#Partisanship

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Cox at American Storylines:

Watching the clips from Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, what struck me more than anything else is how utterly unrecognizable the Republican Party has become under Trump. A party that once stressed the importance of honesty and integrity is gone. The rally speakers engaged in unrestrained vitriol and bigotry.  It’s not all happening on stage either.  The Washington Post interviewed Craig Dumas, a T-shirt vendor at one of Trump’s campaign events. His best seller? “Say No to the Hoe.” Variations of this message can be found at Trump rallies around the country. When the Post reporters talked with Brian Howard, a Trump rally-attendee, about his “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go” T-shirt, he replied: “We can joke. We can wear crude shirts. Everybody here is having a good time.” 

Hilarious.  How much is Trump to blame for the type of nasty, derogatory rhetoric that has become a mainstay of American politics? I would argue more than a little.   But worse than the normalization of casual cruelty is the way Trump has subverted the importance of character in politics. In our late summer poll, we found that 44 percent of Americans believe he committed sexual assault. A Marquette Law School poll conducted over the summer found that 62 percent of voters believe Trump is corrupt. Only 41 percent of voters believe Trump could be described as honest and trustworthy. Even a quarter of Republicans do not believe Trump is honest.  Most Americans who are supporting Trump recognize that he has deep personality flaws, that he is not a good role model. The central animating question of the Trump era has always been: How can so many Americans support Trump for the country’s highest office when so many Americans have such a low opinion of his character? 

All Politicians Are Corrupt and Dishonest 

From the very beginning of Trump’s political career, he has sought to position himself as a brash outsider against a corrupt, effete establishment. At the same time, he never promised to restore honor and dignity to the presidency. Rather, he promised to wade into the swamp and fight dirty. Plenty of Americans were receptive to the message.  It’s not hard to see why.  Trust in government has plummeted over the past few decades. Part of the reason this happened is that Americans increasingly view their elected leaders as unethical. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, only about one in four Americans rated the honesty of members of Congress as low or very low. Most Americans rated the honesty of their elected officials as average, and one in five rated it as above average. Today, most Americans do not believe members of Congress are honest or ethical. In 2023, seventy percent of the public rated the honesty and integrity of congressmembers as low or very low. That’s a massive change and it has profound implications on the voting decisions Americans make. If elected officials are viewed as universally dishonest, then integrity is no longer a useful metric in assessing their worthiness for public office. 

Who benefits the most from this? The candidates who are most ethically compromised. Officials who engage in the most egregious acts of public corruption. 

[...]

Polarized Voters Want Pugilistic Politicians 

It's been well documented that Americans have become more polarized over the past couple decades. This has been especially evident in the negative views partisans have about those across the aisle—a phenomenon political scientists define as affective polarization. Republicans and Democrats have come to dislike each other much more in the modern era.  A couple years ago I wrote about the dramatic change occurring among partisans during the Trump presidency. Republicans and Democrats not only believed their opponents were simply wrong or misguided, but that they presented a threat to the nation. In 2017, only about half of Democrats and Republicans believed their opposition represented a threat to the country—a worryingly high number. By 2020, three-quarters of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the other side posed a threat to the country. 

More recent polling suggests things may be getting worse. A new poll by Johns Hopkins University found that nearly half of Republicans and Democrats believe the opposing party is “downright evil.” And a recent NBC News survey found that 8 in 10 Democrats and Republicans said their opponents are so dangerous they pose a threat that would destroy America as we know it.  The growing hostility that partisans feel towards their opponents has altered the way voters respond to deficiencies in their party’s candidates. As partisan animosity toward their political opponents grows, Democrats and Republicans become less concerned about the behavior of their own leaders. It becomes easier to overlook disqualifying attributes, because the political alternative is always worse.   It has also led partisans to prioritize candidates who would go after their opponents. If character no longer matters amidst heightened partisan hostilities, an ability and willingness to destroy the other side does. Trump excels at this type of combative politics. He relishes it. 

The real tragedy is that more Americans have come to believe that honesty and integrity don’t matter. Trump has convinced many Americans that being a good guy in politics is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. It’s a sign of weakness or capitulation. An unsurprising result is that more Americans discount a candidate’s character when making political choices. In 2011 most Americans believed that elected officials who engaged in immoral acts in their personal lives would not behave ethically in carrying out their public duties. Now, most Americans believe the opposite. The shift is far more pronounced among Republicans, but it’s not exclusive to them.   Whether he wins or loses, Trump’s legacy will be forever wrapped up in his bizarre, belittling and bullying behavior, and how he transformed our expectations for political leaders. When Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, talked with Jared Kushner about Trump’s behavior, he received a startling reply. “No one can go as low as the president,” Kushner said. “You shouldn’t even try.” It was a compliment. 

Daniel Cox of American Storylines wrote a stark reminder that character and morals were jettisoned with the rise of Donald Trump in GOP politics.

[nodynasty4us]

A new NBC News poll shows another difference along partisan lines: media consumption. Among consumers of traditional media (newspapers, national networks and cable news networks), Joe Biden leads 52% to 41%. Among people who get their news from social media, Google, and other digital sources, it's Donald Trump 47% and Biden 44%. Among people who don't get any political news, Trump leads 53% to 27%. Also, the less well-informed you are, the more likely you are to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Electoral-vote.com

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real scandal is overclassification

The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity - it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/30/i-come-to-a-land-downunder/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-01-30-president-classified-document-scandal/

Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.

Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:

https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/

In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:

https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/examining-costs-overclassification-transparency-security/

Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office - which oversees classification - keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:

https://fas.org/irp/congress/2016_hr/overclass.pdf

In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/top-secret-america/2010/07/19/hidden-world-growing-beyond-control-2/

Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/magazine/the-strange-politics-of-classified-information.html

As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.

Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/26/the-wrong-question-about-the-classified-documents-scandal-00079540

[Image ID: A photograph of the Military Records Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Displayed are some captured German records waiting to be boxed.]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Pro-Israel Democrats could have taken a stand against her and Tlaib. But, intimidated by the rise of the intersectional movement that has seized control of the left-wing base of the Democratic Party, and fearing that they will be branded as racists if they speak out, they have refused to ostracize them.

In doing so, they have essentially legitimized Omar’s views. Her anti-Zionist and antisemitic ideas are now routinely published in the pages of liberal mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. And the ranks of the “Squad” have vastly expanded in the last two election cycles, with even more sympathizers among those who identify as progressive Democrats.

Republicans have their outliers, like Greene and others. They routinely make outrageous and often indefensible statements, although Democrats are equally guilty of the promiscuous use of inappropriate Holocaust analogies.

But they are not guilty of seeking to normalize antisemitism by masquerading as mere “critics” of Israel. And, unlike Omar, they lack the influence that comes with being part of a movement that already dominates academia and much of the media with its toxic myths about white privilege and lies about Israel’s being an “apartheid” state.

-

In giving Omar a pass for antisemitism, Democrats have crossed a line that no party or its supporters can transgress without being rightly accused of enabling Jew-hatred. By rallying around her, either out of party loyalty or hypocritical opposition to cancel culture that they never apply to embattled conservatives, is to make antisemitism a partisan issue. This is a historic development that may make it impossible to ever put the genie of intersectional hate for Jews back in the bottle. It’s also an unforgivable betrayal of their Jewish voters and the principles of tolerance that they claim to uphold.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Abstract

A sizable literature tracing back to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style (1964) argues that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than Democrats and liberals. However, the evidence for this proposition is mixed. Since conspiracy theory beliefs are associated with dangerous orientations and behaviors, it is imperative that social scientists better understand the connection between conspiracy theories and political orientations. Employing 20 surveys of Americans from 2012 to 2021 (total n = 37,776), as well as surveys of 20 additional countries spanning six continents (total n = 26,416), we undertake an expansive investigation of the asymmetry thesis. First, we examine the relationship between beliefs in 52 conspiracy theories and both partisanship and ideology in the U.S.; this analysis is buttressed by an examination of beliefs in 11 conspiracy theories across 20 more countries. In our second test, we hold constant the content of the conspiracy theories investigated—manipulating only the partisanship of the theorized villains—to decipher whether those on the left or right are more likely to accuse political out-groups of conspiring. Finally, we inspect correlations between political orientations and the general predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories over the span of a decade. In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers and the socio-political context in which those ideas are considered.

[...]

Discussion and Conclusion

Are those on the political right (Republicans/conservatives) more prone to conspiracy theorizing than those on the left (Democrats/liberals)? The smattering of evidence across the literature provides conflicting answers to this question. We surmise that disagreement in the literature is substantially the product of limitations regarding both the operationalizations of conspiracy theorizing and the context––both temporal and socio-political––in which beliefs are assessed in previous work. Given the imperative of better understanding conspiracy theories and the people who believe them, we compiled a robust body of evidence for testing the asymmetry thesis. Across multiple surveys and measurement strategies, we found more evidence for partisan and ideological symmetry in conspiricism, however operationalized, than for asymmetry.

First, we found that the relationship between political orientations and beliefs in specific conspiracy theories varied considerably across 52 specific conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories containing partisan/ideological content or that have been endorsed by prominent partisan/ideological elites will find more support among those in one political camp or the other, while theories without such content or endorsements tend to be unrelated to partisanship and ideology in the U.S. We also observed considerable variability in the relationship between left–right ideology and 11 conspiracy theory beliefs across 20 additional countries spanning six continents; this variability suggests that the relationship between left–right ideology and conspiracy theory belief is also affected by the political context in which conspiracy theories are polled. To account for the potential impact of idiosyncratic factors associated with specific conspiracy theories, we next examined the relationship between beliefs in “content-controlled” conspiracy theories and political orientations. We found that both Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives engage in motivated conspiracy endorsement at similar rates, with Democrats/liberals occasionally exhibiting stronger motivations than Republicans/conservatives. Finally, we observed only inconsistent evidence for an asymmetric relationship between conspiracy thinking and either partisanship, symbolic ideology, or operational ideology across 18 polls administered between 2012 and 2021. Even though the average correlations across studies were positive, indicating a relationship with conservatism/Republicanism (owing mostly to data collected in 2016), they were negligible in magnitude and individual correlations varied in sign and statistical significance over time.

Equally important as our substantive conclusions is an exploration of why we reached them, which can shed light on existing inconsistencies in the literature. While the core inferences we make from our investigation may deviate from the conclusions of others, empirical patterns are not irreconcilable. Take, for example, the study conducted by van der Linden and colleagues (2021). They infer from a strong, positive correlation between beliefs that “climate change is a hoax” and conservatism that conservatives are inherently more conspiratorial than liberals. However, we demonstrate that such conclusions cannot be made using beliefs in a single conspiracy theory. As can be seen in Fig. 1, climate change conspiracy theories show one of the highest levels of asymmetry; therefore, exclusive examination of almost any other conspiracy theory would lead to a result less supportive of the asymmetry argument.

Van der Linden et al. (2021) also find a positive, albeit weak, correlation between conservatism and generalized conspiracy thinking. While this relationship is statistically significant, liberals still exhibit high levels of conspiracism. Indeed, even strong liberals score above the 50-point midpoint on their 101-point measure (between 60 and 65, on average), whereas strong conservatives typically score about 10 points higher (see Figs. 1b and 3b). In other words, liberals, like conservatives, are more conspiratorial than not. Moreover, van der Linden et al.’s data hail from 2016 and 2018––years in which we also observed relatively elevated levels of conspiracy thinking among conservatives. However, this was not the case in other years and samples we examined. This is exactly what we might expect of a disposition that is not inherently connected to partisanship and ideology, but which may be sporadically activated by political circumstances. We do not question the veracity of van der Linden et al.’s empirical findings or those of any other study with conclusions that disagree with ours; rather, we argue that differences largely stem from the inferences made from empirical relationships, which are frequently more general than the data allows.

[..]

That we find little difference in conspiracy theorizing between the right and left among the mass public does not indicate that there are no differences between partisan elites on this score, nor does it imply that there will not be asymmetries in beliefs in specific conspiracy theories at any given point in time. Specific conspiracy theories can find more support among one partisan/ideological side than the other even though partisan/ideological motivated reasoning and conspiratorial predispositions operate, on balance, in a symmetric fashion. Likewise, the content of those theories and the way they are deployed, particularly by elites, can result in asymmetrical consequences, such as political violence and the undermining of democratic institutions. We encourage future work to integrate the conspiratorial rhetoric of elites with studies of mass beliefs and investigate elite conspiratorial rhetoric from actors including and beyond Donald Trump.

==

Similar to anti-vaxers. We've heard a lot of anti-vax rhetoric from the right over COVID vaccines, but the battle over MMR vaccines was largely on the left, with nutters like Jenny McCarthy and David Avocado at the top, and ultimately trickling down to anti-gluten, organic kale, "chemical-free" mothers conducting their goalpost-moving war on big words.

As with conspiracy theories, it depends on who's for it. If "they" are for it, "we" are against it. If "we" are for it, "they" are against it.

Back in April 2020, the Trump administration aimed to fast-track 100m vaccine doses by the end of the year, intending to shave off 8 months of development in a project called "Operation Warp Speed." Dems who were anti-vax when Trump was going to deliver it...

"Watch out...they are going to push it too early...this corrupt administration could give a crap about the safety of the American people"

... are now pro-vax today and will tell you so as an identity in their bio, while the Republicans who today still talk about them being "experimental" and preemptively deciding that nobody ever died of a heart condition before the vaccines, were cheering it on at the time as "far and away the most effective means of controlling the disease and allowing Americans to return to fully normal life."

What happened? Reality was reorganized along tribalist lines of contrariness, rather than truth.

[mooretoons]

Division

This whole cartoon is a response to a single article in the New York Times, “Two Families Got Fed Up With Their States’ Politics. So They Moved Out.” Well, and taking a potshot at David Leonhardt, whose bloodless newsletter appears in my inbox every morning, like a turd on my doorstep. I moved to Portland in 1995, when housing was still affordable and employment was easier to find. Yet the seeds…

[nosferdoc]

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal! and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his com-petitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

— George Washington, September 17, 1796, Farewell Address.

[erik-even-wordier]

The major dynamic here is called the polarization cycle. Not all conflicts are polarization cycles, but you get such cycles when you have two groups at either extremes, groups that each believe they are in an existential struggle for survival. Especially when you also have a media environment that feeds the worst statements and actions of the other side instead of the average statements and actions. So each side is then driven towards more and more passion by all the anecdotes and stories that supposedly confirm the radicalism of the other side. Both sides also believe the end justifies the means so neither side will care about due process and law. Victory must be had at all cost. Then, yes, you get a polarization cycle that can easily lead to violence. In America we are absolutely experiencing a polarization cycle.

Jonathan Haidt in How to Overcome Tribalism, the Shouty Minority and Facebook Toxicity - POLITICO

[luvsjimmyreed]

I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m also not a Libertarian or a member of the Green Party. My principles don’t jibe entirely with any of the political parties established in this country. My principles are about basic human rights, freedom, equality, and treating others the same way you wanna be treated. I don’t believe in ‘us versus them’. I believe in trying to see the good in everyone. It’s not to say that there don’t exist people with hate in their hearts, but I try to treat everyone with dignity and respect - and I also believe in letting people’s actions speak for themselves. There is a reason for the adage of ‘actions speak louder than words’.

Jimmy Reed, On Principles versus Partisanship

[allurlsaregone-blog]

Politics as eradication. Policymaking as the foremost idea of the fattest faction at the moment the vote is taken.

[usindistress]

Republicans have so much animosity against liberals they will try to punish conservative voters in blue states for "liberal tears" rather than take the uncontroversial stance of FUNDING DISASTER RELEIF IN A DISASTER!

Matt Gaetz is a horrible person who is horrible at government.

[nodynasty4us]

Marriages where the couple belongs to different parties are common, although partisanship is so strong now that there are separate dating services for Democrats and Republicans. Interestingly, the Democratic site offers four options: man seeking woman, woman seeking man, man seeking man, and woman seeking woman. The Republican site offers only two options. We don't want to spoil it for you, so we aren't going to tell you which ones here.

Electoral-vote.com

[deremerstudios]

DIVISION'S MORAL DECEIT

Face it - we live in divisive times. Join us as we examining how the cultures' moral veneration of division has come home to roost in the Evangelical church... and the devastating consequences it has wrought. What counsel does the Scriptures offer?

Examining how the cultures’ moral veneration of division has come home to roost in the Evangelical church with devastating consequences. But what counsel does the Scriptures offer to help us right the ship before it’s too late? “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are My…

[meadowslark]

Off topic, but....

With the experiences of a half century of voting (and many "principled" votes which in retrospect served neither the public nor my own good), I have to concur. And for the record, I am a FORMER Republican precinct person.

Vote! And honestly, this year I've got to encourage you to vote Kamala and down ticket Democrats.

made a beautiful google slides infographic in 60 seconds on why u should Fucking Vote

[carlthemuse]

The Internal Struggle: How American Politics is Becoming its Own Enemy

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Another Lazy Thinking Way Of Operating

There is no left or right, not really, not in political terms. There are many shades of thought and philosophies existing and interacting around the place at any one time in history. Grouping everything into a binary is just another lazy thinking way of operating. It is similar to focusing on one individual at the expense of acknowledging teams and organisations being responsible for actions, achievements and perceived failures. This all comes down to how we like to tell stories and the kind of stories we most like consuming. We, as human beings, shift the emphasis within episodic events to make them more coherent and linked to a central theme or character. We strip out the stuff we judge as tangential and beef up what we want to shine through. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Keeping Our Worlds Small

Our lazy thinking loves to label stuff left or right, good or bad, or whatever broad based category fits our bill. Polarisation feeds off these categorisations and judgements like a gatekeeper. We want to keep our worlds small and prevent expansionary ideas getting in. America is the perfect example of this right now, where you have some 333 million people identifying as American. This is way too many folk to be sharing an overarching national identity. The internal pressures to break this up into smaller groupings are overwhelming. Modern human beings cannot exist in such a large pool in terms of their identity. Especially sons and daughters of the Western enlightenment. Red or blue, conservative or progressive, southerner or northerner, rural or urban, white or coloured, WASP or Latino, Christian or something else, and the list of binaries could go on.  Human beings want to keep their worlds small and keep out those they deem unworthy of fitting in.

Fictions Over Facts For More Lazy Thinking

It seems like folk are choosing fictions over facts, as stuff they believe in and acting accordingly so. Truth, as an adherence to factor, has gone missing of late in the lives of many Americans. Making stuff up and signing up to stuff you hear without bothering to fact check it are increasingly prevalent. Fingers have been pointed at social media as the defining culprit of this popular trend but I am not sure if this is singularly to blame. Sure, as a source of gossip and outlandish stories social media has expanded the field but human nature must be equally complicit, in my view. Social media is a digital bulletin board, a public square where stuff is writ large, and a shared conversation. The fact that you cannot be assured of the actual identity of who you are communicating with and whether they are, indeed, human at all makes it fraught with fraudulent dangers. Ordinary folk are liable to be manipulated by bad actors, bots, and scammers. Algorithms designed to feed us a diet enriched with outrage engage tens of millions of us across the various platforms 24/7. Bill Clinton, during his Presidency failed to properly regulate the online space and nothing much has been done ever since. Talk about Frankenstein creating monsters, which have grown into multi-billion dollar giants too big to control. The influence of Silicon Valley on successive federal governments and the world is almost without precedence in history. A few historians mention the facts that the printing press, pamphlets and books cost around a third of Europe’s population in lives lost thanks to wars they inspired and provoked, as examples of earlier information technologies and the very real dangers they posed. Some like Yuval Harari and Timothy Snyder tell us that our governments are asleep at the wheel in the face of the online perils now consuming us. Harari makes the suggestion that counterfeiting human identities should immediately be made a crime, a serious one akin to counterfeiting money. The Elon Musk’s of this world present an Orwellian like danger to our lives through the mind control reach upon his 200 million followers on X, according to Snyder. https://www.boomsocial.com/EN/X/Account/elonmusk-44196397 Orion at White House for Made in America Product Showcase (NHQ201807230014) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 Demagogues & Dictators Facebook, Instagram, X, Tik Tok and the myriad of smaller platforms provide global messaging for despots and demagogues like Donald Trump. Strongmen in the fascist mould are rising up in authoritarian states around the globe, Putin, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Orban, Madura, and a growing cohort of these populist dictators are presenting a real threat to democracies around the world. Donald Trump wishes to take the US into this cabal of crooks who have amassed fortunes at the expense of their own citizens. Trump sees the presidency as an opportunity to feather his own personal nest to the level he has always wished to ascend to. There have been crooks in the American presidency before but none so blatant and shameless as Trump. The possibility that the American people could be so duped for a second time by this conman makes their own credibility and integrity loom large as highly questionable. Believing in fictions over facts to the extent that Donald Trump is a serial bankrupt, convicted felon, and compulsive liar and still electing him to the highest office in the land makes these Americans seem unbalanced and in layman’s terms batshit crazy. Science is not perfect but when you stop acknowledging its expertise as a matter of course you are in big trouble as a nation. Empires fall and civilisations crumble. Historians, often, struggle to identify what could possibly bring down something so powerful as the Roman Empire in its day. I think that despite the wealth and military superpower the US is heading for destruction if it becomes a corrupt dictatorship under someone like Trump. Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin. Perhaps, what he admires most is Putin’s ability to syphon off billions of dollars of wealth into his own stashed boltholes. Once a nation loses touch with its people and becomes a closed shop for kleptocrats the light goes out of that place. Eventually, someone with a bigger stick comes along and deals that regime a killer blow. If equal opportunity for the majority of citizens is removed by graft and greed of the few the future looks increasingly dark. Keeping a once great country together is impossible if its leaders are screwing the people out of their birthright. A wasteland of warlords in an endless civil war may well be the ultimate outcome for America. Indeed, Hollywood has already made a movie about it in homage to its possible prescience. Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com Predicting The Outcome With AI Human beings have a preference for narratives over data, we are not machines after all. We invent machines like AI to fill this gap in our processing protocols. The stories we tell ourselves don’t always correlate with the statistical data, especially regarding things like the state of our health. Now, we have fitness monitoring smart devices to enhance our understanding of the actual state of affairs. However, we lack such things in our processing of information regarding the political sphere. We rely on pundits, polls, news sources, and social media to glean the gist of goings on in this circus like arena. All of these things run on narrative based themes, as this is what piques audience interest over just the dry facts. Even the polls are defined by the questions presented to those polled. Surely, AI must have the answer to who is going to wing the 2024 presidential election. A recent ad by the Lincoln Foundation tells us that AI has chosen Trump as the answer to that pertinent question.  If a machine can be plugged into all the data points relevant to the question, as massive as that must be, one would suppose that this ground breaking technology can deliver the likely outcome. AI & Global Warming Is AI another lazy thinking way of operating? Is it merely more outsourcing of human brain functioning destined to render us more dependent and dumber down the track? Technology is a two edged sword, which can cut both ways. AI can be used to take our human predilection for stories out of the equation to produce more factual answers to our queries. It will be interesting to hear what AI has to say on the global issue of climate change. Big Oil and the fossil fuel sector have effectively muddied the waters on the world’s perception of the science on this matter. Human beings are not great on dealing with stuff involving deep time, as it spans far beyond our own lifetimes. The global climate is way out of our league on this score. Would the world listen to AI on this existential question? Is anybody asking AI right now? More Lazy Thinking? It seems, as if the world is faced with a choice between the descendants of colonisers and those who see a fairer society for all. This reduction may just be more lazy thinking but bear with me awhile. On one side we have folk who view the world as same as it ever was, where the dominant cohort, white males rule the roost. Individually, they want their slice of the pie and don’t want to risk sharing it with those currently getting less pie or no pie at all. Scattered amongst this large group are a few who don’t seem to fit in, superficially anyway. They might be Black, Latino or Asian but they want a position with an inside run like them white men. Plenty of women have long known that they need to act like men to get what they want at work and in the halls of power. Hell’s bells some are playing rough and tumble sports because this is where the glory still resides in our societies. Why should they miss out on the action and the rewards success in sport brings. Victim or perpetrator, who would you rather be? Identities are no longer fixed in biological realities if they ever really were, they are stories we tell each other and ourselves. Even gender, is no longer a binary imperative anymore. Black women can be Trump voters and members of the Trump cult. Latinos can be likewise supporters, despite the vile stuff Trump and Vance put out about immigrants. Plenty of immigrants, once they have established themselves in their new country, take on the political identity of those who campaign to end immigration and keep foreigners out. They are happy to see the door slammed shut after them. Belief In A Zero Sum Game Is Lazy Thinking Belief in a zero-sum game, where there are always only winners and losers, especially in economic situations is their take on life. Get in and take what you want and to hell with anybody else – this is the mantra of these folk. Private wealth over the public good. The neoliberal economic agenda has thus ruled Western governments for the last 40 plus years. The financialization of every part of life has been led by the United States and other advanced economies are following suit. Housing is all about the market and what profits can be generated there. Thus, we have housing crises all over the world, where shelter has become largely unaffordable for great swathes of our populations. Rents have gone through the roof, as social housing has not been built during the decades of neoliberalism. Market forces want to create expensive luxury style housing, so as to maximise profitability. Now, there is nowhere for the poor to live and people are homeless and living in tent cities in the 21C. A section of the population has done very well from the rampant inflation in the residential property market, which in Australia is at the order of some 330% over the last 30 years. We do not talk about this as inflation, however, because massively increasing property values are a good thing apparently. The banks have made countless billions out of this rampant inflation of land values. The central banks are at heart bankers of course and therefore support this grand con; this approved scam upon the people. Wealth creation for the few over the many has rapidly expanded during the last 30 years. Billionaires strut the world stage making their celebrity felt like medieval kings once did amid their dirt poor subjects. Oligarchy has returned to rule over governments and the people. Democratic government is a thin veneer, a sham, bought and paid for by the great wealth of corporations and their oligarchs. Political leaders are mouthpieces making speeches on TV for the benefit of their donors. The Trump circus has brought reality TV to the halls of political power. Donald Trump is the resurrection of the super salesman, forget about Willy Loman, this compulsive liar reinvents reality for the American public every minute of the day via social media. There is no truth, only fake news, and this whining, braggart paints a bleak picture of America to exploit the grumblings of grievance politics among his cult followers. Trump promises to make it better, MAGA style, by blaming all the bad stuff on those identified as ‘other’. Immigrants are to blame all over America, apparently. The poor and dispossessed are easy targets for overweight, unhappy Americans who feel they are not rich enough in their lives. Populist politicians tell this mob that everyone else it to blame for their hurt feelings. Strangely, I remember JFK saying something like – ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Wow, I wonder how that would go down these days? Some experts define America as split down an urban vs rural divide. Possibly another lazy thinking way of operating, but worth exploring, perhaps? Why do folk live in rural areas when most of the services are in and around the cities? Obviously, it must provide a way of life they enjoy and value. More space and less other human beings in their face, these things are part of the appeal I bet. However, this tends to make many of them less tolerant of other ways of living. Less tolerant of people born elsewhere and who have moved with their customs to their new home. Less tolerant of those who worship differently to themselves. Less tolerant of LGBTQI folk in many instances, but not all. If you only think about your likes and dislikes, your wants, and don’t think about other realities on the national level, then, this is going to be a problem. If partisan politics exploits this and encourages it, we end up with a divided nation – as is the case. The adherence to the zero sum game turns everything into a battle for a shrinking pie. What a smart person would do is ask themself who is getting most of that pie right now? Cui bono? Is it Black folk? No, most of these folk are poorer than white folk. Is it immigrants as a group? Definitely not, these folk are at the very bottom of the wealth measurement ranking. Actually, it is these billionaires and these corporations. How can it be alright for Elon Musk to be worth $269 billion? For Jeff Bezos to be worth $205 billion? Bill Gates $138 billion? What kind of economic system allows such obscene amounts of wealth to be accrued whilst most folk are struggling to afford healthcare, education and a roof over their heads? The answer is a manipulated system, where the rich buy the politicians and they do their bidding in terms of tax relief and lack of regulation. Many of us know this stuff but have no idea about how to go about changing the status quo. It is too hard for all those used to lazy thinking. So, they attack easy targets to vent their frustrations upon - like immigrants. This is called downward envy or as I like to say punching down on weaker folk. Trump can go around laying blame on immigrants and other traditional targets for demonization. White men like to blame women, especially powerful women who have risen above their station in the view of these men. Blacks are pilloried as pimps, gangsters, drug dealers and responsible for their own poverty, more generally, in the minds of many white voters. LGBTQI folk are beneath contempt in the opinion of many white voters on moral grounds, according to their traditional religious beliefs and upbringings. Political violence is an American thing as well, which has been with them since the beginning. Not just assassinations of presidents but far more wide reaching across the nation. Massacres and the lynching of Blacks at every level ever since slavery morphed into peonage, Jim Crow, and apartheid. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and a host of civil rights leaders were murdered. Militias beat up, shot up, and murdered unionists and those that opposed the wealthy and powerful across the land. One gets a sense that Trump and his Project 2025 associates want to turn the clock back to these fertile times for fascists and oligarchs. America rarely talks about its real history of political violence. Hollywood has shied away from telling these non-feel good tales. Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels.com Partisan politics has stymied the ability of Congress to impeach Presidents, whether they be deserving or not. If politicians and elected representatives are playing for their side over and above every other consideration – they are not representing their constituents. The Founders knew the danger of partisan politics and did not want what has eventuated in America at every level of government. Even, the US Supreme Court is heavily partisan and incapable of providing impartiality as final arbiter. Congress has been rendered impotent in the face of this rampant partisanship. Oligarchic money has polluted all 3 levels of federal government in America, including the courts. Abraham Lincoln is once again required, now more than ever, to return economic opportunity to ordinary Americans under siege from the billionaires and their vested interests. Will the nation be able to find such an individual in the 21C? Could the modern version of Abe be a woman of colour in 2024? Or are we destined for disaster and this is just another lazy thinking way of operating? Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump. ©MidasWord https://read.amazon.com.au/kp/embed?asin=B0CY8CMT33&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=kip_embed_taf_preview_265CVVYYX8QY3S5TG6E8 Read the full article