Because of the way the American political system works, this dissatisfaction seldom finds expression ("what, are you going to waste your vote?"), but when an outsider with deep pockets appears, suddenly it can coalesce around him.
Therefore, I suspect that the question of Trump's competence is moot for many voters. If you just want to break the way the system works, four years with an ineffective president may not seem like a high price to pay.
OTOH, I find it curious that the article found no room for a very obvious real-world parallel amidst all the fictional characters Trump was likened to. Twenty years ago, another first-world country saw a political void filled by a boisterous tycoon who paid for his own campaign. It didn't turn out well, nor was it over quickly.
Same with Sanders. Just on the opposite side. He found a niche where he can cater to extremely politically correct liberals and minorities, who also feel misrepresented and feel that america is actually not liberal enough. He has to actually make an impression that he is listening to the voters if he wants to get any attention at all, since he is not getting that much media attention.
Both cases I think shows people are tired of lack of options. Main party candidates seem to be utterly incompetent, like Hilary, others seem to just continue what has been done before, so there's dissatisfaction and search for something to shake up the system. Trump fits it well.
If you are an average straight white man, yeah, it sure looks like things aren't getting better. Your wages haven't increased much at all (adjusted for inflation) since the '70s.
And yeah, women and the gays and men who aren't white (though, I think it's mostly women; there are just so many more of them) are making gains every day... if trends continue, it won't be much longer before those people make as much as we do! and now they want to be treated with respect, too? Christ, when will it end!
I mean, sure, I laugh at those who have this 'white rage' for complaining that we, as white men, are now expected to treat other people with a base level of respect (as that, at root, is the intent of political correctness.) - At least where I live, this expectation is phrased more like "Please consider that women are humans too, you know, if it's not too much trouble" than anything really threatening to the status quo.
But there are a lot of people who feel genuine rage. And I don't know... My own opinion is informed by the fact that I make really good money and work in an industry where I get a really obvious (and fairly large) bonus for being a white male. Would I feel that rage if I had to struggle to make ends meet? If I had to seriously compete with women in the workplace? I like to think I wouldn't, but who knows?
I don't think I've ever heard someone complain about political correctness run amok, and had it turn out that they weren't just complaining--in careful language, mind--about uppity black people or women trying to rise above their station (i.e. the kitchen).
You might not be referring to that, of course. What do you mean about "sick and tired of political correctness"? And what demands are being made that are so burdensome? Is it the stuff about not assuming muslims are terrorists, or not assuming brown people are illegals? Is it the bit about not tossing around phrases like "anchor babies," or the thing about putting a woman on a common denomination of currency?
It's like the reactionary wing of an entire generation grew up getting their political education from watching South Park.
> In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as “dangerous to democracy.”
It's no surprise that Michael Gerson labels Trump "dangerous to democracy." Trump is actually dangerous to the GOP establishment and Gerson stands for that establishment.
What does it say about American democracy that it takes a self-aggrandizimg billionaire to speak openly about buying politicians and offers to be bought in a presidential election debate? It's the job of the moderators to force such an issue into the open, but they don't dare anger the party for fear of never hosting again. If you watched the first debate, you can see that Fox News was tough on Trump (as they should be), but nowhere near as tough on the rest (as they should have been). Even CNN seemed to be a proxy for the Republican establishment in the second debate.
EDIT: Ross Perot was was the last candidate to truly upset the political establishment, and he also was a billionaire. Hmmmm....
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21665014-party-f...
I've said for some time that the world is drifting back towards a place of deep political instability, and this election has the unpleasant air of looming disaster about it. Whoever is elected president is almost certainly going to be regarded as illegitimate or intolerable by a large segment of the population, due to a mix of the internet and demographic sorting a la http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php
I feel we underestimate the influence of the internet on social dynamics. It's much easier to get near-immediate social validation for any given identity group, and something about the combination of anonymity and depersonalization in discussion forums provides psychosocial rewards for antagonistic/oppositional behavior when viewpoints collide.
However, I share your unease, your feeling that Something Is Amiss.
The median Donald Trump article is obviously off topic for this site, but arguably his rise is also "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" [1]. So let's try turning flags off on this post as an experiment and see if everyone can keep the discussion thoughtful.
Edit: I read the article. Trump is a natural subject for Rich, a political journalist with a (much longer) background as an entertainment critic. What makes the article good is that he takes Trump seriously and uses him to make 'serious' politics look buffoonish, reversing the usual trope. If anyone knows a better analysis of Trump, please post the link in this thread—I'm sure many readers would like to see it.
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/watch-a-conversa...
The article makes a case for Trump as new: a pop culture character coming to life in real politics. The fictional antecedents he brings up are fascinating. It's a good article—so good it's too bad he didn't go the whole hog and resist any usual partisan swipes, but that's probably too much to ask of Frank Rich. I'd say it easily passes the HN bar for on-topicness in a political story, though we'll still penalize the thread if it goes flamewar.
This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F#ck Hope.”
-- George Carlin
As an outside observer ( I am German), I think that the theory sounds interesting. However, it is possible that he tries a different maneuver to win the general election. His refusal to found a PAC may mean, that he plans to run on an anti-corruption, Washington outsider platform and basically form a analogous coalition as Syriza did in Greece. Syriza's coalition partner is a right wing populist party, they basically formed a anybody but the old boys club coalition. And my guess is, that assuming Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, there are quite a few moderates who find such a candidate attractive, even if he is a reality TV star.
[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-295-trumping-t...
Jeb definitely looks "pro-Hispanic" compared with Trump. He even learned Spanish!
Both seem like valid points, which need to be understood by everyone who hates the idea of Trump as president and hopes to find a way to defeat him (myself included).
Trump will definitely make a full run at the Presidency if he believes he has a chance - and it appears he does. This guy wants to be the President. This is not a publicity stunt, if it ever was.
Continuing to pretend he's a cartoon character will just make the hangover worse.
Disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter.
He was playing quite a "role" when he was the first president to try to end, rather than contain, the Soviet Union, and then achieved that.
There is no concrete way in which his policies were more substantially more aimed at ending the USSR than containing it compared to prior administrations (in many ways, it was perfectly within the range of approaches taken by prior regimes; the most substantial differentiating element that people tend to point to was the big ramp up in defense spending -- which was a policy initiated by Carter at the end of his term.)
And his administration did not achieve ending the USSR, either.
> It took a village of birthers to get Republicans to the point where only 29 percent of them now believe that Obama was born in America (and 54 percent identify him as a Muslim), according to an August survey by Public Policy Polling. Far from being a fake Republican, Trump speaks for the party’s overwhelming majority.
Edit: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/08/trump-suppor...
someone please tell me that is a joke.
58% believe in The Devil (26% don't)
47% believe in evolution (29% don't)
42% believe in ghosts (37% don't)
36% believe in UFOs (35% don't)
26% believe in witches (54% don't)
The best news about Trump is that he is wreaking
this havoc on the status quo while having no chance
of ascending to the presidency.
You can’t win the Electoral College in 2016 by driving away women,
Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans, no matter how
large the margins you pile up in deep-red states.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/21/donald-trum...
The idea that all minorities hate him probably sits well with your wishes and that of the author of the article but it's not necessarily true.
If anyone has a chance at derailing my beliefs so far, it's been Scott Adams (of Dilbert) and his ongoing series of blogs posts about the 'Master Wizard Hypothesis' [2]. He's essentially arguing that linguistic wizardry can trump (sorry) policy and credibility, and that the Donald is a master. Likely for entertainment purposes only, but he's been right on this matter more than Nate Silver so far! Every time you see 'low energy' Bush, 'nice guy' Carson, or 'that face' Fiorina in the press, Adams makes more sense.
[1] https://twitter.com/jacobaldridge/status/632163459388432384 [2] http://blog.dilbert.com/
What if he parlays this into a VP position? Every other candidate would fall over themselves to grab his market share.
I suspect Trump would view it the same way. Whereas Rubio is well-placed to parlay a VP run in 2016 into a title fight in 2024, I can't see Trump wanting to be someone's second in command.
It's part of why I think he'll drop out - when the poll numbers crater, he's got nothing to fight for, and for his brand he's better off throwing some mud (whatever Master Wizard is for "the Establishment is working behind the scenes to ensure I'll never get the nomination") and walking away than he is waiting to record 2% of the votes in Iowa.
And thanks to another unintended consequence of the GOP 's Citizens United victory, the PACs it enables will keep hopeless presidential candidates financially afloat no matter how poorly they are faring in polls and primaries, thereby crippling the party 's ability to unite early behind a single anti-Trump alternative...When Trump 's presidential rivals attended a David and Charles Koch retreat, he tweeted: I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc...
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"But the party’s real stand on the sanctity of female biology had been encapsulated in the debate by Walker’s and Marco Rubio’s endorsement of a ban on abortions for women who have been raped or risk dying in childbirth."
Real? That's about where I want to stop reading the OP.
Why? I know that for me eighth grade civics was a long time ago, but as I recall (1) the SCOTUS case of Roe v Wade that made abortion legal is now 40+ years old; (2) to change that decision need (A) a lot of what would be, say, unlikely new SCOTUS nominations or (B) a Constitutional amendment that would take 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states. So, first-cut, intuitively, IMHO, for either (A) or (B), any way to have "a ban on abortions" is decades away. Considering how often we have Constitutional amendments, maybe centuries.
Real? Talking about "a ban on abortions" is real? I don't think so.
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
ADDED: See this for extensive discussion of the practice of "jurisdiction_stripping": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisdiction_stripping
That national level Republicans have never tried in the abortion domain suggests to me how much they really care about the issue.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that, really, there is nothing Congress can do about a SCOTUS decision such as Roe v Wade just by passing a law and getting the POTUS to sign it. And should a US state pass a law against abortion, the legal system would instantly use Roe v Wade to strike down that state law.
If all that is so, then the only way to make abortion illegal is to reverse Roe v Wade, and there are only two ways to do that, (A) have another case brought to the SCOTUS and accepted for review by the SCOTUS and with enough new justices to reverse Roe v Wade and (B) have a Constitutional amendment with, as I mentioned, 2/3rds of the House, .... IMHO, the chances of either (A) or (B) within 100 years look slim to none.
If all that is correct, then talking about laws against abortion is some form of self-abuse or manipulation of others and less useful than a spit to windward.
Again, I'm just talking about process, not the pros/cons of abortion.
Presumably, then, you'd expect any serious competent candidate to know this and not make statements suggesting that such a thing could happen?
(I'm in the UK, we have our own flavour of crazy.)
Then, one level deeper, the reason a politician suspects that talking about making abortion illegal would lead to votes is (A) many voters regard abortion as murder of a human life, (B) an appeal to the strong moral objections to murder, (C) an appeal to the desire for traditional family values that cherishes children and, thus, finds abortion repugnant murder, (D) etc.
So, with (A)-(D), can hope to get some voters up on their hind legs, get votes, win, take office, have power.
IMHO, that's the usual explanation.
Again, my point here is not about pro/con on abortion but just on the process and politics: In particular, with my understanding of the US legal system, talking about making abortion illegal is talking about something that has slim to no chance of happening, divisive, a distraction from issues where something might be done, a spit to windward, etc.
A conspiracy explanation would be that the US Republicans have a list of favorite issues, heavily to make the rich richer, don't want to talk about those issues in public in political campaigns, so come up with issues, e.g., abortion, that will serve as misdirections to permit winning elections without talking about or addressing in public in campaigns the real issues they have in mind. For more, the explanation goes that wealthy backers of the Republicans, e.g., the Koch brothers, with their money for political campaign contributions, are setting the real agenda of the Republican party and pulling strings of the candidates as if they were all puppets.
For me, I don't know how real that explanation is: E.g., I know next to nothing about the Koch brothers or other candidate string pullers. And I don't know the extent to which politicians have strings to be pulled.
Money, Koch brothers, strings, puppets, all aside, again, just from the process, I see slim to no chances of making abortion illegal within 100 years so am irritated that our political process and the OP are still talking about abortion as if there might be some change in the law. So, I find the OP not very real and, thus, find some irony in the OP talking about Trump as not very real.
Then, is Trump real? Tough for me to know: His poll numbers are, for whatever they say that is real, look real. His main slogan about "great again" is not very, say, solid as in, say, a legal document, a research paper in physical science or mathematics, an engineering document for, say, a long bridge, a detailed business plan, etc., but, then, for whatever reasons, US politics doesn't have a lot of documents nearly that solid.
So, if must evaluate a politician, and if vote then do have to do that, then have to go on evidence less solid than would want. Or, maybe pay attention to the least un-solid evidence can get.
It looks like politics is not very competitive, that is, doesn't offer very solid products, so that in comparison, if the auto industry were that uncompetitive, then the average distance a new car could travel without falling apart would be about 10 miles -- on a good day!
I don't want to evaluate Trump or any particular politician here. Instead, again, my point was to question how real the OP was; at the place I indicated, I found the OP to be not real enough and soon quit reading. So, I was shooting at the OP. So, I'm not really discussing politics or even abortion but just editorial writing.
But you really need someone who's supposedly in it for real for things to look really, really weird. A case of the Uncanny Valley effect?
I, for one, have given up on hoping the government will enact forward thinking policies.
I do believe there's something fundamentally wrong with politics as it exists today. This is heresy in some systems but I am someone who believes texts written hundreds of years ago cannot possibly remain viable, current and applicable. Certainly not in their entirety.
Yes, I am daring to suggest that the US Constitution might need some tweaks here and there. And, of course, the problem is this is just about as impossible as me flying using two feathers.
You have people in Congress who simply will not go away. If we gave them one or two terms and somehow encouraged young/er people to come to the forefront things could look very different.
Then there's the question of how our form of government might very well have devolved into something that conspires against the very progress we need to make. The last few decades have been characterized by not being able to do much of significance other than wage war. We do that very well. And it is sick. Yes, yes, I get it. But, fuck me, when is the world going to figure out how to coexist?
Yes, part of the problem is we still have whole regions operating from the mentality of pre-medieval humans. That's a huge problem. I am not smart enough to know what the solution might be. It could be somewhere between total isolation and total intervention. Don't know. These things ultimately lead to wars. I wish someone would come forward with the one genius idea to bring some stability to this planet. As intelligent as we are we seem want to prove we are a species that is content allowing a very small percentage of our people to just fuck things up beyond recognition. Most people are good. Yet, most people do nothing when the assholes piss all over what's been built for centuries.
Back to Trump. I have long contended that we, the US, need professional accomplished business people running the show. Contrary to what some might want to believe, business people, even those running large corporations, are not evil. Yeah, some are. The vast majority, by far, are not.
What Trump is putting on the table in no uncertain terms is the difference between "normal" people and politicians. And, to go farther, entrepreneurs or business people in general and politicians. When you listen to the two dozen professional politicians in the presidential race it isn't hard to see everyone is playing back the same old recordings. Sometimes I wonder if they have a pull-cord on their back like Woody that plays back the same old shit over and over. They say the same things, with the same neutered-human tone they've been saying for the last 50 years or more.
Trump comes along and their brains short-circuit. They have no clue. There's a general approach to business and entrepreneurship that does not jive with the way politicians work. The idea of attacking problems head on, proposing and testing solutions, quickly discarding what doesn't work, throwing fuel at things that do, being fiscally conservative yet not being shy about making large investments that will pay off with time and, in general, operating from the idea that we don't have to know everything before we get going.
How many of you started your businesses knowing absolutely everything there was to know about that business and having it all planned out before you even launched? Right. The more likely scenario is that you launched without fear, wearing your ignorance as a badge, and figured it out as you went along. Some things you just can't know or plan.
I am not proposing Trump is the solution. For me he still sits somewhere between a clown and a genius. I have no clue where this is going. Right now, it's interesting. I wish he'd spend more time showing the world how things are done outside of politics rather than lobbing insults at people. I sometimes secretly hope this is part of his media plan. One where, once half the herd has been killed off will have him get in front of the camera to spend a solid hour or two explaining his plans and theories as one might expect from someone who came out of Wharton and has as much real-world experience as he does.
Yes, I am disgusted with politics in the US. We are going nowhere. We are certainly not moving forward. With every passing year we fail to change our ways it will become exponentially more difficult for anything to have an effect. One has to be in awe of what a country like China has accomplished during the last, say, 25 years. Without really bold action we are all living through an era that is producing a massive industrial, financial and intellectual shift in the world.
I am convinced that not one of the professional politicians running today, regardless of party, has the ability to do a darn thing about anything. They are in it to win for their own sake. Once in, they'll be gutless and powerless. Not saying Trump is the solution. Yet, "they" are not the solution either.
@18:39 "With all due respect sir, are you running for president just to meet women?"
I was going to provide a youtube link, but this isn't the place for piracy. Feel free to find it yourself.
Other than that the president himself can be just a figurehead for entertainment.
Trump clearly knows how to hire good people, so while I would not vote for him, I'm also not really worried about what will happen if he does win.
If you think about it, the skillset needed to win an election, is not the same skillset you need for making good calculated decisions.
So IMO we really should not be evaluating candidates on their personal qualifications, but rather on how good they are at hiring good people to do the real work.
No, that's not true.
A minimally competent president, at a bare minimum, needs to be able to hire good people -- who are experts in fields where he is not an expert, in many cases -- and to effectively manage those people, including resolving disputes between them (including in areas where he is less of a domain experts than they are.)
While some of this can be delegated (e.g., to the White House Chief of Staff), ultimately, anyone to whom this is delegated is going to still need to be managed and be involved in disagreements that need to be resolved.
Little evidence Trump is a war monger.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/21/iraq.hillary/
Biden was on a similar timeline (that was still faster than Trump) from May of 2004;
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4992558/ns/meet_the_press/t/transc...