Good Questions, Interesting Answers

Posted on 18 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Brooks wonders, Why isn’t she running away with this?
  • Adam Gopnik wonders why even his opponents don’t recognize the extent of Trump’s villainy;
  • Jill Filipovic wonders why NYT softens headlines about Trump;
  • David French wonders if Trump’s policies make any more sense than his tweets;
  • And items about Trump’s profanity-laden talk to the Catholics, MAGA’s bond, Trump’s dehumanizing language, and Musk misrepresenting Harris’s policies.

NY Times, David Brooks, 17 Oct 2024: Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?”

He wonders why the race is so tied, the polls immobile. And he wonders:

Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.

Well, I’m thinking, the two parties are never all that far apart; it’s not like presidential elections are won by 50%, or even 20%. The standard answer is that each party adjusts its positions as necessary to attract the most voters. This is why conservatives are more liberal today, in general, than they were a century ago; conservative verities of a century ago (at least concerning women, minorities, and so on) would be unthinkable today. (Except perhaps among a tiny minority of MAGA folks, who really do still believe in slavery and subjugation of women.)

Brooks captures this point, along with the current explanation, that tribal allegiance is what matters.

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

And, as Brooks ends with, this means that actual problems are not getting solved.

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The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, 14 Oct 2024: How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?, subtitled “Even many of the ex-President’s opponents haven’t grasped the scale of the man’s villainy.”

He begins with some wry comments about the kinds of billboards one sees on American highways, which you can read at the link. Further down, this observation:

A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

And this observation:

Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

And then to the point:

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Because?

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

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For all that the right demonizes or ignores the ‘mainstream media,’ including The New York Times, critics on the left accuse the major papers of being too soft on Trump. Being too diplomatic. Too even-handed.

Slate, Jill Filipovic, 17 Oct 2024: I’m Completely Losing It With the Way the Press Is Covering Trump and Harris, subtitled “The New York Times must be sent to headline jail for these crimes.”

Donald Trump has never been the candidate of coherence, self-control, and sanity. But his comments and conduct during this campaign season have truly gone off the deep end, and he seems increasingly confused and aged. You might not know all of that if you’re reading the headlines about his campaign—even while you might have heard plenty about how Kamala Harris wasn’t doing enough interviews or hadn’t proposed detailed enough policies.

To be sure, journalists should cover both candidates’ deficits. (And seemingly in response to media criticisms, Harris has started doing more interviews and putting out more detailed policies.) But they shouldn’t insist that in order to be fair, the candidates must be portrayed as if they are behaving similarly. A few recent moments for Trump and Harris in the campaign—and the respective headlines that followed—put this in very sharp relief.

With many examples of how Harris and Trump behave. An example of NYT’s soft headlines:

Earlier this month, for example, Trump went on the conservative Hugh Hewitt show and said that many migrants have “murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” and added, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” … A candidate for president repeatedly trumpeting and endorsing eugenics theories seems like pretty big and shocking news. But although the coverage of his comments often did give this necessary context, the headlines whitewashed it. The New York Times went with “Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes.”

And

But the media treatment of Kamala Harris is the polar opposite: Her words and actions have been carefully scrutinized, and heavily criticized even when her actions are well within the norm—and much more normal than Trump’s.

While Trump was on his eugenicist rant about migrants’ bad genes, Harris was doing what every half-skilled politician and talking head since the advent of radio has done: answering questions in ways that emphasize the points she wants to make. The Times’ take? “In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave.”

And so on.

Criticizing both policy and style is fair game, and the job of the political press. But a sense of proportion is key, and when “Harris is adept at putting her own agenda forward in interviews” is put on the same plane as “Trump says migrants have murder genes,” news organizations have lost it.

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NY Times, David French, 17 Oct 2024: Let’s Take the Republican Policy Challenge [gift link]

He begins:

If you live in Red America, as I do, you’re familiar with two conceptually incompatible arguments for Donald Trump. We’ll call them the MAGA argument and the Republican argument.

The MAGA argument can be summed up in three words: Burn it down. Trump’s core supporters are convinced that the American establishment is irretrievably corrupt, that America is in its last days and that only the most dramatic action can save the Republic. They think the Trump of Stop the Steal and Jan. 6 is the real Trump, and they can’t wait to see him unleashed.

The Republican argument is different. These are the voters who still think they belong to a party of limited government and individual liberty. They look back at the first two years of Trump’s term — when he nominated conventional Republican members to his cabinet, selected conventional conservative judges to the federal bench and passed a conventional Republican tax cut — and think that will happen again.

Both can’t be right, French notes.

So let’s take the Republican policy challenge. Are his policies actually better than his tweets?

No, they are not. For Republicans to believe that Trump will govern responsibly, they have to believe that his campaign is a lie. Because if you actually listen to Trump, he’s not promising peace and prosperity. He’s promising conflict, chaos and economic policies that make no sense if inflation is a prime concern.

With examples about tariffs, mass deportations, and so on, and on.

If you take Trump’s words seriously (and we should take every presidential candidate’s words seriously), his proposed policies mean more inflation, worse debt, greater international instability, incompetent or corrupt appointees, disruptive mass deportations and the deployment of military force against domestic opponents. That is not a formula for peace, prosperity or stability. It’s a formula for precisely the economic and international chaos that Republicans say they want to avoid.

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The story today was Trump’s profanity-laden talk before a Catholic charity last night.

I wonder if they’ll invite him back again.

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A few more headlines, that I don’t have the time to examine in detail…

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