17 responses to “Some Pretzel Logic from American Greatness”

1. 

   daryl and his brother darryl

   December 21, 2022 at 1:09 pm

   I feel bad that you have wasted your morning on a drivel from that rag.
   Pretzel Logic, on the other hand, is a phenomenal album by Steely Dan.

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2. 

   CSK

   December 21, 2022 at 1:24 pm

   David Gelernter is the son of Daniel Gelertner.
3. 

   Jay L Gischer

   December 21, 2022 at 1:41 pm

   Apart from tax cuts and SCOTUS, I am just not sure what those successes were supposed to be.

   I think that for many people, this is quite enough to consider his presidency a success. Trump won an election they thought they were going to lose. He beat Hillary Clinton. They will love him for that for a long, long time.

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4. 

   Kathy

   December 21, 2022 at 1:43 pm

   Apart from tax cuts and SCOTUS, I am just not sure what those successes were supposed to be.

   1) The tax cuts drove up the deficit

   2) the SCOTUS appointees are busily destroying the Court’s legitimacy

   3) Greatest laugh at the UN General Assembly EVER!!

   3
5. 

   Gavin

   December 21, 2022 at 1:56 pm

   I am not yet tired of all the winning.
   Please continue, Mr. Trump.
6. 

   Steven L. Taylor

   December 21, 2022 at 2:02 pm

   @CSK: I thought there was likely a connection, but I didn’t look very hard to find one.

   Thanks for the info.

   1
7. 

   Kylopod

   December 21, 2022 at 2:08 pm

   @Jay L Gischer: In a weird way, Trump is kind of like a right-wing version of President Bartlett from The West Wing. Bartlett didn’t get a huge amount accomplished during his presidency, from the perspective of liberal policy-making. (Of course he had a Republican Congress the entire time.) But he was just kind of awesome, the guy who destroys a Dr. Laura clone who visits the White House, the guy who humiliates his Republican opponent on the debate stage, the guy always “owning the cons.”

   Of course Trump isn’t a political trivia nerd, he isn’t an Oscar Wilde-tier quipster, but that’s a difference of what liberals and conservatives value. Trump is still the personality the right always dreamed about in the WH, the same way Bartlett is to the Dems.

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8. 

   OzarkHillbilly

   December 21, 2022 at 2:11 pm

   On the other, I love these assertions of the “success” of the Trump presidency. Apart from tax cuts and SCOTUS,

   Both of which could have been had from a republican door stop. You know, somebody like Mike Pence.

   I am just not sure what those successes were supposed to be.

   I think he is referring to trump’s “massive rallies,” and “the unwavering enthusiasm of his supporters.”
9. 

   Gustopher

   December 21, 2022 at 2:50 pm

   On the other, I love these assertions of the “success” of the Trump presidency. Apart from tax cuts and SCOTUS, I am just not sure what those successes were supposed to be.

   He pissed off liberals, and he stoked Republican grievance.

   That’s what counts as success for Republicans these days. The party is a coalition of trolls and anger junkies. I know it sounds shallow and reductive, but it tracks far more often than not.

   It’s all daily outrages and performative assholery. Sometimes the assholery is cruelty, but I’ll disagree with the other cruelty is the point” crowd and claim that the cruelty is just one technique in a basket of assholery.

   On the plus side, if stress contributes to heart attacks and strokes, these fuckers should be dropping like flies soon. All that anger can’t be good for them.

   3
10. 

    gVOR08

    December 21, 2022 at 3:06 pm

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Both of which could have been had from a republican door stop.

    Grover Norquist said,

    We don’t want a president who can think, we already know what the top 1% want him to do. He only needs to be capable of signing with a pen!

    That was Trump. It was the McConnell/Ryan tax cut and the Leonard Leo/McConnell judges and justices. About all Trump did was sign them. As you said, a doorstop.

    As to victories, he made them feel like they were owning the libs, which is all they really want.

    5
11. 

    gVOR08

    December 21, 2022 at 3:32 pm

    @Gustopher:

    I’ll disagree with the other cruelty is the point

    There are times, such as reading comments on Dr. T’s The Horrors of Trying to be Kind post earlier today, when I think the world could use a dose of American Pragmatism. Clarity of language and understanding would be improved. I’ll recommend Pragmatism: an Introduction. It covers a fair amount of teritory including,

    Self-creation is one of the aims of ideal liberal society. The second concerns one’s responsibilities to one’s fellow citizens. Rorty captures this relation of responsibility with reference to Judith Shklar’s definition of liberals as people for whom ‘cruelty is the worst thing we do’. For Shklar, cruelty contrasts with sin: whereas sin is transgression against God, cruelty is a matter of inflicting pain upon another human being. There is, Shklar says, no inherent conflict between sin and cruelty, but someone who regards cruelty as the worst thing we do necessarily relegates sin to at most a secondary concern. Rorty takes up Shklar’s distinction between sin and cruelty by presenting liberals as people who take their duties as being owed exclusively to themselves and to their fellow human beings.
12. 

    DK

    December 21, 2022 at 3:58 pm

    @Kylopod:

    In a weird way, Trump is kind of like a right-wing version of President Bartlett from The West Wing.

    This tracks, since Bartlett was also a fake president.

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13. 

    DK

    December 21, 2022 at 5:05 pm

    @Jay L Gischer:

    He beat Hillary Clinton. They will love him for that for a long, long time.

    We’ll see what happens in 2024 when the Senate map is awful for Democrats but the political environment may be better (depending on whether the long-predicted recession materializes, whether Russia or Ukraine is defeated, and whether Trump is still dragging down a party already in civil war mode, either as nominee or as deposed antagonist to the nominee.)

    But Hillary Derangement Syndrome may yet prove pyrrhic for Republicans, and she laughs last — like Goldwater losing in 1964 but living to see Reagan carry his coalition and ideas into power sixteen years later.

    I don’t think it’s truly sunk in how remarkable the 2022 Democratic overperformance was given political gravity. You can maybe blame Trumpy candidates for Republicans blowing gubernatorial races and Biden becoming the first president in 90 years to see his party retain all its incumbent senators.

    But do Trumpy candidacies explain House Republicans expecting a ~40-60 seat gain but only gaining nine? Or why Democrats flipped three state legislatures in the first midterm in 90 years where the president’s party didn’t lose a single state legislative chamber? A few years back, the right was drooling at the prospect of controlling enough states to call a new constitutional convention. That’s now DOA.

    Slapping DeSantis’s face on Trumpism may save Republicans here and there, but Trumpism without Trump may not help Republicans as much as they believe. I think the coalition formed in opposition to Trumpism (youth, women, people of color, suburban households, educated whites, LGBT, etc) is more engaged and motivated than if Hillary had won the electoral collage. And I think this coalition will prove durable and damaging to Republican ambitions.

    But first let’s see how things shake out in 2024 and beyond.

    1
14. 

    Scott F.

    December 21, 2022 at 5:26 pm

    The people rather clearly don’t want him.

    Gelernter simply sees what you don’t see. (Well, you and the fake news media and the establishment GOP and the Deep State and the societal elites and the… don’t see.)

    That is that the only relevant measure of what The People want is massive rallies and the unwavering enthusiasm of a person’s supporters. This view is pervasive in the Republican base – just look for all the chatter about how Trump couldn’t possible have lost in 2020 because he was “filling” arenas with chanting masses while Biden didn’t leave his basement.

    By Gelernter’s logic, Taylor Swift has a legitimate claim on the presidency.

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15. 

    Kathy

    December 21, 2022 at 6:47 pm

    @DK:

    Yes, but Bartlett was more realistic.
16. 

    Kylopod

    December 21, 2022 at 7:10 pm

    @DK:

    But do Trumpy candidacies explain House Republicans expecting a ~40-60 seat gain but only gaining nine?

    Almost none of the serious analysis I read throughout 2022 believed a 40-60 seat gain for Republicans was likely. I’m not saying the analysts were predicting there wouldn’t be a red wave. They did, for the most part, overestimate Republicans. But I was seeing a lot of caution in some of these pieces, partially for technical reasons that the average voter and even political junkie may have overlooked. For one thing, Democrats started out with a much smaller majority than was the case in previous “red wave” years like 2010 and 1994. The good news for Republicans was that meant they didn’t need gains that massive to reach a similar end point. If they’d gained, say, 29 seats, they’d have ended up with the same number of total seats as they ended up with after the 2010 midterms.

    The bad news for them was that it was a much steeper climb. One of the reasons Republicans did so well in 2010 was that Dems had acquired lopsided majorities during the 2006 and 2008 waves by winning numerous seats in very red or reddish districts. Once the national tide turned against them, those incumbents became extremely vulnerable. There was very little of that in 2022. It was kind of a silver lining to a situation Dems found frustrating over the past two years: even though their majority was a lot narrower than what they acquired in 2008, it was in a sense sturdier because it was mostly in districts that were already Democratic-leaning, limiting the ground the Repubs could easily make up.

    Even in 2010, it wouldn’t be accurate to say Republicans paid no price for extremism. They definitely did, with Christine O’Donnell and a handful of other weird candidates in high-profile races. It may have even cost them the Senate that year. But there was just so much else going in their favor. They didn’t need to moderate because, a lot of the time, they were talking to an already Republican electorate, including many of the exact types of ancestrally Democratic voters who were shifting heavily toward the GOP around that time, a very culturally conservative audience who were receptive to the Tea Party and the (usually) coded attacks on Obama’s race. And then you had the double-edged sword of the idealism of the Obama voters, who acted like their job was done once he was elected.

    In some ways, I feel like we’ve reached a kind of maximal point today, like a mostly-used-up tube of toothpaste. Republicans are Republicans, Democrats are Democrats, there’s not much swing-voting and not much ticket-splitting anymore, the Dems seem to have totally outgrown their habit of sitting on their butts during midterms, both sides are highly engaged and they fight to something very close to a stalemate every cycle–yet it seems to be benefiting Dems more at the moment despite the GOP’s geographic advantages. I know this situation won’t last forever, but it’s where we are at present.

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17. 

    Liberal Capitalist

    December 22, 2022 at 6:07 pm

    @daryl and his brother darryl:

    Pretzel Logic, on the other hand, is a phenomenal album by Steely Dan.

    Especially in quadrophonic.

    (Yes. Old. Thank you.)