06-18-2016, 09:03 AM
(06-17-2016, 02:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(06-17-2016, 07:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-10-2016, 11:22 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(06-10-2016, 11:01 AM)playwrite Wrote: Nate Silver nips this latest Great White Hope in the butt -Granted I live in "Bubble-land," but none of the whites in my own social circle have expressed any affinity for Trump. In rough order, here are the actual affinities - Clinton, Sanders, Johnson.
Trump Isn’t Winning Enough White Voters
Quote:...One big reason Trump is trailing — by an average of 4 to 6 percentage points, depending on which aggregator you use — is because, despite all the bluster, he isn’t doing any better than Romney did among white voters. According to Cohn’s estimate, based on pre-election surveys, Romney beat President Obama by 17 percentage points among white voters. To win, Trump would need to improve on Romney’s margin by a minimum of 5 percentage points if the electorate looked exactly the same as it did in 2012 and every other racial group voted in the same manner as it did in 2012.
...Trump is winning white voters by an average of 17 percentage points, matching exactly Romney’s margin from four years ago. That’s not good enough, especially considering that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse than 2012’s. Trump probably needs to do even better than a 22-point lead among white voters, or he will have to pull in more minority voters than Romney did in order to win.
...And Trump is already doing far better than Romney among white voters without a college degree, as Cohn noted. But in politics, as in physics, every action has a reaction. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has pointed out, Trump is also doing considerably worse than Romney among white voters with a college degree. That makes sense, given Trump’s direct appeals to whites who do not have a high level of education, and his penchant for shunning intellectuals.
Basically, it's the Great White Uneducated Hope.
Or, Trump's success really depends on how clueless the country has become.
Choose your side.
... which also suggests that he would do unusually badly outside the Mountain South, the area with the most white voters with low education. Thus he would win West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma quickly and with amazing numbers. On the other side, where white people are generally well educated, Donald Trump could be losing much ground. He has been tied with Hillary Clinton in Utah, which has high-quality education even if the state has typically been one of the strongest Republican states since 1952. The one poll that I have seen of Kansas, a state that has gone for only one Democratic nominee (LBJ in the 1964 blowout) has Donald Trump behind.
Those two states could be on-time, specific anomalies. Of course, Donald Trump might be a poor match for Mormon sensibilities, and the Kansas GOP could be facing some short-term rifts. Besides, the poll in Kansas is one pollster with a suspect reputation for accuracy.
The more educated that people are, the less vulnerable they are to demagoguery. The more likely they are to abhor political violence even supposedly on their side. They are more capable of critical thought that allows them to recognize contradictory statements that can have only absurd conclusions. Knowing that contradictory policies ensure that some people who get promises made to them will get the shaft. Maybe if one is an Insider and knows who (typically more helpless people with fewer connections) will get the shaft and that as an Insider one will get the boon, one might tolerate the dishonesty because one will get the boon at others' expense.
To be fair, there are some intellectuals who seem to now be tolerant of fascism. It is mainly the Duginist strain they are interested in. Their intense hatred of globalism, neocons and the late 20th century version of Western liberalism brought them to such a juncture. We even seem to have a few folks who think like this on this forum. Mainly they come from a Left Anarchist pedigree and in some cases are younger folks who in a past age might have associated with the New Left. But these are few. The typical mainstream Blue County person would have nothing to do with fascism in any form.
Brilliant people can be just as depraved as dullards. For intellectuals, ideas are playthings. Fools might play with nakes, poisons, explosives, or incendiaries, often to the personal ruin of the fool (a travesty) or even take some innocent people down with them (a tragedy, but hardly one that shatters the fabric of the universe). Intellectually-sophisticated people wrote the guide (Malleus maleficarum) to persecuting witches, founded the Inquisition, organized the slave trade and formulated the slave codes, and created the framework for such destructive philosophies as Jacobinism, Bolshevism, fascism, Ku Kluxism, Nazism, apartheid, and Islamism. Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Goebbels, Quisling, Qutb, and Khomeini were all pretentious megalomaniacs with great mental power. They simply had no test of truth, or rejected any such test, of their proposals. But we know those people for their horrible consequences. There's much venom in Nietzsche and Rand, and by all accounts David Duke is a brilliant man. It need not be political; a dullard can easily take cash from the till in the store at which he works for a near-minimum wage or decide to take the contents of a courier packet and run. The crooks behind the fall of Enron Corporation mastered the art of gutting the assets of a company and appropriating the revenues from customers that Enron bled while making the company that they eventually ruined look like the greatest new model of business ever. Need I discuss Ross Ulbricht's "Silk Road" scheme to put dope peddlers and child pornographers beyond scrutiny?
All horrible ideas have their seductive qualities, including the offer of quick and decisive solutions to all that is manifestly wrong with the world in which we live. Globalism is at most a mixed blessing capable of getting us greater productivity and lower cost of consumer goods... but whether cheap stuff that implies falling wages and greater inequality is such a good idea is suspect. Neocon ideology has itself proved a disaster -- like many other intellectual formulations that establish a design for pervasive change. The mass low culture can be as destructive of the soul and spirit as tobacco smoke is to lungs and hearts.
People must pick and choose, with some of the choices that they make denying them some of the potential gain and delight. Modern technology leaves us with more temptations, even in the intellectual sphere. Of course, fascism remains a dehumanizing, destructive ideology, no matter what cultural garb it takes. Idolatry of Imperial Rome, Wagnerian bombast, and samurai shtick are no worse than the idolatry of militaristic tsars. If anyone thinks we Americans are exempt because of our country, then think again: some people admire the plantation South and would bring it back.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.