LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE WEATHERMAN.

Back in 2016, when it was dawning on the pundit class that Donald Trump's message was resonating with enough primary voters, the Wise Experts opted to dial up the scolding.

It's the presidential season, and the developments thus far have pushed the chattering classes into Bertolt Brecht territory, thinking it's easier for the punditry to abolish the people.  When it comes to the Republican voters, we have Juan "How the U.S. Went Fascist: Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters" Cole and Sean "America, you're stupid: Donald Trump's political triumph makes it official -- we're a nation of idiots" Illing.  Follow the links if you want the supporting arguments, such as they are.  David "The Governing Cancer of Our Time" Brooks at least makes the reader read the column to see that, he, too, would prefer to cut out the cancer abolish the people.

I had other things to occupy my attention at the time.  The continuous display track under Cold Spring Shops headquarters was still being built while the punditry came to terms with a Trump presidency.  That section went into service during that term.

Then came the corona shutdowns and the end of the first Trump presidency and more time to work on the railroad.  The pundits, however, persisted with their purity tests.

Call me old school, but I think of the voters as principals and the parties as agents, and if Democrat politicians are most responsive to messages from the wokest, or most dependent, if you will, of their voters, and Republican politicians are most responsive to messages from voters relatively new to Republican voters, then maybe it's time for those party professionals who keep losing to change their message and their appeals.  "We talk a lot about the value of majority rule in a democracy, and we talk a lot about political principle, but you can never have a pure commitment to both, because majorities do not have principles; or at any rate, any principle shared by a majority is unlikely to be contested."  I call that the aggregation problem of democracy, but in that aggregation problem there might be more than one way to obtain a governing majority of agents for some majority or near majority of the principals, who, recall, are the voters.

I got more work done on the railroad, while Donald Trump went from pariah to front runner to nominee to once and future president.

That didn't sit so well with a Ramapo College historian.  “Every White majority Trump voter and every internally colonized non-White Trump voter is dead to me now.”

Ramapo deanlets are aware of the situation and respond instinctively.

A Ramapo spokesperson told Campus Reform: “On November 19, the College was made aware of posts by Professor Kwak to his personal social media account. We are deeply concerned about the potential impact these posts may have on our campus community, including the learning environment. While personal social media profiles of employees and students do not represent the views of the College, we recognize that posts shared publicly can influence the sense of trust, respect, and inclusion that are fundamental to our community’s values.”

The spokesperson continued: “We take these concerns seriously. As an institution of higher learning, we are committed to fostering an environment where all individuals feel respected and supported, and where dialogue and growth can occur constructively. We expect all members of our community to engage in ways that uphold the principles of mutual respect and understanding.”

Unfortunately, that's the mushy language one expects of Student Affairs, and selective outrage at demeaning language is nothing new on campus.  It might be more productive for Ramapo's fraternity members to do a Trump Dance in the quad or in Professor Kwak's class.

Then there's Andrew Coyne, in Toronto's Globe and Mail.  "The U.S. election shows that sometimes the people get it wrong."  Well, that's Canada, bracing, or perhaps not, for an influx of Hollywood talent.  Unless somebody has advised the Hollywood talent about Canada's domestic content laws, which ruined CKLW as a great pop music station.

There are a few nuggets in his column.

What all of these analyses have in common is that the opinions they attribute to the voters – or at least those voters, a minority by all accounts, who were open to persuasion on any basis whatever, and not simply locked in from the start – just happen to coincide, in every case, with the opinion of the speaker.

It’s a well-known phenomenon. It even has a name: the Pundit’s Fallacy, an instance of a broader habit of thought known as motivated reasoning. As in: The policy stance that I, A. Pundit, prefer a party should take, ideologically, also happens to be the stance that is most advantageous, politically.

If you’re a Democrat, and your own thinking leans to the left, you’ll tend to urge the party to move to the left – not because that’s your pet philosophy, heavens no, but strictly in the interests of its electoral success. Conversely, if you lean more to the right, you’ll find, if you search your heart, that the winning strategy for the party is really to move to the right.

If, then, the party fails electorally, it can only be because it did not move far enough to the left. Or right, as the case may be.

You can see this tendency at work equally in the many instant analyses of why Trump voters voted as they did. If you despise liberal elites, or “woke” cultural warriors, or [your preferred object of loathing here], then your analysis will lean heavily on the theory that it was all because voters also despise the same people or things.

If, likewise, you think the problem with America is that there is too much crime, or that taxes are too high, you will find the seeds of Mr. Trump’s victory in these. I have read deep, nuanced thinkpieces on the average Trump voter’s deeply nuanced views about the importance of entrepreneurial dynamism, or the virtues of free speech, or the importance of the merit principle, and in every case discovered, to my astonishment, that these also reflected the thinking of the writer.

I don’t say these analyses are entirely without merit. Probably some Democratic voters were left cold by the Harris campaign’s lack of meaty left-wing policy proposals, or were turned off by the Biden administration’s conduct of foreign policy. Probably some Republican voters were excited by Mr. Trump’s supposed plan to replace the income tax with an across-the-board tariff.

Yes, there is a lot of that sort of punditry going on, and I might, or might not, take up some of it before Thanksgiving.  That the political bundles are so large, and the political preferences of voters so diffuse, makes any sort of equilibrium policy outcome a vain hope, and efforts by partisans to impose their will for once and for all dangerous.  Thus voters might vote for the candidate who offers the least distant bundle from their preferred policy mix, or they might use heuristics, or hold their nose and vote for the least evil.

And Mr Coyne want's to go full Brecht's Commissar on them.

[R]esearch shows voters are more likely to make decisions based on factors such as social identity or partisan loyalty, as filtered through an assortment of prejudices and cognitive biases.

That was true of democracies generally – and long before the advent of social media, state-based disinformation campaigns and other mechanisms by which large sections of the populace across the democratic world have been driven, not to put too fine a point on it, mad.

But now apply that to the chaos of contemporary America, with its ingrained partisan identities (nearly half the country’s voters are formally registered as supporters of one party or the other) and entrenched social divisions. Particularly toxic are those centred on education, expertise and knowledge – in brief, whether anyone knows anything, least of all the folks who are supposed to; whether facts matter, or can be established with any certainty, or even just agreed upon, or whether everyone is entitled to their own facts.

In particular, apply it to Trump voters. This is not a comment about Republicans, or conservatives, or populists. It is a comment about the type of voter who is drawn to Mr. Trump: who is willing or eager to mark their ballot for someone as manifestly, palpably, incontrovertibly unfit for public office, not only in his own character and abilities, but for what he represents, including his attacks on the rule of law, basic freedoms and democracy itself.

To persist in the belief, nevertheless, that he is an appropriate or wise choice for president, requires a culpable error, of one sort or another: either an astonishing ignorance, nine years after he entered the political arena, of the things he has done and said; or an irrational disbelief, in the face of all the evidence, that he means it; or an amoral apathy, so long as he annoys the right people and keeps the Democrats out; or, in the worst case, active approval.

Don’t get me wrong. There are rational or at least explicable reasons why a voter might be ticked off at the Democrats, whether for any of the reasons listed above, or simply because they happen to be in office at a time, postpandemic, postinflation, when voters everywhere are furious with incumbents.

But choosing Donald Trump, after having seen him govern?

The Biden administration made its share of mistakes; Ms. Harris has her flaws; the American economy could be performing better (though quite honestly it’s hard to see how); identity politics has a lot to answer for. But the notion that any of these, or all of them, represent such a dire threat, such an emergency, as to justify a “remedy” such as Mr. Trump – there is no other word for this but irrational.

It is not polite to say this. The notion that “the people are always right” is a staple of democratic discourse. And there is much truth in this. Indeed, I have often been forced to acknowledge it myself – the issue in which I had been so heavily invested, the factors that I had felt sure really ought to decide this or that election, proved, in the fullness of time, not to be of such overwhelming importance as all that, at least when set beside all the many other issues and considerations that combine, by some extraordinary alchemy, to produce a vote.

The average voter, busy as they are with the regular distractions of life, may take a broader and I dare say better view of things than the full-time pundit, too caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of politics.

Mr Coyne came so close to grasping it.  Those "regular distractions of life" might have included much higher gasoline prices, baby formula locked up at the supermarket, neurotic boys trying out for the girls' teams, and they didn't see the county Gauleiter passing out those #MAGA armbands back in 2017.  Plus he's writing from Canada, and criticizing U.S. voters has long been a Canadian pastime.

We will show no such charity to Common Dreams contributor Dan Dinello's "Trump’s Victory Is a Despicable Reflection of the American Character."  The essay's sub-heading goes straight-on Brecht's Commissar.  "More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster."

Maybe he saw the county Gauleiter passing out armbands.

Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of 100,000 voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.

Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: If only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.

Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.

Perhaps because the voters saw the illegal aliens and the shantytowns, the Afghanistan debacle, the economic illiteracy of lowering the grocery bill by pursuing ephemeral price gougers.

Somebody get Mr Diello a crying towel, or perhaps a stiff drink.

Democrats whined further: If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage.” Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men — or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.

Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios—available in about 20 flavors—hit $5.29 at the grocery store?

Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office—even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.

Maybe if Dementia Joe had been juiced on triple espresso and yelled something about "garbage" it would all have turned out to Danny's liking.  Oh, wait, there was that rant in Philadelphia.  And as long as people like Danny pursue their leftward course, the misery for Democrats, and the people who argue with them but hold their nose and vote for them, will continue to be disappointed.

Another Common Dreams regular, Les Leopold, who, yes, is of the "By the Left, March" persuasion, correctly notes that the purity tests will fail.

Will the Democrats learn from this debacle and change their ways? I’m not optimistic. They are the defenders of the liberal elite establishment and have grown very comfortable (and prosperous) in that role.

We may not have all the data we desire or need as yet, but we know this much: something has to change. And that change is not going to come from the old guard of this deplorable Democratic Party establishment.

Comfortable, prosperous, and wrong: no way to go through life.  And thus might we have gotten more Trump.