Covid. I keep putting this in the comments. Covid changed everything for many people, and I was one of them. Before covid I had not realized how profoundly incompetent, dishonest and authoritarian our bureaucracy and our government can be. . I was sick with covid early on, and I am 63. It was a bad flu. Many of my friends got it too. We all realized the sinister insanity of what was going on. We saw the Great Barrington Declaration slandered and then ignored. It changed us forever. Red pilled.
We don't want a world where experts whose whole life is looking for epidemics, and who have massive conflicts of interest, can turn human civilization upside down. And then mandate new untested mrna shots. Never again.
Mixed feelings here. Mostly negative toward Fauci Inc., which covered up the Wuhan origins. It's telling that Biden pardoned him.
In my rural county, the first "covid victim" was a guy who fell off his roof and broke his neck. His blood tested positive, and I have no doubt that the hospital scarfed up the bounty. A neighbor spent 10 days in the hospital with myocarditis from the vaxx, life-flighted to Seattle. A friend's wife in Massachusetts had serious complications from the vaxx. Another friend in North Dakota was barred from visiting his father in a nursing home until he dared them to call the police. They didn't.
On the other side of it, one of my spouse's cousins refused the vaxx, and died of covid at the age of 60, with no contributing factors that I know of. I was vaxxed and boostered once, and got it (as did my spouse) after the booster, and again last fall. Mild cases.
The masks never protected the wearers. Big increases in respiratory problems among retail workers who had to wear them all day. The media never mentioned any of it. They censored the truth about HCQ and Ivermectin, and so did Twitter and Facebook. The social media organizations were abject failures, and worse. Facebook, in particular, is still politically censored. Nothing in the media about vaxx reactions or much higher rates of premature death among the vaxxed. Kids were vaxxed even though hardly any kids get covid, and the death rate is vanishingly small.
Covid did a real number on our rural schools. They still haven't fully recovered from what that did to student discipline. Remote learning was a joke. Anyone recall Obama's "rural broadband initiative" and Biden's renewal of the same with much more money? Um, that's another story, so the short one is that it was and remains a complete fraud. If that whole thing comes up in the comments maybe I will tell that story.
For starters, I think the Democrats have it wrong on climate change. Trump, in his ham-fisted way, has called it a hoax. He's somewhat correct, if we understand climate change to mean the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, i.e., the idea that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity have caused the earth's temperatures to rise.
This just isn't the case. A year and a half ago, Statistics Norway definitively debunked that idea. Naturally, their analysis got no media attention. The warming since the end of the Little Ice age is within the range of natural variability.
Progressives love to ignore, disparage, and smear heterodoxy, all while preaching nuance and critical thinking. Until someone practices it, at which point they become Nazis, idiots, trailer trash, racists, and dupes. We are told that the AGW hypothesis is "settled science," when in fact science is never truly settled. Still, the Dems have pushed some extremely expensive and unreliable alternatives, solar and wind being the biggies, the result being an increasingly fragile power grid and skyrocketing utility rates.
There is much more to say about this, but I'll close this comment by saying that Democrats have positioned themselves directly against the standard of living. Not the way to win, that's for sure.
If you get time, that link to the Statistics Norway paper is in English and it is by far the single most definitive thing I have ever read about the subject. Human-caused climate change is, to me, almost entirely a secular religion.
Man, Ruy, you have my utmost respect. You are willing, as so few are, to actually get into the serious problems of the Democrat Party. As a historian, I very much see similarities to the Whigs---unable or unwilling to address the key issue of the day (illegal immigration), while offering no countervailing issues that might peel away voters. And I don't know what those issues would be. But there are these major civil wars going on inside the Dem Party that haven't even been addressed, and must be for the party to survive---and I'm not talking thrive or win elections, but avoid being the next "Know-Nothings" or "Liberty Party:"
1) The ongoing illegal alien/inner city resident civil war. People such as Noah Smith and some on your blog have identified this as a "good management" problem. NO. It's a fundamental disconnect with the voters about who is an American. Until Democrats get this right, they will continue to see the flight from cities/blue states and erosion of black/hispanic support from cities as their LEGAL benefits are redirected to alien invaders. And that must be the language, I'm sorry to say. IF Democrats continue to portray them as just "job seekers," there is no hope.
2) The ongoing civil war between the Hamas/Palestinian wing of the Democrat Party and the Israel/Jewish wing. The sad truth is short of actual violence against Jews, there is nothing the Party can do to drive Jewish voters from the Party. However, the very bad news is that millions of Christians identify with Israel as the birthplace of their religion and an area given to the Jews. THOSE are the ones you will lose. People such as Omar and Tlaib are NOT viewed as "diverse" but as virtual terrorists who hate America, and this is a huge, huge problem for the Democrats.
3) The latest one, which even you don't realize or discuss, is AI vs. Green. The whole green transition is deader than the Avengers series. But AI is the new kid on the block, is embraced by EVERYONE, and . . . sucks energy like nothing ever before. There is no scenario on earth in which green and AI coexist. It is drill, baby, drill. And the techhies are slowly moving to the GOP because that is the only place they will find energy.
4) There is actually a new civil war brewing, again, ignored. The DOGE revelations show how utterly corrupt the NGOS (which are overwhelmingly Democrat) are and how much money not only is wasted but is criminally directed against the USA. This will be the toughtest one to overcome. Think of the rump Democrats who stayed with the Union in 1862. It would take a group like that, surviving about 10 years while steadily moving to real-world solutions---not woke, green, ESG, DEI kinds of stuff---to survive. I suggest a Democrat Hill group that actually URGES cutting gubment, firing the members of the Deep State, and even prosecuting people like John Brennan and James Comey. You'd be shocked at how fast people would come to your side.
Oh, and the economy won't save you. Inflation dropped by 50%, mfg and industrial production surged by DOUBLE what was expected, and before it's done, DOGE is gonna slash the debt itself.
...Look Larry, the effort is always welcome, but to an impartial observer there are a host of reasons to doubt your capacity as a historian, no offense. This goes back to your claim to expertise on the subject of Chinese history, of which you have subsequently demonstrated little grasp of, whether it be ancient or modern.
Then you do things like claim that the primary concern of the tech titans when it comes to AI is energy production...which is a pretty clear indicator that you don't really understand how AI works or what powers it. Which in turn makes it fairly dubious you understand the underlying dynamics of the AI race. Which, again, makes the depth of your historical understanding likewise dubious.
True historical understanding comes from trying to comprehend the holistic whole of the historical data about a time period...not assembling a selection of historical facts around a predefined narrative. And at the moment, you seem to be engaged in the latter, not the former.
He was saying that the tech titans are somehow changing their allegiances out of concern about energy consumption, when that is a distant secondary concern of theirs, compared to other issues, which are their primary motivating factor--something that is obvious to anyone who understands how AI works and how the tech titans get their massive neural nets to function optimally.
BINGO! Hell of sales pitch, isn't it? And this is a party controlled by progressives who show every sign of thinking that they are smarter than everyone else. You know what? I want them to tell us where they get their mushrooms, so I can hear in colors too.
I think there are two basic skillsets: abstract and social. Progressives are abstract thinkers, and they don't think about sales. If anything, they view "sales" as an educational opportunity. Which has become highly annoying.
I am a fan of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which is rooted in Jungian psychology. The MBTI is controversial; some think of it as voodoo with no more validity than a horoscope, but I don't dismiss it because when I took the test 40 years ago without knowing anything about it and got the results ("INTJ"), I thought wow, it's as if someone has been following me around with a clipboard.
Now, after much more experience in life, one thing I realize is that anything is just a slant, or a construct, and that no "answers" are definitive. They are only attempts at understanding, and should be seen that way: as attempts. Even if I don't agree, or even if I do agree, no one gets it "right" or "wrong," but they should be seen as "serious" or maybe "foolish," but the serious ones should be taken seriously even if I end up rejecting them, an example of the latter being Modern Portfolio Theory.
(I am going over the woods and through the hills here, but I promise to get to grandma's house, and hope it will be worth it.)
MPT was invented by a Nobel Prizewinner or maybe two of them in the 1950s, and purports to construct an optimally efficient mix of stocks that eliminates risk. In business school, I dismissed it and still do because it rests on "beta," which looks at a stock's past performance relative to the market, and allows the believer to arrive at a diversified portfolio whose individual fluctuations will offset each other and eliminate risk.
The problem, as I saw it, was that beta looks backward, and implicitly assumes that the future will replicate the past. I raised my hand and challenged the professor on it, and he replied that, right or wrong, MPT and its companion, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which holds that a stock's price incorporates all information, is nevertheless worthy of close study because they are serious.
It took me time to see that he was correct. You should study serious ideas for their insights, even if flawed. The same goes for the MBTI and its extension, the Enneagram, which essentially put human beings into 16 personality types, a mixture of introversion/extraversion, intuitive/literal "sensing," thinking/feeling, and scheduled/spontaneous.
Now grandma's house: I can't agree with a generality about how progressives think. We all put people into categories. It's a human trait based on pattern recognition, which I think is fundamental to intelligence and not just human. As with any fundamental trait, pattern recognition has positive and negative aspects. It's necessary for survival, but it can lead anyone seriously astray too.
So, as much as we depend on pattern recognition, we have to be aware of its limitations. This is true of many of our traits, both universal and individual. For instance, I am a born arithmetic wiz. I love numbers and statistics, but I am aware of their limitations, one being that quantification, as powerful as it is, can't measure everything so I remind myself to try to remember that there are equally powerful realities that cannot be quantified: love, hate, fear, hunger, emotional attraction and repulsion among other things.
We live in a scientific, mechanical, engineering society, and one consequence is specialization, which underlies economics. Yet, without the generalists, we're lost. I routinely lampoon the generalistic liberal arts graduates of Eastern finishing schools, and with (in my opinion) good reason. The progressives are too heavily tilted in that direction. Too many of them are political scientists, and not nearly as skilled as they think they are. The bowels of the Democratic Party, and many of its rank and file, are filled with bulls--- poly sci students. Ugh.
As a group, I think they tend to be too heavily emotional, and this INTJ (a type sometimes called "the analyst") laments the exclusion of hard-headed, pragmatic, cold-heated analysis. Progressives are susceptible to fads in my view, and fail when they don't apply rigorous tests, in essence the scientific method, to their conclusions. Yet, a world full of INTJs would be a scary one, which is why the dawn of artificial intelligence, aka artificial stupidity, worries me.
In reality, I think the 16 types are distributed throughout society, with conservatives tending more toward the hard-headed but certainly not exclusively so. Therefore, in grandma's living room, they're all present. Maybe it would help if people would do more to recognize the limitations of their inclinations and of the mental tools they hold dear, including pattern recognition without which we'd all be dead.
Damn, this was a long comment. LOL
p.s.: Modern Portfolio Theory led to "portfolio insurance," and was commercialized in the 1990s. It failed spectacularly in 1998, when it led to the Asian financial crisis that year.
p.p.s.: The Bible, being a compilation, is by definition a mixed bag, which is an eternal strength and a major weakness. I am a huge fan of Ecclesiastes, especially 1:9 (nothing new under the sun) and Chapter 3 (a season for everything, or as the Byrds sang it, "Turn, Turn Turn.")
This is the season for hard realities, the season of "no." So was the 1940s; was there ever a more vivid "no" than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subesquent American threat to annihilate the rest of Japan if they didn't surrender? Other times, the 1930s and the 1950s being examples, were seasons of "yes." The Great Society of the '60s was a "yes" taken too far, and the moon landing of 1969 was the greatest "yes" ever.
Re MPT, 99.999% of the time "alpha" is just leveraged beta.
And everything correlates when the shit hits the fan.
Michael Shellenberger's article about Marc Andreeson's experience with the Biden Admin and AI is interesting. It demonstrates why Big Tech embraced Trump. The Progressive need for control loomed large. Good read.
Exactly. MPT and the companion EMH promise something they cannot deliver, the automatic hedging of risk through non-correlation, which rests on beta, which is a way of straight-lining the past into the future. Then comes the Black Swan. Just when you think it'll all be Candygrams, the Land Shark rings the doorbell. In the end, some things cannot be automated. This to me, is also the potential Achilles Heel of "artificial intelligence."
I saw the interview (or article about?) Andreeson. Excellent stuff.
You'll get a kick out of this. I met the Dean from my B0-school in the early 2000s, and started to ask him about the EMH, and he said " do you mean does anyone believe it anymore?"
Americans have long been suspicious of the Democratic Party's mindless accommodations for of divisive, stupid even dangerous Leftist idealogy like gender identification and transformation or lawfare weaponization of the judiciary. The most charitable interpretation of Democratic intent is that the Party has placed winning elections above any and all other considerations or obstacles, including real science and the U.S. Constitution.
Now, its silence, even cheering, in the face of domestic terrorists torching Tesla electronic vehicles and vandalizing dealerships, the party is showing its openness to stopping Elon Musk and, its real target, Donald Trump, by any means necessary, including notably lawlessness and violence.
There may be no rehabilitating nor rebuilding of a Democratic Party wholly owned by fringe radical Marxists.
It is still the economy, stupid! Stocks have plunged. So has consumer and business confidence. Forecasters expect slower growth, higher unemployment and faster inflation. Trumpanomics is rapidly digging its own hole.
I have never liked Trump's citations of the stock market, and I like the Democrats' citations even less. To me, the latter illustrates the degree to which the Democrats have divorced themselves from the working middle class that they once represented but no longer do. On Main Street, people do not spend the S&P 500. They spend what is in their wallet, fer chrissakes.
Of course, the people who run the Democratic Party don't have household budgets. Rich people don't pay attention to the little stuff. They don't have to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the car insurance, and watch grocery prices not for politics but for what they can afford this week. They watch the stock market, and pretend about the rest, like Walz pretended to be a bird hunter but didn't even know how to hold a shotgun.
Kids, it's about jobs and income. Democrats lost last year mainly because unemployment rose during the crucial second quarter of a presidential election year. There is a very solid relationship between the direction of the 2Q unemployment rate and the November results. Only once since World War II has an incumbent party's presidential candidate won if unemployment rose during the spring of an election year. Inflation sure didn't help.
Until just lately, progressives were joyous at the rising price of eggs, or so it sure looked. Aha! Gotcha! You ruined breakfast, evil Nazi Republicans. Oops, guess what? On March 3, the wholesale price was $8.17 a dozen. Yesterday, it was $3.03. In only a bit more than two weeks, egg prices at wholesale are down 63%. The reason: Bird flu is abating. Retail prices will be coming down soon. Progressives will be disappointed. Trump will claim credit.
So what now? Agitate for the rights of Venezuelan gangsters. Revel in the firebombing of Tesla dealers. Argue for the advocates of Hamas on campuses. As someone who voted Democrat in the first 10 presidential elections of my voting history and who went write-in for the last three, I ask progressives the same thing I asked Republicans 15 years ago: What in hell are you FOR?
A big problem (of many) with the Democrats is their widespread belief, not just among their ruling progressives but here too, is that they can fix this with "messaging."
Uh-uh. Not hardly. Democratic Party "messaging" of the past was forged in the crucible of the New Deal and ratified by the sweeping victory of World War II, augmented by the Great Society. Still true now; when all else fails scare 'em about Social Security.
Democrats can make proposals, but the fiscal realities preclude anything sweeping. As for the "messaging," the progressive stranglehold precludes anything meaningful there. See what happens to any major Democrat who says something like, "You know what? I don't think biology has changed since I learned in seventh grade that we are mammals, and that mammals come in two sexes."
You're conflating 'messaging' with 'signaling support for policies XYZ'.
But the thing is, it doesn't matter if you support the most popular policies in American history if you can't get the message out. Case in point, the CHIPs act accomplished more for the working class in terms of re-shoring manufacturing than anything Trump has ever done--but the working class never heard about it.
Why? Because the Democrats' messaging strategies are not optimized for the current informational environment, and the realities of the attention economy. They are still campaigning like its 2008--but the media landscape is completely different than 2008. Right now the Republicans have the edge here.
But it will not last forever. When the party's messaging apparatus adjusts, it will be well-placed to lead an anti-MAGA backlash. (there is always a backlash--never forget your dialectics) Especially once Trump does them the favor (and the country the disservice) of losing Cold War 2.0.
Why do you think the GOP brass is constantly saying "keep your eye on AOC"? It's not because of her policies, many of which aren't super popular. It's because they know it's not *really* about policy--and because they know she understands the current media environment, and how to message in it.
True, you should never hide the light under a bushel. But you (not you personally, but a political party) should not let the tail wag the dog either. First comes the work, then comes the "messaging."
What I see from the Democrats is back-asswards on that. They show every sign of thinking that all they need to do is come up with new wording. Uh-uh, no way.
"Cage free" is a joke. The overwhelming majority of eggs come from indoor egg factories. Anyone who thinks that "cage free" chickens don't still live in cages deserves to be laughed at.
Out here in the countryside -- the America that the movers and shakers in the Democratic Party are scared of and angry about because they cannot control it -- there are actually pasture chickens. They don't "free range" as much as the geniuses think they do. Why? Because the coyotes will break their little necks and eat them, and then the eggs. Egg-suckin' dogs!
Shoot coyotes like my neighbor (who lives with his wife in a double-wide and voted for Sanders in the '16 primary and Trump in the general) does with his 7mm rifle at 300 yards with only iron sights? What's that? Guns? Ban them! Poor coyotes!
Our eggs cost us $5/dozen. The egg lady down the road drops them off personally at our house, and we love her. She has not changed her prices. Anyone want to guess what happens in spring? I'll tell you: The more light, the more eggs. The egg lady's chickens are laying like crazy, and she's donating a lot of them to the food bank. Who knew? Not the Democrats.
Weekly egg production nationally is now 5% higher than it was at this time a year ago. Bird flu is subsiding, at least in those egg factories. Demand is down 12% because there is price elasticity. Democrats, as a group, either didn't take Econ 101 or got gentleperson's Cs, and don't have a clue.
Boy oh boy are they going to be peeved when retail egg prices start crashing at the grocery store.
Dan - I recommend you buy a used Tesla from a liberal neighbor who may have bought it as a status symbol. It is a great car. Your neighbor can then buy another EV brand.
I live in America and I'm afraid to drive a car because of left wing lunatics. This violence is supported by the likes of Tim Walz, who is prancing around chortling about destroying an American company with American workers. Late night t.v. audience whooped and hollered and cheered about fire-bombed Tesla dealership. Vote Dem? No way.
Funny that Tesla came up. I have a long personal history with EVs. I have never been a Musk worshipper when the progressives passed up no opportunity to shine his knob. Today, I chuckle at the wingnuts who are doing the same, and growl at the progressives who condemn him and cheer the vandalism because Musk committed wrongthink.
Today, I had to drive to Portland for a few errands. 170-mile roundtrip. There's a Tesla showroom along one of the freeway routes, so I got off and went over there. Walked in and said to the gay kid at the counter who was acting as a greeter that I was there to offer support. The place and an outbuilding had boarded-up windows from where shots had been fired in the middle of the night.
I told him that my support had nothing to do with Musk, or "DOGE," or Trump, but I was there because I don't think anyone has any god damned business fucking with him or anyone else there (the place is also a service center) who's doing nothing but working for a living.
On my way out, I added that I don't even really like Teslas, that I had driven one and it was fun, but I wouldn't be a customer. But still, I said, you are working for a living and no one should ever mess with that for any reason.
The goddamned progressives are so arrogant! These are the people who lecture everyone about workers? The hell! There's more to say about EVs, which are one of my three dozen or so "islands of competence" that people develop as they get older, but this comment is already long.
Biden hated Elon so much he tipped the scales for Rivian. Tesla got zero subsidies, Rivian received a $6.6B "loan."
"Rivian has received a conditional commitment for a $6.6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program to support the construction of its electric vehicle factory in Georgia."
The short story on that one is that EVs are viable urban commuter cars today. In a decade or so (watch me be wrong on the timing), they will be viable anywhere vehicles. By 2040 or so, I doubt that you'll even be able to buy a new ICEV. They will go the way of oil lamps, propjets for anything but short-range commercial air travel, and incandescent light bulbs for anything other than specialized uses.
This is not a political statement, or any kind of EVangelism at all. This is pure engineering. Today's batteries use a liquid electrolyte. Once the solid-state batteries come online and then ride down the manufacturing scale economy cost curve, driving ranges will triple or more, and the other downsides of EVs will be history.
This is purely engineering to me, always has been, and always will be.
"Expensive charging stations" make me laugh. Hard. They remind me of the car salesman in the Fargo movie selling clear coat treatment. Sure, if you're a sucker you can get one. Or you can have someone wire up a 240-volt outlet. Or you can stick a splitter on the outlet for your electric dryer and run an extension cord.
A level 2 (i.e. 240v, 32A) EV charging cord goes for $100 on Amazon. A 50-foot 240v, 32A extension cord goes for $68. A splitter goes for $40. Voila! $208 total. Feel free to spend more if money is burning a hole in your pocket. There are only two reasons why people get those charging stations. One is that sometimes the car company will throw one in for free, at which point you have to spend a bunch of money to have it installed. The other is that all of this is new, and people are sitting ducks for every shyster.
Solar panel economics are a function of your electric rates and your latitude. When I looked into them eight years ago, the net price for the juice after the tax credits was about 14 cents/kWh not including installation. Electricity is cheap where we live, and it didn't pencil out. That's the simple story. There are more factors.
As for used EVs, the key there is to ascertain the condition of the battery. There is a reliable way to do that, but I wonder how many people go that far. Once solid state batteries replace liquid electrolytes (I think 2035 for solid state battery prices to be viable in the mass market, but maybe it'll be sooner), I think the current generation of EVs will be about as valuable as a used "blazing fast" Gateway 386 desktop computer with a "gigantic" 100 MB hard drive. LOL
Because he is God's own blowhard. That's the downside. The upside is that everyone knows it, so they don't hold him to the outrageous promises. It was said in 2016 -- true then, true now -- that his opponents take him literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him seriously but not literally.
In '16, I wrote in Vermin Supreme because at least he admitted that he was a clown. In '20, I wrote in Kanye West because he made no bones about being crazy. In '24, I wrote in Kanye again and added P. Diddy for VP, because both major party candidates were just as insulting. Anyone who thought Trump would end inflation on Day 1 is exactly who P.T. Barnum was talking about when he remarked that a sucker is born every minute.
By the way, eggs were $4.50 a dozen at Costco today. The wholesale price is down by 63% since March 1st, and I think the next Costco run in a few months will see eggs at $3. The Democrats are going to have to find something else to whine about.
If we are to evaluate promises for what they say, and his promises are simply bombastic lies, by what logic would these lies support the expectation that he will keep any of his promises at all?
When a used car salesman tells you the engine in a car he wants you to buy is "good as new", and you know he's lying, do you then think to yourself "it's definitely not new, but it's probably close to pretty new"?
This was a brilliant assessment, but Dems would do themselves a big favor, if they lost the terms "educated " and "uneducated" when referring to voters. When it is 100 degrees outside, and your AC dies, you want a repairperson educated in air conditioning, far more than a Gender Studies grad.
Pre Biden, I find it hard it hard to remember anyone referring to 2/3rds of the US as, "uneducated", but Dems have become very comfortable with the term, the last 4 years. That is somewhat amusing, because while life without semiconductor chips would be hard, life without food, would be impossible.
Dems have a hard time drawing lines. They believe, because the US should not deport, an otherwise law abiding, undocumented 50 year old female maid, we should also never deport male gang members, who rape and murder young girls, before the victims are old enough to visit the feminine hygiene aisle of CVS.
Likewise Dems believe there should be no bail, because the policy discriminates against the poor. So bail reform has allowed violent, accused criminals to wander the streets, pretrial. Where theirmost likely next victims are, almost always, poor, minorities.
And it appears, things may get worse for Dems, before the improve. Much of the so called Dem "woke" problem, is really a hypocrisy problem. Every Dem Senator voted against legislation that would have required public school bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic fields, remain exclusively females spaces. No one mentioned, it is easier to find a live unicorn, than a Dem Senator, with a kid in public school.
Climate Change reeks of the same hypocrisy. A private jet to Davos, says nearly everything that needs to be said, on the subject. Mark Kelly replacing his Tesla with a Tahoe , because he suddenly hates Elon Musk, as Elon rescues stranded US astronauts, says the rest.
Even many "educated" Dems fail to appreciate ,that last time a US Dem President, failed on the level of Biden. Reagan replaced Carter, and Dems wandered the political wilderness for 12 long years, that could have easily been 16. Surely some Dems. recall the failure
Excellent point you make. The implication that those without a college degree are not “educated” is absurd. And the reality is that many of those college grads are as much indoctrinated as educated, as a result of the Regressive takeover of our universities.
I have a master’s degree, so I am definitely not against college. We desperately need more engineers, scientists, and computer programmers (gender studies, not so much). But for the Democratic Party to smugly console themselves that they are the party of the “educated” (their translation: “smarter and better”) is to perpetuate the attitude that helped dig this hole for themselves.
The economy is definitely a problem for Republicans. It will recover by 2028 but maybe not by 2026. Remember 1981 and how painful that was and how great 1982 was for the Democrats. The thing you are missing among all the cultural issues is that the Democrats have become the war party. That doesn't often move the needle on elections but sometimes it does. If Trump settles a couple of wars and doesn't start any new ones that is going to be a problem for Democrats. And the Democrats need to ditch the Europeans. Trump and JD are right about that. They are war mongering parasites who don't share our democratic values.
Thus far, there's no actual evidence that there's anything wrong with the economy. Trump's tariff dance has the media nervous, and they are making the public nervous. We shall see.
The Democrats that can win normie voters are the Democrats the party doesn't like. If winning was the only priority, they'd lean on Fetterman and G-Perez. They could have probably gone with the new Gavin Newsome but he governed California badly with his high taxes on productive citizens. I think people would worry he talks a good game but doesn't moderate when in power. I think they have to choose. 1. Keep their "morality" as defined by some definition of good that doesn't align with voters. 2. Moderate on culture while finding a plan that speaks to broad economic plans for everyone making more than $30,000 and less than $250,000 per year. (The other groups have had more than their share of attention)
Less international citizens and more American citizens, not necessarily American first but definitely not America last. And, for goodness sakes, stop creating enemies with every single group of people who isn't classified as "oppressed"
The economy is not the stock market, for many people, maybe most people, the economy is the amount they earn versus what they pay out. The job that allows people to earn a wage is immeasurably important to that person.
Support for Trump's handling of the economy is tanking, but most of the people who were on the fence about voting for Trump would still vote the same given a second chance.
Is it tanking? Groceries and gas are coming down in our area, rather noticeably. Brent oil is off nearly $15 bucks a barrel. West Texas is down more than $10 barrel. Nearly everything an American eats, drives, wears, or purchases during the course of a day, is connected to oil.
It has only been 60 days. Should oil settle in the sweet spot for consumers, the lowest cost that allows companies to continue, but not bust, inflation will fall demonstrably .
As much as the usual red meat satisfies the tummies of the alt-right wing of your audience, Ruy, you're not looking beyond the short-run view of the polling, and you're completely leaving out of the dynamics of foreign policy...so you're underestimating the degree to which Trump is currently in the process of sabotaging his party. It's George W. Bush level self-immolation, bumped up several degrees--and we all remember how things looked at the end of Dubya's presidency.
Every American alive right now has grown up with the U.S.'s status as The Great Power as a fundamentally assumed birthright. Built into their psyche since 1945 is the assumption that the U.S. can determine its own fate in the world, and consequently built into their psyche is also a complete intolerance for becoming a 'lesser power' than other countries. That, to them, means they are 'losers'. And they cannot stand looking like 'losers'. At all.
Trump is single-handedly dismantling the basis of the U.S.'s Great Power status. And when Americans have to sit back and watch as the U.S. is helpless to stop the break-up of the dollar zone and the Chinese acquisition of Taiwan...when they are forced to confront the degree to which they have been played by Putin--who has no interest in cooperation with the West--and are now the subordinates of a unified Sino-Russian axis...and when their country has no allies in either hemisphere that trust it enough to cooperate with it...They are going to revile the architect of it all at a scale far worse than their revulsion for Dubya.
The Reagan coalition and the New Deal Democrat coalition was built on the foundations of winning the Second Great War and winning the Cold War. Never will a coalition be built in America on a party, or a leader, that lost the second Cold War.
I recommend listening to the Ezra Klein interview. A very tiny portion of the American electorate cares about foreign policy. Most voters don't even keep up with it and couldn't answer 5 basic questions. They care about what they actually see and experience in daily life. That's it. How do I feel? Is my life good? Is it better now or was it better then? Do I trust these people? I don't know why you think the audience is alt-right. Most of us are old school Democrats who were pushed out or pushed too far. We haven't given up all hope for reform but we probably should.
Not all of the audience is alt-right--and I'm talking about the readership, here, not the authors, who are all mostly center-left--but if you follow the stories on this site, when the authors express left or center-left views, it is greeted with hostility and skepticism in the comments, and does not receive nearly as much attention as when the right is praised, or painted favorably vs the left or center-left. Even when Ruy's inner social democrat peeks out from underneath the Democratic scoldings, nigh every comment is "Great article Ruy, but you're dead wrong on [insert Ruy's social democratic view]."
And no, most voters don't keep up with the *nuances* of foreign policy, but they have always been very attuned to *major foreign policy failures*, and moments when the U.S. 'lost' some global military or economic battle that embarrassed it on the world stage. Most recently, they were angered by what they perceived to be a chaotic pullout of Afghanistan that made the country 'look bad'; they were likewise angered about the failure of the Iraq campaign; Trump provoked rage about the economic rise of China; widespread discontent grew out of Carter's failure to resolve the Iran hostage crisis; they were scandalized by Sputnik--the list goes on.
If you think they won't be similarly stirred to discontent by witnessing a failure to stop the ascendancy of a Eurasian bloc with more power than the U.S., a failure to prevent China from taking Taiwan when it wants, a fall from Great Power status, and--most importantly--the effects of the dollar losing reserve currency status, you'd have to explain away their negative reactions to every other instance of massive foreign policy failure.
You seem to think that we have a choice about this. The Pax Americana is done for. We’re not strong enough to enforce it anymore. Trump seems to be the only person in government who understands this.
There is still a difference between imperfectly upholding the stature of a Great Power whose hegemony is in secular decline and governing in a way that actively sabotages that hegemony and destroys that stature.
That's why Britons still love Churchill, but despise Anthony Eden. And it's why Russians still view Brezhnev favorably, and despise Gorbachev.
And Trump is working very hard on becoming the American Gorbachev right now. Eurasians are appreciative of his dismantling of the West; once the dust settles, Americans will not be. Like I said , they cannot stand looking like "losers"...and losers of Cold War 2.0 they shall likely be, by the time 2028 rolls around.
I would add that Trump’s macho posturing, while irritating, show that he does understand about the loser thing. Determination to fight for our position as a nation, and inspiring the effort and solidarity to do that, is not going to read like “losing” to most Americans.
I guess I see this “imperfect upholding of stature” as a dangerous distraction from the real job of replacing it with something that will ensure our security and prosperity in a world where that hegemony is no longer possible. Once Bush destroyed our moral authority in Iraq, it became Obama’s and Biden’s job to achieve the soft landing. They failed miserably at leading the nation towards this goal, and achieved nothing (or negative-nothing) at such critical tasks as restoring our military and our defense sector to fitness for purpose, building effective ways to resist cultural and information warfare, and addressing our economic and social weaknesses. Nobody is fooled by this vamping we are doing as the global hegemon. In fact, the more we pretend, the weaker we look, and the bolder our enemies become. The big problem the Europeans have is not whether they will defend civilization from the Russians but whether they will not go back to extinguishing each other as they did before the Americans took away all their toys. As Americans, we can and should honor our legacy to the world, to which we gave 80 years of peace and prosperity. We should be unsentimental now about moving to the next stage, which is now urgent.
At some point, the unconscious and natural (because much of the developed world was in ruins) Great Power status of the immediate post WW2 era devolved into the crazy neocon stuff of declaring war on everyone and trying to turn them into Switzerland. There was stuff back in the 50s that presaged this (Iran, Guatemala. interfering in the elections in France and Italy, rehabilitating the Germans as a military power) but this was all below the radar or completely secret. JFK's "Go anywhere and pay any price" was a milestone and it led us into the swamps of Vietnam and to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. All sorts of speculation that he was planning on a reversal but never proved to my satisfaction. We were mired in Vietnam until Nixon (finally) extracted us and gave us a healthy dose of Realpolitik. After the Carter debacle, the neocons defected to the Reagan Republicans for the crusade against the Soviet Union but after the fall of the Soviet Union, they didn't change and led us astray into other conflicts that were not in our interest. These conflicts, over oil were not in the interest of the US, except Afghanistan, but in the interest of our feckless European "allies" since our oil supplies were sourced in the Western hemisphere. Afghanistan was different but shortly wandered off into nation building which led to 20 years of failure, though with fewer American casualties than Vietnam. Iraq followed the same trajectory. Ukraine is simply inexplicable other than in terms of nostalgia for the Evil Empire. So I see Trump's pullback from this as a corrective action of putting America First. We have spent unimaginable amounts of blood and treasure acting as an ATM for ungrateful allies who don't even share our values. The Democrats used to be a counterweight for this warlike tendency but no longer it seems.
Much of that is correct, and Trump is certainly selling his isolationism as a 'corrective', but that idea fails to account for the fact that we have, since '45, never really *wanted* allies that were overly strong. Since WWII we have been unwilling to tolerate the existence of other countries, whether nominal allies or not, whose power rivals our own, and that we are unable to control. (And not coincidentally, this dynamic has been instrumental in preserving the dollar's world reserve currency status) I say this descriptively, not prescriptively. The 'ATM' hasn't been running 'for free'--it has been our preferred tool of Western supremacy.
The recent anger against China for "screwing us" (by being more successful) shows that this impulse is still in force. Right now Russia is being spared this sentiment by the American right because it is not perceived as a true rival in terms of geopolitical power and because it is portraying itself as the right's ally in some broader 'culture war', but once it has taken the opportunity provided by a theoretical 'detente' engineered by Trump (who's apparently deluded enough to think Russia would ever trust the West) to further integrate with China, and a Sino-Russian Eurasian bloc emerges with equal military and economic power, as well as *superior* geopolitical power--owing to its takeover of the vacuums we are leaving in global institutions as we pull back from them (WHO, WTO, IMF, etc.)--you will see that tolerance and the embrace of 'America first' isolationism implode. Would that it weren't so, but that is post 19th-century American Exceptionalism for you, and it hasn't gone anywhere. In fact, now that the foundation of dollar supremacy is being undone, one can expect it to get *worse*--because losing reserve currency status will be a 2008-sized economic blow--and for the 'culprits' who made American 'unexceptional' to be punished. To your point, the Democrats were punished electorally for trying to push back against it, in 2004, and the Republicans were punished electorally for failing to live up to it with the Iraq escapade. (had Iraq been a quick, successful venture their fortunes would have been quite different) Trump has only gotten around it by framing his isolationism as a stratagem to 'beat China' and thence 'Make America Great Again'. It won't work, and while that may be a good thing for Russia, China and Eurasia in general, it will be seen as disastrous for the U.S., right or wrong, and Americans will not be forgiving of those who 'lost the war'.
That is the most consequential political development at work right now, and it isn't reflected in poll numbers. But it will be. (To your point about Ukraine, I'd say that it has always been a morally objectionable but geopolitically ingenious way to enfeeble NATO, and it has been a tremendous success, because by helping to re-elect Trump, it has actually wound up destroying NATO altogether, without fracturing the BRICS bloc at all)
Several. It is curious you did not dispute any of them--but then again the massive sabotage to the U.S.'s great power status Trump is currently perpetrating is fairly indisputable. It's just happening so fast average Americans haven't yet gotten their head around it. Once they do, though...well, just take a look at what has historically happened to the prospects of either party when they made Americans look like 'losers'.
Same thing. What's your point? You sound like an Ivy League grad student who's done a once-over in this or that PolySci class. Democratic staffer, by chance?
I can't do the comprehension for you. Like I said, I made several points--if you're looking for the first, begin by actually reading the post at the top of the thread, in which I point out that in focusing on the short-run picture painted by polling, while bracketing foreign policy developments, Ruy's analysis is vastly underestimating the degree to which Trump is essentially digging a hole far deeper than any in which his opposition sits. Maintain your reading comprehension for a bit longer and you'll then see flowing from that the explanatory elaboration that this digging consists of Trump's efforts to dismantle the U.S.'s great power status and subordinate the country to a de facto Eurasian hegemon--something which Americans simply won't forgive him for, owing to a long-running American exceptionalist mentality.
Then, if you manage to at last make it to the end, you will arrive here, in this strange but oddly entertaining discursive ouroboros you have put us in, where in order to remind you that you must read a text in order to comprehend it, I wind up giving you cliff notes on a thread you probably should have labored to understand yourself before contributing to.
The core problem for Democrats is their Congressional leadership comes from radically gerrymandered congressional districts or deep blue states. Thus, it's difficult for Democrats to adopt positive General Election messaging. Add in that both parties depend on Wall Street and corporate money elites, and D. C. Democrats can remain very comfortable as the professional minority party.
Keep up the good work Ruy. Keep pounding away at the Democrat Party because if the party doesn't right itself, we will truly be in a constitutional crisis with only one governing party. I am an unaffiliated voter but I see the terrible outcome, one party rule and possibly benign dictatorship, if we lose one of the parties.
I tend to agree with you “I would not hold my breath’ either that the Democrats will see the light with this data. I have said this before and I will say it again this is not the kind of challenge that a committee will solve. It takes a dynamic and courageous leader who has one heck of a lot staying power. Without that they are toast
Democrats in general—and progressives in particular—are far from being in a hole in Portland, Oregon. They are riding high. It’s only in politically supine red-state Oregon and beyond the state’s borders that Oregon's progressives give centrist Democrats a bad name. And don’t get me started on the actual Democratic Socialists now sitting on Portland’s city council, thanks to a city charter reform scheme whose political DNA is pure peak woke.
This week, I wrote to the Chair of the Multnomah County Commission to criticize the promotional poster for the County’s College to County internship program. The poster featured ten young people posing as applicants or interns—yet not a single one was a white man. Meanwhile, minorities were disproportionately overrepresented compared to their share of the county’s population.
The response I received the next day from a county staffer left me speechless:
"If the absence of white men offends you, then I encourage you to reflect on how our city, county, state, and country have privileged white men throughout most of our history—and the consequences that has wrought on every population that is not white and male."
The hole Democrats are digging for themselves is just about bottomless—even if some of them refuse to see it.
Covid. I keep putting this in the comments. Covid changed everything for many people, and I was one of them. Before covid I had not realized how profoundly incompetent, dishonest and authoritarian our bureaucracy and our government can be. . I was sick with covid early on, and I am 63. It was a bad flu. Many of my friends got it too. We all realized the sinister insanity of what was going on. We saw the Great Barrington Declaration slandered and then ignored. It changed us forever. Red pilled.
We don't want a world where experts whose whole life is looking for epidemics, and who have massive conflicts of interest, can turn human civilization upside down. And then mandate new untested mrna shots. Never again.
Mixed feelings here. Mostly negative toward Fauci Inc., which covered up the Wuhan origins. It's telling that Biden pardoned him.
In my rural county, the first "covid victim" was a guy who fell off his roof and broke his neck. His blood tested positive, and I have no doubt that the hospital scarfed up the bounty. A neighbor spent 10 days in the hospital with myocarditis from the vaxx, life-flighted to Seattle. A friend's wife in Massachusetts had serious complications from the vaxx. Another friend in North Dakota was barred from visiting his father in a nursing home until he dared them to call the police. They didn't.
On the other side of it, one of my spouse's cousins refused the vaxx, and died of covid at the age of 60, with no contributing factors that I know of. I was vaxxed and boostered once, and got it (as did my spouse) after the booster, and again last fall. Mild cases.
The masks never protected the wearers. Big increases in respiratory problems among retail workers who had to wear them all day. The media never mentioned any of it. They censored the truth about HCQ and Ivermectin, and so did Twitter and Facebook. The social media organizations were abject failures, and worse. Facebook, in particular, is still politically censored. Nothing in the media about vaxx reactions or much higher rates of premature death among the vaxxed. Kids were vaxxed even though hardly any kids get covid, and the death rate is vanishingly small.
Covid did a real number on our rural schools. They still haven't fully recovered from what that did to student discipline. Remote learning was a joke. Anyone recall Obama's "rural broadband initiative" and Biden's renewal of the same with much more money? Um, that's another story, so the short one is that it was and remains a complete fraud. If that whole thing comes up in the comments maybe I will tell that story.
For starters, I think the Democrats have it wrong on climate change. Trump, in his ham-fisted way, has called it a hoax. He's somewhat correct, if we understand climate change to mean the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, i.e., the idea that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity have caused the earth's temperatures to rise.
This just isn't the case. A year and a half ago, Statistics Norway definitively debunked that idea. Naturally, their analysis got no media attention. The warming since the end of the Little Ice age is within the range of natural variability.
https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-miljo/forurensning-og-klima/artikler/to-what-extent-are-temperature-levels-changing-due-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Progressives love to ignore, disparage, and smear heterodoxy, all while preaching nuance and critical thinking. Until someone practices it, at which point they become Nazis, idiots, trailer trash, racists, and dupes. We are told that the AGW hypothesis is "settled science," when in fact science is never truly settled. Still, the Dems have pushed some extremely expensive and unreliable alternatives, solar and wind being the biggies, the result being an increasingly fragile power grid and skyrocketing utility rates.
There is much more to say about this, but I'll close this comment by saying that Democrats have positioned themselves directly against the standard of living. Not the way to win, that's for sure.
I have read some of the stuff from actual climate scientists like the UN agency. They are much less hysterical than climate journalists.
If you get time, that link to the Statistics Norway paper is in English and it is by far the single most definitive thing I have ever read about the subject. Human-caused climate change is, to me, almost entirely a secular religion.
Man, Ruy, you have my utmost respect. You are willing, as so few are, to actually get into the serious problems of the Democrat Party. As a historian, I very much see similarities to the Whigs---unable or unwilling to address the key issue of the day (illegal immigration), while offering no countervailing issues that might peel away voters. And I don't know what those issues would be. But there are these major civil wars going on inside the Dem Party that haven't even been addressed, and must be for the party to survive---and I'm not talking thrive or win elections, but avoid being the next "Know-Nothings" or "Liberty Party:"
1) The ongoing illegal alien/inner city resident civil war. People such as Noah Smith and some on your blog have identified this as a "good management" problem. NO. It's a fundamental disconnect with the voters about who is an American. Until Democrats get this right, they will continue to see the flight from cities/blue states and erosion of black/hispanic support from cities as their LEGAL benefits are redirected to alien invaders. And that must be the language, I'm sorry to say. IF Democrats continue to portray them as just "job seekers," there is no hope.
2) The ongoing civil war between the Hamas/Palestinian wing of the Democrat Party and the Israel/Jewish wing. The sad truth is short of actual violence against Jews, there is nothing the Party can do to drive Jewish voters from the Party. However, the very bad news is that millions of Christians identify with Israel as the birthplace of their religion and an area given to the Jews. THOSE are the ones you will lose. People such as Omar and Tlaib are NOT viewed as "diverse" but as virtual terrorists who hate America, and this is a huge, huge problem for the Democrats.
3) The latest one, which even you don't realize or discuss, is AI vs. Green. The whole green transition is deader than the Avengers series. But AI is the new kid on the block, is embraced by EVERYONE, and . . . sucks energy like nothing ever before. There is no scenario on earth in which green and AI coexist. It is drill, baby, drill. And the techhies are slowly moving to the GOP because that is the only place they will find energy.
4) There is actually a new civil war brewing, again, ignored. The DOGE revelations show how utterly corrupt the NGOS (which are overwhelmingly Democrat) are and how much money not only is wasted but is criminally directed against the USA. This will be the toughtest one to overcome. Think of the rump Democrats who stayed with the Union in 1862. It would take a group like that, surviving about 10 years while steadily moving to real-world solutions---not woke, green, ESG, DEI kinds of stuff---to survive. I suggest a Democrat Hill group that actually URGES cutting gubment, firing the members of the Deep State, and even prosecuting people like John Brennan and James Comey. You'd be shocked at how fast people would come to your side.
Oh, and the economy won't save you. Inflation dropped by 50%, mfg and industrial production surged by DOUBLE what was expected, and before it's done, DOGE is gonna slash the debt itself.
Spoken as a historian.
...Look Larry, the effort is always welcome, but to an impartial observer there are a host of reasons to doubt your capacity as a historian, no offense. This goes back to your claim to expertise on the subject of Chinese history, of which you have subsequently demonstrated little grasp of, whether it be ancient or modern.
Then you do things like claim that the primary concern of the tech titans when it comes to AI is energy production...which is a pretty clear indicator that you don't really understand how AI works or what powers it. Which in turn makes it fairly dubious you understand the underlying dynamics of the AI race. Which, again, makes the depth of your historical understanding likewise dubious.
True historical understanding comes from trying to comprehend the holistic whole of the historical data about a time period...not assembling a selection of historical facts around a predefined narrative. And at the moment, you seem to be engaged in the latter, not the former.
in other words I'm dead on
...spoken ahistorically, as is the trend.
I think he was discussing the connection between AI and energy consumption, not production.
He was saying that the tech titans are somehow changing their allegiances out of concern about energy consumption, when that is a distant secondary concern of theirs, compared to other issues, which are their primary motivating factor--something that is obvious to anyone who understands how AI works and how the tech titans get their massive neural nets to function optimally.
The disconnect is that politics is ultimately a sales business, and the Democrats' pitch is "buy my product or else you are a bad person."
BINGO! Hell of sales pitch, isn't it? And this is a party controlled by progressives who show every sign of thinking that they are smarter than everyone else. You know what? I want them to tell us where they get their mushrooms, so I can hear in colors too.
I think there are two basic skillsets: abstract and social. Progressives are abstract thinkers, and they don't think about sales. If anything, they view "sales" as an educational opportunity. Which has become highly annoying.
I am a fan of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which is rooted in Jungian psychology. The MBTI is controversial; some think of it as voodoo with no more validity than a horoscope, but I don't dismiss it because when I took the test 40 years ago without knowing anything about it and got the results ("INTJ"), I thought wow, it's as if someone has been following me around with a clipboard.
Now, after much more experience in life, one thing I realize is that anything is just a slant, or a construct, and that no "answers" are definitive. They are only attempts at understanding, and should be seen that way: as attempts. Even if I don't agree, or even if I do agree, no one gets it "right" or "wrong," but they should be seen as "serious" or maybe "foolish," but the serious ones should be taken seriously even if I end up rejecting them, an example of the latter being Modern Portfolio Theory.
(I am going over the woods and through the hills here, but I promise to get to grandma's house, and hope it will be worth it.)
MPT was invented by a Nobel Prizewinner or maybe two of them in the 1950s, and purports to construct an optimally efficient mix of stocks that eliminates risk. In business school, I dismissed it and still do because it rests on "beta," which looks at a stock's past performance relative to the market, and allows the believer to arrive at a diversified portfolio whose individual fluctuations will offset each other and eliminate risk.
The problem, as I saw it, was that beta looks backward, and implicitly assumes that the future will replicate the past. I raised my hand and challenged the professor on it, and he replied that, right or wrong, MPT and its companion, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which holds that a stock's price incorporates all information, is nevertheless worthy of close study because they are serious.
It took me time to see that he was correct. You should study serious ideas for their insights, even if flawed. The same goes for the MBTI and its extension, the Enneagram, which essentially put human beings into 16 personality types, a mixture of introversion/extraversion, intuitive/literal "sensing," thinking/feeling, and scheduled/spontaneous.
Now grandma's house: I can't agree with a generality about how progressives think. We all put people into categories. It's a human trait based on pattern recognition, which I think is fundamental to intelligence and not just human. As with any fundamental trait, pattern recognition has positive and negative aspects. It's necessary for survival, but it can lead anyone seriously astray too.
So, as much as we depend on pattern recognition, we have to be aware of its limitations. This is true of many of our traits, both universal and individual. For instance, I am a born arithmetic wiz. I love numbers and statistics, but I am aware of their limitations, one being that quantification, as powerful as it is, can't measure everything so I remind myself to try to remember that there are equally powerful realities that cannot be quantified: love, hate, fear, hunger, emotional attraction and repulsion among other things.
We live in a scientific, mechanical, engineering society, and one consequence is specialization, which underlies economics. Yet, without the generalists, we're lost. I routinely lampoon the generalistic liberal arts graduates of Eastern finishing schools, and with (in my opinion) good reason. The progressives are too heavily tilted in that direction. Too many of them are political scientists, and not nearly as skilled as they think they are. The bowels of the Democratic Party, and many of its rank and file, are filled with bulls--- poly sci students. Ugh.
As a group, I think they tend to be too heavily emotional, and this INTJ (a type sometimes called "the analyst") laments the exclusion of hard-headed, pragmatic, cold-heated analysis. Progressives are susceptible to fads in my view, and fail when they don't apply rigorous tests, in essence the scientific method, to their conclusions. Yet, a world full of INTJs would be a scary one, which is why the dawn of artificial intelligence, aka artificial stupidity, worries me.
In reality, I think the 16 types are distributed throughout society, with conservatives tending more toward the hard-headed but certainly not exclusively so. Therefore, in grandma's living room, they're all present. Maybe it would help if people would do more to recognize the limitations of their inclinations and of the mental tools they hold dear, including pattern recognition without which we'd all be dead.
Damn, this was a long comment. LOL
p.s.: Modern Portfolio Theory led to "portfolio insurance," and was commercialized in the 1990s. It failed spectacularly in 1998, when it led to the Asian financial crisis that year.
p.p.s.: The Bible, being a compilation, is by definition a mixed bag, which is an eternal strength and a major weakness. I am a huge fan of Ecclesiastes, especially 1:9 (nothing new under the sun) and Chapter 3 (a season for everything, or as the Byrds sang it, "Turn, Turn Turn.")
This is the season for hard realities, the season of "no." So was the 1940s; was there ever a more vivid "no" than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subesquent American threat to annihilate the rest of Japan if they didn't surrender? Other times, the 1930s and the 1950s being examples, were seasons of "yes." The Great Society of the '60s was a "yes" taken too far, and the moon landing of 1969 was the greatest "yes" ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVOJla2vYx8
Re MPT, 99.999% of the time "alpha" is just leveraged beta.
And everything correlates when the shit hits the fan.
Michael Shellenberger's article about Marc Andreeson's experience with the Biden Admin and AI is interesting. It demonstrates why Big Tech embraced Trump. The Progressive need for control loomed large. Good read.
Exactly. MPT and the companion EMH promise something they cannot deliver, the automatic hedging of risk through non-correlation, which rests on beta, which is a way of straight-lining the past into the future. Then comes the Black Swan. Just when you think it'll all be Candygrams, the Land Shark rings the doorbell. In the end, some things cannot be automated. This to me, is also the potential Achilles Heel of "artificial intelligence."
I saw the interview (or article about?) Andreeson. Excellent stuff.
You'll get a kick out of this. I met the Dean from my B0-school in the early 2000s, and started to ask him about the EMH, and he said " do you mean does anyone believe it anymore?"
Americans have long been suspicious of the Democratic Party's mindless accommodations for of divisive, stupid even dangerous Leftist idealogy like gender identification and transformation or lawfare weaponization of the judiciary. The most charitable interpretation of Democratic intent is that the Party has placed winning elections above any and all other considerations or obstacles, including real science and the U.S. Constitution.
Now, its silence, even cheering, in the face of domestic terrorists torching Tesla electronic vehicles and vandalizing dealerships, the party is showing its openness to stopping Elon Musk and, its real target, Donald Trump, by any means necessary, including notably lawlessness and violence.
There may be no rehabilitating nor rebuilding of a Democratic Party wholly owned by fringe radical Marxists.
It is still the economy, stupid! Stocks have plunged. So has consumer and business confidence. Forecasters expect slower growth, higher unemployment and faster inflation. Trumpanomics is rapidly digging its own hole.
I have never liked Trump's citations of the stock market, and I like the Democrats' citations even less. To me, the latter illustrates the degree to which the Democrats have divorced themselves from the working middle class that they once represented but no longer do. On Main Street, people do not spend the S&P 500. They spend what is in their wallet, fer chrissakes.
Of course, the people who run the Democratic Party don't have household budgets. Rich people don't pay attention to the little stuff. They don't have to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the car insurance, and watch grocery prices not for politics but for what they can afford this week. They watch the stock market, and pretend about the rest, like Walz pretended to be a bird hunter but didn't even know how to hold a shotgun.
Kids, it's about jobs and income. Democrats lost last year mainly because unemployment rose during the crucial second quarter of a presidential election year. There is a very solid relationship between the direction of the 2Q unemployment rate and the November results. Only once since World War II has an incumbent party's presidential candidate won if unemployment rose during the spring of an election year. Inflation sure didn't help.
Until just lately, progressives were joyous at the rising price of eggs, or so it sure looked. Aha! Gotcha! You ruined breakfast, evil Nazi Republicans. Oops, guess what? On March 3, the wholesale price was $8.17 a dozen. Yesterday, it was $3.03. In only a bit more than two weeks, egg prices at wholesale are down 63%. The reason: Bird flu is abating. Retail prices will be coming down soon. Progressives will be disappointed. Trump will claim credit.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
So what now? Agitate for the rights of Venezuelan gangsters. Revel in the firebombing of Tesla dealers. Argue for the advocates of Hamas on campuses. As someone who voted Democrat in the first 10 presidential elections of my voting history and who went write-in for the last three, I ask progressives the same thing I asked Republicans 15 years ago: What in hell are you FOR?
The Democratic message needs to be jobs, jobs, jobs and law and order. Politics is downstream of the economy.
A big problem (of many) with the Democrats is their widespread belief, not just among their ruling progressives but here too, is that they can fix this with "messaging."
Uh-uh. Not hardly. Democratic Party "messaging" of the past was forged in the crucible of the New Deal and ratified by the sweeping victory of World War II, augmented by the Great Society. Still true now; when all else fails scare 'em about Social Security.
Democrats can make proposals, but the fiscal realities preclude anything sweeping. As for the "messaging," the progressive stranglehold precludes anything meaningful there. See what happens to any major Democrat who says something like, "You know what? I don't think biology has changed since I learned in seventh grade that we are mammals, and that mammals come in two sexes."
Messaging? Yeah, right.
You're conflating 'messaging' with 'signaling support for policies XYZ'.
But the thing is, it doesn't matter if you support the most popular policies in American history if you can't get the message out. Case in point, the CHIPs act accomplished more for the working class in terms of re-shoring manufacturing than anything Trump has ever done--but the working class never heard about it.
Why? Because the Democrats' messaging strategies are not optimized for the current informational environment, and the realities of the attention economy. They are still campaigning like its 2008--but the media landscape is completely different than 2008. Right now the Republicans have the edge here.
But it will not last forever. When the party's messaging apparatus adjusts, it will be well-placed to lead an anti-MAGA backlash. (there is always a backlash--never forget your dialectics) Especially once Trump does them the favor (and the country the disservice) of losing Cold War 2.0.
Why do you think the GOP brass is constantly saying "keep your eye on AOC"? It's not because of her policies, many of which aren't super popular. It's because they know it's not *really* about policy--and because they know she understands the current media environment, and how to message in it.
True, you should never hide the light under a bushel. But you (not you personally, but a political party) should not let the tail wag the dog either. First comes the work, then comes the "messaging."
What I see from the Democrats is back-asswards on that. They show every sign of thinking that all they need to do is come up with new wording. Uh-uh, no way.
CHIPs Act was a good thing but the delivery on it was pretty anemic.
Build, baby, build.
The price of eggs in NV is about half that in CO. Both Kroger owned stores. NV just suspended its requirement for cage free hens. Connection?
"Cage free" is a joke. The overwhelming majority of eggs come from indoor egg factories. Anyone who thinks that "cage free" chickens don't still live in cages deserves to be laughed at.
Out here in the countryside -- the America that the movers and shakers in the Democratic Party are scared of and angry about because they cannot control it -- there are actually pasture chickens. They don't "free range" as much as the geniuses think they do. Why? Because the coyotes will break their little necks and eat them, and then the eggs. Egg-suckin' dogs!
Shoot coyotes like my neighbor (who lives with his wife in a double-wide and voted for Sanders in the '16 primary and Trump in the general) does with his 7mm rifle at 300 yards with only iron sights? What's that? Guns? Ban them! Poor coyotes!
Our eggs cost us $5/dozen. The egg lady down the road drops them off personally at our house, and we love her. She has not changed her prices. Anyone want to guess what happens in spring? I'll tell you: The more light, the more eggs. The egg lady's chickens are laying like crazy, and she's donating a lot of them to the food bank. Who knew? Not the Democrats.
Weekly egg production nationally is now 5% higher than it was at this time a year ago. Bird flu is subsiding, at least in those egg factories. Demand is down 12% because there is price elasticity. Democrats, as a group, either didn't take Econ 101 or got gentleperson's Cs, and don't have a clue.
Boy oh boy are they going to be peeved when retail egg prices start crashing at the grocery store.
Dan - I recommend you buy a used Tesla from a liberal neighbor who may have bought it as a status symbol. It is a great car. Your neighbor can then buy another EV brand.
I live in America and I'm afraid to drive a car because of left wing lunatics. This violence is supported by the likes of Tim Walz, who is prancing around chortling about destroying an American company with American workers. Late night t.v. audience whooped and hollered and cheered about fire-bombed Tesla dealership. Vote Dem? No way.
Funny that Tesla came up. I have a long personal history with EVs. I have never been a Musk worshipper when the progressives passed up no opportunity to shine his knob. Today, I chuckle at the wingnuts who are doing the same, and growl at the progressives who condemn him and cheer the vandalism because Musk committed wrongthink.
Today, I had to drive to Portland for a few errands. 170-mile roundtrip. There's a Tesla showroom along one of the freeway routes, so I got off and went over there. Walked in and said to the gay kid at the counter who was acting as a greeter that I was there to offer support. The place and an outbuilding had boarded-up windows from where shots had been fired in the middle of the night.
I told him that my support had nothing to do with Musk, or "DOGE," or Trump, but I was there because I don't think anyone has any god damned business fucking with him or anyone else there (the place is also a service center) who's doing nothing but working for a living.
On my way out, I added that I don't even really like Teslas, that I had driven one and it was fun, but I wouldn't be a customer. But still, I said, you are working for a living and no one should ever mess with that for any reason.
The goddamned progressives are so arrogant! These are the people who lecture everyone about workers? The hell! There's more to say about EVs, which are one of my three dozen or so "islands of competence" that people develop as they get older, but this comment is already long.
The Dem neighbor would buy a Chinese EV over a Tesla. That's where the Democrat party is today.
I was wondering what percentage of actual American EV production that Tesla represents.
Biden hated Elon so much he tipped the scales for Rivian. Tesla got zero subsidies, Rivian received a $6.6B "loan."
"Rivian has received a conditional commitment for a $6.6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program to support the construction of its electric vehicle factory in Georgia."
The short story on that one is that EVs are viable urban commuter cars today. In a decade or so (watch me be wrong on the timing), they will be viable anywhere vehicles. By 2040 or so, I doubt that you'll even be able to buy a new ICEV. They will go the way of oil lamps, propjets for anything but short-range commercial air travel, and incandescent light bulbs for anything other than specialized uses.
This is not a political statement, or any kind of EVangelism at all. This is pure engineering. Today's batteries use a liquid electrolyte. Once the solid-state batteries come online and then ride down the manufacturing scale economy cost curve, driving ranges will triple or more, and the other downsides of EVs will be history.
This is purely engineering to me, always has been, and always will be.
"Expensive charging stations" make me laugh. Hard. They remind me of the car salesman in the Fargo movie selling clear coat treatment. Sure, if you're a sucker you can get one. Or you can have someone wire up a 240-volt outlet. Or you can stick a splitter on the outlet for your electric dryer and run an extension cord.
A level 2 (i.e. 240v, 32A) EV charging cord goes for $100 on Amazon. A 50-foot 240v, 32A extension cord goes for $68. A splitter goes for $40. Voila! $208 total. Feel free to spend more if money is burning a hole in your pocket. There are only two reasons why people get those charging stations. One is that sometimes the car company will throw one in for free, at which point you have to spend a bunch of money to have it installed. The other is that all of this is new, and people are sitting ducks for every shyster.
Solar panel economics are a function of your electric rates and your latitude. When I looked into them eight years ago, the net price for the juice after the tax credits was about 14 cents/kWh not including installation. Electricity is cheap where we live, and it didn't pencil out. That's the simple story. There are more factors.
As for used EVs, the key there is to ascertain the condition of the battery. There is a reliable way to do that, but I wonder how many people go that far. Once solid state batteries replace liquid electrolytes (I think 2035 for solid state battery prices to be viable in the mass market, but maybe it'll be sooner), I think the current generation of EVs will be about as valuable as a used "blazing fast" Gateway 386 desktop computer with a "gigantic" 100 MB hard drive. LOL
Then why did Trump promise to fix it all on day one?
Because he is God's own blowhard. That's the downside. The upside is that everyone knows it, so they don't hold him to the outrageous promises. It was said in 2016 -- true then, true now -- that his opponents take him literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him seriously but not literally.
In '16, I wrote in Vermin Supreme because at least he admitted that he was a clown. In '20, I wrote in Kanye West because he made no bones about being crazy. In '24, I wrote in Kanye again and added P. Diddy for VP, because both major party candidates were just as insulting. Anyone who thought Trump would end inflation on Day 1 is exactly who P.T. Barnum was talking about when he remarked that a sucker is born every minute.
By the way, eggs were $4.50 a dozen at Costco today. The wholesale price is down by 63% since March 1st, and I think the next Costco run in a few months will see eggs at $3. The Democrats are going to have to find something else to whine about.
If we are to evaluate promises for what they say, and his promises are simply bombastic lies, by what logic would these lies support the expectation that he will keep any of his promises at all?
When a used car salesman tells you the engine in a car he wants you to buy is "good as new", and you know he's lying, do you then think to yourself "it's definitely not new, but it's probably close to pretty new"?
This was a brilliant assessment, but Dems would do themselves a big favor, if they lost the terms "educated " and "uneducated" when referring to voters. When it is 100 degrees outside, and your AC dies, you want a repairperson educated in air conditioning, far more than a Gender Studies grad.
Pre Biden, I find it hard it hard to remember anyone referring to 2/3rds of the US as, "uneducated", but Dems have become very comfortable with the term, the last 4 years. That is somewhat amusing, because while life without semiconductor chips would be hard, life without food, would be impossible.
Dems have a hard time drawing lines. They believe, because the US should not deport, an otherwise law abiding, undocumented 50 year old female maid, we should also never deport male gang members, who rape and murder young girls, before the victims are old enough to visit the feminine hygiene aisle of CVS.
Likewise Dems believe there should be no bail, because the policy discriminates against the poor. So bail reform has allowed violent, accused criminals to wander the streets, pretrial. Where theirmost likely next victims are, almost always, poor, minorities.
And it appears, things may get worse for Dems, before the improve. Much of the so called Dem "woke" problem, is really a hypocrisy problem. Every Dem Senator voted against legislation that would have required public school bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic fields, remain exclusively females spaces. No one mentioned, it is easier to find a live unicorn, than a Dem Senator, with a kid in public school.
Climate Change reeks of the same hypocrisy. A private jet to Davos, says nearly everything that needs to be said, on the subject. Mark Kelly replacing his Tesla with a Tahoe , because he suddenly hates Elon Musk, as Elon rescues stranded US astronauts, says the rest.
Even many "educated" Dems fail to appreciate ,that last time a US Dem President, failed on the level of Biden. Reagan replaced Carter, and Dems wandered the political wilderness for 12 long years, that could have easily been 16. Surely some Dems. recall the failure
Excellent point you make. The implication that those without a college degree are not “educated” is absurd. And the reality is that many of those college grads are as much indoctrinated as educated, as a result of the Regressive takeover of our universities.
I have a master’s degree, so I am definitely not against college. We desperately need more engineers, scientists, and computer programmers (gender studies, not so much). But for the Democratic Party to smugly console themselves that they are the party of the “educated” (their translation: “smarter and better”) is to perpetuate the attitude that helped dig this hole for themselves.
The economy is definitely a problem for Republicans. It will recover by 2028 but maybe not by 2026. Remember 1981 and how painful that was and how great 1982 was for the Democrats. The thing you are missing among all the cultural issues is that the Democrats have become the war party. That doesn't often move the needle on elections but sometimes it does. If Trump settles a couple of wars and doesn't start any new ones that is going to be a problem for Democrats. And the Democrats need to ditch the Europeans. Trump and JD are right about that. They are war mongering parasites who don't share our democratic values.
Thus far, there's no actual evidence that there's anything wrong with the economy. Trump's tariff dance has the media nervous, and they are making the public nervous. We shall see.
The Democrats that can win normie voters are the Democrats the party doesn't like. If winning was the only priority, they'd lean on Fetterman and G-Perez. They could have probably gone with the new Gavin Newsome but he governed California badly with his high taxes on productive citizens. I think people would worry he talks a good game but doesn't moderate when in power. I think they have to choose. 1. Keep their "morality" as defined by some definition of good that doesn't align with voters. 2. Moderate on culture while finding a plan that speaks to broad economic plans for everyone making more than $30,000 and less than $250,000 per year. (The other groups have had more than their share of attention)
Less international citizens and more American citizens, not necessarily American first but definitely not America last. And, for goodness sakes, stop creating enemies with every single group of people who isn't classified as "oppressed"
I should add that today the D party favorables dropped from 29% to 27%.
The Democratic Party will blame the "deplorables." Kids, please trust a dweller in a country "swing" county: That one will ring through the ages.
The economy is not the stock market, for many people, maybe most people, the economy is the amount they earn versus what they pay out. The job that allows people to earn a wage is immeasurably important to that person.
Support for Trump's handling of the economy is tanking, but most of the people who were on the fence about voting for Trump would still vote the same given a second chance.
Is it tanking? Groceries and gas are coming down in our area, rather noticeably. Brent oil is off nearly $15 bucks a barrel. West Texas is down more than $10 barrel. Nearly everything an American eats, drives, wears, or purchases during the course of a day, is connected to oil.
It has only been 60 days. Should oil settle in the sweet spot for consumers, the lowest cost that allows companies to continue, but not bust, inflation will fall demonstrably .
As much as the usual red meat satisfies the tummies of the alt-right wing of your audience, Ruy, you're not looking beyond the short-run view of the polling, and you're completely leaving out of the dynamics of foreign policy...so you're underestimating the degree to which Trump is currently in the process of sabotaging his party. It's George W. Bush level self-immolation, bumped up several degrees--and we all remember how things looked at the end of Dubya's presidency.
Every American alive right now has grown up with the U.S.'s status as The Great Power as a fundamentally assumed birthright. Built into their psyche since 1945 is the assumption that the U.S. can determine its own fate in the world, and consequently built into their psyche is also a complete intolerance for becoming a 'lesser power' than other countries. That, to them, means they are 'losers'. And they cannot stand looking like 'losers'. At all.
Trump is single-handedly dismantling the basis of the U.S.'s Great Power status. And when Americans have to sit back and watch as the U.S. is helpless to stop the break-up of the dollar zone and the Chinese acquisition of Taiwan...when they are forced to confront the degree to which they have been played by Putin--who has no interest in cooperation with the West--and are now the subordinates of a unified Sino-Russian axis...and when their country has no allies in either hemisphere that trust it enough to cooperate with it...They are going to revile the architect of it all at a scale far worse than their revulsion for Dubya.
The Reagan coalition and the New Deal Democrat coalition was built on the foundations of winning the Second Great War and winning the Cold War. Never will a coalition be built in America on a party, or a leader, that lost the second Cold War.
I recommend listening to the Ezra Klein interview. A very tiny portion of the American electorate cares about foreign policy. Most voters don't even keep up with it and couldn't answer 5 basic questions. They care about what they actually see and experience in daily life. That's it. How do I feel? Is my life good? Is it better now or was it better then? Do I trust these people? I don't know why you think the audience is alt-right. Most of us are old school Democrats who were pushed out or pushed too far. We haven't given up all hope for reform but we probably should.
Not all of the audience is alt-right--and I'm talking about the readership, here, not the authors, who are all mostly center-left--but if you follow the stories on this site, when the authors express left or center-left views, it is greeted with hostility and skepticism in the comments, and does not receive nearly as much attention as when the right is praised, or painted favorably vs the left or center-left. Even when Ruy's inner social democrat peeks out from underneath the Democratic scoldings, nigh every comment is "Great article Ruy, but you're dead wrong on [insert Ruy's social democratic view]."
And no, most voters don't keep up with the *nuances* of foreign policy, but they have always been very attuned to *major foreign policy failures*, and moments when the U.S. 'lost' some global military or economic battle that embarrassed it on the world stage. Most recently, they were angered by what they perceived to be a chaotic pullout of Afghanistan that made the country 'look bad'; they were likewise angered about the failure of the Iraq campaign; Trump provoked rage about the economic rise of China; widespread discontent grew out of Carter's failure to resolve the Iran hostage crisis; they were scandalized by Sputnik--the list goes on.
If you think they won't be similarly stirred to discontent by witnessing a failure to stop the ascendancy of a Eurasian bloc with more power than the U.S., a failure to prevent China from taking Taiwan when it wants, a fall from Great Power status, and--most importantly--the effects of the dollar losing reserve currency status, you'd have to explain away their negative reactions to every other instance of massive foreign policy failure.
You seem to think that we have a choice about this. The Pax Americana is done for. We’re not strong enough to enforce it anymore. Trump seems to be the only person in government who understands this.
There is still a difference between imperfectly upholding the stature of a Great Power whose hegemony is in secular decline and governing in a way that actively sabotages that hegemony and destroys that stature.
That's why Britons still love Churchill, but despise Anthony Eden. And it's why Russians still view Brezhnev favorably, and despise Gorbachev.
And Trump is working very hard on becoming the American Gorbachev right now. Eurasians are appreciative of his dismantling of the West; once the dust settles, Americans will not be. Like I said , they cannot stand looking like "losers"...and losers of Cold War 2.0 they shall likely be, by the time 2028 rolls around.
I would add that Trump’s macho posturing, while irritating, show that he does understand about the loser thing. Determination to fight for our position as a nation, and inspiring the effort and solidarity to do that, is not going to read like “losing” to most Americans.
I guess I see this “imperfect upholding of stature” as a dangerous distraction from the real job of replacing it with something that will ensure our security and prosperity in a world where that hegemony is no longer possible. Once Bush destroyed our moral authority in Iraq, it became Obama’s and Biden’s job to achieve the soft landing. They failed miserably at leading the nation towards this goal, and achieved nothing (or negative-nothing) at such critical tasks as restoring our military and our defense sector to fitness for purpose, building effective ways to resist cultural and information warfare, and addressing our economic and social weaknesses. Nobody is fooled by this vamping we are doing as the global hegemon. In fact, the more we pretend, the weaker we look, and the bolder our enemies become. The big problem the Europeans have is not whether they will defend civilization from the Russians but whether they will not go back to extinguishing each other as they did before the Americans took away all their toys. As Americans, we can and should honor our legacy to the world, to which we gave 80 years of peace and prosperity. We should be unsentimental now about moving to the next stage, which is now urgent.
The whole “most voters pay attention only to what’s in front of their faces” thing is such a canard and easy-out.
Thank you for clarity. I misunderstood.
At some point, the unconscious and natural (because much of the developed world was in ruins) Great Power status of the immediate post WW2 era devolved into the crazy neocon stuff of declaring war on everyone and trying to turn them into Switzerland. There was stuff back in the 50s that presaged this (Iran, Guatemala. interfering in the elections in France and Italy, rehabilitating the Germans as a military power) but this was all below the radar or completely secret. JFK's "Go anywhere and pay any price" was a milestone and it led us into the swamps of Vietnam and to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. All sorts of speculation that he was planning on a reversal but never proved to my satisfaction. We were mired in Vietnam until Nixon (finally) extracted us and gave us a healthy dose of Realpolitik. After the Carter debacle, the neocons defected to the Reagan Republicans for the crusade against the Soviet Union but after the fall of the Soviet Union, they didn't change and led us astray into other conflicts that were not in our interest. These conflicts, over oil were not in the interest of the US, except Afghanistan, but in the interest of our feckless European "allies" since our oil supplies were sourced in the Western hemisphere. Afghanistan was different but shortly wandered off into nation building which led to 20 years of failure, though with fewer American casualties than Vietnam. Iraq followed the same trajectory. Ukraine is simply inexplicable other than in terms of nostalgia for the Evil Empire. So I see Trump's pullback from this as a corrective action of putting America First. We have spent unimaginable amounts of blood and treasure acting as an ATM for ungrateful allies who don't even share our values. The Democrats used to be a counterweight for this warlike tendency but no longer it seems.
Much of that is correct, and Trump is certainly selling his isolationism as a 'corrective', but that idea fails to account for the fact that we have, since '45, never really *wanted* allies that were overly strong. Since WWII we have been unwilling to tolerate the existence of other countries, whether nominal allies or not, whose power rivals our own, and that we are unable to control. (And not coincidentally, this dynamic has been instrumental in preserving the dollar's world reserve currency status) I say this descriptively, not prescriptively. The 'ATM' hasn't been running 'for free'--it has been our preferred tool of Western supremacy.
The recent anger against China for "screwing us" (by being more successful) shows that this impulse is still in force. Right now Russia is being spared this sentiment by the American right because it is not perceived as a true rival in terms of geopolitical power and because it is portraying itself as the right's ally in some broader 'culture war', but once it has taken the opportunity provided by a theoretical 'detente' engineered by Trump (who's apparently deluded enough to think Russia would ever trust the West) to further integrate with China, and a Sino-Russian Eurasian bloc emerges with equal military and economic power, as well as *superior* geopolitical power--owing to its takeover of the vacuums we are leaving in global institutions as we pull back from them (WHO, WTO, IMF, etc.)--you will see that tolerance and the embrace of 'America first' isolationism implode. Would that it weren't so, but that is post 19th-century American Exceptionalism for you, and it hasn't gone anywhere. In fact, now that the foundation of dollar supremacy is being undone, one can expect it to get *worse*--because losing reserve currency status will be a 2008-sized economic blow--and for the 'culprits' who made American 'unexceptional' to be punished. To your point, the Democrats were punished electorally for trying to push back against it, in 2004, and the Republicans were punished electorally for failing to live up to it with the Iraq escapade. (had Iraq been a quick, successful venture their fortunes would have been quite different) Trump has only gotten around it by framing his isolationism as a stratagem to 'beat China' and thence 'Make America Great Again'. It won't work, and while that may be a good thing for Russia, China and Eurasia in general, it will be seen as disastrous for the U.S., right or wrong, and Americans will not be forgiving of those who 'lost the war'.
That is the most consequential political development at work right now, and it isn't reflected in poll numbers. But it will be. (To your point about Ukraine, I'd say that it has always been a morally objectionable but geopolitically ingenious way to enfeeble NATO, and it has been a tremendous success, because by helping to re-elect Trump, it has actually wound up destroying NATO altogether, without fracturing the BRICS bloc at all)
Was there a point buried in there?
Several. It is curious you did not dispute any of them--but then again the massive sabotage to the U.S.'s great power status Trump is currently perpetrating is fairly indisputable. It's just happening so fast average Americans haven't yet gotten their head around it. Once they do, though...well, just take a look at what has historically happened to the prospects of either party when they made Americans look like 'losers'.
Same thing. What's your point? You sound like an Ivy League grad student who's done a once-over in this or that PolySci class. Democratic staffer, by chance?
I can't do the comprehension for you. Like I said, I made several points--if you're looking for the first, begin by actually reading the post at the top of the thread, in which I point out that in focusing on the short-run picture painted by polling, while bracketing foreign policy developments, Ruy's analysis is vastly underestimating the degree to which Trump is essentially digging a hole far deeper than any in which his opposition sits. Maintain your reading comprehension for a bit longer and you'll then see flowing from that the explanatory elaboration that this digging consists of Trump's efforts to dismantle the U.S.'s great power status and subordinate the country to a de facto Eurasian hegemon--something which Americans simply won't forgive him for, owing to a long-running American exceptionalist mentality.
Then, if you manage to at last make it to the end, you will arrive here, in this strange but oddly entertaining discursive ouroboros you have put us in, where in order to remind you that you must read a text in order to comprehend it, I wind up giving you cliff notes on a thread you probably should have labored to understand yourself before contributing to.
The core problem for Democrats is their Congressional leadership comes from radically gerrymandered congressional districts or deep blue states. Thus, it's difficult for Democrats to adopt positive General Election messaging. Add in that both parties depend on Wall Street and corporate money elites, and D. C. Democrats can remain very comfortable as the professional minority party.
Keep up the good work Ruy. Keep pounding away at the Democrat Party because if the party doesn't right itself, we will truly be in a constitutional crisis with only one governing party. I am an unaffiliated voter but I see the terrible outcome, one party rule and possibly benign dictatorship, if we lose one of the parties.
I tend to agree with you “I would not hold my breath’ either that the Democrats will see the light with this data. I have said this before and I will say it again this is not the kind of challenge that a committee will solve. It takes a dynamic and courageous leader who has one heck of a lot staying power. Without that they are toast
Democrats in general—and progressives in particular—are far from being in a hole in Portland, Oregon. They are riding high. It’s only in politically supine red-state Oregon and beyond the state’s borders that Oregon's progressives give centrist Democrats a bad name. And don’t get me started on the actual Democratic Socialists now sitting on Portland’s city council, thanks to a city charter reform scheme whose political DNA is pure peak woke.
This week, I wrote to the Chair of the Multnomah County Commission to criticize the promotional poster for the County’s College to County internship program. The poster featured ten young people posing as applicants or interns—yet not a single one was a white man. Meanwhile, minorities were disproportionately overrepresented compared to their share of the county’s population.
The response I received the next day from a county staffer left me speechless:
"If the absence of white men offends you, then I encourage you to reflect on how our city, county, state, and country have privileged white men throughout most of our history—and the consequences that has wrought on every population that is not white and male."
The hole Democrats are digging for themselves is just about bottomless—even if some of them refuse to see it.