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Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

My Racial Blind Spots

March 14, 2016 – 9:19 am

What if I had to answer that debate question?

“What racial blind spots do you have?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Their answers weren’t all that impressive, and I suppose I shouldn’t have expected them to be. After all, the question resembles the standard “What is your biggest weakness?” challenge that job interviewers have been throwing at applicants forever, usually with disappointing results.

Probably nobody’s answer to Lemon’s question would be 100% accurate, because your biggest blind spots are always the ones you aren’t aware of, what Donald Rumsfeld used to call the “unknown unknowns“. If you can describe a blind spot, you’ve already taken a step towards filling it in.

So while it would be easy to stand in judgment over Bernie and Hillary’s answers, the more interesting question is: How would I answer Don Lemon? What are my racial blind spots?

Blind spots come mainly from the holes in a person’s experience, and I certainly have some. As a white person, I have been in the racial majority almost everywhere I’ve gone. I grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, went to mostly white schools, and earned my living in mostly white workplaces. In stores I (mostly) stand in line with other whites. If I find myself sitting next to a stranger at a bar, it’s usually another white. On TV dramas, I mostly watch white people deal with the problems of other white people. And on TV news shows — Don Lemon notwithstanding — I mostly watch whites interview other whites.

Being white may not be mandatory in my world, but it is normal.

I understand that not every white person’s experience is that limited. You might have been the one white guy on your high school basketball team, or the lone white waitress at a Mexican restaurant, or something like that. But I never was.

And that (lack of) experience gave me this blind spot: Thinking about race seems optional to me.

It’s not that I don’t think about race, or about the ways that non-whites’ lives are different from mine. Those sorts of issues come up all the time on this blog. I’ve written about how the Obamas’ experience in the White House has been different than other First Families. I’ve researched the racial history that my formal education swept under the rug. I wrote about Trayvon Martin and Ferguson. I’ve explained what dog whistles are, and how to notice them.

But I think about that stuff when I choose to. I have, for example, read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. And while I was reading, I thought a lot about growing up black in the Jim Crow South. But as soon as I put that book down, Angelou’s reality vanished for me as completely as Westeros does when a Game of Thrones episode ends.

And so, I have a hard time grasping that thinking about race isn’t optional for American blacks. To be black in America is to be constantly aware that many of the people around you are white, and that they might at any moment start reacting strangely to your blackness.

I just finished reading Democracy in Black by Eddie Glaude Jr. Mostly it’s a book about politics written by a Princeton professor. But a few personal stories sneak in. At one point in his childhood, Glaude’s family moved from the black part of their small Mississippi town to the “good” part, a section occupied by whites and a few upwardly mobile black families. On his first day in the new neighborhood, Glaude and another boy were playing in the dirt with their toy trucks, until the boy’s father came out and yelled at his son: “Get over here. Stop playing with that nigger.”

Another story concerned Glaude’s son Langston, who he sent to Brown. Langston’s urban studies class was assigned to visit a rich Providence neighborhood and make various observations. But in a wealthy neighborhood, a young black man sitting on a park bench with a notebook draws police attention, and being an Ivy League student or the son of an Ivy League professor is no excuse. With a hand on a weapon, a policeman intimidated Langston until he voluntarily left.

You can listen to stories like that (which nearly all blacks seem to have) and think: “Those are just isolated incidents. I’ll bet that doesn’t happen very often.” But how often would it have to happen before you came to the conclusion that you had to be on your guard all the time?

Blacks can never “check out” of race. They can’t say, “Today I’m just going to be a human being and forget about being black.”

But I can forget about race whenever I want, and so sometimes it seems strange to me that they don’t. “I don’t see race,” a lot of whites say, and I know what they mean: Of course I notice that the new guy at work is black, but it’s not a thing. I’m not going to go all In the Heat of the Night on him and act like black people shouldn’t have these sorts of jobs. I’m not going to harass him or insult him or treat him badly in any conscious way. If somebody makes it a thing, it’s not going to be me.

Because that’s how my blind spot tempts me to think about race: It’s optional. I can choose not to think about being white and he can choose not to think about being black, and then there won’t be any race problem.

But the new guy can’t just stop thinking about being black, any more than I could stop thinking about being white if somebody dropped me into the middle of Africa. What’s more, he shouldn’t, for the sake of his own safety. What if, when the policeman put his hand on his gun, Langston Gaude hadn’t thought about being black, and instead had thought about being an American citizen in a place where he had every right to be? Might he not have become the next Eric Garner or John Crawford?

That’s what “the talk” is about: Making sure that when the police show up, your black son will never forget that he’s black.

If you’re black in America, you never know when your blackness is going to become an issue. And if it is becoming an issue, you’d better not be slow to catch on, because you’ll need to implement some strategy — challenge, retreat, deflect, avoid — before things get out of hand.

Of course, race wouldn’t seem optional to me if I didn’t also have a second blind spot: a belief that unconscious racism doesn’t count. If I’m not trying to be a racist, well, that should be good enough. So of course it would be wrong for me to say (or even to think) “I don’t want to hire that guy because he’s black.” But if I just have a bad feeling about him, while one of his white competitors impresses me for no quantifiable reason — what’s wrong with that? Don’t I have a right to have hunches about people?

Sure I do. But before I act on those hunches, I ought to take into account the ways my thinking and feeling have been shaped by the cultural stereotypes built up over centuries. Even today, being black in America is like playing golf on a course that is more sandtrap than fairway. Getting to the green isn’t impossible, but just about anything blacks do exposes them to negative judgment, because there’s a very narrow path between lazy and pushy, between too sloppy and too flashy, between looking stupid and being a know-it-all, between refusing to stand up for yourself and being scary. That cellphone he’s taking out of his pocket looks like a gun because … well, it just does. And when Barack Obama acts like he’s President of the United States, it looks uppity. Who does he think he is?

We may not call people niggers any more, but the stereotypes that were designed to keep niggers in their place are still with us.

But if unconscious racism is something I have to take into account, then I have to think about race all the time. And that’s another thing to project onto blacks and resent: Why do they make everything about race? Why can’t we just be people together?

There’s an answer to that, but I hate to hear it: One big reason we can’t just be people together is that I don’t know how. I know how to pretend that I’m doing it. I know how to act as if I didn’t notice race. I know enough not to use certain words or tell certain kinds of jokes. I think I know how to get past my unconscious racism with individual people, eventually, once I get to know them. (But whether that’s true or not, you’d have to ask them.)

But I don’t know how to be people together with everyone, regardless of race. All I know is how not to notice when I’m failing. I can just take all that evidence and shove it into a blind spot.

Posted in Articles | Tagged race | Comments (14)

The Monday Morning Teaser

March 14, 2016 – 8:25 am

I stopped myself from writing a Trump-centered featured article for the third straight week. I know the buzz was all about the cancelled Chicago rally and the potential for violence whenever he speaks, but I’m trying to resist being trolled. I think it’s completely within Trump’s power to generate a new reason to talk about him every week, and I refuse to do that from now to November.

So this week’s featured article is a step back from the news cycle, or maybe a tangent off of it. I start with a debate question Don Lemon asked Bernie and Hillary, and rather than argue that one of them answered better than the other, I try to answer it myself: What are my racial blind spots?

The weekly summary starts with a meditation on the tendency for my attention to get captured by bright shiny objects like Trump or speculating about polls, and the need to occasionally take a step back to make sure this is really ME thinking, rather than the news cycle thinking through me. Having done that, I still have to discuss violence at Trump rallies and what’s going on in the primaries, but I hope I’m doing it with more perspective.

I also have another guns-make-safer link, a comment on President Obama’s rising job approval, and a conversation I had with a low-information voter, before closing with an amusing take on what our election process must look like from, say, Finland.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Unsound minds

March 7, 2016 – 11:16 am

He speaks his mind, but his mind isn’t right.

— 13-year-old Jayka,
in “Kids React to Donald Trump“

This week’s featured post is “Peak Drumpf“, where I make the case that we finally have the right anti-Trump argument.

This week everybody was talking about that strange debate

The best response to Trump’s nationally televised, out-of-the-blue claims about his genitalia is College Humor’s #TrumpShowUsYourPenis campaign.

It’s about transparency. He brought the subject up, and since fact-checkers have determined that so many of his other claims are false, this one requires evidence. The demand isn’t even partisan: If Hillary claimed to have a big penis, they’d want to see that too.

and the presidential race in general

After Super Tuesday, the question in both parties has been: “Is it over?”

I’ve been amazed by the number of pundits I’ve heard say something equivalent to: “Unless something changes, the leaders will end up winning” — as if this were the kind of wisdom people should pay them for. (A better version is sometimes attributed either to Yogi Berra or a Chinese proverb: “If you don’t change, you’ll end up where you’re headed.”)

The most intelligent answer to the question comes, as it so often does, from Nate Silver’s 538. Using a model of which states are good for which candidates, they’ve traced a most-likely-path-to-the-nomination for each candidate. In other words: If a candidate were going to just barely win a majority of the pledged delegates — phrasing the question that way puts to the side what the Democratic super-delegates will do — how many would you expect come from each primary or caucus? And how does that compare with the number of delegates that candidate has gotten in the contests decided so far?

On the Republican side, Donald Trump is running 5% ahead of his minimum winning pace. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is 14% ahead of pace.

Neither of those leads is all that intimidating in an absolute sense, given that something like 2/3 of the delegates are still to be chosen. But what is making Trump and especially Clinton seem inevitable is that some underlying trend has to change before anybody can beat either of them. Cruz or Rubio has to catch fire, or Sanders has to become competitive among black voters, or something.

If you can’t say exactly what that “something” is or why it’s going to start happening now (when it hasn’t been happening so far), the current trend feels locked in. That’s why George Orwell observed, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

I will say this about the Democratic race: I think the results so far show that blacks plus older voters plus middle-aged women is a winning coalition for Clinton. Sanders can’t turn things around unless he breaks that somehow.

A sports analogy: Sanders’ situation is like a running football team (i.e., a slow-and-steady offense) that falls behind. At some point the team has to drop its running game plan and start passing, because time is running out. It’s not that Sanders can’t win at this point, but that he can’t win just by continuing to do what he’s been doing. Pushing the analogy further, Clinton could still blunder into losing, as the other team could if it committed a string of turnovers.

Tomorrow’s Michigan primary is a good test. If Sanders were to become competitive among blacks and pull off a win in Michigan — which in an abstract sense ought to be perfect for his economic message — the race would be wide open. Clinton’s lead would then look like a regional Southern thing.

But the polls say that’s not going to happen. The RCP average of polls in Michigan has Clinton up by 22 points, and the poll most favorable to Sanders still has him trailing by 11. Nate Silver gives Clinton a 99% chance of winning in both Michigan and tomorrow’s other primary, Mississippi.

About the super-delegates: My personal opinion is that if Clinton and Sanders wind up virtually tied, the super-delegates will put Hillary over the top. But if Sanders has any advantage larger than a round-off error, the super-delegates will come around as well.

Last week I discussed Clinton’s strong showing among black voters from the point of view of “What do I know? I’m a white guy.”

I’ve got something better this week. Dopper0189 on Daily Kos explains “Why black voters vote the way they do“. It’s a long post with a lot of different insights, very few of which I would have guessed.

The big thing I learn from dopper0189 is that you can’t win over the black community with an if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach. Even if your policies seem (to you) like they would obviously benefit many blacks, you have to go out and sell those policies to the black community in very specific terms. This isn’t because blacks can’t make the connections themselves, but because they’ve seen those connections fail so many times. Plans that are targeted at “everybody” somehow wind up defining “everybody” in a way that leaves them out. That goes all the way back to Social Security, which originally made no provision for household servants or field workers or many other black-dominated jobs.

Going forward, let’s look past Bernie for a minute, to 2020 or 2024. If a future progressive candidate is going to marshal the kind of black support that it seems s/he ought to get, it’s going to take a lot of work over a period of time. The candidate is going to have to start building those relationships well before the campaign, the way Hillary did.

and you might also be interested in

Trump introduced his healthcare plan. It’s about what I expected: A collection of ideas that have been hashed over in Republican circles for years — like circumventing state regulators by letting insurance companies sell from whatever state they want (presumably the one that most tilts the field in their favor) — plus a number of promises and assurances that the specified proposals don’t deliver. Vox comments:

He says, “We must also make sure that no one slips through the cracks simply because they cannot afford insurance. We must review basic options for Medicaid and work with states to ensure that those who want healthcare coverage can have it.”

There’s a hint of a promise there that under Trumpcare, everything will be fine. Everyone will have access to health insurance, should they desire it. But there’s nothing in Trump’s proposal that takes him from point A to point B. There’s no explanation of whether the government will pay for this care and how they’ll deliver it

Two things stand out: TrumpCare eliminates ObamaCare’s guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions can buy insurance on reasonable terms. And rather than the subsidies ObamaCare offers to help poor and working-class people buy insurance, Trump offers only a tax deduction for premiums. So if you aren’t currently paying income tax, you get no help buying health insurance; and if you are paying income tax, those who pay a higher rate benefit more from the deduction.

Unemployment continues to fall: down to 4.9% in February. That’s the lowest rate since February, 2008, when President Bush’s economic collapse was just getting started.

Critics from Bernie Sanders to Ben Carson sometimes express skepticism about the unemployment rate, since it doesn’t count would-be workers too discouraged to look for a job, part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t find it, and various other people who have reason to be disappointed in the job market.

But as I’ve explained before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of those folks too. It publishes a variety of unemployment measures, prosaically denoted U-1 through U-6. U-1 is people unemployed for more than 15 weeks (currently 2.1%, flat since October, down from 2.5% a year ago). The unemployment rate you see in the headlines is U-3, while U-6 is the broadest measure of unemployment.

U-6 in February was 9.7%, which sounds bad compared to 4.9%, but also reflects a big improvement in the job market when you make apples-to-apples comparisons: A year ago U-6 was 11%. It hasn’t been this low since May, 2008, and it peaked at 17.1% in late 2009 and early 2010.

Governor Bobby Jindal writes in the WSJ that President Obama is to blame for Donald Trump. That is true in the same sense that President Lincoln was to blame for the KKK. If he’d just left slavery alone, the backlash against abolition would never have been necessary.

I’m left wondering if Jindal has found some way to blame Obama for the mess the Jindal administration left behind in Louisiana.

I’ve got a book recommendation: Misbehaving, the making of behavioral economics by Richard H. Thaler. The standard economics (that you may have learned in college) is based on the notion that markets are made up of rational actors who use all the publicly available information to make the best possible individual decisions. Everybody knows that’s not strictly true, but since the 1950s economists have held that it’s a good-enough assumption for making economic predictions.

Since the 1970s, Thaler’s career has revolved around poking holes in that worldview. In other words, he’s been looking for and documenting situations where the quirky decision-making of real human beings leads to results very different than the rational-actor models constructed by economists.

Not only is that an interesting topic that has all sorts of fascinating real-world applications (including the over-valuing of high draft picks in the NFL), but Thaler is a marvelous story-teller. His stories — of experiments in human decision-making, and of his attempts to introduce more realistic thinking into the stuffy and self-important world of academic economists — are consistently amusing. The book’s ongoing theme is that whether you are talking about contestants on Dutch game shows or University of Chicago business school professors choosing offices in a new building, people are funny — and you can’t really understand the world until you account for the predicable ways that people are funny.

The title has a wonderful double meaning: Economic models can fail when humans “misbehave” by not making the supposedly rational choices the model calls for. But by pointing out such embarrassing glitches, Thaler was also “misbehaving” according to the community standards of economists. So his career is a story of successful rebellion.

Finally, there’s political significance to the revolution Thaler has been leading: Idealizing markets, and exaggerating the powers of the people who participate in them, tempts a person to turn all of society’s decision-making over to “the Market”. For decades, economists’ false assumptions have biased their analysis in favor of market-based solutions. But people who are still making those simplistic Econ-101 arguments in favor of free markets are behind the times. They are, as Keynes observed, “slaves of some defunct economist”.

and let’s close with some tongue-in-cheek advice to black filmmakers

If they’d wanted Straight Outta Compton to win an Oscar, it should have centered on Paul Giamatti’s character.

If you’re not getting the joke, read David Sirota’s essay “Oscar Loves a White Savior“.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

Peak Drumpf

March 7, 2016 – 8:59 am

Donald Trump seems to be riding high. But the right anti-Trump message is finally getting out.

I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re at Peak Trump* here. There’s no real sign of it yet in the polls, and he may yet get a bounce out of the unpopular GOP establishment taking the gloves off against him. Even if Saturday’s voting didn’t go as well for Trump as Super Tuesday, none of his Republican rivals has any obvious path to the nomination. So it’s still possible that the GOP will stumble its way to a Trump candidacy in the fall.

Pundits have been predicting the end of Trump from the moment he announced, and so far all of them have been wrong. But I have a simple reason for believing that the threat of President Trump is finally receding: The right anti-Trump message has emerged and is starting to catch on.

The bad boyfriend. Up until now, arguing with Trump supporters has been like telling your 17-year-old daughter that her 29-year-old boyfriend is no good for her: It’s obvious to you, but everything you say just reinforces the me-and-him-against-the-world mystique that has been driving the relationship from the beginning.

So it didn’t work to laugh at the sheer absurdity of President Trump. Pointing out that he was violating all standards of political decorum — or that his facts were wrong and his proposals nonsensical — didn’t work. Being offended on behalf of Mexicans or Muslims or blacks or Jews or the disabled or Megyn Kelly didn’t work. His target supporters don’t identify with any of those groups, and Trump-supporting women probably think Kelly is a little too smart and pretty and full of herself.

Trump supporters are mostly white straight Christians — many (but not all) working class or less educated — who feel like all the trends are running against them and nobody will speak up for them. The fact that the same people who look down on them disapprove of Trump, and that Trump hasn’t been afraid to piss off all those other groups (and didn’t apologize when he was condemned for it) — that just made his supporters love him more.

You know what finally gets through to the 17-year-old? Meeting her boyfriend’s previous three teen-age girlfriends, the ones he dumped when they got pregnant. They look just like her — or at least they used to, before the single-mom lifestyle started to drag them down. Realizing that he told them all the things he’s telling her … that starts to mean something.

And that’s the message that’s emerging: Not that Trump is crude (which he is) or racist (which he is) or a proto-fascist (which he is) or unprepared for the presidency (which he is) or any of that. But he’s a con-man, and he hasn’t been conning Mexicans or Muslims or Megyn Kelly (who is too smart to fall for his bullshit). No, his career is all about conning the kind of people who support him now.

The Trump University scam. An article in Time describes the victims of his Trump University scam (who are now suing him) like this:

They seem to be middle-class or lower-middle-class people anxious about their financial situations and aspiring to do better. In other words, they are the exact group that Trump the candidate is trying to appeal to. … [Trump University] shortchanged thousands of vulnerable consumers, a large portion of whom were elderly, targeted with messages that Trump University was their ticket to avoiding spending their final years working as greeters at their local Walmart.

Trump U raked in $40 million ($5 million of which went straight to Trump) by promising that Trump would handpick mentors (“terrific people, terrific brains … the best of the best”) who would teach his “secrets” of how to make quick money in real estate. Under Trump’s guidance, you’d turn fast profits on deals that wouldn’t expose you to any risk, because somebody else would finance them. (You know: the same way Mexico is going to pay for that wall.)

In fact, the instructors had no real estate experience, had never met Trump, and their training was in how to up-sell students into ever-more-expensive courses: from free afternoon presentations to expensive weekend workshops and then to even more expensive mentorships — none of which would lead to any easy real-estate scores. Trump’s secret to gaining limitless wealth was always just over the horizon, in the next course.

the playbook [for Trump U instructors] spells out how that [weekend] session was meant to up-sell those $1,495 attendees into mentorship programs costing $9,995 to $34,995. It even uses the term “set the hook” to describe the process of luring people at the free preview session to take the three-day $1,495 course. Once their quarry was on the hook for $1,495, the message to be hammered home beginning on the second day of that program was that three days wasn’t nearly enough time to get the students out there making Trump-like deals. Only the more expensive mentorships could do that.

As in his campaign, Trump’s alleged wealth was part of the con: He didn’t need your money; he was going to give Trump U’s profits to charity. But he didn’t. (CNN also can’t figure out what happened to the money Trump supposedly raised for veterans’ charities.)

The Tampa scam. If Trump U were a unique example, Trump’s attempts to explain it away might be believable. But there’s also Trump Tower Tampa, the glorious-but-imaginary condo project pictured to the right. TTT bilked a bunch of middle-class and upper-middle-class Floridians out of their deposits –including a number of retirees who have no way to make that money back. According to Trump, the building was going to be

so spectacular that it will redefine both Tampa’s skyline and the market’s expectations of luxury.

Except he never built it. In fact, he was never going to build it. All he invested in the project was his name, which he licensed to the developers. When the project went bust in the Florida real estate crash — isn’t a real estate genius like Trump supposed to foresee things like that? — he walked away with his licensing fees ($3 million and a lawsuit that claimed he should get another million) and lost nothing.

But his insulation from any possible loss wasn’t revealed to the buyers before they signed their contracts. Quite the opposite.

At a gala reception attended by 600 dignitaries and well-heeled guests, Trump continued to give the impression that he was actively involved in the project. He had a “substantial stake,” he told reporters, and would have increased it but for the fact that the tower was selling so well.

When the project went bankrupt without having built a single condo, the big losers were the people who had trusted the Trump name enough to put down deposits. Jay Magner, the owner of a dollar store, says:

I lost $130,000. I didn’t know people could take your money and not build the building.

Jay McLaughlin, a physical therapist from Connecticut, also lost his money:

The main reason we went into this was Trump. We had no idea he was just putting his name on it and not backing it financially.

The Baja scam. The same story played out with the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico, south of Tijuana. It was supposed to be a luxury resort with a view of the Pacific. Trump licensed his name to the project, and marketed it as if the whole idea had been his to start with. With his help, the developers collected millions in deposits, mostly from Californians. But when it went bust, Trump told a different story to the LA Times:

Trump told The Times that the developers were to blame, saying he merely licensed his name to the 525-unit oceanfront project and was not involved in building it.

Maybe the condo buyers would have wanted to know that fact before they plunked down their money. And those blameworthy developers — shouldn’t a real estate genius like Trump be vetting those guys? Isn’t that precisely the kind of thing the Californians dreaming about their Trump oceanfront condos were trusting him to do?

Do you think he told them that he knew nothing about the developers other than the fact that they paid him money? Or did he claim that they too were “terrific people, terrific brains … the best of the best”?

And you know how Trump claims he never settles lawsuits? He settled that one. Lawyers for his victims said they were “very pleased with the outcome”.

There is no you-and-Trump, except in your mind. That’s the message that is eventually going to get through to Trump’s supporters: It’s not you-and-him against the world. In reality, there is no you-and-him against the illegal immigrants who want to steal your job, against the Muslim terrorists who want to kill you, against the Republican establishment that’s been selling you out, or against the politically correct liberals who keep calling you a bigot. It’s not even you-and-him against the Megyn Kellys who wouldn’t go out with you in high school, or who got to be cheerleaders when you didn’t.

That 50-foot wall between us and Mexico, or the trade deal that will bring all those jobs back from China, or the deportation force that will round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and send them back to Mexico — those are like the luxury condos in Tampa and Baja, or the real estate profits that Trump U graduates were supposed to start making. They’re fantasies he dangles that will never manifest in reality. Afterwards, when you remember how few details he gave you and how quickly he changed the subject whenever anybody tried to get those details, you’ll wonder why you ever believed in them.

That’s how it is when you get conned.

You-and-him is a fantasy he’s happy to let you believe in until he gets what he wants. Then he’ll be on to his next scam, and the marks in that scam will look a lot like you — just like the marks in his previous scams look a lot like you.

The wrong arguments. The stories of Trump’s previous cons have been out there for a while, but they’re only beginning to get the attention they deserve. Up until recently, Trump’s rivals had been ignoring him while they maneuvered towards a 1-on-1 match-up they believed they’d win, while his critics had focused on his apparent political weaknesses — his basic ignorance of anything related to public policy, his loose relationship with the facts, his conservative apostasy, his bigotry, and his un-presidential temperament.

What those critics didn’t appreciate was that Trump’s supporters share a lot of those weaknesses. Denigrating Trump also denigrated a lot of his target audience, and bound them closer to him. If he’s stupid, then they’re stupid — and they’re sick of being called stupid.

Even less effective were the articles written by people who are afraid of Trump. Trump’s target audience are people who feel small and ignored. But if Trump inspires fear, then identifying with Trump lets them experience the thrill that people are afraid of them. What could be more appealing?

Donald Drumpf. But now critics are starting to realize that you have to take out Trump’s apparent strengths. That’s the essence of John Oliver’s amazing takedown. Oliver shows clips of Trump fans enthusing about their hero: He tells it like it is. He says what he means. He’s telling the truth. He’s funding his own campaign. He’s strong and bold. He’s a great businessman.

And then Oliver systematically pops all those bubbles. The Donald Trump we think we know is the “mascot” for the Trump brand, which is a triumph of marketing and image-making over reality.

Oliver reviews the scams I detailed above, and closes by exploding the hype of the Trump brand: It’s not even really his family’s name. Generations ago, an ancestor changed it from Drumpf, which Oliver describes as “the sound made when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy.”

Drumpf is much more reflective of who he actually is.

So if you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump, the charismatic guy promising to make America great again, stop and take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf, a litigious serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader who he can’t decide whether or not to condemn.

Would you think that he would make a good president, or is the spell now somewhat broken? And that is why tonight, I am asking America to make Donald Drumpf again.

Oliver has acquired the web site donaldjdrumpf.com, where you can buy this attractive hat.

Even Romney. Mitt Romney has always been a little tone-deaf, and I doubt Donald was quaking with fear when Mitt announced he would speak out. But even his unprecedented denunciation of Trump (skip the first 2:30 of the video, or just read the transcript) — when was the last time a party’s most recent nominee publicly denounced its current front-runner in such vitriolic terms? — eventually found the right note:

But you say, wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t and no he doesn’t.

Look, his bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business, he didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.

… I predict that despite his promise to do so, first made over a year ago, that he will never ever release his tax returns. Never — not the returns under audit; not even the returns that are no longer being audited. He has too much to hide.

… Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

I’ll add this to Romney’s point about Drumpf’s taxes: He won’t release them because they’ll prove he’s not as rich as he says he is. That’s part of the scam too.

Suckers. The right response to a Trump supporter isn’t to show fear or get angry or paternalistically explain what the facts actually are or how the world really works. The right response is pity: You poor sucker.

Identifying with Donald Trump isn’t making his fans look strong. It’s showing everybody just how weak and foolish they are. This obvious flim-flam man has taken advantage of their insecurities, and is conning them the way he has conned so many people like them in the past.

Those poor suckers. They think Trump is standing up for them. But nobody is laughing at them harder than he is.

* While doing the final edit on this post, I discovered George Will is also talking about “Peak Trump“. Given Will’s record as a seer, that gave me a moment of doubt. But I’m sticking with my prediction.

Posted in Articles | Tagged 2016 election | Comments (47)

The Monday Morning Teaser

March 7, 2016 – 7:09 am

This week I’m going out on a limb and announcing “Peak Drumpf”, the moment when the threat of President Donald Trump looks scariest, and then begins to fade. The reason I expect things to start turning against the Donald is not that Mitt Romney finally marched into battle against him, and certainly not that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio has finally started to catch fire. I think it’s still possible that the GOP will stumble its way into nominating Trump.

But what makes me optimistic about the Donald’s ultimate fall is that the right message to use against him has finally emerged and started to spread: He’s a con-man.

Here’s why that’s important: The victims of Trump’s past cons (like Trump U or the condo projects that took people’s deposits and never built any condos) aren’t Mexicans or Muslims or anybody else his followers resent or fear; the victims are people just like them, and the kinds of things he said to con them sound just like what he’s telling his supporters now.

“Peak Drumpf” still needs a little bit of work, so let’s say it gets posted around 9 EST.

We’re in that three-week period where the nominations are going to be wrapped up, so the weekly summary is also going to be full of presidential politics: the least presidential debate in America history, where the nomination races stand, a better notion of why black voters aren’t backing Bernie, and Trump’s healthcare plan.

Non-race-for-the-White-House stuff includes a fun book about (believe it or not) behavioral economics, more good news about unemployment, and the simple change that would have made Straight Outta Compton an Oscar-winner.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Decisive Races

February 29, 2016 – 11:43 am

We were trying to do some modeling on which states Trump is strong and weak in — there’s now enough polling across different states to do that — and the best correlate we could find for Trump’s support is Google searches for the N-word.

— Nate Silver, 538 podcast, 2-25-2016

This week’s featured post is “Trump is an opportunistic infection“. If you happen to be near Billerica, Massachusetts this Sunday morning at 11, I’ll be at First Parish Church updating one of my best social-justice sermons, “Who Owns the World?”

This week everybody was talking about the primary/caucus results

The week saw two wipe-outs: Trump dominated in the Nevada caucuses, getting 46% of the vote and destroying the idea that his support had a ceiling well below that. And Clinton had an even more impressive victory in South Carolina, defeating Bernie Sanders nearly 3-to-1, 74%-26%.

Tomorrow is the first multi-primary day. Both parties have contests in Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia, while Alabama has only a Republican primary.

Republicans. Until Tuesday, the conventional wisdom among Republicans was that the other candidates were vying to get into a one-on-one runoff with Trump, where the non-Trump candidate would surely win. And so here in New Hampshire, I saw countless anti-Rubio and anti-Cruz ads — and even anti-Christie and anti-Kasich ones — but virtually no attack ads against Donald Trump. Trump himself advertised very little, but held big rallies and did his usual impressive job of drawing free media attention. The others tore each other apart and Trump won.

Since Tuesday, Rubio in particular has been going after Trump, sometimes with some very personal ridicule, but Trump looks set to sweep the Super Tuesday states tomorrow anyway, with the possible exception of Cruz’ home state of Texas.

If that holds, I have a hard time seeing how Trump loses the nomination. Not just because his position is so commanding, but because I don’t know what scenario I’m counting on if I bet against him. Is Rubio suddenly going to become the dynamic candidate of Republican establishment fantasies, rather than the lightweight he otherwise seems to be? And as I explain in this week’s featured post, the best arguments against Trump are off-limits to Republicans.

Democrats. After Sanders’ big victory in New Hampshire, pundits talked about Clinton’s minority “firewall”: Hispanics in Nevada and blacks in South Carolina. Sanders supporters countered that while their candidate may have been slow to catch on among non-white Democrats, now that he was seen as a viable threat to Clinton the polls would change.

Nevada was inconclusive for that thesis: The caucus entrance polls said Sanders won the Hispanic vote, but by a margin well within the margin of error. Nonetheless, Nevada’s black vote came in overwhelmingly for Clinton and put her over the top.

But in South Carolina the firewall held, by a margin even larger than the Clinton people expected. Blacks increased their share of the primary electorate from 55% in 2008 to 61% in 2016, and Clinton got even more of their support than Barack Obama did: 84% rather than 78%. It’s official: Bernie Sanders has a black problem. You can argue that the problem arises through no fault of his own — he has a good civil rights record and hasn’t been race-baiting — but it’s there.

People ask me why this is, to which my first answer is: “I’m a white guy, what do I know?” If pressed, my second answer is that the slow, stuttering, back-and-forth progress of racial justice in America makes Bernie’s promise of “political revolution” sound like pie-in-the-sky to many blacks, while Clinton’s message (that progress is hard, and that we have to be as focused on defending what Obama has accomplished as we are on going further) seems more realistic. But if that doesn’t sound right to you, I’ll retreat to my first answer.

As for what to expect tomorrow, Nate Silver’s primary-prediction model gives Clinton a better-than-98% chance of winning Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The model gives her an 88% chance in Massachusetts and 75% in Oklahoma. It predicts a Sanders victory only in his home state of Vermont (99%).

Obviously, if that happens Clinton will have a huge lead in delegates come Wednesday morning. Does that mean the race will be over for all practical purposes? Not necessarily.

An interesting tool for analyzing the race is Nate’s list of state-by-state benchmarks. The methodology here is interesting: He’s projecting who would win each state by how much if the race were a 50-50 tie nationally. Nate’s list shows that tomorrow’s primary states are ones you would mostly expect to be good for Clinton, though she seems to be polling above his benchmarks. A better run of states for Sanders happens after March 15.

Nonetheless, another 538 analyst, Harry Enten, sees South Carolina as a major setback for Sanders: Until then, he had been gaining on the benchmark totals he needed to pull even, but in South Carolina he lost by nearly 50% rather than the 20% loss the benchmark predicted.

Tomorrow night, the state I’m going to be watching is Virginia, which should be a swing state in the fall. Nate’s benchmark is for Clinton to win by 9%. If the margin is less than that, Bernie might still make a comeback.

BTW, I’ll repeat a point I first mentioned a few months ago: The way you beat a bully is by making people laugh at him, and the Democrats have a great comedian in Senator Al Franken. Wouldn’t he be the perfect VP candidate if the Republicans nominate Trump?

and the Supreme Court

In something of a shocker, news leaked out of the White House the Republican Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada was being vetted for the Supreme Court. Sandoval favors business over labor, but also seems pro-environment and is said to have “moderate” views on abortion, whatever that means. In short, he’s exactly the kind of compromise you might expect Republicans to leap on, if they were at all inclined to do that kind of thing.

Apparently they aren’t. Floating Sandoval’s name didn’t move the needle at all, and the governor removed himself from consideration a few days later.

If Obama’s plan was to appoint Sandoval, Democrats might want to take their chances on winning the next election instead. But if he was just trying to show America how unreasonable the Republican position is, he succeeded.

while some discussed the undisguised racism among Trump supporters

Just before the South Carolina primary, a pro-confederate-flag protest turned into a spontaneous Trump rally. A reporter for the Young Turks interviewed participants, who warned of “ethnic cleansing” against whites and expected Trump to do something about it.

In Iowa, fans at a white high school began chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” after losing a basketball game to a team with more non-white players. It’s hard to say exactly what they meant by it, but apparently his name either invokes white pride or is supposed to intimidate non-whites.

The important question is whether these examples are just random anomalies, or if they point to some larger phenomenon. Tuesday, when Chris Hayes interviewed Trump supporters at the Nevada caucuses, he found a bunch of nice people, some of whom had decided that Trump’s more outrageous statements were just showmanship and not to be taken seriously. (However, my personal experience indicates that a lot of racists are nice people when they talk to a pleasant white man like Chris.)

One way to research this question is through polls. For example, Public Policy Polling found that 38% of Trump supporters in South Carolina wish the South had won the Civil War, and various other polls have turned up additional disturbing results. But again, these results may be anecdotal, or may be blaming Trump for bad attitudes that could be found among many candidates’ supporters.

Nate Silver’s 538 web site specializes in poll-watching. A regular feature of the staff’s weekly podcasts is to review news stories about polls and ask whether they represent a good or bad use of the underlying data. Thursday’s podcast was headlined “Racism among Trump’s supporters“, and the overall conclusion is that yes, there is something in this data. Nate Silver said:

I resisted for a long time the notion, because again it is kind of a default for people on the Left, that “Oh, this is all about race.” But, like, I have almost come full circle the other direction, to where I think the media is not talking about this enough. And I think the centrist Joe-Scarborough pundits who are like “Oh, Trump will really shake things up” [have] to acknowledge the fact that some of this support is a result — maybe not a majority, I think probably just a plurality — but some of the support is a result of … of some of the worst impulses that Americans can have. And to indulge that, I think, is something people should be thinking about more carefully.

while I was struck by

a poll from AP-GfK, based on interviews between February 11 and 15. Most of the poll consists of typical questions: whether the country is on the right or wrong track, how well President Obama is doing his job, how important various issues are, and so on.

But things get interesting on page 21, when they ask:

Would you favor or oppose replacing the current private health insurance system in the United States with a single government-run and taxpayer-funded plan like Medicare for all Americans that would cover medical, dental, vision, and long-term care services?

A plurality favors the program, 39%-33%, which sounds good for ambitious liberals. But then they start filling in details, and approval drops.

What I think we’re seeing here is the low-engagement voter problem that I discussed a few weeks ago in “Say — you want a revolution?” Large numbers of voters have not thought through the issues well enough to have a coherent position. So if you ask them the wrong question and take their answer too seriously, you can easily get misled.

Republicans run into this problem when they ask people about government spending. Polls show that by a wide margin people believe the government spends too much. But when you get specific about what to cut, you find that the public also supports just about everything the government spends money on. What do they want less of? Bridges to nowhere, welfare for able-bodied adults who refuse to work, foreign aid to countries that hate us, and subsidized art projects that offend them — all of which adds up to way less than 1% of the budget. The other 99-point-something percent they’re fine with.

That’s why Republicans have learned not to specify their cuts, but to run on across-the-board reductions that make somebody else pick the victims. As Ben Carson put it: “Now anybody who tells me there’s not 3 to 4 percent fat in virtually everything that we do is fibbing to themselves.” Does that mean he wants to cut your Mom’s Social Security or your uncle’s veteran benefits by 3-4%? No, of course not! How can you think such a thing?

The contradiction that gets Democrats in trouble is that people love progress, but they hate change. Maybe there’s a great plan to improve public schools — and God knows that schools in general need improvement — but if your kid likes his teacher and has some friends in his class, you’re going to look at that plan skeptically. And I know that American health care is way too expensive and doesn’t cover everybody, but personally I understand how my insurance plan works and I like my doctor, so do I really want to shake things up?

Tell people that you’re going to improve things, and they’ll love it. Tell them that their own lives are going to have to change in incompletely specified ways that are probably going to be more positive than negative, and they’ll doubt you.

That’s how the insurance companies beat HillaryCare in 1993. That’s why ObamaCare’s worst press was about people whose insurance plans got cancelled. Almost invariably, the people in those stories eventually got a better deal, but that didn’t matter. They were forced to change, and change is scary.

In 2017, Medicare-for-All will have exactly the same problem. Will masses of people take to the streets to demand Congress pass it? Will filibustering senators fear the wrath of the American people in the 2018 elections? I’m skeptical.

I also think it’s interesting to speculate on what the same question might mean to different respondents. For example, on page 14 of the AP-GfK poll you find: “Which party do you trust to do a better job of handling the U.S. image abroad?” The numbers are close: 27% trust the Democrats more; 26% the Republicans, which is not a statistically significant difference.

But I suspect those two groups of people aren’t really answering the same question at all. If you’re a Democrat, probably the “image abroad” you worry about is that we’re crazy assholes: We start wars for little-to-no reason; we torture people; we want veto power over other countries’ revolutions; we think the rules that apply to every other nation in the world shouldn’t apply to us. So you want Democrats in office to make us behave like good citizens of the world.

But if you’re Republican, probably the image you worry about is that we’re pushovers; you want Republicans in office to convince foreigners not to mess with us. If we have to drop bombs and waterboard people to get that point across, so be it.

and you might also be interested in

Andrew Hacker in the NYT magazine imagines teaching statistics for understanding the real world.

and let’s close with something creative

Trump in Westeros.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (13)

Trump is an opportunistic infection

February 29, 2016 – 8:34 am

For decades, the GOP has been killing off its demagogue-detecting and bullshit-rejecting antibodies. Now it’s helpless.

As Donald Trump moves ever closer to their party’s nomination for president, many Republicans are trying to understand or explain what has happened. Various metaphors have been thrown around: It’s a “hostile takeover“, or a “class war“, or a “populist uprising“.

Here’s a more accurate comparison: Trump is like the opportunistic infections that attack people whose immune systems have been compromised. A healthy political party could have thrown off Trump’s candidacy with barely a sniffle, but today’s GOP is in grave danger.

Over the last few decades, the Republican Party has been systematically destroying all the habits and mores and traditions and standards that keep a political party stable and allow it to play a constructive role in governing a great republic like the United States. Those things function like antibodies: They may be invisible to the naked eye, but they head off outbreaks of all sorts of destructive nonsense.

Now they’re gone, and Donald Trump is running wild.

How did this happen? For years now, the Republican Party has increasingly been winning elections (at every level short of the presidency) by misinforming voters and appealing to their darker passions. It has pandered to believers in baseless theories like Birtherism and the gun-confiscation conspiracy, while ridiculing the scientific community’s warnings about climate change. It has claimed that racism is a thing of the past — “things have changed dramatically” John Roberts claimed while striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act — and that the only real bigotry today is “political correctness” and discrimination against whites and Christians.

Rather than change its own plutocratic policies, the GOP has scapegoated undocumented immigrants for working-class impoverishment. (If you’ve been losing at poker and wonder if someone’s been cheating you, don’t accuse the Mexican who’s been sweeping the floor. Look at the guy with all the chips.) It has pushed self-serving economic fantasies like “tax cuts pay for themselves” and biological fantasies like the female body “shutting down” to make pregnancy-by-rape impossible. It has looked the other way while hucksters and con-men fleeced its faithful. It has struck down any traditional notions of fair play; beating Obama has been the important thing, and only wimps appeal to gentlemanly traditions and rules of decorum. (If it’s OK to yell “You lie!” during the State of the Union, what’s wrong with endorsing a shout-out that Ted Cruz is a pussy?)

In short, the GOP has devolved from the Party of Lincoln — or more recently the Party of Eisenhower — to the Party of Truthiness. (Truthiness, coined by Stephen Colbert, is the seductive notion that what your gut wants to believe must be true, independent of any facts or science or expert opinion.) The result is that the party’s base has no immune system that would reject a candidate like Trump.

All the weapons another candidate might use to take Trump down have been systematically dismantled. Are his “facts” wrong? Mitt Romney already burned that bridge in 2012. Do experts say his proposals are nonsense? There are no experts any more; if you feel a need for expert support, go invent your own experts like the Koch brothers and right-wing Christians do. Are his speeches full of racist dog-whistles? Politically correct nonsense! Racism ended in the 60s, except reverse-racism against whites. And if Republicans had to expel anybody who dog-whistled about Obama, there’d be no party left. Are there echoes of fascism in his giant rallies and cult of personality? In his celebration of real and imaginary violence against hecklers? In his fear-mongering about unpopular ethnic or religious groups? In his implication that specific policies are unnecessary, because all will follow from installing a Leader with sufficient Will? More nonsense: There is no fascism any more, unless you mean liberal fascism or Islamofascism.

With all the legitimate arguments of political discourse unavailable, other candidates were left to fight each other and wait for Trump to go away. And when Marco Rubio recently decided he finally had to take Trump on, the only weapon at hand was to tease him like a third-grader, suggesting that he wet his pants during a debate.

While many “establishment” Republicans fruitlessly look for a miracle drug to cure Trump fever without also taking down Cruz, Rubio, and half their Senate candidates, others are beginning to surrender. It’s just one election; maybe it won’t be so bad.

But this is where the compromised-immune-system analogy has something to teach: People whose immune systems have been crippled by AIDS or chemo-therapy seldom catch just one disease. Even if some massive dose of political antibiotics could flush Trump out of the Republican system, the underlying problem is still there: The Republican base cannot detect and reject hucksters. It cannot tell fact from fantasy. It values posturing and bombast over the skills necessary to govern a republic. It seeks scapegoats rather than solutions. It winks and nods at racism and white entitlement.

As long as that remains true, new Trumps will arise in 2020 and 2024, and any qualified Republican candidate offering real solutions will be defenseless against them. The Republican Party doesn’t just need to find a way to deal with Donald Trump. It needs rebuild its immune system.

Posted in Articles | Tagged 2016 election, Republicans | Comments (27)

The Monday Morning Teaser

February 29, 2016 – 8:13 am

This week, big victories by Trump in Nevada and Clinton in South Carolina set the stage for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries, and have pundits speculating about whether the nomination races are over or not.

But while those sound like similar situations, the possibility that it may be too late to stop Trump is causing far more anguish among Republicans than anything Democrats might be feeling (or would be feeling if Sanders were threatening to sew up the nomination).

All sorts of metaphors are floating around about what Trump represents to the Republican Party. (“hostile takeover” seems to be one of the most popular.) In this week’s featured post I suggest one I find more accurate: “Trump is an opportunistic infection”, the kind that only people with compromised immune systems are vulnerable to. Mainstream Republican candidates can’t get any traction against Trump because over the last few decades the Party has systematically de-legitimized all the fact-checking and expert opinion and separation-of-reality-from-fantasy necessary to take him down. So the GOP’s problem is not just one guy: Unless and until they figure out a way to restore the immune system of their base, they’ll be vulnerable to Trump-like infections in all future elections as well. That post is pretty much done, so it should appear shortly.

In the weekly summary, I’ll examine whether the shift in pundit opinion is justified: Is it all over but the shouting? Is it likely to be over tomorrow? (Probably not, I think, though Trump and Clinton are on the verge of building significant leads.) I’ll also discuss an interesting poll demonstrating the variability of people’s opinions about single-payer health care, and what that means for the viability of Sanders’ signature proposal. Also, Nate Silver’s crew discusses the polls showing disturbing levels of racism among Trump supporters, Obama floats a strange Supreme Court trial balloon, and we’ll close with a Game of Thrones mash-up. Expect that around 11 EST or so.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (5)

Carrying a Presidency to Term

February 22, 2016 – 10:52 am

Apparently, the GOP thinks that Black Presidents only get 3/5ths a term.

— a friend of Ken Wissonker

This week’s featured posts are “Replacing Scalia (or not)” and “The Apple/FBI question is harder than it looks“.

This week everybody was talking about how to replace Justice Scalia

I look (skeptically) at the arguments for delaying until after the election in “Replacing Scalia (or not)“. One argument I left out of that post: the idea that the voters should decide more directly, by making the nomination an issue in the presidential election.

That’s a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest is that if the Founders had wanted the voters to elect Supreme Court justices, they would have written the Constitution that way. In fact, the Founders wanted to insulate the Court from politics as much as was practical in a government of the people. That was the reason for lifetime appointments, as Hamilton explained in Federalist #78.

Matt Yglesias outlines four approaches Obama could take in choosing a nominee, from “olive branch” to “declaration of war”.

Last week I talked about my personal reaction to Scalia’s death, and in particular wrestling with my feeling of joy in the removal of a powerful enemy.

It turns out I wasn’t the only person thinking about that issue. I’m on a Facebook group with a bunch of Unitarian Universalist bloggers (i.e., religious liberals), many of whom are ministers or ministers-in-training. Several of them wrote about their conflicted feelings concerning Scalia’s death.

At Head Above Holy Water, divinity student Michael Brown separated Justice Scalia, who was his legal and political enemy, from Anton Scalia the person, who (like everybody) was a flawed human being but nonetheless deserved compassion. Brown thinks about his internship as a hospital chaplain, when he was called to comfort dying people and their families, regardless of any differences of opinion or lifestyle.

Being awake and alive and sincere means recognizing complexity and honoring it. Spiritual healing is rooted in recognizing the differences between one’s feelings and the universal need for harmony between living beings. The boy I was who was scared, and scarred, by the bigotry Justice Scalia carried into the books of law has grown into a man who understands the beauty of contradictions.

May Justice Scalia, and Scalia the person, find peace.

Taking a conflicting view, Rev. Scott Wells pondered how to discuss Scalia’s death in front of his congregation, and particularly in front of those who had been wounded by Scalia’s judgments, or would have been wounded if those judgments had prevailed. (Wells himself is a married gay man, and reflects that due to the Windsor decision that Scalia opposed “my family is safer.” Getting theologically technical, Wells comes out of the Restorationist tradition of Universalism, where I’m more of an ultra-Universalist, like Hosea Ballou.) Wells sees eulogizing a powerful man in a way that ignores the damage he did as a triumph of “niceness over goodness”.

I would caution people to not forgive Scalia because it’s the nice thing to do, or expected of them. He did not repent of his action, nor seek your forgiveness. Quite the opposite. It is the way of the powerful to expect rules to apply to you and not to them. Do not comply. You are not the unreconciled party. And now that he’s gone, Scalia will have to manage with God’s docket; you do not have to plead to him, or for him.

“It is the way of the powerful to expect rules to apply to you and not to them.” That quote might show up at top of a weekly summary sometime.

But whether we mourn Scalia or not, we should still be fair to him. One quote I’ve seen bouncing around the internet — it was quoted in a comment on last week’s summary, and many other places — comes from his dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 case about teaching creationism in Louisiana schools. The quote starts “The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger” and goes on from there.

Fortunately, another commenter (sglover) realized that the quote is out of context. At that point in his dissent, Scalia is not stating his own opinions, he is summarizing the case made by witnesses whose credentials “may have been regarded as quite impressive by members of the Louisiana Legislature”. His larger point is that the Court’s majority was too quick to assume that the legislature passed the pro-creationism law purely out of religious motives.

I still think he’s wrong, but his argument is much more subtle than the quote makes it appear.

and the primary/caucus results

Democrats. Clinton got a much-needed 53%-47% win in the Nevada caucuses. This narrow win in a small state only nets her four more delegates than Sanders, but a win of any sort should stop the steady drip-drip-drip of what’s-wrong-with-the-Clinton-campaign stories, at least until the Democrats vote in South Carolina this Saturday.

Diving a little deeper into the Nevada results yields some mixed messages. Nevada was supposed to test whether Bernie Sanders could break through with Hispanics, and he did: According to NBC’s entrance polls, 19% of the caucus-goers identified as Hispanic/Latino, and Sanders won that segment 53%-45%. Clinton’s margin came from African-Americans, who cast 13% of the votes, but went for Clinton 76%-22%. South Carolina, where blacks are a majority among Democrats, will test whether Sanders can change that result. If he can’t, his candidacy is doomed; it’s hard to see how white liberals, or even white-plus-Hispanic liberals, can carry Bernie by themselves.

A more subtle problem for Sanders was pointed out Saturday by Rachel Maddow, and then fleshed out on MaddowBlog by Steve Benen: When you ask Sanders’ supporters how he will get elected in the fall and how he will get Congress to pass his programs after he takes office, they talk about a “political revolution”. In other words, Sanders will energize previously apathetic or discouraged voters, creating a tidal wave of support from people whose opinions had not affected American politics until his campaign gave them a voice. (I critiqued that vision two weeks ago.)

But that’s hard to square with the fact that compared to the last contested Democratic campaign in 2008, turnout is down. Nevada continued that trend from Iowa and New Hampshire. To the extent that new voters are showing up, they are indeed voting for Sanders. And the 2008 Obama campaign did draw a lot of new voters to the polls, so comparisons to any year but 2008 are not bad. But so far the revolution does not appear to be happening.

Ever since I posted “Smearing Bernie: a preview” last month, I’ve been waiting for conservatives to start taking Sanders seriously as a possible Democratic nominee, and experimenting to see which attacks get traction.

A few themes are emerging. This video funded by two billionaires focuses on Sanders’ hurting small business and promising to raise taxes. An article by CNS (formerly Christian News Service) connects Sanders to Castro. Another theme that I’ve seen in several places is that Bernie is “a loser“; he was barely able to support himself until he started getting elected to public office. Attention is also being drawn to his personal history, particularly that he wasn’t married to his son’s mother. None of these attacks has gotten national play so far, so I don’t know what conclusions the attackers are coming to.

Republicans. Trump (33%) won a clear victory in South Carolina, while Rubio (22.5%) edged out Cruz (22.3%) for second. In spite of pulling out all the stops, including bringing in his brother, Jeb Bush (7.8%) was a distant fourth, narrowly beating John Kasich (7.6%) who barely campaigned in the state, and Ben Carson (7.2%).

As a result, Bush dropped out, ending the most expensive failure in American political history. Money, it turns out, can bring your message to the voters. But if you don’t have a message, you can’t buy one.

Ever since Bush began to fade, pundits have been predicting that the Republican electorate will eventually settle on Rubio. And Rubio’s second-place finish in South Carolina is a nice bounce-back from his disastrous New Hampshire results, giving yet another lift to the Rubio-wave-is-starting meme. But he still hasn’t won anywhere yet, and no one has identified where he’s going to start winning.

Cruz is still competitive — he even took the lead in one recent national poll — but he has to shake his head when he looks at these results: White evangelicals are supposed to be Cruz’ base; nobody has pandered to as many way-out-there preachers as Cruz has, and his father is one. Those voters turned out in large numbers: 67% of the Republican primary voters identified as evangelical or born-again white Christians. But Trump won that segment. The Trump/Rubio/Cruz breakdown was 34%/21%/26%.

It’s yet another example of how the Trump phenomenon is defying all conventional wisdom. Cruz has got to be wondering how he could possibly lose Southern evangelicals to a three-times-married New Yorker who can’t even name a particular Bible verse.

Digby reflects on why none of that — not even the Donald attacking W for 9-11 or picking a fight with the Pope — turns off his supporters.

As I’ve been writing for quite a while, the Trump phenomenon has exposed something completely unexpected about the Republican coalition, even to people who have spent years observing it. It comes more and more into focus every day: It turns out that a good many members in in good standing of the conservative movement don’t care at all about conservative ideology and never have.

Small government, low taxes, family values, military toughness — a few people believed in all that literally, but for much of the conservative base those have always been symbols of something else.

The chattering classes like to say “the GOP base is frustrated because conservative leaders let them down so they are turning to Trump as a protest.” This misses the point. They did let them down but not because they didn’t fulfill the evangelical/small government/strong military agenda. They let them down because they didn’t fulfill the dogwhistle agenda, which was always about white ressentiment and authoritarian dominance. Trump is the first person to come along and explicitly say what they really want and promise to give it to them.

and Apple

Apple is challenging a court order requiring it to help the FBI crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists. That issue gets complicated in a hurry, so I’ve moved it to its own article.

and you might also be interested in

As the price of oil continues to fall and stay down, the long-term stability of oil-dependent countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia is being called into question. Both regimes look a little like crime syndicates, in which the leader commands the loyalty of his captains only to the extent that he can keep the money flowing. How much can the pool of money shrink without threatening that model?

In Atlantic, Sarah Chayes and Alex de Waal write “Preparing for the Collapse of the Saudi Kingdom“. The Economist looks at “If Russia Breaks Up“. Behind the firewall in Foreign Affairs, Alex Motyl speculates “Lights Out for the Putin Regime“, a scenario that David Marples disputes.

One of my Facebook friends raised the question: Why don’t more poor people vote? And of course there are obvious answers about voter suppression, transportation when you don’t own a car, and the inflexibility of work hours for minimum-wage jobs. But there’s another answer that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and gives me another chance to plug a classic speech by one of my friends, Tom Stites: The media covers political news from a professional-class point of view, so politics is hard for a poor person to get interested in or see the point of.

Just to give one example: When new unemployment numbers come out, what does the media focus on? How this news affected the stock market, and whether it is good or bad for President Obama’s popularity. Rarely does it discuss what this means to you if you’re looking for a job or worried about losing the one you have.

If you’re poor, the underlying message of just about every news outlet is that the news is not for you. In particular, politics is not for you. It’s an overblown wrestling match between competing groups of professionals, none of whom really have your interests in mind.

Tom’s solution is the Banyan Project, which I plug every now and then: local news co-ops whose mission is to inform the bottom 50%.

and let’s close with a candidate you probably hadn’t considered

Our neighbor to the north announces its Canada-cy for President of the United States.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (14)

The Apple/FBI question is harder than it looks

February 22, 2016 – 8:55 am

Nothing about the Apple vs. the FBI showdown is as clear-cut as it initially appears.

There’s a way of telling the story that makes Apple sound completely unreasonable, and could even justify Donald Trump’s call to boycott the company: The FBI needs to get information off the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists (Syed Rizwan Farook), so that it can check whether there are additional conspirators or direct operational links to ISIS. The only damage in the FBI having that information is to the privacy of a dead terrorist. But Apple is fighting a court order that instructs the company to help the FBI, in a case that could well wind up at the Supreme Court. Senator Tom Cotton draws this conclusion:

Apple chose to protect a dead ISIS terrorist’s p‎rivacy over the security of the American people.

Sounds pretty bad. But that story falls apart in a bunch of ways. First, CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen argues that the information on that particular phone is probably not all that important.

What might be learned from Farook’s iPhone? Of course, we don’t know, but it’s likely that it wouldn’t be much beyond what we already know from the couple’s Facebook postings, their Verizon phone account, their computers seized by police, the evidence found at their apartment complex and the fulsome confession of their friend Enrique Marquez, who allegedly provided them with the rifles used in their massacre and also allegedly knew of their plans to commit a terrorist attack as early as 2012.

No evidence has emerged that Farook and his wife had any formal connection to a terrorist organization, and the plot involved only the couple and the alleged connivance of Marquez. What might be found on Farook’s iPhone therefore is more than likely simply only some additional details to buttress the overall account of what we know already.

Bergen thinks the FBI is pushing this case purely to establish a precedent for future cases. In public-relations terms, Farook is the least sympathetic target the FBI is likely to get, so why not have the public battle here?

He notes that Apple’s side of the argument is not so clear-cut either: Apple has cracked iPhones for the government many times in the past, and responds to court orders concerning iPhone data that has been backed up to iCloud. So what great principle are they standing on?

These revelations suggest the possibility that the facts of this particular case aren’t as important as the larger principles at stake and that both Apple and the U.S. government are using the San Bernardino case as something of a test of the question: Should tech companies give the FBI any kind of permanent backdoor?

And then things get technical: What’s different about this iPhone (as opposed to the ones Apple has previously made available to the government) is that it’s a more recent version, the 5C, whose security features Apple touted. So Douglas Rushkoff sums up what the FBI wants of Apple:

They’re saying, “We want you to reveal that the promise you made about this phone turns out not to be true.”

In an open letter to its customers, Apple emphasizes that it isn’t breaking faith with them:

For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.

Summing up a few of the technical details: Apple doesn’t have the information on Farook’s iPhone, doesn’t have his passcode, and doesn’t have a software tool that recovers the data without the passcode. What, then, could Apple do for the FBI? One security feature of recent iPhones is that the data on an encrypted phone is wiped if an incorrect passcode is entered 10 times in a row. This prevents breaking into a phone by what is called a “brute force” approach, where you connect the phone to another computer that just runs through all possible passcodes. (If we’re talking about the typical 4-digit iPhone passcode, that’s only 10,000 possibilities, which wouldn’t take very long. I’ve seen estimates varying from half an hour to an hour.)

What the court has ordered Apple to do is provide the FBI with what is basically a software patch to circumvent that auto-erase feature. Once they have that, the FBI can crack the phone.

Apple’s response is that it has never written such software, and it doesn’t want to.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

In other words, there won’t be any way to un-ring that bell: Once Apple has software that circumvents its security features, what happens to that software after the FBI has Farook’s data? At a minimum, it’s available to court orders in future cases. And if it’s available to American court orders, why couldn’t it be available to Chinese court orders? Or Iranian court orders? The principle that protects a terrorist today could protect a dissident tomorrow. And if Apple doesn’t stand on a principle, it becomes a kind of court itself, deciding case-by-case which governments deserve its help in which situations.

Worse yet, what happens to the security-circumventing software after this case? What if Apple’s internal security fails, and the software (or enough hints to allow some hacker to reproduce the software) gets out? It could even wind up in the hands of terrorists who decrypt information that helps them plan some future attack.

That’s how you wind up with a story where Apple is the hero: They’re bravely fighting to maintain our privacy. That’s how Edward Snowden put it in a tweet:

The @FBI is creating a world where citizens rely on #Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.

But Douglas Rushkoff is skeptical of that story too.

It would be a mistake for people to think of this as “The People” against government security. That’s a ruse. Really, it’s the world’s biggest corporation versus the world’s most powerful military. That’s what we’re looking at.

And while I do believe that we people should defend our right to privacy, I don’t see the individual’s right to military-grade encryption. I see Visa companies, or Bank of America’s need to use it on my behalf, if Chinese hackers are using it to buy condoms on my Visa card…

For me to have something that the full focused attention of the Pentagon – which I’m sure is involved – and the FBI… To have something that they can’t break into… Imagine a real-world metaphor for that. “Oh, you’ve got a lock in your house that’s so powerful that if they brought the freakin’ army, and tanks, they couldn’t get in?”

There is certainly an economic angle here: The big tech companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. — were deeply embarrassed when Snowden revealed how complicit they all were in the NSA’s legally and morally dubious snooping on people who had done nothing to draw suspicion to themselves.

In that sense, Apple’s position (supported by Google and some other tech companies) is a sort of repentance: We have sinned in the past, but we have seen the light now and will sin no more. But the issue isn’t moral, it’s market-based: We need customers to believe we’re on their side, rather than the side of the government that wants to spy on them.

And finally, there’s a technological-inevitability angle on this: If more-or-less unbreakable encryption is possible at a price people are willing to pay, someone will provide it. (In response to Rushkoff: I don’t really need a lock and a door that tanks couldn’t break through, but if I could cheaply get one, it might be tempting.) If the U.S. government won’t let American companies provide those secure products, then they’ll be made in other countries.

So the United States can’t really stop that industry, it can just give it to some other country.

So that’s where I end up: siding with Apple in this specific case, but not making a hero out of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Right now, market forces put Apple on the side of personal privacy. Meanwhile, the FBI is trying to order the tide back out to sea. Law enforcement would do better to start adjusting to the future now.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t think this is affecting my view — I believe I’d feel the same way if Microsoft were taking a similar stand — but I should mention that I own Apple stock, as well as various i-gadgets. However, I am not currently using my iPhone’s encryption capabilities to hide any illegal activities.

Posted in Articles | Tagged civil liberties, terrorism | Comments (21)

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