I think I disagree with Sean Trende’s defense of the polls at RealClearPolitics:

There is a fast-building meme that Donald Trump’s surprising win on Tuesday reflected a failure of the polls. This is wrong. The story of 2016 is not one of poll failure. It is a story of interpretive failure and a media environment that made it almost taboo to even suggest that Donald Trump had a real chance to win the election.

I think the polls and the pundits failed and those were a consequence of some combination of herd behavior and systematic bias. For example:

The final RCP Four-Way National Poll Average showed Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points. She will probably win the popular vote by a point or so, which would equate to an error of around two points.

and yet as of this writing Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by .2%. Based on what we know now the RCP Four-Way was off by 3.1 points and that’s too much. Clearly something else was at work in the polls.

And this:

Sometimes polls are a little more favorable to toward Democrats, while other times they are more favorable toward Republicans.

If some polls are more favorable to Democrats while others are more favorable to Democrats, that’s one thing. When most of the polls are favorable to one party or the other all of the time, that’s systematic bias.

I think the polls and the pundits were both wrong and that will be hashed out endlessly for the next century.

My favorite comment about the 2016 election to date comes from Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, in the Guardian:

Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

BTW, here’s his summary of Sec. Clinton’s media support:

With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
• Her scandals weren’t real.
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

I sincerely hope Democrats start considering some of those things as they reflect on the 2016 election. Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook not so good”.

Donald Trump was such an awful candidate for president it’s not hard to come up with things to fear or reasons to be concerned about his presidency.

Let’s take the other tack. I think there are some good things about a Donald Trump presidency.

• People who criticize the president will be less likely to be called racists.
• The press will resume its role as the watchdog of the public good.
• The members of Congress may rediscover the primacy of Congress in the American system.
• We won’t be expected to believe that the president is so smart he makes Marilyn vos Savant look like Homer Simpson.
• The American people may become more engaged in the political process.
• We probably won’t be seeing a lot of re-runs of The Apprentice.

Any other suggestions for good things about a Trump presidency?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out that the second casualty of the Donald Trump’s election to the presidency appears to be the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement:

White House officials finally gave up on the Pacific free-trade deal on Friday, after weeks of insisting they had the votes to pass it. This failure was inevitable given the left-right protectionism of the 2016 campaign, but let’s hope it’s not the first thunder crash of a new era of trade war that a shaky world economy can ill afford.

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton ran against the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, and at least the President-elect’s opposition was sincere. The TPP has always lacked a majority in the House and maybe even the Senate, and votes weren’t lost merely because both candidates fanned sentiment against “globalism.” The details included too many non-trade provisions like labor and environmental rules that inspired defections by free traders.

I’m not sure it’s completely dead and, as has been said, there’s a great difference between mostly dead and completely dead.

I suspect there will be attempts to resuscitate it. It might help if a real campaign to persuade people of its merits would be mounted. What I’ve seen so far are airy paeans to the virtues of free trade in the abstract and a few estimates measured in the billions or tens of billions of the financial benefits that will accrue, mostly to a handful of big company CEOs.

Here are a few of the questions to which I’d like answers.

• We already have “free trade” agreements with nearly all of the parties of the TPP. What benefits would the United States reap from the multi-laterial TPP that wouldn’t be realized from a bilateral trade agreement with Japan?
• China is not a party to the TPP but does have “free trade” agreements with some of the countries that are. In the light of that how do we prevent China from reaping the benefits of the TPP without being bound by its restrictions?
• What are the specifics of the plans to assist workers who will lose their jobs as a consequence of the TPP?

Since there’s no schwa (“uh”) in the Russian language, the transliteration of Trump in Russian is “Tramp”. The alternative would be “Trump”, pronounced “Troomp” which they’ve decided wasn’t as good.

Just a raw list.

The Story of Sergeant York
The Big Parade
The Fighting 69th
All Quiet on the Western Front
Grand Illusion
Paths of Glory
Gallipoli
Hell’s Angels
Wings
Lawrence of Arabia
The Lost Battalion
The African Queen

If democracy is better than federalism, why doesn’t that apply to the legislative branch as well as the executive? Why not direct democracy?

Update

I think there’s a great misconception about democracy, one that’s held even by learned political scientists. The virtue of democracy is not that it’s fair. Democracy isn’t fair. That would only be the case if every individual’s utility were identical and that’s at the very least unprovable and quite likely not to be the case.

The proof of that is illustrated in comments. If one half plus one of the people vote to eat the rest, is that fair? Obviously not.

No, the virtue of democracy is buy in. Democracy increases legitimacy because participation encourages buy in.

Fairness isn’t conveyed through democracy but by the rule of law. Everyone has the same opportunity to understand the rules.

In his post at Defense One Stewart M. Patrick makes one good point:

What Trump proposes is essentially a return to what the scholar Walter Russell Mead terms the “Jacksonian” tradition in U.S. foreign policy. This populist strain in U.S. diplomacy, dating from the presidency of Andrew Jackson, depicts the outside world as an alien and dangerous place. Jacksonians tend to advocate an insular foreign policy, while lashing out with a “don’t tread on me” ferocity when challenged from abroad.

This detached, unpredictable and reactive style stands in stark contrast to the dominant strain of internationalism that has marked U.S. foreign policy since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman—and which has long reassured partners and allies.

While I think it’s possible for transnational progressive internationalists to convince Americans that less national sovereignty, more international agreements, and more globalization is in their interests, I think they must take some painful steps to accomplish that. They must arrange international agreements and increased globalization so that they benefit themselves and their patrons less and ordinary Americans more.

I’m also curious. Does Mr. Patrick think that our latest international agreements are the best that could have been accomplished? Or are they just the best that could be accomplished easily and without our notional allies complaining?

I’m thinking of the latest Doha round of international trade negotiations which essentially died on the vine. We were pushing for stronger intellectual property controls which practically definitionally benefits the few rather than the many. Brazil and India were pushing for greater special and differential treatment for developing countries.

As I read this post at RealClearMarkets by Jeffrey Snider on Trump’s victory:

Donald Trump’s victory was as much a repudiation of technocracy as the changing operations of the PBOC and the sacking of that country’s finance minister. It cannot be understated that the electoral votes which gave Trump his margin of victory were those of the rust belt. Rural Pennsylvania and Michigan voters who delivered to Mr. Trump those states have in the very few days since the election been slandered repeatedly as xenophobic, sexist, and racist despite twice voting for Barack Obama.

it occurred to me that people who have lived primarily on the coasts and in large cities may not understand what the Midwest countryside is like. Or at least was like.

Until relatively recently not only was the Midwest countryside heavily farmland with many large farms, it was filled with small factories. In Michigan most towns had, in addition to the stores and services supporting farming, factories that supplied the auto industry.

The two changes that have taken place over the last 30 years in these areas are that the small stores have given way to Wal-Mart and the factories have closed their doors, both resulting in significantly less small town employment than used to be the case.

Thinking of rural areas as populated by a bunch of uneducated farmers is cartoonish and simple-minded. Iowa has no really large cities. It’s mostly rural. Nonetheless 25% of its people have college educations and the percentage of Iowans who have graduated from high school is higher than in Massachusetts (the state with the highest percentage of college grads).

One more point from Mr. Snider’s post that bears some thought. The Chinese have technocracy and meritocracy. We don’t. We have elitism and cronyism masquerading as technocracy and meritocracy.