There’s a passage from Fareed Zakaria’s Washington Post op-ed on the roles of elitism and racism in the past election that I want to bring to your attention:

Over the past three or four decades, the United States has sorted itself into a highly efficient meritocracy, where people from all economic walks of life can move up the ladder of achievement and income (usually ending up in cities). It is better than using race, gender or bloodlines as the key to wealth and power, but it does create its own problems. As in any system, some people won’t ascend to the top, and because it is a meritocracy, it is easy to believe that that’s justified.

There’s a fundamental problem with his thesis. Whites in the ante-bellum American South thought they had a meritocracy, too. They justified slavery on the basis of the imagined inferiority of blacks.

Meritocracy inevitably becomes another word for tyranny. Keep in mind that “aristocracy” is the Greek word for “rule by the best”. “Meritocracy” quickly becomes a circumlocution for hereditary aristocracy.

I can understand why Joe Kennedy became the wealthiest man in the world by dint of acumen, guile, ruthlessness, and, well, merit by certain narrow definitions of the word. By what merit were his children ushered through the paths of the elite to positions of power? That wasn’t merit. It was wealth and brand loyalty.

Fareed Zakaria is the son of a politician who, through money and position, went to the right schools and met the right people. Merit?

Every single sitting justice of the Supreme Court is a graduate of either Harvard or Yale Law School. Does that tell us that only Harvard or Yale law graduates have the merit to become Supreme Court justices or in fact that the path to the Supreme Court runs through a cozy club of Harvard and Yale grads? Once again, that’s not merit. That’s brand loyalty.

To demonstrate merit you must have achieved and that means you’ve accomplished something other than getting a high score on a test, going to the right schools, or holding certain jobs by reason of getting high enough scores on a test or going to the right schools.

When I heard that songwriter Leonard Cohen had died the word that occurred to me was the one used in the Rolling Stones obit of him, “influential”:

Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died at the age of 82. Cohen’s label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer’s Facebook page.

“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away,” the statement read. “We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief.” A cause of death and exact date of death was not given.

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records,” Cohen’s son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

“Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed,” his manager Robert Kory wrote in a statement. “I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come.”

Like Bob Dylan he was more a poet than a songsmith. I doubt that many of his songs will become jazz standards but they’ve been covered by a dizzying array of artists over the period of the last half century including Judy Collins, James Taylor, Jeff Buckley, Johnny Cash, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos, R. E. M., Roberta Flack, and Neil Diamond, just to name a few.

There have been some reports of attacks on Muslims following the election. From NBC News:

The first police reports started trickling in within 10 hours of Donald Trump’s victory speech.

A Muslim student from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette reported being attacked by two men on Wednesday morning. The victim told investigators that one wore a white “TRUMP” hat while they hit her with a metal object and shouted obscenities as she fell to the ground. University police say the suspects fled with the woman’s wallet and hijab.

The center of the campus was also defaced with incendiary pro-Trump language.

Another Muslim woman said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage at San Jose State University. A man ran up and pulled at her hijab, choking her, university police said.

Other than in specific direct self-defense or in proximate defense of others, violence is wrong, regardless of the perpetrators.

We should never try to justify or rationalize it.

Update

It is now being reported that the charge was a hoax. Via Talking Points Memo:

A University of Louisiana at Lafayette student admitted to police that she made up a story about being beaten, robbed and having her hijab ripped off by two men, one of whom she said was wearing a white “Trump” hat, The Advertiser reported Wednesday.

“During the course of the investigation, the female complainant admitted that she fabricated the story about her physical attack as well as the removal of her hijab and wallet by two white males,” the Lafayette Police Department said in a news release, obtained by the site.

Police have dropped the investigation, according to the site.

What hasn’t been dropped is whatever fear was created by the original false report. It also will call into question actual reports of harassment or attack.

Perpetrating violence should still never by justified or rationalized. Neither should lying about being attacked.

GM is laying off 2,000 employees from its Lordstown and Lansing facilities:

General Motors plans to lay off more than 2,000 hourly employees due to sluggish demand for cars produced at two plants.

The automaker will eliminate the third shifts at plants in Lordstown, Ohio, and Lansing, Mich., in January.

Lordstown will cut 1,202 hourly employees and 43 salaried workers, while Lansing will see 810 hourly and 29 salaried workers affected.

Basically, what’s happening is that lower gas prices are motivating people to buy larger cars or trucks. The plants in question produce small cars: the Chevy Cruze and Camaro and the Cadillac CTS and ATS.

No doubt about it. It’s hard on the workers but it might be good for GM. The margins are better on the vehicles they are selling. Sales are slower than they were six months ago but they’re still higher than they’ve been for a decade.

There are a lot of predictions being made right now. Keep track of them. I’ll revisit them periodically for the next six months or so.

If you run into any especially juicy ones, please put them in comments with links.

The most obvious failed prediction is Paul Krugman’s prediction of investor recoil from a Trump presidency:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

That had already been proven false before its digital ink had dried.

At the New York Times Nicholas Kristof observes:

Democrats are too quick to caricature Trump supporters as deplorables. Sure, some are racists or misogynists, but many are good people who had voted for Obama in the past. My rural hometown, Yamhill, Ore., is pro-Trump, and I can tell you: The voters there are not all bigoted monsters, but well-meaning people upended by economic changes such as the disappearance of good manufacturing jobs. They feel betrayed by the Democratic and Republican establishments, and finally a candidate spoke to them.

and calls for those who didn’t vote for Trump to be “watchdogs, not lap dogs”.

Consider the photo montage in this piece at Reuters. I may be wrong but I don’t recall that watchdogs generally roam the streets biting people.

Tone down the rhetoric even farther.

I hope that people pay attention to what David Dayen has to say at The New Republic:

You can believe that half the country is racist if you want, and there’s no question that there’s an undercurrent of anger in Trump’s stunning rise. But that anger isn’t directed at any individual ethnic group. It’s more inchoate than that. It’s rage at institutions that people believe have failed them forever. It’s rage at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary folks. It’s rage at a cultural milieu that perceives too many non-coastal Americans as buffoons. It’s rage at the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession, in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and the two-tiered system of justice paraded on full display. It’s rage at an elite class that people feel is lined up against them.

That rage has no doubt been whipped up—by Trump and his campaign, among others. It may not always be based in reality, but it’s real.

In the final analysis, 2016 wasn’t a fear election. It wasn’t like 2004, when George Bush and Dick Cheney repeatedly raised the threat of terror. (And if we’re honest, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats this year often appealed to fear—of a Trump presidency.) No, this was a rage election: a rage built up over many years, among people who’d decided they were disrespected, abandoned, and voiceless.

His advice?

Political parties go into a presidential election knowing the landscape. They know the challenges. Their goal is to win. And my feeling is, the lesson for Democrats is ultimately clear enough: You cannot write off half the country, much less spend an election cycle deriding it, and expect success.

which might sound familiar to you. Look at the detailed voting results. The Democrats don’t even have a “whole state” strategy let alone a 50 state one.

Believing that the results of the election can be attributed to sexism and racism might be comforting to you. I don’t see how but it might be. It isn’t borne out by the exit polls.

It’s certainly exculpatory. It makes it their fault rather than yours and their moral turpitude makes it imperative that they change rather than you.

If you can’t persuade them and you won’t compromise with them, you might try to outlive them. A quick glance at the demographic tables will tell you that’s a very long game. I doubt that I’ll live to see your victory.

I’ve been saying for some time that we’re seeing a low intensity rebellion against the civil authorities. We see it every weekend here in Chicago in the body count on the South and West Sides. What I believe is happening is that alternative governments are being established and they’re contending for power both among each other and with the civil authorities.

I sincerely hope that we’re not seeing the beginning of a more general rebellion against republican government in the aftermath of the election. Make no mistake: if you rebel against republican government you’re rising in support of authoritarianism. In a country as large and diverse as ours those are the alternatives.

There are a couple of things that will serve as bellwethers for what we can expect from a Trump Administration. Pay attention to who he appoints to head his transition team and who he appoints to be his chief-of-staff.

His failure to date to create an organization means that he does not presently have a “deep bench”. The people to whom he reaches out will be telling.

Will he decide on the staff management architecture used by Ike and Reagan or the “buck stops here” one that has tended to be favored by Democrats? There are a lot of questions.