The tone of this election year seems to be more feverish than in previous elections. Mitt Romney was quite calm when he said that 47 percent of Americans wouldn’t vote for him because they paid no income tax and/or received a lot of government handouts. He didn’t say that those voters were immoral. He recognized that they could legitimately perceive that it wasn’t in their interest to vote for him.
People today seem to be taking the opposite tack compared to Romney:
- Paul Krugman in the New York Times says that electing Trump will melt the planet
- “GOP must confront Trump nightmare” says the editorial staff of the Boston Globe (same folks portrayed in the movie Spotlight as not bothering for about 10 years to pursue a story about child sexual abuse in churches… but Trump is urgent!). The article concludes with “There’s only one right answer.”
Is there in fact only one right answer? Start with a voter who perceives her job being at risk due to immigration and therefore votes for Donald Trump. According to the current thinking among Democrats, she is “wrong” and/or “evil” and/or “supports fascism/racism/etc.” I haven’t heard anyone say “Well, she is differently situated than I am and therefore naturally would have different interests and vote for a different candidate.” An environmentalist friend says that Donald Trump is an evil populist and that the entire planet will be put at risk if he is elected. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, not the same kind of “populist” due to his experience in Washington. A Sanders victory will ensure that Planet Earth heals.
Some Facebookers are essentially demanding that all of their friends stop whatever they are doing to pay attention more or less full-time to the Great Cause of preventing Donald Trump from becoming a Hitler-style dictator.
I’m wondering why it wouldn’t be legitimate for a person to say that state or local laws were of more interest and that, to the extent political energy was available, he or she was concentrating attention on those laws. Let’s go through some examples.
- Consider a parent with a child who is not being challenged in a public school. That’s a 7-year-old mind going to waste for six hours per day. The federal government and the President have essentially nothing to do with what happens in this school. Would it be wrong for that parent to say “I don’t care if Trump, Bernie, or Hillary wins because I’m working on getting individual assignments for children at Johnnie’s school”?
- How about a Minnesotan who had sex with a successful married dentist and is collecting $22,596 per year in tax-free child support under Minnesota family law. The same child could yield $100,000 per year under Wisconsin law. Would it be unreasonable for the Minnesotan to say “I’m more interested in getting Minnesota to remove the cap on child support so that I can quadruple my spending power than in who occupies the White House”?
- Alfred A. Stoner needs his glaucoma meds every morning, but his state criminalizes marijuana possession. If his state law were changed so that marijuana were legal, as it is in Colorado, for example, he wouldn’t have to worry about being imprisoned. Is Mr. Stoner a bad person because he says “I am putting all of my political effort into marijuana legalization because I would rather be at home with President Trump in the White House than be in prison with Hillary Clinton in the White House”?
- Melissa Labralover wants to take her dog to a neighborhood field to run every morning and every evening with other dogs, but it is illegal to have an off-leash dog in her town and this field is covered in weeds and broken glass (due to teenagers who were forced to turn to beer after being unable to get the glaucoma medication that they required). She wants to see her town budget to clean up the field and to amend its laws so that dogs can be off-leash within the confines of the field. Is she allowed to say “My income is modest so my tax rate is low and I really don’t care what they do 3000 miles away in Washington because what would make the most difference to Rover and me is a dog park”?
Readers: In terms of things that would have a direct impact on your life or your family members’ lives, are you most interested in seeing changes at the federal, state, or local level?
The immigration issue alone is absolutely crucial and a pivotal moment in American history. This is at the heart of why people are so agitated. It’s not really strictly about economic self-interest considerations, and other things ammenable to dollar based philg style analysis. It’s maybe going over your head a bit.
Somebody puts a stop to the levels of legal and illegal immigration we have at the moment, or the country is unrecognizably transformed by unprecedented demographic changes in upcoming decades. People see this happening and know it on a visceral level, and don’t like it. It’s really not just about jobs or crime. There are flashes of ethnic self-interest and consciousness developing. The screechers on the left are in a sense correct about what’s going on when they try to go on about racism and nazis. Watch the Jeff Sessions endorsement video and listen to that crowd and tell me there is not a new movement forming.
Econ-blogger Tyler Cowen recently discussed the superiority of administration in local govt by Republicans and Democrats hand out goodies to their peoples: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/03/core-differences-republicans-democrats.html
It strikes me as blatantly obvious that Trump’s belligerent posturing could accidentally trigger war with China. Then, all bets are off as to the outcome.
PS- I don’t spend any time feeding trolls.
There’s legit anxiety that every attack on Drumpf only feeds his stature to the people who want to throw all the elites out. (Romney’s attack, for instance, can’t possibly hurt him)
No comparison. The Feds can draft you and send you to war.
I think it is highly important to not leave out the tone of Trump’s rhetoric. Discounting if one agrees with his policies or not. A Trump presidency, and even a Trump candidacy, is legitimizing a bigoted world view.
JT – in what way is Trump bigoted? And how is that illegitimate? What does tone have to do with it?
I’m not a Trump supporter, but all I can gather from your post is name-calling. Perhaps I should take your opinion as descriptive rather than explanatory
In my experience, getting involved in local politics made a significant impact, but it takes much more time than just casting a vote.
In order to have an impact, you actually need to show up at hearings or board meetings, regardless of when & where they’re scheduled (e.g., 25 miles from work smack in the middle of your work day). Often you’ll need to stand up and make statements at multiple meetings over the course of several months before a decision is made. It can be worth it though. A handful of people can have a significant impact.
“GOP must confront Trump nightmare” says the editorial staff of the Boston Globe
Soooo, the GOP should take advice from the editorial staff of the Boston Globe.
@Bobbybobbob: Somebody puts a stop to the levels of legal and illegal immigration we have at the moment, or the country is unrecognizably transformed by unprecedented demographic changes in upcoming decades.
It’s already happened in large parts of the US – large swaths of FL, CA, TX, and NYC, among others.
re: …direct impact on your life or your family members’ lives, are you most interested in seeing changes at the federal, state, or local level?
Federal — cut spending + cut taxes = non-defense corporations flourish > my portfolio increases in value
State — cut spending + cut taxes = non-defense corporations flourish > my portfolio increases in value
Local — I live in a town of 3500, counting cats and dogs. My property taxes are $3,200/year. We have a school and a snowplow. That’s it. No police force, no sidewalks, no street lights, no garbage pickup, no water (each house must have a well), no sewer.
Trump presidency — Families and students around the world pay large sums of money to send their children to elite universities*. Presumably they do this because the faculty has a history of scholarly achievement in their respective discipline. And students benefit from the learning opportunity the faculty provides. My guess is very few faculty members believe in astrology, voodoo, or intelligent design. In other words, (in general) it’s a fairly rational bunch with a wide range of world views. That said, how many faculty members from MIT or Harvard would vote Trump for President of The United States? My guess, less than 1%. I’ll go with faculty consensus from MIT and Harvard.
*MIT Tuition: $46,400 (Plus..room and board $13,730; books and personal expenses $2,816)
*Harvard Tuition: $45,278 (Plus..room and board $15,381; books and personal expenses $3,741)
Sorry about the formatting, I didn’t realize line-breaks are significant! Feel free to delete my previous comment.
Why is it a moral imperative to pay attention to the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency? … [Romney] recognized that they could legitimately perceive that it wasn’t in their interest to vote for him.
You know, that raises a fascinating question. Shouldn’t voters be thinking about the common good as well as their individual interests? I assume that it’s unrealistic to expect them to completely ignore their own interests; but shouldn’t they also be thinking about what’s good for society as a whole? To the extent that they pursue their individual self-interest to the detriment of the common good (as in your example of raising the Minnesota child-support cap), isn’t that bad for the United States?
Matthew Yglesias on The Fast, the Furious, and the Long-Term Decline of American Social and Economic Institutions:
As a Canadian, I find the attitudes of American CEOs and especially bankers (Jamie Dimon comes to mind) a bit bizarre, myopically focused on their personal self-interest. Shouldn’t they be thinking about the stability of society as a whole? Piling up hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth isn’t going to do you any good if society as a whole is getting progressively worse.
Even in Calif*, the burden of federal taxes is onerous compared to all other taxes. Our obligations to doctor unions, insurance company lobbyists, & drug company lobbyists mandated by the federal government are much larger than a 10% income tax.
Pro tip: It’s not a credibility booster in a Trump critique to invoke the funny sounding name of his ancestors.
Ha ha, his ancestors had a name that sounds funny to us. Good stuff.
Mitch, what every half-self-conscious 2-bit nincompoop etc. fears most of all is being laughed at, found out to be the joke that he knows he is. So that’s the context of making fun of his once-ancestors’ name. Plus the fact that (1) earlier Trump tweeted that his recurring critic John Stewart changed his name from Leibovitz(?) [in itself a whiff of Anti-Semitism]; then (2) denied in another tweet that he did it. As explained in the exquisite 20m long segment of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight program on Donald Trump that concluded with the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain (as Nora Ephron’s mother taught her daughter: “everything is copy.”) Thanks, paul kramarchyk, in an earlier Drumofthread.
I’m sticking with the argument that he is a TV giant among dwarves and GOP TV fans will nominate him regardless of the facts and implications.
Not so sure about the general, but most people vote against something. We’ll have to see if more are against Trump or Hillary. It would be easy to oppose either one.
“I’ll go with faculty consensus from MIT and Harvard.”
I think it was Buckley who said that he’d rather be ruled by the 1st 100 names in the phone book than by the faculty at Yale. College faculty live in a type of insulated bubble with lifetime jobs. In the past they have fallen for intellectual dead ends such as Communism. Orwell said that some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. I’m not sure that they are really the best judges of what is good for ordinary Americans.
Mitt Romney was quite calm [in 2012]–
Interestingly, Romney himself is now out there attacking Trump as unfit for office and a danger to the country.
The whole Trump debacle reminds me of Rob Ford’s tenure as mayor of Toronto. Joseph Heath has some interesting comments on this problem: if someone comes along who’s a total fuck-up, how do you convince people that you’re not just criticizing him for partisan reasons?