Four levels of horror

Photo: Gage Skidmore.

Each of these operate independently of one another:

1. Half of the United States voted for that campaign.
2. Trump is driven only by ego, and that's a proven possible road to dictatorship.
3. Discourse poison will continue, this time from the bully pulpit.
4. He's 100% liar. His statements have 0% meaning. We have no idea where this goes.

That last one is a bigger deal than folks outside the media and government may think.

Folks outside these professions often say politicians lie, but that's only half right. Most politicians abide by a loose but real standard. One reason the government establishment and mainstream media were so in tank against Trump, more than his dangerous, repulsive and predatory words and actions, is they realize that his complete disregard for truth is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. And Trump has proven, to those watching, that it's far, far easier to fully abandon truth than they had hoped.

Slouching

Goldwater's landslide loss in 1964 gave us the Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, Medicare and Medicaid. But his success among racists also revealed the potential of what became Nixon's Southern Strategy in 1968, which embedded racial resentment in mainstream conservatism and has polarized national politics along racial lines ever since.

Whatever happens this fall, some rough beast is coming.

Convention brown-nose ranking 2012

I used the NYT's characteristically awesome infographic about the words most used at the 2012 Democratic and Republican conventions to rank the states in order of how many times they were mentioned by people on stage.

The first number is the total mentions at both conventions per 25,000 words spoken. Within the parentheses, the number on the left is Democratic mentions per 25,000 and the number on the right is Republican mentions.

wisconsin 16 (4-12)
ohio 15 (8-7)
massachusetts 15 (7-8)
north carolina 14 (11-3)
florida 12 (4-8)
colorado 7 (6-1)
virginia 7 (3-4)
michigan 7 (2-5)
montana 7 (4-3)
texas 7 (4-3)
california 6 (3-3)
oklahoma 6 (0-6)
south carolina 6 (1-5)
iowa 5 (3-2)
north dakota 4 (0-4)
nevada 3 (0-3)
indiana 3 (0-3)
illinois 3 (3-0)
delaware 3 (1-2)
new jersey 3 (0-3)
maine 2 (1-1)
nebraska 2 (0-2)
connecticut 2 (2-0)
kansas 2 (2-0)
kentucky 2 (0-2)
new hampshire 2 (0-2)
oregon 1 (1-0)
arkansas 1 (0-1)
hawaii 1 (1-0)
minnesota 1 (1-0)
maryland 1 (1-0)
georgia 1 (1-0)
south dakota 1 (1-0)
utah 1 (0-1)
tennessee 0
west virginia 0
vermont 0
rhode island 0
alabama 0
mississippi 0
louisiana 0
idaho 0
wyoming 0
alaska 0

Lessons learned:

1. Politicians are unlikely to kiss up to a swing state if they think they're going to win it, maybe because it makes them look desperate.
2. People really like talking about the state they're from. Therefore a major component of the convention brown-nosing process is actually the speaker selection.
3. The deep South is just not cool.

The masses

It's natural to assume that a crowd of people will behave like water or an amoeba or a nest of ants, creeping and probing until it discovers a path. But a human crowd isn't focused on discovery; it's focused on desire. It's goal-oriented, like a lightning bolt or a cobra. When an event occurs -- a spreading rumor, an opened gate, a shouted order -- each individual calculates what effect it will have on his or her immediate personal objectives and the crowd reacts suddenly and unpredictably.

The best way to control a crowd of humans is therefore to never present it with new information.

Our first WBEZ-listening president

"But here's the thing, Aiken."

All my heroes

It's from the book that was six inches from my foot when I heard the news: Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's wonderful 2005 collection of autobiographical, moral question marks.

I don't mean to impugn or co-opt. It just seems timely.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too: you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox -- the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain -- is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

Self-serve politics

I make a lot of snap political judgments the same way investment bankers make stock picks.

The Andersen Principle: If a proposed political action -- rent control, offshore drilling -- has an obvious, powerful rationale, then it's a bad, overvalued idea and not worth investing in. If, on the other hand, a policy is complicated and hard to explain the benefits of -- cap-and-trade, the EITC -- it's undervalued and you should give it the benefit of the doubt.

First Corollary to the Andersen Principle (Also known as the Greater Wonk Theory): Policies that are hard to explain are also easy, once enacted, for highly motivated rich people to fuck with.