Contextualized

In our moment, facts are negotiable, but the Narrative is not. And therein lies a problem for those whose narrative depends on trashing Le Grand Orange. And the smarter observers know it. Behold Alex Shepard, writing for The New Republic:

There is value in publishing a larger, contextualized account of the Trump White House. There is nothing to be gained, however, from reporting information about Trump that can’t be locked down. Wolff’s recklessness fuels the Trump administration’s critique of journalists and the media. It suggests that journalists really are out to get the president—after all, in Fire and Fury, Wolff suggests that journalists will print anything, so long as it casts Trump in a bad light. The rewards are clear: His cavalier reporting has led to TV bookings, a #1 Amazon bestseller, and insane traffic for any of the outlets that agreed to publish his work.

So we're clear, "contextualized" means conforming with the larger Narrative. But in the marketplace of ideas, narratives compete, and Shepard understands that the Trumpian narrative of "fake news" works precisely because of the elements of truth to it. Trust that the MSM are honest brokers has been steadily eroded for nearly two generations. Even the sacred and heroic work of Woodward and Bernstein now is better understood as a couple of errand boys carrying the water of a disgruntled bureaucrat, Mark Felt, who wanted a job he didn't get.

It all works in Trump's favor. So will this book, despite the surface legal maneuverings and "cease and desist" letters flying around like bullets in the funhouse:

We have produced a generation or two of post-structuralists who now run our institutions. The game has always been the same -- take the meaning out of the existing structure, then claim its vacant imprimatur. What many of us who were earnestly NeverTrump didn't understand is something that should have been obvious, and now is in retrospect; it takes a bullshitter to call out the bullshitters. In a world where, to borrow a phrase from a cynical Reagan-era song, crap is king, it's increasingly clear the guy who's been in the business longest will prevail, especially when his adversaries consistently underestimate his intelligence.

Stepping on rakes

I believe the term is message discipline:

Donald Trump said women who undergo abortions should be punished if the procedure is made illegal. In an interview for a town hall meeting to air on MSNBC Wednesday night, Trump said "there has to be some form of punishment" for women.

Really? Just kidding:

"If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed — like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions."

If you are always talking, you inevitably are going to contradict yourself, especially if you are too busy talking to actually do some thinking first. Trump never stops talking and now, finally, it's biting him in the ass. This tendency is also why comparing Trump to Reagan never made any sense. Reagan spent years reading and absorbing the works of the best minds in the conservative movement. He believed in something other than himself.

A very long time ago

Mark Steyn on the National Review anti-Trumpalooza:

Nevertheless, notwithstanding some contributors I admire, the whole feels like a rather obvious trolling exercise. As I explained yesterday, I don't think Trump supporters care that he's not a fully paid-up member in good standing of "the conservative movement" - in part because, as they see it, the conservative movement barely moves anything. If you want the gist of NR's argument, here it is:

I think we can say that this is a Republican campaign that would have appalled Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan...

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance...

My old boss, Ronald Reagan, once said...

Ronald Reagan was famous for...

When Reagan first ran for governor of California...

Reagan showed respect for...

Reagan kept the Eleventh Commandment...

Far cry from Ronald Reagan's "I am paying for this microphone" line...

Trump is Dan Quayle, and everyone and his auntie are Lloyd Bentsen: "I knew Ronald Reagan, I worked for Ronald Reagan, I filled in Ronald Reagan's subscription-renewal form for National Review. And you, sir, are no Ronald Reagan."

You have to be over 50 to have voted for Reagan, and a supposed "movement" can't dine out on one guy forever, can it? What else you got?

Emphasis in original. Let's think about that last line. You have to be over 50 to have voted for Reagan. That brought me up short, but it's true. I did vote in the 1984 election and I was 20 years old at the time. I wasn't sure what I believed, but I wasn't going to vote for Ronnie Raygun. To show you how confused I was, I voted for Gary Hart in the primary and David Bergland, the Libertarian Party candidate, in the general. How does one go from a Democrat to a Libertarian in less than a year? By continuing to reject Reagan, especially after he enthusiastically signed a law that nationalized the drinking age at 21, while simultaneously recognizing that Walter Mondale was a sanctimonious scold. I also had a good friend who was an LP member and he certainly had some influence on my thinking.

My dad was a rock-ribbed Republican and he always maintained a subscription to National Review, so I had an opportunity to read plenty of NR growing up. Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher were the high priests of the conservative movement and they were willing to cast apostates into the outer darkness. It was Buckley who sent the Birchers and the Randians away. Later on, he cast Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran into the abyss. Buckley has been gone for nearly a decade now and NR no longer holds the imprimatur it had then. Back to Steyn:

The movement conservatives at National Review make a pretty nice living out of "ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth". The voters can't afford that luxury: They live in a world where, in large part due to the incompetence of the national Republican Party post-Reagan, Democrat ideas are in the ascendant. And they feel that this is maybe the last chance to change that.

Hope is a lapel pin

You used to see, from time to time, people wearing a lapel pin of the sort you see on the left. That pin identified the wearer as a speaker of Esperanto, the 19th century synthetic language that people hoped would become the lingua franca of a better world. Esperanto has elements of  both Slavic and Romance languages but also other elements, in an effort to be internationalist. The name itself is similar to the Spanish word esperanza, which means hope. Esperanto still has its adherents but it never really caught on while you can still learn it, I wouldn't be surprised if more people know how to speak Klingon these days. And in some crucial ways, I think movement conservatism is becoming too much like Esperanto, a language people could learn but never will. I haven't seen an Esperanto lapel pin in at least 20 years. Hell, it's increasingly rare to see lapels these days. 1984 is a very long time ago.

Donald Trump doesn't bother with political Esperanto. He talks directly to people and he's very good at it. The writers and thinkers at NR are, in the main, not known for direct expression. Trump is winning because he doesn't bother with caveats and cavils. As Steyn notes, the hour is short. No one gives a damn about fealty to an idea, or for hero worship. People want a plan. A couple dozen denunciations isn't a plan. What is the conservative movement for? Do you know? If you read  the current issue of National Review, you won't know.

A good explanation

Mark Steyn went to a Trump rally in Vermont. As usual, his synopsis is spot-on. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but this passage is crucial:

~MESSAGE DISCIPLINE: In fairness, he is (or was) actually competing against Pataki, and still is (just about) against Rand Paul. But he also did a couple of minutes on Martin O'Malley. He'd been talking about the crowds he's been getting, and he'd said that when he goes back home his wife asks him how the speech went and whether anyone was there. Because the cameras stay directly focused on him and never show the audience. And he thought at first this was because they were fixed and hammered into place - until a protester starts yelling and then suddenly the cameras are twisting around like pretzels, no matter what corner of the room they're in. Anyway, at some point, he mused on a Martin O'Malley rally at which apparently only one person showed up. So O'Malley talked with him one on one for an hour, and at the end a reporter asked the guy whether he would be supporting O'Malley. And the fellow said no.

And we all laughed, as did Trump.

Now, short of the mullahs nuking Hillary in Chappaqua and the following day Kim Jong-Un nuking Bernie in Burlington, there is no conceivable scenario in which Trump will be facing off against Martin O'Malley. So talking about him is a complete waste of time - and Karl Rove says that campaigning is all about the efficient use of the dwindling amount of time you have this close to Iowa and New Hampshire. So doing ten minutes of knee-slappers on Martin O'Malley is ten minutes you could have used to talk about Social Security reform that you'll never get back.

Maybe Rove is right. But as a practical matter it's led to the stilted robotic artificiality of the eternally on-message candidate - which is one of the things that normal people hate about politics. And Trump's messages are so clear that he doesn't have to "stay on" them. People get them instantly: On Thursday he did a little bit of audience participation. "Who's going to pay for the wall?" And everyone yelled back, "Mexico!" He may appear to be totally undisciplined, yet everyone's got the message. Likewise, his line on an end to Muslim immigration "until we can figure out what the hell's going on" is actually a subtle and very artfully poised way of putting it that generates huge applause. Trump has such a natural talent for "message" that it frees up plenty of time to do ten minutes of Martin O'Malley shtick.

Emphasis mine. In contrast, consider this criticism of Trump from a bien pensant at Salon:

The point is that when a large portion of the electorate is fooled into adopting an ideology of ignorance, spaces open up for charlatans, frauds and demagogues to gain political power over the masses. This is precisely what we’ve seen with the rise of Trump in 2015, and it’s why he’s a symptom of the disease rather than a cause, as mentioned above. Indeed, according to a recent poll, Trump’s support base consists of the least educated Americans. As a Washington Post article put it, “Even when pollsters took race out of the equation — to the extent that that is possible since the Republican base is overwhelmingly white — and looked at all Republicans, the relationship between education and Trump support was pretty clear.”

This conclusion is consistent with a Boston Globe analysis that found that Trump talks at a fourth-grade level. And it fits with the observation that the more outrageous, harebrained, foolish, and asinine Trump’s claims — from John McCain not being a “war hero” to shutting down parts of the Internet to violating the Geneva Convention by killing terrorists’ families to temporarily keeping Muslims out of America — the more Trump’s poll numbers seem to rise. Holding beliefs that are properly tethered to reality via the best available evidence doesn’t matter much to the army of quasi-fascist conservatives who’ve been hypnotized by Trump’s shallow charisma.

Again, emphasis mine. The sneer about "talks at a fourth-grade level" demonstrates that the author of the piece, Phil Torres, is more committed to a world view than he is to understanding what's happening in the campaign. Trump is effective precisely because, as Steyn notes, his messages are easy to comprehend. Anyone who writes for a living should understand that reaching the largest possible audience is a good thing, especially if you are asking for someone's allegiance. Trump understands that the vote of someone who understands the world at a fourth-grade level has equal value to the vote of a Wharton grad. Perhaps more, if the voter with the fourth-grade understanding lives in an early primary state.

Note also that Trump was speaking in Vermont, a left enclave that is the home of Bernie Sanders. Back to Steyn:

When was the last time a GOP presidential candidate held (in the frantic run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire) an event in Vermont? Every fourth January, Republican campaigns are focused on the first caucus and the first primary states, as Bush, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Huckabee, Fiorina et al are right now. But in fact the Green Mountain primary is on March 1st, and its delegates count as much as any other state's. In recent cycles, the American electoral system has diminished and degraded itself by retreating into turnout-model reductionism and seriously competing only over a handful of purple states. Even if he's only doing it as a massive head-fake, Trump understands the importance of symbolism: By going into Berniestan, he's saying he's going for every voter and he's happy to play down the other guy's half of the field.

No one has tried to be a national candidate on the Republican side since Ronald Reagan. Trump is not Reagan, yet it's important to remember that Reagan was known as The Great Communicator because of his ability to reach audiences where they were. Trump has the same skill set. He's going to be very difficult to beat.

The great man in retrospect

When we were out in California for our vacation at the end of the year, we were able to visit the Reagan Library. While all presidential libraries are designed to tell the best possible story about the man each honors, the folks in Simi Valley have it pretty easy. Reagan's personal story, and the overall success of his administration, make the case that our 40th president was a great man.

I'm old enough to remember the Reagan era well. At the time he was president, his detractors were legion. One of the more epic rants was Gil Scott-Heron's "B Movie," recorded early in Reagan's first term:

Ol' Gil wasn't too fond of Reagan. A sampling of his, ahem, thoughts:

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a "B" movie.

As it happened, the B movie actor was pretty successful, but we didn't necessarily understand it at the time. You heard a lot of Gil Scott-Heron on college campuses in those days, especially mine. We thought his insights were brilliant. Now, 30+ years on, it's clear that  while Scott-Heron was pretty full of himself and wrong about the motivations of the man in the White House, he was right about one thing. We do value nostalgia. We want a great man.

The issue is that a great man only becomes visible in retrospect. Not many people really thought Reagan was great while he was in office. It only became clear after he was gone. It was, and is, a lot easier to identify the warts than to see the qualities that lead to greatness. One thing seems clear enough -- if someone comes to you and presents himself, or herself, as a great man, it's likely that he isn't.