Reactions to the Trump Victory: F
I fell away from my educational responsibilities and didn’t give out the final grade. Earlier I gave Will Rahn of CBS News an A+ for his soul-searching as a journalist, reflecting on how they had condescended to Trump supporters. I also gave Scott Sumner a B, since he admitted explicitly in several posts (both at his blog and at EconLog) that he had been totally wrong about Trump, but then I detected him backtracking a bit in a way that didn’t really work.
Today I called up the Registrar and let her know that I am assigning an “F” to George Will. His utter refusal to admit error, despite being devastatingly wrong, is something to behold.
I don’t want to belabor what is (perhaps) an inconsequential point, but let me give just a taste of Will’s #NeverTrump stance before the election.
==> In April, Will had already made it clear that he detested Trump and had been telling conservatives they should have nothing to do with the guy. But Will made a broader appeal to the GOP, saying that Trump was so radioactive that he would hurt Republicans in other races too:
Donald Trump’s damage to the Republican Party, although already extensive, has barely begun….
Trump would be the most unpopular nominee ever, unable to even come close to Mitt Romney’s insufficient support among women, minorities and young people. In losing disastrously, Trump probably would create down-ballot carnage sufficient to end even Republican control of the House…
At least half a dozen Republican senators seeking reelection and Senate aspirants can hope to win if the person at the top of the Republican ticket loses their state by, say, only four points, but not if he loses by 10. A Democratic Senate probably would guarantee a Supreme Court with a liberal cast for a generation…
Were he to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.
==> Months later, after Trump had secured the nomination, Will hadn’t changed his tune. Here is his assessment from October 26–a little less than two weeks before the election:
Much ink and indignation has been spilled concerning whether Donald (“I am much more humble than you would understand”) Trump will “accept” the election’s outcome. The nation, like the universe of which it is the nicest part, will persevere even without the election result being accepted by the fellow who probably will be the first major-party presidential nominee in 20 years to receive less — probably a lot less — than 45 percent of the vote.
…This year’s winner is unlikely to become just the fourth nominee of the world’s oldest party (following Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson) to win more than 53 percent. The loser, however, could plunge close to the 37.4 percent that George H.W. Bush received in 1992 when Ross Perot took 18.9 percent of the vote.
This year’s winner probably will be the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to become president without enjoying Democratic control of both houses of Congress….This year will be the fourth of a particular kind of Republican disappointment since World War II. In 1946, 1994, 2010 and 2014 Republicans won huge victories in off-year elections but two years later lost the presidential election…
The last Democrat directly elected (that is, not counting Truman or Johnson, who were elected after inheriting the office) to succeed a Democrat was James Buchanan, arguably the worst president ever. One hundred and sixty years later, Republicans fearing four Clinton years can reasonably hope there will be no more than four: The likelihood of Democrats winning a fourth consecutive presidential term will be reduced if the Republican Party reverts to its practice, adhered to since it chose John C. Fremont in 1856, of nominating a Republican.
Well, things didn’t work out exactly as George Will had warned, did they? Trump won about 47.2% of the popular vote, whereas Will had predicted he’d get “probably a lot less” than 45 percent. Trump not only won, but he did better with blacks and Hispanics than Romney did in 2012. Now in fairness, that might be an unfair comparison because Obama was black and Hillary Clinton is white, but still, Will said Trump wouldn’t be able to “even come close” to Romney’s support among women, minorities, and young people. (Romney got 44% of women voters whereas Trump only got 42%, but again Hillary Clinton being a woman is relevant here. In any event, McCain only get 43% of female voters himself, so Trump’s result is not completely disastrous here.)
The Democratic margin among young voters was smaller this cycle than in the past two, thought it’s partially because Clinton got fewer young voters than Obama had done. In terms of absolute performance, McCain won 32% of young voters (age 18-29), Romney won 36%, and Trump won 37%.
So Will was totally wrong about Trump’s performance. What about his warnings of Trump destroying the GOP’s power in the rest of the federal government? Here’s how the New York Times–not noted for being a Trump mouthpiece–summarized the results of the election the day after:
Republicans kept their grip on the House of Representatives on Tuesday, overcoming months of efforts by Democrats to tarnish them by association with Donald J. Trump in what proved to be a grave miscalculation.
With a handful of races outstanding Wednesday morning, Democrats had a net gain of just five seats and were expected to remain in the minority, a position they have occupied since Republicans swept to power in 2010 on a wave of Tea Party fervor.
In the few districts that changed hands, it was not perennially endangered Republicans in typical swing districts who were falling, but rather some incumbents who had been comfortably re-elected in the past.
…As it became clear that Republicans could not only hold both chambers but also claim the presidency, Republicans who had braced to lose all but the House began entertaining notions of a sweep. That would open the possibility of the passage of the party’s long-stalled agenda, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Tuesday night.
Now to be sure, #NeverTrumpers like Will could still say, “We think Trump will make an awful president and Republicans will rue the day they nominated him.” But you would think after doing everything in his power to hurt Trump, and for him still to perform as he did and now have the GOP in complete control, that Will would have the decency to admit to Republicans that he had given them horrible political and strategic advice.
With that context, let us see how George Will addresses the issue in the first (that I could find?) column he wrote, after the elections:
At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, the easternmost point of the United States, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, the westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic and substantive arrogance, disappearing, as though written on water in ink of vapor.
OK, it takes you a second to figure out what the hell Will is even talking about, but it’s certainly not, “Oh my gosh you guys, I am SO SORRY for giving such horrible analysis.” (And incidentally, the fact that he starts out his column with the above paragraph, is exactly why George Will was so clueless about Trump’s electoral chances.)
In case you’re curious, here is how Will explains what happened:
The simultaneous sickness of both parties surely reveals a crisis of the U.S. regime. The GOP was easily captured, and then quickly normalized, by history’s most unpleasant and unprepared candidate, whose campaign was a Niagara of mendacities. And the world’s oldest party contrived to nominate someone who lost to him.
OK, that’s fine, but Will was unaware of Trump’s mendacities two weeks before the election? George Will–who can (and will) tell us what knot William Jennings Bryan used in his neckties–didn’t know that the U.S. regime was in crisis until after watching CNN on November 8?
And here’s the best part:
Americans perennially complain about Washington gridlock, but for seven decades they have regularly produced gridlock’s prerequisite: divided government. From 1944 through 2016, 22 of 37 elections gave at least one house of Congress to the party not holding the presidency; since 1954, 21 of 32 did; since 1994, eight of 12. Republicans now lack excuses: If 40 Democratic senators block repeal of Obamacare (or Supreme Court nominees), the Republicans’ populist base will demand Democratic behavior — revision of Senate rules to make this body more majoritarian.
So again: Rather than saying, “Holy crap you guys, I am SO SORRY for being SO TOTALLY WRONG about the fate of the GOP if Trump wins the nomination!” Will is now saying, “Republicans now lack excuses.”
And yet, Will seems to be full of them. My grade? F.
A Thanksgiving Miracle — This Week’s Contra Krugman
We almost never get the episode up by Thursday. And on a national holiday?! Here ya go.
Murphy Twin Spin
Sorry for the sparse blogging, I’ve been traveling like a presidential candidate lately. Here are two things to tide you over:
==> A link to all of the talks at Hillsdale College’s recent seminar series on Mises & Hayek. I get into some issues in my talk (which focuses on the book Human Action) that I don’t think I’ve talked about publicly, so even veterans might like this one.
==> The latest Contra Krugman. You will be shocked to learn that now, all of a sudden, Krugman is not so keen on running up big budget deficits on infrastructure projects.
Ben Powell and I Talk International Trade
We taped this before the election, in case that matters.
Hitler Bothers Me As Much as a 3-Second Violation
[UPDATE: I intended this post for humor value, for the regular readers who know the history of my exchanges with Scott Sumner. Let me clarify for newcomers: I am very wary of what could happen with civil liberties under Trump. (In the piece we discuss in this post below, I mentioned that if he builds a wall, it could be used to keep dissidents in.) If there’s another attack on US soil, I would not be surprised if Trump starts rounding people up, FDR style.]
A few weeks ago, Scott Sumner at his blog quoted a news story about voter stress and then responded in this manner:
And talk about “first world problems:
For all their sharp differences, supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have one thing in common: election-related stress.
Nearly half of all likely voters in the ABC News tracking poll, 46 percent, describe the election as a source of stress in their lives, including roughly equal numbers of Clinton and Trump supporters. Nearly a quarter, again among both candidates’ camps, say the stress is serious.
Wow, get a life. I wish politics were all I had to worry about.
David R. Henderson was surprised by this, and said over at EconLog that “[t]his shows that Scott and I have very different views about the importance of politics and government in people’s lives. He appears to think that they matter very little. I think they matter a lot.”
In the comments at his original post, Scott clarified in response to David’s objection:
David, There are 1000s of awful things in the world. Most far more awful than this election. I can’t even imagine being stressed out by everything in the news. Yes, intellectually I know it’s important. But so is drug legalization and kidney market legalization and ending the war in Syria. But I can’t get stressed out over everything wrong in the world, or I’d go crazy…I’m resigned to the fact that the next president will likely be worse than Obama. But that’s a first world problem, not like Aleppo. Life goes on–the NBA season starts tonight!!
OK that’s fine, but then you can imagine my shock when I see Scott has devoted an entire post to my inadequate denunciation of the Holocaust, when I wrote a blog post for the Independent Institute where I explicitly said upfront that since I’m an economist, I would be talking about economics. Here’s a taste of Scott’s reaction to my post:
Bob Murphy (who doesn’t support Trump) has a post reflecting on the lessons of the election. I disagree with much of it, but I suppose all the points are defensible, taken one at a time. Unfortunately, the overall impression is that libertarians are tone deaf.
…No discussion of the vile racism, misogyny, anti-disabled, anti-POW or anti-Muslim bigotry, beyond an allusion to Trump’s “boorish comments about women”. Nothing on his pandering to the alt-right, or hiring the publisher of a leading alt-right outlet to be his campaign manager. Nothing about his support for much worse types of torture than waterboarding. Nothing about his comments that we should steal the oil of countries when we conquer them. Nothing about his support for assassinating the family members of terrorists. Nothing about his embrace of brutal authoritarians like Putin. Nothing about his promises to stop the media from printing anti-Trump stories. Nothing about his bizarre embrace of numerous nutty conspiracy theories. Or his comments in favor of nuclear proliferation. Or his contempt for facts, which I’m afraid goes far beyond the lies we see with even Hillary/Nixon-level politicians.
Look, I’m also opposed to tariffs on Mexican goods. But when people read posts like Bob’s they are going to think that libertarians just don’t get it. One defense is that Hillary is also horrible. I agree, she’s much worse than Obama. So put in a, “To be sure, Hillary also has many faults like militarism and support for the war on drugs” or something like that. But Trump’s outrages go far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in American politics, and if we write posts mostly attacking his critics and then throwing in a few lines about tariffs, we are just giving ammunition to the people who troll libertarians as insensitive on issues such as race and gender (I don’t recall specific examples, but I’m thinking of people like Noah Smith, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, etc.) Lots of female GOP intellectuals (who earlier criticized Bill Clinton) are disgusted right now with the GOP, and their reasons go far beyond “boorish comments”. They don’t understand why the men in their party don’t get it.
Moving beyond Bob’s post, I’m glad those “sore losers” are out in the streets protesting Trump; I wish there were millions of people protesting (peacefully of course.) I’d be disgusted with this country if people simply bowed down to Trump because he won. The fact that he won more states than Hillary doesn’t magically transform him into another person; he’s still the appalling, disgusting, evil person he was on November 7th. A man with literally no good qualities (with apologies to Musil). All that’s changed is that he’s now a government employee.
Sometimes I wonder why we even have a public education system. When I think back to all the “social studies” classes I took in high school, there were lots topics covered. But much of the history (back in the 1960s and 1970s) we covered actually boiled down to one basic point: “Do not ever, ever, ever, ever vote for a demagogic politician who engages in the big lie, is contemptuous of civil liberties and demonizes minorities and foreigners. Just don’t do it.” And if we can’t even get that one basic point, then can someone tell me what these civics classes are for? What’s the point? And please don’t tell me that all politicians are demagogues, of course that true to some extent. But Trump’s a textbook definition of what we were warned to shun at all costs.
If libertarianism doesn’t rise to the occasion and loudly proclaim that Trump is completely beyond the pale, then we are going to make the same mistake those leftists made in the 1950s and 1960s, when they spent more time criticizing anti-communists than they did criticizing the unprecedented evil of global communism. Of course Trump’s not that sort of threat, he’s probably too incompetent to do much harm (one key difference from Hitler), and our democracy is quite strong (another key difference). Maybe he won’t even impose those tariffs—I have no idea what he’s going to do. But in symbolic terms the issues are just as stark, and we need to reject Trumpism without any qualifications, even if Trump were to bring about small government and NGDP targeting. Otherwise libertarianism will be tarnished by this sad episode of American history. [Scott Sumner, bold in original.]
So, can I just explain that I would have done all that, except the game was on?
P.S. Does anybody actually want me to address the substance of Scott’s post? I get the sense that his regulars in the comments think I’m either crazy or a Nazi, and I get the sense that most of you guys think Scott is crazy and/or a Social Justice Warrior (the bad kind). Is there any point to this argument? I personally don’t think one needs to point out that trying to placate Krugman, DeLong, and Noah Smith is a huge mistake, but is this obvious to all of you?
That Saved a Wretch Like Me
I’ve been getting really annoyed with everybody lately, so I assume the problem is me. Time to refresh my gratitude and humility:
(BTW the main song is only about 3 minutes and change, if you want to give his version a chance.)
Reactions to the Trump Victory: B
Scott Sumner gets a B.
At first I was ready to give him an A, because he has repeatedly admitted he was totally wrong about Trump’s chances in the election. (Incidentally, I wasn’t predicting a Trump victory. I heard his speech in Florida the Friday [?] before and was texting some people saying, “Trump is kicking a$$,” and I thought his ad was great, but I was amazed he won too.) Now even here, Scott was still being a tad smug and sarcastic about it, but OK he was officially admitting he had been totally wrong, so I’ll give him that.
But then Sumner wrote 2 things that made me downgrade him to a B.
First, in this post Scott writes:
Before starting this post (which won’t interest most people) let me just reiterate that the big question going forward is whether Trump will govern as a populist or a GOP supply-sider. The markets clearly expect the latter–they think he conned the blue-collar workers to get their votes. Since I’ve been wrong about Trump before, I won’t offer an opinion—just wait and see.
Now I really don’t like Scott’s analysis above. I think he is smarting from being so totally wrong about Trump, and so he’s throwing out economics just to grab onto some way to validate his stance and laugh at the people who voted for Trump.
Specifically, there are two problems in the above. #1 is that it sure sounds like Scott is saying that GOP supply-side policies are bad for blue-collar workers. Is that really true? Do we have a Chicago School economist admitting that Geraldine Ferraro, Mario Cuomo, and Al Sharpton are right? The GOP’s tax cutting agenda is really just giveaways to rich people that won’t help workers?
#2, when Scott says “the markets clearly expect” he is referring to the surging stock indices on Wednesday. But on Tuesday, when the news of Trump’s victory first hit, stock markets around the world–and futures markets for the US–were tanking. Indeed, Scott himself predicted that the U.S. market would open up down 10 percent (and then he amended to 5 percent because of a math error) if Trump won.
In any other post, when Scott explains how to use the EMH to evaluate what “the market” thinks of a surprise, it is the initial response that matters. So even if we accepted Scott’s argument that blue-collar workers have interests diametrically opposed to stockholders, then “the markets” originally did NOT think these workers were conned.
Now on to my next major problem with Scott’s damage control. In a later post, he writes: “And I wasn’t quite wrong about everything. Take a look at this prescient post from a month ago, for which I got roundly criticized. What do my critics say now? Still don’t see a trend?”
OK, so in context Scott is leading us to believe that a month ago, he warmed us up to the possibility of a Trump victory, and then plenty of people were challenging his argument. So if you click the link, you see the title is, “Israel, Britain, Spain, Colombia . . . Trump?”
You read it and learn that Scott is saying there have been a lot of populist rejections of the elites, which were totally unexpected. So was Scott saying he thought Trump might actually win? Or at least, was Scott warning people not to trust the “consensus” view, and that Trump was not nearly the underdog that the “smart money” thought?
No, he wasn’t. In that exact post, he wrote, “This doesn’t mean I think Trump will win—I’m an EMH person and accept the current 25% odds—it’s just that even that risk seems unacceptably high to me.”
So Scott himself made clear in that post that he wasn’t questioning what “the market” thought of Trump’s chances. Hence, we should in no way give him credit now for being “prescient.”
Furthermore, just for kicks, go ahead and skim the comments, to find out what Scott meant when he said he was “roundly criticized.” Sure, he was criticized, but it was by TRUMP supporters. By my count, there are literally two comments, out of 45 total, that conceivably are challenging Scott’s premise that these other world events provide us insight into the Trump phenomenon. And I say “conceivably” because one of the comments is vague; it’s a guy saying, “Stick to your day job, Bro. Political commentary is not your forte!”
So, we have no idea exactly what that guy’s problem is. For all we know, he’s upset at Scott using the EMH to assess an election.
Anyway, I give Scott a B, and I think even that is generous. But I do want to reward him for saying in several posts (on MoneyIllusion and EconLog) that he had been totally wrong about Trump’s electoral chances.
P.S. Obviously neither Scott nor the guy I am going to fail (on Monday if I get a chance to blog) cares what I think about how bloggers handled Trump’s surprising victory. I am providing these grades mostly as an entertaining way to link to the different types of reactions from people who were extremely confident and then ended up being totally wrong. I love this stuff. With the Internet it’s so easy to check up on what people said before.
P.P.S. Before anyone else draws the analogy, here ya go.
Reactions to the Trump Victory: A+
I am going to give scores to people based on how well they dealt with the shattering of their worldviews. Will Rahn of CBS News gets an A+. An excerpt:
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not alogic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
Recent Comments