Why Trump Won

I greeted Donald Trump's announcement that he was running for president with some skepticism.  He has alluded to this in the past and hasn't followed through.  But when he dominated the polls despite saying things that would sink most presidential campaigns, I knew he was a shoe in to win.

I was shocked that media pundits, politicians and pearl clutchers didn't catch on and take him seriously.  They casually dismissed him as a racist demagague that would sputter out by the end of September. They broke the number one rule in any competition: Never underestimate your opponent.

Donald Trump wasn't your ordinary underdog.  He owned this campaign. His opponents threw everything they had at him and he still ended up smelling like roses.  He defeated 16 other Republicans in a spirited primary race at only a fraction of the cost that others had spent.  Main stream media attacks only made his polls go up.  And Barack Obama, the man with the 50% approval rating, came off sounding completely clueless when responding to Trumps rise in popularity while the rest of the Democratic party (including Hillary) only did marginally better.

Let me remind everybody of a few things. This was the man who was able to get Barack Obama to show us his birth certificate.  He uses bankruptcy law to get better terms from his creditors.  He's an expert at handling the media and is great at handling people.  Trump has had some well publicized feuds with other celebrities on social media, but generally, he does well with people.  The man has demonstrated in the past that he has influence to get people on his side and to get what he wants. His book, The Art of the Deal was published in 1987.  Didn't anybody read it and know what this man was capable of? Nobody took him seriously and now he's the most powerful man in the world! 

How? 

Name Recognition

I'm going to start with a cliché just to get it out of the way.  Name recognition still counts for a lot. Especially when the current campaign has as many candidates as this one did.  Unless somebody was living in a cave somewhere, the whole world knew about Donald Trump.  Certainly, everybody in the United States did even if some of them hate him.

People that run campaigns also know this fact, which is why a lot of effort in campaigning is getting the candidate's name out there.  People that have high name recognition with the public such as Clinton or Bush have an advantage.  People already know these names and will feel that they already know them as individuals, even if they don't really know them at all.  But if a candidate can use social media and the main stream media as effectively as Trump does, then he's already won the name recognition game before it even begins. For people that don't regularly follow current events or the news, but still vote, this can make the difference.  They'll tend to vote for names that they recognize.

Doesn't Follow the Script

Ostensibly, the media has been ordained with the task of vetting candidates during elections.  Prior to the internet age this served a valuable function, but not anymore.  Now, people can vet their own candidates and see where they stand on the issues themselves.  Media vetting has degenerated into a gaffe scavenger hunt and trying to set traps and "gotcha moments" for candidates to stumble into.  And they need to sell copy (or clickthroughs in the internet age) so they have incentives to dig up and hype scandals.  Realistically, everything you need to know about a candidate can be gained through their Twitter feed and is already condensed into a 140 character sound bite.  What do we need the media for?

We've all seen how today's main stream media operates.  For example, when an athlete, politician or celebrity makes a public apology in regards to some scandal or impropriety, a tweet or a facebook post isn't going to be good enough.  One must call a press conference, invite the media and make a statement where he kind-of-apologizes, but not really.  Does anybody believe that he's being sincere?  No. Even supporters and fans that are more likely to forgive him realize that this is something they just have to do.  It's part of the script.

Likewise, the media can interview and ask questions of celebrities and politicians, but they can't probe too deeply.  That would be a one-way ticket out of a job.  If word gets around that you're the journalist or a reporter that doesn't play ball, then nobody will talk to you and you can forget getting the press credentials to be on the inside track in Washington, Hollywood or anywhere else.  Even before the Wikileaks scandal had broken about the Clintons receiving interview questions prior to interviews had broken, it seemed obvious that interviews and press conferences seemed rehearsed. Questions are often submitted beforehand and approved before the interview or press conference even takes place.  By the time you see it live, everybody has been through rehearsal and knows their lines. So everybody involved, media and subjects, have to dance the same dance and abide by the same unspoken rules.  Your guess is as good as mine in regards to which of them really sets the agenda or the narrative that the rest of us must adapt to.  It seems to be a chicken or egg debate at this point.

A lot of the exasperation coming from the main stream media is that Trump isn't playing along, and the public love him for it.  He doesn't have a political career that can be ruined by a few scathing editorials or hardball interviews.  When the media confronts Trump about what he may have said--"may have said" being the key phrase since half the time it's a misquote--they expect him to back down, back-peddle or apologize for the remarks.  When Trump doesn't apologize and sticks to his guns, then the media resorts to vitriol and become exasperated when his polls continued to climb.

"He's making a mockery of the political process!"

Pfft!  You're kidding me, right?  After years of yellow journalism that would make a literary hack look respectable in comparison, you are going to start complaining about people mocking the process?  Hillarious!

Remember Dan Rather from CBS?  He became undone over some false documents about Bush junior's military service by a bunch of pajama-wearing bloggers sipping their morning coffee.  It's impossible to overstate the significance of con jobs like this.  The main stream media, and the careers and celebrity of those who participated in it, relied on being in complete control of the medium that they operated in.  The internet shattered this paradigm and exposed about 95% of the journalism profession as talentless hacks and con men (or con women?).  It's funny really.  Dan Rather had the opportunity to dodge scandal by claiming that he just reads the news briefs that people hand to him, but no.  He doubles down on the documents being authentic and chooses to go down with the ship.  Rathergate hasn't been the only news media scandal in recent times.  There are many others-- in print and on air-- that should demolish any public perception of the media as being an impartial source of information.

So it's no surprise that the public opinion of the mainstream media is at an historic low according to Newsbusters.  This Gallup poll also shows public trust in the media being just as low .  The terms politically biased and inaccurate frequently make an appearance when the American public describes the media. The media is as polemic as Daily Kos and Ann Coulter.  Except that neither Daily Kos or Ann Coulter claim that they're balanced or impartial like the main stream media does, which makes them a lot more ethical in my book.


I suppose that a lot of aspiring journalists are looking for that Nixon and Frost moment to define their career, or to  have the same gravitas that Walter Cronkite had, or perhaps get that clever soundbite that people will be talking about for the next decade.  It's not going to happen.  The market is too saturated now.  Every journalist is a glorified blogger copying stories off the wire and putting their own ideological spin on them.  Nowadays, a kid that isn't even old enough to vote can beat you to a scoop because he lives nearby and has an internet connection.

Hillary and the Democrats

What were the Democrats thinking???  They couldn't encourage a few more members of the party to run for president to give the voters a choice?  Biden?  Warren?  Kerry?  Bueler?  Anybody?

There were only two serious candidates.  One was a woman that already suffered an embarrassing loss for the nomination to Barack Obama back in 2008, and was dangerously close to being indicted for federal crimes (that's Hillary Clinton for the slow people).  At the other podium was a die-hard socialist that still thinks it's 1928, and nobody outside of New England has ever heard of him (Bernie Sanders).  That's it?????  Nobody else in the Democratic party wanted to be president? How could this be?  Molly Ball from The Atlantic brings up a good point.  In her essay, Liberals Are Losing the Culture Wars, she writes:

 Republican divisions are actually signs of an ideologically flexible big-tent party, while Democrats are in lockstep around an agenda whose popularity they too often fail to question.

Even before the scandal involving the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz manipulating the primary race had broke, the whole thing seemed a little fishy to anybody paying attention.  Were we expected to believe that nobody else in the Democratic party was interested in occupying the most powerful office in the western world?  They thought Hillary was their best hope for victory?  Nobody in the party leadership tried to convince Hillary that she had too much baggage to be considered a serious candidate?  I'm beginning to wonder if some of the rumors about bad things happening to people that oppose the Clintons are actually true. If so, then Molly describing Democrats as being "in lockstep around an agenda" barely begins to describe their problems.

I can't believe that nobody else from the Democratic party was interested in running for president. It seemed that Hillary Clinton was to be the presumptive nominee from the very beginning.  The news media had little to work with when covering the campaign.  They had to include Uncle Joe Biden in the polls that they conducted at one point just to make the contest interesting.  When the Democrats finally had their first debate (after the Republicans already had two), they had to include a few other individuals just to fill up the stage.  And what a pathetic display it was--a gaggle of idiots arguing about who can give away the most money.

By contrast, there were 17 Republican candidates that officially tossed their hat in the ring.  They came from very diverse backgrounds and represented a broad range of perspectives: business men, senators, governors, doctors, etc.  When primary debate season rolled around, there were too many to fit on one stage.  The debates needed to be split into two sections and they needed to do at least 10 of them to narrow down the field for primary season.  The bickering and arguing on such a large scale had many pundits comment that this was a symptom of troubles within the party.  Matt Yglesias disagreed.  In his article for Vox, Democrats Are In Denial, Yglesias writes:

Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.

It's around the time that Yglesias wrote this article that Republicans regained their majority in the House of Representatives and gained a majority in the Senate while continuing to give Democrats the boot in local contests all across the country.  Republican infighting seems to be a nice problem to have.

Candidates do well in elections when they align their platform with public sentiment.  Instead of realigning with public sentiments, the Democrats are pushing more of the same and the American public has grown weary of it. 

The American public has grown tired of socialism and thought twice before electing Bernie Sanders because, as a political and economic system, socialism is coming to an end.  It has created a parasitic underclass that demands more and more government benefits without producing anything of value. This isn't sustainable no matter how high you raise people's taxes to cover this expense. More and more people will find other ways to screw up their lives, expecting a bailout and it will never end. Have you ever heard of moral hazard?  It's the idea that people will tend to act more irresponsibly knowing that the government or insurance companies will swoop in and bail them out if their actions get them into trouble.  Moral hazard was a primary concern when discussing bailout programs for banks and the automotive industry under TARP. Remember how many people loudly opposed it on the grounds that the banks won't act responsibly in the future?  It's the same disgruntled feelings, but coming from the other side of the political spectrum

More importantly, socialism tends to bankrupt governments and reduce standards of living.  If you don't believe me, then look at the governments around the world going bankrupt.  Look at Greece.  Look at Spain.  Look at Venezuela....  It's not like we can't see this coming.  Look at the USSR during the late 1980's.  That was our warning.  Read Atlas Shrugged, it's coming true.   Socialism eventually leads to economic collapse with a rapid decline of living standards and everybody knows this.  The only reason we are keeping it going is the idea that the system won't implode while we're still here.  It would suck for our grandchildren, though.  Good luck kids!

Hillary, on the other hand, has been strongly pushing the feminist angle in her campaign and it flopped. Feminism is also on it's way out--at least in the form it has debased itself to in modern times.  Recent surveys reveal that less than one in five American women identify themselves as a feminist (albeit about 80% believe in equality).  Looking at the propaganda put out by feminist organizations, it's easy to see why.  The movement has degenerated into a group of foul-mouthed, whining man-haters.  Women were all girrrrl power and you go girl until their sons and nephews started falling behind in school, losing their jobs and losing their shirt in divorce settlements. And now a lot of men are checking out of society or even worse. The chickens have come home to roost.


I'm not really surprised by all this.  I wrote more about how the Democratic party is screwing up.

Anti-Establishment Sentiment

The fact that the Democrats hate Donald Trump isn't a big surprise.  The interesting thing is that the Republicans hate him too--at least the party leadership does.  So does the mainstream media.  Conservative media hates Trump as well (with the exception of Breitbart)--even Fox News hates Trump!  You can barely get these groups to agree on what day of the week it is, but they all despise Trump.  This was a good enough reason for many people to give Trump a second look.

Public opinion of Congress have been at historic lows for a long time.  A solid majority of Americans believe that we are on the wrong track as a country (this is despite President Obama having a decent approval rating--around 50%).  These poor approval numbers, in conjunction with public distrust in the media (discussed above), should have had the establishment very worried.

We saw anti-establishment sentiment during the primary season.  For a time, the top three Republican candidates were all candidates that weren't established, career politicians.  This should have made somebody like Hillary Clinton extremely nervous because she is as establishment as it gets.  Hillary and her husband have either run for public office or occupied public office throughout their political careers and have grown wealthy as a result -- First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, etc. Hillary likes to think she is being anti-establishment because that is what Democrats have been, traditionally.  Except, Democrats aren't the anti-establishment party anymore.  They are now the establishment with just as many ties to big business, special interests and Wall Street, as any Republican.  The Republican party, after compromise and compromise while the country is being pulled further and further left, is simply considered Democrat-light.

The anti-establishment sentiment that led to Trump's election wasn't just a fluke. It's been building to this point for a while now.  Stripped of the novelty of electing our first black president, Barack Obama won in 2008 because, in part, he was considered an outsider.  Yes, he was a Senator for Illinois, but not for very long, and certainly not nearly as long as John McCain or Hillary Clinton were Senators.  Obama was considered fairly pristine as a candidate.  The worst anybody could pin on him was the firebrand rantings of Reverend Wright.  McCain sensing this shift in the political winds had tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate.  As governor of Alaska, Sarah was also as far away from establishment politics in Washington as it gets, politically and geographically.  Later, Tea Party candidates were also being elected and gaining representation in Congress on waves of populist sentiment--the same populist waves that elected Donald Trump.

So this anti-Establishment wave that ended up electing Donald Trump has been in the making for at least a decade.  How else can you explain the phenomenal success of Fox News (number one in prime-time cable news for over 13 years)?  The network has been challenging existing media and political narratives and viewers responded positively.  And before you accuse me of hallucinating, other journalists are remarking on the similarities between Obama's 2008 campaign and Trump's 2016 campaign. Nate Cohn, writing for the New York Times, published an interesting editorial.  Cohn doesn't use the language of populism or anti-establishment in his editorial, but observes that Trump is winning over a lot of the white, blue color demographic that voted for Obama in 2008 for the same reason--both Obama and Trump portray themselves as agents of change in Washington.

My question is, why couldn't our parties adapt to the change in voter sentiment?  Forget what your polls and focus groups say, look at ratings!  Ratings are actually what signals people's preferences when they think nobody is watching them.  Round up the same people and put them in a focus group or start polling them and they start giving the progressive, politically correct answers when they know they're going to be on record.  It's why Democrats call for recounts and bring up accusations of vote rigging when they lose elections; their polls say they're in the lead but the people end up voting differently once they're alone in the voting booth. 

But, nothing is being rigged.  The Bradley Effect explains this outcome very well, and due to the left's hysteria over Trump, I'd say that the Bradley Effect exceeded the margin of error of most polls by a significant amount.  I suspect that most pollsters and pundits are familiar with the Bradley Effect but they don't talk about it for a simple reason:  It would equate to public admission that the liberal left has a very large, firm monopoly on the media and political discourse in this country with tentacles extending into our schools, our churches and even our homes.  Certain political views become so sancrosanct that the only place one can honestly oppose them is in a 4-square-foot voting booth with the curtain drawn.  But this may be changing.  Obama tried to slam people that didn't vote Hillary as sexist.  Hillary slammed Trump supporters as "deplorable". While everybody else tried to blame Trump and his supporters as being racist.  These labels were often used as trump cards to virtue signal, silence opponents or generally get one's way.  But in this election, we are finally seeing some evidence that these labels are losing their effectiveness.  They've been overplayed.

I'll bottom-line it for you.  There's a political and economic realignment that is occuring as we speak, and it's been occuring well before Trump started his campaign.  We'll all find out where it ends up in about 10-15 years, so don't worry.  As long as you can adapt you'll be fine.  But if that scares you, then you've been too busy branding yourself and sticking yourself into nice little boxes.  Look at Jeb Bush.  Look at Marco Rubio.  Look at Hillary Clinton.  Look at Barack Obama. They seem absolutely dumbfounded over what has occured this election.  They all branded themselves thinking it's what people wanted.  Unfortunately, the brand went the same way that grunge did in the 1990's.  But if you want to be a hipster, there's still time!

"But I'm an Independent!"

No, you're not. You have some vague notion that it's a combination of money, special interests, lobbyists, flying saucers and the Illuminati that's screwing things up.  In other words, you didn't independently come to this conclusion.  Somebody told it to you and you're repeating it.  How independent do you think this makes you?

"They should just compromise."

You don't want compromise.  You don't even know what compromise looks like in the first place. Civil Unions was a suitable compromise in the gay marriage debate, wasn't it?  It allowed someone to "marry" someone of the same sex in the eyes of the government, entitling them to benefits extended to married couples.  But this wasn't good enough.  Segregation, you called it. You wanted the "marriage" label, and not only that, you also wanted to force other people to recognize it as marriage even though they understand the term to mean something else entirely.  So you got 5 people in robes to agree with you and the rest is history.

We tend to idealize the concept of compromise as a noble quality, but sometimes this means selling out your principles--one would hope for a greater good but that's often debatable. We laud the original authors of the Constitution for their spirit of compromise--the same spirit that counted a negro slave as 3/5 of a person. None of this is a judgement on you but you have to be careful what you ask for. 

Compromise is an obsolete concept in today's political climate anyway. The Overton Window is a more accurate description in regards to what is occurring in the modern political sphere.  The anti-establishment factions are finding that the Overton window has shifted so far to the left that there's almost nothing in American society that shows any respect or reverence for their values-- and if you bring up the fact that the anti-establishment still has their gun rights, I'm gonna shoot you in the eye!

Read more about the Overton Window and gay marriage here.

"I just want them to do the right thing for the American people."

Who's going to tell them what "the right thing" is?  You? 

I can throw a stick at random and hit somebody who thinks the "right thing" is the exact opposite of what you think the right thing is.  That's when the yelling starts and CNN/MSNBC/FOX is there waiting to broadcast it in HD, 24 hours a day because--you know--ratings!

How does it feel to know that you're being manipulated for ratings? Rhetorical.

Angry White Men

I'm sure that most Trump opponents have more than a few choice words to say about him to anybody that will listen.  Heck, they've been ranting about him since halfway through 2015!

Now imagine that you weren't allowed to do this.  Not that you would end up in jail or a victim of lynching or anything like that.  But imagine that you would be shouted down by everybody within earshot for promoting such hateful rhetoric.  Imagine if it jeopardized your career if you knew that such rhetoric got back to your employer and they had to dismiss you because what you say can reflect badly on the company.  Imagine that such a tense atmosphere was created that you had to look over your shoulder to make sure nobody was listening before you whispered something about Trump to a close friend of yours or else people might overhear you and get the wrong idea about your character.

Can you imagine it?  Can you actually put yourself in that position and imagine how you would feel?

That's how a lot of people felt when Barack Obama was elected!

Unless you were part of the circle jerk that framed Obama's election as "history in the making" and "bringing Change" or a repudiation of the previous administration, then you were made to feel like a pariah.  You were cast as somebody who didn't care about the poor or race relations in the country.  You were accused of supporting the banks and deep pocket interests that were out to screw you (Read What's the Matter With Kansas for details).  They would call you a racist, a mysoginist and a hater.

Opponents had to wait until Obama did something stupid, like send a poorly translated reset button to Russia, to criticize him for anything, and even then, they had to be careful about how they said it.

Couldn't they at least transliterate to cyrillic?

Feels good to live in a country with free speech, doesn't it?  Well, that's for half of the population anyway.

During Trump's campaign, many people, both in public and in the main stream media lamented about "where all this hate is coming from".

First of all, it was always there.  It's just been shamed, shouted down and banished from public discussion based on the idea that such sentiments are regressive and not welcome in our postmodern era.  When I try to explain this, it seems to come as a shock to any supporter of the Democratic party or the liberal left.  They simply aren't acclimated to different points of view.  It's primarily because they have been used to getting their way since the Great Depression.  Year after year and decade after decade, they learned that if they whine about something long enough they'll get it via legislation, or if public opinion wasn't on their side, Supreme Court rulings.  Surely, they've encountered some opposing viewpoints, but they've never encountered an elected official or a candidate that is openly antagonistic to their values in the way that the Clintons or Barrack Obama have been to conservative values.  Donald Trump is the first candidate that has antagonized liberal values since Barry Goldwater, only this time, Trump didn't lose.  Trump's candidacy came as such a shock to liberals that they had no way to effectively address it.  Remember the culture shift that ended up blindsiding conservatives in the 1960's?  Your turn now.

Second, it isn't hate--it's anger.

This might come as a shock, but black people aren't the only people in this country that are angry.  The white people are angry also.  More specifically, white men are angry.  Just ask whitey living in the trailer park about white privilege; he'll tell you everything you need to know about it if you can stomach it.  They're sick of getting blamed for everything. They're sick of falling behind in school and losing their jobs while nobody cares because they're white and supposedly have things easier. They're sick of getting fleeced in divorce court or have tax dollars being wasted on reeducation sensitivity training.

"It's not the same," you say?  "It's different," you say?

Really?!  You think everybody has it easy except you? Everybody else is just lazy or greedy, but you're the one that's getting screwed?

Reality check: Let me issue a challenge right now.  Tell me what rights does a white man have that women and minorities do not!  Write this in the comments.  I suspect that you can't come up with one.  It hasn't been legal to discriminate against black people since 1964 and women have been entitled to equal pay since 1963. Yet, candidates campaign on how much more rights we need to give these people.  More laws, more executive orders, more money.  And white men are just suppose to shut up about it.

I suppose that there could be a legitimate concern that there are forces still marginalizing some groups of the population.  But what causes me to reject this thesis is that there's people shouting the secrets of success from the rooftops: Stay in school, stay off drugs, don't get pregnant, etc, etc. 

But no, we're all suppose to clutch our pearls and try to address the root causes that would compel a group such as #BlackLivesMatter to trash neighborhoods and gun down cops, but jere and condemn Pepe the Frog as being a racist icon of white supremecy?  Does anybody see the hypocrisy in this?  Well, white people do!

I'm just a meme jerking your chain.

"We don't have any good role models", you say?  Really?  No role models at all?

Why wasn't Ben Carson,  Collin Powell or Condolezza Rice inspiration for you?  Because they're conservatives? You can't check out a book from the library about George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr or Harriet Tubman?  Why are gangsters, athletes, promiscuous harlots and rappers good enough role models for you but not people who actually accomplished things, and did so in a much more hostile political environment than the one you are living in right now?

Something tells me that "no role models" means "no people that got successful while being lazy or sociopathic"

Richard Nixon once postulated that there was a silent majority, living in this country--a group of people that didn't express their political opinions publicly or showed up at the polls.  I didn't really believe that this group existed.  They certainly don't exist within my family or peer group.  But increased voter participation this election cycle suggested that the silent majority finally showed up!  And they elected Trump.

Yes, you should be worried.  All that progressive, post-modernism nonsense that you subscribed to might just be a vocal minority opinion. Pull your head out of your echo chamber and look around.

Framing

I've discussed framing before when discussing the Myth of the Gender Pay Gap.  It would be nice if we made all our decisions based on facts, but unfortunately, this isn't what influences the mind on a cognitive level.  The facts need to be presented within a context that will resonate with a targeted person or group of people--now this is the important part--what is said doesn't need to be true, it just needs to resonate with people so that they feel that it's true based on their experiences.  Once people buy into the frame, it becomes relatively easy to demonize people that seek to oppose the frame or reframe the issue, hence you control the narrative.  So obviously, you want to be the person that sets the frame in discussions.

I'm still debating whether or not Trump's framing  of certain issues was a brilliant maneuver that showed a lot of foresight or a remarkable coincidence that current events ended up alligning perfectly with his platform.

When Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, the liberal left went ballistic calling the proposal racist or "not being who we are as a country".  Little did they know that they were no longer framing the debate.  Trump is now dominating the frame on this issue and every terrorist attack since then has reinforced the frame that caused a rise in his polling numbers:  Paris...San Bernardino...Brussels...Orlando...Istanbul...Nice...
 
Until recently, liberals have often framed immigration by stating that we were all descended from immigrants who have come to this country for a better life, legally or otherwise, and we should show compassion and allow open borders and promote amnesty.  This set the frame on public discourse on immigration.  Nobody was able to deviate from it.  It also effectively branded people that oppose this frame as hypocrits since we are all descended from immigrants, so the frame also gets reinforced.  If this attempt of framing didn't work on you then they called you a racist.  These frames may or may not have worked on all people, but it was clear that liberals dominated framing of the immigration issue.  Conservatives just played along because it would result in cheap labor.

But liberals were bush league compared to Trump on framing.  Donald Trump is a master at framing.  Any mud the press tried to fling at him, he managed to spin  it into a positive.  He would have to be great at framing if he is to be one of the most successful businessmen in modern times.  Trump reframed immigration as one of the biggest problems facing our nation.  Immigrants were now viewed as lazy, criminal and sociopathic.  Trump reinforces his frame by linking unchecked immigration to national security issues, low wages, crime, overburdened healthcare systems, rising budget deficits and a myriad of other problems our country faces.

And with a cherry on top, Trump declares that he's going to build a wall on our border with Mexico and make the Mexican government pay for it. Unrealistic? You bet! But that's not the point.  The point is that he's shown that he will fight for this issue on our behalf and enough people believe him.  Every time Trump was criticized on this point, his polls went up.  The media and the Democrats eventually learned to stop talking about it. Game, set, match.

Trump's frame worked in a broader sense as well.  If it wasn't for him, nobody would be talking seriously about immigration right now. The Democrats still aren't addressing the issue.  The GOP would still be talking about defunding Obamacare and Planned Parenthood instead, which would have been suicidal.  It may not feel like it right now, but Trump saved the Republican party in 2016.  Everybody is too proud to recognize it yet.

Radical Islam

I must have fallen asleep for the past few years.  The liberal left, enabled by the Democratic party, has waged a very successful and protracted battle against public displays of religion since Engel v. Vitale.  According to many of the current sound bites on the issue, Religion has been soley responsible for all the misery in the world and throughout history. Many of them think that post modern, secular humanism is the way to go.  Karma, Wicca, Budism and Taoism are okay, but they don't want any of those religions that have a deity telling us what to do.  It ruins the fun.

So now, after a few nuts shoot up some nightclubs, President Obama and the liberal left are claiming that Islam is a religion of peace???  Somebody tell me when this paradigm shift occurred because I must have blinked and missed it.  This is cognitive disonance at its most extreme.

Islam should represent everything a liberal dispises: open practice of religion in public and in government  settings, discrimination based on race and gender, extreme violence, lack of due process, homophobia etc, etc.  This is one issue that liberals and conservatives should be able to see eye to eye on (if maybe for different reasons). So why are so many liberals acting as apologists for the faith?  It's not like you liberals know jack squat about Islam.  Half of you think it's racist to condemn it, even though it's actually a religion that tries to convert others to its faith and not a race at all.

To be sure, I don't know much about Islam either.  And I understand why Obama and others don't want to use the term radical Islam.  They fear that it may lead to stereotyping at the very least or advocate hate crime and genocidal behaviors at worst.  However, recent polling indicates that an unacceptable proportion of Muslims believe that suicide bombings are an acceptable means of waging jihad and want to implement sharia law in the countries that they live in or immigrate to.  This strongly indicates that extreme violence and oppression is a systemic problem within the Muslim faith.  So while the suicide bombings and shootings are being carried out by a minority of nut cases, there will be plenty of Muslims that will give aid or abet their activities and even stonewall our attempts to capture or kill them.  Yes, I said kill them.  We are at war.

Donald Trump positioned himself very well on this issue and this position meshed very well with his overall position on immigration--except it becomes about security instead of jobs. So there was a lot more internal consistancy in his doctrine than Clinton, Obama and the other liberals have on their position.  How does a liberal reconcile our concept of gender equality with supporting a culture that practices female circumcision in many Muslim countries, for example?  And why does such a liberal think that some bakery refusing to serve gay customers is a greater threat to the country than importing a culture that wants to hang them?

Radical Islam is another example of how well framing works in public debate. 

These terrorist attacks weren't rare, isolated occurances.  There was at least one terrorist attack committed against the West every couple of months, and Clinton, Obama and the rest of the Democratic party did absolutely nothing during their campaign to explain how they would address the issue.  These idiots actually thought gun control was going to solve the problem while pushing for the US to accept more Muslim immigration from war zones!  The cherry in top was inviting a kid to the White House for bringing a fake bomb to his school.

I've grown to respect Bill Maher.  He's about as liberal as they get, which means I don't agree with a lot of what he says.  But he infuses a sense of rationality and pragmatism that is sorely lacking in the liberal agenda.  He may be the only pundit that's keeping the left from spinning off into lala land with their insane positions on many issues.  And even Bill Maher suggested (paraphrasing) that the "Democrats were going to lose this election unless they use the term radical Islam."  Trump and the rest of the public are demanding that they use this term but Obama stubbornly refused.  Hillary Clinton finally used a similar term after being goaded into it by Trump (He got a birth certificate out of Obama so that was a piece of cake!).

It's not like we don't know what we are dealing with.  Nobody is keeping it a secret and ISIS et al are boasting about their murderous exploits.  Obama and the left's refusal to brand radical Islam for what it is, no matter how well intentioned, is perceived as denying reality.

Authenticity

The interesting thing that I noted about Trump supporters was they would always have to preface their commentary with, "I don't agree with everything he says but..."

Why?  What is it about today's political climate that somebody feels a need to issue such a disclaimer?  Well, the mind craves simplicity.  If opponents brand a candidate as a racist, sexist zenophobe, then so what?  But if those opponents wield a great deal of influence in society through the mainstream media and our political system, then you can be condemned by associating with a candidate that doesn't hold favor with our intellectual and liberal elite.  The disclaimer seems to be made in the spirit of a plea, "come on, I'm really a good guy.  I just like him, okay?"

There was another candidate that people didn't agree with but still liked and supported--Ronald Reagan.

George Lakoff in his essay 12 Traps That Keep Progressives From Winning, discusses the findings of Chief Strategist for Ronald Reagan in the 1980's.  He discovered that people that didn't agree with Reagan on  issues still ended up voting for him.  Why?  Because Reagan connected with voters on a personal level.  He was trusted by voters to do the right thing because he seemed to be one of them--he was authentic.  Therefore, they trusted him as a known quantity.

Bill Clinton also seemed to recognize that authenticity brings in votes. "I feel your pain!"  Remember that meme? 

Thomas Frank in What's the Matter With Kansas also brings up the sense of authenticity that some candidates have with voters that cause them to vote "against their best interests".  He just doesn't explore this beyond the religious right that he seems obsessed with criticizing.  So there are, most certainly, liberal scholars who are familiar with the concept of authenticity and how it motivates and influences how people vote.

So where are they?  Where are the authentic candidates?  Well there's a problem.  Because of rise of  identity politics, everybody is so hyper sensitive and easy to offend, that it's nearly impossible for a candidate to give a speech and thread the needle without offending somebody.  So he engineers a speech with all sorts of platitudes and qualifiers that don't offend anybody, but then again, they don't inspire and connect with people either. It's empty political discourse and it was the same discourse Hillary Clinton deployed in all three presidential debates.  She may have won a couple of the debates on technical merits and shored up her base, but she didn't win over the undecided voters.

Have you heard Donald Trump speak?  I'm not talking about what you've read from some sorority journalist on Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post about Trump.  Actually listen to him speak. He uses normal words and the active voice instead of the passive one.  He's unapologetic.  He doesn't invent new words.  He doesn't back-peddle.  His tone is conversational. He makes himself available to the media. He runs the campaign, the campaign doesn't run him. He actually sounds like a normal person.  He's authentic! This might be hard to believe, but it's true.

If you interviewed Joe the Plumber and shut off the cameras and refrained from shaming or mocking his views and actually listened to him, he would be saying very much the same things that Trump is saying.  Nobody would realize this because they are too busy judging him for refusing to buy into the liberal frame.  Lakoff writes in his essay about frames and has this to say about conservatives:

Conservative populists see themselves as oppressed by elitist liberals who look down their noses at them, when they are just ordinary, moral, right-thinking folks. They see liberals as trying to impose an immoral "political correctness" on them, and they are angry about it.

You might want to pull your head out of your echo chamber and actually talk to people.   I've been around social media and the blogosphere on both sides of the aisle for a long time.  There's a lot of flaming going on from both sides, but according to the  more rational and thoughtful commentary, it seems clear to me that conservatives understand liberals a lot better than liberals understand conservatives, Lakoff notwithstanding.  There are recent attempts by conservatives to rebrand themselves as compassionate conservatives in an attempt to win over liberals in campaigns. Liberals, on the other hand, seem to assume that a sense of historical determinism is on their side that will assure victory.  They view conservative viewpoints as regressive and they see no reason in wasting time addressing them. Obama, himself, embodies this sentiment perfectly. How many times do you have to hear Obama accuse us of being on the "wrong side of history" to recognize that liberals believe, very much, in historical determinism.  But as they say in The Terminator, "The future is not set!"  Liberals believe that they have a public mandate to push through their agenda by any means necessary while silencing dissenters, even by inciting violence at Trump rallies.  This will only end in disaster. Question the agenda instead of assuming it's what people want. Then you might experience some authenticity instead of the sterile political environment that you built up.



Now that Trump has won, future candidates are going to make one of two critical mistakes.  One is to attribute his victory as a fluke and ignore the popular sentiment that was responsible for his victory while trying to return to business as usual like nothing happened.  The other mistake will be to try and copy Trump thinking that's what people want, and look like a big phony in the process and get creamed at the polls. 

You would need to understand that even if Trump lost, he was a game changer.  Every election campaign, hence forth will be trying to figure out how to capture and ride this populist sentiment that has recently been a significant force in American politics.  We tried to ignore it when Obama was elected.  We dismissed it as fringe when tea party candidates were getting elected.  Trump made it a reality that we can't ignore.

Trump is brash, an egomaniac and very direct with his comments.  That's because he's Donald Trump, but that isn't why he won.  He won because people thought he was authentic and he challenged the establishment.  This is the lesson people need to take away from this.  You don't need to be like Trump.  You have to be authentic in your own way and give the people new reasons to hope.

Christina Hoff Sommers Debunks the Gender Wage Gap

Below is a good companion video to my piece dealing with The Myth of the Gender Pay Gap.

Christina Hoff Sommers debunks the common myths of a gender wage gap that is being peddled by feminists and liberal activists.



Sommers ends the video with a plea to reform feminism which I disagree with.  You don't repair rotten wood by repainting it.  Like the case of feminism, the wood must be torn down.

Activists, interest groups and watch dogs can start out with some pretty noble goals and objectives.  But none of these organizations really plan for an exit strategy.  In other words, What are we going to do when we've achieved our goals?

By the time this question rears it's head, the organization has already become a bloated bureaucracy with revenue streams in the form of donations and public funding that has employed administrators, lobbyists, press secretaries. consultants, etc, etc.  One would think that, after achieving equality between the sexes in society, we all pat ourselves on the back and disband the organization and move on to something else.

But this isn't what happens.  Nobody wants to kill that golden goose.  Such an organization tries to justify it's existence (along with the revenue streams and guaranteed job security) by raising concerns about a backslide--the idea that all the reforms and legislation that was passed for women's rights would get rolled back if they left the scene. 

For the record, I see this as a legitimate concern.  But I would also argue that it would take a lot less money, personnel and resources to stand sentry and safeguard what you have achieved than what you needed to pass these reforms to fundamentally transform a society. 

Also,  I would argue that as time passes, the need to safeguard these reforms would be a lot less pressing.  It's been over a century since slavery ended.  Yet, if an organization such as the NAACP were to disband tomorrow, I doubt we'd see people rolling back the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and putting black people back in chains.  Likewise, my experience in the workforce has seen women working in many different positions, including supervisory and management rolls and being compensated quite well for them.  None of it seems odd to me.  If NOW were to disband tomorrow, I doubt that we would see many women laid off or demoted as a result.

In the case of feminist organizations, this isn't what happens.  Sommers paints a picture of feminism begrudgingly accepting that some achievements have been made for equality between the sexes but there's still more work to be done (so keep those donations coming!).  They'll start to conjure up conspiracy theories such as The PatriarchyⓇ .  They'll invent and coin new concepts such as male privilege , microaggressions and internalized oppression that we must wage a righteous struggle against.

This would normally be so ridiculous on it's face that nobody would take it seriously.  It's one reason why I think that fewer women than ever are considering themselves as feminists and feminism organizations are trying to launch a public awareness campaign to clean up their image (which requires money so don't you dare stop donating!).  But Sommers describes millions of female students graduating from our top universities indoctrinated to believe in myths like the gender pay gap.  This rotten system must be torn down.

A Vote For the GOP Is a Vote For Civil Rights

Another election is upon us which means another discussion about the black vote.  It's that key voting block that supposedly decides the outcome of elections according to the wisdom of the main stream media, and consequently,  the voting block that both candidates must court during their campaign.  Race relations in the United States are currently at their lowest point in recent years and current polling indicates a tight race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  So the contest for the black vote takes on a new sense of urgency.

Black people tend to lean towards the Democratic party in elections and I'm always a little puzzled as to why.  What have the Democrats done for them lately?  What have the Democrats done for them, ever? The Republican party has historically been big on civil rights and other programs that have benefited the black population in this country. 

However, to hear some people tell it, you'd think the party was populated by a bunch of bigots that are one step away from lynching somebody, and the Republican party has been dumb enough to let them be tarred with this brush.

The sentiment I notice from black voters is that they aren't too happy with the Democratic party either, but they aren't disenfranchised enough to defect to the Republican party en mass any time soon.  The demographic seems to be stuck in some type of political purgatory.  I suspect that reminding black voters of all the civil rights initiatives brought forth by the Republican party might shift the mood of the black demographic.

Abraham Lincoln

I'm sure that nearly every American knows about President Abraham Lincoln and his role in ending slavery.  But what proportion of Americans know that Lincoln was a Republican?  The Republican party was formed in 1854 around the ideology of "free labor, free land and free men", an obvious repudiation of slavery and the southern plantation culture that perpetuated it.  Likewise, Lincoln himself held consistently abolitionist views during his entire political career and it led to his election to serve as President of the United States in 1860.  Shortly thereafter, some southern states began to succeed and form their own government while the sitting duck, Democratic president Buchanan, did virtually nothing to stop them.  A four-year war ensued that ended up being the bloodiest in our history and eventually led to Lincoln's assassination by a southern sympathizer who was upset when the South had clearly lost.

So clearly, the Democratic party was on the losing side of this one and needlessly provoked a bloody conflict to keep black people in chains.  I say "needlessly" because slavery as an institution in the Western world was on its way out.  Abolitionism was sweeping the globe leading many countries to outlaw it which would have eventually effected trading prospects for the US, or there would have been diplomatic pressures for us to abandon slavery.  Also, cotton can't be grown everywhere, it's a fairly demanding crop that needs land and a lot of inputs that are suitable for it and there was no more land available to the southern states to expand production.  The plantation owners grew wealthy and bought up all the suitable land, and southern land further west didn't have a suitable climate or soil conditions for growing cotton. 

Republicans wisely decided on a containment strategy for slavery and simply wait until it withered and died.  But when the situation escalated, they literally laid their lives on the line to free black slaves.

I only write all of this because there seems to be a contrary opinion that the Civil War being fought under Lincoln's leadership was never about slavery and that Lincoln was never opposed to the peculiar institution.  I don't know if this is because liberals in the Democratic party want to white-wash history or if it's some douche that's trying to look interesting at cocktail parties.  If so, I suggest just being polite and refill his glass while you call him an idiot.

"But it was really about 'state's rights'"

There was mention of state's rights during the era leading up to the Civil War, but it was often a euphemism for slavery.  Besides, if states rights are so important to you then would you allow states to decide on gay marriage and abortion? No?  Have a seat hypocrite!

"But this is ancient history and the Democrats involved are long dead.  We are a different country and a different people now"

So when are you going to shut up about reparations for slavery?  And if we can truly put this part of our history behind us then can you please stop calling everybody racists?  It makes you look like a trained seal and history shows pretty clearly who the racist party in America is (it's a word that begins with D and ends with rat).

I'm not inventing straw men, here.  I've actually had these conversations with people!  Granted they aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, but still...

13th, 14th and 15th Amendments

It could be argued that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in Confederate territories was technically an executive order made by necessity in wartime and can be later rescinded, overturned or challenged in court.  Lincoln and Congressional Republicans preempted these concerns by leading efforts to secure freedom for blacks and enfranchise them with the rights normally granted to white Americans by passing a series of amendments.

The 13th amendment abolished slavery with the notable exception that it can be used as punishment for a crime.

The 14th amendment broadly defined citizenship to include all individuals born within US territory.  The intention was to negate the Dred Scott decision and to legally characterize a people that wouldn't likely have any legal documentation, such as slaves, as citizens.  However, this amendment is now biting us in the ass since there's a class of citizens that were born in the United States by foreign nationals that have entered the country illegally.

The 15th amendment effectively allowed black men to vote.  It states that the right to vote can't be denied to a citizen based on color or previous condition of servitude (but says nothing about gender; that will have to wait until the 19th amendment).

After sacrificing blood and treasure in a costly war, the Republican party doubled-down on the emancipation of black slaves, nationally and permanently.  Voting in Congress was, more or less, partisan.  Representatives from Southern states didn't regain representation in Congress to debate the issue.  A southern succeeded state's restoration was conditional on them ratifying these amendments.  Lastly, the 14th amendment also prohibited a person that had participated in "the rebellion" from holding office.  So the passage and ratification of these amendments was pretty much a guarantee.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866

Clauses from the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments contained language that allowed Congress to pass laws to enforce its provisions.  One of these acts was the Civil Rights Act of 1866.  The law reaffirmed citizenship of former black slaves and their equal protection under the law.  There was still enough Republican support for the bill to override Democratic President Andrew Johnson's veto (requires a 2/3 majority in both houses).

Unfortunately, the constitutional wall dividing federal powers from state powers was nearly insurmountable at this time.  The original authors of the Constitution was well aware of abuses under British rule and also wanted to get buy-in from the states for ratification.  Consequently, they limited federal power over the states.  The Constitution guarantees the states a representative form of government, but pretty much allows them to run their affairs as they see fit.  Supreme court decisions rarely intervened on the state level.  This may seem odd to us today, but it allowed a politician to be quite liberal and progressive on the federal level while ruling with an iron fist on the local level.

What all this means is that, despite the best of intentions, the secessionists, the former slaveholders and anybody else who bet on the losing side of the Civil War still wielded considerable influence on the local level making the Civil Rights Act of 1866 completely ineffective.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871

Democrat secessionists and former slave holders might have lost the Civil War but they weren't going to accept defeat anytime soon.  As far as they were concerned, this was a country for white folks and they weren't going to give up their privileged status any time soon.  Jim Crow Laws were passed to marginalize and disenfranchise blacks, despite the 15th amendment explicitly giving them the rights to vote.  Black people can be charged for crimes with very little evidence and based on hearsay, and face trial with very little representation.  A guilty verdict was virtually guaranteed and carried sentences that were harsh in proportion to the crimes.  The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups terrorized black populations all across the South and their atrocities were gaining national attention.

Republican President, and former Union General, Ulysses S. Grant petitioned a Republican controlled Congress full of Representatives that were former abolitionists and Union supporters to grant him the means to effectively deal with the KKK.  Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1871 in record time (about 1 month).

The Act, allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus and use federal troops to intervene on the state level to enforce civil rights laws while bringing members of the KKK to justice.  President Grant didn't hesitate to use these provisions and effectively destroyed the KKK in the south.  Once again, the Republican party doubles down in favor of civil rights for blacks.

Posse Comitatus Act of 1878

U.S. Grant might have been a very able general and a staunch supporter of black civil rights, but this doesn't make one a good politician.  Grant's administration was rocked by scandals entailing corruption and embezzlement during the gilded age of American history where corporate tycoons were dictating policy and purchasing influence.  Economic prospects were also abysmal for the typical American (even if he wasn't black).  Grant proved naïve in dealing with them and it pretty much killed any hope for a third term as president.

At about this time, Reconstruction and the enforcement of federal civil rights laws with troops garrisoned in the south was becoming a contentious issue with southern Democrats and they started gaining representation in their state legislatures and Congress.

Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president in 1876 in a bitterly contested election.  It was a very close election that resulted in a deal being made in which Hayes would get the electoral votes he needed to win in exchange for promising to withdraw federal troops from the southern states, formally ending Reconstruction.

Hayes was also a champion of black civil rights and had designs of his own to realize it.  Unfortunately, Democrats also gained a majority in Congress for the first time since the end of the Civil War.  This, in conjunction with the perception by much of the public that Hayes won the presidency in an illegitimate election, greatly diminished his ability to govern.  He would only serve one term.

Democrats promptly passed legislation that defunded federal garrisons and troops in the southern states and returned those states to home rule.  Democrats quickly followed up with passage of the Posse Comitatus Act that Hayes was compelled to sign in order to receive appropriation for the country's military.  The Act effectively barred the federal government form using federal troops to intervene in state affairs, allowing local governments in the south to continue disenfranchising blacks without federal government interference.

By 1881 (the end of Hayes's single term) we see the Democratic party consistently thwart Hayes's attempts at enforcing civil rights for blacks.  Hayes was first in a long line of mostly Republican presidents until World War II that would find resistance in advancing civil rights for blacks primarily due to meddling by Democrats and the diminished authority that the federal government had on the state level.

Of the few Democratic presidents:

Grover Cleveland was a Democratic president that was reluctant to enforce federal civil rights laws on the state level.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist.

Franklin D Roosevelt was more mixed in his approach to civil rights.  Blacks were among the beneficiaries in a lot of New Deal programs, but everybody was suffering during the Great Depression and federal budgets were rapidly expanding due to World War II and spending on the New Deal programs while running up a huge debt at the time.  Arguably, FDR needed all the manpower he could get and keep the country as unified as possible to wage war against the Axis powers, so his civil rights actions seem to have been more of a necessity than any moral conviction.  Conversely, Americans of Japanese descent fared badly under FDR.

Harry Truman was upset over how black war heroes were being treated and desegregated the military by executive order.

Civil Rights Act 1957

We see that only Truman and FDR were Democrats that had a halfway decent view of black civil rights but their acts brought wrath from Southern Democrats, and compared to Republicans like Lincoln and Grant, they were very limited in scope.  The fact remained that segregation and open discrimination against blacks pervaded American society.  This situation was starting to come to an end under the administration of another Republican president--Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower presided over two landmark events in regards to race relations in this country.  First, he deployed federal troops in support of a recent Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to enforce desegregation of a high school in Arkansas in defiance of Arkansas' Democratic governor.

Second he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which created the Civil Rights Commission and levied penalties for coercive and discriminatory voting practices that disenfranchised blacks.  Passage through Congress wasn't a partisan vote strictly speaking, but it did have overwhelming Republican support while Democrat support was more mixed.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans overwhelmingly passed the bill by a vote of 197-19 while Democratic support was more split with a vote of 118-107.  Republicans in the Senate unanimously supported the bill by a vote of 43-0 while Democratic support was more tepid (29-18).

The Civil Rights Bill also had the notable distinction of being held up by the longest Senate filibuster in history led by Strom Thurmond (a Democrat at this time), and being virtually gutted by an up-and-coming Democratic Senator, and future President, Lyndon B. Johnson, making the law almost completely ineffective.

It's at this point in history that we are noting a schism forming in the Democratic party between Southern Democrats and their more progressive Northern kin.  Democratic support for the bill tended to come from Northern Democrats.  Meanwhile Southern Democrats staunchly opposed the bill and were willing to go on record.  In 1956 the Southern Manifesto was written declaring opposition to racial integration.  Of the 99 signatories to the resolution, 97 of them were from the Democratic Party!

Republicans, on the other hand, were more unified in the law's passage.  Despite Democrats in the Senate led by LBJ gutting the original bill that called for more enforcement  provisions, it still required Eisenhower's Vice President, Richard Nixon, to assure its passage.

Even at this point in our history, we see nearly unanimous support for civil rights for blacks from the Republican party while Democrats still attempt to stonewall and derail their efforts.  Liberal whitewashers of history may begrudgingly acknowledge the Republican role in freeing slaves and giving them the vote, but would try to convince the public that the Republican party has changed their position on the matter and it's really the Democratic party that are champions of civil rights.  The Civil Rights Act of 1957 debunks this myth.  It was the first modern civil rights law and an exclusively Republican achievement. This achievement was quickly followed up with the Civil Rights Law of 1960 in an attempt to strengthen the 1957 Act, also signed by Eisenhower.  If these Acts didn't go far enough in securing the civil rights for blacks, it was because of Democratic meddling.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Democratic tradition of flip-flopping seems to have it's origins in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

About a decade after his obstructionism to civil rights during his time in the Senate, Democrat president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This is the quintessential civil rights act and the piece of legislation effectively desegregated America while offering equal protection and treatment under the law.  It also allowed the federal government to intervene on the state level via its power to regulate interstate commerce.

The bill got very broad support from both the Republican and Democratic parties.  In the House of Representatives, Republicans voted 138-34 in favor of the bill.  Democrats also voted 152-96 in favor.  In the Senate, Republicans voted in favor, 27-6.  Democrats voted 46-21 in favor.  Opposition to the bill tended to come from representatives and senators from the southern states.

I can believe that Congress might not have been the same body that obstructed the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.  It's members could have changed over the years due to elections of more progressive public servants.  But why did LBJ change his mind on the issue?  A decade before, he was clearly opposed to civil rights issues and did everything he could to kill the 1957 Act.  Did he really have a change of heart?

Or was LBJ simply capitalizing on the massive civil unrest and angst of the American public over the issue and used the legislation to insure Democratic dominance? 

The Act of 1964 was passed and signed at the pinnacle of the civil rights movements.  It is an era of American history that is almost as well documented in history books as the American Civil War.  And there are still many people alive that remember living during this time, while people that remember living during Eisenhower are rapidly dwindling and the ones that lived during Lincoln are, most certainly, dead.  So despite the Republican party being the originators of civil rights and consistently championing them all through America's history, people give credit to the party that was in dominance during the passage of the more recent 1964 Act.

"What have you done for me lately?"

Every man has been in this situation.  You dote upon your wife/girlfriend and children for years.  And you must continue to do so.  Let too much time pass between favors or romantic gestures and your own family starts to complain and resent you.  This is life and Eddie Murphy did a comedy bit with it (see below).





It's funny because it's true.

The same thing happens in politics.

Heck, the same thing has been happening since the Garden of Eden!

What have the Republicans done for black people lately?

What have the Democrats done for black people lately?

Well, here's the issue.  We've done all that we can.

Black people have the vote.  They have equal opportunity.  Equal housing.  Equal job prospects.

What else do they need?  Minority quotas?  Done that.  Have the t-shirt.

Heck, we even elected a black president!

What rights or privileges does a white person have that a black person does not?

I can understand why we don't ask these questions out loud.  The first person that does so will be voted out of office so fast his head would spin.  But this doesn't stop a lot of people from thinking it.

And certainly, politicians could stump on equality all the want.  They may even come up with some commissions or blue ribbon committees, but there won't be anything actionable coming from them because all the necessary stuff has been done.

During one of Donald Trump's campaign speeches, he asked black voters what do they have to lose (by switching parties).  This is a good start but doesn't go nearly far enough.  It might be worth reminding people of the long laundry list of Republican initiatives throughout history that gave black people the rights they have today; the blood they've shed; their tenacity as the Democratic party thwarted them at every turn.  And the fact that the Democratic party didn't really get on board with civil rights until it was politically advantageous to them.

Remember who is the party of Lincoln.

Insomnia, Mental Illness and Logical Fallacies

As an individual that has studied in the STEM fields and actually work in the field, I've always found psychology as a field of study to be underdeveloped as a scientific discipline.  What I mean by this is that, for as long as the field of psychology has been around, it should have more of a solid intellectual and factual foundation that we often see in STEM fields such as physics, chemistry and biology.  Factual foundations that are well proven and supported by evidence often result in the development of technologies and knowledge that actually improve the quality of our lives.  But we don't see this in psychology. Much of psychology is mired in wishful thinking, logical fallacies and unsubstantiated claims.  In itself, this isn't too bad.  New fields of study often have very little information to work with and researchers have to invent ways to investigate poorly understood phenomena, so there's bound to be missteps and lines of investigation that bare no fruit.  It's when such underdeveloped fields are used to influence and dictate policy, which in turn directs the course of research in that field, resulting in the self-perpetuating cycle of the ignorance that I see in psychology that is such a serious problem.  Since psychology has this impact on our lives, we mistakenly treat it as a mature science on the level of STEM fields when it clearly isn't.

This has been a recurring thought for me for many years and a recent article in The Conversation has compelled me to write about where I see the field of psychology going wrong.  The Conversation intends to describe the link between insomnia and mental disorders, even though the cause still isn't clear, and I currently see no way that they can get much closer to the truth because of several logical fallacies being committed.

Questionable Cause (aka: cum hoc ergo propter hoc)

The logical fallacy of questionable cause occurs when somebody concludes that one event causes another event simply because they typically happen or exist together.  As an example, one might look outside and see dark clouds in the sky and rain.  When considering these two events occurring simultaneously, one might conclude that the rain is causing dark clouds to appear. Such a conclusion is obviously absurd.  The phenomenon is understood well enough that even uneducated people know that it's actually the dark clouds causing the rain and not vice versa. Or one fails to consider that both the rain and the dark clouds can share the same root cause (oversaturation of moisture in the air).

It's when the phenomenon isn't well understood, such as depression and insomnia, that we can inadvertently commit the questionable cause fallacy.  In this case, it's has been assumed for decades that insomnia is a symptom of depression and other mental disorders.  Nobody, as far as I can determine, had seriously considered that insomnia might be causing mental illness.

Literature often describes insomnia being comorbid with other mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),  post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and even bipolar disorder. Also, according to the article:

The relationship between insomnia and mental illness is bidirectional: about 50% of adults with insomnia have a mental health problem, while up to 90% of adults with depression experience sleep problems.

If insomnia is comorbid with mental illness in at least half of the cases, then concluding that mental illness is causing the insomnia, is a textbook case of Questionable Cause.  I can understand the leap in logic.  We often see patients with chronic conditions such as arthritis or acid reflux having difficulty sleeping.  Normal sleep patterns return when the condition is effectively treated or managed.  So I can see that some people might assume that this pattern holds in the case of mental illness.  Except, nobody has ever proved this!  Psychologists assumed that this was true for mental illness as well and ran with it.

It was only until recently that psychologists have begun to question the assumption that insomnia is merely a symptom of mental illness.  According to "The Good Night Study" (Gosling, et al):

The relationship between insomnia and depression has received considerable attention in the past decade. Focus has shifted from the view that insomnia is a symptom, or sequala, of depression to one in which it is conceptualised as a related but not totally dependent phenomenon. Supporting this, insomnia is commonly unresponsive to otherwise successful treatment for depression, being the most common residual symptom following completion of either pharmacological or psychological depression treatment, and the timing of insomnia onset more often than not precedes the onset of a depressive episode.

 As someone who is standing outside looking in, this idea seems obvious to me.  If insomnia is comorbid with other mental disorders, then it's possible that mental illness might be caused by insomnia or that they share a root cause.  This possibility should have been investigated a lot sooner!  Also, consider that we've been raised from the time we were wearing diapers that getting a good night sleep is crucial to good health and well-being--including mental well-being.  Yet, psychology hasn't considered that insomnia could be causing mental disorders until only a decade ago??  Better late than never, I guess, but it shows how the Fallacy of Questionable Cause could allow a paradigm to be established that ends up derailing research in a field that is still seeking good models for mental function.

Appeal to Popularity (aka: Argumentum ad Populum)

The logical fallacy, Appeal to Popularity, is known under several different names--Appeal to Belief, Appeal to Consensus, Appeal to the Masses and the Bandwagon Fallacy.  All of these labels refer to the idea that something must be true because a lot of people say or believe that it's true.

The textbook example of this fallacy was that everybody "knew" that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun, the other planets and the stars all orbited the Earth, which was fixed and motionless.  This was known as the Ptolemaic Model of the universe and this model of the universe endured for over a thousand years.  You would think that this was an awfully long time for an idea to endure that was so obviously wrong!  How backwards they must have been!

Except that the wrongness of the Ptolemaic model wasn't obvious at all!  The people that lived in the past didn't arbitrarily pick a theory and threaten all dissenters with death if they disagreed. The model was very successful at making accurate predictions of movements of the sun, moon and planets in the sky for over a millenia.  Rest assured, these predictions were often a matter of life and death.  Older societies often took cues when to sow and harvest their crops based on the locations of the stars, moons and planets.  This model also informed religions about when they should observe certain holidays and holy days.  The Ptolemaic model worked very well as a celestial model and was quite comprehensive for it's time.  There was only one problem: It was wrong! 

The Ptolemaic model of the universe represents a textbook example of a theory that many people believed in because it apparently explained so much about our world, but it still ended up being wrong.  So we can't necessarily assume that a theory is correct based upon its explanatory power. Later, more accurate and precise heliocentric models of the universe faced much resistance exactly because so many people believed in the Ptolemaic model.  For me, the Ptolemaic model is a textbook example of how strong of a headwind the appeal to popularity can have on the advancement of science.

Don't mistakenly assume that the science of today has shrugged off such a prejudice past.  It's hard to believe that with technology making our lives easier and our easy access to information that we still may not understand much about the world.  This is very apparent in the field of psychology. Even today, the mind is very poorly understood beyond the gross anatomy.  It's very much a black box--we don't know how it works beyond receiving and reacting to stimuli and information.  Black boxes should worry any researcher because it becomes too easy to assert a hypothesis as truth and build a whole field of study based on something that hasn't been proven--much like the Ptolemaic model.  It's too easy to commit the Fallacy of Questionable Cause, and yet, this is what the field of psychology has done and it's going to take decades to undo the damage.

The idea that mental illness is causing insomnia and not vice versa isn't just a minority opinion, it's actually dictating the standards of care in the practice of psychology. Recent research attempted to determine if cognitive behavior therapy conducted over the internet (CBT-I) was effective in reducing insomnia and had observed that patients' moods improved according to a recent research article on PubMed:

"If providing an online CBT-I intervention for patients with both insomnia and a comorbid psychological condition can yield improvements in sleep, as well as improvements in mood, this suggests that patients can initiate treatment for insomnia, even in the presence of psychological symptoms of depression or anxiety. That is, patients may not have to wait to seek help for insomnia until their psychological distress is fully resolved. This is of importance given that some clinicians believe patients with insomnia and comorbid psychological symptoms cannot benefit from insomnia treatment until the psychological issue is resolved, particularly if that intervention is conducted online. "

The passage makes it quite clear that the field of psychology regards insomnia as a symptom of mental illness and that it seems to be standard practice--or the practice of a large portion of practicing psychologists--to delay treatment of insomnia in favor of treating the psychological distress.  What justified this approach besides the prejudices of psychologists?

Now that the idea that insomnia can cause mental illness has been raised, the field will start to reevaluate how mental illness is studied and treated, right?

You wish!

Let's consider another logical fallacy.

Appealing to Authority (aka: Argumentum ad Veracundia)

The logical fallacy, Appeal to Authority, refers to an argument that must be true because somebody in authority has said it is true.  This argument is persuasive because people in authority are assumed to have access to knowledge that the rest of us don't have.  Also, many authority figures can be charming and persuasive as well as skilled in their practice.  It's one reason they became authorities to begin with.

When it comes to science, it's important to note that legitimate authorities (not crackpots pretending to be authorities) often are more knowledgeable then the general population in the subjects that they study, practice and do research in, so opinions of authorities in psychology should carry some weight in discussions about the practice of psychology and it's social and political implications. But how can one tell who the authorities are?  One would think that a psychologist is an authority in psychology, right?

Here's an experiment you can try: The next time you visit your doctor, ask him what's the last research article he or she has read and when?  He doesn't have to be a psychologist, he could be another specialist or even your general physician.  Don't even ask him what the article is about.  Just ask him to tell you the title!!!  I'd say 9 out of ten times he wouldn't be able to give you an answer.  It is likely to have been years since he's read any research, assuming he ever did in the first place!!!

This isn't to say that he isn't a legitimate authority on health and medicine.  He still knows more than you.  But he's practicing with knowledge that he acquired during medical school and his residency which may be years to decades out of date!  Of course he's required to take continuing education where he can glean some information on modern developments, but it isn't nearly as rigorous as medical school.  Left to his own devices he may be practicing medicine using science that has been obsolete for decades.

So who is reading all that research and using it to dictate evaluations, diagnosis and treatments?  Well, the authorities are!  Who are they?  They're the different medical associations and government agencies.  They're the ones  that actually evaluate research and create standards of care within their respective fields based on it.

So your doctor isn't getting his knowledge from research journals, he's getting his knowledge from authorities above him (or the reps that are selling drugs or medical devices).  Your doctor is just following a flowchart and using checklists.  He may be very competent at doing this and may even have knowledge of the underlying causes of your problem, but when he's diagnosing and treating you, he's following a flowchart.  Anybody questioning the checklist and standards of care will be greeted with Appeals to Authority.  It's assumed that the authorities are reading all the research and incorporating it into policy and standards of care.  "We treat the mental illness instead of the insomnia, Dr. Smith, because the ABC Association and XYZ Agency recommends it."

So current discoveries in the doctor's specialty won't impact how he practices until the research is evaluated by the authorities above him and enshrined as policy.  That seems to be a pretty straight-forward method of correction except this is where new ideas meet resistance in much the same way as the heliocentric model of the universe encountered resistance from people who had an investment into the Ptolemaic model. And it happens for several different reasons ranging from no-need-to-fix-what-isn't-broken to people thinking that the new paradigm somehow undermines their authority on the subject and end up resisting it solely on principle. 

This resistance is encountered in any field and often explains the observation that science advances one funeral at a time.

Even if a psychologist does read research journals and keep up on current findings, while still finding time to perform his other duties and responsibilities, it's not going to matter much. He must still follow the standard of care set up by the authorities.  So in the case of insomnia and mental illness, he must regard insomnia as the symptom  (it will be specified as such in his checklist for diagnosis) and not a cause, and then select a treatment from a list of approved or recommended treatments by the same authorities to manage a mental disorder that isn't insomnia.  Deviating from these standards too much could be the quickest way to lose his license or get sued for malpractice.  If the worst comes to pass, he can at least say that he followed the standards of care and let the bureaucrats argue about whether it's the right thing to do.

The best scenario in such cases would be for a psychologist to read the research and realize that both cost and the risk of adverse side effects are quite low and try to treat the insomnia in his patient with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the hope that the symptoms of his mental illness subside.  Then he will concurrently treat the mental illness with the appropriate recommended therapy to keep the authorities happy.  But if the treatment for insomnia does resolve the comorbid disorder, he will have a difficult time convincing anybody of the efficacy of treating insomnia.  "Of course his condition improved, Dr. Smith.  You treated his depression with the recommended therapy and his sleep problems abated."

This is just one example how Appeal to Authority can be detrimental to advances in psychology.  This isn't as much of a problem in other medical and STEM fields (although it can still happen) because outcomes are more easily measurable and the results tend to speak for themselves.  But it's easy to see how logical fallacies can be institutionalized in the field of psychology and retard further advances precisely because so little is known about the brain and the mind.

So what's the point?

We all know that failing or neglecting to treat a condition often makes the condition worse when given enough time.  Perhaps many cases of mental disorders is simply insomnia that has persisted untreated for too long.  Too many of us are living stressful lives.  We check Facebook or play Candy Crush in bed instead of going to sleep.  And it's always rush, rush, RUSH during our waking hours! How long can the mind function normally in the absence of adequate sleep before degradation occurs?  I know that if I miss only a day or two of good sleep, I start getting easily irritated, I lose my temper more easily, I feel disconnected from relationships with other people and my work, I lose hand and eye coordination, etc.  Imagine the state of mind when going months to years without a good night sleep!

Also, let's not forget how this can influence policy when politics get involved.  Consider this:  A child of about grade school age has difficulty sleeping at night for a variety of different reasons.  He wakes up and always comes to school tired.  It becomes difficult for him to pay attention in class.  He's sluggish in recess.  Other children don't want to play with him.  He gets easily agitated and loses his temper over minor things.  He won't sit still. He has emotional outbursts. He fidgets and daydreams.  His grades suffer and the teachers are at the end of their wits.

The child gets referred to a counselor by a school principle or administrator that has incentives from the government to identify children with disabilities so they can petition for government aid.  The child is brought to his first appointment with the counselor by his parents who also have a vested interest in a diagnosis for a mental disability so they can convince themselves that their divorce isn't what's screwing up little Timmy.  The counselor, who is on the government dole, has an incentive to find some type of disorder or disability for the sake of job security.

After an hour meeting with little Timmy, the counselor comes up with a diagnosis of ADHD.  How?  Did the counselor do a brain scan?  A blood test?  No, no.  He used a checklist!!!  It's very probable that all little Timmy needed was a good night sleep!!  But no.  We have a huge bureaucracy with incentives to find things wrong with people, being advised by another group of people that refused to consider insomnia as a cause of mental or behavioral disorders because of the logical fallacies that I've described above.

Has anybody noticed that parents don't seem to be putting their children to bed at reasonable hours like they used to?  I'm seeing parents with toddlers and infants in malls, theaters and restaurants at 9, 10 even 11 o'clock at night, even on weekdays!  Meanwhile, diagnosis of behavioral disorders are skyrocketing, especially among children.  Is this just correlation or something more?


In the meantime little Timmy simply gets diagnosed with ADHD.  Nobody seems to consider that Timmy just needs sleep.  At best, the counselor may decide that Timmy needs therapy.  I'm also a big fan of therapy, especially CBT.  It has the potential to help a lot of people.  The catch is that you need patience and time.  The patient needs to develop new habits and new engrams that become reinforced cognitively.  It could take from months to years to see results.  This time frame won't be good enough for Timmy's teachers or parents.  They want a solution, NOW!

So the counselor refers Timmy to a psychiatrist to prescribe ritalin--A STIMULANT!!

I would call this government sanctioned malpractice and encourage everyone else to think twice before insisting that the government should manage our healthcare!


I can already here you mommy bloggers huffing and puffing about how your child is different and he really does have this phantom disorder.

I only have one question, "Where's his father?"  

"But it's in the genes, you know!"

Yes, I know, I know.  A scatter-brained, easily distracted mother ends up raising a scatter-brained, easily distracted child.  Color me shocked!

According to Sleepdex:

• Schizophrenia (2.2 million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders.
• Anxiety disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social phobia. (40 million in US each year) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Schizoaffective Disorder (under a million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Dissociative Disorders (under a million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Panic disorders (6 million in US each year) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders

Insomnia may not cause only ADHD, but can possibly be the cause of a variety of mental disorders ranging from panic disorders to schizophrenia!  Yes, this is a hypothesis, but if psychology and psychiatry are still grappling with root causes to mental disorders, then I might as well toss this idea out there and see who runs with it.  All these disorders that are being treated as individual and distinct disorders might simply be symptoms of the same underlying disorder--that disorder being insomnia!  This isn't a far fetched idea considering that medical disorders can exhibit different symptoms and complications in different people.  Consider diabetes as an example. The list of symptoms for diabetes is quite broad and varies on an individual basis. We may treat the different symptoms and complications in diabetics but we also give much attention to persuading all diabetics to adopt a much more healthier lifestyle as well as encouraging other people to live healthy lifestyles to avoid diabetes and its health complications in the future.  We must start to think the same way about mental disorders.