Correspondents--I am not singling out Paper.li for special scolding here, although there was one day when their selection of "book news" stories, which their system would have defaulted to sending out under my name if I'd paid for e-mail service, consisted entirely of Trump-bashing stories. Yes, somebody wrote a book whose theme was reportedly that our current President is obnoxious, tacky, and in some people's opinion a jerk. No, none of that is news to anybody I know, thanks just the same...
But this applies to Townhall and Huffington Post and The Blaze and Daily Kos and Freedomworks and all other correspondents. Hear me well: I am not interested in headlines that tell me who liiikes whom, or doesn't. I'm not interested in that information about Hollywood starlets or sixth grade social clubs; party affiliations furnish it about politicians. It is not worth the time you spend typing it to reiterate.
Presidents of the United States put a lot of effort into branding themselves as a certain type of person that a substantial number of Americans tend to find easy to liiike. People like other people when they perceive the other people as being like them in some way--that's why we use the same word "like" as both the verb and the preposition. People don't necessarily like other people toward whom they behave well, nor do people necessarily behave well toward people they like, so as far as I'm concerned "liking" people is almost entirely immaterial. Maybe whether I imagine I'd "like" someone I've only seen on television, if I ever spent any time around the person, makes some difference to me; I try not to let it make any difference, but maybe in some tiny, fractional way it makes enough difference that I consciously work against it. Because the "branding" of a politician's image, at best, reflects only a small part of that politician's work.
Jimmy Carter worked at seeming like Just a Regular Fellow. Ronald Reagan's brand might have been described as The Way You Wish Your Father Were Growing Old. George H.W. Bush came across as more like The Way Your Father (or, in my case, grandfather) Really Is Growing Old. Bill Clinton...I think he was trying for Balanced Practical Moderate Democrat Who Has Learned from the Failure of Socialism, and to the extent that he was able to claim credit (if it was credit-worthy) for Alan Greenspan's decisions he succeeded with that. W Bush did an excellent job branding himself as The Rich Blond Kid Who Has Everything and Gets to Be President of Everything for That Reason. Barack Obama's brand was similar, really, all but the "blond" part, but because he was so completely non-blond he nailed a likable "branding" quality that might be called The Difference That Ought to Be an Improvement. A close examination of each of these Presidents' actual work reveals abundant evidence that each was, in some ways, quite different from his "branding" made him seem to be. Carter was both rich and an achiever, Reagan had Alzheimer's Disease...you can fill in the rest as you like.
Donald Trump is very obviously going for that same type of appeal, guided by the number of Americans who, once convinced that the President of Russia actually claimed authorship of some undiplomatic words and survived, started saying they liked Putin and they liked Truman and they wanted a President who was really a Difference That Ought to Be an Improvement. More "different" than Obama. Obama was a nice, well-mannered, soft-spoken aristocrat. (Wrongheaded, but always in such an elegant, aristocratic way.) People who like saying "President Trump" want Trump to be as different from Obama as it's possible to get. Therefore Trump has reasons to be, at least on television, even more loud, rude, pushy, foul-mouthed, ugly, Yankee-ish, new-money-ish, greedy, tactless, and orange than nature intended. So he is. News? Not.
I don't want to join the chorus wailing about this aspect of Mr. Trump's self-branding, because I don't enjoy it and don't want to encourage it by feeding attention to it.
In a broader, more general way...In feudal monarchies, "politics" can only be about individual personalities, whether the Duke of A is angling for something we like better than what the Earl of B is angling for, and so on. Individuals are neither asked nor told why a policy decision might be a good idea; they can only attach themselves to individual superordinates. In a democratic republic, politics is about policies and social issues. As an American I may feel some sort of personal affinity for the candidate who looks like a relative of mine, or looks unlike my relatives and therefore (at least likely to have children who are) sexually attractive, or speaks with the same accent as my favorite teacher, or whatever personal memories go into "liking"--but as a responsible American I have a duty to ignore that emotional reaction and think as rationally as possible about specific questions of policy, to the extent that I believe I understand those questions, and speak or write about how those policies work or don't work for me and the people I know. That I liked Reagan's voice and did not like Bush's (either Bush's) voice is irrelevant.
I think it's useful to read news reports, or read the texts of speeches, rather than watching the speeches on television, for this reason. How "likable" people look or sound should not be used--as politicians like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did use it--as a distraction from how helpful, harmful, or risky the ideas they are promulgating may be.
More importantly, I think it's important for those of us who publish our thoughts to focus on the questions not the speakers for another reason: There are human beings behind those celebrity brand names, and once in a while one of them might be listening.
If you want a politician not to be influenced by your ideas, go ahead and bash that individual as a person. That will completely neutralize your influence. The person and per advisers will react to what you say with "So this writer/speaker/politician doesn't liiike me. So, s/he and any friends s/he may have will probably never vote for me. So I should ignore them and press harder on what the people who do like me want me to do, which the people who dislike me are going to hate in any case. If I make a speech affirming that today is Thursday, this person would still hate that speech, and me, just as much...so I might as well go ahead and endorse everything this person hates and fears most."
If you want to have any influence on anybody who's not identified with your party as the opposition to the target politician, abstain from bashing that individual as a person. Yes, this can be difficult. Yes, I have one U.S. Senator whom I'll probably never be able to liiike on any level whatsoever; I feel some correspondents' pain. Yes, most politicians are, at the very best, hopeless extroverts with defective consciences, even if they represent a party with which you generally agree, and therefore they're corruptible and will sell out whenever a higher bidder comes along...and those are the best of the lot. Yes, some politicians are total ideological prostitutes and embezzlers and intern-molesters and traitors and at least complicit after the facts of outright murders, if the truth were known.
Nevertheless. The more meretricious, selfish, and greedy your target politician may be...never mind any specific acts of intern abuse or treason or whatever, unless you have evidence sufficient to convict him of a crime and remove him from office...the more likely he is to be influenced by voters' opinions. When some voters express opinions like "Politician X is a jerk," X can safely ignore those opinions. When other voters express opinions like "More bureaucratic regulation of the firearms business is unlikely to reduce the incidence of murder (and thereby win votes for X if he endorses it) because it failed to reduce the incidence of murder in Ireland or in Washington, D.C.," X is likely to back away from those of his party who want him to endorse more bureaucratic regulation of the firearms business.
Was Barack Obama capable of thinking, in his own mind, "I am very special, both as an aristocrat and as an achiever in my own right, and therefore it's reasonable for me to enjoy privileges--like hunting and shooting--that I help others withhold from ordinary people?" You know it. There may be some question about how much ordinary Americans enjoy hunting and shooting as sports, but there's no question either that Obama thought he was special (how could he not?) or that he was surrounded by bureaucrats who wanted to encourage him to make the privileges of hunting and shooting less accessible to ordinary Americans who might enjoy those. What kept him from enacting the anti-gun "executive orders" some of his friends urged him to make? The fact that a critical mass of voters were saying and writing that, regardless of their feelings about Obama as a person, or about hunting and shooting as sports, or about specific firearms, they no longer found it possible to believe anti-private-firearms policies could work.
Is Donald Trump capable of...Let's just stop right there. I don't know what Trump is capable of doing; you don't know what Trump is capable of doing; even Trump doesn't know all of what Trump is capable of doing. I'll say this much. That I've never found him attractive is partly because he resembles some of my Whiter-looking relatives, most specifically the one regular readers may remember by the screen name Oogesti. This means that, to me, although Trump looks like someone I'd find annoying to work with and repulsive enough to keep around to squelch any attraction I might have felt toward someone else, he also looks like someone who would (who often did) go out to your farm and feed your livestock when you thought it was too cold, or go out of town to pick up medicine for you while you were sick in bed, or drive a hundred miles in falling snow and tow your vehicle home. Oogesti was a hopeless extrovert but he was that sort of relative. I have no way of knowing whether Trump is that sort of relative. I doubt that he is; that sort of relative is statistically rare. We had an election during which people discussed the record of Trump's public behavior. I didn't consider that record presidential; a critical number of other people did. The time for discussing Trump's manners and business sense and so on is over. Let's move on.
Let's consider, instead, that if Trump is capable of endorsing disastrously bad policies, what's likely to stop him might once again be a mass of voters and taxpayers talking about what is or is likely to go wrong with those policies. One by one. As policies. Not just "A bill to privatize the X Nature Preserve is bad because Trump seems likely to approve it" (how counterproductive can your argument get?) but "The question of privatizing the X Nature Preserve raises the question of who wants to take it over and what they want to do with it; in the case of the X Nature Preserve the potential purchaser would be the Y Group, whose stated intentions are bad because Z, and also A-prime, B-prime..." and on through ZZZ-to-the-ninth-power if necessary. The more reasons, the more need for discussion of those reasons. But spare everybody the "X is bad because Y likes it" sort of non-news and non-argument, please.
I'd like to hold up for special shame an e-mail that tried too hard to personalize the claim that "Trump's policy would cause good and deserving young people to be deported from Gate City, Priscilla!" Er, um... which people would those be, exactly? Name names! This web site invited refugees who were facing genuine persecution for being Christians to take refuge at the Cat Sanctuary. This web site also told them, frankly, that that would involve sheltering in rooms that did not currently have working electrical outlets, at a place where they might have to walk a quarter-mile or even a half-mile to get cell phone reception, in a town where an "immigrant" even from the town of Appalachia would still be known as "that person from Appalachia" after living here for sixty-some years--a town where one advertised opening for an office job has long been known to attract two or three hundred applications from qualified, underemployed people--a town where some people even make noises as if they thought not even speaking Spanish were a political statement, although I think everyone knows they merely mean they weren't doing well enough in English to be admitted to the Spanish class in grade ten. So we didn't get any refugees. I'm not aware of anyone else near Gate City having brought in any refugees, either. They'd stick out like sore thumbs if they were here; I don't believe they are here. If any foreigners have taken refuge in Gate City, they're hiding "underground" successfully enough that they're unlikely to be deported. So the headline starts right off with an outright lie. You want support for legislation that would protect "illegal immigrants" (and technically you do know that "immigrant" is supposed to mean the legal kind, right?), you really ought to start with something less blatantly false than that.
(I repeat: this web site has no foreign policy, and no immigration policy. I personally tend to feel sympathy for would-be immigrants, Adayahi tends to feel the opposite, and Grandma Bonnie Peters tends to have different reactions to different types, so the position of this web site is that we should at least remind all would-be immigrants that their "American Dreams" are likely to disappoint them and they'd do better to try to build constitutional democratic republics in their own countries. And if I never see another e-mail that mentions immigration, I'll still have seen a few hundred too many to suit me.)
Facts and numbers are simply better. If all the facts you have to support your political position are "My second cousin was being persecuted and discriminated against in the place where he was born, and he's going to school and doing very well here; see how he's at the head of every class in school and how 'mature' his employers say he is on his job," and even if that's because the earliest records of his life indicate that he's four years older than the other students in his classes, well, go ahead and say that. (It's not a totally unsympathetic story; it worked for my husband, it made my stepson a legal immigrant with a valid Social Security number.) Stories like that can be true, whether or not they're true in even a significant minority of cases. Sharing our stories can be a way of finding out what is true in what proportion of cases. But please try not to abandon facts together and attempt to manipulate people's emotions with palpable lies based on your emotional reaction to some individual you don't even know in real life.
If you want to be more persuasive, try being courteous even to--and about, because in cyberspace talking "about" people may really mean talking "to" them--the politicians whose faces make you feel sick. Very few people are altogether evil. No politician wants to be universally loathed; most of them do at least some things that at least some people can approve. Build on that. Feed what you want to have grow. Most of us did not actually want to find ourselves typing "President Trump," but we are, so why not focus on damage control by encouraging President Trump to do the best possible job?
Recently Scott Adams set out to test an idea about communication with a blog post about what Republicans and those identified with " #BlackLivesMatter " on Twitter ought to have in common, based on what (some) people in both groups have been saying. The comments are interesting; a surprising number of Adams' readers seem to want to hold on to emotional attachments to the belief that at least one of those groups is irredeemably evil. But in fact few, if any, Republicans would ever seriously dispute that Black lives do matter; several of my Republican correspondents have relatives who self-identify as Black, as do I; the color mix of Republican Party gatherings may not be fully representative of the nation, but plenty of Republicans are Black. Republicans who want to win more votes from independent swing voters, and Black people who want to win more respect from Republican/older/"conservative"/"establishment"/"law-and-order" people, want to work together on those things that those groups do, in fact, have in common.
Things, not personalities. I've not read that Thomas Sowell ever joined the Republican Party; I have read that, at least in the 1980s, he thought he could never do that with a clear conscience. Republicans liked his books, but he self-identified as a Democrat or at least an Independent for a long time. This means that he was in no way obligated, or even likely, to support anything Republicans were saying merely because Republicans were saying it. It also means that, when Sowell did agree with Republicans on specific ideas, those were at least intelligent ideas with a strong chance of turning out to be right.
Few of us are as clear thinkers as Thomas Sowell. Arguably we may not even have been meant to be. Still, it would be useful if more of us could detach from the non-politics of personalities and write lucidly about what's right or wrong with ideas, again.
(At this point, let's throw in a special commendation for Jim Babka as one correspondent who's consistently stayed out of the electioneering and personality gossip and stuck to logical discussion of ideas. I don't agree with him all the time, nor will you--but that's not necessary. Visit DownsizeDC.org if you'd like to see the kind of posts I like to receive in the e-mail.)
Every U.S. citizen has two U.S. Senators. Both of mine belong to a party to which I don't belong. Knowing neither of mine personally, going by their voting records and e-mail, I "like" one of them much much more than the other; neither represents me, but one of them comes closer to it than the other. I try to let that have nothing to do with what I write about them, because (1) I know that it has nothing to do with how much I might or might not like having them as, say, neighbors--I have no way of knowing that they don't throw noisy parties, or even that they would not molest The Nephews, although of course I expect either would be a tolerable neighbor; and (2) I want them to be able to know whether they are representing me or not, and why, rather than just saying "Oh, Priscilla King just doesn't liiike me, so who cares about her vote."
Every U.S. citizen's U.S. Senators and Representative are required by contract to represent their constituents in a discussion, ideally a consensus, at least a vote, that involves the rest of the U.S. Congress. If you and your elected officials disagree with me and mine, there may be an obvious demographic reason for that, and the decision may come down to numbers--"Everybody in the inland districts wants offshore drilling started now, and everybody in the coastal districts want offshore drilling banned," say. More likely, there are logical, rational reasons: people want offshore drilling because they believe it takes place far enough from them that it won't do them any harm while it gives productive employment to other people; people don't want offshore drilling because they've seen the kind of messes that can be made when things go wrong. The value of the Internet is that people can discuss this kind of thing in a rational, productive way. With offshore drilling the question worth debating is probably "How likely is it that the things that went wrong, that the opponents of drilling have seen, will go wrong again this time?" If sharing facts and stories doesn't always lead to the right decision, at least it can lead to everyone being able to feel that people did the best they could with the information they had.
Many times Popvox has shown that other people's U.S. Senators are representing my views better than my own are willing to do. (Sometimes differences follow party lines, and sometimes not. Sometimes my views are Republican, sometimes Democrat, and sometimes neither.) I'm glad that at least my views are being represented. I'm glad the Internet allows people to affirm our agreement with people in different parts of the country. Those of us who find ourselves stuck with U.S. Senators who make us wonder exactly who in our States ever nominated these people for anything can at least give moral support to other people whose Senators are required by contract to represent them and not us. This is how votes are swung; this is how a national tide of opinion that a certain war is immoral and unwinnable, even if certain congressional districts are raking in money from munitions, or that racial segregation is immoral and impracticable, even if certain cities want to keep it, or that socialism is immoral and unsustainable, even if some people want to get and keep tenured jobs in a socialistic bureaucracy, can override those people who persist in being just plain wrong on those issues. The Internet can be a great help to those who use it to discuss ideas.
So, will all those correspondents who've been guilty of doing so please stop cluttering the Internet with boring blather about personalities, and get back to ideas? You don't liiike Trump? Well, I've never met anyone who claimed to have met him, in real life, and liiiked him--but that's why a lot of other people voted for him, right there, in a nutshell. Liking is irrelevant. Respect him, or at least respect me, enough to tell me some fact-based reasons why you do or don't support a specific idea, whether Trump supports it or not. It wouldn't be the first time Trump's position, or other elected officials' position, shifted--whether in response to what they'd genuinely been persuaded was true, or in response to what they'd seen a critical number of constituents wanted, or in response to what they'd been convinced was too risky a position for them to take; in the long run that doesn't matter.
The election is over, correspondents. Please stop bombarding me with foul, rancid, leftover election spam.
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