Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, January 13, 2025
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42 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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It’s become accepted truth in the MAGA community that people are leaving Blue States in droves (drove: noun – a flock or herd) because they are hell holes and moving to Red States. And it is true that over the past few decades Red State populations have generally increased and Blue States have stagnated or declined. But, and this is anathema to a MAGA, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
First, we live in a capitalistic society, and the market sets the price for housing based on desirability. The cost of housing is often presented as one of the reasons people are fleeing, but isn’t the rising costs an indication that a lot of people really want to live there? It is true that it keeps people from moving there from lower housing cost states, and makes it harder for people just starting out to stay there, but we all know what happens to housing costs in areas with low desirability: they decline. I’m sure most of us have visited parts of Red and Blue states where industry has left, and there are enough empty and abandoned houses to show that the market has completely collapsed.
It’s also worth noting who is leaving, exactly. I don’t have the statistics, but from the people I’m aware of, a lot are retirees. If money is a problem for them, they can sell an expensive house here, and buy the same size house in Mississippi for a fraction of the price, leaving them a nest egg. And their Social Security benefits will stretch farther given generally lower cost of living. But you have to admit, these aren’t the people that are going to be starting new businesses or expanding old ones.
There are a lot more factors to consider, but bottom line, the Blue States remain highly desirable to enough people that housing prices are much higher than in most of the Red States.
Read something in the Times today that finally gave me some understanding of the non-Maga Trump voter.
It was an op-ed by novelist/screenwriter Amy Chozick — last seen whitewashing Elizabeth Holmes in the Times — describing her terrifying experience in the fires… fair enough. But her main point is that the the “story” of the fires doesn’t have a “protagonist.” She wants a “hero” to stand tall and… do something to make her feel better. She’s upset that the “town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith” can’t find a “lead character” to save us from this catastrophe.
Okay, so that’s pretty dumb. She is a writer. She should understand the difference between the actor and the fictional character he plays. And yet…
She goes on and on about how what we really need is someone like Rudy Giuliani on 9/11 — even though she immediately acknowledges that he’s a crook and a fraud and a bully. She also yearns for Andrew Cuomo during covid — although she also immediately acknowledges that he had to resign for, among other things, screwing up a big part of his covid response and then lying about it.
She says she wants a hero, but it’s clear that what she really wants is a Daddy. A Daddy who will tell her that everything is going to be all right, even if he is not only lying, but also stealing the funds that will help people.
And it doesn’t matter that these Daddies turn out to be frauds who we empower to loot our society, as long as he soothes her fee-fees now and tells her everything will be fine.
The fact is, everything won’t be fine. The people of LA County are still in the middle of the fires, and even when they’re out they’re looking at years of struggle to rebuild. The actual leaders she scorns for not being John Wayne — Newsom and Bass and anyone else in California politics — are doing the real work of trying to end the fires and help the people. But they all suck, because all that really matters is a big tough Daddy to say that he’s kill all the monsters under her bed.
I suspect she’ll be putting on the MAGA hat real soon.
Reposted from late yesterday:
Mister Bluster says:
Sunday, 12 January 2025 at 22:47
@Connor:..NYS, IL, MN residents are leaving in droves as well.
Is a drove a specific unit of measure?
Hotel bookings in D.C. are way down for Trump’s inauguration, even among protesters.
@Mister Bluster: From dictionary.com:
Drove
noun
1) a number of oxen, sheep, or swine driven in a group; herd; flock.
2) Usually droves. a large crowd of human beings, especially in motion:
They came to Yankee Stadium in droves.
@MarkedMan: @Jax:..drove…
Thank you for the reply.
I subscribe to the free version of Sinocism, a pretty detailed China analysis newsletter. For the most part free only gets summaries, but every few weeks we get the full newsletter. For the past few months Chinese leadership and official publications have been talking about “Big Data”. This struck me as odd because, in the West at least, Big Data isn’t a term we use anymore. Instead of the “next big thing” it’s become simply an input. But it appears this means something very specific and definitely scary to the Chinese leadership.
They are encouraging local and provincial officials to “Use Big Data to rapidly respond to citizen complaints”. If I’m reading this correctly, it means using machine learning developed algorithms to churn through the entirety of things like transactions (cash is almost dead in China, and every electronic transaction is registered with the government), internet searches, social media posts, school reports, the files the government keeps on everyone, traffic violations, police reports and, yes, actual complaints – but most likely those from the Resident’s or Village Committees, which are volunteer groups that, among other things, identifies people who are not toeing the Party line. So the idea is to constantly churn through all these things to identify trouble makers, and head them off before they can cause friction. Scary stuff.
@CSK: Interesting. Do you have a source?
@MarkedMan:
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-inauguration-2670804690/
Les Bezos’ shiny new rocket’s launch was scrubbed sue to unspecified issues (not weather). Apparently Xtarship’s 7th launch was also delayed.
I feel for the many Youtube channel’s that were all set up and very excited to bring the launches live…
Nice editorial about RFK written by Paul Offitt. (I am old enough that I actually took a rotation in pediatric infectious disease with Office’s mentor.) He illuminates more of RFK’s truly wacky ideas of which most people would not be aware. Everyone knows he is anti-vaccine. However, most wont know that he believes the polio vaccine caused an explosion in soft tissue cancers. First, an explosion never happened and second studies were done on kids vaccinated and unvaccinated and there was no increase in any kind of cancer. Next, he still believes that HIV was caused by poppers and AZT claiming AZT murdered masses.
Maybe the best part is that he is skeptical about the germ theory of disease. He believes that if we eliminate environmental toxins and consume natural nutrition, like raw milk, we will prevent all infectious disease. However wacky you think this guy is, he is probably worse.
https://archive.ph/5kDAq
Steve
@wr:
Many people crave certainty above all else, and a charlatan can project certainty about everything.
Some years ago, before the war in Iraq went full quagmire, so maybe 2004-5, I read an editorial somewhere that suggested the US should do all the things its detractors claimed ti was already doing. things like actually seizing the oil fields in Iraq and such.
It’s been 20 years, but the felon is intent on doing just that.
Not oil fields in Iraq, but he idea of taking the Panama canal is about as insane. Not to mention Greenland.
@wr: @MarkedMan: I read that Chozick piece this morning. I was somewhat comforted by commenters pretty much expressing the same reaction you and I had. Several comments to the effect that she wants a screenplay, divorced from reality, and that the people in charge are handling it as well as possible without a Mussolini. Meanwhile, GOPs can’t even wait til the embers are cool to second guess and try to score points. Seconding @MarkedMan: the real root problem is that an awful lot of people want to live in L.A.
George Lakoff talked about people accepting either a Strong Father or a Nurturant Family view of family life, and by extension, similarly framing their view of the world. A lot of people do indeed want a strong father, hence Trump, the Unitary Executive, and presidential immunity, because to conservatives strong daddy is so basic it must be in the Constitution somewhere. Why anybody would cast Trump as the strong daddy is a mystery for another time.
@Kathy: Trump Tower Panama City might work, but Trump Tower Nuuk?
@Mister Bluster:
You’re including births, deaths, and migration to and from overseas. The Census’s ACS measures inmigration and outmigration between states. For their most recent year 2023, Illinois has the fifth-highest outmigration and the third-highest net migration loss. New York and California are the highest. Minnesota is in the middle. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geographic-mobility/state-of-residence-place-of-birth-acs.html
My older sister moved to Covington TN from Carson City NV a few years ago. She said she wanted to be rural in a red state. She bought a McMansion on a golf course. Gated community. Of course, she’s maga-gaga.
She hates it that there’s no good sushi places and she has to drive so far to get to Costco.
Oh, and no good mobile groomers for her golden doodles.
Made herself miserable just to own the libs.
@becca:
National politics in microcosm.
@wr:
Here is an additional revelation for you—-the line between fiction and reality is blurred in many people’s mind—skewed towards entertainment. This has nothing to do with Academic IQ. It seems to be correlated with Emotional Intelligence. People that are knowledge smart but emotionally dumb, i.e. they are not capable of regulating their own emotional temperature, need an outside heating and/or cooling source to maintain equilibrium.
Feelings are the motivating factor of humans—some humans generate feelings based off facts. Many more cannot—they are cold-blooded reptiles emotionally and will go towards the best source, i.e another person, of heat or cool. That may be direct sunlight, a rock, a shadow, a crevice, etc.
Left-centered and, to an extent, right-centered politics are for emotional warm-blooded humans that are self-regulated and do not need an outside source of emotional well being.
In my opinion, this is the challenge of our time—to understand the rectify the external features of modern culture that has created, to use an entertaining characterization, a glut of lizard people. If, around the world, we continue to create more lizard people than mammals—we will pine for the days when they sought sources of heat like Trump. One has only to look at North Korea to see what a nation full of lizard people looks like—and what the practical results are.
@Jim Brown 32: I can’t argue with a word you say here. But I find this woman particularly infuriating on this score because she has worked as a screenwriter and she has worked with actors playing her characters. She is either the single dumbest person I’ve ever come across or she’s arguing in bad faith to get another little chunk of attention.
I know which side I fall on…
@wr: Is she a Trump supporter though.
Detailed allegations against Neil Gaiman. Oof, it’s Weinstein level of depravity, maybe not in quantity but definitely in quality.
@Neil Hudelson:
My partner read that and was almost crying.
@Fortune: “Is she a Trump supporter though.”
We’ve never spoken. I suspect not, given how much of her early work was about Hillary Clinton. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she decides she’s MAGA now.
@wr: So you saw a cat and it made you think about dogs, so you used the cat as an example of dogs.
For someone who calls the whaaaaambulance the moment someone dares to disparage them or their compadres, Fortune seems to be fishing for people to insult them and their compadres. WR didn’t take the very obvious bait the first time so Fortune just goes at it again. Keep trying, Fortune! Soon someone will insult you and then you can cry crocodile tears on here, it’s clearly what you are craving.
@Jim Brown 32: Very much so. I would mention that popular culture usually encourages the notion that one guy being in charge is how things get done. Rare is the a story in which a debating hero-committee saved the day. Of course, righteous rage is glorious, grants super-powers, and always wins.
Should the Steelers get a new head coach?
On the plus side, Tomlin has won a super bowl, lost another one, and has never had a losing season.
On the minus side, he hasn’t won a playoff game since the 2016 season.
The whole point of the season is the playoffs, and the whole point of the playoffs is the super bowl. Now, naturally you won’t get to the super bowl each year. If teams took turns, each would go once every 16 years. They don’t take turns, so some go far more often than that, some far less, and some have never even been there.
@Fortune: “So you saw a cat and it made you think about dogs, so you used the cat as an example of dogs.”
No. I read an op-ed in the Times and commented on it. More to the point, I read an article by a screenwriter who knows the difference between fiction and reality and is so scarred by what’s going on that she not only chooses that the world obey the rules of fiction fiction, but she demands it and damns all of those who are trying to make things better using the rules of reality.
And I suggested it may well be the story of a person moving from sanity to MAGA’s rejection of sanity.
Was this really so difficult for you to understand? Should I follow your example and stick to three-letter words?
@wr: I thought if it simplified it you’d see the mistake in your thinking. You’re using someone who you don’t know or even think is a Trumper as an example of a Trumper’s thinking. Ever since The West Wing liberals have had a problem distinguishing reality from fiction. All through the Obama years they worshipped him more than I’ve ever seen a Trumper worship Donald. These people refused to admit Biden’s in decline, and are afraid to criticize Carter’s taste in songs because they need the calming presence of an unquestioned leader. Most Trumpers want to see disruption, Democrats want to be nursed.
@Fortune: I realize that you are capable only of reading in terms of whether it is pro or anti Trump, but that is not what I was writing about, which you would have understood if you were capable of sounding out any words other than Trump and MAGA.
And I’m not using “someone I don’t know.” I’m commenting on a piece of writing published in the New York Times by “someone I don’t know.”
That you think saying “dog dog cat cat dog” is somehow “simplifying” an argument just shows — yet again — how completely incapable you are of critical thought.
I don’t know why you have chosen to cripple yourself intellectually so that you can’t allow any thought other than “Democrats bad, Trump good” into your head, but it must be bleak and boring to be like that. No wonder you spend your days trying to pick fights on the internet — at least that might distract you from your own emptiness.
@wr:
This is one of the reasons I harp on religion as a precursor for MAGA. Evangelicals especially, but not solely, are taught from an early age to look up to, and be guided by, a clown with a bouffant hairdo playing Daddy. Conservative religion, including conservative Catholicism and Judaism, is heavily patriarchal in their practice and their doctrine. The shift from bad-hair-preacher to Trump is obvious, including the careful blindness churches frequently show regarding corruption and sexual predation by their Daddies. The religious talent for hypocrisy shows in their indifference to Trump’s lies. And of course as long as you’re pleasing Daddy nothing else matters.
But the creative community does bear some responsibility for decades of the ‘cop who breaks the rules,’ trope and the, ‘Rambo’ trope. It’s lazy and amoral writing, which would be fine if it weren’t so universal. It’s always some lone actor doin’ what’s gotta be done.
I look forward to it.
@wr: Projecting confidence in times of crisis is a major part of being a leader. It helps people focus on what they have to do so they get through the present disaster, knowing that someone else is looking out for everyone.
And, it’s something that Democrats often don’t emphasize enough. All presidential cycles are a blur at this point, but I remember everyone on the left in one of the more open cycles (2020? 2004?) getting all up in arms over the details of which candidate had a better proposal for universal health coverage that they would be unable to pass.
And to the extent that California has leaders that can attempt to do give people confidence, they are being deliberately hobbled by shit throwers on the right who don’t know shit and are very loud about it.
Whether Twitty McTwitface is heading down the MAGA pipeline, or just frustrated, I have no idea (her article sounds bad).
Anyway, this is why I think we should nominate George Clooney (or another actor/spokesmodel) for President in 2028, with some quiet competent people in the background.
@wr:
You read an opinion about wildfires, it wasn’t about Trump and the author wasn’t as far as you know a Trumper. You turned it into a “Democrats good, Trump bad” story in your head. It’s funny.
@Fortune:
Oh. My. God. I thought you were one of the “Reading is Fundamental” people. It’s rather disappointing to learn that I am wrong and that you were, instead, a typical Republican, incapable of reading the damn words right in front of you. Oh well, at least I can now classify at the same level as JKB and Paul L.
@Ha Nguyen: What am I missing? I’m not going to pay the NYT for access.
@Fortune: Yes, indeed, you are rubber and I am glue. Very witty, very wise. And since that’s the total thought of any comment you’ve ever posted here, I think there’s no point pressing on.
Feel free to announce you’ve “won” over the stupid leftie, by the way. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings.
@steve: it astounds me that anti-vaxxers, who claim that childhood diseases started declining in the 20th century not because of vaccines but thanks to better sanitation, also turn around and question the germ theory of disease. How do they not notice the contradiction?
@Fortune: bwah-ha-ha! You can’t be serious! No one that I’ve ever seen has bowed down to a golden Obama statue, like a bunch of Trump supporters did at CPAC during his first administration; or made Obama superhero or holy man fan art, the way Trump fans regularly do; or adorned themselves with diapers or ear patches like Trump supporters did this past year because they so closely identify with their Dear Leader’s suffering.
I’ll give you 1/3 credit for Biden. He hasn’t declined anywhere near as much as righties claim, but it did take a lot of Democrats too long to admit that maybe he shouldn’t run again. It’s 1/3 credit rather than half because likewise, Trump’s supporters won’t acknowledge Trump’s even more obvious decline.
And as for Carter—your point is idiotic. Why should anyone criticize something that doesn’t need criticism? Carter had the right to choose whatever song he wanted for his funeral, and a lot of people like the song in any case.
@gVOR10:
Hard to see that working, since the Trump Hotel Panama City did not work, notably amid falsehoods concerning condo occupancy and unit value during development, followed by accusations of tax evasion. This, despite it being the tallest building in Panama City, which is saying something since the city’s skyline has the appearance of perhaps the Dubai of Central America. The building is now a Marriott.
@Kathy:
I happened to catch the previous (6th) launch on YouTube a few weeks ago–first I’ve seen for this program. It appeared to be successful and all, except the booster catch tower was unable to receive the descending booster, so it was diverted to land offshore of the launch pad. The booster descended and essentially stopped on the surface of the Gulf before toppling over due not having a platform under it… and then blew up and made a really impressive fireball. Oddly, when I looked at other video feeds for replays of the booster descent, the SpaceX videos and even the AP video cut away from the booster about 1 second before it exploded, and the SpaceX commentary said the booster had a soft landing, but ignored the explosion. Now it shouldn’t matter, because the booster was expected to fall over and explode with nothing to support it, as shown in this enthusiast video, but I find the information sanitizing from the official sources to be a bit disturbing. That and the over-the-top cheering and whooping on the SpaceX video feeds, which seems nothing like the genuine celebrating and congratulating after the JWST successfully launched and was sent on its way to solar orbit.