Sunday, February 5, 2017

When Putin goes low . . . Trump will follow

In an interview today that's to be aired in full on Fox News right before the Super Bowl, Donald Trump re-iterated his respect for Vladimir Putin and hope the he will direct Russia to help the United States in various international struggles.  His interviewer, Bill O'Reilly, protested that "he's a killer, though.  Putin's a killer."

Trump's response mixed positive facts with a horrifying normative implication for the United States: “There are a lot of killers, we’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

There is important factual truth (shocking, I know!) in Trump's words: the United States government has overseen, directly or indirectly, operations that have killed innocent people in foreign lands--and our country--for years.  The most recent example is the raid in Yemen last week that killed civilians, including children--perhaps as many as nine children.  Such murderous operations have gone on under Democratic presidents like Barack Obama, with drone-strikes that involved frequent civilian deaths, and Republican presidents like George W. Bush whose misguided judgment led our country into wars that seem endless, and involved the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of innocents at the hands of agents of our government.

But every president before now has lamented such outcomes, and given us a moral example that these were either mistakes, or at the very least that they were the unavoidable results of dilemmas where the greater good of American lives and security, or the human rights of others (as in 1999 when President Clinton bombed Serbia to force a halt to ethnic violence being carried out against Kosovars), had to be weighed more heavily than the lives of innocent people.  The worthiness of the results and wisdom of these decisions can be argued by those who sit on the sidelines of power (and I've certainly argued against them in the case of the attack on Serbia, the Iraq war, etc.), but the basic moral vision that innocent life ought not to be taken unless truly necessary, has been fundamental to American values, at least as we explicitly embrace them, and recommend them to our countrymen, our children, and the world.  Republican Senators like majority leader Mitch McConnell and Ben Sasse of Nebraska referred to this in their push-back against the president declaring things like "America is exceptional" and “There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his cronyism. There’s no moral equivalency there.”

Trump, though, would have us not only look upon what evil America may have wrought in moments of confusion, foolishness, or cold-blooded utilitarianism for what we believe is good, but reject the idea that these evils are to be avoided.  He seems to assert not only that we are no better than Putin, but that Putin's mercenary approach to rulership is laudable, to be embraced.  This moral stance is horrifying, for the killing in Putin's Russia is about his own political gain--from the devastating way that he prosecuted the 2nd Chechen War that helped catapult him to power in 2000, with murders in torture internment camps1 to the killings of dozens of journalists2 and opposition figures,3 including that of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov two years ago on a bridge right across from the Kremlin, to the proxy-war he's backing in Eastern Ukraine that has already cost ten thousand lives in just two years.  If Putin is a killer, as O'Reilly and others on the right who are uncomfortable with Trump's embrace of the Russian leader well know, it's by design, by his choice against morality, for his own gain; it's not accidentally, in spite of making efforts to provide the "moral leadership" upstanding Americans like Senator Sasse hope for.

But even while Sasse and other prominent old-guard Republicans still adhere to such values beyond politics, that "the US celebrates [a] free press . . . . celebrates political dissent," Trump's new politics of the right is about stopping at nothing to get what you want.  This is not exclusive to the group in the White House, but is growing in the grassroots.  Here in Lubbock, "one of Lubbock's most well known radio personalities," Chad Hasty, broadcasting on KFYO radio, argued in his morning show on January 27th that people should not be allowed to move to Texas if they'd ever been involved with the Democratic Party.  If Trump would make a religious test for the immigration of people to the United States, his grassroots supporters seek to avoid dissent and open electoral competition with political tests to determine how people can move around within it.

If Trump would re-make America as a place where human life is routinely placed below not only national interest, but political expediency, as a place where those outside of the single ruling party do not have the same freedoms and privileges of its adherents, a place where we are impressed by Putin's "toughness" and shrug at the brutality and unfairness of his regime because no moral rules ought to constrain us from "getting ahead," and if Trump's allies in places like Lubbock are already cultivating cadres willing to jettison all the basic tenets of democracy to perpetuate one-party rule, then principled Republicans will soon have no place in such a party.

Meanwhile, those of us on the other side of the political spectrum must not stand around hoping for a moralizing revolution inside the Republican party that would change its current trajectory.

Instead, we must stand up, wherever we are--even here in the most conservative part of Texas--and threaten and punish the Trump machine at the ballot-box, because that is the only way to be listened to: by displacing the Republican monocracy that Trump is constructing to resemble Putin's Russia.

Notes:
1Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)
2Nadezhda Azhgikhina, “The struggle for press freedom in Russia: reflections of a Russian journalist” in Europe-Asia Studies v. 59, no. 8 (Dec 2007), pp 1245-1262
3Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012)

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Detained at the Border

I do not live in a war-torn country.  I have never had planes bomb my city, soldiers burn my house, or even been shot at.  I live in Lubbock, Texas, hundreds of miles from either an international border or one of the airports where travelers with all the correct documents to come to the United States were detained Friday and Saturday due to an order given with no warning or apparent pre-planning.

I can't know what it's like for refugees having to leave their homes due to war, violence, and oppression.  But one small, humiliating part of the nightmare that this new administration seems determined to visit upon those who don't enjoy the advantages of already being part of the dominant group is familiar to me: being detained at the border.  This is a scary, creepy experience where the legal parameters are unclear and your standing is always uncertain, especially when a visa is involved (something that most people in wealthy countries rarely have to deal with these days).

In the summer of 1997, I was working for Let's Go travel guide in Eastern Europe.  The countries I had to cover included Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Moldova, and I needed a visa for each; thankfully my editors helped walk me through this process that was totally new to me: filling out the proper documentation weeks or months in advance, sometimes also having to secure an invitation from some kind of local institution (or shady travel agency), mailing away my passport to a consular service and crossing my fingers for its return.

After six weeks in Bulgaria learning for the first time how to travel alone, I arrived in Ukraine, trying to pinch pennies.  I stayed in a communal apartment with Vika and Gari and their baby, the cheapest accommodation I could secure among the hawkers at the train station--I slept on a fold-out chair in a corner of one huge room (where Vika, Gari, and the baby slept at the other end.  I got bed-bugs; there was no shower.  The last day of my stay in Odessa I went to a hotel for one night to have a wonderful (cold) shower before boarding the train to Moldova.

When the train arrived at the border (which had barely even been a border for five years--at the time because of the Transdnistria separatist conflict, it was not even entirely clear where the border was), a guy in a big Soviet-style hat with Ukrainian state insignia walked through the train, and immediately picked me out as "the one of these things that doesn't belong here," looked briefly through my passport, saw my visa (in order), and asked for my Регистрация (Registration).  I showed the second copy of my customs declaration from when I had entered the country a week before, but that wasn't what he wanted.  He told me to follow him off the train.

We walked through one car, then another, then got off the train, and walked towards a station past a scrubby patch of earth where dozens of people were trundling back and forth to a station-like building with loads of those big plaid-patterned bags woven out of heavy plastic that you'd see all the time in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.  I thought, "I'm leaving the country, my visa's not yet expired, and I have no contraband; there will be an office inside where all this will be straightened out."  But instead, we got back on the train, disembarked on the opposite side (where there were no people), and took a path through chain-link fencing into the woods.

In a few minutes, we came to a little shed, inside of which were three large Ukrainians of what official status I could not tell, wearing military fatigues and brandishing their Kalashnikovs.  I was informed that I needed to show my registration to prove where I had been domiciled while in Ukraine.  If Gari & Vika had known that I should be registered, well . . . they had enough on their minds arguing with the other families in their apartment about who got to use the one sink spigot.  I had no registration.  But I was leaving the country; why should it matter now?  The Ukrainians told me they could send me back to the police station in Odessa (it was unclear whether I'd be registered there, or locked up), which would, in fact, result in my overstaying my visa.  They had me over a barrel.

I was scared.  I was upset.  I was 20 years old and this was my first time traveling alone abroad.  I had the advantage, though, of having a passport from the most powerful country on the planet, having cash on me equivalent to several months' pay for these officials, and speaking Russian, so I could explain myself and understand what I was being told.  I was tired, bed-bug-bitten, and worried I'd miss the train's onward journey, but had the presence of mind to ask how much it would cost to "register" here.  I handed over a twenty-dollar bill and my passport was duly stamped (so lightly it could hardly be read).

I had thought all my papers were in order.  I was aware I had just paid a bribe--been complicit, in fact, in criminal corruption.  Guns had been at the ready the whole time.  I felt humiliated, angry at the stupid Ukrainian system that required "registration" in addition to a visa that I didn't understand why it should be.  I felt like I had been revealed to myself as something between a law-breaker and an incompetent at the same time--and it was the fault of the Ukrainian government.

And these feelings were after I was on the train and on my way to what I felt would be the comparably orderly paradise of Moldova.  While I was being led into the woods and loomed over by people who told me I had fallen afoul of their system, I was terrified; if they sent me back to Odessa and locked me up, I didn't know how to contact a consulate.  If I overstayed my visa, would I get in worse trouble?  If I refused to leave and be sent back to Odessa, what physical force might they use?  Would there be medical treatment if I was injured?  How much would that cost?  Whose jurisdiction was I under, in the no-man's land between countries--what legal system could I trust if the one I thought I was doing right by all of a sudden threw me in the slammer for additional bureaucracy I hadn't understood beforehand?  Was it my fault if I had failed to abide by the rules, and how much of my meager summer pay (needed to pay the thankfully-small portion of tuition I'd owe that coming fall) would it take to fix the situation if I had to stay in Odessa, hire a lawyer, pay fines, pay for a flight directly back to the US?  What would happen to my life?  Detained at the border is a scary concept.

It happened again three years later.  By this point, I'd gotten a lot more experience traveling in that part of the world, and was coming to the end of a year spent living in Russia (with multiple visas, and a crash-course teaching myself how various kinds of visas & registrations worked).  As a last hurrah of my year in Moscow, I took the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Mongolia.  After a week on the Mongol steppe, I was scheduled to take the train back across the Russian frontier and then fly from Russian Buryatia back to Moscow, from which I'd take my final leave of the country (for that trip).  In Mongolia, I'd gotten some kind of illness and fever, and spent the final two days of the trip writhing in my bunk in a youth hostel in Ulan Bator.  Weak, sick, and still feverish, I hauled myself to the train station and deposited myself in a bunk there to continue my writhing on the night train, interspersed with drinking water and using the facilities, such as they were.

The carriage had several westerners in it, including a couple of women from New Zealand, a rangy, older Swiss guy, and a couple of others, along with a lot of Mongolians, all of whom were very friendly.

When we got to the border, the train had to stop for the strange ceremony of lifting up every car and setting it on a new chassis that had the right gauge of wheels for Russian railways--a process that took six hours (during which time, the bathrooms were closed, since were no longer moving--the toilets just emptied onto the tracks in those days).  My water consumption, fever, and the accompanying physical exigencies made this really unpleasant for me.  Finally, when the wheels were changed, we rolled forward a few hundred yards, stopped again, and a Russian border guard took all our passports and disappeared for an hour (bathrooms were still locked).

When he came back everybody was given their passports, let out of the train to use facilities in the border station, and allowed to stretch their legs--except for me.  I was "detained".  I followed the border guard into an office at the station, looking bedraggled: clothes rumpled, hair matted, smelling of fever and sweat, and still desperate for various forms of release.  I waited half an hour and the captain came in, with my passport in his hand.  He spent time silently examining all the pages and stamps, then asked me why I had come to Russia, how long I'd been there, who had arranged my visa invitation, what school I had attended and what my current employment was.  He asked where my family lived, and what were their national origins, if I was Jewish, Christian, or something else.  He asked if I had a camera, and to see what books or notebooks I had with me.  There was no question of improper documentation--I was being detained for entirely other, obscure reasons.  And this guy was not some underpaid underling of the border service.

I don't think this "detention" could have lasted more than an hour and a half (although it made up at least the 8th hour without restroom facilities, which made it seem much longer), and this time, there was no question of me being sent back to Mongolia.  I was in the hands of the Russian State now, to do with as it would.

It turned out, in the end, that there had been reports of somebody from our carriage (the Swiss guy, I later discovered) taking pictures out the window when we crossed the border itself (where an anomalous and spirited volleyball game was in progress right by the tracks--a noteworthy spectacle among all that grim security, admittedly).  Whether such border photography was actually prohibited or simply suspicious was never made clear to me, but it did become apparent that they decided to detain me because I was the only one they could interrogate (none of the other westerners spoke Russian, and none of the border guards spoke English or German--or I guess Mongolian).  The situation was resolved when I sort of lost my cool and tried to give my camera and all my film to the captain of the station, telling him he could keep it all, if I could just go to the bathroom.  He told me I could go.

I was released (in time for the train), availed myself of the releases I needed, and by the time I got back to Moscow (well, really by the time I rolled into my friend's apartment in Berlin about five days later, having driven overnight across Poland from Kaliningrad), it all seemed rather more comical than otherwise.

But of course, in the end, everything had worked out according to my plans: I was not arrested or held at gunpoint; I did not languish in a cell in need of legal assistance or have to figure out how to contact the US consulate in Vladivostok or have money wired to me to hire a lawyer or something.  I did not have to make expensive alternate travel plans, and was not deported back to Mongolia.  The friends and family waiting for me did not have to spend days or even hours expecting me to show up when I didn't, wondering why everybody else got off the plane and I didn't.  I did not have a war-torn country waiting for me if my detention had proved to thwart rather than merely delay my border-crossing.  I had no bombs, no mercenary armies, no homelessness, violence, or death as the alternative to getting into Russia (or out of Ukraine).

But that's not true for the people in airports around this country and the world who've been detained at the border due to Friday's executive order (which they hadn't been apprised of when following all the proper protocols, certainly at great personal expense in monetary terms, as well as time, effort, and bureaucratic hassle).  These are people who followed all the rules, and then have had to spend who knows how long in border detention, and at best a lot of money to change their plans.

The fear in being detained at the border, in my experience, is about arbitrariness, not knowing what will happen to you, whose hands you'll fall into, what might be extracted from you on purpose or by accident as a result of the detention interrupting your travel plans; thinking you've followed all the rules, but afraid you didn't understand them correctly.  Or, perhaps even more scary for rule-followers like myself, learning that the rules don't matter, or don't apply to you.  There is no jurisdiction or framework of law on which you can hang your hopes.  The rule of law you'd been promised is a mirage, and the truth is just the arbitrary power of who's got the guns, the physical bulk, the handcuffs, and the willing to aggress the most to get their way, or the way they've been ordered to get.

I can't know the terror of the prospect of being sent back to the kind of strife happening in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, or Somalia that could take your life in a moment.  But I had two tiny glimpses in my life of the free-fall of being detained at the border, the limbo into which a thoughtless, haphazard, and chaotic administration tossed some of the most vulnerable people in the world on Friday night, people who were looking to America for hope, freedom, and safety from war & violence.  Instead they found a legal chaos, a bureaucracy not defined by the rule of law, but by arbitrariness of individuals in positions of power, with overtones of extraordinary rendition and tight-lipped armed men informing you that "your papers are not in order."

If this is happening to certified refugees, green-card holders, and travelers with all the proper visas at this point, just a week into the Trump administration, the scariest prospect for those of us who are not refugees, who are not from those targeted countries, who currently hold American citizenship (by birthright or naturalization) is this: who's next?

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Keep Calm & Don't let FiveThirtyEight get to you this weekend!

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the election.

If you're like me, and most Democrats, or just people who agree with my friend's facebook encapsulation: "You cannot be for Trump and for common decency," you may be spending this weekend freaking out each time you refresh Nate Silver's prediction website and see Hillary's chance of winning the election declining by a fraction of a percentage point.

But as a political scientist & specialist on elections & parties--as well as a junkie of this election, and a dab hand at quantitative analysis in politics, I wanted to share a few observations that I hope might help preserve some people's arterial walls in the next three days.

Here are three big reasons why the closer we get to the election, the less sense this seemingly precipitous decline seems to make (and, keep in mind, Mr. Silver & co would still say the chances of Hillary winning are almost double what Trump's are):

  1. Math of the electoral college: Hillary Clinton could lose Florida, Nevada, Iowa, & Ohio (that Obama won), plus North Carolina, where she's been ahead in polling (and which Obama won in 2008), and still be president, as long as she wins Pennsylvania & New Hampshire (last won by a Republican in 1988 & 2000, respectively--are Keystone & Granite staters really going to let you-know-who lure them over to the Republican side after having turned their noses up at more respectable Republicans like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and the Bush family?)
  2. Early voting doesn't seem to have a meaningful place in Silver's forecast model, and in two of Trump's must-win states, the story for the Republican looks much grimmer than Silver's outcast predicts:
    • Nevada, which Silver's projections give Trump a 50.5-51.1% chance of winning, seems like a lock for Hillary, considering early voting, which ended there yesterday.  Probably at least two thirds of all votes that will be cast in the state have already been cast, and 73,000 more Democrats have cast ballots than Republicans.  In 2012, Obama won Nevada by about 68,000 votes (a comfortable, if not huge 6.5% margin), after Dem-registered voters cast 71,000 more early votes than Republicans did.  So Hillary is farther ahead of Trump in Nevada than Obama was ahead of Mitt Romney (the first Mormon candidate--NV's electorate has one of the largest Mormon blocs after UT).  To imagine that Trump actually has a slightly better chance of winning Nevada than Hillary now is to imagine a rather preposterous degree of uncertainty in what will happen on Nov 8.
    • In Florida, Democrat-registered voters have a lead in early voting, too, although it doesn't compare nearly as well with 2012.  They lead by just about 7,000 votes, as opposed to 104,000 four years ago, when Obama won the state by just 74,000 votes.  Of course, if that were the only info we had, that difference of 97,000 votes is more than enough to erase Obama's final margin.  But from Florida, we also have information about the ethnicity of early voters, and the big change in Florida this year is the huge growth in the Latino vote: although early voting is still going on today, as of yesterday, Latinos had cast nearly 600,000 early votes, or 14% of all early votes (compared to just 300,000 in 2008--the last year with comparable data, when Obama won Florida by 240,000 votes).  In 2012, Latinos accounted for less than 10% of early votes, on their way to account for 17% of all votes in the state that year.
      And this year, there are a lot more Latino voters in Florida, and most of the newcomers are US citizens from Puerto Rico (who lean Democrat, as opposed to the stereotypical Cuban-Floridian voter, who leans Republican), while the total number of white-only voters in the state has declined has declined by 1.5% from 2012.
      While the early voting picture in Florida is not as contradictory to the idea of Trump winning the state as in Nevada, Silver's projection of Trump with a 52.4-53.3% chance of winning the state should not make us simply cast it on Trump's pile in our mental electoral-college maps
    • I could go on with similar stories about places like Arizona, Iowa, and North Carolina where already-in early-voting numbers that aren't built into Silver's model tell a much more hopeful story for Hillary than the numbers on Silver's map (Trump with a 74.1-76.1% chance in AZ, 68.7-70.0% in IA, and 51.7-53.7% in NC), but more meaningful is an investigation of how the model's calculations are currently "grade-inflating" Trump's polling numbers in states across the country.
  3. Head-scratching aspect of the FiveThirtyEight model: One big part of Silver's calculation of the final vote-estimate is based on how much each state's vote-outcome correlates with with national polls.  A big part of this is the trend-line adjustment that Silver adds on top of his polling averages for each state.  That is to say: if a candidate seems to have gained in national polls in the past weeks or months, then Silver's model if the polls in a given state haven't moved much in the period, those state polls must be under-counting that candidate's likely final vote outcome.
    The upshot is that in calculating the current estimates (estimates, we should hasten to emphasize, as Silver would) of the final-outcome vote shares, which he then uses for his percent-chance calculations, Silver's model adds on some "missing" voters for Trump to whatever the adjust poll averages say: about a 2% "bonus" for Trump across all the states.
    Thus, if the polling average (adjusted for the partisan leans of the polls) in, for example:
    • NH is 43.9-40% (Clinton +3.9%), the "Trend Line Adjusted" average is 43.9-41.9% (Clinton +2%).
    • OH is 42.8-43.2% (Trump +0.4%), the TLA avg is 43.0-45.6% (Trump +2.6%)
    • NC is 45.5-43.6% (Clinton +1.9%), the TLA avg is 45.3-45.5% (Trump +0.2%)

      Thus,
      Trump's projected chances in all these races are much higher than if Silver didn't believe all the state-poll averages were under-counting Trump.  NH looks much tighter for Clinton, OH looks like a decent lead for Trump, rather than a neck-and-neck, and NC looks neck-and-neck for Trump, rather than a tight lead for Clinton.  While this built-in calculation of the model might normally make sense, the yawning 2% Trump bonus that the current set of polls produces for it seems way too big to bank on.

      Now
      , maybe the all these state polls really are "missing" the "Trump-bump" that Silver's calculations find in the national polls, but I find big (cardiac-muscle-saving) solace in doubting that these and other well-polled states are all under-counting Trump's final strength, come Tuesday night.
In conclusion, although I know lots of people who love FiveThirtyEight's statistical sophistication and history of good predictions (though not Trump's primary victory!), but justifiably fear a Trump presidency, may be freaking out this weekend, There are three big reasons we should all step back from our windowsills & balconies: 1) Democratic Electoral College advantages that mean Trump would have to be the best Republican candidate in 30 years to win. 2) Early-voting info that seems to confound the polling predictions.  3) The fact that the polling predictions are based on an assumed under-counting of Trump's support in all the state polls.

A final big reason to breathe easy is organization: The Clinton campaign has something like four times as many people organizing Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) phone banks, door-knocking, and other activities as the Trump campaign does.  And they have been at it longer.  Clinton's side began staffing up in swing states 7-8 months ago, building lists of volunteers to door-knock the data-chosen voters, networks of civil-society allies, and armies of organizers (including some great vets of Bernie's campaign!) to make it all happen.  Trump has nothing like this, and the Republican party has barely been scrambling in just the past month or two to come up with some semblance of ground game, and fallen far short.  Having been out there for months for Bernie, and known dozens if not hundreds of others who've done that, and also who are out for Hillary, this matters.  Not enough to create a swamping landslide, but by enough (2-4%?) in a close election like this that it should hearten us.

So we should all Keep Calm, and Carry on--and direct any restless energy we might have into some GOTV calling!

Keep Calm & Don't let FiveThirtyEight get to you this weekend!

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the election.

If you're like me, and most Democrats, or just people who agree with my friend's facebook encapsulation: "You cannot be for Trump and for common decency," you may be spending this weekend freaking out each time you refresh Nate Silver's prediction website and see Hillary's chance of winning the election declining by a fraction of a percentage point.

But as a political scientist & specialist on elections & parties--as well as a junkie of this election, and a dab hand at quantitative analysis in politics, I wanted to share a few observations that I hope might help preserve some people's arterial walls in the next three days.

Here are three big reasons why the closer we get to the election, the less sense this seemingly precipitous decline seems to make (and, keep in mind, Mr. Silver & co would still say the chances of Hillary winning are almost double what Trump's are):

  1. Math of the electoral college: Hillary Clinton could lose Florida, Nevada, Iowa, & Ohio (that Obama won), plus North Carolina, where she's been ahead in polling (and which Obama won in 2008), and still be president, as long as she wins Pennsylvania & New Hampshire (last won by a Republican in 1988 & 2000, respectively--are Keystone & Granite staters really going to let you-know-who lure them over to the Republican side after having turned their noses up at more respectable Republicans like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and the Bush family?)
  2. Early voting doesn't seem to have a meaningful place in Silver's forecast model, and in two of Trump's must-win states, the story for the Republican looks much grimmer than Silver's outcast predicts:
    • Nevada, which Silver's projections give Trump a 50.5-51.1% chance of winning, seems like a lock for Hillary, considering early voting, which ended there yesterday.  Probably at least two thirds of all votes that will be cast in the state have already been cast, and 73,000 more Democrats have cast ballots than Republicans.  In 2012, Obama won Nevada by about 68,000 votes (a comfortable, if not huge 6.5% margin), after Dem-registered voters cast 71,000 more early votes than Republicans did.  So Hillary is farther ahead of Trump in Nevada than Obama was ahead of Mitt Romney (the first Mormon candidate--NV's electorate has one of the largest Mormon blocs after UT).  To imagine that Trump actually has a slightly better chance of winning Nevada than Hillary now is to imagine a rather preposterous degree of uncertainty in what will happen on Nov 8.
    • In Florida, Democrat-registered voters have a lead in early voting, too, although it doesn't compare nearly as well with 2012.  They lead by just about 7,000 votes, as opposed to 104,000 four years ago, when Obama won the state by just 74,000 votes.  Of course, if that were the only info we had, that difference of 97,000 votes is more than enough to erase Obama's final margin.  But from Florida, we also have information about the ethnicity of early voters, and the big change in Florida this year is the huge growth in the Latino vote: although early voting is still going on today, as of yesterday, Latinos had cast nearly 600,000 early votes, or 14% of all early votes (compared to just 300,000 in 2008--the last year with comparable data, when Obama won Florida by 240,000 votes).  In 2012, Latinos accounted for less than 10% of early votes, on their way to account for 17% of all votes in the state that year.
      And this year, there are a lot more Latino voters in Florida, and most of the newcomers are US citizens from Puerto Rico (who lean Democrat, as opposed to the stereotypical Cuban-Floridian voter, who leans Republican), while the total number of white-only voters in the state has declined has declined by 1.5% from 2012.
      While the early voting picture in Florida is not as contradictory to the idea of Trump winning the state as in Nevada, Silver's projection of Trump with a 52.4-53.3% chance of winning the state should not make us simply cast it on Trump's pile in our mental electoral-college maps
    • I could go on with similar stories about places like Arizona, Iowa, and North Carolina where already-in early-voting numbers that aren't built into Silver's model tell a much more hopeful story for Hillary than the numbers on Silver's map (Trump with a 74.1-76.1% chance in AZ, 68.7-70.0% in IA, and 51.7-53.7% in NC), but more meaningful is an investigation of how the model's calculations are currently "grade-inflating" Trump's polling numbers in states across the country.
  3. Dubious aspect of the FiveThirtyEight model: One big part of Silver's calculation of the final vote-estimate is based on how much each state's vote-outcome correlates with with national polls.  A big part of this is the trend-line adjustment that Silver adds on top of his polling averages for each state.  That is to say: if a candidate seems to have gained in national polls in the past weeks or months, then Silver's model if the polls in a given state haven't moved much in the period, those state polls must be under-counting that candidate's likely final vote outcome.
    The upshot is that in calculating the current estimates (estimates, we should hasten to emphasize, as Silver would) of the final-outcome vote shares, which he then uses for his percent-chance calculations, Silver's model adds on some "missing" voters for Trump to whatever the adjust poll averages say: about a 2% "bonus" for Trump across all the states.
    Thus, if the polling average (adjusted for the partisan leans of the polls) in, for example:
    • NH is 43.9-40% (Clinton +3.9%), the "Trend Line Adjusted" average is 43.9-41.9% (Clinton +2%).
    • OH is 42.8-43.2% (Trump +0.4%), the TLA avg is 43.0-45.6% (Trump +2.6%)
    • NC is 45.5-43.6% (Clinton +1.9%), the TLA avg is 45.3-45.5% (Trump +0.2%)

      Thus,
      Trump's projected chances in all these races are much higher than if Silver didn't believe all the state-poll averages were under-counting Trump.  NH looks much tighter for Clinton, OH looks like a decent lead for Trump, rather than a neck-and-neck, and NC looks neck-and-neck for Trump, rather than a tight lead for Clinton.  While this built-in calculation of the model might normally make sense, the yawning 2% Trump bonus that the current set of polls produces for it seems way too big to bank on.

      Now
      , maybe the all these state polls really are "missing" the "Trump-bump" that Silver's calculations find in the national polls, but I find big (cardiac-muscle-saving) solace in doubting that these and other well-polled states are all under-counting Trump's final strength, come Tuesday night.
In conclusion, although I know lots of people who love FiveThirtyEight's statistical sophistication and history of good predictions (though not Trump's primary victory!), but justifiably fear a Trump presidency, may be freaking out this weekend, There are three big reasons we should all step back from our windowsills & balconies: 1) Democratic Electoral College advantages that mean Trump would have to be the best Republican candidate in 30 years to win. 2) Early-voting info that seems to confound the polling predictions.  3) The fact that the polling predictions are based on an assumed under-counting of Trump's support in all the state polls.

A final big reason to breathe easy is organization: The Clinton campaign has something like four times as many people organizing Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) phone banks, door-knocking, and other activities as the Trump campaign does.  And they have been at it longer.  Clinton's side began staffing up in swing states 7-8 months ago, building lists of volunteers to door-knock the data-chosen voters, networks of civil-society allies, and armies of organizers (including some great vets of Bernie's campaign!) to make it all happen.  Trump has nothing like this, and the Republican party has barely been scrambling in just the past month or two to come up with some semblance of ground game, and fallen far short.  Having been out there for months for Bernie, and known dozens if not hundreds of others who've done that, and also who are out for Hillary, this matters.  Not enough to create a swamping landslide, but by enough (2-4%?) in a close election like this that it should hearten us.

So we should all Keep Calm, and Carry on--and direct any restless energy we might have into some GOTV calling!

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Two Elections: Russia & America, mirrors of Apathy & Stability

Russia's 2016 Parliamentary Elections--Sunday, September 18 2016

Last Sunday, about 48% of eligible Russian voters (according to official data) turned out to give Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party a victory in the 4th parliamentary election since he came to power.  It's been dubbed Russia's most boring election yet.  The government probably manufactured about two fifths of its victory through fraud, but the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th place parties all support the Putin system, too, and the only parties that truly stand as opposition attracted the votes of barely a twentieth of those bothered to show up.  This is one of the lowest turnout national elections Russia has seen since the fall of Communism (although the 36% of Americans who voted in our last Congressional elections is even worse).  Are Russians suffering under Putin's regime, and thus desirous of a change, but too afraid to vote for it?  Or is the Russian electorate genuinely quiescent because hardly anybody is really that dissatisfied with the system?

Two years into Russia's most severe recession since the 1990s, the latter answer seems correct to me.  From my many trips there, and contacts I keep up with friends and former students there, the impression I've always had reflects the perspective one Russian facebook user posted about on Monday, to explain why Russians of his generation don't come out in support of the opposition.  The late 1980s and 1990s in Russia were so horrific, economically, and left such an indelible mark on Russians' political consciousness, that they have become the touchstone for comparison to determine how things are now.  In 2016, budgets have been cut, inflation is up (especially on food), and in a few places wage arrears (employers--including government entities--can't make payroll, and so simply fall into arrears in what they owe workers, sometimes for weeks or months) have shown up again.  But unlike the 1990s, nobody is losing their life savings to inflation.  People all have jobs and enough to eat.  Apartment blocks aren't wallowing in horrific states of dilapidation, nor being blown up by terrorists.  People have cars, access to health care, and many can still afford seaside vacations (many in newly-acquired Crimea, which is ironically probably cheaper now than it was three years ago, the last time Russians vacationed there under a Ukrainian government).

Could things in Russia be better?  Of course they can--Russians were doing extremely well economically less than a decade ago.  But that was under Vladimir Putin's rule, as well, so why vote against his party?  Today's democratic opposition, as disorganized and divided by petty personal ambitions as it is, is also directly connected in Russians' minds to the 1990s, the Yeltsin era--and economic depression that has no comparison in the minds of today's Russians.  The idea that a European standard of living and degree of public freedom, a reduction of corruption and the installation of a pluralistic society with the levels of comfort and opportunity that people enjoy in Germany, France, the Low Countries, or even the Central European post-communist countries that are now in the EU seems unrealistic for most Russians.  These social goals, that inspired Ukrainian protesters in late 2013 and early 2014 who wanted to bring that country into the family of Europe simply don't look plausible in Russia.

So then, why rock the boat?  On the whole, Russians would prefer the known path they are on, even if it seems headed downhill, than to blaze a trail off in a new direction--perhaps over a cliff.  And the majority of Russians would really just rather live their own lives, attend to the prospects of their own family, friends, and themselves, then wear themselves out engaging in politics, which at best cannot change things, at worst could be dangerous, and in any event will be exhausting and dispiriting to those who have any public spirit to begin with.

Americans: Citizens or Subjects?  Participants in Democracy?

The majority of Americans are almost exactly like the majority of Russians, in terms of how they feel about commitments to their own, personal, private spheres vs the public sphere and participation in their own democratic government.  Americans have a far higher quality of democracy than do Russians: far less corrupt, far more open to participation (which is far safer), far more avenues to voice their opinions, and far more competition and capacity to hold their leaders accountable than Russians.  But while some Americans take up the privileges and duties of citizens of a democracy, the vast majority of them don't act like they live in or care about democracy--they act just like the majority of Russians do.

Here in Texas, I've been working in the past week to register voters, which means walking up to complete strangers, asking point-blank if they're registered to vote yet, and if they want to, then helping them fill out a brief form.  While many students and grocery-store customers have been willing to, the great majority are not willing to register.  Of those who won't, many will respond that the choice they face for president this year is so dismal that they're not interested.  Others, expressing something similar, say it won't matter who they vote for, because all the choices are bad.  (The majority of those who refuse have clearly not even thought enough about it to articulate, or probably even have, a reason.)

While these opinions are certainly disputable, what is indisputable is that the reason we have the two most unpopular major-party nominees in history is that the huge majority of Americans didn't care to participate in the primaries: On the Democratic side, about 17 million people voted for Hillary Clinton, and 14 million against her, while on the Republican side, 13 million voted for Donald Trump, and 16 million against him.  While the fairness, process, funding, and media attitudes during the primaries are all open to criticism by those who don't like one, the other, or both candidates, the greater truth is this: 160 million Americans eligible to participate in the process that produced these two candidates failed to do so.  Maybe some were physically, financially, or bureaucratically unable to participate, but not all of them, nor surely even a significant portion.  If just one tenth of those who failed to show up when we picked our major party nominees (a process that's been virtually unchanged in most of our lifetimes, that is taught about in required classes in middle schools, high schools, and many colleges--at least here in Texas it's required), had done so and voted for other candidates--against Hillary & Donald--we would have a different pair of nominees this November.  This is indisputable.

The fact that those who claim they won't participate now because they don't like the choices on offer have no one but themselves to blame (their own failure to participate during the primaries) is piquant, but probably not worthwhile to dwell upon.

Perhaps worthwhile is why the majority of Americans, like the majority of Russians, can't be bothered.  There are lots of negative pressures or personal failings we could assign as causes for how low people's interest & desire to participate is.  But still, this is America, the country that claims a unique history, tradition, and very identity with Democracy.  Moreover, this is the government that rules the land--that holds power of life and death over everyone ("a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"), that decides peace & war, how much you'll have to pay in taxes or traffic fines, controls education, trade, abortion, infrastructure.  It's really important, and not just for "this election."

But my answer to the question of why so few Americans care to participate in what's regularly upheld as a hallmark of American-ness takes a different approach than a speculative weighing of the costs & benefits of expending the rather scant resources of time & energy to participate.  I'm interested in opportunity costs: what else are Americans doing with the small amount of time & effort that they could otherwise have spent on registering to vote, generating enough of an opinion to cast a vote, and then casting it?

They're doing much the same things Russians do: they're eating dinner, going grocery shopping, answering a friend's text, heading to work.  Often they're dealing with their kids, maybe watching TV, possibly working long hours, maybe at multiple jobs, or exhausted from doing the same.  They're trying to figure out which Costco account to sign up for; they're trying to get tenure; they're talking to their spouses or taking care of elderly relatives.  They're fixing their cars or mowing their lawns, or snapchatting with a potential hook-up.

They're engaged in their private sphere of social and economic activity--family & friends & career & household (including both work & entertainment).  These take up so much of most people's time & energy, that there's nothing left over for democracy, even though the bare minimum of voting takes very little effort, for most people.

This is certainly not true of everybody--after all, 60 million people did vote in the primaries, and an additional 60 million or so will probably vote in November; and many people go to school board meetings, or volunteer time for charity work.  But I'm not speaking of those people; I'm talking about the ones I can't get to register to vote.  Public-spiritedness may be alive and well in a fraction of the American population today, but that fraction is too small.  Indeed, at the last Congressional election in 2014, I know a number of political science professors who didn't bother to vote.  If educators within the very field of politics, responsible for the instauration in future generations of the values of our American democracy are too pre-occupied with trials and travails of their own private spheres to vote, there's a big problem in America.

The private sphere has been so valorized in America, and the fields of activity that contribute to private flourishing--education, career, kids, house, cars, nutrition, fitness, entertainment, insurance, tax-planning, retirement, vacation, health care--have undergone such hypertrophy in both their number, and more importantly, the imperatives of attending to them, that for the vast majority of Americans, there is no obligation to one's (or one's family's) private flourishing too small push out any activity undertaken in the public spirit.  Even among those with the most resources, who've gotten the best educations and high-paying jobs, we often congratulate ourselves for fulfilling the bare minimum requirement of democracy by merely voting.  The idea of stumping for candidates, volunteering time to register voters, or even running for office is barely conceivable to most of us--we're too busy to make democracy work.

One of the most pernicious catalysts of this problem is social media: facebook posts about politics and the election are a palliative for many people's pinches of conscience about participation (especially academics) that emotionally exempts us from the responsibility to actually do anything outside the virtual world that might make a real difference, to connect with the unengaged, or with people from different walks of life.

Now I'm sure that most people who post on facebook about how terrible this or that candidate is, or how desperate the stakes of the elections are, or how unjust are the agents of justice hired by our elected official, do almost always vote.  But we should see that as a  bare minimum.  Many give money, too, which does do something, but also alienates the donor's political responsibility onto some paid staffers somewhere, who are overworked & underpaid (often to an unconscionable, and now actually illegal degree, by Democratic no less than Republican candidates), usually undertrained, and often hamstrung by a lack of willing & able campaign volunteers.

If everybody who posts on facebook about politics spent an equal amount of time signing up new voters, phonebanking for the campaigns of the candidates who would address the injustices that bother them, or knocking doors to identify supporters & get out the vote, instead, we would go a long way towards making American democracy real, rather than the money-dominated, mass-media-manipulated, de-personalized and anti-community elitist affair it appears to so many to be.  I challenge everybody who reads this to catch yourself before you post or re-post something about the election, and instead spend those few seconds looking up how you can volunteer locally to register voters, or help your preferred candidate or party.  And then actually do the volunteering.  As I found out when registering voters this week--whether ex-felons or college students who didn't know they were eligible, it can be really uplifting and inspiring.

America & Russia: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

I challenge us all (myself included!), because we need it--we need our American democracy not to come to resemble Russia's.  Because there are those who want it to, the ones backing the presidential candidate who has lionized Russian president Vladimir Putin, although for the most part, they know not what they do.  This is one phenomenal inversion of the Russian case in America: if Russians are hesitant to stand up for change in the face of a poorly-performing autocracy because they know--and are afraid--of how much worse things can get, then a dangerously large swath of Americans are pushing for the destruction of our values and institutions because they don't know how good they have it.

It's true that in the past few decades, things have gotten worse for a lot of people in America.  Income inequality has gotten worse in this country, the jobs on offer are worse and less stable than they were before and the expenses most Americans face are harder to afford. Higher education seems more out of reach to many Americans than it used to be.  The solutions that America has used to address racism, crime, drugs, low-quality education, and deficit spending have evolved their own pathologies and problems.  But to submit the whole system to the guidance of someone like Donald Trump is to call for a leap into the abyss (I suspect I'm preaching to the choir for anyone likely to come across this blog).

If the 1990s are the reference-point for Russians, and as problematic as Russian society is today, they won't risk standing against injustice & corruption for fear of returning to that abyss, for Americans backing Trump, the reference-point is the imagined era when America was "great."  And the dark reflection of Trump supporters being so enamored by the force of anemoia (I had to look this up) that they will risk any amount of upheaval, corruption, and destruction offered by a sexist, violent, bullying, lying, arrogant, faithless, corrupt excuse for a businessman whose entire career has been devoted to swindling people, and whose only qualification to be leader of the free world is his celebrity, is a reality that would have been unthinkable in any previous era of American democracy.  (Ironically for the implicitly backward-looking slogan of his campaign, there is no way that someone as ethically bankrupt and devoted to private gain at the expense of other people and the public good could ever have come this close to the presidency in any historical era of American greatness he or his supporters might point to.)

Fortunately, those American voters so callous, foolish, and (in some significant proportion) undoubtedly racist enough to desire to loose Trump's blood-dimmed tide upon the world are not so numerous enough to overwhelm this nation.  They're only about 4% of our population, to judge from primary voting.  And yet 4% filled with passionate intensity may easily bully and bludgeon the rest of us into submission, if we continually show so little conviction as to spare no time from our "busy" schedules for any but the bare minimum of democratic participation.

We friends of justice, equality, and democracy may feel like the biggest enemies we are fighting are Trump, and racism, and the Koch brothers.  But the truth is that our biggest enemies are our own pre-occupations with the private sphere, our own fears that we will not flourish sufficiently if we don't devote almost every morsel of time & energy to our careers, families, children, homes, nutrition, etc.  I may feel good that I spent six hours registering voters this week, but that's the first real political action I've participated since the end of my stint with Bernie Sanders six months ago.  I've been as woefully reluctant to cut into my private sphere as anybody.

But from now on, I'll pledge not to.  I'll start with the next 17 days of voter registration here in Texas, but I won't let it end on November 8th.  Please join with me, pledge mutually, as did the fifty-six signatories twelve score years ago--whether you're already engaged in multiple public spheres and activities, or whether you like me have fallen submerged into the all-consuming private sphere, and want to turn over a new leaf--a real one, not just a virtual one.  Make some campaign calls!  Find out how to register voters in your area!  Knock on some doors for a candidate who will lead us higher up the mountain towards a more perfect union, rather than over a cliff into the abyss.  Leave a comment if you want, so I'll know you're with me, and have the conviction Yeats was so concerned for the lack of!

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Political is the Personal? Update from Texas!

No longer Virginia Jew 5159--now apparently I'm Texas Heathn 6247
Well, it's been a long eventful summer, and as Labor Day approaches, an overdue blog post emerges!

After spending most of June & July teaching economics at Piedmont Virginia Community College, I drove back to upstate New York where with the help of a good friend (Ed!), I packed most of Jasmine's & my earthly belongings out of another good friend's barn (Stephen!) and into a POD, which went hence to Texas ahead of (although ultimately behind) us.  Jasmine & I met up in South Jersey, where we left VJW 5158 at the old homestead, and then sallied forth across a number of states with a gill-filled CRV (and a cat burrowing his way through boxes, tote-bags, and other paraphernalia) first to Wisconsin, and ultimately here to Lubbock, Texas.

Our last stop before hitting our new home was Amarillo, where we enjoyed the Big Texan Steak Ranch, though I held myself to an 18 ouncer, and we got this swell bumper sticker, which joins Bernie on the back of the ol' CRV.

Now that I'm here, attached as a Visiting Instructor to the Texas Tech Political Science Department, I've got some interesting professional obligations.  One is to help write the online course content for the university's version of what the Texas Legislature calls "GOVT 2306 Texas Government (Texas constitution & topics)".  All Texas college students must take this course, which should involve the following "Learning Outcomes":
  • Explain the origin and development of the Texas constitution.
  • Describe state and local political systems and their relationship with the federal government.
  • Describe separation of powers and checks and balances in both theory and practice in Texas.
  • Demonstrate knowledge of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of Texas government.
  • Evaluate the role of public opinion, interest groups, and political parties in Texas.
  • Analyze the state and local election process.
  • Identify the rights and responsibilities of citizens.
  • Analyze issues, policies and political culture of Texas.
Basically, it's an area studies political science course about Texas!  And who better to develop the expertise & content for it than a comparativist who focuses on regional politics and loves to study BIG countries, like Russia, and Brazil, and now Texas!

I'm very excited for the endeavor, and hoping to fit in some politics, too, while I'm in the area--although it's been challenging so far to find much in the way of electoral activity to devote myself to.

Since the incumbent Republican congressman here is retiring, I thought perhaps it might be an momentous juncture in West Texas politics, as these are generally opportune moments for a challenger, especially a Democrat, in a presidential election year!  Apparently, though, it was not opportune enough of a moment, in the eyes of Democrats, to bother to put forward a candidate to run against former George W. Bush staffer & Texas Tech alum & former vice-chancellor Jodey Arrington.  At least, back in December of 2015, when the deadline for declaring candidacies passed, it didn't seem very opportune.  Thus, the Texas 19th is one of seven (out of 25) Republican-controlled districts where Democrats apparently went gentle into that good (?) night, without even "some dude" to present a token barrier to continued right-wing Congressional dominance.

But wait!  The Democratic party is hardly the only party of the left purports to stand against the conservative agenda!  The Green party apparently has a candidate in the race (at least according to Ballotpedia), although when I tried to find his web-site, the closest I got was a facebook page from 2014, and no response to my queries through it.

My next thought was to get involved in the Lubbock County Democratic Party, as a I had such a wonderful (if brief) experience with the open and diverse Albemarle County Democratic Party in Virginia during my all-too-short time as a resident there.  Alas, the Lubbock Democrats' online presence amounts to something called a "parse error: syntax error" and some other machine-speak--though a cached version of the site does yield a phone number.  I called and left a message with the Chair about a week and a half ago . . . no response yet.

We'll see what can be unearthed in terms of electoral activity here in Lubbock in the coming months, but I'm starting to get the sense that if Texan political culture ever does embrace competition at the ballot-box, it's not General Election day.  It may only be found in the primaries, where more than a half-century ago, it was only the Democratic primary that mattered, while today it may be only the Republican primary (and its run-off, which we missed by three months).

More updates coming soon!

Friday, July 1, 2016

Brexit & EU, Hillary & Trump, Obsessions with an "Alternate Reality"


Upset about Brexit

Since the people of Britain voted by a 4% margin to take the enormous cultural, economic, and geopolitical step of leaving the EU last week, my Facebook feed and daily news perusal has been deluged by lamentations.  Practically no sources I run across apparently find common cause with Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and the most prominent generative force behind Brexit (or at least, none of them want to say so on Facebook).

Some of the lamentations are connected to the vote as a harbinger of a turn away from an open society; others are concerned about the racial-cultural backlash against the increasing number of inhabitants of the British Isles who are not as WASPy as those whose grandparents grew up there; and indeed others are gloomy about the economic fallout likely to damage the future of Britain, Europe, and maybe the world.  I found myself pretty sympathetic to these anxieties.

Brexit in UK = Trump in US?

Another trope of fear, however, was that somehow the narrow win for Brexit will prove to be a leading indicator or perhaps even a causal factor Donald Trump's incipient victory in the US presidential election this November.  I found myself less sympathetic to this direction of worried reasoning and added my own scrap of kindling to the Facebook fires by reminding to my friend that:

"The United States is not Britain,"

"A referendum is nothing like a presidential election (especially considering our country's Electoral College," and, most importantly,

"And Hillary Clinton is, I promise you, not the European Union," notwithstanding spite of any current conspiracy theories that she is no longer a human woman married to Bill Clinton, but rather a practically pan-European intergovernmental organization constituting 27 or 28 nation-states and run by bureaucrats out of the same place that used to administer the Belgian Congo (and with an eerily similar flag to that last and most brutal instance of colonial exploitation).

But seriously, aren't people mad at the establishment in similar ways on both sides of The Pond?

As against my dismissive Facebook response, there is an obvious and serious concern that the Brexit "phenomenon," which is now an electoral reality, emerges from the same kinds of dissatisfaction with the globalized pattern of increasing income inequality & stagnation that we see as strongly in the US:  The "haves" (whether they be the 1% or the the 30%)  have more & more, and the have-nots increasingly find that the storied economic mobility of free, capitalist democracies has gone the way of the cassette tape, disappearing sometime around the end of the last century.

In the end, though, patterns of party competition in this country, the Clinton campaign's advantage in financial and human resources (not quite as many bureaucrats as in Brussels, but almost), and the slow but steady dawning on more Americans that her fellow Democrat Barack Obama's stewardship of the White House has been a good thing, convince me of the position of Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik's analysis: "The 2016 election is already decided. History says Hillary Clinton wins."

The real problem: Nobody thought about the Possibility that became Reality

And yet, there is an important and upsetting similarity between Brexit & the US presidential election, though not so immediately dangerous one (at least, to my own normative view of the world).  That's the apparent broad obsession that people in politics, media, and indeed in their own conversations, have with dwelling upon, discussing, and opining about the way the world will not be the day after the vote.

In the long leadup to the Brexit vote, a lot of people were generally worried about Brexit, while in the last couple of days beforehand a few opinion polls showing that Brits would vote narrowly to "Remain" made people (especially financial trader people) increasingly confident that the next day, Britain would still have a future in the EU.

But it turned out otherwise, and indeed, it turned out that even the people leading the charge for Brexit had no idea what that would mean.  As a British friend of mine echoed on Facebook in the days since, "they had no plan."  In fact, now we have a state of reality where the British Prime Minister is a lame duck, the most prominent Brexit-promoter in his own party Boris Johnson (who'd been the odds-on favorite to succeed him) has pulled his hat out of the ring to be the next PM, and there's no certainty who will be the UK's leader in two months' time.  Moreover, nobody knows when the all-important Article 50 will be "triggered" to begin the formal negotiations on Britain's new status vis-à-vis the EU.  And to help matters, the UK's opposition party appears to be entering a slow-motion leadership struggle of its own with nobody quite certain who will succeed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn himself refusing to go gentle into that good night even as the great majority of Labour MPs want him out.

This enormous degree of uncertainty about very important things--and the implicit the failure of powerful people, who have a lot to lose or gain, to have lined up support or come up with a plan of what to do if Brexit won seems to suggest that most British elites--and perhaps even most Brits--were so preoccupied by the way world would (as it turned out) not be the next morning (ie, they all just thought Britain would still be in the EU), they'd devoted little or none of their brainpower to what to do in the case that eventually prevailed as reality:  Where, in truth, can we see the "Reality Based Community" among Britain's leaders, media, or pundits in the run-up to Brexit?

Indeed, the fact that it was such a near vote in the end could perhaps partially excuse the apparent failure to consider "now what happens?" beforehand.  (Though it was also a near thing whether Hitler would have invaded the UK during WWII, or whether the US would confront a Soviet satellite 90 miles off the Florida coast during the Cold War--obviously the former didn't happen, and the latter did--but would it be forgivable if, respectively, UK & US leaders, media, & pundits failed to consider "what happens now" in the alternative of either of those scenarios?)

In the US, obsession with what probably won't become reality threatens to leave us, as a polity, as flat-footed as Brexit leaders

Now we begin to see the parallel with the United States.  For a long time, I personally had been really hoping that the reality this coming November 9th would be Bernie Sanders headed to the Oval Office.  I had to give that up several weeks ago, and join what now appears to be the Reality Based Community that his opponent will quite probably be the president-elect.

But that's a hard to community in which to find any conversation--most of the news media (2/3 of WaPo's front page this morning, 3/4 of Bloomberg Politics, and almost all of NYT's political coverage) are preoccupied with the man who will mostly likely not be elected president, as they and have been unswervingly for the past twelve months.

Even a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Democratic Party of Virginia's state Convention in Richmond, state party leaders from Governor Terry McAuliffe to our Democratic congressmen, down to the merest party functionaries allowed on stage spent far more time talking about Donald Trump than about Hillary Clinton--they even made us watch a video of the most appalling things he's said (as if Democratic delegates were likely to be uninformed about him).  A few people said they loved Bernie (though the tokenism of the comment was as bald as Yul Brynner), and lectured us on how important it was to get Hillary elected, but nobody said anything about what policies she would put in place in the (quite likely real future) even of her being elected president.

And try finding anything from prominent news outlets about what life will be like in America where Hillary Clinton is president--you'll need magnifying glasses and forensic training.  I don't doubt a Hillary will generally undertake policies that I, as a Democrat, would favor, and she's not trying to keep her plans or their details a secret, by any means.  But somehow, almost nobody in the Public Sphere seems inclined to discuss what the next Clinton presidency will be like.  And those who do want to talk about it are mostly wanting tell us how horrible it will be, for example, to have the country run by criminals.

Is this dangerous?  In this particular case, I doubt it--I think the reality we'll be living in starting November 9th will probably be as good as can be expected from the American political system.

But in general, the propensity for us--especially our media & leaders--to ignore in public discourse the way the world really is (or is likely to be) in favor of what is less likely to actually prevail in reality (in the event, Brexit), or even what is fantastical (Donald Trump's presidency), is a huge problem.  I'll forbear speculating on the root of it, but it's something that must change if we're not to be caught as flat-footed by major (and often predictable) world events (climate change comes to mind most quickly, but it's hardly the one!) as Brexit's leaders have been by getting what they wanted!