Idiocracy

[crazyperfectdevil]

russiagate or whatever we're calling it these days seems to be reaching some kind of tipping point. If he keeps doing stuff like firing the people investigating the issue then I think it ironically only brings that time closer.

 

[L K]

The Director of the US Census just resigned.  It's not really getting talked about but this is pretty huge.  Given that Trump hasn't bothered to fill the vast majority of positions he is required to, having a vacuum in the head of the Census team is going to really affect the 2020 census.  2020 is also supposed to result in significant zoning changes for voting.

Gerrymander away Republicans.

 

[Heroic Shrimp]

Gerrymander away Republicans.

Don't be ridiculous, that would be unethical.

 

[princedpw]

The Director of the US Census just resigned.  It's not really getting talked about but this is pretty huge.  Given that Trump hasn't bothered to fill the vast majority of positions he is required to, having a vacuum in the head of the Census team is going to really affect the 2020 census.  2020 is also supposed to result in significant zoning changes for voting.

Gerrymander away Republicans.

I agree, this is a very significant concern.

 

[mr grieves]

The Director of the US Census just resigned.  It's not really getting talked about but this is pretty huge.  Given that Trump hasn't bothered to fill the vast majority of positions he is required to, having a vacuum in the head of the Census team is going to really affect the 2020 census.  2020 is also supposed to result in significant zoning changes for voting.

Gerrymander away Republicans.

I agree, this is a very significant concern.

Gerrymandering, AFAIK, is primarily done on the basis of race and party registration. Any reasonably intelligent and minimally competent political party, absorbing the lessons of the last decade's worth of elections, would see the market inefficiency in this and pounce.

But, of course, the Democrats are neither intelligent nor competent. Just "smart," "reality based," and "on the right side of history" -- which doesn't reek of world-ending hubris at all.

 

[Kin]

I'm sorry but where is there a "market inefficiency" in districts being unfairly drawn up in order to secure safe seats?

 

[herman]

https://streamable.com/mfk9w

Spicey's back!

 

[mr grieves]

I'm sorry but where is there a "market inefficiency" in districts being unfairly drawn up in order to secure safe seats?

Seats are made "safe" by virtue of racial demographics and party affiliation in the unfairly drawn districts. And that seat will be kept safe as long as the political supply is just racist appeals and/or partisan cultural issues. But that just points to how invested the political parties are in a few relatively narrow things (which has increasingly alienated a lot of people from politics in the US).

Introduce something that's been studiously kept out of politics -- something that, say, 70% of the population wants -- and the reliability of demographics and past voting behavior to predict elections falls.

from one the Democrat's post-election autopsies

 

[Kin]

Seats are made "safe" by virtue of racial demographics and party affiliation in the unfairly drawn districts. And that seat will be kept safe as long as the political supply is just racist appeals and/or partisan cultural issues. But that just points to how invested the political parties are in a few relatively narrow things (which has increasingly alienated a lot of people from politics in the US).

Introduce something that's been studiously kept out of politics -- something that, say, 70% of the population wants -- and the reliability of demographics and past voting behavior to predict elections falls.

Yeah, that's still not a market inefficiency because this isn't a market and voters don't react like traditional market forces.

You know what roughly 70% of the American public agree on? That the government should provide more services. You know what else 70% of the public agree on? Their taxes shouldn't be raised or that spending shouldn't be cut. The most common answer people give when asking where money should come from for new programs essentially boils down to "Cut wasteful spending in every district other than mine". 

There isn't a single item on that chart that's been "studiously kept out of politics". Almost all of them were brought up in the last election. The problem is that most policies are a zero sum game once you factor in things like "hey, how do we pay for that infrastructure investment?" or once Republican voters are asked if "making corporations pay their fair share" is worth all the jobs it will lose.

People aren't commodities. They hold a host of contradictory and sometimes self-defeating opinions. Trust me, the problem with American politics, or politics anywhere, is not that nobody is smart enough to push the really good, successful policies that everyone likes.

 

[mr grieves]

There isn't a single item on that chart that's been "studiously kept out of politics". Almost all of them were brought up in the last election.

Of course, "brought up" doesn't bring folks to the polls.

People aren't commodities. They hold a host of contradictory and sometimes self-defeating opinions. Trust me, the problem with American politics, or politics anywhere, is not that nobody is smart enough to push the really good, successful policies that everyone likes.

Ehh... Nik, I like your TV tastes and takes on hockey. But you were dead wrong about the 2016 election.

I was being hyperbolic to say no one's that smart. There are all sorts of very powerful incentives that result in the major left party in the US not really running on any of these and looking for shortcuts that don't commit them to having to actually confront power. I think where they're not particularly smart is that they've overlooked -- and are still overlooking -- the real danger of not pursuing such policies.

 

[Kin]

Of course, "brought up" doesn't bring folks to the polls.

Because most of those issues don't bring people to the polls in the first place.

The mistake you're making is ignoring the third axis of every public policy from a political perspective. There's what the policy is and how many people agree with it, sure, but the big one is the extent to which people care about an issue.

To use an obvious example, take Abortion(note to mods/anyone else, I don't want to debate this, just using it as a high value policy example). You may think it's a foolish policy to talk about when opinion is so split but it's an issue that does get people out. On one side of the issue you have people who think that any restrictions on it is a gross case of government overreach that violates constitutional liberties and bodily autonomy. On the other side, you have people who think it's state-sanctioned child murder.

So when you have a group of voters for whom their chief issue is gross violation of civil liberties vs. infanticide it actually doesn't matter how much they agree on infrastructure investment or tax policy. It doesn't swing votes. That's why those policies aren't the driving force of any major US political parties.

Ehh... Nik, I like your TV tastes and takes on hockey. But you were dead wrong about the 2016 election.

Even to the extent that's true(and it's a distinction I share with some pretty distinguished folk) that doesn't change people into commodities or turn the public square into a market that behaves like financial ones. Saying "here's a popular policy, pursue that" doesn't work after even a little digging.

In addition to the issue I bring up above there's also the one of having to narrowly target policy to particular voters. Take gun policy, for instance. A lot of left wing positions on gun policy poll extremely well. So why don't Democrats run on it?

Because of who it polls well with. It's popular because it primarily appeals to people who are already voting for the Democrats combined with Republicans/Independents in Democratic states as well as Republicans/Independents for whom it's a low priority issue.

Who does it poll badly with? Independents in swing states who see it as a key issue. So it's something they keep fairly quiet about. The difference between Hillary winning and Trump winning was not Hillary just getting more votes, it was about getting specific votes. Your chart doesn't speak to that.

Clinton won the popular vote. A Democrat has won the popular vote in 6 out of the last 7 Presidential elections. Finding popular policies isn't their problem in Presidential elections. What's killing them is voters not showing up in off-year elections and occasionally narrowly losing swing states when they have lousy national candidates.

Career Touts call races wrong all the time. They still know which part of the animal the horse shoe goes on.

 

[mr grieves]

Even to the extent that's true(and it's a distinction I share with some pretty distinguished folk)

that doesn't change people into commodities or turn the public square into a market that behaves like financial ones. Saying "here's a popular policy, pursue that" doesn't work after even a little digging.

I feel like you're really getting stuck on that market metaphor.

And I'm not sure that it isn't a bit disingenuous, since you're deploying arguments derived from some poli-sci papers, I'm guessing? Which is, lest we've already forget, the social science that encouraged us to rely on 'analytics' and demographics and just gave us the game-show president. So...

I think you're just overthinking this.

If people don't understand how their situation might be improved by voting for someone, they won't turn up to vote. Then you're left with the yahoos for whom politics is largely avocational, who will turn out to express their sense of self through position-taking on things like abortion and firearm regulations. Most people aren't like that, because most people aren't weirdos.

Wisconsin, a state that Hillary Clinton had assumed she would win, historically boasts one of the nation?s highest rates of voter participation; this year?s 68.3 percent turnout was the fifth best among the 50 states. But by local standards, it was a disappointment, the lowest turnout in 16 years. And those no-shows were important. Mr. Trump won the state by just 27,000 voters.

[...]

The biggest drop was here in [Milwaukee's] District 15, a stretch of fading wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission. It is home to some of Milwaukee?s poorest residents and, according to a 2016 documentary, ?Milwaukee 53206,? has one of the nation?s highest per-capita incarceration rates.

[...]

?Give us loans, or a 401(k),? he said, trimming the mustache of Steve Stricklin, a firefighter from the neighborhood. His biggest issue was health insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.

?Ain?t none of this been working,? he said. He did not vote.

link: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-didnt-vote-and-dont-regret-it.html

Who does it poll badly with? Independents in swing states who see it as a key issue. So it's something they keep fairly quiet about. The difference between Hillary winning and Trump winning was not Hillary just getting more votes, it was about getting specific votes. Your chart doesn't speak to that.

Yes, that's right. The upper-midwest blue wall fell.

It wasn't because those specific votes thought that Hillary was going to take away their guns. It's because her campaign didn't speak credibly to those people's interests, and so those people didn't show up to vote for her.

The counties in Table 4 all have industrial unionism in their DNA; they were the cradles of the CIO in the great labor wars of the New Deal. With few exceptions (1972 and 1984) they remained loyally Democratic in rain, sleet, and snow; voting strongly for Obama in 2008. So why, in the face of positive economic indicators and the lowest national unemployment rate in a decade, did these older industrial counties suddenly desert the Democrats and embrace Trump?s reindustrialization cargo cult?

Fumbling with the odd pieces of the Trump puzzle, the Economist decided that ?the pitch of economic anxiety motivating Mr. Trump?s supporters has been exaggerated.? But when analysis goes micro plentiful reasons for such anxiety emerge. Table 5 itemizes plant closures that occurred during the campaign season ? striking evidence of a new wave of job flight and deindustrialization. In almost all of these flipped counties, a high-profile plant closure or impending move had been on the front page of the local newspaper: embittering reminders that the ?Obama boom? was passing them by.

Some Ohio examples: Just before Christmas, West Rock Paper Company, the major employer in Coshocton County, closed its doors. In May, GE?s century-old locomotive plant in Erie announced that it was transferring hundreds more jobs to its new facility in Fort Worth. The day after the Republican Convention ended in Cleveland, FirstEnergy Solutions announced the closure of its huge generating plant outside of Toledo, ?the 238th such plant to close in the United States since 2010.?

At the same time in Lorain, Republic Steel formally reneged on its promise to reopen and modernize the enormous three-mile-long US Steel plant that had once been the area?s largest employer. In August, meanwhile, GE warned of the closing of its light bulb plants in Canton and East Cleveland. Simultaneously, pink slips were being handed out to workers at Commercial Vehicle Group?s big stamping plant in Martin?s Ferry on the Ohio River (Belmont County).

link: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class/

 

[Kin]

I feel like you're really getting stuck on that market metaphor.

Because it's not a metaphor. A market inefficiency is a specific thing that doesn't apply in this situation. People are complex, they want complex things. "It's the economy, stupid" is, well, stupid.

And I'm not sure that it isn't a bit disingenuous, since you're deploying arguments derived from some poli-sci papers, I'm guessing?

I'm deriving my answers from my formal education on this specific subject matter as well as my years working in the field of public policy.

Which is, lest we've already forget, the social science that encouraged us to rely on 'analytics' and demographics and just gave us the game-show president. So...

Political Science as a field of study no more gave us Trump as a President than "Economics" gave us the housing crash or "Physics" gave us the A-Bomb. Data nerds brought us analytics. Those kids didn't hang out at the Social Science building. 

If people don't understand how their situation might be improved by voting for someone, they won't turn up to vote. Then you're left with the yahoos for whom politics is largely avocational, who will turn out to express their sense of self through position-taking on things like abortion and firearm regulations. Most people aren't like that, because most people aren't weirdos.

Most people also don't understand macroeconomics on the sort of scale that make that sort of communication one where truth intersects with easy to digest sound bites. On top of that, you're talking about a question that doesn't actually have a complicated answer, let alone a simple one. How to make a global economy work for everyone is something nobody has cracked yet and some of the best policy solutions that have been cooked up yet don't poll well even in countries more receptive to the sort of large scale ideology at work.

Yes, that's right. The upper-midwest blue wall fell.

It wasn't because those specific votes thought that Hillary was going to take away their guns. It's because her campaign didn't speak credibly to those people's interests, and so those people didn't show up to vote for her.

That's great as a talking point but it doesn't actually have much in the way of truth behind it:

In the wake of Trump?s surprise win, some journalists, scholars, and political strategists argued that economic anxiety drove these Americans to Trump. But new analysis of post-election survey data conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found something different: Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.

...

Controlling for other demographic variables, three factors stood out as strong independent predictors of how white working-class people would vote. The first was anxiety about cultural change. Sixty-eight percent of white working-class voters said the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. And nearly half agreed with the statement, ?things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.? Together, these variables were strong indictors of support for Trump: 79 percent of white working-class voters who had these anxieties chose Trump, while only 43 percent of white working-class voters who did not share one or both of these fears cast their vote the same way.


The second factor was immigration. Contrary to popular narratives, only a small portion?just 27 percent?of white working-class voters said they favor a policy of identifying and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally. Among the people who did share this belief, Trump was wildly popular: 87 percent of them supported the president in the 2016 election.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/

 

[mr grieves]

I feel like you're really getting stuck on that market metaphor.

Because it's not a metaphor. A market inefficiency is a specific thing that doesn't apply in this situation. People are complex, they want complex things. "It's the economy, stupid" is, well, stupid.

A market inefficiency is a specific thing.

A specific thing applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable is... a metaphor.

Which is, lest we've already forget, the social science that encouraged us to rely on 'analytics' and demographics and just gave us the game-show president. So...

Political Science as a field of study no more gave us Trump as a President than "Economics" gave us the housing crash or "Physics" gave us the A-Bomb. Data nerds brought us analytics. Those kids didn't hang out at the Social Science building. 

Finance and physics and foreign policy have also been discredited by colossal disasters of the Wall St crash, the A-bomb, and Vietnam & Iraq & just about every American foreign policy intervention of the last 60 years.

(Or ought to have been. In a just world, every moron who said the reasonable thing to do was to bomb Cambodia or arm the messianic theocrats in Afghanistan, while undermining the secular left throughout the Middle East, or deregulate derivatives or air another damned Clinton ad in LA while she went to the Hamptons instead of Wisconsin would've been led into a tiled basement room with a drain in the floor -- that's a metaphor).

There were, of course, economists who saw the crash coming, physicists who saw the dangers of the bomb, diplomats who saw the idiocy of the America's hawkish overseas adventures, and political operatives and observers who saw the Clinton campaign had a pretty dull sense of what the electorate would respond to. What's distressing is that those members of these professions who "got it right" aren't promoted, even if the face of the spectacular failures of the mainstream common sense in these fields.

With respect to the domain we're talking about here...

And I'm not sure that it isn't a bit disingenuous, since you're deploying arguments derived from some poli-sci papers, I'm guessing?

I'm deriving my answers from my formal education on this specific subject matter as well as my years working in the field of public policy.

Which led you to be wrong about the outcome of this election in exactly the same way similarly educated and experienced professionals were wrong.

So, what assumptions about how politics work have you reconsidered given the political upheavals of the last few years? What in the conventional wisdom of your profession ought to be revised, given the reality it just ran into?

If people don't understand how their situation might be improved by voting for someone, they won't turn up to vote. Then you're left with the yahoos for whom politics is largely avocational, who will turn out to express their sense of self through position-taking on things like abortion and firearm regulations. Most people aren't like that, because most people aren't weirdos.

Most people also don't understand macroeconomics on the sort of scale that make that sort of communication one where truth intersects with easy to digest sound bites.

If your explanation for how your political program will improve someone's life takes the form of macroeconomics, you're doing it wrong. "Make America Great Again" and "We're gonna dig more coal" could've been met with "you're going to have a living wage" and "no more insurance companies impoverishing you."

Yes, that's right. The upper-midwest blue wall fell.

It wasn't because those specific votes thought that Hillary was going to take away their guns. It's because her campaign didn't speak credibly to those people's interests, and so those people didn't show up to vote for her.

That's great as a talking point but it doesn't actually have much in the way of truth behind it:

In the wake of Trump?s surprise win, some journalists, scholars, and political strategists argued that economic anxiety drove these Americans to Trump. But new analysis of post-election survey data conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found something different: Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.

First, the poorest economic group counted -- families under $30k/year, I think -- did go for Clinton, as they have virtually every Democrat since the Depression. But Trump ate into Obama's margins and, more important, folks from this segment of the electorate stayed home.

Second, the one thing you did get right about the 2016 election is that Trump's voters were essentially the same voters who typically go for Republicans. He had the hardcore xenophobes and white supremacists (the "deplorables") from the escalator ride, picking Pence brought the religious culturally conservative folks on board, and the suburban petit-bourgeoisie GOPers rebuffed Clinton's appeals (remember "for every vote we lose in the rural areas, we'll get 2 in the Philly suburbs"?) because they fundamentally only care about their tax cuts, and -- finally -- a few tens of thousand downwardly mobile white workers went for Trump. But, as noted above and elsewhere in the article, a lot more stayed home.

Third, the economics vs. cultural anxiety debate is a dull one. "Did fascism get sufficient popular support to be elected because of racism or economic anxiety?" The answer, as it's always been, is that folks' existing racial biases and assumptions are turned into resentments and grievances and then support for fascists when (a) their general well-being erodes, (b) no plausible explanation or ameliorative action is offered by the left, and (c) a demagogue connects those biases to (a). 

Finally, one more article making clear the connection between Trump's election and the failure of the American center-left:

lection Day cataclysm or not, the Democrats remain a party of two distinct groups: a wealthy, motivated, and highly resourceful professional class that supplies the party its leadership and ideological compass; and an unenthusiastic, unorganized, and largely nonwhite working class, whose chief reason for voting Democratic is that the other major party is packed full of racists.

What are the implications of such a starkly bifurcated coalition? One consequence is the ongoing disfigurement of the liberal political imagination. In a world where Ivy League students ? the sons and daughters of Fairfax and Marin ? vote for Clinton at a clip of more than 80 percent, elite Democrats find it exceedingly difficult to identify any tangible common interests they share with most American workers.

Instead, their attitude toward working-class Americans tends to take two forms. On the one hand, a growing contempt for the (white) workers who have slowly drifted away from the Democratic Party; on the other, an essentially philanthropic if not paternalistic concern for ?the most vulnerable? (nonwhite) workers who ostensibly remain within the Democratic camp.

from Matt Karp,"Fairfax County, USA"

On top of that, you're talking about a question that doesn't actually have a complicated answer, let alone a simple one. How to make a global economy work for everyone is something nobody has cracked yet and some of the best policy solutions that have been cooked up yet don't poll well even in countries more receptive to the sort of large scale ideology at work.

So we're both agreed that our political institutions are failing to meet the dominant social question of the day. 

 

[herman]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump?s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump?s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

To be fair, this was denied by literally everybody involved.

Except Trump. He confirmed it on twitter.

 

[herman]

To be fair, this was denied by literally everybody involved.

Except Trump. He confirmed it on twitter.

I love that he demands his staff to tank their integrity to back his play, but then immediately throws them all under the bus because his narcissism demands that people give him credit for this great decision.

 

[bustaheims]

To be fair, this was denied by literally everybody involved.

Except Trump. He confirmed it on twitter.

I especially love how his defence is that he has the right to share this information - which is true, and something no one is disputing. People are unhappy about what he shared, and what that means for the intelligence gathering effort against ISIS, the safety of their sources, etc., and he's saying "I'm President, I'm allowed to do it. Stop complaining." To restate the obvious, the "man" has no understanding of consequences.

 

[herman]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMaRFQY23nA[/youtube]

This is just from the first 2-3 minutes:

Trump will be giving an "inspiring, yet direct speech on the need to confront radical ideaology". He will then participate in the inauguration of a centre devoted to fighting "radicalism and promote moderation" and to take a stand against "extremism and those who use a perverted interpretation of religion to advance their criminal and political agenda".

So Trump is meeting with the Republican party?

 

[Kin]

A market inefficiency is a specific thing.

Yeah, which, as I said does not apply here in either a literal or figurative sense. An electorate is not a market. Not literally or figuratively. I don't believe for a second that you intended it in the figurative sense but it doesn't work there either. There is not a void of people pushing the things that people claim to really like, those people just did worse than Hillary.

Finance and physics and foreign policy have also been discredited by colossal disasters of the Wall St crash, the A-bomb, and Vietnam & Iraq & just about every American foreign policy intervention of the last 60 years.

"Finance" is not economics and the A-Bomb didn't discredit the concept of physics.

There were, of course, economists who saw the crash coming, physicists who saw the dangers of the bomb, diplomats who saw the idiocy of the America's hawkish overseas adventures, and political operatives and observers who saw the Clinton campaign had a pretty dull sense of what the electorate would respond to. What's distressing is that those members of these professions who "got it right" aren't promoted, even if the face of the spectacular failures of the mainstream common sense in these fields.

That's not really true. How much more of a platform do you think Paul Krugman should have? How many Nobel Prizes should he win?

Which led you to be wrong about the outcome of this election in exactly the same way similarly educated and experienced professionals were wrong.

With all due respect, that's complete and total nonsense. My education and years of work in public policy really didn't come into play when handicapping the American election. In thinking Hillary would win I was doing so as a layperson putting their faith in the data nerds who'd had a pretty good track record in recent years. If nothing else, Trump's victory has left me with a healthy distrust for people who have claimed to crack complex problems with the use of arcane and tedious statistical analysis.   

So, what assumptions about how politics work have you reconsidered given the political upheavals of the last few years? What in the conventional wisdom of your profession ought to be revised, given the reality it just ran into?

I'm not entirely sure what you think people study in political science, public administration or PPE programs but nothing about Trump's victory shattered any long held assumptions people made about the political process. The "reality" that emerged was that poll aggregation isn't quite rocket science and that crazy, unexpected things can happen in campaigns. 

But to speak up for the data folk for a second, some of them were very wrong but someone like Nate Silver gave Trump a 30% chance of winning. Trump won. Does that mean Silver was wrong? What's the line there? If I say something has a 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 chance of happening and it happens were the odds wrong?

I was overconfident, sure, but the guy who wins the lottery isn't an investment genius.

If your explanation for how your political program will improve someone's life takes the form of macroeconomics, you're doing it wrong. "Make America Great Again" and "We're gonna dig more coal" could've been met with "you're going to have a living wage" and "no more insurance companies impoverishing you."

Like I said, it requires a basic understanding of the subject so that it doesn't just devolve into two people squawking back and forth competing soundbites at each other.

Effective communication of progressive healthcare and economic policy is more than shouting "FREE MONEY!" to a public that claims to hate socialism if they can get around to spelling it correctly.

Finally, one more article making clear the connection between Trump's election and the failure of the American center-left:

Well, no. It's just another opinion piece.

I can't make the case that the Clinton campaign didn't screw things up or that they didn't have communication problems or messaging problems. They did. But that failure is not "Stop talking about the things that are the actual deciding factors in why people vote the way they do".

Obama was a good communicator, Clinton a bad one. But they didn't talk about wildly different subject matter. The election was a reflection of that.

So we're both agreed that our political institutions are failing to meet the dominant social question of the day.

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "our" institutions. I agree that the Globalist-Corporatist Centre-Left movement of the Bill Clinton, Chretien-Martin and Blair-Brown governments largely failed to meet that question and their ideology has largely been exposed as one that is an unpalatable Neoliberal-Lite.

But let's get a bit of a grip on ourselves in terms of what this one election means broadly. Did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Yup. Have people somewhat erroneously tied that into the far more complicated question of the EU referendum in the UK to present a picture of a world where that ideology is being roundly rejected by the common folk? Well, you sure seem to be.

But the facts are far more nuanced than that. Trudeau won a huge victory here largely under that banner. Macron just won a pretty sizable victory in France under the same. Merkel's still in power. Spain and Italy have swung Left. The idea that the far Right would sweep across Europe fizzled out. Heck, even Austria stuck Centre-Left and if you can't make fascism work there you may as well goose-step home.

And in some of those still Centre-Left countries that issue is being addressed. Policies like a UBI are being openly weighed in places like Canada, Sweden and Switzerland(although, again, it tends to not be popular). It's not like the question's being ignored it's just that it's a question without an easy policy answer and the best ones we have aren't very popular and I've always been in the camp of thinking smart policy in the hands of an unelectable government isn't much use.

Would I like to see a hard turn Left by the Democratic party? Sure. But Obama didn't win his huge victories because he was much further to the Left than Clinton. The platform that came out of the Democratic Convention this year was further to the Left than anything Obama put his name behind.

There aren't policy answers for what happened to Clinton this year. If you think that a hard left turn is a cure-all, feel free to look at how Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party are doing in the UK and get back to me.