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Sober Analysis Is Not Unpatriotic
Coffee: Check.
Biscuits and marmalade: Check.
Classical piano music: Check.
Apricot nectar: Check.
Now then, hiking through the online thicket, the common theme that emerges from across the political spectrum is that in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump paints a distorted and unnecessarily bleak picture of America. The candidate’s canvas, we are told by Slate’s Franklin Foer, is, “an anarchic mess, beyond the technocratic solutions proposed by desiccate, politically correct elites.” Over at CNBC, I read where our friend and Ricochet commentator John Pohoretz laments, “The America Donald Trump portrayed is a horrible place, awash in barbarity, crime, disorder, decay, deceit, rigging, cheating, exploitation.” Podhoretz continues:
I could be fancy and find myself a quote from Tocqueville, but it’s really the philosopher Merle Haggard who said it best: “When you’re running down my country, Hoss, you’re walking on the fighting side of me.” Trump spent nearly 77 minutes running down my beloved country, and I don’t take kindly to it.
On ABC, Chuck Todd opined that, “He painted a dark picture of where America stands today.” To which former Clinton Administration operative George Stephanopoulos said, “And, Martha Raddatz, a pretty dark speech labeled Hillary Clinton the candidate of death, destruction terrorism and weakness and mass lawlessness.” Over to you, Martha: “Yeah. If Americans are not scared for their safety before tonight, they are tonight,” she said. The diversity of opinion, which varied between sycophancy and unanimity, was numbing.
Here, I turn off the music, push aside the biscuits, take a gulp of coffee and point a few things out, not least of which is that here in Memphis, Trump’s diagnosis sounds remarkably like our local newscast, which has become little more than a daily police blotter of death, mayhem, theft, a burgeoning anarchic class, and governmental corruption and ineptitude. Last night’s news, for example, featured the usual reports of various shootings around town along with a hideous story of a pregnant lady who was raped at gunpoint and went into labor as a result.
The city of Memphis barbecue, Beale Street, and Graceland is fast descending into a jungle of deadly violence in which no one and no part of town is safe. To date, 129 people have been killed here, 103 of them black, 62 between the ages of 18 and 29. A total of four of these 129 deaths involved the police, while two Memphis police officers have been killed in the line of duty in the last 12 months. The violence has reached such a level here that on Beale Street a $10 cover charge has been introduced for those wishing to take in the music clubs and barbecue joints after 10PM in an effort to weed out local predators. Why? From WREG:
It was only a week ago when Officer Verde Smith was killed after police said Justin Welsh shot three people and hit Smith with a stolen car. The week before, a stampede involving hundreds of people broke out downtown. And the week before that, Myneshia Johnson was shot and killed on Second Street just a block away from Beale. The teen and two other people were shot when a man sprayed the crowd with an assault rifle.
And that’s just in the tourist district. This is the reality of life across Memphis these days and across much of the country at large. Even the New York Times, hardly an appendage of the Trump campaign, admitted that, “Many of Mr. Trump’s facts appear to be true,” though the Times was quick to add sufficient qualifiers and contextual interpretations of the data to soften the stark reality that civil society is unraveling before our eyes. But they did not dispute, for example, Trump’s contention that homicides spiked by 17 percent in 50 of the country’s largest cities last year, or that homicides are up by 50 percent in Washington DC or 60 percent in Baltimore, or that Barack Obama’s hometown has seen more than 2,000 shooting victims this year alone, or that approximately 180,000 illegal immigrants who have been ordered to be deported are currently moving freely about the country.
I will grant you until the cows come home and Gabriel’s trumpet sounds that Donald Trump is a badly, and perhaps fatally, flawed messenger, but the message remains and the facts will not change themselves. You can’t extinguish a fire by shooting the fire alarm. So what is it that accounts for the anger at Trump’s having identified a reality that a great many Americans see with their own eyes on a daily basis? Here, I think the inestimable Charles Murray put his finger on an important tendency in a recent interview with Jim Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute:
Well, you’ve got two kinds of problems with experts, and one of them has to do with all of the mistakes that they have made. And that is, we have had experts on how to do deal with poverty, how to deal with welfare, how to deal with crime, how to deal with other things over the past 50 years, who have recommended policies that have been disastrous. The experts have been simply wrong. They were wrong about school busing; they were wrong about “prison only makes people worse” back in the 1970s when the prison population dropped even though crime was soaring; again and again you’ve had people who were experts who were advocating and passing policies that ordinary people looked at and said, “This is absolutely nuts.” Affirmative action, by the way, sort of falls into that category as well. So one problem is that they’ve been wrong.
Another problem with the experts — and I think that this gets to a lot of the visceral anger that people have — is that the experts have been recommending policies for other people for which they do not have to bear the consequences. The case of immigration is a classic case where I can sit down with economists on both the left and the right, and we with great self-satisfaction talk about all of our wonderful analyses that show that this idea that immigrants are driving down wages of native-born Americans is way over-exaggerated; that immigration is essentially a net plus, so forth and so on… Those analyses may be right, but that does not change the fact that we aren’t the people who are like the carpenter who used to make $16 an hour, and he is losing work because contractors are hiring immigrant carpenters for $12.
Okay. So perhaps it’s an unpleasant mixture of those who, A) are disconnected from the implications of their own rules and policies, and B) those who understand the implications all too well, and therefore refuse to cede the floor to realisms that would call into question their general competence. Recall please Peggy Noonan’s insightful essay on the protected and the unprotected classes in America:
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment — another word for the protected — nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Indeed, and it was to those people that Donald Trump spoke during his acceptance speech. Yes, he spoke in “all caps” throughout the thing, and yes he was repetitive and long-winded. But with respect to John Podhoretz, it wasn’t Donald Trump who was running down our country, but rather the predators and thugs who roam our neighborhoods, far from the gated communities of the protected, who fill our local newscasts with atrocities and our lives with uncertainty. Trump merely confirmed that which a great many of us already see and understand, and he’s not unpatriotic for having done so.
It was sober analysis, not a lack of patriotism, that led Whittaker Chambers to write in the middle of the last century that:
It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
For his part, if Mr. Trump can curb his infantile vindictiveness and avert his gaze from Ted Cruz long enough to continue shining a much needed light not only on the crime and lawlessness that eats away at our country like a cancer, but on the air of approbation that circulates from the White House down to the editorial offices and outlets of the media and into the halls of academia which fuel that cancer, we may yet have a slim chance at restoring a great nation.
Published in Immigration, Law, Policing
Heh.
But Trump is so crass and vulgar and, and, and…common. I bet he likes beer and pizza. I bet he enjoys the sweet sweet sound of guitar played loud. Why, I bet he looks at a woman’s cleavage when he is introduced to her instead of absorbing her breathtaking intelligence and wisdom. We can’t have a commoner lead us!
No, what we need is a lying, duplicitous, elitist, criminal Ivy League lawyer turned career politician to guide our diverse, tolerant country towards the right side of history because…uterus?
The CRS offers the following counter-argument to your stats circa 2015, essentially claiming that we don’t know yet whether recent increases are an aberration or a trend –
With regard to Trump’s tone, my view of why it was labeled dark is simple – Trump is running his campaign by inciting fear – are you afraid you’ll never work again? blame illegal immigration. Are you afraid of mass shootings and terrorist attacks? blame the Democrats and their feckless policies that either ignore or encourage violence and extremism, and I will build a wall to protect you. Are you afraid of losing in the context of trade – blame the politicians and vote for me so I can raise taxes on imports.
Fear is a very effective tool to use, and both Hillary and Trump will use it. Trump will say the world is scary, I will protect you. Hillary will say Trump is scary, and I am the only one positioned to stop him. Both campaigns will rely primarily on fear to motivate voters. We’ll probably have record turnout.
An obvious straw-man. Trump’s remarks were received as dark because he primarily relied on fear to motivate voters. Hillary will do the same, but the media, fearing Trump more than Hillary because of his racism and his foreign policy proposals, will not characterize Hillary as using fear as a motivation for voters.
So what if it’s a strawman? Is this a debate class? Yes, Trump appeals to fears, fears that people feel. If somebody is a potential voter and says “I am worried about…X”, your response is to give them a long screed full of facts and stats to argue with them. That tells the person “Hey! You’re dumb and your feelings are dumb.” That alienates a voter. Nobody likes to be told their feeling are “wrong”. The standard conservative response to fear-mongering is to give a bunch of facts. Has that worked? That is a recipe for LOSING elections. Trump is using the Left’s playbook and just might beat them with it.
Excellent analysis Dave, as usual. Thank you. Pointing out the facts doesn’t make them less real.
So your plan is to lie and scare people? I guess this is why we have a republic, not a democracy.
Another Dave Carter gem!
I want to be Dave Carter when I grow up.
Where is the lying, Josh? There was an interesting conversation about crime earlier in the week – not sure if you were there.
I have lived in my town for 30 years. And when I see an increase in crime with my own eyes, don’t come back at me with stats.
Especially now that many crimes which were once felonies are now misdemeanors.
The elite classes are like Prince Prospero’s in the Masque of Red Death. They party away and pontificate while servants outside face the plague. The plague has entered their halls and they cannot still fathom what they themselves have wrought through their own stupidity and selfishness. So they deny for now and point some fingers. That phase shall end soon enough and I expect the giant orange oral venereal wart of man to be president. I hope he grows up a bit considering the magnitude of the tasks ahead but I’m not holding my breath. Nice article Dave.
So should we not speak the truth about the Black Lives Matter movement? Its supporters do not appreciate being told their feelings are wrong.
Identify the fears directly, sympathize with the fears, but tell the truth — both the facts that lead to the fears, and the facts that demolish false solutions. The problem with Trump’s playbook is the same as that of the Left: it may lead to political success in the short term, but the promises will turn up empty, and the failure will be ugly.
That said, I had no problem with the “dark” nature of the speech. These are serious times, and people’s fears aren’t based on the statistics, but on a real sense that something is about to snap. It’s appropriate for a leader to address that. My problem was the sweeping promises supported not by constitutional policies, but by one man’s will: “I alone can fix it.”
My plan is to win an election. People are already scared, long before Trump came along. You want to invalidate their feelings with a bunch of debate team ju-jitsu? Sure, I would rather win with a happy warrior proudly carrying the Conservative banner. But we don’t have that. We have Trump v Hillary. You know full well that that a vote for a third party or a write in or just staying home helps Hillary. If you want to take a nice warm bath in ideological purity and sanctimony while we lose to Hillary, be my guest. I want to win, even with an horribly imperfect candidate like Trump.
Herself is indeed the candidate of death – as are all the progressives. Abortion is their idol and they will stop at nothing to allow for free (meaning they want you and me to pay for it) and unlimited access to killing babies in their mother’s wombs.
As the old political saying goes: you can’t beat somebody with nobody.
I join you in that slim chance Dave, that Trump is our only option at this point in time to defeat Hillary Clinton and the party of death.
You’re correct. I didn’t phrase it quite like I wanted to. Facts and truth are important. Some fears are well-founded, other aren’t. Facts can help separate the two. Well founded fears are not to be invalidated and ignored.
I am not saying the original post is lying, I am assuming that, if we can’t use facts to win elections, we have to use lies. Maybe that is not what Metalheaddoc means when he criticize the use of facts in arguments.
Sober analysis may not be unpatriotic, but getting through this election (and the next four years) sober is probably going to be damned near impossible.
Thanks for this, Dave. I agree entirely.
The counter argument to all of Trump’s chicken little nonsense:
http://www.humanprogress.org/
Trump is demonstrably worse than Hillary. Do you want out of NATO and want to proliferate nukes, contrary to the Reagan foreign policy? Do you want to make light of racism? Do you want to tax imports? Do you want to gut the bill of rights? Do you want to kill innocent people because they are related to terrorists? Do you want to refocus federal resources domestically because you think the primary functions of the federal government are healthcare, education, and housing?
Trump wants to do all of these things. By voicing your support for Trump, I assume you agree with these positions. Perhaps you do not.
And I will enthusiastically drink to that.
I am less bothered by Trump’s recapitulation of the ‘dark’ side than I am by his frequent statements like “The crime and violence that afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean, very soon, come to an end,” and “Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”
Totally.
As with everything else, he’s going to do it all by himself, and do it so fast our heads will spin.
We don’t care how. And I’m not sure he could tell us if we did.
But since none of the nastiness is any fault of ours, all we will have to do is stand by and reap the fabulous rewards.
Cue the thunderous applause.
If you believe, as I do, that the rot that permeates much of society today is, to a large extent, related to the breakdown of key societal units, starting with the family, then there is nothing in Trump’s message to make you cheer (not even the word “family,” at least in the published transcript of his speech).
I don’t believe he’s ever going to make a speech about something like that.
EDIT: I checked his speech again, in the name of thoroughness. He does use the word ‘families’ (plural) seven times. Six references are in relation to American families who are victims of violence from illegal immigrants or from ISIS. The final one is an assurance that he will stand up for second amendment rights, so we can keep our families safe. This is not the sort of rhetoric I’m talks talking about or hoping for.
When the heck has anyone EVER supported every position of their chosen candidate?
There’s a thousand things I don’t like about Trump; but there’s 1,000 to the nth degree of things I don’t like about Hilarie. Josh, the people on this site are not stupid and your ham fisted manner is not persuasive.
We get it. The guy’s a jerk. (And we knew it already)
You assume incorrectly. I do not agree with all of those positions. I haven’t agreed with all the positions of anybody I have voted for, ever. Heck, I don’t even agree with myself all the time. But I sure as hell don’t agree with Hillary’s positions.
Using “demonstrably” requires that you demonstrate. Trump has words so far. Hillary has actions to be judged by. Criminal behavior. Libya in ruins. Dead people at Benghazi. That’s on top of her stated positions that I don’t agree with.
Yet you choose to vote for a racist over a non-racist. I find that endlessly fascinating.
[Editors’ Note: @joshfarnsworth, this is trolling.]
I think it’s unfair to chalk up the objections to Trump as distrust of the “common man”. I can’t speak for everyone but my distaste for the Republican nominee has little to do with intemperance and lack of erudition. IMHO the real problem with our choice this election season is that if you strike the words “Ivy League lawyer”, “career”, and “uterus” from your very apt description, you could be describing either candidate.
Trump discriminated against non-whites by denying them apartments. Trump donated to Hillary. But that’s alright with you?
Come on Josh. Accusations of using straw men after you use a “circa 2015” study using data collected from part of 2015 to set against the FBI’s 2015 report?
That’s pretty slipshod.
Murders were up 17% in 2015. Whether the increase in individual cities was “statistically significant” probably turns on whether your neighborhood has become the shooting gallery. The fact that 3/4 of cities saw supposedly statistically insignificant increases while 1/4 saw smaller statistically insignificant decreases is not insignificant.
The bulletpoint excerpt from the CRS is a parody.
Damn reality. Destroying the bien pensant philosophies of advocates for gun control, sentencing reform, cop bashing, open borders, massive Muslim immigration ad nauseam.
This is spot-on.
I was just pointing out that other people argue different statistics. I am not denying that crime is increasing where it is increasing. The question we always have to ask with the stats is – what do they mean? I think the possible explanations of the Ferguson effect, turf wars, and the draw down of law enforcement in the wake of Baltimore and Ferguson are all emboldening violent criminals. I just googled to find other statistics and a more even-handed analysis for purposes of discussion. I do not know enough about the statistics to know what is right, but my gut tells me its getting worse because there is a public campaign being waged against law enforcement by liberal activists not willing to let the truth get in the way of scoring political points to advance their own policy agenda.
Really? We should talk if that qualifies as “endlessly fascinating”. Because I can make it a lot more interesting.
If I had the chance, I would have voted for President Truman, someone who was known to be an anti-semite. If I had the chance, I would have given money and support to Schindler, a known liar, cheat, philanderer and all around scum bucket.
By saying that I am choosing to vote for a racist implies that that is the reason I am voting for him.
Calling me a racist doesn’t scare me. Accusing me of voting for a racist doesn’t scare.
And it sure as heck doesn’t change my mind.