Hey, did you know we are having an election here in the United States? I think I saw it mentioned on TV. Whatever your preferences may be, everyone eligible should try to get out and vote.
This election has, without a doubt, been somewhat unique. I’m cautiously optimistic that Hillary Clinton will win, that we will celebrate the election of the first female President in the history of the republic, and that she will do a relatively good job — although as a good Bayesian I know that empirical predictions are never certain, and in an atmosphere like this uncertainty runs relatively high.
Even if Clinton wins and the U.S. avoids complete embarrassment, I’m still very worried about what this election has revealed about the state of the country. No matter who our next President might be, there are real reasons to be concerned that the U.S. is veering away from some of the foundational principles that are necessary to a functioning democracy. That may sound alarmist, but I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Historically, democracies don’t always last forever; we’d be foolish to think that it can’t happen here.
This isn’t a worry about the specific horrible wrongness of Donald Trump — it’s a worry about the forces that propelled him to the nomination of one of our two major political parties, and the fires he so willingly stoked along the way. Just as a quick and hopelessly incomplete recap:
- Trump built his early political notoriety via “birtherism,” explicitly working to undermine the legitimacy of our elected President.
- He has continually vilified immigrants and foreigners generally, promoting an us-against-them mentality between people of different races and ethnicities.
- He has pledged to violate the Constitutional principle of freedom of religion, from banning Muslims from entering the country to tracking ones that are here.
- His campaign, and the Republican party more generally, has openly engaged in suppressing the vote from groups unlikely to support him. (“‘We have three major voter suppression operations underway,’ says a senior [Trump] official.”)
- He has glorified violence against protesters who disagree with him.
- He has lied at an unprecedented, astonishing rate, secure in the knowledge that his statements will be taken as true by a large fraction of his intended audience.
- He has presented himself as a uniquely powerful strongman who can solve problems through his personal force of will, and spoke admiringly of dictators from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un to Saddam Hussein.
- He has vowed that if he wins the election, he will seek vengeance on those who opposed him, including throwing his opponent into prison.
- He has repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election outcome, implying that he would refuse to accept the result if he lost.
- He has pointed fingers at a shadowy global conspiracy in charge of world finance, often with explicitly anti-Semitic overtones.
- Several Republican politicians have broached the prospect of refusing to confirm any Supreme Court nominees from a Democratic President.
- A government agency, the FBI, has interfered in a Presidential election.
- Republicans have accused Democratic officeholders of being traitors.
- A number of Trump supporters have spoken of the prospect of violent resistance if Clinton is elected.
This is not a list of “why Donald Trump is a bad person who is disastrously unqualified for the Presidency”; that would be much longer. Rather, I wanted to highlight features of the campaign that are specifically attacks on (small-“d”) democratic norms and values. The assumptions, often unspoken, by which legitimate political opponents have generally agreed to operate by over the course of the last two centuries and more. Not all of them, of course; there are glaring exceptions, authoritarians who have run roughshod over one or more of these norms in the name of personal glory. History generally looks down upon them, and we consider ourselves fortunate that they didn’t have greater success. But fortune can run out.
The most worrisome aspect of the situation is the very real prospect that these attacks on the foundations of liberal democracy will not simply disappear once Donald Trump rides off into the gold-plated sunset; that they will be seized upon and deployed by other politicians who couldn’t help but notice Trump’s success. If that’s the case, we will have a real reason to be concerned that American democracy will stop working, perhaps sooner rather than later. I don’t think it’s likely that such a disastrous scenario would come to pass, but one has to balance the small likelihood against the devastating consequences — and right now the probability seems closer to 0.05 than to 10-5.
Democracy is a curious and fragile thing. It’s not just “majority rules”; crucial to the project are the ideas that (1) minority rights are still respected, and (2) in return, losing minorities respect electoral outcomes. It’s the second of these that is under siege at the moment. Since the time of the Federalist Papers, it’s been understood that democracy is an attempt to provide common self-rule for people who don’t agree on everything, but who at least share the common values of democracy itself. Having strong, even extremely passionate, political disagreements is inevitable in a democratic system. The question is whether we cast those with whom we disagree as enemies, traitors, and cheaters who must be opposed in every measure at every turn; or as partners in a grand project with whom we can fiercely disagree and yet still work with.
I don’t claim to have a complete understanding of how we got to this precarious point, though there are a number of factors that certainly have contributed. Arguments have raged over whether Trump’s support among the less well-off should be attributed to the economic anxieties of a class that sees their way of life eroding, or whether we should point the finger at racist and nativist sentiments that have been so ostentatiously on display at his rallies and on the internet. The answer is surely some combination of both; the economic anxieties are very real, and in many cases that anxiety has been channeled into distrust and outright hatred for people with different skin colors or nationalities. A lot of the blame for that channeling has to lie with the politicians who find “stroking resentment” to be a cheap and effective road to electoral success; it’s an old, familiar strategy.
But there are other causes, which can arguably be traced to specifics of our system of government. A politician whose goal is “attain and preserve political power” might have a very different game-theoretic calculation of how to behave while campaigning and in office than one whose goal is “make the country and the world a better place.” It’s not that hard, from a somewhat Darwinian point of view, to see how the former type might prosper in the struggle for political survival. Suppose you propose a certain system for dealing with health-care costs. But then your political opponent begins advocating an essentially similar system. Do you congratulate them on finally seeing the light, or change your mind about the system because it gives you a convenient issue with which to criticize your opponent?
My personal suspicion — quickly acknowledging that there are people out there who are much more expert than I am on these matters — is that the Trump phenomenon is a logical outgrowth of the Tea Party movement. When Barack Obama came into office in 2009, the economy was in shambles, and the government had to navigate a tricky course of promoting job growth, rescuing the financial system and industry, and not blowing the federal deficit too high. Seeking a weapon with which to oppose the newly-elected Democratic administration, Republican officials seized on simmering resentments about taxation and government interference, and flamed them into a full-scale “movement.” Hard-core Tea Partiers, however, went well beyond boilerplate Republican platform items about cutting taxes, and pushed hard on a politics of resentment, often to extremes. One of the arrows in the movement’s quiver was to mount primary campaigns against Republican officeholders who were deemed insufficiently committed to the cause. This had the effect of shifting the GOP uniformly away from the political center, and placed a very high emphasis on obstructing anything remotely associated with the Democratic party. Many in the Republican establishment didn’t subscribe to Tea Party extremism themselves; they just wanted to fire people up to get their votes. They didn’t imagine that those same people would prevent good establishment soldiers like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio from being nominated, in favor of an anti-establishment buffoon with zero loyalty to the party apparatus. It’s often hard to put the genie back into the bottle.
What they don’t tell you in school is that democracy is really hard. Voting is easy; the difficult part is to accept the outcome and work with your opponents for the common good. To think of those with whom you disagree as honest people with different opinions, rather than corrupt hell-beasts who should be thrown in jail. Our psychology tempts us into less lofty ways of thinking. In The Big Picture I talked about a concept in social psychology called the “Pyramid of Choice.” Two people with almost exactly the same views and preferences face a close decision, and the two of them end up choosing different alternatives. Over time, our brains work to justify these decisions; we forget it was a close call, and convince ourselves that the choice we made was the obviously correct one from the start. By this process, the two people who started out from nearly identical beliefs are driven ever further apart. You can see how this plays out in political contexts. People get nudged toward one side of the spectrum or the other, start thinking about all the reasons why it’s correct, listening to news that confirms their beliefs, and prop up their self-esteem by looking at their opponents as haters and losers. Tribal identity is a hell of a drug.
Democratic values, including most especially the ability to disagree without demonizing, are certainly not dead yet. Here’s an example of such values in action, when Barack Obama chides his own audience for behaving disrespectfully toward a protester:
Nor are such values confined to the Democratic side of our two-party system. Everyone remembers John McCain, politely disagreeing with his own supporters who wanted to paint Obama as a frightening foreigner:
We can disagree with each other and still work together. It’s happened, with some bumps in the road, for more than two centuries now. But it’s far from certain that we will continue to succeed.
Wow! Now he is president. Now what?
Hi Sean,
Now that Trump has actually won the election, I believe you should congratulate his supporters in a democratic way, and also give your support to the new government in order to “make the country and the world a better place”, as you yourself put it.
You wrote: “crucial to the project are the ideas that (1) minority rights are still respected, and (2) in return, losing minorities respect electoral outcomes. It’s the second of these that is under siege at the moment.”
Now that it turned out that you and other Clinton supporters are this losing minority, it is up to you to respect the electoral outcomes and diffuse that siege, in line with democratic values. Can you write another blog post, congratulating your new president and calling everyone to support the new US government, despite the fact that this is not the government you wanted?
Best, 🙂
Marko
Actually Hillary Clinton got more votes in the popular vote count.
My attitude is summed up here.
“They broke it, they own it. ”
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/9/1594458/-We-oppose-everything
Forgive me for this brief note to Mr. Lichtenstein. You will never understand what is going on by reading the NYT. Hillary Clinton is not a force for good. She is finished. Try going to the Chronicles (the Magazine of American Culture) website and reading the blog posts. Then subscribe to the magazine.
Mr. Guthrie – you are quite wrong about security requirements. I never signed falsely any security documents.
Mr. Cross – We are a democratic republic, not a democracy. The popular vote does not count, only the vote of the Electoral College.
The Pyramid of Choice is a good insight and a reminder, given that in the first part of your piece you demonize Trump and fail to empathize with his supporters by envisioning their case at its strongest, that ‘understanding’ is not ‘being’. If you can’t be it, you don’t know it.
“Mr. Cross – We are a democratic republic, not a democracy. The popular vote does not count, only the vote of the Electoral College.”
The concept ‘Republic’ refers to the constitutional arrangement pertaining to State, not the executive. The Electoral College guarantees that the people of each state will have a clear voice. So each state has a number of seats in direct proportion to the size of the population in that state. This is identical in effect to the UK Parlimentary democracy, in which the country is divided into constituencies each allocated an MP. Yet at the level of the Affairs of State the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy.
Marko: nice conciliatory thoughts, but let’s replace “give your support to the new government”, which implies that everything they do is OK (which we’re pretty sure it won’t be given Trump’s misogyny, racism, and narcissism), with “respect the laws of the land and act as a thoughtful citizen in a democracy to improve and correct any wrongs done in the name of the new government”.
Conceding the election (necessary) does not entail giving up the fight.
Sean, for a few years now I have been an admirer of yours. I loved your latest book, watch videos with you on You Tube (as far as I’m concerned you knocked WLC into another universe) and probably 99% of what you say just makes sense to me. I came to your website today to see if you had any thoughts on Trump’s victory. I find you a voice of reason. With names like Ben Carson and Sarah Palin floating around for positions of power for the next 4 or more years, this is indeed very sad news. If Trump really wants to bring people together like he said, that’s not the best start. Of course, nothing has happened yet, so there is still hope (but I’m not betting on it).
On another topic:
A few years ago I had sent you a brief email about my thoughts on the universe and you totally ignored me (but I didn’t hold a grudge, well just for a few weeks maybe). Since then I have heard you say a comment here and there which seems to be in agreement with what I said, even if not for the same reasons. Particularly I’m talking about the start of the universe. I don’t think there was a start. My reason is not very scientific, but it makes sense to me and I think that one day science will bear me out. Here is my thought. It is impossible to have true nothingness. No space. Nothing. There must be something. If you try to imagine true nothingness it can’t be done. To imagine it is to imagine “something.” Like I said, it’s not scientific, but it makes sense to me (no matter how much I think about it, I can’t escape it). If our universe had a beginning, then it came from another preexisting space/time. By the way, I’m not claiming a god did it. I’m an atheist/naturalist. Yes, this can be the same mode of argument that a theist can use: It must be true because I can’t imagine otherwise. Well, for me the difference is that I’m not adding in a god. I’m just saying that I don’t think it is possible to have true nothingness, not even empty space.
I look forward to future books and listening to your video clips while at work. I work in a synagogue (computer & Internet related tasks) and hearing you speak helps to keep me sane. So a big thank you for that.
Thank you so much for a thoughtful commentary.
Mr. Smoothblum – I do not understand your point. Perhaps it is some sort of distinction without a difference. The 12th Amendment specifies that the President and Vice President are elected by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. We are not a democracy.
In the First Congress, each House member represented about 20,000 people. Now each House member represents about 720,000 people based on the 2010 census. Senators were once elected by and represented their state government. (See Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution.) Now they are just super representatives of the people in their state. (See the 17th Amendment.) The war of independence was over a lack of representation. We do not have much representation now. [I live in Anne Arundel County Maryland, which is the most Gerrymandered county in America. A conservative Independent, I am always (mis)represented in the House and Senate by liberal Democrats.]
My opinion is that we should break up the country into five or more separate parts. We could start by letting California secede. But speaking of the Constitution, you should understand that it means only what a majority of Supreme Court Justices says it means. Obviously there is something wrong with that.
Regarding scientific issues, I think I read somewhere (I cannot find the source right now, so correct me if I am wrong) that new measurements indicate that the expansion of the universe is not accelerating, which does away with the need for dark matter and dark energy.
In addition, Steven Weinberg thinks quantum mechanics needs an overhaul. (I believe this goes along with my statement above that a model is not the system and a map is not the territory; that is the quantum equations are not reality.)
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/why-quantum-mechanics-might-need-overhaul?tgt=nr
I used to comment that Trump would “make America great again” by motivating Americans to awaken and join together to stop this Trump-style of bigotry that has been seeping into our country. Guess I was wrong.
@Jack Lichtenstein (written prior to election day) – There is the politically correct view of Hitler, and then there is the truth. Hitler was a narcissistic sociopath, a genius at the power game (politics), and had a real talent for reading a mob and manipulating them with oratory, and he was fearless. In a decent sociey, high-functioning sociopaths are valuable as long as they are constrained (Lawyers, CEO’s, politicians). Without constraints they are a bloody horror show. Hitler came to power because the German media had consistently lied to the German people, particularly the soldiers, about the progress of WWI. In their minds, everything was fine, until one morning they woke up to find themselves soundly defeated. It was clear in their minds that they had been sold out. For the next 15 years the allies rubbed their noses in their defeat, bled them dry with reparations, and with the arrival of the great depression, left them to starve. Along comes Hitler, with all his talents, promising to “Make Germany Great Again”, backed by hundreds of thousands of hardened ex-soldiers like himself. And while he was constrained, Hitler was good at his job. But when he finally shook the shackles off, all hell broke loose. In National *Socialism* (emphasis mine), step one is demonize the rich and confiscate their property. Rich to a good approximation meant Jew in those days and times. It was a twofer. Incite the latent anti-semitism and blame everything on the Jews, take their money, put everybody to work building tanks and fighter planes, and then conquer the world.
A sociopath is born without empathy into a world of rules. Without empathy, the rules are seen as a rather arbitrary construct with one purpose – to deny the sociopath from getting what they want. Any logical coherence of the rules is a meaningless coincidence to be given no weight at all. To them, the rules have no coherent purpose other than to brainwash and control “stupid” people (i.e. those crippled by what they sense as a brain disorder called “conscience” or “empathy”), and sociopaths, particularly narcissitic sociopaths, see themselves as much too intellegent, much too clear-minded, to fall for that crap, the way those other poor fools do.
If they have a talent for memorizing the rules, they can become obsessed with the rules, learning them by rote, since, to them, they have no coherence, no thread that ties them together, but knowledge of the rules are the only thing that keeps them out of jail. Thats why they make good lawyers. If they have a talent for reading and rousing a mob, they can become obsessed with doing that as a way of getting what they think they deserve.
Hitler had all four aces in his hand, and a deeply angry, starving mob, hand delivered by the allies, to work with. The mob stood by as he unshackled himself, and they got what they deserved. The allies created Hitler, and they got what they deserved. The proto-oligarchs, the political-financial elite of America, Republican and Democrat, have created Trump with their corruption, and they might get what they deserve.
Clinton is a fearless sociopath, extremely good at the power game, an average orator, and has practically zero ability to read and manipulate a mob. She is a lawyer, obsessed with the rules and how to break them. With no connection to the mob, she sees them as a threatening bunch of idiot s**t-kickers who need to, in her words, “shut the f**k up and do your job”.
Trump is slightly less of a sociopath (he has this crippling desire to be loved) but fearless, not very good at the power game (or else he would have been a politician), an average orator, but has a real talent for reading and manipulating a mob, which he honed to a sharp point in his stint at World Wrestling Entertainment. I imagine he was more fascinated with the crowd’s reaction to the puppet-show than the puppet-show itself. He realized that political campaigns are a puppet-show, which is just his game. He is obsessed with using his gut instinct to manipulate a mob, and oratory does not require the logical coherence of a legal brief, it requires knowledge of where the buttons are and how to push them. From an intellectual viewpoint, he lost every debate. At an irrational gut level, he won them all. At the WWE, he saw an angry mob, cheering the good guy, who against all odds, fought the good fight against the bad guy, who, every time the referee’s back was turned, cheated, and he thought to himself “Oh, I so get it”. Maybe he wants to be the good guy.
Obama with his executive orders, and congress’ acquiescence, has loosened a few shackles on the presidency and this is what he is handing to whoever wins. Not good.
Sorry, neither Clinton nor Trump qualify as a Hitler, they live in a relatively prosperous country half full of rather angry people whose founding fathers were determined to constrain them and put them to work, and each has only two aces in their hand. Whoever wins, lets keep our fingers crossed, try to understand and constrain these deranged but valuable people, and not get swept up in their bulls**t.
Dear Mr Andrew G Van Sant ,
It’s a distinction with a tiny difference that only comes into play when people repeat “We are not a democracy we are a democratic republic” . In the modern usage of the word you are a democracy. It’s possible to be a republic and a democracy or a r.epublic and a monarchy or something more brown-dwarfish. But the electoral college doesn’t mean the US is not a democracy. The reason it’s possible to lose the electoral college and win the popular vote is because the population changes from one election to the next and adjustments need to catch up with that, but never actually completely…do. One flaw is probably that you need a large size population change to add up to a whole seat. They probably wait until the population has grown or shrunk by the equivalent of 0.5 of a seat. But I dunno.
Dear Francis Lane
You are suspiciously close to Hitler’s own position
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuF3uJKsQU
Hi Sean, I couldn’t agree more with you more!! This sounds extreme, but perhaps it’s time to consider #???Exit. Not sure what ??? should be, but for a start states that have little d democratic values you mention. I propose all welcome with all political ideas as long as they value compromise, respect for all people, democracy, truth and honesty. At the very least states like CA should do EVERYTHING possible to safeguard the integrity of our elections! I’m not sure we can even trust our Federal government to do so for us at this time. =(
I heard something representative of our new president’s lack of knowledge(or, simple failure to do his home work). When he and his wife learned that they will have to hire new staff for the White House, they pitched a bitch about it, thinking, apparently, that domestic service/employees came automatically with the privilege of residing at the national edifice. Mr. Trump allegedly said he did not have time for such responsibilities (Melania may have expressed a similar view). Around election day, I wrote a letter to the Columbus Dispatch, in my home state of Ohio. As a closing note to that epistle, I said that, as president, Mr. Trump might be in for some surprises and/or rude awakenings. Looks like I was not all wrong. Wish the Dispatch would have published my letter, ah, but, it wasn’t news, so…
“Democratic values, including most especially the ability to disagree without demonizing…”
Most of your argument turns on this point, and you point out developments on the right that indeed have been corrosive to civil engagement with the other side. Unfortunately, the right sees your side in the same light. Since Bush Jr., the left has been particularly vicious and aggressive in it’s attacks, and since Obama, they have been very aggressive in pushing their cultural values.
You can disagree with that, or you can think that those actions were justified and proper. But if you’re not willing to step out of your “priors” and at least try to see the picture from the other side when building a model of what happened, then there can’t be a reconciliation. On some level this was a desperate move, even for some of those radicalised people on the right you’re talking about. Trump’s unfavorability ratings are high, even among Republicans. It stands to reason that a very important question now is to ask why they were willing to go so far, to such an extreme extent, to repudiate the status quo? Racism, sexism, xenophobia are pat answers. To what extent do they apply? The left seems to be suggesting that Trump voters are full-on Nazis bent on dictatorship and ethnic cleansing. I’m betting Trump supporters don’t quite see themselves that way, so how did these views diverge so radically, and how entrenched is either side?
Thank you for your excellent essay. Very refreshing. Most Americans cannot think. I am so very sad.
Most Americans in fact cannot think. Like all humans, we are a sometimes clever band of hairless apes, who have been around for a blink of geological time. And as such, we are suckers, male and female alike, for an alpha-male type who puts on a good display.
Trump-led hairless apes with nuclear weapons? Good grief!