Racists: They were there all along

 I live in a state that votes Republican governors. It goes about 60% Republicans, 40% Democrats. I live in a city, so we are closer to 50/50. That still means that one out of two neighbors will fully support a white supremacist candidate, if that is the Republican candidate.

We are giving Trump a bit too much credit, though his cult of personality also appealed to these voters.

This thing has been developing since Reagan, amplified by Fox news and the internet. Before that republicans had boring ideas: lower the taxes and support law enforcement. Which back then was white policemen.

The segment of our country now supporting this "white people are being hurt" idea now makes up 40-45% of voters, depending on who is president and what is going on in the world (Ukraine, etc.) and gas prices.

John Oliver covered the Fox news thing well:

Link:

https://youtu.be/XMGxxRRtmHc

And the "white working class"? They were racists too. They may have voted Democrat when they had a union job. Democrats are important in local elections for that and for other things. Once that union job was gone, there was no reason to vote Democrat anymore. In their racism, the working classes were barely tolerant of sexual minorities as well. Anything outside their white Christian bubble was alien.

Moving away from racism and jobs, the white working class also is not quite so liberal as college educated Democrats. It's easy for the GOP trolls and congressmen tot raise hell about parents' rights, gay teachers,  the masks and vaccination thing and all the local stuff dealing with school boards. Those are not items that congressmen and senators deal with, those are local issues. But the party has been well marked and labeled as "exrteme liberals" in matters that are quite trivial to the actual lives of these people.

Public health and the Pandemic

 I've been waiting for a book to explain the Covid pandemic in a sesnsible way for the USA. I like Michael Lewis's book that focused on public health administrators in California.

It covers the early pandemic well, and describes the thankless job of those with any authority. Our quarantine effort was pitiful. The CDC was pitiful. Only states functioned well. We do not have an effective federal program. As far as the pandemic, it only covers the start and going toward the peak.

I have seen a dozen health care professionals push some idea in a book. Not the pandemic in numbers, just some solutions. There are a few well written books on vaccinations.

The first book to give anyone a reasonable summary is by Kate Messner.

She has written a book for middle schoolers on pandemics. Pages 155-186 cover the covid pandemic in such a manner that it merely states the facts. Pick one up if you have grandkids or school age kids.

No trashing of Fauci and masks, although we still have a hard time measuring how much masks helped. The real problems vaccines might have are listed in a paragraph.

I won't summarize the book further, because I think it is such a good book all should read it. It explains infectious diseases well, including the discovery of germs and all that. Enjoy! Kids are not afraid of science, and pandemics will not end there.

Putin

 The war in Ukraine does not really affect our local politics much, other than most Republicans running for office seem to have dropped Trump as far as foreign policy goes.

Putin is the result of 30 years of corruption. The wealth in Russia comes from a small number of industries. They apparently do not even know how to deal with the technical aspects of oil drilling without American help. Rachel Maddow covered all this in her book Blowout. Anyway, the oligarchs all got wealthy by starting with something they knew a little about. They bought state industries after the Soviet Union collapsed. Once you got some chunk of it, you kept buying in that area, still at low prices compared to the world. Eventually a small number of people got very wealthy. Russia also has mining that brings in income, such as palladium and platinum, and other metals. Uranium was largely left in Kazakhstan.

The common people got jobs in the consumer markets that thrived as money flowed into Russia. Some are in the energy industry. Russia grows some food, but the best lands are actually in Ukraine. That side improved as well, with Ukraine exporting the food to neighboring Russia.

Things were fine. Then Putin started thinking about his legacy.

One must understand that it not only Putin that feels somehow the lesser leader and his country as someone who struggles compared to all of Europe and the USA. It is all of Russia that lacks self esteem. Trump was a quirk, and Putin felt comfortable next to him. He was not a real threat. Never mind what Putin had on Trump, he felt like the stronger man.

Now past Trump, Putin is back to the old routine of puffing up his chest and feeling OK as long as he flexes his muscle sometimes. Putin can only show strength in the face of neighbors. And there was only one that used to be part of Russia for most of the 1900s. Finland had been apart longer. Therefore Ukraine was the victim this time.

So, as I said, it was not just Putin. It is all of Russia that has been lacking self esteem for 30 years. Even with all the Western goods coming in, Russians did not feel like an equal just yet. Well off people in Moscow and St Petersburg have been approaching the West as far as freedoms and democracy goes. Most of Russia has also improved manyfold as far as material wealth and standard of living goes. But Russia is still big, some 150 million people. Nationalism is the thing that keeps it together. Putin has to make a show of it to impress the masses in Russia. Thousands of men, tens of thousands of men, tanks and weapons, those are irrelevant losses. Russia thinks the same way it always has. Big sacrifices, such as seen in WWII, are necessary for their self image.

Those not completely agreeing with Putin nevertheless are going along with this because of a lack of options. No election will make a big change. Also, they lived through the Yeltsin years, 91-99, and it was unstable. Conditions were barely better than in the Soviet Union. Putin brought stability, even if most people knew of all the corruption and had to maneuver that to get consumer goods.

Putin is where he is for a reason. There is no majority to rebel at this point. And I suspect that removing Putin would end up with some guy whos seems "reasonable" but turns into Putin again in 20 years.

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.