There’s a good point that emerges in the conversation between Gail Collins and Arthur C. Brooks in the New York Times this morning on the frequently asserted “implosion” of the Republican Party to the effect that both parties have some pretty significant problems. Here’s the kernel of the observation:
I’m not quite ready yet to concede that the Republican Party per se has fundamentally changed, mostly because Donald Trump is an island — an island where all the press has crowded. Most of the other candidates are trying to talk about things besides building walls. And downstream at the state level, the number of Republican governors has expanded to 31 from 19 during the Obama administration. When Republicans win Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, you know they are doing something right.
and
But about those governors. It’s true that a number of blue states have Republican governors right now. And New York City has had a lot of Republican mayors. To get elected, they convince voters that they’re basically just thriftier Democrats. It works fine for state and local elections. But I’m deeply dubious that these guys are a pipeline of potential presidential nominees. It’s too hard for them to convince real, hard-core Republicans that they’re reliable.
So I would concede that it’s a weakness for the Democrats not to be developing a bigger farm team of politicians who can get Republicans to vote for them.
But now, having shown my evenhanded spirit, I would point out that the G.O.P.’s local talent isn’t translating well on the presidential stage.
A funny thing happened on the way to both the Democratic and Republican Parties becoming programmatic parties rather than the “catch-all” parties they’ve always been. The Republican Party is on the cusp of becoming a populist party with who knows what implications while the Democratic Party which likes to think of itself as the people’s party can’t manage to muster a presidential candidate who isn’t Caucasian or below the age of 70.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that party politics, generally, is decadent and I look on whatever is replacing it with a certain amount of foreboding. It certainly looks like the “cult of personality” to me. I’d rather have the party bosses and the smoke-filled rooms.
It certainly looks like the “cult of personality†to me. I’d rather have the party bosses and the smoke-filled rooms.
You can only have a situation with party bosses in smoke filled rooms if those bosses represent significant voting blocs. Instead, the notional party bosses only represent the donor class and themselves. Republican voters have finally figured this out to an extent. Democratic voters are either too stupid to figure this out or they’re too stupid to figure this out – I’ve run out of alternate explanations for describing how clueless their base is. But hey, maybe they’ll catch on eventually. (For example, that “socialist” “man of the people” Obama has been much better at, and much more interested in, helping the rich than he has at helping anyone else.)
As for the difference between state and national politics: It is easy for Republicans at the state and local level to behave as thriftier Democrats. That’s because, thanks to the federal court system, several of the most controversial topics all become federal matters in the end. A governor & state legislature can nibble around the edges on abortion or gay marriage, but ultimately five people in DC are going to tell everyone how it has to be. The same has become true of healthcare. Immigration, trade policy and international relations all fall under federal jurisdiction to begin with. As do many regulatory matters concerning everything from mass communications to whether or not someone can build a house on a property they own. (State and local governments matter too for that last one, but ultimately you will have to deal with the Feds.)
State and local governments just don’t matter when it comes to most of the controversial topics that are out there. And thanks to the entire legal class being Democrats and the donor class wanting a large powerful government that only they can control (so they think), Republicans are always going to lose at the national level as conservatives. For if they make like conservatives, they’ll either not get elected or get nothing done once they do, and if they make like the “liberals” that the donors and lawyers want, then their base will despise them.
The Republicans at the national level have decided to act like “liberals” while telling their voters they’re conservatives, and the voters have finally gotten angry at being pissed on so that Warren Buffett and George Soros can get ever richer.
The current insurgency in the Republican primaries are evidence of that anger – in the last CNN national poll, a full two thirds of Republican voters support either Trump, Cruz, or Carson, all three of whom are billing themselves as outsiders. (I find that funny in Cruz’s case, but I’m on the fringe with that opinion.)
So I’m not finding the opinions of the NYTs people all that insightful. Basically, nothing they’ve said is difficult to understand once you know where the bulk of governmental power lies in this country.
It should also be noted that Republican apparatchiks such as political consultants behave in a manner much more friendly to Democrats than to conservatives. Once these Republican governors surround themselves with these DC & NYC consultants, they all suddenly sound exactly the same – favoring open borders, foreign interventionism (with boots on the ground), tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, etc. The main difference in recent years has mostly been that some of the social conservative candidates have really been socially conservative. I’m thinking of Rick Santorum, as an example. The rest are all merely mouthing SoCon platitudes, and no one really believes they mean it. Just like no one really believed that Obama was anything other than enthusiastic about gay marriage or that Bill Clinton had any respect for any woman.
But the consultants make people that once looked promising (Walker, Kasich) just look like the usual DC dweeb jerk-faced liars that conservatives have come to expect Republican Senators & Representatives to be. Why vote for them?
And I believe that neither Trump, Carson or even Cruz have hired the usual consultants to help them craft their campaign messages. Carson is running on his character references. Trump, from what I’ve heard, is doing a lot of private study of media and then deciding on what to do and say using his accumulation of knowledge as a salesman and public personality. And Cruz is apparently working with people he trusts to tell him when he’s wrong about something while pouring over lots of fairly raw polling data. But the consultants seem to be on the outside looking in regarding those campaigns. Which explains why the political class in DC is howling mad with the three of them – the three musketeers are endangering an entire political ecosystem if they somehow win and do what they say they’ll do. It also explains why the three of them account for two thirds of the possible Republican voters.
(That’s my current understanding of how those campaigns are working on their strategic decision making. If someone has other info, please share.)
Well, jeez Dave we have a choice between an old woman who could be indicted at any moment, an ancient Marxist, a psychopathic strong man from reality TV and a fanatic creep. You don’t think that’s a good field to choose from?
We are in the age of failing institutions. We are living in interesting times.
@Icepick
I think you summed it up succinctly. I would only add that some Republicans & conservatives are now beginning to question the economic tenets they have believed faithfully. Reality has a way of knocking some sense into you.
I suspect the Disney IT workers suing were good little Republicans who supported free trade, outsourcing, and the other tenets, I am sure their new mantra is, “I used to think like that before I lost my Job.”
I would only add that some Republicans & conservatives are now beginning to question the economic tenets they have believed faithfully. Reality has a way of knocking some sense into you.
That’s a good point, too.
…
I wouldn’t be so sure about the prior politics of the Disney IT workers. Disney is a very liberal company and attracts a very liberal workforce on the whole. There were certainly conservative types there when I was, but they tended to favor finance and some management as careers. I didn’t know any IT guys, though.
Ice, I favor “naive” over “stupid” for describing human beings in general (all of them, not just one party), as I don’t like to think about the implications for a free society if the reverse should happen to be true.
Put another way, I’d prefer to think “we don’t understand intelligence” rather than “a plurality of human beings is stupid.”
With that said, time is certainly running out for our institutions.
I say stupid because they keep getting kicked in the teeth and keep coming back for more. Some Republicans are also stupid, as they’re still defending the status quo. Others are dim because it took them so long to figure it out. And some (including me) are insane but getting better because we understood what was happening but supported them anyway because the other side was worse.
But it turns out that the two sides are basically the same, when it comes down to it. The only difference is on who gets what percentage of the spoils.
Put another way, I’d prefer to think “we don’t understand intelligence†rather than “a plurality of human beings is stupid.â€
At least half of all human beings are at or below median intelligence.
To a STEM person, free-trade makes perfect sense, and I do not disagree. The problem is not the value-for-value transaction portion of free-trade. The problem is when a product of the fiat currency used to facilitate the transaction is also used as a value in the transaction.
It is similar to regression but in-reverse (degression?) or like looking at two mirrors facing each other. The copies are not real, and each copy becomes more and more distorted. If you were planning a dinner party based upon the number of people in the mirrors, you would be off by a substantial number. The caterers may make extra money, but eventually, you will no longer be able to hire them.
When this is done at the national level, the distortions are huge, but they take longer to manifest. The distortions began to be felt at the bottom, and they worked up. At each new level, people think they are immune, but an Indian, Vietnamese, or Russian CEO can do what an American CEO does for a lot less. (The Russian would probably be a lot more efficient, also.) Computer programs can (and do) invest better and faster than humans, and any American PE investor that believes he/she is irreplaceable is one or two Google apps away from being obsolete.
“Well, jeez Dave we have a choice between an old woman who could be indicted at any moment, an ancient Marxist, a psychopathic strong man from reality TV and a fanatic creep. You don’t think that’s a good field to choose from?”
I would describe said candidates in the following way: a corrupted, self-serving woman who puts her own ambitions above concerns for the country; a likable curmudgeon, whose political passion has been housed in life-long far left ideology with no real accomplishments in real life; an extremely ill-tempered, erratic narcissus who is way too into himself; and a far right crusader extolling the way he pisses people off.
Ellipses, the status quo works fine while it lasts.
I have more confidence in the institutions. We can talk about the Presidential candidates, but whomever wins is going to face a relatively conventional legislative and judicial branch, probably right-leaning, but McConnell, Ryan and Roberts are the kind of people selected by party bosses in smoke-filled rooms.
IOW, what I am saying is a number of these choices are effectively status quo.
The embarrassing thing is that random pick does about as well as most funds. There have been lots of studies of this.
I think “smoke-filled rooms” worked back when we had a politics of clientelism and personal character rather than what we have today, which is a politics of ideology.
“We are in the age of failing institutions. We are living in interesting times.”
I think our institutions are fine, it is our political parties and, really, us, that are the problem. Both parties either need to substantially reform or go the way of the whigs, but I fear they are too entrenched, “too big to fail” and will continue to founder but no sink. Neither one has a coherent set of ideals that appeal to most Americans.
“The embarrassing that is that random pick does about as well as most funds. There have been lots of studies of this.”
Even better, especially with fees. But these are public equities. Passive investors. The same does not hold in PE. I wonder how many know why.
Institutions are only as good as the people running them.
First, I don’t think things were really all that wonderful when the smoke filled room guys ran things. Things were always better in the past, and we all walked uphill both way stop school in the snow, even in Florida, cept it aint really true. Next, our politicians suck worse than usual this time, but we have had awful choices in the past also. Unfortunately we are getting what we deserve. Many years of the marketing branches of both parties creating polarization. You really don’t get a Trump w/o years of talk radio and Fox News first. Sanders isn’t even remotely a viable candidate w/o the left on the internet.
While I am sort of agreeing with Andy, the one institution that I think is clearly broken and for which no one should have any respect for anymore is SCOTUS. No standards. Partisanship dominates.
Steve
We can talk about the Presidential candidates, but whomever wins is going to face a relatively conventional legislative and judicial branch, probably right-leaning, but McConnell, Ryan and Roberts are the kind of people selected by party bosses in smoke-filled rooms.
And what happens if the next President, billed as an insurgent, falls in line with the conventional pols once he is sworn in? There will be Hell to pay in 2018 and 2020, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that next President, and some of the other conventional pols, fail to live to seek re-election. The mood is bad out here and getting worse.
Immigration is the straw finally breaking the stranglehold the elites have on the political apparatus in the USA. The elites want one thing, and a substantial majority wants something else.
Immigration is the issue where that is most stark, as at least our last five Presidents, and all of the major party Presidential candidates in that time, have been open borders. The only two serious (or at least notable) candidates that have been for restricting the flow of Third World immigration that time have been a couple of billionaires running as populists. Maybe throw in Pat Buchanan for shits and giggles and you get three Presidential candidates of dozens in the last thirty years who have been with the majority on this issue. But what was a trickle in 1992 has been revealed to have been a crack in the dike by now, so the issue has much more resonance now.
Add to that the fact that increasing use of robots is likely to make many of these immigrants completely superfluous in the job market and current immigration policies are clearly a recipe for disaster. Just about everyone that isn’t getting rich off the process can see that. And decades of fluffy “import the world” “diversity is magic unicorn shit that will make us all better” ideology is finally wearing off.
If the elites don’t start reversing course on immigration, and other policies, in the next couple of years, they’re going to be replaced. With violence, if necessary.
NOTE: The comments on the story about the roboticized farm aren’t of the “Gee-whiz, this is neat-o” variety. 14 of the 23 are about immigration, a few are about unions, and most of the rest are jokes. One doesn’t even have to look hard to see that immigration is on everyone’s mind. Bullshit about things like flag-burning or abortion aren’t likely to cut it anymore for keeping the people divided.
tl;dr version of all my comments: The political and business elites of the country have been shitting on everyone else for decades, and the everyone else is finally getting tired of it. We’re entering a period like 1920-1940 again. If the elites don’t get their heads straight, they will lose them. Small loss for the rest of us.
Ellipses, I think the next President will start out with a 51 percent approval rating, which will then decline. Hard to see any of the frontrunners getting a second term.
The legislators will generally be safe as long as they adhere to their district. Outside of major partisan shifts such as landslides, legislators generally don’t lose their seat based upon national mood. I think Dick Lugar and Eric Cantor were grossly negligent.
Right now I think it’s about even money that the incoming president will start with an approval rating under 51%.
Farming should have been mechanized and automated years ago, and manufacturing should have become more high tech at the same time. Both of these developments would require more educated workers (high school & technically capable). This transformation has not occurred, and it does not appear likely to occur any time soon.
Historically, this is the natural progression, but what has occurred is unnatural. The majority of the people spouting the mantra will be consumed by it, and if I am right, this includes the investors, also. As their money becomes worthless, their incomes moves towards zero. A lot of expensive assets are not worth much when you cannot afford to keep them up. (The super rich are in a different league.)
If you look, this is where the trend is going. Technology is about to allow a lot of professional occupations to move offshore. The healthcare industry is just begging to be outsourced. There is no reason why @Jimbino cannot get his/her wish but not by travelling. Initially, it would be with testing and analysis done out-of-country. Later, your initial information could be taken remotely, and finally, the doctor can be remote with a technician local.
Computers and robots are not able to be creative or innovative, but that is the goal. Creativity and innovation are inefficient. The financial sector is the only place that can afford inefficiency, but that cost is paid by the little people. More and more people are learning that they are little.
I think that’s probably your best comment ever, TB, and that’s going some. I agree.
Computers and robots are not able to be creative or innovative, but that is the goal.
To be creative one needs to be able to learn. AI is making progress on that front. A year or two ago someone came up with a neural net framework for a program (Giraffe) that taught itself how to play chess. It got to be pretty good, too, playing at International Master level in just 72 hours. The best programs now, some of which are free, make your home computer a player so strong that not even the world’s best humans can hope to beat them in a match, so the program was behind the older method of programming. For now, for this subject.
That programmer, along with several others at Google’s research arm, have used a similar self-teaching neural net programming to create a program that can beat at least some of the best GO players in the world. GO has been much harder for the programmers to crack than chess, so this is an amazing result if it holds up.
Give it another ten years and the programming of the self-programming will be even better.
Creativity or innovation involves bringing forth something that has never existed and that has never been imagined. It can be intentional or unintentional. Otherwise, it is not creative it is derrative.
Chess is rules based, and there is no real creativity involved. Everything must conform to the rules. If you stabbed your opponent, that would be creative, or if you switched out pieces when your opponent was not looking, that would be a creative solution.
Unless you have a random number generator (RND), poker for a computer is rules based, but almost all RND’s are rules based. (Truly randomness is difficult to reproduce.)
Computer code is about rules, and any computer code to generate computer code will need to be rules about rules. Biology does create new organisms, but it does so through mistakes. The biological reproduction code is mostly rules based, but it is imperfect. It has bugs, and those bugs are what make it powerful.
In order to make the leap to a biological model, humans designing code would need an RND small enough, powerful enough, but efficient enough to be used by most CPU’s. The humans would then need to write code without debugging it, but they would need to ensure that only the good bugs remain.
Now, you are moving away from helpful robots/computers and towards psychotic robots/computers. This chess playing robot will coat the chess pieces in a fast acting poison. I doubt the World Chess Federation has any rules against it, and if they do, it can always take your family hostage.
Would a computer ever think to write an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumps a shark or Dallas an entire season of a dead Bobbie was just a dream Pam had? Would a computer ever think up pet rocks, Justin Bieber, or Bronies?
Chess is rules based, and there is no real creativity involved. Everything must conform to the rules.
Clearly not a player. That would be like stating there is no creativity in mathematics. Sorry, but that’s a strike out.
Biology does create new organisms, but it does so through mistakes. The biological reproduction code is mostly rules based, but it is imperfect. It has bugs, and those bugs are what make it powerful.
The neural nets in question learn, in part, by making mistakes. I think the process is farther along than you give it credit for.
Computers are nothing more than a really fast adding machines, and they simply process truth tables. In order to get an actual thinking machine, you will need an analog CPU. It will need to be able to process irrational numbers natively.
Chess is easy for a computer because it has rules that must be followed. The computer can either process all possible moves or consult a database of known moves. It cannot break the rules. That is cheating.
Actual AI would allow computers to translate from one language into another and back. This causes them problems because language has rules, but there is no rule against breaking the rules. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is a testament to the creative use and abuse of the English language. Most humans can barely process it.