a college education."

In Gerson's rendering, Democrats "mostly live among like-minded, college-educated, liberal peers." Perhaps for that reason, they're disinclined to master the cultural dialect, or understand the world view, of the white working class.

Gerson gives a truncated account of Klein's interview with Shor. We'll offer one basic complaint:

Gerson speaks as if this problem lies with "Democratic lawmakers." In our view, the problem more typically lies with the kinds of people who commented to Brooks' column, but also with the professors and journalists and cable news stars who have helped those commenters form their cultural / political world view.

Our liberal world has been "running on tribal" for a very long time now. The problem may date all the way back to sacred Thoreau, with his possibly supercilious remarks about the kinds of lives being lived by "the mass of men."

Within our tribe, we've long been inclined to offer "sweeping generalizations" about the mass of our fellow citizens—about the great unwashed.  With substantial frequency, denunciation has been our stock in trade when discussing this lesser breed. 

This is the way our brains are wired, disconsolate scholars tell us. Our brains are wired, these experts insist, to keep us running on tribal!

Tomorrow: Everything we needed to know we learned from reading The Iliad

Thursday: Reader reactions to Brooks

Friday: Running on Not Real Sharp

RUNNING ON TRIBAL: David Brooks made an obvious point!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2021

After that, the comments: In last Friday's column, David Brooks made a certain type of fairly obvious point.

On balance, he made a perfectly decent point. Or at least, he made a perfectly decent point as far as his column went.

Opinion columns in the New York Times run roughly 800 words. A columnist can't necessarily say it all in 800 words, though he can sometimes make a generally sensible point.

In general, Brooks suggested in his column that we should avoid sweeping generalizations about large groups of people. In his headline, he seemed to say that the impulse toward such generalizations is "the mind-set that's tearing us apart."

Below, we'll note an obvious weakness in Brooks' presentation. But here's the way his column began, intriguing headline included:

BROOKS (10/8/21): Here’s the Mind-Set That’s Tearing Us Apart

The world is complicated, and our minds have limited capacity, so we create categories to help us make sense of things. We divide, say, the social world into types—hipster, evangelical, nerd, white or Black—and associate traits or characteristics with each.

These judgments involve simplifications and generalizations. But we couldn’t make sense of the blizzard of sensory data each day if we couldn’t put things, situations and people into some form of conceptual boxes...

It becomes a serious problem when people begin to believe that these mental constructs reflect underlying realities. This is called essentialism. It is the belief that each of the groups we identify with our labels actually has an “essential” and immutable nature, rooted in biology or in the nature of reality. In the worst kind of case, it’s the belief that Hutus are essentially different from Tutsis, that Christian Germans are innately superior to Jews.

"This [belief] is called essentialism?" As best we can tell, the belief in question isn't called that very often. 

Meanwhile, in paragraph 2, we've edited out a pointless reference to "our old friend Immanuel Kant." That said, Brooks has already made a very important point. 

It's true! In the worst cases, sweeping (hostile) generalizations, deeply believed to be true, have led to genocidal events. This has happened all over the world—in Germany (six million dead), and also in Rwanda (one million dead), but in other locations as well.

One group may even start calling The Others "cockroaches." This sort of thing has happened all over the world, even within our own nation.

For our money, Brooks is making a very important, almost obvious point. That said, he may have possibly stumbled a bit as he fleshed out his point:

BROOKS: When essentialist groups go at each other, sweeping generalizations have a tendency to fill the air. You run across workshops on topics like “What’s Up With White Women?” as if all the white women in the world were somehow one category. You get a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in Arizona pledging to take a sledgehammer to a category of people called the “corrupt media,” and charging the “corporate media establishment” with employing methods “right out of a communist playbook.” Politics is no longer about argument; it’s just jamming together a bunch of scary categories about people who are allegedly rotten to the core.

Worse, you find yourself in a society with rampant dehumanization, where people are barraged with crude stereotypes that are increasingly detached from the complexities of reality and make them feel unseen as individuals.

In that passage, Brooks adds in a key point:

When "essentialist groups" start generalizing about other groups, they may engage in "rampant dehumanization" as their "crude stereotypes" fill the air. They may even engage in rampant dehumanization of the "cockroaches" kind!

It may be all downhill from there. As noted, this sort of thing has happened all over the world, including within the brutal history of our own nation. 

Brooks is making an excellent point about "otherization"—about the way we humans may be inclined to form sweeping negative impressions concerning groups to which we feel we don't belong. The Others Are All Alike, we may say (and believe). The Others are just cockroaches. 

Brooks is making a strong point about this deeply destructive tendency—but at the same time, please! It's dumber to engage in sweeping generalization about people based on their "race," their ethnicity or their gender than on their voluntary membership in a certain profession, such as "corporate media."

Brooks later refers to sweeping generalizations about lawyers. That said, a person chooses to belong to a certain profession or to a certain branch of a certain profession. A person also chooses to belong to a certain political party, or to a certain wing of some political party.

For that reason, it may make more sense to form generalizations on the basis of such voluntary associations. But it remains a deeply dangerous tendency, a tendency which is wired into our highly fallible human brains.

The impulse to form hostile generalizations is dangerous all the way down. That said, is this (dangerous) tendency really "the mind-set that’s tearing us apart" at the present time, a claim Brooks makes in his headline? 

That, of course, is a matter of judgment. For ourselves, we don't think the claim in that headline is a crazy claim. We don't think it's crazy at all!

In our view, our flailing nation, such as it is, is dividing into warring tribes in the way our species tends to do on its way to one of its wars. Example:

At the start of Gone With The Wind, the silly Southern boys wooing Miss Scarlett can't wait to get at "the Yankees." An hour or so later, the camera draws back to show us acres of their coffins in the streets of their ruined Atlanta.

Our species has always been inclined to play it that way, all around the world. It seems to us that our species is playing that way, within our gruesome public discourse, here in our own failing nation at the present time.

For our money, Brooks was making an excellent point about our current circumstance. That said, is this ugly "essentialism" something the Red Tribe is doing on its own? Or is it possible that our deeply self-impressed Blue Tribe is engaged in this conduct too? 

Human nature will always insist that It's Only The Others! But after reading Brooks' column on Friday, we proceeded to read the first handful of comments offered by New York Times readers in response to what he had said.

We'll start tomorrow with a few of those comments. For today, we'll leave it with this:

The desire to loathe the cockroaches is a form of "own goal" which has run all through all human tribes since the dawn of time.

If we might borrow from Jackson Browne, our deeply self-impressed Blue Tribe has been "running on tribal" for a good long time now. The resulting conduct helps define The Way We Appear to The Others.

Our tribe keeps defeating itself in these ways—and no, this self-defeating behavior isn't going to stop. 

Tomorrow: Blue readers go after the roaches

Squid Games viewers think Squid Games is real!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2021

But also, Gene Robinson's column—and that Northwestern professor: By way of full disclosure, we've never seen an episode of Squid Games, a current "hit series" for Netflix.

Until yesterday, we're not sure we'd ever heard of Squid Games, although we probably had. Helpfully, a news report in yesterday's Washington Post explained what the show is about.

The report was based on a surprising or perhaps unsurprising fact. Some viewers of Squid Games seem to think Squid Games is real. 

It seems that these people don't understand that they're watching a fictional show. The news report started like this:

HASSAN AND MOON (10/8/21): Netflix is to edit scenes of its hit series “Squid Game” after large numbers of viewers began dialing a phone number that appears in the production—much to the despair of those on the other end of the line.

The dystopian series sees hundreds of people who are experiencing the misery of financial ruin, invited to an undisclosed location where they play childhood games in a bid to win a billion-dollar prize. The rules are clear: If they lose, they die.

When protagonist Gi-Hun flashes his games invitation card, an eight-digit number is seen. That number, however, just so happens to belong to a South Korean woman who says she has been bombarded with calls and messages from strangers ever since the show first premiered.

“I’ve been unceasingly getting calls and texts 24/7 to the point where my daily life has become difficult,” said Kim Gil-young, a dessert shop owner who has used the number for 10 years.

Dating at least to the 1960s, even the dumbest creators of TV shows and Hollywood films have known that they have to use phony phone numbers in their worthless productions. A special set of inoperative "555" numbers are often used.

In the current matter, it's unclear who is dumber—the people who began bombarding Kim Gil-young with calls, apparently thinking Squid Games is real; or the producers of the dystopian show, assuming they didn't do this deliberately to create a publicity incident.

How many viewers actually think Squid Games is real? There's no way to know from the news report, though it did include an unverified statistic:

HASSAN AND MOON (continuing directly): She explained that the flood of calls during the day and night was constantly depleting her cellphone battery.

“I’ve had to delete more than 4,000 numbers,” she said, adding that she was “quite taken aback” by the whole experience, which has resulted in some people swearing at her over the phone and others telling her about their financial woes.

“I’m trying to participate in Squid Game, is it possible?” read one text shared by SBS News.

According to this unverified claim, thousands of people may not have been clear about the fact that Squid Games is fictional. We'd score this as an instructive fact about the human condition.

Contemporary politics has taught a somewhat surprising, somewhat similar anthropology lesson. That lesson goes like this:

There's nothing so dumb that you can't get millions of people to believe it.

Many people seem to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  Many people seem to believe the darnedest things about various aspects of the Covid crisis, or about the last election.

Why do so many people believe the darnedest things? In large part, it's because we live at a time when the peddling of misinformation is extremely big business, partly due to the rise of unregulated new industries.

Otherwise mediocre people are paid millions of dollars per year to perform this function on "cable news" TV programs. Very large sums are accrued elsewhere in the misinformation racket—through social media and talk radio, to cite two other major branches of the disinformation industry.

These people say the darnedest things—and other people believe them! This has become extremely common since the rise of talk radio, "cable news" and Internet activity in general.

Anthropologically, there's nothing so dumb that we humans won't believe it! This doesn't mean that we're "bad people." It simply means that we humans aren't exactly "the rational animal" when all is said and done.

Speaking colloquially, you have to be extremely dumb to believe Squid Games is real. Putting it more charitably, you may simply have to be human, with the sins that flesh is heir to.

In truth, we humans believe dumb things of many descriptions. This brings us to the column by Gene Robinson in yesterday's Washington Post.

We live at a time when "dumbness" is an extremely big business. In that sense, Robinson's headline spoke to what may be an existential question:

How dumb can a nation get and still survive?

That was Robinson's headline. We'd say that headline asks a good question. His column started like this:

ROBINSON (10/8/21): T.S. Eliot wrote that the world ends "not with a bang but a whimper,” but I fear our great nation is careening toward a third manner of demise: descent into lip-blubbering, self-destructive idiocy.

How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world?

Read the headlines and try not to weep...

Robinson fears that "our great nation" (such as it is) may be dying of dumbness. We regard that as a very serious point of concern. Indeed, we've been offering that suggestion for at least the past ten years.

Our nation may be dying of dumbness, Robinson warns. But as he continued—as he cited those headlines—his specific meaning became clear:

The dumbness to which he refers doesn't belong to "the nation." Inevitably, every example of dumbness he cites only belongs to The Others!

For ourselves, we've been marginally biased against Robinson since June 1999, when he served as editor of the Post's Style section during The Clinton/Gore Hunt. That said, we take it as obvious that he's a good, decent person, as most people are.

We'd also say that columns like his are part of the general sprawling dumbness which may be our nation's end. We'd say that those Squid Game callers are caught in a certain lack of cognition. but we'd say that columnists like Robinson are caught in a dangerous lack of awareness too.

It's the oldest story in human history—the dumbness, idiocy and nihilism are all found Over There! Traditionally, this is the story we humans tell ourselves before we start our human wars—in Germany, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, but also within "our great nation."

The idiocy is all Over There, we're told. We liberals are fed this ancient tale every hour of every day through our tribal media. Our cable stars get obscenely rich as they ladle this pleasing porridge, and our doomsday hurries on.

We liberals! Quite routinely, we believe and say the darnedest things too! This creates The Way We Look to Others—and we're inclined to grade on the curve, adjusting our grades for "educational level" and for status within upper-end media or within the academy.

What sorts of Uniquely Dumb Things do we liberals say on a daily basis? Our scripted dumbness is simply astounding—catch the statement by the Northwestern professor in this report in this morning's Washington Post—and our dumbness tends to come at the world from the top of the heap on down.

Is it possible that we "liberals" are part of the dumbness too? Human brains are wired to reject such claims, despondent top experts all say.

The dumbness is all Over There, we liberals are constantly told. That's one part of the sprawling dumbness which has become a major threat to "our great nation," such as it actually is.

The Dumbest Thing Ever Said: It may be the dumbest thing ever said! Live and direct from the Washington Post, we highlight the statement below:

FOSTER-FRAU ET AL (10/9/21): Susan Graham, 70, identified as White until she took one of the popular DNA tests a few years ago. According to the results, she was 97 percent Ashkenazi Jewish—and 3 percent Black and Asian.

Graham, who founded an organization to advocate for biracial children like hers—her husband is Black—marked all three races on the census, and now identifies as multiracial, not White.

“If anybody asks me, ‘Are you multiracial?’ I would have to say yes, I’m multiracial,” said Graham, of Los Banos, Calif.

The popularity and ease of at-home DNA tests has led to a problematic conflation of genes and heritage with race, sociologists said. This has contributed to an unknown number of people marking multiple races on the census, despite having grown up identifying as one race, being perceived as that race and living in a culture that reflects that race.

“To say that translates to somebody identifying as White, Black and Asian because their genetic ancestry points to those places on the globe is just really wild and super problematic,” said Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor of Asian American and African American studies at Northwestern University. “I find this to be in some cases a really racist role of peak Whiteness.”

In truth, Graham's reaction to her DNA test may have tilted a bit toward the slightly dumb side. 

That said, the professor's reaction to Graham's reaction qualifies as Dumbness On The Grand Cosmic Scale. We'd have to say that such reactions are just really wild and super problematic!

Our professors do and say the darnedest things every day of the week. Every time these professors speak, more than 4,000 new Trump voters are said to earn their wings.

Some people think Squid Games is real. Other people are employed as professors at schools much like Northwestern!

We humans beings are all just alike. We tend to be captives of our tribes, top major star experts all tell us.

INFIRMITIES AND DELUSIONS: What are Iowa voters like?

 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

How Do We Look to The Others?: By our reckoning, Democrats won last November's elections by remarkably small margins.

By our reckoning, the elections followed four years of The Crazy from President Donald J. Trump—but that's just the way we saw it. Apparently, many voters didn't see it that way on the presidential level:

Nationwide vote, presidential election, 2020
Biden (D): 81.3 million votes (51.3%)
Trump (R):  74.2 million votes (46.9%)

Biden won by seven millions votes—by 4.4 points. By our reckoning, that was a strikingly small victory margin after four years of President Trump—especially since five million of the votes in that seven million vote margin were wracked up in California alone.

(By our reckoning, the total vote in the other 49 states was amazingly close after four years of Trump. Biden won those states by just two million votes. Why were those totals so close?)

We've already shown you the nationwide vote in last November's 435 House elections. Here too, by our reckoning, the Democratic victory margin was strikingly small, given those four years of Trump

Nationwide vote, House elections, 2020
Democratic candidates: 50.8% of the nationwide vote
Republican candidates: 47.7% of the nationwide vote   
Resulting membership: 222 D, 213 R

Even after four years of Trump, Democratic candidates won the House vote, on a nationwide basis, by only a bit more than three points! By our reckoning, that was amazingly close.

How might our politics look today if Democrats had been able to do even a little bit better? If each of those nationwide numbers had moved by only two points, the House election totals would have looked like this:

Nationwide vote, House elections, 2020
Democratic candidates: 52.8% of the nationwide vote
Republican candidates: 45.7% of the nationwide vote   
Resulting membership: Unknown

Presumably, the Democratic margin in the House would look better if we'd won by seven points nationwide, rather than by three. Also, if nationwide totals had bumped by two points, we would have won the North Carolina Senate seat—and we might have had a shot in Iowa, the second-closest Senate race which Democrats lost last fall.

Sinema would be an afterthought. Possibly Manchin as well.

Attention (some) Iowa voters! On what basis were (some of) you willing to vote for Trump last time, and also for a Senate candidate from his Republican Party?

(We won't be trying to flip all their votes. We're just looking for ways to flip some.)

It seems to us that our vastly self-impressed / self-satisfied tribe should be wondering about such questions. We should also be asking related questions, including such questions as this:

What kinds of stupid things do we constantly do—stupid things which may turn off (some) Iowa voters?

In two consecutive recent posts, Kevin Drum took a stab at imagining The Way We Look to Iowa (and Ohio) voters.

We don't necessarily agree with Drum's assessments in those particular posts. But he was asking a very good question, a question which goes like this

How Do We Look to Others?

Needless to say, The Others will never be as brilliant, as perfect or as fine as we admittedly are.

They will never be as smart. They'll never be as morally good. Their human worth will never be the equal to Ours.

That said, if we could have peeled even a few percentage points away from last fall's Republican totals, we might be facing a much better political situation today.

On a human basis, The Others will never be our equals—will never be fully human. Still, is it possible that Our Team is absent-mindedly doing stupid things—on a daily basis, let's say—which may tend to drive a chunk of reachable voters away? 

It seems to us that our team does such things every day of the week, and twice as often on Sundays. In truth, these behaviors occur on a daily basis as top major experts despair.

How Do We Look to Others? Even given the obvious fact that The Others will never be as smart or as good, that seems like a very important political question.

How Does Our Tribe Look to Others? We expect to start exploring that question on a regular basis next week. 

One of our infirmities may be this:

Like human tribes of every stripe, we may not be especially skilled at answering that key question. Disconsolate scholars have even claimed that there may be delusions at work here!

INFIRMITIES AND DELUSIONS: Why did people vote that way?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2021

The New York Times dares to ask: Yesterday morning, the New York Times did it again.

The famous Gotham-based daily newspaper broke every rule in the book. It published a news report about the reason why Trump voters voted for Trump.

Correction or clarification! The newspaper published a news report about the reasons (plural) why some Trump voters may have voted for Trump. Hard-copy headline included, the news report started like this:

Report Paints A Dire Picture For Democrats In the Midwest

The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.

The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities—often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich.—poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.

Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.

“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”

All liberals know that major newspapers aren't supposed to do this. We know why Trump voters voted for Trump. The reason is known to be this:

Amerika is crawling with racists.

All liberals know that that's the reason why Trump voters voted for Trump. Presumably, it also explains why Republican candidates for the House received 47.7% of the nationwide vote in last November's 435 House elections, even after four years of Trump.

Even after four years of Trump, why did so many people vote the way they did? This strikes us as an important question—but in the streets of our self-impressed / self-assured Blue Towns, we tend to get extremely upset when major newspapers ask it. 

Please don't speak to The Others, we cry. Also, Please don't look for varied reasons behind all those Republican votes.

Please don't speak to The Others, we cry. This is a play on the old zoo bromide, Please don't feed the animals. 

We don't like it when these journalists act like there may be more than one reason for all those Republican votes. We very strongly like to stick with The One Big Story We Like.

Our profit-seeking corporate cable channels encourage this part of our psyche. This is Classic Tribal Thinking, major anthropologists tell us. Our brains are wired to produce such thinking. It's as human as apple pie!

For ourselves, we're inclined to see things a little bit differently. We'll turn again to the data from two recent sets of elections:

House elections, November 2008

Democratic candidates: 53.2% of the nationwide vote

Republican candidates: 42.6% of the nationwide vote    

Resulting membership: 257 D, 176 R

(117.5 million votes cast) 

House elections, November 2020

Democratic candidates: 50.8% of the nationwide vote

Republican candidates: 47.7% of the nationwide vote   

Resulting membership: 222 D, 213 R
(150.3 million votes cast)

There are no perfect comparisons between election years. No two such years are just alike—not even 2008, when Obama was elected to his first term, and 2020, when Biden was elected to his.

Those two election years weren't exactly alike. That said, even after four years of Trump, a lot of people voted for Republican House candidates (and for Trump himself). 

Even after four years of Trump, Democratic candidates attracted a smaller chunk of the nationwide vote than they had in 2008, when no one had heard of Trump. How could such a thing have happened? Tis a question devoutly to be asked!

Why did so many people vote for Trump last fall, and for Republican candidates? Even more importantly, in what ways might Democrats peel a chunk of those voters back in line with our own  blue voting preferences?

We'd be curious to see such questions explored. After all, if voters had voted in 2020 they way they did in 2008, Democrats would have a larger majority in the House, and they might even have a real majority in the Senate, rather than the ersatz "majority of 48" which Democrats currently claim.

Where did those various voters go? Correctly or otherwise, the news report in yesterday's Times examined that very question. 

How might Democrats peel some of those lost voters back? That question was also explored in the study on which the Times reported. Stating the obvious, the ability to peel some of those back could be extremely helpful moving forward.

Why do people vote the way they do? In truth, it's hard to say. 

Even after four year of Trump, Republican candidates for the House received roughly 72 million votes last November. Those votes were cast by roughly 72 million different voters.

Presumably, those 72 million people aren't all exactly the same. Except in the Mandated Narratives of Our Town, one of which goes like this:

Amerika is crawling with racists.

Here in Our Town, we love that story, It makes us feel morally good. 

We humans are like that, top experts all say. Our brains tend to be wired for that.

Tomorrow, we'll start to ask an important political question:

How do We in our Blue Towns appear to all The Others? 

What do We look like to Them? More specifically, what dumb things do we do every day which may cost our team votes?

Even in our flawless Blue Towns, our infirmities and delusions are many. We human beings are wired that way, those leading top scholars all tell us.

Tomorrow: Attention, K-mart shoppers! But also Iowa voters!

What was mainstream sexual politics like?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2021

Robin Givhan's column: This morning, the increasingly tabloidized web site of the Washington Post caught up with a personage it had largely been disappearing.

We refer to the Robin Givhan, the Post's "senior critic at large." 

Givhan's columns are called "The Critique." In print editions, the columns run in a fairly prominent place—across the top of page A2, once or twice a week.

Until today, the web edition of the Post had seemed unaware of Givhan's existence. It was virtually impossible to find her columns at the paper's web site. Quite literally, if you entered her name in the Post's search engine, it wouldn't produce a link to her columns until several days had passed!

This was just one part of the puzzling disconnect between the two versions of the Post—the more traditional newspaper which arrives at people's homes in the morning, versus the largely dumbnified version which now appears in-line.

(Until some time in August, the Post's web site produced a listing of the "stories" in that day's print edition. That service no longer exists.)

Full disclosure! We've been biased against Givhan dating all the way back to November 2000. 

At that time, and for many years, Givhan was a fashion writer for the Post, and she may well have been a very good one. The leading authority on her career summarizes it as shown, through the year 2014:

Robin Givhan (born September 11, 1964) is an American fashion editor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer.

Givhan was a fashion editor for The Washington Post. She joined the Post in 1995, and left in 2010 to become the fashion critic and fashion correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. She returned to the "Post" in 2014.

Givhan won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2006, the first time the award was given to a fashion writer. The Pulitzer Committee cited Givhan's "witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism."

Givhan returned to the Post in 2014. She's still at the Post today, writing the columns of which the web site seemed to be unaware until this very morning.

Despite her acclaim as a fashion writer, we've been biased against Givhan ever since November 2000. We've been biased against her because of the astounding column she wrote about Katherine Harris.

Harris had the misfortune of being Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 Florida recount. This thrust her onto the public stage in a very dramatic way.

Givhan's astonishing column about Harris was a bit of a mainstream / liberal "own goal." At a time when the liberal world was praying that the Gore campaign could emerge victorious from a very confusing recount, Givhan managed to create a great deal of sympathy for the Republican state official with all those ties to Governor Jeb Bush.

How did Givhan manage to do this? She did it through a mocking column which carried this mocking headline:

The Eyelashes Have It

For those who want to understand what mainstream sexual politics were like as of the year 2000, that column serves as a bit of a primer. 

It helps explain the ugly way Candidate Gore was attacked, starting in November 1999, for hiring Naomi Wolf as a campaign adviser. (At the time, Wolf was a thoroughly mainstream figure and an acclaimed author.)

It helps explain the way certain figures in the mainstream press ridiculed Monica Lewinsky. It helps explain the ludicrous conduct of many major journalists during the Clinton impeachment chase and during the subsequent Gore campaign.

In fairness to Givhan, everyone makes mistakes.  In this case, hers was an absolute dilly. Her condescension and her contempt could not have been more obvious or less appropriate. 

No, her column didn't change the way the Florida recount turned out. But it was one of various ridiculous plays which made the road that much harder.

Givhan ridiculed Harris' appearance during her crazy column. Headline included, the column started as shown below, with Givhan restricting herself to a strange act of clairvoyance:

GIVHAN (11/18/00): The Eyelashes Have It

The first time the country got a good look at Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, it was in the wee hours of the morning on Nov. 8. Television viewers were bleary-eyed, and the realization that the election was spiraling into a Kabuki drama of chads, butterflies and boils hadn't sunk in. Harris sat hunched in a Shakespeare T-shirt. She looked tired and tousled and like a forty-something woman who hadn't gotten enough sleep. And viewers accepted that without comment because they recognized and could understand the image: honest human imperfection.

How could Givhan possibly know what "viewers" had "accepted without comment" in the wee hours of that fateful night and morning? 

Obviously, Givhan couldn't know any such thing. But at that point, the absurdity turned to ugly condescension. The mockery was overt, obvious. As the fashion writer continued, she offered Post readers this:

GIVHAN (continuing directly): By the time perplexed Americans got another gander of her, she was suited up for business. Her cascade of auburn hair did a lazy Veronica Lake dip over one eye. Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick—the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on shirt collars. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double-check--before reading--her most recent "determination."

Hers were not the delicate individual lashes that can be used to fill out sparse hairs and give the eyes a lush canopy. Instead, they were the lashes of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner or Peggy Moffitt, the '60s model famed for her mod style and huge lashes. They were cartoon lashes. Lashes destined for a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

According to the Pulitzer winner, Harris' skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. 

Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid. Her eyelashes were cartoon lashes, destined for SNL.

The fashion writer with the Princeton degree was just getting started. "By the time folks finished deriding her makeup," she said as she continued, "they couldn't stop the momentum. They went on to the clothes. Hate the suit. Hate the buttons. Hate you."

Just like that, this was a primer in hate. That said, which "folks" was Givhan talking about? At no point did she say. But as she continued, it became perfectly clear that she was, at the very least, talking about herself.

GIVHAN: For her close-up, Harris did what any reasonable person would. Wisely recognizing that television lights wash out features, she looked in the mirror and began to apply makeup. And apply makeup. And apply makeup. Until she looked as if she were wearing a mask. Harris virtually created a character that she could present to the world. Would anyone even recognize her on the street? Has that been her plan all along?

[...]

One of the reasons Harris is so easy to mock is because she, to be honest, seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel. At this moment that so desperately needs diplomacy, understatement and calm, one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.

Besides, she looks bad—not by the hand of God but by her own. She took fashion--which speaks in riddles, hyperbole and half-truths—at its word, imbibing all of those references to the '70s and '80s, taking styling cues from Versace ads in which models are made up as if by a mortician's assistant, believing the magazines when they said that blue eye shadow was back. She failed to think for herself. Why should anyone trust her?

You can read the whole column here; it was very unhelpful. Some other ridiculous columns about political figures followed, but we've been biased against Givhan from that day to this. We've also been biased against the type of journalistic elite which was willing to put such ridiculous work into print.

The misogynistic sliming of Wolf (and Gore) in 1999 had come from this same general playbook. Candidate Gore, "today's man-woman" (Chris Matthews), had "hired a woman to teach him how to be a man" (everyone, in unison). So the children told us as they conducted their war.

In that case, the mainstream press corps, taking its lead from Maureen Dowd, was trying to take down Candidate Gore. In the end, they succeeded, though only barely.  (In their view, he hadn't denounced President Clinton strongly enough.) 

In the strange column by Givhan, she was expressing her undisguised contempt for "this Republican woman" who seemed to have applied her makeup with a trowel. This was the ugly frame of reference which generally ruled this sick elite at that particular point in time. People are dead all over the world because the New York Times and the Washington Post, and NBC News and its cable arms, crawled with people with values like these.

We've been biased ever since! Today, we went back and reread Givhan's column for the first time in many years. As before, we found it shocking, astounding, instructive.

Today, many of these same elite players pretend they deeply care. On the brighter side, the Washington Post's increasingly tabloidy web site has finally started linking to The Critique.

In fairness, perhaps we all make a gruesome mistake at some point in time. If so, this was Givhan's gruesome mistake—but it was part of a torrent of press coverage, at that time and in the years which followed, which spilled with misogynist values.

The liberal world didn't say a word as Candidate Gore was routinely slimed, then as the misogynist mockery moved on to Hillary Clinton. The feminist world barely said a word until 2008!

With respect to the ugly sliming of Wolf, William Kristof spoke up in protest; so did William Safire. We know of no on else who did. This is who and what we "liberals" actually were in that deeply destructive time.

People are dead all over the world because our deeply self-impressed tribe carried those noxious values. First among the bucket of values was, and is, this dominant value:

Total devotion to total silence where misconduct by the guild is concerned.

They'll never discuss the things they did. Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done!

INFIRMITIES AND DELUSIONS: Biden voters support secession!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2021

Trump voters support it too: Does that ancient Dylan lyric capture the state of the nation? 

As we noted yesterday, the lyric in question went exactly like this:

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.

The song was beautifully written, very beautifully sung; we'll suggest that you give it a listen. The year was 1961. The singer was 20 years old.

That said, do the highlighted lyrics capture the current state of the nation? To the extent that it remains a nation, can it perhaps be said that our nation "seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn?" That it "looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born?"

Does our nation look like that, to the extent that it can be described as a nation? Consider some results of a recent survey by the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

We first saw this survey cited by Henry Olsen, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post.  Below, you see the headline atop Olsen's October 1 column, along with his (accurate) account of one of the survey's findings:

Our republic is gravely sick. A new poll confirms it.

[...]

Substantial numbers of Americans in each camp are even willing to break up the country. Forty-one percent of Biden voters and 52 percent of Trump voters say the “situation in America is such” that they would favor Blue or Red states “seceding from the union to form their own country."

Say what? Forty-one percent of Biden voters, and 52 percent of The Others, say they would favor secession? That's a whole lot of "treason," given the way our own tribe's "thought leaders," such as they are, tend to categorize secession, if only when practiced by Others.

Reading his column, it's clear that Olsen doesn't favor secession. On Monday, a writer from our own tribe's side of the aisle cited that same UVa survey and voiced that same point of view.

Ed Kilgore discussed the same survey at New York magazine's Intelligencer site. Below, you see the headline on his piece, and his nugget description:

There’s growing sentiment for secession, particularly on the right. It should be rejected.

[...]

Acknowledging a national political and cultural divide does not, however, mean jumping to the conclusion that the United States would be better off just calling it a day after 245 years. That view is, however, a growing sentiment among Americans, especially in MAGA Land, as some recent polling suggests. A new University of Virginia Center for Politics poll found that 52 percent of Trump voters said they now favored red states “seceding from the union to form their own separate country,” compared with 41 percent of Biden voters who said the same about blue states.

Ed Kilgore opposes secession / separation too. That said, we couldn't help noting the lightly tribalized way he framed the situation:

This undesirable desire for secession is "a growing sentiment among Americans, especially in MAGA Land," Kilgore said. 

You can call that statement technically accurate, because in one sense it plainly is. Given the remarkable pair of numbers which emerged from that survey,, we'd also be inclined to call it a modest form of TribalSpeak. 

Remember: According to mandated hard tribal law, things must always be worse Over There.

Do that many people really favor secession in some serious way? We have no idea. 

That said, it's strange to see a serious person like Kilgore forced to say, in all seriousness, that he doesn't favor secession / separation. Here he is, apparently feeling forced to articulate a truly remarkable viewpoint:

KILGORE (10/4/21): But this Union is still worth fighting for, no matter how frustrated we all are with congressional chaos, with elections that feel like nuclear exchanges, and with “debates” taking place between people who can barely communicate with each other. I’m not willing to peacefully give up our Constitution, abused and abusive as it has sometimes been; our Capitol with its surly bureaucrats and devious pols; or the bonds of kinship and history that connect me with so many red-state people, much as we disagree on most everything other than college football and fried food.

So I say to the would-be secessionists: Please don’t go. And if it’s somehow in my power, I won’t let you go. I have no illusions of compromises yet untried or “third ways” left unexplored. So let’s have it out right here in America as peacefully as we can manage. 

For the record, we don't disagree with Kilgore. But the remarkable data to which he's responding are part of what we've had in mind when we've said that "silent secessions" have already taken place, and when we've said we find it hard to see a good way out of our current mess.

Do that many people actually favor some serious sort of secession? We have no idea, but we will say this: 

During the period when these sentiments have been forming, our own blue tribe may have losing a bit of ground among the national electorate.

Last November, after four years of Donald J. Trump, Democratic candidates were able to attract only 50.8% of the vote in our nation's 435 elections for the House of Representatives. 

Twelve years earlier, as Obama was being elected, Democratic candidates had been able to do much better. But even after four years of Trump, that was the best our blue tribe could manage to do last fall. 

Frustration in the face of such results may be fueling desire for "treason" over here within our blue tents. In a dimly rational world, those results might also fuel a bit of curiosity—curiosity about why that many people would still be supporting the party of Trump.

As far as that goes, Candidate Trump got 46.9 percent of the nationwide vote himself, as opposed to 51.3 percent for Candidate Biden—and if you take away Biden's massive advantage on California, the vote totals are amazingly close to even in The Other 49.

In a rational world, curiosity might be aroused about all those votes for Trump and the party of Trump. Why did people vote that way? Why would they vote for him?

A news report in today's New York Times discusses a new analysis of that question. By and large, though, our own blue tribe has tended to react to such inquiries with anger, telling news orgs that they should stop interviewing Those People and reporting their points of view.

How does the state of the nation look to all those Trump voters? Last week, Kevin Drum offered a type of  subjective appraisal.

In this post, he offered his view of the way a particular proposal must look to voters in Iowa and Ohio—by which he meant, to the kinds of voters who have swung over to Trump. In this way, Drum was suggesting an answer to this very basic question:

How Do We Look To Them?

We all know How They Look To Us. As a general matter, our tribe's "thought leaders," such as they are, tend to reassure us with this explanation of those peculiar vote totals:

Amerika is crawling with racists.

That's the way They Look To Us—but how do We Look To Them?

Tomorrow, we'll consider Drum's assessment. We'll also review this subsequent post, in which Drum asks a similar question.

How do we look to those pro-Trump voters? Under prevailing circumstances, that strikes us as an almost existential question. Next week, we plan to explore that question in embarrassing, depressing detail.

Can our nation remain a nation? Can it function as a nation? In part, it all depends on The Way They Look to Us, and on The Way We Look to Them.

At present, our view tilts toward the gloomy. Concerning our "nation," it seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn. To us, it almost looks like it’s a-dyin’—and it’s hardly been born!

Tomorrow: Attention Iowa voters!

Are people allowed to have "affairs?"

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2021

Kara Swisher's calculus: Are people allowed to have "affairs?" 

We'll say that they pretty much are. We'll even say that, in some cases, "affairs" may be a good thing for the participating individuals. Sometimes they cause lots of harm.

We'll also say that, in the vast majority of cases, it isn't any business of ours if people do or don't have affairs. That brings us to Kara Swisher's calculus about world history over the past twenty-plus years.

World history has turned, in the past twenty-three years, on an "affair" between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The liberal world has agreed that we must never discuss that fact, but it's a fact all the same.

The twenty-month coverage of Campaign 2000 was all about that "affair." 

Al Gore said he invented the Internet was all about that "affair." So was Al Gore said he inspired Love Story and Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal.

So was all that piddle about that candidate's earth tones—and about his boots, his suits, his polo shirts, and the height at which he hemmed his pants.

That was all about the "affair." To this day, Kara Swisher doesn't seem to understand that, or possibly just doesn't care.

(Why does this matter? Because George W. Bush went into Iraq, and that fact has changed world history. Because Donald Trump narrowly slid into the White House on the back end of that "affair.")

Swisher has interviewed Lewinsky for the New York Times. The interview largely concerns the ongoing FX "docudrama" about that history-changing "affair." At one point, this exchange occurs:

LEWINSKY: There are all sorts of selfish reasons I participated [in creating the docudrama]. But then there is also a really important reason for me around moving the conversation of this forward, ensuring that something like this doesn’t happen to a young person again. That if they are taken advantage of, 75 percent of the blame should be on the person in power.

SWISHER: I would say more like ninety, Monica.

LEWINSKY: O.K., 90 percent. 90 percent in this case.

SWISHER: I’m giving it a 99, actually.

LEWINSKY: How about 85? 85 and 15—

SWISHER: You’re being kind. Your life has been so derailed by what happened between you and Bill Clinton. How do you feel about the fact that your life has been so altered and his has not, in a lot of ways?

LEWINSKY: I’ve had moments of bitterness about it, but how I feel now is, I don’t really need anybody else’s life to be fucked up. I just need people to not stand in my way...

This never stops at the New York Times. That's another way of saying that this never stops inside the brains of us, the humans.

What do we see in that exchange? This is what we see:

It seems to us that Lewinsky is almost always inclined to be kind. In this exchange, Swisher scolds her for that inclination.

For our money, Lewinsky's framework concerning this relationship may have made more sense before she adopted the "taken advantage of" framework. But it seems to us that she is generally inclined to be kind and fair, and that Swisher, like the millions before her at the Times, can't stop doling out the blame.

More strikingly, she can't stop doling out the blame to the people who took part in this "affair." It doesn't occur to her to dole out blame to the wide array of people who devoted their lives to making sure that this "affair" would no longer be private—that this affair would be known to the wider world.

Swisher is still hunting Bill Clinton as she apportions her blame. But what would have happened if this relationship had taken place without becoming publicly known?

If this relationship had run its course without ever becoming known, would it have been a bad thing for Lewinsky? Would she have ended up feeling that she had been taken advantage of?

We have no way of knowing, and it will never occur to people like Swisher to ask.

World history didn't change because this relationship happened. World history changed because a bunch of screaming crackpots busted their asses to make sure that the relationship would become known to the general public.

People are dead all over the world because those people did that. At the Times, they kept directing the punishment elsewhere, right on through their deeply peculiar coverage of Candidate (Hillary) Clinton in the 2016 campaign.

To a life form like Swisher, the fault is 99 percent Bill Clinton's, full stop. She can't find her way beyond that iteration of Salem Village, in which the blame must all be apportioned among the participants, with a deranged array of "whistle-blowers" allowed to slither away.

It doesn't matter how many people die in other parts of the world. It doesn't matter how many girls come under the sway, once again, of the Taliban.

Blame has to be apportioned in the most simple-minded way. This is what we humans are inclined to do, and we'll never stop.

Might that relationship have been OK if people hadn't made it public? We'd be curious to hear what Lewinsky would have said to a question like that. It seems to us that Lewinsky, unlike the cretins and criminals of the world, is typically decent, kind, fair.

He had to be punished for what he did. If people have to die all over the world, upper-end elites at the New York Times will see that as reasonable, fair.

The history of the past twenty years has been all about the desire to apportion blame for that "affair." It's how George W. Bush reached the White House. So too with Donald J. Trump.

Our tribe has agreed that these basic facts mustn't be discussed, and they never will be. It's all about apportioning Dimmesdalean blame when people-not-us have "affairs."

INFIRMITIES AND DELUSIONS: Recalling November 2008!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2021

Recording a type of decline: Long ago and far away, Bob Dylan released his first album.

The album was simply called Bob Dylan. It was released in March 1962. Dylan was 20 years old.

The album included only two original compositions. It included one original "talking blues" and one original song. 

The original song was called Song to Woody. It was beautifully written, very beautifully sung. Its lyrics start like this:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.

We'd have to say, as we look around, we keep seeing a world that seems tired and torn, a world that looks like it's dying. 

No, you can't terminate a world in the way a referee can stop a prize fight. But our political and cultural worlds are in a type of downward spiral, and as we've noted on many occasions, we can't exactly see a way to get out of this mess.

It could be that we're wrong, of course—and our national "world" isn't going to disappear or run away from home. But according to anthropologists, we the people are dividing into tribes in the way we humans typically do when we're on the verge of one of our destructive wars.

The longing for war is emerging within both major tribes, as is masterful dumbness. And of course, at times like this, we humans can only see the dumbness among those in the other tribe, or so the top experts all say.

Here within our failing blue tribe, are we losing a bit of political ground as the undeclared war comes on? We ask that question based on last November's congressional elections. Yesterday, we summarized those elections, offering this somewhat discouraging profile:

House elections, November 2020
Democratic candidates: 50.8% of the nationwide vote
Republican candidates: 47.7% of the nationwide vote  

Resulting membership: 222 D, 213 R
(150.3 million votes cast)

Even after four years of Donald J. Trump, Democratic candidates were barely able to top 50 percent of the nationwide vote in those 435 House elections. Even after four years of Trump, a very solid block of the electorate still didn't see things our way.

Here within our flailing blue tribe, we tend to react to this state of affairs with something resembling denial. 

Rachel burns away oodles of time telling us how dumb Boehner and Ryan were with their silly "own goals," while Nancy is so much smarter. When journalists interview The Others to ask them why they voted for Trump, our tribe tends to howl in complaint:

Do not speak to The Others, we cry. Is this the route to our wars?

As is true of all human tribes, our tribe isn't super-sharp. The tendency to live in denial is especially strong, the experts all say, at times of heightened partisan conflict.

We mention this because we've been looking at the way the public voted back in November 2008. 

Last fall, we elected Biden after four years of Trump. In 2008, we elected Barack Obama after eight years of Bush—and here's the way the public voted that year, in those 435 House elections:

House elections, November 2008
Democratic candidates: 53.2% of the nationwide vote
Republican candidates: 42.6% of the nationwide vote  

Resulting membership: 257 D, 176 R
(117.5 million votes cast)

No two years are perfectly comparable, but we're comparing results from two election years which are roughly comparable. In 2008, Obama was elected to his first term, following eight years of Bush. In 2020, Biden was elected to office, following four years of Trump.

The differences between those two sets of numbers help explain why Democrats are currently having such a hard time getting legislation passed. In saying that, we're looking at nationwide vote totals as well as at House membership figures.

In November 2008, the electorate favored Democratic candidates by a margin of more than ten points. Last November, after four years of Trump, the margin was barely three points—and many more people turned out to vote last year.

That narrow three-point margin translated into a very slender Democratic majority in the House. In the Senate, Democrats have only been able to elect fifty senators over the last three election cycles. We only got the number to 50 because of Manchin and Sinema, and because Trump's crazy post-election behavior probably helped two Democrats squeak out narrow runoff wins in Georgia last fall.

Let's return to the House:

Dems were preferred by more than ten points back in 2008. Twelve years later, after four years of Trump, that advantage was down to three points!

That produced a tiny Democratic majority in the House. In Sunday's New York Times, Carl Hulse explained where that state of affairs has left the political arm of our flailing blue tribe. Much of this is obvious:

HULSE (10/3/21): Previous presidents who were able to carry out agendas as ambitious as Mr. Biden’s enjoyed far greater latitude on Capitol Hill, a point Mr. Biden made himself on Friday as he met privately with House Democrats at a unity rally. Lyndon B. Johnson had supermajorities in both chambers of Congress when he maneuvered Medicare into law in 1965. Even then, the process was a difficult one, requiring intensive lobbying by Mr. Johnson, himself a longtime denizen of the Senate.

Enactment of the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration was also accomplished with much larger Democratic majorities, including a brief window in which the party held a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate. Even then, the path to enactment was treacherous and circuitous, forcing adjustments in the legislation that hindered its rollout and have complicated coverage under the law to this day.

Then as now, it fell to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who specializes in navigating legislation through impossibly tight political squeezes, to muscle the measure through to enactment. But in 2010, she had much more leeway; despite 34 House Democrats opposing the health care bill, she still had enough votes to pass it.

The situation was substantially different under FDR and LBJ, whose large majorities included lots of flatly conservative Southern Democrats. But as recently as 2010, Pelosi was able to pass Obamacare in the face of 34 Democrats who voted against it. 

Today, our margin in the House is much smaller. Last November, for whatever reason, Democratic candidates were barely able to attract 50 percent of the nationwide vote—and that was after four years of Donald J. Trump.

Our point in this is simple:

Every liberal will note the moral and intellectual superiority displayed by our own blue tribe. That said, despite our obvious brilliance, we almost seem to be losing ground with American voters.

Even after four years of Trump, we came remarkably close to losing control of the House last fall. And when we start explaining why people would have voted this way, we all know where things will take us.

Bob Dylan, still just 20 years old, finished his song to Woody in the following way:

Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.

Cisco was Cisco Houston; Sonny was Sonny Terry. That closing lyric refers to the Guthrie song, Hard Travelin'. 

This extremely young person dedicated his song to "the hearts and the hands of the men [sic] / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind."

Everywhere FDR looked, he saw "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Everywhere we look today, we see a project that may soon be gone with the wind—and we sometimes think we see our own self-impressed tribe looking for war over wisdom.

Tomorrow: The 47.7%

A second comment from Maureen Dowd's column!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2021

The nonsense our tribe took in stride: In this morning's report, we focused on a particular statement in yesterday's column by Maureen Dowd.

In her overall column, Dowd hammered Kyrsten Sinema hard. Given various aspects of Sinema's behavior, this isn't hard to do.

In the passage shown below, Dowd examines Sinema's various "fashion statements." As the passage ends, Dowd rolls her eyes at the way a certain "strait-laced town" once criticized Barack Obama for wearing a tan suit:

DOWD (10/3/21): Sinema rarely gives interviews and shuns the scrum of reporters at the Capitol. But she is not shy about drawing the spotlight, whether she is swathed in fur stoles, bedecked in pink, purple and mint-colored wigs, bedazzled in glittering stilettos. It is hard to believe that the Senate had a nutty sexist ban on sleeveless outfits on the floor. But the mandarins quit worrying about it for members once their colleague blithely turned the hallowed marble halls into an iconoclastic catwalk.

Sinema’s more conservative—and monochromatic—colleagues were agog at her stylings when she first ascended to the Senate—a moment when she was celebrated as the first openly bisexual senator. And they were appalled this past year when her fashion statements included presiding over the Senate in a pink sweater reading “Dangerous Creature” and when she put a picture on Instagram, following her defiant thumbs down on a $15 minimum wage, sporting a hot pink newsboy cap, matching oversized glasses and a ring that expressed the sentiment “Kiss off,” but in a more vulgar way. (Remember that this is a town so strait-laced, it was a sartorial scandal when President Barack Obama donned a tan suit.)

For the record, the ring to which Dowd refers actually bore the words, "F*CK OFF." And yes, Sinema  posted a photo of herself wearing that ring, along with the rest of the outfit Dowd describes. 

You can see the photo of that particular fashion statement just by clicking here. And yes, the person you see in that photo is one of our tribe's fifty senators!

In the passage we've posted above, Dowd plays it all ways to Christmas. She has the fun of describing Sinema's unusual outfits, even while mocking a certain town for allegedly having cared about Obama's tan suit.

The flap about Obama's suit lasted roughly a minute. But when Candidate Gore wore a suit which was maybe brown or olive but was plainly "earth tones," Dowd helped turn it into an iconic fashion scandal—a fashion scandal she continued to pimp for at least a dozen years.

When we read that snark about the "strait-laced town," we decided to revisit Dowd's reaction to that other pol's "earth tones." We offer a few results here:

The monster dumbness about the earth tones started in October 1999. Dowd enjoyed the theme in real time, though  she focused much more heavily on Gore's highly comical bald spot.

Five years later, Dowd was still pimping the dimwitted "earth tones" theme. During the 2004 primary race, she folded it into her attack on the clothing being worn by Candidate Wesley Clark.

"Al Gore sprouted earth tones in 2000, hoping heathery brown sweaters and khakis would warm him up," Dowd told the world, more than four years later, in a January 2004 column. Here's a taste of the thunder she brought that day to Clark's troubling outfits:

DOWD (1/11/04): After General Clark's ill-fitting suits in his first few debates—his collars seemed to be standing away from his body in a different part of the room—a sudden infusion of dandified sweaters and duck boots just intensifies the impression that he's having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.

It's also a little alarming that he thinks the way to ensorcell women is to swaddle himself in woolly geometric shapes that conjure up images of Bing Crosby on the links or Fred MacMurray at the kitchen table.

Starting with Brian Williams (again and again) in the fall of 1999, these idiots always said that the Democratic candidates' troubling clothes represented an attempt to "ensorcell" female voters. In Dowd's hands, they tended to prove that Democratic men were really just "dandified" girls.

Don't worry—Dowd's column went on and on from there, getting dumber as it went. It included a glancing reference to the tones, more than four years after the fact. 

Two years later, she went there again. This time, she was hunting Hillary Clinton, who she called "Ozone Woman:"

DOWD (5/24/06): At the National Press Club here yesterday, the New York senator finally took a passionate stand. After giving a courteous nod to her old rival Al as "a committed visionary on global warming," she purloined his issue and his revolution, going his Earth Tones in the Balance one better by wearing a blinding yellow pantsuit that looked as if it could provide solar power to all of Tennessee.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That was May 2006. Dowd had now extended this inanity into a seventh year, part of her skillful effort to avoid discussing climate change.

Before you knew it, it was 2010! On September 1 of that year, Dowd started a column as shown below, taking aim at the troubling way President Obama had redecorated the Oval Office:

DOWD (9/1/10): If we had wanted earth tones in the Oval Office, we would have elected Al Gore.

(Oh, yeah, we did.)

On the night we were reminded that George W. Bush ended up in the White House and heedlessly, needlessly started the war with Iraq, President Obama did his Mission Relinquished address from his redecorated man cave.

The Oval Office was done over by the chichi decorator Michael Smith, who was previously paid $800,000 for his part in refurnishing the lair of the former Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain (a $1.2 million project featuring the notorious $35,000 antique cabinet, or commode).

The Oval Office, the classiest, most powerful place on earth, is now suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel conference room or a ’70s conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that even some Obama aides find ugly. 

Ha ha ha ha ha! Thus began Dowd's attack on the browns and beiges in Obama's Oval. Inevitably, the browns and beiges had brought Gore's earth tones to mind.

We haven't made an exhaustive effort to find Dowd's earth tones references. These are just three samples of the brain-damaged theme which couldn't and wouldn't die.

Full disclosure:

We were almost shocked, reading back through this dreck, by how deeply stupid it was. Amazingly, it was substantially dumber than even we would have remembered! 

That said, our mainstream press corps kept behaving this way until the conduct of President Trump brought them in the general direction of their limited senses. Meanwhile, our deeply self-impressed liberal world put up with this stupid shit every single step of the way, from January 1992 on.

The dumbness of this journalistic behavior almost defies belief. But so does the overall dumbness of our own self-impressed blue tribe

Yesterday, this same Pulitzer-winning columnist rolled her eyes at the way a certain "strait-laced town" once complained, for roughly a minute, about Obama's tan suit. She complained about his tan rugs, but also about the other guy's tones, a theme she peddled for years.

Regarding Dowd, our deeply self-impressed liberal tribe tolerated this Monster Truck Dumbness every step of the way. Go ahead! Just name the multimillionaire "cable news" star who ever had a word to say about any of this inexcusably stupid conduct. 

Did our darling Rachel ever say boo? Dear God, you must be kidding!

Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done! Millions of dollars and oodles of fame were hanging in the balance! In the end, of course, our tribe's wider tolerance for this constant bullshit helped send Trump to the White House.

Our tribe is convinced that we're the smart ones. Human delusion is very much like that, or so all the experts have said.

INFIRMITIES AND DELUSIONS: Two people "rule the world," Dowd says!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2021

She fails to name fifty others: Presumably, we all know what the columnist meant.

This morning, we're going to direct you to what she actually said.

The columnist is Maureen Dowd, who has become less influential in recent years. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Dowd's column started like this, headline included:

Sinema Stars in Her Own Film

Just like the original Sphinx, the Phoenix Sphinx is blocking the way until those who would move ahead solve her riddle:

What does Kyrsten Sinema want? And why doesn’t she stick around to explain it?

Somehow, we have gotten ourselves in a perverse situation where Sinema and Joe Manchin rule the world, and it’s confounding that these two people have this much sway. As Hemingway wondered in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” what are those leopards doing at this altitude?

Sinema and Manchin are now directing what Joe Biden gets to do and deciding how his presidency will be defined. Some Democrats even worry that the recalcitrant pair could be helping Donald Trump vault back into the White House.

Is it possible? Is it possible that Senators Sinema and Manchin "could be helping Donald Trump vault back into the White House?"

Given the fact that everything's possible, that's certainly possible too! But do those "two people" really "rule the world?" 

Only if you forget to name the fifty other people who are currently ruling it too!

We refer to the fifty Republicans who currently sit in the Senate, each of whom opposes the Build Back Better proposal. If any two (or ten; or twelve) of those other fifty solons favored Build Back Better, it wouldn't matter what Sinema and Manchin wanted to do.

Putting it another way, of the 100 members of the Senate, only 48 seem to favor the proposal as it generally stands; 52 of the 100 do not. And the margin for possible passage is quite narrow in the House, where Democrats currently hold a very slender majority.

Dowd understands these facts, of course. Presumably, we all know what she meant in the part of the column we've posted.

But with regard to what Dowd said, she rushed past a basic fact. It's a fact our underperforming tribe very much likes to ignore:

Despite our enormously high self-regard, we've been doing a terrible job getting people elected to Congress. Even after four years of Trump, our "majorities" in the two chambers of Congress are amazingly thin.

We haven't been doing a very good job getting people elected to Congress! Consider what happened in November 2020, in the nationwide elections which followed (almost) four years of President Donald J. Trump.

We refer to the 435 separate elections which sent people to the House of Representatives. Even after four years of Trump, these were the best results our self-impressed tribe could produce:

House elections, November 2020

Democratic candidates: 50.8% of the nationwide vote

Republican candidates: 47.7% of the nationwide vote 

Resulting membership: 222 D, 213 R
(150.3 million votes cast)

Democratic candidates did receive more votes nationwide, but only by a strikingly slender margin. This was the best we were able to do as Biden was elected to the White House following four years of Trump!

Tomorrow, we'll show you how those numbers look compared to a second set of numbers. We'll compare those numbers to the corresponding numbers from November 2008—from the election in which Barack Obama was elected to the White House after eight years of Bush.

In 2008, we elected Obama; last year, we elected Biden. But over the course of those twelve years, we lost a lot of ground with American voters, at least with respect to the way people voted in our nationwide House elections.

Our liberal / progressive / Blue tribe spills with self-regard. Despite this fact, we aren't especially good at getting people elected to the House and the Senate—and then we point to Manchin and Sinema, forgetting to note that fifty other (elected) senators stand in the way of our programs.

We may fail to appreciate another pair of facts:

The only way we got to fifty senators was because of one guy who has somehow managed to hold onto his seat in West Virginia, a massively pro-Trump state. And because we elected someone in Arizona who has seemed to possibly be a bit nutty for a fairly good chunk of time.

Why can't we do a better job getting people elected to Congress? Our self-impressed tribe has an answer for that. Inevitably, it's an answer which flatters Our Tribe as it sweepingly denigrates Theirs.

In fact, our own tribe is expansively dumb, and has been for some time. We ourselves are a major part of our tribe's own failure to thrive. Very few things could be more clear, except to human like Us.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Their Tribe may be crazy at this point, but Our Tribe just isn't real sharp.

There's a liberation in coming to acknowledge that fact, but will our tribe ever do that? According to experts, we probably won't. We expect to spend several weeks focusing on the various facts our own tribe will never address, according to those despondent scholars.

As for Dowd, this afternoon we're going refresh your recollection about some of her own past work. We in our fabulously self-impressed tribe just stared into air and sucked our thumbs as she engaged in the jaw-dropping nonsense with which we will briefly refresh you. 

Our self-impressed tribe is quite self-impressed. Given the fact that we're all humans, we also aren't super-sharp.

Infirmities rule Our Town, experts say. Infirmities, but also delusions.

Tomorrow: November 2008