This is like how people argue Tim Snyder can talk about a future American Holocaust because he's studied the Nazis. Okay. He hasn't studied Americans. If you're an expert on elections that doesn't make you an expert on populist uprisings. Worse than that, it's a "don't question the intellectual because he's an intellectual" argument, rather than a "don't question the expert because this is his expertise" argument. People misuse the appeal to authority fallacy all the time but this, right here, is it. So why are we taking Trump at his word now? This is a guy who wanted a cost estimate on a border-length alligator moat. Look - I work with maybe eight people who did season after season of The Apprentice. Donald Trump can't tell people where to eat lunch. The authority he has is entirely due to (A) owning the people he bosses around or (B) inheriting a power structure. People listen to the President because he's the President, not because he's Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump acts outside the bounds of being President, he's got to fall back on his abilities as a leader. Hitler had the SS. Mussolini had the Blackshirts. Trump has an email list full of senior citizens. Yeah - there's a lot of MAGA-heads in the army but ask yourself - what's the moral distance between voting for a guy or shooting your superior officer for a guy? Is Trump that kind of leader? Edsall doesn't want you to notice that he lined up a dozen experts who all answered "no." So he launches into 500 words of prevarication. This is one of those "let's drive to the geographic middle and stand around with our thumbs up our asses asking what 'real Americans' think" pieces.Before you decide that this is paranoia, let me point out that Leege is an eminently reasonable scholar, a former chair of the board of overseers of the American National Election Studies and one of the founders of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.
I’m a leader. I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.
In order for impeachment to be accepted by these voters, he wrote, it "cannot be a technical criminal action. It would have to be a clear case of Trump acting so much in his own behalf and betraying the country that it would undercut these voters’ belief that Trump is acting for them."
I hear you, but I've been taken aback lately at just how well he's been able to influence otherwise very intelligent STEM folks. Only maybe 2% of scientists in my field (and truly, I've had n = ~100 samples) even consider the possibility of feeling neutral about Trump. The engineers are much more likely to ride the Trump train. Here's my release of a transcript from yesterday in which I talk about The Transcript: Them: "No, I don't need to. Listen, would I go and read an academic paper that I know nothing about and try to make sense of it? No, I'd have someone like you read it and summarize it for me." thinking to myself: "dawg, this is Trump talking. if this language is too rich for you, we've got some fuckin' problems" Me: "What? That's totally different, I have no incentive to mislead you on the results of scientific findings." sidenote: I think this may have been what inspired them to segue into their distrust of climate science a few minutes later Them: "Well look, I get my analyses from independent journalists, and they all agree.." (no really, they said this) ".. that this is all just another big nothingburger." me, arguably some form of an independent journalist trying to objectively* analyze recent events, wondering why the other "independent journalists" are parroting leaked White House talking points (I say none of this) The next minute of conversation was spent discussing how there aren't even any real journalists anymore, they're all lying anyway, and everyone's just out to get Trump for nothing. I'm in full smile-and-nod-while-saying-maybe-and-dying-inside-mode. Then last night, I find out that "Just 4 in 10 Republicans say they think President Trump discussed an investigation into Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden during a phone call with Ukraine's president, despite Trump acknowledging having done so,...". But yeah, example #287592 that the right's information infrastructure has shifted into giving Trump whatever he needs to stay in power. And the people listening have no idea. Obviously. I guess my point is that you may underestimate how bad it's going to get. Still, there's no way it goes as far as all the hillbillies coming into the city and shooting the urbanites (read: darkies). Now, some hillbillies somewhere might actually do this, but the vast, vast majority of people don't have enough hate in them to carry all the way through a 30 minute drive into town while imagining killing other human beings. Trump can shove that civil war right up his ass. *I remember sharing and agreeing with an article you posted post-Mueller about how it was a good thing that our president didn't conspire with a foreign country. I genuinely felt a little guilty for accusing Trump of doing so, but I was (still am) a little miffed about how Don Jr. got off so easy. It's not that I'm opposed to giving these guys chances to do good things. It's that Trump really is a traitor. Whether or not he's too stupid to realize it doesn't matter very much.Me: "Sure, I absolutely agree that the Bidens' situation in Ukraine appears similar to a conflict of interest, even though all of the facts I've seen suggest that nothing illegal occurred. But in the transcript released by POTUS, my interpretation of the law is that he illegally solicits a foreign government to open an investigation into not just two private citizens, one of them happens to be perhaps his largest political challenger. I think it's a perversion of the presidency on par or worse than Nixon's. Have you read the transcript? It's like 5 pages."
Engineers tend to be rednecks. This is one reason I do poorly with engineers. CNC class was all about guns, trucks and vaping. I know 2 of 3 pretty well so I blended in. But yeah. Engineers are all about totalitarianism. This is one of the reasons sci fi tends to be full of totalitarian utopias: lots of sci fi writers were and are failed engineers. Engineers (and rednecks) also suck at self-organization. One guy with a van and an AR who will fight to defend the sanctity of Trump's America? That's a terrorist, not a movement. Wake me up when their militias start marching. To date, the best they've been able to pull together is #YallQaeda.
Damn, that amazon link to the gummy bears is broken. But what, do we require some boom-and-bust cycle of dictators, like once all the WWII vets die off, it's time for another global totalitarian fuck up, since there's no longer a living memory of "the last time"? Fuck that. Edit: I also don't subscribe to those criticisms of engineers. There are allllll kinds.
There are all kinds, but show me a person who thinks the world's problems can be solved by simple mathematical means and I will show you someone who has modeled a horse as a sphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theoryBut what, do we require some boom-and-bust cycle of dictators, like once all the WWII vets die off, it's time for another global totalitarian fuck up, since there's no longer a living memory of "the last time"? Fuck that.
There is a thing about engineers being attracted to terrorist groups. But my experience has been people in economics and the social sciences (some that can't even do math) that think the world's problems can be solved simply. The only advantage is they typically have better social skills. Remember Rwanda happened in '94. The best sci-fi writers studied math and physics. Or biochem. Like Arthur C. Clarke.