Many are predicting that the new administration’s plans, especially concerning deportations and tariffs, will backfire and wreck the economy, or at least raise prices in ways they apparently cannot anticipate. But one guesses that the Republicans will not admit it when it happens, and will frantically spin to put their results in the best possible light. Trump’s supporters will believe anything.
- Republican voters, based on no change of evidence whatsoever, now think the economy isn’t so bad;
- David Frum on what he got wrong: that human beings are good at seeing through frauds;
- NPR and Paul Krugman on the consequences of expelling foreign scientists, the ones who have driven America’s dominance in science and technology;
- And quick takes about sex offenders and trans women, Trump’s cabinet of sexual abuse offenders, and conservatives’ veneration of the founding fathers, even concerning public schools.
Washington Post, column by Philip Bump, 21 Nov 2024: Lots of Republicans suddenly think the economy wasn’t that bad after all, subtitled “Polling from YouGov shows a sharp shift in Republican opinions over the past month.” (via)
It’s easy to guess what this is about, though the column here generously provides various graphs of data from polls about people’s perception of the economy. Nothing substantial has changed in the economy in recent weeks, but now Republicans who were sure (on ideological grounds) that the economy was a mess, now think it’s not so bad. Political opinions among some swing back and forth completely divorced from any kind of actual evidence. Near the end of this column:
The pattern with Trump and his supporters has long been that reality is viewed through a Trump-friendly lens; the same facts that applied under Barack Obama were considered very differently when Trump was inaugurated. The good economic data that has been reported consistently for the past year under Biden will soon no doubt be cited as evidence of Trump’s excellent stewardship.
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This piece today is related.
The Atlantic, David Frum, 22 Nov 2024: A Good Country’s Bad Choice, subtitled “And what I got wrong about the 2024 election”
My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.
… Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024.
… Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
… Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue.
… If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:
Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.
The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.
My mistake.
But this is completely consistent with my readings about human nature, derived from Haidt and Pinker and (Joshua) Greene and others, that people function on emotional (especially tribal) grounds, and use reason only to rationalize conclusions they’ve made emotionally or tribally. (Most people. There are exceptions, like most scientists, but not even all of them.)
It’s an ongoing theme in human history, as I’ve suggested. Frum concludes,
So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.
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How this seems to be playing out — getting to the idea potential unintended consequences. America’s science and technology still dominates the world in part because we welcome experts from around the world to come study and work here. But not Trumpists. Anyone foreign: bad.
NPR, Jon Hamilton, from today’s Morning Edition, 21 Nov 2024: Foreign nationals propel U.S. science. Visa limits under Trump could change that. (Via)
Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.
Many were initially hired under H-1B visas, which are granted to as many as 85,000 highly skilled specialists each year, allowing them to work in the U.S. for up to six years.
But the incoming Trump administration has signaled that it will crack down on H-1B visas, which could make it harder for universities, research institutions, and tech firms in the U.S. to find enough highly educated workers.
The result could look like what happened in the U.K. after Brexit made it harder for European scientists to work there…
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And Paul Krugman explores this theme as well.
NY Times, Opinion by Paul Krugman, 21 Nov 2024: How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector
Will business prosper under a second Donald Trump presidency? As far as I can tell, many business leaders are pinning their hopes on the belief that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign pledges on tariffs and mass deportation — that they’ll be like his border wall, which, for the most part, he never built but claimed he had.
But I believe that such optimism is misplaced. Trump’s obsessions with tariffs and immigration go way back, and he probably won’t respond well if people ridicule him for not delivering on his signature policy ideas.
If he does not moderate his policies, the damage will be considerable — bigger than even pessimists realize. Hostility to immigrants won’t just create labor shortages for many grueling manual jobs that native-born Americans are reluctant to do. It will also undermine American leadership in technology.
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Quick takes.
- Title and subtitle say it all. LGBTQNation, Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 22 Nov 2024: The GOP consistently uplifts accused sex offenders while claiming trans women are the dangerous ones, subtitled “They can support a man for the highest office in the land who publicly admitted to grabbing women’s genitals, but trans women are the predators?” (Comment: I’m not sure they think trans women are predators, they just think trans women are icky.)
- If everyone’s doing it, then it’s normalized, and you can’t blame any of them. Slate, Jill Filipovic, 21 Nov 2024: The Sexual-Abuse Cabinet, subtitled: “Trump’s second term is shaping up to platform even more men who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse.” (Of course Matt Gaetz is now out of the picture. Apparently some Republicans *do* have limits.)
- Conservatives venerate the past, the prophets and the founding fathers. Why do they not believe that humanity can have learned anything over millennia or centuries? (Because it’s so much simpler to believe that everything was settled in the ancient past, so we don’t have to think about anything anymore.) Slate, Adam Laats, 20 Nov 2024: Back to the Future, subtitled: “Why ‘Let’s have public schools like the Founding Fathers had’ is such a terrible idea.”
