Whatever one thinks of the stands Donald Trump has taken on the issues, they have resonated strongly with a large enough fraction of the GOP primary and caucus electorate to make him the presumptive nominee. Establishment candidates are not united, and GOP orthodoxy has proved to have too little appeal.
Like Willkie, Trump has run as an insurgent populist, challenging the elitist wing of the GOP that has long dominated the nominating process.
And like Willkie, Trump will find winning enthusiastic support from Republicans who supported establishment candidates very difficult, because they denounced him as an unqualified interloper during the primaries and caucuses.
Neither the Willkie nor the Trump candidacies has destroyed the GOP, but both disrupted it. The consequences were lasting 76 years ago, and I would predict they will be so this time around also.
In Willkie’s case, his nomination helped reorient the GOP away from a strongly anti-New Deal position to one that accommodated the most popular New Deal stands on matters foreign and domestic, such as support for Social Security and aid to Britain during World War II.
Trump appears to be doing something similar, in the sense that his nomination will likely push the GOP to do more to improve life for working- and lower-middle-class Americans, who have seen their quality of life decline in important ways over the past generation.
I am not entirely in line with the below judgement that
... presidential contests have almost never been about a rational comparisons of policies, but instead have been morality tales framed by the respective campaigns ...
I do think that "rational comparisons of policies" are taking place and do play a significant role - especially among specialist political activists (see below).
However, on balance, infatuation with a partisan narrative is likely to be the supreme driver. But that should not surprise us, nor should it be taken as an unmitigated disaster. Here are a number of reasons why:
First, you cannot do politics successfully without a scaffolding of firm story lines. No one is going to win an election by telling their audiences how divided in their honest minds they are on most of the key issues. You need simple, consistent, firmly-held-on-to narratives to come across convincingly.
Second, only very few of us have the time to become thoroughly knowledgeable about political issues. Once you have acquired a taste for a political narrative - mostly during your youth - you are likely to cling to it. For instead of being isolated highlights, political convictions are highly interconnected networks of beliefs. If you start cutting one of them you will soon find that almost all the rest of them must go too. If it was lucrative to become a political expert far more people would have a go at it. As it is, for most people it is rational to subscribe to the spoon-fed (superficially propagandistic) convictions of their chosen political narrative and to support it with their emotions and their vote.
Third, elections/political contests are substitutes for physical brawls, even wars. This is a good thing, which, of course, involves costs. In a free society, political confrontations are part of what I call the transrational arsenal of institutions with whose help we manage to live rather well in the face of fundamental disagreements among the populace.
Fourth, for a political order to be effective, it needs to be organised - like everything else in modern society - along the lines of a division labour. So there are political specialists - such as politicians, their assistants, campaign workers, reporters etc. - which make up only a small part of the population, most of whose members play the role of non-specialist consumers of political propaganda. This need not be a bad system. And there cannot be a good system that does not work roughly along these lines. So let us not ask for too much and be content as long as the activists - many of whom serve as representatives of the non-specialists - do their job satisfactorily, and their interaction with the consumers of politics works reasonably well - i.e. does not result in an uncoupling of a small part of society from the rest of its members and an attendant usurpation of incontestable power.
Say what you may, it strikes me as a healthy sign that the American political system remains prone to be shaken up thoroughly every once in a while by outsiders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
The first two U.S. elections were essentially not contested, with George Washington as the universal preference. So the third election, which occurred in 1796, was the first truly contested election, and it immediately showed the vitriol and ad hominem attacks we have come to expect in presidential politics. In it, Thomas Jefferson was accused of lacking manliness and proper Christian values, among other deficiencies. In fact, presidential contests have almost never been about a rational comparisons of policies, but instead have been morality tales framed by the respective campaigns:
[When] we think a bit more broadly about the cultural structures of American presidential politics, then this first contested election was absolutely seminal. It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two extremes of American politics with the geographically intermediate states deciding between them. It established the basic ideological dynamic of a democratic, rights-spreading American 'left' arrayed against a conservative, social order-protecting 'right,' each with its own competing model of leadership. One can even detect the creation of what linguist and political commentator George Lakoff calls the essential 'conceptual metaphors' of American political life, government as 'strict father' or 'nurturant parent,' but it is not necessary to go that far. Historian Alan Taylor has described a similar idea as the competing political 'personas' of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans: 'fathers' versus 'friends' of the people. It was the Federalists, especially, who got the battle of metaphors started with their efforts to emasculate the image of Thomas Jefferson, but the opposition redressed the balance with a vengeance in the attacks they mounted on the allegedly monarchical, tyrannical tendencies of George Washington and 'Daddy Vice,' as Vice President John Adams referred to himself.
Even with their patchiness, the two campaigns of 1796 managed to construct remarkably coherent images of the two candidates that connected clearly to the policy issues and cultural tensions of the day, especially those raised by the French Revolution. The young United States found its government severely pressured to choose sides in the world war that spun out of that revolution, and its politics were roiled by the democratic enthusiasms it spawned. Keynoted by congressman and pamphleteer William Laughton Smith of South Carolina, with some inspiration from Edmund Burke and guidance from Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist attacks of 1796 wrapped their caricature of Jefferson in a powerful conservative critique of French revolutionary radicalism, the Enlightenment, and post-Christian morals. With the Sally Hemings revelations still in the future, the critics focused chiefly on Jefferson's lack of manly qualities, as evidenced especially by his interest in science and technology. According to the Federalists, here quoted in a sort of dual biography of the two candidates published in Boston, the 'timid and wavering' Jefferson was not cut out to be a 'statesman, still less ... a patriot.' Woe betide America if 'her liberties depended upon the depth of his political knowledge, the strength of his virtue, or the vigour of his mind.' Jefferson's inability to 'act the man' would invite foreign aggression and lead to national ruin: 'our national honour forfeited; war probably ensue, our commerce be destroyed, our towns pillaged.' Better to opt for the 'security' of the 'resplendent abilities,' 'faithful services,' 'inflexible patriotism,' and 'undeviating firmness' of John Adams, who would have the wisdom and strength to stand against 'mad democracy' and 'the wiles of ambition.' The basic images of liberalism and conservatism in American politics have never strayed very far from this original Federalist template.
The politics of the 1790s was not a primitive (or sophisticated) competition of personality cults, or at least not any more primitive than our own. In fact, the 'informed voter' model of party politics touted in civics lessons and journalism schools, where the media provide information that allows voters to select the candidate who best matches their own policy preferences from a list of issues, has rarely been more than an aspiration in American politics. By taking a small leaf from the work of George Lakoff and other scholars of modem political culture, we can proceed on the premise that even with fully developed party politics, partisanship not only can but may most effectively be expressed in terms of metaphors and morality tales rather than platforms and arguments.
I've divided this graph up into "net tax payer states," "break-even states" and "net tax receiver" states. The lightest shade of blue are states that, by far, pay in more than they receive back, such as New Jersey and Minnesota. The next lightest shade of blue are states that are more or less "break even" in the sense that spending and tax collections hover somewhat around a 1-for-1 relationship. The darker blue states are states that receive considerably more in federal spending than they pay in taxes.
Is duelling actually illegal, nowadays? And if it is, would such prohibition be a case of paternalism? Or have we "nudged" ourselves toward a duelling taboo that most moderns are proud about as being a victory of reason?
Lately, Trump and Romney have engaged in a contemporary form of duelling. David Stockman claims that in attacking Trump as a businessman of poor performance Romney is presenting us with "a screaming case of the pot calling the kettle black."
Mitt Romney has lashed out at The Donald for being a “phony and fraud”, but consider this. During his 16-years at Bain Capital, fully one-fourth or $600 million of the firms cumulative $2.5 billion of profits were scalped from companies which went bankrupt soon after Mitt and his partners got out of town with the loot.
No wonder the American voters did not believe him when he claimed to be the “job creator”!
Perhaps more interestingly, Stockman, as ever a little shrill on doom and gloom and human depravity, offers us a graphic account of how to make money in the private equity business.
The headlines are mostly trumpeting (heh!) the Donald’s victory in seven states last night, but the delegate count suggests that the victory was far from overwhelming, and the Republican race is far from over. According to The Post, Trump will receive approximately 234 delegates, Ted Cruz 209, Marco Rubio 90, John Kasich 19 and Ben Carson 3. So the total delegate count last night was approximately Trump 234, non-Trump 321. And in the end, Trump needs to get a majority of delegates, not just win vote pluralities.
I understand that many of the upcoming states will be winner-take-all, and this puts Trump in the driver’s seat. But many analysts expected Trump to win 10 states (all but Cruz’s home state of Texas) and to create an insurmountable delegate lead. That didn’t happen; not only did Trump lose four states, but he came within three percentage points of losing an additional three states (Arkansas, Vermont, Virginia).
Trump is still the front-runner and likely to remain in that position, but a contested convention has become more likely. And if Cruz and Rubio could work out a president-vice president deal soon, that would make a Trump defeat even more likely. As Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
The vacancy created [by judge Scalia's demise] on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court.
Justice Scalia's passing would be a great loss at any time. But at this crucial juncture in the history of the nation -- with 5-to-4 Supreme Court decisions determining what kind of country America will be -- Scalia's death can be catastrophic in its consequences, depending on who is chosen to be his successor.
He does not like Donald Trump:
If, by some miracle, Trump became president, what kind of president would he be? Do we need another self-centered know-it-all in the White House to replace the one we have now?
Sowell thinks the only candidate up to the challenge is Ted Cruz:
If the Republicans are to avoid having Donald Trump lead them -- and the country -- to disaster, they are going to have to have the majority of non-Trump supporters get behind some given candidate.
Senator Ted Cruz has been criticized in this column before, and will undoubtedly be criticized here again. But we can only make our choices among those actually available, and Senator Cruz is the one who comes to mind when depth and steadfastness come to mind.
As someone who once clerked for a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he will know how important choosing Justice Scalia's replacement will be. And he has the intellect to understand much more.
John Stuart Mill was a passionate believer in public debate, and felt with Spinoza that
the "collision" of ideas sharpens the minds of all parties, yielding suggestions no one would have lit upon in isolation and producing decisions more adequate than any proposal presented at the outset. Public opinion is a progressive force only when it is formed in a free-for-all public debate. Without institutional inducements for public criticism and opposition, in fact, political unanimity is likely to be a sign of irrational conformism.
Often there is no simple correspondence between reality and the perceptions of our minds.
So how can we know if our beliefs are true? Mill's trenchant answer was that "the beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded." [...]
The Political Representative - Delegate or Trustee?
This fallibilist epistemology inspired many of Mill's political proposals. Consider, for example, his support of a trustee as opposed to a delegate theory of representation. A delegate is a mere agent, sent to parliament to express the opinions of his constituents and subject to immediate recall if he deviates an iota from his mandate. A trustee, by contrast, has ampler room for maneuver. He can vote as he thinks best, using his discretion, disregarding occasionally, if only temporarily, the opinions of his electors.
The delegate model is objectionable, according to Mill, because it implicitly rejects the epistemology of fallibilism. It implies that a representative has nothing important to learn from an uninhibited give-and-take with fellow deputies. But this assumption is unrealistic: "If he devotes himself to his duty," a representative "has greater opportunities of correcting an original false judgement, than fall to the lot of most of his constituents."
The decisive superiority of deputies over citizens lies not in higher intelligence, virtue, or education, therefore but in the unusual nature of the legislative situation itself, a situation which, according to Mill, fosters self-correction. Voters are parochial. They are seldom exposed to the clashing viewpoints of fellow citizens which live in remote parts of the country. No one is ever invited to prove them wrong or rewarded for disclosing their follies. Voters should defer to representatives, therefore, although only in the short-run, not because members of an elected assembly are likely to be especially virtuous, but rather because representatives enjoy the eye-opening benefits of exposure to stinging criticism and relentless debate.
[...]
A modern legislative assembly is a machine for public learning because it guarantees that rival political proposals will be "tested by adverse controversy." Deputies are encouraged not only to uncover each other's errors but also to change their own minds whenever they become convinced that they have been laboring under an illusion. If recanting is intelligent, then it can be justified publicly, even to the voters back home, at least eventually. Accountability requires that deputies explain their decisions to their constituents. Because explanations of difficult issues take time, however, a system of immediate recall would make a mockery of government by discussion. Far from being antidemocratic, the trustee theory of representation simply recognizes that public learning, or the collective correction of collective mistakes, can never be instantaneous.
Discovery through political competition is not without risks, and it cannot guarantee the absence of severe error, but it is still the best way (1) to incorporate knowledge generated in civil society, (2) to keep politically dominant views exposed to ongoing corroboration, and (3) to include the largest possible number of interest groups in the permanent sequel of repeated games that produce effective trust in society, thus bringing about the dynamic equilibrium of dissension and pacification which defines feasible freedom.
Monadic Rights versus the Constant Rewriting of the Social Contract
Classical liberalism tends to misunderstand or ignore the political logic of freedom, owing to a monadic conception of the rights underlying personal freedom. In theory, these rights are absolute, immutable, and monadic, i.e. attached to and owned by the individual in inalienable form. Under feasible freedom, however, people, in exercising their liberty, negotiate and renegotiate these rights, both in politics and in private transactions. Free citizens constantly renegotiate new permutations of feasible freedom, thereby constantly rewriting the social contract.
Open Discovery Processes Underlying Economic and Political Freedom
We detect an unexpected and rather incongruous similarity of deficiency in socialist ambitions for central planning and liberal calls for a depoliticised society. Both desiderata are based on incomprehension of a vital spontaneous order which concerns politics and the state in the case of liberalism and also the economy in the case of socialism. Both political camps underrate or misconstrue the need and the logic of the indispensable discovery procedures required for strong economic performance (socialism's defect) and the feasibility of civil society at large (classical liberalism's defect).
Search by Free Persons versus Automatisms
As there is no single person or group of persons capable of registering all inputs needed to calculate an efficient allocative distribution, Hayek suggests inclusion of all citizens in a free economy to approximate far better the needed range and quality of information. Analogously, no single person or group of persons is capable of registering the inputs needed to take better political decisions than are available from a regime that guarantees the possibility for all citizens to make their contribution to political decision making. Incongruously, liberalisms akin to Hayek’s insinuate the equivalent of an impersonal central planer by suggesting that observance of certain rules activates automatisms in a free society, notably the market mechanism and the rule of law, that reduce the need of politics to such an extent as to render freedom a state of affairs distinguished by the absence of significant levels of politicisation - a visionary predilection that amounts to the disenfranchisement of the public.
Decentralisation versus Disenfranchisement
A free society, I contend, is akin to a free economy, in so far as only the mobilisation of dispersed knowledge lodged in decentralised units (citizens and their organisations) can bring about a discovery process capable of sustaining human relations that make freedom feasible.
Freedom's Boundaries of Contingencies
Liberalism cannot fulfil its role in a free society unless it acknowledges that its leadership in matters of constitutional integrity does not carry over into the area of legitimate political discretion. And liberalism must recognise that within the boundaries of constitutional integrity there is substantial leeway for political discretion by players of quite distinct emphases of vision. Freedom remains an open-ended project.
Feasible Freedom - A Dynamic Equilibrium Balancing Dissension and Peaceableness
In order to establish her meaning and detailed shape, liberty depends on a political infrastructure that engages contestants in a competitive discovery process that is likely to result in eclectic policy outcomes deviating from puristic ideological positions. Adaptability is a survival requirement for any agent participating in the political discovery process. Puristic ideologies fail to stay in touch with the diversity of interests and views that push toward concrete policies. Feasible freedom may be conceived of as a dynamic equilibrium balancing dissension and peaceableness. Approximating the balance requires that the competing agents continuously search for new information about the prospects of their agendas, swiftly adjusting the latter to sustain support and the power to exercise influence. Precise and consistent accounts of freedom such as endeavoured by classical liberalism play an important role in clarifying the rules of the discovery game and the inalienable contours of freedom, but they are too abstract and too general to be able to prejudge the differing aims that people ought to be free to pursue within the competitive political framework of an open access society. Ideologies lend impetus to freedom’s sine qua non: discovery by political competition, but they do so fruitfully only when being capable of changing and renewing themselves in response to the findings elicited by the search.
The success of politics under feasible freedom is to be judged by the ability to balance dissension and peaceableness under the auxiliary conditions of high levels of personal autonomy, productivity, and wealth. We may register good performance and even progress along these lines in the very presence of states of affairs that appear insufferable from a classical liberal point of view. But it should not be forgotten that classical liberalism is just a set of hypotheses, some of which are rejected by freedom. Freedom is not identical with liberalism. Freedom is not identical with liberalism‘s account or expectations of her.
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.
Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.
Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
Madison, Hamilton and Jay, Federalist Papers (Madison, Federalist 55), 346.
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