Constraints

Maybe an opportune to repost something I wrote in June. Mitch McConnell had just remarked that Trump was no danger because “No matter how unusual a personality may be who gets elected to office, there are constraints in this country”. It reminded of the famous comment of Franz von Papen, leader of the Centre Party in the Weimar Republic, and the man who advised President Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor

Wir haben ihn uns engagiert. … Was wollen sie denn? Ich habe das Vertrauen Hindenburgs. In zwei Monaten haben wir Hitler in die Ecke gedrückt, dass es quietscht…

We hired him to work for us. … What’s the problem? I’m the one who has [President] Hindenburg’s confidence. In these two months we have completely backed Hitler into a corner.

He has such a wonderful way of connecting with the working class…

Advance warning

One of the things that seems to have gotten anti-Clinton forces into the highest dudgeon is the report that one or more questions at a Democratic primary debate were leaked to the Clinton camp. My very own right-wing troll — the only one I’ve had on this generally uncommented-upon blog — expresses (in response to this post) this sentiment to support his contention that polls are all made up.

This was commented upon in tones of offended sense of fairness by Donald “System-is-Rigged” Trump, whose grave concern for Bernie Sanders’s treatment by the Democratic establishment surely presages a cooperative working relationship between the two of them.

Which makes this passage particularly interesting from the NY Times review of Megyn Kelly’s new book:

The day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.

Closing time

Leonard Cohen is dead. Not an untimely or tragic end. But an end.

I never felt like he knew the secret of life. Not even that he knew reasons for hope. But maybe that he was pointing out something head intuited about how to live without hope. (Now may be a good time to go back and read Camus…)

I’ve been listening to his music a lot in the past few weeks. It suited my mood and, I thought, the mood of the times. I first encountered the song Everybody Knows in the soundtrack of the 1990 film Pump up the Volume, and was so impressed by it that I followed the credits to find out who was responsible for the song. Leonard Cohen. Never heard of him.

In those pre-amazonian days it was not an easy matter to find an unknown recording. I went to several record stores before I found a greatest hits CD, which give me my first hearing of Suzanne, So Long Marianne, Who By Fire, and so many more. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. Whereas people argue about whether Bob Dylan’s songs are poetry, with Leonard Cohen it’s not entirely clear whether his songs are really songs. And it’s clear that he was never sure himself, and he always seemed somewhat abashed by the fact, but as long as people thought they were, and wanted to hear him sing them, he’d oblige them.

I eagerly went to share my discovery with a fellow graduate student and folk music enthusiast. I played Suzanne for him. From the first bars he said, “That’s Leonard Cohen. He’s Canadian.” My friend was Canadian. I had no idea that there was such a gap between US and Canadian pop culture experience. I’ve since learned that Cohen has been hugely famous all over Canada and Europe, particularly the UK, since the 1970s.

Leonard Cohen’s words and music have accompanied my life ever since. With my partner of many years we bonded, early on, over noticing that we were sharing a snack of tea and oranges. A few years ago I was amazed that he had started producing albums and performing again. Beautiful new songs — the lyrics all his, the melodies mostly his collaborators, something he’s been doing since the 1980s. An unflinching openhearted reckoning with life and death, with the 20th century in all its horror and beauty. Religion, psychology, and eroticism. Jewish and Buddhist and Christian. Texts like

Show me the place, help me move away this stone.
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone.
Show me the place where the word became a man.
Show me the place where the suffering began.

and

I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot.
My father says I’m chosen,
My mother says I’m not.
I listened to their story
of the Gypsies and the Jews.
It was good, it wasn’t boring,
It was almost like the blues.

But I always come back to the Leonard Cohen lines I first heard:

Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows that he fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That’s how it goes.
Everybody knows.

Everybody knows the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody’s got this sinking feeling
like their father or their dog just died.
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
and a long-stemmed rose.
Everybody knows.

The NY Times has posted a link to a 1995 profile that includes this quote

I’ve always found theology a certain kind of delightful titillation. Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking. They’re not entirely unconnected. I mean, you can get turned on. One of the reasons that they’re both powerful is that they ignore a lot of other material and they focus in on something very specific. In these days of overload, it’s very restful to know, at last, what you’re talking about.

And maybe just one more verse of Everybody Knows:

Everybody knows that you love me, baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows that you’ve been discreet
but there’s so many people you just had to meet
without your clothes.
Everybody knows.

And from Closing time:

It’s partner found and it’s partner lost
There’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It’s closing time…

I swear it happened just like this
A sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss
The gates of love they budged an inch
I can’t say much has happened since
But closing time.

Being demographic

People have been saying for a long time that the Republican strategy of ethnic nationalism is running out of room, because of increasing proportions of ethnic minorities. I noted during the 2012 election how odd it was that some groups of people were considered to vote “demographically”, while others (white Protestant men) were assumed to vote on the basis of a broad array of concerns. According to the demographic fallacy, minority groups have special interests that are very important to them, but only of peripheral interest to the majority. Too much pandering can piss off the majority, but targeted appeals can motivate the minority, potentially to very high percentages, but there is no way to motivate the majority en bloc. After the 2012 election there were any number of comments of the sort “To win the presidency, Republicans need to make up their deficit among black and hispanic voters. They are losing them at such a level that (with changing povulation composition) a future Republican candidate would need to win the white vote at implausible levels to win a majority.” Now it appears that this argument is exactly wrong, for three reasons:

  1. As Trump correctly intuited, white people are also susceptible to ethnic appeals. And if you can motivate them as an ethnic group, they’re the biggest, baddest one of all. Meanwhile, the Democrats appeal to ethnic minorities was maxed out. The pervasive undercover racism of the Republican party gave Obama a huge edge among hispanics and blacks; naked racism, religious exclusion, and threats of deportation by Trump couldn’t move it any further, but could pull in vast numbers of white voters who share his racist world view and are relieved to hear it expressed openly. Those of us who move in educated circles should have taken more seriously the assertions early on that “Trump says what everyone really thinks”. Obviously, we didn’t know what people were thinking.
  2. Similarly for women. The model of what I called “demographic thinking” in politics is  I’m not the first to notice that women are not actually a minority. The power relations (yay intersectionality!) nonetheless seem to justify seeing the struggle for women’s rights as analogous to the struggle for rights of ethnic minorities.
    Feminists may have gotten suckered by a figure-ground second-sex fallacy with regard to women voters. If you think of males as the default, and women as the “minority”, then an openly misogynist candidate like Trump would seem to turn out the women to vote against him. But most of those women have been having to compromise with and make excuses for Trump-like figures in their lives — in their families — their whole lives. Some will recoil in horror, but most will continue to make excuses. And the women voters lost may be balanced by just as many men gained.
  3. It’s perfectly possible to maintain a semblance of democracy while entrenching the power of a minority to rule over the majority. Many countries have done this. With the single exception of 2004, the Republicans have not won a plurality in a presidential election since 1988. Democrats received a majority of the votes for representatives in 2012 and (probably) 2016. Nonetheless, the Republicans have attained unrestricted control over nearly the entire federal government, and very little stands in the way of further restricting voting rights to maintain their control and civil rights of minorities, expanding the political influence of the wealthy, to maintain their power indefinitely.

The electoral college was designed to leverage the 3/5 compromise to increase the power of southern slave-holding states in presidential election. Now, under very different circumstances, it is still serving this function.

Tempering our expectations

Following up on my comment about feeling like I’ve stumbled into a dystopian timebreak, I just got a missive from the alternate timeline that we should have been in. It’s an article by Jeff Stein and Sarah Frostenson on Vox, published at 8:47pm on the night of the election. He is reporting that the early results show that the Democrats will almost certainly fail to attain a majority in the House of Representatives, and commenting on the consequences:

The Republican Party will keep control of the House of Representatives, extinguishing Democrats’ hopes of a new progressive era in Washington.

Failing to retake the House is a sign that liberals will have to somewhat temper their expectations after Election Day. With both branches of Congress and the White House, Democrats could have passed a cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. They may have tried thrusting through immigration reform. There could have been a real chance at implementing a nationwide paid family leave program or universal pre-K. Perhaps there were enough congressional Democrats to dramatically raise the minimum wage, or pass campaign finance reform, or tackle any of the rest of the party’s key agenda items.

All of that is now probably off the table. At the very least, the odds of any of those things happening are massively diminished.

Still tempering…

Ulysses Obama

I’ve just been reading Ronald C. White’s wonderful new biography of Ulysses Grant, American Ulysses. Inspiring and depressing at the same time, it’s the story of a modest man with a peculiar foreign-sounding name. Possessed of enormous gifts of organisation and leadership, he rose from a decidedly modest background to become president. He was extremely popular during most of his eight years in office, and pursued vigorous high-minded policies as president, particularly focused on protecting civil rights of ethnic minorities, and repairing relations with other countries after a long war. At the end of his two terms he was still popular enough that he could easily have been re-elected for a third. 

His successors set about dismantling everything he had accomplished as president, and later generations judged his presidency an utter failure, partly in order to justify the racist policies that followed.

He was a talented writer, who wrote a celebrated memoir, but political opponents, who held his intellect in contempt, asserted without evidence that it had been ghost-written.

I’m not sure why this all seems relevant at the present moment.

Why were the polls so wrong?

While Tuesdays election result is a global disaster, it is most immediately distressing for three groups: American Latinos, American Muslims, and American pollsters.

First of all, let us dispel with the idea (that I have heard some propound) that they weren’t wrong. Huge numbers of polls done independently in multiple states gave results that were consistently at variance in the same direction with the actual election results. I can see three kinds of explanations:

  1. The pollsters shared a mistaken idea or methodology for correcting their tiny unrepresentative samples for differential turnout.
  2. Subjects lied about their voting intentions.
  3. Subjects changed their minds between the last poll and the election.

3 seems unlikely to account for a lot, as it seems implausible to suppose that many people changed their minds so rapidly. 2 is plausible, but hard to check and difficult  impossible to correct. 1 is a nice technical-sounding explanation, and certainly seems like there must be some truth to it. Except, probably not much. As evidence, I bring the failure of VoteCastr.

Slate magazine teamed up with the big-data firm VoteCastr to trial a system of estimating votes in real time. Ahead of time they did extensive polling to fit an extensive model to predict an individual’s vote (probabilistically) as a function of several publicly-available demographic variables. Then they track records of who actually voted, and update their totals for the number of votes for each candidate accordingly.

Sounds like a perfectly plausible scheme. And it bombed. For instance, their final projection for Florida was 4.9 million (actually, 4,225,249) for Clinton and 4.6 million for Trump, a lead of about 3% for Clinton. The real numbers were 4.5 million and 4.6 million, a lead of 1.3% for Trump. (The difference in the total seems to be mainly due to votes for other candidates, though the total number of Florida votes in VoteCastr is about 100,000 more than in the official tally, which I find suspicious.) They projected a big victory for Clinton in Wisconsin.

The thing is, this removes the uncertainty related to reason 1: They know exactly who came to vote, and they’re matched by age, sex, and party registration. Conclusion: Estimating turnout is not the main problem that undermined this year’s presidential election polls.

What is the rating on this movie?

Looking at the NY Times headline

U.S. Faces a Startling New Political Reality After Donald Trump’s Victory

with some mentions of possible cabinet positions for Chris Christie and Rudolf Giuliani, and I had the powerful sense of having fallen into one of those movies where the protagonist accidentally upsets his time stream — for instance, travels to the past and crushes a butterfly — creating an alternate reality where all kinds of bizarre events start to accumulate in the intermediate past: For instance, instead of the respected former secretary of state who is president in our reality, there is a depraved reality TV star who has become president and then filled his cabinet with criminals and then nuked California. (They were nasty.) There must be a way to fix this…

Rehabilitating the single-factor models

Lots of people — myself included — have mocked the penchant of a certain kind of political scientist who like to say that all the superficial busyness of election campaigns is just a distraction, it matters not at all, nor do the candidates really. Presidential elections are decided by the “fundamentals” — usually one or two economic variables. Except that the models work much better for the past than they do for the present or future, and so end up with lots of corrections: So much for an ongoing war, so much for incumbency, or for a party having been in office too long, and so on. They seem kind of ridiculous. Obviously people care who the candidates were. And, of course, these experts agreed that those things weren’t irrelevant, they just tended to cancel each other out, because both major parties choose reasonably competent candidates who run competent campaigns.

And last year they said the fundamentals mildly favoured the Republican to win a modest victory. But the Republicans chose a ridiculous candidate who ran a flagrantly incompetent campaign. So of course this couldn’t be a test of the “fundamentals” theory. But after all that, the Republican won a modest victory. Kind of makes you think…