Draining the swamp - Thank you Donald Trump

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Wow, do you just mindlessly copy and paste memes everywhere you go (kind of like the Johnny Appleseed of intellectual laziness)? Do you really think liberals "cheered" this incident?

[Harry Marks]

As I recall, it was a domestic dispute over who would raise the poor little guy, and Republicans wanted to insist that it be the father because otherwise he would have to grow up in Cuba (as if that was some horrible fate.) Either way, he was going to be separated from a parent. I don't know how anybody could think it was anything but a tragedy.

[KindaSkolarly]

Elian Gonzalez. In 2000 Bill Clinton and Atty General Janet Reno separated him from his father in Miami and returned him to Cuba. Democrats celebrated the incident as a victory over the Republicans.

Oddly, Republicans used to be the pro-immigration party. In 1986 Reagan signed an amnesty for 3 million illegals. A lot of Democrats bitched that it was so Republicans would have cheap labor for their "sweat shops." Now, Democrats want to legalize illegals to expand their voter base. That would be fine if the immigrants went through the citizenship training that the law requires, but Dems want uninformed immigrants (easier to control). Dems also want to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. The NY Times, Wash Post, NPR and other leftist orifices are trying to turn that into an issue now. Again, the Dems need uninformed voters.

The Supreme Court just upheld Trump's ban on travel from 7 countries that pose a threat to the US. On those grounds (posing a danger to the country), he could probably add Mexico to the list. He won't, because of the devastating impact it would have on commerce, but he now has the affirmed authority to do so.

Another court ruling has allowed Trump to withhold money from sanctuary cities. They're breaking the law by harboring criminals, so no federal money.

And now Trump will be placing another judge on the Supreme Court (to replace Anthony Kennedy). With luck Ginsberg (old), Breyer (old) and Sotomayor (sick), will also need to be replaced soon. All 3 of the ones just mentioned are liberal. Replacing them with conservatives would guarantee that the court returns to interpreting US law through the lens of the constitution rather than by the diktats of the globalist commissariat.

[Interbane]

Elian Gonzalez. In 2000 Bill Clinton and Atty General Janet Reno separated him from his father in Miami and returned him to Cuba. Democrats celebrated the incident as a victory over the Republicans.

The opposite is true. Elian Gonzalez was living in America with relatives because his mother had died when they were fleeing to America. Elian's father, then living in Cuba, petitioned to have Elian returned to him. Clinton and Reno agreed that he should be returned to his only living parent.

This is where arguing with facebook memes gets you.

[Interbane]

Dems also want to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. The NY Times, Wash Post, NPR and other leftist orifices are trying to turn that into an issue now. Again, the Dems need uninformed voters.

While there may be some truth to this, it's only partial. Other countries allow younger people to vote. Young people will be left with the issues our voting causes(where it may impact their future, such as climate change). Young people are also fully developed on their cold cognition front at that age.

Regarding uninformed voters, it's no secret that liberals are more intelligent and more knowledgeable, on average, than conservatives.

From Psychology Today:

"Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life."

[Harry Marks]

The opposite is true. Elian's father, then living in Cuba, petitioned to have Elian returned to him. Clinton and Reno agreed that he should be returned to his only living parent.

Thanks for clearing that up. I suppose I could have Googled it. Gettin' lazy.

[Harry Marks]

it's no secret that liberals are more intelligent and more knowledgeable, on average, than conservatives.
apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives

Y'know, although I have been a liberal all my life, I remember when this was not true like it is today. Conservatives have done this weird thing to their movement, turning the reins over to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

But then, liberals did a weird thing, too. Bill Clinton basically bailed on labor unions because his teacher, Robert Reich, convinced him that globalization could not be resisted and the manufacturing jobs would disappear anyway. At the time, it saved the Democrats' ability to remain a majority party (or potentially majority party) but it might have been better in the long run to put up more resistance.

When Democrat meant pro-labor, "liberals" were not necessarily selected for ability in school. Now Republican means in favor of traditional gender roles. Anyone who wants their daughter to get a Master's Degree knows better than to back Republicans (or wants to marry a woman with a Master's Degree).

What's freaky is the way the core of principled Republican politicians has withered away. The Reagan and Bush I administrations were staffed by some high-powered leaders, notably Schultz and Baker, with whom I disagreed but always with respect. I can't think of a Republican leader of the last 30 years whose understanding of economics I respect, and McCain is one of the few whose integrity is still worthy of respect. A lot of this is down to the dynamics with climate change, where it became obligatory to promote ignorance, and Citizens United plus gerrymandering which so empowered the Loony Right. But now that they have had 20 years of selecting for skill at appearing ignorant, the party is staffed by hacks, whose idea of a persuasive message is to body slam a reporter.

They couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag, except with respect to the military. Their economic policy is off the deep end, and it appears they are just waiting til after the election to grasp the third rail firmly in both hands. I wouldn't be surprised if McConnell is praying for the House to go blue so he can take the Senate back to pretending to be in opposition, where lack of understanding of reality doesn't come back to bite you.

[Harry Marks]

With Kennedy retiring and Roe v. Wade about to be back in everyone's face again, this seems like as good a place as any to noodle about gender roles. I will probably put in some parallel stuff on the Job and Jung thread tomorrow. Gender roles have a lot of primal force caught up in them, and Jung certainly rattled on about it.

If you ask yourself why abortion has become such a powerful issue for Evangelicals (who, as recently as the mid-70s, considered it a Catholic issue that they did not really care about) the answer has to do with sex. Obviously. Evangelicals are not against sex, but they are against wanton sex. And that's what a lot of them think abortion is about. Sorry, that's not stated very carefully. The issue has come to stand for wanton sex. That's what they mean by "liberal" (it used to mean "doesn't care about the deficit." Back in the good old days.)

Now, I would not know this if not for hanging around quite a bit on the Patheos Religion forum. It is very easy to find people there who are so self-righteous about the issue that they will not even consider engaging in discussion with someone who disagrees. And they have convinced themselves that it is about murder, not about wanton sex.

I have some sympathy with that position. My children were born very prematurely, and I get hot under the collar when anyone suggests that a third trimester fetus is not a person because they are inside a womb. You will never convince me that is not a person (I have held two of them in my arms), nor that the state has no interest in protecting their rights.

But on the other hand, you will not convince me for similar reasons, that an embryo of one or two, or probably three months, is a person with similar rights. And the very suggestion that a woman who is pregnant because of a rape is under obligation to carry the embryo to term is abominable to me. That is about as sick a rule as I can imagine.

So when I raised this point with some religious folk who were willing to try to persuade me, I discovered to my horror that they didn't see the relevance of the case of rape. Abortion, in their minds, is about getting away with wanton sex, and sacrificing a child to the selfishness of the libertine slut. The idea that a woman might realize she has too many children already, or that she might have been victimized by a man, and then wants to make a responsible choice, well that idea must be kept off the table. It isn't relevant, you see. It's not what abortion "really is." About the fourth time I ran into this, with no other kind of thinking on the pro-life side to help sort out the issue, it dawned on me that the whole movement has been communicating to itself in this way for 40 years now. In their echo chamber, the alternative narratives (including the lives of a significant share of their female members) are not allowed to be heard.

Now, I don't know if the #MeToo movement will have any effect on that. Taboos have powerful effects. But it is obvious that all the democrats have to do to carry the issue (except in the deepest of deep red states) is to get out all that discussion that we thought we left behind 30 years ago (you can pinpoint the moment when anti-abortion stopped talking to mainstream - it was Mondale's debate with Reagan in the presidential campaign, when he knocked the question out of the park). So prepare yourself for a lot of discussion about fetal heartbeats and dismembered fetuses and rape and incest and the privacy to decide about birth control. The Democrats are going to use their right to debate to ask very pointed questions to the nominee, whoever he or she might be, and s/he will not be let off the hook by claiming that theoretical future cases might be compromised.

And here's the thing. All the Democrats need to do to lose the issue is to insist that their wanton sex is their own business and nobody has any right to say anything against it. That plays really well with the highly educated and the urban and the young, but not with middle America. Rape is the hinge of the issue, and they need to connect it to privacy so strongly that no woman in America can fail to see the point.

[Harry Marks]

I straddle the territory between Progressive and Conservative, between educated and working-class. Not by nature, but by some quirk of the way I process my experience. I identify with my working class background, and I still dearly love my intolerant evangelical friends with whom I shared my formative years. But I have been a Progressive since I was a teenager and I have a Ph.D. in economics.

So I have been asking myself about the Trump phenomenon for almost three years now. What is the appeal to conservatives, and even more bizarrely, to evangelicals. What is it about their worldview that makes this anti-democratic, anti-honesty, anti-reason, anti-humanitarian person appealing to them?

Interbane's observation that politics is foreign territory to them is part of this, of course. For a long time evangelical religion consciously avoided politics. It probably sounds unbelievable to many here, but I remember when Baptists in general and Southern Baptists in particular treated politics with all the affection that people hold for soiled baby diapers, and to start on a conversation with one of them about politics was to be greeted by a stone face. Might be different at the filling station or the barbershop, but around the church, politics was off limits to discussion.

I believe that was changed by Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, not by, e.g. Jerry Falwell or even Pat Robertson. The "interest" in politics has been part of reaction to an intellectual drive for tolerance that has eroded symbols of religious power such as prayer in schools and taboo status for homosexuality. None of these agents of change was particularly invested in religious power, but they knew the audience they were trying to persuade and they went after it with a sympathetic narrative painting those flag-burners as intolerant and superior sumbitches, if not Commie slavemasters trying to put us all in concentration camps.

Now, as always, when a narrative has staying power despite obvious contrary evidence, you need to understand how it is functioning. And to my mind, the great neglected function of the down-home conservative worldview, seeing themselves as victims of an elite, faraway manipulative conspiracy, is the maintenance of the traditional gender roles.

I am not going off on some misogynist rant here. I have been a trailing spouse for more than 20 years, am proud to have raised my sons and supported my wife's career, and have come to terms with my wounded masculinity. I'm just saying a lot of conservatives think of traditional gender roles as good, right and normal. And that view may be flawed, but it has a lot going for it.

It is driven partly by male rage. As men have lost their privileged economic position, with, e.g. more than half of law school graduates being women, it has become obvious that women are the intellectual equals of men (if not superiors). The justifications for excluding women from economic status have all crumbled under the weight of reality. And a lot of men are boiling inside from the loss of it.

Not only do a lot of men lack any way of thinking about their masculine "role" that doesn't demand for them to look down on women, but they are scared to be in any relationship that requires them to be vulnerable, emotionally or economically. I know many men who dearly love their wives, but cannot imagine redividing the housework to show that. They are fine with her having a career, but would not for a minute compromise their own for it.

And the vital thing to bear in mind, the great unexpressed truth of the progressive vs. conservative dynamic, is that there is a sound logic behind the traditional gender roles. Girls grow up in a culture of nurturance and household skills. Boys grow up in a culture of competition and unemotional status-seeking. Women have a biology of motherhood, and men don't.

So women also don't necessarily want to overturn traditional roles. I have had an attaché at an embassy tell me she doesn't like being the breadwinner for the family. I have heard raging feminists complain of husbands whose earning power is not enough to make them feel secure during pregnancy. And let's not even get into what women find attractive in a mate - I will just say that vulnerability is not high on the list.

That is a powerful set of motivations to confront with academic arrogance ready to dismiss patriarchy and fight for equality for women in the workplace. Many, many ordinary folk will back off and clam up, but inside feel threatened and shamed. And (surprise!) if someone comes along and says "You don't have to be intimidated by these idiots! Political correctness is a communist plot to enslave us all!" they nod their heads grimly and think, "I knew it all along."

So we are going to have this conversation again. And this time, the academics don't hold the upper hand. We have had forty years of experience to compare to, and the conversation is not going to come down mainly to the justice of equal opportunity, but to the compatibility of parallel systems, one anchored in traditional division of labor and the other anchored in shared nurture of the next generation. If progressives can successfully make the case that the two are compatible, we can heal this hurting country. If they insist on further dividing, dictating and demeaning, then we will remain in Trumpistan for quite a while into the future.

[Harry Marks]

And another thing.

Sorry, I didn't get to a point about God's gender that I mentioned on the Job thread and planned to develop here. Jung has God (the cultural character) as a symbol of power and ferocious justice, and because Reality is mostly amoral, ferocious injustice. The connection to male rage is hard to deny, if only because female rage is not normally expressed through physical violence.

Including the feminine in religion is vital. But evangelical Christianity is determined not to allow it to be equal. As is Roman Catholicism for the moment, but if the next Pope is anywhere near as liberal as Francis, expect a council to be called and exclusivity of male priesthood to be seriously challenged (not to mention celibacy, of course).

Just to put a few items on the agenda, I want to note that research into the historical reasons for opposing birth control by the RCC point strongly to the traditional sexual double-standard, still strong in Berlusconi's Italy and nearly unquestioned in Italy of the mid 19th Century. Men's misbehavior was to be accepted, but women's misbehavior would destroy the family and undermine male care for their children. Which is not stupid, even if it is institutionalizing a sad male sexuality and a patriarchal oppression of women. So sex was to be officially for procreation, and no Christian woman was to use birth control.

So the equivalence between male dominance and religious propriety is a deep-seated cultural motif. It is one of the reasons why Millennials are ditching religion of all stripes. But it's also one of the reasons why older women see the loss of traditional male jobs as threatening to them, their families, and the way of life for which they generally sacrificed any career ambitions. Opioids make a poor substitute for 9 to 5 and a paycheck, when it comes to keeping the man on the straight and narrow. Add to that the likely resentment of less educated women against a system that doesn't allow them to get by economically just by raising some man's kids, and you have a stab of fear that theories about equality are not going to stand up to.

Men can, in fact, have a good life as Dad (or Uncle) with ordinary incomes and the self-respect of managing their anger and alienation. But there is reason to believe that in order to do so, they have to get past the rugged individualist, competition-for-status role they were strongly socialized into. And they have to actually relate to a woman. Both people entitled to emotions, both responsible for managing them.

Which brings us to two difficult topics which were in the shadows of the last election. One is the military. Despite America having far more than its share of military power, and having enough power indisputably to protect itself against any open attempt at conquest (but not, evidently, against manipulation of the election) many men are emotionally invested in seeing the country as under threat. For that matter, women who embrace traditional roles are also so invested. Fighting wars gives men self-respect (that they would have to earn by wussy, liberal intellectual political correctness, if fighting isn't an option). This raises the pitiful prospect of a nation that still dominates the world economy technologically, claiming it can't afford medical care for all, while flushing hundreds of billions down the toilet of male fragility. It is fairly obvious from Dear Leader's contradictions, claiming that other NATO members aren't doing their share while proposing to increase the U.S. defense budget even while cosying to the major threat NATO guards against, and picking a fight with Iran when we had won, that this is about looking tough and covering up insecurity that has nothing to do with actual military threats. But to traditionalists and, we will find before too many more elections have passed, young couples who grew up in red states, it not only makes sense but it is symbolic of all the things they feel are under threat, from family stability to expectations of self-reliance. The code word, of course, the trigger that releases this flood of fear, is "Islam". Leaders of the Religious Right don't talk much about abortion these days, (except back home in the pulpit,) or even the homosexual agenda. They talk about Islam and Sharia law. (And, in the next breath, freedom of religion.)

If it seems as though I am somehow mixing evangelical religion and traditional gender roles with the defense budget and the Iran treaty, then you have been following my point. They mean the same things. They are all about the system of power that shames men out of honest engagement in their family and that has definitively lost the battle for economic status.

The last item for this near-cacophonous roister on gender roles and politics is the evidence coming out that people have been misrepresenting their views on race, gender and immigration on a large scale. Probably as much as 10 percent of the population will consistently claim to believe the politically correct thing while privately entertaining significant silent reservations that may, for some of these silent ones, amount to complete rejection of the PC view. It doesn't mean that they want to see kids dragged away from their parents by U.S. agents, but it does mean that they may take umbrage at the moral superiority expressed by liberals on the subject. I mean, let's face it, that's why we have the term "PC". And that's why people care what Sean Hannity says even if they hardly ever watch him.

In general, PC is how it's supposed to work. People who don't give much thought to politics are supposed to keep mum about their opinions when the experts pontificate. And as long as the experts manage to call the shots more or less correctly, the old views gradually slide away and are replaced by a new orthodoxy. But woe to the experts when the Twin Towers fall, or when the economy takes a nosedive from a housing bubble, or when exports from China and Mexico take 10 percent of manufacturing jobs. The resentments and fears come out of the woodwork.

And if the experts have been busy telling ordinary people that they are moral cripples, then the reaction will involve delegitimization of expertise itself. Some of us tend to think knowledge is holy. If you've just lost a good job and there is no replacement in sight, knowledge looks more like useless, and might even make a good target for anger.

I don't actually think the situation is hopeless. But I do think that my party, the Democrats, need to think all this through when they gear up for an election. The idea that you would have facts and common sense on your side and still manage to lose should be sobering. It might have something to do with the notion that you have to actually convince voters that you represent them and work for them. And if that means resisting the temptation to act superior and look down on the people you work for, well, suck it up.