Bullet not dodged

I thought I should post an email that I wrote yesterday morning, expressing my despair before the election, when I thought we might “dodge the bullet” of Trumpism, but still held out little hope for a political system that put us in front of the gun in the first place: Continue reading “Bullet not dodged”

Second season

When my daughter asked me recently, “What happens if Donald Trump wins?” I said I just couldn’t imagine it (even though, as I noted, I couldn’t see a good reason to think it extremely unlikely.) The mind recoils from such madness, though as I have also noted, Berlusconi is a good precedent, and it took nearly a decade to winkle him out of office. Berlusconi with nukes and the NSA.

But while I tried to find a reason for confidence, there was always a nagging voice telling me: People are going to want to see how this show ends. This was the voice of the Sanders supporter quoted in the NY Times back in June who said he would probably support Trump in the general election because Clinton would be boring:

A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.

The showman Trump had set up an outrageous spectacle that ended on a cliffhanger. If you vote for Clinton, the Trump show gets cancelled, and you never get to see what would have happened.

That dark side won (though not a majority, apparently — now the Republicans will never agree to get rid of the electoral college). The Trump show has been renewed, and we’ll all be watching it — living it, really — for at least the next four years.

Democratic antinomianism

One thing that the US and UK have in common is a sort of democratic antinomianism — a pervading sense that to the holy all things are holy, and to the inherently democratic all things are democratic. Thus they can spy on their populace, torture prisoners held indefinitely without trial, hold embarrassingly badly organised elections, and still be offended at the notion that anyone might have anything to lecture them about democracy. They can elect, or come close to electing, a comically unfit would-be ethnic-nationalist authoritarian strongman and still celebrate their constitutional order.

This is a reason why I feel particularly comfortable in Germany. Germans can be arrogant, on a personal and national level, but they have learned deep in their bones distrust of colourful demagogues.

Used and abandoned

Donald Trump has tried, with limited success it would appear, to convince African-Americans that they have been swindled by the Democrats, who use their votes but ignore their concerns. I don’t think that is actually true. We can argue about whether Democrats have done enough, or had the right priorities, and to what extent this is just another example of the Republicans blocking progress and then accusing the Democrats of not wanting it enough, not “leading” enough. But the needs of African-Americans — including affirmative action, housing integration, support for the poor — are clearly a significant concern of governing Democrats.

The people who were really used and abandoned by the Democrats were the white racists. The Democrats were happy to have their votes through the 1970s, and then abandoned them as the fraction of non-white voters made the racists seem electorally less significant. Shameful!

In the bunker

While accepting all the principles of the dangers of any political argument that involves Hitler, I couldn’t read this report from the NY Times about the desperate final days of the Trump campaign without thinking of Hitler in his bunker fantasising with his loyal paladins about being rescued by new rocket weapons:

On Oct. 28, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, announced that his agency would review newly discovered emails potentially pertinent to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mr. Trump was unsure how to respond.
“What do you think this means?” he asked the small circle traveling with him… To the assembled men sitting in white leather seats, the answer was simple: It could turn the election around.

Trump and the bicycle-riders

We now have Donald Trump’s final argument for his election, which basically amounts to saying that manly man Donald Trump will beat down the foreigners and Jews — George Soros, Janet Yellen, Lloyd Blankenfein — who are secretly pulling the strings behind the political establishment. (Speaking of Janet Yellen, I have to confess that I hadn’t noticed that the Federal Reserve had been led by elders of Zion Jews — three of them Republicans — for all but nine years since 1970.)

I think often of a public lecture that Yale history professor John Boswell gave in the 1980s with the title “Jews and Bicycle-riders”. The title came from a celebrated anti-Nazi joke of the 1930s: A Jew is pushed off his bicycle by a Brownshirt, who looms over him and screams “Who is responsible for Germany’s misfortunes?” “The Jews,” replies the trembling Jew, “and the bicycle riders.” “Why the bicycle riders?” asks the Nazi. And he replies: “Why the Jews?”

Boswell’s lecture was mainly about homosexuality, pointing out that prejudice against gay people had risen and fallen over the past two millennia, and tended to parallel the ups and downs of antisemitism, and to be promoted by the same people. The joke suggests that antisemitism is irrational and arbitrary, and has nothing really to do with the Jews; Boswell extends this to say that antisemitism and homophobia are both targets of convenience for what is really an anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan agenda.

(The bicycle-riders in the joke are supposed to be an obviously ridiculous target of discrimination. Boswell might have been amused to know that in the febrile politics of the 21st century, bicycle-riders have also become a frequent target of right-wing abuse — for example, Colorado Republican who called Denver cycling initiatives “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty” and Rob Ford in Toronto: “What I compare bike lanes to is swimming with the sharks. Sooner or later you’re going to get bitten… The cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists.”)

Obviously part of the point was that the credibility of antisemitism was at a low point in the mid-1980s, while discrimination against sexual minorities was decidedly respectable. From the perspective of 2016 things look decidedly different. Homophobia us barely tolerated in polite circles, while antisemitism is ascendant. I’m sure I thought in 1985 that the downward trajectory of antisemitism was inevitable — it was so obviously irrational — while the rights of gay and lesbian people seemed to need fighting for. In retrospect, I see that no matter how marginalised they may be, both of them are always capable of recolonising the body politic when the right conditions return. Somehow this seems to me more obvious and intuitive with regard to homosexuality than with regard to Judaism; Boswell’s link helps to clarify the danger.

Making sense of the predictions

I absolutely agree that Sam Wang and the Princeton Election Consortium have a good argument for there being a 99+% chance of Clinton winning. Unfortunately, I think there’s only about a 50% chance of his argument being right. It could also be that Nate Silver is right, that there is a 65% chance. Putting that all together, I come down right about where the NY Times is, at about an 85% chance of escaping apocalypse.

I’ve written a bit more about how I think about the likelihoods here. But a fundamental problem with the PEC estimate is that it clearly puts very little weight on the possibility of model failure. A fundamental problem with the 538 estimates is that they are very clearly not martingales. That is, they are not consistent predictions of the future based on all available information. One way of saying this is to note that a few weeks ago Clinton had close to a 90% estimated victory probability. Now it’s 65%. That seems like a modest change, but if the first estimate was correct, the current estimate reflects an event that had less than a 1 in 3 chance of happening. So we’re more than halfway there. But does anyone really think that the events of the past month have been that unlikely?

The smoking gun

US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is all in favour of selective leaks from the FBI about ongoing investigations:

HH: It’s just a practical impossibility. But he might find a smoking gun. If he does, do you think he has an obligation to tell the American people about it?

PR: Yeah, look, I understand why he did what he did, because imagine if he didn’t, and we found out after the fact that he was sitting on this before the election. So I clearly understand why he did what he did. Hillary Clinton has no one to blame but herself, and she and Republicans are saying if you’ve got something you’ve got cleared, put it out there. So yeah, I think if he’s gone through the process that he needs to go through to vet evidence, and he’s got it, he should do it. I do agree with that. More disclosure is better, clearly.

Ordinarily, the crime-fiction term “smoking gun” involves investigation into, you know, a murder, there’s a body, there’s a suspect, and there’s a gun in his/her hand that seems to have just been used. In this case we must imagine a scene like the following:

JW: We see here the smoking gun. What do you make of it, Holmes?

SH: Yes, very odd that this gun has been smoking for the past four years. This is proof that Mrs Clinton is a murderer. It remains only for us to determine who has been murdered.

What is the actual crime that the “smoking gun” is supposed to be incontrovertible proof of? What lurid fantasies do the Republicans and the FBI have of the contents of these missing emails? Contacts with Libyan rebels informing them of the weak points in Benghazi consulate security? The communication that lured Vince Foster into the park? Arrangements to pay a dozen different women to falsely accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault?

Waiting for Armageddon

The US presidential election is now just 4 days away. It seems to me that people are not taking the danger seriously. In particular, last week, in the hour after the FBI started its intervention to bring on the apocalypse (more work for them, I suppose), it was reported that the S&P500 stock index fell by about 1%. If we suppose that the FBI’s announcement made a Trump victory 2% more likely, that suggests an expectation that Trump would wipe 50% off the value of the stock market. Yet that doesn’t seem to be incorporated into the current value of the markets. It’s almost as though investors are in denial: When forced to focus on the Trump danger they rate it apocalyptic, but as soon as the news quiets down — within minutes — they go back to treating the probability as 0.

I’d like to believe Sam Wang’s projections, that the election result is all but certain for Clinton. Nothing is all but certain, least of all the future. Nate Silver’s reasoning, leading to about a 2/3 chance for Clinton, seems to me very sound: Trump will win only if he wins about half a dozen states where he has about a 50% chance. That sounds like about a 2% chance, except that they are unlikely to be independent. The reality is likely to be somewhere between 2% and 50%. Where it is, is almost impossible to judge. I’m slightly more hopeful than that because I believe in the power of Clinton’s organisation. But how much more?

But even 2%, for the risk of a crybaby fascist as president, is far too much. It’s not clear to me how the US can come back from this disaster, even if Trump loses.