Prediction. We are going to see a preference cascade in which many Republican politicians and much of the conservative media come out and openly endorse and campaign for Hillary Clinton as the only way to stop Donald Trump. Once a few do it, the rest will feel protected and pile on. It will start with neocon foreign policy wonks, then spill over to journalists. This will be a major realignment.
37 thoughts on “Prediction: Preference Cascade”
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I am going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite, most will get on board with Trump.
Moreover, those who choose to endorse Hillary will implicitly identify themselves as more concerned with retaining their insider privileges under the status quo than the future of the USA. A lot of money changes hands in Washington DC, payoffs have been made, power allocated, outcomes and access to the throne agreed. A lot of people DO NOT want the boat rocked. And a lot of heretofore unidentified people who benefit from the insider game are about to identify themselves.
If Mrs Vile wins she’ll set about trying to provoke a war with Russia.
That would be one hell of a “reset” button
Lex,
See my “The Day Trump Won” post that just went up.
I am going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite, most will get on board with Trump.
I agree with Michael.
There is institutional loyalty that needs to be accounted for, there is also the aspect of “better to be a King in Hell, than a nobody in Heaven” where Republican politicians are still big poobahs in their own realm, with Trump on top or Trump having lost, than nobodies in the Democratic coalition.
Also there is the problem of split loyalties. Republicans are allied to each other but what happens when some support the enemy while others remain true to the group. Colin Powell showed more race loyalty to Obama than ideologically loyalty to his party and he became an un-person after his betrayal.
Colin Powell showed more race loyalty to Obama than ideologically loyalty to his party and he became an un-person after his betrayal.
He could probably have run for president on the GOP ticket and gotten lots of support. I suspect he and his family had been othered by the black community and he wanted back in the group.
And behind door number 3, we see the Libertarians holding their national convention at the end of the month. My prediction is that if there are defections from Republicans *or* Democrats, that’s the first destination that the defectors will consider. Republicans will see Ron Paul’s successful rehabilitation as a GOP politician after running for President on the Libertarian ticket and Democrats who despise Hillary also significantly overlap with those who despise Trump.
And behind door number 3, we see the Libertarians holding their national convention at the end of the month.
I sense there’s a story here but I haven’t fully thought this through. Off the top of my head it is the libertarian faction of the Republican Party which has given rise to the Trump movement with the application of libertarian principles on open borders and free trade, so in terms of the Trump phenomenon the usual bad guys, the social conservatives, who are said to turn off people are off the hook.
My sense is that it’s not the so-cons who are most in rebellion but the open border fanatics and the free trade advocates, the ones who are actually best aligned with the more purist libertarians.
I see two immediate problems with a migration towards the libertarians. The first is that those who are migrating are those who are already quasi-libertarian, so the problem won’t be a mismatch, it will be that the resulting party is too narrowly focused and thus can’t be an effective mass political movement. The second problem is that the diversity fanatics who are pushing to make the Republicans more appealing to Hispanics are going to be jumping to an even whiter political movement and for their mission to be successful they’re going to have to completely rape libertarian ideology and thus an even bigger civil war will take place within the Libertarian Party than took place within the Republican Party.
When I think of the Republican “Brain Trust” pushing diversity I compare them to the character in this video parody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonSqHNoWkQ
“Off the top of my head it is the libertarian faction of the Republican Party which has given rise to the Trump movement with the application of libertarian principles on open borders and free trade”
The republican faction of the Gang of Eight consisted of two liberal republicans, one flip flopper, and one social conservative. During the same period as the immigration debate, Trump himself was flirting with supporting them.
There are no libertarians to blame here for the rise of the “Trump” Movement – a movement whose namesake didn’t even support it until just recently. Libertarians believe in a limited government engaging in only the most essential and elemental functions the most efficient way possible. The reason so much business was outsourced overseas in the first place was bloated government propping up and bailing out unions and strangling free enterprise with taxes and regulations. Libertarianism applied correctly would have solved the problems that spawned the “Trump” Movement, not caused them.
Libertarianism applied correctly would have solved the problems that spawned the “Trump” Movement, not caused them.
I disagree. We’ve had de facto libertarianism applied to our border policy for quite a while now – open borders. This is driving people crazy. Same with free trade, libertarians gained much more than the lost with various treaties.
Libertarians believe in a limited government engaging in only the most essential and elemental functions the most efficient way possible. The reason so much business was outsourced overseas in the first place was bloated government propping up and bailing out unions and strangling free enterprise with taxes and regulations. Libertarianism applied correctly would have solved the problems that spawned the “Trump” Movement, not caused them.
I think all three of your sentences are in error.
For the first sentence I’m not implying that your description of libertarian goals is in error, I’m stating that the effects of minimal government control of the borders is the cause of the problem.
The second sentence completely overlooks the process of HOW businesses is able to outsource overseas and then import back into the US. This results from trade treaties, another key plank of libertarian philosophy. Absent the ability to ship jobs overseas and then import the products back to the US, offshoring would not be a large phenomenon, it would be restricted to shipping jobs overseas in order to exclusively serve overseas markets.
The third sentence is completely wishful thinking for it wishes away the problems of an open borders society run on free trade principles and is based on the misdiagnosis of what spurred on the offshoring phenomenon, so an erroneous premise leads to an erroneous conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really knocking libertarian principles, I find many appealing, but what I see as current doctrine has a poison pill embedded deep within its structure. Of all of the forms of social organization it is libertarianism which is most dependent on most strictly protecting and regulating the composition and character of the population for libertarianism in a free society only works if all of the citizens buy into libertarian principles. Open borders is an insane component of libertarian thought for it leads to the dissolution of the libertarian state.
Agreed the Libertarians could draw more support than usual, possibly even enough to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Then they lose their guns forever.
Agreed the Libertarians could draw more support than usual, possibly even enough to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Then they lose their guns forever.
I’m often puzzled by the mode of thinking expressed by so many people in that there is an inordinate emphasis on the immediate and many don’t think through to the intended and unintended consequences which follow.
I wonder what effect the prevalence of chess in earlier times had on the ability to make decisions with consequences weighed into the decision.
Tom Sullivan had an excellent analysis on this today on his radio show. Tom is by background a financial advisor (and was a very good one) and as such gave a business analogy to the Trump phenomenon.
He said that the shareholders of the Republican Party – the everyday voters – recalled the Board and installed their own.
And he mentioned that Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard has been trying to get conservatives against Trump to run as a 3rd Party. So far nobody’s interested. I think this is more resentment that the “establishment” Republicans have lost control of the Republican Party than any ideology.
Hello Ross Perot.
Anyone remember John Anderson?
It seems to me that American politics is realigning around two poles- nationalist and globalist.
People who support Trump we end up nationalist, and those who don’t or won’t will end up globalist.
Neocons who want American troops to save the world from itself- such as Bill Kristol- will end up leaving the GOP and joining with the globalists in the democrat party. Trade union members- perhaps such as the people in Pennsylvania and other states who re-registered Republican to vote for Trump- will end up in the GOP with the other nationalists.
Capital-L libertarians will end up with the globalists, I bet. In my experience those folks heart open borders and free trade and don’t understand why nation-states exist today or why they came into being.
But yes, I think this will be major re-alignment. Friendships will end, people will feel betrayed, but will find surprise when they discover that former opponents are now on their side.
And many will not be happy. I remember reading that a signer of one of the states seceding from the Union threw away the pen with which he signed that state’s Ordinance of Secession.
Interesting times, as the saying goes.
I’m with Michael – in general Republicans will fall in behind Trump. He’ll have coat tails too – he’ll bring in some of his his own congressmen too – watch out Paul Ryan.
Trump will win in a landslide.
The great success of the American system is that we can bloodlessly replace our elites when they no longer serve the American people. Yes, this is a major realignment. It is a political crisis that brings hope for most and pain for some.
Xennady has point but we’ll just see less globalism since it has passed the point of diminishing returns and is a loser for most Americans. There will be increased scrutiny of the costs of empire and a balance of who gets what benefits from it.
Most of the Republican talkers who are blustering about #NeverTrump will eventually drop the subject if Trump continues to gain popular support.
The USA may indeed continue to withdraw from international affairs. If so, the outcome will probably be similar to what happened the last time we did that, except that this time we are more likely to be attacked at home.
Whitehall,
We are looking at a GOP sweep year for the presidency due to structural factors.
Any plausible GOP nominee — by that I mean to the GOP Primary voters, not Plutocrat or Consultant class candidates like Jeb Bush — will beat ANY Democratic nominee, with the GOP getting 55%+ of the popular vote and 400+ electoral votes in November.
The those key factors -DON’T- include GOP primary turn out.
The Real Clear Politics site says Trump is at 10.6 million GOP primary votes after to Indiana and he will likely get a million more from the remaining primaries.
George W. Bush got 10.8 million primary votes in 2000 when the US population was 282 million.
While Trump is on a glide path to get more GOP Primary voters than George W. Bush. He would have to get more than 12.4 million voters this year, with 324 million Americans, to beat that proportionately.
I.e., GOP voter participation is returning to its pre-Obama levels.
The real structural factors are the following —
1) The GOP sweeps of Congressional, state and local elections in the 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections.
2) The bad economy for the middle and working class.
Historically, the structural combination of a poor middle class economy and down ballot sweeps by the other party has resulted in an overwhelming turnover of the Presidency at the next open election. Obama in 2008 after the 2006 Democratic take over of Congress was the latest example. You see the same pattern with Kennedy in 1960 and Bush in 2000.
Democratic Strategist “Mudcat” Stevens also adds this Demographic/structural issue to the mix —
Democratic Strategist: Trump Will Beat Hillary Like ‘A Baby Seal’
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/27/democratic-strategist-trump-will-beat-hillary-like-a-baby-seal/
“Working class whites in the South have already departed the Democratic Party for cultural reasons. Well the working class whites in the North are now deserting the Democrats because of economic reasons,” Mudcat told TheDC. He added, “this is the new age of economic populism, man. This is about survival for a lot of people.”
His article makes the case that nomination of Hillary will not so much alienate the white working class outside the South from the Democrats — it will — but it will also make that alienation -indelible- for the Democratic Party.
This alienation will be on a scale and permanence nation wide to rival how Gov. Pete Wilson and the GOP alienated California Hispanics in 1994, with inspired exploitation of that alienation by Leon Panetta and Pres Clinton.
We are talking 20% of the US voter electorate, all of whom currently live outside the South.
This turns Pennsylvania and New Jersey from a “Blue” to a “Purple” states and puts the Midwest into the same GOP electoral category as the South East outside of Florida.
The fact that half of the 200,000 convicted felons given back their right to vote in federal elections by the Democratic Governor of Virginia are working class white males will make the voter returns there very interesting to watch.
These Hillary supporters must be some of the people “Mudcat” has in mind when he talks about how she is going to long-term cheese off the working class white males.
We must shame dumb Trump fans: The white working class are not victims
It’s not smug liberalism to point out Trump backers are low-educated. What’s dangerous is to sympathize with them
Saturday, Apr 30, 2016 08:29 AM CDT
David Masciotra
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/we_must_shame_dumb_trump_fans_the_white_working_class_are_not_victims/
“Shame” only works if there is some sort of shared cultural values to work with.
Without it, you are playing a game of “Fighting Words” and that never turns out well.
But yes, I think this will be major re-alignment. Friendships will end, people will feel betrayed, but will find surprise when they discover that former opponents are now on their side.
This brings to mind Eugene McCarthy. Here is the story from a book review on one of McCarthy’s books:
And here the reviewer adds his two cents:
The great success of the American system is that we can bloodlessly replace our elites when they no longer serve the American people. Yes, this is a major realignment. It is a political crisis that brings hope for most and pain for some.
Can we actually do so? We haven’t tried in a very long time. Theory doesn’t mean squat in the real world.
If so, the outcome will probably be similar to what happened the last time we did that, except that this time we are more likely to be attacked at home.
Your last part is most interesting to me. What are the odds that some Minnesota grandmother, of Swedish extraction, is going to be the suicide bomber in such an attack?
The issue will boil down to – we have nothing to fear so long as we are a cohesive nation, but if we want to cling to multiculturalism then we have to accept that we have enemies within. There is a price to pay for accepting multiculturalism, we grant to the government the power to spy on us all in order to root out those enemies within and prevent them from harming us. Lovers of liberty are going to have a very hard time reconciling a love of a surveillance-free state with universalist, multiculturalist sympathies. One or the other has to be abandoned.
I am in the realignment camp. I think Trump people don’t give a rats a$$ about Reps and Dems or Libs and Cons. I also see this as a Globalist vrs Nationalist battle, just as I see two economies in America. One includes small, midsize, and regional businesses that engage in real capitalism and competition and then there are the multinational mega corps that are corporatist and transnational. In addition there is Crony Capitalism, sectors that are favored, subsidized and or protected by government (bailouts, the revolving door between regulators and corporations) or who benefit from government imposed high fixed costs that undermine smaller competitors. I have no doubt that the Mandarin class would sell the Bill of Rights, and American sovereignty down the river for a buck, or for their own self aggrandizement. As for me, I am an American; I want to live in America, not Sweden or Brazil North, or some transnational flop house.
This x 1000.
I note that Trump’s choice of VP is going to be critical. Not for policy reasons, but for life insurance reasons. Consider that in modern times the main function of a VP is to so horrify the political opposition that both assassination and impeachment are off the table.
BOTH PARTIES would be overjoyed to either have Trump assassinated or to impeach him if he is elected, just to get rid of him. I have worries about him making it to the election without either or both parties trying to have him killed.
^^^^^ what Michael Hiteshew said
Don’t hold your breath waiting for it. Hillary is not just damaged goods, she’s incredibly damaged, and beyond any possibility of repair. The Dem base knows it, which is why why they abandoned her for Bernie, and many if not most of those voters will migrate to Trump in a heartbeat. All of that is if Hillary isn’t indicted.
I don’t necessarily mean Islamic terrorism, although Islamic terrorism may be part of it. I mean a major war or a major domestic terror campaign that begins with mass terror attacks and/or a decapitation strike against our govt and key infrastructure, perhaps using cyber, nuclear or bio weapons. We are inviting such outcomes by forgetting the lessons of 9/11, by disarming and by attempting to withdraw from our post-war responsibilities in foreign affairs. The oceans no longer protect us.
The oceans protect us fine, it’s our open gates which allow big wooden horses into our society that are the problem. 9/11 was a domestic operation. The enemy was moving among us for months prior to the attacks. The enemy didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.
I’m not saying that we reduce ALL risk by living in a homogeneous society, for we would still get occasional outfits like the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Animal Liberation Front, the Ted Kyzinskis, but we wouldn’t have the problems we have with Islam, we wouldn’t be importing foreign grievances onto our soil, like the Air India disaster, so we cut out sources of risk.
It is the presence of these 5th columns which creates the need for a surveillance state directed against all citizens. This does more damage to American values and quality of life than efforts to not get entangled in the affairs of foreign cultures.
The oceans protect us fine
Against missiles, aircraft, container ships, submarines, EMP bombs, smallpox? I think your assumption is unwise.
” smallpox? I think your assumption is unwise.”
The Zika virus literally scares the sh*t out of me. The BBC is on the case, but still not alarmed enough.
The mosquito-borne Zika virus may be even more dangerous than previously thought, scientists in Brazil say. They told the BBC that Zika could be behind more damaging neurological conditions, affecting the babies of up to a fifth of infected pregnant women. Rates of increase in Zika infection in some parts of Brazil have slowed, thanks to better information about preventing the disease. But the search for a vaccine is still in the early stages. And Zika continues to spread across the region.
This week’s New England Journal has a review article that I shared with the other doctors at work yesterday.
Zika virus remained in relative obscurity for nearly 70 years; then, within the span of just 1 year, Zika virus was introduced into Brazil from the Pacific Islands and spread rapidly throughout the Americas.2 It became the first major infectious disease linked to human birth defects to be discovered in more than half a century and created such global alarm that the World Health Organization (WHO) would declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.3 This review describes the current understanding of the epidemiology, transmission, clinical characteristics, and diagnosis of Zika virus infection, as well as the future outlook with regard to this disease.
This is serious stuff.
Subsequently, an outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013 and 2014 is estimated to have involved 32,000 persons who underwent evaluation for suspected Zika virus infection.18-20 Although most of the illnesses appeared similar to those seen in Yap, cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome were also noted.19,21 Subsequent outbreaks occurred on other Pacific islands, including New Caledonia (in 2014),22 Easter Island (2014),23 Cook Islands (2014),24 Samoa (2015), and American Samoa (2016) (Figure 1FIGURE 1
Areas in Which Zika Virus Infections in Humans Have Been Noted in the Past Decade (as of March 2016).
). In stark contrast to these outbreaks, in the past 6 years, only sporadic cases of Zika virus infection have been reported in Thailand,25,26 East Malaysia (Sabah),27 Cambodia,28 the Philippines,29 and Indonesia.30,31
Then it got to Brazil.
By September 2015, investigators in Brazil noted an increase in the number of infants born with microcephaly in the same areas in which Zika virus was first reported,38 and by mid-February 2016, more than 4300 cases of microcephaly had been recorded, although overreporting and misdiagnosis probably inflated this number
It is heading here and is in Puerto Rico.
Even scarier, is a letter from French doctors in the same issue.
An 81-year-old man was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) 10 days after he had been on a 4-week cruise in the area of New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Zealand; he was reported to have been in perfect health during that time.
He was on a cruise ship in the area of the virus outbreak.
Investigations in both CSF and blood for other infections were unrevealing (see the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org), except for a positive result for ZIKV on reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction assay of the CSF (cycle threshold, 34). ZIKV was grown in culture from the CSF on a Vero cell line (see the Supplementary Appendix). These findings all support the diagnosis of ZIKV-associated meningoencephalitis.
He got the virus and nearly died while on a cruise ship !
Anyway, this is not terrorism but we are vulnerable to lots of things.
I think your assumption is unwise.
You chopped my argument in half. A lot of what you list poses a threat due to the open gates, not from having oceans.
Didn’t Tom Clancy have a novel about Iran unleashing smallpox on the US? They can cook up smallpox in a Tehran lab but if they can’t get any Muslim into the US, then they don’t have a delivery vector. Taken to extremes, the same applies to containers, no containers coming into the US means no hidden nuclear bombs in a container. Obviously we are not living at the extreme so we have to have processes in place to lower risk associated with container traffic. Such risk is better lowered by a container inspection regime than by launching foreign wars while having no container inspection regime. As for the part about oceans, container traffic arrives on ships, there are only a handful of ports acting as chokepoints whereas in Europe container traffic moves from country to country on a network of roads, so the chokepoint aspect is less effective. The inspection stations that they do have are under severe time pressure because the driver is waiting for the inspection to complete while at a port inspections can occur without holding up some driver, they occur before the driver arrives and before the container is released to him. The oceans help keep us more secure.
“Didn’t Tom Clancy have a novel about Iran unleashing smallpox on the US?”
It was Ebola and, as with most of his novels, well researched.
It’s called Executive Orders, and is one of his Jack Ryan novels.
The “Rainbow Six” novel had a somewhat similar theme but the group was an environmental extreme group.
Gore Vidal liked to say “We have one party in America ”” “The Property Party,” and it has two wings. Today, he might say the two wings are “DemoRats and Repugnicans.” “NeverTrumps” disclose why there has not been any opposition to Obama, because the would-be opponents are satisfied and comfortable swells, performing a charade and collecting fro, us rubes.
Yes, this will be a watershed election. It will change the tilt of the political landscape. But, which way remains to be seen until after the campaign and the voting.
Change makes most uncomfortable, so they engage in self-calming predictions, not withstanding that their informed predictions of Trump were mistaken and totally wrong. Now, is not the time to double-down on that record. We shall see.
>>The “Rainbow Six” novel had a somewhat similar theme but the group was an environmental extreme group.
Don’t forget The Sum of All Fears, about a smuggled nuke.
“Don’t forget The Sum of All Fears, about a smuggled nuke.”
I’ve read them all. I have a first edition “Hunt for Red October” that I wanted Clancy to sign for me but I think he was sick by then.
I’ve only read a couple of the new ones.
Now, I;m reading about genetics and archeology. I have to keep remembering to buy books through the portal here. The widget doesn;t show on my screen to remind me.
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