Letters to the New York Times!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2020

Sunday's unhelpful example(s): On Sunday, the virus of peaceful separation spread to the letters published by the New York Times:

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman has written another brilliant column, outlining the deep, irreconcilable divides in our country. He describes the fear of less educated whites that the country’s population is moving heavily toward people of color and different cultural backgrounds, and that they are being left behind by a skilled technological society that they believe ignores their needs and demeans them. There is also a rural and urban divide. These differences have deeply divided America, exacerbated by the Trump presidency.

A century and a half ago America fought a civil war over issues painfully analogous to these. Perhaps it is time to consider a similar solution, but by peaceful means. The fractionalization of the country is leaving deep scars that will not heal.

Perhaps recognizing this can lead to peaceful separation of the union into red states and blue states acceptable to both sides. The states on each coast could join in a blue union, with a few states in between, perhaps even joining with Canada to unite the geographic separation.

Once again, our own blue tribe will get both coasts. We might even join with Canada!

We're not entirely sure that this will be "acceptable to both sides." For our previous discussion of such implausible cogitation, you can just click here.

Did it make sense to publish this letter? We have no idea. That said, the letter below was comically wrong on several levels. Let's start with what it said:

To the Editor:

Like [Frank] Bruni, I wonder how more than 70 million Americans could have voted for Donald Trump. I understand that many who live away from large, diverse urban areas believe that “elites” look down on them and have strong negative feelings about nonwhites and immigrants. That said, I am baffled as to why his failure to manage Covid and its economic fallout—which must have affected many directly—wasn’t more important in their electoral decisions.

Part of the answer is that many of them do not share the view that, in fact, he did fail. I heard an elderly person in Florida tell an interviewer that she thought Mr. Trump had done all he could about the virus. Yet those of us who read The Times and other mainstream media know that Mr. Trump rejected science-based recommendations. As a result we did worse than every other developed country.

Since the data don’t lie, my assumption is that those facts did not make an impression on Trump voters. Why? Because they get their news and views from sources—Fox and social media—that overwhelm them with “alternative facts.”

To make progress on the many fronts that need attention, this is a problem that must be overcome.

This letter strikes us as comically wrong. We'll take you through several steps:

We agree on one general point. In our view, Donald J. Trump's approach to the pandemic has resided just this side of lunacy from the very beginning.  There has never been a perfect way to react to this horrible situation. But the president's public statements have generally been insane.

That said, have we "done worse than every developed country?" Also, do "those of us who read The Times" know such "facts" from reading that newspaper? 

Also, "since the data don't lie," is it fair to assume that the letter-writer's factual claims "did not make an impression on Trump voters?"

Comically, the answers are basically no. Things get even dumber when you ponder the link the Times inserted into the letter's text.

Let's start with the basic facts. At present, our "total deaths to date" are not the highest in the developed world after adjusting for size of population.

We do reside near the top on this unfortunate measure. That said, after adjusting for population, the U.K.'s number is slightly worse. Spain and Belgium are still doing considerably worse, with Italy right on our tail.

How about an arguably more salient measure—current "daily or weekly deaths?" On that unfortunate measure, quite a few of our most obvious peer nations are currently doing much worse.

After adjusting for population, European nations which once seemed to have the virus licked are now recording weekly deaths at rates which significantly exceed our own. Canada and Germany are still doing better than we are, but even Germany's weekly death rate has risen to the point where it's more than half of ours.

At present, daily/weekly death rates in Spain, France, Italy and the U.K. substantially exceed our own (see data below). This could always change, of course. But "those of us who read The Times" may not be aware of such facts, especially after reading the letter the Times chose to publish this Sunday.

The self-impressed reader felt fairly sure that "those of us who read The Times" have been getting the full set of relevant facts from that great newspaper. Oddly, when the Times inserted a link into the text of his letter, the link went to a five-week-old, barely coherent report in Bloomberg. 

The Bloomberg reporter sourced her fuzzy claims to a JAMA report, to which she didn't link. The Bloomberg  report was five weeks old and largely incompetent. For unknown reasons, the Times provided a link to that report, not to its own work.

At present, major peer nations are drowning in Covid deaths. Despite the president's crazy behavior, we are not the worst in the world at the present time. That said, "those of us who read The Times" are often poorly informed, along with reams of The Others.

On the brighter side, we're rarely in doubt about our tribal superiority. In such ways, our failing nation continues to slide toward the sea.

Current weekly deaths: Below, you see Covid death counts from the past week (through November 17). When you adjust for population, our rate in nowhere near the worst in the developed world:

Deaths from Covid in the past week:
United States: 8969

France: 4067

Italy: 3983

United Kingdom: 2909

Spain: 1908

Germany: 1308
Canada: 463

When you adjust for population, our current death rate is far from the worst. Example: France's population is roughly one-sixth the size of ours. The same is true of the U.K. 

Italy's population is somewhat smaller than that. Germany's population is about one-fourth our size.

Rachel almost always forgets to adjust for population. So do the bulk of our "highly educated"  upper-end mainstream journalists. 

Such is the state of our failing nation's never-ending intellectual dysfunction. It's been like this for years and years, certainly so in the Times.

THE BRAIN CELL MONOLOGUES: Stephen Brill starts Court TV!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2020

Straight ahead, "World's Dumbest:" If the consequences weren't so vast, our nation's apparent brain cell drain would be comical, little more.

How extensive is the highly destructive "Dumbness Culture" which has led to this winter of our discontent? Consider what happened when Stephen Brill decided to start a basic cable channel.

Brill was a graduate of Yale (class of 1972), but also of Yale Law School. As of 1979, he'd already founded The American Lawyer, "a monthly magazine covering the business of law firms and lawyers in the United States and around the world."

In its initial thumbnail, the leading authority on Stephen Brill also describes him as "the author of the best-selling book, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It." 

Brill has written several other books on major policy topics. These books have always commanded mainstream attention, whether deserved or not.

In short, Brill has long been a major upper-end figure. In 1991, he launched the basic cable channel known as Court TV. 

The comedy starts when we consider where Court TV ended up. The leading authority on the channel thumbnails the channel's early history in the manner shown:

Court TV...was originally launched in 1991 with a focus on crime-themed programs such as true crime documentary series, legal dramas, and coverage of prominent criminal cases. In 2008, the original cable channel became TruTV. 

[...]

Cable television channel Courtroom Television Network, known as Court TV, was launched, on July 1, 1991 at 6:00 am Eastern Time, by founder Steven Brill, and was available to three million subscribers. Its original anchors were Fred Graham, Cynthia McFadden, and Terry Moran...

The channel originally consisted of live courtroom trials that were interspersed with anchors and reporters. It was led by law writer Steven Brill, who later left the network in 1997.

"In 2008, the original cable channel became TruTV." That's where the unfortunate but instructive comedy starts.

(The leading authority makes one factual error in the passage we've posted. We've corrected that mistake with an unmarked edit. As best we can tell, Vinnie Politan didn't start as an anchor at Court TV until 2001.)

One can presume that Court TV was launched as at least a semi-serious venture.  

Fred Graham, the channel's lead anchor, had already had a lengthy career as a legal correspondent for the New York Times, then for CBS News. McFadden and Moran were younger, but they'd been recruited from major mainstream organizations. They went on to have journalistic careers at major mainstream news orgs.

At least to appearances, Court TV began as a semi-serious venture. That said, the thumbnail history of the channel also tells us this:

"In 2008, the original cable channel became TruTV."

According to several sources familiar, it's at this point that the gods on Olympus begin to laugh. 

In fairness, the devolution of Court TV is one of the most familiar stories in the history of "basic cable." The leading authority on TruTV thumbnails that channel's early history as shown:

TruTV (stylized as truTV) is an American basic cable channel that is owned by AT&T's WarnerMedia under its Studios and Networks unit.

The channel was originally launched in 1991 as Court TV, a network that focused on crime-themed programs such as true crime documentary series, legal dramas, and coverage of prominent criminal cases. With its relaunch as TruTV in 2008, the channel revamped its lineup with a focus on reality docusoaps and "caught on camera" programs, which the network marketed as "actuality" television. 

[...]

The new brand was intended to accompany a larger shift towards action-oriented reality series which did not necessarily involve crime or law enforcement, such as Black Gold, Hardcore Pawn, Lizard Lick Towing, Ocean Force, and the caught-on-camera series World's Dumbest. 

Sad! But so it went as Court TV took on new life as a channel so dumb that it doesn't even spell the word "true" correctly!

Simply put, the dumbness is general when we review the history of this change. Concerning the new channel's attempt to draw a distinction between "reality"  and "actuality," the leading authority tells us this:

TruTV promoted its new positioning under the slogan "Not Reality. Actuality." Network staff argued that the term "reality" had become associated with "unrealistic" programming, and that it wanted to emphasize that its new programs would feature "real" people.

So "network staff" are said to have "argued." How the gods must laugh!

At any rate, within a fairly short time span, the channel had proceeded from analysis by people like Brill and Graham to "docusoaps" and to such programs as  Hardcore Pawn and Lizard Lick Towing—but also, to an endless series of dimwitted programs which were literally branded as "World's Dumbest." 

For a review of the World's Dumbest brand, you can just click here. As Judy might have said to Toto, we'd come a long way from Yale Law School, even perhaps from Yale!

In fairness, there's little we can hope to learn from one such transformation. That said, the devolution from Court TV to World's Dumbest is only one of the clownish but instructive transformations which have taken place across the basic cable dial.

Our award-winning "Brain Cell Monologues" start right here, with this initial sighting. Tomorrow, we'll move on to more of this basic cable clowning, and we'll expand our field of view by discussing Brill's next well-intentioned launch.

We liberals find it easy to spot the "brain cell drain" among regular people found in the other tribe. That said, this brain cell drain  has been evident in all aspects of American life over the past three or four decades. This includes widespread apparent brain drains put on display by our own tribe's members and by our own tribe's honored sachems.

We've decided to start this history with the road which led from Brill to (the literal) "World's Dumbest." But the full story extends all through our nation's failed and failing intellectual culture, leading us now to Trump.

The deeply disordered Donald J. Trump actually didn't start this. To an embarrassing but deeply instructive extent, our own tribe's sachems did.

Tomorrow: More of this clowning in basic cable. Also, Brill's subsequent magazine launch

What might the commander's swan song be?

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2020

Disordered man's closing act: Why has commander-in-chief Donald J. Trump fired his Secretary of Defense? Why is he suddenly putting unqualified hacks in place within the Defense Department?

Yesterday, Chris Wallace and Gillian Turner delivered a good post-Halloween scare to Fox News Sunday viewers. Concerning these sudden personnel moves, they discussed what they've been told by  Pentagon sources. 

Fox produces very few transcripts. (At this point, MSNBC is even worse.) For that reason, we'll have to make a longer story shorter:

Turner had already offered some scary rumblings about what "multiple sources" have told her and Jennifer Griffin about this general topic. She said Trump wants to get all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before he leaves office, but also that that the recent personnel changes are intended to further a second "very specific policy aim."

Wallace chose to continue. As he spoke, he raised the possibility of a military strike on Iran:

WALLACE (11/15/20): Gillian, let me follow up with you on that. Because one, I talked to a top Pentagon source this week who said they very much doubted we could get our 4500 troops out between now and January 20 and that—raised serious questions about it, saying it would really weaken our ability to negotiate a deal with the Taliban and to protect the Afghan government.

So first of all, what about the merits of pulling out all of our troops from Afghanistan before the end of the Trump presidency? And the second thing is, they talked about the possibility that this was clearing the way for, whether it's the U.S. or Israel, an attack on Iran's nuclear structure.

Say what? Trump may go out with a military attack on Iran's nuclear structure? We thought of all the times we've heard future experts weeping about the conflagration they've been willing to describe only as "Mister Trump's War."

Wallace said that, according to a top Pentagon source, Trump may be clearing the way for a military attack. Could that possibly be true?

Here's what Turner said:

TURNER (continuing directly): So I think both things are correct, Chris.

There are serious questions, as your source told you, about the ability to pull out so many troops, just under five thousand, in a few weeks. But people tell us that, despite this, this is something that President Trump and his core team of advisers is really intent on doing. And they believe that, if there is any iota of getting it done, they now have the people in place who can facilitate it. 

Whether this sets up the Biden administration in a good way to prepare them to protect the homeland and national security interests in the Middle East remains to be seen.

On the Iran nuclear issue, the Biden team has basically said, as of now, that they are going to try and rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. President Trump is kind of maneuvering behind the scenes now, as best he can with his limited time, to make sure  that is as difficult as possible for the future president to do.

Is the commander hoping to leave the stage with a military attack on Iran? First, Turner seemed to say yes. After that, her answer became less precise.

Is it possible that the commander-in-chief is mentally ill in some serious (and "dangerous") way? The press corps has steadfastly refused to discuss this fairly obvious question.

Will a disordered Samson be willing to pull the temple down around him? Wallace and Turner seemed to say that, according to sources, the answer may be yes.

Crazy people will sometimes do crazy things. A group decision to look away may not be the best approach to such  a state of affairs.

STARTING TOMORROW: The Brain Cell Monologues!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2020

Jake Tapper meets Norman O. Brown: Shannon Palus is a staff writer at Slate. She's also a good, decent person.

Palus is seven years out of college (McGill, class of 2013). Before that, she prepped at Germantown Friends.

Palus's current piece at Slate is one of the first things we read this morning. As of this morning, it was the featured report on the site's front page.

On the whole, we have no idea what Palus is talking about. Slate's headlines offer this:

That Viral Tweet About Suicide Rates in the Pandemic Is Wrong and Dangerous

It was debunked months ago. Here’s why it’s still spreading.

Commander-in-chief Donald J. Trump has been making claims about suicide rates since March. For that reason, we decided to read Palus's piece. Her report starts like this:

PALUS (11/13/20): On Thursday, a social media post from Jake Tapper included an odd call to action, at least for a CNN anchor: “could 2 followers please copy and re-post this tweet?”

The rest of the text contained an alarming, if vague, statement about mental health, along with further specific instructions for sharing:

Suicide figures are up. Could 2 followers please copy and re-post this tweet? We’re trying to demonstrate that someone is always listening. 

Call 1-800-273-8255 (USA hotline)

Just two. Any two. Copy, not retweet.

As might be obvious, Tapper didn’t write this himself. It’s also not quite accurate.

So started this report at Slate. As of this morning, it was the featured report on the site's front page.

The piece is the featured report at Slate; it concerns an important topic. That said, we've read the report several times, and we've clicked on several links, and we have no real idea what Palus is talking about.

We don't quite know why Palus says that Tapper "didn't write [the tweet] himself." We can't exactly say what she means when she says that Tapper's (astoundingly vague) factual claim is "not quite accurate."

Along the way, Palus provides material intended to undercut the notion that suicide rates have been rising. Amazingly, this is the material to which we refer:

PALUS: Back in June, a tweet stating that “suicide figures are up 200% since lockdown,” with the same call to action as Tapper’s and the phone number for a hotline in the U.K., went viral. Shayan Sardarizadeh, who covers disinformation for the BBC, fact-checked that figure at the time, finding no evidence that suicides had gone up—national suicide rates for 2020 in the U.K. had not even been released at that point...Still, the tweet is not quite false, depending on what you consider a “suicide figure”: Sardarizadeh noted in a post on BBC News’ live reporting blog that the person who first posted the 200 percent figure cited a TV report discussing calls to a help line.

But stating that “suicide figures are up” without specifying what one means by that isn’t a neutral statement. It’s designed to be alarming. Consider what it would mean to share the actual fact that calls to a suicide hotline are up. Yes, that sounds concerning. But it’s worth noting that “suicide hotlines” serve more than just people at immediate risk of harming themselves; you can also reach out to the number in Tapper’s tweet, for example, if you are concerned about a loved one “or would like emotional support,” according to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s website. And increased calls to hotlines—no matter the reason—could be an indication that they are doing exactly what they are designed to do: help people who need it.

The reasoning there strikes us as bizarre. We say that for these reasons:

For starters, the initial tweet in June referred to just one statistic concerning one particular help line. Even if that statistic was accurate, it would qualify as "anecdotal" absent other data.

It's hard to know what, if anything, we should conclude based on one statistic involving one help line. But if calls to one particular suicide help line really did go up 200%—that is, if calls to that help line tripled—then on its face, that fact would rather sensibly qualify as "concerning."

Palus makes it sound like that statistic might qualify as upbeat news. It could mean that people are doing the things they should, she correctly (and selectively) says.

Again, a single statistic of that type can actually tell us nothing. That said, Palus's highly motivated reasoning, and her general failure to explain what Tapper did and why he did it, does in fact help show us something about the decline of our nation's intellectual culture and of our larger cultural world.

The web site Slate began its life as a serious journalistic venture, at least to the extent that such ventures were still possible by the time of its founding. The leading authority on  the site thumbnails its early history in the manner shown:

[Slate] was created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. In 2004, it was purchased by The Washington Post Company (later renamed the Graham Holdings Company), and since 2008 has been managed by The Slate Group, an online publishing entity created by Graham Holdings. 

Journalistically, Kinsley had distinguished himself as the well-known "brightest man of the 1980s." As of 2004, the site he founded was purchased by the Washington Post, a major part of this nation's upper-end mainstream press establishment.

Slate was seen as a serious venture as of the time of its founding. By this morning, the site was headlining a puzzling analysis piece by a youngish, somewhat ardent writer—an analysis piece which basically didn't make a whole lot of sense. 

That said, there's nothing unusual about this state of affairs. Published work which doesn't make sense is now widespread across all upper-end mainstream platforms, from the lordly New York Times on down.

The Times has largely become a ship of fools. Why should Slate's work make sense?

The Palus report doesn't make much sense. Why did Tapper post that tweet? Why would Tapper post such a peculiar tweet? Why would any major journalist post a weird tweet like that?

Palus doesn't explain. Along the way, she seems to say that a tripling of  calls to a suicide help line should really be scored as good news.

Slate's featured report doesn't make much sense. But by now, such work is "close enough for mainstream press corps work," and has been for a long time.

Do we modern Americans have the intellectual capacity needed to continue as a functioning nation? Again and again and again and again, the answer seems to be no. 

Due in part to the power of branding, this fact can be hard to spot at the top of the mainstream cultural heap. It's painfully evident in emanations which come to us from down below.

Do we have the intellectual capacity to continue as a nation? Starting this week, we'll look at some of the sectors where the answer may seem to be no. For now, we'll even note the way Tapper's followers scrambled to hail his puzzling tweet, with very few people noting how little journalistic content Tapper was offering.

Starting this week, we'll examine the various sectors where our capacity for sensible conduct seems to have come to an end.  As we do, we'll think again of Norman O. Brown's warning from the acid-downing, street-fighting 1960s. 

Brown, a UC Santa Cruz classicist, suddenly became a major figure during that era. At this site, we've been recalling his rather murky warning since at least 2009:

BROWN (1960): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new. 

The power which makes all things new is magic. What our time needs is mystery: what our time needs is magic. Who would not say that only a miracle can save us?

This warning came from Professor Brown's address to Columbia's Phi Beta Kappa society.  His warning was murky, but apt.

In our view, it's abundantly clear that our failing society is currently "ending in exhaustion." To date, no one has discovered the new mystery, the new secret, which would make all things new.

Do we the people have what it takes to run a giant modern nation? As our monologues proceed, we'll look at indications from below, and at those which come to us from the top of our failing world.

Tomorrow: The comical story of Court TV

Still coming: Listening to C-Span callers; parsing our failing tribe's leading professors; reading the work at the New York Times; top clowns of the History Channel...

Why did Dems lose seats in the House?

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2020

Again with the latest headcounts: For today, we'll recommend a new colloquy between New York magazine's Eric Levitz and Democratic number-cruncher David Shor.

Levitz offers a brief introduction to the lengthy discussion. Once again, we're prepared to explain the highlighted observation:

LEVITZ (11/13/20): Barring an unlikely triumph in Georgia’s Senate runoffs in January, the 2020 election will go down as a down-ballot disaster for the Democratic Party. Even as Biden won the popular vote by as much as five points, Democrats saw their House majority shrink, most of their top Senate challengers fall flat, and their attempts to flip state legislatures come up empty. What’s worse, these losses appear attributable to trends that raise ominous questions about the party’s electoral prospects going forward: The most xenophobic Republican president in modern memory made large gains with Latino voters, while white rural America continued its steady rightward march. Most Democrats weren’t prepared for these disappointments.

Once again, the question arises. If Biden won the popular vote by as much as five points, why did Democrats see their House majority shrink?

As we noted at the start of the week, this doesn't seem like much of a mystery. Here's the breakdown of the electorate in 2018—the electorate which gave Dems 235 House seats:

Total votes, nationwide, 2018 House elections:
Democrats: 60,572,245 (53.4%)

Republicans: 50,861,970 (44.8%)

Biden may end up defeating Trump by as much as five points. But the 2018 electorate favored Dems by almost nine points—by roughly 8.6!

(In a president's initial off-year election, it's typical for the opposition party to turn out more heavily than the president's party.)

In short, the Dems had a larger turnout advantage last time around. We don't know why it should be surprising to see that this year's electorate gave Democrats fewer House seats. 

Dems keep winning the popular vote in national elections. That said, a lot of the Democratic vote is "wasted" in super-majority California and in overwhelmingly Democratic House districts.

Meanwhile, our cockeyed system of "Senate math" vastly favors the GOP. Also, we have the basic fact Kevin Drum recently cited:

There are a lot of conservatives out there! Whatever such fuzzy terms might mean, self-identified conservatives tend to outnumber self-identified liberals by a substantial margin.

You go to the polls with the electorate you have. It's also true that Democrats face several significant structural disadvantages. These basic facts can't be wished away, not even by giants like us. 

Shor identifies as a socialist, but he has also looked at the numbers (and looked and looked and looked). Here's the final Q-and-A, vastly edited down:

LEVITZ: [A]ssuming you still identify as a socialist—what does that identification mean to you? And do you think that your empirical analysis of how politics works today is compatible with a belief in the possibility of socialism’s realization at some distant future date?

SHOR: I still identify as a socialist. I think there’s a lot of academic arguments that we can have. But like I said, when you look at all the popular things that are out there, there’s a lot we can do. And it’s true that not being able to pass large middle-class tax increases is a big constraint. It means we can’t re-create Sweden, definitely can’t re-create things past Sweden. But I think that pretending that these very real political constraints don’t exist does not accomplish anything. 

...And you can’t just switch off cultural conservatism or pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Shor identifies as a socialist, but he says we can't pretend that The Others don't exist! Where does he get these ideas?

Final point:

People with conservative views have every right to hold them. Our tribe is strongly inclined to "otherize" these people, in ways which can get ugly and dumb.

Politically, this probably isn't especially helpful. But our species has always been like this, and we don't seem inclined to move beyond our basic wiring.

Concerning the brilliance we tend to ascribe to ourselves:

A five-point advantage is less than nine. This seems like an obvious point, but we can't seem to puzzle it out!

WINNERS, LOSERS, ENEMIES, OTHERS: Martin is puzzled by The Others!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2020

Gessen is asked to explain: Out in rural Hayes County, Nebraska, [NAME WITHHELD] had a better idea. 

This Monday, in the New York Times, Dionne Searcey described it: 

SEARCEY (11/9/20): When [NAME WITHHELD] realized last week that the presidential vote was swinging Mr. Biden’s way, his thoughts turned to a divided nation. Not just the kind of political division that has fractured much of America, but literal, maybe-it’s-time-we-cleave-this-country-into-two-nations kind of division. He was thinking of secession.

“Is there a point that this country becomes actually split?” he said he thought as he watched the vote tallies from around the country.

Mr. [WITHHELD], a Republican, lives in Hayes County, where nearly 93 percent of voters supported Mr. Trump...

According to Searcey's report, WITHHELD is a a volunteer firefighter who drives an ambulance. He also "serves as the county’s economic development coordinator." 

According to the Census Bureau, Hayes County's population is roughly 900 and dropping. On reflection, Searcey says, WITHHELD eventually changed his mind about splitting the nation in two.

Upon reflection, he changed his mind, but others have felt the same way. Over Here, within our own tribe, a commenter to a Thomas Friedman column recently offered this:

COMMENTER FROM FORT WORTH (11/10/20): I think separatism is what will save democracy in the politically blue regions.  Red America really doesn't want democracy, but is so conservative as to prefer a more authoritarian system.  It's culture is derived primarily from northern Europe of the Reformation rather than the Enlightenment. The largest discriminant with a Trump voter was having an authoritarian value system.  

I would advocate the population of this country separate, with the Republican voting base concentrating in the region between the Appalachians and the Cascades/Sierra Nevadas, and north of the 34th parallel.  Then set up a national border.

Our country is simply too diverse to hang together as a unified nation any longer.

The others don't want what we liberals want, this discouraged observer said. This commenter even knows where the borders should be after the new Trail of Tears! Our blue nation gets both coasts!

Other commenters agreed with this recommendation. The initial comment landed on the Times' list of Reader Picks.

Is it true? Is our country "simply too diverse" at this point to function as a unified nation? 

In our view, there's a great deal of truth to that observation. In our view, it's hard to see a way out of this mess as long as major corporate interests use cable news, talk radio and the like to create two different (epistemic) worlds.

That said, the bullroar isn't all found Over There, and neither is all the otherization. Consider the Amanpour & Co. rebroadcast we watched yesterday.

In the program's principal segment, Michel Martin was struggling to understand Those People, the Trump voters.  She spoke with New Yorker egghead Masha Gessen, who has a high IQ.

Martin grilled Gessen about the troubling Others. On the Amanpour website, the segment is thumbnailed like this:

What Makes People Want Autocracy?

What separates President Trump’s behavior from that of the average autocrat? Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who has been writing about authoritarianism for decades. Their latest book, “Surviving Autocracy,” makes the case that Trump’s presidency has endangered American democracy and the world’s faith in it. Gessen speaks with Michel Martin about all this–and about the road ahead.

The others want autocracy, the thumbnail seems to suggest. 

As the interview started, Gessen said that Donald J. Trump has been trying to create "the vertical of vassalage." He wants all other sources of power reporting upward to him. 

We're not saying that assessment is wrong, though there certainly would have been a simpler way to say it. Around the 5-minute mark, Martin asked Gessen this:

MARTIN (11/11/20): Why do you think it is that the American public to this point doesn't seem more disturbed by this?

I mean, as you pointed out in your [recent New Yorker] piece, 65, 70 million people consciously chose Donald Trump as their president, as their choice, despite seeing these autocratic tendencies over the past four years, as you've described.

And yet Americans, some of the people who supported him, seem more concerned about being told to wear a mask on their face to prevent the spread of disease than they are of being sort of told who's going to be president no matter who voted or not. And I'm just wondering what you think about that.

We're curious about widespread mask aversion too. That said, did those 70 million voters (and counting) "consciously" want autocracy, as Martin's statement and question might seem to imply? 

Plainly, Martin and Gessen feel they've seen "autocratic tendencies" in Trump. We'd say that assessment is accurate.

But did The Others perceive the events and behaviors of recent years in the same way these eggheads did? Did the others, all 70 million of them, see "autocratic tendencies" in Trump, then "consciously" decide to support that? 

That's what Martin seemed to imply. This is classic otherization—and despite its broadcast by PBS, it's very low-quality work.

In what way was Martin engaged in otherization? The prehistoric tribal practice acts in these two ways:

First, we assume that Those People Are All Just Alike—in this case, all 70 million of them (and counting).

Then, we make a second assumption. We assume that the others must understand the world in the same (enlightened) ways we do. We assume they know and believe the things we know. They've heard the same things we've heard.

In such ways, a pair of overpaid eggheads were able to tell us what that ambulance driver in Hayes County had in mind when he voted for Donald J. Trump last week. This is familiar, not super bright work. 

That said, this tribal practice is bred in the bone. This unhelpful practice is as old as our floundering, war-inclined species.

At roughly the 9-minute mark, Martin asked the question shown below. She was responding to Gessen's description of the way Republican office-holders defer to Trump:

MARTIN: Is there something about the Republican electorate at this point that finds this stance and this posture so appealing that the people who are elected by them, that's where they are as well?

It seems as though there is a great appetite for this among certain sectors of the American people. The question I have for you is why? Why do you think that is?

Martin's presentation was a bit hard to parse, but we were struck by a point of oddness:

Martin was wondering why Trump voters vote as they do. She was wondering about what they find appealing.

Those are perfectly sensible questions. But why was she asking Masha Gessen? If she was curious about Trump voters, why wasn't she asking them?

Why wasn't she asking that guy in Hayes County? Why wasn't she asking him to explain how the world looks to him?

As best we recall, we've never seen a Hayes County resident interviewed on our tribe's cable channels. You'll never see such bumpkins interviewed on this PBS program.

In this way, our tribe constructs epistemic silos to match those found in Hayes County. When we want to know what Those People think, we come up with answer ourselves!

Th woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our tribe just isn't real sharp. Don't be fooled by all those degrees or by the incessant branding. 

More specifically, this interview featured some highly unimpressive work by two sachems of our own tribe. Needless to say, Gessen ended up saying that Trump's voters were responding to the same psychological forces which attracted Germans to Hitler. 

Along the way, she offered some remarkably uninsightful analyses of last week's elections—and she drove the tribal line forward.

For better or worse, our tribe is a tribe just like other tribes. At times of tribal division, we don't want to hear from the others. We want to hear pre-existing stories as told by ourselves.

It's true that a large, continental nation can't really function this way. Also, there's no way the nation can split in two, with our tribe getting both coasts.

Reading those recent pleas for separation, we thought of the Harrison Ford character in the Oscar-nominated 1985 film, Witness. 

Urban violence and political corruption have driven him to a type of internal exile in Pennsylvania's Amish country.  He's even developed a love interest there. 

It's tempting to think that he can remain in that exile forever. Eventually, he realizes that he has to go back and confront the dislocation which initially sent him there.

"Be careful out among them English," he's told as the picture show ends.

Barry McCaffrey isn't a nut!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2020

Seven Days in November: Rather plainly, General Barry McCaffrey isn't a nut.

Also, Seven Days in May (1964) was a very convincing "attempted military takeover" film.

Before we try to show you what McCaffrey said to Brian Williams last night—MSNBC no longer makes such content available—let's review some other rumblings across the press landscape today.

Atop the front page of the hard-copy Washington Post, the headlines on the featured news report say this:

Efforts to thwart Biden's victory start taking shape 

Lawyers lobby to delay certifying vote

Those headlines appear in the Post's print edition. Later, this headline appeared atop Margaret Sullivan's latest media column: 

          How to cover a coup—or whatever it is Trump is attempting

Say what? Is Donald J. Trump attempting a coup? Sullivan starts like this:

SULLIVAN (11/12/20): President Trump lost. The nation knows it. The world knows it. And, although he won’t admit it, he certainly knows it, too.

But because he is claiming otherwise—with his Republican enablers joining the chorus—this past week has presented the reality-based press with a strange and extremely important challenge.

How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?

“You don’t want to fearmonger. You don’t want to underplay something this dangerous, either,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Daily Beast, told me.

Is it possible that Donald J. Trump, and those around him, are trying to lay the groundwork for a coup attempt? 

Sullivan isn't a national security reporter. On the other hand, concerning those efforts to delay certification of Biden's victory, Viebeck at al. report the following atop the Post's front page:

VIEBECK ET AL (11/12/20): Pressure mounted on state and local officials in battleground states to accept claims of ballot-counting irregularities and voter fraud in the election despite a lack of evidence, as Republicans sought new ways to block certification of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the presidential race.

In Michigan, Republican lawyers lobbied the Wayne County canvassing board to consider evidence of alleged improprieties before certifying the vote. In Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers were the target of social media campaigns demanding the appointment of electors who favor President Trump. And in Georgia, the Republican secretary of state defended the election and announced a hand audit of the results, despite calls by the state’s Republican senators for him to resign over alleged problems.

[...]

While the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have so far been “summarily dismissed,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) said Wednesday that she is concerned the GOP may try to use baseless claims about irregularities or vote tampering to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win, depriving him of the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“It appears as though that is the strategy they are pursuing,” Nessel said on a call with reporters held by the nonpartisan Voter Protection Project. “We will do everything we can possibly do in the state of Michigan to ensure that that does not occur and that the slate of electors accurately reflects whoever received the most votes.”

Nessel is nobody's dummy. Given the psychopathologies of the sitting president (and presumably of those around him), we find her words alarming.

That's the very term McCaffery used when he spoke with Williams last night. Unfortunately, in a very "Trumpy" cultural play, MSNBC no longer offers transcripts of its profit-seeking TV shows.

For that reason, it's hard to show you what McCaffrey said to Williams. To our ear, Williams showed little sign of hearing what had been said.

McCaffrey said that he's "alarmed" by the president's peculiar new firings and appointments. He said a coup was quite unlikely, but he left the door ajar.

Not long ago, a certain horrible corporate "news channel" stopped transcribing its TV shows. After 22 years of pointless effort, we don't plan to do their work for them today. 

Beyond that, we can't link you to videotape of McCaffery's remarks. That said, he stressed his state of alarm on several occasions last night.

"Mark me down as alarmed over this whole thing," McCaffrey said, right out of the gate. He referred to "a plot in the White House that we might be able to declare this election null and void."

("I don't think it's going to work," the general said, but he didn't exactly say that it couldn't. Brian tried to change the subject two separate times during a very short segment.)

We assume that Trump is severely mentally ill. In typical fashion, the upper-end mainstream press has refused to discuss such possibilities.

We assume there's nothing this particular president wouldn't attempt to do. The press has taken a pass on discussing that possibility, but we assume that Donald J. Trump remains a dangerous man.

At one point, McCaffrey said this to Williams: 

"You know, if I was a case officer in the CIA and I'd spent most of my life studying third world countries, and I looked at the pattern of behavior here, you'd have to conclude that the strongman is about to take control of the government and ignore an election."

General McCaffrey is very experienced, and he isn't a nut. And yes, that's one of the things he said to the unconcerned Brian.

We wish we could link you to a full transcript of the interview, or to the videotape. A certain horrible "cable news" entity decided, several months ago, that we can't have nice things.

WINNERS, LOSERS, ENEMIES, OTHERS: Why did Those People vote for Trump?

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2020

We're back in Nebraska again: In fairness, Jennifer Finney Boylan isn't a political analyst, at least not in the main.

That said, we were struck by something she wrote in yesterday's New York Times column. She penned a familiar type of confession. It resembled a humblebrag:

BOYLAN (11/11/20): For the life of me I have never been able to understand how so many Republicans talk about their patriotism and their love of the flag and at the same time despise the very government the Constitution created. Is that what patriotism means now—hating governance, but getting all teary-eyed and sentimental about Exxon Mobil?

Ignore Boylan's unflattering paraphrase of what "so many Republicans" say and feel. We've long been  struck by this type of confession, in which national opinion writers proudly announce that they don't understand the topic they're writing about. 

Within the deeply unimpressive realm of corporate liberal media, pundits routinely score Brownie points by launching such confessions. 

I can't even begin to under Those People, they brag. From there, they somehow proceed to characterize what The Others are thinking:

BOYLAN (continuing directly): It’s this enduring frame of mind that still eats away at us. It explains, just to pick one example, Republicans’ hatred of the Affordable Care Act—and why they’ve been trying to repeal it for all these years, even while swearing that they’ll protect so many of its provisions.

Is Boylan describing Republican officials, or plain old Republican voters? It's amazing how rarely such distinctions are drawn when the tribunes of our failing tribe perform in this slightly comical way.

Now for our own confession! We don't understand Republicans either—or at least, we don't understand Republican voters. (The values and motives of Republican office-holders and opinion leaders are much easier to imagine.)

We don't understand Republican voters either! In fairness, we offer this excuse—there were maybe 75 million such voters in this year's election, and all but a few million of them voted for Donald J. Trump.

It's hard to "understand" 75 million people, most of whom you've never met. Having said that, we'll restate our initial point:

We score it comical when corporate pundits seem to boast, as they routinely do, about their inability to understand this inscrutable thundering herd. 

Given the haplessness of our own tribe, pundits gain tribal sincerity points when they emit such confessions. We rubes are so dumb that we admire national pundits who happily state that they don't understand the topic they're writing about.

Like many others, we've found it surprising to see Donald J. Trump retain so much support and get so many votes. But we also know what a person can do when he doesn't understand someone else:

At least in theory, he or she can go to such people and ask them about their vote! 

It's hard to adopt this strategy when ten of millions of Others are involved. That said, the New York Times has adopted a version of this approach in recent days:

In this report, Ellen Barry spoke to one of the truest-believing of all Trump supporters, a 26-year-old hair stylist who lives in Wilmington, Mass.

In this report, Trip Gabriel interviewed an array of Trump voters in Pennsylvania. "Many of the president’s supporters were swayed by his blizzard of disinformation that illegal voting had been rampant," Gabriel reported, without necessarily explaining why these people had voted for Trump in the first place.

Meanwhile, in this report, Dionne Searcey was back in Nebraska again. On November 2, she had written an intriguing report about some of the state's Trump voters—a report in which she may or may not have swallowed a fraudulent claim of a politically-motivated arson fire.

(More on that tomorrow.)

This Monday, Searcey was back in Nebraska again, interviewing Trump voters in rural locations. In Nebraska, it can get quite rural, though perhaps not as rural as this:

SEARCEY (11/9/20): Inside the Cattleman’s Lounge in Springview, Neb., signs supporting Mr. Trump decorate the restaurant.

Joleen Kienke, the owner, said she had voted for Mr. Trump because the president opposed the shutdown of the nation’s economy during the pandemic. Cases of Covid-19 are surging across Nebraska, but the effects of the virus aren’t as obvious in Keya Paha County, home to fewer than 300 residents, where Springview is.

Ms. Kienke said the income from the lounge and her Cattleman’s Bunkhouse had increased in recent months.

“I hear a lot of restaurants are going under, but we’re doing pretty good,” said Ms. Kienke, a fifth-generation cattle rancher whose ancestors immigrated from Germany. “There’s very little Covid here, and people who do have it stay home.”

Is Keya Paha County really "home to fewer than 300 residents?" As of last July, the Census Bureau was estimating the county's population at 806—but they're a bunch of federal bureaucrats. How much could they possibly know?

For the record, Nebraska has 93 different counties.  Twelve of these counties have populations of less than one thousand souls.

Most Trump voters don't live in places which are this rural, not even in Nebraska. Nor is there any way that Searcey can possibly know that the highlighted claim is accurate: 

SEARCEY: The 2020 presidential vote hammered home the political divide in the country, with states supporting Mr. Biden largely located along the coasts, and those supporting Mr. Trump in a swath down the middle. Nebraska is tucked deep among them. More than 90 percent of voters supported Mr. Trump in at least five of its 93 counties.

But the knowledge here that Mr. Biden won the presidency—and that Nebraska even sent an Electoral College vote his way—was met with a what-goes-around-comes-around kind of attitude. Many Republicans said they planned to show liberals, who they said had whined for four years about Mr. Trump, that it was possible to simply move on when you lose.

To what extent did Trump voters in rural Nebraska meet the knowledge of Biden's win "with a what-goes-around-comes-around kind of attitude?"

On the basis of a limited number of interviews, Searcey can't possibly know. In this way, our own tribe's most famous newspaper pretends to offer information in its news reports.

We were intrigued by Searcey'a first Nebraska report—the report in which she may or may not have swallowed a hoax. (The New York Times has rarely met a hoax it didn't like.) 

In that report, Searcey was describing people who lived in a very different part of this very large country. It's hard to hold such a country together—a giant country with a wide array of regional histories and cultures.

We were also intrigued by Searcey's new report. She described local attitudes about Covid-19 which didn't strike us as crazy. Also, she wrote this:

SEARCEY: Yutan, population 1,300, is just over the border from the Second Congressional District...Seventy-one percent of voters in Saunders County, where Yutan is, cast ballots for Mr. Trump.

It has the trappings of many rural Nebraska small towns: an overwhelmingly white population, grain bins alongside railroad tracks, a water tower, a short strip of stores both open and long-ago shuttered, and roads that dead-end into cornfields.

[...]

Not all of Mr. Trump’s backers in Nebraska were brushing off the latest voting results. In Lincoln, supporters rallied outside the capitol yelling that Mr. Biden had stolen the election. In Yutan, some expressed worries about trade and the economy under Mr. Biden. One woman stood in her lawn and said she was waiting once Mr. Biden took office “for my government-issued Chinese flag.” Her neighbor worried about socialism taking root. Both were worried that if they gave their names to a reporter, liberals would track them down and destroy their homes.

We'd be slow to judge the people who live in those rural Nebraska towns. (Yutan seems to be one of the largest places Searcey visited.)

Cultural frameworks are vastly different in such locales—and Searcey made no attempt to ask her interview subjects where they get their "information." The various "facts" (and frameworks) to which we humans are exposed may help explain the varied conclusions we reach. 

(For the record, we're speaking here of the way Republican officials and opinion leaders may mislead Republican voters. As a point of basic decency, we think such distinctions matter.)

Why did rural Nebraskans vote in large numbers for Donald J. Trump? If you want to know, you pretty much have to go ask them. Even then, there's a good chance you won't really know.

Having said that, we'll also say this:

You've never once, in all your years, seen a discussion on liberal "cable news" TV shows about elements of "trade and the economy," perhaps including trade with China, which effect farm communities in rural Nebraska. 

Within our vastly self-impressed caste, people in those distant communities don't even exist. Should we really be surprised when we don't understand the inexcusable ways they vote?

The New York Times may (or may not) have purchased its latest hoax. Also, a very large percentage of rural Nebraskans voted for Donald J. Trump.

Within our tribe, we're repelled by one part of that package, oblivious to the other. We may even score tribal purity points for saying we don't understand!

Tomorrow: Why did people vote for Trump? We enter a barbershop!

Thomas Friedman is troubled by Trump!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2020

The way of our own liberal caste: Believe it nor not, today's column starts like this:

FRIEDMAN (11/11/20): On Saturday morning I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: “Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?”

I had to stop and think for a second myself, before answering: “Yes, thou shalt not bear false witness.”

Believe it or not, that's what it says! Ann was stirring her Cream of Wheat—and then, she suddenly asked!

 Before too long, Thomas Friedman has made his way through a set of homely anecdotes including a long, homespun joke about a turkey in the Middle East. 

Eventually, he announces that Trump has robbed us of truth. He says this is where it began:

FRIEDMAN: The truth binds you, and Trump never wanted to be bound—not in what he could ask of the president of Ukraine or say about the coronavirus or about the integrity of our election.

And it nearly worked. Trump proved over five years that you could lie multiple times a day—multiple times a minute—and not just win election but almost win re-election.

[...}

And do you know what our turkey was? Birtherism.

When Trump was allowed to spread the “birther” lie for years—that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president—he realized he could get away with anything.

We're leaving out the homespun joke by which Friedman arrives at the claim that birtherism was our turkey—that birtherism is the place where America lost the truth. 

This notion is as far from the truth as birtherism itself.  Friedman seems to have no concept or clue about the origin and sweep of the crazy claims which virtually define our modern political history.

Did Al Gore say he invented the Internet? Well actually, no—he didn't.

Did the Clintons commit all those murders? Well actually, no—they didn't.

To this day, can anyone except Gene Lyons explain the Whitewater pseudoscandal—the pseudoscandal which gave its name to a political era, but only after getting its start through a set of bungled "news reports" on the front page of the Times?

Actually, no one can!  It all swirled out of the New York Times, and so in the end it was all disappeared. But the endless bullshit to which we refer is what let Trump slip past Hillary Clinton and reach the Oval, and none of this came from Trump.

When birtherism finally arrived, flyweights like Friedman ran off and hid in the woods. Rachel did so a million ways, not excluding her fervent endorsement of Greta van Susteren, her drinking buddy and Trump's long-time birther caddy at the Fox News Channel. 

Good grief! When Greta was hosting the birther god all those years, she was Rachel's drinking pal!

When Friedman's own New York Times got around to discussing birtherism in July 2016, they didn't dare to ask Trump's men if he'd really sent people to Hawaii to check the whole thing out. For whatever reason, they weren't even brave enough to ask, almost surely because they knew that he of course hadn't.

Our political culture lost the truth long before the lunatic Trump came along. Before Trump, the foolishness and the disinformation came live and direct from the jugglers and clowns who constitute Friedman's own guild.

Much of the novelization and the dissembling came from Friedman's guild. For that reason, people like Friedman will never tell you about it.

In truth, he probably doesn't know. These people are stunningly clueless. They're empty all the way down.

In the face of history like this, we're now instructed to assail Trump's voters. Today, the laziest, dumbest person on Earth ends his column like this:

FRIEDMAN: “Lies don’t work unless they’re believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible,” my former Times colleague David K. Shipler, who served in our Moscow bureau during the Cold War, said to me. “I think of each of us as having our own alarm—and it’s as if half of their batteries have died. Lots of Trump’s lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd. Why have so many people believed them? I’m not sure it’s fully understood.”

That is why it’s vital that every reputable news organization—especially television, Facebook and Twitter—adopt what I call the Trump Rule. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trump’s lie-infested, postelection, news conference last week. If critics scream “censorship,” just shout back “truth.”

This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.

At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include digital civics—how to determine and crosscheck if something you read on the internet is true—in their curriculum. You should not be able to graduate without it.

As Shipler sneers at the dumb Trump voters, he ignores all the prior disinformation—the disinformation his own elite, upper-class guild produced or chose to ignore. As for Friedman himself, he's so dumb that he thinks the current state of disinformation can be addressed by the K-12 curriculum.

You almost have to be living on Neptune to think something as stupid as that.

He starts with a weird (alleged) exchange about the ten commandments. He proceeds to a silly homespun joke about a stolen turkey.

His column is drenched in incomprehension about the world his class produced. He tells you to blame it on Trump's voters.

"Look over there," this idiot says. This is the enduring way of our own "liberal" caste.

Final point: As we've frequently noted, Trump seems to be mentally ill. On page 12 of her best-selling book, his clinical psychologist niece refers to his various "psychopathologies," which she then rattles off.

For that reason, we regard Trump as dangerous. But what's the Times' excuse?

WINNERS, LOSERS, ENEMIES, OTHERS: Boylan doesn't understand!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2020

Johnson believes he does: In her column in today's New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan makes a familiar type of confession.

"For the life of me I have never been able to understand [Republican voters]," she somewhat oddly says. 

Tomorrow, we'll show you the fuller statement we're quoting. For the moment, suffice to say this:

Boylan says she doesn't understand. Professor Johnson seems to believe that he does.

Last Wednesday, November 4, Professor Johnson appeared as a guest on MSNBC's Deadline: White House. Already, it seemed that Candidate Biden was on his way to the White House—but Professor Johnson was disturbed by the election returns.

He seemed to think he understood. Once again, here's the bulk of what he said:

JOHNSON (11/4/20): America, by the slightest of disturbing margins, decided they wanted to pick [Biden].

I am disturbed by the fact that not enough Americans made that decision.

I am disturbed by the fact that you have large numbers of people who are like, "Yeah, a guy who leaves people out in the cold, and a quarter of a million people die of Covid, and harasses women and everything else like that, I want a little bit more of that, and I don't really know if I wanted the other guy." 

So this election really shows me a lot of really disturbing things about this country racially, very disturbing things about this country from a gender standpoint, and I have to say this:

Because if Joe Biden becomes president of the United States—and I hope that he does, because he is not a dictator in the making; he seems to be a decent guy—I will immediately turn around my hat and be excruciatingly critical of him. Because you cannot come into this White House with the idea that these people aren't the enemy. They are.

The people chasing the Biden-Harris truck out of Texas, they are the enemies of democracy.

The people right now attacking vote counters in Detroit, they are the enemy.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy. Mitch McConnell is the enemy. And if there's one thing that Democrats should have finally figured out in this campaign, you can't treat the Republican Party with kid gloves, because they won't treat you that way.

I hope Joe Biden just gave this speech to sound nice because everything isn't locked down yet. Maybe Senator Harris will have this idea should she become vice president.

But they have to go into this realizing they're in a war. The war for the soul of America will not end once he's inaugurated and I hope he remembers that.

Earlier that day, Biden had said, "We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies." 

Johnson said he hoped that Biden was lying when he said that. Regarding the kid gloves he rejected, he seemed to say that when the others misbehave, we have to misbehave too.

At any rate, the professor had, quite literally, started an enemies list! Were all Trump voters on that list,  70 million strong?

The professor didn't say, nor did anyone ask. The cable program on which he appeared is scripted for complete agreement. Pundit participants are branded as "friends." No statements are challenged or questioned.

On this day, the professor was speaking the language of "enemies" and "war." Should all Trump voters be regarded as enemies? Are we at war with them?

The professor didn't quite say. That said,  major top scholars are telling us that the professor's oration helps us see some basic parts of the prehistoric, all-too-human process of otherization, the prelude to total war.

How do humans, even today, come to believe that they're part of a tribal war in which all the good is within one tribe while the other tribe is all evil?

Consider the examples the professor cited, these credentialed top scholars suggest.

With whom did the professor start when he began defining "these people?" In fact, these ranking scholars note, the professor started like this:

You cannot come into this White House with the idea that these people aren't the enemy. They are.

The people chasing the Biden-Harris truck out of Texas, they are the enemies of democracy.

"These people" are the enemy, the angry professor said.  For his first example, he cited a small group of Trump supporters who came close to forcing a bus off a highway in a recent, dangerous incident.

Those people "are the enemies of democracy," the professor angrily said. For what it's worth, he now had maybe fifty people on his enemies list!

From there, the professor moved to a slightly more imprecise charge as he kept building his list:

The people right now attacking vote counters in Detroit, they are the enemy.

Were vote counters being attacked in Detroit? We'll admit that we still don't know who or what the professor was talking about.

But this is the way the process starts, credentialed experts insist. In the prelude to tribal war, we cite the very worst members of some group. Then we start imagining that all the others are like that.

At this point, the professor named two enemies by name. 

One of these enemies is 17. (In real time, another pundit on this same show had branded him an "assassin." No one had questioned that fiery claim either.)

The professor paired the 17-year-old with one of the country's most powerful political figures. When human groups prepare for war, conjunctions like this will seem to make sense, leading top scholars now say.

Earlier, the professor had offered a more general description of the people with whom he was at war. He seemed to throw everyone into this stew. The people in question had said this:

 "Yeah, Trump leaves people out in the cold, and a quarter of a million people die of Covid, and he harasses women and everything else like that, I want a little bit more of that." 

That's what the others had said.

We think that Trump's approach to the pandemic has been astonishing too. That said, we've read assessments by Trump voters that don't seem completely crazy to us—and it's possible that we understand something the angry professor does not.

Meanwhile, no! We don't think a Trump voter should necessarily have flipped his vote because of that incident with the buses at the Omaha rally. But when we humans start girding for war, everything's all of a piece, we're told. A quarter million people dead equal six buses hung up in traffic.

We liberals have often found it hard to believe that Donald J. Trump has retained so much support. We're inclined to be surprised by that state of affairs too.

Luckily, major scholars have stepped in to offer a wider perspective. Carlotta Valdes has also been present, dreamily recalling the tribal wars of our species' endless past.

It always starts this way, Carlotta has gloomily told us. At one point, she recited from memory the silly talk by the silly Southern boys at the start of Gone With the Wind:

BRENT (1861): What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is going to start any day now, so we would have left college anyhow.

STEW: Oh, isn't it exciting, Scarlett? You know those poor Yankees actually want a war?

BRENT: We'll show 'em!

SCARLETT: Fiddle-dee-dee. "War, war, war." This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring...

Amazingly, those Southern boys were even dumber than Scarlett! Brent and Stew were eager for war with the others. A few years later, the cameras pull back to show us Atlanta in ruins.

Should Biden see himself at war? Should he form a list?

Most significantly, should Trump's voters be on that list? Did they all try to drive that bus off the road? Are they all as problematic as McConnell is?

The scholars had one basic point they wanted us to grasp. It's this:

When we start to align ourselves for tribal war, we humans are inclined to do what Professor Johnson did. We're inclined to picture the very worst of those we oppose, then let them stand in for the rest.

In this way, we construct "those people," The Others, some 70 million strong. And in fact, it's even worse than that! As Kate Cohn notes in the Washington Post, another 80 million people didn't even bother to vote! Should they be the enemy too?

Should all Trump voters be otherized? Are they all deplorables?

Tomorrow, we'll return to Nebraska with the New York Times in search of provisional answers. We'll examine the way the world appears to some of the others. We may even briefly consider their silly complaints about us!

(Concerning the work of the Times itself, we'll also offer a different perspective on that (alleged) Nebraska arson fire. Did our brilliant tribe's most brilliant newspaper maybe get hoaxed again?)

Last Wednesday afternoon, the professor was creating an enemies list. As we humans have done since the dawn of time, he was assembling the others.

 Yesterday, Margaret Renkl seemed to do something similar. The 71 million who voted for Trump "aren't going anywhere," she said. "And it’s not remotely clear what the rest of us can do about any of that."

Tomorrow, we'll start with Boylan's fuller statement—and we'll have a suggestion for Renkl. In fairness, though, we ought to say this:

For at least a decade, we've been noting the possibility that it's already too late!

Tomorrow: We're back in Nebraska again

Georgia picks Biden, Ohio says no!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2020

Weirdly, Krugman explains: At present, Biden has won Georgia by less than half a point. He has lost Ohio by eight.

What explains these different outcomes? Weirdly, Krugman explains:

KRUGMAN (11/10/20): [T]he fact that Democrats are now competitive in Georgia but not in Ohio, which appears to have become Trumpier than Texas, tells you a lot about where America is heading. In some ways these changes in the electoral map offer reason for hope; but they also suggest looming problems for U.S. democracy.

How did Georgia turn faintly blue? As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote, in a phrase I wish I’d come up with, the great divide in American politics is now over “density and diplomas”: highly urbanized states—especially those containing large metropolitan areas—with highly educated populations tend to be Democratic.

Say what? Biden did eight points better in Georgia because its population is more highly educated?

Later, Krugman seems to advance this claim further. This time, he brings Wisconsin and Michigan into the mix:

KRUGMAN: In practice, density and diplomas tend to go together—an association that has grown stronger over the past few decades. Modern economic growth has been led by knowledge-based industries; these industries tend to concentrate in large metropolitan areas that have highly educated work forces; and the growth of these metropolitan areas brings in even more highly educated workers.

Hence the transformation of Georgia. The state is home to greater Atlanta, one of the nation’s most dynamic metropolises, which now accounts for 57 percent of Georgia’s population. Atlanta has drawn in a growing number of college-educated workers, so that at this point the percentage of working-age adults with bachelor’s degrees is higher in Georgia than in Wisconsin or Michigan. So at some level it shouldn’t be surprising that Georgia apparently joined the “blue wall” in securing the presidency for Biden.

According to Krugman, Georgia joined the blue wall for Biden because its population is well educated. Indeed, the percentage of working-age adults with bachelor’s degrees is higher in Georgia than in Wisconsin or Michigan, Krugman says.

For the record, the percentage is also higher in Georgia than in Ohio. Is that why Georgia went blue, while Ohio voted for Trump?

This idea struck us as possibly far-fetched. We decided to check the data to which Krugman provided a link.

On the one hand, it's true! Georgia does have more college-educated voters, or at least it did two years ago within a certain age range. But, according to Krugman's source, the differences are small:

Adults 25 to 64 with a bachelors degree or higher, 2018:
Georgia: 33.3%
Ohio: 30.9%
Michigan: 31.2%

Wisconsin: 31.8%

Those are the data to which Krugman linked. Georgia's percentage was higher than Ohio's, but only by a smidge. 

Does that explain the gap between Georgia and Ohio this year? Or could it perhaps be related to this, as recorded in this year's (imperfect) exit poll data?

Racial identity of 2020 voters:
Georgia: 61% white, 29% black

Ohio: 84% white, 11% black

According to the exit polls, Ohio's electorate is much whiter. When we compare these states, the "education" gap is small, the "racial" gap much larger.

For what it's worth, "race" isn't always destiny. In Ohio, Biden won 41% of white votes. In Georgia, the number was 30%. 

That's according to the exit polls, which can't be assumed to be perfectly accurate. That said, the education gap seems rather small, the racial gap much larger.

Why did Georgia tip to Biden while Ohio went to Trump? For our money, Krugman's explanation is extremely odd.

Weirdly, Krugman explained. What we want to know is how do you like the things you read in our blue-eyed top newspaper now?

WINNERS, LOSERS, ENEMIES, OTHERS: Ways to swell the number of others!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2020

The war of the all against all: In her column in today's New York Times, Margaret Renkl is thinking about the others.

The number of others is very large. Renkl offers this:

RENKL (11/10/20): People have had four years now to find out just how truly terrible Mr. Trump is. How indifferent he is to the norms of civil discourse and to the responsibilities of democracy itself. How transparently racist he is, how divisive, how selfish. We know he’s a chronic liar who, when caught out, simply doubles down on the lie. We know that he is using the levers of government to enrich himself. We know he delights in and urges on the most violent impulses of his most dangerous followers. We know he has let 237,000 Americans die on his watch and still has no plan for saving the rest of us.

The numbers as of Sunday revealed that more than 71 million people voted for him anyway—eight million more than voted for him in 2016.

[...]

[T]he 71 million people who voted for Donald Trump despite his incompetence, despite his lying, his bullying, his cheating, his racism, despite all the moral failings he proudly flaunts as virtues? Those people aren’t going anywhere, the poison-spewing right-wing media that created them isn’t going anywhere, and Donald Trump himself isn’t going anywhere. And it’s not remotely clear what the rest of us can do about any of that.

We agree with Renkl on one basic point. We think the current commander-in-chief is "truly terrible" too.

Indeed, we would assume he's diagnosable as a "sociopath," and that he remains very dangerous. Renkl is perhaps too dainty, even perhaps too obedient, to traffic in such forbidden language, in such verboten ideas. 

Like Renkl, we're somewhat puzzled by the fact that so many people voted to re-elect Trump. That said, we disagree with the unfortunate tone one finds in the last paragraph we have posted, where Renkl says there isn't much people like us "can do about" all the others who voted for Donald J. Trump.

Like Renkl, we assume that our gruesome right-wing media has played a major role in the creation of our current state of affairs, Unlike Renkl, we wouldn't adopt the simplistic notion that those right-wing media "created" those 71 million Trump votes, full and complete total stop.

We're more disturbed by those right-wing media than by the 71 million others. And no—we don't think our exalted, vastly self-impressed tribe is likely to lead our failing nation out of this mess, in part because of the otherization to which we're so strongly inclined.

Renkl throws all 71 million others into one large burlap bag. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton condemned only half of Donald Trump's voters in the unfortunate remark about the "deplorables" which lives in lore to this day.

Those people were "irredeemable," Clinton actually said. To her credit, she said that half of Trump's voters had a shot at being saved, possibly by greater contact with the wisdom of us.

Margaret Renkl is a good, decent person. The fact that she has written this column helps us see the potency of the ancient, pre-human desire to traffic in otherization, thereby creating tribe versus tribe, the prelude to endless war.

By temperament, Professor Johnson is a bit more stern than Renkl. Earlier this year, he got suspended by MSNBC, and fired by The Root, for his insulting remarks about the "island of misfit black girls" who were working on behalf of Candidate Sanders who he, in his brilliance, opposed.

We hadn't seen that many women described as "girls" since the fall of 1999, when every liberal pundit in America insulted Naomi Wolf in the same pitiful way. 

(At the time, Wolf was 37 years old. She had written three books, two of which had been selected as New York Times Books of the Year. Unfortunately, she was advising Candidate Gore, and so she had to be taken down in the manner described. You saw exactly zero liberal, progressive or feminist groups step us to complain about this upper-end conduct. Our astonishingly hapless though self-impressed team began its resistance in November 2016, on the day after Trump was elected. We're told that the gods on Olympus are still laughing hard about that, right to this very day.)

Professor Johnson is perhaps a bit less delicate than Renkl in these matters. And so, when he indicted the others last week, he otherized them in the manner shown:

JOHNSON (11/4/20): America, by the slightest of disturbing margins, decided they wanted to pick [Biden].

I am disturbed by the fact that not enough Americans made that decision.

I am disturbed by the fact that you have large numbers of people who are like, "Yeah, a guy who leaves people out in the cold, and a quarter of a million people die of Covid, and harasses women and everything else like that, I want a little bit more of that, and I don't really know if I wanted the other guy." 

So this election really shows me a lot of really disturbing things about this country racially, very disturbing things about this country from a gender standpoint, and I have to say this:

Because if Joe Biden becomes president of the United States—and I hope that he does, because he is not a dictator in the making; he seems to be a decent guy—I will immediately turn around my hat and be excruciatingly critical of him. Because you cannot come into this White House with the idea that these people aren't the enemy. They are.

The people chasing the Biden-Harris truck out of Texas, they are the enemies of democracy.

The people right now attacking vote counters in Detroit, they are the enemy.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy. Mitch McConnell is the enemy. And if there's one thing that Democrats should have finally figured out in this campaign, you can't treat the Republican Party with kid gloves, because they won't treat you that way.

I hope Joe Biden just gave this speech to sound nice because everything isn't locked down yet. Maybe Senator Harris will have this idea should she become vice president.

But they have to go into this realizing they're in a war. The war for the soul of America will not end once he's inaugurated and I hope he remembers that.

To the professor, the others are "disturbing." Also, the others are the enemy. He made this point quite clear.

A 17-year-old is the enemy; so is Mitch McConnell. From the context of his full oration, it's fairly clear that the professor was saying that all 71 million (and counting) Trump voters are the enemy too. 

He sees himself at war with these others. He said he hopes that Biden is lying when he says he feels different.

Here at this site, we can imagine that some of those 71 million voters aren't just like all the rest. We can imagine that a few of those voters may be redeemable, just as Clinton said.

In his remarks, the professor seemed to leave no such wiggle room. But in his angry oration, in which the others became the enemy, the professor provided a public service of the following sort:

He helped us see the ancient ways the worst can be made to stand for the all. According to major experts, this is one of the basic ways otherization works.

We'll explore those techniques on the morrow. According to leading anthropologists, these ancient, hard-wired tribal techniques were always extremely important.

Tomorrow: The war of the all against all

Why did Democrats lose House seats?

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Statistical thinking is hard: Democrats won the White House last week. They also lost some seats in the House.

Why did Democrats lose House seats? Dems are at each others' throats, and journalists seem to be puzzled by this. Statistical thinking is hard!

Why did Democrats lose House seats? There are always a million ways you can answer a question like that. But we'd suggest you start by pondering voter turnout in recent House elections, starting in 2008:

Voter turnout, House elections. Off-year elections in bold:
2008: 117.5 million
2010: 83.8 million 

2012: 117.9 million
2014: 75.7 million 

2016: 124.9 million
2018: 111.4 million

2020: 147 million and counting; maybe 155 million when done.

Just consider the last two elections. In 2018, 111.4 million people voted. They elected Democrats to 235 seats.

This year, as many as 155 million people may have voted. In short, this was a vastly different electorate from the one which showed up in 2018.

On its face, there's no reason to assume that this year's (much larger) electorate would produce the same results as the (much smaller) electorate from two years ago. Beyond that, consider this:

Off-year elections tend to favor the party which doesn't hold the White House. So it went in 2018, with angry Democrats turning out to push back against Trump.

This year, with Trump himself on the ballot, Republicans had a major incentive to turn out too. The  smaller electorate in 2018 was largely driven by angry Dems. This year's vastly larger electorate featured a very large wave of Republican voters too.

With these patterns in mind, why wouldn't Democrats have lost some House seats this year? With massive turnout by both tribes, wouldn't that seem like a likely outcome?

Last time, the electorate was Democrat-heavy. This year, both sides came pouring out.

Opponents of the sitting president tend to turn out: 2010 was Obama's first off-year election. More Republican voters turned out. (Roughly, 45 million R to 39 million D.)

2018 was Trump's first off-year election, Many more Democratic voters turned out. (Roughly, 61 million D to 51 million R.)

This year, both parties turned out, bigly. As compared to the turnout last time,  wouldn't this make it fairly likely that Dems might lose some seats?

WINNERS, LOSERS, ENEMIES, OTHERS: Biden says he'll serve all the people!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Professor starts enemies list: Carlotta Valdes was speaking to Jimmy Stewart deep inside the Muir Woods.

(In fact, her statements were filmed at Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz County. Either way, she was surrounded by giant redwoods, the oldest living things on earth. The footage was filmed for Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 classic.)

Valdes (1831-1857) had lived in California a century before. Now, she'd seized control of Kim Novak's person and, with Hitchcock's cameras running, she told Stewart this:

VALDES: How old?

STEWART: Oh—some, two thousand years, or more.

VALDES: The oldest living things?

STEWART (nods affirmation): ...What are you thinking?

VALDES: Of all the people who have been  born—and have died—while the trees went on living.

"Their true name is Sequoia Sempervirens: always green, ever-living," Stewart said.

Moments later, as Hitchcock continued to film, Valdes inspected the remains of a giant tree which had been brought down and put on display.  Its rings were marked with historical dates, extending back to the Battle of Hastings—and we don't mean Hastings, Nebraska!

As Valdes fingered the mighty tree's rings, her dreamy rumination continued. "Somewhere in here I was born," she said. "And here I died."

Reportedly, Stewart never accepted the fact that he had spoken with the historical Valdes. He always insisted that he'd been conversing with a character Novak, an actress, was playing.

In that way, Stewart missed a remarkable moment. In fact, in remarkable footage captured by Hitchcock, "Novak" had emitted the voice of Valdes—and Valdes was dreaming back over the sweep of human history.

A somewhat similar manifestation took place last Wednesday afternoon on one of our cable news channels.  Suddenly, a panel discussion took cable viewers back through the annals of time

Professor Johnson was the speaker that day. On this occasion, the time travel went like this:

Professor Johnson was appearing as a guest on Deadline: White House. It already seemed likely that Candidate Biden was going to win the election.

Biden was on his way to the White House. The professor, like so many before him, was compiling his enemies list.

Earlier that afternoon, the candidate had given a speech in which he said that, while he'd run as a Democrat, he would also be a president for those who had voted against him.

"To make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies," Biden had explicitly said.

As humans have done since the dawn of time, Professor Johnson pushed back hard against this way of thinking. In the oration transcribed below, he mused about the large numbers of people who voted for Donald J. Trump:

JOHNSON (11/4/20): America, by the slightest of disturbing margins, decided they wanted to pick someone who doesn't actively dislike the people who gave him the job.

I am disturbed by the fact that not enough Americans made that decision.

I am disturbed by the fact that you have large numbers of people who are like, "Yeah, a guy who leaves people out in the cold, and a quarter of a million people die of Covid, and harasses women and everything else like that, I want a little bit more of that, and I don't really know if I wanted the other guy."

So this election really shows me a lot of really disturbing things about this country racially, very disturbing things about this country from a gender standpoint, and I have to say this:

Because if Joe Biden becomes president of the United States—and I hope that he does, because he is not a dictator in the making; he seems to be a decent guy—I will immediately turn around my hat and be excruciatingly critical of him. Because you cannot come into this White House with the idea that these people aren't the enemy. They are.

The people chasing the Biden-Harris truck out of Texas, they are the enemies of democracy.

The people right now attacking vote counters in Detroit, they are the enemy.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy. Mitch McConnell is the enemy. And if there's one thing that Democrats should have finally figured out in this campaign, you can't treat the Republican Party with kid gloves, because they won't treat you that way.

I hope Joe Biden just gave this speech to sound nice because everything isn't locked down yet. Maybe Senator Harris will have this idea should she become vice president.

But they have to go into this realizing they're in a war. The war for the soul of America will not end once he's inaugurated and I hope he remembers that.

With that, the professor finished his speech. Quite literally, he was already building his list.

A 17-year-old was the enemy; so was Mitch McConnell. As Carlotta Valdes sometimes reminds us during private consultations, we humans have always been inclined to function this way. 

As a species, we're strongly inclined to split into tribes and to make enemies lists. The professor, feeling himself at war, hoped that Biden had been lying about trying to serve everyone.

The endless election is finally done. It's all over now but the reacting. 

Does Professor Johnson's reaction make sense? At this time tomorrow morning, we'll start our discussion right there.

Tomorrow: Ways to identify others