That’s him in the green, green cotton jersey, prince of the clean sheets – some upright insect boxed between the sticks, the horizontal and the pitch, stood with something up his sleeve, armed with a pouch of tobacco and skins to roll his own, or else a silver tin containing eight or nine already rolled. That’s him with one behind his ear, between his lips, or one tucked out of sight and lit - a stamen cupped in the bud of his fist. That’s him sat down, not like those other clowns, performing acrobatics on the bar, or press-ups in the box, or running on the spot, togged out in turtleneck pyjama-suits with hands as stunted as a bunch of thumbs, hands that are bandaged or swaddled with gloves, laughable, frying-pan, sausage-man gloves. Not my man, though, that’s not what my man does; a man who stubs his reefers on the post and kicks his heels in the stud-marks and butts, lighting the next from the last, in one breath making the save of the year with his legs, taking back a deep drag on the goal-line in the next; on the one hand throwing out or snaffling the ball from a high corner, flicking off loose ash with the other. Or in the freezing cold with both teams snorting like flogged horses, with captains and coaches effing and jeffing at backs and forwards, talking steam, screaming exhausting orders, that’s not breath coming from my bloke, it’s smoke.
When Donald Trump appeared at the N.R.A.’s recent national convention, he had a simple message: Hillary Clinton “wants to take away your guns.” This was familiar rhetorical ground: warning of dire losses has been the core of Trump’s campaign. Free trade means that “we’re losing our jobs, we’re losing our money.” China’s trade practices amount to “the greatest theft in the history of the world.” We need a wall to stop illegal immigration because “we’re losing so much.” In Trump’s world, things are much worse than they seem, and it’s because American prosperity has been stolen: “We’re losing everything.” Trump is playing to one of the most powerful emotions in our economic life—what behavioral economists call loss aversion. The basic idea, which was pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is that people feel the pain of losses much more than they feel the pleasure of gains. Empirical studies suggest that, in general, losing is twice as painful as winning is enjoyable. So people will go to great lengths to avoid losses, and to recover what they’ve lost. Trump’s emphasis on losing is unusual: even in bleak times, American Presidential candidates tend to offer optimistic messages. But it has worked for him, because it resonates with what many Republican voters already feel. A study by the Pew Research Center last fall found that seventy-nine per cent of those who lean Republican believe that their side is losing politically. A rand survey in January found that voters who believed that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 per cent more likely to prefer Trump. Trump supporters feel that they, and the country, are losing economically, too. In the rand survey, Trump did better with the people who were the most dissatisfied with their economic situation, and exit polls from the Republican primaries show that almost seventy per cent of those who voted for Trump said that they were “very worried” about the state of the economy—as against only forty-five per cent of all voters in Democratic primaries. There are a couple of surprising things about all this. The first is that, in objective terms, plenty of Trump supporters haven’t lost that much. We’re familiar with Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters, many of whom truly have seen wages stagnate and jobs dry up. But the median Trump voter is actually better educated and richer than the average American, as Nate Silver recently pointed out. A key point of Kahneman and Tversky’s work, though, is that people don’t look at their status objectively; they measure it relative to a reference point, and for many Republicans that reference point is a past time when they had more status and more economic security. Even people who simply aren’t doing as well as they expected to be doing, Kahneman argues, feel a sense of loss. And people don’t adapt their expectations to new circumstances. A study of loss aversion by the political scientist Jack Levy concluded that, after losses, an individual will “continue to use the status quo ex ante as her reference point.” Trump’s promise is precisely that he’ll return America to that status quo ex ante. (“I love the old days,” he has said.) He tells his supporters that he will help recoup their losses and safeguard what they have. The other surprising thing is that you might expect loss-averse voters to be leery of taking a risk on an unpredictable outsider like Trump, since loss aversion often makes people cautious: offered the choice between five hundred dollars and a fifty per cent chance at a thousand dollars or nothing, most people take the sure thing. However, loss aversion promotes caution only when people are considering gains; once people have sustained losses, impulses change dramatically. Offered the choice between losing five hundred dollars and a fifty per cent chance of losing a thousand dollars or nothing, most people prefer to gamble—the opposite of what they did when presented with the chance to win a thousand dollars. As one study puts it, “People are willing to run huge risks to avert or recover losses.” In the real world, this is why people hold falling stocks, hoping for a rebound rather than cutting their losses, and it’s why they double down after losing a bet. For Trump’s voters, the Obama years have felt like a disaster. Taking a flyer on Trump actually starts to feel sensible. Historical parallels are always tendentious. But loss aversion has been instrumental in the success of authoritarian movements around the world. The political scientist Kurt Weyland has argued that it played a crucial role in the rise of such regimes in Latin America, where the fear of Communism drove putatively democratic societies toward the radical solution of strongman rule. Trump may not quite be an American Perón, but, to his supporters, his unpredictability is a selling point rather than a flaw. Hillary Clinton has recently been emphasizing what a risk Trump represents. That’s fine when rallying the Democratic base and appealing to genuine independents. But it will only make Trump more popular with those who already believe in him. When he says, “We’re losing our country,” it doesn’t sound overwrought to his supporters. It sounds like the truth. For them, Trump is the long shot who may come in and give them back all that they have lost. ♦
James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” and writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine. MORE ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
Poor white Americans know the only thing they have going for them is their whiteness. If they vote for horrible, racist politicians that tell them that racial equality will be done away with, then they won’t have as much competition for the crumbs tossed to the masses by the rich. I never, ever considered that. Do you agree? Why it seems that poor whites continue to vote against their interests
Late in his life, Dr. Martin Luther King began to shift the focus of his work beyond race toward poverty. King held out the charitable belief that elevating the awareness of lower income whites to their condition might offer a pathway to a post-racial coalition among America’s lower-earners. He described his insights in a 1968 sermon, centered on his conversations with police while he was jailed in Birmingham. Here’s a digest of his comments on that interaction:
“And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes.” And I said, “You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.”
As he was wont to do, King spread a Hallmark-card sheen on that interaction, but his jailers did not set him free. They did not join hands with him. They did not march by his side then or at any time after.
Jefferson was not the first man to identify the death knell of democracy, or “self-government,” was an uneducated populace. Republicans understand they could hardly garner any electoral support if the population was educated and informed, so they have went to extraordinary and, often, unconstitutional lengths to keep the populace ignorant by cutting education funding. Whether it is transferring public school funding to private, religious, or underperforming charter schools, or just slashing education funding, Republicans will employ any measure to keep Americans stupid so they will vote against their own self-interests.
On Thursday, another judge ruled that Republicans in Texas used an unconstitutional scam to starve public schools and produce another generation of ignorant Texans to vote for Republicans. The Texas ruling was a repudiation of gubernatorial candidate Gregg Abbot’s defense of slashing well over $5 billion from public schools using an unconstitutional property tax scam. However, the means of slashing public education funding is unimportant, but it is a growing trend among Republican-led states whose goal is simply to maintain a base of support among uneducated voters.
Simply put, people are ignorant. The ignorance is underscored in Britain by lots of people scrambling after the vote to learn what this European Union business is all about. It is underscored in the United States by Trump declaring after one of his primary election victories, “I love the poorly educated.”
And the people are revolting against 'the expert': What is happening in the United States has also been happening in the UK. The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told Faisal Islam in an interview on Sky News on 3 June that “the British people have had enough of experts”. Gove was also widely mocked – if not experts, who was he proposing to get to repair his car, fix his teeth, teach his kids?
But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts Gove was deriding had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighed any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome. Those voices came trailing educational qualifications, which had put them in their positions of authority – at the IMF, the Bank of England, the Treasury. Gove was asking voters lacking anything like the same educational qualifications to feel empowered to reject what they were being told. And in the referendum on 23 June, that is what they did.
...
Educated v less educated may be even more toxic than rich v poor, because it comes laden with assumptions of moral superiority. These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise. To those on the receiving end, that stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest. The fact that the educated are not always the beneficiaries of the social attitudes that they hold – Corbyn’s supporters, like Bernie Sanders’s, would rightly insist that many of the positions they adopt are designed for the benefit the socially excluded – does not help. It just makes them sound even more self-righteous. The EU referendum was seen by educated optimists – including some of the people around David Cameron – as just another way for democracy to let off steam: a means of giving vent to anger without letting it run out of control. That is what the optimists have been saying about Trump too. But the steam is still rising.
The United States is tumbling fast toward a dangerous place. In just the last twenty years or so it has become increasingly acceptable for national political candidates to be openly and obviously dumb about things that matter. More than okay, dumb is now a selling point, an admirable quality that separates uninformed politicians from despised scientists, historians, and other educated experts. Empty-headed politicians and their handlers were once tasked with figuring out how to fool voters into believing that the candidate was smart and competent. Today it no longer seems necessary to hide or pretend. Vote for me because I’m as dumb as you are!
Can’t say we weren’t warned. The prophecy was given in Idiocracy, a 2006 film about a future America where loud, obnoxious morons are ruled by a louder, more obnoxious moron. What was once a forgettable comedy has morphed into a brilliant and relevant cautionary tale.
A simple solution. This is an easy fix. No overhaul of the entire educational system is needed because dumb voters are not the key problem. The truth is, all voters are dumb about most foreign and domestic policy matters and they always have been. Who has time to learn all that stuff while working, raising children, and watching forty hours of TV per week? Fortunately, we don’t have to elevate the IQ of every American voter to solve this problem. All we need is a new awareness movement to sell the public on an old idea. Spread the word: Presidents should be smart and well informed.
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America's political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said:
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media.
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds another perspective:
"The rise of idiot America today represents - for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert."
"There's a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization," says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critiqueand a film and media studies professor at University of California. The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. "We don't educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs."
Part of the reason for the rising anti-intellectualism can be found in the declining state of education in the U.S. compared to other advanced countries:
After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;
According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design;"
18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents;
74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world;
According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;
According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important;"
According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book--fiction or nonfiction--over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004;
Gallup released a poll indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;
A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
In American schools, the culture exalts the athlete and good-looking cheerleader. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as "nerds," "dweebs," "dorks," and "geeks," and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect. These anti-intellectual attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S. And most TV shows or movies such as The Big Bang Theory depict intellectuals as being geeks if not effeminate.
John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, argues the problem is that Asian countries have core cultural values that are more akin to a cult of intelligence and education than a cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In Japan, for example, teachers are held in high esteem and normally viewed as among the most important members of a community. There is suspicion and even disdain for the work of teachers that occurs in the U.S. Teachers in Japan typically are paid significantly more than their peers in the U.S. The profession of teaching is one that is seen as being of central value in Japanese society and those who choose that profession are well compensated in terms of salary, pension, and respect for their knowledge and their efforts on behalf of children.
In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history - such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists - which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world, Traphagan contends. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.
We're creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.
Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times argues that the anti-intellectual elitism is not an elitism of wisdom, education, experience or knowledge. The new elite are the angry social media posters, those who can shout loudest and more often, a clique of bullies and malcontents baying together like dogs cornering a fox. Too often it's a combined elite of the anti-intellectuals and the conspiracy followers - not those who can voice the most cogent, most coherent response. Together they foment a rabid culture of anti-rationalism where every fact is suspect; every shadow holds a secret conspiracy. Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil's tool.
Keller also notes that the herd mentality takes over online; the anti-intellectuals become the metaphorical equivalent of an angry lynch mob when anyone either challenges one of the mob beliefs or posts anything outside the mob's self-limiting set of values.
Keller blames this in part to the online universe that "skews young, educated and attentive to fashions." Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism - we're directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.
Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of[you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians, or Paris Hilton are known for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.
The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.
We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like "critical thinking," "diversity," "ways of knowing," "social justice," and "cultural competence."
Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.
The first part of the regular BBC radio series 'the verb' looks at the language of Donald Trump (at 24 minutes): The Verb - BBC Radio 3
The level of his language has been looked at:
Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader
Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were
to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small
box of Lincoln Logs.
Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence
constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news
conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words
into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he
then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.
The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down
prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English,
the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century
linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language.
In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid
grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading
level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other
candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben
Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level.
John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.
The Washington Post/Getty ImagesRepublican presidential candidate Donald
Trump speaks at a rally held at Signature Flight Hangar in Columbus,
Ohio, on March 1, 2016.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Simple language makes his racist biases go down easier
Donald Trump seems almost deliberately designed as a nightmare figure
to turn an American election upside down, for two main reasons. One of
them, believe it or not, is that he is extremely articulate. Oh, not in the conventional way. As Dana Milbank has noted,
often Trump speaks on a level that testing identifies as comprehensible
to a second-grader. However, this essentially means that Trump is the
most colloquial of our current crop of candidates, and the colloquialism
can be quite the narcotic on the stump.
The difference between casual speech and writing can be vaster than
we tend to think. The two are almost different languages at times.
Talking is all about short sentences and sprinkled interjections. Even
an educated person’s typical sentence gets no longer than nine or 10
words. Talking—as in, just talking—is subjective rather than objective
the way writing often tries to be. Casual talk involves a great deal of
repetition: rare is the person who says everything just once in animated
conversation. Then, casual talk makes single points, not extended
arguments.
Think of all of that in light of a typical Trump speech
(thanks to Mark Liberman at Language Log for the transcription) in
Grand Rapids last year, where he was presenting a hypothetical scenario
in which he is President and beholden to donors, as he is proud to say
he would never be:
Now here’s Trump, now Trump is President, Trump, Trump,
Trump is now President, Trump, Trump, so, President Trump, I owe them –
all I – you know who I owe I – here – this is the group I owe, I owe
these people, wow, I owe these people …
This is the way you talk over beer (or under the table), and key to
Trump’s appeal is that he speaks this way for the public record. It’s no
accident that he is so fond of Twitter with its 140-character limit and
the implied exemption from serious thought.
However, this way of communicating is not only entertaining but
persuasive. It is much of why he has made such headway and will continue
to. Trump talks the way humans evolved to talk. Writing, formal
speeches and $10 words are something we, past second grade, learn to
listen to and learn from (or at least pretend to). Trump takes us back
to basics—back to the way more of us probably wish public figures spoke
than we’d like to admit. So much of Trump talk, for example, isn’t even
sentences in the technical sense: observe the italicized sequences:
I don’t need any … but this is too easy, this
takes minutes, so what happens is … I’ll say 35% and if you wait another
day it’s going to 40, okay? It’s true, it’s going to 40 … here’s what
he’s going to say .. has to … and this isn’t like 99%, this is
100%, he’s going to say Mr. President, we’re going to build our new
plant in the United States … right here … well this is the place I’d
like to see it but we’re going to build our new … and that’s 100%.
There’s a theory that early humans spoke in what linguist Ljiljiana
Progovac titles “proto-syntax,” with choppy utterances like “Him, the
leader??” and “Game over!” Trump’s public speech dwells more liberally
in this Cro-Magnon substrate than one might expect—and for a lot of
people it has the same narcotic effect that makes so many people find
gorillas so cool. Colloquial comes off as, like gorillas, real. It
sounds sincere—just as Obama’s “Yes, We Can, intoned in a black
preacherly cadence, sounded “real” in a way that it never would have
from John McCain. Note also that Trump could almost get away with
adopting that slogan in his own barstool intonations.
Yet we must be under no impression that Trump is some kind of
linguistic Godzilla—he isn’t coming out of nowhere in the way he
communicates in public. He is part of an America that has gone ever more
“cazh” when it comes to public language since the 1960s. In 1890 W.E.B.
DuBois introduced himself to a writing teacher with “I have something
to say to the world and I have taken English twelve in order to say it
well,” already writing on a level most of us would consider celestial—in
his era, to be read or heard, advanced composition was de rigueur. In
our times, the SAT no longer has word analogies because they’ve been
deemed irrelevant to intelligence and generally elitist. Trump talk is a
predictable manifestation of the pathway from 1890 to 2016. To Trump
the idea of saying anything “well” would be beside the point.
However, the alarming thing about Trump’s linguistic power—or
antipower, as it were—is that it makes his racist biases go down easier.
Among blue Americans it is fashionable to charge that Trump’s fans are
as racist as he is and that they love him for venting their own
feelings. However, it is its own kind of discrimination to blithely caw
that all people “out there” are bigots. Just as plausible is an issue of
priority. Trump’s speaking style sounds, fundamentally, sincere. When
someone talking that way promises to work for people struggling in a new
economy, for those people it trumps, as it were, any floutings of
propriety regarding race and how one is to talk about it.
Observe, then, the power of the unadorned, when just about anything
goes over more easily from someone talking in a way that sounds sincere
because of its form—or, more specifically, a lack thereof. The truth is
that a great many people like talk when it’s sloppy, rejecting artifice,
striving, the baroque. Hence “The rent’s too damned high,” “Where’s the
beef?” and “It ain’t over.” However, Trump talk is both shaggy and
mean. He forces us to confront the downsides of the cult of authenticity
we all cherish so deeply.
Veteran travel writer Paul Theroux has been travelling in his own back yard: Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads by Paul Theroux, book review Theroux undergoes a journey of self-discovery in the American Deep South
After a lifetime spent travelling as “an alienated spectator on a train” or suffering the indignity and boredom of the airport security check, Theroux loves to wake up in New England and just get in his car to achieve “the bliss of a sudden exit”. As he explains, “even in the poorest places in America, where there are shacks and rotting house-trailers, the roads are wonderful”. Those shacks – and the poverty of their inhabitants – are as much of a contrast with his home as anything he has seen in sub-Saharan Africa, where, paradoxically, the American government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in aid while ignoring the plight of its own citizens a few hours down the highway.The small town of Glendora, for instance, with its “hideous street of shacks and hovels… where men in rags, with glazed dog-like eyes, [sip] from bottles and cans”, is profoundly depressing. This is where, in 1955, the 14-year old African American youth Emmett Till, visiting from the North, was murdered for having whistled at a white woman in the post office in the nearby hamlet of Money. An all-white jury acquitted his openly gloating killers, an event that riveted Theroux as a teenager. Fifty years on, African Americans he meets tell Theroux that “nothing’s changed”.
And what's gonna happen if he loses? 'Time for revolution': Trump's Deep South diehards ready for revolt if he loses Alabamians for Trump hint at civil disobedience, but 'we pray that don't happen'
In the Year of Trump, the South isn’t just red vs. blue — it’s black vs. white
Businessman and chef Santi Jones (right) and his unidentified associate prepare to work at their stand offering barbecue pork tacos to tailgaters in a parking lot near Bank of America stadium in Charlotte on Sept. 18. Jones ruminated on Hillary Clinton and whether black voters will win her the White House. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
A new poll in Louisiana shows Donald Trump leading by 20 points. And the reason is no surprise: white voters.
What is surprising, though, is the degree to which that statement is true — i.e. just how much Trump dominates among whites. Hillary Clinton takes just 12 percent of them in the Mason-Dixon poll; Trump takes 75 percent.
Huge racial polarization in new Louisiana poll
Trump
Clinton
Black
89%
White
75%
12%
A late-September Quinnipiac University poll in Georgia showed something similar there, with just 16 percent of white voters backing Clinton and 74 percent backing Trump.
In both polls, Democrats completely dominated among black voters, as they regularly do. So the end result was that almost all black voters were going for Clinton and the vast majority of white voters going for Trump.
This is not a new phenomenon, it should be emphasized. But it is notable that racial-political polarization in the South, and especially the Deep South, appears to be sticking around even with the nation's first black president no longer on the ballot.
These polls and others suggests that gap is going to be similar in 2016 — if not bigger in a state or two. A Washington Post-Survey Monkey online poll of all 50 states last month showed white voters favoring Donald Trump by a 71-to-22 margin in these five Deep South states — on a par with the 2012 margin.
Very few whites going for Hillary Clinton in Deep South
Trump
Clinton
Deep South
71%
22%
South
60%
32%
Midwest
50%
40%
West
48%
41%
Northeast
42%
47%
That racial polarization is not nearly so big across the rest of the country. Exit polls in 2012 showed Romney winning white voters by much smaller margins elsewhere: 6 points in the Northeast, 5 points in the West and 16 points in the Midwest. McCain in 2008 actually lost white voters to Barack Obama in the Northeast and West. And today, those regions remain much more competitive in Trump vs. Clinton, within margins of 10 points or less in the Survey Monkey poll.
When Donald Trump appeared at the N.R.A.’s recent national convention, he had a simple message: Hillary Clinton “wants to take away your guns.” This was familiar rhetorical ground: warning of dire losses has been the core of Trump’s campaign. Free trade means that “we’re losing our jobs, we’re losing our money.” China’s trade practices amount to “the greatest theft in the history of the world.” We need a wall to stop illegal immigration because “we’re losing so much.” In Trump’s world, things are much worse than they seem, and it’s because American prosperity has been stolen: “We’re losing everything.”
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
Comment: Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know-nothings