Post-mortem of an election

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.

Well, it’s all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what’s going on.

                                                                        Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 1973

So, the hustings are finally over and Donald J Trump, the reality T.V. star and business magnate, is the President-Elect of the United States. He is the first person without any governmental experience to reach the seat of the White House, making this election possibly the biggest upset in American voting history. Or was it?

It is if you go by the media, the vast majority of whom heavily endorsed Clinton and couldn’t pick their chins off the floor as it became clearer and clearer as the votes came in that the US will have its first orange man to be her 45^th president. The pollsters, professionals whose job is to make accurate predictions using scientific methods, got it wrong too. Looking at Realclearpolitics, on the two days before the election, the vast majority of polls tipped Clinton. The statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning while New York Time’s predictor had Clinton at 85% chance of victory. The error wasn’t trivial, Trump did not scrape through by the skin of his teeth, but won ‘bigly’ – the Republican won 290 electoral college votes to Clinton’s 228 (with 270 required to win). Not only this, but the Republican Party has the majority in the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, thereby capturing the legislative as well as the executive arms of the government.

Christopher Hitchens once said 20 odd years ago that “I became a journalist partly because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.” How right he was. So why did the mainstream media, from whom we are supposed to receive truthful information, and the pollsters, whose job it is to generate accurate vignettes of reality, get it so blatantly wrong?

Decay of the Media

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

                                                                                                            Edmund Burke

The mainstream media has shown during this cycle what most people have already realised – that they have betrayed their vocation and failed the public. The vast majority of the mainstream media is in league with the Democrats, or more to the point, one specific candidate of the Democrats, Hillary Clinton (some examples I have touched upon here, more here and here). Instead of news journalism, many networks such as MSNBC, CNN, ABC, ESPN, The Guardian, Huffington Post, New York Times, Slate, not to mention websites like Vox and Salon have offered their consumers no subjectivity; many have during the election cycle become simply pundits and Pravda for Hillary Clinton.

Rasmussen’s May 2016 poll reflect the fallout of this lurid bias, with 49% of those polled think that most reporters are biased against Trump and only 18% thought they were biased against Clinton. The Suffolk University/USA Today poll further showed that, when asking people “Who do you think the media, including major newspapers and TV stations, would like to see elected president: Clinton or Trump?”, 75.9% answered Clinton, while only 7.9% responded Trump. Furthermore, the tactic most readily utilised by the hard left is to besmirch any opposition by name calling, trigger happy with words like ‘racist’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘bigoted’, words with gravity that the left has sadly depreciated. Like the boy who cried wolf, people don’t care anymore for a media who they have come to realise are fundamentally insincere in their insults.

Since the election, The New York Times has published an apology of sorts to its readers for its transgressions, promising to ‘rededicate ourselves’ to journalism as it should be done. MSNBC’s Morning Joe has also arrived at some self-critical realisations. Others have doubled down. Like NBC, who, when Trump ditched the press pool to have dinner with his family at a steakhouse, apoplectically reported that this move ‘seemed to deliberately limit access to the media’. And “showing a lack of transparency.” This from people that were hand in hand with the Clinton campaign, as shown by Wikileaks, and didn’t give a hoot about Obama’s administration being one of the most opaque towards the media. New York Times reported: 

[...]when Mr Trump ducked out to dinner Tuesday night without informing the journalists assigned to cover him, it struck White House reporters as a small but significant omen that cordial relations between the president and the press corps, a hallmark of the West Wing, were under threat.

To contrast, when Obama ditched the press in 2008 while on holiday the same paper indulgently reported:

In the news-free zone that is Barack Obama’s preinauguration Hawaiian vacation, this passes for a bulletin: The president-elect ditched his “press pool” of media minders to take his daughters to a water park on Friday Morning.

In making his dash – with his Secret Service security detail, to be sure – Mr. Obama drew attention both to the seemingly odd but important rituals of the presidential (and prepresidential) bubble and to just how much this very private public man chafes under its constraints.

Not every one is blind to this double standard. Chomsky wrote in his Manufacturing Consent that:

The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.

This is not surprising for anyone paying attention; the media industry has been dominated by small-‘l’-leftist ‘liberals’ for decades. One symptom of this is the concentration on the trite, the emotional and the sensational, and the result in the media creating a consensus as deep as a teacup. A Harvard Kennedy School study found that only 11% of the coverage focused on policy positions, leadership abilities and professional histories. The complacency and arrogance the media have accumulated in the face of their own perceived influence meant that they, rather than being conveyors of truth and facts, think they can herd the flock to their ideological position by telling them what to think and how to think. They have severely underestimated the intelligence of the people. A recent Gallup poll shows that trust for the main stream media has sunk to a new low in Gallup polling history, with only 32% of people surveyed professing ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust, down 8% from 2015. Trump was therefore right when he said that “[the media is] so dishonest and they’ve poisoned the minds of the voters but, unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it.” The public knows this to be true and they see Trump saying so as the boy who finally dared to point out that the Emperor is wearing no cloths. Many no doubt voted for Trump not as an approval of him, but to stick a middle finger up at the establishment to say that “we see through your non-too-subtle tricks and we are not having it.” This election result is in a large part due to the arrogance of the press/democrat centaur. Like Icarus, they sought for influence beyond what is decent and fell, burning, to the ground. And by doing so their conceit helped elevate an unsuitable man into the White House, fulfilling exactly what they did not desire.

Obama’s Tattered Legacy

A vital cause for the Democrat’s demise is the legacy of left-wing policies. A lot of this went underreported due to journalistic biases, especially for those overseas, but the effects of eight years of Obama’s policies have been felt by many Americans. Under Obama, the world’s number one economy is experiencing its slowest financial recovery since the Great Depression of the 30’s. Job growth was only 1.72% in the first 36 months of his Presidency, compared to Bush’s 2.93% during his recovery and Reagan’s 8.97%. A report from the Congressional Research Service found that real GDP growth during the recent recovery since the 2008 recession was only 2% per year. During the past 10 expansions, real GDP grew by an average of 4.3%. The report also stated that “larger recessions are generally associated with faster growth during the following expansion, referred to as catch-up growth, but this has not been the case following the 2007-2009 recession.” A Heartland Institute report found that had the recovery been the average of the past 11 since the Depression, the family income would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs. The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey showed that real median household income fell by more than $4,500 during Obama’s first term, which is approximately 8%, or the loss of a month’s worth of salary. The author concludes that Obama and his administration have followed the wrong model:

Although presented to the public as a progressive, forward-looking thinker, President Barack Obama has actually taken the United States back to the thoroughly failed economic policies of the 1930s and 1970s, and so ultimately to the same results. Most academic liberals no longer believe in pure, unreconstructed Keynesianism, but Obama and his economic advisors apparently do.”

Casting an eye back in history, Obama makes the same mistake as his Democratic predecessor Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s predecessors, Republican presidents Harding (1921-1923) and Coolidge (1923-1929) were both economically libertarian and believed in a very limited federal government as stipulated by the constitution. After the 1920-22 depression, whose severity exceeded the Great Depression in several quarters, under the guidance of Harding, who trusted in the market’s powers to recover if left unhindered, unemployment rate was actually already less than its normal long-run rate by 1923. Economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway argue that the seven years from 1922-1929 were perhaps the brightest years in the economic history of the US.

From 1920 to 1929, total manufacturing output rose a bit over 50 percent, an aggregate figure that masked even more rapid rates of growth in major sectors of the economy. Primary manufacturing grew at a rate of 2.5 percent per year; end product manufacturing increased 4 percent per year throughout the decade. By 1929, the economy of the United States produced four-tenths of the world’s coal, seven-tenths of the world’s petroleum, a third of the world’s hydro-electric power, half the world’s steel, and virtually all of the world’s natural gas.

Job creation was on average +4.23% per year during 1921-25, and +2.13% during 1925-29. Compare this with Hoover (1929-1933), who, in response to the Great Depression which began in late 1929, advocated an interventionist central government and did not trust in the market’s own recuperative powers, and under whose tenure the job growth was -5.41%. In fact, the unemployment rate, despite all the interventions and money thrown at it, never went below double digits, sometimes above 20%, during Hoover’s presidency. Here, the eminent economist Thomas Sowell gives a great summary of the situation and the amazing extent of Hoover’s meddling. Obama responded in a similar fashion, bailing out banks and injecting stimulus packages and the results are not surprising. Again, Sowell is able to summarise it eloquently.

Many people outside America are not aware of the despondency faced by many Americans due to the gloss the media likes to put on Obama’s administration. Knowing this however would render the push back against more of the same as offered by Clinton unsurprising. Another thing probably unknown to many is that, while the media is breathing fire down Trumps collar for his tough stance on illegal immigration, Obama deported more illegal immigrants than any other of his predecessors. Nor perhaps Obama’s use of the IRS against republicans, the politicisation of the Justice Department; paying what is obviously a ransom to Iran after the disastrous nuclear deal which will in essence grant Iran, a state that funds terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, access to nuclear weapons; the Fast and Furious scandal which gave Mexican drug cartels over 2,000 weapons, including 34 0.5-calibre rifles powerful enough to take down helicopters and the subsequent cover up; the terribly inept handling of Benghazi and the number of ways that he has denigrated the constitution. Obama and the democrats have shown throughout the eight years that they do not understand the people of the US nor indeed liberal exceptionalism which is the foundational creed of the nation they profess to govern. The straw that broke the camel’s back is the latest revelation that Obamacare premiums will rise sharply for many Americans, with those in Arizona expecting a 116% average increase. This is another reflection of the failure of Obama’s ideological adherence, socialism. He is precisely what Hayek called “Intellects whose desires have outstripped their understanding.” Unfortunately, as Milton Friedman puts it, “one of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” This has been the case for many years as people indulged the liberals but it has reached a point where even Obama’s over lauded charms and oratory skills megaphoned by a fawning media cannot hide the fact that in many respects the democratic governance has failed.

Hillary’s ineptitude

Hillary Clinton is an awful candidate. To have had all the natural advantages of 30 years’ experience, numerous contacts and influences, the media at her beck and call, being the ‘most qualified’ candidate and still to lose to someone as unfit, crass and doltish as Trump, says it all. Old sins cast long shadows, and the litany of unsavoury activities dotting her history and new ones unearthed every other week is too much even for today’s short attention span to fully ignore. Whether it’s the DNC collusion, her email scandal, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation (still under FBI investigation), her blame-shifting, pathological mendacity, pandering to celebrities, playing the sex card, forcing the narrative of ‘historic’ moment (as opposed to real female political pioneers like Thatcher, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benazir Bhutto or even Theresa May), it’s no wonder that she lost more than 6 million votes that had went for Obama in 2012. Reflecting this, 53% of white women voted for Trump, who, just a week before the election, was shown on TV talking about grabbing women by the bleep. This is the uncovered story, the election is not so much won by Trump but lost by the democrats; chief reason being that they chose a terrifically unfit candidate.

Cultural suicide

Politics is downstream of culture. And the left had turned American culture, and indeed Western culture into one of social Marxism of the worst kind. Most people might not mean to but through their unthinking acceptance of the victimhood culture and the idea that government and society should provide equal outcome instead of equal opportunity, they are undermining the most precious asset of their culture, that of a system where personal liberty is held as the basic and inalienable right. In their lemmings-like drive to enforce 'social justice' as opposed to simply justice, they don’t seem to be able to see that the only way to achieve this is at the expense of certain groups, and that the natural end of this path is authoritarianism and totalitarianism. As Hayek pointed out in The Constitution of Liberty,

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

For example, an Asian child of the same economic background as a black or a white student is penalised 50 points on their SAT score, whereas black students are given a 230 points boost and Hispanics receive a 185 point boost. There are twice as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks living below 150 percent of the poverty line in the US who gets little attention due to their skin colour and whose children are offered not just less chances of social mobility but are actively punished by their race because they cannot access many of the specialised scholarships or quotas for minorities. Whatever the motives, this is racism defined. Ironically, the left’s ultimate mistake in embracing ‘diversity’ is to group and give credit to people based on surface level differences – what matters least, whereas deep down there is an accretion of an enforced ideological uniformity. 
One example to explode the myth that this election is a reflection of the rise of racist white nationalism: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Iowa turned Republican this round. Michigan had voted Democrat for the last 6 elections, Florida, with its key 29 electoral votes, had endorsed Obama on the previous 2 elections. Pennsylvania had voted Democrat in the previous 6 presidential elections, Ohio and Iowa both voted for Obama twice, Wisconsin voted for Democrats the last 7 election cycles. The accusation of racist etc is not only inaccurate by asinine. 

To put it in another way, what matters most, diversity of thought, is quashed. Two quotes from two of the great thinkers of the classic liberal left precisely diagnose the problem. The great Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg once wrote “Freedom of speech is nothing unless it means the freedom of the one who thinks differently.” This is echoed by George Orwell, who wrote that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” This is exactly where the hard left is determined to impinge society, to make social discourse homogenous to their narrative. Again, the motivation of not wanting to upset or offend especially the minorities might be good in principle, the results of this peremptory thought-policing however are fracture, resentment, anger and Trump. Milton Friedman and others before and since had predicted exactly this. Friedman phrased it pithily as “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a higher degree of both.”

The left has poisoned the social discourse through highly emotionally charged rhetoric and an instinct to go for the lowest motives in their opponents. Hence racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, bigotry – words with terrible connotations describing horrendous ideologies, are thrown without regard at people with genuine concerns about, for instance, border control or who wish to question the feasibility of pan-sex bathrooms. It’s fine to disagree, but to castigate and malign your opponents mercilessly and mendaciously is one, to make them frustrated, and two, like the boy who cried wolf, to traduce the power of these important words to a point where people don’t care anymore to be called such things because they realise that you call them names because you are not intellectually sincere enough to have an actual debate. This is obviously the case with the moral-brandishing celebrities who used the trump-card (no pun intended) of equating Trump to Hitler and publically avowing that they will move to Canada if Trump wins the race. Perhaps Hitler is the only historical reference they know but if they seriously believe that Trump is in any way similar to Hitler, that there will be concentration camps, that minorities will be marked out with a star and treated like animals to be slaughtered, they surely really would move their families to another country. But has any of them bothered? Of course not. Their histrionics is Munchausen by proxy and moral peacocking. The devaluing of words is a terrible thing because we need these words and their powers when real bigots and fascists and sexists and racists rear their ugly heads like some fringe members of the so-called Alt-right movement. The regressive left’s dominance of the media, the education system and the entertainment industry means that a generation of young people are brought up, instead of being able to think for themselves, are spoon-fed a consensus a million miles wide and a millimetre deep. 

This election is a big slap in the face for the left and hopefully will make them take the opportunity for introspection and contrition instead of sinking into the quagmire of blame shifting. A Trump presidency might very well need a principled left wing opposition with credibility. The right on the other hand will need to check its own side and hold Trump’s feet to the fire. The danger of Trump is the opposite of Obama; because he is not an ideologue, he is amorphous; a human Rorschach blot that invites you to project your hopes onto him. He has shown throughout the campaign that he is not principled, is thin skinned and has an instinct to fight over petty, trivial insults. A man like this is more likely to be corrupted by power, as suggested by Lord Acton, rather than to be humbled by it. The right therefore will need to find it in themselves to stand up to Trump when he goes off the rail and not to abandon its traditional liberal principles for the convenience of the man who got them back into power. The wind is shifting in the Western culture; the pendulum of the zeitgeist is swinging back against years of hard left-wing compulsion. Now it is vital to ensure it doesn’t swing back too hard. On the bright side, at least the next 4 years won't be boring. 

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

                                                             Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty and War