WHEN OTHERS ARRIVE: DeSantis changes the shape of the discourse!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

What happens when others arrive: Thank God, it was Monday! (A hat tip goes to Bill Maher.) 

At 6 A.M., the analysts checked the possibilities on our cable system's program listings. At the local ABC station, the program listing said this:

Channel 12 (ABC): Special Report

Thank goodness, they cried, a special report!—but a special report about what? As they scrolled through the rest of the list, the truth was instantly clear:

Channel 12 (ABC): Special Report
Channel 21 (NBC): NBC News Special Report—The Funeral
Channel 23 (CBS): Special Report 

Channel 16 (C-Span): Funeral—Queen Elizabeth II 

Channel 22 (Maryland PBS): Funeral of Queen
Channel 26 (Washington, D.C. PBS): Funeral of Queen 

Channel 58 (CNN): Funeral—Queen Elizabeth II
Channel 61 (MSNBC): Funeral of Queen
Channel 63 (Fox News): Funeral—Queen Elizabeth II

Glumly, the analysts took their best guess. That "Special Report" on ABC wasn't about climate change!

Elizabeth II wasn't even our queen, but the networks all went for the pomp. In line with yesterday's special report, "human interest" was involved, along with a lot of pomp.

Eyeballs were taken across the pond. For one brief shining moment, viewers would get a respite from the one topic which matters here:

The Story So Far: Where 6 Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

"Where 6 Investigations Stand!" That's the headline on this morning's New York Times front-page report! 

Yesterday, we noted the way the Washington Post seems to be aggressively drifting toward "human interest" material. Evidence suggests that we news consumers, being human, may tend to be drawn to such fare.

That said:

Yesterday morning, C-Span took a gamble with the first hour of its Washington Journal program. Viewers were asked to telephone in with comments about this topic:

GOP GOVERNORS SEND MIGRANTS TO DEMOCRATIC AREAS

Governor DeSantis had flown some migrants to Martha's Vineyard! Viewers were asked to respond.

Many calls during the hour were perhaps a bit off-topic. In this world of "segregated" information, other calls repeated the standard points of our two warring tribes.

Finally, at 7:40 A.M., John from New York arrived on the line. Personally, we didn't agree with the tone of some of the things he said, but we thought he got one thing right:

JOHN FROM NEW YORK (9/18/22): Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

The topic today is "GOP governors send migrants to Democratic areas." Now, it took this long for this topic to come front and center in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and actually be front and center on the Washington Journal. 

Basically, this has been going on for—since Biden was elected president. The first day in office, he changed all kinds of restrictions with executive orders. We've had two million people coming across our borders, and we haven't discussed it until Ron DeSantis and Abbott, the governor of Texas, sent a couple of busloads with a couple of thousand people to New York City. DeSantis sent fifty people to Martha's Vineyard...

John from New York got a bit snippy as he continued from there.  

("They don't have a wall around Martha's Vineyard, right? But look it, they kicked them out within two or three days or arriving there...")

Beyond that, the caller made some comments about mainstream media which were almost surely less than completely accurate. 

That said, we thought John from New York had made an excellent point. That reaction was based on our own observations as we've watched our aggressively segregated "cable news" channels over the past many months.

The southern border is a major topic on the Fox News Channel. Presentations will often be misleading or less than perfectly accurate—and as we noted on Saturday, Tucker Carlson will tend to mention the "filth."

That said, the topic is endlessly discussed on Fox, though usually in a segregated manner. In prime time, star performers repeat the red tribe's standard points with no blue tribe rebuttal.

On our own tribe's cable channels, the situation is different. This topic is almost never discussed. Our only news topic is this:

Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail Jail Prison Jail

We don't hear about the southern border on our own news channels. We also don't hear a whole lot about climate change—for example, about the ice sheet in Greenland which is slated to drown New York.

John from New York got a little bit snarky, but we thought his main point was correct. Whatever else one might think about what DeSantis did, his gambit had our own blue tribe discussing this rather large topic.

As Nietzsche described long ago, it almost seemed that we dreamers might have preferred to go on dreaming! But the topic had now been dropped in our laps in a way our stars couldn't avoid.

This morning, all eyes were on a lot of pageantry and pomp from across the pond. Meanwhile, people who are good and decent are crossing the southern border every day, but here within our liberal aeries, we spend uninterrupted hours on Jail Jail Jail Jail Jail.

What happens when others arrive in our nation? The top red star will mention the filth. Until we're forced to change our ways, we blues are strongly inclined to stick with Donald J. Trump Prison Jail.

Tomorrow: Attention, C-Span callers!

Online, the devolving Washington Post!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2022

Tabloid piffle is them: On occasion in the past, we've mentioned the way the online version of the Washington Post seemed to be devolving into a type of tabloidism.

Today, the Post announces that its long-running Sunday Outlook section will no longer be published. That makes this a good day to examine the decline of this devolving newspaper.

As we've noted in the past, the print edition of the Post still resembles a traditional newspaper. Starting on page A1, the most significant news reports appear in its initial section, with sports and entertainment reports shoved to the back of the bus.

Online, the devolving Washington Post seems to be in open revolt against such elitism. Consider the state of the paper's front page in today's online edition.

More specifically, our question is this:

How far down the online front page does a reader have to scroll to reach the WORLD and NATIONAL news sections? And now much dreck will that reader encounter before such sections appear?

Answers:

The reader must scroll well more than halfway down the page to find those news sections. The dreck will be general over America as that scrolling proceeds.

Briefly, let's be fair! At the very top of the online Post's front page, three semi-traditional news reports instantly appear today, one atop the other. Here are the headlines on those three reports:

Ukrainian troops drive abandoned Russian tanks on new front line

Death on a train: A tragedy that helped fuel the railroad showdown

Forget the private jet and limo. Most world leaders relegated to buses for queen’s funeral.

You'll note that the second and third of these reports already seem to be turning in the direction of "human interest." (Major world leaders stuck on a bus!) But at that point, a new section appears: ONLY FROM THE POST.

Four reports appear in this section, with headlines presented from left to right in smaller font. In our view, the first two of these reports extend the tabloidy feel:

Missing people, buried bones at center of Oklahoma mystery

In cowboy country, the cradle of American masculinity, a mom tries to raise her boy to be a good man

Below that section, the front page offers large billing to four more news reports. Here are three of the headlines:

Could ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ really be done? We found out.

Can the Sunday morning talk show be saved?

College football winners and losers: Appalachian State survives with 53-yard Hail Mary

Let's be fair! By now, the Post actually has presented a certain rather limited number of traditional news reports. That said, those reports have been heavily interwoven with tabloidy human interest material—and after this, the deluge:

The next section a reader meets as he scrolls down the page is the all-important ADVICE section. Four headlines are offered there:

Carolyn Hax: Can a married person comfort unhappily single friends?

Ask Damon: My son quit college to work for a misogynist influencer

Miss Manners: My kids and grandkid live with me but don’t help out

Ask Amy: Should I join my husband to tell his parents we’re getting divorced?

We're now about a quarter of the way down the lengthy front page. Some traditional news reports have appeared, but we still have a long way to go before we reach the sections devoted to WORLD or NATIONAL news.

Our next major section is called THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE. Four headlines are offered, including these:

Date Lab: She had to crane her neck to get a good look at him

The secrets and messages of the chairs where politicians sit

Next comes a section called DON'T MISS. The four headlines include these:

An ode to the scrunchie, the ’80s fashion invention we never forgot

He plays college football in North Dakota. He’s 49.

Below that comes a section called FOR YOU. Two of the four headlines:

Carolyn Hax: How to deal with in-laws’ constant fat-phobic comments

In the copycat NFL, now everyone wants a new-school offensive-minded whiz kid

Next, we hit the section called WELL + BEING. The first three reports (of five) are these:

Are soul mates real, according to science?

Why it is awesome that your brain can experience awe

12 questions to measure your workplace happiness

It's awesome that your brain can experience awe. What your brain can't yet experience, on the front page of this sliding newspaper, is a section of reports devoted to WORLD or NATIONAL news!

The reader has now scrolled almost halfway down the online Post's extremely lengthy front page. The next section, WHAT WE'RE WATCHING, recommends four movies or TV shows the reader can enjoy.

Soon, we move past the halfway point of the paper's front page, and we actually hit a section which bears this title: WORLD. But before we hit the NATIONAL section, we must scroll past such dreck as these reports from the LIFESTYLE section:

Design pros share their favorite autumn-scented candles

The new coupon-cutting: Apps that sell discounted food headed for the trash

Going with the flow on an impulsive trip to Thailand

If the reader of the online Post is still "going with the flow," he or she will finally reach the section devoted to NATIONAL news.  The reader will then encounter the section devoted to POLITICS. 

In each case, the reader will have scrolled roughly two-thirds of the way down the online Post's extremely lengthy front page. An endless array of pointless distractions will, by then, have been offered.

On a daily basis, the reader of the online Post will in fact encounter a few traditional news reports at the top of the site's front page. That said, these reports will quickly be interwoven with an endless array of tabloidized piffle—the kind of fare which still tends to be relegated to steerage in the Post's print editions.

Online, the reader will hit the piffle quite quickly. There is little sense that the major purpose of the paper is the presentation of WORLD or NATIONAL news.

Given major changes in revenue sources, newspapers like the Post are trying to sell boatloads of subscriptions. As at the clownishly sillified Slate, so too here:

Dumbing it down—way, way down—seems to be the fairly obvious method of choice. To wit:

Long before you reach the section called CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT, you'll learn about "the new coupon-cutting." 

You'll be waylaid by "an ode to the scrunchie." You'll be given ways to measure your workplace happiness. 

"Design pros" will bring you up to date concerning their favorite "autumn-scented candles." Also, Carolyn Hax will tell you how to deal with your in-laws' unkind remarks.

After today, the weekly Outlook section will no longer exist at the Washington Post. We've long been puzzled by the fact that this iconic Sunday section didn't appear, in any way, in the newspaper's online editions.

As of today, we understand why! Outlook was built around seriousness of purpose and attempts at erudition. Increasingly, those qualities seem to be artefacts of our rapidly failing nation's journalistic past. 

Today we have naming of sections: As of today, this is the order of the sections found on the (lengthy) front page of the online Washington Post:

ONLY FROM THE POST
ADVICE
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE
DON'T MISS
FOR YOU
WELL + BEING
WHAT WE'RE WATCHING
UNACCOUNTABLE
CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT
WORLD
QUEEN ELIZABETH II: MORE COVERAGE
HELP DESK
LIFESTYLE
NATIONAL
POLITICS

The list of sections continues from there. You'll note that the scrolling reader still hasn't reached the section set aside for news from the D.C. region.

We've long been troubled by the way the online Post is devolving in the direction of the trivial and the tedious.

In print, the Post still resembles a traditional newspaper. Online, not nearly so much!

Venezuelans arrive at the Vineyard!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2022

Tucker Carlson reacts: When Venezuelans arrived at the Vineyard, it set Tucker Carlson off. 

By 8:03 on Thursday night, the disordered star was offering this as part of his opening monologue:

CARLSON (9/15/22): Barack Obama is a part-time resident of Martha's Vineyard. Obama is also, of course, as you know, the country's greatest proponent of diversity. 

For years, Obama earnestly told us that immigrants were better than Americans. They were holy. They make our country strong.  

OBAMA (videotape): America is—and always has been—a nation of immigrants. Throughout our history, immigrants have come to our shores in wave after wave from every corner of the globe. Every one of us, unless we're Native American, has an ancestor who was born somewhere else. That's what makes America special. That's what makes a strong. The basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores is central to our way of life. It is in our DNA.

CARLSON: So that was basically the whole presidency right there for eight years. Obama hectoring us about diversity, but he didn't just talk about it. He spent his two years in office making certain that places like Des Moines, Iowa and Portland, Maine became much less white than they previously had been because, as he so often told us, whiteness is bad. It's a disease. 

For transcript and tape, click here.

Almost surely, Carlson is the most disordered of all current "cable news" hosts. 

That doesn't mean that he's always wrong, because he actually isn't. But consider the level of disrespect this avatar of the misleader class has for the misled.

Question:

Has Barack Obama ever "told us that whiteness is a disease?"

According to Carlson, Obama has often told us that. But he offered no examples of any such statement on this Vineyard-themed night.

He did pretend to give an example in support of this earlier claim: 

For years, Obama earnestly told us that immigrants were better than Americans. They were holy. 

So the disordered boy-child said. Our question would be this:

Did Obama ever tell us that? Did he say that even once?

According to Carlson, President Obama told us that "for years." In support of that remarkable claim, he offered a bit of boilerplate from a speech by Obama—boilerplate about the United States being "a nation of immigrants."

In fairness, the boilerplate by Obama that day was extremely hackneyed. In some ways, we would regard it as basically wrong. 

That said, has any modern American pol ever failed to offer such thoughts? 

That boilerplate is often criticized, from the left, for allegedly conflating the experience of enslaved Africans with the experience of true "immigrant" groups. That said, this was completely conventional political speech—but Carlson was now telling his viewers that Obama had told us, in that statement, that immigrants are better than we Americans are. 

Indeed, Carlson claimed that Obama had told us that "for years." So it goes when this badly damaged, abandoned child lectures his viewers at Fox.

Carlson isn't always wrong, though we'd have to say he tries. Even when he starts from a reasonable premise, he instantly toys with basic logic and facts, creating a type of "no-go zone" for people who want to stay sane.

His viewers don't seem to notice the fact that he's manufacturing a culture of analytical depravity. That constitutes a basic anthropological fact—a fact about the powers of discernment native to our persistently war-inclined, tribal species.

Carlson went on at length Thursday night. We often wonder what he thinks about what it is that he's doing.

How does a person end up like this? We can't tell you that. That said, we tend to think that Carlson's true essence only comes to the fore when he discusses the "filth" created by immigrant groups, as he did on Thursday night as part of this disordered passage:

CARLSON: Earlier today, CNN anchor John Berman interviewed noted filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns is famous but sad, exactly the kind of middle-aged prestige hound who spends an awful lot of time looming around Martha's Vineyard looking for other famous people. 

Burns has a new film out that blames the United States, of all countries on Earth, for the Holocaust. Now that the World War II generation has passed, Ken Burns can do that. There's no chance angry veterans will show up at his house and beat him with their canes for besmirching the memory of their closest friends who died in their early twenties fighting the Nazis. So Ken Burns can say whatever he wants, and we will believe him. 

So this morning, Burns played the role of Holocaust expert on CNN, and you know what Ken Burns has discovered? Ken Burns has discovered that Ron DeSantis sending illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard is pretty much exactly what Hitler did, pretty much exactly. Watch this.  

[VIDEOTAPE EXCHANGE]

Do you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? It's literally—literally—just like the Holocaust. Edgartown is Dachau. Oak Bluffs is Treblinka. The horrors! 

This is genocide and it may be, but of course everything is relative. Martha's Vineyard may be a modern-day death camp, but compared to where illegal aliens usually go, it doesn't look that bad. 

Let's compare, just for fun. On your screen, you will see images recently shot in America's border towns, which are now completely overrun under Joe Biden's immigration policy. You'll notice, if you look carefully, chaos, violence and filth.  

For the record, Ken Burns actually didn't say that "Ron DeSantis sending illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard is pretty much exactly what Hitler did." 

Also, Burns didn't say that this action by DeSantis was "literally—literally—just like the Holocaust." If you want to assess what Burns did say, you can check the transcript or watch the videotape. 

Imaginably, a person could disagree with what Burns actually said. For ourselves, it's only when Carlson makes his standard reference to "filth" that we feel we've heard him speak with full authenticity, giving voice to his personal Rosebud.

Carlson is a disordered being, but he's also influential. His vast disorder helps explain the fact that our country, such as it was, has basically ceased to exist.

Barack Obama has never said that whiteness is a disease. Beyond that, we're going to guess that Ken Burns' new film doesn't "blame the United States, of all countries on Earth, for the Holocaust." 

(We'll also guess that Carlson hasn't seen the new film, which starts airing tomorrow night.)

Carlson could have offered some valid points about current immigration policy and procedure. He could have offered a fair account of what Obama and Burns have said, some sort of sane reaction.

He chose a different route. That said, when our own blue tribe discussed these same Vineyard events, we did what we seem fated to do:

Instantly, our tribunes began comparing DeSantis' conduct to Deep South racism of the mid-1960s. It's what our tribunes always do. We seem to have reached the point where our tribe knows no other move.

Carlson's as lost as it gets. As a general matter, the mainstream press corps ignores this basic fact.

In the end, we end up with the Others and Us. Again and again, the Others exhibit a wide array of crazy beliefs. They then get called racist by Us.

Along the way, the American nation has basically ceased to exist. The misleaders aggressively mislead the misled. Elsewhere, the name-calling starts.

We'll close this morning with a point we've been making for roughly twenty years. When major journalists behave the way Carlson did Thursday night, it should be front-page news in our major newspapers.

In our view, our own tribe's "cable news" hosts are bad enough. Carlson seems to be grossly disordered. 

He seems to be a damaged child. We recommend pity for damaged people, though such people should first be stopped from doing additional harm.

Such as it ever was, our nation has basically ceased to exist. We see this when we watch their stars, but also when we watch ours.  

Now for the rest of the story: Later in the monologue, Carlson offered this:

CARLSON: Barack and Michelle Obama are every bit as bigoted as any board member in any restricted country club in the Deep South, assuming those still exist. 

"Those people? They're not dating my daughter. I can tell you that!" 

So in other words, we learned this week that Barack Obama really is a racist and not in the way you've always assumed. Obama may hate white people—he certainly seems to. But he also demands to live around them and only them.

[...]

He is a racist, as we've established, and so apparently are his fellow liberals. They are outraged by the idea of illegal aliens near their island vacation homes.

"I pity the poor immigrant," Bob Dylan once said of this pitiful star. In the meantime, Putin may be losing his world, but we the people are also losing ours.

OTHERS AND US: Each of us has a citizen's duty!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

What Joe Biden might have said: Is it possible that Donald J. Trump could get elected again?

As we've noted several times, everything is possible! 

Could Trumpism prevail in the absence of Trump, through the success of a different candidate? That possibility is possible too. Most possibilities are!

This morning, a bit of gloom emerges from the anti-Trump journalistic camp. In the New York Times, David Brooks says that current anti-Trump strategies have largely failed.

For the record, Brooks has been part of that camp all along. That said, tens of millions of his fellow citizens have had a different view about Donald J. Trump, as is their perfect right. 

Concerning those who have opposed Donald Trump, Brooks offers a gloomy conclusion. "My straightforward conclusion would be that most of what we are doing is not working," he says.

According to Brooks, the strategies of our own infallible tribe have failed. Here's the start of his analysis:

BROOKS (9/16/22): Those of us in this [anti-Trump] establishment correctly identified Trump as a grave threat to American democracy. The task before us was clear. We were never going to shake the hard-core MAGA folks. The job was to peel away independents and those Republicans offended by and exhausted by his antics.

Many strategies were deployed in order to discredit Trump. There was the immorality strategy: Thousands of articles were written detailing his lies and peccadilloes. There was the impeachment strategy: Investigations were launched into his various scandals and outrages. There was the exposure strategy: Scores of books were written exposing how shambolic and ineffective the Trump White House really was.

The net effect of these strategies has been to sell a lot of books and subscriptions and to make anti-Trumpists feel good. But this entire barrage of invective has not discredited Trump among the people who will very likely play the most determinant role...

The barrage has probably solidified Trump’s hold on his party. Republicans see themselves at war with the progressive coastal elites. If those elites are dumping on Trump, he must be their guy.

According to Brooks, a large "establishment" has tried to take Trump down. 

They've made lots of money selling their books. In selling their books and reciting on cable, they've made blue tribe members feel good.

This "establishment" has been extremely active—and their view of Trump is correct. But in the process of performing those tasks, they may have solidified Trump's hold on his party! 

According to Brooks, "Republicans see themselves at war with the progressive coastal elites." Here's where his portrait ends up:

BROOKS: [T]he straightforward conclusion would be that most of what we are doing is not working. The next conclusion might be that there’s a lot of self-indulgence here. We’re doing things that help those of us in the anti-Trump world bond with one another and that help people in the Trump world bond with one another. We’re locking in the political structures that benefit Trump.

My core conclusion is that attacking Trump personally doesn’t work. You have to rearrange the underlying situation...

In Brooks' view, the blue tribe has come to feel even more tribal—but the unity of the red tribe has been solidified too. We've left with two warring tribes, he says. In that way, the attacks on Trump just haven't worked.

The attacks on Trump haven't worked, Brooks says. We can't exactly tell you that's right, but we can't really tell you it's wrong.

We can support the columnist's view about the strain of self-indulgence afflicting our massively self-impressed blue tribe. We tend to be sure that we're brilliant and right, and that the Others are immoral and stupid and wrong.

As we noted yesterday, our nation is left with two warring tribes—the red tribe and the blue. As this forever war drags on, the Others are full of crazy belief—and they're constantly name-called by Us.

("You name it," the candidate said in 2016. She had run through a long list of denigrations, starting with "racist "of course.)

Plainly, such attitudes have long been part of blue tribe culture. Whatever one thinks of Brooks' overall thesis, we're inclined to suggest that these attitudes plainly don't work.

We'll note a fairly obvious point which Brooks makes in the passage above. For those of us in today's blue tribe, we're never going to change the minds of "hard-core MAGA folks." 

Instead, the job is to "peel away" independents who voted for Trump, along with Republicans who have rethought their position. As we put it yesterday, we need to go after the most persuadable Trump voters, not the "hard-core fanatics."

Do such people exist? Yesterday, we saw the way the Times' Charles Blow doesn't exactly seem sure. In Blow's peculiar calculation, if some Trump voters hold horrible views, we should "blame and shame" them all. 

This is the (hard-wired) route our species takes on the way to its endless wars.

Is every Trump voter a slobbering racist? Our deeply unimpressive tribe love to say or suggest this. We refer to the assistant, associate and adjunct professors, and to the rest of flyweights as well.

That said, is every Trump voter a slobbering racist? Below, you see a nugget about some of those folks. It comes to us, live and direct, from the world's leading authority:

Obama-Trump voters

In the United States, Obama–Trump voters, sometimes referred to as Trump Democrats or Obama Republicans, are people who voted for Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama in the 2008 or 2012 presidential elections (or both), but later voted for Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Data shows that in 2016, these voters comprised roughly 13% of Trump voters...

Various studies estimate the percentage of 2016 Trump voters, who had previously voted for Obama, at between 11 and 15 percent. The Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) found that 11% of 2016 Trump voters had voted for Obama in 2012, with the American National Election Study putting the number at 13%, and the University of Virginia Center for Politics estimating 15%. Expressed in total number of voters, these percentages indicate that between 7 and 9 million 2016 Trump voters voted for Obama in 2012. 

Why would you vote for Obama twice, then vote for Donald J. Trump? We don't have the slightest idea, but quite a few people did.

(To find out why, you'd have to ask them. But when journalists try to perform such tasks, our deeply unimpressive blue tribe screams out and insists that they stop. Whatever you do, don't speak to Others! That's what we say Over Here!)

As of November 2020, 74.2 million different people cast votes for Donald J. Trump. And no, these people are not all alike—except in one major respect.

Joe Biden made a blood-red speech about "the extreme MAGA Republicans." He didn't try especially hard to say who he was talking about, though he did say that these people are "committed to destroying America."

To Biden, we'd impolitely say this:

When you talk about people that way, you have to define who you mean. If you don't have the courage or smarts to say who you mean, you may trigger a very large backlash.

We thought Biden was reckless and wrong in the approach he took in that speech, and in the two which preceded it. Most specifically, we thought he should have drawn a clear distinction between the GOP leadership and the GOP rank and file—between the misleaders and the misled.

We even think he might have had enough courage to say that he was talking about many former Senate colleagues—to point to the people who refuse to say the things they plainly know. That would have had Biden kicking up, not seeming perhaps to kick down.

We think Biden should have distinguished between the leadership and the (mis)led. Along the way when he gave that speech, we think he could have done this:

He could have said he respects all American voters—regards them as neighbors and friends.

He could have said that he respects the people who voted for him—and the people who voted against him.

He could have said that he understands that various people hold various views concerning a wide range of topics. 

He could have said he respects the people who voted against him, and that he assumes, and respects the fact, that they're sincere in their views.

Most importantly, he could have said this:

He could have said that he understands that every single American voter—every one of his neighbors and friends—holds the very same ownership stake in the American project. 

That we all sit on the board of governors. That we all have an ownership stake.

Having said those things, he could have said this—and this would be very important:

Each of us has a citizen's duty to question the things we're told.

We Democrats frequently misstate too, he could (quite correctly) have said. Other people are right to challenge us when we do.

But those of you on the other side have a duty to fact-check your facts. You can't assume that something is true just because somebody said it.

I respect every single voter, this blood-red fellow might wisely have said. That said, you have a citizen's duty—and I have that same duty too.

Tomorrow: Something we saw as a college freshman (we'll try to tie up some loose ends)

Mary Trump, interviewed by Slate!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

The question we would have asked: We see where Mary Trump has been interviewed for Slate's Amicus podcast.

The interview was conducted by Dahlia Lithwick. Only part of the interview has been published. The headline on it says this:

Mary Trump on How Her Uncle Keeps Getting Away With It

That's the headline on the piece. As published in Slate, Lithwick's first question was this:

I want to start with you where I just started which is: Why isn’t Donald Trump in jail right now?

Presumably, that question makes sense within the context of the full interview. Having said that, we'll add this:

Mary Trump isn't an expert on any such question as that. In our view, her answer makes that clear:

LITHWICK (9/15/22): I want to start with you where I just started which is: Why isn’t Donald Trump in jail right now?

MARY TRUMP: That is the question of our times. Well, he never has been. I think that is the foundational reason. This is a man who should have been in prison decades ago. He certainly should have been indicted for something. And this is just what happens when there’s no accountability, which leaves room for these countervailing forces to get momentum, and to change the subject. And we see in this most recent ruling by this hack of a judge, Aileen Cannon—she, by postponing what should have happened, gives room for Donald’s enablers and supporters to act as if everything’s fine.

According to Mary Trump, her uncle "should have been in prison decades ago." He "should have been indicted for something," she says, though she doesn't seem to know for what.

Mary Trump isn't an expert, or even a specialist, in matters of criminal law. She doesn't seem to know if her uncle has committed actionable crimes in the past. 

It's certainly possible that Donald J. Trump has committed such crimes down through the many long years. Imaginably, some Gotham-based legal specialist might have a lot to say on that particular topic, and on the way financial crimes do and don't get pursued. 

That said, Mary Trump doesn't seem to have any such insight. Nor is there any particular reason to think that she should. 

In our view, that question went to the wrong person. The question we would have asked Mary Trump would have gone something like this:

Do you think it's possible that your uncle really believes that he won the 2020 election? Based upon your training as a clinical psychologist and your personal acquaintance with your uncle, do you think it's possible that he really believes that?

We'd like to see other (carefully selected) medical specialists asked such questions about Donald J. Trump. Of course, that would be against the rules of the careful, fastidious guild we still describe as a press corps.

Instead, they fantasize about the way the former president should have been locked up decades ago. This is the product our tribunes sell. It's Storyline all the way down.

Mental health / mental illness: Our political world is awash in apparently crazy belief and in sweeping group accusation. 

To what extent can these phenomena be illuminated by the expertise of medical specialists? We have no way of knowing that, and our journalists aren't going to ask.

OTHERS AND US: Charles Blow, by the numbers!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

The Others are all just alike: During the 2016 White House race, Candidate Hillary Clinton made an unfortunate statement. 

Her unfortunate statement became quite famous. The statement proceeded like this:

CLINTON (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. 

(Laughter/applause) 

Right? 

(Laughter/applause) 

They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. 

He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

Let's be fair! At some point, everyone who's running for office will make some sort of unfortunate comment. 

As it turned out, this comment attracted a great deal of attention. Also, we'd have to say this:

The comment captures the way the Others are often perceived and described by Us. And so, of course, it  always has been, down through the annals of time.

Let's be fair! Clinton only said that half of Donald Trump's voters qualified for residence in "the basket of deplorables." 

(What percentage were "irredeemable?" That was completely unclear!)

That said, Clinton was now saying that roughly one quarter of American voters were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic." 

"You name it," she said when she finished her list. And over here, in our failing blue tribe, we quite frequently do!

This is the way the modern-day Others are routinely described by Us. As such, we'd have to say that the modern-day "democratization of media" has created a type of rhetorical standoff:

Many Others believe the craziest things. We say that the Others are racists. 

Briefly, we'll be honest. It's hard for us to make a choice between those two approaches. 

Each approach strikes us as transparently undesirable. That's especially true when you see the ways our own blue tribe is routinely willing to invent, disappear or massage basic facts to advance our race-based narratives.

At any rate, Candidate Clinton said that half the Others were deplorables. Especially when we're given no way to identify such fallen people, such comments will always be heard to be referring to all.

So it was with Joe Biden's recent blood-red, imprecise comments about "these extreme MAGA Republicans"—people who, he chillingly said, are "committed to destroying America." 

Biden said that he was likely referring to fewer than half of the Others—but his remarkable blood-red assertions may been even more aggressive than Clinton's. In our view, when a politician makes a statement like that, he needs to be especially careful to say who he's talking about.

The uproar over Biden's remarks has tended to dissipate in the past few weeks. It may be that people have come to assume that he was talking about Republican office-holders and officials, not the Republican rank and file.

On Labor Day, he seemed to signal that distinction. In our view, the president should have been much more precise. 

We think he should have been more precise in what he said about the Others. But along the way, reaction to Biden's remarks has tended to demonstrate an interesting fact about Us. 

Consider the Labor Day column by Charles Blow. In his column, the Timesman complained about the fact that Biden had said that his denunciation wasn't aimed at everyone who ever voted for Trump.

Online, Blow's column appears beneath this headline:

Biden Shouldn’t Apologize to Republicans

In print editions, the headline said this: 

Republicans Don’t Deserve an Apology

Had Biden apologized to the Others? Apparently, that's the way it seemed to Blow!

Charles Blow is a good, decent person—but he's also a person person. In this column, he was demonstrating a basic human tendency—the tendency to identify a gang of Others, then make our species' oldest declaration:

Those Others Are All Just Alike.

Blow was upset with President Biden, who had been far too kind in his denunciations of these Others. His column started like this:

BLOW (9/5/22): Republicans are outraged—or possibly simply pretending to be outraged—that President Biden has, in recent speeches, warned that “MAGA Republicans” are a threat to democracy and, at one point, called the philosophy fueling Trumpism “semi-fascism.”

But there is no scandal here. Biden was simply calling a thing a thing. In fact, I would prefer that he be even more pointed and not try so hard to dodge the charge that he’s casting the net too widely.

Biden first used the term “semi-fascism” two weeks ago, at a Democratic fund-raiser in Maryland, saying: “It’s not just Trump; it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say, something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Republicans quickly demanded that he apologize for insulting half the electorate. But those Republicans who voted for Donald Trump deserve to be called out for their actions. Trump has consistently exhibited fascist tendencies and espoused racism, misogyny and white nationalism. Republicans supported him, defended him and voted for him. They’ve been actively courting this condemnation.

Biden had failed to denounce everyone who voted for Trump—all 74 million Others. Blow thought this was weak and wrong:

BLOW (continuing directly): And yet, ever since the initial brouhaha over his fascism comments, Biden has insisted on walking back his assertion, seemingly determined to distinguish more genteel Republicans from the rest of their party. At a rally in Maryland, shortly after his fund-raiser, Biden said: “I respect conservative Republicans. I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”

Personally, I have a very hard time splitting that hair. In 2020, 92 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters backed Trump. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, 73 percent of Republicans still have a favorable opinion of him, and 72 percent want him to run for re-election in 2024.

The overwhelming majority of Republicans support Trump. The pool of respectable conservatives is shallow, and that’s assuming that they can be neatly defined as those not voting for Trump.

Biden had said that he respected some Republicans. To Blow, that was the latest outrage. He had trouble "splitting that hair."

Blow seemed to think that Biden should have denounced all Republicans, full stop. He shouldn't have said there are some he respects. Why in the world would President Biden want to say something like that?

We don't know why Biden said that. Also, we think he should have been much more clear concerning who he was talking about in his denunciations of the people who want to destroy this country.

That said, we were struck by the way Blow reacted, or failed to react, to the various sets of numbers which littered his column. In our view, he was displaying an ancient impulse—the impulse to denounce all the Others, everyone who isn't one of Us.

Consider Blow's work by the numbers! Let's start with the numbers we've already posted above:

In the passage, Blow says that 73 percent of Republicans still have a favorable opinion of Trump. Forgive us for being didactic, but that would seem to indicate that 27 percent of Republicans don't have a favorable view of the former president.

What would be wrong with observing that distinction—and with trying to peel those voters away from the GOP column? To Blow, it's hard to split that hair. The Others must all be condemned.

As Blow's column proceeded, so did this peculiar aspect of his work. Even as he thundered that Biden should have denounced all Republicans, he cited an array of statistics which seemed to show that many Republicans don't support Donald J. Trump.

We humans are wired to loathe en masse. Let's ponder some of Blow's presentations:

BLOW: Make no mistake: A significant portion of Republican voters have done exactly what Biden has tried to exempt them from having done. A Public Religion Research Institute poll published in November found that nearly a third of Republicans agreed with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Also, a later poll found that a quarter of Republicans were adherents of the internet conspiracy theory QAnon and believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders” and that “a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation” control America’s government, media and financial system.

As PolitiFact noted in June, citing a number of polls, roughly 70 percent of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner of the presidency.

Consider Blow by the numbers! If "a quarter of Republicans" are adherents of QAnon, doesn't that mean that three quarters are not?

(Fuller disclosure: In the survey to which Blow referred, nine percent of Democrats also qualified as QAnon adherents.)

Also this:

Seventy percent of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner? Truly, that's a shocking number—but doesn't that mean that 30 percent of Others agree that Biden won?

If a third of Republicans agree with the statement about resorting to violence, doesn't that mean that two-thirds don't? That's one of the ways such numbers strike us, but it isn't that way for Blow.

Blow rolls with the numbers like this: "A significant portion of Republican voters have done exactly what Biden has tried to exempt them from having done."

That representation of Biden's statement is semi-bungled. But if a significant portion of Republican voters have behaved in the ways Biden denounced, doesn't that suggest that another "significant portion" haven't? And isn't that more or less what Biden said?

Blow was working by the numbers in a largely irrational way. According to Blow, many Republicans had behaved certain ways, so we should condemn all. 

Of course, that's the way these assessments have always gone, given the way we humans are wired. The Others will always look just alike—or so they will look to Us.

Near the end of his column, Blow quoted Hillary Clinton's unfortunate remark from 2016. 

"She was absolutely right," Blow said. "She may have even understated the number."

With that remark, Blow helped us see one of the ways we humans are wired to behave: 

People like Blow are confident in their assessments concerning who is "deplorable / racist / irredeemable." And if some of the Others are deplorable, that means that all Others are!

Throughout his column, Blow had been working the numbers in a rather strange way. He kept posting statistics which said that some Republicans were guilty of the crimes he alleged—and on that basis, he kept insisting that Biden should have denounced them all:

"No person who voted for Trump or supports him now is above being named and shamed," Blow wrote at the end of his essay. In this way, the columnist was "killing the pig," tens of millions of pigs at a time.

If you voted for Trump but don't support him now, you should be blamed and shamed too! Let's forget about any attempt to peel such voters away from the GOP column.

In our current "democratized" situation, a truly amazing number of Others believe the craziest things. To Us, such facts mean that all the Others qualify as deplorable racists.

Which of these tribes is behaving more poorly? More and more and more and more, we find it hard to say—but you really can't run a large modern nation this way.

Has our nation, such as it was, already ceased to exist? Watching these warring tribes in action, we're inclined to suspect that it has!

Tomorrow: Why Biden had to say what he did. What Biden could have said.

OTHERS AND US: Commenters quickly savage the Others!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

Does this say something bad about Us? Can it possibly be true, this gloomy thing Kevin Drum said?

Drum was reacting a column by Pamela Paul in Monday's New York Times. Quoting the published views of debate champion Bo Seo, Paul made some rather fuzzy suggestions about the way we could improve the quality of our failing public discourse.

Should we attempt to conform to the standards of formal debate? In his reaction to that suggestion, Drum offered this gloomy assessment:

DRUM (9/12/22): Formal debate is all about introducing facts—as many as possible—and then refuting them. In real life, this is not called debate, it's called the most boring thing in the entire world. It persuades no one.

[...]

Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them—perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.

We human beings just wanna have fun—and we want to have our pre-existing worldviews confirmed. And please note:

Drum says this is true across the board. Almost surely, you aren't the exception to this!

It follows that our own blue tribe can't be the exception either. But can this possibly be the case? At present, the Others are notably closed to debate—but is the same thing true about Us?

We think there's a great deal to recommend the view Drum stated or suggested. (We assume that he was embellishing a bit for effect. Also, that he was talking about the types of issues which dominate our failing public discourse.)

At present, the Others are often amazingly bad—but all too often, the same is true about Us. Needless to say, as we scrolled through comments to Drum's post, we quickly came upon this:

COMMENT TO DRUM: Yes, MAGA's don't need no stinkin' facts—they know what they want. But what has to be realized is that the most powerful motivations are often those involving group loyalties. People will obviously give up their lives for their country or their side in a civil war or for some smaller group. People often think they are dedicated to some noble cause, but for most people what they are really fighting for is the group they identify with. When the group divisions get strong enough, nothing that the other side does is right while everything that your side does is right. This is not just cult behavior, it is universal human behavior. Cult leaders and many national political leaders are those who can tap into basic group identification factors such as race and religion, even if there are no real material conflicts.

And it is not inherently stupid people who join these tribal divisions, it is those who have been most thoroughly indoctrinated in cultural things like racism or religion.

Drum had seemed to be floating the possibility that our own blue tribe was no better than the MAGAs. But in this, the fourth comment to Drum's post, one reader adopted a standard position:

He didn't argue against Drum's suggestion. Instead, he seemed to make an assumption:

He seemed to assume that the MAGAs were the group Drum had been talking about, what with their racism and the way they cling to religion. At one point, the commenter seemed to say this behavior is universal, but he only mentioned the Others.

At present, it may well be that "MAGA Republicans"—however membership in that group is defined—are considerably worse than Us. On the other hand, our own tribal thinking may quickly emerge in reactions to posts like Drum's.

Indeed, before encountering Drum's gloomy post, we'd read Paul's column in the Times—and sure enough! Early in comments to that column, comments like these had appeared:

COMMENT: I keep looking at this insight through the lens of our modern political arguments and one thought recurs: All of these techniques only work if both sides have valid, thoughtful perspectives worthy of informed consideration. The MAGA crowd simply does not come to the table with anything close. Using old-fashioned approaches with new-crazy lunacy just won’t work. This well-meaning stuff is from the 1950s.

COMMENT: I do try to acknowledge that the other side is sometimes right. In particular, I think they have a point about cancel culture and how social justice movements on the left are also becoming authoritarian. I also acknowledge that the left has its own dogmas (i.e., that nuclear power and GMOs are inherently bad) that are not really based on facts. But I have yet to meet a committed MAGA person who is similarly open-minded and willing to question their side. They will tell you how they are much more open-minded than you because they question the mainstream media. But I do that sometimes too, and I listen to the right-wing critiques and am willing to change my mind if I see actual evidence that holds up. In my experience, a MAGA person starts, not by questioning, but with the assumption that the mainstream media are wrong.

COMMENT: Nice column, except I don’t see how it applies when we can’t agree on what constitutes a fact, what constitutes truth, or which reality is real.

Appreciate that hard-core MAGAs don’t care about any of those things. They don’t matter. MAGAs have been whipped into and are kept in a state of angered frenzy. Logic doesn’t apply. Reason doesn’t apply...

There is no debating with that. They don’t care about the truth, right, or wrong. They only care about being angry and getting what they want. High school debate etiquette won’t do anything to help when there is no common basis of truth. 

COMMENT: I would love to see Bo Seo moderate a debate between a MAGA fanatic and a normal person. It would enlighten the rest of us on how to argue better.

COMMENT: I'd love to see him try this with Trump/MAGA crowd and see how far this gets him. MAGA world—there's no logic in their thinking, so there's no basis for discourse. 

COMMENT: ...[I]t is impossible to have any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that doesn't believe in facts, objective truths, or reason. Anyone who has had a debate with a MAGA adherent knows this all too well. There is no debate, there is only Trump's truth, which as we have learned over the last 5 years, means nothing to the majority and everything to the minority, leaving us in the mess we are in for the foreseeable future. You cannot debate true believers or cultists, because reason has left the conversation.

Those comments appeared rather quickly. We'd make several observations:

First, it isn't hard to understand the frustration these commenters feel concerning current Republican voters.

Especially in the age of Trump, Republican voters have seemed to accept a steady string of claims which are either false or unsupported. (Our tribe now describes all such statements as "lies.") 

The claim that the last election was stolen has probably turned out to be the most consequential of these bogus claims. Among the Republican rank and file, this claim is widely believed.

That said, the vehemence with which these commenters slam the Others starts to point at possible flaws within our own tribe's tendencies. These comments tend to reveal an ancient human tendency—the tendency to generalize extremely widely, especially about the very bad qualities found in the Other tribe.

At present, our public discourse is a clownish, god-awful mess. That said, please note the way these commenters picture the situation:

You can't have a discourse with these Others, they say. You can't hope to conduct real discourse with Them because they're closed to reason and facts.

In many cases, of course, that may turn out to be true. But note the way these commenters reason:

These commenters picture the world in a way we've described in the past. When they think about the Others, they tend to picture the least persuadable such person. They then generalize about the group based upon their description of that person.

In the first comment we've posted, the commenter simply speaks about the shortcomings of "the MAGA crowd." Needless to say, a lot of shortcomings exist within that group, depending on how you define it.

At present, "the MAGA crowd" can be less than ideal! But note the language used by the other commenters:

In the second comment we have posted, the commenter pictures the attempt to reason with "a committed MAGA person." In the next comment, we're asked to picture "hard-core MAGAs."

After that, another commenter pictures "a MAGA fanatic" (in contrast to "a normal person"). In the final comment we've posted, we're asked to imagine debating "a MAGA adherent," who is later described as a "cultist." 

It's true! Blue tribe members will have a very hard time persuading "cultists" or "fanatics" or "hard-core" Trump supporters. In a rational world, this is a way of stating an obvious fact:

In any public debate, there will always be people who remain unpersuaded. Agreement is never 100 percent. At present, there isn't even full agreement on whether the earth is round.

That said, note the way these commenters portrayed the situation. They could have pictured themselves debating the most persuadable Other. Instead, they chose to picture the least persuadable such person, using that to draw a sweeping conclusion:

You can't possibly reason with the Others! These fanatical hard-core MAGA cultists are all just alike!

Fanatical cultists are indeed beyond the pale, but how many people is that? Deep inside our lizard brains, even those of Us in our infallible tribe are inclined to say that the Others are all like that!

An apparent majority of Trump voters believe the last election was stolen. At present, does a majority of our own blue tribe hold to any bogus claim of so much significance?

We're inclined to say that We murder sleep in our own uniquely blue tribe ways—for example, by insisting that the Others all have to be "irredeemable" racists. For today, we'll close with this observation:

Even in our own infallible tribe, we're strongly inclined to generalize about tens of millions of Others. It's hard for Others to reason with people like Us when we reason that way.

Tomorrow: Charles Blow would punish all the Others!

Friday: Trying a little tenderness! What Biden might have said

OTHERS AND US: You can't persuade the Others with facts!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

Drum says the same thing about Us: Over the course of the past ten years, Pamela Paul served as the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

She's now a regular opinion columnist. Yesterday, she offered a somewhat fuzzy column touching on an important topic. 

Her column appeared beneath a pair of somewhat fuzzy headlines. In print editions, the headline said this:

Is There Room for Debate in Real Life?

Online, the headline is simpler and more direct: "How to Argue Well."

What sorts of debates and arguments is Paul talking about? In our view, that isn't always especially clear, but her column starts like this:

PAUL (9/12/22): School’s in session. Workers have been summoned back. Campuses are open for protests and counterprotests, invitations and disinvitations. And a nasty round of midterms is upon us.

That’s plenty of fodder for argument, and that’s leaving out perennial sources of conflict like who was supposed to load the dishwasher. Who wants to pick a fight first?

Because fight it out we will. In a country riven by discord, the extent of disagreement among people, their political representatives and their media outlets feels simultaneously intransigent, untenable and entirely inevitable. Not only are we bad at agreeing with one another; we’re also terrible at arguing with one another.

In much of the column, Paul seems to be discussing the ways people debate such questions as who should load the dishwasher. But in that opening, we the larger topic at hand:

Our public discourse is "riven by discord," Paul correctly says. 

"We’re terrible at arguing with one another," she says. According to Paul, we don't know how to reduce "the extent of disagreement" found in our public debates.  

We’re terrible at arguing with one another? At this highly polarized time, this is an excellent topic for discussion and/or debate. 

In our view, Paul's column doesn't get especially far in search of a solution to this obvious problem. We were more interested in the way her column struck Kevin Drum.

In this post about Paul's column, Drum focused on the idea that we should be careful to stick to the facts when we engage in our public debates. 

That certainly sounds like a good idea. But in his penultimate paragraph, he glumly offers this:

DRUM (9/12/22):  Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them—perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.

It sounds like Drum has been speaking with the same anthropologists who have been consulting us over the past five years.

We aren't "the rational animal" after all, Drum seems to say in that passage.  We're only persuaded when we listen to people who state our pre-existing viewpoint—and in such cases, we of course aren't being persuaded of anything at all.

(Kevin even refers to "people" as "they!" That's how gloomy his portrait is!)

Compared to the "rational animal" framework, Drum is offering a somewhat gloomy point of view. But as he ends his post, matters get decidedly worse—and we members of the blue tribe are confronted with a challenge:

DRUM (continuing directly): And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.

There are almost no exceptions, Drum says. Even among us blue tribe members, we "just want [our] biases confirmed" when we venture out into the world.

According to Drum, one person in a thousand is actually open to reason. The rest of us are not. 

Can Drum really believe what he says? Only one person in a thousand is open to attempts at persuasion? Everyone else is closed to reason?

We'll assume that Drum is exaggerating a bit for effect. Having stated that disclaimer, let's return to the matter at hand:

Is it true that this is the way we humans engage in public debate? Even here in our own blue tribe, can this possibly be the way our human minds actually work?

According to Drum's portrait, it isn't just the Others who "want their biases confirmed." According to Drum, those of Us in our liberal aeries function the same way too!

Drum seems to be denying what the French call la difference. The Others are impervious to reason, he says. But that's also true of Us!

We're not the exceptions, Drum declares. Is there any chance—any chance at all—that any such claim could be true?

Tomorrow: In comments to Paul and in comments to Drum, we noted some instant reactions

OTHERS: What do pro-Trump voters believe?

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

Our own blue tribe's misleaders: At present, the Republican Party contains a wide array of aggressive Misleaders.

It also contains The Misled.

The rank and file have repeatedly been told, by Donald J. Trump, that the last election was stolen. He has produced no evidence in support of his claim, but he bellows it long and loud.

Consider one result of that endless propaganda campaign, as cited by Charles Blow in last Monday's New York Times:

BLOW (9/5/22): As PolitiFact noted in June, citing a number of polls, roughly 70 percent of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner of the presidency.

The PolitiFact essay to which Blow linked can be seen right here. The essay appeared beneath this headline:

Most Republicans still falsely believe Trump’s stolen election claims

Quite plainly, the PolitiFact essay was talking about Republican voters—the Republican rank and file. It wasn't referring to the party's leadership groups, most of whom understand full well that the last election wasn't stolen, that this belief is bogus. 

Donald J. Trump and those leadership groups are the Republican party's misleaders. By dint of their tireless efforts, a solid majority of Republican votes have been grossly misled.

Having come this far together, let's get clear on one point:

According to the PolitiFact essay, a solid majority of Republican voters believe the last election was stolen! As a result, those voters are angry and disaffected, as sensible people would sensibly be in the face of some such act.

Those voters don't know that The Steal didn't happen. In this way, a majority of the rank and file have been grossly misled.

The Republican Party contains the misleaders, but it also contains the misled. In our view, this is one of the most obvious distinctions in the known human world. 

Our view? We think Joe Biden should have had the decency and the courage to draw this blindingly obvious distinction in his blood-red speech back on September 1.

Sadly, the president made little attempt to draw this distinction. Instead, he may have seemed to be sliming that rank and file when he said such things as this:

BIDEN (9/1/22): I believe it is my duty—my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. 

They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. 

[...]

Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to—to destroying American democracy. 

According to Biden, MAGA Republicans "refuse to accept the results of a free election." 

"They do not recognize the will of the people...They're committed to destroying American democracy," the American president said.

We think it was ugly conduct by Biden which led him to deliver that speech in the way he did. We think it was cowardly conduct by the president which kept him from drawing the bone-simple distinction we've drawn.

Everything which Biden said is true about Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party's leadership cadres. But in what way are the (misled) rank and file "committed to destroying American democracy?"

Because of the ways they've been misled, they think the results of the last election actually have been disregarded! As a result of that (bogus) belief, they're angry and upset, as any citizen would naturally be in the face of a stolen election.

Those voters are angry and upset—and they don't know that their belief is bogus. They're saddled with false belief because of the tireless efforts Trump and his various minions. 

This is an easy distinction to make. President Biden refused to make draw the distinction, as did Jamelle Bouie and Blow.

According to an array of experts, a simple story lies behind this conduct:

We humans love to loathe Others en masse. As an example of what we mean, here's Bouie's explanation for Biden's lack of clarity about who he was talking about when he gave his blood-red address:

BOUIE (9/11/22): One view of Biden’s speech...says that Biden should have made a more Lincolnesque appeal to the better angels of MAGA Republican voters, rather than condemn the entire movement as essentially anti-American.

[...]

Should Biden have used more conciliatory rhetoric? No. He was divisive—just as he was when he called MAGA Republicans “semi-fascist” the week before—but this is a moment that calls for a perfect contrast between the two parties. If Trump is leading an assault on the institutions of American self-government and if that assault implicates much of the Republican Party, then there’s no way that Biden can make his defense of the constitutional order without dividing people.

 There’s no way that Biden could have make his defense? He could have made it by saying this:

"I'm talking about the party's misleaders, not about the misled."

Jamelle Bouie is a good, decent person. That said, he's also a person person—and ever since the dawn of time, we the people have been inclined to loathe Others en masse, or to let our tribe's leadership cadres do so.

Note what Bouie has said. He has said that the rhetoric in Biden's address actually was divisive—but he says that couldn't be helped!

According to Bouie, it couldn't be helped because this is a moment that calls for "a perfect contrast between the two parties." 

No such perfect contrast exists. But we blue tribe voters love to massage basic facts to equip our tales with "perfect victims," and now we insist on being pleasured by "perfect contrasts" too.

According to Bouie, there's no way Biden could have "made his defense of constitutional order without dividing people." Presumably, that statement is technically accurate—but New York Times columnist, please! 

The president could have had the decency, and the courage, to offer the public the simple truth: Millions of people have been deceived about the results of the last election.

It's Donald J. Trump who has led that deception. And of course, many of Biden's old friends from the Senate are numbered among Trump's enablers.

The president refused to call their names—and Bouie cheers the president on, saying he had to do what he did. In these ways, the leadership cadres of our own blue tribe are now misleading us!

In our view, Biden should have tried telling the truth—telling the truth with something resembling clarity. Millions of people have been misled, and it's easy to name the names of the people and the groups who have agreed to deceive them.

That said, we the humans are wired to loathe—and we love to loathe Others en masse. This is the oldest of all human stories. It eats away at the potential decency of our own (failing) blue tribe.

Biden's old friends have been doing this, but Biden refused to name them. Better to avoid saying, with any real clarity, who he was talking about.

In his column from last Monday, Blow was angry with Biden for the minor concessions to clarity which Biden had actually made. In that column, Blow seemed to be strongly inclined to condemn all Others en masse. 

In fairness, this is part of our human inheritance. It's been this way from the very start, all through our succession of wars.

Full disclosure: Your lizard is going to tell you we're wrong. 

Blue tribe citizen, please! It's your lizard we're talking about!

OTHERS: President Biden adjusts his brief!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2022

Charles Blow, disappointed: Who was Joe Biden talking about in his blood-red, September 1 speech? 

Former president Donald J. Trump was the one person Biden named. Aside from Trump, who were "the extreme MAGA Republicans" who, according to President Biden, were "committed to destroying America?"

In this September 7 column, Bret Stephens criticized Biden's speech, seeming to say that Biden had attacked with much too broad a brush. (Headline: "With Malice Toward Quite a Few.") 

By the time Biden was done, he had seemed to attack almost every Republican voter—or so Stephens said. Stephens said that President Biden should have focused on the "sinister" Donald J. Trump.

For what it's worth, we generally agree with that general view—but who had Biden been talking about? It was hard to tell from his speech, which was remarkably accusatory but also remarkably vague.

Who had Biden been talking about?  Right to this very day, the answer remains unclear. 

Four letters in this morning's New York Times help illustrate this basic point. The first letter says this:

FIRST LETTER (9/10/22): While declaring Donald Trump to be the “gravest threat American democracy faces” out of one side of his mouth, out of the other Mr. Stephens decries President Biden’s harsh words for the MAGA Republicans fervently supporting Mr. Trump.

He can’t have it both ways.

Many Republicans in Congress to this day refuse to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Until these Republicans can bring themselves (and convince the majority of their party) to acknowledge that the presidency was not stolen from Mr. Trump, sharp words to save our democracy are warranted.

That writer seemed to think that Biden had mainly been savaging "many Republicans in Congress," or at least that he should have done that. 

In our view, that's one of the leadership groups Biden should have focused on. But is that who Biden specifically meant? In our view, the answer remains unclear.

As a second writer groped the elephant, he seemed to offer a somewhat similar view. This writer said he agreed with Stephens' criticism, but he added this:

SECOND LETTER: Bret Stephens nailed it. The threat to democracy is not Republicans or even just MAGA Republicans. It is the sinister and buffoonish Donald Trump, plus his inner circle that pushed his lies in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

This second writer seemed to agree that Biden had cast too wide a net. But he shouldn't have attacked Trump alone, this writer said. He should have attacked Trump "plus his inner circle," and he should have left it there.

We agree with that general view. That said, a third writer said he disagreed with Stephens' criticism of Biden:

THIRD LETTER: While I acknowledge the validity of some of Bret Stephens’s criticism of President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, I take issue with his conclusion: “The gravest threat American democracy faces today isn’t the Republican Party, MAGA or otherwise. It’s Trump.”

This overlooks the fact that Trumpism has metastasized and infected the entire Republican Party. And getting rid of Donald Trump won’t eliminate the damage to our politics and electoral system that he leaves in his wake.

This writer is challenging Stephens, not Biden. But he seems to say that the problem Biden was discussing does involve "the entire Republican Party," presumably including tens of millions of Republican voters. 

That was the sweeping message Stephens took from Biden's speech. He thought Biden had been savaging the Republican Party's rank and file, not just its leadership groups.

A fourth writer offered a narrower definition of "MAGA extremists." Is this what Biden was talking about? In truth, he had provided no way to tell:

FOURTH LETTER: I agree with much of what Bret Stephens says about President Biden’s speech. I was a registered Republican from 1970 to 2016. I left the party the day Donald Trump got the nomination.

I think there is one simple litmus test that separates the MAGA deplorables from the regular or moderate Republicans. If you deny that Joe Biden won the election, if you insist that it had to be rigged, if you attended the Jan. 6 riot and acted violently, then yes, you are a MAGA extremist bent on the destruction of our democracy. It’s that simple.

This letter writer tickled the keys with a callback to Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" language. He seemed to say that if someone, including a mere Republican voter, thinks the last election was stolen, then that person qualifies as "a MAGA extremist bent on the destruction of our democracy."

In this writer's view, even a misinformed Republican voter is "bent on the destruction of our democracy!" That voter isn't (misguidedly) trying to save our democracy. He's bent on tearing it down.

That judgment strikes us as harsh, unintelligent, politically unwise. But could that be what Biden meant?

As of September 1, the president had made three speeches about "the extreme MAGA Republicans." But in a massive failure of presidential rhetoric, there was no way to know if he had meant to assert some such judgment. The president had failed to say, with any real clarity, who he was talking about.

In Stephens' view, Biden had pretty much indicted every Republican voter by the time he was through. Was Stephens right in that assessment? 

With the exception of one brief and fleeting disclaimer, Biden's rhetoric had been quite unclear. But hay-yo! This past Monday, on Labor Day, President Biden may have adjusted his rhetoric.

That very morning, we criticized the rhetoric the president had been using about "these extreme MAGA Republicans." 

In his blood-red speech, the president had described this group in blood-curdling terms. They were "committed to destroying America," he said—but he kept failing to specify who he was talking about. 

His rhetoric struck us as dangerous. In our view, he was blowing past a key distinction—the distinction between Republican leadership cadres and the Republican rank and file, between the misleaders and the misled.

But then, on Labor Day afternoon, a curious harbinger happened. During the 2 P.M. hour, on CNN, a Democratic strategist said this:

CAMEROTA (9/6/22): Zac Petkanas is a Democratic strategist and former rapid response director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Zac, I will start with you. 

President Biden more and more has been trying to draw this distinction between basically old-school Republicans that he knew and worked with and what he calls "MAGA Republicans." Is he giving an off-ramp to Republicans? Why is he hitting this so hard?

PETKANAS: Well, look, I think it's really important what President Biden is doing.

He's distinguishing between Republican voters who are mainstream, normal, just want to get by, to have food on the table, to send their kids to school, and Republican leaders, who are increasingly showing this level of extremism. And we're seeing it at the rallies. We're seeing it by calls by state legislatures to criminalize abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest.

These are things that are Republican leaders' priorities, but not Republican voters' priorities. And distinguishing that is really key to winning the midterms.

Say what? The president had been "distinguishing between Republican voters" and "Republican leaders?" It was Republican leaders, not Republican voters, who were "increasingly showing this level of extremism?"

Is that who Biden was talking about—the misleaders, not the misled? That's the distinction we had advised—but is that what Biden had been saying in his three speeches?

It's easy enough to voice that distinction; Petkanas had just done so! It's easy to include an additional phrase about the way the misleaders have been aggressively misleading the misled.

It's easy enough to do so such things. But in his three speeches to date on this topic, Biden had made little such effort.

We were struck by this new account of what Biden had been saying. And then, sure enough! During the 4 o'clock hour, Kaitlan Collins aired a brief excerpt of the president's speech in Wisconsin:

COLLINS (9/5/22): We're just 64 days away from the crucial November midterm elections and President Biden is visiting two battleground states, first in Wisconsin this afternoon, where the president once again tried to clarify what he meant by defining some Trump supporters, some Republicans, as "MAGA Republicans."

BIDEN (video): The extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress have chosen to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate, and division. But together, we can and we must choose a different path.

COLLINS: Next hour, President Biden is going to be speaking in Pennsylvania as well. His third visit to the commonwealth in just a week.

According to Collins, the president had once again tried to define who he was talking about. But now, he was railing against "the extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress." He had added two words to his brief.

You can read the text of the Wisconsin speech. Repeatedly, the president specifically attacks the behavior and the intentions of "these MAGA Republicans in Congress." 

He was specifically citing that leadership cadre, not the rank and file. In our view, he should have drawn that distinction all along.

Suddenly, Biden seemed to be narrowing his indictment. At least for one brief, shining moment, he was aiming his harsh rhetoric at the misleaders, not the misled.

That said, some people don't like this sort of thing. They prefer to do their loathing en masse—by the tens of millions.

That morning in the New York Times, Charles Blow had already complained about Biden's fleeting refusals to categorize every single Republican voter as a "MAGA Republican." 

Charles Blow is a good, decent person—but he's also a person person. We humans are wired to loathe en masse, even when such wholesale loathing makes no earthly sense.

On Monday, we'll consider Blow's column by the numbers. He wanted every Other attacked, even including the millions of Others who were moving away from Trump.

Tomorrow: Charles Blow, by the numbers

OTHERS: Why did people vote for Trump?

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Biden disappoints Blow: Why did people vote for Donald J. Trump?

We have no idea. That said, back in November 2020, 74 million people did. You'd have to ask them why they voted that way—and they wouldn't all say the same thing.

In our view, Donald J. Trump was the worst presidential candidate ever. Those others didn't agree with our view. As a matter of basic principle, we respect them as neighbors and friends—and as fellow citizens. 

We disagree with the way those people cast their votes—but then, they disagree with the way we cast ours! Some of us people respect other people. Quite a few of us people just don't.

At any rate, what do Trump voters think today? Last Saturday night, the Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey made an attempt to find out. 

Godfrey attended Donald Trump's rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. While there, she spoke with various supporters of Trump, including the ones who said this:

GODFREY (9/5/22): Trump is back at the forefront of American politics, just two months ahead of the midterm elections. This time, the former president is in a strange new position: He’s backed into a corner by legal trouble. And his ever-loyal fans have joined him in a defensive crouch. “We came because of the Mar-a-Lago raid,” Mike Rutherford, a truck driver from East Stroudsburg, told me. He sat near the stage in a folding chair alongside his wife, Pat. “We’re here to support him,” Pat said, nodding. “I can’t believe how brave that man is.”

For the record, that isn't our own basic view. 

Of course, depending on where you get your "news" in our segregated news environment, you can be encouraged to think a wide array of things about a wide array of topics. With perhaps a hint of condescension, Godfrey extended her reporting:

GODFREY: The Trump fans I’d spoken with earlier, standing near the Dippin’ Dots ice-cream stall and in line for Chickie’s & Pete’s chicken cutlets, all had his back. “It’s politically motivated,” Jim Shaw, a barber from New Milford, told me when I asked what he made of the search at Mar-a-Lago. “If Donald Trump wasn’t looking like he was the [leading] Republican candidate for president, I don’t think it would have happened.” Every one of the dozen or so people I talked with offered some defense of the former president: The search was a setup; the evidence was planted; Biden’s DOJ was trampling on Trump’s constitutional rights to keep him from running for office again.

I detected a touch of desperation in many people’s responses—a sense that, if Trump-endorsed candidates don’t win in November, America as they know it will cease to exist. Here in northeast Pennsylvania—just 20 miles down the road from Biden’s hometown—was a gathering of people not just pessimistic about the future of the country under his leadership, but deeply fearful too. “At this point right now, I’m worried about being targeted by the FBI because I’m a Christian, I’m conservative,” Pat Rutherford said. “I know they won’t find anything, but I am going to need a lawyer to prove I am innocent.” The DOJ “is like a militia for the Democrats,” Linda Hess, from Selinsgrove, told me. “I think our First Amendment rights are basically gone as conservatives. I really do.”

"Trump and his loyalists are eager to fan these fears," Godfrey now said. This helps introduce one of the world's most basic distinctions—the eternal distinction between the misleaders and the misled.

As they stood near the Dippin’ Dots stand and the Chickie’s & Pete’s, these barbers and truck drivers gave voice to various views which arguably have been derived from "fanned fears"—and from misinformation. 

Our own blue world often runs on the fuel of misinformation too. But very few public figures in American history have produced crazy claims to the extent that Donald Trump has, and he has had plenty of help from Republican leadership cadres—from groups of high-ranking "MAGA Republicans."

He's had help from the gaggle of undisguised Crazies—from Giuliani, Powell and Flynn. He's had help from the Republican senators who refuse to push back in public against his relentlessly unfounded and ludicrous claims.

By and large, barbers who stand near Dippin' Dots stands believe that the last election was stolen. Within our segregated news and information culture, they hear this claim again and again, then again and again—and they don't hear it contradicted.

Republican senators know that this claim is ludicrous, crazy, bogus. The barbers near the Dippin' Dots stand believe that the statement is true. 

They also know that they'll be mocked for being barbers standing near Dippin' Dots stands. Our blue tribe culture has frequently functioned that way, going back a great many years.

As our political world has fallen apart in recent years, many people have conspired to mislead the misled. 

For ourselves, we regard Donald J. Trump as being so disordered that we aren't sure what he actually may believe. That said, the United States Senate is full of people who know that these "stop the steal" claims are clownishly false.

They know these claims are clownishly bogus, but they refuse to say so.

President Biden could have named some of their names when he gave his blood-red speech on Thursday, September 1. He could have described their conduct when he gave the several speeches which preceded it. 

Instead, he spoke in sweeping terms as he made blood-red accusations. He failed to distinguish between the Republican Party's leadership cadres and the GOP rank and file.

It's a form of kicking down. Dating back many decades, members of our own blue tribe have often seemed to relish the unhelpful practice.

Starting on August 25, we were troubled by a toxic combination—by the vehemence of Biden's descriptions, matched with his refusal to say, with any clarity, who he was talking about. 

This past Monday, on Labor Day, he began to walk his rhetoric back. He began to signal that he was mainly discussing the GOP's rancid leadership cadres, rather than the masses of the misled. 

Tomorrow, we'll show you what he said. We'll also cite Charles Blow, who made a point of saying that he prefers to loathe the entire 74 million. 

Charles Blow is a good, decent person, but he's inclined to loathe Others en masse. This longing is deeply bred in the bone, and it's how nations come apart.

A barber stood near the Dippin' Dots stand. The lesser angels of our blue tribe's nature have had a strong tendency, for a very long time, to proceed unwisely from there. 

The Others can see us when we do this. This constitutes one of the ways large nations come undone, fall apart.

Tomorrow: Biden and Blow

Full disclosure: We lost a lot of time this morning. For that reason, we're stretching things out.