STARTING TOMORROW: American (cognitive) chaos!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2020

The failures cross tribal lines: The Bulwark is a major site of the never-Trump Republican world.

Jonathan Last, late of The Weekly Standards, is the site's executive editor.  When he penned this recent piece, he was asking a very good question.

Last's essay appears behind a pay wall, so we can't excerpt its contents. Earlier today, we saw a lengthy passage from the essay quoted on Morning Joe, but MSNBC no longer produces transcripts, and the channel has cut way back on its video postings.

Essentially, Last did this in his essay: 

First, he listed the various crazy behaviors in which the Trump team has engaged since November 3. Then, he staged a thought experiment.

Suppose that some pundit, one year ago, had predicted that Trump and his followers would engage in these crazy behaviors. How would such a prediction have been treated, Last now skillfully asked.

This morning, Joe Scarborough answered Last's question for him. Any such pundit would have been attacked for being insane, Scarborough now surmised.

Almost surely, that assessment is largely correct. In truth, the lunacy of the Trump team's behavior has reached a point which it would have been hard to predict.

Then too, of course, there's this:

Our major mainstream press elite has had a very hard time spotting lunacy over the past forty years. 

In many instances, the lunacy was coming from within. But this failure has been a major cognitive fail—an act of American (cognitive) carnage.

It's easy to spot the cognitive failures emitting from Trump and his team, and from the voters who believe the the things they tell them. This afternoon, we'll visit the latest craziness of Sidney Powell—the craziness which got so crazy over the weekend that it could no longer be tolerated by the Trump team itself.

In a world which enjoyed greater cognitive health, the odd behaviors of Trump and his team would have created a discussion of certain psychiatric / psychological topics. That said, our society's upper-end cognitive shortfalls are such that the mainstream press corps has agreed that such discussions must never occur.

During this holiday-shortened week, we'll discuss the obvious cognitive failures displayed by many of the regular people who voted for Donald J. Trump. That said, the cognitive failures which have led to American carnage have also been quite widespread Over Here in our own liberal tents. 

Anthropologically speaking, these cognitive failures are also part of the nation's headlong decline.

That headlong decline has been occurring over (let's say) the past forty years. Psychiatric issues are involved, but so is basic human cognition, such as it is and has been.

On a simple cognitive basis, are we liberals up to the task we now face? In this morning's Washington Post, Hugh Hewitt sketches the challenge with which liberals and progressives, and the press corps elite, are now confronted. 

When last we looked in on Hewitt, he was serving as a panelist in a 2016 Republican debate—and he was applauding one of the answers given by Candidate Trump.

You really can't get dumber than that, but the Post has kept Hewitt on. This morning, his column describes a serious problem:

HEWITT (11/23/20): [L]ike an unseen riptide, this year’s results just handed the GOP an advantage many never thought possible. And it carried far away from shore Democratic hopes and dreams.

“Wait,” you say, “Trump lost the presidency.”

Yes, he did. But Trump, even as he lost, engineered a huge win for the GOP this month, and one that will echo through American politics as our once-a-decade reapportionment fights begin.

“On the eve of reapportionment, Republicans are now in a better position than they were after 2010,” Noah Rothman noted in Commentary. “Following those elections, Republicans controlled 54 of 99 state legislative chambers.” (Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral.)

That number is now 61.

If anything, Rothman understates the impact of the GOP domination of state legislatures...

A certain percentage of Republican voters refused to vote for Trump. To appearances, this helps explain why, even though Trump has apparently lost, no "blue wave" swept away a range of other Republican candidates.

For the record, Trump himself didn't lose by all that much, given the way our system works.  Hewitt adds this, not incorrectly:

HEWITT: It is ironic that Trump’s narrow losses in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin kept him from a second consecutive term. It wasn’t a conspiracy that cost Trump the White House but a terrible combination of bad timing—the vaccines he promised were announced a fortnight too late for them to impact voting—and bad polling. Polling directs resources, locates rallies, energizes or depresses turnout. If polling tells you Wisconsin is lost, Pennsylvania is competitive and other states are safe, when none of that is accurate, the consequences are disastrous.

For ourselves, we have no idea if Biden will ever be president. Until we see Biden take the oath, we won't assume that Trump's machinations won't somehow prevail.

That said, as matters stand at present, is it true that "Trump’s narrow losses in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin kept him from a second consecutive term?"

As matters stand, that's probably true! If Trump had managed to win those states—each state was decided by less than one point—the Electoral College vote would stand at 269-269. 

Due to the structure of our creaky election system, it's likely that this would have produced a Trump win. For the third time since 2000, a Republican would have lost the popular vote while winning four years in the White House. 

Trump came very close to winning Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. (Note to Hewitt—given Biden's one-point win in Pennsylvania, that state was "competitive" too.)  

It's true that Republicans lost the House again. But around the various states, they made some substantial gains.

Cognitive carnage is everywhere as we review the Trump tribe's conduct. That said, our own tribe is fraught with cognitive failure too.

This is an anthropological story. We'll review the cognitive shortfalls on various sides as the week moves along.

The human mind don't work real good. This is even true at the top of our own brilliant pile!

Tomorrow: Attention C-Span callers!


13 comments:

  1. "Last's essay appears behind a pay wall, so we can't excerpt its contents."

    This hasn't stopped Somerby from excerpting from the NY Times and the Washington Post, also behind paywalls.

    Why does he all of a sudden develop compunctions about this now?

    Is Somerby perhaps pretending that he read Last's entire article while only actually hearing the part that Scarborough repeated? Or does he think fair use applies more to small papers than to large ones? Or does he perhaps know people at The Bulwark who might object, and not want to anger his conservative friends?

    In any case, we're supposed to just take his word for what Last said, including the part about Trump's actions being "crazy".

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  2. "It's easy to spot the cognitive failures emitting from Trump and his team, and from the voters who believe the the things they tell them."

    Now Somerby wants us to label a substantial portion of the right wing "crazy" or "lunatic" or "cognitively impaired".

    When did name-calling ever work as a political tactic?

    Then there is the problem that craziness is generally defined as behavioral deviation from norms, but when everyone is behaving a particular way, they can't all be crazy because their behavior has become normative.

    And there is also the problem of blaming people for their thoughts and opinions, not their behavior. All those people who believe Trump and support his opinions are engaging in free thought and free speech, something we pride ourselves on protecting, even when we disagree with it. Calling one's political opponents crazy is disrespectful of that tradition.

    Lately there have been a few articles describing historical precedents for Trump's behavior, including other presidents who have impeded transition to an election winner. That context makes Trump's behavior appear less crazy, but also less innocent, since those others did so in the context of the fight over secession and slavery.

    Somerby blames liberals for trying to malign The Others, but when you call someone crazy, you are both treating them as other and also dehumanizing them so that their rights can be curtailed, because crazy people are treated differently in our society than the sane are.

    If journalists were to take Somerby's advice and treat Trump as if he were crazy, they would play into conservatives hands and give them something genuine to complain about, making Trump a martyr to a supposedly liberal rigged game. Fortunately, journalists have ethics and know how to apply them to their work, something Somerby appears to know nothing about despite all of his many philosophy courses at Harvard.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "For the record, Trump himself didn't lose by all that much, given the way our system works. Hewitt adds this, not incorrectly:"

    Now Somerby is agreeing with conservative writers outright, not just repeating conservative memes.

    In the quoted paragraph Hewitt says that Trump lost because of polling and because the vaccine was delayed. Those are the same reasons Trump cites, except he attributes both to malice on the part of pharmaceutical companies and pollsters.

    Trump lost because he mishandled covid, did nothing to help those losing jobs and homes, and encouraged maskless rallies at which he himself caught covid, demonstrating to all that it was not a hoax. And he lost because he was Trump, and too many people became wise to his grifts and cons. Those polls reflected actual voter intentions, which moved steadily away from Trump after Biden's nomination.

    But Somerby thinks Hewitt is telling the truth. Then Somerby says:

    "For ourselves, we have no idea if Biden will ever be president."

    This makes Somerby the crazy one. Biden has already been elected and he will take office, because that's how our government works. Even Republicans are urging Trump to accept his defeat. But Somerby is not sure...what an ass Somerby is. He is feeding the Republican meme that Trump somehow has a chance to regain what was stolen from him. No supposedly liberal person would do that.

    Note that Somerby said none of this stuff after that creaky electoral system gave Trump the presidency and robbed Hillary of office. The situation was identical, except that Trump's manipulation of the system, aided by Russia and Comey and Bernie, was successful then. Fool me once, shame on you...etc.

    And close only counts in horseshoes. Trump lost. When the counting is done, he will have won the popular vote by the largest margin since FDR. He LOST several supposedly red states (Georgia and Arizona) and Democrats flipped his stolen states from 2016 back to blue. That is in no sense a near victory for Trump.

    But why is Somerby now arguing Trump's cause? Any tinge of liberalness in Somerby's past is clearly gone. He is shilling for the Republicans. Time to turn out the lights, rename the blog, and move on -- because the only howlers here are coming from Somerby himself.

    ReplyDelete
  4. J.M. Opal, a historian at McGill University, writing in The Conversation, says:

    "But the most striking part of Trump’s showing was his strength in places where the pandemic is raging. According to an analysis by National Public Radio, nearly seven in 10 counties with high COVID-19 death rates backed Trump more strongly this year than they did in 2016."

    This contradicts Hugh Hewitt's contention that the delay of the covid vaccine (or covid concerns) caused Trump to lose the election. Trump's strength was greatest where covid is worst.

    Opal blames Reagan for Trumpism. He argues that strengthening public health and welfare measures (e.g., social security, ACA) will combat Trumpism during Biden's administration. So you cannot talk Trump supporters out of their beliefs but you can perhaps restore American faith in the government's ability to help citizens in need, then talk to them afterward.

    https://www.rawstory.com/2020/11/historian-theres-only-one-way-to-move-on-from-trump-and-trumpism/

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