Critical Race Theory

 If you read the Wikipedia article on CRT, you will be a little confused. You get that it has some legal meaning in court cases, that's about it.

There are bout 2 black scholars who came up with the term. One is a feminist, the other is a lawyer. They explain it in...many words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw

It simply means that the current laws and regulations are ineffective in preventing all but whites being discriminated. Even some liberals just say "we took care of that." We did not.

It never says it plainly but you would need to be quite dim not to grasp that a good chunk of white people are still racist.

I do not know what it says about blacks. But there is jealousy of those blacks that became part of the elite.

Three Things Voters Rely On

We have a midterm election coming. The voters always think of the president two years before and their promises. If things are not clearly better, and there is a bit of a crisis like a pandemic, they tend to punish the sitting president. That is, if they are voters that change parties from election to election.

Biden has a steady flat 50-52% disapproval.

But even the party voters need something to quickly make up their mind. Mostly about whether to vote at all. The things are 1) how are things for me? 2) how is the economy? and 3) what are people I talk to saying?

The economy thing ALWAYS tends to punish a president, unless we have 9-11, are at war or some other big thing is taking over the news. House Republicans have a twitter account and keep telling us Biden ruined energy and gas is therefore more expensive. And he caused inflation. The second one is not ever true. Occasionally a president can bail out an industry or save voters from being evicted. But Biden's influence is otherwise little. We have a highly competitive, capitalistic economy. There is nearly no "socialism" going on, other than Obamacare.

But even the energy claim is false. We are mining fuel as before and fossil fuel has not suffered. I've marked the Trump presidency with a blue dot.

This is from a government website. Just google the words in the caption to see full figures. We are going full steam ahead. The dip is the pandemic when the whole economy was slowed down and we did not drive as much.

The claim by the Republicans about the Keystone XL pipe affecting prices is also false. First of all it never got built, so there is nothing that got shut down. Secondly, the tar sands oil going thru now (existing pipe lines) makes very poor diesel type of oil not even used for trucks and all goes to export. You cannot improve tar sands oil to make it more like normal fuel, as the cost of doing that no longer makes it "cheap oil" and it will not compete with oil we import. It would also waste sources like propane or methane that we use for heating.

But back to the voter. The republican voter is fully convinced that Biden is bad for fossil fuels and we are paying more, if the House republicans just keep repeating the mantra. 

Social Psychology: It's not that difficult to change a group member's attitude

Who knew? There are experiments from the 1930s onward testing the will of people when faced with a rigged experiment or placed in groups. Terms such as groupthink appeared. This was difficult material for me to accept, as I have lived the past 50 years in a culture I was not born into. I have resisted conforming in a quiet way. In work type of situations I did in fact become part of the group. My training lumped me with my kind against "engineers" and "business types" to achieve results in my field of science. It was also useful in job interviews. Every job I got was due to a link to the interviewer, we were equals. However, with things like politics and religion, I never made any waves in a group of strangers. Just get on with what we were doing and don't bring it up. I never had to change my attitude for a group. In any test of psychology I would be the outlier.

As it happens, this one area of  behavior where the right and left are equally susceptible to group pressure. You might be a libertarian, hang out with liberals and appreciate personal freedoms. Then global warming comes up. You have not had the time to read the books to find out 1) is it warming? and 2) what are the predictions? Those are separate problems, you realize. You went to college. But it has become dogma in your group. So you just accept that. The election comes up and you do not make any complaints against a political candidate that places climate high on the agenda. Although sexual minorities and freedoms as well as your suspicious attitude to "big government" may be more strongly part of your thinking. And the cute girl in the group is a liberal. You start tolerating climate change as a big topic, as well as the health and exercise attitude you share. You and your partner are building a better planet with healthier people.

The field is social psychology. It is possible to look at the individuals, it is even possible to use neurobiology and other experiments. But still, it is an empirical field. You can measure the activity of groups with polls and tests of groups in lab settings. You measure trends. This causes that. You don't entirely know why. Conformity, response to strong leaders, obedience, all these things can be measured. As it turns out, rank in your gang also matters. It is easier to influence a low ranking member.

Want more? Try the Richardson book. Not the best book on the topic, but easy to read for the layman.  The rest of the classic books are rather dated. Wikipedia will go a long way with Milgram. See also the entry for the man there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Polling: less and less meaningful, except more indpendents

A poll this week by Gallup discovered a shift in 2021 to the Republican side, from Democrats and independents. I did not find it meaningful. I think it is a reflection of disappointment toward Biden and Democrats in the Senate. Or, the entire poll number could be related to mask and vaccine mandates. I have a book that explains that when they call people on the phone for polls, only the events in the past couple of weeks are on the mind of most people. This holds even more for people disinterested in politics but interested just enough to show up to vote.

Suppose we ran an election now. Trump vs. Biden. The pandemic and mandates are a momentary issue. Centrists may have changed their minds after voting for Biden. But, I seriously doubt there is any major change if there are the same two candidates. Here is the current graph on Trump. It may be that hatred of Biden has increased, though, so for that reason there may be more Republicans.

But the Democrats and Republicans do not matter when voters hate the parties and hate congress, that has these two parties and does not seem to be do anything. Young people are hard to recruit for either party. This would be a great time to introduce a third party. Except, our system seems to favor two parties, not a coalition of parties. But our two party system took us to a divided congress, and without 60 votes, nothing will pass in the senate. Excepting Mitch McConnel judicial candidates.

The independents do not have any deep interest in politics. I think the party members vote by party and the independents by gut feel for a candidate. They are not going to vote for Trump but will only reluctantly vote for Biden. 

But the topic was polls. I say ignore the polls until there are actual candidates running. For president look at the states that have been borderline: Wisconsin, Georgia, PA and Arizona. Arizona may be lost, but Trump will not carry PA and WI. We will get a Democrat in 2024 but with a Republican congress. If we are in a stalemate, that is the one I prefer. Unless of course in 2 years Congress strips a president of his powers. Then we are in trouble in 2025.

I only wanted to address polling this time. The voting rights is a bigger problem. 

The Politics of Us and Them

 I was interested in conspiracy theories before, so I made a note of this book earlier.

The book moves onto politics near the end. Though there is some discussion of QAnon type of trends there, the book really does outline how voters in general work. The strong belief in matters that are largely fake or falsified by the right wing press (but not interesting, which the conspiracies are) the behavior is exactly the same as in believing conspiracies carried out by your opponents. The right wing voters believe in a world of their dreams that just is not what we have. By denying climate change, for example, we can just carry on as before. That is the conservatism, no change wanted.

The white working classes that voted for Trump really don't care about policy. It's an us an them game for them. Anyone who does not fall into the white American Christian camp is pretty much "them." Also politicians and lawyers, as well as scientists are them. So the populist simply needs to be in some manner connected to the large group of uneducated voters to capture them. Apparently there was a large shift of white working class Democrats to the Republican party in the Obama years. It was not so much to do with policy but a fear of "them" taking over. They feared for their "way of life."

Theoretically it could happen on the left as well. Many left wingers are not that educated either. But in recent times it has not. Vietnam and hippies are long gone.

Acts of destruction to Democrats all over the country are another phenomenon of this US and THEM thinking. There is no holding back Trump voters. This will not stop till well past 2025. Maybe never.

The dissatisfaction of grid locked Washington is not going to end anytime soon. There was a brief period of GOP senators and congress people being critical of Trump, but now they are back to voting no on every bill that comes up. Important bills, backed by well over half the voters, will not come up for a vote. We will be doing well just to pass the budget yearly.

Is it a country of a bunch of countries?

 The US was initially 13 states, and they were fairly independent. There was not even a common currency at the start. The current Supreme Court seems to think of the states as countries. This explains their decisions on voting rights, gerrymandering and abortion.

The Red States quickly realized, once Trump was gone, that the movement to the right had lost momentum. The solution was to increase state rights and reject mandates from Biden.

All this reminds me of a book by Kurt Vonnegut called Slapstick. It had a crumbled USA and kings in Michigan and Oklahoma. King of Florida DeSantis is making his own army now.

Major changes happened to the the US after the Civil War. Several amendments guaranteed the right to vote. The constitution allowed amendments, so eventually we got women to vote and an income tax. Congress gained power. The court is now trying to hold it back. A liberal court could easily expand federal power. Those things are in the amendments, not so much the Constitution.

National Populism: Another book in the wake of Trump and Brexit

The book covers much the material that other books do. There are no interviews of actual voters that voted for populists, so we are stuck with numbers and surveys.

Yes, the politicians are no longer the same as the great mass of working class voters. They are rich or educated or both. Even in the UK, the labor party has no people that used to labor.

The various points are brought about in historical context. Yes, the rule of the masses has been a concern since Greek times.

One item I distilled out of this in my mind is that the average voter has to make some connection to the candidate in some manner. Trump managed this, Hillary did not (although she certainly got all the liberals, minorities etc. She was not feared by the voters that voted her. ) Conspiracies are not covered in this book, so all that surrounding Trump and distrust of Hillary is not covered. So we are left with this bond that the voter has to a like-minded candidate. The average voter does not seem overly concerned with the campaign promises ("they sounded good") but rather a distrust of politicians in general. Distrust of the elite is covered well. Distrust of "big government" not so much.

The book lists things other than jobs and economy that are important to white nationals: community, belonging, group identity, national identity.  In the examples in the book those items come out in Europe as rejection of Islam and immigrants who do not assimilate.

A bit on the academic side as far as the writing ( I would condense it a bit), I managed to get what I needed by grasping the main topic of each chapter: Distrust, Destruction, Towards Post-Populism.

There is an index if you need to keep it for reference. It is slightly on the academic/global side, so the coverage of the Trump era and the things leading to it (McCarthyism etc.) that might be labeled populist is rather a minor topic. This has the big picture.

The analysis of the voter from a journalistic or social psychology perspective is minimal.

Another side the books fails to capture is the current attempt to sidetrack the democratic process in the US state level control of elections. It could not have been included as it happened past 2020. But the claim is about populist movements supporting democratic elections in general. That may be more of a European trend.

The book has a number of charts that show lack of trust in the government in various places with time. Other charts track the other trends.  Party affiliation decline. The one item I know personally from talking to trumpsters on message boards is again an American trend, though the EU has lost popularity too. The US white working class has some hatred of the federal government, sometimes pretty much all it does. Taxes, regulation, bureaucrats, inspections, cultural programs. Fauci. Everything. Some of these functions are supported at the state level, enough for us to function.

Wages, Biden and Inflation

The wages are going up. This is good news. You can look for the video by Robert Reich with Chipotle in the title.

What happened was not even predicted by economists. But by providing unemployment benefits for a longer period in 2020 and 2021 the government gave people a chance to look for new jobs. With a lot of businesses slowing down services due to the pandemic, they were not needed for a while. Even if they came back to a similar job the pay was raised. Now that we are ignoring the pandemic, mostly, the service jobs are back. With raised wages.

Republicans are not making note of any of that. They are reminding us retirees that there is inflation. Food costs more. The government caused it! Biden caused it!

Well, the pandemic bail outs and unemployment certainly had that effect. But it was already well on its way to the current state before January of this year. Trump and Biden could just stand on the side lines and observe it. Presidents do not cause the economy. But occasionally, with the Obama-Bush bailout and now the switching jobs phenomenon, the trend over even a half year does help us along. Hopefully we raised stagnant wages. But the CEOs, including the Chipotle CEO in Reich's video, also got raises. 

It will be curious to see the long term effect. Rarely does the life ot the one percent and the working class go up at the same time. Maybe we found a more efficient way to work, working from home, so we spend less on transportation and such? Hard to predict.

The inflation? Well, the federal reserve has a small effect. But there will be inflation. The workers will only enjoy the raised wages and income for a short while. In 5-10 years they will be exactly where they were before the pandemic. Maybe we need that free community college.

Reich talks about raising prices when the sellers/providers have control of too big a chunk of the market:

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/truth-about-inflation

Note that big business does not care about "the economy" the way politicians tell us to care, and work hard and tighten the belt. Growth and acquiring more of your sector is the goal. Inflation is irrelevant to big business. 

When Conspiracy Theories Are No Longer Theories...They Move On

I am taking a class for seniors with the "down the rabbit hole" phrase in the title. My third class on conspiracy theory was a bit off topic. We of course think of the CIA as something of a conspiracy, but the professor wrote a book on ISIS etc. outfits recruiting Somali boys in Minnesota to go fight in Somalia and Syria. The conspiracy part is not quite the same, though the recruiters had to act in secret. Standard spy/propaganda recruitment efforts. Almost the same as is used to recruit boys to the US army. The political angle is much of the weight here. You utilize culture, beliefs and even religion to convince young men, anxious to show bravery for a cause, to go fight for your side, or "democracy."

But all this is outside the attractive side of conspiracy theories on social media. The aspects of life that relate to the government, or government sponsored or supported science (vaccines, climate change) are the most popular items to toss in with details of your own. You can also track the funding of various things to locate the conspirators. From my side, all things funded by Heritage Foundation are by definition a conspiracy.

The conspiracy theory has to be at the theory level for a long time. This is when it gets followers. When Russians hacked Podesta emails and released them through Wikileaks, it was no longer a theory, it was a Democratic conspiracy. Few bothered with the details and only read tweet sized bits of the emails. They had moved on to other theories.

The political angle of the conspiracy is certainly one factor for the believers, but much more important is the outrage that someone, a secret organization or a known one (FBI/CIA) is manipulating your opinions. The secret nature produces the outrage. "Deep state" included.

I'm interested in the process that leads so many to these theories in such a devoted, deep way. All of the Trump era there were endless little details coming from Trumpsters and their beliefs. It is based on their belief in small government, but the people stay there as long as it is a smallish club, not main stream, and the theory is a a theory. I have not finished this small book. But I suspect there is a lack of education behind much of it and the skills to use the Internet (the dreaded critical thinking.).

Twilight of Democracy

The book covers Poland, the UK and Spain well. She also knows Putin's Russia better than most of us. She speaks Polish. But the US is now alien to her.

The writer associated with right wing intellectuals and wrote articles in their publications all through the Bush era. She describes a few still active people from that era such as Ingraham well. They may have had democratic ideals back then. But Trump is rather superficially covered in the US chapter and she really has no idea about Steve Bannon or talk radio hosts. Even conspiracy theorists would be new to her.

The idea that the left has equally authoritarian ideas is outdated. That went out pretty much with the Vietnam era. The left is seen as elitist now, and the Trump base of uneducated voters that choose a candidate on gut feel is never going to pick one that does not speak in their terms. That is the one thing that Trump was good at.