Yet another writer describes why Trump leads the Republican Party

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Perhaps this gentleman has read the same pieces that I reported on last week, but now George Packer has written a post for the New Yorker Magazine on the topic: How Donald Trump appeals to the White Working Class.

The article is very easy to read, and a lot shorter than the similar piece on Stir Journal.

Here is the gist of the article; I might deviate a bit from the points of the author if I have a slightly different view of matters.

Off the Beaten Track
Sara Palin and Trump are walking the road between Reality TV and Politics, one going one way, the other going the other.  They both appeal to middle-aged, white Americans, who have been made furious by "globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade."  They are minimally pious, anti-government, and (inexplicably) pro-business.  Trump is also using "White Identity Rhetoric," which is a clever way of saying that he appeals to poor white voters who feel marginalized by National Politics, insinuating that their economically disadvantaged status is caused specifically by their race, and that Trump will work specifically to help this demographic, as signaled by his professed hostility towards immigrant labor.

Traditional Republicans
The mainstream of the Republican Party only had Ted Cruz to represent them.  They were not happy with the Tea Party rhetoric that some of the candidates had adopted, and are not happy with the contentious stupidity of Trump's rhetoric either.  (More importantly, the conservatives in the GOP did not like Cruz either, because he was too extremely Right.)  Trump loves the non-logic of those he perceives to be his supporters; in fact he goes out of his way to make arguments that make absolutely no sense, but depend on superficial verbal cleverness which is either his natural style of speech, or has been adopted specifically to appeal to an audience that is tired of hearing the logic of upliftment of the racial minorities, as if it were synonymous with the upliftment of the economically disadvantaged.  Mainstream Conservatives, even if many of them are not religious, like to maintain the appearance of being believers.  They argue against abortion and gay marriage from a traditional Christian viewpoint, though they could not care less about the religious objections.  (Some conservatives undoubtedly do, but I'm sure they're in the minority.)  This makes the GOP deeply unhappy with Trump.

How Democrats feel about the White Working Class
The Democrats (the author says), have had an uncomfortable relationship with (members of) the White American working class.  They support them in principle, but when the educated Democrat supporters of Bernie Sanders (for instance) actually encounter working-class whites, "the feeling [of empathy with them] can vanish ... [because these working-class folk] often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—[and] might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know."  In short, a Democrat encountering someone who looks and sounds like the Trump supporters we see on TV, but might not actually be a Trump supporter, will be acutely uncomfortable, because though the Democrat agenda is intended to address the needs of the working class, no matter of what race the individual might be, the encounter is going to be uncomfortable to the one who is supposedly bringing the good news.  Trump does a better job of speaking to this demographic, because often their views are repugnant to those of us brought up on a diet of Political Correctness and Equality of Women, and such things which some guys find objectionable, bless them.

To put a more serious complexion on this situation, the writer reports that according to a certain study, in recent decades working-class white Americans have been dying at increasing rates.   The cause, says one author of the study, is mainly alcohol, suicide, and death due to opioids.  The study concludes that it is an epidemic of despair; the psychology of the poor white population has gone far beyond being of merely academic interest.  Indeed, there is certainly an epidemic of narcotic abuse within the white population of all economic levels, which is signaled by a new interest in providing social services for addiction.  Traditional Conservatives would view addressing the mental-health (and chemical health!) of drug-users as important simply as a means of preventing the scourge from spreading to their own families, and for preserving the health of the workforce.  Liberals (and other Democrats) must view the task of addressing the needs of poor whites as something that has not been done up until now, and must be taken care of on moral grounds.  But it is a difficult job, because the target audience is a highly illogical, prejudiced one with actually very conservative social views, which must be battled all the way.

(I suspect that Trump supporters shown on TV are far from being typical.  They are selected to be interesting viewing, and not to be representative.  It is very likely that the majority of Trump supporters are pretty much like our own friends who are impatient with Crybaby Progressives.)

My Take
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are splitting the Democratic Party into the idealists, and the cynical pragmatics.  After Carter, the Democrats reinvented themselves under the Clintons as business-friendly (for the sake of the Nation).  I don't know the inside story of how they managed to gain control of the party; they probably assured them that they (the Clintons) had powerful business support, and that therefore the financial backing to win the White House.  That was the time when we had Enron and all those crazy Wall Street bandits, and half the time the Republicans wanted to put the Clintons in jail, while the rest of the time, they wished they could be bigger Wall Street bandits themselves.  The Clinton years were all about a bunch of adulterers trying to convict Bill Clinton of sexual depravity.  The fact that US citizens were better off in Clinton's presidency than they have ever been since then was of no import: they wanted a highly moral guy as President.

But the fact remained that the Clintons played a lot of financial games in their day, which made them the darlings of the big Banks and Insurance companies, and this makes it very hard to trust Hillary Clinton in her bid for President, because being beholden to the Banks, she might be as dangerous in the White House as Cheney was.  Make no mistake: I would trust Hillary Clinton a lot further than the Bush-Cheney team.  A lot further.  But there is still a little niggling doubt.

With Bernie Sanders (and with Donald Trump, for completely different reasons) one feels anxious about how well he would actually perform in the White House.  With Trump, I'm not going to rack my brains trying to see how he could succeed.  With Bernie Sanders, we shall need not only to win the White House, but win the Congress with Bernie supporters, and there would have to be a credible team behind him, who will help to put together legislation that will bring about a significant part of the political and social changes that he has been talking about, in such a way that it does not end with a huge fiasco with calls for impeachment, and martial law, and a new constitution, and yadda yadda, and repeals of the legislation within a year or two.  Obamacare survives, because, ultimately, the Insurance Industry is happy with it.  But Big Business will not be happy with the majority of legislation that Bernie has planned.  That's good for us, as long as the legislation stands.

[Added still later:

George Blow, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, summarizes many of my feelings about Trump, and the sector of US society that gets inspiration from him, and presumably will win Trump the nomination of the GOP for the presidency in 2016.

I am embarrassed to be delighted at every criticism he hurls at this demographic, but in some ways his characterization of this sliver of our society is somewhat more compassionate, because he indicates the curve of the legislation that took resources away from middle-class white men, and spread it to other sectors of society that was in need.  Most of all, he delineates why Social Security, in its earliest form, left out large sectors of the population who sorely needed it, and (if I understand him correctly) how, when these inequities were corrected, it left middle class white men with less, in order that other sectors of society could catch up with them. This is the nature of a zero-sum game: if I win a little more, you win a little less.
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[Added later:

I believe that Hillary Clinton could be a good President for the USA, probably one of the best.  But my problem with her is that she frequently does not say what she really believes, and says what seems expedient at the time.  The hearts of the Clintons are probably in the right place, but ... she still has to earn my trust.  A good number of Democrats will vote for Hillary without a second thought, but I'm not that comfortable with her.]

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Teachers: Because Parents Can't Do It All

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A few days ago, it was National Teachers Day, and all the schmaltzy "I Love Teachers" stuff got trotted out.  I'm all for adulation of teachers, but we've got to keep the sentimentality out of it.  You know?  It's great to know and admire teachers, but sentimentality really doesn't get you very far.

Why we need teachers
You can do your own research, but deep in the dawn of history, or actually, a few thousand years ago--I suspect it was around the dawn of agriculture--when it was realized that kids could learn more while they were still young, and the amount of non-food-related information began to burst into bloom, the idea was born that you could assign an adult to teach the little blighters a little something extra, and pay him / her with food, and Bingo!  You had a few young people who could take up some of the more complicated professions with a lot less trouble.  And you also had them out from underfoot when the adults were busy.

Lots of higher mammals are like that: even elephants have a prolonged youth, during which they grow intellectually a great deal, whereas something like a rabbit is probably ready to breed within seconds after it is born.  I don't know all there is to know about animals; dammit, Jim, I'm a professor, not a ... well, anyway.

Adulation
In lots of primitive societies, ignorant adults tend to assess the worth of each other based on their own --presumably primitive-- values, such as how much wealth they had, or how good a fighter someone is, or how many women they had raped, or other good stuff like that.  (I'm not trying to save your feelings; this is the real primitive world.  If the potty fits, poop in it.)  It became quickly clear that, A. Teachers did not fit into this value structure.  Also, B. kids who had been to school were generally more successful in life.  Putting two and two together, haha, Gloopy arrived at the conclusion: we should respect Teachy despite the fact that he/she doesn't own a lot of goats, and isn't much good in a fight.

In the US, too, until recently, an education did give one an edge in personal success, and teachers were --generally-- regarded with a degree of respect.  But somehow, primitive values crept in.

Primitive Values
Business began to gain the upper hand in US culture in the sixties, and was helped along in the eighties by affluent politicians, who saw that their own personal financial success depended on the success of the Stock Market.  It is always a mistake to give undeserved respect to something like the Stock Market, because it is subject to interference by unpredictable things.

Many things conspired to make teachers unpopular among people of limited mental acuity.
First of all, the value placed on grades.  Living in the insanely competitive society that we do, it was natural that parents began to feel that the grades Junior got was a reflection on them.  Of course, this is partly true: more successful kids get more educational support from their parents.  Some parents know algebra, others do not.  So the parents of poorly-performing kids began to dislike their teacher, especially if the teacher were so politically inept as to point the finger of blame on the parents concerned.
Secondly, the employment situation got intermittently tight, so that business could get sniffy about whom they hired.  Colleges and universities, too, knew that --while it was always a good policy to admit rich kids, regardless of what their scores were-- kids with high scores were always more likely to do them proud.  This made teachers decidedly unpopular with at least half the parent population.
Thirdly, teachers generally oppose militarism, because they developed an attachment to the kids they had been teaching, and the last thing you want is to see one of your students go off to Vietnam and get killed.  It is difficult to trace this particular source of teacher unpopularity, but I have a hunch that it exists.
Fourthly, the rich idiots who control Congress (and more importantly, the various State houses of representatives) resent the taxes that keep the schools running, and want teachers accountable for even the few miserable tax dollars that they do spend.  This epidemic spreads quickly throughout politics: teachers must be held accountable.

Many other factors make teachers unpopular.  Kids do not like school; unlike in the days of Socrates, it is no longer a privilege to go to school; the law requires it.  This means that young people completely unsuited to the demands of school are forced to submit to education.

I'm not sure when this sentimental approach towards appreciating teachers began, but, embarrassing though it is, I suspect it originated with teachers themselves.  In the vacuum left by absentee parents, teachers had to take on aspects of the education of a child that is more appropriately handled by parents.  "Respect your teachers" is most definitely one of them.  In any case, some of the memes we're getting are just pathetically irrelevant.  The one at right is a case in point.  (Perhaps it was dreamed up by folk from the Far East, who are horrified at the lack of respect for teachers they find here.)  Like many things, the attitude towards teachers must be culturally appropriate for the society: reverence for teachers quickly deteriorates into sentimentality.  Do we really want to describe teachers as consuming themselves for their students?

A teacher must love his or her subject.
A teacher must like young people.
A teacher must have a lot of energy and patience.
A teacher must be able to deal with adults.

Apart from these things, a teacher must be a moderately intelligent human being.  Consuming themselves should not enter into the equation.

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2016: Gender Reassignment, and the Transgender Phenomenon

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Since the question of how to deal with the needs of transgender citizens in our midst is becoming a major policy issue, I think we ordinary folks should take a look at the entire phenomenon.  Psychologists, obviously, have been looking at it for decades, but I tend to be just a little doubtful about their thoughts on anything; the psychologists who have affected public policy have been as often wrong as they have been right.  The entire pain management industry, though helpful to some people, indirectly contribute to the heavy use of narcotics across the country.  That might be considered an entirely medical subject, but I think psychologists have had their hands in it.

Gender is a complex thing.  It is both something that characterizes how an individual sees him- or herself, but almost, even more, how an individual wants society to see him or her.  I’m willing to bet that the attitude of anyone withing the group of people who are sensitive to the question of their gender identity, and to the gender identities of those whom they are interested in relating to, could change depending on the cultural environment of the moment.

Fifty years ago, gender stereotypes were so oppressively strong that only the bravest and most determined people even considered what was called back then a “sex change”.  In some present-day cultures, it is usual for males to take on aggressively masculine personas, and (possibly in response) for females to take on —what other sub-cultures may consider—  excessively feminine personas.  In such a social and cultural environment, life would be difficult for an individual who finds it unpleasant to fit into either the ultra-feminine or the ultra-masculine role that is considered appropriate.  On the other hand in those times, for some people the desire to change gender could be almost desperately strong, because so much is at stake.

Western society is gradually evolving into one in which extreme roles are not expected.  But, of course, because of the great cultural tolerance in American Society (though significantly less than that of certain European societies), there are innumerable cultural pockets in every population center, where the norms are different.  So one could easily find in a big city such as New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, where gender roles are subtle and nuanced, certain neighborhoods in which a male is expected to be excessively masculine as a matter of course.

So, I am beginning to think that a child’s decision to stop being a boy and become a girl, or stop being a girl and become a boy, could be strongly influenced by the microculture in which it finds itself.  Some boys just love to wear dresses.  But what if that boy were in a local culture where dresses do not exist?  Dresses, after all, are an artifact of the culture; a way the culture chooses to express itself at a given moment.  There is very little intrinsically feminine in a dress; most of it is by association and usage.  If a boy in an entirely pants-wearing culture were to suddenly become enamored of dresses upon seeing one in a catalog, for instance, that would be interesting.  One wonders whether gender reassignment would be warranted in such cases, where in my opinion the child is much too young to make a decision of such great import.

More interestingly, because of the gradual drift of gender roles towards a more neutral middle-ground, and because of the tendency of fashions for young people to become more unisex, a trend we can expect to see increasing, it might not be something a young person actually needs, to be surgically altered.  These phenomena of unisex fashions and androgynous presentation of self are more often seen in big cities, and (interestingly enough) among more middle-class populations, whereas less-affluent sectors of society seem to favor the more strongly differentiated gender roles.  A couple of decades from now, we could hope to see a decline in gender-reassignment surgery, simply because it would gradually become easier, some day in the future, for anyone to express him- or herself comfortably at any point in the spectrum of gender identity without gender re-assignment.  We must hope that gender roles of any sort become possible without surgical intervention.  But by then, people might be more interested in becoming whales, or sharks, or something more interesting!  To my conservative eyes, it seems a better choice for an individual to work within the gender he or she has been born with, and use any avenues of costume or other means to create an environment in which he or she can interact in the way he or she desires with the companions he or she desires, than to go the route of surgery.  We hear from those who are happy with their gender transformation, but we ought to hear from those whose gender transformation paths have not been smooth.  Just as things such as surgical body enhancement have been a nightmare for some, so one cannot doubt that desire and attitude alone cannot guarantee success for everyone wanting to change gender surgically.  There have to be a significant number of failures out there which we have not learned about.  But my main thrust is that it may not be long before gender becomes more of a matter of attitude, behavior and choice than a matter of anatomy.

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Important: A poor white woman explains why poor whites support Trump

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Jonna Ivin, in a recent blogpost in the online STIR magazine, explains some of the social history that makes poor whites actually side with the very people who keep them poor.  The title of the post is "I know why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump."

It is tempting to try and paraphrase the article, so that you would not have to read it.  It is a long article, but its length is not superfluous.  It is an accumulation of small facts and events that add up over its length.  Prejudice, ignorance, fear, manipulation, and corruption all play their part.

I'm beginning to recognize that I'm only good at talking about facts, analysis, and my own insights, which might be speculative.  When I get angry, I think I'm less effective; I don't do emotion very well.  This article describes how emotions have been manipulated systematically, and even if you disagree with some of the observations of Ms Ivin, the cumulative effect of the history she relates is convincing.

Anyone who has watched a Trump public appearance has noticed the clever misdirection he employs, and how he systematically puts up verbal effigies of those he wants his audience to hate.  We know that hate is an important tool in his armory.  But for what is he using this hate?

George Carlin has a segment in which he describes a technique used by the Ruling Class.  It has been used from time immemorial, but systematically employed only since the American Republic, when the Colonies needed labor.  Read for yourself.

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Excellence: We used to celebrate it!

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I was just reading that Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, was explaining to a reporter what Quantum Computing was.

Do any of us remember a time just 10 years ago?  Forget about the Fifties; we're talking just a few years ago.  People were interested in all sorts of things: cold fusion, quantum computing, wormholes in space!  At least, my friends were.

But now it appears that while the sector of the population in which I lay celebrated this excellence, while this sector was searching on YouTube for interesting, intriguing, unusual things, another sizeable minority was fuming in resentment against those who knew and understood and appreciated novel and interesting things.  And some switch has been thrown somewhere, and the throwbacks have begun to assert themselves.

An author called Charles Murray (who might be familiar to others, but about whom I only heard a couple of days ago) says that increasingly we're getting to the point where nobody listens to anyone who disagrees with them: we're beginning to seek ideological bubbles in which to live, insulated from the opinions of those whose values are different.  So while I and most of my friends---even those who are political conservatives---celebrate those who have exceptional talents, who are interested in unusual things, who are creative, who like intellectual challenges, there are those out there who simply hate intellectualism, who would mug Justin Trudeau if they caught him alone at night in a parking lot.

This is not news to me; there have always been people like this.  I find them among my students.

Teaching mathematics brings you into contact with all sorts of strange animals.  There are those who had been fairly good at math in high school, but who need to get through a remedial course.  Some jump into it, and do as well as they can.  Some are bored with it, and struggle to pay attention.  Some resent it utterly, and feel that having to learn math in college is an imposition, and an abridgement of their freedoms.

There is an interesting person called Vi Hart, a musician by training, whose avocation is creating videos on mathematical subjects.  She has numerous interesting videos on YouTube, all made by simply recording her doodlings on video with a fixed camera, while she babbles on about what she's doing.  She's the type of person who could be interested in Quantum Computing.  So I occasionally play a video by Vi Hart to my classes.  Some of the kids just love it.  Some are annoyed by her, because Vi Hart can occasionally sound a little patronizing.  Some just cover their heads and hate it with a passion!

So, apparently while---at least a few years ago---some kids were involved in gymnastics and swimming and tennis and ballet and Odyssey of the Mind, and MathCounts, and Spelling Bee, there were others who resented these kids with a passion.  The slimy underbelly of America has been exposed; the worm has turned, the rats have their backs against the wall, and are asserting themselves.  They're striking a blow for mediocrity.

This is not as simple as it appears.

Too long we have pushed toward a society where everyone goes to college.  This means that the minority that never has this privilege becomes a resentful underclass.  It does not help that all you really need to go to college is money.  Not intellectual ability, not hard work.  Just money.  It is inevitable that if a sufficiently large number of mediocre students flood the campuses, colleges must respond with dumbing-down.  I have a colleague who specializes in dumbing down.  He does not see it as specializing in dumbing-down; he sees it as teaching his kids what they should have learned in Fifth Grade, but teaching it really, really well.  I'm not sure he's succeeding.

There is only one tiny little bit of hope, and that is that the other people have not disappeared; they've just gone into hiding, they're staying under the radar, they're playing it cool.

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Stay Tuned: The Whole Cholesterol / Saturated Fat Business Needs to be ReThunk

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The path of true knowledge seldom runs smooth.

Ever since people began turning the eye of suspicion on cholesterol,the general public has been subjected to contradictory recommendations about what to eat.  A recent blog post in the New York Times draws attention to a study from some 40 years ago that seems to suggest that eating less meat and saturated fats did not necessarily increase your expected length of life.  Read the article carefully for yourself; often the studies and their aims are not what you expect from the titles of the articles.

I myself recently almost had a heart attack, and I’m obviously interested in what an ideal diet should be, both from the point of view of eating stuff that tastes good to me, and from the point of view of increasing my chances of avoiding a painful, and potentially harmful heart “event” as much as possible.  A full-blown heart-attack can end up restricting your activities, especially in your work, and in your fun, as well.  And it is no joke going through an almost attack; I can hardly imagine a complete heart attack.

[Any restriction in blood flow into the heart muscle—in contrast to reduction of blood through the heart, which is also troublesome; when the heart doesn’t do its job, you need to have those little nylon Oxygen tubes going into your nose—causes pain, because the heart needs a constant supply of Oxygen to do its work.  A minor reduction is slightly painful, but doesn’t injure the heart.  A complete blockage of one of the blood supply vessels (arteries) results is terrible pain, and actual injury to the heart.]

Anyone who has lived through the last three decades has got the general impression that

• Cholesterol is bad generally, and the LDL Cholesterol is the worst.
• A lot of heart artery blockage actually consists of Cholesterol.
• There is something called Plaque in the artery walls that also blocks them.
• Saturated fats are bad.
• Fats in red meats are the worst.  Fats in eggs and dairy are also pretty bad.
• Unsaturated fats and monosaturated fats are good for you.
• Omega fatty acids are ... what?  Maybe good for you.  These are found in eggs, and Avocadoes, and some sorts of fish, e.g. Salmon and Trout.

The first break in my cognitive structures that had to do with these matters came when I read that saturated oils were actually good for certain sorts of cooking, e.g. frying under high heat.

Now, you’re not supposed to fry under high heat if you can avoid it.  High temperatures are bad for most foods, because it changes the chemistry of the foods in a bad way.  (It’s supposedly worst when you fry cured meats, e.g. bacon and ham.  I’m not completely sure that I’ve got that right.)  But I seemed to read that the high temperatures made unsaturated oils themselves dangerous, whereas saturated oils didn’t change very much when heated.  This is called the stability of the oil; saturated oils are more stable, precisely because they’re saturated.  So Coconut Oil was considered a good oil for frying, stir-frying in a wok, etc.  To date I have not seen anything to contradict that belief.

Some of the reasons why Congress doesn't Work

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What have some people been doing for the last 20 years or so?

Making it easier for Congressmen to make extra pocket money.

• They can get money from Lobbyists.
• They have arranged for businesses to make more money, so that they can hire more Lobbyists.
• They have allowed Lobbyists to weaken laws, and write new legislation that gives businesses and corporations more freedom to act, who, in turn, can hire more Lobbyists.
• They have reduced taxes for business corporations (in return for favorable treatment by Lobbyists), so that Lobbyists can earn more, and treat Congressmen even better, and take the load off the legal aides of Congressmen, so that Lobbyists can write superior laws.

With all these Lobbyists helping Congressmen, why don’t they do a better job of legislation?  We ought to restrict how much playtime Congressmen have with Lobbyists.  I’m sure is just a few bad apples, but those apples are terrible.  It is just depressing to see a few diehard Congressmen addressing a number of empty seats.  They should rename C-Span as C-EmptySeats.

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